Engines of Oblivion Read online

  “So the bomb’s controller is in your memory device?” she asked.

  Sharma looked mildly disappointed at the conversational shift, but she didn’t stop it. Instead, she tapped her temple. “Yes. It sorts through everything I file away in there each day, flagging anything that might be concerning to the board. I can’t betray you or work against the purposes of the mission, which is to keep Ash safe. I have some latitude there, so you don’t need to worry.”

  “I really don’t honestly care if your head explodes.”

  Sharma raised her eyebrows. “This isn’t just about the kidney infection.”

  One last release form popped up. Natalie stabbed it. “Aren’t you smart?”

  Sharma flipped the memory device over, placing it in her lap, knitting her fingers over it, going quiet for a few seconds too long for Natalie’s comfort. “I never betrayed you. You and the others were never supposed to be involved at all.”

  “So you could profit all on your own.”

  Sharma’s gaze sharpened. “We’re not out for profit. After seeing what happened at Tribulation, I’m sure you can agree that nobody who is should have access to zero-point Heart technology.”

  “Everybody’s out for profit.”

  Sharma’s silence was coated with a crackling annoyance. “I sincerely doubt you’re here simply out of the kindness of your heart, Ms. Chan.”

  Natalie clenched her teeth, making it through the end of the major-systems checklist, moving on to the guidance system. She was running out of status buttons, of lists, of rechecks, of things that could take her attention off the conversation. She felt stiff and angry and tight, like someone had wrapped her chest in a wide rubber band.

  “And I suppose they forced you to make the redshift star work,” she said.

  Sharma’s smile thinned. “Is that your guess?”

  “It makes sense to me.” Natalie shrugged. “I’m pretty sure you’re the only one with the skillset to figure out a way to set off a molecular without a trigger.”

  Sharma nodded slowly, then exhaled. She picked up the flimsies again, placing them in her lap, smoothing them with an open palm. “I was just as surprised as you that it succeeded. I told the board that the task was impossible. I still don’t honestly know what I did right.”

  “Don’t fucking lie.”

  “I wish I’d gotten it wrong.”

  Stab. God, preflight had gotten long since the Company had to start acknowledging her personhood. “Maybe you did get it wrong.”

  Sharma paused, pursing her lips, considering that. “I don’t understand.”

  “It worked because there was a trigger present on Bittersweet.”

  “That would be the most logical thing, except that Wellspring never really knew what they were doing in those labs.” Sharma shook her head. “Ash, her friend, the others—those human triggers were by-products of the weapons development process, not the original goal. They never even knew what they had.”

  Stab. “They had years afterward to figure it out.”

  “True.” Sharma still didn’t look convinced. She shuffled the flimsies, then smoothed them again. “That would still mean that a traitor on their side knew what Aurora was planning and triggered the star exactly when and how we wanted it triggered. Other scientists would find that unbelievable.”

  Natalie shook her head. “Well, I saw something.”

  Sharma clapped the nearby tablet-top shut and stowed it. “I believe you. We’ll figure it out together.”

  Natalie snorted. “You make it sound so fun.”

  “We’re a lot alike, you and I.”

  “Right.”

  “Just because the corporate system in which we are all trapped is the only system that seems to work out here doesn’t mean that it’s infallible. Or right. Or good.” She paused. “You agree with that.”

  “You’re a birthright. You can say that. You can do whatever you want.”

  “Ha. If you think I get any more say about my destiny than you do, then you’re—”

  Natalie tore her eyes away from the last release form. “You’re a Sharma.”

  “And they still put a bomb in my head.” The doctor’s words were pointed, loud, forward. “We do what we can, where we are, with what we have. You need to stop feeling guilty about what happened on Bittersweet. Concentrate on Ash now.”

  Natalie had very little to say to that. Instead, she watched the computer logic subsystems come in as green, and moved on to navigation backups. “Maybe you can just wave your hand and make it go away. I can’t.”

