Radiate

by C. A. Higgins

  “Then go,” Constance said. “Take a ship, some supplies, whatever you think you need.”

  Mattie could not force any words past his jaw. He found he could nod, and once he had, he turned to go.

  “Mattie.”

  He turned. There stood his sister, a silhouette against the sun, tall, with her proud shoulders straight and her proud chin lifted. He could not see her face.

  She said, “Whether or not you find him, Anji will be at Callisto. She can send you back to me. Rendezvous with her in a week’s time—she’ll be there.”

  He left his sister standing alone in her bar with the sunlight bright behind her and a hole in the wall above her head.

  FORWARD

  No sooner had the star that was the Ananke vanished from the Copenhagen’s sensors than something new came to take its place. Mattie eyed the sparks of distant light and weighed his prospects: bluff, or fight, or run away.

  Behind him, he heard the rustling of fabric. “Don’t sit up, you idiot,” he snapped. “You have a bullet hole in your leg; lie down—”

  “She’s following us,” Ivan said, and there was then in his voice as there sometimes was an otherworldly certainty, as if he knew something no one else could possibly have told him. It chilled Mattie, and even with the three ships glimmering in the distance he twisted around to look at him. Ivan was seated, his skin gone gray in the Copenhagen’s pallid light, a feverish shine to his eyes. He was wearing hospital garb, a shirt and loose pants, that once had been white but now was stained all over with brown blood. He did not look otherworldly or knowing. He looked sick.

  “Lie down,” Mattie told him.

  “We’re too big of an advantage to lose,” Ivan said, in wavering imitation of his usual calm tone. “That’s how she’ll see it.”

  Those three ships were coming fast: relativistic drives, comparable in speed to the Copenhagen. Impossible to tell at this distance whether they were System or revolutionary. Mattie cut the Copenhagen’s engines. The rumble overhead changed tenor and the ship jerked once, slightly, as its steady acceleration was cut off.

  “She won’t understand. She’ll have to—”

  “Shh,” Mattie said, and closed all the ship’s remaining open vents.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “There’re some other ships out there. I’m trying to trick them into passing us by.”

  “Ananke.”

  “No! System, I think.” All the Copenhagen’s heat sources had been dimmed or concealed. They no longer would show up like a star on the other ships’ sensors. Mattie eyed those distant lights and hoped they would mistake him for an asteroid.

  There was no reason to be quiet; the other ships couldn’t possibly hear them. Mattie found himself moving quietly anyway, in the grip of some old human instinct. He left the piloting platform and crouched down beside where Ivan was staring fixedly out at nothing.

  “Hey.” Mattie tapped Ivan’s cheek to get his attention. He got it immediately, and it held, as if Ivan’s attention were a grappling hook that he had thrown into Mattie and now he was somewhere clinging to the other end.

  “Stay right there,” Mattie told him, and bent down to peel away the sodden fabric of Ivan’s pants.

  Beneath was a mess of red and black. Mattie’s gut clenched: the black of infection winding through the wound. He’d come with medical supplies but nothing that could—

  Then the tip of his finger brushed against a curve of black. It stood up from the torn skin: thread, not infection.

  The beat of his heart struck too strongly, as if with every contraction it threatened to tear itself from its connecting veins and arteries and fall out from beneath his ribs. Someone had shot Ivan, a glancing blow but damaging. If it had been straight on, he probably would have lost the leg. And then someone had stitched up the wound, but then someone else—or possibly the same someone—had gone and with some blunt item split the stitches again. It was an ugly wound, all torn edges, and it was still bleeding. When it healed, it would twist the muscle unless Mattie could get Ivan to a System medical chamber.

  They had no chance of finding a safe medical chamber during a war. Mattie twisted around, opened a cabinet in the wall, pulled out a towel, and pressed down against Ivan’s leg. It swiftly soaked through with red.

  “Where’s Constance?” Ivan’s voice was uneven. Mattie wished he could give him something, but he was afraid of how any drug would interact with whatever was already in Ivan’s system.

