by Jamie Sawyer
Admiral Loeb had asked to see me in his room, and I thought how different the circumstances of my last visit had been. The stately corridor outside his chamber had been almost destroyed in the attack, his chamber doors replaced. His room had no doubt been one of the first targets for the Directorate attackers.
An officer let me in; not the same lieutenant as the one I’d previously been dealing with. Loeb sat on his own by the view-port, a glass of liquor in his hand, dog at his heel. Both looked impossibly tired.
“Please, sit,” he insisted. “Lieutenant Toms, pour the major a drink.”
“What happened to your old assistant?” I asked, inspecting the new officer.
“A little problem of loyalty. He was one of the Directorate sleeper agents and I executed him myself.” He sighed; a long, drawn-out expression. “And as you know, they killed Dr West. She’ll be missed.”
Loeb looked away, ran a hand through the fur on Lincoln’s neck.
“You don’t need to talk about it if you don’t want to,” I said.
“Whatever I want, I’m going to have to talk about it a lot. I guess you already know what that’s like. Questions are going to be asked as to why an admiral – with over forty years of fleet experience – didn’t realise that the Directorate had compromised his ship.”
“It happens.”
“Not to me, it doesn’t. Not to me. Command will want to know how Captain Williams – if that was his real name – managed to infiltrate an Army Sim Ops mission, right under my nose.”
It had been a large and well-planned operation, albeit one that had ultimately failed. But had it? I wondered. Where is Williams? Where are the simulator-tanks that he and the Warfighters used? The thought sent a chill through me. The new lieutenant returned with my drink, and I eyed her warily. The Directorate could be anywhere, now.
Loeb said: “Not a single enemy agent was taken alive. Even sleepers; they’d rather die than be taken prisoner.”
I sipped the drink. It was an aged Scotch: a pleasant reminder of what I could expect back on the Point.
“I’m a fossil, Harris. A goddamn dinosaur. I’m being left behind. I don’t understand this war any more. We went out there to investigate an alien Artefact with seventeen combat-ready ships. I thought there was nothing in this galaxy that could stand in our way.”
“It’s an easy mistake to make.”
“You’re too forgiving.” He swallowed down the remainder of his drink; rolled the ice around in the bottom of his glass. “Listen: I’m sorry about your man. I’m sorry about what happened to Private Kaminski. And Saul too. I – we – couldn’t stay there.”
If Loeb had stayed in Damascus Space, we’d sure as shit all be dead. But even so, it was a decision that I wouldn’t have been able to make. We hadn’t just left Kaminski behind, but also a good deal of the Alliance fleet. Loeb’s logic was faultless, but it still made no sense to me.
“We’re at war, Loeb,” I said. “It’s going to happen to us all, sooner or later.”
“I suppose so.”
“All we can ask for is a good death.”
Loeb motioned to his new lieutenant to pour me another drink. I accepted it, and we both sat in silence for a long while – watching the distant stars, worlds and systems tumbling past.
“When we jumped through the Shard Gate,” I said, my voice barely a whisper, “I felt something in there with us. Something else, in Shard Space.”
“We barely have any data on the jump,” Loeb said. “The sensor-suite was FUBAR. Whatever tech the Shard had, it isn’t like anything I’ve ever seen before.”
“Whatever tech the Shard have,” I corrected. “And that’s my point: it felt like something alive, functional.”
Loeb was quiet for a moment. “I felt it too. Sci-Div will shit themselves when they see the data.”
I hoped that I’d done the right thing; that activating the Artefact – the Shard Gate – hadn’t doomed us all. Not just a few thousand personnel – terrible as that was – but the entire human race.
“Martinez told me that we’re approaching Liberty Point,” I said.
“It’s a bit more complicated than that. The journey through the Shard Gate caused a malfunction in the Colossus’ telemetry module.” He waved at the stars. “Astrocartography isn’t a manual art any more.”
“So where are we?”
“We should be approaching the Point, any day now.”
“But we don’t know?”