  “You don’t have a bomb in your head, but you might as well.” She smiled. “Unlike me, though, you can choose to do something about it. Do you think Joseph will stop at Applied Kinetics, Ms. Chan? They triggered a redshift star without a trigger. Everything is a possibility now, and if we don’t work to control the narrative and the science as best as we can, what we saw this morning is just the beginning of a new and frightening world.”

  Natalie tensed. “And how can you control the narrative when you’re doing their dirty work?”

  “You do know how infiltration works?” the doctor said, clipped and annoyed. “We need resources to live out here, and the corporations have those resources. Inside Aurora, inside the boardrooms in other corporations—that’s where change can begin. And things will change. The Vai are so beautiful, Ms. Chan. They’re cooperative in a way humanity could never achieve. Do you think a society that exists only to compete, like ours, could develop a thing as beautiful as the Heart? With what we learn from the Vai, we don’t have to burn the corporations to the ground. We can change them for the better. If you could just see—”

  A sudden wild anger twisted a knot in the center of Natalie’s heart, and her fingers closed on the edge of the pilot’s interface, tight enough to make her knuckles go white. She tried to breathe. “Are you trying to recruit me? After everything I saw?”

  Sharma’s hands twisted together once more, then dropped to her sides. “We can help you, Natalie.”

  We can help you. The doctor’s words stoked the old rage, the old helplessness, the part of her that was dead on a battlefield somewhere, and she slammed silent and shaking through the last of the cross-check, then sent the signal to detach from the airlock. Guilt was an ungrateful guest in her head, cropping up when she least needed or wanted it to, whispering it’s your fault it’s your fault you’ve ruined everything even when she knew she hadn’t. Saving Ash’s life by shooting the alien hadn’t been a choice. Living through the war had been pure luck. And the redshift star—that was Sharma’s doing, hers and Solano’s and Aurora’s. Natalie had been fresh out of choices when she’d taken her place in the puppet rig.

  This time, Natalie was going to get to choose.

  She was going to claw it out of the fabric of the universe if she had to.

  Sharma focused on Natalie as if she were expecting a response, then picked up a flimsy when she realized one wasn’t coming. Natalie brightened the HUD lights, drowning out her companion’s presence. If she could pretend the doctor were elsewhere, she could breathe easily. She could relax. The departure could be all business, and for a few glorious moments, Natalie could let the information from her HUD flow in and out of her ears, could pretend that Sharma was a person she actually liked—Ash, perhaps, or Keller, who had been the first to encourage her to learn the pilot’s trade. She could calm down.

  The doctor was quiet during the glide to a safe distance, the confirmation of the vector plot, and the nauseous twist of the long-range engines spinning to life. She worked on a tablet tilted toward the ceiling, and Natalie caught glances of chemical formulae and long, incomprehensible strings of numbers.

  Natalie concentrated on the hum of the ship beneath her feet, thought of Kate Keller, the way her old captain would place her hands gently on the console, as if the ship were a friend, a lover, a family member, ceding herself over to the white noise of the engines building up the gravity fields that powered the yacht’s movem
ent through space. Natalie understood now. How Kate had held herself alone for so long, how even then her walls could crumble. When the star-studded black of ordinary space ceded to the total darkness of the distance drive, Natalie slumped in her seat. Thought of the yacht as a friend. Her only friend. Her fist closed in on itself. She felt a delicious ache in her joints as she settled in, kicked her legs up on the dashboard, and closed her eyes.

  8

  The trip to Tribulation took three strained days. They talked, when they had to, and Sharma attempted numerous times to get Natalie to open up. Natalie would respond in monosyllables, followed by stuffing her mouth full of whatever ready-to-eat travel meal was on the top of the pile.

  Natalie spent most of the time planning the rest of App-K’s superhaptic upgrade on a tablet, with Sharma scrawling medical nonsense on the backs of old flimsies. Ingest had already placed most of the renderbots it needed to process daily feeds from her department, and she felt mildly peeved that they seemed to be getting along quite well without her. After reading a whiny petition from Ascanio and half the department about how much the Ingest rig updates would increase their productivity, she sighed and finally signed off, allowing the interface tattoo appointments to go forward at Ward’s discretion.

