Engines of Oblivion Page 37

  She could almost hear the Vaisong from here, even if she was imagining it, even if the master node had left it as a memory in her broken brain, and it kept her going. Exhaustion was a dark, sodden blanket tied to her feet. A river of pain carried her along, her mouth full of muddy water, and she was reaching out when—

  —when they fired again.

  She grabbed for the direct jack. Missed. Fell bleeding to the ground.

  And Solano woke.

  Stretched.

  Kicked at her, his civilized manner gone. His tough-toed boot hit her in the breastbone, and his eyes flickered up to the guards behind him. “We’re going to have to rethink morgues on the big cruisers,” he sighed. “Always something to do.”

  She tried for the jack one last time, but Solano’s boot came down on her hand and crushed it to the ground, and with that pathetic showing, she knew it was over.

  I’m sorry, she whispered to the dead master node. I’m so sorry, then, to Xie and to trapped Ash and enslaved Kate, to broken Twenty-Five, to everyone she’d failed, even Sharma—and when she closed her eyes and thought of home, she was sitting on the side of the road on Lark Street in midsummer, heat on her shoulders, eating a mango ice, the sound of atmospinners grinding nearby.

  She took one last breath, held it. Tasted mango and harbor air and the metallic hue of recycled air.

  Heard the clean slice of a bolt in the oxygen. Held her breath.

  Someone else screamed.

  She opened her eyes. Solano had fallen back into his chair, gasping against a wide, blackening hole in his shoulder. Boltfire erupted from behind her, and she ducked; she looked over her shoulder to see who the shooter was. It was Ward, fucking Ward, she thought, his wild yellow hair sticking up hither and yon, his battered nails catching the light. Natalie saw terror in his eyes. He met hers, just once, and kept firing as cit sec kept coming—

  “Citizenship is a promise,” he hollered, stumbling back as the guards came toward him. “Not a gun to your head. Not this.”

  But Natalie was already moving, reaching for the direct jack. She yanked the cable; it popped out with a spray of blood and gold, and it jumped out of her hands and rolled away. Solano hollered, and grabbed at the shoulders of her cit jacket with more force than she’d thought him capable of, and she lost her balance. He pushed forward, punching her in the nose; she kneed him, and he toppled.

  When they were both on the floor, he clawed at her, at her face, her shoulders, her jacket, while she tried to get at the jack like she was some drunken, drowning sailor and the cable was a lifeline. She was turning her face away to maneuver the jack closer to her neck when his hand popped up next to her and grabbed the memoria. She felt a tug, a pop, the strain of the connection like a wire between buildings, tugged taut. The buffer opening. The world opening for her, every thought and every dream—

  But Solano stumbled back into the chair, holding the faceplate to her memoria. An inchoate no had barely ripped from her throat before he dropped it on the floor, slamming his heel into its curved belly. It made a desperate crunch and a pathetic little shower of broken components, and the Vailight inside shivered and went out, and with it, any chance of making her memories make sense—

  Natalie saw a bright flash, like an apocalypse, and—

  —someone was ranting behind where the nameless woman had fallen. Some other, third person, which was insane, because she knew herself and the man with the boot to be the only people in existence. She had been born seconds ago in smoke and plasteel, a gangling bag of misfiring limbs against a void-cold deck, and she knew only one thing: that she was clawing at pieces of metal that had once been important before the world began, that the man with the boot had destroyed it, but she couldn’t remember why she was so upset.

  “Citizenship is a promise,” the third person ranted. “An agreement. Not a gun to your head. You see yourself as granting it, of holding power you distribute, but you’ve forgotten. You only hold this power because we allow you to.”

  The man with the boot sighed. “Mr. Ward, please.”

  The nameless woman coughed. All she wanted to do was sleep, and there was so much noise. The amount of input was harrowing—alarms screaming against her ear, smoke a thin corkscrew against her skin, and her only memory. A boot. A crunch. A light, skipping into darkness like a missed heartbeat. She hadn’t wanted him to do it. She’d been angry about it, angry enough to fight him. Should she still be fighting him?

