Radiate

by C. A. Higgins

  He blinked awake again seconds later to find that he was sitting down. Frigid water soaked his back and arm and stole all the heat from his immersed legs. Ivan was holding him out of the pool, with his blood turning to crystals on his face and blankness in his eyes. His hands were twisted in the front of Mattie’s shirt, and Mattie could feel the unsteadiness of his breath in his chest.

  “Up,” Mattie said, and struggled up. He had to brace his hand against the ice to do it; the waters closed around it up to his wrist and stole what little warmth he had left in his fingers. Dripping, he stumbled on.

  The edge of the crater was steep but not slick; it was too cold for the ice to melt, and so rather than sliding away, Mattie’s skin stuck to the surface when he went to touch it. Where the Copenhagen’s collision had blown apart the layers of ice, it revealed older and clearer ice hidden beneath the surface, ice so clear and deep that it became a deep and brilliant blue.

  The air lock alarm was still wailing when Mattie reached the top of the crater. He didn’t know how that could be. It surely had been hours since he and Ivan had left the Copenhagen’s doors. Ivan was already sitting up in the sideways light of the falling sun on the white surface of the moon. He had his arms wrapped around himself, but when Mattie started pushing himself over the lip of the crater, he stretched out one hand to pull him up.

  Plumes of steam and dusted ice were billowing not too far away. Another impact, Mattie realized. Now, out of the muffling of the fog, he could hear people screaming. The pitiful sounds of their human terror were almost lost beneath the clamor of the air lock alarm. If he blinked through the lances of sunlight, he could see humans running, black against the white ice. They were in flight toward the air lock, not all together but in spots and drabs, some stumbling, some going the wrong way. The crash of the Copenhagen and the ships that had followed it had thrown this portion of Europa into chaos.

  Dry snow blows like sand. It blew against Mattie’s exposed cheek, sharp and cutting.

  He was, he realized, still sitting down. And so was Ivan.

  Mattie forced himself to his feet. It seemed hard to do, his limbs uncoordinated. Ivan watched him blankly and made no move to do the same. Far off, the air lock alarm was still ringing out.

  “Come on,” he said again, but Ivan didn’t move. “Come on!”

  “Mattie, look,” Ivan said, and pointed up. Overhead, lights flashed and blazed among the stars. One light came hurtling down, seemingly toward them, but it pulled up before it could reach the jagged edge of the shattered greenhouse enclosure.

  “We have to get through the air lock,” said Mattie.

  “The greenhouse over there will be broken, too,” said Ivan.

  He’d never seen it before, thought Mattie, with a surge of resentment filling him; Ivan didn’t know what it was like to die in a shattered air lock, watching people choke and suffocate through a thin layer of glass as the air slowly slipped away, thinning and thinning—

  No, Mattie realized, with a sharper and keener knowledge, like the wind that blew through his thin jacket, like the sun that lanced out across the ice. Ivan knew. He just didn’t care.

  “Stand up,” Mattie said, “or I will carry you.”

  Ivan stood up.

  When Mattie had a hand beneath his elbow again, he began to run. The air lock was not so far—he had steered the Copenhagen to land it near enough to try to make it to safety before it closed—but it was closing down fast. His head was aching. The first wave of fugitive Europans had already passed through the air lock, but the rest of the evacuees were still running their way. Mattie watched a young man dart beneath the lock, his arm around a companion who turned to look back at them with wide and frightened eyes. A young girl followed them, slipping between panes of glass like a ghost. Mattie and Ivan made it through the first door, but there was still the second; when they were near enough that the sound of the air lock alarm was a physical and percussive thing, so loud that it left the ears stunned in the silence between blasts, Ivan’s hand slipped beneath Mattie’s arm, and then Ivan was the one pushing him along toward the inner air lock door as it slid downward, with just a few feet left between it and the ice—

  They made it through. Ivan pushed Mattie first, and Mattie’s heart clenched with teeth of ice, but Ivan was coming through behind him, unsteady with his bad leg. The air lock slammed into the ground and cut them off from the sound and the thinning air.

