Architects of Memory

by Karen Osborne

  Ash tried to loosen the canister one more time, then gave Nat’s crew a quick once-over. They wore citizens’ tags, too, and blocked the only way out, using their armored combat suits and darkened, anonymous faceplates to their advantage. Cantrell’s boltgun would do very little to deter them from taking her down if she made a wrong move. “And that involves bringing armed soldiers to find me?”

  The other woman’s lips flattened into an annoyed line. “Your shuttle went rogue with hostiles nearby. My people are a standard precaution. And even if that wasn’t true, you can’t just break your contract and wander off. Where are the others?”

  “I’m not the one who broke my contract.” Ash craned her neck, looking for another way out of the engine room, spying only a locked maintenance tunnel blocked by the debris of a shattered console. She swore under her breath.

  “Ash, come on—”

  “Seven years. Not so long, you think, not when you’ve just spent quite a few years in a mine, ripping celestium from the walls. But it’s not actually seven years, is it, Ms. Chan? It’s eight, or nine, or nineteen. It’s how much soap you buy and how sick you get. It’s how much the boss likes you, and damn your soul if he doesn’t. It’s bonuses that aren’t, not really.” She paused, shaking, then tried—and failed—to yank the canister from the wall again. “It’s getting shot on a dead colony planet by a freelancer and your CEO telling you that the hospital bed is a treat.”

  Natalie sighed. “You signed that contract. I told you it would be a problem.”

  “I didn’t have a choice.”

  “You could have refused it,” Natalie said.

  A bright anger took hold of Ash, and her hand went white-knuckled with the tight pain of keeping her handhold on the open engine. I don’t have time for this, she thought, but the words came anyway. “You grew up an uncitizen, too. Earth sure, but you still thought war with the fucking Vai was a better life than the one you had. But you were a soldier, with guaranteed citizenship. And Christopher, well—” Ash’s throat closed around his memory. “He died for his better life. I don’t know why I ever thought I had a chance. Not if this is what family becomes when they pin cit tags on your jacket.”

  Natalie took a step inside. “Where is Len, Ash?”

  “He—” Ash felt sour. She closed her eyes. The lie she meant to tell stumbled to a halt on her tongue. The last trihex shot had long since worn off, and her veins burned with the scalding ache of being alone. The voices sang to her of death, of deletion, of Auroran ships twirling in jewel-steady flame, of Len’s body burning. Red flashes filled her vision, bringing back Len’s last cry, the sobbing way light had shoved its way down his spine to the very tips of his fingers, and she fought tears.

  “Ash,” she heard. Then, louder: “Ash! Where is he?”

  She opened her eyes. “He’s dead.”

  Natalie stiffened in her suit. “How?”

  “Cantrell, he—”

  “The R&D doctor?” Her voice was clipped. “Was it him? Where the hell is he?”

  Listening to the clicking silence inside her suit, Ash thought about answering in the affirmative. It would be easy to pin Len’s sacrifice on a dead Jie Cantrell. But Natalie would want to see the body, wouldn’t she? To know for certain that Len was gone, to feel the dull ice underneath his dead skin, to make her soldier’s farewell? She couldn’t give either of them anything like that.

  And they both deserved so much more from Ash than a lie.

  Ash fumbled for the bag and the cold weapon inside, and she withdrew it, revealing the husk of the depleted crescent weapon to the other woman.

  “We had to,” she said.

  Natalie’s eyes grew wide inside her helmet. The moment stretched and festered between them. “He—” She licked her lips. “You what,” she said. It was not a question.

  Ash struggled for calm. “Dr. Cantrell was working for the Sacrament Society. He killed Dr. Julien, and he was going to betray Aurora by handing me over to the Society’s people on Medellin. He shot Len, and Len—” Her throat closed. “Len was going to die anyway. From the long walk he made to the ag-center. You guessed that. You know how much his care was going to cost. And he knew what they were going to do to me, and what would happen to everyone else because of it. I had to. It was the only way.”

  “Don’t you dare blame this on him,” breathed Natalie, pink-faced with anger and quietly incredulous.

