Architects of Memory

by Karen Osborne

  “What do you mean, ‘no routing to node’?” Sharma yelled. “What else does it need?”

  Ash reached out to touch the roiling light, the beating heart, the voice of the man she would have died for—

  —but as she did, she noticed Len’s hands had gone still. He wasn’t working; he stared straight ahead, past the tablet, past all of it toward the weapon, his eyes glassy and filled with tears. His shoulders shook. She could see his breath. She blinked a weight that felt like cotton away from her eyes. Why is it so cold?

  “Something’s wrong with Len,” Ash said.

  “He’s fine,” Sharma said. “Stay focused. We don’t have much time.”

  The spell spun up in her head once more. Sharma was right. All three of them only had a few more seconds before they lost consciousness, like she had in the pod. (Or minutes? She had no sense of time, not here, in the screaming light of glory.) Somewhere in the distance, the Vai sailed in their white ships against the copper Bittersweet sky. Somewhere, she was a child. Somewhere, she was lying on the ground, watching the sky, near death, but not dying. She wanted to consume the light, bury it in her fingers, burst open with the power of the thousand together, get revenge for—revenge for what? for whom? Somewhere, time was slowing down, and Ash breathed air like water, a great wide nothing pouring down her throat, her mouth full of stone and death and everything was cold, oh so cold—

  “I’m shutting this down,” Ash said.

  “No,” the doctor yelled, but Ash pushed past Sharma, yanked the robot arm and pressed the quarantine button. The lid came down, jamming the panel closed.

  The blackening world cleared.

  Len blinked and lifted his arms, staring at them, as if he was a child and he’d never seen them before. Sharma stumbled back into life, throwing herself at the robot arm. “No!” she hollered.

  Freed of the dark molasses holding her back, Ash moved quickly, catching Sharma’s arm with her own and dragging her away, the doctor kicking and screaming like a preschooler or an addict denied a fix. Finally, the doctor’s anger resolved into choking sobs, and the tension leached out of her shoulders. Ash wrapped her arms around the doctor’s body, holding her close until she was quiet.

  When they’d begun, the golden light of midafternoon had reigned; now, a darkening sun bathed the whole plaza in a chablis glow. She had lost time again. Twenty-six minutes? More? She knew how that kind of thing felt, now, knew the quiet song of the device, whatever it was, the way it slipped deep inside her chest and made everything cold and slow and terrible. A change had been made in some dark part of her heart, and she couldn’t put her finger on it.

  “What the hell was that, doctor?” she whispered.

  Sharma’s eyes closed. Her voice sounded raw and shredded. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, lifting her chin, attempting to recover a modicum of gentility. “I don’t know what came over me.”

  “We’re going to talk about it when we get back to Twenty-Five.”

  “I told you we should have gone to Europa.”

  Ash looked up. “Maybe. Len. Call the captain, then call Natalie.”

  Len blinked, moving slowly, as if he were being given information he didn’t understand. He turned to the tablets in front of him and frowned. He jabbed the tablet once, twice, three times, and that’s when Ash realized that the tablet he was using was dead. She released Sharma, then ducked to check the battery below. Dead, too.

  “How?” Ash said. “Len, check the satphone. What about the rest of the tech?”

  Sharma’s eyes widened, as if she was finally considering the implications of dropping the quarantine. She picked up her talkie, thumbing on the power, but nothing happened. Ash grabbed her own, ripping open the back of the comm to find a breached, dead battery, then yanked open a gun locker to find a dead boltgun. The only way this gun would hurt anyone was if she used it as a club or a battering ram.

  “What’s the range on this thing?” Ash asked. “I thought you said a half mile was safe. Could it have drained the shuttle?”

  Sharma’s jaw wavered. “I thought it was fine.”

  “What about Natalie’s talkie?” asked Sharma.

  “What about her boltgun,” Ash responded. “If she was close enough to the building, she might be unarmed, and she might not even know it.”

  “Go find her,” Sharma said. “Leonard and I will pack up and meet you on the shuttle.”

  Len tilted his head. “What shuttle?”

  “The shuttle you flew here. I’ll be back in an hour, tops,” Ash said. “I’ll meet you on the road.”

