The Eternity War: Pariah

by Jamie Sawyer

  “I don’t think that the Krell will pay much attention to the Santa Fe until we start powering her up,” I said.

  “They have bigger things to worry about,” Zero replied.

  I could sense the Krell’s movements all around: hundreds, if not thousands, of bodies skittering along the open shafts, through the tunnel network. Their bio-signs danced across my HUD.

  “I’d tend to agree,” I said. “Activate the Jackals’ tracking devices.”

  “Done and done. Broadcasting their location to your suit now.”

  The armour’s AI opened and digested the data-packet. Although I had no schematics or maps, my suit had started mapping the locale. The place was vast, but I would have to find my way through it.

  I felt yet another impact with the ark-ship. They were coming with increasing, and worrying, frequency now.

  “Any idea what that was, Zero? It felt too big to be a missile or a kinetic.”

  “I think that the Spiral is trying to breach the ark’s hull,” Zero said, sounding dubious. “This is unbelievable! They’ve crashed a starship into the flank. Two more ships are breaching the ark’s outer defences.”

  “Black Spiral agents aboard the ark? That’s all I need.”

  A Krell primary lurched from somewhere above me. I ducked back, watched it move off. A swarm of primaries followed, like a trail of ants defending their hive. I slipped on my frequency-beacon, set it to maximum amplification. Although I couldn’t rely on its accuracy, it was the only tool I had to distinguish me from the invaders.

  “What better way to jeopardise galactic peace than by killing each other,” Zero said, wistfully.

  “It’s the human way. I’m going off comms. Ping me if anything happens.”

  “Anything ‘happens’?” Zero said, with a taut, nervous laugh. “That’s pretty open ended.”

  “All right, anything bad. Anything fatal.”

  “Still not narrow enough,” she said, “but I get the idea. Give ’em hell. Zero out.”

  “Jenkins out.”

  Ahead, doors opened to allow streams of Krell warriors through. Armed with stingers and shriekers, chittering to themselves, they scurried past me.

  On my HUD, the squad’s personal trackers lit.

  Alive or dead, they were somewhere beyond this hatch.

  Either the Krell didn’t have very effective crisis management systems in place, or they’d been knocked offline, because the sector beyond the portal was a complete mess. There were a series of open caverns, very much like those in which we’d met with the navigator. Fire erupted everywhere, had claimed pools of liquid that had gathered on the floor. Whatever that shit was, clearly it was highly flammable. Dead, roasted fry lingered in rock pools. I tried not to look at the rictus corpses in the blister-pods—those prisoners caught in the Deep. At least now they had found release from forced communion with the Krell.

  I’m too late. They’re already dead. Riggs is gone.

  But I couldn’t believe it until I’d seen it with my own, simulated, eyes.

  Gravity had been cut in the next chamber. Krell bodies in bio-suits floated past me, from a variety of castes. A handful of quad-forms pirouetting in the flickering gloom: shredded by weapons fire. That pretty much answered the question of whether the Black Spiral had made it onto the ship.

  I switched to my internal atmosphere supply, drank in processed oxygen. My grip on the plasma rifle had tightened, and my HUD filled with possible targets. I activated my external suit speakers. Tuned them to maximum gain.

  “Jackals! Respond!”

  To my utter disbelief, through the crackle and pop of the burning chamber, I heard a voice.

  “Here!” came a thick, Slavic accent.

  Figures emerged from beneath a burning coral structure. Just because it didn’t seem possible that we’d be so damned lucky, I scanned them with my suit’s senses. But it was true: Novak, Lopez, Riggs, and Feng, all confirmed by their personal ID chips. Alive and breathing.

  “You came back for us,” Feng said, his face splitting into a grin.

  “We’re the Jackals,” I said, bouncing to the cavern’s base with a burst from my EVAMP pack. “And I’d never leave you.”

  Riggs reached out a hand to touch the armour plating of my clean new combat-suit. “I never doubted you, Keira.”

  “How did you find us?” Lopez asked.

  “I told you, back on Daktar, that you’d be grateful one day for those ID chip implants. I just followed them.”

