Lightless (14 page)

“Whatever you think of me,” said Ivan, “I don't want to die anonymously in some explosion on some petty dwarf planet.”

“But you would plant a bomb,” she said, her tone hard and sharp, “if you were paid enough.”

“No,” Ivan said, and he sounded so serious that for a moment she believed him. “I'm a thief, not a murderer.”

“Then what do you call the
Jason
?” Ida asked.

A strange shudder passed over his face, there and then gone just as swiftly. The polygraph measured a jump at the same moment.

“Mattie killed them,” said Ivan, flatly. “I just helped clean up after.”

There was no footage from the last moments of the
Jason;
Ida had hoped to catch him in weakness. There was weakness here, anyway, even if he hadn't killed the crew himself.

“So you're not a killer, then?” she asked.

“No.”

“You've got a soft heart,” she said, mocking, and he shot her a dangerous look.

“Yes,” he said, sarcastic.

“You don't want to kill anyone,” she said. “How good of you.” She paced back around to her empty chair.

“If you're trying to get at something, you're missing your mark,” he snapped.

“I don't miss my mark,” Ida snapped back, but he was holding firm against her, and she felt wrong-footed, unsteady. She took a breath and leaned down onto the table on her hands.

“Let's talk about Ceres, Ivan,” she said.

“We just did,
Ida
.”

“We're going to go over it again.”

By the time Althea reached the kitchen, Domitian was already there. The kitchen, with the adjoining mess hall, was long but narrow; the kitchen side of the room was cramped with cabinets and counters, the wide refrigerator wedged into a narrow space between counter and wall so that it was almost impossible to open all the way. A few feet away from the fridge was the door to the pantry, which was shut for the moment.

“You're sure of what you heard?” Domitian was asking Gagnon as Althea came in, one hand already on the butt of her gun.

“I'm positive,” Gagnon said. “I was getting breakfast before I went to relieve Althea. I was sitting right over there.” He gestured to the opposite end of the room, where the one dining table was welded to the steel wall. “From inside the pantry, I heard a crash.”

“You didn't investigate?”

“I didn't have my sidearm,” Gagnon admitted, and Domitian sighed but did not take the time to dress him down. “There's no way in or out of the pantry,” said Gagnon a trifle defensively. “Not with the maintenance shafts shut down again.”

Althea said, “Let's go in there, then.”

There must have been someone else on board the
Annwn,
someone Domitian hadn't found in his sweep of the ship. Althea felt almost elated. If there was someone on the ship, it would explain all the problems she'd been having with the computer. Whoever it was, he or she could have been coming out when there was no one around, taking a route that avoided all of the
Ananke
's working cameras, stopping at a computer terminal and undoing all the work that Althea had done, adding in more chaos and making it so that Althea couldn't possibly figure out—

“Stay back.” Domitian didn't bother with the knob. He simply kicked in the door. Althea followed him in, her gun out now and feeling awkward and too large in her hands.

The pantry was small; the vast majority of food supplies were stored in the base of the ship in a room kept in a vacuum. The pantry of ready food had only three rows of shelves with a clear line of sight to the opposite wall down each aisle, and Althea and Domitian swiftly covered all the space.

Her aisle was empty. “Clear.”

Domitian had lowered his gun. He cast her a look she couldn't read and set off down the aisle he had been checking. Gagnon shrugged at her, and Althea holstered her gun before following them both to the end aisle.

The walkway of this aisle was choked with boxes. Looming over the fallen pile was one of the
Ananke
's mechanical arms used to check the pantry supplies for expirations. As Domitian advanced, stepping carefully over the boxes, the robot arm blinked red at them and wheeled back a few paces before stopping and staying still.

“That's what I heard,” Gagnon said, gesturing at the pile.

Domitian turned his attention to Althea. Behind him, the robot arm's sensors blinked red at them again, and Althea understood perfectly.

“Ananke,” she said clearly. “Grab box 12, column 45, row 3.”

