Architects of Memory

by Karen Osborne

  She held her breath as they passed; she swung herself into the ship’s central spine and climbed down to the engine ring, trying to hold back giddy sobs of relief.

  Dropping two floors, Keller turned right and found herself in front of the medbay with the locked door. She whipped out the multi-tool in her pocket, looked both ways, and tried to remember the last time she worked an Armour door. The door clicked after a few breathless moments and slid open.

  Keller was staring straight at an exhausted and stunned Reva Sharma.

  21

  Behind the door leading out of the cathedral of death, Ash found narrow hallways, stale air, the faint smell of loam and organic decay and more empty ration bar wrappers. She kicked one aside, watching it skitter to the wall. She was starving, but she knew she couldn’t possibly eat, not with what she’d just seen. The very thought of eating made her stomach lurch. She covered her mouth to keep her last meal where it belonged, letting Natalie and Len take point, the symptoms of her unknown illness warring with the wear and tear of the last few months. The weapon in her pocket whirred and sang, and she drifted off for a moment, the world going blessedly foggy.

  A quick tug on her sleeve brought her back. Len and Natalie were waiting for her to fall in before heading through; the sphere burned and glittered in her hand, a warm, jealous presence. They can’t know I have you. It’s just for now. Just until I know what’s going on, she thought.

  Can’t connect, the voices answered. Can’t connect.

  Connect to what?

  It hummed. No routing to node.

  “Ash,” Len said. His eyes went, nervous, to the motion of her hand. “You don’t look okay.”

  “Sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Clear,” Natalie said, moving into the hallway.

  Len went for his flashlight. This part of the compound was a tight, long corporate hallway that led to another scoured-out tunnel. The lights guttered above, connected to whatever solar power backup that had kept the rest of the facility running all this time. The gray walls were decorated with tasteful black-and-white landscapes. Just like the uncitizens’ dorms on Wellspring where she’d grown up, there was just enough decoration to be palatable and enough blank wall to remind you to whom you belonged.

  To the right were a set of office doors decorated with plain wooden slats displaying unfamiliar officials’ names. The plain styling seemed to speak of every Company Ash had ever known yet implicated no Company in particular. Many of the doors were open, revealing bare desks with broken computer terminals, glass shattered against floors and walls, plastics and circuitry spilling out over thin gray throw rugs.

  A few offices still had bookcases against the walls and pictures on the desks—family pictures, taken on temperate planets, featuring men and women with the healthy builds and white tattoos of birthright citizens. She thought of the picture of Christopher on her vanity on Twenty-Five, now less than dust.

  One office had a set of ancient file cabinets, the drawers open and blackened, the ashes of flimsies and actual paper scattered all over the floor. One office seemed to have been Sharma’s; Ash saw pictures of the woman ten years younger than she was on Twenty-Five, holding hands with another middle-aged gentleman and standing near two handsome teenagers. Next to it was a note, in Sharma’s handwriting: My Family.

  “This was a bugout,” Natalie said.

  “Not an assault?”

  “No,” she said, pointing at the terminal connections below the desks. “These were firebombed. On purpose.”

  Ash walked into Sharma’s office, circling the desk, opening the drawers, scanning through: empty, aside from a few crumpled ration bar wrappers, someone’s experimental printouts, and scattered flimsy pens. She lifted the printouts, paging through, but didn’t recognize any of the scientific terminology.

  Natalie popped up behind Ash, a dirty index finger pointing to the date. She’d seen the same thing. “The doc left the planet to fend for itself,” Natalie said, reading the chart over Ash’s shoulder. “She left them all to die and left in the shuttles. That was her we heard in the record, wasn’t it? Back on London?”

  Ash struggled to bring up her memory of the woman’s voice, but found it drowned out by the horror of the dead captain’s beating heart, the aching, desperate cold. “I think so.”

  “She left them all to die,” Natalie repeated, scowling. “And M-K knew. They harbored Captain Valdes’s killer.”

