The Archive Undying, page 2
The first and most obvious fact: none of them like seeing an ENGINE up close. Usually, their kind only gets such an intimate vantage when said ENGINE’s about to step on them. Or, say, when it’s squishing them between its post-divine fingers for violating this or that Harbor law.
As for the rest, he’s stuck asking in a roundabout fashion. None of the crew will like hearing that he was too drunk to remember who he signed with, let alone what he was hired to do, or, you know, whether he fucked anyone on the roster. Other people, normal people, can get sensitive when you divulge that you forget if you got familiar with their ass.
Sunai is fairly certain there was an ass.
With lucidity have come intermittent flashes, impressions of heat and weight, pleasure, then rising dread. He can’t say for sure whether they all stem from the same incident, though it’s been a decade and more since Sunai bailed on sex for any reason other than boredom.
Something made him flee Ghamor. He hopes it was the letter.
The ass in question might be among the other new hires. One is a long-limbed raptor of a person whose downworld ID talisman is tied to signify third-gender status. Their jacket comes with the padding, straps, and pockets common to a salvage-rat mercenary, while their rakish grin crosses their lean face easy and often. They’re also the only crew member watching Sunai more closely than the ENGINE. That’d be fine, if they weren’t attached at the hip to a serene, manicured aunty—the navigator, whose arms are tattooed with stylized depictions of mechanized tenbeasts, clear indicators of Mohani heritage.
It’s possible Sunai fucked the merc. If they and the aunty decided that entitles them to keep an eye on him, it would be ample reason to flee.
He makes a point not to bring up Khuon Mo, lest someone try to connect over a shared past. Instead, halfway through his third cigarette, he offers a sardonic synopsis of the Harbor’s latest radio drama, Callsign Kill.
“You listen to that propaganda?” the third-gender mercenary asks around a mouthful of curry and nutrient bar, a sin against the culinary arts for which Sunai has decided never to forgive them.
“Call it morbid fascination.” Sunai pays attention to any story the Harbor cooks up about ENGINEs and their relics. It’s as much a compulsion as nicotine. “Do you know they got one of the Sovereign’s relics to guest-star in the last arc?”
“Was that the one who reads minds or the one with laser eyes?”
“Neither,” says Sunai. “The one with three heads and half a brain between them. Delivered his lines like a drugged-up goat. Won an award.”
The navigator laughs delicately. The merc offers an impression. Sunai is tempted to relax. Then the merc throws an arm around his shoulders.
“Fine, I like you,” they say, as if they haven’t been fixated on him all night. Then, under their breath, “How you holding up, kid?”
Sunai’s mouth pinches. “Better, before you got ominous.”
The merc exchanges a glance with the navigator. Sunai believes himself patronized.
“Well, dear, you were listing dreadfully when you went off with the doctor,” says the navigator. “We followed, of course. Made clear we considered you a friend. Just to make sure.”
“Yeah, and then the doctor insisted he needed you—for a job, he said.” The merc shrugs. “We needed a gig, they had space. Figured we might as well come along.”
Oh good, camaraderie. Always hard to shake.
At least this misplaced sense of rapport gives him a lead. The doctor, was it? He scans the crew lingering around the fire. Between those who’ve come, gone, and stayed, he counts twenty or so—light complement for a rig of the Scrap’s size. Of those, none have paid as much attention to Sunai as his Mohani compatriots.
“Hey.” The merc leans down to be conspiratorial. “You’re the scout. He tell you what in the name of God’s infinite tits we’re looking for?”
If he did, Sunai doesn’t remember. “At a guess, nothing good,” he says, more sincere than he means to be. Despite himself, he likes the merc too. He might even learn their name. “Or else the Harbor wouldn’t want it.”
“She’s just an escort,” says the man coming round the Scrap’s foreleg. He’s shortish but broad, with a mess of unkempt black hair and sun-browned skin. The rest of the crew each give him a glance or a nod. Important, then. Going by the merc’s narrow peer and the navigator’s vague smile, the doctor himself.
No one specified doctor of what, but Sunai doesn’t have to guess. There’s a great big honking hint encasing the upper half of his face: a featureless, beetle-black visor made from luridly organic material, the likes of which Sunai hasn’t seen in the near two decades since he fled Khuon Mo.
