Architects of Memory

by Karen Osborne

  “Haptics, remember?” Natalie snatched a headset out of the air above her, dragging it down onto Ash’s forehead.

  Ash clawed at it. “Wait. Wait a second.” I’m going to mess up. You’re going to see that I’m sick. “You do it. I’m on painkillers.”

  “It’s not like this is heavy machinery.” Natalie snorted. She began the process of fitting the electrodes to Ash’s head. She brushed hair back from the nape of Ash’s neck, fitting pinching diodes on her spine, sliding the lenses over her eyes.

  “It’s a fucking starship.”

  “I need my hands free to make adjustments,” Natalie said.

  “I’m drugged up.”

  Natalie frowned. “You just said you were fine.”

  “And drugged up,” Ash said. “What if I can’t, I don’t know, think fast enough?”

  “It’s just new technology. That’s all it is.” Natalie switched on the interface.

  Ash was subject to a shocking rush of information all at once—colors, data, lines, letters, shapes, all of it flickering and hovering on the monitor just inches away. She blinked, and the display shifted, resolved, reacting to the signals her brain was sending. She blinked again and tried to think only of using the ansible. Three or four garbled windows swept off to the side in a hurry, minimized by her need for the ansible. Sounds rattled in her ear—the rushing of an ocean, the barking of a small dog, distant ship engines, the understated chuckling of Christopher winning a poker game.

  Natalie leaned in over her shoulder. “That is cool.”

  “The audio could use some help,” Ash said, breathless. She spread-eagled her hands on her knees to take them out of play. The display blasted orange, blue, pink, yellow. She opened her mouth to ask the computer to display in standard colors alone, and only got as far as the first sibilant when the monitor flickered and settled into calming shades of white and blue. A millisecond later, the computer had called up a message window and was asking for a destination point.

  “This is wild,” Ash said.

  “My friend Amrit told me that once you get good on the haptic, you don’t even use the gloves much. You can fire off a torpedo within milliseconds of thinking up a solution—no more of this pressing a button or pulling a trigger business. Your captain doesn’t even have to issue vocal orders; the bridge gets so quiet, it’s basically telepathy…” Natalie’s voice trailed off, impressed and waiting for the next step.

  Ash blinked away the beginnings of a headache and resolved on the ansible node in front of her. There were two separate terminals pinging off the node they’d fixed a few weeks before. One was a familiar Aurora code; the other was masked. She tried to make a connection to Twenty-Five, but her old ship’s ansible was dead.

  “The first has to be Rio,” Natalie said. “They’re close!”

  “And the other has to be Ramsay.”

  “Call Rio.”

  Ash shook her head. “Ramsay knows our codes. I’ll bet you anything she’ll be monitoring the frequencies.”

  Natalie frowned, and then brought her hand down, hard, on the back of Ash’s chair. “Then we use code. We queue for a system update…”

  “And they’ll notice the discrepancy at HQ…”

  “And come find us.”

  The ansible spun up with a clicking and a soft whispering, spitting the update request past London’s broken walls into the void. The system sounded a quiet chime, and a yellow light began pulsing at the bottom of the ansible.

  “Did that…?” Ash said.

  “I think so.”

  “Wild.”

  They both fell quiet. Natalie rubbed her hands up and down her arms. “Getting pretty nippy in here. Do you think there’s enough power to look at the logs? Maybe we can get a better idea of what went down right before the battle.”

  “Good idea.” Ash reached toward the interface with silver-capped fingers. She thought of the logs and something deep and whining spun up at the center of the ansible array. Light exploded from six points on the ceiling and swirled around the bridge, painting holographic lines in blue and white in every chair: rendering the curve of an arm, the line of a diamond-cut jacket, the slightly parted lines of a crewmember breathing, the shield-like curve of a fingernail. Within seconds, the bridge was full of blue-lined holograms like animated drawings in a sketchbook, their ghostly hands moving over dead consoles in a mockery of life.

  The last figure rendered was the ship’s captain; the hologram displayed him head to toe, tracing lines of life over his moldering body. His eyes blinked, again and again, in the dead bone sockets; his mouth moved where his jaw had fallen open. She couldn’t see his heart behind his rendered Auroran jacket, but she imagined it beating, imagined him breathing, imagined him living.

