Origins (25 page)

Jenkins ran to it, reaching the door just in time. The hatch pneumatic gears roared in protest as she caught the lower lip. She grunted over the comm-link, obviously struggling with the weight of the panel even with the improved strength-aug.

“Give me a hand with this!” she shouted at James.

James did his best, but his contribution was minimal. The door panel hovered off the ground. Both sims laboured with the task.

“Under!” Jenkins said through gritted teeth. “Now!”

I crouched beneath the door. Slid Elena's capsule under – metal clanging against the deck – and began to crawl through. The panel above me jumped erratically, eager to come down. I barely managed to get under; caught a glimpse of Elena's calm face inside the tank—

“Incoming!” James yelled.

There was activity on James' side of the door, and part of the ceiling collapsed. James went down fast and easy – no armour, soft pickings for the Krell. He disappeared beneath the alien horde, firing random plasma pulses into anything that moved.
Back
, the voice whispered to me in jeering tones,
to his twisted corpse of a body aboard your doomed ship.

“Go!” Jenkins roared at Martinez.

The Venusian didn't need to be told twice. As he cleared the distance, the door's protest changed pitch, slamming down another half-metre. Jenkins let out a low animal shout.

“Jenkins!” I said. “We'll hold the door!”

Martinez and I went to grapple with the lower edge of the panel. Jenkins slid through to her waist.

“Hold it steady!” she yelled.

“We're trying,” Martinez said.

The door bucked and slid further to the floor. I roared, felt the strength-amp working in my battle-suit. It was no good: the door was too heavy. Something grabbed Jenkins on the other side of the door and pulled her back by the lower half. She let out an agonised scream. Despite our efforts, the door panel slipped through my hands and slammed down: sliced right through Jenkins' armour, then her simulated body. I looked sideways at Martinez. He grimaced solemnly.

The door panel hit the floor with an enormous boom, almost loud enough to cut off Jenkins' scream. She was cut cleanly in half at the waist: simulated entrails and gene-factored blood smudged against the lower side of the door, guillotined. Simulants were made of tougher stuff than hardcopy humans, and she wasn't dead. Not yet, but the Krell would see to that: their bodies slammed against the other side of the door, angered by the obstacle. They'd only acquired half their prize and they wanted the rest.

“Get out of here!” Jenkins ordered, scrabbling onto her stomach to haul herself upright. She was spilling guts and blood across the floor, would be gone in seconds. “I'll hold them!”

I nodded. “Solid. Martinez, on me.”

Krell just
appeared
in front of us, lurching out of the gas clouds and steam emissions, claws and talons outstretched to take us down.

“It's this way,” Martinez said, waving towards the next junction. “Docking tube is through the atrium—”

We had emerged into the open atrium, the concourse that someone back in the Core had decided would look good with a ceiling composed of armour-glass. Krell emerged from every open corridor, flooding the area: as though Martinez and I had walked into a chokepoint—

Space outside was filled with debris; the flickering glow of exploding warheads, energy beams igniting, and every other weapon of war that the Alliance and Krell had devised to kill one another.

From somewhere behind us, a secondary-form began to fill the area with stinger-fire. Mostly, the rounds bounced off my armour-plate, but some got through: I felt the death-kiss of poisoned flechettes across my shoulder blades. The toxin hit me immediately – sent the world around me spinning like I'd downed a bottle of Martian spirits.
Shit. Storemberg was right: they're getting better at this.
The venom was pure and fast-acting, more effective than any Krell bio-compound I'd felt so far.

Somewhere beside me, Martinez went down. He lashed out with both arms, a flurry of wild retribution, crushing Krell bodies beneath his armoured weight. I was vaguely aware that my HUD had started to stream messages from Mason and Kaminski. Any hope I felt at that was quickly quashed: they had both extracted, swarmed by Krell on their way back through Data.

I began to slow. I stumbled, gasped with the pain. Elena's capsule slipped, collided with a wall.

Not her!
I screamed.
Not like this. Not when I'm so close.

Loeb was shouting over the comm-link, demanding an update. Ordering the bridge to
initiate maximum fucking thrust and get us the hell away from here…

My simulated body was shutting down. Something big and heavy landed on my back, and I felt the slash of claws through my armour. From the mass of the attacker, it had to be a tertiary-form – rendered even more lethal by my incapacitated state. Sympathetically, another module aboard the
Endeavour
exploded behind me, showering surrounding space with frag, crumpling the deck-plates beneath me. I slammed by back to a wall: felt the weight of the tertiary-form leave me, as the fish-head was plastered across the surface. Kept moving –

Something enormous and thorn-covered and lethal smashed into me. I grappled with the xeno –
just fucking die! –
and it violently thrashed, unwilling to abandon its dedication to the Collective. I jammed my rifle into the thing's face; fired again and again. Dead or maimed, it stopped moving. Good enough, but the rifle was empty. It was useless now, anyway. Nothing mattered unless I got Elena off this damned ship.

