Radiate

by C. A. Higgins

  Ivan had been staring at the dead communications equipment in silence. There was no expression on his face, but Mattie had the uneasy feeling that he was planning something. “There’s one by Earth,” Ivan said. Mattie shot him a glare he didn’t receive.

  Shara’s voice came through thinly, as if she were speaking through her teeth. “Earth is too far away. We are not going to Earth. And I am not sending the Badh or the Copenhagen on ahead.”

  Mattie said, “There’s one just outside the asteroid belt, by Jupiter. We can get to that one fast, and there’ll be no one there.”

  It was Ivan’s turn to give Mattie a look that Mattie resolutely ignored.

  “That’s a long trip,” Shara said.

  “We have to make it,” Vithar said. “Anji needs to know how to block a computer against the…virus or whatever killed the fleet. Afterward, we find the Mallt-y-Nos.”

  “While we’re at it, we can confirm what she wants us to do about Christoph,” Shara said pointedly. “Mattie, when you’re back on the Copenhagen, send the Badh and the Macha the coordinates.”

  “Will do,” Mattie said.

  They reached the other relay station a few days later. It was the only habitable place on the asteroid, a rock so small that it had no name, drifting frozen and alone and nameless in empty space. Its solitude had saved it: there were no marks of bombs on its walls, and its greenhouse was intact.

  Mattie brought the Copenhagen down to dock smoothly, then joined Ivan out in the docking area. Other than the docking area, Mattie could see only a few other rooms: one for access to the communications equipment and System database and a passageway that led to a few smaller rooms for living and sleeping spaces. Each room could be sealed off from the others in case of a catastrophic loss of atmosphere, but none of the air lock doors had been shut. The inhabitants of this rock had fled. Maybe they’d been scared off by the attack on the other station.

  Ivan headed off for the interior rooms while Mattie was still sealing the Copenhagen and Vithar was just unfurling himself from the Badh. Mattie gritted his teeth, rushed through the rest of the sealing process, and jogged off after him. Just because the place looked abandoned didn’t mean there wasn’t some loyal System bastard hiding in a closet farther in.

  Mattie caught up to Ivan just as he turned to look at a computer panel set into the wall beside the first interior air lock doors.

  Some great mechanical force groaned and grinded. Mattie ducked automatically, shoving Ivan back with his shoulder, his gun out, looking wildly around for the danger. Overhead, the thick air lock doors had started to close.

  Vithar looked up from the Badh and saw the doors shutting. He started forward, but he was too far to make it before the doors met and sealed.

  In the resounding silence after the doors had shut, Mattie said, “Did you just kill him?”

  “Of course not.” Ivan was calmly inputting a code to keep the door from being opened by any overrides from the other side. “There’s plenty of air in there. We’ll even have to let him out in an hour or so to get back to our ship.”

  Mattie’s temper broke. “It would have been nice if you’d let me know what we were doing before you did it, Ivan!”

  “I thought we were on the same page.”

  “We’re not even reading the same fucking book,” Mattie snapped. “Wait here a minute, all right?”

  When the System cameras shattered under the force of his bullets one by one, Mattie felt a little bit better. He returned to Ivan. “Want to tell me what’s the next stage of your plan?”

  “We’ll warn Anji about Ananke, as we said. But we also find Constance—where she is, how to get to her—and warn her about Anji.”

  “Then what?”

  Ivan shrugged. “Then we go back to our ship.”

  “We’ll have just sabotaged Anji’s people. You don’t think they might take that out on us?”

  “Would you rather we let them kill Constance?”

  “I’d rather we got out of here alive!”

  “Then what do you think we should do?” Ivan said.

  It wasn’t like Ivan had left them a lot of choices. “Overpower Vithar when we come out, fly out, and get away.”

  Ivan was watching him in dark and steady silence. “Are you willing to kill him?”

  “If we have to,” Mattie snapped.

  The distance between them seemed to lengthen like space being warped by a black hole. There was an argument glinting in Ivan’s eyes, one of those wild shouting arguments he’d had with Constance.

