Supernova

by C. A. Higgins

  “Listen, please,” Marisol said, her tone changing from outrage to childish pleading. “I know you have a good heart. I saw it on Julian’s ship when you hid Milla Ivanov’s son—”

  “I told you never to speak of that.” Stupid of her to trust Marisol to keep that a secret. Stupid of her to think that Marisol wouldn’t use that knowledge to her advantage. Stupid to think—what was it Ivan had told her? A secret’s never safe with two—

  “I won’t,” Marisol said earnestly. “I promise. I won’t tell anyone. That’s not what I meant. I’m not trying to threaten you; I’m not trying to put your friends in danger. I’m appealing for the people of Europa the way I should’ve for Venus and Isabellon. Please, Constance. Let’s leave.”

  Marisol made leaving sound so simple, as if it were just a matter of turning around and flying somewhere else. It was never that simple, not with as many people following her as Constance had, not with as much risk. She couldn’t simply leave.

  “I’ll take that under consideration,” Constance said as coldly as she was able, recalling Milla Ivanov and her way of dismissing an unwanted speaker. Yet Marisol did not move. “Thank you, Marisol,” she said, and turned her back on the girl to make the dismissal obvious. She took a step toward the little bedroom in the back of the house, intending to retreat there and think.

  Constance did not hear the front door open and close. Instead, she heard the rustle of fabric, and then Marisol said with a queer tone in her voice, “I wasn’t threatening you before. I am threatening you now.”

  Constance turned.

  Marisol stood on the other side of the kitchen table, out of Constance’s reach even in the small room. The map was still spread out beneath her, showing Europa’s scarred surface. Marisol had her arms up and in front of her, and the gun in her hand was pointing directly at Constance.

  It was like seeing Julian’s corpse on his ship, Constance thought. She should have felt something powerful, anger or grief or disbelief or fear, but she felt nothing at all.

  “You?” she said, because she could not think of anything else to say.

  Marisol’s hands trembled, her face scrunching up, but when she spoke, her voice was steady.

  Marisol said, “I’m not your daughter, and I’m not your brother, and I am not you. I won’t stand here any longer when I could do something to stop you from killing anyone else.”

  “You came in here with that gun,” Constance said, remembering Marisol’s refusal to remove her jacket. “You were planning this all along.”

  “I didn’t want to,” Marisol said from the other side of that gun.

  Rayet was outside. If Constance shouted for him, he would come in quickly but not quickly enough to outrace a bullet fired. “Because you didn’t want to, does that mean it won’t be murder when you shoot me?”

  “Wasn’t Earth murder?”

  “You joined me because of that,” Constance said. “Where would you be if I hadn’t done it? Still in the mines, with the System killing whatever family and friends you had left.”

  “I don’t know whether Earth was right or wrong,” Marisol said. “I don’t know! I think things would have been worse if you hadn’t done it, but I don’t know. But this?” She indicated the map of Europa beneath her without once taking the muzzle of her gun away from its position facing Constance’s chest. “This is clear. This is black and white. This is wrong!”

  “Do you want a revolution without a war?” Constance demanded, lowering her voice as Marisol had raised hers.

  “The war is over!”

  “Everything you’ve seen around you, and you say this war is over?”

  “Yes!” Marisol said. “It’s over. It’s been over for a long time. You did it. The System is gone because you destroyed it. You can’t keep chasing the System from planet to planet, because it’s not there anymore.”

  The System was so omnipotent, omnipresent, eternal, that Constance could not accept the idea. The point all along had been to destroy it, but the idea that it already had been destroyed was alien. She did not know what might follow after such an idea. “The System can’t be gone.”

  “Can’t it?” Marisol’s face was so expressive, so like Mattie’s had been. “When was the last time we saw the System?”

  “Here, on Europa.”

  “No.” Marisol’s hands were so steady on that gun. I’ve made quite a soldier out of her, Constance thought. Marisol said, “Where’s the fleet, Constance?”

