by Jamie Sawyer
But there were more. Always more. Krell poured into the corridor, secondary-forms readying to launch ranged attacks. Threat markers flashed across my face-plate. My null-shield initiated as boomer-fire came from somewhere ahead.
I tossed a frag grenade down the length of the deck. It shook the area as it exploded, stitching the corridor with hot shrapnel and momentarily driving back the boarders.
I knew how this ended. I knew that this was futile.
A primary reached our line, but Pariah was on it. It slammed barbs into the XT’s bio-armour, then barrelled into the hostile. The alien squirmed under Pariah’s weight, thrashing, and went down in front of me. I stomped it with an armoured boot, splitting the alien’s thorax.
“You weren’t shitting me about your buddies being aboard the ship,” I said. “They’re everywhere.”
“We were not shitting you,” Pariah replied, as though unsure of my meaning. “They are not our ‘buddies.’”
“You’re learning fast.”
“This way,” Pariah said. Falling back towards the cargo bay now, away from the bridge. There were simply too many Krell in that direction.
The bulkhead had been ruptured, and through a curtain of live wiring—spitting white sparks—was another module. My suit suggested that we were dangerously close to the outer hull now. Maybe, I decided, this was part of the damage caused by the Krell attack—one of the multiple hull-breaches we’d suffered during the ark-ship’s assault. That the Fe had stayed space-borne for so long after suffering this sort of damage: that was impressive.
Pariah leapt ahead, monkey-like, into the hole in the bulkhead. I did the same, grazing the edges as I pulled my bulk through. We were in an access shaft: one of the elevator hubs between decks.
“What the damn—?” I started.
A lobster-like claw slashed through the Santa Fe’s metal skin. Its tip punctured the hull and emerged in the corridor wall, producing a startling scream as it tore metal.
I turned my rifle on the appendage, but in the blue light of the plasma discharge I saw more of the alien claws. A dozen perforated the metalwork, working fast to open up more holes. The Krell were equipped with specialised ship-boarding enhancements, something I’d never seen before. Bio-electricity danced the alien weapons as they opened the ship like a tin can.
“Stop them, P!” I said, frantically. “We’ve got to stop them!”
It was then that I noticed that Pariah wasn’t moving any more. It had returned to that hypnotised state, grimacing uncomfortably.
“Cannot…” it said. “Collective comes…”
Shafts of light ruptured the outer hull. An opening as big as a man—bigger even—had been created in the passage wall. I went to retreat backwards, firing repeatedly with my plasma rifle. But the tide of bio-signs was closing in behind me, the net tightening.
I was trapped, and I knew it.
“Fight them!” I yelled, spittle flicking across the inside of my face-plate. “We’ve got to fight them!”
Weapons fire poured in from the opening in the hull. Stinger-spines bounced off the metal walls, boomers sparking my null-shield. Lumbering quad-forms—Krell so big and wide, so fully enclosed in their alien bio-suits, that they resembled living tanks—widened the opening in the hull. Their lobster-like heads turned to me, barking commands at the wall of lesser Krell warriors that encircled the Santa Fe.
Through the breach in the hull, I saw flashes of the environment beyond. The Fe was inside an enormous cave. Green-black walls that ran with mucous and liquid, shafts that erupted in every direction. Hellish organic geometry, a world within the closed bio-system of the ark-ship. The same warped architecture of the Azrael, but on a much bigger scale.
Primary-forms circled Pariah. The alien went down, fate uncertain.
As the Krell closed in on me, I vaguely considered making a jump for one of the tunnels. But even as the thought formed in my mind, I knew that it was fantastical. Impossible. There were hundreds of aliens here: Krell of every variety, carrying nightmarish bio-weapons of every type. And only one Zero. She was the only other confirmed survivor of the Jackals, and right now she was somewhere in the Fe—hiding from the horde of XTs that were invading our ship.
I fired my plasma rifle into the tide of xenos.
LOW AMMUNITION! my suit warned.
