by Jamie Sawyer
“I wouldn’t try that again, sir,” I said.
“I don’t think that I will,” Ving agreed.
P bristled beside me. Despite its size, the xeno hugged the floor. Tiny flecks of debris pocked the alien’s carapace.
Wraith’s consciousness pricked my own again. Without knowing how I knew, I could detect the movement of the alien vault-ships. They were concentrating their efforts on holding off the Shard warships. Soon, they would be overwhelmed…
“We need to get P into the capsule,” gasped Saito. “I… I can’t activate another.”
The launch console was wasted. It had been chewed up by gunfire, and even if I could get Dr Saito upright in order to operate it, there would be no point in trying. That left us only one option.
“The active tube is at the other end of this bay,” I said. “That’s exactly where the shooters are located.”
“I didn’t… didn’t know they would be here,” said Dr Saito. His body shuddered, and his eyes fluttered open.
I nodded grimly. “Shit.”
Heart attack, caused by blood loss. Not unexpected, given the size of the wound in his stomach. Dr Saito’s hands were still clutched over the injury. His features had gone vacant and slack.
The gunfire paused. Heavy boots plodded across the overhead gantry, as the attackers took up new positions.
“I advise you to stand down,” came a voice. “This is not a fight you can win. You’re outnumbered and outgunned.”
“Ah, crap,” said Ving, as he recognised the speaker.
“This ship is now under my control,” said Major Mish Vasnev.
She stood on the upper gantry, overlooking the drop-bay, carbine slung over her shoulder, dirty silver hair hanging around her face. Every bit as menacing as when we’d last seen her aboard the Valkyrie.
“What the fuck are you doing here, Vasnev?” I shouted back. “This is an Alliance warship. You’re out of your depth.”
Vasnev’s face settled into an irritated expression. “I go where I please.” She repeated, “Stand down.”
Her gangers wore heavy hard-suits, reinforced space armour. I plotted the progress of one, as he prowled the upper catwalk, providing close protection to Vasnev. The cannon he used would’ve been cumbersome for a simulant in combat-armour, and the ganger only carried it with the assistance of a torso-mounted man-amp. As I watched from a gap between cargo crates, I saw another shooter come into view, equipped with the same weapon.
“What’ve they got?” Feng asked me.
“It looks like they’ve plundered weapons from our armoury,” I concluded. “At least two heavy gatling cannons.”
“They’re using armour-piercing hi-ex munitions,” Lopez added. “Those rounds are punching through plate steel.”
“Don’t do anything rash, P,” I said. “Those rounds will go straight through you, as well.”
Vasnev stalked the gangway, sweeping her gaze across the many and varied hiding places that the drop-bay presented. To get to the active launch tube, we’d have to go beneath her position…
“Even now, the Black Spiral and my Sons approach,” Vasnev said. “This will be easiest if you provide the girl, and the fish.”
“Fuck you,” Lopez yelled back, over her suit-speakers.
“I know that you are in these simulants, da?” Vasnev said. “So I can do as I wish to them now. Then my Sons will find your station, and take your real skins.”
“Why do you want our alien?” I asked.
“The fish will attract high bidder. Directorate, Pacific Pact: wherever. They will want to know of cure for virus.”
Bio-signs coalesced around the edges of the drop-bay. I could hear chanting from the approaching Black Spiral.
Vasnev pressed her hands onto the safety rail, leaning over the drop-bay. Her gunmen were masked, wearing heavy respirators. They flanked her on either side like an honour guard.
“Every disaster presents opportunity for profit…” she started. “This is chance for my Sons to flourish.”
“It’s FUBAR,” I said. “Warlord has done it. Ithaca Prime is dying. There won’t be anything left when Dominion comes.”
Another bio-sign popped into existence behind Vasnev. Was it another of her gangers, perhaps ensuring that her retreat from the bay was covered? I glanced in P’s direction, and asked that question with my mind.
Vasnev barked something in Russian at one of her death squad. The ganger loped sideways, trying to outflank us.
Now! I commanded.
In the dark behind Vasnev, a shape formed. Bulky arms, sweat-slicked skin. Tattoos.
Leon Novak lurched across the platform. A knife in each hand, a silent, wicked grimace plastered across his face. His boots barely touched the deck, as he dropped down behind Vasnev. He was a flash of motion and blades.
One went into Vasnev’s back. The whites of her eyes grew, visible even across the drop-bay, and she snarled.
“Go, go!” I yelled.
Feng and Lopez were up. Plasma rifles firing. Pulses strobing the drop-bay.
