Lightless

by C. A. Higgins

  “Not so improbable,” said Ida.

  Ivan shook his head as if he were shaking off her insinuation. “Do you know how many bombs of that same type are in black market circulation?” he asked. Ida did, in fact, but the numbers had done little to sway her conviction. “Thousands, Ida,” Ivan said with his hands spread as wide as the chains would allow, his eyes searching her face. “Thousands. They’re kept under System military control, but they’re used for mining more often than murder, so they’re not that hard to find, and if they’re not hard to find, they’re not hard to steal. And there are stockpiles of them in the strangest places.”

  Ida did not get so far as opening her mouth, but Ivan threw his palms up at her, anticipating her question. “I haven’t seen any of those places,” he said. “I’ve only heard of them. They found one on Haumea a few years back; do you remember? The planet’s a penal colony now. Better fate than Saturn, but then again, the System had no reason to think anyone on Haumea was going to use those bombs against them.”

  “They had every reason to think that,” Ida said. She had not been assigned to Haumea; it had been a near disaster. But bombs outside of direct System control and on an outer planetoid meant only one thing; that much was obvious.

  “Every reason to think it, but no proof,” Ivan said. “Proof seems important to me, Ida.” He paused, studying her again. Ida knew she could hold up to any scrutiny, and so she let him look.

  “Do you realize how much people hate the System?” he asked. “How much they hate it, completely hate it, not disagree with it on a few points but hate it actively and completely?”

  Ida listened in silence and thought of how long Ivan had spent among the outer planets and around outer planetary men. He had forgotten what it was to be Terran.

  “But they’re also scared,” Ivan said, as if Ida did not realize that. “The System watches them always. Any slight transgression is punished. There is no mercy, and there is no freedom, and there is no opportunity to do anything about it. The people on the outer planets live in fear. The slightest act that seems to be against the System will destroy their home and kill everyone on their moon, all in the name of stamping out infection before it can spread. The number of people who would be willing to steal for the Mallt-y-Nos is long. The number of people she could have bought the bomb from is even longer. Hell, if she faked the right documents, she could have gotten the bomb legitimately, for mining.”

  “I see your point, Ivan,” Ida said without conceding it.

  “Even if it was the same bomb,” said Ivan, lowering his voice, frustration entering his tone, “my connection to her is at least three degrees long. I gave Abby the bomb, Abby either gave it to her benefactor—her employer was rich, which means he wasn’t the Mallt-y-Nos—or her employer wouldn’t take it, in which case she put it on the market, probably through an intermediary. If it made it to the Mallt-y-Nos, that bomb passed through so many hands, it no longer remembered mine, I promise you.”

  Ida had read a play long before. She no longer remembered the play, only a line from it, and at the moment it seemed to fit. Ivan was protesting too much.

  She said only, “All right.”

  Ivan narrowed his eyes. “Are you saying you believe me?”

  Ida laughed. “No, Ivan,” she said. “I simply would like to move on. There’s more I’d like to ask you.”

  “More?”

  “Ivan, we’ve hardly begun.”

  He was wary, strung tight. Ida shuffled through the papers before her, buying herself some time. In the brief silence, she asked, as if casually interested, “You’ve heard the Mallt-y-Nos is planning something, haven’t you? Something big?”

  “Of course,” said Ivan, who adopted an air of relaxation again, leaning against his chair shirtless and pale. “Everyone has.”

  “The Mallt-y-Nos,” Ida said, “is a ‘bomber,’ ” with a delicate turn on the word. She tapped the papers’ edges into order and set the shuffled pages aside. “And bombs have been going missing.”

  Ivan watched her without any sign that her words had surprised him or alarmed him, without any sign that what she had said was a surprise or that he had already known, without any tells at all. Ida said, “Do you know how many Terran Class 1 bombs go missing every year, Ivan?”

  “Enlighten me,” Ivan said.

