Starck's Lament (The Shadow Wars Book 11)

by S. A. Lusher

  “Greg!”

  Greg spun around, abandoning his effort to close the door. At the same time, he groped for his pistol, which should be sitting in a hip holster, but his hand just touched cloth. In fact, he had on nothing but a ragged jumpsuit.

  “Campbell...” he whispered, staring at the lone figure.

  He recognized this bay. It was a huge, abandoned, industrial hangar. The final location of his final escape from the solar system he'd awoken in. He and Kyra and Campbell had run here, run for the ship that would be their salvation.

  And Campbell hadn't made it.

  “You let me die, Greg.”

  Campbell looked awful. He resembled what he was: a dead man. His skin was that awful pallid shade of death, like a corpse left in the snow for several days. His eyes were clouded over with blood. His face was covered in cuts and bruises, though he no longer bled. Blood had collected and congealed around the wounds. His armor was battered, bloodied and largely ruined. In the end, it hadn't saved him.

  Nothing could have.

  “I didn't...I...I tried everything to keep you alive,” Greg replied.

  Campbell shook his head. There was no anger there, no hatred in his gaze, only a slow, cold kind of judgment. His stare was relentless, impossible to hide from.

  “Not at the end, Greg. That's not what I mean. I mean you disrespected me, you didn't trust me. You made me lose my confidence. You made me wonder if I was even worth saving, if my life was even worth living after this. How many times did you threaten to kill me? How many of my friends did you kill?”

  “We had to!” Greg cried miserably. “You all gave us no choice!”

  “How many, Greg?” Campbell pressed. “How many did you kill personally? How many could have been saved? How many were just following orders? How many were just fighting for their lives? Hell, how many didn't even have a fucking clue as to what was going on? I bet most of them didn't even know we'd gone rogue from the government! Most of them probably assumed that what we were doing was the best outcome for mankind! The ends justify the means, isn't that right? Isn't that what you and the others tell yourselves?”

  Greg opened his mouth, but nothing would come out.

  Campbell walked slowly forward, his feet making no sound as he stalked towards him. Greg tried to run, but he was frozen, stuck fast. Slowly, Campbell's pale, bloody hands came up and wrapped around Greg's throat.

  Slowly squeezing the life out of him.

  The darkness began to close in across his vision...

  * * * * *

  Greg snapped his eyes open.

  He tried to scream but nothing came, only weak wheezing sound. For a few terrifying seconds, he lay on his back, staring up at a blank metal ceiling, trembling with adrenaline and terror. He got another lungful of air but at this point he had more control over himself and he managed to stifle the scream that surely would have woke the other person sleeping in his bed. He laid there for a full minute, just breathing and blinking and trying to clear the images and, more importantly, the feelings, from his head. It was not an easy task.

  This wasn't the first time he'd had this nightmare, or one like it.

  It had been almost a year since his tenure on Dis, since he'd encountered Campbell. It'd been close to two months since he'd faced down Enzo and the horrors produced by the Necro Virus. Only in the past month or so had he begun having these dreams. They were a...complex issue. Something he didn't really want to think about.

  Instead, he rolled over, shifting his attention to the woman he shared a bed with. He remembered that it wasn't his bed, it was hers.

  Callie opened her eyes. “Hi, Greg,” she said.

  “Hey,” he murmured.

  She smiled. “You're not gonna get all weird again are you?”

  “No, I...no,” he said.

  She laughed.

  At this point, Greg would prefer the awkwardness that came from having sex with his friend's girlfriend to the awful, guilty horror he had been feeling in his dreams. He swallowed, tried to make himself relax.

  “Come on, Greg, this is the fifth time you've spent the night with me. Nothing bad happened. Nothing bad's gonna happen.”

  “I know! I know, I just...it's, I'm still getting used to it, you know?”

  “Okay, okay, calm down. I'm not attacking you or anything. Come here.”

