Engines of Oblivion

by Karen Osborne

  “Are you done yet?”

  “Almost.”

  “Let’s go.”

  “Calm down,” Sharma said. “If you overclock from stress—”

  “—if you reprogram the memoria to wipe every single memory I have—”

  The doctor looked hurt, then handed back Natalie’s faceplate. “You just don’t stop, do you?”

  “I’m not known for it, no.” Natalie flashed a smile, and clicked the faceplate back against her forehead, feeling a rushing relief as the buffer caught up with the long-term memory in her meatbrain. She thought she saw a green light behind her eyelids as she did so, something bright and shivering, but when she blinked her eyes, it was gone again. Probably nothing.

  The doctor swept up her things as Natalie checked the compass for directions to the location of the signal tied to Ashlan’s heartbeat. The woods out here were a tangle of burnt umber and sulfur, of underbrush that clutched at the trunks of trees. It was a hard hike—just on the edge of doable, even with the rabid sting of the burn on her neck, even though she was so hungry. She found herself craving a very large sandwich, or a can of protein, and was distracted enough that she almost missed the unmistakable, almost imperceptible whir-whistle of a drone.

  Natalie hissed get down, don’t even breathe, grabbing wildly at the doctor’s suited shoulder. To her credit, Sharma crumpled alongside her, dropping to a hunch behind a twisted fallen log, folding her frame into the space behind a loamy stump.

  Natalie wrapped her palm around her cold boltgun, her index finger sliding in just next to the trigger guard, slowing her breath, trying to match the aching wheeze in her chest to the wind that had kicked up after sunset.

  The boots showed up seconds later: InGen boots, big, shiny black groundwhackers with wide yellow stripes, meant for wading through rivers and intestines and blood. Natalie knew InGen wasn’t even supposed to be anywhere near Tribulation, didn’t have an official statement on the hostilities, preferring instead to work through more underhanded means, corporate espionage and merger destruction. They didn’t put troops on the ground unless they had to.

  She pressed herself up against the log, slivers pressing into her forehead as she stared through the knothole, checking for shadows, for an exit. No doors and corners here—just fat hardwood trees clumping around the edge of the clearing, and tight brambles fit to trip over. Not the best place for a fight, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. There were only three men, which was strange, because InGens walked in fours.

  Have you fought, Natalie wanted to ask Sharma, because we’re going to have to fight, but she nearly gave away her position with the skinny laugh that followed. A birthright like Sharma, a scientist, a surgeon, risking her birdbone fingers on something as risky as a wild punch? No. Natalie couldn’t count on her. What’s worse, she’d have to factor Sharma’s uselessness in to any physical decision she made, because the doctor was right: she was the only person in the universe who had any chance of understanding what was happening to Ashlan. She was baggage. She was worse than baggage.

  Reva Sharma was irreplaceable.

  A boltgun spun up nearby, and a skewed, sour note slithered into her left ear. Ah, she thought. There’s the fourth.

  “Stand up. Slowly.”

  The voice belonged to a young man with a dull, ship-bound complexion, wearing InGen cit tags and a dirty yellow uniform. His voice bent around gravel like he’d started drinking backhouse moonshine twenty years ago, and his face, slathered with three days’ worth of a salt-and-pepper beard, wore the angry, bored gaze of a functionary whose already annoying day had just become much worse. His gun hovered close enough to Natalie’s head that she could feel the heat of the spinner against her forehead, and his bulky backpack blocked out the afternoon sun.

  No, she thought. That’s not a backpack.

  The gun was the least of her worries.

  Sharma’s hand closed on Natalie’s wrist a second later. Of course the doctor would recognize a transport isolette as quickly as Natalie—fat, tough things meant for hauling Vai kinetics, wrapped with layers of woven fabric and topped with triple-milled titanium. But these weren’t strapped on antigrav dollies or safely stashed in some proper armory; these were set on the burly shoulders of the InGen soldiers. Each of the four men carried one, like pack mules hauling a small apocalypse.

  Natalie slid up, the blood clammy against her chest, and remembered what it was like to fear. She let her shoulders drop. Imagined the confidence leaking from her veins like blood from Ash’s wrist.

