Engines of Oblivion Read online

  I had to make sure.

  Natalie stared. After what I did for you, you still wonder where I stand?

  Natalie felt anger, inchoate now, disconnected from her body, forced out toward Ash’s disembodied voice. The Heart took your memories. Nat, you might not even know how compromised you are. You might have forgotten.

  I’m fine without them. I’m better.

  Ash’s fingers left her wrist, and Natalie felt her fever-warm birdbone palm slide against hers. You’ve forgotten who you are.

  The red dust kicked up now, dragging itself out of the Bittersweet earth in homicidal waves, and somewhere beyond the airfield were the keen eyes of Solano and the board staring at her with their info-implants shining and their diamonds on their fingers, their clean faces and their dirty hands, their hands full of the warm dreams of all the things she’d thought she wanted. The apartment. Ward. An entire department at her feet—

  Look again, said Ash. This is buried deeper than any of your other memories, which means you need to see it—

  Natalie was suddenly flat on her back, not on Bittersweet, but staring at the keening blue skies of Earth. She tasted the hot, sandy wind, saw the towers of the white plaza, the dark bridge, the doors to the concourse below, the tilting Egg. Verdict. She saw figures moving in and out of the old museum, where her mother sat strapped to all her interfaces—

  —she is sitting at a desk on the fourteenth floor of Tower One, the city laid out below her, the mountains lost in smog. She is not yet a god, not yet a genocide. Her black hair runs loose, even in the heat. She is about to steal something important.

  Her unknown mother turns. Her generic smile is too white. Too wide. Something is coming, something terrible—

  Stop, Natalie cried.

  What came next was a terrible scratching thing inside her mind, a clawed demon with the breath of Tribulation, scoring and scouring her memories with claws of silver Heartfire. She didn’t want it. She hated her mother, hated every lost memory of her, or at least that was the story she’d told herself since she could walk—

  This was love.

  Not the kind she had for Ward, full of briars and bolts and fences, but open to the sky, full-throated and new, the unconditional love of a child for a parent who could never return it. The feeling was overwhelming, terrifying, and it threatened to destroy her, threatened to take the fortress that was her heart and dash it to dust. The kind of love that would hobble her, cast her off the cliff, drown everything she’d built in the river—

  Get out, Natalie gasped.

  I’m sorry. A shiver. I’m so sorry.

  Get the fuck out—

  —and gravity sucked Natalie back down into her own trapped body, leaving the experience shifting in her brain, receding like high tide in the bay. By the time she knit herself back together, Ash and Sharma had pushed on.

  They stood in front of the Baywell commander now, and his green eyes were wide and streaked with red and washed in unblinking tears. She could feel his fear as Ash lifted four fingers to lay across his purpling mouth. Her head tilted back, as if she were some sort of oracle, and out of her lungs came a scarred breath.

  “Baylor-Wellspring doesn’t care about you,” Ash said—loud, so everyone could hear. She let the implications swirl in the air, tightening like a ribbon around dozens of throats. “Your commander was given this assignment because he screwed the CEO’s daughter without a contract. He brought his own yacht, and planned to have your lives cover his exit if things went south. I imagine you might have something to say about that. I know I do.”

  Natalie could see the shift in the Baywell ranks even as their bodies stayed frozen. Raw emotion crackled in their eyes. Ash pressed her fingers hard against the inside of the commander’s wrist, and the skin whitened under her fingers. The man made a whining, desperate sound.

  “The yacht is prepped for intersystem transport,” she said. “We can use it to leave.”

  Sharma cleared her throat. “Are you quite done, then?”

  At Ash’s nod, the doctor pulled the wheelchair away from the crowd and pulled out a measure of quarantine fabric, wrapping the Heart in one economical gesture, staunching the light. A cold wind kicked up through the plaza like the planet catching its breath, and the soldiers began to move again, as slow and tentative as if their limbs had been encased in ice. Kate appeared behind Natalie, her fingers working the lock on the Baywell cuffs.

