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He was lying. Ida could not tell precisely how yet, and the polygraph showed nothing, but she knew that he was lying.

“I want you to describe Abby to me,” she said. “Physically.”

“Why?” said Ivan. “Just look at the picture in her file.”

The picture in Abigail Hunter's file was twenty-five years old, and Ida had no doubt Ivan knew it. “Humor me.”

“Tall,” Ivan said. “Thin. She wears wigs to confuse surveillance and dyes her hair. I think she's naturally a blonde.”

The description matched perfectly with an extrapolation of what the little girl whose picture was in Abigail Hunter's file could have grown up to be, but it was useless to Ida. “Do you have any pictures of her?”

“Abby doesn't like cameras,” said Ivan. “No.”

Ida nodded, thinking. If Ivan was lying, Domitian would find out; he was searching Ivan's ship even now. Perhaps by the end of this session tonight she would have a lever with which to break Ivan open.

“Before Eris, you found her in your ship,” she prompted, and Ivan began again.

“The ship's door was unlocked; that's how we knew there was someone inside,” he said. “We had our guns on us—we'd kept them hidden from Constance while we were at her place, of course. Back then, Constance didn't know what we did for a living—and we drew them before we walked into the ship. And there was Abigail, sitting right in the entryway, watching us like she wasn't impressed at all.”

Ida tried to imagine it, to let it play out in her head as Ivan spoke, to compare what he said with the way she imagined it would have happened. Ivan and Mattie, walking together, elbows bumping. This was eight years into knowing each other, and they would move in harmony.

She imagined them coming to the
Annwn,
the ship standing on her rim, and finding the door unlocked, letting in bits of dust and sand from the howling Martian wind. They looked at each other, and Mattie drew his gun first—or did Ivan?

“Mattie was glad to see her somehow,” Ivan said. “Even though she'd just broken into our ship.”

In Ida's mind's eye, Mattie holstered his gun immediately, pulling the door shut against the howling winds. Ivan was slower to lower his weapon, and he put it away only once Mattie had embraced the woman waiting.

In Ida's imagination, Abigail was faceless, blank.

“She got right to the point,” said Ivan. “Abby doesn't like to waste time. She told us that she had a job for us.”

In Ida's mind, Ivan, standing opposite Abigail, was just as guarded and wary as he was when he was facing her.

“She told us that there was something she wanted us to steal off of Eris. Something from an armory, a box. She had all the information to get it: what the catalog number of the box was, which armory, where in the armory it would be, and the information about all the important employees.”

“She didn't tell you exactly what she wanted you to steal?”

“No,” said Ivan. “She knew that if she did, we would've refused to steal it.”

“How noble of you,” said Ida.

Ivan laughed. “That's not why. It would've been too dangerous to transport live bombs.”

“You just accepted the lack of information?”

“No,” Ivan said. “I questioned her. She wouldn't give me a straight answer.”

“And at no point during the long trip from Mars to Eris did you think about what she might be asking you to steal?”

Ivan quirked a rueful smile. “We assumed it was a box full of files or at worst ammunition.”

She could not tell whether he was being honest. “And when you were questioning her, did you ever ask her the source of all this information?”

“No,” Ivan said. “Whoever it was had hired a middleman or three for a reason. If Abby didn't tell me, I didn't ask, because I didn't want to know.”

“And Abby didn't volunteer the information,” said Ida, just to be sure.

“Of course not.”

“And of course she offered you a large payment for the completion of the job,” Ida said.

“She did,” said Ivan. “But that's not why we took it.”

Ida raised her eyebrows at him, and he raised his in mockery back at her.

“I didn't want to help her,” Ivan explained, “because we knew so little about what we were stealing and why. And because I didn't trust her.”

“Then why did you help her?” Ida asked.

“She told us she needed us,” said Ivan. “And that convinced Mattie.”

Ida wondered if Mattie's defection had been expected or if Ivan had been taken aback by it. If he'd been hurt or if he'd been resigned.

“And once she had Mattie,” Ivan said, “Abigail knew that she had me.”

Althea crawled back out of the mutilated
Annwn,
trying to step carefully over the mangled wires torn from the insides of the ship, but somehow she kept slipping, the wires tangling around her ankles, grabbing at her feet.

She finally stumbled out of the gaping door of the hollowed-out
Annwn,
hopping off the tangle of wires as soon as a clear patch of her own
Ananke
's floor presented itself to her. She sighed the moment she touched the metal. Now she could go back to her ship and spend the rest of the day focusing on that, on what was really important.

Domitian was hunched over the computer interface beside the doors leading out of the docking bay. Suppressing a sigh of a different kind, Althea diverted her steps to stand beside him.

“I'm having difficulty getting the computer to work,” Domitian said, seemingly as calm as usual, but Althea could hear the difference and winced at the evidence of his annoyance. She nudged her way in under his arm, driving him to back away, though he still stood over her, presumably looking at the screen.

“What do you want it to do?” Althea asked.

“Scan a photograph.”

“Is it in the tray?”

“It's in the tray.”

“O-kay.” Althea started small—there was always the chance that Domitian had been doing something stupid, and her computer was fine—and executed the normal command for a scan.

The machine all but exploded.

TEMPERATURE: 298 K

PRESSURE: 1 ATM

VOLUME: 308525.137…METERS CUBED

PARTICLE NUMBER:

PARTICLE NUMBER:

PARTICLE NUMBER:

The screen began to scroll with the open-ended query repeated over and over again. Althea tried everything she knew to stop it, but it had frozen and would not respond. She tried not to be frightened—it was probably just a superficial error, and there was no benefit to panicking or jumping to the wrong conclusions—but temperature, pressure, and volume were all quantities related to the
Ananke
's life support systems. Althea was sure she had fixed the error with the mechanical arm in the ventilation system, but if this was something different, if this was something worse—

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.