A leader-form—recognisable because it was bigger than the other Krell primaries, because its bio-armour was more ornate in an alien way—waved a webbed claw at me.
“Come on, you fuckers!” I screamed.
I grappled for a grenade from the harness across my chest, readied to activate it.
Then a rain of stinger rounds covered the area. My null-shield finally collapsed, and a round punctured the armoured plating at my chest. I gasped, dropped my rifle, staggered backwards. The flood of bio-toxins into my simulated bloodstream was very nearly instant. I raised my hand, thumb to the grenade’s detonator…
But my fingers were numb, unresponsive. Too late. The toxin was already working.
Should’ve taken my own advice, I thought. I’m sorry that I let you down, Zero. No: that wasn’t her name. It was just what everyone else called her. Zoe: that was her real name. That was who she was.
The agony of the engineered poison detonated inside of me, and I was screaming, and the lights went out.
Since the war on Mau Tanis began, the nights had become infinite.
Not just darker, but truly limitless: the sky an impenetrable smog, a cloak that was difficult to navigate by day. By night, there was nothing to navigate with. The moons—once ever-present orbs against the silken, Earth-like horizon—were now gone. The stars concealed by the chemical shroud that the Krell War had brought with it.
“I’m clearing Main Street,” I said into my combat-suit communicator, my voice a whisper. “These colonists aren’t very inventive with their road names.”
“Keep radio comms minimal,” came Captain Harris, his gruff tone carrying over the short-range comm grid and making it rougher still. “Fishes are out there.”
Harris: callsign LAZARUS. No one called him Harris.
“Tell me about it,” I said.
“This place is a damned mess,” Kaminski muttered. His Standard was branded with a thick Brooklyn accent, impossible to mistake.
I glanced at the bio-scanner in the corner of my HUD. It showed the rest of the Lazarus Legion, spread across the remains of Mau Tanis Main. Felt reassuring to know that at least four of these blips were mine—were friendlies doing just the same as me. Reassuring, but didn’t really make this job any easier.
“They don’t believe in leaving much behind,” Harris said.
“You’re breaking your own radio rules,” I replied.
“I make ’em, I break ’em.”
I plotted my way through the remains of a habitation module. The metal and plastic had been bonded by the intense heat of the bombardment: an assault that had lasted all of two minutes, if Naval intelligence was accurate. Sixteen million people had once lived here—had once called Mau Tanis home. It had been a teeming metropolis, an example of Alliance terraforming to be lauded all the way back to the Core.
Now? It was a few dozen kilometres of dead earth. Of skeletal remains. Of charred derelicts and still-burning forests. Hard to believe that the fishes had done this, but it was nothing new.
“Hold,” I said.
My soldier-sense—all the stronger because I was in a simulant—stirred into action milliseconds before I saw the signal on my scanner. Plasma rifle up, panning the gloom of the abandoned hab. If it wasn’t for my tactical helmet multi-sense, I wouldn’t have been able to see in there at all.
“What have you got?” Harris asked.
“Anyone else in my sector?”
“No. Report?”
“I’m getting a bio-sign. Something weak. Ahead.” I picked my way through a room of dead bodies, blast-burnt by the bombardment. Some of those bodies were small, child-sized. I reckoned that this place had onc
e been a family home. “It’s in this building.”
“Wait for me,” Kaminski said. “I can be there in two.”
The signal fluctuated just ahead of me. Didn’t seem very strong.
“Hold your post, Jenkins,” Harris said, gruffly. “I mean it.”
“I don’t think that it’s Krell,” I said. “I’m sure that it isn’t.”
“Doesn’t mean that you should be going after it alone,” Kaminski said.
I ignored them both. In a full combat-suit and a sim I was heavy, and the structure I walked through groaned sympathetically. Mau Tanis had been built for the future—a world of gleaming metal and plastic alongside habs of dark oak and synthetic wood: an attempt to show that not all colonies had to be impersonal, militarised steel bunkers. When war had come a-calling, that vision had been the planet’s undoing.
I cancelled my multi-vision and popped on my suit-lamps. The brilliant beams played around the room, picking out the variety of shades of black that the chamber had become.
