Radiate

by C. A. Higgins

  They slipped past without seeing Mattie or his companions, well-armed, heads swinging like wolves seeking a scent. They were not wearing uniforms, or if they were, the uniforms had been so altered and distressed that Mattie could not recognize them. He looked at the passing soldiers, and slowly his vision narrowed. He did not wonder were they System or were they rebel. He looked at them, and he thought, They will kill me if they see me.

  They did not see him, and after a time, the other soldiers passed and the sound of their steps was gone.

  The woman rose and pressed on.

  They traveled for a long way. Mattie kept track of their direction and knew that they were passing through Mara toward Aquilon, and so he stayed with them. The woman and her brother seemed to know the area, and he was not certain what they would do if he tried to leave.

  At last the woman turned off the road toward a squat building that sat atop the ice. System, then, but unused; it was burned out, blackened, dark. She ducked inside, out of sight of the road. Mattie followed, his fingers flexing reflexively around his empty gun.

  Inside they stood in what had once been a grand antechamber, ruined now by war. A bit of Jovian light glowed a faint and eerie orange from the half-shattered ceiling. When Mattie walked, he stepped on fallen tile. There had been a fire here, but unable to use tile and stone for fuel, it had burned itself out on the furniture.

  The woman’s voice echoed oddly through all that broken tile, as if half underwater. “You did pretty good back there.”

  She was busily tucking her gun back into its holster, but Mattie was not fooled by her apparent inattention. She had fought to survive; he could read it written on her skin, the way she reacted to the shift of his weight without looking up. He made a wrong move, and she would have that gun up and fired before he could blink.

  She finished holstering the gun and looked up at Mattie. “Can’t you talk?”

  “I can talk,” Mattie said.

  “Then I said you did good back there.”

  Mattie considered shrugging again out of simple contrary spite. But he said, “Thanks.”

  Her cheeks dimpled.

  Her brother was walking through the broken building, his face upturned to what was visible of the black sky overhead. His steps took him, as if by accident, behind his sister.

  “I’m guessing you’re a rebel,” the woman said.

  There was an edge of humor in her words, but that alone didn’t tell Mattie what the right answer to her question should be.

  Ivan would have known. “I guess I am,” said Mattie.

  The humor in her expression went stiff like water flash freezing. “Who do you follow?”

  “I thought there was only one person for a rebel to follow,” he said warily.

  That frosting suspicion cracked; she laughed. “One true God, right?” she said not to Mattie but back over her shoulder to the other man, teasing him. Her brother lowered his gaze and gave her a long-suffering sibling look.

  Mattie glanced down at the surface of his gun, as if by mere study he could make more ammunition appear.

  “Hey,” said the woman. “What’s your name?”

  “Mattie.”

  “You’re from—Neptune?” she hazarded.

  The accents weren’t even remotely similar. “Miranda,” he said, and his annoyance must have been in his voice, because this time it was the brother who smiled.

  “Well, right,” the woman said, without much apology, “close enough. What’re you doing so far from home in Mara?”

  “Trying to get out of Mara.”

  “He can be quick if he wants to,” the woman said to her brother, then to Mattie, “Oh, come on; smile. We’re not going to shoot you. Maybe put your gun away, too.”

  “I don’t know who you are.”

  “We’re the best luck you’re going to get out here on this frigid piece of hell,” said the woman. “My name is Tuatha; this is my brother, Niels. Not only are we revolutionaries, we’re part of the Conmacs, Europa’s own revolutionary force. And soon to be hosts of Constance Harper.”

  Mattie’s hastily assembling plans—get a ship through these revolutionaries, find Ivan, leave uninjured; perhaps their luck had turned at last—came to a stalling halt. “What?”

  “The Mallt-y-Nos is coming to join with our forces,” said Tuatha, and there was a gleam in her eyes that was a fierce and wild species of joy. “She’ll be in Aquilon by this time tomorrow.”

