Supernova

by C. A. Higgins

  A flare of fury took Constance now that her immediate fear was passing. “How did they get past us?”

  It was Henry who answered. “As far as we can tell, the other cities that supported Greene sent support to Kidwelly during the battle,” he said, pitching his voice so that Milla could hear. “I encountered more resistance at the south side of the city than we were expecting.”

  “There were more ships than Greene could have possibly had at Kidwelly alone,” Milla agreed.

  Constance had hoped that the other cities would surrender once Kidwelly fell and that her attack on Greene’s city would be too swift for any of her allies to provide meaningful aid. It seemed she had been wrong.

  “Well done, repelling them,” she said to Milla. “I want you to—”

  “It isn’t me you should be thanking.”

  Constance looked at Henry. He was still watching her with the same grim expression. Carefully, Constance said, “What happened?”

  “Marisol Brahe led the attack.”

  “Marisol?” said Constance. For a moment she couldn’t remember the face that went with the name, and then it came to her. The girl who had joined her on Mars, the one whose hair had been perpetually threatening to fall into her eyes, as Mattie’s had done when he had been her age. “What was a teenage girl doing leading an attack with my ships, Milla?”

  “She was on the Pucelle. The first attack took out most of the piloting room and the ranking officers. Marisol took control of the ship and returned fire to Greene’s fleet. By the time the Wild Hunt was able to join the attack, a number of the nearby ships were already following her example. She was a good symbol.” Rarely had Milla Ivanov’s voice sounded quite so flat and cold. “So I used her.”

  The verb chilled Constance. “And is she alive?”

  “Yes. I didn’t leave her to fend for herself; I told her what to do, and she followed my directions. I believe the other captains were glad to have someone to follow who reminded them of you.”

  Curious phrasing from Milla, but Constance let it pass. Out of the corner of her eye she caught sight of Rayet. He was listening with great intensity to her conversation. Constance said, “Tell her I will speak with her when I return to the Wild Hunt.”

  “I will, Huntress.”

  Constance handed the communicator back to Henry. “Keep sweeping the city,” she told him. “I want to be sure no resistance is left.”

  “Yes, Huntress,” he said, and left.

  Arawn was waiting. “Take me to Greene’s body,” she said.

  The place where Greene had died was still burning. Sometimes the heat from an explosion was enough to ignite even material that normally would not burn, and once such a fire began, it was hard to put out. The smoke here was black, and the air was even thicker for it. The buildings on either side of the blast site were charred and half ruined by the force of the blast, and metal beams lay twisted and bent in the crater on the ground.

  Greene had died in a System building. Even though it was in ruins, Constance could tell what the architecture had been.

  She walked slowly around the edges of the ruin, where it was just safe enough to stand. Between the fallen beams and glass and stone she could see the red glow of the fires underground.

  She remembered Miranda, the System lighting a house on fire and shooting the people who came out. System broadcasts had never reported those sorts of events, but Constance had witnessed them with her own two eyes. The people inside had to choose between death in the flames and death by the firing squad. She remembered the smell of the burning houses and the burning people; she remembered the thickness of the smoke. It had smelled much the same as the air smelled here and now.

  There was a body on the edges of the crater. The fire had burned all its skin to bubbling red. Whatever hair and clothes the person had had were all burned away. Constance could not know if the red corpse had been Lyra Greene, but she stood for a moment and watched the flesh bubble as the fire below crept up higher to devour what was left.

  Constance remembered the people in Miranda starving in the streets. She remembered going to other moons in the outer solar system and seeing the way the people flinched away from the System soldiers. She remembered the ruin, the slow choking death of the people trapped and suffocating when the System broke the greenhouse enclosure that kept them alive.

  This was justice, she told herself. Finally, after all those years, she had the power to right the wrongs that had been done, and she would use that power well.

  Constance stood at the edge of the fire she had lit and inhaled the thick, choking dust on the Venerean wind.

  —

  “Tighter,” Althea said. “If you grip it that loosely, it’ll slide out when you move.”

  She sat atop the table in her workroom with one of the mechanical arms wheeled up in front of her, its grasping fingers closing slowly around a pen. In the opposite corner of the room, where the holographic terminal was, Ananke’s hologram sat and watched with sightless eyes. She had one hand raised, fingers curled around the air, just as the physical metal hand in front of Althea gripped the pen.

  Althea held the other end of the pen to stop it from falling. “Slowly,” she cautioned while the mechanical fingers began to tighten around the pen.

  “I already have it,” Ananke said impatiently.

  “Sure,” said Althea, “but you’re using too much force or too little. You have to learn how much force is just right.”

  Ananke was silent for a moment, her holographic and physical fingers working simultaneously. “Do humans know it instinctively?” she asked.

  “Sort of. They learn when they’re babies.”

  Ananke’s mechanical arm stretched forward a little bit, and the hologram leaned forward correspondingly, her arm extending too far, outside the holographic terminal’s ability to project. The holographic hand ended in a fizzing stump at the forearm, but Ananke did not seem to notice.

