Supernova

by C. A. Higgins

  Althea opened her eyes again and looked back at the table and chairs. There was the slightest discoloration on the area between Ivan’s chair and the table, where Ida had died, where her blood had rested the longest.

  Althea felt numb down to the tingling tips of her fingers.

  “Why did you do it?” she asked. “I should have done it.”

  “You didn’t have to. You didn’t want to. I didn’t like having them on board.”

  Althea supposed she should have expected it. Ananke was designed to keep herself running in an optimal state for herself and for her crew. Corpses rotting inside of her would have registered as suboptimal.

  “I should’ve done it,” she said again. “Sending them out without a word, without a—without anything. Their bodies won’t even ever go home. Stuck between stars for the rest of forever.”

  “Their bodies will go home,” Ananke assured her.

  It was an unexpected relief to Althea that Ananke would know to do that much. “You sent them out in the direction of the solar system?”

  Another lengthy pause. “No.”

  Even through her haze of horror, Althea realized that something was wrong. “Then how are they getting home?”

  Another pause, as if Ananke thought she could stop Althea from finding out the truth by taking longer to tell it or by not telling it all. Ananke evaded: “I gave them the same momentum as the ship.” She’d learned that trick from Ivan, Althea knew.

  Althea said again, “Then how are they getting home?” but she already knew. The white room was full of ghosts, ghosts that Ananke’s scouring could not remove. They were not ghosts of people; they were ghosts of feelings, of ideas. Ivan’s despair haunted this room, and Ida’s cruelty, and Domitian’s violence, and Althea’s terror. Ananke perhaps did not know that they were there, but they filled Althea’s breast and rode in and out of her lungs on her every rapid breath.

  Ananke said, “I changed our course.”

  Althea could not speak, as frozen and powerless as a girl made of ice.

  Ananke said, “We’re going back.”

  —

  Constance spent the rest of the night helping the Isabellons clean up their town, dousing the fires, shifting rubble, removing the bodies. The System corpses they threw to the side to be burned. The Isabellon bodies were taken from the town and buried in the cemetery of dust and stone on the outskirts of the town.

  Constance left her people cleaning the gore from the square and tending to her wounded and the wounded Isabellons to pay her respects to the dead. Not all of the graves had been dug yet, and unburied bodies were lying in neat lines to the side. Most of the Isabellons were occupied with digging, but one man stood aside and looked at the freshly dug graves.

  Some distance away, one of her shuttles landed. She did not pause. If people wanted her, they knew where to find her.

  She came up and stood beside the man. He had curly hair down to his shoulders and a bandage on his cheek. She asked, “Did you lose someone?”

  “Everyone did,” he said, and continued to look down at the graves. Constance followed his gaze. The sight of the graves grieved her, made her furious, but there was triumph in her even so.

  In open battle, in direct confrontation, her own forces had faced the System, and the System had been driven back. The war was by no means won, but her revolution could face the System on its own ground and win. The System had felt fear. She would not die uselessly. Her revolution had a chance.

  “Huntress!” someone called, her voice thin with distance.

  “I think that’s you,” the man with the curly hair said without turning. Constance gave the graves one last glance and then went back into the town.

  Milla Ivanov was walking down the path to the graveyard toward her, her blue eyes intent. Her white hair gleamed with the Martian sunlight. Constance said, “News of the System?”

  “No,” said Milla. “They’ve gone off somewhere. I imagine they’ll go to ground somewhere else on the planet or retreat to a different planet to regroup.”

  “How many of them did we take out? How many left? What were our casualties?”

  “A good deal on both sides but more on theirs. I have all that information for you on the Wild Hunt. Constance, that’s not why I came.”

  There was something ominous about her words, about the swiftness of her speech. Constance could not imagine what shadow had come in the moment of her victory, but she feared whatever Milla had come to say. “Why did you come?”

