by Jamie Sawyer
There were areas of the Point where not even I felt safe. It had always been that way, in reality, but my time away had cemented the belief. It was a growing, ever-evolving outpost, with its own ecosystem and populace. Communities rose and fell within the wider structure, little empires and kingdoms splintering under the general Alliance military umbrella.
On larger outposts, it wasn’t unknown for whole sectors to fall through the cracks. The District was an example of that: originally a civilian recreation zone, designated for the use of contractors and visitors, it had evolved over time into an open-all-hours drinking spot. Sometimes, areas of a station were abandoned and took on a purpose that the original builders hadn’t intended. Real estate in space is precious.
The Ghetto was such a sector, and I knew that was where I would find Martinez.
I took the requisitioned Army mule down through the habitation decks. Large signs insisted CARRY YOUR BREATHER AT ALL TIMES! RISK OF ASPHYXIATION! Gradually, the character of the station changed. The stark military corridors became dirtier, some sectors even graffiti-covered. Old propaganda holo-posters jumped to life as my transport glided past: calling out to me to stay behind. The very few view-ports located in the walls were plastered over with maintenance signs or sealed with breaching foam. Much of the works had been started but left unfinished; funded by corporates that had long gone out of business, for military projects that were terminated before they had even started. Just one of the many peculiarities of time-dilation.
I approached a couple of troopers in old and worn-out Army fatigues, sitting around a burning oil can. They carried shock-rifles and one of them slowly flagged me down. I pulled my mule up to the checkpoint.
“Sir,” the trooper said. “You got business in this sector?”
“I have.”
“Such as?” the other asked.
“Here to see a friend.”
The rifles were worn on the hip, safeties off: charge level set to DEBILITATION. One chewed a toothpick, rolling it around his mouth as he looked over my vehicle.
“Can’t take a mule down there, sir. It’s a restricted area.”
“Then I’ll walk. I’m here to see Private Martinez. Either of you know him?”
The lead trooper gave a lazy smile. “Why didn’t you just say? Scares a trooper out of his mind, seeing a Sim Ops major turn up on a mule at this hour of the morning.” The soldier turned to his colleague. “Take the major through.”
The sections beyond the checkpoint were mostly lit by portable units. General power had been cut off to this area of the Point; officially, it didn’t exist. Didn’t mean that the place wasn’t busy though: a multitude of troopers and service personnel milled about down here. The occupants of the sector were made up of a mixture of military agencies. Neither rank nor organisation seemed to matter. Only kudos, reputation, face.
The two troopers showed me through to a storage room, partitioned into several smaller chambers by cargo crates. Some of those were opened: stacked up with older-model plasma rifles, power cells, Sci-Div flak-vests. Destined for onward distribution via strictly unofficial channels. I turned a blind eye to all of it; Logistics could do their own dirty work and it was nothing to do with me. The place smelled dank, caused by a flood from the central water recycling plant a few years back.
I found Elliot Martinez playing a card game with others around a table. It was real old school, proper antique-level shit: plastic cards were positioned in front of each player, with a pool of crumpled American bank notes in the centre.
All of the group were tanned, with dark eyes and hair. They were Venusians; immigrants from the Cloud Cities – the ugly orbital habs that so many poverty-stricken had been attracted to in the early days of the Second Space Race. There had been a time when those had probably sounded exciting, romantic even. Generations on, the reality was anything but: cramped, dirty, the occupants trapped in the cycle of destitution by the corporates and governments that owned not just their homes, but indirectly them. Cloud Shanties, Martinez had once called them. Even so, the Venusian people had a strong identity: behind Martinez, a split Venusian–American flag had been pinned – loud and proud.
A young Hispanic woman was draped over his shoulder, her Naval uniform open to expose her cleavage. She passed him a drink, held out a cigar for him. He set his jaw, nodded. Threw some cards into the pool. Barked something in Spanish, speaking too fast for me to follow.