  “Here,” Sharma said, reaching into her medkit, taking out a scalpel. “It’s nothing, but you should be armed. Just in case.”

  Ash slid the scalpel into her boot, then took off through the shattered glass doors. She picked up speed as she ran down the broken southwestern road. Whatever footprints the younger woman might have left behind had been covered over by blood-colored local dust blown in by the afternoon winds and a light rain. On the slow, lazy westerly wind, there swept in the barest hint of fire. The screaming smell of burning celestium. She turned to see where it was coming from. In the distance, she saw a quiet column of smoke rising from where the shuttle was parked.

  Shit.

  Ash took off down the main drag. She slowed as she came closer, sticking near to the prefab walls around the shuttlepad, staying in the shadows of the skinny, fibrous trees. Closer, now, she could hear two bass voices—male voices, new ones. Holding her breath, she ducked behind a vine-choked bush and peered through the leaves.

  The men were freelancers, dressed in plain black. They were armed with bullet guns—damn, guns for planet use, guns that would actually work—and were siphoning celestium fuel out of the shuttle. Her pod had only rebooted that morning because of the celestium running in its veins. It wouldn’t matter if the shuttle’s solar charger worked if the shuttle didn’t have any fuel.

  Ash felt ill and angry and very small.

  “Boss said they’d do the test in orbit,” said the first man. Bearded and tight-muscled, he checked the generator. “I don’t like it when the plan changes.”

  The other man, a clean-shaven brawler with a hangdog smirk, continued to pump fuel out of the tank. “It’s a bunch of nancy Aurorans, man, and we’ve got the only soldier. This is not going to be a problem.”

  The bearded man narrowed his eyes. “I’m sick of them asking us to improvise.”

  “What do you think you signed up for?”

  “When are they due back?”

  The clean-shaven one indicated the ground with a tilt of his head. “Ask her.”

  Her. The only soldier. Natalie.

  Narrowing her eyes, Ash ducked behind another bush. Natalie was shoved in the shadows, her hands tied around her back with thin rope. She hollered through a gag—muffled profanities that were meant to tell them she most certainly would not answer—and Ash felt pride alongside a clear moment of panic.

  The edges of her vision clouded, and her right hand began to shake. Her vision went gray, and then popped again, a wild chiaroscuro, into stunning color. The sickness. She couldn’t avoid it. Not when it had nearly killed her this morning. Not now, when the others needed her most. It felt like Bittersweet, like the cave-in, like the dirt filling her mouth and the mineral shards Sharma removed from her lungs. It felt like crawling in the dirt, through rocks, her ribs broken, just to find blood and darkness. It tasted like defeat.

  No, she thought. Not now. Not when Natalie needs me.

  She slipped the scalpel out of her boot, then stood, tossing it at Natalie.

  “Hey!” she hollered.

  The competitors whirled and reached for their guns. The scalpel hit the dirt a foot away from Natalie, and she threw herself back, grabbing it with one hand. That’s all Ash needed to see; she stumbled, then turned, barreling away back toward town. The clean-shaven man pulled the trigger on his rifle, and the bullets whizzed by her shoulders, her ears, and she had sulfur burning in her t
hroat and air and her feet hitting the pavement—

  —until pain erupted in her shoulder, more pain than she’d ever felt in her life.

  Shock pushed her off her footing and she crashed into a wall, feeling warm, sticky blood on her back. She scrambled forward, adrenaline and fear pushing her to her feet, making it four more steps before she tripped over a plant growing in the middle of the road and fell, her face cracking against the street, the stones forcing blood into her throat and rattling her brain. She managed to turn over just to see the bearded man raising his rifle, pointing it at her face. She thought she heard an explosion, thought she felt the ground shake, but maybe that was just her heart, the remnants of the alien weapon clawing at her mind—

  “You must be the mission commander,” the bearded man asked, far too calm for how heavy he was breathing.

  She wanted to scream in pain. “You must be an asshole,” she spat.

  “Just a guy doing his job, like you.” He raised his gun. “Tell me where the weapon is.”

