“Maybe,” Arawn said, “there wasn’t one planted on Mars.”
Constance blinked at him, then realized what he was driving at. “You think they brought the bomb with them.”
“Probable,” Milla Ivanov said with a very slender line of respect in her voice. Arawn grinned at her, rubbing the black bristles on his chin as if he thought to hide his amusement.
“And if they had that bomb with the fleet,” Constance said slowly, “they might have other ones as well.”
“They might bomb any planet they go to,” said Arawn. “If they’d hit Mars, they’ll hit anyone. Mars was one of theirs.”
Now all the inner planets and the people who lived on them were in danger. Constance brought death with her wherever she went. Wasn’t that what Ivan had said to her once? No, she told herself; this was not her. This was the System and its instinct for destruction.
Its stupid instinct for destruction. What else would turn the last hesitant peoples of the inner planets against the System but knowing that the System would treat them just as poorly as it had always treated Constance’s people? Constance had no doubt she would find Venus and Mercury ready to rise up behind her. If she could act swiftly, she would be able to drive the fleet from Venus, too.
And after Venus, the System fleet would go to Mercury and join with its bases on the innermost planet. Mercury was shielded by the nearness of the sun, making detection of a fleet difficult, and the planet’s metallic ores were useful for spacecraft. But if the planet was no longer under System control by the time the fleet arrived—
“We need to accelerate,” said Constance, and Milla said, “Mercury?”
Arawn’s hand was still rubbing thoughtfully at his beard. He looked at Constance and said, “When’s your birthday, Huntress?”
She caught on immediately. “April.”
“How would you like a planet for an early gift?”
“A planet and a graveyard full of System corpses would be a nice gift, Arawn.”
He rose to his feet. “I thought I might just let them rot, but if you say so.”
“Keep in constant contact,” Constance said. “Take only a fraction of your own forces and leave the rest with me; we will need them more on Venus, and without them you’ll have more stealth getting to Mercury. If the fleet is there, do not engage—contact me, and I will join you with the rest of our fleet. Your goal is to destroy the System bases and liberate the planet and nothing more. Understood?”
He bowed to her, not deeply, but the inclination of his head sent a bolt of heat out from Constance’s chest like a solar flare. “As you say.”
When he had gone, leaving Constance and Milla alone in the room with the low ceiling, Milla said, “Like a cat bringing a dead mouse home.”
“You are Ivan’s mother,” Constance observed.
“Sometimes,” Milla said calmly, “I wonder what, exactly, kind of relationship you and my son had.” Before Constance could absorb that sentence or let it throw her into darker memories of someone who was gone, Milla went on: “In other matters relating to what happened here today.” She looked at the dark doorway that led to Constance’s room.
At least Milla was different from her son in some ways: she didn’t feel the need to say “I told you so” outright. Constance asked, “Who do you suggest as a bodyguard?”
“Rayet,” Milla said immediately.
“So have him sent to me.”
Milla Ivanov was a woman who knew when she was dismissed. She started to leave, and Constance contemplated the darkness of the bedroom where the two dead bodies were not.
Milla paused at the door. “I take it,” she said, “that I don’t need to tell you that you had no way of knowing about Mars.”
“Next time I will have to know,” Constance said.
Milla nodded, and Constance thought that she was done, but instead of leaving, she said, “Remember, Constance, the point of a bodyguard is to have one with you at all times.”
“Win graciously,” Constance told her, because that was what Mattie would have told Ivan.
Milla Ivanov ignored her words entirely. “Just remember,” she said, “it does not get better from here.”
—
The System fleet was not on Venus.
On the flight over, Constance had been on edge, ready at any moment for alarms on the Wild Hunt to wake her, to warn her that the System was coming. But there had been nothing. And when they had reached the planet, there had been no fleet in orbit.
The fleet was somewhere else. She had contacted Arawn immediately, only to learn that the fleet was not on Mercury, either. Constance had almost wanted to turn around and search for the fleet that should have been here on Venus, face the System’s full might directly rather than wait for it to find a new place to dig in and spread out its power. She’d resisted the impulse. Stick to the plan, she told herself; Ivan’s plan. Go from planet to planet: Mars, Venus, Mercury, Luna. Destroy the System bases on the planet. Cut off from its nutrients, the System would be weak when at last it came to face her again. Destroy the bases first, she’d told herself. Do that before anything else or all this will fail.
Therefore, she had landed on Venus and attacked the System bases there. It was easy enough to defeat them: without the System fleet as backup, Constance’s army was larger and more powerful than that of any of the System bases. Supplies were plentiful on Venus; the planet was mostly farmland pocked with swelling volcanoes. It had taken far longer to colonize Venus than it had to colonize Mars owing to the boiling sulfuric atmosphere, which the System had slowly sapped down to livable levels over a course of time so long that the System had inherited the project rather than begun it. Even so, the planet was hot and humid, and the density of the air around Constance was oppressive.
She set up camp on the vast, smooth mound of the Artemis Corona on a stretch of abandoned fields. There were only two planetary bodies in the solar system that had coronas: Venus and Constance’s home moon, Miranda. Yet when Constance looked out over the green and yellow of unharvested crops and looked up at the dense clouds webbed with yellow lightning, she never felt farther from home.
