Lightless (18 page)

“Exactly,” he said, and smiled. “Anyway, Mattie was impressed…” Ivan laughed and started again. “Impressed by something, anyway. He came over to chat me up, but I realized pretty quickly that he'd noticed what I was doing and found out that what he wanted was to team up.”

“Just like that?”

“He had a particular heist in mind,” said Ivan. “And he'd been looking for a good partner. Mattie's got a lot of talent, but his words-to-mouth program is faulty. If he needs to think on his feet, he better be using his feet and not trying to talk his way out of anything.”

All of this was only feeding Ida's frustration that Gale had been allowed to escape before she arrived. And now he was dead, his corpse floating somewhere in interplanetary space, drifting slowly toward the sun, and she would never be able to interrogate him.

“In the end,” Ivan said, “he talked me into it.”

“Why did you agree?” Ida asked. “You didn't know him. He was a stranger who came up to you and called you out for being a con man.”

“He didn't call me out,” said Ivan.

“Tried to pick you up, then.”

Ivan grinned. “He did try to pick me up,” he said. “Gave up on that pretty quickly, though.”

“So why did you say yes?”

Ivan seemed to think about it. After a moment, though, he shrugged. “I liked him.”

“Why? You spoke to him for five minutes.”

Ivan made a face. “I'm not that easy. He worked on me for longer than that.”

“Why did you like him?”

“Do you like anybody, Ida?” Ivan asked, and it was a strange enough question to make her briefly uneasy, but she rationalized that the strangeness of his question was simply a reaction to the way she had phrased hers.

“Of course I do,” she said.

“And could you say exactly why you like them?”

“Of course,” said Ida. She kept logical little lists in her head, reasons to like a person, why they were useful in one column, reasons to dislike them in another.

“Of course you do,” said Ivan drily, and Ida thought to ask him what precisely he meant by that but could not quite bring herself to ask, and Ivan continued. “I just did. He was interesting. He was entertaining. I had never pulled off a heist before, and here one had fallen into my lap. So I went with him.” He smiled again. “Turned out his instincts were right. We got along so well and worked together so well that we've kept working together ever since.”

“Without any problems?” Ida asked, all polite doubt.

“There are always problems,” said Ivan. “But Mattie's easy to get along with. And he's very useful—an incredible thief and a lot of connections. Criminal connections, Ida, not terrorist.”

“I hadn't even asked,” Ida said.

“I could see that look in your eyes,” said Ivan. “You were going to. Mattie doesn't have any terrorist connections, just a hell of a lot of criminal ones.”

“Why wouldn't he? It seems like terrorists could be useful people to know, if not to work with.”

“You would think that,” Ivan said drily. “No. Mattie likes having fun. He likes taking a risk and getting out of it with his own skill. Terrorists aren't fun. And Mattie is easygoing. He doesn't have the kind of single-minded commitment to live for a cause like that. Besides,” he concluded with what seemed like genuine feeling, “terrorists kill, and Mattie's not a murderer.”

It was curious of him to forget, given that he was the one who had told Ida about it.

“What about the
Jason
?” Ida asked, and watched his reaction closely.

It gave him pause, at least.

“That was different,” Ivan said. “Mattie's life was in danger.”

“From the entire crew?” Ida asked, amused. “You don't think perhaps he might have stopped at one? Or two? Or three, or four? He needed to kill all sixty?”

“He was injured and alone,” said Ivan. “He had one chance to escape, and it involved killing them all. He shut off the life support on most of the ship. Tell me, how was he supposed to instruct the vacuum to pick and choose?”

Ivan was very serious. He meant it, Ida thought; he really meant it. Ida wondered how he had reconciled that protective loyalty with his decision to abandon Mattie in the first place.

“What do you have in common?” she asked with genuine curiosity. “A rich boy from Earth who ran away and a poor boy from Miranda?”

Ivan said, “Companionship.”

“Not a shared cause?” asked Ida.

Ivan looked exasperated.
“No.”

“You're very certain.”

