Engines of Oblivion Read online

  Ward was wearing a tight white autobandage under his jacket instead of a shirt, and she could tell from the pale, worried lines creasing his forehead that her lover was himself again. They no doubt needed his expertise to run the direct line. She almost opened her borrowed mouth to say hey, but she hadn’t come this far to blow her cover on someone who wouldn’t believe her.

  Instead, she reached for Solano’s rig connections. If the hovering board members thought it funny that she could attach her own belts, they said nothing—although Aulander did move in behind him, waiting to apply the neck jack herself.

  Ward pulled his head out of a wall panel. “Direct connection to Ingest established,” he said.

  “Engage the rig,” Natalie said in the most commanding voice possible—it came out strident, booming, completely un-Solano-like, and she couldn’t help looking to Aulander, to see confusion in her eyes, and, shit, here come the drugs—

  The direct connection to Ingest slammed her straight past the secondaries into the center of the Heart on the Vai cruiser beyond, into the violet-green, death-bright hollering light where time seemed to stop. She could feel Kate’s light, half-conscious breathing somewhere in the background. The noise of the secondaries’ chatter increased to deafening levels. She reached forward for the light, taking it in her hands, allowing it to curl around her wrists and spiral up her arms. She welcomed it. Ash had months on Tribulation to examine the Heart, to learn how to turn it from nuclear bomb to surgeon’s knife.

  Natalie had fifteen seconds.

  Ingest knew something was wrong—Ingest, the mad, gold-soaked Heart-gate nanocomputer that was also Kate Keller—then turned the alien mystery in the rib cage room to something Solano could easily control from his comfortable chair. It burned when she told it what she wanted it to do to the secondaries, but it was a computer and she was a master node down to her skin and bone, and it had to obey her.

  By now she could feel Solano’s secondaries start to question her actions. Coriolis, who crawled in shouting alarms; Vidal, who was losing control of the railguns. It was no matter. The battle raged outside, and it didn’t matter if Aurora lost. That wasn’t why she was here.

  Vidal’s voice was a frantic boom in her ear. “Sir. Ingest is throwing errors. What’s going on?”

  “Everything’s fine,” Natalie said, the taste of fire on her tongue.

  “Please confirm your topdown code.”

  What’s a—She paused. She didn’t care. “My topdown code is—you’re all going to hell.”

  The words tasted like sugar, and somewhere she could hear Kate’s wild relief, her laughter.

  And then Ingest was hers. Utterly hers.

  From Natalie’s perch at the top of the universe she could see the secondaries for what they truly were behind the glitter and the gilt. She could see their stories like light on their skin, could know their memories and sins in Ingest’s twisted version of together. She knew all of the bloody things that had made them powerful and proud, all of the places where they’d papered over the rot in their souls, all of the circular reasoning they’d taken to land themselves in power.

  And Natalie was complicit. They were all complicit. She’d known all these truths for years, hadn’t she? Hadn’t they all? Every single time some sort of massive tragedy would happen and she and her team would see it on the news—every single time an answer was demanded by sobbing families or desperate friends. Every meltdown and factory death and cave-in, every tragedy blamed on mechanical failure and malfunctions and the like. Each time, the board would stand in front of the cameras, telling the world it wasn’t their fault. But if there was one thing Natalie had learned from all these years opening her veins to the corporate sky, it was that there was always a finger behind the trigger.

  Slipping into Aulander’s mind was easier than she thought it would be, and as Natalie settled in, she heard the woman’s whisper—please, please, I never pulled a trigger, I never—not once—

  Natalie smiled. You think you’re safe, Cora, because all you did was watch?

  I did what he told me to do—

  I can’t push off my responsibility for Bittersweet on you. What makes you think you can do the same? Show me the Bittersweet meeting—

  Aulander’s memory was hidden and musty, like a sip of yesterday’s water, but she could see it well enough: a comfortable boardroom, hibiscus pastries on her tongue, whiskey, wine, laughter. It’s just an indenture, they said, and it will be presented as an accident. The test will show us if we’re clear enough to go after the Vai.

