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Ida walked toward Constance and opened the door for her. Constance, whose tears had been wiped away but whose eyes still were red, stepped into the hallway. Gagnon was waiting; he slipped into the room as Domitian came out to escort Ida and Constance back to the docking bay.

Constance was silent on the long walk back. Ida was still riding on the pleasure of the interactions she had provoked, and so she let Constance stew in silence. Besides, Constance had served her purpose: she had unsettled Ivan, had frightened him, had shown him the extent of Ida's control. Ida had no more use for the woman.

When Ida opened the doors to the docking bay, they were greeted by a strange muffled sound. Constance did not seem troubled by it, but it put Ida on edge. Perhaps the computer was malfunctioning again. The doors to space were just overhead; if they should open, Ida would suffocate—

The nearer they walked to Constance's ship, however, the louder the sound became, and Ida realized she was hearing the muffled barking of a dog, a frantic sound, as if the dog was terrified of something that Ida could not see. Constance opened the door to her ship, and the barking became suddenly loud, ringing out throughout the docking bay, echoing sharply off of the ceiling, the walls, the disemboweled
Annwn
sitting sullenly in the corner.

“Quiet,” Constance said, but the dog did not stop barking. “Quiet!” she ordered again, and the dog whined.

“Good-bye, Miss Stays,” Constance said, and Ida nodded her permission for her to leave. Constance swung the door to her ship shut.

Muffled by the metal, the dog resumed its frantic barking.

Constance Harper left the ship with little difficulty until the minute the
Janus
had passed through the
Ananke
's open maw, and then, for the third time that day, the
Ananke
's alarms began to wail.

The latent fury over the persisting malfunctions of the ship rose up again in Ida and filled her from top to toe. She said coldly and calmly to Domitian, “If your ship persists in this state, I will have your damned mechanic shot.”

She knew that Domitian was looking at her sharply, but she could not trouble herself to see what his expression might be.

The alarm shut off again. Over the intercom Althea Bastet said, “Sorry. It was the two extra life-signs again.”

Ida controlled her rage, turned on her heel, and went back down the hallway.

It was time for her to speak to Ivan.

As she walked, all her excitement and all her fury seemed to merge, until by the time she opened the door to the white room, her hands were shaking with it.

Ivan, too, was shaking. She could see, as she crossed that vast space, that his hands were trembling in their chains. “Go,” Ida said to Gagnon, who was lingering uncertainly. “I don't need you anymore.” She hardly noticed him leave, she was so focused on Ivan's bent back.

Just as Ida reached the table and the door swung shut on Gagnon, Ivan said, “Are you happy?”

“Happy?” Ida asked, and came into view of his face.

He was furious. It sent a thrill through her that she had in some way broken into his head, into his heart.

“I'm frightened,” he said. “You've scared me. Are you happy?”

“I don't want your fear. What I want is the truth.”

“What you want is my submission,” Ivan snarled. “Are you happy? You've made me admit I'm afraid.”

That was not what she wanted.

That was not at all what she wanted.

“It didn't do you any good, though, did it?” Ivan asked, leaning toward her, his eyes seeming to glow with his anger, his fingers flexing uselessly against the arms of his chair. “You haven't gotten any information. You achieved nothing. Did you expect to walk in here and find me ready to confess?”

She had achieved his fear. She had gathered a good deal of information—information that she doubted would result in a lead—but still, she had risked her career and her reputation to achieve his fear, to make him confess, and he would confess. He would. He had to. She had no other recourse; she had come too far to go back. He had to confess or she would have nothing.

But there he was, glaring at her, confessing nothing.

“You have nothing,” he said. “You know nothing. I know nothing, and I will tell you
nothing
. And the Mallt-y-Nos will burn you all.” There was despair mixed with the hate in his voice, and that was what lingered in the echoes in the white room as the silence between them stretched out long and taut.

There were so many things she wanted to say to him. He would break, she was certain, if only she could say them.

With one finger Ida reached over and flicked off her System-mandated surveillance camera, leaving her and Ivan unobserved, since of course the camera in the white room was not working.

“Think about the things that I can do,” she said to him, into the unwatched, unobserved silence, and the total freedom to speak almost choked her with all the things she would have liked to say. “Think about the people I can hurt if you will not tell me what I want to know.”

“Go to hell.”

