by Jamie Sawyer
“The arm isn’t actually broken,” Maberry confirmed. “But it was a nasty impact. Same goes for that injury to your bicep; it clipped muscle, but it could’ve been much worse. You got lucky. The ribs, on the other hand … Try to avoid physical exertion for the next couple of weeks.”
“I’ll try.”
Yeah, I’d suffered two fractured ribs. Hardly surprising. Another round in the auto-doc and a medi-pack saw to them, and I pledged to avoid laughing, coughing or doing anything else too hard until Maberry gave me the all-clear.
Gustav—the young crewman from the bridge—showed us to a shared barracks. Though cramped, it was idyllic compared to the conditions on Jiog. Lopez, Novak, Zero and Feng all crashed the moment my eyes were off them, exhaustion finally claiming its due. Elena saw to Pariah, providing the alien with somewhere quiet and dark in which it could temporarily nest. She seemed intrigued by the alien, which I could entirely understand.
As for me, I stripped out of the Ikarus flight-suit and took a long, hot shower.
Everything feels better after a decent shower, and I needed some thinking space. Was it strange that I wanted to be alone after so many days of confinement on Jiog? Probably, but this was different. As I stood under the shower head, let the water rush over me, I was alone by choice.
A shower on a starship—a hot water and soap shower, instead of a sonic cubicle job—is a luxury. So I made the most of it, and no one stopped me as the minutes rolled by. I watched the grime of our time on Jiog disappear down the drain.
But I couldn’t rest. We were still in Directorate space. The territory was dangerous enough, only made more treacherous by the unexplained arrival of the infected Krell fleet. There were still so many elements in play here, so many variables. So many unknowns.
I started as the ship’s PA system chimed, and a French-accented voice said, “Jump point reached. Commencing Q-jump in T minus ten seconds …”
I braced a hand against the cubicle wall. Felt the throb of the Q-drive as it activated, and we shifted into quantum space.
I should’ve felt something like relief. That would’ve been natural, the proper reaction to our flight from Directorate space. And yet I couldn’t allow myself that. Instead, I felt something darker. Getting away from Jiog was a good thing, but guilt still gnawed at me. This was probably the same Q-jump point Riggs used to escape, I thought. I hadn’t recognised him for what he was, and I had let him in.
“Q-jump successful,” the ship’s AI added a moment or so later. “We have successfully left the Joseon-696 system.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
BACK IN THE GAME
A little later, I went looking for Harris, eager to secure some answers from him. The Paladin Rouge wasn’t a big ship by any stretch, and it had limited crew quarters. When I couldn’t find Harris there, I went to the bridge, and asked Gustav.
“Ah,” said the young crewman. “Lazarus will be in his war room.” He shook his head with a knowing smile. “You ever need the old man, that’s where he’ll be.”
“He spends more time down there, on his planning, than he does with his own wife,” Nadi called out from her booth.
“Lower deck, module C-3,” said Captain Lestrade.
I followed Captain Lestrade’s directions, and found that Gustav’s description—of a war room—was very appropriate.
The chamber was one of the larger aboard the Paladin, and had been decked out with a highly advanced tri-D tactical display unit in the centre, and monitors fixed to every wall. It had the feel of an animal’s lair, with Harris the alpha male of the absent pack, mostly in darkness, illuminated only by the glow of the various holographic projections. Harris was poised over the main display, eyes narrowed as he studied the flow of data. He barely looked up as I entered.
“You’re awake.”
“Seems that way.”
“I hope you got that arm seen to.”
“I did. Your medic, Maberry, says that the arm’s fine. Or going to be, at least.”
“How about your squad? Are they okay?”
“The Jackals are resting. I’m letting them off the leash for a while.”
A tumbler of something amber and likely alcoholic sat on the display beside Harris, the scent filling the chamber. He scooped up the glass and took a sip.
“I see that you didn’t get around to replacing the hand,” I said.
Harris’ left hand was a bad-quality bionic. He inspected it, holding up his glass.
