Engines of Oblivion Read online

  Gravity embraced the transport, gently snatching her comrades’ limbs out of the air. Ash’s body lay bruised on the back bench, crusted red blood darkening her mouth, her eyes blank and open. Sharma stared toward the ceiling, missing her info-implant, the gold traceries leading back to her cortical bomb dull and dead with the loss of brain activity. Natalie would never know what she was trying to do when Aurora killed her.

  Sharma hadn’t even seen it coming. An ironic end for a woman who had spent her entire life working a plan.

  Natalie heard the clatter of boots, the familiar arrangement of infantry teams and their guns, the whir of the machines meant to crack plasteel hulls like eggs hauling into motion. She curled up on the ground, vomiting up blood, and with a sense of sick shame, she flipped the codes to keep the airlock open. I surrender, it said. Don’t shoot me.

  Auroran soldiers came through the airlock in force, blue coldsuits clattering, their hands holding guns and torches. Smoke blew in from the shuttle, distending above her. Natalie closed her eyes, the light flickering red and brilliant beyond her eyelids. She heard someone coughing. Was it Kate? Why did her chest hurt so much? Why was she so tired?

  “It’s our people,” someone called.

  A deep voice called for medic. A coroner.

  “I’m not dead,” she managed, as if she had a choice in the matter. “Kate’s not dead.” Her pronunciation slurred. Voices were telling her that she’d be okay—like they knew anything about being okay. Nothing would be okay ever again.

  The last thing she saw as she dropped into black exhaustion was her bright new silver hallucination, watching her from the corner, as if he’d never seen anything so beautiful in his life.

  17

  Natalie came awake to a blur of frantic voices. She was in a private room in an Auroran medbay, surrounded by people in white coats whirring around her body like they actually cared about saving it. Someone was shouting for anesthesia; someone else, the pulmonologist. She caught disorienting sparks of light like hornets in her cornea, laid over flashes from the memoria—the transport, the recording, Ash’s fragile corpse, her own smiling hallucination. Thankfully, the scratching fabric clutched in her hand was a hospital blanket, not the thick lining of a coldsuit glove.

  She sucked down oxygen into overscarred lungs that had forgotten what it was like to be full, coughing so hard she curled into herself, spattering blood and mucus down her hospital gown.

  “Where’s—” She coughed. “Where’s Ms. Keller?”

  Blue-gloved hands wiped eggy gunk from the corner of her mouth and told her everything was going to be all right, a theory Natalie very much doubted from the way her recalcitrant body was ignoring nearly every request her brain made. The hands belonged to a middle-aged doctor with shockingly tame silver hair. He held her down as politely as he could while barking orders at other people in blue jumpsuits, all of it junk like surgery and yes, Dr. Coriolis and send more samples to the lab.

  Natalie struggled against the doctor’s grasp, pushing herself up to her elbows. She opened her mouth to speak and felt her lungs burning.

  “Lie back. Don’t try to talk,” said the doctor. He was wearing a white coat with the name Arturo Coriolis stitched over the heart, and he wore an info-implant that looked a lot like a memoria. “And, please. Stop fighting the medical personnel. If you don’t, we’ll have to sedate you again.”

  A Coriolis. A fucking Coriolis. I’m important now. Natalie coughed out a chuckle, then watched as a nurse picked up a nearby tray of tissue laid out in chunky gray strips like rotten sushi—hers? Gross—and ushered it out of the room. She’d ended up in medbays often enough to understand that once a Company doc dragged out that particular chestnut, some functionary nearby was already prepping a syringe whether or not you had cit tags or cared, so she spat out a mouthful of blood and grinned at him. “How’s a kick to the face sound instead?”

  Coriolis’s cheeks flushed. “Listen,” he said, grabbing her hand. He pressed a thumb against the inside of her wrist, searching for a pulse—redundant, of course, in a citizen’s medbay full of bells and whistles and expensive equipment. It was just an excuse to lean in, lower his voice and address her directly. “You need to stop screaming about Len, whoever he is.”

