Supernova

by C. A. Higgins

  “I used to,” Milla said. The tip of the cigarette glowed. “Connor used to get them for me.”

  Constance, curious, might have asked more because she did not think that even Ivan had known this about Milla, but Arawn was staring past her now, too, his own cigarette forgotten in his hand, a frown drawing a deeply shadowed line between his dark brows. Constance turned and looked at the body she had exposed.

  In the shadows, half beneath the table, the corpse had looked like a tumble of limbs, dismembered, disembodied pieces that made up a horrific and unseen whole. Exposed to the light, the limbs became a body, unbroken but for the wound in her chest, and her seeping blood gave her an artificial shadow. The woman’s face was made almost strange by death, as death did: it was still and sunken in a way that made the animal part of Constance recoil. But even through the pall of a recent death, Constance knew that face.

  “She was one of mine,” Constance said.

  “I thought she was,” Milla said quietly.

  “A spy?” Arawn suggested.

  “She was with me before Earth,” Constance said. “If she was a spy, she was a bad one.”

  “She tried to knife me,” Milla said. “I don’t think she wanted anyone to hear a gunshot. I shot her before I recognized her.”

  Josephine, Constance remembered; that had been the woman’s name: Josephine. She said, “You’re sure she was trying to kill you?”

  “I am fairly certain of that, yes,” Milla said flatly. Arawn grinned, and that made Constance more furious than Milla’s sarcasm ever could.

  “This is not the time to smile,” she told him.

  His smile vanished. “The System bought her, Constance,” he said, gesturing at the body. His cigarette was still unlit, though the smoke from Milla’s was starting to cloud the little tent. “She went after the doctor, Milla got her, end of story.”

  “What could they offer her?” Constance demanded.

  “What do they ever offer?” Arawn said. “Safety with them, power on their terms. Cowards’ things. It’s no use trying to understand a traitor, Constance.”

  And Constance never could ask, because Josephine was dead. She stared down at the body on the stone.

  Arawn said, “Maybe Anji sent her.”

  “Anji would never send an assassin.”

  Arawn had the sense not to contest this, and Constance didn’t need him to, for she thought it on her own: once she, too, would have said that Anji never would have betrayed her. What proof did she have that Anji had not sent someone to kill her?

  Constance went to the tent flap. Rayet came in at her wave, and she brought him to the corner where Josephine’s body lay. She saw that he recognized her the moment he saw her in the light.

  “Get Henry,” Constance told him, “and have him come and take her body. Bury her outside the camp but don’t mark her grave. Tell everyone that Josephine was a traitor; she was loyal to Anji and not to me.” Better loyalty to Anji than whatever true disloyalty had driven Josephine to try to kill Milla. “She came to kill Doctor Ivanov, but Doctor Ivanov stopped her. And tell Henry to find her accomplices—the men who came to kill me.”

  Rayet nodded once, then stepped out of the tent again. “Marisol,” she heard him say, “find Henry.”

  Milla was still sitting low in her chair, her cigarette ashing in her fingers. Arawn stood beside her, tall, almost looming, but remarkably, she let him loom.

  “You had to do it,” Arawn said.

  “I know,” Milla said, and put the cigarette out against her chair.

  —

  “I found something,” Ananke said.

  Her voice startled Althea. The mechanical hand’s skeleton creaked beneath her fingers.

  She deliberately loosened her grip. “Ivan and Mattie?” she said.

  “A trace,” Ananke said. “Not them, not yet. But I know where they have been.”

  She had found it so quickly. Althea had known, of course, about the ship’s power, about its connection to all the computers and all the cameras the System had ever had. But they were not yet even properly within the solar system. To have found a trace of Ivan and Mattie already was astounding.

  “Where are they? Or,” Althea added, correcting herself, “where were they?”

  “The asteroid belt,” Ananke said. “Do you want to know how I found them?”

  She sounded proud, in the mood to show off for her mother. Althea said, “How did you find them, Ananke?”

  In answer, the screen set high up on the wall switched on. An image appeared with the grainy black-and-white quality that Althea recognized as being from a System surveillance camera.

