Lightless (15 page)

The gathering sense of
something
was dispelled suddenly by a sharp rapping on her door. Ida dismissed the feeling for the moment and cast the list aside. “Come in.”

Domitian opened the door and stood in its frame, hands clasped behind his back. “You wanted to see me?”

Ida suppressed a smile. He was perfect, this one. Official, dignified, obedient.

“Yes,” she said. “Come in.”

He walked in and closed the door behind himself but remained standing while Ida leaned back in her office chair.

Ida considered him, considered their situation, considered what she wanted to say. With Ivanov she had to be quick. With Domitian she could be slow and consider.

“What is your opinion of our prisoner?” she asked at last.

“Low,” he said. “A thief and a con man.”

“Intelligent,” said Ida.

“Intelligent,” Domitian agreed, “but a disease in the System.”

The proper party line. Ida smiled and entertained thoughts of keeping Domitian for her own.

“And guilty?” she asked.

Domitian's eyes were light, like Ivan's, but a far duller color. “Certainly guilty.”

He was speaking to please her, of course, but Ida always liked to have another person's validation. “Has there been any progress on cracking the
Annwn
's computer?”

For the first time Domitian hesitated. “No,” he admitted. “There was a minor emergency today regarding the
Ananke
. Doctor Bastet has been—”

Ida threw up a hand, and he fell silent and stood perfectly straight and stern even under her darkening attention. She considered shouting but suspected he would love her better if she refrained. He seemed to be unaccountably attached to the ship's rude little engineer, who hid her dislike for Ida very poorly and did not show a willingness to do as she was told.

“If the Mallt-y-Nos intended to use or attack the
Ananke,
those plans have clearly been thwarted,” she said. “The
Ananke
is no longer under threat.” Ivanov was no longer a threat to the ship, and that was precisely what Ida would tell the System, which meant that she soon would be able to take Ivanov off the
Ananke
. “I suggest you reassure your crew with that and remind Doctor Bastet that while her devotion to her ship is commendable, this interrogation is of paramount importance. Surely she cannot still be attempting to repair damage made in under a minute by a stranger to the ship.”

“I will tell her, ma'am,” Domitian said without answering the question.

If Bastet was too incompetent to fix such a trifling bit of sabotage, she shouldn't have been assigned to the
Ananke
in the first place. Ida filed away the information in the back of her mind.

“Remind Doctor Bastet that the
Annwn
is of very high priority to the System and to me,” said Ida, “and inform her that my presence on this ship has a deadline. I need her to provide me with the contents of the
Annwn
before the week is out. That means in the next two days, Domitian. No later. And no excuses.”

“Will you be leaving, ma'am?”

“I will be leaving shortly,” said Ida. “The interrogation of Ivanov is progressing, but while I am making excellent progress”—she tried not to think about how Ivan had blocked her out so completely today—“he is remarkably…resistant and has so far managed to avoid giving me real information.”

Domitian looked grim and nodded his understanding.

“I think,” Ida said, “that it's time to move to the next stage of the interrogation. And for that I need to take Mister Ivanov off ship.”

“Then you will have the information you need before you leave, Miss Stays.”

He was serious, solemn, obedient. Ida looked at him and knew that he would do exactly as he said, and she smiled.

“You need to sleep.”

“Go away, Gagnon,” Althea said, and tested her hypothesis that if she hunched far enough over the screen before her, Gagnon would take the hint and go. She had shut down all the drones like the robotic arm in the pantry and was focused on figuring out what had caused it to go off in the first place. As with the robotics in the ventilation system, she could find nothing even though she knew that there must be some clue somewhere. The new avenue of investigation had forced her to abandon her search for the cause of the other errors she'd identified earlier in the day, and so many incomplete and apparently fruitless pursuits were starting to fill her with a vague sense of panic.

Gagnon did not go away. He simply leaned farther in.

“You've missed a couple sleep cycles and shortened the rest,” he said. “I know you have. You can't fix the
Ananke
if you're having a psychotic break because of insufficient—”

“I'm not going to have a psychotic break,” Althea interrupted. “Should we be having this conversation?” She looked pointedly over her shoulder at the locked door of Ivanov's cell.

Gagnon made a face at her. “We wouldn't be having this conversation if you would just go do what you're supposed to,” he said. “Go to bed, Althea.”

“Not yet.”

“Do you want me to get Domitian and have him come down here and scold you?” Gagnon asked.

She did not, and she suggested to Gagnon exactly what he might do with Domitian instead of bothering her.

