Architects of Memory

by Karen Osborne

  Ramsay narrowed her eyes at the data. “I see what you mean,” she said. “No wonder you were asleep.”

  Keller laughed. “That’s the terrible curse of the captaincy, Ms. Ramsay,” she said, looking back over her shoulder at the other woman. “You’ll never see anything fascinating ever again. You’ll just sit on the bridge, waiting for things to go to hell while everyone else gets to do all the cool shit.”

  Ramsay snorted. “Speak for yourself. I’m heading straight on to middle management. On a cruiser. With a proper water shower.”

  “Big dreams, huh,” Keller said.

  “No use in thinking small.”

  Keller knew she should keep her mouth shut about her subordinate’s snap judgments, but if Ramsay’s ambitions got her a new assignment sooner than later, Keller wasn’t going to be upset. Ramsay disparaged Twenty-Five entirely too often for Keller’s taste. “I don’t consider Twenty-Five to be small.”

  Ramsay took a sip of her coffee. “It’s so small it doesn’t even have a proper name, Ms. Keller.”

  “I like it fine.” Keller fought a twinge of anger.

  Keller thought of the years she’d put into her career—her indenture as a teenager on bustling Medellin, then the lonely solo work on the tug, then doing Ramsay’s job on Fifteen, and back to a kind middle on Twenty-Five. She’d never seen Twenty-Five as small and never viewed the salvage corps as a stepping-stone, like Ramsay obviously did. Keller reminded herself, as she often found she must, that Ramsay’s many talents didn’t include having excellent people skills.

  She’ll be middle management for sure, Keller thought, hiding her smirk behind her coffee cup.

  Ramsay looked back at her work, starting her typical beginning-of-shift tasks. Keller brought up Ramsay’s logs from the previous day, and her monitor blinked with the comfortable familiarity of Twenty-Five returning green status lights across the board. Keller held the mug in both hands while rechecking Ramsay’s work, appreciating the warmth against the slight chill of the bridge, listening to the familiar, comforting hum of the engine.

  “What are you going to do with your share of the hazard pay, if not try for a bigger ship? Go exec?” asked Ramsay.

  Keller had a quick, cockeyed flash of herself wearing an executive’s heels, an ill-fitting diamond-cut jacket sitting on her angular shoulders, a white tattoo clutching at her neck like Solano’s, and she laughed out loud.

  “No. No way. Not in a million years.”

  “Why not? You’d be a good executive.”

  Keller’s cheeks colored, and she heard Ash laugh somewhere in the back of her mind. She waved her hand at the ship, the stars, the darkness beyond. “Because I like it out here. This is where I always wanted to be.”

  “You could at least get away from the indentures.”

  “Hah,” Keller said. “It’s nice to be around people that have dreams.”

  Ramsay’s thin shoulders shrugged. “Well. I’ve got plans that include not getting caught up in their drama.”

  Coffee caught in Keller’s throat. She coughed. How much of the story had Ramsay guessed? “What drama?”

  “Just the typical indenture drama. Ashlan in particular,” Ramsay said.

  Keller tried to treat Ash like everyone else on the crew, but she knew as well as the rest of them that secrets were in short supply on a ship too small to have a name, even if they did manage to keep the honorifics and niceties in place most of the time. She’d been an indenture. She’d come up from the uncitizens’ dole herself. She knew what it took to pay off debt. Her friendship with Ash had been different from the first moment they talked in the Twenty-Five sickbay during the Bittersweet rescue effort. She’d tried not to love her. God, she’d tried.

  Trying was bullshit.

  No. She loved Ash because Ash tried, too. Because Ash had lost everything, yet kept hoping, kept her heart open. Because Ash was facing the fight of her life and she still picked up the sword every day, and tried, and tried, and tried. Ash was worth a hundred ladder-climbing Ramsays.

  “You okay?” Ramsay was staring.

  Keller cleared her throat. “You know what? The worst thing in the world is a party full of citizens. They don’t want anything. They don’t need anything. They don’t care about anything. If that’s the life you want, then go straight ahead. Walk off the dock when we get back to Europa and don’t look back. But you’ll never understand how free you feel on a ship like a tug. Mine was barely a boat. I didn’t even have my own quarters. It was just me and one hell of a grav-drive. It was incredible. Best experience of my life.”

