Origins (32 page)

More Krell followed, leaping out of the water.

Would one Reaper be enough to take them all?
I wondered.

But that question was largely irrelevant, because it soon became apparent that there was more than one.

Chrome-things, only taking shape when they needed to, poured into the chamber. They rippled over me, directing their attentions to the Krell and tossing them aside with reckless abandon.

How many did the Reapers kill? Five, ten, thirty… I soon lost count.

I lay very still, Elena's body pressed against mine, watching the things do their work. Flecks of alien blood hit my face-plate, and I fought the urge to wipe it clean. A claw dropped beside me, slick with ichor – still twitching as though its owner hadn't registered that it was missing. I thought of my own missing hand and the mechanical replacement lurking around Devonia's third moon aboard the
Colossus
.

It took all of my discipline to remain still. Would the Legion react? Jenkins had seen the worst of it at Damascus. Kaminski had sworn an oath to take the Reaper on if he ever saw it again. We knew that it was futile – had seen how the Reaper had been almost impervious to our weaponry – but even so the natural reaction was to fight this thing.

Then the Krell stopped coming. Their cries echoed around the chamber; died out. The sound of a whole Collective in pain.

The Reapers prowled the water's edge. It was hard to judge how many of them there were; dipping in and out of cohesion. One moved near to Elena, spiked limbs lingering so close to her body—

Elena rolled across the floor again, pulling away from me and to the wall she had manipulated before. The symbols there still glowed a pure blue. Her hand moved to the wall. Touching the same glyphs.

The Reapers receded, limbs withering. They disappeared back into the walls in reverse of how they had appeared. It took only seconds for them to completely vanish but I breathed hard for a long moment, unwilling to accept that it had been that easy. My breath fogged the inside of my face-plate, and I scanned the chamber with my eyes: searching for some indication that the threat might return. No one around me moved, bodies remaining pinned to the floor.

“We're clear,” Elena said. Her words were confident, but her voice wavered. There was fear there, I decided, and Elena had known that this plan didn't come without risk.

I thought-commanded my suit to power up again, and fresh info-feeds fluoresced over my HUD. My limbs unlocked, the suit becoming operational. The Legion were recovering just as fast.

“Did that just happen…?” Jenkins said, stumbling around the chamber.

But I ignored all of it.

Elena paused in front of me, watched me stand. I snapped off my helmet. Let it drop to the floor. My body had lost all strength, for the first time that I could remember in a simulant. Elena had that effect on me.

“Is it really you?” I asked.

“It's me, Conrad,” Elena whispered.

She vaulted across the grotto and threw her arms around my neck. The physical response to her presence was immediate, was as though she had never left. We folded into each other and I held her for a long while. We kissed: long, passionate. Her hands reached into my simulated hair, searched through it. On some cellular level, I could tell that this was really Elena. This was no echo.

I lost myself in her for the briefest of moments. In that instant, the war didn't matter. Nothing else mattered, so long as I had Elena.We eventually parted, but Elena held on to my shoulders, looked up at me. In the simulant, wearing the battle-suit, I was enormous to her slender frame. A wistful, tragic smile played at the corners of her mouth.

This wasn't the Elena who had fled into the Maelstrom.

This wasn't even the Elena from the Artefact in Damascus, or the Elena I'd tried to rescue from the
Endeavour
. Physically, this was not the same woman who had left me all those years ago. This was the real Elena. Older, yes, but no less beautiful.

There was a cough behind me, a nervous attempt to get my attention.

“So this is Dr Marceau?” Mason asked.

She looked from Elena and her group to me, and back again. Jenkins and Martinez were silent, probably unsure of what to do.

“Good to see you, Doc,” Kaminski said.

“You too, Vincent,” she replied, still looking at me.

“I think I told you a long time ago not to call me that…” Kaminski muttered.

“Leave it out,” Jenkins said.

I couldn't draw my eyes from her. This was Elena improved: Elena mark three. She had a defiant radiance to her face, her upturned cheeks. Her long dark hair was pulled back from her face, tied at her neck; a practical arrangement. She looked lean, hardened. An anger and determination lingered in her almond eyes.

“I knew that you would come,” Elena said. She nodded at the rest of her team. “I told you that he would.”

“I promised that I would cross time and space.”

“
Merci
, Conrad.
Tu me manques mon amour
. We have waited so long for this.”

