Radiate

by C. A. Higgins

  Then Ivan said, “Mattie.”

  It was too quiet at first, and Morgan’s grip on his arm tightened; Tuatha turned to him with a frown, dark eyes searching. Ivan said loudly enough to be heard even across the din of the living people who separated them, “Mattie!”

  Mattie turned and saw him, and the look on Mattie’s face dispelled any doubts Ivan might have harbored about the act of calling his name.

  And then Mattie was running toward him, through that crowd of people, and Ivan’s heart thudded hard—Don’t run, he almost shouted, don’t run; they’ll shoot you. But no one stopped Mattie, and the two revolutionaries at his back, the guard and the strange man, were not chasing him but following him. Ivan’s escort had stopped—was it because of Mattie? No, it was because the strange man had shouted out to Tuatha, and she’d listened—and Morgan’s grip on Ivan’s arm slackened just in time for Mattie to reach him, his gaze not once deviating from Ivan’s face until the instant he had reached him and could throw his arms around Ivan’s shoulders.

  Warmth soaked through Ivan, and he grabbed Mattie back, getting a handful of Mattie’s coat the better to hold him there, his other hand taking Mattie’s skull in his palm, the better to keep him in place against Ivan’s shoulder.

  Mattie pulled away, grabbing Ivan’s face in his hands, leaning in so that for an instant the skin of their foreheads kissed.

  “You have some good goddamn timing,” said Mattie.

  BACKWARD

  “So that,” said Constance once the bar was empty, “was Ivan.”

  “That was Ivan,” Mattie agreed. Ivan had gone back to the Annwn just a few minutes earlier, claiming to be tired, but Mattie knew that he was leaving him and Constance to catch up alone. It was a little exasperating—the whole point of this trip was to show Ivan and Constance how wonderful the other was, not have them swing by each other like two planets in different orbits—but he was still glad to have some time with his sister.

  Mattie, who was watching her pour something amber-colored into a shot glass for him, asked, “What’s that?”

  “Whiskey.” Constance was on the inside of the bar, leaning on its surface. “Good, Martian whiskey.”

  “Ugh.”

  “You’ll drink it and you’ll like it.”

  Mattie grinned. The drink tasted good the way even the most unpleasant of drinks would taste in good company.

  “Toast first,” she scolded him, pouring herself a glass. When she raised her glass, she said, “To the Ivanovs…Leontios Ivanov.”

  It was a toast that skated dangerously close to treason, and the cameras were still on. “To Ivan,” he said, and clinked his glass against hers.

  “No, no, down it.” Constance fit her fingers under his glass and pushed it relentlessly up. “Drink it—”

  He finished it and let the glass hit the bar heavily, grimacing.

  She grinned at him and began to pour another round. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen you.”

  Mattie swallowed around the smoky taste in his mouth, like the aftermath of an explosion. “Too long,” he said. “I won’t stay away that long again, I promise.”

  She handed him the drink. “Good. To coming home more often.”

  “To coming home more often,” Mattie echoed, and this time the whiskey burned less on the way down.

  Constance knocked the shot glass back down on the table solidly, punctuation to the toast. “Anji wants a full report, you know,” she remarked, and began to pour another shot.

  “You’re trying to kill me,” Mattie said, staring at the filling glass.

  Constance only grinned. “I said, Anji wants a full report.”

  “What, about Ivan?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Constance.

  “Anji sticks her nose places I don’t want her nose to go,” said Mattie.

  “She’s curious,” Constance said. “Just like I was. Handsome young man and you’re traveling with him for years…”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “…never leaving his side, you hardly ever even saw me, you were so busy traveling with him…”

  “It’s not like that,” Mattie repeated, and took the shot when Constance pushed it into his hand.

  “You like him,” Constance said, holding her own shot but making no move to toast again.

  “Yeah,” said Mattie. “I do.”

  There was an expression on Constance’s face that he wasn’t used to seeing. Almost like she was hesitant, but Constance never hesitated.

  Suddenly he got it.

