The Lazarus War: Artefact

by Jamie Sawyer

  No one came to help the female researcher. She was wide-eyed, staring up at Kellerman. He flexed his machine-assisted hand, the hand that he had used to strike the woman, and just stood there: furious, fuming, lips peeled.

  “Have some damned respect,” he repeated, now in a breathy whisper.

  “I – I’m sorry,” the woman stammered.

  “Leave it, Kellerman,” I said, pulling his arm.

  I couldn’t deal with this now. Blake was gone! This wasn’t the time to mediate these fanatics.

  Something struck the outside of the crawler. The same tech who had been the subject of Kellerman’s anger began to whimper. The sensor was trilling.

  “Cap – we’ve got to pull out,” Kaminski said. “Unless – unless we want to end up the same way.”

  Something screamed outside.

  Fuck it!

  “Do it, Kaminski. Get us out of here.”

  The return journey passed in silence. The dark outside was thick and impenetrable, and Deacon assisted Kaminski in plotting the route back. Kellerman’s people sat in a dazed stupor – in equal parts awed and horrified. Horrified by the idea of being ambushed by the Krell, awed by their leader’s earlier outburst.

  Someone suggested that we might sit out the night, buckle down in the crawler until sunrise, but that idea was quickly dismissed. No one wanted to be stuck out in the dark with the Krell.

  I didn’t have the strength – mental or physical – to do anything to help. I broke out a water flask and drank from it, but the lukewarm fluid did nothing to satisfy my thirst.

  Everything feels wrong.

  Blake had become an irreplaceable member of my team. His loss would be felt by all of us. He had died because of me, because I’d led us out into the Maelstrom.

  “Just add his name to the butcher’s bill,” I said to myself.

  Everything had been taken from me. I wanted to stir my anger, my hatred of the Krell, but I couldn’t even muster that. It was simply too much for my crude senses to properly comprehend. That emptiness I had experienced after Blake went down threatened to overwhelm me, engulf me.

  Kellerman sat across from me in the passenger cabin, slumped in one of the seats. It had taken hours for his demeanour to soften, for that wrath to dissipate. Maybe he was angry with me for suggesting he accept some help, back in the crater, or maybe because I had intervened to stop him striking his researcher. She sat alone in one corner of the cabin, cradling her jaw. It had already swollen and turned a pained black-blue. For a long while Kellerman and I sat in silence; I wasn’t eager for conversation. I didn’t really care what he thought of me, whether he was angry with me or not.

  “I don’t know my own strength sometimes, in this suit,” Kellerman finally said. His voice was barely more than a murmur. “I didn’t mean for you to see that.”

  I didn’t reply. Too much to think about, too many ghosts. Would he have killed her? I wondered. He certainly looked like he might’ve hit her again. The exo was clumsy and ungainly, but he had vastly increased strength inside the thing. Maybe that was something to note. There was an expectant air between us; as though Kellerman suddenly wanted to talk, to get something off his chest.

  “I lost my legs on Epsilon Ultris,” he said. “The memory is so painful. I try to forget about what happened. It’s not easy. Sometimes it’s easier to pretend that I was never there.”

  “Whatever,” I said. I didn’t care any more.

  Kellerman added, abruptly: “I’m sure that your colleague was a worthy soldier, and that he will not be forgotten.”

  “You didn’t know him.”

  We sat in semi-darkness and I could just make out the pale moon of Kellerman’s face. He gave me a curt nod.

  “You were very interested in the planetarium, back on the Shard ship. Why was that?”

  “Something that happened to me, a long time ago.”

  I’d felt hope for the first time in too long. I could follow her. I could find her. Her face, her voice, just her: it was impossible to put her out of my mind.

  But hope was also a terrible thing. It had cost me Blake. I felt such a mixture of emotions that it literally exhausted me. With intense guilt, I looked over at the crate housing the Key. It sat undamaged, innocuous, on one of the empty passenger seats. Power emanated from that sealed crate. I couldn’t allow myself to feel excitement, to feel pleasure at this discovery. Those emotions were alien to me. I didn’t deserve to feel those things.

