When they started to walk past the man’s table—he did look up, Mattie noticed, discreetly but not discreetly enough to watch Ivan pass—Mattie tripped over nothing and let a handful of computer data storage chips spill out of his pocket and strew themselves over the Earth-stone floor. The chips held an enormous volume of illegal information, but the man had no way of knowing that from looking at them.
“Shit,” he said very loudly to complement the commotion he had already made.
Ivan gave him an exasperated look.
“Are you all right?” the man asked Mattie, not without a brief glance at Ivan, who had stopped right alongside the man’s chair.
Mattie waved a hand, then got onto his knees to start picking up the tiny flakes.
“He’s fine. He’s always dropping something,” Ivan said to the man. His accent had switched to the way it had sounded when Mattie had met him a decade ago—posh and cultured. It took Mattie aback to realize how much Ivan’s accent had softened since then. He fancied sometimes that Ivan had picked up a bit of Mattie’s own Mirandan drawl.
The man turned in his chair, angling his body toward Ivan. “You’re Terran.”
Ivan smiled. “On vacation,” he said. “I wish now that I’d gone to Venus instead.”
When Mattie had dropped the chips, he’d made certain some of them rolled beneath the chair that held the System agent’s computer. Picking up the chips, he slowly worked his way under the table toward that chair.
“Venus is very nice, especially the northern hemisphere,” the man was saying. “Have you been there before?”
“Not recently.” Ivan hooked his foot around a chair and tugged it out. It screeched by Mattie’s ear, and Mattie glared at Ivan’s ankle. “I went there with my aunt when I was a child, and I still remember the jungle flowers. Mattie, I suppose I should ask if you need help.”
“No,” Mattie said. “I got it. I’m fine.”
“Right,” said Ivan. “Have you been to Venus often?”
“I travel around for my job,” the Systems agent said.
“Oh?” Ivan gave the vowel an arch turn. “What’s that?”
Mattie had heard him flirt with strangers a thousand times before—it was often their only way to get what they wanted—but somehow, something about listening to him flirt now was disturbing. Now fully under the table, Mattie very carefully reached out and began to pick the locks holding the briefcase shut.
“If I told you,” said the man, “I’d have to kill you.”
Ivan laughed. Mattie scowled darkly at the briefcase.
“You’re a dangerous man, then,” Ivan said with a hint of his own wolf’s teeth in his voice, and Mattie scowled even more deeply.
“And you?” the man asked. “What do you do?”
“I travel.”
The briefcase came unlocked. Mattie pulled the tiny device from his pocket.
“Oh?” said the man in a fair imitation of Ivan’s earlier exclamation. “You’ve been many places, then?”
Mattie slipped his hand into the briefcase and planted his and Ivan’s tiny device on the surface of the man’s computer.
“I’ve been around,” Ivan said.
Mattie relocked the briefcase, grabbed the last few data storage chips from the floor, and stood up so quickly that he banged the table on the way to his feet.
“I got them all,” he said to Ivan, and then—reluctantly—nodded once at the Systems agent. The agent was looking at Mattie with one brow arched. He’d looked very attractive in profile from the window, Mattie remembered, but up close and straight on there was a meanness to his features. That would be the System for you, Mattie thought.
“Come on,” he said to Ivan, and Ivan’s eyebrow arched as well—Terrans, Mattie thought, annoyed—but he stood up.
“Do you still want to eat?” Ivan asked him politely, still in his poshest accent.
“No,” Mattie said. “I don’t think I’m hungry.”
Ivan turned back to the man and Mattie imagined he was giving him an apologetic sort of look, but Mattie already was walking out of the restaurant. He stepped out onto the Martian stone and breathed in the clean Martian air with some relief. The sunlight here was not as intense as the light inside the restaurant had been.
Ivan was at his shoulder a moment later. “Good thinking,” he said, and followed at Mattie’s shoulder when Mattie set off for where they had landed the Annwn.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean good job getting us out of there.”
