by Jamie Sawyer
This isn’t a dream, I contemplated. It’s a nightmare.
Mason’s body had acted as a shield for Saul. I finally reached him and grabbed him by the arm. I hauled him alongside me. Through the door, back the way we had come.
It was dark inside the station and even emergency power had failed. My suit-lamps flickered on, threw out bright pools of light. I vaguely registered that I wasn’t carrying an active weapon, and unholstered my PPG-13 plasma pistol.
Keep going. Keep going. Command sent you here for a reason. You saw Shard material in that room! Saul might be a step nearer…
Krell were dropping into my path, through the murk and debris. I slaughtered them all: my plasma pistol laying down a precise curtain of death.
At the end of the main lounge, the objective loomed. There was writing on the wall but it was at the wrong angle. In my impaired condition, it took me a second to recognise the words.
EMERGENCY EVACUATION POD.
“Holy Gaia,” Saul cried, “please protect us through the cold voyage to the stars—”
“Shut up!” I slurred. “I’m all that’s left.”
Another round impacted my shoulder. Stingers pitted the wall around the evac-pod entrance and ricocheted around the chamber.
I reached for the pod activation controls. Bashed again and again on the door stud. The machine wasn’t made for careful or considered operation, didn’t require much to operate. With painful slowness, the doors began to open.
My lamps lit the inside of the pod and I conducted a cursory examination. It was a one-man unit with a tightly padded interior. Not exactly luxurious: no navigational controls, the aim was to evacuate the passenger from a station emergency, and to keep him or her alive long enough for a rescue party to pick them up.
“Get inside,” I said.
Saul scrambled up the deck, tossing his spent pistol into the pod. The gun hadn’t done him any good anyway. Angrily, I grabbed him by the legs and pushed him in. The case was still attached to his arm. He turned back to look at me; through his scratched and battered helmet. The comm-line had been cut between us, maybe at that moment or maybe somewhere else along the way. His mouth moved silently – forming words that looked like “thank you”.
I slammed the ACTIVATE POD control. The doors rapidly sealed.
TERMINAL DECLINE, my AI repeated.
“The station or me?” I laughed.
A stinger caught me in the leg, knocking me over a dead Krell. My lamps flashed over more bodies in the dark. There was another primary-form beside me and a gun-graft was poised on the ceiling.
From my prone position, I grinned up at them.
“Filthy xenos!” I shouted.
The primary moved off towards me. I emptied the pistol power cell – hoping to achieve nothing more than pointless butchery. The primary-form disintegrated under the hail of plasma.
The lounge had no view-ports and I couldn’t see outside. My suit was trashed – all systems failing, my entire sensor-suite off-line. There was no way for me to know whether Saul had made it off the doomed station.
I was tired. The bio-toxins were rampant throughout my system. There was nothing else to be done. The secondary-form overhead sneered at me, aiming the grafted boomer in my direction. There was a sea of Krell forming in the room now, watching.
“I’m Lazarus,” I shouted. “I always come back.”
The secondary-form opened fire.
They say that a man’s life flashes through his mind’s eye as he dies. That you consider all of your regrets, all of your mistakes. People important to you, frozen moments in time, those events that make a man who he is.
The moment of extraction – although it is not a moment at all, but rather an infinitesimal segment of time – is an interesting one. No scientist can really explain what happens to the human mind, as it extracts from a simulant body: it has to be experienced to be truly understood.
It’s like dying, because you do see those important milestones – those iconic occurrences that have shaped you – but there is also that niggling suggestion that you will have the chance to change all of this. A second shot: that things can be undone.
I only saw one face as I made extraction. Snapshots of Elena – as she’d been on Azure, before she left for the Maelstrom. It was a chance to savour those memories that I tried to keep sealed away. I had too many regrets, had made too many mistakes. They would weigh me down, hold me in the dead simulant body, if I allowed myself to dwell on them.
“I’m sorry, Elena,” I whispered through lips that didn’t even exist any more.
Then I heard it: the sound. That signal, so fragile that when I concentrated on it the sound evaporated.
The Artefact.
It was all over in a picosecond, less than that even, and my consciousness retreated across space into the waiting ship.
I woke up in the simulator-tank, aboard the Mallard.
My hands clawed at my shoulder – where that last secondary-form had fired a boomer into me – but it was an automatic reaction. There’s nothing there, I told myself. It’s done. I steadied myself against the plastic canopy of the tank.
There were faces out there, watching from the relative safety of the medical bay, but for a long while no one seemed to do anything. They just looked on; slack, emotionless faces.
No, not emotionless: just uncomprehending.
I blinked the wash out of my eyes, let the tank purge. With trembling fingers I plucked at the cables from each of my data-ports. The transparent tank door opened and I staggered out.
“What the fuck’s wrong with you people?” I rumbled.
My arms, legs, voice – none of it seemed willing to bend to my commands. I glared at the nearest medtech, who jumped and passed me an aluminium blanket – shot me up with a hypodermic of post-extraction recovery drugs. But then she retreated again, and stood in the same stunned silence as the rest of the room.
The Lazarus Legion were present, as well as Avis and Baker, and their respective teams. All just looking at me.
