Radiate

by C. A. Higgins

  Mattie hated it when Ivan was right.

  Behind him, Ivan laughed a strange, dry laugh. “Interrogation in war is so much different from interrogation in peace,” he said. “I don’t think she would have liked it. Barbaric.” He was silent for a blessed moment while Mattie checked the relativistic engines. Still too warm. He didn’t know if anything had been cracked in the stress of the disabling bomb, if there were any hairline fractures the Copenhagen’s computers couldn’t detect.

  “Maybe she would have liked it,” Ivan mused.

  “Hey!” Mattie said. “What do we do?”

  “Try not to get captured.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to fucking do already!” It wasn’t fair; Mattie knew it wasn’t. Ivan was half out of his head with pain and drugs and staying conscious only by adrenaline and will. But he would—should—know what to do. Ivan always did. Mattie just carried it out.

  Ivan’s head was bent forward as if he were near to folding over. The hand holding the blanket had rallied itself and was pushing halfheartedly at his bleeding leg. “If we waited until they got close, we could take one out with us,” he said.

  “What?” said Mattie, less because he had misheard, more because he wished he had.

  Ivan said, “A self-destruct.”

  BACKWARD

  Mattie crouched down in an oddly shaped pocket in the wall of the Janus, breathing slowly to keep himself calm, watching Constance through the grate that separated his hiding place from the rest of the ship, and tried not to think of the Ananke.

  Ivan had named the Janus back when Constance first had acquired the ship. He’d laughed his least pleasant laugh when he’d named it and had explained it to Mattie: Janus, the god of two faces. The Janus was outfitted like the smuggling ship it was: secret compartments had hidden supplies and bombs and now Mattie himself.

  Ivan was still on the Ananke. Mattie tried not to think about that either. Once Earth was destroyed there would be no reason to hide and no reason to avoid the System and therefore no reason not to go find Ivan. He just had to hold on for a few more days, Mattie told himself, and then Constance would figure out how she and Mattie could save him.

  Just visible through the crack in the wall where Mattie sat, Constance moved through her ship calmly, as if this trip were perfectly routine. Mattie could not see the viewscreen of the Janus, only the edges of the instrumentation panels on the tiny ship. But he knew when they approached Earth anyway, because the radio buzzed to life.

  “Terran System defense to civilian ship Janus,” said the radio in an empty female voice. “You are approaching the Earth defensive zone. Divert your course or provide authorization.”

  When Mattie saw Constance’s face through the bars of the grating as she made some small and precise diversion to the ship’s course, she did not look as if she had heard the radio at all.

  “Terran defenses to civilian ship Janus, you are approaching a restricted zone. Cease your forward movement and wait for System police to reach you.”

  The scrape and then the scream of metal against metal. Constance walked back into Mattie’s narrow frame of sight holding a hammer in one hand and dragging a chair behind her. It was not a heavy chair, and Mattie knew his foster sister was strong. She could have lifted the chair with one arm. Instead, she let it drag.

  “Civilian ship Janus, this is the System. Respond.”

  Constance pushed the chair against the wall and stepped up onto it. The black eye of a System camera stared down at her. Constance lifted the hammer, turned its claw against the wall, and pried out the camera in a screech of metal.

  “Civilian ship Janus, cease your movement and surrender your vessel.”

  The camera fell to the floor. Constance stepped off the chair and started to drag it behind her again.

  Mattie pushed open the secret door and unfurled himself onto the floor of the piloting room. Constance pried the second camera out of the wall and let it drop to the floor.

  The radio was still demanding their surrender. Mattie went over and considered it for a moment. All ships were built so that the System had the ability to connect remotely to their computers, allowing it to take control of rogue ships. Mattie had disabled most of those functions on the Janus immediately after Constance had purchased it. Right now, he suspected, the System was realizing that fact.

  Under the same functions, any radio contact initiated by the System should be impossible to ignore or shut down. Mattie, with the first good cheer he’d felt in days, flicked the switch on the radio, and the System’s demands went abruptly silent.

