The Eternity War: Pariah

by Jamie Sawyer

  “Ah, ma’am, that wasn’t me…”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  THE ARK-SHIP

  My initial reaction was that Lopez was just wrong.

  She was the operator of the plasma battery, and of course she’d fired it! Nervously, I checked the ship’s near-space scanner—a projection on my mind’s eye, an element of the ship-to-operator interface. There was nothing else within range, but the scopes were scrambled.

  “Quit fucking around, Lopez.”

  “I … I’m not.”

  “Then what just happened?” Sergkov demanded.

  “I’m reading an enormous energy discharge…” a crewman said.

  I tore off my sensory-helm, yanked the jacks from my data-ports. Meanwhile, the tactical display registered another power fluctuation.

  “The Azrael’s been hit,” I said. “Someone is firing on her. And if it wasn’t us…”

  The Krell bio-ship had just taken a hit to the bow, and was breached. Frozen liquid sprayed from its insides. Although the engine was still alight, the warship listed precariously. I didn’t know exactly what internal systems had been damaged, but the impact had obviously done something to disable the drive function.

  “I’m getting more data,” Carmine said. “Can someone verify this?”

  Yukio swallowed so hard that I thought she might be sick. “Yes, ma’am. It’s a quantum-space breach.”

  As ever, we hadn’t detected the ship until it was virtually on top of us—at least in terms of deep-space combat—but now I could see that a second Krell warship had breached the quantum barrier.

  Not just a second.

  A third, then a fourth, appeared on the scanner. All jumping into real-space, making hard-burn towards the diseased bio-ship. A war party of at least six Krell scoutships had soon assembled.

  “What are they doing out here on their own?” I asked. “I’ve seen that ship pattern before, and it doesn’t usually sail this deep without support…”

  “Don’t question our luck,” Riggs said. “They’re on our side. We’ve got friendlies inbound!”

  The Azrael was soon surrounded by the scoutships, coming at her from all angles. The newcomers were fast and well armed. Bio-plasma and seeker missiles poured over the enemy bio-ship.

  But the Azrael was no easy target, and she fought back. An energy lance punched the dark and hit one of the scoutships. The smaller vessel’s null-shield flickered, failed to absorb the impact. The lance-strike was a solid hit—went right through the ship. The vessel exploded instantly. There was, I realised, no telling which way this battle would go.

  Pariah loomed over the tactical display. An aura of agitation, of something completely alien, prickled around the creature.

  “They fight others,” it said.

  “The infected?” Zero questioned. “The Krell aboard the Azrael?”

  “Not of Collective,” Pariah said. “Not same. Purging.” The Krell nodded its crested head at Zero, and repeated “Infected.”

  “We can talk about this later,” Sergkov broke in.

  “Hang on,” I said. “We’re seeing Krell fighting Krell. That’s not normal behaviour. Aren’t you a little more surprised by all this?”

  “Of course I am,” he said. I noticed that he was clutching the Hannover’s black box to his chest, the battered case reflecting the bridge’s low running lights. “But we remain at risk with enemy Krell in the vicinity.”

  “‘Enemy Krell’?” I said. “Another interesting choice of words, Major.”

  “Pull us out,” Carmine said, her voice quiet and firm. “Leave them to their war.”

  “Main thrust control engaged,” Yukio declared.

  The Jackals had by now all disengaged from the weapons stations, and watched our progress on the tactical display. We were pulling back, hard, making decent progress out of the Gyre. We were soon at the edge of the stellar anomaly. The Santa Fe’s scanners began to probe space beyond the sensor-void, increasing in efficiency outside the Gyre.

  “We’re going to make it,” Lopez said, balling her hands into fists. There was considerable distance between us and the Azrael. The bio-ship was ignoring us. “We’re going to be okay.”

  “Is great story for Senator, yes?” Novak said. “To tell Daddy how we escape the fish heads?”

  “We get out of this alive,” Lopez replied, “I’ll tell anyone who wants to hear.”

  “Can we jump yet?” I asked.

