Engines of Oblivion Read online

  “Oh,” Ash whispered, and looked across the room. She tightened to a drawn bowstring in Natalie’s arms. Whatever she’d seen pricked tears as easily as blood.

  Natalie knew who it was, of course. The master node drew himself up from where he’d been curled on the floor, preternaturally still. He did not move as Ash pushed Natalie aside, stumbling across the messy space, her face drenched in disbelief. She went for a hug, but Len’s hand shot up, work-scabbed fingers wrapping around her wrist. Natalie saw a brief moment of connection, a light in her eyes, a flash of recognition in his. Their fingers tangled together, in a moment of intimacy so bright it made Natalie’s heart ache.

  “It’s you,” she replied.

  “You remember them,” he whispered. “You heard them singing.”

  Natalie felt a sudden twisting discomfort. Jealousy twined up her back and tightened, leaving her lost in the strange, all-too-human conflict between forgiveness and revenge. It’s not Len, she wanted to say. He’s dead and he’s not coming back and he’s mine, not yours, and I get to mourn him, not you—

  She felt a bright, grieving anger. And everything he tried to stop—it all happened, exactly the way Ash told me it would. And it’s all my fault. I called Solano down to the Sacrament lab. I didn’t even know what he was so close to accomplishing. It’s all fucked up, Ash, she wanted to say, all shattered and perverted and slammed into something terrible and new—

  Ashlan glanced over her shoulder. “But you’re here now, and that’s what matters. Nobody asked you to disable zappers the day after you joined up. Forgiveness takes time, and—”

  “Forgiveness is a fucking crock,” Natalie spat, drawing an angry breath. She wanted to slap herself, to bring some sort of solid end to the panic building in whatever was left of her body. Grief wouldn’t help. She didn’t want to grieve for Leonard. She didn’t want to forgive, either. Nothing had really mattered since the day she’d walked down the hill and given up one shitty life for another, and she didn’t want to forgive herself for that, either. And then she realized—

  “I didn’t say any of that out loud,” Natalie whispered.

  Ash tilted her head, as if something just clicked behind her green eyes. “Didn’t you?” Her eyes filled with a strange silver light, like a cup turned toward a waterfall, and the air changed around her, thrumming with possibility, as if the room itself had recognized who she was and loved her. Natalie felt that love like a warm blanket, and that care like laughter in the mess, and behind it, a clammy autumn chill that nested at the base of her spine, as if someone had just walked across her grave.

  “Not a word,” she said.

  “I never understood,” Ash said. She reached for Natalie’s hand. “I do now. Oh, Natalie. You must have felt so alone.”

  Natalie yanked her hand away. “I’m fine.”

  “You’re not.” Ash blinked twice, three times, in quick succession. A chilly confusion crossed her face, and a light crawled at the tips of her fingers, wilding under her skin, beautiful and alien and wrong. “You’re definitely not fine. You never have been. I know who you are, Natalie. I know entirely more than I should. I know all of it. All of that time on London, on Twenty-Five, and—you still felt you couldn’t open up with me. To anyone. How the hell do I know that?”

  The answer was obvious. Sharma had worn that light. Natalie fumbled in her back pocket for the jewel given to her by Sharma’s ghost. “She used her own memoria in the transport because there wasn’t time for anything else. She—”

  “—created a partition for you,” said the master node. “Otherwise, Ash would have been marked as the—”

  “—master node when Sharma uploaded herself shortly afterward, and she couldn’t have that,” Ash whispered, and it echoed in Natalie’s mind like she’d spoken it herself. She had spoken it herself. It had just come out of the others’ mouths.

  “And Kate stayed for me, because that’s just what she does for crewmates,” Natalie said. It was Ash’s thought, but she knew it like she knew her very name.

  “Together,” Ash whispered.

