Engines of Oblivion Read online

  Sharma blanched. “It wasn’t me.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Natalie dropped off into a spate of hard coughing, spitting congealed, greenish liquid onto the back of her hand. It was traced with red blood—clear evidence the atmosphere had found its way into her lungs and started to curdle her bronchioles. Fantastic.

  “Don’t be silly. They wouldn’t have sent me to Tribulation with you if I were infected,” said Sharma.

  Natalie snorted, pushing some brambles out of the way, letting the branch whip back into Sharma’s face, and heard the satisfying snap of wood against skin. Sharma made sense, which annoyed her. The doctor grumbled slightly, but kept up behind her, and Natalie felt a little burning satisfaction under her sternum, next to the evaporator, still hot and white against her skin, unexploded and unexplored.

  “Well, it’s not behaving like one. This is something new.”

  Sharma stepped on a gathering of dry twigs, sending a series of staccato snaps that dragged Natalie straight back to gunfire and Grenadier. “It’s a kinetic.”

  Natalie stopped, then spat on the ground, centering herself, ridding herself of the taste of Tribulation’s tight, rotten air and the aftertaste of iron. She stopped again, allowing the weapon to slide carefully into her right hand. She turned it around in her palm, feeling the warmth of its silver skin, hearing the song, extending it toward Sharma.

  “Can’t be. It’s on.”

  “I don’t need to tell you that Vai weapons are either blood-locked or impact-locked. We already know the rules.”

  The air felt like sandpaper in Natalie’s lungs, dragging pointed nails down her throat, harassing her memoria for feelings she hadn’t had in years. “No, we don’t. There’s the Tribulation weapon, which is neither molecular or kinetic, and—”

  “You mean the Heart, and that’s only because it’s not actually a weapon.” Sharma walked closer, hovering in the white weaponlight, a craggy tree throwing shadows across her face.

  “You named it.” Natalie’s voice came out flat.

  Sharma shrugged. “I’m not sure who came up with it. I’ve forgotten. Ms. Chan, the Vai are living beings, bound by the rules of physics and biology. We know how their weapons work.” The edges of Sharma’s mouth turned down, and she crossed her arms.

  “Maybe you don’t know as much as you think you do.” Natalie watched the weapon spin and whirl, heard the energy inside whisper and howl, chaotic and wordless and blank. Wondered what Ashlan heard when she held this kind of death in her hands, if it felt more like music or terror or blood. Like a promise, perhaps.

  The doctor shook her head. “I’ve been studying this for years. I know what I’m talking about.”

  “Enlighten me, then,” Natalie said, gritting her teeth.

  Sharma turned, then stubbed her toe on a large fallen log. She let out a pained hiss. “Not here.”

  Natalie coughed again, wiping her mouth. Her hand came away smeared with blood. “No. Now. We are having a very bad day. If you know something that can fix this, or explain this, or make it a very good day, then you’d better be out with it.”

  Sharma sighed. “My research concluded that—”

  “Don’t worry about it,” said a third voice, accompanied by the whine of a boltgun. “It doesn’t matter what she says. She lies.”

  Natalie heard the gun fire from the trees, and she whirled; she saw the flashing glint at the muzzle and the bolt that followed, casting vivid, bright light against the tall trees. The bolt hit Sharma right below her left knee, and the doctor fell back against a tree, clutching her leg, her ragged, angry call echoing against the leaves twirling in the evening wind. Natalie thought she caught a glimmer of silver through her grabbing fingers, but lost it in the weaponlight, in her scramble for a response and a boltgun.

  The dark shadows of the dim forest hid the figure, enveloped in the long, wine-dark fronds of a stunted alien bush, her gun black against the evening, completely unmoved by Sharma ripping a tourniquet from the sleeve of her jacket.

  “She lies, Natalie,” the woman repeated. “She lies, and she takes, and she uses, and you brought her here?”

  The shooter was a familiar, near-skeletal woman in a worn, ill-fitting indenture’s jumpsuit, her dishwater hair tied up out of her face, her skin streaked with burgundy dirt in an unprofessional attempt at camo. A shaking recognition hit Natalie, and she stopped in her tracks.

