Architects of Memory

by Karen Osborne

  Keller’s notes went. Her lists. Sharma’s database, and the physicals she’d taken of the crew. She found the file labeled To Ashlan—Letters. With a knot in her throat, she deleted that, too.

  The competitor spat out a few strangled swear words, and hauled herself toward the door, her hand bloody, pain-pale, and shaking.

  “In here! She’s in here!” she shouted.

  Keller panicked for a moment and thumbed the charger on her boltgun. The fear and thrill of it crawled up her arm and settled, warm and unwelcome, in her consciousness. When nobody responded, she took a step closer to her prisoner.

  “Shut up! There are eight of you onboard, tops, otherwise we’d all be getting carbon monoxide poisoning. And they’re all down trying to raid the weapons stash, aren’t they? Or sitting in my chair, trying to get in the front way? Nobody’s going to hear you.”

  Don’t get distracted.

  It was Ash’s voice, whispering somewhere underneath her skull, behind her ear.

  She shook her head. Maybe she was getting carbon monoxide poisoning.

  Footsteps clattered above her, and a sick solemnity settled in her belly. She was going to have to take care of the rest of the list in one fell swoop—until she’d seen the celebration files she’d forgotten about Mumbai’s computer core, wrapped and ready for transport in the lower cargo bay. She couldn’t save any of it. She needed a new plan.

  She wrapped her hand around the warm grip of the boltgun, thinking of the last time she’d nearly died—on the tug, during the Vai advance. A cracked cooling brace on the tug’s engine had nearly killed Keller on her first tug run. She couldn’t ruin Twenty-Five’s engine brace—but the computer had one, too, for when the processor ran hot, like it was now. That would do the trick. It would force Ramsay’s people away from where Keller needed to go. They’d need to run the ship’s environmentals on manual. They could fix it easily—

  —but she’d be gone, in the meantime.

  In a pod.

  On her way to Ash.

  Awash with sudden hope, Keller crossed to the core housing, flipped open the sealer on her multi-tool with one hand and slipped it under the core’s safety box. She had to lose her bead on the prisoner, had to swing the boltgun around so it dangled by the trigger ring, had to use both hands to slide the box away from its housing. The wounded competitor saw she was no longer pegged, and hauled herself toward the door, screaming. Keller let her go; she needed both hands for what came next, and if she wasn’t fast enough, nothing would matter.

  Casting aside the safety box, Keller surveyed the cooling setup. Her tug’s engine brace had decomposed over a period of two days lost and listing, galvanized by cheap Company connectors hooking the fan to the core. This computer had a very similar rig.

  Keller didn’t have two days; she needed the break to happen in two minutes. She aimed the boltgun at the plasteel connecting tubes, firing quick, low-power bursts. The tubes shattered, popping away from the main core. She felt a blast of frigid air and nearly cried.

  The boltgun charge depleted too early, as she’d feared—so she grabbed it by the barrel and started smashing the cooling works with the butt, causing a deafening, screaming noise that could be heard in the hall.

  “Step away from the computer, Kate.”

  Ramsay’s familiar voice, behind her.

  Keller withdrew the gun from the core, sliding her thumb over the charge indicator. It was dead in her hands, dented, lacking the signature hum. It would have to do.

  “I have an itchier trigger finger than you,” Keller said, “and you know it.”

  Ramsay stood blocking the door, carrying a boltgun of her own. She’d changed; instead of the familiar blue Aurora jumpsuit, she was in mercenary black, a jacket and tight, dull pants, decorated with a green armband and unfamiliar citizens’ tags at her throat. Her hair, hands, and chest were streaked with the silver sibilance of celestium residue; it confirmed Keller’s guess that she hadn’t been lying when she said she was working on the injection system.

  The first thing anyone took—salvager or competitor—was the valuable, irreplaceable beating heart of any ship: its fuel. I should have seen this coming.

  “How long?” Keller spat.

  Ramsay’s shoulders seemed straighter; her manner less deferent. Keller took a step to the left to block Ramsay’s sight line to the core, so she couldn’t see the smoke.

