by Jamie Sawyer
“Why did he take the trouble to fly us into Asiatic Directorate territory?” I asked.
“Riggs was a cornered animal,” Harris explained. “He had no choice but to bail out when he did. Had the Santa Fe jumped to Alliance territory, there was every prospect that he would be discovered. We believe that Riggs rendezvoused with a Black Spiral fleet somewhere outside of Jiog’s space.”
“So Riggs—the Spiral—now has the Hannover’s black box,” I said, summarising what we knew. “My mission was a failure. In that case, I need to get back to Alliance space, to Unity Base. I need to make a report to Command. Captain Heinrich and General Draven need to know what we found. I made contact with a Krell navigator-form, of the Silver Talon Collective. It showed me where the virus started. If we can trace the contagion back to source, perhaps we can stop it.”
Harris looked at me with an unusual expression on his features. “It’s not that simple, Jenkins.”
“Of course it is! I have intelligence for Alliance Command, and I need to make a report—”
“Command is compromised. The whole structure is riddled with the Spiral.”
“The Spiral’s a damned terrorist network,” I said, feeling the anger rise in me. “The Alliance has been here before, and we’ll be here again.”
“Command is compromised,” Harris repeated, enunciating the words very precisely.
“Don’t patronise me.”
“I’m not, but you need to know what’s happening out here.”
“Then what are you suggesting?”
“You need to start working outside the normal channels,” he said. “Outside of these structures.”
“You sound almost as bad as Warlord …”
“Now there’s a name we need to talk about,” Harris suggested. “But for now, take it from me: if we’re going to stop this war, then running back to Command isn’t going to help. Your rescue isn’t the end: it’s the beginning.”
This wasn’t over. Not yet, and not by a long way. Our recovery from Jiog was one small battle in a long war.
“I have a responsibility to my squad,” I said. Christo, I sounded pathetic, and I knew it. “They’re green, Harris. I can’t promise that they’ll want this any more than I do.”
“You’re not giving them enough credit. They’re a good squad, a solid team.”
I never thought that I’d hear Harris describe an ex-Directorate clone soldier, or a lifer, as “solid,” but there you go. Jiog had pretty much been the ultimate test of loyalty, and the Jackals had passed.
“Even the fish head,” Harris muttered. “Much as I don’t like having it on my ship …”
“She shouldn’t be drinking.”
Elena stood at the hatch, looking imperious dressed in a dark blue crew-suit, her long hair immaculately plaited over her shoulder. She always appeared so serious, and now she scowled especially gravely.
“Doctor’s orders,” she added.
“A little bourbon never hurt anyone,” Harris replied.
Elena pulled an unimpressed grimace. “Tell that to your liver, mon amour. She should be resting.”
“Maybe she’s rested enough.”
“I am here, you know,” I intervened.
Elena took a position around the tac-display, and tapped a cigarette from a packet, lit it without offering me one. Like Harris’, Elena’s forearms were marked with scar tissue: her data-ports had also been removed, and like him she was unable to operate a simulant.
She glanced at me coolly. “Your squad is in pretty good shape, all things considered. Better than they have any right, or expectation, to be.” She dragged long on the cigarette. Her fingertips were stained yellow by nicotine. “Sergeant Campbell—Zero—was fortunate to escape redaction with such limited memory loss, and the pariah-form is in especially good condition. The fruits of Project Pariah are promising.”
“How do you know about the pariah-forms?” I asked. “I thought that intelligence was locked down tight.”
“The Watch is aware of several off-book black operations,” Elena explained. “Although we thought that the Project had been burnt. Certain special operations were aborted, and their data lost, as a result of the infiltration of Military Intelligence by the Black Spiral. The service is rife with double agents.”
Harris nodded in agreement. “The Black Spiral has people looking for us. They’ve even sent agents to our place in Normandy.”
“More intelligence from this mysterious Watch, I take it?”
Elena gave me a knowing smile. “You are sceptical, ma chère?”
