Radiate

by C. A. Higgins

  “Then why?” Tuatha left her brother’s side, walking toward Mattie. She had to crane her neck up, head nearly vertical, to look at him, but she came up so close anyway that he had to fight the urge to step back. “Why do you know all this? Why do you want to leave before the Mallt-y-Nos arrives if you say you follow her? Why,” she said, “should I trust you?”

  “I’ve encountered this ship before,” Mattie said. “I’ve seen what it can do. I don’t want it to do that to anyone else.”

  Her expression spelled out clearly how little she believed him.

  “It’s not the Mallt-y-Nos I want to avoid,” Mattie lied. “It’s the spiral ship.”

  “The weight of everything you’re not telling me could sink this building through the ice and down to the core,” Tuatha said. “If you want a ship from me, if you want me to let you do something to our computers, you’ll have to tell me why.”

  “What if I am telling the truth?” Mattie snapped, and saw her jaw tighten. “Here’s the truth as far as you need to know. I’m from Miranda. I was in the space battle overhead with a friend; we crashed and got separated. My friend is coming here to meet me. The only thing that I want is to find him and for him to be alive and for us to get off this damn frozen moon.”

  Part of him still wanted to leave the camp, to go off and look for Ivan himself, walking every inch of the moon himself if he had to. But he had to wait here, wait, and prepare, and have faith.

  “That’s all I want,” Mattie promised. “I don’t want to screw you over or hurt your people. I want to stop your people from getting killed if I can. If the System showed up, I’d shoot them down and I wouldn’t feel bad about it, but that’s not what I’m here for.”

  Mattie searched her face for any sign she believed him, but she was frowning, thoughtful, no sign of the bent of those thoughts readable to his eye.

  “Is it so hard to believe,” Mattie said, “that I might not want to have any more deaths on my shoulders?”

  “If you really wanted to prevent deaths, you could wait until the Huntress gets here and do the same thing for her ships.”

  Whether he would be forced to face Constance Harper was a question for another day. Mattie said, hard, “Do we have a deal?”

  Tuatha turned to look back at Niels. Niels nodded.

  “You can have the Ankou,” Tuatha said. “Niels will go with you.”

  FORWARD

  The Ankou was a piece of crap.

  Niels had led Mattie to the oldest and most ragged ship in the Conmacs’ shipyard, an ancient disk-shaped model a little smaller than the Annwn had been. It was not a warship—old civilian class, it had armament designed only for clearing asteroid fields of debris—and Mattie suspected that it would be unwieldy and slow. The name on the side, battered by years of space debris, was barely legible. It opened, unlike the Annwn, right into the piloting room so that as soon as Niels had swung open the hull door, Mattie had found himself staring at the ship’s nerve center. He scanned it swiftly. Doors on either end to other rooms; no central hallway. The control room was arranged with computer terminals against the walls, designed to be manned by one or two people in the old style, glossy white walls and blandly smooth screens with low flat keyboards.

  Mattie said, “This isn’t a ship, it’s a bucket.”

  “It’s a whole bucket more than you had five minutes ago,” said Niels.

  This ship might even have been built before the fall of Saturn, so outdated was the self-consciously futuristic style that now seemed so ancient to Mattie. The ships he knew were more organically metallic than stylistically glossy.

  He felt an unfamiliar and unexpected pang for the Annwn, lost somewhere on the Ananke, rendered wrecked and inoperable. It was strange to have left a place and to miss the place itself, as if all the years he and Ivan—and Constance, he supposed—had spent together on that ship made up walls and atmosphere in some dimension separate from and irrevocably joined to the ship itself.

  He pushed the thoughts of the past from his mind and focused on the Ankou. A ship this old would have a relativistic drive, sure, but the old-style relativistic drives were…untrustworthy, to say the least. Mattie had heard too many stories of them going up in a ball of flame and killing everyone on board. He wouldn’t dare risk trying to engage the Ankou’s relativistic drive unless he had no other choice. He wandered the room, running his hands over the glassy surface of the walls.

  He’d have to crack the screen covers. This was why nobody ever made these kinds of damn ships anymore. “I need a hammer.”

