The Lazarus War: Artefact (36 page)

There’s nothing to help me out here. There never was, and now this is the end
.

I closed my eyes. I drew into myself. I imagined Elena’s face. The colour of her hair. The smell of her skin. I awaited the killing blow – that final and deadly act from the Krell leader-form.

But the attack never came.

After long seconds, I opened my eyes, still held in the clutches of the xeno bastard, feet nearly a metre off the ground. The leader was frozen. All of the Krell had stopped. Some of the nearer xenos backed away. They formed a wide circle around me, and slowly and surely withdrew.

This was not the same as the planned and purposeful retreat on the
Oregon
. The Krell recoiled from me. They knew
fear
.

I realised that in my struggle to find a weapon, I
had
found something.
The Key
. I clutched it like a knife. Unconsciously, I had lifted it, displaying the ancient device to the gathered Krell.

With grace and delicacy that I had never seen from the species, the leader-form placed me back on the ground. I immediately fell into a combat-stance, baring the Shard device.

The leader looked on with undisguised curiosity. It tilted its massive, armoured head to watch me. There was something almost mournful in its features.

My whole body shook. I tore free my helmet, gasping in lungfuls of poisoned atmosphere. My skin bristled with damp sweat.

We faced off against each other: the xeno leader and I.

A deep sonorous drone filled the air. Something around me was coming online, coming to life.

The xeno bowed its head.

For just a moment, we were at peace: captured in time, both species in awe of this ancient alien technology – whatever the Shard Key really was.

Then the harsh report of gunfire – of human gunfire – snapped me out of it, and the leader-form exploded.

A part of my brain that I had forgotten existed suddenly kicked in.

Wessler-Heslake carbine. Standard civilian security forces issue. 9 mm armour-piercing rounds
.

The gunfire was ferocious and intense. Many of the Krell were shredded. Rounds ricocheted off the metal walls and floor. Xeno corpses piled in front of me.

I slammed my body to the concave wall. Through pure chance, I hadn’t been hit. In shaking hands, I unholstered my remaining weapon – my father’s old revolver – and raised it, unsure of who or what to fire on.

“Captain Harris!” an all-too-familiar voice called above the noise.
Kellerman
. “Surrender!”

Just the sound of his voice made my bile rise, caused the flood of memories to almost envelop me. The Artefact’s song rose with my anger: encouraged me to take him on, to take him apart. In my mind’s eye, I saw his bones breaking like matchsticks, his blood flooding the tunnel floor—

Get a grip!

The gunfire stopped. With eel-like fluidity the Krell fled into the walls and ceiling shafts.

Kellerman approached through the smoke, wading through the dead and dying.
Is he really here, or is this some trick of my damaged mind?
But phantoms didn’t usually wear exo-suits, and Kellerman was strapped into his. He was equipped for battle: the exo had been extensively modified, using parts from a cannibalised simulant combat-suit. Armour plates lined the torso and limbs, and new servos extended across his legs, feet and hands.

Deacon was at his shoulder, carbine panning the dark. Whatever was left of Helios Station was in tow; researchers with the hard eyes of religious fanatics, dour-faced security personnel. Ten or so of them.

Kellerman held out one hand, but in his other he carried a sidearm. A Klashov-45 – a semi-automatic, Directorate-issue pistol. He attempted a smile in the half-light of the Shard tunnels, but the best he could muster was a corpselike rictus.

“Doesn’t suit you, Kellerman,” I shouted.

“When we lost contact with the sand-crawler, we assumed the worst,” he said. “It took a fusion-borer to get through the cave-in. Thankfully, I equipped your suits with transponders – once we were in the tunnels, it wasn’t so hard to find you.”

The tracker in my wrist-comp; such a simple thing.

Kellerman’s words gave me reassurance, in a way that he had not intended. He had followed me down here, leaving the base unoccupied.
Has he already executed Kaminski?
Jenkins had just died – her consciousness would have travelled across the surface of Helios almost immediately, back into her real body – and allowing for time to find me, Kellerman must’ve already left the station by the time she made it back. He’d used a fusion-borer to reach me, not the Directorate Interceptor.

“We’ve come to assist,” Kellerman said. “Hand over the Key.”

“Stay there!” I shouted. Pistol still raised: a single shot at this range would put a hole in Kellerman, end his desperate obsession.