  “Does it matter?” Ramsay said.

  “You tried to kill me.”

  “No. I just spiked your coffee. I didn’t want anyone to die. You killed that man. He had a family.”

  “So did I. You were a part of it.” Keller’s stomach flipped. She tightened her hold on the boltgun; behind her, the coolant fan spattered and spun its last, and she heard the first few labored turns of the boltshot core. All she had to do was keep Ramsay distracted for a few more minutes. “Was it money they gave you? Did they make you a birthright offer?”

  Ramsay’s jaw worked. “I can explain, but you need to come with me.”

  “Where’s the rest of the crew?”

  “Let’s go, Kate.” The other woman’s face set like flint.

  “I’ll go with you,” Keller said, her stomach twisting. She inhaled, searching for the taste of burning metal in the air. Nothing yet. Too slow. “But first, you need to tell me where the hell Ash and the others are.”

  “Sharma’s on my ship, Phoenix. She’s safe. The others—”

  Keller’s hand felt sweaty on the damaged grip. “The others what.”

  “They killed themselves,” she said. “Blew up their own shuttle rather than come. I never knew Ashlan had such a flair for the dramatic.”

  She’s lying, Keller thought, but there was plain truth in the face she’d trusted, the woman she’d spent nearly every day with for the past year—and her body reacted, twisting underneath her, drowning in a dark ocean of grief that knocked the breath out of her lungs and loosened the muscles at her knees. She caught herself on the wall before she fell. Her finger squeezed at the trigger, shook against the dead gun, as if she could will the thing to fire with the dragon’s rage clutching her shoulders. This is my fault. I let this happen.

  “You awful—”

  “I didn’t kill them, Kate. I didn’t make that decision. I tried to help. You can make a different choice.”

  The heat was spinning up now, clawing at her back. Despite the grief, she needed to keep Ramsay busy, keep her talking just a little while longer. For Ashlan.

  “And what does the deal include?”

  “You don’t even know how special you are,” Ramsay said. “What you can do. Who you are.”

  Keller’s throat closed again when she tried to respond. She opened her hand behind her back and found the heat she was looking for—the sweet, bitter tang of death burning at the heart of a shuddering ship. Just a few more minutes, she thought. I just have to keep her busy for a few more minutes. That’s all.

  “I told you,” she repeated. “I’m not executive material. We both know that.”

  Shadows moved behind Ramsay; voices whooped. The bitch had men and women clearing out the storage rooms closest to the core access point, stripping Twenty-Five of everything that mattered, that had value, anything that could be used or stored or sold. They’d probably gorge themselves on her whiskey stash tonight. Bastards.

  “But you want more. I can give that to you,” Ramsay said. “The research at Bittersweet—I was part of the team that picked it apart, see, deciphered it after we bought Wellspring, figured out the Auroran connection. It was insane. Insane and beautiful. It’s going to make my company a market leader. And unless you enjoy being Aurora’s vulture, used until you’re broken and cast aside, just like everyone else, you’ll come along.”

  “You’re risking a Company war. A bad one. Aurora’s not going to lie down when they hear what you did to us.”

  “Yes,” Ramsay said, smiling. “They will.”

  The heat curled at the back of Keller’s neck. “Thi
s is about the weapon.”

  “Of course it’s about the weapon. It’s about the weapon and who can protect us when the Vai return. You remember what it was like. You watched what happened to Arcadia. You watched what happened to the Lost Worlds.”

  The disbelief curdled in Keller’s chest. “This isn’t about them.”

  “We were never going to win. Not like that, not arguing amongst ourselves, not letting the market decide who was the leader.”

  “It’s over. The Vai retreated over the White Line. They’re gone.”

  Ramsay’s eyes lit with a quiet, terrible certainty. “And what is the White Line?” she whispered. “Why don’t the probes we send return any data? What’s going on? It’s not good for us, whatever it is. Keller, there’s just one way to make sure humanity survives. Do you really think Solano cares whether you live or die? There are a hundred more like you coming up. A hundred more who would do more to get ahead. Come with me.”

