If the ventilation system failed, Althea thought as she stood and looked up to that invisible spot on the ceiling whence the sound came, they would all suffocate. As big as the Ananke was, the crew would have some time before they felt it, the slow poisoning of the air as oxygen turned to carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide was heavier than oxygen; it would sink to the very bottom of the Ananke, as near to her dark heart as it could get. Anyone down at her base would faint and die surrounded by air but air that was unbreathable. The crew that survived would be driven up and up and farther up until they had their backs against the doors to space, the very highest point on the Ananke, facing before them an invisible toxin, behind them no air at all, fates equally bad. They were fragile, the crew—small and fragile and human—and they relied wholly on the ship that contained them.
That would be if the ventilation system failed. The ventilation system was not failing. The sound was too specific, too particular for that. It came from only one place. For the ventilation to fail, for them all to suffocate, the error would have to be throughout the entire system. Matthew Gale’s seconds of sabotage had been too few to destroy something as great as the Ananke.
The lights reflecting off the ceiling seemed to move slightly, reflections distorted; the ceiling itself was being shaken and bent by some real and mechanical force. Something physical was striking it from the other side and causing that violent sound.
The robotic arm.
There were mechanical limbs throughout the Ananke, autonomous mobile robotics designed to perform simple, repetitive tasks so that Althea did not have to. They were necessary to run a ship as large as the Ananke with a crew so small. They maintained the engine, adjusting the radiation reflectors to propel the ship one way or another. They checked for expired food in the pantry. They opened and closed ventilation shafts automatically on the basis of sensor readings, the ship itself deciding what parts of itself needed heat or fresh air.
And one of them, above Althea’s head, was malfunctioning.
The realization came with a sense of purpose, and the purpose with a sense of relief. This was something she could fix.
Althea went to the nearest computer terminal while the robotic arm banged frantically, arrhythmically overhead, and located the program for the robotic arms in the ventilation, then the designation indicating the particular arm by its location in the ship, and killed the program.
The banging stopped, the hall falling into a silence so sudden and complete that Althea’s ears filled it by ringing. In the silence, she could hear the sigh of air flowing through the ventilation shafts again, the other valves opening and closing without a hitch, carbon dioxide scrubbers whirring quietly, muffled by metal. Althea listened for a time, wary that something would go awry, but the ship hummed and breathed peacefully around her.
Althea sighed. Shutting down a single mechanical arm would have a negligible effect on the entire ship’s ventilation system, but she would have to review the rest of the arms to see if the error had spread to them. If it had and all the arms needed to be shut down entirely, Althea or Gagnon would have to preprogram the temperature and atmosphere settings and monitor them regularly rather than trusting the ship to maintain their environment on its own. It would be simple enough to do, but that kind of effort—bringing a crucial system of the ship under manual control—would require time Althea did not have and attention she would rather pay elsewhere.
She would have to write a report, of course. But it seemed like a waste of her time to write one now, when she should be checking the rest of the ventilation system for further errors to make sure this one malfunction had been a fluke. Gagnon and Domitian would be alarmed by such a report, anyway; they wouldn’t take it in the context it required, she was sure, and the context was that the error had been localized, inconsequential, and solved and required no action or alarm from them. Best, then, that she should complete her investigation before reporting, examine the rest of the robotic arms in the ventilation system and make sure that this one malfunction had been a fluke. Then, when she had some time and there were no longer so many pressing problems in the ship’s systems for her to solve, she could make a proper report and properly tell Gagnon and Domitian about the event.
For now, she had work to do.
—
Ivan laughed, which was exactly what Ida had expected from him.
“I have no idea who the Mallt-y-Nos is,” he said. “Is that what you came all this way to ask?”
“It wasn’t so far,” said Ida. “And I’m afraid you do know her. And I know that you know her. There’s no need to insult us both by pretending to be stupid.”
