Engines of Oblivion Read online

  “Yeah, it’s a new security protocol that came in with updates to Ingest. You’ll have to use your own tablet.”

  She rose. “Then I’ll go by my place.”

  “No time.”

  “Of course there’s—”

  He adjusted his collar. “We’re late.”

  “Cover for me.”

  “I have Ascanio,” he said, eyeing her in the mirror. “And Vanelder. You know the Vanelders. If I’m a second late, she’ll trash me to their family council, and—”

  Natalie snorted. “And you think it bothers me that I don’t have a line. And you think I want to join yours, if this is the kind of bullshit Wards have to put up with—”

  He sighed, and his hand paused in its work. “I thought we figured this out.”

  “We had sex,” she said. “It doesn’t mean we figured anything out. You’re still an asshole. And I’m still—” She hesitated. Thought of the secret under his skin, under hers, the borrowed silver that whispered and took and became. There was no way she could explain what was happening to him now, and no way he’d believe it.

  But she still needed to tell him.

  “I’m still feeling like shit,” she decided to say instead.

  “Look,” he said, heaving a sigh. “You’re probably going to ‘feel like shit’ until the end of time, aren’t you?”

  “It’s a distinct possibility,” she said.

  Curl. Flip. Curl. He was silent for a moment as he finished his hair, then lay the grav-comb on the lip of the mirror, tilted his head to catch the waves he’d created in the light, nodded, and reached for his eyeliner. Slipped it against his lids, then shoved it in his pocket. He looked like some bright ancient god, and it made her uncomfortable. All of a sudden, Natalie became extremely conscious of the dirt and dried sweat still colonizing her body, despite the clothing, the hair, the sure future. She grabbed a few hairpins from his top drawer and used them to paste down her one wild cowlick. There was no time for anything else.

  “We’ll figure it out,” he said. “You ready?”

  She nodded and followed him out.

  20

  Like the rest of Vancouver, Applied Kinetics looked both nothing and everything like it had when Natalie left it.

  The lab kept the same sort of soft, even light and curved white walls. Six tidy workstations gathered around the rig in the center, with the director’s desk to the side, connected to the large wall interface that looked dead but probably was only feeding back information to workers with superhaptics. The workstations were covered with the remains of defused Vai kinetics in safety isolettes, pored over for parts by techs with mask-obscured faces and medical machines appropriated from operating rooms. She’d helped build this. She’d seen what had been done under Tribulation, pitched it to the board, was given directorship. Orders were in her throat as soon as she walked in, orders that she had to choke down.

  But the rig—

  —she hadn’t built this rig.

  This machine was no longer the tidy mess of straps and cables she’d developed with Ward and Ascanio. It had metastasized—invading every corner of the room, hissing and breathing like a living thing, all knives and tentacles and smoke. She thought she heard a voice wailing at the sight of it, something unfamiliar and wild and misled, and she couldn’t look away.

  The specs she’d signed off on back when she was director were for well-ordered, properly constructed work, the kind of reliable engineering she never got while out in the field—not whatever this was, this wild mayhem of ill-soldered cables and wires. Some of the old connections had been hacked off and reconnected to the extra equipment she’d seen in the medbay: a ventilator, two heart regulation machines, a dialysis device. Discerning the purpose of any of it was like trying to read poetry written by a drugged-up child with a half-melted crayon.

  Ascanio stood in ramrod-straight surprise as Natalie walked in, trailing Ward, vertebrae crackling and lips smoothing out from a frown. She’d been slouching. Her polished heels flashed as she stepped out from behind the desk. She removed an unfamiliar, slim new interface from her fingers; the finger-caps retracted to a golden wristband. Her trendy golden tattoos seemed to flicker in the soft white light.

  “Mr. Ward! You’re almost late,” she said.

  “I was held up by business.”

  “I see.” Her eyes, almost accusatory, flickered toward Natalie.

  “Is it ready?” he said.

