Architects of Memory

by Karen Osborne

  “Dr. Julien, please, please put the gun down, Natalie’s waiting for us and she has a bad concussion, she could use—”

  He cut her off. “Those monsters just strolled by, mowing down the soldiers. And you know what? The weapons tore through the mechs, too, and then they just kept on going. Like you, just like you.”

  “But they died,” Ash said, her mouth going dry. “Natalie said—”

  “They died when our reinforcements showed,” he said. “Using suicide moleculars. But until then? There was nothing we could do to stop them. The greenhouse gassers did nothing to them, even as they killed everyone else. I know what I saw then, and I know what I saw now, and I swear on the birthright blood in my veins that you are one of them—”

  Ash took a tentative step back, nearly stumbling on a thorny bramble. “You’re sounding crazy. Let’s calm down. Sort this out.”

  His hands tightened on the gun. “The only place you’re going is the brig.”

  “Natalie’s hurt. The others in the shuttle—you saw the shuttle fall—there might be people still alive—”

  He pressed his lips together, clearly conflicted.

  “We can figure it out together,” she said.

  “If you don’t kill me out here,” he replied.

  “There are people hurt out there, Dr. Julien, I’m not going to kill you. I need you,” Ash said, her voice going ragged and annoyed, unable to keep herself from blowing her top. She stepped forward.

  He pulled the trigger.

  The bolt missed, swishing past her ear, burying itself in the tree behind her. She fell to the side, arms pinwheeling, stumbling into the muddy puddle, the cold liquid dragging at her knees. She tried to get to her feet, but the young citizen had already turned and was tearing farther into the forest, the boltgun still charged and whining in his hand.

  “Stop,” she cried, stumbling after him. “You won’t make it. There’s no oxygen out there. You’ll suffocate!”

  Julien didn’t stop. A gust of sulfur wind came from the west and ripped down Ash’s damaged throat, causing her to catch herself in a bent-over, sobbing sort of coughing fit, placing her hand on a tree and doubling over in pain. When she was done coughing, she looked up. The doctor was gone, and the forest flickered on in darkness, alien leaves twisting in an inhuman breeze.

  She left him his coat.

  She squinted in the darkling night, searching for the path back to Natalie. Lights had returned to her vision, swirling, blocking her path. She shoved the syringe of trihex into her pocket and shouldered the medical bag, then trudged down the path of broken branches and leaves that led back to Natalie and the settlement.

  By the time she got back, the younger woman had found her flashlight. She gave Ash’s approach a weak smile, dropping the grin when she realized that Julien wasn’t present. “Guy’s dead?”

  “He shot at me and took off into the forest,” said Ash, offering Natalie a shaking hand.

  Natalie grabbed Ash’s lower arm, struggled up to her knees and did a queasy half dive for the medical bag. “What was he thinking?”

  “Thought I was a Vai.”

  “What the hell?”

  “He saw the weapon fail, and, I don’t know … jumped to the craziest possible conclusion.”

  “That isn’t the craziest possible conclusion.”

  Ash ignored the salvo. “He’ll have to circle back around to the rally point, eventually, and I’ve got his medkit, so we need to get back and see if there’s anyone left alive.”

  Natalie’s jaw set. “There’s nobody alive,” she said.

  Ash wanted to protest, but she saw the look in Natalie’s eyes, and simply slipped her arm under Natalie’s shoulders, supporting her as they walked back to the settlement.

  It didn’t take long for the slight tremolo of Ash’s fingers to become a disabling tattoo, and by the time they reached the abandoned shacks that had once belonged to the farming hub’s indentured workers, she knew she needed one of Julien’s mind-clearing trihex shots. In the late twilight, the only light extending from the opposite side of the compound looked like a basic flashlight, and it beamed bare and white from the common barn, barely reaching the run-down shacks and dorms that had once served as housing for the Aurora indentures.

  The clearing burned.

  The shuttle had come down hard in the center of the clearing, obliterating the ansible and the command post. The twisted remains were burning lethargic and bright, and she could smell an awful, screaming stink of charred metal. She narrowed her eyes and searched for the bodies of the young soldiers who came with them. Nothing.

