Radiate

by C. A. Higgins

  The docking bay door started to open only after they arrived. Presumably Shara Court hadn’t believed they’d do it. Bombs were still flashing against the Macha’s cylindrical hull. Mattie started to spiral inward toward that massive cylinder, matching its rotation speed, keeping well outside the impact zone of the bombs.

  He was just getting up to speed when the System ships noticed him. He had to drop back out of rotation as a bomb exploded where he had been a second earlier. “Fuck.”

  “There’s another one coming up behind us,” Ivan warned.

  “I can’t—”

  A second bomb went off and sent the Copenhagen spiraling away from the Macha. The first System ship was wheeling around, heading toward Mattie and Ivan.

  Ivan was back on the radio. “Macha, can we get some help?”

  “You’re in our blind zone,” Shara snapped. “Our weapons can’t reach. This is why I told you to wait.”

  Mattie spared a glance for the rest of the field as he tried to get back into line with the rotation of the Macha. The Nemain was some distance away, holding off the rest of the System ships. “What about the—”

  The System ship diving at them suddenly exploded, flames choking out in vacuum, debris flashing in distant sunlight. A moment later, the second System ship suffered the same fate.

  Ivan got back on the radio while Mattie was still admiring the maneuver. “Please pass on our compliments to the captain of the Badh. Also, we are about to crash-land into your docking bay.”

  He shut off the radio before Shara could protest. Mattie aligned the Copenhagen with the Macha’s rotation, aimed for the bright spot in its hull, and hurtled down.

  The Copenhagen struck the docking bay floor hard, bouncing once, thrusters blackening the inside of the ship. The docking bay doors were closing before the Copenhagen had finished moving.

  Mattie quickly checked their systems. The ship would need some repair—he didn’t even want to see what the hull looked like right now—but there was nothing too badly broken.

  Behind him, Ivan was picking himself up from the floor. “You are exceptional at landing a crashing ship.”

  It was absurd that the compliment could please Mattie so much, especially when at any moment they might be blown to pieces. “Let’s just find the captain.”

  FORWARD

  Captain Shara Court had sent four people down to pick them up. Anji, Ivan remembered, had sent only one. By the time the atmosphere had leveled enough for Ivan and Mattie to disembark from the Copenhagen, those four people were openly gaping at the damage Mattie’s landing had done to their docking bay. They led Mattie and Ivan up to the control room, which was identical to the Pertinax’s, with the starscape forming a dome overhead.

  The moment Ivan and Mattie crossed the threshold, a rail-thin redheaded woman turned on them. “Which of you is the captain?” she demanded.

  “Both?” Mattie said.

  “I don’t know what either of you was thinking, but next time, when I tell you to stay away, you stay away!”

  “Our apologies,” Ivan said. “You must be Captain Court. I’m Ivan, and this is Mattie—”

  “I know who you are.”

  So much for charm. Ivan said, “What’s our status?”

  “We’re out of the Jovian system, being pursued by the majority of the System ships.”

  Ivan craned his neck toward the viewscreen overhead. There was a cloud of stars visible as a movement against the background constellations: the System pursuit.

  “How long are we going to let them follow us?” Mattie asked.

  Shara Court had the skin of one knuckle between her teeth as she stared up at the pack of ships in pursuit. She said, “We’re not letting them follow us.”

  “We’re trying to outrun them?”

  “We couldn’t drive them off too early; they’d’ve gone back to Jupiter before Anji could pull out with the refugees.”

  “So now they’re going to shoot us down instead!”

  It was almost enough to make Ivan smile, bitter and humorlessly amused. “The cost of being the decoy,” he said.

  “They haven’t caught us yet,” Shara snapped, but her voice was thin with anxiety. She seated herself in the captain’s chair and got on the radio. The indents of her teeth showed white, then red, on her knuckle. “Nemain, they’re almost in firing range.”

  The radio buzzed, and a man’s voice came on. “We’ll engage.” A moment later, the disk of the Nemain wheeled between the Macha and the cluster of small System ships.