“That was…” Martinez broke the silence, shaking his head, “fucking unbelievable…”
“What are you doing standing around?” I said, uncomfortable with the attention. “There’s a war going on.”
A communicator blared in the background, broadcasting clipped Naval squawk: “…that’s a confirm on pick-up for the evac-pod…”
“Solid copy. Primary asset is in the hold.”
“Issuing retreat order, moving off at sub-light speed.”
“Copy that. Breaking orbit now.”
“Great work, Lazarus,” Baker added. “We were watching the whole thing, through your suit-feeds. Never seen anything like it.”
“We’ll have you people back on the Point within the next day or so,” the communicator bleated again, this time directed to the medical bay. “Good job.”
I just stood, trembling, shaking.
“I need a damned drink.”
CHAPTER FOUR
PSYCH
We pulled out of Maru Prime. Two Alliance ships – the Mallard and the Peace of Seattle – made good the escape and left the Krell to it. The Alliance had given as good as they got, and left behind the carcasses of several Krell starships. Whatever their reason for the abrupt and brutal incursion into the QZ, the Krell didn’t pursue. Maybe they were licking their wounds, maybe biding their time; but several hours into the retreat Naval control confirmed that the Krell had bugged out of Maru Prime as well.
Astronomically speaking, Maru wasn’t far from the Alliance border with the Quarantine Zone. The journey back took less than a day, cruising at FTL speed. I was glad that we could avoid the hypersleep capsules for such a short trip.
It had been a successful operation. Saul had been picked up almost as soon as his evac-pod had been fired out of Far Eye Observatory. He’d survived the ordeal without life-threatening injury, although I had no doubt the experience would be life-changing. He’d been witness to things few Sci-Div staff
had the misfortune of seeing; brushed death so closely that the bony fingers had left their mark deep on his psyche.
I considered searching him out – asking him about the subject of his research, why Far Eye had been chosen as the location of a black ops project – but dismissed the idea. I had a feeling that our allocation to the retrieval operation hadn’t been a coincidence.
Of course, not everything had gone to plan. There had been losses.
There are always losses in war, the Directorate AI tacticians would no doubt say. Victory is all that matters.
I didn’t doubt that but recognising what we’d lost was what made us human. It separated us from the Krell. The mission had cost us an Alliance warship. Likely several hundred personnel onboard; gone to the cold void. Two of the simulant teams under my command had been located on the Washington’s Paragon when it went down. I was sure that their families would receive comfortable compensation packages and “Dear John” letters from the Department of Off-World Affairs.
The Mallard had taken fire during the battle over Maru Prime, and made dry dock on arrival at FOB Liberty Point. My squad gathered in the umbilical tube between the Mallard and the Point’s dock.
The Far Eye operation had taken less than a week of objective time, but coming back to the Point always reminded me how long I’d been away on Helios. So much had changed in that time, and it wasn’t the place that I remembered. There was extensive construction work now: scaffold, welding teams, Army engineering units. The Point had grown to be the biggest station not only on the Quarantine Zone but in all of Alliance space. It was suspected to be the largest in all of human space, although the Directorate weren’t exactly willing to confirm that.
Soldiers and crewmen were dutifully lined up for clearance. The Sim Ops teams were dressed in Army khakis, Sci-Div in white smocks, maintenance techs in orange overalls, Navy in formal blues: all neatly separated by rank and role. Everyone had the tired air of having worked hard for a short period, and now riding the downer at the other end of a sudden adrenaline spike.
My squad had the same vacant, slightly misplaced expressions on their faces. It was a gaze that simulant operators developed over time, an implacable wrongness that a man should never feel when he is piloting the body he’s born in.
Kaminski jostled with Martinez next to me, agitated to get on base.
“Another successful operation,” Martinez said. “Another victory for the Lazarus Legion.”
“Does Mason get her badge yet?” Jenkins asked, in a disinterested sort of way.
The squad, save for Mason, had fabric badges stitched to the shoulders of their uniforms. The badges were an old Army tradition – awarded for achievements as simple as basic combat training, or more complex accomplishments like capsule-dropping or courage under fire. My original team members had a large variety of awards – topped by the Lazarus Legion badge, giving our official Alliance Army designation.
“Absolutely not,” Kaminski said. “No fucking way. She’s only got seven transitions under her belt.”
A holo-patch on the chest indicated the number of transitions each of us had made. Whilst the Alliance Army had medals and honours and everything in between, the patch was the closest thing that Sim Ops Programme had to a dedicated decoration. It was the only statistic that mattered between operators.
“So? She did good.”
“The regs are quite clear,” Kaminski continued, “and she has to prove that she’s Legion material before she gets the badge.”
“Fuck off, Kaminski,” Mason said.
She cocked her head in his direction. She was a good deal smaller than the rest of the group, and stood rubbing her elbows, arms crossed over her chest. Her platinum-blonde hair was tied up behind her head, making her neck look painfully slender.
“She knows how to handle you already, ’Ski,” I said. “And I thought I was Lazarus? Why are you the one making up all the rules?”
