Architects of Memory

by Karen Osborne

  “What do you mean?”

  Natalie tapped her finger against her arm in thought. “If I were at HQ, and I knew any of this before we got the ansible working, I’d have recommended Aurora send a higher-ranked ship, a crew that had experience with more complicated salvage situations. Two. Five. Even Ten. Not us. Even with no ansible, Captain Valdes would still have logged it for the data dump. That’s why we still have no support vessel. Maybe we should’ve listened to Reva in the first place and run to Europa.”

  Ash grimaced. “This was our corpse to pick.”

  “I dunno. It’s weird that we’re here, isn’t it?” Natalie picked at the laces on her shoe. “That they sent Twenty-Five to one of the most important battlefields?”

  “Not weird at all. I’ve seen this kind of shit before.”

  As Ash said the words, several unpleasant options occurred to her. She’d wanted stability, and the Company had given it to her. She’d wanted a path to citizenship. A place to belong. She’d been able to con herself into it for months now, and she’d thought that Aurora wouldn’t demand anything more of her than her body and her mind. Not like Wellspring. Wellspring had taken her blood and her love and her very soul. She had nothing else left to give.

  But Ash had seen this kind of thing before: the unwanted, the weakest, the least liked on the tunnel gang, sent into unstable tunnels, given the dangerous jobs, hazed, used as a human shield wall for Wellspring’s more established workers. Canaries, they were called. The word had been whispered by Ash’s team like a prayer, like a curse, the day the Vai attacked Bittersweet, as tiny clumps of gray earth loosened from the strutless walls, falling on their shoulders like dirt cast on a grave.

  “Because we’re expendable,” Natalie said, before Ash could say more. “Makes you wonder if they’re going to come at all.”

  They’re going to come, Keller said, her voice warm and assured.

  Maybe you don’t want them to come, Christopher whispered.

  Natalie poked her in the arm. “Hey.”

  Ash blinked. “I’m sorry. I was zoning.”

  “I’m starting to worry about you.”

  “Don’t,” Ash whispered. “I’m just thinking. London didn’t know the Vai were coming because London was already dead and there was nobody left to sound the alarm. None of them had a chance.”

  Natalie kept a skeptical look on her face. “Yeah. But we do. What’s next?”

  Ash looked up and around. Keller’s ghost sat in the navigator’s chair, her arms folded. “We’re burning power here, and it’s getting colder by the second. We need to focus on the ansible. On life support.”

  Natalie looked like she wanted to make a retort—her mouth closed, opened, and closed again. She sighed. “Fair. I’ll do the download. You get the blankets ready.”

  “Sure.”

  Ash unhooked her body from the haptic chair and pushed off to where they’d fastened the duffel to a sidebar, dragging out a survival blanket with her good arm. Made of heat-reflective material, it crackled as it expanded, creating a chiaroscuro effect on the dead bridge. Natalie rerouted power to the ansible, and the few lights that were on guttered and stopped. Ash held her breath through a few bare seconds of absolute darkness before Natalie’s flashlight came back on.

  They talked for a little while about Twenty-Five, about Len and Keller and poker night, about how Ramsay had fooled them all, but the conversation soon spun back to other, warmer places—Ash’s childhood on Wellspring Station, Natalie’s tales of running around hacker dens as a teenager. The temperature crashed in a slow, inexorable decline, like a feather drifting toward the bottom of a sunless cliff. Hypothermia slipped in even though they tried to seal the blanket, even though they shoved their hands in their sweatshirts and breathed as infrequently as possible. In the darkness, watching the ansible blink yellow, Ash lost any sense of time.

  They’re coming, Keller’s ghost whispered.

  Her voice was accompanied by flashes of light at the corners of her eye and involuntary trembling in her fingers and arms. Even in the cold, she felt heat, was grateful for the slips of delirium that began to slide into her mind. Natalie was hoarse, shivering; her body was pressed close to Ash’s.

  “I wanted to go home, you know,” Natalie said, after a while. “After this deployment. I wanted to patch things up with my father. Did you ever want to go home?” She paused. “Can you?”

