The Lazarus War: Legion (28 page)

There was light beyond the doors.

Light from outside.

Demarco stopped. He pulled back from the ragged edge of the collapsed floor.

Instead of a stairwell, the building terminated in a wide void. It looked like an entire section had fallen in on itself, creating a thirty-metre drop to the next – equally unsafe – floor.

Demarco wobbled at the edge of the drop. He turned to me, arms out to steady himself. His expression recognised that we’d gone the wrong way.

The drone crashed behind us.

Demarco’s eyes snapped to the other side of the collapsed floor. It was a good six metres – a difficult jump in ideal circumstances, an impossible one in these. I immediately realised what he was going to do.

“Demarco! No – you’ll never make it!”

He underarmed his satchel and hurled it across the gap. The bag crashed into a wall on the other side.

The drone’s engines were just outside the doors now: it would be on us in seconds.

“Better to die trying than not try at all!” Demarco yelled.

Demarco took two steps back.

I went to grab him, my own bag slipping off my shoulder – into the hole in the floor.

Demarco jumped.

He shouted – a loud, guttural roar – as he went, his arms winding, legs outstretched.

The drone paused at the door. It wasn’t programmed for surprise; had no way of expressing that emotion on its fixed metal features, and yet I felt a wave of bewilderment emanating from the machine.

Demarco reached for the far floor, fingers clutching at the air as he went.

He missed the other side of the hole by metres. His wiry frame sailed down through the hole.

I looked away. He made a loose, wet thumping sound as he hit the floor.

Dead.

The drone swivelled on the spot. Caught me in its searchlight. I gingerly raised my hands, palms up. It was over. There was no point in running any more.

It wasn’t until then that I realised there was an insignia printed on the drone’s hull.

ALLIANCE ARMY.

“Harris, Conrad?” the machine asked in abrupt monotone.

I nodded.

“Harris, Conrad?” it asked again. “Provide verbal response.”

“Yes!” I shouted. “I’m Conrad Harris!”

“Identification accepted. Accompany this drone to the ground floor.”

“Fuck you!”

The drone retreated, back the way that it had come.

“Accompany this drone to the ground floor,” it repeated. “Alliance Army personnel require your attendance.”

I took the stairs down all thirty-eight floors of the Penobscot. It had taken Demarco and me hours to get to our position – we’d arrived pre-dawn, to make the most of the darkness – and the journey back down was demanding. Condensed into less than an hour, and without the safety webbing we’d used on the way up, it was a miserable and punishing experience.

The drone was always at my shoulder; watchful and coaxing. It wouldn’t answer my questions. Always waited until I was a few metres ahead, then crashed through the wreckage of whatever room we had just left: probably a latent safety control to ensure that it didn’t bring the whole building down on me. Maintained that searchlight behind me to keep the way ahead illuminated.

“Just kill me and get it over with,” I said, more than once.

The drone always responded in the same way: “Accompany this drone to the ground floor. Alliance Army personnel require your attendance.”

Most of the ground floor – or at least what was left of it – was taken up with a reception room. The marbled flooring was cracked and aged; remaining windows cast a misted sepia, due either to the initial nuclear blast or to the decade of neglect since. Water drip-dripped from above; wires and maintenance cables trailed from the soggy holes in the ceiling tiles.

The drone chimed, moved close to me. Coaxing me onwards into the destroyed lobby.

“For fuck sake! I’m going, all right!”

“Accompany this drone—”

“You’ve told me that already!”

I stumbled through a pair of glass doors; frames twisted and torn, wedged open by a pile of brickwork.

What was I expecting down in the lobby? I hadn’t even considered what I was about to find – why the Alliance Army might want anything from me. It surely couldn’t be something positive. As I marched through the reception area, towards the Penobscot’s main doors, I began to think about ways to get out of this. I had a knife holstered inside my boot. The drone would be a tough target. It was big; armed with several kinetic or energy weapons, capability unknown. The armour plating would likely deflect a direct knife-blow.