  “Always with the jumping,” Carmine said. I caught the hint of a smile on her lips, but she quickly turned away from me, not willing to give in to hope. “Another few hundred klicks and we can risk it. We’ve lost two decks to the void, and we’ll need to conduct some emergency repairs before we even think about engaging the Q-drive for a longer jump—”

  “I’ve got another incoming signal!” Yukio said, throwing alerts across the bridge again. “Watch your scanners. We’re not done yet.”

  Like a shark following blood, came another signal. On a tight trajectory, the bogie was heading straight towards our position.

  “That’s a big signal,” Feng said.

  It had now materialised in frightening detail. A titanic vessel, dwarfing even the Azrael, followed the initial war party.

  “Ark-ship,” I said. “Incoming.”

  Out of the frying pan and into the fusion reactor.

  This is a day of firsts, I thought, as I watched the living biological menace gradually appear on the tactical display.

  Two decades and then some, objective, in the Alliance Army, and I’d seen some serious shit. It was easy, some days, to think that I’d seen it all.

  Today was not one of those days.

  I’d never seen an ark-ship up close. Science Division had only glimpsed the arks, received precious snippets of intelligence from those who had been taken prisoner by the Krell during the war. Images of the vast, globular ships had been blasted across briefings—with Navy crew being told to watch for them, to gather intelligence without actually engaging them—but no one I had ever met had seen one for real.

  Ark-ships were the very pinnacle of Krell bio-tech, much bigger than anything the Alliance had ever built, made for the singular purpose of transporting Krell colonies through deep-space. The closest analogy in the human lexicon was a mobile space station. This was a star fort designed to skip Q-space.

  The ship was vaguely spherical but irregularly shaped, reminding me of an asteroid. Hull a dull charcoal, pocked by a hundred lifetimes’ sailing the void, with an engine erupting from the rear that trailed blue light as it cut thrust. The ship was accompanied by a protective escort, some of the scoutships we’d seen earlier breaking off and falling into a safe pattern around her weathered hull. There was enough firepower in that war-fleet to kill us ten times over.

  “Can someone please tell me how we missed this coming in on the quantum?” Sergkov yelled.

  “Shut the fuck up,” Carmine said. “And keep your voice down.”

  “I don’t think we’ll ever understand these things…” Feng muttered.

  Something that big breaching the Q had consequences. The ark threw out a disruption wave: sent ripples through quantum-and real-space. Electromagnetic disturbance was extreme—equivalent to a dozen Navy EMP mines. The Santa Fe’s systems-shielding was no match: all of her weapons died, immediately. Across the bridge, the lights went out.

  “We’re losing gravity!” Zero exclaimed.

  I felt my body gradually lifting from the deck, saw Zero grappling with the edge of a console bank, as the gravity drive gave up.

  “Life support is down,” Yukio said.

  “Initiate reboot,” Carmine ordered. “Initiate a reboot now!”

  “I … I’m not getting anything from my console,” Yukio said, her voice breaking. I’d been here before, seen how the veneer of military discipline could so easily crack. “We’ve suffered extensive systems damage, and the auto-repair module isn’t responding.”

  “We’ll run a cold reboot on the
life-support functions,” Carmine said. Her unwillingness to give up was quite admirable. “Get a body down to the energy core and run—”

  “That thing is advancing on us!” Lopez said, pointing outside.

  I lurched across the bridge. Grabbed Zero’s shoulder, pulling her into a safer position. She clutched my hand. Sweat had broken across her forehead, tiny droplets of perspiration escaping in zero-G.

  “It’s going to be okay,” I said. “It’ll be fine.”

  “How can you say that?” Zero replied, sounding almost hysterical. “How many of them are there on that ship?”

  She looked past me, over my shoulder, at the advancing ark-ship. It filled the view-port now: so close that I could see every crater on its hull, could see the dozens of docking bays that lined its outer skin.

  “I don’t know,” I said, honestly. “I only know that you’re going to be okay.”

  The ark was studded with coral-like protrusions, with bone growths that belied any rhyme or reason. The ship had a randomness to it: as though, whereas humanity had tried to tame nature, to make everything fit just so, the Krell had instead chosen to embrace chaos. As I saw the full scale of the hostile, it struck me that even if we had control of our weapons systems, the Santa Fe didn’t have enough ordnance to make so much as a scratch on the ark-ship’s hide.

