Engines of Oblivion Read online

  They were working a new wreck—the quiet carcass of Beijing, black and dead and cut down the center in a slithering swipe by the nastiest lancefire Natalie had ever seen. She could still see the echoes of light shimmering through the windows and breaches in the hull.

  “This just happened. They’re probably still alive over there,” Sharma said, swallowing audibly.

  “We have to help them,” said Natalie, her hand going for the ansible controls.

  “No,” said the doctor. Her fingers rapped against the back of Natalie’s hand, pushing it down and away. The shuttle twisted and shuddered in response, and Natalie spent a moment coaxing it back to the original vector.

  “What kind of doctor are you?”

  Sharma’s mouth settled into a serious line. “If they knew about Beijing, they might know about Ashlan. In that case, we need to get down there as soon as possible.”

  Natalie licked dry lips. “Spies. Of course there are spies.”

  “There are always spies.”

  “You’d know.”

  Sharma paused. “Can we get a more comprehensive look?”

  Natalie brought up the overlay map of the battlefield, dragging the pads of her fingers over the space the London weapon had harried. The whole place was registered with the Corporate Alliance as an exclusion zone, watched over by Aurora, which owned the nearby space. Natalie narrowed her eyes, magnified the view on the ships. They were short-range Armour-made salvagers, stocky like Twenty-Five had been, with not one single plasma lance between them.

  “Where’s their cruiser?” Sharma said.

  Natalie chewed the inside of her cheeks. She heard Ash’s heartbeat thudding in her memory device, and she slid her hand up, increasing the velocity. “Probably out past the asteroid field, making calls? They won’t dare use the Auroran ansible.”

  Sharma inhaled. “Let’s assume we’re the only proper Auroran presence in the system for the foreseeable future.”

  “Probably a good idea.”

  They shared a moment of solemn quiet, and Natalie watched the stars wheel beyond the graveyard, watched faraway Beijing in its death throes, felt the thrum of the ship hauling hard for the planet she never wanted to see again.

  The memory device was firing quietly in the back of her mind, connecting the local stars—the Ballerina, that’s what Captain Keller had called that constellation—with a hundred other memories, things that continued to distract her even as they passed into the radar shadow of Tribulation’s malformed moon. The darkness of the space between the stars became the sky above the Verdict plaza back on Earth. And then she was thinking of her father, of his hair moving in the cold November wind, his eyes as flinty as the weather—

  “You have to control it,” Sharma said, quietly.

  “Control?”

  “The memoria. You have to tell it what’s important, which threads to pursue and which to file away, or else it’ll give everything equal importance and you’ll get hit with a bunch of memories at once. Like what’s happening now. I’ve seen that look before. I can teach you how to do it.”

  “Fuck off. I’m fine.”

  “I had a hand in developing it, so I know how to—”

  “Damn it!” Natalie saw the enemy cruiser only moments before its spinal lance shot hot death toward the yacht, emerging from the pitch darkness of the drapery of the moon. Her haptic response wasn’t nearly fast enough—she swerved bodily to the side and the ship bucked and heaved in response. The ship shook around her—three great concussions, rattling the walls. She felt a tearing under her feet, heard the shattering sigh of plasteel tearing apart, and the whining horror of the engines spinning down.

  That’s okay, she thought, that’s okay, we have secondary systems on this yacht. The memory device was already feeding her fingers Ash’s flight-training tactics, and Natalie felt the heady haptic rush of doing before knowing. She yanked the transport to the side, leaning into the extra velocity from the hit to peel away toward the planet.

  “Tell me what to do,” the doctor hollered.

  “Railgun!”

  “How?” Sharma was already scrambling for the targeting array, her hands dancing as it came up.

  “Think: combat HUD to copilot. Concentrate to grab a target, then fire. Aim for the engines; stopping your enemy or keeping them on a consistent vector makes your job easier. Think of it like robotic surgery.”

  “I don’t know—oh. Oh.”

