Radiate

by C. A. Higgins

  Shara said, “We’re trying to repair your ship’s computer now.”

  “No,” Grace said. “No, don’t—leave it. Please, please just get me out of here.”

  “We’ll get you out of there.”

  While Shara spoke to Grace and Mattie monitored the fluctuating communications equipment, Ivan took a look at the rest of the Huldren’s systems. They were just as deeply damaged, but there was something peculiar about the damage, a sort of logic hidden in the chaos. Ivan wondered if someone had tried to reprogram the ship without fully understanding its hardware.

  One piece of nonsense appeared over and over: R = aebθ. The equation for a logarithmic spiral. When Ivan paid attention to that signature, he found that it marked every change that had been made to the computer.

  “Tell us what happened,” Shara said.

  “The others all died,” Grace said. She had gone from nearly sobbing to eerily affectless. That would be shock, Ivan thought. “The ship went crazy…it started thrashing around. My arm,” she said, lifting that mechanical limb of hers, light glittering off hidden gears, “was strong enough to hold me…I wasn’t injured. I could get to the oxygen suits when the life support went down.”

  A logarithmic spiral. It was nonsense code; it did nothing to the Huldren except mark it. Ivan said to Grace, his eyes still on that signature, “That’s quite a malfunction.”

  “It wasn’t a malfunction. There was another ship. It looked like a spiral. It did this.”

  Ivan raised his head and looked her in the eye. He had known; the moment the Macha had reported another ship nearby, he had known, as if a shadow had touched his skin. He could see that same shadow-touched terror in Grace’s eyes.

  He said, “A ship with mass-based gravitation.”

  “Yes,” Grace breathed.

  “You know it?” Shara wanted to know.

  “I may know of it,” Ivan said.

  “Just a rumor,” Mattie said sharply.

  “Is it System?”

  “Not anymore,” said Ivan.

  “We tried to speak to it when it came,” Grace said. “It wouldn’t answer us. All the holograms lit up and a woman appeared, but she wouldn’t speak…”

  “Grace, where has the spiral ship gone?” Shara asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  Shara had her knuckle between her teeth again. Some unease had drawn lines around her eyes. She felt it, too, Ivan thought—the edge of a shadow from something vast and terrible fallen over her shoulder. But unlike Ivan, she would have no name to put to it. “We’ll have someone over there in a shuttle very soon,” Shara said. “Just hold on. It’s all over now.”

  In time with her words, brightness flared on the screen. Grace flinched, hands coming up to her head as if mere light could do her damage.

  The rest of the Huldren’s control room was suddenly illuminated. “I got the lights,” Mattie said unnecessarily.

  Behind Grace, in the far back corner of the Huldren’s control room, a hologram began to take shape. At the same time, a light on the communications panel came on, and the Macha’s computer began to chime.

  “We’re receiving a message from the Huldren,” one of the Macha’s crew members reported.

  “I’m not sending anything,” Grace said.

  “Mattie, Ivan, is it possible that whatever’s wrong with the Huldren’s computers could affect the Macha?” Shara asked sharply.

  Behind Grace, a female shape was forming on the holographic terminal. An arm pushed out against the static like a child’s kicking foot from within the womb—

  The hologram vanished. Mattie was staring at Ivan in open concern, the computer display in front of him showing that while Ivan had been distracted, he had gone into the Huldren and killed the hologram before it could be born.

  “Could this hurt the Macha?” Shara demanded again.

  “It doesn’t matter. I intercepted; the message is nonsense,” Mattie said shortly. He was leaning onto the screen in front of him, his arms covering part of the display.

  When Ivan leaned over, Mattie shifted, reluctant, and let him read the message he was hiding.

  “Grace, we are sending a shuttle over now,” Shara said, and indicated that the communication should be cut. When it had been, she ordered her people, “Send a shuttle to the Huldren immediately. Rescue that woman and anyone else who might be alive but do not have any contact with the computers, understood?”

  Ivan said, “I know the ship that did this.”

  Shara said, “How?”

