Engines of Oblivion Read online

  “Hey.” He blinked. “Take it easy.”

  Natalie shook her head. “In a minute,” she said. “Right now, you’re going to tell me why someone replaced the kicker EMP with my only redshift sun.”

  Nobody spoke.

  “Anyone?”

  She felt a frisson of nervous energy in her staff as they quieted. She cleared her throat, trying to channel her old captain, Kate Keller. “At least one of you useless fuckers can get me the infantry feed.”

  They were all dead silent now: her entire staff, doctors and techs and indentures. Even chatty Ascanio. One of the staff at the main interface waved a hand, and suddenly she was staring at Bittersweet, smoothed out by the suit’s 2D renderbots on the screen in front of her. Flat as a pancake. Quiet as a desert.

  She had been hoping it had all been a bad dream.

  Natalie wiped the corner of her mouth with her sleeve and came back with a smear of blood. Her jaw ached. The view had changed. Instead of the puppet’s view, she saw a multi-camera feed from the raid that followed. The puppet lay cracked and dead where she’d left it. Nearby, red dust kicked up in swirling, circular patterns, filling the quiet little indentations where people used to be.

  One of the techs whooped.

  “That’s a one hundred percent kill zone,” Ascanio said. “Far better than the war committee expected. You did it, sir. It’s a win.”

  “You call that a win?” Natalie said, in the Keller voice, the one that brooked no room for an answer. She still expected someone else to be “sir,” for someone else to stand up and give her orders.

  But she was the one with the director’s tags here.

  The soldiers reached the front door of the Bittersweet mining complex, kicked it in, and shoved themselves into an orange-beige hallway decorated with photographs of smiling miners showing off the underground celestiumworks: machines that dug the rocks from the walls and sucked the precious mineral from the stone. There were no workers in sight.

  Ash never smiled like that, she thought.

  “Tech only.” Natalie’s voice was ice. “The plan called for a kinetic assault on base electronics using a kicker EMP, with soldier-to-soldier engagement to come when reinforcements landed. The plan was not to commit a fucking war crime.”

  Ward cleared his throat. “There was a call from the board about twenty minutes ago. Mr. Solano requested a different tactic, and the decision was made above our heads.”

  Natalie felt something black and wild ignite just behind her heart. “Why was I not on that call? This is my department. I make the decisions here. Who implemented the change?”

  “I did,” said Ascanio, in a near-whisper.

  “They said we were going to lose Savannah,” Ward said. “So—”

  “Did they instruct you not to tell me?” she said, tasting blood on her tongue.

  Ascanio expelled a shaky breath. At least two indentures exchanged glances.

  “Not, ah, in those words, sir.” Ward paused and stood beside her now, offering her gauze, and Natalie took it from his hand, spitting into it, still tasting blood.

  The indentures in the corner swayed. A dark-haired girl choked back a sob, and one of the boys rubbed her back. She gulped, her face faintly pale, reflecting the stinking red suddenly crawling up in the corners of the camera. The dust of human life.

  This is war, Natalie wanted to tell her, and war ruins everything it touches. This is war and this is Aurora and this is who you are. It never gets better. Welcome to the rest of your life.

  “The rules of engagement don’t cover this,” Natalie said. “There were hundreds of indentures down there. Miners. Innocents. People who made the wrong choice when they took the long walk to their local recruiting offices. We want to fight, we fight human. We fight fair. We aren’t the Vai. We don’t massacre indentures. Someone is going to answer for what we just did, and it isn’t going to be me.”

  Silence.

  “Being as the decision was made over all of our heads, perhaps now isn’t the time for a moral discussion we’re not exactly allowed to have, Director,” said Ascanio. “Expected or not, this mission just took down Baywell’s major celestium depot and weapons development facility, and that’s a major win. They were just indentures.”

  Natalie thought of Ash, smiling in the mess on Twenty-Five. Her old team. “Just,” Natalie repeated, and the words were poison on her tongue, were every red drop of blood in her body. She ran a sweaty hand through her hair, and it came back drenched and stinking. God, she needed a shower. She needed a drink. She needed to prevent the memory of the redshift sun from scabbing over her entire future.

