Radiate

by C. A. Higgins

  “He’s so fancy,” she said, to Mattie.

  “I know,” Mattie replied.

  Constance, with shadows stretching out from her hips like a gown, bent in quiet conversation with Christoph. The gray in Christoph’s beard was washed out in this yellow light. He scratched his chin and murmured something low for her ears alone. Constance bent him a harnessing glance, and he yielded, and bowed his head.

  When they were all seated at the candlelit table, only then did Constance blow out her match. “Anji, report.”

  Anji launched immediately into a lengthy description of a meeting with Henry. Ivan had met Henry once, but only in passing. Though he attended these meetings every time one occurred, his reluctance to be more involved in Constance’s revolution was well known.

  Henry, it turned out, was out in the Uranian moons, running the underground that Constance had begun there before she’d moved to Mars. The movement by Uranus seemed to have no end; a few strikes here and there against petty targets, mildly inconveniencing the System’s operations but never stopping them. The usual, Ivan supposed.

  “And Rayet?” Constance asked when Anji was done.

  “Keeping in touch with his friends from the System military,” Anji said. Ivan wondered if Constance intended to try to start a mutiny. It wouldn’t work, he could have told her. He would tell her, but he knew that she wouldn’t listen. She never did listen when he was talking sense.

  “Good,” Constance said. “Christoph?”

  “I put out feelers regarding the Sons of Nike, but so far there’s been silence. A few people here and there; no more groups. The organization has completely collapsed. Well,” he corrected, “almost entirely. There’s still a splinter cell out on Pluto.”

  Constance’s smooth brow furrowed. “Pluto?”

  “Less a splinter cell than a new group entirely. It’s led by a man who once fought with the Son, but he left before the end. The Plutonian group is his.”

  “And his name?”

  “Arawn Halley. He has a reputation for violence, but he’s confined to the planet.”

  And a little planet it was, Ivan thought.

  “Have you been able to get into contact with him?”

  “Not so far. He’s—suspicious. I’ll keep working.”

  “Do so,” Constance said. “Have you scouted out the System monument on Adrastea?”

  “Yes,” said Christoph, and Ivan listened and did not ask where Adrastea was. Terran as he was, they would take badly to the question. Christoph briefly sketched out a view of a System historical museum on a small outer moon—ah, Jupiter; Adrastea was one of Jupiter’s smaller moons. As near as Ivan could tell, some historical event that the Uranians he was with considered to be deeply significant had happened at this base on Adrastea, though he had never heard of it, and they intended to send a message by blowing it up. Christoph was well into his research: he produced some plans of the building to lay on the table, edges curling up between the candles. The plans were computer-made, but through meticulous re-creation; they were not System records. Ivan stared at the little boxes representing rooms and held his tongue.

  “If we can get the soldiers concentrated here,” Constance said, drawing one finger over the surface of the paper, “then someone else can come in through the back—”

  “We don’t need to come in through the back,” Mattie said. “Ivan can get us in the front.”

  They all turned to Ivan, their expressions ranging from expectation to suspicion. Ivan smiled blandly and promised nothing.

  “Mattie and Ivan can get in beforehand,” Constance said, just as blandly ignoring his lack of agreement, as if she could override his own inclinations and force him to go, “and infiltrate the System.”

  Of course, Ivan supposed, the worst thing was that she could. She’d done it before. A surge of frustration hit Ivan like something inside him beating against the bars of his chest. For an instant, facing the relentless surety of Constance’s knowledge that she could change his mind, he felt as trapped as he ever had with the System.

  “Before they can be found out, Christoph and I will detonate a bomb at this point,” Constance continued. She tapped a spot on the page. She did not describe how she would plant the bomb. “Anji, you’ll sweep around to provide assistance to Ivan and Mattie; they won’t be able to take any weapons in with them, and they’ll be in enemy territory. Once the guards are distracted—”

  “No,” Ivan said.

  Four faces turned up to him. Constance said, “Why not?”

  “Because none of that is going to work.”

