The Lazarus War: Legion (5 page)

“
Solid copy. Primary asset is in the hold.
”

“
Issuing retreat order, moving off at sub-light speed.
”

“Copy that. Breaking orbit now.”

“Great work, Lazarus,” Baker added. “We were watching the whole thing, through your suit-feeds. Never seen anything like it.”

“We’ll have you people back on the
Point
within the next day or so,” the communicator bleated again, this time directed to the medical bay. “Good job.”

I just stood, trembling, shaking.

“I need a damned drink.”

We pulled out of Maru Prime. Two Alliance ships – the
Mallard
and the
Peace of Seattle
– made good the escape and left the Krell to it. The Alliance had given as good as they got, and left behind the carcasses of several Krell starships. Whatever their reason for the abrupt and brutal incursion into the QZ, the Krell didn’t pursue. Maybe they were licking their wounds, maybe biding their time; but several hours into the retreat Naval control confirmed that the Krell had bugged out of Maru Prime as well.

Astronomically speaking, Maru wasn’t far from the Alliance border with the Quarantine Zone. The journey back took less than a day, cruising at FTL speed. I was glad that we could avoid the hypersleep capsules for such a short trip.

It had been a successful operation. Saul had been picked up almost as soon as his evac-pod had been fired out of Far Eye Observatory. He’d survived the ordeal without life-threatening injury, although I had no doubt the experience would be life-changing. He’d been witness to things few Sci-Div staff had the misfortune of seeing; brushed death so closely that the bony fingers had left their mark deep on his psyche.

I considered searching him out – asking him about the subject of his research, why Far Eye had been chosen as the location of a black ops project – but dismissed the idea. I had a feeling that our allocation to the retrieval operation hadn’t been a coincidence.

Of course, not everything had gone to plan. There had been losses.

There are always losses in war, the Directorate AI tacticians would no doubt say. Victory is all that matters.

I didn’t doubt that but recognising what we’d lost was what made us human. It separated us from the Krell. The mission had cost us an Alliance warship. Likely several hundred personnel onboard; gone to the cold void. Two of the simulant teams under my command had been located on the
Washington’s Paragon
when it went down. I was sure that their families would receive comfortable compensation packages and “Dear John” letters from the Department of Off-World Affairs.

The
Mallard
had taken fire during the battle over Maru Prime, and made dry dock on arrival at FOB
Liberty Point
. My squad gathered in the umbilical tube between the
Mallard
and the
Point
’s dock.

The Far Eye operation had taken less than a week of objective time, but coming back to the
Point
always reminded me how long I’d been away on Helios. So much had changed in that time, and it wasn’t the place that I remembered. There was extensive construction work now: scaffold, welding teams, Army engineering units. The
Point
had grown to be the biggest station not only on the Quarantine Zone but in all of Alliance space. It was suspected to be the largest in all of human space, although the Directorate weren’t exactly willing to confirm that.

Soldiers and crewmen were dutifully lined up for clearance. The Sim Ops teams were dressed in Army khakis, Sci-Div in white smocks, maintenance techs in orange overalls, Navy in formal blues: all neatly separated by rank and role. Everyone had the tired air of having worked hard for a short period, and now riding the downer at the other end of a sudden adrenaline spike.

My squad had the same vacant, slightly misplaced expressions on their faces. It was a gaze that simulant operators developed over time, an implacable wrongness that a man should never feel when he is piloting the body he’s born in.

Kaminski jostled with Martinez next to me, agitated to get on base.

“Another successful operation,” Martinez said. “Another victory for the Lazarus Legion.”

“Does Mason get her badge yet?” Jenkins asked, in a disinterested sort of way.

The squad, save for Mason, had fabric badges stitched to the shoulders of their uniforms. The badges were an old Army tradition – awarded for achievements as simple as basic combat training, or more complex accomplishments like capsule-dropping or courage under fire. My original team members had a large variety of awards – topped by the Lazarus Legion badge, giving our official Alliance Army designation.

“Absolutely not,” Kaminski said. “No fucking way. She’s only got seven transitions under her belt.”

