Supernova

by C. A. Higgins

  Constance had put out a call for doctors, engineers, technicians, anyone who might be able to shed some light on what had befallen Julian’s fleet. She’d gotten what she wanted, but none of the faces were ones that she knew. Only Marisol, sitting beside her, and Rayet, across from her with his head hanging down and his hands dangling between his knees, were familiar.

  There was whispering in the back of the shuttle, a low susurration of sound, scarcely louder than the humming of the air filtration equipment over Constance’s head. She allowed it to happen. There was no reason to be silent on the whole ride over except for a vague sense of respect for the dead, and the shuttle flight was so long that she would not have tried to enforce any law of silence.

  The dead fleet drifted. For now, Julian’s ship at least was in a reasonably stable place; its orbit was decaying, along with the orbits of the rest of the silent ships, but it would be some time before it fell into the planet’s clouds. The fleet was dispersing like scent in the air, the ships drifting farther and farther apart, and Constance imagined that some of the ships had fallen inward and become part of Jupiter already.

  She had come at a fortunate time, she told herself. A few weeks later and the fleet would have been gone entirely. A few weeks earlier or even a few days earlier and she might have been subject to the same doom that had fallen on Julian.

  The whispering in the back of the shuttle grew louder, more excitable, an argument of a sort growing in speed and heat. Constance diverted her attention from the drifting disk of Julian’s familiar ship to hear what was being discussed a few feet away.

  “…a sign, a sign, you see. For Earth. For Venus…”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. There’s no way the Venereans could have—”

  “I’m not saying it was the Venereans who did it. That many people don’t die without leaving a mark on the universe, you hear me? This is a sign. This is a warning—”

  “They say that scientists haven’t found all the life there is in the solar system.” Another voice, excitable. “Or who knows what the System was hiding? Maybe there’s something in Jupiter, living in Jupiter, and it came out—”

  “Something like that would leave a trace. No, there’s no trace here. I tell you, this is a warning. The only thing that could have done this is—”

  “The System,” Constance said, turning to look toward the source of the whispers. Two men and a woman looked back at her with varying degrees of embarrassment and fear. “Look around,” Constance told them. “What could do this and not leave a trace? Not a god or a monster. Someone who could access the ships’ computers and take control of them. The System did this.”

  No one said a word to contradict her, and after a time Constance returned her attention to the spinning disk of Julian’s ship as it came closer and closer. The whispers in the back of the shuttle did not start again.

  The pilot brought the shuttle up effortlessly to the docking bay of Julian’s ship. On the Wild Hunt, someone manipulated the shuttle bay doors to open, and they glided in. Gravity and power had been restored already, but the pilot still ran a check before opening the door.

  “All clear,” he said, and Constance was the first one out.

  Julian’s ship was chilly and there was a stale scent to the air, but it was breathable and warm enough that Constance could not ascribe to it the gooseflesh on her arms. All the shuttles were still in the docking bay, and aside from Constance and her crew, the docking bay was completely empty. Either no one had been able to escape by shuttle or no one had had time.

  “Rayet, go to the engineering and storage rooms,” Constance said. “Find out what stopped the ship. Marisol, check inside these shuttles and the escape pods. I’ll go to the piloting room.” If there was any place on this ship Julian would have been, it was the piloting room.

  Rayet said, “Shouldn’t I go with you, Huntress?”

  “I need someone to check the engines,” Constance told him, and he exchanged a brief glance with Marisol but bowed his head in acquiescence.

  The ship’s engines were a basso hum somewhere in the distance, but otherwise all was silent. The sound of their feet seemed to profane the heavy silence of the hold, as if Constance had opened the way into some long-sealed tomb where the walls had grown unaccustomed to the beat of human feet. She could feel the unease of the people following her almost as palpably as she could feel the emptiness of the ship but did not acknowledge it herself.

