Radiate

by C. A. Higgins

  “Let’s get some privacy, gentlemen,” Anji said with a hand on each man’s arm. They left the figurine, and the watchful shopkeeper, behind.

  Mattie said, “No Con?”

  “Always a con,” Anji said with a bright teeth-flashing grin for the pun, “but no Constance this time.”

  “You told us she would meet us here,” Ivan said.

  “You’ve got me instead. Isn’t that better?”

  “Ha,” said Mattie, and then, “Ow,” when Anji punched him on the arm.

  “Is she all right?” Ivan asked.

  “After the three of you left Luna, the System got her alone and interrogated her,” Anji said

  Ivan’s mind filled with fast irrational flashes of Constance in chains, Constance drugged, Constance soaked in agonized sweat and spitting fury at her captors.

  But Anji went on, “It was a friendly sort of interrogation, at least, as friendly as the System ever gets. They didn’t get anything out of her, and they don’t think there’s anything to get. Surveillance at her bar is up, of course. Oh, and that woman you wanted me to keep an eye out for was there—not in the room but in the same interrogation facility.”

  “What woman?” Mattie wanted to know. Ivan said, “Ida Stays?”

  Anji snapped her fingers. “Yes, her. The intelligence agent. Con never saw her, but she was there. None of this is the message Constance wanted me to give you, though. The message from Con is that you’re not to contact her.”

  Mattie said, “At all?”

  “She says if she really needs to contact you, Abigail will arrange a meeting.”

  “Abigail” was Constance’s best and most effective pseudonym. She used that name only when it was unavoidable. Ivan was certain that Abigail would not be contacting Ivan and Mattie for any reason at all.

  “And what if we need to talk to her?” Ivan asked.

  Anji laughed. “We don’t make that call.”

  “I need to talk to her, and I can’t wait five months to do it.”

  “Ivan,” Anji said with exaggerated empathy, “you need to let her go. You two had a good thing for a while, but now it’s done, and chasing after her like this is just going to—”

  “You can’t say what will happen between now and—when we go through with the plan. I don’t want things to end between us the way they did.”

  Anji leaned in.

  “You,” she said, and patted his cheek with one callused hand, “are a manipulative bastard. No, Ivan, I’m not going to convince Constance to meet you.”

  “You’re a good dog, aren’t you?” Ivan said. “You bark on command.”

  “And sit and roll over,” Anji agreed. There was no sign of the fear in her that Ivan felt, the fear that she should have felt, knowing what she did about Constance Harper and what Constance was willing to do.

  Then again, perhaps Ivan was the only one who felt that fear. He was, after all, the one who had driven Constance to this.

  Anji smiled at them both, bright and unfettered. “Now,” she said, “I’ve got some time to kill. Which of you knows how to show a girl a good time?”

  FORWARD

  “Another war?” Mattie said.

  Anji grimaced, an odd look on a face Mattie was used to seeing with a carefree smile. “System fleet came through this system a few days ago. It went off, but it left some of its short-range ships behind. We’d all trenched ourselves down on the moons, but—”

  “But Mattie and I just rang the dinner bell,” Ivan said.

  “Exactly.”

  They should have run, Mattie thought; the minute they saw the other ships, they should have picked up and run.

  Ivan said, “You were going to fire on us. Why—”

  “Talk later,” Mattie interrupted. “Which way should we go?”

  “You won’t make it. Are you armed?”

  Mattie had been so focused on speed when he’d chosen this ship from Constance’s fleet that he hadn’t thought enough about firepower. “This ship hasn’t got enough weapons to melt a comet.”

  “Then you need to dock with me. The Pertinax has armor.”

  Below Mattie’s spread arms, Ivan was calling something up on the computer. Anji’s face was suddenly shoved to one half of the viewscreen while the other half showed the Jovian system—and the sparks of light that were other ships, starting to converge.

  There was no way for Mattie to tell which of those lights were Anji’s ships and which were System. “How long do we have?”

  “Seven minutes.”

  “I need at least a half hour to dock!”