One of Ivan’s eyebrows twitched upward at the remark. She noted without especial interest that he shared that particular expression with his mother.
Ivan sighed and made an aborted movement as if he wanted to lean his elbows on the table and remembered the restraints too late. Ida experienced a moment of delight but realized she couldn’t tell whether the motion had been an affectation.
“I do not know who the Mallt-y-Nos is,” Ivan said, “and I have every reason to keep it that way.” He looked up at her, his blue eyes clear and bright and guileless. “When I was nine, the System took me to Saturn. Do you understand me?”
Ida did. “Why don’t you explain it to me?”
He cocked his head as if he were trying to figure her out, but he answered, “I know what happened to my father. I saw what happened to anyone who had even the slightest connection to him. I saw the bodies that float in Saturn’s rings.”
Ida had watched the footage of that trip, Ivan small and young and wide-eyed, standing close beside Milla Ivanov, who was still young, still beautiful, and was pointing out the bodies for her son to see with an even, steady hand.
Ivan said, “Have you ever been to Saturn, Ida?”
“Of course I have,” Ida said. “It was a terrible tragedy, all those people dead.” She put just the right amount of regret in her voice. “All the more important,” she said, “that we catch the Mallt-y-Nos now, before she can infect any more of the System than she already has.”
“Perhaps,” said Ivan. “But you understand why I would want to stay as far as possible from the Mallt-y-Nos.”
“But you haven’t,” Ida said. “We can match your movements to hers in a number of instances.”
“If I was involved with her in any way,” said Ivan, “I was unaware.”
Ida let his words linger and did not answer at once. He watched her to the exclusion of everything else in the room, including Domitian standing behind him in silent threat.
“Ivan,” said Ida, coloring her tone with distant sympathy, “do you know what the punishment for boarding this ship is?”
“Imprisonment.”
“Execution,” said Ida.
“And what?” he asked, a smirk curling his lips as he looked back at her, mocking. “If I tell you the name of the Mallt-y-Nos, you’ll let me go?”
“I’m afraid I can’t offer that much,” Ida said with a smile in return. “But I can give you your life.”
“Prison,” Ivan said, rolling the word around his mouth.
Prison,” Ida agreed. “And perhaps you could choose your facility—within reason, of course. It would doubtless need to be on Earth.”
“Maybe I could go to the same jail as my father,” Ivan said, and laughed. It was an unpleasant sound. He had never met his father, Ida knew; by this point Ida doubted if Connor Ivanov remembered his name, much less that he once had had a son.
“So you’ll give me my life,” Ivan said, suddenly hard and sharp where he had been so cautious before. “What if I don’t want it?”
“Then I’ll let you choose how to go,” Ida said. She went on gently. “I understand, Ivan. You don’t want someone to kill you somewhere in some shameful way, shot in the head on a ship in the middle of nowhere, your body dumped out into space. You want to choose the way you go. You want to be the one responsible for your death, not anyone els
e.”
That wariness had come back into Ivan’s expression.
“So?” said Ida once the silence had drawn out without interruption. “What do you choose?”
Ivan’s gaze was unwavering.
“I do not know who the Mallt-y-Nos is,” he said, precise.
“Then I’m afraid,” Ida said, as if regretful, “that this will have to become a real interrogation instead of a friendly chat.”
Ivan sat motionless, his lips drawn into a thin line.
Ida nodded at Domitian, who came forward, unwrapping the wires of the polygraph from their coils.
“That shirt is too thick,” Ida said to Domitian. “It will spoil the readings.”
Domitian laid the wires down and moved to stand behind Ivan, pulling out his knife from his belt as he went. It was a large knife, serrated, for fighting, for killing.
He stood behind Ivan as Ida had told him to before the interrogation had begun and reached down to grab the neck of Ivan’s shirt, pulling it away from his skin. Ivan was holding himself very still and very stiff, his gaze fixed on Ida as if he could incinerate her with it.
