Architects of Memory

by Karen Osborne

  “Captain Keller can talk us in.” Ash’s hand hovered over the short-range toggle.

  “She’s in the medbay right now,” Ramsay said. “Bit of an accident.”

  Ash looked at Natalie; the younger woman shook her head, her eyes wide. Ash adjusted the camera view to get a better, sidelong look at the unfamiliar ship. “Then it’ll be no problem for you to transfer us down there, so we can talk with her directly.”

  Ramsay was quiet about a second too long for Ash’s taste. “She’s not available.”

  Natalie shook her head again.

  “I think you should explain what’s going on, Ms. Ramsay,” Ash said, keeping her voice as measured as possible, even though she wanted to stand up, reach through the short-range, and throttle the XO with her bare hands.

  She was answered by another quiet few seconds on the line. “Aurora Intersystems is no longer in control of Twenty-Five,” Ramsay said. Her voice was almost apologetic. “It’s for the best, really.”

  Natalie mouthed the word bullshit.

  “You were just like us.” Ash shook with anger. “You were one of us. How long have you been planning to screw us over?”

  Her attention was grabbed by a familiar flashing light in front of her. Ramsay was attempting to slave the shuttle’s controls to the bridge. Ash turned on the fail-safe, her jaw aching. The implications of Ramsay’s betrayal were fire-bright in her head. Had Ramsay’s people been after the weapon this whole time? No, she thought. Alison had to be improvising, because nobody even knew about the weapon until Len had fixed the ansible and obtained the data dump. Three weeks was enough to call a ship waiting in a neighboring system, and there were plenty of radar shadows near Tribulation to hide behind.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Ramsay said. “And if you knew what we knew … well, let’s just say that you would be working with us. You’d be up here opening a vein.”

  “So, tell us what we don’t know,” said Ash.

  The console lit up again; someone was trying to backdoor the fail-safe. Natalie swore and opened a code interface to counter it while Ramsay’s calm voice continued over the shuttle speakers.

  “Do you even know who Reva Sharma is? What she did in the war? Why she never fit in at poker night? Why she even wanted to be on Twenty-Five with you bunch of losers?”

  “I always thought it was your winning personality,” said Ash.

  “You didn’t even look her up. Of course you didn’t. That’s why you’re here in the first place. You don’t do things like that.”

  Ash’s stomach was a black hole. Grief clawed at her throat. Natalie’s hand seized at her chest strap, knuckles white.

  “Where’s the captain?”

  “The captain is fine, as long as you do as we say,” Ramsay said. “Come on aboard. I’ll explain everything.”

  “This is about the weapon we found on London, isn’t it? You took Sharma because she can understand it?” said Ash.

  Ramsay laughed. “And we understand the market.”

  “The market,” Ash said.

  “That’s how the world works, girls.”

  The market. She remembered her Bittersweet orientation, Wellspring supervisors talking about the market, the sheer number of things she’d believed to be true, the way they all shattered in the Vai attack. She thought about the coruscating light she saw on the planet, the desperate cold, the way Len’s eyes had gone entirely blank. She shivered. She found herself opening her mouth to respond, but Natalie leaned over and hit the mute button before she could.

  “You’re thinking about it,” she said, accusatory.

  “I’m not.”

  She snorted. “Yes, you are. We’re not going over there.”

  “We don’t have a choice. The captain and Dr. Sharma are over there. Len is over there. And whatever that weapon is—”

  “We’ll figure it out,” Natalie said. “We can only help them if we can reach Aurora.”

  Ash narrowed her eyes and unmuted the conversation. “—but in the end, Ash, you get to decide for yourself if you’re expendable or not. Because my doctors have just told me that you’ve passed on your little condition to Captain Keller.”

  Natalie narrowed her eyes.

  “You knew?” Ash said.

  Ramsay snorted. “I knew. The whole ship knew. If you don’t come in, we’ll take what we need from Captain Keller.”

  “Lemme talk it over with Natalie.”

  “Twenty seconds,” Ramsay said.

  Natalie muted the feed again. “What condition?”

