by Jamie Sawyer
“You seeing this?” he asked.
The Black Spiral’s symbol had been repeated everywhere, covering every bulkhead and hatch. The ever-decreasing black circles were almost hypnotic. The words REJECT THE LIE had been written on the closest wall in sloppy red paint.
“What lie?” Lopez asked, pausing in front of the graffiti.
“It’s their thing,” Riggs said. “Their leader—some asshole who calls himself the Warlord or something—says that you’re supposed to figure it out for yourself.”
This was just proto-religious bullshit. The Spiral had, in recent months, started leaving propaganda like this behind after their attacks, and I knew that we had Intelligence working on its meaning. So far as I was concerned it was just another terror tactic. I found it somewhat ironic that the Spiral had taken to leaving messages on the walls of a station that they intended to demolish.
“It’s not our problem,” I said. “Move on.”
“Control Room ahead,” Novak indicated, nodding at the hatch at the end of a darkened junction.
“Feng, Lopez: take those corners,” I ordered.
Warning beacons flickered at the edge of my vision, tracking motion around us. I detected bio-signs at the perimeter of my scanner’s range. There were people inside the room.
“Feels like trap,” Novak said. He absently stroked one of the knives holstered across his chest, carrying his shotgun one-handed. “Smells like trap,” he added, in an excited way.
In real life, his teeth were darker and had an almost jagged appearance: as though they had been filed. In his simulant, his teeth were bright-white and new. I wasn’t sure which version I liked better. Not for the first time, I caught myself wondering exactly why he had received that life term.
“A drone would be nice,” I whispered.
“Did you bring yours, Novak?” Riggs said.
“Fuck drone,” Novak replied.
“We’ll breach the door,” I decided. “Get that panel, Novak.”
The Russian nodded.
“On me,” I said. Held up a fist. “Go.”
Novak opened the door with a slap of his glove to the control.
The hatch peeled open, and I was met by a half-dozen figures in survival suits. They opened fire, rounds pranging against the deck and walls.
I brought my shotgun up.
FLASH BANG, I ordered my suit.
A single round fired from the shotgun’s alternate ammo dispenser. A suppression grenade.
“Down!” I yelled.
My mags applied, I went to ground. As the grenade went off—throwing noise and light across the interior of the Control Room—my visor polarised in immediate reaction.
Lopez was a second too slow, and turned to run rather than drop to the deck. One of the tangos saw a chance and let loose a volley from his assault rifle. A round hit Lopez in the shoulder. I caught a brief glimpse of her face—contorted in pain. She yelped over the comm, twisted sideways, and hit the wall.
I was already up, spraying the inside of the Control Room with gunfire. Two more Spiral went down, the rest retreating behind consoles and terminals.
Novak lurched past me. He wasn’t exactly graceful in zero-G, but what he lost in dexterity he made up for with enthusiasm. Over the nearest console in a heartbeat. There was a muted bark of more shotgun fire, then an unpleasant schucking sound as Novak got to work with one of his blades. A body sailed past me, suit slashed and torn.
Riggs took advantage of the tangos’ shock and pounded the chamber with shotgun rounds. Desks and chairs exploded. Two more tangos tried to dash into cover at the other end of the room, but Feng caught both.
“Room is clear,” Novak said, stirring from his wetwork. Blood spattered his armoured chest. The Russian wiped a crude blade on the edge of a console, then methodically replaced it into its sheath.
“Impressive,” Feng said.
“Disgusting,” Lopez corrected. “You’re lucky there are no news-eyes on us.” She hovered near the hatch, her shotgun lowered.
“You okay?” I asked her. “You took a round back there.”
Lopez looked at me with angry eyes. “I’m fine. It didn’t breach my armour.”
“You were lucky it didn’t penetrate.”
“I’m fine,” she repeated.
