Origins

by Jamie Sawyer

  “We’ve seen similar facilities on Damascus and Helios,” I insisted, trying to reassure myself as much as anyone else. “This is nothing new. It’s just another buried wreck. Just another ruin for the Alliance and the Directorate to squabble over.”

  “I wish that were the case,” Elena said, “but this is something much worse. It was our mission to study this site.”

  Cook pulled a grimace. He almost fell over as he stumbled towards Jenkins. “Stay back from there, Lieutenant!”

  Cook’s sudden eruption was enough to put us all on edge. As one, the Legion responded. Jenkins had reached the edge of the room and was standing close to a pedestal-like feature that erupted from the wall. In the low light, I made out a shape atop the pedestal. Something like a misshapen blob of melted rock – the afterbirth of a volcanic flow – that glistened softly.

  “Cool your jets, Commander,” Jenkins said, backing away from the wall.

  Cook panned a glow-stick at the pedestal. The light caught the obsidian-black feature in a pool of illumination. The blob shimmered like metal, throwing out bizarre reflections.

  “That,” Elena said, pointing at the pedestal, “is another example of the entity you know as the Reaper.”

  Jenkins visibly recoiled from the edge of the chamber, her face crumpling in disgust. The chamber was peppered with pedestals: all occupied.

  “They are in a dormant state,” Cook said. “But I would rather not bait them.”

  “They won’t activate unless you get too close,” Elena said. “And even then, their attack patterns are limited. You’ve seen that, if manipulated properly, they have their purpose.”

  Elena’s hands danced over a control console, caressing runes and impressions on the surface of the machine. At first I thought that she was activating the Reapers again, but instead the walls and structure around us began to pulse with light. The dark water that had been running across the textured surfaces coalesced, collected. Silvered metal swam across the walls: alive. I’d seen Shard tech do that before – on Helios, on the crashed ship that Dr Kellerman had shown me – but this was on a far grander scale. The atonal pulse in the background felt as though something truly massive was online, something so much bigger than the ruins at Helios or Damascus.

  “This is a fully functioning Shard facility,” Commander Cook said. “It was the Shard’s origin, we believe, in the Maelstrom.”

  “But you,” Elena added, looking at me, “will know it by another name. To you, it is an Artefact. The whole planet is a Master Artefact.”

  I wanted to question. Wanted to deny the truth of this, but the machines whispered to me. The black rock – the canyons, the ravines: the bizarre geometric terrain visible from orbit? The conclusion that those could be Shard creations was chillingly inevitable. We had been staring at the truth all along.

  “The planet is artificial,” Elena said. “A true feat of engineering. At one time it probably provided docking facilities for thousands of Shard warships. Can you imagine it? This place was a major node in the Machine; a device capable of altering spatial dynamics on a scale that we can barely understand.

  “But over time, it fell into decline. The war was won, at least so far as the Shard were concerned, and they perhaps felt that the facility no longer needed to be garrisoned. The Krell might be responsible for Devonia’s subsequent terraforming, as they made their resurgence, or it could be a natural occurrence: the result of millennia in space. Either way, the Shard were here first and this is their facility.”

  Cook nodded. “This is why Command sent us out here. Not to agree a Treaty, but to secure, and utilise, this Artefact.”

  The imagery on the walls shifted. It showed a familiar spread of stars – the former Quarantine Zone, the star systems bordering that sector.

  “Science Division discovered Devonia’s location from ruins found on Tysis World,” Elena explained. “It was quickly identified as a location of key importance to the war effort.”

  That name again: Tysis World. Professor Saul had mentioned it.

  “We knew that we were searching for a weapon,” Cook said. “And that is exactly what we found. A world-weapon; a device capable of ending the Krell. All it required was a Shard Key. We haven’t been able to find that, despite searching Devonia.”

  “What we did discover, however, was that contrary to Command’s intelligence the Shard were not dead,” Elena said. “And once we knew the reality of this weapon – the consequences of its activation – we knew that we couldn’t allow the Artefact to be used.”

  “What consequences?” Mason asked.

  Elena’s face was stern. “There will be a cost,” she said. “A dire cost, one that is surely not worth the gain.”

  “The closest human analogue to this Artefact’s purpose,” Cook said, “is a summoning. It will summon the Shard.”

  I watched as a pictorial formed on the wall, sketched in molten metal. Dots of light were thrown across the display. More star systems: I could even identify some of them; realised that they were systems within the same galactic neighbourhood as Devonia Star. Far too close to home, I thought. The display showed something moving from Helios – from the world on which we’d found the first Artefact – to Devonia.

  “The Shard were bringing the Key here,” I whispered. “That was the purpose of the activation on Helios.”

  An icon, cast in glowing silver, moved across the Shard display: something crossing the gulf of space, moving towards our location, towards the Devonia system. The metal above us reformed at Elena’s control. She zoomed in on a world now, on a single planet. Choked with vegetation and cloud cover, but the jagged black lines crossing the surface looked a lot like those banding Devonia’s surface.

  “We don’t have all of the answers,” Elena said, “but we can now understand enough of the Shard’s language to decipher that if the Master Artefact is activated, the Shard Network will open. It’ll allow whatever is left of the Shard to come through. It will summon the Revenant to Devonia.”