  The memory device kicked in again. She remembered Ash’s face, her friend’s hands slicked with blood and silver, standing over the dead alien on Tribulation. Her words. There’s not just one—they don’t live just one life—

  No. That had been impossible then. It was impossible now. The death of the alien colony wasn’t her fault. Natalie couldn’t have known. She still didn’t quite believe it.

  The redshift star wasn’t her fault either.

  Natalie focused on the transmission from the ground, watching the soldiers get off at an elevator, seeing the red dust pull into tiny swirls as the doors slid open. The soldiers waded through ankle-deep swaths of it, wondered aloud what it was. She thought of toggling the comm and telling them, then stopped in her tracks. Maybe it was better that they didn’t know the dust used to be people. They could figure it out later.

  She swallowed her growing anger. “The next time I hear you talking about innocent people like that, Mx. Ascanio, I’ll have you sent back to Europa. This isn’t some sort of bullshit assignment. The math is fucking sacrosanct, and nobody’s disposable. Just indentures. God.”

  One of the cit techs jumped slightly, her shoulders hunching under her white coat, but she said nothing. Nobody met Natalie’s eye except for Ward, his hair catching the ocean-blue colors of the lights above, his skin reflecting the yellow-red hell on the planetoid below. He wiped sweaty hands on his skirt.

  “Em,” she said, knowing she shouldn’t use his nickname, knowing what it meant, knowing she didn’t quite care. “Who on the board gave the order?”

  He lowered his voice, clearly concerned for her. “Mr. Solano is still watching, sir.”

  “Let him,” she said, louder, adjusting her jacket. “Maybe he saw the survivor, unlike the rest of you.”

  Ward blinked, the first slivers of doubt pushing into his voice. “There were no survivors, sir.” He ran a shaking hand through his hair and turned to Ascanio. “I told you not to give her the whole syringe.”

  Ascanio stiffened. “We were well within the dosing guidelines.”

  Natalie’s mouth was dry. Her lips tasted like bloody plasteel. She touched the memory device at her temple, felt the warmth, queried for something calming. It gave her an afternoon’s break a few days before the Battle of Grenadier, sitting on the beach with her teammates, smoke in her mouth, the touch of salt air, the feeling of sand in her toes and the taste of contraband liquor on her lips, some citizen’s stolen rotgut. Calming. Right. As calming as that Sacrament Society abattoir back on Tribulation.

  “You wouldn’t survive one day on a salvage craft,” she said. “Corporate rules are fine until they try to kill you. And they will try to kill you. You goddamn birthrights.”

  Ascanio’s mouth flattened in confusion. “Corporate rules—”

  “—are the thin red line between civilization and anarchy, yes, you said that yesterday. And last week. And—” Natalie’s stomach heaved. She retched, and Ward rubbed her back. She allowed that little comfort; it felt too good to ask him to stop. “There was a survivor. At least of the initial blast. He called me a monster. We know Bittersweet was the center of the Wellspring weapons program. And they’ve had a couple years without Alliance oversight. Who knows what they’ve accomplished?”

  The room was silent, and she caught at least one or two of the techs raising their eyes toward the corners
, where the black circular renderbots recorded everything in the room, sending it to the newly formed Ingest Department to be processed and used for development and discipline. The programming team had said Ingest wasn’t panopticon surveillance—that Aurora was too big and too varied to run everything through an algorithm that wouldn’t understand nuance—but Natalie had grown up in a software cult, and knew that it wasn’t the programmers you needed to worry about, but the users. The users were executives. Assholes by definition.

  At any rate, it didn’t matter. She was a citizen now. Dissent was no longer a crime. A problem, yes. But not a crime.

  Ward’s hand finally lifted, and he waved at the indenture running the feed. The view shifted to earlier, to the last few seconds taken by the puppet camera, lying half-kilter on its side, facing the airstrip. She watched the last few runners pop like cherries, their skin turning to flags, their liquid blood dropping into trails of dry dust. She saw nothing else: no footprints, no bodies, no survivor.

