by Jamie Sawyer
“It’s not good news,” Martinez said.
Jenkins was physically and emotionally in a bad way.
She was skinned and she had forced her armoured bulk into a comms officer’s chair. She sat with her head in her hands; plastered with blood, a nasty wound on her temple still streaming black fluid. I knew that her real body must be in an even worse state – hoped that she had received some medical attention.
Mason and Martinez hung back as I approached, like they were frightened of Jenkins’ reaction.
I soon understood why.
Kaminski’s still out there; and he isn’t coming back.
A static-riddled holo was projected from the desk in front of her. Kaminski inside the evac-pod: his appearance quivering and shaking with every disturbance in near-space.
Jenkins looked up at me sharply. She said nothing, but I could read the anger and hurt in her face. She pushed off from the desk.
“Harris?” Kaminski asked.
I leant over the console, into the camera mounted there. “It’s me.”
“Saul and I are going to be fine,” Kaminski said.
“He isn’t!” Jenkins shouted. “Loeb’s leaving him!”
“Hey, Jenkins!” Kaminski insisted. “Someone can come back and get us. It’s not a problem.”
He has no damned right to sound so calm! I clenched a fist, with my only hand, and clutched Jenkins to my chest. Her whole body shook and bucked: on the verge of fighting me off. Saul and Kaminski looked back from the evac-pod, consigned to their fate. I locked eyes with Kaminski.
“I still have a man out there!” I shouted to Loeb. “We can’t leave without him—”
“We’ve already tried to get him twice!” Loeb said. “Both ships were shot down, and every passing second the evac-pod is moving further into the moon-fields!”
Around us, the crew were preparing for launch. Orders were being exchanged.
“We have to go. There isn’t time to send out another sweep. Inform any operational vessel to follow us into the Rift. I’m sorry.”
“No! You don’t even know if it will work—”
“It’s not right!” Jenkins shouted. “We can’t leave him!”
“Powering up propulsion drive.”
There was a deep rumbling from the Colossus. Her drives were cold booting, getting ready to move off.
“All hands take safety precautions!”
The view out of the blast-shutters spiralled as we manoeuvred. There was another explosion – something hit the ship as we changed position. I half-expected to feel the prickle of lost atmosphere, the cold of vacuum, as we suffered some catastrophic damage.
The ship navigated towards the Rift. Jenkins broke away from me and slammed both of her fists into a bulkhead. She was sobbing uncontrollably.
“Closing in T minus ten seconds,” an officer shouted above the din. “Nine…”
“No!” I yelled. “We have to stay!”
“Eight…”
A stray Krell bio-weapon glanced the Colossus’ flank.
“Buckle in if you want to live,” Loeb ordered.
“Seven…”
Mason and Martinez dragged me to a seat.
“Six…”
I struggled against them, yelled in defiance, as they strapped me in.
Gravity began to ebb and flow. Stray debris was being sucked into the gap in time-space. Ships spiralled end over end towards the Rift. I didn’t know how we were managing to maintain our position.
“Five…”
Mason and Martinez were strapped in too now.
“Four…”
The Rift dominated the view-ports. I tasted blood at the back of my throat, felt my whole body constricting as we made the final approach.
“Three…”
Jenkins was still crying.
This, I decided, is probably how it ends. Lost in the Maelstrom, reduced to constituent atoms by an alien gravity well – blown across time by a technology that none of us understood.
“Two…”
The Colossus emitted an enormous groan. The clash of metal on metal, the grinding of the superstructure collapsing in on itself—
“One…”
There was only the Shard Gate.
My body was torn apart.
No, not torn apart. Disassembled was more apt a description.
But just as quickly, I was reassembled.
And I was in a hundred places at once.
Space and time became instantly malleable. I was somewhere beyond the touch of the natural laws of physics – a lacuna between planes of existence, the space between space.
The Shard Network eddied around me. It was a galaxy-spanning web of ancient Artefacts, connecting myriad planets and stars. Both transmitters – waypoints in the night, like the machine on Helios – and also gates, like that in Damascus Space. There were so many of them.
The Artefacts were truly legion.
I wanted to reach out and touch the worlds of the Network. To explore the terrible black holes of the Outer Dark; to reach the collapsed wormholes of the Xerxes Spiral; to fly the gas giants of Tia Star. These were worlds that no human explorer had ever visited. Such terrible beauty lurked in the tapestry of stars – an empire crafted by the Shard that had grown too vast for a single species to tend, and had long ago fallen into disrepair. And yet, as I saw those worlds, I knew that they were far from dead. I sensed Shards of the great mechanical mind – just slivers of the higher consciousness – and quickly recoiled from them.
There was no time to dwell on any of the visions that the Network showed me. As each galactic wonder appeared, it was gone just as quickly. The Colossus was moving too fast, blurring the lines between dimensions—
I detected something else in there with us. Something malevolent and terrifying; awakening so slowly that the passage of time was barely measurable. A Shard machine-mind incapable of comprehending lesser entities. It carried such hatred for the organic, the biological.
