“Is it really.” A statement, hollow-voiced, hurt.
“Yeah.”
“There’s nothing else you need to tell me?”
She breathed out. Everything, maybe. It’s my fault. They’re already using you. Which is why you can’t come with me.
Maybe: I did this to you.
“Nothing,” she said. “What do you need to know?”
It wasn’t the answer he wanted. Natalie saw a nasty, slippery echo in his eyes, some sort of uncontrolled anger that she couldn’t quite understand. He took off his jacket and turned it inside-out, using the lining to wipe his face. A few moments later, he slid it back on, the last of the eyeliner tracing gray streaks under his left eye.
“I wish I’d never met you,” Ward said, then placed his fingers on the superhaptic interface, and the entire thing went gold. She felt the shiver of the ship preparing for battle under her feet, and saw the hurt in his eyes harden into something else, into the thing she needed him to be. Seconds later, he was back in the corridor.
She watched the space where he was.
“They always leave,” Downey said.
“I made him leave,” she responded, hoarse. “It’s not the same.”
“If there’s one thing I’m learning,” he said, “it’s that you can’t ever make a human do anything.”
She snorted. “That’s extremely fucking true.”
“Keep going,” he said, hiding right behind her shoulder, his nonexistent breath in her ear.
She shuddered back into motion. Beyond the now-open hatch to the computer core, alarms wailed in varying shades of attack and general quarters, alarms that accessed her shivering animal brain, the place where the war had dug in and scrambled it, and she had to keep herself from that Pavlovian response to find the nearest jumpsuit or strapdown.
No. She had work to do. That first week on Twenty-Five, she’d learned the basics of how Auroran ships were built. Most of them kept the cylinder-and-spine design of the earliest colony ships, the huge spinning vessels that had gone out before antigrav was common. She still knew enough—how to access maintenance tunnels, how to remove walls, how to cut cabling while preserving function. How to find the useful items, the reusable stuff, the expensive shit. How to blow past standard locks. Natalie thought it was incredible that more salvagers didn’t just go pirate.
It was only on Mumbai and London, moving carefully through the cruisers’ dead veins, that the blueprints became real. She’d learned how citizens and birthrights lived, saw the massive chunks of ship owned by the different family lineages, saw the obscene open space occupied by executives and board members. But those living dead so rarely remembered the smaller details, the tinier spaces, never smelled the acrid, metal-bright scent of warm cabling close to a core vent.
“You’re wrong about that,” she said to Downey, who was following her like a sad puppy. “You can make people do whatever you want. All you have to do is be an executive.”
“Nobody ever made you do anything,” Downey said. “Isn’t that true?”
“I—” Her hand paused. Was it? “I don’t know. I’m starting to wonder if that’s just a story I’ve been telling myself to justify acting like him.”
Downey pursed his lips in thought. “So you can choose to hide the truth from yourself. I thought you couldn’t simply choose to believe something antithetical to truth. Truth is—”
“Fungible,” she said, stepping through the door.
“That’s impossible,” he said.
“You’re human now. Everything’s impossible. Keep up.”
Inside was the computer core. Twenty-Five’s core had been smaller, accessible from the front and the back. A cruiser’s was five levels deep, with a labyrinth of progressively larger data centers clustered around the main logic towers, with passages between for techs to run repairs, replacements, and updates. There were no techs here today—just the great rainbow bulk of it, the blinking lights, the hum of almost-intelligence, the breeze from the vent, the places on the first logic tower, where she saw vein-slippery Vai tech hacked into the rest of the technological nonsense.
She stopped. “You seeing this?”
Downey was barely breathing. “Together,” he whispered.
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
It was hot in the core, almost unbearably so. She came around the last arc to see the second logic tower, and stopped in her tracks, sweating. The tower had become an arachnophobic nightmare of cables and legs and dripping oil or water or golden blood. It had probably been a proxy rig once, maybe even built off the plans for her team’s proxy rigs, from the way the struts leaned against one another. She wondered, seeing the familiar way the Vai weapons parts were so carefully soldered in place.
