The Lazarus War: Legion (22 page)

“Yeah,” Kaminski said. “I hear you.”

“I can’t condone you hitting an officer.”

“Even Williams?”

“
Especially
Williams.”

“I know. I’ll apologise to him.”

“Good.”

“Doesn’t make it right…” he started. “He had his hands all over her…”

“I’ll dress it up, make it look like you were at fault. I know it’s not easy, but I warned you about keeping this professional. A couple of nights in the sack doesn’t make Jenkins your weakness all of a sudden, does it?”

Kaminski smiled weakly. “Guess not.”

“Because you can’t think like that, Kaminski. Not in this job.”

Kaminski gave a long sigh. He looked pained all of a sudden. “She’s all I have,” he said. I passed him the vodka but he waved it away. “Do you know the first thing that I did when we got back from Helios? I commed home. I haven’t done that in years. An automated message every Christmas, the occasional birthday comm. That’s the contact I got with home. That’s how my old ma remembers me. Or how she used to remember me. She had Alzheimer’s before we left.”

“I guess the time away didn’t help?” I offered.

“No,” Kaminski said. “It didn’t. I didn’t begrudge it one bit but I blew a whole year’s wages on an FTL link. We talked for a while. She didn’t recognise me at all. I haven’t got anyone left, except Jenkins.”

“And the Legion.”

“Yeah – and the Legion.”

“Just watch it, is all. I know that Williams is bad news. He’s a lazy bastard I’d rather be without, but Cole chose him. You can’t let your private life interfere with work.”

Kaminski nodded. “Understood.”

“Now, get an early night and sleep it off.”

I polished off the vodka, in several uninterrupted mouthfuls, and let the stuff hit me. I’d quickly reached the sweet spot of being just drunk enough: the boundary between being incapable of coherent thought, and being comfortably numb. I dropped the empty bottle into the pile of trash. We both stood, pushed our way through the artificial jungle.

But my night wasn’t over; not by a long way.

I knew that the SOC would be empty by now. Anyone left awake would be at the party. This was the perfect time to move. After making sure that Kaminski had actually got back to the barracks, I fumbled my way into Medical. The entire ship was on night-cycle and the med-bay was deserted. That suited me just fine.

I desperately needed to know whether she was real; whether the woman I’d encountered on the Artefact really was Elena.

“She’s all I have as well,” I whispered to the dark. “And I need to go back.”

I stripped out of my fatigues. I activated my simulator-tank and the intimate electric hum filled the air. Through the glass canopy, it glowed with an effervescent blue light – holding such promise, seemingly just beyond my reach. I’d seen this done so many times before that I was more than qualified to do it myself.

Just one more death, that might be all it takes
, the voice taunted in my ear.

“I doubt it,” I said, steadying myself against the tank exterior.

Slowly, swaying under the influence of a bellyful of vodka and a gut-load of disappointment, I realised that there was another light in the room: another blue glow, from the corner of my eye.

Williams’ simulator-tank.

Not only was his tank operational but he was inside it. Caught in the cradle of data-cables and feeder tubes, his hardcopy bobbed tranquilly. I watched him for a long moment, processing what I was seeing – in my state, that took longer than it should have done. His eyes were tightly shut and the muscles of his face occasionally twitched.

Where Kaminski had hit him, there was no injury at all.

Was I imagining this as well? Maybe things were getting worse.

The monitor above his simulator was in sleep mode – had been running for a while, I reckoned. It flickered to life as I approached.

The timer was running.

“Well I’ll be damned…”

Where has he gone?
I asked myself. Surely not somewhere aboard the
Colossus
: someone would’ve seen him, called the incident in. The same went for the other warships in the fleet. I struggled to see any purpose in making transition, to board one of those vessels. There was nowhere else for him to go but the Artefact. Just the idea that he might have seen Elena: it somehow stirred the coals of my anger. She was mine, and whether she was real or not Williams had no Christo-damned right to see her.

“Get a fucking grip. We don’t even know if he can see her.”

Of course
, the holo-psych suggested,
if she’s real, then he will definitely be able to see her
.

I frantically searched the other tanks, ensuring that they were unoccupied. Maybe I was so drunk that I’d missed it, that the rest of his simulant team were engaged as well. But the other tanks were empty.

