Architects of Memory

by Karen Osborne

  Was it all really just a few days ago?

  Stopping just after the cargo deck hatch, Ash looked past the shattered hull and the shredded gray metal ribbons that stood at attention there, jagged strips of seaweed standing sentinel against a raven-black ocean. The Auroran troop transport was docked at an airlock nearby, the rail gun a malignant glint in the starlight. She palmed the entrance, hauling herself into the back, then fell into the pilot’s chair. This ship, at least, had no haptic interface.

  Small mercies, she thought.

  Ash brought the vessel online, and the system chimed its cheery salute as if her world had not already died, as if she were going on a simple salvage mission, as if someone would be there at the end to hand her a coffee and a protein bar. Releasing the hold on the airlock, Ash pulled the transport away from London, driving toward the whirling, pivoting starships and the blood-red marble of dead Tribulation.

  The great cruisers passed in tight circles in front of London, moving fast. They exchanged fire; arcs of white and red sailed across the expanse, causing too bright explosions against the darkness, hothouse flowers swallowed in seconds by choking nothingness. She held tight on the tiller, calming herself, telling herself that there was no way they could see her at this scale. Behind her, Natalie pulled away in Julien’s shuttle, ducking debris, hauling away for Rio.

  Ash pushed the nose of the transport under Mumbai’s nose, using the ship’s corpse to block any followers that might have already painted her as a problem. A torpedo flashed by, nearly clipping her gun; panic grabbed her throat, and she yanked the transport to the right. It took a moment to realize the torpedoes weren’t heading for her, but for London itself. She held her breath as they made impact, shattering the ship’s broken hull into glitter, pulverizing what was left in a bright orange cataclysm. Baylor Wellspring was trying to destroy Natalie’s shuttle.

  Go. Now, whispered Christopher’s ghost. You can’t help her now.

  You’re back. She felt a quiet thrill in her chest.

  I’ll be with you until the end of your days, he said. I promised you that.

  Ash snorted, reset the altimeter and gunned for the Baywell line, ducking through the debris to block targeting sensors. The battle was a cipher within a storm, an ill-scrawled ebony ink note in a dead-dark room, a confusing chiaroscuro sweeping by in breathless, brilliant arcs. She figured her best chance was to circle backward and approach from the rear, where—

  Shit! Shit!

  Wrenched from her plans, Ash nearly wheeled straight into a group of Baywell fighters, dragging the transport straight up, whirling, the enemy ships a wheeling kaleidoscope. Expecting them to follow, she dove back into the debris field, bringing the rail gun around in a heavy rush. Instead of engaging with her, though, she watched as they careened down toward an apex she could not quite see from this distance, bent to attack a bright and burning point, sailing hell-bent away from the Baywell line at incredible speed.

  She slammed her gloved hands against the bulkhead nearby in frustration. The last moments of her salvage career had been spent barely missing things. Putting her shipmates in danger. Barely able to distinguish fantasy from reality. Barely able to control her own reaction time.

  This time, she was ready.

  She gunned the grav-drive, reached into the transport’s medkit, and stabbed herself with a stimulant. Then a second. A third.

  A cold, terrible sigh took hold of her heart. The world slowed down around her. She felt more awake than ever, connected to the universe in a way that transcended the connection she had with the together. She felt focused. Sharper. Somewhere, her mind screamed that she was just high, that her body couldn’t survive this, that an overdose would kill her, that her heart would burst and shred in her chest.

  But Ash knew like she knew the Tribulation sun would burn for another hundred million years that she no longer needed a body that didn’t belong to her. She did not know what to do with hands that she did not control. She could not live with blood that flowed with alien memory, with a mind that could disassemble the atoms of another human being with a thought.

  Len’s terrified face flashed before her eyes. She’d felt his every decomposing atom, every shattered bone. His death had given her a great and terrible knowledge that every victory, every flag planted, every enemy killed, was hollow. She could not live with what she had done. She could not live with what she could do. She could not live with being the last one left.

  She could not live without Kate Keller.

  More Baywell fighters screamed by, ignoring her.

  She adjusted her trajectory. “What the—?”

