Exodus

by Jamie Sawyer

  “Elena has instructions,” he continued, “to get you and your squad off this station.”

  “That’s crazy talk,” I said, looking back at Harris now. “We’re all leaving. No one gets left behind, and that’s—”

  I swallowed. The sight was actually almost impossible to behold. Harris didn’t say anything at first, just grasped his stomach, frozen still.

  “Take the gun,” he eventually muttered. “We can’t sit here all day.”

  “You—” I started. I felt weak with a sense of unreality, because—for the second time that day—I couldn’t accept that this was actually happening. I tried again: “You’ve been hit.”

  “It’s a fucking flesh wound, Jenkins. Stop making a big deal of it.”

  Harris clutched his stomach with one hand. The light was too low to properly evaluate his condition, but something had gone all the way through his Ikarus suit. Struck the armoured plates at his stomach and made a ragged hole there. The flexible element of the armour was wet with blood, liquid seeping between Harris’ gloved fingers.

  He looked more angry than scared, although I could tell that the wound was painful. Hell, I’d taken a round to the stomach before and still had the scar to prove it. I knew that he’d be in some serious hurt.

  “Christo damn it, Harris!” I said, more loudly than I’d intended. “You should’ve said something!” To Novak, I shouted, “We need to get out of this shaft and get a medi-kit, now.”

  Novak looked on. “Maybe the dark module has one.”

  “The lifer is right,” Harris said. “And like I keep saying, I’m fine. I can move.”

  The tactical situation had changed. Although they’d almost killed me, my injuries suddenly seemed to pale in comparison. Harris was the one in immediate danger. In all the time we’d served together, I couldn’t remember a time when I’d actually thought that the old man—Lazarus himself—might actually die. And yet here we were, crawling through a smoke-choked air shaft in a space station that was rammed with Black Spiral terrorists, and Harris had been hit.

  “You’re not dying in here,” I promised. “We’re not giving the Spiral that victory.”

  Harris’ forehead was beaded with sweat, and not just as a result of the rising heat around us. “That might not be your choice, Jenkins.”

  Novak braced at the end of the shaft, waiting patiently and ready to open the hatch in the roof. He grinned at me. The aching in my head had grown so that it almost blotted out everything around me, and I tried to shake it away. Maybe this is something worse, I thought. Maybe being strangled and beaten and almost killed just isn’t enough shit on one woman’s doorstep …

  “Ready?” Novak asked.

  “On my mark,” I said. “Three, two …”

  “… one!”

  Novak popped the hatch, swinging it upwards on a hinge. Even in power-assisted armour, the cover was big and heavy. In Novak’s hands, though, the metal plate opened with ease. He scrambled up and out, immediately searching for cover. I went next.

  We were in a corridor. I squinted into the dark, reading words printed on the bulkhead. The dark module suddenly had a name.

  “Specimen Containment,” I said. “Restricted access.”

  “We do not count,” Novak decided, scouting the next junction.

  Harris staggered out of the tunnel, waving off my assistance, one hand still to his stomach.

  “Looks deserted,” Novak decided.

  “There wasn’t anyone in here when we boarded the station,” Harris said. “But Nadi said that she couldn’t breach the security protocols to access this sector’s AI.”

  I remembered that Feng and Lopez had run a scanner-sweep of the whole station. There had been no one hiding in here, and none of the techs had raised an alarm about the module. Still, that the module had its own AI was concerning enough.

  “Well,” I decided, “at least the Spiral haven’t breached these chambers yet. We can take a breather here and regroup.”

  “Don’t bother on my account,” said Harris.

  I knew from the base schematics that the dark module was located broadly in the middle of Darkwater, where the station’s arms met. We were still a distance from the docks.

  “This way,” Novak said.

  A long corridor stretched out ahead of us, in the same red light. The walls on either side were glass, segmented into cells. Dozens of little prisons, currently in darkness, but capable of being observed in relative safety from the main corridor. Beside each cell window, though, was a shotgun in a glass cabinet marked with BREAK IN CASE OF EMERGENCY. A bad feeling welled up within me.

