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The names of System ships must have been irrelevant to him, he who had such a good memory for the things people said or did.

She saw the moment he remembered.

“The
Oenone,
” he said. “One of the ships we robbed was the
Oenone
.”

“That gives me only one ship, Ivan,” Ida said with a frown that edged near to a pout. “How do I know what you were doing the rest of the time, when you weren't robbing the
Oenone
?”

“You can look it up. You know where Mattie and I were; you can check the System databases for other supply ships that were robbed,” said Ivan, suddenly brazen now that he had nothing left to do but call her out and hope it was a bluff. He was so very transparent sometimes.

And yet, for all she understood him and his emotional reactions, she hadn't been able to trip him up.

“And what if I don't find that any other ships were robbed in that time in that place?” Ida asked.

“You will,” Ivan said with certainty.

Unfortunately, she had been bluffing. She had no doubt she would find other accounts of robberies at that time, though she would be certain to check. She did not let Ivanov know that he had won, however, but straightened up without losing her pleased, smug expression.

“Why do you remember the
Oenone
out of all the ships you robbed?” she asked, mostly as an afterthought.

Perhaps Ivan was relieved that she had ceased to press him for information he could not produce. Or perhaps he did not think anything of answering, “Because we were nearly recognized.”

“Who nearly recognized you?”

“The captain,” he said. “He'd been a System administrator on Ceres we'd robbed once.”

Ida could have waited, could have gone back to her room and looked it up: the captain of the
Oenone
two years earlier who had once been a System administrator on Ceres, when he had been robbed. But her senses were all screaming at her that there was some connection to be made here, that there was something important waiting to be uncovered.

“When were you on Ceres?” she asked, gripping the back of the chair tightly.

The polygraph jumped. It could have been the noise of the machine, it could have been an accident of the program, it could have been an abnormality in Ivanov's physiology. Ida did not think so.

“Seven years ago,” said Ivan.

It was the very instincts that had led her to ask about Ceres that always led her to the correct conclusion; it was those very instincts that made her so good; it was those instincts that would show the System she was right about Gale and Ivanov. Because seven years ago on Ceres was an important date and place.

“And was that,” Ida asked, trying hard not to show her excitement, “around when a System bank was bombed on Ceres?”

Ivan hesitated.

“Yes,” he said, as if the hesitation had just been remembrance, casting his mind back, and not a frantic attempt to find a lie, which Ida
knew
it had been. “It was the exact same day.”

When the terminal finally was isolated, Althea climbed out from underneath it and faced the flashing screen.

At first the screen would not react to her. She tried gentle methods, then less gentle ones—shortcuts that should immediately shut down whatever program was running—with no effect. It was only when she reached underneath the display, back into the ship, and shut down the terminal as a whole that the screen finally went dark and stayed that way.

She waited, then started up the terminal again. The home screen appeared, and Althea could interact with it, but the screen was still dimming and brightening again in a patternless cycle. Some sort of video error, then.

Reassured by the clarity of the source of this error, at least, Althea delved into the code of the
Ananke
.

It was a curious error when she found it, nestled in the code for the video display of this particular computer terminal. It was ugly code, ragged and full of nonsense, dead lines of useless code surrounding the functional bits. It seemed that some of the nonsense was what was causing the screen to flash.

Althea cleaned it out, and the screen stopped flashing, growing calm again. Then she started to track down the source of the error.

The ship itself had implanted it, as far as she could tell, as part of the
Ananke
's automatic updates. Althea looked for what had provoked the ship to make such an update, but all she found was nonsense, references to the malfunctioning camera feeds.

And then she found something strange. In the back of the
Ananke
's brain, buried underneath a thousand more important programs that took more time and more energy, there was one little program running in an endless loop.

She opened it.

TEMPERATURE: 293 K

PRESSURE: 1 ATM

VOLUME: 308525.137…METERS CUBED

PARTICLE NUMBER: 6

ENTROPY: UNKNOWN

ENTROPY: INCREASING

The numbers blinked on and off as they were updated over and over again. It was the same error she and Domitian had seen when trying to watch the video of Milla Ivanov.

