by Jamie Sawyer
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CONDITION CRITICAL
The shuttle carried a basic chemical drive—nothing so fancy as a fusion engine or Q-drive, but it was fast enough.
The world shifted. The bio-ship’s interior blurred.
We were in space. Outside.
And then came the hard burn.
Thank Gaia I was in a sim. My musculature locked up, the G-force pinning me to the pilot’s chair. Every organ was squashed by the enormous pressure. I think that I screamed, but who knows? Everything was happening so fast—too fast—and the pounding in my head was almost unbearable. The comedown on combat-drugs is a bitch, and I knew that I was now riding the tail end of that particular comet: the simulant nearing end of life.
Warnings filled the Warhawk’s control console. A siren sounded in the cockpit, the shuttle’s AI speaking, but the words were lost to the throb of my own heartbeat.
Were the Krell giving chase? No way of knowing right now. I hadn’t seen any aerospace support on the Azrael, but we’d only explored a tiny fraction of the ship. When I tried to lift my arm, to activate the local scanner, it slapped back down, restrained by the G-force.
I couldn’t see or sense Pariah’s response, and I wondered whether the fish had been crushed by gravity. It was hard to care when I was in this much pain. I ground my teeth. All that kept me going was the assurance that it would soon be finished.
“I’m taking over control from here,” Carmine’s voice cut in on the comms. She sounded so far away, like she was on a different plane of existence.
“Please do,” I managed.
The Santa Fe’s battered hull was dead ahead, coming up fast to meet us.
“Don’t want you crashing into my ship, after all,” she said, in her matronly way. “Not after everything you’ve just been through.”
The shuttle’s grav-brakes hit, and the boat began to decelerate. That was almost as unpleasant as the acceleration, but at least it was briefer. The Fe’s outer docking door was open, and the shuttle—now slowed to a speed that my simulated skin found far more agreeable—slid into the bay, skids clanking against the deck, generating a dull roar through the Warhawk’s cabin.
“You are damaged,” Pariah said. Its voice warbled erratically, as though it was speaking to me underwater.
“Huh, you’re not dead after all.”
I tried to sit up in the cockpit, but the body resisted. Didn’t feel like it was mine any longer.
“Do you read me, Lieutenant Jenkins?” came Sergkov’s voice, squawking from the console speaker. “Are you still operational?”
“Negative,” I slurred. “Multiple injuries. It’s over. I’m done…”
There was noise at Sergkov’s end of the connection. Something was happening on the bridge. I laughed, but the sound was horrible and wet and sent shivers of pain through my ribcage. How could anything else go wrong? Hadn’t I done enough? The black box was suddenly in my hands, slick with my blood.
“Extract,” Sergkov ordered. “Feng and Lopez will take care of the Pariah.”
I turned to the alien beside me. Parts of its armour had been torn away, revealing charred skin beneath, and it had taken several impacts to the torso, stinger-spines poking through ruptured bio-plate. Dark Krell blood splattered the inside of the Krell’s face-plate, had stained every surface it came into contact with.
“You okay?”
The Pariah nodded. “You go now.”
“You say that a lot,” I said.
Then it raised a barb-gun to my head, and fired.
The neural-link severed, and I jumped the length of the Santa Fe, the simulation collapsing around me. I was back in my tank, in the familiar surroundings of the SOC.
Of course, I’d never really left my body. It had been here all along, remotely controlling the sim in the hellish environs of the Krell bio-ship. But it was hard to think that way sometimes, because the memories of what had just happened—like a nightmare, vivid and thick, the product of an overworked imagination—came back with me. My real body carried the agonies of the sim and especially the kiss of the barb-round to my temple, but the sensation was already fading. I rested a hand against the inside of the tank’s canopy, felt the conducting gel begin to stir and evacuate the capsule—
The world around me swayed.
“Get dressed!” Zero yelled.
“Wh—what…?” I slurred.
I wanted to explain that I needed time to become accustomed to my body again, that whatever she had to tell me could wait, but the urgency in Zero’s voice, the expression on her face: those things told me that I should do as she said.