  Another dark shape was strung between Novak and Feng. Ragged as a scarecrow, and dripping life-blood faster than it could probably make it, was Pariah. When it saw me with those big alien eyes, the XT’s face seemed to shift.

  “Are you trying to smile, P?” I asked.

  “We do not smile,” Pariah replied.

  “Whatever you say. What happened in here?”

  “Something big hit the ark, just after you extracted,” Lopez said. “Most of the chamber collapsed, took out a lot of Krell. The others ignored us, left this chamber.”

  “We kind of hoped you’d have some answers,” Feng added.

  “The Spiral is here,” I said. “They’re boarding the ark.”

  “Maybe I’ll get to finish this magazine after all…” Lopez said.

  She looked a million light-years from the girl I’d known back on Daktar: covered in dirt, uniform tattered, pistol cocked in both hands. The change was impressive.

  “That navigator got wasted,” Riggs said.

  He nodded behind me. The navigator had been caught beneath a falling chunk of black coral: crushed so precisely that its head was almost severed from its torso. Sergkov’s body lay beneath the alien, crumpled and useless. Not simulated this time: for real.

  “Couldn’t have happened to a nicer XT,” Riggs said, with a jeering expression on his face. Shrugged. “Sergkov might be gone, but shit comes around.”

  “The navigator thought that we were attacking the ark,” I said. “The Krell don’t seem to know the difference between us and the Spiral.”

  “They can’t tell the difference between humans,” Lopez pitched in. “Good or bad.”

  “There are good humans?” Novak said. He had his knife in one hand, the blade dripping with Krell blood.

  “Yeah,” I said. “And as of now, that’s us.”

  I bent down to inspect the navigator’s body. It was one ugly son of a bitch, that was for sure, but it was obviously important to the Krell. To see an apex Krell organism die like this … It didn’t feel right. My gloved hand brushed the xeno’s skull, the enormous armoured carapace—

  The creature’s eyes flared suddenly. Black and empty, they reflected the burning chamber: the heat-quivered outlines of my squad.

  “Shit!” Lopez said. “That thing’s still alive!”

  She aimed her pistol, ready to take a shot, but I was faster. I pushed her aside before she had the chance to fire.

  “There’s no need for that,” I said.

  The alien shifted beneath the platform, stirring pieces of rubble, but remained pinned. The debris was too substantial for me to remove, even with the suit’s strength-aug.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “There’s nothing that I can do to help you.”

  Without Pariah’s particular abilities, the navigator couldn’t vocalise communication, but it still tried to make contact. The connection was sharp, frightening. This creature had sailed the stars for hundreds of years. Anger and then fear washed through me. Fear of the virus, not just of what it was doing—would do—but of where it came from.

  Worlds on fire. End times. Exodus.

  “What are you trying to tell me?” I asked the xeno, bending lower now so that my face-plate was almost against the Krell’s head. “I need to know!”

  But it was futile. The Krell’s great gills fluttered, then flattened to its head. It folded over Sergkov’s corpse and went still. LIFE-SIGNS EXTINCT, my HUD confirmed. No bio-sign even lingered on the scanner—


  Boom. Boom. Boom.

  The chamber shuddered with each impact.

  I stood from the corpse. Readied my plasma rifle.

  “We should go,” Lopez said. “This place is finished.”

  “Get back to the Santa Fe,” I ordered.

  I unclipped my M63 plasma pistol; that was about the only weapon I carried small enough for a real skin to use. I tossed it to Riggs, who inspected the gun as though it were the first time he’d ever seen it. Then I unhooked the wrist-computer set into my right vambrace, and gave that to Feng.

  “My freq-beacon is broadcasting on my wrist-comp. Keep together, and keep it turned on. I’ve plotted a route back to the Santa Fe. One more thing.”

  I bent to Sergkov’s corpse. In the pool in which his body lay was the Hannover’s black box. I picked it up. Handed it to Riggs.

  “Take this with you,” I said. “And make sure you keep it safe.”

  “Solid copy,” Riggs said.

  Lopez nodded. “What about you, ma’am?”

  I smiled at her. “I’m going looking for someone. Now get moving.”

  I bounced off into the smoke, leaving the Jackals to it.

  I followed the destruction, further into the nest.

