Lightless (7 page)

Once Domitian and Ivanov were gone, she left her place and ran down to the base of the ship to check the terminal there, just in case.

The room was vast and empty and white, and Ida sat on a cold steel chair behind a cold steel table in precisely its center, facing the door over the empty chair across from her. On the table beside her a System regulation polygraph and interrogation camera had been placed, not yet recording and, like Ida, waiting.

The steel door across the room swung open, and framed in its tiny square beneath the wide featureless stretch of white wall above, Ida Stays saw him, her subject, Leontios Ivanov, dressed all in black with his blond hair cropped short. His gaze darted around the room before settling on her, the only creature inside. His wrists were chained behind his back.

Ida let the smile she'd been holding locked away unfurl on her lips, and Ivanov watched her, the full subject of his gaze.

When Domitian gave Ivanov a shove to move him forward, he started to walk straight toward her, and there was consciousness of her attention in every step he took. When he reached the other side of the table, the empty chair with its back to the door, Domitian grabbed him by the back of his neck and pushed him harshly down, pushing him to bend forward over the table until his chin was just above the surface of the table so that Domitian could unchain his wrists. A line was digging into Ivanov's forehead between his brows as Domitian handled him roughly, but as Ida continued to watch, he looked up at her, his face smoothing over, and smirked at her.

The problem with Leontios Ivanov, she thought as Domitian pulled him back upright against the hard back of the chair and started to chain his wrists to the armrests, was that Ivanov was handsome, and knew it, and intelligent, and knew it. He could not help overplaying both hands. Ida was smarter than he, and Ida had him precisely where she wanted him to be.

Domitian tightened the last chain and took a step back, waiting behind Ivanov's chair, looking to Ida and wordlessly waiting for instructions, just as he was supposed to. The camera and the polygraph sat to the side on the table between Ivan and Ida, out of the immediate way, but their very presence was a threat.

Ida let the silence of the interrogation room linger a moment longer.

“It's good to meet you at last, Ivan,” she said, and watched his face for a reaction. “Ivan” was what Gale called him, and Constance Harper; presumably Abigail Hunter did, too. “Ivan” was what he called himself to his friends, to his equals.

Ivan hardly reacted. He tilted his chin very slightly to the side and said, after a breath too long to represent anything but careful consideration, “May I call you Ida, or should I stick to Miss Stays?”

He had recognized her. Ida swallowed her thrill.

“Ida, of course,” she said, and leaned forward slightly, pleasant and charming, and he smiled back in the same way, taking his cues from her. He wore his black turtleneck like armor. “I see you recognized me.”

“Of course.” Ivan's accent was Terran in full force, as crisp and sharp as only one raised on Earth could achieve, and for an irrational moment Ida wondered if he could hear the hidden traces of Venus in her own imperfect Terran affectation.

“I wanted to know the name of the beautiful woman who has been asking after me for months,” Ivan continued. “So I looked you up.”

Her inquiries had not been clumsy, but they had not been terribly discreet, either. Still, it indicated a greater degree of awareness on Ivan's part than Ida's superiors, for certain, would have expected. The glow of gratification had started to fill her chest.

“And is that all you found out?” she asked, as if charmed. “My name and my face?”

Ivan leaned forward, too, as far as the chains would allow. Their faces were still separated by the wide expanse of the table, but the movement imagined intimacy, and he said confidingly, with a curl of amusement in his voice, “I heard that you're the woman who's always right. All of your interrogations have resulted in convictions, and all of your suspects have—so far—been found guilty. There are people who think that one day you'll be head of System Intelligence, or the System itself, if you can keep up your reputation.”

“And does my reputation frighten you?” If his words had pleased her, it was only because they were all true, not because someone had spoken them about her.

Ivan smiled. This smile was different from the others—dangerous, bitter, almost wolfish—and Ida memorized it, cataloged it, filed it for later consideration.

“Not yet,” he said.

