by Jamie Sawyer
The entire scene was cast against the backdrop of the Damascus Rift. It seemed to glow especially bright: an insanity-inducing, effervescent green. My cameras scanned the mass of moonlets tumbling around the Damascus Rift. Something out there flashed red-and-yellow. That had to be the tell-tale pattern of an evac beacon. An idea occurred to me. I activated my receiver and began to search through the Alliance distress frequencies. My suit found the relevant band quickly, began to decipher the decoded transmission.
“Kaminski?” I asked. “That you?”
“Major?” He sounded relieved.
“Affirmative.” I had to keep it brief; at any given second I might move out of comms range. “Any injuries?”
“Negative. I…I don’t know what the fuck just happened. I was guarding Saul, when all hell broke loose. Jesus. It was bad.”
“I copy that. Hold tight. You’re going to be okay. We’re retaking the Colossus. Once James has control of the flight deck, your pick-up will be the priority.”
“Where are you going?”
“I’m making a drop to the Artefact.” There was no time to explain the plan, so instead I just said, “I’m calling in some back-up.”
Kaminski said nothing, and the line crackled and popped with interference from the Rift.
“You still there?” I asked, after a long pause. I was worried that I’d lost the signal.
“Yeah, Major. I’m still here. Don’t leave that pick-up too long, if you can help it. The pod’s atmospherics will hold out for a few days but we’re being bathed in radiation from the Rift. We’ll run out of anti-rad drugs before we lose oxygen.”
“I copy. Hopefully we won’t need that long.”
“Major!” came another voice: Saul. “I need to speak with you urgently!”
There was some movement at Kaminski’s end of the line.
My drop-capsule made another course correction, and the transmission suddenly became even more static-heavy.
“I’m not sure it matters any more,” Saul said, dourly. Sounded like he had no preconceptions of survival either. “But you need to know what happened—”
The line abruptly went dead: descended into a wail of white noise.
“Saul?” I yelled. “Kaminski!”
I cycled the bands again, furiously tried to reach them, but every band was claimed by feedback. What did Saul know? Fuck. What had happened out here?
I gradually shed the remainder of my drop-capsule. The safety webbing loosened, slid free. My retro-thrusters fired. I landed on the outer hull of the Artefact and my mag-locks activated.
The Directorate boarding party was still scattered, disorganised. Two soldiers advanced on my location – firing Armtrade X-90 laser rifles – but I dispatched them with a volley from my M95. Even in hard-suits, they dissolved to plasma. In the distance, flagged on my HUD as major threats, a heavy mech had just made landfall. I wondered whether any of those had already breached the Artefact: whether I’d have any Directorate opposition once I was aboard.
Only one way to find out, I thought. I’m coming to get you, Elena.
A ubiquitous iris-airlock sat in the hull beside me. It slid open. With a gentle nudge from my thruster pack, I launched myself inside.
The familiar tug of gravity, the glowing blue corridors.
I crossed the threshold.
I crouched, my rifle held in my left hand – a hand which my real body no longer possessed – and slid the Key free with my right. My HUD sparkled with error messages as it sought to recreate an analysis of the Key’s energy output. The device began that cyclic flashing, the glyphs along the blade alight. The Artefact on Helios had yearned for activation. This cold, dark station was no different. I was going to give the machine exactly what it wanted.
“Elena!” I shouted. “I’m here! I have the Key!”
The Artefact creaked and groaned around me. A noise like the distant beating of drums, or the churning of ancient machinery, fell in rhythm with my heartbeat. In the distance, I could hear the rattle of gunfire. I was sure that the Reaper was doing its thing: there would be plenty of Directorate targets.
“We aren’t so different,” I shouted to the Artefact. “We both want the same thing.”
My bio-scanner began a regular chiming.
There. A single bio-read; a flashing blip moving towards me.
The air tasted of ozone, of burning, but there was no sign of fire. The cuneiform on the walls gently strobed and pulsed. My skin crawled for no good reason. It felt as though something was awakening from a long slumber. Every footfall, it lingered just beyond my field of vision. Liquid shadow pooled wherever darkness fell, but then abolished under the light of my combat-suit lamps.
My sensor-suite was going crazy. There were spikes of electrical activity all around me. The biological read was always tantalisingly out of reach; a corridor away no matter how far I got into the Artefact. I shouted Elena’s name, but my voice was claimed by the moaning of the Shard machinery all around—
The Reaper suddenly took shape in front of me.
It hovered, almost in vacillation: torn between two paths – I could sense the agony coming from the thing in waves – and undecided what it should do with me.
I breathed hard, fought the urge to shoot. The Key was still in my hand and I held it out to the machine. I knew that fighting was useless – knew how this scenario had played out so many times before – but I couldn’t let it just kill me. Too many people depended on me.
The black mass squirmed under my gaze; took on a humanoid form. A skull-like face appeared, mouth open in a machine scream. My audio-dampeners reacted a second too late and the noise pricked my consciousness. The tactical-helmet began to stream a series of errors; fuzzing with lines of static.
Fuck. Not static. Something else.
