by Jamie Sawyer
Mason paused, cocked her head. She had a habit of doing that – staring into the middle distance, stopping to inspect her HUD. It was a habit that might cost her a transition in the wrong circumstances. She was so new to all this: using the neural-link data-streams hadn’t become second nature yet.
“What’s wrong, Private?” I asked, still moving.
“What are the Krell doing here? It’s just – well, doesn’t this seem all a bit coincidental? I mean, the station is going down – crashing into Maru Prime – and the Krell choose now to invade?”
“Never question the Collective. The Krell can’t be predicted. The Quarantine Zone isn’t worth shit any more. If Command had listened to me, years back, I’d have told them that it would come to this.”
I repressed a memory. Elena.
Mason jogged to catch up with me. “In basic training, I read that it costs in excess of a billion Alliance credits to send a simulant team into the Quarantine Zone.”
I stopped outside the main lab doors. They were sealed shut and the corridor outside was now swarming with drones. Whatever was beyond that door was preventing them from mapping the base, and they weren’t happy about it.
I turned to Mason. “Command doesn’t want the science team. They want Professor Saul. The others are a necessary inconvenience.”
“But the briefing from Command referred to retrieval of the entire staff…”
“Welcome to your first real lesson, Private. Never believe what Command tells you.”
That was something that I had learnt a long time ago.
“Did you read about Saul’s background?” I asked. “His expertise?”
Mason nodded. “He’s an expert in xenolinguistics.”
“Yeah, with a specialism in the Shard.”
Mason fell silent. From the expression on her face, she had clearly seen the evidence of the Helios mission: the knowledge that we’d brought back. It was supposed to be classified, but the Point was a closed community. Word got around, myth became fact.
“I bet that Command has a plan for Professor Saul,” I said.
And if it involved the Shard, then I wanted to know about it – wanted to be part of it.
I popped the laboratory door with a single pulse from my plasma rifle. The metalwork was heavy duty but no match for a phased plasma charge. I created a man-sized hole in the panels, smoking hot at the edges, and prised open the rest.
The drones darted inside and, rifle up, I stalked after them. Mason followed closely behind.
The primary laboratory was jammed with scientific equipment, the likes of which I couldn’t identify, and the lights were dimmed. One wall was claimed by ceiling-to-floor reinforced windows, as though this was an observation point. Outside, the rolling red sea of Maru Prime’s surface was visible: the view quivering uncertainly as the station shifted on its axis again.
“Professor Saul?” I called into the room.
A tall, lean figure was over one of the workbenches – a man wearing a civilian spacesuit, just like those worn by the rest of the crew. He’s at least got that right, I thought to myself. He was hurriedly collecting items from around the room: data-clips, slates, disassembled electronic components. An armoured black case sat open on the bench and he was packing the items away.
The drones swooped around the man’s head and shoulders. Without any apparent conscious thought, he swiped them away with a gloved hand.
I sighed. Science types: all the same.
“Professor Ashan Saul?” I asked. This was nothing more than a nicety, as my suit had already positively identified him from onboard data.
Saul nodded and grumbled something in agreement, continuing to work without looking up. He wore a pair of thick-rimmed spectacles, which at first glance looked painfully archaic. As I got nearer, I saw that these were enhanced vision goggles: recording and playing back data onto the transparent lenses.
“Saul?” I barked, this time turning up my external speaker volume.
Saul jumped and turned to me.
“Yes,” he muttered. “Yes, yes. You must be the Simulant Operations team. They said that you were coming.”
He eyed me suspiciously; lingering on the Alliance battlegroup emblem on my shoulder.
“You are the rescue party, aren’t you? Ah, challenge: Chicago.”
“Response: claret,” I said. I hadn’t expected to need to use the safety protocol. “My name is Major Harris. Let’s go. There isn’t much time—”
“Yes, yes. I understand. The station is capsizing, and the Krell are invading.”