  Ash looked down at her interface and called up a map of the surrounding area. Her hand shook like a rotten environmental connector; she couldn’t tell if it was fear, or the disease, or both. I couldn’t have passed it to Kate, she thought. That’s not how celestium madness works. She’s just bullshitting me. Nat doesn’t need to know. “I’ll tell you if we get out of this. And anyway, it doesn’t matter. Suggestions?”

  “Um, maybe.” Natalie pointed at the battlefield map. “Last week, when we did the air compression testing on London’s bridgeside decks, we found there might still be atmo. Can we get there?”

  “I think we have enough fuel. Trust me?”

  “Always,” Natalie said.

  Ash turned her face back to Twenty-Five and the enemy ship, shining in the sun. She unmuted the feed.

  “We’re coming,” she said. “Make sure there’s an airlock clear for us.”

  Ash thought of the photo of Christopher that still hung near her bunk—the sole thing in her possession that she cared to lose. She’d never see it again. She thought of trying to remember his face without it. She wondered if it would become indistinct, lost to the sickness like her parents, just another foggy fever dream to watch as she queued for the dole on Europa Station. She thought of Keller, her eyes smiling and inscrutable behind her bangs. They were going to leave her. They were going to leave her because it was the only way to save her. Ash only hoped that Keller would forgive her someday.

  “Ash,” said Natalie.

  “Yeah?” she responded.

  “Concentrate.”

  “Right,” Ash breathed.

  Natalie looked like hell—her black hair coated with sweat and dirt, her eyes tired, the blood on her jacket an earthlike burgundy-brown. The blood on Ash’s own shoulder felt clammy, and the wound screamed despite the painkiller. Natalie said, “Twenty-Five’s bolt-loaded railguns fire immediately. But that looks like a charge lance on the other ship. Takes five, six seconds to load. If you can steer us away from the lance and we move fast enough, we might be able to make it to the debris field before we’re shredded to pieces. Lance hits us, well … we won’t know, we’ll be dead.”

  “That’s not a lot of time.”

  Natalie shook her head. “Gonna have to be.”

  Ramsay’s voice, on the speakers. “I don’t see you moving.”

  Ash engaged the engines, moving at a slow pace toward Twenty-Five. She called up the maps of London she and Len had made on their first trip around the dead behemoth, tagging the places where the Vai weapons had not breached and atmosphere might still exist. Len had marked a possible atmo area in the secondary supply area on delta deck, close to open standard airlocks that had once contained escape pods.

  Ash had mapped these debris fields. She’d been in and out of them for twelve hours every day for the last few months. That was something she knew that Ramsay didn’t, she thought. Ash narrowed her eyes and stared at the sparkling expanse, imagining every single piece of floating, twisted debris between the shuttle and the airlock. Until the incident with the zapper, her piloting record had been clean. If she could hold on a little while longer, she was sure she could make it through.

  Ash breathed in, willing her vision to clear, willing her hands to be stable. “Okay, hang on.”

  “Punch it,” said Natalie.

  Ash kicked the throttle into its highest gear while dragging a hard right-and-up on the helm. The shuttle wheeled around and hurtled headl
ong into London’s debris field. Natalie focused her camera on the mystery ship; as promised, the weaponry spun up, orange-red plasma charges flowing into the discharge chambers of the spinal lance. Since the mystery ship’s computer could calculate the same optimal path the shuttle’s computer did, Ash altered the trajectory by hand, her own reflexes avoiding spinning debris, pieces of hull, broken boxes, the remains of lights and furniture and floor plating.

  “They’re firing!” screamed Natalie.

  One, two, three, Ash counted, and then hauled the ship toward a higher trajectory. The slice from the spinal lance took out the aft camera and scored the plating around the engine. Natalie screamed. Ash felt her teeth rattle. She tightened her hands on the controls and pushed on, following a circuitous course through London’s swirling garbage. The railgun bolts scraped the hull, drawing screaming, deep cuts in the armor. One tore off a portion of the heat shield in a barrage so vehement that Ash thought that the next shot would be the one to do them in.

  A second charge bolt whipped by the fore camera at a sickening velocity, filling the room with an unpleasant golden glow. It made a cracking impact on London’s open rings ahead, and flying debris tossed the shuttle to one side. Ash maneuvered the shuttle underneath London’s protective undercurve to one of the airlocks that dotted its pockmarked abdomen, and backed straight in.