  As she spoke the word, Natalie was no longer entirely herself. Perhaps the other two had done it before and could handle the overwhelm of together, but Natalie was floored by light and whispers and the press of lives and thoughts and dreams that weren’t her own. It was bad enough to have to live in her own crumbling body, to know what she knew about her mother, to know about all of the things she’d done wrong. It was quite another to be wrapped in Ash’s wild mourning upon seeing Kate as Ingest, a breathing statue wrapped in wire, no longer entirely human.

  Perhaps if Natalie had understood any of it, together would have felt beautiful, and not like a sick echo of Solano’s hand twisting her soul out of the body she should have occupied, of the hell Natalie brought to Bittersweet, of what was being done now, as they spoke, outside this nonspace.

  “I can’t do this,” she said. “Stop.”

  “It’s all right,” Ash whispered, and knelt on the floor. “I understand. You’re exhausted. And I never knew you were hurting so badly.”

  “I—I didn’t want anyone to know. And you—”

  “I had her,” Ash said. “You had—”

  “Leonard and I never really—” She slumped forward. “I think that’s part of it. To know what I could have had. To live with the fact that I was too small and stupid to stop any of it, that I wasn’t important enough to him to convince him to stay alive.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Ash said.

  “It’s not yours, either.”

  Ash opened her hand. “Do you want to try again?”

  This time, together transformed the space itself around them, and Natalie kept her head down out of dizziness—the walls expanded, the floors pushed wide, and the wild bone rib cage she’d seen on the ship formed above them like she’d been swallowed yet again by that great breathing leviathan. The sides of the room formed themselves of mining-planet plasteel, and the floor bubbled up in Verdict macadam and marble.

  Together made Natalie feel mad and sane at the same time; in the partition, she knew Ash as intimately as she possibly could, right down to the crannies of her capillaries and her cells, as this massive shining light and this close warm companion. And the Downey-thing, the master node, the alien being beyond any name—she knew them, too, although she had no human words for what that meant.

  She wanted to say that what existed there was love, but she didn’t know, because people had used love against her before: her mother, and Xie, and Joseph Solano, whose fingers had worried apart the catch-points in her soul and convinced her that love was due to no one else but the Company. She didn’t know if she deserved to be seen like this—not Natalie, not the person who had been used to drop a bomb on Bittersweet, the person who still dreamed of choking on red dust and terror and probably always would.

  This isn’t about what we deserve, she heard. Ash. And Downey, a faint whisper. It’s about what we have to live with. I understand.

  Her voice broke. How can you?

  I could have waited, he said,

  and he showed her Natalie in the suit

  in the rib cage room in her body in her blood

  she was there unreachable and they were

  shaking in their grief ever since

  a woman in a lab

  on a planet

  taught them about death taught them

  that each alien body was a civilization

  a library a lab a memory a garden a planet

  and horrified

  they retreated into their nebula

  because what else could you do

  in the face of so much death

  and that they had destroyed all of it

  them

  those who were life eternal

  and then you forget

  and forget

  and forget

  until a human named Natalie Chan comes to find you

  and you lie to her

  about what you know
>
  of death

  because you have already changed

  And Ash, holding the hand of her lover and watching the dusty Tribulation sun set beyond alien trees, knew that nothing would ever make up for pulling the trigger on the Heart, even though she had been forced to by the situation she experienced—not even the hundreds of little deaths she suffered while setting off the weapons that were stored there, screamer after screamer tearing her skin and bone apart and knitting it back again, a thousand resurrections, pain beyond pain. It wasn’t enough. It would never be enough.

  And Natalie understood, finally: what grief could do to someone who had never known it, that the three of them had all shaken in grief so fully that millions had felt it, that enough blood was between them that they could drown in it—it brought them here, to this moment, facing down another great calamity.

  She could fight it. Or she could accept it and move forward.

  One left her Solano’s victim.

  The other option made her something new.