“Funny,” Gagnon said, “but I'm serious.”

She glanced again at the silent door to Ivanov's cell. “Fine,” she said. “But I need to finish up what I'm doing.”

Gagnon considered her. “Five minutes,” he said.

“Until I'm done,” Althea countered.

“Five minutes.”

“It'll only take me ten,” said Althea, frustrated. “If I'm still down here in fifteen, you can carry me off over your shoulder. But I need at least ten minutes, uninterrupted.”

“Over my shoulder,” Gagnon promised. Despite it all, there was a smile twitching at the edges of his mouth. “Like a sack.”

Althea glared at him.

He did eventually get the hint.

“I'll come back in fifteen minutes,” he said, raising his hands in defeat. “Fifteen, Althea,” he reminded her, and she ignored him, and then he was gone.

She had sent him away almost more out of obstinacy than out of a genuine desire to finish working. She hated to leave problems unsolved, but for the moment she was too tired to start any new solutions and she knew it, and so she was merely retreading steps taken earlier in the day.

Like a ghost or a hallucination, manifesting only when everyone else was gone, Ivanov said, “You really should get some rest.”

“I wasn't talking to you.”

“I get it,” Ivanov said, seemingly unfazed by her waspishness. “You hate to leave something unfinished. You're worried something will get worse while you're gone. But you'll only make more mistakes if you're tired.”

“I'll also make more mistakes if people keep talking to me while I'm trying to work.” Though she snapped, she was very tired, almost too tired to maintain her frustration at him.

“You're almost done working.”

“Well, I'm not done yet!”

Ivanov said, “How long are you going to be angry at me for something I didn't do?”

It was so sudden a change in subject that it jolted Althea out of her irritation. “What?”

“The ship. I didn't do that. Mattie did.”

“He was your partner.” The reminder that Ivanov certainly knew how to fix her machine and Ida Stays would not ask him about it made her bitter.

Into the silence that followed Ivanov said, “I'm sorry.”

He said it without annoyance, or sarcasm, or qualifications, or anything to mitigate the openness of the apology. And it sounded like—Althea almost could believe it—he was sincere.

For a moment she mulled over the unexpected sincerity, and remembered Ida Stays's arrogance that morning.

“I looked over your computer,” she said, cautious, almost afraid of what would happen if she spoke to him without him provoking words from her.

The shifting sound of movement from behind the locked door. “Did you?”

“It stonewalled me,” Althea admitted, and waited, but Ivanov didn't say anything. She said, hoping for his sincerity again, “Could you— Could Mattie have done to the
Ananke
what you did to the
Annwn
?”

“In terms of security?” Ivanov asked, sounding remarkably calm, as if the question wasn't offensive at all, as if they were colleagues comparing notes and not the subject and inquisitor in a most uncertain interrogation. “No, there wasn't anywhere near enough time for him to do that while he was on board the ship. It took us weeks to program Annie. Mattie wouldn't want to give a ship that is this dangerous a personality, anyway.”

“No?” Althea asked, more to herself, and frowned down at the interface before her.

“No,” Ivanov said. “See, a personality is just…a little bit of chaos organized. It's not quite predictable. It can have its own motivations, its own fears and wants, and it'll act on those independently of what the people around it want. Whatever Mattie did, he added chaos to your system, I don't doubt that. It's quick, and it's easy, and it's effective. But a personality is chaos organized. A computer can't organize the chaos itself; it doesn't know how to. Mattie or I would have had to do it, like we did for our ship. And Mattie didn't have time to do that.”

“Then why haven't I found it yet?” Althea asked. “Whatever he did to my ship.”

She glanced at the clock on the display before her. Gagnon would be back soon but not immediately. She still had time.

“That's the thing about chaos,” said Ivanov. “It only ever increases. It's spread throughout the system.”

“So you're saying I'll never find it?” Althea asked.

“I think you will eventually.”

Althea sighed and leaned her head against the cool metal of her ship's wall. She closed her eyes. She really was very tired. At this point there was no use in hailing Gagnon; he would come down himself in a few minutes. For just a few minutes she could rest.

“Althea?” said Ivan.

“Yes?” Althea answered.

Ivan said, “Who is this ship supposed to destroy?”

In her half-dreaming state, there was something awful about the question, some ominous quality. “What?” she said, sitting away from the wall and turning to face the blank steel that separated her from Ivanov.