The woman I'd known: she would have looked absurdly out of place in a combat-suit. This woman? She was comfortable in the battle-worn armour, dripping wet from an alien waterfall, spattered with Krell bodily fluids. She smiled at me, knowingly, as though reading my response.

“Things have changed,” she said, “very much.”

“I thought that I had lost you in Damascus, and then again on the
Endeavour
.”

Kaminski interrupted.“Yeah, Doc. You could have made this easier…”

Elena shook her head. “I wish that I could have told you,” she said, “but it really wasn't that simple. I had to take precautions, and I needed to know that it was you.”

“It was me,” I said. “And it's me now.”

Elena shook her head. “Not the real you though. Always simulated.”

There was truth in that. On Damascus, we had met sim to sim. I'd rescued Elena from the
Endeavour
, and met her simulant in my real skin. On Devonia, I was skinned and she was for real. I yearned to be with her in my own body, to be out of this simulant.

“It had to be this way,” Elena said. “You will understand. If not now, then soon.”

Although I saw a smile creeping over Jenkins' lips, the Legion stood watching us. They had the uncomfortable air of witnessing a private moment.

“Get a room, guys…” Kaminski sniggered.

The
Endeavour
team bristled.

“We should get back to the camp, Doctor,” one of them said.

Elena nodded. “Yes. We have so much to show you.”

“You have questions, yes?” Elena asked, as we picked our way through the tunnels. She had taken the lead, her crew in tight formation behind her. “Ask, and I will answer them as best I can.”

“How did those things – the Reapers – get here?” Jenkins said. “Did they come from Damascus?”

“No,” Elena said. “We found them here, as part of this structure.”

“You just, ah, controlled them,” Mason said. “How is that…?”

“I activated them,” Elena said, patiently. “They can't be controlled, but they have a limited response range. Once you understand their programming, the process is simple enough.”

“Right, right,” Kaminski said. “Like a computer or something.”

“Exactly.”

“That was risky,” I said to Elena. “You could've been hurt.”

Elena smiled at me. “I've been here for ten years, Conrad. I've been hurt lots of times, and the Reapers aren't really sentient. I knew what I was doing. I can teach you how to activate them, if you'd like.”

“If it's all the same,” Jenkins said, “I'd rather not know, thanks.”

Although I followed closely behind Elena, I regularly caught her looking back at me. It was like she was checking that I was really here; that I was not some figment of
her
imagination. Maybe I wasn't the only one seeing things.

“Watch your footing here,” she said, as she navigated a rock-pool.

The tunnels were wide enough to accommodate our battles-suits, but jagged outcroppings sometimes protruded from the walls or floor. Some of the structures looked worryingly manufactured.

“This place freaks me out,” Mason whispered to Jenkins, from somewhere behind me.

“You're not the only one,” Jenkins said. “Shard shit… here…”

“It feels…” Martinez started, then paused.

“Spit it out,” Kaminski said. “Unless you want to tell me in Spanish or something?”

“It feels
wrong
down here,” Martinez said. “
Espíritu maligno.
”

“‘Bad spirit'?” Elena suggested.

“That'd be about right,” said one of the
Endeavour
group.

“What are those guns,
cuate
?” Martinez asked the same trooper. “Where'd they come from?”

The woman grinned. “You like one?”

“Maybe,” Martinez said. “Don't look like they were made local.”

“Sure they were,” she said. “We call them prism-guns.” She patted the dark stock of the rifle, slung over her shoulder with a makeshift strap of worn leather.

“We found them,” Elena joined in. “Whoever made this place left them behind.”

Although it was cooler, the air still cloyed with humidity. Water tumbled gently in the background, echoing through the labyrinth. It felt like we were in a different world, but though there were no Krell down here their presence was never far. A distant rumble came from somewhere far above; the thundering of a thousand clawed feet.

“Don't worry,” Elena said. “They won't follow us. They'll keep looking for a while, but eventually they'll lose interest.”

“How do you know that?” Mason said. Her voice was low as a whisper; as though she was concerned that the Krell overhead would hear her, despite the distance between them and us.

“Because,” Elena said, pausing further down the tunnel, “they know that this is not a place for them.”

We eventually emerged from a narrow tunnel mouth, set into a canyon wall. Brushing against the cold rocks we surfaced in the dull sunlight, in the jungle again.

“Fuck me…” Jenkins said.

