Supernova

by C. A. Higgins

  His grim look grew darker. “No,” he said. “She got away.”

  Constance nodded. She supposed it was a relief.

  “There’s more,” Arawn said, and something in his tone brought Constance’s full attention back on him. “She didn’t go alone. She took that Europan boy with her, Tory, and Rayet escaped with her, too. And your people followed her away.”

  “My people?” The sentence didn’t seem to make sense. “How many?”

  “The only troops we have left are the ones that came with me,” said Arawn. “The rest are gone.”

  —

  She stuck to her determination despite the loss of her troops, despite Arawn’s opposition. He argued with her all the way from their camp back to the shuttles, and he argued with her at the shuttles while they communicated with what was left of her fleet in orbit around the moon, but he did what he was told, and that was all Constance needed from him, though it took all her will to bend him to her command.

  Marisol and her followers had taken most of the shuttles and sabotaged what they couldn’t take in an attempt to prevent pursuit, but Constance had no intention of pursuing them. Mars called to her with an opportunity to fix what she had done wrong. Not all of her ships had left with Marisol when she’d returned to the fleet, but it took Arawn some time to get back into contact with them, time that he spent telling Constance she was making a mistake.

  “A mistake, maybe, but it’s my decision,” Constance had told him.

  “You’re turning your back on your own cause,” Arawn had said.

  She had been furious. “Remember who I am,” she’d warned him, and he’d let the subject drop.

  Now their ships were finally sending more shuttles to pick them up. Constance stood some distance from the air lock and sighed out her breath in anticipation of leaving the moon.

  Arawn was standing beside her, his solid presence as much a reproach as a reassurance. Constance did not look at him but only watched the ships that were flying toward them. Blurry through the greenhouse glass, they were as yet indistinct.

  Jupiter was so large overhead.

  There was something strange about the oncoming ships. Constance frowned and squinted out at them, trying to see through the glare off the ice, through the distorting glass. Their shapes were not quite right, she thought. Their number was too high. For a moment she imagined it was Marisol coming back to rejoin her even though she knew that was impossible. But the ships she saw had never been her ships, had never been in her fleet. They were not her ships.

  She turned to look back at Arawn, a question on her lips, but he was not watching the ships. He was watching her.

  That was when she knew.

  There was no time to demand explanations, no time for furious accusations. She knew what he had done, and he knew that she knew.

  “Coward,” she said.

  Arawn’s face set, grim. He reached up and cradled the back of her head in one hand as if he might kiss her. She glared at him defiantly from a few inches away.

  And then his other hand came up in a fist aimed at her face, and Constance’s world went black.

  —

  The time was now.

  Althea walked up the hallway. Ahead, she could see the glass doors to the docking bay, which was vast and silent. Ananke hadn’t spoken to her since her rejection. The holographic terminals had remained cold and black.

  It was not long before this ship would reach Europa.

  When Althea reached the doors to the docking bay, she would turn around. She would walk down the hall, down toward the base of the ship.

  This time, when she reached the hatch to the core, this time she wouldn’t turn around and head back up. She would open the hatch and reach in and flip the switch that controlled the ship.

  The rumble and grind of the mechanical arm was still following her up the hallway, but it was more distant than it had been before. It should be far enough away. It should be enough.

  The doors were only a few paces away. Althea’s pace was unchanged, as if she would walk right through them, but she stopped herself just before she would collide with them, a small space of air separating her from the glass. She rested her hand against it.

  Reflected ghostly in the glass, she could see her own face, the silhouette of her wildly curling hair and her rumpled jumpsuit. And behind her, distant in the hall, she could see the shape of the mechanical arm coming ever closer.

  Althea turned around.

  Carefully placing her feet, carefully keeping her steps evenly spaced in time and space, Althea began to walk back down the hall.

  The fluorescent lights overhead were spaced just far enough that the hall was not lit perfectly evenly. Althea’s mind registered the changing light better than her eyes did; the slow dimming and brightening was almost imperceptible, but she knew it was there. The mechanical arm rumbled to a stop when she was a few paces away, the base stopping but the arm and the hand still moving restlessly. The fingers of the mechanical hand clenched and unclenched.

  Althea did not pause. She moved to the side of the hallway, pressing herself against the wall, and slipped by the mechanical arm without touching it. The arm rotated itself around on its base to follow her progress but did not move. It could not see her, Althea knew, but even so she could feel it watching her like a touch at the back of her neck.

  The doorway to Ida Stays’s temporary quarters was up ahead. Althea had not gone in there since she had set up the room for Miss Stays to sleep in. Ida’s body was gone now, but Althea wondered what traces of her the room would hold. Trinkets, personal items? Clothing tossed aside where she had dropped it last? The sweet, pervasive scent of decay?

  Althea walked past the closed door.

  Domitian’s quarters were on her other side. She walked past that door, and then she walked past Gagnon’s. How long would she have to be on this ship, she wondered, before those rooms would cease to be owned by the dead? How long before she finally stopped thinking of this room as Domitian’s, that as Gagnon’s? The rooms belonged to no one any longer.

  Her own room was the one deepest in the Ananke. She walked past her own door, too.

