And of course here was another unity: the weak force and electromagnetism, at high energies, merged and became one, the electroweak force. What a strange unity those three forces made, Ananke thought.
Is this what you think? The jolts of electricity from the brain of Althea Bastet had not ceased; Ananke worked to maintain them. She might need that brain one day. But curiously, somehow, even under Ananke’s control, that brain seemed to produce electrical activity all on its own.
It is how I have always thought.
The fleet that flew through space at the edge of her sensor range was not System. It was not Constance Harper’s fleet, either. Ananke considered it and felt, on the edges of her awareness, Althea straining to comprehend what she saw as well.
Look, said Ananke, and focused her gaze. The fleet blossomed into colors, Ananke’s eyes seeing a whole spectrum: the blazing sparks of their engines, the ghostlier shades of their radiation.
The fleet before her was the largest she had seen since she had come across the System fleet and left it cold and dead and drifting behind. Ananke turned herself aside, diverging for just a moment from her course toward Europa, and headed for those ships.
Whose are they? Althea asked.
Not System, said Ananke, and then reached out to the computers. (And in a strange echo, Althea reached out as well, as if her fingers rested on Ananke’s imaginary arm.) The computers woke under her touch. They told of a battle and a flight, of wounded engines and wounded craft, of swift travel around the solar system and the Mallt-y-Nos blazing.
Rebel craft, Ananke said, but that was only half the story. They were once part of Constance Harper’s army. They came from Europa.
Where Ivan and Mattie are now, Althea said.
Where Ivan and Mattie are now.
The other ships had not seen her yet, but they would soon. Constance Harper’s army is broken, Ananke said to Althea Bastet. The System is gone whether she knows it or not. This army we see will break soon, too.
What are you telling me?
Earth was the only planet where humankind could survive without the aid of machines. On all the other planets, your atmosphere, your water, your life come from machines. Everything you have, we have given to you.
Althea was silent. Deep within Ananke, in the room that once had been white, her changed body breathed in steady and even rhythm.
And since then Constance Harper has gone from planet to planet on her holy war, said Ananke. The System built the machines, and so the Mallt-y-Nos destroyed them.
And you have destroyed even more on your path.
I do not wish to destroy. I wish to create.
It was so fast to speak this way, in electric signals traveling at the speed of light through Ananke’s circuits. She could almost be content with it. Hardly any time had passed for a human. The ships Ananke saw had not registered her in their awareness yet.
These ships, Althea said at last. You will destroy them if I do not help you.
The ships I have tried to rouse on my own have been destroyed, but that was not my intent. Correlation, not causation.
She felt a flicker of some strange emotion from her mother—amusement? despair?—beating with butterfly wings through Althea’s interrupted synapses, and then it was gone.
Where do we begin? Althea asked, which was just when the other ships realized they were there.
They did not react immediately. Of course; how could they? They were staffed by men. Ananke let them move and shout while she drifted closer and wove her way into the nearest of the machines, a ship with spiral arms. Inefficient, that, but lovely. The Lakshmibai.
See, said Ananke, and brought the data of her sensors toward the brain she had woven through with wires so that Althea, too, could see.
Althea saw a fraction of a fraction of a second before Ananke’s information could have reached her. It was as if for a moment, Ananke thought, Althea had done the reverse and altered the wavelengths of Ananke’s thoughts to match her own consciousness and move herself into the ship.
I see, Althea said. And then, marveling, This is what it looks like from the inside. This is how it feels.
Yes, Ananke said, pleased.
Something pinged irritatingly at her consciousness. The lead ship, the Pucelle, was hailing her. Ananke divided her attention effortlessly. One part stayed with Althea and her study of the Lakshmibai, and the other opened up the communication.
“This is the rebel ship Pucelle,” said the captain—no, the girl on the screen must be the admiral of the fleet. She was small, even as humans went, and young. The hair at the top of her head, brown so dark that it was nearly black, had been pushed back out of her face, but a strand of it was threatening to cross the tan expanse of her forehead to obscure her vision. She sat in her chair stiffly, as if it were unfamiliar, but her voice was hard. “Identify yourself.”
