The Lazarus War: Legion (7 page)

“Psst!” came the voice. “You want to see something cool?”

I was in my bed.

The apartment had three rooms: the bedroom that my mother and father had shared, in the little time they lived together as a couple; the combination kitchen-diner-lounge; the room that I shared with my sister. The whole tenement had that same smell – not specific, just the scent of decades-old decay – and our apartment was no different. The smell of too many animals living together, huddling in too close a space.

Except that these animals were human.

We were lucky, my mother used to say. There were plenty out there with even less.

It had been a few months since she’d died.

Carrie leant over me, on the edge of my bed. Her scraggly blonde hair escaped all over the place: big and unkempt. She never bothered to wash it.

She was – what? – maybe eleven.

Which made me eight, Earth-standard. Terms like subjective and objective ageing meant nothing to me, because I’d never left Earth. So, eight years was eight years – but at that age, nearly nine was better. Which made Carrie my older sister.

I bolted up in bed. The window was open, broken shutters allowing in the milky early-morning light. I was dressed in last night’s clothes – my school jumpsuit, though I hadn’t actually attended the local education centre in over a month.
There’s nothing they can teach me there that I don’t already know,
a voice – the voice of my eight-year-old psyche – told me.

“What’s up with you, Con?” Carrie asked. “You been at the meth again? Jonathan will have you if he finds it.”

Jonathan Harris. My father. Carrie always called him by his first name, mostly because it irritated him. The more he complained about it, the more she did it.

I shook myself awake. “All good. And you know I don’t do that shit.”

“Hmm. You look kind of sick?” Carrie said, tilting her head. She had the annoying habit of raising her voice at the end of a statement, so that everything she said sounded like a question.

“I’m good. Honest.”

“Don’t worry; Jonathan’s been drinking again.” She slung a thumb towards the broken door to our bedroom. “He’s in the lounge.”

I nodded. I’d seen that too many times before to bother going to investigate.

Carrie zipped up her jumpsuit. The same deep blue as mine, except that the edu-centre badge had been torn off the sleeve. Whether she’d done it herself, or one of the other children on the block was responsible, I couldn’t remember. She had become an easy target for bullies.

“What the fuck is up with you, Conrad?” Carrie asked again, pushing her face right into mine. “You want to see something cool, or not?”

“Okay. I want to see something cool.”

Our apartment was on the twenty-eighth floor, overlooking the mass conurbation that had become known as Detroit Metropolis. When I’d bothered attending school, I’d learnt that in earlier times this whole region had been known by a different name – that the Metro had once been regarded as an affluent area of Detroit and Michigan. Right now, that seemed hard to believe. We darted through the tenement communal hall, past the jeering street prostitutes and drug-pushers. Even though we were kids, they’d harass anyone: easier to keep your head down and get past them. Carrie led the way. Out into the bombed-out main plaza, the communal area between three apartment blocks.

It wasn’t long past nine in the morning but it was hot. The air carried the promise of another muggy July day. The sun was still a brittle haze in the sky, burning off low cloud cover. Where the clouds were thinnest, where the sky was a dirty blue colour, it was just possible to make out a fine black matrix. I put my hand to my forehead, squinted to make out the detail.

The Skyshield.

An orbital defence network – the answer to the Asiatic Directorate hostilities. The metal framework was in reality a collection of satellites gliding overhead in loose formation, in low orbit.

“Hey, Con!” someone shouted from across the plaza.

A man shuffled through the crumbling remains of a dried-up water fountain, a communal feature that the municipal authorities had long since turned off. His age was indeterminate, to me at least, but he was indisputably ancient: bony shoulders poking against a worn green T-shirt, skin like torched parchment. He pushed a shopping cart filled to the brim with papers and magazines, old bottles and rags, that produced an uncomfortably loud scraping noise as it moved.

“Hey, Con!” Joel called again, with a genuine smile. “It’s gonna be a hot one. A real Detroit summer.”

That had become a joke among the city folk: a Detroit summer. Carrie waited at the edge of the plaza, looking back – encouraging me to hurry up.

“When is it not a Detroit summer?” I asked. That was the punchline, apparently: I’d heard the joke, didn’t really understand the meaning.

“We get promised a nuclear winter,” Joel went on, waving his hands at the sky, “but that doesn’t seem to have cooled things off much.”

I was only eight. I didn’t recognise that sort of terminology. But I understood well enough the pictures on the newscasts and vid-feeds: the graphic images of New York under fire. The buildings, the emergency vehicles, the politicians and scientists demanding retribution.

