Engines of Oblivion Page 34

  And Natalie smiled at that, smiled through the nausea and the overclocking and the brain stuck permanently on guest mode, running too fast, too hot, the memoria a hot coal against her forehead. She smiled, because she finally understood. It didn’t matter how high she climbed. Everyone was tied down. The only difference between Aulander and Natalie was that Natalie no longer held any delusion that she’d been anything but a body the entire time.

  She cleared her throat, ignoring Solano.

  “Ms. Aulander. Ward suspected he was infected, but I’m not sure he actually knew that he was dying,” she said. “Do you know? Did they tell you that you’re dying?”

  “Excuse me?” Aulander blinked.

  Laughter bubbled up. “Sharma never gave anyone the cure but herself. Or were you going to reverse-engineer that, too? And even if she did—was she really going to give it to you?”

  Solano and Aulander shared a dark, dangerous look as the party loaded the car. The doors swished shut, and the lift whirred underneath her feet as it pushed up through Vancouver’s bloated midsection.

  “I see what you’re doing,” Aulander drawled.

  “Seriously, though. You need to be educated. Celestium madness is a shitty way to die. If you like your original liver, at least.”

  Aulander rolled her eyes. “God, you can talk.”

  This isn’t working either, Natalie thought, but by now the words were coming in tiny tsunamis like they always did, too fast to stop. “I’m pretty sure Ash was vomiting up her intestines at the end. You have to know you haven’t got long, when your blood goes silver—or are you just choosing to ignore what’s happening because he lied to you?”

  “I’m a secondary node.” Aulander’s fist balled; something in her delicate neck fluttered in swallowed anger, and Natalie thrilled to the sight of it. “Not tertiary. Not like you. He trusts me.”

  “Cora,” Ascanio warned.

  “We might be able to win with our own firepower, sir,” she said. “We just need to wait for Cartagena and the others. We don’t need the Vai ships.”

  Is he really in all of these bodies? Natalie asked the master node while the two executives sniped at one another.

  The master node stirred at her side.

  His presence, walking next to her, was strangely calming.

  Direct control? No. If his brain is anything like yours,

  he probably couldn’t handle it.

  That’s why they’re all moving the same way.

  You probably remember that from the war.

  There were times I didn’t understand what was going on, and I had to pull back—

  The memoria gave her a flash of mechs approaching across a dark battlefield. I can’t talk about this.

  The good news is that he’ll designate secondaries to run the various departments, to colonize a planet, to operate ships. You’ll need to take them down before you can deal with him.

  Natalie nodded. I’ll do that while you escape into the partition.

  He snorted.

  I’m not going there.

  That is a trap.

  Do you want to die? I’m too weak to fight again—

  You? You’re never too weak.

  That’s something Len would say.

  The ghost of a smile. It’s true.

  The doors opened onto the bridge. Ascanio stepped back with a thin smile, gesturing for the others to go first. Natalie responded with a smile of her own: a wide, tactical, shit-eating grin. She got a painful prod in the back for it as they stumbled together onto the bridge. The doors closed with Ascanio still in the lift car, and with that any chance of going anywhere else.

  An Auroran bridge was supposed to be a lively place, or at least it was in the holos: loud, bright with readouts, alight with muttered chatter, with hollered reports and orders and the all-too-human scent of sweat and coffee and someone wearing too much perfume. People working in concert, getting in each other’s personal space, making mistakes.

  Instead, the Vancouver bridge was utterly silent and crammed with superhaptics: black boxes and proxy rigs, wires and bloodsilver connections to hands and fingers and necks and even the corners of bloodshot eyes, the indentures inside twitching and moving like marionettes, their eyes open to everything and nothing at the same time, the scattered board members standing in silent supervision.

  And not just one or two of them, either, but the entire board, she realized: Aulander, yes, but also Coriolis and Stephenson and Amberworth, McCarthy and Li and Buchanan and Issa.

  We might be able to win with our own firepower, Natalie remembered Aulander saying minutes before.

