The Lazarus War: Legion (4 page)

“I think the doors might hold—” Kaminski started.

He never got to finish the sentence.

The blast doors creaked, then spectacularly failed. The shuttle fell right through them as they gave way in the centre.

Kaminski scrambled to get free of the shuttle but it all happened too quickly.

Shuttle, Kaminski, any hope of evacuation from Maru Prime: all tumbled through the destroyed doors.

The ship fell side-on, nose down. Kaminski spiralled out of the hatch – waving his hands frantically, his plasma rifle falling with him – to the awaiting lava flows below. There was no way that the shuttle could be preserved, nothing that could be done.

The wave of heat from the open doors hit me like a fist. My mag-locks held me upright, on a wall that had seconds ago been a floor. Debris fell all around me, through the open hangar doors. Krell bodies, station staff – all and sundry were being sucked out.

I lost sight of his falling body and Kaminski’s vitals flatlined. I scanned the area, desperately making an assessment of what damage we had suffered, who was left.

Two staff members remained: one aura-tagged as PROFESSOR SAUL – PRIMARY ASSET. He was locked to the deck, near the entrance door. The other – a middle-aged man – staggered about on his mag-locks. He clutched towards Jenkins, reaching out desperately, arching his back.

“Please!” he screamed. “Don’t let me die!”

Jenkins was attached to a cargo anchor point on the floor. One hand wrapped around the pin, she went to grab for him with the other.

“Jesus,” she moaned, “why is nothing ever easy?”

The man managed to grasp her forearm, just as his mag-locks gave way. Jenkins lost her balance momentarily, but managed to stay attached to the anchor.

Mason was upright, locks holding, terrified behind her face-plate. She was still squeezing off pulses from her M95 into the mass of following Krell.

The fish heads had fared well in the confusion. Some clung to the ceilings, others leapt between sparse cover on the walls. Gun-grafts assembled in the distance – clambering into the station through the destroyed blast doors. Krell fire began to cover the area – stingers, boomers, shriekers. I returned fire with my rifle – sending a volley of explosive grenades across the hangar-bay doors. Xeno bodies dropped from the station in hordes but there were always more.

“Mason!” I ordered. “Cover Saul – get him back towards the entrance door.”

My comm crackled to life: “Lazarus Actual, do you read?”

“This is Actual,” I said,. “I read, but I’m busy right now.”

“Command reads your position. Team appears compromised.”

“Negative. Hostiles present. Shuttle has been lost.”

“We saw that. Suggest that you make extraction. Call it a day, Lazarus. It’s over.”

“Fuck that.”

I thought-commanded the station map onto my HUD, still firing away at the encroaching Krell. It wasn’t over; it couldn’t be. Saul was alive. There was still a chance that the mission could be redeemed.
The evac-pod.
A route to the pod lit on my map: back through the main corridor, through the living quarters.

“I can make it to the evac-pod. I can do this.”

“The station is crawling with hostiles, Lazarus.”

“Then why are we wasting time talking? I have a job to do.”

“The extraction is hot. More Krell are inbound. We’re bugging out in two minutes, tops.”

“Fuck you. Lazarus Actual out.”

Jenkins grunted beside me. She was still holding the unknown scientist, one hand locked around the man’s wrist, the other grappling with the anchor point. The civvie bashed against the deck—

Jenkins slipped again, and then she was gone.

No more ceremony than that: even in a sim, she couldn’t hold the man’s weight any longer. She spun along the deck – out of the shuttle doors, the blue-suited civvie beside her, and into the inferno below.

Mason had Saul. He was still teetering on his mag-locks, that ridiculous armoured case swinging back and forth.

A Krell stinger-spine clipped me. The round lodged in my shoulder and the impact threw me backwards. It carried a poison load – enough to kill Saul, enough to seriously injure me. My locks gave out, and I started to slide the way that Jenkins had just gone.

“Not me, you bastards!” I shouted.

I immediately let go of my rifle. Irrelevant now; staying alive was far more important. In exactly the same way as Jenkins, Martinez, everyone else I’d lost on this damned mission, I started to claw at the sky – desperate for something to grab on to.