  A flare of anger took her. “That’s what we’re looking for.”

  “Where could it be? You know the System better than I do. But make me understand why the most powerful fleet in the solar system would go somewhere and hide. Make me understand and I swear, Constance, I will put down this gun and you can do whatever you want to me.”

  “The fleet went to rebuild its strength.”

  “Where? We were destroying any place it could have gone. Wasn’t that the point?”

  That was true. She remembered Ivan, sounding so cold, the way his mother had sounded, when he told her, Planet to planet, don’t let the fleet get a foothold. If you destroy their bases, they won’t be able to find a place to rest; they won’t be able to recover—

  But—

  “They found another base,” Constance said.

  Marisol said, “Where?”

  Not Mars; Constance had driven them from the planet. She’d heard that the System had come back, but when she had gone there, she’d found nothing but the angry Isabellons. Her fleet had not seen any kind of large-scale force. The System could still be on Mars, but not in force, and the fleet was not there.

  Not Venus, either. Constance had been there for weeks. The System had not been there, could not have been there.

  Not Mercury; she’d been there, too.

  “Luna,” she said, thinking to herself, You fool. You should have completed your plan; you should have gone to Luna. “They’re on Luna.”

  But at the same time she remembered Ivan leaning in to her, saying softly so that the cameras could not pick up his words, Luna’s last. Go to Luna last; it’s too small to support the full fleet for any length of time…

  Marisol was shaking her head. “If the fleet’s still out there, why haven’t they used the rest of the bombs?”

  “The Terran Class 1s?”

  “They used one on Mars and then what?”

  And then nothing. Why would the System not use the greatest advantage it had? It could have easily swung by Venus, or Mercury, or Mars again, anywhere Constance might have gone, and detonated the rest of its bombs with hardly any risk to itself.

  Marisol was shaking her head, bitter. “When I joined you, I thought you were amazing.”

  Constance barely heard her. The fleet must have decided to save the bombs for later use, but why? And not a word about them. Surely the System would have threatened to use them, would have tried to spread fear, but they had not said a word. Then the fleet must have gone out past the asteroid belt, but where? Julian had been with Anji on Saturn; if the fleet was there, it was there only recently—

  “I thought your war was justice,” Marisol said.

  —and even if she imagined that the fleet was on Saturn now, where had it been before Saturn?

  “I still think your war is justice. It’s terrible, but I think it was justice. But you?”

  Jupiter. Her thoughts took her unerringly back to where she was now: the System must be on Jupiter. But here she was, in the Jovian system, and where was the fleet? The only fleet she had found had been Julian’s, dead. She’d heard of one ship, one System ship, but no others. And with a terrible lurch, like taking a step in the dark and realizing just as her balance shifted too far that there was no ground underfoot, like pulling the trigger and realizing only after the hammer had struck that the chamber was empty, Constance knew what she had not allowed herself to realize: there was nowhere in the Jovian system to hide the System fleet. Not even the clouds of great Jupiter could hide so large a force for so
long.

  Marisol said, “I thought you were better than the rest of us. I thought that you could see—could see more clearly than any of us could. But you can’t, can you? You’re not what I thought you were.”

  I didn’t, said the Mattie of Constance’s memory with the same disillusionment that Marisol showed now.

  “Then you tell me, Marisol,” Constance said. “Where is the fleet?”

  “I don’t know,” Marisol said. “I don’t—I think it must have fallen apart.”

  Constance tried to imagine it, a force that great simply disintegrating, all its component pieces spreading themselves to the solar winds and, separated from the great whole, becoming individual parts as unlike the whole as could be: the great fleet dismembered.

  Perhaps they deserted, she remembered Milla Ivanov suggesting millions of miles and what felt like hundreds of years ago. There’s a world of a difference between disgruntled colonists and an organized enemy.

  Her own forces were falling apart by the day, and they had come together out of a mutual cause and mutual loyalty. The System’s forces had no such cohesion.

