Lightless

by C. A. Higgins

  In the hologram, Ida Stays had no chance of meeting the eyes of either Althea or Domitian; instead, she gazed directly ahead, most likely into the camera that had recorded the message.

  “To the crew of the Ananke,” she said, “detain Leontios Ivanov and Matthew Gale. Take extra precautions in their detainment; they are known for escaping System control. They are crucial to my investigation and the safety and security of the System. I have been granted access to your current location, and I will rendezvous with you at System Standard Time 1700 hours. Do not let Ivanov or Gale out of your sight and wait for me to question them. Ida Stays; end message.”

  The woman vanished; the diodes went dark.

  “That’s in an hour,” said Althea. “What do we do?”

  “Nothing,” Domitian said. “We can’t pursue Gale; even if we could, we have no means of capturing him. I have already updated the System on our situation, and when Miss Stays arrives, I will handle it.

  “Until then,” he continued with his eye on something above and behind Althea, where the camera displays were, “I will be interrogating our prisoner.”

  Althea’s heart jumped. “Let me come.”

  Domitian gave her a strange look.

  “I want to find out if he knows what Gale did to the computer,” Althea said. “They work together; there must be particular tricks they use all the time. This is one of those tricks; I know it. I just don’t know what, or how advanced, or what it’s supposed to do—”

  “I’ll question him,” Domitian said. “You stay here, monitor the control room, and work on the computer.”

  “You wouldn’t know what to ask,” said Althea, without really thinking it through.

  Domitian, fortunately, was always patient with her. “What would you ask?” he said. “Would you give him a list of the computer’s problems and ask him which of his and Gale’s ‘tricks’ it’s likely to be?” Althea said nothing, as clear as if she had admitted it. “You can’t give this man any information, Althea. In his position he survives on his information. Telling him something he doesn’t need to know is the same as putting a weapon in his hand. I will ask about the computer, and you will stay here. Understood?”

  He held her gaze until Althea dropped hers. “Yes, sir,” she said.

  When he left, closing the door behind himself, she turned to look at the grid of camera images. In them she found the footage of Ivanov’s cell, where from above she looked down at Ivanov still sitting with his back against the opposite wall and his bare feet crossed at the ankle.

  It was standard to interrogate a prisoner until a satisfactory explanation of the reason for his presence was obtained. On most ships, that interrogation would be followed by imprisonment. On ships like the Ananke, a System-sponsored research vessel with military applications, an interrogation would be followed by execution.

  It was fortunate for Ivanov’s sake, Althea supposed, that she and Domitian had heard the message from Ida Stays before Domitian had had time to interrogate him.

  The files on Matthew Gale and Leontios Ivanov were still open on her abandoned workspace. Althea dragged them to the side, but her next step in attempting to fix the ship involved a long period of waiting, and so, with only the slightest twinge of guilt, she opened the video showing Ivanov’s cell and skimmed through the two men’s files while she watched Domitian walk down the Ananke’s long, winding hall.

  Looking at the men’s files, Althea became more certain that whatever virus had been put in the machine, if it had been some pre-prepared disease, as it must have been to be so complicated and so swiftly created, Gale couldn’t have created it alone. He had never even graduated from lower school, much less gone to university. But Ivanov had gone to the North American Terran University and studied computer science. Althea didn’t believe that Gale could have fooled her computer so completely himself on the spur of the moment. Ivanov must have helped him design it; maybe Ivanov had designed it himself. Gale had just taken their design and applied it so that he could escape.

  That meant that whatever virus was infecting her ship, Althea thought, Ivanov knew how to fix it.

  On the video screen, Althea saw that Domitian had reached Ivanov’s cell. Without a word, his face still and set as stone, he opened the door. Ivanov didn’t move even though he had to crane his head back to look at Domitian’s face.

  “We know who you are,” Domitian said, his low rumbling voice poorly picked up by the cameras, so that Althea had to lean forward to listen. “We know who your companion was.”