It hadn’t been a particularly good job; Mattie had essentially just dragged Ivan out, but Ivan didn’t sound sarcastic. Instead of trying to parse out what Ivan meant, Mattie said, “Why didn’t you let me do the talking?”
“Because I always do the talking.”
“But it was a man,” Mattie said.
“I know how to drive stick,” said Ivan.
“What?”
But Ivan already was heading into a narrow alleyway farther down the street, tugging the computer out of Mattie’s jacket pocket. “Come on. I want to find out what we can before he notices what we planted on him.”
Mattie had the little computer out and in his hand in a moment. The computer would connect to the device Mattie had planted on the System agent’s computer back in the restaurant. System intelligence agents, when traveling, had to be very careful about security, yet they had to travel frequently and could not always trust the government outpost hosting them to hold the sensitive information they needed. So sometimes they brought portable computers with a direct connection to System intelligence information, a connection that could be accessed only from that physical computer itself.
Unless, say, a pair of crafty strangers had planted a device like Mattie’s on the computer to interrupt the computer’s electric processes and hijack them with his own commands. Mattie went to work persuading the System to let him sign in to its data and tried to enjoy the puzzle again.
It didn’t take long before he was in. He passed the handheld to Ivan wordlessly.
Ivan nearly snatched it from his hand. Mattie couldn’t see the screen, and so he watched Ivan’s face instead, the way the quality of the light reflected off it changed as Ivan moved from place to place on the screen in front of him.
At long last Ivan sighed. “She’s alive.”
“Of course she is,” Mattie said, baffled.
Ivan flicked him a glance. “They arrested her after we left Luna, Mattie. Anything could have happened.”
Mattie doubted it. Constance could take care of herself. Constance always had taken care of herself, and more than that, she’d taken care of Mattie as well. There wasn’t a chance the System could take her down.
“There’s nothing else in here,” Ivan said with that peculiar tension in his voice again. It made Mattie’s gut twist the same way it had before. “I don’t know what happened.”
“I can get into contact with Anji,” Mattie said. “Con can’t get into contact with us, but I bet she can talk to Anji. I’ll have Anji get a message to her. Set up a rendezvous.”
“How soon?”
“I don’t know,” Mattie said. “It depends on Anji and on Constance.”
He almost asked Ivan then, Why? Why do you need to see her so badly? What is it you need to say?
He did not. He was not certain he wanted to know the answer, and so he carefully set the thoughts aside.
“Contact Anji,” Ivan said. “Ask her to set up a rendezvous. Tell her we need to see Constance soon.”
FORWARD
After the first week with no sign of the Nemain, Ivan appealed to Shara again.
She wasn’t pleased by his opening the subject. “The Nemain will catch up.”
“The Nemain was surrounded by System ships. If it’s not here by now, they destroyed it.”
Shara’s sudden pallor was stark against the orange of her hair. “The Macha had a head start. We’re not giving up on them yet.”
“The Copenhagen—”
“We’re not splitting up, not until the Nemain gets back,” Shara snapped. “And even then, it’s only up for discussion. Our orders were to escort you there.”
“If you won’t let us leave, you’re not escorting us, you’re imprisoning us,” Ivan said.
“We wait for the Nemain,” said Shara.
After that, she took to avoiding him. The Macha was a large ship, and she was quite effective at hiding in it. Ivan’s next opportunity to speak with her directly did not come until he and Mattie were summoned to the war room to discuss some new intelligence Vithar had received.
“Sit, gentlemen,” Shara said when they arrived. She tapped at the holographic display on the table that filled the room. The glittering stars blacked out, replaced with a face-on view of the solar system, planets marked in exaggerated size. “Shut the door.”
Mattie shut the door. Ivan seated himself, carefully hiding his limp. “Did you find the Nemain?”
If looks could eviscerate, Ivan’s organs would have been splayed out around him like butterfly wings, and his beating heart would have been jolting down to stillness in the middle of the holographic table. Shara said, “We received a message this morning that may change our status.” With another brief touch she brought up an overlay onto the table, moons in static whirling. Oversized images of the Macha, Badh, and Copenhagen appeared at their approximate location in the asteroid belt—still so far from Mars and Constance Harper—alongside ghostly, uncertain images of the System fleet spread out through space.
