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“The trip to Eris is a month long,” said Ivan. “Do you want to hear the details of that, too?”

“Only if anything happened during it,” said Ida.

“No,” Ivan said, and Ida spared a glance at the polygraph. Truth, it said, but of course it had been saying that this entire time.

“What do you do during those trips?” she asked, leaning forward onto the cool brushed steel of the table. “To amuse yourselves. You and Mattie must get very bored.”

“We talk,” Ivan said. “We play games. We creatively reprogram our ship's computer. Whatever we think will pass the time. Sometimes I tell Mattie stories.”

It was a strange detail, a caring one. Ida wondered if Ivan realized how much of himself he had revealed with that tiny little detail. He had to know, she thought. So why had he told her?

Scheherazade,
she remembered. The nickname in parting. A revealing detail, certainly, but told to her in defense, out of necessity.

Leontios Ivanov did nothing by accident.

“You are a good storyteller,” said Ida. Ivan would understand her meaning perfectly, she knew; the camera would miss it entirely. “What kinds of stories do you tell?”

Ivan leaned back in his chair. She noted how he still did not flinch when he touched the doubtlessly cold back of the chair with his bare skin. His guard was far up.

“All kinds. Mattie didn't really go to school,” he said. “You probably have records of that. And when he did, he liked math and computers but not literature or history.”

Ida raised her brows. “So you tell him stories from history,” she said. “The plots of novels and poems.”

“Yes,” said Ivan.

“And once you reached Eris?” she asked.

“Once we reached Eris we did a short reconnaissance to make sure Abby's information was still correct. It was. Usually we'd spend longer planning a heist—a week or more—but Abby had gotten us all the information we needed, and we went in the next day.”

“And she got that information from her employer?” Ida asked.

“She must have,” Ivan said. “I didn't ask.” He gave her a look like he was daring her to challenge that.

Ida didn't. He had not yet dug a large enough hole for himself for her to begin to bury him.

“Could she have gotten it herself?” she asked.

Ivan snorted. “No. She's terrible with computers, and that's the only way she could've gotten that information. She might have gotten some of her other contacts to find it out for her, but there's no way to tell.”

“I see. Continue.”

“I went to talk to the secretary,” said Ivan. “Red hair in pigtails. She was cute. I don't remember her name; I think it was Irina…maybe Ursula…?”

“Unimportant,” said Ida.

“Alana,”
said Ivan, triumphant. “Her name was Alana. I talked to her for a bit. Softened her up.”

In the surveillance tapes, Ida knew, Alana with the pigtails blushed as red as her hair when Ivan leaned over the edge of her desk.

“I told her I was there from the System to examine their surveillance system,” Ivan said. “A surprise inspection. I had falsified credentials to back it up, and better than that, I could speak like this.”

In the white room, he slipped effortlessly into a deeper Terran accent, sharper, harder. In the surveillance, Alana with the pigtails had an accent that was broad and uncultured.

“She called her superior, of course, once she found out why I was there,” Ivan said, and the superior was a short balding man who came out of his office both scowling and looking nervous. “He'd been Terran once, too, but he'd spent so long on Eris, he was going native. What would you do, Ida, if all your representatives went native?”

“We are all members of the System, Ivan,” Ida said. “The Eridians are his people, too.”

Ivan smiled at her, scornful. “Of course. But he'd been true Terran System recently enough to doubt me. I only really convinced them who I was when I told them what I thought of them and their pathetic little moon.”

Ivan was slipping back into the sharp, terse Terran accent he'd used just a few moments before.

“I told them that the outer planets were a scar on the face of the System,” said Ivan, sounding haughty and cruel. “I told them that they had no control over their citizens. No true order. I told them that if the System had been wise, it would have destroyed all of them after Saturn tried to rebel, or put them under military control and kept it that way. They were a bunch of frozen, cold rocks, full of the stupid and the poor, who do nothing but beg for resources from our poor overtaxed Earth.”

