Sharma.
The doctor was bent over the dead alien, using an unfamiliar tool to pull back muscle on its dead, claw-bent arm. Ash winced and stepped forward to see—the white skin was still mostly intact, and she could view the doctor’s work directly on the corpse itself. Ash had seen Sharma’s face like this so many times: the uncanny concentration, the bright, wide eyes, the businesslike mouth. She’d always been able to work well under pressure, Ash knew, but until this point she hadn’t realized just how well.
Orange sketch-soldiers carrying boltguns ran down the corridor outside, and she heard shouting from a distant speaker. Ash jogged to the door and stuck her head outside, following their path. They hung a right into the shuttlebay, and before she could say anything, she heard crates falling and tools scattering over the concrete surfacing, then Len swearing up a storm.
“It’s just a recording!” she yelled. “They’ve got this place wired up like a ship!”
“Figured that out, thanks!” he hollered back.
A young woman wearing a long, orange-dark coat ran down the hall from the offices and slipped right through Ash on her way into the morgue. Ash blinked away the orange light that lined the hologram as she passed.
“I’m busy, Dr. Jessen,” Sharma muttered.
The woman was Natalie’s age, and had a familiar bearing. Ash noticed her WellCel citizen tags and tried to remember if she’d ever seen her from far away on Bittersweet. Maybe. I don’t know. “Problems,” she said.
Sharma kept her eyes on her project. “Bribe the governor, then.”
Jessen straightened, offended. Her voice adopted an arrogance Ash recognized at once as a Wellspring birthright tactic. “Shut up,” she said. “We’ve got Auroran cruisers inbound, coming fast. They saw our ship on the long-range. Allen and our Manx friends have already fragged the ansible, but Command still wants a demonstration.”
This hijacked Sharma’s attention. “Absolutely not.”
“The device is finished. You’re go for launch.”
“Finished but not tested.” The doctor flexed her left hand and looked down at it. “We’ve never tested it on a living human being. We haven’t tested it on a living Vai. And we can’t get our ships out of the way in time.”
The girl put her hands on her hips. “This isn’t doctoral research, Reva. It’s war. We don’t have any more time and I can’t tell you how screwed we’re going to be if Aurora gets hold of this tech. You have to set it off.”
“And if the secondary node calls in reinforcements?”
“We want it to call in reinforcements.”
Sharma was silent. “This was not what I signed up for.”
“We can end the slaughter, Reva.”
“With more slaughter. It doesn’t have to be a weapon.”
The younger woman tilted her head. “If you really believed that, you would have campaigned otherwise at the beginning of all this. But you didn’t. You agreed with the directorate. Did all those indentures die for nothing?”
Sharma was quiet for a moment, and then slid her arms behind her back—Ash had seen Natalie use that stance when speaking with Keller. “If you say we’re ready to set off the device, then we’ll be ready.”
“Good,” Jessen said, her voice going soft for a moment. “Reva, you should be very proud of what you’ve done here.”
The doctor did not smile. “What’s the plan?”
Jessen peeked out into the hallway. “Allen and his people will take care of the Aurorans and clear a path. We’ll put you on one shuttle, the Heart on another, the secondary node on a third with the frag team. The rest of us will evac to the city and hope for the best.”
Sharma looked surprised. “No. I need to go with the weapon.”
“And lose you, too?”
Sharma bit her lip. She was nervous. Ash had never seen the doctor nervous. It gave her a strange, uneasy feeling. “I need to make sure it works.”
Jessen stepped forward. “It will. Just follow the plan. Don’t doubt yourself now.”
“I know.”
“It’s us or them.”
“I know.”
“The team is sedating the other Vai, and the quarantine locker will be on the second shuttle. You have to get on one or the other in ten minutes or we have to leave you behind.” She sighed. “Don’t make me do that.”
Jessen passed through Ash on the way back into the hallway, causing orange light to block her vision. She blinked away the sudden headache. Sharma’s ghost wavered where it was, then placed her hand on the expanse that looked like it might have once been the alien’s forehead. The doctor stroked it with her thumb, as she would a sleeping child, and then leaned over and kissed it, light and sweet, her lips lingering against the dead thing’s cold skin.
