by Jamie Sawyer
“I’m sure that you’ll be recertified in good time,” said Jenkins.
Fortuna was a pleasure world, but it was also light-years from the frontline. If Kaminski went there, his posting with the Lazarus Legion would be over, and the time-dilation would surely end any relationship he had with Jenkins.
“Have you told him about the Point?” I asked her.
She nodded. “I’ve told him everything: the Point, the Warfighters, the Krell…”
Although ’Ski had only been gone for a few months so much had happened. He would have to be formally briefed on the situation if he was ever going to get back to active deployment.
“Damned fish heads,” Kaminski said, with some fervour. “The Point was home. Un-fucking-believable.”
“You better believe it,” I said. “The Krell have made it as far as Barnard’s Star.”
“You’re shitting me?”
“I shit you not. They’re spilling out of their tank and they’ve already taken a dozen systems on the border.”
“Then we need to get out there and do what the Legion does.”
“Easy, trooper,” Jenkins said. “Take your time. The Krell can wait.”
The truth was that the Krell could not wait, and Jenkins knew it. The situation along the Maelstrom border was dire, and it had taken all of my clout as a lieutenant colonel – as Lazarus – to resource the operation into Directorate territory. We were running low on everything; even simulants, the most basic of commodities required to keep the Sim Ops Programme going. I didn’t tell Kaminski, but one of the territories just ceded to the Krell had been a farm: a geno-facility dedicated to harvesting sims.
“Why were they down there?” I asked. “The Krell, I mean.”
“It’s too early for a debrief—” Jenkins protested, protectively.
“It’s okay, girl,” Kaminski said. “I’d rather tell the Legion what happened before the MI.” He gave a sharp intake of breath, started the story. “After we bailed out, the Krell turned up. We – Saul and I – saw the Colossus going through the Rift, then everything was chaos. The evac-pod didn’t have scopes or sensors, and next thing we knew the Directorate had picked us up. They weren’t in much better shape. There were lots of survivors in near-space – lots of crew evac’d their ships – and the Directorate took them all. And not just human crew: Krell too. We saw some of them aboard a Directorate ship. That’s how they must’ve gotten to Capa.”
“But what did the Directorate want with the Krell?”
“They never told me,” Kaminski said. “But I’d guess the same as us: intelligence. After they captured us, they put us in the freezers. I woke up on Capa.” He rubbed his head again, the nerve-staples there. “They knew who I was, and they wanted intel from me.”
“They picked the wrong trooper there,” said Jenkins.
Kaminski smiled. “Sure did, girl. When I didn’t tell them anything, they started to use the staples.”
“That shit been scanned for tracking tech?” I said.
“Of course,” Jenkins replied. “None of it is traceable.”
Even so, we couldn’t rule out the possibility that one or more of the POWs had been implanted with a tracer. Although over interstellar distances it would do the Directorate no good, the Chino played for the long game: I didn’t want this to be something that they could use against us on a future occasion. The nerve-staples would have to come out once we got to a proper medical facility.
“Did they tell you anything?” I asked.
“That isn’t how an interrogation works,” Jenkins said. “And this is too early, Harris.”
I knew that I was pushing it too far now, that I should leave this. Debriefing of a POW was for Mili-Intel, and Jenkins was right – it was far too early – but I had to know.
“It’s okay,” Kaminski insisted. “They didn’t so much as tell me anything, but we talked among ourselves.”’Ski raised his shoulders; still muscled despite his ordeal. “We heard things.”
“Such as?”
He sighed, and his reaction made me all the more eager to hear what he had to say.
“Go on.”
“We heard that they had the Key,” Kaminski muttered. “They said that they had the Shard Key.”
“How is that possible…?” I started. “I saw it destroyed…”
Jenkins gave me a hard look. “I’ve read your debrief,” she said. “You left it aboard the Artefact. You never actually saw it destroyed.”
