Architects of Memory

by Karen Osborne

  “Hang on,” said Len. “We’re entering the atmosphere now. Heat shield deployed.”

  Natalie squirmed in her seat while Sharma read a packet of flimsies like she was back in her office. Ash kept her gaze focused on the ground tumbling up to meet her, the hold of gravity clawing around the shuttle, grabbing violent and sure at her soft body and the protective metal keeping them all from the flames and the fall. A massive roar filled her ears as the shuttle slipped into the planet’s ionosphere, and she clutched the harness tight enough to cause her knuckles to go white.

  Ash was an asteroid brat, daughter of the dole, descended from celestium miners and ice cutters. Going downwell just felt wrong. The closest she’d ever gotten to living on a planet was in the mine on Bittersweet—not that Wellspring had even tried to terraform that choking dust ball, not that she’d ever been outside in the interminable years she’d been indentured there. When Keller and Sharma showed her pictures of how Auroran indentures lived, they’d been pictures of Tribulation before the war, pictures of smiling homesteaders earning their way to their own land, to agency over their own bodies, to their own dreams, their own money, their own children—

  —and in only seven years guaranteed.

  Seven years guaranteed had made the decision about abandoning Wellspring a lot easier than she’d thought it would be.

  It still wasn’t enough.

  The shuttle bounced to the side, and Ash’s belly shuddered into the back of her throat. This time, she was pretty sure it wasn’t her fault.

  “Len, stop fucking up,” howled Natalie.

  “I’m just making it fun.” Len smirked at her, righted the shuttle, ramped up the anti-grav, and started looking for a place to land.

  The war-torn version of this colony looked nothing like the photographs Ash had seen. Trashed and overgrown, the asphalt roads lay infiltrated by fibrous local grasses like broken crackers, and unprocessed food wrappers rolled in a gentle eastern wind from the recycling center. The doors of prefab houses sat open like cracked eggshells. The whole city felt like it had taken a very long breath and never let it go.

  Len found a municipal shuttleport near the center of the city that looked mostly clear of rubble and set the shuttle down on a clear civilian pad with a jarring clank. By the time Ash had loosened her restraints, the others were already outside, squinting against the too-bright afternoon sun. Natalie opened one of the gun lockers, loading the boltgun with a quick, practiced snick. The air was flush with fetid rot and sweet sulfur, and when Ash filled her lungs she still felt slightly dizzy.

  “Where do you want to go, Dr. Sharma? Will right here do?” Ash asked.

  The doctor raised her hand to shade her forehead and wrinkled her nose. “If you don’t mind, I would actually prefer to head to the center plaza. The admin center is defensible and will have adequate afternoon light, which we’ll need in case this is a zero-point charger and we lose power to our equipment. We don’t want to screw up the shuttle.”

  Natalie rubbed her hands together. “I like being able to get home.”

  “How far?” said Len, loading the dolly.

  “Half mile.”

  Ash considered. “We can do that,” she said.

  Len finished loading the boxes on the dolly, and pushed off, leading the way through the southwestern axis of the city. Ash walked in silence, flanked on either side by silent plasteel prefab homes with half-cracked doors, the black shadows inside promising grisly discoveries. Nobody knew why the captain of the London hadn’t been able to inform colonial administration of the Vai advance. As the Battle for Tribulation wailed above the planet, many of the colonists had still been going about their normal evening schedules, and Ash imagined families slouched dead at their dinner tables, the meals still moldering where they sat.

  Or maybe not, she reminded herself. The Vai used molecular weapons here, the kind that screamed through the streets on the wings of devils, tearing apart women and children and soldiers and farmers and scattering their ashes to the sulfur wind. It seemed unholy to leave the colony to rot like this, but triage was triage. Survivors first.

  There were no survivors here.

  Ash’s eyes were caught by a group of black ashen outlines on the wall—she thought it was street art at first, but then recognized bodies bent in fear: the chins tilted toward the sky, the arms folded over their heads, the delicate, defiant turn of one woman standing over a child.

  “Is that them?” she whispered.

  Natalie set her jaw, her face dark, then continued walking toward the plaza. “Yeah. That would have been the work of a C-6 Hornet.”