And she recognized the rest of it, machine on top of machine, the Sacrament tech Solano’s teams had loaded up on Tribulation while she’d been watching Downey walk away instead. It was paired with medical equipment—ventilators, life-support systems.
Beyond it, she saw the body.
A woman’s corpse was buried in the computer. Cabling wrapped around her matchstick legs, ran into veins at the neck, wrists, and ankles. Her eyes were gold-rheumed, mouth hanging slightly open. Someone had started replacing the woman’s skin with superhaptic circuitry, with boards and braiding that had become arms and fingers and skin, slipping up from the extremities like a river slurping up a valley. And the face—
She knew that face.
Beside her, the master node gave a sob and dropped to his knees, and Natalie felt a sudden, grinding headache, the purpling feeling of the alien in her brain trying to understand what he was seeing.
“Captain,” she whispered, unable to move.
I’m too late.
The body stirred. Its eyes flickered open. Kate’s voice, left unused, was a wondering croak. “Natalie?”
Natalie’s limbs moved almost under someone else’s control, taking her to the rig connections, fumbling in her back pocket for the drill. “Captain! I—I’ll get you out of there,” she stammered, taking inventory of the parts, understanding how thoroughly she had just lied: superhaptic connections at the fingers and the belly, drug delivery to the brainstem, the way the neural crown sat against Kate’s pale forehead.
She didn’t have to call for the node to help; didn’t have to even ask him what she was looking at. He was in her thoughts, he was her thoughts, and his half-life hands danced over cables and circuits like a master magician. I know this, he said, his eyes widening. It breathes like I do. I’ll show you what to do.
Kate shivered in her tomb. Pain and a quiet disgust slipped across her face, and her gold-rheumed eyes closed. “No. I’m all right. Live your life. Go back to Aulander and get your nice fucking jacket.”
The master node was a crescendo in Natalie’s ear, and she tried to wave him off. “Tell me Solano made you do this. Tell me you didn’t volunteer.”
Words formed around Kate’s mouth, but nothing came out. “He promised,” she managed. “That I could see Ash. He promised.”
“Ash is dead.”
“No.”
Natalie’s fingers closed on the cables. “She died at the White Line. I saw her body.”
Kate’s cracked lips parted. She fought her own breath, lungs filling and emptying of air, cables tightening around her body. Her wire-crusted hand curled around Natalie’s cold fingers, and underneath the metal, Natalie could still feel sinew. “No. She wouldn’t be captured. I wouldn’t let her die. You have to understand. I see it all. This is the way it has to be.”
“Make me understand. What have they done to you?”
Bony fingers brushed against the inside of Natalie’s palm like a twisted benediction. “It’s the treatment they promised. It’s not what we thought, but … it was the only way Ash would live. She went inside, Natalie. Sharma showed her how to do it. I was supposed to go in too, but I was knocked out before I could install the memoria. And Solano—”
“He did this to you.”
“When I’m done, I can go to her.” Her voice cracked. “It’s the only way.”
I know this, said Downey, grabbing the cables.
I know this. This sings.
“Go,” Kate said. “They already know you’re here. Your stupid boyfriend—”
Home, Downey breathed,
and lay himself against the cables,
twisted them in his fingers—
“No way,” Natalie said. “I’m not leaving you now.” She dropped Kate’s hand, put her attention back to the rig itself. “Go to her,” she thought. How? Ash is dead. You can’t just go somewhere and leave your body behind. She followed Downey, touching the things he touched, trying to figure out what he was trying to say to her. The rig helped its user go places by broadcasting information from a proxy into the brain; the actions of the user on the ship would drive the proxy elsewhere. Hadn’t she left her body behind when she took the redshift star to Bittersweet, in a way? She knew enough from her days in Verdict and her chats with the R&D legates that the puppet wasn’t a true upload, just a fancy wireless rig, that the mind contained too much information for a real upload. And that was impossible—
—but she was watching Downey, a real creature wrapped in a hallucination, his eyes turning against the light at the center of the rig, and she knew.