  Ivan leaned on him, breathing hard; for a moment Mattie rested his aching head against Ivan’s shoulder and tried to suck in breaths despite his pulsing, bruised ribs. On the other side of the glass, a woman slammed into the closed door, her fists striking it, her mouth opening to shout unheard. She slammed against the glass again, uselessly. Her hair was blowing back in an eerie breeze, bent upward, toward where the air escaped from the sky. She struck the glass again and again, but there was nothing Mattie could do for her, and the cold of the ice beneath him was sinking into his legs, and if they stayed there any longer, they might freeze there like statues. The fabric of his pants was stiff and crackling; the water had frozen into ice, pressing against his flesh, sticking to his skin. Mattie pushed himself upright. This time Ivan went with him.

  No one built anything near an air lock. It had been against System regulations. There was a stretch of empty ice all around them, half a kilometer deep. On the other end of that enforced empty space, the city began. Glinting steel, buildings built on stilts to protect against flows of water, flames alight and jagged holes in the skyline where buildings had collapsed. Atmospheric ships hurtled around beneath the greenhouse shell, firing at shapes below. A roar rose up from the city, a thousand cries all melted into one. The battle was burning in the city as well.

  Battle or not, where there was a city, there was likely to be a spaceport. Mattie aimed for a part of the city where the fighting seemed to be less intense and stumbled on. Gunfire rattled across the open space.

  They came across the first corpses not far from the edge of the city. The gunfire was louder there; rippling waves of heated air from the fires in the city distorted the already warped space before Mattie’s eyes. The bodies were fallen atop one another, and the ice beneath them had melted and partially refrozen; they lay sodden, half in and half out of the ground. Mattie left Ivan standing at their edge, staring down at them in a strangely fixed manner, while he stepped through the corpses, searching.

  He found what he was looking for at last: two men, near to his and Ivan’s size, with coats that were reasonably dry and mostly undamaged by the manner of their death. Their clothes had been System uniforms at one time, but Mattie didn’t care: it was that or freeze to death. He fell to his knees beside them and began to strip the coats from the corpses.

  “What are you doing?” said Ivan. The blood on his face that had managed to dry rather than freeze was turning brown, but frozen red droplets still clung to his skin. Mattie handed him one of the System’s long military jackets. Ivan’s sodden outer jacket fell to the ice with more weight than mere fabric should hold, and Ivan pulled the drier coat on over his bared arms.

  Not all of the water in Mattie’s coat had frozen, and when he dropped it to the ice, the freezing water oozed out from its folds. His new trophy was too small in the shoulders but close enough. The jacket was cold, too, with pockets of ice melting against Mattie’s arms, but at least it wasn’t wet. Mattie tried to button it but found that his fingers could not make themselves work.

  “Here,” Ivan said, and then was kneeling in front of him, across the declothed corpse. Mattie stuck his fingers into his own collar, against the beating warmth of his neck, while Ivan clumsily did up his jacket. Then Ivan ducked down to the corpse again and was stripping its gloves off its frozen hands. He pushed them against Mattie’s chest, and when Mattie didn’t move immediately to take them, began to put them on Mattie’s hands.

  Mattie pushed him off. “Do yourself,” he said, and Ivan went to the other corpse and began to strip its hands, too.
/>
  With the gloves on, Mattie felt no warmer, only more isolated. He wondered if the cold had gone too far, if all he could do now was stop it from going any further rather than hoping to be warm again. His legs and feet still were cold, his pants still soaked. A glance at the corpses dispelled any idea of taking their pants; whatever explosion had melted the ice had gone off at a low level, and their legs from midthigh down were shredded and pulpy red. Constance had had some munitions like that once, Mattie remembered muzzily. The bombs had detonated low enough to the ground to maim even the people who had dropped low for cover.

  Still: “Should we take their boots?” he wondered.

  “Better to have ones that fit,” Ivan said. “Where are we?”

  Mattie tried to lay his thoughts linear. He’d been looking at the Copenhagen’s automatic display of Europan maps while they crashed.