Even if she didn’t want to admit it, from the way her shoulder hung I could tell that the shot had hurt. When she saw me looking, Lopez righted herself and tried to shrug the injury off. From her bio-signs I knew that she was still mission-capable, and her medi-suite was already working to correct the injury, but her ego had been bruised.
“Be more careful next time,” I said. “I saw what happened in the airlock. I can’t afford to lose you out here. Every trooper counts.”
“Understood,” she said, with singeing belligerence.
I turned away and inspected the room. “Someone watch the door. Feng, get me a working terminal.” As a former Directorate clone-trooper, Feng was the most technically adept of the squad. He liked to mess with machines whenever he got the chance. If anyone could get the systems running, it was him. “Access the surveillance system; try to call up the security-feeds.”
“Can do.”
The Control Room was long and rectangular, set into the side of Tower One. In usual circumstances, this was the main command centre for all three Towers, with computer consoles arranged in banks to face a view-port that stretched the length of the room. Someone had left the shutters open, and the port gave a view of space outside: the Shard Gate, sitting in the distance, looked disturbed in some way that I couldn’t really explain…
Feng chose a computer and a seat. It creaked precariously under the combined weight of a sim in armour. He frowned and started jabbing at the console with fingers made chunky in his gauntlets.
“Do the terminals still work after what we just did in here?” Riggs asked, keeping watch over the hatch.
“They’re made of sterner stuff,” Feng said.
“Chinese-built and made to last,” Riggs joked. “Just like you, Feng.”
Novak grumbled a laugh.
Feng kept working. “You were supposed to be shooting at the Spiral, Riggs, not the computers.”
Lopez raised an eyebrow. “Touché, Riggs.”
“Here’s what I’ve got,” said Feng, turning to me.
A series of real-time surveillance feeds appeared in tri-D. Location names were assigned to each: PRIMARY LOCK, INTER-HUB JUNCTION and so on.
“Good job, Feng,” I said. I swiped a finger at the last monochrome image, labelled TOWER ONE—DOCKING SPIRE. “Can you magnify that feed?”
“Affirmative.”
Feng did as ordered, and the image bloomed in front of me. It showed the tip of Tower One. Several levels above us, the place looked to be a web of gantries and criss-crossing walkways. My suit began to paint icons onto the imagery as I watched, indicating the location of the missing officers.
“There,” I said, pointing at part of the feed. “That’s where the officers are.”
“How do you know?” Feng asked. “I can’t see anyone in there.”
“All Alliance military personnel carry ID chips. Your suit AI interfaces with the station’s.”
“Really?” Lopez said. “Do we carry ID chips?”
“Didn’t you listen to anything during induction?” Riggs snorted. “Of course you have an ID chip.”
“You all do,” I said.
“Even Novak?” Lopez queried.
“Especially Novak,” I replied. “Let’s hope that we never need to use them, but if you ever get trapped behind enemy lines it might be something you’ll be grateful for.” I turned back to the tri-D security feed and began to plot our route up the Tower. “Place is going to be a nightmare to assault,” I decided.
Riggs suddenly snapped alert. “I’ve got readings…” he said. “Multiple signals on the bio-scanner. Closing on our position.”
“Could be Riggs’ civilians…” Lopez said.
There was only one way into the room—through the hatch we’d just used—and the signals were moving quickly in that direction. I kicked my mags, checked my ammo. Reloaded the shotgun.
“Get ready. Take up positions and keep eyes on—”
Then the hatch door slammed open, and the noose tightened.
If the Spiral had any sort of comms in place, by now they knew that they were facing an Army Sim Ops team. Most likely, they realised they were going to die in that room. But these guys were fanatics, not soldiers, and that didn’t stop them. They had numbers on their side and they knew this station, knew that there was no other way out of this room. The only question was whether they were going to take enough of us out to stop our mission.
The initial wave was made up of sixteen armoured bodies. Carrying assault rifles, security shotguns, even a couple of flare guns. Pretty much any equipment that could be modified for offensive use.
