The Lazarus War: Legion (36 page)

As the mist cleared, I saw that it was done. Nothing stirred in the corridor.

The mess hall doors were open ahead.

I kept my flame-thrower poised – ready to fire again – as I entered and found that it was deathly quiet inside.
Am I too late?
I questioned.

Any encouragement I’d felt from the firefight in the corridor immediately left me. The hall was the site of an unmitigated massacre. Alliance and Directorate bodies littered the floor. Gunfire stitched the walls. Like the corridor outside, impromptu defences had been erected from tables, chairs, whatever furniture was on hand.

“Anyone alive in here?” I called.

A bedraggled figure emerged from behind a barricade.

Martinez.

An immense wave of relief flowed over me. Battered, bruised – but mostly alive. Other dirtied faces peered from hiding places as well, aimed weapons in my direction. I recognised a handful of Scorpio Squadron’s aerospace pilots. They were holed-up in the rec room, behind the servery.

“Stand down, people. He’s a friendly,” Martinez called. He carried an oversized Navy flare gun. “Fucking A,
jefe
.”

I opened my helmet, flung it aside. I was immediately assaulted by the scent of roasting flesh and burning plastic; the cloy of halon spray.

“Where’s Jenkins?” I asked.

“Down here,” Martinez motioned. He gave his diagnosis bluntly: “She’s hit. It’s bad.”

I followed Martinez behind an upturned table at the far end of the hall, backed against one of the floor-to-wall observation windows. Those had been sealed to space: heavy shutters deployed so that the mess hall was now a closed environment.

Jenkins lay on the floor, clutching at a wound in her stomach with a torn-off strip of uniform. Thick blood had soaked through her fatigues. Turned everything a black-red.

“Thought you’d never make it,” she said.

“Stay still,” I said, crouching beside her.

Jenkins’ skin had gone a waxy white; she was sweating unnaturally. Hair plastered to her forehead. She still held a shotgun over her chest – protectively, like it was all that was keeping her alive.

“Pistol shot,” Martinez said. “I’m not sure where the bullet lodged.”

“Somewhere painful, is where!” Jenkins said, baring her teeth. It was a bad impression of a smile. “But I’m okay. I can still fight.”

“Like fuck you can,” I said. “You given her anything?”

Martinez shook his head.

“Except for offering me last rites,” Jenkins said. “But I think I’ll give that a miss.”

I flipped open the medi-suite panel on my combat-suit. The kit was intravenous, hardwired to my nervous system, but if Williams could unwire it then I was sure I could too. I disconnected the analgesic supply.

“That would be nice,” Jenkins said. “As much of it as I can stand.”

I hooked up a redundant hypodermic and stabbed Jenkins in the leg, through the fabric of her fatigues. She hissed with the pain, but sat back. I imagined it wasn’t much compared to the agony in her gut.

“What the fuck’s happening to this ship?” she managed.

“We’re being invaded by Directorate commandos. Williams and the Warfighters are defectors. He has access to next-gen sims.”

“He what?”

“Get back into cover. I’ll explain.”

With my improved sim-senses, I could already hear the pound of boots and the distant chatter of gunfire. The Directorate were moving to our location, sending whatever resources they had to the mess hall.

“Positions!” Martinez shouted.

The survivors scrambled as one.

I started again. “Williams is Directorate. Mason killed him in Medical, but he was using a next-gen simulant. He must have a supply somewhere aboard the
Colossus
, or the fleet.”

“Christo…When did they get to him…?”

I shook my head. “No time for that now.”

There was a sudden, muffled explosion. The faraway
wer-chunk, wer-chunk, wer-chunk
of machinery activating; a giant’s footfalls echoing around the empty corridors of the
Colossus
.
That sound again…

Jenkins ignored the noise, quickly asked: “Have…have you found Kaminski?”

“He’s okay. He’s evacuated the ship, in a pod from the brig. I think that he has Saul.”

“And Mason?” Martinez said.

That distant mechanical sound was undeniably moving in our direction now. Something big was coming our way. The flyboys bristled behind their barricades, all eyes on the mess hall entrance.

“She’s in the SOC, covering the simulators,” I said. “That’s where you need to go.”

I didn’t add that she’d gone off-line, that she might be dead. The fact that my real body hadn’t given up yet had to be some evidence that Mason was still alive. I glanced down at my wrist-comp and saw that the connection to Medical was still down. Whatever Mason was doing, she was still off the grid.

“I have a plan,” I said, speaking faster now. With the metallic booming coming nearer and nearer, I got the distinct feeling that time was running out; that this hiatus was about to be shattered. “I’m going into the Artefact. I’m going to call the Krell here, give the Directorate fleet a run for their money—”

Wer-chunk, wer-chunk, wer-chunk…

“And I’m going to open the Shard Gate.”