Deacon noisily armed his carbine; the
click
of the safety catch a marker in the sand. The sound echoed twenty-fold and impacted me like a gunshot. The message was simple:
You shoot him, I shoot you
.

“Who’s faster, Deacon?” I asked.

The security chief shrugged. “Why don’t we see? Y’all injured, and slow. I reckon that I could take you. And I’m damned sure that I want to.”

Deacon wore an arm-band over his left bicep. Just a piece of black rag, covering the Helios Expedition and Alliance badging. Replacing it with the sword-and-hydra insignia of Directorate Spec Ops. All Kellerman’s people wore the same badge. Fresh recruits, malleable to his twisted sense of scientific idealism.

“No army, then?” I asked. “No Directorate troops on Helios? Just sleeper agents for the cause – traitors.”

“You don’t know shit,” Deacon barked back at me.

“Who’d they get to first? You or Deacon?”

Kellerman shuffled onwards, that dead grin still dominating his face.

“We lost people on the way down, but you did a good job of clearing out the tunnels,” he said. His tone was controlled, calming.

“Stay the fuck back!” I shouted through gritted teeth. “What happened to my squad? Are they alive?”

Light reflected off something above Deacon’s head. Two wet eyes, staring down. The Krell hadn’t gone far; they were waiting for the chance to strike. I wondered whether there were xenos lurking behind me as well, whether I would die from a gunshot wound or the claws of a Krell.

“They are well. They’re being cared for.”

“And Tyler?”

Kellerman’s gun was rigid at his side. He hadn’t fired it before, I decided. He held the matt-black pistol against his leg, kept his forearm fixed.
Not a trained weapons operator. Probably won’t be able to account for the recoil if he has to fire it
.

“I’d say she deserved what she got,” Deacon said, grinning idiotically. “Bitch.”

“She’s alive,” Kellerman added.

He fixed me with his eyes. That smile was gone from his face. He took another small step forward. Twenty or so metres away, now. His boot crunched a Krell skull underfoot. Smoke still poured from the alien bodies, acting as a barrier between us.

Another flash of light in the shaft above Deacon: two, three pairs of eyes. I sensed the Krell’s barely restrained bloodlust.

“I said,
stay the fuck back!
” I yelled.

“I don’t have time for this!” Kellerman snarled, striding onwards – through the remains of Jenkins’ simulant. “I want that Key now! Deacon – shoot him but don’t damage the Key—”

Several things happened within the blink of an eye, microseconds apart. To my unaugmented human senses, they appeared to all intents to happen simultaneously.

I fired my pistol at Kellerman.

The ceiling exploded with activity.

My shot went wide, and glanced over Kellerman’s shoulder. The revolver had a nasty kick, so unlike an energy weapon. The kinetic round hit Deacon in the chest – punched cleanly through his flak jacket. The heavy-calibre slug knocked him backwards.

But even as he was hit, he was firing.

And even as he was firing, he was finished.

My eyes darted to the ceiling, for just a heartbeat, and Deacon knew what was coming. His expression was horrified.

A primary-form lurched out of a ceiling cavity, upside down, and eviscerated him cleanly with its razor-claws. The gunshot wound became an irrelevance. Deacon didn’t even have time to evade the attack; just stood there, rifle braced in his hands.

But he managed to open fire, the action carried over in the throes of death.

Deacon’s spent corpse collapsed to the floor, finger still depressed on the weapon trigger. He indiscriminately sprayed the corridor with gunfire. Carbine rounds raked the walls, bullets ricocheting all about.

Kellerman reacted a second later – in battlefield terms, a lifetime too late – and began shooting at me as well.

The traitors rushed on, yelling Directorate battle cries: hack Chinese from Americans grown up on the Outer Colonies.

That was all the invitation the Krell needed. They renewed their attack, streaming from every shadow. Kellerman’s men fought back, but they were not simulants. Screams echoed down the tunnels as the massed primary-forms assaulted. These were amateurs, despite their dedication, and there was an awkward moment of indecision – some of them erratically firing in my direction, others trying to hold back the Krell.

Their demise was inevitable, and I knew if I stuck around I would face the same fate. This fight could only go one way – and under cover of the chaos I could escape. I squeezed off another few shots into the melee, hoping to hit Kellerman, but the effort was token. Then I turned and ran as fast as my damaged body would carry me.