  Although I told myself that I was covering the Jackals’ retreat, even as that thought formed I knew that it wasn’t really that. I don’t much know why I felt the need to track him down, but I suspected that he was the key to all this.

  Cooper. I was going after the Warlord.

  How did I know that he was aboard the ship? I didn’t. Not really, but something guided me. Something told me that he would be here: in the thick of it. And if Cooper was aboard the ark, then I wanted to be the one to kill him. I wanted revenge, pure and simple.

  Our peace accord with the Krell wasn’t perfect, and it wasn’t what everyone wanted. But it was the best we had: that was just the way things were. And now Cooper and the Black Spiral, they threatened it. I had no way of knowing whether the navigator finally accepted that we were not the same, that I was different to the Spiral, and that cryptic message that it had thought-pinged in its death-throes hadn’t made things any clearer. Perhaps, I considered, I was being guided by the brief mind-communion with the navigator. Cooper had once been in the Deep, once been part of the Collective.

  “Maybe stopping Cooper will make a difference…” I whispered to myself.

  And maybe this talking to yourself is becoming a thing, I thought.

  Finding Cooper wasn’t hard. The Black Spiral were invading the ship, and in force.

  “Stupid bastards should’ve turned off their comms systems,” I said, again to myself. “That was their first mistake…”

  The Black Spiral shed data like proper rookies. I could see their comms, hear them bickering to each other in a variety of Standard dialects. As I got nearer, I detected that three ships had in fact breached the ark.

  Now that the Spiral were aboard, they were wreaking havoc. Krell bio-fire stitched the walls, chasing exo-armoured Spiral agents. Quads roared in anger and pain, bodies absorbing volleys of gunfire from the invaders. Secondary-forms popped from shafts all around the tunnels, laying down barriers with their shriekers, sending bolts from boomers.

  “Nuke breaching coordinates alpha-six-nine-three,” someone said.

  The tunnel shook with a not-so-distant explosion. Krell bodies rolled past me, gravity flexing and twisting so that I had to use my EVAMP to keep moving.

  “We’ve got a tactical plasma charge coming in on your six. Fishy bastards’ll never know what hit them.”

  “Copy that. Praises be to He that Cares.”

  “He’ll see you on the other side, Braven.”

  “Who the damn is He that Cares?” I said, over the open comms.

  “Who’s this?” someone asked.

  “Lieutenant Keira Jenkins.”

  I jumped into a cavern-space above me. The chamber had taken a direct hit from something—maybe one of the Black Spiral’s missiles—and the Krell were fighting to contain a hull breach. Frozen liquid streamed past me in hard spheres, reflecting the destruction.

  “What are you still doing here?” a voice asked. “Cut comms, cut the comms!”

  A stream of kinetic gunfire hit the floor beside me, and I rolled away. My suit predicted the firer’s location. Without conscious thought, I responded with a volley from my plasma rifle. Old faithful did its job, blasting apart several Spiral agents. Another half-dozen were on my six, their jump-packs glowing bright as they closed the distance. I primed an incendiary grenade and tossed it behind me, watched as it caught the invaders in the blast, their bio-signs extinguishing on my HUD.

  “I’m here, Cooper,” I said. “I just wanted to say thanks.”

  “Not necessary,” came the response. That same raspy voice: as though the speaker was in pain.

  “I think that it is. I got this mission after what happened on Daktar. You got me this mission.”

  “We’ve all got a mission,” Cooper said. “Some are just more difficult than others.”

  “That’s right,” I said, goading him now. “Some have a cost.”

  I scanned the devastation. Coral and bone structures rose from the cavern floor like a maze of skeletons. Alien life-forms had been reduced to blackened husks. Krell bodies spiralled past me, twisting to fire at incoming Black Spiral tangos. Gravity had gone haywire, and as I jumped between structures I felt my centre of balance twisting, shifting. Then I was back on solid ground, landing on another coral platform. I ducked some more gunfire. Took cover behind something that looked like a giant spiked urchin.

  “You’ve done a lot of damage, considering how long you’ve been on this ship,” I said.