The ganger to Novak’s left sprayed the deck with gunfire from his cannon. Rounds churned up the metalwork, piercing crates and punching holes in empty drop-capsules. Feng went down, his armour peppered with AP rounds, null-shield failing under the weight of fire. But Lopez picked off the shooter with a precision plasma shot. The pulse punched through his torso armour and exploded out of his back. Corpse and cannon toppled from the gantry, slamming to the deck ten metres beneath.
“Behind me, P,” I said.
I weaved between loaders and crates, determined to reach the active launch tube. P used all six limbs to scramble over obstacles. The second ganger opened fire with his cannon, indiscriminately spraying the bay with life-extinguishing gunfire. I felt something pierce my suit, and the pain was sharp enough that I gasped, but not enough to put me down. The psychic resonance of P taking a hit was more jarring.
Vasnev reached for the wound at her back with one hand, touching gloved fingertips to blood. The blade had gone into her ribcage, through armour plating. Novak’s shoulders rose and fell as he faced off against her, half observing us as we made the dash beneath. He was rage incarnate, the anger pouring out of him.
Vasnev crumpled to the deck, on her knees in front of Novak.
“Do not need skins any more,” Novak said to Vasnev. He wiped blood across his tattooed face. His face. His real face. Novak wasn’t in a simulant. “I do this for real.”
“Leon Novak…” she purred. “Look at what you have become.”
“I am Jackal,” Novak roared. “I am Vali’s dog!”
“Leave her!” Lopez yelled. “Cover P and the lieutenant!”
The Black Spiral burst into the compartment. Their roaring voices echoed around the chamber, their cries audible above the churn of gunfire. The second ganger was adjusting his aim, and had me and P in his sights. Another bullet sliced the back of my calf. The round went through my armour, and made a golf-ball sized wound in the muscle. P faltered beside me, jerking as it too took impacts.
“We’ll get you down there, P,” I said. “Just keep going.”
The open drop-capsule was metres away. We kept going.
The mission comes first.
Novak turned from Vasnev, who was still alive, but in a state of shock and disbelief. He pounded towards the lone gunman, sweeping his mono-knife in a long, deadly arc. The ganger was so focused on us that he didn’t notice Novak’s attack until it was too late. Novak sliced again and again and again. The cannon was silenced.
P reached the drop-capsule and folded its bulky body inside. The alien was wet with blood fro
m a dozen wounds. Its apparent invulnerability was just a mask.
“Good luck down there,” I said. “We’ll be right behind you with a pick-up.”
P shook its head.
“Don’t get all gallant on me.”
I was silent. Realisation hit me and my blood froze.
“But… but you’ll be—”
“No. We’ll tell Wraith to use the starfyre!”
“You don’t have to do this! You can exist outside the Deep. All Krell can!”
I slammed a fist into the drop-capsule’s outer canopy. “No! You can’t do this! You’re a Jackal! You can’t do this.”
Lopez was firing her plasma rifle, Ving his pistol. The bay was shouting and chaos and horror. The Defiant’s deck quaked again, as the ship took another impact. Out in space, Wraith’s vault-ships resisted another round of dark-matter pulses from the Shard ships. And on Ithaca Prime, the Harbinger’s stain spread further, seeping into the very core of the planet. These things were projected into my head—by P or Wraith, I couldn’t tell—and I knew that they were true. I also know, as much as I hated to admit it, that P was right.
“You’ll be destroyed!” I said, trying one last time to change P’s mind. I couldn’t stop the emotion from breaking in my voice. Not that it mattered what I said. P was in my head, and it knew what I felt. It knew what I wanted, and still this wouldn’t change.
The deck listed. Gravity warped. Something ruptured in the Defiant’s hull.
There was nothing else that I could say or do to stop this. With resignation, I saluted. “Be seeing you, fish.”
The drop-capsule entry hatch slid shut with a low whine. The launch sequence commenced immediately.
“We can’t hold them off any more,” said Lopez, over the comms, the desperation blatant in her voice.
The attackers—Christo only knew how many of them there were—had circled them, breaking in through the hatch, taking spots behind the hard cover of robotic loaders and missile racks.
“We will help,” Novak said. He tossed aside the dead ganger, the heavy cannon clattering on the gang walk. “There is still—”
Bang.
Vasnev was on her knees, dying, bleeding out. But she clutched a heavy pistol in her hands, and aimed it at Novak. The Russian ganger dropped.
“Novak!”
Vasnev grinned down at me. “I am the leader of this—”
Lopez felled her with a single shot from her Widowmaker pistol. Right through the head.
I slid against the deck, numb with loss, unable to comprehend what had happened.
“Confirm on launch. P is gone.”
P’s capsule arced through space.
Out of the Defiant, and the increasing cloud of debris that circled the dying ship, and then towards Ithaca Prime. The drop-capsule’s second-stage thruster unit activated. It gained speed as it jinked past more space wreckage, avoiding gunfire and energy pulses. The AI compensated for P’s increased weight.
