Origins

by Jamie Sawyer

  “Gravity well is stable and holding. All life-support systems are active.”

  “Bring us ninety degrees starboard,” Loeb said. “And break umbilical with the orbital dock.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  There was a loud, pained screech – metal-on-metal – as the Colossus repositioned herself. The hull ground against the landing spars attaching her to the dock: broke the shell in which she’d been encased. Parts of the deep-space facility broke away, floated in space around us—

  The communicator chimed.

  “Oh, shit,” Kaminski said.

  The simple, commonplace occurrence had taken on a sinister edge.

  “We’re being hailed,” a communications officer declared.

  Loeb turned to me. His expression was fixed. “You make the call, Lazarus.”

  “How long until we can pull away, make for FTL?” I asked.

  “We’ll need clearance from Calico’s gravity field,” Loeb said. He shrugged. Quickly calculated, based on data scrolling down his monitor. “Another thirty seconds.”

  Thirty seconds was more than long enough for a warhead to breach our shield. Not only that, but pulling away from Calico’s gravity wouldn’t guarantee our successful escape: the Shanghai or her sister fleet could pursue, send robot fighters or attack ships after us.

  The chime sounded again.

  Though our course continued, and the agonising groaning went on as we pulled from the dock, the CIC fell quiet.

  “It’s coming from the Shanghai,” the same officer confirmed. “She’s locking weapons on us.”

  “She’s turning,” Mason said. “Engine thrust at ninety per cent.”

  From down in the crew-pit, Martinez tutted with obvious annoyance.

  “Solo déjame tomar un tiro, por favor,” he barked. Just let me take one shot, please. “It’d be for ’Ski; we owe him that at least.”

  Kaminski was white-faced with a combination of rage and nerves – being presented with his captors – but to his credit said nothing.

  “Not yet,” I said. “But be ready on my mark.” I nodded at Loeb: “Respond. Open a comms channel.”

  The tactical display illuminated with a holographic of Admiral Kyung’s face, and I looked on the Assassin of Thebe.

  “Am I addressing Colonel Harris?” she said. That same tight, precise pronunciation of Standard.

  “I am here,” I said.

  “You are the one that they call Lazarus?”

  “I am.”

  Mason held up a hand to me. She mouthed words. Twenty seconds.

  Across the CIC, displays began to illuminate. Green responses were coming back from each station. Keep her talking, I thought. Give the crew time. Loeb sighed quietly, no doubt willing the machines around him to work faster. His wish to train weapons on the Shanghai, to take out the woman who had caused his disgrace, was intoxicating, but I knew that he was too good an officer to let bloodlust get the better of him. I was wrestling with my own emotional response. Did Kyung know, I wondered, what she had taken from me?

  Outside, the Shanghai described a tight arc. Thrusters fired along her aft and her black bulk initiated a turn in our direction.

  “I am Admiral Kyung, appointed as battlegroup commander of the Third Asiatic Directorate Response Force—”

  “Let me stop you there,” I said. “That ship is Directorate Spec Ops, and I don’t give a fuck who you are. I already know what you are: the Assassin of Thebe. A murderer.”

  The woman’s face was unreadable. The nano-comms threads that etched her features glowed as she read her ship’s systems, but her cheeks were puckered and swollen; a mass of keloid tissue that looked like the result of Krell boomer fire. Injuries from Damascus? I asked myself. That would make sense.

  “Surrender,” Kyung said.

  There was an impassive coldness there: as though there was a huge void between this woman and the rest of the human race.

  “Fuck you,” I said.

  I mentally counted down the seconds, but that gaze – the hard edge to the woman’s eyes – was enough to put me off.

  “Ten seconds…” Loeb whispered.

  “There is no point in running,” Kyung said. “We have more than enough firepower to put Calico Base down.”

  “I know what you want,” I repeated, feeling the rage swell within me. “But what I want to know is why? This isn’t about me. It’s about the Endeavour.”

  “Is that what you think?” Kyung said. “I can assure you, it really isn’t about her at all.”

  She was playing for time, I was sure, as well.

