Engines of Oblivion Read online

  Natalie was already putting together the plan in her head, her mind slipping through the maintenance tunnels of Vancouver like she was back on London, stripping power cables to store in Twenty-Five’s massive cargo bay. The memoria provided her a quick memory of Solano picking at her vomit-streaked sleeve, like he’d been watching her moments before entering App-K. She shivered.

  “It would be difficult. Ingest can find us—”

  He blinked. “So no.”

  But she was already on to the next thought. “So maybe. Ingest can only find me if I’m inside the ship,” she said, and then stuck out her palm. “Gimme your eyeliner.”

  His eyes widened a little. “Don’t you think there are more important things to deal with right now?”

  “I know you have it. Just give me the fucking eyeliner.”

  He fumbled in his pocket, coming out with the black vial. She twisted off the cap, then switched off the autodraw. It was black—not perfect, but better than nothing. She pushed herself up against the sink, staring at her face in the mirror, at the shape of her eyes, at the turn of her lips.

  The basic steps to getting around facial recognition hadn’t changed in four decades. Maybe they would now that Ingest existed. Variable holomasks were preferable, of course, but you could still get pretty far with markers and paint. She made a few lines to lift her cheekbones, triangles to disrupt her forehead, opaque geometrics to change the way a renderbot might understand the curvature of her nose. Circles around her mouth, arcane circles on her cheeks, triangles and lines like some kind of nightmare clown.

  “It’s really fucking obvious,” he said.

  She snorted. “Nobody stopped me in the corridor when I walked to your place with no pants on.”

  Ward closed his eyes, rubbing his thumbs against his eyelids, drawing blood to the bleached-sugar skin. “Give it here when you’re done.”

  “You can’t come.”

  “Oh, I can.”

  “No,” she said. “You have to cover for me.”

  “If I cover for you, I might never find out what I want to know.”

  Her hand stumbled a little, squiggled a line. “I can find out for you.”

  He paused. Waited for her to finish with the tube of eyeliner. There was something reticent in the way Ward scratched at the back of his neck. “Or I can go.”

  He doesn’t trust you, said the master node.

  He slipped in like an alarm on a groundcar

  screaming in from the edge of town.

  You are alone.

  I don’t know how you stand it.

  The ache tied a knot in her chest.

  You just do, she said. You get up in the morning and go on. No matter who’s screwed you over. Because the other option’s worse.

  Deletion.

  “Got it in one,” Natalie said. She breathed out, nodded, and then turned back to the mirror. Finishing her work, she capped the eyeliner and turned her chin to the side. Perfect.

  “Fine,” she said, quickly. “Now shut up and come here.”

  She made dark swirls on his face—exaggerating his cheekbones, expanding his eyes, making mincemeat of his nose. A few minutes later, the eyeliner stowed, the two of them pushed open the cramped maintenance tunnel at the back of the bathroom.

  Natalie had a salvager’s basic knowledge of the systems—where to find them and how to rip them out. The cramped maintenance tunnels on Vancouver ran between decks, above and beneath the corridors on citizen and executive-level floors. They allowed secluded access to environmental systems like plumbing, air circulation, and trash evacuation—systems too smelly and messy to be dealt with in front of people who had bought their way into something better.

  Twenty-Five had maintenance tunnels around the engine and computer core, but the reasoning for that was the maximization of limited space, not creature comforts. Lower floors on the newer, post-Tribulation cruisers—inhabited primarily by indentures and citizen bosses—had slightly wider hallways to accommodate the larger number of workers, with all maintenance running behind the main walls, actual corridors and locked-away compartments to keep more people alive in case of a hull breach. Here, hiding the tunnels meant that citizens and executives didn’t have to witness the mess. It also meant that she could get pretty far without triggering Ingest.

  She didn’t like enclosed spaces. They reminded her too much of the trenches on Cana, where so many of her teammates died. As if prompted, the memoria sent nightmares following behind: zombie-slow Vai mechs, slim-fingered Vai bodies dragging light into substance behind her, and the alien with her old friend’s face haunting every remaining shadow like a vid emcee, muttering about being alone.