  It’s basically telepathy, Natalie remembered her old CO saying, as Sharma’s hands grabbed at the battlefield like a child at a toy giveaway, her eyes glassy and darting from side to side, the back railgun ripping suppressing fire just milliseconds later—wide and wild at the start, but more targeted as the doctor’s breath settled, wrapping her mind around her new task.

  The cruiser was squarely behind them now, coming around in a tight arc, and Natalie knew it would be easy to mistake the lumbering mass of the moon for relative safety. They’d be easily pinned there and eventually chased in-system, toward the sun. She gunned the engine, shoving celestium through the grav-drive’s engineering matrix, using the resultant power to send the yacht into a wild spin, to push and pull just long enough to confuse the cruiser’s plasma lance.

  Sharma scattered fire against the enemy railgun points, giving Natalie enough time to whirl the ship around toward the safety of the asteroid field beyond, adrenaline convincing Natalie that she’d make it, that they’d be able to hide, that she’d—

  —incoming, she felt, more than heard; Sharma’s voice ripped through the memory device in a crackling, double-blind chorus. The cruiser fired its plasma lance before she could do anything else. The lance impact hit a millisecond later, and even the cit-quality safety web didn’t stop a jolt that had her screaming, a violent push forward that threw the breath out of her body, that made blood-blisters of the skin on her shoulders. Then: a second impact, one that caused a sick wind to lick at her hair, her chin, her hands, to howl like a hurricane, and she didn’t need the red alarms to know the ship had been breached.

  Natalie looked over her shoulder. It was a small breach. The smallest of mercies. She saw movement to her left; it was Sharma, throwing off her web and securing a tether, her chin resolute, the lines in her face growing deeper, her voice calling out breach sealing protocol. The doctor hung suspended in the rushing air, slapping sealer on the breach, then crashed to the floor like a sack of bricks. As gravity returned, Natalie sucked in a shocked breath, a breath that barely held oxygen. There wouldn’t be enough air to take them to safety—

  —she hauled in another breath—

  —but there would be enough air to take them to the planet.

  If she were a good enough pilot. If she could do the math fast enough.

  Tribulation wheeled below, spreading its bloodstained welcome.

  Natalie plotted a vector with a quick twist of her hand. She knew it was a bad plan. It was the panicked thought of a worm who didn’t want to die, but that didn’t matter: the yacht computer translated her thoughts into flight as fast as she could feed them into the haptics, taking her panic for gospel. The lack of oxygen stealing her breath, she called to Sharma to strap in, because we’re going down to where they can’t fucking follow. With one last shuddering impact direct to the engine, the ship gave up control like a soldier bleeding out, and she allowed gravity to suck them down into a darkening planetary atmosphere intent on chewing their ship into hot coals.

  It was all Natalie could do to keep the damaged yacht from corkscrewing, and the land was coming up fast, too fast, and her thoughts came like gulping shadows, the panicked commands through the haptic a prayer to the god she didn’t believe in, over and over again, slow down, slow down, slow the fuck down—

  —I’m sorry, Ash—

  9

  Natalie’s first conscious breath was hot with the humid tang of Tribulation on her tongue. The doctor’s hysterical laughter rang in her ears.

  She blinked away the bleary, dizzy twist of he
r returning vision, and before she could even determine up from down, she pulled at the safety web digging into her shoulders, fumbling with the fastenings, ripping it aside. The motion was agony; since the crash foam hadn’t deployed well on her side of the cockpit, it hadn’t stopped the fire stemming from the sputtering grav-drive, which had committed suicide to save them from becoming carbon-based smears on the forest floor. Half of Natalie’s safety web was burned away, and some had melted into her skin. Above, the dark Tribulation wind cast itself through the flags made of a spare flightsuit, lighting her nerves from the inside. The memory device ran hot with panicked scenes from her past—

  —fire, fire in the forest, blue fire tugging at her legs, at her hair, teasing at her ankle, the scent of bright death in the air, the scattering of Marley’s body, I hate this goddamn planet so much—

  Damn thing was still glitching.