  “It’s my fault, but—”

  “Indenture, you are under arrest for—”

  Ash met her eyes. “I’m not going back with you.”

  “The hell you aren’t.”

  “You’ll shoot me first.” Ash felt spit on her lips.

  The engine room interface flickered. Natalie’s eyes went wide with curdling hate, and all Ash could think of was Len’s silent scream, Cantrell’s twisting, voracious mouth, the thousand ways that Keller would die in Ash’s exhausted dreams when she finally found a safe place to sleep again. I can’t live with it, Ash.

  Natalie’s boltgun whined, still charged and hungry. “You murdered him.”

  I can’t live with it, either, Ash wanted to say, but she felt reckless now, invulnerable in her burden, coasting on starving adrenaline and a sick, desperate hope. She stepped forward until the breastplate of her suit was one yawning inch away from the barrel of the other woman’s gun. I can’t live with it.

  And I’m going to make sure you can’t live with it, either.

  “No. But you did murder them,” she said.

  She wasn’t really talking to Natalie, now. She hadn’t been, not since the second trip to Tribulation, after they’d promised her friend the blue tags glinting on the front of her suit. Ash was talking to Ms. Chan, an Auroran full citizen, and behind the honorifics and the faceplate was every chin-tilted citizen she’d ever met, every man and woman who chose to ignore that their world was built on spreadsheets and blood, on manipulation and broken promises—because it was convenient, because it hurt, because confronting it brought them to truths their lives could not sustain.

  “It’s war.”

  Ash swallowed. Her dry throat felt uncomfortable. “It was genocide, Nat. An entire colony of Vai,” she said. “Vai innocents. Civilians, colonists. They’d been tortured. Is that all right, now that you’re a citizen? Is it justified now, that it’s them and not us? Me, and not you?”

  The boltgun still sang in Natalie’s hands. “You’re lying. You lie. Lying is what indentures do. No more words; move into the corridor. You’re under arrest.”

  Ash took one step forward and felt the jarring impact of her suit against the other woman’s gun in her fingers, her legs, her toes. She wondered if the bolt would feel like that, once it punched through her suit and buried itself in her breastbone. If she’d die from that ache, or if the ache of the airless cold would take her first. “If that’s what you believe, Natalie, but I’m still not going anywhere.”

  Natalie’s eyes went lambent with some angry, wet emotion. “Are you trying to make me shoot you?”

  Am I? Ash shook in her suit, savoring her dry throat, her desert lips, the ache in her back, the erratic, broken-machine beat of her heart. The words came out before she could stop them, and she closed her eyes. “You’d be doing me a favor.”

  “Ash. Please. Don’t make me do this.”

  “Make you. Like you were made to kill an entire colony. I understand, and I’m sure Len would, too.” Ash whispered. “He’d get it, wouldn’t he. He’d understand why you were so eager to get so much blood on your hands. He’d understand why your citizenship is so much more important.”

  She heard Natalie’s hissing, angry breath. In the darkness of what was left, Ash thought of Christopher’s smile, and the dirt under his fingernails. Of the crooked way Kate crossed her arms. Of her mother’s eyes, limned by liquor, lost somewhere on the Wellspring dole. And, finally, she thought of the bright together, of the humming warmth of a thousand voices. She held on to that, grasping at that great, golden memory, and wai
ted for Natalie to pull the trigger.

  “Get out,” Natalie said.

  The bolt never arrived.

  When Ash opened her eyes, she was alone with Natalie. The engineer was crying openly, a skewed group of wet trails lit bright blue on her skin. Her men were gone.

  “Is it true, what I did?”

  Ash nodded, unable to speak.

  Natalie processed that information, her mouth working soundlessly behind the faceplate. Her eyes dropped to where Ash was still holding the dead crescent weapon. “It’s war,” she whispered, then looked up. She gulped down air as she spoke. “We do things. In war. That we’re not proud of. Just like you. Like—you can control this, can’t you?”

  “No.” Ash blinked away exhaustion and black scrollwork and the faraway screams of the dead in her veins. “It’s not control. It’s more like—like I’m talking to it. Requesting. Asking. Back in the forest—do you remember, after I died? I told you that Dr. Julien thought I was Vai. And we thought it was ridiculous.”