  “I don’t know who—”

  “It’s making them suspicious,” Coriolis hissed, cutting her off. “They won’t trust you, and we need them to trust you. They’re going to require you to get the superhaptic upgrade. It’s important that you refuse. In fact, it’s crucial. You see all those zombies walking around outside? I’ve managed to keep most of them away from our work, but it’s difficult, especially when Ingest is listening. You need to—”

  “Pulmonologist’s here,” said someone by the door.

  The doctor closed his eyes for an exhausted moment, then let go of her wrist. “Stay in the medbay until you receive further instructions. Be careful what you tell them.”

  He straightened and flipped the long-awaited soporifics into her main line, switching back to medical jargon she couldn’t quite understand. A drug-strong, inevitable darkness took her words away seconds later.

  Her body ached like she’d been dropped from a skyscraper and left to rot in the sun. She took a hard breath, muttering at the needle-bright pain occupying her lungs; a moment’s clawing at her hospital gown found a collection of six tiny new autobandages denoting some sort of robotic surgery. A nurse flickered by, adjusting the blanket near her feet, and the fact that she even did that was insane, wasn’t it—hospitality was the kind of billing con-job bullshit they pulled on unconscious indentures.

  But she couldn’t pay for a nurse, for surgery or soporifics or quiet or the blanket. She had to leave. Now. She pushed herself up, feeling the cold deck through the thin socks, the entire room listing to the side as she remembered.

  She was a citizen now. The nurse, the medicine, all the blinking equipment that existed to keep her alive, even the interface silently playing the Company news channel in the corner—she’d paid for it in effort and sacrifice and seven long bloody years. She was a citizen. This was earned. This was hers.

  Then why did she still want to panic?

  “Help me.” A too-familiar whisper from the back wall.

  Natalie didn’t want to look, but she eventually turned her head. The hallucination—her Bittersweet survivor—leaned against the back wall in an Auroran indenture’s jumpsuit, striped with thick Tribulation dirt. Worry creased the wrinkles near her hallucination’s eyes, and his hands dangled useless by his sides, as if he did not know how to use them. Stitched onto his breast pocket was the number 25.

  She didn’t reply. She flushed with embarrassed about talking to him in the transport. She’d been sicker than she thought. What was the use in replying to herself? She was less concerned with what coughing, confused part of her needed that kind of whiny help than the fact that the memoria hadn’t yet connected him to any of the other memories in her broken brain. There were holes in her six months on Twenty-Five, as there were holes in everything, but an entire person?

  Could she really have forgotten a whole person?

  The answer was yes, of course. A resounding yes. Sharma had literally blocked out whatever memory had been keeping her brain from blowing up. Natalie’s memoria had helped her wrap her mind quite well around a father she could hardly remember.

  She ran through her memories again. Her mind fed her dependable Kate, a straight-faced Sharma, that bitch Ramsay, and Ash, the lead salvager—but no ship’s mechanic or cargo mate. Which was the mind-boggling thing—that she just understood it as the truth that she’d left for a year’s salvage mission without a mechanic. It hadn’t occurred to her until this very moment how wrong that seemed. There were other holes—she could have sworn someone had been there with her to watch that entire second season of Alien Attack Squad—but she’d always brushed that off as being standard human brain nonsense, like forgetting a crucial piece of information while under pressure.
/>   “You are just my stress response,” she told the hallucination in the corner, sucking down her sudden anxiety. “That’s all you are. You’re not a ghost. You’re not my disease. It’s too early for symptoms.”

  He extended his hand. “No.”

  “Get out,” she whispered. Dizziness clawed at the corners of her vision. “I refuse to see this. You’re not real—”

  She realized her mistake in seconds: she was still standing. She shouldn’t have been standing. Acid twisted in her trachea, closing her off from speech, and she grabbed at the corner of the medibed. Her chest constricted with the effort of keeping herself upright, and instead of sucking down air, her lungs seized, throwing her into another blackout coughing fit. The floor hurtled toward her, and her head cracked on the floor.

  Darkness followed.

  When Natalie awoke, the hallucination was gone and she was once again lying on her medibed. New bruises purpled her bare left arm. Her head ached. She probed a loose tooth. The doctor was missing, having been replaced by the board’s personnel director, of all people—slim, perfect Cora Aulander, looking svelte in an impeccably tailored suit, a matte-gold info-implant that seemed different from the one before, and a thin, quiet smile. She held out a glass of water, as if she could be trusted.

