by Jamie Sawyer
“Grab something,” I said.
“Trying,” he snorted, hitting a safety rail and repositioning himself so that he was level with the ship. “Is not easy!”
“Lopez!” I called. I couldn’t see her through the hurricane of debris. “Report!”
I was answered by a piercing scream over the comms line, and I recognised Lopez’s voice. Her life-signs spasmed across my HUD, weak enough for me to know that she wasn’t going to make it, strong enough for her to experience some pretty terrible pain. Novak met my eyes.
“Nothing that we can do to help her,” I said.
Without hesitation, I silenced the comms channel. Did the same to Novak’s suit so that he couldn’t hear her either. Novak grimaced. Was I colder than even him? He’ll understand, I told myself. He’s green, and eventually all of this will become second nature. That was what watching comrades die had become to me. Just another day on the job.
“Stop that ship,” I ordered. “Do whatever it takes!”
I activated my EVAMP in a short burst, and took another gut-lurching jump to a higher position, Novak in tow. I was close to the transport’s rear cargo bay now, so close that I could see tangos waving on their comrades, their faces determined behind the visors of their survival suits. The interior of the hold was lined with metal crates, stacked with cargo palettes.
And something else.
There were prisoners in there. Real, honest-to-Gaia hostages. The Spiral were hustling them, prodding rifles to survival suits, herding them onto the ship. One of the prisoners turned, and with my improved simulant senses I flagged a face. Beard, shaven head, hard features. A primary warning marker appeared on my HUD.
MAJOR VADIM SERGKOV.
Sergkov’s expression was cold and neutral. Maybe that was because he didn’t want to give the Spiral the gratitude of seeing him break. Maybe he was just a fool with a death wish. It was standard Alliance Army capture response: to remain in control at all times. Still, I wondered whether I would be quite so calm if I were in his position. The fact that the Spiral had equipped the prisoners with vac-capable suits meant that they wanted them alive. I considered the implications of that decision. Senior military officers, falling into the hands of the Black Spiral? That was bad news by all accounts. Whoever these brass were, they would be privy to high-level intel; their personnel files had been redacted for even my security clearance.
“Move up!” I ordered Novak. “Don’t let them slow you down.”
I fired my thruster. Launched to another gantry.
Novak threw a knife at the nearest Spiral. Although his aim was good, considering he was throwing a blade in micro-G, the homemade weapon was by now tarnished and blunted. The knife bounced off the tango’s armoured torso. Lightning-quick, he threw a second at the same target. That found a home in the woman’s chest: planted securely between two armour plates.
But it wasn’t enough to stop her. She brought up a chunky plasma rifle—an older Alliance Army model—and peeled off a retaliatory volley. Bright bolts of plasma showered Novak. Punched through his suit.
What was left of his plasma-riddled body floated free of the gantry.
I bounced upwards, twisting mid-jump. Nailed the attacker with a blast from my shotgun. She toppled from the gantry. Gone.
Only me left.
Something else exploded in the hangar silo. On autopilot, I fired my thruster again. Landed right in front of the Spiral transport. The cargo ramp was still open, and a ragged figure waited there, surrounded by Spiral. I went to fire—
But that something that had exploded in the hangar?
With sick realisation, it occurred to me that it wasn’t the hangar. It was me. My right shoulder was frozen, and I clutched at my shotgun with a weakening grip. More warnings on my HUD now, so many that the system looked on the verge of overload. The recon-suit’s self-repair systems had initiated, were trying to seal a breach in my armour, but I could already feel the cold seeping in, breath escaping from my lungs.
Pain rippled through my right side. I snarled and held it back. My medi-suite fought to keep me operational. A few more seconds was all I would need.
A dozen red-dot laser sights flickered over my recon-suit. As with the rest of the Jackals, my stealth-field had failed. I kept the shotgun trained on the aft of the transport ship.
A figure paused at the ramp. Watched me.
