by Jamie Sawyer
They aren’t infected. That thought occurred to me, and lodged in my mind. It seemed impossible, improbable. The Krell had speckled red and green carapaces. Red Fin Collective. The Collective that had killed Zero’s family, obliterated Mau Tanis Colony, and taken Clade Cooper’s future. But Red Fin had fallen to Harbinger. There was nothing left of them.
A Krell tertiary-form stumbled through the wall of white. It was eviscerated, its trailing innards steaming as they were exposed to the frozen atmosphere. A black metal lance caught the fleeing Krell squarely in the back, and pierced the fish’s armour. The body recoiled, back in the direction from which it had come. Lifted off the ground, like a puppet on a string. My gorge rose as I saw more bodies disappearing in the same way. They were being dragged back into the storm.
Something huge and dark advanced through the snow squall.
Holy shit.
It absorbed light with its liquid metal body. Pseudopods fired in every direction, pulling more and more xeno bodies into the dark. Actually consuming them with the black tide.
“Please,” I said, “someone else confirm that they’re seeing this?”
“I wish that I wasn’t,” Lopez said.
“Me too,” said Feng.
Novak just grunted. “Is big motherfucker, yes?”
A Shard construct—bigger than anything I’d ever seen before—coalesced from the white. It was a rippling mass of black quicksilver. Dark lances of energy speared some bodies. Others were cast aside, rejected by the living machine. But those that were caught were consumed. Taken into the nano-tech’s suffocating embrace, to be broken down and used as nutrients to grow more of the machine… Harvester. That name popped into my head. The harvesting of corpses; just another reflection of the Shard’s machine technology.
“Zero!” I yelled. “We have an active Shard construct down here!”
“… Copy… on the… ship!” came the garbled reply. “Everywhere!”
Overhead, shapes became distinct. Needlers—Krell bio-fighters—descended through the clouds, in precise formation. They dropped living Seeker missiles from their stubby wings, and more explosions rippled across the basin.
The Jackals were struck by the resulting shockwave, and hit the snow hard. The entire ice shelf shuddered. Warheads detonated on impact with the surface, creating miniature mushroom-heads. Every ripple threw up debris into the atmosphere, made it harder to see what was happening around us. The Shard Harvester reared up, on fire now.
With a sound like ripping fabric, more fighters broke the horizon. Needlers, but bio-ships too. Breacher-pods punched through the clouds, slammed into the ground. Larger Krell bio-ships hovered in low orbit, bio-plasma batteries illuminating as they engaged in combat with unseen enemies.
“Whoah!” Lopez screamed, struggling to remain standing.
The ground quaked, shook.
Somewhere in the space between the pylons, the ice sheets simply ruptured. More debris was thrown up, and pressurised atmosphere vented in a column.
“Don’t fall under the ice!” I yelled. “Fire your EVAMPs, get clear of that break!”
Lopez tumbled along the ice, inevitably drawn to the breach. Novak and Feng went with her, trying to activate their EVAMPs, but failing. The theatre was utter chaos.
At its centre, the Shard Harvester was a thing of utter destruction. It speared bodies in every direction, absorbing more bio-mass. Krell weapons-fire was everywhere, with more vessels on the horizon now.
I barely took any notice of that, though, because I too was falling towards the fissure. I managed to keep hold of my plasma rifle in one hand, while clutching for the ice with the other, but it was hopeless. The snow and ice gave no purchase, and the shelf on which we’d been standing had nearly capsized. It was almost at a right angle now.
Together, the Jackals hit the water. My suit streamed errors and critical warnings, alerting me to the extreme temperature. Breath fogged the inside of my visor, and my medi-suite dumped a huge dose of combat-drugs into my bloodstream.
As soon as we hit the water, we were sinking. There was darkness all around. The shaft of light above me—the fracture that led back to the surface—faded. There was still a battle going on up there—the detonations that rippled across the underside of the ice were testament to that—but none of it made sense. I sank deeper and deeper, the light becoming more and more distant. Dwindling, dwindling. Until it was nothing more than a star.