Her capsule was under my arm again, and I was moving towards the docking tube. My medi-suite was flooding my body with drugs, counterattacking a hundred injuries that I hadn't even realised I'd suffered. Warnings of suit breaches, impending power loss, imminent extraction, all scrolled across my HUD.

Elena's eyes were still shut, but she spoke to me. She drove me on.

You can't die out here
, she said.

“I can,” I said, “and I will: but I can't let
you
.”

Everything became a blur.

Maybe it was the combination of drugs that my suit had administered, some added feature of the Ares armour, or perhaps my simulant was fighting off the Krell toxin. The truth didn't matter: only that I could suddenly operate again, that was all that I cared about.

The universe had slowed down, and I was moving faster than light.

I ran for the docking tube. Faster and faster. The suit was doing the work, the leg attenuators pumping.
If I died in the suit
, I wondered,
would it simply keep running?

The Krell were just behind me.

The
Endeavour
's airlock doors were open, and the
Colossus
awaited—

The docking tube began to warp. The deck rippled.

The
Colossus
was moving off. More of the
Endeavour
had broken up; I saw the reflected glow of muted explosions cast against the
Colossus
' hull. A Krell bio-ship spiralled past me, caught by one of the
Colossus
' counter-measures: a small victory amid the sea of defeat. Stingrays and Needlers flitted by, breacher-pods slashing space.

The Marines were at the end of the tube. Fingers on triggers of their laser carbines: panic in their hardcopy eyes.

I found my voice. “Hold the airlock!” I shouted over the open comm-network. “Get this capsule inside!”

The docking tube collapsed around me. The floor gave way, and the walls fell in. Instinctively, I grappled for something – desperate to remain upright – but that was a hopeless goal. Atmosphere began to suck from the tube, venting into space. Worse yet, I felt clawed feet on my back, my shoulders. Krell: scrabbling over me, clambering up the tube. The Marines began to fire – ruby lances flashing by, hitting tertiary- and primary-forms – but they were too few in number to do any good.

From the corner of my eye, I saw the
Colossus
' thruster engines fire. Blue against the black.

Fuck. I wasn't going to make it—

I had the capsule in both hands, ready to propel it. Elena had slept through it all—

I reached out, threw it towards the
Colossus
' open lock in a single underarm sweep. The muscles in my simulated arms screamed, flooded as they were with bio-toxin.

The capsule – so, so fragile – sailed through zero-G. Onwards towards the open airlock in the
Colossus
' hull. The Marines were ready to receive it—

With spinning vision, I saw the
Colossus
' outer airlock door beginning to cycle shut.

“Do you have her?” I shouted over the comm. “Report!”

The network was a wash of barked orders.

Krell scrabbled through the vacuum, lurching for me.

In dizzying, sickening zero-G, I saw the
Endeavour
and the
Colossus
side by side; surrounded by Krell bio-ships, opening up with everything they had.

Then the tether between the human ships was broken, trailing alongside the enormous bulk of the
Colossus
. I slammed my left arm against one of the now-loose deck-plates. Felt armour and bone crack – agony shooting through that limb. The pain was shut down almost instantly by my combat-suit, but it was an irrelevant if merciful reaction.

I already knew that I was gone.

I cartwheeled out into space, joined by a mass of dead and dying Krell…

… a string of blue lights drew my failing eyes.

Crystals, like miniature blue stars, spinning in a line, creating a trail across space. Almost beautiful, but with dreadful implications.

Cryogenic fluid.

Oh shit.

Sometimes life – simulated or real – just wasn't fair.

Elena's capsule had been breached.

I extracted.

The world around me was formless chaos.

A heavy, ponderous drum beat in my ears.

Light.

Noise.

Pain.

The beating drum? It was my heart: thudding and irregular.

My brain was rebooting.

An alarm sounded in the distance. A shipboard warning.

I was in my simulator-tank. The amniotic fluid sloshed like a storm-tossed sea—

Where is Elena?

Has her capsule made it?

Are the Krell aboard the
Colossus
?

The SOC was in confusion. Had to be that we were trying to outrun the
Endeavour
's blast zone. Inside my tank, my only connection with the outside world was the bead in my ear. Some Navy officers were chanting coordinates, others yelling orders.

“
Bearing point nine. Null-shield holding!
”

“
Bio-plasma incoming.
”

“
Hull breach on Deck A-11—
”

“
—engine compartment is hit!
”

“
Vent! Vent now!
”

Then Loeb's voice cut through the discord: “
Ease off the thrust!
”

An indistinct shape appeared outside my tank. I braced against the inner canopy: felt my pulse quicken involuntarily.

The Krell—?

Something
pressed against the tank. I recoiled, struggling to focus on whatever was out there.