She then crossed over quickly to the computer and sat. Natalie jumped up like a popped hull breach, waving her hands, as if the orange light was a cloud of stinging insects.
“Ew. Okay, that’s really weird.”
“What’s she doing?” Ash said.
“Erasing logs,” Natalie said, looking over the hologram’s shoulder. She raised her fingers and tried to follow Sharma’s fingering. “I think. I can only see her keystrokes, so it’s just a guess.”
Ash turned away and walked back to the bed where the alien lay. She looked at its long legs, its folded-in hands, the darkened, chylous eyes. Terrible thoughts wove together in dark patterns behind her eyes. “The Sacrament Society was responsible for the Battle of Tribulation,” she whispered. “Sharma was responsible.”
Natalie’s hands stopped in mid-air. “Manx-Koltar killed London, yeah. It’s war.”
“War between companies. When we were supposed to be fighting the Vai.”
“Doesn’t mean that Sharma was responsible.”
Ash pressed her fingers into the side of the bed. “But you remember those bodies, right? The ones in the last compartment, the Sacrament operative in the black coat, the scientists. We couldn’t figure out how they died. What if someone triggered the weapon, and that’s how they died? The scientists, the rest of the crew?”
“The Vai did it,” Natalie said.
“What if it was someone like me?”
“Impossible—”
“You saw me with the crescent.”
Natalie said nothing in the few moments that followed, then shook her head. The younger woman’s face reflected the pallid light of the monitor. “I don’t know,” she said. “The most reasonable guess is still a Vai attack. I just know—”
The rest of her sentence was drowned out by the rattle of gunfire and shouting from down the hall. Ash’s hand went to the gun at her waist—Len’s gun, confiscated an hour before.
“He’s not armed,” Ash said.
Natalie hurtled into the hallway, taking point. “Right flank, Ash.”
Ash followed, her adrenaline spiking; she felt for a moment like she was in the pod again, like she was a live bomb, shivering, unready, unable to make the connection, ready to go off at any second. Calm down, Keller said behind her eyes—and she focused on following Natalie’s sure stride, turning, coming to a screeching halt alongside her, flanking, spinning up the weapon at a room washed in orange light—
“Holy shit,” Natalie said, relaxing. Her shoulders drooped, and her voice went husky. She wiped the back of her mouth with the sleeve of her jacket and shoved the gun back in its holster. “The log’s still on. We forgot the log was still on. I am a dumba—”
She stopped mid-sentence.
Ash grabbed at her arm.
The cameras in the room stuttered and strove, working overtime to properly render the fight occurring in front of the trashed Armour shuttle. Five soldiers in power armor fought a demon from hell. No—not a demon, Ash realized. A Vai. The orange light painted the Vai’s rawboned body and clawed hands with an infernal tint, lit its whirling eyes and sharp teeth, its wide, roaring mouth, the broken chains hanging on its legs.
The Vai smacked the humans away like toy
s, a gyroscopic nightmare, clawed through their armor, used its fingers to pierce them through the chest, twirl them like rags, fling them to the ground. They fell, one by one, their breath failing, their blood painting the walls, and as they died, their silent forms evaporated like rainfall in the heat of the summer. The Vai, remaining, screamed the sound that gave the creatures their name—the vvvvaaaaaaaiiiiii noise of a dying star, the grinding, heartrending sound of a planet ripping apart.
The renderbots closed their lenses and went silent.
“Jee-sus,” Len moaned, emerging from where he’d hidden behind a stack of storage crates. “I thought you—I thought it—”
He wrung his hands, in the motion he used when he was trying to convince someone that he wasn’t scared, and his eyes focused not on Ash and Natalie but on the alien figure in the center, limned with orange, huffing quietly, recovering its breath. He worked his jaw, picking his way over the moldering bodies on the floor toward Ash and the door. “Can I have my gun? I need to take a walk. I need to—” He gulped, looking down at the corpses, and said nothing more.