The corridors were suddenly aflame with alien cuneiform. Patterns ignited – blues, whites, incredible star-fields – as I ran. Spiral galaxies beyond our own. Worlds within worlds.

No one has ever made it this far
.

The Artefact’s signal pulled me onwards, as though I was possessed by the spirits of the long-dead architects of this structure. The transmission resonated off the walls and floors. The structure was humming; the metalwork reverberant. An immense power was building around me. Not the predictable, muted power of human technology: there was something self-aware, something malignant about this presence.

The tunnel became rock again. Stumbling over broken ground, I made it to a simple break in the cavern wall, marked by a pile of rocks. I just followed the light. Dust and grit filtered into the network from the opening. Despite my exhaustion, I fervently tore at the loose rocks. It didn’t take long, and soon the opening was big enough to pull myself through.

Ahead, like an angry testament to gods long forgotten, the Artefact loomed in all its terrible majesty.

A storm raged around me.

Not just a storm: the storm to end all storms.

I was immediately exposed to the full fury of the wind. The rain was unearthly hard, coming down in great sleeting sheets, a thunderous deluge. Huge droplets hit my naked head, splattered noisily against the padding of my suit. The sky was dark, lit only by the crackle of luminescent lightning, and storm clouds eddied overhead – black, prophetic. As though Helios was venting all of its pent-up elemental power in one go. The place didn’t feel natural, didn’t feel real. Even the atmosphere was changed: heavy with ozone, cloying to the extent that it was barely breathable.

Assailed by the intense wind, I desperately clutched the Key in one hand and my father’s pistol in the other.

“Where are you!” I bellowed into the storm. “Jenkins! Kaminski! Martinez!”

But the sky was empty, and there was no sign of the Interceptor or my squad.
Time to face it: they’re all dead. Kellerman has executed them
. I went to wipe rainwater from my eyes, with the back of my right hand. When my arm didn’t respond – or rather did, but with frozen sluggishness – I realised what had happened. A dark bloom appeared at my shoulder, right through the collarbone: blood oozed through an open wound.

I’d been shot. A solid round; probably from Kellerman or Deacon.

“This isn’t fair!” I shouted. My arm sagged, and I wrapped my fingers around the Key to hold on to it. My strength was fading fast. “I want to live!”

The Artefact’s song overwhelmed me. I pitched forward, struggled to stay on my feet, and retched into the rain. It was a painful dry heave and nothing came up.

I was in the centre of an alien ruin. Shard structures peppered the desert floor, miniature artefacts. Aeons-old slabs of obsidian, slick with rain, draining the light. There were other, more ominous structures as well: wicked-looking spires, sharp and brutal, lined the route ahead.

The Artefact lay at the end of the path, rising out of the desert like the blade of an upturned knife, so big that it touched the sky. I couldn’t concentrate on the Artefact – couldn’t make out the detail of the vast design. It came into sharp focus, but then rapidly dissolved.

It doesn’t want to be seen. It doesn’t want to be remembered
.

—hurts so bad, throbbing, thrumming behind my eyes—

A
click-click-clicking
noise rose above the wind.

I whirled around, tightening the grip on my pistol.

Kellerman suddenly broke free of the tunnel exit, smashing aside rocks and debris with wild abandon. This was a reborn Kellerman: empowered, renewed. He effortlessly rolled a boulder out of his way and his exo crackled with energy – it had been overcharged, the maniac operator’s strength increased ten-fold. He’d lost his pistol somewhere in the tunnels, but that made him no less lethal.

“You can’t escape,” he shouted. “You’re a dead man walking.”

“Are you all that is left?” I called back, my pistol raised to fire at him. My arm – my good arm – trembled.

Kellerman appeared in double vision. The lank remains of his hair were plastered to his head, rain dripping from the craggy features of his face. Another lightning fork split the sky, illuminating him from behind. Inside his exo, he was a skeleton within a skeleton: a ragged mass of bones.

“None of them matter,” Kellerman answered.

No one followed him out of the tunnel mouth, but there was movement all around us. The Krell were everywhere: skulking between the Shard ruins, hanging upside down from blasted structures. Relishing the rain, flashes of light winking off wetted carapaces. A gun-graft materialised out of my peripheral vision. The Key seemed to repel them – but for how long?

The ammo read-out on my revolver flashed, mocking me.

One round left.

One fucking round left
.