  The dead captain’s voice sounded over, guttering speakers.

  “Francisco Valdes. Captain, Aurora cruiser London. September sixteenth, the year of our chief executive three-oh-two. We’ve been diverted from our projected path to take care of an issue on Tribulation Colony.” The dead captain raised his blue-limned hand to rub his right temple. “And it is, unfortunately, an issue.”

  “Whoa,” Natalie whispered. “That’s new.”

  11

  For a moment, it felt almost like Ash and Natalie were no longer alone.

  The blue-lined holograms spat out by the three-dimensional renderbots rolled their tight shoulders, blinked, and smiled; their faces were remarkably lifelike, their every move caught by the haptic security panopticon. Even their chests rose and fell with recorded breath. Ash tried to keep her mind on playing the log, while Natalie marveled as one sketchbook ghost rose from the navigation station and ambled toward the entrance to the spine. Natalie reached out to touch it, and her fingers passed through the light like rain through smoke. The figure ducked into the spine, disappearing legs first as if entering a deep, dark pool of water.

  Natalie whistled. “They were not kidding when they were talking about upgrades on the cruisers. I didn’t think this tech was even doable.”

  “Yeah,” said Ash. “And we thought the text logs were bad.”

  Natalie made a face. “Well. Hopefully by the time this trickles down we’ll be citizens and we won’t have to deal with it off the job, right?”

  The dead captain was rendered in the kind of incredible detail that betrayed the signs of his vague middle age: blue smile lines touching the corners of his mouth, stress creases dragging the corners of his eyes, the ill-kept beard curling at his chin. He had the lean, gangly body of someone who’d grown up in low gravity, and his mouth was turned down in the darkening, haunted stare of the broken and exhausted. Behind the animation, the corpse stayed still, jaw open, staring at nothing.

  The audio crackled.

  “We avoid a battle with the Vai on our way here only to find ourselves needing to start one with Manx-Koltar. Of course, for the record, Manx-Koltar is the one in violation of the noninterference treaty, here.”

  He coughed, dry and rattling, into a balled fist. Behind him, a group of executive types, wearing the tags and tattoos that marked them as birthright citizens who had blood and backgrounds clean enough to work a bridge like this, waved slender, silver-capped fingers in motions that looked like magical spells. The readouts behind Valdes showed them to be above the now familiar continents of Tribulation.

  “There was nothing about a treaty violation in the public narrative of the battle,” Natalie said. Ash heard the crackling of a ration bar wrapper in her ear, and the ordnance engineer’s next words were pronounced around a mouthful of food. “What’s wrong with him?”

  “It was war. Poor bastard probably hadn’t slept in days,” Ash said.

  Natalie narrowed her eyes at the corpse. “Kinda sad, really. He was hot.”

  And totally my type, said Keller’s ghost, from the darkened aft corner of the bridge.

  “Are you serious?” Ash asked the ghost.

  “Deadly,” Natalie said. “Look, they’re all birthrights. Loyal as hell. Y
ou don’t get that kind of composure growing up somewhere like Arimathea or Baltimore. You grow up on Europa, you learn how to survive in space from day one. You have the best teachers—”

  “Shh, he’s talking again.”

  Valdes grabbed at the sides of his chair and leaned forward. “Twenty minutes ago, a ship bearing a Manx-Koltar IFF killed the Tribulation system ansible node and then refused to answer hails. We found them sending shuttles down to the surface, to an ag-center about twelve miles south of the main colony.” He paused. Looked around. “If they don’t disengage, we will have to move to protect Auroran assets.”

  He leaned back into the chair, his eyes going glassy. Ash could barely see the dead body behind his animated blue limbs. He rubbed his forehead. “Damn it, I don’t want to have to fight other humans. Not right now.” The captain looked down at his lap for a moment, seeming to decide. “London actual to all personnel. Prepare to—”

  The holograms dropped out, plunging the bridge back to pitch darkness.