  None of the others looked surprised. This was familiar to them by now, Ivan realized. They expected Constance to describe a plan, and Ivan to object, and the whole thing to be hammered out into something they were more likely to survive.

  Against all odds, he had found himself a place with these people.

  “What about it won’t work?” Constance asked.

  Ivan looked down at the paper. He started to analyze it, to pick apart its weaknesses: sending him and Mattie in unarmed, for a start; for another, how would Constance and Christoph plant that bomb—

  He sat back, shaking his head.

  “All of it,” he said. “This is flawed from the start.” Then, drawn by some perverse impulse that Constance and only Constance could inspire in him, he added, “And it’s a waste of time.”

  Christoph scowled. It had, after all, been his plan. But he did not offer protest.

  “How so?” Constance asked.

  “Nobody cares about some little museum on—where is this?—Adrastea.”

  “Adrastea is where the first ships sent to destroy Saturn came from,” Constance said.

  “So?”

  Christoph interrupted. “So don’t you know your own history, boy?”

  “The System doesn’t give a damn about Adrastea. It’s a tiny moon that holds no strategic importance. And they don’t care about a half-forgotten museum. Blow it up, and what does it cost them? Nothing. They build a new one. No one needs to know about the explosion except the Adrasteans who witnessed it, and even then, what will they learn from it? That you’re good at asking rhetorical questions and not very good at making a mark.”

  Silence at the table. Anji, strangely enough, was smiling.

  Constance said, “Then what do you suggest instead?”

  Nowhere, Ivan almost said, as he usually did. Give this up and leave me alone.

  But now he stopped.

  Afterward, he could not have said why he— No. Self-serving illusion. He knew why he’d said to her what he had. He had looked at her and seen that fire in her, banked but dangerous, like a campfire lit in the middle of a dry wood. And with the same reckless perversity, that same focused loathing that had driven him one morning to the roof of his mother’s house with a knife in his hand, in that moment in Constance Harper’s bar he looked at her and wanted to see just how brightly she could burn.

  “Someplace practical,” he said. “Keep the symbolism—you’re not doing violence just for violence’s sake—but it has to be something that injures them as well.”

  The candlelight reflected out of Constance Harper’s eyes as she watched him darkly over the table.

  “There’s a meeting of the Martian System representatives in a few months,” he said. “They’re gathering at the summit of Olympus Mons to discuss System policies.”

  Constance said, “How do we target them?”

  And he told her how.

  FORWARD

  There was a vast open space between the edges of the city and the edges of the greenhouse glass, and that was where the gray woman led Ivan.

  His leg was aching, knotted around where Althea Bastet had chosen to let him live. He stopped on the ice and bent over himself, breathing in the harsh and cold air.

  The gray woman ran a little farther before realizing the crunch of his steps no longer sounded; she wheeled back around with her gun still clutched in her arms and jogged back over to hi
m. “Are you hurt?”

  He shook his head.

  “Then let’s go,” she said, and her gloved fingers were again wrapping around his arm.

  He was too tired to run. “They’re not following us,” he said, though he had no way of knowing that. There were no sounds of pursuit over the ice, no sign of dark figures on the hunt, and that would have to be enough.

  The woman hesitated, glancing back again toward the city. It was lit with a dark glow, flashes of fires showing through choking smoke that pooled at the greenhouse ceiling.

  “Let’s get out of sight,” she urged, and led Ivan to the side, down a bend in the undulating ice, and then farther, into a crevasse. It was hard to keep his balance, and the crevasse was unnerving, a shoulder’s width only, with sheets of blue ice higher than his head. It wound down deeper and deeper, growing smaller, and Ivan did not know how far down into blue darkness it would go. The woman wedged herself just inside, and Ivan climbed in after her so that they could catch their breath in safety.

  The wind was gone in the crevasse, but it still was cold and tight, like a tomb.

  “Thank you,” said the woman, after a time staring out past Ivan at the pitted slope.

  The wall of ice at his back seemed to lean on him, like someone pressing her hands on his shoulders and bending to whisper in his ear. Ivan found a deprecating smile inside himself and said to the woman, “No problem. What else was I going to do?”

