Althea scowled and closed the video window. She tried to remember where she’d left off in her work before that damned tapping had drawn her out of it, but then, cautious and quiet, the tapping started again.
“Ivanov!”
“Sorry,” he said. “It’s boring in here.”
Althea could not have cared less. She said nothing in the hope that he would do the same.
That particular tactic failed, as it had failed every time during their brief interactions thus far. “Maybe I could help you try to figure out what’s wrong with the ship,” Ivanov suggested.
It was tempting, but Domitian had ordered her not to, and so Althea did not give it a second thought. “No.”
“Mattie must have installed the virus at a specific computer terminal,” Ivanov mused, as if he hadn’t heard her. “If you look at that terminal, you should probably see traces of whatever he did.”
“I already looked at that terminal; I’m not an idiot,” Althea snapped. “Shut up. I’m trying to work.”
“I’m trying to help,” Ivanov countered.
“Well, I can’t leave my place to guard you anyway,” said Althea, firmly. “So shut up.”
Ivanov laughed.
“What do you think I’m going to do if you leave me alone?” he asked. “The door is locked. I have no picks and couldn’t pick it from the inside anyway. There’s a camera on me at all times; someone would see any attempted escape before it got very far. Whether or not you’re physically outside my door doesn’t matter.”
“I have a gun,” said Althea, a statement that also should have ended the discussion. She did not mention how not all the cameras were working and it was only sheer luck that Ivanov’s cell had one that was still successfully recording.
“Though I suppose you’re right,” Ivanov said. “There’s no point in going back to the terminal Mattie used if you’ve already looked at it. You were the one who realized immediately that we’d hacked into your computer when we first boarded; you know this ship so well, you wouldn’t have missed anything this time around.”
Althea had not in fact noticed immediately that her computer had been hacked into earlier that day. She stopped typing and sat, tense with the idea that there was something she could have missed the way she’d missed things this morning.
“Hey,” said Ivanov. “Doctor Bastet.”
She barely registered the correct name and title; doubtless he and Gale had looked up her and the rest of the Ananke’s crew before boarding the ship, after they’d hacked into the Ananke’s computer. “What?” she snapped. She couldn’t leave her position, and she knew that she hadn’t missed anything down at the terminal in the base of the ship anyway, but the idea, once introduced, nagged.
“You really care for this ship, don’t you?” said Ivanov, sounding thoughtful and a little gentle as if he were looking upon a mother with her new child. “Look, like I told you before, Mattie wouldn’t have done anything that dangerous. All he wanted to do was escape. He wouldn’t need to do anything more than, say, mess with the cameras so that you couldn’t track him.” He laughed a little, more to himself than to Althea, who was still furiously going over in her head her actions at the base of the ship, trying to figure out if at any point she could have failed to check something. “We’ve worked together for ten years, and I can only remember one or two—maybe three—times when he deliberately messed up the navigation of a ship just because he didn’t like the crew.”
“Ivanov, shut up!”
“You’re not very friendly, are you?” Ivanov asked.
“I’m trying to work, and you’re bothering me,” Althea snapped, and started to check the ship’s navigation for any errors.
Perhaps she should go down and check the last terminal. It was possible, after all, that she’d missed something. She’d thought she’d checked all the places, but there was always the possibility that somehow she had missed something. But she couldn’t go now; Domitian had ordered her not to leave her place, and the System’s punishments for disobedience, well…
Ivanov sighed. He was just about to speak again—Althea heard him take in a breath—but she heard distinctly the sound of steps coming down the hall, and she hissed, “Shut up,” at him again. He must have heard the change in her tone, because this time he did fall silent.
When Domitian came into sight, Althea was bent over the computer terminal, to all appearances deeply engrossed in the machine, but she was filled with an uneasy sort of guilt. She hadn’t been forbidden to talk to Ivanov, and indeed she hadn’t been talking to Ivanov; he had been talking to her. But somehow she did not want Domitian to know.
When he was near, she looked up just long enough to catch his eye, to assure him that she was aware of his presence and was actually doing her job of guarding Ivanov, but she turned her eyes back to the machine as soon as she reasonably could, unwilling to endure that vague uneasy guilt while looking directly at Domitian.
From behind her, she heard the metallic click of the key in the lock and then the sound of the door sliding open. “On your feet,” said Domitian, low and commanding and dangerous, and Althea steadfastly did not turn around.
A pause and the sound of rustling, then the soft slap of bare feet on the metal floor. Althea sat with her back stiff, facing the machine, and listened to the rattle of metal as Domitian cuffed their prisoner.
“Go on,” Domitian said, and she heard Ivanov stumble; only then did she turn her head to peek back between the wiry strands of her curly brown hair.
Ivanov was only a foot or so away from her. His hands were cuffed behind him, stretching his shoulders back and making the fabric of his black turtleneck pull in little lines from his neck to the roundness of his shoulders. He was different when he was physically there and not just a voice behind a door, more real and less real at the same time. He glanced at her, and for a moment she was pinned by blue.
She looked away and let the curtain of her hair fall between her face and his.
