The Lazarus War: Artefact

by Jamie Sawyer

  Elena gently gripped my arm. Gave me a reassuring smile.

  “One day I went down to the basement to see him. The door was locked, but I knew he was inside: the tri-D television was blaring away on full volume.” I gave a long sigh. “So Carrie and I knocked the door in.”

  “It’s okay,” Elena said. “You don’t need to tell me any more if you don’t want to.”

  “You’ve opened the gates now,” I whispered. “I do want to tell you. I want to. My father was in the room, lying over the caretaker’s workbench. He still had his gun in his hand. The viewer had cloaked the shot, I suppose, and no one above him had even heard it. The medics reckoned that he had killed himself the night before: taken the gun and placed it under his chin, fired it. Both hands on the trigger – he must’ve been pretty determined.”

  Elena’s eyes were wet with tears, and she gripped my arm more firmly now. I grimaced, waved her off. Nothing more to be said; his death hadn’t been recorded in his military record as a gift to Carrie and me.

  “Death follows me, Elena,” I said. Suddenly eager to move on from the memory: to avoid recalling my father’s cold body, that pool of black blood around his head. “See, doesn’t matter where I run – it follows me. Always has, always will. That’s why I don’t have anything to fear from this job: I already know death.”

  Elena clasped her body against mine.

  “This war won’t last for ever,” she said. “And when it’s over, when the Krell are done, you won’t need to fear anything.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  SEVEN SHADES OF HADES

  Pain.

  Real, unsimulated pain.

  I tried to move. My right leg erupted in agony, and I cried out. There was pain all along my right side, concentrated on my ribcage. I’d felt the sensation before: broken ribs. Multiple. My fatigues were stuck to me, wet in places. Blood.

  Worst of all was the intense ache that dwelt behind my eyes, deep in my head. Rolling thunder; a pressure headache like a tactical nuke firing in my skull.

  For a long while I just lay there.

  I wanted to sleep so badly.

  Get up, I told myself. This is real. Fuck this up, and you won’t wake in the simulators.

  Vision came back to me in snapshots of the outside world. I was in the wreckage of the medical bay, still strapped in by the safety harness. Fabric straps bit into my shoulders. I struggled to move an arm. Fumbled with a release buckle, but it was too much for me to get myself free of the webbing.

  Need to sleep.

  Don’t. Stay awake!

  I was awake for a few seconds, then unconscious again.

  I breathed deeply, feeling the tang of alien atmosphere in my mouth. Gravity and atmosphere felt wrong. Medical was at the wrong angle. The floor was slanted, and parts of the external structure had punched through the walls of the module. An emergency lamp set in the ceiling flashed red. Dirty light streamed in from holes in the outer hull. Every window, every view-port, had been shattered during the crash. Parts of the bay had come away during the evacuation, and the entire structure yawed and creaked with the motion of the wind outside.

  If I sleep now, Death comes later.

  Good enough.

  I was on Helios.

  I awoke again to a sharp, urgent pain.

  “Get away from me!” I yelled, twisting my arm in the safety harness.

  Jenkins’ face came into focus above me. She held my left arm, and I realised that the pain was from my outer forearm. My fatigue shirt was rolled up and Jenkins held a hypodermic to the skin. A small well of blood told me that she had just injected me with something.

  “It’s me, Cap.”

  I rubbed my arm, groaning to myself.

  “Just some painkillers and a stimulant cocktail,” Jenkins said. “It’ll help with the pain and keep you awake for a while.”

  I pulled myself into a more comfortable position. The chemical rush hit my bloodstream very quickly and the fog of pain dispersed. I felt mildly more alive – I could operate, at least.

  “Take it easy,” Jenkins said. The concern in her face was enough to make me pause. I looked down at my right leg and grasped the ripped fatigues. They were caked in hot, sticky blood. Something metallic and sharp had penetrated my fatigues. It had pierced tissue and muscle, part of it still protruding from my leg above the knee. I looked in disbelief at the injury.

  Why hasn’t it started healing yet? I asked myself.

