Engines of Oblivion Read online

  Ash would have told her she was being ridiculous. But Ash was dead, and Kate was missing, and Sharma—

  Fuck Sharma, she’d said, but damn, had the woman really deserved to die like that? A gory vision of Sharma’s cracked skull splayed in front of her eyes, scorched and spilled and twirling in the transport’s loss of gravity. She stumbled, nearly crashing into a crowd of people waiting for the spine lift.

  Most were citizens in heels and miniskirts—involved in checking their social credit rating on their tablet or watching the news channel on the wall and definitely trying not to stare at anyone else, especially Natalie. Natalie felt frustrated that she had to wait in the crowd, that it allowed Aulander or Coriolis that much more time to catch up, and that she couldn’t just head for the indenture ladder to the left. But she tapped her index finger against her thigh like all the others, enjoyed the staring, took the lift, and got off at Ward’s deck.

  Aulander didn’t really need to chase her here. Ingest would see her path and figure out she was going to Ward’s place, but since she’d gone so many times before, the algorithm wouldn’t flag it as suspicious. Ward might not, either. After their last conversation, the last thing he’d think when she showed up at his door in her underwear was that she wanted an airgapped place to do brain surgery.

  As she walked, she entertained the woolly feeling that always rose to the surface whenever she thought of Ward. His slanted smile, the twist of his hand on her hip when they slipped into close proximity in the lab. It had been fun until the proposal. It had been perfect. He’d made her feel warm again. He’d made her laugh again. And now—

  Natalie paused in front of his drab blue hatch.

  She should leave.

  Instead, she pressed the ringer. A few seconds passed, and the door slipped open to reveal Emerson Ward, half-dressed in lab pants and shirtsleeves, a grav-comb dangling from his hand, his cit jacket tossed over the couch behind him. His hair was half-curled, the long lines of his yellow locks still slightly matted from sleep. Golden tattooed lines twinkled from his fingers to his ulnar vein, then up his arms, to disappear under the fabric; like everyone else she’d seen on the walk here, he’d obtained the superhaptic upgrade.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey,” he said, blinking.

  “Hey,” said the hallucination, waving from a seat on Ward’s couch.

  She waited for him to move aside, shuffling her feet, trying to keep her eyes on him rather than the breathing lie behind him. “Can I come in?”

  He pressed his lips together; there was something uncomfortable and gray there, a startling weight she’d never seen on his face. “I have a shift, Chan.”

  “I come back from the dead and walk all the way from medbay in someone else’s underwear to see you, and all you have to say is ‘I have a shift, Chan’?”

  He sighed. Rubbed his face. “You said no. I’ve spent the last month coming to terms with that.”

  “I said later.”

  “You said later, and then swanned off on some mission—”

  “—which was not my idea—”

  “—and didn’t get back in touch with me. That hurt.”

  She pursed her lips, trying to fight off the sudden annoyance she felt. Natalie expected him to be uptight after the refusal, but he’d gone full dumbass on this one. She was suddenly reminded why she had a hard time connecting to him on any other level than the physical. “Yeah, a medically induced coma and full lung rehabilitation makes it kind of difficult for a person to make calls.”

  He tried to hide the surprise he felt at hearing that, but Natalie caught his raised eyebrows, his deepening frown, the slight dip of his shoulders.

  “You didn’t know?”

  His face flooded with regret. “I didn’t think to ask.”

  “You never do.” Her fists balled with a growing annoyance. “You’re a Ward, you know. You have friends on the bridge and some connections in pretty high places, as you told me a bunch of times. You could have cared about me enough to make a few friendly inquiries.”

  He crossed his arms. “I’m not that kind of Ward. And you could have cared about me enough to not make me jump through hoops for you. But that’s your thing, isn’t it? You get off on it.”

  “Look. I wasn’t ready to say yes.” She wrestled down a sudden anger. “If you’d have asked me the next day, or when I calmed down—you knew I was upset about what had happened on Bittersweet. You had shit timing.”