Althea hesitated, watching it loop and loop, and then moved to terminate it. The program shut down, and she removed it from the computer terminal without any trouble at all.

While she frowned down at the screen before her, something flashed bright farther down the hall.

A computer terminal up the hall had started to flash on and off.

“Damn it,” Althea said, and left her disconnected terminal to jog up to the other one, staring down in dismay at the error that had propagated even though she had cut off its origin. If the error was traveling, even like this, it meant that there was a deeper flaw and she could not hope to treat the computer by separating each of its parts and figuring out what was wrong with them.

Abruptly, the screen ceased to flash. Althea reached forward toward it, but before she could lay a finger on a key, sound blared out of the speaker, shouting loud and with all the force of a blow, disembodied voices echoing through the hallway.

“This is for Europa,” said the recorded voice of Matthew Gale, overlaid with Althea herself muttering inaudible code, and Domitian barking orders to search the ship, and Ivanov saying, “It was the exact same day,” and Gagnon rambling about pions and the sweet high voice of Ida Stays saying, “The Mallt-y-Nos is a bomber,” and Ivanov telling a story and Gagnon reciting equations and Domitian speaking to Ida and Ida questioning Ivanov and Althea talking to herself, talking to herself about the state of the ship, the whole thing a meaningless jumble of useless ineffectual communication, building to a roar—

Althea shut off the speakers, and the hall fell silent.

The screen blinked once more and then returned to blankness. Althea found that her hands were shaking, and when the intercom hummed and spit to life, she jumped and swore.

“Althea. Domitian,” said Gagnon, sounding terse, nervous. “I need backup.”

Althea pressed her hand to her breast and tried to catch her breath.

“There's someone in the pantry,” said Gagnon.

This was the moment Ida lived for. Ivan had slipped, and now Ida could catch him.

“Why were you on Ceres?” she asked.

“For the same reason I told you,” Ivan said. “Mattie and I heard of some System administrator, the guy who was later the captain of the
Oenone,
but at the time he was the one in charge of Ceres's water mining and water exports to the outer planets. That meant he was rich. We went to rob him.”

“A rich man on Ceres?” Ida asked with a gentle scoff, and dug her fingers more tightly into the top of the chair.

Ivan smiled humorlessly. “Water transport is a valuable business,” he said. “The man was rich. We went to rob him, not to steal things from his house but to get to his personal computer. People trust their computers too much. It's easier for me and Mattie to go into someone's house, have their computer sign in automatically to their System banking account, and then transfer or deposit the money to another account than it is for us to actually rob the bank. Once the money's been transferred, another person goes to a branch of the bank and withdraws it before the mark knows it's been transferred. Simple.”

“A two-person con,” said Ida. “One to sneak into the house, the other to withdraw at the bank.”

“Well,” said Ivan with a dryness so complete that Ida could not help admiring it, “we were two people.”

“I assume you were at the bank and Mattie was at the house,” said Ida, and Ivan inclined his head, conceding the obviousness of her conclusion. “Was the bank you visited the one that exploded?” If she could place him at the scene of the crime…

“No, it was a different branch,” said Ivan. “Lucky for me.” His smirk her way seemed to also say, Lucky for
you
.

“The asteroid was locked down within ten minutes of the bombing,” Ida said. “You couldn't possibly have gotten off it in time if you didn't know about the bombing beforehand, especially if you and Mattie were in different places.” She knew for a fact that Gale and Ivanov had not been on the planet after lockdown; the citizenry had been thoroughly vetted afterward for anyone who might have had a criminal connection.

Ivan took a breath. Ida held hers.

“That's because,” Ivan said slowly, “I knew about the bombing beforehand.”

She
had him
.

The elation rose up fast enough to nearly choke her, but she tamped it down as fast as she could, before it could stretch her lips in a smile. She had him, she knew she did, but she would not have him in the eyes of the System—in the eyes of her colleagues—until she had just a little more evidence.

