The Lazarus War

by Jamie Sawyer

  “She came out here,” Nate completed. “She left you in the Pen.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I wanted to see her. I’ve been writing to her for years, but she never responded. Then she agreed to meet me. I wanted to make peace with her.” I almost added: to explain myself. Instead I laughed. “That didn’t exactly work out.”

  “You could’ve just told us,” Lucina said. “Plenty of starship crews have their demons.”

  I drank hard from the bottle. I hadn’t drunk since the night of the incident, and the taste brought back fragments of memory – recollections that I wished I could completely erase, could wind back. It had never proved to be that easy.

  “It’s okay,” Sheldon said. “You got some closure, yes? Maybe that’s all you needed.”

  “Maybe,” I said. I wasn’t convinced by that. “I just wanted—”

  “Hey!” someone yelled from across the bar. “You assholes want to keep it down over there?”

  “We’re trying to have a private conversation…” Daryl replied.

  It was then that I realised, as did the rest of the crew, that Blake’s Last Stand had fallen almost completely silent. The music had stopped. Patrons were clustered around the view-screens set up on the walls. It was eerie how the character of the place had suddenly changed. I’d been so engrossed in my own drama that I hadn’t even noticed.

  She told me to leave, I suddenly thought.

  I was about to express that concern when the lights went out around us.

  A blackout on a space station is never a good thing.

  When your atmosphere, gravity and heat depends on a regular supply of juice, a power outage can be crippling. Going dark usually meant some catastrophic systems failure. For the lights to go out on a station like Liberty Point was bigger than most. This wasn’t some ramshackle mining outpost run by amateurs; by the Holy Stars, this was the Point! There had to be a hundred redundancies in place to ensure that things like this didn’t happen. I instantly knew that this wasn’t a regular occurrence, that this was something far more serious.

  The bar was completely black. There were no portholes or view-screens of space. Nothing to provide any light. For several seconds, it was utterly silent, all occupants wrapped in the dark, paralysed by panic.

  Then Daryl started to talk. The words flowed out of him so fast that I could barely understand him. “It’s going to be okay. Probably just a drill. Nothing to worry about. I’m sure that it’s going to be fine. Nobody panic…”

  I felt for Nate’s shoulder. He grabbed my arm in return.

  “That you, Taniya?”

  “Yeah. It’s me.”

  “Stay with me. I won’t leave you.” To the rest of the table: “No one leaves anyone behind, all right?”

  “I got you,” Sheldon said, leaning in on my other shoulder. I felt the heat of his breath against my cheek. “Daryl, Lucina?”

  “We’re here,” Lucina said.

  Daryl was still babbling.

  “What’s happening out there?” someone shouted. “Can anyone get a link to Control…?”

  There was a deep, throbbing chug somewhere underfoot: reverberating through the soles of my sneakers. It was an unhealthy sound, the sort of noise produced by an abused chemical engine pushed too far. The engineer in me identified it as a breaker resetting; a hard reboot of the station’s autonomic functions.

  Then the lights cycled on. Not the regular, soft-focus lighting that this particular bar forced on its customers: this was clinical, brilliant emergency light. In sequence, the racks of overhead LEDs dowsed the bar until it was fully and uncomfortably lit.

  I blinked away the dark – glad to be free of it – and scanned the room. Everyone looked to be in the same state of shock. To my surprise, that included the soldiers and sailors.

  “No one knows what’s happening out here,” I said aloud.

  The rational part of my brain insisted that all was well. We were, after all, on the biggest space station in Alliance territory. These people were professionals; they were military. The Point was probably one of the safest stations on which to experience such an emergency.

  But although I wanted to believe that, I just couldn’t persuade myself.

  A siren began wailing overhead: a tri-tone, distinctive emergency klaxon. I’d heard the sound before – when I was a child, during a blow-out on one of the Arcology’s domes. It was a universally recognised alarm for serious structural damage; a sound specifically pitched so that it travelled well through a thin atmosphere. An electronic voice accompanied the alarm.

