Origins

by Jamie Sawyer

  Williams paused in his MMR. The machine heaved up and down, never at rest: like it was breathing, ready to pounce again.

  “Williams…” I said. “So good to see you.”

  “This is the end of the line, Lazarus.”

  “No, it isn’t. Not until I say so.”

  In hardcopy, he was leaner, wearing a black Directorate Sword uniform. Despite myself, despite the gunshot injury, that caused a stir of anger in me. An Alliance traitor, wearing the uniform of the Asiatic Directorate. His blond hair was shaved close to his scalp, which was pocked by two chemical-inducers: metal studs used to trigger drug inducements.

  “You killed them,” Williams repeated. He cycled up the assault cannon attached to the Spider’s body, multiple-barrels spinning in readiness to fire. “You killed the Warfighters on Calico.”

  Directorate Sword commandos filtered into the chamber, crunching wreckage under booted feet. Ten mag-rifles were aimed at me: laser-dots dancing over my damaged armour. My suit tracked the group as they circled around behind me.

  “Actually,” Martinez shouted, his voice echoing around the chamber, “that was me.”

  Williams’ face twitched. One side was claimed by a tattoo – a manic barcode that may or may not have had some purpose other than decoration.

  Martinez had begun to climb among the Shard machinery, using the battle-suit’s strength-aug to his advantage, his camo-field activated so that he was more difficult to track. Despite his armour, he moved fast. He fired off a volley of grenades into the room, sharp frag littering the area.

  “Aim for the cabin!” I yelled.

  “On it,” Mason called back.

  We moved as a team, plasma fire pattering against the heavy null-shield. Whatever tech the machine was carrying, it was impressive: the shield was capable of dispersing a direct plasma round, absorbing the charge.

  The Spider swivelled at the waist, its heavy assault cannon indiscriminately spraying the walls. Dust and debris were thrown up into the air. The Swords’ gunfire slowed, became even more erratic: panicked—

  Martinez’s body slid down the wall. Chewed up by assault-cannon rounds, his life-signs extinguished.

  And then there were two.

  Without warning, the Spider twisted about-face and lurched towards Mason. She rolled aside, flung her rifle behind her.

  “Get out of its path!” I shouted, as the machine bore down on her.

  “I’ve been saving a special something for you, Mason,” he yelled. “Payback for the Colossus.”

  He fired at Mason. Her armour was taking hits at a terrifying rate.

  Despite my order, she stood ground and unsheathed the mono-sword at her belt. The blade lit, blue-white lightning playing across the cutting edge, and she tested the weight.

  I kept firing, moving up on the Spider. Williams seemed almost absorbed in the moment. His every attention was focused on Mason—

  “Fuck you and your payback!” she shouted, running forward.

  Then she was under the shield, within killing range of Williams.

  He grunted in surprise as Mason’s armoured body collided with his. Her blade swiped back and forth, in a frenzied arc—

  The Swords closed around us. More anti-shield rounds rained down on the chamber, forced me back into cover. Something pranged off my armour plating.

  “That’s harder than it looks, isn’t it?” Williams yelled at Mason.

  Still beneath Williams’ null-shield, dodging the Spider’s many legs, she ran at him again. The blade swiped up, mono-filament edge leaving a trail of sparks. Sliced against Williams’ outer canopy—

  And bounced off.

  The armour-glass breached, fractured, but held.

  Mason dropped the sword, collapsed into the waiting claws of the Spider MMR. She struggled against the machine. Williams split her face with a blow from the Spider’s claw, then deployed a laser mandible from the machine’s main body.

  What was left of Mason, sans head, collapsed to the middle of the room.

  Then there was one.

  I dashed back into cover. Gunfire was everywhere: more and more of the temple collapsing around me.

  Williams saw me move. I rolled aside, just a little too slowly…

  He slammed an enormous mechanical foot down on my right hand. The walker was several tons of solid metal and weaponry; not even my battle-suit could withstand that sort of weight. The armour crunched as it took the stress. My right hand exploded with pain, my med-suite struggling to control the agony that erupted there.