  “He’s my friend,” Mattie said. “Just my friend. You’re my sister. I’m sorry I didn’t see you more often these past few years, but I was trying to protect you just in case he wasn’t…a good guy.” He finished lamely, aware of the camera overhead, watching.

  “To brothers and sisters,” Constance said, and raised the glass.

  “To brothers and sisters,” Mattie said, and then, “Wait, wait.” He grabbed her arm and pulled it toward him, spilling a little as he went—“Mattie!” she protested—and then looped his arm through hers, elbows bent.

  “We’re going to spill it,” Constance said, but it wasn’t an objection.

  “Ready?” Mattie asked, and laughed. “Ready?” and then was nearly pulled off balance onto the bar when Constance tipped her own glass back and he got his own drink half in his mouth and half down his front.

  Constance managed to spill none of hers, and when she saw what Mattie had done, she laughed at him. “Another?”

  “A napkin,” Mattie corrected, shaking whiskey from his hands, “and then another.”

  She went to grab a napkin while Mattie shook droplets from his fingers and breathed in the smoke of the whiskey. From the other side of the bar Constance said, “Just friends?”

  “Friends,” Mattie agreed, and took the napkin she handed him, using that as an excuse not to meet her eyes.

  Constance leaned on the bar. She held her liquor well, but there was a looseness in the way she leaned.

  “For a while,” she said, “I thought you might be in love with him.”

  FORWARD

  Ivan looked like he had half frozen to death, and so the first thing Mattie did was get him inside, not into the Conmac headquarters his guards had been taking him to but into the Ankou. When they were near enough to the ship to read the name inscribed on the side, Ivan stopped short. “Hmm,” he said.

  “What?” Mattie asked. “What does it mean?”

  “It’s an old god.” Ivan nearly split his cracked lips with a smile. “The Europans know how to name their ships.”

  “We do,” said Niels gravely from behind them both.

  The piloting room of the Ankou was a riotous mess, but the mess represented, at least, an almost complete task. With an old ship like this, it hadn’t been too difficult: some of its components dated from before Saturn’s destruction, when the System’s surveillance hadn’t been quite as intense.

  Ivan stood beside a pile of plastic coverings that Mattie had torn from the walls to expose the darker, more chaotic machinery beneath and looked around the room. “Ananke?” he said.

  Mattie glanced back at Niels, who frowned at the unfamiliar word. “That’s the idea.”

  “It looks like you’ve done a good job,” Ivan remarked, and began to walk around the circumference of the room, stepping over discarded bits of System surveillance equipment and smooth plastic screen covers. He stopped at the doorway that led to the rest of the ship and said, as if the thought had just occurred to him, “Did you check the rest of the ship? Sometimes the System hid relays in the strangest places.”

  “I’ve already looked through. There’s a canteen, some living spaces, and a storage hold with a couple boxes inside that the rebels put there. It’s clean.”

  Ivan caught his eyes again, and Mattie knew he understood: the Ankou was not their ideal getaway vehicle.

  “You know Constance is coming,” Ivan said suddenly.

  Mattie opened his mout
h to answer, then stopped and looked at Niels.

  “I can’t leave you in here alone,” Niels said.

  “You can go outside and leave the door open,” said Ivan. “The ship can’t take off if the hull door isn’t sealed.”

  Niels’s hand rested briefly on the edge of his unloaded gun, his nails scraping over the ridge of the safety. “I’ll be outside.”

  “What do they know?” Ivan asked when he had gone.

  “Not much.” Mattie sat down on one of the old stools shoved beneath the usable terminals. Ivan followed his example, his knee brushing against Mattie’s. “I got in with them when I ended up shooting at the same people.”

  “I was using your name to get around, and I told them I was Con’s foster brother.”

  “Niels knows about that,” said Mattie with a jerk of his head to where Niels stood facing the wind. “I think he’ll back us up if we need it.”

  Ivan was watching not Niels but Mattie; when he caught Mattie’s eye, he smiled faintly. Mattie said, “I’m starting to see what you meant earlier.”

  “What did I mean?”

  “About Constance. You were right…The battle up in orbit, that was between two groups of her people. Things are falling apart for her. She’s in trouble.”