“Just get dressed. Captain Carmine wants us on the bridge.”
So I clambered out of the tank. With Riggs at my shoulder, I struggled into a pair of fatigues, still dripping with gel from the simulator. Riggs was in his real skin, but wore a Navy-class flak vest that barely fitted his muscled chest: with the words UAS SANTA FE printed in bright white letters across the plate.
“Come on, come on,” he urged me.
“Bridge, now!” Novak yelled from the corridor outside.
The ship is moving, I suddenly realised. And I can feel it. Except that wasn’t possible, not normally. The inertial gravity field held us in a tight envelope, protected us from the effects of acceleration…
“Unless the inertial damper is failing,” I decided.
“You got it,” Riggs said. “You’ve got to get moving, Keira!”
Zero and Riggs propped me up. A wave of anxiety came off Zero, her eyes wide. Her command station in the centre of the SOC was long-abandoned, and gone was the sense of adventure.
She isn’t just watching this any more. She’s living it, and maybe dying it too.
The overhead lamps sputtered, and the deck was plunged into darkness.
Novak grabbed my shoulder, hauled me out of the SOC.
Riggs filled me in on the latest news as I stumbled the distance across the ship. The situation had developed at a terrifying rate: I reckoned that Riggs had extracted from his sim seconds before I’d touched down in the Fe’s dock, and yet so much had happened in that brief space of time.
“Deck two is gone,” he said, solemnly. “Carmine is calling a ship-wide emergency.”
“But we’re not bailing out,” Zero added, machine-gun rapid.
“Not yet,” Riggs said. “While you were on the Azrael, the Navy crew have been tracking activity throughout this sector.”
“Then who’s shooting at us?” I asked.
“Whoa,” Novak yelled, almost crashing into Pariah as the xeno rounded the corner. “Easy, fish!”
“I’m watching it,” said Feng, holding a sim-class Widowmaker pistol in both hands, trained on the alien. He carried the Hannover’s black box in his other hand, and was looking down at the module as though he couldn’t quite believe it was here.
Pariah ignored both of them. Cocked its head like it was listening to a distant song that only it could hear. The alien still wore its bio-suit, and although it was oozing ichor from every open wound on the armour, the lacerations were beginning to seal: its blood coagulating. Enhanced regeneration—perhaps another of Dr. Skinner’s gifts.
The deck shuddered, a cold gust of atmosphere making my skin tingle.
“Hull breach,” Novak declared, as if I hadn’t already deduced that for myself. “The missile bay is gone.”
“I still haven’t heard who is actually firing on us,” I said. “Will someone give me a proper sit—”
A siren sounded overhead, cutting off my words, and the ship’s PA system crackled.
“All personnel to the bridge,” Carmine declared. “Now.”
The Santa Fe’s meagre crew filled the chamber, and worked with a focus that I hadn’t witnessed from them so far. Even Carmine: processing data faster than I’d ever seen, hard-jacked to her command console. The captain’s eyes flitted between the display unit in front of her, and the Fe’s near-space holo, as she babbled commands at her staff.
“Crew to weapons stations!” she barked.
Sergkov appeared from a recess of the bridge. “Where the hell are your people, Captain? We don’t have time for this!”
Lieutenant Yukio jabbed keys at her console. “Fabian and Klein were on deck four, checking the missile bay—”
“Then they’re gone,” Feng said. “We’ve just passed the missile bay, and it’s open to vac.”
“That’s a confirm on the damaged deck,” another officer replied. “We have venting atmosphere in three modules.” A wireframe holographic of the Santa Fe span in front of the staffer, flashing with numerous red markers, indications that the ship had suffered significant damage. “Missile bay charlie has been hit.”
“Jettison the tubes,” Carmine said. “We can’t risk those warheads cooking off.”
“Aye, ma’am.”
“That’s one of your primary armaments, Captain,” Sergkov said. “What are you going to fight them with?”
“It’s either that,” Carmine said, “or this ship goes up with the missiles. Have you ever experienced the uncontrolled explosion of a high-yield warhead? In your real skin, I mean?”