  Ash spat out blood and a broken tooth. She fell back, looking away to the pink-soaked afternoon sky, and tried to think of Christopher. Keller’s face came up instead, unbidden.

  “Up my ass,” she whispered.

  The man walked forward and cocked his gun. “Where’s the weapon?”

  Ash tested another tooth with her tongue, and tasted blood. The pain grayed out the sky, the buildings, everything but her body and the man and the gun in his hand.

  “I wouldn’t get involved with Vai shit if I were you,” she said. “As you can see, it ends up bad for everyone.”

  The man raised his gun. “Last chance.”

  “Bite me,” she said, sucking down her last breath.

  A shattering noise came from behind the mercenary—another bullet gun firing, an all-too-human crack against an alien soundscape. The man’s forehead erupted in a fountain of blood. He died instantly, collapsing like a mine shaft under fire.

  Ash, not breathing, looked up.

  Natalie stood before her, legs wide, covered in blood, holding the bearded man’s bullet gun. Shaking, she dropped it and knelt before Ash, reaching for her. Ash’s hands found purchase in Natalie’s, and she crawled toward her shipmate, sobbing.

  “It’s okay,” Natalie said, grabbing Ash’s forehead, pressing her hand against it, drawing her close. “It’s your first time seeing something like that. I know it’s not your job. It’s my job. You shouldn’t have had to do that.”

  Ash took a shuddering breath. “The other guy?”

  “No longer a problem.” Natalie leaned closer, peering at Ash’s wound. “Okay. Ash, I need you to get it together. The bullet looks like it’ll be fairly easy to remove, but we need to get you back to Dr. Sharma.”

  “I—I know—” Ash wiped her nose on the back of her hand.

  “I’ll stabilize you until we can get there.”

  Natalie drew out a needle from her pack, and Ash felt the agony of a shot for the pain and the sweet, rushing numbness that followed, then Natalie bound the wound with a battlefield sealant. “At least—” Ash sucked in a deep breath. She smelled fire, worse now than before. The stink of electronics burning: plasteel, wood, metal. “At least Aurora’s going to pay for this.”

  “Hah,” Natalie said.

  “We need to talk about the freelancers.”

  “Competitors,” Natalie said. “He knew who I was.”

  “Think they’re here to take the weapon from us?”

  Natalie swore, then slid her arm underneath Ash’s as an answer. They limped down the road, smelling the stench of scorched metal as they came closer to the plaza.

  The admin complex was on fire. Natalie stood in front of the cracked glass doors, blocking her body from the heat with her hand. The equipment they’d used to test the Vai weapon was a twisted, melted wreck inside, and the quarantine locker was gone. Ash watched in horror as Natalie threw herself into the fire, grabbing still-smoking pieces of metal and throwing them aside.

  “They’re not here,” Natalie said.

  Ash scanned the burning room. No bodies but the man draped in Len’s uniform coat. No doctor’s sweater, no engineer’s overalls, no shock of glossy black hair. Fighting the heat, her eye was caught by a sparkling scrap of rainbow mane, tossed in the corner away from the fire.

  She dove for it, picked it up, turned it over and over. The eyes were dead, the animatronic leg broken and held together by scorched pink fabric. The underside had been torn open and the stuffing hung out—white, puffy, cloudy blood and guts. This was a quick, surgical strike with the sharp edge of some tool, not the ragged, careless treatment of a bomb. She saw the outline of a dark mass there, dug in, and was rewarded with the touch of hard plastic. She narrowed her eyes and yanked the stuffing aside with two thumbs, noting a hard memory card straight from an Aurora console sisterboard. It was a move straight out of an episode of Alien Attack Squad.

  Len, you magnificent asshole, she thought.

  “They’re not here. Probably taken. Got to go,” Natalie said. She jumped a burning girder to walk over to Ash, grabbing her by her good arm and tugging her out of the building, back to the relative chill of the alien afternoon. They ran to the center of the plaza, coughing, gulping clean, warm air. Searching the sky, Natalie sighed and straightened.

  “We’re right in the middle of a Company war,” she said. “All the people that died, after how we held the line against the very devil—and we’re going back to profiteering with human blood.”

  Ash shook, wiping sweat out of her eyes. “We’ve got to find Len and the doctor.”