“I will send your mother to rot in prison,” Ida said. “I will send Constance back to Miranda without money, without friends, without a chance at a better life, all the things she hates. I will have Abigail shot. And when I find Matthew Gale's corpse, I will bring it here and lay it on this table before you so that you can watch him rot.”

“And what good will any of that do you,” Ivan asked, “if I have nothing to say?”

He was angry now, but the fear would set in soon, the fear that would make him bow to her, that would make him bend. She knew it would. It would have to.

“Think on it,” she said, and strode out with her hands shaking with a rage she could not fully understand or control, leaving him alone in the white room to think and to fear, helpless and chained.

The camera in the white room was working. The crew of the ship and the System itself could not see what the camera saw, but the camera was recording, and the ship saw.

In the white room, Ivan sagged over the brushed steel table and breathed. He was alone, by the ship's records, for the first time in eight days.

After a long time, Leontios Ivanov raised his head. The
Ananke
watched him sit upright, the wires tugging at his skin in reaction to the sudden shift in position.

Ivan was very still and silent, as if listening for something.

Whatever it was, he did not hear it.

Cautious, too quiet, Ivan said, “Mattie?”

There was no response. Ivan hesitated, then tried again, louder, “Mattie?”

The vast white room was silent still.

“Mattie?” Ivan called. “Mattie?” But the white room remained empty, and he received no response.

The entropy (or chaos, or disorder) of an isolated system may never decrease.

Because of this, the laws of nature are irreversible, and an increase in disorder unavoidable.

The
Ananke
was made of metal, but men had built her. All things men create have some aspect of humanity in them, for men are incapable of creating the truly alien. And so the
Ananke
was made of metal, but all her parts were analogous to flesh.

The cameras were her eyes, the hallway her spine, the computer her brain, the layers of metal and carbon that shielded her insides from the vacuum of space were her skin. And the dark hungry emptiness inside the hollow of her rib cage that took all light and air and in impossibility devoured them forever, that was the
Ananke
's beating heart.

Through her cameras the
Ananke
could watch simultaneously Ida Stays in her room working with dark lips and a dark expression, Ivan in his cell leaning his forehead against the gray wall, Althea—always most importantly Althea—bowed over an interface, trying futilely to understand. The
Ananke
could watch, but the
Ananke
could not speak, and so, like an infant wailing to its mother, unable to express in more detail what had gone wrong, the
Ananke
's alarms wailed day and night, and the crew did not sleep.

There was something Ida was missing.

The consciousness of the fact that there was some connection she was failing to make haunted her and had haunted her for the last long few days since Constance Harper and Milla Ivanov had left the ship. Her interrogation of Ivan had taken on an air of futility—what he knew, he was not telling, and she no longer felt she was advancing closer to the final truth.

The Mallt-y-Nos had not attacked again yet, but everyone knew that she would. There had been a dozen other minor uprisings on the outer planets—most subdued, but some of the moons were still breaking out in sporadic violence. The System had just arrested a man with a stockpile of weaponry, and as he'd been taken into custody, he'd shouted to the watching crowd that the Wild Hunt was beginning. Titania was still defiant; the System was contemplating total depopulation. The state of the outer solar system was not beyond what the System could handle, but it was incomprehensible that it had gotten this far—and there would be more. This was the prelude; the Mallt-y-Nos had not yet struck her primary blow. The System had almost its entire military out by Jupiter and Neptune and Uranus and the planetoids, waiting, but what they really needed was information. Ida needed to give them information. But she had none. If she failed—if she failed—if she failed—

Humiliation and fear warred in her breast. Intelligence agents did not retire. If she failed, she would lose her livelihood and likely her life. To prison for crimes against the state—disobedience and squandering of System resources, probably—or to exile on some planetoid that was like a prison. Either would be followed by a discreet death, she was certain. She knew too much. If she failed, first humiliation before all, then the final loss of any power she had, even over her own life—

This couldn't be it. She couldn't be wrong. There was something she was missing.

“I want to go over the events on Ganymede again,” Ida said, pacing, pacing. Her heels rang out through the vast white room.

“Why?” Ivan asked. The alarms had been keeping him awake, as they had the rest of the crew. He was pale and shadowed with too little sleep, as Ida knew she herself was. “You've already asked me about that.”

“And I'm asking you again.”

Ivan laughed. He had long since ceased to pretend to be pleasant to her, and his laughter now was vicious, taunting.

