Engines of Oblivion Page 27
You will not, he said.
I’m an alien to you. I don’t think like you at all. We are not in any way similar. There’s no way you’re going to approve of everything I do from here. I’m going to make choices that you hate, and you’re going to have to make a choice to support me or not. I need to know what happens when you object.
The master node sounded serene.
You are my master node right now.
We are together. I cannot object.
You’re in a human body. All we do is object.
We are together now.
You can’t object.
She snorted. Watch me.
You didn’t object to Leonard Downey.
Don’t you fucking say his name.
The master node was right, as much as she hated to admit it; she didn’t mind taking orders when it calmed the chaotic sea that was the rest of her life. An order made sense of the nonsensical. It explained the next step. Adapting to giving the orders had been a little more difficult, but it made committing to a task much easier, knowing that you had a force of smart, knowledgeable people covering your exit.
But she now understood that living to take orders messed with your very sense of reality. Because of that, it had been so easy for Sharma to undermine her on the mission. She’d almost fallen for the I care about you shit, the there’s a treatment for the death shit, when what she’d really meant was slotting Natalie into one more step in her master plan, which was—what? To install Vai tech in both their heads after the battle, and then blow herself up, leaving Natalie to puzzle things out alone? It made no sense.
And then she’d done the same damned thing with Joseph Solano. She’d followed his orders, given her own, perpetuated the entire cycle, ensuring Kate’s disappearance and the kind of culture that ended up in Ash’s death and Sharma’s brains spread all over a borrowed transport.
She didn’t want anyone to give her an order ever again.
I can help you with that,
said the master node.
All you do is give orders. You’re a master node. It’s what you are.
He hovered there, far enough to avoid triggering her defenses. Not if you’re a master node too.
But two in one place is impossible.
So we’re impossible—
Her hand went automatically toward her memory device; her glove bounced off the faceplate, and she stopped dead. Something about how the battlefield was set up looked wrong. Behind her, shaded in the light of the Vai starships, the master node cleared his throat.
I thought that was impossible too, he said.
She focused, narrowed her eyes—instead of the long line, the vein, the inexorable waves that would come, the ships were gathered in clumps, deadly outparcels flanking a killer center. Human tactics, she thought. Human arrangements. We never saw that in the war. We lost because we couldn’t even understand what you were doing.
This is different.
This we can win.
The comm shivered into action at her throat, the sound of a stranger’s concerned lilt buzzing there, silencing Natalie’s own answer.
“Engineer 6–324, Engineer 6–324, you are not authorized to be EVA at this moment. Please return to your home airlock.”
She could hear Ward’s sudden, panicked breathing in her ear, and raised her free hand to silence him. Before answering, she made sure her feet were magnet-flat against the hull.
“Home base, home base,” she repeated, waving for Ward to stay quiet—she knew these patterns, knew how to respond with the right accent to the other’s citizen’s patter, knew how to get them out of this, or, at least, knew how to keep deluding herself long enough to keep Ward from a well-deserved panic spree that might kill him. “I received an emergency notification of a small hull breach at coordinates—” Shit. Where were they? “—just outside Deck 3.”
“Engineer 6–324, we aren’t reading a hull breach.”
“I understand, control, but the situation being what it is—”
“—which is at battle stations, so you need to return inside.”
Natalie rolled her eyes, grateful that her grimace was hidden behind the radiation faceplate, and engaged the comm again. “I might as well get eyes on it while I’m out here, control.”
“Engineer 6–324, it’s not safe. We’ll have Ingest take a look.”
Natalie could hear Ward’s ragged breathing hot in her ears, or maybe that was her own—
“Acknowledged. Heading in.” She managed to spit the words out before shutting down the comm, pulling at the next handhold. She and Ward were still too far away, still entirely too vulnerable, and she should have realized that Ingest could see them here, too, that the renderbots had found their way outside, in the same exact way they’d crawled into every damned cubbyhole in each overwatched Auroran life. In the corner of her eye, the Vai ships loomed in their incomprehensible mass, and her breath felt hot, too hot, sweat beading her upper lip.
Ward cleared his throat. “Damn.”
“Let’s go,” Natalie said, catching her breath. “As fast as we can.”
“You told me not to rush!”
“Fuck what I told you. Ingest will probably check with the duty engineers and discover that they’re not actually outside, so we need to be inside. Yesterday.” Natalie was hauling, now, skipping handholds and trying to keep her heart rate down so it wouldn’t twig the suit controller’s suspicions. She felt the hum of the ship through her boots, imagined Ingest as a disruptive shiver emerging from the black beyond. Shivered herself.
“They might not see us,” Ward said, following her. As he reached for his next handhold, the silver connectors of his gloves caught and returned the bright white lights that illuminated the hull.
“Where did you grow up that you’re still so fucking naïve?” she responded.
“You’re such a bitch.”
Natalie bristled, pulling herself along. “You don’t know me.”
“Oh, I think I do.”
She could tell he was angry from the way he was breathing, even in the bulk of the suit, and he reached for the next handhold at a weird angle, coming too close to a jagged edge of his vestigial toolkit. She opened her mouth to tell him to be careful, but it was too late. Natalie heard a tearing and a warm, hissing hum.