A terrible despair descended on me:
I am going to die out here
. Whatever happened, I was finished. I was going to die like Sara Tyler, like the other explorers condemned by Kellerman’s obsession. Like Elena, like Blake, like my father. I considered shooting myself. Take my father’s way out of the problem, the easy way out.
What’s one more death to a man who has experienced so many?
As if reading my thoughts, as if unhappy with that suggestion, I saw a primary-form leap between structures – moving nearer.

I scanned the horizon – momentarily –
please let them be here!

With preternatural speed, using his exo-suit leg servos, Kellerman
leapt
towards me. My reactions were blunted, and the sudden speed with which he was moving caught me off-guard.

I fired.

The shot missed him completely, whistling off into the wind.

Kellerman body-slammed me with all of his mass. His armoured shoulder connected with my sternum, forced the breath from my lungs. We fell backwards, joined, and collapsed into the dirt. Water splashed all around us.

Kellerman followed up the attack immediately, and I had no time to react. He balled a fist, hammered it into my good arm. The blow sent a shockwave through me, and I dropped my pistol.

Kellerman was on top of me now, rising up with both powered fists over his head – ready to strike again. His body was so wide, twice as big as he was before.

“I’m sorry Elena,” I whispered. I wasn’t sure whether I had actually vocalised the thought.

Kellerman paused, held off the assault. Sitting astride my battered body, he grabbed the collar of my suit. He pulled me close to his face.

“Is that who you hear, when the Artefact calls out to you?” Kellerman asked. “Is that who you hear? Elena – that was the name. Who is she? Some fifty-credit whore back at
Liberty Point
?”

His skin was a ghostly white. A tracery of blue veins popped up all over his skull.

Leeroy, chasing me through the tenement with that damned bat—

“You have no Christo-damned right to even say her name!” I shouted back. My H-suit was soaking wet – absorbing water and blood, becoming heavier. I was losing my edge from the gunshot wound.

Kellerman gave me a slow, informed nod, like he understood exactly what I was saying.
Can he see the Krell all around us?
I asked myself.
Are they really here?
A whole Collective had assembled, spectators to our confrontation. I still held the Key, and it was growing warmer and warmer: hot enough now that I could feel it through my padded gloves.

I swiped at Kellerman with my good arm – a sidelong punch to his head. He pulled back, evading the blow. Then he hauled me to my feet, exo-assisted fingers tearing at the fabric of my H-suit.

He shook me, and although I struggled to fight back against him I just couldn’t. He had expanded to fill the universe. His face split into a demonic leer: eyes burning hot embers, filled with red light. More alive than he had ever been before.

“Isn’t it wonderful?” Kellerman asked. Not of me, but of the universe at large; indicating towards the Artefact, dwarfing us both now.

“Fuck you, Kellerman!”

He flung me into a nearby ruin. My injured shoulder impacted the solid structure – I felt something else breaking in my back or arm. Hard to say. I could still feel my legs, so it wasn’t my spine.

So damn cold. Numb inside and out
.

I shook my head; needed to concentrate. The Artefact’s transmission had settled into an unbearable thrumming. All around me, the atmosphere pressed uncomfortably.

Kellerman appeared over me.

“Let me tell you what I hear,” he said. “I was on Epsilon Ultris in an official capacity, as part of a Sci-Div expedition, in a sector that the Alliance Army had
approved
I visit. The UAS
Santiago
fired a barrage on my position. Sixteen of my best people, blasted away in the press of a button, because some idiot technician didn’t check whether there were allied forces in the area. Command called it friendly fire.
Friendly fire!
I ask you, as a military man, what is friendly about a plasma ordnance barrage?”

My heart began a slower, staccato beat.
It will be a release
, I decided. My thoughts were jumbled, disconnected. I struggled to decide which pain was worse. Despite being wounded by a gunshot and severely beaten, my head was winning the competition. I blinked blood from my eyes – not even sure where I was bleeding from any more.

“That’s the noise I hear: the humming, in the second before the plasma barrage reached us. The sky was on fire, Harris – the damned sky! I’ve never heard anything like it, before or since. The sound of death, the sound of annihilation. The end of all things. I survived by pure chance. But, I ask you, what kind of a survival is
this
? The Alliance: they did this to me. When they took my legs, I thought that my life was over. That I would never again set foot on an alien world, never again experience the thrill of a new finding. And you are just the same: you could never do what you do inside your body. Injured or otherwise.”