  “You said later,” he said. “In cit talk, that means no.”

  “It means later.”

  “Chan, I—”

  “It’s later now.” She placed her hand on the doorjamb and stepped closer. The guilt she felt about using him like this had dropped out sometime during the conversation; now, she just wanted him to move aside.

  He let out an embattled sigh. “Fine,” he said, and took a step back into his quarters.

  Like the rest of Vancouver, Ward’s compartment hadn’t changed much. It was significantly bigger than her own—not that he’d done anything with the extra space. She hadn’t realized until now how much his blue, blank surroundings bothered her. The guy had the chance to exercise his personality since the day he was born, to do anything he wanted within the confines of his social credit, and yet he’d chosen to be indifferently Auroran: blue Company blankets on his bunk, the blank, smiling faces of Company advertisements on his walls, Company sweatpants to relax in, preferring to keep his jumble of possessions inside the drawers of his bathroom and kitchenette.

  The only personal effects he exhibited were the pictures hanging on the mirror just by the door: parents, siblings, linemates. No boardschool friends, but then, from what she’d heard about boardschool politics, friends were few and far between. His picture of Natalie, the one taken at the App-K party where they’d met, was gone. She blinked, feeling a lump in her throat, then reminded herself that she should have expected it.

  She turned away, anyway, toward the kitchenette at the back of the room, balling the blanket in front of her belly, letting him see the curves of her body, her exposed collarbones. She knew the effect it would have, and she watched it with some disobedient pleasure. Ward swallowed and crossed the room, standing in front of her—close. Too close. He put the comb aside, and she responded by turning away. Hell if I’m gonna make it easy on you, she thought.

  “Where’s your info-implant?” she asked.

  His hand flew up to touch the blank cover just over his left eyebrow. “Oh. The old one started glitching when I got the superhaptics, so I was going to head to the neurotechs after my shift. I’m … having a really weird afternoon. You want some food?” he said.

  She snorted. “I’m not eating your garlic noodles.”

  “I like the garlic noodles.”

  “That’s the only thing you like.”

  “Not the only thing,” he said, and moved up behind her. She felt his body hover behind hers, his hands light on her hips, the tips of his fingers moving slowly toward her belly. A quiet, forgotten greed curled under her skin, and she let out a breathy sigh. He took this as permission to go further, and she felt his fingers find her waistband and slide beneath, his breath hot in her ear, his lips—

  —and she slapped him away.

  “This isn’t talking,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re still recovering.”

  “It’s not that,” she said, turning, immediately regretting it. One hand went to press lightly against his chest, and underneath, she felt the thrum of his heart and the heat of his body. She felt something else, too, a quiet whispering, the kind of alien shiver she’d only recognized after her experience in the rib cage room.

  The realization was slow and inexorable, a molecular darkness stepping over into her skin and destroying it from the inside. Her breath hitched, and she was unable to speak; she just leaned forward, her forehead against his chest, hiding the guilt on her face. Ward was infected.

  Of course he was. How many
times had they kissed? How many times had they—

  —did he know?

  She blanched and turned her face away to hide her nausea; he took that as demure invitation and tugged at the edge of her gown, sliding his hand up her thigh. There was usually no talking when he did that kind of thing, and she didn’t want to talk, didn’t want to tell him, not now when there was so much else on the line—

  “I thought you had a shift,” she managed.

  He leaned forward, drew his lips up her neck. She felt the tug of his teeth in the sensitive space under her ear, and she shivered. “I’m the director. My meeting isn’t for another two hours. It’ll be fine.”

  Natalie felt a painful itch at the back of her throat and brought her fist to her mouth to cover her cough; when she removed it, she saw flecks of ruby-bright blood on the skin. She wiped it hastily on the gown behind her leg, where he wouldn’t see it. “The director. A promotion. That’s good. They’re finally seeing your potential. Where’d they put you?”

  “Applied Kinetics.”

  The reaction was nearly visceral; she pushed him away, palm of the hand to blue-shirted breastbone. “What the hell, Ward?”