  “She’s on Callisto,” Mattie said, and began to try to pick the surgical thread out of the wound. That only made it bleed more.

  “Callisto—”

  “We’re on our way there now. Don’t you remember?”

  Ivan stared at him. His eyes were blue again, the pupils pinpricks, too small for the light available. Mattie held his leg in place and pressed.

  From up on the piloting platform, the communications chimed.

  Ivan smiled. “Found us.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “No,” Ivan agreed.

  The communications chimed again. Mattie twisted around to see the viewscreen. The ships he’d seen far off were closer now, flying in formation: System ships.

  Damn it.

  Mattie’s hands were smeared to the wrists with blood now and if he moved that high watermark might rise, but if they got shot down, Ivan would lose more than a leg. Mattie hauled Ivan into a sitting position—Ivan’s fingers grabbed at his arm, startled, cold—and propped him up against the wall. Mattie grabbed both of Ivan’s hands and guided them to the sodden towel on his thigh.

  “Press here,” he urged. Where he’d grabbed Ivan to haul him up, Mattie had left the imprint of his hands in Ivan’s blood.

  The communications chimed again. Mattie left Ivan and opened up the radio.

  “Identify yourself,” a Terran voice crackled over the radio immediately.

  Mattie cleared his throat. “This is the civilian ship Copenhagen. We were on our way home to Callisto when—”

  “Explain why there is no System surveillance equipment on your ship.”

  On the viewscreen, the ships had come closer. Behind Mattie, Ivan had leaned his head against the wall, eyes shut, hands resting—not pressing—on the growing stain over his leg.

  Fuck it.

  Mattie brought the engine back to life.

  BACKWARD

  Two days after the fall of Earth and a little over an hour before Mattie left his sister standing alone in her bar, Mattie went looking for Milla Ivanov. He wanted to speak to her before he spoke to Constance. With Ivan’s grieving mother at his back, Constance would have to hasten whatever plans she had for his rescue.

  He found Milla in the kitchen of Constance’s bar, a set of headphones pressed to her ears and a furrow between her pale brows. She must have been aware he was there or else she was even better at hiding her reactions than he’d expected, because she showed no surprise at all when he sat down across from her.

  She lifted one finger to keep him silent, listening closely to whatever was coming through the radio, and Mattie took the time to study her. Anji had exclaimed over Milla’s physical similarity to her son and even Christoph had commented on their family resemblance, but Mattie barely saw it. They were both pale and fine-boned, but so were many people.

  At long last, Milla lowered her finger. She lifted the headphones from her ears and laid them across her neck. When they were thus exposed, thin sounds escaped from the earpieces and traveled indistinct and inarticulate to Mattie’s ears. Milla said, “Constance is in her bar.”

  “I know.” Mattie nodded at the headphones and the radio. “What are you doing?”

  “Listening to System broadcasts.” Milla had a peculiar, piercing gaze. Mattie smiled disaffectedly at her—one of Ivan’s tricks for deflecting attention—and she blinked and glanced away.

  “Aren’t there other people doing that?”

  “Very many,” Milla said. “But none of them have the experience
with the System that I do.” She spoke with a careful lack of inflection. Mattie wondered what she would do if he reached over the table and shook her furiously.

  “Heard anything good?”

  One of Milla’s pale fingers drummed a quick beat against the table. “The System government is still in chaos. Their highest-ranking officials are all dead or missing. They don’t know who’s in charge, and they can’t get themselves together to attack.”

  For a moment Mattie felt a vicious sense of satisfaction at the news. The System in disarray, the System in trouble; finally, he felt as Constance must feel.

  It faded so suddenly and swiftly that it left him wrong-footed. “That is good,” he said around the curious charred numbness left behind by the passage of the brief joy.

  “It is,” Milla agreed. “But that’s not why you’re here.”

  “How could you tell?”

  Milla Ivanov was not the kind of woman who would miss the edge to Mattie’s question, but she answered as if she had. “You should be in with your sister, planning the revolution you’ve ignited,” she said. “Instead, you came to find me.”

