Starck's Lament (The Shadow Wars Book 11)

by S. A. Lusher

  CHAPTER 11

  –Alone–

  Beep-beep. Beep-beep.

  Eric didn't want to wake. He was tired, and in pain. A lot of pain. It had been a hard day. He wasn't too clear on the details of that day, but he knew that it had been hard. Possibly the hardest day of his life. So he kept his eyes closed.

  Beep-beep. Beep-beep.

  But that damned alarm was so insistent. And it awoke within him a slow dread, a feeling that he was missing something, something vitally, crucially important. And yet...even then, he did not want to open in his eyes. In his present state, somehow, Eric was aware of the fact that he some great loss had occurred, some tremendous tragedy that he wasn't sure he could handle if he had to face it head on. Right now, he didn't know what had happened, and he was afraid of the knowledge, afraid that it might mean the end of him.

  Beep-beep. Beep-beep.

  Ever insistent. But it wasn't an alarm, he slowly realized. At least, not an alarm meant to wake. No, it was an alarm meant to indicate...

  His oxygen was bottoming out.

  Eric opened his eyes. He found himself staring at...nothing. Slowly, nothing became a dull, flat, gunmetal gray. He became aware of his head's up display. There was a flashing red icon, a bar that was almost empty.

  His oxygen!

  He sat up, or tried to, and grunted with effort as he shoved something off of him. A crate. It tumbled slowly away from him in the low gravity. Autumn! It all came rushing back to him. Had she made it out alive? He remembered her screaming and the explosion. He was almost certain she was dead, and he didn't know if he could handle that, but there was the slim chance that she could still be alive. Eric shifted painfully to his feet. By some miracle, his faceplate remained intact and his suit seemed to have held up fine too.

  He faced the door that he had been thrown through some time ago. How long had he been out? For the moment, he ignored his bottoming out oxygen, lurching forward. He had to see, to know the truth. Was she alive or dead? Was he alone or not? He made his way into what remained of the armory and all at once the cold, hard truth hit him.

  Autumn was dead.

  He saw the remains of both her and the two creatures she'd taken with her when she had triggered the explosives. Eric expected some kind violent reaction to the knowledge. Screaming, punching something, vomiting.

  Instead, there was nothing. He felt suddenly cold and dead inside, as lifeless and barren as the asteroid he strode across the surface of. For a moment, he simply stood there, staring, feeling a distant pain in his chest, a hollow agony that was as far away from him as the stars above that he couldn't see, blocked by the hull of the Discovery.

  The chime of his oxygen warning brought him back to the world, at least partially. Numbly, he began to search the area for an oxygen reserve. He moved on autopilot, not really thinking or feeling anything at all. Around him, the world was pale and mute, even more so than it had been before. There was nothing in the ruined armory but he found an emergency reserve of atmosphere in the storage room he'd just come from.

  He hooked up to it and drained it. Just in time, too. He had maybe ten seconds' of oxygen left in his tank. Once he emptied the reserve, Eric moved slowly back into the armory. He carefully picked through the remains of the room, searching for anything that he might be able to use in his fight for continued survival.

  There wasn't much.

  He only managed to scavenge a few extra magazines of armor-piercing ammo and a single grenade to add to the other one he'd found. He pocketed this, then left the armory, pausing only once in the doorway and looking back on the scene of bloody, ruinous destruction. She was gone. She was really gone forever.

  Eric turned away from the armory and stepped back out into the main corridor. He began trudging heavily down it, his brain absolutely still and quiet for once. He could think of nothing, he wasn't even sure where he was going. As he reached the wrecked part of the corridor and stepped back into the cargo bay that had once held the creatures, he realized that he was leaving the Discovery. His brain continued functioning on automatic, guiding him out of the wrecked vessel and back towards Theseus Station.

  Why? To what end?

