Supernova

by C. A. Higgins

  Constance sat up straighter and folded her hands together on the old table.

  “Hello, Anji,” she said when the door opened and Anji Chandrasekhar stepped in.

  Anji halted at the unexpected sound of her name. Constance did not remember those lines by Anji’s eyes. She was thinner, too. Her hair was still cropped short, but there were no jewels in her ear.

  Then Anji turned to the men and women who had accompanied her. “Go,” she said. “I’ll speak with her alone.”

  The man directly behind her, a very tall man with a skeletal aspect, hesitated. The other people behind Anji looked to him.

  Then he said, “Yes, ma’am,” and only when he agreed did the others stand down.

  Anji came into the room without another word and shut the door behind her. Constance heard the sound of the key turning in the lock outside, but Anji did not seem to notice or care. Instead, her old friend came over to the table where she sat and placed two glasses and a bottle of something on the surface. Anji nodded at the bottle, and Constance reached across the expanse of that table to pick it up.

  She recognized it. “I gave this to you,” she said.

  “I haven’t had much time to drink it.” Anji slid one glass over to Constance, who did not take it.

  “And you’d like to drink it now,” Constance said.

  “It was yours to begin with. I thought we might as well.” Anji reached out and took the bottle back. She uncapped it with a flick of her wrist and poured a considerable amount into her own glass. When she reached over to pour for Constance, Constance covered her glass with one hand. Anji hesitated, looking at her. Constance took the bottle from Anji’s grip and poured for herself.

  “You weren’t surprised to see me,” Anji said.

  “I’m not an idiot.”

  “Hmm.” Anji stuck out a hand as if the better to feel the air around them. “Titan’s got a particular smell, doesn’t it? A particular smell and a particular feel. We’re not all that far from where Connor Ivanov made his last stand, you know. I’ve been there. There was talk of building a monument.”

  “But it hasn’t been done.”

  “No. There’re always better things to do.” Anji paused. “What do you think Doctor Ivanov would have thought of that?”

  “A monument or that you haven’t built one?”

  “The first. Or either, I guess.”

  “I don’t know what Milla would have thought,” Constance said.

  Anji toyed with her glass. One of her short fingernails was cracked, but that wasn’t unusual. When they had been younger, working in the same dull bar on Miranda, Constance had never been surprised to see Anji show up to work with broken nails or a bruise on her face.

  “It’s true, then? Doctor Ivanov’s dead?”

  “On Mars,” Constance confirmed.

  “Pity,” Anji said. It was only because she and Constance had known each other for so long that Anji could say something so short and wholly inadequate and have it be entirely sufficient. “I liked her.” Anji smiled ruefully. “After I met her, I finally understood where Ivan got it from.”

  There was something off about Anji’s smile. It took Constance a moment to place it. One of her teeth was broken, the canine on the right side. That had not been so the last time Constance had seen her.

  “Ivan,” Constance said, asking without asking.

  Anji’s smile faded. “He’s alive. Or he was last time I saw him. Not looking great but alive.”

  “And Mattie?”

  “With him. Mattie was a lot more trigger-happy than he was the last time I saw him; nearly shot some of my people. They came to me looking for you. I sent them off for where I’d seen you last. I haven’t seen them since. That doesn’t mean anything, though. They weren’t very happy with me.”

  “I’m not very happy with you,” Constance said.

  Anji avoided the subject. “Well, last I knew, they were alive, at any rate.” She toyed with her glass some more. “You and him were a disaster, you know.”

  “Who?”

  “You and Ivan.”

  Constance chose not to respond. She lifted her glass and drank.

  “Mattie didn’t deserve to be stuck in the middle of that,” Anji said. Then she said with strange firmness, “But they’ve got each other still. They’ll be fine.”

  Constance knew perfectly well that Ivan and Mattie would be fine.

  Anji said, “And I heard some news from Venus. Your friend Marisol Brahe just landed there. Rumor has it she’s trying to rebuild the cities she helped you raze.” Anji swirled the liquid in her glass, seeming to cast her mind about. “And Christoph’s dead. I don’t know what happened to Julian.”

  “Julian’s dead, too.”

  “Pity,” Anji said again, and resumed staring down at her glass.

  Constance said, “And Arawn?”

  Anji scowled. “That coward. He knew he couldn’t keep you around if he was going to strike off on his own. He knew he had to get rid of you somehow, but he didn’t want to deal with it himself, so he dumped you on me. No, Connie, he’s not going to last much longer, I promise you that, if he’s not gone already.” She tipped her glass at Constance, her dark eyes sincere.

  In a way, Constance appreciated what Anji was doing even as she thought that Arawn was not the only coward they both knew.

  Anji lifted her glass. “To the living. May Ivan and Mattie not get their dumb asses killed, and may your friend Marisol not get murdered by angry Venereans.”

  “How about to the dead?” Constance suggested.

  A darkness passed over Anji’s expression to settle in the lines of her face as if it lived there, deepening them. “To the dead,” she said. “Julian, Christoph, Milla Ivanov. Connor Ivanov. We might as well toast him, too.”