  She raised one arm, lifting the blanket and showing off her bare breasts. Greg stared at her for a moment. She looked really good: her dark hair a mess, her body well-built and smooth and pale, marred only by a few scars. He shifted closer to her, laid against her. She was warm and soft. She wrapped him in a hug.

  “Hugs make everything better,” she said quietly.

  “Naked hugs are pretty nice,” he murmured.

  She laughed again. “You gonna be okay?”

  “Yeah,” he said, feeling calmer now. She was right. A hug helped.

  As he shifted back, getting another good look at her, he thought about how odd this all was. He and Eve had opened their relationship in December of last year and now it was August. They'd been at it for a while. But that opening had really just resulted in either splitting up and having sex with other people on vacation or sometimes threesomes, but not really other relationships. Callie had approached him last month, informing him that she and Allan had decided to open their relationship and wanted to know if he and Eve felt like swapping partners.

  After talking about it a bit more, they all agreed that it'd be fun.

  And here he was. It was a little different with Callie, though. He felt like they were forming an actual relationship instead of just having sex. Which had admittedly freaked him out a little bit in the beginning, but nothing really bad seemed to be happening. No one was jealous and no one was getting left out.

  “So...I was wondering something,” Callie said as she rolled over away from him for a moment, bringing him back to the here and now.

  “What's that?” he asked.

  Callie fished around on her nightstand for a moment. Right now, both of their significant others were gone. Eve had left to go on a mission involving some precious cargo and Allan was away with Jennifer tracking down some weird insurgents. He was supposed to be back sometime today. Being alone, Callie had asked him if he'd wanted to enjoy a tumble or two in bed.

  “You don't have to answer if you don't want to but...have you slept with anyone else besides me on the ship?” she asked, finally finding what she wanted: a joint and a lighter of thin steel. She put the joint in her mouth and snapped the lighter open. A half-inch of blue flame jetted out. She lit the joint and snapped the lighter shut, then set it on the nightstand.

  “I have,” he said.

  She smiled around the joint. “Who?”

  “You know that technician, the genius computer tech?”

  “Laura?”

  “Yeah, her.”

  “Oh my god, she is beautiful. You slept with her?”

  “Yeah, a few times. We've got kind of a friends with benefits thing going. And Genevieve once,” Greg admitted.

  “Just once?” Callie asked, blowing out a puff of smoke.

  “Yeah. I mean, it was really good, but she...” He struggled to remember what it was she'd said. She'd actually been the first he'd tried to hook up with, well, the first out of the group on the ship, several months ago. “She said that sex was always kind of a weird thing for her, that she'd liked it less and less as time went on. And then Trent had come along and it had been really great with him. But then, well...you know, he died, and she said she thought she might be done with sex for a long time, maybe forever.”

  “That's sad,” Callie murmured.

  “Yeah. She seems to be doing better but...well, it's really hard to tell with her.”

  Greg was technically lying, though it was a lie by omission. He'd actually slept with a third member of the crew, but she'd made him promise not tell anyone about it, and he hadn't, respecting her wishes.

  “What about you?” he asked
.

  Callie laughed and passed him the joint. He took a long, hard pull on it. Weed was the only real vice he allowed himself anymore. He had to be in top condition to keep doing this job, but it helped him relax, which was important.

  “I've been with a couple. Once with Mertz. Once with Vetra. A few times with Harper, that combat engineer.”

  “Nice.”

  They fell silent for a few moments, passing the joint back and forth between them until it was half dead. Callie took it then and stubbed it out in the ashtray on the nightstand. She yawned and stretched, then sat up.

  “You doing okay?” she asked. “You still seem kinda...gloomy.”

  “Just a nightmare,” Greg replied uncomfortably. “But...I was curious about something. It's kind of heavy.”

  “What?”

  “Uh...you've killed a fair share of people, I imagine.”

  She nodded. “Yeah, I am a Spec Ops vet and we did take down Rogue Ops together.”