“We spend almost every minute of our time together,” said Ivan. “I know what he does and doesn't do, who he knows and doesn't know.”

“And you're never separated,” said Ida.

“Except when we have to be for a job, or for a few hours for our sanity.”

“And yet he left you now,” said Ida.

Ivan swallowed. He said, “After the
Jason
and Europa—”

“Europa was eight years ago,” Ida pointed out. “Surely the two of you—”

“Europa established boundaries,” Ivan said, each word snapping out precise, heavily Terran. “Help each other when we can, but otherwise each puts himself first.”

There was a logic to it that appealed to Ida. If she ever were to spend ten years of her life with someone, she would like to have the same rule established between them. But other people were not like her. Other people were weak, even Ivan. And she doubted that Matthew Gale had run because of a betrayal nearly a decade old that he seemed to have forgiven already, shortly after it happened, as he had returned to working with Ivan.

“That seems rather cold to me,” said Ida, “for someone as friendly as Matthew Gale.” Ivan made a face at the word “friendly,” but Ida did not take it back. “Perhaps he left you because he had something better to do.”

“Yeah,” said Ivan. “Live.”

“Or perhaps he had better secrets to hide.”

Ivan gave her a long, cold look, and this time did not deign to answer.

Ida started to pace again behind the bars of her long-unused chair, listening to the sound of her heels ringing out throughout the room. “Tell me more about Mattie's connections.”

“Since they're not relevant,” Ivan said, “I'd rather not turn a rat.”

“You are a rat,” Ida said. “You and Gale both. You betrayed each other. I want to know about your connections. Did you often get jobs through Mattie's friends?”

“Sometimes,” said Ivan.

“Abigail was one of them.”

“Yes, she was.”

“What about your connections?” Ida asked. “Did you have any connections Mattie didn't?”

Ivan looked away. She watched him as he seemed to struggle for a moment.

“Abby,” he said finally.

“What?” Ida asked, coming closer.

He rested his hands on the very edge of the table. “After a time, Abby became my contact, not Mattie's.”

“But she was Mattie's foster sister.”

“When she was
eight,
” said Ivan.

“I thought you hated her.”

“In a manner of speaking.”

Ida looked down at him, his chains stretched to the limit so that he could grip the edge of the table, and wondered why he would tell her such a thing.

“Were you sleeping with her?” she asked.

A pause. “Obviously,” he said.

Not obviously, though Ida saw the signs now. She suspected the real reason for his confession was to separate Mattie from Abigail. Interesting indeed.

“Does Mattie have any connections that you don't know about?” she asked.

Ivan all but rolled his eyes. “Well, I wouldn't know, would I?”

“I mean that he doesn't let you meet,” Ida said. “That he doesn't know you know about. Anyone he is hiding.”

Ivan leaned in toward her, as close as he could get. He said, “No.”

“Could he be keeping any secrets like that?”

“No,”
said Ivan.

“I want you to give me a list of all of Mattie's most important connections,” Ida said.

“I can't do that.”

“Yes, you can, and you will,” she said, “because you have to.”

Ivan took in a deep breath.

“I don't know their last names,” he said.

“Is that a lie?”

“It's the truth,” he snapped.

Ida, slow and deliberate, said, “Names.”

“Adina,” said Ivan. “River. Charles. Nora. Ling. Farrah.”

“Is that all?” She knew most of those names; some of them were currently in System custody.

“Anji, Christoph, Abby. How far do you want me to go?” Ivan snapped. “Do you want me to name every criminal in the outer planets?”

“Does he know every criminal?”

“He knows a damn lot of them,” Ivan said.

“What is he to you?” Ida asked, keeping him on edge, unsteady. “Matthew Gale. Is he your coworker? Your friend? Your lover? Brother? Little brother? Tell me, what is he to you?”

“He's Mattie,” Ivan said.

Little brother, perhaps, Ida thought. Ivan was protective of him the way he hadn't been of Constance Harper.

But then again, perhaps not.