  “You don’t sound like you approve.”

  “You shouldn’t have started a revolution you weren’t willing to finish.”

  Mattie leaned onto the table and said directly, “Constance hasn’t said anything about rescuing Ivan.”

  “No. She hasn’t.”

  Mattie waited, but Milla simply sat and looked at him, the thin and far-off voices of frightened System soldiers coming tinnily through her headphones.

  Mattie said, “Isn’t that something we should do soon?”

  “Constance will direct us.”

  “Oh, right,” Mattie said with a bitterness he hadn’t known he’d felt. “Connie calls the shots. We don’t get to think. We just wait until she tells us what to do.” It was shocking how natural Ivan’s words felt on his tongue.

  “What do you want?” Milla asked abruptly. “There can be no rescue. My son is dead.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I know something of System captivity. Leon is dead.”

  She spoke with cold and eerie certainty. Mattie had heard Ivan’s stories of her, but he had hardly understood them before. Now he said, “What the hell kind of mother are you?”

  Milla blinked once. Her fingers twitched a fleeting beat against the table. She did not, Mattie thought, look anything like Ivan at all.

  “If you want to go find my son’s body, it’s not me you should speak to,” she said.

  “I see that,” Mattie snapped, and stood. If he did reach across the table and shake her, he decided, she wouldn’t react. She must have spent so long pretending not to feel anything that the lie had become truth.

  “Your husband’s dead, too, isn’t he?” Mattie asked as he pushed his chair in with a screech of metal against tile. Even that sound made no mark against the diamond surface of Milla Ivanov. “Connor Ivanov died on Earth when Constance set off the bombs.”

  “Yes,” Milla said without hesitation, without grief or guilt. “He did.”

  He stopped before he reached the door to the main bar. “If Constance says yes,” Mattie said, “would you come with me?”

  “There would be nothing to find.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  For a moment she did not answer.

  Then Milla Ivanov said, “No.”

  FORWARD

  Mattie’s initial estimate of the other ships had been right: they were fast. He jerked the Copenhagen off course as fast as the engines could go, but the other ships were tight on his tail. He might be able to outrun them eventually, but they had another advantage on the Copenhagen: firepower.

  “I’m sorry,” Ivan said after the first bomb detonated not far off Mattie’s port side and rocked the ship.

  “What for?”

  Ivan’s voice was unsteady. “I shouldn’t have gone.”

  “You didn’t go anywhere. I went somewhere,” Mattie said, then swore at some length as one of the other three ships put on a burst of speed and gained distance on him.

  “We should have stayed.”

  “Sure,” Mattie said. “Are you putting pressure on that leg?” He dared to glance around and saw Ivan lift up his bloody hands to squint at them.

  “Put pressure,” said Mattie, and changed their course again, directing them toward the empty space between Neptune and the sun, “on that leg.”

  A chase in the openness of space was a battle of distances. There was no point in Mattie trying to double back or make sudden turns: there was nowhere to hide and so much distance between him and his pursuit that they could easily take his movements into account. But if he flew the Copenhagen into the void between planets, perhaps the System would become uninterested and leave him for better prey.

  “The towel is soaked.”

  “So use the blanket!” The Copenhagen was rattling with the force he was getting from the engines; he had a sudden, terrible image of their engines blowing and leaving them stranded. “I have to pilot the ship right now, so you need to do this for me, right? You need to stay conscious and try to see if you can stop that bleeding.”

  “She won’t blow us up.”

  “I think he would,” Mattie said as another bomb went off directly behind them and jarred the Copenhagen’s centripetal gravity.

  “She needs us,” Ivan said. For a second he sounded so rational that Mattie was reassured; the next words out of his mouth put to rest that moment of peace. “Ananke won’t blow us up.”

  “God damn—Ivan, the Ananke is not following us. Althea Bastet let us go; do you remember?”

  “Althea let us go. Ananke did not.”