Sim Ops taught me how to die but Special Forces taught me how to survive. I learnt my craft as a soldier during covert ops; using my environment and adapting to it. You don’t forget those skills.

I connected with the deck and grabbed at the space between floor tiles. One hand caught – by the tips of my fingers. Then the other hand caught as well. I roared with the exertion – all of my armoured weight held on my fingertips – but held tight.

“Glove mag-locks!” I roared.

The magnetic strips in my gloves were weak, not intended for use in these circumstances, but they would have to do. Anything to help me stay put.

Above me, Mason and Saul were still on their feet. Mason was shooting at the Krell – now below me.

“Not today…” I whispered to myself.

Out of the corner of my eye, the semi-translucent picture of Elena was still on my HUD.

She’s why I have to do this. She is why I can’t give up.

One hand over the other, I began to climb towards Mason and Saul. Behind them, the bay entrance door was still open – and that was a route back into the station, to the evac-pod. My gloves were fully powered and I began to dig my fingertips into the metal flooring. I made finger holds of the gaps between every tile. As I prised each one up, I moved on to the next handhold. Meanwhile Krell fire rained all around me and my bio-scanner went berserk with incoming hostiles.

“Fall back towards the door,” I ordered.

“Affirmative,” Mason said.

Her null-shield lit with sidearms fire. It was only a few steps to the bulkhead but in these conditions it seemed impossible. Mason was now bleeding, I realised, from several stinger impacts.

STATION IN TERMINAL DECLINE, my AI declared.

SHUT UP, I commed back.

As I got nearer, I heard that Saul was praying. He wept in great, chortling waves; a man afraid that he was about to meet his maker. His exact words were unclear but he sounded resigned to his fate.

Another Krell weapon hit me, dragging me back to precision of thought. My medi-suite complained that safe drug administration levels had been exceeded. I overrode those warnings, fed more endorphin and adrenaline into my system. I was going to shut down soon – crash and burn. The world had started to take on a dreamlike quality: edges blurred, everything moving in slow motion around me.

Mason lurched over Saul, protecting him from more bio-weapons fire. Her shield suddenly gave out and she disappeared under a wave of flechettes. A secondary-form, attached to the ceiling – now parallel to my position – streamed a shrieker down on her. Even in the low atmosphere, through my helmet, I could hear the weapon’s distinctive sonics: a pitched scream. A jet of super-heated flame scoured over Mason and coated her armour. The flechettes opened her up, the flame cooked her: the perfect combination of weapons.

Mason’s vitals flatlined on my HUD – no doubt, she was dead. Even so, she stood upright in her baking suit for a second or two. Her face boiled through the melted plate of her helmet; skin and bone and plastic. I was quite sure that it was a death that she would remember and the image of her standing there was something I would struggle to forget as well.

This isn’t a dream,
I contemplated.
It’s a nightmare.

Mason’s body had acted as a shield for Saul. I finally reached him and grabbed him by the arm. I hauled him alongside me. Through the door, back the way we had come.

It was dark inside the station and even emergency power had failed. My suit-lamps flickered on, threw out bright pools of light. I vaguely registered that I wasn’t carrying an active weapon, and unholstered my PPG-13 plasma pistol.

Keep going. Keep going. Command sent you here for a reason. You saw Shard material in that room! Saul might be a step nearer…

Krell were dropping into my path, through the murk and debris. I slaughtered them all: my plasma pistol laying down a precise curtain of death.

At the end of the main lounge, the objective loomed. There was writing on the wall but it was at the wrong angle. In my impaired condition, it took me a second to recognise the words.

EMERGENCY EVACUATION POD.

“Holy Gaia,” Saul cried, “please protect us through the cold voyage to the stars—”

“Shut up!” I slurred. “I’m all that’s left.”

Another round impacted my shoulder. Stingers pitted the wall around the evac-pod entrance and ricocheted around the chamber.

I reached for the pod activation controls. Bashed again and again on the door stud. The machine wasn’t made for careful or considered operation, didn’t require much to operate. With painful slowness, the doors began to open.

