by Jamie Sawyer
I visualised myself there, in the death-grip of the Krell primary-form: I instantly recognised the poise of the xeno, knew what it was about to do.
“Kaminski!” I roared.
My reactions were slow, human.
Kaminski’s were improved, superhuman.
He was already reacting. His rifle was up, firing. The Krell was caught off-guard, and two plasma pulses impacted its torso just under the ribcage. In a brilliant flash of light – bright enough to momentarily blind the vid-feed – the creature collapsed backwards. It thrashed violently, sending water and alien flora spraying into the air.
“I’m moving!” Kaminski called. “I’m moving!”
“They’re all around us!” Jenkins said, following Kaminski.
The cave was abruptly filled with the tell-tale squawking of Krell primary-forms. They were dropping from the ceiling, I realised, and using the stalactites to guide their descent.
“Tracking multiple targets,” Martinez shouted.
Something heavy thump-thumped on the roof. I unconsciously grabbed for my pistol, cycling the safety off, even though I knew that it wouldn’t do me any good against these odds.
“Get ready to move out, Martinez,” I ordered. “Power up the engine. Soon as they are onboard, we’re gone. Activate the guns!”
The sand-crawler turrets sprang to life. There was a pair of guns on the roof – multi-barrelled, solid-shot assault cannons. Automated, they selected the most viable targets and opened fire. Equipped with camera-mounts as well; I watched as the muzzles of each gun glowed white-hot, churned through the attackers. More bodies collapsed from above, in various states of injury.
The noise was tremendous: the chatter of the guns, the screaming of the descending Krell, echoing off the vast cave walls. Overwhelming, even inside the crawler.
I feverishly looked back to Jenkins’ vid-feed. There was too much happening at once for me to keep track of, and once again I cursed my fallible body. She fired from the hip with her flamethrower. Kaminski was in front of her, blasting through bodies. Two huge xenos landed beside him, in another explosion of water. They advanced. With lightning reactions, he armed a grenade and threw it.
A fraction of a second later, the grenade exploded. Shards of alien blood and body tissue showered Kaminski and Jenkins. Everywhere, jagged shadows were cast by approaching Krell and weapons-fire.
In that instant of perfect light, I saw that the ceiling was lined with Krell. There were hundreds of them roosting above. Even as they made their way towards the transport, more were emerging from their hibernation.
“Flamethrower on the left,” Kaminski called.
Jenkins swung about-face, charging her flamer. A jet of combustible chemical fluid sprayed the area, ignited almost instantly. Another group of aliens descended and squawked commands to those above. I watched in morbid fascination as Jenkins activated her flamer again and again, as white-orange flame poured over the massed bodies.
Kaminski and Jenkins were finally at the hatch.
“Open up!” Jenkins said. She pounded her hand against the metal framework.
I dashed for the door controls, tripping over my increasingly-pained leg. The cavern rumbled with the weapons-discharge all around. I willed myself onwards, grabbing for the hatch and wrenching it open with all of my bodily strength. Another wave of stench hit me, but this was different: the tang of roasting alien flesh, the acrid burn of plastic from the damaged combat-suits. My eyes stung with the heavy smoke from Jenkins’ flamer, and I choked as I tried to breath.
Jenkins tumbled into the crawler. She was covered in xeno blood, still firing her flamer into the mass of aliens that had gathered at the hatch.
Eyes streaming, I looked at the chaos outside. Something emerged from the burning napalm laid down by Jenkins’ flamer – a ragged shadow, still aflame. It was already dead, but momentum kept the thing moving. Kaminski stumbled on another body—
I imagined what he was seeing inside his face-plate: painted with so many targets that his auto-sighting probably couldn’t even decide which needed to be killed first—
The burning xeno-form lurched forwards, raptorial forearms raised. It was a scarecrow of a thing; flesh melted by flamer-fuel, blackened and desiccated. Only then did Kaminski see it – the open mouth, the impossibly dangerous knife-tipped arms.
