The Eternity War: Pariah

by Jamie Sawyer

  Feng sat in Zero’s command chair, glancing up at the monitors with an anxious look on his face. Fluid pumped into the tank, filling rapidly. I didn’t need to see the monitors to know that my pulse was elevated, because I could sense it. I was getting the euphoria, the simulant-shakes.

  I wanted transition, and I wanted it now.

  “Maybe I should get into the tank too,” Feng suggested. Part of his uniform had been pulled free from his injured shoulder, and an empty analgesic syringe sat on the console beside him.

  “That’s a nice offer,” I said, deliberately misinterpreting him, “but we don’t know each other that well just yet, Feng. I’m ordering you to stay aboard the ship. Have Lopez and Riggs reported yet?”

  Feng’s watery outline nodded. “Affirmative. The HURT suit is locked and loaded. She’s ready when you are.”

  I opened a comms channel to Carmine on the bridge. “Captain? You read me?”

  “I hear you,” she said. “Whatever has happened to communications, it doesn’t appear to be blocking local comms aboard the Fe.”

  “Good. I want you to remain on-station until I make exfiltration.”

  Feng motioned to me through the simulator’s canopy. The readouts behind him were all in the green.

  “Jenkins out,” I said, before Carmine could argue any further. “Feng, send me in.”

  He nodded. “Transition in three … two… one…”

  The world made that short, sharp shift that it always does when you make transition into a sim. Seconds later, I was in the Santa Fe’s hangar again. Standing in front of the closed cargo hatch, but in a brand-new body.

  “I’m ready to do this,” I said. “Open the ramp.”

  I rolled my simulated head inside the HURT suit’s helmet, and liked the way such a simple motion felt powerful. My bio-engineered blood thrummed, hungering for combat.

  Carmine audibly sighed over the comms. “You know best.”

  “I sure do,” I said.

  The cargo ramp lowered, and I started to take fire.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  TARGETS NEUTRALISED

  The HURT suit was an exquisite piece of engineering. Heavily armed and armoured, it was the epitome of a personal assault suit: a veritable tank on legs, the biggest and baddest class of combat-armour currently approved for use by the Alliance armed forces. There was enormous locomotive strength pent up in the suit’s limbs, but the man-amplifier that powered the armour also made every motion feel like second nature.

  “I’m outside,” I said. “Reading multiple hostiles.”

  The HURT’s combat systems came online, and my already-sharpened simulant senses became razors. A grid of complicated combat-schematics appeared on my HUD. Dozens of targets materialised across North Star’s hangar, with threat-ratings assigned to each.

  The HURT had an AX-10 assault gun locked to each hardpoint on the forearms. They were big weapons, capable of firing high-calibre, armour-busting kinetics—more cannon than gun, really. Each was supported by a complex array of servo attenuators that held them in place, and that would compensate for their ferocious recoil.

  The Black Spiral began to fire on me, and the HURT’s null-shield activated. Plasma and laser fire rippled across the energy shield, dissipating harmlessly. The occasional kinetic round punched through the shield, sure, but that was like gentle rain against the HURT’s heavy exo-plating. The tangos were ants, their weapons a petty inconvenience to the might of the HURT suit.

  “You there, Feng?” I asked, over the comms.

  “I copy you,” Feng said.

  “What about the vid-feed?”

  “Affirmative on that too.”

  “Then you might want to watch this.”

  I raised my arms, tracking targets.

  I wondered, as I stood there absorbing fire from every angle, what enemy Sergkov had envisaged we would face when he’d requisitioned the HURT suit. It surely couldn’t have been the Black Spiral.

  I opened fire with the suit-guns.

  My guns carried smart ammunition: jet-assisted rounds, with a rudimentary tracking system built into every projectile. Bodies exploded across my field of vision, chased down by bullet-swarms.

  “Splash one,” I declared, counting off the dead. “Splash two, three, four…”

  I felt the gentle rhythm of rounds loading into the weapons from the ammo hoppers on my back. The guns had an incredible rate of fire. Craw’s warning about North Star being a fully pressurised environment was long forgotten.

