The Lazarus War: Legion (30 page)

“Where did she go, Saul?” I shouted. The pain in my head was almost all-consuming: and the only way to end it was for me to end Saul. “Where did Elena go?”

My vision wavered and my hand had started to shake.

“I’ve told you everything,” Saul said. “I have nothing else to say. I want a lawyer.”

“Ghost him!” Williams yelled. “This is all lies!”

Maybe this is the only way.

Saul shut his eyes again – eyelids twitching with stress – and began to mumble something under his breath. It sounded a lot like a prayer.

“That’s enough,” Jenkins said. Her hand was on my shoulder with a firm but gentle grip. “No one’s getting ghosted. He deserves a proper trial. Put the gun down.”

I was on a knife edge; could go either way.

A nice clean headshot would do it…

Fuck it.

I dropped the gun to the table.

It clattered on the metal surface. Quick as a Krell primary-form, Jenkins whisked the pistol up and stepped back. She glared at Williams; dared him to challenge her.

“Don’t forget what happened here,” I said to Saul. “Remember how this could have gone.”

Saul let out a pained sigh. “Thank you, Major.”

“Don’t thank me,” I said. “Not yet. Not until Alliance Command has decided what to do with you.” I turned to the room in general. “Make sure that he’s watered and fed. I want him kept alive until we can hand him over to the proper authorities.”

I scanned the gathered personnel. I couldn’t trust Williams to do the job: I suspected that he would kill Saul the first chance he got, and the Marine standing behind me was likely to turn a blind eye to the murder.

“Kaminski,” I ordered. “Keep guard on Saul until we make the Q-jump.”

“Solid copy,” Kaminski said.

“No one else is to be allowed access to the brig.”

The Marine sergeant gave a glum but accepting salute. He looked about as disappointed as Williams that he hadn’t seen Directorate blood spilled.

“Get him back to his cell,” I directed. “Everyone else out.”

I left the brig reeling from Saul’s disclosure.

He was the one under investigation, but it felt as though the interrogation had yielded as many questions as answers. I could think only of Elena. Where had she gone? How had she got onto the Artefact?

The
Colossus
’ crew wasted no time in preparing for launch back to Alliance space. Everything about the ship set me on edge. Everywhere I went, there were cargo-loaders hauling materiel to safe locations; crew members laughing and joking, looking forward to returning to the
Point
.

I had to get away from it all, had to find my own space. I had to get my focus back.

If the Run can’t calm my mind
, I thought,
then nothing can
.

I took off my wrist-comp and placed it on the floor beside the elevator door. The end of the corridor looked an impossibly long way away; not helped by the infinite blackness that stretched off around me. I took a deep breath, psyching myself up, and got ready to move off—

Something flickered at the edge of my vision. Moving fast; black against the starlight. I wasn’t far from the Hornet landing bays but from the dimensions and trajectory it wasn’t a fighter. Something more familiar moved beyond the glass corridor, floating above me, barely metres from my position.

A barb ran through me.

That’s impossible. I’m losing it. I’m actually losing it.

It was a Directorate Interceptor. Those waspish engine units, enormous gun pods and the iconic black armour: the ship was a symbol of Directorate supremacy on the worlds upon which it was deployed.

The Interceptor delicately hovered in position on VTOL engines. There was no way that this was an Alliance ship that I’d mistaken for Directorate. This was the real thing. The hydra and sword emblem of Directorate Spec Ops – brazenly printed on the nose-cone – confirmed that.

“Oh fuck…” I whispered.

My instant and overriding reaction was that I had to get out of there – had to take cover. I turned for the elevator, thumbed the control.

“Identity not recognised,” the AI chirped.

“Come on!” I shouted, swiping my thumb again. “Red-clearance – Major Conrad Harris!”

“User not recognised.”

A hundred thoughts ran through my mind and I fought to order them. What was the ship doing here? Why hadn’t it tripped proximity alarms across the
Colossus
? Where were the Christo-damned space jockeys when I needed them? The H-28 laser cannon tracked my movements. Mounted on the Interceptor’s nose, the cannon was standard Asiatic Directorate equipment: deployed to eradicate heavy infantry and light armour.

I was neither of those. If that thing fired on me directly, I was vapour. In a split second, my eyes flickered to the armour-glass corridor ceiling. Would it hold against a multi-kilowatt laser discharge?

I was about to find out.

The Interceptor fired.

Bright laser pulses slashed the glass, and I had no doubt that I was the target of the attack.

I turned and started the Buzzard’s Run.

I ran like I’d never run before.

The glass audibly cracked, the corridor giving in all around me. I knew that I would be losing atmosphere in seconds.

Run!