  “Mara,” he said at last. “We’re in the Conamara Chaos. This has to be Mara.”

  “I’ve only been to Europa once.” Ivan was very close to Mattie, and the sunlight streaming in caught at the blue of one eye. “Do you know where the spaceport is?”

  “No. I can guess.” Most cities were laid out the same way by the System. Mara’s spaceport should be near an air lock door. “It should be nearby.”

  Gunfire rattled nearby, and Mattie ducked instinctively, though a beat too late. With his head all askew, his instincts were slow. But the sound of it reminded him, and he groped about the waist of the corpse between him and Ivan. A moment later he came up with a pistol. He checked it for ammunition, for ice fouling up the connections. There were only three bullets left, but the gun would fire. He offered it to Ivan.

  “No,” Ivan said, then, when he offered it again, “Mattie, there are civilians and there are combatants here. If you take that, you’re a combatant.”

  “Everyone’s a combatant.” Mattie pocketed the gun and led Ivan into the outskirts of Mara.

  The air was warmer in there, closer. The ground beneath was sodden. They’d only just escaped such a thing, Mattie thought wearily; now they were thrown into it again. The houses were built with their supporting stilts buried deep, deep into the ice in case of any such melting, and so they stood still, but Mattie found himself slogging through inches of meltwater, and it only looked to grow deeper farther into the plastic forest of houses. It would be a waste if he fell again and got this coat as soaked as the other had been. He and Ivan pressed back out to the edges of the city, and skirted gunfire and screams. Every now and then Mattie looked back for Ivan and found him there, the blood still painting his cheek.

  “Even if we get a ship,” said Ivan after some time walking, “Ananke could take the computer.”

  “We can rig it,” Mattie said. “Like we did with the Badh and the Copenhagen. Ananke—it’s still limited by hardware.”

  “Even if we rig it, she’s still up there. You heard her. She found us.”

  “So we fly off before she can reach us.”

  They found the spaceport where Mattie expected it to be. A sign declared it THE SHIPYARD OF MARA. Mattie let out a breath of relief and tried to peer through the fence.

  It was no use: he couldn’t see a thing. He glanced right and left and saw no one, then started to swing himself up onto the chain links. Ivan grabbed him before he could jump the fence.

  “If there’s nothing here, where do we go?” he asked, gripping Mattie’s shoulder. His eyes were the same color as the deepest ice.

  Mattie cast his mind back to the map of Europa. They were in the Conamara Chaos; to the east was the Annwn Regio. He tried to recall the name of the nearest city on the edge of the Regio. “Aquilon. It’s the nearest other city, and it’s big. If these ships aren’t good, we’ll find some ships there.”

  Ivan nodded and released him, and Mattie finished scaling the fence, swinging right over it. From the inside, he unlocked the door with fingers made clumsy by the thickness of their gloves, and Ivan limped in to join him.

  The shipyard was bombed out. The ashes were cool; it must have been the attackers’ first target. Mattie went through looking for a salvageable item but found nothing.

  Mattie climbed down off the last ship in the tiny shipyard, landing unsteadily on his feet, thrown off by Europa’s weak gravity and the ache still in his skull.

  Ivan stood a few feet away with his arms crossed against his chest, looking chilled.

  “Aquilon,” he said.

  “Yeah,” said Mattie.

  The fastest way to Aquilon was straight through the town, from Mattie’s memory; Mattie gauged that neither he nor Ivan could afford to waste the time and energy that going around Mara would require.

  The center of Mara was bright and hot from the fires, and the ice underfoot was melting. There were several kilometers of ice before the liquid interior of the planet and so there was no danger of falling through, but the icy streets were pitted and slick, standing puddles filling holes that fires had melted in the ground. The houses were closely packed on their stilts; as there was enough room to travel beneath them, there was no need for wide roads. Some had fallen down and taken their neighbors with them; the nicer houses were made of wood and were burning. Mattie saw embers winking at him from within the stilts of a house they passed as the legs of the house were devoured from the inside out.