The alien was on top of him, and he stopped firing. One forearm pierced his torso, clean through the combat-suit. Four layers of reinforced, ablative plastic-steel compound – like it wasn’t even there. Another punctured the plastic of his face-plate. Kaminski instantly went limp, his simulated body held firm in the alien’s grip. His rifle clattered to the ground, trampled underfoot by the enormous attacker.
“He’s gone,” Jenkins stated flatly.
I stumbled backwards, in denial and horror. Such human reactions, such undermining emotions: strangers to me for so many years, now returned in force.
No sim to hide in out here. I’ll end up the same.
Just like that, Kaminski was snubbed out. With his neural-link severed, he would awaken back at Helios Station – probably screaming in pain. I knew that experience too well. There was no time to grieve for him now.
“Get back!” Jenkins yelled at me, without turning.
I scrambled from the lock, and she laid down another carpet of flame. The xeno and Kaminski disappeared beneath it. Even then, two more Krell leapt from hiding places, charging through the flames to reach the crawler. One grappled with the doorframe, claws screeching against the metal. The other scrambled up into the crawler. I fumbled with my pistol.
Jenkins pushed me back into the crawler, hauling shut the hatch. She slammed the alien bodies aside. The xenos were left outside, pounding against the hatch in frustration.
“Move, move!” Jenkins called to Martinez. “Thirty seconds until that charge goes off!”
Jenkins had full battlefield intelligence. She knew exactly how long until the charge detonated, in real-time.
Overhead the turrets fired continuously, shaking the vehicle. Two, three, maybe more, xenos were on the roof now. The crawler rocked side to side violently.
“They’re trying to overturn the crawler. Get us out of here,” I said, grappling with an overhead support rail to steady myself.
“My pleasure,” said Martinez.
The crawler roared into action. The headlights doused the area in brilliant light. Everywhere, in impossible numbers, the aliens descended. The scanner trilled continuously.
I counted the seconds, erratically, in my head. There was a muted explosion behind us and a moment of uncertainty: the explosion could seal us within the cave with those things, or it could deter them from pursuit.
There was a second deep rumble of a different tone. The crawler rocked indecisively. Martinez fought with the controls, desperately trying to keep us upright.
“What’s happening?” I yelled.
“Looks like part of the ceiling is coming down,” Martinez said, consulting a tri-D topographic map of the area on the control console. “These tunnels aren’t going to hold—”
Something big hit the side of the crawler. Whether it was the Krell, or just rock, I couldn’t tell. Then something else hit us from above. The crawler roof deformed with the impact.
I fell sideways as the crawler lurched, hitting my head on a locker. As I went down, I stole a glance at the view-screen. There was no path any more, no visible route. Only a wall of falling rock, water and dust.
I was thrown sideways again, but this time Jenkins caught me. She held me tight against her huge armoured body, grappled with another locker to keep us both upright.
We were falling, falling—
“It’s all right,” she whispered to me as we went. “It’s going to be all right.”
If there were Krell outside, they were being buried just like us. The cave-in seemed to be all around, so loud that it blotted out all other sound. I couldn’t even tell if the gun-turrets were firing any more. Death by K
rell, or crushed in a cave-in: it was all the same to me, and in my real body it could happen so quickly.
A fractured skull, a shattered spine.
I closed my eyes.
I woke with a start, taking in my surroundings.
“There was a war in heaven. It was centuries ago, perhaps millennia. So long ago that it doesn’t matter any more. Time is difficult to express in human fractions when the stars glow for ever.”
The voice was so clouded by static that it was impossible to identify the speaker.
Martinez had stripped off much of his combat-armour. Wet, fresh sweat glistened on his back. From where I sat – propped up in a passenger seat – I heard his ragged, panting breath. Like a dog; feral, barely contained.
