Architects of Memory

by Karen Osborne

  “Baywell’s too fast.”

  “We’ll make it,” Ash said. “I can go faster.”

  “Even Len couldn’t make this thing go faster. It’s not meant for speed.”

  Len. Ash felt the familiar knot in her throat, the yawning loss. “We don’t have any other options.”

  “Yes, we do.”

  “Prayer?”

  Ash could see the knot in Keller’s smooth throat. “That thing.” Keller pointed at the helmet still in Ash’s lap.

  Ash felt a ringing in her ears. “No.”

  “I’m not strong enough to control the weapon,” Keller whispered, her eyes reflecting railgun fire, her fingers causing it right back. “I can detonate it a hundred meters, tops, like I just did when I jumped. That’s not enough for any of these assholes. But your nanotech’s been integrated for a year. You can do more.”

  Ash’s world spun. She wants me to— “No,” she said. “Fuck no, not even for you.”

  “It’s the only way.”

  Ash yanked the transport left to avoid spinning rubble and a shining, dead Vai skimmer, then right to avoid a short torpedo. She felt like Natalie, standing behind the trigger, staring at the starving together on the ground. She thought of dead civilizations and dead ships and dead planets. “On the planet, on the shuttle, with Len, when I—” She couldn’t speak. “It’s not an option. If we die, it all dies with us. You haven’t fucking seen genocide, you didn’t see it explode in your brain, you don’t know what you don’t know.”

  Kate’s mouth turned down. “We don’t have a lot of options, Ash.”

  “No,” Ash spat, but she thought back to being in the shuttle with Natalie, facing down Ramsay’s treachery for the first time. Ramsay had been quick to accept their refusal, so quick, but Ash hadn’t known at the time what she was looking for, hadn’t thought for a second she’d passed on the bloodtech to Keller—

  —and if she could fly right, fly straight, fly better than anyone else in this damned graveyard, she could be on-planet in ten minutes, breathing air, holding Kate’s hand, kissing her, together—

  The temptation was almost too much.

  Railfire reflected in the viewscreen, painting fireworks on Keller’s jaw. “We don’t have a choice, Ash. Just detonate it once. It’ll destroy Baywell’s evidence, destroy whatever research both sides have. It’ll bring down anyone who knows.”

  “You never knew me at all if you think for one fucking second that I will do that, even for you, even for us.”

  Keller grabbed a stabilization rail and dragged herself to a sitting position. Ash spied a glint of metal around her neck; gravity dragged at the pendant and it fell out, dropping against Keller’s breastbone like a molecular taking a claw to her heart. Horror curled in the quiet places in Ash’s mind, hacked away at her last dreams of happiness. Her world tilted. “You’re one of them.”

  Keller clutched at the necklace. “I— What? Dr. Sharma gave this to me when she told me to go to Medellin.”

  “How long have you been screwing all of us?”

  “I’m not! She gave it to me! On the Baywell ship!”

  Distracted, Ash wasn’t fast enough to dodge a bolt impact, and they felt the juddering explosion of one of the thrusters being blown out of existence. Ash, shoved into the safety harness, took the brunt of it on her bruised shoulders, while Keller was thrown against the side of the transport. Ash thought she might have hit her head, but Keller pulled herself up, dazed, hanging on to the copilot’s harness. The HUD painted a guttering future on the side of her face: they weren’t going to make it. Ash swore. The ship’s controls were damaged and logy, half fried by the blast, and the targeting computer was burned to a crisp, with the engines to follow.

  “We’re doing manual atmospheric entry,” Ash shouted.

  “We won’t make entry at all if you don’t detonate!”

  Six fighters followed them—Aurora’s and Baywell’s, firing on each other while jockeying for a better position to stop her transport. They fought each other at short distances, using railguns and small spinal lances that sizzled Ash’s cameras to death and jolted their small universe once, then twice.

  Keller hollered in pain. “Please! Or everybody dies! I saw it, Ash! They’re never going to stop. Not Baywell, not Sharma’s crew! They’ve all seen what that thing can do, and they don’t care how many people they run over to get it! To get us!”

