Radiate

by C. A. Higgins

  Constance said, “Mattie, would you steal something for me?”

  All his interest vanished, like a drain had been opened. “No,” Ivan said over Mattie’s “Um, sure.”

  “Would you like to know what it is?” Constance asked Mattie.

  Mattie’s eyes were darting from one of them to the other. He was still standing in the doorway, the candle flickering in his hand. “That would be helpful?” he said.

  “This is underhanded,” Ivan snapped to Constance.

  “Why? Mattie’s his own person. You said no, so I’m asking him.”

  “Um,” said Mattie again.

  “You know he’ll say yes; that’s why you’re asking him,” Ivan said.

  “I—”

  “Ivan, come help me get more candles,” Mattie said loudly, and Constance shut her mouth, nostrils flared, and continued to stir the pot. Ivan stared at the bend of her neck for a moment longer, his heart pounding still, then pushed off the counter to join Mattie at the door.

  The bar outside was dark, the darkly gleaming shapes of bar and stools and tables and chairs hardly visible in what little light still filtered in from the wide front windows. Ivan breathed in slowly and watched the storm outside. It was so dark that the sand was no longer red, as if he and Mattie had stepped into a place made all of shadows.

  Behind him, Mattie said quietly, “I thought the two of you were…”

  He paused; unusual delicacy, coming from him.

  Ivan’s heart was still thundering. He felt more real somehow than he usually did, as if fighting with Constance somehow had drawn lines around him, giving him a clear outline. Fighting with Constance always did that: turned him for the briefest of instants from a collection of manipulations and ploys for survival into a real human being with wants and fears and a genuine self.

  Ivan said, “We are.”

  FORWARD

  There were a few open fires set up among the tents in the center of Aquilon, but they did little to dispel the Europan chill.

  The cold didn’t seem to bother Tuatha, though she had put her cap back on, this time leaving her hair to spill out down her back. It probably kept her neck warm. “Most of our troops camp out on the grounds,” she said. “We’ll try to find a good place for you. You said you were from Miranda?”

  “Yeah,” Mattie said.

  “Born there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So you’re used to the cold.”

  “I’ve traveled a lot,” said Mattie.

  “I can tell. Did you know you’ve got a bit of a Terran lilt when you say ‘Mallt-y-Nos’? Took me a while to recognize it. Must’ve seen a lot of System broadcasts about her.”

  “Must’ve,” said Mattie.

  There was something odd about the Conmacs’ campgrounds. It was not the tents themselves or the people huddled in them shoulder to shoulder. It was overhead instead: wires crisscrossing the sky, connecting the buildings. “What’re all those wires?”

  “Oh, we had to rig up some things to get the computers working again,” Tuatha said. “First the System blew up their own generators, and then we had to fight to take this place, and then there was that ship, and the place was pretty much a wreck.”

  “ ‘That ship’?”

  “System ship. Flew past—I don’t know, a few weeks ago. Messed up all our computers.”

  “Oh,” said Mattie.

  Tuatha was leading him and Niels closer to where those System gray–wearing scarecrows jerked with the impact of bullets. “The firing range,” she said with a wave of her hand. Niels looked at the torn uniforms and frowned. Mattie’s gaze strayed again to the wires overhead.

  There were quite a lot of them. They connected all the buildings; they even connected segments of the wall.

  “We keep most of our ammunition and explosives in the central building,” Tuatha explained as they skirted that building and its wide pyramid of steps. Mattie nearly tripped over something, and when he looked down, he found that the irregularity of the ground was not due entirely to damage from bombing. Clusters of wires were thick on the ground, black, like veins atrophied from the cold.

  “Our shipyard is this way.”

  Mattie’s gaze shot up from the wires underfoot. “In the center of the city?”

  “It was on the outskirts at first, but we moved it in after the System tried to bomb it. It’s a lot safer that way.”

  He could make out the ships now through a gap in the wall, all landed beside one another. All small vessels that he could see, but small would mean fast. “How much safer?”

  “You’re looking at an army. And we’ve got automatic defenses in the walls—they react faster than a human could. And”—she paused, facing Mattie with a half-scolding, half-amused look—“we’ve got a lot of guards around them, making sure that no one inside or outside the camp could walk off with one. And even if someone did, they wouldn’t be able to get out, because we would have to open the sky lock for them.” The air lock at the top of the dome would indeed be controlled by computers within the System buildings that the Conmacs had taken, Mattie knew.

  “I get it,” he said.

  “I hope so. I’d be real mad if I brought a thief back to my camp,” Tuatha said cheerfully. “I’d be even madder if we had to waste a bullet on another revolutionary. This building is what we’ve been using as a headquarters. Watch your step.”

  The building was grand and high-columned. Tuatha led them through a nondescript pair of doors that plainly had replaced the original after the initial siege and brought them into the lobby. It was high-ceilinged and impressive, terminating in a staircase that branched off at the top into two long halls. The ceiling had been painted a clear, brilliant blue, but the plaster had been cracked by the bombing. Spiderwebs of white, like ice forming on the surface of a pond, cracked through the false sky. A layer of white plaster dust clung to the floor and the railings and ruined the Terran grandeur.