“What?” says the doctor to Sunai’s unabashed stare.
“Is that salvage?” Sunai asks. “On your face?”
“It’s a prosthetic.”
“So are my specs, but they’re not about to go full frag and eat my brain.”
“I’ll let you know if it becomes a problem.”
“I think I’ll hear you when it does.”
The doctor crosses his arms. The awful visor obscures his gaze, but his attention is an inescapable pressure. “I knew you were going to be trouble.”
Sunai holds up a finger and digs in the loose folds of his drape trousers, from which he extracts a cigarette. He offers it to the doctor, who frowns but takes it for the peace offering it is. The doctor’s fingers on Sunai’s are roughened by rig chores and sorting through salvage. Sunai shakes his brain for any recollection of those calluses skimming his cheek on their way into his hair; nothing falls out of his pitted gray matter but for a single self-directed scold: You fucked an autonomist?
No other kind of doctor would strap corrupted AI tech to their face. Most autonomists wouldn’t do that either, so this one presumably has a particularly ambitious death wish.
Sunai’s taste in men has once again proven itself a special kind of horrid.
“Are you the client or what?” the merc is saying while Sunai plows his way through a fourth cigarette.
“And the medic,” the doctor replies. He freely and succinctly answers the merc’s follow-up questions about where the last medic went (taking a month off to get fitted for a new arm prosthetic) and where the other gaps in the roster came from (mental health leave), and he doesn’t spare much attention for Sunai, who, to be fair, hasn’t managed another word. He only clams up when it comes to their objective. “You’re not important enough to know.”
Meanwhile, the ENGINE strides past the Scrap’s foreleg, down the perimeter of the plateau. Sunai wonders if her proximity is responsible for the doctor’s silence.
“How important am I?” he blurts.
The doctor tilts his head, as if just remembering Sunai’s presence. He might not have heard the question. The ENGINE’s footsteps thunder, accelerating. The merc’s radio crackles on their hip. Fragtech sighted, incoming trajectory—mercs to stations, everyone else on standby.
The merc sprints to join the others at the rear cargo bay entrance, where they will gather harpoon guns, nets, and decoy drones. The navigator zips up the foreleg ladder to her station by the pilot’s nook. Sunai grabs his spice belt and makes for the edge of the plateau.
Someone grabs his arm. The doctor. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“What I’m paid to.” Sunai points at a shiver in the pines. “You have a radio? Tell them it’s bigger than it looks. Not tall, but wide. Either it isn’t bipedal or it’s broken. Probably broken, which means it’s hungry. Nothing’s corrupted in the Ghamori region for like three hundred years, except for So-Beloved, and I doubt it’s one of hers. Unlikely one of her frags made it all the way out here before the Sovereign culled it. What?”
It’s difficult to read the doctor. The visor obscures so much of his face, and his mouth has the performative range of rigor mortis, yet the acuity of his focus bleeds through, leaving Sunai feeling like a dangerously interesting specimen. He drags Sunai away from the plateau. “I didn’t haul you out here to feed you to a goddamn frag.”
Sunai and the doctor are halfway up the Scrap’s ladder when the fragtech lumbers from the tree line. It’s built like a person—they usually are—with two legs, two arms, and a battered helmet skull. It hunches, apish silhouette obscured in the gloom.
“Looks like one of Manifest Echo’s,” Sunai calls to the doctor. “Tell them to watch out for shock waves—”
His warning is cut off as the fragtech plunges broad forearms into dry earth. A distant thunk-whoosh sounds as its arms piston deeper, driving targeted vibrations into the ground. The Sovereign adjusts her stance, ready to lunge. Then the cliff crumbles under her feet.
The Sovereign scrambles for footing and skids with gravel and boulders. Manifest Echo’s fragtech wrenches its arms from the ground and breaks into a four-limbed gallop. In seconds, it’s up the slope, over the Sovereign’s body, and careening toward the Scrap.
The mercs fire decoy drones, and at first their swooping dizzies the fragtech. It slows and weaves, and the mercs take aim with their harpoons. First shot. The fragtech rolls out of the way, nearly off the cliff. As it scrambles upright, the next harpoon drives into its ankle joint. It staggers again, falling to its knees—then tears the harpoon from its leg and hurls it at the Scrap.
