Lightless (30 page)

Ivan's voice was low, sincere. “The ship is alive.”

The
Ananke
watched Althea as she stormed from the white room and out into the hall. For a short stretch of hall she kept up her wrathful stride before she slowed, and it became apparent that she had had no real destination in mind.

She went to one of the computer terminals lining the walls and began to dig around in the
Ananke
's head again, looking for a flaw that wasn't there. Her allotted hour was nearly up by the time she sighed and pulled back from the screen, laying her head against the wall and closing her eyes.

Althea raised her head.

“Ananke,” she said into the air, her eyes cast up in the instinctive way all humans do when they address a divinity. “Ananke, if what he said was…If you can hear me.”

She swallowed. The hallway was empty. There was no one around to listen to Althea's madness—no one but the
Ananke
.

“Answer me,” Althea said, and with her gaze she found one of the ship's cameras and looked straight into it as if it were an eye. “If you can hear me, let me know.”

The computer screen beside her flashed. Althea turned to look down at it.

“Ananke?” she whispered.

The number 1 appeared on the screen.

For a moment Althea was baffled. Then she understood.

“One for true, zero for false,” she said, then shook her head, hardly able to believe what she was considering.

“That's not enough,” she said to Ananke. “Tell me if you can hear me, Ananke.”

TRUE, said the screen.

While Althea stared in wonder, caught still on the edge of disbelief, the machine paused, almost as if it were thinking, as if it were reconsidering.

TRUE blinked out, and Ananke said instead,

YES, I CAN HEAR YOU.

There was nowhere on the ship that Ananke couldn't see.

“She's not responding on the intercom,” said Gagnon, who was still in the control room with Domitian, ignorant of an intelligence watching. “And I can't get the
Ananke
's computer to tell me where she is, either.”

Domitian sighed.

“Can't get the computer to do much of anything, actually,” Gagnon said, frowning down at the machine.

Ananke could not keep his hands off of her skin or dials or screens, but she could make certain he got nothing out of it. And so she had responded in only the most rudimentary ways to his attention.

“We've given her an hour and a half,” Domitian growled.

“You have,” Gagnon corrected absently, still bent over Ananke's interface, as if she would help him who wanted to kill her. “
You've
given her an hour and a half,” he corrected pleasantly, and gave Domitian an entirely insincere smile.

“If she's going to sulk somewhere like the
child
that she is,” Domitian said, “then you and I will shut off the computer ourselves.”

“Good,” Gagnon said, and levered himself out of the chair with alacrity.

Ananke watched through her cameras the two men walk down the hall down the ship's spine toward her core. She alerted Althea before they left the room, and so when they arrived at the very base of the ship, Althea was waiting for them.

There they stopped short and stared.

Ananke was communicating with Althea through her lowest computer interface, which stood just beside the hatch to the core, which was still locked and shut. Althea had, while Gagnon and Domitian were distracted, gone and repurposed one of Ananke's robotic arms like the one in the pantry as a secondary defense, and the ungainly machine had been dragged down to the base of the ship, where it teetered back and forth on its wheels and swung its arm around warningly. The tips of the grasping hand had been modified, wires pulled out and exposed, enough electricity coursing through the copper to give an unpleasant zap. Ananke's arm was clumsy, but she moved it of her own volition, and her mother had made it for her.

In front of Ananke's arm Althea stood with her gun out, firmly planted in the center of the hallway, keeping the men away from the dead man's switch and away from Ananke.

When Ananke had let her know that the rest of the crew was finally coming down, Althea took a deep breath and braced herself, raising her gun to aim it down the long hall. She did not move even as the two men came into sight, even as they saw her and slowed down, looking from her to Ananke's mechanical arm in baffled incomprehension.

Gagnon found his voice first. “What in the ninth circle of hell are you doing?” he said.

“Every way to the dead man's switch is defended,” Althea said, keeping her voice firm, refusing to react to his surprise. If she wavered, she was lost. “Ananke is watching the maintenance passages. You can't get past us.”

“Us?” Domitian asked.

Of course, he didn't understand quite yet. It had taken Althea so long to understand herself. “Me and Ananke,” said Althea.

“Can you take a step back,” Gagnon asked, “and explain to us what you're talking about?”

“The computer is alive,” said Althea.

Gagnon started to laugh, but Domitian was not smiling. That was all right. Althea had expected some disbelief. Domitian, though, would listen.