  Ivanov cocked his head to the side. The camera in his cell was positioned above where Domitian now stood, and so Althea could not see Domitian’s face clearly but Ivanov’s face was nearly head-on.

  He was smiling, insolent, amused.

  “What we want to know,” said Domitian, “is why you are on board.”

  Ivanov took a beat longer to reply than was normal. Althea’s fingers were tight around the edge of the control panel.

  “Simple curiosity,” Ivanov said. His accent had changed. No longer sharply, purely Terran or broadened by the traces of an adopted Mirandan drawl, it had something of Jupiter in it, faintly similar to Domitian’s accent. “We were flying past, and by pure chance we saw your strange ship.”

  Ivanov’s eyes flickered up and straight into the camera. Althea knew he couldn’t see her, but she was made uneasy nonetheless and was relieved when a moment later he looked away.

  “You don’t expect me to believe that,” said Domitian.

  “I don’t expect you to believe anything I say,” Ivanov said, “but I’m telling you the truth. Mattie and I were on our ship, headed for Mars, when our path intersected with yours. We wouldn’t have even found the Ananke if we hadn’t nearly run into her. Now, men like us, when we see a ship this magnificent—”

  Domitian interrupted. “If you’re hoping for rescue, none is coming. Gale was killed trying to escape.”

  Althea supposed Domitian was telling the truth in a way; Gale would be dead soon from asphyxiation or starvation unless he was picked up by another ship, and with no one looking for him, his escape pod probably would never be found.

  Ivanov went very still in exactly the position he had been in, his head cocked slightly to the side. His face showed nothing at all.

  Then his face relaxed back into the insolent amusement he had adopted against Domitian.

  “You know, the first rule of interrogation is to get the subject’s trust,” Ivanov said. “You just lost it.”

  “I killed Gale, and I can kill you, too,” said Domitian.

  “Then why don’t you kill me?” Ivanov asked. “You could shoot me in the docking bay. Fire that gun there”—he nodded at Domitian’s hip and the weapon resting on it beneath Domitian’s heavy hand—“right into my chest. And I fall. And then you leave and open the air lock. My body, my blood, all the mess goes flying out into the solar wind. Maybe I’m already dead, or maybe you’re a bad shot and I’m not dead yet, so I get to drown in my own blood and suffocate in a vacuum both.”

  Ivanov seemed to be watching Domitian very closely. What he was looking for, Althea didn’t know. But his manner unsettled her.

  “So then why don’t you kill me?” Ivanov asked. “Oh,” he said, feigning coming to a realization, one finger lifting to point toward the ceiling. “That’s right. You’ve just told me. You can’t kill me unless I tell you what you want to know.” He smirked at Domitian. “You’re not very good at this.”

  “I don’t need to find out anything from you,” Domitian said. “Gale is dead. Once you are, too, the threat will be neutralized. But if you tell me what I want to know, I’ll reconsider killing you.”

  “Thanks.” Ivanov had a deft sense for sarcasm.

  “Answer me. Why did you and Gale board this ship?”

  “I already told you,” Ivanov said. “Curiosity. Nothing more. What answer are you expecting?”

  “I want the truth,” Domitian warned.

  “And I’m giving
you it,” said Ivanov. “We’d never seen a ship like the Ananke before. It’s something different. It’s almost an organism instead of a machine, the computer is so powerful. Mattie and I both have a professional interest in computers, and in any case, we figured there would be something valuable on board.”

  “Did you come on board,” said Domitian, “on orders of the Mallt-y-Nos?”

  Althea thought she saw Ivanov flinch. “I’m a thief, not a terrorist.”

  “Then you know her.”

  “Not personally.” He was wary.

  “You know of her.”

  “Everyone does.”

  “Tell me what you know about her,” Domitian said.

  “Just that she’s a terrorist.” He paused, then lowered his tone as if telling a ghost story, with only a fine edge of sarcasm to spoil the effect. “I know enough about her to avoid her and her hounds. Do you know what her name means?”

  “No.”

