Supernova

by C. A. Higgins

  On the other side of the System base, far from where Constance and her attack force hid in the pitted and cratered land, a bomb went off and the System soldiers came streaming out, shouting, heading for where they thought the attack would come.

  It was Mattie’s old trick: misdirection. Get the target looking one way, then come in from the other side. He used it to rob people, slipping wallets out of pockets; Ivan used it to con people, to keep them from realizing some dark and ugly truth. Constance used it for war.

  For a moment she felt wrong-footed, unbalanced, standing without them at her back. But she had her war and she had her army and she had no other choice, so Constance went into battle alone.

  There was no cover to be had anymore. Her people followed her not in lines or rows but in a crowd, like hunting wolves. They were silent at first, running as quietly as they could over the stone, but when they came into firing range of the System soldiers, they started to yell. The soldiers were still coming out of their barracks; some already had reached the other side of the water dome, chasing the explosion. The rest were trapped inside or trapped outside, with the water dome at their backs and nothing between them and Constance’s people.

  Constance raised her gun and fired, the sound echoed by a hundred other shouting weapons, and watched the first row of soldiers fall.

  Then the System soldiers were moving with practiced speed, getting to cover, pulling weapons, ducking into buildings. A few had made it to their armory; Constance diverted her steps toward the armory as well. If she could stop them from getting better weaponry, she would—

  A bullet close to her arm buffeted heated and speeding air against her skin; Constance ducked behind a boulder just in time as another shot sprayed rock on her skin. The strange truth of Martian rock was that the dust and the sand and the outside of the rocks all were a rusty reddish brown but the inside of the stone was not. When she looked up, she saw a scar of steely blue where the bullet had struck inches from where her head had been.

  Someone returned fire and no more bullets struck her hiding place, so Constance crawled out and dashed away again, heading for the squat square building that housed the armory.

  The sky was still lit; Constance could see the light of the sinking sun glancing off the mounds and valleys of the plain overhead. But the fossa was dark.

  To her right, her forces had reached the System forces. The gunfire had nearly ceased as the two groups came too close for it. The System soldiers tried to retreat, to regain their secure distance, but Constance’s people chased them down and set their teeth to their throats.

  Someone fired at her again but again missed. Constance’s breath was coming fast but steadily. Ahead of her was the door to the armory, hanging ajar. There was movement within and Constance dodged just as he fired; she was up and firing into the darkness inside the building before he could take new aim.

  Someone fell, she thought, but someone else fired and hit her in the vest. The force of it dropped her and forced all the breath from her; she sucked in air again, and behind her someone else fired.

  One of her people had followed her. Constance allowed herself three breaths before pushing herself back to her feet, and then she was running the last few meters to the building, dropping low beneath the sight lines of the windows just as another bullet took out the glass.

  The revolutionary who had followed her, his face too far away to see clearly in the indistinct light, dropped like a stone and did not move again. Constance leaned against the concrete and steel of the System building and took heaving breaths and thought that there was no one at her back any longer.

  She pushed herself to her feet and reloaded her gun, settling it in her elbow, and inched her way along the wall toward the door.

  Then she swung around the door frame and started shooting.

  She took two by surprise; a third ran for better position, vanishing through a doorway. All these System buildings were laid out the same way, Constance knew: two hallways that met in a crossroads at the center of the building and then rooms all of the same size and shape in the spaces between. There would be staircases at the termination of each hall.

  Predictable, Constance thought, and started down the hall after the man who had fled, trying to remember how many men she had seen run into the armory.

  There seemed to be a good deal of shouting from behind her, out on the battlefield. Constance noted it and filed it away; she could not consider it now. The armory was dark and quiet, but she knew there were monsters inside.

  She was nearly at the crossroads when they started to fire at her again.

  Their bullets chipped the wall behind her but were too high: they knew she had a vest on and so they were aiming for her head, but they had missed. She darted away, ducking into the nearest room, quickly sweeping it for an ambush. There was none. Outside, she heard them come out of hiding, chasing after her.

  The room she was in, she realized quickly, held grenades. She picked one up but knew that she could not use it here: if she did, she might destroy the building. She tucked it into her belt anyway, and moved on to the adjoining room.

  This room held more explosives. She cast a practiced eye over them, her interest piqued, though she could not use them now. She fired at the pursuing System soldiers and hit one but could not risk going for the others, and she was forced on.

  The next room was a dead end.

  She’d known it would be, but a bolt of fear hit her heart, anyway: the horror of no escape. Distantly, she could hear the shouting from outside. Constance positioned herself behind the door frame, and when the soldiers came into the room behind her, she fired at them.

  They quickly pinned her down. There were, she noted with satisfaction, only three of them left. She had killed the rest. But she was only one person, and she could not get a shot off without being shot herself. If Mattie and Ivan had been there, their numbers would have been equal, but they were not there, and wishing they were was weakness.