“Shit,” Ward said, his voice jumping a register. “What do I do?”
Natalie’s annoyance spiked, and she made sure her mag-boots engaged against the footholds before turning to check. A small amount of smoky air slithered into existence just below Ward’s left knee, disappearing into the vacuum just as quickly.
“Just stay still. Suits like this have an automesh that takes care of microbreaches.”
His voice tightened. “Like a bandage.”
“Exactly.”
She heard a slurping noise, and then the hiss subsided, and what was left was Ward’s hyperventilation, tough little spikes in her ear.
“Breathe, Ward.”
“Fuck,” he said, gulping down air. “You could have warned me.”
“That’s in at least six training holos. I can’t believe they don’t teach you this shit on station boardschool.”
She didn’t want to tell him that things were worse now, that suits like these also had medical monitors that set off alarm bells in control rooms, that if the fuckers in Central Ingest weren’t paying attention before, the algorithm had certainly alerted them that something was wrong and they were still outside. She tightened her jaw; there was no reason to make Ward any more freaked out than he already was.
“I didn’t grow up on a station,” he said.
“Don’t all birthrights?”
“I’ve never told anyone this,” Ward said. He straightened after another too-long moment, then checked his mag-boot seal. “Right. I’m not naïve, you know. In fact, I—” He sighed. His breath evened out. “You asked where I was from. Technically, the Wards own half of Los Angeles. I would be there if they considered me a full Ward. They don’t.”
“That’s why I asked you to contract with me. Because one look at the directory and all the other guys and girls have a laugh and move on to my cousins.”
She continued moving up the hill, hand-foot-hand-foot, muttering it to herself like a mantra. “You’re not exactly making your case, here.”
“My mom was a Ward. My father was an indenture. That’s why it fucks me up when you think I’ve had everything so easy.”
She fought her surprise. “I didn’t know that was possible.”
“Failed reprocontrol? Apparently it happens.” Ward still sounded slightly out of breath. “It was a massive scandal. When I came along, my mom decided she’d rather enter a contract with a Mejia on Los Angeles than pay off two indentures, so she only paid off mine. The family board wasn’t interested in having me on Los Angeles, so I was shipped off to Dauntless Colony. My dad’s been a celestium miner ever since. I was put in the boardschool there, all paid up as a Ward, but everyone knew the whole story.”
Hand. Foot. Hand. Keep moving. Keep him distracted. “So that’s why you can only marry someone straight out of indenture. I get it. What was Dauntless like?”
“Cold.”
“Space is colder.”
“Natalie, do you think this is important right now?” She heard the edge of panic in his voice. He pointed; the Vai line was moving.
“Keep talking. Distract yourself. So you finally found your way to Vancouver?”
In his voice was the shrug she couldn’t see. “A couple years ago, the Ward occupying the Los Angeles seat on the Auroran executive board died, and the family gave it up to the Aulanders. I wasn’t privy to why. Politics, maybe. Without the scrutiny, Mom could use her influence to get me on a ship. I did the rest. Turns out that some of the shit you learn in school on a celestium depot are skills that come in handy years later on the flagship.”
“And your dad?”
“I dunno. I can’t get letters out there reliably enough to see how he’s doing.”
Natalie thought of Ash. Of her own father. “You’re just going to leave him behind?”
“I can’t possibly pay off his debt. Joseph Solano couldn’t pay off his debt now.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Well,” he breathed, reaching for another handhold, “I don’t intend on being like him.”
She laughed. “That’s why you’re so obsessed with your looks. You feel you have to be perfect because he wasn’t.”
“I’m not obs—The point is,” he said, hauling himself up, his hands and feet almost as fast as Natalie’s, “that the deck is stacked, and you need to be on top.”
Natalie snorted, then came to a stop over the airlock, her hand hovering over the latch, and she imagined the two of them as they actually were: two tiny motes of dust, barely recognizable against the grand machine that was Aurora, lost brackets in a code that no longer needed them. Just extra characters occupying one sad fucking story.
She wondered what it would be like to simply let go. To float backward, open her helmet, do what should have been done when she was an indenture—
That’s not what a master node does.
Downey hovered nearby, his face serious.
But I’m just me, she wanted to say, a nobody-nothing who can’t even see when she’s being used, but the words clogged in her throat, wrapping around the year in App-K. The embarrassment of having everything she ever wanted and hating it, the inexplicable loneliness, staring at the ceiling, listening to the blood rush in her head, feeling lost and wild, even with Ward, even when she should have been close to being perfectly happy.
She grasped at the latch to the airlock like it would save her from drowning. Leaving now wouldn’t do a damned thing, and Natalie Chan was no deserter.
Not anymore.
“You okay?” Ward said, as if he’d sensed something was wrong.
She hauled the seal open as an answer and dropped directly after him into the bright womb of the airlock. She heard the echoing slurp of sweet, ship-conditioned air beginning to cycle back in. She imagined she felt the pressure of wind against her suit, equalizing the atmosphere against her skin like the truth, neutralizing all of the lies she’d told and been told.