“Althea,” Domitian said slowly, taking a step toward her with hands stretched forward but stopping when Althea raised the gun in warning, “I know that this computer has been your project for a decade. I know you care about it and you're proud of it. But I don't know that you realize what you're doing right now.”

“I know exactly what I'm doing,” said Althea. After so long in confusion, it was only now that she truly did.

“No,” Domitian snapped, then calmed himself. “No. You don't. You're telling me that the computer is alive.”

“It
is
.”

“This is career suicide,” said Domitian. “And if you don't stand down right now, it will be real suicide as well. Death is the punishment for insubordination on a military vessel, Althea.”

The idea of Domitian killing her was absurd, but even if he would—even if he turned her over to Ida Stays, who would execute her in a heartbeat—Althea's conviction could not be swayed. “I can't let you hurt her.”

“Hurt
who
?” Domitian demanded, frustrated, trying to take another step closer and again warned off by Althea's gun and the restless sweep of Ananke's sparking arm.

“Hurt Ananke,” Althea said, because she had already told him, and by now he should have understood. Domitian swore, his words hard and shocking. Gagnon had stopped laughing.

“Why do you think the ship is alive?” Domitian asked. He was speaking in a slow, cautious tone, as if Althea was liable to go off at any moment, as if she had gone mad.

He would understand. Althea had only to explain it to him, though it was so marvelous that she herself still barely comprehended what had been done. She tried to start at the beginning and fell somewhere in the middle. “The signs have been around me this whole time, and I didn't see them,” she said. “The errors I couldn't fix because it was like someone else was propagating them. That someone was the ship.” Domitian was looking at her, unmoved. “The strange text that would appear. That was her trying to talk. The alarms going off—like a baby crying—the lights going off—like a baby trying to walk and falling over. She was just trying to communicate, to understand her body—”

“Jesus Christ,” said Gagnon, breaking into her speech before she could get anywhere at all.

“Althea,” Domitian said, taking another small, cautious step forward. “We've all been under a lot of stress lately, and we all understand that—”

“Stop condescending!” said Althea, and in her frustration at his deliberate resistance to the truth she shook the gun, and both men grew tense. “It's true! I needed Ivan to make me see it, but it's true.”

Domitian's expression suddenly darkened, growing stormy and furious and dangerous. “Ivan?” he said, and that sea change frightened Althea as nothing had before. “You heard this from
Ivan
?!”

Domitian did not look fatherly now; he did not look fearful. When Althea looked at him now, she could see someone who could hurt her, and finally she was afraid.

Ida Stays had cleared her mind and cleared her desk. Her shoes had been tossed into some corner of her strange-shaped cabin; she was stripped down to blouse and slip and stockings. She found it not only more comfortable but also easier to think with her armor removed.

The computer was being slow, as if its attention were elsewhere, but it was obeying her, and that was more than the damned thing had done in the last week and a half.

Ida had, open before her, the files of Matthew Gale, Leontios Ivanov, Abigail Hunter, Milla Ivanov, and Constance Harper, as well as sundry other files of sundry other people, anyone no matter how distantly connected who she thought might have something to do with the events she was investigating, as well as reports on nearly every event she had questioned Ivan about.

One by one she closed the files slowly, deliberately, removing the people, the events from her head as she did, until she was staring at the pale blue glow of the
Ananke,
waiting for input.

She had to start from the beginning.

With her mind blanked, she groped about to find the first principles that had started her train of deductions nearly two years ago.

She had to start with Ivan. He was her source, he was her sink of knowledge; everything she had came from him, and everything she did not have he had taken away.

Leontios Ivanov had left home when he was twenty years old, immediately after graduating from the System's most elite university.

Only a few months before, he had tried to kill himself.

He had survived to adulthood only through luck or his mother's skill; the System watched his every movement closely for any signs that he was taking after his father.

Upon escaping from Earth, he met Matthew Gale—

No, Ida decided. Facts would not help her solve this problem. Facts obscured, sometimes. Facts did not carry all the information and could not adequately define the truth any more than physiology could explain to her the gaping emptiness beneath her ribs.

Ivan hid the truth with facts, worthless verifiable things that could be proved with surveillance footage but gave nothing away.

Ivan, then. What did he want? Did he want the System destroyed?

The discomfiting and strange realization that had been troubling her came to mind. No, he did not. Or perhaps, Ida thought, Ivan did want the System dead, but in an abstract sort of way, with a generalized hatred that did not want to burn up the life it inhabited in seeking consummation, only to wish it ill from afar. It was not the hatred of a believer.