  “You can give me that,” said Kate Keller, extending her hand for the evaporator.

  “You shot her. You fucking shot her.”

  Sharma gasped. “That was my good leg.”

  Keller waved her hand, and the molecular died, leaving the noisy evening forest preternaturally quiet. “Oops.”

  Natalie focused on the dead evaporator. Keller’s hand. The impossible presence of Keller herself. “What the fuck,” she said.

  Her presence was impossible, and what she’d done to the evaporator even more so. The captain—who had been one of the first supportive citizens she’d ever met, who had reached out, been her friend, gave her dozens of new chances, new desires, new hope, had redirected her energy—had most certainly died, either on Twenty-Five or when Ramsay had taken her prisoner. That Keller had been kind and funny, with a warm, devious smile. That Keller had mediated, navigated, supported.

  This Keller was barely alive.

  Gone was the constant ponytail, the bias-cut bangs, the reliable shoulders. This doppelganger’s skin had turned from bright to wan, the whites of her eyes muddied and darkened, her muscles gone to waste. Her dirty-blond hair had been cut to her ears, and thin, sweat-soaked strands peeked out from under a dishrag that served as a bandanna.

  Natalie had always thought that Ashlan’s fragile constitution had been left over from her time at Wellspring Consolidated, but now she saw the truth of the illness: the alien silver just below Keller’s skin, the whisper of death in the tremor of her hand, and a ghoulish darkness around her eyes. The joy at seeing Keller—the joy at knowing her captain had made it out, that she’d found Ashlan, that she was safe—died immediately, because she’d seen that look before. It’s just that she’d never recognized it for what it really was.

  “You’re sick,” Natalie whispered.

  Keller laughed, but there was no mirth in it—just the hollow, meaningless, cracking sound that lived in Natalie’s own throat. “Come on.”

  “But the evaporator—”

  “I’ll explain inside. InGen’s still around.”

  By now, Sharma had shredded her jacket to make a bandage and a tourniquet, covering the burned, bloody boltgun wound, mopping up the edges with what used to be a sleeve like she was still worried about offworld contamination protocols. Natalie saw the glimmer hiding under the doctor’s sleeve again, playing against the weaponlight, and began to suspect that she was the only one in the little group who would die if the evaporator she was carrying went off.

  “I can’t exactly walk,” the doctor spat.

  “Not you,” Keller said. Her eyes flickered back to Natalie. “Her.”

  “She’ll die. You can’t leave her,” said Natalie.

  “It’s a flesh wound,” Keller said. “Sure I can.”

  “You meant to shoot her?” Natalie said, aghast.

  “All of this,” Keller said, her hand making a wide arc around the space, the trees, them, “is her fault.”

  “And that’s why I’m here,” the doctor continued, fixing her eyes on Keller, breathing hard. “That’s my lab you’re living in. Your illness is my field of research. I can help her. I can help you. I might even be able to save you both, and you thank me by shooting me.”

  “Yeah, well,” Keller said. “We didn’t start this to be saved. You of all people should understand the idea of sacrifice.”

  Sharma’s mouth jawed open like an offended fish. Some dark emotion played across her face, as if she’d just been outplayed in some game Natalie couldn’t quite understand. She swallowed. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes, Ms. Ke
ller. Twenty-Five was the first place I thought I could change. Let me make it up to you.”

  Keller’s eyes darkened, but Natalie could see her wavering slightly. “That’s a lie.”

  “Are you going to stake Ashlan’s life on that?”

  “Doesn’t matter. You’re too late.”

  “Nothing is ever too late.”

  Keller narrowed her eyes. “I know you’re working for Mr. Solano. We saw your yacht IFF register on the ansible when you arrived.”

  Sharma laughed. “And you’re going to care about that when she’s dead? Do you want InGen to have the Heart? What about Armour? Baylor-Wellspring? Are they any better?”

  Her former captain’s lip twisted. “I sure as hell don’t want you to have it.”

