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“Now, Ivan,” said Ida, and laid the paper down, “I want you to lie to me.”

“Lie to you?” Ivan said. “I thought that was the one thing I wasn't supposed to do.”

“Just this once. Lie to me.”

“What should I lie about?”

“Anything,” Ida said. “Whatever comes to mind.”

He was cold; she could see him shivering lightly. But he said, “I can't think of anything. Tell me something to lie about.”

He was very cautious. “Then tell me,” said Ida, “how old you were the first time you stole something from someone.”

He looked at her, blue eyes rounding, and said, “Ida, I've never stolen anything.”

The polygraph jumped. It traced a wide arc over the pixelated surface of the screen, indicating a lie, lie,
lie
as loud as a scream.

Ida looked from the polygraph to Ivan sitting half naked and chained down before her.

“I want you to do that again,” Ida said, “and this time I want you to really
try
to lie to me. How old were you the first time you stole?”

Ivan smiled.

“I've never stolen anything in my life,” he said, and the polygraph did not so much as twitch.

Ida loved a challenge.

“Your partner's name,” said Ida. “Is it Matthew Gale?”

“No,” Ivan said, and the polygraph was perfectly steady. Ida gave him a look. “He usually goes by Mattie,” he clarified.

He was toying with her. Ida asked, “Do you know the name of the Mallt-y-Nos?”

Ivan's good humor left him suddenly. No longer playing with her, he leaned forward, serious, straight mouth, and said, “Just to be
perfectly
clear, Ida. This time I am not lying.”

Ida waited.

“I do not know the name of the Mallt-y-Nos,” he said, and the polygraph, of course, showed no lie.

Domitian had been right; there was something strange about the
Annwn
's computer. Althea had opened with her usual tricks, progressed to cleverer methods of manipulation, and finally resorted to frustrated brute force, but the machine refused to give up its secrets.

Domitian arrived shortly after she took a break from arguing with the machine to pace across the narrow space of the
Annwn
's piloting room and glare at the machine from the opposite corner.

“What's going on?” he asked, and displayed no surprise at the sight of his ship's engineer standing in the corner of the room, attempting to melt the casing of the control panel with the hatred in her gaze. It was one of the many reasons Althea was so fond of him.

Althea pointed.

“They've programmed some sort of artificial intelligence into it,” she said.

“Gale and Ivanov?”

“Yes.” Althea left her corner to stalk back toward the computer. Every machine had a feel to it; the
Ananke
was majestic, brilliant but a little awkward, and loving. The
Annwn,
she had decided, was smug. Smug and arrogant and stubborn.

“Watch,” said Althea. She bent over the keys again and swiftly typed out a string of code that should have overridden any restrictions and enabled her to take a peek at the computer's inner workings.

A pause.

TRY AGAIN, the computer suggested, in as condescending a tone as mere text could manage.

“Maybe you should try a different method,” Domitian said, but when Althea looked sharply up at him to see if he was mocking her, his expression was as humorless as ever.

“Well, I did,” said Althea. “I've tried everything. And watch.”

“Bitch,” she typed, striking each key a little harder than necessary, as if the computer could feel it.

It came swiftly back with WHORE.

“I don't understand,” Domitian said. “Gale and Ivanov programmed some childish quips into it? Why is that stopping you?”

“It
learns,
” Althea said, frustrated. To properly explain would require sitting Domitian down and going through all the methods she'd tried, and that presumed a degree of patience that she knew he didn't have. “It's like it knows somehow that I'm not Gale or Ivanov. It has, I don't know, personality.”

“So there's a password,” Domitian said, clearly trying for her sake to keep up.

“Of some kind, yes.” Althea sighed. A software engineer who couldn't even manage some finicky software. This, combined with the
Ananke,
her own computer ailing of some unknown disease, had her frustrated and filled with an anxious, aching fear of failure.

“So can you get around it?” Domitian said in a tone that made it sound as if he had been waiting for some response from her.