Words rapidly scrolled across the interior of my face-plate. The machine-shriek wasn’t just a sound. It was a data-burst.
The Reaper was speaking to me.
Query: organic?
Exterminate organic! Not Shard!
Non-organic?
Shard, no shard
Execute command:
//Not one!//
<
//Shard one!//
Execute: unity
<
There was so much more to the noise than just those words. It spoke of incredible loss, incredible pain. Emotions that I knew too – but on a level that I couldn’t understand. Didn’t want to understand, because this was the suffering of ages. It was beyond the ken of human measurements.
Unity: it wanted to be one again.
“What are you?” I asked.
Sharp appendages formed from the Reaper’s body – a million black chrome needles, poised to launch at me. But instead of attacking, it spoke again.
//Execute command: guardian//
<< No time log >>
Long time: too long–
//Command: no end//
Eternity washed over me: thousands of years out here, alone and undying. The construct was angry; so very angry. It wasn’t just a guardian for this place. The Reaper was the Artefact. The structure and thing in front of me were one and the same, and they yearned to be part of the Shard Network. The Reaper’s words were mere expressions it was using so that I could understand; representative tools, nothing more.
It screamed again: another burst of machine-code.
<
<
//War no end//
Command execute: protect
Unity–
Something exploded from elsewhere in the Artefact. The floor rumbled, the structure amplifying the distant violence. I guessed that it was the Directorate; maybe a shuttle crashing on the hull, or perhaps the heavier machinery being used to breach and secure the Artefact.
“Finish them,” I said, tossing my head back down the corridor: towards the airlock.
The Reaper hesitated. Its f
acial expression – if you could call that monstrous mimicry, cast in living black metal, a face – flickered with confusion. I didn’t know how this would play out, and kept my rifle at the ready. The construct’s proclivity for sudden and lethal violence naturally made me wary—
As abruptly as it had appeared, the Reaper recoiled back into the walls: instantly gone.
“Conrad?” came a familiar voice. “You came back.”
Elena. She emerged from the shadows ahead, her face panic-stricken.
“What’s happening?” she asked.
“The Directorate are here. Our ship has been invaded and this place isn’t secure. We have to act fast. Were they on your ship? Were the Directorate on the Endeavour?”
Elena nodded. “They were with us all the way.”
We embraced. “I told you that I would come back. We have to get you off the Artefact.”
I broke free from her, looked down into her wide eyes. She looked so tired, so vulnerable. This close, I could see every pore of her unblemished skin; see the perfect structure of her face in every detail.
“I have the Key,” I said. “We have to get you out of here, but I have so many questions…”
“You know what you need to do,” said Elena.
“The rest can wait,” I said.
Before us, glowing so bright that the light scorched my eyes, was the portal to the Hub.
The doorway yawned open.
“The Endeavour is beyond the Rift,” Elena began, talking as we ran. “You have to follow me – save all of us. You cannot let the Directorate know where we are.”
“Stay behind me,” I said. “We can talk soon—”
Her tiny hand was inside mine, and I had to be so careful not to hurt her.
Elena shook her head. “This is important, Conrad,” she insisted. “More important than me. The Directorate have eyes and ears everywhere. I’m sorry that I couldn’t tell you before.” She shivered. “There are so many things that I want to say.”
“There will be time.”
I wrestled with the urge to know, to question her further, but danger lurked everywhere. With Elena behind me, that guise of invulnerability that I enjoyed inside a sim was gone. If she died, all of this was for nothing. If I died, she would either be trapped in here for ever, or worse, she would be captured by the Directorate. Loeb’s countdown could be up at any time: my HUD was still scrambled and I had no way of knowing how long I had left. Every second counted.
“I’ll never let them get to you,” I said to Elena.
“I have things to tell you. I need to explain it all.”
We prowled across the bridge, towards the raised platform in the middle of the cavern. I avoided looking over the edge, into the deep chasm over which the bridge was constructed. Just once, curiosity got the better of me. Shit. I couldn’t make out the purpose of the chasm, but it was deep. I repressed a crash of vertigo; kept my eyes on the ground in front of me. My rifle lowered to illuminate a distressed, pitiful xeno body: an ancient cadaver crawling towards the cavern’s centre.
We finally reached the other side of the bridge and set down on the platform. This was completely unchartered territory: the very heart of the Artefact. Mist circled around my feet, like dry ice; dripping off the edge and disappearing into the chasm below. There were alien structures, cast of black rock and crystal, all around us. An atonal humming – maybe generated by the machines – caught the air.
“It’s this way,” Elena said.
There was a raised dais sat in the centre of the platform, and something was self-assembling on top of it. Formed of living metal, shivering with an artificial heartbeat, the thing was an alien control console – like no tech that I had ever seen before. Snippets of radio transmissions reverberated from the console and the semi-mirrored surface flayed with images. Reflected transmissions, caught in Damascus Space: bouncing off the moon-fields for ever. Those memories, like the Reaper, would never be allowed to die.
I could feel the heat emanating from the Key. It yearned for unity in the same way as the Reaper.
