PARTICLE NUMBER: 6, the computer finally concluded while Althea was still struggling with her fear and confusion.
In that moment of stillness, Althea jumped and tried to stop whatever program had inadvertently started to run. At the touch of her fingers on the keys, the computer woke again.
INTERACTION, said the computer. PRESSURE INCREASING.
And then, finally, at Althea’s insistent attacks, the window closed, shut down, and the computer hummed and began to scan the image.
Althea surrendered the keys back to Domitian, but stayed put in case the computer stopped scanning in the middle. She wasn’t sure what she had done to fix it, just as she wasn’t sure what she had done to provoke such a response.
At the very least, she thought with guilty relief, it hadn’t been the life support going awry. She was glad she had kept her head and not alarmed Domitian.
The image blinked into existence on-screen. It was of a young girl and a younger boy standing side by side. The boy had floppy brown hair and a wide, gap-toothed grin. He looked like he was about eight, and with a jolt, Althea recognized him—a very young Matthew Gale. The girl, who was nearer to ten, had her arm around the boy’s shoulders. Her brown hair was curled and coiffed for the photograph, but unlike the boy, and in contrast to her affectionate gesture, she was not smiling. She stared straight at the camera with solemn brown eyes, and Althea found it hard to look away.
“If I run facial recognition, will it work?” Domitian asked, and so Althea leaned back over and took the keyboard from him.
To her relief, the program opened without a hitch and scanned the two young faces in the photograph, bright green lines appearing superimposed, decomposing the faces into their component planes before vanishing, leaving the image untouched, as before.
“It’s checking the archives,” Althea reported after checking to see that the program was in fact working correctly and doing just that. The data it got from the picture would be sent to the main System computers on Earth and compared with the database there of facial decompositions of all the System’s citizens. It would take several minutes.
“Good,” said Domitian, and bent down to pick up some drives scattered on the floor at his feet. They were not from the Ananke, and so he must have taken them from the Annwn. “Can I run these?”
The only honest answer to that question was a shrug. “Absolutely.”
When Domitian slotted the drive into the machine, the computer whirred and presented the option to play video. Althea let out an internal sigh of relief.
Domitian let the video play, and a vaguely familiar face appeared on-screen.
It was a woman whose hair had gone white and whose pale skin had gone papery with age. She was on a stage, a screen behind her that was blank for the moment. She crossed the stage to stand behind a lectern and let her fingers rest on the outside of it, drumming out a strange arrhythmic pattern against the wood. Althea recognized who she was in two different ways—as Doctor Milla Ivanov, scientist and lecturer, and as the mother of the man imprisoned on board their ship.
Mother and son had precisely the same clear, brilliantly blue eyes. Althea’s stomach clenched at the comparison, and she did not want to put into words why.
“Today,” said Doctor Ivanov in a voice just too soft to be perfectly clear to everyone in the lecture hall, as Althea knew from experience in many lecture halls like it, “we will be discussing path-planning algorithms: traveling from one known point to another known point by an unknown path.”
It was a publicly released lecture video, but Althea felt like a voyeur. Domitian had found it on the Annwn.
“That’s his mother,” she said.
“Ivanov’s,” Domitian confirmed. He was watching the screen intently.
Althea hesitated. “What are you looking for?”
“Any sign that they were communicating,” Domitian said, and Althea glanced back at the screen to watch Milla Ivanov bring up a display of Dijkstra’s algorithm behind her.
“This was a public broadcast,” said Althea.
“There still could be some communication,” said Domitian. “If they are communicating, it makes Doctor Ivanov an accomplice. With her history, the System will need to know that immediately. It’s suggestive that it’s on board Ivanov’s ship in the first place.”
Doctor Ivanov is his mother, Althea thought, but did not say it again.
“It is possible to bias your searching methods,” Doctor Ivanov said, her clear blue eyes scanning the crowd before her impersonally, her fingers drumming in agitation. “However, in general, a bias may impede your attempts to proceed.”
The computer chimed, indicating that the facial recognition program was completed. Domitian paused the video and opened the results.
The screen froze. It flashed black for an instant, then went back to normal before Althea could become alarmed.
NO MATCHES FOUND, said the computer.
“That’s impossible,” Althea said.
“I’ll run it again,” said Domitian.
This time, the response from the computer was almost immediate.
NO MATCHES FOUND, it insisted.
“That’s impossible,” Althea said again. “How old is this photograph?” It was just feasible that the photograph was from before the installed surveillance and had been well maintained, and the boy in the photo was not Matthew Gale, and fashions were coincidentally similar enough to be mistaken for a more recent year. That would be hundreds of years ago on the inner planets, but from the look of the sky, Althea thought this picture must have been taken on an outer moon, and if that was the case, it could be a few hundred years sooner than the latest possible date for the inner planets—
“The computer says between twenty and thirty years,” Domitian said. Deeper lines were appearing on his forehead, a sign of his annoyance. “So that is impossible.”
