“I should have known better than to trust a pack of wolves like this to be true revolutionaries,” Danu snarled. “How long have you planned to kill him, ever since he landed?”
“What?”
“My fleet will wipe you out—”
“Anji killed Arawn!” Mattie interrupted. “It wasn’t the Conmacs; it was her ambassador.”
“Then we’ll go to Saturn next,” Danu said. “We should have done it months ago and shown that the revolution suffers no traitors.”
“Forget Anji!” Tuatha said. “Forget the Huntress; forget Arawn!”
“Forget the System,” Niels said suddenly. “They’re dead, too; the fleet’s gone, the Earth’s gone, it’s just that ship—”
“ENOUGH.”
The room fell silent. Ananke was glowing brighter than before. Somehow, rather than destroying the shadows in the room, her increased brilliance seemed to deepen them.
“ENOUGH,” said Ananke, and her voice rattled the room, that basso hum growing louder, shaking through Ivan’s limbs. Out of control; this was flaring out of control. “BRING ME IVAN AND MATTIE OR I WILL TAKE THEM MYSELF.”
She glowed brighter, brighter, her flaming eyes on Ivan—
Danu shot out the holographic terminal. Sparks flew; Ivan ducked, throwing up an arm. Danu grabbed the microphone again and barked into it, “All revolutionary ships, to all ships in the revolutionary fleet! Attack the spiral ship. Destroy it. And then make ready to advance on Saturn.”
“No—” Tuatha began.
Ivan didn’t even see Danu move; that was how fast she was. Without releasing the microphone Danu drew her gun and shot her. Tuatha jerked and dropped.
“ENOUGH!” Ananke shrieked from the holographic terminal, and from outside there was the rattle and blast of an explosion.
Tuatha wasn’t dead. She was struggling to sit up on the floor, and Danu lifted her gun again, but then someone brushed past Ivan, and a moment later he went cold to see Danu on the floor, Mattie pinning her down, her gun skidding over the floor. The lights in the room flickered on and off. The air roared with some distant detonation.
“STOP,” said Ananke, and her voice shook the ground.
Ivan ran forward, but he would be too late; Danu had her wrist blade out and had flipped Mattie, bringing her knife down toward him, and Ivan would not make it, he would be too late, but then another gun barked through the room, piercing the roar of Ananke’s electronics, cutting through her furious mechanical screams, and the top part of Danu’s head sheared away into blood and gray liquid. Her knife traveled down with just enough force to pierce Mattie’s skin but was stopped on his collarbone.
Ivan shoved Danu’s body off, hauling Mattie up, hands clenching around his. “I’m all right,” Mattie said.
Niels had found Tuatha’s fallen gun. He stared at the corpse, then dropped to his knees beside his sister, who had her fingers clamped over the spill of red from her arm. At Ivan’s side, Mattie grabbed Danu’s gun and shot out the third and final holographic terminal.
Outside, another explosion roared, then another and another. Computerized ground defenses, Ivan realized. Ananke was detonating them against the revolutionaries.
“How do we stop her?” Tuatha shouted at them over the roar of explosions, pulling herself up on Niels’s arm.
“Get your people into Arawn’s shuttle,” Ivan told her and Niels. “It’s defended against Ananke—she can’t control it. Get as many people into it as you can and fly away. She’ll be destroying the fleet right now.”
“What about you?” Niels asked.
“We’ll take the Ankou,” Mattie said. “She can’t control that one, either.”
“When we’re away from Europa, we’ll call to her,” said Ivan. “She’ll follow us. We’ll lure her away.”
The dead holographic terminals sparked. The lights turned off and on, and the ground trembled.
“Go,” said Tuatha, and Ivan and Mattie went.
FORWARD
The Ankou started, which was a relief; an irrational part of Ivan had been convinced that they would be grounded there, brought to bay while Ananke roared down and destroyed everything around them, as trapped as his father had been on Saturn when his revolution had failed.
Mattie was moving frantically around, turning on shipboard systems. Ivan sat at the display, flicking it on to see what was going on outside.
