by Jamie Sawyer
“Solid copy. Good to go.”
Feng, Lopez and Novak collectively hollered and whooped.
“Transition in three… two… one…”
I opened my eyes in my new skin, blinking away the vestiges of chemically induced sleep. Kickstarted by combat-drugs delivered directly from my combat-suit, the simulant came online immediately. I was wearing a tactical-helmet, and data flushed the HUD right in front of my face, and via my neural-link.
I took a split-second to orient myself in my new body and evaluate my surroundings. We were in the cryogenics vault, the storage area used to contain our entire stock of simulants. The hold was filled with capsules. These were stacked vertically against every bulkhead, and each held a new skin. Readouts on the base of the capsules flashed in the dark, indicating that the bodies were still on ice. Although most of them would take some warming up before they could be deployed, Zero had prepped several. I was very glad she had. A single copy of each skin had been armed and armoured, in case of emergency. This most definitely qualified.
“Transition successful, Zero,” I declared.
I was already wearing a Class X Pathfinder suit. The armour was docked to the bulkhead behind me, attached to a charging cradle. I disengaged the external cabling and slid free.
“We’re in zero-G,” I realised. “Watch yourselves, troopers. Mag-locks on.”
The Jackals went through the same routine, and unhooked themselves from the bulkhead. Mag-locks anchored each of us to the deck. Lopez switched on her suit-lamps. She panned the bright beams across the rows of slack-faced simulants.
“At least our skins are safe,” she said, looking in awe at the number of bodies contained in the hold.
“What’s happened to gravity in here, Zero?” I asked.
“The envelope has failed in that sector,” Zero said, “but I’m not sure why. I’ll run an analysis on the life-support systems, and see if—”
“This is Captain Heinrich,” interrupted another voice, on the priority communications channel. “What’s your status, Jackals?”
Lopez rolled her eyes at me, and I scowled back at her.
“We’re in cryo-storage, sir,” I said, my breath fogging the inside of my face-plate. “We’re advancing on the damaged compartment.”
“Well move faster,” Heinrich said. “I’ll send you the route.”
“Received, sir,” I said, as the data-packet uploaded to my suit. “We’re on the move.”
“All crew are accounted for—there shouldn’t be anyone left down there. Not alive, anyway. Get that fire extinguished.”
Glowing graphics appeared on the interior of my face-plate. Schematics showed the route we should take through the Valkyrie’s damaged interior.
“Understood, sir. Jenkins out.”
“Move. Heinrich out.”
The line closed.
I unlocked my mags. With a short burst from my EVAMP, I boosted towards a hatch that would take us into Deck C. The Jackals did the same.
“Zero, can you see to this door,” I said.
“I should be able to open hatches as you go, direct from the SOC.”
“Good work. Keep in touch.”
“This is the place,” said Lopez.
The words on the outer hatch read C-13. It was still sealed, but my suit-sensors detected a steady rise in temperature.
“These must be the fire extinguishers,” Feng said.
Four heavy spray cannons were inside a unit on the wall. Feng opened the locker and distributed one to each of us. Although the extinguishers were heavy, the Pathfinder’s man-amp made their weight manageable.
“These are halon sprayers,” I said. “Point them, and deploy the gas.”
“Nice and easy,” Novak said. He hefted the cannon with one hand, aiming it.
“Do you read, Zero?” I asked.
“I copy.”
“We’re at the hatch to C-13.”
“Here goes.”
An amber warning strobe started overhead, and the hatch began to grind open. Safety icons and black-and-yellow hazard stripes plastered the heavy blast doors. The words DO NOT ENTER stuck in my mind. The Jackals braced.
“Holy fucking Gaia…” Lopez said.
A wave of heat hit me like a fist. It was accompanied by a flash of light so blinding that my face-plate polarised to compensate. Worse yet, exotic energy—in levels that threatened to penetrate even my heavy armour—spilt out. Health warnings flashed across my HUD. Yeah, yeah, I thought. I get it. But I’m going to die anyway, right? Stepping foot inside the chamber just meant that it was going to happen a lot faster.
