by Jamie Sawyer
“I don’t think that I have ever seen you look more beautiful. And I don’t think that you look fat at all.”
The train started up, and sped out of Rockwell Central station.
The carriages began to get busy as we picked up several more passengers at the next few stops, all still within the perimeter of Fort Rockwell. A variety of different military staff both boarded and left, but I was engrossed in conversation with Elena and took little notice.
“Isn’t the sunset stunning?” Elena asked.
She looked over my shoulder to appreciate the view. Tau Centauri was low on the horizon, throwing dazzling sunrays over the ragged skyline. The vista was a luscious orange – unpolluted, welcoming.
“It’s something about the composition of the upper atmosphere. But it’s nice, I guess.”
“Don’t take the fun out of it, Conrad!” Elena chided. “Just enjoy it for what it is. We’re here, together, on this planet. We have to be grateful for the small things in life, and then everything else will fall into place.”
The city lights flew past us, as the train moved at high speed, and crossed the perimeter into the surrounding metropolis. Only the distinct lit towers of the skyline remained constant. One of those was the Weskler-Trump International.
“Do you remember when we stayed at that hotel?” she asked. “When I first arrived here?”
The train drew into the next platform. Another tranche of military personnel, a handful of downtrodden civilian workers. Vacant faces, weathered hands, dust-stained overalls – workers from the local spaceport. Two small children scurrying around an old man’s legs. A woman wearing a hijab, a tiny mewling child in her arms.
“I remember. We should go back there some day.”
A tall man boarded the train, dressed in a military uniform. He scanned the carriage, made brief eye contact with me: then turned, and walked to the end of the carriage.
Close-cropped grey hair, but he wasn’t old. Tall and lean. Piercing steely eyes; he flinched slightly when we made eye contact again. His face was anonymous – forgettable even – and I didn’t recognise him. He sat, deliberately facing away from me, a silvered attaché case on his lap. Hands clasped atop it, protectively. Over his head, like a guardian angel, an Alliance Army recruitment poster loomed: RECRUITING ON YOUR WORLD, IN YOUR CITY, IN YOUR NEIGHBOURHOOD it threatened.
What’s inside the case?
Elena was still talking but I had stopped listening now. The train was moving off, fast, gathering speed as it moved through the city proper.
Although I didn’t recognise the face, I recognised the uniform. Simulant Operations. Something didn’t seem right here. Wearing duty fatigues, not dress uniform.
I know Sim Ops, I thought, and I don’t know you.
Elena kept talking, oblivious. I stood, grabbing a handrail to steady myself. I pushed aside some indigs. Needed to get a better look at the man.
“Conrad!” Elena called. She tried to stand to see what was happening. “What’s wrong?”
The man swallowed hard – ten, fifteen metres away from me – across the carriage. He twisted to look in my direction, maybe alerted by Elena’s voice—
I noticed his fatigue sleeve rucked up, just a little—
A tattoo on the arm. A tattoo of a hydra—
“Elena – get down!” I managed to shout, through the throng of passengers, half-turning to look in her direction. I already knew that it might be the last thing that I ever said.
“For the Directorate!” another voice yelled behind me.
Then there was screaming, for just a split second, as the train descended into madness—
The attaché case exploded.
I lay in the wreckage.
I had no sensory perception save for the constant ringing in my ears. The sensation was excruciating: a demonic sine wave enveloping everything, becoming my only reality.
Is this what real death feels like?
An endless nothing – dark, shrouding, all-encompassing. But the noise told me that I wasn’t dead. So I held on to it, rode it.
I wanted to panic, to cry out – not for me: for Elena – but I couldn’t.
While I lay in the twisted remains of the train carriage, I considered what had just happened. What was the real target of this attack? Had this train been the target, or something or someone else? I discarded any notion that I had been the target: I was just a soldier, no matter how good I was becoming at operating a sim. There was no way that the Directorate would dedicate resources to eliminate me. But was it an attack on Sim Ops?
Murky, flashing lights appeared overhead. Red, blue: the shrieking of a police siren. Then brilliant white light, flickering somewhere far above me.
People were crying for help all around me. Nearby, someone was praying – mumbling words in a language that I didn’t understand, over and over again. Something or somebody was on fire nearby. The scent of smoking flesh was thick in the air.
“Elena!” I yelled.
No response.
It was impossible to orient myself. Something had pinned me down – a piece of metal. I scrabbled to get free of it, to pull my body out of the wreckage. Glass fragments had penetrated my chest. My shirt was blood-stained, the ridiculous dress jacket torn. I couldn’t feel any pain, yet – couldn’t see or feel how bad the damage was. I didn’t want to know.
There were twisted metal spars above me. Blackened by the intensity of the explosion. Difficult to discern what those were; whether they had once been part of the window structure or whether the diamond-tread pattern meant that they had been part of the floor.
More light coalesced above me. Bright beams penetrated the gloom, slowly panning back and forth. Searching.
A voice rang out, loud and clear, from somewhere outside of the wreckage: “A curfew is in effect. Please return to your homes. A curfew is in effect. Alliance Army soldiers are inbound for your protection.”