  “Was tug work how you got into salvage?”

  “At the beginning of the war, we ended up hauling a bunch of the smaller wrecks to the Europa yards, but we couldn’t work fast enough because of the Vai advance, so they told us to start breaking them down on the way. There was one run on the tug where I cracked a cooling brace. Had to fix it without a mechanic. I thought I was going to die.”

  “And you were good at it.”

  “Yeah. But it helps that I have a good crew now, too.”

  “That is such a line.”

  Keller laughed, then turned back to watch the graphs scroll by. Ramsay was quiet for a minute or two, then tilted her head and sat back in her chair.

  “You never told me what you wanted to do with the money.”

  Keller groaned internally. “I didn’t, no.”

  “That’s not quite fair. I told you mine.”

  “I’m your captain. I don’t have to be fair.” Keller dropped the smirk and turned back to the readings coming in from the planet, feeling the bare beginnings of a headache. Satisfied by the numbers rolling by in quick succession, she brought up the ansible dialogue and sent out a ping to the new hub Twenty-Five had installed to replace the one damaged in the war. If she kept working, maybe Ramsay would forget about her questions.

  The bridge flooded with the white light of the ansible dialogue. The sudden change caused Keller’s vision to swim, and she raised her hand to her head. She’d been right about the headache: tiny, angry fingers clawed at the edges of her mind. A migraine. Damn it. She tried to blink away the way the bridge began to sway back and forth for a moment and dismiss the telltale black halo at the center of her vision. No dice.

  I don’t need this right now.

  “Are you going to drink up?” Ramsay asked, pointing at Keller’s coffee.

  “What, do you want it?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Trust me. I need this.”

  The migraine was a sudden one, coming on steady and savage, and her mind wandered to the medbay and Sharma’s accessible store of easy painkillers. She couldn’t tell Ramsay that she planned to dump this year’s profits into Ash’s citizenship account, but she still felt like she needed to toss the other woman an olive branch.

  “You asked what I wanted,” Keller said, adding a soft edge to her voice. “I want haptics installed on this bucket, even though I know the salvage line’s last on the list. I’d like some better coffee.”

  “That’s the dream, right?”

  I’d like to be with Ash. She’d been the one to encourage it, those first few months in Twenty-Five’s tight space, with a tilt of a chin or a gaze that lasted a few seconds longer than it should have. Keller knew she should have stopped, but her heart campaigned in a way her mind did not, and she found she couldn’t push Ash away as much as she knew she needed to. There were the nights talking quietly in the mess together, the connection, the unstated knowledge between them that something terrible and wonderful was developing. She knew she should have informed Sharma when Ash confided in her that she suspected she had celestium sickness.

  But that would have meant she’d never see Ashlan again.

  “If you want me to be realistic,” Keller said, drinking the last dregs of the bitter coffee, “I haven’t had any time off since before the war. I think I’ll go visit my parents. They’ve both got cit tags, now. Stay awhile. They took a rebuilding contract instea
d of relocation, so they’ll have a nice guest room finished by the time we get back to the hubworlds. I’ll go hiking or something. Try to get some normalcy back.”

  “Sounds nice, I guess,” said Ramsay. “Are you going to bring Ashlan?”

  The last of the coffee caught in Keller’s throat; she leaned forward, coughing, pounding her chest with her right hand. A few seconds later, she dragged a clear breath back into her lungs and swung on Ramsay, narrowing her eyes. “You’re skating on thin ice, Ms. Ramsay.”

  Ramsay’s cheeks colored; she focused on her keyboard, dropping her hands to her lap. A quiet darkness crossed her face. “Just between you and me,” she said, her voice slow and careful, “because the others aren’t going to say it…”

  Heat flared in Keller’s cheeks; her left hand trembled. “You’re not going to say it, either. Leave it alone.”

  “Ms. Keller—”

  “Captain,” she stressed, rising. Damn it; any inroads she’d made with Ramsay this afternoon had just been smashed. Her head was akimbo, full of cymbals and marching bands; the pressure rushed at her temples with a hammering urgency. “Take the watch. My head’s a mess. I need some painkiller.”