Something pulled me down. I wriggled, squirming against the flow of the water. The fact that I was wearing almost a ton of military combat-armour didn’t help. My fingers were deathly cold, and the pressure of the frozen ocean around me was insurmountable. Warnings blurted across my HUD, the thought-connection becoming thick with new alerts.
The Jackals were with me. Like dead weights, they sank too. Arms outstretched, bodies limp.
Another light dawned—throbbed—beneath us. Calling, drawing in. We were so, so wrong about these guys, I decided, as I desperately fought against the vortex. My stomach rolled like I was entering a gravity field and a wave of vertigo hit me. In the dark, I couldn’t differentiate up and down any more. The rational, obvious thing to do would be to simply extract. I’d wake up in the simulator, back on the Valkyrie, and could explain to Captain Heinrich what a disaster first contact had been.
But I wasn’t going to do that. Failure wasn’t an option. No fear, no regrets.
The Aeon waited.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
FIRST CONTACT PROTOCOLS
I blinked away the darkness. The simulant rebooted instantly, and my thought-connection told me that I was still in armour. Except that this wasn’t the suit that I’d been wearing when I’d fallen under the ice.
“You’re all right,” someone said. “Just breathe deeply. In and out.”
It took me a moment to recognise the voice. The accent was cultured, foreign to me. British. The only person I knew who spoke like that was…
Dr Skinner.
He crouched beside me. His pock-marked face was folded in a grin, those creepy dark-moon glasses reflecting the outline of my heavy armour. I could see my own surprised expression there; the smoke marks wiped across my face. I didn’t have my helmet, although I couldn’t remember when I’d taken it off.
“You’re dead,” I whispered.
“And you’re a fine one to talk!” Dr Klaus Skinner replied.
I shook off the vestiges of whatever had just happened to me, and got to my feet. I wore a HURT—“heavy utility response team”—suit. This was the armour that I’d worn during the mission aboard North Star Station. I was in Dr Skinner’s lab. The chamber was filled with workbenches, cluttered with scientific equipment. Cryogenics pods lined the walls, everything kept in a state of semi-darkness. Dr Skinner had conducted his research into Pariah here.
“This isn’t possible,” I insisted. “North Star Station is gone.” Panic hit me. “Where are the Jackals? They went under the ice with me…”
Dr Skinner nodded. “They’re fine. You’ll see them soon enough.”
The doctor’s smock was badly stained with dark substances, adding to his macabre aura. He’d been known to Major Sergkov and Military Intelligence by the codename “Skinsmith”, I remembered.
“This isn’t real,” I said.
“It’s real enough to you, though,” Dr Skinner said, “which is what matters. You’re on North Star, during the last few minutes of the recovery mission.” Skinner’s smile became strained. “Which, as you will probably recall, didn’t turn out so well.”
“I remember.”
“I’m a reconstruction of your memory.” Dr Skinner grinned, exposing a line of nicotine and coffee-stained teeth. Scientific genius he might be, but personal hygiene hadn’t been a priority. “This is one of our many abilities, Lieutenant.”
“I’m not sure I like the sound of that.”
“We are the Aeon,” Dr Skinner said. “You are not like us. We understand that.” The Skinsmith adjusted his gl
asses. “Your thoughts are easy for us to read. We have existed for a long, long time. And in that time, we have learnt a lot about how best to make contact with lesser races. Accessing memory is just one tool in our armoury. So, you sent soldiers to make contact with us, eh? That’s telling.”
“We came here for your help. We’re fighting a war.”
Something lingered at the edge of my vision. The Skinner-construct saw it, too, and half turned to inspect the phantom. It was Pariah. The alien’s outline was ephemeral, wavering.
“Our war is over,” said Dr Skinner. “You saw what happened on the surface.”
“So none of that was real?”
“It happened millennia ago, during the Great War. The Shard destroyed many of our number. In this sector of the galaxy, we are all that is left.”
“Is this your home?”