  There was another screech and thud. The third and final camera had been torn from the piloting room’s walls to topple onto the floor, upended, with wires sticking out like torn-up roots. Constance stepped down from the chair and walked over to where the camera had fallen, raised her booted foot, and stepped down on the fallen camera. The metal groaned; the glass shattered beneath her heel.

  A fleeting sense of unease struck Mattie then, looking at Constance’s thinned lips, the tension between her brows as she crushed the camera. “Yeah, you’ve got no deep-seated issues at all.”

  Constance gestured to another fallen camera on the floor, the one nearest Mattie, in wordless invitation. It was a round, solid, perfect shape, but the glass of it looked very fragile.

  When he brought his foot down, it shattered very satisfyingly beneath his shoe.

  Constance crushed the last camera and walked past Mattie to the instrumentation panels. Mattie felt something nudge the sole of his foot and looked at the bottom of his boot to find that shattered bits of glass and brittle metal had embedded themselves in the sole. He carefully pulled the largest of the slivers out.

  “System ships are coming,” Constance remarked, and Mattie lifted his head from his boot. On the screen, a hundred red dots were flying toward the gleaming white light that indicated the Janus’s current position.

  The Janus was not alone, of course. Fifty other ships flown by Constance’s people had converged on Earth at the same time. They would distract the System, spread out its defensive reaction, and buy Mattie and Constance a little time. One of those ships, Mattie knew, had Ivan’s mother on board.

  “Are we in range?” Constance asked, and Mattie switched the view on the front screen to video.

  The System ships were too small to be seen in this view except as tiny sparks moving against the stars. But bright and gleaming blue, filling up the center of the screen, was the Earth. They were close enough now that the moon’s orbit took it to the very far edge of the screen; Mattie could just pick out the curls of white clouds in the Terran atmosphere.

  “Yeah,” he said, and sat down and delved into the computer.

  The System ships were coming toward them, but Mattie left them to Constance. She darted the ship away from those ships but did not move away from the Earth. The Janus was too close to the Earth and the moon and in a highly trafficked area; the System ships wouldn’t fire until they were very close. Constance and Mattie had some time, but Mattie didn’t want to have to work in a ship that was actively in a firefight. The System’s attacks would only increase in intensity once they realized that Constance’s ship was outfitted with illegal weaponry.

  He’d been afraid, a part of him, that something might have happened to the bombs that had been planted on the surface of the planet in the intervening time since he and Ivan had gone to the moon to make sure that everything was in place. He’d been afraid that something might go wrong, even more afraid once Ivan wasn’t there to be afraid on his behalf. But he found the bombs in a few short keystrokes, ready and waiting.

  Constance was busy dodging the System’s attacks. It was Mattie who would have to detonate Constance’s bombs.

  Ivan hadn’t wanted them to do this, Mattie knew. Ivan had been bent on persuading Constance to turn aside from this moment. And Ivan would have been horrified to see that in the end it was not Constance’s finger on the trigger, but Mattie’s.

&n
bsp; Constance said, “Mattie, do it.”

  Ivan wasn’t there. Mattie detonated the bombs.

  FORWARD

  “Are you out of your fucking mind?” Mattie asked.

  Ivan made a thoughtful noise.

  “We’re not going to blow ourselves up!”

  Another bomb went off and rocked the Copenhagen sideways. Mattie caught himself on the wall and hauled himself back into the pilot’s chair. Ivan said, “Not if they do it first.”

  “You don’t get to be drugged and have a shitty sense of humor,” Mattie snarled.

  Ivan smiled at him through split and bloodless lips.

  “The Copenhagen has no self-destruct,” Mattie said, and turned back to the computer displays, racking his brain for some other way out of this.

  “Good. If it did, the computer would know about it and she could read it right off.”

  Mattie’s fingers tightened around the edge of the control panel. “The Ananke isn’t following us, Iv—”

  “You have weapons,” Ivan said.

  “None powerful enough to put a dent in those ships. And I’m short a gunner.”

