Radiate

by C. A. Higgins

  Her own surety seemed to overwhelm Ivan’s, as if Constance could, in speaking, rewrite Ivan’s own mind with her own will.

  “You’re one of us now,” Constance said. “That’s why I told you.”

  She was tall and terrible and deadly. When Ivan leaned forward and kissed her, she made a sound of surprise; then she kissed him back. Her mouth was hot, and he was cold, yet in kissing him she seemed not to be warming him but chilling him, as if in seeking her brightness, her heat, he was spilling all he had into her and keeping nothing to stop his own blood from turning to ice—

  FORWARD

  On Europa, Ivan dreamed of the white room again.

  Ida was there, of course. The white room was Ida, after all, or Ida was the white room; they were of icy equivalence, the same black and frigid substance. She smiled at him across the slab of ice that was the steel table. Her lips were dark, darker than crimson. Ivan remembered her last act, bending down over him, taunting, a near and unwanted kiss. She could have sucked his soul out with those lips and left him as blackly hollow as she.

  He said, “It’s petty of you to haunt me.”

  “But I’m not, Ivan,” Ida said, with that mocking gentleness he’d grown to hate of her. She sat across from him, a thing rooted in ice, a thing made of ice herself. “There’re no such things as ghosts.”

  “Then what are you?”

  “Nothing.”

  Nothing? There was nothing in her eyes, as if her inner blackness had swollen up and hollowed her out inside, and left her just a shell over a black and empty core.

  “If that’s true,” Ivan said, and found that he was shivering, “how are you here to tell me about it?”

  She only smiled. “Can you feel it?”

  He could feel it, that heavy pull. He bent with it, he bowed. But then there came a light from somewhere behind him. It cast strange shadows on the snow. Ida’s lips were still moving, words unheard, as the light cast Ivan’s own shadow over her face and the blood that streaked down from her ruined neck.

  Ivan turned away from Ida, away from the chill that came from her reddened lips, and beheld Constance Harper.

  Glorious, shining, brilliant; she was fire, she was the sun. Ivan leaned in to her light, but he was too far off to feel the heat that it should bear. It was as he had seen it before, Constance afire, far off, untouchable.

  But this time across that vast impassible distance, Constance Harper looked directly at him.

  She saw him. She saw him. And Ivan had the strangest, strongest conviction that if she would just reach out for him, if she would only extend her hand, he could find his way to her side. The light around her burned and pulsed like a star about to flame out, and if she but reached out to him, he could make it there to be consumed by those flames, too.

  She did not reach out. Her gaze remained upon him, knowing, seeing, but she did not reach out. And the light that was around her pulsed and pulsed, until at last it supernovaed and nothing was left of Constance Harper but the rain of heavy elements and the fading afterimage of a dying star. Her last act had been the grace to let him live.

  With Constance gone, the place was dark again. Behind him, he heard the steady click-click of heels, alone now in the blackness. There was no one here with him but her chill.

  Cold, after all, was not a thing in and of itself. Cold was an absence: the absence of heat, just as darkness was an absence of light. And there was an absence behind him, a dark and terrible absence that was reaching for him, around him—

  Mattie, Ivan thought suddenly. Where is Mattie? He got me out—

  The chill behind him breathed out cold onto his neck—

  “Wake up,” a woman’s voice whispered from very close, and Ivan woke with a start. Not Mattie. Not Constance. And not Ida Stays.

  It was Alyssa, her face very close to his, her voice very quiet, her eyes very wide. “Shh,” she whispered.

  He wasn’t cold anymore. He wasn’t cold.

  “Shh,” she said again, and pressed one hand over his mouth. He knew she did it only because he saw it happen. He did not feel her glove against his skin.

  Somewhere nearby, there was a crackle and a roar like a great fire. Someone shouted, “That’s enough!” and someone else shouted back, his words lost to distance and the static roar of Ivan’s own ears.