  FORWARD

  Ivan and Alyssa walked near enough to the edge of the greenhouse glass that Ivan could just see the warping in the air where it slammed down into the ground but far enough that if they were attacked, they would not find themselves pinned with their backs to cold and unyielding glass.

  The long twilight of Europa’s day was drawing very slowly toward night. In time, there would be no light but the reflected glow of Jupiter.

  To Ivan’s left, Mara was still burning, but the battle had slowed down or else they had traveled too far from it for the shouts still to be heard. Alyssa’s head swiveled back and forth restlessly as she walked, her long braid of dull wispy hair swinging against her back. Ivan followed her at a little distance and watched her, her back, her braid, the gun in her hands.

  Some time into their journey she said, “Why did a Terran come to Europa?”

  “By accident.” Ivan focused his accent just the slightest bit, made it more Terran, sharp as shards of ice. “My ship crashed.”

  “You were in the battle?”

  “Not intentionally,” Ivan said, but if he kept dodging her, she would become suspicious. He gifted her with a piece of truth: “I was looking for someone.”

  “They must be very important to you.”

  “They are.” The ground underfoot here was growing unstable; he picked his next step carefully.

  “Do you really think we can get off this rock?”

  “Of course,” Ivan lied. “Is there somewhere you want to go?”

  “Anywhere that isn’t here.” Ice crunched beneath her feet, echoing off the glass that shielded them from the sky. She said, “This person you’re looking for. Who are they?”

  He recalled the wedding ring on her finger. “My wife. We were separated right before the war started.”

  “You must love her very much,” Alyssa said, wistful as the bits of sparkling snow that eddied in the gentle wind.

  “She’s my wife.”

  Ivan watched the way she gripped her gun and said, “Tell me about this moon. I didn’t expect to find it like this when I landed here. Why was there a space battle in orbit?”

  “The war started here the way it did everywhere else. One of the Mallt-y-Nos’s dogs came—Anji, they called her—and stirred up the mob and started bombing us. There were already terrorist groups here, and when she came, they saw their chance and they took it.”

  There was such bitterness in her voice that she could have made this whole land barren, had the cold not already done so. “And then Anji left, but even after she left, the terrorist groups that were here already stayed. The Conmacs are the closest group. There are a hundred others. One of them came to the military base where I worked and blew it up. The others died. I ran.”

  “You had to leave,” said Ivan.

  “I’ve been running ever since, but they’re everywhere. And then the Mallt-y-Nos herself came, and everything’s gotten worse. She’s been taking over the planet the way they say she took over Venus. She hasn’t gotten very far yet, but it’s only a matter of time.”

  “The Mallt-y-Nos is here?” Ivan said sharply. “On this moon, now?”

  “Yes. It must’ve been her fleet in orbit, but I don’t know who they were fighting. It wasn’t ours.”

  Again that bitterness, but this time Ivan hardly heard. Who had Constance been fighting? He knew what must have happened: the revolution had begun to fall apart, had begun to turn inward and devour itself.

  And the first casualty of that self-devouring would be Constance Harper.
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  “What happened to the crew of your ship when you crashed?” Alyssa asked. They were traveling down a slope of ice, and she bent and wavered for balance like tall grass in a storm.

  The idea of him being an only survivor, too, was probably too much to swallow, he decided. “I was traveling with only one companion,” Ivan said. “A guide from the outer planets. We were separated in Mara.” He could only pray that Mattie was safe, that he had continued on, and not died seeking Ivan in the chaos. “He should be waiting for me in Aquilon—if he hasn’t defected and abandoned me,” he added, recalling to whom he spoke.

  Alyssa cast a frown at him over her shoulder as she reached the bottom of the slope. “You had no crew?”

  “I had my guide.”

  “Weren’t you on active duty?” Alyssa asked.

  If he stumbled, Ivan thought, she might reach out a hand to help him.

  Or she might not.

