Supernova

by C. A. Higgins

  There were so many of them, so many more people than Constance had ever led before. The shadows concealed their number; their number was the shadows. Constance could not wait for them all to reach the top of the fossa through the bottleneck of the climbing wall. She turned to face Isabellon and saw that although System ships still wheeled overhead, they had stopped bombing the distant city: System troops must be on the ground.

  The System had the sky. The System had the ground. She and her people were trapped and exposed on the desert stone. It would take only a single well-placed bomb to take them out at the pass.

  A swell of fury filled her, equal to her terror. Fear would do her no good. She had to act and act immediately.

  “Follow me,” she said to her people, and started off again without waiting for them all to reach the mesa. She headed for Isabellon.

  The ground was scarred with pits and gritty with sand, but she knew this place and she knew this land. Her people followed after her without complaint or hesitation, spreading themselves out over the stone so that it would be harder for the System ships’ infrared cameras to detect them and so the System’s bombs could not take them all out at once.

  Constance’s breath was coming harshly in her throat, a harshness exacerbated by the dryness of the Martian air. Isabellon was far from the fossa, and it was a long walk to the edge of the city. Behind her, the System was still blindly bombing the abandoned base. They had not realized her people had escaped from the confines of the fossa. Stupid of them, Constance, thought; stupid. Once her people were within Isabellon, the System would not be able to drop its bombs without killing its own troops as well.

  The Isabellon house farthest out in the desert, farthest from the edge of the city, was on fire. Constance gripped her gun more tightly as she passed it, but there was no one nearby. She used the night and the shadows from the flickering fire as cover for her approach and saw around her that her soldiers were doing the same thing.

  Shouts and screams, the rattle of gunfire. That was the System. She entered the edge of the city, her feet falling on concrete ground.

  Someone fired to her left; one of her own people, the first bullet of the assault. A System soldier fell beneath it. Soon the rest of the System troops would realize they were here.

  When the two forces found each other, it was sudden. One moment there was nothing but fire and the Isabellons crying out; in the next Constance saw the gray uniforms of the System soldiers; in the last the soldiers let out a shout that was cut off by the retort from her gun and the guns around her.

  Constance’s people must have seemed to have materialized like demons out of the fire, they had moved so swiftly and silently. The battle broke up into a series of swift images, noises so sudden and loud that they managed to pierce the growing ringing in her ears. Constance tried to keep her back to any fires that she passed so that she could maintain her night vision; the System soldiers, who came at them in direct and orderly lines, were dazzled by the light of the flames, and their shots went awry. At some point she made it into the center of the city, a wide-open public space. Bodies lay on the Martian stone. She looked over the corpses and did not see a single System uniform. Men and women, children, with blood on their faces and their arms and their hands, lay still on the stone.

  The System had rounded up Isabellons and shot them down.

  Constance stepped carefully around the square. She did not dare to go through the center of it; that would leave her too exposed. Around her, her men were following her lead and keeping to the walls of the buildings around them. Not all of the Isabellons in the square were dead; some moved, sluggish and weak. Most of them would bleed out before it became safe enough to get them help. More would die of infection or complications later on. A few might live, but each and every body that Constance saw she blamed on the System.

  If they failed here, Constance knew, those bodies would include her and all her people.

  She forced herself to focus. There were too few bodies lying on the stone to represent the entire population of Isabellon, so some of the Isabellons must still be alive.

  Movement low on the ground ahead; Constance lifted her gun and crouched low as she moved swiftly forward, ready to fire, but when she came near enough to see through the dark, it was not a System soldier. A little girl, perhaps ten and looking stunned, was sitting on the edge of the square, near the stone steps to a residence. She was looking out at the bodies of her neighbors.

  Constance took the girl by the arm and pulled her back from the square, beneath the shadow of the stairs behind her, ignoring the girl’s sudden terror. When the girl was hidden, her face streaked and her blond hair sticking to her cheeks and neck, Constance took out her sidearm.

  “Do you know how to shoot?” she asked the girl. The girl stared at her and did not answer, so Constance took her hand and put the gun into it. It was too big for her palm.

  “This is the safety,” Constance said. “If you want to fire, you flip that switch. All right? Only flip it when you want to shoot. After you’ve flipped that switch, then you point it at your target and you pull the trigger. Do you understand?”

  The girl stared at her.

  “Hide here,” Constance said. “Don’t move; just hide here. But if the System comes and they find you, shoot them with this.”

  At last the girl nodded. Constance left her in the dark beneath the stairs, where the lights of the fires could not reveal her form.

  If the System found the girl and she had to use Constance’s gun, there was no hope for her. They would kill her before she could pull the trigger. But at least Constance hadn’t left her defenseless.

  Around her, Constance could see more Isabellons coming out of hiding, joining with her people. Some were carrying makeshift weapons of their own; the rest were being armed by Constance’s soldiers as they passed. Ahead of her, Constance could see where some of the System soldiers had retreated. It was a solid building, the same clean, monotonous lines in the architecture that defined System buildings throughout the solar system. There was light inside the house—idiots—and the windows bristled with weaponry.