  She grounded herself in the familiar pull of the planet’s tight gravity, and clambered to her feet, a headache rioting behind her eyes. The pilot’s visor had been ripped from her head in the fall, and the haptics lay, sparking and useless, by her feet. The ceiling was open to the burgundy sky, and a toothpick-sharp tree had punched its way through the cargo space. Even if they’d had a crack mechanic, the yacht would never fly again.

  Sharma groaned from the copilot’s seat. Her head lolled to the side, eyes closed, lips parted, laughing.

  “Doc,” Natalie said, pulling herself closer. “Doc. Ship’s fucked. Can you walk?”

  “Glory,” Sharma breathed, and laughed again.

  “What, is your memoria glitching too?”

  Sharma’s broken fingernails dragged a logy line to a dark place near her shoulder where a piece of shrapnel stuck out like a broken pencil. Her laughter trailed off, the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes slackening slightly, her brown eyes unfocusing, but she didn’t move. The wound was actively bleeding, a dark, seeping red swirled with a silver sheen reminiscent of oil skating over water. Ash’s blood had looked like this when the Vai was bleeding her dry in the bugout bay, a fact that stopped Natalie short. If Sharma had the same sort of celestium sickness—

  —but that was impossible, she couldn’t, she’d be sick like Ash, dead by now—

  “The crash foam was supposed to work,” Sharma said, “executives ride shuttles like these,” then dissolved again into a paroxysm of giddy laughter.

  “I’ll get the shrapnel out,” Natalie said, wondering if it would be appropriate to punch her companion in the face and call it anesthetic.

  “Just toss me the medkit,” the doctor responded.

  “You’re not at the right angle to—”

  “The medkit,” Sharma barked. “You take care of those burns. There’s areprazin in the back, if the foam didn’t ruin it.”

  Natalie wanted to protest, but she reached for the medkit instead, threw it open, and tossed it in front of the doctor. Sharma found a plastic tube, held it in her mouth, and then used a surgical tool to remove the shrapnel, resulting in a gush of blood and a quick slap of an autobandage. By the time Natalie found and smeared on a helping of the burn cream, Sharma was shoving things in a backpack.

  “How far are we from the ag-center?” she said. “Should we fortify or run?”

  Natalie grabbed her own pack. “We run. We left a contrail fancy enough to be seen from Europa.”

  Sharma frowned. “I don’t know how badly your burns will interact with the atmosphere outside.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Let’s go.”

  “You’re the boss, I suppose,” Sharma quipped, quick and clipped.

  Stung with a sudden, crystal-clear annoyance, Natalie tied her jacket around her waist and leaned over toward the door, releasing the lock. She cracked the door, tasting dark smoke and the tough, meaty heft of the alien soil outside. And then they were tumbling out into the Tribulation forest, into the blood and the burgundy and the memories, as the sun dropped further into the swaying treetops.

  Just like the first time.

  The air was heavy, the very taste of it redolent with sulfur and scorched plasteel, soaked with the humid weight Natalie remembered entirely too well from her last time here. Her lungs labored from the very first moment she hit the air; she felt out of breath, permanently scarred from the inside.

  Natalie shook away the echoes. Run, she’d said.

  —the blue screamer lapping at her ankles—

  —to have come so far, to have given so much, to die like this—

  Her muscles ached to the bone. Her eyes focused on the twisted, bloodred brambles on the forest floor. Her vision went blurry and blank.

  The doctor grabbed at her wrist. “Where’s your rebreather?”

  She’d forgotten. Natalie skidded to a stop and turned around, fumbling in her pocket, finding the rebreather, then shoving the thing over her mouth. She felt winded already, like she was a kid again and had been playing tag in the dirt basin of the Washpark amphitheater. The doctor was right—with the planetary atmospinners almost entirely dead, there was very little oxy-mix. A long walk meant toxic claw marks inside her lungs, a delicate spatter of blood. A longer walk might be fatal.

  Natalie took a shallow, painful breath, her hands resting on her aching knees. She could almost feel every single one of her cells on fire, like the atmosphere itself was a twisted Vai weapon intent on taking a torch to her very cytoskeleton. She looked back at Sharma, who was breathing heavily, her mouth open to the air.

  “Where’s yours?”

