“Don’t we?” Keller said.
“No.”
Keller closed her eyes and let go of Ash’s arm, and she slouched forward. “We still can’t make any rash moves.”
“Why not? I would. For you.”
“It’s different when you run the show.” The other woman swallowed before continuing. “I can’t be your girl out here. I have to be your captain first. That’s why. I’m responsible for your life, and for Len’s, and Natalie’s, and Sharma’s. Not just yours. I need to be honest with you, and you need to be honest with me for their sake. And we need to continue to work on getting you citizenship, and—”
“You want honesty, Kate? I’m dying,” Ash spat.
A chime from the reporting system sliced through the tension between them. Keller’s attention was stolen immediately, and Ash felt a swell of momentary grateful heat in her cheeks. She leaned forward to look over the captain’s shoulder; Keller had received a data dump from Len, full of numbers and graphs Ash didn’t quite understand.
When Keller was done reading, she grabbed Ash’s hand.
“This could be something,” she said. “Let’s get through these next few days. Rio will be here before we know it. Let’s see what the hazard pay nets us. We’ll make it work. Please, Ash.”
Ash thought about Keller’s skin on hers, the other woman’s hair running through her hands, her quarters in the dark. She felt light-headed, angry and assuaged, dizzy and as certain as she’d ever be about anything. “All right.”
Keller squeezed once more, then put the report on the ansible monitor so Ash could see it as well. “So. The thing in the locker. Do you think it’s Vai?”
“Sure felt like it,” Ash said softly. Quiet suffocation. Death. Voices.
She heard a clattering at the access tube. Sharma pulled herself out, breathless and full of blue-sweater bluster like she’d just won the lottery. “Oh, it’s Vai. For sure. But that’s not the interesting part.”
Keller sat back down. “I’m listening.”
Sharma brought up her medbay interface on the main ansible monitor, then ducked into the same report Len had just filed. “Look at those usage numbers. The Vai weaponry we’ve seen—zappers, screamers, even greenhouse bombs—even at Grenadier, they rarely registered over a six-point-two on the Miles scale, right? This one’s a fourteen-point-five. Isn’t that exciting?”
Ash’s hand started to shake, and she shoved it in her pocket. Not in front of the doctor. “I think the word I’d use is terrifying. That could take out dozens of ships. A planet.”
“Could it have killed Tribulation?” said Keller.
Sharma’s eyes widened. “It certainly could have. But that’s still not the interesting part. Number one, from the compositional analysis taken by the indenture’s pod before it failed, we know it’s not a kinetic, but it’s not a molecular style with which we’re familiar. It’s doing two things we don’t expect Vai moleculars to do. Number one, it functions when there aren’t any Vai around. Number two, it let Indenture Ashlan live.”
Keller whistled.
The doctor’s face was formal and excited all at once, and she waved her hands in the air like a child at a birthday party. “That’s nothing compared to number three. What if the fourteen-point-five isn’t power output, but power input?”
It took Ash a few moments to catch on, but Keller’s eyes widened immediately, and she stood, crossing the bridge until she was nose-to-screen with the data. “A battery. An engine?”
“A zero-point battery. This could change everything,” Sharma said. “I mean, it’s been posed by some people at HQ for a while that the Vai use zero-point energy, but it’s always only been a theory. And if this is real, the fact that it drained the pod battery and disrupted Ash’s memory is … worrying. It could be messy. That doesn’t mean it’s out of the question. General quarters or not, all the scientists on London would have wanted to see it. And power loss explains why we never received most of the battle data.”
Sharma went silent. Keller stayed where she was, staring at the numbers, swaying like a squirrel charmed by a cobra. Ash’s mind was a sudden deluge of implications, rolling over each other faster than she could open her mouth to say them, but one of them was in front of all the others.
“An end to scarcity,” she said.
She might as well have dropped a bomb in a quiet forest.