  She saw meeting after meeting, the deaths rolling through her fingers in red-lined budget numbers: a closed medical clinic, a safety rule ignored, only a dozen dead because of it, sir, it doesn’t impact the bottom line or our schedule—

  And there. There, she’s standing in back, taking notes, as they cut Reva Sharma’s body open, drain Ash’s dead blood—

  She flashed back to their quiet space together in Aulander’s memoria, where the fear in those bright birthright eyes almost made Natalie reconsider. Almost. “You justify it because you’re not making the decisions yourself, you just enforce, but we both know the truth about that,” she said. “What you did to Ash and Sharma—”

  “They were dead,” Aulander said.

  “They were people,” Natalie said. “And that’s not something you’re ever going to understand.”

  “But I do—” Aulander’s heartbeat felt almost desperate. “I do.”

  “Do you? And then you support this madness anyway? I’ve done the same, and I think that might be worse.” Natalie placed her ghostly thumb against the assistant’s lips. She steeled herself. Remembered the indentures. Remembered that the only thing between freedom and damnation was Natalie fucking Chan, zombie princess of Aurora Company.

  She had to do this. She didn’t have to like it.

  For a moment she hesitated. Knew that they made me and they deserve this were just her brain justifying the terrible thing she was about to do. She felt a terrible, gnawing guilt. She’d been pushing off guilt for Bittersweet, saying it wasn’t her fault—but this would be. Could she call herself a good person after this? Would she want to? Was there another way?

  No coup is truly bloodless, she thought. And that’s what this is.

  It’s time I started taking some fucking responsibility.

  “Only a dozen dead, you say. I bet they have people who remember them. Let’s make it a dozen and one and see if anyone remembers you.” Natalie hesitated. She could stop here. She could stop.

  She couldn’t.

  “Forget.”

  Aulander’s eyes opened wide, and her hands clawed for Natalie’s, her body stiff, her breath stopping, her cheeks sinking into grave-dust as if she’d been deleted and dead a long time. And then it felt as if Natalie had been staring at Aulander’s body for months, and her name slipped from Natalie’s mind, going as anonymous as the records in the dead woman’s hands.

  By the time the rest of the board realized what was going on, she’d yanked their permissions, one by one, then slipped into their minds, fishing around for their sins. Their minds caught fire, their bodies shook—the fear they had given so many others. Ingest erased each one of them—

  Forget, she whispered. Here is Alistair Coriolis, who revoked sixty-three Earth-based indenture contracts days before citizenship, leaving them uncitizens, with thousands of credits saved. Her lips brush his cheek and suddenly he’s drowning, the water behind his teeth stinking like the dead Hudson, his skin sloughing to fish-eaten bone, forgotten like an uncitizen—

  Here is Raynor Stephenson, who left contaminants in Ryker Colony water systems, so concerned about all the lost profit if Aurora evacuates. She buries him like he did the three hundred Ryker sick, choking on the bitterblack poison, his body going rigor-black like the children did—

  Here is Aileen Amberworth, her bones broken like the suicides outside the Auroran celestium refinery on Glassheart, still breathing—at least for now, be
cause most of them made it, I installed nets, shouldn’t that be enough, and they need to die like those suicides did—

  Winter Vidal, who burns like his indentures did in the cable factory, his skin turning easily to black paper, forget—

  Others. Starved, boltshot, simply forgotten, like the lives they took. They’ll be forgotten too—

  And here is Rothan Issa, who dies of blackvein, the bogeyman illness that existed only in hushed rumors from miners with celestium sickness, because it was never given a true name, never studied, because the board said it wasn’t real, so she could only guess based on his memories of burst capillaries, black tears, enlarged hearts—

  And here is Joseph Solano—

  She stopped mid-thought. Her tongue felt like a nuclear wasteland, her body aching—

  —her body—

  Natalie had gotten this part wrong. Unless she wanted to live in this murderer’s skin forever, she couldn’t erase Solano until she was back in her own body, when she wouldn’t have the ability to do it at all. She shivered in the twisted language of Solano’s nerves. Not her limbs. Not her tongue. Her tongue was across the room, her body a battleground between Solano and the master node. And the master node hadn’t rejoined her. Vai slid in and out of bodies all the time, but humans—

  Humans could only live as themselves.

