Lightless

by C. A. Higgins

  —

  There was something Ida was missing.

  The consciousness of the fact that there was some connection she was failing to make haunted her and had haunted her for the last long few days since Constance Harper and Milla Ivanov had left the ship. Her interrogation of Ivan had taken on an air of futility—what he knew, he was not telling, and she no longer felt she was advancing closer to the final truth.

  The Mallt-y-Nos had not attacked again yet, but everyone knew that she would. There had been a dozen other minor uprisings on the outer planets—most subdued, but some of the moons were still breaking out in sporadic violence. The System had just arrested a man with a stockpile of weaponry, and as he’d been taken into custody, he’d shouted to the watching crowd that the Wild Hunt was beginning. Titania was still defiant; the System was contemplating total depopulation. The state of the outer solar system was not beyond what the System could handle, but it was incomprehensible that it had gotten this far—and there would be more. This was the prelude; the Mallt-y-Nos had not yet struck her primary blow. The System had almost its entire military out by Jupiter and Neptune and Uranus and the planetoids, waiting, but what they really needed was information. Ida needed to give them information. But she had none. If she failed—if she failed—if she failed—

  Humiliation and fear warred in her breast. Intelligence agents did not retire. If she failed, she would lose her livelihood and likely her life. To prison for crimes against the state—disobedience and squandering of System resources, probably—or to exile on some planetoid that was like a prison. Either would be followed by a discreet death, she was certain. She knew too much. If she failed, first humiliation before all, then the final loss of any power she had, even over her own life—

  This couldn’t be it. She couldn’t be wrong. There was something she was missing.

  “I want to go over the events on Ganymede again,” Ida said, pacing, pacing. Her heels rang out through the vast white room.

  “Why?” Ivan asked. The alarms had been keeping him awake, as they had the rest of the crew. He was pale and shadowed with too little sleep, as Ida knew she herself was. “You’ve already asked me about that.”

  “And I’m asking you again.”

  Ivan laughed. He had long since ceased to pretend to be pleasant to her, and his laughter now was vicious, taunting.

  “What point would that serve? I’ve told you everything I can,” he said. “And you’ve verified it all. You have, or you’d be asking me more detailed questions.”

  Ida stood and looked at him, at his handsome face, and his blue eyes, and his pallor, and wished with sudden, overwhelming keenness that she could hurt him again the way she had with Milla, the way she had with Constance.

  But she already had played her hand where Milla and Constance were involved, and Mattie was dead and Abby was missing still.

  Ivan said, mocking, his eyes bright, brilliant with exhaustion and anger, “Why won’t you just admit that you’re wrong, Ida?”

  Ida said, “I am not wrong,” with all the surety she possessed, but the worm of doubt was hollowing out her chest, and Ivan’s expression seemed to show that he knew it.

  “Now,” said Ida. “Ganymede.”

  That day’s interrogation was as useless as all the others had been. At the end of it, Ida left Ivan alone in the white room, chained to his chair. She could leave him to sit there alone forever if she wanted to. Perhaps, when she went back to him, Ivan would be so tired and humiliated and dehydrated that he would bow to whatever she said. Once Ida had her proof, the System would be so relieved that they wouldn’t look too closely at how she’d obtained it. She knew that for a fact.

  Ida was so caught up in her thoughts that for a few seconds she did not notice when, all over the Ananke, without any warning or reason, the lights went out.

  The lights keeping the halls bright went out; all the lights marking the instrument panels went dark. The steel walls lost their gleam. Ida found herself suddenly in a vast black nothing-space, unlit by sun or star, no walls visible, the total blackness of empty space without a star, of the view from the horizon of a black hole.

  She went very still.

  Ida was a planetary woman. She knew—she had seen it proved in math, in words—that the apparent safety of a planet’s solid ground beneath her feet was based on precisely the same physical laws that described the construction of a spaceship, that there was no real difference between the solidity of dirt beneath her feet and the hollowness of sculpted carbon and iron. She knew this for the fact that it was, but Ida Stays was a planetary woman, and it was with a planetary woman’s fear that she froze in the darkness, because Ida did not believe in God, did not believe in any gods at all, only the cold fact of existence and man’s ability to work within the inflexible laws of nature, but somehow she, so human, so unmechanical, somehow she trusted the engineer that had constructed the planets far more than the human ones who had built the ships that flew between them.

  Here, in the dark of the hallway, with the image of civilization—and human control—vanished, where all Ida knew was that she was not on some planet but was on a man-made structure and its first output (let there be light) had failed, and she was afraid, and that was the worst thing of all: the utter loss of her power, destroyed by as insignificant a thing as the loss of light.

  But then again, perhaps the heat would be next to go, or the air, and Ida would freeze in the cold emptiness of space. Perhaps she was already out in space now, for the space around her, unbounded by light, with the walls and floor and ceiling all invisible, could have stretched out to infinity.