  Then a sick realisation hit me. I was in a real, fallible human body: not an improved simulant. I would bleed and I would die – maybe for good.

  “Are you all right?” Blake asked, standing beside me.

  He was dressed in shipboard fatigues but his hair was still slick with amniotic fluid from the simulator-tanks.

  “I’ll live, I think. Have I been out for long?”

  “Couple of hours,” Blake said, noncommittally. “Give or take.”

  I could tell that he was lying.

  “How does that leg feel?” Jenkins said. “We need to get it bandaged. I tried while you were out, but you kept moving around.” She frowned at me. “You were talking while you were unconscious – something about Elena.”

  “Just help me out of here,” I said, struggling free of the remainder of the safety-webbing.

  Jenkins and Blake assisted me. I ground my teeth against the pain. My entire body hurt; I felt bruised and battered on every level. Standing from the harness was a mission. I could see Martinez and Kaminski getting their bearings. All four of my team had made it, at least.

  “I feel about as bad as you look,” Jenkins said, wiping a cut on her head. “But it could be worse.”

  She motioned towards the back of the medical bay. In the dim light, I made out bodies pierced by support struts and squashed beneath heavy equipment. A couple of the techs were no more than smears on the walls, thrown about so viciously during the landing.

  “Welcome to Helios.” Kaminski spread out his arms, encompassing the med-bay. “Hot towels and drinks will be served at your seats. If you require any assistance disembarking please await a hostess. As our regular attendants are either dead or about to be eaten by fish heads, you will have to make do with Jenkins – she scrubs up okay if don’t look too hard. This is totally FUBAR.”

  “Leave it, tech boy,” Jenkins said, punching Kaminski in the arm. “This isn’t the time or place.”

  “I guess being inside the simulators during the crash saved us,” Martinez said. “Acted as a cushion, or something. We got lucky. La gracia de Dios.”

  “Olsen was the only other survivor,” Jenkins said. “He took a bad knock to the head, but he’ll live.”

  She jerked a thumb towards Olsen’s body, hanging in one of the wall-mounted safety harnesses. His smock was shredded at the front and a huge egg-shaped lump had already formed on his temple. His skin was an ashen grey colour but his chest was just perceptibly moving.

  “Jenkins sedated him,” said Blake. “He was becoming hysterical. The others … Well you don’t need to be a medic to realise what has happened to them. I guess that some might’ve escaped from the Oregon, like us, in evac modules.”

  In my mind’s eye, I remembered the fleeing evac-pods. There was no way that anyone else had made it down to Helios: the Krell had mercilessly dispatched everything that had left our ship. I closed my eyes. Nightmare images of the evac were painted inside my eye-lids as well. I wouldn’t be able to escape those memories easily; the experience would be one I would relive again and again.

  “I saw what happened,” I said, “on the way down. There won’t be anyone left. No point in setting a distress beacon, at least not yet. There was another Krell warship. The asteroid field – I think it was a trap.”

  I swallowed, recalling the cold of space as it claimed my body. That had felt significantly worse than I did now, but I’d known that pain was fleeting. I wouldn’t be able to get away from this pain anywhere so swiftly.

  “We saw it too,” Jenkins sai
d. “The Oregon didn’t stand a chance. We’ve been awake for a while, and I ordered a stocktake of our supplies. Most of the spare simulants made it.”

  “Most?” I questioned. Jenkins was holding something back.

  “Just rest,” she said, holding my shoulder. “No need to worry about that now.”

  “I need to know everything,” I said.

  Jenkins bit her lip, and I pushed past her: scanned the destroyed interior of the module.

  Sweet Christo.

  At the back of the med-bay, among shattered storage tubes and twisted metal, sprawled parodies of my real body. What little strength I still had seemed to ebb from me. Most of the simulants were a sickly, fish-belly white colour. Several of them had bled out. Although they were incredibly resilient, the bodies had been thrown about like trash. The inactive simulants hadn’t stood a chance.

  Snuffed out as easily as the medical team.