The answer was chaos.
People were running. He could not hear through the screen, but he could see them in flight. The crowd seemed to be generally funneled toward Arawn’s shuttle, but not all of them would make it.
“We can go to Titan,” Mattie said as he fired up the engines. “Constance is there.” A flick of his wrist, his long fingers typing a command, and with a chime, the ship ran through its onboard systems and confirmed a go. “Anji sent an assassin to kill Arawn instead of bargaining with him. So maybe there’s some hope for Connie over on Titan.”
Ivan turned away from that hope in time to watch the first of the ships crash into the ground. The Ankou rattled with the impact. When the dust cleared, a crater was steaming up on the far edge of the plaza.
Mattie hit the engines, and with a jolt the Ankou lifted off the ground. Ivan looked at the screen, which showed the mass of frightened people.
He had done this.
“Get Ananke’s attention,” he said.
“Not yet,” Mattie said. “Let’s get off the moon first.”
Ivan tilted the exterior cameras toward the sky. He could see Ananke without enhancement now, a gleaming shape coming closer by the second, silent and dire. The wreckage of the one-sided battle that Arawn’s ships had stupidly engaged in was her bow wave, and as Ivan watched, the first pieces of debris hit the greenhouse glass.
“Mattie, we’re in trouble,” he said. The glass was reinforced and could not be broken easily, but Arawn had had huge and heavy warships in the battle, too.
“Blessing in disguise,” said Mattie. “It’ll take us too long to open the air lock on our own.”
Ivan could only hope that the Conmacs could get as many people either out of Aquilon or safely inside Arawn’s shuttle before the first dead ship hit.
All around him, the other ships rattled and shook, falling out of the sky like meteors. Only the Ankou was able to hold her course. Ananke had reached out and taken the computers of all those doomed ships like a mother cat grabbing a kitten, and she had shaken them and shaken them until their spines had broken. The ships plummeted down, sending flames and dust fuming up from where they hit. Below, the automated defenses of the city were going off: guns firing wildly into the crowd, mines detonating on the city’s perimeter, sending flames and shards of shattered ice flying up. The entire city of Aquilon might be destroyed before the greenhouse enclosure broke.
Yet Ivan saw as they flew that of all the ships that were so controlled by Ananke, a small fraction did not strike the ground. They received power and control to their navigation just in time to avoid destruction. There were gaps in the rings of explosions: some of the mines did not detonate. In those small spaces of safety, in that small fraction of ships that escaped, Ivan recognized Althea Bastet’s kind heart.
Beyond the glass, a great hulking shape fell from the stars, shedding bits of torn metal behind it like the hair of a comet. It was a piece of what once had been a warship.
Mattie said, “Heads up—”
The piece of broken warship struck the edge of the glass with apparent gentleness. As Ivan watched, lines spread out like lightning from that point of impact like ice cracking. And then the glass shattered, thick shards coming loose and glittering in the dim sunlight and the warship hull following. Mattie dodged it as it fell down toward the moon, flames licking at its sides. Mattie cajoled the Ankou up and out through the hole in the greenhouse, escaping with the atmosphere. Ivan watched as the piece of hull hit the surface of Europa, as soundless and solid as a sack of flour hitting the floor. But the icy surface of Europa rippled, a
nd a cloud of something rose up, and the tiny shapes of buildings began to fall.
Saturn, Ivan thought. This was how Saturn must have fallen. The end of the world had followed him to one more moon.
Mattie flew them through the debris of the battle. Some of it was drifting away, but most of it was raining inward toward the undefended moon. Saturn, and Earth, and Julian’s fleet. Even the System fleet was a loss. How many men and women had manned those ships? One day the rest of the solar system might follow.
Beyond the debris of the battle, alone, untouched and untouchable, the seashell-shape of Ananke gleamed pristine, her logarithmic spiral as divine a form as ever the hand of God had made, her steady and unrushed approach the same ticking torture as the pressure of time. From this distance, her invisible influence, the mass of her core, was already pulling the Ankou slightly off course.
