Lightless

by C. A. Higgins

  “He’s not here right now,” said Domitian. “Until we know how he could have escaped, we have to assume he could be anywhere on board this ship. Leave the computer and think. Are there any other ways out of here?”

  “There’s the hallway,” Althea said, still kneeling in front of the machine but leaving it alone for the moment.

  “Gagnon and I were in the hallway. What else?”

  She tried to think past her immediate knee-jerk reaction that there was no way out. “There’s the hatch to the core.”

  She turned to look at it, a heavy hatch near the extreme end of the hallway, set into the floor. Althea could see that it was still locked from the outside.

  “What else?” Domitian asked.

  “I don’t know—”

  Domitian walked past her to the hatch and, still with his gun in his hand, undid the latches sealing the hatch shut and gripped the handle. With a grunt of exertion—the gravity this far down made the hatch very heavy—he lifted the hatch and looked down. Althea walked over to stand behind him and look over his shoulder.

  Right below them both, trying to pull them down, was the Ananke’s beating heart, the electromagnets that caged it humming with electricity, arcs of plasma and reddened photons following the swoops and curves of magnetic field lines and fighting the impossible pull of the mass cradled in the center of the ten-story-radius hollow sphere that was the rib cage of the ship.

  If Gale had fallen in or jumped, he would still be visible, his body shredded and stretched and dead, frozen in time just above an event horizon so small that Althea wouldn’t be able to see it from this distance even if it could be seen—because the heart of the Ananke was a black hole.

  If Gale had thought to hide in this enclosure, clinging to the highest part of it, he would not have been able to resist the pull of the Ananke’s heart, and Althea now would see him dead down there as well. There would be nothing to hold on to, anyway; the only protrusion inside the hatch was the dead man’s switch inside its clear plastic cage, which would shut down the computer if it was flipped and leave the computer solely under manual control.

  But there was no one there. Gale had not gone into the Ananke’s core.

  Domitian closed the door and sat back on his heels.

  “What else?” he asked again, and Althea knelt once more before the computer screen.

  “I don’t know,” she said, and urged the computer to open whatever had been closed last. She would see what Gale had done.

  “He didn’t vanish, Althea,” Domitian said.

  A window opened on the screen. It took Althea only a moment to recognize it.

  “The maintenance shafts,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know how he even knew…” She had no idea how he’d known about them; they were vestiges of the ship’s construction, made, sealed, and forgotten except for emergencies Althea never expected to happen. They had not even occurred to her as a method for Gale’s escape, and she couldn’t imagine how he’d persuaded the program to run. The shafts were airless and frigid, uninhabitable unless the program was running; the program itself was well concealed and responsive only to Althea’s clearance level. He must have hacked into the program quickly: the maintenance shaft doors could not be opened unless a certain bare minimum of habitability had been achieved, and although the process was very swift, it still took a certain amount of time, time that would have been valuable when he had Domitian and Gagnon running down the hall toward him—

  “Althea!” Domitian barked.

  Althea collected herself and tried, for Domitian, to speak quickly.

  “There are maintenance shafts throughout the ship,” she said. “They were shut down after the ship was constructed, but they still exist in case I need to use them for a big repair. He shouldn’t have known about them, but somehow he did. He ran the program to make them habitable again.”

  “He’s in the maintenance shafts?”

  “Yes.” Althea left the computer to run to the back of the ship, to the metal-paneled wall. “There should be an opening—”

  It fell open at her touch.

  “—here,” she finished, and turned to see Domitian checking his gun once, efficiently, then heading for her with a grim expression.

  “Where do those shafts go?” he asked, kneeling down beside her to look up into the narrow space.

  Althea took a breath. “Everywhere,” she admitted.

  “I’m following him in,” said Domitian, and leaned forward to crawl into the tunnel just as the Ananke’s alarm began to wail.

  Domitian was on his feet and going for the intercom before Althea could even process the sound. “Gagnon!” he barked.

  “An escape pod has been launched,” Gagnon said, sounding tense. “Gale?”

  “Do the maintenance shafts go to the escape pod bay?” Domitian asked Althea.

  The maintenance shafts went everywhere. They were lucky, Althea thought, that Gale had gone for the escape pods and not for some sensitive part of the ship. “Yes,” she said.

  “Scan the pod,” Domitian said into the intercom. “Confirm Gale’s inside.”

  “The ship’s been affected; the sensor readings might not be accurate,” Althea started to protest, but the two men ignored her.

  “The Ananke recognizes one life-sign,” Gagnon reported. “Gale’s on board.”

  “Can you fire on him?” Domitian asked.

  “I’ve been trying to start up the Ananke’s weaponry system, but it’s not responding.” Gagnon sounded frustrated. He was never patient enough with the Ananke; Althea itched to go up there and coax the shell-shocked ship into obedience. She might be able to do it fast enough to hit the escape pod before Gale was out of safe firing range.

  “Keep trying, but even if you can’t, we’re between planets and outside the usual trade routes,” said Domitian. “The escape pods have no mode of propulsion, and if he turns on the distress signal, the System will pick him up. Either he’ll starve to death or he’ll be captured again.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Gagnon cut the connection. Domitian turned to Althea. “How did Gale get out of his cell?” he asked.