“Let’s hope that this fucking Skyshield keeps us safe,” Joel added.

Of course, I knew that it hadn’t worked; had only made the whole ugly war go underground. All it did was force both sides to change their tactics. Instead of dropping bombs from the sky, they’d turned to dirty bombs, sleeper agents, attacks on civilians.

“Come on!” Carrie shouted. “Leave Joel to it.”

I waved Joel off and followed Carrie down to the highway.

We took a shortcut through an abandoned factory. The name MACMILLAN-FORDSWELL MANUFACTURING was printed in fading letters on a signpost out front. Story went it used to produce ground cars but I hadn’t seen many of those without armoured plating in recent history, and the factory didn’t look capable of making the sort of vehicles I saw on the streets. The windows had been stolen and there were holes in the walls. None of the factories here were operational any more: anything of value was produced off-world – Mars, Alpha Centauri, Epsilon Eridani – or on the orbital nano-factories.

“You’re slow as fuck today,” Carrie said.

“Leave it.”

She led us down to the riverside. That was what the local children called it: the riverside. It was really a storm drain. Now parched dry, it gave easy access to the sewer system.

That was where Carrie was headed. She picked her way down the bank of the storm drain, clutching the dry concrete side with dirty fingers. I followed her – smaller, more nimble. We reached the basin at the same time.

“Too slow!” I gabbled at her.

Carrie tutted. “Not like you know where we’re going, anyway?”

“Show me then.”

She pointed at one of the run-off drains set into the side of the basin: a big black rectangle. A little taller than me, probably protected by a door or gate that had been torn off at some point. A corrugated rusty tin roof – a makeshift porch – sat crooked over the entrance.

Carrie stooped to get into the drain. Her uncontrolled hair clipped the frame as she went.

“Come on.”

I stopped at the entrance. I could smell the scent of real, present rot: that malodorous spoor. Clinging to the back of my throat. I knew that whatever had died in that storm drain was bigger than a rat or a wild cat – was big enough to give off a pungent wave of decay. Even old Joel’s smell was a preferable alternative.

On automatic, I followed Carrie into the dark.

There was a body inside.

The drain entrance led to a tiny chamber, not much bigger than the body itself, lined with further drains. A filthy fabric shoulder bag lay in one corner, the remains of a small fire in another. The place likely smelled bad at the best of times but the odour of death was undeniably coming from the corpse.

The body was on its front, face concealed, and dressed in a black costume. Good-quality boots, I noticed. The flesh beneath strained at the outfit; had bloated through exposure to the elements. I could see one bare hand poking from the sleeve of a black fatigue cuff.

I’d never seen a dead body before. There was some significance that this man wasn’t coming back and it was paralysing; more impactive than the smell and the press of the sewer walls.

Carrie knelt down beside the body. She didn’t seem frightened by him – by it. She grinned up at me.

“You’ll like this.”

She attempted to shift the body, with obvious difficulty. When she couldn’t do it on the second try, she scowled at me.

“Come on, Connie. Get the other shoulder. We have to turn him over.”

I didn’t want to. I shook my head, mute.

“He’s like Jonathan,” Carrie said. “A soldier.”

On automatic again: frightened at eight years old that she would tell someone else about my fear of the corpse. So I went to the other shoulder, careful not to brush my jumpsuit against the mouldering walls, and in unison we turned the body over. In life the man might’ve been small and compact but in death he had become heavy and swollen.

Carrie was right: he had been a soldier. He wore fatigues, of a type even I recognised. Directorate People’s Army. A winged emblem had been sown onto the lapel of his blouse. Carrie reached for that, tugging at it.

“Might be worth something,” she said.

When it wouldn’t come free, she moved on to rifling through his pockets. He was carrying a unicard and a couple of scrunched-up twenty-dollar notes. Some more money that we didn’t recognise.

“Don’t,” I said. My voice faltered. “You’ll get into trouble. We…we should tell someone about this.”

“Why?”

“It’s serious.”

Carrie rubbed the notes between her fingers, like she was testing whether they were real.

“Won’t get us a fucking packet of smokes, let alone a ticket out of this joint,” she said, shaking her head. Again, adult language that she didn’t understand how to use: parroting back what she’d heard older children saying.

“Maybe soldiers don’t earn much,” I whispered. Stayed a respectful distance from the body, eager not to disturb it any more than we already had. “Dad doesn’t earn much.”

“Jonathan is an asshole,” Carrie said. “That’s why he doesn’t earn much.”