  “He was right there,” she said. “Is the footage corrupted? Nobody saw him?”

  Silence. Her hands shook.

  “We’re not doubting you,” Ward said.

  “You’d better fucking not.” Natalie licked her lips and savored the tension in the room. Sometimes having a known temper was a good idea. She wanted to give in to the sudden rage she felt, the anger that burned constantly beneath her breastbone these days, the thing that curdled and wailed and shoved up her throat whenever she wanted to speak, but she’d had enough incompetent commanders to know she didn’t want to be one herself. But Natalie couldn’t invent a survivor if there wasn’t one on-screen, and she felt the angry pang of having lost some sort of high ground with her staff before she even knew the battle was joined.

  Was she hallucinating, then? Natalie went cold. Hallucinations were the only other reasoning Auroran science might accept. They could be from the drugs she took, or—impossible—they could be celestium-induced hallucinations like Ash had described a little over a year ago on London’s freezing bridge. It made sense that a hallucination might occur on the planetoid that spat out broken citizens with debilitating neuropathies on a regular basis. But Natalie had never left Vancouver. And she’d certainly never voluntarily exposed herself to celestium.

  “Nobody has any grand ideas?” she said, after a moment.

  Ascanio winced. “Sir, nobody could have survived that.”

  “Yes, but—”

  But there was another explanation, Natalie knew, one the others couldn’t know. She felt a sudden breathlessness and an overwhelming exhaustion, and she started breathing quietly, steadily, trying to center herself. She thought of Ash, of the way the blue screamer had twisted around her spine on Tribulation, the way she’d come out of certain death with her skin clear and her eyes wet. The way that had been impossible before Natalie saw it happen with her own eyes. Natalie hadn’t mentioned this before, hadn’t wanted the department to know about Ash, hadn’t wanted her sacrifice to be in vain.

  But.

  She took a breath.

  “It’s possible to survive Vai detonations, with the right exposure to celestium and the right medical tweaks. Those tweaks were developed here on Bittersweet. I’ve seen it.”

  Ascanio’s mouth widened a bit. “Is that how you survived Tribulation? That’s why you’re wearing a memoria?”

  “No,” she said. “I thought you got over the ‘I survived the alien superweapon and only lost half the memories of my life’ bullshit.”

  “Of course, sir, but—” Ascanio licked her lips. “It’s just that you might be overlooking the simplest, most obvious explanation. Since you’ve had exposure to this kind of Vai-based brain injury before, I’m actually concerned the memoria itself was the cause of your seizure. It might explain what you saw. I’m worried that you’ll put yourself at risk for further brain damage if you use the rig again. And I really suggest you go to the medbay.”

  Blood welled between Natalie’s back teeth. I’ve had worse, she wanted to say. She’d been hauled screaming out of an alien-induced coma and lived to tell the tale, even if her temporal lobe resembled a pasta colander. But Ward’s eyes were dark and concerned, and even though their relationship was largely casual, she still hated to disappoint him.

  “Fine,” she said. “And someone take these poor bastards back down to Janitorial.”

  “Don’t you remember?” said Ascanio. “We were told to send them to R&D afterward. For the upgrade.”

  “Whatever.” Natalie turned to the indentures. They were young, all of them, as young as she’d been when she thought going corporate was the best way out of her shitty tiny life. They held each other, stared at the floor or the wall or anywhere but at her. If she hadn’t stepped in, it would have been one of them in the suit, and they knew it. They owed her, and knew she could collect. Somehow, the weight of that responsibility made her feel worse than any of the drugs burning their way out of her system.

  Best to do what citizens did best and pass it off up the chain.

  “Just—” she said, licking her dry lips. “Sorry to muck up your entire day, but I don’t have any control over this. It’s really the board’s fault.”

  I don’t have any control over this. The worst thing you could say to an indenture, the absolute worst thing. She steadied herself on the back of a chair, dizzy-woozy and angry and embarrassed, and strode off to the medbay without another word.

  4

  The anger was back.

  No. The anger was always there, making barbecue of Natalie’s heart, rattling around in the space between beats. This time, however, it barged in holding hands with guilt and wearing a garland of ruin, pushing her through the busy corridors at a brisk pace. It made her old talk to me and I’ll end you face easy to pull off.