  “Then what do you want? Why do you want me, Assassin?”

  “I have my reasons.” Kyung’s pale-lipped mouth twitched at the corner. On another face I’d have considered the expression a smile. “The Colossus is an old ship; we can outrun her, and take what we want.”

  “Your FTL isn’t hot. You’re talking shit.”

  Loeb counted down the seconds on his hand – five, four, three, two, one!

  “And we’re good!” he yelled. “Systems online across the board.”

  Leaning into the display so that I was staring her down, had her in my sights, I said, “I’ll be seeing you.” I pointed to Martinez. “Do it.”

  Kyung went to speak again, but the image collapsed into the holo.

  “Vete a la mierda!” Martinez yelled.

  He hunched over the weapons controls, his holo indicating successful discharge of the railgun battery. Bright flashes signalled null-shield breaches, explosions racking the Shanghai’s flank.

  Buzzard takes Assassin.

  Loeb slammed a fist onto his armrest. “Go!”

  The perspective through the ports changed and the wasted vista of Calico Base disappeared beneath us. I remembered fleeing Damascus Space, travelling through the Shard Gate. The Colossus had been in her prime then, but even then she’d been a bruiser, not an assassin. Speed was not her strong suit. Without any proper opportunity to calculate thrust, to predict course vector, all we could do was move. I collapsed into a crash couch, just as the Colossus’ thrusters fired.

  Martinez’s volley didn’t go unanswered, and the Shanghai responded immediately. The railguns on her spine charged, began to lay down a heavy curtain of projectiles through near-space.

  “Point defences are operational,” an officer said.

  A bright matrix of light stitched space, dispersing lethal debris in our vicinity.

  The Shanghai was poised in the distance. At least one railgun shot looked to have breached her hull armour, but it was difficult to tell. I squinted, watching the tactical displays and the logistic-engines flush with data. But even now, the Shanghai was dwindling, and as the distance between the two ships increased the flow of reliable intel trailed off. She’d been hurt but it was impossible to know how badly.

  “Maximum thrust achieved! Permission to activate FTL drive?”

  “You have it!” Loeb said.

  The Colossus’ FTL drive lit and space around us collapsed into a blur—

  In that last instance – as the ship breached, broke and then rewrote Einstein’s laws – I saw a spark of light where the Shanghai Remembered had been.

  Could’ve been a critical hit, I thought: a lucky shot from Martinez’s chance attack. But just as likely it was her drive lighting.

  Before I could reach any conclusion, and long before we could do anything about it, the Colossus’ CIC lights went out.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  BLEEDING EDGE

  I sat in darkness for a moment, my own heartbeat – thumping in my ears like gunfire – my only companion.

  Then the CIC slowly rebooted.

  Beneath me, as though the Colossus’ cardiac system had been resuscitated, the deck vibrated just ever so softly, life-support systems coming back online. The Colossus’ thinking machines seemed to take a moment longer to recalibrate. The tactical display fuzzed with static, then holographic schematics began to rebuild. Overhead, the lights flashed on in se
quence.

  “Everyone all right?” I whispered. Corrected: “Everyone alive?”

  “Affirmative,” Mason said. “But I don’t think that I will ever get used to that…”

  She looked decidedly green around the jowls. It wasn’t only her; the rest of the CIC staff looked on the verge of being sick. It was perhaps a miracle that no one had been.

  “That’s what, your third FTL jump?” Martinez said.

  Mason nodded. “About that.”

  “Trust me, when you’ve done enough FTL travel, you won’t feel a thing.” He yawned, rolled his shoulders. The weapons pod in which he was mounted had lowered, ready for him to disembark. “We used to do them all the time in the Marine Corps.”

  “Fucking jarhead…” Jenkins said under her breath. She stirred beside me, still strapped into her crash couch. “But let’s not do that again anytime soon.”

  “No promises on that one, trooper,” I said. “Kaminski, Saul?”

  Both were strapped into CIC workstations, alert enough to respond.

  “That was pretty intense,” Kaminski said, rubbing his newly patched skull.

