Lightless

by C. A. Higgins

  For an instant she could taste the salt, feel the frigid spray, the cold slick fingers around her ankle like a manacle.

  “And I’m so tired of hanging on,” Ivan said. He almost seemed to be talking to someone other than her, to himself or to someone who wasn’t there, and it sent a chill down Althea’s spine. “There’s a hollow dark place inside my ribs instead of flesh and blood, and sometimes I just want to go down with her. On Earth I had no reason not to go down with her. Out here I have—I have reasons not to let go.”

  —

  Ida was aware of how close she stood to the edge. Her reputation, her force of personality, had brought her this far, but she had to get results. The System did not believe her theory about Ivanov and Gale, but after Titania, with the threat of worse to come, they were letting her take the risk because they were desperate for some success. But the burden of success was solely on her. She’d thought she’d had six more days; she had fewer now, however long it was between today and the Mallt-y-Nos’s next attack. If the Mallt-y-Nos attacked again and Ida still had nothing to tell the System—if she failed to get anything out of Harper or Doctor Ivanov—

  It was not worth thinking about. She would get results. She was always right, always.

  Time was ticking down. She could feel it in her bones like a bomb on a timer of unknown duration. It was not would it blow but when, and the constant knowledge that that unknown when drew ever more near.

  “Milla Ivanov will arrive first,” she told Domitian as they walked together down the hall toward her second makeshift interrogation chamber. “Constance Harper second. The time of Harper’s arrival will overlap with Doctor Ivanov’s departure, so be ready.”

  “You intend for them to meet,” Domitian said carefully, asking without asking.

  Ida allowed herself to smile, but she knew it came out stiff and fierce.

  “If both of them are as innocent as Ivanov claims, then they have never met before,” she said. “Let’s find out if they have.”

  —

  Ivan had not spoken since his confession, and Althea had kept the silence from her end. It was as if his words had spun a hollow shell of glass around the two of them; no matter what Althea said, her words would shatter the glass and she would not be able to go back to the way things were before.

  Domitian arrived in that fragile silence with no more than a nod at her, although his eyes lingered on her face for a moment longer than she wanted to meet them, as if he were looking for something from her: anger or acceptance or apology. Althea did not have the courage to answer his silence, either. The moment was brief; Domitian did not waste time on unnecessary things. He opened the door to Ivan’s cell, his gun black and gleaming in one hand.

  “On your feet, facing the wall,” said Domitian. Althea peered through the tiny window made by Domitian’s arm and the wall and saw Ivan, pale and slender, with his brilliant blue eyes darkly shadowed, rise slowly to his feet. Althea watched Domitian cuff him roughly and wondered why Ida Stays had seen fit to dress him in thin white hospital clothes, as if he were ill.

  Domitian got a hand in the crook of Ivan’s elbow and hauled him out of the tiny cell and into the hallway, leading him away. Ivan did not look at Althea once. Perhaps he, too, found it easier to speak to Althea through the door, when they could not see each other’s faces.

  She found herself unaccountably on the edge of tears, and it frustrated her, and so when she signaled Gagnon about a note he had left her in the comments of some code he had been examining, she was sharp and snappish. “It doesn’t make any sense,” she said over the intercom. “What do you mean, ‘the rewriting is constants’?”

  “I mean exactly what that means,” said Gagnon with such maddening uselessness that she briefly visualized beating his head against the walls of the Ananke until through the power of percussive maintenance the ship resumed normal operating status. “Except without the typo. The rewriting is constant; the ship keeps rewriting any fixes I make to that part of the code.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Althea snapped.

  “The problem we’re facing, summed up in one sentence,” Gagnon said drily.

  “I don’t want quips,” Althea said. “I want you to actually achieve what I tell you to do!”

  A brief pause filled by the static sound of silence through the intercom’s speakers and then true silence as the connection cut off.