  Ascanio cleared her throat, and Natalie caught the leading edge of her smirk, the knife’s-edge regard of her eyes, and if the screaming in Natalie’s head hadn’t been mounting, building, drowning everything else out, she would have wanted to punch the younger woman. Sometimes she really missed the dorms, where nobody cared about that sort of thing. “The executives will arrive in less than ten minutes. If the test goes well, we can have the rig moved to the bridge by—”

  Pain flared behind Natalie’s eyes. The hallucination appeared in a sudden screaming lurch, shocked and stumbling; the noise belonged to him, the howling like metal on bone, his eyes wide and his arms pinwheeling like he’d been ejected from a burning transport.

  “Deletion,” he wailed, “death—”

  And then the Downey-voiced ghost was no longer just something dangling from her consciousness, frightening and unhelpful—he was the entirety of it. He held her vision on the tables and slabs and their half-blank, dismembered corpses, watched him shudder to his knees, screaming alone, alone, they died alone—

  She saw App-K for what it was now, thanks to the thing in her head. Ward and Ascanio presided over a slaughter: over the weapons laid out on a table with their insides open like corpses in a morgue, over the isolettes blinking with disassembled screamers. Some of them were still occupied by fallen, tortured Vai. The room, the rig, its straps and tentacles: this wasn’t repurposed technology, but an impossible necromancy.

  She hadn’t made the connection until now—and she’d seen it before, heard it on the Vai ship, when she inserted her human intention into the massively inhuman structure of the Vai civilization. She held her own body, her blood, her flesh, her one chance, her unfolding future writ in the gray slush of her brain, the only one she owned and could ever own, even with the grosgrain shambling of the memoria patching it all together.

  But the Vai slipped in and out of bodies in cascades of shimmering silver, uploaded and downloaded into long-fingered walkers and immutable mechs—why not into a fragile human body connected to the alien mainframe in the middle of a battle they could not win?

  She had been right from the very beginning.

  Downey wasn’t a hallucination.

  “No,” she whispered. “Not possible.”

  “Excuse me?” said Ascanio.

  She blinked away pain, saw her former tech staring. “I’m fine,” she lied, like humans lied—

  —and turned away toward Downey and the rig.

  If you had not come,

  Downey said,

  standing over the dead,

  I would have been lost forever.

  He was still. Inhumanly so.

  I would no longer be alive.

  What an amazing thought.

  She whispered. How—

  The Downey-thing stepped forward.

  Placed a warm finger on her forehead.

  Empty, he said. Empty space. Your file structure.

  I’m not a computer. I’m alive.

  His eyes still brimmed with tears.

  Acetylcholine is code. Norepinephrine is code. Serotonin. Dopamine.

  Glutamate. GABA. The nanotech that holds it together.

  This is your code.

  You allow me to read it.

  I am the master node.

  The scent of celestium dragged Natalie’s tongue, and swirled up in her brain like a shot of barracks rotgut. Oh, she thought, I’m not the only one in my brain.

  The light in my head, it’s—

  A rush of nausea came from nowhere; her stomach loosened, and a
cid rocketed up her empty throat, swirling at the back of her mouth. She scrambled for the door, thought better of it, then sailed over to the trash chute, where she vomited until there was nothing left and she tasted rot and garlic between her teeth. Some of the workers hovered nearby, clearly repelled.

  We’re not done, said the node.

  We are for now, she replied.

  But—

  Unless you want them to find you.

  “I—” I need to get out of here, Natalie wanted to say, the words barely forming in the midst of her sudden dark panic, like getting out of here would rid her of the Downey-thing, the light in her mind. “Um. I need the medbay.”

  “Ingest says he’s ten seconds out,” a tech said.

  “No time. Wipe your face,” Ascanio whispered.

  She looked around for something to do that with, found nothing, and raised her sleeve, making quick work of the last few rotten noodle bits clinging to the corner of her mouth. The doors opened, drenching the lab in light from the corridor, and the age-old corporate dance began.