Ash offered Len the butt of his boltgun. He grabbed it and exited the room, turning back toward the cathedral. Her attention was on Natalie, who stared, wide-eyed and vacant and shaking, at the recording. She was still holding her own weapon, clutching it so hard her knuckles had gone white. Ash walked up to the younger woman. “Go with him,” she said. “Take a break.”
Natalie stood stock-still, a blank statue. “It’s still here,” she whispered. “The other alien.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s still here.” Natalie looked around the room. “It has to be. Do the math. Three shuttles. Two got out. One’s still here. And the recording’s still going.”
The recorded Vai shook quietly where it stood and examined a gash where flickering orange blood dripped to the floor, evaporating into dust and faint traces of dead glitter in the real world. The renderbots closed their lenses and went silent.
Ash reached for Natalie’s arm. “It’s been over a year. It can’t have survived.”
Natalie narrowed her eyes. “Okay, sure. And I bet you think it’s that priss-face Sharma and her scientists leaving the food wrappers everywhere?”
“You don’t think—”
“Think is bullshit on the battlefield. Think is death. I need to know.” She swallowed. “We need to clear this room. Shit, you don’t have a gun. Get behind me.”
Sudden panic kindled in Ash’s throat. “Okay.”
Ash followed, slow and sure, as Natalie padded her way toward a pile of debris. This side of the room contained the lost detritus of engineers who had evacuated in a hurry: generators left on, their fuel long ago having run out, spanners cast every which way, tool racks turned over in fury, and ration bar wrappers forgotten in the corner, next to a pile of linen smocks.
The pile moved.
“Nat,” Ash said.
Natalie responded with a terse nod. The woman was engrossed, her eyes narrowed, looking down the sight of her boltgun. Ash ducked forward, pushing the pile to the side until her breath caught, until she saw it, until both of them swore and stumbled back, until the orange recording of the bleeding, screaming Vai reflected on the pathetic body below—an alien, but barely recognizable as the same one, wrapped in linen and sallow and shaking, as if it were bracing against a cold wind or hiding from something terrible.
Hiding from us, Ash thought.
The alien barely moved upon seeing them. It was starving; Ash recognized the way the skin stretched over dark bones from seeing severe debtors in the lower echelons of Wellspring Station, walking past them quickly, her mother’s hand tight and painful on hers, before she’d joined them. Either way, the alien was nothing she’d ever seen before. Its mouth worked, the jaw weak, revealing a set of variegated, sharp teeth. It had a face—eyes and a nose—but she would be hard-pressed to call it anything like human. Near the alien’s hand were empty syringes with familiar labels.
“Don’t get closer,” said Natalie.
“That’s trihex,” Ash said.
She breathed in; she could detect no smell, no sign of rot. She leaned over to pick up one of the syringes, and the alien moved: the antelope-horn fingers first, then a ragged, strained breath in the torso. The alien’s eyes opened, milk-opaque, focusing. Like a tidal wave, Ash’s mind was filled with burning ships, inhuman screaming, a crown of stars above an unfamiliar planet, blood on her hands, fear, fear, human figures in monstrous guise, loneliness, loneliness, staggering loneliness and terrible hunger, don’t hurt us, don’t hurt us—
Ash screamed, clawing at her head.
In a quick half second, Natalie was up, her gun primed and wailing, flanking Ash. “I’ve got you.”
“Don’t,” Ash screamed.
“You saw what it did to the others, sir,” Natalie replied, her hands steady, calling her sir like she were back at Cana and Ash was a citizen, leveling her even, half-glazed stare at the alien. It uncurled, made a high, sibilant noise, and reached out its hand toward the women, a ration bar wrapper open and crackling in its thin hand.
“It was hiding from us. It’s scared,” Ash said.
“It should be,” Natalie responded, her eyes like flint.
“It’s a witness to what happened here,” Ash said, “and I think it was just talking to me.”
“You’re sick,” Natalie said. “Sir, I need to put it down. You have no idea what these things did to my unit.”
“Or what the Sacrament Society did to them first.”
“Sir, I respectfully disagree.”
“We don’t have enough information.”
“It’s the enemy, sir; that’s all the information I need to know.”
