Engines of Oblivion Read online

  A commotion of corporate security officers in newly printed blues stepped through the nearest hatch, and her old instincts found her back flat against the wall before she remembered she didn’t have to do that any longer. They rushed by like they were on a mission, four of them in quick succession, flanking a duo of quiet, confused cargo workers wearing indenture tabs. She watched them all stop before a door labeled SUPERHAPTIC UPDATE LAB, and Natalie blinked. Had that door even been there before? Hadn’t that been a biologics lab? Had that been before the last mission? Was she forgetting new things now?

  A mission. Natalie’s mind seized on that thought. She could do that. She imagined her own door as the mission target, searched for her old armor in the memoria, saw how it clapped around her shoulders and her chest, felt the weight of a gun in her hand, set back out on her way to her compartment. Eyes on the prize, stay on target. Don’t cry. Don’t err. Don’t let them see you bleed.

  And then she was through her compartment door, the burning knot in her chest unraveling as soon as she was alone.

  Alone.

  She’d had her own space on Twenty-Five—barely more than a cot and a cubby, and only because of the disastrous early journeys that made it clear that having some privacy on long-haul salvagers was a psychological need rather than a want. But, otherwise, she hadn’t ever really been alone. Not with Verdict. Not in the barracks later on. Certainly not on Twenty-Five.

  Verdict. She felt an unwelcome pang of nostalgia. She still wanted to call the hacker collective home, because she had been born there, because it had been just about ten years since she’d walked off that gray plaza in the snapping November wind, the weight of snipers in the skyscrapers above no longer a comforting one. When you leave, her father had said, you don’t come back.

  I get it, she’d said, hope in her heart. That’s the whole idea.

  Hope.

  In the corporations, hope was a citizen’s privilege. So was being alone. The stupid shit she’d wanted her entire life. A fucking palace, Ash might have called her room. A real bed. Cold storage for food—food she could save, food she could choose, could stuff in her mouth while stretched out on the aforesaid real bed. A gray couch, a dark blue table, a place to keep her things, now that she could have things. Cits called it tiny, muttered about the shit accommodations on these big new flagships, but to Natalie, the compartment was too big, rattling with shadows and silence.

  The only thing missing was all of her stuff—the stuff that mattered, at least. That had all disappeared with Twenty-Five. Her favorite boots. The picture of her old fire team on the beach after training. The other photos she’d printed on Europa because she couldn’t have cloudspace out here. Her father’s sweater, which didn’t really fit her anymore, but still smelled like concrete and flame.

  The best part of her new room was the lack of optikals and renderbots in the ceiling, tracking how Natalie slept, what she ate, who she talked to. She had a bath closet of her own. Her very own interface.

  Which was blinking.

  Natalie tossed her jacket over the couch, collapsed there, told the interface to play her messages, and unhooked the front plate of her memory device. It was blinking, as always. She poked it, not expecting much. It responded by humming against her skin. She didn’t see anything wrong with it, but then again, she wasn’t a neurotech, and the memory device wasn’t a Vai bomb. She didn’t really know how it worked—the faceplate she held or the parts buried in her brain beyond the plate screwed into her skull. Natalie had done what she could to rejigger the device’s code to increase the speed of recall or the memory storage, but biohacking techniques had progressed since her days in Verdict, and she always stopped short of breaking it.

  Natalie had been given the device a few days into her recovery after Tribulation, when she was still half-drugged and shaking from the rescue, unable to keep a thought in her mind for over ten minutes. The memoria was a more complicated version of a citizen’s info-implant, modified by R&D to keep her alive. Average citizens probably won’t be able to tell the difference, they’d said, and you can still decorate it, like they thought that would have been at all a thing she’d be interested in.

