Origins

by Jamie Sawyer

  “Where is she, Ostrow? Where is the Endeavour?”

  “In the Maelstrom,” Ostrow said. “Her c… coordinates… the box…”

  After years of searching, this case contained hard intel on her location. I held it in my real hand, felt the worn safety catch. It was DNA-encoded but had been unlocked by Ostrow. I had to fight the almost irresistible temptation to open it here and now – to examine exactly what it contained – but Ostrow’s ragged breathing drew me back to the room.

  “You don’t have long,” he said. His lucidity seemed deliberate, as though he was really concentrating on telling me this. “Planning a c… counter-attack… All in package…”

  Sunsam’s counter-attack: reinforcements from the Core Systems. But High Command hadn’t survived long enough to give me the details of the operation, and I only knew that they had – somehow – intended to rely on the Shard Gates…

  “Tell me,” he said, “did Professor… Saul… make it?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Saul is alive.”

  If what Saul had become – a frightened shell of a man – was actually living.

  “He knows more than you can ever appreciate,” Ostrow managed. “This will be the last time, Harris. You’re finally getting what you want.” He reached out, blindly feeling for my hand. “For God and the Alliance.”

  “I’ve never believed in the first,” I said, “and I’m not sure there’s much left of the other.”

  Ostrow’s eyes shut. “I’m sorry, Harris. Sorry for what you will find out there.”

  The bio-signs on the machine next to him abruptly flattened, and Ostrow’s breathing became softer and softer.

  “Medtech!” I yelled. “Get in here!”

  There was no death-knell – no last-ditch, desperate attempt to cling to life. He just faded, until the machines began their insistent chiming. The medtechs came, blustered around him. Took their readings, logged it all down. Just as they ever did.

  “He’s gone,” Dr Serova declared.

  It struck me, as the medical team left the room, as they drew the bed sheet over Captain Ostrow’s ravaged body, that I knew so little about him. We’d served together for months now, and despite the annoyance that he had caused me he had been a faithful servant of the Alliance. This was not a soldier’s death. He had deserved more. I didn’t even know his first name, for Christo’s sake.

  Despite all of that, I left the Medical Deck in a hurry. I told myself that it was because I wanted to make Ostrow’s death mean something – because this was what he had died for – but the truth was closer to home. Is this it? I asked myself, as I clutched the security case. I could focus on nothing but what I would find inside. It had taken on near demonic proportions – felt as though it had grown heavier and hotter in the brief time that I’d possessed it.

  I raced from Medical to Communications. There would be a closed computer suite there. The room was lit only by space outside: the view-ports in the open position.

  Strength began to ebb out of me, as the after-effects of the massive adrenaline flood left my system. I felt the hardwired chemical reaction that was my body telling me “thank Christo we made it out of that alive.” The sims never suffered from that response; the combat-suit medi-suite countered the comedown perfectly. Things were very different in my own skin.

  Light-headed and giddy, I slapped the case down onto a workstation. My hands – flesh and mechanical – were actually trembling as I opened it. Inside, dwarfed by the case, I found a single data-clip. It was battered, scratched, dirty: I guessed that the clip was the original that Storemberg had described during the briefing. It had come from Liberty Point, had survived attacks from the Directorate and the Krell.

  I inserted the data-clip into the workstation. Holographics jumped to life in front of me; military-issue security warnings.

  I sat back and watched, as everything was unlocked.

  There were files on crew manifests, on equipment lists, and ship specifications for the Endeavour, her sister ships the UAS Ark Angel, the HMS Lion’s Pride, and numerous other ships. I dismissed all of that information. While it was no doubt important, analysis of that material would require time and patience. I had neither of those qualifications right now.

  Finding Elena’s whereabouts: that was my objective.

