Architects of Memory

by Karen Osborne

  “Do what again?” Len said, arriving back with a microspanner cradled in his hand. His eyes darted from Ash to the still-whirring isolette. “You didn’t fucking open that, did you?”

  “Dr. Julien was right,” Natalie whispered. “Fuck. Fuck!” Her hand came down hard on the bench, causing Ash and Len to jump.

  Ash’s stomach ached. The dizzy terror returned in seconds, storm-surge sure. She backed up, eyeing the staircase that led to the sulfur air. “I’m not a light switch.”

  “No, you’re a Vai,” Natalie spat.

  “Wait a minute.” Len put a wide-splayed hand between Ash and the door. “Nobody’s going anywhere until someone explains this to me.”

  Ash gulped for air, pushing at him. “Let me by, Len.”

  “She’s a fucking Vai, I made a joke about it in the forest, shit—”

  Len kept his voice reasonable. “That’s a pretty big accusation.”

  Natalie ignored him, and focused on Ash with bright, angry eyes. “We know you’re different. You walked away from that blue screamer. The doctor on Rio saw nanotech in your blood. Maybe the reason none of us have seen a Vai is because they can’t be seen, because they look like us. Fuck, maybe the Sacrament Society are the good guys—”

  Len clearly believed none of it. He dropped his hand, watching Natalie like he might if she’d been holding her boltgun and pointing it at him. “Okay, guys, this is bullshit. We’re done here. Let’s go upstairs and wait for Rio.”

  “Tell him,” Natalie spat. “Tell him what really happened.”

  Ash stumbled over all of the things she wanted to say. “Don’t make me.”

  “Tell him, or I will.”

  Ash eyed the door and thought about running, but Len had softened a little, and she was tired of lying to him. “I—” She balled her fists again. The pain felt sweet. “I thought it was celestium sickness. I’ve had it since I left Bittersweet. I thought I had years to go, that I’d become a citizen. Get treatment. I didn’t know it was anything more until I got to Rio and talked to the doctor there.”

  Len’s face darkened into disbelief. He rubbed at the stubble on his chin. “While we were working together. Did the captain know?”

  Ash bit her lip rather than respond.

  He stepped away from her, dragging his hands through his hair. Ash’s eyes caught on the stubble of Len’s brown beard, the terrified, sharp line of his jaw. “I need a second.”

  “Len, I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “me, too.”

  A yawning silence descended.

  “You’re the trigger,” said Natalie.

  The ordnance engineer was a sudden flurry of motion, moving back over to Ash, stepping in front of her, shining light into her eyes, staring at them like a bad impression of a Company physical. A sudden headache flared behind Ash’s forehead, and she pawed at the flashlight. “Stop—”

  “Vai moleculars are always on, just waiting for their trigger. If that’s what they were trying to do here—figure out how to trigger the London weapon—” She shone the flashlight at Len. “This could change everything, Ash. We figure out what happened to you, and we could stand a chance against the Vai.”

  “No,” she said, immediately

  “We could bring the war to them,” Natalie said. “We could win.”

  Ash closed her eyes and tried to think about what winning would look like. All she saw were bodies. Hearts. Livers. Blood. Stones, fallen from above, crushing Christopher’s chest, blood pooling at his neck. Marley, taken apart by light, breathing one moment and gone the next. Natalie, bloodstained and snarling.

  “You don’t win a war,” Ash whispered, stumbling backward, away from the offending light. She looked around for an exit, for the staircase leading to the dead receptionist’s room, for the sulfur air.

  Len reached forward and grabbed at Ash’s wrist, to stop her, but he was speaking to Natalie. “If what Ash is saying is true, the only way to save Ash is to bomb this place. Make it look like the shuttle crash took it out.”

  “Save her?” Natalie slid the flashlight back into her belt, and the beam cast harsh, dark shadows on her face. “What about saving Aurora? Or do the two of you want to start over somewhere else? Are you just dying to go back to the dole?”

