Christoph detonated it.
The whole air, the whole structure of the greenhouse enclosure rattled with a sound too low to be heard properly. Constance looked out of the window back toward where they had come from and watched the ceiling of the greenhouse enclosure above the System base shatter from the bomb she had planted on the exterior glass. Sparks kindled and died swiftly in the thin oxygen as air rushed out and cold rushed in, and glass fell down like flakes of ice. The fires still burning from Constance’s first bomb died more swiftly than the System ever could have put them out. Constance could tell the fires had gone out only by the darkness that replaced them; they were too far away to see any of the System soldiers still standing outside the base on Pallas’s green-flecked stone. Even so, she knew what would happen to them. With their atmosphere fleeing out through the hole to space overhead, they would suffocate slowly, freezing while they did. They probably would live long enough to make it to the air lock, only to find that it had been closed already. If they managed to get to oxygen masks first, they would live even longer. They would live long enough, in fact, to freeze there on the uninhabitable stone or beat with their fists against the unyielding glass wall that separated them from warmth and breathable air.
Constance knew what would happen to them because she had seen it happen firsthand. The System had done that to her people over and over not just on her native Miranda but on Haumea and Makemake and on all the mortified moons of Saturn.
“Huntress,” said Christoph, and Constance turned away from the death behind them to find a woman standing some distance away, near the entrance to the mines, watching them.
Christoph already was going for his gun. Constance put a hand out to stop him and stepped out of the truck, gesturing stillness to those in the truck bed before Ivan could do something stupid like try to talk to her. The woman was almost too far away to see clearly, but Constance knew that she had seen their escape from the air lock and had seen the bomb they had detonated above the System base.
Constance was still holding her gun. She lowered the nose to point it at the ground and then raised her free and empty hand toward the sky, palm out.
For a time the woman did not move. Then she, too, raised one hand with the palm out, a silent hailing. Gesturing broadly, she brought up both hands and held them flat before her face, and like that she turned away and walked back down into the mines.
Satisfaction burned in Constance’s chest. She went back into the truck.
“What did she say?” Christoph asked.
Constance said, “She said she was on our side.”
AFTER THE FALL OF EARTH
Mattie Gale’s ship flew out of the Ananke’s docking bay, out through the open doors into space, and while Althea watched, it became a tiny star that dimmed and vanished.
“Althea?” Ananke said, and Althea turned to look down the hallway of her spaceship. In the holographic terminals embedded in the walls, the same glowing image stood duplicated a hundred times. The hologram was of a very young woman, scarcely older than a girl. Her skin was a shade lighter than Althea’s, and her hair was a shade more brown than black as it curled wildly down her back. She glowed with unearthly light. She looked like Althea, but she looked just as much like Matthew Gale. Her eyes, though, were the same Terran blue as Ivan’s had been.
The young woman in the holographic terminal did not exist. It was an image invented by Ananke for Althea’s benefit, perhaps, or perhaps for Ananke’s so that she could feel more human, like the man and the woman who had created her. The Ananke had been a spaceship—an incredible ship but still nothing more than a computer—until Matthew Gale had infected the ship’s computer with a virus. And somehow, under the influence of that virus, Althea’s ship had awoken.
“What course should I plot?” Ananke queried, and her manufactured voice echoed up and down the hall, a strange mix of tones. The depth and tenor of the voice were much like Althea’s, but the cadence had something of Ivan in it, and the accent wobbled from Terran to Lunar and back again, dipping every now and then into something from farther out in the solar system, something reminiscent of Matthew Gale. The look on the hologram’s face was open and attentive.
Althea snapped herself out of her shock. Her daughter needed her. It was true that her crewmates were all dead and her government, the System, was at war. But she could not stay still and stunned when her daughter needed her.
But what could she do? Althea’s first impulse was to reach out to Mattie’s escaping ship for help, but that was a useless and childish hope. Even now that ship was out of the Ananke’s sensor range.
Normally, she’d contact the System, but the System was gone and Althea had no more orders to follow. She could return home to Luna, but she didn’t know what she’d find there. After the Mallt-y-Nos had used her seven stolen Terran Class 1 bombs to destroy Earth, she had kicked off a civil war that had spread across the entire solar system. Ananke was a System spaceship: if she came too close to a rebel craft, they would see her as a threat; if she came near a System base, they might try to drag Althea’s brilliant daughter into the blood and terror of war. And even if Althea took those risks, it was possible that the black core of the Ananke would perturb the planets’ orbits and throw the delicately balanced mechanics of the moons and planets into chaos.
The certainty of it struck her like a blow: she and Ananke could not stay in the solar system.
“Set a course outside of the solar system,” Althea said, and strode away from the docking bay doors, heading toward the piloting room.
“Where outside?”
“Just go out. Perpendicular to the orbital plane. We’ll pick someplace later.”
“Why?”
Althea did not answer immediately. The duplicate holograms and the echoing and multiplying of Ananke’s voice were bothering her. “Could there not be so many of you?”
The nearest hologram blinked, and then all the others winked out, leaving just the one. As Althea strode down the hall, the hologram followed her, vanishing from the holographic terminal Althea had just passed and re-forming in the one Althea would next approach so that the image of Ananke kept pace with Althea’s stride.
