The Lazarus War: Legion (38 page)

“I have things to tell you. I need to explain it all.”
Then Elena’s last words:
“Find me.”

That was how she’d existed out here: because she had never really been here. Her real body was somewhere beyond the Rift. Safe, I hoped, from the Krell and the Directorate.

“She’s still alive…” I whispered. “And I can find her.”

Hope – that most toxic and dangerous of emotions – poured into me, reinvigorated me. I was alive again: driven, awake, directed.

I turned the Key over in my hands. I knew this would be the last time I’d see it.

The Artefact rumbled again. More dust and debris began to fall from above. The Reaper shrieked, bubbling all around me. Williams screamed and screamed and screamed.

A portal opened in the console. The liquid metal flashed with glyphs, pulsed with unrealised power.

“There’s still hope. That has to be something.”

I inserted the Key.

I activated the Artefact.

It began to transmit a signal, broadcasting at a speed that no Alliance or Directorate technology could ever achieve. Like wildfire, it spread through Damascus Space.

I knew all of this as I stood at the console. The air around me was saturated with data – information flowing like an atmosphere. More than just a language: this was Shard lifeblood.

Beneath the churn and whine of the signal, I felt emotions. Loss and longing. Although they were not spoken, words formed: a message that repeated over and over until I understood the meaning.

Find me
, it said.

I stood at the console for what felt like an eternity, although it might’ve only been the blink of an eye. Under the onslaught of such perversely advanced technology, my equipment was useless. My combat-suit was off-line. Unpowered, it was a dead weight on my shoulders.

The signal was building in volume and intensity.

Conversely, my sanity was evaporating.

I collapsed to my knees. Felt blood streaming from my mouth, my ears.

The Reaper was everywhere but it was glitching – bubbling with irregular shapes, struggling to control its own body. It had become an iridescent, mirrored silver.

“What the hell have you done?” Williams screeched over the noise.

Then the Reaper dissolved. It splashed to the floor like water, all semblance of form gone.

Its job is done
, I told myself.
And now mine is too
.

I struggled with my plasma pistol. In the unpowered suit, every movement was a war. I prayed that the pistol would operate – that I could escape the Artefact. The chamber was shaking so violently, and the signal was so strong in my mind, that I couldn’t focus on anything.

“Take me with you!” Williams wailed. “Don’t leave me here! Let me out of this body!”

“Fuck you, Williams.”

I put the pistol to my chin and fired.

“Come back.”

I gasped for breath. Choked on a mixture of blood and amniotic.

“Stay with me.”

I’m trying!
I couldn’t seem to make my mouth work.

The blue – focus on the blue—

I was sick some more.

I was back on the
Colossus
. Clambering out of my tank, supported by strong hands. I glared down at the ragged stump of my missing hand.

Martinez stood in front of me. He was saying something – babbling so fast in Spanish that I couldn’t understand him. That didn’t matter though, because I could read the urgency in his eyes.

“Slow down!” I said. “Slow down!”

Alliance Marines, in various states of battledress and injury, stood at the door to the SOC: carbines covering the corridor outside. I guessed that part of the plan had worked and that Alliance troops had managed to retake some of the
Colossus
.

I stumbled out of Martinez’s hands, caught myself just before I collapsed. My vision was blurred; my world shaking violently.

“His vitals are all over the place,” Mason yelled, standing beside Martinez.

Both were operating simulants. Their helmets were removed, and their faces bore minor injuries.

“I don’t feel so good,” I slurred. “The shaking—”

“It’s not you, Major,” Martinez said. He was shouting to make himself heard. “It’s the ship.”

The entire vessel shook – the deck beneath my feet, the walls around me. Medical equipment rolled across the floor, clattered against walls. I could still hear the piercing wail of the Artefact’s signal ringing in my ears, but there was new noise around me. Mechanical groans echoed through the SOC.

“Whatever happened out there,” Martinez said, still propping me up, “cancelled the dark order. We’re operational again. The Shard Gate is open.”

Mason helped me into some fatigues. With my missing hand and the pain in my head I was in no position to turn her down.