  “Tuatha will love that. Five minutes alone and the stranger asks his guard for a blunt-force weapon.”

  “I’d be a lot sneakier if I were trying to take you out,” Mattie said. “I’d ask for a wrench, maybe, or a screwdriver if I really wanted to kill you. Besides, you’ve got a gun.” Tuatha had handed it to him as Niels and Mattie had left the war room, slipping it into her brother’s hands casually but with her body angled so that Mattie could see.

  “There’s a toolbox underneath that panel. There might be a hammer in there.”

  With the hull door shut, cutting out the Europan wind, Mattie was almost warm. He went where Niels indicated and dug out a box from beneath the panel. The surface of the box was white and smooth like an egg. Mattie cracked it open and produced a tarnished hammer.

  Behind him, Niels had seated himself in one of the abandoned chairs. Mattie hefted the hammer and picked a screen.

  The hammer shattered the glassy white covering of the old computer into a spiderweb of cracks. None fell to the floor—the old-style coverings had been designed better than that. Instead, they clung to one another in the same shape they had held before the blow of Mattie’s hammer.

  Mattie flipped the hammer around, got the edge of the claw between shards, and began to pop the pieces out.

  “Shouldn’t you be wearing gloves?” Niels asked.

  Once Mattie got one piece out, the rest would follow quickly. “Yeah.”

  Rustling behind him, and then a pair of thick winter gloves appeared over his shoulder. Mattie took them and thought of Ivan kneeling in front of him just after they had crashed onto Europa, pulling the gloves onto Mattie’s hands.

  Mattie pulled the gloves on his hands. Then he picked up the hammer again and started to pry off the glass coverings.

  “You’d think they’d be removable,” Niels remarked.

  “Some of them are.” Mattie caught the glass pieces as they flaked out. Something scraped the floor by his ankle: Niels had slid him a bucket. He dropped the glass inside. “But these pieces were never supposed to be taken out.”

  Removing those pieces would give Mattie access to the circuits that the System could exploit to take over the computer from afar. Removing them was the only way to defend against Ananke.

  He carefully pulled the smaller shards loose with his clumsy, glove-bulked hands.

  Niels said, “What you’re doing…is it going to provoke that spiral ship into attacking us?”

  “Why would it?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t understand what you’re doing.”

  “I’m just making it so she can’t take over your computers.” Mattie focused on picking out the pieces of shattered glass.

  Niels said, “Who are you?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “How do you know the Mallt-y-Nos?”

  “I don’t know her,” Mattie snapped too quickly. When he turned, Niels rose to his feet and drew his gun.

  Mattie had put the hammer down; he wished he still had it in his hand, but it was too far for him to grab it before Niels could shoot him. He was still evaluating the distance when Niels popped out the clip on his handgun and angled it so that Mattie could see. With his bare thumb, he popped the bullets from the clip one by one. They fell onto the floor and rolled. Then he drew back the slide on the gun he still held, angling it so that Mattie could see it as well. It was empty.

  Tucking the gun back into his waistb
and, Niels said mildly, “I was a priest before the revolution.”

  The System hadn’t been fond of religion; any higher power conflicted with their authority. But Constance had never been fond of religion either, perhaps for similar reasons, so Mattie was not certain he had ever met a priest of any kind. “For what god?”

  “The One True God.”

  “There’re a lot of those.”

  “Every god needs its priests. The System targeted my parish when the revolution began; I’m sure you know something of how they feel about us. I guided everyone to a secret room carved into the ice to hide while I left to look for help—from the revolutionaries, from the System, from whoever would help—but while I was gone, the System bombed the house above the cave. Everyone was dead. Their bodies were already buried in the ice. And so I came here.”

  “Decided you wanted revenge?” Mattie said.

  “I wanted to see my sister.”

  “Don’t you hate them, though,” said Mattie, “for what they did? Killing the people you cared about?”

  “I’m afraid I’m the sort of priest who believes in forgiveness.”

  “That’s bullshit,” Mattie said.

  “What is?”