“Wait!” Harris ordered. “Jenkins, this isn’t—”
I don’t know why I did it, but I cancelled my comm. Directed both lamps into the corner of the room. Something stirred there. Something that had remained hidden, had survived the Krell bombardment. Had somehow, against the odds, survived.
“You … you okay?” I asked. The words came out too loud, and I dialled back the volume of my external speakers.
A bundle of rags cowered in the corner. A filthy moon of a face peered out from behind what had once been the arm of a chair: two eyes set deep into the pale-skinned face.
I’d never had much empathy with children. Never really encountered many; in those days, if I wasn’t on an operation, I was getting ready for the next. But something about the little girl in the corner of the room, it called out to me. She called out to me.
I crouched. Felt the servos in my legs creaking beneath me, the combat-suit taking the weight.
“You okay?” I repeated.
The girl had a shock of ginger hair. A speckling of freckles across the bridge of her nose, over her cheeks. She held up a hand to her face, shielding her eyes from the light of my lamps.
“I’m sorry, kid,” I said. Turned down the lights.
For a long while, she just crouched there, watching me.
I cracked the seal on my tac helmet. Slowly, so as not to freak her out, I removed the helmet. Set it down on the floor between us.
“Hey, kid. You can talk to me. I’m Alliance. I’m here to help.”
The girl’s face gradually softened. Not by much, but enough.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Zoe,” she whispered. “My name’s Zoe.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
END GAME
Drip-drip-drip.
The shock of being alive was almost as vivid as that of dying.
I was suffering from the worst hangover ever. My limbs throbbed, and every beat of my heart was agony. I’d felt plenty of pain before. That wasn’t a problem for me. But this? It was something new. My temples ungodly ached, had become deep wells of pain that threatened to suck me in.
I was still skinned—still in a simulant. Surprising. But I wasn’t in my combat-suit any more, and only wore my neoprene undersuit; I guessed that the Krell had cut me out of my armour, although for what purpose I didn’t know. I’d never seen them do that before.
I realised that I couldn’t move, was being held in place by something that bound my legs, arms, body. Only my head and neck were mobile. I was in some sort of cocoon, webbing tight around me. I twisted in my bonds, tried to get some idea of my location, but the pain came back again. Getting free would have to wait.
Where was I? How long had I been here? My eyes took a while to adjust to my surroundings. Bioluminescent fungus, or at least some alien equivalent, had collected here and there, casting pale light across the chamber, but the place was dark. It stank of Krell—the sickly, briny smell that accompanied them everywhere, but so much stronger. I fought the urge to gag, to throw up. I felt my nose wrinkle, twitch. A bug, or something like it climbed, my face, just visible on my cheek. The dripping was water, coming from somewhere far above, running down the slicked walls.
Then it struck me that the room around me was the wrong way up.
Or, to put it another way, I was upside down. I could already feel the rush of blood to my head, the pressure that came with being held in this position for too long. Probably not fatal, yet, but it would be soon. Without my armour, I had no medi-suite to rely on. Hysteria gripped me for a second, and I renewed my efforts to break free of the cocoon, violently thrashing, wriggling both legs together. But the cocoon was made from a strong, weed-like material—something that seemed to constrict the more I fought.
“Everyone thinks I am bad. But sometimes, when they think you are bad, it makes you that way.”
I strained my neck to find the origin of the voice.
“This is prison, but this is not worst.”
Slavic. Russian.
I focused on the shape beside me. I recognised it.
“Novak?” I asked. My throat was dry kindling and it hurt to talk. “Is that you?”
“Is me,” he said. Then continued, as though he wasn’t bothered by my presence: “I know prisons. I know worst gulag on Old Earth. They ask why I join up. They ask what I do to make it so. I tell them one day.”
Like me, Novak was suspended. Encased in green webbing. Swaddled all the way to his neck: only his head poking from the cocoon. He turned to me, sharply, visible in outline.
“Fifteen men I kill, and that is truth. But not two women. No women.”