  “Let me go get it for you,” Ramsay said, pushing herself out of the chair with a sigh. “I’ll get you a refill on your coffee, too.”

  “Thanks,” Keller said, handing her empty mug over her shoulder. Ramsay ducked down the access hatch and disappeared into the body of the ship.

  Keller swore to herself and turned back to the ansible diagnostics, trying to concentrate but finding her mind sliding off the data and onto the memories of the day they’d recovered Mumbai’s computer core and Ash earned her first bonus. Ash hadn’t known what a bonus was. She’d kept on opening and closing her credit account with wide eyes, almost like she didn’t believe the years that were suddenly stored there, the possibilities it introduced. Keller opened one of her bottles of scotch to celebrate, told her that she’d help Ash earn her citizenship and the cure for celestium sickness, and after the others went to sleep, Ash had kissed her.

  Keller kissed back.

  She’d done more than kiss back.

  She had feelings. She had strong feelings. She had memories of Ash dozing, soft and quiet in her bedsheets, lit by the beam of Keller’s watch and the enormity of her guilt.

  Keller didn’t want to be a stand-in for Ash’s dead fiancé. She couldn’t be the captain and believe one of her crew to be inherently more valuable than another. She didn’t want to be responsible for patching up another broken partner, or to feel the guilt if she had to choose Ash over someone else. She didn’t want to take advantage of someone who was fighting a serious illness. She wanted to have realized all these things before she’d slept with her.

  Had pushing her away been the right thing to do? I’m Twenty-Five. I’m not my own person out here.

  She ached for Ash’s smile, her easy support, the knowledge that she’d follow Keller wherever they went. She was still taking advantage of that. She relied on it. She was an asshole.

  She had to stop.

  She resolved to fix the problem when Ash came back onboard.

  After I fix this damn headache. Keller rubbed her temple, making a stab at distracting herself by running diagnostics on the ansible, but the headache was a loud brass band playing in a small metal box; the entire bridge was turning on its axis, slipping aft like it was a thousand miles away. She’d never had a migraine that came on this bad or this fast.

  I’m having a stroke—something’s wrong. She thumbed the all-ship comm on her interface, trying to stand and failing miserably.

  “Ms. Ramsay,” she croaked out, “get back up here. Need help.”

  “On my way,” she heard.

  The entire ship shuddered once and cycled the environmentals, as if Twenty-Five had just docked with a station. But we’re alone out here. We’ve been alone out here for weeks. Keller’s hand struggled for purchase, and she fell back into her chair, her limbs heavy. She felt a rising, terrible panic clawing its way from her gut, but even that couldn’t fight the encroaching darkness. The bridge quieted around her as she fell into unconsciousness.

  Her last memory for a long time was the burnt scent of sour coffee.

  7

  In the old days, breaking atmo would have taken five million dollars, fuel tanks the size of houses, and a lake’s worth of liquid hydrogen. Standing within a mile of liftoff would shake a human to death, unless you happened to be the lucky bastard strapped to the top of the rocket. Humanity was stuck to its own planet, victim of the spin and strain of gravity, of the never-ending tug-of-war between profit and science, between rampant capitalism and the need for human advancement.

  The development of the grav-drive placed the exploration of space in the hands of corporations: first, ExR, then Laikasoft and Jin Industries, then Aurora and others, and they began to do the things the warring, starving governments, stuck in the ancient ways, could not do: to marry science and profit, to push outward, to explore, to colonize, to lift tiny ships like Twenty-Five’s shuttle up and away from the ground.

  Ash had never been so grateful for Auroran science, for auto-assist liftoff, for the software that told her how far to angle the nose of the shuttle, how much fuel to feed the reactor, how fast to go. Len would laugh at me for using auto-assist, she thought. I’m going to find him, so he gets a chance to laugh at me.

  As the chilly planetside afternoon gave way in a last spasm to the ever-black, ever-blank darkness of space, Ash felt herself afflicted with a vicious, drunken clarity, and when the shuttle clicked control back to the pilot’s seat, she took a deep breath and swung the shuttle around. She was back in vacuum. It felt right. They were close to home. This day would get better, fast.

