Engines of Oblivion Read online

  Showtime.

  Natalie aimed, cranked up her boltgun’s damage rate, breathed out, squeezed the trigger, and painted an arc into the brush. InGen’s back guard fell, one-two-three, in a crackling sizzle-splatter that might have been artistic in Alien Attack Squad, then let the gun charge, and let out another salvo to press the issue. InGen attacked the only visible culprit, Baywell at the maglev, and Baywell returned fire. This time, just barely in her scope, she could see the Ballard line, taking advantage of InGen’s confusion, pushing forward toward the plaza themselves.

  She swallowed a triumphal yelp, and pulled back into the shadows between the buildings.

  Natalie moved around the second structure to the north of the battlefield, coming up behind the Ballard position. This would be trickier. She would have to be fast, and she didn’t know how fast she could be with Tribulation-bruised lungs. She peeked around the corner, releasing fire on their back line. She got six rounds out before she had to pull back and make pell-mell for the forest line, her breath pushing out of her lungs, her feet making crackling noises, making her obvious, making her body a target—

  —but everyone else was already engaged in the plaza, too busy to notice her.

  Too busy with blood and guts and—

  Catching her breath, Natalie stashed herself behind a stand of trees, warming her hands underneath her armpits, swallowing every cackle that threatened to expand from her heaving, oxygen-starved body. She lifted her gun again and pressed her eyes to the boltgun scope.

  The results of her crazy little plan were almost too perfect.

  Almost.

  InGen was decimated, having taken significant crossfire from the other two companies. Bodies in mustard yellow shuddered on the plaza, half-dead, crawling for shelter. She shoved down her nausea, waiting for Baywell or Ballard to engage again.

  Nothing happened.

  Natalie adjusted her scope. Why were they hovering? Were they checking angles? Negotiating for peace? Realizing they’d both been had?

  Fuck no. That couldn’t happen. She needed to get closer. Find better cover. Try again. If Baywell had abandoned the maglev for their center position, that would be the best place to go.

  She traced a tight arc around the wooden outbuildings. The forest’s edge was unfamiliar ground, the vines skipping up and twisting, threatening to slip around her ankle and ruin everything with one swift tug. She ran hard until she was next to the maglev track. The one broken rail was a desperate, dark score in the alien ground, broken in places by plants she didn’t recognize—woody, jagged things that didn’t look like they belonged here on listing, burgundy Tribulation. Hauling herself bodily into the almost-empty maglev station, she found two soldiers guarding a few boxes of tools and a small, sector-only ansible. She shot both with a nauseous twist, feeling the thump of their bodies through the metal floor. Her stomach twisted but she pushed forward, grabbing the ansible handset and paging through the local frequencies until she found the Baywell-only chatter.

  “Command, this is overwatch,” she said. “Just spotted three figures fleeing into the underbrush below the south dorm. They seem to be wearing Auroran indenture suits. Recommend moving to intercept.”

  “Acknowledged, overwatch.”

  And for the first time since she’d landed on this stupid planet—for the first time since the war with Baywell began—she watched the giddy sight of the enemy actually breaking their line in the opposite direction of where she’d told Kate to go, sucking down her lies like candy. Three, four fireteams careening into the forest—

  Wait, she thought. I’m missing three more teams—where the fuck did they—

  A bolt hit her shoulder a millisecond before she registered the flash of the muzzle. Close range. The corner of her eye. She hadn’t seen it coming. Pain sailed through her body, and she fell against the window behind her, her blood smearing the plasglas, dripping in a hot surge down her arm. She clutched at the bloody vacancy her shoulder had become.

  “Don’t kill her.” It was the man who had acknowledged her feint.

  “You really fucking should,” she spat back.

  Baywell cits grabbed her by her arms, took her gun, and dragged her out of the maglev into the plaza. A wild screaming noise in her throat dragged her attention away from the pain. Distracted her captors. Made them think she was weak. This way she could count her living enemies, get a sitrep, and try not to die.

  “On your knees,” she heard.