  Tribulation came up fast. Red. Angry. Accusing.

  A thought occurred to her. “You said Sharma was there?”

  “She was there.”

  The helmet warmed nearby, and Ash imagined the delicate filigree of the weapon spinning, starlike, behind the polarized faceplate. The decision came on like a shock to the chest, like a long-simmering poison that had turned her organs and her bones and her heart to darkness—like sleep, like prophecy. All she had to do was ask, and nobody would be left to know what was in her veins. What could be. What would be, if she didn’t make this choice.

  Keller was right. Ash could stop all of it.

  She could end the war.

  And all she had to do was trade her soul.

  “Kate,” she whispered. “If we do this, there’s no coming back.”

  Keller’s hand slid, warm and human, into hers. “We don’t have to. Not as long as we’re together.”

  A projectile sailed past Ash’s window and she scrambled to catch her breath—no, no, don’t breathe so hard, air is precious—and hit the transport hard to starboard. Fighters sailed in gracious, sharklike arcs, dropping and twisting and firing and exploding in patterns of gory glitter that splattered the ship with clanking, iced-over debris.

  Ash looked back at the battle, the weapon making excited humming noises. Beyond them, the cruisers fought on. Aurora seemed to be losing; Cape Town’s hull was shredded, and Rio’s aft wing, where she’d stayed in the hospital months ago, was open to the stars. Ash thought of the unicorn toy that had repeated everything she said, and the nurses, and her stomach churned with guilt.

  She unhooked the safety harness and slipped out of the chair, the weapon warming in its improvised, failing helmet isolette. Glory, it whispered, the excitement slipping up her arm and into her mind, connecting her to Keller’s fear and Solano’s lust and the memories of those who had died in the battle like she was an ansible terminal and the entire galaxy was whispering in her ear and glory was reuniting with the master node, with the together, with what was left of together in the weapon that was the Heart of a long-dead ship, the echo of a defeated civilization.

  I can’t live with it, Ash. Len’s voice, just twenty minutes ago, when he was still alive.

  Or maybe he was still alive, somewhere in the lost together.

  Or maybe she was already dead.

  She thought of him as she kept her breath as shallow as possible, fighting off the encroaching fog that came from the stimulants wearing off. She wondered if this blank, overwhelming emptiness was what Len felt when he turned the blue screamers on the people he thought were enemies. She wondered if he felt sorry when he died.

  Sorry—or relieved.

  Keller turned the transport into a planetary orbit, bringing them to a bruising stop. The fighters screeched to a halt, trying not to bounce off the atmosphere, spinning off back toward the battlefield.

  “Now—before they come back—”

  Keller threw her the helmet, and Ash tore open the seal. The grav-drive wailed underneath their feet and Keller prepped for manual entry, gripping the control wheel, flipping the throttle levers. Ash placed her hand on the weapon again. It slipped into her mind, a supernova, a lover, a tale of revenge, a deep rumble that made her think of ancient forests and canyons cut deep into the prismatic stone of an alien planet. It waited for her to speak.

  “Just stop this,” she whispered.

  Keller looked out the front window and gasped.

  Ash closed her eyes. One minute. One minute fifteen. One minute thirty—

  The transport politely reb
ooted.

  Kate slid out of her chair and retched.

  Ash could not see the stars for the debris. She scrambled to aim the transport’s cameras at the battlefield around her, to better see what she had done. The fighters spun out into the darkness, their pilots’ eyes glassy, staring ahead, their minds blank, their memories sucked into the black hole in Ash’s hands, their engines as dead as the sky around them. Some of the pilots who had once been chasing them had unclipped their safety harnesses, screaming, clawing at their lost memories, and now stared at their hands like they had just been born. Some of them had hit the hatches on their fighters and spat themselves into space, not understanding what was going on, struggling for a few seconds before going calm. Others stared, shaking, into a desperate nothingness. Others smiled, lost somewhere beautiful.

  The lucky ones.