When he spoke, his voice was hoarse and ragged. “How do you know this? What are these things?”
The speaker, who could only have been Kellerman, continued with the monologue as though no question had been asked.
“The Krell and the Shard are all that is left of the war. The organic versus the mechanical. The war tore apart the galaxy, with those species strong enough to survive, scrabbling for what little resources remained. The Shard have a long memory, even if all they have left is wreckage and dust.”
“Is that why they insist on staying here?” Martinez asked, his tone bordering on aggressive insistence. “Answer me, padre!”
Kellerman laughed. “Perhaps what is left of the Shard is only a tiny fraction of the whole. A ghost of what the species once was, if you will. The Krell seem to be in much better shape. They must have won the war, I suppose.”
Martinez’s hands twisted into fists, and he pounded the control panel. The whole crawler rocked with each blow. I frowned, struggling to stand. I was pinned beneath a support strut, across the legs and torso.
Then I realised the inside of the crawler was in utter disarray. Equipment lay smashed on the floor. Crates were battered and dented. I struggled harder to get free.
—at the back of the med-bay, among shattered storage tubes and twisted metal, sprawled parodies of my real body—
Jenkins lay opposite me, her body in an odd position – legs buckled backwards, arms crushed beneath her torso. Her head was at an awkward and unusual angle, hair draped over her pale face. Blood dripped from the corner of her mouth in thick strands. Her chest had been pierced by a piece of wreckage – a beam emerging from her back.
—twisted metal spars above me. Blackened by the intensity of the explosion. Difficult to discern what those were; whether they had once been part of the window structure or whether the diamond-tread pattern meant that they had been part of the floor—
I shouted, calling to Martinez. The crawler continued rocking. My voice sounded alien, distorted by static.
“Martinez! Get back here and turn off the antenna!”
—a voice rang out, loud and clear, from somewhere outside of the wreckage: “A curfew is in effect. Please return to your homes. A curfew is in effect. Alliance Army soldiers are inbound for your protection”—
Martinez shifted in his seat, turning his enormously muscled neck to look at me. His face was covered in cuneiform tattoos, dripping from his eyes like the blood from Jenkins’ mouth.
“Martinez, get that communicator turned off!”
“When you’re here, all you want is to be back out there!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
BORN DEAD
I jolted awake, screaming Martinez’s name. The whine of the Artefact’s call still touched my mind, reluctantly receding as I woke up.
The crawler had hit solid ground. It kept moving, continued forwards, but very slowly. A regular crunching sounded from somewhere below – the grind of metal on metal.
Martinez was howling – either in frustration or elation. But the scene inside the crawler wasn’t from my vision: the interior cabins were intact. I was pressed up against Jenkins’ armoured body. She peeled me off her, and slowly evaluated me. She stared at the middle-distance of her face-plate; considering my bio-signs on her HUD. Her face was painted with holo-projections from inside her helmet.
“I – I blacked out,” I stammered.
“You’ll survive,” Jenkins declared. “No internal damage. Or nothing new, anyway.”
I stumbled back from her. “And you?”
She grinned. “I was born dead.”
A trio of stingers protruded from her left thigh, already streaming ugly black fluid. The ammo had punctured her combat-suit, polluting her bloodstream with whatever toxins this Krell Collective used. She brusquely plucked the stingers from her leg. It didn’t seem to hurt Jenkins, but it made me squirm. She must’ve suffered the injuries back in the cavern, had simply fought on through them.
“Thanks for the save.”
“Anytime,” Jenkins said.
“The crawler is wasted,” Martinez said. “Trans-axle is blown.” That crunching noise became louder, unhealthier. “These maps are sketchy, but we’re pretty deep underground now. No way I can repair the crawler in these conditions.” The transport ground to an abrupt stop. Something mechanical hissed outside – hydraulics or maybe steering, it didn’t matter what. “But the Krell have let up. The scanner is clear.”