  Natalie had caught up by now or had made enough calculations to realize what she needed to do next, and she was already engaging the measures that blew the airlock for an emergency landing. A third lance bolt went by, missing them by a mile; as she’d hoped, the enemy ship had lost visual confirmation of their location and was moving into a new position, a drab executioner annoyed at its prey’s momentary and worthless escape.

  “Now or never. Less than ten seconds before they come around,” Natalie said.

  The airlock engaged; the shuttle shuddered. Ash didn’t feel the common stomach-dropping nausea of a quick return to gravity, as London’s grav-engine had long been extinct. Natalie unhooked herself from her harness, grabbed a crate, and launched herself toward the back door, pushing it open to the pitch-darkness of the dead ship. Ash programmed the shuttle’s next movements, unhooked herself and planted her feet against the front window, catapulting back. She grabbed Len’s second-favorite tool set on the way—the only thing she could grab, the only thing that was remotely close—before the proximity alarm started hollering and clanging.

  On the way out, she kicked the airlock door closed.

  The airlock clicked shut, and the shuttle took off.

  The corridor plunged into a screaming charcoal darkness that pressed against her retinas and crawled into her mouth and made everything silent.

  She closed her eyes anyway.

  “Please be far enough away, please be far enough away,” Natalie whispered.

  Ash listened for the sounds of the shuttle’s destruction. The confirmation she craved came when debris clanged against the side of the ship in a hollow rainfall.

  Natalie clawed at her arm.

  “Light,” Ash said.

  “Oh,” Natalie said. She seemed young and far away. She heard Natalie fumbling at her belt. A few seconds later, the flashlight on her army knife came on, focusing on Ash, who blinked to clear the bright light in the pitch black. It was freezing; their breath was white smoke between them.

  “Oh my God, we’re still alive,” Natalie said.

  “It’s Christmas.”

  Neither of them laughed. The silence took over.

  8

  The air on London’s shuttle deck was thin but palatable, hideously cold, and tainted with metal and rot. Ash’s first breath was pure instinct, the oxygen around her an intoxicant that filled her with incandescent joy.

  Breathing out was another matter entirely.

  Lancing pain erupted from the gunshot wound in her shoulder, and Ash screamed. Nearby, Natalie mumbled out a string of broken swear words, then grabbed at Ash’s perforated field jacket.

  “Off with this,” she said.

  “It’s freezing.”

  “Don’t care. The bullet needs to come out,” Natalie said. “It needed to come out on the planet, but that’s when I thought we could get you to the ship. Brace yourself.”

  “You’re not a field medic,” Ash said.

  Natalie snorted. “I was at Cana. I can do this.”

  Ash answered by facing away from Natalie, hooking both palms around one of the low-grav handholds, her knuckles going white with dread. Natalie fumbled in the medkit for the med-aid machine, then slipped her cold hands underneath Ash’s jacket. She tugged the jacket up and away from the gunshot wound. Ash used her chin to hold the bunched-up jacket in place, thought better of it, then stuffed its elastic edge into her mouth instead. She tasted rough fabric and angry Tribulation dust.

  Her body betrayed her, bucking and kicking and shuddering as Natalie ripped away the battlefield adhesive from Ash’s broken skin. Natalie pressed the med-aid machine against Ash’s wound, and Ash bit down on the jacket, stifling a howl at the pain of cold plasteel on open muscle.

  Natalie guided the machine’s moving parts past the broken gristle in Ash’s shoulder. The pain detonated behind Ash’s skin, rode her nerves until they burned, and she realized she was screaming when she stopped just long enough to fill her lungs with rot-tainted air.

  “Almost done,” Natalie muttered, yanking the machine away. She slapped an autobandage over the open wound. That was just as bad: the medical gunk inside yanked at bone and sinew, stitching the wound back together and lighting her nerves on fire.

  “Painkiller.” Ash made it a statement, not a question.

  “I don’t want you to overdose.”

  “Painkiller.” The word was a shriek in her throat.

  Natalie exhaled, then rustled in the medkit again. “It’s your body.”