  I gingerly picked my way through the wreckage to investigate. It was like looking at myself, in a variety of different poses: each corpse killed in a different way. One had been pierced by a support strut through the gut, leaving an eruption of intestines and other internal organs. I involuntarily touched my own stomach; felt my own intestines twist in psychosomatic sympathy. Another had been cleanly decapitated. Then another had been caught up in electrical cabling that had come loose from the ceiling, lighting it and leaving it blackened and burnt.

  I grappled with an upturned console, steadying myself. It was sickening. I was trapped inside this damaged, imperfect body: trapped on Helios, surrounded by Krell. Even if we had the right equipment with which to do it, I was quite sure that none of the bodies were salvageable. The idea of being on Helios, without a simulant to hide inside, filled me with dread. I felt physically drained.

  No point in going on any more. If you can’t use your simulants, what sort of a soldier are you?

  “I told you not to look,” Jenkins whispered.

  Blake sighed. “At least the others made it, although the tanks are in a bad way.”

  The simulants for the rest of the squad sat in their pristine glass storage capsules. They were still clad in combat-suits, dull-eyed and ready for activation. The simulator-tanks themselves weren’t so well-preserved; spider-web fractures marked the outside of each tank. Several of the delicate connection-cables had been torn from their moorings.

  “Looks like those tanks will need work before they’re operational again,” I said. Needed to concentrate, for the good of my squad if nothing else. “I want to get this place secure, and scout the immediate—”

  Thump. Thump. A series of percussive booms echoed through the abandoned module.

  “What the hell was that?” Jenkins asked.

  Something was on the roof outside, and had hit the hull hard. Thump. Thump.

  “A survivor?” offered Blake.

  “More likely Krell,” I said. This had suddenly stepped things up; we had to act fast. There was no prospect of staying in the crashed module if we were about to be swarmed by Krell. “Have we got weapons? Are they useable?”

  “Yeah, they made it down fine,” Jenkins said with an empty laugh. “Proper Alliance-issue, made to last. Or something like that.”

  Jenkins opened the metal crates of unused M95 plasma rifles and grenades. She quickly distributed the weapons, and we each took a rifle and a pistol.

  I held a rifle in both hands, felt the weight of it. We won’t stand a chance out there, I thought to myself. I loaded the power cell into the stock – even that looked ridiculously oversized in human hands. Like the rifles were made for adults, and we were only children, playing at being soldiers. I lifted the M95 and fumbled, could barely operate the heavy weapon. There was no way that I would be able to carry the gun for any protracted period of time, let alone operate it.

  “Isn’t there anything more appropriate?”

  “The armoury went down with the Oregon,” Jenkins said. “This gear was an overstock. Just happened to be in the med-bay during the attack.”

  Then I saw my pistol, hanging from the holster beside the crushed remains of my simulator. Perfect condition, the burnished metal grip gleaning, ammo clips still loaded into the webbing. Taunting me. I hobbled over to it, strapped the gun and ammo to my leg.

  No time to argue. There was more thumping outside, only now it sounded like it was coming from all around the module – as though there were attackers all around us. I considered our choices. The module was unpowered and there was no way we could set up the simulator-tanks without Olsen. In any event, they’d been badly damaged – I didn’t know what sort of repair work was necessary to get them running again. Olsen still lay comatose in his harness, eyes tightly shut; he was out of action for now. Whatever was outside, we would have to confront it. I swallowed back fear and staggered over to the exit door.

  “You might say you feel okay,” Blake said, frowning at me, “but you sure don’t look it. Maybe you should stay inside, while we go investigate.”

  More pounding on the hull. The screeching of metal on metal somewhere outside.

  I waved Blake away. “I’ll be fine. Form up on me; I’ll pop that hatch and then we move out together.”

  The main entrance door to the med-bay acted as a bulkhead but had become deformed by the force of the impact, and broken free of its frame. I kicked it with my good leg and it came open easily. The squad deployed smoothly out of the ship, rifles aimed into the unknown.