  “I’m a well-traveled man.” Ivan left the computer interface, seeing Mattie wipe the message from the Huldren from the Macha’s memory. “That ship can do what it did to the Huldren to the Macha, or the Badh, or any other ship it likes—and if it hit the Huldren, it’s nearby.”

  That ship should have been months away by now, far enough from the solar system that the sun would be no more than a brighter star. Instead, she was here, warping the motion of the planets with her pull. There was a sense of the inevitable to it—the wrists had already been cut, and there was nothing left to do but wait until he bled out.

  “Why are you telling me this now?” Shara demanded.

  “I didn’t know she was still around. But Mattie and I know how to defend your ships against her.”

  “How?”

  Ivan lifted a shoulder. “There’s a price.”

  Her expression twisted. “You’d demand payment?”

  “Only that you let us take the Copenhagen and go on ahead.”

  “Anji told me about you,” Shara said. Her bony hands had curled into fists on her chair. “You’ve never mentioned this ship before, and I wouldn’t dare let you into my ship’s computers. Besides, my orders are to get you to the Mallt-y-Nos safely. If there’s a ship like that out there, I can’t let you leave.”

  “Then we are your prisoners,” Ivan said.

  “If that’s what it takes.”

  “This won’t be the only ship we find like this,” Ivan warned, the message from the Huldren ringing in his head. “There will be others.”

  “Then we’ll deal with them when we find them.” Shara turned her head away. “What’s the status of our rescue shuttle?”

  Ivan could have warned her, could have given that prey animal fear a name. But there was nothing he could say without endangering himself or Mattie: he did not imagine Shara Court would be pleased that they’d had a hand in the creation of the mechanical sentience that was wandering the cosmos, or that she would be happy to know that it was apparently out of control.

  It was a good thing Mattie had wiped the message before anyone else on the Macha could see it. Even though Ivan had seen it only once, every word of it was burned into his mind.

  The message had said, IVAN, PLEASE HELP ME.

  It had been signed ALTHEA BASTET.

  FORWARD

  Sometime after the Macha came across the Huldren, Vithar received word that Constance Harper had left Mars for Venus. So Anji’s fleet changed course for Venus. Mattie didn’t mind that much for the very same reason, it seemed, that Ivan did.

  “Venus is on the other side of the sun.” Visible from Mattie’s perspective only as a pair of boots and black-clad legs, Ivan was trying his hardest to do the impossible and wear a hole into the Copenhagen’s fireproof, airtight, missile-proof armored flooring.

  “Yep,” Mattie said. Even though Mattie and Ivan weren’t allowed to leave the Macha, they spent their time inside the landed Copenhagen. Most of the repairs that they’d needed to do were done by now, but Mattie still wedged himself beneath the computer interface and checked for the thousandth time that he’d removed any possible System hardware the Ananke could use to get inside their computer.

  “It’ll take us…”

  “…a long fucking time,” Mattie finished. “What are you worrying about? Vithar’s news says she beat the System fleet.”

  “Not in one battle,” Ivan said darkly, and continued his mission to erode a valley in
the Copenhagen’s floor.

  “I’m more worried about us surviving.”

  “They can’t hurt us; they need us. All they can do is make us their prisoners.” Ivan sat down heavily in the captain’s chair.

  Mattie stared at Ivan’s boots, his hands dangling between his knees. He said, knowing it was abrupt, “Tell me something.”

  “Tell you what?”

  “Anything. A story.”

  Ivan’s fingers twitched: restless, patternless. “I haven’t got any stories to tell.”

  “You’ve run out of things to say?”

  “Well done. You’ve finally shut me up.”

  The edge of the panel Mattie was working on dug metal beneath his nails. “I could teach you something,” Mattie offered, before he could think the better of it.

  “How to be an insufferable roommate?”

  “You’ve already got that covered.” Mattie slid himself out from beneath the panel. He went to the wall, spent a moment contemplating the cupboards—where had he put the things?—then remembered, stuck his head in, and after a moment of pushing aside lock picks and false papers produced a pair of handcuffs.