“I have every right to be, Doctor.”
“Have you shown her the footage?” Elena asked, turning to Harris.
He shook his head. “It’s not for the faint of heart. I wasn’t sure whether she was ready.”
“What footage? I’m ready. Show me everything.”
Harris still seemed reluctant, but Elena encouraged him. “Go on,” she said.
“If you say so …” Harris muttered.
The tactical display filled with a tri-D image: a surveillance feed. A single Krell was curled at the back of a prison cell. A light came on in the chamber, and the Krell’s reaction was instant. The bio-form was up, hurling itself against the cell’s transparent walls.
“This is recorded footage,” Elena said. “It would be far too dangerous to keep an infected specimen aboard the Paladin.”
The alien slid down the inside of the glass wall, leaving a smear of ichor and slime where it had made contact. But the reprieve didn’t last long. Again and again, the alien slammed its body against the inside of the tank.
“What designation is it?” I asked, unable to pull my eyes from the harrowing spectacle.
“It started as a primary-form,” Elena said. “But what it is now …” She shrugged. “We’ve taken to calling them thralls. They are nothing more than slaves to the virus.”
The Krell’s body frame was much larger, bulkier than a typical primary-form. Its carapace was warped, spiked and spined all over, but otherwise free of any markings: as though it had shed its allegiance to its birth Collective. Instead, the monster’s hide was stained black, and every piece of exposed flesh was stitched with new capillaries and throbbing veins. The xeno’s eyes were silver orbs, completely alien even to the Krell.
“It’s infected with the Harbinger virus,” Harris said. “That’s what Science Division is calling it.”
Giving the virus a name should’ve made it less frightening. It was, after all, the first step in understanding it. Instead, it somehow personified my fear. I wanted to look away as the creature slammed its body against the observation window, but I somehow couldn’t. I wanted to see some element of rationality in those dead eyes, in that decayed and wilted face.
Nothing. That was what I saw. A complete absence.
I’d seen the effect of the virus. Seen what it could do, to the Silver Talon ark-ship. That had taken just one man—Warlord, Clade Cooper—to infect an entire living vessel …
Elena opened another file on the display. The image that appeared reminded me a lot of Harris’ battlefield maps. But whereas those showed the war in macro, this was the conflict in micro. I wasn’t sure which was more worrying.
“This footage is the invasion of a Krell primary-form’s higher functions,” Elena said, staring at the rippling silver forms that corrupted and twisted the Krell’s cellular structure. It was almost hypnotising. Cells were unbound and ruptured, neural pathways rewritten. “As you can see, once Harbinger gains a foothold, it moves rapidly, and it is almost universally effective.”
The virus usurped the host cells, took over the body. Here was something more organised than even the Krell. It was the perfect hive organism. There seemed some malignant design behind this virus, behind this contagion. It was so singularly effective that I couldn’t accept that it was random …
“When Harbinger gains a foothold in the host specimen, it quickly supplants higher brain functions. The virus then enters a co
mmunicable phase, usually within hours of infection. Once enough primary-forms become infected, the Collective reaches a sort of critical mass. The infected are desperate to spread the virus. Civil war erupts, although there can only be one winner in the conflict that ensues.”
“Harbinger’s adaptable, capable of infecting all Krell bio-forms,” Harris said. “Their ships, structures, bio-technology.”
The tri-D projection shifted again, now showing images from long-distance scopes. Things advanced through the void of space. Shambling, rotten corpses of starships, hulls universally ruptured, trailing intestine-like innards as their plasma engines burnt. Every biological component had been corrupted, had turned.
“Imagine what this shit can do to a Krell world,” Harris said. “It trickles from the warrior forms, to the leaders, to the navigators. Then the bio-ships and arks. Changing them, twisting them.”
Elena continued: “The Krell have no natural immunity to Harbinger. Once they overcome a particular strain, it adapts, mutates, and just starts again. Every laboratory in the Alliance is working on a cure for the virus, but every time we find an answer, it just mutates into a new strain.”
