by Jamie Sawyer
Another marker flashed on my HUD. Another ship was off course now.
“Lazarus Actual,” James said. His voice was unclear, whining with static. “We are experiencing some technical difficulties with Scorpio Four and Five.”
My skin prickled. The noise behind that interference: I recognised it. It was a ghostly whisper of the Artefact’s signal. I swallowed hard, fought back the urge to call this whole damned thing off.
Two of the fighters were dangerously off course. Their running lights flashed intermittently. They’re losing power, I concluded. Our attack party suddenly seemed painfully vulnerable and underarmed; insects to the enormous Shard device.
“Oh shit…” someone whispered.
Scorpio Four dropped into an uncontrolled spin, end over end towards the Artefact…
My cams were still magnified. I saw something that no one else had noticed.
The Artefact was changing.
Structures rose from the hull.
“Anyone else seeing this?” one of the fighters queried. “Looks like some kind of—”
Weapon mounts suddenly studded the Artefact. Concealed turrets peppered the hull. As we drew nearer – into the kill zone – the weapons sprang to life, tracking incoming signals. The cannons weren’t any weapon that I could identify but the muzzle calibre was big enough to throw out a decent energy output.
Which is exactly what they did.
“Oh, fuck!” said the same voice. “We’re taking fire out here!”
“Hostile is active. Repeat: hostile is active—”
“Evasive manoeuvre! Hot fire on your six.”
A brilliant beam whip-cracked across my vision; gone before I even recognised what it was. The beam licked Scorpio Four. Punched straight through the armoured undercarriage.
“James!” I said. “Evade!”
“We’re experiencing systems failure,” James said. “Not sure what—”
That meant no null-shields, no electronic countermeasures. No defences at all. No nothing.
Another flash of light: Scorpio Five was suddenly in two pieces. The pilot babbled like crazy over the comms, managing to loose a missile. The plasma warhead corkscrewed in the direction of the Colossus.
“Danger close!” Jenkins screamed. “Danger close!”
A tiny, short-lived explosion marked the death of Scorpio Five. Debris rained across the dark hull of the Artefact, more turrets tracking the larger remnants. Where the ship hit the structure, fire poured over it.
“It’s awake,” Martinez declared. “I’m getting readings…”
An energy beam scythed into the hull of our APS.
Cut through the triple-plated ablative armour.
Went right through Martinez’s combat-suit and torso.
Left a hole in him as big as my head: immediately cauterised. The beam proceeded through the cabin roof.
“Shit!” Jenkins yelled. “Martinez is out and we’re open.”
Warning alarms began to sound in my head. The shuttle lurched into a spin.
“Seal suits!” I ordered.
The exterior cams were fried but they suddenly weren’t necessary. Through the gaping puncture in the hull, I saw the scene develop with my own eyes. The turrets poured beams into the approaching Alliance expedition. The fighter squadron was in total disarray. There was debris everywhere, fighters spinning out of control. None of them had managed any meaningful return fire.
I mag-locked my boots, held myself at the edge of the hull breach. It was a long way down; a vertiginous drop. Anti-sickness drugs flooded my system and kept me from throwing up inside my suit.
The sensation passed but suddenly the opposite became a reality: the Artefact spiralled beneath me, coming up far too fast. A crash-landing on the hull would be fatal.
“We’re taking heavy fire out here!” Williams reported.
“What exactly are we supposed to do about it?” Kaminski said.
To shut up and die.
The second Wildcat was lit up by a beam. It hit the engine. The fuel reserve must’ve been breached because the entire shuttle exploded.
My HUD flashed with confirmations that the Warfighters had made extraction.
Then Scorpio Squadron were all gone.
We were all that was left.
Our shuttle banked again – the AI making an irrelevant and futile attempt to avoid enemy fire. We were thrown towards the cabin ceiling. I slammed into a support strut, felt intense pain blossom in my back. Broken spine? It was agonising.