“Exactly. And as for when we are: the Q-jump might’ve cost us six months, or it might’ve cost us twenty years.”
I started to probe the darker consequences of the time-lapse for Kaminski or Elena, but before I could really do that there was a chime over the ship’s PA.
I noticed that Loeb started involuntarily, and his face then crumpled like he was angry with his own reaction.
“Admiral Loeb to the bridge,” announced the PA.
All of us gathered in the CIC: Jenkins, Martinez, Mason, Loeb. Even Lieutenant James – in a healthy next-gen sim, dressed in the flight-suit that he never seemed to leave.
The blast-shutters were open again.
“What are we looking at?” Loeb questioned.
The CIC was only half-staffed. There was an air of anxiety among the personnel: from the clipped exchanges occurring around me, I also detected confusion. I automatically scanned near-space.
“Nothing, sir,” an officer replied.
“Then why the priority summons?” Loeb barked.
“Because we’ve managed to get the telemetry module online, sir.”
“Good. Then where are we?”
An officer down in the well of the CIC tilted her head, frowned at the readings in front of her. I looked over her shoulder and tried to interpret the data-feed myself.
“We should be on top of Liberty Point, sir.”
“Do we have comms?” I asked.
“Yes, sir,” the comms officer said.
“Then open the general channel!” Loeb ordered.
“…is an emergency broadcast…Alliance FOB Liberty Point has fallen…All surviving personnel are to await pick-up…Retrieval crews are inbound…This transponder is set to repeat this message…”
“This is it,” I whispered. “This is all that’s left.”
We all stood in silence, watching the black, as the wreck of home drifted past the view-screen.
Acknowledgements
Writing any book is a collaborative effort, and I am grateful for the support and assistance that my family has shown throughout the process.
Once again, my wife, Louise, has been my frontline proofreader and the ideal sounding board for the long list of ideas that seem to pour out like a stream of consciousness. As ever, thank you for encouraging and inspiring me.
My children have also put up with long hours of writing and weekends when I’ve had to be at war rather than in the park.
As with my first book, my agent, Robert Dinsdale, helped me to shape and direct this novel. His feedback and comments are always on the mark. And what do you know? The second book was a little less work than the first…But not by much!
My editor Anna Jackson and the whole Orbit team have also been hugely encouraging and assisted greatly in getting this book out there.
Meet the Author
Photo credit: author
JAMIE SAWYER was born in 1979 in Newbury, Berkshire. He studied Law at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, acquiring a master’s degree in human rights and surveillance law. Jamie is a full-time barrister, practising in criminal law. When he isn’t working in law or writing, Jamie enjoys spending time with his family in Essex. He is an enthusiastic reader of all types of SF, especially classic authors such as Heinlein and Haldeman.
Find out more about Jamie Sawyer and other Orbit authors by registering for the free monthly newsletter at www.orbitbooks.net.
Also by Jamie Sawyer
THE LAZARUS WAR
Artefact
Legion
Origin
If you enjoyed
THE LAZARUS WAR: LEGION,
look out for
ANCESTRAL MACHINES
by Michael Cobley
It was named Bringer of Battles, three hundred worlds orbiting a single artificial star, three hundred battlefields where different species vie for mastery and triumph. It is a cage where war is a game—brutal, savage and sudden. In this arena, all must bend the knee to the Lords of Permutation and the ancient sentient weapons with which they have merged. Or suffer indescribable agonies.
Trapped in this draconian crucible of death, Brannan Pyke, captain and smuggler, must fight his way to freedom.
Because in the Bringer of Battles, the game of war is played to the death and beyond.
CHAPTER ONE
Through Brannan Pyke’s slow-waking mind, thoughts stole like foggy ghosts…
Death came…
He felt cold, lying on something soft, something weightless.
Death came whispering …
Cold, yes, but not soft, not lying on anything.