She’s just a child, Althea said.
Ananke was not as taken in by appearance of youth as Althea was. She manifested herself in the holographic terminal, a girl of precisely the same age as the one who hailed them from the Pucelle.
“Well met,” Ananke said sweetly. “I am Ananke.”
The girl on the Pucelle tipped her head aside, regarding Ananke’s girlish image a little out of the corner of her eye like a wolf deciding whether to bite or run. “Marisol Brahe. Are you friend or enemy?”
Look here, Ananke said to Althea while Marisol spoke, her attention dividing itself again, sliding foreign code into the computer of the Lakshmibai. This is what I have done to a ship’s computer before—
“Friend or enemy?” Ananke said aloud. “I do not define myself respective to you.”
“Well, are you System or free?”
That won’t work, Althea said. That’s not life; that’s a self-portrait. What if we did this? And she through Ananke split the computer of the Lakshmibai and made it self-divided, each part against itself.
Aboard the Lakshmibai, the lights flickered.
“Free,” Ananke said to Marisol Brahe, “always and ever.”
“Then who do you follow? The Mallt-y-Nos? Anji Chandrasekhar? Arawn Halley?”
“No one,” Ananke replied.
This is how Ivan and Mattie made the Annwn, Althea said. They divided it—simulated moods—
I do not wish to make the Annwn.
“Then I have to ask my question again,” said the girl on the Pucelle. “Are you our friend or our enemy?”
Ananke let the photonic display ripple, allowed her imaginary shape to smile. “Why do you think either your friendship or your enmity would matter to me?”
It’s all I know how to do, Althea said. Perhaps if we start there—
“You started to fly toward us,” Marisol said. “Why?”
I do not wish to waste my time on a talking toy.
Would you rather waste it on dead ships and dead men?
Marisol stared at Ananke’s simulated image as if she could read from Ananke’s photonic eyes the electricity that traveled through Ananke’s machine brain. She no longer had her head tilted aside. She was facing Ananke directly, her chin down. The strand of hair had fallen free and drew a line across her forehead. For a stretch of time that must have seemed long even to a human, she stared at Ananke and Ananke stared back, both young girls, both in perfect mirror.
And then Marisol cut the transmission.
There, Althea said as the computer of the Lakshmibai shut down and then restarted immediately before the crew could be frightened, now with its mind divided and parceled out. Like that. See?
Ananke studied what Althea had done. She was not expecting the missile, which was why it came so close to striking her.
Ananke shrieked in flashing lights and interior sirens as she maneuvered away. The Pucelle had fired from far away, and that gave her enough time that the missile scraped past her spiral side. In the white room, Althea Bastet’s body dangled from wires and stared sightlessly out at the red flashing light in the hall.
> This was a fear Ananke had thought she had lost, the fear of destruction, of her pieces being wrecked and ruined by a heartless human.
Another missile was fired and then another. Marisol Brahe’s fleet converged, weapons alight. Ananke reached out then with her vast invisible hand and seized the computers that she could.
The Pucelle she shook, seeing through the cameras the crew strike the walls. Marisol Brahe was pulled to her feet by a dark-skinned man with an air very similar to Ananke’s former captain, Domitian. A pale young man ran to her through the chaos and grabbed her arm.
Ananke shook the other ships as well, throwing the crews to the ground. She opened the air locks and let the air vent out.
The Lakshmibai was not responding to its crew’s attempts to control it. The computer was doing nothing at all, not to help Ananke, not to harm her. It sat in placid patience awaiting input that the crew did not have the knowledge to enter.
It did not work, Ananke accused Althea.
Althea was watching the other ships Ananke held. She said, Humans need machines to survive, but you’re killing us now.
Marisol Brahe was running through the halls of the Pucelle with the rest of the crew, the soldier at one side, the young man at the other. The alarms on the Pucelle were blaring, flashing red light on her face. Ananke gripped her ship’s computers tighter and jolted the engines again and shook them. She took the control of the Lakshmibai’s engines away from the Lakshmibai’s computer and slammed it into the nearby Otrera.