  “What is this place?” I asked Harris. My skin had started to creep, to crawl. “If you know, now’s the time to tell me.” I turned to him. “No secrets, Harris.”

  He gave me a hard stare. “I … I don’t know. The Watch had heard rumours, but …” He swallowed. “Nothing more than that. Other than it’s obviously a Science Division facility, I honestly have nothing else to tell you.”

  I cautiously took a step towards the nearest cell, my gun up and aimed inside.

  “Holy Christo …”

  Pure dark launched at me.

  Despite his condition, Harris dragged me back from the observation window and lowered my weapon.

  “Shooting that thing is not a good idea, Jenkins,” he said firmly.

  What I saw inside the cell was difficult to properly describe. Not because I couldn’t see it—I could barely take my eyes off the thing—but because words fail to convey the horror of it. A spiky black mass, sharp and fluid and moving: that’s about the best that I can do. Phantom-like, it seemed to warp in and out of reality, its outline defined one moment, then transparent and ghostly the next. It hovered, then became indistinct and fluid. As I watched, the thing inside the cell lashed against the reinforced window. Again and again, in a concerted effort to escape. It threw a dozen spear-like tendrils at the glass, then withdrew, and started once more.

  I got instant recall of the surveillance feed that Elena and Harris had showed me on the Paladin, of the Harbinger-infected Krell. That was what this thing’s attempts to escape reminded me of.

  Novak stopped. “What the hell are these things?”

  A dozen or so life-forms were trapped in individual cells, all acting in exactly the same way. We were in some serious shit.

  “Reapers,” I said. “These are Shard Reapers.”

  I’d seen a lot of bad things in my Army career. When you sign up for Simulant Operations, you’re pretty much agreeing to seeing, shooting and hopefully killing the worst the galaxy has to offer. And the thing inside that cell: it was that. Not the actual construct, although that was dangerous enough, but what it represented.

  It was a small part of the machine-mind. The Reapers were Shard weapons, and there was no plausible reason why Science Division should have them in containment on Darkwater.

  See, everyone likes to think that the Shard are gone, and that their technology is dead, inert. That suits the likes of Senator Lopez, Alliance Congress, General Draven and all the other pen-pushers who direct military affairs. But the truth is a lot more complex. The Shard were a race of intelligent machines. They were capable of incredible feats of engineering, on a cosmic scale. The Shard Gates are just one example, offering instantaneous travel between the stars. But not all Shard tech is so helpful.

  The Shard Reapers more than demonstrated that point. They were xenotech machines designed with one purpose in mind: to kill. Sci-Div had concluded that the liquid-metal composition was in fact a poly-alloy, an advanced nano-technology. Each Reaper was actually a supramolecular entity, its unique construction making it impervious to most forms of weaponry, extremely adaptable, and almost impossible to destroy.

  Novak had drawn a knife from his sheath, but as he watched the Reaper shifting in the cell, he lowered it with a defeated look on his face.

  “Why are the Shard here now?” I asked. “Promise that you’ve told me everything, Harris.” />
  “I really don’t know,” he answered. “I’ll need to report this back to the Watch. Maybe someone there has answers. We’d—we’d heard that the Spiral were tracking certain black ops science projects.”

  “Is this why the Spiral are here?” I asked. Then, before I could get an answer: “What would the Spiral want with Shard Reapers?”

  Harris just grimaced at me. “I think you can figure that out for yourself.”

  “They can’t be controlled,” I said, shaking my head. “Surely they know that!”

  Novak had lost interest in the murder-machines and was already retreating back up the corridor. The Russian knew when he was out of his depth.

  “We try different route,” he said. “Is too dangerous—”

  The deck listed sideways, and the hatch at the other end of the corridor was suddenly breached.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  REVEALED

  The corridor was immediately flooded with a cloud of smoke and debris. Another layer of sirens—somehow more insistent, more threatening—filled the air, managing to cut through the gunfire and the shouting.