  “I got the other hand on the Colossus,” Williams said, leering at me.

  I was pinned to the ground.

  The missile pods on my shoulders swivelled to face him, but ERROR flashed across my HUD. Something must’ve been damaged during the fight; the weapons wouldn’t respond.

  “What are you waiting for, Lazarus?” he snarled. “Aren’t you going to fight back? I expected more from an old war hero.”

  “You’re not looking so young yourself, these days,” I said.

  Williams’ loomed over the machine’s controls, bobbing inside the cabin. “I can give you their names. Every one of them a good man and woman. And you killed them, in their fucking tanks!”

  “You’re a lackey,” I said. “Nothing more.”

  Williams’ face was flushed red with utter, utter rage. “You’ve really fucked things up for me,” he said. He shook his head, the machine’s legs dancing restlessly like he was trying to dispel that anger. It wasn’t working. “You are one big fucking pain in the ass, Harris. The op in Damascus? I was going to make out like a bandit!”

  “It was your deal with the devil.”

  “They wanted the simulant technology, and they wanted the Endeavour. I could’ve given them both!”

  Another figure advanced through the dark.

  Director-Admiral Kyung stood at the head of the chamber. Shorter than the other soldiers, wearing vac-rated ghost-plate: a type of Special Operations armour that hadn’t been in service for a long time. The plating was equipped with an active camo-field that swirled as she moved, reflecting the Shard glyphs around her.

  Seeing this construct up close: it triggered the deep hurt.

  “What are you doing here?” Kyung asked me. “You were warned to leave.”

  “That’s what I’ve been asking him,” Williams said. “Bastard got no right…”

  “Shut up,” Kyung said, never taking her eyes off mine.

  “Of course, Admiral,” Williams said. “It’s your show.”

  The chamber began to shudder around me, but Kyung’s face betrayed no emotion. Even inside the ghost-plate, she was much smaller than the surrounding troopers.

  “How’s the Shanghai doing?” I asked, as glibly as I could.

  “Well enough,” she said, but her words didn’t match her reaction: she visibly winced.

  “It wasn’t last time I looked, and I think you know that, Assassin.”

  “You keep calling me that,” Kyung said. “Did you lose someone, I wonder, on Thebe? A brother, a sister, a parent?”

  I am going to kill this woman, I reassured myself. If not in this life, then the next.

  “I take no pleasure in the name, Colonel Harris. Jupiter Outpost – Thebe – means nothing compared to what we can achieve out here. This place: this is where real change will be made. We know what the Revenant is. We know what it is capable of.”

  “None of this is going to matter,” I said, “because you’re going to die out here.”

  She snapped her head around in Williams’ direction; made a sudden decision. “Hold him.”

  “Of course,” Williams said, raising the Spider’s forelimbs. “Do I get to kill him yet? I’ve been dreaming about this, man. And let me tell you: since Damascus, I’ve been having some seriously bad dreams…”

  He turned his attention on me again. Scooped my armour up with a manipulator; the two-pronged metal claw clasped around my neck guard. The Ares armour was heavy, but even that
squealed and deformed under the pressure. The claw began to close on my neck…

  Head down, Kyung marched across the chamber. Two of her troopers carried a black armoured case, the lid open. Something all too familiar sat inside: the Shard Key. It blazed with energy, glowing and pulsing and offering a universe of destruction. The Swords set it down in front of the effigy, moved back from the box as though frightened of the contents. Kyung looked up at the statue that towered over her, hands clasped behind her back.

  “So this is the Shard?” she asked. “They went by many names. Some species referred to them as the ‘Dwellers in the Dark’, others the ‘Machine-Mind’. I am quite partial to the name that Species 134 referred to them as: ‘the Ones who do not Care’.” More sparkling across her face: more damage to the Shanghai in high orbit? Or were the Shard, somehow, trying to communicate with her crippled bio-machine of a mind? “The Shard is a species that knows only war; that can claim responsibility for the extinction of hundreds of sentient races.”