  Natalie wondered how the birthright class was taking it, this gate-crashing of one of their favorite haute styles. She giggled under her breath. Tattoos used for direct connection to devices didn’t sound Auroran. It sounded like a software cult idea, a Verdict idea. She imagined Aurora’s richest and brightest sailing through the parties Natalie was still not allowed to attend, boasting about their biohacks, not knowing they’d been developed on forgotten, starving Earth. The more she thought about it, the more the wild idea made sense. She barely remembered that her father had been working on biohacking issues when she left—and what was laying down tattooed paths for computers to pass orders directly in and out of a brain if not the purest form of biohacking? Had one of her old buddies gone corporate in the meantime? She made a note to search the Company directory when she returned to Vancouver.

  Natalie was asleep in one of the transport’s thin bunks when the autopilot disengaged fifteen minutes earlier than scheduled. Her dream—there had been blood in it, and something sweet and violent—disappeared in the bleary twist of the descent from fulldrive. She pushed herself upright, shrugging into her rumpled jacket, leaving behind the vat-beef sandwich she’d put next to her shoes for breakfast.

  In the copilot’s seat, Sharma sat dull-eyed but awake, her tablets tossed to the floor, her fingers flicking at the haptic controls with the half-graceful talent of someone who knew just enough about what they were doing to be dangerous.

  “They didn’t teach you to take a ship out of fulldrive in human sacrifice school, did they? Lemme at it,” Natalie said, stifling a yawn.

  “An alarm sounded,” said Sharma, her eyes traced with the beginnings of exhaustion. She abandoned the pilot’s seat with a grateful lift of her left hand. “I reacted, and it—”

  “Read your reactions. Right. It does that.”

  As Natalie sat down and reached for the haptic crown, she noticed that the faceplate of Sharma’s memory device lay unhooked on the interface nearby, next to a bag of half-used tools. The doctor grabbed it as soon as she saw Natalie’s attentions, snapping it back into place above her left eyebrow.

  Natalie cleared her throat. “We’re just inside the asteroid belt, where we should be. Did you check for sensor glitches?”

  “I—” Sharma paused. “No. This is a late-model yacht. It’s too new to have sensor problems.”

  Natalie narrowed her eyes. “You’re awfully trusting for a traitor to the brand.”

  Sharma’s lips widened slightly. “I’m a pragmatist. Mr. Solano is not going to send out two of his most important stakeholders in the kind of rustbucket he gives to everyone else.”

  “Oh. Right. Is that the kind of expertise you get from running covert organizations that rip the hearts out of people?”

  Sharma smacked her lips in annoyance. “Do you ever get tired of trying to get a rise out of me?”

  “Never,” Natalie said.

  She put on the haptics and felt the stir of the neural patches against her fingers, her wrists, her temples. Numbers and lines in blue and gold erupted in front of her eyes as the HUD settled in next to her irises, humming hot and sure where it interfaced with her memory device. Fancy as hell, but not really anything different from the kind of hand-flown ship that had taken her away from Earth for the last time ten years ago.

  And that was the thing about haptics, she thought, buckling the safety mesh at her shoulders and waist. War. Piloting. Science. It was all process and checklists and muscle memory just like it always had been, and as helpful as haptics were, gravity did not forgive, even the grav-drive. If you didn’t know what you were doing, the reduction in lag was no help.

  They spent some time in their now-familiar silence, watching Tribulation’s sun blossom from tiny speck to riotous mass, the asteroids passing them by like stones in a river. Natalie accessed the engine, antigrav, and navigational settings. She sent out an approach ping to the Beijing comms, but received nothing in return, which set tiny, loud alarms ringing inside her skull. Her stomach churning, she focused on the long-range sensors as soon as they came online.

  “Well, shit,” she said, a second later.

  “What?”

  Natalie switched the HUD to combat view, then pushed the information to the main interface so Sharma could see it. The doctor’s eyes widened at the sight of ships settled in tight orbit of the dead colony planet, around the wrecks of London and Mumbai. None of them displayed the safe blue IFFs of Auroran friendlies.