“The Black Spiral is spreading this shit,” I whispered. “We were on an ark-ship, in the Gyre. We encountered Warlord. Maybe Riggs set that up, too. Warlord deployed something—a vial, a canister—to infect a Krell ship.”
Neither Elena nor Harris appeared surprised by that information.
“We suspected as much,” Harris said. “Where he’s getting the virus from, that’s the real question.”
“So what’s your plan then, Harris?” I asked. I knew that he was building up to this—that his explanation had all been part of the sell. “How exactly are you going to stop all of this?”
“We’re searching for a counter for this virus,” he said. Now there was an interesting choice of words. Not cure, not remedy: counter. “That’s our priority. That’s what we do first. The Black Spiral, the Directorate, those things can wait. The virus is the biggest threat right now, and we have a lead on some intelligence in the Mu-98 system, so that’s where we’re going.”
“And where do the Jackals fit into this plan of yours?”
I knew, then, that Harris hadn’t rescued me from Jiog without a reason. He had been planning something. The rescue mission was a demonstration of what Harris’ forces were capable of … He met my gaze levelly, his rugged features hard as stone.
“We need a simulant team,” he said. “For what will follow. Mu-98 is Russian space. It has a Shard Gate. The area may be hot with fighting. Our objective will be Kronstadt.”
“What’s there?”
“Not what, but who,” Elena said.
“There’s a Watch contact on Kronstadt,” Harris explained. “A xeno-archaeologist, goes by the name of Dr. Olivia Locke. She was once chief science officer examining the Shard ruins on Tysis World. There was a dig there, the remains of a large Shard facility.”
“It was one of the first Shard sites to be verified,” Elena said.
“I … I don’t know it.”
“No reason why you should,” Harris replied.
“Let me guess: more dark ops?”
“Something like that. But if Dr. Locke has information that might assist in the war effort, we can’t let this go. She was senior, very senior, in Sci-Div before she went off-grid.”
“So you’ve met her?”
“A few times,” Harris said.
“Why did she turn?”
“She had a difference of opinion with Command. But we can talk more about that later. Right now, I need an answer from you. Are you with us? Of course, if we meet the Black Spiral along the way,” he said with a shrug, “well, that’ll be your chance to get even with them.”
And there we have it, ladies and gentlemen: the sweetener. The kicker, the dangling carrot.
“In case you haven’t noticed, we’re a Simulant Operations team with no sims,” I said.
“That condition might not be as permanent as it sounds,” Harris suggested. “We’ve identified a Science Division facility, a farm, that we intend to raid. It’s in the Thane system, an outpost called Darkwater Farm.”
“But if we do this,” Elena said, “there can be no contact with Command.”
“The mission will be strictly sub rosa,” Harris added.
“What are you suggesting?” I asked. I wanted to flush Harris out, to make him say the words, but I couldn’t help myself. “That we go AWOL?”
Going AWOL—absent without leave—was pretty high in the lexicon of service misconduct. By rote, the relevant military code came to me: Article 87—missing deployment, failure to attend at an appointed time. Maximum punishment: life imprisonment. I remembered more of the Combined Military Code. Article 85—desertion. Maximum punishment in times of war: death. And looking down at Harris’ map, I couldn’t think of a more apt term to describe the mass of troop movements than “war.”
Harris didn’t seem to notice my hesitation. “That’s right,” he said.
Can I do this? I asked myself. Although they were light-years away from me, all I could think about was what my folks back on Old Earth would make of this. That frightened me more than the ranked Krell war-fleets. I could almost imagine the look on my father’s face. Ol’ Teddy Jenkins, darling of the Alliance Army: reputation dashed because his daughter went AWOL …
“I’m not doing anything without the Jackals,” I decided. “They’re my team, and my people.”
“Fine,” Elena said. “Speak with them.”
