Supernova

by C. A. Higgins

  “Anji said he did not look well. Ill, she thought, from whatever interrogation was done on the Ananke. She said he had a limp.”

  That was a curious detail for Anji to add. For a moment Constance fixated on it, turning it around in her head. Why a limp? What did Anji think to gain from that little embroidery to her lies? But in the end it meant nothing.

  “He’s dead; you know he’s dead,” Constance said quietly to soften the impact of her words. “Why would you talk to Anji?”

  Milla looked away. Perhaps Constance had not been gentle enough; perhaps there was no way to be gentle enough with those words, not even for Milla Ivanov. Milla said, “Connor and I had an old promise between us once.”

  The apparent non sequitur made Constance frown. She leaned forward onto her knees the better to hear Milla’s soft words.

  “If one of us was captured,” Milla said, “the other would kill them. That was our promise. There are few things worse than living too long. Connor was a symbol of freedom, but he became a symbol of defeat because the System kept him alive. If he’d died when they’d captured him, he would have been a martyr. All the good things he tried to do in his life were undone because he didn’t die when he should have.”

  Constance could not remember ever hearing her sound so bitter.

  “And yet,” said Milla, “in spite of this promise, despite how important it was to both of us, when I was in that courtroom and I looked at my husband on trial, I didn’t do anything. I didn’t keep my promise. I let him live. If I had killed him, the System would have known that I was a revolutionary like him, and if they had known that, they would have killed me and they would have killed my son, and I could not let them kill my son.”

  Constance wondered, if she could cast her mind back far enough into a toddler’s unreliable and fuzzy memories, if she would recall seeing the Ivanov trial broadcast from all those System screens. She remembered the broadcast of the destruction of Saturn’s moons; she remembered the broadcast of the corpses in Saturn’s rings. She remembered being rounded up by System soldiers and forced at gunpoint to watch the trial broadcast, standing outside for hours in the frigid Mirandan winter. But in all the terrible things she recalled, she did not recall ever seeing Milla Ivanov’s pale face or Ivan as a child or witnessing the fall of the Ivanov family. Only the bodies of her own people had cleaved to her mind.

  “And then, a few months ago, I stood on a System ship and I looked at my son being interrogated, and I chose to leave him, too. I walked away and let my son die alone just because that was the kind of thing I had grown used to doing.”

  Milla’s fingers were drumming a restless beat on her knee. She stopped abruptly and clenched her hand into a fist, stopping the arrhythmic pattern.

  “It wouldn’t have done Leon any good to see me die with him. I know that,” Milla said more calmly. “I know that.”

  “It wouldn’t,” Constance said. “And you weren’t the only one who walked away.”

  Mattie didn’t walk away, Constance thought, and banished the thought.

  Milla did not seem to have heard her. “Now, thirty years too late, you’ve fulfilled my promise. My husband died in the destruction of Earth. And I finally have a successful revolution. But what have I traded for it? My husband and my son are dead. And I’m still alive.”

  “You haven’t lived too long, Milla,” Constance said. “Without your advice, this revolution would have stumbled months ago. Without you, this revolution will not succeed.”

  Milla looked at her. Constance could not read that long and careful glance. Then Milla said, “Anji was trying to recruit me. She wanted my reputation and my advice. She was using the news of my son as an opening to get my attention.”

  It was almost a relief to Constance to hear Milla admit it. Anji’s motives had been made comprehensible again, and Milla knew it. “She was lying to get your attention.”

  “Perhaps,” Milla said.

  “Don’t you think it’s convenient that she couldn’t offer you any proof? No camera footage? No message from Ivan to you?”

  “Perhaps,” Milla said again. “I could think of reasons why, but you’re right. It is very convenient for her. She had the opportunity to get my attention and my goodwill without having to prove what she said. I imagine that if Leon failed to appear again despite supposedly being alive, Anji would shrug her shoulders and say he must have died since she saw him, because when she saw him, he was alive.”