  “There are still surveillance cameras?” Althea asked.

  “Not many,” Ananke said. “The revolutionaries have been tearing them out.” She sounded vaguely annoyed by this. “But sometimes they miss one.”

  The image on the screen showed a segment of a hallway. The walls were concrete or stone; reinforced System architecture, Althea suspected.

  There were blackened marks on the walls and tumbled stone on the floor. Althea could not see it in the image before her, but she suspected that the ceiling had collapsed.

  On the far right of the image, grainy figures moved over the ruined stone. One was limping. The other had his hand beneath the first man’s arm and was helping him over the uneven ground. The limping man had light hair; the other man—taller—had dark. Althea did not need to wait for them to come close enough for the camera to distinguish their faces to recognize Ivan and Mattie.

  They were speaking to each other, she realized, seeing Ivan’s lips move as they walked. Mattie gestured down the hall back the way they had come, and Ivan frowned, glancing back as if anticipating some pursuit.

  Then Ivan’s eyes passed over the scorched walls, skimming across them with an attention that looked practiced. Automatically scanning for cameras, Althea realized. And indeed, Ivan’s eyes found the camera that had become her and Ananke’s eyes, and there they stopped.

  The footage was in black and white, and so Althea could not see the color of Ivan’s eyes, but the directness of his gaze froze her even so.

  Stopped beneath the camera, gazing up straight into its lens, Ivan lifted his arm and pointed at the camera, at Ananke’s eye, at Althea. Beside him, Mattie looked up as well. Where Ivan’s expression was blank, emotionlessly watchful, Mattie’s darkened and grew grim.

  Still with one arm beneath Ivan’s elbow, Mattie reached behind himself and pulled out a gun from where it had been tucked into his pocket, the same way he had done it when he had encountered Althea just before escaping from the Ananke with Ivan at his side. And with both men looking up into the camera, at Althea and Ananke, Mattie raised his gun to point it toward the lens and fired, and the image went black.

  While Althea was still sitting there, absorbing the shock of seeing the men, the shock of the fired gun, the video looped and began to play again. In the distance, the two men picked their way over the rubble.

  “There was a bomb detonated on Mars,” Ananke said offhandedly, “but this footage is from after.”

  “After?” said Althea, and then, “A bomb? What kind of bomb, Ananke?”

  On the screen, Mattie helped Ivan down the hall.

  Ananke said, “A Terran Class 1.” She must have seen the horror on Althea’s face, because she added, “The planet is still inhabitable.”

  “Still inhabitable, but how many people died?” Althea asked. “The Mallt-y-Nos set off another bomb? Why? Wasn’t Earth enough?”

  “Constance Harper did not detonate the bomb. The System fleet did.”

  The idea was incomprehensible. Constance Harper might commit genocide to make a political point, but the System? The System was law and order and peace—or so Althea once had thought.

  On the screen, Ivan’s eyes met the gaze of the camera head on.

  “It is too bad that humans have only five senses,” Ananke said as Ivan lifted his hand to point at them. “And all five are s
o limited. This footage is in only a narrow spectrum of wavelengths.”

  Althea broke her gaze from the video to look back down at the mechanical hand in her lap. She bent the finger of it as if she were working, testing the joints, but her mind was blank. The System had detonated a Terran Class 1 bomb on Martian soil. No one could stand for that, she knew. No System civilian would approve of that. Yet the System had done it.

  “If this camera could see in more wavelengths,” Ananke mused, “I could see so much more. There would be so much more information. I could see everything, everything. Everything down to what they were feeling by watching the distribution of heat in their bodies.”

  “Well, I’ll call up Constance Harper and tell her to install better cameras,” Althea said.

  Ananke looked thoughtful.

  “I was joking, Ananke,” Althea said.

  “She wouldn’t do it anyway,” Ananke decided. “She’s the one tearing the cameras out.”

  Then something curious came to Althea’s mind, brought on by her ill-considered quip and Ananke’s thoughtful reaction: she could, if she wanted, confront Constance Harper. If she wanted, she could find the Mallt-y-Nos, wherever she was, and force Constance to listen to her. Constance would have to listen to her because of Ananke; no true leader could ignore a ship this powerful.