The soldier’s face was big and white. He’d been dead for a while. Days out in the storm drain. I couldn’t see how he’d died. Maybe flu or something viral. Maybe a shot from some backstreet pusher. The eyes were wide open, lids peeled back: so dry that they hurt to look at. The expression was sad and lonely.

“He’s a damned bad guy all right,” Carrie said, hands on hips. “We should burn him.”

“How do you know that he’s bad?”

“Look at his uniform! They all wear them. Black uniform, bad guy. They killed Mom.”

“You – you don’t know that,” I said. The futility of my argument was obvious: the Directorate had killed my mother. But I couldn’t muster much animosity towards this pathetic thing in the drain. “Doesn’t mean that
he
did it. He might’ve been different.”

“They killed her,” Carrie repeated. “The Chino. This one is probably a deserter.”

“Maybe he didn’t want to go to war.”

“That makes him even worse.” Carrie kicked the corpse. “Fucking coward. Won’t fight. My old man has to go to war, and you get to stay in this drain?”

“Don’t do that, Carrie,” I said. Then reiterated, impotently: “We should tell somebody.”

“This one is a scumbag. Probably wants independence for Mars and all that shit. Help me drag him out of here. We should definitely burn him.”

“Please don’t.”

“You’ve got to toughen up, Con. This sucker would kill you in a heartbeat.”

“He’s dead.”

Carrie shook her head in disgust. “He killed Mom, and you don’t even have the guts to burn him.”

Outside, it had started to rain. The droplets made a distinctive sound as they hit the tin porch roof: pitter patter, pitter patter.

With the dream about Carrie so fresh that I could almost smell the storm drain, I woke early the next morning. Much earlier than I needed to. I’d only had a couple of hours’ sleep but that didn’t matter. I languished in the shower unit. The hot water was refreshing; one of the few luxuries that I missed while I was in the field. As a major, I got subsidised water and heat rates: I made the most of both.

I felt the scars on my torso; those reminders left from my time on Helios. The skin was still puckered and white in places – keloid scars, tissue grown proud – although the pain had faded. I only really felt that in my leg, and only if I thought about it.

With a careful precision that belayed my fraught nerves, I arranged my smart-suit uniform and got dressed.

By the time I’d finished with my preparations, I looked halfway respectable: a reasonable facsimile of a military officer.

The chamber AI chimed just before oh-seven-forty-five.

Captain Ostrow waited outside, Lieutenant Pieter just behind him. Both wore dark glasses but otherwise appeared unchanged.

“Good morning, sir,” Ostrow said, saluting briskly.

“I hope so.”

“If you’d like to come with us, we have a mule waiting.”

Pieter drove and Ostrow sat in the back with me. The mule was a basic anti-grav buggy, used to ferry material and personnel around the
Point
when the public transport system wasn’t appropriate. Lieutenant Pieter regularly sounded the electric horn to scatter soldiers and sailors out of our path. I tried to ignore the flight of sky-drones that followed us across the station.
It’s in your head,
I insisted. Whatever the truth was, the drones peeled off shortly after we left the officers’ quarters.

“Where are we headed?” I asked.

“The general hasn’t declared his attendance on-station,” Ostrow said. “He wants to meet in a neutral environment.”

“Which is where?”

“Tactical Command Centre.”

“So he thinks we’re enemies?”

“Right now, everyone is an enemy.”

The mule pulled into the Command deck and Pieter leant back in his seat. “You’ve been away from the
Point
for a while, haven’t you?”

“You’ve read my file.”

Pieter smiled. The expression was painfully practised. “I don’t mean to pry. I just wanted to offer some advice.”

“Go on,” I said, curious.

“General Cole is different now,” the officer said. “Since the accident.”

“I heard,” I said. It was public knowledge.

Security troops approached the mule, before we had a chance to finish the conversation.

“You go straight through, sir,” the captain said to me. “When you’re done, we’ll be waiting here.”

The elevator doors slid open and I walked out into the Tactical Command Centre. I was anxious, and fought to control my heart rate.

Two voices vied for dominance.

Don’t overthink this: it’s probably nothing.

No, this has to be something.

The Command deck was located on the outermost ring of the
Point
. Maybe that was deliberate: beyond the observation windows, the Maelstrom glittered garishly – a sparkling reminder that the Krell were still out there, across the gulf of space. Inside, the deck was filled with holo-displays and working command consoles. Officers of every stripe crammed the space. The business of coordinating the Alliance Army, Navy and Aerospace Force elements was not an easy one: requiring the presence of almost every nationality united under the Alliance banner.

