The Eternity War: Pariah

by Jamie Sawyer

  “Are you sure that we can’t go back for another load?” he asked.

  “I’m sure.”

  “But I think that I’ve left some of my virology research behind. Perhaps if the Pariah could…”

  “The lab is compromised,” I said. “You know the plan.”

  “Yes, and I’m not at all happy about it. They are not weapons!”

  “We’ve already been through this.”

  Skinner huffed, but did as he was ordered, and he and the Pariah settled into the rear passenger section. The buggy had six seats and had once probably been equipped with a gun hardpoint, but that was in a former life, and now its rubber wheels were only used for transporting cargo up and down the station’s transit route.

  “Lab is prepped,” Sergkov said, buckling into one of the front passenger seats and glancing back the way we had come. His eyes trailed to his wrist-comp, at the graphics that indicated a link to the lab’s security systems. “Let’s hope that your plan works. Sergeant Campbell is driving. You can drive, can’t you?”

  Zero licked her lips and nodded. She looked desperate to get out of here, and I couldn’t blame her. “Of course. We had aerocars on Mau Tanis before the fall.”

  “You were eight years old when Tanis fell,” I said.

  “I also picked up a little during Basic…” Zero insisted.

  “Fine,” Sergkov said, now staring into the darkened interior of the transit tunnel: our route out of here. The place stank of oil and burnt rubber. “Just don’t get us killed.”

  I clambered onto the buggy’s cargo bed, and its wheelbase sagged as the vehicle took my weight. From here, I had a pretty good vantage point down the tunnel, and I would be able to deploy my suit-guns at a distance. I hoped that I wouldn’t need to use them.

  Skinner stirred again, moaning to himself. “I need to go back. I can’t leave those files!”

  “Buckle in,” I said, putting a gloved hand to his chest. The simple action almost winded him, and he unwillingly settled into his seat. “There’s no time left. I mean it. The Spiral are advancing on the main entrance right now, and once they breach your lab…” I let that hang. “Start her up, Zero.”

  Zero powered up the buggy’s engine. An electric hum reverberated down the tunnel, and two thin headlights penetrated the gloom.

  The stretch of tunnel ahead was tight, long, and straight—featureless except for the overhead rail line, now redundant and unpowered. A small local-network map appeared on Zero’s control panel, beneath the steering wheel, and the HURT’s sensor-suite tapped into the vehicle’s primitive intel system. I snapped my helmet into place, allowing the data-stream to flood my neural cortex.

  “Go,” Sergkov ordered, slapping one hand on the dashboard. “Now.”

  “Solid copy,” said Zero. The buggy moved off down the tunnel. “Is Chu okay?”

  “He was last time I saw him,” I said. I couldn’t give Zero any more assurance than that. “He sends his love.”

  “Really?” Zero asked.

  “No, but your reaction gave away more than it should.”

  “Concentrate on driving,” Sergkov muttered. “You’re carrying one of the premier minds of the Alliance scientific community.”

  Skinner smiled. “It’s nice to be recognised.”

  The buggy began to build up speed. The Pariah bristled in front of me, lurching in the ill-fitting seat, perhaps reacting to our plan. Although it was almost sitting on him, Dr. Skinner showed no apprehension about being so close to the alien—

  LAB BREACH, my suit said.

  “Hold on!” I yelled.

  There was a cavernous boom from somewhere behind us.

  The transit tunnel shook with the force of the explosion. Debris and dust clouded the buggy’s headlights, fat motes of dirt falling from above. Zero built up speed, driving faster and faster.

  “You ready?” I asked.

  “All that research…” Skinner whimpered.

  “I’m ready,” Zero said.

  “Do it,” Sergkov barked, as though trying to retain some modicum of command.

  “Opening cryogenics pods now!” I shouted.

  Back in Dr. Skinner’s lab, the two dozen capsules holding his failed experiments suddenly opened. The Spiral were going to get one hell of a welcome committee.

  TAKE EVASIVE ACTION, my suit insisted. XENO CONTAINMENT BREACH.

  “They’re free,” I said. “Plan has been executed.”

  The effect was almost instantaneous. From the direction of the lab: screaming, the chatter of gunfire, alien shrieking. The noise carried off down the tunnel, echoing tenfold.