  The System ships couldn’t be that fast if the System had left them behind on Jupiter rather than taking them with the rest of the fleet. “How fast can the Macha travel?” Ivan asked.

  Shara’s hands were claws on the armrests of her chair. “We’re lucky if we can reach 0.01 percent lightspeed. This is a transport ship, not fast travel.”

  Ivan had known the Macha would be slow, but the number astounded him. It would take them half a year at least to reach Mars.

  The System fleet, wherever it was, would reach Constance before them.

  “How many people on board the Macha?” Ivan asked.

  “We’re full up with troops. Some of the other ships were trying to make room for refugees.” Shara touched the communications beside the captain’s chair. “Nemain, status?”

  A man’s voice came irritably over the radio. “We’re fine.”

  “You’re surrounded. Pull back.”

  “We’re trying to drive them off, remember?” said the Nemain, and the connection went dead.

  Shara switched channels. “Macha to Badh. Vithar, can you get to them?”

  “Yes,” said a man’s deep voice, and a moment later an explosion flashed from the middle of the System ships that were now worrying the Nemain. Ivan did not see the ship that had fired; the Badh was too small to be visible.

  The System ships weren’t being driven back. If anything, they were renewing their attack. While most of them converged on the wheeling Nemain, some split off, heading for the Macha. Ivan watched them grow larger in the viewscreen overhead.

  “Can’t you go any faster?” Mattie demanded.

  “This ship is not designed for speed,” Shara said through her teeth. She ordered her navigator, “Fire on those ships when they’re near enough.”

  They were near enough. The Macha fired, but the agile System ships dodged the bombs easily. Their weapons systems lit up, and at this distance the massive Macha would be impossible to miss.

  The nearest System ship exploded. This time, Ivan caught sight of the Badh, minuscule, moving with impossible speed to flank the other System ships before they could even register that one of their own had been destroyed. It took swift care of the others, and the last System ship, distracted by the Badh, was blown apart by the Macha.

  Next to Ivan, Mattie blew out an unsteady breath.

  In the chaos, the Macha had nearly left the Nemain behind: the flashing battle between it and the System ships was a spark of distant light. Shara got back on the radio. “Nemain, leave them and join us.”

  The returning call was more fuzzed with static than it should have been. The Nemain’s communications had been damaged somehow. “If we join you, they’ll follow. The Nemain is faster than the Macha. We’ll deal with these and catch up.”

  “We’re not leaving you behind,” Shara said.

  “We’ll catch up.”

  “Take the Badh with you.”

  “The Macha needs the Badh’s weaponry if you encounter any more ships. We’ll catch up.” The line to the Nemain went dead.

  Shara leaned back in her chair, worrying at her knuckle again. “Keep going,” she ordered her navigator, and the explosions of the battle dimmed with distance.

  “Wait for the Nemain,” Ivan suggested. “Send the Copenhagen on ahead. We’ll get to Constance, pave the way for your fleet.”

  Shara’s eyes were on where the Nemain had last been. “My orders were to take you to Harper safely, not let you fly of
f at the first opportunity.”

  “With the Macha’s speed, it will take half a year to reach Mars, if not more,” Ivan said. Mattie was trying to catch his eye for some reason, but Ivan didn’t dare take his attention from Shara until he had won. “The Copenhagen can get there in a matter of weeks.”

  “We’re not separating,” Shara snapped.

  “So you’d hold us against our will?”

  “I’m keeping you safe!” She threw up her hands to forestall any further objection. “When the Nemain returns, we can discuss it with Captain Laran.”

  All sight of the Nemain or the dozens of System ships surrounding it had vanished into the black. Somewhere up ahead, the System fleet was roaring in toward Constance Harper, faster than the Macha could ever travel.

  Shara was so tense that Ivan could see the tendons standing out in her wiry arms. He couldn’t push her any further, not yet.

  “When the Nemain returns,” Ivan agreed.