  “Inside the ship,” Ivan clarified. “You’re the brother of the Mallt-y-Nos. You must have bombs on board.”

  “Great,” Mattie said. “So that’s your great plan. I pull the trigger on a bomb and kill us both. Is that really what you want?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t want to get yourself blown up?” Mattie asked, and for an instant he understood how Constance could blaze with rage, how it could not matter to her who she hurt or what she did in her anger. “No?”

  But Ivan didn’t answer.

  “No?” Mattie demanded again furiously, and twisted around to see that Ivan’s hand had fallen from his thigh and he was staring down at the blood in his lap with peculiar blankness.

  “Ivan?” said Mattie. “Ivan?”

  He did not answer.

  The System ships were coming closer. They would disable the Copenhagen, Mattie realized, and take them both captive.

  The relativistic engines could be broken already, or trying to use them could destroy them beyond repair and trap both Mattie and Ivan in the middle of nowhere until they starved.

  Mattie turned the relativistic engines back on, gave them full power, and ran.

  BACKWARD

  The first time Mattie escaped from the Ananke, he left on his sister’s ship.

  He realized quickly after Milla Ivanov had been brought on board the Ananke that Constance must be next, and the thought relieved him. Ivan’s mother, Milla, was an unknown quantity, but Con was Mattie’s sister and Ivan’s…friend, and she’d brought dogs with her, which meant that she had a plan for getting him and Ivan out. They were badly in need of a plan.

  His first impulse when he realized Constance was landing in the docking bay was to go straight for Ivan and get him out of that white room and away from that bitch interrogator immediately. But Ivan had warned him against a rescue attempt while he was under guard, because Mattie was outnumbered and injured: Domitian had broken Mattie’s arm when Mattie had come on board the ship. But now Constance was here. Mattie would rendezvous with Connie, and she would tell him what to do.

  It took a little bit of help from Milla Ivanov to get into the Janus unseen, but he managed it, slipping into Constance’s ship right behind the backs of the Ananke’s crew. He was grinning when he burst in from adrenaline and the joy of the con. Then the dogs lifted their twin black heads from the floor, quizzical, and he stopped short.

  “There, doggie,” he said. One black Lab wagged its tail uncertainly, beating against the floor, but the other rose to its feet from where it had been lying on a blanket on the floor and advanced toward him, starting to bark, low and deep and dangerous.

  Before Mattie could do anything Constance appeared at the door and said, breathless, “Sit!”

  The dogs continued to bark. “Constance—” Mattie whispered.

  “Still!” Constance snapped with a look that meant the order applied to him as well, and she grabbed a bag from beneath the Janus’s central panel. There was a syringe inside. She grabbed the dog nearest her and stuck the syringe into its flank. It whined and twisted around, teeth digging into the skin that had been punctured.

  Constance straightened up. “Stay,” she said to Mattie, to the dogs, and left, locking the door behind her.

  Mattie went to the computer and quickly deleted the last few minutes of surveillance from the camera in Constance’s ship, shutting it down and then adding a few more errors to her system for good measure; when the System found that the footage was missing, Constance could explain that contact with the Ananke had contaminated her computer as well. When he was done, he sat down where he had been before, out of view of the door and across from the black dogs.

  He wondered what Constance’s plan might be. She would have one: Constance always knew what to do.

  Not long after Mattie had sat down, the dog that Constance had stuck with the syringe began to move oddly, its hindquarters shivering, whimpering low in its throat. It stood up jerkily and tried to move away from where Constance had stung it but stopped a few paces away and stood very still.

  The other dog followed, its tail low but wagging uncertainly, sniffing the injured dog carefully before whuffing out the air and shaking its head. The injured dog walked back to the blanket they shared—limping now—and lay down slowly, its wounded leg twitching. Mattie watched the ribs moving beneath the satiny black fur slow down, grow shallow, and finally, at last, stop.

