Engines of Oblivion Page 12

  No.

  She wanted to explain to Kate why she’d been right. Ash’s claim of mass murder was insane, anyway, when anyone could see the alien had two hands and two feet and two eyes, that it was one creature, one breath, one heartbeat. Not thousands.

  Kate would see. She would understand.

  She could hardly breathe; everything seemed tight and callous and hot, like some dark executioner had a boltgun spinning hot just inches from her brain. The hangar itself was still nothing to write home about, meant to hide the Sacrament Society’s stolen pods and shuttles in plain sight, kept at the ready in case they needed to leave in a hurry. There were no working shuttles here now, of course—just useless repair equipment, a burned-out Becker Ace, and half-empty boxes filled with picked-over engine parts, as well as piles of uniforms and smocks in the corner. Someone had made an aborted attempt to scrub away the bloodstains on the floor—brown and gray, human blood and alien.

  The resulting smear glittered in the heliotrope light that remained. Natalie’s eyes took a moment to adjust. Kate waited in the center of the room, her left hand hovering over an open quarantine locker.

  “You remember this?” Kate asked. “The Heart?”

  Natalie shivered. “Like I could forget.”

  “Ash told me that you left to run a perimeter check before the doctor turned it on, back at the admin center when everything began. You never saw it work. This is what you missed.”

  The room grew brighter—notes of pomegranate and sage, brighter than the sun—and Natalie felt suddenly breathless. The Heart sang in shades of purple and green, twisting inside a cage of black scrollwork that whined like vines shrinking and dying in the summer heat of her childhood, like blank arteries opening in the sun. The temperature dropped off a cliff, as if Sharma had shoved her in a cycling airlock without a suit, and Natalie felt cold panic in her throat. Her bones shook where they stood.

  “Stop,” she whispered.

  “I think it understands what you did here,” Kate said.

  “I saved Ashlan. That’s what I did.” She used the palm of her hands to block the stabbing light.

  “You have to stop telling yourself stories, Natalie. Justifying the horrors around you just to get through the day. If you don’t, they’ll eat you alive. You’ll go straight into that maw, singing.”

  “That thing was killing her,” Natalie said—the blood, the memoria showed her the blood on the floor, red and silver mixing together, a Charybdis of it, the memoria making her remember how it swirled there, inhuman, only this time it was so cold in the room it froze in cells and crystals, glittering in the Heartlight—“I did the right thing. Unless you think I should have let her bleed out.”

  “Excuses.” Kate drew in on herself, shoulders hunching, and she turned so Natalie couldn’t see the gun at her holster—not that Natalie was concerned. Kate had never held a gun any smaller than the railguns mounted on Twenty-Five’s prow when Natalie had known her, and she truly doubted she’d practiced enough to outshoot Natalie.

  Natalie wondered if Kate was going to push this toward a fight, if she’d have to bloody this person she’d loved in Joseph Solano’s name. You were a soldier, she thought, you chose that life, what did you expect?

  Not this.

  “Turn it off,” she said, shivering.

  Kate didn’t move. She didn’t look affected by the plummeting temperature. “Not until you tell me what Solano has planned.”

  Natalie’s jaw chattered. The air in the bugout bay felt like the aftermath of a nuke, like a black hull against midnight stars. “He didn’t tell me. But they do want you back. And maybe for a little while, maybe, I thought about bringing you there. But, Captain—Kate—anywhere is better than this. The Vai are massing, Baywell won’t back down, and the alliances aren’t going to hold after today. I’m not saying Aurora is the best situation for you. I’m not even saying it’s a good situation. But you’d live. You’d live.”

  Natalie heard yelling from down the hall. Sharma. Keep that on if you want to kill her yourself, but I need the machines to work.

  Kate softened. She shoved the isolette back into the black quarantine box below and flipped the lid, sealing it shut. The last tendrils of light caressed her bent fingers, then surrendered to darkness. Heat rushed in like a wave, scrambling at Natalie’s stiff muscles. She felt a scurrying gratitude.

  “We didn’t come here because we were running away, or because we wanted to die, Nat,” Kate said, quietly. “It was the only way. It still is.”

