Lightless (4 page)

The hallway there was choked with wires and pipes that covered the walls and twined through the grates that made up the ceiling, separating the hallway from the blue-white fluorescent lighting above. The lights hummed and whined at frequencies almost too high for Althea to hear. Ivanov's door was indeed almost directly across from a computer interface. This was less by design, Althea knew, than by coincidence; the interfaces were spotted at even intervals up and down the hallway. The wires and pipes of the walls had to bend around the shapes of the computer interface and Ivanov's cell door, distorting like light around a black hole.

Althea stopped in front of Ivanov's door, took a breath, and pulled the gun from her holster, opening and closing her fingers around it until she was comfortable. Then she said through the door, “Put your back against the opposite wall and don't move.”

There was no sound of movement from within the room.

Althea hesitated, wondering if she should open the door anyway, but caution won out. She debated going to the computer terminal and trying to coax the
Ananke
into showing her the camera footage from inside the cell, but she doubted it would work and she wanted to obey Domitian quickly. She thought about calling out again and decided that would only make her sound weak. That left her with only one option. She dithered about it for a moment, hoping that Ivanov would speak up from inside the cell, or move, or do something to confirm that he was there, but still there was nothing. She crouched down to eye level with the food slot, as Matthew Gale had done fifteen minutes before, and lifted the slot to look into the cell.

Leontios Ivanov was seated on the floor across from the door. His back was against the opposite wall. She suspected he had been sitting there this whole time and simply hadn't bothered to move or reply when she'd spoken. When he met her eyes, he raised his eyebrows at her expectantly, as if she were taking up his time.

Althea let the slot clang shut so that he wouldn't see her scowl. She pulled a key from the tool belt around her waist and checked her gun again before unlocking the door. When she opened it, she immediately trained the gun on Ivanov.

He was still sitting and only glanced down at the gun, unimpressed.

Then he looked back up at her.

“Give me your shoes,” Althea said.

“Do you know what that thing does?” Ivanov asked instead of obeying. He nodded at the gun.

Althea narrowed her eyes. “It shoots,” she said.

“Yes,” Ivanov said with a trace of exasperation, “obviously. But it's not an ordinary gun, is it? Do you know what that particular type of gun does to the human body?”

Althea stared at him and brought her other hand over to hold the gun with both hands.

“It's designed for use in spaceships,” she said. “The bullets are designed for wholly inelastic collisions. It won't ricochet if it's fired in an enclosed space like a ship. So I can shoot you if you don't do what I tell you and not worry about hurting my ship.”

“ ‘Your ship' again,” Ivanov said with the same flash of interest Althea had seen back in the data room, and her unease grew. “But that's not what I was asking. Do you understand what that particular type of gun does to the human body?”

Althea opened her mouth, about to say yes, of course she knew, she had been trained, but Ivanov interrupted her.

“It hurts,” said Ivanov. “All that kinetic energy from the bullet moving goes into the human body. It keeps none for itself. That bullet will create a miniature explosion in the target's flesh—organs will rupture, muscles will be shredded, blood vessels are more than torn, they're burst. If you fire that into a man's torso, it will liquefy his guts.”

Althea stared at him in silence for a long, long minute.

“Give me your boots,” she said at last with the gun still trained on his heart.

Ivanov did not move, watching her as if testing her; then he did move, bending forward to unlace his boots and slide them off. He tossed them toward her gently when he was done, and she kicked them out into the hallway and closed the door on him, his feet slender and pale and vulnerable against the steel floor as he sat against the wall between the narrow cot and the toilet in a dark cell the size of a closet.

She locked the door behind herself and called Domitian to let him know she had the boots.

Althea worked on the computer for some time without much success. Something Gale had done, some virus he had infected her ship with, undid every change she'd effected, and the errors seemed to propagate out like ripples in a pond. Several of the cameras refused flat out to work. The computer would obey her normally for some time and then without warning execute a random operation that had no reason and no connection to what she had been doing. It was as if every operation on the machine had become a little bit more chaotic than before.

She was so absorbed in the computer that she almost didn't notice Gagnon's arrival.

“Althea.”

“What?” she asked flatly, keeping her eyes on the screen in the vague hope that their interaction would be fleeting enough that he wouldn't break the focus of her concentration.

Gagnon leaned in and spoke in a low voice, as if he did not want Ivanov to hear.

“Domitian wants you,” he said. “He needs your help up in the control room.”

“With what?” Althea asked.

“Repairs” was the cryptic response. Gagnon then said, “I'll stay here and guard Ivanov until he sends you back down.”

Althea's concentration was well and truly gone now. She reluctantly closed down what she had been doing and headed up the hall. Gagnon leaned against the wall to watch the door to Ivanov's cell.

Domitian, when she joined him, was standing in front of the holographic terminal in the corner of the room, right at the circular edge of its raised platform, staring at it with the expression of a man who had run out of ideas. His eyes darted to the door once when she entered, but when he saw it was only Althea, he resumed the lost stare she was used to seeing on other people's faces when confronted by technology.

“What is it?” she asked.

“The ship is clear,” Domitian said instead of answering immediately. “I located the hatch to the maintenance shafts that opened into the escape pod bay; Gale hadn't shut it behind him when he escaped, so I sealed it, then shut down the habitability program as you instructed—the computer reports that the maintenance shafts are completely sealed and uninhabitable again. And Gagnon managed to access the footage from when the men boarded; only the two of them disembarked. But while Gale was escaping, the System tried to contact us. We received a communiqué, top priority, from a System intelligence agent by the name of Ida Stays.”

Althea didn't know the name, but when it came to intelligence agents, that wasn't a surprise. Like every sensible person, she tried to stay out of situations in which she'd need to meet one, and like every sensible person, she tried not to be seen looking too closely into their activities.