  “Evacuate station. Proceed immediately to the nearest evacuation point. This sector has suffered a catastrophic systems malfunction. Evacuate station…”

  That decided it.

  “You still think that this is a drill?” I barked at Daryl. I was up. “We have to get back to the Edison.”

  Too many things of too great a significance seemed to be happening in far too short a time. I’d finally made it to Liberty Point. I’d seen my mother for the first time in years, and that meeting had pretty much gone as badly as it could. Now, on top of all that, the station was suffering some unknown systems malfunction. The situation seemed unreal.

  “Maybe Taniya is right,” Nate said. “Captain, ma’am, we should go.”

  A chain reaction started by the patrons closest to the door. Panic crashed all around me like a wave. Tables were suddenly upturned, chairs thrown aside. The clatter of furniture against walls and floors was almost as deafening as the yelling and shouting of the crowd. Bodies began to push and press for the limited exits from the bar. Dancers in glass tubes were scrabbling for release: I saw one girl being carried out of a broken tube, another clawing at the exit handle to no avail. Very few people stopped to help them.

  Sheldon held my arm. I stumbled on, avoiding broken glass, weaving between other escapees. Daryl, Lucina and Nate were around me, grabbing at each other to stay together.

  “It’s got to be some sort of attack!” Daryl shouted. His earlier optimism had been shattered, replaced by blind dread. “They’ve come here! They’ve found me.”

  In the press of bodies, I didn’t question that remark. I was being crushed and could barely breathe. Elbows jabbed me in the ribs, someone pushed me hard from behind. I followed the herd and it burst out onto the concourse outside – into the District’s main corridor. Where previously the zone had been ablaze with neon and other light sources, now it was drenched by red emergency lamps, like everyone and everything had been coated in blood. The image was not an endearing one.

  Every establishment on the concourse was emptying. Thousands of off-duty military, civilian hauliers and service crew all clamouring for release. Bodies were being trampled underfoot, limbs tangled.

  The idea that I might be left behind suddenly occurred to me. I grabbed Sheldon’s hand tighter, caught him looking back at me. Daryl was clutching at Lucina – the younger woman doing her best to stay upright among the crowd. Nate was somewhere alongside me, ruthlessly pushing people aside. I’d never seen him like that before, and I wasn’t sure that I liked this new side to him.

  “The sector exit is ahead!” Sheldon yelled.

  The enormous bulkhead door was shut, and a yellow security light flashed overhead.

  “Let’s hope that the door isn’t locked,” I said.

  We were still twenty or so metres from the portal, surrounded by a crush of fellow escapees, when – as though in answer – it peeled open.

  When I saw what was on the other side, I wished that it had stayed shut.

  For just a second the crowd froze.

  All eyes fixed on the door.

  The new arrivals were revealed by parts, and it wasn’t until the whole had become visible that I realised what I was looking at.

  Three soldiers, silhouetted by the light of the corridor beyond the door. They were armoured in sleek black suits with faces covered by bulky helmets, respirators attached to the chin and nose. The red light of the emergency la
mps played off the angles of their armour, made them look cruel. Each carried a large rifle, muzzle up and pointed at the crowd. Having never been remotely interested in weapons tech, I had no idea what the guns were. I only knew that I did not want the devices pointed in my direction.

  Are they cops? I asked. A military rescue team?

  Something deep-seated and primal told me that no, they are neither of those things. I recoiled, back the way that we had come, toward Blake’s. Without even thinking, I jammed myself against the man or woman behind me. Where before Sheldon had been dragging me along, now I tugged at his arm. I grabbed for Nate with my other hand and started pulling him back too.

  “It’s okay!” Sheldon said. “They’re soldiers! They’re here to help…”

  Were Nate and Sheldon seeing what I was? Maybe it was the press of people, the horror of the day.

  “They aren’t!” I implored.

  The nearest soldier took a step into the District’s concourse, his weapon still up. He looked down the scope or whatever that thing on the top of the gun was.

  “Get back!” I shouted to anyone who would listen. “Get away!”

