Ida waited patiently. The silence stretched out just long enough that her patience started to turn to impatience, but at last a man’s voice came on.
“The Ananke apologizes, Miss Stays,” said the man. Willem Domitian or Rufus Gagnon, then; the Terran accent suggested the scientist, not the captain, although there was no way to be certain. “We’re stretched a little thin at the moment. I’ll help you dock and board.”
“Thank you,” said Ida, still sweetness; she did not know the politics of this crew yet.
Another pause, and then the man—Gagnon?—spoke again.
“Usually we’d just have you maneuver in front of the main doors, then the Ananke’s computer would dock you itself,” he said, sounding a little strained. “Unfortunately, we’re having some computer difficulties right now.”
“That’s quite all right,” Ida said. “I know how to fly a ship.”
Gagnon sounded relieved. “The main doors will open in a moment.”
Ida looked at the viewscreen, which was showing the seashell shape of the Ananke growing larger and larger as she drifted closer. At the termination of the ship’s spiral, there were two long, flat panels forming the spiral’s edge; as Ida watched, they slid slowly open, exposing the inside of the ship like a wound being stretched wide.
She steered herself into that wound, careful to compensate for the gravity of the Ananke. It was a simple task but a slow one; distances were vast in open space.
The mission of the Ananke, whatever it was, was a state secret. Ida had pushed her luck to be granted access to the ship; she had been denied knowledge of its purpose. The gap in her knowledge was a weakness, an annoyance, but in the end it hardly mattered. Gale and Ivanov doubtless had boarded the ship to sabotage it; knowing that the ship was System and military was more than enough explanation for that impulse. Ida gladly would take advantage of the ship’s paranoia to interrogate Ivanov and Gale on board, uninterrupted by the tedium of arranging a prisoner’s transport.
Of course, no doubt the crew cared a good deal about the ship and its secrecy and would resent her arrival, so Ida would have to step carefully.
There was already another ship in the docking bay, one that Ida recognized immediately from surveillance footage and police images: the Annwn. Gale and Ivanov really were here. Their ship stood dark and hollow in the Ananke’s bay.
Gale first, Ida decided. Everything she’d heard about him indicated that he was the weaker. He’d be less able to lie to her effectively, more likely to bend and break. It was lucky Gale and Ivanov had been captured together; they could be used against each other very effectively.
The hold had repressurized; Ida opened the doors of her ship. On the far end of the vast hold, a pair of glass doors swung open and a man stepped out, tall and imposing most likely, but he seemed small and insignificant so far away and beneath the Ananke’s high arching ceiling.
Ida walked toward him, calm, confident, sure. She did not show the way her heart pounded with excitement. Gale and Ivanov, here, now, and hers.
The man was indeed tall and broad, with graying hair and a craggy face. He had piercing gray eyes and wore a System uniform impeccably, and Ida knew at a glance that he was the captain of the ship, Domitian.
Ida smiled at him and held out her hand. She’d remembered to put on her darkest red lipstick, and she knew its effect.
“Captain Domitian,” she said pleasantly, still striding forward, and he took her hand in a firm grip and shook it, the corners of his thin lips turned down. “I’m Ida Stays. I’m pleased to have come on board.”
Domitian hesitated, and Ida knew at once, with a sudden chill that left her roiling excitement frozen in her gut, that something was wrong.
“Miss Stays,” he said, diffident and polite, in a low rumble of a voice, “I’m afraid there has been a problem.”
—
The last thing Althea wanted to do was talk some arrogant Systems agent straight from Earth through the relatively simple task of landing in the Ananke’s hold.
“One sec,” she said when Ida Stays hailed her in a high sweet voice that Althea didn’t like at all, and she immediately got on the intercom to Gagnon.
“I need you to come up here and help someone board,” she said, censoring herself at the last second when she remembered that Gagnon was standing in front of Ivanov’s cell, guarding it. “I’ll take your place. I need to focus.”
A pause. “Okay,” said Gagnon, agreeably enough. “But I can’t leave Ivanov, so you need to come down here first.”
Althea glanced at the few working camera images. She could see Domitian just striding into the frame in one of them, still heading up the Ananke’s hall at a walk.
“Fine,” she said, and left her station, locking the door behind herself out of habit and jogging down the hall toward the cell. She passed Domitian on the way. He said, “Althea?” as if he thought he might have to spring into action right away, but she only said, “Gagnon will explain!” as she dashed by. The control room couldn’t be left unattended for very long, especially not with Miss Stays waiting.
She reached Gagnon in a matter of minutes, breathing hard when she did.
“Domitian will explain?” he asked with a glance at Ivanov’s cell, and Althea nodded and felt only a very little bit guilty about leaving the two men to figure it out. Gagnon was soon gone, and Althea got comfortable in front of the computer terminal by Ivanov’s cell and prepared to devote herself to the study of her ship, uninterrupted, for a few hours.
She had not counted on Ivanov.
“The captain said you’re still having trouble with the ship,” he said after the sound of Gagnon’s steps against the metal-mesh floor had rung away into silence.
From behind the brushed steel of his locked cell door, his voice came disembodied, like the voice of a ghost or a god.