  “Please,” she whispered. “Please, help us.”

  “Unlikely,” the leader said, mirthless.

  “It’s just me and my boss,” she whispered, throwing herself into the role. She remembered the retreat at Grenadier, the terror in her throat, the fire in her lungs, and let it wrap around her tongue. “We crashed. Someone—someone shot at us. We need help—”

  The man tilted his head. “Are you Auroran? Shit.”

  Sharma had figured out the ploy by now. She moaned, her fingers dropping from Natalie’s wrist to claw at her dirty ankle. When she spoke, her voice softened into a pale version of itself. Natalie knew she shouldn’t feel so surprised that the doctor was so good at acting.

  “Of course we’re Auroran,” she said. “This is our planet. We’re terraformists. And if your company was responsible for shooting us down—” Sharma huffed for air, and this time it was obvious she wasn’t quite faking it, that the atmosphere had taken up residence in her lungs. She gulped again, almost as if she were daring the planet to kill her.

  Natalie leaned over, pressing her bloody hand to Sharma’s forehead. “Look,” she said, trying to sound as worried as possible. “She might care who you are. I don’t. She needs help, she—” Think of Ash. Think of everyone who died. Cry. You know how to cry. “Do I need to tell you what a mix of forty percent methanethiol does to the human lung? She needs a rebreather, bandages, a doctor—”

  The man’s hand shook on his boltgun. “We’re going to take you in.”

  Sharma let out a theatrical groan, and Natalie scrambled to her feet. “Seriously? This is an Auroran planet, asshole. I don’t know who you are, but you’re not even supposed to be here. When Beijing notices we didn’t make our checkpoint, they’ll fire on whatever can of shit you have in orbit. You either help or you let us go.”

  She didn’t expect the lie to work. She expected to be stunned, shoved face-down into the brig of some foreign cruiser, perhaps dragged in front of some yellow-shirted InGen interrogator. But the man harrumphed, holstered his boltgun, and nodded. “I meant help you,” he said. “We have food and meds at the camp. We’ll have the commander fire up the ansible to Beijing, and then we’ll go get the rest of your people.”

  His smile was a shark’s.

  Natalie smiled back, wide and with teeth. A feint in return, she thought. They know Beijing’s dead. They want us to lead them to other Aurorans on Tribulation so they can clear their path to Ashlan.

  “I appreciate it,” Natalie whispered.

  “Just try to keep up,” he said, turning away.

  “We’ll make an attempt,” Natalie said, picking her way through the brush and brambles. Just behind her, Sharma favored her right ankle like she’d actually rolled it in the crash, letting out entirely realistic cries of agony at completely appropriate times.

  “So, you’re terraformists,” said the team leader, looking over his shoulder. “We didn’t know Aurora was looking to recolonize so soon.”

  “We didn’t know InGen was coming to help,” said Natalie.

  The team leader paused for a moment, using a long knife to slash a set of tight-knit vines blocking the path. “Well, you know,” he said, “our executive board was entirely shocked by what happened here. We’re still proper members of the Alliance. Were you making your survey in the area of the old colony?”

  Why? Natalie thought. Are you looking for a particular ag-center too?

  “The southern continent, nea
r Tanner Point. A new site.” Natalie’s eyes snagged on the man’s long knife, which was catching the violent, late-afternoon light as it minced the brambles, and Natalie moved to loosen the safety on her boltgun while he wasn’t watching. Nearby, Sharma’s eyes widened in warning. She sent a dark look back in the doctor’s direction—I know what I’m doing.

  “Ah,” he said. “Too many ghosts here, huh.”

  “Something like that.”

  Snick. The long knife sliced throuth the brambles again, opening their path, and the man’s eyes drifted toward Natalie’s waistband. “I didn’t know scientists needed boltguns.”

  “War is a science,” Sharma said.

  The man’s eyes narrowed as he walked.

  “The battle plan: the hypothesis,” Sharma continued. “The battle: the experiment. The aftermath: the data, examining what you need to change for the next time.”

  “Interesting,” he said, in a voice that said he considered it anything but.