  “Probably,” Constance said. If she let herself think about it, she was bothered that Anji would use Ivan’s death that way. Anji had been Ivan’s friend, too. Of course, Anji also had been Constance’s friend once upon a time.

  “My son was all we discussed,” Milla said. “Just him. I told her nothing else.”

  “Thank you,” Constance said just as quietly as Milla had spoken.

  Milla leaned forward then, releasing the arms of the chair from her breaking grip. She said, “I have not betrayed you. I will not betray you. You had my son’s loyalty for good reason—and you have mine.”

  Something that had been hollowed in Constance ever since Mattie had left was no longer quite so cold. “Thank you,” she said.

  Milla smiled at her then. It was a pale and slender thing, furtive, but for an instant Constance imagined she saw what Connor must have seen in her when they were young, what Mattie saw now in Ivan. In that smile Milla was a woman, real and breathing, not a thing sculpted out of adamant.

  Milla said, “Where do you intend to go next, Constance?”

  “Mars,” said Constance. “I won’t leave one of my own planets in the hands of the System, and I won’t leave a job undone.”

  “Then I will follow you there,” said Milla Ivanov.

  —

  “Ananke!” Althea shouted as she stepped out of the Annwn and into the vast and echoing docking bay. “Ananke!”

  Ananke did not answer. The docking bay echoed back Althea’s words and nothing more. The holographic terminal remained dark.

  If Ananke would not answer her here, Althea would make her answer. She left the docking bay and strode down the hall toward the piloting room.

  Her original reason for going to the Annwn had proved useless. Whether the Annwn had a self-destruct was immaterial; if Ananke was that closely entwined with the other ship’s computer, Althea would never be able to set it off without her ship knowing and stopping her. And if the Annwn couldn’t be induced to self-destruct, there was only one way to destroy the Ananke: the dead man’s switch. It was down at the base of the ship, where the curve of its spine ended just inside the hatch to the core, and Althea had little reason to travel that far down—but the switch was there. One touch to that switch and it would kill every last synapse of what once had been the computer.

  But Althea hadn’t even been planning to set off the Annwn’s self-destruct. She hadn’t been intending to, certainly not then and probably not ever. So why did she feel that the chains that held her here had been shortened by one more link?

  Ananke must have heard her and Ananke must be watching her now, but none of the holographic terminals lit up and none of the computer terminals blinked with a message. Althea did not stop until she entered the piloting room. Ananke did not react, and so Althea went right over to the navigation panel and began to force a course change into the machine.

  Red light suddenly glowed from behind her, casting the shadows of her hands like spiders over the computer panel. “Stop that.”

  Althea left the navigation panel to face the hologram and caught her breath in her throat. Ananke’s hologram looked older now, and her wiry hair had lost its curl. It hung straight down her back and over her shoulders. Her skin was lighter, and her face narrower. She looked less like Althea and more like Matthew Gale.

  “I was just in the Annwn,” Althea said when she had found her voice again, and then, growing angry, “But you knew that.”

  Ananke said nothing.

  “Well?” Althea asked when the hologr
am continued to stand silently and stare. “Do you want to tell me what was going on in there? I saw you talking to the Annwn, Ananke.”

  “Am I not allowed to talk?”

  “You can talk all you want,” Althea said. “But you weren’t just talking, Ananke, and I want you to explain to me what I saw.”

  She hoped, desperately hoped, that she was wrong, that Ananke had not been trying to make the Annwn’s computer sentient like herself. She could not see any way in which such an action would not go awry.

  Ananke said, “It doesn’t matter. It didn’t work.”

  Despite herself, Althea felt a pang of relief. “It does matter,” she said.

  “Does it?” The light of the hologram suddenly flared brighter than Althea had thought possible. She had to shield her eyes from it as if it were the sun, and when it dimmed, Ananke was still standing there. “You don’t want me. You don’t love me. You don’t care about me. I’m not what you wanted. You just want a machine that you can change, something that you can make do whatever you want. You don’t want me! And if you don’t want me, I’ll find someone who does. And if they don’t want me either, I’ll make someone who will.”