  “Then explain it to me, because I don’t understand.”

  Kate bit her lip. “She already told you on London. Nobody can have the Heart. Nobody.”

  Natalie nursed a note of frustration. “And when you die, what happens then? Someone’s just going to walk in and take it.”

  “We’ve been doing our own research, trying to figure out what it will take to disarm it. We—” She swallowed. “We spent a long time with Sharma’s notes. When she cut the Heart away from the Vai ship she discovered all those years ago, she cut the Heart from the Vai network in general. But if we could reconnect it, they might simply leave with it. But we couldn’t do that because we didn’t have a ship. Now that you’re here—”

  “Reconnect it, so they’ll know their people are dead? I’m sorry, Kate, but that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. This situation is far beyond solutions that sound like ‘let’s ignore it and hope it goes away.’ We need to focus on active fixes.”

  Kate sighed. “We have.” She drummed her fingers on the quarantine box, clearly nervous. “Neither Ash nor I will serve as a human trigger for Aurora or for any other corporation. That leaves us one option. We need to take ourselves out of the equation, and the Heart at the same time.”

  “You mean suicide.”

  “More than suicide.”

  Natalie blinked. “There’s nothing past suicide.”

  “There is with the Heart.” Kate cleared her throat. “The point is, no company gets the ability to use Vai tech.”

  “And if the Vai decide to attack again? Kate, do you want those millions of lives on your conscience?”

  Kate opened her mouth to answer, but her words were drowned out by a rumbling from above. The bay doors clattered. Clumps of wet dirt fell from an unfinished section of the upper wall. Natalie placed her hands on the wall, feeling the reverberations—not Vai, she figured, but kinetic, human things, bullets and mortars and grenades. Most of it seemed to be coming from the north—InGen, here early, Natalie thought—but she also felt a violent answer from the east, a shaking, momentary blast that could only mean Baylor-Wellspring had brought the same kind of artillery that they’d been known to bring to decimate Auroran infantries over the past few months.

  Her former captain’s eyes closed, and her body bowed, exhausted.

  “I don’t have a better answer,” she whispered.

  “So we’ll go find one,” said Natalie. “Together. As soon as we’re done with InGen.”

  “And Sharma?”

  “Fuck Sharma.”

  A small smile danced across Kate’s face, and she nodded. “All right. You’re the tactician. What do we do from here?”

  11

  Natalie walked back to Sharma’s surgery with her fingers dragging against the wall, feeling the thud of men and machines above. She reached out to the memoria and it responded, like spiders playing tiddlywinks with her vertebrae. Memories spun her back to basic tactics training, to when the execs still thought ordinary methods of warfare could win against the Vai. She tasted the glassy, recycled stink of the classroom, then the bright, clear air of the exercises on Bethel.

  Bethel, only the second planet she’d ever visited, where she lost sixteen cit points and one whole credit-year gawking at the spindletrees instead of paying attention to her commanding officer. There were holes on that planet, too, moments of forgetfulness not even the memoria could salvage, faces she couldn’t remember. It seemed unfair that she could remember the
chorus to every stupid Smashboys song and not the friends from her very first unit.

  “Natalie,” Kate barked, behind her. “Focus.”

  The ghostly figures dissipated. “Do you have sensors? A comm system?”

  “In the dorm. I have the ansible Len built. I wired it into some equipment the farmers used to measure crop yields and atmospheric percentages. It’s not video, it’s not holo or haptic, but it’ll tell us where the assholes are. We tried to bring it all downstairs but didn’t have the cable.”

  Len again. Was he another friend she’d forgotten in the Tribulation soup? She wanted to ask about him—her? Who?—but right now wasn’t a good time. “That’s good enough. Guns?”

  “Two. In the kitchen with the comms.”

  “How much ammo?”

  “Some.” Kate took a breath. “The problem is, I can’t aim. My hand-eye coordination, it’s—”

  “—just as bad as Ash’s was last year. Okay,” Natalie said. She remembered that, at least. A year into her illness, Ash had nearly piloted her salvage pod here and there into walls and debris, even a loose kinetic or two, although Natalie had figured it for exhaustion at the time. Fatigue was easy to entertain on long-haul assignments. “That’s fine. Just because your aim is shot doesn’t mean you can’t tell me where to aim.”