  “Starting on Mars,” Constance said slowly, testing the sense of it for herself. “The battle at Isabellon. We defeated them. And then they detonated the bomb.”

  Mars had been Earth’s brother planet, second behind Earth among the inner planets. So much of the System army was composed of Martians. How could those System soldiers accept the assault on their own planet?

  “It would have split them,” Constance said. “Terrans against all the rest, and maybe not even all the Terrans—they never won a battle against us, either. Not at Isabellon, not after. Not until Olympus Mons—and they were taking heavy casualties.”

  “I don’t know,” Marisol said. “I just know that they’re not here now.”

  It made sense. And Constance knew that if Ivan had been here, he would have pieced it together ages before in his shrewd and careful way. Milla Ivanov had not—or perhaps, Constance realized with the same lurch in her heart, Milla Ivanov had realized it but had not dared to speak.

  “Then where are the ships, the physical ships?” Constance said more to herself than to Marisol. “Even if the fleet fell apart, there were thousands of ships…”

  “They must be hiding,” Marisol said. “They know you’d kill them if you found them. Most of the ships from the System fleet could pass for rebel ships once they were roughed up a bit, and a few ships alone won’t attract any attention, not the way a whole fleet would.”

  Most of the ships the rebels flew were stolen System craft. If Constance had passed by a handful of System ships that looked like they had been stolen and that had told her that they were rebels, she would have believed them, because she had been looking for the entire fleet.

  How many ships had she passed that had been System and she hadn’t even realized it? How many pieces of the System fleet had she allowed to live?

  “And maybe what Tory told us was right,” Marisol said. There was a tight edge in her voice. “Maybe that ship, the one that killed Julian’s fleet, maybe it isn’t System at all but just a rogue virus, and it came across some of the System ships, and they’re dead somewhere between the planets. We wouldn’t have known about Julian’s fleet if we hadn’t stumbled right on it.”

  Too many maybes, too many ifs, too many possibilities. Constance shook her head and focused on what was real. “The fleet may be gone, but there are still supporters of the System,” she said. “Any peace now would turn to violence again in a short time, and it would be a worse and a longer fight than if we did the job cleanly now.”

  “Isn’t that what the System did to us? Killing whole planets, whole crowds just to get at the one or two people who wanted to overthrow them?”

  “Then what would you have me do?” Constance asked, advancing toward Marisol, toward the gun that still pointed with a soldier’s unerring certainty at her heart. “What do you want from me, Marisol?”

  “I want you to leave this moon,” Marisol said. “I want you to go back to Mars, or to Venus, or to Mercury, and I want you to fix it. You left those planets in pieces. Build them back up again.”

  She didn’t know how. That was her first thought, that she did not have the slightest idea how to create. Constance had known only how to destroy; the System had only ever taught her how to destroy, the fire of an explosion, the rending of a bullet.

  Someone knocked on the door. Constance stared at Marisol, and she stared back, each of them frozen, neither knowing what to do. Then whoever it was knocked again, but this time the door shuddered open.

  Marisol had not closed it properly, Constance realized. The latch hadn’t taken. A man was standing just outside with Rayet’s hand on his shoulder, trying to prevent him from knocking—a prevention that had been too late. The man was one of Arawn’s men. She saw the moment Rayet and Arawn’s man saw Marisol, the moment they saw Constance, the moment they saw the gun. Arawn’s man turned to shout, to call for help, and Rayet moved forward—to Constance’s aid, she thought—but no, he had grabbed the man by the throat, stopping his shout. He was choking the man, holding him, bearing him down to the ground. Constance stared. When the man was down, Rayet looked at Marisol and nodded.

  “Hey!” someone shouted from farther away; they had seen the attack. Constance stared at the dead man at her doorstep. The shout had brought more spectators. Rayet was straightening up, his hand going to his gun.

