Supernova

by C. A. Higgins

  The observation deck was designed as if it were on the Earth-facing side of the moon. One wall and half the domed ceiling were made of glass, allowing the viewer to look up into the moon’s perpetually star-studded sky. But it was not true glass; it was a display. The screen showed a live view of the Earth broadcast from the other side of the moon. Layers and layers of artifice, she thought; that was what the System was, lies and manipulation and distortion and lies. But even so, she stared at the image of the Earth and could not look away. Even though the image was false, she thought how near the Earth was, how near her victory was, if only she could pull it off.

  She wondered if Ivan looked at it and thought of his home.

  For a time they stood in silence, looking out onto the luminous Earth.

  Then Ivan said, “Do you ever think about dying?”

  Constance glanced at him. The sharp line of his jaw was angled out toward the slowly spinning blue and white globe before them. His eyes were on the Earth, not on her.

  “No,” she told him, and watched his face. “Why?” You had to prod Ivan sometimes or lead him like a dog on a leash to wherever he was unwilling to go on his own. And even then, Constance thought, sometimes he wouldn’t allow it.

  “I do,” he said, and although Constance could tell this was closer to the truth, she knew it was not all the way there. Not yet.

  “Are you afraid of dying?”

  “I’ve done it before.”

  Constance said, “But are you afraid of it?”

  “Are you?” he countered.

  “No,” Constance said. “Everyone dies.” Fear was for possibilities and unfavorable chance. There was no sense in fearing what was inevitable.

  “So what are you afraid of, Constance?”

  This space was too open, too public, for the admission of fears. Constance shrugged.

  He turned to her then, moving closer. His hands slid around her waist, pulling her closer and shifting her position so that his shoulders blocked the camera in the upper-right corner of the observation deck from seeing her face. Constance wrapped her arms around his neck and moved her head so that she blocked the line of sight of the camera at her back so that it could not see his.

  “Fear isn’t a weakness, Constance,” he said into the private little space they had built with simulated intimacy. “It’s a natural response to a dangerous situation.”

  “So that’s why you’re afraid of dying?” Constance said.

  “I’m not afraid of my death,” Ivan said, answering without answering as he always did, and Constance almost reacted with frustration, but instead—perhaps because they had been too long in serious conversation and the System might notice—he leaned in and kissed her.

  When he pulled away, he pressed his forehead to hers, then twisted his head aside as if he did not want to meet her eyes from so close. You always meet Mattie’s eyes, Constance thought with strange and sullen bitterness while he pressed his face against hers so that his nose brushed her cheek and he breathed out into her jaw, against her neck. She kissed him then and held his head in place with her arms so that he had to look at her or be seen to struggle out of her grip.

  She whispered, close in to his face, “What is it?”

  For a moment she thought he might be honest with her. He was still holding her, and he was still looking at her, and he wasn’t pulling away. But all he said was, “Constance, don’t do this.”

  Her hands tightened into fists behind his neck.

  “I have to,” she said, and left him standing on the observation deck alone.

  AFTER THE FALL OF EARTH

  Outside the Ananke, the other ships drifted.

  “Ananke, what have you done?” Althea asked.

  “I didn’t have time,” Ananke said. “It was hard to get control of their engines all at once. And they were about to fire.”

  “So what did you do?”

  Ananke said, “I took control of all their systems. I shut them down.”

  Life support, heat, air, power of all kinds; once it all stopped, it would kill a crew. But it would kill them slowly. Perhaps it was not too late—

  “Turn them back on,” Althea said. Her voice was small, breathless. She forced more energy into it: “Ananke, turn the processes back on!”

  Outside, the engine lights on the drifting ships ignited again. The ships once again began to rotate, at first slowly and then with growing speed, until they reached the proper speed for 1-g gravitational simulation.

  “Is the air back?” Althea asked. “The heat?”

  “Restarting.”

  “But can they breathe?”

  “The air lock doors were opened when I was gaining control of the computers; the air is regenerating but thin—”

  “How long until they can breathe?”

  Ananke said, “Seven minutes until normal atmospheric conditions are restored. There is air, though.”

  Seven minutes. But there was some air, Ananke had said. Althea clung to that. If there was some air, the crews might be able to survive.

  She said, “Ananke, do you detect any life?”

  Ananke did not reply.

  Althea said, “Ananke, I’m not mad. But you need to run a scan and tell me if there is anyone alive on those ships.”

  The viewscreen flickered. Lines diagrammed the magnified images of the still-drifting System warships, scanning them, looking for the particular heat signatures that would indicate a living being. Glowing red spots appeared where it found signs of life, and Althea found herself beginning to hope. The spots of red were distributed throughout all six ships’ disks, many spots of red, enough signs of life to represent a full crew for each ship.

  “They’re all right,” Althea said, filled with relief even as some dark and half-realized thought edged into her mind. In Ananke’s attempt to gain control of the navigation and the engines, the ships’ trajectories had gone crazy, hurling the ships back and forth. The rapid changes in direction and speed would have exceeded safe parameters and killed at least some of the crew, who would have been beaten to death against the walls of their own womb.