The truth will set you free, went the old Verdict phrase. That’s for people on planets, she thought. For people who were free. For indentures, for spacers, for people like her trying to come in from the cold, it was more like: the truth will give you the bends.
What came next was just the inevitable.
“Yeah,” she said, grabbing the interior latch. Beyond was Aurora, Ingest, the truth. The future. The light next to the interior door snapped to green, and she pushed through the last of her hesitation, opening the door to whatever consequences came next.
22
During Natalie’s first days on Twenty-Five—during the long week’s ramble to the Tribulation star system, after the enforced Company icebreakers but before she’d navigated a space for herself between Kate’s brash optimism, Ramsay’s smirking wit, and Downey’s easy confidence—the captain had planted her in the mess with Ash and a sickening number of salvage training holos to wade through.
With the grav-drive engaged, training on actual equipment was too dangerous—so she and Ash drank bad coffee and answered interactive tests on their tablets, bonding over the stupidity of it all. They poked fun at the announcer, whose voice sounded like he’d spent years guzzling quarts of macadam. They criticized the terrible animations. They had races using the holographic pod controls. Salvage training was pathetic compared to the grueling months of ordnance disarmament training and the constant threat of shivering oblivion—it had been easy.
But now—
Now, hovering outside the narrow gray door to Central Ingest’s main watchroom, her fingers cold on the unresponsive passpad, she couldn’t remember any of it. The memoria was blank. She swore, drawing her fingers back like the thing had burned her.
“I don’t remember how to beat this,” she whispered, if she’d ever known—forgetting for a moment that Ingest would hear that, too, that her anonymous steps wouldn’t matter if the damn thing had her voice on record. People walked by behind them, trudging in lockstep, their eyes blankly staring ahead, new info-implants on their heads. They looked tired. Me too, she wanted to say.
She waved on the tablet and typed: Superhaptic locks. DNA-based. You’re going to have to go through the office.
Ward’s eyebrows furrowed, and he stole the tablet from her. I’m going with you.
But her mind was already on another plan, already folding out beneath her like the Auroran computer core, spiraling out from behind these doors like a willow tree from its central complex on the citizen mid-deck. She grabbed his wrist, then tugged him down the corridor, kneeling in front of a maintenance hatch. He tilted his head—a clear what? as a group of fighter pilots jogged by in bulky exo-suits, and he turned to watch them. Lockstep, she thought. Again. Weird. She grabbed his chin, moving to hide their faces from the passersby with the hiked shoulders of someone angling for a kiss. As soon as the pilots rounded the corner, she ducked into the maintenance tunnel.
Ward tumbled in behind her, his face set like flint. “I’m going with you.”
“No,” she hissed. “This isn’t a holo. We’re not going to get a second chance at this—”
“So I need to come with you.”
She flushed. “Tell me what you want to know. I’ll find out for you.”
“I didn’t just fuck myself over with App-K to be your decoy.”
“Then you’re not here to spy on me?”
It was his turn for his face to go red. “For fuck’s sake—”
“Then do as I say.” She picked her way down the tunnel until she found an unlabeled maintenance hatch—and, if she remembered her deck plans correctly, the access point for indentured techs whom the cits didn’t want accessing feeds in the watchroom. She found the proper d
oor—but it wasn’t the standard dual authentication of number and access token she’d expected. This, too, had been converted to a superhaptic.
She stared at it for a moment, feeling dumb. Of course they’d slapped a superhaptic on the door. You can’t fool a superhaptic.
Her father would have shrugged. Picked up his tablet. Someone has to try, he would have said.
“You can open this?” she asked.
He recoiled visibly. “Probably. But my name would come up in Ingest immediately.”
“So you’ll go in and complain that the back door isn’t working, and ask to be let in the front,” she said. “Ingest is new, right? You don’t really know where to go. And, besides, you need your new info-implant. Central Ingest has neurotechs. You’re the big, fancy App-K director. Go ask them.”
Ward stared. “Someone’ll get suspicious. They don’t send directors to do scut work like this.”
“Mr. Solano does. He sent me to Tribulation. He’s in your department right now. Ingest can see that.” She breathed in. Pain seemed to be buried deep in the lining of her lungs, and she wondered if it would ever withdraw. “He sends people like Aulander on fetch missions. It makes perfect sense that he’d send you to Ingest. You need that info-implant to work on the rig, and you need it installed by the best.”
His face darkened. “You have all the answers, don’t you?”
“I do.” She tossed him a jaunty smile.
“You’re using me. Like always.”
“And you aren’t?”
He barked out a disbelieving laugh. “Apparently, I’m learning from the best.”
Downey pricked the edges of her vision, lost and breathing somewhere behind her in the tight quarters of the maintenance tunnels. She focused on Ward: on the hollowing of his cheek, the anger in his jaw, the breath that smelled like stale coffee. The graying of his skin. In this light, his illness was hard to deny.
The pain was evident on his face, something bright with anger, and she almost felt sorry for him. She touched his smooth cheek with two light fingers, and he turned away, the anger settling quickly into resignation. “You need to do this for me. For us,” she whispered. “This is the only way.”