“All a Vai needs to do is touch a weapon to set it off.”
“That’s all?”
“Mostly. I think you need to talk to it. The moleculars are somewhat intelligent. They connect to the local Vai node,” she explained. “Except that the Vai node was slaughtered twenty minutes ago, and even before that, it had been divorced from its mainframe. Anyway, the weapon talks to you. You talk back. It responds to commands given by any local Vai. Or…” She paused. “Or, I suppose, the closest thing would be me, right?”
“Talk to it,” Cantrell said, clearly skeptical.
“Like you’d talk to a friend.”
“How do you know?”
“Because we’re together.” Ash fished the whining crescent out of her pocket; it felt like a beating heart, a straining violence, a quiet desire for death. It twirled heat up her arm in anticipation of what she might have to do, spoke in delicate whispers of blood and energy. She pulled it out. A soft golden shimmer lit the cabin, and Cantrell jerked back, his eyes wide.
“Great fucking Arbiter,” he whispered. “This is everything we’ve worked for. Everything we’ve dreamed.”
Len took Cantrell’s momentary distraction as a chance to slide his arm toward his safety release.
Violent-white, sibilant, curved like a knife, the golden crescent rested in her palm. It trembled, warmed in her hand, and in some sort of language she’d never heard before, called out for alone. The percussion pressing against the back of her eyes graduated to a crescendo.
We’re going home, it said.
“You don’t want peace, do you, Mr. Cantrell,” said Len. It was more of a statement than a question.
By now, Medellin filled the viewscreen, a black hulk blotting out the stars; she could see the lights on the bow, blinking stubborn and sure against the freeze. The Aurora curves should have been comforting; instead, they twisted her stomach. She began to shake, and she clutched the weapon close to keep it from falling. The thing warmed in her hand, until it was almost too hot for comfort. It told her, in sibilants against the back of her neck, that it loved her.
“We are so close to everything humanity ever dreamed of, everything we’ve been working for. An equal society, built on the zero-point energy the weapon provides. Don’t you want to go down in history as the person that made that happen? A society where people don’t have to be indentured? Hungry? Without debt? Where all people can live as equals, and do what they like?”
“And how many people am I going to have to kill to make that happen?” she whispered, thinking of the tall man who had taken Captain Valdes’s heart in vain, who had perished along with everyone else. “How many people did you kill on Tribulation? God, your own people—the spies on London and Mumbai and the M-K ship?”
Cantrell blinked. “We didn’t kill anyone at Tribulation. It was the Vai, they—”
“Dr. Sharma reverse-engineered the Heart in that lab on Tribulation. That’s what the Vai call the device you’re all looking for. She changed it so that when they showed up, the Vai wouldn’t upload. They’d all die. And she did something to the humans, too. Something awful. Not like we weren’t already doing a good enough job of being awful already. And, of course, it took her a year to get back to the battlefield to retrieve it without tipping off the hand of anyone at Aurora. There’s one last thing I don’t know: Who was the trigger?”
“What?”
“If the weapon was usable on its own, you wouldn’t be chasing me. You need a trigger. It can charge without one, sure. But to set it off? To—I don’t know, to delete everything—you need a trigger. Who was your trigger at Tribulation?”
Cantrell blinked. He wavered, for the first time that afternoon looking a little less than smug. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Was it Aster Jessen, the other doctor? Did she die like I’m going to die?”
They were so close now that Medellin felt like an entire planet, an inviolable, unbreakable wall. Ash could see the details on the sleek black hull and the hatch to the cargo bay opening on the inside. Once they got there, she’d be rushed out, pushed somewhere, installed like she was some sort of part, ordered to work and told that was equality. Indenture. Slavery. It was her payment for being born into the wrong life, for the generations before her who never saved enough to become citizens. If she allowed the shuttle to land, she would be a citizen as long as she lived, and her hands would destroy in the name of the Company or the Sacrament Society or whatever other group stole her away.
Her children would be citizens, as she always wanted: children not of her body but of her blood, young birthright soldiers with their bright faces being turned and changed, celestium in their veins, nanotech slipping out their fingers, orchestras in their heads, watching the world come apart, willing sacrifices to a war that would go on forever.