  She looked over to the main interface to figure out who had the advantage. The superhaptic displays were migraine-bright and different for everyone; since Natalie wasn’t yet connected to a bridge station with the right permissions, her view was of a basic set of weapon-tied exterior vector cameras returning ordinary, old-style sensor data. She saw Vancouver, Rio de Janeiro, and Athens, all heavy cruisers, all flanked by the silver-wild Vai fleet that Solano had stolen from Sharma’s control. Across the black expanse, riled up and in attack formation, a smattering of colors from the Corporate Alliance, or what was left of it, that mishmash of old enemies that barely spared a ragged word for one another if not for the Vai. Dozens of ships. More than dozens. Thousands and thousands of lives.

  But we’re a part of the Alliance, she thought, we’re a leader, and as soon as the thought was in her mind so was a memory of the master node whispering humans lie—

  Because she hadn’t been paying attention, had she? She’d been on Tribulation and unconscious for a month and avoiding the news as best as she could. The Alliance had come together against the Vai. They were still together against the Vai. The Vai were the only massive threat that would make them cooperate, and gather up an expeditionary force with railguns thick as a forest.

  “All pre-battle reports to the chair, please, and load ordnance,” said Aulander, sweeping to the right and then down toward the commander’s chair, which was occupied by a rig and a silent corpse she couldn’t quite see wearing fancy boots and ring-rounded fingers. Solano, she guessed. She took up a place right beside it. The guards pushed her forward toward an open rig, toward the gunner’s rig, a complicated riff on the proxy rig she’d designed for Applied Kinetics—to take the blood out of warfighting, she’d thought. She’d hoped. The HUD designed by R&D operated like a puppet, just below the level of consciousness, placing the gunner directly in the center of the battle.

  It took her two seconds too long to realize that she was the ordnance.

  “Wait,” she called to Aulander. “You’re not really doing this. You’re not going up against the Corporate Alliance. You’re not—” And the realizations came faster than her mouth could handle and the ship shuddered underneath her, the kind of terrible wail that presaged some of her worst memories of the war. She nearly lost her balance, and they used the moment to shove her into the chair.

  Last year, she’d thought that the war with Baylor-Wellspring was just necessary fallout from the debacle at Tribulation, but that had just been the Auroran message. Aurora had only always wanted what any company desired—full control of the market. Hegemony. Monopoly. The Wellspring war had been a pregame, the debacle on Bittersweet not a misunderstanding or mistake, but a weapons test.

  He doesn’t want to stop at Aurora, she realized. He’s going for the whole fucking Alliance. The Vai aren’t the enemy. That’s been us—it’s us, it’s always been us. All these years, all these wasted years, building towers for people who deserved only graves.

  Natalie was too exhausted to fight. The install was sweaty and too fast, the jack going in like a knife and the drugs like a tsunami. From here, she could see the commander’s rig and the changes they’d made; the CEO was barely recognizable in his mess of cables and life-support devices. It looked like he was sleeping, his skin shining with a faint golden glow. His mouth was covered with a breathing apparatus that fed air into his lung
s, inflating and deflating. She’d seen soldiers like this as she’d left the hospital after Tribulation, men and women in the coma ward who had escaped death to slip instead into death’s waiting room, their consciousness locked inside a brain that no longer made any connections.

  So this is what you have to give up, Natalie thought, your very own body, and looked at her own graying hands, her own blackening exhaustion. She was a prototype in more ways than one. She wondered how many minds they’d already severed—just the ones in hallway lockstep, just Ascanio and Ward, or was the entire ship in the process of being changed? Had Solano found a way to reverse-engineer the cure and save his nodes from the facts of death, or were they all just going to go the way of scrollwork and rot?

  The shiver of Vancouver’s spinal lance preparation echoed in her jellied legs, and she felt the slight kick of the railguns in her useless fingers as they shuddered online. The interfaces came online too, jumping in front of her vision, clamoring for her full attention—weapons manifests, targeting, vector analysis, all of it so familiar she flashed back to Bittersweet. For a second, the adrenaline almost convinced her that she was back in the shuttle coming up from Tribulation with Ash, with Alison Ramsay attempting to convince them that everything was fine.