  “I didn’t expect—”

  “You expected bodies? Rubble? That’s not how the Vai do things.”

  Ash stared. She could almost imagine the dusty outlines moving, their fingers trembling—Or maybe that’s the celestium sickness talking, she thought. “I know. But … this whole city is in a lot better condition than I thought.”

  “They didn’t use kinetics here, like armor-breachers or hullcrackers, not like Gethsemane,” Natalie said, an edge of respect in her voice. “Can you imagine what would happen if we could just figure out how it was done? You could take a ship, a colony, in seconds, without spending a lot of time scrubbing bloodstains and brain matter off the walls you’re set on occupying. Or burying bodies.”

  Ash shuddered. “Just slide right in and take your place.”

  “No wonder people want to figure out how they work,” Len added.

  “Yeah,” Natalie said. “Would make the crappy part of war much easier.”

  Sharma cleared her throat. “Can we not speculate on things that make me sick?”

  The rest of the trek was short and silent. The main administration building occupied the entire block on the north side of a plaza paved with bricks sticking up from the ground like jagged, bloodstained teeth being eaten alive by tough red blades of native grass. Just a hundred years and there will be no city here at all, Ash thought. Archaeologists are going to need isolation suits and chainsaws.

  The lobby was the only place in the city that hadn’t been built from prefab blocks. The space was open and airy and aesthetically pleasing, with a wide reception desk made of dark local wood and a mural depicting happy farming families of all colors and origins. The glass doors yawned open, smashed. Glass crunched and crackled under Ash’s boots in the uncanny quiet.

  Sharma pointed at the open center of the floor. “That space looks fine,” she said.

  Ash turned to search the room as they unpacked, and her eyes were caught by a flash of color: a stuffed unicorn toy with a golden horn and a rainbow tail, sitting half wrapped next to a plain white coffee mug, a roll of tape, and a scattering of flimsies. She walked over and picked it up, flicking on the power button. The animatronics kicked into gear, and the toy neighed, kicking its fabric hooves in the air.

  “Huh. Battery’s still working,” Ash said. “Birthday present?”

  “Birthday present?” the toy repeated.

  Sharma looked up. “Cute. My granddaughter would like that.”

  Ash waved it in the air. “Want it?”

  “Want it?” said the unicorn.

  “That seems gauche,” Sharma said, after a considering moment.

  Len stopped unpacking and walked over, yanking the unicorn out of Ash’s hand and shoving it through his belt. “We’re a salvage crew, and that’s a character from Alien Attack Squad, so I’m salvaging it for my room. I have no problem with gauche.”

  “No problem with gauche,” said the unicorn.

  “Oooh, Len,” Natalie said. “You have someone who will actually listen to you now.”

  He snorted in response and got back to unpacking boxes.

  Ash shook her head, then turned her attention back to the coffee cup and the flimsies on the desk. The liquid inside had long since evaporated, leaving a brown film. The flimsies were strewn on the desk, chair, and floor, as if someone dropped them in surprise while rising from their chair.


  Ash peered over the desk to see a dark shadow. It took her a moment to register it as a body: the body that had dropped the flimsies, the body that had been in the middle of wrapping a child’s present, lying blackened and rotten on the floor behind the desk, curled into a ball, clutching its head with hands made of thin, white bone.

  Her lunch rocketed back up her throat.

  The others snapped up to Ash’s side in a second. Natalie’s hand rubbed Ash’s back as she spat recalcitrant chunks of protein bar onto the floor, then sucked the vomit out of her teeth, retching again, her vision pinpointed with black scrollwork. She’d seen dead bodies before, she’d seen Christopher’s dead body, but she’d never seen anything like this, couldn’t imagine this dark terror was what he looked like, now, buried in the Bittersweet sand.

  Sharma padded around the body, crouching, examining the dead man with a curious light in her eyes. “Poor man. This isn’t consistent with death by blue screamer, or anything else we’ve seen so far. I can’t even tell you how long he’s been dead because of the slight difference in atmospheric composition since the atmospinners on the colony stopped working,” she said after a quiet moment. “Definitely over eight months. Could be a year.”