A rifle barked in my direction and chased me into cover behind a console. Rounds slammed into the metal framework against my back. Machines spat sparks as gunfire slashed the room. A grenade sailed overhead. Exploded in the pit of the room, showering me with frag. Smoke started to cloud the atmosphere, reducing visibility.
TAKE EVASIVE ACTION, my suit warned.
“There are too many of them!” Lopez said, popping a round from her shotgun, then dipping back into cover.
Bodies tumbled past, but the corridor outside was pressed with new attackers.
“They’ve got a heavy inbound,” Feng declared.
“How heavy?” I said. Even using the closed comms, the noise around us was blistering, becoming almost overwhelming, and I found myself yelling.
“See for yourself,” Feng said.
A figure in a mining mech advanced down the corridor, a bright splash of yellow against the darkened interior. The mech’s operator sat inside the pilot cabin, safely encased within an armoured cage, and gunned the controls. It fired pulses from a shoulder-mounted laser, strobing the chamber. The device was industrial, and short-ranged, but it was capable of breaching our armour.
The battle-space was closing around us. The press of bodies becoming tighter and tighter. Another grenade exploded, and I felt the shockwave of the blast wash over me. I wasn’t sure whether that was the Spiral or the Jackals.
I shifted position across the chamber, took cover behind another bullet-riddled console. Snapped off a few rounds from the shotgun, and took out two more tangos.
Novak flashed past me, a blur of motion. One of his knives was plunged into the suited body of a terrorist. He pinned the struggling figure to the floor. Feng rose up from another terminal, firing his shotgun again and again, a snarl plastered across his face.
The Spiral were pouring fire onto us now. It seemed that no matter how many we hit they just kept coming.
“Prepare for extraction,” I ordered the team. This was fast becoming a question of when rather than if.
I caught Riggs’ face across the room. He looked almost relieved by the order, as though I was giving him permission to die. I found myself smiling at him.
But death didn’t come.
There was an almost imperceptible lull in the fighting. In my real body, and without the sharpened senses of the simulant, I doubt that I would’ve sensed it. But in that microsecond, I realised that something had changed. Even Novak stopped his grisly work.
A whine of white static was building over the comm network. Filling my earbead, and my head. Too fast, or too strong, for my suit systems to properly counter.
“Oh shit…” Feng said. Eyes to the view-port. To space beyond the glass.
All faces—Jackals and Spiral—were directed to the window.
“Shit indeed…” I whispered.
My communicator was still awash with white noise, but a single looped message became audible.
“Gate is open … All Alliance forces be aware: Gate is open…”
The Shard Gate had taken on another aspect, and its black heart had become energised. Light began to dance across the Gate’s surface.
A couple of the tangos crossed themselves, made pseudo-religious protestations of fear or respect—maybe Gaia Cultists or System Primarists—suggesting that at least some of them had a religious motivation for joining the Spiral. Or maybe not; when witnessing an event like this, there wasn’t much distance between fear and respect. The Gate was an example of ancient, working xeno-tech—the likes of which we still didn’t really understand. Active Shard technology had a universal effect, and even I felt a sense of dread. My heart raced, my breathing becoming fast and ragged…
But it wasn’t the Gate’s operation that was responsible for the reaction. It was what had come through that was causing it.
A Krell bio-ship.
Maybe because we had been so intent on killing each other, neither side had noticed the ship’s arrival. Now it sat in tight orbit around Daktar 436, moving with a near-serenity that belied its destructive potential.
You spend enough time in and around human ships, you recognise nearly every pattern, every engine style, every spaceframe. Bio-ships were something completely different. I’d seen my fair share of them, but—at least to my eye—I’d never seen two that looked the same. Every ship was unique, and every one was alive. This one’s shape was all wrong. Not a single sharp angle on the thing; it was covered in armoured plates that had grown and regrown.
