The Eternity War: Pariah

by Jamie Sawyer

  “It is dead.” The Pariah observed the doctor’s corpse with a slightly cocked head and a blank expression. Did the alien feel anything for its creator’s passing?

  “My suit confirms it,” I said. “Body’s already cold.”

  Sergkov’s eyes flared with anger. “Jopa! He was for priority retrieval!”

  “Least of our worries,” I said. “Take cover behind me. I don’t know how long I can protect you—”

  A Krell bio-form—weeping ichor from a dozen wounds—dashed past me, lunging towards Zero. It was bigger than Pariah, wearing bio-plates that sprouted thorns. Zero screamed, recoiling from the enraged xeno—

  The Krell was lanced by a bright plasma bolt. The seared corpse collapsed at Zero’s feet.

  A new signal appeared on my HUD, coming from the direction of the docks. A friendly signal, IFF and freq-beacon blazing.

  “You look like you could do with some company,” Feng said over my comms.

  He bounced up the tunnel, using his EVAMP, and landed beside the buggy. Wearing a full combat-suit, carrying a plasma rifle. Fully skinned and ready for war. He scooped up Zero from the wreckage of the buggy, and nodded in my direction.

  “Shall we go now?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “I think that would be a very good idea.”

  Under the cover of the escaping Krell, we emerged from the transit network and into the docks. Two berths on, and we reached the Santa Fe: just where I’d left it. The cargo ramp still kissed the deck, a warning lamp flickering in the ship’s open guts.

  Covering Zero and, by association, Sergkov, Feng bounced onwards. He wasn’t wearing his tactical helmet, and his face was smeared with soot and stitched with fine slashes: the tell-tales of being too close to a frag grenade detonation. Although the injuries looked painful, they were skin-deep, not serious. Feng’s improved simulated blood had already started to coagulate.

  “How’d you find us?” I asked. “Those tunnels were supposed to be secret.”

  “I just followed the fighting,” Feng replied. “Thought that you’d be in the thick of it.”

  “Always try to be.”

  Feng paused, then said, “I thought I’d lost you.”

  “I’m not that easy to kill,” I answered.

  “I wasn’t talking about you, ma’am,” he said. He sounded sheepish, which was a difficult thing to achieve in a sim.

  Zero stirred under in his shadow, her body tiny in comparison to the armoured bulk of his simulant. Her uniform was in a state of utter disarray, a bruise beginning to develop on the line of her jaw.

  “Maybe I’m not so easy to kill either,” Zero said, with a bitter grin.

  “Let’s hope so,” Feng said.

  Alongside us, the Pariah leapt from surface to surface, adhering to the sides of cargo crates more like a spider than a fish.

  “Who approved this transition?” I asked.

  Now that we were at close range, I had a clean comms link to the Jackals, and got green signals for encrypted comms with the Santa Fe as well.

  “That would be me,” Riggs said. Also skinned and armed, plasma rifle to his tactical helmet. “I was using my initiative.”

  “We all know where that will get you,” I said.

  Riggs, Lopez, and even Novak were at the cargo ramp, all in sims, their armoured outlines easy to differentiate from the Spiral. The Jackals pounded North Star’s hangar with suppressing fire, but it wasn’t necessary: the Spiral were focusing their attention on the Krell, giving us a temporary reprieve. It was impossible to tell how long that would last, and we had to make the most if it. That was the thing about fanatics: they were easy to rout, but they got up just as fast.

  As we made it to the pool of bodies surrounding the Santa Fe, Novak’s face twisted into a grimace. He turned his plasma rifle on the Pariah.

  “This the fish?” he drawled.

  The Pariah flipped both barb-guns in Novak’s direction, alien face mimicking the aggression of Novak’s features. I was quite sure that both outcasts could kill each other in an instant.

  “This is the Pariah,” I said. “Play nice. For now, it’s on our side.”

  The Santa Fe’s engines were hot, the running lights on her nacelles flashing in sequence. The spooling engine components were generating a low roar in the oxygenated atmosphere, sufficient to making my bones rattle uncomfortably even inside my armour.