  “News from Jupiter came during the night, just after the battle,” said Milla, and Mattie, Constance thought, suddenly certain of it. It’s Mattie; Mattie is dead, too, certain that as Ivan had been the cost for Earth, Mattie would be the cost for Isabellon, but Milla went on speaking. “It’s Anji Chandrasekhar.”

  “Anji?” Anji was on Jupiter with a bottle of Constance’s best liquor. Anji could not be dead or in trouble; the System fleet was on Mars fighting Constance, not on Jupiter as Anji had feared.

  “She’s declared herself independent,” Milla Ivanov said. “She no longer follows or supports the Mallt-y-Nos.”

  Chapter 2

  MAIN SEQUENCE

  SIX MONTHS BEFORE THE FALL OF EARTH

  Constance had contacts on Pallas, and with their help and with the destruction of the System’s base, she, Mattie, Ivan, Anji, and Christoph got off Pallas without difficulty. The other six bombs were already on Ivan and Mattie’s ship, the Annwn. Constance stood in her own room on the Annwn while the others loaded the bomb and sent a message to Julian.

  “En route,” she wrote. “On schedule.”

  Then she began to encrypt it as Ivan had taught her to, a complex cipher of numbers and letters.

  From down the hall, she heard Anji’s distinctive tread, the sound of it pausing in front of a door some distance away from Constance’s. “Where’s your better half?” Anji said loudly enough for Constance to hear though she was not speaking to her.

  Ivan’s quieter tones answered her. “Mattie’s flying the ship.”

  “I meant Constance.” Anji’s voice was rich with amusement.

  “Constance is in her room.”

  “She has a room all her own?” Anji teased. “Why don’t I have a room on your ship, Ivan?”

  “You do. Go right down the hall to the air lock and then, when you’re inside, hit ‘eject.’ ”

  Anji laughed, and that laughter crescendoed and came nearer. She was still smiling when she appeared at the door just as Constance finished encrypting the message.

  “Christoph says he’s clear,” Anji said, and Constance nodded. Christoph had stayed long enough on board the Annwn to finish packing the bombs away—he once had been a gunrunner and knew something about the safe and discreet transport of explosives—and then had left. Anji had stayed until he was some distance away. It wouldn’t do for them to seem to be as close as they were.

  “He’s still not too happy about the plan, though,” Anji added. “He really wanted to be the one to take Luna, not end up past Neptune herding planetoids.”

  “He’ll get over it,” Constance said. When she had met Christoph through the foster program when she had been young, she’d been able to offer him things no one else could: a little freedom and a little more revenge. She still was the only one who could give him those things, and so even aside from the loyalty she had earned through friendship, he would do as she said.

  “Are your people ready on Triton?” Constance asked.

  “Ready to go,” Anji said. “We asked them to start rumbling early, even before we got there. By the time Christoph and I are on Triton, the System will already be paying attention—we’ll just make sure they can’t look away.”

  As planned. Constance nodded again slowly, reassured, if not entirely. There were still things that could go wrong; there always were. “Good luck,” she said. “Are you heading out soon?”

  “Yeah,” said Anji. “Are you sure you guys will be fine on Luna?”

&n
bsp; “Why?”

  “Well, Christoph and the others have Triton pretty well in hand, so I wanted to make sure you didn’t need me there,” Anji said. “For another distraction, closer to Earth.”

  Constance had considered it, but the goal was to get the System’s attention as far from Luna as was possible. “Thank you, but that won’t be necessary.”

  Anji hesitated again, then nodded and grinned at her and somehow managed to show every last one of her teeth in the smile. “Happy hunting, Constance.”

  “I’ll see you soon,” Constance said, and Anji left. Constance retraced Anji’s steps from her door to the den, where Ivan was sitting.

