The Lazarus War: Artefact (26 page)

“I’m not going without you, Blake. Kaminski, execute those orders and move now.”

Kaminski nodded – visible only as a tiny figure at the far end of the ruined Shard ship. But Blake held up his hand.

“Belay that order, Kaminski,” he said, using his communicator and a good deal of his available strength. “Don’t bring the crawler back. Just move. Cap – please go with him.”

“I’m not leaving you out here!”

“It’s okay,” Blake said. “It’s okay. None of it’s real. We’ll wake up in the tanks. I promise you that.”

“I’m not leaving you! We’ll go back to the crawler and—”

“
Just go
,” Blake said, a powerful edge developing to his voice. He coughed again and righted himself a little more. “I’ll use whatever I have left in this rifle to give you some covering fire.”

He struggled with something around his neck, then passed it to me. His biometric dog-tags. With monumental effort, Blake pulled his forearm up and checked his wrist-computer. The model was old and worn out, and blood-stained now. The display blinked erratically.

“My oxygen tank is half-full. Remember what Deacon told us? If it breaches, it’ll go up. Help me to put it on my chest.”

“No – just sit tight. That’s an
order
!”

“I’ll only do it on my own if you don’t … help … me.”

He tried to disconnect the tank hose, his fingers fumbling with the release mechanism. He really couldn’t do it on his own. Ephemeral wisps of smoke were starting to rise from Blake’s wound.

“You don’t have to do this.”

“My choice, Captain. Now, please … help … me.”

Reluctantly, I unstrapped the oxygen processor from his back. Unclipped the hosing.

“That’s it,” he said.

He clutched the tank to his chest and repositioned the rifle. It was awkward and difficult, but I realised what Blake was going to do.

“If they get near to me, I’ll blow the tank,” Blake said. “Take out … as … many of them as I can. Rookie mistake to get shot … in … the first place.”

I nodded, utterly numbed.

“I’ll see you on the other side,” he said to me. Those words: they had a different, more poignant meaning now. “Give my t-t-tags to my folks.”

“Anything you want, Blake.”

“Now, just go.”

He got ready to aim his rifle, but nodded back towards Kaminski. He waited at the very edge of the bank, the civilians in an orderly line behind him.

“Take care of Jenkins for me, Kaminski,” Blake said, over the communicator. His voice was wet and gravelly. “Make sure she stays in check. And one more thing: I’m … tw-tw-tw-twenty-three standard years.”

Kaminski nodded. “Be seeing you, Blake.”

Then Blake was up on the ridge again, hunting for targets.

I had watched Michael Blake die thirty-seven times. I had been with Kaminski, Jenkins, the rest of my squad, and seen and heard all of them die. But this was different. This was real; not simulated. This was happening to Blake, not some distant flesh copy. I hated myself for not being able to help him. This would be his last death. As I took one final look at Blake’s dying body – the only one that he had left – something perceptibly died inside of me as well.

I was empty. So cold inside and out, that I had nothing left to give.

I stooped, moving as fast as I could towards Kaminski. My legs screamed with the effort and I yelled to Kaminski to just move.

Ahead of me, Kaminski leapt between broken areas of terrain. He herded on the civvies. Deacon had his arm around Kellerman, kept the old man moving. The researchers did their best to keep up.

My progress was slower. Every injury that I’d experienced over the last couple of days descended on me, with a vengeance. I ground my teeth as I took another step, pain exploding in my leg.

Through the swirling, dust-ridden wind, I made out the hulking black shape of the crawler. The Krell nest was to my right, up on the crater edge. They had camped behind a collection of boulders and were using the hard cover to move as quickly as possible into the crater.

Blake continued firing somewhere behind me, although far less often. In contrast, the return fire from the Krell was becoming more ferocious, more concerted. Whenever Blake rested, I glimpsed the Krell descending another level into the crater. The fish heads were absolutely focused on Blake.

I paused for a second, gasping to catch my breath, and checked by wrist-comp. By now, I was well out of communicator range with Blake, so instead I babbled commands at the rest of the group.

“Keep going!” I shouted at Kaminski.

He never paused, never questioned me.

The sand-crawler was ahead. The gun-bot was in pieces nearby, blackened with corrosive Krell ammo.

