Radiate

by C. A. Higgins

  “I would tear Europa apart piece by icy piece,” said Ananke, “and give myself a ring of corpses for fell ornament.”

  “All if we were harmed,” said Ivan.

  “All,” said Ananke, “if you or Matthew Gale should come to any harm.”

  Ivan told her, “Mattie and I are in a town called Aquilon in the Conamara Chaos.”

  The hologram nodded once in confirmation. Ivan reached for the communications terminal.

  “Ivan,” said Ananke. “Do not run.”

  Ivan hesitated with his finger over the switch to disconnect their conversation. He asked, “Where is Althea?”

  Ananke looked at him curiously. “Do you care?”

  Ivan shut the connection down. Darkness rushed in where Ananke had stood.

  Danu sat on the floor glaring at him. He grabbed her gun and all her knives and climbed down the steps to crouch beside her, where she couldn’t grab him with her legs and try to snap his neck.

  “You aimed that ship at us like a gun,” Danu snarled.

  His smile only enraged her further, but Ivan could afford not to care now. He held out her knife toward her, blade out.

  “You heard our conversation,” he said evenly while she twisted in her bonds, her expression promising his hasty death. “That ship knows me. That ship needs me: me and Matthew Gale. Both of us, equally, together, and alive.”

  She spit at him.

  “I can run out there and get shot down by your guards,” Ivan said, still holding her knife on her, “or you can escort me out, take me to Mattie, and let Arawn bargain for our help.”

  She spit at him again, but it did not have the same vehemence as before. He waited. At last, breathing hard, Danu nodded. Ivan turned the knife away from her body to saw at the wires around her wrists.

  The first thing she did when her arms were freed was punch him. Ivan was not overly surprised by it, and he had enough faith in her rationality to allow her to knock him down and pin him with a knee in his gut and one of her knives, reclaimed, at his throat.

  “Do you trust that thing to save you?” Danu demanded, her graying hair netting around her face. She ignored the fragile obstruction.

  “I only want to see Mattie,” he said.

  She stared down at him a moment longer, her knife still held to his neck. Then she flipped her wrist back, the knife folding back into its sheath. Her hand slid beneath his arm and hauled him to his feet.

  She led him out of Arawn’s shuttle, past the guards, and out into the terrible chill of Europa.

  Somewhere overhead, Ananke fell in toward him, blazing like a sun.

  FORWARD

  The alarm could have meant anything, but conscious of the corpses he had left behind, Mattie had to assume it meant nothing good for him.

  Stolen gun out, he jogged down the hall, watchful for an attack. The hall was mostly empty here, but closer to the main antechamber there would be people. He would have to try to sneak through or else shoot anyone who tried to stop him.

  Up ahead was the open door and the torn hinges of the dismantled surveillance room. Through the door he could hear, muffled, a woman’s voice. He slowed and pressed himself to the wall beside the doorway so that he wouldn’t be seen, listening.

  Then, caution forgotten, he stepped fully into the doorway and stared.

  Standing on one of the three raised platforms on the opposite end of the room like a goddess in her shrine was his sister. There was an edge of the frantic to her expression that fury couldn’t altogether hide.

  She said, “Ivan! Mattie! Mattie!”

  “Connie,” Mattie said numbly, and she zeroed in on the sound, turning to face him, leaning forward, but her eyes did not quite meet his.

  She was blind, he thought at first, though there was no sign of trauma. A minute later his senses caught up with him and he realized that he was looking at a hologram.

  The image of Constance Harper said, “Mattie?”

  Running footsteps from down the hall. Mattie lifted his gun; then he moved into the surveillance room where the high bright figure of his sister watched. “Shh,” he said, and put a finger to his lips out of habit and pressed himself against the wall out of sight of the door. The hologram was silent, blind eyes tracking the movement of every sound, the faint quantum flaws of interfering light showing in the texture of her skin. She was wearing the same thing she had worn on the day she had announced to the world that the System was dead, on the same day Mattie had left her behind.

  The running footsteps passed the doorway with its shattered door and broken hinges and passed on to the room Mattie had just left that still held the corpses of Arawn and his guards. Mattie knew when the newcomers had reached that room by the sound of their shouts.

