Architects of Memory

by Karen Osborne

  The tension leached out of the executive’s mouth as she handed the flimsies back. “Drop this off and fix your uniform. If this happens again, you’ll go home. Clear?”

  Keller’s back unknotted. “Yes, sir.”

  “Go on.”

  Keller took off, walking brisk and straight-backed to the main battery, her breath stuck in her throat. Dizzy, adrenaline pumping, she didn’t even turn around to check if the executive was still looking at her. She stopped at the battery door—painted dusty green, with Baywell’s orange logo—and thumbed the comm.

  “Yes?” A man’s voice.

  Keller’s voice squeaked from stress. “Cameron from cargo.” If it worked on the executive, it might work here. “Bringing up the list.”

  “The list? What list?”

  “Vai manifest. I was told to bring it up.”

  A moment passed. She heard the muffled pop of the hatch lock, and the door drifted open. “All right, let’s see it.”

  The main battery was a rangy, thin room extended along Phoenix’s forecourt curve. A large visual interface dominated the room, fed by young people lying prone in haptic chairs, their fingers and foreheads covered in shining silver metal. They shook and thought and worked, their eyes rolled back into their heads, their bodies thin and starved and stuck in syncope. They looked curved and gaunt and weak, as if this were a hospital ward and not the most important war room on the ship.

  Someone had hung a star at the center of the battery.

  No, not a star. The weapon.

  It lay sparkling in a familiar isolette, larger, spherical like a moon and argent like a supernova, just big enough to carry and just bright enough to make the clear lights in the ceiling seem like rudimentary torches. It was beyond beautiful.

  Wires led from the isolette in question to the front targeting computers, connected to an empty chair laced head to toe with haptic wires.

  She moved toward the weapon.

  “Hey,” someone snapped. Keller stopped, turning her head.

  A burly indentured tech rose from where he’d been working on an open panel near a targeting computer. He had a well-cut black beard and wiped an oily substance onto his overalls. He looked her over, his gaze lingering on her face before dropping to her boltgun. His face was dark and unwelcoming, compared to the bright light in the room.

  “Indenture Cameron,” he drawled.

  “Here’s the list,” Keller held it out.

  The man paused, then perused the flimsy with a confused stare. Keller looked from one side to the other, trying to figure out how she was going to get around him to the weapon. “You know,” he said, “I thought there was only one of you on this ship.”

  “I’m his sister,” Keller said, attempting to be dismissive.

  “No,” the man said, after a moment. “Pretty sure you aren’t.”

  She met his gaze.

  He broke, diving for a nearby comm panel. Keller whipped out the boltgun she carried, almost forgetting it was chargeless, then jumped forward to chase him. She threw herself at his legs when he got too close to the computer, feeling the thick fabric of his pants in her grip, and he yelped, coming down hard on his knees. Keller stomped on his leg. He hollered in agony. Keller felt a crunch and a snap in the man’s ankle and a shaking, cracking pain in her own shoulder.

  He dragged himself forward and made a wild grab for the comm panel, but Keller climbed through the pain in her shoulder to grab the waistband of his pants and yank him back. He struggled. She brought down the butt of the gun on back of the man’s head, repeatedly, until she saw blood. The man grabbed at her twice, three times, and then went limp.

  She scrambled to her feet before she could see if he was still alive, pointing the shaking end of the dead boltgun at the young people in the battery chairs.

  Lost in their haptic dreamland, scanning the sector for enemy cruisers, they hadn’t sensed a thing.

  Keller turned back to the isolette. She was shaking too hard to operate the keypad, so she slammed the butt of the gun into the familiar Auroran controls until sparks flew, until the gaunt men rose from their seats like fairy-tale skeletons, until the lights of the isolette flickered and failed. The men roared, clambering forward, calling at her to stop.

  She ripped off the top of the isolette and reached inside. Something ancient and giant and horrible exhaled around her, and the world went dark.

  26

  Adrenaline hit Ash like a blow to the chest, and she slammed the safety release on her straps—but this was a shuttle, where would she go? The pilot raised his visor. He was familiar. He was more than familiar.

