Natalie hauled in a breath and held it. Back on dead London, she’d told Ash she was going to come back. That hadn’t been a lie—at least, not then. She’d meant to return, meant to stage some sort of rescue, but simply hadn’t found the right way to do it. Or maybe that had been the lie. No. By staying quiet, by staying away from Tribulation, Natalie was just protecting a friend. Keeping everyone safe.
Wasn’t she?
Was she lying to herself?
Natalie tossed aside the thought. There was only one lie here that mattered, and that was that she had any choice in this matter at all. She pressed her lips together and worried some dirt from underneath her left thumbnail, noting Solano’s frown growing deeper with each passing second. There would absolutely be consequences if she refused this assignment. For herself. For Ash.
For everyone.
“I’ll bring her back, sir,” Natalie said, and stood.
6
Natalie swung from Vancouver’s spine into the cruiser’s transport deck, wiping her hands on her pants to rid them of their crust of sweat and blood. She shook with a strange kind of anger, a bright shiver wound with a tight thread of disbelief. After all she’d accomplished—earning her citizenship, driving the work of Applied Kinetics, ensuring the Auroran victory on Bittersweet—the idea that the Board could manipulate her so easily left a foul taste in her mouth. On top of that, her memory device was on the fritz again, throwing up visions of Tribulation, of blue death and humid, choking air. The glitch caused her to walk face-first into a wall.
Natalie peeled herself away from the bulkhead, massaging her nose. She could feel a sharp ache still clutching at the place her IV had gone wrong, resting itchy and dark in the hollow at the bottom of her brainstem. God, she needed a shower.
Vancouver’s main transport section—a wide hallway painted the color of a darkening sky, dotted with airlocks and emergency-access hatches—was full of citizens and indentures alike, shoulder to shoulder, cheering the end of the battle and moving from their airlocks toward the exits. A quick scan on her tiptoes identified the only evidence of imminent departure: stevedores silently loading crated equipment, with Ascanio, of all people, supervising. The younger cit waved as Natalie approached.
“I thought you’d be in App-K,” Natalie said, nursing a slight disappointment that Ward hadn’t shown up instead.
“Nah,” Ascanio said. “Technical section’s taken over my station for the rig upgrades, and, besides, I wanted a chance to apologize for shooting you up with so much—”
“Rig upgrades?”
Ascanio frowned. “Yeah, the new superhaptics. That, and the body upgrades.”
Natalie wrinkled her nose. “Right, I forgot. Body upgrades. Tell Ward that I don’t want them installed on you or any of the other personnel until we have the puppet rig fully tested. I don’t want to fry anyone’s cerebral cortex. That includes him. And you.”
The roboticist’s face fell slightly, and Natalie caught the flustered twitch of her lips as she flipped through her tablet. “Fine. So, your medic’s already aboard. She’s an executive. I’m supposed to make sure you have everything you need, so take a look at the load list and tell me what else you want added. What are you doing that they’re sending an executive?”
Natalie pursed her lips, running her hand through her still-dirty hair. She grabbed the flimsy Ascanio offered. The board had certain advantages in this situation. Natalie had others—namely, that they could not make her disappear entirely, as long as the proper Auroran shipboard gossip routine was being maintained. Anything she told Ascanio would be all over the cit lounge by daybreak, a mantra against being forgotten.
“Dark-edge stuff,” she replied, giving the other woman a knowing smile. “Research and retrieval related to my last assignment. You know if there’s a shower on board?”
Ascanio took this in, wide-eyed, and it took a moment for her to process the abrupt change of topic. “It’s a midrange yacht. No shower.”
Natalie grimaced, then scanned the flimsy she’d been given, momentarily relieved that most of the equipment she wanted was there. The quartermaster had gone light on the weaponry, which irked her.
“This is not a full fire kit. Please tell the quartermaster that I want a full fire kit. I’m not trusting these people I don’t know on Beijing to have it ready to my specs. Boltguns, ranged weapons, a backup long-range portable ansible, and make sure the railguns are charged. I am not going back down to that steam bath without a way to shoot some bastards and then call home.”