“What’s his ETA?” Constance asked Rayet, staring up at the clouded sky for Arawn’s ships. The sun was not visible on Venus, but the planet was well lit all over: farmers used bright sunlamps on their crops to ensure adequate nutrition, and that light reflected off the dense cloud cover overhead, creating an eerie uniform glow with few shadows.
“Any moment now, Huntress.” Constance saw now why Milla had suggested Rayet for her bodyguard; like Milla herself, the man didn’t like to give Constance more information than she immediately needed. He was not guarding her alone today: Constance had brought a few more men with her to wait some distance from her camp for Arawn to arrive.
“Thank you,” Constance said, and resumed staring up at the lightning-cut clouds overhead.
The first sign she had that Arawn was arriving was a ripple in the clouds a little to the south of her. It could have been nothing more than a storm, but Constance trusted her instincts, and indeed a few moments later a small fleet of shuttles came out of the cloud layer, carrying down with them a few curls of displaced vapor and bolts of lightning that struck furiously at their metal hulls. Constance had to look away or burn her retinas as the shuttles came near.
They landed not far from her and her guard with a concussive sound made louder by the density of Venus’s atmosphere. The ships opened their sides and began to spit out men; Arawn came from the nearest and went straight for her. He’d shed his heavy drapes in a concession to the Venerean heat; Constance could see the shape of his shoulders through his shirt even from that distance.
She dropped her shielding hand from her eyes and waited for him to come to her while a heavy puff of Venerean wind pushed against her healing side.
He came straight for her. “Huntress.”
“Arawn,” she greeted him. “Did you see the fleet on your way here?”
She
started to walk back toward her camp, the hastily constructed tents and landed shuttles that her army was using to live in while on the surface. Somewhere beyond the veil of clouds, her space fleet and Arawn’s were merging once more.
“Nothing,” Arawn said. “Not even a radar blip. They could be on the other side of the sun, but I don’t know why. There’s nothing there.”
The rough edges of grass caught at Constance’s ankles as she trudged forward over the volcanic soil, lost in thought. There were no cameras left in Constance’s ship. There were no cameras left in her fleet. There were no cameras left in her temporary Venerean camp, and there were certainly no cameras left out here, where they were trudging through an abandoned field. But the years in which the cameras had watched her, the years of hiding her heart and her thoughts under the silent and steady gaze of the cameras, of knowing that the watching cameras were as clear a threat as a gun held to her back, had stayed with her even after the removal of the surveillance. Constance knew the System could not see her, but she felt an itch on her back as if somehow it must still know. The System always knew: it had more men, it had more weapons, it had more knowledge. The best Constance and her people could do sometimes was to keep some small amount of knowledge out of the System’s grasp and survive a little longer on that secrecy.
And so even now, with the cameras gone, Constance was sure that the System knew more than she did. The only thing she could do was guess, be alert and aware. But over the decades of revolutionary resistance she had grown to be very good at guessing what the System was doing, and now she was certain that it had gone somewhere in particular. They were building their base, building up their power again. The longer it took for her to find them, the stronger they would be.
“They’re not here,” Constance said. “Where are they? Speculate.”
“Luna?” Arawn guessed.
“Can’t be. There’s not enough natural resources.” Arawn probably had never been to Luna.
“There are some rumors of the fleet farther out,” he said. “Near Jupiter—Europa, maybe.”
“Europa?” Constance said. “Why would they go that far out?”
Arawn shrugged. He said, “What does Doctor Ivanov think?”
“Doctor Ivanov doesn’t like to speculate without more data,” Constance said.
Arawn’s laugh, loud and full-bodied, surprised her. Constance imagined it almost echoed off the cloud cover overhead. “Of course she doesn’t,” he said. “But for Venus, what do you want me to do about the System here?”
“There’s only one small corner left,” Constance said. “Mostly in the Themis Regio. But the System’s gotten clever.”
“Clever?”
“They’re not openly calling themselves the System,” Constance said grimly, “and they’ve abandoned their bases.” The last few bases she and her people had come across had been empty, stripped of supplies. The System soldiers who had harbored there had gone to hide elsewhere on the planet’s surface, and not even Constance and her fleet and her army could easily search an entire planet. “There’s still fighting going on in the region, but neither side will admit to being System.”
“Call themselves Venereans so that we’ll leave them alone, and then, when the System fleet comes back, they’ll find the planet still in their control,” Arawn said.
“We’ll find them with some recon,” said Constance, because of that she had no doubt. She and Arawn—and Rayet a short distance behind—passed through the outermost edge of the camp, the guards waving them past. “The System can’t hide what they are. I want your people to wait until we do. I’ve summoned the leaders of both of the warring parties to speak to me; one of them will be System—”
She recognized the sound instinctively before she consciously realized what it had been. It echoed off the clouds like thunder in the distance, and Constance was running toward it before she realized that what she’d heard had been a gunshot from within the tents.