Have you gone insane? I wondered. He was babbling, his voice sounding as though his larynx was filled with grit. I could hardly stand to listen to the crack of it as he talked.
“They put me in deepest, darkest hole. No light, never. They accuse me of killing my own wife and child.”
“You don’t have to tell me this,” I said. “We have to get out of—”
“I do have to tell you this,” Novak pursued. “I have to tell you this because if we die in here, I want you to know truth about me. About Leon Novak.”
“Not now, Novak—”
“I was once bratva, a member of the Brotherhood. Like your crime rings, yes? An enforcer, is word. I work for them. I go where they say. I do what they tell me. I make money for family. I have wife, I have daughter.
I had no choice but to hang there and listen to the man’s ramblings. Who knew whether it was true? It probably didn’t much matter now.
“Then one day I decide: no more. I decide will be good man.” Novak grinned, and the bioluminescent fungi flashed against his teeth. “I try to. But no one leave bratva. Brotherhood, ones I call friends, come after me.” He sniffed, and let out a long, pained howl. A cry. “They take them both. Kill them.”
“You don’t need to tell me this,” I said again. Slowly, patiently.
“I am blamed. So they lock me away. And I become the monster they want me to be. And in that hole, in the gulag, I kill the rest. But not because I am bad man, but because I must. To survive, you understand? Only to survive. Fifteen men. No women.”
“We don’t have time for this,” I said. Began to wriggle in the cocoon again, fighting to get free. “We have to get out of here.”
Then, as suddenly as a flipped switch, Novak’s presentation changed again. The wracking sob that had enveloped him evaporated, was replaced by the cold determination of the killer that I knew. His transformation was terrifying.
“Easy,” he said. “Don’t want to black out again. You’ve been under for long time.”
“How long?” I asked.
Novak laughed, and because he was upside down the noise came out all weird. “I only know I am here long time before they bring you.”
“You’re hurt,” I said. My eyesight was changing, improving, and I could make out more of Novak’s features now. I registered his face: bruised, lacer
ated all over. Something dark—blood—dripped from the pate of his head.
“Is nothing new,” he said. “Is life, or something like it. I saw them bring you in. Is worse for you, yes?”
Sensation was returning to not just my head, but also the rest of my body. Now that Novak mentioned it, I could feel the poisoned throb where the bio-toxin round had hit me. It felt like the undersuit had been torn there.
Memories came flooding back, so fast that I had to close my eyes to ride the pain-wave that accompanied them. The Jackals being cut off. Carmine left on the ship. Pariah. Then, most poignantly: Zero. In the SOC. Alone again.
“Where are the others?” I asked. “Have you seen Zero?”
“The Krell came aboard the Santa Fe,” Novak explained, “and took us. I fight back, kill one of fishes.” He gave a characteristic grunt, a sound that might’ve been another laugh. “There were too many of them. The sailors got hit. They won’t be coming back.”
“Is Riggs…?” I started.
“They took him. They took all others—Sergkov too. But since I am here, I have not seen any others.”
“What about Carmine?”
“She was not with us.” Novak sighed. “Is good captain.”
And just like that, I saw the spark of hope. That, or the blood pooling in my head was making me see flashing lights. Either was possible.
“I’m still on the Fe,” I said. “My real body, I mean. In the SOC. And if you haven’t seen Zero, then she must be there too.”
“I hope so,” Novak said. “She does not deserve to end up like them…”
My eyes suddenly focused on the desiccated things at the edge of the cave. Human-sized cocoons that were webbed to the walls, from which pale, atrophied faces peered. I could just make out scraps of uniform, Navy blues and Army khakis. Those poor bastards were long dead. None of the Jackals deserved that fate.
“Prisoners,” I whispered to myself. “This is where the Krell must’ve taken them, during the war.”
Dead, black pits stared back from the faces of those corpses, where eyes had once been. I turned away from the bodies, tried not to think about what those servicemen and women had gone through. I hoped beyond hope that Zero was still alive, that she had managed to ride out this catastrophe.