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It was fortunate for Ivanov's sake, Althea supposed, that she and Domitian had heard the message from Ida Stays before Domitian had had time to interrogate him.

The files on Matthew Gale and Leontios Ivanov were still open on her abandoned workspace. Althea dragged them to the side, but her next step in attempting to fix the ship involved a long period of waiting, and so, with only the slightest twinge of guilt, she opened the video showing Ivanov's cell and skimmed through the two men's files while she watched Domitian walk down the
Ananke
's long, winding hall.

Looking at the men's files, Althea became more certain that whatever virus had been put in the machine, if it had been some pre-prepared disease, as it must have been to be so complicated and so swiftly created, Gale couldn't have created it alone. He had never even graduated from lower school, much less gone to university. But Ivanov had gone to the North American Terran University and studied computer science. Althea didn't believe that Gale could have fooled her computer so completely himself on the spur of the moment. Ivanov must have helped him design it; maybe Ivanov had designed it himself. Gale had just taken their design and applied it so that he could escape.

That meant that whatever virus was infecting her ship, Althea thought, Ivanov knew how to fix it.

On the video screen, Althea saw that Domitian had reached Ivanov's cell. Without a word, his face still and set as stone, he opened the door. Ivanov didn't move even though he had to crane his head back to look at Domitian's face.

“We know who you are,” Domitian said, his low rumbling voice poorly picked up by the cameras, so that Althea had to lean forward to listen. “We know who your companion was.”

Ivanov cocked his head to the side. The camera in his cell was positioned above where Domitian now stood, and so Althea could not see Domitian's face clearly but Ivanov's face was nearly head-on.

He was smiling, insolent, amused.

“What we want to know,” said Domitian, “is why you are on board.”

Ivanov took a beat longer to reply than was normal. Althea's fingers were tight around the edge of the control panel.

“Simple curiosity,” Ivanov said. His accent had changed. No longer sharply, purely Terran or broadened by the traces of an adopted Mirandan drawl, it had something of Jupiter in it, faintly similar to Domitian's accent. “We were flying past, and by pure chance we saw your strange ship.”

Ivanov's eyes flickered up and straight into the camera. Althea knew he couldn't see her, but she was made uneasy nonetheless and was relieved when a moment later he looked away.

“You don't expect me to believe that,” said Domitian.

“I don't expect you to believe anything I say,” Ivanov said, “but I'm telling you the truth. Mattie and I were on our ship, headed for Mars, when our path intersected with yours. We wouldn't have even found the
Ananke
if we hadn't nearly run into her. Now, men like us, when we see a ship this magnificent—”

Domitian interrupted. “If you're hoping for rescue, none is coming. Gale was killed trying to escape.”

Althea supposed Domitian was telling the truth in a way; Gale would be dead soon from asphyxiation or starvation unless he was picked up by another ship, and with no one looking for him, his escape pod probably would never be found.

Ivanov went very still in exactly the position he had been in, his head cocked slightly to the side. His face showed nothing at all.

Then his face relaxed back into the insolent amusement he had adopted against Domitian.

“You know, the first rule of interrogation is to get the subject's trust,” Ivanov said. “You just lost it.”

“I killed Gale, and I can kill you, too,” said Domitian.

“Then why don't you kill me?” Ivanov asked. “You could shoot me in the docking bay. Fire that gun there”—he nodded at Domitian's hip and the weapon resting on it beneath Domitian's heavy hand—“right into my chest. And I fall. And then you leave and open the air lock. My body, my blood, all the mess goes flying out into the solar wind. Maybe I'm already dead, or maybe you're a bad shot and I'm not dead yet, so I get to drown in my own blood and suffocate in a vacuum both.”

Ivanov seemed to be watching Domitian very closely. What he was looking for, Althea didn't know. But his manner unsettled her.

“So then why don't you kill me?” Ivanov asked. “Oh,” he said, feigning coming to a realization, one finger lifting to point toward the ceiling. “That's right. You've just told me. You can't kill me unless I tell you what you want to know.” He smirked at Domitian. “You're not very good at this.”

“I don't need to find out anything from you,” Domitian said. “Gale is dead. Once you are, too, the threat will be neutralized. But if you tell me what I want to know, I'll reconsider killing you.”

“Thanks.” Ivanov had a deft sense for sarcasm.

“Answer me. Why did you and Gale board this ship?”