Ida would see him afraid before this interrogation was done.

“Have you ever been interrogated before, Ivan?” she asked, and leaned back from the table, leaving him bent forward toward her almost as if partway through a bow. He had been interrogated before, of course, and on the record, but information was not the purpose of the question.

“Not like this,” Ivan said, leaning back into his chair as well. He looked quite at ease, but his eyes were fixed on her in a way that she thought might indicate wariness.

“Then here's how it's going to go,” said Ida, as if she wanted this to be as easy as possible for him. “I'm going to ask you questions, and you're going to answer them all honestly, with as much detail as I am pleased to hear. You will not lie to me or refuse to answer, because if you do, I am authorized to resort to less pleasant methods to obtain the truth. Do you understand me?”

“I understand you,” Ivan said. “But I don't know what you're hoping to get from me. I already told your mastiff”—he jerked his chin to the side and beside him in the general direction of Domitian, who was still standing in stony silence—“what he wanted to know about why I was on board. What else do you want from me?”

The perfect opening, handed, wrapped, into her hands.

“Remember, Ivan,” she said, “I am the woman who is always right, and I know all about you.”

He was wary. She imagined she could smell it.

“I know that you know the name of the Mallt-y-Nos,” said Ida Stays, “and I know that you're going to tell it to me.”

There was nothing more to be gained from the computer terminal at the base of the ship, of course. When Althea came back up and sat down in her appointed position across from Ivanov's empty cell, she glared at it as if it, empty, were still in some way a part of the person it usually held. He had gotten into her head somehow, yes, but he wouldn't again.

With no small amount of relief for the guaranteed peace now allotted to her, Althea focused again on her baby, falling deep into that blissful zone of total absorption in her work. Because of this, she probably did not notice the sounds as soon as she should have. When they finally filtered into her consciousness, Althea pulled herself slowly out of her trance, as if waking from a dream.

The hall was empty and quiet. The sound that had triggered her attention was not to be heard.

Still she sat and listened.

Althea knew all the sounds of her ship. Althea knew what the ship sounded like when she was well and what she sounded like when she was ill, and she could diagnose her from the sound, the feel of her parts.

This sound was not a sound she had heard before.

It started as a scratching, faint, weak, but foreign to her ship, a scratching like nails scrabbling for purchase. It was too distant to define exactly, but Althea thought it had to be the sound of metal scratching lightly against metal.

She rose to her feet and walked over to the part of the wall where the scratching sounds originated and laid her hand against the wall.

Something creaked inside the ship where Althea knew that nothing should creak. She leaned closer, pressing her head against the pipes and wires that covered the surface of the wall, her hair snagging on the rivets—

And then the sound was moving. Althea chased it, moving close to the wall, her palms brushing over the odd curves of the
Ananke
as she followed the sound up the hallway, her mind racing.

Ivanov had said, had mentioned, that Gale—before the
Ananke
Gale had targeted the permanent functions of other ships, destroying their navigation systems. What if Gale had done something like that to the
Ananke,
too? Something permanent? Something crippling?

She almost lost the unnatural sound halfway up the hallway, when it receded into the distance, and so she stopped where she was and stood and listened, backing away slowly to stand in the center of the hall. Never did the
Ananke
seem so vast as it did now, when the hallway stretched in an eternal spiral before and behind, and Althea was all alone in it. Gagnon and Domitian and Ida Stays and Ivanov were all somewhere else, behind doors locked and silent, and they might as well have not been there at all, because in that moment there was nothing but Althea and her ship.

Althea heard the distant creak and groan of the magnets at the ship's core, the sounds of metal and carbon shifting to accommodate the strain of such a mass, soft background noises, reassuring and familiar, like the sounds of some great creature breathing. She heard the high-pitched hum and whine of electronics, of a bulb that needed to be changed overhead. The rattle of liquid through a pipe: water, no, coolant.