  My suit was actively tracing Cooper’s signal, whenever he spoke with me: all this chat had a purpose. NEGATIVE LOCK, it said. I needed more time, needed to get just a little closer…

  “I like to think so,” Cooper said. “There’s a plan behind it all, Jenkins. Everything I am doing here is with reason.”

  LOCK ACQUIRED. Coordinates flashed across my HUD. Cooper was above me, where the wash of enemy comms traffic was thickest. I let the rangefinder search for the source of that signal.

  I was surprised by what I saw. Two plumes of heat appeared on my scanner: a couple of hundred metres overhead, but as dazzling as twin stars. I recognised the distinctive flare-pattern as belonging to the VTOL engine of a starship. It was making a fast but cautious approach into the ark, descending on a white column, manoeuvring around the Krell bio-structures. The engine regularly fired with blue-white emissions, bringing the small vessel further inside the ark, using the cavern as a dock.

  “What are you doing here, Cooper?” I said. “After what happened to you, why come back to the Maelstrom?”

  “You don’t need to know that,” Cooper answered. “Not yet.”

  Black Spiral troopers, wearing exo-assisted survival armour, had assembled all around the cavern. By now, I was heavily outnumbered. As my HUD flagged the enemy assailants, I realised that the Krell were too.

  “What’s your objective then, I wonder?”

  I dodged back into cover as an assault rifle fired on my location.

  “I know what you’re doing,” Cooper replied. “And I can do just the same.”

  COMMS LOCK LOST.

  Damn.

  “Question still stands,” I said, trying to track his signal again. I bounced up another level, through more dead coral structures. “You’ve done a lot of damage here, like I say, but I don’t think that is your objective. Not just that, anyway. I know what happened to you. I know all about the Deep.”

  Cooper’s snarl surprised me. “What do you know of the Deep? Nothing! I’m the only one who came back from it!”

  “What were you doing on North Star, for that matter?”

  Two Black Spiral troopers descended from somewhere above me. I dispatched both with my rifle, plasma bolts punching through their armoured bodies. They were well armed, I noted, carry
ing zero-G assault rifles with grenade bandoliers over their chests. Even as I killed them, another began to fire on me.

  “I see you,” Cooper said.

  Energy fire raked my location. Above me, the starship descended further. Whatever that ship was doing, it was important to the Spiral, and important to Cooper.

  “Is it in position?” someone else asked.

  “Not yet. She’s holding us up.”

  “Cut your comms,” Cooper roared.

  “My apologies, Warlord.”

  “Warlord? That what you make them call you now? Doesn’t the name Clade Cooper suit you better?”

  Cooper let out an angry roar. “That’s not who I am any more.”

  TRIANGULATING LOCATION, my armour told me. RE-ACQUIRING LOCK…

  Good. Keep going.

  I bounced upwards again.

  “Clade Cooper. Formerly of the 1st Alliance Rangers. Originally MIA on Barain-11. Your whole unit was wiped out.”

  “Wiped out?” Cooper growled. I could imagine the spittle dripping from his lips, his anger hot enough that I felt it over the comms. “Is that what they told you?”

  LOCATION CONFIRMED. LOCK ACQUIRED.

  Now I was getting somewhere. I pushed on. “And only you made it out. Did that hurt? I’m an Army brat myself. It’s bred into us, isn’t it? Maybe we’re closer to the Krell than we think.”

  “They are a virus!” Cooper bellowed. His anger was stronger than the pull of a black hole, drawing me onwards. “They need to be purged from this galaxy, and that is my mission!”

  “I’ve read your file,” I lied. “You had a mission once, Sergeant Clade Cooper. It was called Operation Pitfall. And you fucked it up.”

  “You know nothing about what happened! I did not fail!”

  Then I saw him. Cooper: galactic enemy number one, Warlord of the Drift. Standing on the edge of a precipice, surrounded by a handful of Black Spiral operatives. All wearing heavy survival suits, equipped with thruster packs and rifles.

  From my position, through the blackened strands of webbing, they couldn’t see me. My combat-suit camouflage was also running active, and I stayed low. The starship was descending the shaft above them, moving slowly, her access ports open. Thrusters on her nacelles fired periodically, their heat muted by the distance. Although I couldn’t swear that it was the same, the ship looked very similar to that Cooper had used to escape from Daktar.