by Jamie Sawyer
“They’re all around us!” Mason managed. “I can’t get a fix—!”
Then the thing was suddenly inside Mason’s null-shield. It lifted her body with ease. She struggled, her armoured limbs thrashing.
“Stay still!” I ordered.
I brought my rifle up, trying to get a clean shot at the blur of motion that had her. But before I could fire, before Mason could get free, she was slammed against the wall. Again and again, so fast that she had almost become invisible. Her neck, chest and arms snapped. The force was sickening – enough to rupture her suit and pulverise the body inside.
Jenkins put two shots into Mason; either accidentally or as some small act of mercy. Didn’t much matter, because we were all about to die in the tunnel. Of that I was certain.
It tossed Mason aside. Her body landed with arms and legs at the wrong angle, combat-suit crushed beyond recognition. I’d never seen armour suffer that much damage.
By the time I managed to loose a shot, the shadow had already moved on. My pulses scorched the walls and ceiling.
“I have it—!” Jenkins said.
Then Jenkins was off her feet as well.
Kaminski twisted about, and perfectly illuminated her with his suit-lamps.
Jenkins brought her rifle up to fire at something that was breaking from the dark. And for just a split second, I saw what was hunting us through the Artefact’s dead tunnels.
A sculpture of living metal.
A thing of black chrome.
A shadow within a shadow, glistening like oil.
Whatever it was, it grabbed Jenkins.
For a moment, the construct was rippling, amorphous dark. Then, without warning, it became precise – so fucking defined – and punched a limb right through Jenkins’ shoulder. Her armour did nothing to protect her: the shadow sliced into it with ease.
“No!” Kaminski roared.
Jenkins’ face exploded as the construct put a tendril through her helmet. The face-plate shattered noisily and bloodily.
Kaminski and I fell back, desperately trying to get a bead on the thing. It never seemed to stay still.
In a perverted lover’s embrace, Jenkins’ arms and legs shook in the ecstasy of death. She was wrapped in viscous strands: ensnared by a poisoned web of mercury. The dark spewed ten twisting pseudopods, needle-tipped limbs.
“Fuck you!” Kaminski shouted.
He opened up with his rifle. Plasma pulses impacted the dark all around. He was firing without discipline, driven by pure rage. The living metal pitted and twisted as each shot hit home; but reformed just as quickly.
“Get back,” I said.
It didn’t have the effect that Kaminski wanted. As the volley hit, Jenkins’ body twitched. Probably born of the wish to end her simulated suffering, her finger pressed on the trigger of her rifle. Uncontrolled plasma rifle-fire poured over the area – washed over Kaminski. He was hit, reeling backwards. I only just managed to dive out of Jenkins’ fire arc, and predicted what would happen next.
Kaminski’s grenade harness went up almost immediately. He was loaded with explosives – carrying more than regulation would allow – and his whole body went off. His torso vanished beneath the first explosion and the second set off the power cell in his own plasma rifle.
By the time that the third went off, there was nothing really left.
Martinez was showered with frag from Kaminski’s dead body, and stumbled back the way we had come. He laid down a sloppy shower of plasma with his rifle to cover his retreat.
“Gracia de Dios!” he shouted.
The Shard-thing finally dropped Jenkins.
It speared Martinez with a hundred sharp appendages. It was everywhere in the corridor, flowing from the cuneiform: a thing of absolute nightmare. Martinez’s body slumped to the floor, oozing simulated blood and loose organs.
I was in here alone with the thing.
The Shard reared over me.
“Come get me, asshole!” I yelled.
I began to fire. I knew that it would do no good; that my weapons were useless.
In a flurry of motion – movements so fast that I could barely track them – it was done.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE GRIM REAPER
No one took the extraction well.
That included me: for hours afterwards, my body ached – echoes of the ghost injuries I’d suffered aboard the Artefact.
I called a debrief in the SOC and everyone except Loeb attended. Following today’s disaster, I imagined that he was counting the hours until he could justify pulling the plug on the whole op.
Dr West and Saul sat at the back of the centre, already working on the data we’d collected from the operation. Vid-feeds showed the final moments of our demise, broadcast direct from the Artefact. The tri-Ds looked like post-mortem photos; remains decanted from a Midwest serial killer’s hideaway. Busted and punctured combat-suits, blood everywhere, severed limbs.
“It was so damned fast,” Williams said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
His squad rumbled agreement. For the most part, the Warfighters had become withdrawn and sanguine. Strange, I thought, how a taste of death could have such a calming effect.
“Your people never had a rough extraction before, Captain?” Kaminski asked of Williams, with a put-on sneer.
“We’ve made plenty of extractions,” Williams said. “Two hundred and nineteen is my magic number – two-twenty after today.” He patted the big Martian on the shoulder. “The big man has a couple hundred under his belt, and the girls are nearly there as well.”
“But nothing like this…” one of them whispered.
The images of the Shard – whatever it was – were always out of focus, usually blurred. The thing was a moving shadow; definitely not Krell. It seemed to pour from the ceiling and fluidly move towards the camera.
“So that’s what the Shard look like…” Kaminski said. “A real nice species. Makes me almost wish that we could have the Krell back.”