  A familiar map of the Maelstrom appeared in front of me. Coordinates were flagged; deep, deep within. Through the twisted web of black holes, quasars, spatial anomalies – into the eye of the storm. Other than the Colossus, during her fleeting jump through Shard Space, this was further than any Alliance ship had ever gone: far into the heart of the Krell Empire, within a cluster of suns called the Reef Stars. Every trooper worth their salt had heard of those stars, and the worlds that orbited them. The Krell’s supposed home star – identified only through analysis of the Shard Key – sat in the middle of the Maelstrom, flickering softly. Around that system, unnamed so far as I knew, were numerous other stars bearing occupied worlds. These were ancient holdings; likely the first interstellar settlements claimed by the Krell. No one – not even the Lazarus Legion – had set foot on those alien worlds, but through repetition rumour had become fact. Troopers told of hell-worlds, of whole star systems driven mad by alien bio-technology.

  “Why did you go there, Elena?” I whispered to myself. “Why did Command send you there?”

  The briefing offered no answers. Quantum-space jump points had been identified, again as a result of the Shard Key that the Legion had recovered from Helios. In tri-D, I watched as the jump data was plotted – safely taking a starship to the Endeavour’s current location. Of course, the Endeavour and her fleet had done the journey without Q-jump data: had flown blind into the hazing stars of the Reef.

  The briefing tagged a sector of space known as the Arkonus Abyss, but the computer overlaid the map with the words SHARD GATE. Another wormhole. The Abyss was a node of the Shard Network, and this was where we had seen the Endeavour, during the retreat from Damascus. There were worlds held within the crushing grasp of the Abyss – gathered in a vast accretion disc – but this was no simple black hole. The spectral and spatial analysis of the rent in time-space was a virtual copy of the Damascus Rift. I watched in wonder and horror as the two Shard Gates connected: felt my temples begin to throb and ache as it went on to show how the Endeavour, and later the Colossus, had crossed the Maelstrom in less than a second of real-time. It pained me to see how close we’d come – how we had almost grazed the Endeavour’s hull, during the flight through the Shard Gate. The computer glitched for a second, the portal between the Rift and the Abyss appearing to remain open—

  A hundred Shard Gates suddenly appeared all across the Maelstrom. Markers throughout the region – glowing red, sometimes connected via glittering strands. The hairs on the nape of my neck bristled. I felt the Artefact’s signal piercing my mind again – felt it lingering at the edge of my hearing. I shook my head, rubbed my neck; chased it away—

  When I looked back at the display, it had refocused on the single Shard Gate: the Arkonus Abyss.

  That was where Command wanted us to go; to find the Endeavour.

  A stream of words were associated with the operation.

  CODENAME: REVENANT.

  I punched some keys on the terminal, called up a comm-link to Loeb in the CIC.

  “Loeb,” I said, “I have news. I need to call a briefing.”

  “Copy that,” Loeb said. “I have news of my own.”

  “How long until we reach the muster point?”

  “We just did.”

  “And?”

  “I’ll explain,” he said.

  I cut the link. Stared hard at the maps of the Maelstrom that appeared in front of me; tried to ascertain why they were so important to the war effort. Ostrow’s dying words had been insistent.

  After a long minute, I ejected the data-clip and made off for the briefing.

  By the time I arrived, the briefing room was already occupied by the Legion, James, Saul and Lo
eb. I took a seat and turned to Loeb. His expression was grim.

  “This is bad,” he said. “We’re currently at the muster point. There’s no one else here. As of now, we are the fleet.”

  “Christo…” Martinez said. “No one else made it out? You sure we’re in the right place?”

  Loeb nodded. “The Broken Knife code is fleet-wide – it generates the same muster point. I suppose that there could’ve been a mistake, but it isn’t likely. We’ve run diagnostics on our AI mainframe, and it’s functioning correctly. I think that we’re in the right place.”

  “Fuck me,” Jenkins said. “This really is the shit.”

  “Then what do we do?” Mason asked. She looked particularly shaken, her pale cheeks still crossed with smears of my blood.

  “I say that we use the FTL drive back to Calico,” Loeb said. “We can search for survivors, pick up any personnel who managed to get off-station. We can jump deep in-system, and surprise the Directorate.”

  “And you can get your pound of flesh from the Shanghai Remembered, huh?” Jenkins said. “Except it’ll be a wasted gesture when the Directorate counter-attack wipes us out in return.”