  Natalie went down hard, discomfort juddering through her pelvis and back, sending painful echoes to her shoulders. In the plaza, bloody survivors stared daggers at the ground, their hands knit behind their heads. She wanted to puke. All she’d done in the end was create a situation that put Baylor-Wellspring at an advantage and trapped her friends in the cavern below. Some tactician I am.

  The leader pinched Natalie’s chin between a tight, bony index finger and palm, wrenching it toward him like meat from a barbecue, pain-blue light shining in her eyes from a nearby torch.

  “This the package?” said the commander.

  Natalie started laughing, hiccupping little things that would piss him off, because didn’t they always get pissed off, these Baylor-Wellspring shits, she thought. Ash had always told her they were big on respect, big on knowing your place, big on cits-over-here and fuck-the-indentures. She laughed so hard she didn’t hear the answer.

  “Can’t be. She’s too healthy. Where are the others?”

  Natalie spat out blood. “I’m the only one here.”

  The butt of the gun came from the left, connecting with the side of her head, making the world spin. Her captor paused to eye the tags on her collar. “We can make you tell us.”

  Natalie smiled, her teeth slicked with blood. “You can try,” she said.

  “Where’s the human trigger Aurora hid here?” he said.

  “Dead.”

  She closed her eyes. Waited for them to slap her, or shoot her, or hit her again. She’d never been captured like this before, but she’d seen enough security theater to know how it went. The blow came again, as she’d expected, hot plasteel to the reach of her jaw, a hard crash of light exploding behind her eyelids. She sucked her teeth to keep herself from crying out.

  “Where’s the trigger?”

  “She’s a person. She has a name.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Dead,” Natalie spat. Focused on an imaginary vision of Ash’s body breathing out for the last time. Winced. “I told you. She died this morning.”

  Crack. He struck her again, and she felt a rib give way, crack, like popcorn, like kindling.

  “Give us her body and we’ll let you walk.”

  She hurt, hurt all over, a starving, death’s-head hurt, could barely catch a breath thanks to the burned-glass edges of her shoulder wound. “You think I can walk?”

  “I think you want to live.”

  Natalie hunched over as much as she could, as if she was losing the last of her energy, as if the situation were too much for her to handle. The lie would come much easier if her body backed it up.

  “Can’t. I burned her.” Natalie closed her eyes again.

  She waited.

  “What the hell do you mean?”

  “I burned her. This morning. I told you.” She let herself choke on the words. “I love her,” she said. “Too much to let assholes like you lay one damned hand on her.”

  “You must be Kate Keller,” the man said. His tone was almost reverent. “The one who killed Phoenix. You’re supposed to be dead.”

  She huffed the ache in her chest like a drug. “You don’t think that I would walk off your stupid Armour bucket with the Heart for anyone less than Ashlan Jackson, would I?”

  “Check her blood,” said the man. “Make sure.”

  Shadows moved around her. Women. Men. It was getting harder to breathe. She was dizzy, not getting enough oxygen, blood pooling in all the wrong places inside her body, the memoria struggling with upload overwhelm. A medic a
rrived, floating in front of her with a half-apologetic gaze. Natalie stared daggers at her as she flipped a case open to locate a syringe. Two others ripped her jacket away from her shoulders. The quiet evaporator dropped out of the inside pocket and hit the dirt with a muffled thump.

  The world ground to a halt around her. The syringe hovered inches from her arm. The guards tightened their grip. The shadows just beyond her vision held their breath, and Natalie delighted in her sudden power, the control over the situation that this silver, half-cracked egg slicked with sweat and blood gave her. It was dead—of course it was, she thought, Kate’s gone—and she looked around for something she could use to set it off, something plasteel—

  The commander knelt to take a closer look. He had a typical birthright’s build, slender-skinny like a flower, sculpted. Aesthetic. Breakable, Natalie thought, if I could just get my arms free. He snatched up the evaporator with his thin fingers, weighed it in his hand, and turned it toward the overhead light.

  His men stepped back as if they were already burning, but he laughed. “Someone get an isolette. If you’re going to threaten us, Keller, you’d best pick a thing that actually—”

  The weapon whirled to life.