  “Human blood,” said Sharma, interjecting before Natalie could get a word in edgewise. “Soldiers’ blood. Their sweat, their loss. Those are the reagents in the chemical reaction that is war. Violent, yes, and all too often necessary. Hopefully, the research bears it out for the betterment of all. If not, well. You still have data to analyze.”

  The man grunted, unimpressed, and Sharma went on for a bit while Natalie tried to figure out how to turn a possible fight to her advantage. She wondered if the men even knew what they carried, if they felt the humming hubbub against their shoulders, cackling like needles under her fingernails, breaking open behind their eyes like birds against a dark sky. She was even more sure now that if she and Sharma made it back to the InGen camp they wouldn’t make it back out again. But one against four? That was a risky move.

  “Do you know what you have?” Sharma finished.

  “Excuse me?” said the man.

  “On your back,” she said. “Do you know what’s in there?”

  Hah. You can’t stop poking either, Natalie thought. She’s right. We may have more in common than we think. Ugh. “Boss, let’s not bother our hosts.”

  “Ssh, dear,” said Sharma. “We all know one against four is a rotten ratio. I’m just evening the field.”

  “Excuse me?” said the man.

  Natalie’s tight shoulders took on a tighter knit. She didn’t want to follow Sharma’s lead—the lead of a genocidal freak, like her, impaler of hearts, skewerer of livers, but then, wasn’t she the same? Hadn’t she pulled the trigger on thousands, too? And if they were both lucky, nobody would die here. She could dial down the boltgun setting. The InGens would dream about knives in their lungs until they were found, but she didn’t have to kill them herself. She didn’t have to make that leap right away.

  The memoria whispered to her. Ash, bleeding out, her blood pooling on the concrete—

  She could do it right this time.

  Right. What was right? There was no reason to play happy houses with the very company that shot them down. This would not end up with established prisoner of war treaties; the corporate engagement rules had already been thrown out when Beijing died and these InGen assholes lied about it. If they made it back to InGen’s camp, their next destination was an InGen brig.

  Natalie balled her fist, taking a breath, smelling death and ozone and lemonade, as the man’s gaze hit her waistband again and he realized that the weight of the equation had shifted. His hand hovered near his own weapon.

  “Don’t even try it,” he said.

  Sharma cleared her throat and spoke before Natalie could think of a comeback. “I’m very much a lover of science,” she said. “Shall we see if you are, as well?”

  The leader blinked. “What the hell?”

  “I have a hypothesis,” Sharma responded. “You were sent here on a suicide mission. You didn’t know that until just now. When I told you.”

  “I will shoot you if you make that necessary.”

  “You’ve been told not to,” Sharma said, “or you would have thirty seconds ago when you saw that my companion’s safety was off. No. They told you that you couldn’t shoot, but they didn’t tell you why. They probably told you to just stay away from plasteel, and that they didn’t know if energy discharges would affect your cargo.”

  The man’s boltgun wavered. “How did you—”

  “Hypothesis,” said Natalie, feeling a stab of cruel confident fire. “You’re the ones who are going to need a medic.”

  Natalie was already in motion before the man could respond. The fight was quick and dirty, the kind of scrap she’d enjoyed back at Verdict, her fists fast with the bloody talent that got her fast-tracked to the Auroran military division. Men who relied on barrels and triggers forgot about fists and feet and the force of metal. She slammed down on the man’s foot, smashed his nose and his eye, cackled at the jelly giving way under her hand. Gross, but effective.

  He stumbled, clawing at his face. The other three advanced, their focus entirely on Natalie, and Sharma took advantage of the moment of distraction to pop the leader’s backpack open.

  A light emerged, violet and sodden and wilding like a bleeding child. The four soldiers froze, and the fight ended as quickly as it had begun. The leader knew what that meant in an instant; he panicked and shoved the pack off his shoulders, backing away. It fell to the ground. Inside, behind the light, Natalie could see a round silver-violet ball large enough to rest inside her palm, wrapped in golden isocloth, nestled in the center of the isolette.

  Natalie, who understood these things, reached in and fished it out.