  Keller breathed in a tendril of smoke. “I told you before where I wanted to be. What—an hour ago? Two? Was this why you asked?”

  “You said you wanted to be up here. Doing good work.”

  “I said I wanted to be on Twenty-Five,” Keller said. “And you fucking killed her, so go to hell.”

  A confused, deep disappointment crossed Ramsay’s face, but she dropped the gun to her side and stepped back into the corridor. “Fine. Go with your ship. I have what I need. Just know that I tried to save you, Kate.”

  Behind her, Keller heard the crackling of the circuits frying.

  Here we go, Ash whispered, long ago and far away.

  “You’re forgetting one thing, Alison,” Keller said.

  “And what is that?” Ramsay crossed her arms.

  Keller took a long, sweet breath. It smelled of death and burning data and shattered dreams. “You’re forgetting that this is my ship. And that, on my ship, I don’t need a weapon to beat you.”

  “What are you going to do, try and—” Ramsay stopped mid-sentence, finally catching the scent of frying electronics, her eyes going wide. “No.”

  Without the cooling brace and heat sink attached, the core behind her had been heating up all this time as it spun and ground, frying the environmental motherboard. When this had happened to her tug, Keller spent two exhausting days running herself ragged from manual interface to manual interface, keeping the backup systems in check until rescue showed. Ramsay would have an easier time of it, but enough of her crew would have to be diverted to allow Keller to make her next move in relative peace.

  Fire sparked and flickered, lighting up the cabin.

  “Have fun,” Keller said, before the entire ship was plunged into darkness.

  This time, Keller welcomed the acrid stink of her dying ship—Twenty-Five’s last breath spent to keep her safe, to keep Aurora’s secrets safe. Smoke billowed out of the core, and she threw herself back at the hole in the ductwork. Ramsay moved as if to follow, but a sudden, terrible light flashed up and sucked at the remaining air in a destabilizing rush, and what was left of the ship’s autonomic systems started screaming. She heard Ramsay’s voice shrieking orders as Keller took the turn toward the cargo bay. She knew her ship. She knew every step. Every bend. She didn’t need something as prosaic as light to get her to where she needed to go.

  Fire would take the core—the last of Aurora’s privileged data and the final six months of her life. It was a decent exchange. The sacrifice would give her enough time to draw the last line between Aurora’s secrets and the competitors who would have them, to justify the sacrifice of her crew, to honor them in the way she hoped they would have honored her. Keller knew she might die, that she still might fall into the hands of Ramsay’s outfit, but she still needed to do what she could to make this right.

  She would draw the line. She would stand. She thought of Joseph Solano and the citizens’ tags still on her collar.

  And yet, as she hauled herself through the darkened maintenance duct toward her uncertain future, the same questions dogged her certainty:

  Why not kill me? Why am I even alive? Why am I special?

  13

  Ash’s next memories were half hazy, barely in focus, shaky, and feverish. She was warm, lying on soft pillows, and people in white and blue came and went, moving over her without speaking, like ghosts or shadows. For a little while, she was too tired to care if her new world was death or rescue.

  When she finally felt coherent enough to move, she lifted her head, locating herself squarely in a medbay on a Company ship, lying in the same sort of hospital bed that she’d occupied in those first incoherent days after Bittersweet. The ceiling was dotted with the same black-circle renderbots she’d seen on London. She was connected to familiar hookups: intravenous port, heart monitor, brain monitor. Someone had started an IV feed of some sort of greenish-yellow, unlabeled fluid into her uninjured hand, and she wondered if that was the reason everything was surrounded with a fuzzy, half-unreal halo. The other half of the room lay behind a heavy curtain. She checked for the autobandage at her shoulder and found just scabbed, rough skin, stitched and healing.

  They came for us.

  She felt grateful, at first, a feeling that was swept aside by a crush of fear. How many years is this going to cost me?

