Architects of Memory

by Karen Osborne

  “It’s an inversion cube,” Natalie finally said. Her voice was measured, calm. Too calm. “Starts inside. With your nucleotides. But that—that—”

  “That,” whispered Len.

  “Ash, don’t,” Natalie said, putting her hand up to stop Ash, but Ash was too close, and she saw the beating human heart, and all the thoughts in her head screeched to a quick, nauseous halt.

  The heart was lying next to a half-breathing, coal-black square molecular, impaled on a piece of surgical equipment glistening in the wet confines of the quarantine box, the chambers contracting and expanding like the thing were still nestled close inside someone’s chest. The flaps of the artery were ragged and torn, as far from surgical as Ash could imagine. The whole thing was fitted onto a clear tubed apparatus that fed blood into blank black notches carved into the weapon’s exterior.

  She followed the passage of the blood into the weapon and out again, back to the heart, and back to the weapon; sickened, mesmerized, she stayed there until Natalie grabbed at her arm and forced her gaze toward the next one.

  The next isolette was similar—and the next, and the next—weapons of death hooked up to evidence of it, slammers and sounders and screamers being fed with clotting blood, bags of it, fed into sickened, exhausted human body parts. She saw beating enlarged hearts, shivering, shrunken kidneys, cirrhotic livers and, most horrific, entire circulatory systems that looked like they’d been ripped from human hands and torsos and legs, laid out in the careful, recognizable treelike pattern of what had once been life.

  Farther down the line, the biological matter—Ash couldn’t bear to think about it as tissue that used to be men and women, as parts that used to be people, not in an Auroran lab—became less and less recognizable; the tissue took on a grayish discoloration, and Ash, with her limited knowledge of battlefield medicine, was no longer able to recognize the organs, the circulatory patterns—if nerves were what they were, muddied and slippery with fluid.

  “The man who killed Captain Valdes talked about samples,” Natalie said. “Is this what he meant?”

  “What the hell is this one?” Len whispered.

  “Check the interface. She’s labeled them all. See for yourself,” Ash said, and then moved toward it herself. These were the blue-and-gold rounded buttons of the Aurora ships that had been her home, given her friends, granted her hope, helped her build a future from a world she thought was dust. One more quiet betrayal, in a life that had far too many of them.

  Inversion Cube, Black. Origin: Wellspring-Bittersweet 10-B. Never used. Undergoing Secondary Gene-Twisted Tests. Director: Dr. Reva Sharma.

  Ash had seen dead bodies. She’d seen rockslides split open a woman to her intestines, had seen the surprised, twisted mouths of the poor space-burned victims on the ships she’d been tasked to salvage. But tragic as it was, the rumble of an earthquake, the impact of a cruise missile, atmosphere venting from a half-breached hull: those were unlucky, elemental, inarguable for miners like her, ordinary people caught in the teeth of extraordinary times.

  This kind of death was much different. This was intentional, purposeful; this was a butcher-surgeon intimate with a knife, and a murder victim on a medical table. These were the dark years of Karner-Albion and General Spaceflight and the failed experiments meant to place humans on heavy-grav worlds, the horror stories from her history books. These were the Lost Worlds fighting back, their last breath a nuclear scream against the Vai.

  These were the dark centuries, the fallen governments, the tyrants who did not answer to shareholders. This is what she’d learned about back on the station, in the nighttime Wellspring vids at her mother’s feet.

  “What the hell does the doctor have to do with this?” asked Natalie.

  19

  Lit only by her flashlight and the humming, bloody transgressions that surrounded her, Natalie moved down the line of isolettes, checking each one for identifying information. Ash followed, and read Sharma, and then Sharma again, and Sharma a third time. One or two displayed the name of another doctor—an Aster Jessen—but most of the isolettes with accessible data belonged to experiments run by Twenty-Five’s missing doctor.

  A quiet panic began to build in Ash’s chest.

  C-6 Hornet, Gold, she read, Origin: Cluster 2827A. Possibly used. Undergoing Nervous Connection/Neuroglia/Meninges. Director: Dr. Reva Sharma.