  “It’s deep enough, put them in,” said a man’s voice, terribly near, and from over the top of the ice ledge Ivan and Alyssa had sheltered beneath came the golden touch of torchlight. Alyssa crouched like a dog going belly to the snow, her face upturned in terror. Ivan grabbed her shoulder and pulled her in, away from the traitorous touch of the unfamiliar light. Somewhere, a man grunted with a heavy weight. There was a heavy splash, then another.

  “Hurry,” the same man’s voice urged.

  The voice was not as close as it had seemed to begin with; the light was not as bright.

  Perhaps it would be better if they were discovered, he thought, but the thought was distant. There was an ashen cast to Alyssa’s face. Ivan’s sleeve had frozen into the ground where his body heat had melted the ice, and then, when his skin had cooled enough that the ice could refreeze, it had trapped the loose edge of the fabric. He stared down the length of his arm.

  “That’s all of them,” said a second voice. If Ivan had not been lying so still and listening, he would not have been able to make out the distant words.

  Ice crunched; someone was walking, a lonely sound in the eerie silence. The distant torchlight flickered.

  “That’s good,” said the first man at last. “Let’s move out.”

  Ice crunched again, echoing oddly. The torchlight dimmed, faded, receded.

  Alyssa pushed herself up, her limbs clumsy. “Let’s go,” she said, her voice high with fear, but when she reached for her gun, she could not pick it up. It had frozen to the ground.

  “Leave it,” Ivan said, and forced himself upright as well. His head felt strangely light.

  Alyssa pried at the gun with her fingers once more to no effect. She left it behind, and in an instant it was lost to the shadows beneath the ice shelf.

  Europa had passed from Jupiter’s penumbra into the umbra while Ivan had slept, and the tundra would have been pitch black had the strangers not left a single torch behind, embedded upright. Even as far as they were from it, that point of light was enough to dimly illuminate Ivan’s steps. It burned there, alone, floating like a fairy light. An oversight—or a warning?

  “Ivan!” Alyssa hissed, breathless, but Ivan did not heed her. He strode toward that sole burning torch, the light of it imprinting itself in his eyes, until the ground beneath his foot gave way.

  He stumbled back and fell. The ground beneath him was slick, the ice refreezing, tacky against his palms. The place where he had stepped rippled.

  Carefully testing the ground, he moved forward again until he could see what the torch—now hissing and spitting sparks—was there to warn of.

  The ice had been melted into a pool, deep and black.

  No, not black. The water was clear. Ivan leaned down.

  Wide and whitened eyes stared back up at him from out of the pool.

  He recoiled but did not step away. As if some rope had been tied to his waist and the other end had disappeared down into the depths of the slowly freezing pool, he could not take another step back.

  He leaned over again—

  A woman’s body floated in the pool, her long brown hair drifting about her head, her mouth slack, her clothes fluttering in gentle currents like some otherworldly breeze. There was a tear in her gut and something dark poured out of it, fouling and obscuring the water around her. Her hands, limp, floated and fell at her sides. She was so obviously dead that never did Ivan think, I should help her, she might drown. She was so clearly dead, so clearly part of that twilight underwater world, that he could do nothing but stare.

  Something beneath her moved, a dark and faceless shape, and then that shape upturned and Ivan saw that it was another bo
dy, one that had once been a man.

  “Mother of God,” Alyssa whispered beside him. He did not know when she had come to stand with him.

  Ivan pulled away from the awful entrancement of that dark pool and, stumbling, trying to feel his unsteady way around the shape of the melted portion of the ice, found his way to the torch.

  “What are you doing?” Alyssa asked as he pulled the torch from its perch and brought it down to the surface of the ice, where the flickering white reflections flashed at him, but between them the light of the torch managed to penetrate the ice.

  The ice had crystallized cleanly, as smoothly as its surface had frozen flat. It was like glass, and Ivan could see straight down through it until the layers of ice grew blue with depth. And embedded in that ice, he saw them. Some were deeper down; some were higher up. All were frozen, their arms extended in lax reach, supplication. He stood over a graveyard.

  He knew what must have happened. A portion of the ice had been melted, by fire, by explosives; it didn’t matter. Then the bodies had been tossed into the melt, into the pit, and they sank, or they floated, and they froze however they had been suspended when the cold came back to claim the moon again.