  “When we get back to the station, I want that star-data,” I said. If it wasn’t given freely, then I would take it.

  Kellerman nodded. “And you shall have it.”

  “You know what the Artefact is, don’t you, Kellerman?”

  Now it was Kellerman’s turn to sit in silence. He rubbed a gloved hand across his chin, pulled a face as though he was in deep thought.

  “I do,” he slowly proclaimed. “I’ve known for a long time.”

  “Then tell me. I lost a good man out there today, and I deserve to know.”

  “It’s a beacon,” he said. Still so reluctant to reveal what he knew, still the guardian of secret knowledge. The man disgusted me. “The mechanics remain unclear, but I’m learning. A deep-space beacon, capable of sending a signal across the Maelstrom.”

  “A neutrino signal?”

  “Probably not. This is something different. It’s far more advanced. It can be detected in the same way, but the signal is something else. Something that we don’t yet understand. There’s something hidden inside the signal, another broadcast method that the Shard relied upon. Our science is fallible – it can’t explain everything.”

  “Command told me that it had been heard from several star systems away, not the whole Maelstrom.”

  “That is where the Key comes in. The Artefact is not fully operational. There is a power source, somewhere inside or beneath the structure. We have detected it via our comms satellite. The Key will activate the Artefact – broadcast the signal across the entire region. Enable other ships – Shard, maybe human – to use the Artefact’s transmission as a Q-jump point. Imagine a lantern, visible to those who care to look for it.”

  His face illuminated again, and I saw that instantaneous change of mood that seemed to have become the man’s defining feature. He flashed me a rare smile.

  “What about the Krell?” I asked.

  “What of them? The Artefact’s signal is strong enough to draw them here when it is not even at full power. It is already nearly disabling for them. Now imagine what the Artefact would do to them at full power.”

  I found myself – involuntarily – nodding along with Kellerman. It would surely destroy them – override the Collective, send them over the edge into madness. A whole world of Krell, destroyed in one fell blow. Maybe more than a world, maybe a star system—

  Like all deadly viruses, his fervour was infectious.

  “I know that you hear it as well,” Kellerman suddenly said, leaning across the cabin. His face looked especially gaunt.

  I wanted to deny it, to lie to Kellerman, but my response came unwillingly: “Sometimes.”

  “I hear it too. Not everyone is so receptive. My research suggests that the sound is different for each subject. I don’t quite understand why. Be warned: it is a mixed blessing. There are consequences for those who hear it.”

  Eventually, Kellerman drifted into a sleep, still propped up in his seat. The exo wasn’t made for sitting or resting. Peters carefully placed a blanket over his lower body, breaking open a crate of emergency supplies. The cabin grew quiet.

  Everyone has their demons, I considered.

  I tried to stay awake. I didn’t want to remember any more. But I was so tired, so completely exhausted, that I knew sleep was inevitable. Hours into the journey, I couldn’t resist it any longer.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  NOT AN ECHO OF YOU, NOT A SIMULATION OF YOU

  Five years ago

  We’d been on Azure for three years.

  I
remember the day too well, with a clarity that I wished dimmed with age, but has instead grown.

  Our last day.

  I had been operational for three weeks running. By now the Sim Ops Programme had been an unrivalled success and my record of effective missions was unsurpassed. I’d spearheaded a large simulant op out on the Rim; disabled a Krell battleship; rescued the marooned crew of an Alliance space station. The border with the Maelstrom was all-out war, but slowly, so slowly, the Sim Ops Programme was making a difference.

  It was a short route between the officers’ habs and the Simulant Operations Centre, but I walked through Fort Rockwell in a sort of daze. My own skin felt uncooperative and unforgiving. The sky overhead was brightening now – pre-dawn light filtering in from the east. Inside the compound, the streets were like a grid, with expected military precision.