“Prepare for emergency landing!” I managed.
Another turn; another blistering impact against the cabin wall. Mason’s suit was breached and she clutched at a rent in her stomach.
I was almost glad when an energy beam caught our flank.
Moving at speed, firing thrusters and jinking, the superstructure fractured. There was a brief wave of heat over my combat-suit – I saw components exploding as the innards of the shuttle broke apart. Something heavy slammed into my chest. I grappled for purchase, tried to stay standing, but my mag-locks failed.
Mason was screaming, then she abruptly went silent.
Jenkins was still shouting orders. It was all pointless. I wasn’t even sure when Kaminski had bought it.
My body was flung clear of the wreckage, towards the Artefact. This could only go one way. I picked out flashes of light as the Artefact’s defences fired: again and again.
Either because I wasn’t a threat, or because I was a spent force, the Shard weapons completely ignored me.
The hull came up fast to meet me—
I was back in my simulator, screaming so loud that my vocal chords burnt.
Above me, floating on a viewer-screen, scrolled text:
WILLIAMS’ WARFIGHTERS
CAPTAIN LANCE WILLIAMS: DECEASED…
CORPORAL DIEMTZ OSAKA: DECEASED…
PRIVATE ALICIA MALIKA: DECEASED…
PRIVATE REBECCA SPITARI: DECEASED…
LAZARUS LEGION
PFC ELLIOT MARTINEZ: DECEASED…
PFC HAYDON MASON: DECEASED…
PFC VINCENT KAMINSKI (ELECTRONICS TECH, FIRST GRADE): DECEASED…
SERGEANT KEIRA JENKINS (EXPLOSIVES TECH, FIRST GRADE): DECEASED…
MAJOR CONRAD HARRIS: DECEASED…
ALL OPERATORS EXTRACTED…
MISSION TIME: 73 SECONDS…
All dead. All gone.
The tank canopy popped open.
A team of medtechs reached over, wrapping an aluminium blanket around me, whispering soothing words. I shoved them away, collapsed out of the tank. My vision was spinning and I clung to consciousness: if I passed out I didn’t think that I would come back.
Williams stood beside me, out of his tank and holding a blanket around his naked body. He grimaced – his face full of red lacerations, the reminders of how his simulant had just died.
Debrief was short and to the point.
No one knew what had happened. Saul had detected some internal energy signatures but couldn’t tell us anything else.
“No shit,” Williams said. “Those were some big ass lasers, Professor.”
It was hard to disagree with him on that.
The atmosphere aboard the Colossus felt subdued. News of the disaster spread through the ship like wildfire – with the rumour that the Shard were maybe not as dead as we’d expected. Not even the Colossus, with all her massed firepower, could stand up to such an enemy. The Hornet space fighters, absent from the hangar bay, were evidence of that.
Everyone avoided the mess hall that night. Warfighters, Legion, even Scorpio Squadron.
I wanted to check on the Legion but they had gone to ground. It wasn’t an official visit, so I didn’t bother comming them. I just took for granted that they were all wrapped up in their own private hells: reliving the sudden and brutal dispatch we’d just experienced.
Almost as an afterthought, I went up to the Vulture’s Row. The Row was a tower-block construction, and by elevator it took almost a minu
te to reach the top. The deck itself was empty, save for a lone figure standing at the end of the observatory.
Mason started as I approached, wiped her face.
“Good evening, sir,” she said.
“Is it?”
“Well, the view is okay.” She leant against the safety rail. “I’ve never been on a ship like this before.”
“The others will think that you’re a tourist, if they catch you up here.”
“Maybe I am. I like watching the fighter-ships taking off, coming in to land. Scorpio Squadron has been running security patrols.”
It was so easy to forget that not everyone was like me. Not everyone had seen this all before; not everyone was so tired, jaded and bitter. Maybe it was even a little refreshing to meet a trooper who was still impressed by such simple things.