  Of course she found nothing.

  Natalie rested her back against the native wood slats of the house while Ash crouched on the dusty ground, rifling through the medical bag. She gave a small white pain pill to Natalie, then yanked the syringe of trihexphenidyl from her pocket. She applied it to the inside of her arm, gritting her teeth at the pain of the needle breaking skin. The lights flickered away. She felt cleaner. Brighter.

  It’s not a cure, she reminded herself. Two doses in less than an hour can’t be good for you.

  Natalie tossed back the painkiller Ash handed her; her knuckles were white where they grasped at the wall for purchase. She looked back around the corner of the building, narrowing her eyes. “There’s—that’s a flashlight. In the barn. Was that light on when we left?”

  “I don’t think so,” Ash said, looking herself. Behind the fire licking at the edges of the clearing, threatening the darkness of the forest, she could see a bare white light moving in the barn. “If they’re Vai, we’re screwed.”

  “Yeah, the fuckers are in there,” she said, rising to her feet. “Time for recon.”

  “Wait.” Ash snapped the bag shut and stood. She didn’t feel like she had the heart to mention to the bloodied, concussed Natalie that if the Vai were behind this attack, Rio might not even be there to call in a few minutes. “I don’t know,” she said. “That crate was pushed over—”

  She was cut off by the sound of swearing.

  Human swearing.

  Natalie pushed herself up again. Ash intended to ask her companion if the sound was yet another hallucination, but Natalie had her war face on, and months of working together had taught her to shut up when the younger woman was trying to analyze a situation. Ash ducked, crouching in the dirt. A human figure emerged, silhouetted with light. He was alive—alive—and moving boxes around.

  “We need to retreat,” she whispered.

  “Wait.” Natalie had her eyes narrowed, and the look on her face was that of someone attempting to solve a tough puzzle. But then her face went bright, and her eyes wide, and she popped up like a field antenna, taking off through the briars and the brambles, careening toward the barn after a destination Ash couldn’t see.

  “Natalie!” she hissed, but Natalie was undeterred, a shout tearing from her throat.

  “Len!” she called.

  17

  Ash grabbed at Natalie’s sleeve as she took off toward the dark figure in the clearing. The fabric slipped through her fingers like water.

  The man—it was a man, skinny and crooked, with a familiar stoop to his shoulders—was limned in light from the burning shuttle. He turned at Natalie’s approach, and the light caught his face. It was Leonard Downey: alive, right there in front of the burning shuttle, smeared with soot and dirt. Alive, when the soldiers had died, when she’d nearly died, when Natalie had nearly died. Alive, like her.

  An initial jolt of happiness ceded to a crowding of questions, and not all of them pleasant. The questions twisted and curdled: How did he get here? How did he survive the screamer? He had to have been over a half mile off, walking from town, maybe, recognizing the presence of friends, running to see them. The alternative was too awful to consider, too sick to bear: a version of her friend who would be in league with Ramsay, who had been inside the barn, who had pushed over the box with the screamer on purpose.

  A version of Len who would k
ill for profit.

  Ash closed her eyes, refusing to believe it. That kind of bad guesswork was what got a canary trapped.

  Len’s boltgun was raised soldier-tight in the direction of the quick-footed Natalie. He coughed against the back of his other hand. His dark-eyed, terrified gaze watched the younger woman down the weapon’s short barrel. The whining sound broke up the reunion, and Natalie drove straight to a questioning halt.

  “Come on, man, it’s me,” Natalie said.

  He blinked and licked his lips. He held the gun for a few more seconds, his hand shaking, as if he could not quite decide if Natalie were made of smoke or flesh. Then he switched off the gun and dropped it to his side, the tension leaching out of the air with the loss of the charge.

  Natalie yelped and crossed the last few steps, enveloping him in a hug that was too tight and too long to be friendly. He returned it, kissing the top of her head, his hands tight around the small of her back.

  “Nat,” Len said, his voice muffled where he spoke into the cushion of her jacket. “I thought you were dead. I thought they’d killed you.”