  “So start moving,” Anji said, and cut the connection. Jupiter and the starscape filled in the space where her head had been.

  “I’m going to fucking kill her,” Mattie said.

  Ivan already was getting up from the pilot’s seat. “I don’t think that would help.”

  “It would help me.” The Pertinax was sending course information and permission to the Copenhagen already. Mattie scrambled to give the computer his instructions.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  There. Mattie located the Pertinax’s docking bay and aimed the Copenhagen for the other ship at the fastest speed he dared. “Have you changed your mind about prayer?”

  Ivan grabbed for the back of Mattie’s chair. “If you don’t decrease our speed soon, I might reconsider.”

  The Pertinax was staying perfectly still, its side angled toward Mattie, but the other three ships were spreading themselves out, weapons online. A small group of ships that had risen up from Io were arrowing toward this fragment of Anji’s fleet more swiftly than Mattie would have thought was possible.

  Something flashed out by Ganymede. Two fragments of the fleets had collided.

  The largest of Anji’s ships that had come to greet Mattie and Ivan, a sharp-edged disk of a stolen old System warship, sped forward through the sky toward the arrow of approaching System ships. Mattie hoped it would hold them off long enough for Mattie to dock.

  The curved side of the Pertinax was filling almost all of the Copenhagen’s viewscreen. Mattie gritted his teeth and did not slow down.

  “Uh, Mattie—”

  “I know.”

  Impact in ten—Mattie had to slow. He left scorch marks from his thrusters on the side of Anji’s ship. Maybe she wouldn’t notice.

  The door to the docking bay of the Pertinax was already opening, visible as a flash of darkness in the ship’s gravitationally revolving side. Mattie started a theta movement that would bring him in synchronous orbit with that docking bay door—

  Suddenly the Pertinax jolted, moving. Mattie grabbed the radio. “Pertinax, hold still.”

  An unfamiliar male voice came on, presumably the Pertinax’s pilot. “The System ships have reached firing range. If we don’t move, we will—”

  An explosion brightened the viewscreen and interrupted the call with static.

  “—be hit,” the pilot finished.

  Mattie was already catching up to the other ship and finding that revolving door. “Just don’t move!”

  “This ship—”

  Ivan grabbed the radio from Mattie. “Pertinax, this is Copenhagen,” he said pleasantly.

  The Pertinax jolted again, and Mattie found himself facing revolving carbon and steel. He swore and pulled the Copenhagen’s nose up.

  “If you move while we are trying to dock,” Ivan continued, still in the same very pleasant tone, “then we will collide with your hull and do far more damage than a System bomb.”

  Anji’s voice came on. “We’re holding, Ivan. Get in.”

  “Good,” Mattie snarled while Ivan held the communications equipment safely out of his reach, and when the Pertinax’s docking bay door appeared again, he dived down into it.

  The Copenhagen landed hard, skidding, still half trying to revolve on its own. The shifted gravity threw them both forward—Mattie felt Ivan collide with his back—but nothing crashed and aside from a few dents in Anji’s floor, they wer
e both undamaged. Behind them, the docking bay doors already were closing. Mattie watched the excruciatingly slow closing of the outer doors and the equally slow refilling of oxygen to the docking bay, every second waiting for a System bomb to tear through the hull of Anji’s ship.

  When the computer beeped to signify the atmosphere was safe outside, Mattie shoved open the hull door and rushed out, Ivan at his heels.

  One of Anji’s people was waiting for them. “This way,” she said, and rushed off into the hall.

  Mattie went two steps before realizing Ivan was not beside him. He was behind, limping, face set. “Slow down,” Mattie snapped at Anji’s woman, and grabbed Ivan’s arm.

  They hurried down the hall as fast as Ivan could go—Mattie gripped his elbow and thought about torn stitches and bleeding out on the Pertinax’s floor—and came out at last to the Pertinax’s control room. The ceiling of the control room was a semicircular viewscreen, giving them a 180-degree view. Mattie had a moment of disorientation, as if he had stepped out into open space, and overhead the dogfights flashed.