Death came whispering orders…
Just hanging in zero-gee, he realised drowsily, hanging in the dark, with something glowing faintly red off to one side. Those words about death whispering seemed familiar somehow… then he remembered. It was poetry, something that Dervla had been singing yesterday…
Then Pyke awoke with a curse on his lips as it all came back in a black, bitter rush, the rendezvous with Khorr, the handover, the sleepgas ambush … and now here he was in some shadowed corner of the Scarabus where he spun lazily amid a cloud of angular objects that caught faint red glimmers from… from a solitary emergency lamp over the hatch.
“Lights,” he said, voice hoarse in a dry throat. Nothing hap pened. “Scar – can you hear or respond?”
Silence reigned in the gloom, which meant that the comms and/or the AI was offline.
Pyke coughed, swallowed, and realised he was in Auxiliary Hold 3, the place where they stored stuff that wasn’t pointless and wasn’t crucial but might be later. A variety of containers, plastic, card and fabric, drifted all around, some agape and surrounded by their contents, components, silver-wrapped edibles, unidentifiable disc things webbed together in tangled nets, trade goods maybe.
Well, he thought. Still most definitely alive. But why would that pusbag Khorr do that? Why leave behind witnesses that could identify him…
His imagination provided a variety of answers in shades of sadism and horror, and it was impossible not to think about the rest of the crew, Dervla especially. He had to get out of here, find out what had happened, whatever it was.
Several unsecured storage straps hung from the ceiling, drifting like strands of plaslon kelp. He stretched out and caught one with his fingertips, drew it into his hand, then hauled himself up to the ceiling and used the sling loops to get to the nearest bulk head. Loose boxes and tubes and bags hung in his way, reminding him of the number of times he’d asked Ancil to sort through this guddle and clear out the really useless tat.
Racks lined the bulkhead. Pulling himself across them he steered towards the hatch, anchored himself with the metal handle and prodded the panel of touch controls. As expected, they were dead so he reached down and twisted the manual release. The doorseal popped and he felt a brief but definite puff of air as pressures equalised. Wedging his arm between the hatch handle and the doorframe he slowly forced the unlocked hatch open. With a sigh of relief he floated out into the ship’s starboard passageway, glanced either way and saw the same emergency lights shedding meagre red halos amid the murk. There were no sounds, just a muffled quiet. He hooked one arm around a wall stanchion and paused to think back.
The trade rendezvous had been set for the environs of a snow bound world called Nadisha II, in an unexploited system right on the border between Earthsphere and the Indroma Solidarity. The Scarabus had been in orbit for over an hour when Khorr’s vessel finally arrived. The meeting had taken place in the Scarabus’s main hold, and was Pyke’s first face-to-face with the client. Over subspace comms Khorr had claimed to be the descendant of higrav workers but in the flesh he was clearly much more, humanoid in appearance though possibly lab-coded for what headhunters referred to as non-civilian applications. Garbed in worn, leathery body armour, Khorr was easily seven feet tall, bald, and had a fighter’s brawny physique, as did his two slightly less imposing henchmen. With the body armour and the heavy boots they resembled extras from the set of an exceptionally ultra gothique glowactioner.
Pyke had taken the usual precautions: apart from Punzho and Hammadi, the rest of the crew were on hand to provide the deter rence of an armed welcoming committee. Khorr and his men had climbed out of their squat shuttle and strode leisurely over to where Pyke stood next to a waist-high crate on which sat the merchandise, resting within its shaped padding, a state-of-the-art milgrade subspace scanner-caster. When the three stopped a few feet short and crossed their arms, Pyke had heard one of Dervla’s trademark derisive snorts from behind. Ignoring it, he had given a bright smile.
“Well, now, here we are, meeting at last. Very nice.”
Khorr, face like granite, grunted. His dark eyes had flicked right and left at the rest of the crew for a moment before fixing on Pyke again.
“This is the device?”
Pyke gave the scanner’s case an affectionate pat.
“You see before you Sagramore Industries’ latest and finest scanner, factory-fresh and field-ready, conveyed to your waiting hands by my professional services. Which don’t come cheap.”