  Mattie turned away. “Computers are in here,” he said, jerking his gun in their direction.

  Ivan said, “I’ll check the database for any reports on where Constance might be. You try to get into contact with…anyone.”

  Whatever argument they just hadn’t had, Mattie realized, he had lost.

  The relay station was made mostly of reinforced greenhouse glass. Before the cameras had been shot out, all that glass would have guaranteed that there were no dead spots in the footage. Even with the cameras shot out, Mattie felt exposed. He found the communications station beside where Ivan was frowning down at the database of past communications and took the time to reprogram the computer so that any messages sent out from this station would not carry the mark of their location.

  “Any luck?” he asked Ivan. The silence after such a near argument was making Mattie nervous.

  “Not much.” Ivan seemed unaffected. “The database is full of dead ends and lost connections. When the data centers on Earth were destroyed, it left holes in the records.”

  Constance’s war had scarred even the virtual realm. Mattie shook his head and sent off the symbol of the Mallt-y-Nos, barking hounds, looking for an answer.

  A click from the computer nearby, and then a familiar voice spoke. “People of the System.”

  Mattie jerked. “Turn that off.”

  “I haven’t seen it before,” Ivan said quietly. His gaze was fixed on the screen, where Constance Harper, with a blazing look, declared the System destroyed.

  Mattie had been behind the camera. Not that long ago, and a lifetime since. A surge of resentment rose up in him. “Turn it off.”

  Ivan’s hand lifted as if he would deny Mattie or reach out to touch Constance’s face, but instead he stopped the video and closed it. A minute later, old recorded messages once again were scrolling rapidly across the screen.

  Beneath Mattie’s hands, the howling of hounds played, the answer to his call. Mattie got on the microphone. “This is Matthew Gale and Leontios Ivanov. Who are we talking to?”

  The response took a long time in coming. Whoever they were talking to was several light-minutes away—by Jupiter, maybe.

  A woman’s voice, warped and warbled, came on. Mattie’s fingers tightened around the edge of the control panel until he realized that the speaker was a woman he did not know.

  “This is the diplomatic fleet of Julian Keys in support of the Mallt-y-Nos,” she said. “Please repeat your identity.”

  “Mattie Gale and Leontios Ivanov,” Mattie said for the second time.

  Ivan was up and at his shoulder. “Julian?”

  There was a chair by Mattie’s hip. He kicked it out for Ivan to use. “Yep.”

  They waited. At some point while waiting, Ivan decided to sit down. Mattie did not let on that he had noticed.

  The woman’s voice spoke again. “Please confirm your identities.”

  Mattie scowled. He reached up and flicked a switch, and the camera above the communications terminal lit up, displaying the two of them on half of the screen, with black beside them.

  “Is that good enough?” Mattie asked, and saw the corners of Ivan’s mouth twitch.

  The silence this time was rather longer, though perhaps it just seemed longer because the camera was on them and recording. At long last, the screen split in two, and a man appeared: older, dark skinned, with the stillness to his face and precision to his movements that spoke of an upbringing on Terr
a.

  “Julian,” Ivan said, and smiled.

  That impassiveness was broken by pleasure. “Leon,” Julian said, and then, “Mattie. It’s good to see you.”

  Mattie hardly knew Julian—he’d met him only once, really, when handing off the seven bombs that eventually would destroy Earth—but Ivan had known him since childhood, one of Milla Ivanov’s few surviving revolutionary friends. “You as well,” Ivan said.

  Another lengthy pause as their words traveled to him and his traveled back across that impossible reach of space between them.

  “We didn’t think you were alive,” Julian said.

  “We’re pretty glad we’re breathing, too,” Mattie said.

  “And mostly in one piece,” Ivan added. “We’ve been trying to get into contact with somebody—”

  “But the solar system’s a mess,” Mattie interrupted, knowing that Ivan was trying to hurry the conversation along: with the delay in communication, pleasantries could take hours. Vithar probably would lose patience and blow open the air lock door with the Badh’s weaponry before then. “System everywhere and rebel ships that aren’t Con’s. People keep trying to shoot Ivan. And me sometimes.”