  “You went on a mission. They told me you knew.” His eyes widened in surprise. “I’ve been the director since the day you left. I supervised the entire superhaptic switchover. We’ve made a ton of revisions to your proxy rig project. And we couldn’t have done it without you.”

  Anger flared. “I didn’t leave! I was forced on that mission.”

  “Nobody’s forced on a mission, Nat.” He paused. “Cits, at least.”

  “You are such a dumbass.” She stopped, wavering where she stood, rubbing her temples. No, she thought, she couldn’t be mad at him. Not for this, at least. Walking off her proxy assault of Bittersweet, she hadn’t even been sure she’d wanted to continue as director. She hadn’t even had time to think about it before Aulander arrived to upend her life. There’d been no space to consider what the red dust meant for how Aurora was going to proceed against Wellspring and the Vai and the other companies—she’d expected some bad behavior and occasional skullduggery, but a redshift star? A fucking war crime?

  Of course she doubted.

  And in a department as crucial to the war effort as Applied Kinetics, there was no room for doubt. The director needed to support the CEO with every mad scratch of his heart. And that was the decision Ward had made. She was not safe here. She crossed her arms in front of her thin gown, feeling nauseous that she’d spent any of her time at all on this bullshit relationship.

  “I need to use your shower,” she said, swallowing a shameful lump in her throat. “And maybe borrow some of your cit-wear.”

  “Right,” he said with a frown, shoving his hands in his pockets. “You came to talk. So now you don’t want to.”

  “Congratulations on the promotion,” she muttered, gathering the hospital gown over her shoulders and tearing it off. “You worked hard for it.”

  “I don’t have any control over Aulander’s personnel decisions,” he said.

  “But you do have control over how you react to them.” She yanked the grav-comb from his counter, crossed the room, then opened the thin door to the tiny shower compartment, dialing it to opaque.

  “That’s unfair. You know if you say no to something like App-K, you’re never given another chance. You wither away and die in—in recycling, or bookkeeping.”

  “There it is,” she said, smiling. “Ward is worried about Ward again.”

  Without waiting for an answer, she shut the door like she had a dozen times, then went through the other grooming tools lined up in front of the spigot. None of them would do. Instead of grabbing Ward’s rinseless soap and getting to work over the collection of scars that covered her skin, she turned on the scraper, set it on the ledge to whine and whir and cover her tracks, then sat on the bathroom floor.

  Outside, Ward switched on a shaver. “Nobody else will understand. I thought you might.”

  That caught her where it counted. She had to pause to fight the sudden jolt of anger, her hand halfway up to the faceplate. “Understanding goes both ways, asshole,” she said. “You saw what happened with your own eyes. Don’t you care about what they made me do?”

  “They didn’t make you do anything. It’s not my fault you didn’t follow instructions.”

  “We had cleared another plan. A plan that would have worked. You were in all the meetings. You voted for it. You’re okay that they made me a mass murderer because this is how things are, this is the law, these are the rules?”

  He snorted. “You’re a soldier. Don’t you care that we won? Don’t you care that there were no Auroran casualties?”

  “Yeah, I am a soldier,” she snapped. “And soldiers aren’t robots. We’re not computer programs or murder machines or—or Vai. We have morals and we have feelings and we’re doing a job, and that job includes not following immoral orders like that one. That’s why they had to lie to me. Did you ever think that Mr. Solano could be lying to you? How are you fine with this?”

  And she could hear, in the silence, in the quiet way he was holding his shaver without moving it, that he had not.

  “I’m not—I’m not fine with it,” he finally said. “But things are how they are. You’re overreacting.”

  She slammed her mouth closed, biting her bottom lip, and focused on the task ahead of her to keep from yelling at him.

  “Aurora comes first, huh.”

  “It has to.”

  “I guess that’s your answer.”

  He paused. “I guess it is.”

