Architects of Memory

by Karen Osborne

  Keller scrolled down the list. Everything read as functioning within proper operational parameters—the ship’s base code, memory storage, environmental systems. Even the five main CO2 scrubbers seemed to be functioning at full capacity, despite what her starving lungs were telling her.

  Keller took another long, unsatisfying breath. Something was broken. Something was very broken. She couldn’t wait for Ramsay. She was going to have to do a full visual inspection herself.

  Which means I need to get that door open, she thought.

  She checked her pockets for her multi-tool, but found them empty. Figuring that it must have fallen out on the bridge when she’d fainted, she raided Sharma’s desk drawers like a human tornado instead, disturbing the neat, sensible little piles of flimsy notes and medical doodads and making a mental note to apologize to the doctor when the crisis was over.

  Pushing aside a framed picture—an angelic smiling child wrapped in a colorful Alien Attack Squad blanket, captioned with a neatly handwritten “My Granddaughter” at the bottom—she uncovered the multi-tool she’d given Sharma at Bittersweet. The doctor had left it behind, as Keller had guessed she might. Sharma preferred her own tools, and rarely needed to cut cable or solder breaches.

  Keller headed for the hatch. On Auroran starships, locks didn’t exist to promote privacy or personal security—their exclusive function was to keep hull breaches and fires from sucking the breath out of a broken vessel. She flipped out the captain’s skeleton key, sliding the end into the lock mechanism, feeling for the slip point. She turned her wrist, yanking the tool back and to the left, and the door shuddered open.

  “Thanks, baby,” Keller said, patting the bulkhead and stepping into the hallway.

  She was rewarded with a rustling of harsh fabric and a punch in the face from someone who wasn’t supposed to be there.

  Keller heard a sickening crunch and staggered back against the doorjamb. Pain sheared from her nose to the back of her head, and blood splattered on her jacket. The man—it was a man—went for the boltgun at his waist. Keller struck at his wrist and he dropped it. She and the man locked eyes as it skittered down the corridor.

  “Don’t,” she said.

  The man ducked to retrieve the weapon, and this time it was Keller’s turn to punch him in the face. He keeled back, toward the other wall, his hands snapping at her jacket, yanking her off-balance. She fell, and her ribs hit blank metal, the breath cast, quick and violent, from her body.

  “Boss, ’s Flynn.” He yanked at his commlink, trying to call out.

  No, she thought, not on my ship. She threw herself at the gun at the same time he did. She was a centimeter faster, and the man knew it. He swore. Her fingers connected and slipped around the trigger. He clawed at her jacket, her neck, her wrist. She broke free, bringing the gun around with its bright, silver whine.

  “Don’t,” she said, pain shooting down her side. “Please.”

  He hovered, white-fisted. “Give me the gun, or I’ll take it from your dead body,” he said.

  “I warned you. Stop,” Keller repeated. Her heart thudded in her chest.

  “Auroran bitch—”

  He moved. Keller fired. The bolt of energy hit the man in the soft part of the stomach just below the sternum. He hollered in pain, but kept coming. Panic had control of Keller’s fingers, now—she wanted him to stop, she just wanted him to stop—and she fired off another bolt. And another, and another, until he stopped.

  The light slipped from the man’s eyes. He toppled forward against Keller’s torso, a sudden sack of useless meat, his blood wet and warm where it soaked her shirt.

  She pushed the man’s body away and scrambled to her feet, unsteady and shaking and hyperventilating, her head going faint with lack of oxygen. She stumbled back against the open hatch. His blood clung to her shirt, cooling against her skin.

  A stranger. She’d killed a stranger. On her ship.

  Not a stranger. A guard.

  He was guarding the door.

  Keller closed her eyes. Her world spun. Her fingers felt numb against the hilt of the stranger’s boltgun. Her breath came in quick, desperate gulps. Ramsay was still in the engine room. She needed to know what had happened, needed to know that they’d been infiltrated, that she was in danger, too, that the mission was compromised—

  Why don’t you get some rest, Ramsay’s voice echoed.

  Ramsay wasn’t fighting the celestium leak.