  “Where is Constance, Julian?” Ivan asked.

  This time, the delay the light took traveling between their little asteroid and Julian’s fleet was impossibly long. Absurdly, Mattie found himself hoping that the response would get trapped like light frozen at the edge of a black hole and the answer would never return. But at last Julian said, “On Venus, but not for much longer.”

  There was some distance to Venus, at least. They would have some time.

  “She’s sticking to the plan—Mars, Venus, Mercury, Luna. But communication has been difficult. If she changes her plan, I won’t know.”

  It had been abstract before, Mattie realized, knowing where Constance was. But now they knew for sure. There was a real place they might go. There was a real danger.

  Ivan seemed relieved. “Luna,” he said. “Thank you.”

  “What about everyone else?” Mattie asked abruptly. “We saw Anji, but what about Christoph?” He could still see all those fleets converging on one place on the Macha’s map.

  “My mother?” Ivan asked quietly. “Is she with Con?”

  “If you saw Anji, I’m glad you’re alive,” Julian said. “I think Anji will kill any one of us if she’s pressed.”

  Ivan didn’t move, but Mattie felt the “I told you so” anyway.

  “I spoke to Milla not long ago; she’s alive and safe, with the Mallt-y-Nos. Christoph—”

  Julian stopped, arrested, and that moment of silence was more telling than anything he could have said. “Christoph is dead,” he said at last, precisely.

  Christoph is dead. Mattie had grown used to understanding the unspoken words from a Terran mouth, and Julian’s words, he knew, meant Christoph is dead, and I killed him.

  I told you she could take care of herself, Mattie thought at Ivan, not without bitterness. He did not believe that Ivan heard.

  Julian said, “Come join me and my fleet. It’s dangerous in the solar system now, and there’s safety in numbers.”

  “No, thank you,” Ivan said. “We’ll meet Constance on Luna.”

  “My fleet is heading to rejoin Constance, too.”

  “No, thank you,” Ivan said firmly, and without once asking Mattie what he thought.

  Julian tried once more. “It will be safer with my fleet.”

  “It will be faster if we go alone,” Ivan pointed out. “She needs us there, Julian.”

  Julian frowned. “Do what you must,” he said, “but—what is it?”

  He was addressing someone out of frame. Mattie could just make out her response:

  “Julian,” said the same unseen woman who had pressed him for his identity, “someone’s tapped into this transmission. They’re listening in. There’s an unidentified ship out on the edges of our sensors; it looks like it might be System.”

  Mattie’s fingers tightened slowly around the back of Ivan’s chair, blood fleeing from them with the pressure until he could not feel anything from their flesh, only their bones bending, taut, creaking like unoiled metal.

  The transmission from Julian’s end had been recorded in the past: a few minutes ago now. What Mattie and Ivan were witnessing had already been done.

  “Julian, wait,” Ivan said sharply, uselessly.

  “I apologize,” Julian said, already too late, addressing them once more from the past, a faint frown marking the edges of his eyes. “I will make contact with you again as soon as this problem’s been dealt with.”

  “Julian,” said Ivan, “Julian!” as the screen went suddenly black and threw them both into silence and the soft humming of dormant electronics.

  “We have to call him back,” Ivan said. “What frequency did he call on?”

  “No,” Mattie said.

  “What do you mean no?”

  “If we call him back, it could intercept the transmission.”

  “We have to warn him!”

  “No,” said Mattie.

  The communications center chimed with an incoming call. Ivan reached for it.

  “Wait!” Mattie said, and Ivan stopped.

  Whoever was calling in had not used the signal of the hounds.

  Together, they stared down at the communications terminal while it rang, a low, steady chime. The incoming transmission sound ceased abruptly, long enough to take a breath.

  And then it started up again.

  “We should answer,” Ivan said as the computer chimed with a patient and steady rhythm.

  Mattie said, “Not until he gives the signal.”

  The chiming ended. Then, for a third time, the communications gently rang.

  Even if Julian somehow had forgotten to send the hounds signal on the first call, he would not forget on the second and certainly not the third.

