Lightless

by C. A. Higgins

  “Sometimes,” said Ivan.

  “Abigail was one of them.”

  “Yes, she was.”

  “What about your connections?” Ida asked. “Did you have any connections Mattie didn’t?”

  Ivan looked away. She watched him as he seemed to struggle for a moment.

  “Abby,” he said finally.

  “What?” Ida asked, coming closer.

  He rested his hands on the very edge of the table. “After a time, Abby became my contact, not Mattie’s.”

  “But she was Mattie’s foster sister.”

  “When she was eight,” said Ivan.

  “I thought you hated her.”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  Ida looked down at him, his chains stretched to the limit so that he could grip the edge of the table, and wondered why he would tell her such a thing.

  “Were you sleeping with her?” she asked.

  A pause. “Obviously,” he said.

  Not obviously, though Ida saw the signs now. She suspected the real reason for his confession was to separate Mattie from Abigail. Interesting indeed.

  “Does Mattie have any connections that you don’t know about?” she asked.

  Ivan all but rolled his eyes. “Well, I wouldn’t know, would I?”

  “I mean that he doesn’t let you meet,” Ida said. “That he doesn’t know you know about. Anyone he is hiding.”

  Ivan leaned in toward her, as close as he could get. He said, “No.”

  “Could he be keeping any secrets like that?”

  “No,” said Ivan.

  “I want you to give me a list of all of Mattie’s most important connections,” Ida said.

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Yes, you can, and you will,” she said, “because you have to.”

  Ivan took in a deep breath.

  “I don’t know their last names,” he said.

  “Is that a lie?”

  “It’s the truth,” he snapped.

  Ida, slow and deliberate, said, “Names.”

  “Adina,” said Ivan. “River. Charles. Nora. Ling. Farrah.”

  “Is that all?” She knew most of those names; some of them were currently in System custody.

  “Anji, Christoph, Abby. How far do you want me to go?” Ivan snapped. “Do you want me to name every criminal in the outer planets?”

  “Does he know every criminal?”

  “He knows a damn lot of them,” Ivan said.

  “What is he to you?” Ida asked, keeping him on edge, unsteady. “Matthew Gale. Is he your coworker? Your friend? Your lover? Brother? Little brother? Tell me, what is he to you?”

  “He’s Mattie,” Ivan said.

  Little brother, perhaps, Ida thought. Ivan was protective of him the way he hadn’t been of Constance Harper.

  But then again, perhaps not.

  “You realize that he’s dead, do you not?” she asked, and Ivan looked away. She watched a muscle in his jaw tighten. “The escape pod he abandoned you in has no form of propulsion, and he was aimed nowhere in particular. There was no one around to pick up his pod. He is dead by now, dead for a week, suffocated or starved.”

  Ivan would not look at her.

  “There’s no need to protect him,” Ida said. “He is dead.”

  “I’m not protecting anyone,” said Ivan.

  “I think you are,” said Ida. “You have been connected to the Mallt-y-Nos. That means that Matthew Gale has been connected to the Mallt-y-Nos. The two of you do, after all, go everywhere together. The connection is undeniable. But if you are telling the truth and you have no connection to her, then that means that Mattie must—”

  “We do not have any connection to the Mallt-y-Nos!” said Ivan. He was looking at her again now, glaring, his fingers clenched bloodless on the edge of the table. “Is it so impossible to you that for once you might be wrong?”

  Ida smiled and leaned in closer, just out of reach of his chained arms.

  “You’re singing a different tune now than you were before,” she said. “You said it yourself: I am the woman who is never wrong.”

  He looked up at her without speaking, breathing with such evenness in and out through his nose that it had to be deliberate. She cherished it, his tension. He was strung so tightly that she could almost feel it in the air she inhaled; it was like running her tongue over the tautness of a harp string.

  She was about to speak, ready to speak, ready to turn the subject to the last of Ivan’s friends, the one she had been waiting to ask about all this time, the one she knew he knew she would ask about next, the best lead that she had: Abigail Hunter.

