Origins

by Jamie Sawyer

“He’d like that,” I said. “It’s a short flight from any of the off-world terminals.”

  “Be seeing you, Dr Marceau.”

  She turned and left.

  The flight back was less crowded. I slept again.

  Paris wasn’t much better than Detroit, but at least it was French. Almost as soon as I left the orbital, I shed Standard and dropped into my native tongue. The terminal was quieter than it was on the way out, and I was confident that I hadn’t been followed. I took an autocab downtown, under the shadow of the ruined Eiffel Tower: a ragged, skeletal reminder of the war.

  I found the cafe in one of the less-frequented suburbs, a district occupied by many ex-Army vets. None of them knew me: I was just another face among the crowd. I’d been dead for years. But I smiled as I took up a seat, because it wasn’t me that needed to avoid being recognised. I ordered a cappuccino.

  “How’d it go?” he asked.

  Voice like gravel, dripping in animosity. Such an angry man.

  “You’d have liked it,” I said. “There was a good turnout.”

  He grumbled into the newspaper. “Can’t they print this in Standard?”

  I laughed. “You could’ve gone, you know. Maybe worn a disguise.”

  “They’d have seen me,” he said. “That’s the whole point of this; of going underground.” Conrad folded the newspaper and slid it across the table. “I don’t want to put you in any danger. Lazarus is dead, and now there’s a body in a casket in prove it.”

  The body was next-gen, just a simulant. But if any one cared to examine it, the corpse would pass rudimentary analysis: Sci-Div were getting better all the time. The soil out Detroit way was so radioactive that the simulant would degrade quickly. Soon, Lazarus would be gone for ever, leaving just his legacy.

  “I did it for you,” he said.

  “And I’ve already told you: I can look after myself.”

  I half-turned in my seat. Conrad always seemed uncomfortable in civilian attire. He might look healthier, but he was constantly on edge. There was a lot of pent-up energy in the man. Beside him, attached to the cafe table, sat a jamming device: the reader indicating that it was functioning, that it was cloaking both our conversation and disrupting communications signals in the vicinity.

  “Did the Legion go?” he asked. Metal hand resting in his lap, polished through manual labour back on the farm. “How are they?”

  “Of course they went,” I said. “And they are well, all of them. Lieutenant Jenkins is going back.”

  The Legion knew that Harris was alive. They’d played their roles at the ceremony, done their part to make this seem real.

  “They’re better actors that you give them credit for,” I said.

  “Figures,” he grunted.

  I laughed. “Not even death changes you, Conrad.”

  “Not any more, it won’t,” he said.

  There was some truth in that. Conrad’s sleeves were pulled up, revealing his swollen, muscular arms. Naked arms, scarred by the absence of the data-ports. Barring the well-worn metal hand, mine were just the same.

  “Do you miss it?” I asked.

  “All the fucking time,” he said. “But that’s a whole other story.”

  extras

  meet the author

  JAMIE SAWYER was born in 1979 in Newbury, Berkshire. He studied law at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, acquiring a master’s degree in human rights and surveillance law. Jamie is a full-time barrister, practising in criminal law. When he isn’t working in law or writing, Jamie enjoys spending time with his family in Essex. He is an enthusiastic reader of all types of SF, especially classic authors such as Heinlein and Haldeman.

  introducing

  If you enjoyed

  THE LAZARUS WAR: ORIGINS,

  look out for

  LEVIATHAN WAKES

  The Expanse: Book One

  by James S. A. Corey

  Two hundred years after migrating into space, mankind is in turmoil. When a reluctant ship’s captain and washed-up detective find themselves involved in the case of a missing girl, what they discover brings our solar system to the brink of civil war, and exposes the greatest conspiracy in human history.

  PROLOGUE: JULIE

  The Scopuli had been taken eight days ago, and Julie Mao was finally ready to be shot.

  It had taken all eight days trapped in a storage locker for her to get to that point. For the first two she’d remained motionless, sure that the armored men who’d put her there had been serious. For the first hours, the ship she’d been taken aboard wasn’t under thrust, so she floated in the locker, using gentle touches to keep herself from bumping into the walls or the atmosphere suit she shared the space with. When the ship began to move, thrust giving her weight, she’d stood silently until her legs cramped, then sat down slowly into a fetal position. She’d peed in her jumpsuit, not caring about the warm itchy wetness, or the smell, worrying only that she might slip and fall in the wet spot it left on the floor. She couldn’t make noise. They’d shoot her.