Khorr nodded, reached inside his heavy jacket and produced a small flat case just the right size for holding a number of credit splines. He held them out and waited until Pyke’s fingers were prying at the release button before saying, “Here is your pay ment!”
Now, floating weightless in the half-lit passage, Pyke remem bered how his danger-sense had quivered right at that moment but his hands had had a life of their own and were already opening the small case. A faint mist had puffed out and even though he had turned his face away from it he still caught a whiff of some thing sweet. He had felt cold prickles scamper across his face as he turned to shout a warning, but saw Ancil and Win crumpling to the deck a second before grey nothing shut down his mind.
And yet I’m still alive, he thought. And that skagpile Khorr really doesn’t seem like the type to leave behind loose ends.
Grabbing handholds on the bulkhead, he launched himself along the passage towards Auxiliary Hold 4. He slowed and floated over to the hatch window, gazed in and swore at the sight. Hammadi’s corpse hung there, adrift amid blue and green spares boxes. Dead. The jutting tongue and noticeably bulging eyes spoke of suffocation by depressurisation, gradual not explosive, otherwise there would have been webs of burst blood vessels and more grotesque damage. Hammadi was – had been – chief engineer, a genius in his own way who had made the Scarabus’s drives sing like a chorus of harmonised furies.
But all Pyke could think about was Dervla. Dear god, please no!
Pyke pushed away from the hatch, turning towards a side opening, the midsection lateral corridor which led to the port-side passageway and the other auxiliary holds. He launched himself along it, driven to get it over with.
The quiet was eerie, unnerving. No mingled background murmur of onboard systems, no whisper of a/c, no low hum of micropumps, no faint sounds of crew activities, no music, no chattering news feeds. Just a numbed silence. But the air… he sniffed, breathed in deep, and realised that it was not as stale as it should be. Some backup ventilation had to be running some where, but how and why? More unanswered questions.
It was just as gloomy over in the port-side passage. From the T junction he glided across to Auxiliary Hold 2, grabbed the door stanchion and peered in through the hatch window. There was movement, and the surprised, bandito-moustached face of Ancil Martel glanced up from where he floated, crouched next to the manual override panel.
“Hey, chief
,” came his muffled voice. “It’s jammed on this side. Can you… ?”
Pyke nodded, pried aside the outer panel and after several sharp tugs the hatch seal gave with a familiar pop. A moment later the hatch was slid aside enough for Ancil to squeeze through.
“Those ratbags chumped us, chief.”
“I know.”
“But why are we still alive… ?”
Pyke ground his teeth and shook his head. “Hammadi’s in Hold 4, dead from air-evac. I think that’s what that gouger Khorr had in mind, for us all to be in our quarters and dead from some massive failure of the environmentals. But something must have interrupted the scum … or he just made a bollocks of it and didn’t know.” He glanced along at the next hatch. “What about Hold 1? D’ye know if there’s anyone in there?”
Ancil shrugged. “Only came around a short while ago. Banged on the wall a few times but I didn’t hear anything.”
“Better find out, then, hadn’t we?”
So saying he pushed off along to Hold 1’s hatch, grabbed its handle and swung in close to the window and…
“Feck and dammit!” he snarled.
Inside, near the rear bulkhead, the bulky, brown-overalled form of Krefom, the Henkayan heavy weapons specialist, drifted a few feet off the deck, still as a statue, sightless eyes gazing out of that craggy impassive face. In Pyke’s mind he imagined Khorr and his men moving through the ship, dragging the unconscious crew along, imprisoning them one by one.
“That son of a bitch is going to pay!”
With the last rage-filled word he slammed one palm and upper arm against the flat bulkhead, making a sudden loud bang which reverberated along the passage. Then he gasped as he saw the Henkayan’s still form jerk convulsively, eyes staring wildly around him for a moment or two. Then he spotted the disbelieving Pyke and Ancil at the window, gave a big grin and pointed.