  The guns on the great cruisers had gone cold. They themselves had joined the great dead hulks in the sky above the planet, tiny, pulverized moons playing a silent testament to the greed of man. Grav-fuel and glinting, crumbled hull fragments floated in lazy spirals. She did not want to imagine what would be happening on the cruisers. Thousands. Tens of thousands, glassy-eyed, turning, twisting, sweeping through the corridors, trapped inside their memories, dying in increments. The silence of strangulation on a dozen grisly moons. Baylor Wellspring would come for them. Aurora would come for them. But it would be too late.

  Keller sobbed behind her. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Ash, I’m sorry, I didn’t know. I didn’t know.”

  “You knew.”

  “Ash, please. Please.”

  Ash ignored her. For a moment, she wished she could forget, but she was a weapon now, and weapons could not forget.

  She turned the transport back toward Tribulation, kicked the engine into gear, and vomited in her suit.

  32

  The transport dropped like a rock through the Tribulation atmosphere. Ash tilted her chin toward the receding battlefield, taking in every moment of the last descent she’d ever make; around her, the burgundy sky knit together from snatches of black space and the flame screaming around the windows of the transport. It was morning again in the hemisphere when the transport broke through, and there was just enough celestium left in the tank to land them in the ruins of the agricultural center, just outside the Sacrament Society lab.

  Ash ripped off the harness and stumbled outside, clawing off her suit, dragging down mouthfuls of sulfur air. She looked every inch the cancer-ridden uncitizen she was now. Kate followed, casting aside the Baywell jacket, her legs unsure and wobbly, and her body covered with red pinpoints right underneath the skin. She reached for Ash’s hand, and for a moment, Ash almost refused it.

  Weapons did not love.

  She could only imagine how inhuman she looked, her hair tangled, her eyes wild, holding the weapon that had killed an entire battlefield in the hollow of a shattered Auroran suit helmet. But Kate looked like hell, too, spittle at the corner of her mouth, shaking, her eyes darting like the scrollwork was taking her vision, too, and her hand was warm and tight, and suddenly, Ash felt like she could breathe again.

  In the days that followed, they pulled themselves into a semblance of a life. They slept in a bed that had once belonged to someone else, and sat at night on the colony’s dormitory porch, watching the blank burgundy sky and listening to the avians sing down the sun. They kissed in the heat of the afternoons and talked until they were hoarse, beating back the shivering fear with the call of warm skin.

  But this wasn’t retirement.

  There were five Aurorans left on the planet, blank and gibbering under the death-sodden sky—scientists, of course, from the newly named molecular department. She and Kate dragged them to the dormitory below, put them in beds, fed them a paste made of water-soaked ration bars, found IV bags, and made saline solution.

  She and Kate inventoried the conventional weapons, the screamers, the moleculars—all of it was straight or dome dispersal, quite possibly to protect the Sacrament lives below the surface, and now, to protect the lives of the so-called survivors. They pulled apart Sharma’s lab. There was medicine—stims and painkillers, at least for a while—and food, although weapons only ate when they were forced to eat, when Kate would plead with her to shove something, anything, down her throat.

  They expected retribution to come, for fire to rain from the sky, for shuttles to land, full of violence.

  But nothing came.

  A day passed. Two. Three, and still they lived. Ash found herself up before dawn doing maintenance on the atmospinners with some of the parts from the lab’s shuttlebay. Kate set up a perimeter of crescent weapons that hummed, bold and ominous, whenever she checked them, just in case someone arrived when they were elsewhere.

  Only then did they feel comfortable descending once more into the black cathedral of the old laboratory.

  Solano’s men had partially restored Sharma’s server and left enough computer equipment to get her medbay running. Being around the weapon made both women unsteady, backward, prone to drifting off into blank, terrible reveries, so they kept it in an isolette in the bugout bay, unless they had to take it out for research.

  And there was so much research. Medicines to learn about, blood tests to take, numbers to crunch—how long they had, how many months they could expect, how quickly they’d lose their ability to walk and their ability to speak and their very mind itself, how many months they could stay wrapped around each other in this groggy parody of the thing they’d wanted for so long. They spent two days trying to remove Ash’s monitor, to no avail.