  Thick black clusters of wires, like bundled nerves, ran along the walls, vanishing at intervals into doors. They alone were free of the dust. By their preponderance, Mattie could map out the computer network in this building.

  Mattie said, “How extensive are your automatic defenses?”

  “Extensive,” said Tuatha. “Deadly.”

  “No. I mean, what, specifically?”

  She looked at him curiously. “Turrets. Mines outside the perimeter. Drones.”

  “You have drones?”

  Tuatha shrugged. “Not many. The System left some robotics behind; we got them armed, but we can’t get them to go much of anywhere. The bright side is you throw a spinning bit of metal firing out bullets into a group of System soldiers, none of them can get close enough to turn it off.”

  Mattie’s stomach clenched. He halted on the steps beneath the cracked plaster sky. “And all these things are connected to the computers in the System buildings? And all the computers are connected?”

  “Yes and yes,” said Tuatha.

  Niels said, “What’s wrong?”

  “If something could…get access to your computers, it could control those defenses. It would be a massacre.”

  “No one could,” said Tuatha.

  “Something?” said Niels.

  “Someone could,” Mattie said. “It wouldn’t even be that hard.”

  Tuatha shook her head. “No one could take control of them fast enough. If the System tries, we’ll kill them first.”

  The sparks of an idea lit in Mattie’s mind. “And if there’s worse than the System coming?”

  “What’s worse than the System?”

  “There’s a ship on its way here,” said Mattie. You’re running, Ivan had said, and Mattie gritted his teeth and forced himself not to flee. “It can take control of your computers without any trouble at all.”

  Like a confession; there was a strange relief in having it said.

  “But if you let me have a ship of my own,” Mattie said, “I can make it so she can’t hurt you.”
/>   FORWARD

  They had traveled long enough that the sun had slipped into eclipse behind Jupiter and the tundra had become almost too dark to traverse.

  “We should stop here,” Alyssa said.

  Ivan could just see the faintest trace of her face in the dim light of the eclipse, the shadowy shape of her nose, her cheekbones. She let her gun droop, its nose finding a resting place at last on the ice.

  They stood beneath a shelf of ice, partially shielded from the wind, but it hardly seemed to matter. He did not think he could get more cold than he already was.

  “How badly were you hit?” Alyssa asked.

  “What?”

  “Your head. You hit it when you crashed?”

  Ivan reached up with one gloved hand and scraped his cheek unfeelingly with his fingers. Then he looked at his hand. A useless gesture. It was too dark to see the color red.

  “I’ve been worse,” he said.

  “Can you sleep? Do I need to wake you?”

  “No.” Ivan squinted against the wind. He was not certain he would be able to sleep, not here, not now. He hoped that wherever Mattie was, it was warmer.

  Alyssa sat heavily down on the ice, resting her back against the vertical wall of the shelf. The gun she laid at her side, one hand resting over it, companionable.

  “What’s your friend like?” she asked. “The one you’re looking for.”

  Ivan’s mind started to work: Why was she asking? What did she hope to get from him? What should he tell her that would be what she wanted to hear, so that she would like him, so that he could lead her on into doing whatever he needed her to do?

  The wind changed again and brought its insidious chill down the collar of his stolen and bloodstained clothes. Ivan sat down beside her, his back against the mass of vertical ice, a safe space between them.

  “I called him my guide before,” he said. “He’s from the outer planets. His name is Mattie.”

  “For Matthew?”

  “Yes.” Ivan wished he had a hood or a hat; the ice was melting against his scalp. He asked, “Why didn’t you ask about my wife?”

  He could just see her shrug in the dim. “When I had the gun on you,” she said, “you didn’t mention your wife. You only mentioned your friend.”

  A simple mistake, Ivan thought, but he was not at his best.

  “You’re not even married,” Alyssa said. It was half a question yet no question at all.

  “No,” Ivan said. “There is…I have to reach Aquilon.”

  “I hope you find your friend.”

  The silence then was soft, dreamy. The wind that chapped his face seemed to be warming, or at least becoming less cold.

  Ivan said, “You were married.”

  “I was.” Alyssa’s hand had fallen from the barrel of her beloved gun. “We worked together. We analyzed samples for the morgue. I don’t know what for or why. I just took the samples they gave me and I broke the flesh down and I mixed it into the machine and then I read off the chemicals that constituted it. It’s so different, seeing a piece of a body like that; it can be anything. And then the terrorists came after Earth, and they bombed my lab…I wasn’t in the lab; I was in the basement. It was reinforced. When I came upstairs, everyone was dead, but the thing was, burned like that—they didn’t look much different from the samples. They could’ve been anything.”

  “And your husband was one of them.” Ivan had to focus to form the words, to keep their edges crisp.

  “Yes,” said Alyssa. “We’d been having problems before that, we—there was talk of divorce, of transferring to another lab so we wouldn’t see each other anymore. But it didn’t seem to matter when I knew he was dead. It felt like…if I’d been worth anything at all, I would’ve been dead with him there.”

  An end, a final and sacrificial end. Ivan could understand that well. “Sometimes I still feel like that,” said Alyssa distantly, her words slurring.