  “Don’t try to get up,” she said.

  “They keep on telling me that.”

  The executive pressed the cup to Natalie’s mouth and tilted it for a second or two; the water stopped her questions, tasted like ship, like metal, like familiar memories, and she felt a grateful anger alongside a ridiculous discomfort. Natalie slid her cold fingers around the cup, brushing Aulander’s warm ones, worrying it from the executive’s hands and polishing off the contents herself.

  “Perhaps you should listen, Ms. Chan,” the executive said. “You’ve had a trauma. Take it slow.”

  “I’m not good at slow.”

  “It’s a learned skill.” Aulander paused. “How are you feeling?”

  Natalie exhaled. Each breath she took resembled a hot, double-bladed knife under her breastbone. The sheer pain of it stopped her from speaking long enough to consider and load in the old, familiar indenture’s lie, the brush-and-switch that kept doctors from poking around in their cit accounts with costly tests. “I’m fine,” she replied. “Can you tell me where Ms. Keller is?”

  “I wouldn’t use the word fine to describe your condition,” said Aulander, following it up with a muted chuckle.

  “I’ve had worse.” Natalie shook her head. “Now, if possible, I need to see Ms. Keller. I need to know she made it off the transport alive.”

  Aulander paused. “I have no idea who you’re talking about.”

  “Kate Keller. The captain of Twenty-Five. I found her alive on Tribulation. She was with us on the transport,” Natalie said. She put the cup aside; she fumbled the landing, and it rolled onto the nearby table, trailing droplets of water. “I need to see her. Now.”

  Confusion creased the corners of the executive’s eyes. “I’m sorry. You were the only survivor, Ms. Chan.”

  “That’s ludicrous. You must be lying.”

  “That’s quite the rude accusation.”

  “There were four of us. You’ll see three of them on the cockpit recording—Dr. Sharma, Ashlan Jackson, Kate Keller—”

  Aulander pursed her lips, lost in thought for a moment, then flickered her fingers to access her personal comm. “Dr. Coriolis, can you join us, please?”

  “Don’t call that asshole.”

  “You might be hallucinating. It’s possible your memoria took damage in the firefight, and your infection is quite advanced. The nanotech is everywhere in your bloodstream. It’s possible that—”

  “I’m—” Definitely hallucinating. Natalie swallowed. “I’m having problems, but there’s no way I hallucinated the captain. Someone set off those guns I put on the roof of the dorm, and I had entire conversations with all three of them at once.”

  “But there’s nobody who can confirm that.” Aulander looked worried.

  Natalie opened her mouth to say Reva Sharma, but the name turned to stone behind her lips. She asked the memoria for a memory that had Kate doing something she hadn’t been there for, and—No, she thought. I could have programmed the gun. I could have threatened the InGens without knowing it. I could have activated the Heart in the bugout bay. But there was a mattress in Sharma’s old lab, meals—

  —only eight of them, she countered. Not enough for two.

  A cold doubt ate at the corners of her warm certainty, and she wanted to throw up. Ash couldn’t have lived all of those months alone. Lived all those deaths alone.

  “The answer’s on the recording,” she said.

  “There’s no recording,” Aulander said, her voice kind. “Ms. Chan, dozens of salvage and health workers gave sworn statements telling us that only three of you came off the transport, and that you were the only survivor.”

  Natalie’s hands twisted in the blanket. “I know what I saw.”

  “We’ve been doing research on the nanotech infection for some time now. Dr. Sharma spent some time with us after she was rescued, and we learned quite a lot. The brain is a marvelous machine, capable of many things, and we’re only now figuring out how the memoria really works with the messages sent to and from the hippocampus.”

  “This sounds like Sharma’s research.”

  The executive’s thin fingers extended to pluck the cup from the nearby table, to hold it between her thumb and forefinger. “Which is why we think she was manipulating you the entire time. To explain: You think I’m holding this cup because your senses tell you I am. But your senses are run by your brain, and your nerves tell your brain what you see and hear, and your nerves, Natalie, are being attacked by an alien nanotechnology we’re only beginning to understand.”

