Engines of Oblivion Page 25

  “This,” she asked. “The memory device. I can buy it?”

  “Let me check,” Aulander said. Her fingers twisted in the jacket’s collar, wrinkling it, and she used her other hand to fire off a question to some unseen eye. She received a response back almost immediately. “No,” she said. “It’s still considered proprietary technology.”

  Natalie’s hand flashed up to touch it, felt its warmth where it was soldered into her skull, heard the master node crying somewhere nearby. “But it’s in my head. It runs my body.”

  Aulander nodded. “And as a birthright citizen, you have the right to make purchases and sell items, but only consumer tech. You can’t sell proprietary data storage secrets, Natalie.”

  “I’m sorry?” Natalie shoved the tablet aside. She choked down something tight and sharp in her throat. “The memoria is data recovery, not storage.”

  “No, it’s storage,” she said. “Or didn’t they tell you?”

  “There’s a difference?”

  “A big difference.” Aulander’s face changed, ever so slightly adopting a quiet sheen of confusion, almost as if she’d understood she’d said something wrong, but couldn’t figure out what. “You don’t need to be worried. As long as the info-implant is updated correctly, it won’t matter who owns it. And you’ll get updates without having to collect credit.”

  But it will, she said, watching as Downey slowly picked himself up from where he’d been shaking. It matters. And you know it matters, because why else would you have tried to con me with a birthright position that isn’t? It was such a simple difference. Such a tiny thing, a shift from flesh to tech. They’d been able to save her because she’d been infected, but they hadn’t been able to put her back in her body.

  Of course they hadn’t. For all of their medical technology, the autobandages and cloned organs and lung reconstructions, the brain was still such an uncharted territory. She wasn’t in her body, occupying the tissues and gray matter and veins and arms. She was in the device.

  And the device was owned by Aurora.

  And so was the Vai.

  “I—” It took every inch of her composure not to claw at her memory device, to rip it off her head, to slam her heel into it and watch the machine go to glitter, to go to glitter herself. Instead, she put aside the tablet and tried to stand straight. “I don’t feel well, Ms. Aulander. I’ll sign this when I get back from the bathroom.”

  “Don’t take long,” Aulander said. She yanked the birthright’s jacket back, tossed it over her shoulder. “You can wear the jacket for the big test.”

  Natalie stalked into the corridor, leaving Aulander and Ward and the Vai master thing behind, kicking up her pace until she was in the bathroom nestled close to the spine. She shut herself in the little toilet cubby away from the optikals, trying to breathe through the overpowering, incredibly human scent of urine and bleach, holding her rapidly souring stomach and trying to figure out how she could take apart the toilet to kill herself. Really kill herself, this time, not just her mind and memories, leaving her a useless breathing husk they couldn’t shove in a puppet rig.

  She wasn’t even sure that death would solve the problem. If she wasn’t in her own head—if everything she was resided in the memoria—what if the master node just slid into her fingers when they were free? Then the Vai could just walk around in her rotting body, and who knows what next—

  This time, she vomited.

  She couldn’t stand the noise of two of her rattling around underneath one skull, a ghost inside a zombie like some sort of queasy nesting doll. She wanted to rip out her eyes, her tongue, her belly, anything that the alien in her brain had touched. The alien swam in her fingers, through every shuddering beat of her heart. Maybe if she set herself on fire—she looked around for a knife, a boltgun, hell, even someone’s soldering wand. She could put one of those straight through her eye, ripping open the squishy framework that ran her used-to-be-human operating system.

  She’d thought they’d wanted her because of the celestium. Turns out that was as easy to accomplish as a couple of swigs of water, and what they’d really been doing was taking apart Sharma’s device, seeing how it ran her body, putting it back together again, figuring out how to make a puppet rig of a human being. Natalie was always one to tease out the implications, and these implications made Bittersweet seem like boot camp.

  No. She couldn’t possibly go back.

  She tossed herself against the cold wall, taking fistfuls of too-long hair, tugging until it hurt, digging her fingers into her scalp, whatever hurt the most—was there a knife, she thought, was there a comb, could she gore a hole in her skull with her spanner and let the cursed thing out? Could she do it now?

  I won’t allow you to kill yourself,

  he said, appearing—

  —and oh, it came rushing back,

  with him so close—

  —Len’s stupid beautiful face, the way he leaned back in his chair when Kate was talking, the way every one of his smiles tilted from the left side of his mouth. Len talking endlessly about Alien Attack Squad, the way he’d decorated his room with little toy figurines he’d dragged out of wrecks from here to Omega Colony. His warm, patient hands on hers.

  It hadn’t started as love. They hadn’t wanted it to be love. Love on a vessel as small as Twenty-Five was difficult and messy and wrong and inevitable, as inevitable as hate. So she’d shoved it down, wrapped it in a coat of the everyday, until it was far too late.

  And then he’d died, and she nearly drowned in the thick anger of it, so tight and so tough in her chest that she barely spoke, she just pushed it all into Applied Kinetics, into her promotion, into whatever it was with Emerson, and placed an iron staple around her heart.

  Until now.

  Now it was all ruined for good.