  “Let’s go,” she hissed, expecting some kind of violent consequences, the three sides flowing back into the fight like a river bursting through a dam. But the desire for conflict had drained out of the plaza like a quick-punch breach. A redheaded woman fell to her knees, bawling. A few others wavered. One vomited.

  The Baywell commander stumbled to his feet. He reached for his gun, but his fingers were still fumbling-cold, and he dropped it on the ground like a toy. He called out for the soldiers to get her, but none of them seemed interested in following the orders of a commander who would have left them behind, and they did nothing but stare and search for bandages.

  The man scrambled for the gun and picked it up, but his grip seemed off. In the maglev, he’d been trained, vicious, sharp. Now, he held the gun like he didn’t even know what to do with it. “W-what did you do to me? I can’t—I’m too—”

  Ash smiled. “I took it all away from you, all those bloody things you want so much. You’ll never hurt anyone again.”

  His eyes darted toward his wavering platoon, clearly afraid. He shoved the gun into the hands of his nearest subordinate like a too-hot cup of coffee. “I don’t—I can’t—who are you?”

  Ash breathed out. She looked slightly disappointed. “After all that, you don’t remember me? Of course you wouldn’t. I was just another soot-streaked face to you. You might remember Christopher Durant, then. He was tall. Great sense of humor. Loved coffee. While you were stationed on Bittersweet, you took him from Dorm A to the admin wing three days a week for a year. For his new job, we all thought.”

  The man stopped fumbling. “You’re her.”

  “I am. He died, you know.”

  “I had no control—”

  Ash nodded. “I took some of your memories, yes. But I gave you a memory, too. I thought you might like to know how it feels to die. You were certainly very interested in giving that experience to others, after all,” Ash said.

  His jaw wavered, wordless.

  Ash’s eyes flickered toward the Baywell indentures, who were recovering quickly from their reverie. “Besides. You might need the practice. Ask your questions, friends.”

  His platoon pushed in like a wave, their anger kindling like a bonfire, and Sharma pulled Ash out of the tangle like they’d been forgotten by everyone else, and a quiet, insane thought nagged at Natalie, then—that, through whatever Ash had done, they had. She heard Kate’s voice call a retreat, and Natalie gave herself over to the comforting balm of someone else’s orders.

  At the tree line, Kate muttered something about the evacuation protocol, and Ash said no, Kate, the people, and Kate pressed her palm against Ash’s cheek, keeping her voice low. We made this promise, she said, that nobody gets the Heart and nobody gets the research. All I’m going to do is kick off the charges we set. Don’t leave without me. She gave the woman a short kiss to the forehead and was gone, sweeping up Natalie’s boltgun and hauling back toward the city.

  The wheelchair didn’t last long—the road out of the ag-center to the outbuildings was half-paved and cracked with crabgrass—and before long the chattering, stinking normalcy of the forest surrounded them, every step carrying them farther away from Ash’s hideous miracle.

  What had Ash done? They’d practiced, Kate had said. Practiced with the screamers, practiced with the Heart. Last year, the thing had been a hammer, coming down hard and fast and indiscriminate, because they weren’t as sick and everything was new. This year, they could use it as a scalpel. Who knows what they could do with it next year, if they lived.

  Her blood ran c
old.

  “Ms. Chan,” Sharma said. “You’re going to walk into a tree.”

  Natalie looked up. She looked at Sharma in a completely different way, the nauseating pieces falling into place. The silver she thought she’d seen in the doctor’s blood after the transport crash, the way Sharma had barked at her to leave the medkit and find her own medicine. Natalie had lived through the Vai war because of proximity, but Sharma had been on Phoenix, or that, at least, is what the soldier on Bittersweet had said. She shouldn’t have survived. Unless—

  “You’ll need to support Ashlan,” Sharma said. “The captain can walk, but Ash is going to need assistance. I’ll take the Heart—”

  “—in your eternal generosity,” Natalie snarled. “No.”

  Ash’s face was a mask of bloodless exhaustion. “Let her take it.”

  “She’s infected, Ash!” The words came out before she could stop them. “I didn’t think it could be possible, but it’s the only explanation. You give her the Heart, she pulls the trigger, and hell, I’m like your friend the commander zombie.”