“Was that one of the Shard?” Mason asked.
“There are many possibilities…” Saul said.
“Then explain,” I said. I was fed up with Sci-Div games.
Saul chewed the inside of his mouth. “Perhaps it is another defensive response; an advanced electronic sentry. Maybe some form of nanotechnology? That might explain the ability to reform and absorb energy discharge.”
“It enjoyed the slaughter,” Martinez said, shaking his head. He looked over at Kaminski, still shirtless. There was a grinning skull tattooed on his chest, sightless eyes peering out at each of us. Martinez nodded at ’Ski. “That thing was the Grim Reaper.”
“Whatever it was, it attacked in sequence,” Saul offered. “Suggesting that the Reaper, as Private Martinez calls it, is a single entity.”
“How do you know that?” I said.
“I’ve analysed the vid-feeds and the suit data captures. The Artefact’s structure interferes with comms, but I’m certain that there was only a single specimen.”
He indicated the computer monitors. A timeline, stitched together from each of our vid-feeds, showed the rapid demise of all nine simulants. Although the thing moved at lightning speed – with barely milliseconds between some kills – there appeared to be a single Reaper.
“Why’d the Reaper let us in,” Kaminski said, “only to kill us?”
“Perhaps it is a foreign-body reaction,” Dr West suggested. “Falling into a programmed sequence, then reacting to your presence once it realises that you are intruders.”
“An allergic reaction,” Williams muttered. “Like a living machine.”
“A machine that has been alive – functional – for thousands of years,” I said. “It knew those tunnels well.”
I pointed to a cut-away map of the Artefact, on one of the viewer-screens. There were probably hundreds – if not thousands – of kilometres of chambers and tunnels. If we were going to meet the same reception every time we entered the Artefact, the idea of
mapping the place was beyond daunting. There, in the very centre of the map, was the Hub: the control chamber.
“If Saul is right, and we’re dealing with a machine,” I reasoned, “then what about an electromagnetic pulse?”
Saul paused. “An EMP? I don’t know. The Reaper might be shielded. Given the abilities that the specimen has demonstrated so far, even if the grenades are effective, I doubt that they will do much more than temporarily disable it.”
“Got to be worth a shot,” I said. “Do we have any EMP grenades aboard?”
“The Colossus armoury has most things,” Jenkins said.
“Those grenades have a very small blast radius,” Mason muttered. Her gaze was fixed on her own death-scene. “We’re going to have to get personal with that thing if we want to have an effect.”
“If that’s what it takes…” Kaminski replied.
I turned to Saul. “What about the combat-suits? Are they shielded?”
I didn’t much like the idea of being trapped inside a non-effective combat-suit, aboard the Artefact.
“The armour is EMP-proofed,” he said. “Although the grenades will probably disturb your transmission capability.”
“Good enough,” I said. I nodded at Jenkins. “Distribute the EMP grenades among the simulants.”
“Affirmative,” Jenkins said, her back arching now, the embers of her dedication stirring. “Sounds like a plan.”
“Get some rest, people. We’ll try again tomorrow.”
Later that night, I went to the comms-pod again.
I found the same pod as I’d used before, but it irked me to find that my mission papers had been removed. Must’ve been cleaned by one of the maintenance crews, I decided. I tried a search of the comms bands – tried to find any evidence of the Endeavour’s ghost transmission – but it yielded no results. Indeed, there were no transmissions at all. Every frequency was full of squalling, bubbling static: not so much as a human voice among the madness. Maybe I imagined them, I considered. Wouldn’t be the first time.
Angry with myself, I decided to take a different tack. I would speak to Saul. He was the key to real progress. I hadn’t been entirely convinced by Saul’s responses today. It still felt as though he was holding back, like he knew more about the thing aboard the Artefact than he was willing to let on. Watch him, a voice suggested to me. He could be trouble. I tried to dismiss the whispers, but it wasn’t that easy. I was tired and frustrated with the progress we’d made so far: finding a human face to blame was an appealing prospect. We had weapons, we had armour, we had technology. I could handle the pain, the dying: it was the unknown that I couldn’t deal with.
So I took an elevator down to the laboratories. The lab complex adjoined the SOC and it was as well equipped as the rest of the starship. This late into the night-cycle, the deck lights were dimmed – mostly lit by view-screens and monitors, machines set to run tests while the Sci-Div staff got some shut-eye. There were metal gantries and catwalks above me, criss-crossing the larger chamber, and a nest of sub-labs fed off the main facility. Place’d be a nightmare to assault or defend, I thought to myself.
In the centre of the room, concealed behind multiple layers of reinforced plasglass, was the Shard Key.
I felt a surge of adrenaline in my system, caused by my proximity to the device. I hadn’t seen it, in person, since Helios. Christo, it’s just as I remember it. A dark-metallic dagger blade, engraved with Shard glyphs. Occasionally, those illuminated – a miniature spark of lightning reaching out against the glass wall. Suspended inside the prison, it gently twisted as if caught by an unseen stellar wind.
Saul wandered about the lab. Although he lacked the vac-suit I’d first seen him in, his presentation immediately reminded me of our meeting on Maru Prime. He was buried in a data-slate, mumbling to himself, the light of a data-read reflecting off his glasses.
