The Lazarus War: Artefact (28 page)

She looked back at me once, then she was gone.

* * *

I took both bottles of Scotch and went straight to the Simulant Operations Centre. I got in easily, and found it deserted. Still several hours until the morning shift commenced, and I had the place to myself.

The ops room was dark and cold. I deliberately seated myself, facing the empty simulator-tanks. The inert sims were behind me, watching on with hooded eyes.

Then I drank straight from the Scotch bottle. Lapped up the harsh, smoky liquid. Swigged it down, voraciously. Spilled spirit over my hand, winced as the alcohol hit the broken skin.

I screamed as loud as I could. I flung the bottle against my simulator-tank. Watched as it shattered, spraying liquid and glass fragments across the floor. I took off my boots, felt the glass biting into the soles of my feet. It was so good to
feel
something.

I was in agony, inside and out. The woman I loved had been taken from me, and there hadn’t been a damned thing that I could do to stop it. Not a Christo-damned thing.

How can you miss something that you never even knew that you had?
I asked myself, as I swilled down the second bottle of Scotch.

The child.
My child
. Gone, taken from Elena and me by a bomb probably not meant for us. I raged again, throwing myself against the simulators, bouncing harmlessly off the plastic.

Filled with alcohol and hate, I stripped off my fatigue shirt. It was already stained with blood, useless. I tore back the fabric, tossed it away. Circled the data-ports in my forearms, in my neck, on my chest.

We made it back to Helios Station just as the two suns were beginning to rise. For all the expectant anxiety of the research team, there hadn’t been any Krell ambush. Just a long, uneventful journey through the desert, with only my memories to occupy me.

I gathered Jenkins, Kaminski and Martinez in the mess hall. I had to do something that I had always dreaded, that I had hoped I would never have to do. This was something I hadn’t done since joining Sim Ops. But I was commanding officer and it was my duty to inform them of what had happened. I knew that I would have to do the explaining all over again when we got back to
Liberty Point
.

Jenkins and Martinez were silent as I gave the account. Kaminski quietly paced behind me, neither adding nor detracting from the report.

“Where is his body?” Jenkins said. I knew that she would take it the worst. “He can’t be left out there.”

I shook my head and avoided making eye contact with Jenkins. It was too painful to look at her. She was usually so strong – the cornerstone of my squad – but now she was broken. I’d never seen her like this, in the entire time I’d known her.

“We had to retreat. The Krell swarmed his position.”

Jenkins’ eyes flared with mad, impossible hope.

“Then he might still be out there!” she said. Her voice broke with emotion. “We have to go back. We have to. We never leave anyone behind.”

Kaminski banged an open palm down on the table, sighing.

“You weren’t there, Jenkins. The Kid is gone. Gone.”

“Fuck you, ’Ski!” she roared, standing to face-off against him.

“There was nothing we could do. He’s gone. He saved the rest of us – took out the Krell with him so that we could get away. As soon as we got back to the crawler, they were all over us. If we had stayed, they would have taken us as well.”

“So, you bugged out and left the Kid to deal with it?”

“It wasn’t like that at all!” I said, staggering to my feet. I could see where this was going, and I didn’t like it one bit.

Jenkins frowned at Kaminski. “Like losing the Kid means anything to you, anyway. You were always messing with him. Are you glad he’s gone?”

“This is madness,” I said. “Both of you – cut this shit out. Martinez, help me here.” I grabbed Jenkins’ arm, pulled her away from the table, but she struggled against me. Martinez jumped to it and placed an arm across Kaminski’s chest.

“How can you say that?” Kaminski bellowed. He pushed Martinez away, hard. “I always looked out for the Kid.”

“By jibing him about his age? I don’t call that looking out for him.” Now Jenkins lurched away from me and I wasn’t fast enough to catch her. She turned her scathing glare on me, pointed a finger into my face. “And you’re no better. You took him out there! No simulant, no guns. What were you thinking?”

“Leave it!” I barked. “I don’t want you to say something that you’ll regret later. I’m commanding officer of this expedition—”

“What expedition?” Jenkins sneered. “We’re trapped on this rock, a simulant team without any simulants, surrounded by fish heads, with a madman in charge. I don’t see you doing anything to get us out of this cluster-fuck!”

“What the hell is with you?” I shouted. “There was nothing that we could do. Do you think anything you say can make me feel any worse? I haven’t got anything left. I’m done. I don’t have anything else to give.”

“Fuck you,” Jenkins said, through gritted teeth. She set her jaw. The muscles all around her jowl twitched with tension.