“I’m sorry,” I said to Elena. “For what I did. For everything. I’ll make it right.”
Elena nodded. “We can both make it right—”
The distinctive pitched tone of a plasma rifle firing suddenly filled my ears.
Elena reeled backwards.
Three shots, all to the chest.
She didn’t even have time to scream.
I did. “No!”
She staggered towards the edge of the platform.
I reacted, dropped the Key and my rifle – because, if I lost Elena, those things wouldn’t matter anyway. I went prone, belly-down, and lurched towards the edge of the chasm. As she fell, I grabbed for her with my right hand. Caught her just in time, as she was about to drop. I closed my gauntlet around her left hand so hard that I feared I’d break her. She dangled at the edge of the platform, her whole body swaying over the edge.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ve got you. It’s okay!”
I knew that it really wasn’t. All three shots had hit her in the torso; punched right through the vac-suit, exposing burnt skin and bone. There was no way that she would survive the plasma wounds, and if I let her fall into the chasm then the drop would surely kill her.
“Hold on to me!” I yelled. “Don’t give up! Never give up!”
I clutched her hand – palm to palm – and tried to grab her with my other hand as well. Her fingers were already growing limp, beginning to lose traction against my glove. There was blood everywhere. It bathed my hand and hers, made it difficult to get proper purchase. I couldn’t get the leverage to drag her body back up.
Another plasma volley erupted around me.
Elena lurched – like she was suddenly able to see through the fog of pain, grasp some transient clarity – and scrabbled against the wall. Her glassy eyes fixed on mine.
“I’ll get you out of here!” I roared.
“Do it, Conrad,” she said. She swallowed, her hand slipping through mine. “Then find me…”
“Don’t let go!” I shouted. “Don’t leave me!”
Her face went slack.
She was already gone.
The strength in her hand seemed to evaporate.
Elena let go, and fell from the platform edge.
Grasping for thin air, I watched as her body faded into blackness.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
THROUGH THE RIFT
I wanted to shout.
Wanted to rage against this cosmic injustice, to tear the universe apart.
But the words wouldn’t come to me. Desperation clouded my thought-process; made it impossible to think rationally. This couldn’t be happening. Not after everything that we had been through.
I just saw Elena die.
The hurt was so enormous that I couldn’t deal with it. The humane, human, parts of my neural matrix began to shut down. I felt the pathways withering: felt positive emotion being stolen from me.
Elena is dead.
Elena’s suffering – waiting here, for some purpose that I still didn’t fully understand – had been for nothing. Eight years of hope and dream and finally its realisation all gone. To be so close, and to have my objective ripped away from me: that was the story of my life.
Gone.
Elena was everything.
Without her, I was nothing.
I was hollow.
I looked down at my gloves. Just seconds ago Elena was in my grasp, and now the only evidence that she’d ever been here was the blood soaking my combat-suit. It covered my palms, ran into the creases of my fingertips.
I’m gone.
Was it worth going on any more?
My answer came from an unexpected angle.
“Hey, Harris! You kill my woman, I kill yours. Sounds like a fair trade.”
My combat-suit wasn’t expecting the surge of feeling – of pure, unadulterated hatred – that detonated inside me. The medi-suite tried to compensate; began t
o flood my system with dangerous levels of combat-drugs in an effort to keep me optimal.
I didn’t need that any more. My psyche began to reboot, rebuild. I became a machine calibrated only for violence. Something new pulsed through my veins – filled me like a Krell venom, consumed me.
Hate.
I stood. Didn’t even bother with my plasma rifle, because I wanted to see Williams’ face when I killed him. This had to be up close and personal. I looked down, saw the weapon sheathed at my belt: the Directorate mono-sword that Mason had liberated. Standing, invulnerable, as plasma fire rained all around me, I drew the sword. The blade lit immediately and I swung it to test the weight. It was a heavy, solid weapon, with a killing edge. I was no swordsman but sheer and brutal determination would make up for lack of experience.
All four of the Warfighters were in the mist, their outlines illuminated by the muzzle-glow of firing rifles. They advanced through the Shard structures, trying to encircle me.
“Give it up, Harris!” Williams shouted. “This is a waste of time. The Legion has already surrendered. They’re back aboard the Colossus, safe and sound.”
You don’t reason with a rabid animal, Williams. I was a cornered street dog; an animal with no purpose any more. Attack was the only option.
I shouted a war cry, long and violent, then ran at the nearest Warfighter. It didn’t matter which: I was going to kill them all. Exactly who had fired the killing shot was irrelevant. They were all guilty.
A Warfighter was trying to outflank me: moving through the mist to my left. Without any conscious thought, I grabbed a fragmentation grenade from my suit-webbing. Primed it, tossed it sideways. The grenade exploded, sending red-hot frag across the area. I felt something hit me in the ribs – maybe a plasma pulse, maybe debris from the blast – but the injury wasn’t enough to put me down and I ignored it.
One of the female Warfighters was suddenly in front of me. She went to fire her rifle.
“He’s here!” she shrieked. She had discarded her helmet, and I could see every trembling feature of her face. “I have him!”