  “How many Natalie Chans have there been? How many experiments, how many broken promises?” The yellow-haired third was holding something, something metal and wild-mouthed. “You can say that this was necessary, that you’re done, but you’re not. Are you?”

  She looked up at the man with the boot. He had the thing that he’d destroyed, pasted to his head. She wondered if she shouldn’t just take it. He’d taken hers, after all—

  —and her body moved almost without her command, from an intention that almost felt alien, the one muscle memory seared into her from the moment she was born. He was looking at the golden-haired man, not her. A fist connected with his cheek, and she felt something hard underneath the skin give way. He stumbled back, and she used that moment to grab the metal thing on his forehead. He clawed at it, and between the two of them, it popped out of their grasp and went sailing across the room—

  —where the third man raised his whining thing and with a crook of a finger cast hot red light, scoring straight through the spinning device.

  The other stumbled back, blinking, as lost as she was.

  The yellow-haired man was nearby in a second, and his face was full of an embarrassed relief. “Oh, my God, Natalie,” he said. “Are you okay?”

  “That was mine,” she said.

  “You were going for the jack,” he said. “Come here. I’ll plug you back in.”

  He started moving toward the seat, where the man with the boot was sitting, staring at his hands like he’d never seen them before. He tugged her hand, but she didn’t move. She didn’t know where to go. Her only memories were smoke, plasteel, shattering electronics, blood. But the name seemed familiar, like an echo in a room etched in bone, and how had she remembered that? “I—Natalie,” she said. “Is that me? Is that who I am?”

  He wavered for a moment, as the alarms clanged and jangled, then some sort of realization hit his angular face. He reached out and touched the bare metal place on her forehead with some thin reverence. “The memoria,” he said. “Oh, damn. He destroyed it all, didn’t he? Yes. Yes, that’s who you are. You’re Natalie Chan. You’re the most stubborn bitch I know, the first person I’ve trusted since—since, I don’t know, since God knows when.”

  She tasted that name. It seemed right. With it came the words forget, forget, forget. “Who are you?”

  “I’m an asshole,” he said, and his smile went wide. Something dark and wet passed through his eyes, and he blinked away tears. “Your asshole, apparently.”

  “Well, that’s good.” The bridge shook. She looked at the interface, the black outside, the moving shapes, the beams of light. “That’s not.”

  “No. It’s not.”

  “Death,” she said. “A battle. I know about fighting, don’t I?”

  He rocked from one foot to the other, sucked in a breath. “You do. And we’re losing. Without Solano, there aren’t enough of us to handle the ship. We’re all going to die. So—I’m going to do what I should have done earlier and load in to fight. I’m going to—”

  She looked toward the jack. Something about it twigged a memory she shouldn’t have even had, something deep, something folded into her muscle and her bone, into everything she was. Something more than her own body. Something she’d be looking for the rest of her life, however long that lasted. If she didn’t go now, she’d regret it.

  “No. I’ll go,” she said.

  “But you don’t remember—”

  “He didn’t take everything,” she whispered.

  Something dark and wet echoed i
n his eyes, and he blinked it away. He pushed back her hair with his left hand, slid that hand behind her neck, slipped her fingers into the locks, pulled her in. “I should have trusted you before.”

  She felt the edge of annoyance, and the words came out before she could stop them. “So trust me now. Just fucking do it already.”

  He laughed. “There you are,” he whispered, then dropped his hand, turning back to the center of the bridge. He slid his hand under her shoulders and helped her over to the black breathing monster of a rig in the center. The man with the boot was trying to climb back into the chair, and the yellow-haired man responded by shooting him in the shoulder, then kicking him in the face. She lay back, and fuck, when he said jack, did he mean a fucking flaming knife in her neck—

  —and she tunneled—

  —to a place she’d kept in her bones, a temple to violence, with wheeling stars and the wrecks of unknown ships, boxes and lances and teardrops, silver and black and grunt-gray. And at the center: a shining, singing jeweled thing that made her ache with the brightest of choirs.