  10-A Cutter, Green. Origin: Wellspring-Bittersweet. Never used. Vascular System/Antigens AB and 0. Director: Dr. Reva Sharma.

  “What the hell are meninges?” Natalie said.

  Len stopped in front of an isolette where a golden, apple-small sphere nestled against a chunky, cirrhotic liver. He snorted in disgust.

  “Ash, this can’t be right,” he said. “Wasn’t the doc already with Twenty-Five when Captain Keller got the salvage contract for Bittersweet? She was on Cana cleanup, right, and then Gethsemane shuttle duty? She was nowhere near here.”

  Ash took a deep breath, tasting mildew and loam and hating her suddenly dry throat. She drew her hands into fists, pressing her nails into her palms, hoping the pain would stop her from panicking.

  “I don’t know,” she gulped out, fighting an abrupt, embarrassing dizziness. “Dr. Sharma was on some other captain’s crew before the attack on the mine. Captain Keller noticed our team hadn’t been triaged, and went back down into the tunnels to search for us. The doc was the only medic willing to go. That’s how they met.”

  “Wait, the only one?” Natalie blinked, confused.

  “We were hollowing out a new set of tunnels that week, and we didn’t have the struts up yet—not that the struts would have helped.” Pain yanked at Ash’s back molars, and she realized she was clenching her jaw. “Wellspring didn’t want Aurora filing a wrongful death claim if the tunnel collapsed on their heads, too.”

  Wellspring didn’t want them to find Christopher, Keller whispered somewhere in her amygdala. That’s why he was on tunnel duty that week.

  We don’t know that.

  Yes, we do.

  Natalie’s eyes widened in disgust. “Wellspring was going to write you off. Why didn’t you tell us?”

  “Well, why don’t you talk about Cana? I mean, really talk about Cana? I just—” The words evaporated as Ash fought a wave of angry fatigue. “I just wanted to move on with my life.”

  Natalie nodded slowly, getting the hint. “But she was on Twenty-Five, afterwards?”

  “Yeah. Mostly. Dr. Sharma turned the cargo bay on Twenty-Five into a hospital deck. She saved our lives. And then it was all training on Europa. I saw Captain Keller a couple times—she was having the grav refit done and running my sponsorship paperwork. But I didn’t see Dr. Sharma again until Twenty-Five left for Tribulation.”

  Why are you lying? Keller whispered. I came to see you nearly every day.

  Ash balled her fists tighter and concentrated on breathing.

  “Which was months later,” Len said. “That’s enough time for a trip out here—”

  “Let’s be real, Len. You can’t place yourself on Europa Station right now,” Natalie snorted.

  Ash looked down at the weapon in the isolette to her right, blinking away the bright swirl of it, letting the light burn into her retinas—anything, really, to keep the hallucinatory Kate Keller locked up tight in whatever closet the trihex shots had originally put her in. It was bad enough Ash was barely keeping it together, dealing with this stupid panic and this shuddering room full of nightmares. She didn’t need Natalie realizing she was having symptoms, too.

  “Just check the confirmation dates.” The words rushed out of Ash’s mouth. “Aurora’s isolettes will have them. Wellspring’s, too.”

  Len frowned as Ash ducked back around to the WellCel machine she’d originally been using. The interface ID was still active, and with a few quick motions, she brought up the date the experiment’s information had originally been entered.

  “Holy shit,” Ash said. Her stomach flipped.

  Natalie whistled. “This
is—”

  “Dated a year and a half before the Gethsemane massacre,” Ash finished.

  “Not possible,” Len said. “Gethsemane was first contact. That was the first time anyone had ever heard of real aliens, let alone their goddamned murder weapons.”

  “Unless it wasn’t the first time,” said Ash.

  She locked eyes with the others, all of them caught still and cold with the heresy she’d just uttered. Ash’s heart thudded in her chest, and she took a step back, her stomach a tight, nauseous knot.

  “It would explain why the war got so violent so fast,” Len said, his voice low. “If the war was already going on, and Gethsemane was an escalation.”

  Natalie moved to another isolette. “Does it matter? The Vai wanted to kill us. We defended ourselves.”