“Are the Krell here?” I asked. “Did the plan work?”

“Too well,” Mason said. She grimaced. “They’re everywhere.”

“We’ve got to get to the CIC now,
jefe
,” Martinez said. “Clear a path! Lazarus coming through.”

A lot seemed to have happened. The corridors were cleared of hostiles but warning klaxons still sounded and the atmosphere tasted of smoke. There were bodies – Alliance and Directorate – strewn on the floor, and as we moved past one junction I heard the
crack-crack-crack
of an assault rifle firing.

The CIC was in utter chaos. There were officers everywhere, crew everywhere. No rhyme or reason as to who was in command – deckhands were plugged into control consoles, a couple of Marines occupied the weapons pods. Being alive seemed to have become a good qualification for taking command.

“All power to the aft null-shields,” Loeb shouted across the CIC. He sat at his command station, surrounded by holo-feeds. “Now!”

“Damage sustained to the port-side generator. Shields running at twenty per cent, sir.”

“Better than nothing. Get me power to the drive propulsion unit.”

“What’s happening?” I asked.

Martinez ushered me to the tac-display. Loeb looked down at my missing hand, went to say something, but was interrupted by another officer.

“We have fifty per cent thrust, sir.”

“Bearing ninety-degrees!” the admiral yelled. “Keep the comm-line to navigation clear!”

The blast-shutters to the CIC were open.

The Krell had come back in force.

They had brought carnage with them. Debris scattered near-space. Brilliant explosions flashed across the view-port, impossibly close. Had to be a human ship cooking off, lost to the vacuum. A Directorate Interceptor passed, laser raking the underside of a Krell bio-ship. Plasma fire and kinetics seemed to fill space.

“Someone get me comms with any operating Alliance ships!” Loeb roared. “They need to know we’re leaving!”

The Artefact was a black heart to the battlefield. It throbbed with new life. A beam of green light streamed from the Artefact itself, beyond the battle – out into Damascus Space.

I felt bile rising in the back of my throat; felt that sense of wrongness that only operational Shard technology could evoke. I clutched the display a little tighter to stay upright.

The beam pierced the Damascus Rift. Illuminated it; activated it. The entire Rift had turned an iridescent black – filled with stars, like some terrible mirror. That was where Elena had gone.

“Your Shard Gate is working,” Loeb said to me. “We can’t perform a Q-jump under our own power, so it’s our ticket out of here.” Back to his crew: “Issue the extraction order to Scorpio Squadron. We are leaving!”

“Where’s Jenkins?” I suddenly realised that I hadn’t seen her since I’d made extraction. Then another realisation hit me: “Please tell me that we’ve got Kaminski aboard…”

“It’s not good news,” Martinez said.

Jenkins was physically and emotionally in a bad way.

She was skinned and she had forced her armoured bulk into a comms officer’s chair. She sat with her head in her hands; plastered with blood, a nasty wound on her temple still streaming black fluid. I knew that her real body must be in an even worse state – hoped that she had received some medical attention.

Mason and Martinez hung back as I approached, like they were frightened of Jenkins’ reaction.

I soon understood why.

Kaminski’s still out there; and he isn’t coming back.

A static-riddled holo was projected from the desk in front of her. Kaminski inside the evac-pod: his appearance quivering and shaking with every disturbance in near-space.

Jenkins looked up at me sharply. She said nothing, but I could read the anger and hurt in her face. She pushed off from the desk.

“Harris?” Kaminski asked.

I leant over the console, into the camera mounted there. “It’s me.”

“Saul and I are going to be fine,” Kaminski said.

“He isn’t!” Jenkins shouted. “Loeb’s leaving him!”

“Hey, Jenkins!” Kaminski insisted. “Someone can come back and get us. It’s not a problem.”

He has no damned right to sound so calm!
I clenched a fist, with my only hand, and clutched Jenkins to my chest. Her whole body shook and bucked: on the verge of fighting me off. Saul and Kaminski looked back from the evac-pod, consigned to their fate. I locked eyes with Kaminski.

