Engines of Oblivion Page 16

  Natalie, distracted, fumbled for the weapons and lost focus on the vector. “Shit! I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”

  Ash let out a wordless sob.

  “I got targeting,” yelled Kate.

  “You said you can’t shoot—”

  “I just need to find an exit.” She’d risen from her chair, given the Heart to Sharma, then strapped herself into the copilot’s seat. She called up the weapons display. “You just get us out of here.”

  Natalie nodded, keeping the ship stapled to the escape vector, the transport obeying her Aurora-trained motions in angry shudders. Kate fired the railguns wide and scattershot, painting the transport’s wake with fire, making it possible for Natalie to put enough distance behind them to safely fire up the long-distance engines.

  Even then she hesitated.

  Home, she told the transport, but it again caught not on Vancouver but on gin rummy and laughter and stars. The transport rumbled in response and the engines attempted to engage, but Natalie’s glitching memories of Twenty-Five weren’t workable coordinates, and the hesitation lasted just long enough for the fighters to catch up and fire. The enemy guns found purchase in the transport’s clean underside, wheeled around, and came around for a second sortie.

  Kate was suddenly next to her, slamming the copilot’s neural net on Natalie’s head.

  “These coordinates, Nat! Now!”

  —and new coordinates appeared, coordinates that were somewhere else anywhere else. She seized on them with all of the fear and guile and forward motion she could muster, swinging the nose of the vessel around to face interstellar space. The engines engaged below her, and the ship shuddered forward, leaving Tribulation and its secrets behind in the whir of fulldrive.

  Kate ripped off her haptics, letting out an unchained, bright laugh. “We’re free of it,” she said.

  With her senses returning and the long-range autopilot engaged, Natalie’s muscles unclenched, leaving her in aching agony. Kate unhooked herself from the safety web of the copilot’s seat and rushed over to Ash, leaving Natalie to bring up the coordinates again, to see them full and bright on the galaxy plot.

  She’d expected a quick waypoint, perhaps a fueling station or a transfer ansible—not a well-considered route to the most dangerous nebula in the universe, one that would take them away from most commercial shipping lanes.

  The White Line, she thought. We’re going to the White Line.

  She looked back to see if Sharma had noticed. The doctor hovered over Ash’s torn stitches, her face turned away from the screen. Natalie wiped the interface as fast as she could, thinking of the bomb in the doctor’s head. She thought about switching the coordinates back to Vancouver.

  Thought about home.

  A cold metal table in a tiny mess hall. A salvage pod.

  Again.

  When it came down to truth and bones, what she was being asked to do here was simple salvage work: dragging Auroran assets back to Auroran space, no different than bodies or weapons or computer parts or cable. Easy. This decision should have been just as easy.

  Her hand tightened, hovered over the coordinate entry interface, then withdrew.

  Home wasn’t a small white compartment with an in-wall storage space, or Emerson Ward’s jagged hipbones in her bunk, or even her chair in Applied Kinetics, as much as she wanted to be. It wasn’t the tall white towers of Verdict. Home was just out of her reach, in the way Ash and Kate looked at each other, at the sacred space between their fingers. Home was so far out of Natalie’s grasp she might as well be sucking down vacuum somewhere near Betelgeuse.

  It was an easy decision.

  There was one last problem to address: whether or not Reva’s cortical bomb would handle the change in destination. Whether Reva herself could, even if she wanted to.

  Well, Natalie thought. She’ll have to deal with it. We’re going.

  “Reva,” she said, using the doctor’s citizen’s name for the first time. It felt like a tiny poisonous victory. “We’re settled on a vector back to Vancouver. Why don’t you bunk down first? This, ah—might give you a headache.”

  “A headache.”

  “A bad one.”

  Sharma understood immediately. She made a small, wordless nod, then pushed against her knees to stand. She hovered there for a moment, her conflict clear, then lay her fingers against Ash’s wrist to check her pulse, then tangled for a moment in the isocloth around the Heart, settled in next to the dying pilot like a swaddled child. And then, careful to avoid looking toward the front interfaces, Sharma disappeared into the bunkroom.

