“I can’t even believe you.”
“I know it’s not what you’re used to where you come from, but—”
She sighed, rolled her eyes, and pushed off, leaving him standing by the couch. She shoved her hand in her pocket. “Out.”
His eyes widened. She thought she registered genuine surprise. “I thought you’d be happy,” he said.
“It’s nice of you to ask,” she lied, hoping it would make him leave.
It did not. “There’s someone else. Ascanio? I mean, we only have to contract for a year or two if you want—”
“That asshole?” she said, frustration building. “Okay, the answer’s not no, but it’s just—not a good time for me to discuss this. Maybe when Baywell surrenders. It’s not you. It’s not anything you’ve done. And we are … I’m just…”
“I get it,” he said, after a moment, with a dark look on his face that said he most certainly did not. “But I’m not going to wait forever.”
“I get it. You’re going places.”
“And so are you. We could go together.”
“I know.”
He kissed his fingers and brushed them against her shoulder as he walked to the door, and she stiffened at his touch. He paused, as if he wanted to say something else, then pulled the door open. She wanted to feel something, wanted to feel heat, a spark, anger, disgust, love or lust. She wanted to feel.
I should be happy he’s interested, she thought, closing the door. He’s a nice guy. I should just say yes for a year, forget to tell him I’m never going to get my reprocontrol removed, go to all the Ward-line parties, squeeze what I can out of it.
But all she could think about was that his skin was the wrong color, his laugh the wrong shade, that his wrists were thin and his chin too different, that his humor lacked a particular edge. That he wasn’t—someone else. Someone faceless, someone forgotten. Someone lost.
The door rang.
She popped up, apologies on her lips, and opened the door again.
“Em, I’m sorry—”
“Tell the executives.”
When she looked up, her belly unclenching, she found herself face to face with Cora Aulander, the board’s tight-lipped personnel director.
“Come with me, please,” Ms. Aulander said.
“I was going to take a shower,” Natalie replied.
“Sorry,” she said, shrugging slightly, as if Natalie’s filthy state wasn’t her problem. “They want you right away.”
5
Aulander’s info-implant was an understated matte gold—awfully drab, compared to the screeching embellishment usually favored by Auroran executives and their striving hangers-on. As they walked, Natalie stared at the executive’s tight-fitting, ruby-studded jacket, her briarpatch eyes, the ship-pallid hands that had lost any sense of planetside glow. She dredged through her memoria to find some appropriate small talk that would be both practical and complimentary, some of the quietly obsequious shit she learned from her former ship’s exec, Alison Ramsay, back before Ramsay had betrayed Twenty-Five to Baywell. The personnel director remained calmly unmoved through the walk, responding in polite half statements, until she turned a corner, palmed an unassuming door lock, and ushered her bodily into a boardroom.
Any thoughts that Natalie would be taken up to the executive level died as soon as she saw who was inside.
“Be welcome, Ms. Chan. Please, sit down,” said Joseph Solano, Aurora Intergalactic’s CEO.
The boardroom itself looked fairly executive, plush in that rich, Earthbound way she was still becoming accustomed to, drenched in wooden accents, comfortable seats, and a kind, yellow glow, light-years away from the bare metal and bright rooms of her indenture and the charcoal concrete and crumbling marble of her childhood. It made her itch, made her grind her teeth. How had they arrived here? Had this room been here the whole time? What else was hidden behind Vancouver’s quiet gray doors? Was the executive level so sacrosanct that the entire fucking board had put this room here just to talk to citizens? Natalie cast her gaze around, suddenly aware of the tightness of her muscles, the twist of her spine, the half-hunched position of her back, and met the calm eyes and blank faces of the Auroran executive board.
The men and women who had thought switching out her perfectly good plan with a last-minute war crime would be a fabulous idea.
The rig-induced kinks in her back flared up, and Natalie winced in response. If cits were lucky, they met the CEO once or twice in their lives, at promotion ceremonies or recognition luncheons. Never so close. Never in a boardroom like this. And never in front of the whole fucking board.