  “And to those who will soon be dead,” Constance said.

  Anji tossed back her drink, and Constance followed suit. Before Anji could think of some other old friend to talk about or some other reason to avoid continuing the conversation, Constance said, “What happened on Jupiter, Anji?”

  Anji lowered her empty glass slowly. “Does it matter?”

  “Of course it does,” Constance said.

  Anji hesitated. “I didn’t have a choice, Con. I could either do what they wanted and keep myself alive and keep some control of them or I could have let them kill me and declare war on you.”

  She was looking at Constance as if she wanted Constance to say, Of course there was nothing you could do, but Constance would not and could not tell her that.

  She didn’t bother to tell Anji, It’s not too late; you can stop this, either. It was too late, and Anji couldn’t stop this, not anymore.

  “You have to believe me, Con,” Anji said, still speaking useless words. “I didn’t want you here. I didn’t want that coward Arawn to send you to me, because I don’t want to do this. You’re not my enemy, but I can’t let you go.”

  “Say it out loud,” Constance said. “I want you to say aloud what you’re going to do to me, Anji.”

  Anji looked at her in reproach for a long moment.

  Then she said, “I’m going to execute you.”

  —

  Constance spent a day alone in the faded grandeur of the rotting suite before Anji returned with an array of guards behind her.

  “Eager?” Constance asked.

  “You know I’m not,” Anji snapped. She waved away the guards. “There’s a place not far from here where the greenhouse glass wasn’t destroyed. There weren’t any towns there, and Connor Ivanov was over here, so the System left it alone. It’s still standing. That’s where we’ll go—I thought you’d rather be outside.”

  “I won’t appreciate it long.”

  “The other thing,” Anji said. “I won’t let them have your body, Constance. I’ll bury you someplace where they won’t find you and they won’t dare to look.”

  “That’s very kind of you,” Constance said.

  Anji’s face screwed up; she sh
ook her head and turned away, ready to go back to the door, to summon the guards. Some impulse stopped Constance, some sense of bitter compassion. Anji had been her friend once, though Constance hardly recognized her as she was now. “Anji.”

  Anji stopped.

  Constance said, “You’re showing them how to kill their leader. How long do you think it will be until they come for you?”

  “I didn’t expect you to beg for your life, Constance.”

  “I’m warning you about yours.”

  “I’ll be fine,” Anji said. She hesitated as if she wanted to say something more but could not find the words or the courage. “Come on,” she said at last, and Constance followed her out into the hall.

  Constance found that she recognized the men and women Anji had assembled. There were not many of them, only five, with Anji as the sixth. But they all had followed Constance once. She knew their names: Louis, Tyche, Roy, Jean, Lan. And they remembered her. She could see their doubts the moment they saw her step out.

  Anji must have meant it as another sign of respect to allow Constance to be surrounded by people who did not hate her in her final moments.

  Constance nodded to them in recognition and greeting. Tyche nearly smiled at her, and Constance smiled faintly back. It was very possible that Anji had made a mistake.

  Anji started down the hall, and Constance fell in behind her. Outside, the people had gathered around to see her again. Constance stepped out and felt all their eyes upon her, more oppressing than the constant watch of the System’s cameras. The crowd did not shout or throw stones. They simply watched. There was a feel in the atmosphere like the prickling on one’s skin right before a thunderstorm begins. Constance had felt it on Miranda and on Mars, in secret places, hidden out of the System’s sight. This was a people on the edge of explosion, on the edge of a change, all that stored and angry energy ready to be tapped. It would take only a target and some angry words and that energy would start to come toward the surface like lava rising to spill out and burn.

  She doubted that Anji knew that her people were on the edge of revolution.

  Anji did not lead her back to the docking bay but on another route that took them down a road that ended abruptly at a tall wall constructed of metal welded together. There was a single door in that wall. It was colder down this street, and the crowds thinned out, the people following Constance’s last walk stopping some distance from the end of the street. A few children played down at the end, where it was open and they were unsupervised; when Constance appeared, they scattered, all but one girl. The little girl was playing with some rocks, smashing them against one another, needless destruction. It sent echoes like explosions off the metal wall beside which she sat. She looked right up at Constance. Her eyes were blue. Constance had just enough time to register their color before she was passing through that door behind Anji, into a tunnel.

  In the tunnel, Constance found her breath coming short. She tried to hide it, not to let the people around her see. Only thin glass overhead separated her from the freezing inhospitality of Titan. Yellow lightning flashed; liquid methane slid greasily down the glass from the Titanese storm overhead. Each flash of lightning seemed to strike a blow into Constance, to increase the heat that burned in her chest.

  I am afraid, she realized, and thought incongruously of Ivan. I am afraid.

  At long last the tunnel opened up into a brighter, clearer place with sweeter air. Anji had been right when she’d said this part of the greenhouse enclosure had been left alone because the area was uninhabited; there was no sign of buildings or streets. The space was vast, magnificent, a work of architectural complexity as enormous and powerful as the force that had made it, the force that Constance would never regret destroying. The level Titanese stone stretched out so far to Constance’s left and right that she almost could not see where the glass came down again to seal off what once had been an air lock between sections of the greenhouse. Overhead, the glass stretched up so high that it reached the edge of Titan’s atmosphere, and Constance could look up and see the sky. They were facing away from Saturn, and so she could not see its rings, but she could see the bright sparks of stars.