The war had never ended for the Shard. They had been gone for a long time but that meant nothing to them. Their lesser machines might feel atrophy – wither from the gnaw of insanity, the passing of lonely millennia – but the Machine did not care.
I heard Elena’s voice.
She was crying, laughing, whispering to me.
“Surely you would cross light-years of time and space to be with me?”
“I’d cross the universe to be with you. Truthfully.”
I saw the UAS Endeavour, the starship Elena had used to travel into the Maelstrom, lurking within the Network. The ship was suspended in space, among the familiar constellations of the Maelstrom. That was how she was able to broadcast to the Artefact. She had used the Damascus Rift, somehow managed to maintain the neural-link with her simulant. I saw the data-thread of her consciousness, weaving through the Shard Network.
Is this it? I asked myself. Have I really found her?
Then the Colossus was moving again, onward through the Network, to whatever destination the Shard builders had programmed. I tried to lurch from my seat, to yell to Loeb that we had to stop – we had to save her! – but the Network had a life of its own.
Our final destination, our translation back into real-space, was not of our choosing.
Crewmen were everywhere. Some hadn’t been lucky enough to get buckled in before we made for the Gate: others had been thrown free of safety harnesses and webbing. Either the ship’s gravity well had given up, or the Shard Gate was causing disabling distortion.
The Colossus was dying. Her hull roared and her frame groaned in response to enormous tidal forces. Her instrument banks were going berserk. Every system bleated warnings, protested against the Gate’s violations of time-space. Striations of light flowed past at maddening speeds. Stars became white lines; galaxies multi-coloured waves. Space folded in on itself. Klaxons rang out all around – breach warnings, proximity alarms. A nearby console was aflame, and someone was fumbling with a fire extinguisher.
�
�Stay down!” I shouted. “You’ll be torn apart!”
I tried to lift my body from my seat but I was pinned. Every muscle and joint was frozen. In my own skin, I could only take so much. My senses were being overloaded. I closed my eyes, wanted the noise and colour and damned sensation to just fucking stop!
When the blackness descended, I was grateful.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
WRECK
I lay there for a long time, in the quiet and the dark.
Recently those had become such rare commodities.
I wondered whether I might be dead. Not simulated dead; really dead. But I was cold. If Martinez’s sermons were anything to go by, my final destination would be a good deal warmer.
I exhaled, inhaled, felt the frozen atmosphere fill my lungs. I recognised the familiar tang at the back of my throat; the cloy of formaldehyde and cryogen. Images began to come into focus above me. An overhead light. A glass canopy. A safety label.
I was in a hypersleep suite. While that wasn’t where I’d expected to wake up, it was better than being dead.
The capsule lid hissed open, lifted slowly. I pulled my aching body upright.
“Watch your arm.”
Martinez stood next to my capsule. He was clean, dressed, in his own skin: a world away from when I’d last seen him. Maybe even further, I thought – remembering the Shard Gate, the sudden jump through the Network. Martinez rubbed his small goatee, put a hand through his hair. He had obviously been awake for a while.
I clambered out of my capsule and realised I was still aboard the Colossus. The walls were plastered with battlegroup insignia and deck numbering – but the capsules around me had been used recently. The crew had just been thawed.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“That would be a good question. Maybe approaching the Liberty Point.”
He tossed me some fatigues. I went to catch them with my lost hand, and almost missed.
“I…I saw Elena’s ship…” I started. “The Endeavour…”
Martinez gave an involuntary shiver and crossed himself. “We saw a lot of things when we went through the Shard Gate. Some that I would rather forget. You were in a pretty bad shape. The medtechs thought it would be best if you went straight into the freezer.”
“Where are Jenkins, Mason and…”
Martinez pulled a face. “Come with me, jefe.”
We walked the endless corridors of the Colossus, at my decrepit pace.
Everything still ached, churned and burnt. I couldn’t stop looking down at my missing hand. That was bandaged now and, Martinez had explained, I’d received the best medical treatment that the Colossus had available. Still, the techs hadn’t managed to save the real thing.
“We went through the Gate,” Martinez said. “Loeb thinks that we were gone for a second of ship’s time.” He shook his head. He obviously didn’t believe that explanation. “The AI says that we jumped the entire Maelstrom; made at least three stops before we finally became stable again.”
“And that was when I blacked out?”
Martinez nodded. “Yeah, Major.”
“Where did we end up?”
“Anyone’s guess. The telemetry module and the universal clock got fried when the Gate finally dumped us. I’d bet the science pukes would love to know, though.”
“The Endeavour is somewhere in the Network,” I said. “But not here.”
“Exactly, jefe.”
“Then where are we? You said that we were approaching the Point.”
“I said that we were maybe approaching the Point,” Martinez said. “After we left the Network, we were in dead space. It was quiet: there was nothing on the other side of the Gate, no Krell or Directorate. We had no idea where we were, jefe. Loeb ordered a Q-jump back to Alliance space, back to Liberty Point. Everyone, including you, went into hypersleep.”