  The name was on her tongue, Ivan’s eyes were fixed on her face, and then someone knocked at the door.

  She didn’t believe it at first, too caught up in this moment of her interrogation to comprehend that someone could dare to interrupt her.

  The knock came again. She straightened slowly, holding Ivan’s gaze, and just as she broke it, the knock came a third time, a little more insistently, as if the knocker thought she might not have heard.

  She crossed the white room and went to the door. When she opened it, Gagnon stood there with one hand upraised, as if he had just been debating whether he should knock once more.

  “Yes?” she said pleasantly, but he looked as wary as if she had raised her hand for a blow. His eyes were shadowed, his clothes rumpled, his cheeks unshaven, and it was plain he had been roused recently from sleep. She felt a surge of contempt for him.

  “Captain Domitian needs to speak to you,” he said.

  “It’s urgent?” Ida asked with a delicate and unmistakable threat in the word.

  “Yes, ma’am. He’s in the piloting room.”

  She held up one finger to him, and he stood still and silent while she turned back around and walked back to Ivan, who was sitting tense and alone. She and Gagnon had been speaking too softly for him to hear.

  When she came up behind him, she laid a hand very lightly on his shoulder. Beneath her fingers, she felt the hardness of his tensed muscles, the bow of his collarbone. It was the first time she had touched him. He did not look to her.

  “Pardon me,” she said softly. “We’ll continue this conversation shortly.”

  He said nothing and did not look at her as she walked away.

  When she passed Gagnon in the doorway again, she said, “Watch him. Do not leave this room. Do not speak to him. I will be back.”

  —

  Ida strode toward the piloting room with all the dire tension of her interrupted interrogation still shaking in her hands. She was annoyed at the interruption but not furious. Ivan was in a precarious state, and leaving him to stew and to stress, going over in his head obsessively how he next would lie, might work to her advantage.

  When Ida reached the piloting room, she found that Domitian was not alone. The mechanic, with her curly hair affray, was pacing in the narrow space of the piloting room when Ida arrived. She stopped once Ida entered, turning her wide brown eyes on her. There were shadows beneath them. It was no wonder the Ananke was not fixed, Ida thought, if the mechanic refused to sleep.

  “You wished to speak to me?” Ida said, dismissing the mechanic to address Domitian, who was standing beside the door as if he had been waiting for her to arrive.

  “Doctor Bastet has information,” said Domitian with a nod at the mechanic. Ida, with thin patience, turned to face the other woman.

  She was still watching Ida with those round brown eyes. “I got into the Annwn,” said Althea Bastet.

  The frisson of annoyance that had entered Ida’s breast at the thought of having to interact with Althea vanished immediately. This was far better news than she had expected, and she was pleased that the mechanic had finally taken it on herself to obey Ida’s orders, though she hardly understood why it had been necessary to interrupt the interrogation to inform her. “What did you find?”

  “Not all the way,” Althea amended. “Just a little bit. I don’t thin
k it’s possible to get farther in, not without putting the whole ship at risk.” Ida gritted her teeth; phrased that way, the System would be certain not to approve any further investigation into the Annwn. The safety of the Ananke was above all most important to the System.

  “But I did,” said Althea, “manage to find their…stash of useful programs.”

  “What was there?”

  “Some viruses,” said Althea. The lights of the control panel behind her flashed on and off in patterns Ida lacked the ability to recognize. “Not much useful, but there were some things. One”—she took a breath; the girl was nervous, Ida saw, anxious and on edge for no reason that she could see—“was a program for the detonation of a sequence of bombs.”

  Ida nearly smiled, that flush of near triumph she had felt when Ivan had slipped earlier that day coming back to fill her hollow chest. The Mallt-y-Nos was a bomber. And here Ivanov had connected himself to her favorite weapon. “What kind of bombs?”

  “I don’t know—”

  “Doctor Bastet, this is very important,” said Ida. If she could only connect Ivan explicitly to the missing Class 1s, she would have him and have reason to use the Aletheia. “Tell me, what kind of bombs?”

