by Jamie Sawyer
Science Division and Command had labelled these creatures the Krell High Council. In reality, there was no suitable description in the human lexicon. The Deep Ones—the progenitors of the Krell Collective, the controlling mind of the entire species, and the embodiment of the Deep—were no more a council than the Krell were really fishes. They were the ancient personification of a collective species and the lynchpin for the entire existence of the Krell. The Deep Ones were the source of the psychic pain that stained this planet. They knew that Ithaca Prime was dying, and that if the planet fell, so too would the Collective. Their fear was palpable.
Whatever physical form the Deep Ones took, it occupied the shaft. How far the tunnel went, I didn’t know. Whether any Krell bio-form had ever returned from their pilgrimage to the well of shadows, I couldn’t say. All I knew with any certainty was that Warlord had to be stopped from making contact with the Deep Ones.
He crouched at the lip of the well, glancing between me and the darkness.
“You are on your own, Lieutenant,” he said, his own voice a sibilant, dying mess. “Dominion comes. You fought admirably. You did your best, but there is nothing left for you to do but let this happen.”
The ground rumbled, quaked, and a nearby coral shelf came away. It fell into the cavern. The impact caused a chain reaction; more coral outcroppings breaking up, slamming into one another. A keening cry filled the air. The Deep Ones shivered in the dark.
Long time no speak, P, I broadcast back. Ready the warheads. Fire every anti-viral you’ve got on my position. I’m going to take care of Warlord.
For all the good it would do me, I primed a hi-ex grenade with one hand and aimed my pistol with the other.
“Step away, Cooper,” I said. “I’m not going to let this happen.”
“Why are you even trying to save them, Jenkins? Look at what they are.” Warlord gestured towards the pit. “They are pathetic, dead things. Shivering in the dark.”
“I’m not even going to pretend to understand them,” I said, “but I do know the difference between right and wrong. Whatever happened to you, Cooper, this is wrong.”
“The Deep Ones don’t care. I can feel them in my head. They don’t even understand what is happening.”
“I think they understand just fine,” I said as calmly as I could. “Who are we to judge the existence of an entire species?”
“I am,” Warlord said. “The Shard will wipe them from existence, for eternity.”
“And us, too, right?” I said. Through my breached helmet, the stink of burning coral and singed flesh was almost overpowering. “Do you really want that?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Would your wife and children want it?”
Warlord’s face froze. “They are gone, but they will be remembered. I will remember them. This will be their legacy.”
Warlord smiled with his thin lips. The scar tissue on his lower face distorted the expression. The veins under his skin were bulbous, and lesions crept up the collar-ring of both his exo-suit and his neck. He was a walking Harbinger bomb.
“I brought the virus back from Barain-11,” Warlord said. “It was what Command, what Military Intelligence, wanted. Command could’ve saved my family, Jenkins. Sim Ops should have been there when the invasion came.”
“Command didn’t know this was going to happen,” I said. “Command didn’t know that you were going to turn into this. They wanted a weapon, but they didn’t know it would do this to you.”
“They always want a weapon, Jenkins. Always. Something bigger, better, stronger, faster.”
“I’m not going to pretend I won’t kill you,” I said, edging closer to Warlord, holding out the grenade, “but you can still redeem yourself. You can change this. Call off your attack, and step down. The virus is making you do this, turning you into something that you’re not.”
The smile broadened, but Warlord’s body twitched. Shard Reapers danced around his torso, snakes that jumped in and out of reality. The Krell habitat shook again, and an explosion from somewhere above shook the structure.
“The virus hasn’t done anything,” Warlord said. “That responsibility falls on one man.”
“Who?”
Another step forward. I was desperately trying to make contact with P again. It either wasn’t listening, or the Deep Ones were causing some sort of psychic disturbance.
“Rodrigo Lopez,” he said. “The Senator, as he was then. He made me into this. He endorsed the mission, and he sent the Iron Knights to Barain-11.”
“That’s not true,” I said. “That—that can’t be true.”
“I can give you every name you want. Major Vadim Sergkov was my commanding officer. Commander Vie Dieter was to be responsible for our exfiltration.” He choked a sob. “Jandra Cooper was my wife. And Marbec Riggs my best friend. Daneb Riggs was Marbec’s son, the boy he left behind.”
I was virtually standing over Warlord now. In my head, I calculated the likely blast zone of the explosive grenade. The yield might be enough… Warlord reached down to touch the gelatinous floor, his palm against the living tissue, one leg outstretched. Poised.
“You lied to Daneb Riggs,” I said. “You twisted him against the Alliance. Against me.”
“Maybe I am sorry for that,” he said. “But he isn’t the only person I’ve lied to in order to get here.” Warlord’s presentation shifted suddenly, and the hard edges returned. “None of that is my fault. Lopez created me. It’s all on him. He was the one who brought me back from the dead. Resurrected me.”