This was the moment of truth. I listened for the chime of an incoming comm message. Then I expectantly looked over the faces of Martinez and Jenkins. If Kellerman executed them, they’d drop dead in the crawler – the neural-link between sim and operator immediately severed. A few seconds passed: nothing. Jenkins looked back at me, frowning, confused by my behaviour.
“It’s all right, Jenkins,” I said. “I have a plan, or as close to a plan as I can get. Martinez, what’s the comms mast status?”
He ran a check on the crawler systems. “Non-operational. No contact with Helios Station. The radio mast was also damaged during the attack.”
“Good. What about suit relays back to the station?”
“Also negative. They were set up to relay through the crawler antenna. Without the mast, they can’t broadcast.”
“So we’re out of contact with Helios Station?”
“Far as I can tell.”
Jenkins crossed her arms over her chest. She had every right to be suspicious. “What’s this all about?”
“I needed to be sure that we were out of communication with the station. I wish that I could’ve told you earlier, but I have important intel. Kellerman and Deacon are Directorate. And Kellerman has a starship.”
Jenkins’ eyes widened.
“It’s a Directorate Interceptor. High-end, black ops stuff.”
“That asshole,” Martinez said, pounding a fist into the empty navigator’s seat.
I gestured with my hand for Martinez to calm. “Easy, Martinez. He has the ship stowed in the lab module. Looks almost brand new, with a full complement of air-to-ground warheads.”
“Does it have a Q-drive?” Jenkins asked.
“It does. Tyler showed it to me.”
“Does she know how to fly it? Is the ship working?” Jenkins went on. “Can we use it to get off this rock?”
“Affirmative on all counts.”
“Fucking A!” Martinez said.
“You’ve got to get to that starship.”
“What about you?” Jenkins asked. “The tunnels are sealed. There’s no way that we can follow you down here.”
“I took a risk, Jenkins. There was no other way to break comms with Helios Station. Right now, Kellerman probably thinks that we’re on our way to the Artefact – that I’m executing his orders. So long as he thinks that, we’re safe, and I hope that Kaminski and Tyler are too.
“I won’t be leaving Helios without the Key. On the Shard ship, Kellerman showed me a star-map. The Shard, whatever they were, knew the Maelstrom well. They had plotted stable Q-jump points. They knew how to avoid the solar storms. The Key contains the star-data.
“We’re going to get off Helios. So here’s what we’re going to do. Sooner or later, you’re both going to have to
make extraction. These tunnels are going to be swarming with Krell, once that storm develops. After you make extraction, overwhelm security, evac Helios Station and pick me up.”
Martinez gave a bitter laugh. “You make it sound simple. But where are we going to evac you from, Cap? The tunnels are blown. There’s no way we could fight our way through these caves skinless.”
“Use the ship. Pick me up from high ground, somewhere you can find me easily.”
Martinez and Jenkins traded looks. They had guessed exactly what I was suggesting, and from the expressions on their faces, they didn’t think much of the idea. Martinez punched some keys on the crawler control console, casting up a wireframe holo in pale green light.
“I don’t think that you will want to be going anywhere near the high ground, Captain,” he said sombrely. “I think that you’ll want to avoid that completely.”
The holo rotated, showing the Artefact and the surrounding sectors. If Kellerman was right about the tunnel network, it would lead us – me – directly to the foot of the Artefact, on high ground overlooking the desert.
A desert swarming with Krell of every conceivable type …
I nodded. “Maybe in other circumstances, but now it’s the perfect cover. Local comms will likely be obliterated in nearby regions. I’ll have the Key, and you can use the Artefact as a beacon for navigation.”
I tried to make it sound nice and easy, as though it was a simple rescue operation. I left aside that there were an impossible series of variables: such as whether the team would be killed on extraction, whether they would be able to overpower the guards at Helios Station, whether they would actually be able to pilot the Directorate ship cross-country, in a storm, to the foot of the Artefact—