Dr Skinner laughed. “Oh, dear child, no. It is our tomb. We were once many, but now we are few. The Shard destroyed our Enclaves. Turned our allies—the Krell—against us.” Dr Skinner sighed, thoughtfully. “Many members of the Pantheon were lost. Entire species, decimated. The Dominion almost won the Great War.”
“The Shard are coming back,” I said. “We’ve been looking for you for a long time.”
“We understand this,” said a voice.
But it wasn’t Dr Skinner speaking any more.
The scene changed. I was on Darkwater Farm, in the simulant storage chamber.
I hurt all over. I wore a Directorate-issue Ikarus suit, but of far more immediate concern was the pair of hands that were locked around my throat. My neck was agony. I struggled to breathe.
“Get back!” roared a wet-gravel voice.
Lazarus. Lieutenant-Colonel Conrad Harris.
The hands around my neck shifted. Oxygen rushed into my lungs.
Daneb Riggs stood over me. He was using a freshly hatched simulant, wearing only a neoprene undersuit.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” Riggs said, to Harris, true to memory. “You’re dead.”
“You’d be surprised how often I hear that,” Harris snarled in his gruff Detroit accent. “I’m Lazarus.”
“But—”
“Enough talk.”
The machine-pistol in his hands barked, and a volley of rounds hit Riggs across the torso. The sim collapsed, spilling crimson onto the sterile floor. Harris paused momentarily, eyeing the body as if to make sure that it was really dead.
“You okay?” he asked me.
I nodded. Rubbed my neck. “I’m fine. Why did you bring me here? This is a memory I’d rather forget.”
“It’s another construct,” said Harris.
“Can you bring the real Harris back? Change events in the past?”
“No,” Harris said, shaking his head. “That’s beyond even us. What’s done is done.”
“That’s a shame.”
I stood. For a memory, the pain across my body felt surprisingly realistic. Harris steadied me on my feet.
“Why can’t you show yourselves?”
Harris gave a half-shrug. Like me, he was wearing a Directorate Ikarus suit. The armour whined softly as he moved.
“It’s complicated, Jenkins. We’ve been in seclusion—a sort of self-imposed exile—for a long time. This planet, Carcosa, isn’t our home, but there are only a few of us left here. If we do this, join your conflict, we’ll be exposing our species to the war all over again.”
Before I could argue with him, Harris activated a hatch. Beyond, there was a corridor drenched with emergency lighting: an area of Darkwater that had been labelled the “dark sector”. The bulkheads on each side of the corridor were filled with containment cells. Inside the small chambers, swirling black shapes turned and twisted and throbbed. Shard Reapers. Just being around them made my skin crawl, my very bones ache. The Harvester that we’d seen on Carcosa’s surface was a larger example of the same technology.
“You’ve come out of exile before,” I said. “Science Division has seen your ships, from a distance.”
“That was a long time ago,” said Harris.
“So? You’ve shown yourselves. You can do it again.”
Harris paused in front of one of the containment cells. The black matter inside drifted in and out of reality. In the blink of an eye, it went from ethereal, barely visible, to completely solid. In reality, the Shard Reapers were colonies of billions of nanites, working together in perfect union. They were almost impervious to energy weapons, and damn near impossible to kill.
“The Harbinger virus, the Reapers, the shadow matter,” Harris said, “are all the same thing. All aspects of Shard technology. This is the Dominion.”
“It’s what we’re trying to stop,” I said, becoming increasingly frustrated with the Aeon’s riddles. “Are you going to help us, or not?”
“This is all your fault, though,” said Harris. “Your people brought the Harbinger virus back to life, on Barain-11. Sergeant Cooper carried it into the Krell nest base. Then they made the mistake of trying to harness the virus, through Cooper. He became Warlord, and now seeks to bring about the Dominion.”
“We’re not all the same!” I argued.
But when I looked back to where Harris had been standing, he was gone.
Back into a simulant. The scent of smoke in my nose, despite the atmo-filters of my combat-suit.
Another death scene. Another person I’d let down.