  There were now six fighters trailing away from the Baywell line, but they weren’t engaging with the Auroran ships. Instead, they focused on the shining thing with the screaming velocity, like whatever was there was more important than Rio and Medellin and Hong Kong put together. She magnified the area in question.

  “A Baywell pod?” she said aloud.

  It was pod-size, for sure, with the same kind of worker-bee accoutrements she was used to using herself, and it was wobbling slightly, listing to the right, as if the pilot wasn’t quite experienced. The pod didn’t look like it was attacking any Auroran property; in fact, it looked like it was being chased.

  Christopher slid into the troop seats behind her. She felt his presence like a quiet curse. Why would they be going after their own? he said.

  “This is the absolute right time to show up with a rhetorical question—”

  She heard his kind laughter. It felt terribly out of place. It had always been out of place. It made her ache. It’s not rhetorical.

  Alarms sounded. One of the fighters had figured out who she was and had painted a target on her tail. She waited until she’d come close to a piece of rubble, then dropped two hundred feet and reversed thrusters, letting loose with the rail gun. The fighter tried to stop but caught a bolt in his engine, and barreled straight into the piece of rubble. The cabin sheared in two, then exploded.

  When Ash could breathe again—could think again—she brought up the view on the Baywell pod. It was listing in a staccato motion that reminded her of watching Keller at the helm.

  I know someone who drives like that, she thought.

  She turned on the local comms.

  “—and that’s right, get near me and I’ll fry you—”

  Kate?

  Hope kindled like dynamite in every length of her body. The ships outside were moving again, taking up a new formation against the sleek Auroran cruisers: hulking old WellCel things, a Bay-Ken freighter with a brand-new spinal lance, a nascent, terrible alliance come to bear, a Company war beginning, human against human, blood against blood. Lives yielded to profit, like they always had been, always would be. Ash looked down at her hands, sweaty on the tiller, red-dark in the cabin’s light, then hit the line-of-sight comms, sending a direct beam toward the enemy pod. If I’m wrong, I’m dead.

  The shaking transport, the taste of eternity at the back of her throat: it all fell away.

  “Kate,” she said.

  “Auroran vessel. Auroran vessel. Disengage.” Keller’s voice, high and bright with the kind of starving glee that only came with a dose of adrenaline. “I’m an Auroran citizen. Unless you want to blow me up, in which case you might as well get fucked by your own fucking rail gun, because that’s how pissed they’re going to be when they find out you—”

  Ash stammered. “Kate. I’m here, it’s me, it’s Ash.”

  Silence. A sob on the line. “Can’t be.”

  Adrenaline pushed its way into Ash’s fingers, and she swerved, half drunk with it, toward the Baywell pod. “I’d know that driving anywhere. Look thirty degrees portside. I’ve got a rail gun and I’m coming alongside.”

  “You know,” Keller said, “when Ash told me about the hallucinations, I didn’t know they’d be such bullshit, right? And this is what you freaks want, people dying to kill, actually dying—”

  “I’m not a hallucinati
on.”

  “How can I tell?”

  The words ripped from Ash’s throat. “Because I fucking love you, you total asshole!”

  When Keller spoke again, her voice wavered, as if she hadn’t used it in a while. “Do you have a heat shield on that thing?”

  Ash checked. “Yeah.”

  “I don’t. I’ve got the weapon with me, Ash. I was going to enter a heavier mass value into the shuttle computer, get drawn down into the atmosphere. I’ll be dead before I hit the ground, and with any luck, this bastard won’t survive reentry, either. I was hoping”—another sob—“that you had a better plan.”

  Ash slammed down on her velocity and drew around to point the back airlock at Keller’s pod door, to match her trajectory. The Baywell fighters re-formed, trying to flank the Auroran transport, letting loose a scattering of railfire meant to puncture her hull. She yanked to the side, then back again, returning with her own gun.

  “I have the beginnings of a really shitty plan,” she said.

  “I’m good if I keep breathing.”

  Her mind was too foggy to do the math. Is there enough food, is there enough air, is there enough fuel, do I even care about any of that— “Get in a suit,” Ash answered. “We’re going to the White Line.”

  “I don’t have a suit.”

  “Then hold on to the weapon and get ready to jump. Don’t hold your breath.”

