Architects of Memory

by Karen Osborne

  Ramsay hissed, “Just—give up—”

  “No,” Keller said, slammed on Ramsay’s left shoe with her heel, then brought her knee up to knock her foot from the ladder. Ramsay’s eyes widened as she lost her balance, which gave Keller enough give to make a violent strike against Ramsay’s wrist. Ramsay’s eyes went dark and frightened, and she pinwheeled. Keller shoved her one last time and Ramsay fell, screaming, into Phoenix’s faraway belly.

  Keller threw herself through the nearest hatch as techs started climbing in from above. She heard the sickening crunch of Ramsay’s body hitting the floor. She looked in once to see her former XO unmoving, bent at an unnatural angle on an aft hatch, and choked down puke. She heard juddering footsteps, boots against metal, shouts to get her get her get her get the bitch, and so she turned in the opposite direction, barreling away in the alien-lit darkness.

  For a few seconds, the recycled air caught in her throat, and she thought she was going to get away with it. The shouting Baywell troops were behind her now, but she was faster, and she hurtled ahead, weapon in hand, until she turned a corner and skidded to a halt. A line of green-clad people blocked her path down the hallway, helmets down, eyes barely visible. Their boltguns were alive, whining and straining, pointing in her direction. She skidded to a halt, trapped, afraid, and in the guttering light, she felt not fear and panic but a quiet, brilliant assurance that climbed into her veins and sailed through her heart. She grasped the weapon and held it to her chest.

  Keller wondered if this clear, clean assurance was what the Vai felt when they went into battle.

  If it was what kept them from hating themselves.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  The soldiers advanced, left foot first, the leader screaming for her to drop it, bitch, drop it. The lights around them guttered and died.

  “You drop it,” Keller whispered.

  The weapon breached light from her fingers; it swirled and slipped and turned, and she felt heat running up her spine and around her shoulders. This was warmth like she’d never felt before, warmth like Ashlan’s skin and her mother’s arms and a lover’s kiss. It was the closest thing, since Neversink, that she ever came to feeling calm. To together.

  Her blood sang. Glory.

  The lights crashed around her.

  The men toppled at once, their bodies collapsing together, their guns falling against each other like harmless sticks, lying on top of each other like cargo. Shaking, hating herself, Keller picked her way through, then followed the guides on the wall to the hangar. When Baywell indentures came to stop her, she told them to step aside. That she didn’t want to hurt them. That she was a weapon now, a monster. They fell, too, their eyes open, staring beyond as she passed.

  She was sobbing as she wrapped the weapon in the quarantine fabric, and sobbing when she cracked open a pod airlock and climbed in, setting the grav-drive in motion. The system whined its welcome in an unfamiliar, content tone, as if her world had not already died, as if this were just another day in the tug, as if Ash would be there at the end to smile at her and tell her things would be all right. She lay her hands on the interface, feeling the mundane comfort of switches and buttons.

  This would either work, or Keller would die gulping down vacuum, her lungs rupturing from the inside out. Either way, she wasn’t going back.

  Keller’s mind was too full of blood and glitter and remorse and triumph to concentrate, so the pod jerked to the side and slammed into the bay door as she left. As the pod burst from Phoenix’s main bay and rolled into the sunshine, the ship came fully back to life, and she saw fighters behind her, spit from cruiser bays like marbles dropped from the hand of a child.

  Adrenaline powered her hands. The weapon powered her soul. She was not out of the woods by a long shot.

  But she had a ship.

  And she was a captain.

  28

  Medellin loomed like a cold gray death sentence; it gobbled up the viewscreen, the dark teeth of a cruiser transport bay spinning closer with every second that passed.

  Ash could still taste incineration in the air, could still feel Len’s sacrifice as an electric charge, could still remember the bright orchestra singing the humanity out of her fingers. Her body howled with pain, nerve endings echoing the memory of a death she deserved but never received.