  Two troopers launched themselves towards me, using their exo-suits to achieve sudden bursts of speed. Before either could get close enough for concern, I adjusted my aim. Both attackers jerked backwards, pulled on unseen puppet strings, and vanished in a red mist.

  “Splash six, nine, eleven…”

  TARGETS NEUTRALISED, my suit said. ARMOUR INTEGRITY: 100%.

  Much to my disappointment, the hangar bay was clear. I hadn’t even used the grenade launcher on the HURT’s humpback rig. That would’ve been overkill, and I’m not one for being flashy.

  “You catch that, Feng?” I asked.

  “We saw it all,” Feng said. He sounded about as excited as I felt. “Nice shooting.”

  “I think that I’m going to like this suit,” I said. “Keep trying Zero on the communicator. Tell her that I’m coming for her.”

  “Solid copy,” Feng said. “Good hunting.”

  Comms dropped shortly thereafter, but that didn’t matter.

  I proceeded to take the most direct route to Dr. Skinner’s lab: the Black Spiral knew that I was coming, and there was something liberating about throwing caution to the wind.

  I popped tangos everywhere. The HURT had an impressive sensor-package, with a sensitive bio-scanner the like of which I had never seen before. I tracked hostiles on decks above and below, and reacted accordingly. The suit-guns fired with sniper-like precision through the ceiling and floor, punching through the deck.

  The whole of North Star had turned against us. Civilians, Military Police, prospectors: they were all in on this. This was something organised—not an ad hoc revolution. Even inside the invincible HURT suit, an icy shiver ran down my spine. Sergkov said that he had been tracking the Spiral, but had the Spiral in turn been tracking him?

  I stopped thinking and kept shooting.

  Fire spread through the station. Inside the HURT, my vision wavered—black-armoured figures leaping out from the smoke. They were maniacs, fervent devotees to the Spiral’s cause. Their calling cards marked every bulkhead and hatch.

  REJECT THE LIE.

  NO PEACE.

  CLEANSE THE TANK.

  I checked my timeline. Found that I’d been off-ship for less than a minute, and already I was in Skinner’s lab sector. Glowing schematics on my HUD indicated that I had passed through the half-dozen checkpoints and security stations that marked the journey, but I had hardly noticed. Depressingly, none of those had been manned with Alliance forces.

  I evaluated the scene. The hatch to Skinner’s lab was sealed shut: coffin-like and resolute, although pocked with some heavy scorch marks. The HURT mapped the corridor, identified several bodies—still warm, but undeniably dead—outside the entrance. The components of a quadruped gun-bot were liberally strewn among the bodies—the lab’s last-ditch defence, now spent.

  The Spiral hadn’t got in yet, so that was a good sign. According to the HURT suit’s mapping programme, this was the sole entrance to the lab. I could only hope that Zero and Sergkov had sealed themselves in.

  I paused at the hatch. What about Dr. Skinner? Was he in on the Spiral’s plan, or was he the Spiral’s target?

  I lifted a hand. Despite its brute size, the HURT carried a deceptively delicate pair of gauntlets for precision work. I rapped an armoured knuckle against the metal door, while I activated my comms unit and searched for working bands.

  “…answer! Is that you, ma’am?” came a familiar voice, static-tinged and excitable.

  Zero.
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  “It’s me,” I said. “You going to let me in, or am I going to wait here all day? I’ve got hostiles on my tail.”

  Seventy-one seconds after I’d left the Santa Fe, I was inside Dr. Skinner’s lab.

  The place was a mess: papers and data-slates and breakable science shit scattered across the floor. I’d been wrong about the Spiral failing to get inside: fresh red blood—human blood—spattered the floor, and two man-sized outlines lay behind a bench, draped with opaque plastic sheets like funeral shrouds. When I opened the HURT’s helmet and drank in the local atmosphere, the smell of dead flesh hit me immediately.

  Zero bolted across the room.

  “I knew that you wouldn’t leave us behind,” she said, biting her lip. The emotion was raw on her face, her eyes rimmed red with stress.

  “You’re a Jackal, Zero. I’d never leave you.”

  “I wasn’t so sure,” said Sergkov. “The nature of this event wasn’t clear to us.”