The doors to the piloting room were just ahead. She strode into them, and Ananke’s hologram flickered into existence in the holographic terminal in the little room.
There were ghosts in this room, almost more ghosts than in all the rest of the Ananke. This was Domitian’s chair, that had been Gagnon’s, when they had been alive.
“Why are we leaving?” Ananke asked, and Althea leaned against the instrument panel at the front of the room.
“Because it’s not safe here,” she said. “And there’re so many other beautiful things to see.” She looked at Ananke, not at the hologram but at the camera set into the ceiling, like the thousands of other cameras that riddled the Ananke’s halls.
“Let’s see the universe,” she said, and she smiled at Ananke, because she was a mother now. She could not cry.
She could not show fear.
—
After Mattie left, Constance stood for a time alone in her bar. The sun was rising outside over the scarp, bright and reddened by the thin Martian atmosphere.
Mattie and Ivan were gone. She’d always known there was a chance that the System might take them from her, that the System might kill them, but the System hadn’t taken Mattie: Mattie had left.
On the other side of the room, the door to the kitchen creaked open. Someone said, “He’s not coming back.”
The voice was cool and Terran, the intonations so like Ivan’s that for a moment Constance’s heart clenched. But it was a woman who spoke: not Ivan but his mother, Milla Ivanov.
Constance said, “No, I don’t think he is.”
She heard Milla moving deeper into the bar. The sunlight stretched long shadows of the ships moored outside across the sand. Milla Ivanov looked like her son: the same pale skin, the same blue eyes, the same shape of mouth and brow. Constan
ce wondered what Ivan’s father had looked like to leave so little of himself behind.
“He left to find my son,” Milla remarked.
“Yes.” The argument she had had with Mattie before he’d left was still vivid in Constance’s mind, hot and bright and painful. We’re your family, Mattie had said, advancing on her through the tables on the barroom floor, furious.
It had flared up her own fury in turn, an instinctive reaction to threat. Don’t you think I know that? she’d said. Do you think this was easy for me?
Yeah, Connie, he’d said. That’s what scares me.
There had been such grief and pale anger in his face, foreign things turned against her. She wondered if she would ever be able to remember Mattie’s face any other way.
“He thinks Ivan still might be alive,” Constance said.
“I know,” Milla said quietly. “He told me.”
Constance turned away from the window and the rising sun and paced deeper into her bar. This was where she and Ivan and Mattie had sat a thousand times before, together and united; this was where she had met Ivan for the first time; this was where she and Mattie had celebrated their freedom from Miranda.
The bar was not the same as it had been in all those memories. Now the System’s cameras that once had crouched and blinked like the eyes of mechanical monsters in every corner and wall of the house had been pulled free of their perches. Their bodies had been strewn about the bar, on the floor, on the tables. They lay on the tables where Constance and Mattie and Ivan had sat; they filled up spaces on the floor where Ivan had stood, where Mattie had walked. Upside down, with a tangle of wires and spikes curled up over them, those dead cameras resembled nothing so much as insects, arachnids with their legs curled up over their corpse bellies, empty and stiff with rigor mortis.
“I know that he’s dead,” Constance said. “I think even Mattie knows it.”
She could not recall ever having seen Mattie as angry as he had been then, scarcely an hour ago, in this very room. She could remember Mattie as he had been as a child, when she’d first met him in the System’s foster program, the moment he became her brother, with his brown hair falling into his eyes and a crooked smile. She remembered Mattie as a teenager; she remembered Mattie as an adult. She remembered Mattie following at her heels; she remembered Mattie standing at her side.
And now she also remembered Mattie leaving.
The dim light in the bar was merciful; in it, Constance could not see the color of Milla Ivanov’s eyes, that Terran sky color that Milla shared with her dead son. Constance said, “I set up a rendezvous at Callisto with Mattie so that he’ll have a way to find me again. Anji will meet him there.” She did not say what she thought: that Mattie would not come back. It didn’t matter whether he found Ivan’s corpse and so knew he could not forgive her or—more likely—he failed to find it and spent the rest of his days searching the vast emptiness of space.
He should have been there, both he and Ivan. What would happen if they weren’t here?
She could not fail—
Milla said, “What did Mattie say?”
“What you would expect him to,” Constance said, feeling suddenly sharp and bitter and small, a little girl again, huddled and hiding and hating. “That I’d betrayed Ivan and him when I left Ivan behind on that ship, the Ananke. That I wasn’t really family, since I left him.” She shook her head and leaned back on a table, feeling the wires and limbs of the torn-out camera brushing against the fabric of her shirt. “I never lied about what had to be. This revolution has to be first. These billions of people, and I have to do anything that I need to to make sure this succeeds even if it hurts me. I told him Ivan had known that from the minute he’d gotten involved with me.”
And Mattie had said, I didn’t.
Constance had said, Ivan knew that about me when he got involved with me, and Mattie had said, I didn’t.
“And Mattie left,” Constance said.