  “We feel them,” the Pariah said.

  The alien’s features twitched. Was it unhappy that its kindred, feral or otherwise, were being used as cannon fodder? It was hard to tell much from the alien’s face, but Skinner was much easier to read.

  “Such a damned waste!” he deplored. “Those specimens presented invaluable research opportunities!”

  “I’ll bet,” I said. “But it was our lives or theirs.”

  “Kindred fight,” the Pariah said, its electronic voice linking to my helmet in a way that I found disturbing: as though the creature’s thoughts were being projected into my head. “More others come to lab.”

  “Tell your buddies to kill everyone who gets into that room,” I said.

  “Just make sure your friends don’t come after us,” Zero said, her hair whipping about as we drove. She looked terrified.

  The Pariah said nothing to that.

  “What’s the range on this thing?” I asked Skinner. “The Pariah, I mean.”

  “Unknown,” Skinner said. “I was still running field tests. The link to the collective consciousness isn’t always reliable. You should be aware that the effect works both ways: it’s a two-way mirror. In other circumstances this might be a disadvantage…”

  The buggy lurched onwards. The tunnel sides were smooth but oppressively close.

  “Half a klick to go, Zero,” I said. “You’re doing fine.”

  The HURT’s sensor-package flagged the end of the tunnel as a glowing icon. There was a hatch that led directly into a disused hangar; I would have to dismount the buggy to manually open the shaft and let us through. My bio-scanner was effectively useless at this speed, and I couldn’t tell whether there were hostiles beyond the hatch. Just had to hope that Skinner’s intel was reliable—that no one else knew about the tunnels.

  “Are you able to make uplink with the Santa Fe yet, Lieutenant?” Sergkov shouted, turning his head back in my direction.

  “Not yet, but—”

  “Down,” said the Pariah.

  “You talking to me, fish head?” I asked. “Because I don’t like—”

  But then an enormous force hit me in the chest, and the buggy pitched forward.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  READY TO EXTRACT

  I tried to make sense of what had just happened. It had been so sudden that, even with my sim-senses, I struggled to process it.

  I’d been thrown from the buggy and hit the deck: hard.

  My medi-suite ran a damage report: indicated that I was shaken, but otherwise unharmed. That was the organics taken care of. So far as my suit was concerned, ARMOUR INTEGRITY 100% showed on the HUD. My bio-scanner commenced a reboot—

  Something swooped from above, and gunfire raked the ground next to me. I rolled sideways, simultaneously struggling to my feet. The HURT suit wasn’t made with agility in mind.

  Multiple shooters.

  Positioned in the rafters of the transit tunnel.

  I brought up the suit-guns.

  WEAPONS SYSTEMS RECALIBRATING, the HURT insisted. ADVISE AWAIT COMPLETION OF DIAGNOSTIC PROGRAMME BEFORE—

  I fired both guns. The tunnel lit with a swarm of self-guided ammo. Without the suit’s targeting suite, the gesture was token, but it would force any potential attackers to keep their heads down. Instantly, I knew that I’d done something right. An armoured shape fell from above, made
a loud crunch as it hit the deck.

  All of this took place in a second—a fraction of a second, maybe. For me, now under the sway of combat focus, time was slowing, becoming syrupy and flexible.

  For Zero, Sergkov, Skinner, and the Pariah, it was moving at an altogether different rate.

  The buggy careened forward. Zero fought with the steering, but panic gripped her. More gunfire sparked the deck, and as the buggy jinked to avoid being hit, Zero lost control. Her short, sharp scream was largely lost to the cacophony of weapons fire that filled the tunnel.

  With a squeal of shearing metal the buggy collided with the tunnel wall. It rolled end over end, came to a stop twenty metres up the passage, upside down.

  Now my suit was back online, bio-scanner functions had been restored. Behind us, from the direction of the lab, definite signals were pursuing. Fear rose inside of me like a hurricane. Those signals could be Black Spiral, or they could be the Krell mutants. Neither thought was comforting.

  I dashed for the buggy. Cleared the distance in a couple of strides, and let my null-shield take the heat of enemy gunfire.