  Major Sergkov and Dr. Skinner emerged from the rear of the lab. Both looked dishevelled, but relatively collected given the circumstances. Skinner’s pockmarked face settled into an impression of a grin.

  “A simulant, eh?” he said. “How marvellous. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen one of those. A Mark 16 combat sim, if I’m not mistaken.”

  I nodded. “Affirmative, Doctor. My real body is aboard the Santa Fe.”

  “Excellent,” Skinner said. “Most excellent.”

  “This is a new issue simulant,” I said, referring to the “Mark 16” designation. “I thought that you said you’d been alone out here?”

  Skinner shrugged. “I like to keep up-to-date on developments in the field, as much as I can.”

  “This will have to wait,” Sergkov interrupted. He turned to me, looking immensely insignificant and tiny before the might of the HURT suit. “What’s happening out there, soldier? Give me a sitrep.”

  “It’s bad. The Black Spiral have infiltrated North Star. They have agents everywhere, and they’ve taken control of station security. North Star’s a write-off.”

  Sergkov clamped his jaw, obviously displeased with my assessment. “Where’s the rest of your team?” he asked.

  “They’re aboard the Santa Fe, holding the ship and awaiting orders. But I can’t contact them: local comms are down. Probably being blocked by some form of jamming technology.”

  Zero swallowed. “We can vouch for that. We’ve been trying to contact you and the Fe since…” Her eyes trailed to the dead bodies. “Since they turned up.”

  “What happened in here?” I asked.

  “Two Military Police officers attempted to invade my laboratory,” Skinner said. “A man and a woman that I didn’t know.” He sighed. “I’ve been here a long time, Lieutenant. You get to know the same ugly faces.”

  I stared at the dead bodies, and something occurred to me. There was an awful lot of blood staining the floor. “I thought there weren’t supposed to be weapons on this station…?”

  “There aren’t,” Skinner said. “Although, in light of current events, I would suggest that particular policy is reviewed…”

  “Then who killed them?”

  “We did,” came an electronic voice.

  The Pariah was perched atop one of Skinner’s cryogenic banks, so preternaturally still that I hadn’t even noticed it until it had spoken. The alien uncoiled its sinewy body and dropped to the deck with a loud thud. I realised something as the bio-form stood before me.

  “You’ve got bio-weapons?” I asked. To Skinner: “You gave this thing guns, for Christo’s sake?”

  The Krell’s long arms ended in twinned weapon-enhancements—bio-guns that were not much bigger than a Widowmaker pistol, but wickedly curved and spiked, machined of flesh rather than plasteel. The guns meshed with the creature’s palms, giving the false impression that they were part of it. I’d seen that sort of bio-adaptation many times before; Krell secondary-forms were even purpose-bred to carry grafted weaponry.

  “Barb-guns,” the Pariah said. “Lethal to others at close range.”

  “Others?” I asked.

  “Humans,” Skinner said. “Pariah means that the guns are lethal to humans.”

  “Isn’t that nice,” I said. “You fishes sure are a hell of a species.”

  The Krell ignored the slight, if it had even noticed.

  “In answer to your question,” Skinner said, a defensive tone to his voice, “yes, Lieutenant, I gave ‘this thing’ weapons. All Krell have a genetic predisposition towards aggressive bio-adaptations. The weapons were self-developed, as was the armour.”

  The pariah-form came into the pool of light cast by the nearest glow-globe, and I saw that its frame was now significantly bulkier. It was wearing a full bio-suit: vac-proofed living armour that was almost as tough as a combat-suit. A sleek-looking, organic helmet was hooked to its back.

  I shook my head in surprise. “It’s your call, Skinner. It’s on your head.”