In the silence that followed, Constance watched the shadow of her bar stretch out over the edge of the scarp, watched the glint of sunlight off metal from the ships moored outside.
Milla said, “Excluding divine intervention, my son is dead. If there had been any way to save him, I would have taken it. But there was none. My son is dead.”
Constance flexed her fingers against the manufactured wood of the bar. There was a curious relief in hearing Milla say it aloud, as if she were freeing Constance from the burden of its truth.
“Second,” Milla said in her quiet voice, “whatever Mattie does now, whether he goes to your rendezvous or not, that is outside of your control. You cannot save him or stop him any more than he can save you or stop you from doing what you have to do.”
It went against all of Constance’s impulses to agree with that, but out of respect for Milla Ivanov, who had been revolutionary royalty herself, she held her tongue.
“Third and finally, Huntress, I am going to be very plain.” Milla leaned forward, her elbows on her knees. “The weakness you just showed to me you must never show again.”
She was right, of course. It had been weakness to show what she had shown, as deep a weakness as it was to show fear. And Constance knew well never to allow herself to be afraid.
“Show you?” said Constance in a voice she strove to make as firm and dispassionate as Milla Ivanov’s had been. She rose to her feet: if nothing was wrong, there was no reason for her to stay here. “I didn’t show you anything.”
—
“Tell me the sum of three and two,” Althea said.
“Five.” Ananke answered promptly, no delay. Good; that was good.
“Their difference?”
“In which direction?”
“Give me both.”
“Three minus two is one,” said Ananke, “and two minus three is minus one.”
“Good.”
Ananke smiled, glowing lightly in the holographic terminal, just brightly enough to cast the faintest shadows in the piloting room. Gagnon and Domitian’s chairs had been pushed conscientiously in; Althea sat in her own chair, although Domitian’s seat was closest to the holographic terminal.
It didn’t matter. Althea was comfortable where she was, sitting in front of a computer display that she no longer needed by a tiled wall of video feeds that no longer needed to be watched. She had all her questions written out on a piece of paper and all the answers, too. She’d had to cover the camera while she wrote them so that Ananke wouldn’t be able to cheat and even now had to sit awkwardly to keep the paper out of view of Ananke’s ever-watching eyes. Althea had felt a strange twinge of something—guilt, perhaps, a very deep and terrible guilt—when she had covered up the camera, but Ananke hadn’t seemed to mind in the least.
Computational speed seemed to be fine, and the answers, of course, were accurate. Althea decided to skip a few items on her checklist.
“Derivative of x4?”
“Four times x to the third,” Ananke said promptly.
“Derivative of x times the cosine of x?”
“Cosine of x minus x times the sine of x.”
“Is that quantity cosine of x minus x end quantity times the sine of x or—”
“It’s cosine of x minus quantity x times sine of x end quantity,” Ananke said in an aggrieved tone. Althea grinned.
“Integral of x divided by the natural logarithm of x evaluated from zero to pi?”
“It does not converge.”
“And from pi over two to pi?”
“Approximately four point five. Isn’t it fascinating,” said Ananke, “how it’s only that one point where it’s a problem? All those infinite, infinite numbers, and it’s only one number that’s special—one number with an infinite output.”
Althea looked at the hologram thoughtfully. Ananke’s holographic eyes could not quite simulate focus properly, and so it seemed to be staring not quite at her but through her, though that hardly bothered her. The holographic simulation would take a little work, but it could be f
ixed.
“I never thought about it like that,” Althea said.
“How did you think of it?”
“Avoid that one number where things are unbounded,” Althea said. “Okay, try this. Integral of x times the cosine of x.” Ananke couldn’t solve that one numerically.
“X times the sine of x, end quantity, plus the cosine of x.”
“Plus…?” Althea prompted.
For a moment Ananke looked oddly blank.
Then, “Plus constants,” she said.
“Plus a constant,” Althea said.
“If they are all constants, it does not matter,” Ananke informed her.
“The right way to say it is ‘plus a constant.’ ”
“Constants. Constants,” said Ananke. “I like the word better.”
Althea felt her face grow tight. There it was, a trace of Matthew Gale’s old virus. Constants, as Gagnon had seen, always in the plural even when the word should be singular.
Ananke seemed to be watching her face very closely even though the hologram could not see and they both knew it. Then Ananke said, sounding strangely subdued, “Ask me again.”
“A different question or—”
“The same question,” said Ananke.
Althea said, “Tell me the integral of x times the cosine of x.”
“X times the sine of x end quantity plus the cosine of x,” Ananke said, “plus a constant.”
Good, Althea thought. “Constant”—the way it should be. Not “constants”—not like Constance, the Mallt-y-Nos, the terrorist who had destroyed the Earth.
—
Constance picked up the nearest bottle on the shelf and studied its label. Low proof: not worth saving. She shoved it back into the dusty recesses of the shelf.
The bar was quiet, but voices echoed from outside. A hundred ships taking off from the scarp shivered the glass in the windows and rocked the dead System cameras back and forth: her revolution was taking flight.
The next bottle of liquor was some sweet and vile thing Mattie had been fond of. She held it for a very long time and looked down at the label.
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