The Lazarus War: Legion (12 page)

“Saul! Where’s Saul?”

The Marine sergeant cocked his head, gave me a disapproving look.

“He’s on the bridge. Admiral Loeb wants to see you when you’re feeling up to it.”

I grabbed an oxygen bottle from one of the soldiers and clipped it to the harness of my vac-suit. The whole ship seemed to be awakening: lights and recycling units whirring to life, not just in the hypersleep chamber but the adjoining rooms. The alarm continued; unexplained and intrusive.

“Stay here,” I ordered. “Jenkins, you’re in charge.”

“Affirmative,” Jenkins said, still sitting on the floor, back rigid against the wall. “For all the good it’ll do.”

Still wearing the ridiculous vac-suit, I stormed onto the bridge.

On a smaller Naval starship, the command centre and bridge were often combined. The
Colossus
was so big that division was not only possible but necessary. There were dozens of stations but most stood empty, with only a handful of crew working. Those crewmen looked as though they were not long out of the freezers.

I found Loeb at the helm. Dressed in simple shipboard uniform, he was yelling orders at the crew. But there was a calm coldness in his voice, and something in his eyes that I hadn’t noticed during the briefing back at
Liberty Point
.

“Bring us point-five port side!”

“Aye, aye!”

The ship’s view-screens were dominated with the same image: a field of bright white lines, sparks thrown across near-space. A billion rock particles struck the null-shield, aerating the energy field. We were still travelling at an insane, Einstein-denying speed: the minuscule rocks were punching against the ship’s armour, acting as kinetic rounds. It was inevitable that some of the debris would get through, even if the null-shield was at maximum polarity.

Saul sat beside Loeb, in the same attire I’d seen him wearing back on the
Point
. He was strapped into a station and gripped the armrests with enough force that his tanned knuckles had gone an unhealthy white.

“
Point
-defence lasers firing, sir!” another officer called to Loeb.

“Shields holding, XO?”

“Affirmative, sir.”

“Are we clearing the field?”

I watched the view-screens for activity and breathed a sigh of relief. The storm was slowly subsiding; impacts becoming less regular, particulate striking the null-shield and not the ship herself.

“All clear,” an officer declared.

Loeb held his rigid position for a moment, eyes fixed on space outside. Then, slowly, he grasped at the data-cables jacked to each of his forearms, yanked them free and tossed them aside.

“Sweet Mother Earth,” Saul groaned. “That was too close.”

“We’re through,” Loeb said. “The course correction will take us well out of the field.”

“What just happened?” I asked. “The hypersleep suite is a damned mess – you have multiple casualties.”

Loeb sneered at me from the command console. “We hit a meteor field. One of the many – and unavoidable – hazards of this fool’s errand.” He jabbed at a terminal in front of him and the alarm abruptly ceased. “For your information, only two of the hypersleep bays were hit. We managed to make an evasive manoeuvre, which saved a number of other decks from serious harm.”

“It appears that the navigational AI developed a fault,” Saul said. “We were thrown off course by a storm in Ypress Sector. I’ve tried to repatch the ship’s AI. Yes, yes – not my specialty, but I’ve done what I can.”

“That easy, huh?” I quivered with anger. “Tell that to the dead.”

Loeb ignored my protestations. “Some of the cargo holds weren’t included in the course profile. Cargo holds six and nine are carrying a full load of military equipment. The course projections allowed for empty modules.”

Such a simple error, such enormous ramifications. Making Q-jump – technically translating from Q-space into real-space – required a precise calculation of weight and mass. The specifics were arcane, usually computed by highly advanced AIs. A minor error was enough to send a ship off course. In well-plotted Alliance space, that was bad enough: you could end up translating into a moon or find that the screwed-up dynamics of Q-space cost you a decade of real-time. Stories about these errors were commonly traded among Alliance space forces – usually anecdotally. In the Maelstrom, as with everything, the consequences could be so much worse. We’d made translation off course and the result had been we’d strayed into a meteor storm. Looking down at a holo-map of the surrounding sector, there was at least one black hole and the remnant of solar storm within a parsec of our position.

“This is the first time that the
Colossus
has suffered such a fault,” Loeb said. He nodded at a nearby officer. “XO, I need an immediate assessment of the damage. It looks like we’ve maintained structural integrity, but I want a sitrep on the rest of the Operation Portent fleet.”

“Aye, sir.”

“Better yet, get me visuals,” Loeb corrected.

“I can do that, sir.”

The holo filled with ten or so glowing icons: the
Northern Pledge
, the
San-Ang’s Finest
, and the
Midwest
, among others. I recognised those names as American ships, from the briefing back on the
Point
. There were other multinationals among the flotilla, and I noted that the Antarctic Republic and the Pan-African Union vessels had made it through as well.