His voice sounded very near, as if he were standing just behind the door, only a few feet from Althea. “This ship is an expensive and highly advanced military vessel with an incredibly powerful computer,” he said. “It's on a secret mission, and it's armed. Who is it going to destroy?”

“The weaponry is for
protection,
” said Althea, hardly understanding what he was saying. The
Ananke
was a research vessel. It existed to test a scientific hypothesis, nothing more.

“From whom? The System has sole control of the solar system. There are no rival governments or organizations. Weaponry like this ship has isn't for protection; it's to destroy.”

“The
Ananke
's weaponry is standard for a ship of her size,” Althea hissed, glancing at the clock again. Gagnon would be there any moment.

“Yes, it is,” Ivan said, lowering his voice as she had. “I know. But guess what all System ships like this are designed to do?”

“Leave your propaganda out of this,” Althea snapped. She looked up the hall, but Gagnon was not in sight or hearing yet. Leaning in close to the door to be heard, she said, “The
Ananke
is a research vessel. She's a very valuable research vessel. That makes her a target—look at you! You came the moment you saw her and tried to destroy her!”

“We didn't come to hurt your ship,” said Ivanov swiftly. “We came to see what it was doing.”

“Of course the ship has the means to defend herself,” said Althea. “Of course she does.”

Footsteps not so far distant. Gagnon would be in sight soon.

“My ship isn't going to kill anyone,” said Althea to the silent Ivanov. “She isn't going to kill anyone.” Still Ivanov did not answer. Althea said, “Is that what you thought?”

When Gagnon arrived, Ivanov still had not answered her. Althea left the hallway, troubled by thoughts she did not dare put into words.

“We're going to try something different today,” Ida said.

Ivan was slouching in his chair. He was paler than he had been the day before, closer to the color of the room, of his shirt, and bruised shadows were becoming apparent beneath his brilliant eyes. He must have been having trouble sleeping, and Ida knew that that was as good a sign of his fear as any she could hope for. With the wires of the polygraph coming out from the neck of his shirt and the base, adhered to the inside of his elbow, it looked almost as if the machine were sucking the life and the blood out of him and eventually would leave him dried out and hollow.

“How exciting,” he said, in a tone that contended with the sun side of Mercury for aridity. Not a trace of weariness was audible in his voice.

“Instead of asking you about events,” Ida said, “I'm going to ask you about people.”

Ida took her time before continuing, letting him linger on the thought. She'd spent a long time considering who to ask about first before deciding on Milla Ivanov. Theirs was the oldest relationship, and Ida knew he would have a weakness for his mother.

“Your childhood must have been difficult,” Ida said with gentle sympathy, leaning against the back of her chair.

“You know it was,” said Ivan. He was giving nothing away, but Ida saw that when he moved his arms, reddened chafing was visible beneath the metal manacles.

“Of course,” said Ida. “I know all about it. After all, I do have the surveillance footage. And your childhood and adolescence were very well surveyed.”

He must have known what she was referring to, but he said nothing.

“But of course,” said Ida, “there are some things cameras can't record.”

She began to pace again, a few steps one way and a few steps the other.

“Your mother was very protective of you,” she said.

“I was her son,” said Ivan immediately.

Her son and her ticket out of jail. Whether or not Milla Ivanov had known of her husband's attempt to divorce the Saturnian moons from System control, she certainly would have ended up in prison along with her husband if not for Ivan. The System had destroyed the people of Saturn for the crime, after all. But Milla Ivanov had been clever. She had gotten herself into the public eye immediately, and the Terran people saw one of their own, a beautiful, brilliant young Terran woman devastated and disbelieving, fooled and abused by an outer planetary husband who already had estranged her from her Terran family, first hugely pregnant and then carrying a babe in arms: little Ivan, clutching at his mother's blouse with tiny, perfect fingers.

“I understand the impulse to be protective of her,” said Ida gently, and thought of Milla Ivanov going into court of her own volition only a week after giving birth, appearing wan and weak with Ivan at her breast, as much a performance as Ivan was putting on for Ida now. “She is your mother. But I only want a few simple answers to a few simple questions.”

Ivan was so perfectly expressionless that Ida knew he was on lockdown. “I only ever tell you the truth, Ida.”

“Did your mother ever talk to you about your father?” Ida asked.