  “I don’t know if my mother’s alive,” Ash said. “She’s still a Wellspring uncitizen, and she had to give me up to a child wellness center, and Wellspring doesn’t even really exist, not anymore. And I can’t even contact her, or hell, even the center, to find out until I have some sort of standing with Aurora.”

  “Maybe you could come home with me,” Natalie said. “Get my dad out of Armour and into Aurora. Find your family.”

  “I…” Ash thought of Keller, sitting just out of reach in the darkness, “… would like that.”

  “So you wouldn’t go home with Captain Keller.”

  Ash flushed, grateful for the darkness. “Let’s change the subject.”

  “Oh. Len was right.” Natalie elbowed her.

  “What did he say?”

  “That you liked her. That she liked you.”

  “Like we’re kids?”

  Natalie laughed. “I didn’t want to be rude.”

  Ash was silent for a moment, then decided to go with a version of the truth. “There’s nothing to tell. Maybe if we were different people.”

  “You said you had a fiancé,” Natalie replied.

  “Christopher.”

  “It’s okay, you know. To get on with your life. You’re not betraying him or anything.”

  Ash bit her bottom lip. “It’s all just hard.”

  The ansible kept up its reassuring wail. “Where did he go, when you joined up with Aurora?”

  “He died on Bittersweet. In the barrage.”

  “I’m sorry,” Natalie whispered. “I’m exhausted. My brain isn’t working right.”

  Ash shook her head, realizing seconds later that Natalie couldn’t see it. “It’s okay. The whole thing was kind of a blur. Like today.”

  “I should have remembered,” Natalie whispered.

  “Memories are weird sometimes. You know, you should have been there, when Dr. Sharma was running the experiment on the Vai device back on Tribulation, I heard Christopher talk. It was weird.”

  “What do you mean, you heard him talk?”

  Ash inhaled more cold air, and her lungs complained. “His voice. In my head. I kept it to myself because you don’t just go telling other people you’re hearing voices, right? But looking back, I wasn’t the only one who had a weird experience. Dr. Sharma asked me if the weapon was talking to me. Len didn’t say what he heard, but he did hear something, and I’m betting it was pretty similar. We never got a chance to iron it out. Anyway, what I heard. It was what Christopher said directly after we signed up for Bittersweet, like the Vai just reached in and popped my memories out and played them back for me.”

  Natalie shivered. “Creepy.”

  “You don’t think I’m crazy?”

  Natalie wiped her nose with the back of her sweatshirt. “I think this thing sounds more dangerous every second that passes. And now Ramsay has it.”

  Ash wound her hand in the edge of the blanket, trying to get warmer. “And Kate’s with Ramsay.”

  “If she’s not dead.” Ash heard a laugh, rueful and dark.

  “She’s not.”

  Natalie shivered. “You do have a thing for the captain, no matter what you say, Ash.”

  Ash’s face flooded, even in the darkness. “I can’t have a thing. She’s the captain.”

  “And I can’t have a thing for Len, but there you go.”

  Ash pushed a breath out of her shivering lungs, inhaling chill, metal-soaked air. Sharp pain throbbed and stabbed at her shoulder. She tried to put it out of her mind and failed. “Okay, fine. After we loaded up the Mumbai core, we, ah … um, le
t’s just say that I didn’t go back to my room.”

  Natalie was quiet. “Oh my God, are you serious? Len had money on kissing, but—”

  Ash felt her face flush. “She shot me down in the end. It was too serious, too fast. She didn’t want the complication to affect the crew. We had two more years out here. We were going to make a go of it afterward, if we both still felt the same way. I kind of doubted it, in the end.”

  “She feels the same way.”

  Ash coughed. It rattled in her chest. “She never told me that. Not directly, at least.”

  “It’s so obvious. The way she watches you when you leave the room.”

  “Stop.”

  “She doesn’t wait for me or Len after dinner.”