  If she finished this litany of curses in Solano’s body, what would happen to her? To the master node? Would Solano die? Would she? Could she take that chance? She could already taste the blood slicking Solano’s teeth, could already feel the rejection gathering inside like she was some violent disease.

  She had to finish this in her own body.

  She lay back. Reconnected Solano’s body to Ingest, a cable at a time. Reached for the vent.

  Felt the machine slide air into her borrowed body—

  —and loaded back into her own head.

  The battle rendered around her in brilliant black; the only light in the rig HUD came from occasional bursts of flame that died as quickly as they were born and the cones of light created by railfire. She could feel, more than see, Vancouver’s spinal lance spinning above her, could see the Alliance ships growing closer, moving in banding circles to box the rest of the fleet in.

  Solano stood in the center, his avatar clothed in light, sweating. Whining Vai weapons lay stacked at his feet. This time, she saw the singing jewel at the hollow of his throat—the partition where Sharma had put the Vai.

  “Stop,” she said. “You’re killing me.”

  “I understand that. It’s a risk I’m willing to take.”

  The ship listed to the side, took the volley, disintegrated—and in the bright, wild explosion that remained, she saw the master node curled on the floor, bloody and broken, but still breathing. Despair crawled into her throat.

  “And what about your own body?” she said.

  “That thing?” said Solano. He picked up something purple and black, something that breathed out death and had no name that Natalie knew. “You think I don’t have a plan for that? I’ve been training for this my entire life. To end it all. The competition. The politics. When we’re united under one mind, there will be no end to what we can accomplish. All you have to do is let it happen. There’s no shame in it. All you have to do is move the fuck on. And you’ve wanted that for so long, Natalie. I know you have. Let yourself have what you want.”

  Solano’s words echoed, solidifying in their inevitability. Even if she were able to stop the battle, make everyone forget Solano, throw herself into some sort of suicide pact with him here and now—even if the other companies won, they’d come aboard. Find the technology. Build their own. And it would never be over. It would never end.

  She feared the hundred Tribulations that might follow, the bodies that were fodder for hard work and war, the hundreds of thousands born just to upload and die, who would never see anything different from the path laid out for them. Who would never even live, because Solano could destroy them the moment they thought they could have something more.

  She couldn’t just give up. She was a soldier. An ordnance engineer. When you couldn’t defuse the bomb, you ran. And when you couldn’t run—

  —you throw yourself on the bomb, said the master node.

  It was the very thought she’d started calling up herself, a terrible thought from the depths of a terrible war, and as she started to consider it, the master node stirred in the darkness of her mind. He had pulled himself toward the thought first; it was his voice she’d heard, his body curling up from the vast nothing below. She could go. She could finish this. But only if she left the master node behind. And he knew it, too.

  “I thought I killed you,” Solano whispered, somewhere far away.

  “Humans lie,” the node said, coughing up blood.

  “You’re not human.”

  “I’m human enough.” He stretched his fingers, looked from one hand to the other.

  “Impossible,” Solano said.

  “I had a good teacher,” Downey said, picking himself up from the ground. “Natalie, go. I will hold him back.”

  She reached out to say this time you won’t make it out—

  —and he was there,

  assured,

  as sure as the glint in his eyes.

  I know how to do this.

  Leonard taught me.

  He would want this.

  He would want to stay with me, she whispered.

  Perhaps. He smiled.

  I don’t know why it’s never been clear

  that he did what he did for you—

  not just Ash—

  because you existed.