  She knew having the memoria installed was a risk, but the alternative was forgetting everything she’d ever known. It was one of just a few experimental prototypes, and she imagined those usually went to people the company wouldn’t miss too much if the experiment went wrong. But she’d done this kind of thing before—you had to test your own tech on yourself, to keep respect in Verdict—and Natalie figured if she ended up frying her brain for good, it wouldn’t feel any worse than the time she couldn’t remember her own name.

  The installation was done while she was awake, like most neurosurgery, and she’d seen the faces of the scientists gathering around her cracked-open skull, heard their whispers. It was strange to think that she was at the center of their hopes and dreams, that she got to carry and use this brand-new, lifesaving technology without having to pay anything for it. Not one credit. Not one extra day of her life. No smuggling of questionable painkillers, no backroom trades, no suffering through injuries not accrued “in the line of duty.” No Dr. Sharma pushing the hatch closed in her face instead of treating her nausea. The memoria was hers because of the simple, plain fact that she was now a citizen and worthy of the company’s money and time.

  The memoria was supposed to help her feel secure about the memories that still remained in her hole-punched head, as well as knit together thoughts that had been torn apart. It operated like an old-style search algorithm of sorts, calling up fading memories when she needed them—but it didn’t always behave, and it would sometimes offer up visions and thoughts she didn’t want at all. Sometimes it would try for a memory she’d lost entirely, return a blank, and her field of vision would swim and scatter and go gray. She’d slammed into more than one pylon that way, like an embarrassed human pinball.

  It’s in beta, the doctors would say when she complained, and yeah, she’d grown up in a software cult, she knew beta like a prayer, but the Verdict hackers had been better at beta with shittier technology than the supposedly cutting-edge Auroran R&D.

  A few weeks into their relationship, Emerson would give her info-diamonds as a courting gift, and she’d try to install them near the memoria and end up in the medbay with horrible flashbacks. She spent a few days supposedly stuck in the mud on Cana, blood in her mouth, her skin tearing, watching her platoon burn behind her. It was at that point that R&D told her that upgrades and decorations needed to be done in the medbay, that they were sorry, which was odd, because Emerson and Ascanio loaded updates on their own.

  No doctor had ever told her they were sorry before. You didn’t tell indentures you were sorry. It was tongue-snapping delicious, that sorry. Almost worth the pain.

  Natalie flagged the thought to remind herself to see about routine neuromaintenance, then started paying attention to her messages, slapping the memory device back into her face. She rarely received personal messages. This one was from Node 73, Arpeggio Station, the last fucking thing she wanted to deal with today. She thumbed the play button anyway.

  The older man on the other end—her father, who had been going by a codename, Xie, when she left Verdict—smacked his thin, wrinkled lips together, and began to speak. His hair was a slushy gray run through with void-black vestiges of a lost youth, and he’d kept the wrinkles on his forehead and his cheeks despite the aesthetic offers that had doubtlessly been made during his Auroran onboarding. Xie had been planetborn to the core, a Verdict sniper since he was fourteen. He’d inexplicably entered Armour three years after Natalie left, despite a lifetime of screaming fuck the corps at the skyscrapers by the river and refusing to eat the rations distributed by the area’s Auroran sponsor. She knew this not because she remembered much of it, or of him, but because of the notes still in the central file from Natalie’s own onboarding interview.

  Fucking Tribulation.

  The years had spotted Xie’s fac
e and arms with brown smudges and smears. Natalie wondered about the curves of his face, flattened into shadows over the ansible video connection, wondered if he would hug warm and hard or long and loose, or not at all.

  Natalie, he said. It’s been a year. I don’t understand why you paid to stick me here if you weren’t going to talk to me. I traded six days for this call.

  He sighed, looked off-screen, then continued.

  They tell me you’re okay, that you’re on Vancouver, that you’re doing important work. Life is fine here. The food is fine. Everything else is stupid. I can’t work on anything without having to turn it over to the fucking company. I did this for you, Nati. What the hell do I have to do to get you to talk to me?

  A second sigh.

