Origins

by Jamie Sawyer

  As if to reinforce the point, she declared, “I am commanding officer of the Asiatic Directorate vessel Shanghai Remembered, currently in orbit around Calico. I want no part in this war, people of Calico. It is a matter for you whether you wish to be governed by the Alliance military complex. I wish to make clear that my mission is not with you.”

  “Bullshit…” Mason whispered.

  “I expect that they funded the rebellion,” Ostrow said.

  Kyung continued. “I come to Calico Base seeking your assistance. I am looking for a person who has done great harm to the Asiatic Directorate. Most specifically, he has inflicted injustice upon me, my starship and my crew. His conduct cannot go unpunished.”

  Kyung’s face dissolved on the screen and another took its place. An image from my service record. Probably from Azure, shortly after my promotion to captain.

  “I will not call this man a soldier, because he is not. He has no honour and has no right to bear the title. He is a war-criminal, and that is why we come here. We require immediate surrender of this man; the man that you know as Lazarus. I urge your leaders to deliver him to us, and forthwith.”

  Kyung paused, looked into the camera. I could swear that she was looking at me, and I felt my heart freeze. Every bit the Assassin of Thebe. She’d left no one alive on Jupiter Outpost, and I had no doubt that she would pick Calico clean too.

  “That will be all,” she said, and the announcement ended. My mute picture remained on the viewer-screen.

  I breathed out slowly. Turned to face the survivors. “You want me to hand myself in,” I said, “I’ll do it. If it’ll save Calico – preserve whatever we have here, then I’ll go.”

  “It isn’t you that they really want,” Ostrow said. “They’ve come here for the intel, and they think that capturing you will be the fastest way to acquire it.”

  “Which is probably true,” Mason said. “Sir, you can’t do it. You can’t give yourself up to them. Whatever she – this Kyung – says, it isn’t about you.”

  Ostrow tossed me a respirator, detached from his suit. Strapped around my head, the black plastic mask would cover most of my face. It was hardly a disguise but I’d pass a quick glance.

  “No,” I said, standing as upright as I could. “I’m not hiding.”

  “Have it your way,” said Ostrow, scowling. “We have even less time than I thought and the Spine’s dock is two sectors away. We need to move.”

  “Remember your CQB training,” I said to Mason as we closed on the terminal.

  “As if I’d forget that,” she said.

  CQB: close quarters battle training. But fighting your way through a city of corrugated training huts on Olympus, Mars? That was hardly the same as what we were facing down here.

  The place was a write-off: beyond repair or recapture with what limited military resources we had on-station. There were insurgents everywhere. Men and women armed with mining gear, with industrial lasers and rivet guns, yelling battle-cries and warnings to leave the station. The chanting carried on the air, was audible above the crackle and pop of a hundred fires: “Alliance go home! We don’t want the war! Soldiers back to the Core! Alliance go home! We don’t want the war! Soldiers back to the Core!”

  “Bastards,” I hissed. “Don’t they understand what’s happening here?”

  It’s not whether you want the war, I thought bitterly. It’s whether it wants you.

  Clattering mêlée weapons against helmets – a percussive accompaniment to their chant – the mob disappeared through the smoke in a ragged column, onwards through the outpost. My team hid behind a cabinet that someone had dragged out into the corridor, Mason holding on tight to my arm Perhaps she thought that my natural inclination would’ve been to take the rebels on. She was probably right, but equally I accepted that it would’ve been a wasted gesture. Getting off Calico: that was a far more pressing goal than teaching some dipshit colonists the true meaning of citizenship.

  The mob passed us by, their voices becoming more distant.

  “Move up,” Ostrow ordered. “Terminal is through here.”

  I stalked on to the next corridor junction. My body ached from combat with Williams. Every minute, the throb in my face seemed to become more vibrant. My fatigues were sticking to my back now. I took that to mean that I was bleeding. The question was how badly.