I thought for a moment about extracting Williams, about hitting the emergency override and bringing him – or at least his consciousness – back to the
Colossus
. I dismissed that idea: I needed to know why he was out there, and what he was doing.

Only one way to find out.

I lurched over the SOC control system. Slowly punched in the relevant command codes. Christo knows how I managed to obtain a firing solution for the drop-capsule, but I did. In double-vision I reviewed the destination of Williams’ capsule. I was right; he had boarded the Artefact. There: near the frontal facing. If it was good enough for him, it was good enough for me. I selected the same coordinates.

Clambered into my own simulator and let muscle-memory do the rest: jacking in my data-ports, clasping the respirator to my mouth.

I hit the COMMENCE TRANSITION button.

I’d operated a simulant in most environments and in many conditions. When you’ve done this as many times as I have, it’s very easy to think that there’s nothing left to be learnt from the technology.

But I was definitely learning something from this transition.

I was pushing my mental and physical boundaries. As I slammed the operating controls, I realised that I had never actually done this drunk. Aboard the
Liberty Point
, the medtechs and psychs wouldn’t have allowed it. I imagined their frowning faces outside the tank: peering in, disapproving. Beyond disapproving: I was quite sure that I would be seriously reprimanded. A major in the Alliance Army – with so many years under my belt – should know better than to operate heavy machinery while drunk.

The experience was disconcerting, to say the least.

One second I was raging drunk, having difficulty focusing on the world around me, nausea creeping through my gut.

The next I was absolutely awake, utterly sharp.

Simulant senses took over and I became hyper-aware. I was instantly sober; like I had jumped off a cliff, been hit by an air-car, shot with a gun. The drink and that cloying deprivation of senses that it brings with it just vanished.

My HUD came online, flashed with boot messages, and I stared out into the familiar dark. I was inside my combat-armour, in a drop-capsule, inside a firing tube aboard the
Colossus
.

CANCEL LAUNCH SEQUENCE? the AI asked me, reading the state of my biorhythms.

FUCK NO, I transmitted. CONFIRM LAUNCH.

CONFIRMED. T MINUS FIVE SECONDS UNTIL DROP.

I lay still in the capsule and let the ship do the rest.

I made the descent.

Drunk, I’d forgotten almost completely about Loeb’s prohibition on further simulant trips until the Rift-storm had abated.

Sober, I recalled the fact immediately.

It was a very rough trip down. Once I’d breached the null-shield, near-space became a storm-tossed sea. Not in the physical sense: space looked just as calm and serene as it ever had. But while there was nothing to see, the instrumentation on my suit and capsule told a very different story. The region was being bombarded with squalling particle matter; engulfed by a tsunami of magnetic waves. The
Colossus
and her sister ships had advanced protective measures for such an occurrence – weather patterns like this were unfortunate, but hardly unexpected in the wilderness space of the Maelstrom. Once the hatches were battened down, the storm was of limited threat to the starships.

To me, travelling through the void in the drop-capsule, sealed within my combat-suit, it was potentially lethal. My suit rebooted twice; shorted by electrical spikes. Alarms started to flood my head. I very quickly realised that I was losing control of this drop.

“Fuck!” I shouted as the drop-capsule jinked and wove, battering me inside the tight confines.

Something shorted out with a spray of sparks, so close to my head that it left scorch-marks on the outside of my face-plate. My combat-suit administered dizzying, poisonous levels of sedative and anti-sickness drugs. I began to think that maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. Maybe the Buzzard had made the right choice in restricting expeditions while the Rift was active—

Williams must’ve done it. I can do it too.

Then the drop-capsule shed around me. I triggered my thruster pack. I was through the worst of the storm; inbound on my set coordinates. It wasn’t a pleasant drop, by any stretch, but it was suddenly manageable. The urgent need to vomit subsided.

I landed near an airlock.

Safely down on the Artefact, I took in my surroundings. In miniature, the
Colossus
hovered above me – kilometres from my position. I thought of the party in the mess hall: now just a tiny dot of light on the hull of the warship. I had bigger things to worry about. I wasn’t part of their world any more.