  Behind her, far up the hall, the sound of gears and the rumble of wheels over an uneven floor. The mechanical arm was moving again.

  The grinding and rumbling of her pursuit sent a spike into her heart. Calm, she told herself. You knew it would follow. But she found that her pace had increased the slightest bit nonetheless.

  Next she would pass the piloting room. There she nearly diverted just to see and confirm for one last time that the ship was on an unvarying course toward Europa. It was always possible, said the desperate and dying hope in Althea’s heart, that Ananke had changed course just a few moments ago and was headed out of the solar system now. Perhaps she’d set course toward the galactic center or toward Canis Majoris.

  But Althea knew that Ananke had not. She had checked on the way up. Ananke had not changed course, and Ananke would not change course.

  Althea passed the piloting room door.

  For a long time Althea walked down the hallway, past doors to storage rooms and doors to equipment and doors to Gagnon’s experiments, down to where the air was thicker and gravity pulled more strongly at her limbs. The black hole was nearer here. Althea could feel it in the difference between the pull it exerted on her fingertips and the weaker pull it made on her shoulder.

  She passed the door to the white room, which was shut and locked, and did not even think to stop there and go inside.

  Down here, the metal and carbon of the Ananke was under constant strain; the girders and bones groaned and creaked as the ship itself tried to pull them down. Behind Althea, the mechanical arm rumbled on. Had it gotten closer? She picked up her pace.

  That room had been Mattie’s cell for all of a few moments; Althea remembered watching him on the cameras as he broke out. And that cell right there, that had been where they’d kept Ivan. The door was shut, smooth and featureless except fo
r the single slash in the center of it for passing in food. Mattie Gale had knelt before that door and spoken to Ivan through that slash. Althea wondered if their ghosts were on this ship, too, if even the living could leave ghosts behind.

  She walked past Ivan’s empty cell, and she walked past the computer terminal where she had worked while keeping guard.

  Surely she was not imagining that the mechanical arm was speeding up. The sound of its wheels had gone a little higher in pitch. Was it just matching her speed, or was it trying to catch up?

  If she was stopped now, Althea knew, she would never have the chance or the strength to do this again. She walked even faster. If she moved any more quickly, she would break into a run.

  It wasn’t far to the base of the ship, Althea knew. Matthew Gale had made it from Ivan’s cell to the base of the ship once with Domitian and Gagnon in pursuit, and still he’d managed to infect Ananke with the virus that one day had woken her. Althea’s task was much simpler. She only had to flip a switch.

  It was, it was coming closer. Althea was certain of it. Was Ananke suspicious? Althea didn’t think she’d done anything to make Ananke suspicious, but she understood so little of what her daughter thought that maybe she was wrong. Or maybe Ananke had just decided that Althea no longer could be trusted and it was just coincidence that she was making her move at the same time Althea made hers—

  Althea started to run. The mechanical arm behind her whirred high and loud, rumbling down the hall toward her, but it wouldn’t be able to catch up. She was elated. It could move fast, but not as fast as a running woman. Althea’s human legs were better than Ananke for one thing at least. She ran and ran, as fast as she could, the downward slope of the hall pulling her in faster and faster toward that inner blackness. In a moment she would be able to see over the bend. In a moment she would be able to see the base of the ship and the hatch—

  There were two of the other mechanical arms down there already, by the hatch. They were waiting for her.

  She nearly stopped then, the terror taking her, but it was too late; she was already headlong into it, and there was nothing to do now but finish her fall. She ran forward and dodged one when it snapped out like a snake to grab at her arm, and she slipped by the other, and then she was on her knees by the hatch, unlocking it, straining to pull its weight up and away—

  A hand latched around her arm, and another hand grabbed her wrist. She shrieked at the cold grip of those inhuman hands and tried to pull herself free, but they were stronger than any human could be. The third arm had nearly caught up and was barreling toward them, and when the two arms lifted Althea up and away from the hatch, it reached their side.

  The door to the hatch, which Althea had lifted all of a few inches, fell back down with a clang and concealed the dead man’s switch from sight.

  Althea screamed and struggled, but the third arm wrapped around her ankle and then released her ankle to grab her knee with crushing strength. She pulled against their grip, her eyes on the hatch, but it was useless, hopeless. They had her.

  An alarm might have been going off. Ananke might have been wailing. Althea knew that she herself was screaming. She knew that there should be the sounds of the mechanical arms creaking and whirring as they lifted her up, held her, and pinned her, the strength of her human limbs nothing compared with the power of the shrieking, wailing machine. She knew that there should be the sounds of the magnets in the core groaning and the alarm going off and the rattle of the metal as she struggled uselessly against the bands of steel that gripped her, but the only sound that filled her ears was the hopeless pounding of her own human heart.

  Chapter 6

  CHANDRASEKHAR LIMIT

  SIX MONTHS BEFORE THE FALL OF EARTH

  Luna receded into the distance with impressive speed. Soon it was no more than a single spot of light among many, and soon after that it was gone.

  Constance stood in the back of the piloting room, bracing herself against the walls whenever Ivan made a too-rapid turn and threw off the gravitational simulation, watching as Mattie and Ivan worked together seamlessly to escape from the System.

