Radiate

by C. A. Higgins

  “It’s hard to hate someone if you understand why they’ve done the things they did.”

  “Is it?” Mattie asked in a steely tone that Ivan had never heard him use before. “I don’t think so.”

  The computer beeped. Mattie turned to see why, and Ivan held his breath. An alarm would be louder, surely, if they were under attack or a System ship had come near.

  “We’re in the Hill sphere,” Mattie reported.

  “How long until Callisto?”

  “Direct route, a half an hour. Long route—”

  “Direct route,” Ivan said.

  “We don’t want to fly straight at it,” Mattie said. “We don’t know what’s going on in there.”

  “So run a scan. Check the radio.”

  “I am running scans, and I’ve opened the Copenhagen to transmissions,” Mattie said patiently.

  “Don’t just open for transmissions; turn on the radio for any broadcasts at all,” Ivan said, and Mattie reached over to the radio and flicked it on. A dreadful roar of white noise burst from the throat of the machine. Mattie cocked a brow at Ivan as if to say, Happy now? But he did turn the radio down and set it to scan between frequencies for any real transmissions.

  “I’m going in obliquely,” he said, and that was that.

  The Copenhagen skirted Jupiter, keeping to the vast regions of space unpopulated by the moons or thin, vacuous rings. Ivan leaned back against the wall and ignored the way the burning in his leg grew worse with every second.

  The static of the radio flickered off and on at even intervals as the radio automatically jumped between frequencies. It was hypnotic, like the way the clouds on Jupiter’s vast bulk spiraled and moved almost too slowly to be seen.

  Mattie said, “You haven’t asked me about your mother.”

  His back was to Ivan; he was focused on the screen, on flying the ship. His question had no origin that Ivan could find. Not understanding why a question was being asked had always made Ivan uneasy: he couldn’t tell what Mattie might want to hear.

  “No,” Ivan said. “I haven’t.”

  Mattie asked him nothing else.

  They took a long spiraling loop into the Jovian system, the best way to see anything that might be there. They had gone nearly all the way around the planet, and the ache from Ivan’s leg had spread up into his torso nearly all the way to his head when he realized that there was something strange about all that static.

  “What frequency are we on?” Ivan’s voice sounded distant even to himself. Sometimes he felt that way, as if his skin were not his own, as if his voice were someone else speaking, as if the real he were somewhere locked up inside his head.

  “Uh, we’re a couple of channels above System Standard Frequency 25.”

  “And we’re going through channels with increasing frequency?”

  “Yeah.” Mattie was leaning over the controls, clearly more intent on navigating through the Jovian system unseen than listening to the radio.

  Ivan said, “These are the short-range frequencies.”

  “So?”

  Another click; the radio blasted static from a new channel into the cabin of the Copenhagen like a polar wind. “We should be hearing transmissions from the moons.”

  “There’s a war going on; they’re probably blacked out.”

  There still should have been something, Ivan thought, a few rebel bursts of communication. Or, more likely, if the war was actively going on, there should have been communication between ships, between armies.

  He said, “Have you seen any ships so far?”

  “We’re not that close to Jupiter. They might be farther in.”

  The radio looped back around to the lowest frequencies and began to step through them again. There was a different quality to the static at different wavelengths; Ivan could hear it. Low, down here, the basso hum of Jupiter could be heard, pierced through by the whizzing of its moons, like clouds passing over the sun. The static at all frequencies was the singing of the stars.

  They were drawing, at last, near to Callisto. Ivan leaned more heavily on the wall and watched it grow. He could see its star-pocked surface against the vast looming bulk of Jupiter.

  But there was something off about Callisto’s gleaming shape. The sunlight was sparking off points around the moon. The static switched again on the radio, shivering. Ivan found himself leaving the wall and limping toward the piloting platform, his gaze fixed on the glints of light that surrounded Callisto.

  The static had filled the cabin to such an extent that it had filled his leg; there was no longer any burning pain, only a dull and buzzing numbness.

  Mattie finally looked up when he heard him move. “What are you doing?” he demanded.