“It’s a badge of office,” Harris said. “I’ve grown attached to it.”
“Are you trying to be funny? They can give you a proper graft now, you know. Science Division has been doing them for a while.”
“Yeah, well, I kind of like this one.”
He cycled the fingers of his hand. The whole thing was completely mechanical, an Army job with exposed ligatures and metal components that terminated at the wrist. He’d lost the original during one of the Lazarus Legion’s most famous missions. A Directorate agent—another Alliance turncoat, as it happened—had been responsible for causing the injury. The Army had repaid Harris with a replacement bionic the likes of which would give children nightmares. The metal fingers clink-clinked against the glass as he manipulated them with expert precision.
“You want some?” he asked me, referring to the drink. “You know how I feel about drinking alone.”
“You made a sport out of it, back in the day.”
“It’s good bourbon.” I wasn’t surprised when Harris slid a small silver flask from his pocket and produced another glass from nowhere. He raised an eyebrow in my direction. “Proximan-brewed, just like that girl on your squad.”
“I’m not a bourbon kind of girl,” I said, “but today, I’ll make an exception.”
Seeing Harris’ hand reminded me of Carmine and her replacement leg. That had been of the same manufacture.
“They killed Carmine,” I said. “The Directorate killed Carmine on Jiog.”
“Captain Carmine? The Carbine?” Harris said. He’d known her too, had served with her during the New Ohio operation. He let out a sigh, shook his head in disappointment. “Shit. I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Not as sorry as her daughters will be.”
“You and her were tight.”
“We were, but I hadn’t seen her in years.”
“Family’s important, right? We were like family, once, but you never did come visit me in Normandy.”
Without even a thought, I answered, “It was too painful. After what happened, I mean.”
“Kaminski?”
Jesus, hearing his name hurt more than I wanted to accept. I hadn’t thought of Vincent Kaminski in a very long time. He had been my sometime lover when we served on the Lazarus Legion.
Harris nodded. “Now, he came to visit. ’Ski was that kind of guy. Stayed a whole week.”
“I’m sure he did.”
“Hated every minute of it, too. ’Ski wasn’t an outdoors type. But he visited, at least.”
We sat for a moment, in companionable silence, both drinking. The bourbon was strong, swilling around my mouth, burning my gullet on the way down. It felt reassuringly warming as it hit the empty pit of my stomach. But I knew that it would never fill the void that had been left behind.
“Sometimes people die, Jenkins. Sometimes the universe is just unfair like that, and that’s okay. It’s just the way things are.”
“Not ’Ski,” I said. “Not my ’Ski.”
The Lazarus Legion had each gone their separate ways after the Krell War. Harris, into hiding with Elena. Me, back into the military, trying to fight my way out of Harris’ shadow, but failing at every turn. I’d heard that Dejah Mason, the youngest member of the squad, had gone into politics on her return to Mars. She was tough, smart and more than capable—she would do well for herself. Elliott Martinez had taken up with gunrunners, and there were reports that he had been fighting alongside rebels for Venusian independence. Like that was ever going to happen. Like Mason,
Martinez was another political animal, although of a different sort. That left Vincent Kaminski.
“Funny, isn’t it,” I observed, even though I didn’t think that it was funny at all. “How we survived so much shit as the Lazarus Legion, but six months back in New York and death finds Kaminski.”
There was a dam inside of me, and sitting here like this—with one of my oldest friends, the man who had once been my senior officer … I was worried that if I let it open, it wouldn’t stop. The tears welled in my eyes.
“You okay?”
“I will be. It … It’s been an emotional few days.”
I shuddered. Rubbed my arms across my body, snagging the black data-ports on my forearms.
“Let’s cut through the shit,” I said. “What are you doing here, Harris?”
Harris smacked his lips as though the answer to that question required some serious thought. “The place in Normandy didn’t quite work out. It was Elena’s dream, not mine.”