  She knew who it was going to be from the way the air choked in the throats of her former colleagues, from the way Ascanio snapped her body straight like a marionette’s, from the way Ward’s eyes filled with a quiet, excited dread. As the Downey-thing—the alien, the thing—howled in her head, she threw everything she had left into staying upright as Joseph Solano entered the room, ignored Ward and his deputies, walked straight to Natalie, and picked up her vomit-streaked sleeve, like he’d seen her throw up. He frowned.

  “Ingest,” he pronounced, “tells me you left medbay, Chan. I’m not happy.”

  Natalie’s tongue stumbled still. “I-I wanted to get back to work, sir.”

  “Indeed. But we have to talk about what getting back to work means for a person who is hallucinating about having her pants on.”

  “Sir, I wanted to show you—”

  Solano’s jowled face softened. “Listen. You don’t need to prove anything to us, Ms. Chan. You did everything we asked of you.”

  She wanted to relax, wanted relief, but behind her the master node was still sobbing, still whiling in her head, still stealing her breath. She hauled in oxygen, felt the now-familiar ache of her healing lungs, let that pain ground her in reality. “Of course, sir.”

  “I’m not entirely happy about having to chase you all the way to the White Line, but you came through in the end, and that’s the point.” He shrugged, then sat back on the edge of Ward’s desk, crossing his arms. “It’s understandable that you’re nervous. The birthright examination is tough. It’s different for everyone. Yours was harder than most. But we had to be sure you were loyal enough to bring Ash home.”

  Behind her, Solano’s team parted to encircle the rig—Aulander and another executive leading a team of white-coated bumblebees dipping and bowing around a monstrous flower. She was wearing a new info-implant, as were the others. Larger. More like Natalie’s.

  Solano cleared his throat, annoyed that Natalie seemed to be drifting. “We’d like to offer you a position on the bridge. You’ll be a ship’s gunner—a Defender, a new rank qualified only on the superhaptic rig. It’s a position of trust, so you must be a birthright to take it. You’ll be the originator of a new line, if you want that. A witness to history.”

  Words rushed to her throat and died there.

  He waited a moment, and his eyebrows knit together. “Are you willing?”

  Was she?

  It was everything she’d ever wanted. Beyond what she’d wanted, actually, when she’d placed her signature on the indenture contract and was whisked off Earth for the very first time, away from Verdict and its petty pyrrhic victories. This was freedom.

  She felt nothing but the master node pinballing in her head.

  And she had her father’s words in her mind—this isn’t freedom, he would say when she finally got the guts to leave him a message a decade later. Her blood in a machine, powering the death-dreams of the most powerful corporation in known space—how could she really call that freedom?

  A black dread built, and she slammed her hands into fists at her side to prevent herself from clawing at her head, screaming get out, from ruining this farce for good. Was she willing? No. Did she want to be a birthright? More than anything. Could she be both willing and not, like Reva Sharma? Could she do better than Sharma? Ash, of course, said no outright, had been violent in her refusal, and Solano had changed the game in response. Natalie could say she was willing, if she wanted to turn her back on Ash, on the captain, but hadn’t that been what she’d done all along? And didn’t she deserve the right to have what she wanted? She loved her friends, missed them—but she’d always wanted different things.

  Natalie knew she would have to commit. Sharma’s fate showed her there was no way for one person to go up against a juggernaut like Aurora. No way to tear away from an Ingest that indexed the twitch of her mouth, the shiver in her step. Ash and Kate had tried and failed. Sharma had tried and failed. Natalie could choose a different path. Work from the inside. A contract marriage to another bridge officer could be played straight onto the board.

  And then she could change everything.

  Solano waited for her answer with an impatient twist to his mouth, Downey wailing somewhere in the corner. Downey. Shit. She hadn’t figured out where Downey fit. The proxy rig would allow Aurora access to Natalie’s mind, her broken body, her memories, and that included the alien now. There was no way she could allow the Vai in her head access to Auroran systems, just as there was no way she could allow Solano access to the Vai.

  It didn’t matter what Natalie wanted.

  Like always.

  Solano translated the panic on her face as excitement. He clapped his hands together once more, then stood.

  “Good,” he said. “We’ll get you set up.”