I rubbed my chin, let that thought bounce around my head. In Damascus, I’d used the Key to activate the Artefact – to open the Shard Gate – and then I’d extracted. I’d left it there, confident in the knowledge that it could never be retrieved and used against us…
“I don’t know why they’d want it,” Kaminski said, “but it’s Shard, and the Directorate seem to want pretty much anything Shard. But listen, don’t read too much into it. For all I know, it might be wrong.”
I nodded, although it was hard not to. “Anything else?”
“Just that the Asiatic Directorate really hates you,” Kaminski said. “They told me that Director-General Zhang himself knows your name, and that he wants you dead.”
“I’m flattered, but I’m still waiting.”
Zhang: premier of the Asiatic Directorate, leader of over two-thirds of the population of explored space. His counterpart – President Francis – had been assassinated at some point while we were away in Damascus. We still didn’t know whether there was any connection there, but the Directorate had assumed responsibility for the incident.
“That was all they said,” Kaminski added. “Thanks for coming back for me.”
“You should never have been left out there in the first place,” Jenkins said. “You can thank James and Loeb for that.”
Kaminski didn’t react, and his face was accepting. That was the lot of a soldier: the risk that a man took when he went into the Maelstrom.
“What about the Warfighters?” I asked. “Did you see them on Capa?”
Kaminski pulled a face at Jenkins. “I told you that I never trusted Williams.”
“That wasn’t the question,” she said.
He shook his head. “I don’t think so. But, if what Jenkins tells me is true, they could be anywhere now. Until Command and Sci-Div let you in on the Next-Gen Project…”
Next-gen simulants were almost indistinguishable from human bodies. Wearing those skins, the Warfighters could be anywhere, and that did spook me. I shivered involuntarily and scanned the Obs Deck again, fought the dizzy sensation in my head. My data-ports began that steady throb, promising release and a sense of invulnerability that I could never feel in my own skin. My missing left hand gave off a phantom itch.
“Sorry to hear about what Williams did to you,” Kaminski said.
“It could’ve been worse.”
“I just want to get back into the tanks,” he said. “I can almost count the days since my last transition.” He nodded at the chest of my fatigues, at the holo-badge that read “236”. “I need to catch up with the boss.”
Although there was a captain somewhere on the Askari Line who claimed to have topped two hundred and thirty successful transitions, I still held the record. It was a dubious honour and one that I wasn’t necessarily proud of, but it was another aspect of my legend: a statistic for the greens to look up to.
“It’s not the number that counts,” Jenkins said, “it’s what you do with it.”
“We’ll be back on Calico in three days, provided we don’t meet resistance,” I said. “Take it easy until then. Anything you need, just let me know. There are some perks to being a colonel.”
“Well done on the promotion,” Kaminski said.
I shrugged. “They had two choices: court-martial me or promote me. Glad to have you back, ’Ski.”
I turned to walk away, but Kaminski kept talking. “They know you, Harris, and they’re scared of you.”
“They should be,” I said, with all the conviction that I
could muster.
My mind was elsewhere. I found myself wondering whether the Asiatic Directorate would fear me if they knew who I really was.
What I really was.
Old, exhausted, lost.
By the time I’d finished with Kaminski, and checked on the progress of the other prisoners, it was late in the Independence’s day-cycle. Mess had finished, and the ship was quiet: exhausted Sim Ops teams and flyboys sleeping off the short trip back to Alliance space.
So I found the mess hall dark and largely empty. I grabbed a hot coffee and some stale bread from the servery, and hunkered down in one corner of the hall.
“Do you find that dying makes you hungry?” came a voice.
I snapped awake and realised that I wasn’t alone. Lieutenant James sat at the other end of the room, and stalked over to sit at my table. He looked dejected and shaken: a similar expression to that I’d seen him with on the surface of Capa, when he’d hesitated on the landing pad.
“No,” I said, swallowing a mouthful of bread, “but dealing with fuck-up flyboys who lose it when I need them most: that tends to make me hungry.”