  FORWARD

  The nice thing about a really large ship like the Macha, Mattie thought, was how stable it felt. There was no dizziness from artificial gravity straining to apply itself evenly. Layers of armor separated him and Ivan—and everyone else in the ship—from the breathless danger of the cold outside. Even the steady acceleration of their movement was almost imperceptible from inside the ship. What they gained in stability they lost in speed, of course, but if it came to danger there was always the Badh. And the Nemain, once it returned.

  It could have been, in fact, an ideal situation.

  “What the hell were you thinking?” Mattie said, remembering to lower his voice halfway through the sentence when two Macha crewmen appeared farther down the hall.

  “I was thinking that if we wait seven months to reach Constance, the System fleet will get to her first,” said Ivan.

  “You just antagonized the woman hosting us.”

  “Would you rather not have known we were prisoners?”

  “I would rather you’d talked to me first!”

  It was amazing how precisely Ivan could control his expressions sometimes. The look he slanted at Mattie had only a knife’s edge of incredulity in it, razor thin, razor sharp. “Sorry,” Ivan said. “Next time I will make sure to confirm any obvious conclusions with you first. Should we check on the Copenhagen?”

  The Copenhagen did need repair. Mattie ran his hands over the hull of it while Ivan ran diagnostics from inside. At least, Mattie thought, most of the repairs could be done aboard the Macha.

  He was just trying to decide if it was worth replacing the hull plates on the living space entirely when the message came over the intercom to clear the docking bay.

  Once Ivan and Mattie were clear, a peculiar ship that was more engine and armament than living space docked beside the Copenhagen. That, Mattie realized, must be the Badh.

  The doors to the docking bay hissed open, and Mattie followed Ivan back inside, heading toward the new ship. A lantern-jawed man with dreadlocks hanging long down his back uncurled himself from the Badh. He was strangely familiar.

  Ivan reached the man a step ahead of Mattie. “You must be the captain of the Badh.”

  “You must be the son of Milla Ivanov,” the man said. He had a low, sonorous voice, and Mattie knew him from somewhere.

  “You saved our lives out there,” Ivan said. “Thank you, Captain…?”

  “Vithar,” Mattie said suddenly, the name returning to him in a flash of memory. “You’ve worked with Constance before.” He couldn’t remember quite what Vithar had done for her. It bothered him that he could remember the face and the name but not how or why.

  “A long time ago.” Vithar offered his hand to Mattie. His grip was cool and firm.

  “Your ship has no crew,” Ivan remarked. He was right; the Badh was too small to fit anyone but its captain inside. “Will you be docking on the Macha?”

  “Most of the time,” Vithar said.

  Ivan seemed to wait, but no more information, as far as Mattie could see, was forthcoming. Ivan said, “The Badh is a remarkable ship.”

  “I like it.”

  Again, that stalled silence. Ivan said, “Where did you get it from?”

  “Ganymede.”

  Mattie had to cover his mouth with his hand under the guise of scrubbing at his stubble so that Vithar wouldn’t see him grin. Ivan’s expression hadn’t changed, remaining pleasant with the rigidity of a computer program stalling in the face of unexpected information. It was rare to see Ivan stonewalled.

  Ivan said, “You’re the spy.”

  That got a reaction. “What?” Vithar said.

  “Stealthy little ship, flying alone, resistant to interrogation.” A smile took some of the edge off Ivan’s words—but not all. “You’re Anji’s spy.”

  “I’m her diplomat.”

  “You’re the one who’s supposed to talk to Constance?” Mattie interjected.

  “Yes.”

  “Well,” Mattie said, “good fucking luck.”

  Ivan said, “I could make your life easier. Send Mattie and me ahead in the Copenhagen. We can reach Constance long before the Macha and pave the way for your arrival.”

  Vithar looked at him sidelong. “Did you suggest this to Captain Court?”

  “Of course.”

  “She denied you.”

  “She was inclined to wait for the Nemain’s return.”

  Vithar looked amused. “Then we will wait for the Nemain.”

  Ivan seized on that amusement, smiling himself, so fully focused on Vithar that Mattie was starting to feel peculiarly invisible. “Captain Court’s only objection was our safety. Do I seem like a man who can’t take care of himself? Does Mattie?”