“Martinez,” said one of the troopers who had showed me in. “Got company for you.”
The other players turned as one. Looked up at me as though I were a Krell primary-form, invading the Point. All of them had gang tattoos. The Naval officer tending to Martinez had a Widow identifier on her cheekbone; three small spiders dripping from her eye like tears. The Black Widow gang were relatively innocuous – had helped clear up Venus during the initial colonisation, even been made semi-official as a law-enforcement agency.
“It’s okay,” Martinez quickly said. “He’s okay.”
“Lazarus?” the man opposite Martinez said. He had an Odeo’s Crew marker on the nape of his neck – a large star drawn around the primary data-port. He was Sim Ops as well, I realised. “Come to the Ghetto to rough it for a while?”
The trooper’s allegiance to the Odeo Crew could get him a life term back on Venus but out here regulations were a little more lax.
“Just leave us to it, troopers,” I said.
No one moved though. Not until Martinez gave a nod. I was a stranger here: I didn’t feel like a major, but Martinez was a king. Seems I wasn’t the only one whose reputation had been enhanced by what had happened on Helios. The gamblers filed out past me. The woman reluctantly disengaged herself from Martinez and followed them.
Martinez looked like he’d been awake all night. He pushed a hand through his sweated hair, reshaped his black goatee.
“Good to see you, jefe.”
I sat down in one of the ancient metal chairs. It was warm to the touch and creaked precariously under my weight.
“Come to join my church?” he asked. “Maybe St Maria can persuade you to attend one of our meetings.”
I laughed, although Martinez didn’t. “No, it isn’t that. I need to run something past you.”
“Go on.”
“Let me make it clear that this is not an order. You have a choice.”
“I’m still listening, cuate.”
I explained everything.
“Kaminski and Jenkins are in, but don’t let that influence your decision.”
“Do I get danger pay?”
“Of course.”
“It’s not just about the money, but I got mouths to feed back on the City.”
“I didn’t know that you had children.”
“I’d never get a licence, but that wouldn’t stop me,” Martinez said, smirking. He was referring to a child licence, to allow a legally registered birth. The authorities on Venus were probably the strictest in Alliance space. There were as many unregistered births as there were registered, though, and I doubted that the lack of a government licence would impede a man with Martinez’s initiative. “I mean my family. Things on Venus are bad, Major. Real bad.” He threw both hands up. “I do what I can to help.”
“Well, you in?”
“I’ll go with you.”
“You sure?”
“We’re Lazarus Legion. We stick together.”
“I’m going to ask Mason as well. Kaminski has doubts, thinks that she won’t be able to handle it, but she deserves a chance.”
Martinez nodded. “Girl is okay by me.”
“Good. You’ve got forty-eight hours to put your affairs in order.” I stood to leave and eyed the weapons crates. “Any of this stuff stolen?”
“Better not to ask,” he said. “If you don’t know, you can’t tell.”
I was escorted out of the Ghetto by two Latino troopers, and I took the mule right over to the training sector.
I found Dejah Mason in one of the simulato
r ranges.
There were whole banks of virtual-reality machines down there, specifically for troopers running training programmes. A soldier could jack-in via a machine and access a range of drills. Of course, the training was fully VR – because of their enormous credit value, no actual simulants were involved. But the theory went that if you could shoot well enough in a fully immersive VR environment, then you could shoot in a real simulant. They were both simulations, after all.
I stress theory, because the reality wasn’t anything so simple. The neural-link between simulant and operator rendered everything actual and so far as I was concerned the only experience worth a damn was to do this for real.
I checked in with the systems technician overseeing the training and he directed me to the relevant tank.
Mason was just finishing up and towelling herself dry from the simulator amniotic fluid. Other troopers were noisily chest-bumping around me – the atmosphere was something like a high school locker room after a speedball match – but Mason looked a species apart. The sys-tech must’ve commed her to tell her I was inbound, because she didn’t look surprised to see me.