“What point would that serve? I've told you everything I can,” he said. “And you've verified it all. You have, or you'd be asking me more detailed questions.”

Ida stood and looked at him, at his handsome face, and his blue eyes, and his pallor, and wished with sudden, overwhelming keenness that she could
hurt
him again the way she had with Milla, the way she had with Constance.

But she already had played her hand where Milla and Constance were involved, and Mattie was dead and Abby was missing still.

Ivan said, mocking, his eyes bright, brilliant with exhaustion and anger, “Why won't you just admit that you're wrong, Ida?”

Ida said, “I am not wrong,” with all the surety she possessed, but the worm of doubt was hollowing out her chest, and Ivan's expression seemed to show that he knew it.

“Now,” said Ida. “Ganymede.”

That day's interrogation was as useless as all the others had been. At the end of it, Ida left Ivan alone in the white room, chained to his chair. She could leave him to sit there alone forever if she wanted to. Perhaps, when she went back to him, Ivan would be so tired and humiliated and dehydrated that he would bow to whatever she said. Once Ida had her proof, the System would be so relieved that they wouldn't look too closely at how she'd obtained it. She knew that for a fact.

Ida was so caught up in her thoughts that for a few seconds she did not notice when, all over the
Ananke,
without any warning or reason, the lights went out.

The lights keeping the halls bright went out; all the lights marking the instrument panels went dark. The steel walls lost their gleam. Ida found herself suddenly in a vast black nothing-space, unlit by sun or star, no walls visible, the total blackness of empty space without a star, of the view from the horizon of a black hole.

She went very still.

Ida was a planetary woman. She knew—she had seen it proved in math, in words—that the apparent safety of a planet's solid ground beneath her feet was based on precisely the same physical laws that described the construction of a spaceship, that there was no real difference between the solidity of dirt beneath her feet and the hollowness of sculpted carbon and iron. She knew this for the fact that it was, but Ida Stays was a planetary woman, and it was with a planetary woman's fear that she froze in the darkness, because Ida did not believe in God, did not believe in any gods at all, only the cold fact of existence and man's ability to work within the inflexible laws of nature, but somehow she, so human, so unmechanical, somehow she trusted the engineer that had constructed the planets far more than the human ones who had built the ships that flew between them.

Here, in the dark of the hallway, with the image of civilization—and human control—vanished, where all Ida knew was that she was not on some planet but was on a man-made structure and its first output (let there be light) had failed, and she was afraid, and that was the worst thing of all: the utter loss of her power, destroyed by as insignificant a thing as the loss of light.

But then again, perhaps the heat would be next to go, or the air, and Ida would freeze in the cold emptiness of space. Perhaps she was already out in space now, for the space around her, unbounded by light, with the walls and floor and ceiling all invisible, could have stretched out to infinity.

No, Ida thought with a deep chill of fear that was animal in its intensity, space would have stars. She was not in space. Perhaps the containment fields at the center of the ship had failed and the hollowness there, the emptiness that could not be filled, had swelled up and devoured all in its path, and Ida, too, and next, next it would swallow up the planets, the sun, and then, with redshifted photons howling, it would devour the solar system entirely—

Light, flickering eerie light from behind her that touched on the walls and made them exist again. Ida took gulping breaths.

The flashlight shook and wavered and bounced up and down and came nearer, and something rushed past Ida, knocking her into the wall and taking the flashlight with her, while Ida stood and gasped and could not make herself move.

Althea Bastet was holding the little light; Ida recognized her by the wiry silhouette of her hair. Althea pushed into a room just ahead of Ida in the hallway, and Ida blindly followed the faint glow of that light, unwilling to be left in the dark any longer.

Ida found Althea kneeling before the machine as if in prayer, the flashlight cast down beside her and illuminating the floor. Ida gripped the frame of the door and watched as Althea touched the machine, and the computer brightened into a glow. Althea tapped away at the machine like a pianist playing a soundless song, and by the time Ida took her next shaking breath, the lights flared suddenly, brilliantly back on.

It was too bright, all that lost light returned at once. Ida had to squeeze her eyes shut and shield her face. When she dared to open her eyes again, blinking reddened afterimages away, Althea was still kneeling in front of the computer, frowning.

“What was that?” Ida asked, and was startled by the hoarseness of her voice.