  She walked over to pick it up, and as she closed her fist around it, held it roiling and shuddering to her broken chest for just one second.

  There was just one word she remembered, exhaled like smoke: return.

  A thousand voices flowing into her fingers, into her blood, and with them the memories of a million years; the conscious broken lives of a thousand stolen Auroran indentures, all of their memories, the hundred thousand voices calling her home, every single thing that had been stolen by the Heart.

  Home, wherever it was, because home was the universe, a thousand walls and beds and hearths in a thousand places, the warm, close walls of a tunnel filled with silver voices. Home was a grand plaza and a building shaped like an egg and five tall towers, was Grenadier and Cana and the thousand bombs that could have killed her but did not, was a mine and a coffee cup and a man named Christopher. It was walking away, always walking away, from battles and blood, from Davin and Xie and a dead granddaughter in a rainbow blanket, from the guilt left behind on the fourteenth floor of a comm tower in the form of a chin that curved like hers, and I wasn’t a mistake, I was never a mistake.

  And as the tsunami died down, as the million who knew Natalie breathed her memories back into her body, she heard Ingest.

  Your command, Node, said Kate’s voice.

  Here is Katherine Keller, Natalie said, who after my one last request will have the power to open the partition and be with her wife.

  She heard the dead woman’s ragged cry of relief. Your command, Node.

  Here is Joseph Solano, Natalie began again, who looked at the world and saw only himself.

  Let us know a world without him.

  The world shivered, and the computer engaging the command was a wild, dark wind—

  —a pulling, a wild loss of together, a pop of the jack coming out—

  —and she woke.

  Natalie’s assistant, Emerson Ward, was standing in front of her, blinking, his hands covered in blood. Hers? Someone else’s? How did we get here? “Thank God, Ms. Sharma,” he said. “You—were overclocking, overdosing—”

  And that was true. She was barely keeping herself together. The memoria was gone, somehow—that damned machine in her head that stapled her mind to her body and kept her from dying again. That was why the world felt strange and wrong and tilted and completely new. Maybe that’s why she’d forgotten there was some bloody uncitizen clawing his way toward her chair, because she was sure she wouldn’t have forgotten that. This man wore the signs of birthright power, the diamonds, the implants, the tattoos. He’d been shot twice and was dripping blood on her deck.

  She had no idea who he was.

  “What the fuck, Mr. Ward?”

  “I’m not exactly sure,” Ward said. “There was a battle. Apparently we’re supposed to surrender to the Corporate Alliance. I simply—I don’t know—”

  “Well, that isn’t happening.”

  She checked to see if the crawler was listed in the Company directory, but found herself disconnected from the main computer. She clawed at her head, and—where was her info-implant? Did she take it off? Did she have to do everything the old way? It was bad enough that someone had seemed to force through the superhaptic renovations the old board had wanted when her mother disappeared.

  For a moment, she thought her memories might be wrong.

  Was that even possible? It had to be—there were so many bodies. The man curled on the floor, crying. Fifteen dead, all of them nameless, all of them looking like they’d walked straight out of a Corporate Idol judging booth. God, it was like they weren’t even Auroran.

  “Tell them it was a mutiny,” she said. Her mind felt clouded, like she was missing half her life, and she’d have to have the doctors look at it, but right now there were other things to deal with. “That’s the only explanation.”

  “A mutiny,” said Ward. He sounded reticent. “Of course, sir. And.”

  “Get medical up here.”

  “Right away.”

  The man with the curly hair arrived at the chair, slapped one bloody hand on the arm, curled his fingers tight.

  “That’s my chair,” he hissed.

  She leaned forward, rubbing her eyes. She felt like shit herself, like she’d been shot herself—had she? Oh, shit, she had—and she was far too fucking exhausted for this kind of display, even with her mother’s upgrades done.