“Don’t speak to the captain like that,” Kaminski said, pushing past Martinez, now moving right into Jenkins’ space. “You weren’t there, and you don’t know what happened—”

“I know
exactly
what Blake went through,” Jenkins said, very slowly, very carefully. “I know
exactly
how it would feel to die out there.” She looked around the group. “We’ve all died simulated deaths by boomers, by stingers. Felt that shit in our blood, seen what it can do. Only Blake went through it for real, and he was only a kid. That’s on your heads.”

Kaminski puffed up his chest and looked from me to Jenkins, then back again. For a terrible moment, I thought that one might hit the other, so high were tensions. I couldn’t have that, not on my team.

“Both of you just leave it,” I shouted, pushing them apart bodily.

“Whatever,” Jenkins replied.

She gave way and backed off from the table. Her eyes were anger-filled, red-hot. She sucked her teeth, then stormed out of the room.

“Fuck you, Jenkins,” Kaminski called after her as she went, his words echoing through the empty mess hall.

Just like that, our unit had been torn apart, and would never be the same again.

The following day, we held an informal ceremony in one of the hangar bays. In between time, none of my squad had spoken – right then, I wasn’t sure whether the rift between Jenkins and Kaminski was ever going to heal. I was just too damned tired with all of this shit to make an effort myself – thinking beyond our current situation was impossible.

But I ordered everyone to attend, and out of respect for Blake they did so. Kellerman, Deacon and a handful of other station personnel also appeared, although they made sure to keep a respectful distance.

All this took place in a dingy and utilitarian storage hangar, the building in which we had arrived when Deacon first brought us to the station. Still crammed with exploration and excavation equipment: sand-crawlers, diggers, a couple of enormous fusion-borer machines. Hardly the kind of place for a funeral.

I sealed Blake’s combat-armour in a military-grade crate, and Kaminski welded it shut with a hand-held tool. The armour was custom-made for his simulants, and wouldn’t do anyone else any good.

Olsen had, of his own initiative, retrieved the sim-bodies that Blake would have used on future operations. They were equally useless to any other operator, only capable of activation by his genetic signature. Taking each tube in turn, Olsen deactivated the life-support systems that kept the sim-bodies in suspension. He triggered the purge cycle on each capsule. We watched silently as the tubes filled with caustic black fluids, anathema to the blue amniotic liquid in which the sims were preserved. For all their military might, the sims did not fight back, did not even squirm, as they died.

Fifteen or so cold faces stared down at the caskets. I knew that I should say something. I barely had the strength for a public speech, so I just said what I felt.

“Let’s take a moment. Private First Class Michael Blake was a respected member of the Simulant Operations Programme. But more than that, he was a good friend. He’s irreplaceable. I had the pleasure of knowing him for three years. I wish it could have been longer.”

Martinez came to stand beside me, placing a hand on the nearest tank. He put the other up to his chest, over his heart. The gathered copied him.

“Christo Almighty,” he started, “watch over my
compadre
as he makes his final journey. And watch over us, too, during these dangerous times. Watch over all of those who would give their lives to the cause, to the continued protection of the Alliance. Remind us not only of the passing of Michael Blake, but of the deceased aboard the UAS
Oregon
: of Captain Atkins, of his officers and crew, of the science team. Allow us to uphold the values of the Constitution of the Alliance. Make us righteous in our indignation against the Krell, against all of Your enemies. Guide us in our bleakest hour so that we might do the right thing, so that we might see the right choice.
La gracia de Dios
. Amen.”

“Amen,” echoed around the hangar bay.

It wasn’t any sort of prayer that I’d ever heard, but it was good enough. Martinez fell silent and bowed his head, paying his final respects to the departed. Jenkins held a salute, tears welling in her eyes but remaining stony-faced.

There was nothing I could say to her to limit her loss. There was nothing I could say to any of them.

“There should be a flag and shit,” Martinez eventually added. “You know, over a coffin.”

“If we had his body, we could take it back to the
Point
,” Jenkins said, accusatively. “There would be a proper ceremony. His folks would want that.”

Jenkins didn’t know that Blake had wanted out of the Programme. It would do no good to tell her now.
Some things are better left unsaid
, I decided. I closed my eyes and imagined Blake’s name on the Memorial Hall wall: just another name eternally etched onto the cold steel. Would his parents visit that spot every year, to commemorate the loss of their son?

“A body doesn’t matter,” I finally said to Jenkins. “It doesn’t matter at all.”

Jenkins went to say something, but then decided that it was better not to. The glare that she shot me was enough.