  It was like snapping on a mask, that charm. She cast him a fleeting little smile. He wondered if it was the blue light that robbed all the color from her face or if that was just the way she had been born.

  “My name’s Alyssa.”

  “Ivan.”

  “You aren’t from here.”

  There’d been little point in hiding his accent; he hadn’t even thought of it when he’d shouted his first warning. At least Alyssa seemed grateful enough for her rescue not to hold it against him. “I’m not.”

  She nodded more to herself than to him. She was still staring past him, her attention so focused on the ice outside that it was as if he half wasn’t there.

  “I’ve been going from city to city,” said Alyssa, with her gloved fingers picking at some imperfection on the barrel of her gun, “looking for someplace…but there’s nothing. It’s chaos. The fighting’s everywhere.”

  Of course it was. It was right, wasn’t it, that his sin was something that couldn’t be run from, that couldn’t be escaped?

  Alyssa stopped picking at her gun to tear off one glove so that she could run her fingers over its dark surface more carefully, restlessly searching for any flaw that might render it unusable. Ivan wondered if she knew she was doing it. He said, “Who holds what area?”

  “I don’t know. Nobody knows. It changes every day. It doesn’t matter; none of them will help us.”

  I can talk myself through a blockade, Ivan thought, and then, with frigid fingers dripping down his back, he realized that all his tricks were designed for a world where there were rules and there was order. He had run Ida Stays in circles because of her own restrictions; he had conned a thousand people by relying on manipulation of the rules that already controlled them. But here there were no rules, there were no restraints, and there were no guarantees that his wits would be enough for him to get his way.

  He was a creature of a dead world. He wondered how long he would last without it.

  He wondered how long Mattie would.

  Yet here, at least, was one small facet of his situation he could still control. Alyssa already trusted him. He said to her, “You know this area. You know these people.”

  “Sure,” said gray Alyssa. There was a wedding ring on her finger, he noticed; the pale gold gleamed in the faint light.

  “I need to get to the spaceport in Aquilon,” he said. “I need to get a ship and escape Europa.”

  “Escape,” Alyssa repeated.

  “Yes.” Ivan looked at her and believed that she was the only one who could save him, the only human being in the world who mattered in that moment. “If I go on my own, they’ll kill me.”

  The corners of her lips turned down. “It won’t work.”

  No, Ivan thought, it wouldn’t. There was no escape, not anymore. But he couldn’t give up when Constance and Mattie both were out there.

  “It can’t hurt to try.” He gave her a reckless smile.

  And she, hooked and ensnared as Althea Bastet had been, said, “I think there’s an air lock that’s probably unguarded. It won’t lead straight to Aquilon, but we can go around and through.”

  “Good,” Ivan said, and then moved when she moved so that she could climb out of the fissure. Jupiter still glowed overhead, vast, with oppressive nearness.

  “We’ll stick to the ice,” Alyssa said, stepping out beside him. Her hair must have been blonde, once, before ill care and the sick strange twilight of this moon had stained it to such a thin and wispy gray. “And we have to be even more careful in Aquilon. It’s worse than Mara.”

  “More fighting?” Ivan could hardly imagine it; Mara seemed to be in active battle throughout its breadth.

  Alyssa was shaking her head. “No, it’s quiet,” she said. “But the terrorists are just conquering Mara now. They’ve held Aquilon for months.”

  And Ivan looked at her again with new eyes. Not just at how alone she was, and how frightened, and how ragged her clothing had become, but he looked at her, the straightness of her teeth, the trained and familiar way that she held her weapon, the color and material her clothes had been before hard wear and patching had rendered them nearly unrecognizable…

  “They’re organized there,” Alyssa said. “There was supposed to still be a force in Mara, but you can see they got here before I could.”

  He should have realized before now. If he hadn’t been so exhausted, his head aching, his body tense with awareness of the creeping cold, he might have figured it out.

  “We won’t find any friends in Aquilon,” said Alyssa, the System woman with the ragged System uniform and the System-issued gun clutched in her hands. “We’ll have to rely on each other.”