  Someone saw them, saw Marisol and Constance through the open door, and the shouts changed tenor. Rayet fired once but missed, and the shouting spread, the camp rousing, an uproar building like a low fire fed fuel.

  “Go,” Marisol said to Rayet, and he hesitated, looking at her, looking at Constance. “Go,” she said again, and he slammed the door shut and left. Constance could hear the shouting through the shut door. Marisol still had her gun trained on Constance. Rayet might get away, perhaps, but Marisol never would.

  “Arawn will be here soon,” Constance said to Marisol, feeling impossible calm. “If you’re going to shoot me, this is your last chance.”

  For a long time, Marisol looked at her while the shouts outside grew louder and louder.

  Then, “No,” she said, and placed the gun on the table, atop the marked up map of the Annwn Regio.

  “They will kill you,” Constance said.

  “If Arawn wants to kill me, let him try,” Marisol said.

  Outside, Constance heard the shouting grow louder. Running footsteps were coming closer, but even though Marisol turned to face the door, she didn’t take up the gun again.

  “The moment he steps through that door, he will shoot you,” said Constance. “Do you understand that?”

  Marisol swallowed but said nothing. A strand of her hair pulled away from where it had been slicked back and dangled down over her forehead, falling into her eyes. She was as stubborn and angry as Mattie had been the moment he had left her.

  Constance said, “Go to the back, out the window. If you move quickly, they won’t catch you.”

  “You want me to run away?”

  “If you want to live, you don’t have a choice,” Constance said. “Go!”

  The shouts were very near, but still Marisol hesitated. Then she decided as Constance had known she would. Marisol was young and alive and full of ideals, and when Constance had been sixteen and furious on Miranda, she’d chosen to live every time in hope of justice later, in hope simply of living. Marisol pushed open the back window and slipped out. Constance watched to make sure she was out, then went back into the main room just in time for Arawn to burst in with his gun drawn.

  “Where is she?” he demanded, his eyes and the nose of his gun searching the room.

  “Out the back,” Constance said, and Arawn pushed her into the corner to go past her and look out the back window. He leveled his gun out the window and took a shot before Constance could stop him, but a moment later he swore, and so Constance knew he had missed.

  “She’s
heading north; get her,” he snapped at the men who had followed him in, and they took off running.

  “Rayet’s with her,” Constance said.

  “We know,” Arawn said with dark fury. “What happened in here?”

  The door had been left open, and the chill from outside was creeping in. “Marisol was angry,” Constance said. “She tried to shoot me. As your man saw. Rayet was guarding the door.”

  “But she didn’t?”

  “She changed her mind.”

  “And got away.”

  “And got away,” Constance said.

  Arawn was looking at her in a way that Constance couldn’t read. “Leaving her gun.”

  “Yes,” Constance said without a glance to where the gun still lay on top of the map of Europa, silently daring Arawn to question her word.

  He looked aside when she didn’t speak. “Rest here,” he said. “We’ll catch her. I’ll leave guards with you.”

  “That’s not necessary,” Constance said.

  “Then I’ll leave them outside your door,” Arawn said, and was gone. At a glance from Constance, Arawn’s guards went to stand outside, closing the door behind themselves.

  Constance went into the bedroom and closed the window. She looked through the glass. There was a lot of movement down that way, but she could not see Marisol.

  She went back to the kitchen and paced, thinking of the System fleet, thinking of Mars, thinking of all the things that she had done, thinking of all that she should do.

  When Arawn came back, his face was grim, but Constance was ready for him.

  “We’re leaving Europa,” she said.

  “What?”

  “We’re leaving.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To Mars,” Constance said.

  “Why?” Arawn said. “The System’s here, Huntress.”

  “Look around you, Arawn; it isn’t,” Constance snapped. “There’s nothing here.”

  “We haven’t even reached the cities yet, Constance!”

  “We’re leaving,” Constance told him firmly. This was her will, and he’d follow it; this was her army, and he was her general, and he would do as he was told. “Did you catch Marisol?”