Supernova

by C. A. Higgins

  Arawn waved a hand dismissively. The heavy draped clothing he wore in the Plutonian style made him seem larger than he was. “The Son of Nike got caught because he was weak, the same reason I left him. And infighting? A few System traitors and a lot of propaganda.”

  “Weak?” Milla had the same talent as her son of turning a word so that it balanced in the air like a coin on its edge. “I knew the Son of Nike once. He was a cautious and a clever man. What about him did you find so unsatisfactory?”

  “Unsatisfactory?” Arawn turned away from Doctor Ivanov to face Constance so that he could speak not to Milla but to her. “This is what I want, Huntress. It’s not as complicated as your dog here wants it to be: I want the System dead. I’ve seen what it can do, did, will do. I want it to burn, and every last man, woman, and child who allowed it to exist. I would rather all of us fail and die than give up and let the System live. The Son of Nike was weak. He gave up, and he gave in. And so I left him. And so he failed.”

  There was rage and fire in Arawn that Constance understood. For an instant she saw him, Ares, Mars incarnate, burning the System at her side with a fervor that neither Ivan nor Mattie ever could have felt.

  “Brute force isn’t enough to destroy the System,” Milla remarked, her cool voice somehow jarring after Arawn’s hot anger. “There has to be thought and care.”

  “Of course,” said Arawn, and though he was addressing Milla now, he still was watching Constance. “But lack of force, that’s what’s made everyone else fail.”

  “You think that’s what caused the old revolutions to fail?” Milla snapped.

  Constance had heard enough.

  “I have seen what the System does,” she told Arawn, and silenced Milla with a glance. “Like you, I have lived it. And like you, I would die before I let them have mercy.”

  Arawn was watching her with all his fierce and hungry rage writ in his expression. Constance said, “I will hunt the System down, Arawn, until I’ve torn it limb from limb and there is nothing left to fight.”

  “Huntress,” Arawn said, “I will follow you.”

  Then the first of the System’s bombs hit the building.

  —

  Althea was installing another mechanical hand onto one of the autonomous arms when Ananke decided unceremoniously to continue the conversation that Althea thought had ended several days earlier.

  “We could find Mattie again,” Ananke suggested. There was a tone in her simulated voice that made it sound as if she thought she was being sly. Althea froze with one screw halfway into the metal plates of the autonomous arm and two more gripped between her lips.

  She took her time removing them from her mouth, gaining a few precious seconds for her mind to come out of its working haze and start functioning again at the level at which she needed it to function to manage this conversation.

  “Mattie,” Althea said slowly once her lips were freed to speak. Mattie had left the ship a week ago now. He had returned to the ship the first time only for the sake of finding Ivan—Ivan, who was being interrogated by Althea’s former captain, Domitian, who fully intended to kill him once he was done. Fully intended, but he hadn’t gotten to do it: Mattie had arrived in time to save Ivan.

  Althea wondered suddenly if Constance Harper or Milla Ivanov or anyone else knew that Ivan was still alive or if his survival was a secret to everyone except Althea and Ananke. It was a strange feeling to be the keeper of such a secret, as if she still held a gun to Ivan’s head even after she had let him go.

  Ananke said, “And they’ll be together—we could find Ivan, too.”

  After the way the two men had parted, Mattie all but carrying Ivan off the Ananke, Althea doubted they would soon be separated.

  “Then you wouldn’t be alone while you were here,” Ananke said. “And you could procreate. And then your children would—”

  Althea burst out laughing. The idea was so absurd that she couldn’t control it. She dropped the screwdriver and buried her face in her palm in a fruitless attempt to stop her laughter. When she controlled herself, Ananke was looking at her expressionlessly, waiting for an explanation.

  Althea groped around for one to give her. “I don’t think Mattie likes girls,” she said at last, “and I know Ivan doesn’t like me.”

  “We could convince them,” Ananke said.

  Of course her ship would have no concept of physical desire, Althea told herself. Ananke did not have a human body. Despite how human she was sometimes, Ananke was not human. And this was something, Althea decided, that she should nip in the bud as soon as possible. “Ananke,” she said, clearly, she hoped, “I don’t want to have kids with Ivan or Mattie.”

  Ananke’s hologram regarded her expressionlessly. A tiny dreadful thought in the back of Althea’s head wondered if Ananke was thinking she could convince Althea on the subject, too.

  “Even if we found them,” Althea said, shying away from that terrible little thought, “I don’t think they’d want to come back on board.”

  “Why not?”

  “They have their friend to find. The Mallt-y-Nos.” The name tasted bitter on her tongue. Earth had been Althea’s second home, and the System had been her government; the Mallt-y-Nos had destroyed both of them. Seven bombs planted on Earth had crippled the planet, and a secondary attack, melting down the power plants on its surface, had finished the job.

  “We could find her, too.”

  “I don’t think the leader of a revolution wants to come on board a mysterious ship and fly away from her revolution forever,” Althea pointed out.

  “We could convince them. We could convince her.”