Vai tech can handle that level of information. It has to.
Her hand snapped up to touch the memoria, and it hummed under her fingers. She didn’t need to find evidence that consciousness transfer was possible. She’d been living it this entire time.
Natalie’s chest tightened. The memoria. The device that Sharma had spent time adjusting on Tribulation. The device she’d installed on Natalie’s head, the Vai technology inside. Was that it? Was that why Sharma had wanted to go aboard the heartship? And when that became impossible, she sent Ash instead?
Sent herself?
And what had happened to Natalie on the Vai ship? If she had the same sort of technology in her brain as Sharma, why was she still living in her own skin? Had that grand, silvering rush at the end been some gate in her mind swinging open—and instead of tentative steps taken toward some unwanted heaven, the master node came through the other way instead?
I had to live, the master node said.
I had to survive.
I know, she whispered.
That’s how I know you’re alive.
She turned to follow the master node’s gaze, and caught the edge of a familiar, violent light. Her breath hitched. She tugged his borrowed hand aside, and slipped her own through the tangle of cables, pulling them back to see the center of the rig keeping Kate alive.
No, she thought. No, no, no. They have the Heart—
But she could also immediately see that she was wrong, that this roiling ball was not the Heart but a haphazard construction of human make, fashioned from the innards of Vai weapons, surrounded by a slapdash housing inspired by the utilitarian motives of the board. It only looked like the Heart. Natalie traced its connections—cables attached to the ship’s main computer, tiny arteries running in and out and through Kate’s body—but its purpose remained opaque.
This is my fault, she thought. They built it. But I pointed to photographs and records and Sharma’s old lab logs. And almost immediately afterward, she recoiled. No. I was doing my job. Taking orders. I’m not responsible.
The more she looked at the strange machine, though, the more she felt the responsibility weighing on her body, tugging at her faulty lungs. She could not deny that the housing was pure Applied Kinetics. The Heart as built by the Vai was both power draw and power source for a race that was power; this wild screaming ball, then, was the power source, and she traced the connectors with her cold fingers back to the power draw—
—of course.
Kate.
Natalie almost trembled. She could see the whole system now, through Downey’s dead eyes, through the master node’s living ones. She could feel the energy exchange pulsing beneath her fingers. In the real Heart, Vai bodies were both input and output. How had that been changed here? This—Solano’s Heart, Solano’s computer, Solano’s world, Solano’s entrance to the Vai universe, all of it controlled by life running through it like a river—Kate’s life—
Her head snapped back to look at Kate. “You’re Ingest,” Natalie breathed.
Kate coughed again. “Not for very much longer.”
“You’re still dying,” Natalie whispered. “And you don’t want me to leave. You called me through the directory.”
“I knew you’d be smart enough to pick up on it. I need to warn you.”
Natalie found herself at Kate’s side again, her hand pressing against the older woman’s forehead. “Solano is going to let me see her,” Kate said again.
“Don’t tell me you believe that,” Natalie whispered.
“I have to.”
“And what is he going to do when you’re gone?” She smoothed back Kate’s hair; it came out in thin, broken clumps.
“He needs someone who’s been infected for over a year, Natalie,” Kate said; the effort to speak an entire sentence was palpable, and she closed her eyes, trying to manage her breath. “Who do you think is next?”
Natalie didn’t need to respond. She pressed her forehead against Kate’s, breathed out, letting her anger boil.
There had been a hundred moments like this: simple, incremental choices that meant nothing by themselves, just chips in the dam holding together the world she’d constructed for herself. Keep on trying, keep on making progress, and eventually, one chip breaks the dam, she heard her father say, somewhere in the memoria tying her living mind to her dead body. The river runs free and drowns everything.
