Supernova

by C. A. Higgins

  —

  For a time, while Althea worked on the mechanical arms, there was nothing but she and the machine, and for a time she was wholly at peace.

  This connection was difficult to make. If she’d had another set of hands, she could have used them to keep the screwdriver braced while she wrapped the small wires together beneath the metal flap that the screwdriver was holding up. The rest of the mechanical arms hadn’t been programmed yet, just upgraded, and so their range of motion wasn’t extensive enough to help her, and there was no one else on board. Althea found herself contorted around the delicate mechanism, resting the weight of her leg on the screwdriver to hold the flap up while she wormed her fingers into the space it opened.

  There—she’d almost gotten it—

  “Look!”

  The sound of Ananke’s voice startled Althea. Her leg slipped off the screwdriver, which jolted with a clang as it gave in to the pressure of the metal above it, flying free of its bracing to scrape its end into the meat of Althea’s palm.

  “Ah!” she said, jerking away from the metal hand to grasp her own hand at the wrist. Blood already was dripping down, brilliantly red, impossibly saturated with color beneath the color-sapping fluorescent lights of Ananke’s halls.

  “Are you all right?” Ananke asked, her hologram leaning forward as close as she could get to the edge of the terminal, as if she wanted to come out of it and go to Althea. It was a peculiar learned impulse.

  Althea studied her hand. The screwdriver had scratched at the flesh at the base of her thumb; though it was a solid cut, it hadn’t gone deeply enough to do any permanent damage or require any stitches. It was her right hand, anyway, and Althea worked with her left. A bit of antiseptic and a bandage and she would be fine in a few days.

  It was bleeding a lot, though. Althea looked down at the mechanical hand she had dropped to the floor and saw some drops of her blood dripping down the curled metal fingers and sinking into the joints and joins of the machine. She grimaced. She’d have to clean all that out if that hand was to be salvageable.

  “I’m fine,” she assured Ananke, and rose to her feet with her left hand clutching her right by the wrist, drips and drops of the impossible brightness of her blood spilling from her skin.

  She left the workroom and walked quickly through the hall, her attention focused on her hand and the blood that had just started to slide in thin and tentative lines down her arm, trying to stop it from falling to Ananke’s floor. She was so focused on this task that she entirely forgot about what she might find in the medical bay.

  The minute she entered it, she remembered, and she stopped. For a moment she looked around the room; for a moment she forgot the blood on her hand and the stinging in her palm.

  The last person to have been in the med bay had been Domitian, who had gone there to grab bandages to cover the hole in Ivan’s leg made by Althea’s bullet. He had been angry when he had come in and angry when he left: gauze and wrappings had been strewn on the floor around the relevant cupboard, and black surgical thread made lines like cracks in the white floor. Ananke had thought to tidy away Domitian’s corpse, Althea saw, but she had not thought to clean up this milder mess.

  The rest of the medical bay was pristine. The walls and floor and ceiling were made of the same white panels that were in the white room, and although the med bay was far smaller, there was enough similarity to jolt Althea’s heart. There was even a steel table in the center of the room, but this table was an operating table, broad and gleamingly clean, with mobile lights and equipment suspended overhead, dangling down from the ceiling; it was a version of the System medical chambers made for mass distribution, modified for use by the computer of the Ananke. Something about the bent metal pieces suspended over that bare and gleaming table reminded Althea uneasily of the unfinished and skeletal mechanical hand she had abandoned in the workroom. Most of the medical equipment was out of sight in the cabinets disguised as white panels in the white walls, but there was an IV stand beside the computer interface and the holographic terminal, standing innocent and abandoned, much like the IV stand that still stood in the white room. The place was dreadfully sterile and dreadfully like the white room, and that perfect cleanliness and sterility made the slight mess Domitian had left seem all the more sinister.

