Radiate

by C. A. Higgins

  Vithar said, “There’s no doubt those ships destroyed the Nemain. If the Copenhagen goes into battle, you’ll be killed.”

  “You’re letting us go?” Mattie asked.

  “I don’t have a choice. Anji is your friend whether you believe it or not. She made me a promise. I’m not what I was before the war. Now I fight in open battle if I have to, and if not, I’m a diplomat. I did not come to do any harm to Constance Harper.”

  “Then why send you?” Ivan asked. “Why not just send a message to Constance?”

  “Messages can be intercepted,” Vithar said. “The System is still out there. You’d better go.”

  “Wait,” Ivan said.

  “Ivan!” Mattie hissed.

  Ivan spoke quickly. “What Anji started is only going to get worse—you saw it with Christoph. Whatever happens next, Anji is going to be in the thick of it. Even if Anji isn’t sending you out as an assassin now, one day she will.”

  The heat from the Badh’s engines warped the air around Vithar so heavily that his expression was unreadable. He said, “We’ll meet up with you wherever Harper is. Keep your radio open for messages from us.”

  Ivan let Mattie pull him into the Copenhagen’s cabin and seal the door. He started up the engines so that when Mattie came forward and nudged him out of the piloting chair, the ship was ready to follow the Badh into space.

  The Badh went rocketing immediately toward the darting stars and distant explosions of the battle. Mattie turned the Copenhagen in the opposite direction and sped away as fast as the engines could bear.

  “We never warned Anji about Ananke,” Ivan realized.

  “Vithar’ll do it,” Mattie said.

  The space battle was almost out of sight, but Ivan imagined he could still see the violence of it, the new stars being born and dying in explosion. “Where are we going?”

  “Away.”

  “We need a course and heading,” Ivan said. He began to pace slowly, stretching out his leg. “Julian said Constance is going to Luna soon.”

  “We should find a place to lie low,” Mattie said. “If Julian knows where Constance is, then the Ananke would, too.”

  “All the more reason for us to find her first.”

  “You know, Ivan, if we’re dead, we can’t help Constance.”

  “We can’t help Constance by running away, either,” Ivan said, and let the sharpness of his anger out into his voice. “She’s your sister, Mattie. What the hell did she do that makes you so willing to leave her to die?”

  “I’ll put in a fucking course to Luna,” Mattie said.

  “Leave the radio open, too. Just in case someone survives that mess.”

  But the next message the Copenhagen received was not from the Nemain or the Badh. It was a public broadcast, sent throughout the entire solar system, bearing news of the Mallt-y-Nos.

  It said that the Mallt-y-Nos was dead.

  BACKWARD

  Even stealing one bomb was feat enough, but Ivan realized soon that Constance didn’t intend to stop there.

  The realization grew in his chest like frost spreading over a surface, like flame unleashing from the epicenter of an explosion. He and Mattie stole the Terran Class 1 bomb, and they brought it back to Mars, and then they hid it in a secret storage space beneath Constance’s bar. With every proud step she would tread upon potential energy enough to atomize her and everything around her. By the fact that they had stored the bomb, not planted it anywhere or detonated it immediately, Ivan knew that Constance intended for them to steal more bombs than just the first.

  Now, Ivan thought, that was thinking big.

  Ivan and Mattie had come in and greeted Constance before hiding the bomb away, and so when Ivan rentered the bar, she looked up unsurprised to see him. The System’s cameras were installed overhead, their eyes steadily watching. There were other people in the bar—Anji was there somewhere, probably, and Christoph, too; they were rarely far away—but Ivan felt their presence only as an extra set of eyes in addition to the System’s constant watch. And there was Constance behind the bar, with her dark eyes and her brown hair and the freckles on her shoulders visible even in the dim light, watching him come in with joyous triumph still written on her skin. Ivan wondered how the System couldn’t read it.

  When he was near enough, he grabbed her and kissed her as hard as he could.

