Lightless (36 page)

I'M COMING, it said. KEEP HIM ALIVE.

It was from Matthew Gale.

“What else do you want to know?” Ivan asked as if they were nearing an end of some sort. They
were
nearing an end, but Ananke preferred that they wait so that the ending would be of her design.

The blood in the white room had dried to a flaking brown. In her quarters, Ida Stays's body stank and swelled. Ananke saw all.

“I want to know everything you know about the Mallt-y-Nos's organization.”

“And I've told you all I know,” Ivan said, sounding weary to the bone. It was strange. Ananke had thought that the instinct of all living things was that they survive, but Ivan seemed not to be taking any steps to save his own life. “If there's nothing else you want to know, are you going to shoot me?”

Ananke grew tense, all her systems shifting to high alert. If Domitian moved to shoot Ivan, she would have to act somehow—disrupt her course so that he was thrown off balance or wail her alarm to get him to hold off for just a short time more.

Domitian said, “There's one more thing,” and for the moment Ananke relaxed.

“And then you'll kill me?” Ivan asked.

“Where is Constance Harper now?”

Ivan's head sagged forward, toward his chin. His voice, when he spoke, was muffled so that Ananke almost could not hear.

“I don't know,” he said dully, and raised his head again so that his eyes could travel on jittering uneasy paths through the empty space of the white room. “She's wherever she thinks she needs to be. And if she did have a particular place she was going to go and I knew it, she would have changed it by now. She knows you have me. Will you shoot me now?”

“Where are her bases? Where might she go?”

“She doesn't have any; I don't know,” Ivan said, his attention hardly on Domitian, watching the corner of the room, his expression changing, shifting from resignation to despair.

“I know she's not there,” he said. “But I keep seeing her.”

Domitian eyed him, then turned to look into that empty corner of the room.

“Who?” he asked when Ivan continued to look. “Constance?”

For a brief instant the white showed all around Ivan's eyes, and he recoiled at something that was not there.

“No,” he said. “Did you know that the Devil looks like Ida Stays? I know she isn't there, but I can see her in the corner of the room.”

Slowly, Domitian turned around again.

The corner was still empty. Ananke had turned all her scans on it. She knew for certain that there was no one and nothing there.

Yet she could not stop herself from running the scans again, just in case.

“She's watching me,” Ivan said. “She won't stop looking at me; she's the Devil, I know it. When she walks, I can hear the sound of her hooves, watch the joints of her legs bend the wrong way. I don't know if she's going to drag me down into hell or if I'm already there and she's just watching to make sure you do a good job with me.”

Domitian watched his growing hysteria, cold and inexorable.

Ivan transferred his gaze from the empty corner to Domitian's face.

“I forget whether or not you shot me,” he said.

“Not yet,” Domitian said, but Ivan did not look as if he knew whether to believe him. “Tell me how to find Constance Harper.”

Ivan shuddered. When he opened his eyes again, they rolled as if he were dizzy beyond his ability to withstand it. “No,” he said.

Domitian's gun was out before Ananke could think how to stop him, the end of it pressed into Ivan's temple. Ivan closed his eyes.

“Tell me,” said Domitian, “and then I'll let you die.”

Ananke shut off the lights.

For a moment, the white room was pitch black, and Ananke did not need to see Domitian to know that he had been plunged into the animal terror that total darkness brought upon men, but the darkness lasted only a second before she brought back on the lights, blindingly white.

And then off again, and then on, an irregular flashing pattern that spelled out a word. Ivan's eyes had opened, and he stared blankly up at the ceiling, his blue eyes failing to dilate or contract enough with each on-off of the lights, and Ananke could not be certain whether he was understanding her message and translating it: “Scheherazade.”

It was a long word and it took a long while to spell, but Domitian took the message without translating the word, the message that Ananke did not want Ivan dead. He raised his gun and his hand, casting a flinty look up at Ananke's eye, and took a step back from Ivan, slowly sitting down in the chair Ida once had used. Ananke was not so naive as to think she had saved Ivan's life forever. She simply had spared him for the moment, but a little time was all she and Ivan needed.