  Natalie nodded. “And it’s not.”

  “No,” Ash said. Her skin prickled and itched. Her veins burned. “But they’re inside, I think.”

  Natalie bit her bottom lip, hard. It was a common spacer move, meant to reroute pain or discomfort from inaccessible places elsewhere in her vacsuit. “So if you die, this secret dies with you. Fucking hell, Ash.”

  Ash turned back to the broken engine, sliding her gloves along the sides of the fuel canister, finding purchase there. She yanked, and it refused to move. “I don’t know. I have to hope so. On my way here, Mr. Solano mentioned that Baywell is sure they have the weapon and a way to use it. That trigger has to be Kate. There’s no other option. So, if you’re not going to kill me, I’m going to take this leftover fuel, rescue Kate, and then take her to the White Line, where we can end this.”

  But Natalie was shaking her head, already on to a new thought. “If it’s the captain, she won’t cooperate.”

  Ash slammed the top of the canister in frustration. “She won’t need to. This is Wellspring. They’ll—” Her words caught. “They’ll core her. Or torture her, or worse. And imagine what Aurora’s going to do to me since I signed their damned full indenture. And even if you don’t care about that—even if you’re perfectly fine with screwing your old family in favor of that asshole Joseph Solano—with the Vai colony dead and the weapon lost, the Sacrament Society will be desperate. They were already desperate enough to kill Dr. Julien.”

  Natalie shook her head. “But if Baywell has you and the captain—”

  “Then Baywell has market share, and it’ll be bad. But there’s no arms race, no Company war. At least—not in the beginning. You’ll have time to prepare for a bigger Company war. But imagine this fucking arms race, Natalie, if I go with you. Imagine the new war that starts tomorrow, that spills out from Tribulation like a fucking plague. You didn’t fight the Vai so you could just turn around and shit on humanity. I know I won’t stand for it. Len wouldn’t. The peace he died for will die, too.”

  Around them, the light from their helmets bounced off the walls of the engine room, off dead consoles and the traceries of frozen blood and quiet ice. Natalie subsided into an aching, trembling silence, which ended when she flicked her gun to neutral, sliding it back into the holster.

  “It’s a mess out there, Ash. Even if you can make it past the Baywell ships, you can’t survive in open space in a shuttle, let alone fuck off to the White Line,” she said.

  “I can, with enough fuel and the right burn sequence. That’s why I’m here,” Ash said. She pushed off, sailing over to the injection system, shutting down the remaining engine works protocol by broken protocol. “Are you going to stand there, or are you going to help?”

  Natalie hesitated, the indecision clear in her eyes. Finally, she exhaled and stepped forward, fishing out a multi-tool. She called up some industrial pliers and slipped it around the canister bolts, yanking with a few violent tugs, loosening the connectors easily enough for Ash to shake away the tubing leading to the rest of the engine. The canister hung there, indecisive about falling, and Ash grabbed hold of the bottom to steady its drunken curve.

  “Thanks,” Ash said.

  Natalie snorted. “Don’t thank me yet. Your plan is still pretty thin. Baywell’s got four ships out there, and they’ve all got pod and fighter decks.”

  “And they’ll be watching Rio and the capital ships. I fly well. I can slip by.”

  “And if you can’t find Captain Keller?”

  “Then I’m—” Ash had sorted it in her mind; she hadn’t put it to words. The plan was, as Natalie had said, thin. Her brain seemed blank, inchoate, full of bad ideas, and the worst one of them all was also the only one that seemed remotely sensible. “I’m going to remove myself from the equation.”

  “Not acceptable,” Natalie said. “No. You can find Dr. Sharma. There must be treatment for this. A cure. You have to live.”

  To live. Life had always been hunger and struggle, even with Christopher, even when that struggle was punctuated with the warmth of his arms. On Bittersweet, those little moments of happiness slipped through her hands like stars wheeling above, cold and out of reach. She’d thought it was enough just to see them.

  But then came Twenty-Five, where she’d loved again, where four strangers had become a crooked little family. They’d taught her to trap happiness, to keep it inside her body, to make it her own.