And then there it was again, that foreign sound, a rattle and a scrape like a cough in the ordinary sounds of the ship.

It was above her head.

Althea looked slowly up at the ceiling, where the sound was coming from, and wavered on her feet, moving with the sound, forward, back.

It could be an error induced in the ventilation or the fuel systems, if not the navigation. But no sound like this, so physical, could be anything harmless or good.

The sound faded, and so she stretched up as far as she could, on her toes, listening, listening—

Abrupt, overwhelming,
BANG,
the ceiling shook, and
BANG,
the walls rattled, and Althea flinched and turned to see where the bang had come from, when
BANG BANG BANG
the walls all shook and rattled, percussive, overwhelming sound that was a physical thing beating Althea's torso, her arms raised in unconscious defense around her head.

Hollow, deep, metallic, the blows echoed up and down the bending hall in percussion without a pattern Althea could recognize. No one came out, alarmed by the sound, no other member of the crew came to see, Althea alone listened as her ship hacked and coughed and moaned, heartbeat out of sync, pounding wildly, and her ears were filled with the echoing of her ship's desperation.

There was a pattern to this. There had to be; there always was. Althea lowered her arms from around her head and listened.

“It's okay,” she whispered, spreading out her hands toward the walls, the ceiling, her fingers spread over the surfaces separated only by the slightest space of air. “It's okay,” even though the ship could not hear her and no one could have heard her over the rattling in the walls.

The banging was not coming from everywhere, she heard, and hardly noticed the tremble in her fingertips as they glided over the surface of the walls. She moved up the hall a few feet and stopped—the banging was coming from behind her. She moved back and walked the other way until the banging grew distant again. The noise was not throughout the
Ananke,
she realized. It was localized. The error, despite the apparent omnipresence of the sound and the terror it had produced in her, was not throughout the ship. It was coming from only one particular place.

Althea walked back, toward the center of the hall, toward the center of the sound, and stood and listened to the cacophony of the ship's malfunction. The banging was coming from just beside where she had been looking before, above her head, reverberating through the walls like a drum, obscuring its source, making it seem greater and more confusing than it was. Althea took a shaken breath and called up the plans to her ship in her head.

The ventilation system. It was the ventilation system that was situated there, in the walls and the ceiling over her head; it was the ventilation system that was making such a sound.

If the ventilation system failed, Althea thought as she stood and looked up to that invisible spot on the ceiling whence the sound came, they would all suffocate. As big as the
Ananke
was, the crew would have some time before they felt it, the slow poisoning of the air as oxygen turned to carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide was heavier than oxygen; it would sink to the very bottom of the
Ananke,
as near to her dark heart as it could get. Anyone down at her base would faint and die surrounded by air but air that was unbreathable. The crew that survived would be driven up and up and farther up until they had their backs against the doors to space, the very highest point on the
Ananke,
facing before them an invisible toxin, behind them no air at all, fates equally bad. They were fragile, the crew—small and fragile and human—and they relied wholly on the ship that contained them.

That would be
if
the ventilation system failed. The ventilation system was not failing. The sound was too specific, too particular for that. It came from only one place. For the ventilation to fail, for them all to suffocate, the error would have to be throughout the entire system. Matthew Gale's seconds of sabotage had been too few to destroy something as great as the
Ananke
.

The lights reflecting off the ceiling seemed to move slightly, reflections distorted; the ceiling itself was being shaken and bent by some real and mechanical force. Something physical was striking it from the other side and causing that violent sound.

The robotic arm.

There were mechanical limbs throughout the
Ananke,
autonomous mobile robotics designed to perform simple, repetitive tasks so that Althea did not have to. They were necessary to run a ship as large as the
Ananke
with a crew so small. They maintained the engine, adjusting the radiation reflectors to propel the ship one way or another. They checked for expired food in the pantry. They opened and closed ventilation shafts automatically on the basis of sensor readings, the ship itself deciding what parts of itself needed heat or fresh air.