  “…Why were those on your packing list?” Ivan asked.

  “I always carry handcuffs,” Mattie said, pulling out a length of long wire as well, both tools of his trade. Something indescribable passed over Ivan’s face, so to shut down whatever might come out of his mouth next Mattie said, “They’re rigged cuffs, Ivan; I didn’t know if we’d need a Trojan prisoner to get you out of that fucking ship.”

  “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

  Mattie snapped one cuff over his own wrist and then knelt at Ivan’s side. The dangling cuff clanged against the pilot’s chair. “You know how to pick cuffs already,” Mattie said, and waited for Ivan’s nod.

  When he’d gotten it, Mattie said, “But not when your hands are chained apart.”

  Ivan’s left hand started drumming patternlessly again. He must have known he was doing it, Mattie thought, but couldn’t—or didn’t bother to with only Mattie here to see—stop. “I’m listening.”

  “If you’ve got both hands there’re two things you can do,” said Mattie. “Slide a shim beneath the gears to loosen them up or get a pick and twist the mechanism inside.” He picked up the wire in his cuffed hand and held it, deliberately keeping his free hand behind his back. He rested his arm on the edge of Ivan’s chair. “If you’ve got one hand and a long enough pick, you can do the same thing.”

  In a few quick moves, he bent the wire into the correct shape, then twisted his wrist as much as he could and angled the wire toward the cuffs. Cuffs were easy to pick; there was only one lever inside them, and so he managed to pop them open after a few minutes. The cuffs fell from his wrist; he just managed to catch them before they hit the ground.

  Ivan said, “And if you don’t have a pick?”

  Mattie clapped the cuffs around his wrist again. “If you don’t have a pick, you need a hard surface of some kind.” Like the armrest of a steel chair. Mattie kept his eyes fixed on his own wrist rather than look to see what Ivan’s expression might be. “You’ve got to angle your hand like this, see, so that the base of the thumb will hit right at the nub of bone. You want to angle a little inward, like this, so that the force goes in toward the palm. And then you need a short, fast blow—”

  Ivan’s hand came down hard on his wrist, aborting his movement, pinning him to the chair.

  “Do not dislocate your thumb,” he said.

  “I’m showing—”

  “I know,” Ivan said. He moved his hand without releasing the pressure on Mattie’s wrist to flick the rigged lock on the handcuffs so that it came off of Mattie’s arm again. “Thank you.”

  Long days after their changed course to Venus, Anji’s fleet received new information, which was duly passed on to Ivan and Mattie: Constance Harper was on Mercury.

  “She can’t have gone to both Venus and Mercury,” Ivan said. “There’s not enough time to travel between them, much less fight the System.”

  Shara scowled. “Vithar, are you sure your reports are accurate?”

  On the other side of the holographic table, visible over the white edge of the holographic sun, Vithar shrugged. “There’s fighting happening on Mercury. Is it the Mallt-y-Nos? That’s what I’m told.”

  “But do you know?”

  “There’s no way to know for sure,” Vithar said. “If you wanted confirmation, you could always send the Badh on ahead. Or the Copenhagen.”

  There was an edge to his voice Mattie hadn’t expected. Ivan was eyeing Vithar as if he were reconsidering his use. Mattie swallowed down a surge of irrational annoyance.

  Shara said, “Out of the question.”

  “You sent me out yesterday to look for the Nemain.”

  “And look at what you found!”

  “The System ships are far from us.”

  “Sorry,” said Mattie, “maybe I’m not keeping up. Did you just say we have System ships following us?”

  “Following us, maybe,” Vithar said. “Behind us, certainly. There was no sign of the Nemain.”

  Ivan said, “Could those be the same ships that followed us from Jupiter?”

  “Possibly.”

