Engines of Oblivion

by Karen Osborne

  “The green one. The Baywell transport.” She drew in another precious breath. Canned oxygen, the bright hint of metal on the back of her tongue. Limited, now. “The description is right there in my memoria. I should recognize it—”

  “There are too many to tell.”

  “Too many what?”

  “Green ships.”

  She fumbled for the accel controls, trying to swallow the edge of annoyance building up at the back of her throat. She plotted a vector that took her around the curve of the heartship, aiming to get a slightly better view of the Line. Her vision was caught by slivers of light too bright to be this far away from a star. Weapons, starships—

  “Oh, come on,” she whispered.

  Of course they’d been followed. Of course Baywell had arrived with their forest-dark, interchangeable cruisers, and of course Ballard had followed them, and Armour, and—goddamn, Aurora too, flanking the rest with that familiar, stomach-twisting boxy blue.

  She wasn’t really trained in space vector analysis, wasn’t meant to work without her feet in the dirt or on a deck, but she could tell enough from the tight, defensive bubble formations to know that this was no united force, no common-cause Corporate Alliance, despite the fact that they’d all arrived with their noses turned against the Vai.

  Teasing out the ties within would have to wait; her hallucination had told her to survive, and survival meant maximizing her leftover oxygen, figuring out who was going to shoot first, and finding the transport, because railguns or not, her coldsuit and her angry breathing human skin and bones weren’t going to last long out here. She’d been yammering on about peace, while the Vai had already discovered the only truth about humanity that mattered: the hot, wordless truth of the plasma lance.

  “Death,” he whined.

  “You’re not helping,” she said, seeing bright explosions in the corner of her eye.

  Natalie couldn’t tell who started the fight, and in this petri dish of corporate suspicion, it almost didn’t matter. There would be captains on vessels listening to executives on planets who weren’t even present; anxious, warsick gunners with bellies full of nightmares; board members with inchoate memories of quarterly losses. Human greed was a sick fucker, and fear—

  Well.

  Fear was a psychopath.

  She didn’t need to be afraid. All she needed to do was activate the suit’s homing beacon. The polite alarms inside clanged, giving her the transport’s location on the helmet HUD: far, almost too far, twirling in the staggered light of plasma lances, limping away from the battle. It was hard to calculate the distance between them, as the relative sizes of the ships and the vastness of space meant anything she decided by sight would be dead wrong. She hesitated, imagining what it would be like to die in her suit, how far decomposition would get before the chill of space found its way in to harden her body to ice.

  “You’re not helping,” the man said.

  “Fuck you,” she replied, bringing up the suit HUD. For a moment, she doubted herself—and then thought fuck that, if I wait I’m Natalie-flavored soup, plotted a vector that would hopefully not kill her too quickly, and slammed her thumb on the accelerator.

  Natalie was swept up in fire. The pressure in her ears built as she lurched forward, reaching into her eyeballs, the sudden acceleration heavy against her head and shoulders. Using the suit to fly had one advantage: her power signature was small enough that cruiser haptics might not differentiate her from space dust. She tested that theory immediately by tilting herself to the side as she approached the first cruiser—yellow, with InGen markings—making a close enough approach to slip into the ship’s blind spot. The cruiser was firing, but she was too close to see the target.

  Natalie skated close enough to see the hull dancing by her nose, then kicked up thirty degrees to use the ship’s exhaust to punt her up and away. The suit cackled its temperature alarms, and she broke into an immediate sweat, sucking down hot air at top volume. She lost control—which was fine, just fine, she’d get to the transport faster—and found herself heading straight toward a Baywell cruiser cutting a tangent toward the Vai heartship, which had started to move in formation with some of the smaller ships. Light brighter than her corneas could process erupted above her—the familiar brilliance of an Auroran spinal lance—and she closed her eyes, hearing Ash’s breathing advice for being EVA, sip don’t gulp—

  —and she nearly clipped the thing as it passed beneath her like some dark leviathan, curling into a ball, twisting around, making one more course correction—

  The transport was right behind, damaged, spitting air—

  She flicked the switch to decel, feeling pins and needles flood the aching bruises on her shoulders and trunk, swinging her boots hullwards. It was the worst way to land, coming this fast and this hard with only boots and bones and bad lungs to catch her. She slapped the boot magnets with her left hand and a breath to spare, then hit the hull with a devastating crunch from her left foot.