Arawn was only a second behind her, his gun in his hand in an instant. Her people were spilling out of their tents and landed shuttles, grabbing their arms, ready for war, looking only for a target. Constance spotted Henry, eyes wide, head swiveling like a dog seeking a scent. “Who fired?” she demanded as she passed, but he said, “I don’t know,” and she swore. Someone else said, “It came from the doctor’s tent!” and Constance started to run again, faster than before, adrenaline as thin and sour and bitter as fear driving her on toward Milla’s tent.
Milla’s tent was near her own. People had gathered around it but hesitated to go in. When Constance appeared, they cleared a path for her with relief at seeing authority. Constance went right for the tent flap, but a hand landed heavily on her shoulder, stopping her. Rayet pushed through the flap instead, and Constance waited outside, chafing at the enforced protection. Arawn waited with her, his gun still out. Milla should have had a bodyguard, too, Constance thought, berating herself. If something had happened to Ivan’s mother, Constance did not know what she would do.
A moment later Rayet appeared again at the tent flap, his expression unreadable, pulled the flap open, and stepped aside to let her in.
It took Constance’s eyes a moment to adjust to the light inside the tent, where the blinding glare of the sun was blocked by the canvas walls. Milla Ivanov’s tent was spartan, bare and clean, and Milla was sitting on a chair inside, alive and breathing. She did not look at Constance when Constance came in.
There was a corpse in the corner of the room.
“Rayet,” Constance said, “don’t let anyone else in.” He nodded his acknowledgment and let the tent flap fall closed, shuttering them in the shadowy tent.
The body was half hidden by the bulk and shadow of Milla’s desk. From her vantage point at the opening to the tent, Constance could see only its legs. While Arawn stalked around the circumference of the sparse room, checking for any enemies, Constance moved until she stood directly beneath the single lantern hung from the tent’s central pole. From there she could see into the corner.
It was a woman lying there, and she was very dead. Her arms and legs were cast out, their joints oddly bent, and there was a dark red spot in the center of her breast. Blood was beginning to creep out from under her arm, visible only as a darker shadow. The light made it hard for Constance to see the dead woman’s face.
Arawn came up behind Constance. “Assassin?” he asked Milla.
Milla did not answer immediately. Constance looked around the rest of the room warily. A tidily made cot, a small bag of clothes and necessities, a slightly larger bag of books that Milla brought with her everywhere but that Constance knew she was prepared to abandon, an old metal table that functioned as a temporary desk, and a metal folding chair that moved around the room depending on where Milla needed it—there was no place for anyone else to hide.
“Yes,” Milla said, and glanced at last at Constance. “I would imagine there were one or two waiting in your tent as well.”
Arawn lifted his gun again. “Allow me,” he said, and left.
“You killed her?” Constance asked.
“Yes,” Milla said. She was not holding her gun anymore; it was on the ground beneath her dangling fingers. Her white hair was out of its eternal bun, and it was a little longer than Constance had expected it to be. She was uninjured, and no sign of pain showed on her face, but there were red spots on her cheek from a spray of someone else’s blood. Because she was sitting so far from the center of the tent, away from the tent’s one light, the shadows were heavy on Milla, half of her body falling into obscurity in the dark. She was not meeting Constance’s eyes.
Constance said, “Are you all right?”
Milla moved her fingers abortively as if she meant to rap them against her arm in a patternless beat but then changed her mind; the motion only revealed their slight tremor. She said, “Constance, did you look at her?”
“Yes. I saw she was dead.”
Milla gave her a look that could have flash-frozen a T
erran ocean. She said, “Did you see her face?”
A low drumbeat of alarm had started up in Constance’s heart, and she left Milla where she sat to walk back toward that silent corner and the corpse that lay on the stone. She stepped carefully around the woman’s outflung limbs and crouched down in the shadows by her head.
A bright slice of light cut into the tent as the flap was opened; Arawn strode back in.
“No one there,” he reported. “But a few people in the crowd reported seeing some men running after the gunshot—running away from the gunshot, not toward it.”
“Have them found,” Constance said, and frowned down at the woman below her. There was something familiar about the features even though they were indistinct in the dark.
“Are you hurt, Doctor Ivanov?” Arawn asked.
“No,” said Milla.
People were moving around outside; the lantern in the center of the tent swung slightly on its perch, sending the shadows to creep along the boundaries where the tent met the ground. It only further blurred the face that Constance was trying to see.
Rustling from Arawn. He was standing beneath the central light and digging around in his pocket, from which he produced a crumpled box. He offered the box to Milla. Milla stared at it as if she thought it might be some sort of trap, but finally she reached out and carefully pulled a slender white bar from the box.
It was no good: Constance couldn’t see. She stood up again and stepped over the body. The table screeched when she shoved it over the stone to where its shadow would not conceal the dead woman’s face.
A lighter clicked softly behind her—Constance had ignited too many bombs for it to not catch her attention immediately. The box Arawn had offered had been full of cigarettes, and he was lighting one for Milla, which was about as absurd an image as Constance could contemplate. Cigarettes were illegal in the System because of their health dangers and the more practical dangers of having them in atmospheric domes or spaceships or other places with limited supplies of oxygen. “I didn’t know you smoked,” Constance said.
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