  “Harris!” I yelled, falling back the way that we had come. “Get down!”

  The closest cell window fractured. I guessed that the thing inside—the Shard—had been kept under pressure. Maybe that was how they liked it, or perhaps that was some added layer of security. Whatever. It wasn’t working.

  The blackness inside the cell coalesced and became solid. A tendril lashed against the window. The glass exploded outwards with the roar of escaping atmosphere.

  “I’ve got this,” Harris shouted back at me.

  Harris had pulled a shotgun from one of the emergency boxes, and he fired the weapon. It was a semi-auto security model, nothing fancy, but loaded with something I hadn’t seen before. He pummelled the shadow-thing that erupted from the cell with shot, and where the blasts impacted blue sparkles of electricity appeared.

  “EMP rounds,” Harris said, already backing up.

  EMP: electromagnetic pulse. The Alliance Army made a flavour of grenade that did the same thing—disrupted electronic equipment, scrambled advanced tech—but I’d never seen EMP shotgun shells. When Harris hit the Reaper, it froze, lost consistency for just a split second. Given that the Reapers were basically very sophisticated bodies of nanites, it was the ideal weapon to use against such an enemy.

  “We go now!” Novak said, grabbing my arm. I hadn’t really seen Novak frightened, and this was all new to me. I didn’t much like it.

  At the other end of the corridor, I could see a half-dozen Spiral tangos advancing through a wall of smoke. One paused in front of a containment cell window, then raised her weapon—

  The window shattered. The Shard construct inside pierced the tango’s body with one of its many tendrils. The black spear lifted her off the ground, went right through her—

  And punched through the opposite cell window.

  Darkwater’s AI woke up.

  “Alpha alert. There is a containment breach. Alpha alert. There is a containment breach. All hands, abandon this facility … ”

  Except, of course, that wouldn’t be possible. We’d fired every evac-pod the farm carried, and now the only way off this bucket was the Paladin. Or the Firebird, I thought.

  Rather than retreat, the remaining Spiral whooped in approval. The Reaper inside the cell launched itself free, slashing and tearing at another convert. Some of the tangos were overcome by a religious euphoria. They were actually fucking smiling. Smiling, as their bodies were torn apart by spears of black light. Smiling, as their corpses were thrown against the walls.

  The next window ruptured too, and the corridor was suddenly a matrix of shadows, a nightmarish spider’s web. In an instant, every cell was open. Terror rose within me and crashed around inside my head.

  “We must go!” Novak shouted again.

  He had my shoulder, was shaking me hard. That was enough to bring me back to reality. A Shard tentacle rippled past me, another Spiral body slamming into the ceiling overhead. Harris fired again and again with his shotgun, his face contorted in pain as he took the recoil of the stock against his hip.

  “Hatch at other end of corridor is open,” Novak said.

  I dared a look back as we went, and wished that I hadn’t. It was almost impossible to say how many Shard constructs there were, because they moved together, intertwined at times. Shifted between ephemeral and solid.

  My God, are those …?

  They were absorbing bodies. Breaking them down. Arms and legs and heads extruded from the black mass as it invaded the corridor.

  And something else.

  Warlord stood at the end of the passage. Brazen, arrogant even, wearing the same exo-suit as when I had last seen him, back on the Krell ark-ship when he had followed us into the Gyre. I was vaguely aware that both Harris and Novak were yelling at me to get out of there, but I paused. Watched as Warlord—Clade Cooper—advanced towards us through the fog of war.

  “Lieutenant Jenkins,” he said. “Stand down.”

  He extended an arm in my direction, but there was no weapon in his hand. Instead, his fingers were splayed, index finger and thumb twisted. Warlord flexed his wrist, as though his fingers were working some invisible mechanism.

  “Never going to happen.”

  I answered him with a hail of fire from my PDW.

  Okay, I never expected a burst from the PDW to actually kill Cooper. He seemed star-touched, capable of surviving the worst. Like Kwan, I guess. It was a special ability shared by complete bastards. But I never expected this.