  Ash pulled herself into the pilot’s chair, hearing her dead friend’s voice echo inside her skull. His favorite phrase; Kate’s favorite phrase. Space plus bullshit equals death. Her hands shook as she picked up the pilot’s haptic interface. She repeated it like a mantra, over and over, slipping on the gloves, the helmet. All she could think of was Len’s face. All she saw was the golden light taking him apart. I can’t live with it, Ash, he’d said. I can’t live with it.

  Bastard. And you thought I could?

  The haptic interface pushed at her thoughts and caught the back of her brain, clumsy and unsure compared to the glossy certainty of the Vai moleculars, but unmistakably, eerily similar. It felt like she’d just downed half a bottle of vodka on leave—fritzy, half melted, but up and stumbling off to a party nonetheless. She took three deep, hard breaths to banish the grief from her chest. The shuttle shimmied in response and the engine thrilled to a crescendo.

  Her eyes blurred with tears.

  The shuttle responded, executing a too-quick, half-cocked turn, shifting toward the twinkling battlefield. No, not there, she thought, somewhere safe, but the shuttle hurtled bold and bright, the destination the broken husk of London.

  London, the last place someone with her Vai blood could hide, with her memories of the together and her ability to tear to bloody, broken shreds anything she’d ever known. Anything she’d ever loved.

  She could go to London. Could wander to the bridge and sit in the captain’s chair. Take off her helmet and let the cold creep in. Let the ghost ship finish what it started.

  Len didn’t sacrifice himself so that you could end up a goddamn suicide, Christopher said.

  And then he was there, seated in the copilot’s chair with his feet resting on Julien’s still, slumped body, there with his kind smile and his tired eyes and his stupid floppy hair. She thought of the mines again, of celestium glittering sweet and silver in the rocky sky. The shuttle listed to the side and she blinked away the tears, trying to concentrate on the approach vector.

  “I don’t want to die,” she said.

  Don’t you? he said. He lifted a hand, indicated the battlefield around them. The shuttle’s pretty sure that’s what you want to do. Fucking haptics.

  The comm sounded, five blaring, clear notes. The source said: ARS Rio de Janeiro. She ignored it, and careened past a set of dead fighters, their cockpits cracked open like empty boxes. “Nobody else is going to die for me.”

  That’s not your decision to make.

  “Isn’t it?” she spat.

  Debris hit the top of the shuttle with a resounding smack, jarring her teeth, slamming her world to the side, then up, then into a shattering spin. She swallowed puke. Her vision swirled, unable to reconcile telemetry with her celestium-soaked brain. The after-strike confusion was so much like the attack on Bittersweet, the way the ground swayed as if the entire planet was being knocked off course, the crush of her entire world down to the body of a dead man and an hour’s worth of oxygen.

  “If I hail Rio, if I tell them about Julien, about the Society…”

  The interface helpfully accepted the local connection to Rio—

  “No, no, shit! No, I’m not ready.”

  She tried to shut down the connection. Too late.

  “Shuttle Seven, this is Rio actual. Pilot, why have you diverted?” Solano.

  Ash swallowed thick, sour spit. She felt thirsty, aching. “Because I’m not coming back,” she said.

  A thin, dark moment passed before Solano responded. “Ashlan, put Dr. Julien on, please.”

  “He’s, uh, he can’t,” she stammered.

  “Put him on.”

  Londo
n was growing larger by the second. “None of this is my fault,” she said. “I didn’t want this.”

  Solano paused before responding. She could hear the quiet hum of the Rio bridge. “That’s not exactly true, Ashlan, now, is it?”

  Her voice wavered. “I wanted to live.”

  “You remember that your choices brought you here?” Solano said. “Specifically, the choices you made every day to save your own life at the cost of your shipmates’ safety?”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “Of course you didn’t. Nobody does. You understand why we had you sign that contract, now? Turn the shuttle around and come in.”