  Carefully skirting the buttons that would answer the call, Mattie checked the source. There was little to be seen. The call had come from a ship of System build—that didn’t mean anything; just about all ships currently flying had been System-built—but where the ship’s identification should have been, which said who it followed and where it was from and what it was called, there was a simple equation:

  R = aebθ

  “Mattie,” Ivan said with eerie calm, “I’m going to answer her.”

  “No!” Mattie said, and Ivan let the call ring out into silence. This time the caller did not try again.

  Mattie said, “We have to get out of here.” He straightened up and started for the sealed doors on the other end of the room, hastily scanning his memory for anything he might have set down and left behind. His gun was still in his waistband, so that was good.

  Ivan was not with him. “We still have to warn Con and Anji.”

  “Fuck them,” Mattie said. In front of the communications terminal Ivan’s shoulders squared with readiness for a fight. “We have to get out of here, now.”

  At Ivan’s back, the communications began to ring.

  For a moment, Mattie stared at Ivan and Ivan stared back. “Don’t,” Mattie said, starting forward, but Ivan already had turned around and opened the connection.

  “Leontios Ivanov speaking,” he said into the microphone with his usual damned pleasantness, and Mattie sucked in his breath, his hand twitching automatically toward his gun.

  But the response came far too fast to be from Jupiter. “Good,” said a man’s voice, Ganymedan-accented. Vithar. “I’ve been trying to reach you.”

  “If you’re looking for an apology…”

  “I’m calling with a warning,” Vithar said. “Those System ships have caught up.”

  FORWARD

  It seemed to take impossibly longer for the doors to the docks to unseal and open than the bare few seconds between when Ivan had entered a command into the door controls and Vithar had been shut out.

  Vithar was waiting for them in the middle of the docking bay. Behin
d him the Badh was already powered up and vibrating with energy. “The Macha is holding them off, but it’s pinned down.”

  “Those ships must have followed us from Jupiter to the dead System fleet,” Ivan said. Mattie already was entering the code to unlock the Copenhagen’s hull door. “They know the System fleet is destroyed, but they don’t know how.” And if they thought the Copenhagen and Anji’s ships were responsible, they wouldn’t stop attacking until they had destroyed or been destroyed.

  “What is the Copenhagen’s weaponry?”

  “Exterior? Fucking pitiful,” Mattie said.

  Ivan could feel the heat from the Badh’s engines even from the door of the Copenhagen. “Can the Macha defeat them?”

  “I don’t know. We need to get out there.”

  “And do what?” Mattie demanded. The Copenhagen’s door hissed open.

  “We’ll figure something out.”

  “No,” Mattie said, “you’ll figure something out,” and then he was coming around the Copenhagen, gun out and aimed. Ivan nearly tried to stop him—Anji’s people were under attack; he and Mattie could escape later—but Mattie’s eyes widened, and there was a distinctive click from somewhere by Ivan’s ear.

  Of course he would be fast on the draw. Vithar said, “Drop it.”

  Mattie’s gun clattered to the floor. Ivan looked at him, looked at him hard, feeling as if there were some singular and crucial message he needed, in this moment, to pass on to Mattie Gale, but somehow the words for it would not come to his mind.

  Mattie swallowed and looked away, and turned a glare onto Vithar, out of sight over Ivan’s shoulder. “Now what?” Mattie said. “You force us at gunpoint to go up there and get shot down?”

  Behind Ivan’s ear, Vithar’s gun was uncocked. Ivan only heard it; he was facing Mattie, who was standing, tense, arms upraised and fingers twitching on the edge of a bad decision. Only when Mattie heaved out a breath did Ivan dare to turn around.

  Vithar was tucking the gun back into his belt. “My orders,” he said, “were to broker an alliance with Constance Harper and to keep the two of you safe. Those were my only orders, Ivan.”

  Ivan took a slow backward step away from Vithar, toward Mattie. He was rubbing his wrists unconsciously; when he realized what he was doing, he took a carefully even breath and let his hands fall back to his sides. Far overhead, visible through the glass of the relay station, something lit up like a far-off star in supernova.