Engines of Oblivion

by Karen Osborne

  She recognized them.

  Cables obscured their faces, and blankets their legs, but Natalie saw enough to cue the memoria. These twisted, wasted bodies belonged to Solano’s staffers; they were members of the team the Company had landed on Tribulation to inventory the Sacrament atrocities. She’d left with a fire team to find Ashlan, leaving behind men with clipboards and cameras. They must have still been below when Ash triggered the Heart in orbit.

  They were undernourished, despite the obvious care to keep intravenous drugs flowing. They had the beginnings of bedsores, yellowed teeth, and lungs that inhaled and exhaled with the dregs of a ragged instinct. Natalie couldn’t stop staring; this, she knew, would have been her fate if she hadn’t listened to Ash.

  Take this away, she begged the memoria, but for the very first time, the damned thing seemed to be working as advertised. She saw them hauling equipment down the stairs, their eyes wide with excitement. Heard their voices saying how honored they were to be here, to be trusted by the board. They must have still been poking through the isolettes when the Heart went off, ripped through ships, through space, through their bodies, their pasts, and their futures. She didn’t even know their names.

  “You’re reusing IV bags?” Sharma’s voice at least had the respectability to sound shocked.

  Kate heaved a sigh. “It’s not like we get regular shipments of saline solution down here. What the hell else was I supposed to do?”

  Natalie thought of the yawning black chasm of the things she should have known, the things she could have done for the five young men. How much worse would it have been without the memory device? The words came out before she could stop them. “Bullet. To the head.”

  “Oh, is that your best idea?” said Kate, the sarcasm thick.

  “Did you expect them to wake up?” said Natalie.

  Kate sighed. “I kind of hoped they would.”

  Sharma didn’t respond right away; she moved from patient to patient, her hands lightly touching the improvised IV bags, resting her fingers against the inside of a wrist, checking the temperature of another. “They’re not going to wake up,” she said. “Natalie’s right. A bullet would be better.”

  Kate breathed out. “I can’t believe you two.”

  “What about the memoria? Could that help, if we could get them back to Vancouver?” Natalie said.

  Sharma’s voice soured. “The memory device has to contain some reference to who you used to be. These poor men, well. There’s nothing left to save. The memoria would provide, at best, a programmed fantasy, not that they’d understand it, because they don’t even have the experiential touchstones of a newborn baby—like a mother’s heartbeat, or light and darkness. I feel for them, Ms. Chan, but there’s nothing I can do.”

  “We can take them home,” Natalie said.

  “I think it’s interesting that you’re suddenly a humanitarian,” Sharma said.

  “These people are Auroran.” Natalie’s face reddened. “But I wouldn’t expect that to be important to you.”

  Sharma shrugged. “It’s not important to the executive board.”

  “There was a lockout—”

  “Come on.” Sharma’s laughter took on a bitter edge. “Beijing was here the whole time. They could have sent search parties down at any time.”

  Kate cleared her throat, stepping between the two. “So do you want to see her or not?”

  Sharma cleared her throat, tore her eyes away from Natalie, and hobbled away. It took Natalie a few more moments to leave; her hands brushed the palm of the body closest to her. She shivered when she found the pads of his corpselike fingers were still warm.

  The administrative wing was still a mess, still choked with papers and clutter from the Sacrament Society bugout. Kate explained that as their disease advanced, she and Ash focused on making updates to Sharma’s lab, which had morphed from an alien abattoir into a hospital, if a hospital could be cobbled together out of scraps and trash by minds and hands more used to working on engines and ships.

  Natalie’s vestigial Verdict brain saw the proliferation of wires and tubes and interlaced computer parts first, fastened together with wire and shoelaces, running to and from a set of blinking, jury-rigged servers in the corner. These were innards ripped out of quarantine boxes and old colony terminals, tied into repurposed power sources running pumps where blood-dark medicine dripped in regular intervals. All of it served the central surgical bed, where what was left of Ashlan Jackson lay battered and dozing, lost in a drug-induced haze.