  “Hey, they might know just as little about this as Aurora does,” Ash said. “Nothing. We’re still just guessing as to who he was.”

  “You’re presuming that Aurora is completely innocent,” Len said, and the two women quieted, staring. Len shrugged at this, his face grim. His hands slipped into his pockets. “What’s necessary during a war effort becomes a war crime afterwards. And you don’t think people aren’t going to kill each other over zero-point tech? It might have been the best decision she could have made. If she couldn’t get back under the radar, maybe, or if she couldn’t find her coconspirators.”

  “Tearing out somebody’s heart is necessary?” Ash said. “What the hell, Len?”

  “When you’re up against the wall, necessary feels like it has a different definition. War is just like salvage: you’ve got a problem in front of you, so you have to figure out a way around that problem,” he said.

  Natalie looked at him with a hard-edged respect. “We need to talk about this.”

  Len pushed off the wall. “Later. Let’s find something more useful to do. A look at some real equipment will tell me more about this mess, and if there were shuttles here…”

  He moved down the hallway, whistling, following the painted floor into another corridor and around a bend.

  “Jackpot,” he said.

  Ash rounded the corner and nearly slammed right into Len’s back. Natalie skidded to a stop, her eyes wide.

  The space was a pod bay, excavated from the earth itself like the other rooms and sized big enough for three four-person shuttles. The walls and floor were decorated with yellow safety patterning, with a closed hatch in the ceiling just big enough for the firebombed Armour shuttle in the corner. The south wall was decorated with tools, the north with stacked storage boxes, the east with flimsy logs hanging on clipboards. If it hadn’t been for the twisted black wreckage and the six dead bodies rotting on the floor, Ash might have thought that the people who worked here were expected to return at any minute.

  The soldiers no longer looked human. They’d been savaged with some sort of serrated weapon before they died, their black mercenary jackets ripped and torn. Dried blood lay in quiet, branching puddles around their hands, their stomachs, their heads. Their eyes, rotten holes, lay as open to the local insects as their shattered jaws. She turned away in seconds, wandering instead to the inorganic wreckage of the shuttle, the smashed interior, the burned, twisted plasteel hull. “This would have been a pretty big fire,” she said. “Do you think they died because of that?”

  Natalie squatted near the bodies, kicking aside another empty ration bar wrapper. “No. They’re not burned. Three women. Two men. Not sure about the last.” She pointed to the body closest to the door. “That one was thrown against the wall. His back was broken. The one closest to the ship has wounds on his chest. They’re deep enough that they punctured his lungs.”

  She gulped, then pointed at a third. “This one had a broken neck. But he suffered before that. And they got a few shots off before they died.”

  “A mech?”

  “I’ve never seen a mech do this,” Natalie said.

  “Hey, more clues,” said Len, who was bent over a large, half-burned storage box, ignoring the bodies. He fished out what looked like a pod gravity stabilizer and waved it at them.

  “Engine parts are clues?” said Ash.

  “Yeah,” he said, dipping back down. She heard crashing noises; metal against metal. Len was not being careful. “The parts in here make me think they had an InGen retrieval pod, maybe a Wells
pring pile driver. All of them could have fit through the hidden bay doors above and broken atmo. This,” he said, picking up an unfamiliar silver box, “is for that Armour Ace 4400.”

  “Valdes’s log said two shuttles got off the planet. You think…?” Natalie said.

  Ash cleared her throat to get the stench of fire and death out of her lungs. “I think it’s too much of a coincidence. What else did you find?”

  Len paused. “You two keep on. I’ll look for clues in here. I’ll meet you around the bend when I find something.”

  Ash pulled back into the hallway and continued exploring. The next doors belonged to labs: microscopes and machines, some shattered, most with their power cords ripped away from the wall, as if they wanted to destroy them but not the source of the power that was keeping the rest of the experiments alive. The smell of decay became stronger; Natalie pressed a glove to her mouth and muttered to herself.