  “Can we back out?” Anji was asking, pacing the space in front of the captain’s chair beneath that dome of stars. It was a curious relief to see her, the familiar way she walked, those glinting earrings. “The refugees—”

  “If any more ships come this way, the Nemain can’t handle them,” said a gaunt man in the navigator’s chair, the same voice Mattie had heard through the radio on the Copenhagen.

  “So pull out and we’ll deal with that when it comes.” Anji glanced their way, and her dark eyes widened until Mattie would have sworn they were taking up half the space on her shaved head. “Mattie!” She flung herself at him for a swift and fierce hug.

  Mattie sucked in a breath to reinflate his lungs when she released him.

  “Ivan!”

  “No Leontios?” Ivan said, and looked startled when her arms settled around him with exceeding care. With Anji’s reaction, Mattie saw him anew: his shirt buttoned up to hide the marks on his neck imperfectly, bruised, pale, weary.

  “I thought you were dead. You get an ‘Ivan’ for that. You could’ve had better timing—”

  “You could’ve not tried to shoot us out of the sky. We sent the hounds signal. What were you—”

  “Can we get out of here first?” Mattie interrupted, watching the clash between Anji’s Nemain and the System ships in the sky overhead.

  Anji was shaking her head. “We can’t. I still have ships on the moons—”

  “Doing what? If you really want to fight the System, you can come back later!”

  “They’re collecting refugees,” Anji said. “I want out of here as much as you do, Mattie, but we have to wait.”

  “You’re abandoning Jupiter?” Ivan frowned.

  Anji spread her arms out toward the flashing sky. “With all possible speed!”

  “That wasn’t in the plan.”

  “Anji can tell us all about it later,” Mattie said. As far as he could tell from the lights flashing overhead, some of the System ships had slipped past the Nemain and were approaching the Pertinax. “Can you get your ships off those planets any faster?”

  “If I could, I’d already be doing it,” Anji said.

  “System ships are back in firing range,” the gaunt man reported.

  “So move!” Anji snapped. She pressed a hand to her forehead. Mattie was disturbed to see it shaking. “Listen, boys, I know we need to talk—”

  “Talk about how you’re at war with Constance now?” Ivan asked.

  For a moment his words didn’t make sense. Mattie was still trying to piece them together when Anji said, “I’m not at war with Constance.”

  “Which is why when we broadcast that we were from the Mallt-y-Nos, you tried to shoot us down.”

  The Pertinax shuddered. It wasn’t a particularly agile ship, and Mattie would bet it hadn’t been able to dodge the first System bomb.

  “Were you ever going to tell us?” Ivan asked when the Pertinax had steadied, and after this, Mattie was going to have a talk with him about priorities.

  “Sure, Ivan, after we were done getting shot at!”

  “The hull hasn’t been breached, but the armor is damaged in section 19,” the gaunt pilot reported.

  “We need to draw them off,” Anji said. “Is the Macha back yet?”

  “She’s on a course for us but trying to avoid System ships.”

  “Tell Shara to hurry!”

  Ivan said, “Anji.”

  Anji made a swift gesture of frustration. “Constance and I have had a falling-out. Her way of doing things is going to get everyone killed, and I—and my people—would like not to die.”

  It seemed fair enough to Mattie. He had the sense not to say so.

  “We’re retreating to Saturn—there’s no System there. Half my fleet’s already over. I stayed here, getting refugees, waiting for you. I should’ve known you’d find a way to show up in the worst way possible.”

  The barrage of attacks suddenly let up. The Nemain had been joined by two other ships, one a heavily armored troop carrier like the Pertinax, the other the exceedingly small and exceedingly fast ship that Mattie had noticed on their arrival.

  “If you’re not at war,” said Ivan, “then why did you try to fire on us?”

  “Because you know Con; she’s gonna be pissed. Either that or you were a System trap. I’m not your enemy; I was waiting here for you!”

  Ivan said, “What if we told you we were still on Constance’s side?”