  Althea, it seemed, could do nothing without guilt today. She bent over the machine and tried to put aside thoughts of Gagnon, and Ivan, and her own frustration. She was not having much success five minutes later when the sound of footsteps came down the hall, and she turned only reluctantly to see Gagnon walking down toward her, his hands in his pockets, his red hair starting to fall into his face in thin, wispy flyaways. He stopped beside her and said, as if there were no hurry and he hadn’t just left his post unmanned, “What’s up?”

  “Nothing,” Althea said. “I’m busy.”

  Gagnon was nodding and frowning at the same time in the way that Althea hated because it meant he was understanding something about her that she didn’t want him to understand. “Didn’t sound like nothing,” he said.

  “Shouldn’t you be in the control room?”

  He leaned against the wall with one shoulder, boxing her in, too close. Althea suddenly had a flash of a memory from when she was a child, when a little boy had come and leaned over her shoulder too close and tried to take away her computer from her. She’d punched and kicked him until he’d run away.

  “Doctor Ivanov and Harper aren’t scheduled for another fifteen minutes,” he said.

  “But they’ll enter Ananke’s sensor range soon,” said Althea.

  He made that frowning, nodding face again.

  “You’re right,” he agreed. “I should really be up there. You know, you should answer my question so I can get back up there in time.”

  “I answered your question.”

  “Lying isn’t answering the question.”

  “Who are you, Ida Stays?” Althea snapped, and immediately wished she could have kept her mouth shut.

  Gagnon was regarding her steadily. “Is this about Miss Stays? Has she been giving you a hard time?”

  “No,” Althea said, but she glanced against her will toward Ivan’s open cell.

  Gagnon followed her gaze. “This is about the prisoner?” he asked. “Has he been bothering you?”

  “No!” Althea said too vehemently, she decided after saying it, and tried to calm her tone. “He hasn’t been bothering me.”

  “But…?”

  “But I feel bad for him,” Althea said, and it seemed like only the barest, meanest explanation of what she felt.

  Gagnon was looking at her, perfectly baffled. “Why?” he asked.

  “Because”—now that she had opened the subject, it seemed easier to express—“because of his mother, and because of…of Constance, and because Miss Stays is torturing him…”

  “Miss Stays isn’t torturing him,” Gagnon said, sounding amused but looking at her with something too close to concern. “Has he been talking to you?”

  “Ivanov?” Althea asked, stalling, having remembered to use his surname at the last moment.

  Gagnon gave her a look as if he thought she might have been struck suddenly stupid. “Sometimes,” Althea admitted, and Gagnon’s expression darkened.

  “Damn it, Al,” he said. “And you’ve been listening to him.”

  “I can’t not hear when he talks.”

  “Yeah, but you’ve been listening.” Althea did not like the look on Gagnon’s face; it skated too close to the expression that meant he was going to tell Domitian.

  “I’m not going to tell Domitian,” he said, and she was embarrassed to have been so obvious. “I just…” He stopped and chewed on the inside of his lip. “I’ll make sure he stops bothering you, Al,” he said.

  Althea tried to ask what he meant by that, but her words were drowned out by the sudden wailing of the Anank
e’s alarm.

  —

  Ida burst out of her second interrogation room at the screaming alarm, looking up and down the hallway for someone to demand answers from.

  The ship screamed and wailed as she hurried down to the control room and unlocked the door, but there was no one inside.

  “Son of a bitch,” she hissed, and then snapped at the ceiling, “Enough!” without really expecting to be heard.

  The ship continued deafly blaring that deafening sound.

  Running footsteps. Ida turned to see Gagnon coming up the hallway, followed by the shorter, wild-haired figure of Althea Bastet. Gagnon avoided Ida’s gaze—a sign of guilt; doubtless he was the one who was supposed to be manning the control room—but Althea’s round brown eyes lingered on hers for a moment before breaking away, and Ida could not quite read her expression.

  It was unimportant. Ida had full control over the ship once again. However Doctor Bastet would rather things be was entirely irrelevant.

  Ida stood in the center of the room as Althea and Gagnon rushed from console to console, watching their frantic motions, listening to Gagnon say, “It’s not a machine error,” and Althea say, “It’s not an internal alert,” and Gagnon say, “So what is it?”