  One of the bodies had been shot in the jaw. The muscle of its tongue dangled out from a mess of gristle, the skin of the cheeks torn up into a grisly smile, and red clouded the space between his head and his bent knees, as if the man had died curled up around a mist of scarlet.

  The heat from the torch he held was thawing his skin, and he felt like he was falling apart with it, as if the brittleness of the ice that had formed on his clothes was the only thing holding him together. And when he swept the torch to the side to see more of the ice beneath them, he saw her.

  He saw her very clearly, as if there were not layers of ice separating them, her white hair coming loose from its bun, floating around her shoulders, her clear blue eyes glowing bright, her skin red with Martian dust, and one hand extended out like a beckoning.

  His body jolted as his knees struck the ice. He shivered, shuddered. It was not his mother below him, not the corpse of Milla Ivanov. What he had taken for dust was a spray of red that had frozen fast before it could diffuse, but there was no body there at all, only an empty space deepening down to blue as dark as a starless sky. Yet she was there; he was certain of it. If he went down into that ice, he would find his mother, and he would find Constance, and he would find Ida Stays down where the ice was deepest and darkest and coldest, and he would find Althea Bastet with her eyes frozen over with tears, all of them.

  And worse thought—

  “Those bodies are new.” He staggered to his feet, stumbling toward the still-freezing pool.

  “What?” Alyssa cried out behind him, left kneeling on the ice where he had been.

  “The bodies in the water,” Ivan said, and found the edge of the pool and fell to his knees again. “They died recently.”

  He swept the torch perilously low over the surface of the water, sparks spitting.

  “What are you looking for?” Alyssa asked.

  “Mattie.”

  He leaned down farther, but the very light that made it possible to see anything at all was now reflecting off the water’s surface, turning the clarity of it impenetrable. Was that something there, near the surface? He stuck his hand through the surface of the water.

  “Don’t!” Alyssa grabbed his arm and pulled him back, and he nearly dropped the torch into the pool, where it would have sunk and left the contents of the water forever obscured.

  “Your friend’s not in there!”

  “I have to check,” Ivan said. If Mattie was here, if Mattie was down in the ice with the rest, there was no point in going on to Aquilon.

  His wet hand ached. It surprised him. He lifted it to look at it and realized that he was shivering again.

  “Ivan, please,” Alyssa whispered, and then her hands were on his face. She was colorless in the dark, her ragged hair melting around her thin face, dripping down like sweat or tears. “We can’t stay here.”

  “If he’s down there—”

  “Then you can’t go down there with him,” said Alyssa.

  Sometimes I still feel that way, she’d said to him before. “You understand,” said Ivan.

  “I do,” Alyssa said, a low and fearful whisper. “I understand. But you can’t go down there. You can’t stay here.”

  “If—”

  “I think the man I love is dead,” Alyssa said. She was hardly blinking, so closely was her attention on him, so visibly desperate was she to keep it. Ivan could not have turned away from that desperation if he had wanted to, and so he was riveted to her when she said, “But not my husband. My husband was here, and he died. But the man I love was on Luna, and I don’t know if he’s dead or alive.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because you can’t stay here. Because I can’t stay here. Luna was so close to Earth, the Mallt-y-Nos must have…but I can’t stay here, because he might not be dead.”

  Saturn and Callisto, Earth, Europa, Ida Stays. He was surrounded, always, by death; he had been born into it. He had seen the corpses floating around Saturn and Callisto, and he had stepped through the bodies on the Jason, and Earth was ash because of him, and Ida Stays had died on his lap in the white room, and now he stood above the bodies of the unknown, and Mattie might be among them, and Ivan saw that all the bodies were looking up at him, all those blank empty eyes, and he was seen, he was seen by something, the hunt about to end, the hounds with their frozen teeth about to leap with their weight upon his back—

  He looked at Alyssa.