  Rayet pulled open the door to the hallway and stopped. For a moment, all Constance could see was his broad shoulders, straight and still. Then he turned to look at her, and his look was warning and grim confirmation all at once. She strode forward to look past him out into the corridor, where she saw what she had feared, what she had known she would find all along: corpses fallen on the floor, bodies slumped against the walls. Julian’s crew members had died where they stood. One of the dead was stretched out toward the door to the docking bay as if he had realized too late that he should flee toward the safety of the shuttles.

  The bodies had fallen when the ship’s interrupted gravity had been resumed; that explained why they looked so broken and limp, like dolls that had been cast down by a great unseen hand. The ship’s slow chilling had frozen ice crystals on their skin and in their bodies, and the ship’s resumed warmth had melted the crystals again, but the ice had already torn skin and ripped cell walls, and the bodies Constance looked at had skin of a strangely soft appearance, in places bruised. One of the bodies must have had ice crystals form around her eyes; the meltwater from those crystals streaked down her cheeks like tears. Constance stood in the doorway for a moment, thinking of the frozen corpses on Miranda.

  “Come on,” she said, and stepped into the hallway, around the dead man’s outstretched arm.

  Julian’s ship was a very standard Lunar type; the halls were cylindrical and made of steel, patterned with support beams like a rib cage. The support beams were spaced closely enough to be used as a ladder in case of a failure of the ship’s gravity. Because it was a standard layout, Constance knew where to go.

  Yet with every step she took, it followed right behind her, dark and hulking and low above her head: her old fear. This was what the System did; this was what it would do. It followed her where she went as if it were her own self displaced. It haunted her as closely as a shadow, as thickly laid and inescapable as the bodies that filled these halls.

  But she was not afraid. She could not be afraid. She held her head high and ignored that fear, sending off her followers to look in the rooms they passed: bedrooms, rec rooms, computer rooms. By the time she reached the door to the piloting room, she was the only one left. That was as it should be: if Julian was dead, she would give him the honor of private witness.

  Constance pushed open the door to the piloting room and stopped.

  Frozen in place on that main screen, impossible not to notice, the first thing Constance saw when she entered, was an image of two faces she knew very well.

  For a moment she thought it must have been an old picture, though why an old picture would be showing on the main screen of a battleship was beyond her. But no, she thought. Surely Ivan had never looked that tired before. Surely Mattie had never looked so grim. For the image was of Ivan and Mattie—Ivan seated, Mattie leaning on the back of his chair, both of them looking directly at the screen, frozen in the moment before speech.

  Constance stood and looked back at them and felt seen even though she knew that they could not see her. Anji had been telling the truth, she realized, yet Milla had died without ever knowing for sure. Ivan was alive.

  If Anji hadn’t been lying about the men being alive, the rest of her story could be true as well. Constance tried to trace it out in her head. The men had been delayed somehow and had missed the rendezvous at Callisto. Then they’d gone to Anji only to find that she was no longer allied with Constance. They’d left Anji, and…

  Her thoughts stalled. What did it matter where they’d gone and what they’d done
? They were alive. And if Anji had spoken true, they were looking for Constance and had been all this time.

  Constance had thought they were no longer hers. She’d thought that Mattie had chosen Ivan over her, that Ivan had lied every time he’d spoken. But here they were, seeking her out through a war and the Wild Hunt.

  “Constance,” someone called, and she turned too late to stop Marisol from entering the room behind her.

  Marisol stared up at the vast image of Constance’s family on the wall and then around herself, gaping. For the first time, Constance realized that the image of Ivan and Mattie was not just on the main screen; it was on all the screens around her. The piloting room was designed with typical Lunar pretensions to grandeur: there were levels to it, balconies. The main floor was the central piloting area, reachable by a gently curved but fairly cramped staircase to Constance’s right. To her left, overlooking the main floor and reachable by another short, narrow staircase, was the captain’s room, a duplicate of most of the main floor’s areas except for its privacy. The main screen took up nearly two stories of space right in front of Constance, and so it could be seen from both the main floor and the captain’s room. The image of Ivan and Mattie was on all of the screens, the large and the small, on both floors of the piloting room.