Sunai kicks the doctor off the ladder and drops after him. As they fall, the harpoon strikes deep into the hull, cracking ceramic armor. It would have skewered the doctor.
The doctor lands okay—on his back, winded. Sunai thuds beside him with a crack. Pain radiates from his right elbow. It’s a clean break—no visible bone, or even blood. He’ll deal with it later.
For now, he cradles the fractured limb against his body as he rolls over the doctor. Instinct always puts him between fragtech and squishy humans.
The fragtech circles, calculating its next assault. As it springs, the mercs fire again. Another harpoon strikes a crevice between the fragtech’s torso and hip, and a simultaneous shot from the bola-cannon on deck snarls a weighted line around its knee. Hobbled, it nonetheless finds its balance—then the ENGINE returns.
A crimson ode to human violence crests the plateau. The Sovereign barrels into the staggering fragtech and slams it to the earth. Her armored hand wraps around its dilapidated face and she beats its skull into stone again and again.
Sunai is transfixed. The doctor coughs, wheezes, and sits up beside him. They watch in brittle silence as one artifact of corruption destroys another. The Sovereign never turns. Sunai is left to imagine the relic’s face.
2
“I’m fine, you know,” Sunai insists over the rumble of the Third Scrap reseating itself. He keeps his fractured right arm tucked against his torso.
“Let me check it.” The doctor’s warm palm remains on Sunai’s shoulder blade. “I heard a crack.”
Sunai curses silently. The second the doctor is called away—the captain wants him for someone else’s body problem—Sunai hops up into the Scrap’s innards through the cargo bay. On the way, he asks an older merc where he can find a med kit. When the merc grimaces at his bruising arm, he says, “Just need sanitizer.”
The merc’s directions send Sunai through the bowels to a narrow workshop beside the crew quarters, just across the hall from the viewport through which Sunai first saw the Sovereign. Now the view shows slashes of flashlights as the mercs retrieve harpoons from the fragtech corpse while the captain gestures at the Sovereign, kneeling beside (and partially within) her pulverized prey. It’s too dark to tell if the doctor’s out there. Sunai has to be quick.
The workshop is a clutter of boxes and drawers, bolted down and locked against the vagaries of rig travel. The med kit is strapped beneath the counter. As Sunai retrieves it, he knocks his right elbow into the workbench. He grits his teeth against the awful jolt this sends through the split ends of his forearm bones—the whatever they’re called. He retains anatomy only vaguely. What’s the point if none of it sticks?
Something broke when Sunai fell. He knows that as intimately as he knows how long it takes to bleed out. In the time since the fall, as he sat watching the ENGINE tear into the fragtech, as the doctor tried to baby him, and as he stole away into the Scrap, whatever broke was knitting back together. The break blossomed in malevolent bruises from his wrist to elbow, but give it an hour and Sunai could display an arm so clean and tidy that not even an expert physician could find fault with it. For now, the arm is purpling black where it isn’t redly swollen, and it hurts like an absolute bastard.
Sunai presses it harder into his ribs and bites the inside of his cheek for distraction as he fumbles open the med kit latch. He needs bandages. A splint. Anything to conceal his vanished injury until he can pass it off as a quick-healing sprain.
“What are you doing?” The doctor fills the doorway. The upper half of his face remains obscured by that chitinous visor, but the lower half has an intimately familiar expression: a Don’t touch my shit frown followed by an Ah, I’m sorry, I see you’ve already touched my shit, and therefore it’s time to throttle you scowl.
The doctor steps into the workshop. Sunai jerks back, hiding his arm behind him. He is uneven on his bad ankle—it always complains when he’s stressed—and he knocks the med kit off the counter.
The doctor catches the box. His mouth is still as he pushes it back onto the counter, and his hands stay away from Sunai. “Just sit, okay?”
Sunai doesn’t sit, but neither does he run. His teeth dig blood from his inner lip as he watches the doctor unpack sanitizer, antibacterial, analgesics, gauze, et cetera, all laid across the counter while the doctor sticks to his side of the workshop.