  The mattress nearby belonged to Kate, from what Natalie could tell. The captain’s belongings had always been impeccably sorted and cared for aboard Twenty-Five, and here, she saw even meal wrappers folded and stacked in a rubbish bin nearby in some fantasy of control. She counted eight days’ worth of uneaten pasta dishes, one fork, and no obvious change of clothes. Kate lived here. Natalie felt a quick pull at her heart, a quick thought of nobody would do that for me.

  “You did this?” Sharma whispered, sounding impressed.

  “I followed your manuals,” Kate said. “Whatever else you are, you’re not a half-bad technical writer.”

  Sharma ignored the dig, then moved toward the familiar stranger on the surgical bed, checking her vitals. Ash still had her dark hair cut into the ragged, knife-slash edges of a busy indenture, but that was where the resemblance to the friend she’d known on Twenty-Five ended. This Ash lay withered, exhaustively thin, breathing irregularly in a low, congested rattle. Her fingers twitched as the doctor approached—not that she looked at all conscious.

  “This,” Sharma said, waving her hand over a set of diodes on Jackson’s feverish forehead. “This is wrong. Do you want to fry her frontal lobe?”

  “That was in your instructions—”

  “I wrote that years ago,” Sharma said. She licked dry lips, shaking her head. “There were so many things I didn’t understand back then, knowledge I didn’t have regarding the way the human brain interacts with Vai physiology. Let me fix this. Please.”

  Kate hesitated near Ash’s head, then leaned over, lifted the sick pilot’s fingers, and pressed her lips soft and light to Ash’s bony knuckles. She took a few quick strides toward the door, settling in the space just outside the room, her shoulder lingering against the doorjamb and her arms crossed. Sharma moved in, stepping in front of the readings on the monitor. Natalie followed Kate, a thousand questions bubbling behind her teeth, but when she arrived, it was the ex-captain who spoke first.

  “He sent you, didn’t he?”

  Natalie considered telling her otherwise, but the truth had always been the best option when talking to Kate. “Solano? Yeah. He figured out that I lied and let Ash go, during the battle, so—”

  “—so now you’re back to fix your…” Her lip curled. “Mistake.”

  Natalie took a breath to respond but was caught instead in a wreck of a cough, the lingering mucus in her throat clotting her air intake. Inside the room, Sharma darted from the computer to the bed, checked Ashlan’s pulse, tied a tourniquet on her upper arm, and fished out a lancet from a nearby drawer like she hadn’t spent years and years away from the lab.

  “You know I don’t think letting her go was a mistake. I told her I’d return as soon as I could.”

  Her former captain’s lips settled into a full, derisive twist. “Once they put your shiny new citizenship on the line, I’d imagine. I know how this works, Ms. Chan. Everyone has their price. What was yours? A directorship?”

  Natalie winced. “That’s not—”

  “A directorship, then.”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “You know, Nat, I always thought you were going places. That you were going to be better than the rest of them. But now I know I can’t trust you, either. The old Natalie would know not to dangle false hope in front of me like a fucking executive.” Her osprey eyes fixed cold and angry on Natalie’s.

  “Just talk to her,” Natalie said. “She has no reason to lie.”

>   “Dr. Sharma has every reason to lie. Never forget that,” Kate said. She pushed off the doorjamb and entered the lab, effectively ending the conversation. “Doc! Give me good news.”

  Sharma looked up from where she was bent over some scar tissue on Ashlan’s wrist, banishing some dark, unknowable emotion. She wiped her hands on a clean towel, which she tossed aside, as if she were still on a ship and there was some indenture haunting the wall nearby ready to catch it. “You’re not going to like the good news, and there’s plenty of the bad kind, too,” she said.

  The tension in the room tightened like a noose.

  “Out with it,” said Kate.

  “She’s extremely close to organ failure.” Sharma rubbed the back of her neck. “You were right to be concerned about her AST/ALT levels. She’s going to need tissue regeneration to her lungs and a liver transplant to survive, so we need to get her off-planet to a proper medbay as soon as possible.”