“Stop scaring me, Nat.” The words came out as final, as Keller-like, as commanding as Ash could make them, and she pulled herself up, her shoulders back, fighting the nausea that had been a constant companion since she woke up after London. She ran her hand through her hair. “It’s in no condition to hurt anyone.”
“Um, I think there might be some shuttles descen— Holy shit,” Len said. He appeared at the door, paused, gulped, and the three humans watched in almost reverent quiet as the Vai staggered to its knees and pointed straight at Ash. Its hands were thin, seven-fingered, topped with tearing claws; one claw was set with a thin line of tiny diamonds. Along the alien’s right side was a set of ill-healed wounds, ragged skin set in nasty blue scars. It keened again but did not open its mouth.
“It likes you,” Len muttered.
“Um,” said Ash.
It extended its hand.
Orchestras sounded, somewhere far-off, hits of angry brass. The sighs of the dead. Fear. The weapon in her pocket told her what she needed to do.
“Do you hear that?” she said.
Len exchanged worried looks with Natalie. “We don’t hear anything. Come on now, step back—”
Ash looked back at the alien. She took a few tentative steps forward instead, opening her hands in what she hoped was a pacifying gesture.
“What were they doing to you?”
The alien continued to speak, adding an octave—a ghosting, ethereal, questioning note far above the first note, in a register Ash couldn’t quite hear. The lids of the milk-white eyes narrowed, looked around the room one last time, and with a smooth motion the Vai grabbed Ash’s arm, plunging the diamond claw into the soft flesh of her wrist. The world went blurry and bright in the shocking pain, turned on its side and back again, and beyond the hollering she vaguely recognized as Natalie’s voice, she heard a new song.
Baby. Baby, it’s all coming down around us. It’s all coming down. We have to leave now. We have to go, or everything’s gone.
“Christopher?” she gasped.
22
Sharma sat at a haptic console, looking hunched and hungry. She was half hidden behind a representation of the London weapon, turning round and bright, shining like a diamond lit for display in a museum. The doctor’s own
dark eyes were the opposite—dull and striated with red, rimmed with sleepless exhaustion.
Keller’s identity took a moment to register, but when it did, the doctor jumped to her feet, brushing off her hands on her filthy blue pants, as though looking good for Keller still mattered. Sharma was wearing an ill-fitting green shirt, like Keller had seen on the executives in the hallway, but the pants were Auroran, the pair she’d been wearing when she left for the planet’s surface a day earlier, now streaked and soiled with red Tribulation dirt. She crossed the room to stand in front of Keller, her face bright with surprise.
“You can trust me,” Sharma said.
“I need water,” whispered Keller.
“Just stand there,” Sharma said, “and tilt your chin down. You’ll look like security.” She pointed at the ceiling with her other hand. Keller followed the motion with her eyes, checking for cameras. She didn’t see them, but this was Ramsay’s world, and she’d assumed a hundred things about Ramsay that turned out to be wrong. She could assume nothing.
The doctor crossed the room—methodically, like the request was ordinary—and filled a beaker from a dispenser spigot. Keller kept her chin tucked, looking around. The lab was small but tiered, set up around what looked to be an operating theater. In the center was a metal bed, flanked by haptic devices she couldn’t quite explain. A grand gathering of cables met underneath, ran aft, and rose toward the ceiling, separating where the bulkheads met, threading into the wall. In a place like this, Keller hoped to see medical trays full of surgical tools she or Sharma could use as weapons, but the surfaces were clean.
“You’re working for them.” Keller fought a deep and dark disappointment.
“No. She thinks I am, but no. This isn’t my first trip into the glorious lands of corporate espionage.” Sharma snorted, and returned to Keller, handing her the beaker of water. Every cell in Keller’s body screamed for it, and she lifted it to her lips. The liquid was cold, sweet, and welcome, with a metallic tang that betrayed its recycled origins. It tasted like heaven.
“I’m so glad you got away,” Sharma said.
Keller took another gulp of the water. “Got away is a pretty charitable description of what’s been happening. How’s Twenty-Five?”
Architects of Memory Page 21