  Len heaved a sigh and stepped back. “After the attack. Freelancers. I’ll pack up, then.”

  “Pack up, then,” said the unicorn.

  “No.” Sharma straightened, her voice calm and sure. “We’re losing the afternoon light. We don’t have time to relocate.”

  “We’re going to do it right here? With this guy staring at us?” Len said, aghast.

  The doctor blinked. “It’s not like there’s anything we can do about it. He died a long time ago.”

  “We can bury him.”

  Ash’s stomach unclenched, and she spat on the ground one more time, listening to the engineer and the doctor bicker. She liked Len better—everyone liked Len better—but in this case she’d have to agree with Sharma. Bringing the isolette back to a more controlled situation on Europa would rob her of a bonus that could save her life. “I think it’s probably best that we do what we came to do and then get the hell off this planet,” she said.

  “Shit,” said Len.

  “Shit,” said the unicorn.

  Natalie patted her gun. “I’m going to clear the perimeter,” she said. “I’m worried about that body.”

  “Ain’t nobody here,” Len said, crossing his arms.

  “Len,” Ash warned, pointing at the body. “Space plus bullshit. And that is bullshit. So is going out there alone, Natalie.”

  “I’ll be fine,” she said.

  “Yeah. Of course. Everybody here is fucking fine,” muttered Len.

  “Everybody here is fucking fine,” repeated the unicorn.

  The toy’s bright, thin voice pierced the tension. Nobody laughed, but the corner of Natalie’s mouth lifted as she turned and left. Sharma let out a pent-up breath and turned back to unloading her mess of tablets and sensors. Len took off his jacket and laid it over the dead man’s face and torso, then turned back to his own work: running cables from the battery he’d brought to Sharma’s equipment and a local-area comm system meant to feed data back to Twenty-Five.

  Ash walked a few steps away to calm down. She uncapped a bottle of water and washed out her mouth, then took a few deep, calm breaths until the black dots peppering her vision slowed and stopped.

  Living on Twenty-Five felt like a permanent holiday visit with relatives Ash had to tolerate but didn’t necessarily like. They knew entirely too much about each other: their annoying habits, their tics, their most boring stories. She knew too much about Len’s gambling debts, had heard Natalie’s story about the Bailey skirmish eighteen times, and, thanks to Keller, knew how to catch a trout in a Neversink lake with a rope and her teeth. She probably knew more about her crewmates than their own families did.

  But maybe not, Ash thought, taking a swig. She’d told a lot of stories of growing up a Wellspring uncitizen, but had avoided her mining indenture and Christopher’s death until recently. Ramsay’s deflections about her family were absolute. And, of course, there was the desperate, important, terrible thing Ash had never said to any of them but Keller, in the dark of her quarters: the madness that was the biggest secret of them all.

  And then there was Sharma. Ash knew very little about the Auroran scientist. Busy like a perpetual motion machine and full of relentless formality, Sharma regularly mentioned a son and a granddaughter living on Mars but had never taken a family call. She was a birthright citizen—her parents were top-ten earners, and she’d been born with full rights. Her dossier said that she’d spent a lot of her career doing medical research for Aurora HQ. For a person like her, moving to a salvage vessel staffed by indentures was like ditching a sky-top penthouse for an uncitizen dorm.

  When Ash was finally feeling well enough to breathe in without wanting to vomit, she looked up. Sharma was checking the seals on the quarantine equipment, the isolette humming quietly in the center of a clear second quarantine box. Len was screwing in the housing on a robot arm.

  “Both quarantine levels are sealed and we’re ready to proceed on your mark, Indenture Ashlan,” said Sharma. “This is your last chance to go outside.”

  “It’s safe, isn’t it?” said Len. “I thought you said this was going to be safe.”

  Sharma’s mouth quirked in a sly half smile, and she indicated the unicorn. “Quite safe. This is a K-1 isolette, tested on some of the most sensitive bits of the Christmas list that we’ve got. If I’m right, we’re about to change everything. Isn’t that worth watching?”

  Ash’s stomach twisted again, and she flipped open her talkie. “She’s going to open it, Natalie. Stay out there in case we need a rescue?”

  Sharma sighed.