Sergkov set his jaw. Turned to Feng. “Give me the Hannover’s black box, Private.”
Feng very reluctantly handed over the memory module, and the MI man took it.
“Hope it was worth it,” Feng said.
“It was all we came here for,” Sergkov replied.
“All we came here for?” I repeated, letting the words bounce around my head. “We were supposed to be an escort operation, Sergkov. Not recovery.”
“This is not the time,” Sergkov said.
Riggs met my eyes with a hard glance. “First we’ve heard about it…”
“Holy shit,” Lopez said. Her face was still loaded with lacerations, pocked by the simulated deaths she’d just suffered on the Azrael. “How the fuck are we going to fight that thing?”
Then I saw for myself why everyone was so spooked.
The Azrael dominated the view-port and the tactical display. The sheer enormity of her bulk suddenly became apparent, but that wasn’t the worst of it.
The misleadingly delicate-looking drive spines that ringed the ship’s aft—reinforcing the impression that the vessel had more in common with a deep-sea creature than a starship—were no longer a dull grey. They now glowed a pure, eye-watering blue—like the most inviting ocean I’d ever seen: the pictures of the western seaboard’s coast my grandpa had kept on his wall. The black hull flickered with sporadic light, bridge-blisters illuminating.
“She’s waking up…” I whispered.
Plumes of frozen fluid—ejecta from dormant systems—shot across space, and the ship was caged by debris as it threw off the vestiges of interstellar sleep. Tiny specks of light raced along the hull: attack ships that looked like silver needles, starlight reflecting off their hulls.
“Null-shields up, three-sixty degrees,” Carmine ordered.
“Aye, ma’am. Shields up.”
Carmine’s mechanical leg was jerking uncontrollably, and she was sweating heavily: almost through the back of her fatigues. The hand on her leg carried that crumpled picture of her daughters again, and now she didn’t seem to care who saw it.
“What is happening to fish?” Novak said. “Does not look so good.”
Pariah’s features had adopted a sort of blank serenity. It did not react at all to Novak’s comment.
“Maybe it’s infected…” Lopez mused. “Jesus, what if the plague, or virus, or whatever it was on the bio-ship … What if the Pariah is infected with it?”
“You aren’t paid to think about things like that,” Sergkov said. “You’re paid to go where I say, and die doing it.”
“Not for real, we’re not,” Riggs said.
Sergkov’s nostrils flared. His face was chiselled from stone, his brow determined and resolute. “Turn of phrase, Corporal. Nothing more.”
“I think that we can safely say that Pariah is out of the game,” Riggs said. He spoke with particular vehemence, a tone that I hadn’t heard from him before. I wasn’t sure that I liked it much. “Fucking waste of life getting it in the first place. Your plan failed, Major.”
“Hostile starship is moving,” another officer said. “I’m detecting energy readings consistent with weapons charging…”
“Pull back, maximum thrust,” Carmine chanted. “I want as much distance as possible between us and that bio-ship.”
“Can we make a quantum-jump from here?” I asked.
Carmine never took her eyes from her terminal. “Not until we clear the Gyre.”
A lance of energy speared across space, from the Azrael. Met the Santa Fe’s null-shield and dispersed, but close enough that several of the Fe’s stations reported damage.
“Azrael is giving chase,” an officer declared. “She’s accelerating hard.”
“Give me drive control now,” Carmine said, the pitch of her voice rising.
“Hostile is targeting us,” Yukio declared. “Multiple tracking systems.”
“Initiate counter-measures,” Riggs said. “Make an evasive manoeuvre!”
“Let the Navy see to it,” Feng insisted, holding an open hand on Riggs’ chest, pushing him back into his seat. He nodded at me, his expression cool and neutral, half of his features claimed by the glow of the bio-ship’s lighting drive, now almost painfully bright through the view-ports.
We’re not getting out of this, he silently communicated. And I know it.
Just as silently, I found myself pondering whether clones worried about meeting their makers. Feng and I hadn’t deigned to discuss his exact religious position. Another question that I’d never get the chance to ask.