  “Intense doesn’t really do the experience justice,” Saul said. “At least the inertial dampeners held out.”

  “We’d be plastered across the bulkheads if they hadn’t,” Loeb muttered.

  “And you, sir?” Mason asked me.

  “I’m good,” I said. “All good.”

  The Legion looked on with concerned expressions.

  I was in a bad way. My stomach had finished somersaulting but I still had the iron tang of bile in the back of my throat. I unstrapped myself and clambered out of my couch – slowly, reacquainting myself with my own body: with the rheumatic aches in my knees, my shoulders, my neck. Though my insides felt pulverised – like I’d been in a high-G dogfight with one of James’ Hornets – the sensation seemed to drill down to the cellular level. I held up my bionic hand: watched as the metalwork sparked with blue light, the finger-joints twitching erratically. Every muscle screamed, and my head pulsed with an intense ache. I felt something wet on my upper lip. Reached up to my face, with my real hand, and wiped a strand of bright red blood from my nose.

  “I thought that the flying was pretty good,” James said. He looked completely unruffled by the experience, almost as cool as Martinez. “I barely felt a thing.”

  “You wouldn’t,” Jenkins said. “We’re not all skinned up, you know.”

  The CIC was soon a well of light and noise. Admiral Loeb, ever the taskmaster, leant forward in his command throne and surveyed his empire.

  “Give me a damage report, XO,” he yelled.

  “We’re green across all systems, sir,” the executive officer responded. “All appear to be running at acceptable levels. No significant structural damage.”

  “Has every department called in?”

  The officer paused, then read from his screen, nodding. “Engineering, life support, drive, bridge… Everything looks good.”

  “Anything on the scanner?” I said. “Did they follow us?”

  Loeb gave me a knowing grin. “This is my speciality, Colonel. Our destination is wilderness space. We’re using the FTL engine, not the quantum-space drive. There’s no tachyon wake to trace.”

  I consulted the tac-display. We were currently in the void between stars, teetering somewhere on the Alliance side of the Quarantine Zone, but I couldn’t identify our location or destination. The Directorate weren’t the only threats in this quadrant: there were probably Krell war-fleets out in the dark, roving for targets.

  “This is dangerous territory,” I said. “We shouldn’t linger out here for long; at least, not alone.”

  Loeb sighed. “‘Broken knife’ is the retreat code for the Alliance fleet. Always has been, since I was a green. The ship’s AI has a pre-programmed destination in such a scenario: a randomly chosen muster point to which all remaining fleet assets should retreat.”

  “How long will it take us to reach the muster point?” Mason asked.

  “ETA is an hour,” said Loeb. “We can’t fly FTL for ever, but we can plan our next move from the muster point.”

  The faster-than-light drive was a crude device by modern spacefaring standards, and the Colossus wasn’t made for unlimited FTL travel. Like most contemporary starships, for long-distance ops she relied on her Q-drive. The power required to fly a ship at FTL speed was phenomenal, and I knew that staying on FTL propulsion was out of the question. We’d have to plot our next course via Q-space; find a jump point and move on from there.

  “We’ll have to assemble what forces we have left,” Loeb said, staring at the obs windows, “and then we can go back and take on the Shanghai. When we have safety in numbers, we can make uplink to Command and teach these bastards a proper lesson…”

  “I hit her, for sure,” Martinez said. His beard and dark hair were glossed with sweat. “She might already be gone.”

  “I doubt it,” Jenkins said. “You aren’t that good a shot.”

  “No telling what damage I did though,” Martinez said with a self-assured grin.

  “Maybe we took out the Warfighters,” Mason said.

  “I hope so,” Kaminski said, with an earnestness that surprised me. “I really do.”

  That thought was darkly warming. It was likely that the real Williams’ Warfighters had been ensconced somewhere – in their own Simulant Operations centre – aboard the Shanghai. The suggestion that Martinez’s chance operation of the railgun had killed them, struck at the soft underbelly of the traitors’ strike force, was certainly appealing.