“That’s not what I mean. What are you doing here in Directorate space, with a new crew? You’re supposed to be a dead man.”
“Being dead didn’t suit me.”
“That’s no kind of answer.”
“Then let’s just say that I came out of retirement. I’ve been working under the radar with the intelligence services for a while now.”
“With Military Intelligence?”
“Yeah, among others. It turns out that there are plenty of government agencies who find being dead useful.”
“I’ll bet.”
“We’re currently working with the Watch.”
I’d never heard of that organisation, but then deep intel wasn’t my line of work.
“You always needed to be the hero,” I said.
“That’s not true at all,” Harris said. “Not now, anyway.”
Harris wasn’t even an operator anymore. The sleeves of his crew-suit were rolled up, revealing blank spaces—and well-healed scar tissue—on his forearms, where his data-ports had once been. On the back of his right hand, the numerals 239 were tattooed. That was the man’s final score, his total number of transitions. When the Krell War had ended, and Harris and Elena had gone into hiding, Harris had been made non-operational—his data-ports removed. There was some irony in the fact that the man who had once been the figurehead for the Sim Ops Programme could no longer operate a simulant …
Harris continued, “But when I see a wrong, it’s hard not to want to right it.”
I laughed, although the sound came out sour and humourless. I was very much aware of Harris’ eyes boring into me, watching me. I fought the feeling that he was just another man evaluating me, testing me. Just like Riggs, just like Sergkov, even Pariah.
“The universe is falling apart again,” Harris said, “and I can’t sit by and let it happen. You can’t save them all, Jenkins, but you can try to save some.”
“We tried,” I said, “when we were Legion.”
“I recognise the girl, Zero. She’s grown up.”
“It’s been a while since we rescued her from Mau Tanis,” I explained. “She’s suffering from hero worship syndrome as far as you’re concerned. Try not to disappoint her.”
“Kid’s got smarts then, huh?” Harris said with a wry expression on his face.
I stared down at the tactical display. “I see that you’ve been keeping yourself busy.”
The tri-D display showed a particularly complex map of space, sliced with numerous battle lines. There was the Maelstrom, every Shard Gate across the region mapped and plotted, then the Former Quarantine Zone, currently clogged with Krell migrant fleets. Every graphic had been painstakingly labelled and catalogued, with the names of various Krell Collectives—Silver Talon, Blue Claw, Red Shell—floating beside each pawn on the chessboard.
“Dozens of Collectives have already been infected with the virus,” Harris said, sighing. “Many Krell star systems have fallen. Every time one goes down, it triggers a migration event. An exodus.”
A frightening number of systems glowed red. Where a system or planet fell, the Krell population migrated outwards: like an organic flood, inevitably smashing against the Former Quarantine Zone and threatening to spill into Alliance space.
“Can’t we communicate with the Krell?” I suggested. “We have the frequency-beacon.”
The frequency-beacon was one of Science Division’s breakthroughs at the end of the Krell War, technology that was supposed to allow us to make contact with the Collective’s higher intelligence network.
“The freq-beacon?” Harris repeated. “It doesn’t work on the infected Krell, and the uninfected Collectives don’t seem to want to listen anymore. All lines of communication between us and the fishes are gone. We’re on the verge of something terrible. This war will be like nothing we’ve ever fought before. Sometimes the uninfected Collectives trigger conflict as they flee the virus, but just as often the infected reach out and strike against human worlds.” He raised an eyebrow. “Which sometimes has its benefits.”
“What do you mean?”
“We used the Krell invasion of Joseon-696 as cover. Military Intelligence had been cultivating a prisoner revolt there for months, managed to smuggle in some communicators. The work-gangs aren’t as closely monitored as the rest of the prisoners. Your man Novak didn’t even know who he was working with. According to Carmine, Command hadn’t even known the prison’s location. Harris’s intel must’ve been deep.”
“That was quite the plan,” I said. “But we got lucky. Things could’ve worked out very differently.”