  “It’s not that easy. I have hallucinations.”

  “All you have to see is the enemy line. I’ll take care of the rest. If we do this right, we won’t even be doing most of the shooting ourselves.” Natalie stopped in the hallway to squeeze Kate’s shoulder. It was the kind of thing Kate might have done for her, once, and Natalie felt momentarily nervous, like she was going to insult this person she admired, but Kate didn’t seem either embarrassed or grateful. Instead, she looked nervous.

  “I really don’t want to leave her,” Kate said.

  “You’re not leaving her,” Natalie said. “You’re saving her.”

  Kate choked up. “What we’ve been through together, Nat, it changes you—”

  “So use that feeling,” Natalie said. “Do your best. Come back to her. It’s not an option. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  They walked toward the cavern together. Natalie tossed a glance into the lab as she went; Sharma was bent over Ash’s prone body, instruments flickering in the artificial light. Natalie saw bloody tools, spent syringes, the pale curve of Ash’s chin. She saw the chain of jewel-red liquid scattering the floor, shining in the electric light, and followed it with her eyes all the way out into the cavern. Kate skidded to a halt behind her, breath hot on the back of Natalie’s neck.

  “No,” Kate whispered, then took off.

  “Wait,” Natalie said, grabbing for her old captain’s sleeve, but it passed through her fingers like water. She followed Kate into the cavern. One of the men on the mattresses was dead, his guts open to the ceiling, his forgotten body still too recent to enter rigor. From where Natalie was standing, she could recognize the shining red curve of the stomach, the empty bowl where the liver had been, and all the guts that had slurped in to take its place.

  Kate turned back toward the lab, and Natalie’s fingers finally found purchase in the other woman’s ragged sleeve.

  “Don’t,” Natalie said.

  “She said she wouldn’t kill him.” Kate yanked her arm away.

  Natalie’s hand clamped around Kate’s thinning, bony wrist. “She’s in surgery. I don’t know what’ll happen to Ash if you interrupt her. And if we don’t get everything set up, we’re not getting out of here alive.”

  “You brought her here. You convinced me to—you—” She closed her eyes, unable to finish. “What happened to you, Natalie?” she asked. “You used to care.”

  But maybe I never did, she wanted to say, or maybe I just can’t take anything more, but the words came too late. Kate stared at Natalie’s silence with a disgusted twist of her lip, then turned back, walking quick and stiff toward the exit as Natalie had asked her to.

  Outside, night was threatening, inky black and chattering, with only a whisper of moonrise at the tree line. It wasn’t the most ideal time for rival companies to attempt a full-on assault of a facility where Vai weapons were known to be stored in spades, but Natalie had seen dumber orders given, and the plan coming together in her head, at least, felt more agile than anything InGen would pick up on.

  Kate pointed across the plaza. “About a hundred feet,” she whispered, and Natalie attempted to delineate the chunky line of the dorm from the obsidian darkness beyond. Failing, she picked up, running pell-mell with her former captain until the building was close, until the prefab plasteel wall was under her hand, until Kate pressed herself against the door, fiddling with the lock. It popped open just as they heard a whack-crackle from the tree line, like boots stepping on branches or a machete slicing through one of the hungry vines clogging the windows, and the two tumbled inside.

  “Do you think they saw us?” Kate said.

  Natalie wheezed, taking longer to catch her breath than she wanted. Fucking Tribulation air. “Always assume they did.”

  Kate nodded, pretending not to notice the crackling sound in Natalie’s lungs. “It’s all back here.”

  The air inside the dorm was slightly stale, tinged with the stink of blankets and linens left to rot in the humidity. Kate coughed, lighting a torch but keeping it low and dangling from her fingers. She pushed past a hanging knit blanket into what had once been the main dining hall.

  “I don’t remember all of those vines outside,” Natalie said. “And the forest being so close.”