Ascanio whistled. “So. You are heading back to Tribulation.”
“Can’t possibly confirm that,” she said, flashed Ascanio a wide-toothed smile, and ducked through the airlock.
The yacht felt stiffly comfortable and was painted in shades of calming Auroran blue—the kind of lush austerity she’d come to expect from cit-level status. The cabin was slightly longer than the average salvage shuttle, with a proper long-distance drive, ergonomic bunks in a private back compartment, a thick kinetic web at the side for cargo, and a pilot’s seat that wouldn’t make her rear end go numb after an hour. Natalie had registered for and passed her official pilot’s certification after returning from Tribulation, but knowing she was meant for the open seat up front still made her stomach flip. Instead of dwelling on it, she looked around to find and introduce herself to the medic, who was securing tubs of cargo in the back.
Her pleasant greeting died in her throat.
The medic was an older woman, small of stature, wearing a white coat over her Auroran executive’s uniform. Her black hair was gathered behind her in a simple queue, her familiar lined hands tying off the web with businesslike flair, a new info-implant clipped above her eyebrow. She’d seen those hands on a renderbot recording on Tribulation, limned in orange. She’d worked next to those hands for six months. These were the hands that traded two weeks of her indenture time for amoxicillin. That had refused to play rummy with Ash and Kate in the mess. That had witnessed the horrors on Tribulation.
That had perpetrated them.
The corners of the medic’s mouth tipped up slightly as Natalie stopped cold.
“Hello, Ms. Chan,” said Reva Sharma. “It’s delightful to see you again.”
“Oh, fuck no,” Natalie said, wavered for a moment, and walked out of the shuttle, slamming straight into Ascanio.
“Hey, I need your authorization for the quartermaster—” Ascanio said.
“I’m not going if she’s going,” Natalie said.
Dr. Sharma followed her out, looking as calm as a born executive usually did, while poison butterflies collected in Natalie’s chest. The hum of the bay dimmed slightly as her blood ran hot and loud in her ears; the nearby indentures caught the tension immediately and shuffled off to find somewhere else to be.
“Ms. Chan,” Sharma said, wiping her hands on a towel. “We had our differences on Twenty-Five, but I am one hundred percent the only person here who has any chance of saving Ashlan.”
“We had our differences? Oh, fuck right off.”
“We must have, for you to react like this.”
“Um.” Ascanio stepped forward, scratching the back of her neck. “I would like to remind you both that they’ve made the Ingest upgrades in here, so anything you say will be processed through—”
“I don’t give a shit,” said Natalie.
“And I don’t need to,” Sharma said. “Don’t you have something else to do, tech?”
Ascanio muttered something under her breath, then pulled away, clearly put off. Don’t you know what she is, Natalie wanted to say to her, don’t you know what she’s done, how has she not been imprisoned, interrogated, tortured, but the words stopped on her tongue, remembering the early morning in the puppet, the swirling red dust that had once been human, and the fact that the board had installed the redshift star in the puppet knowing exactly what it would do.
They know about Sharma, she thought, and the memory device helpfully supplied Ash’s voice. S
olano was down on the planet before Ash set off the weapon. He saw the experiments. And now she’s back and working in R&D like nothing happened? Shit, how else do you think they made the redshift star work?
They know. They just don’t care, as long as she’s working for them this time.
The smallest of smiles touched Natalie’s lips, and she stiffened. “Don’t you need to be at some sort of victory party, or planning your next genocide? What’s your angle?” she said.
“No angle,” Sharma said. “I’m here because I care about Ashlan and what happens to her. I’m the only person in this entire company who can possibly understand what has happened to her and how to keep her alive. Of course I’m going with you.”
“And they’re just letting you?”
“There are mitigating circumstances keeping me with Aurora at the moment,” Sharma said, tapping a bright flash of silver on her forehead. Not an info-implant, she finally saw, but a memory device just like hers.