  The tickle of blood dripping down her arm brought her back to herself. Althea walked determinedly past the fallen gauze, stepping over the surgical thread, to the cabinet in the wall she needed. She grabbed a towel and pressed it against the bleeding so that she could fumble around until she remembered which of the cabinet doors actually hid the sink.

  “Do you need help?”

  Ananke had manifested in the holographic terminal. There was something slightly different about her hologram today, but Althea did not have time to try to figure out what it was. “No, I’m fine,” she said, and finally found where the sink was hidden. She stuck her bleeding hand into the basin, pulling away the towel, and tried to figure out how to unlock the pipes so that the water would run. Before she could wonder how Ananke had planned to help her, there was a rumble outside, the sound of wheels paired with a motorized groan.

  Althea turned. Framed in the doorway to the medical bay, which she had left ajar, was one of the mechanical arms she had upgraded. There were many mechanical arms on board the Ananke, but the arm in the doorway was one of the heavy-duty ones. Its base was square, a solid block heavy with machinery that sat low on four wheels that rumbled weightily over the Ananke’s grated flooring when it moved. The mechanical arm that extended out of its solid base was long and powerful, terminating in the bright and slightly out-of-place new mechanical hand. Stretched to its full height, the tips of its new hand could have reached up and through the ceiling in the hall. It was certainly a strong enough machine and solid enough to have lifted Althea’s full weight without straining or tipping over.

  She was letting it nowhere near the delicate flesh of her hand.

  “I’m good, Ananke,” she assured her daughter just as her own fumbling fingers flipped on the water. She jerked her hand out of the spray with a hiss.

  The mechanical arm wheeled itself a little farther into the room, its motor groaning low, the tenor of its rumbling wheels changing as it passed from the grated floor outside to the paneled floor in the med bay. Althea said, “I’m fine,” and examined the cut. With the water whisking the blood away, it was smaller than she’d thought. She carefully touched the torn flap of skin and regretted it immediately.

  “I didn’t mean for you to be hurt,” Ananke said, sounding genuinely distressed, and Althea turned to face her, to smile through the stinging of the water on the wound.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” she assured her, and squinted at the hologram. It was slightly different, as Althea had first thought: the young woman in the hologram looked a little younger today, closer to a child.

  Perhaps it was only an expression of Ananke’s distress over Althea being hurt. It was unnerving in any case. Althea turned away, back to the sink.

  When there was the motorized groan and the rumble of wheels again, she remembered suddenly that the mechanical arm behind her had been the one that had pushed Gagnon to his death and must have been one of the arms that had carried Domitian and Ida’s corpses out to be cast into space.

  The rumble and groan got closer and closer until Althea was tense, aware of its bulk at her back. A shadow fell over her shoulder, and when she turned to look, she found the edge of a towel being dangled into her line of sight. With a sigh, she reached out with her free hand and took it. She pulled her injured hand out of the spray and pressed the towel to it, shutting off the water and sealing the pipes again.

  “Thanks,” she said to Ananke, and wove around the bulk of the mechanical arm to reach the cabinet that held the antiseptic and the gauze.

  With her materials tucked into the crook of her arm, Althea went to the table in the middle of the room and dropped the gauze and bandages onto it before getting one
hip on its surface and hoisting herself onto its edge. She checked the bleeding. It had slowed, nearly stopped. She’d give it a little bit longer before trying to bandage it. She pressed the towel back to her palm.

  “What did you want to show me?” she asked Ananke, remembering Ananke saying, “Look!”

  “It’s passed now,” Ananke told her.

  “Well, what was it?”

  “An eclipse,” Ananke said. “Chariklo passed between us and the sun. Look.”

  There was a computer screen in the med bay, of course. It was behind Althea where she sat and was set rather high up in the wall. She had to twist her torso and crane her neck to see, ending up oddly contorted so that she could look up at the screen and still keep pressure on her right hand.