  “How do you...I mean, how do you handle it? Do you feel...guilty? Bad for it?”

  “I used to,” she replied.

  “But not anymore?”

  She shook her head. “No, not anymore. At least, not if it's during a firefight and it's an enemy. I've had accidental deaths before, but they're rare, and I haven't had to operate in a civilian-rich environment for quite some time.”

  “So what changed?” Greg asked.

  “I did. I had a lot to think about, a lot of reasoning to get through. Murder is easy. Shockingly easy, especially if you're well-trained and you're in a life-or-death situation. You or them. There's a kind of horror to how easy it can be. But for people capable of higher brain functions, as in, most of us, it's the part that comes after that's the problem. When the horror of what you've done sets in, the reality that you have taken another human being's life, regardless of the how or the why, it's the knowledge that you did it.

  “But you can get past that, and most of us do. There's more layers after that. More questions, more horrors. Ultimately, though...they knew what they were getting into, Greg. They chose to put on the armor and pick up the rifle. And if that's not enough for you, well, look at this way: it was you or them...does that help?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he lied.

  It was clear that she'd put a lot of thought into this, that it was a subject with which she'd dealt with, probably for years. She was right. Murder was easy. And, as he was still learning, when you were in a line of work where a lot of it was required, it was necessary to maintain certain hard lines of thought so that you didn't go out of your fucking skull.

  Like he felt like he might be doing now.

  Callie wasn't the person to talk about this with.

  “Come on, let's take a shower and have some wake up sex,” she suggested, turning and heading towards the bathroom.

  Greg knew that his problem was far from over, in fact, he was sure that it was just beginning, but the sight of Callie's shapely backside was at least enough to distract him for the moment. So, he pulled the blankets back, stood and followed her into the bathroom.

  * * * * *

  “So...sorry again for, you know, propositioning you,” Allan said.

  Jennifer laughed. “Allan! Oh my god, will you relax?! It's not a big deal, I promise. It's not like I'm sitting over here, silently fuming and hating you. It's fine. It's happened often enough. I'm not offended or anything.”

  “Okay, I just...I'm kind of socially, uh, stunted, I guess is the right word? It's kind of hard for me to tell about these things and sex is just one of those things that people can get really weird about right away, you know?” he replied.

  “Yeah, I know. Don't worry, we're fine. And besides, I get the feeling that if I was into sex, I'd have said yes. You're pretty cool, and handsome. And obviously capable at your job.”

  “Oh, well...thanks.”

  She and Allan were currently in the galley aboard a speedship.

  In reality, Jennifer had a lot more on her mind than sex or socially awkward situations. Those didn't bother her much anymore. What was bothering her was that she had yet to go on a really big mission in the two months since she'd joined up with Anomalous Operations. After everything that had gone down first aboard the Cimmerian and then on the nameless derelict colony that had been repurposed by what remained of Rogue Operations, then under the command of a pain-crazed lunatic intent only on ending his own pain, she'd come out alive and relatively intact on the other end. And jobless to boot.

  Hawkins, the man in charge of Anomalous Ops, had offered her a job after making sure she was up to snuff. Since moving in, she'd only had a handful of operations. Granted, the first one she'd found herself in, what was supposed to be a milk run, had resulted in almost everyone but her dying and Genevieve had had to come save her ass. They'd ultimately dealt with the strange entity she'd encountered on an asteroid-based mining colony, but it had been a near thing. She'd initially thought that perhaps that could be dubbed her first 'big mission'. And Hawkins and the others sure acted like it was, saying it was her trial by fire.

  But, in her mind, for some reason...it had fallen short. It felt more like a prelude to the real thing, a test run.

  She was looking for a real challenge.