  “No,” he said as his steps took him nearer and nearer to where she stood on the ice, “I wasn’t.”

  He was almost within an arm’s reach of her. Almost—

  And as he stepped down to the bottom of the slope, she swayed back a step, a motion almost imperceptible…but wholly deliberate.

  “I see,” she said, and started off again, walking slowly over the undulating ice.

  Almost, Ivan could hear Ida Stays’s crystalline little laugh. Would it be a fitting revenge, he wondered, for him to die out here alone in this vast white emptiness of snow and ice?

  He had no answer to his own question, and no other choice. He followed Alyssa as she walked across the snow a safe distance ahead of him, her gun clutched in her hands.

  BACKWARD

  “I need you to do something for me,” Constance said to Mattie one day while Ivan was out, sitting down across from him at the kitchen table in her bar.

  Mattie paused, fork halfway to his mouth. “Sure,” he said.

  “I need you to convince Ivan to help me out with our next attack against the System.”

  He blinked at her, then up at the surveillance camera planted innocently in the upper corner of the room. “I’m…guessing we’re talking privately.”

  “The surveillance cameras are off,” said Constance patiently, with only the smallest shade of “I’m not an idiot, Mattie” to ruin it.

  “Probably shouldn’t do that when there isn’t a storm as an excuse,” said Mattie, and finished the fork’s journey to his mouth.

  “This couldn’t wait,” Constance said. It could have waited, probably, if she hadn’t been trying to talk to Mattie behind Ivan’s back. “I need his help for the next one, and I know he won’t do it.”

  Mattie chewed. He swallowed. “Have you tried asking him?”

  “I think if I asked him to do something for me he already wanted to do, he’d say no just to be contrary.” There was a bitterness in his foster sister’s voice that Mattie didn’t want to hear. “But if you ask him, it’ll be different.”

  Mattie looked down at his plate. He had been amused, but not surprised, to find Mirandan fish in Constance’s refrigerator; he had been even less surprised to find that she had prepared it in the Mirandan way (“Bland,” Ivan had decreed on the one notable occasion he’d dared to try it, “yet still repulsive.”). Now, the whimsy of his choice of meal was no longer as amusing. He poked at it with his fork.

  Constance was watching him steadily across the table, her very silence and attention anticipating Mattie’s protests.

  “He’ll know I’m asking because you asked me,” he said.

  “If you’re just doing it because I made you, then yes. But you want this attack to succeed, too.”

  She did not make it a question, but there was a question in her eyes. Mattie dropped his gaze from hers.

  “Why do you need his help?” he asked, and laid his fork down on his plate.

  “In order to plant the explosives, we need to get into the building,” Constance said. “It’s a bank on Ceres. They won’t let you, or me, or Anji, or Christoph in. But they will let Ivan in to see their vaults. And they’ll let in his guest if he asks.”

  “There’s no other way in?”

  “This is the best way.”

  “He’s gonna say no when I ask him.”

  “If he doesn’t do it, we’ll have to abandon this target.”

  “I can’t make him do something he doesn’t want to do,” Mattie said. “Can’t you just seduce him into it?”

  The iron silence that followed made him regret his words at once. Mattie stared down at the meal he’d taken from Constance’s refrigerator. He wished he could just throw it out, but his old habits wouldn’t let him throw out edible food. Instead, he pushed at it with his fork and tried not to think about Constance and Ivan together, or why Constance would look at Mattie so frostily when he mentioned it.

  If the silence had continued uninterrupted much longer, he might have been forced to face the uncomfortable realization he could feel building up in the back of his head like static in a storm cloud, but Constance spoke.

  “I’m not saying you should manipulate him,” she said. “I’m not telling you to do what he does to his marks. I care about him; you know I do. But this is bigger than him, or you, or me. And I need his help.”

  “You’re the one who needs his help,” Mattie said. “You’re the one sleeping with him.”