  “Forgiveness. You can’t forgive something like that. A betrayal or if someone hurts someone you love—nobody can forgive that. Nobody should forgive that.”

  “Maybe not,” Niels said. “Or maybe that’s a child’s way of looking at the world.”

  “A child’s or a god’s?”

  “A child’s,” Niels said firmly. “An adult recognizes that everyone has their reasons for doing what they’ve done. It does not mean you have to support them, or condone them, or even accept them. You can be entirely opposed to them. But you can forgive them.”

  The interior of the Ankou was growing warmer. The sounds from outside could not be heard through the hull.

  Mattie said, “Tell me, Father Niels of the Unloaded Magazine, does your sister know you wouldn’t shoot me even if I came at you with this hammer?”

  “I’d appreciate if you didn’t tell her.”

  “She has a whole army full of soldiers, but she sent you,” Mattie said. “Are you her spy?”

  “Tuatha sent me because she knew I would take your confession.”

  “So you are her spy.”

  One corner of Niels’s mouth turned up. “The thing about a confession is that unless you are actively planning to harm someone else, I’m not allowed to tell anyone what you’ve confessed.”

  Mattie flexed his fingers at his side. They were stiff and bulky in those thick winter gloves. Niels said, “Who is the Mallt-y-Nos to you?”

  “She’s my sister,” Mattie said.

  “I didn’t realize she had any family.”

  “Foster sister,” said Mattie. “We grew up together. I helped her…with the revolution. Then I left. My friend knows her, too.”

  “Why did you leave?”

  “The fuck does it matter to you? You know my secret now. You can go off and tell Tuatha I’m not a threat.”

  He bent down and picked up the hammer again, and then he turned his back to Niels and slammed it against the next screen in line. It splintered.

  Niels did not press him any further. Mattie supposed he was grateful. He tried to forget Niels’s silent presence and fall into his work. Bit by bit Mattie pulled the glass and plastic coverings away; bit by bit he exposed the wires and circuitry beneath.

  Yet his thoughts were distracted. There was one prevailing thought in his mind that never quite broke into conscious consideration. And yet it or its sister concerns peaked through—constantly—and distracted him from his concentration on the cracked screen. It was the thought of civil war and of a woman caught in that conflagration, through her own fault perhaps, but somehow now that seemed not to matter.

  He was concerned for Constance Harper.

  FORWARD

  Alyssa led Ivan on a roundabout route to Aquilon, taking him not through the air lock door that connected to the Mara greenhouse but through a door that led into an otherwise abandoned section where the wind swept unimpeded over the snow. The city was smoking and silent.

  “Amphitrite,” Alyssa said, seeing his look. “One of the first cities to go down. But it’s right on the edge of the uninhabitable, so no one wants to try to hold it.”

  The sides of the Amphitrite greenhouse abutted the part of Europa that was not enclosed by greenhouse, rendering the city a plane of glass away from oblivion.

  The air lock between Amphitrite and Mara was, however, guarded. Alyssa and Ivan hid. It was still dark but not as dark; Europa was coming back into the penumbra, and a faint gray light could now suffuse the air from the still barely invisible sun.

  “What was your plan for this?” Ivan asked, looking across the icy plain to where revolutionaries paced in front of the vast air lock doors, lights utterly unable to penetrate more than a few weak feet into the tundra around them.

  “I was going to shoot them,” said Alyssa.

  “Are you that good a shot?”

  She shrugged. “How else would we get in?”

  The guards were sitting on the ice, or on chairs. A few were engaged in a game Ivan couldn’t see the details of from this distance. One appeared to be systematically dismantling his gun—the ice must have crept into the machinery.

  It would be a boring duty, guarding this lock; no one would be coming from Amphitrite, and the path was so roundabout that Ivan doubted anyone would have thought to take it from Mara. There were no threats here, and they were only a token defense.

  Ivan stood up.

  “What are you doing?” Alyssa hissed. She might be afraid he was giving in to the same impulse that had nearly devoured him by the graveyard, but if so, she was wrong.

  “Trust me,” he said, and offered her his hand.