Warlord’s back was to the opening of the pit. From there, the Deep Ones screamed, their collective despair filling the cavern. There were no words, no formed expressions, in the wall of alien emotion. Being this close to the vast xeno intelligence was almost overwhelming, and I struggled to concentrate.
Come on, P! Answer me!
“He needed a weapon, Jenkins,” Warlord continued. “You know yourself that he tried to shut Sim Ops down. He needed something new, that he could control and make his own.”
A chill ran down my spine.
“I was the symbiosis of Shard, Krell and human. Except, when it comes to it, there’s not enough room in one body for that mess.”
“Maybe I can help you.”
“Now who’s lying?” Warlord said. He stood. “There was a time, long ago, when I wondered if perhaps you—or someone like you—could. But then I remembered the help that Sim Ops had been to my family…”
“That was different. Had the Army known, they would’ve sent help.”
“That’s exactly the point. They did know, Jenkins. They knew that the war-fleets were coming to my home, and they let it burn.” A distant, vacant look descended over Warlord’s shattered face. “Logistics. Numbers. They sacrificed my homeworld for a victory elsewhere.”
He backed up. Arms out now. A mere step from the edge of the pit.
Answer me, P!
“You’re insane,” I said. “That isn’t how things happened, Cooper.”
“On my honour as an Army Ranger,” Warlord said.
“That means nothing. You’re not that person any more.”
“But why would I lie? I know that there’s no coming back from this. I either die here, my objective achieved, or you kill me. This is exactly how things happened.”
I saw my chance and took it. I vaulted forward, all my strength in my right leg. Grenade outstretched, into Warlord’s body. I punched through the blizzard of angry darkness that swirled around him.
“You were stalling, right?” he said, as I pulled him close, body around the grenade. “It’s okay. So was I.”
Warlord and I fell backwards into the pit.
The grenade detonated, but it didn’t matter any more.
By the time he reached the bottom of the pit, there was nothing left of Clade Cooper except for Harbinger.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
HARBINGER REALISED
The neural-link broke.
Normally, when that happens it’s a cold, calculated process. Although some operators describe life flashing before their eyes, or memories suddenly coming to the fore, that’s never happened to me. Science Division had comprehensively debunked this phenomenon as a reaction to intense trauma; the human mind playing tricks, trying to make sense of the simulation process.
Which made what happened all the stranger. In the micro-second it took to extract from the simulant, images burst into my head. Real-time captures of the war. I knew what I was seeing was real, and I had no doubt as to the reliability of this information.
Space around Ithaca Prime was a clusterfuck of activity.
There were no battle lines any more, no fleet formations. The Alliance fleet was in ruins. Warships were scattered across the Kalliper Belt, around the Ring of Thorns. Several of the larger ships were still firing—unleashing devastating fusillades with their plasma cannons and rail guns, releasing swarms of missiles—but the activity was disorganised, without leadership. The theatre was littered with the wreckage of starships and evac-pods. Cries for help reached across the void, but went unanswered.
The infected Krell war-fleet circled Ithaca Prime. Space was laced with a network of Needler attack ships and Stingray troop carriers. Infected ark-ships, their original Collective now long forgotten, sat in high orbit.
As P had predicted, the Black Spiral’s fleet had been largely consumed by the invasion. Those few ships left picked off damaged Alliance assets, conducting attacks of opportunity.
Then there was Ithaca Prime itself. The target of this conflict, Ithaca’s vulnerability was exposed. The Deep Ones’ influence was pervasive and their corruption was visible from space as a stain on the face of the planet. The Great Nest had begun to desiccate and wither as Harbinger took root. The very planet was reacting to the infection. The surface of Ithaca Prime was a swollen mass of activity. Whirlpools and vortexes blighted the oceans. Vast bio-structures broke up. Even in orbit, Krell warships had started to falter—some dropping to the planet below, others withdrawing from the defence of Ithaca, unsure of what they should now do.
The Shard warships prowled deep space like predators on the hunt for prey. Their black outlines were only occasionally lit by nearby explosions, or when they released their offensive technologies to annihilate a vessel that got too close. The Shard ships closed on Ithaca with calm, mechanised precision.
My focus shifted to the Aeon fleet. Only five vault-ships left, and those were beleaguered. They were being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of enemy fire, from every direction. One of the vessels was being circled by a dozen infected bio-fighters, its hull punctured in several places. The ship trailed debris, as it sporadically returned fire with its energy weapons.
Are you putting these images into my head? I asked. Is this more of your mind-manipulation bullshit?
I felt, rather than heard, a laugh.
What are you going to do? Activate the starfyre?
I thought about that for a long moment. The memory of an entire species, lost. Gone in an instant. The black blot—a nightmare Rorschach pictorial—had spread further. It was threatening to envelop the whole of the Great Nest.
If there is another way, we have to try that first, I said.