“I won’t do this for you. I won’t do this for anyone. The only thing I’m going to do is take this shuttle beyond the White Line and find the together and make peace,” said Ash.
Cantrell’s face reddened. He was done being polite. “Come with me willingly, as a war hero, or you can come as a prisoner. Either way, we’re going to Medellin.”
“No,” she said. “We’re not.” Ash thought she would feel frightened, but with the Vai crescent in her hand, all she felt was anger and a strange kind of loud, humming power that filled her fingers and her arms and her head with noise.
“Tell her I was going to come to Albany,” said Len. “To meet her dad. I wanted to go to that little place she talked about by the river, the one with the coffee and the mango ices.”
“What?” said Cantrell.
“I mean, I’m dying,” he said. She could hear the rattle in his chest. “I was dying the moment I walked those ten miles, breathed that air. I can’t pay for it. I was dead the second I didn’t stop Natalie in the hangar. I can’t live with it, Ash.”
“You said you wouldn’t give up,” she said, reaching for his hand. “You said we carry each other.”
“So don’t let me down,” he said.
Before she could protest, Len pressed down on the release tab; the safety harness flew back, and he was up in a split second, throwing his body toward Cantrell. The doctor fired. The bolt burned Len in the soft mass of his stomach, but he kept on barreling forward anyway. Len slammed Cantrell with a tough right hook and pressed him against the bulkhead, grabbing his right wrist and clobbering it against the molded metal, attempting to get him to drop the gun. Cantrell was clearly the better fighter; he slammed his heel onto Len’s foot, loosening Len’s grip long enough to push him off, swinging the gun around one last time.
“Do it!” Len called.
“You’ll die!”
Cantrell responded by firing again, hitting Len in the shoulder. Len staggered back, bleeding.
“Tell Natalie I love her,” he gasped.
Cantrell fired the boltgun at close range. Len fell against the wall, clutching at his gut. His hands came away covered in blood. Cantrell advanced, the gun spooling up for another round. Len closed his eyes, blood flowing from his mouth. Ash stumbled forward. The weapon told her what she should do.
“Stop this,” Ash screamed.
Glory, came Christopher’s quiet voice.
In her hands, the crescent shook and shuddered; small portals opened at the top and the bottom. Green light poured out. She expected particles—chasing, swirling, like they had with the blue screamer—but this time the light multiplied, slithering into the corners and the shadowy places behind the seats, slipping up the gun barrel, filling Cantrell’s open mouth with bright blood.
The light bent backward and found her very pores, drilling into her eyes, silencing her heart. Pain sliced her skin like a thousand knives at once, carving lines in her belly, separating muscle from bone. Her blood slowed to a trickle. The world pulled away from her. This is it, she thought. This is death.
Upload, Christopher sang in her mind, long ago and far away. Cantrell leaned back, clutching
at his chest, then his throat, then the air in front of him. He began to peel apart, slivers of his skin stripping away, floating in front of his frightened eyes. Panicked, he threw himself toward Ash, screaming with a shredded larynx, his slivered fingers attempting one last grab at the weapon. And then, like the end of a twisting firework, the floating slivers burned with hot white light and consumed what was left, leaving a faint cloud and the acrid scent of burning oil.
Len looked over his shoulder. Ash pleaded for the weapon to stop, screamed at it to end, but the process continued. Len’s eyes shone red and streaked with white light; from his fingers erupted skeins of silver thread. He opened his mouth to say words that couldn’t come out, reached out to her, and with a shredded cry, evaporated.
As hastily as it had taken hold, the light let her go, and Ash could breathe again. Her blood shielded her, saved her, like it had in the forest.
She clawed her way into the pilot’s chair, sober and sobbing.
Run, she thought.
27
Swaddled in the darkness of the living star, Keller tasted blood, then night, then silence. The temperature crashed. Memories flickered somewhere dark and deep: Auroran ships burning so hard they could be mistaken for stars, andan trees swaying in the breeze on Neversink, the astringent smell of Twenty-Five when it was new. All of it danced and sang and disappeared, and then only blank silence remained.