I let the news soak in. I’d been out for the decision to jump to Alliance space, but I remembered parts of the rest. My temples still ached with the touch of the Artefact’s signal. Subjectively, not counting the months I’d spent in hypersleep, my battle with Williams had only been a few minutes ago.
“So we beat the Directorate?” I asked.
Martinez stopped. We were outside the mess hall.
“I guess that we did, at least on the Colossus.”
“Did any of the other ships make it?”
“No,” Martinez answered, firmly. “They didn’t.”
I considered that. There had been sixteen other ships in the battlegroup. Likely thousands of crewmen: all dead. Either lost to the void, destroyed by the Krell, or captured by the Directorate. I wasn’t sure which fate was worse.
Martinez nodded towards the mess hall. “Jenkins is in there. Go easy on her.”
Martinez left me at the door.
There had been efforts to clean up the mess hall. New shutters were bolted over the observation windows – a makeshift repair job to keep the chamber pressurised. The fix gave the place a peculiarly claustrophobic feel.
Jenkins sat alone in the corner. Recently defrosted, she cut a haggard figure. An unsmoked cigarette – half-consumed by ash – was poised in one hand, and she stared at the shutters: like she was trying to see through them and into space outside.
“I’m surprised that you want to spend any time in here, after what happened,” I said.
Jenkins turned to look at me. She moved sluggishly, putting pressure on her left side. I remembered that the gunshot wound had been to her right.
“Morning, Major.”
“Morning, Keira,” I said. I was unsure of what to say, how to put it. “I didn’t think that any of us were going to make it out of Damascus Space.”
Jenkins gave a slow nod. “Some of us didn’t.”
“I…I’m sorry. About Kaminski. But it’s not over. We’re Legion. We’ll find him.”
“The universe is a big place. And like Martinez says, God doesn’t do coincidences. ’Ski is gone. No point in kidding myself.” She gave a dry laugh. “I have terrible taste in men.”
“You mean Williams?”
“Yeah. He was an asshole, but to think that he was Directorate? It’s just beyond me…”
“He had access to next-gen and combat sims, but it goes much deeper than just Williams. There were Directorate infiltrators among us from the start.”
“Of Operation Portent?”
“No. From the start of the Simulant Operations Programme.”
“Then when did they get to him?” she asked, frowning as though she’d been thinking about the question for a while.
“Who knows? Maybe they’ve had the technology for years. Maybe Williams was recently turned.”
“Military Intelligence is going to have a field day with this.”
“Are you wondering whether he was a turncoat when he was with you in Basic?”
Jenkins gave a blasé shrug, but I could tell that it was feigned. When she moved, it was obvious that the stomach injury hadn’t been resolved: there were creases of pain on her face.
“Maybe there’s no telling any more,” I said. “Sim Ops is changing. A long time ago, someone told me this would happen. That we would change the whole system.”
“Elena?”
“Yes.”
“And what about her?” Jenkins said. “Did you find the answers you were looking for?”
The unasked question: was Elena real? Whatever had happened on the Artefact, back in Damascus Space: it proved that Elena was still alive. I’d only seen a simulant, only a glimpse of the real Elena, but that was enough.
“She was operational,” I said. “I don’t know how she did it, but she was using a next-gen sim as well.” I sighed; wished that I’d learnt more from her.
“Didn’t Dr West say that the next-gen project was a recent development? The Endeavour left for the Maelstrom years ago…”
“Dr West is dead,” I said, “so I can hardly ask her. But when we get back to the Point, I want some answers. Someone knows about
that project, and about what happened to the Endeavour.”
Jenkins nodded. After what we had been through – what we had uncovered – nothing seemed beyond possibility any more.
“I was searching through Kaminski’s stuff,” she said. “What he had left on the Colossus. I found this.”
Jenkins opened her hand. She held something out to me. “Kaminski wanted Mason to have it. Maybe you should go see her.”
I found Mason in the infirmary.
She looked a decade older than when I had last seen her. I wondered whether the Point’s facial recognition would even recognise the war-scarred veteran that she had become. A medtech fretted over her, offering her an injection to the forearm. She waved the man away with an angry scowl.
As I entered, she looked up, and her expression softened a little.
“I’m fine, Major,” she said. She glared at the retreating medic. “Really. They just want to keep me here for observations, until we get back to the Point.”
I nodded. “I understand.”
She didn’t look fine. She had that glaze to her eyes; a look that I knew too well. The look of a proper operator.
“None of this will hold me back,” Mason said. “I’m eager to get into the tanks again, as soon as I’m certified.”
“If you’re sure that’s what you want.”
“Never been more certain.”
We walked to the end of the infirmary. Mason did her best to hide the obvious: that even the short distance was hurting.
“I have something for you,” I said. “From Kaminski.”
I held out my hand.
A fabric badge, like that sown onto all of our duty fatigues: a stylised pyramid with an eye atop it, the name LAZARUS LEGION printed beneath.
“Jenkins figured that you deserve to wear the badge. If you still want it, that is.”
“I’d like that.” She took the badge from me, held it tightly. “I’d like that a lot.”