  Something new. Natalie closed her eyes with the hope of it. She took a long breath, tasted harbor air mixed with station air and silver, the unsteady trust between them, the darkness they were leaving behind. And Natalie thought—

  “Oh,” Ash whispered. “Oh, that’s good.”

  Natalie blinked. “I didn’t even—”

  “It’s very possible,” said the master node.

  She hadn’t even given the thought a real consideration yet—it was just a memory, just something tied up in the thought of grief and forgetting and moving on—a thought related to Ash, on Tribulation, being wheeled around by Sharma, and what she’d done to the enemy there. If Natalie could do that—

  If she could do more than that—

  And once she had the thought wrapped in her brain, curdling there like asphalt in midsummer, she knew she could not stay, just as she knew Ash and the node could not go. And there would be no need for a goodbye, either, because that had been said. Natalie simply rose and reached for the gem in her pocket.

  “Tell Kate I love her,” Ash said, as the edge of the partition swung open to the darkness.

  “You’ll tell her that yourself,” Natalie answered, and walked through.

  27

  On the other side of the partition door, the death-song of Aurora’s salvaged Vai weapons hit Natalie like a knife to the throat. Her mind tipped back into her body like hot water from a pitcher, and she and the master node flowed back into the limits of her skin and bone, reentering the proxy state where Solano had control. Natalie gasped at the loss of together, and the fact that the node was present at all—

  “I told you to stay!”

  “I changed my mind in the millisecond before the door closed.”

  “This is my fight—”

  He crossed his arms. “And is it not mine, as well?”

  Natalie was suddenly too busy to argue. The battle raged around them in flavors of hot blood and surprise, massive cruisers and tiny fighters in varying stages of forced dissolution. Solano was winning. Out here, Natalie was still a secondary node. He almost didn’t see her; his hands were alight, casting Auroran weapons into the void. And then—

  “Cora!” he called.

  “Seriously,” Natalie said. “Can’t you do anything without her?”

  “She won’t be able to help you,” the master node said, and flexed his fingers.

  Solano snarled, a rattler curdling black in his hand. “You have no power here, Ms. Chan. And—” He blinked. He breathed in. For the first moment, fear creased his eyebrows. “Who are you?”

  “I am not human,” the master node said. “I do not lie.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Then you know I speak the truth when I say that I will take my world back. Natalie, go.”

  She didn’t need a together to know what he meant.

  I can’t leave you.

  And you can’t do this.

  Not for me.

  Go, they breathed.

  They looked less like Downey now,

  and more like themselves,

  like silver and gold and earthquake-dark Vaisong.

  I am not doing this for you.

  You’ll be alone—

  He’ll kill you.

  So come back to me before he does.

  Damn you.

  Natalie took a deep breath.

  “There’s one thing about permissions that most non-programmers like Cora forget, Joseph. A door in is always a door out unless you lock it correctly.” She barked out a laugh.

  “Cora,” he called, a note of panic in his voice.

  “She’s not going to be able to hear you.”

  “She’s my secondary—”

  “No, she’s mine,” Natalie said, and woke up.

  Solano had locked down access to his brand-new Defender fairly well, but he hadn’t thought to close the escape hatch to his own body, bless his narcissistic soul, and from being together with the master node, she knew exactly what to do next. She tunneled up into his skin like the node had shown her and felt Solano’s heart—her borrowed heart—thudding back to life in three shuddering beats, like a hard reboot on a broken machine. She gasped for air, her lungs shoving themselves against a rib cage that felt too loose and too wide, and she fought off an instant, nauseous dysphoria.

  “Sir—” she heard. Aulander.