Sharma pointed to her. “We hope,” she said. “We don’t even know what the Vai look like, let alone have any idea how Vai energy exchange works. Human spaceships are easy to describe: refined celestium fuel powers the grav-drive, the grav-drive powers virtually everything else. But for all we know, Vai ships are powered by magic. We figure out how this works, and everything changes for Aurora. This could be the difference between survival and suicide if they come back, the thing that keeps Aurora as a market leader until the end of time. We must figure out how it works. We must get this to some proper engineers. Immediately. We can’t wait for Rio. We need to call a colleague of mine on Medellin, then get back to Europa Station straightaway.”
Ash’s heart thudded. “And give up top-tier hazard pay?”
“This is bigger than any of us, indenture.”
“Oh, I know,” said Ash. She pushed off the wall, taking two steps toward Sharma. “You’re a birthright, so let me remind you of why Len, Natalie, and I are even here.”
Sharma narrowed her eyes. “You can’t be a citizen if you’re dead.”
Len popped up from the access hatch, followed by Natalie; she’d combed her hair and changed her uniform. “I heard that,” he said, “but Ashlan’s right. We’re doing this ourselves.”
Keller sighed. “Guys.”
“We need to wait for the professionals, indenture,” said Sharma, shooting a glance at Len.
Len flexed his arm. “You’re looking at them, doc.”
“Guys,” said Keller, louder this time. She rubbed her temple, as if fighting off a headache. “I appreciate your thoughts on safety, Reva, but I can’t ignore the fact that this mission could be life-changing for our indentures, and if they’re willing to try, I think we should listen to them. How do we run tests on this thing without turning Twenty-Five into Tribulation?”
Sharma crossed her arms. “We call Medellin. We push hard for Europa Station.”
Keller sighed, then leaned forward in her chair. “What about going to the planet?”
There was silence on the bridge. Natalie shuffled her feet. “Aren’t we, ah, not supposed to land there?” Natalie asked.
Sharma tapped her chin in thought. When she spoke, it was with a hint of dark, professional anger. “It isn’t as safe as a proper, locked Company lab with proper, trained Company scientists. But you can’t suck power out of dead plasteel. The worst that would happen is that you’d have to wait around for the solar rechargers to work.”
Keller rubbed her eyes. When she looked up, her gaze rested on Ash for a few seconds longer than she probably should have. “Okay, planet it is. Ash, you have the most experience with this thing, so you get to run this show down on the planet. Get it set up. I’ll get back on the ansible with corporate to tell them what we’re doing.”
Ash closed her eyes for a moment. The weapon’s painful light was still there, a seared, violent memory. She felt weight like a band around her throat. Someone was whispering behind her eyelids, someone that sounded like dead Christopher, and she opened her eyes to stop it. Keller had her arms crossed, and she tapped her thumb against her opposite elbow, a rapid and erratic tattoo.
“Mr. Solano did say we’re the best,” Ash replied.
“Damn straight we are,” whispered Natalie. “Come on, Ash, let’s go get this thing.”
Ash followed her, grinning at Keller before she swung a leg over the lip of the hatch and dropped into the ship’s spine. The captain had a faraway look on her face and a short, amused smile on her lips. Ash let herself think of a planet and a lake and a cabin, Keller in a sweater with her head on Ash’s shoulder
, and the thought kept her so warm she put aside her worries about the quiet, prickling lights and her shaking body.
Citizenship was just around the corner.
3
Natalie and Ash left Twenty-Five in the ship’s two retrieval pods, taking a graceful arc back toward London and the quarantine locker. Natalie spent the time humming wartime pop songs under her breath.
“Hey, do you know this one by the Smashboys? The one that samples the machine roar they recorded on Cana? Vvvvvvaaaaaaiiiiii—”
Ash snorted. “You sound like you just ate a cat. And, no. I grew up on the Wellspring dole. There was a lot we didn’t get. Mostly we got WellCel vids, some Manx-Koltar movies.”
“What about Alien Attack Squad?”
“Never even heard of it until I met Len.”
Natalie made a small noise of disbelief. “But you lived on a colony.”