  Ash clawed at the blankets, attempting to sit up, feeling the quiet rumble of a stalled grav-engine in her legs. She tasted the blessed, metallic tang of well-filtered atmospheric mix. Her things—the important ones, Len’s tool set, her pants, the multi-tool Keller had given her—were sitting on the nightstand like a minor miracle, presided over by the toy unicorn, staring sightless and worn from atop the pile.

  Her vision twisted as she reached for the unicorn, and she fell back into her bed. Scrollwork, black and burgundy, slipped from the corners of her vision like someone writing on her retinas. She clamped her palm over her eyes, bringing blessed darkness.

  “Be careful,” a man said.

  She dragged the hand away. Someone had been sitting nearby the whole time, writing with a stylus on a tablet just outside of her drug-slagged vision. He was in his late fifties, dressed in an immaculate Aurora-blue suit, with dark curled hair tied back in the kind of businesslike chignon that had been popular two decades ago, an extravagant diamond info-implant right above his left eyebrow, threading down into his ear, the kind of implant Kate had always said she wanted but could never afford.

  “Hey,” she croaked, waving her hand. “Hey. I can’t pay for this. Let me walk out. I can’t afford this kind of treatment.”

  The man was planet portly, with the tattoo of a birthright citizen under his ear. She was sure she’d seen him before. “Of course you can’t.” He paused. “That’s why we have citizenship accounts. But we’re grateful for your fealty in a tough situation, Ashlan, so we’re providing bandages and the bed at no cost. I just had to approve the adjustment myself. See you myself, actually.”

  She blinked. Tried to place his voice. “How many years?”

  “Don’t think about that right now. Do you know who I am?” he said.

  She shook her head. “I feel like I should.”

  “Confusion is part of the disease, I’m told. I’m Mr. Solano.”

  Ash felt dizzy. “You got our message.”

  His face slotted in as recognizable. She’d only ever seen it over the two-dimensional ansible feed, softened and flattened by the distance. In person, she could see the dark circles under his eyes, the flush to his cheeks. He looked human. “We did, yes. Very smart of you. Are you well enough to answer some questions?”

  Questions of her own rushed to her lips. “Have you found out what happened to—”

  He raised his hand. She fell silent. He put down the stylus and leaned back in his chair, just like the doctor on Bittersweet when he’d given her the bad news the first time.

  “We found Twenty-Five in the asteroid belt an hour ago—picked to the bones, the engine scragged. There’d been a computer core meltdown. No survivors, or none
that we can find. We think the pirates might still be on the planet, so we’ll be sending a party to check. You and Indenture Natalie are our best sources of reliable information. So. Tell me what happened.”

  “Ms. Ramsay,” Ash said, and then was caught by a coughing fit that, violent and involuntary, shoved air out of her frostbitten lungs. “Sir, I need to be on that search party, I need to find Kate—”

  “Ramsay, your executive officer,” prompted Solano. “She was a pirate.”

  She hauled in a painful breath. “They’re not pirates. She was working for another Company this whole time. She took Sharma, the experiment—”

  Solano waved his hand again, stopping her. “Are you sure that is correct?”

  Confusion. “You don’t think I had something to do with it?”

  “Did you?”

  Heat rushed to Ash’s face. Anger. “Kate was my—my best friend, I would have never—” She gulped a breath. “We fooled Ramsay into thinking we’d died with our shuttle. Then we called you. Two people against an entire cruiser was not a good bet, sir.”

  Solano didn’t respond right away. “What was your last memory aboard London? Do not lie to me.”

  Natalie, warm and close, her hair smelling of frost. In the air, ketones and piss. “Frostbite.” Visions. Falling.

  Solano picked up his tablet and spun it to face her. He flicked it on. The tablet opened to a video taken with a standard Company tactical camera, the kind grunts like Natalie clipped to their helmets. She saw herself strapped to a stretcher, her eyes open, fighting, her hands like claws, screaming “Glory, glory, Kate, Kate, cannot connect, glory.” The rescue operator turned around long enough to see Natalie on another gurney, her mouth covered with an oxygen mask. The video came to an end, and Solano narrowed his eyes and remained silent.

  “I—” She swallowed, a sour note dangling at the back of her throat. “I can’t explain that.”