  Pain rocketed up her leg. Natalie hollered, her fingers fumbling for the clamp on the airlock door and slamming the entrance code. The airlock opened without a sound—or maybe she couldn’t hear it for the sound of her own voice. She threw herself inside, waiting for the air pressure to equalize, swearing at the way her ankle rested, screaming and wrong, against the inside of her suit.

  She hit the inside comm. “I think I broke a bone, Doc,” she said. “I’m gonna need one of your magic splints.”

  Nothing.

  “Ash?” She hit the comm again, just to be sure. “Kate?”

  The transport chimed, letting her know the atmosphere was safe. She ripped off her helmet and chestplate, then released the boot magnets.

  Her feet lifted from the ground; she ran her hand through her sweat-soaked hair, watching droplets loosen and pull away. The antigrav was off. What the hell—

  —and this time she skipped ingress protocol entirely, stowing the suit and decontamination and the rest of it, forcing herself through the door, tearing through the empty bunks using her hands and upper body until she reached the main cabin, where their names died on her lips.

  Ash’s thin body lay buckled and unbreathing in her seat, blood streaming into the air from a nasty new head wound. Sharma’s memoria was hacked into her skull, like the doctor had followed up the hasty liver transplant with some last-minute brain surgery. Ash’s eyes were filmy in death, fixed on somewhere beyond the ceiling, her lips parted halfway between terror and hope.

  Natalie felt her stomach lurch.

  Sharma was dead, too, her head open and bloody where someone had yanked out the entire memoria, interior storage and all—but that wasn’t what killed her, Natalie realized, as the woman’s head floated to the side with the juddering of the cockpit and she saw a broken, bloody, grayish mush that was, no doubt, the result of a cortical bomb. Installing her memoria on Ash would definitely not be on the approved list, she thought.

  And Kate was in the pilot’s seat, her fingers twitching on the haptics—

  Kate was alive.

  First aid kit, Natalie thought, then, where do these Baywell bastards keep it—

  Alarms clanged. The transport hadn’t figured out its pilot was unconscious. No first aid kit would help them if a spinal lance sliced them through, so Natalie muttered a reluctant apology, yanked the haptics from Kate’s fingers, and hooked her elbow through dead Sharma’s safety web, thinking a dislocated shoulder would be better than a railgun breach. A wild yellow plasma bolt came within inches of the transport, singeing the hull, and the bodies waved and thumped behind her in their seats. She winced. Every moment she wasn’t focused on saving Kate and figuring out what had gone wrong was wasted time.

  And what had gone wrong? Boltfire bad enough to kill three people at once would have done far more than just fuck up the gravity. And it didn’t explain why Ash was wearing Sharma’s memoria.

  And it didn’t explain why the Vai seemed to be having a hard time fighting back.

 
She dodged another Ballard bolt, then set the transport’s vector to drop below the battle, away from danger. “Go,” she whispered, and the transport shuddered its compliance. Natalie felt the curve of the safety net digging into her shoulders with its agoraphobic fingers. She didn’t realize she was holding her breath until the transport slowed down.

  Natalie had some leeway. Some. Not a lot. Definitely not enough.

  She cast off the safety web and turned back to the carnage, pushing across the room to yank a first aid kit from the wall. At least with the antigrav off, she wouldn’t have to put any weight on her broken ankle. She could keep Ash alive, she could call for help, she could—no, she couldn’t call for help—

  None of this made sense.

  “Alien Attack Squad,” the man whispered; Natalie whirled to find him floating by the bunkroom hatch. A second later, she realized what he—what her brain—was trying to say. There’s a recording—

  She slid the haptics back on and the ship roared into compliance seconds later—Baywell holorecording software and renderbot technology was remarkably similar to the Auroran kind, so ubiquitously present that she’d nearly forgot to check if they existed. Natalie ripped into the first aid kit as the renderbots spat out bright violet versions of Sharma’s long fingers, Ash’s half-lost limbs, and the wisp-soft streamers of hair lining Kate’s face.