“I get it,” says the doctor. “No touching. You should let me do it, but if you can’t … just let me watch.”
Sunai gropes for the sanitizer. “Is that what does it for you?”
“I do like telling people when they’re about to fuck up.”
Sunai takes his time thumbing open the bottle, and more to peel off a patch of gauze. He daubs it across the scratches on an arm still darkened with burst blood vessels. The doctor watches, fists clenched over the counter like he’s the one who has to fight through the pain.
“You really don’t remember?” the doctor asks in abrupt Mohani. His accent is stilted from disuse.
“Remember what?” Sunai asks in the same language. He doesn’t use Mohani much either.
“What I hired you for.”
Sunai’s hand pauses over the analgesics. He takes the bandage instead. “Is this a bad time to reveal that I don’t know your name?”
The doctor seems less offended than annoyed. “Are you serious? Never mind. You probably threw that up too. Veyadi Lut.”
Veyadi Lut. Sunai digests this revelation like a hangover cure: with reluctant gratitude for a gesture that ultimately lacks impact. He has gleaned no memory, no insight, though this doesn’t surprise him; it takes true persistence for Sunai to get blackout drunk, but he’s a stubborn bitch.
“I’ve never met a scout who can identify AIs as old as Manifest Echo,” Veyadi pushes, as if this will help Sunai’s neurons retroactively construct memories they were too sodden to build. “And despite how intoxicated you were, you described the underlying neurotransitive principles of AI-human interfacing with startling clarity.”
Sunai’s metacarpals twitch. Veyadi mistakes this for a pain response and is compelled to cross a line. He steps forward to place his palm on Sunai’s bruise-mottled arm, and Sunai tenses at the gentle pressure of Veyadi’s fingers against the skin of his inner elbow.
Sunai is ten on ten kinds of idiot for letting this happen. He’s worse than that for opening his stupid mouth in front of Veyadi Lut in the first place, a Mohani autonomist who works with the salvaged tech of Khuon Mo’s corruption, and therefore one of the few people in the world perfectly suited to diagnosing exactly what the fuck is wrong with Sunai.
Sure, it’s not every day that Veyadi gets to manhandle Iterate Fractal’s human remains, but other people aren’t even equipped to clock Sunai as a relic, a walking, talking artifact of corruption. He’s lucky that way. Most relics wind up marked with physiological manifestations of their dead AI. In the dramas loosely inspired by Iterate Fractal’s demise, its relics are by turns animalistic and botanical, their eyes lit with tapetum flashes, their hair interwoven with budding flowers. To mark his death, Sunai came away with nothing but a persistent case of life. Inconvenient, but invisible to anyone who doesn’t know what to look for.
Veyadi, though, Veyadi is trained to perceive the signs. And then there’s that visor. No telling what it lets him see. Sunai should have bolted out of any establishment Veyadi Lut wandered into. Yet like when he tried to spy the relic in the ENGINE’s chest, and when he sat gawping at the ENGINE pummeling Manifest Echo’s frag into scrap and memory, and when he kept that goddamn letter, he is unable to resist. Sunai has never witnessed any trainwreck more compelling than his own. He stands dazed and unresponsive as Veyadi gingerly applies the splint, entranced by his own self-destructive impulses.
“This could have been worse,” says Veyadi of the arm.
“Could it?” Sunai asks, as he revisits the fantasy of strangling his past self.
“You haven’t fooled me.” Veyadi smooths tape to bind the bandage, unaware that Sunai’s stomach has inverted. “Last night. I knew you were only looking for a way out of Ghamor, but … you knew what you were talking about. You’re as good as I could’ve asked for, and I need someone good. So whatever you’re running from, I don’t care. I’ll do whatever it takes to make sure it can’t follow you. Starting with those two assholes pretending to be your friends. Say the word, and I ship them back to Ghamor with the Sovereign.”
No one who gets sent off with an ENGINE ends up anywhere nice. The set of the doctor’s mouth makes it clear that this isn’t an idle threat. He’s willing to get mean to keep whatever he’s found in Sunai. That’s either sweet or damning; Sunai wishes his skin weren’t prickling so pleasantly under the doctor’s touch.