“Just remember this,” Harris added. “Whatever they say about Lazarus, the only thing special about me was that I kept on going, no matter how much it hurt. No matter what.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
BURY THE DEAD
Conrad Harris had never been a by-the-books kind of officer. To him, discipline was a byword for bureaucracy. He hadn’t ever let that get in the way of an objective, and because he got results, High Command had rarely interfered with the way that he operated. But the suggestion that we shouldn’t report in … Well, that was something I hadn’t expected. It was something else entirely.
Call it what it is, Jenkins, my conscience said to me. Lazarus wants you to go rogue.
I went down to the Paladin’s recreation room. The Jackals had claimed it as home, and they sat together in one corner of the chamber. The team was focused on a tri-D viewer set into the wall, but jumped to attention as I entered.
“At ease,” I said. I dialled up a cup of hot coffee from the dispenser, and settled down in an uncomfortable chair. “Where’s Pariah?”
“Fish is in Engineering,” Novak answered. “Has nest now.”
Lopez gave a noncommittal nod. “I’m not sure what’s worse: that the fish is building a nest or that I don’t notice its smell anymore.”
Zero gave a tight grimace, suggesting that even if she was getting used to Pariah, she wasn’t quite comfortable with the Krell.
“Y’all keeping up with current affairs, huh?”
The hall’s viewer was a window into the outside world, into the universe beyond the Paladin’s hull. The Jackals had been watching a newscast.
“Yes, ma’am,” Feng said.
“Then what’s the latest?”
Lopez rolled her eyes. “Same old, same old. The Directorate Executive has issued a press release assuring all territories that rumours of a Krell invasion are just Alliance propaganda.”
“Tell that to Jiog,” Novak said.
“So Harris can get Directorate news channels on the tri-D?” I asked, a little impressed.
“Sure,” said Zero. “The ship has a decent receiver.”
“Did we make the cut?”
I dreaded seeing images of our capture on the state-sponsored newsfeed. There had been drones present throughout our incarceration. When I’d been younger, and the Alliance and Directorate had been at war, such broadcasts had been regular and graphic: constant reminders of the divide between the two camps.
But Zero shook her head. “No, ma’am. Nothing.”
I breathed out a sigh of relief. “That’s surprising, if nothing else.”
“We were probably Commander Kwan and Major Tang’s secret project,” Feng said. He stared at the screen, but I could sense the anger in his voice. Maberry had fixed his broken tooth with a ceramic implant, and Feng’s injuries weren’t as serious as they could’ve been, but that was hardly the point. It’s often said that family feuds are the worst, and this was the closest Feng was going to get to a falling out with Ma and Pa.
“What else is happening?” I asked.
The tri-D scrolled with imagery of Krell war-fleets. Some looked infected, others not so much, but I doubted that the average Alliance citizen could tell the difference. The news was careful to refer to the bio-fleets as “limited exploratory forces,” as though that would somehow allay panic. Then the cast shifted to a piece on recent terrorist activity in the border colonies—seizures of supplies, personnel, ships.
Lopez continued with the update: “Black Spiral raids are increasing in frequency. Most shipping lanes to the Core are now classified as no-go zones. Pirates, religious freaks, the whole deal. This Warlord bastard, he’s sweeping up anyone with an axe to grind against the Alliance. Criminal gangs, fanatics, the disaffected.”
“But worse yet,” Novak said portentously, “Senator Lopez has been appointed Secretary of Defence to the whole Alliance!”
His raucous and deep laughter filled the room. No one else joined him.
“Maybe this war, or whatever it is,” Feng said, easing back in a chair, “will mean that the Senator’s plans to cut Sim Ops have to be abandoned …”
Lopez sighed. “You guys don’t know Daddy like I do. Even if the Krell made it to the Core, I’m not sure it would change his mind. People are—or at least were—behind him in cutting the budget.”
I drank my coffee and thought about that. Just a short while ago, the very idea of the Krell—infected or otherwise—making it to the Core Systems would’ve been unthinkable. Now it was a painful and very foreseeable reality. Senator Rodrigo Lopez was the one man who could change all of that.