“Look, we can’t have every wet-behind-the-ears, greener-than-puke, freshest recruit, claiming that they’re Lazarus Legion. Take the guy before her – what was his name?”
“Omar,” Jenkins said. “He was nice.”
“Yeah, well nice doesn’t cut it with the Legion. How long’d he last?”
“He managed two ops,” Mason said. “I read all about him. He dropped out.”
“Couldn’t keep up with the A-game,” Kaminski said. “So you have to prove you’re good enough.”
I said nothing. It was just a bit of fun; something to keep Kaminski engaged between operations. Although she’d done a good job on Maru Prime, in truth I wasn’t sure whether Mason was Legion material either. She had the makings of a decent trooper but I’d been there. I wanted to make sure she was stable enough to stay on the team before I made her permanent.
“We did show them our A-game, mano,” Martinez said, shaking his head. “But I got questions.”
“Such as?” I asked. Although I was tired, the circumstances of the last mission didn’t sit easy with me.
“Like why do the Krell keep coming into the QZ?” Martinez said. “Since we got back from Helios, we’ve been there too often. The QZ isn’t exactly quarantined any more.”
“I’m quite sure that Command know exactly what they’re doing,” Jenkins said, adopting her most cynical tone of voice. “And that grunts like us shouldn’t ask questions.”
“Well, it’s good to be back,” Kaminski said to the group at large. “Nothing like recycled air and bad beer.”
The docking doors chimed and the tube opened to Liberty Point. I gathered up my duty gear in a canvas bag and stalked down the ramp. The air felt and tasted familiar, more metallic than that on the Mallard. There was a slight gravitational shift as well: just enough to let me know that I’d stepped between artificial gravity wells.
“Do you ever hear from Tyler?” Jenkins said.
Jenna Tyler was the sole civilian survivor from Helios. She’d been gone for months; back Corewards after our debrief, to be settled somewhere nice and quiet, with a decent severance package, where neither the media nor the Directorate could get to her.
“She went to Alpha Centauri, I think,” Kaminski said. “For a civvie, she was okay.”
I fell in step beside Martinez, cricked my neck painfully. I didn’t yet feel completely at ease in my own skin. Each breath was alien, each heartbeat foreign. I knew that it would get better with time, but the acclimatisation back into my real body was unpleasant.
“You okay there, jefe?” Martinez asked, under his breath. The rest of the team were moving off ahead of us; maybe Martinez was trying to talk to me without them overhearing.
“As I ever am,” I said, quietly.
Martinez gave a gentle nod. “Maybe that extraction, you know, jarred you or something?”
“Maybe.”
Martinez didn’t quite have it right, I decided. It wasn’t the extractions that were getting worse; it was the transition into my real body. The sense of not belonging in my own skin was increasing.
“It’s been getting worse since Helios. What about you?”
“Helios changed everything,” Martinez said, pulling a concerned face but at the same time trying to keep our conversation private among a sea of people. “No shame in admitting that. You still having the dreams?”
I sighed. “Sometimes.”
“Go see the medtechs. They might be able to give you something.”
“Think I’ll do that.”
We were greeted by a fleet of security drones, and the conversation was over. These were bigger than the combat models we had used back on Maru Prime – tasked with checking biometrics and immigration status.
“Please remain still while your Alliance citizenship is confirmed,” bleated the nearest drone. “Please remain still while…”
The human flood mostly ignored them and we were no different. They did their best, weaving between bodies and lighting up exposed skin with data-sensors, but it was a losing war. I caught sight of a couple of
familiar faces in the crowd. I’d been seeing them a lot, recently. Before I could make any enquiry, the faces were gone: swept along with the tide.
On aching legs I stumbled back to my quarters.
After my promotion to major, I’d been assigned a new cabin. That sounded grander than it really was: my original quarters had been reassigned while I was on Helios. Someone in Logistics had decided that I was probably KIA, that Command would shortly reach the same conclusion, and that my old quarters should be reallocated. It wasn’t a big deal – I hadn’t been particularly attached to the room – but it was another change, another indication that while I had remained the same the rest of the universe had moved on.
I swiped my palm on the entry scanner and the AI chirped: “Welcome home, Major Harris.”
The lights inside the suite were dimmed, and that subtle smell of sweat and used clothing crept into the back of my throat. Told me that there was someone else in my quarters. I dropped my bag to the floor, walked straight through to the tiny washroom. The harsh electric lighting flickered on, tracking my movements. I had three interconnecting rooms, and from the main bedroom there came the crackle of a tri-D viewer: the jangle of a commercial news-feed.
“Today marks the sixteenth day of hostilities on the Rim – and the possible reignition of armed conflict between Alliance and Directorate forces…”
“Harris?” a female voice called, from the room.
I watched my own ageing reflection in the mirror over the sink. The damned mirror that I’d told her to get rid of—
“…President Francis, speaking from Olympus City, Mars…”
“That you?”
I closed my eyes. For just a moment, I could imagine that it was her: that the speaker was Elena. It was a sublime self-delusion.
Maybe that’s the lie that I’m trying to live?
“…We will not be cowed. I am in direct communication with Director-General Zhang, and I will not allow the compromising of Alliance interests…”