Perhaps he was trying to impress her with his acting, with the degree of his duplicity. Ida let him perform.

He smirked at her nonetheless. “After that, they believed I was System through and through.”

Still he was performing.

“They let me into their main surveillance interface,” Ivan said. “Mattie had already snuck into the place as a janitor. No one pays attention to the janitor. We had agreed on a prearranged order of surveillance interference. I let him know I was ready by briefly flickering the lights in the hall and then went room by room, switching the surveillance off and back on again, ostensibly checking it for flaws but really allowing Mattie to get in and out of the restricted areas undetected.”

This part of the surveillance, of course, was full of holes, as Ivan did just as he said. Ida had watched it, fascinated, knowing that each time the camera turned off and then back on again, Matthew Gale had just passed unseen through that room. The timing was impeccable.

“I finished up, made my excuses, told them they would have their grading in a few days, and left to join Mattie in our rented vehicle. I wasn't concerned about being caught; it's nine hours at the speed of light between Earth and Eris, and by the time they found out I'd been a fraud, Mattie and I would be long gone from Eris.”

Ida remembered the footage. An outdoor camera had just caught Ivan walking into a van parked a street away from the armory. It recorded him sliding into the passenger side and turning to talk to the man in the driver's seat, Mattie Gale with his hair mussed from the janitorial hat he'd taken off.

“And when did you realize that you'd stolen bombs?” Ida asked.

“In the van as we were driving away,” Ivan said promptly. “We were going to rendezvous with Abby in an hour, so we just intended to drive to the rendezvous point immediately; it was out at the very edge of the terraforming shell. I went into the back of the van and got a crowbar—Mattie had one in the van, I don't know why; we couldn't possibly have used it, but I don't question the things he feels the need to carry around—and tore open the box. And inside,” Ivan continued, “I found, stacked all neatly together, a full box of Class 50 bombs.”

“And?”

“Mattie hadn't wanted me to open it,” Ivan said. “He thought we shouldn't know. But I didn't trust Abby, so I opened it, and once he saw what was inside, he stopped defending her, too. We got to the rendezvous point before her, driving very carefully.”

Planetary bodies like Eris, the ones that were too small or too inhospitable to be properly terraformed, had been encased or, as in Eris's case, partly encased in clear plastic enclosures like greenhouses. It was the only thing that could make them habitable, and so the enclosures were multilayered and strongly supported, with dozens of fail-safes and air locks all around them, and were divided into grids so that if one section failed, it could be separated from the rest. The only way into the enclosures was through man-made openings in them. In theory, all the openings should be System-manned; in practice, on far-off wild planetoids like Eris, they were little regulated if at all.

The explosion had taken place far from any of the towns, where the greenhouse enclosure touched the ground and dug deep into Eris's sooty stone, right where an unregulated air lock allowed access between the habitable area and the vacuum outside.

“The rendezvous was by an air lock,” said Ivan, “for easy escape if we needed it. I went into the air lock, and I placed the bombs there in a pile. And then, when Abby came, I blew them up.”

There was no footage of this; the cameras in that area of the enclosure had not been maintained. But the explosion had been real enough.

There was cleverness to Ivan planting the bombs in the air lock. They would blow the outer edge of the shell, which would trigger an alarm and slam shut the inner air lock, making a point without actually destroying the entire section of the enclosure or killing him and his companions.

“Mattie worked with you?” Ida asked.

“Mattie worked with me,” said Ivan.

“And Abby?” Ida tried to picture it: Ivan standing with that same wary defiance opposite the faceless figure of Abigail Hunter, but this time with Mattie beside him, looking…looking unhappy, she decided. Disappointed. Uncomfortable. But in the end standing with Ivan.

The corner of Ivan's lips twitched. “She was furious,” he said. “And Abby really can shout.”

“You told her why you did it.”

“Of course,” Ivan said. “It would've been useless otherwise. I told her we'd destroyed her merchandise because she'd endangered us both. I told her she wasn't allowed to lie to us or put us in danger without our knowing.”