  “You’re clearly very capable,” Vithar said with a wry half of a smile, and suddenly it wasn’t funny or impressive that Ivan could get a reaction out of him, and Mattie wanted him to leave. “But if Shara says we wait for the Nemain, then we wait for the Nemain.”

  Ivan held his gaze for another excruciating moment, then leaned back, shrugging, graceful. “As you say.”

  “I should speak with Shara,” Vithar said.

  “I’m sure we’ll speak again soon,” Ivan said.

  “I’m sure we will.” Vithar walked off, shaking his head.

  Mattie stood stiffly, caught in the obscure feeling that if he moved too suddenly, whatever self-control usually encased him would shatter. “Making friends?” Mattie said when Vithar was gone, hearing the tightness of his own voice and hating the sound.

  Ivan was still looking in the direction Vithar had gone. “Apparently not.”

  “Good,” Mattie said, then dared to move his arms, stuffing his hands deep into his pockets. “I’m going to fix the Copenhagen before the Nemain gets back.”

  He was aware of Ivan’s gaze on his back, but he did not dare turn around to see what his expression might be.

  BACKWARD

  They’d been hunting this quarry for days. This was all in good fun for Mattie—he’d always loved puzzles, and here were he and Ivan solving a puzzle in a sneaky, underhanded way—but Ivan seemed almost unbearably tense.

  Case in point: when Ivan spotted the System agent they were tailing, he gripped Mattie’s arm a shade too tightly to stop him and said, every syllable ringing despite his lowered voice, “There he is.”

  “Where? Brown hair and briefcase?”

  “Who else?” Ivan released his arm. “He’s going into that restaurant.”

  A traveling System agent had to eat eventually, after all. Even a System intelligence agent.

  The restaurant the man was going into was not the kind of place Mattie would go to get a meal; actually, Mattie wasn’t sure when he’d ever been in a proper restaurant before. They didn’t have those things on Miranda, and a fugitive felon like himself usually found it unwise to sit that long in one place, especially one so heavily surveilled and with so few easy exits. Ivan, though, probably had been in hundreds of them before. Mattie had heard Terra had a lot.


  The man vanished inside the dusty red Martian stone edifice of the building. Through the windows, Mattie could see that the interior had been designed with Old Earth in mind. White stone pillars held up the roof; bright light streamed from overhead in imitation of the Terran sun.

  Ivan leaned against the wall of the building while Mattie squinted in. “What do you think?”

  “I think they should fire him,” Mattie said. “Leaving that sweet little computer all alone and undefended on a chair like that.”

  Ivan did not smile, as Mattie had hoped. “So you can get the device on the case?”

  “I need to put the device on the computer itself,” Mattie pointed out. “He has to be very distracted not to notice that.”

  Ivan twisted his neck to peer in the window. To anyone who passed, they would look like two friends debating whether to get lunch at that restaurant. Yet Mattie could see the tension in his shoulders even through his jacket.

  When he turned back around to face Mattie, he was smiling, but it was not an especially nice smile. “We can distract him with a little honey, I think.”

  Mattie peered back in to see what Ivan was talking about. As he did, the System agent turned his head and Mattie got a good look at his face. He had a sharp jaw and a strong, jutting chin and bright eyes that crinkled at the corners even though his lips did not curve when he greeted the waiter. It was a remarkably Terran sort of smile, and something about it made Mattie’s heart hit an extra beat.

  He also saw what Ivan had meant when the man’s gaze lingered noticeably on his male waiter as the waiter walked away.

  “Oh, please,” Mattie said, “let me throw myself on this grenade for you.”

  “We’re not going to let this grenade get off,” Ivan said, “and thank you, but I’ll do the talking. Drop something when we pass his table.”

  And then he swept off into the restaurant. Asshole.

  Mattie caught up with Ivan in two long strides, the benefit of superior height, and quickly racked his brain about what he might be able to drop in front of the man that wasn’t completely illegal. Somehow he thought that if he let his collection of lock picks fall on the floor the System intelligence agent might become distracted by the wrong thing.