  She’d just about despaired of ever leaving the tunnels when she came across a thin hatch in the wall. Nothing special. Nothing interesting.

  Except she’d done salvage work.

  “Wonderful,” she whispered to nobody in particular. She pushed it open, revealing a noxious stench. “Take a deep breath before you go in,” she said. “Breathe through your mouth.”

  “What?” said Ward.

  “It’s a trash room.”

  “A what?” he said.

  He ducked inside, Natalie following after a moment of exhausted annoyance. “A trash room. Where the trash goes.”

  “I thought it—” Ward started. He flushed cherry red. “Right.” About the size of a birthright’s closet, the recycling room was an organized archaeology of daily life on Vancouver, full of human detritus cast aside and aged over weeks: plasteel bins full of used meal boxes, sealed disposal bags, and broken tools. The room itself was compact, no bigger than four toilet stalls wide, with walls meticulously scrubbed with bleach solution—possibly to counter the stench.

  The rest of it was broken tech: tablets, pre-haptic innards, and stacks of flimsies too old for recycling. She saw an old purpose-slaved terminal on the wall—most likely used to access janitorial logs from a time before most Auroran ships allowed indentures to have even restricted access to the central computer.

  “Can you find a spanner?” she said. “A laser scalpel would be helpful, and a couple screwdrivers. They don’t have to be perfectly functional.”

  Ward nodded and turned to an upended bucket of tools, holding his nose. Natalie turned to the pile of old tablets, choosing one that seemed to still have a decent amount of battery left. Like most of the tablets headed to recycling, it had been stripped of any personal data. She stuffed it into her waistband.

  “How’d all this end up here?” Ward said.

  “It’s just tossed.”

  “Like trash?”

  “Well, to you, it is trash,” Natalie said. “Cits and birthrights don’t even think about it. They just bundle all their old tech into recycling and move on. Along with some stuff that isn’t supposed to be here, because you’re lazy.”

  Ward snorted. She was hallucinating now—black filigree turning at the edges of her vision and the alien slouching among them. She swallowed, and picked through the tablets, operating boards, and crystalline data matrices. She hadn’t seen this much tech in one place since some of the storage rooms at Verdict. The coder kids she grew up with would have killed each other for access to a room like this.

  A faraway alarm began to howl: the stomach-bottoming, three-elevated-horn pattern she’d heard first over Grenadier and hoped never to hear again.

  She’d hoped to go to her death before hearing it again.

  “That’s not standard stations,” Natalie whispered. “That’s—”

  Ward gulped. “Battle GQ, yeah.”

  She paused. “We can still use that to our advantage,” Natalie said, cutting him off before he could drop off an emotional cliff. “While they panic about the Vai approach, we’ll keep going toward the next level.”

  Not the Vai, whined the master node. Not my people.

  “Does it fucking matter at this point?” said Natalie.

  “I didn’t say anything,” Ward said, slowly.

  Natalie
waved off his sudden concern. “We can’t move up through the ship itself. The maintenance tunnels don’t go there—just the spine. And at battle GQ, Ingest will be especially concerned with spinal movement. So we just need to take the outside route,” she said. “That’ll reduce the amount of time we’re in the corridors. We’ll hop up to Deck 3 on the gunside, and from there we should have a clear shot to Central Ingest. The flimsies will open the door, and we’ll be inside before Ingest gives a shit.”

  “Out—what?” gulped Ward. He stuffed another tool in his pocket. “You don’t mean outside outside?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean,” Natalie said.

  He shook his head. “I’ve never been in a coldsuit, let alone EVA.”

  “It’s easy,” Natalie lied. “Keep three points of contact at all times and go slow. Keep your eyes on the surface of the ship. Don’t look behind you.”

  He gulped. “It’s all well and good when you’re sitting inside with some snacks.”