Natalie’s mouth shut against a glut of sudden questions. Sharma had disappeared shortly after their original camp on Tribulation had been raided by Baywell troops. Natalie assumed that she’d been taken by the same Baywell heavies that had grabbed her, and when Sharma hadn’t been listed among the seven survivors of the Battle of Tribulation, Natalie had just assumed she’d died in the final blast—or was one of the terrifying few that didn’t die, their husklike, half-breathing bodies languishing in a storage facility somewhere like bags of frozen vegetables.
And it had been a relief, hadn’t it? For Natalie to know she was the only one left, the only one who knew where Ashlan was. To know that the monster behind the Sacrament Society horror show was gone, in soul and in body, and that everything had tottered on back to the way it should be.
She should really have known better.
“How many memories did you lose in the blast?” Natalie pointed to Sharma’s implant.
The doctor stiffened. “Enough,” she said.
“And you’re doing this because—what, because they gave you a memory device too?”
Sharma looked surprised, and then made a fist, rapping her leg just above the knee with her tight knuckles. A damp, metallic sound returned. “After our lab site was raided, I was taken to the Wellspring ship and forced to continue my research on the Heart for their use. My femur was crushed in the battle, so it was a couple months of rehab and a bone replacement for me. And then there were the interminable re-onboarding interviews, and very few breaks in all the work afterward. Most importantly, of course, there’s the cortical bomb.”
She said the last few words in such a plain, everyday tone that Natalie’s brain went straight past them, stumbled, and blanked. “I’m sorry, the what?”
Sharma inclined her head. “The board put a cortical bomb in my head, so they wouldn’t worry about my wandering off to betray Aurora to my old friends.”
“That’s—” The word danced near the tip of her tongue, was replaced by a dire, more fitting silence. Inhuman. Inhumane. But to say that to mad, inhumane Reva Sharma sounded like a cop-out. “That’s certainly a choice.”
“It’s completely expected, given my behavior.” Sharma sighed, and her smile contained an insolent edge. “I kept on defeating all of the devices they used to try tracking me, so I suppose I did it to myself.”
“You’re just going along with this so they don’t curbstomp you before your old friends pick you up. You don’t give a fuck about Ashlan.”
“And you’re here because you made your own shady deal with the board. No—” She raised her hand to stop Natalie from speaking. “Don’t deny it. If I bring Ashlan back, safe and hale and healthy, the bomb comes off. If I divert in any fashion from the mission, if I make contact with the Society or give Auroran assets to anyone outside the Company, this will turn my brain into chutney. And I do care about Ashlan.”
Natalie shook her head. “You don’t care about anything but your bottom line.”
“That’s completely unfair. I believe that both of us care about Ashlan—”
“No, you care about what Ashlan can do—”
“If that’s all she meant to me, I wouldn’t be here.”
“I’m not going to let you near her. You’re a—”
Sharma sighed. “Yes, I know. I’m a terrible human being.” Her tone was almost mocking.
“A murderer.”
“As are you. If you want to keep on punishing me because of your own self-righteous delusions, you may proceed. The only person you’re truly punishing is Ashlan.”
Sharma turned away. The conversation was clearly over. Ascanio, in the corner, had the pursed, deliberate look of someone who had been trying hard not to be caught listening.
“I’m going to take a shower,” Natalie said, waving her hand over the last of the gear—the last thing in this world she could control. “You guys get this packed.”
7
Natalie showered in a nearby pilot’s ready room. By the time she returned, scrubbed clean and smelling like soap, the cargo was loaded and both Sharma and Ascanio were elsewhere. She paused in front of the open airlock. Glanced around at the rest of the small-craft bay. She saw indentured mechanics everywhere, of course, and Ingest would be a problem, but it still might not be too hard to drop into one of the other yachts when no one was looking, hotwire the thing like Ash had taught her, and go—
—go where?