“This can go down one of two ways,” I said, activating the suit’s general channel, trying to broadcast to anything that was in the immediate vicinity with a comms-net. Trying to sound like I wasn’t dying. “Either you hand over the hostages, and stand down, or I blow your brains out.”
The figure wore a full-powered armour exo-suit, the chest-plate adorned with a detailed version of the Spiral’s eternity symbol. The exo was restricted, military-grade tech that would make him stronger, faster. Even so, ordinarily I’d have the physical edge on him, but right now I was in no condition to fight.
“Not today,” the figure said. Male voice. Papery, dry. Thick with an accent that I couldn’t place. “This is over, and we are leaving.”
The helmet of the exo-suit was sprayed with a white skull motif, but through the glass visor I made out a furrowed, weathered brow and intense dark eyes. Although a respirator plugged his lower face, I got the distinct impression that the Spiral’s leader—I had no doubt that he was in charge—was smiling as he addressed me.
He raised a hand. Waved something at me.
A sidearm. Alliance-issue. A PPG-17 plasma pistol.
“Shoot me, then,” I said. “If you know how to use that thing, that is.”
Mag-locked to the deck, I took a step forward. Could see all six military officers now. Stiff-backed and still: with a defiant dignity. That wasn’t something I’d seen from Command before. Even now, Sergkov’s face remained aggressively neutral. Whoever he was, this guy was a cold operator.
The Spiral’s leader flicked the muzzle of the plasma pistol in my direction. When he moved, I noticed that he did so very carefully and with a measured gait. This guy has had training, I thought. He knows how to use that suit.
“I don’t think we need to worry about that,” he said.
He gave a barely perceptible toss of his head towards the men and women around him. The cargo hold was now filled with Spiral. Several of them had weapons trained on the military officers.
The threat was clear enough. The officers weren’t simulants, and if they died out here it was for real.
Below me, Krell primary-forms were clambering up the Tower. In response, one of the leader’s crew tugged at his shoulder. The leader backed away just a little. Placed a hand on Major Sergkov’s forearm, as though escorting the officer.
The hatch to the ship began to close.
“You shoot,” he said, over the comms again, voicing the threat now, “or you try to pursue: I will kill him. I will kill them all. You hardly know what we are capable of.”
Again with the invisible smile. I was fast developing a dislike for this guy.
The Krell were advancing around us. Leaping between gantries, bio-fire flaring as they went. But the Spiral’s leader showed no hint of concern or fear, nothing that would suggest this was anything out of the ordinary.
“Do not follow,” he warned again, still speaking over the comms. “Tell your people this.”
He lowered the pistol.
And I saw my opportunity.
I fired the shotgun one-handed, right into the open cargo bay.
The chief twisted. The exo-frame of his left leg pumped, and the motor silently whirred, giving him dexterity that few unaugmented humans possessed. He rolled out of the shotgun’s threat radius. Instead, the round hit one of his bodyguards, and blew a hole in the man’s vac-suit.
My suit’s AI burst into my head, with such insistence that it was a red-hot poker through my skull. TAKE EVASIVE ACTION! it told me. TAKE EVASIVE—
The response from the Spiral was immediate.
A dozen kinetic and
energy weapons emptied on my position. At this range, and under that much fire, I didn’t stand a chance. Rounds impacted my torso, legs, arms. I tried to stand my ground, to get off another shot, but my hands wouldn’t work any more. Nothing worked. Damned mortality was getting in the way. I was powerless to stop this.
The starship’s ramp slid shut. Thrusters washed the interior of the docking bay, sending a backwash across the deck, making the gantry shake. The vessel lifted, nose towards the open bay doors. The Shard Gate was visible in the distance. Mocking me. The starship’s engines lit blue-white and a wave of intense heat enveloped the surrounding area. Everything—and anyone—caught in the backdraft was vaporised.
That just so happened to be me. I didn’t feel a thing, because pain on that level is impossible to process.
White.
CHAPTER SIX
FUBAR
Blue.
The neural-link between the sim and my real body was instantly severed. The white of the explosion faded. Was replaced by a deep, soothing blue. From instant danger, back to a place of relative safety.