The conditions for Milla Ivanov's freedom had been very specific. Heightened surveillance on her and her son for the rest of their lives, maintained without break. A mandatory visit to Saturn when Ivan was nine, successfully accomplished and successful in making an impression on him. Public appearances on the System's behalf to speak against rebellion and terrorism; the System brought her out whenever they needed a speaker, and Milla Ivanov had poise and charm. The retention of her marriage and her husband's name as a permanent reminder of her shame, although as a living warning to other terrorists Connor Ivanov was rotting in a System prison so dark that Ida doubted he even remembered Milla's sky-blue eyes. If Doctor Ivanov had deviated even slightly from those conditions in the thirty years since her husband's incarceration or shown any signs of sympathy for her husband or his cause, she and her son would have been executed or imprisoned faster than they could have reconsidered their words. Telling Ivan anything kind about his father was likely to fall under that heading.

“No, she didn't,” said Ivan, as calm as if they were discussing the weather or the minutiae of a computer's code. “Which you know, because you've seen the tapes.”

“I hope I'm not boring you,” Ida said with the slightest edge of danger. “Your mother truly never told you anything?”

“Nothing more than the System told me,” said Ivan.

“But the System would say nothing good,” Ida said, affecting a frown. “Surely your mother would like you to hear something good about the man she loved.”

“She told me,” said Ivan, “nothing of the kind.”

“And yet you choose to be known as Ivan,” said Ida, advancing closer to the table. Ivan sat up a little straighter, the anxious patternless tapping of his fingers against the rests of his chair ceasing. That was a habit his mother had, the only anxious flaw in her perfect poise. Ivan had picked it up from her when he was a well-mannered accessory at her side, but from what Ida had seen of footage since, he had lost it once leaving home. “You know that your last name, Ivanov, was an ancient Terran patronymic, do you not? You took the name of your father.”

“My father's name was Connor,” Ivan said drily. “And you would have chosen to go by another name, too, Ida, if your mother had named you Leontios. Don't you think you're reaching a bit?”

“Did you learn your revolutionary sympathies from your mother?”

“I didn't even admit to revolutionary sympathies, and I certainly didn't learn anything like that from her,” said Ivan. He raised his hands slightly, and the ring of chafed skin was visible on his wrists. It probably hurt, Ida decided, in a dull, itching way.

“You're going after her,” Ivan said suddenly, watching her as closely as she was watching him. “Why?”

“Your mother had intimate revolutionary connections once,” she said. “It seems likely that would happen again.”

“The System proved her innocent,” said Ivan, his voice hard, leaning forward in his chair. It was delightful how his nonchalance had all but vanished. If only his surety would go as well. “She didn't know anything about my father's revolution. She didn't have revolutionary connections then, she didn't when I lived with her, and even if she does now, which she won't, I'm not in contact with her.”

“I'm glad to hear that,” Ida said, and Ivan seemed to hear how sincerely she meant it, because he was back to looking wary. But it was his fault; he had stepped into her trap. “Except that there's one thing that troubles me.”

“Just one?”

“You tell me you are no longer in contact with your mother?”

“No.”

“And you haven't been since when?”

“Since I left home.”

“No contact at all? Nothing?”

“I told you, no.”

Ida leaned forward onto the table separating them. Beside her wrist, the lines on the polygraph swung back and forth, too steady for her liking. “We found video of your mother—recent video—on your ship.”

For a long moment Ivan simply looked confused; then he started to laugh. “Those were public broadcasts,” he said. “I don't think even the System will take that as proof of collusion.”

“They were the only recordings on board your ship,” Ida said, omitting any mention of what may or may not have been saved to the ship's computer, out of her reach.

“Did you even watch them?” Ivan demanded. Ida had; they had all been of Milla Ivanov lecturing, cool and composed, her words precise and sharply enunciated. Ivan must have read the confirmation in her expression, because he said, “Did you notice that all of the lectures were on computer science?”

“Of course,” said Ida.

Ivan had his arms spread as wide as the chains would allow. He was looking at her as if he expected her to make some obvious connection. When Ida simply waited, he said, “That's the subject I studied at university.”

“There are many public broadcasts on computer science,” Ida said. “Why only save your mother's?”

“Because she's the best researcher there is,” Ivan said flatly. It was spoken without pride, as if it were a simple fact. And perhaps it was; Ida knew little of the field and nothing of the subject. “Mattie and I like to keep on top of developments in the field. We need to for our job.”

For their thefts, Ida thought but did not say. “You want me to really believe that, Ivan?” she asked.

“You know what I believe?” said Ivan. He smiled at her, wolfish. “I think you're grasping at straws and you know it.”

For a long moment Ida simply watched him. She intended her silence to be cold, intimidating, but Ivan seemed to take it as confirmation of his success; the snarling smile on his face grew by the second.