  Then Sheldon stumbled with me. He had finally seen what I’d seen.

  The soldiers had insignia and icons all over their armour. The largest was also the most chilling: the moon and sword formation of the Asiatic Directorate.

  I felt like I was teetering on the edge of a cliff; like this shit was about to get hysterical. The crowd began to reverse from the door. Slowly at first, but quickly accelerating, repelled by the trio of Directorate soldiers like an adverse magnetic reaction. Where are the Alliance troops? I wondered. This is a military station! Where are the police? For probably the first time in my life, I would’ve been grateful for a genuine law enforcement agent. There had to be at least one good guy in this sector. I scanned the bodies around me – desperate to find some symbol of authority.

  With a detached calmness, the lead Directorate soldier raised his weapon.

  The gunfire was loud and lethal. I’d never heard a kinetic weapon being fired before. On the domes, we don’t have kinetics: they are outlawed on pain of life imprisonment. For good reason – pressurised environments and sharp projectiles are incompatible. That’s not to say that the citizens of the burgs haven’t found other ways of killing each other that are just as deadly, but that seeing a real gun fire – hearing that harsh bark as it spat rounds – was completely alien to me.

  Hysteria broke out.

  I immediately dropped to the ground and kept low, scrambling through bodies. Someone exploded not far from me, caught by a bullet to the head. Sheldon went down too, although I was pretty sure that he wasn’t injured. Nate braced himself behind a woman – I saw her catching a chestful of bullets – then slugged another man to get a better position on the floor. Something wet and hot sprayed across my face. I hoped that it wasn’t my blood but couldn’t tell; just now, my entire body was a numb, trembling mess.

  My mind was back in the Penitentiary. I remembered how to keep my head down, to stay out of trouble and under the guards’ radar. I let my body do the work without any conscious thought.

  It felt like the Directorate were firing for an age, but it was probably only a couple of seconds. In that space of time, the lucky had retreated into the bars and clubs. The unlucky were in piles around me, dead or bleeding out. I just lay there. Played dead. What more could I do? I wasn’t a soldier.

  Sheldon held my hand tight. There was genuine worry in his eyes, which were fixed on mine. “It’s going to be okay, girly. It’s going to be okay.”

  He was right next to me but I could barely hear him. My ears still rang with the gunfire. I nodded mutely.

  The Directorate troops stalked onwards. Boots crunching debris and bodies underfoot, panning the ground with their guns. The nearest trooper was talking into his face-mask, maybe relaying something. Even if I didn’t understand the words – he was, I was certain, speaking in Chino – I recognised the intent. They were searching for something or someone.

  Nate lay next to me. He seemed strangely unperturbed. For some reason, I found myself smiling at him: a weak, terrified grin. His own face was fixed and resolute. Arrogant, even.

  I saw a boot a metre away from me, a laser dot dancing over a corpse. I held my breath. They were almost on top of us. The trooper kicked at a body: one of the dancers from the bar – still semi-naked, now stippled with glass fragments and streaks of blood. I saw her breasts rising, heard a death rattle in her throat. The Directorate soldier ended her with a single round to the head. Brain matter flecked Nate’s cheek.

  I put a cap on my response. Again: learnt Pen behaviour. I might be next.

  The trio circled the concourse. Moved a few metres away from us. I grasped at the hope that they would pass us by. That they would find whatever it was that they were looking for – because I was sure that was what they were doing here – and just leave us alone.

  My optimism was dashed when Nate started to get to his feet.

  “What are you doing?” I hissed. “They’ll see you!”

  Staying down is always Rule One. I grabbed for his arm, pulled at his jumpsuit. He looked at me, that expression I’d seen him wearing too many times today spoiling his handsome features. When he kicked me to the stomach – a hard, well-placed blow – I wasn’t expecting it. He was wearing deck boots, and I writhed in pain on the floor.

  “What the damn are you doing?” Daryl said in a loud whisper. “Get away from Taniya!”

  I was in too much pain to say anything in my own defence. Sheldon put an arm around me, protectively.

