Engines of Oblivion Read online

  “I don’t know,” Natalie said, finally. “I’d gone outside to make some repairs to the hull. I think they waited for me to leave.”

  “Did you?”

  “It was a Baywell bucket. It had problems.”

  The executive nodded. “You were drenched in their blood.”

  “After they’d died.”

  “Was that before or after you came back inside?”

  Natalie’s mouth opened, closed, opened again in disbelief. “After. God. You can check the door access log, if Wellspring was smart enough to put one in. There was no gravity. They’d been bleeding. I got splattered trying to get away from all the railfire. Basic fucking physics. Wait, are you asking if I killed them?”

  “I’m asking for the full story, Ms. Chan.”

  “So this is a test.”

  Aulander’s lips thinned alongside her patience. “When we meet the Vai fleet again, we need to know how to defeat them. And we need trustworthy people to help us. I’m sure you’ve always wanted a place on the bridge.”

  “Now I know you’re fucking with me.”

  “I would never do that. Not to another birthright. All you have to do is explain why you were at the White Line and not on a direct vector back to Vancouver and we can talk about that.”

  Natalie felt her blood thrumming. Her heart kicked, a wild hope rattling around in her broken head. A place on the bridge, she thought. Birthright status. This isn’t a test. It’s the test.

  “I’m not a traitor, if that’s what you’re asking. They wanted to go to the White Line,” Natalie stammered, scrambling for a lie they’d believe. “Sharma—” Was dead. Natalie could throw her into the gears with absolutely no guilt. “She was a member of the Sacrament Society this whole time. I knew you could track Ash, and I knew you’d be watching. Frankly, I thought I could bring home more than just the nanotech. It was a chance I had to take. You would take that chance. I even sent you a ping, so you would know. I did everything I could to make sure Vancouver knew exactly what was happening.”

  “I see,” said Aulander. “Of course, the offer is contingent on the fact that you’re telling the truth.”

  Natalie’s lungs ached. Everything hinged on this conversation. Aulander was the only one besides Solano with the authority to raise anyone to birthright status. “What are you expecting? For me to say that I sold out to the Sacrament Society? I don’t want to hear any of this contingent bullshit. I went to Tribulation. I found Ash.” And Kate, she thought, although doubt had started to slip through the cracks in her faulty, broken mind. “Give me the promotion, or let me go back to work, or whatever. It’s not my fault you sent the doctor along with a bomb in her head. I have no idea what you want to hear. Whoever recorded her bomb records will.”

  Aulander blinked, clearly confused. “Bomb? What bomb?”

  “The one she said R&D put in her head.”

  The executive’s eyes widened, and she looked genuinely horrified. “In her what? Who do you think we are?”

  Natalie was about to answer—something cheeky, something inadvised, something related to so this is how you keep me from birthright status, by making me look like a drama hound—and was saved at the last minute by a violent coughing fit. The doctor handed her a towel; Natalie spit salty blood into it, folded it and placed at the bottom of her bed. “That’s how she died. She told me Aurora had installed the bomb, that it was recording what she spoke, and that if she wandered off script it would explode. I’m done playing games. I’ll only take this offer if it isn’t contingent on anything.”

  Aulander’s forehead creased with worry. She placed her warm hand over Natalie’s chilly one. “No wonder you’re not cooperating. Ms. Chan, I told you from the beginning of this conversation that you have done everything we wanted you to do, and more besides. And I understand you believed the deal we offered at our last meeting to be unfair.”

  “It was—”

  “Unfair, yes.” The executive breathed out. She seemed rattled, and her voice had lost its previous guarded accord. “I came to tell you that you can write your own future with Aurora, and that remains true. Why don’t you wait here, focus on your recovery for a few days, get your superhaptics installed, and then we’ll do the official paperwork at the end of the week? No contingencies.”

  And without an answer, she patted Natalie’s hand three quick times, turned, and moved out the door.