  “You’re so damned young,” he said, gravel in his words. He grimaced, rubbing at his temples. “There’ll be a war, all right, but it’ll start right at home. You have no idea what it was like before the Vai, before the intercompany treaty. You two were still on the dole for the last Company war. You don’t remember what it’s like for humans to kill other humans. You like weapons, Natalie? Well, this is the fucking arms race of the century, and we’re all going to be meat on a bayonet. I know that’s not what you want.”

  Natalie’s shoulders stiffened, and she said nothing. Ash couldn’t breathe.

  “You don’t want that,” said Len. His eyes were dark and haunted. “Any of it.”

  “You didn’t tell me,” she said.

  Len looked away. “This is Twenty-Five. Nobody talks about anything.”

  The Company war. Ash shivered. Wellspring had always won the Company wars. Company wars had meant bonus days at the wellness center, ice cream on the promenade, and afternoons in the park. It wasn’t until she was on Twenty-Five, working the wrecks, that it had occurred to her that war was terrible.

  I have to know, she thought.

  Natalie was talking, now, and Len, too—but she heard louder voices in the margins, in the isolettes, in the tussocks of alien clay shivering above, and they wanted her to listen. Ash ran her hands over the edges of the isolette, pressing the disconnect switches. She heard the top of the isolette loosen with a click and a hiss, and the sterile walls gave way once more.

  She looked down at the beating heart, the ragged place where the human tissue met cloudy plastic tubing. The heart slowed. The machine ground to a halt. The blood moving through the Vai weapon became viscous and still. The isolette was of Wellspring make, as familiar as the plates in her childhood apartment, her first orange jumpsuit, the chained hope she felt upon signing the indenture agreement.

  I have to know if I’m the trigger.

  Dirt and stone became fear and shame and anger, dripping down the walls in lurid reds and yellows. The ground below her rumbled, reaching in bone-rattling shudders up her legs and arms and throat. The weapon sang as she slid her hand against its smooth golden curve, lifting it from the isolette. The blood vessels it had been connected to gasped once, twice more, and putrid, silver-clotted blood puddled on the bottom of the box.

  Like the screamer, the weapon seemed to exist not just in her hands but right under her skin, in her ears, in her mind. The heat was uncomfortable, but it did not burn her fingertips. The light was as bright as a supernova, but her eyes were bathed in blessed black. The weapon whined in its desperation to burst apart. It whispered without words, showed her vast, burning vistas, alien stations ablaze, spoke of revenge, wailed in mourning for the hundreds and thousands of ancestors, milk-white eyes stilled and gone. She saw herself above all of it, her body long and white, her fingers thin, her vision expansive, and she felt a searing pain like she’d never felt before. Death.

  No, more than death—

  “Okay, Ash,” Natalie said. “You can put it down now.”

  “I don’t think I can,” Ash whispered.

  Natalie’s hand twitched near her gun. The strain made her voice tighten. “Put it down.”

  Ash pushed her hand back into the isolette, and her stomach cramped with the effort of letting it go, a spasm of loneliness flooding her fingers at the very thought of it, and when Ash placed the golden crescent back in its hell-sworn bed, she felt an ache like the aftermath of a gunshot to the heart.

  Satisfied, Natalie turned around and stalked off to the door of the administrative wing. Len hovered for a moment, his face a rictus of fear tinged with dark sympathy, then hurried to follow. “Come on,” he said, and turned away.

  T
he crescent was back in Ash’s hand before she knew what she was doing. The weapon sang, dazzled, swirled on her palm. She closed her hand around it, feeling truly warm for the first time in weeks, and when Natalie told her to hurry up, she slid it into her jacket pocket.

  Everything is fine, it told her, now that you are with me.

  It chilled her to the bone.

  20

  Keller stepped into the body of the enemy ship as if she belonged there. Beyond the door was a bright corridor, decorated with scuffed lines of paint running down the center of the deck, military-style. The gentle, sloping curve made her think big, made her think cruiser; the shades of orange and green on the walls made her think merged conglomerate.

  She waddled forward, holding her bladder, looking for a bathroom. With every step, the architecture became more familiar. The ship had updates and a sparkling paint job, but its bones were Armour Shipwrights, the kind they’d sold to smaller companies on both sides during the last major Company war, the kind she’d salvaged over Cana back when colonial corporations were working together instead of stabbing each other in the back.