  “Why him?” she managed.

  You needed to trust me.

  It was the only way to survive.

  I need your help.

  If there had been any other option—

  You want me to help you? she thought, dizzy. You came for us. World after world, you sent down your weapons. You fried entire cities. You took everything I loved. And now you’re wearing him like a coat. She closed her eyes, but he remained there, she clawed at her eyes—

  He hovered. Warm.

  You’re the one who taught me it could be done.

  Your secondary node came for me.

  Took my world.

  My people.

  Help me.

  No fucking way. It’s war. We have to protect ourselves. She squeezed her eyes shut and he was still there. And she’s not a secondary node. It doesn’t work like that. We’re on our own. You’re on your own now.

  So are they. Alone.

  And it’s not my fault, she said, almost desperate. I was doing what I was told. Her throat closed with the hypocrisy.

  We are not different.

  You’ll help me.

  Never, she said. You can rot in there. They’ll find some way to shut you up if I can’t. He sounded like Len, so much like him, down to the cadence of his words, but that was just the master node fucking with her head, wasn’t it?

  The thing paused.

  Then you’ll give me to them?

  Of course. You are human.

  Weapons are evil.

  You called them evil, so you felt justified in taking them apart. Killing them.

  He was close enough for Natalie to feel the warmth of his skin.

  Your daily bread.

  Just a job.

  Then: a joy. His hand tightened.

  “Not joy,” she gasped, “never joy.” She stared at the Downey-thing, searching behind his work-lined face, his too-human eyes, and discovered his hand warm against hers. When had it learned that trick, to be warm?

  That’s a lie, he said. Humans lie.

  She exhaled. “You’re lying too.”

  No. I tell the truth.

  I can do no other thing.

  I am alone, sh
e heard.

  Alone—

  “It’s not so bad, being alone,” she said, through the angry wire closed around her throat.

  The master node’s grief was a seismic rattle at the center of her rib cage. He showed her his memories: his people, silver and streaming through the expanse of the heartship, the great shining expanse that had once been his body. He showed her what he would do to hear them sing again: anything, anything. Even take Natalie’s broken body for his own—

  “You wouldn’t,” she snarled, and imagined the entire terrible war with the Vai, negotiated down to a single set of unimportant skin and bones—

  It would be wrong to take that from you, it finally said.

  And I’m not sure I could.

  Two master nodes cannot exist in one network.

  And now it has morals. She nearly laughed.

  What are morals? He weighed heavy in her mind, tight and cramped around her heart.

  “It means that I can’t sign the contract. Even if I wanted to. I can sign for myself, but not for you. Not for all of you. I’m going to have to think of something else.”

  She heard a rapping noise on the door—hollow, blank, knuckles on bulkhead. “Chan? You didn’t want to sign?”

  It was Ward. Shit. Natalie wiped her eyes, and removed the foot from where she’d wedged it against the door, then grabbed the bottom with her toes, pulling it open. Somewhere in her borrowed, aching head, she heard the master node settling in, searching, mourning.

  “I’m thinking about it.”

  His voice was lined with worry. “You all right?”

  “Fine,” she said, biting off the word.

  He paused. “You don’t sound fine.”

  “I’m taking a shit.”

  Ward’s voice grew tight, and he took in her fully clothed form, right down to the vestigial buttons on her borrowed pants. “Right. This is the second time today I’ve had to come rescue you from a bathroom. This is becoming a pattern.”

  “You aren’t here for a rescue. You’re here for a hijacking.”

  He blinked. “You’re making them nervous, Chan. Aulander’s worried that you might need a second visit to the medbay. She asked me to take you.”

  Natalie shook her head. “That’s not what Aulander is worried about.”

  He canted a hip, blocking her way out. “To be honest, I’m worried too.”

  She stood. “You’re not. Move it.”

  “So you’re going back?”

  She sighed, the master node with her. “I can’t.”

  “So where are you going?”

  “Up your—”

  He raised his hand. “Hey. I’m not here for them. I’m here for you. I told you I wanted to work it out, but I can’t possibly do that unless you let me in. And you have to make that decision, not me.”

  She worked her jaw. “You’re being too fucking nice to me.”

  “Not nice,” he said, shrugging. “I’ve … just been thinking about Bittersweet.”

  The words came out acid-edged. “Only now?”

  “Since it happened.” He looked down. Away. His shoulders shuddered. “Look. My head’s full of things I shouldn’t be thinking. I don’t even know where to start.”

  She considered this, pushing away several dark thoughts—then hoisted herself up to the countertop.

  “Okay. Start here,” she said. “There’s a problem with my contract and I’m not sure what to do about it. I think it might have something to do with some lies they’re telling me about an old shipmate of mine. And I’m worried.”

  “Tell me more,” said Ward, and she did.

  21

  To his credit, Ward listened to most of her story about needing to find Kate and the red flags in the contract—leaving out the aliens, of course, because there were certain lines that she was sure Ward wouldn’t cross. He folded his arms and frowned, his back going taut, his baffled body language saying everything Natalie needed to know about his reaction. She stopped mid-sentence, heaving out a sigh.