P used all its abilities to understand what was happening. The drop-capsule’s cams provided some information, but P gleaned much more through its own preternatural senses. Although it had seen the world in dreams, P had never witnessed Ithaca Prime with its own faculties, and what it saw pained the alien. The planet’s green-blue prospect was currently blighted by bands of dark corruption. P computed the landing coordinates for the centre of that mass, into the heart of the Great Nest. It sensed the location of the Deep Ones, and on some molecular level knew that was where it must go.
The war raged in orbit around Ithaca Prime. The Black Spiral’s disparate fleet was scattered, but still dangerous. Infected bio-ships chased down Kindred war-fleets. The remaining Alliance Navy assets were rallying, but they were too few in number to do much good.
The Aeon vault-ships were in position, their orbit fixed over the Great Nest. Their quantum-weaponry was alive with energy.
P did not answer immediately, but then said,
The drop-capsule punched through the upper layers of Ithaca Prime’s atmosphere. P detected the increase in ambient temperature inside the craft, as friction heated the outer shell. There was a quickening of the alien’s pulse, which—if asked—it would have explained as a simple by-product of the changing atmospherics.
Except, P realised, there will be no one to ask. Not any more.
Wraith’s vault-ship was hulled in a dozen places. It fired a quantum-beam at the nearest Shard warship and watched as the machine absorbed the impact. There was not much time left for any of them, truth be told. Only the machines persisted. P knew this too. It was a galactic truism, and always would be.
The many minds echoed. That was the first time P had heard them reach agreement on something.
P hit the face of Ithaca Prime.
There was a stabbing, piercing whine of white noise over my communicator.
Then silence.
The absence had returned to my head, but this time it was so much worse. The finality of it made me shake.
“What the fuck just happened?” Captain Ving said, as he rose from cover.
“P is gone,” I repeated. “It made planetfall. This… this was always the plan. Between P and the Aeon, at least.”
“I’m not talking about the fish,” said Ving. “I mean the Spiral.”
Lopez stirred too, now. She kicked at a body, which lay gibbering on the deck. The man wasn’t dead, but was clutching his head, repeating something over and over again. Lopez bent down and picked up the tango’s pistol, pinching it between her finger and thumb like it was dirty. She tossed the weapon out of the tango’s reach.
“They’re all like it,” said Ving. He picked his way through the carpet of chattering wrecks and approached me.
“Dominion come… Dominion come… Dominion come…” the group muttered.
“They were chanting this a moment ago,” said Lopez. She grimaced. “Something they were welcoming has just become something they’re frightened of.”
“It was Wraith,” I said. “Maybe.”
I got to my feet, careful not to place any weight on the injured leg. Fresh blood oozed from the gun-wound inflicted by Vasnev’s gan
ger. That wasn’t the only wound I’d suffered during the gunfight, but it was the worst. My combat-suit was administering a steady stream of painkillers to keep me from going under. I checked my bio-scanner and saw that all hostiles in the area had frozen.
“If it was,” Ving said, “then that’s one hell of a weapon the Aeon have there…”
“Figures,” said Lopez. “Mind-manipulation was their thing on Carcosa.”
I scrambled up the gantry to find Novak, but before I’d even knelt down beside him, I knew that he was dead. The bio-scanner didn’t lie. Novak’s body lay still on the gantry, not far from Vasnev’s. This was their ending, intertwined in death, just as they had been in life. You did Vali and Anwar proud, I thought to myself. There was something bittersweet about that. Not for the first time, I considered how hollow hatred was. I should’ve felt the swell of triumph, the endorphin rush of victory…
But there was nothing. Nothing but an overwhelming sense of loss.
I unlatched my helmet and threw it to the deck. Fiddled with my communicator. The white noise burst had ceased. I thought-commanded a line back to the SOC.
“Do you read, Zero?”
“I copy,” came Zero’s voice. “Are you all okay down there?”
“We’re operational, if that’s what you mean. Dr Saito is dead.”
“Do you want me to send Feng back out?”
“I don’t think that’s necessary. P’s launched.”
“I know. I read its progress from here.”
I glanced up at the bodies on the gantry. “Novak’s dead too. We’ll meet you in the SOC. Stay locked down until we get there.”
There was no need for that last order. There were tangos everywhere, but they had been reduced to quivering wrecks. Universally, they were curled up on the deck, crying and wailing about the Dominion. What they had once dreamt of had become their nightmare. We met no resistance at all as we picked our way across the ship.
Zero, Feng and Captain Heinrich were poised over Zero’s terminal, watching vid-feeds.
“We tried to stop Novak from going after you,” Zero started. Fresh streaks of tears marked her cheeks, and her eyes were watery. “Is he really gone?”