  The Spine’s docking terminal sat ahead. The bars that had previously dominated this sector had been looted and abandoned. Signage had been torn down and windows had been broken. AMERICANS GO HOME had been sprayed across one fascia. Two bodies – headless – were bound up with heavy chains outside a bar door. Both wore Alliance fatigues, bloodstained to the point that their military agency was impossible to identify. As we passed by, I saw a metal flask on the floor; stopped to scoop it up. That, and a box of cigarettes poked from the pocket of a dead miner. I grabbed them both, slid them into a pouch on my uniform. Mason paused and watched me, but I waved her on.

  “Thought I saw an ammo clip,” I said.

  “We should stay with the Marines,” she said, unconvinced by my explanation.

  Mason crushed glass fragments underfoot, and her laser sight caught smoke in the air, as she moved into the terminal. Overhead, dangling from lighting rigs, were crude effigies of Governor Al Kik: burning. Christo only knew where they had come from; whether the dissidents had prepared them in advance. It was scary how the atmosphere, the tone of the place, had changed so rapidly.

  “The Directorate won’t need to shut down life support,” I said. “The fires will see to the oxygen long before.”

  “Maybe that’s part of their plan,” Ostrow said.

  The Spine’s terminal was in overdrive. All four elevator carts had been locked down, and they sat docked at the base of the shaft. The chamber was rammed with people – thousands of civilians, all clamouring for the middle of the terminal, for safe passage. The crowd produced an overwhelming wall of cries and shouts, echoing around the terminal.

  Barely visible through the civilian mob, a military barricade had been established around the base of the Spine. The immigration gates had been reinforced: shoulder-high metal stockades bolted to the deck-plate to provide instant cover, arranged around the elevators. Dozens of Alliance Army soldiers and Marines were deployed in a tight circle inside the cordon.

  Ostrow waved us on. “Weapons ready, people.”

  “Let us take this, sir,” one of the Marines said. The four-man unit fanned out, pushed their way through the crowd. “It might get nasty.”

  “They want to get off Calico too,” Mason said. “That’s all they want.”

  “We can’t help them, Private,” Ostrow said, angrily. “Unless we get the Legion out of here, we can’t help anyone.”

  I grabbed the cuff of Mason’s uniform with my bionic hand, pulled her close. “We don’t have a choice.”

  She nodded, mutely. It was hard not to be moved by the hungry, frightened eyes glaring back at us. So many were just looking for some peace, attempting to escape what Calico had become—

  “Step away from the elevators!” an Army officer roared over a handheld PA system. Although his voice was amplified by the horn, it barely cut through the cacophony generated by the baying mob. “This area is in lockdown! Seek shelter per emergency protocol!”

  “It’s Captain Baker,” Mason said. “He made it out too.”

  “And the Baker Boys,” I said.

  He was in hardcopy; this was the real Baker – I could tell from the weathering of his old face. His uniform was ripped at the shoulder and he held a service pistol in one hand. Many of the troopers manning the barricades wore Sim Ops badges, but none of them were in simulants.

  The civvies surged forward. Soldiers raised rifle-butts, slammed them into faces. Some of the horde went down. Others tried to clamber over the blockade. All were eventually repelled.

  “I will authorise lethal force if you do not stand back from the elevators!” Baker yelled. “This is your final warning—”
/>
  Someone in the crowd launched a bottle.

  “Americans go home! Americans go home! Americans go home!” they chanted.

  Baker got to full height behind the barricade. Looked angry. He had been hit, I realised: a red slit marked his left temple, claret smeared across his forehead. He extended his arm in the air, rigid. Fired a single round from the pistol. Speaker unit to his mouth again.

  “Stand down! The Spine terminal is closed! I will not issue another warning! I’m not even American, for Christo’s sake!”

  The crowd retreated, cleared a perimeter around the barricade. Although I knew that it would only be temporary, they were cowed: their shouting dampened for a moment.

  “Get down, and let military personnel through!” Baker shouted.