Domitian slid the knife between Ivan’s skin and the fabric of his shirt, blade angled out, and then stopped. He looked at her. For a moment Ida contemplated them both: Domitian tall and broad and strong and silvered, standing and waiting for her word, whatever that might be, and Ivan, chained down and helpless, holding himself so rigidly still that he was trembling lightly and looking at her with the beginnings of an imperfectly concealed hatred.
Ida smiled.
She nodded at Domitian, and his knife slit the fibers of Ivan’s shirt apart, carving down from the neck to the shoulder and then down the sleeve. The tip of the knife brushed, feather-light, against Ivan’s skin but did not draw blood. She watched Ivan struggle not to shiver.
“Ida,” Ivan said as Domitian moved to his other side, “are you trying to get me naked?”
“I’m leaving you your pants,” Ida said, and Ivan tensed again as Domitian’s knife slid lightly over his neck on the other side.
“I was going to say,” Ivan said over the tearing of fabric, “if you wanted to, all you had to do was ask.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
Domitian moved in front so that he could slice Ivan’s shirt, his knife sliding over Ivan’s sternum. When he pulled the rags away and dropped them onto the floor, Ivan shivered. The room, Ida had ensured, was just a little cold.
Without the armor of his black shirt, Ivan seemed even more powerless, even more exposed. Wordless, Domitian returned to the polygraph and began to affix the wires to Ivan’s chest, the suckers attaching to his skin like mouths and the wires extending between Ivan and the polygraph like veins drawing blood from him into the machine.
Domitian turned on Ida’s regulation camera and then the polygraph. He glanced her way, and she nodded, and then he turned and walked out the door, his heavy boots echoing through the vast white room.
When the sound of the door shutting behind him had faded into silence, Ida said, “Now we begin.”
—
Althea should have known better than to expect that she would be allowed to remain in peace. It was one of the rules of programmers: the law of constant interruption.
“Althea,” said Gagnon’s static-fuzzed voice over the intercom while she was checking the rest of the robotic arms in the ventilation systems for a second time; the first search had turned up no more errors, but she wanted to be certain. She was tempted for a moment to ignore him, but the cameras were always on, always watching, and so after a moment she leaned over and opened the connection. “Yes?”
“Is Ivanov still in interrogation?”
He could have just checked the surveillance. Perhaps he was too afraid of her wrath to touch the computer at the moment. It was a gratifying thought that after seven years of collaboration with him on the construction of the Ananke, she had finally trained him not to touch her machines.
“Yes,” Althea said. “Why?”
“We need to dismantle the intruders’ ship’s computer.”
“You can’t do that yourself?” The dismantling of an intruding ship was System standard procedure; it should have been done immediately. Althea had been so wrapped up in handling her own ship, and Ivanov, and Gale’s escape, that she hadn’t remembered it.
“I can’t leave the control room,” Gagnon said. “Domitian’s already on board the intruders’ ship; he says the computer is strange somehow, and he thinks you should take a look at it.”
Althea scowled. “Why doesn’t he switch with you? You could deal with the computer.”
“I’m missing my sleep cycle to babysit the navigation for you,” Gagnon said drily. “Domitian seems to doubt that I could walk a straight line with fewer than eight hours; he’s forgotten I went to eight years of grad school.”
From what Althea remembered of certain instances when she and Gagnon had worked sleepless hours on particularly difficult problems of converting Gagnon’s scientific requirements into actual design possibilities for the Ananke, she was inclined to agree with Domitian. She scowled at the computer terminal before her and said nothing of the kind to Gagnon.
“He wanted you specifically,” Gagnon added when she was silent. “Something about the computer being strange. Miss Stays asked him personally to search the Annwn for her.”
Miss Stays, the interrogator. Already she was throwing the careful routine of Althea’s ship into disorder.
“Is she going to take control of the ship?” she asked abruptly. “Is that why she’s still on board?”