Kronstadt. During the final phases of the operation in Svoboda.
I was in the cramped confines of a Turing MBT-900 automated battle tank. The crew cabin was on the slant, because the vehicle had crashed. The tank’s control panel was filled with error messages.
Feng’s comatose body sat beside me. This was when he had been corrupted by the Directorate Special Operations team, when the so-called Mother of Clones had come for him.
“Why are you only accessing my shit memories, Aeon?” I protested.
“You’d prefer not to relive this particular event?”
“I have plenty of good ones, too.”
“Don’t lie to us, Lieutenant.”
Dr Olivia Locke was hunched in the passenger seat beside me, wearing a destroyed survival suit. Her face was stitched with minor lacerations, covered with red burn marks where she had been exposed to Kronstadt’s acid rain. The doctor studied me with light eyes.
“Do you have a name?” I asked.
“We are Dr Locke,” said the construct.
“That’s not your real name.”
There was an impact outside the tank. I heard gunfire, the pitched whine of plasma weaponry firing. That would be Lopez and Novak, fighting off the Directorate. Meanwhile, the Krell were also pouring into Svoboda, and would soon overwhelm not just the city, but the planet.
“The Krell came to Kronstadt with a purpose,” Dr Locke said. “They were being directed.”
“By the Spiral.”
She nodded. “Yes. The Warlord has mastery over them.”
“How can he do that?”
“Warlord is Harbinger. He and the virus are one and the same. The Harbinger virus, the technology used to create Warlord, all of it came from the same place. Warlord is able to manipulate the quantum-streams, and also access the Deep. He is the perfect conjunction of Shard and Krell technology.”
“Perfect” seemed like something of an exaggeration, but I decided not to argue.
“We need your help,” I insisted. “We can’t do this on our own. The Black Spiral are massing a fleet in the Reef Stars. They are going to overwhelm the Krell, and infect the Deep Ones.”
“This is concerning, we admit.”
“Show yourselves to us,” I said.
“Are you sure that you want to see our true form?”
“I’m sure.”
Dr Locke looked at me with a fixed expression. “Do you still have that grenade?”
I reached for the frag grenade. The tank’s cabin thundered with enemy fire, as every enemy on Kronstadt seemed to focus its attention on us.
“Then take care of it.”
There was a milky, diffuse light somewhere beneath me, and I swam for it. Both hands scything through the freezing liquid that made up Carcosa’s hidden sea. Although I’d been sucked downward I now felt like I was swimming up. I had the feeling that I was deep underwater, but my sense of direction was completely lost. Nausea and disorientation crashed around inside my head, suggesting that I had passed through multiple gravity envelopes. I kept swimming until, eventually, I reached the light, and felt something solid underfoot. I’d lost my rifle during the chaos, but I was quite confident that it didn’t matter. No weapon was going to help me here. My HUD flickered with new data, and the Jackals’ bio-signs appeared. Their shapes emerged from the water.
“Everyone alive?” I asked.
“Yes,” Novak said, repressing what could’ve been a sob. “That was not good. Did—did you see things?”
“Memories,” Lopez blurted. “Mostly bad ones.”
It was no reassurance that the rest of the squad had suffered the same experience as me. Each of us had been trapped in our private hell; reliving the past.
“Was any of it real?” Lopez said.
“I don’t think so,” said Feng. “The chronometer says no time has passed. Where in the Core are we?”
“It’s some sort of… vault,” I decided. “We haven’t made extraction, so I guess that we’re still somewhere on Carcosa.”
“It feels like we’re underground,” said Lopez. She turned back to look at the liquid, lapping around our ankles now. “We were dragged down here, but we just swam towards the light.”
The chamber was large, with curved walls made from a substance that glowed with pale light. They were etched with geometric symbols that intermittently flashed, suggesting activity.
“Do you read, Zero?” Feng said, over the comm. “Valkyrie? Christo, I hope they’re okay.”
The hail was answered by a wail of static. Echoes, repeated over and over. The noise grew in volume until it became too painful to listen to.