Jenkins nodded. She’d been in the interrogation room when Saul had revealed the existence of the gateway.

Near, nearer:
wer-chunk, wer-chunk—

“As soon as the Shard Gate opens, we use it to leave Damascus Space.”

I left out that we didn’t know whether the Gate worked, that Saul’s research had probably been hypothetical, and that even if we did use the Gate we had no idea where it might lead…

“If that fails,” I said, checking my wrist-comp, “in less than forty-nine minutes none of this will matter anyway. Loeb will blow the
Colossus
’ energy core and the data-stacks.”

“How are we going to get to the SOC?” Martinez asked.

“Get a pilot over here,” I ordered.

Martinez waved to the nearest flyboy. He dashed between barricades.

“Is there a crawlspace beneath us?” I asked.

He nodded. “I…I think so. I used to serve on the maintenance team.”

“Is it pressurised?”

“No, but we have respirators.” He nodded at a pile of bright yellow masks. “There are enough to go around.”

“Good. Get into the crawlspaces, leave this deck. Put on the respirators.”

I unhooked the hand welder from my belt, and tossed it at Martinez. He deftly caught it.

“Look after these two,” I said. The flyboys were in their sims; their real bodies safe in the tanks. “I mean that: your crew might be disposable, but mine aren’t.”

The man nodded. “I copy that.”

“What are you going to do?” Martinez said.

“No time to explain,” I said. “Go now. Just make sure that Loeb doesn’t leave without Kaminski.”

“Good luck, Conrad,” Jenkins said. The words were quietly resigned.

Emotion stirred within me; that boundless well of anger. “Solid copy.”

Martinez started signing to the pilots, and, as one, the survivors moved off to an access plate mounted on the floor. He had it up within seconds.

Each titanic footstep made the deck vibrate.

I sat behind the metal table and watched as my bio-scanner began to fill with signals. Alliance and Directorate life-signs, but the Alliance were distinguishable – they were moving away from the mess hall now, slowly but surely. There were far more Directorate signals: those were swarming across the exterior corridors, all converging on my location.

There was shouting from the corridor. Harsh, angry.

I unclipped my remaining gear from my backpack. A demo-charge sat on the ground beside me, and I began to synch it to my suit systems. I slapped it against the nearest window shutter: the magnetic locks activated, holding the charge firm.

They would be here soon—

The barricade exploded with enemy fire.

Hot frag showered the mess hall. I rolled sideways: not quite fast enough. My shield caught most of the debris, but enough hit my torso to cause a suit breach. I felt white-hot pain blossom in my pectoral region; slivers of frag poking from the ruptures in my armour.

I was immediately glad that Martinez and Jenkins weren’t here.

Fighting against the pain, and without an active medi-suite, I scrambled into alternative cover – a crate metres from my original position. I loosed off a handful of shots with the military shotgun: watched as figures began to loom through the smoke. The gun had a terrifying blast radius and several bodies exploded.

Wer-chunk, wer-chunk, wer-chunk
, came the sound again. It was now so near that it was almost on top of me, dominating the chamber, coming right down the main corridor.

It has to be a heavy mech
, I decided.

I peered out from behind the barricade. My breath caught in my chest, and I felt a ripple of anxiety through my simulated skin. The Directorate troopers hadn’t been proper, real quarry. Here was the challenge. This was an undeniable threat – something capable of taking not just me out, but a squad of simulants.

My mind raced with combat scenarios. A direct assault against the mech would be suicide; worse than suicide. To call the machine a tank on legs was an understatement. Walkers based on the same chassis had almost replaced the tank, and had become commonplace among the ranks of the Asiatic Directorate. It was much bigger than a man – bigger than a simulant in a combat-suit, even. Equipped with a heavy flame-thrower under one arm, with an assault cannon under the other; a half-spent rack of anti-personnel missiles mounted on the monster’s back. Pistons and attenuators were half-concealed by thick ablative plating, all cast in the same matt black as the Interceptors and foot troops.

I’d seen the Xi-989 before, but never this close. It was a bunker-breaker, used for shock value as much as combat potential. The single pilot was cramped inside the semi-mirrored cockpit; cranium a mess of wires and cables that directly connected him to the machine. When his head pivoted, the mech responded: moving left and right, sniffing out prey—

More thumping.

Another mech plodded along behind the first. The pair slowly advanced into the mess hall.

I popped a few cartridges into advancing Swords. The flash of the discharging weapon gave my position away and soon the crate was being pounded with fire.

“Surrender!” the lead mech squawked with an electronic voice, from a soundbox on its shoulder.

The mech advanced on me. Behind, Directorate Swords swarmed around the feet of their bigger brothers.

“Mason, you there?” I asked over the comm.