  “Don’t hold—shit, shit, you don’t mean—” Keller’s voice rose three octaves.

  “Get ready. We only have a few seconds.”

  A group of Baywell fighters swerved, aiming their fire toward Keller’s engines. Her pod was hit and it lurched to port; the engines flamed and swirled. The comm link dropped, and Ash worked her hands over the interface, desperately trying to reestablish it. Her hands were shaking. Bad idea, she thought. She grabbed another stimulant, stabbed it in her leg, and depressed the plunger.

  For a moment, she felt as normal and as focused as she ever had been before Bittersweet, before the madness crept into her bones, before her blood ran thick with celestium and nanotech and the memory of an alien civilization. She kicked the engine into gear and hurtled closer to Keller’s pod. The fighters fired again, this time making a fire-bright impact on Keller’s engines, causing the pod to spin. Of course. If she has the weapon, they can’t get close without risking a loss of power. And neither can I.

  She yanked the controller into a matching spin and yaw. The shuttle pitched, vicious and stark, the harness digging into her shoulders so hard they’d bruise. Ash leaned over and slammed the handle on the transport hatch.

  “Now,” she screamed into the comm, hoping the damned thing was back up.

  “I love you,” she heard.

  The top of Keller’s pod snapped open with a puff of air. Five seconds. There was Keller: bright in the sun, beautiful, her hair spread out around her like a mermaid’s, her arms wrapped around a light so violet and beaming there seemed to be nothing else in the universe. Four seconds. Her eyes wheeled until they met Ash’s, and then rolled away, unconscious. Three seconds.

  Keller sailed into the cockpit.

  Ash closed the door with a bone-shuddering slam. Two seconds.

  She ripped herself out of the safety harness, repressurized the cockpit, and set the transport on autopilot to the planet. One.

  Keller was cold as ice but breathing; she was unconscious, covered with the red, veiny blotches of broken blood vessels. She’d held her breath, and was carrying a silver-white blanket in her arms. Ash tore off her helmet and gloves, tasting blank machine air, reaching down with a trembling hand to touch Keller’s cheek. Warm her up. She took out an emergency blanket, wrapped Keller in it, then grabbed the last stim, jabbing it into the other woman’s arm. The woman’s real arms, her skin, her clothes—they were real, she was real—

  —and the device was real.

  Keller’s hand loosened and opened, and the weapon rolled toward Ash.

  The shuttle started to shut down around her. The pod’s exterior cameras crashed, one by one. Her nose ran; when she wiped it, blood stained her fingertips. The temperature plummeted twenty degrees.

  It was a yellow-gold sphere with a light like a thousand summer days—no, the glare of a thousand snowy mountaintops—no, the warmth of her mother’s home or a guttering sunlamp in a Bittersweet lounge, purple like a sunset, black like the night, heavy like the bottom of an ocean.

  It was calling her in a chorus of a thousand voices, calling her home, calling her beyond the White Line.

  She picked it up.

  Glory, it sang.

  31

  The universe rolled to a stop as Ash stared into the depths of the London weapon, as it rolled from the protective fabric, as it started dragging the light and the heat and the life from the world around her, as it tried to connect to the master node hundreds of thousands of light-years away. Her nose bled. A great need slipped into her mind, grasping at her memories of the together, probing at her veins, thrilling to the nanotech, calling to her.

  She thought it would speak of battlefields, of blood, of mourning and revenge. Instead, the shaking, shuddering world of the transport gave way to a foggy memory—dancing together in the mess to the sounds of Twenty-Five’s engine, to Keller humming an old spacer’s song, feeling the thrill of it as she pressed her lips against her neck, the two of them in their own world. And even that slipped away into the gathering darkness, those memories being sucked down, down, into the Vai matrix, into together.

  Keller’s hand came out of nowhere, clawing at Ash’s wrist, and she tumbled back into reality. Keller shoved the isolation fabric at Ash. Ash unhooked her helmet, dropped the fabric over the weapon, slammed the helmet over the fabric, then hit the seal.

  “Isolette on the cheap.”

  “You’re not a hallucination,” Keller whispered.