  Baker panned his pistol across the crowd. His boys were armed with carbines and a couple of shotguns; itching to fire on the ungrateful civilians. The mob begrudgingly obeyed, either stooping over or crouching. That made it much easier for us to reach the foot of the stockade, and we started to climb over: Mason first, then me, Ostrow and his team following.

  “This all for us?” I yelled at Baker.

  “Lazarus?” he asked, smiling. The expression was tired but genuine. “We thought you’d never make it.”

  “It’s me, Baker. Haven’t you heard? I always come back. Where are my people?”

  “I’ve been looking after them.”

  Jenkins emerged from the group, carrying a carbine, with Kaminski behind her. Martinez followed, also armed. They looked uninjured, though Kaminski’s skull was a welter of fresh scars: flesh-grafts where the surgeons had removed the metal from his head.

  “Thank Christo that you’re alive,” Jenkins gushed. “What’s going on?”

  I shook my head. “Shit. Fan. Hitting.”

  “You okay, Mace?” Jenkins asked of Mason.

  The younger soldier nodded. “For now, but—”

  “Where is Professor Saul?” Ostrow shouted. “It’s imperative that he goes with you.”

  Jenkins nodded behind the barricade, to Saul. He stood near the elevator cart, so still that he had almost blended into the background. His face was completely slack: devoid of any emotion whatsoever. Physically, he was in one piece, but the damage went far deeper than that.

  “Saul!” I called to him. “Stay with it. We’re getting out of here.”

  He jumped to life, nodding. “I understand,” he said.

  “Who we fighting?” Martinez barked.

  “Kyung’s here,” Mason said. “The Shanghai Remembered has come after us.”

  “Then let’s bring God to the godless,” Martinez said. He looked down at my hand. “Nice hand, jefe.”

  “We’re not doing that,” Ostrow declared. “We’re bugging out, because you need to start your mission. We’re going to the Colossus.”

  “We don’t have a captain yet,” I said.

  “In position,” Ostrow said, pointing to the sky. “Already gone up the Spine.” He turned to Baker. “Is this all there is?”

  Baker shrugged. “Everyone alive is here. I ordered all Sim Ops teams to the dock.”

  Ostrow exhaled. “Damn it.”

  “Why do we need—?” Jenkins started.

  “Because this is so damned important!” Ostrow barked. He looked, suddenly, like he had lost his cool. I’d never seen Ostrow do that, had never seen a Mili-Intel man do that. He shook the black case at Jenkins, began to climb the barricade. “This mission could change everything.”

  Something rumbled around me again; the entire structure shaking. Could’ve been a bomb detonating, a collapse inside the base, even the Spider MMRs breaking through the walls. Whatever it was, the noise triggered another wave of panic from the civvies. Many got back up, began to charge for the barricade again. The soldiers manning the line gave each other worried looks.

  “Go, go!” Ostrow yelled.

  A woman holding a bundle of rags made it to the blockade. I watched her running the no-man’s land between the civilians and the base of the Spine: closing it surprisingly fast. My sighting laser skated over her weathered vac-suit – patched up with so many emergency seals that the original suit was barely visible. She was on top of Ostrow before he could get fully over the barrier.

  “My baby!” she wailed, thrusting a filthy package in our direction. She wore the full niqab over her face, only a pair of dark eyes peering from within.

  Baker reached for her, his pistol lowered. “We can’t help you, ma’am!”

  “Get back!” another officer yelled.

  Then there were hands everywhere, grabbing at us, dragging one of the soldiers across the barricade. It was inevitable that someone would lose their cool. A carbine started to fire, then another, bodies falling on both sides of the divide. The woman with the child continued her piercing wail, thrusting the limp baby towards us.

  “Take her with you!” she shouted.

  The niqab fell from her face, part of her cloak catching on another refugee’s vac-suit. She was smiling beneath the covering.

  I immediately recognised that face.

  “Bomb!” I shouted, at the very top of my lungs. “Everybody down!”

  The woman held out the bundle. “This is payback for Damascus!”