A marker for the Nemain had been left where the other ship had last been seen, gray, like a tombstone. Ivan eyed the lost ship and the System ships around it until Shara’s next words shattered his concentration:
“Christoph Bessel has declared war on the Mallt-y-Nos.”
“War?” Ivan said.
“War.” Under Shara’s touch a smaller cluster of ships up by Neptune brightened, aimed inward, toward Mars. Not just the System but Christoph as well: the cage was closing around Constance Harper.
Mattie said, “Christoph was an asshole. But why do we care? He’s way out by Neptune.”
“Precisely.” Shara’s gesture covered the field: Constance on one side, besieged, Christoph on the other, a free agent to be fought or allied with, and Anji in between.
Ivan said, “What does this mean for us, Captain Court?”
“That’s what we’re here to decide.” Shara looked at Vithar. “Opinion?”
Vithar was eyeing the table thoughtfully. “Christoph has said nothing regarding Anji. His route to the inner solar system takes him wide of Saturn.”
“She may want to ally with Christoph.”
“Hang on,” said Mattie, while Ivan’s blood ran cold.
“Perhaps we should return to Saturn—leave a message for the Nemain—and see where Anji would prefer to send us.”
Ivan felt as if slender icy fingers had closed around his heart and clenched. Leave Constance behind to face the System alone—and the last time he and Mattie had faced captivity, at least they’d had the option of a bomb on a timer. “What would happen to us if you did?” Ivan asked.
“That would be for Anji to decide.”
“Anji’s orders were clear,” Vithar interrupted. “Constance Harper is her old friend; we ally with the Huntress.”
“I want that confirmed by Anji,” Shara said.
Vithar’s brows lifted, but he kept his annoyance well contained. “I will confirm, but we will continue on our course for Mars.”
“Perhaps we should wait.”
“We continue on,” Vithar said.
Ivan thought Shara would argue with him. She’d paled again, the way she did when she was angry or under stress. But the intercom rang before she could respond.
Shara hit the interface on the table. “What is it?”
“There’s a ship ahead, Captain.”
“A System ship?”
“Unclear. It’s not responding to our hails.”
“Approach with caution. I’ll be up in a moment.” She shut the intercom down. “We’ll continue on to Mars. For now, I need you in the Badh. We may need offensive abilities.”
Vithar was already half out the door. He lifted two fingers in acknowledgment, and left.
A strange ship, all alone. Maybe System. Maybe not. Ivan said, “Let me and Mattie see it.”
“What? The ship?”
What else? But he reined his temper in. “We might be able to help.”
The Macha had been a long way off from the strange ship when the alarm had been raised. By the time they were near enough to get detailed scans, the Badh was zipping around overhead. Ivan leaned on the railing separating the upper level of the Macha’s control room from the lower, staring toward the distant ship, half expecting to see a graceful seashell spiral emerge out of the black.
“Life support is on, but the engines don’t seem to be working,” one of the Macha’s crewmen reported.
Mattie was all nervous energy next to Ivan, jittering his leg when he leaned against the railing. Ivan said to the crewman, “How large is the ship?”
“Civilian class. Smaller than the Nemain and unarmed.”
“Centripetal gravitation,” Mattie said under his breath to Ivan, pointedly.
Ivan asked, “Any contact yet?”
Shara was trying to hail the other ship from the captain’s chair. “Either they’re not answering or they can’t answer.”
“Maybe there’s something wrong with their computers.”
“If they’re not a threat, we could just fly past,” Mattie suggested.
“They’re revolutionaries in need of assistance or they’re System lying low, hoping we’ll fly past,” Shara said. “We have to find out which.”
“Let me and Mattie try to get into their computer,” Ivan said.
“Can you?”
Mattie laughed. Ivan said, “Yes.”