  “He picked the lock,” Althea said, remembering the video. “He had picks hidden in his boot.”

  “With a broken arm he picked the lock,” Domitian muttered, and then seemed to snap out of his distraction. “Confiscate Ivanov’s boots. We don’t know what he might have hidden in there.”

  “Ivanov’s in the cell,” Althea protested. “There isn’t a lock to pick from the inside.”

  “He could have something else hidden. Confiscate Ivanov’s boots. Then you can continue to work on the computer, but I want you to stay by his cell. There’s a computer interface near it; work on that.”

  “But—”

  “I have to finish sweeping the ship,” Domitian said. “There still could be a third intruder. With the way these people have been manipulating the computer, we need to check manually. Gagnon needs to monitor the control room. Are you going to disobey me again?”

  Althea went. Domitian jogged past her up the hall after relaying the same information to Gagnon, and so she was alone when she reached the blank steel expanse of Ivanov’s cell door.

  The hallway there was choked with wires and pipes that covered the walls and twined through the grates that made up the ceiling, separating the hallway from the blue-white fluorescent lighting above. The lights hummed and whined at frequencies almost too high for Althea to hear. Ivanov’s door was indeed almost directly across from a computer interface. This was less by design, Althea knew, than by coincidence; the interfaces were spotted at even intervals up and down the hallway. The wires and pipes of the walls had to bend around the shapes of the computer interface and Ivanov’s cell door, distorting like light around a black hole.

  Althea stopped in front of Ivanov’s door, took a breath, and pulled the gun from her holster, opening and closing her fingers around it until she was comforta
ble. Then she said through the door, “Put your back against the opposite wall and don’t move.”

  There was no sound of movement from within the room.

  Althea hesitated, wondering if she should open the door anyway, but caution won out. She debated going to the computer terminal and trying to coax the Ananke into showing her the camera footage from inside the cell, but she doubted it would work and she wanted to obey Domitian quickly. She thought about calling out again and decided that would only make her sound weak. That left her with only one option. She dithered about it for a moment, hoping that Ivanov would speak up from inside the cell, or move, or do something to confirm that he was there, but still there was nothing. She crouched down to eye level with the food slot, as Matthew Gale had done fifteen minutes before, and lifted the slot to look into the cell.

  Leontios Ivanov was seated on the floor across from the door. His back was against the opposite wall. She suspected he had been sitting there this whole time and simply hadn’t bothered to move or reply when she’d spoken. When he met her eyes, he raised his eyebrows at her expectantly, as if she were taking up his time.

  Althea let the slot clang shut so that he wouldn’t see her scowl. She pulled a key from the tool belt around her waist and checked her gun again before unlocking the door. When she opened it, she immediately trained the gun on Ivanov.

  He was still sitting and only glanced down at the gun, unimpressed.

  Then he looked back up at her.

  “Give me your shoes,” Althea said.

  “Do you know what that thing does?” Ivanov asked instead of obeying. He nodded at the gun.

  Althea narrowed her eyes. “It shoots,” she said.

  “Yes,” Ivanov said with a trace of exasperation, “obviously. But it’s not an ordinary gun, is it? Do you know what that particular type of gun does to the human body?”

  Althea stared at him and brought her other hand over to hold the gun with both hands.

  “It’s designed for use in spaceships,” she said. “The bullets are designed for wholly inelastic collisions. It won’t ricochet if it’s fired in an enclosed space like a ship. So I can shoot you if you don’t do what I tell you and not worry about hurting my ship.”

  “ ‘Your ship’ again,” Ivanov said with the same flash of interest Althea had seen back in the data room, and her unease grew. “But that’s not what I was asking. Do you understand what that particular type of gun does to the human body?”

  Althea opened her mouth, about to say yes, of course she knew, she had been trained, but Ivanov interrupted her.

  “It hurts,” said Ivanov. “All that kinetic energy from the bullet moving goes into the human body. It keeps none for itself. That bullet will create a miniature explosion in the target’s flesh—organs will rupture, muscles will be shredded, blood vessels are more than torn, they’re burst. If you fire that into a man’s torso, it will liquefy his guts.”

  Althea stared at him in silence for a long, long minute.

  “Give me your boots,” she said at last with the gun still trained on his heart.

  Ivanov did not move, watching her as if testing her; then he did move, bending forward to unlace his boots and slide them off. He tossed them toward her gently when he was done, and she kicked them out into the hallway and closed the door on him, his feet slender and pale and vulnerable against the steel floor as he sat against the wall between the narrow cot and the toilet in a dark cell the size of a closet.

  She locked the door behind herself and called Domitian to let him know she had the boots.

  —

  Althea worked on the computer for some time without much success. Something Gale had done, some virus he had infected her ship with, undid every change she’d effected, and the errors seemed to propagate out like ripples in a pond. Several of the cameras refused flat out to work. The computer would obey her normally for some time and then without warning execute a random operation that had no reason and no connection to what she had been doing. It was as if every operation on the machine had become a little bit more chaotic than before.