  “Around seven,” Ida said. “Seven of the System’s most dangerous weapons go missing every year. Usually on the outer planets, where they’ve been placed for population control.” The silent threat of a weapon powerful enough to entirely destroy the terraforming measures on a small moon did wonders to keep an unruly population quiet, but security far from Earth and among hostile people was hard to maintain with the same rigor as on Terran soil. “And by the end of the year, the System has found them all again. Usually they’re only missing for less than a day before the thief is found and caught. Bombs that destructive are a tempting target for a would-be revolutionary, but the System has them well controlled.” Terran Class 1 bombs were the very type that had depopulated Saturn’s moons, and Ida knew that Ivan knew that. Ida said, “Do you know how many have gone missing this year?”

  Ivan shrugged.

  “The usual amount,” Ida said. “About seven. But do you know how many have been found?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “None.” Ida leaned onto the table. “Someone’s organizing it. Someone has those bombs. Someone with enough infrastructure to get them and to keep them. Someone who likes bombs.” She waited, almost holding her breath, watching for something on Ivan’s face, some tell. “What do you think she’s going to do, the Mallt-y-Nos, with all those bombs?”

  She might be planning to attack multiple targets. She might be stockpiling them for a war that the System would never allow to come. Ida did not have enough information to tell. She knew only that no good could come of it, a terrorist having weapons each of which was powerful enough to depopulate an asteroid or small moon.

  Ivan only smiled at Ida, showing his white teeth.

  “You’re the expert,” he said. “Why don’t you tell me?”

  Chapter 3

  TEMPERATURE

  Ida awoke before her alarm could chime.

  The cabin she had been allotted on the Ananke was small and strangely shaped; it had been another empty storage room before her arrival, when it had been hastily adapted to serve as a living space. She sat up on her cot, letting her mind and body come to focus, and with one hand brushed her smooth black hair out of her face.

  The alarm went off. She lashed out and struck it, hard; the clock tumbled to the floor and lay silent. She shifted to slide her legs off the bed and bent down to pick up the toppled clock and place it, reset, back on the bedside table before crossing the room to the computer terminal, which glowed more brightly at her approach.

  While the computer woke as well, Ida collected herself. She had another interrogation session with Ivan in a few hours: enough time to eat, to check the surveillance for a tale he’d told her the day before, and to plan what today’s interrogation would cover.

  Overnight the System had sent her the surveillance she’d requested. They also had sent her a pointed message inquiring about her progress, with a reminder of her deadline. Ida opened the first; for the moment, she ignored the second.

  She had spent as much time watching surveillance of Ivan, looking for inconsistencies in the stories he told her, as she had actually spent interrogating him. She had found nothing yet, it was true, but that did not mean she could stop looking, especially not with the amount of time that had passed. And so Ida collected herself and turned all her attention to the screen before her.

  On the surveillance, she watched Ivan and Mattie break into a bank. She watched them come out with a bag full of expensive documents. She watched everything happen precisely the way Ivanov had described it to her. There was hardly even a word out of place.

  Just as in all the other surveillance records she had watched over the last few
days, everything matched what Ivanov had told her. He was good, and he was very careful, and in five straight days he hadn’t slipped up once. The interrogation was more difficult than she had anticipated. And it would take more time.

  She watched Gale reach over and hook an arm around Ivan’s neck as they left the bank, pulling his partner into a playful embrace. Ivan was grinning and pushed at Mattie’s ribs, but not too hard.

  It was a pity Gale had been allowed to escape. Perhaps when the System found the escape pod, and Gale’s body inside, Ida would have the corpse brought to the Ananke.

  This footage was a waste of her time. Ida shut it down.

  —

  Althea was waist-deep in the wall of the Ananke when she heard the footsteps. She’d thought that, perhaps, if she could isolate the instances in which the Ananke produced errors, then maybe she could figure out their cause. Not treating the symptoms but freezing the symptoms in place so that she could see what had spontaneously produced them and then track that thread back to the origin.