His blasé attitude irritated me – such apparent disregard for the efforts it had taken to retrieve him. He waved at the full-length window. The station axis shifted again and now the window showed the airspace above the facility. Krell and Alliance ships continued their assaults.
“I’m almost ready. Shouldn’t be much longer.”
I inspected Saul. He looked older than he had on his personnel file: beard a little greyer, skin tauter across his cheeks, far more worn out. He had a nasty scar on his left jaw, partially concealed by his beard. His left eye, beyond the coloured projections of the enhanced-vis glasses, was a milky white. His good eye twitched in my direction.
“The station is going down,” I said, definitively. “We need to leave.”
“Of course, of course,” Saul nodded.
A cold feeling gripped me as I looked down at the open case on the workbench. It was filled by printed sheets: star-maps. My vision swam uncomfortably as I took in the tight printed scripture, something so alien that it was impossibly familiar.
Saul moved in front of me, breaking the spell. He grabbed for the case and sealed the outer locks. Attached it to his left wrist with a handcuff.
“It has to be me that carries this. It is my research. Command will want it.”
“What is this stuff, Major?” Mason asked, prodding the workbench with the muzzle of her plasma rifle.
I recognised other components, up close. There were scattered hololithic plates pinned to the walls, backlit by light boxes.
Shard scripture.
Saul didn’t say anything but he didn’t need to. I was looking, I was absolutely sure, at data downloaded from the Key. There were even vid-captures of the Artefact on Helios – grainy, imprecise.
“I thought that this was an observatory?” Mason said.
She was smarter than we’d given her credit for.
Professor Saul nodded absently, almost glumly. “Far Eye Observatory isn’t what it seems.”
Mason glanced at me. I’d let her fill in the blanks, I decided. Whatever the crew of Far Eye had been working on – it was strictly a black op, established on a station out in the QZ because here it would be safe from prying eyes. It was all about plausible deniability.
Mason looked wounded by the revelation but I’d already decided that Command wanted the recovery of a substantial asset from Maru. Professor Saul, with his experience in such a specialised field, and his research: those were definitely worth risking a five billion-credit simulant team for. It was the sort of conceit I’d not only come to accept, but learnt to expect.
SIXTEEN MINUTES UNTIL TERMINAL DECLINE, my HUD insisted.
“We need to move,” I ordered. “Get your shit together, Professor. Stay with us as we move through the station.”
“Yes, yes.”
I thought-activated the drone swarm: sending them off across the station to monitor our path. At that moment, something deep within the station’s structure exploded, giving a reverberant metallic boom.
“And suit up, if you want to breathe.”
The professor scrabbled around beneath his workbench, producing a battered plastic safety helmet. He clasped it into place, looking uneasy inside the spacesuit. Then he strapped a solid-shot pistol to his leg.
I linked to Jenkins, moving as I talked.
“What’s your status, Jenkins?”
“Clearing the main mess hall now.”
The mess ha
ll wasn’t far from Communications – the group hadn’t made much progress. Damned civvies.
“Not helped by the gravity and atmosphere leakage. Decks three through eleven are venting.”
“Just keep moving. You got a bead on Kaminski?”
“His signal is intermittent. I can’t get through to him.”
“Keep trying.”
“My scanner is malfunctioning as well. I can’t even pick you up on it.”
“Use your good old-fashioned mark one eyeballs.”
“Mark twos, actually.
“Stay frosty. Harris out.”
“Jenkins out.”
We moved through the damaged lab doorway and out into the corridor. The overhead lights gave up – casting an impenetrable gloom over the section. I used my helmet sensor array, a combination of infrared and night-vision, to manoeuvre onwards. I triggered my mag-locks to keep moving. Behind me, I saw that Saul had a similar system incorporated into his suit. He wasn’t used to walking with locks though, and stumbled like he was wading through drying concrete. Mason hustled him along, her rifle panning the dark. A shrill keening filled the air.