  On the third day, thirst had forced her into action. The noise of the ship was all around her. The faint subsonic rumble of the reactor and drive. The constant hiss and thud of hydraulics and steel bolts as the pressure doors between decks opened and closed. The clump of heavy boots walking on metal decking. She waited until all the noise she could hear sounded distant, then pulled the environment suit off its hooks and onto the locker floor. Listening for any approaching sound, she slowly disassembled the suit and took out the water supply. It was old and stale; the suit obviously hadn’t been used or serviced in ages. But she hadn’t had a sip in days, and the warm loamy water in the suit’s reservoir bag was the best thing she had ever tasted. She had to work hard not to gulp it down and make herself vomit.

  When the urge to urinate returned, she pulled the catheter bag out of the suit and relieved herself into it. She sat on the floor, now cushioned by the padded suit and almost comfortable, and wondered who her captors were—Coalition Navy, pirates, something worse. Sometimes she slept.

  On day four, isolation, hunger, boredom, and the diminishing number of places to store her piss finally pushed her to make contact with them. She’d heard muffled cries of pain. Somewhere nearby, her shipmates were being beaten or tortured. If she got the attention of the kidnappers, maybe they would just take her to the others. That was okay. Beatings, she could handle. It seemed like a small price to pay if it meant seeing people again.

  The locker sat beside the inner airlock door. During flight, that usually wasn’t a high-traffic area, though she didn’t know anything about the layout of this particular ship. She thought about what to say, how to present herself. When she finally heard someone moving toward her, she just tried to yell that she wanted out. The dry rasp that came out of her throat surprised her. She swallowed, working her tongue to try to create some saliva, and tried again. Another faint rattle in the throat.

  The people were right outside her locker door. A voice was talking quietly. Julie had pulled back a fist to bang on the door when she heard what it was saying.

  No. Please no. Please don’t.

  Dave. Her ship’s mechanic. Dave, who collected clips from old cartoons and knew a million jokes, begging in a small broken voice.

  No, please no, please don’t, he said.

  Hydraulics and locking bolts clicked as the inner airlock door opened. A meaty thud as something was thrown inside. Another click as the airlock closed. A hiss of evacuating air.

  When the airlock cycle had finished, the people outside her door walked away. She didn’t bang to get their attention.

  They’d scrubbed the ship. Detainment by the inner planet navies was a bad scenario, but they’d all trained on how to deal with it. Sensitive OPA data was scrubbed and overwritten with innocuous-looking logs with false time stamps. Anything too sensitive to trust to a computer, the captain destroyed. When the attackers came aboard, they could play innocent.

  It hadn’t mattered.

/>   There weren’t the questions about cargo or permits. The invaders had come in like they owned the place, and Captain Darren had rolled over like a dog. Everyone else—Mike, Dave, Wan Li—they’d all just thrown up their hands and gone along quietly. The pirates or slavers or whatever they were had dragged them off the little transport ship that had been her home, and down a docking tube without even minimal environment suits. The tube’s thin layer of Mylar was the only thing between them and hard nothing: hope it didn’t rip; goodbye lungs if it did.

  Julie had gone along too, but then the bastards had tried to lay their hands on her, strip her clothes off.

  Five years of low-gravity jiu jitsu training and them in a confined space with no gravity. She’d done a lot of damage. She’d almost started to think she might win when from nowhere a gauntleted fist smashed into her face. Things got fuzzy after that. Then the locker, and Shoot her if she makes a noise. Four days of not making noise while they beat her friends down below and then threw one of them out an airlock.

  After six days, everything went quiet.

  Shifting between bouts of consciousness and fragmented dreams, she was only vaguely aware as the sounds of walking, talking, and pressure doors and the subsonic rumble of the reactor and the drive faded away a little at a time. When the drive stopped, so did gravity, and Julie woke from a dream of racing her old pinnace to find herself floating while her muscles screamed in protest and then slowly relaxed.

  She pulled herself to the door and pressed her ear to the cold metal. Panic shot through her until she caught the quiet sound of the air recyclers. The ship still had power and air, but the drive wasn’t on and no one was opening a door or walking or talking. Maybe it was a crew meeting. Or a party on another deck. Or everyone was in engineering, fixing a serious problem.

  She spent a day listening and waiting.

  By day seven, her last sip of water was gone. No one on the ship had moved within range of her hearing for twenty-four hours. She sucked on a plastic tab she’d ripped off the environment suit until she worked up some saliva; then she started yelling. She yelled herself hoarse.

  No one came.

  By day eight, she was ready to be shot. She’d been out of water for two days, and her waste bag had been full for four. She put her shoulders against the back wall of the locker and planted her hands against the side walls. Then she kicked out with both legs as hard as she could. The cramps that followed the first kick almost made her pass out. She screamed instead.

  Stupid girl, she told herself. She was dehydrated. Eight days without activity was more than enough to start atrophy. At least she should have stretched out.

  She massaged her stiff muscles until the knots were gone, then stretched, focusing her mind like she was back in dojo. When she was in control of her body, she kicked again. And again. And again, until light started to show through the edges of the locker. And again, until the door was so bent that the three hinges and the locking bolt were the only points of contact between it and the frame.