I was in a familiar location: on the Bainbridge, floating inside my simulator-tank. Surrounded by warm amniotic fluid like an artificial womb. I sucked down processed air through my respirator, and tried to order my thoughts. I was in pretty bad pain—the human psyche is kind of screwy like that, and my real body was struggling to differentiate actual and simulated injury. As a counterbalance, a cocktail of pain inhibitors and nano-meds flooded my skin, calming me. That blunted the agony enough that I remained conscious.
Someone hit the release valve on my tank, and it flushed. Wet with sticky blue fluid, I dragged my ass out, blinking rapidly in the bright light of the Simulant Operations Centre.
I wasn’t alone. Because the Jackals were so raw, they were taking this a whole lot worse than me. There was vomiting, shaking, cursing.
“Remember your pain management,” I said. “Breathe deep and the let meds work. Keep telling yourself that it wasn’t real. The hurt will pass.”
“That’s easy for you to say, ma’am,” Lopez said, shivering under an aluminium blanket. “You’ve done this before. That felt so real.” She swallowed, shook her head. “I—I’m so cold…”
“So that wasn’t hot enough for you, Lopez?” Feng asked, trying his best to sound clever. Although his sense of bravado was returning, he didn’t look to be in much better shape than Lopez.
“Is it just me,” Lopez said, “or do clones have a shit sense of humour?”
“It’s not just you,” Riggs replied.
Zero stood in front of my tank. Her uniform was pristine, but her freckled brow was creased.
“What happened down there?” she asked.
“Can’t you at least let me get dressed before we start the debrief?”
“I need to hear it now, ma’am,” Zero said, with an edge of determination to her voice that I wasn’t used to from her. She passed me a fresh towel and some shipboard fatigues. “Take these.”
“Thanks.”
I struggled into the uniform but Zero hovered at my shoulder. “We were in the dark the whole time you were deployed,” she said. “You weren’t transmitting at all.”
I shook my head. “We couldn’t make uplink to the Bainbridge. What’s the problem?”
Without feeds, the Bainbridge wouldn’t know what had happened on Daktar. Hell, even the Jackals wouldn’t know what had happened in the final minutes I’d been inside Tower One…
“Why the look?” I asked, realising that something was very wrong here.
“What look?”
“The look that you always give me when shit goes wrong.”
“Yeah,” Zero said, drawing the word out. Her body shook a little: another of her tells. “Maybe. I think it might help if you get your story straight.”
I noticed then that several medics and operators were gathered at the nearest view-port. In such a hurry to look outside, some of the operators hadn’t even bothered dressing after the tanks.
“She’s really done it this time…” someone muttered.
“Done what?” I yelled. “What’s going on?”
Zero tilted her head. “That.”
I pushed my way through the group to look through the port. Near-space was a tangled mess of debris. Daktar’s asteroid belt had been thrown into disarray, with a mix of starship wreckage and shattered rocks drifting past the port. I picked out Daktar Outpost among those rocks, spied where I’d just died.
No, no, no…
I watched in sick fascination. At this distance, I could barely pick out the individual modules that made up the station, but the explosions were clear enough. They rippled across the base, and the operators and techs around me seemed to flinch in sympathy with each detonation. Very quickly, Towers Two and Three crumpled in on themselves, leaving only Tower One standing.
“Here she goes…” said another sim operator, Captain Ving of Phoenix Squad.
One of Ving’s troopers began a whistling sound as Tower One gave way.
“Holy Christo,” Lopez said. “Everything … everything is gone…”
“Is bad, yes?” Novak said. The Russian was dripping with amniotic, standing naked beside me.
“How many people were there left on that station…?” Lopez asked, her shoulders slumped.
Everyone down there was dead. The weight of it was crushing.
The other Sim Ops squads didn’t find it quite so difficult. There was more whooping. Some gasping from the medtechs.
Riggs sighed and tried to put a brave face on things. “Most were already dead,” he said. “The rest were probably on the Spiral’s starship.”