  The only thought that came back, and it was a distant, lonely echo, was to get to the control tower so that he could hook up with the emergency beacon. After that...well, there was no after, at least not to him. He couldn't think of anything. So, he made his slow, plodding way out of the Discovery, coming back to the rip in the hull and climbing down, onto the landing pad. All around him was the gray, epic desolation of the asteroid, a silent graveyard for hundreds. And he was here to bear witness to it, the lone survivor.

  Eric walked down the stairway that led to the access road between the installation and landing pad. He kept going, his boots making no noise as they struck the pavement. If there were any creatures out here on the surface with him, he had an idea that they could snuff him without any problem. He wasn't sure if the will to fight back existed within him anymore. Eric reached the airlock without incident and cycled through, coming out into a bay of lockers, benches and the scattered remnants of extra vehicular activity suits.

  He moved through them, dimly aware of the fact that he was navigating his way through the labyrinthine passageways back towards the control towers. Eric's consciousness seemed to drift in and out over the next twenty or so minutes as he took the twists and turns, like a candle flickering in the wind, on the verge of being blown out and dying entirely. At one point, he was aware that he had ducked into a small bathroom and was hiding in the last stall, waiting, as he had detected the presence of another one of the creatures.

  Then he faded out again.

  He came to another time, and now he was up in the vents, crawling carefully forward. Nearby, something let out a short, huffing breath and he froze. He was reacting on instincts now, not fear. Whatever emotions he had came from a great distance, muted and soft, almost nonexistent. When he came to for a third time, he was much closer to the control tower. He didn't feel the echoes of fear and terror, so he assumed that he must be safe. As Eric began to climb the twisting stairwell, he slowly came back to himself.

  To say that the experience was weird would be a massive understatement, but he thought he was in shock. No, he knew he was in shock, he had to be. How he was going to deal with this? He had an idea, but he didn't want to think about it. By the time he'd reached the top of the control tower, Eric was largely in control of himself and his actions again. He still felt cold, distant and numb, but there was something on the horizon of his soul, something that was on approach. Something that would force his hand, one way or the other.

  But it was not here yet.

  Eric crossed the control room and settled into place at the communications console. Using the radio in his suit, he managed to piece together a link between his suit and the emergency beacon. The process was slow, but, after several minutes, the uplink was established. Eric spent a few more minutes studying the data.

  It had worked. Perfectly. What a cruel irony. The emergency beacon was in orbit, transmitting to any and all that could hear it, and it might as well not be. He was alone now. Utterly, totally alone. And now that he had run out of things to do, Eric's hand slowly fell to the pistol on his hip. Here came the decision he would be forced to make. Ultimately, it all came down to a very simple question that he had to answer.

  What did Eric Starck have to live for now?

  He tried to take stock of his life. A common idea that he seemed to come back to, that lots of people seemed to, was the people in your life. But there were no more people in Eric's life. For a plethora of different reasons, the only people that had mattered to him in any real capacity had been aboard the Liberation, the ship that was now so much scrap metal, floating off into space or littering a forgotten asteroid.

  They were all gone. Every last one of them. What a great and cruel irony it was that he, of all of them, should be the last one left alive. He who had the least to live f
or. Any one of them would have found a reason to keep going. Even Autumn. Especially Autumn. If Eric had been the one to perish in that blast, she would keep going, grim and miserable, but determined, he was sure. Because she had discovered the true key of relying on one's self, on being truly independent. Something Eric had never been able to figure out for himself.

  So, here he sat in a forsaken control tower on a dead asteroid, hand resting on the butt of his pistol, for the first time in his life truly contemplating suicide. Eric undid the latch on his holster and grabbed the pistol again. Did he really want to do this? If he did, there was no going back, but what was honestly left for him?

  He pulled the pistol out of holster.