  No, Ida thought with a deep chill of fear that was animal in its intensity, space would have stars. She was not in space. Perhaps the containment fields at the center of the ship had failed and the hollowness there, the emptiness that could not be filled, had swelled up and devoured all in its path, and Ida, too, and next, next it would swallow up the planets, the sun, and then, with redshifted photons howling, it would devour the solar system entirely—

  Light, flickering eerie light from behind her that touched on the walls and made them exist again. Ida took gulping breaths.

  The flashlight shook and wavered and bounced up and down and came nearer, and something rushed past Ida, knocking her into the wall and taking the flashlight with her, while Ida stood and gasped and could not make herself move.

  Althea Bastet was holding the little light; Ida recognized her by the wiry silhouette of her hair. Althea pushed into a room just ahead of Ida in the hallway, and Ida blindly followed the faint glow of that light, unwilling to be left in the dark any longer.

  Ida found Althea kneeling before the machine as if in prayer, the flashlight cast down beside her and illuminating the floor. Ida gripped the frame of the door and watched as Althea touched the machine, and the computer brightened into a glow. Althea tapped away at the machine like a pianist playing a soundless song, and by the time Ida took her next shaking breath, the lights flared suddenly, brilliantly back on.

  It was too bright, all that lost light returned at once. Ida had to squeeze her eyes shut and shield her face. When she dared to open her eyes again, blinking reddened afterimages away, Althea was still kneeling in front of the computer, frowning.

  “What was that?” Ida asked, and was startled by the hoarseness of her voice.

  Mercifully, Althea did not seem to notice. “I don’t know yet,” she muttered. “I’ll figure it out.” It sounded as if she were speaking half to Ida and half to herself, as if her words were rote, well learned, well rehearsed.

  The glow of the machine on Althea’s face was bland, innocent, mechanical. Ida ran a hand down her own face and tried to regain her composure.

  “Fix it,” she ordered with almost enough force to hide the trembling in her tone, and Althea looked at her in surprise, as if she’d just realized, really, that Ida was right there.

  Without another word, Ida left Althea inside the machine room and proceeded tow
ard her room.

  Domitian met her there some time after he had been intended to, but in light of the difficulties with the ship, Ida let his lateness pass. It had given her time to recover some of her composure, at least.

  “I need this ship repaired immediately,” Ida snapped the moment he stepped in. “I don’t care how. This is unacceptable. This is an embarrassment. Your mechanic is incompetent, criminally incompetent.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Don’t ‘yes, ma’am’ me,” said Ida. “I want it fixed.” She would have Doctor Bastet punished, but first she needed the ship to function.

  “I will ensure that it is,” Domitian said with enough force that she knew he meant it.

  “Good.”

  Domitian asked, “Is there some other reason you wanted me here, Miss Stays?”

  Ida looked at him, so solid and loyal and dependable, and sighed.

  “The interrogation is not going well,” she admitted. “It may be that I will be required to transport Ivanov to the surface of Pluto. We should discuss those arrangements later this week, provided, of course, that your mechanic has managed to repair the ship by that point in time.” Or if they even made it to Pluto, Ida thought. If the Mallt-y-Nos attacked again, it was likely that the System would have the Ananke return to Earth. Already the System had required the Ananke to report its location on the hour; it was only the ship’s considerable firepower and the enormous expense of its mission that had persuaded the System to allow it to continue on. As for taking Ivan off the ship, if Althea Bastet had not managed to fulfill the basic role of her position by the time they reached Pluto or by the time the Mallt-y-Nos attacked, thus making it possible for Ivan to leave the premises, the System would have to become involved. A part of Ida was pleased at the thought of finally seeing the damn mechanic reprimanded, but she knew that if she had achieved nothing by the time they reached Pluto, more of the System’s attention was the last thing she wanted. Her failure would be clear and obvious enough without being the subject of an investigation.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Domitian said, but although this time Ida turned her back on him in dismissal, he did not leave.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Miss Stays,” said Domitian in a softer tone, “if you’ll allow me. Over the past days I have seen that you are a brilliant interrogator and loyal to the System. If you think that Ivanov knows something, then I have no doubt that he truly does.”

  That Domitian saw that in her strengthened something inside of Ida that she had not known needed strengthening. For a wild moment, she had the impulse to tell him the truth: that the System did not believe her theory about Gale and Ivanov knowing the Mallt-y-Nos, that Ida herself was near ruin if she could not break Leontios Ivanov immediately.

  The impulse passed, strange and irrational, and Ida cast it from her mind.

  “Of course he does,” Ida said. “There’s something I’m missing, but he does know.” An idea was forming in her head. “If I start from the beginning,” she said, to herself, not to Domitian, “without any preconceptions, perhaps I’ll find it…”

  “Permission to leave, Miss Stays?”

  “Granted,” Ida answered absently, and hardly heard the door shut. Instead, she sat down before her computer and started from the beginning.

  —

  Althea had run out of ideas. Althea had nothing left to try. Althea did not know what to do.

  “Come on, calm down, shh,” she crooned at the computer like a mother trying to soothe her colicky baby, but the alarm continued to wail inconsolably. “Please, Ananke, shh.”

  She had gone through all the usual sources. The manual override wasn’t working, and she could not find the source of the error, and she could not figure out why the ship was crying out, just as she could not understand why all the lights had gone off.