  My gunfire didn’t even reach him. Instead, the bullets sort of suspended. A whirlwind of debris formed around Cooper, like he was the eye of a storm. For a second, I was disarmed. This made no sense. We’d fought before, on North Star Station, then again on the ark-ship. Warlord had proved to be a very capable opponent on both occasions—he’d survived going toe to toe with a simulant in a full HURT suit—but this was new. This was frightening.

  But … There most certainly had been something wrong about the way that Cooper fought when I’d first met him. His speed seemed almost supernatural, almost unworldly.

  Like Novak, I was out of my depth. And I knew it.

  The corridor walls rippled with activity. The Shard Reapers weren’t attacking Warlord. Instead, they hovered around him.

  “My reality is no longer yours,” Cooper growled.

  He almost looked surprised. As though he couldn’t believe this was happening.

  You and me both, bud.

  He was pushing his abilities, or whatever they were, to the limits. Like Pariah, he was changing. But what Cooper was becoming? I wasn’t quite sure.

  “What the hell are you doing, Cooper?”

  “Making things right,” he answered. “Correcting the galaxy.”

  “We changed it already. You’re bringing a war down on our heads that none of us want! We won the war with the fishes!”

  “You call this victory? A galaxy ruled by bureaucrats and administrators?”

  Harris stirred at my shoulder. “We have peace, Warlord. We have—”

  If Warlord was in the slightest bit surprised by Harris’ appearance, he didn’t show it.

  “I have nothing!” he screamed back. “The fishes took everything from me, and there’s no space for veterans like us in the new world order. You should know that more than anyone, Lazarus!”

  “You’re wrong,” said Harris. His strength was already draining, his face turned ashen. “We can change things.”

  “We’re the same, you and I. Leftovers. Forgotten.” Warlord shook his head. “This isn’t peace. This isn’t resolution. This is surviving, and that’s not enough. So I’m going to tear it all down.” His eyes became steel, full of determination. “And I’m going to tear apart anyone who stands in my way.”

  Warlord kept his hand outstretched and twisted his fingers again. The corridor warped around me. The deck rippled, caught in the aftershock of a
n earthquake. I stumbled. The Ikarus suit’s sensor systems fluctuated, error messages appearing over the wrist-mounted controls.

  “Clade Cooper!” Harris yelled. “I’m bringing you in—”

  Warlord’s brow knitted in consternation. He twisted his hand again.

  The walls buckled, the structure of the station groaning. I slammed my mag-locks to the deck: only remained upright because of them. The Reapers were shifting, shifting.

  They were under his control.

  Harris broke the spell, Gaia be thanked.

  He fired off a single round from his shotgun. EMP again; enough to interrupt whatever power Warlord was using. Making the most of the distraction, Harris grabbed for the grenade at my chest and tossed it into the fray.

  “Fire in the hole!” he yelled, turning away from the blast.

  The corridor washed with bright light.

  Using the carnage caused by the frag grenade as cover, we retreated back through the corridor network and away from Warlord. The hatches to Specimen Containment had all been blown.

  “You’ve got to tell Elena,” he started, the shotgun held in hands that were quickly losing strength. He staggered. “The Shard—the exodus …”

  “We’ll both tell her. It’s not far.”

  Any suggestion of medical assistance was long gone. Survival was key.

  “Mess hall,” Novak said. “This way! It will be empty!”

  “How do you know that?” I yelled back at him.

  I took a second to get my bearings. We were at one end of a chamber that was filled with tables, chairs. Flashing STATION BREACH warnings set into the walls, indicators glowing to demonstrate the direction of vital locations …

  Novak had been wrong. The Spiral were here too.

  Novak launched himself at the closest tango and unleashed. A knife filled each hand, sweeping in long wet arcs across the man’s throat, where the survival suit’s collar-ring connected with the torso. The tango let out a scream, grappling with the gush of blood caused by the fatal injury. Novak slammed a foot into the body, and it toppled backwards. Crashed into a table, rifle clattering to the floor.