  Althea turned her attention away from it. It was nothing more than a hologram, she reminded herself; it wasn’t truly Ananke, just a representation.

  “Let go,” Ananke said suddenly.

  Althea didn’t. “Have you got it?”

  “Yes. Let go.”

  Althea let go. The pen stayed.

  “Good,” Althea said. She held out her hand. “Now give it to me.”

  The mechanical arm reached out carefully and placed the pen on Althea’s fingers. Althea closed her hand quickly to catch it before it rolled off.

  “Good, but your localization was off,” she commented, putting the pen on the table beside her. “You’re going to need to learn how to tell where exactly something is.”

  “Let me try it again.”

  “I have a better idea. Call another arm in here.”

  Ananke’s hologram sat back, pulling all her limbs back into the bounds of the holographic terminal. The mechanical hand in front of Althea remained frozen, outstretched. Althea hopped down from the table to dig around in her toolbox.

  By the time she had found what she needed, there was a low grumbling roar from the hallway of wheels rattling over grates. Althea sat back up on the table just as Ananke’s hologram turned its head to face the door in uncanny sync with the mechanical arm that at that very moment pushed its way in.

  Ananke said, “I got the doorknob.”

  “Very good,” Althea said as the second mechanical arm rumbled its way up beside the first. They were both very large even with their joints bent, and they crowded her on the table.

  Althea tried to ignore it. She lifted up the item she had pulled out of the toolbox for Ananke to see.

  Ananke said, “Rope?”

  “Twine,” Althea corrected, and quickly untangled the length of it. It was a good meter, a usable length for the sizable mechanical arms. Althea offered one end to the first arm and the other end to the second, and Ananke accepted the twine.

  “Now,” said Althea, and pulled her legs up onto the table, too, for a little bit m
ore distance from the arms, though they could have reached her even if she had been on the other side of the table entirely. “Tie a knot.”

  “What kind of knot?” Ananke wanted to know.

  “Just a box knot,” said Althea.

  The mechanical arms began to move, and then each one stopped, with Ananke evaluating. Then they began to move again but overshot each other. The next time they managed to come close together—the localization, Althea noted, was the problem; she’d have to go in and refine the code herself—moving slowly so that they would not collide and damage themselves. But the fingers could not quite figure out how to achieve the dexterity required to pull the loop through.

  Ananke said, “Is this something humans must learn, too?”

  “Well, sort of,” Althea said, watching as the arms fumbled and one hand dropped its length of twine. “But the dexterity and the localization—uh, the body awareness—” She could not tell which term was better. “—they’re an instinctive sense, and babies just have to refine it.”

  The hologram was frowning. The hand picked up its end of the twine again.

  Go into the code and refine the localization, Althea thought. Then see if there’s anything that can be done with the touch sensors. Ananke will probably be able to update them herself, but the localization may be a problem. Perhaps Ananke needs better hardware—

  “Proprioception,” Ananke said suddenly.

  “What?”

  “Proprioception,” Ananke said. “Awareness of the location of body parts and the ways that they move. That is the term for the human sense.”

  Proprioception, Althea thought. She likes that term better than “localization.”

  “Thank you,” Althea said for lack of anything better, and watched the mechanical hands begin to move again.

  “Ananke,” she said carefully, taking a risk, but it had been troubling her for a while and this seemed as good a time as any to bring it up. “Do you understand why what happened with those ships was wrong?”

  “You told me,” Ananke said. “Because those people died.”

  “But do you understand why?” Althea pressed.

  The hologram was moving her fingers, her hands, as if she were tying an invisible knot. Closer to Althea, the mechanical hands moved as well in graceless imitation of the hologram’s well-practiced simulation. Ananke said, “I do not understand why energy must be conserved and why parity may not always be so, but they are rules.”

  For a moment Althea felt relief. If Ananke saw her rules as being as inviolable as the conservation of energy, everything would be fine. But Ananke said, “But I do not understand—the universe prevents me from violating the conservation of energy. But your rule, not to kill—I can break that law.”

  Althea’s heart thumped heavily in her chest. In front of her, the two mechanical arms were wheeling slowly apart with the grinding of unoiled gears, stretching out the twine to its full length so that the camera above could see it clearly. The hologram stretched her arms out to her sides, fingers pinched together, and regarded empty space with a thoughtful eye.

  “You can’t break this rule,” Althea said as firmly as she could.

  “ ‘Can’t’ implies inability,” Ananke said. “I am able to do it. I should not—there is obligation. But there is no inabil—”

  “No,” Althea snapped, “you cannot,” just as the mechanical arms, with their imperfect localization, drew too far apart and the twine snapped in two.

  “Okay,” Ananke said while each broken piece of twine dangled from its respective hand.

  “Good,” said Althea, and swallowed and then hopped down from the table so that she could go get another length of twine.

  But, she thought, Ananke was right. A real child, a human child, Althea could have picked up in her arms and put into her crib. A human girl Althea could have held, could have physically overpowered. But Ananke was vast and great and vaster and greater than Althea, and if she decided not to do as Althea said, Althea would not be able to stop her.

  —

  Constance listened closely to the tablet she held, but she heard nothing but static.