“That will be the primary drive malfunctioning,” Saul proclaimed. “The station was originally tethered into a geosynchronous orbit by the drivers in the lower decks. With those gone, we will reach terminal decline faster than anticipated.”
My AI updated almost immediately: TWELVE MINUTES UNTIL TERMINAL DECLINE.
“Damn. We’re losing time.”
I was using the updated intel from the Communications Centre. The path to the shuttle bay was now mapped by my HUD and the continuous visuals from the drone swarm. Roughly half of those had now gone off-line; either no longer broadcasting, or perhaps destroyed by the chaos erupting across the facility.
“What would cause such an occurrence?” Mason said, still moving on. “Didn’t your station AI predict that you had several minutes before safety parameters were breached?”
Saul gave a soft shrug. Through the plasglass helmet, his thin face was sweating profusely. A disabling layer of condensation had formed on the interior of his face-plate.
“Maybe the AI got it wrong. I’ve never really trusted her. Nothing that intelligent should be fully trusted. Or maybe some external force—”
Before he could finish the sentence, the bio-scanner illuminated with a wave of soft targets – potential organic life-forms in our vicinity.
There was no time to shout a warning.
In front of me, a six-inch-thick metal bulkhead suddenly exploded. Debris showered us – boomer-fire pouring through the destroyed door. Bright as plasma, just as deadly: multi-coloured laser lances, scorching the floor and ceiling.
“Brace!” I ordered, rolling aside as Krell flooded the corridor. “Shields up.”
Another piece of new kit: the personal null-shield generator – one of Research & Development’s more useful innovations. I locked my left arm in front of my face, plasma rifle aimed with my right, and watched as the generator activated. The actual tech was encased somewhere in my backpack, powered by the same generator as my life-support package. An oily shimmer appeared in front of me. As it went up, the shield began to hum angrily – made my skull bones vibrate.
“Get behind me, Professor,” I ordered.
Three targets presented. Krell gun-grafts – technical designation “secondary-forms”. They were slower than the primary-form warrior caste but armed with larger and longer-ranged weapons. The nearest drone caught a decent image of the lead Krell: armed with a grafted bio-cannon – a boomer – complete with an ammunition sac that trailed between its stomach and gun-arms.
The Krell group moved as a single entity. They poured through the door and fired. They looked vaguely confused – if they were capable of experiencing such an emotion – as their shots hit my null-shield.
Upgrades, fucker! It felt good to get one up on them for a change, although I knew that it wouldn’t last. The null-shield generator was new tech – once the Krell had faced the gear a few times, they would devise a counter-measure. Individually, the Krell had limited tactical awareness, but the Collective was the best battlefield database in the universe.
Incandescent pulses fired on both sides. The Krell advanced regardless. The lead xeno caught a round to the chest – leaking blood and ichor across the floor – and began to close the distance between us.
Mason primed a grenade, scattered it towards the Krell. It breached her shield temporarily, bounced off the wall as the station axis shifted again. The secondary-forms had no mag-locks and grappled with whatever terrain features they could to stay fixed to the deck. The lucky distraction was enough to throw them off balance: the grenade exploded amid the trio of aliens. Suddenly body parts and gore covered the corridor. Two of the aliens went down, although the third was rallying for a further attack.
This was a kill or be killed situation; no cover, nowhere to run. There was little point in stealth, little purpose in trying to effect a retreat. I rose up, cycled three micro-grenades into the underslung launcher of my plasma rifle. New tech is good, but sometimes the old ways are best: I launched the incendiary grenades at the Krell attackers.
“Down!” I yelled to Saul, grinding my teeth in expectation.
The professor rolled sideways, the deck listing beneath him like that of a ship at sea, and the incendiaries went off.
The remaining secondary-form exploded. It fired its boomer as it went but every shot went wide.
“More incoming,” Mason said.