“How much of a head start do we need?” Mattie asked.
“Just go. I’ll summon her.”
“If we’re too close, she’ll catch us, and then we’re not helping anyone either,” said Mattie. “Remember the Macha; it let those System ships it was luring away from Anji get too close, and they caught up.”
“Then go,” Ivan said, but Mattie already was gone.
Ivan waited only until they had passed the orbit of Callisto before, as a call to Ananke, he broadcast the barking and howling of hounds.
His instinct was right. A few minutes after that the Ananke’s course changed, away from Europa and following in the Ankou’s trail.
FORWARD
How fast was Constance’s transport ship?
Mattie tried to run the calculation as he steered the Ankou. How fast was Constance’s transport ship, and what would Anji do when she arrived? What would Constance do? How long did Mattie have?
He aimed the Ankou not at Saturn but out into open space, yet the questions ran through his mind.
“We’re maxing out,” Ivan said. “Any impulse after this won’t appreciably increase our speed.”
“We’ll still speed up.”
“It’ll burn our fuel—we need fuel to maneuver.”
The spiral shape of the Ananke on their viewscreen blinked in placid pursuit.
“We need to maneuver,” Mattie admitted, and changed direction sharply. If he could move quickly enough, he could lose Ananke, and then they could go to Titan without leading the feral ship to Saturn.
After a moment—the spiral shape of the Ananke changing direction to match theirs—Mattie said, “Can’t we go any faster?”
“Not with the impulse engines. The ship has a relativistic drive, but it’s ancient,” Ivan said. He was on the other side of the piloting room, beneath one of the screens Mattie had shattered. Bits of white glass still stuck jaggedly out like shattered ice. “I don’t know if it’ll work—I don’t know if the Ankou will shatter apart under the stress of it.”
At Mattie’s elbow, the communications terminal chimed at him, a long descending sound. A gentle reminder that someone was looking to speak with him.
He shut it off. “What else have we got?”
“I’ll look,” said Ivan, and left his station, vanishing into the Ankou.
Alone in the piloting room, Mattie gritted his teeth when the communications terminal began to chime once again.
Ivan returned an eternity later. “We can toss some of the supplies if we need to lighten our mass, but a few crates of food and fuel and ammunition won’t lighten us much.”
“Ammunition? What kind?”
“What you’d expect. Bullets ad nauseam. Some bombs.”
“What kinds?”
“Mostly Eridian Class 50s.”
Mattie’s favorite. Small and easily concealable—a Class 50 could fit in Mattie’s palm—but extremely powerful. Constance had nearly leveled a System government building, taking out the Martian representatives, years ago—and that with only one bomb. “How many?”
“A crateful. What are you thinking?”
“If we can direct their detonation—”
“—we can use that as impulse,” Ivan finished. “Not a chance. We don’t have time or materials to build a parabolic reflector or mount it outside.”
“Try the relativistic drive.”
“Are you certain?”
“Yes, I’m fucking certain,” Mattie snapped, and Ivan moved back toward his station by the engine display and began to tap at the controls. At Mattie’s elbow, the communications terminal began to chime again.
And then the Ankou shuddered with terrible violence, the whole ancient ship rattling and groaning, metal under pressure screaming, the plaintive sound of communications drowned out by the agony of the machine.
And then they were through. Mattie found himself on the floor, his hands over his head as if that would shield him. He turned to look for Ivan and saw him doing the same thing, pulling himself upright with one hand between shards of glass on the broken cover of the computer display above him.
Mattie stood on shaking legs and looked at the navigation again. The screen showed the Ankou moving at a significantly increased speed, the distance between it and the Ananke increasing rapidly. The relativistic drive on the Ankou was working.
“Fuck,” Ivan breathed.
Mattie seated himself again and changed the Ankou’s direction once more to lure the Ananke into believing they might be traveling outward, toward Neptune. As soon as Ananke was off their sensor range, they could go straight for Titan instead of traveling in this roundabout way.