As soon as the glass broke, there was a flash at the end of the corridor. It was the safety lock-box, containing vac and security gear. There would be a breather.

I was engulfed by noise: the pitched whine of the laser firing, the shriek of escaping atmosphere, even the pressing hum of the Interceptor’s engines.

A shadow fell across me, across the remainder of the Run.

Keep going! Keep going!

Lactic burn spread through my legs, my arms. I went from rapid breathing to stilted panting; oxygen suddenly finite, every mouthful precious—

The elevator door felt so far away.

The temperature was dropping rapidly – vacuum leaching away the ship’s heat—

Then gravity collapsed.

I didn’t know how – possibly a malfunction in the grav-generator, maybe some localised damage caused by the Interceptor’s gunfire – but it was a gift. Every footfall became a bounce, my body unable to comprehend the immediate shift, and I kept running. The forward momentum carried me on and I sailed towards the elevator door. In a step, Vulture’s Row loomed over me. Automatically, I outstretched my arms, breaking my fall as I collapsed against the wall.

The Interceptor continued firing, churning up the corridor floor behind me.

I grappled the wall for the emergency box. My body was numb with the ache of exposure to vacuum and I broke open the cabinet seal. The respirator kit floated free. I grabbed the mask with both hands.

The Interceptor swept around, better positioning herself to take me out.

The kit was made for use in an emergency. As soon as I placed it on my face the seals attached. A pair of plastic goggles fixed over my streaming eyes; a small oxygen bottle dangling at my neck. Alongside the respirator kit was a button labelled EMERGENCY. A shipboard shotgun. I palmed the button with one hand, pulled out the shotgun with the other. I floated off the deck, but anchored myself with both actions.

The elevator door remained resolutely closed.

I’ve been set up
, I told myself.
Loeb has to be behind this
.

The Interceptor was directly over the Run, so low that I could almost touch her. She grazed a metal spar from the ruins of the corridor against her armoured undercarriage, and I felt a brief wave of heat generated by the VTOL engine.

Last stand. This has to be how it ends.

It was no small irony that the last time I had seen a ship like this, she had turned out to be my salvation. This time the opposite was true: she was death incarnate.

One man with a shotgun against an armoured gunship.

Even Martinez wouldn’t like those odds.

The ship paused. Waited.

The black angular lines of the vessel looked so similar to those of the Artefact, to those of Shard technology. That had been what the Directorate wanted all along, and at Damascus they had it all. An Artefact, the Key, and a repository of operational Shard tech.

“Better to die trying than not try at all!” I shouted.

I lifted the shotgun and fired at the Interceptor’s belly.

The Remington 900 is a shotgun approved for use in pressurised environments. Specifically, the Alliance Navy approves its use aboard starships. The standard munition is a solid-shot ball-bearing anti-personnel round: the sort of ammo that causes non-lethal injuries to unruly crewmen. With low armour-penetration, a stray shot is unlikely to cause a hull breach.

The Asiatic Directorate Interceptor is a multi-purpose aerospace craft. A generalist rather than a specialist, the Interceptor is equipped with heavy hull armour.

All of this ran through in my mind, in the space of a heartbeat. Braced against the elevator door, equipped with only the shotgun, I’m not sure what I expected to achieve.

The double-barrels fired simultaneously. In an environ with gravity, the kick would have been jarring. Here, in zero-G, the recoil was crippling. The feedback slammed me into the elevator door, sent intense kinetic force up both arms.

Eyes still streaming, I watched the rounds impact the underside of the Interceptor.

The ship didn’t even falter.

She had weaved and pivoted throughout our encounter, but now she was completely still – save for that nose-cannon, which twitched like the muzzle of a hungry dog. I imagined the pilot savouring my image on the HUD as the cross-hairs closed in.

I racked the slide and fired again. A read-out on the stock of the gun flashed with remaining ammo: another eight shots. Even if I’d had a hundred rounds left, I was quite sure that they would do me no good.

The recoil caught me again, sent me spinning back into the elevator door. This time I readied myself for the impact – expected to feel the hard metal against my back and elbows as I made contact—

Except that I didn’t.

Gravity sucked me in.

The door behind me was open and I collapsed into the elevator. Someone caught me, hands grappling around my shoulders.

Williams
. It was Williams.

“What the fuck’s happening out here?” he yelled, over the rush of escaping atmosphere.

He wasn’t wearing a respirator and must’ve overridden the security protocols as the AI would’ve stopped the elevator from calling at this level without his clearance. He was unarmed, and looked about as shocked as I’d felt when I first saw the Interceptor. Poised at the elevator door, he repeatedly keyed the EMERGENCY CLOSE switch.

