The Lazarus War: Legion

by Jamie Sawyer

  “You’ll like this.”

  She attempted to shift the body, with obvious difficulty. When she couldn’t do it on the second try, she scowled at me.

  “Come on, Connie. Get the other shoulder. We have to turn him over.”

  I didn’t want to. I shook my head, mute.

  “He’s like Jonathan,” Carrie said. “A soldier.”

  On automatic again: frightened at eight years old that she would tell someone else about my fear of the corpse. So I went to the other shoulder, careful not to brush my jumpsuit against the mouldering walls, and in unison we turned the body over. In life the man might’ve been small and compact but in death he had become heavy and swollen.

  Carrie was right: he had been a soldier. He wore fatigues, of a type even I recognised. Directorate People’s Army. A winged emblem had been sown onto the lapel of his blouse. Carrie reached for that, tugging at it.

  “Might be worth something,” she said.

  When it wouldn’t come free, she moved on to rifling through his pockets. He was carrying a unicard and a couple of scrunched-up twenty-dollar notes. Some more money that we didn’t recognise.

  “Don’t,” I said. My voice faltered. “You’ll get into trouble. We…we should tell someone about this.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s serious.”

  Carrie rubbed the notes between her fingers, like she was testing whether they were real.

  “Won’t get us a fucking packet of smokes, let alone a ticket out of this joint,” she said, shaking her head. Again, adult language that she didn’t understand how to use: parroting back what she’d heard older children saying.

  “Maybe soldiers don’t earn much,” I whispered. Stayed a respectful distance from the body, eager not to disturb it any more than we already had. “Dad doesn’t earn much.”

  “Jonathan is an asshole,” Carrie said. “That’s why he doesn’t earn much.”

  The soldier’s face was big and white. He’d been dead for a while. Days out in the storm drain. I couldn’t see how he’d died. Maybe flu or something viral. Maybe a shot from some backstreet pusher. The eyes were wide open, lids peeled back: so dry that they hurt to look at. The expression was sad and lonely.

  “He’s a damned bad guy all right,” Carrie said, hands on hips. “We should burn him.”

  “How do you know that he’s bad?”

  “Look at his uniform! They all wear them. Black uniform, bad guy. They killed Mom.”

  “You – you don’t know that,” I said. The futility of my argument was obvious: the Directorate had killed my mother. But I couldn’t muster much animosity towards this pathetic thing in the drain. “Doesn’t mean that he did it. He might’ve been different.”

  “They killed her,” Carrie repeated. “The Chino. This one is probably a deserter.”

  “Maybe he didn’t want to go to war.”

  “That makes him even worse.” Carrie kicked the corpse. “Fucking coward. Won’t fight. My old man has to go to war, and you get to stay in this drain?”

  “Don’t do that, Carrie,” I said. Then reiterated, impotently: “We should tell somebody.”

  “This one is a scumbag. Probably wants independence for Mars and all that shit. Help me drag him out of here. We should definitely burn him.”

  “Please don’t.”

  “You’ve got to toughen up, Con. This sucker would kill you in a heartbeat.”

  “He’s dead.”

  Carrie shook her head in disgust. “He killed Mom, and you don’t even have the guts to burn him.”

  Outside, it had started to rain. The droplets made a distinctive sound as they hit the tin porch roof: pitter patter, pitter patter.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  OPERATION PORTENT

  With the dream about Carrie so fresh that I could almost smell the storm drain, I woke early the next morning. Much earlier than I needed to. I’d only had a couple of hours’ sleep but that didn’t matter. I languished in the shower unit. The hot water was refreshing; one of the few luxuries that I missed while I was in the field. As a major, I got subsidised water and heat rates: I made the most of both.

  I felt the scars on my torso; those reminders left from my time on Helios. The skin was still puckered and white in places – keloid scars, tissue grown proud – although the pain had faded. I only really felt that in my leg, and only if I thought about it.