  The den of the Annwn was a simple room with curved walls and a curved floor in accordance with the wheel-like shape of the ship. Usually it was wide and spacious, with a few couches pushed against the walls and whatever odds and ends Mattie and Ivan happened to be carrying scattered throughout the rest of the room. But now, with the ship’s cargo hold full of bombs, the food and fuel supplies that Mattie and Ivan usually stored overhead had been displaced. Boxes and crates clogged the den, and all the couches had been pushed to one corner, accessible only by a narrow pathway through the labyrinthine packing of the supplies. Ivan was on one of the couches; Constance could see his shape through the clear plastic of the shipping containers, warped. He had cleaned up from Pallas, but he was still all in black. There was tension in his body, in the way he sat, and Constance knew that his mind was churning over something. What it was in particular she couldn’t say, but she knew it was not good.

  “What is it?” she asked as she seated herself across from him.

  He flashed a smile at her. It was one of those smiles where she had a difficult time telling whether it was sincere. “Connie, you’re so suspicious,” he said.

  “I have reason to be,” said Constance, and smiled his own smile back at him. The small space they were in between the stacked boxes seemed to exist on some razor line between intimate and claustrophobic, and Constance became even more aware of how small it was when Ivan looked at her like that.

  He rose to his feet without haste. “No reason to be suspicious of me,” he said with charm and self-deprecation, as if she were a mark, and she felt her heart start beating faster in anticipation.

  Whether the anticipation was of love or a fight didn’t matter. Ivan stepped over the low table separating them and knelt down in front of her, as close to her as he could get, leaning his arms on her knees. He said, whispering, “Do you know what’s right over our heads, right now?”

  Constance leaned forward until the shadow of her head fell over his face. “Bombs.”

  “One bomb like that would be enough to destroy this ship and all of us in it,” Ivan said. “We have seven.”

  “Just like we planned,” Constance said. She could feel the heat of his arms through the fabric of her pants. There was a play here; he was up to something, and she had to be careful of what it was. Somehow the anticipation of that conflict made her heart beat even faster.

  Ivan said, “If all these bombs went off, it would be the brightest thing in the sky to someone on one of the nearby asteroids. Like a supernova right overhead.”

  “The bombs won’t go off until I want them to go off.”

  “Until you want them to go off,” Ivan echoed. He reached up to push a strand of her hair back behind her ear. Constance grabbed his wrist. There was a way that he looked at her and her alone, a wary and anticipating look, and he was giving it to her now while her fingers were bent like bands around his arm.

  “Are you afraid they might go off?” Constance asked.

  “They won’t go off on this ship,” Ivan said. “We loaded them too carefully.”

  “So what are you afraid of?”

  He didn’t answer her. Instead, he reached up his other hand, the one she hadn’t taken, and brushed her hair behind her ear. This time Constance let him.

  “I saw Saturn once,” he said. “After those bombs went off.”

  “So did I,” Constance said. “It’s one of the first things I remember.” She had been a very young child when Ivan’s father’s revolution had failed; Ivan had only just been born. “They kept broadcasting the footage on Miranda over and over again.” The moons of Saturn lighting up with flames. Enceladus with the bombs falling down, shattering the greenhouse glass. Constance had seen it all. “They liked to show us the bodies in Saturn’s rings…the ones that were frozen, preserved by the vacuum.”

  “They’re all still there,” said Ivan.

  “We’ll punish them for that and for all the thousand other things they did,” said Constance. She could remember everything she had seen the System do with perfect clarity, even the things she had seen as a child on Miranda—especially those things. She remembered the darkness of the planet, the dirty ice and quartz underfoot, the dark looming and eerie blue glow of Uranus hanging ever overhead. She remembered the System soldiers stalking the streets, watching her, a little girl, with mistrustful and hating eyes. She remembered supplies delayed or diverted, herself and her people starving and far from the sun. She remembered cameras overhead and her mother warning her to be careful because the System was watching. She remembered two years after Connor Ivanov had fallen the System soldiers coming into her house and taking away her mother for being the friend of a rebel. Constance had dreamed for years of that moment, her mother being taken away, hands wrapping around her arms, her waist, her neck, dragging her away from Constance. She did not remember the faces of the System soldiers who had come. She only remembered their hands.

