Engines of Oblivion

by Karen Osborne

  This is someone’s body, she remembered. Thousands of someones.

  “Okay, Doc,” she breathed, keeping her voice low. Low like church. Low like an ambush. “I don’t see the obvious interface you’re talking about. How far do I have to go?”

  There was no answer.

  She thumbed the comm. Silence. Not even static.

  She would not panic.

  She was beyond panic.

  With the comm down, she could hear the ship, muffled by the coldsuit. The walls seemed to be breathing, long straight exhalations that the memoria told her were actually the breaths of her first boyfriend, the one she’d met in the ordnance-training barracks where names didn’t matter. It swore in golden certainty that she was right back there in her thin bunk, her ear pressed against his chest, listening to the wheezing of his lungs and the echoing thump of his heart, like he was some ancient chamber of secrets.

  “Where the hell are you, Reva?” she said. “Ash? Kate?”

  Nothing.

  It was too late to go back. Natalie traced her next few steps according to where bone met bone, then scurried carefully across the pulpy floor. The room narrowed slightly toward the apex, where the flesh shifted to a much brighter red. Her muscles felt tight, tighter than they had any right to be, and she ached down to her teeth.

  Finally, Natalie’s torchlight found her destination. Natalie was tempted to call it a slaughter—but no, she thought, because it was clear to her now that these bodies had not yet been alive. They lay in front of her like cadavers in state, silver-white skin thinly arranged over sensible bone, connected with arteries, tubules, and flaps of the skin to the floor and the walls like they’d grown there. Maybe they had, she thought, her stomach doing a backflip. She inched closer, to see their eyes, but was distracted almost immediately by the Heart, trilling excitement and bliss under her skin.

  Something was answering, singing a song that wasn’t quite a tune, using notes formed by a throat that did not exist. The closer Natalie came to the apex of the room, the louder it got, and her eyes started to pick up a violet turbulence that by now was as familiar as the taste of blood on her tongue. She knew what she had to do as if she’d always known, as if her heart beat not with leukocytes and plasma but with Vai silver. Moving toward the apex of the room felt exactly like coming home. Her arms moved as if she weren’t in control, removing the Heart from the sling and placing it at her feet. She heard a click that was also a slurp.

  One of the bodies moved.

  Sat up, slowly.

  Opened its eyes.

  Sharma had said blood contact, and Ash had said wrist to wrist, but the voices in her blood told her anywhere would do. The knife was in her hand before she knew it, and all thoughts of being careful evaporated into the too-thick air. She heard the aching rip of her suit fabric, the arctic laceration of the knife going into her vein, and the hot regret that rushed in right after. She offered it to the alien, who slipped its long, knife-vine fingers around her wrist.

  And she fell.

  Natalie struggled through it: a thousand feet, a million, until she couldn’t stop falling, until her body went limp with exhaustion, until she became the fall itself, until she was no longer Natalie and existed only as a moment between moments, as a cold wind in a canyon. The cliff was too far away, the ground a yawning lie. And the silver was on her tongue, drenching her with presence, with the murmuring breath of a consciousness that stretched across the nonexistent sky, that wrapped around her mind, hot and alien beyond the whisper of her functioning air filter.

  She felt like she was on fire, every nerve jangling, the silver a waterfall in her mind. She was drowning, her mouth full of viscous liquid, her mind being rewritten. The memoria couldn’t handle the input; it gave her people she didn’t know, faces she didn’t recognize, places she’d never been, things that were absurd, feelings that were impossible—

  Hello, she heard—

  Are you here, she said.

  We,

  said the thousand,

  and sang in roses,

  in the song of morning light on metal,

  in the smell of a thousand seasides

  Natalie had never seen.

  She heard a wild clattering. Bathed in violet light, her body far behind, the only metaphor Natalie could think of for what was going on was upload. She didn’t need to speak, didn’t need to think, because the silver knew her, was inside her, was her.

  Natalie bled into the poison air, too overwhelmed to move. This was not the choir Ash had described in the transport. This was an ocean, a desert, a crashing sibilance that went down to the atom. They were voices, but only because that was the nearest thing her memoria could give her; she imagined the thing smoking and sparking on her head from the effort to make sense of this impossible song.

  Of course, she said, clawing herself back from the brink. Ash only met a colony. This is the civilization. This is the whole fucking thing.

  Natalie tried to push forward with the script Ash gave her, but her mouth was full of hot blood, red and silver. She gulped it back down, trying to make room for language. The room became brighter, slippery, wrong, and she could see the silver rolling through the walls like blood careening back to a beating heart, just like the thin, squelching insides of a Vai weapon. She knew that pattern, the motherboard-jagged movement of viscous liquid against the gaunt layers inside. The ship itself was a molecular.

  Ash had been wrong.

  They didn’t know we could die, she’d said. She’d turned the war into a misunderstanding, and desired to make peace. But how could she make peace, when the very existence of the aliens was death itself?