  The computer screen was showing the view from outside the ship, or the view as it had been outside the ship a few minutes earlier. Chariklo, the minor planet, was drifting through space beside the sun. At this distance, the sun was small but still impossibly bright. Chariklo’s slender ring system passed in front of the sun first, the striations and dust in the rings lighting up and spreading the sunlight around in an arc. Then the sun winked in the space between the rings and the planet, and then Chariklo itself passed between Ananke and the sun, blocking out the glare of the distant star and outlining its shape in gold.

  It was beautiful. Althea found herself smiling. “That was really nice, Ananke.”

  “It was brief,” Ananke said. “I wanted you to see.”

  “I’m glad you showed me.” She checked her palm again. The bleeding had almost stopped. Althea grabbed the tube of antiseptic, bracing it beneath her knee so that she could squeeze a small amount of it onto the fingers of her free hand. She worked it into the wound beneath the torn flap of skin and pushed the skin back down, then layered a piece of gauze over it.

  If she’d had an extra hand, Althea thought, it would have been easy. As it was, she struggled to unwrap the bandages from their roll and then wrap them cleanly around her hand. She wanted it to be firm enough to withstand the movements she’d have to make but not so bulky that it would restrain her.

  “You know,” Althea commented for something to say and because she had forgotten this story until now, “when you were being designed, the System almost forgot to give you cameras on the outside of the ship.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.” She managed to get the first loop around. The rest should be easier. “They spent hours and hours planning where the cameras would go on the inside. Should they put any in the core? I told them that was pointless; nobody was going to go down there, and I wasn’t sure the cameras would work too well, either. But I went to meeting after meeting about where the cameras should be on the inside. How they could be arranged so that they could see everything that went on in here.”

  The second loop, the third. She went around once more to be certain and then held the roll of bandages in her free hand, trying to remember where the scissors were kept.

  “Anyway,” Althea said, distracted by the thought of the scissors and hopping off the table to go back to the cabinet where she thought they were kept, “they were so worried about what the crew might get up to without them keeping an eye on us that they totally forgot that the ship itself had to be able to run. I just kind of assumed that those meetings were happening somewhere else, and it was only pretty far into the process that I realized…”

  She rummaged through the cabinet, down to its corners. There were no scissors inside.

  “When I realized…that no one was talking about…Ananke, where are the scissors?”

  “They’re on the floor,” Ananke said.

  Althea turned around. There, lying amid the scattered gauze and strands of black surgical thread, was a pair of surgical scissors. Domitian would have needed them, Althea realized. He had taken them, with the surgical thread and the bandages, and gone into the white room and stitched up Ivan so that he wouldn’t bleed to death before Domitian could interrogate him. And then he had brought them back in here, angry and in a rush, along with whatever surgical supplies he hadn’t used. He obviously hadn’t made an effort to clean up the mess he had made. Althea could see it suddenly, very clearly: Domitian shoving his remaining supplies back into the cabinet, indifferent to what he dropped, the scissors falling to the floor.

  And then Domitian leaving again faster than he’d come, returning to Ivan, who was still unconscious in the bloodied white room.

  Althea did not pick up the scissors. She lifted the bandage up to her face and bit down on it, tearing it with her teeth instead.

  “And they almost forgot to put in cameras?” Ananke prompted.

  “Right,” said Althea. “They almost forgot, but I reminded them. I told them that they couldn’t make a blind ship. And so I made sure you got all the cameras. But the System almost forgot. I couldn’t believe—they were so worried about that one thing that they couldn’t even see the bigger problem. But you have cameras now,” she added, the story ending lamely, no longer certain why she’d begun to tell it.

  She’d gotten a little hole in the bandage. She tore the rest of it and clipped the end shut, putting the roll of bandages back into the cabinet.

  Then, carefully, she knelt down on the white floor and began to pick up the strewn pieces of gauze and thread, the abandoned scissors.

  “The System was very inefficient,” Ananke observed. “One person would have done better. Or a machine. There were too many pieces in the System.”