  Her breathing had slowed again to a normal and steady cadence. She felt alert, alight; it seemed to her that if metal touched her skin, she would send off sparks. She was alone with no way out. She would not let herself be captured, and she could not escape. There was nothing more to be afraid of: her future had narrowed down to one single path. She would die, but what the men outside did not yet know was that they were about to die, too: Constance still had the grenade.

  She stood up slowly, still with her back to the wall. She held her gun in one hand even though she had no intention of firing it again. She slipped her finger through the pin—

  Gunshots rang out, deafening her. For a moment Constance wondered if they’d somehow known what she was about to do, but then her senses caught up with her and she realized that the shots had not been fired at her.

  She just barely heard her name called through the ringing in her ears from the firefight. “Constance?”

  Constance would know that accent anywhere: Milla Ivanov. She let go of the grenade and stepped out into the open. The three System soldiers were all dead, crumpled on the ground, one sprawled in the moment of turning to face the attack. Milla Ivanov was standing just inside the adjoining room, her lips set in a tight, grim line and her white hair starting to fall out of its eternal bun. She had not come alone: Constance saw more revolutionaries behind her, filling the room, examining the weaponry. Rayet, a tall dark man who had been a System soldier before defecting to join Constance’s army, stood at Milla’s shoulder.

  Milla should have been on the other side of the encampment, leading the misdirecting attack. Constance said, “What’s happening? What are you doing here?”

  Rescuing you, Ivan would have said with an annoyed ironic curl to his accent. His mother said only, “The battle’s over, Constance.”

  That was impossible. They had been outnumbered at least five to one. “How?”

  “Citizens from Isabellon,” Milla said. “They came to join us when they realized what was happening. With them—”


  “With them we outnumbered the System,” Constance realized, triumph unfurling in her chest. The people had come to fight with her. The people had risen up against the System when called, even the Martian people, who were only a few degrees removed from Terran themselves. Even if she did not win this war, the right was on her side.

  Outside, Constance realized, the sound of the shouting had changed. It was no longer furious and brutal, the screams of animals going to die.

  It was victorious.

  —

  “Have someone inventory the weapons and the supplies,” Constance said to Milla as they strode out of the armory. Milla stepped delicately over the corpse in the entranceway, but Constance saw the blood on her boots. “What are our casualties?”

  “Light, comparatively,” Milla told her. “No exact count yet, but I have Henry organizing everyone and determining them. We did as you said: set off the bomb and then pulled back.”

  “Good.” Constance could see the lights and movement out on the fossa where her people were gathering their wounded and their dead. “He’s there?”

  “Yes, with the lights; nearer to the right of the group.”

  “I want you to stay here,” Constance said. “Organize the captured weaponry, get it loaded onto the ships and brought back up to the fleet. I want us ready to leave suddenly if we need to.”

  “Yes,” said Milla. “Are there any wounded inside?”

  “If you find any, kill them—they’re System.”

  “You went in alone?”

  “Yes. The recruits from Isabellon are down with Henry, too?”

  “I believe so,” Milla Ivanov said.

  “Good,” Constance said again, and started off toward those lights. “Keep a fraction of the arms down here for the ground troops to use.”

  She was aware that Milla stayed where she was for some time after she started walking away, watching her go, but Milla did not call after her.

  When Constance’s people recognized her, they let out a shout that was carried through the crowd. Constance looked across them with satisfaction: they filled up the fossa from side to side. Her army had come here smaller than that, but even with casualties, her forces had grown.

  She found herself automatically calculating the supplies they had taken from the System this day. Not enough, she realized; not nearly enough. A swell of something sharp and terrible rose up in her chest, but she forced it away. There was nothing to be done about it now. Not until they found the next System target to take and could arm themselves better there.

  But if the System fleet arrived before they could—

  “Huntress!” Henry’s voice pulled her from her thoughts. Constance turned to see him jogging toward them, his bald head shining in what little light was left. Farther afield, her people had started lighting lamps and flicking on flashlights that shone like stars against the backdrop of the black rock.

  “Status?” Constance asked him when he drew near.

  “We’re gathering the wounded. I sent out groups on Milla Ivanov’s orders to search the area, make sure no System soldiers survived. Others are clearing the buildings.”

  “I spoke to Milla. Clear the barracks first,” Constance said. “I want to set up the wounded in there, out of the open.”

  “Yes, Huntress. Otherwise, we’re trying to organize the new recruits.”

  “The people from Isabellon?”

  “Most of them were,” Henry said. “But some of them came from farther out in the solar system not just to join this battle but to join the campaign. Not all of them are fit for battle, but most of them are; we’ve only had to turn away a few—”

  “Turn away?” Constance interrupted. “We can’t afford to turn anyone away.”

  “Some of them couldn’t possibly fight, Huntress.”

  “So find something else for them to do,” Constance said. “We need people to tend the wounded. We need people to inventory supplies. We need people, Henry.”

  Henry hesitated. “Some of them were very young.”

  “How young?”

  “The youngest is thirteen.”