  “You will be inside,” said Natalie. “Granted, think of the suit as a ship barely bigger than you are, but it’s still a ship. It’s there to take you from one place to another, to keep you alive.” She opened the hatch.

  The corridor was full of cits hollering and running from place to place. She couldn’t imagine what London would have been like at a time like this, just linked compartments and hatches with no corridors, people having to work amid all this clattering. Natalie caught the black eyes of the renderbots above as she climbed out, felt the weight of the crusting black eyeliner still smeared on her cheeks, then helped Ward out and replaced the hatch. From here, they had only a short time—minutes, if they were lucky—to disappear outside before Ingest noted there was no original access matching that open hatch and started investigating.

  As she walked quickly toward the cruiser’s gunside, in unfamiliar corridors she’d never had to traverse, Natalie marveled at how small her world had become. Applied Kinetics, the puppet drone, the smattering of citizens’ lounges where they kept the lights low and the drinks strong. Her rooms. The gunside armories. The flight deck. She hadn’t needed to know any of the rest, not like she’d known London. Where were the coldsuits?

  The memoria dangled a thought: an afternoon sitting in a pod, learning the ropes, watching Ash cut through doorway after doorway, descending into the outer shuttle deck, noting the various life-sustaining system cabinets along the way: life support, engineering, hull repair. Hull repair, she thought. The master node muttered about so much space, so much wasted space, and she tried to ignore him. Instead, she superimposed Vancouver over the memory of London, allowed for the new flagship’s bigger bones and corridors, and made a snap judgment.

  “Down three, over five,” she whispered. “We should find suits there.”

  Ward kept pace alongside; not too fast, not too slow, just the quick-swept motion of a citizen on his way to work. The closet in question was twenty feet from where Natalie had expected it to be, and she fumbled it open with too much force, stuck between the countdown in her head and the need to be careful. She reached in and found two suits; engineer and spotter. She disengaged the second from the wall and handed it to Ward.

  “Here you go, cit boy.”

  Ward snatched the suit from Natalie’s grasp. “I don’t know how to put this on.”

  “Legs first.”

  “You’re judging me.”

  She fumbled with the waist fasteners. “I’m not judging you.”

  “Then why do you look like you’ve just eaten an entire lemon?”

  Natalie flipped open the seals on her suit with more force than she probably should have, settled her feet inside, then helped Ward to do the same. “I said I wasn’t judging you. I’m just … kind of flummoxed that you don’t know how to EVA and you’ve been living on ships for your entire adult life.”

  Ward gave her a sour look, then helped Natalie snap her seals closed as Natalie did the same for him. “You are judging me.”

  “Absolutely not,” she lied.

  “Sure.”

  Natalie’s passenger ducked into existence right behind Ward’s shoulder, staring out of the darkness of the suit locker, his eyes oddly accusing. She felt the same quiet draw to his hands, the same soft pang under her breastbone. “Stop distracting me,” she whispered.

  You don’t trust him either, said the master node.

  Of course you don’t.

  You have no idea what he is thinking.

  How did your species ever learn spaceflight?

  We did science.

  If you did science, you could properly expect and predict behaviors. You could communicate properly.

  Maybe that works for a hivemind, she thought. But humans aren’t predictable.

  How do you stand it? said the master node.

  Natalie thought about it. Orders. Societal norms. Expectation. Ranks.

  The opposite of trust. Of together. There must be so much violence—

  Like a million humans dead?

  He paused.

  His mouth opened, like a fish.

  You don’t trust me, he said.

  What a feeling, what a delightful feeling—

  She tried to ignore the master node. Ward’s pathetic attempt at fastening his suit was a much easier target of her derision.

  “You don’t know me, not really,” she said, fixing Ward with an icy stare. “You think you trust me, but you don’t know what trust is, not until you’re facing down the enemy and your teammates are the only thing keeping you alive. I’m not going to coddle your feelings. Because on the other side of the hatch? Is death. Death feeds on feelings out there, and sucking vacuum is a shitty way to die.”