  “We need to call her back,” said Ash. “We’re not going to be alone for long.”

  Reflected in the HUD, Natalie could see Kate lit from behind by faraway railgun fire, the kind of crazy Baywell shooting they’d all hated, her eyes glassy. Ash shook, or was it that the bawling afterburn of a plasma lance hard to port? The breath in Natalie’s lungs? The ghosts riding shotgun? Natalie tried to focus. She slammed autobandages on Kate’s lacerations, stemming the bleeding, then brought up the local situation map.

  It was worse than she’d hoped. Baywell had found them, and they were in the process of pulling the battle down around her ears.

  Kate’s fingers made small, comforting circles against Ashlan’s left shoulder. The woman moaned, closed her eyes, and her head listed to the side. “We’ll hear from Natalie any minute now,” Kate whispered. “Then we can bail, and—”

  A slow blink from Kate, a shudder of realization that something under Ash’s skin had simply stopped.

  “Doc. Something’s wrong. Reva!”

  But Sharma didn’t respond right away. She was concentrating on something else entirely: silent in the rumble seat, she’d been removing her memory device from her head, fiddling with the insides with a spanner, exactly like she’d been doing in front of Natalie ever since they left Vancouver, railgun fire alight on her skin like freezing rain, causing Natalie to pull hard to shotgun, ninety degrees up and out, keep moving, keep moving, her old CO’s voice telling her that when there’s nowhere to go you make a hole, her skin slithering against the playback like there was some alien thing still inside her, some rotten radiation—

  “Doc,” Kate spat, violent. “Now.”

  The doctor looked up from her work. “I’m sorry, Ms. Keller. There’s nothing I can do. Her body is rejecting the liver. I matched the phenotype as best I could, but her body is recognizing it as foreign.”

  “Get the fuck up and fix it, then.”

  “Kate,” Ash whispered, waking. “Stop.”

  Kate was a wildfire. “You said it would work.”

  Sharma nodded. “I said it could work. I said it would get her off the planet and that’s what you chose to listen to. You knew there was just enough fuel to get here and not enough to get anywhere else. We all make sacrifices to get what we want. You wanted this. It’s not my fault you didn’t think about what would happen next.”

  “You absolute—”

  Sharma stood. “See, the problem with this memory device—I knew I needed to come to the White Line. I thought I had to get on board. That’s all I allowed myself to know. But I think I might have been wrong.”

  She stared at the memory device, made a few final twists to the innards. Watched it blink. Pushed it back against her forehead.

  “Ah.” Barely a whisper. “That makes sense.”

  —and damn it, Natalie thought, that was railfire, she was losing the engine, she was losing in general, and Sharma’s body clattered behind her like a bag of rocks drenched in clots of gray and Natalie wanted to be sick, extremely sick, everything was sick, her whole life was sick, and behind her the doctor was in motion, slammed with new purpose, chased by a demon Natalie can’t see. She rose up, out of her chair, moved away to the front of the transport to where Natalie was sitting right now, her purple outline settling in over Natalie’s space-wan skin and bones.

  “I told Natalie. I should have been telling myself the same thing. You have to control how it delivers the memory,” she said, like a hymn, like a psalm, and dropped into the chair, pulling the transport back and away from the shuddering Vai ship. If Natalie could just get to Aurora, just let them know somehow that she was here—

  Exhausted, Natalie leaned to port. She thought of Ash and it nearly got her killed, lighting up the cockpit and the bodies and the death with another near-miss, some Vai weapon, because they were truly engaged now, the silver Vai monstrosities and their clambering human counterparts. The transport followed her motion. The plan—fuck it, there was no plan but react, twist, react—became pulling out, pulling down, swinging around and swinging away. It was the next thing. The thing after that. It was always like that, had always been like that, back in Verdict and defusing kinetics on a battlefield and kissing Emerson Ward. The next thing. And the next thing was—

  —Sharma launching a wide-band distress beacon, a wail every company within three sectors could hear. She worked with intention, with a slight and thinning mouth, with the steady hand of a tech working on a kinetic meant to activate against human skin.

