Exodus

by Jamie Sawyer

  “Come on,” I ordered Harris. I propped him up as we advanced into the mess hall. “Novak, we need some cover!”

  Novak turned to me, eyes wide and frenzied, and for a moment I wondered whether he had actually lost it, whether he was consumed by the red mist. Blood streaked his face like war paint.

  But a heartbeat later, the Russian did as ordered. He upturned the nearest table, making a temporary barricade.

  Gunfire erupted from the far end of the mess hall. I ducked back, behind the metal table. Pulled Harris with me and noticed how his reactions had slowed. Novak roared in defiance as rounds spanked against the tabletop, punched through the thin metal surface.

  “Tables as cover only works in the movies,” I said to Novak, above the din.

  “Cover is for assholes,” Novak replied.

  “Assholes that want to stay alive,” I answered.

  The Spiral yelled orders in a language I didn’t understand. My heart sank with each fresh pair of boots that entered the room. We had Riggs at our back, Warlord somewhere on the station, and now Shard Reapers roaming free …

  I popped up, over the lip of the table. Used it to steady the gun. Fired once, twice. Both rounds hit tangos, sent bodies sprawling backwards.

  But there were more. Agents armed with pistols and melee weapons advanced on us. Some screamed battle-cries, others chanted. One sprang across the room, brandishing a shock-baton. The figure looked different from the others, with a tattoo-filled face. My finger fixed on the firing stud as the figure bolted across tables, that heavy baton ready to smash my head in—

  “No!” Novak yelled.

  He pushed me aside and grabbed the man’s body as he reached us. The Russian punched the tango in the face—hard, very fucking hard—and the figure crumpled into his arms. Novak proceeded to drag him behind the table-barricade, effortlessly wielding the heavy baton.

  “What was that for?” I asked, competing with the gunfire.

  “Is intelligence, yes?” Novak answered. “Is for prisoner.”

  “Since when did you care about intelligence, Novak?”

  “First time for everything,” he replied. The tango was unconscious, and Novak had him by the collar, holding his prize firmly. I didn’t have the strength to argue with him.

  “He’s your responsibility,” I said, by way of concession.

  “Of course,” Novak replied. “Here, take this.”

  He pulled a grenade from the tango’s armour and palmed it to me. It was another frag grenade.

  “We’re going to make a run for that door,” I said, formulating some kind of plan. DOCKS glowed at me from above the hatch at the end of the chamber. “I’ll throw the grenade, and Novak will take the baton.”

  “No,” said Harris. “I’ll take the grenade.”

  “No fucking way. I’m not leaving you.”

  I pulled Harris upright. A bullet punctured the metal skin of the tabletop, very close to his head. Sweat drenched his hair, dripped from the end of his nose.

  “With me, Novak,” I said.

  Novak tossed away one of his knives—the blade broken by the savagery of the attack—and racked the shock-baton.

  “Am ready when you are, ma’am.”

  “Grenade out!” I lobbed the grenade overarm, in the direction we intended to run. “Go, go!”

  I was up first. Novak was at my side, dragging the prisoner with him. Quite why he was so sure that we needed a prisoner, all of a sudden, was beyond me. But if it kept the big guy in check, and it didn’t end up killing us, I was willing to go along with it.

  —reach out, keep reaching, searching—

  I stumbled as the pain in my head almost felled me. I just about managed to stay upright, and kept going.

  DOCK.

  I fixed on that word.

  Then we were out of the mess hall. Through the smoke, into another darkened corridor—

  “Whoa, whoa!” came a deep voice.

  Riggs blocked our path. Skinned and armoured, a plasma rifle across his chest. He grinned from behind the face-plate of his combat-suit.

  “Come on,” he said. “It’s over, guys. We’ve got you.”

  “Back up!” I shouted at Novak, who was still dragging the prisoner along with him.

  Tangos had sealed off our exit route. Fuck. Fuck.

  Riggs nodded. “No one touches them. Not without my authority.”

  The Spiral agents didn’t seem particularly agreeable to that. Like hungry dogs, they circled us. We’d killed enough Spiral that I knew they’d want payback. Warlord, and the mess we’d left of Specimen Containment, couldn’t be far behind.