  The room was relatively quiet for a moment, with some nursing assistants moving in the background, checking equipment and writing on tablets. Natalie felt dazed, drunk, like her head was filled with cotton. The doctor from earlier—the Coriolis, the one with the cryptic comments about the superhaptics, which still bothered her—walked in and filled a glass of water. The news announcer droned on about changes at the Corporate Alliance, about Solano and the shareholders and a radical shift in power, and as soon as the doctor arrived near her bed, Natalie yanked the glass from his grasp, using a long sip and the curve of her hand to give her a few moments of privacy.

  Natalie imagined that Aulander’s conciliatory behavior was meant to make her feel more comfortable, but there was one thing the executive was getting wrong—Natalie thought on her feet, not in a boardroom, and sitting around made her feel more uncomfortable, not less. On top of that, she didn’t want to make any decisions until she confirmed that Kate Keller had been killed at Tribulation last year, and she needed to do that independently, on her own. Perhaps the support staff had sworn Kate was absent because they were sent in after the captain was removed. Natalie had been hallucinating. In pain. She didn’t remember.

  If Kate was on Vancouver, Natalie would find her.

  Her first idea was to check the company directory, which had been partially automated by Ingest six months ago. She thought about waiting until she was alone and using the interface to do that—this was allegedly a private room—but Coriolis and his people moved in and out with the choreography of people instructed to never actually leave her unsupervised for very long. She thought about signing out and making her inquiries on the computer in her quarters, but she was still sure Ingest monitored citizens’ queries, and simply remembering certain masking tricks from her Verdict childhood didn’t make her a good enough hacker to get around that.

  A birthright’s private systems, though, were robust, specific, and, as far as she knew, hadn’t been upgraded for superhaptics. Ingest might get suspicious, but the department needed a warrant from the personnel office to check, so she might be able to get the answers Aulander was clearly unwilling to give her. She needed a private room. At this point, there was no way she wasn’t going to check for a bomb in her head after a few days in the Company medbay. Too bad she wasn’t close enough to any current birthright to use their private interface.

  No. She was.

  Natalie pushed the empty cup back in the doctor’s direction, then pushed the blankets aside to place her feet on the cold floor. The cup exists, she thought. The blankets exist. The floor exists. I exist.

  Kate exists.

  “Thank you,” she said to Coriolis, waving him down. “I quite appreciate the hospitality, but I’m going home. I want my own bed.”

  That was not the reaction the doctor expected. He looked down at the cup, confused, then back up at her. “That’s really not a good idea,” he said. “You’re still recovering.”

  Natalie smiled. “You and I have just met, so let me fill you in. I’m not known for my reliance on good ideas. Or executives.”

  “Your lungs experienced significant interior trauma. We’ve rebuilt much of your capacity, but you’re in absolutely no condition to leave. The executives aren’t just being nice to you. They’re acting on my express advice.”

  Natalie felt fuzzy. “Rebuilt? How long does that take?”

  “About a month. You—”

  “A month? I’ve been awake for an hour.” She felt a twist of dizzy nausea and tried to stand again. The doctor slipped in right in front of her, sliding a hand underneath her for
earm. She tried to twist away, then stumbled back onto the medibed.

  “We had to put you in a coma.”

  “Give me my jacket. A month! Fuck.”

  “You’re not authorized to leave.”

  She frowned and tried to stand again. “I’m a citizen. That’s enough authorization. And I don’t trust you. You said some really weird things back there about the superhaptics, and I’m too tired for games.”

  His voice lowered. “I can explain.”

  “I’m just interested in going.”

  “Hear me out. Please.” Coriolis’s voice lowered, and he moved in close. Too close. It was only then that she saw the necklace dislodged by his motion, swinging out from behind his unbuttoned collar—a saint, an oval, an arrow, hidden from the renderbots in the shadow of his chin.