  The computer terminal Althea was now beneath had been flashing like a beacon, a strange pattern of white and black that seemed not to repeat or to have any sort of pattern, some flashes long and others short. It had turned the hallway into a freeze-frame film with its flashing brilliance, an unsteady strobe light that had disoriented Althea as she came closer and closer to its source, frantic shivering brightness like the ship seizing.

  Althea had turned down the brightness on that screen so that it would not burn itself out, but the flashes continued dimly. If she looked down the line of her body as she lay on the floor, she could see her feet sticking out into the hallway and watch the shadows on her trousers flicker and shift with every shudder and flash of the still-seizing screen.

  Anything Althea did with the software would be likely to be affected by the same virus that was causing the flashing anyway, so she took inspiration from what she had done to the Annwn and disconnected the wires attaching this interface to the rest of the computer, carefully and swiftly severing them from each other.

  She was right in the middle of this process, jimmying out a wire from a connection that had gone stiff and stubborn with custom, when she heard the footsteps.

  They were not familiar steps; they did not have the solid heavy sound of boots but were a lighter click, click of heels. Unless Gagnon—or—a more disturbing thought—Domitian—had a fetish Althea hadn’t known about before, the footsteps that now rang out down the hall belonged to Ida Stays.

  For the most part, Althea had managed to avoid her for the last five days. Now Althea hoped that Ida would see that she was busy and simply pass her by.

  The clicking heels slowed and stopped. Peering out through the panel in the wall, Althea could see that they had stopped a foot away from her hip. The pointed toes of the black heels cast shifting shadows in the screen’s flashing light.

  “Doctor Bastet,” Ida Stays said in her Terran accent. She sounded sweet, but Althea did not think she was imagining the ominousness of Miss Stays’s address.

  As much as Althea would have liked to pretend she had not heard the interrogator, ignoring such a high-ranking System officer would be both implausible and unwise. “Yes?” she said cautiously.

  “I would like to know when you think you will have successfully managed to obtain the information contained on the Annwn.”

  Althea had not been on board the Annwn since she had left it four days previously. There had been too much to do on the Ananke.

  “The Ananke is still malfunctioning,” she said.

  “I can see that.” The heels shifted, angling the points of the toes directly at Althea. From inside the wall, Althea could not see Ida’s expression, but at least Ida could not see hers, either. “Regardless, I would like the Annwn to be processed.”

  Because Althea could not say no outright, she tried again. “The Ananke—”

  “I am aware of the condition of the Ananke,” Ida said, as swift and harsh as the lash of a whip. Althea recoiled against the solid metal of her ship. “I expect you to do your job. The Annwn is crucial to my investigation, and I have requested your assistance.”

  There could be nothing more clear than the fact that Ida’s request was no request at all. Althea lay motionless and silent, half inside her ship, until Ida seemed to take her silence as acquiescence and those black heels stepped delicately over Althea’s prone body to continue down the hall.

  The irregular pattern of light still flashed in the small square of hallway that Althea could see.

  “Wait,” said Althea, and slid back out of the wall, sitting up in the hallway. Ida Stays had stopped farther down the hall and was looking at her with something terrible and foreboding in her expression, and that nearly froze Althea’s tongue. “I just wanted—I wanted to ask—has Ivanov said anything about the ship?”

  Miss Stays frowned, her shaped eyebrows pulling inward. She was pretty and put together, sleek hair brushed and cropped, her white blouse without a wrinkle, and Althea felt even smaller sitting on the floor in a day-old uniform with her hair tangled and uncombed.

  “About the Annwn?” Ida asked.

  “About the Ananke.”

  “It has not yet come up in my investigation,” said Ida, dismissive, and she started to turn, but Althea steeled herself and said, “It’s just that he might know what’s going on with the ship.”

  Ida turned slowly, incredulity in her expression. “Excuse me?”