  “Mattie.” Ivan reached out and gripped the back of Mattie’s chair across the platform but did not have the strength to pull himself up beside it. “Callisto doesn’t have any rings,” but there he was, looking at Callisto, and there was a thin low ring encircling it.

  Mattie looked and swore, his voice low and punching. He reached for the controls.

  “No,” Ivan said, “get closer.”

  Before Ivan’s eyes, the unnatural rings grew larger, more clear. He could see the bits of debris that constituted them. There was a partial hull of a ship; there was a girder that could only have been human-made. He saw flecks of steel and carbon, and that was only what was large enough to see. The radio clicked between stations beside him, a low roar of snowy static. He had seen the rings of Saturn once, and now, here, he knew, knew, that if they got close enough he would see the same thing. But what bodies would he see here? Constance, bloody, eyes staring? His mother with half her skin blackened? Anji or Christoph or Julian—

  “Ivan!” In a moment Mattie’s face had replaced the gleaming image of the slowly approaching moon.

  “That’s where the fleets are,” Ivan said. “That’s why we haven’t heard anything on the radio.”

  “There’re not enough ships there to be a full fleet,” Mattie said slowly and clearly. “Not enough to be the System fleet. Not enough to be Constance’s fleet, or Anji’s, or Christoph’s.”

  Ivan forced himself to look at the debris, how spread out it was, how low to the moon. “If there’s a ring like that on all the other moons—”

  “There isn’t,” said Mattie, as if by conviction alone he could make truth.

  The static-skipping radio suddenly beeped, a rapid pattern of tones. “Code,” Ivan said, but Mattie already was moving, tapping in a directive to the computer, trying to recover the wavelength they had just lost.

  An ache was traveling up Ivan’s arms; he looked down to see that he had his hands clenched so tightly into fists that the skin of his knuckles had gone bloodless.

  Static, static, static, nothing. “It was just—”

  “I know,” Mattie snapped, and iterated the radio again, stepping it from frequency to frequency. Ivan listened to the staccato bursts of static. This was where the signal had been before, he was sure—

  The radio beeped again, an arrhythmic pattern that set Ivan’s heart to beating once more. This time Mattie was ready and stopped them on the station immediately, listening to the rhythm.

  “Do you know what they’re saying?”

  Ivan was counting intervals, matching them to the codes he’d had memorized since he was a child. “No. It’s definitely code, but I don’t know the key.”

  “Can you crack it?” Mattie asked just as the signal vanished.

  “If you can find it.”

  Mattie already was searching. He looked like a hunting dog bent over the computer like that, all sharp and focused attention. A strange throb of affection for him struck Ivan’s heart then, entirely inappropriate to their situation; he pushed it aside.

  “They’re changing stations,” Mattie said a moment later, after he’d found the beeping once more.

  “Can you tell the pattern?”

  “Not with only three frequencies. They’re sticking to short-range, thou
gh.”

  Then the broadcast was from nearby. “This is some variant on my mother’s code.”

  “You think it’s Anji?”

  “Who else could it be?” Ivan asked. His fists were still so tightly clenched that his forearms ached, but when he looked away from the radio, trying to center himself, he only saw the bodies outside Callisto once more. “Broadcast the hounds signal.”

  “We don’t know who else is out there.”

  “These are revolutionaries. We haven’t heard any other broadcasts in this system.”

  “Ivan.” Mattie was a tense curve over the computer, turned toward him but not meeting his eyes. “If the System—”

  “You are the brother of the Mallt-y-Nos. If the System attacks us, the revolutionaries will fall over themselves to save your life.”

  Something bitter bent the bowed curve of Mattie’s mouth, and then he was stabbing a message into the computer, and the barking and howling of the Cŵn Annwn roared out into the stars on all frequencies, overwhelming the tense and unsteady beat of the revolutionary communication.

  When the howling had finished, the radio went back to iterating through stations. Nothing showed but static.

  “Did they hear?” Ivan wondered.

  “I don’t know how they fucking couldn’t have.” Mattie stood in agitation, moving restlessly, as if he would like to pace but didn’t want to move too far from the ship’s controls.