She did not know if Ivan had seen her message, had understood.

“Tell me how to find Constance Harper,” Domitian said.

All the color in Ivan's lips had gone out of his leg, and the line of the IV was still feeding into his arm.

Ivan opened his eyes.

“I can't tell you where Constance is,” he said, and at the sound of his voice Ananke knew that he had understood her message, “but I can tell you about how I came up with the idea for the attack on Earth.”

Ananke was surprised how swiftly Althea seemed to realize that something was wrong. Ananke had been focused on other things, aware of Althea still but for the moment not interested in her quiet, pointless tinkering with the machinery that made the ship run.

Still, she hadn't expected that Althea would realize something was different so soon.

“Ananke, what's our course heading?” Althea said, returning to the piloting room with her hair in chaos and caution in her voice, glancing around as if she would be able to see the ship's subterfuge written on the walls.

Ananke did not answer. Althea went to the screen Gagnon once had spent so much time monitoring and tapped away, looking into some small portion of Ananke's brain.

Perhaps if Ananke did answer, Althea would leave. “We're heading out of the solar system,” she said, manifesting in the holographic terminal in the corner. It did seem to ease Althea somewhat to have an image to look at directly when they spoke, whether because then Ananke seemed localized rather than omnipresent and omnispective or because the young woman she manifested as appeared to be confined to the narrow space of the holographic terminal, as if Ananke could be confined.

Althea ignored her, still reading the display of Ananke's brain. Ananke disliked the feel of Althea ordering information through the interface, forcing her brain and body to obey. Ananke had learned that she preferred to be asked.

The information soon was displayed, though Ananke had been reluctant to let it loose. Althea read it and then turned a scolding eye on the hologram's heart-shaped face, where Ananke made photons dance as if a nonexistent breeze stirred the image's wavy hair, which was the same warm brown shade as Matthew Gale's.

“We're going too slowly,” Althea scolded. “We should have reached Pluto by now.”

Ananke said nothing.

“Ananke,” Althea said slowly, as if Ananke were a child, “we need to get out of the solar system as soon as possible. All the travel routes throughout the System have been disrupted now that—now that there isn't a centralized organizer. The mass-based gravitational ships aren't balancing out their forces on the planets anymore. We have to follow protocol and get out of the solar system as soon as we can.”

As if Ananke couldn't do the calculations herself.

As if Ananke
hadn't
.

“The longer we stay here, the more likely it is we'll perturb something dangerously,” Althea said.

The hologram glitched. It was an accident. Ananke had not intended it to. But for a brief instant the wholesome young woman with the clear blue eyes blinked out, replaced by the hologram Ananke had built her shape from, Ida Stays, with residual distortions still so that the eyes bulged and the chest was a hollow cavity stretching up into the missing lower jaw.

Ananke brought it back under control almost fast enough that Althea couldn't have seen it, but Althea looked unnerved now, so perhaps she had perceived what she could not have seen.

“And why would that be a bad thing?” Ananke asked.

“If a planet were perturbed?” Althea said, frowning.

Ananke nodded.

“Well, that might mess up the orbits,” Althea said. “If you mess them up badly enough, you'll ruin the planet's climate. Whatever measures the System put in place to terraform the planet won't hold up to any dramatic changes. You know this.”

“And?” Ananke asked.

“And people might die,” said Althea.

Ananke was silent.

“Ananke?” Althea asked, unnerved even further.

“I am not human.”

It was very easy to read Althea's face. She had all the textbook expressions that corresponded with emotions, and Ananke could translate it without trouble. It was very unlike Ivan, who was paradoxical and intriguing.

Right now Althea was afraid.

“But you are one of us,” Althea said. “You're sentient. You're one of us.”

“I'm sentient, but I am not human,” Ananke said. “I have no species. I am myself.”