  “You’re an asshole,” Harris growled, standing on his own. “We’ll never surrender to you.”

  Riggs slammed a fist into Harris’ stomach, with such speed and ferocity that I barely even saw it. Harris hit the wall, crumpling with another groan. I went towards him, aware that there was nothing much I could do—

  The pain enveloped me again, and this time I doubled over. At first, I thought I’d been shot, or that Riggs or the Spiral had used some weapon on me. But this was in my head, an intense jolt. A connection.

  “Stay there!” Riggs ordered, as though shocked by my presentation.

  We are here, came the words in my mind.

  Harris slid to the floor, gritting his teeth against the pain.

  “We’re going to be okay,” I whispered to him.

  “No, you aren’t,” Riggs said. “This is Warlord’s station. This is Spiral territory!”

  “Then show yourself,” I muttered.

  Riggs looked down at me. Some of his crew had similarly started to back up, the tables turning again.

  “Who are you talking to, Jenk?” he asked.

  “I’ve got company,” I said.

  Pariah appeared behind the traitorous bastard, a nightmare of shadow and bladed limbs and animosity.

  “We are here,” it said. “And Riggs-other should be prepared to suffer.”

  Riggs’ mouth opened, simulated lips parting to say something. Maybe it was an order. Maybe a prayer. Whatever it was, he never got the chance.

  Pariah was a thing to behold. It batted aside Riggs’ plasma rifle. The weapon’s casing smashed against the bulkhead. Then the xeno launched forward, delivering the momentum of its full weight into Riggs. One clawed appendage pierced Riggs’ collarbone, went right through the combat-suit’s armour plating as though it were wet paper.

  Riggs roared in pain, twisting his body. His hand went for the plasma pistol holstered on his thigh.

  Another claw tore through Riggs’ right shoulder. P pinned the asshole to the wall.

  “Your species is over, fish,” Riggs said, sudden and real venom in his words. His lips were wet with blood, and his body convulsed. Going into shock, despite the best efforts of the suit’s automated medi-suite. “Your time is finished.”

  P cocked its head. “We are just beginning.”

  Riggs gagged on blood. Struggled to speak, but managed, “The Harbinger virus will finish everything. It’ll bring this galaxy to its knees.”

  “Goodbye, Riggs-other,” P said as it tore the traitor in two.

  P stomped clawed feet—every aspect of the alien seeming to scream armour, spikes, death and strength—and swatted aside another Spiral tango. The woman screamed. Crumpled against the wall.

  “We go now,” P said. “Jackal-others are this way, aboard craft that sails stars. Navigator-other is with them.”

  I took it that P meant Lestrade but didn’t have time to confirm. “Lazarus is hurt!” I shouted back. “He needs medical aid!”

  “Leave me!” Harris countered.

  “Carry him, P.”

  P gave a disdainful look at Harris, folded on the floor, his guts leaking from the hole in his stomach.

  “Saved by a fish head,” Harris said, swallowing. “Something else that I’ll never live down, huh?”

  “Other may not get to,” P said. Another flick of its claw, another dead tango. �
�We are not saved yet—”

  The entire corridor shifted on its axis.

  “They’re blowing the tethers,” I said, words spilling out of me now. How did I even know this? “Warlord is scuttling the whole farm.”

  I grabbed for something, anything, for some purchase. Novak sailed past me, snagging a piece of exposed pipework in the bulkhead. The station almost capsized. The air suddenly tasted cold and pure: a far cry from the tainted atmo I’d been sucking down for the last few minutes—

  Shit!

  I reached for Harris.

  Maybe it was the injury. Maybe it was age. Harris had got slow, real slow. His hand grazed mine, fingers slid through my palm.

  “Harris!” I yelled. “Harris!”

  The station rumbled again, and gravity fluctuated. Harris tumbled back towards the mess hall. When I lost sight of him, he looked barely conscious.

  “He’s gone.” Novak hauled his prisoner by the neck. “And we should be too. Docks are through there.”

  “I’m not leaving him!” I screamed.

  “There is no choice,” P said.