  Zero was strapped in and upside down, held by the safety webbing, barely protected by the driver section roll-cage. Sergkov was beside her, struggling out of his seat. I couldn’t immediately see what had happened to Skinner, but his precious lab gear was spilled across the deck, crushed by the weight of the errant transport. Smoke had started pouring from the buggy’s engine module, its wheels still spinning.

  “Stay down!” I ordered. “We’ve got hostiles coming down the tunnel, and I’m reading bio-signs closing from the direction of the docks as well—”

  Shapes were emerging from the smoke around us: troops in bulky exo-rigs. I recognised them as the Warlord’s elite, as Spiral veterans from Daktar. They were making quick progress, plasma and assault rifles stuttering as they advanced.

  The Pariah bolted past me. One of the tangos fell with a yelp, eviscerated by the Krell. The alien tore another in two with its shoulder-mounted talons. Tossing the body aside, the alien dodged a retaliatory volley of gunfire with ease.

  “We are being ambushed,” the Pariah coolly declared.

  “No shit.”

  Another jackhammer blow hit me in the side. The force was immense—enough to stagger me, despite the HURT suit’s gyro-stabilisers.

  Without thinking, I brought my guns up. Explosive rounds stitched the corridor.

  The attacker darted under my field of fire, moving with superhuman speed. Quite something, given that I was using self-guided ammunition. I lurched forward, and reactively punched out with one hand, grappled with the other.

  I hurled the body against the tunnel wall with weight enough to kill a normal skin. But instead of doing the decent thing and dying, the attacker got back up, slammed a fist into my torso.

  “Mothhherrr-fffucker!” I growled. “No one damages my armour!”

  The armour plating to my chest had become warped: deformed in the shape of a fist. What could’ve hit me hard enough to damage reinforced exo-plate?

  “You awake there, Lieutenant?” intruded a voice over my comms.

  Warlord.

  He wore the same armour as I’d seen him in on Daktar, suit covered in Spiral motifs, helmet sprayed with the image of a crude skull. But the armour looked more ragged, worn out, than before, with a dirty camo-cloak that gave Warlord a wraith-like appearance. A long-shot sniper rifle was strapped across his back. I decided that must’ve been responsible for knocking me from the buggy. Equipped with shield-breaker rounds, a weapon like that would be capable of breaching a HURT suit’s null-shield.

  Without answering him, I brought up my suit-guns to fire, intent on ending this.

  But, shit, Warlord moved fast. Flipped across the tunnel. An impressive move, especially in an exo. The camo-cloak reminded me of those used by recon teams during grounds ops, and it whipped around him as he moved. He launched at me, fist connecting with my face-plate.

  I took the blow full-on. The visor of the HURT suit rang with the impact, but didn’t break.

  Now I was getting angry. I tracked Warlord, brought my left arm up to shoot—

  He parried the movement with his forearm. Diverted, my suit-gun sprayed the tunnel floor.

  I twisted. Slammed a fist into Warlord’s body—

  He dodged again, narrowly avoiding another stream of smart rounds—

  We traded blows, again and again. Every time one of us loosed a shot, the other countered it. Every time one of us went to land a blow, the other dodged or parried it. Warlord’s suit was smaller, but fast; my armour was heavy, but slow. He was equipped with a micro-grenade rig on his forearms—but couldn’t get a fix on me. Equally, every time I shot on him with my suit-guns, he managed to evade and move off.

  Battle raged around me. On the HURT’s HUD, I saw that the Krell were almost on us now, that any second the tunnel would be filled with Skinner’s science experiment rejects.

  “Zero!” I yelled, blocking another skull-shattering blow from Warlord’s powered gauntlet. “Get out of here! Now!”

  I managed to grapple his cloak, and yanked hard. Warlord slammed to the ground, on his back, but quickly evaded the curb-stomp I attempted with my boot. Who is this guy? I asked myself. No ordinary terrorist, that was for sure. He was putting up quite some resistance. Would I get the better of him? Probably. Already, I noted that his movements were slowing—perhaps suggesting that he was tiring. But would I get the better of him before the Krell broke out of Skinner’s lab? I wasn’t so sure.

  “It doesn’t have to be like this,” Warlord said.

  “How are you using my comms grid? It’s restricted.”