  “Nope,” Ashlan said, breathless, gulping down cold, tin-stinking air. She tasted blood on her lips and wiped her nose with the suit sleeve. “You weren’t sure when you jumped?”

  Keller’s eyes jumped back to the exterior. “Didn’t need to be sure. I wanted it to be true.” She hauled in a breath, then coughed. “They’ve been trying to stop me, not destroy me. They know what’s onboard. That’ll give us some room to move.”

  Ash grabbed the tiller and pulled herself back into the pilot’s chair. How long had it been? Five seconds? Ten? Minutes? The transport had broken away from its straight line to the Baywell line’s left flank, hurtling instead toward Tribulation’s pockmarked moon. She yanked the ship back on course and looked over her shoulder at the woman she had thought she’d never see again. Her heart twisted, mended, and broke in one moment.

  The transport shuddered with the impact of railfire.

  “Shit,” Keller said, crawling into a sitting position, using the back of Ash’s chair as ballast. “I think that was the engines.”

  Ash bit her bottom lip. She was sweating. She grabbed the tiller and swerved to port. She felt a sickening crunch against her hands, and a shudder below her feet “It was. Check it.”

  Keller pulled herself into the copilot’s seat and punched up the maintenance interface. “Broken injection seal. It’s not good.”

  Ash felt a dark, screaming panic. “We just need to punch through, burn for the White Line—”

  “Impossible,” Keller said. “We’ll get one burn, tops, and no correction burn. I get the math wrong, and we suffocate or starve. And they’ll be able to follow us. We need another option, and fast.”

  “Kate, we have to—”

  The other woman shook her head, and when she spoke again, it was in her tight, no-nonsense captain’s voice. “Another option.”

  Ash heard the silence of the cab, the rattling of the hull. She remembered a sulfur sky, alien air rolling in on a dead farming town like a bastard tide. “We’ll go to Tribulation,” she said. “There are beds. Rations. Weapons.” She tasted bile at the back of her throat. “Crates and crates of blue screamers.�
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  Keller entered a firing solution into the keyboard before her, as serious as Ash had ever seen her. “How long do you think we can hold them off?”

  “Years,” Ash said. “But it won’t be years. It’ll be six months, tops. For me. A year for you. That’s all the time we need to make things right.”

  Kate blinked. “Six months? You don’t mean—”

  “All we have to do is hold off. Defuse all the weapons, and hold off.” The plan, inchoate in Ash’s throat, was terrible and screaming.

  “How?”

  Ash grabbed Keller’s hand, tightening her fingers; her lover’s hand felt warm and dry and real, a fever dream fashioned into flesh, and she fought tears so strong they threatened a flood. “I’ll tell you later,” she said, and brought up the battle on the transport’s main HUD.

  “Later.”

  The fighters around them—unsure Baywells, and tailgating, hungry Aurorans, now, sweeping in from the side—were recovering from exposure to the London weapon, coming online one by one. Behind them were the cruisers, turning toward the transport, the eye of the entire battlefield on the small opening. They all knew what it meant now, knew who was on the transport, knew what was on the transport. Knew how that changed the game.

  “Is it nice down there?” asked Keller.

  “It’ll be fine, as long as you’re there,” Ash said, her voice a winding laugh. “You can tell me if it’s like Neversink.”

  “Where?” she said. “I’ve never lived on a planet before— Shit! Gun! Make a hole.” Ash yanked the tiller to the ceiling, too busy to ask her what that meant.

  There was no gravity here, but she could imagine she felt it pushing on her chest as she pointed the transport toward a break in the Baylor Wellspring line. Keller splayed her hand on the railgun controls, spraying railfire, causing explosions on the fighters. Aurora swirled in where Baywell careened out, though, firing at their maneuvering thrusters.

  “Aurora, hard to port. You don’t remember Neversink?”

  “Never what? Got it,” Keller said, firing again. An Auroran ship bloomed into death, and Ash punched the engine to its highest velocity, twirling around until she could see Tribulation. They shoved forward, a bright silver kite, the other ships falling in behind them like a deadly tail. Keller swung the railgun around and scattered fire, knocking another Auroran ship to the side, but her eyebrows furrowed, and her lips tightened in stress, and she shook her head.