  “No way,” she said. She pulled away, then cupped his chin with the curve of her palm. Len leaned into the gesture, and the firelight caught the tears in his eyes. “Me and Ashlan, we’re hard to kill.”

  Len’s voice adopted a sharp edge. “Ash’s here?”

  “And Rio. We can take you home.”

  “Where is she?”

  The sharp edge to his gravel-caught voice caught Natalie cold, and her face tilted toward the fire. She paused. Tensed.

  “Stopped to tie her shoe.”

  Len’s face fell. “Don’t fuck with me, Natalie.”

  Natalie’s jaw worked, and she stepped back, putting some distance between herself and the engineer, her hand going back to hover near the boltgun at her waist. “No. Don’t fuck with me. What’s your problem, Len?”

  His arm traced a wide arc over the burning wreckage, the dark barn. “Are you working with them?”

  “What?” Natalie’s hand tensed. Her eyes darted around the square, the burning shuttle, the dead screamer sitting in the dirt, emptied of its horrors. “You mean us. This was us, Len.”

  “I saw you with them,” he whispered. He coughed again, the sound shattering into the crook of his arm.

  Natalie blinked. “You were in the barn when the weapon went off?”

  “Yes, I—”

  He realized what he’d said far too late. A dark disgust crossed Natalie’s face; she drew her gun with a fluid flicker of one hand. Len mirrored her, and Ash heard the whine of boltguns painting the air with promised bloodshed. She swore under her breath and dove for the medkit, opening it up, trying to find something that might double as a weapon.

  “You killed them,” Natalie whispered.

  “They were in crates! Crates! Like they were defused—I didn’t know! I just meant to scare them off. They had guns, like the people that took Sharma—”

  Natalie snarled. “We were wearing Aurora blue. Aurora fucking blue!”

  The gun shook in his hand. “That word again, like it’s supposed to mean something to me. Aurora! What the hell is Aurora?”

  “Be serious, Len!”

  “Never been more serious in my life,” he whispered.

  For a moment, the only sound was the low, aggressive hum of their weapons.

  Ash’s world twisted to the left. She felt dizzy, upset, broken. This wasn’t what was supposed to happen.

  Keller. We don’t always get what we want, do we.

  Ash picked up the medkit thermometer. It had a cold, round end, and although it was too small to resemble a gun barrel, she knew Len wasn’t a soldier, and all she needed to do was end the standoff. The cold, the pressure, the shape—the very thing that worked on her in the forest just fifteen minutes before would probably work on Len. She slammed her boot heel into the wall and strode around the corner with self-inflicted, half-true confidence, coming up behind Len, pressing the thermometer to the soft triangle at the bottom of his skull.

  “Put it down, Len,” she growled.

  “Ashlan. Come to finish the job?” Len said, still looking straight at Natalie, whose face warred between sheer relief and angry panic.

  “This is gonna end one way and one way alone,” Ash said, “and that’s with you putting down the gun so that you can talk straight with your family.”

  Len closed his eyes and flipped his wrist, letting the gun drop so the body swung harmless by its trigger ring, dangling from his outstretched thumb. Ash reached around and took the gun from him, shoving the weapon in her belt, and then nodded to Natalie.

  Natalie lowered her boltgun in a slow arc. Her voice was full of heartbreak. “Why’d you do it, Len?”

  The engineer’s skin was touched with gray, his jawline covered in stubble, his hair streaked with rust. He looked defensive. “I thought they killed you. And then—when you came back, when you were there, I thought—” He coughed again, phlegm clogging in his chest. “I thought you were working with them.”

  “Them? Look at my fucking uniform,” Natalie repeated, grabbing a handful of her collar. “You killed your family. Your brothers. How the hell can you not remember?”

  “I just don’t!” Len trembled, his voice dropping to a fevered whisper. He expelled an exhausted breath, and his shoulders deflated. “You had guns. A shuttle. There are—holes in my memory. A lot of holes. I remember you. Ash, and the doctor. I remember Captain Keller. I remember my parents, the apartment in New Orleans. But I don’t remember how we got here. I don’t remember why we’re here. We had to have come here on a ship, for a reason, but all of that’s gone. And when you don’t know what you don’t know—”

  Natalie took a step forward, her fist coming up. “Oh, I’ll make you remember, you son of a—”

  A memory tugged at Ash’s mind, and she stepped forward, her arms out, placing her body between Natalie and Len. “Wait. Let’s hear him out.”