  Williams’ claw tightened some more.

  Kyung inspected the control consoles. “Dr Kellerman’s research was quite specific on the activation protocols,” Kyung said. The room around us was buzzing with activity. “His death was a loss to the Directorate scientific mission, but the activation of the Shard technology is surprisingly simple.” She lifted the Key from its case, held it up.

  “You’ll doom us all!” I managed.

  “Just shut the fuck up,” Williams said, “and let the lady work, then we can all get out of here.”

  Kyung stood with her back to me. “It’s almost as if the machine wants to be activated…”

  Very carefully and precisely, she inserted the Key into a throbbing portal on one of the consoles.

  Time seemed to stop.

  Kyung stood in front of the machine. I dangled on the end of Williams’ claw, eyes darting to the control console, mere metres from my position. The Directorate troops had emerged from their hiding places and were frozen, watching the shadows around us.

  “Did it work—?” Williams started.

  Then the signal exploded in my mind, and an enormous wave of blue light poured from the Shard statue: the cries of a million machine-minds freed at last.

  Still holding me tight around the neck, Williams’ mech locked. He frowned as he tried to deliver the final twist of his claw, but the Spider did not respond.

  The air was filled with data – with crackling streams of information that coursed through my mind and soul. Shard glyphs spiralled all around me, igniting the air. Machines that had not spoken for millennia, that had forgotten that they even had a voice, screamed into the void. As a human, even a simulated one, I could hear only a fraction of their cry. That was more than enough: to be in the heart of that deluge of machine-code was almost crippling.

  I couldn’t see it, but I knew that the Arkonus Abyss had activated.

  Kyung raised a hand to her face, stumbled back from the control bank.

  Shard control consoles rose from the deck, following assembly routines that had been long dormant. Vibrations spread through the artificial ground. The entire chamber quaked. Lesser components of the temple broke off, chunks of the ceiling raining down on us. Directorate troops darted to and fro, using the improved mobility of their exo-suits to escape the rockfall.

  “Here we fucking go, man!” Williams yelled over his external speakers. His words sat uneasily with the tone of his voice: manic, verging on terror. “This is the shit!”

  The roof split apart. Metal ground against metal, sending nerve-jangling echoes around the shafts. The deck beneath me was rising up, moving faster and faster. The platform on which Kyung had stood, together with her entourage, moved away from us – leaving Williams and me.

  The structure rose for several seconds, like an elevator in a shaft, then the process stopped with a jolt. We were on the surface of Devonia, among the raised elements of the Maze. The sky was visible now, a billowing sheet of cloud cover, black and terrible, stretching into infinity. Searing beams of light speared the sky.

  I swallowed back fear of failure: the idea that the universe was going to end on my watch… How long will it take for the Revenant to get here? I asked myself.

  There was a terrible grandeur to what we were witnessing, and even Williams paused to take it in. The landscape around us had warped and the Maze was pocked with numerous raised platforms like that Williams and I found ourselves on. Each edifice was a hundred or so metres above the highest points of the canyons, too far for even an armoured simulant to survive the drop.

  “She’s done it!” Williams jeered. “This is going to end what you started a long, long time ago—”

  His mech was crackling with blue energy, sending off sheets of electrical feedback. He fought to control the machine as it was subverted by Shard machine-code.

  “Damn it!” he yelped.

  The manipulator claw jerked open and dropped me. The platform beneath us rocked, and the Spider – Williams still struggling to control the rebellious mech – stumbled away from me. I landed on my feet. My armour was experiencing the same difficulty, but I had the strength to correct and control it. I shook my neck, released from the agony that Williams had caused.

  I couldn’t leave without seeing to him, without finishing him for real. I raised my right arm – extended it to arm the flamethrower – but bright warning lights flashed over my wrist-comp. The armour plating around the weapon was deformed, smashed out of shape. Williams must’ve damaged it in the temple.