  The living dog whined. Its first bark rang out unexpectedly through the cabin and made Mattie flinch. Better a dog than he or Ivan, but there was something unpleasant about that wild, inconsolable howling.

  A key turned in the door. Constance entered, and the dog started barking at her.

  “Quiet,” said Constance, and closed the door again, locking it. She went straight for the pilot’s chair.

  “What…” Mattie began, and Constance said sharply, “Shh!”

  She activated the ship’s launch sequence. There were fine tremors in her hands.

  The Janus lifted off and rose up and out of the Ananke. Constance bent over the ship’s controls as if she felt that if she leaned far enough forward, the ship might travel faster. Mattie had thought that he’d seen something almost like fear in her eyes when she first had come back on board the Janus, but looking at her face now, he saw nothing of the kind. It was fury that pulled taut all the muscles on her face, a burning, hating fury.

  Mattie said, “How are we going to get him back?”

  The surviving dog had lain down beside its dead partner, resting its head on the dead dog’s still shoulders.

  Constance said, “We aren’t.”

  FORWARD

  The Copenhagen’s engines did not give out. Mattie waited until the System ships had vanished entirely from their instruments before he let their speed drop again, allowing the engines to fall into a safer output range. Then he changed their course so that they were headed once more to Callisto. At a moderate speed, they would make it there in time for the rendezvous.

  He would have to examine the engines for damage, and soon. But for the moment he had greater concerns.

  Ivan had, true to his warning, passed out. Mattie wasn’t certain what had done it: the end of adrenaline from keeping himself alive on the Ananke, the cumulative effects of blood loss and injury, the poisons in his bloodstream coming due. His skin was cool when Mattie touched him, and he did not respond to his name.

  In a way, it was a mercy he was so deeply unconscious. Mattie set to cleaning and bandaging the wound in his leg. When he went to find the pulse, he found bruises on Ivan’s neck: small, spaced a finger’s width apart.

  Ivan might sleep for a while yet. Ivan might never again wake up. Mattie dragged himself away from Ivan eventually to sit in the piloting platform’s one chair and stare out at the stars through the viewscreen.

  The System ships were
gone. The Ananke was gone. Mattie and Ivan were far out between planets, where no one, not System or rebel, would bother to venture. They were as alone as they could be in the solar system at the moment and as safe as they could be in their isolation. If Mattie wanted to make the rendezvous Constance had planned at Callisto, he simply would have to maintain their course, and they would arrive at Jupiter’s moon in due time. He simply had to maintain their course.

  Behind him, Ivan was still and silent.

  Mattie changed their course.

  FORWARD

  Ivan was in the white room again, and Ida was watching him from across that gleaming steel table.

  No, Ivan thought for a lucid moment, I’m not here, Mattie got me out, but Ida was watching him and he couldn’t relax his guard for a second, not around her. There was a chill in the white room, as there always had been, a cold that stole his stillness in shivering; it seemed even colder now. He smiled at Ida, thick with charm, and she smiled back, and showed her tombstone teeth.

  “When you know someone completely,” Ida said, “they have a kind of life in you.”

  Ivan said nothing. Sometimes that was the best course to take. She stood and smoothed out her skirt and blouse, as slender and sleek as a sheathed blade.

  “An animal that knows its hunter completely can predict it,” Ida said, and began to pace. The sound of her heels was the Russian roulette click of a revolver on an empty chamber. “The prey that knows its predator survives.”

  She smiled at him again. Her lips were crimson against her teeth. When she moved, the cold moved with her as if she were an inverse star that did not emit heat but absorbed it, a black hole that sucked the warmth and life from the room.

  “Of course,” she said, laughing, “the predator that knows its prey never goes hungry, either.”

  Ivan had a sudden flash of her, thrashing, the weight of her in his lap struggling, her black eyes going empty. Her eyes now had that same incognizant darkness.

  He said, “It’s petty of you to haunt me.”

  “People are petty,” Ida said.

  A chill struck him. It seemed to come from inside himself, like if he cut himself open, he would find the same darkness that lit Ida’s eyes.