  I grabbed for Ostrow—

  The Warfighter known as Private Alicia Malika self-detonated.

  For a long time, all I could hear was a high-pitched whine.

  I wasn’t on Calico any more.

  I wasn’t a lieutenant colonel in the Alliance Army.

  I was a sergeant again – about to face promotion – and I was lying on my back among the wreckage of a monorail train, on a world called Azure.

  I had no sensory perception save for the constant ringing in my ears. The sensation was excruciating: a demonic sine wave enveloping everything, becoming my only reality.

  “Elena!” I shouted, searching the dark.

  Her body was warm and wet. Soaked with blood, covered in frag.

  Then the white noise all around me, obliterating everything.

  It was not the sound generated by the explosion any more, but something much, much worse.

  The Artefact’s insidious signal: the Shard’s call to arms.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I’LL BE SEEING YOU

  I was close enough to the explosion to be in the primary blast zone.

  The overpressure wave roared over me.

  My already-aching eardrums became dense balls of pain and the air was wrenched from my lungs. I felt internal organs compressing, the bones of my ribcage crushed by the pressure. Bright splinters of pain lanced across my chest, through my shoulder. Those injuries, I knew, were secondary – likely to be less serious than anything going on inside, but they hurt all the same. My Army fatigues were no protection at all from the blast.

  Then the calm: the terrifying tranquillity that comes after a life-threatening experience. I teetered on the edge of consciousness. Made my addled brain focus on the here and now. The ground beneath me. The pain in my chest. The feel of wet blood between my fingers. I grasped those details and focused on them.

  Pain is good. It reminds you that you’re alive.

  The calm didn’t last long.

  “On your feet, trooper!”

  It was Jenkins, screaming into my face. She grabbed the lapels of my fatigues and pulled me up from the floor.

  I felt woozy, sick. The ringing gradually receded, so that I could register expanding pandemonium around me. My vision shivered, but I made out enough of the surrounding deck to know that this was FUBAR.

  “Here they come!” someone yelled.

  The terminal was shrouded in black smoke, and the air was thick with the unmistakable odour of roasting human flesh. The barricade was a mess of torn metal and body-parts, soldiers and civilians alike crumpled across it. There wasn’t much of Alicia Malika left – most of the body had been incinerated by the blast, burnt rags and a few shreds of vac-suit lingering on the skeletal remains
of her lower half.

  A simulant suicide bomber. The perfect weapon.

  Mason lay beneath me. She slowly got to her feet too.

  “Th… thanks for the save…” she stammered.

  “I didn’t realise that I had…”

  “Harris is hit,” Martinez yelled, half-turning to me. He was firing into the indig mob, slicing bodies with carbine fire as they threw themselves at the line.

  “We are gone!” Jenkins said. “Like, yesterday gone! Up, now!”

  “Ostrow!” I started. “Where’s Ostrow?”

  He had the Endeavour’s intel. He knew what we were supposed to be doing, where we’d find the ship.

  “I’m here,” he rumbled, stirring beside me.

  Several pieces of shrapnel had peppered his face; shattered one lens of his glasses. He was on his side, clutching at the black box – crawling back towards the Spine elevator entrance.

  “Can you walk?” I shouted, over-compensating because of my trashed eardrums.

  “I’m fine. Lieutenant Jenkins is right; we need to go.”

  I knew, from painful experience, that the most serious injuries caused by such a blast would be internal. But there was nothing that we could do to evaluate those down here. The Colossus would have an auto-doc and a medical bay – the best chance for any injured personnel was to get them onboard. Both Ostrow and I probably needed a full assessment–

  “Fuck, fuck!” an Alliance soldier yelled.

  A flaming object – a Molotov cocktail of some sort: crude but effective – sailed over the remains of the barricade. It smashed into the outer hull of the elevator cart. Flames licked over the area, caught one of the defenders. Dressed in only fatigues, the young Army woman’s clothing ignited. She dropped her rifle, began to roll around on the floor, screaming.