  I went straight to the base PX. It was open all hours, and I was sure that I would have broken in if it hadn’t been. A young-faced Army clerk served me two bottles of Earth-imported Scotch – raising an eyebrow at me as he rang up the total cost.

  “Hard night?” the clerk asked, as he wrapped the Scotch bottles and placed them into a brown paper bag. He had a smug look to him, the blush of fresh acne on his forehead.

  I nodded. “Something like that. Let me ask; you ever seen real combat?”

  “No, sir,” he said. His expression froze, eyes dropping to the Sim Ops badge on my lapel.

  “So you’ve never looked down the barrel of a Krell bio-gun, seen the look in a fish head’s eyes as it takes you apart?”

  The kid swallowed. “No, sir. Not sure I’d want to either.”

  “Thought so,” I said. “Assumption isn’t good for you. I’ve been working. Bet you supposed I was drunk?”

  The clerk looked down nervously. “Apologies, sir. I – I didn’t realise that you were Sim Ops.”

  I swiped my unicard and left the store.

  Of course, the clerk was right.

  Elena was waiting for me when I got back to the hab.

  Our domicile was split over two levels, set into a block with twenty other officer suites. Facing the sunrise: affording a decent view as Tau Centauri rose every day. Elena had chosen it because it was quiet – the opposite end of the base to the main spaceport. Two bedrooms. Although one of those had never been used, logistics hadn’t asked us to consider moving.

  “Welcome home, Captain Harris,” the household AI chirped, as I stumbled inside. “You have sixteen new messages for approval. I can route those to your wrist-comp if you would—”

  “Shh!” I hissed. “Keep it down. And I told you to call me Conrad.”

  “As you wish, Captain,” the AI said, voice pitching a little lower but still too loud for this hour of the morning.

  “I’m already up, or still up, depending on how you want to look at it,” Elena called from the bedroom. Her voice sounded brittle: accusative. “Are you drunk?”

  I didn’t answer but I stopped by the front door, looked at a mirror set into the wall. I’d asked Elena to take this away plenty of times, and looking into it I remembered exactly why. I was tired, with rings under both eyes, but that wasn’t the reason I didn’t like the mirror there. It was because I didn’t recognise the face looking back at me. Because I didn’t want to recognise that face any more.

  I stalked through the apartment, fetched a glass tumbler from the galley. Elena had gone silent, hadn’t followed me. I didn’t immediately know whether that was a good or a bad thing. Had to face the music. I paced into our bedroom.

  The window shutters were open, and the room was filled with pale strands of morning light. Individual shafts fell across the chamber, illuminating drifting dust-motes.

  “You couldn’t sleep?” I asked, vaguely registering that the bed was still made, that Elena was sitting on it rather than in it.

  “No,” she said, firmly. “I didn’t sleep. I waited up for you.” She wrung her hands on her lap. That was another of her habits, another of her tells. “You said that you were coming off-duty at twenty-hundred hours. I asked you a question: are you drunk?”

  “I’ve had a drink.”

  “Where have you been? It’s nearly five in the morning.”

  “So what? I haven’t been anywhere.” I hoped that this wouldn’t be another argument. We had been having too many of those lately, and always over the same things. “Just venting some energy. I’m due shore-leave in two days. Only one more op to go.”

  Elena wouldn’t meet my gaze. She knew that shore-leave meant nothing to me, and I think that it had started to mean less than that to Elena. She sat so rigidly, upright. Dressed in a formal smart-suit, her hair clipped back from her face.

  “And what will you do with your shore-leave?” she asked.

  “You mean what will we do. Look, we’ll talk about this later. I’m tired. It’s late, or early, or whatever.”

  I sat the Scotch bottle down on the bedside cabinet, unwrapped it. The cap seal clicked off, and I poured a finger into the glass.

  “Are you listening to me?” Elena said. “What’s the point of shore-leave? When you’re not working, all you ever want to do is work. You’ll be consumed by running checks, thinking about your next operational period.”