“Yeah,” he said, “I’m sorry about that.”
He had a small bottle of Martian vodka, already uncapped. It was plain and unmarked, but seemed to emit a psychic beacon that called out to me.
“Next-gen sims don’t get drunk,” I said. “We’ve been through this before.”
That wasn’t quite true, because I’d seen James inebriated when he drank at speed. But this was a single bottle of vodka and I didn’t think that it would be sufficient.
“I’m not drinking to get drunk,” he said.
“You get permission to bring alcohol aboard?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Why? You going to tell Captain Qadr on me?”
I didn’t answer but took the offered bottle. I’d been resisting it for a while – trying to do my best, hoping to avoid the other simulant teams seeing me in an impaired condition – but I couldn’t resist any more. That ache in my bones, the sensation that could only be relieved by a good drink… I couldn’t hold out. The spirit tasted hot and calming as it went down.
“What the fuck happened out there today, James?”
“Nothing,” he said, sighing. “I… I just…”
This wasn’t like James, not at all. He was everything that a space jockey should be: handsome, cocky, a devil with the ladies. This James – simulated as he was – just looked frightened. He leant back in his chair, the rubberised flight-suit creaking. I had never actually seen him in his real body, and in the months we’d been stationed together I couldn’t recall ever having seen him out of the flight-suit either.
“Kaminski was lucky,” he said.
I gave a hoarse laugh. “Try telling him that, but I wouldn’t do it when Jenkins is around.”
He swigged the bottle, wiped the back of his hand across his lips. “I’m sorry. I fucked up. It was just seeing those prisoners. It was too close to home.”
“What do you mean? You never said anything…”
He grimaced. “You ever wonder why you don’t see me in my own skin, Harris?”
“Not especially. Your next-gens are made to live in, aren’t they?”
“Some of us don’t have a choice. What happened on Capa… It brought back memories.”
There was more to James than I’d realised. He’d mentioned family, mentioned previous postings, but not much else about his background. Scorpio Squadron had their own Sim Ops bay; that was pretty much protocol now, whenever Aerospace Force crew were attached to a sim operation. There were sixteen pilots on James’ wing, and he was commander of the airgroup.
“How long did you do?” I probed.
“Six years, real-time,” he said. “Nothing like Cold Death, but just as bad. Jungle world; real hot, real sticky. I never even found out the name.”
“You should’ve told me. You could’ve run support—”
“That’s not what I’m here for.”
“You jeopardised the mission, James. There were real skins down there.”
“It won’t happen again,” he said. “We’ve all left people behind, Harris. We’ve all got guilt.”
Those words hit a nerve within me and I swigged deep at the bottle, wished that I had a whole case of the stuff. There was a real, bona fide war going on with the Krell. Not just a cold war, the likes of which I’d endured since the Treaty, but the real thing. The Krell were invading Alliance space again. I knew that I had responsibilities on the frontline.
All of those things were true.
But that didn’t mean that I’d wanted to hear them.
I was feeling survivor’s guilt.
I felt guilt because I hadn’t been there when Liberty Point had gone down. I hadn’t been there and hadn’t been able to stop it. I felt guilt because over a dozen Alliance Navy starships had been lost in Damascus Space, with all hands. But if I dug really deep – painfully so – I knew that the real reason for my melancholy was Elena. At Damascus, I’d been so close to finding her: found a simulated copy of her aboard the Artefact. When the UAS Colossus had travelled through the Shard Gate, I had even seen her starship – the Endeavour. We’d witnessed the Shard Network; the grid of planets, stars and gateways that the Shard had left behind. The Colossus had been damaged by the journey; her sensor-suites and telemetry modules fried, her data-core burnt out like the neural synapses of a man driven into insanity.