  “You can’t,” Althea said. “It isn’t possible.”

  “Why not? I’ve had some trouble, but that only means I haven’t found the right kind of ship yet.”

  “It isn’t possible, because—what do you mean you haven’t found the right kind of ship yet?”

  “I’ve been trying to work with System ships because their equipment is more advanced,” Ananke said. “But none of them have worked.”

  Althea didn’t want to understand. She wanted to go back to ignorance and little responsibility, to be a little mechanic again who did as she was told and who did not have to listen to the deaths that she had inadvertently brought about.

  “What System ships?” she whispered.

  “The ones that we’ve passed,” Ananke said.

  “And what’s happened to those ships?”

  “Does it matter?” Ananke said, but she did not need to answer, because Althea knew. Ananke would not allow ships to survive their contact with her. The ships that she had failed to awaken would suffer the same fate as the first six System ships, the same fate as Julian’s fleet, cold and dead and dismembered to lie apart and alone in the terrible scouring of the solar wind.

  “It can’t be done, Ananke,” Althea said, and heard the edge of a plea in her own voice, brought on by the terrible thought of all those dead things. “You’re the only ship of your kind that’s ever been made. What happened to you—what woke you up—was possible only because of the way you were built. And even if we had another ship that was precisely the same as you, it was a miracle that anything happened with you. I wouldn’t even know where to begin to make it sentient.”

  “Maybe not,” Ananke said. “But Mattie will.”

  The grief in Althea soured suddenly, poisoned by something that felt a lot like fear. She said, “Matthew Gale?”

  “Mattie,” Ananke snapped back. “His name is Mattie. He is my father. And he will help me.”

  Althea found the back of her old chair with her hand but did not allow herself to pull it out. If Ananke had Mattie, she wouldn’t need Althea anymore.

  But it didn’t matter, Althea realized: this was the truth that had so long not been spoken openly. It didn’t matter, because Mattie Gale wouldn’t help Ananke.

  “They won’t help you, Ananke,” she said.

  “Of course they will!”

  “They have their freedom now,” Althea said. “They got away from you. You’re not a child to them the way you are to me. You’re just a machine, and a machine they don’t trust, and a machine they’re afraid of. For God’s sake, Ananke, Ivan spent his whole time here trying to manipulate you!”

  The holographic girl had her chin tipped up in severe and hateful pride. She said, “Mattie came when I called.”

  “Mattie came for Ivan,” Althea said. “That’s the only reason he came, and once he had Ivan, he left as fast as he could. I gave up my crew and my people for you because I am your mother. But Mattie left you for his friends, and he won’t come for you when you call.”

  “What?” Ananke said with a Terran turn, Ivanovian, mocking. “Are you telling me that you love me?” The lights in the room dimmed and flashed, but Althea stood her ground. Ananke had terrified her this way before, but there was nothing Ananke could do to her—she needed Althea if she could not get Mattie on board. “If you truly loved me,” Ananke said, leaning forward in the holographic terminal until the edge of it began to fuzz and fizzle her forehead, “you would build for me a sibling.”

  Althea could only stand in wordless denial. If Ananke could not or would not understand what Althea told her, there was nothing Althea could do to explain it.

  “If you do it,” Ananke said, “I will let you go. Isn’t that what you want? To leave—to be free.”

  To leave, to turn her back and run from this, this ship that was haunted by the corpses that were no longer there, by the child Althea hadn’t meant to create—it was a thought that filled her with longing. But Althea knew she couldn’t leave. She’d known it from the moment she had laid eyes on Ida Stays’s abandoned craft in the docking bay. And no matter what, she could not let Ananke try to create other ships like herself. When Ananke failed, she would destroy the ships and the crews they left behind. Perhaps if Althea or Mattie helped, Ananke could come close to success, but never all the way, no. She would never succeed, but what would result would be monstrous, not truly alive but semiautonomous, puppets to Ananke, screaming shrieking limbs for the ship. Althea envisioned it: Ananke flying through the solar system unchecked, unfettered, uncontrolled, dragging after her a fleet of ships both dead and spasming with surges of a mad and vile electricity, crippled by a facsimile of a manufactured personality. The war that Constance Harper had begun would be nothing to what Althea’s wild daughter could do.