She thought of the kowtow crap she’d tried on Aulander earlier, and pushed it to the side. That wasn’t going to get her out of this because nobody was brought in front of the entire board to be praised. Her cit tags lay heavy against her throat.
Citizens didn’t have to bow.
So she stared instead.
At Solano, at his dark brown hair, at the way the wrinkles crowding his eyes grew darker with the deepening of his frown. At the fact that he was gaining wrinkles at all, in a roomful of people who looked like they spent half their day getting anti-aging treatments. He wasn’t like the others—and maybe it was the height of power, to know you could let yourself go a little, Natalie thought. To be secure enough to allow the existence of the lines creasing the corner of his mouth as he gave her a solemn battering ram of a smile.
“You will want to sit,” he repeated.
Natalie slid into the offered chair exactly like her old captain Kate Keller taught her, swinging one ankle over the other, folding her blood-cracked palms over the nearest knee, feeling hot and nauseous. This was a trap. It was almost certainly a trap.
The executives—eight of them, skinny fuckers in blue suits, their diamond rings catching the starlight outside—stared right back, clearly bored. She thought that they’d be happier about her involvement with the afternoon’s “win,” but maybe permanent bitchface was the price you paid for becoming an executive.
“Do you know why you’re here?” said Mr. Solano.
Stop this patronizing indenture bullshit and just tell me, Natalie wanted to say. Instead, she twisted her lips like she’d just sucked down a lemon. Her hand flashed up to brush her cit tags again, to remind herself that she had license to speak.
“Let me guess, sir,” she said. “You’re going to apologize for what you made me do this afternoon.”
One of the executives—Vidal, she thought, her thick yellow hair drawn up in a complicated pile—laughed out loud, then exchanged glances with Solano. “That’s an … interesting theory, but no.”
“The operation was properly planned between Applied Kinetics, Ground Operations, and Fleetcomm,” Natalie said, hoping she sounded more stable than she felt. “We all agreed that an EMP kicker would have taken out threats while leaving noncombatants alive, which was the goal.”
Raynor Stephenson, the host of Corporate Idol—spindly fingers, sharp chin, eyes so blue they might have been newborn-gray, the most recognizable of the others—spread his fingers palm-down against the table. “The goal, Ms. Chan, was to control Baylor-Wellspring facilities on Bittersweet. The only goal. I understand you don’t agree with what was done. There was a reason we sent down a set of perfectly capable full indentures to run the suit. Was it our fault you chose differently?”
“They weren’t capable.”
Stephenson opened his mouth to respond, but Solano lifted his hand, ostentatious rings glinting in the overhead light. “Was it our fault you chose to go of your own free will?” he said.
Natalie winced. “I didn’t know about the change in plan. It was manipulative.”
“We followed Company policy. Did you?”
“No, sir.” She wanted to disappear into the shining floor. “But—”
“And that’s the problem with you, Ms. Chan,” Solano said. He sighed, then brought his hands together in a loud clap that made her nearly jump in her chair. “You do
n’t trust Company policy to guide your decisions.”
“That’s not true, sir,” she said. “Shipboard Company policy is that experienced personnel should take lead on crucial matters.”
Solano’s eyes narrowed on her; his left index finger tapped out a quick, bothered tattoo on the desktop. “Shipboard Company policy is that you follow directions given to you by the captaincy, shipside officers, and members of the board,” he said. “We’re not having this discussion, not when you’ve refused treatment for ester intoxication, and you’re technically still high.”
Natalie recoiled as if she’d been slapped. “Was it Company policy to inject that much ester into my system in the first place, and then call me to a meeting in front of the entire board when they knew I just needed to sleep it off?”
“You would have made a different decision, if you’d been in command of the mission?”
“Of course.”
He smiled, mirthless. “But you weren’t in command. And here you are, still complaining about it like you don’t know any better. I thought I could trust you. I had you on tap to be elevated. Instead, I find—” He shrugged, trailing off, and Natalie realized, with growing horror, that she’d said all the wrong things. “We’ll send some detox tea with you on your way to Tribulation.”