“Morning, sir,” she said, going to salute.
“Cut that shit out.”
Mason was a new breed of soldier. Someone who had never been to war in her own skin, whose only experience of the Krell was through her simulant. The rest of my team all had real military history – had been soldiers of differing stripes, before induction into the Sim Ops Programme. Kaminski and I had even served as Alliance Special Forces together.
Mason slipped into a black bodysuit and swept her blonde hair back from her face. Despite the defiant pout on her lips, she still looked like a kid playing soldiers: the sort of fair-weather trooper that’d be paralysed with fear by the Krell if skinless.
“Walk with me,” I ordered.
We fell in step and walked around the simulator chamber. The place was noisy; both the mechanical and electrical hum of so many tanks working at once, and the whooping and hollering of troopers coming and going. Occasional glances in my direction informed me that everyone down here fully knew who I was.
“What training programme were you running?” I asked as we walked.
“I was doing a hard-drop. Sixteen simulations. All successful landings. I’ve worked really hard on this, and I can guarantee that the incident on Maru Prime won’t happen again.”
“Incident is a very neutral word to describe it, Mason.”
“I know that it was serious.”
“You did good. Don’t worry about it.” To be fair to Mason, Kaminski had warned me against making her go through with it. “Hard-dropping from high altitude isn’t easy. Especially under fire.”
Mason nodded. “And there was a lot of enemy fire.”
“Affirmative. We can agree on that.”
“Then you’re not here to take me off the squad?”
I laughed. “No. It’s more complicated than that.”
She looked both deflated and relieved, her small shoulders sagging. “Go on, sir.”
“I’ve been made an offer, by Command,” I said. Wasn’t quite sure how to put it; I wanted to give her full disclosure, but didn’t want to scare her off the mission, if she really wanted to go. “The opportunity to go back into the Maelstrom.”
To follow Elena.
“You want me to come?” she asked, her voice rising sharply. “If you’ll have me, then I’ll willingly go.”
“I can give you the details, such that I know. But make no mistake; this won’t be a cakewalk. They’ve found another Artefact, and if Helios is anything to go by – it’ll be hell.”
“The others have told me what happened out there,” Mason said.
“It’s probably worse than you’ve heard. No point in dressing this up. Out there, in the Maelstrom, there won’t be any room for mistakes.”
“I want to be Lazarus Legion. I won’t let you down.”
“See that you don’t.”
Mason nodded. I really hoped that she appreciated what she had just signed up to.
At least, if it all goes wrong, I thought to myself, you can rest assured that you gave them the choice. That they decided to follow you.
But that wasn’t much assurance at all.
CHAPTER NINE
I DON’T WANT TO DREAM
I woke up in the brig.
“How the fuck did this happen?” Kaminski asked me.
I couldn’t answer the question because I had very little memory of the previous few hours. The only real evidence of our last night on the Point was my pounding, aching head.
“Just get some sleep, mano,” Martinez muttered.
We were all in the same holding cell. Two drop-down bunks were attached to the walls; I occupied one, Kaminski the other. Martinez had taken up a position in the corner of the cell, lying flat on his back, hands clasped behind his head. Eyes tightly shut, he had removed his fatigue shirt and rolled it up to use as a pillow.
“Hey Martinez?” Kaminski said “This must be just like old times for you.”
I cracked an eye open and looked down at Martinez. His chest was marked with scars, from real military service, but there were tattoos there as well. An old analogue watch-face without hands; a Black Widow spider on his shoulder; an Alliance Marine Corps bar-tag. All memoirs of his past life, scrubbed away on joining Sim Ops.
“Fuck you, ’Ski. I left all that behind in the Cities.”
“Sure you did. Like you can ever really leave that behind. What’d you do again? Didn’t you get a stretch for driving an air-car through a pressurised dome?”