Riggs reached over and fleetingly grabbed my hand. I tried to ignore him, pushed it away: felt bad that he was almost certainly going to die out here with a bitch of an older lover.
“Not now,” was all I could say. “Not here.”
Anything that he might’ve had to say by way of reply was lost as the Azrael attacked. Bio-cannons opened up.
“Brace,” Carmine said.
Space was awash with energy discharge, and the view-ports polarised to hold back the glare. The tactical display flickered intermittently.
“Weapons operators!” Carmine yelled. “Get me my weapons trained on that ship!”
Yukio shook her head. “We’re all that’s left, Captain. I’m not seeing any more life-signs aboard the Fe.”
This was it, then: the Jackals, and a half-dozen remaining staffers. Everyone else had been caught in the venting decks, in the chaos of the initial attack. I’m going to have to do something about this, I thought. I struggled out of my crash-couch.
“Jackals, get to the weapons stations,” I said. “We aren’t going down without a fight.”
Carmine smiled at me. “That’s my girl.”
The Jackals moved to crew stations, jacking to data-ports.
“Will it do us any good?” Lopez said.
Looking out into space, at the slumbering giant that was the Azrael, I honestly couldn’t say.
There were five weapons stations arranged around the edge of the bridge: immersion-pods with their own specialised data-ports and sensory-deprivation helms. I slipped into the nearest, was vaguely aware of the rest of the team doing the same, and fastened the helm into place. I swapped my eyes for the Santa Fe’s external sensors, immersed myself in the datascape. I was no starship weapons officer—with the exception of maybe Riggs, none of us was qualified for this—but one of the benefits of being simulant-operational is that the technology is universally compatible. A wealth of battle-data flooded my synapses, registered in the machine-implants that every operator carried.
USER RECOGNISED, the Santa Fe told me. WEAPONS FREE.
The Azrael appeared not as a bio-ship any longer, but as a target. A collection of data on the subject scrolled across my mind’s eye, filtered through to the weapons at our disposal. The Santa Fe wasn’t made for direct combat
, but we had some offensive measures. Her most powerful weapon was an ion accelerator. I took that, while Riggs and Novak were on the railguns, Lopez on the plasma cannon battery, and Feng took point defence lasers.
“Just shoot,” I ordered. “And don’t stop until you’re dead.”
Novak grunted across the bridge. “Is not hard.”
“Dying or shooting?” Lopez asked.
“Where I come from, is both,” Novak said. “Railgun away.”
The Azrael advanced at a frightening speed now, gaining momentum. Bio-plasma cannons fired from its flanks, picking off incoming railgun munition before it got into range. Offensive weapons packages met defensive counter systems. The Krell had an organic equivalent to everything we had machined.
The Santa Fe was smaller, more manoeuvrable, and Carmine did a good job of maximising that advantage. She initiated thrust when she could, giving us the best chance of countering incoming weapons fire.
We scored a couple of hits on the bio-ship, but nothing significant: nothing that would put the ship down. It was a war of attrition. The Krell bio-ship was so much bigger. Although most of the Azrael’s return fire was absorbed by the Fe’s null-shield, that couldn’t go on forever. The Fe took at least two hits, suffering damage to non-critical systems.
“Railgun bay beta is empty,” said Novak.
“Energy reserve on point defence lasers is reaching critical condition,” Feng declared.
“We’re going to have to drop shield on the portside—” an anonymous officer said.
“No!” Carmine shouted. “Keep all shields raised!”
Plasma suddenly rippled along the Azrael’s hull. A cheer went up across the bridge—the exhausted and beleaguered crew grateful to see any effective action against the monstrous bio-ship. Several further explosions followed.
I looked sideways, to the station next to me: crewed by Lopez. She was on the plasma battery—must’ve been responsible for the successful hit.
“Well done, Lopez,” I said. “Good shot.”
Lopez bobbed her head in the sensory-deprivation helm, curls of dark hair escaping beneath the visor. I could only see the lower half of her face inside the helmet. She was biting at the inside of her lip.