  She kissed him back, strength in the grip of her fingers as they closed around the nape of his neck.

  Behind Ivan, someone whooped. Anji, he noted distractedly, because not even Constance could make him forget when he was watched and by whom, but his thoughts of Anji were driven from his mind by the way Constance’s nails dug into his skin.

  She pulled away, or pushed him away, and held him a short distance from her. “Come on,” she said with command in her low voice, and someone else in the bar laughed the laugh of an uncomfortable voyeur.

  In the kitchen Constance turned to him, and he caught her as she came toward him, pulling her in until his back hit the door they had just closed, making it bang against the door frame. She pressed her nose to his, their lips almost touching, as if she were thinking of nothing but that touch, but she was listening to him quite closely. He whispered into her hair, “It’s beneath your house.”

  She smiled. Ivan felt the upward curve of the muscles with his own lips. He pulled away from her to press a kiss to her cheek and continued, “You’re not going to stop there, are you?”

  “Of course not,” Constance murmured, brushing her nose against his cheek, her lips against his jaw—low, so the System couldn’t see.

  “How many?”

  Constance tugged at his shirt, undoing the buttons. “I like the number ten,” she said. The look she gave him was raw and dangerous.

  “Seven,” Ivan said. “Not ten.”

  “Why seven?” Constance asked, and bent in to kiss him.

  “Because that’s the average number the System loses every year,” Ivan told her, whispered between strands of her hair when they embraced. “If they lose seven, they won’t realize right away that something’s wrong.”

  He ran his hand down her cheek, and from a powerful urge to see that feral light in her eyes again, he added, “And seven is one for every continent.”

  The clutch of her fingers was fierce approval. It felt right. Like this, his will was an extension of hers, his thoughts her thoughts: everything was controlled. When she took his hand and drew him away from the door, deeper into the kitchen toward the staircase that led to the bedrooms upstairs, Ivan let himself be led.

  At Constance’s bedroom she kissed him again, and Ivan thought of nothing but Constance, the taste of her, the perfection of the skin on her neck, the divinity in the bend of her collarbone.

  When she pushed him down on the bed while she began to strip off her shirt, Ivan saw triumph in her eyes, shining bright and glorious.

  He grabbed her wrist and pulled her down and off balance so that she landed atop him, catching herself on her elbows on the bed. He said, “What are you going to do with them?”

  Constance’s voice got deep and low and rough and private: “I’m going to plant them on Earth.”

  “Now you’re thinking big,” he said into her ear. His hands could span her skull, but when they did, they got tangled in her hair. “Now you’re thinking right.”

  His next indrawn breath came from her lungs. She pulled away only to take off her bra and toss it casually in the direction of the System camera, partially obscuring its view. Then she bent over him with that triumph still in her gaze, and the freckles on her shoulders spread down as far as her breasts.

  He caught her wrists. “How?” he asked.

  “Carefully,” Constance said, and broke free of his grip to bend back down over him, but Ivan flipped her in the heartbeat of time when she was off balance, forcing her onto her back on the bed and pinning her down.

  “How?” he said, keeping his voice as soft as he knew how.

  Constance was breat
hing hard. “While you’re up, take off your shirt,” she told him, and Ivan slid his unbuttoned shirt off his shoulders. She watched him and reached up her arms to the back of her head and began to undo her braid.

  Ivan leaned in to her ear. Her hands were already up over her head as if she were in surrender. He whispered, “How?”

  “We’ll figure it out,” said Constance, “you and I.”

  “Not good enough. How?”

  Constance sat up very suddenly. He let her. He had not really been holding her down at all, he knew, if she could sit up at will. Her hair was loose and she was dangerous and powerful and beautiful, and when she touched his cheek, her fingertips burned like sparks against his skin.

  Constance said, “Together.”

  He was the one who kissed her then, and he almost didn’t think of the System when he did it. She kissed him back as if the kiss were a part of her war, and somehow he ended up beneath her again.

  “First,” Constance said, “we smuggle the bombs to Earth.”