  This was the sigil of the Sacrament Society, Sharma’s shadow company, the organization she’d founded to figure out how to use the Heart. The organization responsible for the sick experiments under Tribulation, for pushing forward the crushing wheel that was this new life of hers, the weight of which had taken Ash and Kate and Twenty-Five and God knows what else.

  Natalie pushed against his breastbone, harder this time. “No.”

  He stumbled back. “Ms. Chan—”

  “I’d rather lick Solano’s butthole than trust the lot of you.”

  “You have to trust us.”

  “Shit, is Aulander part of this too?”

  “No,” he said. The doctor reached up with his left hand, tucking the necklace back underneath his collar. His voice remained quiet, measured, and his body calm, as if he knew exactly how much Ingest would take in before it figured he wasn’t behaving as expected. “Dr. Sharma told me you might feel this way. She also told me that you’d come around.”

  “Sharma’s dead.”

  He paused. “Her work continues. If you knew what I sacrificed to be in this room right now, to talk to you directly—”

  Natalie was standing now, feeling a little steadier than before. “I don’t care. I’m a citizen and I want my pants. I’ve spent thousands of hours dreaming of this moment, this delightful moment, when I can do whatever I fucking want in my very own pants.”

  He sighed. “But—”

  “My pants, from my compartment. Not new pants. Not someone else’s pants. My pants.”

  The doctor wavered. This was a citizen’s basic right: he had no grounds to hold her or control what she chose to do with her body. His jaw worked, to one side and then the other; his hand flickered up to his chest, a few inches short of touching the Sacrament emblem she knew was there. For a moment, she expected the indenture’s treatment—a brush-off, a non-explanation, a cuff to the bed for her own good, or some other bullshit. He finally sighed, slipping one glove off his hand to rub his temples. “I’ll get your pants,” he said, and walked out.

  She wavered where she stood, and grabbed the edge of the bed to steady herself. The interface had flashed back to the news channel—to the victory, they were saying, the incredible triumph of Auroran ingenuity, to Auroran engineering—

  A month, she thought, a fucking month.

  She needed to find Kate yesterday.

  “I don’t understand,” said her ghost.

  She whirled dizzily. The nanotech hallucination was sitting cross-legged on the floor nearby, his back straight against the wall, his body preternaturally still. His eyes were red, and his cheeks skin-scrubbed, as if he had been crying and trying to hide it.

  “I do,” she muttered.

  “Explain,” said the man.

  “Aurora wants what any company wants,” Natalie said. “Profit, market share, expansion. To be at the top, to be unassailable. The Sacrament Society, well—we know they wanted Vai weapons, and a corpse is a corpse, no matter what story the executives are telling. The only move we have right now is to make sure we’re not standing in the middle.”

  “They are lying,” he said, as if it were some mad new realization.

  “Someone is. We need to find out which one. Or both.”

  The hallucination frowned, and then rocked himself against the wall, over and over, his eyes filmy, his shoulders shaking. For a sliver of her disintegrating brain, Natalie thought, he was remarkably upset about a basic truth of the universe, something Natalie had known since she was a very small child. “Humans lie,” he said.

  Humans lie, she thought. “All of them,” she said. “Every single one.”

  “Even you.”

  She thought of the doctor, of Aulander, of all the things she planned to do. “Especially me.”

  And now she was starting to see the details on her body she’d been missing earlier. No pants, no jacket, no underwear, no jumpsuit, just a hospital gown—they didn’t want her to leave. The interesting, useful tools were stuffed in cabinets sealed with fingerprint locks—not a common practice for a citizen’s space. Her fingers brushed at her throat, at her lack of a collar, of tags. Humans lie, she thought, and she felt a desperate ache at the thought of Aulander’s offer, of the possibilities that lay there, of the possibility that that, too, had been a lie.