A crashed starship lay on its side, half-buried in the soft earth. Less than half was visible: the ship was almost subsumed by the surrounding green. I took the lead, slowly advancing out of the caves. One eye trained on the jungle – expecting Krell scouts to appear at any moment – I assessed the ship. From the way in which the foliage had grown around it, I guessed that it had been here for years. She was undeniably of human manufacture; a small vessel, not as big or grand as the
Endeavour
. So deep was she in the jungle that I suspected she wouldn't be seen from orbital or even aerial scans: the canopy had grown thick, almost impenetrably so, and the glade in which the ship had crashed was cast in a semi-gloom.

I recognised the vessel. I'd seen it on news-casts more than enough times. Barely visible through the muck that had accumulated on the hull, the name UAS ARK ANGEL was stencilled on the ship's flank.

“This was one of your ships,” I said. “This was part of the
Endeavour
's fleet.”

“It was,” Elena said, with a perfunctory nod. “Other than the
Endeavour
, she was the last.”

“You lost the rest of the fleet?” Mason asked. “
All
of them?”

Elena sighed. “All of them. Getting here wasn't easy.”

“Must've been a hell of a crash,” Martinez said.

I walked the perimeter of the ship's crash zone. She had come down at a low angle, with enough force to shatter her hull. Many of the internal modules had breached, and only the aft – where the energy core and drive cortex were located – had escaped any significant damage.

“You don't have any perimeter defences,” Jenkins said. “The Krell could just roll in here at any time, Doctor.”

“They could,” Elena said, “but they won't.”

Figures appeared from inside the ship – popping half-submerged access hatches, empty view-ports and observation windows. Men and women wearing a variety of jumpsuits and crew uniforms, but universally ragged, dirty and exhausted. Some were embellished with Krell armoured plates, others carrying improvised mêlée weapons like spears – made from metal and wood – alongside ancient sidearms. Soon, a hundred pairs of eyes were on us. They looked wary, but also elated.

One man came forward to meet us. As with the ship, I recognised his role in the expedition: Commander Christopher Cook, captain of the UAS
Endeavour
. I remembered his image, broadcast on the vid-screens back at Calico, a decade ago. Dressed in the remains of genuine Alliance evacuation-suit, but combined with shoulder-plates and a chest-guard removed from a combat-suit. A nasty scar marked his cheek – healed, but badly so. It looked a lot like it had been caused by a Krell's talon, and had only just missed his right eye.

“By Gaia,” the man said, speaking with a clipped Calican accent, “have you really come?”

Elena gave a proud smile, stood beside me. “I told you that he would.”

Cook had tears in his dark eyes, and his jaw trembled.

“Hoping and seeing are two very different things,” Cook said. “We have missed the world a great deal.”

“Meet Major Conrad Harris,” Elena said.

“Colonel now, actually,” I said. “Lieutenant Colonel, at least. Only a half-bird colonel.”

Elena raised an eyebrow. “And I thought that you never wanted to be an officer?”

“The decision was made for me,” I said, dismissively. This seemed unreal: Elena being here, on this alien world, discussing a largely irrelevant promotion.

“Come,” Cook said, waving us towards the UAS
Ark Angel
. “We have much to discuss.”

“You probably landed a couple of klicks from here,” said Cook.

“We tried to reach your coordinates,” I explained, “but we didn't get that far. Our gunship was shot down.”

“I'm sorry that I wasn't able to give you more precise information,” Elena said. “I didn't have much time aboard your ship. There's a significant Krell nest east of here, but I had hoped that you would be able to evade their defences. As you've probably seen, they have the skies covered.”

Kaminski nodded. “It's a regular Krell-ville.”

Elena gave him an unimpressed look. “You haven't changed, Vincent.”

“Not much,” Kaminski said.

We sat in what had probably once been the
Ark Angel
's mess hall. Due to the angle at which the ship had crashed, her deck now listed to one side and the view of the jungle outside was strangely off-kilter. I'd already introduced my team, and run through the specifics of our ship's location in orbit around Devonia. The Legion had reluctantly dismounted from their Ares battle-suits, and I did the same. It made me nervous being out of the armour – dressed in only a neoprene undersuit and combat boots – and I kept looking over at the suit.
How long would it take me to mount up again if I needed it?
I wondered.

Elena had changed out of her body armour; instead now wore a crew jumpsuit that had been modified for the environment. The sleeves were torn short, and I noticed the environmental control on the collar had malfunctioned. Despite everything – where we were, the avalanche of unanswered questions, the fact that we were stranded here – I couldn't stop looking at her. The curve of her neck, the lilt of her heart-shaped face…

“Do you have any smokes?” she asked.