The unfulfillment of an unanswered question nagged at Althea’s nerves like an unclosed parenthesis, and so after the opened silence stretched for a long minute, she said tersely, “Yes.”
“Then I should apologize,” Ivanov began, but Althea snapped, “Stop talking, Ivanov.”
On the screen before her, the Ananke opened at her touch like an infant outstretching its arms, and Althea resumed her search through the ship’s systems.
“Call me Ivan,” said Ivanov, and Althea did not trouble herself to respond.
For a few blissful breaths she was left alone, just long enough that she let herself relax and start to fall into the machine, the world around her falling away in importance until there was nothing left—nothing important—but her and her ship.
Ivanov said, shattering her concentration like a dropped glass, “I wanted to apologize on behalf of my friend.”
Althea gripped the edges of the keyboard so hard that the tips of her fingers went white. “Do you?” she said.
“Of course,” said Ivanov. He seemed not to notice her warning tone. “Mattie wouldn’t have wanted to hurt your computer. We came on board because we were admiring it, and we wanted to get a better look at it. Mattie has a great respect for beautiful things—he likes to take them, make them his, not destroy them. He wouldn’t have hurt your machine at all, or he wouldn’t have intended to.”
It was a strange apology as apologies went, but Ivanov sounded genuine, entirely sincere. For a moment Althea hovered on the edge of half belief, her grip on the keyboard gone loose.
Then reality came back to her, and she remembered all she had read about the man locked away out of her sight, and she bent back over the screen once more.
“Shut up, Ivanov,” she said, and got back to work.
—
Fury was a dangerous emotion because it was self-indulgent. Fury didn’t want to ensure that it got what it wanted; fury only wanted to rage, and rip, and tear, and make another hurt in proportion to fury’s strength.
Ida Stays took measured steps back and forth across the floor of the docking bay in front of Domitian and tried to control her fury.
>
Gale was gone. Suddenly, the two weeks she had been allotted seemed a short time. She had had Gale, had had both men, and then, through the incompetence of others—
Ida breathed in and out, her respirations as slow and measured as her steps. Domitian was standing in precisely the same place he had stood when he had told her of Gale’s escape, his back straight, his eyes directed straight ahead, waiting for her reaction. She glanced at him and continued to pace and to breathe while she considered what she would say.
Some wrath was expected. She was allowed to cut into him. She only had to consider first precisely what she would say so that the System, watching on the ship’s cameras—if the camera in the docking bay even worked!—would not see anything untoward about her, so that they wouldn’t suspect anything from her except a healthy frustration and a healthy expression of her frustration. She was risking her career enough simply by interrogating Gale and Ivanov; she did not need to risk it any more with unsuitable displays of rage.
She glanced again at Domitian, who stood without a muscle moving, waiting for her judgment. Another reason to control herself: she wanted him on her side.
She halted her pacing and decided what to say.
“Do you understand why it is so important that I speak to these two men?” she asked.
Domitian’s focus slid down from the far wall to settle on her face. “I know a little, ma’am,” he said.
A good answer. It did not admit ignorance, but it did not attempt to prevent her from continuing her explanation, as she clearly intended to.
“And what do you know of the Mallt-y-Nos?” she asked.
“She’s a terrorist, ma’am.”
There was softness in him, Ida judged, despite his scarred face and bloodied past. She aimed for that softness. “The Mallt-y-Nos is more than a terrorist,” she said. “She’s a murderer. She uses her rhetoric as a way to cover up all the innocent lives she’s destroyed. Nine months ago the Mallt-y-Nos severed surveillance on Ganymede—it took the System a month to bring it all back online. During that time there was looting and rioting, the destruction of several System buildings—chaos. And because we had no surveillance, we will never catch all the people responsible and we can never be sure that some of the people we disposed of for the safety of the System weren’t innocent. And you know about Mars: fifteen System representatives dead with a single bomb, as well as everyone else in that building. Some worked for the System. Some were tourists. Men, women, children.”
Domitian’s lips were set in a hard line. She was having an effect.
“The Mallt-y-Nos,” continued Ida, and resumed her steady stalking back and forth, “destroyed a System military craft out by Neptune headed to quell rioting on Triton, which she also doubtless started. The Mallt-y-Nos is a bomber first and foremost: the fastest, brightest kind of murder with the highest amount of victims. Half a dozen minor bombings are attributable to her before the System came to know her from the Martian attack, and doubtless there are many more we don’t know of—government buildings, military compounds, banks, one of which put Ceres’s economy into a depression for months after its destruction—she’s targeted them all. She is a poison in the System, a disease, a virus, and if we don’t find her soon, she may infect every part of it. And now we know that she is planning another attack. That attack could even be on a ship like this one. Do you understand?” Ida asked, speaking each word like a strike against Domitian’s stillness. “Do you understand why she must be found?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Domitian.
She stopped again to take another breath, to consider him before moving on to the next stage of her performance.
“Matthew Gale and Leontios Ivanov are currently our best leads on the Mallt-y-Nos,” Ida said. Domitian’s expression hardly changed, but Ida saw the confusion nonetheless; doubtless he had read the two men’s files and had seen that the System did not share her opinion.
