by Jamie Sawyer
“Understood,” I replied. “Although, if we don’t come back from the Ghost Maker Nebula, I’m not sure that it will matter much.”
Commander Dieter gave a tight smile, making the scar on her face curl around her eye. She popped a brightly coloured detoxifier pill from her fatigue pocket and slipped it into her mouth. The pill had an immediate sobering effect, and Commander Dieter primly straightened her uniform, pushing some stray hairs across her brow.
“Can I interest either of you in a detox tab?” she offered.
I knocked back my drink in a way that whiskey-drinking aficionados would seriously take issue with, and shook my head. I didn’t want to be fully sober, not with that new knowledge knocking around in my head.
“I’m fine,” Captain Heinrich said, his eyes half-lidded. “I like the feeling of being on the edge. It reminds me of home.”
Commander Dieter nodded. She was back to business, her guard up again. “Just make sure that you’re ready for deployment, Captain. We still have a mission.”
“Don’t I know it,” he answered. “How long until we reach the Ghost Maker Nebula?”
“Thirty hours, subjective,” Dieter said.
The fact that we were now measuring the journey time in hours rather than days brought home the immediacy of our situation. Dieter seemed to repress a slight shiver, and I knew exactly how she felt. My data-ports had started to ache, yearning to make connection with a simulant again.
A chronograph holo popped into existence on Heinrich’s desk, displaying time zones and quantum-stream fluctuations. This was the universal clock by which the entire Alliance, and specifically its military assets, was coordinated.
“Very soon,” Captain Heinrich said, “the Alliance fleet will be converging on Ithaca.” He paused, flaring his nostrils. “I hope that we don’t disappoint them with what we find out here.”
Then Heinrich was back to himself as well. He snapped his boots off the table, and hurriedly buttoned his fatigues. Ran a hand through his hair.
“There’s still a lot to be done before we reach the objective,” he said, his tone terse, very much like the old Captain Heinrich that I knew and despised. “Dr Saito will be giving a briefing on the next stage of the operation at oh-nine-hundred tomorrow, ship’s time. Be ready.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “We will be. I’d advise that we keep Pariah under constant observation, and that we space Daneb Riggs.”
Okay, I wasn’t exactly expecting Heinrich to agree with that, but it was worth a try. He frowned at me and gave a curt shake of his head.
“Absolutely not. More like space the fish and observe Riggs, Lieutenant.”
“Pariah is a vital asset. You said so yourself.”
Heinrich thought on that for a fraction of a second, before answering, “Fine. But if that fish so much as demonstrates a single sign of hostility…”
“Understood. What about Riggs?”
“The former corporal remains a potential intelligence source,” Captain Heinrich said. “I can’t order his execution here; not yet.”
“I think that we’ve exhausted all avenues of investigation with him,” I said, although I plainly knew that wasn’t true. “There’s nothing more he can tell us. He’s been scanned; no covert tech except for his data-ports.”
Dieter clucked her tongue. “We could always arrange for those to be taken out.”
“That’s an idea…” I agreed.
Heinrich wasn’t buying it. “We don’t have the necessary facilities to do that here.”
That was true, although I was quite okay with extracting Riggs’ data-ports using a rusty scalpel.
“All right,” Heinrich said, standing now and circling the desk. “That will be all. You’re both dismissed.”
Dieter and I saluted the captain and left the chamber.
When I awoke, I was woven into the wall.
Without thought, I knew where I was. The Krell nest on Barain-11. Where this had all started, and where—for some—it had ended.
The place was moist and dark, and the air so thick with fish-stink that it was barely breathable. My body was woven into the nest. When I tried to move my limbs, I realised that they were broken. That was a technique used by the Krell. Not to torture, but to incapacitate. They wanted Clade Cooper alive.
There were others around me. Faces that meant nothing to me, but the universe to Cooper, peered from the incessant gloom. These were the Iron Knights, Cooper’s Army Ranger squad. They were in a prison, but nothing like that the Alliance, or any human faction, would ever know.
How could anyone have survived for two years in this horror? I asked, in that twilight between my existence and Cooper’s memories. Was it any wonder that Cooper went insane?