A holo-patch on the chest indicated the number of transitions each of us had made. Whilst the Alliance Army had medals and honours and everything in between, the patch was the closest thing that Sim Ops Programme had to a dedicated decoration. It was the only statistic that mattered between operators.

“So? She did good.”

“The regs are quite clear,” Kaminski continued, “and she has to prove that she’s Legion material before she gets the badge.”

“Fuck off, Kaminski,” Mason said.

She cocked her head in his direction. She was a good deal smaller than the rest of the group, and stood rubbing her elbows, arms crossed over her chest. Her platinum-blonde hair was tied up behind her head, making her neck look painfully slender.

“She knows how to handle you already, ’Ski,” I said. “And I thought I was Lazarus? Why are you the one making up all the rules?”

“Look, we can’t have every wet-behind-the-ears, greener-than-puke, freshest recruit, claiming that they’re Lazarus Legion. Take the guy before her – what was his name?”

“Omar,” Jenkins said. “He was nice.”

“Yeah, well nice doesn’t cut it with the Legion. How long’d he last?”

“He managed two ops,” Mason said. “I read all about him. He dropped out.”

“Couldn’t keep up with the A-game,” Kaminski said. “So you have to prove you’re good enough.”

I said nothing. It was just a bit of fun; something to keep Kaminski engaged between operations. Although she’d done a good job on Maru Prime, in truth I wasn’t sure whether Mason was Legion material either. She had the makings of a decent trooper but I’d been there. I wanted to make sure she was stable enough to stay on the team before I made her permanent.

“We did show them our A-game,
mano
,” Martinez said, shaking his head. “But I got questions.”

“Such as?” I asked. Although I was tired, the circumstances of the last mission didn’t sit easy with me.

“Like why do the Krell keep coming into the QZ?” Martinez said. “Since we got back from Helios, we’ve been there too often. The QZ isn’t exactly quarantined any more.”

“I’m quite sure that Command know exactly what they’re doing,” Jenkins said, adopting her most cynical tone of voice. “And that grunts like us shouldn’t ask questions.”

“Well, it’s good to be back,” Kaminski said to the group at large. “Nothing like recycled air and bad beer.”

The docking doors chimed and the tube opened to
Liberty Point
. I gathered up my duty gear in a canvas bag and stalked down the ramp. The air felt and tasted familiar, more metallic than that on the
Mallard
. There was a slight gravitational shift as well: just enough to let me know that I’d stepped between artificial gravity wells.

“Do you ever hear from Tyler?” Jenkins said.

Jenna Tyler was the sole civilian survivor from Helios. She’d been gone for months; back Corewards after our debrief, to be settled somewhere nice and quiet, with a decent severance package, where neither the media nor the Directorate could get to her.

“She went to Alpha Centauri, I think,” Kaminski said. “For a civvie, she was okay.”

I fell in step beside Martinez, cricked my neck painfully. I didn’t yet feel completely at ease in my own skin. Each breath was alien, each heartbeat foreign. I knew that it would get better with time, but the acclimatisation back into my real body was unpleasant.

“You okay there,
jefe
?” Martinez asked, under his breath. The rest of the team were moving off ahead of us; maybe Martinez was trying to talk to me without them overhearing.

“As I ever am,” I said, quietly.

Martinez gave a gentle nod. “Maybe that extraction, you know, jarred you or something?”

“Maybe.”

Martinez didn’t quite have it right, I decided. It wasn’t the extractions that were getting worse; it was the transition into my real body. The sense of not belonging in my own skin was increasing.

“It’s been getting worse since Helios. What about you?”

“Helios changed everything,” Martinez said, pulling a concerned face but at the same time trying to keep our conversation private among a sea of people. “No shame in admitting that. You still having the dreams?”

I sighed. “Sometimes.”

“Go see the medtechs. They might be able to give you something.”

“Think I’ll do that.”

We were greeted by a fleet of security drones, and the conversation was over. These were bigger than the combat models we had used back on Maru Prime – tasked with checking biometrics and immigration status.