  “Please, sit down, indenture. I assure you,” Jie Cantrell said, calm and assured, “that man did not have your best interests in mind.”

  Len stayed seated, shocked and stock-still. Ash couldn’t breathe. The kind, excited doctor who had treated her after her return from the London icebox was the last person she’d expected to see under the pilot’s helmet. She crushed her nails to her palm in her right fist. The pain told her she was still alive. Don’t panic, said her old miner’s hindbrain. You’ll just die faster.

  “He—he—you killed him.” She gasped for oxygen.

  Cantrell flicked the barrel of the gun at Ash’s chair. His voice was ice. “Sit down, strap in, and shut up. It’s dangerous to be up and about while the shuttle’s in flight.”

  Ash fell back, left hand grabbing at the safety straps. Her body felt like rubber and her hands felt wrapped in heavy insulation, and she clutched at the fastenings, nervous, three or four times, before succeeding.

  “You didn’t have to—you didn’t—”

  Len’s wide eyes fixed on the doctor’s dead body. Cantrell checked a reading on the haptic interface that only he could see, his eyes momentarily glassy. “You don’t want to have to do these things,” he said, “but there’s a crisis on, and we do what we must.”

  “What—what crisis?” Len had finally recovered enough to stammer out a few words.

  “The Vai weapons crisis. The fight you started. The blue screamer was a very convincing demonstration, by the way. Everyone’s on their way, and they all seem rather panicked. Some of Dr. Julien’s colleagues basically had to be held back from piloting a shuttle on their own to go get you, Ash, during the molecular waiting period. They wanted to stick antipsychotics into you until nothing was left but drool and reprogram your motor cortex. And it changed the Society’s timeline. We’ve had to rethink our entire approach, and without our top administration. But then, no plan survives implementation, as they say.”

  “Our?” repeated Ash.

  Cantrell stuck his fingers under his uniform collar and fished out a familiar religious medal on a chain. It dangled there in the light of the console, hanging from his thumb, before he let it fall onto his chest. “Our.”

  Ash’s heart beat a tight, frightened bass line; her hands twisted together, her knees shook and knocked. She couldn’t calm her breathing. Beside her, Len’s face faded into a gray shade of green.

  “The cancer at the heart of Aurora Company is real, and has been for some time,” Cantrell said. He placed the gun on the dash, and slid the haptic interface back onto his left hand. “It’s a lot like the cancer at the heart of Wellspring, the science that led to the cataclysm you barely lived through, Ashlan. It’s the cancer at the very heart of our society. We must fight against it. The things they have planned are wrong. We must stand up and fight the things that are wrong, no matter who you are. Don’t you agree?”

  “He didn’t deserve that.”

  She couldn’t stop shaking—she felt like an earthquake that would never end, violent aftershocks slipping into her hands, shaking her jaw. She could not breathe. Julien’s hot blood oozed onto the decking, running in a rivulet toward her boots, in the zigzag pattern dictated by the grav-drive functionality.

  “Did he? Do any of them?” Cantrell adjusted the interface with a flick of his index finger. “All right. Listen. The plan is to shuttle you throu
gh medical elsewhere, where we’ll implant an interference card that will make it difficult for Aurora to track you. By the time they realize you’re gone, you’ll be safe with the Sacrament Society.”

  “Safe.” Ash bit off the word. Her thoughts wandered through a fog as thick as any station smoke spill.

  “You can work with us. You’ll have a place. A voice. In the Society, there’s no such thing as citizen and indenture.” Cantrell made further edits to the interface. “We’re all equal.”

  “You talk equality, and at the same time you’re treating me like I don’t have a choice in the matter.”

  The destination coordinates disappeared, but Ash could still extrapolate where they were going from what she knew about the vectors: the newest Auroran cruiser, Medellin, packed with traitors and parked farther along the x-axis toward the Tribulation sun. “I’m sorry. But it’s not a difficult choice, is it? To go with us? You’re loyal to the truth. That makes you precious. There is no Auroran plan to give you the cure. Julien was truthful about that, at least. If they cure you, they’ll lose their best chance at market share. If you walk into molecular development on Rio de Janeiro, you’ll die there.”