The moment took forever and lasted less than a second. It crushed her so completely that she could not breathe and filled her lungs with the musty breath of an ancient and dire need. She was intoxicated, sent whirling, subsumed. Even the Tribulation sun suffocated beyond the window, sacrificed to the black hole at the center of the battery.
One by one, the computers rebooted.
The orange Baywell logo graced the grand interface over the targeting computers, filling the room with charring light.
Keller stood, coming back to herself, her hand still wrapped around the weapon’s warming curves. It was beyond cold. Her joints howled with pain. The men in the battery room lay where they’d dropped, taking in shallow, broken breaths. Their eyes were focused somewhere past the bulkhead, somewhere past the stars, their faces in rictus, like they were witnessing the bloody end of the world. She checked her chronometer: it hadn’t even been ten minutes, but then, she’d expect a ship like Phoenix to have more efficient solar chargers than Ash’s pod.
She stumbled toward the door, the weapon whispering glory in her hindbrain. It had been waiting for her, she knew, thrilling her blood, sending a stab of yearning, longing, lust into her fingers and toes. She felt cleaner. It felt like sleeping next to Ash, if Ash hadn’t been dead. There was a word she wanted so badly she could taste it, digest it, eat it: together.
“It’s a mindfuck, isn’t it?” A familiar voice.
Blinking, Keller watched Alison Ramsay swing in from the darkened corridor, blocking the door. Still swirling in the aftermath of the weapons fire, Ramsay looked less like another human being and more like stark lines and howling anger and stinking, charring black. She was holding a boltgun in her right hand.
Keller stumbled to a sick and dizzy halt. Boltguns. I’m so sick of goddamn boltguns.
“How are you awake?” she asked.
“A literal mindfuck,” Ramsay said, tapping the barrel of the gun against her temple. She advanced, three short steps. “See, Dr. Sharma was right on both counts. It’s a zero-point battery, sure, but it’s not just sucking the energy from Phoenix, is it? No, it’s going much further than that. Congratulations, Kate. You’re a killer, just like the rest of Aurora.”
Keller stepped back, trying to keep some distance between them. She checked the gunners’ bodies again, watched their chests rise and fall. “They’re not dead. They’re still breathing.”
“Are they?” Ramsay gave the living dead less than a cursory glance. “Does it really matter if they’re breathing? That thing just sucked the memories straight out of their minds. All the years that were left. All the electric signals in their brains, bouncing neuron to neuron, or did Dr. Sharma not tell you that was the way it worked? You took everything they were. Everything they were going to be. Congratulations, Kate. You’re a Vai. Just hand it over.”
Keller felt something wet dripping from her nose; she wiped it and found blood smeared on the back of her hand. She was loath to believe anything that came out of Ramsay’s mouth, but the young men hadn’t moved.
“Your boltgun is dead. You’ll have to punch me to death.”
“It’s not a boltgun.”
Smirking, Ramsay turned the weapon toward the veins of starlight spreading across the floor, so Keller could see its ancient, deadly lines: it was old, made of bright, burnished silver metal, with a stock and a hammer and a cylinder for projectile ammunition. She had seen something like it before in a museum exhibit about pre-corporate Earth.
Keller felt the weapon respond to her twisting, sudden fear, rumbling and building in heat. Of all the dangerous, stupid things to bring aboard a spacecraft, this was one of the worst. She stepped back. “That’s a bullet gun. You’re crazy. You brought a bullet gun and you’re threatening me five feet from the hull?”
Ramsay ran a thumb up and down the handle. She flashed white teeth in the burning light of the reboot. “Don’t worry. As close as I am, it’ll be quick.”
The dark terror in Keller’s chest was staunched by a rising, red anger. “And you call me a murderer. That the kind of thing they teach you, growing up in Wellspring? Or are you a Baylor kid?”
“Wellspring? No. I’m just as Auroran as you.” Ramsay laughed, and it sounded like broken glass. “Maybe this’ll help explain things. I didn’t grow up on Brown’s Station, like it said in my file. I had that changed. We all had that changed, every single one of us that made it out. No, I grew up on Gethsemane.”