  The most they managed to do was shut off the wailing alarm, the most basic of tasks. Ida stood perfectly still and felt her fury grow.

  “Found it!” said Althea, leaning so far over the screen that more frizzed curls popped free of her loose braid and dangled downward, as if reaching to connect to the machine below. “It’s the proximity sensor. It’s sending up an alert for…a weapon fired at the ship?”

  “There are no weapons discharges in this area,” Gagnon reported from another screen.

  “It’s telling me about some danger heading toward us,” said Althea, sounding frustrated.

  Ida said in her sweetest, politest tone with her heaviest of affected Terran accents, “You need to fix this computer.”

  The tension in the room increased tangibly. They had been so absorbed that they had seemed to have forgotten her presence. When it became apparent that Althea was not going to respond, Gagnon said, “Yes, ma’am. We’re doing our best.”

  Ida could have stripped them of their jobs, their titles, their qualifications, for such incompetence on so important a ship. She could have done the same thing to their families and close associates if need be. Gagnon clearly knew it and feared it, but Althea Bastet—stubborn still, still resistant—did not respond to her.

  It irked Ida, made her want to strike at Althea again, but she had no reason to do so—the woman was not actually being insubordinate—and so she controlled herself.

  “Got it,” said Althea, although she sounded a little muted and her back still was to Ida. “It’s the proximity sensor. Doctor Ivanov’s ship just came into range. It triggered a reaction in the ship.”

  “Got some wires crossed,” Gagnon muttered. Ida looked at him incredulously.

  The intercom came on.

  “I am in the white room,” said Domitian’s even tones, made especially even at the moment. “Do not explain over the intercom. Send someone down to guard Ivanov. I will come up.”

  Althea Bastet started to stand, but Gagnon was faster.

  “I’ll go,” he said, and Althea looked as if he had slapped her in the face as he hurried from the room, leaving the two women alone together.

  Ida watched Althea and watched Althea avoid looking at her. Simply by standing there in silence, Ida could see that her presence was making Althea tense, but Althea said nothing to her, her downcast eyes scanning the screen before her with more attention than it deserved. Perhaps the mechanic had learned her place after all.

  Something beeped, and the mechanic moved to look at the relevant screen while Ida stood in the center of the room and watched her, full of power.

  “She’s hailing us,” Althea said. She was obligated by regulations to report such a message to Ida; Ida was certain she would have said nothing at all if she hadn’t been required to. “She wants permission to dock.”

  “Grant it,” said Ida, as cool and calm as if she were indifferent to Althea’s presence when Althea was so affected by hers. “And send Domitian to the docking bay when he arrives.” She took the moment as the perfect time to depart and leave Althea with an order, with Ida having had the last word.

  Domitian caught up to her at the doors to the docking bay. They were sealed as an air lock; beyond them the vast mouth of the Ananke was opening to admit a small, gleaming ship.

  “I’ll escort the both of you to your room, then to the white room,” Domitian said quietly, clarifying, and Ida nodded slightly.

  The ship landed lightly. It was sleek and small, the newest model from Earth. The great doors of the Ananke slid slowly shut overhead, and Ida waited until the light beside the bay doors turned green, indicating the repressurization of the space beyond.

  She pushed open the glass doors and stepped out into the vast hollowness of the docking bay; across from her, out of the sleek ship stepped a sleek woman who glanced briefly around the room before fixing her attention on Ida.

  The years, Ida knew from her study of the woman, had hardened Milla Ivanov into perfect clarity, as pressure did to a diamond. No expression showed on her face. The woman walking toward Ida had aged out of her beauty but kept her handsomeness, her blond hair lightened to white, her forehead and the corners of her mouth outlined in the marks of frowns. Doctor Ivanov was the type of woman who would go to slenderness and fragility as she aged, and indeed she had already started down that path, but even though her wrists seemed small enough to snap, when she took Ida’s hand, her grip was firm.