All Natalie could manage was a quiet, shocked “What?”
“We’re sending you to Tribulation.”
“No, sir,” she said. Her cit tags felt like anvils. “I’m a citizen. I can refuse.”
Solano traded a silent glance with Aulander. The blond woman glided over to the interface. She reached into her pocket, located a small personal drive encrusted with diamonds, and activated the drive reader.
The room burst into light. On the table interface before her was a scattering of stars in a pattern even the Earthbound knew: the famous view from the most important building in human history, the intercorporate comm station that monitored the White Line. Beyond it lay the roiling violet-white nebula and Vai space, where humans had never gone.
Ships gathered there.
Alien ships, Vai ships, wearing clammy silver hulls, their sharp lines tracing the thin arc of a dancer’s outstretched arm. Ships humming the hulking beat of vvvvaaaaiiiiiiii and bristling with the kind of death that she could never forget, the kind of bright fear etched into her being at the cellular level even as the memory weapon ripped everything else away.
She felt a stab of inchoate terror. “Is that real? That—that can’t be real.”
“It’s quite real. We could not afford to lose Bittersweet today, Ms. Chan. The survival of our company is at stake. We need people who can fight the Vai, and for that, we need the technology that made Ashlan Jackson. We need to fight them on their terms this time, with weapons that can deal actual damage to their ships and soldiers. Unless you would trust Baylor-Wellspring to lead the fight that will come?”
“No, sir,” she whispered.
Solano nodded. “I am glad we agree. Because this, Ms. Chan, is real as well.”
He waved his hand, and the interface changed, from wild, unbelievable photographs to a standard medical interface—similar to something she’d last seen when recovering from hypothermia on Rio de Janeiro after Wellspring agent Alison Ramsay’s betrayal of Twenty-Five.
Natalie’s heart banged fast and wild in her ears. She felt like the others could hear it echoing through the room, rattling the floor under her boots, and flushed—until she realized that they could, and that it wasn’t her heart at all, but a recording fed through the renderbots above.
“I don’t understand,” she said.
Solano nodded. “You thought you would get away with it. You thought you could ascend to citizenship while protecting one of the worst criminals Aurora has ever known—a human being, if we can even call her that, who murdered hundreds of Auroran citizens and indentures in one remorseless breath to rob us of what we legally owned.”
“I—criminal? Sir, I—”
The CEO raised his hand, and Natalie’s stammered protest died behind her teeth. Her confusion was replaced with a nauseous certainty. The heartbeat in the recording thrummed, dragged at her molars, echoed her own heart. It was ragged, half-pathetic, sick. She knew who it belonged to. She’d heard it before, on the bridge of London, wrapped in a blanket as they waited for Rio de Janeiro to answer their distress call, her arm linked in Ashlan’s, her frostbit thumb pressing tight against the outside of her former friend’s wrist.
“Our cruiser working the Tribulation battlefield picked up this broadcast coming up from the planet. Ingest identified it as the heartbeat of Ashlan Jackson, transmitted by the monitors we installed the last time she was on Rio. Ms. Chan, you told us she was dead by your hand on London due to an accident and that her body could not be retrieved. That’s the story you gave your team, at least. The funny thing about that is that none of them saw it happen. You sent them away.”
“Sir, I—”
“Save it,” he said. “You lied.”
Natalie straightened her back. “I did what was best for the Company.”
“It’s not for an indenture to make that decision,” Solano said. “Misrepresentation is cause for termination. Think very carefully about what you want to say next.”
Natalie fought an electric shiver that made her want to bolt, to fight, to drag herself up and gash the pretty wooden table with her diamond-bright fingernails. Instead, she nearly bloodied her tongue with a bite from her back molar and let the mounting dread paste her body to the chair. Solano was leaning on her old indenture’s instinct to tell the truth, but which truth? Watching Ward and the executives had taught her that truth only went one way. What they fed to her was more like a story. Perhaps she could get away with her own story now that she was a citizen. Part of the truth. Enough to pass the test he was presenting her with.