  And if this is an Armour cruiser, two intersections and a turn should get me to a junction, which means there’ll be a main sewage line running behind there, and a bathroom—

  She hurried, hearing voices, and ducked into the head just as two indentures walked by, slamming the door, holding her breath. She saw two stalls, and one of the doors was closed.

  “Ms. Diallo? That you?”

  Scratch that. One was occupied. Keller dragged herself into the unoccupied stall, closing the door behind her, yanking down her pants in a near desperate motion. She’d never been so happy to find a bathroom, even if it was one of the zero-gee ones, even if she had to whack away half of the vacuum equipment just to use it.

  Even if there was no water.

  She peed, hoping beyond hope that the person in the other stall didn’t notice she was wearing blue pants.

  “Ms. Diallo?” the voice repeated. A man.

  “No,” Keller said.

  “Can you get her?”

  She reached for the cleanser, saying nothing.

  Rustling. The door to the other stall opened. The person sharing the bathroom lingered, then spoke again.

  “Are you okay in there?”

  Keller pulled her pants up, but stopped just before buttoning them, her hands hovering for a moment before she yanked her pants off. She didn’t like the plan coalescing behind her eyes.

  She didn’t like what she needed to do. She didn’t like any of it. She’d have to do it anyway. “No,” she said, then gulped down more guilt. No, more shame. “I’m, uh, actually feeling pretty sick.”

  They wouldn’t put Sharma in a brig, Keller thought. They’d put her with the weapon, in a lab. A lab or a medbay. But I don’t remember where the medbays are on an Armour-type. C-deck? B-deck, by the engines?

  “Do you need me to call Dr. Richards?” the voice said.

  Keller cleared her throat. “No, I’ll walk. Where’s their office again?”

  The man paused. “Eir office.” His voice had picked up a hint of suspicion. “So, yeah, I’ll just call Dr. Richards for you.”

  Keller winced. “Just, uh—just remind me where eir office is—” She swore to herself. “Ah, shit. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t recognize your voice. What are you doing on this deck? What’s your name—”

  He didn’t get a chance to finish his sentence. Keller opened the door to her stall with a vicious yank and barreled forward as hard and fast as she could. The man—a few inches shorter and broader than her, blond, an indenture—barely had a second to react before Keller pushed him against the wall. His head cracked against the plasglas mirror, and he hollered in pain. Keller kneed him before he could recover. He swore at her, doubling over. She pushed his head back into the wall, and this time, he fell to the floor, insensate, a sack of forest green.

  Keller pressed her fingers to his neck.

  A pulse. She exhaled, relief shaking her shoulders. Still alive.

  She stripped the enemy of his clothes, apologizing under her breath: green pants and a jacket, plus the same orange armband she’d seen on the man she’d killed. She buttoned the too-short jacket over her Aurora-blue shirt, tied the armband around her biceps, then hooked her arm underneath the man’s shoulders, dragging him into the stall and closing the door on him.

  She turned to look at herself in the mirror, straightening her hair and frowning at her broken, skewed nose, then locked the bathroom door behind her. She stiffened and walked forward, trying to look as normal as possible. Two men came up behind her; they were dressed like executives, in tight, long skirts and high heels. Absorbed in their briefcases and flimsies, they gave Keller little attention as she ducked into an open office door.

  If I’m right, there should be a crew boss office … there.

  The boss’s office was empty, but there was plenty to rifle through: tools and manifests hung neatly on the walls, and a tech’s jacket hung idle and wrinkled over the back of a chair. It looked like Len’s office might have looked, if Len at any point had ever heeded her requests for him to clean up. She opened the desk drawer and picked up a faded credit chit from a Baylor-McKenna Company store.

  So this is Bay-Ken, or used to be, she thought. Makes sense. The green. Bay-Ken and … who else? Which other Company used orange? I should know this.