  And one last time, so that it bent far enough that the bolt was no longer seated in the hasp and the door swung free.

  Julie shot from the locker, hands half raised and ready to look either threatening or terrified, depending on which seemed more useful.

  There was no one on the whole deck: the airlock, the suit storage room where she’d spent the last eight days, a half dozen other storage rooms. All empty. She plucked a magnetized pipe wrench of suitable size for skull cracking out of an EVA kit, then went down the crew ladder to the deck below.

  And then the one below that, and then the one below that. Personnel cabins in crisp, almost military order. Commissary, where there were signs of a struggle. Medical bay, empty. Torpedo bay. No one. The comm station was unmanned, powered down, and locked. The few sensor logs that still streamed showed no sign of the Scopuli. A new dread knotted her gut. Deck after deck and room after room empty of life. Something had happened. A radiation leak. Poison in the air. Something that had forced an evacuation. She wondered if she’d be able to fly the ship by herself.

  But if they’d evacuated, she’d have heard them going out the airlock, wouldn’t she?

  She reached the final deck hatch, the one that led into engineering, and stopped when the hatch didn’t open automatically. A red light on the lock panel showed that the room had been sealed from the inside. She thought again about radiation and major failures. But if either of those was the case, why lock the door from the inside? And she had passed wall panel after wall panel. None of them had been flashing warnings of any kind. No, not radiation, something else.

  There was more disruption here. Blood. Tools and containers in disarray. Whatever had happened, it had happened here. No, it had started here. And it had ended behind that locked door.

  It took two hours with a torch and prying tools from the machine shop to cut through the hatch to engineering. With the hydraulics compromised, she had to crank it open by hand. A gust of warm wet air blew out, carrying a hospital scent without the antiseptic. A coppery, nauseating smell. The torture chamber, then. Her friends would be inside, beaten or cut to pieces. Julie hefted her wrench and prepared to bust open at least one head before they killed her. She floated down.

  The engineering deck was huge, vaulted like a cathedral. The fusion reactor dominated the central space. Something was wrong with it. Where she expected to see readouts, shielding, and monitors, a layer of something like mud seemed to flow over the reactor core. Slowly, Julie floated toward it, one hand still on the ladder. The strange smell became overpowering.

  The mud caked around the reactor had structure to it like nothing she’d seen before. Tubes ran through it like veins or airways. Parts of it pulsed. Not mud, then.

  Flesh.

  An outcropping of the thing shifted toward her. Compared to the whole, it seemed no larger than a toe, a little finger. It was Captain Darren’s head.

  “Help me,” it said.

  By Jamie Sawyer

  THE LAZARUS WAR

  Artefact

  Legion

  Origins

  Redemption (ebook novella)

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  Contents

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  WELCOME

  DEDICATION

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  CHAPTER ONE: RIGHTEOUS FURY

  CHAPTER TWO: RETRIBUTION UNREALISED

  CHAPTER THREE: SAME AS US

  CHAPTER FOUR: KNOWS YOUR NAME

  CHAPTER FIVE: SHE’S ALREADY GONE

  CHAPTER SIX: CALICO

  CHAPTER SEVEN: WHEN THE WAR’S DONE

  CHAPTER EIGHT: CHAOS BREEDS

  CHAPTER NINE: PAYBACK

  CHAPTER TEN: I’LL BE SEEING YOU

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: BLEEDING EDGE

  CHAPTER TWELVE: SLEEP WELL

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: NEED A NAME

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: GODS OF TECHNOLOGY

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: DESTRUCTION

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: TOO LATE

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: HULL BREACH

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: ELENA’S ARMS

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: THE TREATY

  CHAPTER TWENTY: DEVONIA

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: THE GREEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: TSUNAMI

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: WE CAN CHANGE THINGS

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: THEY ARE HERE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: THE ARTEFACT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: KYUNG

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: NO COMING BACK

  EPILOGUE: THE FUNERAL

  EXTRAS

  MEET THE AUTHOR

  A PREVIEW OF LEVIATHAN WAKES
r />   BY JAMIE SAWYER

  ORBIT NEWSLETTER

  COPYRIGHT

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 by Jamie Sawyer

  Excerpt from Leviathan Wakes copyright © 2011 by Daniel Abrahamand Ty Franck

  Cover design by Kirk Benshoff

  Cover illustration by Ioan Dumitrescu

  Cover copyright © 2016 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  Simultaneously published in Great Britain and in the U.S. by Orbit in 2016

  First ebook edition: August 2016

  Orbit is an imprint of Hachette Book Group.

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  ISBN 978-0-316-38646-3

  E3-20160628-JV-NF