“Good evening, Professor.”
Saul nodded, but kept reading for a moment, walked right past me.
“Professor?”
“Hmmm?” he started. Then he looked up, jumped. “Yes, yes, Major.”
“You’re working late.”
“Aren’t we all?” He smiled; a toothy, forced reaction that was vaguely unsettling. “So much to do. So much to learn.”
“Find anything useful in the data-reads from today?”
“It’s all useful, Major. Every little bit.”
I paced the Key’s glass prison. A quad of sentry guns were mounted overhead. The high-calibre plasma weapons were augmented by a bio-sensor and motion-tracking AI. The guns twitched, following every motion below. The Key was the last remaining evidence of Helios, of an operational Artefact – a device of untold value to the Alliance. Security here was even tighter than in the rest of the ship.
Saul activated something on a nearby terminal. An image of the Damascus Artefact, gliding through space, filled one of the wall-screens. The image was jittery, frequently dipping out of focus. But I could see flashes of red light on the outer hull: could make out squadrons of drones drifting over the structure, investigating the hull.
“What are the drones doing?” I asked.
“Those?” he said. “Just intelligence-gathering drones. I ordered their deployment after your mission. Didn’t think to bother you. We have several thousand of them, working on the cuneiform patterns. Provided they remain on the hull, the Artefact appears to ignore them. Whatever the Shard were, this appears to be their method of communication: they recorded everything.” He sighed. “I’m sure that we will eventually understand it all, but it will take time. This lab has some of the most advanced AI systems poring over the texts day and night.
“I’m very interested in the markings on the outside of the structure. Before Dr Kellerman…” – he paused, as though carefully considering his next choice of word – “…uh, passed, he provided Sci-Div with images from the Helios site. I have access to the sum total of Command’s knowledge. The language repository is proving very helpful in understanding this Artefact.”
“Then what is this place? This thing?”
“Probably a very large machine, a computer made to link with other nodes in the network. A long time ago, Damascus was a busy star system: several planets, each of those with several moons. This might’ve been a major Shard holding.”
“Any idea what they were? After today, anything might help.”
Saul paused, rubbed his chin. “I’ve told you everything that I know: they were machines, and they hated the Krell.”
“Is that supposed to be enough?”
“It makes them a potential ally.”
“Not from where my people were standing.”
“I’m sure that the Reaper’s reaction can be explained.”
Saul placed his data-slate on a nearby terminal, tilted his head as he looked at me. “Is there anything else I can help you with, Major?” he asked. “I have so much to get on with.”
“I wanted to ask you about the Endeavour’s tachyon trail. Have you found anything new?”
Saul nodded. “I expected you to ask that, sooner or later.”
He punched some keys on a keyboard. A golden dust trail appeared on the view-screen; alongside the Artefact. I watched on, felt my heart begin to race – begin to beat again. That feeling, that Elena was tantalisingly close, almost overwhelmed me. Stay with it, I told myself.
“This was the Endeavour’s trail. I can be sure of that. But it seems to have just disappeared.”
“How is that possible?” I asked. I was desperate for more information. “Surely a starship of that size couldn’t just disappear from time-space.”
“It was here, now it is not,” Saul said, shrugging. “It’s unlikely that the Endeavour was destroyed.”
That possibility had barely occurred to me, but I discarded it immediately. I’d done my research on the Endeavour, and she had been a city-sized starship: had she been involved in a fight, she would’ve caused a debris field the size of the United Americas. There would
be plenty of evidence of that. Her battlegroup had also included numerous warships for protection – a fleet much larger than the Damascus operation.
“What about if she jumped to Q-space from here?” I offered.
“There isn’t any evidence of that. I’d expect to see a further tach trail if the ship used her Q-drive.”
“Then what happened?”
“It is one of the many mysteries of the Maelstrom, Major. Maybe it is linked to the Artefact’s purpose. Until we can understand that, it’s impossible to track where the ship went.”
I sighed. I knew all of this already, had expected the same answers.
“Rest assured, I would be most interested in understanding why the Endeavour was here,” Saul said, staring at the view-screen: light flashing over the insides of his enhanced-vis glasses. “And I’d like to know where she has gone.”
“You and me both,” I said.
I needed a clear head, so I took the Run again. This time, Martinez insisted on coming with me. I found him waiting for me beneath the shadow of the Vulture’s Row.
“Nice view, jefe.”
“Guess so.”
I pointed to the other end of the corridor. It looked a distance away; the elevator door impossibly small. The red emergency supply box winked a warning light.
“You heard about this place?” I asked.
Martinez nodded, limbering up. “Some of the space jocks told me about it.”
“Then you know about the challenge?”
“Si. I reckon I can beat the Old Buzzard’s record.” Martinez pulled a face and lifted his shoulders. “He’s fast, but I’m faster.”
“Just try to keep up with me.”
We sat at the end of the Run; drenched in sweat and panting for breath. The physical exertion was punishing, but it felt good: that lactic burn in my arms and legs, the thundering of my heart. I slid back against the cold floor, put my hands behind my head.