The robot arm whirred distressingly, then reached up for the requested box but overshot, knocking the box over to the left. It chattered back and forth in place, trying to get the box and succeeding only in knocking over the boxes in the entire area.

“I didn't hear the arm,” Gagnon said, palms out. “I didn't,” he insisted to Domitian.

“The localization is off,” Althea said. She thought of the problem with the robotic arm in the ventilation system, which she had not yet told the others about, but this was not the time to share that particular detail. She had fixed it, anyway. “The cameras in this room aren't working, so the arm has to rely on its internal sensors, and those aren't as reliable.”

She wondered if it was the same error that had spread to this mobile arm, if the errors in the
Ananke
were more closely connected with the mechanical limbs than she had expected or this was just another symptom of the deeper problem, if she should expect more of the robotic arms to begin to fail.

“Exactly!” said Gagnon. “The cameras in here aren't working!”

“Exactly what?” Domitian demanded. “There's no way in or out of this room, and there is no one in here.”

“There's the maintenance shafts,” said Gagnon.

Domitian's brows went up. “The maintenance shafts?” he said. “The maintenance shafts are shut down. Aren't they?”

“They are,” Althea said, “but I'll check.” Her initial fervor for the idea of a second stowaway had faded in the face of her concern over this continued malfunction, but she went to the computer interface embedded in the wall and did a quick check on the maintenance shafts.

Sure enough, the ship reported that the shafts were still shut down, uninhabitable, sealed. She tapped the screen and turned to look at Gagnon. “The computer reports no one has gone into or out of the maintenance shafts since Gale left the ship.”

Gagnon deflated. With circles beneath his eyes almost as dark as Althea knew hers were and with his long red hair coming out of its ponytail, he looked very tired and very unreliable, and Althea felt a surge of almost unreasonable frustration at this waste of her time.

“It was a machine malfunction,” she said. “It was just the computer.”

“Of course it was the damn computer,” Gagnon muttered. It was unfair, and Althea almost snapped at him, when there was the mechanized sound of an engine whirring and gears turning, and Domitian said sharply, “Hey.”

Althea turned in time to see the arm wheeling forward, extended, pincer hand opening and shutting, grasping, moving faster than she had thought it could. Domitian was behind it, and Gagnon was behind her, and the arm was heading straight for Althea.

She scarcely heard Domitian and Gagnon shouting, scarcely noticed them coming forward, their arms extended, reaching for the machine, for her, as she backed away into the wall and the arm still rushed forward. Gagnon came into her peripheral vision; the arm swung wildly and knocked him aside. Domitian was still shouting something, but all of Althea's attention was on the arm as it reached forward and the pincer fingers closed around strands of her hair.

Its momentum still drove it forward into the wall behind Althea, and the clenched robotic hand struck the wall with a hollow sound, Althea's hair sticking out of its grip as she leaned against the wall, trapped. The arm wheeled back a few centimeters, then forward again, striking the wall once more. It repeated the motion, rocking back and forth, striking the same spot on the wall while Althea stood very still.

“Al, come out of there,” Gagnon said. At their closest, the wheels of the arm's base came within a few centimeters of Althea's toes.

She spoke as calmly as she could. “It has my hair.”

The robotic arm struck the wall again, with more force this time, so that the entire panel Althea was leaning on rattled under her back.

Someone's hand gripped the robotic arm at the pivot of its wrist and managed to pull Althea's hair out of the machine's grip. As soon as she was free, she slipped under the arm and out as it slammed into the wall again.

There was a dent in the panel of the wall beside where Althea's head had been.

Domitian had been the one to free her, but Gagnon grabbed her as soon as she was free and pulled her back a little behind him. “Is the ship trying to kill us?” he asked, sounding half serious, as the arm rammed the wall again.

“The arm can't kill you,” Althea said. “Not without some serious modifications.”