  Lopez started, “Captain Carmine’s ready to evac—”

  Her words were cut off by the whine of incoming gunfire.

  “In!” Lopez screamed.

  Black Spiral troops began to fill the deck behind us, and a grenade went off closer than I would’ve liked. Whatever Warlord’s intent aboard the station, he was dedicating a lot of firepower to the operation. He wanted something on this base, and he was going to make sure that he got it. As I pounded onto the ship, my null-shield flashing with incoming fire, I caught a glance at the heaped bodies on the deck. I thought of Skinner, dead now, left behind. Had the Spiral come here for him, or his research? But now wasn’t the time for answers.

  The Pariah lingered behind, pausing at the foot of the ramp. The xeno fired both barb-guns, gunslinger style, into the advancing Spiral troops.

  “We’ve got to go!” Riggs said. “There are too many of them!”

  I grabbed the alien by the shoulder-guard of its bio-suit. It was deceptively heavy, even with the HURT’s strength-amplifier.

  “Leave them,” I said. “Save the ammo.”

  “It can make more,” Novak rumbled.

  “Not the point, lifer,” Lopez said.

  “Everyone in?” Carmine’s voice came over the comm link.

  “That’s an affirmative!” I said. “Go, go!”

  “Glad to hear that you made it back,” Carmine said. “I knew you would.”

  “Liar,” I replied.

  Her cargo ramp still deployed, gunfire pattering against her hull, the Santa Fe began to lift off. It was a manoeuvre that I suspected was strongly against Navy protocol. The deck bucked and listed as the ship’s engines activated.

  “Lopez!” I yelled. “Get the cargo ramp shut!”

  “Hold tight,” Carmine said. “This isn’t going to be my best take-off…”

  “Just get us out of here,” Sergkov said, reasserting his command. “On my orders!”

  Carmine laughed throatily. “You’re still alive too, huh?”

  The Fe’s hold was dowsed in amber light as the deckhead warning lamps lit. A thin siren sounded across the hold, the deck vibrating beneath us. The cargo ramp shut with a resounding boom.

  “We’d better get to the bridge,” I said.

  The Jackals, with Sergkov and the Pariah, spilled onto the bridge as the starship took flight, the entire spaceframe bucking like a goddamn bronco. Without being instructed, the Jackals slipped into the crash-harnesses around the edge of the bridge, ready for gravity failure if we took a catastrophic hit.

  I’d disembarked from the HURT suit, simply because it was too big to wear on the bridge, but the rest of the squad were still equipped with their combat-suits. No one was yet willing to give up the protection of the simulant bodies, and as the Santa Fe accelerated out of the hangar, and the tactical display lit with incoming targets, I thought that we might well need them. A sudden movement from the Pariah, slinking at the edge of my field of vision, reinforced that belief.

  “What the hell is that?” Carmine yelled, eyes still on the controls but poking a finger at the alien. “And why is no one shooting it?”

  “No time, Carmine,” I said. “No one shoots it until I give the order.”

  “No one shoots it at all!” Sergkov shouted at me.

  “You do not have permission to disembark from the bay!” a static-riddled voice said from the comms console. “UAS Santa Fe, this is North Star Traffic Control: pull back on thrust now!”

  Carmine stabbed at the console, her ship accelerating. “Oh, fuck you,” she said, closing the channel.

  �
�Maybe not everyone on the station was a traitor after all,” Feng offered.

  “Just go!” Sergkov ordered.

  “What does it look like I’m doing?” Carmine said.

  Traffic Control must’ve realised that unless they opened the docking bay doors, the Santa Fe was just going to go straight through them, because the dock was in vacuum, the bay doors now open. We cleared the chamber at significant thrust.

  “Holy shit and Gaia on a brick…” Feng said.

  North Star spread out before us. The station sparkled with internal fires, with vented and crumpled modules. Everywhere, docking bays were open or punctured. The tactical display tracked targets all around—the remains of ships that had been caught in the station takeover, other fleeing vessels, the station’s evacuation pods.