  With a careful precision that belayed my fraught nerves, I arranged my smart-suit uniform and got dressed.

  By the time I’d finished with my preparations, I looked halfway respectable: a reasonable facsimile of a military officer.

  The chamber AI chimed just before oh-seven-forty-five.

  Captain Ostrow waited outside, Lieutenant Pieter just behind him. Both wore dark glasses but otherwise appeared unchanged.

  “Good morning, sir,” Ostrow said, saluting briskly.

  “I hope so.”

  “If you’d like to come with us, we have a mule waiting.”

  Pieter drove and Ostrow sat in the back with me. The mule was a basic anti-grav buggy, used to ferry material and personnel around the Point when the public transport system wasn’t appropriate. Lieutenant Pieter regularly sounded the electric horn to scatter soldiers and sailors out of our path. I tried to ignore the flight of sky-drones that followed us across the station. It’s in your head, I insisted. Whatever the truth was, the drones peeled off shortly after we left the officers’ quarters.

  “Where are we headed?” I asked.

  “The general hasn’t declared his attendance on-station,” Ostrow said. “He wants to meet in a neutral environment.”

  “Which is where?”

  “Tactical Command Centre.”

  “So he thinks we’re enemies?”

  “Right now, everyone is an enemy.”

  The mule pulled into the Command deck and Pieter leant back in his seat. “You’ve been away from the Point for a while, haven’t you?”

  “You’ve read my file.”

  Pieter smiled. The expression was painfully practised. “I don’t mean to pry. I just wanted to offer some advice.”

  “Go on,” I said, curious.

  “General Cole is different now,” the officer said. “Since the accident.”

  “I heard,” I said. It was public knowledge.

  Security troops approached the mule, before we had a chance to finish the conversation.

  “You go straight through, sir,” the captain said to me. “When you’re done, we’ll be waiting here.”

  The elevator doors slid open and I walked out into the Tactical Command Centre. I was anxious, and fought to control my heart rate.

  Two voices vied for dominance.

  Don’t overthink this: it’s probably nothing.

  No, this has to be something.

  The Command deck was located on the outermost ring of the Point. Maybe that was deliberate: beyond the observation windows, the Maelstrom glittered garishly – a sparkling reminder that the Krell were still out there, across the gulf of space. Inside, the deck was filled with holo-displays and working command consoles. Officers of every stripe crammed the space. The business of coordinating the Alliance Army, Navy and Aerospace Force elements was not an easy one: requiring the presence of almost every nationality united under the Alliance banner.

  A young male officer peeled off from the mass of personnel and saluted me.

  “This way, Major. General Cole is waiting for you.”

  We walked a metal gantry, over the heads of the staff below, and into a discrete sub-chamber.

  “A spy booth,” I said. “Very clichéd.”

  The military aide said nothing but as we went inside the noise levels immediately dropped. There was a pitched hum and a box on the wall above the door flashed with green lights. The ultrasonic vibe in the air denoted that the anti-surveillance field was in effect. The aide retreated, the door sliding shut behind him, and two Military Police privates took up position beyond the transparent do
or.

  General Mohammed Cole stood in the middle of the room; one hand resting on the corner of a hololithic display table, the other propped on a walking stick. As I entered, his face seemed to brighten a little, and he shuffled to greet me. He was dressed in a blue and gold-rimmed, near ceremonial, officer’s uniform. It hung off his frame. I tried not to make it obvious that I was surprised by his presentation. I hadn’t seen him since he’d briefed me on Helios, but time hadn’t been kind to Cole. His dark hair had almost fully greyed – it off-set peculiarly against his coffee skin – and he’d lost a lot of weight. He’s finally earned his moniker “Old Man Cole”, I thought. There was more to his ageing than natural atrophy: even the dynamics of time-dilation couldn’t explain his appearance.

  “Sir,” I said, abruptly saluting.

  “Morning, Major Harris. As you were.”

  A surveillance drone hovered at Cole’s shoulder; kept a respectful distance.