“The Ananke must be presenting a false negative somehow,” Althea muttered, moving to take control of the computer back from Domitian, “misinterpreting the results being sent from Earth—I don’t know how, but I bet…”
“No, don’t.” Domitian dropped his hand on her shoulder. “It’s not worth your time. I’ll communicate with Earth directly and have them run the photograph themselves instead of doing it through the computer.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure,” said Domitian. “You focusing on this symptom won’t fix the problem. Go work on the computer.”
Althea lingered a moment longer, always unwilling to leave a problem unsolved.
“Go,” Domitian said. “I need to watch these recordings.” He smiled faintly at her as if he knew why she was hesitant, and Althea finally left.
Just as she opened the doors to the Ananke’s long spiraling hallway, the holographic terminal in the hallway nearest to the docking bay, without being touched, switched on and started to glow.
Althea let the doors close behind her and went to it to see what was wrong, but by the time she reached it, it had gone dark and quiet.
—
“The trip to Eris is a month long,” said Ivan. “Do you want to hear the details of that, too?”
“Only if anything happened during it,” said Ida.
“No,” Ivan said, and Ida spared a glance at the polygraph. Truth, it said, but of course it had been saying that this entire time.
“What do you do during those trips?” she asked, leaning forward onto the cool brushed steel of the table. “To amuse yourselves. You and Mattie must get very bored.”
“We talk,” Ivan said. “We play games. We creatively reprogram our ship’s computer. Whatever we think will pass the time. Sometimes I tell Mattie stories.”
It was a strange detail, a caring one. Ida wondered if Ivan realized how much of himself he had revealed with that tiny little detail. He had to know, she thought. So why had he told her?
Scheherazade, she remembered. The nickname in parting. A revealing detail, certainly, but told to her in defense,
out of necessity.
Leontios Ivanov did nothing by accident.
“You are a good storyteller,” said Ida. Ivan would understand her meaning perfectly, she knew; the camera would miss it entirely. “What kinds of stories do you tell?”
Ivan leaned back in his chair. She noted how he still did not flinch when he touched the doubtlessly cold back of the chair with his bare skin. His guard was far up.
“All kinds. Mattie didn’t really go to school,” he said. “You probably have records of that. And when he did, he liked math and computers but not literature or history.”
Ida raised her brows. “So you tell him stories from history,” she said. “The plots of novels and poems.”
“Yes,” said Ivan.
“And once you reached Eris?” she asked.
“Once we reached Eris we did a short reconnaissance to make sure Abby’s information was still correct. It was. Usually we’d spend longer planning a heist—a week or more—but Abby had gotten us all the information we needed, and we went in the next day.”
“And she got that information from her employer?” Ida asked.
“She must have,” Ivan said. “I didn’t ask.” He gave her a look like he was daring her to challenge that.
Ida didn’t. He had not yet dug a large enough hole for himself for her to begin to bury him.
“Could she have gotten it herself?” she asked.
Ivan snorted. “No. She’s terrible with computers, and that’s the only way she could’ve gotten that information. She might have gotten some of her other contacts to find it out for her, but there’s no way to tell.”
“I see. Continue.”
“I went to talk to the secretary,” said Ivan. “Red hair in pigtails. She was cute. I don’t remember her name; I think it was Irina…maybe Ursula…?”
“Unimportant,” said Ida.
“Alana,” said Ivan, triumphant. “Her name was Alana. I talked to her for a bit. Softened her up.”
In the surveillance tapes, Ida knew, Alana with the pigtails blushed as red as her hair when Ivan leaned over the edge of her desk.
“I told her I was there from the System to examine their surveillance system,” Ivan said. “A surprise inspection. I had falsified credentials to back it up, and better than that, I could speak like this.”
In the white room, he slipped effortlessly into a deeper Terran accent, sharper, harder. In the surveillance, Alana with the pigtails had an accent that was broad and uncultured.
“She called her superior, of course, once she found out why I was there,” Ivan said, and the superior was a short balding man who came out of his office both scowling and looking nervous. “He’d been Terran once, too, but he’d spent so long on Eris, he was going native. What would you do, Ida, if all your representatives went native?”
“We are all members of the System, Ivan,” Ida said. “The Eridians are his people, too.”
Ivan smiled at her, scornful. “Of course. But he’d been true Terran System recently enough to doubt me. I only really convinced them who I was when I told them what I thought of them and their pathetic little moon.”
Ivan was slipping back into the sharp, terse Terran accent he’d used just a few moments before.
“I told them that the outer planets were a scar on the face of the System,” said Ivan, sounding haughty and cruel. “I told them that they had no control over their citizens. No true order. I told them that if the System had been wise, it would have destroyed all of them after Saturn tried to rebel, or put them under military control and kept it that way. They were a bunch of frozen, cold rocks, full of the stupid and the poor, who do nothing but beg for resources from our poor overtaxed Earth.”
Perhaps he was trying to impress her with his acting, with the degree of his duplicity. Ida let him perform.
He smirked at her nonetheless. “After that, they believed I was System through and through.”
Still he was performing.