  “Ananke, please,” she begged, and the alarm cut out abruptly, as meaninglessly as it had begun. She had done nothing to stop it. She had done nothing to start it in the first place. She did not understand, and she didn’t know what else to do.

  She leaned her head against the wall of the ship and, with no one but the Ananke to see her, with nothing to distract herself from her frustration and her humiliation and her despair, started to cry.

  A light shone through her closed lids; when Althea opened her eyes, the nearest holographic terminal was lit up, glowing red, a flickering shape appearing and disappearing in the terminal, there and gone before Althea’s eyes could make out its shape, but for an instant it looked like an image of the last hologram the ship had received: the face and figure of Ida Stays.

  Her tears had dried. Althea rested her head against her ship’s familiar metal, and breathed, and watched as the holographic diodes died back down into darkness.

  There was one thing left she had not tried. A week and a half ago, even a few days ago she would not even have allowed herself to consider it. But she had nothing left to try, and still the Ananke was broken.

  She could talk to Ivan.

  Matthew Gale had broken Althea’s ship. Matthew Gale had been Ivan’s friend and partner for ten years. Ivan already had admitted that he knew something about what Gale had done, something about “a little bit of chaos.” Surely if Althea questioned him more closely, he would be able to tell her precisely what Gale had done. Ida already had made it clear that she had little interest in interrogating Ivan about the ship, and Althea did not want to have to confess that she’d been speaking to Ivan against orders. Ida Stays already hated her. If Althea admitted that—or if she even troubled Ida again without the Ananke being functional—she doubted she would ever work, or even see Earth, again.

  Gagnon had kept his word; Althea had not guarded Ivan’s cell since the day Milla Ivanov and Constance Harper had been on board. But Ida had taken to leaving Ivan alone in the white room for hours at a time, and Althea knew that Ida had already left today. Ivan would be alone, unguarded. The camera in the white room wasn’t working; no one would know what Althea had talked about with Ivan. They wouldn’t even have any proof that she had said anything to him at all.

  Slowly, without feeling that she had really made a decision at all, Althea stood up and began to walk up the Ananke’s spiraling hall.

  She had not really, truly made a decision, she felt, even when she was standing in front of the door to the white room, even when without hesitation she turned the knob and walked in.

  Ivan sat in the center of the white room, the bow of his back very tense. Althea could not speak, did not know what to say, and so she only walked forward, her boots making dull sounds against the floor.

  “What happened?” Ivan asked, tense, before she had come into his line of sight.

  “What?” Althea asked, slowing down.

  He twisted around to glance at her and did not seem surprised to see her there. Her shoes, Althea realized. He’d recognized she wasn’t Ida from the sound of her walking. “With the lights,” he said. “What happened?”

  “The ship,” said Althea. “She malfunctioned again.”

  Ivan looked up at her sharply as she came to stand a little distance away from him. Althea felt pinned, pierced. It was different seeing him and speaking to him than it was just to speak to him; he was more real somehow, not a voice from behind a metal wall, yet he was different somehow, too, now that she could see his blue eyes, the way they searched her face, as if he was reading things off of her she did not know were there to be read.

  Ivan leaned back slowly in his chair. The chains around his wrists clinked with the movement.

  “Why did you come here, Althea?” he asked.

  “I need your help,” she said.

  This was it, the point from which she could not return, yet Althea had a strange fear that she had passed the extremal point already and simply had not recognized it.

  Against his silence she began to explain, the words falling nervously from her as if from a broken dam, all in a rush. “I can’t figure out what Gale did. Yo
u knew him. You could tell me; you could tell me what exactly it is that he did. You know Gale, so you know what he did. You told me something about ‘a little bit of chaos’; what does that mean? I can’t— I can’t fix the computer. I need you to tell me.”

  “First of all,” said Ivan, and there was something dark in his tone, “his name is Mattie.” He cocked his head to the side. “If you’re going to try to convince me to help you, you’re not off to a good start. Call him by the name I use; that’s how you generate a rapport.”

  Althea’s tears had started to flow again. It happened without her volition, without her understanding. She stood very still, like prey in sight of a wolf, and for the first time in weeks—perhaps for the first time since she had caught him dressed all in black and toying with her computer—she was afraid of Leontios Ivanov.

  He did not speak again immediately. Althea could not find the courage to speak, and only stood and let him take her apart with his eyes.

  He said, “Did you come here to make a deal with me, Althea?”

  “I just wanted to ask you a question.”

  “Information is my only currency right now, Althea. It’s my only power. I’m not just going to give that away because you asked me nicely.”

  Althea swallowed. She felt very small, hopeless and desperate, in that vast white room and under Ivan’s piercing attention.

  “You’re smart,” Ivan said. If he had said this to her before, Althea’s heart would have glowed at the compliment. Now she felt only chilled. “You must have known, coming in here, that you would have to make a deal.”

  “What do you want?”

  He did not look surprised. At the moment Althea could not imagine anything so fallible in him as being surprised. “What will you offer?”