  She choked down a scream. Did Ash know? Did she care? Natalie wanted to say fuck it to the plan, to spit out every atrocity she’d seen at Cana against every prospective offer of friendship, to let them know how they’d woven themselves into the horror that was her life. How was she supposed to negotiate a truce when she hated, hated, hated—

  Natalie felt a hand on her shoulder and whirled.

  Her father stood behind her. A hallucination. He was bearded, older—wearing the old sweater he’d given her three days before she left, his hair rustling in the alien atmosphere like it had in the winter wind that kicked up as she walked away from Verdict for the last time. She knew the two days’ worth of stubble curling around his chin. She knew the sad light in his eyes. He stood just a foot away from her, edges lost in mist, as if Ingest had paused halfway through a render.

  You wish to talk to this iteration. The sound of a human voice, although no lips moved.

  No. Not him. The words echoed around her like bells.

  Speak, she heard. You know where they are.

  Natalie felt a tickle at the back of her throat,

  wrapping her cerebellum,

  an ice pick behind her temples.

  The Vai was not wrong.

  Let us be, she said. Go home.

  He had a galaxy behind his eyes.

  You know where they are.

  The words were difficult,

  were tied around her tongue and stuck in her teeth.

  They’re dead.

  It was a mistake.

  Bring them home.

  I can’t, she whispered.

  The script was dust in her mouth.

  You know what death means.

  You have to know.

  The word had come from her, but it was new to her alien hallucination.

  He tested it, tried it, rolled it on his tongue, swayed where he stood.

  Death, he said. Unfamiliar.

  She moved back to the script.

  I am returning the Heart so we can end the war.

  So nobody else dies.

  Vai or human.

  Do you understand?

  The words felt wrong on her tongue,

  and the air shivered around her.

  We must find them.

  He was shaking now, and behind him an orchestra—

  Don’t you unde
rstand?

  They’re not coming back,

  Just like our millions aren’t coming back,

  And if you don’t leave, if we don’t leave—

  she said, suddenly desperate,

  the words pushing out like a spurt of blood from an open jugular.

  My people, we’re not the forgiving kind.

  Go back behind the White Line. Get out of here.

  They’re gone.

  We must find them.

  His words were lost in a sudden orchestral discordance.

  I get it. You don’t understand.

  You’ve never lost someone before.

  They’re gone.

  They’re fucking gone

  and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

  The truth of it caused the rehearsed words to stop on her tongue.

  Impossible.

  Everything comes home.

  His words hurt in the folds of her brain where her team still lived, where they played cards and dreamed and breathed and their blood thrummed under their skin. His words hurt in the space he’d carved out.

  You’re in my head, she whispered.

  Can you see the memoria?

  Let it show you the bugout bay—

  And he did—

  Together, they saw Natalie,

  the bullet, the spray of silver,

  the dead alien—

  Impossible, she heard.

  They are alone

  —dead

  —how, impossible

  The dreamworld shook in desperate convulsions around her, and she felt for a moment like her body filled again with blood, her lungs with hell. She heard a wail, louder than any gov-raid siren over the concourse, louder than any blue screamer. We didn’t know, she said, suddenly desperate,

  the rehearsed words pushing out like impatient waterfalls, like a spurt of blood from an open jugular.

  We know now.

  —well, some of us—

  We were just so—

  —So afraid, she whispered.

  The alien didn’t respond. All Natalie felt was a silence so deep and dark that she couldn’t even hear herself breathing.

  Dad—

  she said—

  And then—

  Her puppet-father animated, just for a moment.

  These words. Some. Death. Fear.

  This is what you want for us.

  I did not know until now. I did not understand until now.

  Did you come here so we would understand what was happening to us when you took it all away?

  A pause.

  You do not want peace. You never did.

  Know this: I will not be alone.

  Wait, no, we do want peace—

  Jagged screaming—

  —her own screaming, a month of it, a year—

  —a wild violet light behind her eyes—

  —and she came out of the trance seconds later, years later, gasping, clawing at her throat, feeling like a too-full water balloon. She was enveloped in blue light, running above and under her skin, burning in her veins. She felt a violent whisper somewhere at the back of her skull, and scalding in her lungs.

  The alien flagship shuddered around her in great seizing gulps. She yanked back her poisoned, peeling hand and the silver slurped back into the portal, leaving her bereft of the carnival noise. She felt alone again, gasping for breath in her suit, devoid of a single clue about what to do next. If she’d succeeded. If the Vai would leave.

  It hadn’t felt like a win.

  “Autobandage,” said a man’s voice. “Bleeding.”

  Autobandage. Right. She was bleeding and everything hurt and the poison atmosphere was pouring into her suit. The sitrep could wait. Her hand moved like she was trained to do it, right into the tool bag on her left leg, flipped it from its housing, slapped it on the hole. The oxy-mix flooded in, and the suit’s environmentals began properly cycling, and she tried to steady herself on the floor as the alien ship shuddered again, and she—

  —she looked up into the brown eyes of the Bittersweet survivor.