  Ash gritted her teeth against the pain in her shoulder, bit her bottom lip and tasted blood. She thought of Keller in the light of the bridge interface, the blue light tracing down the curve of her cheek; her body under Ash’s, in the pitch-black of her cabin, quiet together, so as not to wake the others. “Maybe.”

  She thought of Keller, and like the devil of old, her ghost appeared, stepping out of the shadows.

  Natalie moved inside the blanket, settling herself closer against the cold. “I learned in the war … it can be a thin line sometimes, with the right people.”

  “It can be a very thin line,” Ash said.

  “There was a guy in my platoon once,” she said. “I get it.”

  Ash leaned in. “What happened?”

  “Died at Grenadier. Saw him die.”

  A frisson of shock went through Ash’s shoulders. “Were you there for the whole siege?”

  “No, we were the reinforcements, as much as that helped,” she said. “I just saw the dead mechs. The aliens inside vaporized themselves with suicide moleculars before we could get a decent peek. But some of them were injured before they pulled the trigger. Their blood is silver. Sticky. Gets into everything and won’t come out.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Natalie shivered again. “Don’t be. Goddamn, it’s cold in here.”

  “Why don’t you get some rest?” Ash whispered back.

  “You’re going to be able to stay awake?”

  “What would Len say? ‘It’s better than the alternative’?”

  Natalie laughed. “I miss him,” she said. “No situation’s too bad with Len, you know? He’d be telling stories, joking about having a captive audience or whatever, trying to make us feel better.”

  “Yeah. He’d be good to have around right now.”

  The silence settled between them. “You’ve been a good friend, Ash,” she said. “Whatever happens, I can’t say we didn’t do our best.”

  “We did our best. We’re Twenty-Five.”

  She kept her eyes open against the darkness and imagined the life Keller promised, the one in the Aurora recruitment materials: a cabin by the sea, a name, salt air, whatever that smelled like. She drifted off to sleep with Natalie’s warm head on her shoulder, and, before she knew she was dreaming, the ocean had turned red with blood and the seashore into a tall white bluff over a churning sea. She lost her balance, pinwheeled, and watched the cabin fall away as she plummeted, the voices swirling around her.

  I’m going to die, she realized.

  But the voices were still there, in the red, churning sea. We’ll catch you. But she fell.

  12

  Keller breathed hard and hot as she pulled herself through the maintenance tunnels leading to Twenty-Five’s computer core. It was only a matter of time before the dead man in the medbay missed a check-in, and stopping to catch her breath would be suicide.

  Ramsay kept me alive, so she must need me, she thought, as she struggled to drag air into her body. The files, maybe. She’s made my command codes invalid, and she has salvage codes, but that doesn’t automatically mean she has access to the Company directories.

  Pulling herself into the crawl space behind the server room, she blinked away small black dots hovering in the corners of her eyes and swallowed a smoldering, furious anxiety. She pressed her ear against the secondary access hatch, screwed her eyes shut, and listened. She heard the soft clatter of a set of careful boots on the deck, the dull thud of fingers on the server interface, and the soft hiss of lungs breathing plain air.

  One person. No suits. No respirators.

  To be honest, she’d expected better efficiency from a crew commanded by difficult, exacting Ramsay. It made her lean toward a theory that Ramsay was competition, and that she’d been playing a long game, but hadn’t quite expected the endgame to be laid out quite like this. Pirates would have come in suits. Pirates would have flooded both sides of the engine first, would have disconnected it and secured it for transport in less than twenty minutes, leaving the ship and crew helpless and frozen, bony carcasses spinning lost and endless in the everlasting night.

  No, these were competitors, drilled on different equipment. And people drilled differently made stupid mistakes.

  She was counting on those mistakes.

  It wasn’t a sure bet. Ramsay had been on the Auroran command track long enough to have been trained on how to properly yank an engine core. But she’d also know about the firewall lock that fell into place on the computer if the engine was removed from its housing outside of dry dock, and whatever else Ramsay was doing right now, she apparently still needed core access.

  “Sir,” murmured a woman on the other side of the hatch, “none of these command codes work.” She paused. “Yes, I’m running the firewall protocol.”