Fury. Fury like the hollow blackness inside Ida's chest swelling out, wanting to be filled.

She took her growing fury and ruthlessly broke it down, and turned that energy into an attack as sharp as the point of a knife.

“The surveillance at your house was very advanced,” she said, and Ivan's smirk began to fade at the unexpected change of subject.

Ida sat down slowly and deliberately in her chair.

“The cameras even had infrared,” she said. “There were even cameras on the roof.”

Ivan was very still, very tense. He wasn't smiling anymore.

“They recorded everything,” she said. “The audio caught the sound you made when you made the first cut on your wrist. The infrared caught the rush of heat out through your wrists as you bled out. The visible caught the sun just peeking out over the hills by the time you fell to your knees, pale, too weak to stand on your own two feet.”

Ivan was as still as stone. She wondered, if the chains had not been there to hold him in place, whether he would have attacked her.

“Why the roof?” Ida asked with genuine curiosity. “For the drama?”

“Because it was harder to reach,” said Ivan.

“Why?”

“I was timing the System's ability to respond to what they saw in the cameras,” said Ivan. His voice was very even, very calm, but Ida saw that his hands were trembling minutely against the chair.

“You were testing them,” she said.

“I wanted to know how long they would take to get to me if I did something they didn't like.”

“So you tried to kill yourself,” Ida said, “to test the System?”

“Yes,” said Ivan.

“Were you counting the seconds?” Ida asked, her voice gentle and low like a knife driven slowly into the heart. “When you were on the roof? Counting how long it would take?”

“Yes.”

“Could you do that even as you felt yourself dying?”

“Yes.”

“You passed out before the System got there,” said Ida. “How was that in your plans?”

For the first time, Ivan looked away. “It was a whim,” he said. “I didn't think it through very well.”

He was rattled, disturbed. Ida asked, “What did your mother think of you trying to kill yourself?”

“Obviously,” Ivan said sharply, “she was upset.”

“And what does your mother think of you taking after your father?”

He really had extraordinary eyes, even when—especially when—he was glaring at her. “I'm not taking after my father.”

“I meant living as a criminal,” Ida said, as if she had not laid the linguistic trap intentionally.

“Then I imagine my mother isn't happy about that, either.”

“You imagine?”

“I haven't been in contact with her.”

“You really do intend me to believe,” said Ida in astonishment, “that you never tried to contact your mother to reassure her you were all right—”

“I
didn't,
” said Ivan.

“—and that she never tried to contact you herself?”

“She didn't.”

“Is your mother's revolutionary contact John Walker?”

“What? No. My mother doesn't have any revolutionary—”

“Is it Alaina Purcell?” Ida had a list of Milla Ivanov's associates; if she was lucky, one of them would provoke a reaction from Ivan.

“My mother has no revolutionary contacts.” The polygraph showed that Ivan's heart was beating fast.

“Is it Julian Keys?”

“I don't—”

“Jesse Carter?”

“I don't know anything about my mother's affairs,” Ivan shouted, breaking into Ida's litany of names, “and she doesn't have any connection to the Mallt-y-Nos!”

Ida smiled at him.

“All right,” she said.

“All right?” Ivan repeated warily, his fingers jittering a patternless beat against the edge of his chair.

Ida said, “Now I'd like to hear about Constance Harper.”

Althea woke as suddenly and unexpectedly as if a sound had triggered her waking, but when she opened her eyes to the dimness of her room, it was silent.

When she looked at her bedside clock, she sat up with a curse.

Gagnon had been supposed to wake her for her shift; he had, in fact, been supposed to wake her three hours ago. For a moment Althea worried that something had gone wrong before she realized that the far more likely explanation was that Gagnon had decided to let her sleep. It didn't seem to matter; even with the extra hours, she still felt exhausted.

Oversleeping at least explained why her dreams had been so strange. When facing a computer problem, she sometimes dreamed in code; she had even solved several tricky problems in REM. The dream she'd been having right before she woke, faded and indistinct as it was becoming, had started off as a dream of code.

But the code had not been the
Ananke
's, as she'd thought, but rather the
Annwn
's, and when Althea tried to find where her computer had gone, she had run all the way to the base of the ship, where was the black hole that was her heart, and she had opened the door and looked inside, past the dead man's switch, but the black hole had swollen in size, and she stared at blackness right before her face. When she reached into the event horizon of the black hole, her hand came up dripping with a dark liquid that was not black but red, and in the black hole's place was a vast and beating heart.