  “Acknowledged.” Natalie’s voice was tinny and tight. “I’ll be outside.”

  “Just get back here in time for dinner.” Ash flipped off the device, stuffing it in her pocket.

  Len wrung his hands. “All right,” he said, jumping up and moving to a secondary console. The lights inside the isolette brightened his worried face. “Let’s get this party started.”

  Sharma took hold of the robot arm and used it to punch the button on the quarantine locker.

  The lobby filled with light and sound, and the temperature dropped. Fast.

  * * *

  Inside her pod, the light had been overwhelming, ancient, roiling; it had crawled behind her eyes and kept her from seeing much else. Behind Sharma’s K-1 isolette, she could see the device free and clear. It was spherical, containing the same sparkling, roiling interior of any Vai weapon in a housing that was far more ornate than any of the zappers they’d retrieved from the area around London. She had no reference for it but the old pictures she’d seen of ancient ironwork fences, the scrollwork on Earth’s dead cathedrals, the eyes of gargoyles and the scent of incense. She saw teardrops, human hands in filigree, the curve of inhuman eyes, the quiet of the graveyard. A cold wind spun in from somewhere; Ash felt like the heat was being leached out of her bones, and she shivered like she’d never be warm again.

  Len shook his head, keeping his eyes on the tablet like he wasn’t even affected by the deathless alien beauty ducking in and out of Ash’s head. “I’ve never seen anything like this. This is beyond me. I didn’t think it was even possible. It’s drawing power from the tablet batteries through some sort of advanced heat sink. Draining it. I can’t tell how.”

  “Cover it up. I feel terrible,” Ash whispered. She struggled to speak. Her words seemed locked away, sewn in the seams of heavy, suffocating velvet curtains.

  Len blinked. “I’m hearing some really weird shit, Dr. Sharma.”

  Sharma’s hands moved over her tablets with quick, practiced motions. Her words slurred. “No. Stay focused. Is it speaking to you, Ashlan?”

  Ash watched her fear slip out of her fingers in black ribbons, coalesce and knot together in front of her chest in a slithering, sable Gordian kno
t. Far away, she heard the whispering of familiar voices: Kate’s, her mother’s, Christopher’s, all in wordless vowels and sibilants, or some strange language she did not know. Her tongue felt heavy and coated with vomit.

  “Yes,” Ash said.

  Sharma kept working. “Good. Fantastic. Ask for a connection.”

  Out of nowhere, the voices started to resolve into Christopher’s. Trying to connect. Trying to connect. Trying to connect. Connection failed. No routing to node.

  “It, um,” Ash said. “It doesn’t. It can’t connect. You ask it. What the hell?”

  “Glory,” said the unicorn, still stuck in Len’s belt.

  “Finally,” Sharma said, her eyes lit with a strange intensity Ash had never seen before. She started to cry, her body shaking as if she was fighting a deep and dark power clutching her heart. Sharma reached for the button that kept the K-1 isolette in place; the curtains fell, and there was no longer anything between Ash and the weapon.

  That was when things started falling apart.

  5

  Being eye to eye with the weapon was one of the most fascinating and terrifying experiences of Ash’s life.

  She felt dizzy, as if she were perched at the top of a mountain of bewildering height, as if she were looking down at a roaring sandstorm, watching the dirty winds batter the city over and over again, watching them abandon themselves on the encroaching forest, watching them chew on the planet’s burgundy trees. Sharma’s instrumentation went wild. Len’s hands moved over his console as the tablets flashed and flickered. The unicorn in Len’s belt loop opened its diminutive red mouth and roared in a two-toned, high-pitched alien shriek, screaming Glory, glory, glory—

  “What do you see now?” screamed Sharma. “Can you touch it, Ashlan?”

  “You’re closer!” said Ash. “You do it!”

  “I have to be able to hit the shutdown!”

  “Fine. Okay.” Ash pinched herself, and the pain helped her tumble back into her skin. The voices told her that everything is well now that you are with me, and the unicorn was saying it, too, opening and closing its stitched-up jaw, electricity glistening in its quiet glass eyes, speaking in chorus with the voices of the man and woman she loved: Glory, glory, no routing to node—