  “You believe this asshole?” Natalie said, her voice full of heartbreak.

  “You weren’t there,” Ash said. “The weapon—it messed with my mind. I wanted the doc to shut it down, but she wouldn’t.”

  Len ran his hand through his hair. “Right. I heard things, too. I don’t remember what, but I remember how I felt. I was scared. I don’t get scared.”

  “So how did you get away?” Ash said.

  “I stepped outside to take a piss and figure things out,” he said. “And that’s when I saw them. Five of them, wearing black, hauling guns, and so I lifted my talkie to comm someone for air support, and that’s when I realized I didn’t know who to call. And you had just left, so I thought it might have been an evac—”

  “I would never—” Natalie started.

  “No, listen. The doc could have hauled out the back, but she said she wouldn’t leave the weapon. That it was too important, that someone had to get away so they could tell Aurora about what happened. So I put the card in the unicorn and ran, so if I was captured, they wouldn’t get the data. I knew that one of you would get the Alien Attack Squad reference, at least.”

  Ash shook her head. “She tell you why she wouldn’t leave?”

  He breathed out. There was a dark shudder in his halting breath, a muted wheeze. “No. They just firebombed the place. They knew exactly where to go, what to do, how to hold the weapon, even brought their own quarantine isolette. So, you’ll understand why I thought it was you—”

  Natalie spat on the ground, then turned for the barn. “It was Ramsay who screwed us over. You remember Ramsay?”

  He nodded slowly. “So she has the weapon.”

  Natalie’s jaw clenched. “Whatever Company she’s working for, it has some sort of connection with Manx-Koltar. Ramsay didn’t make her move until we fixed the ansible, and Solano put a damn move on when he found out. From what we could piece together on the London, some information was released from the buffer that … changed things. For her. For Solano.”

  �
��Solano. He’s … the boss?”

  “You don’t remember anything about Aurora, do you,” Natalie said, but didn’t wait for an answer or a comment, just walked over to where the screamer husk lay on the dark ground. She squatted and polished the surface with her thumb. “Like I thought. One and done. Let’s call Rio and tell them the situation’s clear.”

  “It’s not clear,” Len said.

  “What do you mean?” said Ash.

  “Look inside,” he responded. “That’s what I thought you were coming for. The weapons.”

  Natalie exchanged glances with Ash and stood, walking into the barn with her flashlight on. Ash nodded at Len, and Len shoved his hands into his pockets, entering the barn in front of her. They made it three steps in before Natalie raised her hand.

  “Nope. Both of you, stay right over there. Don’t even get near these things.”

  The barn resembled what Ash had once thought a colonial farm might look like: packed to the brim with bales and crates, maglev carts, broken equipment and scattered tools, all covered with the thinnest layer of burgundy dust from when the atmospinners on the outside of the hub had begun their inevitable failure.

  Most interesting were the ten weapons crates piled haphazardly and just inside the door—the kind of weapons crates they’d had on Twenty-Five. Natalie stowed her flashlight in her belt and stood, unlatching them one by one, looking inside. Her frown grew deeper.

  “Screamers. One-use screamers. Hundred-and-eighty-degree deployment, half-mile range. All of them have the same fucking screamers in them. And they’re fucking live. What the hell do farmers need with this many kinetics?” Natalie said.

  “Farmers don’t,” Ash said. “But these are on the Christmas list.”

  “What were you doing in here?” Natalie asked.

  Len pointed to the corner, where a plain cot was set up next to an open first-aid kit and a large tin of ready-to-eat settler meals. Next to the cot was a scattering of tools and what looked like the heart of an ansible, divorced from its comm tower and controller. “I was working on the ansible. I didn’t know who I was going to call. Just that I had to call someone, if I was going to live.”