  I’m ready to talk about your mother, if that’s what it takes. Call me.

  Natalie paused the recording. Reached up to the memory device, tapped it, waited for the blank answers that just weren’t there. Looked at her own reflection: her face, her fingers, the long, straight white scar on her neck.

  She just didn’t know what she would say to Xie if she called back. She’d found her father’s name in the Armour uncitizen rolls, paid off his indenture debt with her bonus from Tribulation, and used the rest to secure him a warm place to sleep, because Armour was a terrible place to be old. The memory device told her that he’d spent most of her childhood getting drunk because of Natalie’s mother, aside from the brilliant sober moments when he’d taught her how to shoot, to code, to swear. He was the one who told her she couldn’t come back if she left Verdict, then left himself.

  Hypocrite.

  Xie was wrong. Natalie didn’t want to know about the mother who had walked away when she was too young to remember her. Natalie had rescued Xie for a far more selfish reason.

  She wanted to know about herself.

  Natalie knew she was one of the lucky ones. When Ash’s weapon was triggered at the end of the Second Battle of Tribulation, she’d been on a shuttle hurtling away from London, empty-handed and lying like a rug to her team of combat engineers about killing Ash. She didn’t even know she’d been caught in the area of effect until she woke up in a Company medbay for the nth time, the ache of the memory device newly drilled through her skull.

  In the days that followed, she put herself back together like a puzzle with a hundred missing pieces. She spent days scrolling through Auroran corporate records for her name, or references to Verdict. Her unhelpful linksave list (why had she marked so many Alien Attack Squad jokes?). She trolled through news holos from the war, filling her eyes with the death and destruction she’d forgotten. The memory device helped shore up what was already there, making connections, filling in details, noting blanks. The curved outline of a teammate at mess. The metal tang of a ship’s recycled air. The rough fabric of an EVA suit. She’d lost whole chunks of stuff she’d learned as a kid, like coding in ellis-b and the layout of the Concourse (although she still knew C-kalibre and starslip). Losing that was almost a mercy.

  But there were some things only Xie would know, and she was still too scared to ask.

  The doorbell chimed. She felt a sudden, embarrassed flush, and walked over to the door, palming the lock. Her visitor was Emerson Ward, his smile crooked, his brown eyes and jagged nose hiding behind a shock of too-long saffron hair, and oddly symmetrical birthright’s lips regarding her from an angle. His collar was loose and his jacket unbuttoned, and one hip canted slightly against the doorjamb.

  “You said you were going to the medbay,” he said.

  “I did say that,” she said, deadpan, moving to close the door in his face.

  “Wait.” He pressed his palm against the door to stop her. “You were pretty hard on the staff today. And me. We’re not indentures. You can’t just swear at citizens like that.”

  “What, do you want me to apologize? After—after—” She couldn’t say it. She couldn’t swallow. All she could do was keep herself from shaking. “After. You let Ascanio push me way too much ester. You ordered it.”

  “It was dangerous to disconnect you. You know this.”

  The memory device helpfully supplied a rush of red dust, and for a moment she felt it choking her, coating her tongue. She shook the cobwebs away from her head. “They made me do it. But you made me watch.”

  He shoved his hands in his pockets and looked away. “I get why you’re angry. That was a shit move by the board, Nat.”

  “I’m not angry. I’m furious. Do you understand why they wanted a full indenture for the mission now? They needed someone who couldn’t say no.”

  Ward pushed in slightly, blocking the light from the corridor.

  “Like I said. Shit move.”

  “Is that all you’re going to say?”

  “Let me in.”

  He crossed his arms, leaning on the doorjamb. She felt a tight truth loosen in her chest. She wanted to tell him no, to fuck off, but he had that unguarded look he usually had post-shift, the last time they’d had a close moment. Not that she could afford close moments as a recently turned cit with everything to prove. It was the kind of look that could shake down her walls in seconds.