Feng put a hand to his face. It was a wasted gesture, but I could understand where he was coming from. Chemical fire raged across almost every surface. Baleful flames licked at the deck, the bulkheads; crept across the ceiling. The fire was like a living thing. Alien, unreal. It pulsed like a jellyfish, crawling, writhing…
“Inside,” I ordered. “Sprayers up.”
The lock behind us slammed shut, and the four of us advanced into the chamber. It took me a moment or so to get my bearings, to recognise our position. The map on my HUD flickered and flashed with energy discharge.
“I’m frying in this suit,” Lopez said, panting hard. “Christo, this is unbearable.”
“Stay mobile,” I suggested. “Focus on the task.”
We bounced through the module. Bodies—twisted, burnt, unrecognisable—spiralled by. We couldn’t do anything for them; not even recover their remains. That sent a chill through me. These were not simulants. These were real bodies, real lives…
“Objective ahead,” said Feng.
We fired the halon sprayers as one, and plumes of gas blanketed the bulkheads and deck. Fire twisted and turned in every direction. It was hypnotising, almost beautiful. Every surface glowed. That could’ve been down to the heat, the fire, or some more complex explanation. It was eerie.
“Advance on the next compartment,” I said, spraying as I went.
TAKE EVASIVE ACTION, my suit suggested. TEMPERATURES REACHING CRITICAL LEVELS.
“I know, I know,” I said. To Feng: “Open the hatch, trooper.”
“Solid copy,” Feng managed.
He reached for the crank wheel that activated the lock. Where his gloves made contact with the metal surface, smoke rose. He hissed, taking the increased heat, shoulder against the door. Lopez and I stood ready to deploy into the chamber…
“Fuck!” Feng shouted.
The hatch opened with a rush of escaping atmosphere. A backdraft of chemical fire washed over the four of us, with such intensity that it threw me backwards. I reached out, at the last moment, and caught a pipe on the wall. The mags in my gloves activated, and I anchored myself there.
Feng wasn’t so fast. The hatch blew outwards. A metal panel slammed into him, sandwiched his simulant against the bulkhead. The force of the impact was strong enough to crack open his suit. His face-plate shattered immediately, blood squirting from the body inside.
PRIVATE FENG EXTRACTED, my armour told me.
“That intel is a little late,” I countered.
Lopez spun by, thrown clear by the shockwave. Her fingers grazed my shoulder.
“Ma’am!” she yelled.
She disappeared into the raging inferno.
Novak’s life-signs vanished from my HUD. Fire consumed his body. The blaze seemed to rise in every direction.
Get a fucking grip! I screamed at myself.
My suit was on fire, and my halon sprayer was at my feet. I clutched it and dowsed myself with a burst of gas. The fires went out, although everything around me was still burning.
“P? That you?”
The fish wasn’t here, but I felt it in my head.
I gasped. Used my mags to lock myself to the deck, and began the slow and inexorable walk towards the fire control console. My head had started to ache. In combination, the heat a
nd radiation were certain to kill me.
Got to get this done. Then I can rest. Then I can sleep…
Everything was swimming, moving. It was like being drunk, but much worse. Something tangy and putrid seemed to fill the back of my throat. My vision had started to darken, and black spirals danced in front of my eyes…
P told me.
“I’m trying, P.”
“You’ve got to do this!” came Commander Dieter’s voice. “I know that you can, girl.”
“My comms aren’t active,” I said. “How are you speaking to me?”
Commander Dieter reminded me of Captain Carmine, in that moment. Dear old Carmine. I missed her a lot. I missed them all so damned much…
“Listen to me, girl!” yelled Carmine.
“I hear you,” I said. My throat was so tight. Tight as Clade Cooper’s throat, attached to the wall of the Krell nest…
“You’ve got a mission here, trooper,” said Carmine. “Don’t let me down. Activate fire control.”