  She tightened her grip on the grav-comb, raised it to her temple, and called up the recollections of Reva Sharma poking at the innards of her memoria in the Tribulation forest, as well as the work she’d been doing on the transport recording. She found that the motions were quite similar—and that the memory was also reassuringly full of an angry Kate Keller. Which made sense: if Sharma could hide memories from herself and from Aurora, she could certainly do the same for me, Natalie thought.

  Natalie lay the comb against the bottom of the faceplate, then used the comb’s tiny gravity-field generator—usually used to finesse the reality-defying hairstyles found on executive climbers—to loosen it. The comb felt like a low-powered civilian version of a similar tool to defuse Vai kinetics in the field, and Natalie relaxed, allowing herself a little more confidence. This was her Auroran career, wasn’t it? Teasing apart the insides of things she couldn’t possibly understand? Opening the memoria was no different than defusing a screamer. She tried to put aside the thought of making a mistake and ruining Ward’s precious face pomade with bloody Natalie bits.

  Although the first thing he’d probably think about was how I ruined his day again, she snorted.

  Natalie slipped the comb under the hinges, and the memoria’s faceplate came off with a metallic shiver. She felt the connection between the front and the back snap tight in her head like a fishing line. It was the only sign that her brain didn’t function like everyone else’s, that Natalie’s neurons were knit together less like a proper human anatomy diagram and more like a bad sweater. She turned it over, not seeing anything new or different in the skull implant—no corners cut, even if Sharma had told her so in the forest.

  But the bomb would be in her head. She needed to go further.

  Ward cleared his throat. “Are you okay in there? You’re taking forever.”

  She sighed, then shoved her face as close to the shower mirror as possible. “I’m not overreacting.”

  “Mr. Solano says—”

  “Right. Mr. Solano. Go fuck him if you love him so much.”

  He sounded exasperated. “Natalie—”

  “Get to your meeting.”

  “Not with you acting like this.”

  She nearly laughed. “You’re not at all afraid it’s going to happen to you? I’m not the first to get screwed like this, Ward, and I’m not going to be the last, but, hey, it’s okay, Emerson Ward is play
ing by the rules, Emerson Ward gets to be a comfortable asshole doing what he’s told, and that’s what matters. Nothing’s wrong in Ward’s world. Bad shit happens to other people. He doesn’t see the bad shit, so he doesn’t feel the bad shit. He looks away.”

  This time, Ward didn’t respond. The shaver went quiet, and she heard the slither of clothing against skin—Ward putting on his jacket, no doubt.

  She used the gravity fields to pull the housing of the implant section of the memoria away from her skull, staring for the first time at the intricate interior of the memoria under her skull. She saw transistors and resistors, newfangled haptic cards, the detritus of human industry, familiar metal twisted into the technological alchemy that made space travel possible. No sign of a bomb, she thought. She was about to breathe easily, to close the housing, when she saw the light.

  It was hidden behind the warren of wires, deeper in the recesses of her mind, so deep it was buried behind the other side of the implant, so deep it was almost an ache. Light, familiar, purple and blue and sickening gold, silver, silver, the song of silver right fucking there.

  There was something exquisitely Vai in it, a roiling on the back of her tongue like the canned aftertaste of rotgut vodka. Everything went bright and fuzzy, lighting her nerves on fire like a blowtorch. She heard a chorus, atonal, wrong, music that disappeared into blue light, a song taking her apart from the inside. She disappeared into herself like a camera down an artery—

  —and no. No. It had only been a year since Tribulation. A year in which Aurora hadn’t even discovered the nanotech in her body, a year in which they didn’t even control the Bittersweet labs. Now that they did, she could imagine the Auroran R&D machine roaring into gear, ripping apart every single piece of Baywell research to find the secret that became Ashlan Jackson. Still, though, she imagined the only person who knew enough about Vai technology to incorporate it into a memoria would be Reva Sharma.

  Was that why she’d gone along with Solano’s requests? The bomb in her head? To make sure she’d be in a position to put this Vai thing in Natalie’s head and check to see if it was still there on Tribulation? What was it for? For that matter—