  Ash felt a distinct prick of the needle at her neck, then glitter-bound bliss. She luxuriated in the blank absence of pain. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s move.”

  “The autobandage needs a chance to work.”

  “It can work on the way to the bridge.”

  Natalie tossed the needle aside, then slid her hands underneath her armpits for warmth. “Let me sling your arm, at least.”

  “There should be a pilots’ ready room on the way. We can find extra clothing there. What do you remember from the briefing about what might be working on the bridge?”

  Natalie narrowed her eyes in thought. “The bridge was on the schedule for Len and I once we got through with processing the R&D section, which was a weird schedule inversion—but now, I guess we know why. The distress array was smashed during the fight, but if there’s air all the way down here, we might find functioning backup circuits on the bridge. We can reroute the cables to power the ansible. Tell someone we’re here before we starve.”

  Ash’s jaw chattered. “Or freeze.”

  “Or that,” Natalie said. She tied the tool set and the medkit to her belt, then pushed off the deck ring like she’d been born in zero gravity. Ash followed, one-armed, listing to her better side like she was full of badly weighted ballast.

  The ready room was in bad condition. Lockers gaped wide, their contents afloat, like the room had been ransacked. Ash hovered just outside the open hatch at Natalie’s instruction, feeling dizzy and lost, while the younger woman rummaged through the detritus, humming about survival blankets and sweaters, stuffing half-eaten ration bars down her shirt.

  “Can I help?” Ash said.

  “You can help by standing there and letting the autobandage work,” muttered Natalie. “Take a break.”

  Ash hated breaks. Back on Bittersweet, breaks meant she didn’t get paid, didn’t accrue citizenship credit, didn’t move forward. She amused herself, instead, by imagining what Keller might say to this. I’d expect this kind of thing from you, maybe, smirking from her seat on the bridge. In fact, it felt almost like she’d heard Keller’s voice aloud, like the woman she loved was just acros
s the room.

  Which she was.

  No, Ash thought, feeling the sudden panic down to her toes. Not yet.

  Keller sat smiling on one of the benches near Natalie, as if gravity on this ghost ship was a fact, not a fever dream.

  “Nat, do you see—” Ash cut herself off.

  “See what?”

  Ash searched desperately for another word than Kate, for a word that meant hallucinations, that meant danger, that meant death.

  “Pants,” she said, instead.

  “I think this guy was around your size,” Natalie said, throwing a sweatshirt in Ash’s direction. Ash clawed it out of the air with her good hand, still staring at Keller, smiling quietly in her blue pajamas and her signature messy ponytail. “How did you get off the ship?”

  I didn’t, Keller whispered.

  Natalie looked up from the locker, snatching a glinting item out of the air: a silver chain with an oval pendant tugging at the end. “You sure you aren’t having problems with that painkiller?”

  “I’m fine,” Ash lied.

  Natalie turned the necklace over, staring at it, letting it catch fire in the beam of the flashlight, then shoved it in her pocket. “If you say so.”

  “What about you? Are you feeling all right?” Ash said.

  Natalie snorted her response to that, and before Ash could protest, she was back across the room, her work-worn hands pulling a pilot’s jacket, smelling of old sweat and mold, over Ash’s head. She fed Ash’s cranky arm through the sleeve like she was threading a needle, made a sling from a pilot’s belt to keep her arm and shoulder immobilized, then pulled on a few layers herself. In the end, the whole effect made them both look inflated in the harsh light, like punctured, lumpy balloons.

  “I look stupid,” Natalie muttered. “I’m going to freeze to death on a dead starship, looking stupid.”

  “We’re a salvage crew,” Ash said. “This is salvage.”

  Natalie rolled her eyes, picking at the lumps sitting on her breastbone, where she’d stored the ration bars to warm them against her body. “Yeah. Real professional, us. Come on. We’re wasting air.”

  Natalie trained the torch at the rest of the corridor, checking vectors in the thin atmosphere while Ash made a crude map with a pencil, her memory of the floor plans for the science deck, and the back of someone’s rumpled family photograph. They pushed off together toward the first hatch, where Keller waited in a pitch-black corner with her brown eyes, her dark hands, and her impossible crooked smile. Ash nearly sailed into the wall at the sight of her.