Engines of Oblivion Read online

  The doctor looked hurt. “That transplant was a masterpiece, Ash. Death is the last thing I want for you.”

  “Then tell us why you’re so desperate to get aboard.”

  Sharma’s tone thinned. “I can save you if I do. I can save all of you.”

  “I thought you had a treatment if I went back to Aurora,” Ash said.

  The doctor blinked. “I do. But—”

  “Another lie!”

  Natalie felt the standby haptics cold against her fingers, a new idea congealing like old blood, and her mind divorced from operating the shuttle. The argument behind her went fuzzy as she concentrated on the shivering sound of the white fleet. Sharma was right: Ash and Kate couldn’t go. But neither could Sharma.

  There was only one person left who could.

  “I’m the captain,” Kate said, “and I will go—”

  “Sit down, please, Ms. Keller,” Natalie snapped.

  Kate cast her a disparaging glance. “Natalie—”

  “This isn’t Twenty-Five. You’re not the captain.”

  “Oh, and I suppose Doc Cannibal here—”

  “I am the captain here,” Natalie said, feeling the safety web release cold and ready under the pads of her fingers. “This is my mission. So I’m going.”

  The other three stared.

  Sharma blinked after a very long moment filled with beeping machinery. “I’m the executive present.”

  “No. You’ve been taking my orders for the past four days. You’re listed as my medic. Solano made sure of that. Plus, I’m the only one here who can make unbiased decisions. The only one who is invested in all three sides of this story.” She stared at Sharma. “So I’m the only one who can do it.”

  Kate snorted. “Unbiased my ass.”

  Ash shook her head. “You aren’t infected.”

  “You can fix that. There’s a syringe in that medkit.”

  It was like Natalie had dropped a bomb.

  Ash was the first to speak. “And what? You go back to Aurora afterward? Give them what they want? Because if that’s your play—”

  Natalie snorted. “There are other options. I can’t even use the Heart for six months, right? That’s how long it took Ash to manifest on Twenty-Five—”

  “Six minutes,” Kate snapped. “It took me minutes to get some sort of hold on the Heart when I was on the Baywell ship, and that was with Ash much less ill that she is now. I took down a fire team in eight.”

  Natalie kicked her safety webbing aside. “Kate. Do you trust me?”

  “You know I do.” Kate looked away.

  “Then you know I don’t want this.”

  “Everybody wants this,” whispered Ash.

  “I don’t,” Natalie said. “Ash, you know what I want.”

  It was Ash’s turn to look away. “And you’re one of them now. You’re going to want until it kills you, Nat.”

  Natalie thought of Ward, of her father in his new Auroran assignment of her citizenship, of all the clawing things she wanted, and all the things she’d thought she wanted. Of Joseph Solano with his fingers splayed on the wooden table in the boardroom, the other executives watching her with the magpie eyes of Verdict codelords just waiting for her to fail.

  Earth. The Hudson. Verdict. The blazing summers, the humid winters that settled wet and angry in her throat, the river creeping slowly up the hill every year. The corporate skyscrapers. The stony concourse. The plaza. The comm outpost up in Tower One, arcing gray against the blue sky. Verdict’s leader, whoever it was by now, would take her back. They’d strip all the corporate secrets from her mind, and she’d give them gladly.

  No, not gladly. But she’d give them.

  The secrets would buy her a place. A place could buy her influence. Influence could buy her power. And power—

  Maybe you were right, Doc, she wanted to say. Maybe we are more alike than I think.

  Natalie swallowed, then grabbed Ash’s hand. “Then trust me. I won’t go back to Aurora. I’ll bail back to Earth so hard they won’t even know where to look. It’s really the only solution, and you know it.”

  “The infection is a death sentence,” Ash said.

  “Sharma has a cure.”

  “I’m never going to believe that.”

  “It’s a treatment,” Sharma said.

  Natalie shrugged off the difference. “And this isn’t the first time I’ve been told to grab a weapon and walk straight into the line of fire on bad intel. It’s what I do.”

  “But—”

  “It’s what I do,” she said again, and forced a smile. “Hell, I’m surprised I got this many years in first.”