  Ivan said, “We should broadcast again.”

  “What, and get every System ship in an AU of Jupiter headed toward us?” Mattie made a sharp, agitated slash of the air with his hand, then changed the exterior camera view on the viewscreen, turning their sight out toward the open universe and away from the corpses on Callisto.

  Ivan seated himself in the abandoned piloting chair. The cramped muscles in his leg throbbed and spasmed with the movement, but there was no dampness on the bandage. He bent over the computer.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m checking the instruments,” Ivan said.

  “Just stay away from Callisto.”

  “I have no intention of—Mattie.”

  Mattie was at his side faster than a breath, leaning over the chair, leaning over Ivan. Ivan knew when he had seen what Ivan had, because his agitated fidgeting stopped, settling down into that focused attention once more.

  Far off, half hidden by the planet’s wispy rings, were spots of warmth that did not move with the rest of the stars.

  “They were orbiting one of the other moons,” Mattie guessed.

  The little sparks of light were coming toward them slowly, steadily, and in chill silence. Why had they not responded?

  “There’s more,” said Mattie, and Ivan saw that there were other ships, too: small, hidden among the moons and the thin rings, but now leaving their moons behind and coming toward the Copenhagen.

  “Hail them,” Ivan suggested, and Mattie bent over him to reach for the comm—it was better to have Mattie make first contact in situations like this; his accent was much less alarming to a nervous revolutionary than Ivan’s was—and open a broadcast again.

  “This is the rebel ship Copenhagen,” Mattie said. “We’ve come on behalf of the Mallt-y-Nos.”

  No response. A few of the nearer ships were close enough now to run a scan on them: attack ships, all four of them. More heavily armed than the Copenhagen.

  Mattie got back on the radio. “This is the rebel ship Copenhagen. We’ve come as friends. We’re looking for the Mallt-y-Nos.”

  The four foremost ships were not just near enough to be scanned; they were near enough for the Copenhagen’s sensors to detect an increase in radiation in a specific place on their layout and to draw the logical conclusion.

  “Their weaponry systems just came online,” Ivan said.

  “They’re System?”

  “Two of them are System ships but modded. The other two are civilian ships even more heavily modified. System doesn’t mod its own ships.”

  “Maybe it fucking does now!” Mattie bent over Ivan again, this time going for the piloting controls. “There are more of them coming from the moons. We’re getting out of here.”

  “If we run, they fire,” Ivan pointed out.

  “So we outrun their bombs.”

  “Maybe we can outrun some of their bombs. But we can’t outrun that third ship, the small one. Do you see—”

  “We’re not going to just sit here and—”

  “Signal them again,” Ivan said.

  “What good did that do?” Mattie said, and reached for the flight controls. Ivan grabbed his wrist before he could. Ahead of them, the radiation signature that indicated a live weaponry system brightened: a sure sign of the ships’ bombs being armed. Around the distant moons, more and more ships were rising, engines bright.

  They had stumbled into a hornet’s nest and woken the wasps. Ivan said, “Hail them again.”

  Mattie swore at him. Ivan hardly heard him, staring at the brightness of their oncoming destruction, and Mattie pulled free of Ivan’s grasp and went to the radio again, shouting into it, “This is the rebel ship Copenhagen. This is a rebel ship!”

  The ships’ brightness was reaching peak. At any moment, Ivan knew—and the Copenhagen’s sensors warned—those ships would fire. The Copenhagen would be hit, and the gravity of Callisto would pull them in. Ivan would be another blackened body in that graveyard ring.

  “This is the brother of the Mallt-y-Nos, Matthew Gale! I am on this ship with Leontios Ivanov, the son of Milla and Connor Ivanov! This is Mattie and Ivan! Do not fire!”

  And then—unbelievably—the brightness of those stars began to dim. Mattie sucked in a ragged breath, and Ivan found himself moving without forethought: reaching up to Mattie’s arm that crossed over his chest in order to reach the communications panel, closing his fingers around the warmth of that arm, crushing the fabric of his shirt against the space over his heart.