  All of that was over, now.

  Ash coughed away nausea. Her arms felt weak, and her legs ached, her muscles tight and exhausted. “I’m dying, Natalie. I have been for some time, and I’m asking you to let me go. Nobody should have the Heart. Nobody should be able to use it as a weapon. It’s too powerful.” Her voice broke. “If you loved Len at all, you’ll let me go.”

  Natalie blinked quickly, then turned her face away. “Did he say anything about me? Before—” She licked her lips, gave up, and looked back. Tears pooled above her eyelashes. “Before.”

  “He loved you,” Ash said. The words felt muffled, quietly apocalyptic, like a bomb exploding underwater.

  “But not enough to stay,” she said.

  “You could stay,” Ash replied, and for a moment Natalie wavered where she stood. Considered it. “You could come with me.”

  Ash sucked in a breath and extended her hand to Natalie.

  She looked like she was considering it, too, until suit alarms went wild. Natalie swore, her moment of indecision left behind, then raised her wrist and brought up a holographic interface showing the battlefield outside. The space above her arm blinked into bright fire. The battle had begun, with both sides using conventional kinetics, torpedoes and fighters and human lives. Explosions bloomed in the black between the two sides.

  Baylor Wellspring’s four starships had taken up a spherical formation above and below Aurora’s, trapping them at the very center. Aurora, on the other hand, had drawn their ships in a tight formation around London, oscillating in all directions to avoid targeting sensors, large burning satellites around the dead shipwreck, outflanked and outgunned.

  In the bare, formidable darkness between the flashes of artificial light, she could see Natalie’s lips form a thin, determined line.

  “You’re not going to make it past that line in a shuttle,” Natalie said, after a moment.

  “That’s what I have.”

  Somewhere, metal tore from metal in a splintering, screaming shear. Sparks came from a junction above.

  “No, I mean, my team will take your shuttle. You take our troop transport. It has a railgun. You’ll be able to defend yourself. And if they think you’re in the shuttle, we can give you a little more time. If you’re going to break their line, you’re going to need it,” Natalie said. “You’re probably going to want to swing around wide, then flank around the back. Looks like they’re doing a center push.”

  “You’re going back to Solano?”

  “You’re going to need someone on the inside of Aurora. Someone
who knows about all of this. It’s gotta be me.”

  Ash nodded.

  Natalie hollered orders at the other engineers, who were hanging angry and confused outside the engine room door, then waved them out and down toward the spine of the ship. They objected—Ash heard her hollering about follow my orders or I’ll have your credits docked, you assholes—but they eventually left. When they were gone, she turned back to Ash.

  “I’ll come for you,” she said.

  Ash shook her head. “I’m not worth it.”

  Natalie snorted. “I’m not doing it for you. I’m doing it for Len.”

  London shuddered, the telltale shiver of a missile impact somewhere on the top deck. Ash thought of the bridge, of the broken, rotten body of poor Captain Valdes. “And for the colony.”

  Natalie bit her bottom lip. “It’s not—” She paused. Something terrible settled behind her eyes. “And for the colony.”

  “Go,” whispered Ash.

  “Don’t forget. Space plus bullshit, Ash,” she said, and was gone.

  Ash gulped down a frog in her throat, tasting tin-stained recycled air, and shoved Cantrell’s gun in her bag. She hoisted the fuel canister, examining the fuel level tally on the front. She might get one long burn out of it. If she could set a course for the White Line—if it were straight enough, if she were lucky enough—it would have to do.

  It would have to be enough.

  The ship shuddered as a Baywell missile gave it a last coup de grâce somewhere near the bridge, and then all that was left was her own breathing, and the guttering lights on her low-battery suit.

  It was time to move.

  30

  Five minutes of oxygen got Ash back to London’s spine and to the cargo deck below. Twenty-Five had pillaged this section first, hauling out boxes of personal items, undelivered farm equipment, toys, guns, and computer parts. The light from the Tribulation sun poured into open compartments she herself had created from a Company pod far above to better access the science deck. Staring into the broken deck above felt like staring into a different life. A different universe.