  He looked at Ivan, expecting to see the sort of suppressed exasperation that comes of having been right all along, but Ivan was frowning after some thought Mattie did not know how to follow.

  “Well, you got here fine,” Mattie said, and from outside someone shouted. “Or mostly fine. What happened to you?”

  “Tell you later,” said Ivan as the shout was picked up and carried through the camp: “Coming in! The Mallt-y-Nos!” At the door, Niels turned back to look at them.

  “Already?” Mattie said.

  “Is she early?”

  “I don’t know.” Mattie stared back out into the cold but could not yet make himself move.

  “Come on,” Ivan said, and then, as if giving in to some impulse, he wrapped one hand around Mattie’s skull and pressed a kiss to his temple. Then he was up and out the door, shielding the side of his face against the slow return of the sunlight from Europa’s revolution. Mattie stayed in the piloting room of the Ankou until he had taken another breath, then hurried after Ivan out the open air lock and down, with the crunch of ice, onto the ground below.

  “Is that her?” Ivan was asking Niels, his head craned back, his neck stretched long. Mattie came up between them and looked up as well, toward where the sky lock was opening to admit six great ships. Beyond them, warped by the thickness of the glass, Mattie could see a starry fleet in orbit.

  Tuatha had sent up some of her ships as well; they darted into the air lock when it opened to let Constance’s six ships through. When the inner lock closed, the outer lock opened, and Tuatha’s seven ships escaped out into open space. Six of them headed for Constance’s orbiting fleet, but one, flashing sunlight, darted orthogonally away. Next to Mattie, Ivan smiled faintly to himself.

  The largest of the descending ships was an enormous System war shuttle designed for troop travel between the ground and a System warship. Hulking, multistoried, matte black for stealth, it filled the air with a terrible basso hum. The other five ships were smaller shuttles. Constance must have left the spaceships in orbit; smart of her, since there wasn’t nearly enough room on Europa’s surface to land a warship. The black lead ship descended lower and lower, and a wash of heated air struck Mattie’s face.

  Suddenly Niels’s hand was on his arm. “We have to move,” he urged, and Mattie realized how carelessly close Constance’s ship had come. He grabbed Ivan’s shoulder—Ivan was still looking up at the hurtling ship, a frown creasing his brow—and pulled.

  They had made it nearly out of the shipyard and to the plaza when the ship touched down. It braked minutes before impact and seemed to touch the ground with odd gentleness, but the impact rattled the ice anyway. The other ships docked in the yard trembled with the wind and the impact, and Mattie stared through them to the open space at the other end of the shipyard where, he could just barely see, Constance’s other five ships landed as well and began to disgorge.

  “Come on,” he said to Ivan, but suddenly Tuatha said sharply, “Niels! Keep them there,” and Niels said, “Mattie, don’t move.”

  “Why the fuck not?” Mattie demanded, because Constance was there, a shout’s distance away.

  Tuatha was striding toward him, looking annoyed. “Did you do it?” she demanded, gesturing up at the closed sky lock.

  “What?”

  “I only sent up six ships,” she said. “Someone stole the seventh. We need all those ships for the Mallt-y-Nos.”

  “He’s been with me the whole time, Tua,” said Niels.

  Mattie remembered Ivan’s private smile at the sight and resisted the urge to glance aside at him. “I didn’t do it,” he promised.

  “Stay here anyway,” she said, and set off, a few of her people following her as she moved toward the dark shuttle, vanishing between crafts.

  Voices rang out between the ships, the words indistinct. Mattie strained his ears for familiarity. There were female voices there, sure, but none of them were hers. Was she still up with the fleet? Maybe she’d sent envoys instead of coming herself.

  Next to Mattie, Ivan was peculiarly tense. “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know,” Ivan said, but his eyes were darting around, his shoulder stiff against Mattie’s.

  Tuatha was coming back through the ships: she was speaking to a man, the two of them pulling ahead of their followers to confer. She seemed agitated, her hands cutting the air with sharp emotion. The strange man was light-skinned, so he wasn’t Julian or Rayet; he was dark-haired, so he wasn’t Henry. He was broad-shouldered and tall, though shorter than Mattie; he had a dark cropped beard and wore a strange fashion of heavy drapes about his person. Plutonian, Mattie realized—odd to see someone from so far out here with Constance’s army.