“Did you?” she asked, making her voice quiet and sweet to cover up her elation. “That is something you should have mentioned before.”

If she spun it right, perhaps she could even convince her superiors that this counted as a lie of omission, and she would be authorized to use the Aletheia—

“Why?” Ivan asked. He was putting on a good front of genuine bemusement, but Ida knew better. “It has nothing to do with the Mallt-y-Nos. And I hadn't gotten to that part of the story.”

“It has a good deal to do with the Mallt-y-Nos,” Ida told him. “This is certainly one of her earliest acts of terrorism.”

“The Mallt-y-Nos didn't come onto the scene until the Martian bombing,” said Ivan, frowning.

“Don't be disingenuous,” Ida snapped, then took a breath and softened her tone. “Of course the Mallt-y-Nos was committing acts of terrorism before that. That's just what made her name.”

Ida glanced toward the polygraph. Everything was slightly increased, showing Ivan in a state of apprehension.

“How did you know about the bombing?” she asked. “And why were you on Ceres if you knew the attack was going to occur?”

“We didn't find out until we were already there,” Ivan said. “Just an hour before it blew, actually.”

“And who told you?”

Ivan hesitated. “Abby did.”

“Abby,” said Ida, and relished the name.

“Abby,” Ivan said, with mockery in his mimicry. “Yes, it was Abby. She sent us a message as we were on our way to Ceres, warning us to avoid it but not why. Because it was from her, I made Mattie ignore it. Somehow she found out we ignored her order. While I was waiting across the street from a smaller branch of the System bank, she contacted Mattie and told him we needed to run immediately, and why. Mattie dropped the heist midway through, picked me up, and we got off the planet just before the largest branch blew. We'd already transferred the money, though, so the future captain of the
Oenone
had good reason to remember our faces from the surveillance footage.”

Ida couldn't care less about the captain of the
Oenone
. “How did Abby know?”

“I don't know.”

“No?” said Ida, dangerous.

“I don't,” Ivan said sharply. “I told you, her job is to make connections. She has very good contacts. I assume one of them warned her, and so she warned us.”

“Or she could have known because she was involved.”

“Abby wasn't involved.” Ivan's tone was flat.

“And why not?”

“Because she's a mercenary. She works for money. Terrorists don't have money.”

“But you don't know.”

“I don't have proof of her lack of involvement if that's what you mean,” Ivan said.

“What if this was a cause she embraced?” Ida asked.

“It isn't her cause.”

“But you can't prove that, either.”

“It isn't her cause.”

“Why not?”

“Because that's not what she's like!” said Ivan.

Ida considered him. He was leaning forward in his chair, trying to impress her with the sincerity of his brilliant blue eyes. His arms were still chained to the rests of the chair, which rattled when he moved. The wires of the polygraph, thin and violet like veins, came out from underneath the white of his shirt and hooked into the wildly oscillating machine. He had no power, no control, and he was bluffing. Yet he was bluffing well.

“I don't believe you,” Ida said.

Ivan cocked his head to the side, tilting his chin up in challenge.

“Then why don't you find Abigail and ask her about it?” he said. “I can't tell you anything.”

“It's a bad idea to lie to me,” Ida said, pacing around the table to stand near him so that she could lean over him. Bluffing or not, if he didn't break, she would have nothing but suspicions to show for this line of interrogation.

“I'm not lying,” said Ivan, clear and guileless, and the polygraph showed no lie at all. “Look, she didn't even tell us until we were already on the planet. If she'd had something to do with it, she would've told us why we should avoid Ceres before we ever got there. Because she didn't have anything to do with it, she protected her contacts by not telling us anything. And if I'd known, if she'd known and she'd told me, Mattie and I would have never gone near the place.” He was keeping up his innocent act the whole time; Ida almost found it impressive, except she knew how much of it was an act. He had to break. He had to.