Engines of Oblivion Read online

  —was this the bomb?

  “Can’t be,” she whispered. “No, that’s stupid. She wouldn’t have put a bomb in her own head.”

  “Why not? She’s done worse.”

  And then he was there—him, the hallucination, occupying the rest of the space in the shower, all wide shoulders and ship-smell and kind brown eyes. Adrenaline kicked in and she shrieked, cracking her head against the bulkhead.

  “You okay?” said Ward.

  “Fine,” she lied, thinking not fine not fine not fine—

  —and fine came forward like an overwhelming intoxication, thanks to the memoria, like it was made bespoke for her pain and her fear, with the scent of a memory and the consistency of a dream. Twenty-Five was long dead, but the caustic instant coffee served in its mess was burning the inside of her mouth like gasoline. She felt the heat of his body. He hummed the Alien Attack Squad theme. She remembered a time when they sat like that, a long time ago, when her cheek had pressed promises into the hollow of his neck.

  She placed her fingers to his pulse point. No heartbeat shivered there, no matter how she prayed for it.

  A moment passed as she considered the situation. She’d been here before. This was obviously the memoria trying to process her current situation, making connections between the things she couldn’t remember and the things she could. Is this confusion why they wanted authorized neurotechs? I don’t even like Alien Attack Squad, she thought. He had been the one who’d brought those holos on board, and she watched it because of him, because it made him smile—

  —Len, that was his name, Leonard Downey—

  “There.” A whisper in the black. “Full organic integration was difficult in substandard organic equipment, but I suppose I’ve made it work.”

  The hallucination took a deck of cards from his back pocket, slipped off a rubber band, and started shuffling them near her cold bare feet.

  “What the hell,” she whispered, half-hoarse.

  “This is familiar to you,” Downey said. “You like this.”

  “Yes, but—”

  The last time she’d played cards with Leonard Downey—and she remembered it now, remembered it all—had been in the mess hall on Twenty-Five three days before Ash had discovered the Heart. Len looked exactly how she’d last remembered him, down to the white crescents of his nails and the notch in the collar of his favorite jacket, his fingers tap-tap-tapping against the cards in his hand, the warm sound of his humming running just under the mumble of the engine.

  She swallowed something tough and hard in her throat, then looked down at the blank playing cards in her hand. Of course they’re blank, she thought, I didn’t play to win. I didn’t even care about winning. I’d lose any day just to see him smile.

  “Oh,” Natalie said, losing her breath. “I loved you, didn’t I?”

  Sitting on the floor of the shower, Natalie stared at the memory she’d lost and felt the tearing in her heart all over again.

  He looked up, the ghost of a smile on his lips. “I died, and I left you alone,” he whispered, as if all of it were some wild revelation. “How do you stand it?”

  “I—” She felt lost for a moment. Cold. “People die. They die every fucking day.”

  “Impossible,” he whispered.

  “You’re—” She rubbed her temples, trying to push aside the burgeoning headache right behind her eyes. She’d expected a smile from him. A joke. Len had been the kind of sardonic asshole who dealt with tough situations with black humor learned over too many years of indenture. He deflected. Swerved. Ricocheted. It was why they’d gotten along in the beginning, and partially why they’d come apart at the end.

  But this wasn’t Len. It was just her memory of him.

  “Right,” she said, “I’m talking to myself. That’s why you have no sense of humor.”

  “What is humor?”

  “For fuck’s sake,” she repeated. “Ash told me this was going to be weird, but I didn’t expect it to be this weird.”

  The Len-thing blinked at her and templed his fingers over his stack of blank playing cards. “We need to find them.”

  Grief sucked her down into herself like a heat wave, and she bit down hard on her bottom lip to keep the renderbots from seeing that she was close to tears. “There’s nobody left to find,” she said. “Everybody who really knew me is gone.”

  He folded his hands. “We need to find them,” he repeated.