“I already told you,” Ivanov said. “Curiosity. Nothing more. What answer are you expecting?”

“I want the truth,” Domitian warned.

“And I'm giving you it,” said Ivanov. “We'd never seen a ship like the
Ananke
before. It's something different. It's almost an organism instead of a machine, the computer is so powerful. Mattie and I both have a professional interest in computers, and in any case, we figured there would be something valuable on board.”

“Did you come on board,” said Domitian, “on orders of the Mallt-y-Nos?”

Althea thought she saw Ivanov flinch. “I'm a thief, not a terrorist.”

“Then you know her.”

“Not personally.” He was wary.

“You know of her.”

“Everyone does.”

“Tell me what you know about her,” Domitian said.

“Just that she's a terrorist.” He paused, then lowered his tone as if telling a ghost story, with only a fine edge of sarcasm to spoil the effect. “I know enough about her to avoid her and her hounds. Do you know what her name means?”

“No.”

“It means ‘Matilda of the Night,' ” Ivanov said. “In mythology, the Mallt-y-Nos was a noblewoman who loved so much to hunt that she said to God, ‘If there is no hunting in heaven, I will not go.' And so God damned her to hunt forever as part of the fairy host. The sound of her shrieks and howls drive her fairy hounds to hunt the souls damned to hell, hunt them down and drag them there.”

His voice had lowered, hushed, and Althea strained to hear.

“They say that the louder the sound of her hounds' barking, the farther away they are,” said Ivanov. “And so, when the howling is the quietest, only a whisper, that's when the hounds are right beside you.”

The beep of the
Ananke
's computer, indicating that its scan was done, was so loud and sudden after Ivanov's soft story that Althea jumped and swore.

“I don't care about fairy tales, Ivanov,” she heard Domitian say as she leaned away, and she kept half an ear on the interrogation while she dealt with her injured machine.

Domitian said, “Tell me what Gale did to this computer before he escaped.”

“I don't know,” Ivanov said, politely acidic in a way that was very Terran. “I was locked up in a cell.”

“You must have some idea,” said Domitian. “The two of you must have contingency plans for situations like this.”

“Contingency plans for being unexpectedly captured on a secret military vessel with a superpowered computer of a kind neither of us have seen before?” said Ivanov. “Shockingly, no.”

“Enough,” said Domitian, and, to Althea's frustration, moved on. “I want you to explain what Gale meant when he said, ‘This is for Europa, Scheherazade.' ”

Ivanov hesitated.

“Ivanov,” Domitian said when the silence stretched for too long.

“Which would you like first?” Ivanov asked. “The Europa part or the Scheherazade?”

“I don't care,” said Domitian, “so long as you answer the question.”

“Scheherazade,” Ivanov said, “is an easy answer.” He smiled, brief and charming. “When Mattie and I are traveling between moons and planets, that's a lot of space and not a lot of things to do. So sometimes I tell stories. One time I told Mattie the story of Scheherazade and her thousand and one nights, and Mattie thought it was funny how she told stories for so long and I did the same thing. So sometimes he calls me Scheherazade.”

“A nickname,” said Domitian.

Something flickered over Ivanov's face, like an impulse to laugh, suppressed. “That's what I said.”

“It's affectionate?”

Ivanov shrugged. “It's just a nickname.”

“And Europa?” Domitian asked.

“You've already checked up on times Mattie and I were on Europa, of course,” Ivanov said, and Althea winced, because with the computer in the state it was in and with securing the ship, Domitian certainly had not had the time. She started trying to bring up the file; Domitian would want to look at it when he came back up. He also would know, once he saw the file open, that she had been listening to the interrogation, but Althea knew that his annoyance with her wouldn't last.

“And so you know,” said Ivanov, “that a con went wrong on Europa last time Mattie and I were there. We were robbing a ship called the
Jason
—a System ship, but the crew were pirates and extortionists in their spare time. The System doesn't care what their ships do as long as they keep the System's people quiet and under control.”

He had the rhetoric of a terrorist for all that he claimed not to be one.

“Mattie was caught by the crew of the
Jason,
” said Ivanov, his measured tone growing more and more distant with every word, “and I left him.”

“You came here together,” Domitian said.

Ivanov very nearly rolled his eyes. “Obviously, he escaped. The point is that I left him there. We kept working together because we make a good team, but that established something: each man for himself. I left Mattie on Europa, and so Mattie left me here.”