  The sound of metal scraping against leather was very loud in the quiet confines of the control room. Eric set the pistol down in his lap and stared at it for a moment. It seemed so heavy for such a relatively small thing, denser than it should be. Guns had always seemed to be that way to him. Almost as if they were heavy with responsibility. A gun was a form of power. You had to be responsible with it. If not, then, well, like most people who dicked around with power, someone almost always ended up getting hurt, maybe even killed, possibly yourself.

  He'd learned a lot respect for guns very quickly.

  But at the end of the day it was tool to be wielded.

  “Well,” he said to empty room, “I guess this is it. I guess this is the end.”

  Eric raised the pistol and stuck the business end of it in his mouth. He settled his finger on the trigger and closed his eyes.

  For a few seconds, he just listened to the sounds of the base around him, realizing that, besides a gun blast, it would be the last thing he would ever hear. It was calming, in a way. The quiet respiration of oxygen filtration, the white noise hum of power being generated and machinery running. They were sounds he had grown very familiar with. But...something was different. He heard a quiet chiming. Soft, but insistent.

  Eric opened his eyes.

  Directly in front of him, on the screen he was facing, was flashing text.

  WARNING...

  WARNING...

  AI CORE | POWER: CRITICAL LOW

  WARNING...

  WARNING...

  “What the fuck...AI?” he muttered, taking the gun out of his mouth. There was an Artificial Intelligence on the station?

  What difference did it make?

  He began to raise the pistol again, but then stopped as new text appeared.

  PLEASE DON'T.

  I NEED YOUR HELP.

  YOUR HELP IS DESEPERATELY NEEDED.

  THEY MUST NOT SUCCEED.

  “What the hell is this?” he said softly.

  THE CREATURES MUST NOT SUCCEED.

  “Can you hear me?”

  AFFIRMATIVE.

  “Shit...what do you mean?” he asked, intrigued in spite of his own personal situation. “What are they doing? Do you know?”

  YES.

  HELP ME.

  “Help you how?”

  The original message flashed again.

  AI CORE | POWER: CRITICAL LOW

  Eric sighed heavily. He considered it. If he'd been waiting for a sign, for some reason to go on, then, he supposed, this was it. Most people didn't consider AIs anything more than tools, advanced software, but Eric thought differently. Maybe it was pointless sentimentality on his part, but he respected Artificial Intelligences as peers rather than tools. He supposed his logic was that he'd rather looked stupid to other people being wrong than to be disrespectful to something that might have emotions and sentience.

  The corporations and the government claimed there was no sentience hiding inside the AIs but Eric had never been entirely convinced of that.

  “All right,” he said, putting his pistol away and standing up. “I'll help you.” He knew, somewhere down deep, that this was the equivalent of a band-aid for a gunshot wound, that his problems needed real attention and what he was really doing was just delaying his deeper emotional problems with a surface solution.

  But it was all he had for now.

  “Show me the way there and what I need to do,” he said.

  A map replaced the text and then, on a screen adjacent, more text appeared. Instructions on what needed to be done and how. Finally, below that text, a flashing timer appeared. He had just under fifty minutes to get this done.

  “I'm on it,” he said, turning and walking out of the room.

  CHAPTER 12

  –Sierra–

  Eric had come back to himself.

  He felt oddly calm, as though he had been thrust into the center of an apocalyptic maelstrom. The eye of the storm. The stairs creaked and groaned under his weight as he tread down them, exiting the control tower once more. Again, he had been given purpose. He had been connected to another living entity. At least, in his mind this Artificial Intelligence was alive, in some capacity. And even if it wasn't, well...

  What difference did it make anymore?

  At his core, some small but powerful part of Eric knew that he no longer cared enough about his own life to fight for himself, to survive for himself. It just wasn't enough. Why that was, he wasn't sure he'd ever find out, but it was the truth and even if it could be fixed, there wasn't the time to fix it. So he latched onto this being, this one responsibility. His feet hit the deckplates and he surveyed the cluttered makeshift storage area at the base of the tower. For a moment, he found himself wondering what it must have been like here.