  She looked between him and the armed revolutionaries. He thought for a moment that she might shake her head and vanish back into the dark, perhaps to go to dead Amphitrite in useless search of another path to Mara.

  The weight of her was very slight, as if her skin were full of nothing but feathers and bones. Ivan let go of her hand to put his arm around her shoulders, and she, with some hesitation, wrapped her arm around his waist. He could feel her fingers digging into his side even through the thickness of his stolen coat.

  They were perhaps sixty yards from the air lock before the sound of their steps betrayed their approach. A challenge rang out over the ice: “Who’s there?”

  Ivan said, his accent as near an imitation of Mattie’s as he could make it, “Friends!”

  “Who are ‘friends’?” the guard retorted. None of them lowered their weapons.

  Alyssa’s fingers were like nails in Ivan’s side.

  “Followers,” Ivan said as he stepped out into visibility, “of the Mallt-y-Nos.”

  The guards exchanged a glance.

  It was a risk he had taken. If these men did not follow the Mallt-y-Nos, they would kill him, and Alyssa, too.

  The lead guard—a stocky man, his face almost invisible beneath its swaddling of a Europan-manufactured hood—said, “We heard you were to come in from the west. How did you end up here?”

  Come in from the west? “I was sent out to scout,” said Ivan. “I’m meant to go to Mara next.”

  “Good timing.” An older woman sat casually back down on one of the crates that formed a makeshift trench wall in front of the air lock. “She should be arriving in Aquilon today.”

  Ivan’s heart stopped cold, then thudded once, a painful, halting beat. “The Mallt-y-Nos is already in Aquilon?”

  The older woman cocked a brow. “Not yet, I said. Today.”

  “How do we know you are who you say you are?” the stocky man said.

  Ivan unwrapped his arm from Alyssa’s shoulders and left her standing unbalanced on the ice so that he could walk over to the stocky man and stand by him, towering above him.

  “My name is Matthew Gale.” Ivan presse
d down his terror and hope like a stone into his chest, where it filled all the empty cavities of his heart. “I was born on Miranda, and I lived as the foster brother of the Mallt-y-Nos. I helped her revolution grow from the minute she imagined it. And I am helping her still.”

  All the guards were staring at Ivan. He said, “What do you need me to say to prove myself? That the Huntress’s name is Constance Harper, that she has freckles on her shoulders, that when she was a little girl she was as much a leader as she is now? That her ship took her from Mars, to Venus, to Mars, and then to here? That seven bombs were planted on Earth, and I was the one who detonated them? Or would it be enough to tell you that the symbol of the revolution is the barking of hounds?”

  The wind gusted once, as if the ice and the dark were laughing at his back, but in the circle of the torchlight Ivan could ignore it.

  The guard said, “And who is that one?”

  Alyssa still stood back at the edges of the torchlight, her arms wrapped around her waist, her ragged hair hanging loosely about her narrow face, nervous under the sudden attention. Ivan said, “Her name is Abigail Hunter. She was a foster sister of the Mallt-y-Nos, too, and she’s also spent her life helping the revolution.”

  “Is this true?” the guard asked Alyssa, and Alyssa hesitated but nodded once rather than speak. Good girl.

  That seemed to decide him. “Welcome to Aquilon,” said the stocky man. “The Conmacs are set up in the center of town; that’s where you’ll find the Mallt-y-Nos.”

  “I was supposed to meet her at the shipyard,” Ivan said.

  “That’s in the center of town, too,” said the stocky man. “Morgan, you take them.”

  “We don’t need an escort,” Ivan said as the older woman rose to her feet.

  “It’s for your protection,” said the stocky man. “If you go in there unescorted, they’ll shoot you.”

  “Fine,” Ivan said, like Mattie would.

  They passed beneath the vast air lock. For a moment Ivan was paranoid—what if they were caught between the two layers of glass and trapped in that brief expanse of empty no-man’s-land?—but Morgan strode with calm confidence, and soon Ivan and Alyssa had emerged unscathed into the Aquilonian side of the air lock. The guards there saw Morgan and nodded a greeting, and Morgan led them out of this second circle of torchlight and onto the road that led to Aquilon.