  Natalie’s voice lowered in rough disbelief. “We just assumed that the M-K wreckage belonged to an ally that had come to defend the planet. They were allies. They were on the Corporate Alliance Council. All those M-K people in the room with the scientists? The ones we IDed and put in coffins? We thought they were helping.”

  “You know what they say about assumptions,” said Keller’s ghost.

  Ash bit her bottom lip, trying to keep her attention on Natalie. “So, an M-K ship got the drop long enough on London to board it—with Mumbai nearby? That’s really weird.”

  “Fast-forward and see.”

  Ash narrowed her eyes. “The index is a bit fried from the battle … there’s not a lot here. Here’s the next bit I can access.”

  The ansible spun up again, and this time rendered the scene Ash had originally expected to see: a cruiser bridge at war. London was taking fire. The holograms shuddered in their seats, holding on to their chairs, snapping their safety belts around their shoulders. Natalie held out her arms, walking slowly in a circle around the bridge, taking it all in, running her fingertips through blue-sketched faces, resting her palms on heads and hunched backs, watching the holograms sweating through their last minutes of life.

  “The second surface shuttle is escaping, sir. Our fighters can’t break the railgun fire long enough to pursue,” a young woman in the tactical seat said.

  “And the first?” Valdes yelled.

  A young tech looked over his shoulder. “Sir. Ordnance reports that the first shuttle has some sort of Vai molecular weapon in it. Claris says she’s never seen readings like it. The shuttle was dead; it was going forward on momentum alone. Door was booby-trapped. We lost two indenture teams. Whatever it is, we have no record of anything like it being stored on Tribulation—”

  “Sound familiar?” mumbled Natalie.

  “Mm,” said Ash.

  Valdes sat back and tilted his chin. “Go for the weapon.”

  The image shuddered again as London took more fire. “Sir, I’m having problems keeping the power on in the lower cargo bays,” another officer said, across the bridge. “Life support is failing.”

  “When it arrives, get it into an isolette.” Valdes’s head snapped, his dead eyes meeting the first man’s. “We’re getting the hell out of here. Tell Claris to get the scientists together. I want answers—I want to know what it is, why M-K’s after it, why it was on our colony—”

  “M-K is boarding.” The woman who said this was no older than Natalie. She turned to Valdes, to say something more, then guttered out with the rest of the holograms, leaving the bridge death-dark and silent.

  “Is there more?” said Natalie.

  “One.”

  The bridge was empty this time. Captain Valdes sat in his command chair, bowed and sweating, his hands tight-knuckled and tied to the arms of the chair with some sort of organic rope. His chin was set and tilted up at a second figure who stood in front of him, holding a long, serrated knife in one hand. In the other, he held a hammer.

  “We … uh, we missed something,” Natalie said. “Can you go back?”

  Ash paused and peered into the file structure. “It’s corrupted.”

  Valdes’s attacker was human, wearing his hair long like any uncitizen, ribbons braided in like he was as proud of them as an executive was of his tattoo and torc, wearing a black coat that dusted the floor, with no outward sign of Company or status. Ash recognized his coat; it was the same one worn by the out-of-place body below, the stranger rotting in the same hallway as the scientists and the bridge crew. In the background, over the speakers, Ash could hear the screaming of human voices. Proximity alarms bawled. The M-K forces? Where are the Vai?

  “Humans,” Natalie whispered. “Humans did this.”

  “Natalie,” Ash said. “That knife. Do you think he’s going to—”

  “Shit. I don’t want to watch this.”

  “I think we have to.”

  Valdes spat toward the freelancer’s feet; whether it was spit or blood or both, Ash couldn’t quite tell. “Makes me happy,” the captain said—he was missing teeth, now, and his face was stippled with blood. “It makes me happy that you’re going to go down with the rest of us when the Vai get here. And when the salvage teams come—”

  The freelancer’s voice sounded hoarse and gravel-bound, as if he’d inhaled smoke in the battle without a breather. “When the salvage teams come, they won’t care what they find,” he said. “Don’t you know what you’ve done, Francisco? You nearly ruined everything. Everything. You should have left us well enough alone.”