  But Zero didn’t need to hear any of that. She was shaking. Her auburn hair escaped around her head like a halo, uncontrolled, reflecting her state of mind. Feng was at her side now, too, and I let the pair embrace, bodies floating away from me.

  “What’s happening to the fish?” Lopez asked.

  Pariah drifted across the bridge, limbs thrashing against terminals and crew alike. Its voice-box emitted a series of garbled warning messages, as though unable to translate any longer, and it was oil-wet, a repugnant odour washing the bridge.

  “It’s a two-way mirror,” I said, to Sergkov. “That was how Dr. Skinner described the Pariah’s connection.”

  Sergkov hissed. “So?”

  “Maybe whatever is aboard that ship is trying to bring Pariah back into the fold,” I offered.

  “And that’s good how?” Lopez asked.

  “I didn’t say it was good,” I replied. “But perhaps we can make contact with them.”

  Pariah touched a claw to its head. “They are Kindred of the Silver Talon Collective. Our kin.”

  Was the Pariah tapping into the Collective, becoming lost in the abyss of shared intelligence? I remembered what Dr. Skinner had told me: that the pariah-forms were separate from the rest of the Collective, but still connected to it.

  The ark-ship threw a shadow across the Santa Fe, cast by the distant stars. One of the many hangar bays, which looked increasingly like an open maw, lined up with our position.

  “Gravity readings are fluctuating,” Yukio declared. “It’s … it’s sucking us inside.”

  “Can it do that?” Lopez said, looking around the room for confirmation that this was in fact possible.

  There was no answer to her question.

  “It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” Sergkov said, sighing. “I’m issuing an abandon ship order. All hands make for the evacuation pods. It’s over.” Sergkov was broken, and his words sent a ripple of hysteria across bridge.

  “Bullshit,” I said. “We board those pods, we’ll die in them.”

  The ark-ship grew larger with each passing heartbeat. A planet, capable of generating its own gravity field: the Fe like a moon, trapped within its orbit.

  “I’ll escort you to the SOC,” I said, “and the Jackals will get skinned up. We’ll stand our ground and repel any Krell that try to board the Fe.”

  “My orders are to abandon this ship!” Sergkov said. “Anything else is suicide!”

  His hackles rose, eyes burning from across the chamber. No one moved. Sergkov’s hand dropped to his pistol, rested on the holster buckle.

  Riggs, Lopez, and Feng floated around me. Novak just a little closer, making it plain that if anyone was going to shoot, he’d react soon thereafter.

  “No,” Carmine said. “Jenkins is right. We have to make a stand.”

  “Five sims against that?” Sergkov said, tossing his head towards the view-port and the advancing ship.

  I said nothing but met Sergkov’s gaze. He was silent for a moment.

  Finally, he said, “Execute the order. We’ll repel them.”

  I nodded. “Very good, sir. Jackals, let’s move. Yukio, try to hard-restart all ship’s systems.”

  “You’ve got some balls on you, Jenkins,” Carmine said, a thin smile on her lips. “The SOC is still running. You’re on emergency power.”

  Only then did I notice that Carmine’s carbine had been stowed beneath her terminal. She removed the weapon and harnessed herself in her workstation.

  “We’ll get Pariah down to medical,” I said. I glanced at the crumpled, sweated abomination of a xeno. It looked pitiful. “I think that it may be our only method of communication with the ark-ship.”

  “How long until that thing swallows us?” Carmine asked. “I need a number, Yukio.”

  Yukio shrugged, an exaggerated motion in zero-G. “Two minutes, ma’am. Maybe less.”

  “You heard that,” Carmine said to me. “That’s how long you have to make preparations. Crew, you might like to break open the weapons locker. This is New Ohio, all over again.” She stroked the stock of her carbine, the arming stud turning green.

  “Second time you’ve said that this mission,” I said.

  “And yet I’ve still got my other leg.”

  “Good luck, Carmine,” I said, brushing my hand against her shoulder as I drifted past, already making my way to the hatch.