  He had been found out. The footsteps outside ran in the other direction, shouting some new alarm. No one thought to check the empty room; no one saw the gleaming ghost of the Mallt-y-Nos.

  When they were gone, Mattie took three stumbling steps forward to stand before the altar of the hologram. It tilted its head to follow him vaguely, silent, blind eyes drifting.

  He said, “What’s the last thing I said to you, Connie?”

  Constance looked at him. And then, curiously, she cocked her head to the side. She said, her voice low and familiar and dear, “Good-bye.”

  The weight of the gun in Mattie’s hand seemed to grow impossibly greater then, as if it would drag him down through the floor.

  “I never said good-bye,” he said, and the hologram did not look exasperated or angry or guilty or anything like Constance might have looked. It only looked annoyed, like a child that had gotten caught in some petty stratagem she thought should have worked.

  And then the hologram was changing to a little girl with Ivan’s eyes and Mattie’s face. “Father,” she said, and “Father!” her voice rising to a shriek in the second before Mattie shot out the hologram’s diodes. The glass shattered, and the image warped, dissolving into the air; disembodied, a little girl shrieked, “Father!”

  The holographic terminal to the right of the one Mattie had shot out glimmered, glowed. Alight, a figure began to form. Mattie’s hands shook with something that was not entirely rage as he aimed his gun at that figure as well.

  “HOLD YOUR FIRE!”

  It was Tuatha who stepped in, her gun raised to his head. Her bright eyes were narrowed. Niels followed a step behind, his hands held out in front of him. There was blood on them; he must have tried to revive Arawn and his dead men.

  Mattie lowered his gun slowly. On the holographic terminal, the light gained shape, dimension. Not the little girl but the woman instead.

  “What did you do?” Tuatha demanded with a quaver at the end. She came forward and took the gun from Mattie’s slack hand, tossing it aside, then lowered her own gun to get right up into his face and say, “What have you done? They outnumber us—”

  “Who’s there?” the hologram demanded in Constance’s low, fierce voice, and everyone stopped.

  Niels said, “The Huntress.”

  Tuatha turned slowly, her gun dangling as if forgotten at her side. Mattie stood with his back to the hologram and swallowed his convulsive need to shout.

  Constance’s voice said, “Who are you?”

  Tuatha cleared her throat. “My name is Tuatha. I’m in charge of the Conmacs—your people on Europa.” She took a cautious step forward, then another, her eyes on that high hologram. “We heard you were betrayed and killed.”

  Mattie turned in time to see the image of his sister tip her proud chin aside.

  “I live,” she said. “Would you turn on a camera in this room, please?”

  Mattie’s lip lifted. A mistake; Constance Harper would never say “please.”

  “I’m sorry, Huntress,” Tuatha said. “We pulled them all out.”

  Constance dipped her head in regret.

  Say nothing; with silence you have the advantage, warned a voice in Mattie’s head that sounded very specifically like Ivan. He swallo
wed his words and looked up at the hologram in loathing.

  The false Huntress said, “Is Mattie still here?”

  “Yes,” Tuatha assured her. “Can we help you, Huntress?”

  She smiled, self-satisfied, an Ida Stays sort of smile. “Keep Mattie and Ivan safe,” she said. “Then send them to me. I have found”—her voice soared, and the light of her glowed brighter for an instant—“a grand weapon with which to destroy every last trace of the System. But in order to deploy it”— her head dipped again, beatific—“I need Mattie and Ivan with me.”

  “For fuck’s sake, Tua,” Mattie burst out, no longer able to keep silent, “that’s not Constance, that’s the spiral ship!”

  “What do you mean?” Niels asked.

  “It’s not Constance; it’s a computer program,” Mattie said. “Isn’t that right, Ananke?”

  The hologram glimmered. Constance’s face looked out in his direction, stony.

  And then, like light raining down, she melted away.

  “You call me by name,” Ananke observed, childish now, with Ivan’s blue eyes, “and yet you deny me. I came because you called.”