A couple of the Spiral began to mutter profanities, in languages that I didn’t understand. Those left in the room with us scrambled through the open door. None of my team gave chase: they were still entranced by the enormous alien ship.
The heavy mining mech retreated, servos whining as it moved off. There were shouts from further down the corridor, outside the Control Room. Gunfire began in the distance.
“How can they be on the station already?” Lopez asked.
I swallowed. “They’re faster than you’ll ever know.”
The bio-ship’s flanks flashed intermittently, discharging what could be mistaken for weapons systems, but something I knew to be much worse. One of the projectiles slewed past the view-port, so close that I could pick out almost every detail of the object. Spherical, armoured, studded with hooks. The ship was sending breacher pods to the surface. Krell boarding teams.
Space was soon filled with the pods in such numbers that Daktar’s defensive grid was easily overwhelmed. Probably hundreds of Krell landing on Daktar. Greater women than me had spent the better part of their lives trying to understand the fishes, to predict when they would and would not turn up. The end result was that they were unknowable. The aliens were just that: alien.
The noise outside the room grew in volume. Shouts were replaced by cries, by screams.
The communicator bead in my ear had fallen back to static. I cycled the bands by thought-command, hoping for some scrap of information on what the Krell were doing here. Nothing. My throat was suddenly dry, constricted. I hated how the Krell could still make me feel green, even after all this time.
“Novak, get the door,” I said. Could the Jackals detect the panic in my voice? I hoped not. “Seal us in.”
Novak bounced across the room. Reached the control and slapped it. The hatch slammed shut.
I glanced around at the Jackals. My suit told me that every one of them was experiencing the same fear as me. I wished that the closed hatch blocked out more of the sound, because despite the three inches of reinforced plasteel I could still hear the screaming, the chatter of alien weaponry.
“Christo, sounds like a slaughter out there,” Riggs said. He clutched his shotgun to his chest, fingers closed around the stock. “What are we going to do?”
“They’re getting closer,” Lopez added.
“There must be another way out of this room,” Feng offered, although we all knew that there wasn’t. “Maybe through the airshafts—”
Just then, there was an enormous rumble on the other side of the hatch. I braced.
A welt appeared in the m
etalwork.
“How can…?” Lopez started, but her voice trailed off, question left unasked.
“Away from the door!” I ordered.
The Jackals dropped back. Shotguns trained on the hatch now.
More welts appeared. More rumbling. More bio-signs.
My pulse beat faster and faster. The rush of blood to my ears was almost deafening.
I knew exactly what was coming.
The hatch buckled. Split. Like it had been nuked, hit with a breaching charge. There was a flash of light from outside, and a tendril of smoke languidly trailed into the Control Room. A body—ripped apart, survival suit breached—glided past.
Then another.
And another, but in several pieces rather than one.
A shape—a wet, grisly outline of a thing—emerged from the dark.
A Krell primary-form.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE TOWER
Six-limbed and massive, the Krell poised a pair of talon-tipped claws on the hatch and used another to grapple further into the hole. Empty, fish-like eyes scanned us, mouth open in an animal grimace inside its bio-helmet. It wore armour over a muscled body—plating that was contoured, looked like scales—and its webbed hands were encased in gauntlets. All of that tech had been grown rather than built, and some of it the Krell had probably self-produced.
I took in the detail in short bursts, trying to quell the rush of emotion that the alien’s arrival caused in me. It had been years since I’d last seen a Krell, but old memories resurfaced immediately. I teased the trigger of my shotgun and fought my natural instincts.
“Hold your fire, Jackals,” I ordered.
I had been at war with these aliens for the better part of my military career. I’d killed hundreds of them during the war, and in turn they had killed almost as many of me.
It wasn’t the same for the Jackals, of course, because they had never fought the Krell. They hadn’t seen the things that I had; for the entirety of their deployment the Alliance had been at peace with the Krell. Their experience of them had been second-hand, from vid-files and simulations. Even so, their anxiety was palpable, readable from their vitals.