  Sharma crossed her arms. “That’s it,” she snapped. “I’m done. You either believe I’m with you, or you don’t. Draw your line in the sand, Natalie, and hop over it, because that’s the only way any of us are getting out of this alive.”

  Behind them, Natalie heard a familiar crackling sound, like fire against cellophane. She whirled, her animal brain saying run, her engineer’s brain saying you’re far enough away, her human heart saying not again, not fucking again—

  Through the trees and spindly corn husks and jagged roofs she could see enemy transports landing, their lights being swallowed by a greater one on the ground, slippery-bright and greenish-gold. “Go,” Sharma said, sweeping her arm under Ash’s skeletal shoulder blades, “we’ll be fine, but you—”

  The metallic light twisted in the air, slammed up with a firework’s breath to the sky, loosening the transports’ grip on gravity, sucking up their hulls in one broken breath, leaving plasteel and bones and half-uttered screams. And she knew what that meant, had seen it before, had watched from a craggy cliff on Cana just four hundred feet away as the other teams disappeared in that crashing light. The evaporator.

  And then: a second explosion. Fire.

  Natalie wanted to feel something, anything at all, anger or relief or vomit in her throat, but all she had now was the run. That’s all that ever remained, in the end: just the air in her lungs and the exhaustion coming up behind like truth come to take her down.

  It was going to have to be enough for now.

  13

  When Kate swung into the transport fifteen minutes later, breathless and silent and blowing dust from underneath her fingernails, Natalie had patched herself up as best she could with a Baywell indenture-aid kit and was halfway through preflight.

  Preflight was a mess—the ship ran an unfamiliar OS with haptics that didn’t recognize Natalie’s autonomic muscle movements and stalled when interfacing with her Auroran memoria. That difficulty alone kept her from immediately asking Kate the thousand questions dancing at the tip of her tongue. Those topics were taking up precious brain space, after all, cycles that should have been better devoted to figuring out how the piece-of-shit Baywell proprietary grav-drive engaged.

  Sharma passed the Heart to Kate, who strapped her safety web across her shoulders and served as its human restraining bolt, fastening the lap web across isocloth, the edges loosening just long enough to prick the back of Natalie’s neck with a thousand needles and that damned memory of her father at the Verdict gate.

  “Let’s go,” Kate said, her face flushed, and it took a moment for Natalie to realize she wasn’t making up the tension in the air. She turned to check if Kate was strapped in correctly, and her stomach dropped. Natalie would have recognized the death-pale look in her former captain’s eye from a mile away.

  “You set off the evaporator, didn’t you?” Natalie said.

  “Don’t fucking judge me.” Kate’s voice was ice. She tightened the isocloth, and the nibbling pressure on Natalie’s brainstem eased. “I set charges in the lab months ago so the assholes that inevitably found us wouldn’t get any of the research. There were reinforcements coming. I was attacked.”

  “We saw the transports.”

  “I told them to run. I told them how far they would need to go, and how fast they needed to go. You of all people, to judge me, when you asked me to do it—”

  “I’m not judging you.” Natalie stabbed her assent to a release form, hoping Baywell was too lazy to cross-check her biometrics with an authorized-pilot list. Fucking release forms, every single corporate entity and their fucking release forms. “It looks like you’re doing a good enough job of it yourself,” Natalie said.

  Kate rubbed her temples. “There wasn’t any time.”

  “Stop thinking about it. Do whatever you need to do to get through the next few hours,” Natalie said.

  “I shouldn’t have—”

  Natalie whirled in her seat. “Fix your straps. Check Ash’s safety web again. Recheck my preflight. Keep busy. Do whatever you need to do, but do not let the emotions win. There’s nothing to regret.”

  Kate’s eyes widened in surprise at the orders, but she didn’t argue. Natalie knew what Kate was going through, entertaining those vicious, unhelpful human feelings in their soft meat-made bodies. She’d thought the Vai war had scrubbed hers clean.

  She’d thought, at least, that the redshift star might have.