  I saw her, Natalie wanted to say. I touched her. You’re lying. Executives lie. And you have every reason to lie to me. You threatened to take away my citizenship. The words were just on the tip of her tongue, full of red dust and pain and the memories she couldn’t erase. She’d seen the hallucination on Bittersweet, so she’d had symptoms for a long time. What else about her life was counterfeit?

  She looked away from Aulander, finding the room’s interface, focusing on that instead. Like many of the public interfaces on Vancouver, this one defaulted to the Company news channels when unused. She waved on the sound and caught her least favorite announcer—the perky, cream-haired morning-shifter, a longtime cit who wore the gaudiest and largest info-implant Natalie had ever seen—in the middle of describing the recent battle with the Vai.

  At a ceremony on Watcher Station, Mr. Solano gave credit for the stunning victory—humanity’s first against the Vai—to the captain of the heavy cruiser Vancouver, Lucia Varela, honoring the Varela line with elevation to the board …

  “Oh, my God,” Natalie whispered. “I’m going nuts.”

  “No. That was quite real, actually. You did everything we wanted and more,” Aulander said, her voice warming. “You brought back Ashlan’s body and your own, ensuring Aurora has access to the alien nanotechnology—the advancement that will push Aurora to the front of the market. In fact—”

  But Natalie wasn’t listening to the executive spin out her bullshit praise. She didn’t even feel like she was in the room. Her head was lost in the rush-rumble of disbelief. Everything was wrong. Everything was off. This room, the hallucination haunting the shadows next to the cabinets, Aulander talking to her, this entire world. It had been that way for so long.

  She’d known for a long time that there was a dishonest edge to the official feeds; the week she’d spent getting her bones knit back together after the rout at Cana was riddled with interface announcers yammering about victory this and a great Auroran advance that, when she’d been there, she’d seen it, and she knew how little reality was in it.

  They’d stretched the truth after Tribulation, too, calling the Heart a Baylor-Wellspring superweapon, using i
t to justify the continuing war in front of the Corporate Alliance. Ash had come from Bittersweet–Wellspring space. They’d had a word for this kind of truth-twisting over there. Propaganda, Ash called it, an old, extinct phrase like injustice or slavery, one of those old hurts from the history books.

  She didn’t know how something could be propaganda when everyone knew the truth was something companies owned outright. Maybe the truth had meant something different when she was growing up, but she’d signed over those rights in the pursuit of her Auroran future.

  But this—

  She expected to hear the Company line—a good citizen always expected that kind of bullshit—but the channel was displaying the actual, honest-to-God truth, aside from the announcer droning on about Varela’s heroism in the face of bloody whatever. She wasn’t seeing quick edits and explosions interspersed with the faces of the dead. There were no bright and bombastic emotional appeals masquerading as facts. This was a direct, uncut feed from Vancouver’s gun-level cameras, a plain record of ordinary railfire finding purchase in the white bellies of the line of slippery alien ships beyond—and then, impossibly, impossibly, those ships exploding, one by one, like pearls crushed beneath an executive’s heel.

  She hadn’t noticed any of that in the thick of everything, when she was just another mote of dust spinning out below the Alliance plasma lances. She’d been too focused on keeping herself alive.

  “That’s impossible,” she whispered. “You’re right. I’m seeing things. I—” She gulped. “How?” she said.

  She’d been expecting the same kind of bullshit explanation from Aulander, too, but the executive relaxed slightly, her tone going almost friendly. “We were hoping you knew.”

  “You were just explaining to me why I can’t be trusted.”

  Aulander blinked. “I think after what you’ve done for Aurora we can at least take your story and verify it.”

  Natalie nodded, then rubbed her eyes, trying to sort through her memories and buy some time. She remembered the doctor from earlier, his words, his warning to be careful. She fought some nausea. This was absolutely some sort of test—Aulander’s friendly voice was probably for show, and their ostensibly private conversation was taking place under the eyes of Ingest’s renderbots. She had to assume they’d seen everything: her absence from the shuttle’s records, the silver nanotech in her veins. They’d have discovered the liver transplant in the autopsy. She closed her eyes, searching her memoria for the last few moments of the recording, then exhaled and chose something relatively close to the truth.