  She felt her teeth start to rattle on contact. Something felt wrong—the same kind of wrong she’d felt in the puppet rig. All of the Vai weapons had cutesy Auroran pet names: poppers and jammers and clippers, nicknames that might have been used for viruses distributed on a Verdict hacknetwork in her previous life; she recognized this as an evaporator, and felt a rushing relief. It was a kinetic, and kinetics stayed dormant until they hit the right trigger—in this case, coldsuit fabric. It was also fairly easy to outrun. All in all, not the worst thing to be up against.

  But this evaporator wasn’t dormant.

  She saw traceries of light surrounding the cool silver sphere, flash-flickers of intense violet and stabbing red, of boughs and blood and little whining trout with their poison bones. She felt the tingling heat of alien energy beneath her fingers, heard it crackling in the air around them like flames licking at the insides of a computer or acid souring her fingertips. She knew that old twist of her stomach, that wild beat of her heart, that caustic anticipation of death—but the whisper behind it felt new.

  Sister, she heard.

  “Doc,” Natalie whispered. “Doc. That’s a molecular.”

  “Don’t be silly, Ms. Chan. It’s clearly an evaporator kinetic.”

  “I know what I’m talking about,” Natalie snapped.

  “So do I.”

  The leader tightened his grip on the boltgun. “We were carrying Vai weapons?”

  “Let’s engage in the scientific method,” said Sharma, who might understand what Natalie meant, quite possibly more than any other person in the universe. She fished a piece of broken plasteel hull from her bag like she’d grab a bandage or a hairbrush. “Is it a kinetic or a molecular? The only way to find out is to run an experiment. Let’s set it off.”

  Natalie’s chin snapped up. What?

  The man’s eyes were wide, and it was obvious he hadn’t thought for a second about what he was carrying, and didn’t understand how Natalie could just stand there holding a Vai weapon like a holiday trinket. Natalie glanced at the others, who were equally rooted to the ground. She felt for them. She really did. Every single person alive had been there at some point during the war, staring down a short, hot, violent future.

  Natalie breathed out. Looked at Sharma. “They could always run.”

  “They could,” the doctor replied. Her eyes were wide and warning, Sharma-speak for follow along.


  “I mean, I run pretty fast,” Natalie said, sweating. “There was that time at Grenadier, then here on Tribulation—”

  “And you’re not encumbered,” Sharma said, and smiled.

  The leader shivered. “Yeah, but you are. Your ankle—” he said.

  Sharma shifted her whole weight on it. “What about it?”

  Natalie turned back to the others, swallowed her terror, and slid the thing into the crook of her arm like a murderous infant. It sang, sang, sang—“Gentlemen, it’s been lovely. But I think that if you enjoy your skin on the outside of your body, you’d better run.”

  The man at the back was the first one to break. He’d been trembling since the violet light first appeared. The other two followed. The commander hollered, turning his attention away; Natalie could almost see him doing the math delineating exactly how screwed he was in his head: four lost weapons and three lost indentures. Shitty math for the InGen commander, but it worked out in Natalie’s favor.

  Natalie and Sharma whirled, hurtling into the underbrush, heading in the path of least resistance, losing themselves once again in the anonymous embrace of the darkening forest. And that was a problem—a major problem—but Natalie was used to Kate Keller’s salvage motto of one fucking problem at a time, and right now she only had eyes for the horizon.

  Once Natalie was sure it was safe, she wheezed to a stop, her lungs sucking down the oxygen that grew more plentiful the closer they got to the ag-center.

  “I have to say,” Sharma said. She closed her eyes and leaned against a tree. “I’m proud of you.”

  “Ah. You still think we’re friends.” Natalie coughed.

  “We’re not?”

  “That was a performance.”

  Sharma kicked away a vine. “And a good one. You’ve come a long way in a year. The Natalie I knew when I first boarded Twenty-Five wouldn’t have thought of that gambit.”

  “I’m not sure that’s a compliment.”

  “You’ve developed a sense of subtlety since you’ve become a citizen.”

  “Yeah, fuck you, too.” Natalie watched her footing as she pushed up and away again, striding through a particularly soggy patch of ground, trying to stifle a wet cough. She tasted salty mucus at the back of her throat and thought about how much she hated subtlety. “It’s not a kinetic. I didn’t activate the thing. They didn’t activate the thing. Which means it was you.”