  The room boasted an older wall monitor at the back and a haptic holograph on the desk; Keller had been right about the upgrades, the ship had been subject to more recent technological installations. Keller skipped the haptics and went straight to the familiar wall monitor, tapping her fingers against the slick black interface like she was still on Twenty-Five.

  The OS was precisely what she expected from an older Armour install, and a moment’s quest found the query window, where she searched for the ship’s status. The computer obliged with a low, dark drone, returning the kind of basic information that would be available to any low-level requester. The ship’s name was ACS Phoenix, and it belonged to Baylor Wellspring Consolidated, an unfamiliar Company with a very familiar logo.

  Baylor’s slanted sigil overlay blended with the stylized fountain of Wellspring Celestial Holdings.

  Ash’s old Company.

  The shock wore off quickly. It made sense, really. A merger. Two companies that hadn’t made it out of the wreckage of the Lost Worlds on their own, coming together to survive, purchasing a couple of Armour cruisers and going after big-ticket items to reestablish market share.

  “Like a legendary zero-point battery,” she muttered.

  You’ve probably got five minutes before the man in the bathroom wakes up, Ash said, behind her. You should probably figure out where they’re holding Dr. Sharma.

  Adrenaline kicked Keller’s body into sudden, stabbing overdrive, and she whirled. As if Ash had never died, as if this awful day was any plain Tuesday after dinner in the Twenty-Five mess, Ash was perched on the holodesk, one heel on the low support bar beneath her, the other crossed at the knee, her black hair swept up away from the nape of her neck. She was staring at Keller like nothing in the world was wrong.

  Keller tried to speak and found that words failed her as much as her heart.

  “You’re dead,” Keller croaked.

  And you need water, Ash said.

  The dead woman wore the orange uniform and tight-spun ponytail of the Wellspring indenture she’d met on Bittersweet, with the Company logo on her chest. This hallucination was her first memory of the woman, was Ash the day she’d met Keller on Bittersweet—the broken ex-miner with the celestium-streaked hair and the shattered heart. “This is all in my head,” she whispered.

  I’m not kidding, Ash said. They’re going to find that man, and then you’re out the airlock with no suit. Get a move on.

  “What—what are you?”

  Ash smiled in the way she always did—with crooked yellow teeth, infuriating, endearing
. Your own thought process, mostly.

  “So, I’m hallucinating.”

  Her lover’s ghost shrugged. Could be the fact that you’re really fucking thirsty.

  Could be something else. Keller felt a jolt of unease. “I need to find Dr. Sharma.”

  Yes. Before she gives up the zero-point device.

  “She would never collaborate.”

  Ash hopped off the holodesk and crossed the room between blinks. She hovered in front of Keller, smelling of death and metal. Look at me, she said. I’m not sure you can trust what your brain is telling you.

  Keller’s heart ached. “I don’t care. Stay with me.”

  She pushed Ash’s bangs back, to smooth back her hair as she’d done months ago, first in the danger of the mess but then in the quiet of her quarters, in the storage cabinets, on the bridge. But there was no heat in her skin, and no comforting human touch—all Keller felt was a draft of canned air from the environmentals in the corner. The spell broken, Ash and her crooked smile vanished like smoke out an airlock.

  “I wish we’d talked about it,” Keller said to the empty air.

  Keller heard low talking in the corridor, and quiet, casual laughter, and she turned her back to the door, swiping some flimsies from the desk for her cover in case anyone looked inside the office, then returning her attention to the deck plan on the back interface. Once the group in the hallway passed by, she turned back to the interface and requested engineering specs: the power draws, the locked doors, all the quiet little numbers that told a captain all the stories she needed to know about where people were and what they were doing.

  She smiled to herself.

  There was only really one reason to lock a medbay.

  She took one more look at the deck plan, memorizing it, before wiping the request clean, fixing her armband, and setting off into the hallway. She walked forward, toward the engine ring, hiding behind her bangs, holding the manifest in front of her as if she were just another nameless tech on the way to somewhere more important.

  She passed a gaggle of stevedores in the hallway, then the same two executives from before; their eyes slipped over and through her. Just another indenture, whispered Ash.