  Her hands shook. The shuttle shuddered around her. She remembered the forest, Marley’s eyes, Len’s bones, the stink of it, the sick whisper of glory that remained, even now, haunting her brainstem. They’d be alive if she hadn’t hidden her illness. They’d be alive. “If I come in, you’re going to make me use those weapons. You’re going to make me a weapon.”

  “Yes, Ashlan.” He paused. “That’s the only way.”

  Her voice wavered. Tears blurred her vision. “You’re Mr. Solano. You have a fucking Company at your disposal. Figure out a different way.”

  “I understand that you must be feeling confused, so let me give you the whole picture,” said Solano. “You’ll want to bring up the tactical map, and perhaps that will help you understand.”

  All she had to do was think about the map, and it popped up, painting bright lines against the debris field speeding by. Behind her were the four Auroran cruisers, lined in blue, receding quickly. Behind London, though, limned in orange and green, was the enemy—Ramsay’s unknown ship, accompanied by three new ships whose designs she knew very well.

  Ships like those had brought her to Bittersweet.

  “I thought Wellspring filed for dissolution,” she stammered.

  “Everyone did,” Solano said. “But we just discovered Wellspring also entered into a silent merger process with Baylor-McKenna and a few others shortly after the war. They registered their articles of incorporation with the war council five days ago, probably to be ready for something like this. I just got off the comm with their admiral, and they have confirmed that they have the London weapon, and a way to use it. Without you, Ashlan, every citizen and indenture aboard our ships will die.”

  The implications spun out in her head, bloody and broken, her stomach twisting. The shuttle lost speed. With articles of incorporation filed, this was no longer piracy. This was war. She would be able to stand against the very people whose policies killed Christopher, who took Keller.

  “They have someone like me? A trigger? Are you sure?” she repeated.

  “We have no reason to doubt, and every reason to prepare,” Solano said. “And we don’t have time to waste.”

  She looked over at the copilot’s chair, where Christopher sat smiling in the ruddy darkness, his eyes filmed over, his head half open, his brain spilling out. The pressure on her chest felt like he’d been that day—heavy, dead, permanent. There had been so few survivors of the Bittersweet attack; what was the chance that someone else had made it out of the mines from the medical program?

  But she hadn’t been in the medical program; Cantrell had told her she’d contracted the disease from contact with Christopher, and she’d been with—

  —she’d been with Keller.

  “Sir, it’s Kate,” she said. Hope was raging, sudden and true, at the very core of her body. “Captain Keller. It’s Captain Keller over there. That’s who they have. It has to be. We can’t attack. We’ll kill her.”

  Solano’s voice had gone hard. He seemed done with explanations. “Return to Rio immediately, indenture.”

  “I can’t. We can’t.” She grabbed at her safety net and yanked to make sure it was fully deployed. “I know you don’t understand. I know you can’t, but please, this is the way it has to be. She’d die rather than use the London weapon on Aurorans. I know Wellspring ships. I can get to her. She’ll be trying to escape, I know her, she will. We get onboard, we find her, we bring her back.”

  “I said, return.”

  She swallowed sheer panic. “No, sir. I won’t kill her for you.”

  “Indenture Ashlan, you are under contract, return to base.”

  She closed her eyes. Thought of Len. “I can’t live with it, Joseph,” she said, and cut him off.

  When she opened her eyes, the shuttle was screaming ahead toward the dead husks once more, and Christopher was gone. London came up fast in her window, black and blue and dead, darker than frightening Medellin. She swallowed bile and tried to calm down. Keller had always repeated that salvage was a state of mind. Len had always said that a good salvager could find a way to work with what was on hand.

  Ash was about to put that advice to the test.

  She braked, almost too late, and the shuttle hit the port with a sickening crunch, throwing Ash forward against the harness hard enough to bruise. She felt a savage, jolting pain in her bad shoulder as she unhooked herself and crossed the cabin to the survival cabinet. She pulled out a breather and a vacsuit, grabbed Cantrell’s gun, and, for the second time, evacuated into London’s dead halls.