“You okay, Coop?” came a dry rasp of a voice.
“Now there’s a question,” I found myself answering. I was reliving someone else’s memories; a mind trapped in a body while someone else was at the controls. “How about you, Riggs?”
Marbec Riggs, Daneb’s father, was woven into the wall beside Cooper.
When the fishes had brought Cooper and Riggs into this place—whatever the fuck it was—they had brought the remainder of the Iron Knights with them. Singh, Boswell, Carpenter… The others, Cooper hoped, had died in the ambush, but he couldn’t be sure. He had heard Singh praying. Heard Carpenter pleading to her husband, back home in Tau Ceti. A week or so into their captivity, Boswell—the squad’s comms-man—had stopped talking. Cooper hoped beyond hope that Boswell was dead. He was just a kid, twenty standard. He fucking deserved better than this.
Cooper and Marbec outlived them all. Together, they had watched as each of the Knights had been claimed by the Red Fin Collective. Listened as shouts and cries devolved into requests for mercy. The squad’s bravado only lasted so long. Cooper heard their voices become hoarse, then diminish to wheezes as vocal cords gave out. Finally, all that remained were harsh whimpers in the dark.
When had Cooper finally lost his sanity? It was impossible to tell. Had he dreamt of his children, of his wife, and their reunion, during those hot, warm months of confinement? This wasn’t how things were supposed to happen. This wasn’t how things were supposed to go. Sergeant Clade Cooper kept telling himself that, and it became a refrain. A mantra. A safety net. Because, if he told himself that enough, if he actually believed it, then the horror wasn’t real.
Cooper was a career Special Operations man. He was supposed to do one of two things.
Option One: get old, get fat. In other words, get out. There were plenty of agencies out there, in the Alliance, that would want an ageing ex-Ranger on their payroll. Military Intelligence, the Core Intelligence Agency, the Secret Service… Any of them would do. It wasn’t Cooper’s preferred choice, but it was okay. It was an honourable, decent way to go.
Option Two: die in combat, go down a hero. The Army Rangers didn’t have the luxury of simulant technology. Cooper would be remembered for what he’d achieved, and his family would be compensated for his loss. Another honourable end. Fuck. Oh fuck. A wave of melancholy and regret poured over him. He always got this way, when he thought of Option Two, because that meant thinking of Jandra.
Was this a divine punishment, a sentence for his sins? Cooper often wondered that, in the brief moments of clarity that dwelt between ages of madness. Commander Vie Dieter. She had been nothing but a fast lay, a dirty secret. Cooper was sometimes taunted, and haunted, by flashes of their trysts aboard the Iron Knight. Her tight, muscled body—so different to Jandra’s—coiled like a spring beneath him. Their bodies rutting in rhythm. His hands through her short red hair, over the curve of her buttocks…
“Easy, Sarge,” came a rusty voice to Cooper’s left.
“I… I’m sorry,” Cooper replied.
“Don’t be so harsh on yourself.”
It was Corporal Marbec Riggs. Cooper made out his shape. Marbec was webbed to the wall beside Cooper, his body so close that Cooper could almost touch him. Like Cooper’s, Riggs’
body was twisted, limbs contorted unnaturally. He’d suffered broken bones, for sure, but that was the least of Riggs’ problems.
“How… how long, Riggs?” Cooper managed. His own voice-box was tight, dry, and he didn’t recognise it as his own.
“How long we been here?” Riggs questioned. His eyes were bright stars in the dark, the curve of his face illuminated by bio-luminescent fungi that crawled across the cavern wall. “Too long, Coop. Too fucking long.”
Riggs’ lean, chiselled face was sprinkled with days’—weeks’?—worth of facial hair. He always went into the field clean-shaven. That was Riggs’ thing, one of his rituals.
“That… that wasn’t what I meant…” Cooper managed. Jesus, it hurt to talk.
“Then what, Coop?” Riggs asked.
“How… how long until they kill us?” Cooper replied.
Riggs let out a harsh, pained laugh. It was the laugh of a madman, of a dead man walking.
“Long time, Coop. Long, long time…” he said. “Aeons.”