“I still have a man out there!” I shouted to Loeb. “We can’t leave without him—”

“We’ve already tried to get him twice!” Loeb said. “Both ships were shot down, and every passing second the evac-pod is moving further into the moon-fields!”

Around us, the crew were preparing for launch. Orders were being exchanged.

“We have to go. There isn’t time to send out another sweep. Inform any operational vessel to follow us into the Rift. I’m sorry.”

“No! You don’t even know if it will work—”

“It’s not right!” Jenkins shouted. “We can’t leave him!”

“Powering up propulsion drive.”

There was a deep rumbling from the
Colossus
. Her drives were cold booting, getting ready to move off.

“All hands take safety precautions!”

The view out of the blast-shutters spiralled as we manoeuvred. There was another explosion – something hit the ship as we changed position. I half-expected to feel the prickle of lost atmosphere, the cold of vacuum, as we suffered some catastrophic damage.

The ship navigated towards the Rift. Jenkins broke away from me and slammed both of her fists into a bulkhead. She was sobbing uncontrollably.

“Closing in T minus ten seconds,” an officer shouted above the din. “Nine…”

“No!” I yelled. “We have to stay!”

“Eight…”

A stray Krell bio-weapon glanced the
Colossus
’ flank.

“Buckle in if you want to live,” Loeb ordered.

“Seven…”

Mason and Martinez dragged me to a seat.

“Six…”

I struggled against them, yelled in defiance, as they strapped me in.

Gravity began to ebb and flow. Stray debris was being sucked into the gap in time-space. Ships spiralled end over end towards the Rift. I didn’t know how we were managing to maintain our position.

“Five…”

Mason and Martinez were strapped in too now.

“Four…”

The Rift dominated the view-ports. I tasted blood at the back of my throat, felt my whole body constricting as we made the final approach.

“Three…”

Jenkins was still crying.

This
, I decided,
is probably how it ends
. Lost in the Maelstrom, reduced to constituent atoms by an alien gravity well – blown across time by a technology that none of us understood.

“Two…”

The
Colossus
emitted an enormous groan. The clash of metal on metal, the grinding of the superstructure collapsing in on itself—

“One…”

There was only the Shard Gate.

My body was torn apart.

No, not torn apart. Disassembled was more apt a description.

But just as quickly, I was reassembled.

And I was in a hundred places at once.

Space and time became instantly malleable. I was somewhere beyond the touch of the natural laws of physics – a lacuna between planes of existence, the space between space.

The Shard Network eddied around me. It was a galaxy-spanning web of ancient Artefacts, connecting myriad planets and stars. Both transmitters – waypoints in the night, like the machine on Helios – and also gates, like that in Damascus Space. There were so many of them.

The Artefacts were truly legion.

I wanted to reach out and touch the worlds of the Network. To explore the terrible black holes of the Outer Dark; to reach the collapsed wormholes of the Xerxes Spiral; to fly the gas giants of Tia Star. These were worlds that no human explorer had ever visited. Such terrible beauty lurked in the tapestry of stars – an empire crafted by the Shard that had grown too vast for a single species to tend, and had long ago fallen into disrepair. And yet, as I saw those worlds, I knew that they were far from dead. I sensed Shards of the great mechanical mind – just slivers of the higher consciousness – and quickly recoiled from them.

There was no time to dwell on any of the visions that the Network showed me. As each galactic wonder appeared, it was gone just as quickly. The
Colossus
was moving too fast, blurring the lines between dimensions—

I detected something else in there with us. Something malevolent and terrifying; awakening so slowly that the passage of time was barely measurable. A Shard machine-mind incapable of comprehending lesser entities. It carried such hatred for the organic, the biological.

The war had never ended for the Shard. They had been gone for a long time but that meant nothing to them. Their lesser machines might feel atrophy – wither from the gnaw of insanity, the passing of lonely millennia – but the Machine did not care.

I heard Elena’s voice.

She was crying, laughing, whispering to me.

“Surely you would cross light-years of time and space to be with me?”