  The communications panel chimed: someone wanted to speak to them. Mattie moved to open the connection, and even that slight motion unhooked Ivan’s fingers from his arm.

  The view of great Jupiter and the lights of the rising ships vanished, replaced by a video feed from one of the other ships. For a moment, nothing but black as the Copenhagen negotiated with the other computer for video access, and then a familiar woman’s face was staring out at them, black buzz starting to grow out on her shaven head and her dark eyes wide.

  “Anji,” said Mattie, and she reacted to her name like a physical touch, a flinch passing over her features. The jewels in her ear winked.

  “Hello, boys,” Anji said, and then, “You may have just accidentally started another war.”

  BACKWARD

  “She’s late,” Ivan said.

  “She’ll be here,” Mattie said. “She always is.”

  Ivan didn’t particularly share his confidence. They’d been waiting at the Martian black market for almost an hour, longer than Ivan liked to stay at such places. He couldn’t shake the constant paranoia that at any moment the System would come down on them like lightning.

  But this was where the rendezvous had been set up, and if they missed this one, it might be months before they could arrange another.

  And Ivan had to see Constance.

  A steady wind went through the makeshift kiosks, the storefronts of landed shuttles. The entire place was ready to take off at a moment’s notice. Mattie wandered off, and Ivan headed parallel to him, not close but never far.

  Ivan shuffled through illegal wares—drugs, weaponry, rare foods and animals from Earth—without really paying attention to what he held. His attention was on the crowd around him, on the faces and forms of the unknown people who pressed up against him, who butted into him, who engulfed him. He had been with Mattie long enough to know when his pocket was being picked, but that was only one kind of defense against a crowd.

  His attention finally was arrested by a display of art. Beautiful things for beauty’s sake tended not to s
how up in black markets like these. The only reason anyone would bring a work of art here was if it was stolen, and even then it would be hard to fence. Easier to sell ore and bullets. But here, in front of him, was an array of sculptures.

  The shop owner watched him with a shrewd and beady eye as Ivan picked one up. It was surprisingly heavy: metal, Ivan realized. Metal down to the core. It had been cast in the shape of a woman, almond eye sightless from lack of iris and pupil. She gazed out of only one eye, because the skin of her face did not stretch all the way around her head. The bones of her shoulder pulled out of her skin like a woman shrugging off a blouse; her delicate metacarpals detached themselves from her flesh as if she were peeling away a glove.

  The shop owner said, “It’s one of a kind.”

  Ivan hefted that strange and troubling sculpture with one hand. The slow detachment of the skull from the woman’s flesh seemed inevitable, unstoppable, as if gravity were peeling away her skin, and soon only the metal bones would be left.

  “Made by an artist on Mercury,” said the shop owner.

  Fingers gripped his arm suddenly and with force. Ivan’s wild heart urged him to lash out, but his habit forced him to go very still, set the statue down again, and turn calmly to face the intruder.

  Anji Chandrasekhar grinned at him, her earring flashing a deep crimson. “Hey, handsome.”

  “Hello,” Ivan said, and left his choice of adjective to the discretion of the listener.

  Anji released his arm for the sake of hurling herself at him for an embrace, her arms wrapping around his chest. The physical intimacy was unnecessary in Ivan’s opinion, but living with Mattie had shown him that his dislike of being touched was a rather Terran tendency.

  Plus, he privately suspected that when Anji hugged him, she had serious designs on breaking his ribs.

  “You look stressed,” she suggested when she pulled back, still gripping him by the shoulders.

  “That’s a natural reaction to the sight of your face.”

  “I’ve missed you, Leontios,” Anji said mistily.

  “Anji!” Mattie pushed through the crowd, drawn, no doubt, by the psychic echo of Ivan’s physical distress. Anji released Ivan to hurl herself at Mattie as well, nearly knocking him over with the force of her affection. Mattie handled it better than Ivan had, grabbing her back as if the embrace were a contest of strength. By the look on his face when Anji let him go, he’d lost.