  Constance circled the house in the dark, with her people gathering around her. Elsewhere in the town she heard gunfire and shouting. She had cornered only a small group of System soldiers here, separated from the main force; at any moment their companions would arrive to assist them.

  The soldiers fired a few times at Constance and her people, but her troops melted away into the night, and none of the bullets made contact. Even so, the house was too well defended; Constance couldn’t approach it. She withdrew, gesturing to a few of her people to follow her.

  “I want to speak with our fleet,” Constance said once they were safely behind a nearby house. Bullet marks had spiderwebbed the glass of the window above them.

  Rayet was there. He reached down to his hip and handed her a thick black box. “I sent Isaac for a radio a few minutes ago,” he said. “He’s bringing one to Henry now.”

  “Good,” Constance said, and lifted the radio to her lips. “Doctor Ivanov, can you hear me?”

  “I’m receiving you,” said Milla.

  “Are you receiving my location?”

  “The GPS is working, yes.”

  “There’s a house nearby full of System soldiers. All the lights are on. I want you to bomb that house and give us a warning before you do so that we can get out of the blast radius. We’ll keep them pinned down until you can arrive.”

  “We can’t come right now,” Milla Ivanov said, as calm as if she were discussing something of no urgency at all. “We’re pinned down by System ships. They’ve got us backed up against—”

  The sound abruptly cut out.

  A dreadful fear struck Constance’s heart. “Doctor Ivanov? Milla?”

  Milla said, “Get everyone away from the house now.”

  An order like that was not to be ignored. Constance said, “Back, get back,” and her people retreated with practiced swiftness, leavi
ng the System-controlled house standing alone.

  A System soldier took a step from the house out into the yard, his eyes warily scanning the darkness, a slow dreadful comprehension dawning on his face.

  A ship hurtled down out of the sky, weaponry alight, and the bomb it dropped blew the house apart.

  When the ringing in Constance’s ears had subsided slightly, when the concussive haze had faded from her mind, she looked up at the sky and found it alive with ships.

  They were not System ships, but they were not her own, either.

  She started to laugh. She stood herself up and looked up at the sky while her fleet and Arawn’s joined together and drove the System ships back.

  There were still System soldiers in Isabellon, but they were fleeing. Constance and her people pursued them, running them down the way hounds run down a stag. They were fleeing toward their own ships, boarding their shuttles and flying away, rushing to retreat to the safety of their ships in orbit. One of Constance’s ships managed to shoot down one of the shuttles, but the System defended the retreat well, and none of the other ships could get near.

  Constance managed to corner one of the retreating soldiers on the ground. She shot him in the shoulder; he fired at her and missed, but she was out of ammunition and her second gun was gone. She pulled out her knife and advanced on him where he lay on the sand and stone.

  “How many Isabellons dead?” she asked him. He tried to push himself away from her, but behind him was one of the bombed houses, and it was still burning. He had to face Constance or be burned alive.

  “This is for Earth,” he told her viciously, but he was too weak to push her off when she knelt on his chest and put her knife to his neck.

  “This is for Miranda,” she told him. “This is for Haumea, for Titania, for Triton, for Pluto, and for Puck. This is for all the outer planets. This is for Saturn.” He was afraid, she saw, but he was angry, too.

  He had no right to be angry. “Fuck your Earth,” Constance said, and killed him.

  —

  Althea’s ship was full of death.

  Gagnon was shredded in Ananke’s core. Ida’s corpse was rotting in her quarters with a bloody tear in her neck. Domitian’s body was in the white room, and Althea did not even know precisely how he had died. Even the core of the ship was the corpse of a star. And one day Althea would be one of them.

  But until that day she could not live in terror of those corpses. The task would only grow less pleasant the longer the delay dragged on. She had to move the corpses now, while they still resembled men and women, rather than wait to shovel stinking and spongy flesh into buckets, bones sticking out of sloughing skin. She had let her fear keep her from her duty for nearly two weeks, since Ivan had left at Mattie’s side, but now she would not let her ship suffer by leaving those corpses to rot and stain Ananke’s pure halls.

  Gagnon had no corpse Althea could reach; it had been destroyed by the black hole. That left only Ida and Domitian. Althea wished she could think of them as nothing more than objects, but she could not. She could think of them only by the names by which she had known them, as the people they once had been but no longer were. A body without a soul was no more alive than a computer was—at least, any computer except Althea’s Ananke—just a jumbled compilation of parts that slowly and inevitably were ceasing to work together. But she remembered them as they had been, she remembered who they were, and she remembered how each of them had died. Ananke had killed Gagnon, sending him to be shredded by the tidal forces at her core. It had been self-defense; he had been trying to kill her. Ivan had murdered Ida, had slit open her throat with Althea’s knife and left her gaping corpse arranged in state on the table in the room in which she had tortured him. That had been self-defense, too, of a sort. Althea could not justify either fully in her head, though she tried. And to make it worse, she had provided the tools to both Ivan and Ananke that they had used to kill.