  The graphic showed the Revenant coming down to the surface. Then darkness spread over the world, everything scorched away, leaving only a blackened, criss-crossed husk.

  Leaving only the Artefact.

  Revenant. It wasn’t an operation or a project: it was a starship. I had a name for the horror that had been stalking me. I had no doubt that this was the thing we’d felt in the Shard Network.

  “Mass xenocide…” Elena whispered. “But we are all alien to the Shard.”

  After it had ended Devonia, the Shard graphic showed the Revenant moving on. Showed the ship jumping between systems, igniting worlds and stars as it went. Using the activated Shard Network, the Shard Gates, the Revenant travelled light-years in an instant.

  “The Shard didn’t just wage war against the Krell,” Cook said. “They sought to destroy all organic life in the Milky Way Galaxy. If they are summoned here, their war will start again. Neither side has forgotten what happened millennia ago.”

  “And they say that the fishes have short memories…” Kaminski said.

  “The Krell, in fact, have a highly advanced species-memory,” Elena said, answering ’Ski’s comment as though it was a serious scientific observation. “They pass down recall of specific events, through the leader-forms. The Collectives remember this war with the Shard, and they never forget. This, we believe, is why the Krell are attracted to operational Shard technology.”

  They were preparing for war on Helios, I thought. The Krell hadn’t forgotten what happened there. The same could be said of Damascus. I wondered whether this might explain their advanced evolution.

  “The Shard are just as bitter,” Cook said. “They are a species that has outgrown the flesh, shed it like a second skin. It’s all here: recorded in these walls. The organic races of this galaxy are just a reminder of what they left behind, and an unwelcome one at that. To them, we are nothing. We are a scourge, just like the Krell.”

  “The Shard are a far greater enemy to the Al
liance – to the Directorate, to humanity, to everything organic – than the Krell ever could be,” Elena said. “And it is for that reason that this Artefact must never be activated, and it must never fall into Directorate hands.”

  The simulation on the walls froze. Elena manipulated the controls again, and the glowing icon representing the Revenant vanished.

  “How do you explain the Quarantine Zone?” Mason asked Elena. “The Collective stopped fighting for a long time.”

  “Did they?” Elena said. “The Maelstrom is a big place. The Krell have other things to worry about, and you all talk about the Krell as though they are a single, unified race. That isn’t the case at all. They panic and flee just like us, and their species-memory often dictates their actions without plan or strategy. What this place proves – what Shard tech proves – is that activation of certain devices allows us to manipulate their behaviour.”

  “Billions dead, and it’s all some big mistake?” Martinez said.

  “That isn’t the way I would put it,” said Elena, “but perhaps.”

  “Command sent us here to end the war,” Mason said, more apprehensively. “Maybe they expected us to activate this weapon; to call the Shard here.”

  That, I had no doubt, had been General Cole’s plan. But because the Endeavour expedition had not reported, High Command had not been in possession of the facts. They could never have known the true consequences of the Master Artefact’s activation.

  “They must be more desperate than we thought…” Kaminski said. Though Martinez and Mason were still in denial, Kaminski seemed to have accepted Elena’s explanation. “But we can’t mess with this Shard tech. We have to close the door, for good.”

  Jenkins nodded. She stood side by side with Kaminski. “I think that ’Ski’s right.”

  “So we hide like rad-roaches until Judgement Day?” Martinez queried.

  “Rather a roach than dead,” Jenkins said. “That, or we make ourselves ready for when the Shard come looking for us.”

  “While this place still exists,” Elena pushed, as though sensing the way that my mind was working, “the Directorate will just keep coming. They’ll hurt all of us until we can’t hurt any more.” There was no softness to her voice; only a steely dedication. “It has to end here, before any of us can leave this place.”

  I knew, then, that Elena was right. Whether it was the Asiatic Directorate itself, or some rogue element like Admiral Kyung, didn’t much matter: this was a trove of working Shard technology, a weapon of such power that surely they would risk everything to acquire it. Once it was acquired, how could they ever resist activating it?

  “Does your ship have nuclear or plasma warheads?” Elena asked. “Something big enough to kill not just the planet, but the Artefact?”

  None of the Legion answered. This was my call.

  “She does,” I said. “We have nuclear warheads. Enough to level Devonia.”

  Loeb had told me about the Colossus’s nuclear payload when we’d fled Calico, and I’d checked on the specs myself: been able to confirm that we carried several high-yield nuclear weapons. Devonia was a surprisingly small planet, and if Elena was right about the world’s purpose then there were must’ve been power generators somewhere beneath the surface. Breached, they would add to the planet’s funeral pyre. I found myself looking at the stalled graphics on the wall; at the Revenant and what it represented. We were all killers of planets, in our own way.

  Elena’s face illuminated. “Then that is what we must do. We must blast this place from existence, and stop the Machine from coming through.”

  She believed in this mission – whatever it was – and the glimmer in her eyes spoke of her certainty that this was the right thing to do. Her beauty hadn’t been diminished by this place, and the fire in her eyes only amplified it.