I laughed. “You haven't kicked the habit?”

“It's been a long time, but not that long.”

Commander Cook hadn't stopped smiling since our arrival. “I have missed my wives and children so very much.”

I hadn't the heart to tell him that Calico Base was long gone. I could only hope that his family was safe somewhere, that they had escaped the Directorate attack.

“You didn't try to communicate with the Alliance?” Jenkins probed. “If you missed everyone so much, wouldn't that have been the easiest thing to do?”

“The easiest thing,” Cook said, “but not the right thing.”

“I have a lot to explain,” said Elena.

“You can start with how you did all of this,” Kaminski said, with genuine interest. “Sending yourself to Damascus, using a simulant aboard the
Endeavour
…?”

“Both required some ingenuity,” Elena said. “We have a Simulant Operations Centre aboard the
Ark Angel
. Even inactive, it is possible to establish a neural-link between the Arkonus Abyss and the Damascus Rift. I sent a sim back through the wormhole, waited for help. The ranges involved meant that I couldn't go any further than the Rift.”

Elena had already shown me around the ship that had been her home for the last ten years. With a functional energy core, the vessel had allowed some of the basic necessities to support human life on Devonia. The ship's battery wouldn't last for ever, but by human timescales it was close enough. The
Ark Angel
had been one of Science Division's premier research vessels at the time of her departure – a support ship for the
Endeavour
fleet – and she carried an extensive Science Deck. It had been from here that Elena had operated a simulant.

Elena continued. “We detected the alarm signal when you boarded the
Endeavour
, and I made transition. Our remaining simulant stock was held aboard the
Endeavour
, but the ship's AI had become corrupted over time. Many of the skins perished.”

“That's quite some plan,” Kaminski said. “But I guess that it worked.”

“There's a lot more to it than that…” Elena said.

“Start from the beginning,” I said, eager to get as much information as possible from the survivor group: to start planning our escape.

And so Elena started to tell the story of the
Endeavour
.

As Elena spoke, I felt parts of my world – of a belief mechanism that had grown up around me,
justified
me – begin to slip away.

“There has never been a Treaty,” she said. “It was all a lie.”

As much as I'd hated and disagreed with the Treaty, it had been a constant in my life. It had explained so much:
Liberty Point
, the Sim Ops Programme, the Quarantine Zone. None of these things had meaning without the Treaty.

Elena sighed. “I know that you will be angry. I know that you will find it hard to understand, but it's the truth.”

“Did Science Division know?” I asked.

I wanted something, someone, to vent my anger on. Had Professor Saul known that the Treaty was a lie?

“Some knew,” Elena said, “but not many. It was a controlled disclosure; highly classified.”

“Did you know before you left?”

“Not until we departed Alliance space,” she said, haltingly. “And even then, not everything. It was strictly need-to-know, but as the mission progressed it became difficult to restrict.”

“Why lie about it?” Mason retorted. She, too, was in disbelief: couldn't handle what we were being told. As the youngest member of the team, Mason was the least cynical.

“Stay out of this, Mason,” Jenkins said. “It's not our business.”

Elena answered anyway. “Because the Alliance – because Command – needed a plausible explanation for assembling a fleet of this magnitude, for sending it into the Maelstrom.”

“And it was the perfect cover,” Cook explained. “The Core Systems were in fear. The Krell menace loomed large. No one asked questions, because everyone wanted the war to end.”

“Psych Ops at their finest,” Kaminski said.

Mason still couldn't accept it. “But who were they hiding it
from
? Surely not the Krell?”

“Something much worse,” Elena said “and far closer to home. The Alliance needed to cover this up, to hide it, from the Asiatic Directorate.” Elena turned to me, her eyes pleading. Not just for acceptance, but for understanding. “It worked, but not completely. The Directorate were with us all the way. We were compromised.”

“They infiltrated our expedition at every level,” Cook said. “Many of Sergeant Stone's security forces were working with them. Gaia praise the sergeant; he died in the fighting.”

Sergeant Stone had been the head of security aboard the
Endeavour
, in charge of the Army simulant operators, assigned to the mission by Command as protection detail.
Williams' Warfighters weren't the only traitors in Sim Ops
, I thought. Colonel O'Neil, head of Simulant Operations, had approved the attachment of a squad to the operation…