She shook herself out of her thoughts.

“Eventually,” she admitted reluctantly. “But I'm worried about the
Ananke
. If the virus has spread to the nav systems or the ventilation or if it starts to affect life support or weaponry or the core containment, we're all in trouble.” It was not the only reason, but it would suffice.

“The first concern is the
Ananke,
” Domitian said, and Althea could have hugged him, thrown her arms around his neck as if he were her father. “Fix the
Ananke
first, then come back for this. Miss Stays is confident she can get all the information she needs out of Ivanov; the
Annwn
's computer is a secondary source of information. This can wait for a day or two.”

“Thank you,” said Althea, and meant it with all her heart. A day or two was a small amount of time but a vague one, and she would not look too closely into this gift of allotted time. “I'll disconnect the computer from the ship so that no hidden programs can come bite us in the—can become a problem. Hardware can't argue.” Hidden programs were her main concern at this point. The
Annwn
could be programmed to self-destruct if, for instance, a certain amount of time passed without input from Ivanov or Gale. A ship like the
Annwn,
if it self-destructed inside the
Ananke
's hold, would destroy the
Ananke
entirely.

Domitian clapped a hand on her shoulder.

“Work on that, then get back to the
Ananke,
” he said, and left her.

The best way to ensure that the
Annwn
's computer could not speak to the rest of the ship was to go through and sever every connection between the two. On a ship like the
Ananke
such an operation would not be possible; her computer was so entwined with her body that the only way to effect such a separation would be to kill the computer itself. But the
Annwn
was a more common make, and Althea knew exactly where were the nerves that connected the brain to the body.

It was difficult; the connections were often well hidden, buried deep inside the walls of the ship. Landed as the ship was, some of the
Annwn
's rooms were on their sides or upside down, depending on their place in the ship. Althea did not walk through the main hall; she climbed up and down and around.

There were very many connections, hundreds, even thousands of wires. Each time she severed a connection, Althea drew it out of the wall, and when she had a bundle of wires, she wrapped her arms around them and carried them out of the ship, leaving their ends to coil uselessly on the ground of the
Ananke
's docking bay, as if the wires had been vomited out the mouth of the
Annwn
.

The last few connections were the most important, in the piloting room. Althea climbed over the mass of severed wires into the room and went to kneel beneath the main interface.

A message was blinking on the screen. Curious, she craned her head up to read it.

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE? asked the computer.

I CAN'T FEEL MY BODY.

Althea severed the last connection, and the screen went black.

“The first thing I would like you to tell me about,” said Ida, “is Eris.”

“It's a dwarf planet in the outer solar system,” said Ivan, deadpan. “What else would you like to know?”

“I want to hear about the theft you and Mattie committed on it,” Ida said. “About four years ago.” She smiled at him. “The theft that ended in an explosion.”

Ivan grimaced at the memory. “You mean when we stole the bombs.”

The bombs that Ivan and Mattie had stolen—and immediately detonated—were of the same make as the one that the Mallt-y-Nos had used against the Martian System representatives a year later: Eridian Class 50s. Ivan, of course, would know this was true as well, given that he had delivered the remaining bombs directly into the hands of the Mallt-y-Nos, but Ida suspected that he would not know that she knew.

Ivan leaned back in his chair although the metal must have been icy cold against his bare back. He was working hard to present an unaffected demeanor. “You have this on tape,” he pointed out. “Or almost all of it on tape. There's surveillance everywhere, especially in armories. What do you need me for?”

“There are things,” said Ida, “as you know very well, that can't be recorded by a camera.” The camera had seen Ivan pretending to be a System representative and paving the way for Mattie to sneak into the facility, but it could not tell Ida why. “I want to know what you were thinking. I want to know what Mattie was thinking. I want to know why you went to Eris in the first place and why you stole a case of bombs only to explode them immediately afterward on the outskirts of the city.”