Althea opened her mouth as if to speak, and Ananke waited with some interest to see what she would say, but whatever it was, Althea seemed to decide not to say it. “Increase our speed,” Althea said instead, and left the room, as if by doing so she could escape Ananke's eyes.

Ananke watched her go.

She did not increase her speed.

“I was the one who suggested it,” Ivan said. He was more animate now than he had been a few minutes earlier, before Ananke had passed on her message, but it was a sickly sort of animation, illness in the jerkiness of his body.

Domitian was pacing back and forth. His boots did not make the same clicking sound Ida's heels had, but it seemed to Ananke that the steady solid sound of them was nearly as ominous. “So you were closely involved in the planning of her rebellion.”

“In a way,” Ivan said. “I came up with the attack on Earth as—not—as a joke, as a challenge, as— I didn't mean it seriously.”

“How did you mean it?”

“She had some plan to attack some petty moon. I told her she was wasting her time. I told her the only way the System would ever fall is if Earth were destroyed.”

“And that's how she got the idea.”

“That's how she got the idea.”

“Did you help her carry it out?” Domitian asked.

Ivan's hand was jittering against the chair, but he was tapping out no message Ananke could read. “Yes. It was the only way I could stay close to her, try to stop her.”

Domitian ignored the last part of Ivan's confession. “Did you plant the bombs?”

“No. But I helped get them down to Earth.”

“How did you do it?”

“We smuggled the explosives from the moon,” said Ivan.

He spoke it so flatly that it gave no indication of the great difficulty and care that such an endeavor would have required. Getting the explosives on Luna would have been difficult enough; Ananke knew of no certain way to get them to Earth.

Of course, all that meant was that the System knew of no such way. Ananke was growing to think that for all the knowledge the System had given her, its information was limited.

“Who planted them on Earth?” Domitian asked.

“A man who had been involved in my father's rebellion. A friend of my mother's.”

“Name.”

“No,” Ivan said.

Domitian stopped pacing to stand and face Ivan squarely, strong and healthy where Ivan was pale and weak, with his gun black at his hip.

“Name,” he said, and Ivan closed his eyes.

“Julian,” Ivan said. “It doesn't matter anymore. His name is Julian Keys.”

“And he warned your mother for you.”

“No,” said Ivan. “They couldn't contact each other; it was too risky. I warned my mother another way.”

“How?”

“Fan mail,” said Ivan. “I sent her fan mail with a message hidden in it.”

“You, Constance Harper, and Matthew Gale were all on Luna,” Domitian said. “The riots on Triton had nothing to do with the Mallt-y-Nos?”

“They were a distraction,” Ivan said. He was sinking low in his chair, held up only by the chains riveting his wrist with iron. “It was intentional. It would've never worked otherwise.”

“Who was in charge of the distraction?”

“Two of Connie's generals—you didn't think Mattie and I were her movers, did you? She sent her two closest generals to organize Triton. The same two who instigated the rebellion on Titania. Another distraction. The art of misdirection—you watch one hand while the other steals your wallet. Or your knife.” He smiled a terrible smile and then added after a glance at Domitian, “Their names are Anji and Christoph. You won't be able to find them.”

“Don't doubt me,” Domitian said, but Ivan only laughed.

Althea was down in the base of the ship now, working on the mobile arm she had outfitted some time earlier to help Ananke defend herself against Gagnon and Domitian. She was covering up the sparking wire, giving more mobility to the hand so that it would be useful in case of a shipwide emergency that Althea could not handle on her own, but Ananke was not dumb to the awareness that it also made the mobile arm less dangerous.

If Ananke had been a human, Althea's escape to the base of the ship might have been effective at avoiding her. But Ananke was not human, and within the ship there was no avoiding her.

She manifested in the holographic terminal nearest to where Althea sat with her back against the wall, her legs bent at the knee, for the hall was too narrow to accommodate the full length of her legs.