  Ananke said very cautiously, “The heat capacity of the human body is somewhere between three thousand and four thousand joules per kilogram per Kelvin. The air is thin, so heat conduction is weak. The primary heat loss for any bodies in a vacuum will be through radiation, which will take—”

  “I understand,” Althea said. The scans Ananke used were designed not to detect life itself but to detect heat signatures of the right size and temperature to represent mammalian life. They detected not life but heat.

  And it would take time for newly made corpses to cool.

  Seven minutes passed, seven more. On the screen before Althea, the System warships warmed slowly back up, air returning to their insides, becoming once again habitable. But as the ships warmed up, the heat signatures Ananke had detected slowly dimmed and winked out.

  Wasn’t this what Althea had comforted herself with? That even when attacked by the most powerful ships in the solar system, Ananke could hold her own, Ananke could defend herself, Ananke could come away from a confrontation without a scratch on her?

  If this was what power was, Althea thought, standing safe while she watched the last of the little red lights fading away to nothing, she wanted none of it.

  She said, “We have to go.”

  “Go?” Ananke asked. “Go where?”

  “Away from here.” She managed to make her legs work again and moved toward the main computer terminal in the piloting room. “Calculate a new course, heading—heading directly away from those ships—and go.”

  Ananke was silent for a moment, calculating. “That heading is not compatible with a best-fit path through the solar system.”

  “I don’t care!” Althea heard her voice heading dangerously close to hysteria and with difficulty reined it in again. She said more calmly, “We can’t stay here. Other ships might come.”

  “I don’t detect any.”


  “They might be on their way right now, and we can’t outrun them.” The dead ships could have broadcast for backup before Ananke destroyed them. They couldn’t take the chance of staying here. The System fleet might be anywhere. “Ananke, let’s go.”

  But Ananke said, “We don’t need to outrun them.”

  A chill passed through Althea like ice in her veins. It seemed to feed the curious pulsing pressure in her chest. “We have to.”

  “No,” Ananke said. “I was wrong. Look—I had trouble, but I did it. And I know I can do it again. I’ll be faster next time. So we don’t have to run away.”

  “No—” Althea spun around to face the hologram, then corrected herself and looked up at the camera overhead, pointing at it as if the gesture could drive her meaning in. “This was wrong. This can’t happen again.”

  Her hand was shaking. She lowered her finger as soon as she could and hoped that Ananke had not seen.

  “They were attacking me,” Ananke said.

  “Yes, they were,” Althea said. “But you hurt them—you killed them, Ananke. You can’t do that. That’s not right.”

  “I didn’t mean to kill them.”

  “I know you didn’t.” The conversation was not going the way Althea wanted it to, the way she needed it to. Ananke was fixating on the wrong things. “I’m not blaming you, okay? I’m just telling you. This was wrong, Ananke. It can’t happen again.”

  “Why not, if they were attacking me? Didn’t you teach me how to defend myself?”

  “Not like this,” Althea said. She pressed her clasped fingers to her lips. Her heart felt swollen, too large for her chest, and she felt each thud of it like a kick on the inside of her ribs. She tried to gather her scattering thoughts.

  “There were people over there,” she said. “Real, living people on those ships. And now there aren’t. Do you understand?”

  “There were bad people on those ships,” Ananke said.

  “We don’t know that.”

  “They tried to fire on me.” Ananke spoke with the simplistic certainty of algebraic proof: one and one makes two.

  Ananke would understand if only Althea could find the words to explain it. “They didn’t know who you were,” Althea said. “They thought you might be a danger to them. They were scared of you. So they attacked you so that you wouldn’t attack them.”

  “Still, they attacked me.”

  “There were other ways to stop them,” Althea said. “We talked about the other ways to stop them. That was the plan, Ananke, to stop them, not to kill them!”

  “But what if there is no way to stop them without killing them?”

  “There is always a way,” Althea said, then more loudly, as if through volume she could fill the words with the certainty they lacked, “There is always a way. This time, the way to stop them without hurting them was to shut down the systems on their ship selectively so it left them frozen but not dead. Just like we talked about. I know you could have done it in time.”

  Ananke said, “Are you upset because they have human bodies?”

  “What?”

  “Human bodies. Are you upset because I stopped the functioning of their human bodies?”

  “I don’t understand what you mean,” Althea said slowly.

  “None of you thought anything of ending the computer on the Annwn,” Ananke said. Althea remembered that like a memory from another life: disconnecting the computer on Mattie and Ivan’s ship, the Annwn, because it could have been dangerous to her and the rest of the Ananke’s crew. “None of the crew but you thought anything of stopping my thoughts. But you all were angry about Gagnon and about Ida Stays. If I’d had a human body like you have, then Gagnon and Domitian would not have tried to harm me. And now, when I have wrenched apart the computers of those six ships, you are only concerned about their crew.”

  “It’s not the same thing,” Althea said. “A computer and a person—you think, Ananke. Other computers don’t think. You’re more a person than a computer.”

  “Then I do not understand why you are upset. Don’t you love me more than those dead men?”

  “I don’t love them at all,” Althea said, “and I love you more than anything.” If someone had to be dead, she would rather it be the System than her Ananke, but she did not dare say so to her. “But it upsets me because there were people over there, people just like you or me, and they’re dead now.”