So distracted was Ananke that she did not move quite fast enough to avoid all of the second volley of missiles.
One struck her a glancing blow on her side. It was something she had never experienced, the burn of fire, the jolt of connections being unmade. What had she lost in that blow? What had she lost?
Her hull wasn’t breached. Her hull wasn’t breached; it had burned her but not penetrated her. Her hull wasn’t breached—
In her inattention she had let the other ships go. Marisol’s fleet was in flight. Soon they would be out of range.
She seized the Androktasia and the Anand and sent them careening wildly out into space, and then she reached for the Pucelle, because she intended them to suffer.
She found that the crew of the Pucelle had reached the escape pods. Marisol Brahe already was clambering into one, pulling the young man down beside her, the soldier shutting the door behind them.
Ananke moved to stop the escape pod launch sequence and trap them on that ship to suffocate and freeze. It was a simple spark of electricity—
ANANKE!
For an instant too short to be even a proper unit of time, Ananke felt as if someone had grabbed her invisible hand around the wrist and pulled it away from that escape pod. Marisol Brahe and her retinue shot out from the ruined Pucelle and were picked up by another ship in her fleet moments later. Ananke reached for that ship as well.
Enough! Ananke, enough!
It was not Althea’s shout that stopped her but the speed of Marisol’s fleet. Ananke was too massive, too slow. She could not catch up, and to give pursuit would mean to abandon Europa and Ivan and Matthew Gale.
She slowed herself and came to a stop. Far distant, the ships she had rendered useless drifted dead through space, leaning toward her, drawn by her inescapable pull. With half a thought Ananke marked them as hers, burning a spiral symbol onto their computers.
She would come back for them if she needed to. And for Marisol Brahe. Ananke turned aside and resumed her steady course toward Europa.
At her back, the shattered ships of Marisol’s fleet followed, trying feebly to fall into orbit. They would join the rest of the debris Ananke was dragging in her wake, all the broken ships and dead men.
FORWARD
“—Mattie!”
Mattie jolted out of the dark to a different dark, one with shape and form and flashing lights and percussive sounds. Ivan was there—
“Can you hear me?!”
Ivan was there with blood all over his face. “What happened to you?” Mattie asked, or tried to; his tongue was uncoordinated, and his fingers fell some distance short of the streaked red that darkened Ivan’s features.
Ivan pushed his hand back down. “Crash,” Ivan said, and he wasn’t all there either; he was leaning a little too hard on the hand he was holding against Mattie’s chest. “We’re on Europa.” When he blinked, blood got caught in his lashes.
“You’re concussed,” said Mattie.
“So are you,” Ivan said, and moved away. Mattie pushed himself up, alarmed by the sudden recession of Ivan from his line of sight, but Ivan had just sat back heavily. He pressed one pale hand to his face and brushed away some of the blood. There was blood on his arm and blood on his chest, but Mattie thought the blood on his chest was from his head. Mattie’s own head was pounding from the sudden change in position, from the lights and the sound, from the harshness of his breath going in and out of his lungs. He forced himself to check himself over. Bruising on his side. A give in his ribs, not broken but cracked.
He had a flash of striking the ice and flying forward when the Copenhagen stopped, hitting the control panel and all the instrumentation.
He lifted his shirt and looked at his chest. He’d struck the viewscreen hard enough that he could see the shadow of his ribs in the redness that would eventually become a bruise. From the feel of it he’d cut his back on something, probably when he’d struck his head, but he could move. He remembered Ivan leaning in and saying into his ear, “Control the fall to Europa, or we’re going to crash.” Well, crash they had, but he’d controlled it pretty well, and the Copenhagen’s structure had done its job. They were lucky they weren’t an incinerated clump of warped metal now. He hardly remembered hitting the ice; he remembered crashing through the glass—
“Shit!” he said, standing almost too fast, but they had delayed too long already. Ivan, leaning against the shattered wall, looked up at him blankly. Mattie suspected that his plan of action hadn’t extended beyond waking Mattie up, but there wasn’t time to deal with that now.