  Ivan threaded his fingers through her hair. “How?”

  She was never frightened. Even though she was vulnerable and he held her, even though the System was watching, Ivan saw only calculation in her eyes, the movement of troops like wolves spreading out to take down a stag.

  “We’ll smuggle the bombs to Luna first,” Constance said. “Then switch ships on Luna—”

  “Not one ship,” Ivan said. “Many.”

  “Many,” Constance echoed, “so that if one is compromised—”

  “—the rest will still make it to the planet.”

  She shifted above him, her fingers gripping the fabric of sheets on either side of Ivan’s head as if she would like to tear through it. “We need ships that the System wouldn’t scrutinize—”

  “System maintenance craft,” Ivan said. “They’re everywhere around Terra.”

  She kissed him again. Perhaps it was genuine. Perhaps it had been too long since they had kissed, and the System was watching. “So we need seven false System maintenance craft,” she said.

  “No,” Ivan said, “real ones. We just need a few people on board working for us; the rest of the crew doesn’t need to know what they’re carrying.”

  Constance laughed. Ivan’s heart pounded in rhythm with her laughter. “We don’t even need more than one,” she said, and even in her satisfaction she kept her voice low. “We load all seven onto one maintenance craft. Then we stage breakdowns—”

  “—of other ships in the range of our compromised maintenance craft,” Ivan said, her words coming out of him. “That way the bombs are being added to their cargo holds outside of customs—”

  “And the System won’t check for them. The same bombs. The same bombs they let off on Saturn, and we’ll set them off on Earth.”

  Her hair brushed over his skin. Ivan looked up at her and felt it, the same thing he’d felt when he’d been bleeding out of his wrists: the submission to an inevitable end, the slow loss of his self.

  The same bombs as on Saturn—

  “We need a contact,” Constance whispered. Her hand was cradling his head. His hand was tracing down the curve of her spine. “On Earth.”

  Corpses floated through Saturn’s rings, a billion frozen corpses, casualties of the System’s bombs.

  “Julian,” Ivan said through his strange and clouding unease. “My mother’s friend. Julian.”

  When she leaned up and away from him, he saw a look on her face like joy. She tilted her head back, and he stared at the soft skin of her throat while she turned that triumph on the ceiling like a challenge to God. The System would fall, he knew, and in that moment he shared her certainty down to his very bones, because if he was her now, he had to feel the same things she did. He was her, he was hers, and in being her and hers and not himself and his own, he was finally free, finally at peace, and—

  Nine billion people to die on Terra.

  The thought crashed down on him like a wave of ice water. Constance was looking at him again, still with that smile on her face. He’d come in here to help her plan better, because if she planned better, he would stay alive, and she would stay alive, and Mattie would—had he? He’d come in here, and he’d helped her plan, and why had he done it?

  Later, when Constance was curled up next to him, there was peace in her face that he did not share. Even with the heat of her so close, Ivan felt cold.

  Nine billion people.

  Their conversation ran through his head like fire over flesh, leaving open weeping sores behind.

  It was not Constance who had done this, Ivan knew. It was Constance who would pull the trigger, but it was he who had built the gun, loaded it, and laid it in her hands. He knew how many would die when she pulled that trigger, and he knew what Constance would lose in the firing.

  Nine billion people and one Constance Harper. Dead like all those people in Saturn’s rings.

  And Ivan had killed them all.

  FORWARD

  “It’s just a rumor,” Mattie said to him while the Copenhagen flew at its highest speed toward the red planet. There was no arguing with such deliberate blindness, and so Ivan did not, but when he closed his eyes, he saw Constance dead, throat slit, blood covering her neck like a scarf.

  It was not Mattie’s fault she was dead; he had been dragging his heels on finding her, but it still wasn’t his fault. It was Ivan’s fault, as sure as the sun had risen every morning on Earth. It was not Mattie’s fault, Ivan knew, but he knew that Mattie felt the blame even so.