  Valdes wheezed and coughed up more blood. “You were breaking the Alliance treaty,” he said. “Some of us believe in the Alliance. In the future.”

  “You still think this is about property and profit and peace,” the assailant groaned. “You are so far out of your depth you might as well be a nutrient farmer on Neptune Depot. I have my ride off this husk. You, though…” He paused. “You’ll help humanity in another way.”

  Valdes’s eyes darted to the knife, as if he knew what was coming. “No. Please. I’ll get you whatever you want, citizenship, money. What do you want?”

  “Revenge,” he said.

  The man in the long coat plunged the knife into Valdes’s chest and twisted. The captain’s eyes went wide, and he struggled; he screamed as if someone could hear him, but no figures entered the bridge, and the cry settled into a desperate, base gurgle. The murderer tore the blade toward the captain’s kidney, using the rib as a guide, then cracked the ribs with a tool in his left hand. There was a squelching noise as the man slid his hand into the captain’s—

  “Don’t get sick,” Natalie said, grabbing at Ash’s sweater.

  Ash turned her head and buried it against the back of Natalie’s warm hand. “Tell me when it’s over.”

  “You think I’m looking?” she said, her voice shaky.

  The murderer’s comm rang.

  Ash slit her eyes, peering through her lashes, trying to wait out the violence. Valdes’s head lolled as it did now, his jaw wide, his face frozen forever in horrific surprise. The man held a human heart in one hand, fishing out a talkie from a coat pocket with his other blood-drenched hand, dripping on the floor. She looked down to see, for the first time, the rusty-brown evidence of the murder.

  “This is Allen,” he said.

  “We’re at the extraction point.” The voice was a woman’s, somewhat familiar, although Ash couldn’t place it through the interference.

  The assailant opened up a small cooler bag and placed the heart inside. “Thank God.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “We’ve collected more samples since you had to leave the others behind. I’m making my way to the extraction point as we speak.”

  “Allen,” the voice said, slower, “Mumbai scragged the Manx-Koltar ship. All we have are the shuttles. We can’t get you in time. Any of you.”

  “What?” The man swayed.

  “We’ve
got Vai thirty seconds out and Aurora’s taken the weapon aboard London.”

  “I can go—”

  “No. It’s too late. We have seconds before they slap it in a quarantine locker and take it back to Europa. I need to set off the weapon right now, to show the Vai that we can kill them. That we can actually kill them. We haven’t killed one of them this entire war, and we need to show them, Allen. It’s bigger than you, it’s bigger than me.”

  The man was quiet for a moment, and then he looked down at his hands. “I understand.”

  “I’m sorry, my friend.”

  “No,” he said, his voice dropping a register. His shoulders shuddered. “This was always the endgame.”

  “I’ll remember you.”

  “No,” he said, “you won’t.”

  The bridge lit up in a sudden blinding cacophony of warning lights and sirens. The assailant—Allen—dropped into London’s spine with the cooler and disappeared.

  She heard the familiar, keening scream of the Vai engaging.

  The hologram vanished, leaving the long-dead captain holding vigil over his glacial hell.

  Ash ran her hand through her hair. She was sweating, despite the temperature.

  Natalie gulped, then retched. “I knew M-K was full of fucking deviants, but I didn’t know they were cannibals. Ash, this is bad.”

  “Is there more?” Ash shook her head and reached for the records with her hand, her mind. The computer whined and reloaded the logs from the beginning. The dead ship rattled; the air grew colder. “There has to be more. We can check the computer core for real-time data, maybe get a read on the tactical display,” Ash said.

  “Don’t have the right tools.” Natalie twisted around and found a railing; she hauled herself back down to the access ports. “It won’t tell us anything more than the readings HQ had at the time, and we’d have to route power from the ansible—”

  “And we’re not doing that,” Ash responded.

  “God, no. I want to live.” She looked back up to the screen where Captain Valdes sat in eternal pause, exhausted and unbowed. The birthrights and their bright white tattoos hung forever at their stations, their faces set in serious ardor. “This is what they must have seen at HQ. This conversation. ‘Set it off,’ that woman said. Do you think she meant the weapon?”