  “Permission to speak freely.”

  “Always.”

  “I’d like to relay my condolences for what happened.”

  Cole gave a tight-lipped nod. I certainly didn’t begrudge him his aged appearance: he’d survived an assassination attempt on Epsilon Ventris II. People die on Ventris II, I thought. Even those that don’t deserve it. The Directorate had claimed responsibility for the incident – an orbital launch on an Alliance military station – that had cost five hundred lives.

  Cole had survived.

  His wife and children hadn’t been so lucky.

  “Fucking Directorate,” Cole muttered. “Happened while you were away. We’re going to shift some personnel in that direction, make sure that the Directorate knows that Ventris II is Alliance true and through.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Can’t go anywhere without these damned things now,” Cole said, waving his stick at the drone. “I’m a class-one political target, apparently. I’m not quite sure what a drone would do if I was attacked, except record my death for posterity.”

  I nodded. This explained Cole’s secretive arrival on the Point; his decision to take an unscheduled shuttle, to keep this sub rosa.

  There were two other personnel in the chamber. Cole pointed them out in turn.

  “This is Admiral Joseph Loeb, of the Alliance Navy.”

  I took the man in for a moment. Older; mid-sixties Earth-standard. Dressed in immaculate Navy blues, he was freakishly thin but barrel-chested, as through his proportions had grown all wrong. I’d seen the body-type before. It was caused by long periods in micro-G, back before they’d made the gravity generators so reliable. The exposure to reduced grav caused variation to the skeletal and muscular structure – made the human body all screwed up. It immediately marked Loeb as one of the old guard; as a long-term sailor.

  “Major,” he grunted.

  “You already know Professor Saul.”

  Saul gave a tight smile. He was dressed in civilian clothes: grey slacks and a crumpled shirt. His glasses rainbowed with colour, that one white eye staring blankly at the info-feed. A heavy gold pendant hung around his neck.

  “Earth’s praises be upon you, Major Harris,” he said. “I wanted to see you as soon as I felt well enough. My thanks to you for your efforts back at Maru Prime.”

  Cole rapped his walking stick on the metal-plated floor, giving Saul a sharp look. “Let’s get down to business.”

  All parties were gathered around the tactical display. It showed a variety of different images and read-outs. Cole manipulated the controls and an image of familiar space spread out to fill the table.

  “You probably recognise this as the QZ,” he said, waving at the hologram. Several markers appeared on the graphic; all clearly inside the Zone. “These are the locations of recent Krell–Alliance engagements.”

  Statistics on each engagement floated alongside the markers and I recognised a few of the names. Most recently there was Maru Prime, but there were other sites of interest as well. Naval engagements, the occupation of certain star systems. The QZ didn’t look good.

  “Have the Krell reneged on the Treaty?” I asked.

  “Not formally,” Saul said, “but then again they’ve never formally recognised it either.”

  “Then why the change in behaviour?”

  “It’s impossible to quantify the reasons for these interactions,” he said. “Some of my associates feel that Helios is the primary aggravating feature, but I’m not so sure.”

  The display shifted again, showing a much wider tranche of space: the QZ, the border with Alliance territory, the Maelstrom.

  “This is only a projection, and considering the erratic movements that we have witnessed so far, it is difficult to place much weight on the prediction,” Cole said, “but we anticipate that within the next two objective years, the QZ will collapse.”

  That prediction hung in the air for a moment. The display animated, showing movement of large Krell Collectives through the Zone, directly butting up against Liberty Point. The other associated, more minor, FOBs – “forward operating bases” – faced a similar fate. War-fleets spilled into human space, both Alliance and Directorate.

  “With all due respect, sir,” I started, “what do you expect me to do about this? I went into the Maelstrom as ordered. I’ve sat through numerous military psych-evals, and I’ve given you all the detail that I can—”

  “This isn’t a blame game, Harris,” Cole said gruffly. “I want to show you what’s at stake here. I’m losing men out there – real and simulated. We’re adopting a change in policy. The discovery of the Key – your discovery – has changed our approach.”