  “Null-shields are active,” an officer declared.

  “Fusion drive is powering up,” Lieutenant Yukio said, her display dancing with green lights. “We’ll have control in less than a—”

  A warning siren filled the bridge.

  “Targeting lasers,” another officer said. “Two ships. Portside.”

  “Are you tracking them back?” Carmine said.

  “Affirmative,” the officer replied.

  The Santa Fe accelerated aggressively, away from North Star. On the display, more guns were turning in our direction. Two ships broke their positions, started after us.

  “This is UAS Santa Fe,” Carmine said into her console. “Unidentified vessels, please stand down. North Star is experiencing some sort of takeover event—”

  “They’re part of it!” Lopez insisted.

  “Multiple targets,” an officer said. “Closing fast.”

  The tactical display was very suddenly and very clearly filled with warning icons.

  “What in Gaia’s name?” Carmine cursed, as though her disbelief of the enemy action would somehow protect us. “Those are damned civilian ships.”

  What little detail the Santa Fe could glean from the enemy vessels surely indicated that the enemy ships were civilian-made. They were cargo-transports, although likely refitted: those vessels were usually unarmed, and few carried null-shields.

  “Weaponised civilian ships,” I said. “Can we outrun them?”

  “They look like they have fast fusion drives,” Carmine said. “I don’t know if we’ll make it through this mess…”

  Six starships closed on us, but even more vessels were breaking away from North Star, and debris was fouling our sensor-suite.

  “Our fusion drive is at 90 per cent,” Yukio said. She paused, swallowed. “We could make for the Gate.”

  The Shard Gate sat ahead. It seemed to fill the view-port.

  “Do it,” Sergkov said, his voice now steely calm. “Take us in.”

  Carmine fumbled with her console, murmuring something to herself that sounded like a lullaby.

  “Firing counter-measures,” a weapons officer, whose name I’d never even asked, declared.

  The display lit with detonations, as the Santa Fe’s laser defences caught incoming warheads. Still, we were one ship, and with so much enemy fire surrounding us, we couldn’t go on like this. Laser fire raked our null-shield.

  Carmine nodded. “Make it so. Bearing ninety degrees, full fusion.”

  “Aye, ma’am.”

  The Santa Fe’s main drive engaged. We moved towards the Shard Gate, falling between twin rows of gravity-buoys that marked the approach path, flashing red against the black of space.

  “Here we go,” Carmine said, licking her lips.

  Then the Santa Fe accelerated hard, alarms wailing, and was consumed by the waiting Shard Gate.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  HOSTILES

  They say that the Shard were machines. From what little evidence we have of their original form, Science Division insists that they were a type of life-form that was born of a violent and completely alien ecosystem.

  But what hell breeds machines like this?

  Machines that feel.

  As the Santa Fe went through the wormhole—that’s still the best we can do to describe the interstellar Network—I felt a wave of emotion crashing over me. So intense and complex that I could barely comprehend it.

  Colours, lights, visions of things that might or might not be real.

  A string of stars blazing with such intensity that they must surely now be dead.

  A trio of worlds that had once been green. Now no more than blackened nubs, trailing their atmosphere to the void.

  Then nothing.

  Nothing.

  Only the endless expanse of space, and the cold—empty—reassurance that no matter what we did out here, no matter what we did to each other, none of this really mattered, and the universe did not care.

  No. I couldn’t accept that the Shard Network was built by machines, that it was the result of an analytical or a logically ordered mind. The Shard Gates touch something in us all, something dark and irrepressible.

  As we entered Shard Space the Santa Fe, and everything and everyone aboard her, ceased to exist.

  After such a brief, infinitesimal segment of time that it could only be described by Science Division as “instant,” we were back.

  One moment we were in the Drift, on the edge of human space.

  The next we were in the Maelstrom, coordinates unknown.

  The Santa Fe erupted into real-space. The sensation was nauseating but thankfully also brief. Maybe it was easier on me because I knew what to expect; I’d been through it a handful of times before. Even so, I couldn’t resist grasping the arm of my crash-couch—trying to maintain some semblance of normality, to anchor myself to reality.