  Natalie cleared her throat, feeling the conversation lingering close to the edge of a massive cliff she was quite sure she didn’t want to step off. “Well, we can’t stay here,” Natalie said, looking over her shoulder. “InGen will have drones in the air by now. We need to go.”

  Keller played with the safety on her gun, her eyes migrating to the pale, dead evaporator in Natalie’s arms. “I’ll let her decide.”

  Keller reached into her pocket. Natalie expected a gun—it was always guns, these days, bullet guns and boltguns and the violence of the gun’s simple request. Instead, she brought out a bog-standard walkie and thumbed the transmission button, asking the question, then pressing it up to her ear to listen to the response.

  And for a moment, stupidly, Natalie wondered who her was.

  The growing darkness underlined Keller’s illness; her hat-shaded eyes turned toward the sounds in the distance, the increasing clanks and clatters, the signifiers that InGen was getting closer.

  “All right,” Keller said into the walkie, after a moment spent listening. There was a tight and terrible thing in Keller’s eyes, then, a light and a darkness, and she slid the walkie back into her pocket. “You fuck anything up, Doc, and I mean anything, you drop a fucking spoon, and I’ll shoot you in a place it isn’t going to be so easy to fix.”

  Sharma’s eyes had gone narrow and lambent and, for a second, suspicious, but when she spoke, it was with a tiny smile. “Fair,” the doctor replied. “Let’s go.”

  10

  Natalie followed her former captain into the vine-choked remains of the agricultural center’s main plaza. As they walked, Keller explained that she and Ash had moved the atmospinners closer to the main dormitory and barn, increasing the percentage of breathable air there while allowing the native forest to encroach on the outer buildings, creating natural camouflage. This resulted in brambles circling the broken maglev, trees weaving themselves through the wooden buildings, and sharp, hardy Tribulation grasses invading windowsills and doors.

  Otherwise, it was exactly as she’d remembered: a scene straight out of a colonization holo, with plain-walled barns and dorms set squat and square around the mud-choked plaza, the whole place scattered with shredded festival banners. Rusted trucks and tractors lay where they’d been left after the war; doors to indentures’ cabins jawed wide open, their bright tattered curtains flapping in the sulfur breeze. This was the other way to citizenship—working Auroran land you’d eventually lease as a citizen, supplying the Company’s assets in space with food and resources. Boring as hell. Maybe it was the dream of people who grew up on stations, Natalie supposed, or people who cared about what Earth was like before the biosphere tanked. Not her.

  Ash and Kate—calling her captain by her first name just felt curious and wrong, even though Kate now insisted on it—had removed all evidence of their post-battle presence: the leftover comm tent, the ansible equipment, anything that would point at current human habitation. She could see halfhearted stone fortifications in the west but recognized them as new only because she’d been here before.

  New, too, were the solar-powered sensors on the east end, covered with artistically arranged burgundy scrub grasses to make it look like the machines had been there awhile. Ash and Kate hadn’t bothered to hide the impact crater where the escaping transport had gone down; they had been too weak at that point to do heavy shoveling, Kate explained. Natalie half-listened to her former captain talk, remembering how this was where everything had started to go wrong: where the blue screamer had gone off, where her team scattered like they hadn’t even been trained, where she’d lost the men and women of her very first command to a Vai kinetic the Sacrament Society had left lying around in their haste to get off-planet.

  Natalie swallowed down memories: the fireball’s stunning heat, the fear, the pounding of her feet on the ground, the screamer wrapping around Ashlan’s chest and tearing her apart before it spat her out breathing. Of all the terrible memories the Heart could have taken from her, it left Natalie the empty, screaming loss of the people she was supposed to protect—the men and women of her first real command. She blinked away a sudden tightness in her chest, padding across the expanse, trying to keep up with Kate, who was walking faster than any woman as sick as she was had a right to.

  “You’re in danger,” Natalie said.

  “No shit,” said Kate. Her mouth twisted. “I was hoping we’d have a few more weeks. It’s fine. We knew we couldn’t hide forever. We’ve done most of what we came here to do, and if the rest of it fails, at least we have a plan to kill the Heart.”