It must have a control mechanism somewhere, an override panel—

“Conrad Harris?” came a stern voice across the lobby.

There were four men outside the building, gathered at the entrance. All military men: wearing khaki fatigues and dull green body-armour. Behind them, a few metres across the street, was a small wheeled vehicle: a jeep or a buggy.

“Mr Harris?” the lead man called again, impatiently. His voice bounced around inside the lobby, competing with the sound of dripping water. “Can you identify yourself?”

I approached the exit. No one had told me to, but I put my hands up anyway. At least three of the four soldiers were armed – two with rifles trained on the deserted street, the third aimed in my direction – and it seemed like the right thing to do.

“Yeah. I’m Conrad Harris.”

The lead soldier was a middle-aged man, spoke with a Detroit twist. He had a respirator over his lower mouth. Pulled it free and smiled.

“You’re a hard man to find, Mr Harris.”

None of them wanted to stay here any longer than was absolutely necessary: that was obvious from their body-language, their entire presentation. I couldn’t say that I blamed them.

“What do you want?” I said. “Am I under arrest?”

“No,” the lead soldier said. He had no weapon that I could see; just nodded in the direction of the buggy. “Not at all. It’s more complicated than that. Can you come with us?”

“What do you want?”

My mind absently returned to thoughts of escape: of the best route out of this street, of the available resources to win a fight against three armed men.

“It’s about your sister,” the soldier muttered. “You do have a sister – Carrie Harris? Daughter of Jane and Jonathan Harris? Immigrated to Ventris II?”

I swallowed. My throat had suddenly and inexplicably closed; chest tightening with forgotten emotions. I thought of Carrie leaving on the forged papers: of whether any admission I made would get her into trouble, whether it was better just to lie—

I answered before I’d considered the implications. “Yeah. That’s me. Has – has something happened to her?”

The soldier didn’t introduce himself but I recognised his shoulder stripes as those of a sergeant simply because that had been my father’s rank.

“She died on Ventris II,” he said, as we drove through the remains of downtown Detroit. “We’ve been looking for you for two months.”

We were all buckled into the ATV – six big wheels clambering over the debris-strewn highways. The buggy was open-topped; although it only had five passengers, there was room for a full squad. The drone had been docked at the rear and diligently covered our wake: ready to fire at anything that fancied its chances. One of the soldiers occupied a gun-mount in the passenger cage, panning back and forth over the empty buildings. Whispering into his comm all the way.

Those little details occupied me. Because what the sergeant was saying was too much to focus on.

“The aid workers are dropping like flies,” he continued. He shook his head. “Always getting caught in the cross-fire. We’re a new task force; supposed to track down next of kin, to formally identify the bodies.”

“Sure,” I said, watching blackened shadows on the walls that had once been people.

The ATV eventually rolled out of the blast zone. Past the enormous battered signpost – words only just visible beneath a gloss of graffiti and dirt.

Two desiccated corpses hung from lamp posts beside the sign. Not victims of the bomb; these corpses were far too fresh.

It took another hour to reach the government sector. Would’ve been much faster in an air-car, but the ATV had to do. I phased out the sights and sounds of the living city.

Carrie is dead.

It sunk in by degrees.

The squad took me to a medical facility, then through to the DETROIT MORTUARY. The room was small and dark and the cold hit me as I entered. One wall of the chamber was taken up by fridge units, shelves closed. The sergeant and another of his team paused by the door.

A medtech appeared. Dressed in a dirty white smock, he jabbed at a data-slate: looked up at me over scratched glasses.

“This him?” he said. “Conrad Harris?”

“Yeah, this is him,” the sergeant answered for me.

“Can I see her?” I asked.

The mortician scoffed. “That’s what you’re here for, son.”

He slid open a freezer.

Carrie lay inside.

Not the Carrie I had known. She had died four years ago; at the Detroit Metro Off-World Terminal.