  She waved at the voice, coughing down the vomit. Her borrowed fingers stung with pins and needles; they’d used enough drugs to keep Solano under, but not enough to keep him from resurfacing if needed. Coward. Solano’s memoria fumbled, still trying to reconcile flesh to consciousness. If it failed while she was here, she’d die right alongside him. And she was willing, but—

  No. Not unless I have to. She picked herself out of the rig, dragging the vent from her borrowed throat, slapping an autobandage there. Solano was slightly taller than her, and he weighed more, so she nearly tripped against his foreign center of gravity. His body fit like a too-tight wetsuit; his shoulders pulled and twisted, like she’d shoved herself inside and forced the zipper to close. His rings were too tight for her taste, clutching fumbling fingers that had never had to defuse a bomb or solder a motherboard.

  The board members swiveled their heads all at once, the bright flashes of the battle outside reflecting in their silver shoes and rotten golden tattoos, and she felt the undercurrent of their questions—

  —right, she thought, he’d noded them, too, made them secondaries. He dies, one of them will take his place. Damn it. Solano might be a master node, but here in the real world, his human brain could only handle so much input, and his understanding of the master node’s world was exclusively hierarchical, passing through rank rather than function.

  So he’d delegated. He’d passed the nanotech to his board and let them have tertiaries. She could hear their doubt and their hope and their fear—and, like Solano, could manipulate that fear. She could feel the colonies lurking behind Coriolis’s blue eyes and the indenture systems behind Issa’s, and more beyond the others, the entire Auroran architecture. She wasn’t sure as to the limits to their autonomy, and pulling the trigger on her plans right now might give them enough time to respond. The direct jack he asked Ward to install would allow her to do it, but they were using it for the chair her body was occupying.

  No wonder he’d gone fishing off the deep end of the harbor. Anyone would, with this many assholes chattering on about business in his brain. Budget approvals and dying colonies and balance sheets and where to store the bodies—

  —she looked over at the body she’d worn all her life, wrapped in the gunner’s chair, and felt a wave of dysphoria.

  “Sir?” asked Aulander, sliding in beside her.

  Natalie jumped. Her borrowed lips took a stumbling moment to form around a reply. “I’m experiencing interface issues. My response time’s shit. I need the direct jack we used for the gunner spliced over to the gunner’s chair.”

  “Sir, y
ou’re doing fine. We need you back under now.” Natalie could hear an edge of panic behind Aulander’s serene exterior.

  “Which should tell you that I need that jack now.”

  “Mr. Ward’s already working on it.” Aulander’s voice was calm, but the part of her that rambled under his skin shook with nervous energy. “But you were doing so well, and the lances alone won’t hold back as many fighters as they’ve deployed.”

  The borrowed memoria shot her a memory of Ward—colored with pity and mild disgust. She could feel Ward somewhere behind Vidal’s skin, moving toward the bridge with his install team. Creepy as hell. She smiled at the assistant with as much patronizing glee as she could.

  “Ward. Direct jack. Now. And—Cora?”

  She felt Aulander’s fear like ice on her tongue. “Sir?”

  “Don’t fucking question me.” The words were liquid glee in her mouth.

  “Sir, you always said to question you if I thought you were wrong.”

  Natalie spat pooling blood from her mouth onto the floor. “This isn’t one of those times. This isn’t fast enough. Do you want to keep your head, or would you rather get fucked in a Wellspring prison camp? I know what I’m doing.”

  Aulander cringed, and the satisfaction Natalie felt on seeing it was a heady, guilty feeling. The entire experience was guilt—after all, every pair of lungs that breathed air on the bridge did so because Natalie Chan allowed it. Every pair of boots on the deck, every mouth calling that their console was no longer theirs, every panicked heart—she could clutch them in her hand, gobble them down, consume their fear. She understood now how intoxicating it was. How easily it could go askew.

  She thought she’d understood power. She’d been dead wrong.

  This was power.

  Smoke rose from some kind of broken system nearby, curling quietly to the ceiling, sucked out in disaffected swirls by the environmentals. Natalie sat back in the rig and watched the battle turn toward the Alliance, trying to keep calm. As long as there weren’t Vai weapons in play, the master node was winning the fight. She tapped her index finger until Ward and his team arrived.