“There will be a good deal fewer of those ships,” I said, “given what happened today. The simulants – next-gen or otherwise – are expendable. The ships are not.”
Mason laughed. “Did today go as you expected?”
The Artefact lingered at the corner of my eye. I didn’t want to look out at it, didn’t want to face it tonight.
“Of course it didn’t. I think that you can guess that.”
I’d expected it to be easy. I’d expected this Artefact to be just like the one that I had known on Helios. But this Artefact was different.
Unconsciously Mason rubbed her stomach with the palm of her hand. I had no doubt that the pressure still dwelt there – the pain that had killed her just hours ago.
I found myself choking at the memory – because that was all it was – and struggling for breath.
“Is it always like this?” she asked.
“Not always,” I said. “Sometimes it’s worse.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
STEEL COFFINS
I called a general assembly early the next morning.
“Let’s work on what we know,” Saul said, pacing the CIC.
The Warfighters and Legionnaires sat around the enormous tactical holo-display. Loeb, Dr West and James were in attendance as well. The Artefact’s response to our first approach had seriously altered the game.
Saul lapped the display, one hand poised beneath his bearded chin, the other used to punctuate every point he made.
“The Artefact has a defensive mechanism of some sort. Likely an automatic response.”
For likely, I heard possibly.
“Have you seen technology like this on any of the other Shard sites?” I asked.
“No, no. None of the other sites have yielded working xeno-tech.”
James tapped the display controls, rewound the feed. Each Hornet in his squadron had been recording and broadcasting as they went down. In tri-D, we watched the fighters being torn apart by the Artefact’s defences. Brilliant beams criss-crossed the sky, leaving destruction in their wake. James winced as the last of the fighters went down. He and his team had made immediate extraction. They were now back in new bodies; I hadn’t seen them in their real skins yet. His new skin was indistinguishable from the last.
“Probably some form of laser weapon,” he concluded. “Maybe plasma.”
James looked somewhat crestfallen by the turn of events. I got the distinct feeling that Scorpio Squadron hadn’t suffered a defeat like this before.
“Doesn’t much matter what it is,” I said. “We know that it kills us.”
James nodded. “Not only that. Immediately before we got hit, the Hornets suffered general systems failure. It wasn’t targeted; we were all hit.”
“That suggests a ‘dead zone’ around the Artefact,” Saul said, “which is consistent with existing research on Shard tech. Perhaps Shard tech is capable of producing an anti-electronic field.”
I watched the last few seconds of our demise. Scorpio Squadron now gone, the feed jumped to footage from the Wildcats. They had barely lasted longer than the Hornets.
“They took out everything,” Williams said, shaking his head.
“Not quite…” I said.
The last few seconds of the feed played. Burning wreckage showered the Artefact’s hull. The Artefact used more energy beams to break up the larger elements, until there was nothing left at all.
Not quite nothing.
I watched as my simulant sailed out of the Wildcat. I could still feel the muscle-memory reaction. Flash, flash. The remains of the Wildcat were annihilated. The feed jumped to my combat-suit – a jittery, poor-quality stream that I knew would imminently terminate. Another simulant – maybe Mason or Jenkins – flew past me, also thrown clear of the APS.
“There…” I said.
My body fell to the Artefact.
There was no response from the cannons.
I froze the display. An operating Shard turret sat within metres of where my body had fallen, but it did nothing. The video abruptly terminated in a wave of static as I smashed into the Artefact.
“It reacted to the incoming ships. But it didn’t react to me, or the other falling simulants.”
“So, what are you suggesting?” Williams asked. “We’re a long way from the Artefact, man. How the hell are we going to get down there? Jump?”
His team laughed, but nervously.
An idea had begun to form.
“The Colossus was a drop-troop ship, wasn’t it?” I said. “Admiral Loeb: does the Colossus still have drop-troop launch tubes?”