The chamber walls were formed of organic matter, and Cooper and Riggs weren’t the only captives in there. Mostly human, but other, unspecified things too: creatures that Cooper didn’t recognise. The captives generated a background noise, a hubbub of cries, squawks and gibbering.
“This wasn’t supposed to happen,” Cooper said in response. “We did what they told us.”
“You’re telling me, bud. You’re telling me. I got a kid. I got to get home.”
“I know, Riggs. I promised you. I promised you all I’d get you home.”
“It wasn’t your fault, Coop,” Riggs insisted. “You got to believe that. You got to know that.”
“I… I was squad leader…” Cooper said.
He wanted to say so much more—that he should’ve checked the mission intelligence, that he should’ve argued with Command, that he shouldn’t have been sleeping with Commander Dieter… But it was too much, and he couldn’t muster the energy.
“Military Intelligence did this to us,” Riggs rasped.
“We succeeded,” said Cooper.
And in that, he was right. The Iron Knights had penetrated the Shard ruins and had executed their orders. They had discovered the… artefact. Where Cooper’s flesh had touched the xenotech, it had become blackened. Corrupted. A darkness crawled under his skin, in his veins. He could barely make out the infection, as it crept through his limbs, into his torso. But he could feel it, well enough.
Clade Cooper was becoming something else.
“I’m… s–sorry!” he shouted.
The noise stirred up the prisoners. More cries, shouts: other sounds that could’ve been alien, or were perhaps the product of tortured human vocals cords. It was difficult to really say.
“You get out without me,” said Riggs, “I want you to promise me something.”
“Anything…” Cooper managed.
“You make someone pay for this,” said Riggs. “You make them understand what happened here. Don’t let them forget.”
“I won’t.”
“And you look after my kid. You make sure he knows who I am, and that I cared.”
The Krell hardly ever attended the prisoners any more. As the months dragged on, they saw fewer and fewer of the alien guards. At first, Cooper had thought that was his imagination. Perhaps, he reasoned, he was choosing not to see them. Or maybe, as his eyesight failed, he was missing them as they moved through the dark.
Except… except that wasn’t right. If Cooper contorted his head just so, he could see other bodies on the floor of the cell. Those weren’t prisoners. They were Krell. Partly decomposed primary-forms. Their skin was black, but silver strands danced beneath the flesh…
“The Krell are dying,” Cooper said.
Marbec Riggs growled a laugh. “That won’t help us, Cooper. It’s too late for us.”
From the corner of his eye, Cooper caught another flash of light. Silver tendrils, creeping under his own skin. Like living mercury, a thinking poison that claimed everything it touched… He’d seen this stuff—or something like it—before. This was Shard technology.
“We brought something back with us,” said Cooper. His voice faltered. He could feel the infection inside of him, leeching his life-force, but renewing him as well. “The ruins… The Shard.”
“That was our objective, Coop,” said Riggs. “We did what we were told.”
But not all of the Krell were dead. A fish appeared in front of Cooper. Upside down, using the organic vines and surface details to scurry down the chamber wall. Another clambered over a body that was webbed in place. A third clutched living pipework that sprayed mist into the chamber, and descended spider-like into the well of the prison. All three of the aliens were desiccated, dying. Their carapaces were blotched with black, filigreed with silver veins. They were infected.
“They’re keeping us alive, Coop,” Riggs ranted, his voice rising in volume. “They want to understand us.”
Riggs started to spit insults at the xenos, but the aliens ignored him. The guards focused on Cooper. They peered at him with their deep, dark eyes.
“What… what do you want?” Cooper groaned. His throat was sandpaper: so dry, despite the intensely humid atmosphere that filled the chamber.
The XTs didn’t answer. Instead, they forced living machinery into Cooper’s body, using open wounds at his forearms, his chest, his legs. This had happened several times already, but that made it no easier to suffer. Pain coursed through his body. The blackness inside of him was soon out. It eagerly polluted the Krell nest.
Jandra’s face was all that kept him going. Jandra and the kids—Tom and Rae—playing in the garden. Drinking a nice, cold American beer, with Marbec Riggs at his shoulder. The smell of barbecued meat in the air…
What was Marbec’s kid called again?