Harris didn’t take the bait, but said, “Novak was an enforcer with the Sons of Balash, you know. There were lots of former gang members down there, and several from the Sons.”
“I know about all this, Harris. But the Sons of Balash, that’s not him anymore.”
“Maybe, but loyalty like that never really leaves a man.”
“They killed his wife and child,” I explained. Sudden recall of that disclosure—hanging upside down in the Krell holding facility on one of their ark-ships, somewhere in the Gyre—made me feel sick … I drank down the rest of my bourbon, and Harris immediately poured me another glass. “Novak might have his reasons for working with the Sons,” I said, “but he’s a Jackal now, through and through.”
“If you say so.”
“How did you know that we were on Jiog?”
“I keep my ear to the ground. When the intelligence came through that you’d been captured …” Harris pulled a face. “I couldn’t let it go.”
“Why did the Krell choose Joseon-696—Jiog—as their target?”
“It was random, more or less. The infected Collectives don’t appear to have any specific objective. They just wander, mindless, into occupied space.”
“That figures,” I said. I’d seen the infected fishes up close, and I could easily accept that there was no reasoning behind those dead eyes.
“I wish that the Krell virus was our only problem. The Black Spiral are also running rampant, conducting raids on Alliance holdings all along the Former Quarantine Zone and throughout the Drift.”
The map lit with dozens of glowing attack locations, and I saw how busy the Spiral had been in the last few months. Harris had methodically categorised their various activities, as though he was trying to predict their next target.
“What’s the Spiral’s objective?”
“As you can see, the Gates have attracted particular interest. For what reason? I don’t know. Not yet, anyway.”
It was obvious from his tone that this was a problem to which he had dedicated considerable thought. As a military tactician, to understand the enemy meant that it could be predicted, could be measured and estimated. An enemy that could not be understood was a very dangerous one indeed. That the Spiral were focusing their attention on the Shard Gates wasn’t new information, but it was still worrying. The Gates were literal wormholes in time-space, and allowed for instant travel between the Maelstrom and sometimes vulnera
ble locations in Alliance space. No one had thought to shore up the defences of those star systems, because—until recently—the Krell had been on our side. The Shard were the only other confirmed xeno threat, and no one had heard from the machines in a very long time.
Harris continued, “The Spiral are also stealing equipment and supplies. They’ve attacked outposts across the Former Quarantine Zone. Some military targets, others civilian. Sometimes, the Spiral’s purpose seems to be to destabilise defensive lines.” He pointed to a location. “Here, they found an experimental research station. Stole stealth missiles, proper cutting-edge technology.”
“Stealth missiles?” I asked. I hadn’t even heard of such a thing.
“They shoot you with one, you won’t see it coming until it’s too late,” Harris muttered. “Whenever Alliance forces come up against the Spiral, they never know what they’re going into.” Harris thoughtfully sipped at his bourbon. “So those are the highlights,” he concluded. “The universe has gone to shit.”
“We were working with Mili-Intel too,” I said. “An officer called Major Vadim Sergkov.”
“I know about your mission,” Harris replied, “and I knew Major Sergkov. He was okay, for Mili-Intel. We already know that the Santa Fe was tasked with tracking the ECS Hannover.”
“You have been busy,” I whispered. That was supposed to be protected information. “We found the Hannover.” I shuddered, recalling what we had discovered in the Maelstrom, and the subsequent loss of that intel. “Or what was left of it. But one of my squad—Corporal Riggs—was a traitor. The bastard manipulated me.”
Just speaking Riggs’ name brought with it a deluge of anger, regret, disgust. I had let Riggs in, let my guard down. Where had that got me? I shivered with rage.
Harris wasn’t one for reassurance, but he did offer, “Hold it in, Jenkins. You’ll get your chance to get even.”
“Is that a promise?”
“As good as. Riggs was a Black Spiral convert. Someone persuaded him to join their cause as a result of his background. We know that he was responsible for your capture by Directorate forces. That was a deliberate act, to take you out of the game.”