Ash shook her head. “Bittersweet wasn’t a real colony. Not like Tribulation. It was a mine. We were all indentures. There were strict rules.”
Natalie smirked at her through her porthole and gunned the pod forward. “There are rules everywhere you go.”
“Not like Wellspring’s. I just didn’t know any better. I thought they were fair.” Ash took a breath. Christopher had called their indenture slavery once he’d learned enough about the word, but how could it have been slavery if they’d both agreed to it? Signed a contract, even?
“What do you mean?”
“Wellspring’s indenture period is supposed to be a decade, except for the fact that they own your ass once you sign up, and if you’ve got family, they own them, too. It’s not like you have any other option, though. My parents were Wellspring. Debtors so far in they were never going to get out. So were all my friends. We were uncitizens, so we all ate off the dole and accrued debt. I was only able to settle my own debt with those bastards and enter indenture with Aurora because my fiancé put me down for his death benefit and Aurora thought I could be a decent pilot.”
When Natalie spoke, it was with quiet embarrassment. “I didn’t know you had a fiancé.”
“That’s because I don’t like to talk about it.” Ash checked her altimeter.
Natalie hummed a few bars of the Alien Attack Squad theme, trying to return the conversation to the easy back-and-forth of before. Ash bit her lip, trying to force down the unmoored feeling she always had when someone mentioned Christopher, and focused on flying.
They cleared a particularly thorny patch of spinning debris, revealing the hulk of dead London beyond. During the battle, Vai weaponry took to London like a machete to a water balloon, making the ship the graveyard’s largest and most valuable corpse. Three of its six levels were laid open, their contents spilled in an ever-whirling, sun-glistening spiral.
“Sounds like Wellspring was a bit like the military,” Natalie said.
Ash switched her trajectory toward the science deck and sent the new numbers to Natalie’s pod. The second pod matched the change in less than a second. “Not quite. You’ve only got a year left, right? That’s because you had a savings account. You could put credit toward your contract. You were learning useful skills. On Bittersweet, everything you owned came from the Company store, and you had to pay it out of your indenture. The prices were so high that you’d spend your entire paycheck on food and soap, let alone buying yourself out.”
“But the death benefit was enough?”
When Christopher came up, she generally shifted the topic to something else—anything else. “He’d been promoted, I think,” she said. “Those last few months are a little fuzzy. He’d been going off to the exec wing for his new job, at least. Hey, we’re going to want to focus up here; this part’s full of spinning debris, and you need to keep your mind on the target if you want to keep yourself and your cargo out of the mix.”
“You’re begging off?” Natalie said.
“Not begging off.” I just can’t trust my hands right now and I don’t want you to know. “I just want to see you work, Miss Minefield.”
“Flatterer. I work in an EVA suit, not a pod.”
“Just another skill to learn on your way to citizenship.”
Natalie groaned and pushed the pod forward, taking the lead. The quarantine locker with the Vai device was waiting, stripped of all power, in the exact place Ash had left it. She moved her pod alongside Natalie’s, and slid both hands into the pincer controls, just in case. Natalie’s breathing was heavy and deliberate in her ear. Ash switched to her fore cameras and watched the other woman carefully push her pincers toward the quarantine case.
“Slower.”
Natalie laughed. “C’mon, live a little.”
Ash winced and watched the pod’s pincers, molasses-slow, slip around and under the quarantine locker. She heard the satisfying click through the comm and let loose a breath she didn’t know she was holding. Natalie’s pod turned back toward its stocky, square mother ship.
“Ready to go,” Natalie said.
“Setting return course.”
The two pods fired their burners, taking them out of London’s debris field and back toward Twenty-Five.
After depositing the locker just inside the cargo airlock, Ash stowed her pod in its station for the second time that day and headed for the ship’s spine, dropping down to the habitat ring and applying her thumbprint to her storage closet. It was quiet; everyone else would be in the cargo bay, loading the shuttle.