  “I’d say I was hoping you’d say that,” Anji said, before Mattie could decide whether he should go for the gun that was not on his hip. She turned to her pilot, “Get Shara on the line; tell her we’re going to do the decoy but there are some people she needs to pick up first.”

  Mattie reached desperately for some sense. “Who’s getting picked up?”

  “You are. I was planning to send some ambassadors to Constance. The two of you can get to Con, and you can vouch for my people.”

  Ivan said, “You just tried to shoot us down when you thought—”

  “I don’t want a war! You’re going to negotiate with her so that I don’t feel like I might need to shoot down any of the Huntress’s ships that show up in my territory.”

  No expression showed on Ivan’s carved-marble features. He said, “You could ally with Christoph if you’re that scared of Constance.”

  “Christoph works for Constance,” Anji said. She waved an expansive hand to cut Ivan off. “We don’t have time. Will you vouch for my people with Constance?”

  “What’s the catch?” Ivan asked.

  “It’s not what you’re thinking. I’m sending you with a small diplomatic fleet that is also going to draw some of the System ships away so that we can get away with the refugees.”

  Mattie said, “We’re your fucking decoys?”

  “You’ll be perfectly safe.”

  “No fucking way!”

  An explosion of spectacular brightness filled the sky, nearly blinding Mattie in the second before the Pertinax’s computers could compensate for the brightness and dim the viewscreen output. A moment later he realized that the impressive display of firepower had come from the minuscule Badh.

  “Listen,” said Anji. “I could’ve left this system days ago with the rest of my fleet, but I stayed, waiting for you. No matter what is going on between me and Constance, you are my friends and I will not let you get hurt.”

  “And Constance isn’t your friend?” Ivan said.

  “Constance is the Mallt-y-Nos first, my friend second. The two of you have never been what she is. Will you do it?”

  If it was the only way to get out of this mess alive, Mattie would have danced naked underneath a full Terran moon for her. He nodded at Ivan.

  Ivan’s jaw tightened. For a minute Mattie thought he would refuse out of some stupid principle, then he said, “We’ll do it.”

  He must want to see Constance very badly, Mattie thought. Some emotion he re
fused to name jabbed unpleasantly at his heart.

  “Good,” said Anji, and then suddenly, with helpless hysteria, she started to laugh. “But first you need to get off the Pertinax and redock on the Macha.”

  FORWARD

  It was easier to get off the Pertinax in midbattle than it had been to dock, but the Macha’s hull was sparking with explosions.

  Mattie eyed it. “Do they know we’re coming?”

  Ivan was already on the radio. “Macha, this is Copenhagen.”

  A woman’s voice, tight with stress, answered the call. “This is Shara Court on the Macha. Who is speaking?”

  “Leontios Ivanov on the Copenhagen.”

  “Wait where you are. We’ll come to you.”

  Ivan put the radio down. “She knows we’re here.”

  One of the bright stars broke off of formation and headed for the Copenhagen. It was not the Macha.

  “Great,” Mattie said. “So does the System.”

  Ivan picked up the radio again. “Macha, this is Copenhagen.”

  Mattie watched that star approach. “Would you put a little urgency in your voice?”

  “We seem to have a System ship headed toward us,” Ivan continued, as if he hadn’t heard.

  The radio buzzed. “Copenhagen, hold your position.”

  The System ship was coming closer. In a minute, it would be near enough to fire. “Ivan—”

  “Macha, we are about to be shot down,” Ivan said.

  “Copenhagen, do not engage the enemy. We will come—”

  “Macha,” said Ivan, “open your docking bay doors and hold your position. We’ll be there in a moment.”

  “Oh, fuck you,” Mattie said.

  Ivan set the radio down again. “Go for it,” he said, and Mattie jumped to relativistic speed.

  He came out of it less than a second later, shaking, the Copenhagen shaking around him with the sudden stresses. A hundred warnings started to flash on the screen before him: the Copenhagen’s hull was pitted with debris that had impacted at high speed. But they were only a few kilometers away from the Macha now.