  On the fourth, Ash found the Vai’s diamond claw—hacked off, like someone had seen it and wanted to take it as a trophy—and slipped it on a string, tying it around her neck. It made her remember a picture she’d kept in her quarters, a picture that burned in the fire that claimed Twenty-Five. She’d loved the man in the picture, loved him so much she could have broken in two for it, but she no longer remembered who he was. She still saw his shadow, sometimes, darting through the trees, looking at her from across the clearing with black eyes burning, whispering into her dreams.

  The Tribulation sun was high in the sky the day Ash and Kate opened their first box of moleculars. These were new: silver-red, eight-pointed stars that glistened in the sunlight and spoke of flame, whispering sibilant death. Deletion. They hummed at both women and shivered as Ash lifted one from its bed. Glory, it said. Glory. We are together again.

  Kate’s hair was loose, tossed by the breeze, winding around her throat in fluttering strands. She was the most beautiful thing Ash had ever seen.

  “Will it hurt?” she asked.

  “More than death itself.”

  “And we have to do this?”

  Ash ran her finger down the moleculars’ curves and valleys, thought of silver blood, of Joseph Solano, of the man she’d loved whose name she could not remember, of the people and places she’d never see again, of the Vai who would never go home.

  It was her turn to say it, her turn to take Kate’s hand and tell her it was the only way, that disarmament meant death, over and over again, that they would start here and work through every single box in the damned, broken place, and end with the Heart. That disarmament meant that they could start to make up for what had happened in the graveyard above, among the liars and the cheaters and the people who were just trying their best, that they could end the war before it began. Before others died.

  Before they died themselves.

  It was a story she told herself every day, a story she believed sometimes. A story she had to believe.

  “It’s going to be okay,” Kate whispered. “I’m here. I’ll always be here.”

  “I know,” Ash said.

  Forgiveness was a tricky thing.

  “Then let’s begin,” Kate said.

  Ash opened her hand and dropped the screamer on the ground.

  The bright light blasted out the overhanging trees and the clearing grew boiling hot. Ash’s skin cha
rred. Kate’s bones crumbled. Their breath boiled. Ash writhed. She threw herself to the ground, clawed at the sky, screamed at gods in which she no longer believed. Kate’s esophagus twisted, and her stomach burned, and the sky fell and—

  —and then it was over, and they were left gasping on the ground, whole and safe and thinking straight, the victims of a terrible clarity. Between them was the weapon, spent, a form without a void. Deleted. Nobody would ever be able to use it again.

  “One down,” Ash whispered, picking up the next one. Kate swallowed and nodded. This one will be easier, she thought. The next one is always easier. She could repeat this over and over again, but it could never drown out the memory of dying. It could certainly not drown out the memory of love. Death, she thought, holding her lover’s hand, and her chin went back, and her mouth opened, and the blue light took her, and the screaming began.

  Eight hundred to go.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Writing a novel is the only team sport I enjoy, and I am gobsmackingly fortunate to play with the best in the game. I am indebted to my agent, Dorian Maffei, and to my editor, Jen Gunnels, as well as to everyone at Tor who made sure this novel sang. Thank you for believing in the crew of Twenty-Five.

  My deep gratitude to everyone who beta read or commented on the many drafts of this novel, including John Appel, Phil Margolies, Beth Tanner, Jo Miles, Christopher Spooner, Chelsea Counsell, Tim Shea, Jill Seidenstein, Jennie Goloboy, and Jennifer Mace. My thanks, as well, to the Viable Paradise work group that read the first chapters—some of the names above, as well as Susan Taitel, Valerie Valdes, Amanda Hackwith, and Teresa and Patrick Nielsen Hayden. Thanks to Kjell Lindgren for the chat at the ’17 Nebulas about surgery in space; to the staff at the Orange County Library System and the Enoch Pratt Free Library, for research guidance; to UnitedHealthcare, Empire Blue Cross, and Cigna, for the, uh, um, inspiration; to the staff at Atwater’s and the Red Canoe Cafe for serving me gallons of coffee; and to the doctors at Albany Med who saved me from the blood clot that eventually inspired Ash’s story.