  He manipulated the controls again and the star-map was replaced with a graphic of wider space. The Key’s star-data. The graphic displayed a broad overview of the Maelstrom, of Krell Space. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of star systems within that glittering eye. Just as many black holes, pulsars and quasars: a churning mass of live space. I noticed that Admiral Loeb – who had so far been still throughout the briefing – visibly flinched at the image. Navigation through the shifting time-space of the Maelstrom was every captain’s worst nightmare.

  But this image was different. An overlay appeared; a spider web of calm white light superimposed over the Maelstrom. Like a net, taming the ferocious beast.

  “This is the result of our research into the Key,” Saul said. “We’ve discovered, and safely tested, a number of Q-jump points throughout the Maelstrom.”

  This had been Dr Kellerman’s dream. A network of operational Q-jumps, taking human ships into the Maelstrom and beyond.

  “It’s time that you had some answers,” Cole said. “I certified your most recent mission into the Quarantine Zone because we couldn’t afford to lose Professor Saul. He is a significant asset, and he has primary experience of several Shard sites. Far Eye was a deep listening post. We were tracking another potential objective.”

  “Another Artefact?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Saul said. “I’m almost certain that I’ve found another Shard Artefact.”

  “We’re calling this Operation Portent,” Cole said. “And I want you to have full disclosure. You’ll know everything that we know.”

  “Far Eye wasn’t an observatory in the traditional sense,” Saul continued. “For the last three months, we have been searching for something inside the Maelstrom. Using the star-data, downloaded from the Key.”

  Saul pointed to a holographic representation of stamps. The astrocartography I’d seen him with back on Far Eye. Those maps had been so important to him that he’d risked his life to retrieve them from the lab. Holos of the Key flitted over the display: scrawled with imagery – somehow both crude and highly advanced. Ancient circuit-prints, finely detailed.

  “The data from the Key suggests the presence of another device,” Saul said, leaning into the display. “Another Artefact.”

  “And that was what you were listening for?” I said.

  “Exactly,” Saul said. “But this Artefact is
n’t transmitting.”

  Thirteen indicators showed the locations of Shard sites. The most familiar to me was Helios III, caught in the orbit of Helios Primary and Secondary. The other locations were spread far and wide across the QZ and to the best of my knowledge I hadn’t been to any of them.

  “Where is the new Artefact?” I asked.

  The tactical display shifted again. A close-scan area of space that I didn’t recognise at all. I got the impression that this was an area that I didn’t want to recognise. The reaction was immediate and overwhelming.

  “Welcome to the Damascus Rift,” Saul said.

  A collection of blue stars – ancient and cold – circled the phenomena. They threw dying light across a series of sterile grey planets, trapped in a death-dance with the Rift. Moon-sized pieces of debris tumbled through the schematic.

  Then there was the Rift itself.

  A fissure in time-space; one of so many stellar phenomena found in the Maelstrom that human science was unable to classify properly, let alone understand. It shimmered with balefire, brighter than the stars that circled it. The debris in near-space gave the impression that it was being gently pulled into the Rift, and, on a glacial scale, that was exactly what was happening. Those stars, those worlds and moon-fields: over the millennia all would be claimed by the Rift’s insatiable hunger.

  Space is collapsing in on itself.

  Cole went on: “Professor Saul thinks that he has a basic understanding of the linguistics used by the Shard. He can translate, broadly speaking.”

  “The Key suggests that another Shard Artefact is located within this sector,” Saul explained. “It’s largely wilderness space, unexplored to any degree. The logistics of moving a fleet into such a perilous area would ordinarily be insurmountable, but the Key changed all of that.”

  “We can use the star-data to reach the Rift,” Cole concluded. “But there is more.”

  Cole and Saul exchanged knowing glances.

  My mouth suddenly felt dry, palms sweating. My data-ports positively burnt: so eager for activation.