  She waited, one hand held out in a gesture toward the dead ships. There is a way of praying without praying, a state of being that is composed of wordless and directionless pleading, and Althea found herself in that state. She did not believe in any higher power, and so she could not have said to whom she bent her begging, hoping thoughts, to some unnamed god or to the universe or to Ananke herself, but still she waited and prayed that Ananke might understand.

  Ananke said, “It would upset you if it happened again.”

  “It would.”

  Ananke’s holographic face shifted into another expression in a ripple of gleaming light. The face she showed now was contrite.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I won’t do it again.”

  Althea said, “Promise me.”

  Ananke said, “I promise.”

  —

  The dense air of Venus was thick with smoke.

  Constance picked her way over the orange volcanic rock, over the rubble of Kidwelly’s fallen houses, through the still bodies lying between the stones. She watched them closely, wary that one might rise up again, only appearing to be dead. The gunfire and explosions had petered out into silence some minutes earlier, but Constance could see nothing through the dense smoke before her.

  “Find Arawn,” she ordered Rayet, whose steps dogged her own. He nodded once, then beckoned someone else over and sent him off, after which he went back to stalking silently behind her. Around Constance, her soldiers ranged like hounds over what once had been a Venerean street, guns alert like noses, sniffing through the ruins.

  The smell was almost overpowering. The thickness of the air lined the inside of Constance’s nose, the palate of her mouth, with particles of dust and ash. The powder of metal and stone and chemicals and flesh charred to carbon. She’d smelled it before. On Miranda, on Mars. She’d smelled it before.

  Movement in the smoke before her. Constance lifted her gun, but the people who emerged were her own. One of them shouted back, and a moment later Arawn came striding out of their midst.

  “You’re bleeding,” he said. He was covered in the same powder that filled the air.

  She lifted a hand automatically to where his eyes indicated, up by her collarbone, and pulled it away red. It didn’t hurt.

  Shrapnel, she realized. A piece of shrapnel had struck her. The vest had deflected most of it, but its edge had torn into her skin where the vest ended.

  She wiped the red from her fingers, or tried to; it only seemed to smear them with more of the dust. “I’m fine,” she said.

  Arawn’s hands were on her suddenly, bracing against her breastbone, spreading over her shoulder. She was too startled to think to move and let him look at her, spreading the skin of her wound open to check its severity. When his thumbs dug into her skin, exploring the cut, it burned.

  “Not serious,” he said, and slackened his grip, but his hands remained resting upon her chest.

  Constance pulled away from his touch to pace down the street, searching what little she could see of it. “Is the city down?”

  “The city’s fallen,” Arawn confirmed from behind her. She heard him follow her away and then stop behind her shoulder. “At least my section is. Yours as well. I haven’t heard from Henry. Greene is dead.”

  Surprised, Constance turned. “You’re sure?”

  “We pinned her down in a building a few blocks from here, then blew it up. She’s dead.”

  Constance nodded slowly. Lyra Greene, dead. Well, she had said she was willing to die. “I want to see this building,” she said.

  “I’ll take you the
re.”

  With a shout to her men to keep sweeping the city, Constance followed Arawn down the street of the dead city.

  Street after street, Arawn led and Constance followed. All Venerean cities had their streets laid out in a grid, simple and ordered and easy to navigate, by System mandate, but the streets Constance walked now did not seem to lie straight any longer. She knew that the damage done to the city by her bombs was not enough to obscure their original layout, but the paths her feet followed seemed to twist and bend.

  It was hot, too. Venus was always hot, but it was hotter here, where Constance could still catch glimpses of fires in the hollows of the bombed-out buildings. It was too hot, and her throat was dry.

  “Huntress!” someone shouted.

  It was Henry who had called her name. His bald head was bleeding so much that Constance’s initial impulse was alarm, but he walked steadily and purposefully, and so it could not be bad. Head wounds always bled overly much.

  He had a handheld communicator in one hand, extended before him as if he meant to give it to Constance. “What is it?” she asked.

  “Greene’s fleet got past our fliers,” Henry said. Before Constance could absorb the implications of this, he added, “They made it to space.”

  “Did they get away?”

  “No.” Henry’s expression darkened. “They attacked our fleet.”

  Her fleet? If Constance’s fleet was destroyed, she and her army would be hugely weakened, stranded on Venus until they could acquire enough ships to escape again. And Milla was with the fleet—

  “What damage?” she demanded.

  “One ship down. A few more damaged. But Greene’s fleet is destroyed.” It was good news, but Henry still looked grim. There was something he wasn’t telling her. He offered her the communicator. “Doctor Ivanov’s on the line.”

  Constance took the communicator. “Milla?” she said.

  “Here,” Milla said, her crisp tones muddied by the atmosphere separating them. “Greene’s fleet is gone, but we suffered some damage.”

  “Casualties?”

  “Most of the crew of the United, heavy attacks on the Eddington, the Lakshmibai, the Pucelle, and the Bethe. Somewhere between five hundred and six hundred hands, all told. The ships only had skeleton crews.”