  Natalie pushed open the half-closed metal door at the end of the hallway. It swung open, revealing a smell that was weighty and wet, rotten and stale. The lights flickered but stayed on long enough for Ash to see a long silver table in the center, several cabinets with their doors open and contents strewn across the room, a large pile of smocks and blankets in the corner, discarded ration bar wrappers, and fat cables running from a large, flickering computer system into a hole in the ceiling.

  Above the table hung large machines that resembled the laser cutters she’d used to section celestium from stone on Bittersweet, and a standard intravenous injection machine she’d been hooked up to in Aurora hospitals. To the right were four isolettes, all carrying circular molecular hullbusters connected to lumps of flesh that might have once been kidneys.

  But none of that stank like the thing at the center of the room.

  Natalie covered her mouth, and a disgusted, strangled noise caught heavy on Ash’s tongue.

  There was a white, smooth thing on the bed, laid up and tied there, covered with a white linen smock. It took her a moment to recognize fingers, legs, arms, the blank orbs of what could be eyes, the dark braided lines of bones and disintegrating muscle. This was a dead body, dead for months, disintegrating at a different pace than the soldiers on the pod bay floor. It was clearly not human.

  Glory, whispered the weapon in her pocket.

  Natalie dragged herself up and reached out toward Ash’s left hand, lacing their fingers together. She looked miserable. “What the hell is that?” she whispered.

  The dead figure was vaguely humanoid, in the fashion of a bird or a gazelle; the floor was covered in a putrid, sticky slime, and the elven, clawed fingers had long since rotted to bone. She couldn’t tell how long it had been dead. Ash forced herself to walk around it, observe the slack jaw with its sharp silver teeth, see the graceful and articulated bones of its long-dead hands.

  “It’s a Vai,” she said. “I mean. It has to be.”

  “Nobody’s ever seen one.”

  “What the hell else could it be?” Ash said.

  Natalie moved toward the dead thing, taking in its bony fingers, its empty eyes, the remains of its life-starved, desiccated flesh. “No, you’re right. It makes sense. Basic Auroran engineering, right? If you’re trying to figure out how something works, you’re going to want the original model it’s based on.”

  “Nat,” Ash said, “has it occurred to you how big this is?”

  “No shit,” the younger woman whispered.

  “If Sharma was using Vai in her experiments here, as well as humans? When the Company was telling the rest of us that nobody had ever even seen one, let alone—let alone this?”

  Ash flashed back to the war propaganda she’d seen while on Bittersweet—the commercials encouraging uncitizens to apply for citizenship through the military program, the bloody footage from the battlefields over the Lost Worlds, the sobbing news anchors after the first contact massacre at Gethsemane. She remembered footage of the lethal silver teardrops that were Vai fighters, of the stunning war machines on the Cana plain, of the blue-green flicker of razor-sharp Vai weaponry taking apart a Bay-Ken cruiser. She remembered the carelessness of their desire to kill. The sheer destruction they’d brought on bodies and bones. The fatal, silent ease of their suicide lines.

  But of Manx-Koltar and Aurora above Tribulation, there were only stories.

  The stories said that the Companies turned back the alien onslaught, but they’d never said exactly how. The strength of our alliances, the plutocrats said, the backbone of our industry and the leadership of our executives.

  The smell of our bullshit, whispered Kate at the back of her head.

  Natalie shook her head, tapping her finger against the table. “I don’t get it,” she said. “I just don’t understand. How did this one get captured? They kill themselves rather than be captured.”

  “Some of the experiments outside are dated before the war,” Ash said.

  Confirmation flickered over the younger woman’s face. She drew a thin breath between her teeth. “You don’t think they started killing themselves because of this one, here?”

  “It’s possible.” Ash skirted the table and sat down in a rolling chair nearby. Her shoulder ached with the motion. She tested the power button of the flickering computer system with one index finger and felt the comforting, telltale rumble of Auroran-based computer system starting up. “Maybe the Vai were just trying to rescue their friend.”

  Natalie narrowed her eyes. “That’s naïve.”

  “I’d do it.”