  He looked hurt for a moment, then flashed a nervous smile. “Oh, come on, now. Would you throw yourself out an airlock with someone you didn’t trust?”

  He tapped the final seal to his helmet like he’d been doing it his entire life, the smile disappearing behind the treated plasglas. Natalie stayed silent as the two of them climbed into the airlock, sealed the hatch behind them, and felt the airlock cycle out to vacuum with a meditative hiss.

  With a final click, the outside hatch rolled open, revealing endless, wheeling black.

  The master node was waiting for her outside, exactly where she thought he’d be, nearly lost in the shadows against the hull. He seemed silent for now, thoughtful, regarding her with a new, contemplative intelligence. Behind him, as she reached for her tether, Natalie saw the reason for the alarms, bright and shimmering in the white light of the unknown nearby star: the bright Vai fleet, settling around Vancouver like snow on shattered stone.

  Ward’s face turned toward the black. “Holy shit,” he breathed. “That’s—that’s—oh, my God—”

  “Look away.” Natalie widened her fingers, palming Ward’s helmet, directing his faceplate back down to where she was attaching his tether. She knew very well the hell Ward had just introduced to his brain: the formless black forever, the stars spinward, crowding out his common sense. Space-sickness, her old team had called it, or “the reality bends.” It might even have been the first time Ward had seen space the way it really was, instead of behind the perspective-inducing assistance of a porthole or window. Human brains aren’t meant to understand that kind of depth, Sharma had said, before.

  “Don’t think about it. Don’t look. None of that exists. Your feet exist. Your breath exists. All you have to do is breathe and move and follow me,” Natalie said.

  Ward’s breath moved in quick, ragged spats. “My feet exist.”

  “Just breathe. Keep three points of contact at all times. We’re going to stay close to the hull, just beginner moves, none of this walking straight up like you see in Alien Attack Squad,” she said, going into instruction mode, trying to remember how Ash had acted when she’d been teaching Natalie how to use the salvage pod. She didn’t like sounding like somebody’s whiny CO.

  Ward made spider-like, tenuous movements, his shoes making the sucking-quick trans
ition of movement to seal against the plasglas. “I’ve never seen Alien Attack Squad.”

  “Why not? It’s great. It’s full of assholes doing karate when they should actually be shitting their pants.”

  “Sounds funny,” said Ward, following.

  “I think so. Or, at least, I think I do.” The pressure and give of the suit calmed Natalie with all of the grace of a weighted blanket. This was familiar: the movement, the weight, the meditative slowness. Don’t look up. Don’t look out.

  “You think you do?”

  “I—” She paused. “I used to know a guy who liked it. I watched it with him, but all of those memories got nuked at Tribulation.”

  “A guy.”

  “Fuck you.”

  He snorted. “That guy why you said no?”

  “I said later,” she hissed.

  She tugged on her tether one last time, engaged her own mag-boots, reached for a handhold, and promptly went against her own advice, turning her face toward the bright, spindling Vai ships cornering Vancouver against the asteroid field.

  Cornering Vancouver, she thought, or Vancouver using the asteroids as a sensor-blocking tactic? It mattered, and she didn’t know, and that dragged like an itch in her backbrain. Assuming the Vai used sensors was assuming they thought like humans did, which Natalie knew by now to be dead wrong. But hiding was an awfully human thing to do, and the Vai had never hid before. Which choice would she take?

  What is a choice?

  She paused, her hand hovering in space. You know. You can do one thing, or you can do another, and you pick.

  Ah. She felt a quiet, rumbling acknowledgment. Yes.

  We make choices to ensure

  the longevity of every node.

  It must be so difficult to live when someone else

  can make a diametrical choice to your own.

  You have no fucking idea. Natalie pulled herself up again, trading handholds for footholds in the slow, methodical fashion all salvagers were taught. What if I choose to do something that you don’t want?