The rest of the fleet – those sixteen other anonymous starships – was positioned in a precise arc around the Artefact. The Damascus Rift was unusually bright tonight, and cast the ship hulls in a green nimbus. The display was perversely beautiful. A reminder of nature’s unchecked ferocity.

“Jesus…” I said to myself, as I registered the rad-dose my suit was absorbing. It’d be enough to kill a real skin outright. “Imagine what this is doing to Elena…”

Clutching my plasma rifle, I waited as the airlock cycled open.

Even the terrifying can become routine with repetition
, I thought. The sense of
déjà vu
was almost overwhelming and I struggled to stay focused.

I moved off.

Once I was inside the Artefact, I switched off my suit-feeds and activated my bio-scanner. I decided that I would use that judiciously. If what Elena had told me was correct – if she was real – then I suspected that the Reaper could track me with passive returns on the scanner as well.

Almost immediately, I got a single result. I wondered whether that might be Elena, but quickly discarded the idea. It was moving slowly and within a previously mapped sector. Had to be Williams.
What is Williams doing out here, on his own?
Had he seen Elena? I doubted it, given his reaction during the debrief, but Elena’s words haunted me: “How do I know that you haven’t been compromised?”

I found Williams in an open corridor. I thought about dropping some drones – letting those creep up on him – but the data-bleed concerned me. Returns on my scanner gave me limited information on his status. His suit-feeds were, I noticed, all cancelled.

I crept along the corridor behind him, staying a junction away until I had caught up with him. He was fully suited, armed with a plasma rifle. Crouching, he clutched something in the pool of light cast by his combat-suit-lamps.

The corridor emitted a dull metallic glow – barely enough light to see by even with enhanced vision but damn better than the constant dark. I watched him intently. I couldn’t see what he was doing. No IFF beacon, I realised.

“Hello, Harris,” Williams suddenly declared, over the comm.

“How’d you know it was me?” I asked.

I stood to block the corridor. Tensed with my plasma rifle; for some reason half expecting to need it.

“Had to be you. No one else would think of coming in here alone. That, and you make too much noise. Maybe your hearing is letting you down. You sound like a Krell primary on a rampage.”

Williams stayed on the ground, but turned on his enormous boots to face me. Behind his face-plate, he was grinning broadly; face underlit by his helmet.

“You saw me on the bio-scanner, I take it?” I said.

Williams sniggered. “You got me, man.”

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing in here?” I demanded. “I didn’t give you clearance for an expedition.”

“The Buzzard restricted all operations,” Williams said, “which technically means that you shouldn’t be here either.”

“Repeat: what are you doing, Captain?”

Williams nodded at the floor beneath him. “See for yourself.”

He was, I realised, standing among a sea of corpses.

Krell corpses.

“I found them during the last operation,” Williams said. “Thought I’d come aboard and take some samples.”

“Why didn’t you tell anyone what you found?”

Williams looked surprised. “I didn’t think to bother anyone. Seemed like more important things were happening, what with the whole Dr Marceau issue.”

“And why didn’t you tell me that you were coming back aboard the Artefact?”

“I tried to comm you. The watch officer was off-duty – probably at that damned party.”

“So you just came aboard alone…?”

“I haven’t been sleeping so well. Bad dreams. That, and the fat lip your private gave me wasn’t exactly comfortable.”

“Then see Dr West. Get some ’gesics. This is an unauthorised expedition.”

We walked among the dead, crunching remains of ancient Krell specimens underfoot. For the most part they were desiccated to the point of ossification. Shrunken through exposure, heaped sometimes three bodies deep, erratically positioned all along the corridor. Their physiology and appearance was so familiar to me that I could classify them easily. Mostly primary-forms but several secondary-forms as well. The bizarre tableau went on for a few hundred metres, skirting the edge of the area Williams had explored on today’s mission. At the last safe junction, a huge leader-form had slumped against the wall: raptorial arms deployed ready to strike some imagined enemy. Dead eyes long boiled, now just empty cavities staring back with indignant hate.

“Cause of death?” I asked.

“Probably that Shard asshole. These aren’t evolved for ship-to-ship combat.”

I agreed with him. The bodies were standard Krell primaries. A lot more resilient than a human soldier but no match for the Reaper.

“I’d be hard pressed to decide which side to bet on in a fight,” Williams added. “But it’s a match I’d like to see.”