  “I don’t know.” Althea’s hand had fallen onto the back of the piloting chair; her fingers were digging into its gray fabric. She was so tense, and Ida could hardly understand why.

  “Then give me a size. Large or small?”

  Althea looked behind Ida, presumably at Domitian. “Don’t look at him, look at me,” Ida said. “Tell me what kind of bombs.”

  “There’s no way to tell,” said Althea.

  “Surely you can tell me, large or small.” Ida was growing frustrated.

  “I can’t!”

  “You can tell me nothing at all about the type of bombs this program is designed to detonate?”

  “No, just that it detonates them in sequence or all at once—it’s a timing mechanism basically, but more advanced—”

  “So this program,” Ida interrupted, “could apply to a sequence of small explosives such as the kind used by thieves like Ivanov and Gale to open locked doors?” The two had used that very tactic many times before to get into and out of secured System locations.

  “Yes, but—”

  “Then I thank you for your assistance in this matter,” said Ida, and could not stop herself from using a tone that said the opposite. If the program had such a simple explanation, the information was useless to her and the interruption to her work unnecessary. “Write up a report and send it to myself and the System, and you may return to repairing the Ananke.”

  Althea Bastet took a deep breath. “It could be used to detonate bombs on the Ananke,” she said.

  Of course. Ida understood now the reason for Althea’s anxiety. She was afraid for her ship. It was a silly, stupid fear; there was no reason to think that the Ananke was in danger, and Ida very much doubted that if the ship had been wired to explode, someone on the crew would not have noticed by now. “And have any of the many sweeps of the Ananke performed by yourself, the computer, and the rest of the crew located any bombs or signs of bombs?” she said with deliberate patience.

  “No,” Althea admitted.

  “And did Gale have sufficient time while on board to plant a series of bombs on the Ananke?”

  “No, but—”

  “Then I suggest,” said Ida, “that it cease to concern you.” The mechanic still looked nervous, so Ida added, vaguely irritated but wishing to end Althea’s anxiety before it could grow and become an issue, “In a few days’ time I will take Ivanov off ship. You will not have to trouble yourself with this affair again.”

  Althea’s chin tipped up. Whatever was troubling her, Ida’s words had seemed only to increase it: Althea’s hand was shaking, trembling nervously in steady rhythm against the piloting chair. “There was something else,” Althea said. “There was another program on there. Most of the programs were viruses, but there was the bombs one, and there was this one. This one was—it made it so that whatever computer had it installed would react to the appearance of certain people. It would recognize them and do something about it.”

  Ida frowned, an ominous suspicion growing in her mind about where Althea was going with this.

  Althea said, “I know for a fact that that program was in my—was in this ship. That’s how Gale and Ivanov got on board. And I keep finding traces of that same program still—it keeps showing up in the errors in the camera programs. Until I can wipe it out completely, it’s still possible that there might be consequences for taking Ivanov off ship. I don’t know what kind of consequences; it could be anything. It could be more sabotage. Gale could have programmed the ship so that if we ever killed Ivanov, the ship would destroy itself.”

  “Revenge from beyond the grave?” Ida asked drily. The mechanic was letting her fancy get the better of her. “What are you saying, Doctor Bastet?”

  “You can’t take Ivanov off this ship.”

  Ida said, “I beg your pardon.”

  It had sounded for a moment as if Althea had tried to give her an order.

  Althea was leaning more heavily on the pilot’s chair, and somehow, without either of them moving, she seemed to give the impression of having been backed into a corner. The room was small, Ida knew, and the force and strength of her unspoken anger had filled it and driven Althea back.

  “I think it’s too dangerous,” Althea began, but Ida interrupted her swiftly.

  “I decide what is best for the prisoner. You were not presuming to tell me, your superior, how best to manage the prisoner under my care?”

  “No, I—”

  “Then I will expect you will not try to do so again,” Ida said. “Write your report on your findings on the Annwn and deliver it to me. Then return to your job and repair this ship.”