  “In the ship. Probably.”

  “We’ll share, then,” Natalie groaned. “Two minutes on, two minutes off.”

  “Didn’t think you would.”

  Natalie straightened. She forced the words out. “You’re on my team.”

  The doctor was behind her, strands of black hair loosened from her typical tight bindings. “It’ll only buy us some time, anyway. Colonists weren’t even allowed down here until the oxy-mix ratio was at least eighty-eight percent in the settled areas. This tastes like sixty. If we’re lucky.”

  Natalie wiped her nose with the back of her hand. It came back bloody, and she swore, immediately regretting the wasted breath. The memoria flashed again, and she whacked her head with the butt of her hand. Distracted again. “It’ll be fine. Ashlan will have the atmospinners running at the ag-center. She was a miner; clean air is gonna be pretty high on her to-do list.”

  Sharma’s alarm flattened into obvious suspicion. “It’s not fine. Do I need to tell you what a mix of forty percent methanethiol does to the human lung?”

  “Walk,” said Natalie, shoving the rebreather at Sharma.

  The doctor’s jaw worked, momentarily speechless, and Natalie took the compass out of her pocket, recalibrating it for Tribulation’s magnetic field. The thing whirled and fluttered before it settled on a direction. Natalie sighed, checked for the direction of the lowering sun, and spun around, stomping deeper into the forest. Sharma followed, her breath ragged and audible in the rebreather.

  “Okay, let me see.”

  “See what?”

  Sharma huffed and pushed around to block Natalie’s path. “Your memoria. You’re glitching. You’ve been glitching for hours. And it just got worse when we crashed. Trust me, I can tell.”

  “Because you’re glitching too?”

  “Because I care about you.”

  Natalie coughed. “You care about getting off the planet alive. Let’s not make this any more than it is.”

  The doctor fumbled in her backpack for the tools she’d been using earlier. “I’m just concerned that they put a bomb in your brain, too—”

  “They didn’t put a bomb in my brain.”

  Sharma raised her eyebrows. “Are you willing to bet your life on that?”

  Natalie’s slight hesitation was enough to send her memoria wheeling toward distraction again. The doctor’s face disappeared, replaced by the unwelcome memory of waking up in the medbay after the Battle of Tribulation to a splitting headache, a smiling nur
se, her own name disappearing into the haze. Sharma tapped Natalie’s shoulder, tilting her back into the world. She blinked, and the doctor shoved the rebreather against her mouth. “Take this,” she said, “and sit down.”

  They ducked into an overgrown copse of trees that Natalie deemed defensible enough. She sucked plain, sweet air through the rebreather while Sharma’s hands slipped underneath the device and removed the control-module faceplate, and Natalie felt the dry scratch of her fingers against her skin, the loss of the slight weight that had become the most important part of her body, the tight invisible skein that was the wireless connection between the portion of the memoria embedded in her brain and the control module. Sharma knelt on the wet forest floor, spreading out her tools on a handkerchief, and told her to close her eyes.

  “Are you done?” Natalie complained, closing them until they were barely slits. “If they were monitoring my memories, they would have known Ashlan was alive months ago.”

  The doctor’s hands came up again, this time with an unknown tool, to hover over Natalie’s head. She felt a warmth at her temple, a clicking sensation as the doctor peeled back the safety cover, and a full minute of relatively terrified silence as Sharma poked around inside the other half of the memoria’s workings—the neurotech that interacted directly with the rest of her brain, where her memories were stored. When she pulled back, the doctor’s voice was bright and curious. “No bomb,” she said. “But I do think I can assist. The circuits leading into your cerebral cortex are almost fried from overuse, and the connectors are corroded. I’m going to install something that’ll help.”

  Natalie snorted, keeping her eyes closed. “So you’re a neurotech now?”

  “Been one.” She rustled in her tool bag, drew out a spanner and a few more tools Natalie didn’t recognize, then spent some time drilling around under her skull, which wasn’t painful, but still made her teeth rattle. Natalie grabbed at the rebreather, took a long draught like in the old holos, and then dangled it in Sharma’s direction.