It came from a military drone, I realised. Hovering low, probing the wreckage. The searchlight slowed, panned again. Someone nearby shouted something in Arabic. The drone’s light focused on our position and I held up my hand to cover my eyes.
“A curfew is in effect. Please return to your homes. A curfew is in effect. Alliance Army soldiers are inbound for your protection.”
“Survivors!” I shouted. “Survivors in here!”
Faces appeared above me. Dark-skinned, wearing peaked law-enforcement caps.
“We’ve got live ones down here,” one of them muttered. “Get med-evac ready for casualties!”
They took me out of the rubble, along with fifteen other survivors recovered from the same carriage. I don’t remember much about that, except that a police utility robot managed to clear the heavier pieces of wreckage away while medics removed the bodies and survivors.
I was immediately taken, by a med-evac transport, to Rockwell Infirmary.
The hospital accident and emergency wing was seriously taxed by the immediate influx of new cases. The sterile white hallways were filled with the walking wounded. As more casualties were recovered from the wreckage, those with less serious injuries were placed in the waiting rooms and lobbies. Not just soldiers, not just Alliance military: women, children, the young and old. All around, people were crying, clutching injured loved ones. A woman was screaming uncontrollably as she grasped a tattered bundle of bloody rags. An old man with one eye, gore already streaming from a freshly applied bandage. And everywhere, Alliance Army troops patrolling the corridors – carbines slung over shoulders, watching on with an air of detached suspicion.
I sat in a padded chair in a corridor, still wearing the remains of my uniform. Shell-shocked was an understatement.
Later, I was told that three hundred and twenty-five people were seriously injured on the monorail train. There were ninety-eight killed. Of those, sixteen were minors, twenty-three female.
Elena was just a statistic.
A rogue terrorist, acting on his own agenda. Whatever I had heard
or seen, it wasn’t sufficient to prove otherwise. The Asiatic Directorate officially denied responsibility. The agent had self-terminated. He was never traced. There was no evidence left to identify him. In the scheme of things, the terrorist attack on the train was a minor incident.
The attack was catalogued as one in a series of Alliance-Directorate hostilities. It didn’t trigger any formal declaration of war. It was easily forgotten, in a universe consumed by constant conflict. Just another day.
Most forgot about it.
But I didn’t.
“Sergeant Conrad Harris?” a medic called, reading from a data-slate.
“Yes, that’s me.”
The medic was only a young girl. Short blonde hair pulled back from a painfully thin face. Wearing blue scrubs, the name-tag on her chest askew: KASHA, A. (INTERN GRADE).
Not even a real doctor.
“I’m not qualified yet,” she said. Must’ve seen me looking at her tag. “The doctors and medtechs have their hands full with the more serious cases – those with life-threatening injuries.” She raised an eyebrow. “Is it a problem for me to treat you?”
I shook my head, mute.
“You’ve suffered minor lacerations to the chest. We’ve removed the glass and dressed the cuts. Some bruising to the legs. The X-ray doesn’t show any breaks. You’ll make a full recovery.”
“My ears – I can still hear the explosion.”
Kasha nodded. “That will disappear. You’ll probably have some permanent hearing loss at those frequencies though.” She tapped my chest with a pen, through the wad of dressings that had been applied there. “Your data-ports are undamaged. I expect you’ll be able to make transition.”
“That doesn’t matter,” I mumbled.
Kasha gave me a disbelieving look. “Of course it matters. I know what you sim operators are like. You’ll be back out there before you know it. Didn’t do you any good this time though, did it?”
“I was on the train with a woman – she was sitting near me—”
“Name?”
“Marceau, Elena.”
Kasha glanced down at the data-slate, clucking her tongue as she read. “We have her here. DNA confirmed her ID.”
I felt a burst of relief.
“Is she alive? Is she injured?”
“She’s in theatre right now.”
All energy drained from me. I collapsed back into the chair, my head in my hands. I couldn’t think. That ringing in my ears, in my head, was overwhelming. If Elena was dead, if she was really gone—
“Wait here,” Kasha said, backing into the emergency room again, reading from her data-slate. “Congrats on your promotion, by the way. Your personnel file just updated.”
And so I sat and waited, a captain now.
None of that mattered to me.
Not unless I had Elena.
Hours passed.
The same faces stared back at me. Military advisers visited some family members. I heard wails through the corridors, from adjoining family liaison rooms. “Sympathy suites”, they called them.
An enormous electronic board in the lobby listed the names of patients currently receiving medical attention. The list changed constantly, with updates such as IN THEATRE – AWAIT NEWS. Some posts were of a more final nature: SEE MORTICIAN.
Through tired, blurred vision I made out her name:
MARCEAU, ELENA
IN THEATRE: RECEIVING TREATMENT
AWAIT NEWS
Other wall-mounted monitors broadcast the degree of devastation. Vid-feeds from drones, flown high over the explosion. The entire monorail train had derailed, and the force of the detonation had collapsed some adjoining buildings. Emergency services were on site. Police air-cars, ambulance ships. Military dropships, soldiers streaming the adjoining streets. All transport shut down. The sky was closed: orbital access suspended for the next twenty-four hours.