  A storm seethed. The wind was a roaring inferno, carrying with it sharp, angry sand. The landscape was a blurred orange-red, almost burnt. Huge sand dunes shifted and lapped like waves, topped by a deep red-brown sky. Through the intense wind, it was impossible to gain any sense of geography or scale: Helios just looked like endless, unforgiving desert. Bulbous, low-lying clouds filled the sky. Barely visible were two huge suns. They sat bloated on the horizon, just beginning to rise from their slumber. Dawn was coming.

  “I thought that Olsen wasn’t expecting the storm yet,” Blake shouted, over the wind.

  “I don’t think that the storm has hit,” I said. “This is Helios on a good day.”

  “Ah, shit,” Blake replied.

  Just then, there was an enormous thunderclap and a brilliant flare lit the sky. Lightning streaked down from the pregnant clouds in angry red forks. The ground shook violently as each clap sounded. The sky flashed again and again. In those brief seconds of illumination, I made out shapes all around me. I backed down into the door.

  There were figures out in the storm and they were rapidly moving towards the wreckage. Kaminski fired once, twice, three times with his rifle. Every shot missed, but the nearest figure dropped into a prone position. Another took its place, turning glowering red-and-green eyes towards us.

  “This is all we need!” Kaminski shouted, sending more bright plasma shots into the miasma.

  His aim was off; outside of a simulant, such heavy ordnance was very difficult to operate. I wasn’t doing any better with my rifle. I fired several times, every shot going wide. The rifle was meant to slave with a combat-suit, not to be fired manually. I jammed my finger on the firing stud, aware that warning lights illuminated on the rifle control panel. Without a tactical helmet, I couldn’t even tell what the warnings were. I dropped the rifle to fire it from the hip, but the dimensions were all wrong, and the ugly metal stock jarred against my broken ribs.

  Damn it! I tossed the rifle away. This isn’t going to work. The muzzle was red-hot, smoking.

  I unholstered my pistol. I fired into the storm, my eyes stinging with the sand in the air. The Smith & Wesson was a slug-thrower – firing basic manstopper rounds. Those would shred a man at close range, but I didn’t know whether they could stop a primary-form. It occurred to me that I’d never actually fired the gun in combat; that I didn’t know whether it had been fired in anger before. I’d fired it on a range, back at the Point, but the last person to properly use it had been my father. I repressed the memory: instead, fired until I’d spen
t all ten rounds. I couldn’t tell whether I was hitting anything with such restricted vision, and equally I couldn’t tell whether we were being hit. The rest of my squad were just vague blurs in the midst of the storm, only properly visible when their rifles illuminated with plasma discharge. I prayed for a combat-suit and a tactical helmet.

  The figures continued their advance.

  “Fall back to the medical bay,” I called out.

  I looked back at the tortured remains of the module. The hull was still smoking in places, and it had settled in a blackened crater, surrounded by torched rocks and superheated sand. Dark shapes clung to the outside of the wreck.

  My squad fluidly fell back, firing as they went. My injured leg briefly gave out beneath me. I stumbled. Blake caught me and dragged me back into the wreckage.

  “Jenkins, prep explosive grenades for clearance inside this bay,” I ordered. “Take out as many of them as we can.”

  She nodded and knelt beside me, fumbling with a satchel of grenades. She scattered a handful of them in front of her, clasping her rifle over her chest. Martinez and Kaminski took up positions near the shattered door, while Blake crouched over me protectively.

  A figure appeared at one of the view-ports, peering inside the module. Then another. Then finally, a silhouetted outline materialised at the door.

  The wind eased for just a moment, allowing me a clear, unhindered view of the attackers. The alien eyes turned, and I saw them for what they were. Lowlight goggles of some design, worn over a primitive and battered black helmet. Human tech. The figure – a man – paused and raised his rifle. He waved a hand.

  “I am Security Officer Deacon of Helios Station,” he growled, using an archaic speaker-unit that distorted his voice into an angry buzz. “I’m ordering you to cease fire!”