  “Lead me,” he said, because he’d gotten turned around, and he no longer knew which was the way to Aquilon or which would lead back to death and ice and Mara. Alyssa stood and pulled him up with her, and when Ivan dropped the torch, it landed on its side in the ice. It sparked and guttered and drowned slowly behind them as they stumbled off in the dark, and by the time it died, it was just one more star lost to the black.

  FORWARD

  “Why?” Tuatha said, and while Mattie contemplated the enormity of that question, she interrupted herself. “No, come this way.”

  She started up the stairs again. Mattie followed, aware of the way Niels had fallen in behind him, blocking retreat. Tuatha led them to a room in the very center of the System building. The walls there were reinforced against explosions or gunshots and carefully soundproofed as a measure against espionage. There was one door in or out of the room, and it was reinforced as well, thick and swinging heavily on its hinges. A System war room: Mattie had been in ones on ships before, like the one on the Macha, but never in a planetary version.

  It looked much like the Macha’s. A holographic map of the silver surface of Europa was displayed on the round table that took up the entire center of the room, the glassy striations of the scarred surface of the planet showing in pale glowing gray. The walls were plastered in smooth gray unbroken by window or design except where, high overhead, the System cameras had been torn out and discarded. There, bits of wiring stuck out of the wall, their copper ends exposed. Metal chairs surrounded the table, all empty. The only clear difference from the Macha’s war room was the total silence of this one, unbroken by engine muttering.

  Niels shut the door behind himself, locking them into that silence. Tuatha said, “Tell me what you mean about this ship. It’s System?”

  “No,” Mattie said. “Once, yeah. But it…” How to prove it to them without sounding mad?

  “I was flying with a fleet of other rebels before I landed here,” Mattie said. “And we came across a dead fleet in the asteroid belt. The spiral ship did it. We could tell because of the way the, uh, computers had been wrecked. The ships were dead with all hands on board.”

  “The escape pods?”

  “No one got out,” said Mattie. “It’s not that it happened fast; it’s that the computers were taken over and prevented any pods from being launched.”

  �
�And this fleet…” Niels said.

  “It was the System fleet.”

  “Impossible.” Tuatha leaned on the table that separated them, her hands vanishing into the ice of holographic Europa.

  “I saw it.”

  “But the System isn’t gone!”

  “I don’t know whether it’s gone or not. I know Earth is gone and the fleet is gone. I saw them both.”

  Tuatha pulled off her hat, running her fingers back over her scalp. Mattie said, “You’ve seen it. Both of you. The ship that came by and messed up your electronics.”

  “Only a few people died,” said Tuatha. “And those were—accidents. Their engines lost power and crashed. No one was trying to kill—”

  “That’s because she wasn’t aiming for you last time,” said Mattie. “She was looking for something else; she must have just flown by and you felt the ripples. But this time she’s—”

  He stopped himself too late. Niels and Tuatha were staring at him. Between him and them, a shadow traveled slowly across the holographic surface of the moon, darkening the gray to black. Night was falling on Europa.

  “Believe me,” said Mattie, “it’s heading straight for you now.”

  “It’s not System,” Tuatha said. “Is it rebel? Is it coming for the Mallt-y-Nos?”

  “I don’t know. But it’s not rebel, either. I don’t think she…cares about either side.” The Conmacs were looking at him warily in the gray light of the war room. Mattie said, “Look, you can’t destroy her with your ships. You go anywhere near her and she’ll do to you what she did to the System fleet. But I can fix your computers so that she can’t affect them.”

  “She or it?” Tuatha asked, and when Mattie did not reply, she pressed, “Is it a she or an it? Is there someone we could negotiate with?”

  “No,” Mattie said.

  Tuatha exchanged a glance with Niels. “What can you do to our computers to protect them, exactly?”

  “When the System built a computer, it left in backdoors so that the computer could be accessed and controlled remotely,” Mattie said. “Some of them you know about—the ones connected to the cameras—but there were thousands of them, and not everyone knows where they all are. Some of them are hidden. I know where they are, or at least I know the same ones that the spiral ship knows about. I can close them off. I can lock her out.”