I knew that my words were a lie. I had to grieve Elena, and I had no body to say goodbye to. Was that why I couldn’t let go?

Not only that, but
my
body did matter. I hurt all over. My leg seared with pain every step that I took. The activity out in the desert had aggravated my injuries, reinforced the already-present pain from the crash-landing only days ago. I felt old and tired; too tired to watch young men dying under alien suns, too tired to explain to colleagues and friends that their comrades weren’t coming home.

Then there was the Artefact’s signal. Surely it was just lack of sleep, but the alien whine felt like it was echoing in my head during the day now, as well.
Is it getting worse?
I wondered. There was no one to talk to about it, no one to confide in.

There was no service or ceremony for Ray or Farrell. That I heard, no one even commented on their deaths. It seemed an unspoken conclusion that they had been at fault for what happened. I did wonder if they had partners or family elsewhere – whether they would be missed – but anger quickly derailed that train of thought.

I considered Deacon’s reaction to the ceremony, his head bowed and eyes sullen. He certainly did not seek to detract from the loss of Blake. There was no gloating comparison over the loss of so many of his own officers, as opposed to a single trooper from my team. His security detail, by any reckoning, had been reduced to barely a handful of men. I supposed that when the crew became too few to operate properly, Deacon would ask for staff to assist him from other departments. Eventually, ground down to an absolute skeleton crew, the station would cease to operate at all. Then Kellerman would have no option but to leave the accursed planet behind; there wouldn’t be enough researchers or scientists or technicians to keep him here.

Someone coughed behind me, and I turned to see Tyler standing in the hangar door. She looked almost as discomfited as Deacon: her hair escaping from beneath her faded bandana, thin muscled arms crossed over her chest. She gave an embarrassed smile. We were now on our own in the hangar bay, I realised. Everyone else had filed out of the room and I had been lost in thought. My hand was still resting on the casket of Blake’s dead sim.

“I guess you want to say sorry as well?”

“Not quite. Your squad is out of
Liberty Point
, isn’t it?” she asked. “I guess that you are more up to date with current affairs than we are out here.”

“I don’t feel like talking right now.”

But she held her ground, nervous energy prickling around her like an aura. She stood in the shadow of a giant fusion-borer – a tracked vehicle, not unlike a crawler, with a nose terminating in a huge drill-piece. The drill was capped with a thick layer of Helios’ sand, but the heating elements – industrial lasers that would burn through even dense rock – had been cleaned.

“I’m a speedball fan,” Tyler said, pointing to a faded emblem on her headscarf: SAN-ANG SENTINELS. “I wondered whether you – or maybe one of your team – could let me know how the Sentinels are doing this season? We don’t get news updates.”

She made me very angry.
A damned speedball team, at a time like this?
I wasn’t in any mood to talk with her about sport.

“I know they played in the twenty-two-hundred series – which was, what, three years ago?” she persisted.

“Get your sports updates from someone else.”

“You’ll miss him, huh?” she suddenly asked.

“Of course I will.”

“Happens a lot out here, on Helios. People die. It’s what this place does to you. Gets every one of us, in the end.”

Her reaction should have made me even angrier – she was a civvie and didn’t have any idea what losing someone like Blake meant – but something caused me to pause before responding. Looking into her eyes, my venom seemed to slowly dissipate. Then suddenly the moment – whatever it was – was gone, and Tyler was smiling again.

“Kellerman said to speak with you about using Operations to contact
Liberty Point
,” I said. “We want off this rock. He’s welcome to whatever he finds down here.”

Tyler moved a finger to her lips, so briefly that I barely saw it. Her eyes remained locked on mine.

“Listen, if you want a warmer area of the base, feel free to drop by and see me sometime,” she said. “We can talk more sports.”

She fidgeted with the toe of her boot on the floor, then shrugged and left. I watched her go, frowning uncertainly at her behaviour. Maybe she was interested in me. I wasn’t interested in her, but it had been too long since I’d felt wanted. She was a pretty girl, and I was flattered.

There was something on the floor, written in the dust. Tyler had drawn something.

M11.

Module Eleven. She wanted a meeting. I slid my own foot over the characters, blurring them, and looked about cautiously. The bay was still empty. Tyler had chosen now to approach me and whatever she wanted to say she couldn’t say it in front of the rest of the crew. She’d been speaking in code: there was no twenty-two-hundred series for speedball. She was referring to a time.

I stood silently, turning Blake’s dog-tags over in my hands, feeling the pressed metal and the embossed biometric chips. I slipped the neck chain over my head, and tucked them inside my fatigues.