  She was causing it.

  She just hadn’t expected Keller to wake up as early as she had.

  The entire situation made a sudden, sickening sense. The only real cascade failure on Twenty-Five was in Keller’s own inability to see Ramsay’s lies. She had sent the others to the planet, leaving her naked throat exposed to an enemy she should have seen coming from the moment Mr. Solano had talked about the weapon.

  She’d gotten soft.

  How else had she missed it? Ramsay’s background was just like Keller’s—indentured parents, an entrance into her own indenture at eighteen, regular promotions, near perfect health, cit tags on schedule. Goals met. Hard work. Grit. Consistent results. And it would have been difficult to be disloyal on a ship like Twenty-Five, with everyone living on top of one another. It was difficult enough to keep from farting in front of one’s coworkers, let alone communicate with outside entities.

  But Ramsay had taken the night shifts. She’d been alone on the bridge for hours when—

  —when Keller had been talking with Ash in the mess hall.

  Distracted.

  Soft.

  Keller felt hot and cold at the same time, dizzy and sober. She wiped blood from her bottom lip and pushed herself off the wall, dredging up her instructions on what to do next.

  She was the captain of this ship. She was Aurora in this forsaken place, a citizen with the right to use her own last name, not just Indenture Kate from Neversink Mechcenter 10. It was her job to have a solution for every problem, to yank survival out of the jaws of certain death, to bring everyone home. She’d trained for decompression, life support failure, grav-drive unsync, and illness in the crew. And she’d trained for this, too. They’d taught her about corporate espionage, about what a captain was required to do when a member of the crew chose to work against Aurora.

  She thought of her crew. Sharma, with a war record as immaculate as her peacetime work. Len and Natalie, the rising stars on their final pre-citizenship tour. Ash.

  Of course, Ash.

  She hoped they were bored out of their skulls waiting for the tests to finish, waiting for her to get back in contact, maybe wondering why she hadn’t checked in.

  I’m sorry I can’t come get you yet, guys. There’s something else I have to do first.

  With her cit tags and the captain’s rank came a second, quieter oath, made privately to Mr. Solano. An oath that meant, above everything, even her own life, even above the lives of her crew, that she had to protect Company secrets.

  Keller slung the boltgun into her waistband, then twisted her fingers into the scratchy fabric of the dead man’s jacket. She hauled him back into the medbay, propping him up against the wall, checking his pockets. He had no Company identification or cit tags, but his comm had a biometric interface, so she applied the man’s thumb to the access port and scrolled through his text messages. They seemed to be in code, referencing orders from the past four hours, when the team had left for the surface.

  Good, she thought. They’re not working too far ahead.

  She shoved the comm unit into her pocket, then checked the boltgun with clammy, shaking hands. It was some other Company’s model, with the proprietary information filed off. It was low on charge, which might be another sign the competition hadn’t had a lot of time to prepare for their assault. Either way, she could get a few more uses out of it. And I only need one bolt to put Ramsay down, anyway, she thought.

  Changing out of her bloody jacket into one of Sharma’s folded blue scrub shirts, she shoved the man’s orange armb
and in her pocket and then grabbed gauze from the doctor’s drawer, holding it to her nose and tilting her head up and back until she stopped bleeding, the metal tang of it clotted and hot at the back of her throat.

  She wouldn’t go soft again.

  At the back of the medbay was a hatch built into the wall, leading to the duct network: maintenance tunnels that allowed the crew to reach the auxiliary parts of systems that needed updating, tweaking, or fixing. Twenty-Five was every inch her ship, her baby; she knew every bolt, every tunnel, every turn by heart. She knelt and unfastened the hatch, crawling in and dragging the door closed by wedging her toes against the inside latch. The sound of the closing hatch echoed down the tunnel, and Keller was left with the quiet thrumming of Twenty-Five’s ailing engine and the sour sadness of her own anxious thoughts.

  She pulled herself along the tunnel, feeling fatigued and out of breath. She felt the ship shudder in the pads of her fingers and the angry ache of the engine spindown in her bones. The CO2 spinners didn’t register as broken, because they weren’t. There simply weren’t enough of them for the number of people onboard. She remembered the extra scrubbers they’d had to install when they left Bittersweet with that cargo bay full of survivors, the way they hummed and clanked and kept her awake the entire ride home.