Shara hesitated a moment longer, biting her lip, before giving way to the inevitable. “Do it.”
The woman trying to get through the other ship’s computers ceded her place to Ivan and Mattie immediately. Ivan leaned on the chair, watching the screen, while Mattie studied what could be seen of the other ship’s computers.
The other ship’s hardware seemed to be working: it was broadcasting something at the Macha. The broadcast itself was nonsense.
“Think they’re trying to radio us?” Ivan asked.
“Yeah, maybe, and something got scrambled.”
“What can you learn about the ship?” Shara asked.
Ivan read off what Mattie had managed to pull up. “It’s a civilian-class ship with a standard crew component of seventy souls. The name is the Huldren.” He seated himself at the computer interface beside Mattie and began to check the old System records stored on the Macha for information about a starship called Huldren.
Mattie asked, “Can Vithar see any modifications?”
Vithar’s voice crackled out of the radio. “The ship has weaponry. It doesn’t look original.”
It was an old skill, well used, to get into the System data banks. Ivan had the information he wanted in an instant. “The Huldren was a transport ship owned by a private company that operated out of Venus. Last reported location was Venus, right before Earth was hit.”
“System civilians, looking to escape?” Shara suggested.
“System civilians wouldn’t head to the outer planets,” Ivan said.
Mattie was already elbow deep inside the other ship’s metaphorical guts. It looked like he had been testing various System backdoors, trying to get into the computer, but the backdoors had been blocked off. Definitely revolutionaries.
The code was odd, though. “It’s garbled,” Ivan said.
Mattie was intent. “I don’t think it’s on purpose.”
“Can you get in?” Shara asked.
“I think I—uh, yes,” Mattie said, and Ivan saw what had surprised him. One of the more uncommon System backdoors had been left,
metaphorically speaking, wide open, as if someone had taken remote control of the other ship and then left without reverting the change.
“I got the communications,” Mattie said. “Want to talk?”
Shara nodded and lifted a hand, signaling for silence. She said, “This is the revolutionary ship Macha. Where is your allegiance?”
Static. Then, rising like mist out of the ground, high and tight and frightened, came a woman’s voice, the words lost to the snow.
Some unnamable weight seemed to rest more heavily on Ivan’s shoulders, the approach of some creeping dark. He wondered why none of the other crew members seemed to sense it as he did. Even an elk felt the nearness of the wolf.
“…Huldren,” the woman’s static-drowned voice begged. “This is the revolutionary ship Huldren. Please respond. This is the revolutionary ship Huldren. Please…”
“We can hear you,” said Shara. “Who is speaking?”
“My name is Grace Kim. The rest of the crew is gone. They’re dead. The ship won’t move. The ship, it…”
“We’re going to help you, Grace,” Shara said. “Mattie and Ivan, can you restore power to the Huldren?”
Mattie sounded doubtful. “We might be able to get you a video connection.”
“Do it.”
A black square opened up on the screen, obscuring the stars ahead, the Badh circling the still-distant Huldren. For a moment, nothing was visible but darkness, nothing audible except heaving, tear-edged breaths.
Then a pale blue light flickered like lightning. The woman sitting in front of the screen flinched away, one arm coming up to conceal her face. The blue light gleamed off her black hair, off the metal joints that covered her arm. The light was coming from in front of her, but all behind her—what little was visible of an empty piloting room, chairs askew, instrumentation dark—was still in blackness.
The Huldren’s interior lights had failed, Ivan realized. The only light in the room now was from the video connection to the Macha that Mattie had just opened.
Ivan wondered how long she had been in the dark.
Grace lowered her arm, squinting hard even into the dimness of the computer screen’s light. The metal was not covering her arm: it was a prosthetic. Ivan could see the places where metal joined to flesh, rivets sunk deep into muscle to join with bone and a thin ridge of skin trying to grow up and over the metal beside it. When she moved the arm, pulleys and wires flexed. She was a revolutionary, certainly. A System soldier would have a much more expensive prosthetic.
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