“Please remain still while your Alliance citizenship is confirmed,” bleated the nearest drone. “Please remain still while…”

The human flood mostly ignored them and we were no different. They did their best, weaving between bodies and lighting up exposed skin with data-sensors, but it was a losing war. I caught sight of a couple of familiar faces in the crowd. I’d been seeing them a lot, recently. Before I could make any enquiry, the faces were gone: swept along with the tide.

On aching legs I stumbled back to my quarters.

After my promotion to major, I’d been assigned a new cabin. That sounded grander than it really was: my original quarters had been reassigned while I was on Helios. Someone in Logistics had decided that I was probably KIA, that Command would shortly reach the same conclusion, and that my old quarters should be reallocated. It wasn’t a big deal – I hadn’t been particularly attached to the room – but it was another change, another indication that while I had remained the same the rest of the universe had moved on.

I swiped my palm on the entry scanner and the AI chirped: “Welcome home, Major Harris.”

The lights inside the suite were dimmed, and that subtle smell of sweat and used clothing crept into the back of my throat. Told me that there was someone else in my quarters. I dropped my bag to the floor, walked straight through to the tiny washroom. The harsh electric lighting flickered on, tracking my movements. I had three interconnecting rooms, and from the main bedroom there came the crackle of a tri-D viewer: the jangle of a commercial news-feed.

“
Today marks the sixteenth day of hostilities on the Rim – and the possible reignition of armed conflict between Alliance and Directorate forces
…”

“Harris?” a female voice called, from the room.

I watched my own ageing reflection in the mirror over the sink. The damned mirror that I’d told her to get rid of—

“
…President Francis, speaking from Olympus City, Mars
…”

“That you?”

I closed my eyes. For just a moment, I could imagine that it was her: that the speaker was Elena. It was a sublime self-delusion.

Maybe that’s the lie that I’m trying to live?

“
…We will not be cowed. I am in direct communication with Director-General Zhang, and I will not allow the compromising of Alliance interests
…”

“It’s me,” I eventually answered.

A shadow padded up behind me, the gentle slap of bare feet on the tiled flooring.

“
Is he the man for the job? It’s an interesting question. Some commentators have suggested that Francis is too old, been in-seat for too long. His empty threats have been ignored before, after all
…”

The news-feed snapped off in the background.

When I turned around, there was no one there at all.

Just a figment of my imagination.

I activated the tap. Splashed cold water over my face, allowed it to drip onto my uniform.

 “I can tell you the story again, if you’d like,” Dr Viscarri said, shaking his head. “I was the first man to examine you when you got back from that damned mission…I’ll dine out on that story for years.”

I was in the
Point
medical bay; a special wing dedicated to monitoring and certifying Simulant Operations crews. Such a familiar setting: the beige walls, tired metal bunks, exhausted medical teams. Viscarri sat on a stool opposite me, completing the assessment. Most tests were done remotely via the subdermal chip in my neck but some assessments like bloodwork were still conducted manually. Viscarri had done most of those. His diagnostic kit was on a table between us.

“I couldn’t believe it was really you,” he said. “We all thought that the mission had gone wrong, that you’d been killed in the Maelstrom…”

“It was supposed to be classified.”

“You think ‘classified’ means anything to an old man like me? I have my methods, Harris.”

Viscarri chuckled to himself. The doctor was a senior medico, white coat straining against a frame grown flabby over the years. He shook his head a lot, which made his sagging neck shake. Viscarri was the lead medical examiner for the Sim Ops Programme. Something of a
Point
fixture, he’d held the job for as many years as I could remember. That said, he was genuine enough: knew a lot about me, had been my assessor before and after the Helios mission.

“My blood all good?” I asked, eager to get this over and done with.

Viscarri was more interested in retelling the story of my return – as some
Point
commentators had termed it, my “resurrection”.

“When I first examined you,” he said, reading now from a data-slate he had perched on his knees, “you had a recently healed injury to your right thigh – possible deep tissue infection, although an inexpert attempt to remove that seemed to have been made. You had multiple rib fractures to the right of your cage. You’d a gunshot injury to the right shoulder, causing damage to your collarbone.” He paused, sighed. “The things you soldiers do to yourselves. Let’s not even get started on your face: the broken bones and nose.”

“I didn’t do anything to myself. I had some help.”