  Kate took the news like a bolt to the face. She closed her mouth. Opened it again. Natalie recognized shock in the way her hands started to shake—or was that the celestium madness? It had been a year, after all.

  “Natalie was talking about a treatment. Not major surgery.”

  Sharma stiffened. “Yes, but I can’t do anything for the Vai tech in her blood until we stabilize her.”

  Kate’s shoulders tightened. “Do it here. We can’t go off-planet. It’s impossible.”

  The doctor clasped her hands together in front of her abdomen, as if this were a normal consultation and a normal day. “You asked me to save her life. I need proper equipment to do that. Once she has a functioning liver and her lungs are drained of fluid, we can move on to the treatment.”

  “No.” Kate’s eyes focused on Ash’s sleeping face.

  “Well,” Sharma said, giving her hands a last quick wipe on the front of her jacket, “if you don’t want to save her—”

  “Look at the two of you.” Kate’s voice broke. Natalie could feel her ex-captain’s rage shivering underneath her own fingernails, tried to breathe in air salt-thick with her fear, and found she couldn’t. “You’re not here to save us. You’re here to dangle the cure, the fucking nonexistent cure, just long enough to get us on a transport back to Rio de Janeiro. I’m never going to trust either of you ever again.”

  Sharma took two steps back, away from the surgical bed, lifting her hands, and when she spoke, her voice was careful and slow. “You asked me to be her doctor, and I agreed. I will not lie about a bond as sacred as that. There was no cure before the Battle of Tribulation because watching it happen—having access to Heart-coma patients and memory devices afterward—gave me the last few pieces of information I needed to synthesize a cure. It’s a very specific thing, customized for the patient’s particular situation. I cannot do it here.”

  “Then what can you do?” Kate said, after a long, considering moment.

  Sharma looked away, toward the ground, losing herself in a sudden thought. She tapped her fingers against the bedside. “I’m going to find some of my cloning equipment and grow her a functioning liver. I don’t have the ability to do a full cell regen panel, so it won’t be a good one, but it will last until we can get her to Europa Station.”

  Kate’s shoulders slumped, like Sharma had shattered a bright and terrifying gem inside her heart. Natalie lingered in a conflicted silence, trapped between a lie and a truth, or perhaps two truths, or two lies. She’d seen dozens of indentures take out years of credit for medicine, for basic medical care, for splints and gunshots and the flu, and here Sharma was talking about growing an organ like an ear of corn. Talking about borrowing it for a while, like Ash had misplaced a shoe or a power tool. Is this why the executives lived so long?

  “How long does that take?” Kate asked.

  “Twelve hours.”

  “Not possible,” Kate said. “The other companies will arrive way before that.”

  “InGen is already close,” Natalie said.

  “Liver structures are complicated, and need time to grow and resolve,” Sharma said. “But they’d be hers, and rejection wouldn’t be an issue during the transport to Europa.”

  “Which means there’s an option where it would. Tell me about that one.” Kate advanced and stared down the doctor. Natalie had only ever seen that look in fellow survivors of Cana. People who had been in the war from the very beginning, who had seen and done things so terrible they’d lost all sense. The old Kate Keller would have tossed off a joke at this point, lifted her chin, made you feel foolish and loved and accepted. This version—

  This Keller made Natalie shiver.

  Sharma pursed her lips and looked out toward the office complex. “Your coma boys outside. Odds are that you’ve been feeding them the proper intravenous solutions, they’ll be healthy enough for surgery. We excise her liver and replace it with a lobe from one that still works. I inject some medicine that makes Ash’s body think the liver is hers.” She raised her hand to forestall Kate’s immediate questions. “The surgery is risky to both parties, yes, but livers regenerate, and I can have her prepped for transport shortly afterward.”

  Kate looked aghast. “You can’t do a liver transplant within the hour.”

  “Then you’ll have to buy me time. If you’d brought the Heart to Medellin like I asked, we’d already have Ash treated and secured in a safe place, far away from anyone who would do her harm, and you would be with her. So, yes, we’re doing this my way.”

  “All right. And the men? How do you propose to ask their permission?”

  “Ask?” said Sharma. “We don’t ask.”