  “You ever wonder why they wanted to kill us?” said Len.

  “They’re aliens. I don’t know. Do I look like a philosopher to you?”

  Len narrowed his eyes. “Don’t fall back on this ‘I’m a dumbass soldier’ bullshit, Natalie, not to me. You’re better than that.”

  “Don’t treat me like a child,” she snapped.

  Dizzy and uncomfortable, Ash let them fight. She closed her eyes, trying to remember the dreamlike, terrible days around the massacre at Gethsemane. She remembered watching the community uplinks in the miners’ lounge, the sweep of silver alien mech-wings and the first glance of weapons that spat black fire and golden death. She watched the drone footage of the massacre site with Christopher, held his hand as the headlines uttered the words that changed her world. She’d felt small, insignificant, and terribly confused.

  Aliens are real. She’d never seen an Auroran communications associate hyperventilate during an ansible transmission before. Auroran settlement at Gethsemane destroyed by alien attackers. Aliens attack Barricade Station. Aliens attack Grenadier. Aliens attack Cana.

  And, inevitably: Aliens attack Bittersweet.

  “Ash,” Natalie said. “Are you okay?”

  Ash opened her eyes, wiping cold sweat away from her upper lip. “Fine. So she knew?”

  “She knew.” Len had moved away toward the front of the room, and indicated the three lines of isolettes near the door they figured led to the administrative wing. “She was here before Gethsemane, at least, and for some time afterwards. She could have come on any of the colony supply ships. But the planet was under interdiction after the war. The only way to get back would have been a work ship. Twenty-Five.”

  “So which Company was in charge of this bullshit, do you think?” Natalie said. “There’s an awful lot of crap from InGen here.”

  “You assume that CEOs were running this, but these people were like us,” Len said, his hand making a quiet arc over the rest of the room. “When you’re doing salvage, you work with what you have, right? This is all salvage engineering: Manx-Koltar parts with this Wellspring bit, this Armour framework paired with an InGen logic board. They were working with what they could get.”

  Natalie shook her head. “But then—dozens of people must have been complicit. Hundreds, even. I mean, you’d need executives who could sign off on shipment deliveries in all of these companies. The indentures who ran the maglev had to know. And, come on, these farmers must have noticed different procedures. Like you said outside. The level of collusion would be unprecedented.”

  “So is the Sacrament Society,” said Ash.

  She fumbled in her pocket for the necklace. She turned her hand palm-up, then let the necklace slither into the palm of her hand. It shimmered in the shivering, gory light. She looked down at the saint standing on the skin of the earth, the arrows, the palm branches.

  “Shit,” said Natalie, closing her eyes. “We can’t even tell the executives about this, can we? Until we figure out which ones are traitors.”

  “I doubt they see themselves as traitors,” said Ash, thinking of businesslike Sharma on Twenty-Five, scanning her broken ribs, telling Ash she was home now, that everything was going to be fine.

  Len sighed. “Dr. Sharma was always so nice to me.”

  Natalie stared at him. “Yeah, well. Everyone’s nice as fuck until market share’s on the line.”

  “Look,” Len said, shaking his head. “I get that you’re mad at me for what happened upstairs, Natalie, but I’m done fighting with you. I’m going to try to open the door to the administrative wing while you calm down. Maybe that’s where we’ll find this ‘Main Lab.’”

  “Take your time,” muttered Natalie.

  The engineer nodded and moved off, and Natalie looked back down to the interface, her body a nervous, angry perpetual motion machine. Her fingers moved, thin and shaking, bringing up more data, more dates, more history. The light from the silver weapon below caught her unkempt hair and her sour face.

  “Nat—” Ash began.

  “You think you know people,” she said, after a moment, not meeting Ash’s eyes. “You think you work with someone for six months, a year, stand by them in the black and the cold. You think you know them.”

  Ash hesitated. She means Ramsay, she thought. And Sharma. Not me or Len.

  “You know the captain,” Ash said. “So let’s think about what she would do.”