  “It means ‘Matilda of the Night,’ ” Ivanov said. “In mythology, the Mallt-y-Nos was a noblewoman who loved so much to hunt that she said to God, ‘If there is no hunting in heaven, I will not go.’ And so God damned her to hunt forever as part of the fairy host. The sound of her shrieks and howls drive her fairy hounds to hunt the souls damned to hell, hunt them down and drag them there.”

  His voice had lowered, hushed, and Althea strained to hear.

  “They say that the louder the sound of her hounds’ barking, the farther away they are,” said Ivanov. “And so, when the howling is the quietest, only a whisper, that’s when the hounds are right beside you.”

  The beep of the Ananke’s computer, indicating that its scan was done, was so loud and sudden after Ivanov’s soft story that Althea jumped and swore.

  “I don’t care about fairy tales, Ivanov,” she heard Domitian say as she leaned away, and she kept half an ear on the interrogation while she dealt with her injured machine.

  Domitian said, “Tell me what Gale did to this computer before he escaped.”

  “I don’t know,” Ivanov said, politely acidic in a way that was very Terran. “I was locked up in a cell.”

  “You must have some idea,” said Domitian. “The two of you must have contingency plans for situations like this.”

  “Contingency plans for being unexpectedly captured on a secret military vessel with a superpowered computer of a kind neither of us have seen before?” said Ivanov. “Shockingly, no.”

  “Enough,” said Domitian, and, to Althea’s frustration, moved on. “I want you to explain what Gale meant when he said, ‘This is for Europa, Scheherazade.’ ”

  Ivanov hesitated.

  “Ivanov,” Domitian said when the silence stretched for too long.

  “Which would you like first?” Ivanov asked. “The Europa part or the Scheherazade?”

  “I don’t care,” said Domitian, “so long as you answer the question.”

  “Scheherazade,” Ivanov said, “is an easy answer.” He smiled, brief and charming. “When Mattie and I are traveling between moons and planets, that’s a lot of space and not a lot of things to do. So sometimes I tell stories. One time I told Mattie the story of Scheherazade and her thousand and one nights, and Mattie thought it was funny how she told stories for so long and I did the same thing. So sometimes he calls me Scheherazade.”

  “A nickname,” said Domitian.

  Something flickered over Ivanov’s face, like an impulse to laugh, suppressed. “That’s what I said.”

  “It’s affectionate?”

  Ivanov shrugged. “It’s just a nickname.”

  “And Europa?” Domitian asked.

  “You’ve already checked up on times Mattie and I were on Europa, of course,” Ivanov said, and Althea winced, because with the computer in the state it was in and with securing the ship, Domitian certainly had not had the time. She started trying to bring up the file; Domitian would want to look at it when he came back up. He also would know, once he saw the file open, that she had been listening to the interrogation, but Althea knew that his annoyance with her wouldn’t last.

  “And so you know,” said Ivanov, “that a con went wrong on Europa last time Mattie and I were there. We were robbing a ship called the Jason—a System ship, but the crew were pirates and extortionists in their spare time. The System doesn’t care what their ships do as long as they keep the System’s people quiet and under control.”

  He had the rhetoric of a terrorist for all that he claimed not to be one.

  “Mattie was caught by the crew of the Jason,” said Ivanov, his measured tone growing more and more distant with every word, “and I left him.”

  “You came here together,” Domitian said.

  Ivanov very nearly rolled his eyes. “Obviously, he escaped. The point is that I left him there. We kept working together because we make a good team, but that established something: each man for himself. I left Mattie on Europa, and so Mattie left me here.”

  The file on Europa finally had opened. Domitian queried something else, but Althea didn’t hear. She was too busy reading and rereading the first few lines of the report.

  Eight years ago—longer than she would have guessed—eight years ago, the report said, the Jason had been found drifting in orbit around Europa, unmanned, its computers wiped.

  All the System could determine was that Matthew Gale and Leontios Ivanov, under alias, had been recorded in interactions with the ship’s crew some days before.