  Sharma stood. Sighed. “It’s settled, then?”

  “Go get the syringe,” Natalie said.

  Kate fumbled in the medkit, then removed the syringe in question. She pushed the needle into her own arm and filled it, a scramble of water-thin liquid that was darker than blood and swirled with silver light. All Natalie could feel was an unexplainable sense of loss and an immediate pang of regret.

  “Stop,” Sharma said. “Just stop. You don’t need it, Ms. Chan.”

  Natalie rolled up her sleeve. “How else am I going to get onboard?”

  “You don’t need it because—” She looked away for a moment. Cleared her throat. “You’re already infected.”

  15

  Natalie heard nothing but the rush of blood in her ears. Infected. The word was blood-thick, needle-sharp in her mouth. She tasted iron.

  “What?” she said.

  “You’re already infected,” Sharma repeated, heaving a sigh.

  Bullshit, Natalie wanted to say.

  “No,” began Kate. “I can’t even believe you, I can’t—”

  Sharma huffed, cutting Kate off. “I had to try.”

  And that was true; the truest thing Sharma had said for a very long time. The truth settled like a fast-acting poison into Natalie’s belly, and she felt the smack of vertigo, the compartment spinning like she was a bird that had suddenly forgotten how to fly. The survivor on Bittersweet had been a celestium hallucination. The evaporator hadn’t gone off when Baywell took it from her, because she didn’t believe she could trigger it. The weapon never got whatever it needed out of her thought process. “When were you going to tell me?”

  “I wasn’t going to tell you at all.” The doctor crossed her arms. “And before you twist the knife again, please know that I’m very surprised that the bomb in my head didn’t just go off.”

  “Whine, whine, whine. When? How?”

  Ash cleared her throat. “It happened on London. It must have. We were on the bridge. We were talking. We shared that canteen, remember?”

  Natalie felt numb, like she was skating around the edge of rage. “You can get this shit with backwash?”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “I shared a bunch of drinks at a lounge party last week. Why the hell isn’t Aurora full of hidden triggers, then?”

  Sharma wasn’t even looking at her. She was looking at her toes. “Maybe it is. But none of them would be as powerful as you. Bog-standard celestium sickness requires constant exposure to unrefined celestium over the space of years. It kills in a little over a decade, shorter if you keep yourself exposed via indenture. The modified weaponized version Wellspring created in the war multiplies on its own, enters the bloodstream through the brain, and needs only a few molecules to begin. The Wellspring scientists on Bittersweet didn’t get far enough to realize how it happened. I couldn’t get the answers from my own history. I only figured it out myself when I studied Ash’s progress on Twenty-Five. So, yes. There are probably others.”

  And there it was again—the anger, same as it always was, tight and strong and strangling. Times like this, Natalie missed dirt under her boots. Being able to solve arguments with her fists. “When I get back, we’re gonna talk about how you know that. And then we’re going to sit down and make a plan,” she said. “In this plan, I am going to explain, in graphic detail, how we are all go
ing to walk out of this alive. Because—”

  Behind Sharma, Ash had gone cherry-red. “I’m sorry, Nat, I—I didn’t know.”

  Natalie choked down something hot and tight and completely unhelpful, then turned back to the interface, her haptic devices, the vectors that would bring her closer to the Vai line. “Because I’m not a fucking martyr. Not like the rest of you.”

  The others were silent as she flew closer to the Vai line, then docked the Baywell shuttle alongside the largest ship in the line—the flagship, she would have called it, if she thought for a second the alien minds who built these ships sorted their hierarchies like humans did. She knew now that it was folly to ascribe human motivations to alien constructs, which is why it had been so easy to slip straight from sitting in a Verdict sniper aerie to scattering fire at Vai mechs.

  Sharma called it a heartship instead—a ship big enough to store the bodies and mechs they needed when dealing with planets and people and the rest of the universe, a ship that stored the devices that connected Vai to and from their central civilization. Heartships had airlocks, Sharma said, even though human instruments wouldn’t recognize the space inside as air. Natalie pulled alongside the first one she found, a perfect circle surrounded by a dark line that seemed to be the only real joint in the flagship’s too-smooth hull.