  Or, if Althea preferred, she could go find the System, whoever was leading it now. Althea was in command of the Ananke, and the System would have to listen to her, too.

  She could confront them both if she liked, call both sides to account for the murders they had committed. With Ananke, they would have to listen to her.

  It was a strange feeling, having power.

  On the screen before her, Mattie fired his gun at the camera over and over again, to black.

  —

  The disarray of the System included the disarray of its infrastructure. Constance had known this would happen and had planned for it, but she had never expected it to be so difficult to contact her people farther out in the solar system.

  The communications equipment of the Wild Hunt was not strong enough on its own to reach even to Saturn, where, as far as Constance knew, Julian was still in an uneasy standoff with Anji’s people, much less out to Neptune, where Christoph would be. Even if it had been, direct broadcast from Venus to Saturn or to Neptune was prone to disruption or interception or corruption by planetary bodies or solar flares. Instead, communication across the solar system was effected by a series of relays: messages could be transmitted directly across space from relay station to relay station. There were lesser relay stations on each of the inner planets, but the main points of relay were in the asteroid belt and in secret orbits around each of the outer planets. The orbits were secret because the System had not wished to provide the outer planets’ resistance movements with an easy target, for all the good that had done them. The rebels had had their own private line of relays, which were prone to shutdowns or equipment failure or discovery and destruction by System craft. Constance had been trying through force of habit and desire for secrecy to contact Julian and Christoph via their own relay stations, with no success. Perhaps, she thought, she would have more luck with the System equipment. Enough of the System’s former territory had been lost to them by now that Constance thought it was worth the risk. The message would be encrypted, of course, a variant on the encryption Ivan had taught her years earlier, and as a mark of its veracity Constance would include the revolutionaries’ signal: a recording of the barking of hounds.

  She had sent a message out to Julian and Christoph earlier that morning. It would take hours longer for the message to reach Christoph, but Julian’s response, if there was one, should be coming at any moment. Since it would be some time before the two leaders of the war on Venus—Kip Altais and Lyra Greene, according to her intelligence—would arrive on her ship, Constance turned her steps toward the communications room on the Wild Hunt.

  She pushed open the door and found Milla Ivanov and Arawn Halley sitting together in the center of the room. Constance would have expected to find Ivan and Mattie secluded away, just the two of them, speaking conspiratorially. Indeed, she had hardly ever expected to see them separated. But to find Milla Ivanov and Arawn Halley alone in each other’s company was strange.

  “Did I call a meeting?” Constance asked, and let the door shut behind her.

  “No,” Milla said. Constance doubted she had missed the sarcasm; the literalism must have been intentional. There were no cigarettes between the two of them, not on board a spaceship.

  Arawn, leaning back comfortably in his chair, was watching Milla Ivanov. “I was just here in case any last-minute intel came in,” he said. “About Altais and Greene.”

  Sensible: Constance had called him to the Wild Hunt from his own ship, the Rhiannon, because she wanted both him and Milla Ivanov to be present when Altais and Greene arrived. She preferred to meet the two warring leaders on board her ship, not on the surface of the planet, because she thought it might induce some rightful fear in whichever one of them was secretly System.

  “Did anything new come in?” Constance asked, crossing the room to check the nearest terminal for any messages from Julian.

  “Nothing but what we already know.”

  Nothing from Julian. Very well; it was rather soon.

  “So recap for me,” said Constance. As long as they all were there, they might as well prepare to meet Greene and Altais. She took another look at their positions and frowned to herself. It appeared that Milla and Arawn had dragged chairs away from the computer terminals into the center of the room to face each other as if trying to distance themselves from the blinking, glowing equipment that surrounded them.

  Constance grabbed a chair and dragged it to the center of the room as Arawn said, “We don’t know much about Altais. It seems like he led some sort of labor strike a few years ago—failed, of course. The System came down on it. He served a bit of time for it but not much; we’ve got nothing else on him. But Greene.” Arawn leaned onto his knees, facing Constance, a light in his eyes. “Lyra Greene was on the board of directors of the Venerean Consulting Corp.”