  Althea looked beaten back and beaten down, and Ida almost turned to leave, successful at stamping out the mechanic’s useless grab for control, but then Althea Bastet straightened her back and a determined look settled in place on her heart-shaped face. It was unexpected, as if the mechanic had a spine Ida had failed to recognize before, and Ida watched her with narrowed eyes. Althea said, “I’m not acting out of my authority.”

  Ida raised an eyebrow and prepared to beat the mechanic down again, this time for good.

  But Althea wasn’t done. “The facial recognition program means that there could be hidden viruses in the Ananke that Ivanov is affecting in ways that we don’t understand. The only thing we can do until I can fix the computer is to keep the ship in the same state it is now and to not make any changes.”

  Ida tilted her head, daring Althea with her eyes to finish her thought.

  The mechanic dared. “Until I finish repairing the Ananke,” she said with only the slightest tremor of nerves in her voice, “for the safety of this ship, you cannot take Ivanov off board.”

  —

  Ida returned to the interrogation room with fury boiling under her skin and sharpening her movements. Gagnon was standing just inside the room, arms folded, watching the back of Ivan’s neck. Ida dismissed him with a sharp cut of her hand, and he left swiftly.

  Back inside the room, with just herself and Ivanov, she tried to center herself. This was what Ida had been building to throughout that long day of interrogation; this was what she wanted to know. Milla Ivanov, Constance Harper, Matthew Gale; all were of only tangential interest to her. But Abigail Hunter: there was a lead. Ivan knew it, too. Ida was certain. She had a clear goal, and she had only to reach for it.

  But when Ida tried to reach for calm, she found only the image of the little mechanic standing in the piloting room, frightened but daring to defy her, and succeeding. She found only the knowledge that she had been confronted and had lost to the most insignificant member of the crew, wielding her petty power with all the stupidity of a child.

  Time was of the essence. She could not stand just inside the doorway of the room and fume all day. “Let’
s talk about Abigail Hunter,” she said to Ivan as she strode into his line of sight, her heels ringing out with savage sharpness against the paneled floor. He looked at her warily.

  She could not show weakness, not here and not to him.

  “How did you meet Abby?” she asked.

  “Accidentally,” Ivan said. His answer was as swift and short as her question had been. He was picking up on her mood and responding accordingly.

  “On her part or yours?”

  “On Mattie’s.”

  “Explain,” Ida said.

  “Mattie took me to meet Constance a little over seven years ago. After we left her bar, we went elsewhere on Mars to refuel and restock our supplies. Abby found us there.”

  “And your first meeting?” Ida said. “What was that like?”

  “Unfriendly,” said Ivan, “with an edge of violence. You’re out of sorts, Ida. What happened to you?”

  “Answer the question, Ivan,” Ida said with all the deadly sweetness she possessed.

  “I was buying provisions, minding my own business. Mattie had gone elsewhere to get something else; negotiate for fuel, I think. Then Abby came up beside me and said, ‘So you’re the one who nearly got my brother killed.’ ”

  “Referring to Europa.” The significance of seven years and change had not escaped her.

  “Referring to half a dozen things,” Ivan said. “Including the Jason. I didn’t know who she was, of course, so I stalled for time. She wasn’t System, that was obvious, but I knew that she was dangerous. What did happen to you? Tell me, I’m curious.”

  “Whatever may or may not have happened to me is not your concern,” Ida said. “We are here to talk about you. When Abigail confronted you, what did you do?”

  “I asked her what she meant while I reached for my knife. She saw me going for the knife and told me I didn’t want to do that. I told her I thought I did. Mattie saw us then and came over, grabbing my wrist so I couldn’t finish drawing the knife. He told me who she was. She’d already heard about me.”

  “Where did this take place?” Ida asked. She had not seen the footage of this meeting, which meant the System hadn’t flagged it. Perhaps it was part of some surveillance that hadn’t been watched yet. That she had never even heard of the encounter—from surveillance or rumor—only increased her simmering frustration.