  Kate’s jaw worked for a second. “This isn’t your fucking organ factory anymore, Reva. They can’t consent to surgery.”

  “They are far past consent.”

  “They’re breathing on their own—”

  “It doesn’t matter. The most important part, the bit that makes us human, is gone,” Sharma said, tapping her memory device. “Who we are, what we make of our world, it’s all knit together from the experiences we write on our brains and our bodies. Those poor young men were at the epicenter of the deployment of the Heart, and the Heart worked exactly the same both times it was triggered, and you know here—” She pressed against Kate’s chest with one finger, and Natalie could see her former captain barely resisting some deep, aching anger at that. “You know that there’s nothing left.”

  “Who are you to say that?” whispered Kate.

  A new voice. Whisper-weak, crunching tight like booted feet on rolling gravel, but so familiar. “It’s true. We’ve done everything we can. They’re gone.”

  Three heads turned to watch Ash, her dull eyes open for the first time, her body almost entirely still. She shifted enough to raise her hand, then drop it to her lap and gather a part of the blanket into a rumpled ball. She was crying.

  Natalie rushed to her side. “Hi,” she said.

  “You came back.” Ash smiled through cracked lips.

  “Don’t get too excited. Doc wants to take you back to Europa, and I’m not at all convinced it isn’t a good idea.”

  Ash laughed, a half-hacking horror show of a thing, and Natalie saw blood and spittle at her lips. “Oh, I’m fine with leaving, but not for Europa.”

  “Then where?” said Natalie, still hoping for an out.

  “That’s impossible, love,” Kate said, sweeping in before Ash could answer.

  “Not—impossible,” Ash whispered, starting to shake. “It is the only necessary thing.”

  Sharma frowned. “What’s she talking about?”

  The comment had made Kate frown too, frown with a specific gray sadness that told Natalie she knew exactly what Ash was talking about. Instead of answering, Kate stood up. “Not that,” she said, pushing back her hair, smoothing it against the side of her head.

  “Put the evaporator away,” Ash whispered, even though there was no way she could have known about the singing thing in Natalie’s jacket. Her eyes rolled back, and she slipped back to
whatever quiet hell she’d been living in.

  “Make a decision, Captain,” Sharma said. “She doesn’t have much time.”

  Kate turned away to hide her tears.

  “Do it,” she said, and then pulled away, running down the hallway. Her footsteps echoed in the blank hallway outside, and Natalie’s eyes followed—she wasn’t heading for the cavern, but the bugout bay. That bugout bay. Seconds later, she saw a sickeningly familiar violet-green splatter of light at the end of the hallway; suddenly, the memoria forced her back into the transport fleeing the battle, her breath hot in her throat, the blood thrumming in her ears, the memories that said run, this is the Heart, run—

  “You don’t need help, do you?” she managed, lost in the shimmer.

  “Normally, I’d say yes,” said Sharma, moving toward a case of bottled water in the corner. She rolled up her sleeves, removed the cap, and drenched her hands up to the elbows. “But, in this case, I think your skills could be better put to use elsewhere, say, prepping for our visitors, or…” Her eyes wandered to the light. “Making sure she isn’t cooking up another rash decision, like using it on us.”

  —I’ll be back for you, the memoria cried, as if Natalie were back on London with Ash, and she whacked the side of her head like she was attempting to dislodge water caught behind her eardrum. She was on the edge of panic, moving through a forest of could-have-beens, stretching sleek and delicious into the bloody sky careening over the ground above. She slammed her foot against the concrete to remind herself where she was, and then licked her lips, pointing at the doctor.

  “Do not fuck it up,” she said, quietly. “Do you understand?”

  Sharma’s mouth creased into an amused grin, and she picked up a white device with a pointed end, flipping open the lightning end of a cauterizing laser. “You’re the one with the gun. Of course.”

  Natalie turned and walked off with the wide, angry strides of someone about to throw up. Sharma was right. She needed to check in on Kate, who was now in the one room in the entire complex Natalie didn’t want to go. Couldn’t go. Wouldn’t go.