A thick liquid, gagging and metallic, slipped down the back of Keller’s throat, warring with bare shock. “Can’t be. Everyone at Gethsemane died in the massacre.”
“War propaganda,” Ramsay said. She slipped her thumb behind the hammer of the gun and cocked it; it made a stunning snick-click in the broken silence, and Keller jumped. “There were three shuttles for the executives and their families. None for the rest of us, of course, but that was Auroran evac protocol at the time. Execs first. That’s how Aurora taught me that nothing is truly yours until you take it. Baylor Wellspring understands that.”
“You’re a birthright?”
“No, I was a farmer’s kid,” she said. “They were going to leave me behind, just like those poor assholes on Tribulation. So, I took a spot for myself. With my father’s gun. This gun.” She held it up; it caught in the light. “You have to fight for what you want, Kate, or else you’re just a dead body burning at the end of the world. Everyone talks about teamwork, about rising through the ranks, about earned citizenship—don’t you know that you’re living a lie? They gave me citizenship to shut me up. You’ll never be as equal as the birthrights. They’re never going to give you half of what you deserve. Are you willing to sacrifice everything you are for executives who don’t give half a shit about whether you live or die?”
Keller’s breath came more quickly now. “That’s not how it is.”
“You wouldn’t have hidden Ash’s medical records if you really believed that.”
“There were extenuating circumstances—”
Ramsay’s eyes were wide and frenzied. “Nothing is rightfully anyone’s, Kate, not unless you can hold it. All these planets, these asteroids, this infinite emptiness. The executives came out here and they took it all. We didn’t wait for someone to come along and grant it to us. That’s the way things get done, the difference between us and them, and the faster you realize that, the faster we can get on with changing the world.”
The orange light of the reboot ceded to white; the ship shuddered again as it started to come alive. Behind Ramsay, Keller could see the door, the flickering lights, a sleeping human form slumped agains
t a wall, head lolled. She flicked her gaze back to her former XO, fear dancing in her chest. The weapon tried to calm her, to tell her that glory awaited, that it did not understand this fear, that she did not need it.
Ramsay heard it, too. She raised the gun. “That has no place in the arms of a coward.”
Keller smiled. “Fine,” she said. “If you think I’m a coward, take it.”
Potential energy zipped up and down her spine, crackled in her hands, slammed toward her feet as she struggled to stay down. She met Ramsay’s confused eyes for a half second, then took off into a pell-mell zigzag run. The sound of the gunshot came as soon as Keller’s second step. It hit the wall in front of her with a discordant report, ricocheting back into the room, desperate to bury itself somewhere in body or bone.
Ramsay fired again as Keller ducked through the hatch back into the corridor, the weapon cradled in the crook of her arm. The lights were low, guttering, still reestablishing a connection to the main computer. She escaped being hit in the back of the head by tripping over a pile of unconscious Baywell indentures. Ramsay screamed her name, firing again, the bullet hitting the shoulder of a sleeping tech. The tech bled but did not move. Keller pulled herself up, feeling alternatively terrified and invincible.
Up ahead, she could see the spine—the lights blasting from below, the people shouting, trying to figure out what the hell was going on above. So, I didn’t take down the whole ship, she thought, just a level. Reva was right. I’m not strong enough.
She swung into the spine, hooking her feet around the ladder, then muttered a prayer to nobody in particular and loosened her one-handed grip, sliding down the ladder like she’d been taught in training. Ramsay appeared before her, shooting once and missing, then swearing, losing the bead the farther she got from Ramsay. She climbed in herself and slid down the ladder, closing fast.
Keller stopped back at the cargo level, swinging around to shove herself between the ladder and the wall, anchoring herself with her left arm, the arm that cradled the weapon. Ramsay matched her speed and smashed at Keller’s right knuckles with her shoe as she passed, bringing up the gun one last time. Keller caught Ramsay’s wrist, her muscles straining to keep her from bringing the gun any closer, and she met the other woman’s triumphant gaze. Below her, she heard the clatter of troops on the move. If she didn’t win now, it wouldn’t matter.
Architects of Memory Page 28