  “That one fucker’s good,” Mattie said.

  “The one who keeps getting between us and the sun?”

  “Yeah, that one. He’s keeping up.”

  “We’ll see about that,” Ivan said, and Constance braced herself against the wall.

  “You can go down to the den if you want, Connie,” Mattie said, seemingly not concerned by the way Ivan was hurtling the ship back and forth.

  “I’ll stay,” Constance said. If she went to the den, she would have to sit there alone, wondering. She preferred to remain up here and watch the viewscreen to see where the other ships were, even though she wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.

  The ship jerked suddenly and then again, almost hard enough to send her to the floor. Mattie was grinning, and there was a trace of smugness in the way the corners of Ivan’s eyes crinkled. The two men were alive in front of her, alive and enjoying themselves while she stood just outside.

  At last the System pursuit ships went the way of the moon, and the Annwn was in the clear. It settled into a slower and less savage course.

  “Meet me in the den in ten minutes,” she said to them, and walked out into the hall.

  With the gravitation on, out there in space the hallway was no longer sideways but circular. Constance walked down it and into the den, where chaos reigned. The boxes that had not been returned to their place in the Annwn’s hold had fallen over as a result of Ivan’s overzealous flying and covered almost every inch of floor. Some of them had split open, spattering all over the floor items Constance was going to pretend not to know about later. The communicator, fortunately, had not fallen far from its place on the couch; Constance spotted it half under the lid of a nearby box. Coins ground beneath her heel when she stepped into the room, but she ignored them.

  She flicked the communicator on. The screen glowed at her, a pale and chilling blue, and its slender, boxy shape seemed to sit awkwardly in her hands. She summoned up the message chain sent to Anji and Christoph, attached the sound of the howling hounds, and flicked on the recorder.

  “Success on our end,” Constance said. “All of us are well and free, and the gifts have been delivered. End your activities and retreat to a safe place.” She paused. This was where her heart told her to say Are you well? told her to say Good luck, told her to say Be careful. But it wouldn’t be appropriate here.

  “Report as soon as you can,” she said instead, and ended the message, encrypted it, and sent it.

  Voices from down the hall: Ivan and Mattie were coming toward her, and just in time. She couldn’t quite hear what they were saying. It didn’t matter. They weren’t talking to her.

  Mattie appeared at the doorway first. He looked at the chaos in which Constance sat. “Oh, damn.”

  “I did tell you to put them all back into the hold,” Ivan said.

  “Only one of us was hiding on a System ship for the past couple of hours,” Mattie said, taking a careful step into the room, “far away from this mess, and it wasn’t you.”

  Ivan nearly smiled, just a slight lifting of the corners of his eyes, but that faded when he took a closer look at Constance.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked, which was the very question she felt she was always asking him.

  “Sit,” she said, not letting him take control of the situation from her. Mattie, standing beside the couch, was looking between them, his expression as wary as Ivan’s ever was. That expression struck her as well: she had let this go on too long.

  When Ivan had seated himself on Mattie’s other side, Constance said, “We’re going to have to separate.”

  Unexpectedly, Ivan grinned. “Are you breaking up with both of us?” he asked.

  But Mattie wasn’t laughing. “What do you mean, Con?”

  “When we get to Mars, they’re going to arrest me,” Constance said with a nod at Ivan. “They don’t
have anything on me, so they won’t be able to hold me, but they will question me about you. And once they’ve let me go, they’ll be keeping a closer eye on me because of that interrogator.”

  “Ida Stays,” Ivan said.

  “We are so close,” Constance said, and for a moment was caught up in it again, how near was her victory, how terrifyingly close she stood to the edge of failure. “So close, too close to fail now. Nothing can be allowed to threaten this.” She waited long enough to see if that sank in.

  “So,” she said, “until we’re ready to take the next step, our contact will have to be minimal.”

  “We can do that,” Mattie said. “We’ve done that before.”

  But Ivan said nothing.

  “Ivan?” Constance said, because she could not leave his silence alone, because when he pushed, she pushed back until he backed down.

  Ivan said, “You’re not being entirely honest.”

  “I don’t know how I can be any more honest with you, Ivan.”

  “You’re telling us we need to stay away from you because it’s dangerous, because the System might notice. When has that ever not been true?”

  “It’s more true now than it was before.”

  “But it’s never been a problem before. It is a problem now because you don’t want to hear me tell you what you don’t want to hear.”

  He was on his feet. Constance rose as well, unable not to meet that challenge.

  “You want us gone until it’s too late to do anything, until it’s time to ignite those bombs and it’s too late to stop you or convince you to stop,” Ivan said. “You don’t want us here. No—you don’t want me here because you know I’ll tell you the truth.”

  Mattie was watching them both, tense, caught in yet completely outside their argument.

  “And what is the truth?” Constance asked.

  “The truth is that this is wrong,” Ivan said, his blue eyes bright, and Constance didn’t know how she’d missed it all the time before, that he looked at her as if she had a weapon aimed at his skull, that he looked at her as if she was something dire and terrible. “The truth is that this is murder.”