The Interceptor wheeled about like an angry insect – drawing ever closer to the elevator. The nose-gun erratically darted left and right—

The doors finally shut.

I fell to the floor, fingers wrapped around the shotgun out of deep-seated instinct rather than conscious thought.

“Wh…what’s going on?” Williams stammered. “What was that thing?”

I tore off the respirator, flung it away. Gasped mouthfuls of processed ship air. “It was a Directorate Interceptor.”

“What’s it doing out here? How did the Directorate—?”

“How the fuck should I know?” I shouted back. “My best guess is Loeb.”

Panic detonated across Williams’ face. “Are you serious?”

“Do I look serious?”

“Fuck, man! Just fuck!”

“How else could the Directorate get that close to the fleet? Maybe he’s working with Saul.”

Williams swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing against his fatigue collar. He was shit-scared.

“This real enough for you?” I asked.

“Just about.”

“Am I so old and used up now?”

“No, but you are bleeding.”

I used my free hand to wipe liquid from one ear and then the other. Everything sounded like I was underwater; subdued, muffled. I had to concentrate on what Williams was saying to understand him.

“If you’re going to stay standing, you need treatment,” Williams said. “This shaft leads down to Medical.”

“I’m fine.” I wasn’t at all, but there were more important things happening on this ship than my loss of hearing. “Forget about me. Where’s the Legion?”

“I…I don’t know.”

There’s still time to undo all of this – to put things right
. I racked the shotgun, ignored the deep ache spreading throughout my body.

“I need to get my team out. If Loeb has turned traitor, then he might’ve brought the whole ship down with him.”

Williams nodded uncertainly. “Unless we try to hand ourselves over – ask for mercy or something…”

“You’re an Alliance soldier, goddamn it!” I yelled, right into his face. I was a hair’s breadth from hitting him.

Williams squirmed beneath my gaze, but composed himself. “I was in the mess hall,” he started, “when the proximity sensor went off. Someone must’ve overridden it, because it only sounded once. I just had a hunch you’d be up here – trying to beat that record. I think Kaminski is still covering the brig. I haven’t seen the others.”

Fuck
. With Mason in the infirmary, that was a lot of distance to cover. I needed proper firepower, needed something more robust than my real skin.

“And the Warfighters?”

Williams rubbed his face. “I don’t know. The crew quarters, maybe.”

The barracks were even further away from our location.

I made a decision. “We need to get to the SOC.”

“You want to get your sim?” he asked, raising his eyebrows in a way that would be almost funny if it wasn’t obvious he was in deep shock. “What if the Directorate have control of the tanks? That sounds like a bad idea.”

“The Directorate don’t have sims,” I said. That was the age-old mantra of the Alliance military. “Or at least I hope that they don’t, because if they do we’re all in the shit.”

The elevator pinged down another level. I thought that I heard shouting outside, but my ears were still ringing with nightmare tinnitus and I couldn’t be sure.

“All right, all right, whatever you think is best.”

“Stay with it. We need to get my crew, get into the sims, and organise our defence.” The elevator came to a stop. “You still have clearance?”

Williams put his thumb to the DNA reader. “I think so.”

“I’ve been deauthorised.” The machines had been erratic before, but I was certain that I’d now been removed from the database: that someone had deliberately locked me out. “You’re going to have to get us through ship security.”

I watched as the doors peeled open. I pointed the shotgun at the corridor beyond: my finger poised over the trigger in case of incoming hostiles. As it turned out, the area was still and empty; disconcertingly quiet. Bright lights overhead, the atmosphere a reasonable temperature. As though I’d imagined that whole encounter up on the Run.

“I need a gun too,” Williams muttered, following me out of the elevator.

“That isn’t a priority right now,” I said. Armed with a projectile weapon like a shotgun in his own skin, I wasn’t sure whether he’d be a hindrance or a help. “Where’s the nearest communications station?”

“Two corridors away. I can use the reader to access—”

I held up a hand, called for silence. Williams abruptly complied.

A body lay on the floor ahead of us. A bright red splash indicated blood up the wall.

I fell into a combat-crouch. Moved up as stealthily as I could and held my breath until I was on top of the body. I nudged it with the muzzle of my shotgun.

“Oh sweet Jesus Christo…!” Williams started. “This cannot be happening, man. This cannot be happening!”

She had been a soldier. Not a turncoat – not Alliance – but a proper Directorate commando. Her helmet was gone, exposing a pale but grizzled face that was almost androgynous: hair shorn to a single strip across her scalp. Features distinctly South Asian – Korean or Chino. Clad in sleek black body-armour; segmented, like a human version of the Interceptor gunship. There was a hole punched cleanly through the commando’s gut, with pureed organs and bodily tissue inside.