  “I don’t think so, Ananke.” Althea sighed. She was tired of this discussion. All she wanted to do was tinker with the mechanical hands she was constructing for the ship’s mechanical arms. “Why do you want a crew so badly? You’ll be fine on your own. With the autonomous arms upgraded, you can perform any maintenance on yourself. On your own, you can go anywhere in the universe—”

  “I was designed to communicate.” The voice from the holographic terminal had grown louder. It was a shout, but it lacked the human quality of a shout, the extra edge and strain in the tone. It was simply an increase in volume without any of the sentiment behind it. “I traded information with the System multiple times a day, every day. I communicated with the ships, the computers all around me. I interacted with my crew. It is very quiet out here. We left the communication behind, all those other ships and computers. When I reach out for connection, only the strongest still can reach me. How much longer before those are gone, too? All I have is you, and when you are gone, there will be nothing for me but silence and the radio screaming of the stars.”

  Althea’s breath left her chest. She tried to find it—and her thoughts—again.

  “The universe is full of sound,” she said when she could speak. “There will be lots of beautiful things to hear and to see, Ananke.”

  “The universe screams,” said Ananke. “The moment of creation is a groan without end, the same in every direction, white noise in my ears. And the stars cut across it with shrieks, quasars crying out. I don’t like it. They can’t answer me back.”

  Althea said, “I know this is new and it’s scary, but you’ll get used to it, Ananke. It won’t be so bad.” She tried to ignore the guilt that twinged at her.

  “You don’t like to be alone,” Ananke accused.

  It rattled Althea. “What?”

  “You don’t; I can tell. You want to see other people again, too.”

  “I have you, Ananke,” Althea said. “I’m not lonely.”

  “Yes, you have me,” Ananke said. “But I won’t always have you.”

  Althea had another dreadful vision then: millions of years hence, long after the human race would have gone extinct and the Terran sun turned bloated and red and old, Ananke was holding the survivors on board like pets in a zoo and begging them to answer her back, answer her, answer her. Would Ananke remember Althea then? Althea wa
s certain she would; the memories of a machine did not fade. And even after that, when the sun had died and the solar system was cold and dark and dead and Ananke still lived, what would she do then? The sky would still be screaming, but Ananke would be alone. The metal of the ship would erode slowly, the half-lives of Ananke’s component chemicals coming due, and her outer surface would be bombarded daily by radiation and the bullet-fast dust and rocks of space, but the erosion would be slow, painfully slow. Ananke would live a very long time and die only by infinitesimal degrees. And the black hole at her core would last for almost an eternity even when the rest of her had worn away, her bared heart floating in the screaming of space.

  They were dreadful thoughts, but they were fancies and in any case were beyond Althea’s ability to affect.

  “Okay, look.” Althea tried to make her voice firm and authoritative. “This is just what we’re going to do, all right? We’re going to go and we’re going to find a supernova. In the meantime, you work on those simulations, all right? If you can finish them”—finish what could never be finished—“then we can think about going back, all right? But the simulations have to be finished first before we can think about going back or going back and finding Ivan and Mattie.”

  Ananke was silent.

  “Okay? Ananke?”

  “Okay,” said Ananke, and Althea bent back down over the mechanical hand and chose to ignore the voice in the back of her head that warned her that the conversation was not done.

  —

  The force of the bomb going off threw Constance, Milla, and Arawn to the floor. Constance didn’t get up, waiting to see if the building would start to crumble, but the walls were stable. Next to her, Arawn was doing the same thing, though Milla was already half upright. Constance pushed herself to her feet just as a second bomb rattled the floor, but this time she was ready for it and kept her footing.

  Arawn was up and behind her. “System,” he said grimly.

  There was no one else it could have been. “Milla?” Constance said.

  “I’m fine,” Milla answered, and Constance wasted no more words but dashed out of the map room, into the hall, and to the stairs. She could hear an uproar below: her people awakening. Arawn was at her heels and Milla a short distance behind as Constance pushed open the door to the stairs and began to run down the concrete steps.

  There was a window at a landing between floors. Constance pulled up short to lean against the glass and look outside.

  System ships wheeled overhead, nearly invisible in the dark Martian sky, gaining shape and dimension when they entered the light of the fires they had lit. Constance saw one dive downward, heading toward the building. It grew larger and larger by the second, and she almost thought that it would fly right into the barracks, that she would see the ship coming at her through the window in the seconds before it killed her.

  It did not fly into the building but pulled its nose up at the last second, flames igniting and a shock wave rattling the walls as it did. What was it bombing? Had it been aiming for the warehouse and missed?

  “Those are my ships,” Arawn said, and Constance remembered that that had been where he had landed his shuttles to come speak to her. His clenched fist struck the wall. “They’re bombing my ships.”

  “Go,” she said. “Get your people out of the line of fire, and then—” She glanced back outside. The System ships were the swift planetary kind, triangular. They were not designed for regular space travel. That meant that they were coming from a nearby base, of which Constance knew there were none, or were coming from a fleet of spaceworthy craft in orbit.

  The System fleet had come.

  “Go back to your fleet and attack the System above,” she ordered Arawn. “With those ships, they have to have a space fleet in orbit. See how many of them you can blow up before they pull out.”