Yet Ida had no doubt in her, especially after speaking to Ivan all these days, that he knew the Mallt-y-Nos and that he was determined not to give her up.

That left her with a paradox: Ivan was loyal to the Mallt-y-Nos, yet he did not follow her. Ivan supported the Mallt-y-Nos yet did not support her cause.

There was only one reason, Ida thought, for someone to be that loyal without believing in a cause: because someone he loved did believe in her.

In all the System there existed only four people Leontios Ivanov loved: Milla Ivanov, Matthew Gale, Constance Harper, and Abigail Hunter.

One of them, then, was the true believer.

“What the hell were you doing listening to
Ivan
?!” Domitian's voice filled up the narrow hallway, terrible in real, genuine wrath, and Althea was as terrified as a child.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Ananke's arm swing around nervously, sparks flashing on its fingertips, and Gagnon push his hands up against his forehead, pacing away, but both Gagnon and Ananke seemed far off and peripheral in comparison to Domitian, as if Althea's sight had narrowed or he had bent space around him like a black hole to seem larger than he was.

She was stuck somewhere between defiance and a desperate need to explain herself. “He knew what was going on!” Althea said. “He knew Gale! He told me what Gale did. That's why I couldn't figure out what was wrong; I didn't know what Gale did.”

“Did it once occur to you that he was lying to you?” Domitian demanded.

“But he wasn't!” said Althea, because that much she was certain of. “He was right!”

“Jesus Christ,” Gagnon said again, though Althea hardly heard him, and she hardly noticed that he threw a hand out as if he could no longer deal with her at all and walked away up the hall and out of sight.

Domitian's jaw was clenched tight; he was shaking his head at Althea as if he had passed words. He didn't understand. He had to understand, because if he understood, if he saw, he wouldn't be angry at her anymore, and he would stop trying to kill her beautiful ship. Althea said, “Ananke, show Domitian you can understand us. Show Domitian, all right?”

The holographic terminal between them went from dark to flaring red, red like light through a vial of blood. A hologram appeared on the terminal, the most recent hologram in the
Ananke
's data banks: the hologram Ida Stays had sent to announce her arrival. The figure of Ida Stays appeared on the terminal, the image rotated so that she was facing Domitian, the image distorted oddly by the imperfect rotation, her shoulder set into her neck, her jaw askew from her face, fingers kinked. Her feet were facing the opposite direction from the rest of her. The image blinked, the hologram righting itself to match the feet, but with the head remaining facing Domitian, as if it had been severed at the neck and placed sideways. Another blink, and the holograph was mostly facing him again, bits and pieces intersecting at unnatural, broken angles.

“No, no, Ananke,” Althea said. It was not Ananke's fault that she did not know how to speak in ways Domitian would understand and had to make do with bits and pieces stitched together.

A sound came from the hologram. Ananke must have tried to play the recording that had come with Ida's image—to appropriate the language that Ida had spoken fluently and speak to Domitian. The noise came out distorted beyond comprehension. The distorted Ida's mouth opened, dislocated jaw hanging ajar, and then the recording stopped, Ida's voice coming out in one long, flat drone like the cry of the machine.

“Ananke, stop,” Althea said, and the scream ceased, the nightmare visage vanished.

Domitian was pale and furious when he looked at her, and a chill ran through Althea, a chill like despair, when she realized that he was even further from convinced than he had been before.

In that moment Althea knew how Domitian must be seeing Ananke: something unnatural, something inhuman, something to be destroyed—something monstrous.

Ananke's eyes were studded throughout all of her halls, and so she saw Gagnon as he walked away.

He had just passed out of sight of Althea and Domitian when he stopped, half turning back to where the echoes of Domitian's shouts could still be heard—the sound of Althea's distraction.

There was an opening to the maintenance shafts in a storage room a few yards ahead. He went inside that room—Ananke watching—and knelt in front of the maintenance shaft, feeling around for the hinge of the hidden door.

When he had found it, he nodded and got up and went to one of Ananke's interfaces. Ananke was curious, and so she let him go into her files, seek out the program that, when running, would make the maintenance shafts safe for human passage.

It seemed that Gagnon was surprised when he found that contrary to what the ship had told him and Althea and Domitian before, the program was running and had been running all this time, ever since the moment Matthew Gale had escaped from his cell.