Would Anji execute Constance right away when she arrived? Mattie wondered. Or would Anji spare her old friend? And what would Constance do?
“When we’ve got Con back, then what?” he asked.
Ivan’s response was slow to come. “That would depend on Con.”
“We can put plans together. We can think of options.”
Ivan sat down at Mattie’s side. The space beyond the Ankou warped with their speed, and Mattie watched that rather than meeting Ivan’s eyes.
“We couldn’t go back to Europa,” Ivan said. “And we’d need to leave Saturn. It would depend on what allies she had left.”
“There’s this girl, Marisol, out on Venus. Arawn mentioned her. He didn’t like her, and she followed Con once. Maybe she’s still Con’s.”
“Maybe,” Ivan said, and Mattie stared out at the warping stars, his mind running through possibilities, where to go, what to do, after this crisis. They had survived all the others, hadn’t they? Even Con. They’d escape from Ananke, and they’d go to Titan, and Constance would be there.
It was Ivan who noticed it first, as if he had some sixth sense for oncoming destruction. “Mattie.”
“What?”
“Ananke’s catching up.”
On the screen over Mattie’s head the little star that marked the Ankou zigged through space. And behind that, the Ananke’s spiral symbol moved with ominous and increasing speed after them, her trail undulating gracefully through space.
If they tried to outrun Ananke first, they would never make it to Titan on time.
“Fuck it,” Mattie said, and changed course for Titan.
Behind them, the star of the Ananke changed course, too.
BACKWARD
Ivan’s companion wasn’t new enough to be wholly strange, but he was new enough to be an uncertain quantity, and no one, in Ivan’s opinion, could ever be not strange enough to be trusted.
It didn’t help that the Tam Lin was small; there wasn’t really anywhere to go to avoid Mattie, not if Ivan actually wanted to pilot the ship. At first it had made him uneasy to let Mattie live between him and the ship’s controls, but, he realized, that fear hadn’t crossed his mind in some time.
Mattie sat on the couch shoved into the Tam Lin’s living area, which merged smoothly into the piloting area, where Ivan now was sitting. The ship had once been a luxury craft, one that Ivan’s mother had hated with every diamond shard of her heart, and the sleekly curving room had been designed and furnished with
a sort of minimalist System elegance. Ivan had been content to leave it that way, but Mattie had managed to mar that minimalism. Brightly colored clothes had been tossed over the arm of the couch, a blanket was wadded up beneath them, a pillow had been shoved beneath the modest gray cushions of the couch itself. A spray of stolen material had been dumped onto the surface of the coffee table, data chips glittering in the light of the glassy light fixture overhead. A wrapper of something sat on the other end of the table, the bright color of the packaging suggesting an outer planetary packaged meal.
Mattie toyed with one of the data chips they’d taken, making it flip and leap across his knuckles with causal deftness. His hair was mussed from running his hands through it after they’d escaped from the Titanian bank from which they’d taken the chips.
Each of those data chips had several thousand dollars of System electronic currency on it, undetectable, as they’d taken them before the bank could stamp identifying information into the metadata. They had a small fortune spread out on the table in front of them. It was curiously numbing: Ivan hadn’t spent enough time without the money he’d taken from Earth to appreciate the strangeness of having wealth again.
“You did really good back there,” Mattie said, and through some swift movement of index and middle finger made the chip dive into his palm and sit there. “The System was eating right out of your hand.”
“Thanks,” Ivan said. Mattie had a pleasant smile, but Ivan wasn’t sure what lay beneath it.
“And you kept your head when they pulled their guns, too.”
Ivan toyed with the leather accents on the captain’s chair. He had a sudden impulse to take out his knife and stab through the expensive leather of the padded armrests.
“Can’t be a lot of soldiers like that on Earth,” Mattie said.
Ivan left off digging his nails into the leather. “Earth’s not under occupation like Titania is or any of the other planets, but there’s a threat there anyway.”
It made him nervous to say even that much, but the System was not here, and the System was not watching. Ivan had made sure to pull out all the cameras on his mother’s hated luxury ship.
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