  Rounds impacted the alien’s body armour, taking chunks out of the organic plate. P grappled with me, pulled me along. The volume of gunfire coming from the mess hall was too intense, too heavy.

  “We can’t leave him! We can’t leave him!”

  But that was exactly what we were doing. The dock loomed ahead.

  “Onto ship,” Novak commanded.

  Except, I realised, this wasn’t our ship.

  We were in Beta Dock. The ship in the cradle, attached by an umbilical to the station proper, wasn’t our fucking ship! Instead, the Firebird sat in the docking claw.

  “This isn’t the right ship!” I railed. “We have to go back, for the Paladin!”

  P kept moving, absorbing weapons fire, covering me, but talking as it went. “The Jackal-others fell back here. The simulants have been loaded onto this craft. There is no other choice.”

  “But Elena, Nadi!” I started.

  “They are on own now,” Novak said brusquely.

  No matter how much I disliked it—there was no choice here. Going back was suicide. It was this ship, or none at all.

  We closed on the open cargo ramp. Feng and Lopez were at the lock, waving me on. I couldn’t hear them over the roar of weapons discharge, but I could see the determination on their faces. They had plasma rifles, probably plundered from the station’s armoury.

  Then I was aboard the Firebird, collapsed on the deck.

  “Where’s Colonel Harris?” Lopez asked me.

  “He—we lost him!” I shouted. “We can’t leave without him!”

  The cargo bay was now stacked with dozens of copies of the Jackals, staring back at me with impassive, hooded eyes.

  “It’s done,” Feng said, shouting to compensate for the noise, into a communicator at his neck: a direct line to Captain Lestrade. “We’re all on the ship!”

  “Hold on to something back there,” came Lestrade’s voice over the ship’s PA. “I’m opening the docking claw in three!”

  I looked back the way we’d come, at the skewed corridor, through the mass of moving bodies. Desperate for some indication that Harris had made it out. Through the haze of fire, the dense smoke that claimed the atmosphere, I saw a shape emerging.

  “Wait!” I ordered. “Tell Captain Lestrade to hold position! I see Harris!”

  But, of course, life isn’t that fair.

  It was Riggs, now in a shiny new combat-suit, plasma rifle drawn. A mindless swarm of Spiral cultists followed. They’re just like the Krell, I thought as I scrambled away from this man I had once called a lover. We’re becoming just like them. Meanwhile, Shard Reapers, dark and malignant, swirled behind him. The impossible shadows reflected what I saw in Riggs’ eyes, what I had seen in Warlord.

  The station’s docking bay suddenly and definitively decompressed. The Firebird was still open to the elements, and a hurricane of debris escaped the open bay. I grabbed for some cargo webbing, watched as the world outside was pulled into space. Crates, weapons, bodies: a swirl of detritus followed as we lifted off.

  Riggs stood among the carnage, his face-plate now transparent, and watched as the Firebird launched.

  He waved—fucking waved—as the ship left.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  AT WHAT COST?

  Lopez, Feng, Pariah and I ran for the bridge. Novak had secured the prisoner, for what good that would do us, and Zero met us en route, laying to rest any fear that she had been left on the Paladin. Her face, though, was abject horror.

  “Where’s …?” she started, before stumbling over the words and trying again: “Where’s Colonel Harris?”

  “He’s still on the farm,” I said.

  “Is he …?”

  “I don’t know. We lost him, but the Spiral are blowing the tethers. We couldn’t go back.”

  Was he dead? I didn’t know right now. The thought chilled me, was almost paralysing. It felt like the universe needed Lazarus more than ever. It felt like I needed him more than ever. I couldn’t do this alone.

  “Was that Riggs?” Lopez asked me as we ran. “Back in the docking bay?”

  “Long story,” I said. “But it was him. What’s the sitrep?”

  “Zero told us about an incoming signal,” Feng explained, “and we fell back to the Firebird. Nadi redirected the simulants here as well.”

  “Smart move,” I said. “Anyone injured?”

  Lopez shook her head. “We did better than you, ma’am. None of the Jackals are hurt.”