  “I have the distinct feeling that we’re all going to need it,” Carmine said. “So the same to you too.”

  Sergkov and I took point, jointly supporting Pariah’s bulk—not an easy task in zero-G—and kicked off down the corridor as fast as we could. Feng and Zero stirred close behind, Zero plotting our route through the pressurised decks of the ship. Riggs, Novak, and Lopez took up the rear.

  “That way,” Zero said, pointing ahead. “Take the main corridor to Junction B-6.”

  That was the spine linking the command modules such as the bridge, Medical, Engineering. The walls were plastered with words in printed glowing letters: EVACUATION PODS THIS WAY—DECKS 4–19 TO 4–23. Sergkov glanced sidelong at the open doors, at the activated control panels. I could see that he was tempted, but our confrontation on the bridge had put pay to any further discussion about abandoning ship.

  I readjusted Pariah’s mass under my arm. The xeno was shivering, its voice-box chirping with machine-code that could just as well be an alien language.

  The air tasted metallic and cold. Behind us, Riggs, Novak, and Lopez had stopped at a bright red box that was set into the wall. Labelled EMERGENCY, it was loaded with supplies such as respirators, oxygen bottles, flare guns: everything a girl could want in the event of a hull breach. Riggs took to distributing the stash.

  “Keep up!” I barked. “Feng, go get them. We don’t have time for this.”

  “Copy that,” Feng said. He broke off from Zero, retraced our steps to hurry on the rest of the squad.

  Back to Sergkov, I said, “You knew about the Hannover, didn’t you?”

  Sergkov’s tongue shot from between his lips, licked them experimentally. Snake-like. When he answered, I was surprised by his honesty.

  “Yes. We knew.”

  “And that was why we came out here, wasn’t it? To collect the black box, I mean.”

  “Not just the black box, but whatever was left of the Hannover. That was always our objective. But everything I’ve done, everything that has happened … It was for the good of the Alliance. You have to believe that.”

  I shook my head. It wasn’t far to Medical now. “That’s not how the Jackals will see it.”

  “I chose you because I knew that I could trust you. I knew that if anyone could ge
t this done, it would be you.”

  “Flattery will get you everywhere but off this ship. What’s really happening out here, Sergkov?”

  “I’m trying to stop a war,” he said, bluntly. “What you saw on that bio-ship: it’s only the beginning. I’m not in this alone.”

  We were on a roll so far as honesty was concerned, and it struck me that this was the most intel Sergkov had shared with me the whole mission. I chanced my luck with another question.

  “And Cooper?” I asked. “Who is he? How does the Black Spiral fit into this? Don’t pretend that you don’t know.”

  “Cooper is a prime target for the Alliance intelligence agencies. He, and the Spiral, are—”

  There was a yell from behind us. “Ma’am!”

  Zero’s voice. Shrill, panicked.

  I whirled around. Only managing to control the movement of Pariah’s bulk with Sergkov’s help.

  I hadn’t realised how far the Jackals had dropped behind. The squad was still back at the evac-pods, encumbered with survival gear—the straps of breather masks and cables from oxy-bottles floating around them like a cloud of flies—made slow by zero-G. Riggs, Novak, Lopez, and Feng.

  Zero kicked off after me, pointing at the ceiling frantically. Indicating to something no one else had noticed. I frowned, tried to follow her words as she shouted over the emergency klaxon.

  “Hatch!”

  The light set into the deckhead had begun to flash.

  “Emergency breach detected in module B-13,” the AI said. “Please evacuate this corridor. Safety protocols initiated.”

  The whole ship was subject to emergency safety routines, and a series of bulkhead hatches set across the main decks would seal in the event of decompression. That was basic starship protocol: an age-old method to inhibit the spread of fire, or prevent atmospheric breach across multiple modules. It was supposed to save lives, not take them.

  Every face was stricken into a kind of living rigor mortis. I was paralysed as I played out in my head what was going to happen.

  The hatch is going to seal.

  That will cut the corridor in two.

  The Jackals will be sealed on one side of the ship, and Pariah, Sergkov, Zero, and I on the other.