I frowned at the nearest corpse. There was no obvious cause of death, and considering the alien physiology, it was unlikely that we’d be able to reach a conclusion. The Krell corpses had died suddenly, in flight. Some had fallen on to their forelimbs, tails extended.

“They were running,” I said. “Towards the Hub.”

Williams nodded. “Maybe.”

“It was a blind run,” I said, considering the pattern of corpses. “The Krell don’t usually think like that. They’re a Collective. They don’t have individual thought streams.”

“Yeah, well…” Williams said.

It was like he had lost interest in the Krell. I found it strange that someone so experienced at fighting Krell didn’t see that little detail. Sure, Williams was a bonehead, but he also had a couple of hundred transitions under his belt.

I pointed up ahead. An ornate Shard bulkhead sat at the terminus of the corridor: iris-lock fully contracted, surrounded by depowered alien runes. I made sure to get a good look.

“Must be something big behind that door then,” Williams offered. “I’m sure that Saul would love it.”

He slung his battle-rifle over his shoulder. It was disarmed, I noticed; the activation studs glowing red. He sighed loudly. Leant against the wall.

“Strange fish, isn’t he?” he said.

I paced the corridor some more. This was a unique location aboard the Artefact and I didn’t want to miss any detail that could be used against it. I was unsettled by the presentation of the Krell bodies.

“You mean Saul?” I asked.

“Yeah. Real strange fish. Has he shown you his little shrine in the chapel? Fucking Gaia Cultists – freak me out, man. All that religious nonsense about Mother Earth and the rights of inheritance.”

“Don’t worry about it, Captain. Just do your job.”

“I’ll try. He’s started converting some of the crew. He’s apparently holding some sort of mass up there. Mind if I smoke?”

Williams gave a guilty grin behind his face-plate. Lightning quick, he reached for his helmet and opened it with both hands. There was a brief hiss of escaping air and he dropped the helmet to the floor.

“You have to grow it strong,” he said, “if you want it to have any effect on the simulant physiology.”

He reached inside the collar of his suit and produced an oversized cigarette. Fingered the tip with his glove, and it ignited with an orange ember. He took a long drag.

“You think I won’t bust you for breaking regs?” I said. Made sure to look as unimpressed as possible.

“You’re not that kind of CO,” Williams said, cocky as anything. “Sir.”

“Must’ve taken some work to get smokes into your sim.”

He nodded. “Not easy but it can be done. First, my stash in Hydroponics had to be strong enough to affect my sim. The herbs have been growing up there for a long time. Second, I got access to the firing tubes down in the drop-bay. Third, my combat-suit has had a little modification.”

He tapped the status indicator on his chest. On most suits, the small panel was hardly visible: with the camo-field activated, it wasn’t individually distinguishable from the rest of the chest-plate. But on Williams’ armour, the indicators visibly pulsed red.

“You’ve disabled your medical suite?”

“Sure, man. And not just this suit: I’ve disabled
all
my medical suites. It’s a hack I picked up.”

I wasn’t sure what I was more disconcerted by: the idea that he had done it alone, that he might’ve received help from someone on the
Colossus
, or that here was someone who knew simulants better than me. The whole thing made me uneasy.

“I want that shit shut down, Captain,” I said.

Williams nodded, but also took another long drag on the enormous cigarette. “Barely works anyway. Doesn’t seem like it was really worth the effort.”

“It’s a breach of protocol.”

“Will you listen to the man? Lazarus, lecturing a lowly captain on breach of protocol.”

“Everyone has their limits.”

Williams held my gaze. The malicious joker façade was suddenly gone: replaced by an angry, hungry bastard of a man. “And has this place pushed you to yours? I wonder if it has. Because, you see, Major,” he emphasised that last word, like I was of a different breed to him – a proper simulant trooper, “you’re not going to break this place. No matter what you’ve done out there in deep-space, I’m better at this.”

“Cut that shit out.”

Williams’ crooked smile was fixed, unbothered. “Sure, man. You’re in charge. But I’m going to do this. The Warfighters will finish this puzzle.”

“I beat the one on Helios. Damascus is no different. And you’re right about one thing: I am the one in charge. You are not to come aboard the Artefact unless I personally approve the order. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m watching you.”