  “Where’s Beijing? Our salvagers? They’re supposed to be enforcing the no-fly zone,” Natalie said. “Those IFFs near the wrecks are InGen, and the ones hanging by the moon? Penumbra. I don’t read any Auroran signals at all. This is really strange. Confirm that for me?”

  Sharma’s fingers waved. “I don’t see Beijing, either,” she said. “There has to be a good explanation. Maybe it’s patrolling the other side of the system?”

  The unease stirring up Natalie’s sour stomach became stronger, and her hands hovered for a moment over the fire controls. She was tempted to warm up the railguns.

  “Yeah, well, I don’t know if it’ll be a good explanation.”

  “Jumping to conclusions is bad science.”

  “Sticking with the previous plan when conflicting evidence is presented is bad recon.”

  Sharma considered the battlefield, the tiny ships displaying InGen gold flickering like honeybees between the picked-over Auroran wrecks. Her hand clenched for a moment, and she dragged it away from the keyboard, as if stopping herself. “Maybe an emergency? They could be offering assistance to Beijing. Most of these companies are still bound by the rules of the Corporate Alliance, even if Baywell dropped out.”

  The adrenaline was back, the twist at the back of Natalie’s neck, the huff of short, stolen air in her lungs. Dismay. The birth of panic. She’d felt this shatter her body so many times she knew exactly how to breathe through it. In. Out. In. Slowly. “I don’t think so.”

  “No?”

  “Fuck no. We’ll take a long arc behind the dark side of the moon, hide in the radar shadow, then slip into the atmosphere hidden by the glint of the sun. They won’t even know we’re here,” she said, drawing up a vector plot as she said it.

  Sharma smiled knowingly. “You’re going to be a good executive,” she said.

  “And have to answer to people born with their thumbs up their asses?”

  “Well,” Sharma said. “Birthrights have their uses, as you’ll find out soon enough.”

  “Aren’t you a birthright?” Natalie responded, keeping her eyes on the HUD, skirting asteroids with a practiced hand. The fact she could do that made her proud. Just this time last year, she’d still been training with Ash in a pod, still unsteady with the math, the force
of the grav-drive, the pitch and the yaw. Now, with haptics training, the transport felt like an extension of her body, exactly like the puppet rig, and it was fun. This exhilaration must have been what Ash had loved: the kick of freedom in a life that was a cage, a taste of flight in a life spent underground. She could understand wanting more. Getting addicted to it.

  “I suppose,” Sharma said, again.

  “What do you mean, you suppose?”

  “I don’t entirely remember.”

  Natalie pushed the tiller, charting an arc out of the asteroid field. “That’s convenient. You remember what you did in your death cave.”

  The doctor’s face settled into stone. “I worked with the Heart for years. You get used to losing things. You get used to navigating around the holes in your mind, even without the memory device. You’re doing it right now. You’ve obviously figured out how to live without Len.”

  “Who?”

  The doctor’s face settled, the barest hint of sadness smoothing out the lines under her eyes. “Well. That’s unfortunate.” She paused. “Or maybe it’s for the best.”

  “Stop trying to bait me.” The anger was sudden and inexplicable, riding the back of Natalie’s tongue, and she swallowed it. “Just watch for Beijing, okay?”

  They rode in unfriendly silence through the asteroid belt, Natalie mentally listing off of how many ways she could abandon the doctor without killing her—not that she would, of course, but she couldn’t deny that fantasizing about it made her feel better. Tribulation gobbled up the horizon on the other side, wine-soaked and graceful; its star hovered small and far to port, lighting the battlefield in fits of sparkling silver. As they grew closer, Natalie identified the familiar shattered hulks of London and Mumbai, black against black, the backdrop to the worst three days of her life.

  Around them was the wreckage of the Second Battle of Tribulation, the one she’d barely escaped: nearly a dozen massive cruisers, their lines cut and shattered. Around the scattered chaff was a buzz of unwelcome industry—squat, half-square ships in formation just outside the battlefield, salvage pods glimmering in the Tribulation sunlight. But they weren’t working the older wrecks, the familiar, bent curves she’d grown to understand last year.