  “It doesn’t matter where they’re from. It’s my job to get what’s left of this fleet to the Huntress safely. None of us are separating.” Shara leaned over the table. The silver cloud of System ships on the map had dispersed, no longer representing a definite location but rather a possible area where the System fleet could be. Nearly half the inner solar system was filled with that quicksilver. Around three of the four inner planets, uncertain red ships had been marked: the possible locations of the Mallt-y-Nos’s fleet. Only Earth was black and barren of ships. Even the comet of Christoph’s approach out by Neptune was dispersing; their reports of his location were coming too infrequently to be certain where he was.

  Mattie rolled an Old Earth coin through his knuckles and stared at the mess of uncertainties on the table before them.

  “We have to pick a target,” Shara said. “This fleet stays together, all its parts. I say Mars: we knew the Huntress was there for certain weeks ago, and it’s closest to our location.”

  “Venus,” Ivan said.

  “Venus is on the other side of the sun!”

  “No,” Mattie said, “Ivan’s right. We should go to Venus.”

  Shara’s lips pressed, thin and strained. “Vithar?” she said.

  Vithar was looking at Mattie and Ivan—no, just at Ivan—thoughtfully. Mattie pressed the old Earth coin hard with his nail until he felt the old metal bend.

  Vithar said, “Ivan and Mattie have known the Huntress the longest.”

  “Venus was next in the plan after Mars,” Ivan said. “Anji knows. Constance won’t be on Mercury, not yet. She’s on Venus.”

  “Then we go to Venus,” said Shara.

  “We’re going to lead those System ships right to Constance,” Ivan said after the meeting, following Mattie down the familiar path to the Macha’s docking bay. Ivan was still limping even after all this time. That leg of his, it seemed, would forever be a reminder that Mattie had been late.

  Mattie would rather have talked about anything, anything, other than Constance Harper. “She’ll be fine. She’s got good people around her.”

  “Like Anji?”

  “What do you care?”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “Because I think what might happen to us is a little more disturbing!” Mattie hissed.

  “You—”

  “No,” Mattie said flatly, and if the subject wasn’t dropped, at least for the moment Ivan stopped pushing it.

  Vithar had hedged, but those System ships could easily be the ones from Jupiter. If they were, they’d destroyed the Nemain and were determined enough to follow the Macha and the Badh into the darkness of interstellar space.

  If Mattie and Ivan could get into the Copenhagen, they could outrun those ships. Mattie had that t
hought ringing through his head when an alarm went off in the Macha a few hours later.

  Shara was already in the control room when Mattie and Ivan arrived, standing beneath the half dome of uninterrupted sky. Ahead of them, like a fine mist, something winked and flashed between the stars.

  “Can we divert course?” she asked.

  “We’re close enough to be seen by their sensors,” one of the revolutionaries reported.

  “Why didn’t we see them before?”

  “We did,” the same man said. “But there’s no voluntary motion. They’re cold. We thought it was…debris from a collision, maybe.”

  “What is it?” Mattie asked.

  “Ships of some kind,” Shara said. She was leaning tensely forward, her hands wringing together. She’d been doing that more and more often lately. “A lot of them.”

  A lot indeed. They filled up almost the entire viewscreen, drifting, as densely packed as the stones in a planetary ring.

  Drifting and cold, just like the Huldren.

  From beside Mattie, with calm and eerie certainty, Ivan said, “They’re dead.”

  Silence fell among the revolutionaries, underlaid by the low, relentless hum of functioning electronics. Shara broke it. “Is there any sign of heat or life support among those ships?”

  “Negative,” one of the revolutionaries reported.

  Mattie said, “We should get out of here.”

  “Check the computers,” Shara told him. “Like you did before.”

  “What if—whatever did this to them is still here? We should leave.”

  The radio buzzed, and Vithar’s voice came over through the static. “Macha, can you count the ships? The Badh can’t get a definite number.”

  “Count them,” Shara ordered her people.

  Ivan was already on the lower level, trying to get into the other ships’ computers. Mattie joined him reluctantly and took over the endeavor. He understood immediately why the Badh hadn’t been able to get a definite count. There were an impossible number of ships out there. Mattie chose one—the nearest—and got to work.