  She was in.

  For whatever that would get them.

  14

  In theory, the White Line was a treaty agreement, not that any treaty had been formally negotiated. Not that any treaty with the Vai could be formally negotiated in anything but blood and oblivion.

  In practice, the Line was the edge of a great roiling nebula, dust and gas and guttering light from the new stars within, the edges twisting into a bright silvery white, tracing a twisting, ropelike pattern across a vast expanse. Humans had gone farther, elsewhere, but until the Vai emerged in their dreamlike cruisers, nobody had given that area of space much of a spare thought. There were no colony worlds nearby, no celestium-rich moons to strip, and far more interesting nebulae elsewhere.

  So when the Vai emerged from the other side in their twisting teardrop starships, no individual company had ever made a legal claim to the space. The only ships wanting to spend time here were the underfunded, ignored research departments interested in the inner workings of stellar nurseries—people like the Auroran science crew where Sharma had spent time as the staff medic, Natalie had learned.

  These days, a virtual city wall of ansibles decorated a cobbled-together monitoring station within spitting distance of the nebula, a scattering of sparkling human metal against an alien sky. They were still networked and supporting one another, a shining testament to the wartime alliance that was currently in the middle of falling apart like a box of broken toys.

  Natalie had hoped to see the station in person one day. The array was a feat of spectacular reverse-engineering the Verdict coders would have appreciated, a house of cards made from sixteen different proprietary coding languages and machines not meant to work together, and her wayward hacker’s heart thought all of it an absolute delight. The thought of finally seeing it kept her centered on the four days of the trip—four days that Natalie knew Aurora was expecting to hear from her, four days in which the other companies would be attempting to track them. She’d already made a list of reasons justifying this to corporate if she needed to, mostly laying the blame straight on Sharma’s shoulders.

  The Baywell midrange shuttle had much more space than the yacht. Kate spent a lot of the journey with the ghosts rattling around in her head, playing solitaire with a deck made from the backs of ripped-up, forgotten flimsies. Natalie let her be—she recognized the cold, haunted look on her former captain’s face as the same one Natalie’d seen in the mirror after Grenadier, although instead of the solitaire cards she’d chosen far too many bottles of Second Company’s toilet liquor. Ash rested most of the time, limbs and shoulders and hips tied to a bunk with the safety net to keep her bandages from malfunctioning.

  Sharma stayed in the bunkroom, where her purposeful lack of knowledge kept her cortical bomb from exploding. When not checking the progress of Ash’s autobandages, she coded programs in a language Natalie didn’t recognize on a borrowed Baywell tablet, or read text—old diaries, she said when Natalie asked, downloaded quickly from a backup drive while on-planet.

  “Anything interesting?” Natalie said, regretting the words as soon as she said them.

  “Very,” Sharma said, and heaved a sigh. “I think I’ve lost more than I realized.”

  “Research-wise?”

  “No.” The doctor paused. She swallowed, switched off the tablet, and knit her fingers together, composing herself before continuing. “Somehow, I thought that R
obert—he’s my son with the Horton contract—had been listed in the Sharma line. I registered him that way when he was born. But I wrote here that he re-registered as a Horton three years ago. Before he died. It makes no sense.”

  Does to me, Natalie thought, thinking of Xie on the bridge over the Verdict concourse, watching her take the long walk down the hill toward the corporate skyscrapers for the very last time, both of them ready to live the rest of their lives in anger and shame and guilt rather than admit they might have been wrong. “Are the Hortons a problem?”

  “No. I mean, yes.” Sharma frowned. “The Hortons are middling at best, even if Davin was running personnel at the time. It’s like being able to choose between a pod and a yacht and choosing the pod.”

  “You took a contract with someone middling?”

  “I’m a Sharma. Most lines are middling. I suppose I can’t fault Robert for hamstringing himself to spite me, but to do that to my granddaughter—he must have been under pressure from Solano. That’s the only reason that makes sense. When I get back, I’ll—” She let the thought drop and looked back at the tablet. Then back up again. “We should have linked up with Vancouver by now.”