“You realize that he's dead, do you not?” she asked, and Ivan looked away. She watched a muscle in his jaw tighten. “The escape pod he abandoned you in has no form of propulsion, and he was aimed nowhere in particular. There was no one around to pick up his pod. He is dead by now, dead for a week, suffocated or starved.”

Ivan would not look at her.

“There's no need to protect him,” Ida said. “He is dead.”

“I'm not protecting anyone,” said Ivan.

“I think you are,” said Ida. “You have been connected to the Mallt-y-Nos. That means that Matthew Gale has been connected to the Mallt-y-Nos. The two of you do, after all, go everywhere together. The connection is undeniable. But if you are telling the truth and you have no connection to her, then that means that Mattie must—”

“We do not have any connection to the Mallt-y-Nos!” said Ivan. He was looking at her again now, glaring, his fingers clenched bloodless on the edge of the table. “Is it so impossible to you that for once you might be wrong?”

Ida smiled and leaned in closer, just out of reach of his chained arms.

“You're singing a different tune now than you were before,” she said. “You said it yourself: I am the woman who is never wrong.”

He looked up at her without speaking, breathing with such evenness in and out through his nose that it had to be deliberate. She cherished it, his tension. He was strung so tightly that she could almost feel it in the air she inhaled; it was like running her tongue over the tautness of a harp string.

She was about to speak, ready to speak, ready to turn the subject to the last of Ivan's friends, the one she had been waiting to ask about all this time, the one she knew he knew she would ask about next, the best lead that she had: Abigail Hunter.

The name was on her tongue, Ivan's eyes were fixed on her face, and then someone knocked at the door.

She didn't believe it at first, too caught up in this moment of her interrogation to comprehend that someone could dare to interrupt her.

The knock came again. She straightened slowly, holding Ivan's gaze, and just as she broke it, the knock came a third time, a little more insistently, as if the knocker thought she might not have heard.

She crossed the white room and went to the door. When she opened it, Gagnon stood there with one hand upraised, as if he had just been debating whether he should knock once more.

“Yes?” she said pleasantly, but he looked as wary as if she had raised her hand for a blow. His eyes were shadowed, his clothes rumpled, his cheeks unshaven, and it was plain he had been roused recently from sleep. She felt a surge of contempt for him.

“Captain Domitian needs to speak to you,” he said.

“It's urgent?” Ida asked with a delicate and unmistakable threat in the word.

“Yes, ma'am. He's in the piloting room.”

She held up one finger to him, and he stood still and silent while she turned back around and walked back to Ivan, who was sitting tense and alone. She and Gagnon had been speaking too softly for him to hear.

When she came up behind him, she laid a hand very lightly on his shoulder. Beneath her fingers, she felt the hardness of his tensed muscles, the bow of his collarbone. It was the first time she had touched him. He did not look to her.

“Pardon me,” she said softly. “We'll continue this conversation shortly.”

He said nothing and did not look at her as she walked away.

When she passed Gagnon in the doorway again, she said, “Watch him. Do not leave this room. Do not speak to him. I will be back.”

Ida strode toward the piloting room with all the dire tension of her interrupted interrogation still shaking in her hands. She was annoyed at the interruption but not furious. Ivan was in a precarious state, and leaving him to stew and to stress, going over in his head obsessively how he next would lie, might work to her advantage.

When Ida reached the piloting room, she found that Domitian was not alone. The mechanic, with her curly hair affray, was pacing in the narrow space of the piloting room when Ida arrived. She stopped once Ida entered, turning her wide brown eyes on her. There were shadows beneath them. It was no wonder the
Ananke
was not fixed, Ida thought, if the mechanic refused to sleep.

“You wished to speak to me?” Ida said, dismissing the mechanic to address Domitian, who was standing beside the door as if he had been waiting for her to arrive.

“Doctor Bastet has information,” said Domitian with a nod at the mechanic. Ida, with thin patience, turned to face the other woman.

She was still watching Ida with those round brown eyes. “I got into the
Annwn,
” said Althea Bastet.