  “—works,” he whispered. “Wait, that can’t—”

  Natalie’s entire body was wracked with sudden terror and joy, a cackle that shook her shoulders, anger and giddiness slamming into one another underneath her. She sucked down air, thinking damn you, Kate, damn you for not leaving, damn you for doing this, pulling at the grip of the guards holding her tight, feeling their fingers loosen with fear. She knew she should run, knew she needed to if she wanted to live through this, but a quiet and terrible rage had taken control.

  It’s not suicide if you’re doing it to save them, she thought.

  “Aurora’s ahead of you,” she whispered, the evaporator humming wild and alive in the air around her, humming thin, reedy songs through the commander’s fingerbones. Inside this hellish music, the lies were easy. “We’ve always been ahead of you. We have the labs on Bittersweet now. We have your ships. We have your future. And you’d—”

  “How?” the commander said. “This is a kinetic—”

  Natalie coughed, blood spraying from her lips. The gambit was coming together underneath her tongue, whirling and whining there like the evaporator between them. A good lie, her father had said once, always holds a grain of truth.

  “Is it?” she lied. “Or is it the best technology Aurora has ever developed? You have all of these soldiers, all of these guns, but I’m a human trigger. With one twist of my tongue, I could send you all to hell. Do you know what happens when an evaporator engages? It likes the skin, first, it goes layer by layer, and I’m going to watch—”

  The leader breathed in, clearly considering this, but her screed seemed to be having the opposite effect to what she hoped.

  He was actively calming down.

  “Barnes,” he said. “Explain.”

  The doctor shook her head. “She’s lying, sir. Evaporators don’t stall like that. If the weapon were going to engage, it would have already done so. I believe it’s a fake.”

  Natalie kept talking. Might as well. “You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to watch from here when the timer goes off, and it’s going to burn the skin off all your faces—”

  “So do it,” the commander said.

  Why isn’t it going off? Is Kate too far away? Is there not enough power? No, it doesn’t make sense, she did it before—

  “—and you’ll be alive to watch your liver explode—”

  “You can’t, can you?”

  “—and disintegrate, because the last thing it targets is the heart and the brain, and you’re still alive when—”

  The commander straightened and slapped his knees, letting out a brief, relieved laugh. “Let’s get a move on, folks.”

  The guards fastened a gag around her mouth that tasted like blood and dirt and smelled like it had spent considerable time in a soldier’s underwear. They dragged her toward the plaza as the evaporator spun and whined, thin and ineffective. Natalie spat invective, struggled, pushed against her captors even though she was in pain, even though she had no more moves left, even though this was it, she’d failed Ash and Aurora and even Kate, failed her for asking her bright heart to kill. They lined her up with the other prisoners, and she struggled, her feet and arms leaden and sharp. She couldn’t move—

  —so she tried to turn and spit and howl, but she couldn’t move—

  —but neither could anyone else.

  It was like everything had stopped, like some unseen god had paused the holo and went to the cooler for a snack.

  Stopped was the only word that felt comfortable, because frozen sounded like a rejected Alien Attack Squad script and interrupted was impossible. The still-whirling evaporator silvered the air with a single long note. Every single human in the plaza was motionless as stone: the commander with his skinny voice and his day-old beard, the guards behind her, the Ballard soldiers and the interrupted, bloody InGen kids. She couldn’t even tell if anyone was breathing.

  The plaza filled with light.

  It tipped up from the chamber below the barn: violet-green, death-bright, hollering Heartlight, so strong it slammed into her eyelids like hot daggers. She could barely see the figures following behind it: Sharma walking, pushing Ash in a wheelchair, the black outline of her sickened hands clutching the alien device in her lap. Ash resembled nothing more than a skeleton with skin hanging in decorative strips, wearing loose blue scrubs that covered white autobandages, some saint drenched in wild violet heat.

  Natalie tried to breathe, tried to say it’s me, help, please, but her interrupted skin felt thick and hard, like she’d turned into a statue.