  The Baywell coldsuit went on slack and glistening—almost as easily as an Auroran one, which meant Natalie didn’t trust it as far as she could throw it. Natalie checked four times that the seals on the wrists were drawn tight, that the oxygen was connected to her lungs and the rest of the air to the engine, and that the comm connection to the transport was working. She didn’t expect much more than that. The suit had a vector accelerator—not a proper propulsion system, but good enough if something happened to the tether.

  Sharma latched a go-bag containing the Heart to her left leg and then a standard tool set to her right. She instructed Natalie in how to talk to the Vai: how many seconds she could leave her suit open once she broke the seal on her glove to make contact before she died, what she should say (not that she’d be talking, which was nuts), and what to do when she was done. Natalie nodded, keeping her fear to herself. Her lungs were already compromised, and every breath felt like someone had tipped a glass of needles down her throat; if she didn’t time it right, there wouldn’t be enough air left to get back.

  And when Natalie was ready to go, she tried to think of something to say, something other than I can’t believe I’m doing this, but found herself without words. Sharma haunted the door. Ash sat on her bunk, leaning on Kate’s shoulder, with Kate pressing her palm against Ash’s forehead, her eyes pooling with liquid. Natalie felt a pang of something between sadness and jealousy; she managed a final, solid smile, though, as if she were just going off to London to pick up some cable.

  “Don’t be so fucking serious,” Natalie said. She coughed up a counterfeit laugh. “I’m coming back.”

  “I honestly didn’t know,” Ash said. “I didn’t know I could spread it to you like that, Natalie. If I’d known, I—”

  Sharma rolled her eyes and ducked into the front compartment. “I’ll be on the comms.”

  “It’s fine,” Natalie lied. She wanted to vomit. Instead, she smiled. With teeth.

  “Everything’s fine, Ash. I’ll be fine. I’m always fine.”

  “Remember,” Kate said. “Space plus bullshit—”

  “—equals death, yes.”

  “Except for the hallucinations,” Ash said, closing her eyes and trying to hide the pain she was in. “Listen to them. They can be useful. They’re your own brain processing the information you’re receiving.”

  Natalie nodded. The Heart hummed little silver notes against her leg, and she closed the airlock, turning away from the window. She didn’t want any more goodbyes. She didn’t even want the chatter she usually relied on to keep herself calm and focused during an EVA. She heard the clattering of the oxygen injection system, felt the loosening gravity of the back airlock, drew her gloved hands around the still-slack safety of her tether, and surrendered to the bright, lifting feeling of weightlessness.

  Then: the airlock door opened, revealing the slippery edge of the alien vessel wringing all of the memories of the war from her stomach, and the slow yet sudden knowledge of the celestium cooling in her veins like a promise.

  She took deep breaths. Focused. Space was cold and Wellspring-era suits were leaky. Natalie counted to ten, and then counted again, then reached for her tether.

  Behind her were the rest of the Vai vessels, hundreds of them, shuddering and spinning and unworried as Natalie crossed the space between the shuttle and the heartship. She kept expecting the aliens to open fire and the world to go dead in a riot of color and song, but the Vai line remained tight and unbroken and devoid of any formation Natalie would understand as useful for battle. Ash proposed that the Heart’s presence on the transport had kept them from identifying it as anything other than another Vai ship, which was a good enough explanation as any.

  Natalie’s memoria likened the oscillation of the ship-skins to the disorienting shiver in her stomach as she crested the high ground at Cana—the moment just after she realized the twisting silver bones on the scoured rocks below used to be human.

  “Ms. Chan, can you hear me?” Sharma said.

  “Affirmative.”

  Static. “All right. What you’re going to have to do is—”

  But Natalie didn’t have to do anything at the airlock. While still tethered to the transport, her hand brushed the skin of the ship and something dark and terrible beyond the door sang to her, sweet silver voices of glory and home and welcome home sweet sister—

  She froze.