The file on Europa finally had opened. Domitian queried something else, but Althea didn't hear. She was too busy reading and rereading the first few lines of the report.

Eight years ago—longer than she would have guessed—eight years ago, the report said, the
Jason
had been found drifting in orbit around Europa, unmanned, its computers wiped.

All the System could determine was that Matthew Gale and Leontios Ivanov, under alias, had been recorded in interactions with the ship's crew some days before.

The ship was unmanned, the report said, because the entire crew had been murdered.

And all Ivanov had said was, “Mattie escaped.”

Domitian was done with their prisoner when Althea looked back over at the feed, leaving the tiny cell and locking the door, while Ivanov sat in the same place with his back against the wall and his slender pale feet crossed at the ankles.

What kind of man are you? Althea wondered, looking at Ivanov with his handsome face and his Terran accent and his murderer for a partner, and it wasn't until Domitian was halfway back up the hallway, leaving Gagnon to guard Ivanov's cell door, that her attention was drawn away from the video by the sound of an incoming message.

It was from the System: high security clearance. Althea opened it.

Ida Stays was ready to board.

The amount of work done in one direction is the same as the amount of heat transferred in the other, or, the internal energy of an isolated system is constant.

Because of this, a perpetual motion machine cannot exist, and all systems come to an end.

Ida Stays was always right.

The System Intelligence Agency as a unit did not believe that Leontios Ivanov and Matthew Gale were anything more than occasional hires by the Mallt-y-Nos, separated from her by many go-betweens; they did not know her name and had never seen her face. But Ida had known that the meeting of the Martian representatives would be targeted even before the Mallt-y-Nos had struck. Ida had known that Ivanov and Gale would be captured soon. And now, Ida knew that Gale and Ivanov could tell her the terrorist's name.

Soon everyone else would know that Ida had been right about that as well.

The movements of Matthew Gale and Leontios Ivanov—both known and suspected and plotted out even as far as their first meeting ten years ago—started to show a correspondence, beginning around five years before, with the known and suspected movements of the Mallt-y-Nos. There was the snag, of course: the Mallt-y-Nos's movements could not be known for sure, and there were inconsistencies with the two men's course even in a best fit.

But there was more than the facts that Ida could marshal and present to her superiors, more than the numerical equation of guilt she could construct, more than anything else: she
knew
. She knew with solid and certain instinct that Matthew Gale and Leontios Ivanov knew the Mallt-y-Nos.

Her superiors had consented to the interrogation in the end, though it had been a near thing and they had imposed on her certain restrictions for reasons of the
Ananke
's security: if it was possible that Ivanov and Gale knew of some immediate threat to the
Ananke,
the System required that the two men be kept on board the ship to be readily at hand for the dissolution of such threat; therefore, until the ship was certain to be out of danger, the interrogation could happen only on board the
Ananke
. Whether they posed a threat to the ship was part of what Ida had come to determine, and until she had reason to leave, she was content to conduct her interrogation on board for the convenience of it: with no transport time required, she could begin the interrogation immediately; there was no extra hassle of the increased security required for the transport of prisoners. Her presence on the
Ananke
had a time limit—Ida had only until the ship reached Pluto on its course, two weeks' time away—but Ida knew that if she did not have something to show for her efforts by that time, she would have more concerns than where she should conduct the interrogation.

But running out of time was of little concern to her. She was right, of course, and she would get confessions from Gale and Ivanov or both. To consider otherwise was impossible.

And to be proved right when all others doubted her—that was the best kind of glory anyone could have. Ida looked forward to it.

She had been approaching the
Ananke
for the better part of an hour; it first had appeared in her viewscreen as nothing more than a tiny spot of white, indistinguishable from the background stars. Now she was near enough for voice communication thanks to the speed of her ship's relativistic drive. Ida reached over in her bland little shuttle—System standard issue—and hailed the
Ananke,
saying in her most pleasant tone, “Ida Stays hailing
Ananke,
please come in.” She always thought it was best to lead with a caress.

A static-filled moment, then a woman's voice said, “One sec.” Brusque, Terran with a trace of a nasal Lunar accent; Ida mentally reviewed the crew on the
Ananke
. There were only three, she recalled, as strange as that was for a ship this size. The woman's voice she'd just heard must have been the voice of the only female crew member, the mechanic, Althea Bastet.

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.”