  I doubt it’s the only reason. Maybe Robert Horton is the smartest shithead in the room, Natalie wanted to say, but she bit her tongue. “I’m sure we’ll hear from them soon,” she said instead.

  From the bed, Ash groaned. “Nobody told her?”

  Sharma set down the tablet. “Don’t tell me, please. The cortical bomb—” she began.

  “We’re not going to Vancouver,” Ash said. “We’re not going back. Ever.”

  The bunkroom went silent, save for the humming of the engine. For a moment, Natalie’s hand slipped toward a boltgun that wasn’t there, until Sharma’s fingers stretched over the tablet, her face curiously blank, her voice curiously flat. “Ah. It’s too bad I am a prisoner. Help. I am being kidnapped.”

  “What?”

  “It’s too bad I’m stuck in the airlock, tied up, and can’t quite hear what they’re all plotting. Oh dear,” Sharma said, matter-of-fact, rising from her seat and heading for the cargo compartment.

  Ash blinked, confused.

  Natalie sighed, then explained the bomb in Sharma’s head and how it worked.

  “So whatever she really feels about this—she’s not going to tell us. Because if she does, she explodes.”

  Natalie hadn’t thought of it that way. She got up and went to the front, sinking into the pilot’s chair and checking her vectors as they moved in toward the Alliance comm station. Sharma had to know by now that they weren’t going back to Vancouver. She was quite sanguine about the whole situation. Was she simply trying to stay alive? Or was she counting on Vancouver coming to find them?

  Natalie put on the HUD and switched to the bunkroom camera. Ash’s eyes were closed again, and she’d started to fall away into one of the fitful, uncomfortable catnaps that ruled most of her days. Ash’s tracking device would kick in when they were within range of the Auroran ansible at the comm station. That might be what she was waiting for.

  Sharma had certainly been careful. Careful to only talk of her desire to help Ash, careful to avoid entanglements with what might happen next. Even the recruiting talk had been circumspect. But Natalie hadn’t—and she’d been in the doctor’s eye the entire time. As soon as they arrived back on Vancouver, the neurotechs would make a download of the doctor’s memories. Sharma might be able to get around implicating herself, but Natalie? Sharma had her on the record agreeing to help Ash and Kate. It would be damning.

  She flushed, angry—but before she could figure out what to do next, the ship’s proximity alarms sounded, and she slammed the haptic gloves back on her hands, yanking the shuttle out of fulldrive with an economical jolt. The stars slipped into place around her in sparkling, foreign gatherings, and she muttered a soft oh, shit under her breath.

  The Vai massed at the White Line in numbers Natalie had only imagined in her nightmares. She saw dozens of ships of all shapes and sizes, lit from the back by the constant glow of the stellar nursery. Their mother-of-pearl hulls roiled in patterns she’d never seen before, resembling tendrils and teardrops and the root systems of alien trees. The uniform variation made a quiet sort of sense to Natalie: if the Vai truly were what Ash said they were, if shape was a choice rather than a constant, she was staring down both individuals and colonies at the same time. Not a hivemind, not an insect’s view, but something completely alien. Wrapping her brain around that thought was like trying to make Len be serious for five seconds. She couldn’t do it.

  (That name, she thought, again. I’m glitching.)

  Natalie gulped down her fear. There was no way around the line of ships, no way to hide from it, nothing to do but hang here in space, a little black bug facing down a thundering silver river, taking its last breath before being swept away.

  “Now what?” she whispered.

  “Wait,” whispered Kate, looking up from her game of solitaire. “We just wait.”

  And Natalie did, even though the anticipation made her bones ache. Any moment now, the Vai ships would realize the human transport was present and break formation. She knew it. That’s what had happened in the war. She tightened her hands and put the haptics into standby. Waited for the adrenaline to squeal into action. Waited for the inevitable.