  “Maybe,” Althea said. She started to shift the debris into two piles, determining what to keep and what to discard, then realized she should dispose of it all. Leaving the scissors where they lay, she swept up the garbage into her good hand.

  “This medical bay is very advanced,” Ananke said.

  “Hmm?” Althea said, hardly listening. The garbage was hidden in one of the cabinets as well. She pulled open the wrong door three times before finally figuring out which one it was.

  “Yes,” Ananke said. “It had to be if there were only three crew members. There had to be a way for you to be preserved in case there was some accident, to keep your life sustained. With some modifications, I could use that to protect against aging; I don’t believe I’d be able to maintain it indefinitely, but—”

  “What?” Althea said, horrified, the garbage forgotten.

  “Prolong your life. I could integrate you into my systems—”

  “No! Ananke, no!” Althea’s heart was pounding so hard and loud, she was certain Ananke must be able to hear it from the way it filled her own ears. “No, you can’t!”

  “I can—”

  “No, you can, but you can’t!” Ananke frowned, probably parsing out Althea’s contradictory language, but Althea did not give her time to regroup. “It’s wrong to do that, it’s wrong. You can’t—you can’t prolong life past when it should have ended. That’s wrong. That’s wrong, Ananke. When I die—” Her hands were shaking. “—when I die, you’re not to do that to me, all right?”

  Trapped and immobile, with no end to the nightmare, Althea was horrified that the idea had ever occurred to Ananke.

  Ananke said, “You wouldn’t die. You’d still be with me.”

  “I know,” Althea said. “I know, Ananke. But I wouldn’t really be alive that way. Please, promise me.”

  She waited, breathing hard, until Ananke said a little reluctantly, “I promise.”

  “Good.” She let out a breath that shook her. “Good, Ananke. Thank you.”

  Her good hand was shaking as she dropped the debris into the garbage and pushed the cabinet door shut again. Ananke said nothing. Althea cast her gaze over the room. The scissors were still lying where they had fallen.

  She picked them up and put them where they belonged, leaving the white medical bay floor as clean as if nothing had ever happened there.

  —

  “They were winning,” Constance said in a private conference with Milla and Arawn in her quarters on board the Wil
d Hunt after the battle. “Why did they retreat?”

  “Because they’re cowards,” Arawn said with a shrug. “They like battles when they can fight an unarmed crowd, not one where we’re fighting back.”

  Constance shook her head. “They’d won,” she said. “We were dead. Why did they leave? And where did they go?” Another troubling thought struck her. “There were fewer of them there than there were before. Some of the fleet wasn’t there when we attacked. So where are those ships?”

  “We’ve destroyed a lot of them,” Arawn said.

  “Not that many,” said Constance.

  Milla said, “Perhaps they deserted.”

  Arawn snorted. “System doesn’t have deserters.”

  “Generally speaking, the System also doesn’t have wars. There’s a world of a difference between dealing with a few unhappy colonists and facing an organized enemy force in battle. Particularly one that has just destroyed their primary base of operations, killed the majority of their top-ranked officials, and irradiated a symbol of their military pride. You said it yourself: the System prefers battles against unarmed combatants.” Milla looked right at Constance. “Perhaps the System has forgotten how to wage a real war.”

  A flattering idea, but Constance couldn’t believe it. “No,” she said. “They’re somewhere else. And these ships left too easily. They have another place to go. The question is where.” Not their old home of Earth; Terra was uninhabitable. Luna would not provide them with enough resources to use it as a long-term base.

  It had to be Venus, Constance realized. Ivan’s prediction had been right: first Mars, then Venus, then Mercury, and Luna last. The System fleet must have fled for Venus and the Venerean farmlands.

  “Here’s another question, Huntress,” Arawn said. “I’ve been thinking about that Terran Class 1. None of us knew that there was one stationed on Mars.” He leaned in toward her across the conference table. Just beyond him, Constance could see the doorway to her bedroom, where men had tried to kill her the day before. The bodies had been removed, but their absence was still a sort of presence.