  Keller slid Sharma’s multi-tool out of her pocket. She unthreaded one of the bolts holding the hatch closed and peered through the hole, sliding the used bolt into her pocket to keep it from making noise.

  A brown-haired woman in a black jacket and green armband hunched in front of the server interface, dropping blocks of code into the server backend.

  Jackpot, Keller thought. She’s trying to circumvent the firewall with salvage codes. But she can’t grab the whole core without a captain’s authorization—

  Wait. She doesn’t need to. She’s not after the entire core. Keller’s blood turned to ice. Ramsay only showed her true colors when we found Ash’s weapon. Our weapon.

  Her hand shook as she lifted the multi-tool and started to remove a second bolt. The competitor still hadn’t left the room. Without her command codes, a full wipe was out of the question, but that couldn’t stop a captain from going sector to sector, deleting the most important data by hand. She’d just need time. Access. To hold the room.

  “Ramsay to Keller.”

  Her breath froze.

  Here we go.

  The sound came from all around Keller, rattling in from above and below—the ship’s announcement mode, loud enough to shatter any sleeping crewmember’s happy dreams. Ramsay’s voice was still somewhat casual, and amiably obsequious. Keller bit her bottom lip, ignoring her, and moved bolt by bolt to unfasten the hatch.

  “This isn’t a big ship, Captain. I know you’re in the ductwork. It’s what you do. There’s quite a few of us, and we’re going to find you.”

  Doesn’t matter, Keller thought. She slipped the last nut away from its housing with her left hand, then grabbed for the boltgun with her right.

  The hatch fell to the deck with a clatter. The woman at the interface whirled in surprise, and Keller used that moment to fire once at her opponent’s leg. The bolt caught the woman just above the knee, and she cried out, toppling over, trying to stop her fall with outstretched hands. Keller pushed herself out of the access tube and aimed the barrel of the gun at the woman’s sternum. The competitor’s eyes went wide and pain-bright.

  “Stay down, stay quiet, stay alive,” Keller said, catching her breath.

  “They know— Fuck! They know where I am,” the woman said, but she didn’t move.

  Keller moved to the interface and yanked out the woman’s commlink, tossing it to the ground and smashing it with the heel of her boot.

  The other woman’s
eyes went tight and flinty gray. Keller transferred the weapon from her right hand to her left, using the right to bring up the root dialogue on the core interface. Only then did she allow her hands to start shaking.

  “You’re Auroran. You’re not going to be able to kill me,” the woman said.

  Keller kept the gun humming, and she cast the woman a withering glance. “You never know. I might miss and plant one in your head by accident.”

  The competitor stared back. “I’m gonna bleed out—”

  “Sure will, if you move.”

  Keller returned her attention to the interface, using her left hand to enter the command codes for the core wipe—which didn’t work here, either. She swallowed her disappointment and moved on. She’d have to delete the most interesting sectors manually, using one of the techniques she’d learned while stripping war-dead freighters near the ruins of Arcadia.

  She waved the gun at the competitor again. “What were you trying to do?”

  “Screw you,” the woman said.

  “If Ramsay wanted the new episodes of Alien Attack Squad, all she had to do was ask,” Keller said, bringing up the computer’s root directory. The most recent files went first—all the precious new data from the planet, the records from Ash’s pod, and Sharma’s analytics. She felt a pang in her stomach—she’d never even gotten to read them.

  After that, she deleted all the executive-privilege directories: the list of weapons they’d discovered in the wrecks, the Company ansible directory, the maps of Auroran-owned wrecks near the Lost Worlds. She followed up with files flagged for captain’s-eyes-only, memos from Solano’s office, ansible news meant for citizens only. Len’s cache of Alien Attack Squad vids. Holos of the six of them celebrating the full inventory of the Mumbai weapons cache with her treasured Neversink bourbon.

  She skipped over the names and faces of the men and women they’d lifted from London’s eviscerated corpse. Their bodies, held in coffins in the darkest part of Twenty-Five’s ample cargo bays, would never come home, but she couldn’t in good conscience remove them from history.