Despite the situation, I felt a wave of desire prickle over my skin as I looked on his naked body. Then, immediately, that was wiped clean with a wave of guilt, as another explosion rocked Daktar, and the crowd around me reacted in amazement.
My stomach went stone cold. A tight knot formed there.
“That’ll be the outpost’s plasma reactor,” Ving said, knowingly. “Gone super-critical, I’d say.”
The null-shield that had once protected the outpost from invasion briefly worked in reverse—holding the explosive force of the reactor’s meltdown inside—but a second later that, too, collapsed. A rapidly expanding fireball spread across the face of Daktar 436.
Then there was nothing. The station was dust.
Various announcements sounded over the Bainbridge’s public address system, scrambling air support and recovery teams. The Aerospace Force would be going into the belt to search for survivors, but I knew that it wouldn’t do any good. No one could’ve escaped that.
“This is a fuck-up, Jenkins,” Captain Ving said. He gave me one of his most unpleasant smirks. “And it’s on your head.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say that would make this any better, but Feng gave it has best shot. “We were trying to rescue the officers,” he said.
“Leave it, Feng,” I said, eyes still pinned to the port.
“Yeah, Directorate,” Ving chided. “Leave it.”
“You weren’t there,” Feng said to Ving. “Phoenix Squad didn’t even make it into the station.”
“Thank Christo we didn’t,” Ving muttered. “Tower One was our objective. You weren’t supposed to even be in there, Jenkins.”
“We didn’t have a choice. There wasn’t anyone else available.”
Ving’s chest shivered. A large holo-tattoo of a phoenix crossed his pectorals, and when he moved it made it look like the bird was alive. This was one of Ving’s trademark moves—a crowd-pleaser for the ladies.
“That was our objective,” he said. “We were supposed to be getting those officers out.”
“You weren’t doing a very good job of it,” Riggs said. “We had no choice but to go into the Tower…”
“No choice but to ignore your orders?” Ving said. “You’re going to have to sound a whole lot more convincing in front of the court martial, Green.” Phoenix Squad bro
ke into a laugh, closing ranks around their CO. Ving shook his head. “Well, the intel was right. We suspected that Tower One was mined.”
“Then why weren’t we told that?” Lopez asked.
Ving glared at me instead of Lopez. “We had a target in that Tower, Jenkins. Public enemy number one…”
I guessed that was the Spiral’s leader—the man in the exo-suit—but I didn’t give Ving the satisfaction of arguing with him.
Ving slapped a hand to the view-port with male bravado. “You weren’t even supposed to know about him. Looks like he got away, thanks to Jenkins’ Jackals.”
The Shard Gate was visible through the expanding debris cloud. Now activated, it positively sparkled with fresh cosmic energy, and the Spiral’s starship—rendered tiny by the distance—hit it at speed. A ripple of blue light as it went through, then it was gone. Onwards to wherever the Gate went.
“Why aren’t we at least chasing that ship?” Feng suggested. “Are we just going to let them go?”
“You might want to get dressed first,” Ving said. “Then, if you want to fly this bucket through the asteroid belt,” he continued, turning to the rest of Phoenix Squad, “be my guest, Green. You’re even more batshit than ol’ Jenkins.”
There was laughter, but it wasn’t a good sound.
The spectacle done, the medtechs and other simulant operators eventually dispersed from the window. Left the Jackals with the mess.
“This isn’t our fault,” Feng said, although the intended meaning of his words—this isn’t your fault—was pretty clear. “We had no choice but to assault Tower One. We should never have been in there solo; if Captain Ving’s team had been doing their job, they would’ve taken their objective … I mean, we were running recon, right?”
“I don’t think that Heinrich will see it that way,” Zero said with a sigh. She looked down at her wrist-comp, the screen of the vambrace unit flashing with an incoming message.
“Is that who I think it is?” I asked.
Zero gave a reluctant nod. “Sorry, ma’am. General Draven is demanding the Bainbridge’s immediate recall to home base.”