“No damage reported, sir,” an officer responded. “Looks like it was only us that got hit. We’re still waiting for three further ships to make translation from Q-space.”

“When are we expecting complete battlegroup conversion?” Loeb asked.

The same officer paused, reading from his terminal screen. “Within the next hour.”

“Good. Maintain course vector to the rendezvous point.”

“Aye, sir,” the XO replied.

“Is the battlegroup still mission able?” I asked.

“Preliminary indications are positive,” Loeb said. He sounded almost dismissive of my question.

“Another of the perils of the Maelstrom…” Saul added. “Praise the Divine Earth Mother that we got away so lightly.”

“What about our sims and tanks?” I asked.

I recalled what had happened on Helios: losing my sims, the damage to the tanks, going into battle in my own skin. I dreaded that happening again.

“Only the hypersleep suite has been hit,” Loeb growled. “Your equipment was stowed in cargo bay fifteen – it’s fine.”

I nodded, tried to hide my relief. Despite Loeb’s reassurance, I knew that I’d take the first opportunity to check on the gear myself – to see the simulants with my own eyes.

Loeb shook his head. “Get a clean-up crew down to the damaged bays. I want confirmation that those hull breaches are sealed within the next fifteen minutes.”

“I’ll make it so, sir,” another junior officer said, scuttling off the bridge.

Loeb turned to me. “I want to see you in my chambers before we reach Damascus Space. You should probably have breakfast, see the medtechs. I’ll let you know when I’m available.”

“Whenever you’re ready,” I said.

I can’t wait,
I thought, and stalked out of the chamber.

Despite Dr West’s objections, I skipped the medical evaluation. Instead, I hit the showers and got dressed. By now the whole ship was awake: corridors flooded with crewmen, the ship’s systems running as though the incident in the hypersleep suite had never happened.

The first meal after a long sleep is important. Hypersleep messes with the body’s natural rhythm: although you’re pumped with sufficient nutrients to keep you alive, long-term the experience is debilitating. The side-effect was the gnawing in my gut that reminded me I hadn’t eaten for nine months. It inevitably took its toll, to the extent that Loeb’s directive to go and eat was actually welcome.

After getting lost twice, I found the mess hall on one of the lower crew decks. It was a large and busy room; lined with metal tables and chairs, enough for maybe a couple of hundred personnel to be fed at the same time. The place had a relaxed ambience, with a clutch of big green trees occupying one corner. Full-scale observation windows claimed a wall, gave a decent view of near-space. The stars looked alien to me, and they were: we had passed over into the Maelstrom now. Space was full of colours, full of disarmingly beautiful spirals and multi-hued stars.

A constant reminder that we are in enemy territory.

Sailors and support staff were catching meals; the ship had a real servery dispensing proper cooked food from a kitchen at the end of the hall. The smell was welcome – I wasn’t used to real food aboard a ship. Mostly MREs and vac-packs were the order of the day. I picked up some kind of geno-modified fried meat and a pureed potato paste. I decided to skip the Centaurian insect-bites, grabbed a nutrient shake. Wasn’t any breakfast that I’d ever heard of but I needed carbs and sugar badly.

The Legion sat around a table, all drawn and tired – hunched over trays of steaming food. Saul sat with them, working on a data-slate, but he wasn’t eating.

“All in order, Major?” Jenkins said.

I grimaced. “As well as it’s going to be. We’re out of any immediate danger.”

“Immediate?” Jenkins said. “That sounds real encouraging.”

“We’re in the Maelstrom,” Kaminski said. “Being out of immediate danger is the best that any of us could ask for.”

He’d probably meant it as a joke, but for once Kaminski was actually talking sense.

“Scuttlebutt is that we got hit by a meteor shower,” Jenkins said. “Care to confirm, Major?”

“Yes,” I said. I chewed on the steak. It was a vat-grown clone source, and the texture felt wrong. The techs never seemed to get the little details right. “Your intel is accurate.”

“How bad is it?” Jenkins asked.

“From what I could see, just the hypersleep suite,” I said. “A couple of bays. Ours happened to be one of them.”

Jenkins whistled. “We really do get all the luck.”

“Loeb is putting it down to a cargo load error,” I said. “That sent us off course, apparently. We wandered into the storm.”

“How’s that possible?” Mason said. “The cargo mass is calculated by the ship’s AI. There’s virtually no room for error.”

I sighed. “You want to go and argue with the admiral, be my guest. Loeb is a piece of work.”

“We heard that his nickname is the Buzzard,” Kaminski said, swallowing down a mouthful of hot food. “And that he doesn’t like Sim Ops.”

“Well he certainly doesn’t like me.”

“We thought maybe he’d invite you for breakfast in the officers’ mess…” Jenkins said.

“That isn’t going to happen anytime soon. How are the quarters?”