  Everything was not fine.

  “I’m not doing this for you,” she said. She heard the whir of targeting readiness in her ear. “You put me in there and I won’t do a damned thing. I’ll let this whole fleet turn to rubble before I pull the trigger, I’ll sit there and watch my fingers fall off—”

  “It’s all right, Natalie. You don’t have to do anything at all.”

  “Then turn off the drugs,” Natalie said, scrambling to hold on to the edges of her consciousness for as long as possible. She set her teeth on edge, and then the master node was nearby too, holding her hand, whispering hold on like he was actually Leonard Downey—but even he couldn’t hold her recalcitrant body against the tide, and she was dragged down, down—

  Aulander patted her corpse, and looked to the captain’s chair. “The body’s ready, sir. You can take it at any point.”

  And Natalie couldn’t scream—

  —and the world twisted around her, re-forming in shades of black and silver.

  She stood at the center of the circular, three-dimensional HUD that she’d designed for the puppet to make proxy combat more efficient. This time, instead of looking at a 360-degree view of golden Bittersweet, she was hanging in the middle of black space, her body in place of Vancouver in the center. She was able to see in a hundred directions, her bare skin a beacon of light against sheer vacuum. The Auroran side was thick with stolen silver Vai ships, shimmering teardrops and seeds and tentacle-twirling lengths glowing in the deep black. Farther off, corporate ships of every shape and size hovered just outside of firing distance.

  Nearby, the master node had manifested like Len, all scrubby beard and dirty pants and Alien Attack Squad tee. He ducked away immediately, moving into a darker area where no ships flew and no lights shone.

  The HUD popped up with a battery of sick choices—the entire Auroran Christmas list, more kinetics and moleculars than she’d ever imagined could be in one place. Green screamer. Edison spiral. Catherine wheel. Expirant. Black gloriana. Beyond it, the tac-HUD fed her information on possible vectors. She reached for it, greedy—

  —but her hand did not move—

  Solano appeared in front of her, loading in like a tornado made of glass. Natalie felt him slide straight into her skin, wearing it like a coat. He pushed her aside, taking her place at the center of the battlespace. She stumbled back, out of the area of effect, unable to touch the weaponry or the gunspace or Solano himself. It made sense. Applied Kinetics had only ever expected one mind per puppet.

  We weren’t thinking big enough, Natalie thought, and opened her mouth to drop a sentenceful of swear words in the CEO’s direction.

  “Cora,” he said, sighing. “She’s still here.”

  “Working on it, sir.” Aulander’s voice echoed from every direction. “If you want the wetworks working, the drug mixture has to be absolutely correct.”

  “I don’t want you to work on it. I want her gone.”

  I’ll fight you, she thought, I’ll fight for every cell, every nerve ending—

  She felt his sneer more than saw it, weighing heavy against her borrowed mouth. Solano flexed her borrowed fingers. Fight me, then.

  But he didn’t throw a punch, or even wait for her to respond, because the Corporate Alliance ships had taken his few distracted seconds to fire off the first volleys of the battle. He slipped into her fingers and toes and legs, taking every breath, firing every neuron. All she could do was retreat, fall backward toward the master node, not even a welcome visitor to her own DNA.

  Natalie felt a crashing wave of despair, for how could she fight? What did she think she was doing, going up against the technology that had turned an entire alien race into just another corporate asset?

  “Cora,” snapped Solano.

  Natalie laughed. “What, am I being annoying?”

  “Cora!”

  “Oh,” she whispered. “I am.”