  BACKWARD

  “Your boyfriend’s not going to come,” Christoph said.

  Out the window of the tiny spaceship Christoph had commandeered from somewhere—being a former smuggler, Mattie supposed, had its limited uses—Mattie could see Ivan and Constance still standing together on the surface of Mercury. They appeared to be having a conversation, but it did not seem to be going well. Ivan was standing as still and sculpted as a statue, and Constance’s back was proudly unbowed.

  “I know,” Mattie said. “I told you.”

  He did not append the standard protest, though a part of him wanted to. Christoph was just trying to get a rise out of him. Mattie was certain, most of the time, that the only one of them Christoph actually liked was Constance herself. Even then, he wasn’t sure that what Christoph felt for her could be properly called liking.

  Out the window, Constance turned on her heel. Her hair floated behind her head in the low gravity as she strode toward the ship and Mattie himself.

  “They’re sleeping together, aren’t they?” Christoph said with an unpleasant edge to the question that Mattie really didn’t want to try to decipher. “But he still won’t help her?”

  Sometimes, Mattie thought, he wished that Constance had not gone out of her way to persuade a dissatisfied System civil servant to defect to their side. If she hadn’t, Mattie wouldn’t have to deal with Christoph on a regular basis. “He doesn’t want to be part of a revolution.” He could almost hear a Terran lilt to his own accent when he said the words; how often he had heard them from Ivan’s mouth.

  “Terran still,” Christoph said. “You could talk him into coming, I think.”

  “Who, the Terran?”

  “He could do a lot for us.” Christoph was not as subtle as Ivan was when he wanted something. Mattie scowled at the window. “The son of Connor Ivanov.”

  “You could ta
lk to him yourself,” Mattie suggested, maliciously.

  “But he doesn’t care about me the way he cares about you,” Christoph said, and this time Mattie might have snapped back except that the hull door slammed open to admit the women of the party.

  “Oh, leave him alone,” Anji said, bouncing up into the ship. “He wants to talk to you, Mattie.”

  Mattie looked sharply back out the window toward where the bright rays of the Mercurian sun cut at Ivan’s still figure. “Now?”

  Behind Anji, Constance walked without a word into the cockpit.

  “Yeah,” said Anji, choosing, by some miracle, to reply simply. Mattie rose and, ignoring Christoph’s expression, climbed past his silent sister and down and out onto the Mercurian soil.

  Ivan made him do all the work of walking. When Mattie was near enough to hear him, Ivan said, “You don’t have to go.”

  Mattie stuck his hands in his pockets and shrugged. Whether he had to do anything had never been in question.

  “This whole thing is going to get out of control; you know that,” Ivan said. “Constance Harper’s revolution. The Mallt-y-Nos. She won’t be able to control it even if it survives long enough. Even if you all survive long enough.”

  “Did you want to say something specific to me, or did you just want to repeat yourself?”

  “I just wanted to make sure you understood what you’re doing. What they’re doing.”

  “I’m not a child, Ivan.”

  Ivan looked at him with an expression Mattie couldn’t read and said nothing more. At last Mattie nodded, not even sure himself what he was acknowledging, and turned to leave.

  He had nearly reached the door to Christoph’s stolen ship when he heard light steps jogging behind him.

  “I’m coming with you,” Ivan said.

  FORWARD

  The man and the woman led Mattie to a patch of smoking rubble. Perhaps it once had been someone’s home. Now it was nothing but jagged wood teething at the wind, frost settling over their outer layers, embers still lit in their depths. Mattie followed them in, and when they crouched down beneath the scarred wood, he crouched down as well. At first he did not see why they had stopped, but before long another group of strangers came by, packed together, armed, looking around with hard and wary looks. Mattie gripped his useless gun and wondered how many rounds the woman had left. Her lips had lifted in a grin at the sight of the hunting party outside their cover, but her thoughts must have tended in the same direction as Mattie’s, because she glanced toward her brother and then made a quick check of her clip before settling back on her heels to wait for them to pass.