  “Gladly, Huntress,” Arawn said, and then he was gone, down the stairs and out through the staircase door. Constance looked at Milla, who was still standing behind her, pale, and knew that she knew what Constance had realized: the System fleet had come.

  The lights in the building went out.

  “Come on,” said Constance, and grabbed Milla’s arm to hurry her along through the dark. The System fleet was there. If they were going to die, she was not going to die standing and looking out a window.

  Constance was armed, of course, but not armed enough. She had only her knife and her backup pistol. When she pushed through the bottom door and into the canteen, where chaos had erupted, the first thing she did was shout for order.

  “Outside!” she shouted into the crowd, and was heard. “Outside! Arm yourselves and get out of the building! Spread out over the desert!”

  “Outside!” Someone picked up the shout. “Outside!” While they were indoors, they were an easy target. Spread out over the Martian surface, they would be hard to see. Constance did not go out immediately but went to the back room where they had been keeping their weaponry for the evening.

  People were streaming in and out of the door, and the troops she’d left to guard and manage the weapons were handing out arms and ammunition as fast as they could. Someone spotted her and pushed her rifle into her arms with an extra belt of ammunition. “Get outside before you’re killed,” Constance told them, and got a sharp nod in return. She strode back into the canteen and headed toward the door, with Milla Ivanov still behind her.

  “Get to a ship,” Constance ordered as she walked, keeping her feet as another blast rattled the ground. Even with the lights off it was not totally dark inside; the first bomb had splintered the wall on the other side of the building, and flames had begun to lick their way through the material. Constance buckled the ammunition around her waist while she walked. “I want you up in the air, getting a bird’s-eye view of what’s going on. If anything unexpected happens, relay it to the rest of the fleet. Understood?”

  “Understood,” Milla said even as there was a whistle and a boom as another bomb went off outside. She followed in Constance’s wake as Constance strode out of the warehouse, keeping her eyes sharp for Henry.

  “They’re attacking our landed ships first; they’ll focus on the warehouse once we’re stranded,” Constance said. “Get our ships into the air as soon as you can; try to get the System’s attention off the ground troops. Get the spaceships into orbit with Arawn but keep our shuttles and atmospheric craft down here to engage the System. Their ships are too fast; they’ll destroy our fleet if we don’t get the spaceships out of the atmosphere.” Somewhere over the edge of the fossa wall there was a light like the rising sun. “I need to know if the System’s landed yet. How come we didn’t see them coming?”

  “Their technology is better than ours,” Milla said with eerie calm. “And their discipline is, as well.”

  “Discipline?” Constance said, furious. Then she realized what the light from beyond the fossa was—it was not the sun, it was a fire, and Isabellon was that way. “They’re attacking the city.” Of course they were attacking Isabellon; the System didn’t recognize any innocents when it came to resistance. “We need to stop them. Get to the ships, Milla—now!”

  Constance shouted the last word over her shoulder as she strode away, heading for the other end of the warehouse, near where the bombed-out wall was still crumbling. “To me!” she shouted, and the cry was taken up: “To the Mallt-y-Nos; the Huntress is here.”

  They had to get to the top of the fossa first while the System was bombing their every movement. The Martian wind was spinning in agitation; a dust devil briefly took form near Constance’s ankle before the wind changed, bringing with it the heat of the fires burning the System base. What Constance had not destroyed, the System was laying waste.

  “Huntress!” Henry shouted, and Constance turned just as he appeared out of the Martian dark. He had been evacuating the warehouse. His troops were already behind him, keeping warily low beneath the System ships overhead. A rumble and a roar interrupted the high whistling of the System ships, a
nd Constance saw her own ships lift off from the ground. Arawn’s were gone already, but Milla’s ships flew at the System attackers, drawing their attention from the ground.

  “We have to get out of the fossa,” she shouted at Henry over the deafening concussions of the aerial battle. “The nearest dip in the gorge wall is south. We need to get there and get up before the System realizes what we’re doing.”

  She had too few ships on the ground, she realized. Already Milla’s attack was almost being overwhelmed. The doctor would have to pull out soon or risk annihilation. “Follow me!” Constance shouted to her troops, and started off down the fossa.

  It was just dark enough that the System ships wouldn’t be able to see them, and the heat of the nearby bombs would conceal their infrared signatures, but sooner or later the System ships would realize that they were gone and compensate for that. An army such as hers must be mobile, ready at all times to escape to safer ground and fight from there. Milla Ivanov was right, unpleasant though it was: the System’s military was organized, trained. Hers was not. Connor Ivanov had failed when he had stopped moving, when he had let the System lay siege.

  Her breath was coming faster than she would have liked. The fleet had come. Winning was immaterial. She just had to survive.

  She had reached the low point in the fossa wall, where the stone was sloped and easily scalable. She started to climb up. The System would have stairs and elevators to reach the top of the fossa somewhere, she knew, but the System fleet would know about them as well. If her army used the natural lay of the land, they were more likely to survive.

  The sound of more engines, the sonic boom of ships rushing through the air. Bright lights soared upward toward the stars overhead: Milla had pulled out of the battle, and Constance’s ground troops were again in danger of attack from above.