  Ash’s fingers curled; her hand formed a fist. “I’m going to die anyway.”

  Cantrell sighed. “But you still have time. And you still have so much to do. Don’t you see? You’re the missing piece to Dr. Sharma’s research, the key to all of this. In a way, you’ll be the most important person there.”

  “People keep telling me that.” It was hard to speak; it was like her brain itself had shaken loose from its moorings. “And I’d be inclined to believe you, except for the fact that I’ve seen your work. You know, like Captain Valdes and his missing heart. Or the time Dr. Sharma and the lot of you walked onto a Vai colony ship and committed genocide and taught an entire race to hate. You started the war. You kidnapped those aliens. You are the reason all of this began.”

  “And we’re willing to give our entire lives to fix it.”

  She choked spit down a dry throat, heaved in a breath and continued. “You’re willing? I already have.”

  “And it doesn’t have to be in vain.” Cantrell looked back out to the stars and looming, black Medellin, and through the fog Ash thought of Reva Sharma in her medbay, quietly stocking the shelves. Cantrell’s voice softened. “Dr. Sharma told us you were brave. That you were brave and good, and I’m glad to see that she was right.”

  The world turned around her, addled and upside-down, pointing her woozy feet at the floor where Julien’s blood soaked the decking and his shocked, blank eyes looked up to the ceiling and the stars beyond. She found herself looking at him with the eyes of the Vai, through the dead nanotech that congealed in her veins, dragged at her throat. All the people Julien had been—the child, the teenager, the man, maybe the husband, the father, the possibility of a future—all gone in a millisecond, ruined by a bolt. A together of a sort, murdered. She choked down nausea and grabbed at her safety straps for comfort that did not come.

  Going with the Sacrament Society would be just as much a prison as going anywhere else.

  Run, she thought, I need to run, but where? Where could I go?

  Her blood ran hot, banging pots and pans and neutron bombs in her ears, a full percussion section of panicked thoughts. Medellin loomed even larger; a curved, onyx mass that was patently Aurora and much less comforting than Ash would have liked.

  “Don’t make me do this,” she said.

  Cantrell paused for a moment in deliberation. “Make you? Once you see what I’ve seen, you’ll want to. You were an uncitizen once. We want to take down the corporations that see human lives in trade for product and profit, that decide you’re worth something because of how much product you put out. We want to save the stateless, make indenture illegal. Don’t you want that, too?”

  Ash felt a dull, febrile roar in her ears. She thought of Gethsemane—the dead colony, the human bodies, the crumbling, splintering feeling as the human hands dragged her away from her home. It felt like Bittersweet. She weighed the aliens against her human family for clarity and found only indistinct shadows. “I’m nobody. I can’t do any of that.”

  “Let me explain,” he said.

  “She said no, asshole.” Len moved to rise and unhook his safety restraint.

  Cantrell turned in his chair and snatched up the gun, swinging the barrel toward Len. “The fact that you’re not involved doesn’t restrict you from earning the good doctor’s fate, indenture, so sit your ass down.”

  Len closed his mouth and sat down.

  Ash’s eyes went from Len to the gun to the dead man, and she couldn’t even think for the vertigo, the orchestra that played havoc with the world around her, the whispers in her ear that accompanied it. Run, run run run run—

  “Now,” Cantrell said. “You think you’re nobody. Watch.”

  Cantrell flicked a finger. Video popped up in the upper-right-hand quadrant of the viewscreen, laid out over the advancing hulk of dark Medellin. With some shock, she realized it was her, hovering around London in her retrieval pod: she recognized the swift rise and fall of her panicked chest, the dark, dead exterior, the way she’d done her hair, even as the wide, high angle of the camera distorted the image. She watched herself use the pod’s arms to retrieve the isolation chamber with the weapon in it; she watched the computers in the pod flicker and go dark, watched her frantic attempts at fixing them.