  She looked at him—really looked, took in the texture of his skin and the curves of his fingers; after the Battle of Tribulation, Natalie was never quite sure if she was remembering anything the way it had actually been, or if her mind was just filling in the blanks with dreams and expectations. She had no way to be sure.

  “This isn’t the first time you’ve lost someone, Natalie,” she whispered. “You got over it. Get over this.”

  He looked shocked. “That’s not possible.”

  She snorted.

  “Death is shit and life is worse, but at least you’re still breathing. At least you’re here. At least you still have a chance. Because you’re right, Natalie. All you have to do is get the fuck out of here.”

  The Downey-thing nodded. His fingers hovered, reverent, over the blank cards spread out on the floor, as if he were afraid to touch them.

  “Nat, who the fuck are you talking to?”

  Ward.

  She looked away, and Downey disappeared.

  “Nobody. Implant glitch. It doesn’t matter.”

  He knocked on the shower door. “Can I come in? Aulander called. They want you in Applied Kinetics along with the rest of us.”

  She was still half-naked and shivering and dirty. She looked back in the mirror, pushing the housing back against her forehead and fastening it on her skull, then clicked the rest of the memoria into place. No bomb. Vai tech, instead. That was much worse. She yanked the rinseless soap off the shelf and scrubbed her face and underarms, made a face at her scummy hair, then opened the door.

  “I need more time,” she said.

  He looked perfect. “I know. Your hair’s still way too short. Ascanio will talk.”

  She stared. “I can’t believe you think I’m worried about my hair.”

  His mouth formed an unhappy line. “That was a joke.”

  “I have a shitty sense of humor.”

  He sighed. “Do you? I don’t know, because you don’t let me in. You never have. You don’t talk about what worries you. I just have to—” He waved his hand in her direction. “Guess. And after you left, I assumed you never would. Chan’s out for—”

  “Don’t you dare use that one on me, asshole—”

  “Chan’s out for Chan, I told myself.” He smiled briefly, showing white teeth. “But I’d still rather be with you than without you, though, so I guess I’m just screwed.”

  It was Natalie’s turn to look away. Her stomach soured. “Guess you are. Asshole.”

  He shrugged.

  “I keep on calling you an asshole,” she said.

  “Yeah, well.” He shrugged. Squeezed her hand. “Takes one to know one.”

  It was the kind of thing someone in her old platoon would have said, someone she couldn’t quite remember, and the jibe felt familiar, even coming from Ward’s too-earnest face. She didn’t want to laugh, but she did. “Tell me the truth. Was I just something you had to do to get ahead?”

  He flushed. “I could ask you the same question. And it’s complicated.”

  “Then why can’t you admit that the rest of it is complicated too?”

  “I think I’m about to.”

  “Ha. I ought to go away more often.”

  He laughed. The corners of his eyes creased, and his hand dangled on the small of her back. “Don’t.”

  Natalie put the grav-comb back on the shelf and lifted her chin, daring him to go further. He swallowed, wordless, for a moment, and his fingernails dug into the tight muscle near her spine. She hooked her fingers around his belt loop and drew him closer.
<
br />   “Fine,” she said. Then: “I’m not sorry.”

  “You don’t have anything to be sorry about,” he said, and met her lips with his, and after a while she was too lost in his bedclothes and his body to say this, this, this.

  19

  Afterward, her naked back curled against the cold curve of the bulkhead, Natalie traced the winding gold tattoo on Ward’s arm to where it met the rig port in his neck, feeling exhausted and satisfied and incredibly guilty. This port looked like a permanent part of his body—installed by a neurotech, with a metal rim and a proper hygienic seal. It made Natalie think he was going to be using the proxy rig on a daily basis. We didn’t make a rig that would handle a daily load, she thought.

  “Can we talk?” he said. “About why you said no?”

  “Didn’t we have to be in App-K ten minutes ago?”

  “Come on.” He drew his hand up her thigh, making a quiet circle there with his thumb. “I’m not going to let you brush me off this time. That’s the problem—I ask, you say later.”