Enough to help Ash.
“I did what was best for the Company,” she repeated. “She wasn’t going to come along quietly and I wasn’t going to shoot her for it. But you wouldn’t give me a direct order to murder a shipmate, would you, sir?”
A nasty frisson went through the board at this, their heads looking this way and that, at this member of the board and the next without even the courtesy of a whisper, and Natalie realized that the executives were talking to each other somehow—maybe through the new superhaptic upgrades the Company was in the process of installing everywhere. She flushed, sitting up straighter. Her old drill instructor’s voice came out of nowhere. She jumped in her chair. Show ’em you’re Auroran, you fucking niblets.
Solano pursed his lips again, his eyebrows raised. “That’s not the order I gave you, no.” He paused. “Unfortunately, we no longer have time to figure out the arcane and archaic technology below. We need a template. We need Ashlan. Now.”
“If I’d been allowed to use the kicker today, we’d have people to interrogate about that. We might even have an actual template body to work from.”
The youngest board member, Aileen Amberworth, wore coarse black hair ribboned so tightly Natalie thought she might be trying too hard. She cleared her throat and tapped on the table.
“Ms. Chan,” she said. “It’s very clear even from our earliest investigations that Baylor-Wellspring wasn’t able to reconstruct the experiments that led to Ashlan’s continued existence. If they did, there would have been survivors. There were not. So you’ll take a small team to Tribulation, retrieve Ashlan Jackson, and bring her home.”
“Sir, I have the puppet rig project to finish—”
Solano nodded. “Mr. Ward can do that. You are the only one who can command a mission to Tribulation. Nobody else knows the area like you, and on top of that, you have military experience. We have actionable intelligence from our cruiser Beijing that both Baylor-Wellspring and InGen are already present on-planet. Everyone has seen the ships massing at the White Line. With that kind of threat, the exclusion zone might as well be a fairy tale.”
Natalie resisted the urge to roll h
er eyes. “Intelligence couldn’t keep the spies out?”
“Nobody can keep the spies out, Ms. Chan. Not with something this big. You can only attempt to get ahead of the game.” He sighed. “No matter why she chose to flee with that weapon, Ashlan is still one of ours. We need her more than ever, and she needs us. And—”
“She’s not going to want to come.”
Solano cleared his throat. “That does not matter. And you need us, unless you’d like to be reassigned to another seven years of indenture to make up for what you took from honest, hardworking Aurorans.”
Natalie’s shoulders felt wire-tight as she cast around for a way out. “She might be too sick to move.”
A third board member clapped his hands together—Alistair Coriolis, she guessed, from the distinctive tornado-tight birthright tattoos that spiraled up the left side of his neck and around his long fingers. “We’re sending a medic with you. She’s part of the team that developed a—what did you call it, Joseph? A treatment?—for her condition. With the memory device and our recent superhaptic developments, we can keep her alive long enough to develop a real cure. Which we will give her free of charge.”
“She won’t believe that.”
“She will if it comes from you.”
Natalie stayed quiet for a moment before responding. “How long is ‘enough’?”
“Four months. Five.”
Natalie nodded. Her eyes went back to the video from the White Line playing on the interface, the slivering, frightening Vai ships collecting there like a necklace of misshapen pearls, and felt a halting, unwanted hope. “How am I supposed to convince her to come back if the promise of a cure isn’t enough? Because I worked with her for a long time, and I know that sure as hell won’t be enough.”
The CEO shrugged. “That’s up to you. Just get it done.”
“I imagine I’ll be given a fire team?”
“You’ll pick them up in-system. Beijing will be there to provide material support and extra manpower if you need it, and two other cruisers are due to arrive within the week—but to be honest, Ms. Chan, we don’t want to spook her. Ash will respond to a friendly face. Your friendly face.”
Engines of Oblivion Page 5