“Kaminski – get everyone onboard and power up the engine!”

We were suddenly at the crawler entrance hatch, and I drove the others inside. The sky behind us was alight with blues and reds: boomer-fire rained down on Blake.

“Start this thing up. We’re going back for Blake.”

“Affirmative, Cap,” Kaminski shouted. He was in the driver cab, powering up dormant systems.

Deacon slammed shut the hatch, sealing us in. The transport hummed to life. Kellerman grappled with ammo crates and scattered clips across the cabin floor.

“Take us right down into the crater. Deacon, get armed and keep the hatch covered. When we reach Blake, cover me. I’ll go outside and retrieve him.”

I stumbled into the driver cab, activating the secondary systems.
Too slow, too slow – got to get down there
. The crawler started to move off, jerkily at first as Kaminski tested the controls. The vehicle had a basic sensor-suite, and I activated that too. Hot signals appeared all around us.

“We got Krell on the six,” I muttered, looking out of the view-screen ahead. “Let’s make this fast and—”

“Christo,” Kaminski whispered. “Oh Christo.”

There was a momentary flash outside, from Blake’s position. Inside the crawler, I couldn’t hear the explosion, but I knew that it was considerable.

Kaminski brought the crawler to a stop. He just stared ahead, into the swirling darkness outside.

The sensor began a steadier, more hostile chiming.
They’re coming for us
. My head swam, and I lurched up and out of the cab.

“I do hope that the explosion has not damaged the Shard starship,” one of the researchers said.

It took some serious self-restraint not to react to that. I held myself in check, fixed my eyes on the view-screen. Kellerman had no such qualms.

“Have some respect for Christo’s sake!” he shouted.

Kellerman reeled across the crawler cabin, with indomitable force. The exo-suit servos screamed as he pulled back his hand, and landed a single back-handed blow across the researcher’s face. The woman flew backwards, hand to her cheek, but made no sound. A streak of blood landed on the cabin floor; pure red.

No one came to help the female researcher. She was wide-eyed, staring up at Kellerman. He flexed his machine-assisted hand, the hand that he had used to strike the woman, and just stood there: furious, fuming, lips peeled.

“Have some damned respect,” he repeated, now in a breathy whisper.

“I – I’m sorry,” the woman stammered.

“Leave it, Kellerman,” I said, pulling his arm.

I couldn’t deal with this now. Blake was gone! This wasn’t the time to mediate these fanatics.

Something struck the outside of the crawler. The same tech who had been the subject of Kellerman’s anger began to whimper. The sensor was trilling.

“Cap – we’ve got to pull out,” Kaminski said. “Unless – unless we want to end up the same way.”

Something screamed outside.

Fuck it!

“Do it, Kaminski. Get us out of here.”

The return journey passed in silence. The dark outside was thick and impenetrable, and Deacon assisted Kaminski in plotting the route back. Kellerman’s people sat in a dazed stupor – in equal parts awed and horrified. Horrified by the idea of being ambushed by the Krell, awed by their leader’s earlier outburst.

Someone suggested that we might sit out the night, buckle down in the crawler until sunrise, but that idea was quickly dismissed. No one wanted to be stuck out in the dark with the Krell.

I didn’t have the strength – mental or physical – to do anything to help. I broke out a water flask and drank from it, but the lukewarm fluid did nothing to satisfy my thirst.

Everything feels wrong
.

Blake had become an irreplaceable member of my team. His loss would be felt by all of us. He had died because of me, because I’d led us out into the Maelstrom.

“Just add his name to the butcher’s bill,” I said to myself.

Everything had been taken from me. I wanted to stir my anger, my hatred of the Krell, but I couldn’t even muster that. It was simply too much for my crude senses to properly comprehend. That emptiness I had experienced after Blake went down threatened to overwhelm me, engulf me.

Kellerman sat across from me in the passenger cabin, slumped in one of the seats. It had taken hours for his demeanour to soften, for that wrath to dissipate. Maybe he was angry with me for suggesting he accept some help, back in the crater, or maybe because I had intervened to stop him striking his researcher. She sat alone in one corner of the cabin, cradling her jaw. It had already swollen and turned a pained black-blue. For a long while Kellerman and I sat in silence; I wasn’t eager for conversation. I didn’t really care what he thought of me, whether he was angry with me or not.