“I can go home.” Somewhere bouncing around in her spleen, the master node was pulling apart the revelation too. She felt his cascading joy so deep and wild that she couldn’t help but smile. His mouth moved for the first time. “We can use this to go home.”
“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I’m not entirely sure of that.”
“Home,” the node sang. “It’s right behind the door, it’s right there—please—”
Natalie’s fingers found and closed on the rig’s neck jack, wound up and hung exactly where she’d expected it to be. Downey ignored the hand, sliding into a Len-like hug, all arms and fingers around her shoulders, smelling of sweat and cheap Company soap. “And if you go home,” she said, “you’ll keep your promise? To go beyond the White Line?”
“Yes,” he whispered. “To go, and never return. Keeping promises is what you would do.”
A knot formed in her throat as she felt the tight warmth of his biceps, his torso, his body, and her senses told her that this was Downey in every way that mattered, and it was difficult not to feel like this was the goodbye they’d never had.
She swallowed that feeling, biting her bottom lip, using the resultant pain to drag herself back to some semblance of reality. The hellthing hugging her was not Leonard Downey. It was the hellthing that killed millions of humans in the war, and the more she forgot that, the less human she became herself.
No, she wanted to say, entertaining a desolate, angry darkness. I would follow and salt your fields and blow up your matrix.
Or I would have.
Before.
“We have a deal, then,” she whispered.
“Who are you—” A wheezing sound, breath pushed through cables. “You’re not talking to me.”
“There’s an alien in my head.” The words felt foolish on her lips, so she barrelled forward. “The Vai control node. I’m taking him home. Kate, this works like the puppet rig, right? Neck jack, immersion drugs, haptics?”
Natalie didn’t wait for a response. She scrambled for the familiar parts of the rig, the things she needed to slip into the proxy world: a second drug infusion cable, haptics for her fingers, the neck jack. Without anesthetic, without hooking her into the strap-induced antigrav, it was going to hurt.
Kate cou
ghed in a breath, taking the announcement in stride. “He’ll control you.”
Natalie knelt on the floor, slid the haptics on, raised the neck jack, made sure the end would work with her own hardware. Barely. “I know how he thinks. I’ll be fine.”
“No. You can’t. Natalie—” Her chest fluttered, struggling for breath. “This connects to the Vai world, yes, but it’s not the Vai-controlled network. He’s made himself the master node of his own connected network. That way, he can get around—”
“—the fact that you can’t have two master nodes. Okay. Shit.” Natalie felt a wail inside, something breaking in two. It felt like the master node losing the grip on hope. It felt like she was losing her own hope, too, a wild winding sadness building in her tired shoulders. She slapped herself to make it stop. “So we fight.”
“No,” Kate wheezed. “Fuck, Natalie, you can’t fight him. You’ll have no power in there, no power at all.”
“Then we’ll find Ash. Sharma uploaded her for a reason. She didn’t do it out of the kindness of her heart, and you know it—”
Kate sounded desperate. “Please. You need to run while you still can. She would want you to live your life. Steal a transport, go anywhere else—”
And then Natalie heard voices approaching the door. Laughter. Ward’s voice. The noise meant only one thing: that she had to make a decision. Now.
“What do you want to do?” she asked the master node.
“Fight,” he whispered, crawling to his feet.
So we fight.
“No network is inviolable, Kate,” Natalie said, then slammed the cable into the opening at the back of her neck, felt the stabbing pinch of the needle—
Nothing happened.
—fuck, I forgot about the permissions, she thought, the gold tattoos are permissions. She’d suspected, but it was entirely clear now what they were—the changed, adulterated silver of her Bittersweet-born nanotech, turned to Solano’s needs, the one thing she needed to connect to this sick Heart.
She exhaled.
Stared at Kate.
“Oh, fuck no,” said Kate.
Engines of Oblivion Page 28