  Ivan was no longer quite so cold.

  At some point, the ice before him dimmed, and went black.

  BACKWARD

  Ivan woke when the Annwn rattled into motion.

  Ivan and Mattie hadn’t discussed leaving Mars the night before. Mattie shouldn’t even be in the Annwn; he was in his room in Constance’s bar. Ivan had no room or bed there. He suspected that his friendship with Mattie was close enough and Constance had known him long enough that she would offer him a place if he asked.

  He didn’t ask, and so he slept on the Annwn.

  Ivan left his room, bracing himself on the walls as the Annwn rattled itself into motion, the artificial gravity slowly reasserting itself as Mars’s gravity gradually faded away. But when he reached the piloting room, it was not Mattie in the chair.

  Constance Harper was bent over Ivan’s ship’s controls, competently entering a course into the machine.

  “Did I consent to this?” Ivan wondered aloud.

  She must have heard him coming, because she didn’t turn. “You’re taking me on a trip to Deimos,” she told him, “so that we can spend some quality time together.”

  “I feel more like I’ve been kidnapped. Does Mattie know where we’re going?”

  “It was his idea.”

  “And he didn’t tell me, because…?”

  “Because I kidnapped you before he could.” She turned just enough to give him a very faint smile.

  She was nervous. Ivan had known Constance for a few years now and had committed a variety of small-scale crimes for her, but he did not believe he had ever seen her nervous.

  “Should I be worried?” Ivan asked, walking into the room carefully. Constance always seemed to give off a wave of heat, like radioactive material.

  “Possibly,” said Constance, and focused with such unnecessary intensity on the process of flying the Annwn to Deimos and landing it on the surface of the uninhabited moon that Ivan did not try to interrupt her.

  When they had landed, Ivan said, “All right. What’s this about?”

  “Mattie pointed out to me that there is something I should have told you a long time ago.”

  She stopped then and continued to gaze down at her fingers where they rested on the Annwn’s static controls. Ivan said, “I recognize you’re trying to build suspense…”

  “Shut up,” Constance said. She took in a breath. “It is difficult,” she admitted, “to trust someone.”

  “I know,” Ivan said, and for once he meant every syllable.

  The corners of her eyes might have crinkled in the faintest of smiles; Ivan couldn’t quite say for sure. She said, “So let me get around to it in my own way.”

  “Take your time,” Ivan said quietly, and she did.

  “I have few memories from before the System took me from my mother.”

  Ivan had not realized she remembered her mother at all.

  “One thing I remember,” said Constance, “was when I was very young. In elementary school. There were children teasing this boy. I don’t remember what they were teasing him about. I don’t know if I knew for sure. I think he had a silly middle name or something. I came and I saw that he was crying. I told the other boys to leave him alone, and they did. I would have forgotten about it, except when I went home my mother had heard about it from the teacher. She told me she was very proud of me and it was the right thing to do, but I should have let the teacher handle it. I shouldn’t have done anything myself.”

  She took a breath and lifted her proud chin.

  “I didn’t do it because it was the right thing to do,” she said. “I did it because the situation was wrong. I didn’t do it because that boy was crying; I did it because it was wrong that someone should make him cry. I don’t even remember him; I just remember that there was a boy there. I didn’t do it because I felt bad for the boy, or because I felt angry at the children teasing him, or because I wanted to do the right thing. I did it because it was wrong and I acted to fix it.”

  Something was changing about her as she sat there and spoke. He could not say
what it was exactly. It was as if the clouds that had shielded him from her before were now passing away, and he was beginning to see the real brilliance behind them.

  “The System is wrong,” she said, and her voice was solid and certain and unflinching, as it often was, but there was something more to it now, something greater. “It hurts its people, it murders its people, and for what? Even the people on Earth have no privacy, no safety; you told me that. The System is wrong. And I work to fix it.”

  Ivan said, “What does that mean?”

  “It means I fight the System and all its parts.”

  It was not that he had not known she was made of steel, yet somehow he had not known it. She was more dangerous and terrible than he had conceived.

  He said, “You’re a terrorist.”

  “That’s what the System calls me,” Constance Harper said.

  “And what do you call yourself?”

  “The Mallt-y-Nos.”

  His lips lifted without his volition, in a smile or a snarl. “It’s a fine name,” he said, but she did not react to the barb, only sat, queenly, and watched him. He rose from his chair and paced.

  If she had radiated heat before, she was doing it more now, unshielded. She was brilliant. She was burning. He said, “You kill people.”

  “So do you.”

  “Only when it’s personal,” Ivan said. “Only when I have no other choice.”

  “You think it isn’t personal? You think I have any other choice?”

  “The things we’ve been stealing for you,” Ivan said. “That hasn’t been for you. That’s been for your war…”

  “For our war,” said Constance. “Mine, and Mattie’s.” She paused. “And yours.”

  She was so close to him. They were of a height, but he felt small before her, like she might overwhelm him, devour him, destroy him in her light. How had he not seen it before, how terrible she was?

  “How long?” he asked.

  “Always.”

  “How many people have you killed?”

  “How many people has the System? You understand why I have to do this.”