  Through tear-filled eyes, I saw Nathaniel stand with his hands raised. In other circumstances, it might’ve appeared a gesture of surrender. In these, the action stunk of complicity. The Directorate squad responded immediately: weapons trained on him, those red sighting dots dancing across his chest. He barely looked concerned.

  “They’re over here,” he said, speaking Standard slowly and precisely. That lovely Venusian drawl was gone. “This is them.”

  “What in Gaia’s name are you doing?” Lucina said. “They’ll kill you!”

  Lucina was wrong. The Directorate lowered their rifles, stood with Nate.

  “They know you…” I whispered.

  He was Directorate; one of them. That was the only explanation.

  “He has it,” Nathaniel said. He pointed out Daryl.

  “I have what?” Daryl said. He was kneeling on the floor, in such a vulnerable position. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Where is it?” a trooper asked in Standard, speaking through the voice-grille in his helmet.

  “I’m the captain of a merchant starship,” Daryl protested. “I have no idea what you are talking about.”

  “He’s telling the truth!” Lucina said.

  One of the troopers turned his gun on her. She wilted, tears streaming down her face. Lucina was beside Daryl, clutching at her husband’s shoulder.

  What the hell was going on? My eyes shifted from the Directorate soldiers to Daryl, and back again. I desperately wanted to do something to help. I considered whether I should break Rule One: keep your head down. To play out a cheap tri-D action flick – to be the heroine. But those were such empty thoughts. All I really wanted to do was get off the station – to spring to my feet, to run as fast as I’d ever run back to the Edison and let the damned military sort it out. I couldn’t even do that –

  For an old man, Daryl’s reactions were a lot faster than I’d expected.

  This wasn’t the Daryl Boeta that I knew, not at all.

  With his left hand he pushed Lucina away. It was a hard, open-palm motion but it wasn’t done with malice. He wanted her moved out of the firing line to safety.

  With his right, he pulled something from inside his jacket.

  A small gun.

  It was up and aimed at the Directorate soldier within a heartbeat.

  I felt a swell of hope in my ches
t.

  Do it, Daryl! Shoot these bastards!

  For all of his bravery, Daryl wasn’t fast enough.

  The Directorate soldier standing over him fired a single shot. It impacted with Daryl’s left knee, and crimson immediately blossomed there. He let out a loud cry and toppled backwards.

  As he fell, he fired the pistol – twice – towards the Directorate soldiers. I flinched with each shot; saw the flash of gunfire.

  When I looked back at them, the Directorate soldiers were still standing. I couldn’t tell whether any had actually been hit.

  The nearest leant over Daryl. He slammed a foot onto Daryl’s hand. The captain yelped again, rolling around on the floor, and let the gun drop from his grip.

  “He has it,” Nate repeated. “I’ve been on this crew for years. I’m certain that he has it. We picked it up at Barnard’s Star.”

  “Is the ship in lockdown?” the trooper said.

  “I have the access codes.”

  “Nate!” I wailed. “Why are you doing this?”

  Nate ignored me and started to speak in Chino. The Directorate troops nodded and gathered around Daryl’s prone body.

  Lucina shouted, “Leave him alone! He doesn’t have anything!”

  Nate grabbed Daryl’s pistol from the floor. “I’ll take care of this one—”

  The station klaxons had been sounding throughout the encounter, but they were suddenly swallowed by another, louder noise.

  An insane metallic scream that was quickly rising in volume: metal grinding against metal, a machine in agony. I had no idea what was causing it; only knew, in the marrow of my bones, that it was a very bad sound. I jammed my hands over my ears. Now you can move. Fucking coward. The noise had quickly become worse than deafening – too painful to listen to.

  Then the concourse just exploded. Light, sound and horror poured into the tunnel. Heat washed over me, so intense that I thought that I might be set alight. But Sheldon – dirty old Sheldon – was on top of me, taking the worst of it. I saw Lucina and Daryl in outline only – also trying to roll to safety, away from the explosion.