  “Fine,” she said, sighing. “Come in, as long as you leave your ulterior motives outside.”

  “I never have ulterior motives.”

  Natalie grinned. “Fuck you.”

  “I live in eternal hope,” he quipped.

  She stepped aside. As he walked in, Natalie noticed the sweat beading slightly at his temples, his fingers fiddling with the zipper hovering at the base of his jacket. No ulterior motives, my ass, she thought.

  They’d met six months ago in the hot, crowded darkness of one of the citizen lounges. He’d leaned in, smelling of sweat and cologne, and she’d felt wrong and indentured and lucky and drunk as hell. She’d tilted her chin, appreciated the slight curl to his hair, enjoyed the way he walked. She’d liked how he made her feel human again. Their relationship was everything she wanted in the wake of Tribulation. Casual. Quiet. A little hot.

  Natalie ran her hand through her own shorn hair. An indenture’s style, still. She couldn’t let it go. Short hair was comfortable, easy to wash, manageable. She should let it grow out, learn how to twist it up into buns and curls and whatever spiky bullshit the bridge officers were into that season, like Ward’s long, curling sweep down the edge of his whip-curve jaw. “Did they get to the weapons wing?”

  “They did,” he said, collapsing against the sofa, ignoring the fact that he was crushing her jacket. “We’re securing the labs right now. And it’s all because of you.”

  Her shoulders seized. She imagined soldiers getting off at an elevator, the red dust pulling into smoky, glistening swirls on a helmet HUD.

  “I need a shower,” she said, slapping her thighs and standing.

  “Stop walking away from this,” he said.

  “I’m not.”

  “You won. Take the win.”

  “I—” Her throat seized. “That was winning?”

  “Nat—”

  The words came out before she could control them. “At least with the Vai, the war was just. The war was necessary. What happened this morning was just plain murder.”

  He sighed. “Aren’t you the one who told me that the tactic that wins is the tactic we should use?”

  “That was during the Vai war. We are not the Vai. We don’t wipe out innocent people because they happen to be in the same vicinity as a hard target.”

  “Then why did you agree to run Applied Kinetics?”

  She had no immediate answer for that; her mouth worked, and she dropped angry hands into her lap, expelling a quick breath. The conversation was rapidly passing her threshold of casual, and she didn’t like how uncomfortable it made her feel. “That’s not fair.”

  He joined his hands tight enough for his knuckles to go white. “The purpose of Applied Kinetics is to develop technologies based on Vai weaponry, which exists to kill human beings. And right now, Baylor-Wellspring exists to kill us.�
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  “I know,” she sighed, giving up.

  “Maybe you should talk to someone about this.”

  “I’m talking to you.”

  “We’re…” He pressed his lips together, then patted the couch next to him. “Complicated. Which is what I actually came here to talk to you about.”

  She sank into the space next to him. “I stink. Your funeral.”

  “You’re fine.” He took a deep breath and made a face. “Look, you’re not used to this, which is why I’m going to explain. You’re going to get a lot of personal contract proposals over the next few weeks, once everyone in the Company learns you were behind the raid. I just … want you to consider mine first.”

  “You’re proposing?” She flushed, suddenly nauseous. She felt a crashing, overwhelming desire to kick the earnest look on his face into the nearest trash chute.

  “You know we’d be good together,” he said. “Our work is just going to get more important from here. With my connections and your visibility, we could easily parlay this into the executive track. Both of us could—”

  Dizziness roared, and she blinked, unable to listen. Her jaw slowly opened, in shock, and she found she could barely look at him. “You think that question is appropriate right now? This is literally how you’re going to ask?”

  “Just think about it. You can have kids, now that you’re a citizen. With me involved, they’ll be birthrights. They can go to a proper school on Europa while we crack the executive track. We can go places, Natalie.”

  “Children? I thought we were just having fun.”

  He tilted his head in surprise and reached for her hand. “We are, which is why we should go ahead with this.”