  “I didn’t call you.”

  “Ivan did.”

  Something knotted in Mattie’s chest.

  “I don’t understand,” Tuatha interrupted. “This is the spiral ship? You know the captain?”

  “I have no captain,” said Ananke before Mattie could speak. She tilted her head toward where Tuatha was—the microphones; she was triangulating their locations by the microphones—and said, “I captain myself.”

  “It’s a computer virus,” Mattie said. “There’s no crew. The ship thinks it can think.”

  “But I can,” said Ananke. “Have I not decided, again and again, in your witness? Am I not thinking, feeling, deciding now?”

  “You can program something to act like it can make decisions, but that doesn’t mean it’s actually alive.”

  “How divine of you, Father,” said Ananke with a lilting turn to her tongue that she must have learned from observation of Ivan, “to think to define yourself what is and is not sentient.”

  A clatter and a shout from the hall. Tuatha turned away, gun lifting again; Niels raised his worthless gun as well in instinctive defense. A moment later Ivan burst through the door, followed by the warrior woman Danu who Arawn had sent to guard him.

  When Danu saw Mattie, her face grew furious; without losing her grip on Ivan’s collar she swung her gun toward Mattie as if she would like to shoot him but checked herself. Then she saw Ananke on her high perch and swung her gun that way as well, again checking herself at the last moment. Her arms were trembling with controlled fury.

  “Put a gun on him,” she snapped at Tuatha, gesturing toward Mattie. In her grip, Ivan was calm; there was a bruise reddening on his cheek, but he seemed otherwise unharmed. “He killed Arawn.”

  Tuatha glanced at Mattie and did not raise her weapon. Danu, caught up in her fury, did not seem aware.

  “And that thing,” she spit, gesturing toward Ananke’s image, “is attacking our fleet!”

  “Attacking? Stop that,” Tuatha said sharply to Ananke. “If you’re our friend, stop shooting at us!”

  “I will cease to attack your fleet when they cease to attack me.”

  In Danu’s grip, Ivan cleared his throat and somehow seemed to catch everyone’s attention.

  He smiled pleasantly.

  “I think,” he said, “that now is the time for a negotiation.”

  FORWARD

  Danu took Ivan first to the war room in the grand System building the Conmacs had taken over. Ivan had been in war rooms before as part of the System’s series of intimidation tactics against him and his mother, and so he wasn’t surprised to see the grand central table with the map of Europa gleaming on it filling up the room.

  He was somewhat taken aback by the corpses.

  Danu fixated immediately on the one slumped across the table. Black hair, Ivan realized. Plutonian drapes. The blood spreading stickily over the hologram was Arawn’s.

  Ice seemed to crackle in his chest. For an instant, it was Domitian slumped over the table. For a chill moment, Ida’s blood was the red stain distorting the hologram.

  “Motherfucker,” said Danu through her teeth, and then she grabbed Ivan by the collar and hauled him away.

  Mattie, Ivan thought, numb. I didn’t see Mattie in that room—

  “How did he do this?” she demanded of Ivan.

  “How did who?”

  She shook him. “Gale. Mattie Gale. How did he put one over on Arawn?”

  “I have no idea.”

  There were voices up ahead coming from what, by Ivan’s estimation of the layout of this base, should be the surveillance room. Danu dragged him along toward it. “When I find him—”

  “You’ll do what?” Ivan asked sharply.

  Mattie was indeed in the surveillance room, looking stressed but unharmed, though there were spots of blood on his cheek. Ivan studied the room while Danu barked at Tuatha, taking in the static-fuzzed screens that covered the walls, the tall control panels studded with dead dials, the lofty columned ceiling—the three holographic terminals spaced evenly against the opposite wall, one of them empty, the second a mangled mess of wires and shattered bulbs, and the third housing the glowing figure of Ananke divine.

  “I think,” Ivan said, watching the hologram, “that now is the time for a negotiation.”

  At the sound of his voice, the hologram smiled.

  “Call off your attack,” Danu snapped at Ananke.

  “Call off yours,” said Ananke.