I cringed as more gunfire poured over my location. I hugged the floor. Rounds ricocheted off the armour-glass windows behind me, chewed up the ground around me. My continued existence in the mess hall was becoming increasingly finite.

My comms bead crackled. “I’m back, sir. I copy you.”

It was difficult to judge, above the roar of weapons discharge, but the tone of her voice sounded different.

“Get ready. I’m about to make extraction.”

The lead mech advanced, the pilot’s face just visible inside the cockpit. An angry look crossed the man’s brow. Maybe he was frustrated because I wasn’t cowed by their show of fire superiority.

I smiled to myself. The Directorate were all over the mess hall now, both mechs inside the chamber. A swathe of flame poured from the second mech’s incinerator, torching the floors and barricades – making sure that no one would leave this room alive.

Which was exactly what I’d planned.

“I am Lazarus,” I shouted. “I always come back.”

My eyes flashed to the demo-charge, attached to the observation window.

The lead mech twisted its torso in that direction—

Someone shouted a command—

My wrist-comp display flashed.

CHARGE ACTIVATED.

The blast-shutters and the armour-glass compound were tough – strong enough to withstand glancing gunfire impacts, maybe even a plasma pulse – but the explosive was a shaped nuclear charge.

There was a brief explosion.

All of the wall-to-floor windows were gone.

The metal shutters, then the armour-glass beyond.

On the other side, there was only vacuum.

The hall decompressed immediately.

The Directorate scrambled towards the door.

None of them were quick enough.

The
Colossus
emergency subroutines kicked in again, and this time not so sluggishly. The bulkhead door slammed shut, sealing the mess hall from the rest of the ship. We were all trapped inside the doomed chamber, and the ship was working fast to make sure that the breach was sealed.

On this occasion, I was grateful for that.

The Directorate wanted the
Colossus
intact. That was their weakness: they couldn’t blow the hall, because they wanted the ship in one piece. I was desperate. I didn’t care any more. So long as my people avoided capture, that was good enough for me.

Debris was sucked out into space. Mostly, that was made up of cartwheeling Sword commandos: slamming into one another, colliding with solid objects. Corpses sailed past me, limbs flailing at awkward and foreign angles. There was gunfire, but it was disorganised and irrelevant. Directorate bodies floated all around me, their weapons and armour a cloud of detritus that erupted from the mess hall window.

The real prize came next.

Both heavy mechs slid along the deck. They were too big for mag-locks: instead, they were clawing at the floor for purchase. One flew past me, close enough that I could see inside the cockpit. The pilot was panicking; jabbing at controls on the illuminated panel in front of him, yelling into his communicator.

I gave him the finger as he went, grinning with malice.

I knew that it would only be a temporary set-back to the invaders. The mechs were probably space-proofed; would rely on their internal atmosphere supplies until they were back aboard the ship. But equally, it would do the Directorate no good for their heavy machinery to be floating outside.

Of course, the vacuum got me just the same as everyone else, and there was no time to revel in my victory. I’d already discarded my helmet and my life support was redundant. Within seconds, the grip of vacuum took me and wouldn’t let go.
Not even Lazarus can escape this one
. Once, I would have dreaded that icy grasp: the agonising stab of cold invading my lungs, every cell of my being.

Now, like an old friend, I welcomed it.

I was part of the great cosmos now.

I extracted.

I opened my eyes.

The pain was only bearable because I knew that it wasn’t real. This time I didn’t make a sound – just let it flow through me.

Another sort of suffering spread through my body. My head ached so badly. My severed hand trailed blood and the amniotic had become a murky, impure purple. That deep-seated wooziness that comes with blood loss nagged at my consciousness, threatening to pull me under. I suspected that only the smart-meds were keeping me awake, let alone alive.
Just ride it over. Just let it go
. I was experiencing the worst of both worlds: pain from my real and simulated bodies transposed.

“Extraction confirmed,” I groaned.

A figure appeared outside my tank and looked in.

Am I hallucinating again?

It was Mason, but not Mason: much bigger, meaner.

“What have you done?” I said.

“I couldn’t let you do this alone. The Legion needs me.”

She was skinned up, in her simulant.

Armoured, armed, enormous.

Over her shoulder, in double-vision, I made out her real body. Curled inside her tank.

Her simulant smiled, and she said, “War is a crucible, Major. You either rise from it, or you die trying. Whatever happens, I’m not going to go down without a fight. There’s something waiting for you in your capsule.”

I nodded, not understanding her words. Everything seemed so distant and I had to fight the urge to sleep.

“Hurry,” Mason said. “Loeb’s countdown won’t wait.”

“How long h…have I got?”

“Forty-three minutes.”

My finger paused over the console, inside the tank: over the control labelled COMMENCE TRANSITION.