“They let me into their main surveillance interface,” Ivan said. “Mattie had already snuck into the place as a janitor. No one pays attention to the janitor. We had agreed on a prearranged order of surveillance interference. I let him know I was ready by briefly flickering the lights in the hall and then went room by room, switching the surveillance off and back on again, ostensibly checking it for flaws but really allowing Mattie to get in and out of the restricted areas undetected.”
This part of the surveillance, of course, was full of holes, as Ivan did just as he said. Ida had watched it, fascinated, knowing that each time the camera turned off and then back on again, Matthew Gale had just passed unseen through that room. The timing was impeccable.
“I finished up, made my excuses, told them they would have their grading in a few days, and left to join Mattie in our rented vehicle. I wasn’t concerned about being caught; it’s nine hours at the speed of light between Earth and Eris, and by the time they found out I’d been a fraud, Mattie and I would be long gone from Eris.”
Ida remembered the footage. An outdoor camera had just caught Ivan walking into a van parked a street away from the armory. It recorded him sliding into the passenger side and turning to talk to the man in the driver’s seat, Mattie Gale with his hair mussed from the janitorial hat he’d taken off.
“And when did you realize that you’d stolen bombs?” Ida asked.
“In the van as we were driving away,” Ivan said promptly. “We were going to rendezvous with Abby in an hour, so we just intended to drive to the rendezvous point immediately; it was out at the very edge of the terraforming shell. I went into the back of the van and got a crowbar—Mattie had one in the van, I don’t know why; we couldn’t possibly have used it, but I don’t question the things he feels the need to carry around—and tore open the box. And inside,” Ivan continued, “I found, stacked all neatly together, a full box of Class 50 bombs.”
“And?”
“Mattie hadn’t wanted me to open it,” Ivan said. “He thought we shouldn’t know. But I didn’t trust Abby, so I opened it, and once he saw what was inside, he stopped defending her, too. We got to the rendezvous point before her, driving very carefully.”
Planetary bodies like Eris, the ones that were too small or too inhospitable to be properly terraformed, had been encased or, as in Eris’s case, partly encased in clear plastic enclosures like greenhouses. It was the only thing that could make them habitable, and so the enclosures were multilayered and strongly supported, with dozens of fail-safes and air locks all around them, and were divided into grids so that if one section failed, it could be separated from the rest. The only way into the enclosures was through man-made openings in them. In theory, all the openings should be System-manned; in practice, on far-off wild planetoids like Eris, they were little regulated if at all.
The explosion had taken place far from any of the towns, where the greenhouse enclosure touched the ground and dug deep into Eris’s sooty stone, right where an unregulated air lock allowed access between the habitable area and the vacuum outside.
“The rendezvous was by an air lock,” said Ivan, “for easy escape if we needed it. I went into the air lock, and I placed the bombs there in a pile. And then, when Abby came, I blew them up.”
There was no footage of this; the cameras in that area of the enclosure had not been maintained. But the explosion had been real enough.
There was cleverness to Ivan planting the bombs in the air lock. They would blow the outer edge of the shell, which would trigger an alarm and slam shut the inner air lock, making a point without actually destroying the entire section of the enclosure or killing him and his companions.
“Mattie worked with you?” Ida asked.
“Mattie worked with me,” said Ivan.
“And Abby?” Ida tried to picture it: Ivan standing with that same wary defiance opposite the faceless figure of Abigail Hunter, but this time with Mattie beside him, looking…looking unhappy, she decided. Disappointed. Uncomfortable. But in the end standing with
Ivan.
The corner of Ivan’s lips twitched. “She was furious,” he said. “And Abby really can shout.”
“You told her why you did it.”
“Of course,” Ivan said. “It would’ve been useless otherwise. I told her we’d destroyed her merchandise because she’d endangered us both. I told her she wasn’t allowed to lie to us or put us in danger without our knowing.”
“And she listened?”
“She listened,” Ivan said. “She just didn’t obey.”
Ida smiled faintly. Ivan seemed to be waiting, or perhaps he thought he had come to the end of his story, so she said gently, “You didn’t blow up all the bombs, of course.”
“No,” he said. “I saved one.”
“And you gave it to Abby,” Ida said.
“And I gave it to Abby,” said Ivan.
Ida leaned forward. “Why?”
“Because I wanted to complete the job,” Ivan said, “if only in token.”
Ida cast a quick glance at the polygraph. Still steady. “Another insult.”
“She took it that way,” Ivan agreed.
Ida folded her hands on the table, her elbow nudging the sharp edge of the polygraph display. “Are you aware that the very same kind of bomb that you stole on Eris that day was used to kill the Martian System representatives a year later?”
Ivan tilted his head to the side. “Are you suggesting that it was the same bomb?” he asked, patronizing, amused, incredulous.
Acting.
“You tell me,” Ida said.
Ivan huffed out a laugh and looked at her like she was being absurd.
“Do you realize the incredible improbability of that?” he asked, his brows down but his blue eyes wide. “The ridiculous impossibility of the single bomb that I held in my hand ending up in the hands of the Mallt-y-Nos a year later?”
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