Her closet wasn’t any larger than Sharma’s storage, and it was ignored as a rule, the blankets rumpled, and yesterday’s shirt cast on the floor. She was still trying to get used to the Auroran spacers’ obsession with being scrupulously clean and her own surprise at having her own space. Other than two pictures on the vanity, she’d brought little else to her new life with Aurora. Natalie liked to tease Ash about her Spartan surroundings; the younger woman’s own walls were covered, top to bottom, with photographs of people in Alliance uniforms and campfires under dark skies, groups and gatherings of people her age, on beaches and on leave, holding bottles of scotch and smiling with wide, white teeth.
Natalie’s room made Ash feel sad and alone.
Ash went straight to the drawer, picking out her cold-weather coat and gloves, her expedition socks and her lined exploration pants, then, as usual, stopped to touch each of the two photographs with reverent fingers. There was the picture of her parents as she liked to remember them, at the billiards hall on Wellspring Station, standing side by side against bright blue lights, smiling after a win. Next to it hung the picture of Christopher in his miner’s uniform, his dirty platinum hair long and drawn over his left shoulder, holding a steaming cup of coffee.
Ash had forgotten when the picture was taken. Christopher’s shoulders drooped, and his eyes seemed sunken and tired, so it must have been some time into the contract. His smile was still gorgeous and crooked. He hadn’t yet started to show signs of the celestium madness that would come to claim anyone who got off Bittersweet alive.
“Miss you, baby,” she whispered, like she always did, then went above. Miss you, and I’ll always be sorry.
When she walked into the cargo bay, Len was loading the last boxes of scientific equipment in the back of the landing shuttle, and Natalie was locking up boltguns for travel. Sharma tiptoed, looking into the airlock with determined eyes. “There it is,” she said. “What a beauty. Can’t you bring it in?”
“It’s a quarantine locker, Dr. Sharma,” Ash said. “I like my life.”
Sharma narrowed her eyes. She adjusted her scarf, sliding on tight leather gloves. “I’m sorry. I just want to get to work. Have you ever seen a Vai molecular up close? It’s the closest you’re ever going to get to synesthesia. First time I saw one, I threw up. Then I nearly died.”
Ash stared.
Keller grinned, sweeping in from above. “Are you scared, Dr. Sharma?”
“No,” said Sharma, deadpan. “I’m dismayed that we’re not burning for Europa right now. You should be scared.”
“All right, Ash is in charge,” responded Keller. “We’ve loaded enough provisions for three days. If you all do your jobs, we’re going to accrue a lot of credit. Are you ready?”
The others cheered. Ash looked down at her hand. It was steady enough. She turned it over and took a breath. Thought of Christopher, and what he would say. Thought of her citizenship account. Their dreams. I can handle this. I’m so close.
“Let’s go,” she pronounced.
She thought she heard someone laughing, but when she looked around, she didn’t see anyone smiling.
Ash shivered.
“I love you guys,” Keller said, looking relieved. “Now get out there and get us a bonus.”
4
As the shuttle approached the planet, Ash tightened her hands around her safety harness and tried to swallow the starving, tight nausea threatening to derail her afternoon. She wanted to place the blame for how she felt directly on Len’s shoulders—as the only one on the planetside team with atmospheric flight certification, he was cackling at the tiller, acting like he’d gotten into Keller’s special whiskey stash—but Ash couldn’t forget the bright hallucination from earlier in the afternoon or the miscalculation that had nearly gotten her killed. She felt guilt as keen as the acid in her throat and looked out the window to distract herself.
Tribulation yawned underneath her, a sick, striated marble clothed in cloudy green seas, golden deserts, and burgundy-blue forests. With the atmospinners settled into a hush as dead as the colony itself, the planet’s original flora and fauna were crawling back from the brink of annihilation. As the shuttle tumbled toward the ground, she could see the central city and the hub-and-spoke clearings leading out to the agricultural settlements where indentures like her had once lived and dreamed and tended the land: a ragged stain left over from the Vai smallpox, a human oasis losing the fight against an encroaching wine-red tide.
Architects of Memory Page 3