Where could she go?
Sharma would take another yacht to Tribulation, of course, alongside some other cit—a climber like Ward, someone on the fast track to promotion and willing to do whatever it took to get there. And meanwhile, Natalie’s own achievements would cease to matter. Her department would be given to someone else. She’d starve. She had precisely as many options now as she did when she signed her indenture.
She tightened her fists and stepped in.
The doctor was already sitting in the copilot’s chair up front, the safety web loose behind her, reading flimsies. She wore her familiar white coat over a blue Auroran jumpsuit, the light from the warming interfaces reflecting against her topaz skin, just a few shades darker than Natalie’s. Natalie dropped into the pilot’s seat and went through preflight without saying a word, grateful for the relative silence. She was halfway through checking fuel flow when Sharma laid her flimsies to the side and cleared her throat.
Natalie looked up. “If we could get through the next few days without having an unnecessary conversation, that would be great.”
“It’s a very small bomb,” Sharma said, in a smirking tone that made Natalie wonder if she was being condescended to. “It’s located between the folds of my frontal lobe. From what I can tell, it will turn my brain to slurry and crack my skull in a few places, but that won’t create a problem for you or the ship.”
Natalie watched the fuel flow test come back green, then moved on to the environmental subsystems. She confirmed oxygen levels, integrated antigrav, and the head mechanic’s inspection. “Maybe we should just get it over with, then.”
The doctor’s lips pressed together. “I don’t understand where this hostility is coming from.”
“I suppose you’re going to say you don’t remember two months into the Tribulation contract, when I had a UTI and you wouldn’t give me antibiotics because I hadn’t gotten sick ‘in the line of duty.’” Natalie stabbed the air in front of her with her thumb to sign off on the inspection, then switched over to the release forms.
“I don’t.”
“You don’t remember that I had to defuse six zappers while fighting off a kidney infection, huh?” Stab. “Oh, and then there was that time I tweaked my back cracking open a crate for Ms. Ramsay and was in pain for a week, but you reminded me that my indenture released the Company from any medical liability ‘when not engaging in activities that are directly related to my job description.’ Because that was her personal crate and not the Company’s.” Stab. “That was before we figured out that you were just using us.”
Sharma n
odded slowly. “Ah.” She paused. “It’s just Company policy.”
“Oh, sure,” she said, stabbing her agreement one last time and closing the HUD. She turned in the chair, fixing Sharma with her coldest gaze. “You know, where I grew up wasn’t heaven. But we took care of each other. That was Twenty-Five, too. Except for you. You fucked it up.”
The doctor paused. “Where did you grow up?”
“A noncorp in the North Atlantic protectorate. You’d call it a software cult.”
Sharma’s chin lifted imperceptibly. “I didn’t know you were a coder.”
Natalie frowned. “It wasn’t one of my skills. One of the reasons I left.”
“Along with the constant war with the townie governments over Company-issued rations, the climate—”
“You sound like you’re speaking from experience.”
“I spent some time in a software cult when I was in my twenties, just after medical school. The Society used a lot of hacker-cult framework from Earth to build our earliest experimental processes, mostly because it didn’t interface with corporateware.”
“Of course you did. You know what?” Natalie exhaled. “I don’t need to hear about the summer you slummed it in the Manhattan warrens or whatever.”
Sharma breathed out. “No, I suppose you don’t,” she said, in a tone that suggested a grudging concession. “I honestly don’t begrudge anyone wanting to leave. Although it must be very hard to be away from your family…?”
“Nah.” Natalie thought of her father, the way his hair ruffled in the cold November wind as she walked down the hill to the river. If you go, you can’t come back. He’d finally taken the long walk down the hill too, when things got bad enough, and now she didn’t even remember enough about him to make a conversation worth a damn. Her stomach flipped with a rush of sudden anger, in a blast of cold wind across the marble plaza of her childhood, and Natalie cleared her throat, making an attempt to change the subject.
Engines of Oblivion Page 6