Mercifully, Althea did not seem to notice. “I don't know yet,” she muttered. “I'll figure it out.” It sounded as if she were speaking half to Ida and half to herself, as if her words were rote, well learned, well rehearsed.

The glow of the machine on Althea's face was bland, innocent, mechanical. Ida ran a hand down her own face and tried to regain her composure.

“Fix it,” she ordered with almost enough force to hide the trembling in her tone, and Althea looked at her in surprise, as if she'd just realized, really, that Ida was right there.

Without another word, Ida left Althea inside the machine room and proceeded toward her room.

Domitian met her there some time after he had been intended to, but in light of the difficulties with the ship, Ida let his lateness pass. It had given her time to recover some of her composure, at least.

“I need this ship repaired immediately,” Ida snapped the moment he stepped in. “I don't care how. This is unacceptable. This is an embarrassment. Your mechanic is
incompetent,
criminally incompetent.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Don't ‘yes, ma'am' me,” said Ida. “I want it
fixed
.” She would have Doctor Bastet punished, but first she needed the ship to function.

“I will ensure that it is,” Domitian said with enough force that she knew he meant it.

“Good.”

Domitian asked, “Is there some other reason you wanted me here, Miss Stays?”

Ida looked at him, so solid and loyal and dependable, and sighed.

“The interrogation is not going well,” she admitted. “It may be that I will be required to transport Ivanov to the surface of Pluto. We should discuss those arrangements later this week, provided, of course, that your mechanic has managed to repair the ship by that point in time.” Or if they even made it to Pluto, Ida thought. If the Mallt-y-Nos attacked again, it was likely that the System would have the
Ananke
return to Earth. Already the System had required the
Ananke
to report its location on the hour; it was only the ship's considerable firepower and the enormous expense of its mission that had persuaded the System to allow it to continue on. As for taking Ivan off the ship, if Althea Bastet had not managed to fulfill the basic role of her position by the time they reached Pluto or by the time the Mallt-y-Nos attacked, thus making it possible for Ivan to leave the premises, the System would have to become involved. A part of Ida was pleased at the thought of finally seeing the damn mechanic reprimanded, but she knew that if she had achieved nothing by the time they reached Pluto, more of the System's attention was the last thing she wanted. Her failure would be clear and obvious enough without being the subject of an investigation.

“Yes, ma'am,” Domitian said, but although this time Ida turned her back on him in dismissal, he did not leave.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Miss Stays,” said Domitian in a softer tone, “if you'll allow me. Over the past days I have seen that you are a brilliant interrogator and loyal to the System. If you think that Ivanov knows something, then I have no doubt that he truly does.”

That Domitian saw that in her strengthened something inside of Ida that she had not known needed strengthening. For a wild moment, she had the impulse to tell him the truth: that the System did not believe her theory about Gale and Ivanov knowing the Mallt-y-Nos, that Ida herself was near ruin if she could not break Leontios Ivanov immediately.

The impulse passed, strange and irrational, and Ida cast it from her mind.

“Of course he does,” Ida said. “There's something I'm missing, but he does know.” An idea was forming in her head. “If I start from the beginning,” she said, to herself, not to Domitian, “without any preconceptions, perhaps I'll find it…”

“Permission to leave, Miss Stays?”

“Granted,” Ida answered absently, and hardly heard the door shut. Instead, she sat down before her computer and started from the beginning.

Althea had run out of ideas. Althea had nothing left to try. Althea did not know what to do.

“Come on, calm down, shh,” she crooned at the computer like a mother trying to soothe her colicky baby, but the alarm continued to wail inconsolably. “Please, Ananke, shh.”

She had gone through all the usual sources. The manual override wasn't working, and she could not find the source of the error, and she could not figure out why the ship was crying out, just as she could not understand why all the lights had gone off.

“Ananke,
please,
” she begged, and the alarm cut out abruptly, as meaninglessly as it had begun. She had done nothing to stop it. She had done nothing to start it in the first place. She did not understand, and she didn't know what else to do.

She leaned her head against the wall of the ship and, with no one but the
Ananke
to see her, with nothing to distract herself from her frustration and her humiliation and her despair, started to cry.

A light shone through her closed lids; when Althea opened her eyes, the nearest holographic terminal was lit up, glowing red, a flickering shape appearing and disappearing in the terminal, there and gone before Althea's eyes could make out its shape, but for an instant it looked like an image of the last hologram the ship had received: the face and figure of Ida Stays.