  “I’d have to explain Verdict to you.” The memoria flashed: the scent of trash in the harbor, wind whipping up State Street, the five white towers that dominated the view from the swollen Hudson.

  “Explain, then.”

  “You never cared before.”

  He pushed up on an elbow. “You never let me care. You wanted space. I gave you too much of it.”

  There’s never too much space, she thought, the memoria pummeling her with blood in her mouth, with code under her fingers, with her first gun. The dust-choked summers, the hot winters, the twinge of uncitizen rations on her tongue, the warren of streets that was old, broken Albany. The world they’d built on dying Earth under the thumb of the companies.

  “It’s nothing like here,” she said. “And nothing like what you see in the holos. There’s no way up, so you build out. Street by street, if you have to. There are a lot of dead suburbs. It’s different out by the mountains—more cooperatives, fewer orgs, moisture farms and shit, more people just living their lives. Most of that’s all Armour territory. But Verdict—”

  “It’s a hacker cult, right?”

  She managed a laugh. “You know about it?”

  “Half the infosec team on Europa’s recruited from hacker cults. Why not you?”

  She snorted, then pushed him away, tossing the blanket on his body and dropping to the floor. “Because I was shit at coding, that’s why. I couldn’t keep up with the other kids. Couldn’t bring in the resources. I was a big disappointment to my father. I think.” She paused. The memoria gave her Xie’s face at the windswept gate. His frown. She always thought he’d been disappointed, but now that she was older Natalie only saw worry. “I was good at guns, though.”

  He lay back. “So your parents were uncitizens.”

  “Just a dad. And a bunch of teachers.” She went to his drawer and started pushing through piles of very similar skirts. “He was a programmer. A really good one. Could have aced an Auroran skills test, been one of your Europa infoseccers. He was pretty disappointed in me.”

  “Why didn’t he join? An office indenture’s a cakewalk.”

  Natalie pulled on a set of tight blue leggings. “He hated the companies. Something to do with my mom, I think. Hated space.” She paused. “He told me that if I listed up with Aurora to fight the Vai he’d never talk to me again.”

  “But you did.”

  She chose a shirt and dragged it over her head, trying to block out her father, watching by the gate. Worried. “He got over it.” I hope. “When I got my tags, I went to look for him, but he’d already indentured into Armour. They’d bought out Aurora’s investment in the rest of the city, see, and the war—” She shrugged on one of his jackets. “The war changed everything.”

  Ward watched her for a moment, as if at a distance; he then got up and started fishing his clothes off the floor. “And your mom?”

  “I don’t have any memories of my mom.”

  “She left when you were little?”

  One last dive into the drawer netted her a second grav-comb, which she used to smooth out the wider fit of his shirt. She ran the device over his jacket, and the wrinkles fell out like water; pulled the jacket snug at the shoulders and waist and the wrists. She looked at herself in the mirror, then ran the grav-comb so her hair slipped back into a peak at the top. A faint try at cit style.

  “That’s the story. My dad doesn’t remember.”

  “So he won’t tell you.”

  “Maybe.” She sighed. “He said he doesn’t remember her at all.”

  Ward blinked, clearly flummoxed. “How do you not remember someone you had a baby with?”

  She tapped her info-implant. “Maybe he chose to. I used to wonder if that was possible, and then—I came out the other end of Tribulation with swaths of my past just gone. That’s one of the reasons I got back in touch with him. I don’t know what happened, but brain damage can fuck you up.”

  He blinked. “Doesn’t it bother you that neither of you knows?”

  “Why would it bother me?” She shrugged. “I remember not knowing, and that’s enough. I used to think that as soon as I entered indenture, she’d get in touch. Help out. That she just didn’t like uncitizen life—and, yeah, I mean, it’s not for everyone. But she never did. She didn’t want to make me a part of her life, so I’m not going to spend any more than a few seconds making her a part of mine.”