  Domitian had been murdered last by Matthew Gale, who had come to rescue his friend. That was the one corpse Althea had not seen yet. She did not want to know what she would see: Domitian cold and rotting, stiff and seized up, with a ragged hole in his chest or his head, no longer looking like the man she had known and trusted. She knew his body was in the white room, where Ida’s corpse had been before Domitian had returned Ida to her quarters.

  She went to see Domitian’s corpse first.

  The Ananke’s spiral hallway was very long, and the white room was rather far down its curve. The ship was silent, as always, except for the low hum of its running. Althea listened to the background noises of the ship intently, listening for any sign of error or trouble, but heard nothing but the susurration of air from the vents overhead, the clean soprano note of electronics switched on, the low rumble of electromagnets at the center of the ship shifting to contain the core, rhythmic, like the beating of a heart. There was no sound of voices or of human life except for Althea’s footsteps, because everyone else who had been on board was dead or gone. Ananke was silent, but there were cameras overhead, and so Althea knew the ship was watching her. Possibly Ananke could not stop herself from watching. Cameras were not eyes that could be closed; they could only stare.

  Althea had not been in the white room since she had shot Ivan in the leg. She had not been in the white room since the Ananke still had been within the solar system. The last time Althea had been in the white room, the floor had been stained brown and crimson with Ida’s blood. There had been dried drips down the legs of the steel table in the center of the room from Ida’s blood spilling over the edges of the table and down to the floor.

  Althea knew she was breathing too heavily. She thought of her ship. She listened to its sounds. That knocking there; that was a good knocking, wasn’t it? That was the mechanical arm in the air system—she tried to time it, counting beats, counting breaths.

  The door to the white room was ahead. Althea tried to calculate the stress the added speed might cause the black hole containment, but as soon as her hand lay on the doorknob, she thought of nothing but what was inside.

  Althea thought, Ananke must not see me afraid.

  She opened the door to the white room that had become a tomb.

  But there was no corpse at the steel table, no corpse on either of the two chairs. There was no blood on the floor or on the table or on either of the chairs. There were no bloody footsteps leading to the wall; there were no corpses in any of the corners of the vast and empty room. The steel table gleamed, as clean as a blade, and the white room was as pure and brilliant a white as it had been before Ida Stays had come.

  Drawn by astonishment greater than her fear, Althea stepped fully inside. The room was enormous, as tall as the full height of the Ananke, floor and ceiling and walls alike all white and brightly lit and, except for the table and chairs and the items atop them, completely empty.

  Althea’s gaze went back to the table and the chairs. Ida’s polygraph had been broken in Ivan’s escape; it had been placed back on the table but not put back together. The coiled crimson wires dangled off the edge of the table like veins carefully excised from their parent corpse. A neat pile of nuts and bolts and bits of broken glass sat next to the bent polygraph. On the other side of the table was an IV stand with a half-empty bottle of clear liquid hanging from the hook. Truth serum.

  Althea walked into the room. She could not help herself, drawn in by a macabre impulse to marvel at how the dreadful things that had happened there had been cleaned up so carefully. It was almost worse this way, as if she had stepped into a stage set and not into the site of a real tragedy, as if the suffering and fear had never happened at all, as if they had not been real, as if they might happen all over again in the next performance.

  Finally, she stopped, not yet close enough to touch the chairs or table, but near enough to see, standing just behind the chair that had been Ivan’s. There were still chains hanging from the arms, from the legs.

  He had been bleeding from the thigh, she knew, from whe
re she had shot him. None of his blood was on the chrome chair.

  “Ananke,” she said.

  There was no holographic terminal in the white room; there were no computer displays. But Althea had left the door to the white room hanging ajar, and Ananke’s voice came through that door immediately, as if she had been waiting for Althea to speak.

  “I thought you wouldn’t want to have to clean them up,” Ananke said. “I thought you might feel better if they were put away.”

  Althea knew that Ananke was speaking through the intercom just beside the door, but she could not shake the eerie impulse that Ananke was physically out there, standing in the hall, hidden just out of sight at the door. Althea stared at the chair. She had never, it occurred to her, seen it empty. She had only ever seen it with Ivan chained to it.

  “Ida, too?” Althea asked, feeling hardly conscious of the things she said and distantly astonished by the calm of her voice.

  “Yes. Her room is clean.”

  Althea said, “Where are they now?”

  The silence that followed was long.

  “I sent them into space.”

  Althea closed her eyes, momentarily blocking the white room from her gaze. Peculiarly, for all her dread of the task, she felt no relief at its having been done. Instead she thought only, Alone, alone.

  She wondered when Ananke had done it. Althea had just finished her first round of improvements to some of the mechanical arms. Ananke must have used the upgraded mechanical arms to move the bodies and clean up the areas. There was no other way she could have done it. It must have been one of the first things Ananke had done with her new hands: clean up the bodies and make her rooms orderly again. But Althea hadn’t finished her upgrades to the physical arms, and she hadn’t started upgrading the code to control the new hardware, either. She pictured the mechanical arms learning dexterity and precision through trial and error, one gripping too hard and splitting flesh and snapping bone, another gripping too loosely and letting the body drop heavily to the floor.