Ida moved, turning to square her shoulders parallel to his, and said plainly, “What I am about to tell you is classified information. Matthew Gale and Leontios Ivanov know the Mallt-y-Nos. They know her name. They know her face. They can tell us who she is.”
Domitian’s chin had lifted slowly in understanding.
“And you,” said Ida, calm and controlled, her fury bubbling over into cruelty, “let one of them get away.”
Domitian took it.
He stood there and took it, and Ida let the silence stretch, aching and agonized. She was outwardly cold and still and pleased inside that he had bent so easily at her sharpened words.
Domitian said, “However I may assist you, Miss Stays, I am happy to do so.”
He had broken. He was humble. Ida relented, and Ida smiled.
“You are in a position to help me a good deal,” she said. “For the time being I will be conducting the interrogation on board the Ananke. If it is feasible, for the safety of your ship and the expediency of my interrogation, I will leave before then, but most likely I will remain on board until the Ananke reaches Pluto. I have with me all the equipment I need. I only need a room.”
“We have rooms,” Domitian said, and led her out of the docking bay and into the Ananke’s hall.
They left the vast, echoing docking bay and stepped into a narrow, wire- and pipe-choked hall where there was not quite enough space for her and Domitian to walk abreast and fluorescent lights flickered overhead. Computer terminals every ten yards or so glowed among the tangled pipes, with dark holographic terminals sunk into alcoves in the walls beside them, and the whole effect was almost claustrophobic, as though Ida were walking through the veins of some great creature meant for blood and not the steady click of her low black heels.
“The rooms I’m going to show you won’t be used until we’ve passed Pluto,” Domitian explained, and his low voice seemed louder and fuller outside the echoing emptiness of the hold, “once the experiments begin.”
“Are all the rooms identical?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Then I’d like the one that’s the largest,” said Ida. “The most imposing.”
“I was just about to take you there, Miss Stays,” Domitian said. “May I ask how the interrogation will proceed?”
“I assure you that my interrogation will in no way impede the running of your ship,” Ida said immediately.
“I was only curious, Miss Stays.”
Again Ida was pleasantly surprised by him. She said, “Legally, I am not permitted to use truth drugs until after I catch him in a lie that directly impedes my investigation. So I will begin by simply conversing with him.” She had little doubt she would be able to catch Ivanov in such a lie, and without much effort. Ivanov would be chained to a chair for hours at a time, filmed, and attached to a polygraph; the psychological effects of that alone would trip him up eventually. But even more than that, Ida had studied him, had watched selections of the years’ worth of footage of every moment of his childhood up to the age of twenty, had studied the sparser footage of the last ten years, when he had been working actively as a con man. She understood how Ivanov thought, how he worked. She knew how he lied.
“I will, and I think soon, be authorized to use the Aletheia,” she said, and thought of the truth serum sitting in little glass vials in a little box in her little ship. “But I hope to break him without needing to resort to drugs that way.”
It was more satisfying in the end to break someone with nothing but words.
They had come to a door. It was no different from any of the other doors they had passed, but Domitian had stopped beside it, waiting for her to finish speaking, and so it had to be the one. “Is this the door?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Domitian said, and reached for the handle. Ida reached out and laid one hand on his, noting abstractly that her hand was small and her fingers slender against the weathered skin of his strong hand. She saw that he noticed it, too.
“Before we go in,” Ida said with a gentle smile, “I want to assure you that I will not attem
pt to interfere with your authority on this ship. I am simply here for an interrogation.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” Domitian said. He had gray eyes. She smiled more widely, and he opened the door.
The room inside was vast and empty and white. Ida took one wondering step into its wide brightness, the entire thing nearly half the size of the Ananke’s hold and so much brighter; each of the identical white panels that made up walls and ceiling and floor was lit from behind, and the whole room was as bright and blindingly white as if that could hide the fact that it was entirely empty. She was small in that room, small and exposed, and a camera blinked at her from the corner, the eye of the ship—of the System—watching.
She turned to Domitian and did not have to feign pleasure now.
“It’s perfect,” she said.
—
There was some sort of awful arrhythmic drumming sound coming from behind Althea, slightly muffled, and its inconstancy jarred her thoughts out of code and drew her attention from the computer to the closed cell behind her.
Briefly abandoning her interrupted work, Althea accessed the video stream from the camera inside the cell, which, fortunately, continued to work, and peered at it. In the image before her, Ivanov had moved to sit on the narrow cot with its flat bare mattress. His shoulder was pressed against the wall out of necessity, the cot was so narrow, and Althea found the source of that uneven, frustrating pattering in the drumming of his fingers against the wall.
Althea stared at the image for a moment longer, expecting to see some sort of explanation of the action, but Ivanov continued to drum against the wall without apparent aim.
Finally unable to endure it, Althea snapped, “Ivanov, stop that!”
The drumming cut off abruptly, but Althea still saw his hand twitching against his thigh as though he would have liked to continue. Perhaps it was a nervous tic. Ivanov said, “I thought I told you to call me Ivan,” and his voice was light, amused, almost teasing, and that did not match with his expression at all.
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