  “The virus,” Althea said. “He might know. What it is.” Her courage was failing her with every second spent under Ida Stays’s cold gaze.

  “If it comes up,” Ida said, “I will let you know. Until then, the Annwn.”

  Althea almost spoke one last time to ask Ida to ask Ivanov, but caught herself before she could. Ida Stays walked away, the clicking of her heels fading into the distance.

  Althea sat beside the still-flashing screen for a time without moving, a part of her thinking that perhaps she should go to the Annwn immediately, another part still focused on her ailing Ananke.

  In the end she lay back down underneath the terminal and resumed where she had left off. She’d work on the Annwn right afterward; she would. She just had to finish what she was doing, and then she would follow her orders.

  —

  “Two years ago,” said Ida. “March.”

  Ivan was wearing a shirt today, and pants—hospital garb from the Ananke’s infirmary, as there had been no other clothes to give him four days prior. They were thin and white, and what little gold there was in his hair and his stubble seemed darker in comparison to the white of his garb.

  “You mean during the surveillance slip on Ganymede,” said Ivan.

  “That is what I mean,” said Ida. Ivan certainly had been in the outer solar system at the time, and that was precisely the kind of technological sabotage he and Gale would have been skilled enough to effect.

  “Mattie and I were out in interplanetary space between Jupiter and Saturn,” Ivan said. “Robbing System supply ships.” There was a taunt in his words.

  Ida was no longer sitting but standing behind her chair, leaning on its back. She found she preferred this as the interrogation dragged on; she could look down at Ivan from above.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Is that a serious question?”

  “System supply ships bring valuable material to the outer planetary moons,” Ida said. “Materials they can’t produce themselves. Materials the outer planets need to survive. Why do you rob them?”

  “They don’t only carry supplies,” said Ivan. “They carry valuables. Luxuries. We steal those.”

  “But you leave all the necessary supplies,” said Ida.

  “Why would we take them?” Ivan asked. He had a strange half smile, as if he did not understand why she was asking these things, and the look he gave her was amused, as if he were inviting her into the joke. “The people who would buy them can’t afford to pay. We don’t steal without pay.”

&
nbsp; It had a logic that appealed to Ida. She let it pass.

  “How do you rob them?” she asked.

  “Mercurian fire drill.” The memory seemed to be a funny one for him. “We pretend to be System, tell them there’s something wrong with their vessel and we need to check it. It’s the same tactic some viruses use to infect a computer. Tell the system they’re there to help, the user lets them in, and then, once they’re past the defenses, they do whatever they like.”

  “And while you’re fixing their vessel, you rob them.”

  “We rob them blind.” Ivan’s teeth flashed white.

  “And while you were in interplanetary space,” said Ida, “between Jupiter and Saturn, did you ever go to Ganymede? While surveillance was down, it seems to me like that would have been the perfect time to commit some undocumented crimes.”

  “We actively avoided it, actually,” Ivan said. “Ganymede was in chaos. I have no desire to be in physical danger for a few petty thefts.”

  Ida moved out from behind her chair to advance closer to Ivan, leaning one thigh on the armrest and bending forward. He would look at her when she leaned like this, look at her and be stupid, the way men were.

  “I’d like to hear,” Ida said in a lower, sweeter tone than before, “exactly how close you were to Jupiter while you were in ‘interplanetary space.’ ”

  Ivan’s eyes were fixed on her face. The polygraph, she noticed, showed only the slightest increase in heart rate.

  “I have no idea,” he said. “Maybe within a half AU.”

  Ida had calculated the radius of his possible locations based on his and Gale’s last known location. Half an astronomical unit was a good choice; it was just within the outer edge of possibilities. She wondered if he’d calculated it in his head or if it was true.

  “That’s near enough to communicate with Ganymede,” she pointed out.

  “It is,” he admitted.

  “A half AU,” she said, “is near enough to have interfered with the System-run computer systems controlling the surveillance on Ganymede.”