“Yeah, but it—”

The arm swung around and advanced forward again, straight for Althea. Domitian moved forward as if he had some stupid idea about grabbing it, and Gagnon shouted and moved to push Althea further back, but Althea dodged them both and the swing of the ship's mechanical arm and got behind the arm, where she knew the switch was; she shut it down as she had done with the robotics in the ventilation system. The arm rolled to a stop, and its hinges went loose, the pincer hand dangling to point limply at the floor.

For a moment, none of them said anything; they only stood there, breathing heavily. Althea's mind ran at the speed of light through all the possible reasons the ship could have gone so violently awry.

Domitian said, “Until you can find out what caused that and fix it, all the autonomous arms need to be shut down.” Althea sighed but nodded. One error was a fluke; a second was the beginning of a pattern.

“What, all of them?” Gagnon asked. “They're all over the ship.”

“That's why they need to be shut down,” Domitian said. “In case any of them are malfunctioning the way this one is.”

“Yeah, but you can't just shut them down,” said Gagnon. “Our workload will triple if we have to take on all the duties that the arms usually perform.”

“I think in this case it is better that we play it safe,” said Domitian. “Althea?”

The first error in the robotic arms had been merely frightening, not actually dangerous, but the second error—no matter how accidental and probably unreproducible—nearly had injured her.

She did not want a third error to harm anyone in the crew.

“If this is what they're doing,” said Althea slowly, her eyes on the still, hulking figure of the disconnected arm, “we can't let them run.”

The rest of the interrogation proceeded fruitlessly. After she ordered Domitian to return Ivanov to his cell, Ida returned to her room, sat down, and breathed.

She needed some perspective. Certainly, Ivan's story had gone nowhere, and she had come close to catching him only to fail. That was a disappointment. But she was by no means out of options. She would check surveillance footage on Ceres to find any discrepancies in Ivan's story, though she doubted there would be any.

More important, the case for Abigail Hunter's connection to the Mallt-y-Nos had grown significantly. She at least could report that to her superiors and intensify the manhunt. Even for someone as careful as Abigail, for whom the System did not even have a recent photograph, there was only so long she could hide.

And Ivan had slipped up. She was certain he hadn't intended to mention the events on Ceres at all and had brought them up inadvertently in trying to make her believe his alibi for another event. If she could make him slip up once, she could make him slip up again, and sooner or later, she would catch him.

She had ordered Domitian to join her once he was finished settling Ivanov in place. It was time to move to the next stage of her interrogation, and for that she would need him.

The next stage of the interrogation would require a good deal of preparation. Ida took out a pad of paper and a pen while she waited and began to make a list.

The first name was obvious: MATTHEW GALE. She wrote it down.

The list of connections between the two men on the System database was long and detailed, their partnership spanning without a break a full ten years. She checked her mail again for updates on Gale, but there was nothing, and so beside his name she wrote LOCATION UNKNOWN (DECEASED).

ABIGAIL HUNTER was next. The list of connections between her and Ivan was sporadic at best, but Ida was strengthening the connection. Abigail was at this point her best lead, and so it was a pity that she had to write LOCATION UNKNOWN beside the mysterious woman's name.

MILLA IVANOV, Ivan's mother. To all appearances she and Ivan had not been in contact for ten years, since Ivan had run away from home and never gone back. Ida had her doubts on the subject but little in the way of proof. In any case, Milla Ivanov, according to her query to the System, although a resident of New York, Earth, was currently vacationing on OLYMPUS MONS, MARS.

The last on the list was CONSTANCE HARPER. Her connections to Ivan had been added retroactively by the System following her interrogation a few months earlier, but she had not had contact with him since then. Ida doubted that as much as she doubted the same thing of Milla Ivanov. Constance, Ida knew, was in a little town at the edge of the VALLES MARINERIS, MARS.

Ida put the pen to the side and considered the list for a long moment. She held in her hand a complete list of all the people in the universe Leontios Ivanov cared for.

For a moment a strange feeling struck her, the same feeling she always got just before she saw a pattern in evidence. She could not say what it was about this simple list of people and places that triggered that curious sense of standing on a precipice and looking over the edge into the emptiness below, waiting for the truth to come.