This Carrie looked older, but not as old as I’d expected. Time-dilation had played its part and she had probably spent a good deal of the years since our parting in hypersleep. The young woman who lay flat out on the slab was a different version of Carrie. A blanket covered her lower half, torso naked: her skin a pale blue. Her eyes were closed, giving the impression that she was sleeping rather than deceased. She looked peaceful.

I touched her shoulder. The flesh was cold.

“You came back, Carrie,” I whispered. “You always said that you would.”

I hadn’t noticed them at first, but now I saw that there were ugly bruises on her temples – half-covered by her unruly blonde hair – and a deep blue laceration on her chest. Black stitches tapered together a wound there.

“How did she die?” I asked.

The sergeant read from a holo-dossier. “Executed. Directorate Special Forces. They sometimes take hostages from the aid workers. They don’t usually want anything in return – not really – but it’s a terror tactic.”

“She was an aid worker?”

“Yeah. Looks like she used false papers to get on-world, then started using her own name. Went in with a whole clan.”

“Did she suffer?”

“Not likely. Her contingent got ambushed. Whole crawler of aid workers was taken. She was executed the following week.”

Her arms were positioned at her sides, over the blanket. I touched her right hand. Felt the calluses on her palms; saw the grit and blood under her fingernails. I could see that she’d worked hard at what she’d been doing. She had believed in it.

“When did she die?” I asked.

“Objective: a few months back. We’ve had the body on ice since then.”

I stared down at her thin arms, at the frail blue skin.

Bare arms. No tracks. No habit.

“You did it, Carrie. You said you’d kick it, and you did.”

The emotions that I felt were almost disabling. I struggled to process the mixture. Guilt, because I’d let her go, and thereby I’d been complicit in her death. I could – and damned well should – have done something to stop her. But more than that I felt pride, because Carrie had done it. Carrie had become something greater, escaped the Metro. Just as she had promised.

“You okay?” the soldier asked.

“I’m stone cold,” I whispered back. “Have…have you found the soldiers that did this to her?”

“Do we ever?” the sergeant replied, with a knowing snigger. Maybe realised – given the circumstances – that it wasn’t such a clever comment. Corrected himself: “The Directorate aren’t like that. They’re ghosts.”

“Can you positively identify this corpse as your sister, known as Carrie Harris?” the mortician asked. His voice was cold and even.

I nodded. “It’s her.”

He pulled my hand free from the body, gently slid the freezer tray back into the wall.

“Thank you, son. If you’d like to follow the sergeant, he will show you out.”

Carrie’s placid, peaceful face disappeared: hived away with the dead.

I felt numb.

That was the only way to describe it: the absolute absence of any sensation. I wanted to feel rage, wanted to feel purpose, but I couldn’t muster either of those reactions. Both would be futile, because I had no outlet for them.

Who was I? A street scav: one among a million, riffing off the remains of the old world. Who would I be in twenty years? No more or no less than I was right now.

I wanted to make a difference.

I paced the medical centre lobby. It was a quiet, empty space: much bigger than I was used to. The sergeant sat with me, watching me. He hadn’t spoken since we’d left the mortuary. A security droid was in one corner, tracking me with empty eyes, but I guessed that I’d been biometrically tagged – given some leeway because of what I’d just seen.

It felt like I’d been running all my life. Felt as though the drone, the cops, whoever – had always been chasing me. They’d chased Carrie too, but she had stood up to them. She had made a difference. Everything that she had said she’d do: she’d made good on those promises.

I wiped at my eyes with the backs of my hands.

“Why’d they send someone?” I asked the sergeant. “To find me, I mean?”

He smiled. It was a crooked, world-weary expression. “It’s a tick in a box somewhere: a positive statistic for the war-effort.”

“I don’t believe you.”

He went to say something; to conjure some explanation that would support what he’d said, but instead he just nodded. “You’re a clever kid.”

“Then tell me the truth.”

“I recognised the name – Harris – on the death-docket. I knew your old man. We served together years back, during the Rebellion. He looked out for me a couple of times. When the name came up,” he shrugged nonchalantly, “I took a chance.”