  Because he loved you.

  Because he wanted a better world for you.

  Her voice caught. There has to be another way.

  I failed my people once.

  I will not do it again.

  Warmth.

  You’ll only have milliseconds.

  Make them count.

  I was never going to be able to return.

  I have changed too much. But humans—

  —ah, you are change.

  Natalie ached. He lifted her chin.

  When my world was ripped from me,

  when I realized I could never go back,

  I was ready to stop existing.

  They pulled themself in front of Natalie, and for a moment she could see them, as they were, as they wanted to be—she couldn’t quite settle on a form for it, for the silver and the light and the way it interacted with the world. They were a cloud and a human body and slippery mercury and a bird singing and all her broken memories of what love had once been.

  “Natalie Chan changed that,” said the master node. “She taught me that even when you’re alone, even when you hurt, you get up. You keep going. That is a miracle. She is a miracle. Humanity is a miracle.”

  Solano tossed off a barking laugh. “Two master nodes can’t be in the same place. You know this. And you know you can’t possibly win.”

  And the being she had come to love smiled. “She also taught me that was a terrible reason to run from a fight.”

  They moved, in a motion that was smothering and flailing and vicious all at once. Solano reacted, and to do so, he had to loosen his grip on the world around him. Natalie didn’t hesitate. She threw herself back with a bone-breaking, spraining force, emerging from the gunner’s trance and hitting her physical body like she’d been dropped from a helicopter.

  The bridge seemed like it was waking up from a long somnolence—with the master node taking Solano’s full attention, navigators and gunners and assistants’ eyes flickered open, coming conscious in their rigs. There were birthright bodies everywhere—people she didn’t recognize, and after a moment she realized the code she’d written, the forgetting, must have worked. That she’d forgotten. Had she killed them? Who had they been?

  Did it matter, now that she had proof the code worked?

  Ward appeared nearby as she started ripping out her haptic
s. “Sir, if you come awake again, we’re going to start losing for good.”

  “Fuck the sir, Ward, it’s me.”

  “I—” He looked confused.

  She stared. “The answer’s still no. Is that better?”

  The confusion on his face ceded to obvious relief. “He told me you were uploaded. That you were gone, like everyone else.”

  She ripped away her torso harness, tasting blood, as if she’d uploaded razors as well as her soul. She pulled herself up with all the force that her exhausted, dead muscles could bear, yanking the jack out of the back of her head like a knife from a piece of meat. Blood sprayed the seat.

  “After all you’ve seen, after all I’ve told you, you still believe Solano?”

  “I don’t have a choice.”

  She swallowed blood. Her voice was coated in gravel and she thrilled to it—her blocked, Tribulation-burned lungs. Her own fucking lungs. It was enough of a victory to keep her going. “I don’t either,” she said, “but damn if I’m not going to fight the whole way down.”

  When his mouth just swung open and stayed there, she pushed him aside, leaving him in the past with everything she’d walked away from. From now on, there was only the future, and it was short and bloody and brutal, and she’d already reconciled to it. Her body felt wrong, like it was peeling away from her skin-first.

  She dragged herself to the commander’s rig, her fists balling. She was a soldier, and soldiers fought until they couldn’t. She couldn’t get off the ship, and she couldn’t find her way back into Solano’s head, so there was only one way to connect to the Heart to deliver the code she needed to take Solano down.

  She heard the swish of doors opening, the whine of a cit-sec boltgun, the click of it firing.

  Natalie ducked, but not fast enough. Her body had gone numb enough from her failing memoria that it didn’t quite hurt when the bolt found a place next to her spine. She fell, her shoulder cracking when it hit the floor, and she smelled her own burned flesh. She’d be dead if she wasn’t already. The pain came milliseconds later; she bore down on her bottom lip, climbing forward, toward the jack. There was no past—just the future, this future, the one where everything counted on her, where the choice was between Solano’s shattered memoria or her own death.