  Theseus Station was obviously an old, unhappy place, cobbled together from whatever people could find. It seemed like whatever open space there was had been used as storage of some kind, like pack-rats who shoved stuff everywhere without much regard for organization or cleanliness. He wondered who had started this place, what its point of origin in history was. It seemed like it might have originally been a research outpost. It was far enough out there and isolated enough for it. Probably, as the company or government-funded group that started it either folded or lost interest, they sold the installation off.

  Obviously, someone thought they could make money by turning it into a refit and repair station. This led Eric down another thought path: what kind of people willingly went to live out here, at the edge of known space? What drove them? He couldn't imagine many, if any of them, had been here because they wanted to be here. It was why he'd chosen the job he had. Ironically, although Search and Rescue was high-intensity and required a lot of precision-based, under pressure work, it called to people who weren't very well-adjusted.

  Who else could you find to live on a ship for six month at a stretch where, at any second, you might have to board a burning ship or any of a dozen other nightmare scenarios? Eric realized that he was still standing there, that his mind was drifting. Not good. He took a moment to check over his gear. Running a suit check, he looked over his SMG and then his pistol. Both were in good shape and topped off for ammo. Speaking of ammo...Eric checked over his pockets and found a half-dozen magazines for the SMG, another three for the pistol, plus the two grenades he'd pocketed. Not exactly a whole lot to work with.

  The suit check came back clean. His suit was functional, power only down to seventy percent and intact, though it warned him that there were many signs of stress all over it. Not much he could do about that right now. With a heavy sigh and leaden heels, Eric set off out of base of the control tower, fixing the map of the installation and his specific destination in mind. The AI Core was positioned quite a ways away unfortunately, and he had no idea what kind of obstacles lay between him and it. The AI had tried to be helpful, but given its severe lack of power, it could only do so much. Eric jerked slightly as he remembered that.

  He was on a time limit.

  How could he have forgotten that already?

  He checked his chronometer and saw that he now had about forty five minutes to get there. With this in mind, Eric set off down the corridor he was in, jogging to its end, trying to maintain silence but having to sacrifice it for speed.

&nb
sp; All around him, Theseus Station breathed with ominous life. While before the hum of power and the whisper of oxygen were comforting, they now seemed to have taken on a darker quality. It was almost as if the installation itself had come to life and was hunting him. He had the sudden strong impression of traversing the bowels of some great, malignant beast. Eric shook his head, focusing. His thoughts and his emotions were getting away from him. He couldn't fail in his task. He knew that. If he failed to save the AI, then he'd fail to save himself, because he would be back to square one, having no one and nothing to rely on.

  He reached the end of the corridor, it terminating in a T junction, and looked left, then right. Nothing awaited him. Taking the left turn, he recommenced his journey. He would have to cut through a mess hall, traverse the medical wing and finally make his way through a cargo bay before arriving at his destination. With lots of corridors in between, because, hey, why not? What was life without long hallways to have to hurry down while something inhuman was coming after you? Eric kept going, trying to keep his head clear.

  Good thing, too.

  As he approached the end of the corridor he was in, he heard a sharp snuff. Eric froze and quickly looked around. There was an open door to his left. Without thinking, he ducked in through the door and hit the close button. The door closed with relative quietness. Immediately, though, he heard footfalls. Eric looked around. He'd ducked into an office. He spied a pair of messy workstations, chairs, a stack of crates in the corner...

  Not much to work with. The footfalls were getting closer, rattling everything in the room. Eric's eyes zeroed in on something above the crates. A vent! It was open and accessible. It would have to do. He hurried across the room, climbed up the crates and shoved himself into the vent. Behind him, the footfalls drew ever closer. He heard the quiet whir of the door opening and felt terror fill his veins with ice. He finished getting into the vent and began crawling as quickly as he could. The vent was big enough to allow him to crawl on his hands and knees. Back in the office there was a sound, something like a low-pitched squeal.