A young male officer peeled off from the mass of personnel and saluted me.

“This way, Major. General Cole is waiting for you.”

We walked a metal gantry, over the heads of the staff below, and into a discrete sub-chamber.

“A spy booth,” I said. “Very clichéd.”

The military aide said nothing but as we went inside the noise levels immediately dropped. There was a pitched hum and a box on the wall above the door flashed with green lights. The ultrasonic vibe in the air denoted that the anti-surveillance field was in effect. The aide retreated, the door sliding shut behind him, and two Military Police privates took up position beyond the transparent door.

General Mohammed Cole stood in the middle of the room; one hand resting on the corner of a hololithic display table, the other propped on a walking stick. As I entered, his face seemed to brighten a little, and he shuffled to greet me. He was dressed in a blue and gold-rimmed, near ceremonial, officer’s uniform. It hung off his frame. I tried not to make it obvious that I was surprised by his presentation. I hadn’t seen him since he’d briefed me on Helios, but time hadn’t been kind to Cole. His dark hair had almost fully greyed – it off-set peculiarly against his coffee skin – and he’d lost a lot of weight.
He’s finally earned his moniker “Old Man Cole”
, I thought. There was more to his ageing than natural atrophy: even the dynamics of time-dilation couldn’t explain his appearance.

“Sir,” I said, abruptly saluting.

“Morning, Major Harris. As you were.”

A surveillance drone hovered at Cole’s shoulder; kept a respectful distance.

“Permission to speak freely.”

“Always.”

“I’d like to relay my condolences for what happened.”

Cole gave a tight-lipped nod. I certainly didn’t begrudge him his aged appearance: he’d survived an assassination attempt on Epsilon Ventris II.
People die on Ventris II,
I thought.
Even those that don’t deserve it.
The Directorate had claimed responsibility for the incident – an orbital launch on an Alliance military station – that had cost five hundred lives.

Cole had survived.

His wife and children hadn’t been so lucky.

“Fucking Directorate,” Cole muttered. “Happened while you were away. We’re going to shift some personnel in that direction, make sure that the Directorate knows that Ventris II is Alliance true and through.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Can’t go anywhere without these damned things now,” Cole said, waving his stick at the drone. “I’m a class-one political target, apparently. I’m not quite sure what a drone would do if I was attacked, except record my death for posterity.”

I nodded. This explained Cole’s secretive arrival on the
Point
; his decision to take an unscheduled shuttle, to keep this
sub rosa
.

There were two other personnel in the chamber. Cole pointed them out in turn.

“This is Admiral Joseph Loeb, of the Alliance Navy.”

I took the man in for a moment. Older; mid-sixties Earth-standard. Dressed in immaculate Navy blues, he was freakishly thin but barrel-chested, as through his proportions had grown all wrong. I’d seen the body-type before. It was caused by long periods in micro-G, back before they’d made the gravity generators so reliable. The exposure to reduced grav caused variation to the skeletal and muscular structure – made the human body all screwed up. It immediately marked Loeb as one of the old guard; as a long-term sailor.

“Major,” he grunted.

“You already know Professor Saul.”

Saul gave a tight smile. He was dressed in civilian clothes: grey slacks and a crumpled shirt. His glasses rainbowed with colour, that one white eye staring blankly at the info-feed. A heavy gold pendant hung around his neck.

“Earth’s praises be upon you, Major Harris,” he said. “I wanted to see you as soon as I felt well enough. My thanks to you for your efforts back at Maru Prime.”

Cole rapped his walking stick on the metal-plated floor, giving Saul a sharp look. “Let’s get down to business.”

All parties were gathered around the tactical display. It showed a variety of different images and read-outs. Cole manipulated the controls and an image of familiar space spread out to fill the table.

“You probably recognise this as the QZ,” he said, waving at the hologram. Several markers appeared on the graphic; all clearly inside the Zone. “These are the locations of recent Krell–Alliance engagements.”

Statistics on each engagement floated alongside the markers and I recognised a few of the names. Most recently there was Maru Prime, but there were other sites of interest as well. Naval engagements, the occupation of certain star systems. The QZ didn’t look good.

“Have the Krell reneged on the Treaty?” I asked.

“Not formally,” Saul said, “but then again they’ve never formally recognised it either.”

“Then why the change in behaviour?”

“It’s impossible to quantify the reasons for these interactions,” he said. “Some of my associates feel that Helios is the primary aggravating feature, but I’m not so sure.”