This time a primary-form darted through the smoke. It moved with an alien grace: a bio-form obviously adapted for life in or near water, a theory supplemented by the xeno’s sharkish features. The xeno didn’t pause and I caught its movements only in freeze frame. Despite their physical bulk, the primary-forms were seriously fast.
Mason slammed the xeno aside with a volley of shots from her plasma rifle.
The primary kept coming, tumbling to within a metre of our position – holes smoking in its chest and head. The body eventually collapsed.
“Just follow me and stay safe,” I ordered, and was already up and moving.
CHAPTER THREE
I ALWAYS COME BACK
A swarm of hostile signals – blazing hot on my HUD – followed us through the skewed corridors. Elsewhere, pestering my hindbrain like a hot needle, the drone army sent regular alerts: going off-line faster than I could follow, broadcasting a stream of unpalatable images.
Far Eye Observatory was now filled with invaders. The whole pantheon of Krell xeno-forms was present: from primary-forms, through to secondary-forms, even a handful of the dedicated leader-forms.
It was a pleasant surprise when friendlies appeared on my scanner – identifiable by their IFF beacons – and even more of a turn when I realised that the survivors weren’t Lazarus Legion.
“Hold your fire,” I barked at Mason, waving a hand behind me towards Saul.
Three troopers made their way through the smoke and dust. My suit flagged them as the team under Captain Baker, and as they approached I saw that he was still in command.
“Moving on objective, sir!” Baker rumbled. He saluted me.
I sighed, shook my head. “Ah, the fabulous Baker Boys. Is this all that’s left of your outfit?”
All three survivors were battered, covered in xeno gore and severely rattled. Behind his face-plate, Baker looked much like he did in real life: middle-aged, grizzled, a veteran soldier a little past his prime. He pulled back his thin lips and flashed a toothy grin.
“Yes, sir,” Baker said. He shook his head. “Fish heads got us on the way down. Lost two skins before we could get on-station.”
“Doesn’t look like the other teams even touched down, so you have that honour at least.”
Baker indicated towards Saul. “But it’s the Legion that claims the HVT.”
“Only the best need apply.”
He eyed Mason, saw her blank combat-suit. “So New Girl isn’t official yet?”<
br />
“Well, if she fucks up she can always apply to join your outfit.”
I clocked the two behind Baker, both in unmarked suits.
Baker flared his nostrils and sighed. “I’d have her any day of the week, but that’s another story. Ready to assist on the bounce when you are, sir.”
“That’s appreciated. We’re moving on the shuttle bay.” I uploaded my tactical plan to Baker’s suit. “Less than three hundred metres.”
“Solid copy.” He turned to the two fresh-faced simulants behind him. “You heard the man – move out!”
Visibility had improved, but only slightly. There were flashing blood-red emergency lamps in the walls and ceilings, but black smoke pumped from the air-recyclers.
“This station is experiencing a critical emergency,” the mainframe AI repeated, over the PA. “All hands evacuate.”
“Where’s your sergeant, Laz?” Baker asked me, as we picked our way through the corridor. “Has she gone and left—”
Before he could complete the sentence, another primary-form sprang up ahead. The Krell slammed into Baker, knocking him sideways. One of his squad opened fire but in the tight confines of the corridor lost his nerve. The Krell slashed its enormous bladed forelimbs through Baker’s body, ripping open his combat-suit. The station atmosphere had not yet fully drained, but was seriously depleted: Baker started gasping for air, clawing at his face-plate.
“Oh fuck!” one of the fresh-faces shouted.
The Krell whipped its head around, double-jointed jaw opening to expose row on row of shark teeth. I fired, sending bright lances across the corridor, but the xeno was too fast. It cleared the dead captain’s body, vaulted right into one of the privates. In less than a second, all of Baker’s squad had been reduced to bloody ribbons.
I put three more shots into the xeno’s armoured body. Carnage complete, the alien was dead.
I caught the panicked look in Saul’s eyes; the look that asked, “Am I actually going to make it out of this alive?” But he didn’t voice the question and I had no time to baby him.