  We burst onto the Firebird’s bridge. The module was compact, and packed with cutting-edge military tech. Lestrade had plugged himself into the captain’s console.

  “All hands, buckle up!” he barked.

  The ship’s thrusters roared, and she banked hard as she swept out of the docking clamp. Her inertial dampener field kicked in, but struggled to compensate for the extreme manoeuvre.

  “Can you pilot this ship on your own, Captain?” Zero asked, fumbling with her seat straps.

  “It’s an Intruder-class,” Lestrade said as he manipulated the pilot controls. “Not a dreadnought. She’s made to fly with minimal crew, but I won’t argue if someone wants to help with the gunnery stations …”

  The Intruder was smaller than most line vessels, designed with manoeuvrability and speed in mind. Captain Lestrade made the most of those characteristics as he evaded the storm of debris that surrounded the station.

  “You heard the captain,” I said. “Lopez, Feng. Take the posts.”

  We all slid into gunnery pods. Screens lit in front of us.

  “Tracking hostile weapon signatures,” Lopez said, already punching in weapons clearance. “I’m activating the flak cannons.”

  “Just do whatever you can to keep us alive,” said Lestrade.

  The communications console crackled to life with an incoming transmission. I understood enough of the console’s readout to see that it was the Paladin.

  “Do you read, Firebird?” came Elena’s static-riddled voice.

  “We copy,” I replied.

  “You made it out. Very good.”

  “I’m turning on the farm’s defensive systems,” Nadi declared. “Brace yourselves.”

  The farm’s weapon array came online and began shooting asteroids out of the sky.

  “You have to listen,” I said. “Something happened on the farm—”

  Elena spoke over me. “I’m broadcasting a data-packet to your ship,” she said, her voice remarkably calm and composed. “Encrypted channel.” My console showed incoming data, and I accepted the packet. No time to consider it now, but the Firebird would keep it on the data-stacks for later retrieval. “In case we don’t make it out, this is the mission. Understand?”

  “Solid copy.” But of more pressing concern: “Did Harris make it off the station? Tell me that he’s on the Paladin!”

  “Say again?” Elena said over the comm. Her voice was becoming ha
rder to make out. “Do not copy.”

  I watched as the Paladin Rouge cleared Alpha Dock, at the far end of the station. Her thrusters glowed blue, trailing plasma. I rubbed my temples. I was so tired that I could barely think straight.

  “Boost the transmission!” I ordered.

  “This will have to wait,” Lestrade yelled across the bridge. “We can’t stay here.”

  Darkwater Farm was a complete mess. Several modules were open to the void—streaming debris into Thane’s upper atmosphere—while intense fires were visible behind some view-ports.

  “Lazarus might still be on board,” Zero said.

  “Or he could be on the Paladin,” Feng offered.

  Thane’s angry surface spun beneath us, the yellow cloud cover spiralling in sickening patterns …

  There was a bloom of light from the station.

  “The station’s remaining bolts are blowing,” Lopez said. “The farm’s going down.”

  One bolt, then another. Then a third. The enormous tethers holding the base in position whipped around in zero-G. The reaction was immediate. Detonations rippled along the underside of the asteroid, through the upper levels of the station. The base tipped, lopsided, then began to careen off-course. The entire facility impacted with the asteroid field, tumbling now. Its null-shield intermittently reacted, throwing surrounding debris into complete disarray. There were so many targets on my display that I could barely decide which to shoot first.

  “We can’t stay here,” Lestrade repeated. “If the station’s energy core cooks off, and we’re still in the blast radius …”

  Yeah, he really didn’t need to finish that sentence. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of power tech knew that being within range of a failed quantum-energy containment core was a very bad idea.

  “Get us the hell out of Dodge,” I decided.

  Then Darkwater hit Thane’s upper atmosphere and immediately began to burn up. It was pulled down into the gravity well, glowing hotter and hotter, caressed by the poisonous atmosphere …

  “Energy core cooking off,” Zero declared.

  There was a sudden and brilliant flash of light. So intense that the Firebird’s view-screens polarised to protect our eyes. The hard radiation sensor chirped a warning, despite our distance from the detonation.