  Mattie knew that next to him Ivan was having trouble finding his footing. Both of their boots were getting wet again, but there was nothing Mattie could do about it. Behind them, a house fell to the surface, its stilts finally giving out from the fire, and it collapsed into its own sinkhole, the ice melting under the blaze and the fire drowning itself in the meltwater.

  The farther inward they went, the more people there were. Most ran past Mattie and Ivan without a second glance. Some were shouting to one another, to no one, as they slipped on the melting ice and vanished in and out of the choking smoke.

  They passed a woman standing in what had probably once been the intersection of three roads. Sparks struck the water and hissed as they died around her, and she was wearing nothing but nightclothes, with the sleeve of her shirt falling over her shoulder and her auburn hair unbrushed. Standing all alone, she was screaming something, inaudible and incomprehensible beneath the other shouts and the fire and the ships overhead, choking with the force of whatever she was screaming with her bare feet in the water. Ivan slowed at the sight of her, but Mattie pulled him on.

  The road ahead of them grew narrower, thicker with people. Mattie left the path they had been following to duck beneath a mostly intact house and follow the next street over, but it was choked with people in flight as well.

  He tried to divert them again, to find another route, but there was fire to their right and nothing but more people to their left, and somehow Mattie found that they had been swept up in the fleeing mob. The heat and the thin air filled with smoke seemed even worse here, worsening the splitting ache in his head. People pressed him on every side, pushing and shoving.

  Someone tall bumped into him hard enough to jostle his head, and everything blurred: heat from the fire, people around him. The pain in his head spiked, and he was carried along in the current of the crowd.

  When he could focus on his surroundings again, he was not in the same place but still was surrounded by gleaming plastic buildings and fires burning red and the far-off curve of the sun making its slow trip toward Europa’s icy horizon.

  And Ivan was not beside him.

  FORWARD

  The smoke and the fire and the press of all those desperate people was too much without Mattie beside him. Ivan stumbled away from that press, limping chilled and overheated all at once out of the chaos of Mara to the outskirts of the city, where the houses began to give way again to the icy twilight. Out there, the people were stealthier, darting through the fallen houses and the melting frost rather than pushing madly forward in blind flight.

  He managed to get far enough away from the center of the town that he could see the vast glittering surface
of the ice plain through the houses. Jupiter was enormous overhead, heavy, looming. It would stay in that same place, he knew, an eternal weight pressing down on the dead chill of Europa.

  Lower down and closer but still seeming smaller than Jupiter, sleek aerodynamic ships—so unlike the Copenhagen’s open-space dumbbell shape—darted over the ice and over the town, dropping fire. Ivan wondered reflexively whether they were System or rebel.

  It didn’t matter anymore.

  Ivan stayed away from the open danger of the ice, where he would be a clear target for them to shoot down, and stumbled over the fallen beams and uneven ice of the outskirts of town, hoping he was heading in the direction of Aquilon.

  He thought of Mattie as he walked. He thought of Constance, alone and fate unknown. He thought of his mother, her blood seeping somewhere into the Martian soil. He thought of the people of Earth, blackened and choked and burned and dead, and he thought of Althea Bastet, whom he had manipulated and deceived and who was trapped with a computer that thought itself a god.

  In all that blackness of thought he nearly fell onto a man crumpled beneath a fallen house and smelled the disturbing scent of cooking meat when he passed by a building crackling with fire. A woman lolled on the ground as he limped past, her head at an impossible angle, as if her neck had turned to rubber. The ice was starting to re-form in the puddle she had died in, creeping up to encircle her wrists and cling to her waist and entombing her brown hair in a perpetual watery drift. The fire inside the town had driven the ice out, but at the edges of the town it was creeping in again.

  Gunfire sounded someplace not far distant, but it sounded distant in Ivan’s head, and then it sounded nearer, as if it was right beside him. There was a regularity to it, like the clicking of heels against a metal floor. That was all he could hear clearly, that rhythmic sound like someone walking beside him, someone with cropped black hair and lips colored dark, that, and the harsh edge to his own panting breaths, echoing in his head.