  The ship was unmanned, the report said, because the entire crew had been murdered.

  And all Ivanov had said was, “Mattie escaped.”

  Domitian was done with their prisoner when Althea looked back over at the feed, leaving the tiny cell and locking the door, while Ivanov sat in the same place with his back against the wall and his slender pale feet crossed at the ankles.

  What kind of man are you? Althea wondered, looking at Ivanov with his handsome face and his Terran accent and his murderer for a partner, and it wasn’t until Domitian was halfway back up the hallway, leaving Gagnon to guard Ivanov’s cell door, that her attention was drawn away from the video by the sound of an incoming message.

  It was from the System: high security clearance. Althea opened it.

  Ida Stays was ready to board.

  The amount of work done in one direction is the same as the amount of heat transferred in the other, or, the internal energy of an isolated system is constant.

  Because of this, a perpetual motion machine cannot exist, and all systems come to an end.

  Chapter 2

  PRESSURE

  Ida Stays was always right.

  The System Intelligence Agency as a unit did not believe that Leontios Ivanov and Matthew Gale were anything more than occasional hires by the Mallt-y-Nos, separated from her by many go-betweens; they did not know her name and had never seen her face. But Ida had known that the meeting of the Martian representatives would be targeted even before the Mallt-y-Nos had struck. Ida had known that Ivanov and Gale would be captured soon. And now, Ida knew that Gale and Ivanov could tell her the terrorist’s name.

  Soon everyone else would know that Ida had been right about that as well.

  The movements of Matthew Gale and Leontios Ivanov—both known and suspected and plotted out even as far as their first meeting ten years ago—started to show a correspondence, beginning around five years before, with the known and suspected movements of the Mallt-y-Nos. There was the snag, of course: the Mallt-y-Nos’s movements could not be known for sure, and there were inconsistencies with the two men’s course even in a best fit.

  But there was more than the facts that Ida could marshal and present to her superiors, more than the numerical equation of guilt she could construct, more than anything else: she knew. She knew with solid and certain instinct that Matthew Gale and Leontios Ivanov knew the Mallt-y-Nos.

  Her superiors had consented to the interrogation in the end, though it had been a near thing and they had imposed on her certain restrictions fo
r reasons of the Ananke’s security: if it was possible that Ivanov and Gale knew of some immediate threat to the Ananke, the System required that the two men be kept on board the ship to be readily at hand for the dissolution of such threat; therefore, until the ship was certain to be out of danger, the interrogation could happen only on board the Ananke. Whether they posed a threat to the ship was part of what Ida had come to determine, and until she had reason to leave, she was content to conduct her interrogation on board for the convenience of it: with no transport time required, she could begin the interrogation immediately; there was no extra hassle of the increased security required for the transport of prisoners. Her presence on the Ananke had a time limit—Ida had only until the ship reached Pluto on its course, two weeks’ time away—but Ida knew that if she did not have something to show for her efforts by that time, she would have more concerns than where she should conduct the interrogation.

  But running out of time was of little concern to her. She was right, of course, and she would get confessions from Gale and Ivanov or both. To consider otherwise was impossible.

  And to be proved right when all others doubted her—that was the best kind of glory anyone could have. Ida looked forward to it.

  She had been approaching the Ananke for the better part of an hour; it first had appeared in her viewscreen as nothing more than a tiny spot of white, indistinguishable from the background stars. Now she was near enough for voice communication thanks to the speed of her ship’s relativistic drive. Ida reached over in her bland little shuttle—System standard issue—and hailed the Ananke, saying in her most pleasant tone, “Ida Stays hailing Ananke, please come in.” She always thought it was best to lead with a caress.

  A static-filled moment, then a woman’s voice said, “One sec.” Brusque, Terran with a trace of a nasal Lunar accent; Ida mentally reviewed the crew on the Ananke. There were only three, she recalled, as strange as that was for a ship this size. The woman’s voice she’d just heard must have been the voice of the only female crew member, the mechanic, Althea Bastet.