  Natalie had built so much of herself on the prospect of citizenship—of becoming something more than hungry spinning Earth could ever offer—but now she just felt shaky and small, just as alone as she’d been on the last day of her life in Verdict. Part of Natalie had thought that Ash would come back to Aurora after the battle, because that part of Natalie that wanted so much to belong—the part that threw herself into the war, into her platoon, into that feeling—still believed. She’d believed, even though Ash stood in London’s dead engine room and said no, said that over my dead body will I be a weapon. She’d believed even until Ash wasted away for it, until Natalie saw her use the Heart to dip into those Baywell soldiers’ minds in the plaza, until she’d died for it.

  Natalie hadn’t gone so far. She’d sold herself to be a weapon, of course, because that was the price she could get for her life—that was the game and the bargain, and the only way off Earth was pushing through the indenture shit sandwich to get the citizenship that would make it all worthwhile. It was depressing to discover that she was still in the game, and that the only way to win was to be born into victory in the first place.

  “Humans lie,” the ghost repeated.

  And maybe that’s the truth Ash knew, she thought. Maybe that’s why she decided not to play. Until I forced her to.

  Truth. Lies. Propaganda. Truth had to be more than just orders to be followed. It had to be more than belief. She remembered Solano in the boardroom, telling her what was right, what was true, and he knew that truth, knew it with every straightened nerve in his body. Sharma had certainly believed in a truth beyond any corporate reach or order. And there had been a truth in the way Kate and Ash held each other during their rattling escape from Tribulation, more truth than anyone offered here. Kate is real, she reminded herself.

  Natalie grabbed the blanket and dragged it around her body. She adjusted the socks. She knew a month was long enough for R&D to put a bomb in her brain, and maybe that’s why they were so sanguine about giving her a chance at a promotion.

  She couldn’t wait for her own pants.

  She dug around in the bottom drawers near the back corner of the room and came out with a too-big pair of maternity underwear, pulled them on, and went to leave. For a moment, she thought the door might lock against her fingers, but it, at least, lined up with whatever game they were playing, and opened for her. Not that it mattered. It was going to be easy to track an oil-haired, sick-mouthed, hospital-gown-wearing soldier when there were renderbots every three feet in the ceiling.

  The game is on, she thought. May the best liar win.

  18

  Emerging from her room wearing only the hospital gown, a blanket, and her borrowed underwear, Natalie felt better than ever.

  The medical section was like the rest of Vancouver: blue, sterile, perfect. No weapon-bright heat choking the doorways, no enemy shadows, no pervasive
planetbound dirt or ragged edges or weapons or enemies wearing mechsuits. With her bare feet on the floor and the fabric in a flail at her exposed back, she was the one radically different element in the Aurora-standard spectrum of variegated blue and gray, of clothes made for management and similar cit jobs, where you could be elegant and delicate, where you didn’t have to wade through people or engines or the dead corpses of broken cruisers.

  She watched cits pass by, going this way and that, most of them attempting executive style—twists in their hair, short heels, skirts that hugged their thighs, and gaudy info-implants that she would have called memorias, if she hadn’t known she and Sharma had the only prototypes. Quite a few sported the new superhaptic tattoos she’d seen in the medbay, golden and twisting, like wires or chains or vines winding around their arms. Some walked in a funny sort of lockstep with each other, arms and legs swinging at exactly the same pace, faces gray and bored.

  She nearly laughed at herself, at the months of fussing with the fit of her jacket, wondering how fast her hair would grow out. No—to be noticed, all she had to do was be the child that had left Earth once more, saying fuck it to every convention she was taught to be good, going from ambitious director to hallway curiosity. This felt like power, even though it shouldn’t have. She reveled in the way she caught each of their gazes, the way they snapped their chins toward her, the slight widening of their eyes at her bare legs and her sour mouth and her balls-to-the-wall ambition. She bet Cora Aulander never felt like this, but Aulander had never sat quietly in a Baywell shuttle alongside the corpses of the last people that really knew her as a human being.