  He looked uncomfortable. “Ah.” He paused. “So that’s why you don’t trust people.”

  “I—” She bit her bottom lip. “I suppose that’s part of it. I mean, my dad wasn’t a killer parent, either.”

  Ward paused. “You know, I still think we’d be good together.”

  “Because this would ensure our line’s eventual stranglehold on Applied Kinetics and all of the daughter departments?”

  He smirked, and didn’t deny it, throwing a pillow in her direction. “Are you going to actually take a shower?”

  “You go ahead,” she said. “I’ll go eat your garlic noodles.”

  He nodded, and went into the shower.

  Humans lie, she heard. You’re not going to eat the garlic noodles.

  Natalie opened the fridge and removed the dish in question—brown protein noodles, plainly dressed like everything else in Ward’s world, twisted by some sort of culinary grav-comb into whitecapped ocean waves. Her stomach hollered; she hadn’t realized just how hungry she was. She grabbed a fork and dove in, shoving in a too-big bite, then another.

  “Oh, no,” she said, through a tangy mouthful, “I am. I’m starving. That’s just not the only thing I’m going to do.”

  She ate the noodles like she was still back in training and had five minutes to go from the distribution line to her bunk, tossed the dish into the recycler, then crossed to Ward’s interface. It was off—off, of course, which never really meant off unless you had the credits to purchase such a privilege. And now that she thought about it, off in her cupboard of an apartment meant still on, or how had Aulander found her after the massacre at Bittersweet when she was supposed to be in the medbay? Had Ingest followed her from App-K and watched her enter? The optikal surveillance was passive, everyone knew that—

  —so how long had they been actively watching her?

  She thought of her father. At least we’re free, he’d said at the gate. At least we can do what we want. She hadn’t understood what that really meant at the time. She’d been too angry.

  I understand now, Dad. I do.

  The scraper whirred in Ward’s bathroom, and she turned on the interface, swiping over from an episode of Corporate Idol past the news channels to Ward’s work interface. It looked so much like hers—messages from Ascanio, schematics, meeting reminders—that she entertained a momentary pang of jealousy. She then paged past that and went to the Company directories.

  Auroran directories were more than just lists of who worked where. They were a social invitation system, a historical record, a matter of pr
ide—and because of such, the code was rarely updated, and Verdict had introduced a hack a long time ago that allowed them to see the back end, to see personnel moves on a macro level and respond in kind. It was possible that if Kate was alive, her movements could be seen here.

  She went straight to Kate’s entry. Citizen Katherine Keller, it said, former indenture, the picture plucked from the moments before Twenty-Five left Europa Station. She grumbled. Twenty-Five, captain, it continued, with her cabin number and credit rating. On Abeyance. Not dead. Not missing in action. Abeyance, the most bullshit of statuses.

  She chose the credit rating and paged back, then chose file a grievance.

  These old systems were the places where you could find your way in, her father had taught her: the far edges, the places that didn’t get updated, the forgotten directories. And with enough Verdict folk in infosec, she hoped—she prayed—that they’d left some of the old doors propped open. She wrote a familiar, almost-forgotten line of code, then sent a request to Ingest to see the video from the last time Kate was aboard.

  <>

  Huh, she thought, and then did the action again.

  <>

  She paused for a moment, then reworded the request. Maybe they’d finally figured out a proper firewall protocol—

  <>

  She drew her hands back as if scalded. “That’s what I’m doing.”

  The scraper had stopped behind her, and the door slid open. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m—” She paused, made something up. “I’m trying to access my mail from your console, and—yeah, uh, I can’t.”

  Ward crossed to his mirror, grav-comb in hand. A flick of his wrist smoothed and locked another curl of yellow hair into place, then another. Some new style, she thought. It was impossible to keep up with birthright styles, although if Aulander had actually been dangling that birthright status, she’d have to figure it out faster than she thought, or it wouldn’t just be Ascanio tittering at her.