  She had the same brilliant blue eyes as her son and the same intensity in her stare.

  “Miss Stays,” said Milla Ivanov. She had a soft voice. At lectures, she always needed a microphone.

  “Doctor Ivanov,” said Ida, and smiled charmingly. “A pleasure to meet you. Please call me Ida.”

  Milla Ivanov neither acknowledged the liberty nor returned it. She simply released Ida’s hand when Ida released hers and said, “I assume you have a room prepared.”

  Milla Ivanov had been the subject of more interrogations than Ida had ever performed. It put Ida at a slight disadvantage, perhaps, but in the end she still had Milla’s son.

  She smiled and said, “Of course. Right this way.”

  Doctor Ivanov seemed not to notice or simply not to care that Domitian followed them at a politely dangerous distance. She kept pace beside Ida, her flats striking the ground more softly than the click, click of Ida’s heels.

  Ida said nothing until they reached the door to the second interrogation chamber. This chamber was smaller, almost cozy; the room had been used for storage of various valuable equipment that Ida had had removed. The ceiling was a trifle low, not enough to bother Ida but enough to induce the faintest feeling of claustrophobia when combined with the dark uniform metal of the walls, ceiling, and floor. The only object left inside the room was a table rather like the one in the white room but smaller, with two chairs on either side.

  Ida led the way inside and signaled to Milla to take the chair with its back to the door, seating herself opposite. Milla Ivanov sat with her back perfectly straight and her hands folded loosely in her lap and did not even blink when Domitian swung the creaking door shut behind them.

  For a moment, Ida simply enjoyed the setting. Milla Ivanov sat across from her in the very same way her son had every day for a week. The resemblance between mother and son was impressive: the same blue eyes, the same shape of jaw and lip, the same close, careful attention. The only differences that Ida could see were that Milla Ivanov did not waste her time with charm as her son did and that unlike Ivan, Milla was not in chains.

  Not yet, perhaps.

  “Doctor Ivanov, I’m afraid I’m going to have to confess I’m a bit of a fan,” Ida said with the slightest bashful smile. “To be perfectly honest, you were one of my role models as a
child. A brilliant, successful woman who rose in spite of all the adversity that surrounded her.” Ida sighed. “It is something I have always admired.”

  She had admired even more the way Milla had lied and performed at her husband’s trial, using her infant son as a prop to save her own skin.

  “I am glad to inspire,” said Milla Ivanov, her voice crisp, tonally perfect, and perfectly empty. She tilted her head ever so slightly to the side, and Ida had a sudden flash of Ivan making the same motion. “I have heard something of you, too. Of your impressive and rapid rise to fame.”

  If Ida had not been paying attention, she might have mistaken that for a compliment.

  Ida held her smile for a moment while she reconsidered. Charm, then, was out. So directness it was.

  “Doctor Ivanov,” Ida said, leaning forward onto the table and looking serious and concerned, “are you aware of the events surrounding your son lately?”

  Perhaps the briefest flicker of blue eyes. Milla said, “I haven’t been in contact with my son since he left home.”

  “But you are aware.”

  “Through what has been told me through System news broadcasts,” said Milla Ivanov, “and the occasional ill-timed System questioning on the subject.”

  This barb seemed to cut especially deeply for being spoken in Milla’s crystalline Terran accent, unsoftened by a childhood on Venus or an adulthood in the outer planets.

  “I apologize for this inconvenience,” said Ida. “I’m afraid it was quite necessary.”

  “Every time my son steals from a grocery store, the System comes to question me about his habits, taking me from my studies and from my lectures,” said Milla. She cocked her head to the side again, even more strongly reminiscent of her son. “What is one more interruption in the middle of my vacation?”

  “I will try to make this interrogation as brief as possible,” said Ida. “But it is, of course, for the good of the System.”

  “I will do my duty as a citizen,” Milla Ivanov said. “You went through all the trouble of blindfolding my computer’s navigation system and bringing me to a ship in the middle of nowhere. I assume this is important.”