My lamps lit the inside of the pod and I conducted a cursory examination. It was a one-man unit with a tightly padded interior. Not exactly luxurious: no navigational controls, the aim was to evacuate the passenger from a station emergency, and to keep him or her alive long enough for a rescue party to pick them up.

“Get inside,” I said.

Saul scrambled up the deck, tossing his spent pistol into the pod. The gun hadn’t done him any good anyway. Angrily, I grabbed him by the legs and pushed him in. The case was still attached to his arm. He turned back to look at me; through his scratched and battered helmet. The comm-line had been cut between us, maybe at that moment or maybe somewhere else along the way. His mouth moved silently – forming words that looked like “thank you”.

I slammed the ACTIVATE POD control. The doors rapidly sealed.

TERMINAL DECLINE, my AI repeated.

“The station or me?” I laughed.

A stinger caught me in the leg, knocking me over a dead Krell. My lamps flashed over more bodies in the dark. There was another primary-form beside me and a gun-graft was poised on the ceiling.

From my prone position, I grinned up at them.

“Filthy xenos!” I shouted.

The primary moved off towards me. I emptied the pistol power cell – hoping to achieve nothing more than pointless butchery. The primary-form disintegrated under the hail of plasma.

The lounge had no view-ports and I couldn’t see outside. My suit was trashed – all systems failing, my entire sensor-suite off-line. There was no way for me to know whether Saul had made it off the doomed station.

I was tired. The bio-toxins were rampant throughout my system. There was nothing else to be done. The secondary-form overhead sneered at me, aiming the grafted boomer in my direction. There was a sea of Krell forming in the room now, watching.

“I’m Lazarus,” I shouted. “I always come back.”

The secondary-form opened fire.

They say that a man’s life flashes through his mind’s eye as he dies. That you consider all of your regrets, all of your mistakes. People important to you, frozen moments in time, those events that make a man who he is.

The moment of extraction – although it is not a moment at all, but rather an infinitesimal segment of time – is an interesting one. No scientist can really explain what happens to the human mind, as it extracts from a simulant body: it has to be experienced to be truly understood.

It’s like dying, because you do see those important milestones – those iconic occurrences that have shaped you – but there is also that niggling suggestion that you will have the chance to change all of this. A second shot: that things can be undone.

I only saw one face as I made extraction. Snapshots of Elena – as she’d been on Azure, before she left for the Maelstrom. It was a chance to savour those memories that I tried to keep sealed away. I had too many regrets, had made too many mistakes. They would weigh me down, hold me in the dead simulant body, if I allowed myself to dwell on them.

“I’m sorry, Elena,” I whispered through lips that didn’t even exist any more.

Then I heard it: the sound. That signal, so fragile that when I concentrated on it the sound evaporated.

The Artefact.

It was all over in a picosecond, less than that even, and my consciousness retreated across space into the waiting ship.

I woke up in the simulator-tank, aboard the
Mallard
.

My hands clawed at my shoulder – where that last secondary-form had fired a boomer into me – but it was an automatic reaction.
There’s nothing there,
I told myself.
It’s done.
I steadied myself against the plastic canopy of the tank.

There were faces out there, watching from the relative safety of the medical bay, but for a long while no one seemed to do anything. They just looked on; slack, emotionless faces.

No, not emotionless: just uncomprehending.

I blinked the wash out of my eyes, let the tank purge. With trembling fingers I plucked at the cables from each of my data-ports. The transparent tank door opened and I staggered out.

“What the fuck’s wrong with you people?” I rumbled.

My arms, legs, voice – none of it seemed willing to bend to my commands. I glared at the nearest medtech, who jumped and passed me an aluminium blanket – shot me up with a hypodermic of post-extraction recovery drugs. But then she retreated again, and stood in the same stunned silence as the rest of the room.

The Lazarus Legion were present, as well as Avis and Baker, and their respective teams. All just looking at me.

“That was…” Martinez broke the silence, shaking his head, “fucking unbelievable…”

“What are you doing standing around?” I said, uncomfortable with the attention. “There’s a war going on.”

A communicator blared in the background, broadcasting clipped Naval squawk:
“…that’s a confirm on pick-up for the evac-pod…”