“Clean, small, quiet,” Martinez said. “Good.”

“How far are we from Damascus Space?” Jenkins asked.

“A few days. I didn’t get the chance to ask properly.”

“It’s that bad, huh?” Jenkins said.

“Pretty much,” I answered. “We’ll need to get to work soon. This new guy – Williams – what’s he like? Sounded like you knew him.”

I smiled at her, teasing the point.

“I know – or knew – him,” Jenkins said. She stared down at the potato-substitute on her plate. “Sort of.”

“You didn’t mention it,” Kaminski added, otherwise oblivious to the significance of the comment.

I recalled Jenkins’ reaction to Williams when we’d boarded the
Colossus
, and I suspected that there was something more to Jenkins’ comment. Williams and the Warfighters ate breakfast a few tables away. His team was younger, probably fitter than mine. They were boisterous and seemed to have thrown off the thawing already. I noticed that Williams was regularly looking over in our direction: trying to make eye contact with Jenkins.

“’Ski,” Jenkins said, her voice dropping to that authoritative tone that made her such a good NCO, “I want you to escort Professor Saul to the cargo bay. Do an inventory check on the Sci-Div crates.”

“Sure thing,” Kaminski said. “Just as soon as I finish this.”

“
Now
,” Jenkins said. “It’s a priority; Admiral Loeb will want to check on any damage. Martinez, you go with him.”

Kaminski looked nonplussed. Martinez didn’t argue and stood without argument. He hauled a very confused-looking Saul to his feet.

“Come on, Professor,” he said. “Sergeant has a good point.”

The three quickly disappeared out of the mess.

Once she was sure they’d gone, Jenkins looked over my shoulder, at the Warfighters. Sipping a fruit juice from a foil pouch, she began to talk again.

“This Captain Williams: we were in Basic together.”

“And?” I asked. “So what?”

Basic training was the standard infantry course that all Alliance Army went through – that had been so for as long as the Army had existed. There had to be more to this than just two soldiers training together.

“We had a thing.”

“Right…” I said, waiting for more.

“Nothing serious. It only lasted a few weeks.”

Mason broke a smile. “Is that all? Basic is a different world. It must’ve been years ago. Captain Williams probably won’t even remember you.”

Jenkins looked offended. “Thanks, Mason. And there was me thinking that we had a sisterhood thing going on here.”

“I didn’t mean it like that—”

Jenkins cut her off. “He obviously remembers, but I haven’t seen him in a very long time.”

“Nothing sinister in that,” I said. “The
Point
’s a big place.”

“Yeah, maybe.” She looked at me awkwardly. “I’m pretty sure that someone will be pissed to hear an old boyfriend is on the scene.”

“Kaminski?” I asked. “He’s a big boy now, and he’ll just have to deal with it. But if you were in Basic together, Williams made captain fast.”

“I know. It surprised me too. He has a background in technical training.”

“Now he’s on a crucial operation into another Artefact,” I said. “Cole spoke highly of him.”

“Well, he must be doing something right. Maybe he’s changed.” Jenkins slurped down the remainder of her juice. “Just thought that you should know.”

Loeb called an orientation session shortly after breakfast. It was an expected inconvenience and most personnel were required to attend. Navy officers briefed us on safety measures aboard the ship, on emergency exits, on the flight decks. The blurb was standard: evacuation pods are clearly signposted; do not collect your belongings in the case of an emergency; please try not to activate the airlocks without permission. It all washed over me pretty easily and I was sure that my team ignored most of it too.

“Communications between the fleet are restricted,” droned a junior officer with a penchant for his own voice. “And comms back home are completely prohibited. Such broadcasts could attract the attentions of the Krell, and we want to avoid that if at all possible.”

“What if they find us first?” Kaminski called.

“Shut up, ’Ski,” Jenkins hissed. “Let him talk and let’s get this over with.”

“We have a procedure called the ‘dark protocol’,” the officer continued. “In the event that a significant Krell war-fleet is discovered near our location – a Krell Collective with a threat-range the Damascus battlegroup is unable to deal with – then we simply go dark.”

“We hide?” Kaminski said. “All this firepower, and that’s what we do? Just hide?”

“Exactly. We hide and wait for the threat to pass.”

Just as boredom was starting to set in, and the crowd was beginning to turn against the Navy officers, Admiral Loeb took the podium. He scanned the room, jaw set. He was, in many ways, the very epitome of an old-school Navy officer. The room fell into a nervous hush.

“I know that everyone has heard about this morning’s fiasco,” he started. “Sixteen personnel were killed in Sector Three.”

He let the words breathe, kept those eyes pinned on the crowd. Although it could’ve been paranoia, it felt like a good deal of his animosity was directed at me.