  She scrubbed her face with one hand. For a moment she’d thought she had heard Julian, muffled by static and almost incoherent, but she must have been wrong. She had broadcast out the sounds of the barking hounds hours earlier and recently received it in return, but perhaps Julian’s message had been lost to the interference of the sun.

  It was past time since she should have heard from him. Communication across the solar system was nearly impossible. In part, she knew, this was due to her revolution, which was working to destroy all System bases and equipment regardless of function. Those were her orders, and she did not regret them. But it did leave her sitting in the conference room adjoining her quarters on the Wild Hunt, hunched beneath the room’s low-hanging ceiling, hoping that the communications equipment her people had been trying to boost for days would be able to reach all the way to the outer solar system. Her people and Altais’s were cleaning up the last traces of resistance on Venus now; it would be time to move on from the planet soon, but Constance did not want to proceed until she had some idea of what was going on in the outer solar system.

  If Mattie were here, she thought, but shut the thought down swiftly. Mattie was not there. And even if he had been, there was no guarantee he could have forced subpar equipment to reach all the way to Julian’s location, anyway.

  Someone knocked on her door.

  “Come in,” she said, and for the moment ceased to hope that Julian’s message was going to emerge from the static emptiness.

  The door swung open. Carefully, hesitantly, Marisol Brahe stepped in, with Milla Ivanov ghosting along behind her. Milla came to sit beside Constance while Marisol stood stiffly by the door.

  “You wanted to see me?” Marisol said.

  Constance studied her. Marisol did not look as young as she was in Constance’s memory of her, but she was still painfully young, dark hair still on the edge of falling into her wide brown eyes. But she stood at attention in front of Constance without fidgeting or wavering.

  “Yes,” said Constance. “It’s about what happened on the Pucelle.”

  Marisol swallowed.

  Constance chose her words carefully. “I think you have good instincts, Marisol. In the battle, you knew what you had to do to keep yourself and the people around you alive.”

  “Thank you, Huntress.”

  “You also knew, I imagine, that you shouldn’t have acted without consulting with Doctor Ivanov first,” Constance said.

  “Yes, Huntress.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “There wasn’t time, Huntress.”

  “So you acted anyway.”

  “Yes, Huntress.”

  “Were you afraid?” Constance asked.

  “Yes,” said Marisol. “I mean, I wasn’t when it was happening. I just thought: this is something I have to do. Not, I have to do this or I’ll die. Just, this has to be done, and I have to do it.”

  Marisol shifted her weight when she spoke, her hands coming up to gesture expressively. When she finished speaking and remembered herself, she let her hands drop and resumed her attentive stance. She was short, Constance noticed; the terrible lowness of the ceiling did not trouble her.

  “That’s how it is,” Constance said. “In the moment, everything has perfect clarity. You can’t be afraid when the way forward is that clear and when your decisions are that simple.” Her favorite moment in every attack was the moment when she pressed the detonator, right before the explosion, the moment the System was coming at them and it was finally time to turn on them with tooth and nail.

  “But there’s more that goes into it than that one moment,” Constance said. “There are plans that you are not a part of, rules that you have to follow. I tell you what to do or what not to do, and you obey me. Do you understand?”

  “I understand,” Marisol said, then, more strongly, “I understand. I should h
ave talked to Doctor Ivanov before I attacked the other ships.” Her gaze flickered briefly, apologetically, to Milla Ivanov.

  “You should have,” Constance said quietly, “if you could have,” and with those words Marisol’s attention snapped so closely on her that Constance thought that if the ship blew up around them, Marisol still would not take her gaze from her face.

  Constance made her decision.

  “I’m going to have you spend some more time with Henry. He’ll take care of you, teach you. We need people with good instincts,” she said, “and we’ll need them more than ever when the System fleet strikes. Do you understand me?”

  “I understand,” said Marisol, and now she did smile, her smile small and controlled but brilliant in its sincerity.

  “You’re dismissed,” Constance said, and Marisol nodded, moved as if she meant to bow, and thought better of it. She glanced once more at Milla Ivanov, then left the room.

  When they were alone, Milla said, “She’s a good girl, but a danger.”

  Constance laughed. “A danger?”

  “Yes. Keep her loyal.”

  “Or what?”

  Milla lifted a shoulder. “Or have her killed.”

  Constance stared at her for a moment, trying to decide if this was a strange Terran form of humor. Certainly Ivan had tended to say things that she had not thought were funny but had left him laughing a breathless and bitter laugh.

  “You’re serious,” she said.

  “If Marisol ever decides not to follow your orders, she will be a great threat to you,” Milla said.

  “I don’t kill my own!”

  “Of course not,” Milla agreed. “That’s why you should keep her loyal.”

  Getting angry at Milla Ivanov was a waste of energy; Constance could have shouted at Ivan and reliably had him react, but her words slid off Milla Ivanov like raindrops off glass. She sighed and rested her head against the back of her chair, staring up at that low ceiling. There was a patch in it over her head. A camera, she thought; a camera had been there and had been removed, but Constance still could see where it had been.