  “You’re the one he’ll listen to.” Constance leaned toward him then, across the expanse of the table separating them. “Don’t you see it, Mattie? This is important. What else matters but righting the wrongs the System has done? What else could possibly be worth our time and our lives? Compared to that—Ivan is just a man.”

  Mattie resented it a little when she spoke like that, remote and far away, no longer in the moment his sister and his friend, but someone who dictated rules and reality instead.

  Constance said, “Aren’t you with me?”

  FORWARD

  The sky came down, frosted, to bury itself in the earth; that was the edge of the air lock that separated Mara from Aquilon. Tuatha led Mattie and Niels unerringly toward it, and her confidence was such that it took Mattie a long time to realize that the door was guarded.

  He slowed, heels digging into the pitted ice. There was nowhere to hide out there; they were already in the empty space between the ruined city and the air lock.

  At the diminished sound of his footsteps, Tuatha looked back. “Come on,” she said with total unconcern, and Mattie looked at the guns in the arms of the guards ahead, gritted his teeth, and started up again.

  He was conscious of the lightness of the gun at his hip as they approached, but Tuatha lifted both arms and waved them, and the guards lowered their guns.

  “Anything?” she asked as the three of them approached the warped glass of the air lock.

  “All quiet,” one of the guards said briskly. Tuatha nodded and walked into the tunnel between air locks, her gun comfortably holstered.

  Their way out was similarly relaxed. The guards on the other end spotted the three of them coming but stood down at the sight of Tuatha. They looked curiously at Mattie and Niels as they passed. Mattie did his best to look like he belonged, and wished he had a little bit more ammunition.

  Aquilon was less savaged than Mara had been, more quiet, no smoke. The Conmacs had taken over this city swiftly, then hidden the evidence of the violence as far as they could. No bodies lay in the streets, no smoke marred the skyline, but the buildings were pitted and the ice was warped from a melt and a fast refreeze, and the Systematic straight line of the main roads had been made jagged and uneven. There were people living here, not running from their houses; they looked out windows at Mattie, then pulled their heads back in, away from his eyes. The armed men and women who stalked the roads passed Tuatha with a nod.

  These people were rebels, Mattie reminded himself, but the people in the windows were drawn and gray and cold, like icy Europa itself, and they withdrew from the touch of his glance. These were Mattie�
��s people, who had suffered from the System, who had risen against it, who had believed the holy word of Constance Harper, the Huntress who soon would visit them herself.

  He did not want to see her. He didn’t. He wished she wasn’t here; he wished she wasn’t coming. He hated her still. Yet here, among strangers, he felt a strange and unconscionable softness at the thought of a familiar face.

  He fought the thought off, pressed it ruthlessly to the base of his mind, and let his roiling anger rise to the surface again and cover his thoughts of Constance Harper.

  At last they came to the center of Aquilon, where what had once been the center and symbol of the System’s power there had become a fortress. The first thing Mattie saw when they approached was a wall. Like a brutal, opaque imitation of the glass greenhouse that enclosed them, it stretched up over Mattie’s head and curved around some unseen interior. It was cobbled together from wreckage and ruin, and the eight System buildings that had encircled the center of the town made up its pillars, with the walls stretching across the road to connect the System buildings, unnatural union between the mechanical perfection of the System architecture and the organic flaws of the rebel walls.

  “Amazing, isn’t it?” said Tuatha brightly, watching the side of his face as Mattie craned his neck around to see all of the edifice that was visible.

  “Yeah,” Mattie said, because even if he could have put words to the strange foreboding that filled him, he would not have been so unwise as to try.

  There was no door, but two walls sheared away from each other, creating an opening to weave through past the wall without exposing the interior to the exterior eye. Tuatha gestured for Mattie and Niels to wait a few feet back, then strode up to that gap with the same ease with which she had approached the air lock doors. There was a brief but animated discussion, and she beckoned them cheerfully into the camp.