  “We’re a match for the Shanghai,” Loeb insisted. Jenkins had obviously shone a spotlight on his motivation, and it had nothing to do with rescuing survivors: it was instead old-fashioned revenge. “We can go in with stealth systems engaged, and strike hard—”

  “Hermano,” Martinez said, “I hit the Shanghai, but she wasn’t the only ship out there. I saw plenty of them. There was a fucking battlegroup. We go back, they’ll ghost us.”

  James sighed and sat over the table, the plastic of his flight-suit creaking noisily. “I agree with Martinez. We don’t have the aerospace support to fight a war against the Directorate.”

  “Rubbish,” Loeb said. “We have a full complement of plasma torpedoes.”

  James shook his head. “Even if the Colossus has superior firepower, their fighters will bring us down. They had Interceptors and Wraiths; we have nada air support.”

  “That’s not quite true,” Loeb argued.

  “All right,” James said, exasperated. “We have two Hornet gunships. Sorry to speak out of turn, Admiral, but that’s not going to cut it. Even if we had ships, we don’t have pilots. As of now, I am Scorpio Squadron.” He paused, looked around the table. “So believe me when I say I want to go back as much as anyone: my pilots are back there.”

  “How’d your real body end up on the Colossus then, James?” Jenkins probed.

  “Good fortune,” James said, caustically. “Because this was our next posting, and I was loaded in advance of the others. We can’t do this; we can’t go back to Calico and expect to make any difference.”

  James rubbed his face. Sim bodies usually coped with exhaustion and hunger very well, but I guessed that it was the emotion that was catching up with him. That came from the mind – currently floating in blue amniotic in the refitted SOC, somewhere at the aft of the Colossus. That was something that Sci-Div could never solve.

  “Then we should make uplink with whoever is next in the chain of command,” Loeb said. “The Navy yards at Novo Selo—”

  “Those docks are gone,” Mason said. She gave an involuntary bristle. “They fell to the Krell last month. And Command is gone.”

  “They’ll appoint replacements,” Loeb said. “We’ll get new orders!”

  “When, exactly?” Kaminski suddenly spoke up. “Admiral, I know this is hard to accept, but the structure is gone. We’re on our own. It could be months, real-time, before we get new orders from the Core. Meantime, the Krell will be running rampant through Tau Ceti, through Alpha Proxima, through the Centauris.”

  Loeb tapped his chest, over his heart, at mention of his beloved homeworld. “Then what are we going to do?” he asked, almost meekly.

  I placed the intelligence package on the table in front of me, the data-clip still in its protective casing.

  “Ostrow’s dead. He died getting this off Calico,” I said, indicating the data-clip. “It’s an intelligence package on the Endeavour.”

  I called up the course projections, the route maps; showed the team where the Endeavour was located. The group sat in silence as I went through the intelligence, stunned by it.

  I nodded at the projected map. “This was the mission that High Command tried to give me.”

  “Except they got bumped in the process…” Jenkins said.

  “Because the Directorate wanted what we have,” I said. “This is what they died for. Before Command was assassinated, General Cole told me that – in the hours before she went down – Liberty Point had been infiltrated by the Directorate. The Krell killed the station, but the Directorate let them in: disrupted the sensor network.”

  There were mutters around the table. Only Jenkins seemed unfazed by the suggestion. “I’ve been saying that since the start,” she said. “My sources never lie.”

  “Nowhere is safe any more. The Directorate hit us at Damascus, Liberty and Calico. They will not stop until they have this information; until they have the Endeavour. Before he died, Fleet Admiral Sunsam told me that the Navy were planning a counter-attack, an offensive against the Krell.”

  The mission briefing had been scant, and I wished that I’d had just a little more time, just a little more intel… This attack will not succeed unless we have some assistance, General Cole had said. What did he mean by that? I knew nothing about the timing of the offensive, about the forces involved.

  Loeb chewed his lip. “I’d say those course projections will take us almost nine months, objective, to get into the Maelstrom.”