I made transition and the pain vanished almost instantly.

I was back in the dark of a drop-capsule, bound in place as I’d been so many times before. I flexed my limbs, began to acquaint myself with the new body –

I felt something different in the capsule with me. With such little room to move, every additional item on the sim was immediately recognisable. I felt my thigh. A holster was there; and in the low light I could see the glitter of glyphs on the shaft. Shard glyphs.

The Key.

Mason had delivered the Key to me.

There was something else strapped to my waist.

A sword, the hilt slick with black liquid. Blood.

The launch countdown timer began on my HUD.

“You read me, Mason?”

“Affirmative, Major.”

“That was some good work. I’m impressed.”

“You needed the Key. Should give you some additional time to reach the objective. And the sword was – ah, forcibly liberated, shall we say.”

“All right. I’ll be out of communication as soon as I leave the ship.”

I paused. Listened to the distant crackle of the comm-line.

“See you on the other side, Mason.”

“Affirmative, Major.”

For what it was worth, I didn’t think that I would be seeing Mason again in this life.

If I was a gambling man, I’d have bet that I wouldn’t be seeing any of the Legion again.

The firing tube activated and the drop-capsule was ejected from the underside of the
Colossus
.

I braced – half expecting to be shot down as I left the ship. The Directorate might be watching for vehicles leaving the
Colossus
, hoping to pick off anyone fleeing the warship. But as the seconds after ejection passed, I dismissed that: the drop-capsule’s anti-tracking systems were engaged, meaning that the only way to trace my progress properly would be by eyeballing me as I dropped.

I activated the remote cameras of the drop-capsule, to take a look at surrounding space.

The Directorate were everywhere.

Z-5 Wraith gunships – the Directorate equivalent of the Dragonfly – circled the Artefact. The Shard tech fought back, firing energy beams into the invaders when they got too close, but the Directorate had the weight of numbers. Like Krell, they simply did not care about casualties. The Wraiths were disgorging squads of foot troops, and some of those were getting through the defences. Commandos in hard-suits – vac-proofed heavy armour – were all over the hull of the Artefact. Even worse, the Artefact’s rules had not changed and the airlocks were opening: allowing the Directorate onboard.

The entire scene was cast against the backdrop of the Damascus Rift. It seemed to glow especially bright: an insanity-inducing, effervescent green. My cameras scanned the mass of moonlets tumbling around the Damascus Rift. Something out there flashed red-and-yellow. That had to be the tell-tale pattern of an evac beacon. An idea occurred to me. I activated my receiver and began to search through the Alliance distress frequencies. My suit found the relevant band quickly, began to decipher the decoded transmission.

“Kaminski?” I asked. “That you?”

“Major?” He sounded relieved.

“Affirmative.” I had to keep it brief; at any given second I might move out of comms range. “Any injuries?”

“Negative. I…I don’t know what the fuck just happened. I was guarding Saul, when all hell broke loose. Jesus. It was bad.”

“I copy that. Hold tight. You’re going to be okay. We’re retaking the
Colossus
. Once James has control of the flight deck, your pick-up will be the priority.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’m making a drop to the Artefact.” There was no time to explain the plan, so instead I just said, “I’m calling in some back-up.”

Kaminski said nothing, and the line crackled and popped with interference from the Rift.

“You still there?” I asked, after a long pause. I was worried that I’d lost the signal.

“Yeah, Major. I’m still here. Don’t leave that pick-up too long, if you can help it. The pod’s atmospherics will hold out for a few days but we’re being bathed in radiation from the Rift. We’ll run out of anti-rad drugs before we lose oxygen.”

“I copy. Hopefully we won’t need that long.”

“Major!” came another voice: Saul. “I need to speak with you urgently!”

There was some movement at Kaminski’s end of the line.

My drop-capsule made another course correction, and the transmission suddenly became even more static-heavy.

“I’m not sure it matters any more,” Saul said, dourly. Sounded like he had no preconceptions of survival either. “But you need to know what happened—”

The line abruptly went dead: descended into a wail of white noise.

“Saul?” I yelled. “Kaminski!”

I cycled the bands again, furiously tried to reach them, but every band was claimed by feedback. What did Saul know? Fuck. What had happened out here?

I gradually shed the remainder of my drop-capsule. The safety webbing loosened, slid free. My retro-thrusters fired. I landed on the outer hull of the Artefact and my mag-locks activated.

The Directorate boarding party was still scattered, disorganised. Two soldiers advanced on my location – firing Armtrade X-90 laser rifles – but I dispatched them with a volley from my M95. Even in hard-suits, they dissolved to plasma. In the distance, flagged on my HUD as major threats, a heavy mech had just made landfall. I wondered whether any of those had already breached the Artefact: whether I’d have any Directorate opposition once I was aboard.