  The strange man scanned the crowd with a practiced eye that reminded Mattie of Constance herself. Then his eyes landed on Ivan and stopped.

  “What is it?” Tuatha asked, and followed the bent of his attention so that now they were both looking at Ivan.

  The stranger said, “Disarm them. Hold them. Don’t let them move. Danu—” A group dispatched from the soldiers following him surrounded Ivan and Mattie, pushing Niels aside.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Mattie demanded.

  Ivan said, “Do I know you?” He did not trouble to disguise his Terran lilt.

  The strange man laughed, more in surprise than in humor. He came forward, leaving Tuatha standing alone.

  “No,” said the man, studying Ivan’s face in astonished fascination, “but you take so much after your mother.”

  He had a heavy Plutonian burr. “Who are you?” Mattie demanded.

  “So you must be the brother,” said the man, turning his marveling attention now on Mattie. “You’ve been following her all this time.”

  “Who are you? Where is Constance?”

  The man showed his teeth through the gap in his beard.

  “My name is Arawn Halley,” said the stranger. “I lead the revolution now.”

  BACKWARD

  “Your sister,” said Ivan, just to be sure.

  On the viewscreen of the Annwn, the rusty surface of Mars was rising up to meet them. Mattie’s sister lived on the edge of a cliff where the wind tugged veils of sand off over the edge to fall airily through empty space.

  “Yes, Ivan,” Mattie said, steering the ship with a confidence that spoke to his familiarity with this area. Ivan would certainly be more cautious about landing a ship as heavy as the Annwn on the edge of a scarp. “My sister.”

  “I didn’t realize you had a sister.”

  “She’s not really my sister. She’s my foster sister.”

  “She’s still your sister,” said Ivan as the craft landed with a thud and a rattle on the surface of Mars. It was nearly incompreh
ensible that he had not had any inkling of this. He’d looked Mattie up on System computers back when they’d first met, of course, but with no blood relatives the constant churn of foster siblings the computer had displayed hadn’t singled any out for particular affection. “You never even mentioned her.”

  “She doesn’t really approve of being mentioned.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means gird your loins,” Mattie told him.

  Ivan digested that for a moment. “You think she won’t like me?” Absurd to think. Ivan could make anyone like him.

  “I can’t even guess what my sister thinks.”

  “You could offer me a little reassurance.”

  But Mattie Gale had been taught by a small army of social workers while growing up that if you threw enough meaningless platitudes at someone else’s emotions, they would eventually go away. “You’ll be fine,” he said. “Just be yourself.”

  “And if she doesn’t like me?”

  “I had a boyfriend once who broke up with me because I didn’t like his dog. Told him it was stupid to bring an animal on long spaceflights.”

  Ivan waited, but no illumination seemed forthcoming. “Am I the dog in this analogy?”

  Mattie gave him a pitying sort of look.

  “Now you’re really not being reassuring,” Ivan said.

  “Yeah, Constance is way better than a dog.” He got a look at Ivan’s face and rolled his eyes. “I’m joking, Ivan. It doesn’t matter. And you two are going to love each other.”

  “You make that sound like a threat.”

  “You and Con have got—things in common. You’re going to get along like fire gets on with oil.” Mattie clapped a hand on Ivan’s shoulder. “Come meet my sister.”

  Ivan followed him down the ladder of the Annwn’s tilted hall and stepped out onto the dust of Mars. It was colder up there on the scarp, windier. He had been to Mars before, but not like this. The sun seemed harsher, too, as if the radiation skipped the process of providing warmth to go directly to a burn.

  A building stood alone on the scarp some distance from the rest of the town, which was farther from the perilous edge of the scarp. Mattie headed straight for that lonely building, and Ivan followed, noting the deliberately old-fashioned look of it, as if it were a Terran saloon—a styling that seemed imperfectly done, as if the designer had never truly held interest in the project but had felt obliged. Beneath the false wood panels Ivan caught glimpses of carbon and steel.