  “Yeah, it’s also likely that old Solano’s gonna go full equality on the entire Company and give kids citizenship.” Natalie’s voice had taken on a hard, sarcastic edge. “The Vai care about killing us, and nothing else. You can’t compare anything they do to human thought, to human life. That’s a massive logical leap, Ash. You make logical leaps like that in battle, and people die.”

  No routing to node, the crescent spun from her pocket. But you are with me. You are with me.

  Ash felt her stomach churn. “But they’re sentient, right? They must have—I don’t know, feelings. Families. Friends. They have to care about something. Or else, what was it all for?”

  “You are fucking wrong.” Natalie looked away, dropping a curtain on the conversation.

  Ash swallowed a sour retort and dropped the line of inquiry, focusing on the machine in front of her. This computer had been carefully ignored in the bugout—had been kept connected to the backup generator system that was powering the rest of the facility. The screen flashed as it connected to the renderbots in the facility, loading with a simple circle, silver on black, with an infinity sign turning and glistening in the center.

  The Sacrament Society—whatever they were—hadn’t spent much time on the operating system of the computer. This one sported white-on-black text and simple iconography with a keyboard interface, nothing like the complicated, beautiful haptic graphics and slick operation of the postwar Auroran fleet. She tried to open the main drive to search for ansible messages or security logs, but the system asked her for a passcode.

  “Hey, let me,” Natalie said, and Ash traded places with her. Ash rested her hand on the back of the chair, distracted by the dead alien. Natalie wriggled her fingers and set to her first guess. Invalid, said the interface.

  “It’s weird that this computer isn’t firebombed like the others,” Ash said. “It works fine.”

  “Well, if you think you’re coming back…” She trailed off, then opened a salvage window. “You leave a back door, you leave a server. We know that someone got off the planet, right? That there were at least two shuttles.”

  Natalie entered a nine-digit number and the computer’s main menu flashed into being. She smirked and started looking for the security logs. “This was definitely Reva’s console.”

  “Wait,” Ash said. “How do you know her passcode?”

  Natalie smirked. “Six months with anyone who isn’t a hacker, and it’s obvious. Sharma’s smart, but I’m not sure she had a prope
r computer tech here.”

  “Do you know my passcodes?”

  Natalie snorted. “What do you think?”

  Ash rolled her eyes, then moved away from the computer screen, letting Natalie scan the file system. She searched the room again, supporting herself against the cold-packed earth, noting the room’s flickering lights, scattered flimsies, layers of opaque dust. She tried not to look at the dead body, its crooked arms, its thin, knobby knees, its broken ribs, its predatory, skinny claws.

  Less a medical bay than a morgue, she found herself thinking, pushing off from the wall, fighting her typical dizziness as she leaned over, picking up pill bottles and printouts.

  Kerithromycin. Bescinol. Korithstat. Not medications she recognized.

  The Effect of Half-Life Hemolytically Soaked Celestium on Human and Vai Physiology.

  How to Remove the Human Heart for Use in Experimental Processes. There were diagrams.

  She gulped and dropped those flimsies on the floor. Definitely a morgue.

  “Ash, I’ve found some logs,” Natalie said. “Local storage. She, ah, taped whatever experiments she did here. Her autopsies. I think someone tried to wipe them, but they left the cameras on when they bugged out. The last file was automatically closed out when there was no more drive space.”

  “They had a haptic recording system? Like on London?”

  “Want to see the last couple minutes of this horror show?”

  Ash wanted to say Hell no, but kept her mouth shut. Light swirled up—a red-orange holographic grid that dredged up shivering, unwelcome memories of the London bridge in Ash’s unwilling mind. She eyed the renderbots in the ceiling—earlier, bulkier versions of the panopticons that watched over London and her hospital room on Rio, recording and remembering and reporting whatever they saw. The renderbots drew feet, hands, a knee-length coat that might, in life, have been white. The ghost was a woman—dark hair, tight bun, compact frame. More than familiar. She was family.