My sim seemed to take an age to respond. In slow motion, I started to input the code. My HUD was a scrambled mess of numbers, of transmissions, of garbage code. None of it made sense any more. The combat-suit must have suffered damage. The extreme radiation levels could’ve compromised the suit’s AI. Any of that was possible.
My fingers jabbed at the keys. I made a couple of errors, and the small LED terminal flashed every time I got an entry wrong. But I went back, corrected the errors. Soon it was done.
The compartment’s overhead lights flashed. I froze. Looked up. The fire control system activated, dowsing the chamber in white gas. Visibility dropped, and the temperature with it.
I frowned. “Something’s not right,” I said.
There was no answer, except for the chime of my bio-scanner. It was detecting a life-sign, somewhere in Engineering. There was someone still alive down here.
“Commander Dieter? Zero?”
No reply.
I stalked through a curtain of white mist towards the next compartment. There was a life-sign on the other side of the hatch. I cranked it open. An engineering sub-compartment was beyond, and it was dark inside. A sector that the fire hadn’t reached. Why would someone be in here? Captain Heinrich said he had accounted for all bodies…
You could be imagining this, I thought. That seemed like a completely plausible solution.
“If anyone can hear me,” I said, “I’m beyond the fire.”
Carmine was gone now. Dieter was gone. I was pretty sure I was gone, too.
A bank of steam enveloped the corner ahead, and I jumped back. Overcompensated in zero-G. I cursed myself for the reaction, but it was spooky as shit in there. Something moved through the steam. I unholstered my plasma pistol. Thankfully, Zero had prepped the armour for combat deployment.
A shadow broke from the rest. It pushed off from me, making the most of the zero-G conditions.
I followed. Fired my EVAMP to gain pace, grappled against the bulkhead with my free hand. Fresh combat-drugs flooded my skin, giving the dying sim a new lease of life. My bio-scanner throbbed with activity. The target was now confirmed.
“Hold it!” I shouted.
My voice echoed off the metal bulkheads, around the cavernous deck. Pistol up, I advanced on the next junction, passing through another steam-bank. The gravity did weird things to that, making the moisture coil and swirl.
A blow hit me full-on in the face, and my visor crunched with the impact, head snapping back. The sudden and abrupt violence stunned me, but didn’t put me down. I recovered fast. Brought my pistol up. Aimed it at the shape.
“Stand down!”
“Make me,” came the answer.
A blur of light slashed towards me. I recognised it as an active mono-knife, held up defensively in a warding pose. The shape paused. It had backed up into a dead end, with nowhere to go. My suit-lamps flashed on, catching the shadow in a pool of light.
Oh no no no no…
This couldn’t be happening. Not here. Not now.
“You’re not…”
“Real?”
I swallowed. Struggled to breathe. For a long second, we both just stood there, watching one another. The simulant felt like it was going to expire at any moment. At last I acted.
“Drop the weapon,” I ordered, “and stay exactly where you are.”
The attacker did as requested, then raised both hands. The mono-knife mag-locked to the deck, and I kept my eyes on it at all times. I thought-commanded a comm-link back to the SOC.
“Zero? Do you read me?”
“I copy, ma’am.”
“Get a security team down here, immediately.”
“What’s the sitrep?”
“We have a stowaway. It’s Riggs, Zero. Daneb Riggs is on the Valkyrie.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
TRAITOR: RETURNED
“How in the Core did he get onto the ship?” Captain Heinrich asked.
An hour or so had passed since the incident in Engineering. The Jackals, with Ving and Heinrich, watched an image of the ship’s brig on a security terminal. Daneb Riggs, the arch-traitor, sat on the other side of an energy barrier. Phoenix Squad had safely pacified the bastard after I’d called it in, and now he looked mighty sorry for himself.
“I can’t say,” said Commander Dieter. She prowled the Valkyrie’s Command Intelligence Centre. “But I’m confident that we’ll be able to find out.”
Since the attack, she hadn’t been able to stop checking and rechecking every system of her ship. Dieter reviewed another camera feed, which showed the rest of Phoenix Squad searching the vessel. Real-time footage of their sweep was being broadcast to the CIC.