Domitian looked big and dangerous with a gun in his hand, and with his slender wrists bound, Ivanov looked vulnerable, helpless. He was no such thing, she knew. And even if he had been, he was still a criminal, an enemy to the System.
Once Domitian and Ivanov were gone, she left her place and ran down to the base of the ship to check the terminal there, just in case.
—
The room was vast and empty and white, and Ida sat on a cold steel chair behind a cold steel table in precisely its center, facing the door over the empty chair across from her. On the table beside her a System regulation polygraph and interrogation camera had been placed, not yet recording and, like Ida, waiting.
The steel door across the room swung open, and framed in its tiny square beneath the wide featureless stretch of white wall above, Ida Stays saw him, her subject, Leontios Ivanov, dressed all in black with his blond hair cropped short. His gaze darted around the room before settling on her, the only creature inside. His wrists were chained behind his back.
Ida let the smile she’d been holding locked away unfurl on her lips, and Ivanov watched her, the full subject of his gaze.
When Domitian gave Ivanov a shove to move him forward, he started to walk straight toward her, and there was consciousness of her attention in every step he took. When he reached the other side of the table, the empty chair with its back to the door, Domitian grabbed him by the back of his neck and pushed him harshly down, pushing him to bend forward over the table until his chin was just above the surface of the table so that Domitian could unchain his wrists. A line was digging into Ivanov’s forehead between his brows as Domitian handled him roughly, but as Ida continued to watch, he looked up at her, his face smoothing over, and smirked at her.
The problem with Leontios Ivanov, she thought as Domitian pulled him back upright against the hard back of the chair and started to chain his wrists to the armrests, was that Ivanov was handsome, and knew it, and intelligent, and knew it. He could not help overplaying both hands. Id
a was smarter than he, and Ida had him precisely where she wanted him to be.
Domitian tightened the last chain and took a step back, waiting behind Ivanov’s chair, looking to Ida and wordlessly waiting for instructions, just as he was supposed to. The camera and the polygraph sat to the side on the table between Ivan and Ida, out of the immediate way, but their very presence was a threat.
Ida let the silence of the interrogation room linger a moment longer.
“It’s good to meet you at last, Ivan,” she said, and watched his face for a reaction. “Ivan” was what Gale called him, and Constance Harper; presumably Abigail Hunter did, too. “Ivan” was what he called himself to his friends, to his equals.
Ivan hardly reacted. He tilted his chin very slightly to the side and said, after a breath too long to represent anything but careful consideration, “May I call you Ida, or should I stick to Miss Stays?”
He had recognized her. Ida swallowed her thrill.
“Ida, of course,” she said, and leaned forward slightly, pleasant and charming, and he smiled back in the same way, taking his cues from her. He wore his black turtleneck like armor. “I see you recognized me.”
“Of course.” Ivan’s accent was Terran in full force, as crisp and sharp as only one raised on Earth could achieve, and for an irrational moment Ida wondered if he could hear the hidden traces of Venus in her own imperfect Terran affectation.
“I wanted to know the name of the beautiful woman who has been asking after me for months,” Ivan continued. “So I looked you up.”
Her inquiries had not been clumsy, but they had not been terribly discreet, either. Still, it indicated a greater degree of awareness on Ivan’s part than Ida’s superiors, for certain, would have expected. The glow of gratification had started to fill her chest.
“And is that all you found out?” she asked, as if charmed. “My name and my face?”
Ivan leaned forward, too, as far as the chains would allow. Their faces were still separated by the wide expanse of the table, but the movement imagined intimacy, and he said confidingly, with a curl of amusement in his voice, “I heard that you’re the woman who’s always right. All of your interrogations have resulted in convictions, and all of your suspects have—so far—been found guilty. There are people who think that one day you’ll be head of System Intelligence, or the System itself, if you can keep up your reputation.”
“And does my reputation frighten you?” If his words had pleased her, it was only because they were all true, not because someone had spoken them about her.
Ivan smiled. This smile was different from the others—dangerous, bitter, almost wolfish—and Ida memorized it, cataloged it, filed it for later consideration.
“Not yet,” he said.
Ida would see him afraid before this interrogation was done.
“Have you ever been interrogated before, Ivan?” she asked, and leaned back from the table, leaving him bent forward toward her almost as if partway through a bow. He had been interrogated before, of course, and on the record, but information was not the purpose of the question.
“Not like this,” Ivan said, leaning back into his chair as well. He looked quite at ease, but his eyes were fixed on her in a way that she thought might indicate wariness.
“Then here’s how it’s going to go,” said Ida, as if she wanted this to be as easy as possible for him. “I’m going to ask you questions, and you’re going to answer them all honestly, with as much detail as I am pleased to hear. You will not lie to me or refuse to answer, because if you do, I am authorized to resort to less pleasant methods to obtain the truth. Do you understand me?”
“I understand you,” Ivan said. “But I don’t know what you’re hoping to get from me. I already told your mastiff”—he jerked his chin to the side and beside him in the general direction of Domitian, who was still standing in stony silence—“what he wanted to know about why I was on board. What else do you want from me?”
The perfect opening, handed, wrapped, into her hands.