  And she could not fight him, but she could speak. And if she could speak, she could sing—and oh, when he was alive Len would make such a show of clapping his hands over his ears when she started singing. The Alien Attack Squad theme was the first song that appeared behind her teeth, and she threw it in Solano’s direction, full-throated and rowdy, like she wanted to fill a beach or a battlefield. When aliens come to ruin your day, the Attack Squad’s just a second away—

  It worked almost immediately. Solano plucked a K-7 screamer from the menu. Flesh-bright, acid-edged, it hollered toward a gathering of Alliance gunboats and missed. A second popped an Estrinbel fighter like a can.

  “When aliens come to ruin your week, the Attack Squad has a killer technique—”

  He threw a rattler; it hit a Wellspring corvette, stripping the thing of its plasteel hull, and she saw people blinking in the light, poison spangles working on their bones, and god, she thought, I’m sorry—

  “When aliens come to ruin your month—”

  “Shut up,” Solano said. “Cora!”

  Natalie laughed; the words hiccupped in her parched throat. When aliens come to ruin your year, something something persevere—

  Solano roared. He cast a black gloriana at her, straight through her nonexistent throat—and it made contact not with an enemy vessel, but with one of his own gunboats. The gloriana gobbled the ship’s engine in seconds, and the escape pods glittered among what was left, all of them twisting in the black wind neither of them could see.

  “Cora,” he whispered.

  From far away, Aulander’s voice: “Sir, you fired on—”

  Solano snarled. “Do you see those Baywell cruisers at seven o’clock? You should be worried about your own goddamn wetworks out there, because unless this body is fully mine, I’m going to lose my immersion—”

  “Getting it done, sir.”

  Natalie scrambled back. No more singing. But she wasn’t done yet. She refused to be done. She had the master node, and a working knowledge of his entire repertoire of Vai moleculars, still had her pants on, and that meant she was still doing better than she had been earlier in the morning. She would not lose this in front of the fucking Vai master node, oh no, she was going down screaming.

  She plunged her hand into her pocket, fishing around for the code dead Sharma had given her. She felt ice against the pads of her fingertips, pulling out not a card, but a jewel as bright as a curse on a dead god’s forehead, whispering heat and light and welcome. The partition. All she had to do was speak the right words and they’d be gone.

  What are you waiting for?

  The master node, his throat closed in wonder—

  I get one chance to do this,

  she said.

  I don’t even know where this goes.

  She said it was Ashlan, but—

 
But humans lie, she wanted to say.

  But Reva lies.

  Something else instead.

  I wanted you to have a chance to go home.

  This is home.

  And we will fight for it.

  The master node was quiet. Serious.

  A brilliant ache at that sound.

  Natalie didn’t want to care, but she did.

  We.

  You and I.

  Is this how humans make peace?

  They just find other humans to attack instead?

  The master node exhaled.

  He was laughing with wide, white teeth.

  And she laughed, too. Her fingers closed around the gem. It burned. It brightened. She held it close to her nonexistent heart.

  I think that’s your first joke, she whispered.

  When aliens come to ruin your life, howled the node. Something something—

  Route to partition, Natalie screamed.

  Her vision tunneled. Dragged to black.

  Upload, she thought.

  Natalie hadn’t expected to wake up, but she did.

  She lay in a cabin on Twenty-Five, on the floor in a nest of dirty blue jumpsuits that smelled of sweat and tomato sauce. She picked herself up, hearing the muffled hum of the engines in her ears like an earthquake wrapped in cotton. This wasn’t her room—the only photograph was tacked to the mirror by the door, a faded printout of a young man, exhausted, holding a coffee and grimacing. This was Ash’s room—

  “Holy shit,” she heard, and was half-tackled by a dead woman.

  “Reva wasn’t lying,” Natalie whispered, reveling in Ash’s staggering hug. She grabbed for Ash’s shoulder, thinking impossible, impossible, and felt tight, strong muscle where she expected waste and cartilage. This was not the dead woman she’d left in the transport over the White Line, her blanched skin stretched over rattling bone, her hands full of torn miracles. This version was bright and birthright-strong, as if she’d never spent a day underground.

  Ash choked out a laugh. “We? Did Kate come?”

  “Kate’s fine,” Natalie lied. “It’s actually—”