“I don’t know my own strength sometimes, in this suit,” Kellerman finally said. His voice was barely more than a murmur. “I didn’t mean for you to see that.”

I didn’t reply. Too much to think about, too many ghosts.
Would he have killed her?
I wondered. He certainly looked like he might’ve hit her again. The exo was clumsy and ungainly, but he had vastly increased strength inside the thing. Maybe that was something to note. There was an expectant air between us; as though Kellerman suddenly wanted to talk, to get something off his chest.

“I lost my legs on Epsilon Ultris,” he said. “The memory is so painful. I try to forget about what happened. It’s not easy. Sometimes it’s easier to pretend that I was never there.”

“Whatever,” I said. I didn’t care any more.

Kellerman added, abruptly: “I’m sure that your colleague was a worthy soldier, and that he will not be forgotten.”

“You didn’t know him.”

We sat in semi-darkness and I could just make out the pale moon of Kellerman’s face. He gave me a curt nod.

“You were very interested in the planetarium, back on the Shard ship. Why was that?”

“Something that happened to me, a long time ago.”

I’d felt hope for the first time in too long. I could follow her. I could find her. Her face, her voice, just
her
: it was impossible to put her out of my mind.

But hope was also a terrible thing. It had cost me Blake. I felt such a mixture of emotions that it literally exhausted me. With intense guilt, I looked over at the crate housing the Key. It sat undamaged, innocuous, on one of the empty passenger seats. Power emanated from that sealed crate. I couldn’t allow myself to feel excitement, to feel pleasure at this discovery. Those emotions were alien to me. I didn’t
deserve
to feel those things.

“When we get back to the station, I want that star-data,” I said. If it wasn’t given freely, then I would take it.

Kellerman nodded. “And you shall have it.”

“You know what the Artefact is, don’t you, Kellerman?”

Now it was Kellerman’s turn to sit in silence. He rubbed a gloved hand across his chin, pulled a face as though he was in deep thought.

“I do,” he slowly proclaimed. “I’ve known for a long time.”

“Then tell me. I lost a good man out there today, and I deserve to know.”

“It’s a beacon,” he said. Still so reluctant to reveal what he knew, still the guardian of secret knowledge. The man disgusted me. “The mechanics remain unclear, but I’m learning. A deep-space beacon, capable of sending a signal across the Maelstrom.”

“A neutrino signal?”

“Probably not. This is something different. It’s far more advanced. It can be detected in the same way, but the signal is something else. Something that we don’t yet understand. There’s something hidden inside the signal, another broadcast method that the Shard relied upon. Our science is fallible – it can’t explain everything.”

“Command told me that it had been heard from several star systems away, not the whole Maelstrom.”

“That is where the Key comes in. The Artefact is not fully operational. There is a power source, somewhere inside or beneath the structure. We have detected it via our comms satellite. The Key will activate the Artefact – broadcast the signal across the entire region. Enable other ships – Shard, maybe human – to use the Artefact’s transmission as a Q-jump point. Imagine a lantern, visible to those who care to look for it.”

His face illuminated again, and I saw that instantaneous change of mood that seemed to have become the man’s defining feature. He flashed me a rare smile.

“What about the Krell?” I asked.

“What of them? The Artefact’s signal is strong enough to draw them here when it is not even at full power. It is already nearly disabling for them. Now imagine what the Artefact would do to them at full power.”

I found myself – involuntarily – nodding along with Kellerman. It would surely destroy them – override the Collective, send them over the edge into madness. A whole world of Krell, destroyed in one fell blow. Maybe more than a world, maybe a star system—

Like all deadly viruses, his fervour was infectious.

“I know that you hear it as well,” Kellerman suddenly said, leaning across the cabin. His face looked especially gaunt.

I wanted to deny it, to lie to Kellerman, but my response came unwillingly: “Sometimes.”

“I hear it too. Not everyone is so receptive. My research suggests that the sound is different for each subject. I don’t quite understand why. Be warned: it is a mixed blessing. There are
consequences
for those who hear it.”