  No. She needed to buy some time. “Why me, sir?”

  “You’re an excellent soldier.”

  “I’m not a gunner, though,” she said. “I had a gun. I had a platoon. But they trained me as an ordnance tech. I’m more qualified to build and detonate.”

  He examined her hands, her face. “A gunner’s skills can be taught. What you have—cannot.”

  “You mean the nanotech I contracted on Twenty-Five.”

  “I do.”

  She thought of Ashlan. “You have the nanotech, sir. You can inject someone who is an actual gunner.”

  “I said that what you have cannot be taught,” Solano said, his brow creasing in growing annoyance. “Chan, the propagation of your nanotech can’t be fabricated or counterfeited. Someday, you’ll be able to step down when the other Defenders are ready. We’ll give you the cure then. One month’s exposure is not one year’s exposure.”

  “There’s no cure. Just a treatment.”

  “There will be.” Natalie examined his face, trying to weed out the truth from the lie, and Solano sighed. “But we have to survive first. Vancouver is being chased by the Vai fleet right now—and nobody’s here to honor their mutual defense treaties, not Ballard, not Penumbra, not fucking Baylor-Wellspring. It’ll be us, Chan, here, on the thin fucking red line between the Vai and the rest of human space. Do you want to die?”

  Ascanio made a strangled noise and disappeared behind the rig.

  “I’m dying anyway. Apparently.”

  Solano’s eyes gleamed. “So go out screaming.”

  She turned toward his words like a tree ached for acid rain, knowing it was poison, wanting it anyway. everything she’d ever worked for. And the Vai in her head—

  The Vai in her head—

  She was dumb. She was an idiot. She was just catching up right now. Natalie searched the room to find him; he shook, hunched, in the corner, his face haggard, pleading, like he knew that face was the one she’d respond to—

  If the Vai master node is in my head, she thought, then what is controlling the Vai fleet?

  “I—” she began, letting the vowel ride for a moment, just to fill the
space. “Yes, sir. Yes. Screaming.”

  He brought his hands together into a loud, unexpected clap that scared a tech across the room. “Fantastic. Ms. Aulander, why don’t you take Ms. Chan to get her moved up? We’ll need the tattooist here, and a couple proper—”

  He nattered on about all the things Natalie would need to access the bridge, like she hadn’t just axed her way in to a half-dozen Auroran bridges while she worked on Twenty-Five. She felt outwitted, outplayed, like Solano had woven a trap in her path and waited for her to step into it, like she’d prepared for years to avoid getting hit by a train only to step into the river and drown.

  Solano finished talking and moved over to the rig, and Ascanio rubbernecked her way to the front of the crowd, intent on being the one to present the new machinery. The white-coated bees were moving around Natalie now, handing her a tablet where blue letters on a white background signified a legal contract written in the way they’d been written for centuries; twenty-two pages flickered by in a half-breath. One thin finger flicked to the end, told her to sign, moved off to do something else.

  “This is a contract,” Natalie said.

  “Yes.” Aulander had taken Solano’s spot at her side. “Delineating your responsibilities as a birthright citizen. What you own, and what you do not own.”

  The words seemed almost lost in the haze that was the master node’s grief. Natalie’s finger hovered over the signature box. “But I thought there was no contract. I thought—”

  Aulander clutched a different jacket in her hand; the dark-as-heaven, gold-trimmed formal coat of a birthright. “Oh, lord, you thought we were free,” she said, then laughed. “That’s just in the holostories, Ms. Chan. It’s contracts all the way down until we die. Well, go on. Read it, if you must. I don’t have all day.”

  Natalie paged through, her headache roaring. A good chunk of the contract was ensuring the rights of the company versus the rights of the birthright, what they owned on elevation and what they could accrue and what positions they could take. She scanned most of it, not quite understanding the economics of it all, but stopped when she came to a clause that sounded like it might affect her directly. Any technology owned by the Birthright at the time of elevation will remain the property of the Birthright; any technology owned by Aurora will remain the property of Aurora, unless purchased by the Birthright or their Line.