  Natalie looked down at the unicorn. “Of all the things you could have dragged out of there, you chose that?”

  Ash fished out the chip, showed it to Natalie, then shoved it in her pants pocket. Paused. Shoved the unicorn down the front of her jacket. “He saw the other Company coming.”

  Natalie whistled. “That’s Len, all right. Why are you—”

  “He wanted the stupid thing,” Ash said. “I’m not going to leave it here. You can give it back to him.”

  “Why would I—” Natalie blinked, and shook her head. “You know, let’s just get out of here.”

  They ran from the burning building and the silent plaza, barreling back down the boulevard. Arriving at the shuttle, Ash tried not to look too closely at the clean-shaven man, who lay dead in a puddle of blood under the shuttle’s right nacelle, his jaw yawning, his neck snapped at an inhuman angle, and his eyes stuck in permanent surprise. Natalie and Ash dragged the whole lot of it—the first-aid boxes, ready-to-eat meals, and extra jackets that the mercenaries had tossed out—back on the shuttle. They raided the man’s pockets for his wallet and his multi-tool. Then they jumped in the back of the shuttle and hit the door seal.

  Natalie pushed Ash toward the pilot’s seat and then stuck her in the shoulder with another painkiller in one quick, fluid motion. Ash sat down and felt a rush of dizziness tilting the planet to one side. She poked at the interface and it responded—they had just enough fuel, and power, to break atmo.

  “I can’t fly if you give me more of that,” she said.

  “Yeah, you can.” Natalie flopped into the copilot’s seat, jamming the seatbelts into place and reaching up to flick the right toggles and press the right buttons. “And you only have to be awake for another, what, fifteen minutes? Then we’ll be out of atmo and back on Twenty-Five, and in a proper medbay. We did worse in the war.”

  Ash took a breath. I’m not a soldier. I’m sick. “I can’t fly.”

  “So, I need to give you more adrenaline.” Natalie rooted around in her bag.

  “No, it’s not that.” Ash paused. “It’s—” I can’t tell her. I can’t tell her why I’m sick. “It just hurts like hell.”

  Natalie leaned over Ash’s lap. Her hand hung over the start-up. “Not for the next hour, it doesn’t. Then you get medical attention. Then you live. Right now, you fly.” She thumbed the toggle. The shuttle shuddered to life. Ash s
aw the tiniest flicker of keen emotion in Natalie’s eyes before her soldier’s training trampled on it.

  Ash looked back at the familiar preflight readings and took a breath. She grabbed the checklist. Her hand shook. Somewhere, her hindbrain was screaming in animal fear.

  She pushed all of that away. She was Auroran. She could do this.

  She ignited the launch sequence.

  6

  “Coffee, Captain?”

  Keller jolted awake, her nose full of the caustic, familiar scent of Twenty-Five’s store of sour instant coffee, her cheeks hot with the scandal of being caught dozing on the job. Ramsay hovered between Keller and the data feed she’d been pretending to watch, mouth pulled into a smirk, holding a steaming mug two inches from Keller’s face.

  “Just resting my eyes for a moment,” Keller said.

  She took a deep, stabilizing breath and straightened her spine, pushing herself into a more professional position before reaching out to take the mug from her executive officer. She felt every inch of the mid-mission exhaustion that had dogged her steps over the last week, but that didn’t mean she could just let the crew see that she was tired.

  Even if Ramsay was a citizen.

  “What am I going to do, tell Mr. Solano?” Ramsay let out a chilly little laugh, then slung herself back into her own chair, bringing up her work for the afternoon. She had placed her own mug of coffee close to the pitch and yaw controls, so close it worried at Keller like a nail scratching at the back of her neck. She took a long sip of coffee, then turned back to the main monitor, pretending to understand the numbers and graphs streaming back.

  Ramsay followed her gaze. “Is this the data from the surface?”

  “You missed the most interesting gobbledygook about a half hour ago. Should have sent them all down with the body cameras.” Keller waved her hand at the raw data streaming in from Sharma’s experiments—complex numbers in baffling combinations, filling up the main viewscreen in an impatient, hypnotic fashion.