  “They have done many things,” said Ivan quietly, which hardly covered the horrors of it to Constance, who had seen men beaten until they stopped moving, who had seen people rounded up in alleys and shot without hope of escape, who had heard the silence that interrupted the last woman left alive to scream.

  “Those bombs are justice,” Constance said, and Ivan licked his lips and looked at her as if he was going to say something.

  “Am I interrupting something?” said Mattie from the direction of the doorway.

  Ivan broke their gaze first, pulling his hand out of Constance’s grip.

  “Because I can come back,” Mattie said.

  “Constance thinks rhetoric is good pillow talk,” said Ivan, and stood up.

  “I kind of suspected but didn’t want to know. Con, Anji’s safely out; she says the way’s clear.”

  “Is it wise to leave the ship on autopilot?” Constance asked.

  Mattie shrugged. “Annie can handle it.”

  Constance didn’t think much of the men entrusting so much to their ship’s computer, programmed personality or not, but it wasn’t her affair. “Is that all you came to say?”

  Mattie said to Ivan, “Did you tell her yet?”

  “No,” Ivan said, and sat down heavily on the couch.

  “Tell me what?”

  The two men exchanged a glance. She hated it when they did that. It was irrational, she knew, but they cut her out so cleanly and completely that it unnerved her.

  Mattie sat down beside Ivan on the couch, creating a unified front. Ivan said, “A System intelligence agent has been asking after us.”

  System Intelligence? System Intelligence dealt solely with issues of terrorism and revolution, with threats to the System as a whole. A System intelligence agent shouldn’t be interested in Ivan and Mattie unless—

  “She hasn’t been asking about you,” Mattie said. “Just us and Abigail. So she knows Abigail’s name, but she doesn’t know you’re Abigail. But she’s haunting us good; everywhere we go we hear her name.”

  “Ida Stays,” Ivan said, pronouncing the syllables precisely, the name foreign to his tongue. Constance committed the name to memory.

  Ida Stays would track them down eventually, Constance was sure. Given enough time, this System intelligence agent would figure it all out, and then they all would be dead—unless the System was destroyed first.

  “We have to act
fast,” Constance said. “And we can’t fail.”

  Mattie was nodding, unfazed. Constance envied him that sometimes, that total faith, that total lack of fear. Ivan was watching her with a careful lack of expression.

  Constance said, “It’s too late to go back now.”

  AFTER THE FALL OF EARTH

  It always took time to travel in space, but the shuttle ride from Isabellon to the Wild Hunt took an eternity to Constance. She itched to see the message from Anji. There were codes in their messages; if Anji’s betrayal had been forced—if Anji was in trouble—she would be able to let Constance know. It seemed to take years before the shuttle docked and she could step out into the Wild Hunt’s docking bay.

  The Wild Hunt had been a System ship once, but a ship for the System’s elite. Constance had taken it on the way back from Earth, replacing her cheap civilian interplanetary transport with the most powerful ship she had come across. It was heavily armed and swift but also designed for the comfort of dignitaries and politicians; the marriage between the two facets of its purpose had resulted in an oddly organic design to the corridors.

  “Who knows?” she asked Milla on her course toward the main communications room. The ship had centripetal gravity, and so the corridors had to stretch out in circular shells around the center of the ship or wind up and down in curling staircases in rays away from the center. In these restricted shapes they branched in fractals like roots constrained by the odd shape of a pot and flowed through strangely shaped rooms like organs wedged into the narrow confines of a body. Constance supposed the design represented an attempt at artistry, but that attempt was so ruthlessly constrained by the outer shape of the ship that she could find no beauty in it, especially not when everything was made of the same dull, soulless metal, wearying to the eye.

  “Anyone might,” Milla said. “The broadcast was publicly sent. For the moment only you and I know for certain. But this news will spread.”

  The news spreading was inevitable. Constance only hoped the issue could be cleared up before the rumor had spread too far.