“Captain Conrad Harris?”
A small, elderly man stood in front of me. Weathered skin, a bright white drooping moustache. He was a doctor: white coat, liberally stained and splashed by iodine and blood. A veteran of the long war. He dug his hands into his pockets. Awkward, uncomfortable.
“Yes,” I said. I had the feeling that I was speaking too loud, that I was adjusting for the noise in my head. “Is she—?”
The doctor grimaced uneasily.
Please no—
“There was nothing that we could do. She suffered a significant blow to the abdomen.”
“I need to see her.”
The doctor fished something from his pocket: a cigarette. He flipped the lighter.
“Of course. Do you mind?”
“I need to see her – now.”
He bobbed his head, sucked on his cigarette.
Fuck no, fuck no, fucknofucknofuckno!
My blood ran cold as hypersleep cryogen, but my data-ports burnt red-hot. For all of my military prowess, there had been nothing I could do. Nothing I could actually do to stop that bomb going off.
“She suffered significant internal bleeding. We’ve tried nanite surgery, but the impact,” he shook his head, “was major. She won’t be released for at least a couple of days. We’ll have to keep her in for observation.”
My vision suddenly cleared, the whining in my head diminishing for just a second. I swallowed.
“She’s not dead?”
The doctor frowned. “No, Captain. But I’m afraid that the baby is.”
Elena wasn’t even on a proper bed. I supposed that those had been reserved for more serious cases. Instead, she was curled up, semi-foetal, on an examination couch – an inert medical scanner on a metal arm still propped overhead. They had put her in a private chamber, just off one of the ER corridors. The strip-lamp above flickered, waxing and waning.
I stood at the entrance to the room, gently pulled back the plastic curtain dividing the enclave from the rest of the ER. Such emotion ran through me, such depth of feeling that I could not process it all at once. My head throbbed, but my heart broke for her – for both of us.
Elena was drowning in a pale green hospital gown, far too big for her. Her hair was tussled, unkempt; make-up in streamers down her cheeks. She’d been crying – was still crying, as I watched her – but the noise had settled into regular sobs. The sort of noise that a person makes when they have no energy left to cry, when they cannot muster the strength to continue the physically draining action of producing tears. Her feet were bare – dirty, stained by blood and soot.
I went to her, and held her. She cried some more – now deeper, more heart-felt moans. I had never heard her cry like this and every noise that escaped her body fuelled the growing fire in my chest.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked. My voice sounded stilted, formal: choked with grief.
“I did not know. I didn’t even know.”
We held each other for a long time, until Elena had cried herself to sleep, and the hospital staff told me that I had to leave the ER.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
WHAT MATTERS
A new day dawned on Helios.
A contingent of security men collected me early. My squad reluctantly stayed at base camp – I was in this alone. Under armed guard, I was trooped across the compound.
The weather had improved significantly, and both Helios Primary and Secondary shone brightly on the horizon. It was hot and still outside; so different from the storm the day before. Difficult to imagine that I was on the same world.
Kellerman’s quarters were probably the largest on Helios Station, and could easily have been on any of the Core Worlds. An old oak desk dominated one wall, surrounded by upholstered leather chairs. Real wood on an outpost this far from Alliance space: the cost implications were shocking. Antique electric lamps were sunk into the walls and ceiling. Alcoves around the room were loaded with stacks of paperwork and data-slates. The walls were pinned with holographic plates and aerial photography of Helios’ surface. Many of the pictures were of the Artefact, but the
images were always slightly skewed or out of focus.
The rest of the chamber continued in the same vintage theme. A series of photo frames hung behind the desk. Each of those held bleached, ancient pictures of the current and former presidents of the Alliance; even a hopelessly dated photo of President Underwood. He looked far more youthful than the last time I had seen him. That bizarre little detail gave me a sudden pang of homesickness – inadvertently reminding me of how far from Liberty Point we had come.
Deacon met me at the entrance to the room, and pulled up a chair in front of Kellerman’s desk. He kept his firearm across his chest and acknowledged me with a curt nod. Then he took up a post by the door, stock-still. With his worn features and sand-mat skin, he looked like a golem thrown up by the desert.
I sat down and the leather of the chair crunched. The room had three large, vaulted windows that gave a panoramic view over the desert. Right now, the sky looked a murky pink-red.
Kellerman trundled into the chamber, hovering over to his desk. He awkwardly reversed himself into position behind it.
“Damned chair,” he muttered. “Always getting in the way. My apologies for keeping you waiting, Captain. There is so much to do and so little time in which to do it. My body is not what it was. I trust that your leg has received some attention?”
“My science officer assisted,” I said bluntly. I added silently: No thanks to you.
Kellerman frowned and tilted his head. “Very well. As you can see, the manpower available to me on-station is significantly depleted. Medical and scientific personnel, in particular, are at a premium. So, let us start at the beginning – why are you here?”
“You failed to report to Alliance Command,” I said: the facts spilling out of me like an indictment before a court of law. “Your orders were to send a broadcast every week and you have failed to do so for the past twelve months. Command believed that a rescue operation had become necessary.”