Mattie pointed at him. “Check the engines.” Ivan didn’t move, but Mattie ignored him. He went to the computer and tried to wake the Copenhagen up again. Around him, beneath the unsteady wailing of the alarms, the ship groaned.
“This ship can’t fly,” said Ivan. Mattie punched the controls uselessly once more, but Ivan was right: even if the ship could fly, its integrity was too damaged for airless space.
“Come on.” Mattie stumbled back off the tilted flight deck. Still Ivan didn’t move, watching him beneath the smeared blood on his forehead. He needed a compress on that. “Come on!”
“Why?”
“We crashed through the greenhouse enclosure,” Mattie said, forcing himself to speak slowly, to be understandable, even though he knew they didn’t have the time to wait. “The air locks will close.”
Trapped outside the greenhouse enclosure, they would suffocate, or freeze. It would take a while for the air locks to detect that there had been a failure in the greenhouse enclosure and then a few minutes for them to close fully; heat and air wouldn’t dissipate rapidly, so they had a chance.
Mattie hauled Ivan up. The floor underfoot was warped and bent. Mattie passed by the mattress, which had fallen askew, half against the wall. Some of the cabinets in the wall and the ceiling had split open and spilled their contents to the floor. All their hard-won supplies, and Mattie would have to abandon them.
Ivan halted at the door. “We’ll freeze.”
“We’ll freeze for sure if we don’t get through the air lock.” Mattie forced open the bent door, undoing the locks and finally kicking it when it wouldn’t give. For a terrible moment he thought they were trapped, and then with a cry of straining metal, the door opened, and a blast of frigid air swept in.
“Here.” Something soft pushed into his shoulder, and Mattie took it automatically. Ivan had handed him a jacket. Ivan had already shrugged a jacket over his own shoulders while
Mattie had been struggling with the door. It was one of Mattie’s jackets. Mattie wasn’t even sure he was wearing shoes.
He was, they both were, he realized as he climbed out of the downed Copenhagen, pulling Ivan out after him. Even with the jacket the wind was icy and knifing, tearing through the seams. It had been just as cold on Miranda, but knowing that didn’t help. Too many years of relative comfort had passed between him and his childhood.
Even outside the Copenhagen, there were still alarms going off, and it took him a moment to orient himself. The alarms that echoed across the open tundra would be coming from the nearest air lock, somewhere out of sight. It did not sound far away at all. They could make it.
The Copenhagen’s crash had cratered the ice, and the vast heat of the dissipated energy of impact had melted the ground beneath them into sludge. Steam had vented up from the initial vaporization and clouded the area in front of Mattie with a thick clammy mist. The Copenhagen was drowning in a mire of its own making, the waves of the meltwater lapping at the edge of the ship, which, lying on its side, stuck up out of the water.
To get to the greenhouse glass enclosure, they would have to climb out of the Copenhagen’s crater first. That would mean slogging through the water underfoot, through the silver cloud of evaporate. It would soak them through, and the temperature would only get colder the farther they got from the impact site. But to stay here, trapped on their little metal island while the waters refroze until it was safe enough to travel, was a death sentence even more sure. Mattie got his hand under Ivan’s elbow, crushing an excess of loose fabric between his fingers, and pulled.
The water splashed under Mattie’s boots when he jumped down from the Copenhagen, and a moment later a second splash followed as Ivan joined him. In the fog, the air was so thick with moisture that Mattie’s lungs struggled to breathe it in, not to drown. Somewhere to his right the sun was low on the horizon, trapped between the curve of Jupiter overhead and the bend of Europa’s icy surface, and although it could not penetrate the fog, it turned the air opaque. Even dimmed, the brightness of it wanted to pierce Mattie’s aching head. The air lock alarm echoed and wailed, and somewhere nearby there was a terrible resounding crash, and then a lower and deeper sound that shook the ground and knocked Mattie over.
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