  Natalie leaned on the buttons for the short-range comm once it came online. “Twenty-Five, this is Natalie on the shuttle. Twenty-Five, please come in.”

  Ash swung the shuttle around and punched the fuel expenditure, increasing the shuttle’s speed toward the battlefield. From this distance, it was all sparkling lights in the sky, stars that were not stars, graves torn open where there shouldn’t be graves. She bit her lip, feeling pain flickering under the muggy edges of the medicine.

  Ramsay answered the comm in just three seconds, bright and cheery, as if nothing had gone wrong.

  “Hey, Nat,” she said. “How did it go?”

  Natalie sat up in her chair, the relief in her voice clear. “Ms. Ramsay. We’re coming in hot. We were attacked on the planet’s surface by unknown assailants. They took the Vai weapon, shot Ash, killed or kidnapped Dr. Sharma and Len. You need to extend the sensor net and call Rio. Now.”

  “Shit. You’re serious?”

  “And you need to prep the medbay for trauma.”

  Ramsay sounded wary. “Will do. Got ID on the attackers?”

  Ash tried to focus on the dizzying space in front of them, swinging the shuttle back toward Twenty-Five’s homing beacon. She blinked away black scrollwork at the corners of her eyes. “Definitely competitors,” she said. “But that’s all we’ve got.”

  “Shit,” Ramsay said. “Okay, you guys are in an unsafe situation now and you’re about to enter the debris field. That’s no way to fly. Concentrate on getting home. I’ll call corporate and Keller will get the medbay ready. See you guys soon. Ramsay out.”

  Ash squinted out the front window, pushing the shuttle hard, watching London and Twenty-Five in their spinning, parasitical dance. The Auroran ships grew larger and larger by the moment. In zero-gee, strapped to the chair, Ash could almost imagine the shuttle was the settled, parked point, and the ship, the debris, her home in the sky, all of that was in motion. The familiar sight of the warship corpses took an edge off her shock, and relief crowded her mind. In a few minutes, she’d be back home, back on the ship, back with Keller. Rio would come. There would be soldiers and scientists and forensic artists. They’d find Sharma and Len. They’d figure out what the hell was going on.

/>   You’ll have to disclose your illness, a voice whispered in the back of her head.

  Ash pushed the accelerator.

  No. Keller would help her. There had to be a way. Keller wouldn’t allow the Company to push her out, not when Sharma and Len were still out there. Keller would come for her, wouldn’t she? She’d promised—

  Ash blinked away bright, sudden tears. There was something different about the way Twenty-Five reflected against the Tribulation sun. She had made this approach dozens of times; something was wrong. She squinted.

  “Natalie, I’m seeing things,” she said.

  A new ship glinted in the sunlight next to Twenty-Five, where there should have only been quiet, black space.

  “You’re okay, Ash, I see it, too.” Natalie’s voice was all warning and no reassurance. She leaned forward and toggled the forward cameras, magnifying the view on the right-hand screen.

  Twenty-Five was not alone. Settled nearby, connected by a gray umbilical, was a ship twice its size: a spindle-bound, spinning vessel the color of an exhausted, rainy sky—the shade of bare plasteel, nose painted in thin ribbons of orange and green. The design was a common Armour shape that had been sold to a dozen companies at the beginning of the war, but the blue-fire exhaust spitting out the back was the signature of a newer, post-Vai grav-drive, a reactor that ran as silent as it was expensive. The ship was armed, too, with railguns and a fat spinal boltlance pointed straight at them.

  Ash pressed the button to call Twenty-Five, and pulled back, allowing the shuttle to decelerate. She didn’t wait for Ramsay to identify herself before speaking. “Who are the visitors?”

  The XO’s voice was cheery. “Yes, they’re here to help.”

  Natalie muttered something under her breath and shook her head.

  “They’re not Auroran,” Ash said.

  “I noticed your velocity has decreased,” Ramsay said. “That’s not good. You’ll burn fuel you can’t afford to burn. We’ll have to come out to get you.”

  What the fuck is this? Natalie mouthed.