  He saw my reaction as well. Stomped towards me. I backed away. A blistering wind, powerful enough to shake even my Ares armour, scoured over me and through the Maze.

  The entire weight of the Spider collided with me, and I hit one of the Shard consoles. It crumbled beneath me, but slowed my progress: I skidded to a halt mere metres from the edge of the platform. The chest panel of my armour was crumpled, and the collision was strong enough to knock the air from my lungs.

  The Shard control console immediately began to repair itself. It rippled with energy as it regenerated, glyphs lighting along the various panels—

  The Reapers.

  I saw them from the edge of my eye: saw flickers of energy playing over them. They were still, not activated, but I sensed something about them. Williams clumsily circled me, brushing so damned close to the dark metal machines…

  I thought fast.

  Williams was gaining speed now, crossing the platform again—

  I rolled sideways. Grappled with my plasma pistol, unholstered it—

  —Williams swivelled, his face a mask of hate inside the machine cockpit, fingers braced on the firing studs of his assault cannon—

  “Too slow, old man!” he shouted.

  —I fired the plasma pistol at the nearest platform—

  It hit the Reaper statue full on. Williams’ leering face remained fixed, unable to comprehend anything other than my destruction. The Reaper began to ripple. Williams saw the motion too, and turned to face the activating machine.

  Suddenly, there was a bigger threat out here than me. A strand of shadow suddenly shot from the nearest pedestal. Wrapped around one of the Spider’s legs.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” he screamed at me.

  The Spider stomped to get free. Servos whined in protest.

  First one, then two, then three shadows were on him. Black metal wrapped around the mech’s legs, body, torso. For their size, the Reapers were immensely strong. Armour plating deformed, then ruptured, as force was applied to it.

  Williams struggled with his assault cannon, tried to aim it at me. Rounds haphazardly stitched the area, impotent against the Shard machines.

  I stood, watched the things taking him apart.

  “I am—” I started.

  “Let me guess,” Williams roared, his speakers at maximum amplification. When he spoke, spittle lined the inside of the mech’s canopy. “I am Lazarus?”

  He raised his right arm – the mech re
sponding in kind. There was a flamethrower attached to it, the pilot light already lit. He punched the firing stud: ignited the air in a plume of white flame. The nearest Reaper was consumed by fire, but that didn’t stop it.

  The Spider was crippled. It collapsed sideways, torn apart by a flurry of Reaper stabs and slashes. The pilot cabin, set into the torso, was being consumed by a mass of black metal. Any thought that Williams was safe inside was quickly dispelled. The fracture that Mason had caused with her mono-sword expanded, and the black plague began to seep inside.

  The Creep had found another organic target.

  “And you are dead,” I completed.

  The mech suit vanished beneath the tide of roiling shadow, and Captain Williams was finally finished.

  The nearest shadow advanced on me, and I readied for an attack from the Reapers. But it never came. Their work done, I watched as they simply dissolved. The living metal just crumbled, was rapidly thrown to the wind. They became the nanophage: the Creep that was engulfing Devonia. All aspects of the Shard machine, working towards the same goal.

  I turned, activated my EVA thruster pack.

  Out there, on the horizon, was a titan-sized structure: something so big that it almost touched the sky. A beam of light poured from the flattened tip.

  Kyung is up there.

  Even if I couldn’t stop her, I was going to die trying.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  KYUNG

  Come on, come on! I urged myself. I have to stop that beacon.

  The Krell were everywhere. The Shard were here to destroy their very habitat: there was no point in retreating, in trying to defend against the onslaught. They poured from the coral hives, from the destroyed trees. Bounded across the dead jungle.

  I joined them, bouncing onwards with my battle-suit’s enhanced-mobility pack firing regularly: making speed on the platform. Soon, a hundred Krell were at my back. Racing as a tide, as a bloody-minded swarm lurching up the side of the structure: crushing each other in a collective wish to reach the summit. As many Krell bodies were strewn across the jungle floor as consumed by the Shard swarm.