Daneb. Daneb Riggs. That was it.
Cooper gave in to the dark now, because that was easier. That was all he could do.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
LONG AEONS, EVEN DEATH MAY DIE
The dark greeted me, and I sat bolt upright in my bunk. Nearly hit my head on the underside of the cot above, where Feng slept. Christo, Christo, Christo. My brain hurt like I’d just made the worst possible extraction.
That wasn’t my memory, I told myself. I wasn’t there. None of it was real. It was the Deep: the shared connection P had described to me. I had been reliving Clade Cooper’s memory, as though it were my own.
“You okay, ma’am?” Zero asked, her eyes visible as white dots in the shadow.
Like Marbec Riggs, woven into the wall on Barain-11…
I shook away the thought. Cancelled it. That wasn’t easy: the images, thoughts, emotions were needle-sharp. If only P were around to explain this to me. The mind-link to the alien was still dead air. I pulled back the sheets. Breathed deep, and tasted the processed air. So much better than what Clade Cooper and Marbec Riggs had been breathing in the fish-nest…
“Are you all right?” Zero repeated.
“I… I’m good,” I said, hesitatingly.
The Jackals’ quarters were as they should be. Lopez and Feng in their own bunks, sleeping soundly. Zero across the room.
“Sorry if I woke you,” I said to Zero.
“It’s okay. I couldn’t sleep anyway. Not with that son of a bitch still on the ship.”
“Try not to let Riggs bother you. He’ll be gone, soon enough.”
“Were you dreaming?”
“Something like that.”
“You were saying a name. You kept saying Marbec.”
“Forget about it, Zero,” I whispered. “Go back to sleep.”
My wrist-comp chimed. MEDICAL ALERT, it said. I sighed and felt a sinking feeling in my gut. This was hardly unexpected, but that didn’t make it any easier. I rolled out of the bunk, pulled on my fatigues.
“What are you doing?” Zero said, sitting up now. “It’s late into the night-cycle. We have a briefing tomorrow.”
“I’m going t
o check on Novak.”
“Do you want me to come with you?”
“No. Get some sleep. As you said, we have a big day tomorrow.”
I took a detour to the armoury first. Signed out a sidearm—a Navy-issue shock-pistol—and made sure it was armed. Hoped that I wouldn’t need it, but it never hurts to be sure. Then I took the Valkyrie’s main elevator down to the brig. As the elevator descended the decks, I tried to pull up the surveillance feed of Riggs’ cell on my wrist-comp. The image was being blocked. You stupid fuck, Novak, I thought to myself. MEDICAL ALERT, popped up on my comp again, confirming my suspicions.
The brig’s main hatch was unmanned. A noise—an impact with wet meat—shattered the quiet. A groan, then gruff male voices.
“… need to find her,” said Novak, his Russian accent instantly recognisable.
“It’s not that simple,” said Riggs. “She finds you, see? You know how difficult these—”
I tightened my grip on my pistol, pretty sure what I was going to find.
The observation-field was lowered, and Novak was inside the cell, looming over Riggs. The traitor’s electro-shackles had been removed, and he was on his knees in front of the big man. Novak had the collar of Riggs’ prison jumpsuit clutched in one paw-like hand, while the other was drawn back in a fist, ready to land another blow to Riggs’ face.
“Put him down, Novak!” I roared, weapon up, aimed at the Russian.
Novak instantly released Riggs, and he backed away, hands up and open. Riggs slid to the floor. Crumpled, gasping in relief.
“Thank Gaia you got here in time,” said Riggs. His words came out all slurred and imprecise, like he’d been drinking. “I thought he was going to kill me.”
“What the fuck are you doing, Novak?” I almost screamed.
“He slip, hit head on bunk,” said Novak. “I go in to help.”
“You were hitting him!” I said. “And you blocked the surveillance feed. I set the cell to remotely monitor his bio-signs.”
“Really?” said Novak, a look of genuine surprise on his face. “I did not know you could do that.”
“Well, you can!” I yelled back. “If certain medical safety parameters are breached,” I said, tapping my wrist-comp while still holding the pistol, “then the ship sends me an alert.”