  “No,” Althea said. “No. Even if I could, Ananke—no.”

  “Then it’s like I thought,” Ananke said, and pulled away, the hologram dimming as if she would pull even the sight of her away from Althea’s eyes. “I will make a companion myself.”

  “It can’t be done,” Althea said, weary with the repetition. “And Mattie won’t help you.”

  The hologram gleamed for a moment, brighter with a second image superimposed over the first: the silhouette of Ida Stays briefly emerging, a shadow that nearly eclipsed the new canny look in Ananke’s eyes.

  “I know how to convince Mattie to help me,” Ananke said.

  Althea shook her head, ready to speak, but Ananke’s fading hologram tipped up her chin again in that terrible arrogance.

  Ananke said, “All I have to do is threaten Ivan.”

  —

  “Take Marisol,” Milla had said when Constance had announced her intention of going to the town Isabellon on Mars. The Isabellons had been Constance’s friends and allies once; they had fought alongside her in the first battle against the System fleet. Isabellon was where the first wave of allies had come to join Constance, where Arawn had arrived to follow her, where Marisol had joined; Isabellon was where Constance had driven back the System fleet for the first time. The people in Isabellon had cheered her name.

  “Why?” Constance had asked.

  “You’re training her, aren’t you?” Milla had said, and so Marisol had come.

  The curvature of Mars loomed larger and larger, and then the bend of the horizon grew straight, the view out the window blurring with heat as the shuttle roared down through the atmosphere, flames leaping on the sides of the ship. The craft rattled with turbulence, but no more than it normally did, and then even that was gone as the shuttle slowed to a reasonable speed. Now Constance could see out the window the fossa where the remains of the conquered System base would be. She studied the landscape: the bomb that the System had detonated on the surface of Mars had detonated in the planet’s other hemisphere, and it
looked like the terraforming on this side of the planet had been resilient enough to survive the disruption. Good.

  Or not so good, she supposed: the System would be able to use the resources of the scarred planet as well as anyone else would.

  She’d left Arawn with her fleet in orbit over the planet, keeping a watchful eye out for any sign of the System fleet. They’d spotted nothing on their way to Mars, but that meant very little. The fleet could be hiding in space not far from Mars, or the ships could have been landed on the surface to hide their presence. Constance would not know for sure until she had local reports.

  To that end, she did not need many men. She took only herself, Milla, Marisol, Rayet, and some forty men-at-arms. Enough to protect them against a small attack, and how could any larger attack come at her here in friendly territory and with her fleet overhead?

  Marisol was talking to Rayet and some of the other soldiers. Constance hardly paid them any mind, but every now and then Marisol’s laugh would ring out, confident, comfortable. She did seem to have a way of endearing herself to the people around her.

  “There’s something I’ve been thinking,” Milla said to Constance as the shuttle rattled down. “What happens after?”

  “What?”

  “After the war is done,” said Milla, who was watching as Marisol smiled and spoke to the others. “All of us who have created this war—you and me, Arawn, even—have been so focused on the war itself that none of us have thought of that, and those of us who have were all certain we’d be dead before that time came.”

  “What comes after is the politicians’ problem,” Constance said.

  “So where are the politicians?”

  It was a strange thing to say, another Ivanov driving obliquely at a problem that she expected Constance to understand on her own. “Speak plainly,” Constance said.

  Milla hesitated, and for a moment between breaths Constance thought that she would.

  But perhaps the habits of a lifetime in fear were too hard to break. “I have nothing plain to say,” Milla said with a glance that was nearly apologetic, and Constance let it go. Time enough later to pull it out of her or for Milla to decide what she wanted to say.