For an instant, I could hear the same noise as Kellerman: the electric hum caused by the atmosphere igniting. I imagined the air crackling all around us, the retina-destroying flare of light as the barrage claimed the horizon—

“I’m nothing like you,” I managed, taking slow breaths.
Fuck – my ribs hurt so bad
. “And I never will be.”

“We are both trapped in these fallible bodies. Both doomed to live out existence in mortal frames that we have outgrown.”

“Never.”

I struggled to my feet, went to punch Kellerman – only overstretched, left myself open to a counter. Kellerman was no fighter but he had strength on his side. He dodged the blow. Launched a powerful elbow strike, right into my face. Bone and steel connected: something popped in my face. Bright red blood spewed from my nose.

With monumental effort I tried to scramble to my feet again. The thrumming sound had increased in pitch, become all-enveloping. It felt like the universe was collapsing in on itself.

“The Directorate wants what I have,” Kellerman snarled.

“This is madness,” I slurred. “You don’t know what will happen if you activate the Artefact. You can feel what it is doing to us now. You don’t know what you are dealing with. Once the Artefact is activated, the Directorate won’t give a shit about your research.”

“I don’t care about the Directorate, but I hate the Alliance. Knowledge is all that matters. I will call the Shard here. Can you imagine the advances that a race like that can offer us? The Directorate is a means to an end. They helped me, and I helped them.”

Kellerman raised a booted foot and kicked me hard in the gut. Broken, spent, I collapsed to the ground.

“It’s over. This is how it ends. Give me the Key.”

I shook my head. Couldn’t talk any more: breathing was too much effort.

Kellerman kicked me again and again. Every blow was a ball of iron into my stomach. I doubled over in pain. Something else inside me ruptured. The Key fell from my hand. I was too weak to hold it any more.

Kellerman strode past me. He was a force of nature now, elevated beyond a man. His footfalls were slow and heavy, and he confidently scooped up the alien relic.

I lay on the floor, in the dirt, rain falling all around me. So cold. Fading so fast.

The Krell poured out of the tunnel, amassing an army, encircling us. They had finished the rest of Kellerman’s away team, and now we were completely alone out here.

My vision splintered. Debilitating, crippling pain kept me down on the floor. I prayed for the starship – for Jenkins and my squad to make their appearance. But even as I managed to scan the sky, there was no sign of them.

More alien devices and structures were rising out of the sand. The consoles started to glow, pulsating with new life. One of them – sitting at the very foot of the Artefact – blazed especially bright. I recognised the cuneiform: the same as the scripture on the Key. Kellerman lurched over to the Artefact control console.

The ringing in my head was so strong that I couldn’t think straight. I wanted to live so badly – and I wanted the Key. I searched the area for my pistol – for a rock, for a gun, for anything. But my head ached so fucking badly—

Got.

To.

Stay.

Awake.

Somewhere a child was crying. A high, newborn’s cry. A baby that I had never known.

—the explosion—

—the UAS
Santiago
acquired the firing solution—

—that noise: high pitched – so loud that my head split—

—Blake’s face as the stinger hit—

—Elena as she turned to leave—

Old Death lurked nearby. Come to claim his dues, after so long. The Dark Angel himself – beating enormous black wings, hovering in the rain. Casting a long and shifting shadow across both Kellerman and me.

Breathing hurts so bad
.

Stay.

Awake.

My father in the rain, part of his head missing – jaw working to shout something into the wind: words lost to eternity, just like Elena.

Blake – uninjured, as I wanted to remember him – yelling at me.

Elena, in that black dress she had worn on the train – her long hair swept back by the rain, but her face full of dignity. She was shouting something too.

“I’m sorry!” I yelled. “I let you all down.”

Kellerman had his back to me, manipulating the alien console. It flared with new light – bright, inviting whites and blues, haloed by the rain. Framed by the Artefact, Kellerman held up the Key in both hands: the high priest offering a sacrifice to the gods, the console his altar.

I retched some more. Kellerman was being sick as well – great bloody strands pouring from his rotten mouth.

I only wished I could hear what Elena was saying. I listened so hard, pulled myself back from that yawning abyss from which there could be no return.

And then, abruptly, I could hear exactly what she was saying:

“You always come back.”

Lazarus, they called me
.