  Her chest was burning. She could hear the rasping sound of her breath in her ringing ears.

  Anji’s people took lanterns from the tunnel. Anji led Constance to an empty space and stopped.

  “I would offer you a blindfold,” Anji said.

  “I wouldn’t take it,” Constance said.

  Anji walked away without a word. Constance stood where she had been placed while Lan put a lantern on her right and Roy put one on her left to light her shape in the starlit dark, and then they strode away. She could have run, perhaps, but it would have gotten her nowhere, and she would not have subjected herself to the indignity of trying to run away. Anji had known that.

  What use was running, anyway? Her heart was pounding.

  Some six yards from her, they lined up together, their guns lowered, and Anji stood to the side. At Anji’s signal, they raised their rifles.

  Now, almost—Constance’s breath caught in her throat—

  Unexpected, brilliant—there was a light in the sky.

  Constance looked up sharply. In the sky overhead, in the stars, there was a new star, shining bright and brilliant, brighter than all the other stars combined. It exploded, spreading out its light and its ash, as brilliant and bright as a supernova.

  Murmuring from Anji’s people. Fear on Anji’s face. In the slow dying of the light from the supernova, Constance saw their conviction waver. Their fear of the omen made them look at her with new eyes.

  She had but to say a word, she knew, and they would be hers.

  For a moment of perfect clarity Constance saw what she would do. She would call out to these people, these old friends of hers whom Anji had so unwisely brought. Their old loyalty to her and their fear that she had something to do with whatever had exploded would be enough to sway them. They would turn on Anji, and Anji would be the one whose corpse was left out here on the Titanese stone.

  Constance would go back into that tunnel with Anji’s followers at her back and would step out into the city reborn. Her near death and her survival, Anji’s death at her hand, would be enough to sway the crowd. There would be fighting; there would be a battle between Anji’s people and Constance’s new followers and those just trying to survive, but Constance had never yet lost a battle. Then Constance would finish her work. She would do as Marisol had said, do as she’d intended to do before Arawn had betrayed her, and go back to Mars and rebuild. She would defy Ivan’s prophecy and cease to destroy but create instead. She would bring life back to the solar system. She would—

  No, she realized as clearly as if Ivan stood right beside her, patiently walking her through the logic that would lead her to the only, the inevitable conclusion. She might escape now. She might rally the people of Saturn behind her, but it would be bloody work, civil war. And when the war on Saturn was done and she went to Mars, she would only find more resistance there. The people had grown to hate her. If Constance tried to force her own peace and her own order on them, she would have to enslave them to do it; she would have to do what the System had done.

  War on Saturn. War on Mars. War when Arawn realized she still lived. No matter what Constance did, no matter where she went, the violence would follow her. The fact that she lived would ignite wars around her. And eventually Mattie and Ivan would find her and be drawn inexorably into the blood and death around her and drown in it. She was ready now to try to bring peace back where she had taken it away, but it was too late for her to do that herself.

  She would not be the System. She would not be death. She would not be less than those who had loved her had once believed her to be.

  Anji was looking at her with fear, but Constance was not afraid anymore. She had not realized how deeply that denied terror had dug itself into her limbs until now, when it was gone.

  Constance spoke.

  “Don
’t waste my time,” she said, and they all looked to her, heeling to her words like hounds. “You came here to shoot me. Do it.”

  Her heart was pounding in her ears, but all her fear was gone.

  “When I give the word,” Constance said, “you will fire. Raise your guns.”

  They raised their guns. Overhead, the light died to nothing.

  Constance said, “Fire.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Aside from my gratitude toward the usual people who provided me with the holy trinity of emotional support, caffeine, and chocolate, this book required a lot of research on the various moons and planets that Constance visits (and blows up). I’m grateful especially for the International Astronomical Union Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature, whose website is full of the most exciting maps, including one of Europa’s surface that I have used extensively.

  The University of Sydney’s website provided me with the approximate specific heat capacity of the human body, as well as some pressing questions on how they came to have such a precise number for that value.

  The equations governing Hawking radiation and the evaporation of a black hole I got from Wikipedia, because I gave up on making the citation gods proud after I realized that my college textbooks never got that far.

  Thanks to my seventh-grade teacher for telling me the logic problem that Althea poses to Ananke. It pissed me off, so I put it in a book.

  And finally, Wolfram Alpha, you are my star, my perfect silence; the light of my life and the fire of my loins; shall I compare thee to a summer’s day; etc. If there ever is an Ananke, I hope she is exactly like Wolfram Alpha.

  BY C. A. HIGGINS

  Lightless

  Supernova

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  C. A. HIGGINS writes novels and short stories. She was a runner-up for the 2013 Dell Magazines Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing and has a B.A. in physics from Cornell University. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

  cahiggins.com

  @C_A_Higgs

  Facebook.com/cahiggs