“Are we sure it’s really him, and not a simulant?” Heinrich asked.
“That’s what Dr Saito says,” Ving answered. “He’s run a scan.”
“And the scan can’t be fooled?”
“He has data-ports,” I said. “That wouldn’t be the case if Riggs was using a sim. And when I last saw Riggs… He didn’t look like this.”
“We should waste him,” Ving said. “This guy is complete human trash.”
“For once,” I said, “I agree with Captain Ving.”
I was back in my real body. My simulant had been totalled by the radiation levels, and Zero had ejected it into space. My head still spun, and I was involuntarily shaking. The Jackals weren’t in much better shape, but they hadn’t been exposed to the same radiation levels as me. Not that I had actually been exposed at all; it had been my simulant in danger. But that didn’t stop my body’s natural reactions from kicking in. The psychosomatic response was the same, simulated or otherwise.
Captain Heinrich swallowed, eyes still pinned to the camera feed. “Then it’s a good job I’m in charge. I want questions answered before anyone ‘wastes’ the deserter.”
“Deserter?” Lopez said, her voice dripping with anger. “That guy is a Black Spiral agent. He infiltrated Simulant Operations. This isn’t about military protocol, Captain. He’s a traitor.”
Heinrich answered without looking up at Lopez. “Emotions are running high. I understand that. Don’t forget, Private Lopez, that I’m Proximan too. We have a shared heritage. What the Black Spiral did—or tried to do, at least—to your father is bound to cause you great upset. But you’ve got to think with a level head.”
“That’s has nothing to do with it, sir,” Lopez protested.
“He doesn’t look like much,” said Ving, sneering at the image. “Maybe I could go in there, soften him up.” He cracked his knuckles.
“Do not trouble yourself, Captain,” said Novak. He loomed over Ving’s shoulder, bigger still. Novak’s breathing quickened, his body tensing in the expectation of violence. “If traitor is to hurt, I will do it. He was one of Jackals.”
“He was hiding in the tunnels beyond the fire,” I explai
ned. “He came at me with a mono-knife.”
Captain Heinrich shook his head. “Better tactical planning was required, Lieutenant Jenkins. You should’ve considered the possibility of an ambush.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, putting a cap on my anger.
“What’s the ship’s status, Commander Dieter?” Heinrich said. “Can we still sail?”
“We escaped any major structural damage,” Dieter answered. She called up a holo of the ship and marked it with her finger to show the compromised compartments. “Available evidence suggests that the prisoner detonated an explosion in Compartment C-13. This was caused by a small blasting charge. Due to a pressure valve failure, the area became irradiated.” Another glowing marker on the ship’s outline. “It resulted in a chemical fire in this section. We suffered multiple casualties.”
There were sighs around the chamber, some gaunt expressions from the Navy staff. The dead had been friends and colleagues of a tightly knit group.
“Is the Valkyrie still mission-capable?” Captain Heinrich persisted.
“The detonation wasn’t powerful enough to hole the ship. Had the charge been placed on the outer hull, it might’ve been a different story.” Dieter gnawed on her lower lip, but gave a determined nod. “We can repair the damage.”
“What about the crew?” I asked.
“This is a next-generation strikeship, Lieutenant. We can fly with a minimal crew, if needs be. My people have operated under worse conditions.”
That didn’t lighten the mood much, but it at least meant that the mission could continue. Given how things could’ve turned out, it was a victory of sorts.
“Riggs was trying to cause chaos,” said Feng. “Fucking typical.”
“Well, Private,” said Captain Heinrich, “in that respect, he certainly succeeded.”
“He should’ve blasted cryo-storage,” said Ving. “That would’ve been the smart thing to do—to take out our sims.”
“Riggs is not so clever,” said Novak.
“The blasting charge came from our inventory,” Dieter continued. “He used our own equipment against us.”
Captain Heinrich paced the CIC, his boots producing an annoying clip-clip as he walked. He rubbed his clean-shaven chin. “How do we know that?”