“And she listened?”

“She listened,” Ivan said. “She just didn't obey.”

Ida smiled faintly. Ivan seemed to be waiting, or perhaps he thought he had come to the end of his story, so she said gently, “You didn't blow up all the bombs, of course.”

“No,” he said. “I saved one.”

“And you gave it to Abby,” Ida said.

“And I gave it to Abby,” said Ivan.

Ida leaned forward. “Why?”

“Because I wanted to complete the job,” Ivan said, “if only in token.”

Ida cast a quick glance at the polygraph. Still steady. “Another insult.”

“She took it that way,” Ivan agreed.

Ida folded her hands on the table, her elbow nudging the sharp edge of the polygraph display. “Are you aware that the very same kind of bomb that you stole on Eris that day was used to kill the Martian System representatives a year later?”

Ivan tilted his head to the side. “Are you suggesting that it was the same bomb?” he asked, patronizing, amused, incredulous.

Acting.

“You tell me,” Ida said.

Ivan huffed out a laugh and looked at her like she was being absurd.

“Do you realize the incredible improbability of that?” he asked, his brows down but his blue eyes wide. “The ridiculous impossibility of the single bomb that I held in my hand ending up in the hands of the Mallt-y-Nos a year later?”

“Not so improbable,” said Ida.

Ivan shook his head as if he were shaking off her insinuation. “Do you know how many bombs of that same type are in black market circulation?” he asked. Ida did, in fact, but the numbers had done little to sway her conviction. “Thousands, Ida,” Ivan said with his hands spread as wide as the chains would allow, his eyes searching her face. “Thousands. They're kept under System military control, but they're used for mining more often than murder, so they're not that hard to find, and if they're not hard to find, they're not hard to steal. And there are stockpiles of them in the strangest places.”

Ida did not get so far as opening her mouth, but Ivan threw his palms up at her, anticipating her question. “I haven't seen any of those places,” he said. “I've only heard of them. They found one on Haumea a few years back; do you remember? The planet's a penal colony now. Better fate than Saturn, but then again, the System had no reason to think anyone on Haumea was going to use those bombs against them.”

“They had every reason to think that,” Ida said. She had not been assigned to Haumea; it had been a near disaster. But bombs outside of direct System control and on an outer planetoid meant only one thing; that much was obvious.

“Every reason to think it, but no proof,” Ivan said. “Proof seems important to me, Ida.” He paused, studying her again. Ida knew she could hold up to any scrutiny, and so she let him look.

“Do you realize how much people hate the System?” he asked. “How much they
hate
it, completely hate it, not disagree with it on a few points but hate it actively and completely?”

Ida listened in silence and thought of how long Ivan had spent among the outer planets and around outer planetary men. He had forgotten what it was to be Terran.

“But they're also scared,” Ivan said, as if Ida did not realize that. “The System watches them always. Any slight transgression is punished. There is no mercy, and there is no freedom, and there is no opportunity to do anything about it. The people on the outer planets live in fear. The slightest act that seems to be against the System will destroy their home and kill everyone on their moon, all in the name of stamping out infection before it can spread. The number of people who would be willing to steal for the Mallt-y-Nos is
long
. The number of people she could have bought the bomb from is even longer. Hell, if she faked the right documents, she could have gotten the bomb legitimately, for mining.”

“I see your point, Ivan,” Ida said without conceding it.

“Even if it was the same bomb,” said Ivan, lowering his voice, frustration entering his tone, “my connection to her is at least three degrees long. I gave Abby the bomb, Abby either gave it to her benefactor—her employer was rich, which means he wasn't the Mallt-y-Nos—or her employer wouldn't take it, in which case she put it on the market, probably through an intermediary. If it made it to the Mallt-y-Nos, that bomb passed through so many hands, it no longer remembered mine, I promise you.”

Ida had read a play long before. She no longer remembered the play, only a line from it, and at the moment it seemed to fit. Ivan was protesting too much.