  “Natalie never told you why she chose to trust me. It was this.” She tapped the memory device. “The cortical bomb our delightful CEO put in my brain so I’d behave. He paired it with the memoria so he could trigger it whenever he saw a thought he didn’t like.”

  “That’s sick,” whispered Ash.

  “It was a last-ditch effort on his part, a method that he doesn’t normally approve, and that was largely my fault, you see. I defeated every measure they used to keep me cowed. Every single one. Until this.” She tapped it with her still-lacquered fingernail and shit shit shit, she had to get out of the crossfire—

  “You’re going to set it off,” Kate said. “Stop.”

  “That’s the point,” Sharma said, her eyes bright. “I programmed this to deliver instructions to myself the next time I was near the Heart, instructions I didn’t want Solano to see, at least not until it was too late. And, thank God, everything actually fell into place. I’m far ahead of him. I’m so far ahead of him now, there’s no way he’s going to see any of it coming.”

  “You wanted to come here.”

  “I don’t even need to go aboard. All I have to do is—”

  “Reva, please—”

  —and the recording was cut off by a power surge. The cortical bomb, Natalie guessed. The violet recordings ceased. Outside, space had gone dark again; behind the interface, she saw the darkening squat hulk of Vancouver, then a few last bright lights blossoming and blinking out. The battle was petering to a close, but she couldn’t for the life of her figure out who had won.

  Natalie knit her haptic-laden hands behind her head and tried to calm down. It was impossible. The exhaustion weighed on her eyes, her head, her shoulders. Her guts were blank, her throat and tongue a barren desert, and everything hurt.

  She checked the fuel level. Not enough.

  There would be no going back to Earth.

  “Kate?” she whispered.

  Natalie knew the truth of it now, every sickening alarm bell she’d pushed aside to make herself feel better, every crying shame that called for her attention, every wrong decision she’d gleefully made. The kick of he
r broken ankle was just the beginning. She’d traded everything for this defeat: her self-respect, her desire, her body, her love, her mind. There was no way up. There was no way out.

  Kate stirred. “Is that you?”

  “It used to be,” Natalie managed.

  She wanted to say more. She had so many questions. But her former captain had already drifted off again, lost in a haze of painkillers. Natalie’s mind wandered to her boltgun. She’d forgotten where she’d put it, like a complete fucking idiot. She could go find it. A flick of her fingers and it would all be over. Her body would fit easily next to Ash’s. Everything would end: the Vai war, the secret of the silver, all of it.

  Natalie would see him again.

  “No,” said the hallucination, as if she’d conjured him up by just thinking of his face. He smelled of vanilla and sweat, and slid into the rumble seat nearby, knitting his fingers together. Too real. Far too real.

  “You’re dead.”

  “No,” he repeated. “It hurts.”

  Natalie bit her bottom lip. “It hurts like a star going nova. God, it’s so stupid. I just—why me? Why the fuck am I still alive?”

  “No.” A statement.

  She shoved her broken foot against the wall. The purposeful pain shocked her system. Kept her awake. Breathing. “That’s right. I can’t leave Kate. She needs me now. And that’s just fucking arrogance, isn’t it? To think she even wants to see me now? To think that I have a right to be here, to say that I can just walk out from here and—and breathe, when Ash isn’t here, when—” She descended into a painful coughing fit, covering her mouth. When she removed her lips from her balled hand, she was slick with blood. “That makes me a bigger fucking coward than ever before. Doesn’t it?”

  But the man said nothing more.

  There was, of course, a good ten minutes between when the transport was authorized a slot inside Vancouver’s expansive shuttle level and when the bay doors opened. The ingress protocol for boarding a captured enemy ship, even an enemy ship broadcasting an Auroran IFF, required infantry teams. Probably some App-K support, just in case. She wondered, idly, if her teams had finished upgrading the puppet drone for superhaptics.