  The next bomb went off even closer than the others. The blast of it knocked the Copenhagen askew, sending the edge of the instrumentation ledge painfully into the space under Mattie’s ribs. He pulled them out of their spiral, but the engine display on the computer before him was edging yellow.

  If he pushed the relativistic engines too hard, he and Ivan would be trapped traveling at impulse only. It would take them years to get between planets.

  He cut the relativistic engines and hoped that the speed they’d built up so far would be enough to keep them ahead.

  Behind him on the mattress, Ivan was trying to push himself back upright. “Stay still,” Mattie said, and then left the Copenhagen to its inertia, half falling the two steps back to Ivan. “Listen,” he said, hauling Ivan back up—his skin was cold—“listen. We are being chased by System ships. I need you to help me, okay?”

  Ivan’s head was dipping. Mattie grabbed it, held him where they could see each other’s eyes.

  “I need you to stay awake,” Mattie said. “I need you to put pressure on that leg, and I need you not to bleed out. Okay?”

  There was a split in Ivan’s lip, a bruise darkening his cheek. Mattie shifted his grip so that his palm did not brush the shadowed edge of that mark.

  Ivan said, “I’m going to pass out. You have me…I’m yours until I pass out. System ships?”

  The ship rocked again, hard. Mattie caught himself before he could land on Ivan’s leg, took Ivan’s hand, and pressed a bunched-up corner of the blood-spattered blanket into his grip. “Press there,” he said. “I’ll handle the ships.”

  Ivan said, “They don’t want us dead.”

  “Ivan!”

  “I know, not the Ananke,” Ivan said. “Those System ships attacking us. They won’t kill us—we have information that they want.”

  BACKWARD

  “We’ve done it,” Constance said in a voice Mattie had never heard from her, breathless with awe.

  He sat in the Janus with Constance in low orbit over Earth. On the viewscreen, Mattie could see the blue and white shape of the Earth below. From up here, there were no waves on the ocean, nothing but the pure and perfect glistening sheen of mirror-smooth blue.

  As he watched, black clouds billowed over that orb. Darkness was not a thing; i
t was an absence of light in the same way that cold was not a thing in and of itself, only an absence of heat. Yet the clouds that moved across the blue oceans seemed to be not clouds but shadows made solid, as if darkness had become a conscious thing and was slowly taking the Earth in its hands.

  If the radio had still been on, Mattie and Constance would have heard the System crying out in shock, shouting in rage, silent in horror, shrill with desperate and disbelieving questions—some sort of reaction. Instead, the Janus was quiet, filled only by the sound of his and Constance’s breaths.

  Mattie stared out the viewscreen at the fallen planet and waited for the roaring elation to hit him. This was it, he thought. This was the moment. Constance had done it, and he’d been at her side. The Earth was destroyed, the System dealt a crippling blow.

  He waited.

  “Take over the navigation.” Constance snapped out of her stillness, moving back toward the panel that controlled the Janus’s illegal weaponry. “We have to get out of here.”

  There were still System ships in orbit around the Earth, Mattie knew. He reached for the navigation and woke the computer, turning the Janus around. In space around them, he knew, Constance’s allies were gathering to cover her and Mattie’s retreat to Mars.

  Still, no roaring elation electrified his bones.

  “We’ll dip into Venus’s orbit,” Constance said with a wild light in her eyes, firing another shot at a pursuing spacecraft. “Once we’re there, we’ll stop, and I’ll broadcast the news. Are the relays to the rest of the solar system set up?”

  They had been set up for weeks. “Yes,” Mattie said.

  “Good,” said Constance, and then, uncanny, she laughed, a wild and bloody Valkyrie laugh.

  Mattie flew the Janus away from the ruined Earth and felt nothing at all.

  FORWARD

  The System ships had not lost interest in Mattie’s new, meaningless heading. Instead, they were starting to catch up.

  Another bomb blasted alongside the Copenhagen, far enough away not to do damage, near enough to rattle Mattie. But all the bombs had been like that—aimed at the space around them, not directly at the Copenhagen. They had been shooting not to kill but to disable.