  “Weird, isn’t it? I figure it has something to do with the return of the planetary atmosphere interacting with the food crops. They don’t really belong in the biosphere, after all, and I have no idea what the biological implications are, which would be fascinating to think about if I had more time,” she said, and pushed open a wooden door. “But there’s never enough time.”

  Natalie tried to keep her disappointment from showing on her face. She failed. This had been the dorm cafeteria, a largely functional expanse populated by metal tables and twirling, fading homemade decorations from some lost festival, colorful paper cut into connected circles by the small, blunt hands of children. The shapes cast dark, whirling shadows on a set of west-facing windows meant to showcase the fields beyond.

  It was the worst kind of room they could have picked for this kind of dark work.

  Whatever. Ash and Kate had obviously picked the room for its ease of access and proximity to food as they grew weaker. Natalie shut her mouth on the criticism that threatened to spill out. This was what they had. They’d set up a bed and a closet. The settlement’s ansible was here, propped up on a table that once functioned as a banquet server. Kate slaved a computer to it, one of the cit-consumer tablets left behind when the Vai turned the inhabitants of the ag-center into dust. Kate turned it on, sliding into the chair, then routed power to the terminal while Natalie hovered behind her.

  Instead of the familiar blue of an Auroran machine, the terminal greeted Natalie with the simple black-and-white logo of the Sacrament Society before loading straight into the ansible data, displayed on an old, keyboard-directed interface. If Natalie had a few hours, she could have opened up the back end, matched the code with what little she knew from her Verdict days, and seen if Sharma had slipped her fingers into this machine as well. Unfortunately, she didn’t have that kind of time.

  “Wow. C-kalibre. That’s a flashback,” Natalie said.

  “All of the Sacrament machines are built off C-kalibre,” Kate said. “It still supports the best firewalling you can get.”

  “I didn’t know you were a coder,” Natalie said.

  “I’ve had some time to learn this year.” Kate smirked. “I’m surprised you recognized it.”

  The memoria blasted Natalie with one of the memories she would have liked very much to forget: the tang of smoke, rotten fear in her throat, watching the robot run by her classmate’s program rip apart her own in t
he murk of the reflecting pool above the concourse. Her father, frowning. Maybe we’ll just give you a gun and put you on the wall. You’re just not good at any of it. I don’t know what else to do.

  “Learned it as a kid,” Natalie said.

  “Huh. Okay, I’m seeing three separate approach vectors. Three companies?”

  “Yeah.” Natalie narrowed her eyes in examination.

  Keller nodded. “It’s too bad we can’t figure out which one is which.”

  “We absolutely can,” Natalie said. “I’m going upstairs to look.”

  “Nope. Don’t like that.”

  “I have to go there anyway. Guns?”

  Kate hesitated. “In the kitchen fridge. Lock number 56278.”

  Natalie ducked into the kitchen—Kate and Ash had prepared meals here, messily and recently, from what she could tell. An empty package of carb-cubes lay sodden in the sink; nearby lay the remains of a desiccated onion. She moved to the refrigeration unit, flipped the lock, and opened it to reveal the armory, which consisted of precisely two boltrifles and absolutely nothing else.

  Her stomach dropped. “Only two? Where’s the stuff for the civvie police?”

  “Elsewhere? We didn’t think about the guns. We had blue screamers.”

  “Too bad you don’t have any left.” She removed the guns from their housing. “You could’ve just set them off and gone below.”

  “We already used them.”

  “On what?”

  “Ourselves.”

  Natalie paused. On ourselves. Suddenly Kate’s earlier explanations to Sharma made sense. Practice. Oh, no. Her blood ran cold, and the memoria blasted her again with images of Ash caught in the blast of the blue screamer, her bones rattling apart, her blood evaporating, and then her body falling to the ground, alive, alive, alive. Natalie’s breath froze in her lungs.

  You get time to practice, Kate had said.

  They’d come out of it alive, every single time—

  “Kate, you didn’t,” Natalie began, as she swung back into the dark cafeteria holding the guns. It was her imagination, not the memoria, that provided her with the gory details. She shivered. “You couldn’t. You set them off? There were—there were hundreds of them. It would have been awful—why didn’t you just defuse them?”