  The survivors’ eyes were all a glassy-edged green, as if the Heartlight had grown into their irises and taken root somewhere below. The last time Natalie had seen Heartlight this keen, it had been right before a rushing wave of nothing took her to death’s waiting room. But the Heart couldn’t be engaged, she thought. It swept, it slaughtered, it stopped—

  —but not like this.

  “I have what you came for,” said Ash, scanning the crowd with a quiet smile. “The ultimate weapon. The ultimate source of power. You want it, and you want it, and you have no idea what it truly does. Perhaps you’d like a demonstration. I have no Vai hivemind to connect with, but I can see into yours.” The sick woman paused, her hand tightening on the rail of the wheelchair, her voice brighter than it had any right to be. “In fact, I can do more than that. Let me show you how it works, and why we can never let you win. Any of you.”

  The light twisted behind Natalie’s eyes. The air felt heavy in her mouth. She could only watch, hurting and helpless, as Sharma pushed Ash and her chair toward the nearest Baywell fighter, a short young citizen with sweat-drenched black hair peeking out of her helmet. Ash rested her fingers against the inside of the woman’s wrist, and a muddy stormcloud darkness rolled in over her pale face.

  “You were his beneficiary and best friend—until you found out just how close he was to turning cit,” Ash said. The soldier’s eyes were alight with terror. “They called it a training accident, but you know better. And so does the coroner who chose to call the hole in your friend’s head an unfortunate occurrence rather than what it really was.”

  Ash dropped her hand. “And the answer to your question is—no. No, you won’t be able to live with it.”

  Ash moved to the next soldier in line—an older man with no helmet, blood matting his gray hair. Aurora would call him too old for the infantry, but Baywell had no such compunctions. Ash’s fingers rose to rest like a blessing on his forehead, and she breathed out, letting out a quiet moan.

  “Antje was kind to you, but you were not kind in return,” she whispered. “She adored you, and you broke her. For what? To catch the eye of Citizen Eyler? Was that failed gambit worth breaking her heart?” She pushed him away, forehead-first, and he crum
pled to the ground.

  Natalie could only watch in horror as Sharma pushed Ash from soldier to soldier. She stopped before each of them, one by one, placing her fingers on their foreheads or wrists or hearts, dragging out their secrets. Some she spoke aloud. Some of them she kept for herself, her body softening as she read each of them like a human flimsy. And then, as if no time had passed, Sharma moved Ash in front of Natalie.

  Ash hesitated.

  No, Natalie thought, don’t you fucking dare.

  But Ash lifted her hand, pressing her cold fingers against Natalie’s wrist. “What aren’t you telling me?” she said.

  We’re on the same side, Natalie wanted to say, I’m your ally, you don’t have to do this—

  Are you? Ash’s clear alto voice was a bell—

  —a bell that tumbled her back to Bittersweet, to the puppet standing in front of the Baylor-Wellspring airfield, staring down the closed door, the pilots running for their ships, the little gusts of celestium dust picking up near the air vents. The Baywell team standing before her in their anonymous coldsuits. A name. Susan. One of them was named Susan.

  Susan was dead.

  I didn’t plan this, she cried.

  Looking down at her dreaming body, Natalie saw she was barefoot in the golden Bittersweet sand, wearing not the bulky puppet but her indenture’s clothes, the blue jumpsuit with the patches at the knees, the one that had been washed so much it should have gone back to requisitions, but why get new clothes when you could save six days on the end of your indenture? And, oh, oh, someone she’d forgotten had once said she looked cute in it. Why can’t I remember?

  The evening wind kicked up around Natalie’s ankles, snatching at her hands and her hair. Ash was trying to slip her fingers into memories that no longer existed, and she felt bereft, searching, and very angry. Her toes curled in the sand.

  Stop, she thought.

  Red dust filled her mouth. She heard Emerson somewhere. Ascanio. The words they were just indentures haunting the hollow notes of the wind.

  Oh, Natalie. Ash’s voice. This, after everything.

  Don’t judge me, Natalie thought. I’m not your enemy.