  She wondered just how many strangers were rooting around in the guts of her baby right now, sucking down Twenty-Five’s precious oxygen. It was a sign they didn’t care what happened to the ship. That they didn’t have any plans to use it.

  Keller wondered if they were looting her crew’s hard-earned bonuses, stealing the weapons they’d discovered, the data they’d logged, making off with her future and her dreams and her last chance at a life with Ash.

  It didn’t matter.

  She would make them pay for every last inch of it.

  10

  The captain, at least, had died where he’d served, in the black chair at the center of the bridge. If he’d been a citizen—and of course he had, all captains were citizens—Ash couldn’t tell in death. His uniform was half flayed, and the jaw had long since gone slack and rotted to bone. His empty eye sockets stared, blank and rotten, at the ceiling.

  “Where is everyone?” said Natalie.

  “Evacuated, or went to fight.”

  Natalie shook her head. “Bridge like this, battle like that—every single seat should have a body in it. You need a bridge crew to fight.”

  “Some of the people below looked like they might have been bridge crew.”

  “But they shouldn’t have left. This bridge should be full of bodies,” Natalie repeated. “Captains fighting the battle alone? That’s just for vids.”

  Ash leaned in to examine the captain’s body. A wrongness caught her about the dead man’s chest, the great, ripped-out cavity of it. She grabbed a pair of pliers from the tool set and, with a grimace, pulled back the captain’s ragged clothing.

  “His heart’s missing,” Ash said.

  Natalie leaned in. “That’s … new.”

  Ash replaced the shredded uniform flap so she wouldn’t have to see the blackened hole, the cracked, punched-out ribs, the desiccated mess that had once been a human life. Whatever happened to this man, she thought, it hadn’t been decompression that did it. Natalie lifted her hand to her mouth and bit down on her index finger, hard enough to whiten her skin.

  “What kind of biological does this?” Ash asked.

  “A knife does,” Natalie said. “Metal. Hands, later.”

  “Murdered? By a human?”

  “That’s what I’d guess.”

  “Are you sure it’s not Vai?” asked Ash.

  “They’re into evaporation, not evisceration.” Natalie paused. “Or cracking open rib cages.”

  Ash’s vision went blurry and sideways as painkiller-borne exhaustion hit the side of her head like a rock hammer. She heard Keller laughing, somewhere, and she straightened, rubbing her temples to drive the sound of it away.

  “We’re losing time. We can figure out this poor bastard later. Ansible now.”

  “One second.” Natalie reached into the duffel bag and took out the silver necklace she’d found in the pilots’ ready room. “Let’s leave him this.”

  “What is it?”

  “I dunno. It seems like a nice thing to do, though.”

  Natalie passed her the medal. It looked religious, but she couldn’t place the saint it depicted in her own half-forgotten tradition. The saint was a woman, her arms spread wide, surrounded by a dented halo made of tarnished gold filigree. She stood on the Earth itself, holding arrows in one hand and an olive branch in the other. The bottom was lettered in italics: Sacrament Society.

  Old Christian? A saint cult? Mary Our Executive? The Arbiter of Hearts? Saint Clare? Her memory blank, she slid the medal into the captain’s front pocket. “Rest well, buddy,” she whispered, and pushed back off toward the ansible.

  Natalie was already working through the salvage protocol; step one, ensuring her own safety by tying herself and the duffel she was trailing to a nearby hook. Ash took step two, securing the environment; she spent some time looking for air leaks and sealed the bridge hatch. They then started checking to see what equipment was already working—step three.

  The recitation of the salvage rules calmed Ash as she ducked under the comm console, opening the access port. There were salvage lights here to direct her work: they flickered silent and sure, drawing power from their own long-lasting battery supply like their world hadn’t ended, blinking out their stories in a language any Aurora salvager would know. She felt a stab of grateful fealty.

  “We’re going to have to run some power over here,” Ash said. “The draw is going to be pretty significant. We’ll freeze.”