  Not everyone had such a painless reaction. Even in a simulant, this was no easy ride.

  Lopez was monumentally sick, pouring the contents of her guts onto the deck. Given that she was in a simulant, and hadn’t eaten anything in that body, that turned out to be a stream of stomach acid and green bile. The odour was strong enough that it made my own gorge rise, and I stifled the urge to join her. Vomit splattered her combat-suit.

  Novak still had his eyes pinned shut, as though he was frightened to look at the view-screens around him. The image was vaguely comic: the trooper made enormous by his combat-suit, but humble by the expression on his battered face.

  Riggs shook uncontrollably.

  “Can’t stop falling,” he murmured. “Just can’t stop falling…”

  “That’s a common reaction to a Shard Gate translation,” Zero said. She looked more excited than shaken—another experience to be quantified and considered. “Extreme loss of balance has been recorded in several cases.”

  “Why are we being affected like this?” Lopez said, wiping a hand across her chin. “We’re in sims!”

  “It’s the crossover from the effect that the jump is having on your real bodies,” I explained. “Look it up sometime. Turns out that the Shard aren’t so bothered whether you’re using a real or simulated skin.”

  “Yeah,” Riggs said, “it fucks you up all the same.”

  “That’s about the size of it,” I said.

  “You want me to break out the meds?” Feng asked. He slapped a hand to the chest-plate of his armoured suit, where the onboard medi-suite was located.

  “They make you Directorate bastards out of better stuff than the rest of us?” Carmine said, voice gravelly but devoid of malice. “Why are you holding it together so well?”

  Perhaps it did have something to do with his clone physiology, because Feng seemed the most collected of the Jackals. He shrugged off the comment; he’d just endured much worse aboard North Star.

  “Better sense of balance in my real body,” he said. “I was built to travel the stars for real. Maybe that’s why it’s not getting to me.”

  “Forget medication,” I said. “Best we can do is extract.”

  “Check it out…” Novak managed, throwing an armoured thumb in the direction of the Pariah. “Does not like Gate much, yes?”

&nbs
p; The xeno had coiled, snake-like, into a corner between terminals. Its eyes flickered open at the sound of Novak’s voice. He hadn’t even mentioned the creature by name.

  “This is Machine Gate,” the Pariah said. “We do not like it any more than others.”

  “He means us,” I said, translating for the alien.

  Carmine searched my face, looked at the Pariah, then back at me. “It’s … talking? They do that now?”

  “Just this one,” I said. “So far, at least. We can explain later; it’s an experiment. Is the Santa Fe operational?”

  Although obviously dissatisfied with my truncated explanation of why a Krell bio-form was somehow capable of speech, Carmine nonetheless turned back to her terminal.

  “Just about,” she confirmed. “We’ve got full AI processing power, and the navigation module is online. Internal systems are shielded against the effects of a jump.”

  Around us, the bridge was gradually shaking off the effects of the jump through Shard Space. All of Carmine’s officers were alive and functioning, which was all we could ask for in the circumstances. Without being asked, a couple of officers saw to the mess that Lopez had made, and she looked away with embarrassment as they worked.

  “Confirm our location,” Sergkov said, at Carmine’s shoulder now. “This Gate has been fully mapped…”

  The Fe’s sensors took a second to draw a holo-map of the sector. We were on the edge of a foreign system.

  “We’re in an explored but unlisted star system,” Carmine said. “Four planets. A dozen moons. Uncolonised. The Gate’s emissions are fouling our sensors; it’s going to be hard to get much more data without launching a sensor probe.” She paused, pulled at her chin as though deep in thought. Something on the scan had caught her eye. “Take us towards that moon.”

  The identifier “NX-923” flickered on the map.

  “Aye, ma’am,” an officer responded.

  “What are you doing?” Sergkov said.

  Carmine snorted. “I’ll take care of the flying, if you don’t mind. Make it a hard burn, maximum thrust!”