“Mattie and I stole those bombs, and we blew them right afterward,” he admitted, and he shifted position, sitting up a little straighter, moving into a different pose. “The whole thing is a bit of a story,” he said with his con man smile. “You want to hear all of it?”

“Every last detail,” Ida said.

Ivan was thinking, she could tell, wondering what he should tell and what he should keep a secret, no doubt. It didn't matter what he decided. Ida would get it all out of him eventually, one way or another.

“It started,” said Ivan, “on Deimos. Mattie and I didn't steal them for ourselves: we got a commission. I wasn't in favor, but Mattie was, and so…”

“The commission,” Ida said sweetly. “It was from Abigail, I understand.”

Ivan stopped dead.

Ida spent a moment enjoying his derailment. It had only been a guess that Abigail Hunter had been responsible for the commission, but it had been a very good one and one that had, of course, turned out to be correct.

It was always good, especially at this stage of the interrogation, to keep her subject off balance.

To his credit, he recovered fairly quickly.

“Yes,” Ivan said, his eyes darting between hers, “the commission was from Abby.” He watched her for another moment, doubtless trying to gauge what precisely she wanted, but Ida kept her expression impenetrable. “Would you like to hear more about Abby,” Ivan asked, “or would you prefer if I finished talking about Eris?”

“I'm interested in anyone who would commission you and Mattie for such an exciting theft.” Ida wished she could see through his skull, into his brain, to watch what he thought, what he wondered.

She would get to see that soon enough.

“Abigail always shows up when we don't expect her,” Ivan said. “You'd think we'd get used to that and start expecting her whenever we don't expect her, but it doesn't work. She just seems to know. This time, Mattie and I found her on board the
Annwn
just as we were about to leave from visiting Constance, Mattie's foster sister.”

“Abby is also Mattie's foster sister, is she not?”

“Yes,” said Ivan. “She is.”

Ida prompted, “And is he fond of her?”

Ivan laughed. “Immensely.”

“And is she fond of him?”

“As a person is of a dog,” Ivan said with a bitter little twist to his lips.

This was interesting not for what he said but in that he had admitted it. “Your relationship with her is not easy, then,” Ida said.

“Abby is selfish,” said Ivan, flat and honest. “She doesn't care about Mattie or about me, not really.” His blue eyes flickered up from the table to focus on Ida. “I don't think,” said Ivan, and Ida wondered if she was imagining his deliberateness here, “that she really feels bad for anything she's done. She understands how other people think, but I'm not sure she really
empathizes
.”

That old creeping fear was coming up Ida's spine again, the fear of discovery, but she did not let it show, did not break Ivan's gaze. He knew nothing, and his choice of words was a coincidence. “If you hate her so much, then why do you deal with her?”

“Mattie grew up with her,” Ivan said with a shrug.

“And his affection for her outweighs your dislike?”

“Mostly,” he said. “But also…there's something beautiful about her, about her and the way she doesn't care. The same way an explosion is beautiful. Something that could destroy you.”

Ida could not tell for certain what weakness to strike at here—if there was one—and so she changed the subject. “What does Abby do?”

“Abby is a middleman,” Ivan said. “She connects people who are interested in commissioning a theft or a bit of sabotage with the people who can do it for them. Sometimes she doesn't even connect with either end directly but is part of a chain of people like her, just to keep everyone's identity secret. She gets a fee for putting people into connection that is usually a percentage of whatever's being stolen. She'll work for anyone who can give her a high enough fee; she doesn't care what the job is.”

Ida could hardly dare to hope that Ivan had admitted his connection so soon and so easily, but a part of her was delighted, anyway, that she was right in spite of all who did not believe her. “Might Abigail take a commission from a terrorist group?”

“She would,” Ivan said, “but I don't know that they could pay her enough. Terrorists are poor. And even if they did, Ida, terrorists wouldn't use a single middleman; they'd use many. Abby would just be one in a chain. Even if she'd ever worked with the Mallt-y-Nos, she could no more tell you who the Mallt-y-Nos is than I can.”