  Natalie’s head was buried in a navigation console. “So, we’re trapped in the fatal sort of way?”

  “It depends on how fast Rio can get here. They should be able to trace the power draws. We might get hungry.”

  “I’ve been hungry before,” Natalie said.

  “Not like this.”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  Ash flashed back to Bittersweet, the nights when they didn’t meet quota, the stale pieces of bread she and Christopher hid in their pockets and shared after dark. She decided not to argue. “Can we run cables from the nav computers? This hulk isn’t going anywhere.”

  Natalie waved a wrench in Ash’s direction. “You’re not allowed to carry any of it. I’m not redoing that autobandage twice in one day. You can cut, but not haul.”

  “Fine.”

  Natalie worked efficiently, like she always did; Ash worked slower than she wanted, hampered by her dizzy vision, the tug of the half-finished autobandage, and the distant, wordless whispering that seemed to come from beyond the closed bridge hatch. The voices sang songs of mutiny, cackled out orders in stubbed, sibilant Vai, sounded a little like Keller and Christopher. Ash did her best to ignore it all. These aren’t symptoms. You can’t have symptoms right now. You can’t leave Natalie. Not until you’re back home. With Kate.

  Beats trying to fix an ansible with prayers and school glue.

  Natalie pried off the decking near the nav console with Len’s battered multi-tool, then hung over it, tracing the flow of the cable with her eyes, noting already marked cut points.

  Harvesting cable without damaging it was one of the main skills of any decent Company salvage operator. Aurora’s pearlescent, responsive lines were candy for competitors, years ahead of what most other companies strung through their ships. Removing them was difficult work. Natalie refused to allow Ash to lift any of the cables, and Ash ended up watching as the younger woman detached them, one by one, from their trusses, wound them over her shoulder, and dragged eight yards of cable across the bridge to the ansible interface herself.

  Natalie took a break while Ash connected the cables to the ansible power supply. It was comforting work, reasonable work she could understand in a widening gyre where her reason was rapidly losing i
ts grip on reality. It reminded her of the repetitive nature of mining, the comforting presence of Christopher at her side, the dull expectation of the expected—all the things she was trying to recapture when Keller inspired her to indenture with Aurora after Wellspring fell apart.

  Kate.

  The apparition was back. The thought of Keller tumbled Ash back out of her head onto the bridge, and she wavered, gritted her teeth, and tied off another cable, kicking it across to Natalie at the ansible. Keller had been quiet for a while, quiet and gracious in her absence, but now she was on the left side of Ash’s vision, standing sentry just outside of her comfort zone.

  “Damn it.” Ash fumbled at a third cable, and it fell from her hands. Natalie watched, her lips pursed, as Ash clutched at her leg, futile in her efforts to hide her shaking hand. Shit.

  “You look like crap,” Natalie said. “Take a break.”

  Ash shook her head. “No, I’m fine. This is more important.”

  “You sound like Len right now.”

  “I’m goddamned fine.”

  “And the role of Leonard Downey will be played tonight by Ash Jackson,” Natalie pronounced. “Go have some food and a swig of water, and I’ll finish it up.”

  Ash let go of the cables and pushed off toward the duffel bag. “Fine.”

  Natalie started soldering the cable connections while Ash ripped open a ration bar. She chewed slowly, enjoying every starchy, sawdust bite. Keller’s ghost slipped onto the chair next to Ash, her arms folded, her face beatific. The whispering increased. Ash tried to ignore the ghost, stuffing the last of the bar into her mouth and squeezing her eyes shut. Maybe if she concentrated on a more engrossing topic, like work, the ghost would go away.

  “Break’s over,” Ash said.

  “It’s been three minutes,” Natalie protested.

  “You’ve almost got it working, anyway.” Ash looked over Natalie’s shoulder. Natalie slapped the power button, and the monitor started flickering in and out; the ansible was trying to connect to the local network.

  “We’ve done it,” Ash crowed, flexing her fingers on her good hand. She pulled herself around and dropped into the chair, moving her fingers over the unfamiliar interface, trying to find a keyboard.