  The trip was impossibly fast with the Copenhagen’s relativistic drive but not fast enough. If Constance had been killed, that had been days ago now; her body would be rotting on the soil.

  “Ivan,” Mattie said as they neared the planet, “there’s a lot of radiation.”

  Of course there was. Where Constance trod, atoms split themselves. If she had died, the ensuing explosion surely would have scorched the soil. “There’s a war on.”

  “There’s a lot of radiation,” Mattie said with a queer note, and at last Ivan came over to see what he saw.

  Ash in the atmosphere, radiation raining down. Ivan had a strange surreal moment in which he wondered if this was the trace of her death that he was seeing, if she had indeed gone up like a supernova on the planet’s surface.

  No. He shook his head from the dreamy irrationality, from the distant ringing echo of heels on a white floor. “That’s a Terran Class 1 bomb.”

  “There isn’t one on Mars,” Mattie said, “and Con blew up all of hers on Earth.”

  “The System set it off.” Ivan should have seen it before, that the System would keep some bombs in reserve.

  “Bullshit,” Mattie said. “Not on Mars.”

  Mattie did not realize what the System would do to the inner planets in revenge for Earth. He never had. It had always been “us against them” for Mattie and Constance, but no matter how many times Ivan tried to explain it, they had never realized that although there might be a real and tangible “us,” there never was and never had been a solid “them.” Of course the System had bombed Mars.

  “We have to go to the Fox and the Hound,” Ivan said.

  “If it’s in the fallout zone—”

  “It’s not.”

  Constance’s old bar was not in the fallout zone, but only barely so. Mattie brought the Copenhagen down only after extracting a promise from Ivan not to linger. The trip to the planet’s surface was familiar, and he had done it so many times before that the shape of the scarp was burned into his brain.

  When they had landed, Ivan went out into the high wind without bothering to shield himself from the sand. Mattie followed him at a little distance.

  The place where Constance’s bar should have been was nothing but blackened stone. Ivan said, “Did she do this?”

  “Yeah,” Mattie said, sounding unexpectedly frustrated.

  Ivan should have known this, too, he realized. Constance would burn anything that connected her to her past. She h
ad Milla Ivanov in her ear now, after all, and Milla would tell her that a past was a weakness.

  Far off, unnatural clouds loomed and gathered.

  The cities of Mars were burned and destroyed and abandoned; the people had fled into the desert, into the tundra. The first few places they went expecting to find people, they found nothing but the dead.

  Perhaps the whole planet was dead, Ivan thought, but at last they found a temporary settlement of wary refugees and descended to speak to them. Mattie was looking nervously at the fuel gauge—they were taking off and landing so often that they were burning through even their significant supply—but Ivan didn’t care.

  He found a young woman who looked susceptible to charm. “Excuse me,” Ivan said. She looked at him with green eyes that held the same shadowed look that could be seen in the rest of the surviving Martians, that fear of nameless things. Ivan smiled his most charming smile. “I heard a terrible rumor.” He spun his story with such charm and sincerity that he hoped she could not hear the pounding of his heart.

  The Huntress was dead, the green-eyed girl told him, but when Ivan moved on to the next people, they told him that the Huntress was alive but an ally of hers had died in her stead; the Huntress was alive, and no one had died; the Huntress had never been to Mars. The confused and contradicting reports spun through Ivan’s head like dust on the Martian wind. Ivan flew from persona to persona, tossing off lies as if he were shedding his clothes, desperate to convince each person they passed that they should tell him everything they knew. The longer they searched, the more Ivan plied his trade in the desperate hope of answers, the quieter Mattie grew, the more strangely he watched Ivan lie.

  The rumors took them at last to a town called Isabellon. Ivan and Mattie had learned its name and its location and had flown the Copenhagen to where it should have been, but when they stepped out of their ship, they found only ash and bone, the ruined shells of houses that had been burned and bombed into nothingness. Whatever had happened there, there was no one left alive to tell.