“That’s one of those questions I don’t really want to try to answer,” Gagnon said lightly, and Althea reminded herself of the gaze of the camera on her back.
“Right,” she said, and did not give voice to the frustration that seized her at Miss Stays or at the errors that appeared and vanished again unnervingly on her ship. “I’ll be there in a moment.”
—
“First,” said Ida, “I need to get a baseline for the polygraph. I hope you’ll excuse me asking you some tedious questions.”
“Not a problem,” Ivan returned.
The screen of the polygraph was just at her elbow so that she could look down at it but positioned so that it did not rest on the table between her and Ivan. The polygraph was all electronic, but the readout had been made to look like the ancient paper version. Ida had braced it on top of a small pile of papers; she reached over now and pulled the papers out, shuffling them into straightness, making a production out of the System’s bureaucracy.
“All right,” she said, peering at the paper as if she were reading it and did not have the sequence of innocuous questions memorized. “What is your full name?”
“Leontios Dana Ivanov,” Ivan said in the resigned tone of a man who had been mocked so often and completely for his name that he no longer bothered to take preemptive measures and simply accepted it as inevitable.
“And your parents’ names?” Ida asked sweetly, letting the opportunity pass.
“Doctor Milla Ivanov,” said Ivan, “and Connor Ivanov.”
“Milla Ivanov, née…?”
“Née they disowned her before I was born.”
Ida glanced at the polygraph. It had been steady for his name and his parents’ names; she expected to see a jump on it now, but it maintained its even level.
“Where were you born?” she asked.
“New York, New York, Earth.”
“How old were you when you first told a lie?”
Ivan cocked his head at her again; there was something challenging about it. Ida watched him over the edge of her paper and waited.
“In the womb,” Ivan said, and when Ida raised a brow, he said, “I pretended not to be my father’s son.”
From what Ida had seen of the pregnant Milla Ivanov at Connor Ivanov’s trial, it was a fair assessment. She permitted him to see that she was amused by his little joke, but it did not seem to relax him at
all. There were too many teeth in his smile.
“Now, Ivan,” said Ida, and laid the paper down, “I want you to lie to me.”
“Lie to you?” Ivan said. “I thought that was the one thing I wasn’t supposed to do.”
“Just this once. Lie to me.”
“What should I lie about?”
“Anything,” Ida said. “Whatever comes to mind.”
He was cold; she could see him shivering lightly. But he said, “I can’t think of anything. Tell me something to lie about.”
He was very cautious. “Then tell me,” said Ida, “how old you were the first time you stole something from someone.”
He looked at her, blue eyes rounding, and said, “Ida, I’ve never stolen anything.”
The polygraph jumped. It traced a wide arc over the pixelated surface of the screen, indicating a lie, lie, lie as loud as a scream.
Ida looked from the polygraph to Ivan sitting half naked and chained down before her.
“I want you to do that again,” Ida said, “and this time I want you to really try to lie to me. How old were you the first time you stole?”
Ivan smiled.
“I’ve never stolen anything in my life,” he said, and the polygraph did not so much as twitch.
Ida loved a challenge.
“Your partner’s name,” said Ida. “Is it Matthew Gale?”
“No,” Ivan said, and the polygraph was perfectly steady. Ida gave him a look. “He usually goes by Mattie,” he clarified.
He was toying with her. Ida asked, “Do you know the name of the Mallt-y-Nos?”
Ivan’s good humor left him suddenly. No longer playing with her, he leaned forward, serious, straight mouth, and said, “Just to be perfectly clear, Ida. This time I am not lying.”
Ida waited.
“I do not know the name of the Mallt-y-Nos,” he said, and the polygraph, of course, showed no lie.
—
Domitian had been right; there was something strange about the Annwn’s computer. Althea had opened with her usual tricks, progressed to cleverer methods of manipulation, and finally resorted to frustrated brute force, but the machine refused to give up its secrets.
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