  I knocked back the Scotch. Focused on the tri-D caricature on the side of the bottle: a black-and-white dancing cowboy, the words YANKEE MALT. An ashtray on the bedside cabinet literally brimmed with cigarette butts: Elena must have been smoking all night.

  “You only ever take minimum downtime between transitions,” Elena went on. “And don’t think that I haven’t seen your psych-evals.”

  “Those are confidential. Between me and whatever tech—”

  “I’m on the Programme, Conrad! I can see whatever I want. And I’ve accessed your files. I’m not a fool, so please don’t take me for one. Your most recent report recommends a year to eighteen months’ shore-leave, and a rehabilitation and adjustment course.”

  Elena had, I suddenly realised, lost weight in the last few weeks. It pained me not to have seen that before now. She had been crying. Her pale skin – always pale, despite the heat – was streaked red. Even then, I didn’t want to talk about this – didn’t want to do anything except think about that next transition, think about skinning up.

  “It’s too light in here,” I decided. “Those shutters should be closed.”

  As I passed Elena, I noticed that she was rubbing the ring on her finger. She slid it off smoothly, covering the motion – almost apologetically – with her other hand. That was the ring that I had bought her when she had first followed me out to Azure. I hadn’t seen it in months, but the memory of her arrival came flooding back. I stifled it, buried it away. The window shutters adjusted, casting light like energy beams across Elena’s legs.

  “There is something that I need to tell you,” she muttered.

  “Can’t it wait? I’ll have some proper downtime after the next op. Oh-eight-hundred tomorrow. Another battleship raid. Command thinks that this will break the back on the second advance—”

  “It can’t wait,” she hissed. “It can’t.”

  I poured another drink and downed it. The warmth in my gullet, spreading to my stomach, from the Scotch, was in stark contrast to the chill growing in my heart. A paralysing realisation hit me: this isn’t just another argument. This is a different and more serious beast.

  Elena sighed and looked away from me – fixing her glassy eyes on a particular spot on the empty wall opposite where she sat. Our hab had taken on a strangely anonymous feel; there were no ornamentations or personal objects left here. How long has it been this way? Had I just noticed the change, or had Elena removed them months ago? Even Elena’s holo-pictures of home, of Normandy, had been taken off the walls.

  “I’m not happy here. I gave up everything to come out here with you. Whatever happened to getting married, settling down, having children?”

  “What difference would a marriage contract make to our relationship? You
know that we wouldn’t get a licence for a child, let alone children. It was just talk. Maybe one day.”

  “One day will be too late!”

  “It was all easy talk. You never wanted any of those things, anyway.”

  “How the hell would you know that? I did want those things. And there was a time when you did too.” Elena abruptly threw up her hands, becoming animated again. “When did things change?”

  I traced the edge of the glass with my index finger. Said nothing. Maybe I could get out of this by just letting her blow off some steam; maybe leave the hab, come back tomorrow—

  “We both know when things changed,” I said. “And we both know why things changed.”

  “How many times do I have to tell you?” she continued. Her voice was raised to a shrill pitch and her face had reddened. “Let me spell it out: I did not know. You think I would have hidden that from you?”

  We hadn’t learnt much from the medics after the terrorist attack. Elena had been two months’ pregnant, still in the early stages. Did I blame Elena for our loss? I didn’t want to blame her, I really didn’t. But I needed someone to blame.

  “Doesn’t matter if you did, because she’s gone now anyway,” I blurted, before thinking about the hurt my response would cause.

  “What? And you blame me for that?” Elena roared, standing from the bed. “I did not know I was pregnant. There, I’ve said it. There was nothing that I could do that night.”

  I slammed the tumbler onto the cabinet top, producing a loud crash. The glass immediately broke with the force of the impact. A shard slit my thumb. Concentrate on the pain. Pain is good.

  “And there was nothing I could do either. Nothing I could do to save you or her. Do you know how that felt, Elena?”

  “Don’t you dare use her against me! What would have been different about that night if you had known about it?”