The display shifted again, showing a much wider tranche of space: the QZ, the border with Alliance territory, the Maelstrom.

“This is only a projection, and considering the erratic movements that we have witnessed so far, it is difficult to place much weight on the prediction,” Cole said, “but we anticipate that within the next two objective years, the QZ will collapse.”

That prediction hung in the air for a moment. The display animated, showing movement of large Krell Collectives through the Zone, directly butting up against
Liberty Point
. The other associated, more minor, FOBs – “forward operating bases” – faced a similar fate. War-fleets spilled into human space, both Alliance and Directorate.

“With all due respect, sir,” I started, “what do you expect me to do about this? I went into the Maelstrom as ordered. I’ve sat through numerous military psych-evals, and I’ve given you all the detail that I can—”

“This isn’t a blame game, Harris,” Cole said gruffly. “I want to show you what’s at stake here. I’m losing men out there – real and simulated. We’re adopting a change in policy. The discovery of the Key – your discovery – has changed our approach.”

He manipulated the controls again and the star-map was replaced with a graphic of wider space.
The Key’s star-data.
The graphic displayed a broad overview of the Maelstrom, of Krell Space. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of star systems within that glittering eye. Just as many black holes, pulsars and quasars: a churning mass of live space. I noticed that Admiral Loeb – who had so far been still throughout the briefing – visibly flinched at the image. Navigation through the shifting time-space of the Maelstrom was every captain’s worst nightmare.

But this image was different. An overlay appeared; a spider web of calm white light superimposed over the Maelstrom. Like a net, taming the ferocious beast.

“This is the result of our research into the Key,” Saul said. “We’ve discovered, and safely tested, a number of Q-jump points throughout the Maelstrom.”

This had been Dr Kellerman’s dream. A network of operational Q-jumps, taking human ships into the Maelstrom and beyond.

“It’s time that you had some answers,” Cole said. “I certified your most recent mission into the Quarantine Zone because we couldn’t afford to lose Professor Saul. He is a significant asset, and he has primary experience of several Shard sites. Far Eye was a deep listening post. We were tracking another potential objective.”

“Another Artefact?” I asked.

“Yes,” Saul said. “I’m almost certain that I’ve found another Shard Artefact.”

“We’re calling this Operation Portent,” Cole said. “And I want you to have full disclosure. You’ll know everything that we know.”

“Far Eye wasn’t an observatory in the traditional sense,” Saul continued. “For the last three months, we have been searching for something inside the Maelstrom. Using the star-data, downloaded from the Key.”

Saul pointed to a holographic representation of stamps. The astrocartography I’d seen him with back on Far Eye. Those maps had been so important to him that he’d risked his life to retrieve them from the lab. Holos of the Key flitted over the display: scrawled with imagery – somehow both crude and highly advanced. Ancient circuit-prints, finely detailed.

“The data from the Key suggests the presence of another device,” Saul said, leaning into the display. “Another Artefact.”

“And that was what you were listening for?” I said.

“Exactly,” Saul said. “But this Artefact isn’t transmitting.”

Thirteen indicators showed the locations of Shard sites. The most familiar to me was Helios III, caught in the orbit of Helios Primary and Secondary. The other locations were spread far and wide across the QZ and to the best of my knowledge I hadn’t been to any of them.

“Where is the new Artefact?” I asked.

The tactical display shifted again. A close-scan area of space that I didn’t recognise at all. I got the impression that this was an area that I didn’t want to recognise. The reaction was immediate and overwhelming.

“Welcome to the Damascus Rift,” Saul said.

A collection of blue stars – ancient and cold – circled the phenomena. They threw dying light across a series of sterile grey planets, trapped in a death-dance with the Rift. Moon-sized pieces of debris tumbled through the schematic.

Then there was the Rift itself.

A fissure in time-space; one of so many stellar phenomena found in the Maelstrom that human science was unable to classify properly, let alone understand. It shimmered with balefire, brighter than the stars that circled it. The debris in near-space gave the impression that it was being gently pulled into the Rift, and, on a glacial scale, that was exactly what was happening. Those stars, those worlds and moon-fields: over the millennia all would be claimed by the Rift’s insatiable hunger.

Space is collapsing in on itself.

Cole went on: “Professor Saul thinks that he has a basic understanding of the linguistics used by the Shard. He can translate, broadly speaking.”

“The Key suggests that another Shard Artefact is located within this sector,” Saul explained. “It’s largely wilderness space, unexplored to any degree. The logistics of moving a fleet into such a perilous area would ordinarily be insurmountable, but the Key changed all of that.”