  The practicalities of killing a world would have to come later.

  The Legion and the remainder of the Endeavour’s crew set about preparations to leave. We’d discussed using the orbital flares from the Ares battle-suits, or one of the Legion making extraction, to communicate with the Colossus. James could send down the second Dragonfly, and the survivors would evacuate. It wasn’t a plan without risk but it was a plan at least. Former Navy officers and security staff, armed with more bizarre prism-guns and plasma carbines, dressed in ill-maintained uniforms, patrolled the interior and exterior of the Ark Angel. I noticed, with some pride, that Elena had become the unratified leader of the survivor group. Even the Naval officers deferred to her: sometimes in preference to Commander Cook. He showed no concern at that, rather a quiet acceptance. It was as though Elena’s determination to survive had driven the rest of the crew.

  Elena and I walked together through the Shard ruins, through the filtered sunset. Devonia Star’s light was guttering now and only occasionally breaking the jungle canopy.

  “Is this really almost over?” she asked.

  I thought on that for a moment. There was a hard answer – the answer that the voice in my head teased me with: that this would never be over, not after what the Lazarus Legion had seen, what we’d done. Then there was an easy answer, and the lie came to me.

  “Soon,” I said. “This will be finished. I’m no stranger to destroying Artefacts. I can explain to Command.”

  I suspected that there wouldn’t be much to go back to. There would be nothing to stop the Krell’s incursion into Alliance space, but I was satisfied that was the lesser risk. Better to fight the enemy we knew, than that we did not.

  “If I close my eyes,” I said, “I can imagine that we are back on Azure. This is exactly how things were, years ago. We could pretend that the last ten years haven’t happened.”

  “Is that what you’d like?”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  She stirred, drew her long dark hair back from her face. “A lot has changed since then.”

  Although her body was small next to mine, this Elena wasn’t fragile. Her frame had grown sinewy, muscular: forged by a decade of hardship. Her arms were stitched with old white scars. So very different from the woman I had once known. She had come out here as a shipboard psychologist, but become so much more.

  “Are you angry with me?” she asked, quietly.

  “No. Of course not.”

  “I did this for you,” she said. “That was why I joined the mission, because I wanted to end the war with the Krell. It was destroying you, and I thought that I could save you by finishing things. If we had a Treaty, the war would be over, and I would have you back.”

  “You could’ve talked to me…”

  Elena shook her head. “Not then. Not as you were on Azure.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. Just saying those simple words: they lifted a weight from my heart. “I’ve wanted to say that for so long.”

  “Things were not as they should have been, but it wasn’t just you. I inducted you into Simulant Operations—”

  “But I let it consume me,” I said. “I let that happen; not you.”

  “The technology is addictive,” Elena said. “It should never have been used as frequently as it was.” She sighed. “I have tasted it too, now.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me,” I said, “that Command had made you operational?”

  Elena’s lips tightened. “I knew that you would find that the hardest thing to understand. Being operational, using a simulant: these are your things, not mine. I felt like this was the greatest betrayal. I ask you again: are you angry with me?”

  “I’m happy,” I answered, “to have found you.”

  Elena’s expression softened, became good-humoured. “You’re such a bad liar, Conrad.”

  “It’s…” I said, fighting to marshal my thoughts; to present them coherently. “It’s just a lot to take in, is all.”

  “Becoming operational was part of the mission plan,” Elena said. She traced the data-ports in her forearms. They looked sadistic, cast against her slender arms. “I was activated two weeks before I left, and I hid the d
ata-ports from you. At that time, the mission details were still classified. I wanted to tell you, but I knew that you would try to stop me. You were so obsessed with Simulant Operations, only ever interested in the next transition…”

  “Not anymore,” I said. “I’ve changed too. I’ll give all of this up.”

  Elena sighed. “Could you really do that?”

  “So long as I have you, I would.”

  “You had me before,” Elena said. “And that didn’t stop you.”

  There was a playful tone in her voice, but a sadness in her eyes. Things had changed. Not just in a galaxy plunged back into war, but between us. Though it had probably been a very simplistic view, I’d always imagined that when I found Elena she would immediately forgive me for letting her go, and that all of my past transgressions would be forgotten. The reality was somewhat more complex.

  I nodded. “I’d leave the Army tomorrow. We can leave all of this behind, live somewhere safe. I always promised you a farm.”

  “I remember,” Elena said. Her eyes clouded, as if she was recalling a pleasant memory. “You always said that it would be a house in Normandy. I wonder if they still have farms there.”

  “France hasn’t been hit, so far as I know.”

  “This is your promise then, mon chéri, that you will give me my farm in old France when we get home?”

  Elena smiled; an ironic, equivocal expression. I’d never known someone whose simple expressions could mean so much, whose face could convey such emotion. This smile relayed many things. Happiness, yes, but also sadness and regret, perhaps even resignation.

  I nodded. “That is my promise. We’ll have a farm, and get a proper child licence. You’ll have everything that I promised you.”

  We stood there, silently, for a long while. Not quite at ease, but contented nonetheless. That was a strange reaction, given that we were aboard an alien Artefact and surrounded by Krell, but I felt more contented than I had for a very long time.