  She knew him now. His name was on the tip of her tongue, just behind the memoria’s graying curtain. He was Twenty-Five’s indentured mechanic—but they’d never had an indentured mechanic on Twenty-Five, had they? The ship left Europa without a mechanic—and even as she had the thought, she realized how nonsensical it sounded. The memoria spun hot against her forehead, and she reached back to her recollections of that year, running the faces of her fellow crewmembers through her mind, over and over: Ashlan. Kate, in the captain’s chair. The traitor Ramsay. Reva goddamn Sharma.

  Staring at the hallucination, the memoria provided a jangling, black-and-white sketch: the mess hall, a stack of cards, a broken spanner, the feeling of a warm, one-handed hug from a person who didn’t exist.

  One of the lost memories, then.

  Here. In the rib cage room.

  It made no sense.

  Her mind didn’t remember him, but her gut did. She could see every detail of the time they last met: the smudges of week-old dirt on his pants, the scabs on his fingers from working on an ansible without his gloves, his indenture’s haircut going curly-wild around the sweat-crushed shirt collar three months in.

  His name poured into her mouth from somewhere forgotten, sweet like sugar water, like plain sunlight, as if engaging with the Vai through the Heart had pieced together her shattered drive core and restored her entire heart, and flowed out again, forgotten.

  It was fine.

  She didn’t need his name to know who he was.

  The forgotten engineer crouched next to her, whole and smiling, as if she’d never lost him. The memories of his smile flowed back like a spring downpour. He filled a space inside her mind that she’d never known was empty, his brown skin bright against the alien backdrop, his crooked front teeth whiter than they’d ever been and his eyes laden with stars.

  He felt like nothing less than a fucking miracle.

  Except, she thought, except he died. She knew that even though she knew nothing else—and now she was the one dying, swinging straight from the diagnosis of the infection to a full-on hallucination in a grand total of forty-five minutes. Or maybe she’d been aboard the Vai ship for hours. Days. She’d lost time after the battle, so it made sense that she might have lost time here—

  “Outside,” he said, pointing to the airlock. “Now. Emergency.”

  “I forgot you,” she whispered, taking in an uncontrolled gulp of air, feeling knives in her esophagus.

  “This was deleted,” he explained.

  What? Her breath came in shorter gasps—save it, save it, calm down, you’re still alive, you still have choices—and, as she calmed down, she checked the timer on the suit, to see how long she had left.

  She’d lost twenty-six minutes.

  Just like before, just like every single damned time the Heart was used, and hopefully not long enough for the transport to give up on her and bail. Not that Ash or Kate would give up, but she’d left them on board with Reva Sharma, hadn’t she? And Sharma had plan after plan after plan—

  “Emergency,” he said.

  “Yeah. You’re telling me.” Natalie’s temples rang with a sudden headache. Twenty-six minutes, she thought, the Heart takes twenty-six minutes to fuck you up, oh God—anything could have happened in that time.

  She turned and ran, as fast as she could, across the rib cage room, throwing herself bodily into the shaking, shivering wall near where she thought the airlock might be; it took her in, wrapped her up in the whisper of sister, of child, of we.

  He came with her, his limbs wrong and close in the darkness. “We—” he said, then stopped. “We—”

  “You’re dead,” she whispered. “When I saw her on London, Ash told me you died. I remember now. You died for her, not for me, and—and—there’s really only one way to tell if this is really happening.”

  There was no tether here, simply the motion of pushing out, and the skin of the hu
ll twisted aside. Natalie expected to see the tether, her transport, the clean, straight lines that meant safety. What she saw instead was a twinkling black nothingness, as deep and as dark as death itself, as eternity. She turned to grab the alien ship, but physics was the same everywhere; she was punted out into the vacuum with a bang, and she went head over heels into the black shiver.

  The transport was gone.

  16

  As she went head over heels, Natalie tried not to panic. Instead, she fumbled for the vector accelerator on the back of her suit, using it to propel herself back toward the Vai ship, slamming her coldsuit against the wild oscillation of its hull. She scrambled at the thin, dark line of the alien airlock, but nothing happened this time. Physics bounced her back into space—slower this time, like that was any help. Natalie’s lungs stopped functioning and refused to push oxygen through her system. Dread spiked near her heart. Calm down don’t panic don’t panic don’t panic—

  “Emergency,” said the hallucination.

  She pawed aside the useless tether. The hallucination hung nearby, knees bent, eyes glimmering, as if he could breathe in vacuum. He looked confused. She was somehow sure her nameless friend had never looked confused before—not at work, not EVA, not with his elbows deep in engine guts. Not even when he’d been holding a gun in the shadow of the ag-center barn, unable to remember he worked for Aurora (is that where they’d met?).

  “If you’re going to fuck with my brain, at least be helpful about it,” she said. “Ash said you could be useful. So be useful. Help me find the ship.”

  “The ship,” he said, slowly, as if the word were new.