  Natalie tapped her finger against her chin. “She’d wonder about the profit advantage from running such a massive, dangerous experiment, which means the people in charge of this madhouse thought the outcomes were worth some pretty severe risk. So, if we’re sticking with Auroran thinking, because Dr. Sharma’s Auroran, what’s the first thing the manual tells you to do when you find another Company’s technology and there’s no mutual return treaty?”

  Ash thought back to basic salvage training. “You reverse-engineer it.”

  Natalie nodded. “Right. The only major thing we know about Vai moleculars is that they have some sort of biological trigger. We only have battlefield experience to go on, so we don’t know if it’s skin contact or something else. Hell, maybe you fart on it.”

  “And the profit motive?” said Ash.

  “Oh, shit, yes. Imagine the profit if you were first on the market with weapons that could kill the Vai.”

  She took off, and Ash followed her down the line to an older Auroran isolette. It held a Vai weapon connected to a smattering of striated, variegated tissue, ending in what looked to Ash to be some sort of artery. The whole setup pulsed with a silver fluid that resembled the liquid celestium shipped out from the Bittersweet refinery. The weapon was a sweeping gold crescent, small enough to fit in her palm. It had hard lines and spoke in a sweet voice, slipping behind her ears and into her mind as if it were standing behind her, a comforting friend.

  She blinked and swallowed and tried not to listen.

  It’s just my illness, she said. Just panic. That’s all it is. I’m underground and nervous as hell that the ceiling’s going to fall in and I’m stuck in the nads of a massive conspiracy. That’s all.

  “I don’t exactly know how this one works,” Natalie said, “but this crescent form usually means it’ll evaporate any organic matter within a particular radius, kind of like the blue screamer, but worse. I’d bet you a bottle of the captain’s whiskey that this is a test to figure out which part of the body makes the weapon work: the circulatory system, the nervous system, lymph nodes—”

  Ash swallowed acid. “They’re assuming the aliens have any of these things.”

  “It’s a big assumption, sure,” Natalie said. “But, you gotta remember, science is science out here or in Vai space: for a bomb, you need a charge, a payload, a detonator. A trigger. Kinetics, well. That just takes an impact. Vai moleculars just have … well, think of it as a Company-specific trigger, but with blood. Or genes. Or spit. Or the alien equivalent of that. We just don’t know.”

  Ash nodded. “Which is why the Vai need to be present for it to go off.”

  Natalie looked at the weapon with grim determination, and then started to unseal the top of the isolette. “Time to do some science of our own. It’s a mole
cular, so I should be able to unhook this one without setting it off, and we can look at the guts of the experiment and what it’s trying to do.”

  Ash grabbed for Natalie’s wrists. “No way. Not after what happened upstairs.”

  “I know,” Natalie said. “It’s a molecular. That was a kinetic.”

  “We can check when Rio gets here. They have specialists.”

  The other woman snorted. “I am a specialist.”

  “You have a concussion.”

  Natalie narrowed her eyes and lowered her voice. “You’re one to talk. Something something degraded neural pathways, Ash.”

  “Just tell me what to do.”

  The younger woman bit down on her bottom lip and paused. “Fine. Okay. What we need to do is test the attachment point to see if the arterial’s permanently fused, or whether we can remove that adhesive, there.”

  Ash moved in closer as Natalie pressed the disconnect switches, sliding the top of the isolette open and exposing the inner workings of the experiment to the dank air of the cave. Everything seemed intact. The battery-powered nodes were still pumping silver liquid from the arterial to the weapon. And the weapon hummed, it sang, it—

  She heard kind whispers.

  Shut up, Kate, Ash thought.

  Keller’s ghost did not respond.

  The crescent weapon shimmered, soothing and gold, as if it were a jewel or a bar of soap or a stone glistening on the side of an alien river. Ash hesitated for a moment, reached in and pressed her index finger to the curve of the plastic equipment near the arterial.

  The weapon lit up, starbright, and whined. Light poured through her fingers in gracious beams.

  Sweet sister, the weapon said.

  Ash snapped her hand back. “Um.”

  Natalie blinked, reverent and horrified. “Do it again, Ash.”

  Ash responded by slamming the switch that slid the isolette top back into place.