“Like I said, I left that behind. Did my dues same as everybody else.”
“Yeah, whatever.”
“You’re one to talk, ’Ski,” Martinez said. “Didn’t you do time for hacking that bank in Queens? Those in glass domes shouldn’t throw stones.”
“Or air-cars,” Kaminski said. He laughed at his own joke.
“Can it, ’Ski,” I said. “We’ve all done things that we regret. But my head hurts too much to listen to your bullshit.”
“Who says I regret anything?” Martinez asked.
Just then, there was a rattle at the cell door. The wicket opened. The facility was sturdy and used such old-fashioned tech. A face appeared through the grate-covered window. A stern-looking female MP – the ever-present Point Military Police – peered into the cell. She nosed us for a second, like she was checking that the three of us were still in there.
“I got good and bad news for you,” she said.
“We’ll take the good first,” I said.
“Seems it’s your lucky day, boys. The Navy ensigns you trounced last night don’t want to press charges.”
“That’s good,” Kaminski said, “even if I can’t remember doing anything wrong.”
“They didn’t want to press charges against the so-called Legion,” the MP went on. There was more noise as she manually unlocked the cell door. “If it was me, can’t say I’d feel the same way.”
Kaminski was already up, bouncing towards the door. Martinez and I were less enthusiastic; as I stood, another wave of nausea caught me.
“Whoa, whoa,” the MP said. “That was the good news.”
“The bad?” I managed.
I noticed that there was a whole squad of Military Police outside the cell, all wearing full body-armour and bulky helmets: carbines slung. So they’re not taking any chances, I thought with a smile.
“Your transport off-base leaves in less than an hour. I got a direct order from Command. Do you know how often a dumb-shit MP stationed on the Point gets a directive like this from Command?”
Kaminski shrugged and grinned. “Most weeks?”
The MP gave him a cold stare. “Never is how often. I’m ordered to get your sorry asses direct to a waiting transport shuttle.”
That had to be something. We weren’t going to miss the flight.
We were hustled down to the dis-bark deck by the MP squad, led by t
he female sergeant. I guessed that I – or maybe we – had been watched by Mili-Intel, because our luggage was already packed and palleted for onward transport. The deck was busy again, filled with bustling personnel being ferried to and from other awaiting ships.
Jenkins and Mason stood with a couple of MPs. Jenkins waved through the crowd.
“So it wasn’t just us that ran into trouble?” I asked.
“No,” Jenkins said, shaking her head. “This was a Legion affair.”
“Even New Girl?” Kaminski asked.
“Even New Girl,” Jenkins said.
“I tried to break it up,” Mason said, “and got involved by accident.”
“Girl’s got balls,” Martinez said.
“Whatever, assholes,” the female MP said. “I would’ve hoped that a major would know better.” She looked me up and down; I hoped that I didn’t look as exhausted and hungover as I felt. “Or maybe not.”
A Naval ensign approached, holding a data-slate. Looked flustered and embarrassed as she scanned each of our barcode tattoos – I bared my wrist. She smiled nervously at the MPs.
“These are your priority passengers,” the MP said. “Can I leave them in your care?”
“Sure thing.”
The MP eyed us one last time. “Guess you’ll be off the grid for a few months. Can only hope that it’ll quieten things down around here. Now get the fuck off my station.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Kaminski said, saluting. “Thanks so much for the bed and breakfast.”
My squad sniggered and the MPs disappeared into the crowd.
Around us, the crew was being herded onto an umbilicus, boarding a transport ship moored somewhere in the Point’s near-space. A series of pallets passed by. Those were loaded with plasglass capsules: a hundred perfect and naked simulants. Improved versions of the Lazarus Legion.
“If you’d care to come this way,” the ensign said, “we’ll get you aboard the shuttle.”
“My head hurts,” Kaminski interjected.
“Whatever, ’Ski,” Jenkins said. “At least we know it can’t be brain ache.”