“And it's a hologram?” Althea asked, coming to stand beside Domitian and look at the holographic terminal. It was wide and tall enough for a person to stand inside it, but the floor of the terminal was raised and its ceiling lowered to accommodate the diodes that would create the hologram. At the moment it was dark, dead.

“Yes,” said Domitian. “There's no text portion.”

Sometimes very high security transmissions wouldn't have a text portion so that they would be protected from espionage. Althea walked over to the computer and attempted to access the holographic terminal.

At first the terminal flatly refused to turn on. There was no reason for that, so Althea relentlessly tried again and again, and eventually—without any reason—it did turn on with a low hum. The diodes glowed, brightened, and then stuttered.

“Play most recent message,” Althea said, her voice projected with confidence so that the machine would hear and understand even as she frowned at the unusual stuttering of the diodes.

At her words the machine rallied, lighting up again, a form coalescing and then shuddering once more, the visage and shape of a slight woman created by the interference of light coming together and then twitching, jerking apart. Patches of dark and light appeared where there should be none, the ordinary human form appearing briefly monstrous, deformed. Then the whole thing went dark, the premature hologram vanishing.

Althea exchanged a glance with Domitian. On the bright side, she supposed, now he would certainly believe her when she told him that the ship's computer needed her attention.

Althea hesitated, looking at the holographic terminal and at the unopened message on the screen at her fingertips, then decided to fall back on the age-old solution for all mechanical problems before trying anything more complicated.

She ended the program for running the holographic terminal—stopped it dead—and then turned it back on again.

The diodes glowed, red and cold.

“Play new message,” said Althea.

An uncertain flicker, and then that misshapen woman appeared once again in the terminal. Her head was offset through an accident of filtration, her knee disconnected from her thigh. The recording began to play, distorted and groaning, whining, a harlequin baby born and screaming like tangled steel wool being wrenched into straightness. It was wrong, it was horribly wrong, something terrible put forth from Althea's beautiful machine. Even though she knew it was nothing more than an accident of corruption in the ship's systems, the hellish mistake in the terminal made her hands shake and her skin crawl. But just as Althea was reaching out to turn it off again, the horrible image glitched once more, then flashed into perfect life. Domitian didn't seem to have been affected by the distorted figure but stood with his back straight, looking at the holographic image as if he were really in the presence of a superior instead of a superior's image.

The woman in the holograph was petite, slender, and flat, with a strong sharp jaw for someone so delicate, light-skinned with black hair chopped rigidly short, sweeping down to brush the underside of her chin. Her shoes were practical and professional but with a sharp little black heel, and her skirt was fitted and black. Her blouse was loose and flowery, a touch of charming, innocent femininity that contrasted with the rigid lines of the rest of her garb. Her lips were colored like bruises, a red so dark and deep that it touched into purple.

Althea had known women like this woman before. This was the kind of woman who preferred the company of men to the comfortable logic of Althea's machines, who looked at Althea with her awkwardness and her impatience and her wiry tangled hair and smirked among others like herself behind their hands.

Althea looked to Domitian to see if he had experienced the same instinctive dislike but saw nothing of the kind on his face. He was only watching Ida Stays's hologram with close attention.

Of course, she thought to herself, the System was watching; the System was always watching. She turned her attention back to the hologram.

In the hologram, Ida Stays had no chance of meeting the eyes of either Althea or Domitian; instead, she gazed directly ahead, most likely into the camera that had recorded the message.

“To the crew of the
Ananke,
” she said, “detain Leontios Ivanov and Matthew Gale. Take extra precautions in their detainment; they are known for escaping System control. They are crucial to my investigation and the safety and security of the System. I have been granted access to your current location, and I will rendezvous with you at System Standard Time 1700 hours. Do not let Ivanov or Gale out of your sight and wait for me to question them. Ida Stays; end message.”

The woman vanished; the diodes went dark.

“That's in an hour,” said Althea. “What do we do?”

“Nothing,” Domitian said. “We can't pursue Gale; even if we could, we have no means of capturing him. I have already updated the System on our situation, and when Miss Stays arrives, I will handle it.

“Until then,” he continued with his eye on something above and behind Althea, where the camera displays were, “I will be interrogating our prisoner.”

Althea's heart jumped. “Let me come.”

Domitian gave her a strange look.

“I want to find out if he knows what Gale did to the computer,” Althea said. “They work together; there must be particular tricks they use all the time. This is one of those tricks; I know it. I just don't know what, or how advanced, or what it's supposed to do—”

“I'll question him,” Domitian said. “You stay here, monitor the control room, and work on the computer.”

“You wouldn't know what to ask,” said Althea, without really thinking it through.

Domitian, fortunately, was always patient with her. “What would you ask?” he said. “Would you give him a list of the computer's problems and ask him which of his and Gale's ‘tricks' it's likely to be?” Althea said nothing, as clear as if she had admitted it. “You can't give this man any information, Althea. In his position he survives on his information. Telling him something he doesn't need to know is the same as putting a weapon in his hand. I will ask about the computer, and you will stay here. Understood?”

He held her gaze until Althea dropped hers. “Yes, sir,” she said.

When he left, closing the door behind himself, she turned to look at the grid of camera images. In them she found the footage of Ivanov's cell, where from above she looked down at Ivanov still sitting with his back against the opposite wall and his bare feet crossed at the ankle.

It was standard to interrogate a prisoner until a satisfactory explanation of the reason for his presence was obtained. On most ships, that interrogation would be followed by imprisonment. On ships like the
Ananke,
a System-sponsored research vessel with military applications, an interrogation would be followed by execution.