  “They’re singing to you,” Sharma said. “They know you’re coming. Don’t get distracted. Keep on going.”

  Natalie caught her breath. “That’s not the memoria glitching?”

  The Heart warmed against her coldsuit, sang in harmony, and it was insane—beyond insane—that a Vai construct could suddenly be so beautiful, could twist into her spine with a song called glory and convince every nerve in her body of the rightness of it.

  She wanted to vomit.

  Nothing’s right, she said, they tried to exterminate us, glory is just blood and shit, but her mouth wasn’t working. She repeated the question, but Sharma still didn’t answer. Perhaps she couldn’t hear human voices behind this wretched cacophony. Was this the silver speaking? The Vai themselves? Echoes made from the celestium in her blood? Did she have months to live, weeks, or just days?

  Hours?

  She wanted to split her skin in two, dump her blood into the river, anything to reverse this nauseous ache.

  Instead, she pressed her gloved hands against the airlock and the covering shivered aside. It felt strange to Natalie that hands could make an alien construct work, but of course, the Vai had hands sometimes, she thought, remembering the long, spindling fingers on the hands of the aliens on Tribulation. Hands are a pretty decent tool. And with one last, lingering gaze on the wheeling darkness of space, she pulled herself inside. The covering slid shut behind her, and everything went dark.

  She slapped the helmet light on. Swallowed an immediate, wild panic.

  There was no door on the other side.

  She shoved the panic where it belonged—in her gut, near her diaphragm, where it couldn’t mess with clear battlefield thinking—then placed her fingers against the smooth, silver wall, looking for another seam. The wall moved like water, like she’d shattered the surface tension of a bead of mercury, then reformed, crawling up her arm, gobbling her up like a marble in an ocean, wrapping her in a symphony of skin and blood and intestines.

  Terror took over. Sick. Unprofessional. She held her breath until it spoiled, until the knifing, rotten dregs of it forced the air out. She tried to breathe. It hurt. The bulkhead of the alien ship burned around her, so tight and tough she thought the faceplate might crack, that the ship itself would pour into her suit and
drown her and slick up to her skin and her bones. She’d suffocate with only her shipmates to hear—

  —and then the ship released her, slipping away from her body like the tide going out, and she found herself standing on the other side of the wall.

  Natalie stood in a wide, dark bay lit in reds and purples, the aching, breathing walls decorated with oscillating colors that had no human names, so massive that the ceiling was lost in darkness. The helmet light wouldn’t be enough, and she fumbled for her torch.

  Sharma’s voice came over the suit’s comm. “—Chan. Ms. Chan. Respond, please. Your heart rate just spiked.”

  “Yeah, that happens. Were you going to tell me about the fucking door?”

  “Breathe in through the nose, out through the mouth. If it makes you feel any better, we blasted through.”

  “How?”

  “We thought the ship was in distress at the time.”

  “You are so full of bullshit,” Natalie said. “Space plus bullshit.”

  “We don’t have time for bad language,” said Sharma. “What do you see?”

  “I’m in some sort of”—she searched for a word to properly describe it and failed—“belly.”

  “The rib cage room?”

  No, she wanted to say as her torch finally came on, drenching the bay in light. Worse.

  She could understand why Sharma described it that way. Soaring above and below was what Natalie thought might be the structure of the ship: wide white pillars in high gothic arches, resembling nothing less than a rib cage, stripped and striated with the slightest of gray lines. It was like being inside a massive, dreamlike leviathan, like she was Jonah and she’d just shoved herself gleefully into the whale. It resembled the experiments in Sharma’s underground lab writ large, or a thousand childhood nightmares. The walls pulsed with organic energy, thick and twitching, reacting like she was a tiny invader inside a massive set of intestines. She felt the thrum of the ship like an insomniac heart.

  The floor—she couldn’t call it a floor, because it met the walls at the oddest angle, pockmarked and breathing, and she wasn’t sure gravity was the reason she was attached to the surface—was just another facet of this flesh-coated diamond. Her boots squelched where they held fast to the surface. All around, she could see veins of rushing silver, tightening and stretching like blood vessels headed for a stroke.