  And the missions that had come in its wake, spread out over the past few months, had only been disappointments by comparison. She and Allan had just come from one such mission. After the Systems Wars had finally been shut down, the galaxy had gone into a clean-up mode, slowly picking up the pieces of galactic warfare. It was an ongoing process, one that would likely be continuing for at least another decade, perhaps two. Probably the most important thing that needed to happen was there not be more conflict.

  And that was tough.

  Unfortunately, there were some fringe groups, radicals, terrorists, wayward warriors, they had many names in the media and labels given to them by the government and military, but what most of them amounted to were a lot of nuisances.

  But not this new group that had been popping up recently. Information was sketchy, mainly because they were so damned effective. They'd been wiping out fringe colonies and military outposts wholesale and stripping them of basically everything: tech, weapons, vehicles, fuel. Anything. And although it was obvious that fierce firefights had gone on, they never left any of their own fallen behind. They were also quite thorough when it came wiping out anyone they came in contact with. There weren't many survivors.

  The few survivors that there were gave scattered reports. The only thing that seemed solid was that the enemy soldiers were heavily modded with technology. So, Jennifer had to admit, it was a mystery and it was interesting, and it was definitely important. Someone should be dealing with this. She just wasn't sure if it was an Anomalous Ops job.

  Neither did Hawkins.

  He'd been complaining about it for a little while now but, well, one of the problems was that weird ass situations tended to be few and far between.

  Right now, they were coming back from their third time investigating one of these sites. It had been pretty fruitless. No survivors, no data, no real evidence. One of the three Raptor class speedships that the Dauntless was equipped with had whisked them out there and was now was whisking them back. They should be not very far from the Dauntless itself by now. Jennifer was looking forward to taking a nap and a shower, then getting some more training in. That was what her life had been pretty much been since she'd signed up.

  Training and working out and preparing herself.

  Although her experience with the strange entity on the asteroid hadn't been what she considered a full mission, it had definitely primed her for the realities of going up against something that was utterly, wholly alien. And although she was sure there were some situations that couldn't be tackled by strength or speed or really, really accurate gunfire alone, she knew that these things would definitely help her survive, and so she she trained.

  Despite all this, Jennifer felt fairly taxed. The investigati
on had been a long one. She realized that Allan hadn't wandered off.

  Which was good, she supposed. There was something she'd been meaning to ask him.

  “So, I'm a little curious,” she said, prompting him.

  “Yeah?” he replied.

  “Your open relationship with Callie. How, um, exactly, does that work?”

  “It's pretty basic. It's like a normal relationship except that sometimes we have sex with other people. Sometimes both of us at once, sometimes we go spend the night in someone else's cabin.”

  “So, it's just sex? Not like...emotional?”

  “Well, I mean, it can be. Both of us have been in open relationships before this, so we're a little more experienced. But that's what it is for us. Although...”

  “What?”

  “I think she's been getting kind of serious with Greg. Which isn't a problem. We all trust each other. Trust is a big thing to take into consideration when you go into this. Anyone in an open relationship has to completely trust their partner and vice versa.”

  “This is so...interesting,” Jennifer said. “I don't think I could do it, personally, but then I haven't had many relationships.”

  “Yeah, I guess the whole 'no sex' thing would kinda make that difficult.”

  “Yep. It sucks but, well...I dunno, I mean, if there's one thing I've figured out, it's that if you're going to be good at something, I mean really good at something, a lot needs to go on the chopping block. Free time, hobbies, habits, sleep, relationships.”

  “That's true,” Allan murmured.

  “So, in a way, it's kind of paved the way for me ultimately getting this job. I've got good habits, I train up a lot, I'm...well, I'm hoping I'll be more ready when something weird and freaky shows up again,” she said.

  “I'm not sure we can ever really be ready. I've seen some weird ass shit and I wasn't ever really ready for any of it,” Allan replied.

  A long moment of silence hung in the galley between them.

  Before they could fill it, the intercom clicked on and the pilot informed them that they were a minute out from docking with the Dauntless.

  They left the galley and made for the airlock.