  Icons on my HUD indicated that the comms grid was still secure, so I knew that Warlord wasn’t hacking the network, but he was accessing an encrypted military channel.

  “I have methods,” he said. “We’re not that different, you and I.”

  “I just want to get my people off this station.”

  “A noble objective,” he said. “It’s a shame that our paths must cross, Lieutenant. Things could’ve been different.”

  Warlord evaded another volley from my suit-guns, and hurled himself at me again. He landed a series of blows across my torso with machine-like precision, each fist threatening an impact like a railgun. My armour held.

  Zero and Sergkov were stirring from the wreckage of the buggy now, but the Spiral were surrounding them. There was nothing I could do to help them: Warlord was my focus.

  “There’s a darkness within us all, Jenkins,” he said. “You’ve just got to learn to let it out. When the time comes, which side will you be on?”

  “Not yours, that’s for sure.”

  I couldn’t see Warlord’s face behind the visor of his helmet, but I could hear the sneer in his voice. “You sure about that? I was like you, once.”

  Another hammer blow from my HURT suit, another dodge from Warlord. That presented its own set of problems—how the fuck was he outrunning me? I was in a sim and a full HURT suit. He was a nobody.

  “That so?” I asked. “Then what happened to make you such an asshole?”

  “A lot. I’m surprised that you don’t know.”

  “Why are you here, Warlord?” I said. Desperate to buy time for Zero.

  “Because I wanted to speak with you,” he replied. “Because you need to know what’s happening out here.”

  “All I see is a bunch of tangos who want to see it burn.”

  “That’s probably how it looks, but it’s far from the truth. The Krell can’t be trusted, Lieutenant. We’re here to right a wrong.”

  “Then you don’t need us any more,” I said. And done! I jerked my head in the direction of Skinner’s lab. “You can take it out on them.”

  The bio-scanner on my HUD flared with activity: a ragged mob of signals, swarming down the tunnel.

  “Zero!” I said, over the comms. “The Krell are here! Get back!”

  The Pariah must’ve felt the sh
ift in battle as well. It hurled the body of a terrorist aside, then jumped towards the wreckage of the buggy. Took up a defensive position, bio-guns raised, back to Zero and Sergkov.

  “They come,” it said. “We must go.”

  Warlord froze. Eyes back down the tunnel.

  I could’ve shot him then. Probably, I should have. But’s it’s very hard to make rational decisions when you’re presented with that many fish heads.

  They swarmed the tunnel.

  I knew that there had only been twenty-four viable specimens in Skinner’s cryo-capsules, but it sure felt like there were a lot more. They moved so fast, and they looked so wrong. The Krell predilection for mutation had spiralled out of control, each so very different: each the product of the Fleshsmith’s warped scientific intellect.

  The tangos barely got off a word of warning before the Krell fell on them.

  The first was shredded by stinger fire, speared by a dozen rounds of living ammunition. He screamed, loosed his own carbine in the direction of the attacker. But the Krell had already moved on, thrown itself at another Spiral agent.

  “Back!” one of the insurgents yelled. “Get back!”

  Suddenly, we weren’t the focus of the battle any longer.

  Warlord launched himself into the conflict, as if unable to resist the opportunity to spill Krell blood. He left me with a parting comment.

  “This can’t go on. It’s not peace. It’s giving up.”

  COMM LINK SEVERED, my suit said.

  “Whatever you say,” I replied.

  I retreated down the tunnel. Zero and Sergkov crouched beside the buggy, Pariah towering over them.

  “Will they attack you as well?” I asked.

  The alien stared at me impassively. “We are Pariah.”

  “I think that’s a yes,” Zero said.

  I desperately wanted to tell Zero that we were going to be okay, that we were going to make it, but I couldn’t bring myself to lie to her. I was going to wake up in the tanks with a bad hangover and another war story. Sergkov and Zero: they were the ones trapped down here for real.

  “Secure the Fleshsmith,” Sergkov ordered, waving at the rear of the buggy. “He’s the priority.”

  But I realised that I hadn’t seen Skinner move since the crash. I peered into the wreckage, found him upside down, still held in place by the safety belt. His arms hung limp at his sides, smock spattered with blood.