  She kicked his hand away from the chair, then shoved him back with one well-placed bootheel. It was the kind of thing her mother would have done—the Sacrament traitor, the CEO who had held this seat before her, who had taken the Vai hostage and started this whole damned war. She’d been trying very hard not to be her mother, a person who had never faced anyone powerful enough to counter her desires. And a person in her position really shouldn’t get her hands dirty.

  Nevertheless, she really felt like punching the man in the face.

  So she did.

  Numerous times.

  And when she was done, Natalie stood. Slapped the comm. “This is Ms. Sharma,” she said, “and I have a fuckton of dead mutineers on this bridge I can’t account for. Send a team to mop it up and figure it out. All directorates, report any irregularities.”

  “Ascanio here,” came the response. “There’s a … dead woman in the computer,” said Ascanio, the leader of Applied Kinetics.

  (Why did we still have Applied Kinetics? she thought. I thought I had that shut down—)

  “A what,” she whispered.

  “A dead woman.”

  “What the fuck, Mx. Ascanio.”

  Ascanio stammered. “And I don’t recognize any of this cabling—”

  “Okay, hang tight. We’ll send a team to you, as well. We’ll get it all figured out.”

  She sat back in the CEO’s chair, felt it curl around her body as it always had, as it always would—well, if she could fight off these Alliance assholes—and why were they fighting, anyway? Who had attacked first? Wait, what the fuck, that was a Vai ship out there, a fucking Vai fleet—

  —she heard it singing—

  —and she didn’t remember—

  —she couldn’t remember anything—

  —and thought: wait, something is desperately wrong with the world—where’s my memoria, where is the master node—

  But it wasn’t something wrong with the world. It was something wrong with her. She felt a slow, dizzy ache in her stopped-up heart, felt gray and strange and gone, and a quick darkening of the world around her, and the headrush of a thousand voices and a hundred thousand memories that weren’t hers, and oh, I forgot, she thought, I’m already dead.

  28

  By the time the gathered Corporate Alliance forces recovered enough to make a real move against the newly quiet Vai fleet, the aliens had collected their heartships and fled beyond the White Line, taking their answers—and their secrets—with them.

  And as for answers, nobody found them on the bri
dge of Vancouver. Nobody on the bridge remembered the mutineers, even though they were dressed in birthright brilliance. The computer had no record of them. The CEO allowed an Alliance judiciary team to review the records, and the chief investigator found a record number of inconsistencies: the mutineers had taken over the computer core as well as the bridge, had experimented with Vai technology, had installed a citizen in the computer for some reason the team couldn’t figure out—partially because the CEO ejected them immediately when they asked to see the crime scene.

  It was the Vai, she told the investigative boards for weeks after. They must have been in league with the Vai. I mean, we all saw the Vai ships leaving halfway through the battle, once the Alliance disabled Vancouver.

  And look what happened to the survivor, she said. The uncitizen survivor, who had stolen some birthright’s diamonds and rings and even an info-implant, had gone completely insane, claiming he was the Auroran chief executive, whipping and whirling and punching until the chief investigator was forced to bind him and send him to a medbay for his own safety.

  “Humans lie,” said the Auroran CEO, when asked for a comment.

  And there was the matter of that CEO. Everyone else swore that someone else was the CEO—a man from a line that had died out twenty years ago with the death of the executive Ernesto Solano and his curious lack of progeny. Proper Auroran accession had put the Sharmas in charge—or, at least, that’s what the Auroran records said.

  Their current CEO, listed as Natalie Chan Sharma, traced her line back for decades—there was some murkiness about her father, and about her mother’s abdication and disappearance, but the Corporate Alliance wasn’t allowed to meddle in Auroran accession affairs. Everyone onboard Vancouver swore the CEO was Sharma. Everyone at Aurora HQ did the same. The Corporate Alliance was about to write that off as correct when they discovered a few citizens who hadn’t yet been upgraded with Auroran superhaptics. They told quite a wild story, but—quite honestly, the investigators found, how could it be believed as anything more than a holoshow?