  She was so absorbed in the computer that she almost didn’t notice Gagnon’s arrival.

  “Althea.”

  “What?” she asked flatly, keeping her eyes on the screen in the vague hope that their interaction would be fleeting enough that he wouldn’t break the focus of her concentration.

  Gagnon leaned in and spoke in a low voice, as if he did not want Ivanov to hear.

  “Domitian wants you,” he said. “He needs your help up in the control room.”

  “With what?” Althea asked.

  “Repairs” was the cryptic response. Gagnon then said, “I’ll stay here and guard Ivanov until he sends you back down.”

  Althea’s concentration was well and truly gone now. She reluctantly closed down what she had been doing and headed up the hall. Gagnon leaned against the wall to watch the door to Ivanov’s cell.

  Domitian, when she joined him, was standing in front of the holographic terminal in the corner of the room, right at the circular edge of its raised platform, staring at it with the expression of a man who had run out of ideas. His eyes darted to the door once when she entered, but when he saw it was only Althea, he resumed the lost stare she was used to seeing on other people’s faces when confronted by technology.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “The ship is clear,” Domitian said instead of answering immediately. “I located the hatch to the maintenance shafts that opened into the escape pod bay; Gale hadn’t shut it behind him when he escaped, so I sealed it, then shut down the habitability program as you instructed—the computer reports that the maintenance shafts are completely sealed and uninhabitable again. And Gagnon managed to access the footage from when the men boarded; only the two of them disembarked. But while Gale was escaping, the System tried to contact us. We received a communiqué, top priority, from a System intelligence agent by the name of Ida Stays.”

  Althea didn’t know the name, but when it came to intelligence agents, that wasn’t a surprise. Like every sensible person, she tried to stay out of situations in which she’d need to meet one, and like every sensible person, she tried not to be seen looking too closely into their activities.

  “And it’s a hologram?” Althea asked, coming to stand beside Domitian and look at the holographic terminal. It was wide and tall enough for a person to stand inside it, but the floor of the terminal was raised and its ceiling lowered to accommodate the diodes that would create the hologram. At the moment it was dark, dead.

  “Yes,” said Domitian. “There’s no text portion.”

  Sometimes very high security transmissions wouldn’t have a text portion so that they would be protected from espionage. Althea walked over to the computer and attempted to access the holographic terminal.

  At first the terminal flatly refused to turn on. There was no reason for that, so Althea relentlessly tried again and again, and eventually—without any reason—it did turn on with a low hum. The diodes glowed, brightened, and then stuttered.

  “Play most recent message,” Althea said, her voice projected with confidence so that the machine would hear and understand even as she frowned at the unusual stuttering of the diodes.

  At her words the machine rallied, lighting up again, a form coalescing and then shuddering once more, the visage and shape of a slight woman created by the interference of light coming together and then twitching, jerking apart. Patches of dark and light appeared where there should be none, the ordinary human form appearing briefly monstrous, deformed. Then the whole thing went dark, the premature hologram vanishing.

  Althea exchanged a glance with Domitian. On the bright side, she supposed, now he would certainly believe her when she told him that the ship’s computer needed her attention.

  Althea hesitated, looking at the holographic terminal and at the unopened message on the screen at her fingertips, then decided to fall back on the age-old solution for all mechanical problem
s before trying anything more complicated.

  She ended the program for running the holographic terminal—stopped it dead—and then turned it back on again.

  The diodes glowed, red and cold.

  “Play new message,” said Althea.

  An uncertain flicker, and then that misshapen woman appeared once again in the terminal. Her head was offset through an accident of filtration, her knee disconnected from her thigh. The recording began to play, distorted and groaning, whining, a harlequin baby born and screaming like tangled steel wool being wrenched into straightness. It was wrong, it was horribly wrong, something terrible put forth from Althea’s beautiful machine. Even though she knew it was nothing more than an accident of corruption in the ship’s systems, the hellish mistake in the terminal made her hands shake and her skin crawl. But just as Althea was reaching out to turn it off again, the horrible image glitched once more, then flashed into perfect life. Domitian didn’t seem to have been affected by the distorted figure but stood with his back straight, looking at the holographic image as if he were really in the presence of a superior instead of a superior’s image.

  The woman in the holograph was petite, slender, and flat, with a strong sharp jaw for someone so delicate, light-skinned with black hair chopped rigidly short, sweeping down to brush the underside of her chin. Her shoes were practical and professional but with a sharp little black heel, and her skirt was fitted and black. Her blouse was loose and flowery, a touch of charming, innocent femininity that contrasted with the rigid lines of the rest of her garb. Her lips were colored like bruises, a red so dark and deep that it touched into purple.

  Althea had known women like this woman before. This was the kind of woman who preferred the company of men to the comfortable logic of Althea’s machines, who looked at Althea with her awkwardness and her impatience and her wiry tangled hair and smirked among others like herself behind their hands.

  Althea looked to Domitian to see if he had experienced the same instinctive dislike but saw nothing of the kind on his face. He was only watching Ida Stays’s hologram with close attention.

  Of course, she thought to herself, the System was watching; the System was always watching. She turned her attention back to the hologram.