  “Right,” she said, brushing past Ward. “If you’re not listening to me, I’m going to the medbay myself.”

  He blocked her, palm against shoulder. “I’ve heard that one before.”

  “Yes, well, this time—”

  “They’ve heard that one before. If you’re going, I have to walk you.”

  “Yeah,” she spat. “Freedom, huh.”

  In the bright white bathroom, she could see the signs of nanoscale sickness encroaching on Ward’s face in a way the quiet of his apartment hadn’t afforded. He was too pale, and he’d thinned slightly; he’d consider both a personal achievement, not a problem to be addressed. She herself had thought her early illness an effect of stress from citizenship onboarding. She wondered if he was seeing things yet. Hallucinating dead ex-girlfriends. Hearing hijacker aliens. Maybe they’d convince him someday that he’d hallucinated her.

  She didn’t know why she’d even tried to get him to understand. He wasn’t like Ash. She couldn’t trust him. He’d probably never thought to interrogate the terms of his contract before today. After all, he’d been born into those terms, and he’d never yet run into a situation where he found those terms unacceptable. Frustration fired behind already-exposed nerves, and she moved to knock his hand away.

  “You don’t believe me,” she said.

  “I don’t believe they’d enforce it.”

  “The company that tacked on three weeks to my time because I needed a bandage for bashing my knee in the mess hall off-shift wouldn’t enforce it?”

  He sighed. “Natalie—”

  “The company that dropped a Vai nuke on a mining planet instead of sticking to the limited-casualty plan the war committee voted for? Look,” she said. “I don’t have time for this. I’ll explain, you’ll keep on arguing with me, you’ll do the frowny thing with your eyebrows—”

  “I just don’t understand how you got to be so paranoid.” His brow furrowed.

  “You’re doing the thing.”

  He clapped his left hand to his forehead. “For fuck’s sake.”

  She took the moment to make another attempt to push by, but he stood in her way. This time, she responded by grabbing his wrist and twisting it toward the sink, using a little more force than she probably should have. “Okay, asshole. Tell me what I should do about finding Ms. Keller if you’re so smart.”

  Ward winced. “I’d ask the board directly.”

  “Only if you think they never lie, and I’d never date anyone that stupid. I already asked Aulander about it, and she told me I was seeing things.”

  “I’d—” His brow furrowed further, like he might actually agree with her. She tapped the sink in frustration; she could almost see the gears grinding in his head. “I’d get independent verification.”

  “Tell me how to do that, Director.”

  “I’d—” His eyes narrowed. “You’re doing the thing, now. Trying to make me come up with the answer you’ve already had for twenty minutes so I think I came up with it.”

  Natalie raised her eyebrows. “I plead innocence.”

  “Just be out with it.” He rolled his eyes.

  In the corner of the room, Downey shook his head. “This is fascinating,” he said. “The concept of disagreement laid so plain—our best philosophers never quite understood—”

  “Shut up,” Natalie told the alien ghost, but it was Ward who winced. Whatever. She didn’t care what he thought right now. She did one more scan for the renderbots that supposedly weren’t present in citizen bathrooms. “Okay, Emerson. You keep on wondering why I didn’t say yes, and it’s this. It’s all of this. I have to manage you whenever our relationship moves out of bed. It’s not that you don’t care about me. It’s that you don’t care about anything.”

  Ward’s eyes steeled, and he shuffled his arms, settling in against the sink. “I just don’t understand why they would even try to hide your old captain.”

  She paused. Considered how much to tell him. “She’s dying.
Everyone who gets it dies. They’re probably concerned about mass panic.”

  Ward clutched his crossed arms closer, stiffening slightly. “Dying of it. It kills you.” He wanted to say more—Natalie could see the words fighting in the back of his throat.

  “Two years and you get liver failure. On the way, you hallucinate. Are you okay?”

  He licked his lips. “And you have it.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re dying.”

  Her stomach twisted. “I suppose.”

  “Shit.”

  “It looks like you’re the one that needs the medbay.”

  His fingers clamped down on the edge of the sink. His knuckles went white. “I’m fine. Everything’s fine.”

  He has to know. Natalie nursed her suspicion but didn’t press. She didn’t want him to know it might have been her who caused his illness. Not yet. She was being a coward, but she could do that for Kate. “I can’t go back and sign the contract until I have more information. And they’re hiding it from me.”

  “I bet Central Ingest would know.”

  “I know they would.”

  “So, you’re … not just going to wander into Central Ingest and ask them?”

  Natalie breathed in. Her lungs ached, a slow, needling crescendo. “That’s not the worst idea, actually.” I can use salvage tricks on the direct interface to find Kate. Then I could take her and Ward and the thing in my head and we can—go somewhere. Anywhere. Back to Verdict. Beyond the White Line. We could make our own damned company. “Yeah, that would work. If I went, would you stop me?”

  He considered it—she could tell he did, the way his lips twisted to one side, the way he shuffled his hands back into his jacket pockets. His commlink trilled, and he fished it out of his pocket, giving it an annoyed little snort. “They want us back. Look. Do you think you could actually get the answers you need without any of them figuring out what you’re doing?”