  I hadn’t checked the calculations, but I suspected that Loeb was right. Going into the Maelstrom, via a Q-jump, would take a decent chunk of real-time: for all I knew, even if we succeeded in acquiring the Endeavour – in doing whatever it was Command had expected of us – we might be too late.

  But what’s the alternative? I asked myself. To just give up?

  “Did Ostrow tell you why the Endeavour is so important?” Martinez asked.

  “He didn’t,” I said. “But this will be our target, and whatever is out there, it’s the key to ending this war. Ostrow believed in this. And I know that the Directorate are putting everything into stopping us.”

  Martinez sighed. “It’s not like we have a choice, jefe. We’re Lazarus Legion. We stick together.”

  Mason nodded. “For the Legion.”

  “I might not be Legion,” James said, “but I can’t let the Directorate win. I got family back in the Core; I can’t let them down either.”

  “Anything to add, Professor Saul?” I asked.

  Saul had that same distracted air that he seemed to get when he was around Shard discoveries. He was still ghost-like – pallid, thin – but as he looked at the mission plan, something began to burn behind his eyes. I wondered where Ostrow had sprung Saul from, dressed as he was in a simple blue jumpsuit. Had he been detained in the infirmary, like Kaminski, or had Sci-Div immediately put him back to work? The nerve-staples had been removed from his shaven scalp, and like Kaminski he had received unpleasant flesh-grafts, but he didn’t look capable of going back into the Maelstrom.

  Even so, he said, “There is nowhere else to go, and Command wanted this done.”

  “He knows more than you can ever appreciate,” Ostrow had told me. Saul avoided eye contact as I watched him from across the table.

  “Don’t worry,” Kaminski said. “We’ll look after you, Prof.”

  “Or at least we’ll try,” Jenkins added, making the joint decision.

  “Give me a full tac-analysis of our situation, Loeb,” I said.

  Loeb stared down at a data-slate in front of him. “Weapons systems and null-shields are operational. The munitions stores are full: we have plasma warheads, power cells for the laser batteries, slugs for the railguns. We have a dozen orbit-to-ground nukes, if we ever need them. Food and air for a long haul – years, in fact. All life-support systems are functio
ning optimally. The hypersleep bays are running. The engine systems have acceptable bleed.

  “But there are less than a thousand personnel on this ship, and only a third of those are experienced hands. We were in orbital dock; having veterans do routine work probably didn’t sound like a good idea at the time. We can cover the minimum number of watch standers, but you” – he nodded at me, as though deferring responsibility – “need to understand that this crew is mighty tight, and they’re all on edge.”

  “The Legion will step up,” I said. “We can cover whatever posts you need us to. We’ll set a watch schedule. What about other equipment? Do we have simulators? Is the simulant operations centre functional?”

  “The SOC is ready to run,” Mason said. “We’ve got tanks, and they work. But no Science Division support.”

  “I never thought there would be a time when I’d miss those fuckers,” Martinez said, “but it’s finally come.”

  He was right. The Sci-Div complement was a requirement for a simulant operation; usually made up of fifty or so medical staff. I’d already checked the numbers, done a tally: the Colossus currently carried five medtechs. All were of the minimal operating grade for a sim op and one was injured. Dr Serova was the most senior, but she had seen only a single combat operation and wasn’t sim-tech approved.

  “We’ve got plenty of simulants,” Mason said. “On last count, we’ve got enough for ten bodies a piece.” She smiled at Kaminski. “Even ’Ski has some new skins.”

  “That so?” he asked, raising an eyebrow. “I’m itching to get skinned up again.”

  “Could’ve been an administrative error,” Mason said, “or maybe Captain Ostrow planned it that way.”

  “What about other equipment?” I said, turning to Martinez.

  “Good news on that front; we’ve got a decent supply of arms and armour,” Martinez said. The Venusian’s eyes glimmered for a second, and despite our current circumstances he looked enthused. “We got upgrades, jefe. Mili-Intel came through on this one. There are fifty suits of Ares battle-armour in the armoury.”