“We flew into a previously uncharted meteor storm. Unfortunately, that’s the reality of travel in the Maelstrom. Before the rumour mill gets out of control, allow me to spell it out: we are still mission capable and we are pressing on to the objective. Professor Saul assures me that we are approaching the designated coordinates in Damascus Space.”

Saul sat a row away from the Legion. Some faces turned to look in his direction. Uncomfortable with the sudden attention, he quickly nodded in an attempt to diffuse it.

“As we move closer to the Rift,” Loeb said, “cosmic radiation counts will increase. Dr West will be arranging anti-radiation drugs and appropriate smart-meds. I want complete compliance with the medical team.

“There will be a remembrance service for the dead – for today’s casualties – at seventeen hundred hours tomorrow evening.” Loeb lingered on the words “today’s casualties” as though he suspected that there would be many more before this fool’s errand was done: again, the barb of his criticism was directed towards me. “My office is distributing the list of names. All are welcome to attend.

“That’ll be all.”

The Legion filed out of the auditorium, appropriately admonished by the admiral. The corridor was jammed with personnel; several looking at the list of deceased crew displayed on a terminal screen outside.

“Major Harris?” someone called.

I stopped and turned, took in the man following me. He was an aerospace pilot, and a real flyboy at that; dressed in a bronze-metallic flight-suit, mirrored helm under his arm. Tall, handsome and the better side of thirty standard. He threw me a crisp salute and smiled broadly.

“Lieutenant Andre James, Alliance Aerospace Force,” he said. “I wanted to introduce myself and my team. I’m commander of the aerospace group.”

A badge on his shoulder marked him as the “CAG”: this man was in charge of the
Colossus
’ space force element, the fighter ships that we would rely on in the event of enemy action. His flight-suit was covered in varied and colourful insignia. The largest was a comic depiction of a rad-scorpion, tail arching to stab at a star.

I nodded down his salute. “At ease.”

“It’s an honour to meet the commanding officer of the Lazarus Legion,” James said.

“Ah shucks,” Jenkins said. “We’ve got a fan.”

“Scorpio Squadron – my boys – are the best.” James tapped the scorpion insignia; obviously his squadron badge. “We’ve got a whole wing of fighters aboard the
Colossus
: we fly Hornets, Dragonflies, Wildcats. Whatever your team needs by way of space support, we’re at your disposal.”

At least this reception is better than that I got from Loeb,
I thought. His presentation was a good deal better than I’d seen of Williams’ Warfighters as well. If nothing else, at least James was enthusiastic and seemed behind the operation.

“Glad to hear it,” I said. “Was that you outside on the approach back at
Liberty
Point
?”

“Damn straight. Sorry about the acrobatics. Something for the ladies.” He gave a surreptitious glance in the direction of Jenkins and Mason. James had a precise and sinewy physique, like most flyboys that I’d known; I’d heard that it came from a lifetime of space runs at high-G. “The squadron likes to stretch its wings every now and again.”

“Don’t we all.”

“Admiral Loeb thinks that we’re unlikely to see any proper action during this operation, but I’m not so sure—”

Lincoln bounded into the corridor. The old dog was barking and growling; had worked himself into a real rage. I realised that his vitriol was directed specifically at James. The pilot shooed the dog away with his booted foot, growled back at him.

“He doesn’t like you much,” I said.

“It’s not personal,” James said, “he just doesn’t like simulants.”

I paused; felt the rest of my squad doing the same behind me.

“Simulant?” Jenkins asked. “But you’re not in a sim…”

James gave her a perplexed stare. “Did the hypersleep scramble your head or something?”

He pointed to an emblem on his shoulder: SIMULANT OPERATIONS – AEROSPACE FORCE DIVISION.

I’d heard of testing – expanding the Programme beyond front-line troops – but nothing more than that.
Liberty Point
exclusively ran simulant combat operations; I’d never heard of simulant space pilots before.

“I’m on the Programme,” he said. “I thought that you knew.”

“How could we?” I asked. “You look – well – like a flyboy.”

“I’m just the same in my own skin,” he said. Gave a brief look down at Mason: on automatic, her cheeks flushed red. “Except, some say, a bit better looking.”

Dr West appeared beside James and patted him on the arm like he was a piece of meat. Which he was, in a sense.

“Lieutenant James is operating a next-generation simulant. I expect, Major Harris, that you and your team are conversant with the combat-simulants. The next-gens are the newest models. The project has been in development for several years, and we’re finally seeing the results. The next-gens are being used for various alternative military roles, other than direct combat.”

“I’d call flying a Hornet direct combat,” James muttered. “You try getting one of those things to do as it’s told.” He laughed; typical flyboy humour. “My whole flight wing is skinned up. There are thirty-two of us. We have our own dedicated Sim Ops bay. I’ll show you around some time, if it interests.”