  Not strictly System, then, was Greene, but everyone knew that the supposedly private large businesses had truly been controlled by the System. It seemed likely that she was the System in disguise.

  “I’ll speak to them separately,” Constance said. “I want to hear what they have to say without the other’s interference. Altais first.”

  “Sounds smart,” said Arawn, then turned very suddenly to Milla. “And you, Doctor Ivanov? Why don’t you tell the Mallt-y-Nos what you were up to in here?”

  Milla flicked a cool glance at him.

  “I was keeping Mr. Halley company,” she told Constance.

  “And here I thought it was the other way around,” Arawn said.

  Milla ignored him. “Are you hoping for a message from Julian?” she asked Constance.

  “Yes,” Constance said. “I sent a message by the System relays this morning; if a response is coming, it’ll be here soon.”

  “Well, messages from Saturn should be coming in fine,” Arawn said. “Shouldn’t they, Doctor Ivanov?”

  “As far as I can tell, the System relays are all intact,” Milla said.

  Arawn smiled, baring his teeth. He had adopted his heavy Plutonian drapes again; they made him seem larger than he was. Milla, with her hands clasped in her lap to stop their restless tapping, looked very small.

  “I was thinking while me and Milla were in here,” he said, “that it’s a pity I don’t know both of you better.”

  Constance looked to share a glance with Milla, but Ivan’s mother was staring serenely into space at nothing and no one. Arawn said, “We’re fighting with each other—dying for each other—shouldn’t we all get to know each other’s quality?”

  “What were you hoping to know, Arawn?” Constance asked.

  “I’d heard a little bit about how the two of you met,” he said. “And I�
�m very curious about this Ivan.”

  The name spoken aloud was like a spark jumping on Constance’s skin, her own thoughts expelled into the air, and from Arawn’s mouth, no less. Milla was looking at Arawn now, a look as remote and cold as the distant stars.

  “His name wasn’t Ivan,” Milla said clearly. “His name was Leon. He was my son.”

  Arawn, Constance saw, knew Milla’s relationship to Ivan already. “Everyone around here calls him Ivan.”

  “When he left home, he decided to call himself Ivan,” Milla said. “His name is Leontios.”

  “Connor Ivanov’s son,” Arawn marveled.

  “My son,” Milla said, and Constance could not tell whether it was correction or agreement. “He was never comfortable on Earth.”

  “He was a true believer, then?” Arawn said. “I heard he died for Constance.”

  “A true believer? No,” said Milla, and then she looked right at Constance with eyes that were precisely the same shade as her son’s. “My son died for someone he loved, not for the revolution.”

  They were both looking at her now, but Constance could not bear to speak. One of the last things Ivan had said to her had been that he loved her. He might have meant it, but that didn’t mean it was true: Mattie and Milla also stood to fall if Ivan gave up Constance, and she knew that he had died as much for them as he had for her, perhaps more.

  She had brought about his death. She had led him to it, and it was because of her plans that he had had to die. No, she reminded herself; it was his and Mattie’s childish stupidity that had brought him to the Ananke. They had been curious about the dangerous ship, and they had recklessly boarded it and been captured. She had always offered Ivan the choice to follow her or not.

  “Were you and the doctor’s son close?” Arawn asked. His expression was carefully closed off.

  “We were close,” Constance said.

  “What was he like?”

  There were many ways to answer that question, some of them too harsh and sad and exposing and others too harsh and cruel and sharp. She could tell Arawn that Ivan had been handsome. She could tell Milla that Ivan had been brilliant and that he’d had a good heart. She could say that he’d hated himself and had always been looking to find a way to be destroyed like a sailor dashed to pieces against a stone. She could say that it was his caution and his cleverness that had made her revolution take off from where it had been mired for years. She could say that he had been infuriating and manipulative, that he’d made her think things were her fault when she hadn’t done anything wrong at all. She could say that he loved her or that he hated her but that either way she had always suspected he loved Mattie more than he could ever love her and that when she had lost Ivan, the wrench of it had taken not just Ivan himself but her brother and her best friend and her right hand away, too.