  London was a puzzle coming together around her, an autopsy that finally made sense. The dead bodies, the scorch marks on the walls, the lowered hatches: the Sacrament Society in the guise of Manx-Koltar, trying to recover what they thought was theirs. The engine room lacked power, but it hadn’t locked, and she wrapped her feet around a handhold to give herself enough leverage to crack it open. She shoved herself inside, slammed her feet against the wall and pulled up to close the door behind her. There was just enough air in the chamber to hear the clang of the bulkhead seal.

  The engine room was smaller than she expected for such a large cruiser, bathed in the guttering light of whatever consoles were left and far too quiet for her liking. It was as drab as Twenty-Five’s and almost as tiny, packed full of instrumentation, a dizzying, starry-sky array of questions and answers and status updates she’d need extra time to understand. Machinery ground its teeth in the quiet behind her.

  Ash turned away, pulling on the wall’s damaged main hatch. She was rewarded with access to London’s innards. It took her about ten seconds to diagnose the situation: the injection and delivery cables were coiled in on themselves, corroded, torn open by an explosion—and, following that, decomposition and evaporation. There was very little fuel left, and she didn’t even know if it would get her out of the Tribulation system, let alone all the way to the White Line.

  She screamed again, bringing her fist down against the wall twice, three times, until the pain made her feel human, until her suit read damage.

  Space plus bullshit equals death, said Len, and this is bullshit behavior. You still have one last place you can go.

  The planet? That’s death.

  She heard his dark belly laugh. It’ll keep your blood away from the companies. What other future do you think you have?

  Ash turned back to the hatch too late—she stuck her head out into the corridor just as a group of Auroran combat engineers in heavy armor and navpacks burst into the spine three decks up. She panicked, grabbing a sliver of floating metal and slipping it into the lockworks to cause a jam. They saw her and floated closer, leaving fluffy blue chemical trails behind them.

  Ash counted four, gathering around the lock. They spent ten seconds trying to pick the lock before the commander brought out a mining laser from her backpack. The commander was slight and young-bodied; she flicked on her helmet lights to reveal a familiar face, dark-haired, young, exhausted. Her lips moved as she shouted unheard words to the rest of the team and dragged herself over to the porthole.

  Natalie.

  Of course Solano would send Natalie.

  The suit lights made her former friend’s face look jagged, unfriendly, wan; she put her glove against the glass and mouthed something at Ash.

  Ash gave her the middle finger.

  Natalie ban
ged on the door.

  The decision to draw Cantrell’s gun on the murderer of the together was a quiet, sure one, settling onto her shoulders like a weighted blanket, smothering her future in a rolling dark fog. It was just one more thing she’d have to live with. She was accruing those like dole debt.

  The hatch rolled open. Fumbling with the suit gloves, Ash lifted the gun just as Natalie burst into the engine room with her three blank-faced suits. Ash heard the sticky whine of line-of-sight comms being established.

  “Where’s Len?” Natalie said.

  29

  Natalie’s face was angular and death-blue in the light of her faceplate. She pushed past the other three combat engineers, leveling her flashlight first in Ash’s direction, then around the rest of the engine room. The light caused a sudden, nauseous dizziness to rise into Ash’s throat, and as she raised her open hand to block it out, she saw the bright blue citizens’ tags on the front of her former shipmate’s suit.

  She tightened her grip on Cantrell’s gun in response.

  “We don’t have time for that,” Natalie said, indicating the gun with a twitch of her flashlight. Her voice sounded businesslike and bright in Ash’s helmet speaker, as if nothing had happened between them on Tribulation, as if they were still equal, as if Natalie hadn’t put a bullet between the eyes of any future she and Ash could have together. “We’re here to take you home. Where are the others?”

  Ash’s stomach twisted. She turned back to the fuel canister, making another attempt to yank it from its housing. “Twenty-Five was my home.” She paused. “Ms. Chan.”

  Natalie sighed. “Don’t be dramatic. Rio is home now.”

  “For you, maybe.”

  The younger woman stiffened in her suit. “I’m doing what I can.”