  She expected the camera to go down, too. The camera persisted. The tiniest green light flickered on next to the lens; alien-green, like nothing she’d ever seen before. It was just enough light for the camera to log her unhooking herself from her harness and standing, banging one fist on the wall, shouting, sobbing.

  “How did you—”

  “Get this vid when the rest of your pod was down?” Cantrell said. “The camera is based on some Vai optical circuits Aurora picked up just after Gethsemane, the same circuits that power the HUD and half the new haptics we have,” he said.

  “Dr. Sharma put it in?” Ash said.

  “She did.”

  Onscreen, she clawed at the plasteel window. She imagined Keller on the bridge of Twenty-Five, shouting orders. Natalie running pell-mell for the second pod. Len hauling himself around the ship, preparing for battle or an issue or a death or whatever came next. Ramsay, hearing the alarm, pulling herself exhausted from her bed.

  “Watch here,” Cantrell said. “This is where you finally access the weapon.”

  He fast-forwarded; on the screen, she finally stopped throwing herself against the wall of the shuttle and had collapsed on the ground, sobbing over some faraway anguish, then going quiet, like Len had been quiet on the surface of Tribulation during the test. She pulled herself up, then, into the chair, and reached out toward the Heart. Light slipped into her veins, as if poured from her own heart; green light, gold light, blue light, slithering into every capillary. She held out her hand and the Heart trembled in its quarantine chamber, falling dark and silent.

  “You operated it,” said Cantrell. “Hundreds of subjects on Bittersweet, and you’re the only one that can communicate with it. You know how it works, don’t you? Quantum entanglement across the light-years? That’s how it was used the first time, at Tribulation.”

  She started to shiver. “I didn’t operate it,” she said. “It took something from me.”

  It was Cantrell’s turn to look surprised. “What do you mean?”

  Len raised his hand. “I’m told I work for Aurora. I don’t actually remember that.”

  Cantrell blinked. “That makes so much sense,” he said. “And that’s a small price to pay, isn’t it, for such a future?”

  Ash felt as if a great landslide was building inside her, an earthquake that had shaken loose from the gravity of her heart as surely as their shuttle had from the planet. The landslide was the roar of a thousand people, a thousand screams, an echo running in her blood from her heart to her toes and back again. It said: You are going to
die, and the only thing you can control is how.

  “Save you,” she said, “save you from the great Company war. The one that you’ll win with me at your side. Nobody’ll ever see it coming, because nobody knows you exist.”

  Cantrell cleared his throat. “We’re not a Company. We’re impartial.”

  “Nobody’s impartial!” Ash said. “You want it as badly as Mr. Solano and Alison Ramsay! Just because you didn’t walk in there and kill Captain Valdes for his stupid sad heart yourself doesn’t mean you’re not as culpable as your friends who did! Is that what’s going to happen to me? Heart, lungs, liver, intestines, stomach—what else, my spleen? All you need is my blood. Plug me in and go. Isn’t that right?”

  Cantrell’s mouth opened and closed like a fish. “That’s not what we want.”

  “It’s what I’d want. Lungs don’t fight back.”

  “Do you plan to fight back?” He looked amused.

  Medellin sat in the window, coming closer every minute. The tendons in Cantrell’s thin wrist bulged where he held the gun. Underneath his collar Ash could see the white tattoo she’d never have, the inked-up hope she’d never get for herself. Len’s eyes flickered over to the fingers on Cantrell’s left hand, the ones capped with the haptic interface, the ones driving the ship. He was staring at them like he stared at new engines—willing them to divulge their secrets, running checklists in his head. He was planning something. She needed to give him space. A distraction.

  She had a distraction in her pocket.

  “No. I’ll … tell you what I know,” she said, after a few nervous seconds.

  Cantrell sighed. “And what is that?”

  She slid her hand into her jacket.

  “You had a hard time figuring it out because you never were able to understand the Vai,” she said. “You saw the mechs and you figured there were aliens inside with hearts and livers and kidneys. And that’s true. To a point. That’s not exactly how they work.”

  “And?” Cantrell said, raising his eyebrows.