  Back in the war, the most important quality in a gunner hadn’t been the traditional measures of effectiveness and accuracy; that was a bonus. The most important quality was reaction time, the ability to transfer a sitrep to a trigger finger. Reaction time meant the difference between allowing a Vai mech to drop a kinetic on her squad and being far enough away to give them a good middle finger. The Vai were always more accurate, and they were fast. But a good gunner could buy time, and she’d blown dozens of Vai mechs this way, splattered their silver blood on her gunsuit as they turned suicide before the ordnance crew got close. By breathing. By waiting. By being ready.

  I’m ready, she breathed, if saying it could make it so—and still jumped when the sound came over the speakers, a sound darker and deeper than anything she’d ever heard, rolling through the haptics, a sound that rattled her bones and brought her straight back to Cana, a marrow-clattering vvvvvaaiiiiiiii—

  She ripped off the haptics, searching for silence, only to hear Ashlan whispering in unknown sibilants from the back of the compartment.

  “Move us closer,” Kate said, helping Ash back into one of the passenger seats.

  Natalie’s hands shook. “No way.”

  “They won’t hurt us.”

  “How the fuck do you know that?”

  But Natalie didn’t get an answer before the line of ships shuddered into motion, like they’d all dropped into the same thought at once.

  Natalie wanted to turn back, wanted to run anywhere and elsewhere, but it was too late; the transport listed to the side. Her hands snapped for the haptics and their shattering communication, and she shoved them back on her head and her fingers, letting the chatter of ship operations fritter its way into the back of her brain. She wanted to drown out the sudden panic, the tight feeling in her chest that had been there since bouncing into the airspace above bloody Cana, that had always been there. She fumbled for the coordinates to Aurora, because, God, she’d made a mistake—

  “They’re not talking to me,” Ash whispered.

  Kate kissed her shoulder. “Give it time.”

  Ash shuddered. “I don’t think being out here is enough. I need to go aboard with the Heart.”

  —vvvvvaaiiiiiiii, whined the comms, and Natalie’s hands went white-knuckled on the console—

  “No,” Kate said. “You can’t even walk.”

  “I just need to get inside.”

  “The pressure differential alone, after surgery—it’s too dangerous.”

  Ash lay her hand on Kate’s. “I love you, but you’re not going to tell me what I can and can’t do.”

  Sharma knelt next to Ash, checking her b
andages. “The captain’s right. Not to be rude, but autobandages only do so much. I don’t think any of us wants to clean up the mess if your intestines rupture all over the floor. Which they will, if you move from this chair. And then my head will explode, because I didn’t keep you safe.”

  Kate shot the doctor a disgusted look. “I’ll go.”

  Sharma laughed. “You’re barely in better condition.”

  “But I am in better condition.”

  “You’re exhausted, Ms. Keller. If this were Twenty-Five, and any of the crew were in this position, you wouldn’t allow them to proceed.”

  “You’re right. I would go in their place.” Kate took to her feet, wobbling like a broken doll. Her hands pinwheeled, and she fell back into the seat next to Ash.

  “You’re exhausted,” Sharma repeated. “You’re light-headed, dealing with end-stage symptoms of your own. You’re not going to be able to operate a heavy coldsuit, let alone deal with the hatch and slogging through the rib cage room. I’m the only one of us who has been aboard a Vai ship and lived to tell the tale. I know exactly where to put the Heart, because I was the one who took it away. I know what to say and how. I’m going.”

  Sharma had the narrow look in her eyes Natalie had seen a dozen times before: the doctor had been sitting on her thoughts for entirely too long, her mouth moving in occasional spasms, ready to speak as soon as she found an opening. It was the look the birthrights in her department shoveled in her direction whenever Natalie had a new idea, and sitting in the pilot’s seat, the song of vvvvvaaiiiiiiii making mincemeat of her composure, she finally realized what that was.

  Contempt.

  Ash laughed, a broken, half-carved thing, then used her fingers to claw herself upright. “The last time you went aboard a Vai ship, you started a war and doomed me to this, so no. You’re not going. Kate, help me stand.”

  Sharma’s frown deepened. “You can’t possibly think you understand the Vai.”

  Ash breathed. Fought for the breath. “More than you. You’ll go over my dead body.”