“Remember, Ivan,” she said, “I am the woman who is always right, and I know all about you.”
He was wary. She imagined she could smell it.
“I know that you know the name of the Mallt-y-Nos,” said Ida Stays, “and I know that you’re going to tell it to me.”
—
There was nothing more to be gained from the computer terminal at the base of the ship, of course. When Althea came back up and sat down in her appointed position across from Ivanov’s empty cell, she glared at it as if it, empty, were still in some way a part of the person it usually held. He had gotten into her head somehow, yes, but he wouldn’t again.
With no small amount of relief for the guaranteed peace now allotted to her, Althea focused again on her baby, falling deep into that blissful zone of total absorption in her work. Because of this, she probably did not notice the sounds as soon as she should have. When they finally filtered into her consciousness, Althea pulled herself slowly out of her trance, as if waking from a dream.
The hall was empty and quiet. The sound that had triggered her attention was not to be heard.
Still she sat and listened.
Althea knew all the sounds of her ship. Althea knew what the ship sounded like when she was well and what she sounded like when she was ill, and she could diagnose her from the sound, the feel of her parts.
This sound was not a sound she had heard before.
It started as a scratching, faint, weak, but foreign to her ship, a scratching like nails scrabbling for purchase. It was too distant to define exactly, but Althea thought it had to be the sound of metal scratching lightly against metal.
She rose to her feet and walked over to the part of the wall where the scratching sounds originated and laid her hand against the wall.
Something creaked inside the ship where Althea knew that nothing should creak. She leaned closer, pressing her head against the pipes and wires that covered the surface of the wall, her hair snagging on the rivets—
And then the sound was moving. Althea chased it, moving close to the wall, her palms brushing over the odd curves of the Ananke as she followed the sound up the hallway, her mind racing.
Ivanov had said, had mentioned, that Gale—before the Ananke Gale had targeted the permanent functions of other ships, destroying their navigation systems. What if Gale had done something like that to the Ananke, too? Something permanent? Something crippling?
She almost lost the unnatural sound halfway up the hallway, when it receded into the distance, and so she stopped where she was and stood and listened, backing away slowly to stand in the center of the hall. Never did the Ananke seem so vast as it did now, when the hallway stretched in an eternal spiral before and behind, and Althea was all alone in it. Gagnon and Domitian and Ida Stays and Ivanov were all somewhere else, behind doors locked and silent, and they might as well have not been there at all, because in that moment there was nothing but Althea and her ship.
Althea heard the distant creak and groan of the magnets at the ship’s core, the sounds of metal and carbon shifting to accommodate the strain of such a mass, soft background noises, reassuring and familiar, like the sounds of some great creature breathing. She heard the high-pitched hum and whine of electronics, of a bulb that needed to be changed overhead. The rattle of liquid through a pipe: water, no, coolant.
And then there it was again, that foreign sound, a rattle and a scrape like a cough in the ordinary sounds of the ship.
It was above her head.
Althea looked slowly up at the ceiling, where the sound was coming from, and wavered on her feet, moving with the sound, forward, back.
It could be an error induced in the ventilation or the fuel systems, if not the navigation. But no sound like this, so physical, could be anything harmless or good.
The sound faded, and so she stretched up as far as she could, on her toes, listening, listening—
Abrupt, overwhelming, BANG, the ceiling shook, and BANG, the
walls rattled, and Althea flinched and turned to see where the bang had come from, when BANG BANG BANG the walls all shook and rattled, percussive, overwhelming sound that was a physical thing beating Althea’s torso, her arms raised in unconscious defense around her head.
Hollow, deep, metallic, the blows echoed up and down the bending hall in percussion without a pattern Althea could recognize. No one came out, alarmed by the sound, no other member of the crew came to see, Althea alone listened as her ship hacked and coughed and moaned, heartbeat out of sync, pounding wildly, and her ears were filled with the echoing of her ship’s desperation.
There was a pattern to this. There had to be; there always was. Althea lowered her arms from around her head and listened.
“It’s okay,” she whispered, spreading out her hands toward the walls, the ceiling, her fingers spread over the surfaces separated only by the slightest space of air. “It’s okay,” even though the ship could not hear her and no one could have heard her over the rattling in the walls.
The banging was not coming from everywhere, she heard, and hardly noticed the tremble in her fingertips as they glided over the surface of the walls. She moved up the hall a few feet and stopped—the banging was coming from behind her. She moved back and walked the other way until the banging grew distant again. The noise was not throughout the Ananke, she realized. It was localized. The error, despite the apparent omnipresence of the sound and the terror it had produced in her, was not throughout the ship. It was coming from only one particular place.
Althea walked back, toward the center of the hall, toward the center of the sound, and stood and listened to the cacophony of the ship’s malfunction. The banging was coming from just beside where she had been looking before, above her head, reverberating through the walls like a drum, obscuring its source, making it seem greater and more confusing than it was. Althea took a shaken breath and called up the plans to her ship in her head.
The ventilation system. It was the ventilation system that was situated there, in the walls and the ceiling over her head; it was the ventilation system that was making such a sound.
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