  Skinner indicated to the other cryogenic capsules, all sealed but just waiting for activation. “The species has a proclivity for spontaneous mutation, and so many of my experiments have ended up with dangerous bio-enhancements. Take experiment TY963: a Krell pariah-form that sports a carapace three times stronger than the average bio-form. Now, experiment WQ623 is even more dangerous—having developed a shrieker cannon on its left limb.…”

  The capsules were internally lit, catching the Krell prisoners in bright illumination, demonstrating Skinner’s handiwork. He might call this work scientific genius, but to me it was lunacy. These things were lethal. Although the Krell mutants trapped inside each pod were still frozen—bodies coated with frost-crystals, kept in deep-hibernation by a no-doubt potent chemical combination—I could feel their anger even now. I wondered whether these specimens were as rational-minded as the Pariah…

  Sergkov tutted impatiently. “This is not the time to debate the ethics of the Pariah Project,” he said. He nodded at a series of terminals set into the far wall. “Dr. Skinner’s surveillance network suggests that the attackers are moving on this lab.”

  I stalked over to the monitors and assessed the situation. Dark figures were advancing through the trail of destruction I’d left behind me. It was only a matter of time before the Spiral breached the lab door, and although I could hold my own I wasn’t sure how well I could protect the rest of the team. That, and there was no telling how long Carmine and the Jackals could hold out aboard the Santa Fe.

  “We’re going to have to find another way to the docks,” I said, thinking through our options. “There’s too much resistance in the main station. Is there any other way out of here?”

  Dr. Skinner rubbed a hand over his chin. “There’s a transit tunnel that leads down to the docks located at the rear of my lab. Several tunnels, in fact.”

  “Does anyone else know about that exit?” I asked, intrigued. The idea of a secret route off base, that would bypass the fireworks, appealed to me greatly.

  “I don’t think so,” Skinner explained. “When North Star was decommissioned, many of the transit tunnels were sealed. But I insisted that this access point remained active, just in case I needed it one day.”

  Zero sighed. “One day has come all right…”

  My sim-senses picked up an explosion somewhere else on the station, distant but close enough to cause me concern.

  “We need to get my research material onto your ship,” Skinner said, pulling at his jowls. “That’s the priority.”

  “How much material are we talking?” I asked.

  “We can use a buggy to traverse the tunnels,” Skinner said. He shrugged. “It’ll take a couple of trips, I suppose.”

  I laughed out loud as I watched the surveillance feeds. “There’s no way that we’re going to be able to make two trips, Doctor. I’m disposable; you’re not.”

  “I can’t leave this lab without my work. I can’t let all of this,” he waved a hand in the air, taking in the whole dirty operation, �
�fall into the Black Spiral’s hands.”

  I glanced around the lab. My eyes settled on the malformed thing in the nearest cryo-capsule.

  “There might be a way of solving this problem…” I suggested.

  “If you have a plan,” Sergkov said, “then I’d love to hear it, Lieutenant.” The fact that he had very little authority over this situation was irking him, and his impatience was growing. “We need to get out of here, and now.”

  An idea was starting to form in my head, becoming more defined as the Spiral advanced on the lab—as their footfalls started to sound through the structures around us. But as I thought on it, I almost hated myself for considering it.

  Needs must, I decided.

  “I think that I have a plan,” I whispered. I caught Zero’s eye. “But you’re not going to like it.”

  Turned out that North Star was criss-crossed with tunnels. Literally dozens of decommissioned rail lines, connecting all of the station’s major facilities: the legacy of an outpost that had once housed a much larger contingent of military personnel. Most of the network had fallen into disrepair, but Dr. Skinner had made it his business to keep several tunnels active. He provided me with a map marked with cargo runs.

  “These tunnels weren’t on my schematics,” I said.

  “Not even the MPs were aware of most of these passageways,” Skinner insisted. “They’re not on station maps, and I’ve only ever used this tunnel to take receipt of, ah, sub rosa specimens.” He pointed ahead, into the poorly lit tunnel mouth. “This route will take us to the main docks.”

  “And from there, it’ll be a short bounce to the Santa Fe’s berth,” Zero added. Her faux optimism was almost grating.

  The cargo run was a large empty space that seemed to capture and amplify sound. The noise of approaching battle was now undeniable.

  “We’ve got to move fast,” I said, slinging the last palette onto the back of the buggy.

  Skinner immediately set about lashing the cargo to the open bed. The small vehicle was loaded with miscellaneous science junk: a rag-tag selection of cryogenics tech, a terminal server unit, some small storage containers which contained Gaia-knew-what.