  What had caused that? Now that she had been freed of her initial reaction to seeing their faces again, their appearance here was ominous. What connection had they had with the destruction of Julian’s fleet? She was sure they hadn’t caused it. Mattie and Ivan had killed, but they weren’t killers. The System must have attacked while Ivan and Mattie were in communication with Julian.

  But Constance thought of the superstitious murmurs on her shuttle and grew cold.

  “Marisol, shut the door and lock it,” she said, and Marisol obeyed. “Shut off all the screens.”

  Marisol did as Constance said. Constance turned to the nearest screens and began to click them off or tear them from the wall with a wrenching of wires. Marisol went down the stairs to the main floor, and Constance traveled up toward the captain’s room.

  Where were Ivan and Mattie now? she wondered as she erased their image from another screen. Had the System caught them, too? Were their corpses drifting in one of the ships in Julian’s fleet? Perhaps they were already dead.

  In the captain’s room Constance found Julian’s body. He had died near a communications interface, the only computer screen in the whole of the piloting room that did not show an image of Ivan and Mattie’s faces. For a moment Constance stood over his body and looked down at his blankly staring eyes, the lips and tongue that had swollen from choking. She surprised herself by feeling so little. It even seemed useless to promise him she would exact justice for his death: even if he had not died, she would have pursued the System all the same.

  She spent longer looking at the black screen that was unlike the rest. What image had that shown? she wondered. The face of the System slave who had killed Constance’s friends? It was useless to wonder, pointless to try to find out. The System would die regardless.

  The last screen left was the main screen, the vast one. Constance could not find a way to shut it off from the captain’s room.

  “I can’t figure out how to turn this one off,” Marisol said when Constance came to the edge of the balcony.

  Constance looked at the screen, really looked at it for a moment, her eyes following the familiar shapes of Mattie and Ivan’s faces. Then she went back into the captain’s room, stepping past Julian’s body, and grabbed one of the chairs.

  From the edge of the balcony she could just reach the upper half of the viewscreen. She swung the chair around and into the glass. Marisol made a startled sound, jumping back as sparks fell. Where the chair had made an impact, there was a starburst of cracks and strange colors, partly obscuring Ivan’s head. Only one blue eye looked out now.

  Marisol was staring at her. Constance did not appeal to her for help but swung the chair again. Another starburst appeared on the screen, further obscuring the shape.

  Dragging the chair behind her, Constance walked down from the captain’s room to the door level, then down the other staircase to the main floor, where Marisol still stood and watched her. From the lower level, she lifted the chair and slammed it into the screen again and again. When she lowered the chair, her breath coming short, the screen was ruined. Bits of the image still showed—the edge of Mattie’s finger, the curve of Ivan’s shoulder—but no one who looked at it would have been able to recognize that the screen once had shown two men or who the men had been.

  When the screen was sparking splinters, Constance leaned on the back of the chair and caught her breath.

  They are alive, she thought. They’re alive.

  It did not bring the same lift to her heart that it had just moments earlier.

  The men were alive, yes, but they were far away from her. She could not go look for them. She had an army and a war to run. No matter how she might wish they were there, by her side, she could not leave her responsibilities behind to find two men.

  She could try to contact them, try to get a message to them, wherever they were. But she did not know where they were, and she did not want to bring unfriendly attention to them by being too obvious in her attempts to contact them. It was dangerous in these times to be loved by the Mallt-y-Nos.

  And then there was the third thought, the last and most dreadful.