  It was nice that the news cycle had largely moved on from its inexplicable focus on Natalie Chan, Genius War Hero. There were regular photographs of her on the Company announcement stations—the ones where they’d made her up in lines of thick black eyeliner, blue lipshade, and—ugh, the worst—heavy matte powder for her topaz skin. This was Vancouver, where she was the war hero who destroyed the Vai infestation on the planet and uncovered the work of their human collaborators.

  That wasn’t entirely true, of course. It was the story the board told, and she supposed it was true enough. True enough was easy to swallow but would choke her if she spent too much time with it.

  She bit her bottom lip until embarrassment distracted her long enough to drag the sudden tears away from her eyes—tears, like an absolute fucking child. When she felt composed enough, she checked the optikals above, as if daring Ingest to send security after her, and moved down the corridor that led back to her small apartment.

  She still had pride; an indenture’s pride, a pride in being independent even when her entire life was ruled by the contract she’d signed. Natalie lived through the Vai war, walked off battlefields so full of slaughter that she was glad the alien weapon ripped those memories from her mind. Going to the medbay for getting knocked around a bit in a puppet rig felt like overkill. Her hands flew up to touch her cit tags; as a citizen, health care was affordable to her now. Citizenship was the very thing Ash had desired most. Going to the medbay was what Ash would have wanted her to do.

  You had a seizure, Ward said, only it felt more like a flashback, and damn that man for lying to her, and damn the stupid Company psychologist who’d told her what that word meant. She pressed her fingers against the memoria and it gave her Marley’s spine torn apart by a blue screamer, gave her the darkness of Ash’s weapon dissolving her mind back on the battlefield. Gave her the choice once more: kill the alien or lose Ash.

  That choice. Her finger on the trigger in the bugout bay, placing Natalie between what was and what would be.

  She’d chosen Ash. She’d chosen right.

  Of course she’d chosen right.

  And here was the other thing she couldn’t stop thinking about: that she might be the on
ly soldier in the entire war who had actually killed an alien. She hadn’t known that when she was on Cana and Grenadier, wading knee-deep through the dust and viscera, doing her part to save humanity. Nobody knew then that the alien constructs she and her fellow soldiers gave their lives to cut down were no better than broken hard drives.

  She and Ash had discovered that the Vai themselves were made of light and memories, collective beings that colonized bodies like humans occupied starships, moving in and out of a shared consciousness of sorts through the weapon Ash had found in the wreckage of London. Natalie had kept her secret all these months: that the thing wasn’t a weapon at all, but an organic consciousness-transfer machine that took its charge from the environment around it, from planets and stars and batteries and living things and everything the Vai didn’t need to survive. To the Device, as Natalie had come to think of it, ordinary, uninfected humans were just another power source to draw upon. The detonation at Tribulation had nearly killed her, leaving her mind pockmarked with aching black swaths where her memories should be.

  She had not killed. Not one Vai, not the entire time. She’d been just another victim in the galaxy’s bloodiest con job, until she’d killed the alien on Tribulation.

  Until she’d killed human beings this morning.

  The black, broken clarity grabbing her throat couldn’t be guilt. Natalie didn’t allow herself to feel guilt. She was a soldier. An ordnance engineer. Death was her job. They’d scrubbed guilt out of her neocortex during training, and if any was left it had been tossed aside with her friends’ bodies on burning Grenadier.

  No. Whatever this was, it was worse than guilt.

  She was breathing hard. Too hard. Ingest might pick that up, flag it, and a messenger would be dispatched from the medbay to check on her. Ash would have laughed in shrieking gales at that level of attention. Natalie had been flagged more than once in the last month, so maybe they’d send security, too, just to make sure she wasn’t too broken. She was a Company investment now. She was important, important enough to monitor, important enough to care for. Thinking about Ingest felt like spiders crawling up her back; she’d had much less surveillance during her wartime indenture, but that was before haptics, before superhaptics, before renderbots as ubiquitous as stiletto heels.