“We want the same thing, I think. Sir.”

So far as I was concerned, the conversation was over. “Extract,” I ordered.

With practised calmness, Williams flipped the buckle on his sidearm holster and plucked his PPG-13 plasma pistol. “You serious?” he asked me.

“Deadly.”

“What about the Reaper?”

“I’ll risk it,” I said.

“Your call.”

Williams placed the pistol beneath the chin plate of his helmet. His eyes were fixed on mine and he stood rigid. Perhaps he expected me to back down. If he did, he was very wrong.

“Do it,” I said.

He pulled the trigger.

The combat-suits were good but there was probably no personal body-armour in existence that could withstand a pulse from a forty-kilowatt plasma pistol at that range. There was an instant flash of white light, and the pulse fired up through the weak spot in the chin guard. The weapon gave a pitched hiss: nothing more, and the sound barely travelled down the corridor. The contents of Williams’ head splattered the wall and ceiling. His body was stiff for a second, then crumpled in a heap.

“That’s going to give you one hell of a headache.”

Williams’ cigarette butt lay discarded on the floor. It looked peculiarly out of place – a human relic aboard the monstrous alien vessel.
What would the Shard make of it?
I wondered.

I seemed to be doing a lot of things for reasons that I couldn’t really explain. I lifted the cigarette butt and scanned it with my chemical-analyser. The device was a recent Sci-Div upgrade: something I rarely had the opportunity to use, but that I knew would one day come in handy. The probe – a small needle – extended from the tip of my right index finger. I pinched the cigarette.

The results of the chem-analysis were almost instant. Data scrolled down my HUD. Williams was right – it was a very strong narcotic combination – a chemically enhanced strain of marijuana laced with a methahydride. No surprises there. The stuff would have to be especially potent to have any impact on a simulant’s nervous system. I stored the analysis results in my wrist-comp.

“And now to do what I came here to do,” I whispered.

The signal appeared on my bio-scanner almost on cue. A lone blip, flickering in and out of existence.

“I’m here!” I shouted.

I flipped the catches on my helmet, let my atmosphere supply mingle with that of the Artefact. I needed to breathe the same air as Elena; to share the same experience.

The anticipation of seeing her was almost too much to bear. I resisted running to meet her: recalled her tense posture and angry response on my last visit. She had to come to me. So I waited at the end of the corridor, got another look at the runes circling the door. Their luminescence increased as I approached – encouraging me onwards, to an almost certain demise. The language was indecipherable: the tightly scripted symbols, an almost living ebb and flow to the writing.

I had seen it somewhere before.

At the foot of the Artefact, in the sleeting rain; bleeding out. The alien command console, rising up from the desert. Kellerman, lifting the Key into the air like a madman.

“It needs the Key…”

The structure around me was silent, and the Artefact itself offered no explanation.

I deactivated my null-shield as Elena appeared in the distance.

She had no weapon and looked the same as when I’d seen her earlier that day. There was no reaction from her when she saw the stacked Krell corpses, and she deftly picked her way through the bodies. Williams’ body, on the other hand, evinced an instance response. Her eyes went wide.

“It’s okay,” I whispered. “He’s dead.”

“Is there anyone else with you?”

I shook my head. “Not now.”

“Where are they?”

“I have a ship. A whole fleet.”

“Did you tell them about me?” Elena insisted, glaring through her brows at me. “Is he one of them?”

“I don’t know who you’re talking about, Elena, but I’m here to rescue you.”

There was still an impossible distance between us. Every fibre of my being wanted to close it. But that guarded expression on Elena’s face told me that I’d have to wait.

“They would send you, I suppose,” she muttered. “My weakness. Perhaps they don’t know how we left things…”

“I can undo it all.”

I could’ve given her the time since our parting in months, days, hours; expressed it in whatever measurements she wanted. Unconsciously, just because I couldn’t stop myself any longer, I began towards her.

Elena glared at me. “Don’t come any closer. Before you do anything, I need to believe it’s really you.”

I swallowed back emotion. My mouth felt impossibly dry.

“Azure,” I said. “We lived together on Azure.”

That answer didn’t seem to satisfy Elena. Her expression remained fixed. “Anyone could know that,” she responded. “I need real proof!”