  The third thought brought with it the memory of the heat of her old home on Miranda burning, knowing that Abigail was somewhere in those flames. It brought with it the image of Milla Ivanov silhouetted against the lights held by those who would tear her apart, the memory of Henry’s body crushed by ash and stone, the reminder that she even now stood on Julian’s ship, surrounded by his dead crew, with Julian dead there, too. She even remembered Christoph, dead by her own order, as good as murdered by her own hand.

  All of her old allies and loyal friends were dying. And here were the oldest and most loyal, brought back from the dead.

  The men were not hers. Mattie had turned from her. Ivan had never been hers at all. She would not take them as hers now; she would not give Mattie another reason to loathe her, and she would not give Ivan the death he’d always wanted to blame on her.

  Marisol said, “That was Milla’s son.”

  Denying it would not conceal the evident family resemblance. “Yes.”

  Marisol said, “Did you know he was alive?”

  “No,” said Constance. She expected Marisol to ask a dozen other questions: Who was the other man? Where were they? Why were they here, and what did they have to do with what had happened to this fleet?

  But Marisol asked none of them. When Constance turned to look at her, troubled by the long silence, she found Marisol looking down at the bodies fallen and limp at her feet.

  “Well?” Constance said quietly.

  Marisol looked up at her. “I won’t tell anyone,” she said just as quietly. Her hair was pulled back out of her face. It made her look older. In her soft brown eyes Constance saw nothing but honesty.

  “Good,” Constance said, and left the chair in the center of the floor, stepping around the bodies on the ship of the dead.

  —

  Europa was made of ice. Wherever Constance stepped, thick glacier supported her feet, and below that was a whirling ocean of freshwater. Beneath the atmospheric dome, the planet was livable but frigid, the better to keep the ice solid all the way through.

  Constance had given Julian and his crew whatever funeral she could give them. She’d had their dead ships driven into Jupiter’s clouds to fall inward, ignite, and be crushed, absorbed into the bulk of the massive planet. A burial of a sort. She could do that much, at least. And it ensured that no one else would find any trace of Ivan and Mattie.

  Then she’d done what she’d been waiting to do: she’d gone to Europa. It had been easy enough to get into Europa’s dome. An uncontrolled and undefended air lock provided Constance with ingress; onc
e she and the main mass of her forces had landed on the ice, she took the air lock for herself. It had been foolish of the System to leave any of the air locks unguarded, but they had. Her troops made camp not far from where the multilayered glass of the greenhouse enclosure plunged into the ice, separating the livable dome from the faint wispy atmosphere and lethal cold just outside. Constance could just see that barrier glinting faintly in rare twinkles of sunlight, blurring the landscape on the other side.

  Europa was tidally locked to Jupiter, and Constance’s fleet had landed on the Jovian-facing side, in the Annwn Regio. What sunlight the moon got was less noticeable than the vast and weighty bulk of Jupiter looming overhead. Twenty-four times larger than Terra’s moon appeared from Earth’s now-dead surface, Jupiter seemed unnaturally close, as if it might crash down at any moment.

  The Annwn Regio. Constance wondered now, as she never had thought to wonder before, if when Ivan had named his and Mattie’s ship, he’d named the Annwn for this region of Europa or if the name was older than that.

  Arawn came back to their camp in the early hours of the second watch. He did not come back alone.

  “Who are they?” Constance asked when he appeared at last, frost in his beard, grinning. Being from Pluto, he probably enjoyed the cold. When she asked, he spread his arms expansively to indicate his two captives. One of them was a System soldier. His cleanly cropped regulation mustache was showing signs of becoming unruly, and there was a frostbitten patch on his cheek. His gaze was frightened but not terrified: clearly, he had not recognized her. The other was a Europan native, a skinny young man whose thick clothes did not disguise the fact that Constance probably could have broken him in half with one arm. He did not look much older than Marisol.

  Both were cuffed. Constance did not think Arawn would have bothered to bring handcuffs with him on his scouting mission, and so it was likely that they were cuffed with the System soldier’s own chains. Arawn, Constance did not doubt, would have found that particularly amusing.