Even as I watched, a fifth Aeon ship was devastated by Krell bio-fire. The vault-ship’s lights went out, and like its brethren, it broke up in the void. Triumphant, the wing of Needler bio-fighters moved on to a fresh target.
The remaining Aeon fleet collected together, sailing towards Ithaca Prime. Their collective might was focused there now. Wraith was on one of those ships, and her mind touched mine again.
I opened my eyes in my real skin and extracted to find that the Simulant Operations Centre was on fire. Literally.
Novak wore a respirator and was spraying a halon dispenser across a damaged section of bulkhead panelling.
A fragment of background noise entered the comms: “… fire control on D-Deck! Fire control, immediately…”
“Get Jenk out of the tank!” Zero yelled, her voice a constant in my earbead.
Zero sat at her terminal, trying to work amid the chaos. She typed rapidly, her eyes scanning lines of data as new information popped up on her tri-D screens. Feng worked at a terminal beside Zero, attempting to assist her. Meanwhile, Lopez still wore the uniform we’d rescued her in, and had armed herself with a Navy-issue sidearm. I was glad that she had got back in one piece.
“You heard the lady!” Captain Ving said, hurrying me on. “Give us a sitrep, now!”
Ving popped the catches on the tank and dragged me free. I quickly shook off the post-extraction confusion.
“The Iron Knight made planetfall to Ithaca Prime,” I said, words tumbling out of me. “Warlord has reached the surface. I tried to stop him, but he made contact with the Deep Ones.” I paused, hesitant to voice the last words aloud. To say them would make them real. “Harbinger has reached Ithaca Prime,” I said.
P watched me. This close to the alien, I realised that it knew this already.
“Get dressed,” said Dr Saito, tossing me a fresh set of fatigues. “I’m not sure if—”
The Defiant rumbled around us, and everyone paused for a moment. Something keened within the ship’s hull.
“What the fuck was that?” Ving asked. “Have we been hit?”
Zero typed even faster. Surveillance feeds appeared on her screens. There were vid-feeds from across the Defiant, covering her portside docking bays and access corridors.
“Another ship has got through the Defiant’s defences,” Zero said. She shook her head in disbelief. “We have hostiles across the vessel. More boarders.”
“More?” I asked.
“We’ve already had our fair share of problems in the SOC,” said Captain Heinrich. His ordinarily well-presented uniform was dishevelled, and a dark bloom spread across his left shoulder, the colour spreading through the fabric.
“You’ve been shot, sir,” I realised, the surprise impossible to conceal from my voice. “It—it looks serious.”
Captain Heinrich nodded grimly, clutching his own sidearm in both hands. “Yes, I have,” he said, “and I can’t say I like it much.”
“Repetition doesn’t make it any easier,” I said.
Captain Heinrich grimaced, but also couldn’t help smiling. His face was bathed in sweat. “Can’t say it’s an experience I’d like to repeat. One of the Spiral got me, while I was defending the SOC.”
A siren cut through the background rumble that filled the Defiant, and the AI’s voice cheerily declared, “Evacuate ship. This is not a drill. Evacuate ship. This is not a drill.”
Dr Saito ignored the siren, and leant over Zero’s position, reading from her terminal. “The planet is experiencing some sort of cataclysmic shift, caused by the Harbinger virus. It’s infecting everything down there.”
“Where are the Aeon?” Captain Heinrich asked.
“They… they told me that they could use the starfyre,” I said, “but if they did, it would wipe the Deep for ever.”
“We see this on way into Ithaca system,” said Novak. He’d armed himself with a mono-knife, but exactly where he’d acquired the weapon from wasn’t clear to me. “It will destroy planet too, yes?”
“What about the anti-viral warheads?” Zero asked, desperately searching for another
possibility. “We can’t let them do this. There has to be a way to stop it.”
“We could get into an evac-pod and leave it all behind,” Ving offered. “That’s what most of Sim Ops has done.”
But as I looked at his face, I knew that it wasn’t a serious solution. “I know you won’t do that, Ving,” I said. “Whatever has gone down between us, whatever you think of the Krell: you’re better than that.”
Ving exhaled slowly. “All right. The warheads, then.”
“We have to at least try,” Zero argued, her eyes still on the monitors. Some of the screens had gone dark now. “The planet is dying.”
“Then what other option do we have?” Feng asked.
“I’m all ears,” said Ving.
“How will that work?” Zero questioned.
“So how can you stop this?” Ving challenged. “You’re just one body, fish.” He gestured at Zero’s tri-D screen, which showed the devastation developing across Ithaca Prime. “There’s a whole planet of infection down there.”
“You are the second option,” I said, remembering what P had told me during the drop to the Iron Knight. “We talked about using starfyre, then you said there was another possibility.”
“Then that’s what we’ll do,” Captain Heinrich said, grunting as he readjusted his injured shoulder. “We can take a dropship, and bring the pariah-form to the surface.”