  Kate simply nodded and turned back to check Ash’s safety web. The transport’s engines shuddered to life, and Natalie allowed it to calculate the escape vector on its own while she blatantly ignored the advice she’d just given to Kate and stewed in her feelings.

  For the first time, she didn’t really want command, didn’t want the hot seat or the power to make all the decisions. Absolution was supposed to be the most comforting part of indenture: knowing that whatever morally gray things you did, you could push the guilt up the chain. You weren’t really a human being, so you weren’t liable for human emotions. You followed your director. You did what she asked you to, no matter what it was, because your human heart was legally in abeyance.

  But she was the director here. She’d put herself in charge by giving absolution to Kate. She’d done it so easily that it made her nauseous. And maybe by doing it Kate could have the small measure of peace that was impossible for Natalie.

  Maybe. Perhaps. The questions behind her teeth proliferated like bones on a battlefield, and there was so much else to consider: Kate’s flinty, uncaring eyes, Ash’s scary new abilities, the thousand new and terrible functions of the Heart. The implications had been bad enough when deploying the Heart meant the death of thought, a vacuum-sweep of all human memory. But Ash had learned to steal through the curls of the mind, sorting through their memories like citizens choosing diamonds for their hair.

  Natalie thought about the innards of one of the kinetics she’d learned to defuse, looking at it through dusty old memories from Verdict: the Heart had to operate via some sort of organic learned access protocol, if Ash could use it to duck in and invade someone’s brain. And if she brought the Heart back to Solano, and he learned how to do that too—

  “I think that might be InGen approaching from the north,” Kate called.

  Natalie, shivering, slammed on the ignition.

  “Check your straps,” she called, like this day was anything close to normal. Normal was important at a time like this. When you were running unfamiliar haptics, abnormal got people killed.

  She looked back. Sharma had fixed up a double safety net to keep a bloodied, half-awake Ash as still as possible during takeoff, but the doctor was still out of her seat, cracking open a medkit.

  “I said strap in, Doc,” Natalie called.

  “Just five minutes, Ms. Chan. I need to make sure you don’t have a concussion along with that shoulder wound. And your memoria—”

  “—is fine,” Natalie lied. “
Focus on Ash.”

  “You’re in pain.”

  “Ash,” she said, turned, and brought down the HUD. She didn’t wait to see if the doctor had complied, just adjusted the tiller with her stupid forgetting fingers and let the Wellspring autolaunch take them up and away from the cursed red world into an uncertain future.

  The scene above the planet had changed significantly. Ballard had established three cruisers, weapons bristling, at the farthest Lagrange point on the far side of the planet. Armour was here, too, playing chicken with Penumbra, another newcomer. Farther out, she could see the needle-bright volleys of plasma lances and the bright confetti of Baywell railgun fire.

  As the transport hurtled away from Tribulation and she brought up the long-range controls, her memoria went dark for a few seconds, and her fingers paused in white-blank terror. I’m glitching, she thought, goddamn it, and Aurora, that’s right, we’re going back to Aurora. We’re going home.

  Home.

  The memoria kicked in again.

  Home. With that keyword, she expected Vancouver. Her apartment. The white-bathed overhead light of Applied Kinetics. Solano’s very particular rendezvous coordinates.

  It gave her Twenty-Five. Gave her gin rummy and burnt coffee and glossy after-dinner laughter over the howl of the Baywell engines, so familiar and delightful and lost that her heart ached to stop—

  “Nat! Incoming!” Kate called.

  She blinked. Glitching again. The interface threw up fighters approaching from 40 degrees port-south, backed up by a large cruiser. Baywell colors. They already knew the shuttle was stolen. They’d been tracking the shuttle, she guessed, using the transport’s IFF protocols. A stupid mistake, she thought, I should have seen that coming—

  She hollered for the others to hang on, then threw her head back to gun the engines, tilting the rudder toward the closest escape vector. The ship sped up fast enough that the antigrav almost didn’t matter. She could feel the accel in her bones, screaming up her marrow. She could almost feel her ribs cracking, her planet-scoured breath being yanked away and replaced by vacuum. Ash let out a grinding scream.