Although I’d seen the tubes when we’d first boarded the Colossus, I didn’t know whether the starship still had the necessary internal loading mechanisms.
Loeb frowned at me, as though the question was some insult to him personally. “Command doesn’t consider drop-troop assaults a good use of resources any more. We haven’t used the launch tubes in years. When the Simulant Operations Programme gained favour, Command more or less abandoned the drop-troop initiative.”
“But do the tubes work?”
“All of the original features of my ship are still functional.”
“What are you thinking?” Jenkins asked, a half-smile on her lips.
Kaminski leant over the table, grinning as well. “The Torus Seigel manoeuvre?”
“The very same,” I said.
Exactly an hour after the briefing, I clambered back into my tank and jacked myself in. Around me, through the watery prism of the tank, I saw the Legionnaires and the Warfighters jacking in as well.
“Are all simulant operators ready for transition?” Dr West called.
“Of course we’re ready,” I said, and activated the internal tank controls.
Back in the early days of the Alliance space forces, the drop-troop delivery method was considered the pinnacle of shock tactics. The Alliance had used the strategy on Epsilon Ultris, on Barnard’s Star, even during the Martian Rebellion. Tacticians had long regarded the orbital delivery of a large-scale infantry force to be an admirable but impossible goal.
The development of dependable anti-grav technology changed all of that. Imagine it: a thousand Alliance troops raining down from the sky, landing in precise formation and taking the fight to the Directorate’s front door. The mothership, the drop-troop base, remains in high orbit – lending fire support to the ground pounders. No need for costly dropship insertions any more.
That was the theory, at least.
Now the reality. The trooper is loaded into a drop-capsule: an armoured shell, not much bigger than the soldier encased inside. Wholly dependent on Naval intel to make sure he is fired at the right moment, to make sure he lands on target. The period between launch and landing in enemy territory? It lasts seconds but I can tell you, it’s hell. Anything could go wrong: your capsule might not fire, you might get hit on the way down, or you could land off-target. Coming out of the capsule, you’re likely to be under heavy enemy fire. You better hope that the Navy boys – safe in their warship, just visible on the horizon – have tracked you on the way down as well. You can just as easily end up being hit by friendly fire.
As I lay insi
de the capsule, I silently considered all of this. The capsule was Iron-Horse pattern, manufactured by some long-defunct Earth corporation – through some twist of coincidence, the same type that I had used on my last hardcopy mission. Torus Seigel had been a hellish drop-troop operation, a true meat grinder for the Alliance Army and, in particular, Special Forces. It had been a planet of strategic value to both the Krell and the Alliance, into which each species had poured millions of lives to achieve a bloody stalemate. The memories came flooding back. I remembered being trapped inside one of the flying caskets as it launched over Seigel. I hadn’t thought about that op in an age, but now I could recall every detail of the mission…
I snapped back to reality. I was in utter blackness, body held rigid by webbing across my arms, legs and torso. That was for my own safety. A crippling sense of anxiety overcame me, made me want to thrash out – to break the webbing, to be free from the drop-capsule.
Relax. You’ve done this a hundred times before. You know the drill.
And I did know the drill, too well. The only difference was that this time I was simulated.
At just that moment, my tactical-helmet came online. The HUD illuminated. Glowing graphics confirmed what I couldn’t physically see: successful transition for the rest of the operators.
“Sound off!”
There came a barrage of “affirmatives” from the rest of my team, as well as Williams’ Warfighters.
“Countdown initiated,” Dr West confirmed.
Nine steel coffins, in a tight grid formation. Several other dud capsules were being launched as well, filling out our numbers: extras in case the Artefact took offensive action.
“Stay together and stay cool,” I ordered.
My heart beat fractionally faster, containing an impossible fear that a simulant body could never know.
Five…
Four…
Three…
Two…
One…
“Yee haw!” someone shouted over the communicator, generating enough feedback that my ears ached.