  “There’s no point going back anyway,” I cut in, “because there is no Command. Not any more.”

  Loeb paused for a second, unsure of how to take that comment. “We can try the tightbeam communications array, make contact with High Command—”

  “They’re all gone, Loeb. I was there. Williams and the Warfighters killed them all.”

  Loeb narrowed his eyes, unwilling to accept my explanation. “That can’t be right,” he said. “Not High Command. I knew Fleet Admiral Sunsam. What were they all doing on Calico?”

  These were the very people who had insisted on charges being brought against Loeb. Perversely, he seemed to be clinging to the chain of command as though it was a life raft.

  “They’re dead,” I insisted. “They came to brief me on an operation; a mission that General Cole said could turn this war.”

  Saul shivered from the back of the CIC. “By Gaia. This is worse than I thought.”

  Before I could ask Saul to explain that comment, there was a chime over the ship’s PA system.

  “Colonel Harris to the infirmary,” requested the AI. “Your presence is required immediately.”

  I nodded at the Legion. “I want a full inventory check of what equipment we have aboard this ship, by the time we arrive at the muster point. Mason, check the simulant operations centre. Martinez and Jenkins, the armoury. Kaminski, see to Saul. And Loeb, anything out of the ordinary at all – Krell, Directorate or Alliance – inform me immediately.”

  A Sci-Div medtech appeared at the entrance to the infirmary, dressed in a smock that was so splattered with blood that it looked more red than white. A pretty middle-aged woman, with cold features and blonde hair plaited down her back, she looked seriously out of her depth. She bowed her head at me.

  “Colonel, I am Dr Erika Serova. I received mission attachment orders this morning…” She trailed off. “Are you all right, Colonel? Your face – it looks like you need some attention yourself.”

  “Save the niceties,” I said. “Where’s Ostrow?”

  Now we were away from immediate danger – away from the Shanghai and her sister ships – my mind had turned back to the mission. Ostrow knew what I was supposed to do, and he was my only link back to the Endeavour intelligence package.

  “He’s through here,” the tech said. “He keeps asking for you, saying that he has to see you. You should be aware that he’s in a critical cond
ition. That he’s conscious at all—”

  “Is he going to make it?”

  The woman pulled a noncommittal face. “He’s suffered extensive blast injuries. Likely ruptured a lung, and with a grade-six hematoma on his liver. I suspect some form of spinal injury as well, although he won’t let us examine him any further.”

  She showed me through to a small chamber. Inside, Ostrow lay on his back in a bunk. The doctor quickly retreated from the room, leaving us alone, and the door hummed shut behind her.

  Ostrow was in a really bad state. His eyes were closed, and although the machine beside him beeped rhythmically – showed a holo-projection of what I guessed was his heartbeat – he looked a lot like he was already dead: his skin had that waxy pallor, and his closed eyes were sunken into his head. Other bio-signs were broadcast on to the terminal, and none of them were encouraging. He’d been stripped out of his body armour, and his undersuit had been torn apart both by shrapnel back at the Spine and the treatment he’d received in the infirmary. Cables and monitor pads ran across his chest; medical dressings were plastered over his left shoulder. As I came near, he jerked awake, eyes flashing open with surprising determination.

  “Harris…” he started.

  “Take it easy,” I said, genuinely surprised by his reaction.

  “Y… you need to know what to do…”

  Ostrow still clutched the black metal box in a bloodstained hand. It attracted me like a magnet: made my heart beat that little bit faster. I quelled poisonous emotive responses that threatened to infect me.

  “The Endeavour is the key… to this war… She’s the origin.” His face twitched, spasmed with pain. “And the war won’t stop unless she’s found…”

  “You’re not making any sense. Tell me what I have to do.”

  He pushed the case near to the edge of the bed, offering it to me, and I reached for it without a thought. The outer armour plating was battered and warm to the touch; Ostrow had been holding it tight.

  “Ev… everything,” he said, struggling to speak, “is on there. That’s what they want; it’s what they’ve always wanted. L… look after it. A lot of good people have died for what’s in that box.”