So, Elena’s location remained unknown. And try as I might, I hadn’t been able to secure backing for another operation into the Maelstrom. The Alliance was too busy defending the new frontier to risk sanctioning another offensive. That wasn’t good enough for me. The war wasn’t going to be won by retreating, by gifting real estate to the Krell and hoping that they would be satisfied. For the Krell, it was never enough.
I pulled myself back to the conversation, realised that I’d finished the liquor. James didn’t complain as I passed him the empty bottle.
“Did you hear what happened to the Buzzard?” he asked.
That was Admiral Joseph Loeb’s nickname; earned from his appearance and his nature. He had been commanding officer of the Colossus, during the Damascus mission. I didn’t answer: Loeb’s situation was another source of guilt.
“His wings got clipped,” James said, drolly. “He’s been permanently grounded, awaiting court-martial.”
“I know,” I answered. “I hear that he’s on Calico now.”
James nodded. “I got new orders, too,” he said. “The whole of Scorpio Squadron got a recall notice.”
“Maybe that’s for the best,” I said.
“Maybe,” James replied.
The conversation ended and James left a short while later.
I sat alone in the dark, the heave and sigh of the ship my only company.
It wasn’t long before my mind turned to thoughts of Calico…
CHAPTER FIVE
SHE’S ALREADY GONE
Ten years ago
Thirty-four years old, I was a captain with the Army’s Simulant Operations Programme. The day that I had a chance to change my life, but didn’t take it.
The last time that I saw Elena for real was on Calico.
I jostled my way through the crowded passageway, cursing as I nudged elbows with miners, colonists and corporate employees. Every outpost, even ship, had its own scent and aura: that instantly recognisable smell that comes with a home territory. Calico Base had it in force; a sweaty, grimy odour that reminded me this whole planet was basically one big mine.
Before the First Krell War, Calico had been a very profitable mining outpost. The original colonists were practitioners of some bizarre Hindu-Gaian sub-sect. Big on peace, small on war: despite the outpost’s location close to the frontline, the Calicans had successfully avoided much involvement in the hostilities. They earned a living by mining raw materials from the rock, processing them in bulk, then hurling them Corewards. The planet wasn’t much bigger than Old Earth’s moon
, and there was no atmosphere outside to terraform.
Closed ecosystems like this were always the worst for smell, and the off-worlders and tourists seemed to have swelled the population to double normal capacity. There were people everywhere: crammed into doorways, leaning from overhead railings. Every public space on Calico had been turned over to the procession, to the pomp and ceremony that would mark the launch of the UAS Endeavour. As I fought my way through the crowds, I even saw banners and flags printed with HAPPY LAUNCH DAY! It made my stomach turn.
Months prior, Elena had told me – when she left Azure, when she left me – that the launch details for the Endeavour expedition were classified. That had remained the case for several weeks, but when the Alliance media machine had got their teeth into the project everything had changed. The last few weeks had seen the mission made public.
I stared down at my wrist-comp. Thirty minutes until the launch. An avalanche of ideas occurred to me. I had to see her one last time. I had convinced myself that if I saw her – if she saw me – things would be different somehow.
“Where you headed, stranger?” a teenaged boy asked me, blocking my path.
“Shuttle bays.”
“Same as everyone,” he said. Shook his head. “It’s a walk. You cutting it fine, soldier.”
I had cut it fine, and I knew it. I’d come down on the utility docks on the other side of Calico. That had cost me more time than I’d appreciated.
The boy shrugged. “But I can get you there, through the shafts, before a launch. You want, that is.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I reckon.”
The kid wore a bright orange vacuum-suit, his head comically small poking from the ring collar. I hadn’t been on Calico for long – I’d taken a shuttle in, used my Sim Ops credentials to get a free ride – but I’d already noticed that everyone here wore vacuum-suits around the clock. While the base was fully pressurised and atmo-rated – you could go anywhere without a suit – some traditions were long in the tooth. The kid’s suit looked as though it had been passed down several generations – worn and frayed, covered in a variety of neo-religious symbology. I doubted that it would actually survive exposure to vacuum.