  Constance remembered Mattie at thirteen, deft of hand and already intimately familiar with the sound a man made when his windpipe had been torn open by shrapnel. She remembered herself at thirteen, with the blood of three deaths on her hands already, watching the System shoot down Mirandans in the streets and feeling her fear ignite into hate. “Teenagers make the best soldiers, Henry,” she said.

  “Perhaps if you saw them,” Henry suggested.

  “Then show me,” Constance said, and Henry led her into the gathered crowd.

  A rough semblance of order had started to arise in the temporary camp, centered on the gathering of the wounded. The bodies already had been cleared from this area of the fossa. Constance saw the bodies of her people laid out gently a short distance away and those of the fallen System soldiers tumbled together in a sprawling and shapeless mound that almost faded into the darkness of the desert. Henry skirted the place where the wounded had been gathered, avoiding their smell and their low and desperate sounds, and headed toward where Constance’s people were beginning to gather the stolen weaponry.

  In the middle of the boxes of ammunition and death-dealing fire, Constance saw the children. They were gathered together, most of them sitting in the dirt cross-legged, talking to one another. They had obtained a lamp from somewhere or been given one, and it sat in the center of their group and threw light on all their faces. One of them did not sit in the dirt with the rest, and it was on that one girl that Constance’s attention focused. She had dusky skin and dark hair cropped at the sides but just long enough at the top to threaten to spill into her eyes, and she swung her slender bare legs and booted feet carelessly to thunk against the side of the crate on which she sat. It was something Mattie would have done: sit atop something that could plausibly go up in flames with such an astounding lack of concern. Constance did not think the girl was as young as thirteen, but she could not have said how much older she might be.

  The girl saw her before Constance spoke. She sat up straighter on the crate and looked at Constance intently. The other children picked up on her attention and soon were looking to Constance as well.

  Constance came to just within the light of their lamp. They shifted, moving to open their circle, to face her all together. The girl on the crate hopped off lightly and came forward to stand in front of Constance.

  Constance said, “How old are you?”

  “Sixteen,” said the girl.

  “And what is your name?”

  “Marisol Brahe,” the girl said.

  She had an accent that rang against Constance’s ear as familiar, but she could not immediately place it. An asteroid, perhaps: either way, the girl was not from Mars.

  “Where is your family, Marisol?”

  “I have no family,” Marisol said. She had a clear, high voice, and though she seemed nervous, she did not look away from Constance.

  “No?”

  “My parents died in a mining accident when I was little. The System wouldn’t waste resources to go after them when the mine shaft collapsed. But I was old enough to work by then, so I stayed in the mines.”

  “You have no brothers or sisters?”

  “I have no one to go back to.”

  Constance glanced past her at the children gathered behind. Most of them were Marisol’s age or a little older, but Henry had been right: the youngest of them could be no older than thirteen.

  “And your friends?” Constance asked.

  Marisol hesitated. “Their parents are dead or here.”

  The hesitation gave it away as a lie, but Marisol didn’t back down from her words, only held Constance’s gaze steadily.

  Constance said, “What can you offer my revolution?”

  “Followers,” said Marisol. “Fighters. I used to work with the explosives in the mines; I know how to plant a bomb.”

  “This will be dangerous,” Constance t
old her. “When the System finds us, they will try to kill us, and they will never stop.”

  Behind Marisol’s back, one of the other girls glanced sideways at her friend, a quick, nervous look. But Marisol did not blink. Her hair was slipping down over her forehead. Cut your damn hair, Mattie, Constance remembered saying. It’s in your eyes.

  “Six months ago you came to Pallas,” Marisol said. Of course; Constance recognized her accent now. The girl was Palladian. “Before you came, the System had a bomb there that could have blown the asteroid apart and killed all of us. But you blew up their base and you took their bomb. We weren’t free—the System came right back—but for a little while we didn’t have to live with that anymore.”

  Constance remembered that day on Pallas, Ivan and Mattie beside her and the old Palladian woman turning away, and felt fierce pride.

  Constance couldn’t turn anyone away. She couldn’t afford to: the System was coming.

  “Welcome to my war,” Constance said.

  —

  Ananke seemed curiously reluctant to answer Althea’s question about where she wanted to go next. Perhaps, Althea thought, that was because she did not know how to narrow down the possibilities for her exploration. Althea set out to help her.

  Althea never liked to sit idly; she always wanted to have something to do with her hands. So before she joined Ananke to look through data of nearby astronomical options, she went through the ship and gathered up all the spare robotics parts she could find, all the finest wires and most delicate bits of metal, and spread them out in front of herself on the floor in the workroom that she hadn’t used since the Ananke had first been mission-ready and began to sort through them.

  If she worked while she talked, if she kept herself busy, if she knew that she was accomplishing something important, Althea could let herself forget about the other, less pleasant tasks that awaited her.

  The workroom was large and circular with unusually bright lights in the ceiling. There was a large table in the back of the room, but Althea preferred to work on the welded metal plates of the floor. There was a holographic terminal in this room, too, of course. It stood right beside the black screen that once had broadcast System news without pause. Now that the System had fallen silent, so had the screen. If Althea looked into it, she could see her own shape reflected in shadows.