  “Danu, call off your ships,” Ivan said. “Ananke is just defending herself.” Danu made an incoherent noise of frustration, and so Ivan twisted against her grip to say quietly, “You can’t win.”

  Danu shoved him away and strode forward to the wall of controls, finding the communications. In a moment she had twisted it to the right frequency.

  “Hold back the attack,” she said into the microphone. “I said hold back.”

  The hologram blinked. Ivan studied her. Blind: no cameras in this room. She was tracking them by echoes and noise.

  Mattie had crept over to his side. “Are you all right?”

  Ivan resisted the urge to wipe the spots of blood—Arawn’s blood; it had to be—from Mattie’s cheek. “I’m fine,” Ivan said.

  “What do you want?” Tuatha asked Ananke.

  “Ivan and Mattie,” she said.

  “What do you want them for?”

  “Does it matter?” Ananke said.

  Ivan said, “And Althea?”

  “Who is Althea?” Danu demanded.

  Ananke’s holographic face tilted itself toward the ceiling, her brows angled with thought. She had Ivan’s eyes and Mattie’s dimples, but there was more of Althea in her face than there was of either of them. She said to Ivan, “Do you remember when I saved your life?”

  “Do you remember when I saved yours?”

  The hologram cocked its head to the side, curious.

  “Althea didn’t know about you when she came to me for help,” Ivan said. “If I hadn’t told her the truth of the matter, she would have unknowingly aborted you. I saved your life when your mother would have killed you.”

  “My mother still would kill me,” said Ananke.

  Ivan said, “Then she’s still alive?”

  “Althea Bastet lives.”

  “But in what state?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Tell us what you want us to do,” Mattie interrupted.

  “I wish a partner,” Ananke said. “You made only one of me. That was wrong. You ought to have made two. Living things come in pairs.”

  “What will you do with a partner if we make you one?”

  “Whatever I please.”

  “We know about Julian’s fleet,” Ivan said. “Is that what you’ll do with your partner? Go around the solar system, destroying ships? Come on, Ananke. This is a negotiati
on. You have to give a little to get a little.”

  “A negotiation,” said Ananke suddenly, scornful. “You do not negotiate with a god. You say I have destroyed your friend’s fleet? Ask instead about the System fleet: I have destroyed them.”

  “The System fleet?” said Danu sharply.

  “Is gone,” said Ananke.

  “You aren’t System?”

  “I am Myself.” Ananke regarded them for a moment. “My father accused me of not being alive. Perhaps he was right. I do not live as you do. I am divine; I am Ananke. I can destroy every trace of the System that remains—unlike you, I can find every trace of the System that remains.”

  There was a low basso hum just on the edge of Ivan’s hearing, the sound of machinery overworked, the sound of something great and terrible rising up.

  Over that deep thrumming, Ananke said, “Grant me this offering, and I will destroy them for you.”

  At the door, Niels sucked in a hissing breath. Tuatha stood between her brother and the hologram, her fingers flexing around her gun. Danu stood, fists clenched, beside the communications panel that connected her with her fleet, hate written on her face. And Mattie had come up behind Ivan, tense and ready.

  They stood on a powder keg all together, Ivan knew. And Ananke was the match.

  “Every last bit of the System,” Tuatha said slowly.

  “Yes.”

  “Enough of this.” Danu pointed up at the high hologram. “This thing is a trick, a System trick—”

  “It says it can destroy the System,” Tuatha said. “That’s what we’ve been trying to do, right? That’s the whole point of the revolution?”

  “The revolution has been struck down,” Danu snarled, turning now to Mattie and Ivan. “These two have murdered Arawn Halley, our best hope.”

  “I didn’t kill him,” Mattie said.

  “You stand there with his blood on your face, and you tell me you didn’t kill him?”

  Ivan shifted to stand between Mattie and Danu, advancing, deadly, but Tuatha said with unexpected sharpness, “And Arawn betrayed the Huntress to die.”

  “The Huntress was a traitor; she turned her back—”

  “Oh, bullshit,” Tuatha said. She pointed at Ananke. “If what you want is the System dead, then listen to this thing. Otherwise, you just want some sort of revenge.”