  Natalie could hear Sharma hacking up a lung behind her, gasping at the spun oxygen as it slithered closer, leaning on her makeshift crutch. Natalie coughed herself, feeling an absurd stab of gratitude for the change in the air, and then swallowed the last clot of thick mucus in her throat.

  “You can’t,” Sharma said, gasping for breath. “You can’t kill the Heart.”

  Kate opened a side door to the barn. “Watch me.” She paused. “You know, I actually hope you do.”

  Sharma shook her head. “It’s my life’s work. I should know.”

  “Is it?” Kate ducked into the barn, and it swallowed the sound of her voice. “Do you know, or are you just hypothesizing? There’s one thing about dying from celestium toxicity in an underground test site that’s actually quite fun: you get time to practice.”

  “If you think you know so much, how do you plan to disable it?”

  “The same way you defuse any molecular. The same way we neutralized the stash of weapons stored here.”

  Natalie interjected. “You can’t defuse most moleculars. You can only set them off.”

  Sharma’s eyes gleamed. “You mean—all the others—you—” She paused. “Everything we stockpiled is gone?”

  “Yep.”

  “Then you’re ready for the fight.” The doctor struggled to catch up, limping, while Natalie struggled to understand. “The Vai are massing at the White Line, Ms. Keller. We don’t know why. We need the Heart.”

  Kate smirked and continued on like Sharma hadn’t said a thing. “Do you honestly want to find out what it really does?”

  “Yes,” Sharma breathed.

  “Then shut up about your goddamn research.”

  Sharma’s eyes grew wide. Kate simply smiled and moved forward, the sound of her footsteps echoing against the wood and plasteel floor.

  Natalie pulled away from the doctor’s eyes burning a hole in her back, disappearing into the darkness of the barn. She expected to see the crates of Sacrament-stored kinetic weapons that were inside last time, as well a dusty cot and some old, rusting farm implements, but the crates were missing, quite possibly relocated elsewhere. A polished wheelchair sat in the corner. She pursed her lips, casting another glance around, and then hurried to catch up with Kate, who was already clattering down the staircase to the Sacrament lab.

  “Wait,” Natalie said, leaving a boiling Sharma in her wake. “Captain. You’re infected too. How?”

  Kate paused on the staircase. “The price of a kiss.”

  “How long do you have?”

  “A couple months,” said her former captain. “Not long enough.”

  “The doc has a treat
ment,” Natalie said.

  Kate’s mouth flattened, and she took in Natalie’s information like she always had, back on the ship—with the same calm face, the same unlined forehead. The only sign Kate had felt anything was her knuckles whitening against the railing. “Doesn’t matter,” she finally said.

  “If she can save you, it’s worth hearing her out.”

  “If,” Kate said, her eyes darting over Natalie’s shoulder.

  Natalie straightened. “You wouldn’t believe what we’ve been able to accomplish back home. I believe them. You should, too.”

  This caught Kate by surprise. “Never.”

  “Do we really have any other choice?”

  “We.” The former captain repeated the word, then frowned. “There’s no we, Natalie. There could have been a we, but you brought her. Maybe you’ll understand once I show you—”

  “Is Ashlan downstairs?” The doctor’s voice, and her shadow, draped over Natalie’s shoulders, and Kate turned, continuing toward the underground facilities.

  Sharma limped down the staircase behind them; she’d fashioned a splint of sorts from the hilt of some old farm tool. Kate rolled her eyes, fired up a solar torch, and shone the beam toward the metal door at the bottom of the stairs. They passed through the small reception room—the dead body was gone, but the stink remained, scrubbed into the walls like sin—and passed into the cavernous underground chamber where the Sacrament Society had once stored their nauseating experiments.

  Natalie’s boots hit the dirt following Kate’s, and she wiped sweaty palms on her uniform top before looking around. The quarantine boxes were gone, replaced by five old mattresses surrounded by improvised medical equipment. Nearby was a generator, whirling power into intravenous poles and dialysis machines. Lying on the mattresses were five men, sleeping.