The
Colossus
' gravity well adjusted. Began to stabilise. The part of my brain currently rebooting – where I stored the technical jargon which was largely irrelevant to my life as a soldier – whispered to me that the inertial dampeners had probably come back online; that they were countering the effects of the rapid acceleration.

The shape outside the tank became distinct, and the world snapped into sudden clarity. There was another voice in my ear.

“Confirm extraction!”

Jenkins. Naked, wrapped in an aluminium blanket, a red line cutting her neatly at the waist. The raised welt looked like a very pale reflection of the punishment she'd just endured back on the
Endeavour
, but she was also bleeding from the head. Holding a fresh wound dressing there that had already turned a pink-red colour. That must've been fresh damage, something that had happened to her hardcopy body during our retreat. Jenkins had made extraction seconds before me and would have suffered the worst of the ship's sudden evasive manoeuvring.

“Do we have her?” I asked, my voice a wet growl in my throat, muffled by the respirator on my face. “Is Elena safe?”

“We have her,” Jenkins said. “We have Elena, Harris.”

The tank began to slough out and I collapsed against the canopy. Slammed a hand to the EMERGENCY RELEASE button, and wriggled out of the simulator. The data-cables anchored me to the machine as though threatening to pull me back inside. I tore the respirator from my face.

“I need to see her,” I said.

“She's secure,” Jenkins said. “And so are we, but the
Endeavour
is gone. You need medical attention—”

“I
need
to see her!” I shouted.

Loeb stormed into the SOC, scattering injured medical officers and Navy staff in his wake. His face was flushed red with what I assumed was anger.

“Can someone please shut off that Christo-damned alarm!” he shouted. He threw his arms up in the air as he paced in front of me.

“Aye, sir,” an adjunct said.

The sound of shipboard and station alarms had become so common to me that I realised I'd phased it out. That, and my head was still ringing from the hard extraction. The
Colossus
' emergency routines had been in full effect, and the ship around me hadn't yet recovered from the
Endeavour
's demise; monitors and consoles fizzled and stuttered with nervous error messages. The air stank of burning plastic and the acrid tang of halon. There had been a fire somewhere aboard the ship that had recently been put out.

“As I was saying,” Loeb continued, “the Krell war-fleet has been neutralised.”

That hardly got the reception that Loeb had intended. The first and only thing I cared about right now was seeing Elena. I needed to hold her, needed to be with her.

Martinez stepped up, beside Loeb. “Leave him be,
jefe
.”

The rest of the Legion had dismounted their tanks too.

Loeb's eyes flared with anger. “We almost died out there!”

Jenkins nodded at Loeb. “Leave it, Admiral.” To me: “You should go now.”

There was a brittle edge to Jenkins' voice that I had only just noticed; a melancholy tone that I rarely heard from her. I paused, looked around at the Legion, and realised that they had closed around me in a circle, as though protecting me from Loeb's accusations.

Even James, back in a fresh next-gen simulant, stood between Loeb and me. “This can wait. The colonel should go to her.”

“Is she alive?” I asked, suddenly aware that there was something very wrong with what was happening here. I struggled into my fatigues, mechanical hand twitching disobediently as it caught on my uniform.

The expression on Loeb's weathered face softened, and his eyes fell from mine. “She's in the infirmary,” he said. “Dr Serova is tending to her.”

Dr Serova met me at the hatch to Medical. I stormed past her, towards the infirmary, and she trailed behind me.

“Her capsule must've been breached during the rescue,” she said. “Those cryogenic capsules are not made for exposure to vacuum or low pressure, Colonel. The canopy was cracked.”

Medtechs and crew parted to let me through, all eyes to the floor.

“That probably wouldn't have been enough to kill her,” Serova insisted, “but the patient also suffered an injury from a Krell stinger.” She shook her head vigorously, despite almost running to keep up with me. “The bio-toxin is virulent, untreatable with our current medical supplies.”

I stood outside the treatment room: through a large window that allowed observation of the room beyond. A Marine – maybe one of those responsible for taking the capsule aboard – ducked his head in my direction and made himself scarce. A smart move.

“We've placed her in quarantine for the time being,” Serova said. She clutched a data-slate to her chest. “I'm very sorry, Colonel. There's nothing else that we can do: the toxin is rampant, self-multiplying.” I watched her reflection in the plasglass window, and she gave a limp smile. “As I'm sure you know, Krell bio-weapons are unpredictable and singularly lethal.”

I let the words wash over me, but I wasn't really listening. My body felt as cold as Elena's probably was; my heart a rock. This couldn't be happening again, not when I'd got so close to saving her. The cosmic injustice of it all was almost overwhelming.

Elena was the only occupant in the stark white room. She lay on her back in a bunk, her glossy dark hair spilled across the pillow, a sheet pulled up all the way to her neck, concealing her body. Her eyes were shut, but very lightly – as though she was just asleep and could awaken at any moment. Her brow was slightly creased – that characteristic frown that she wore, caught in a dream. The expression hinted that, perhaps, whatever she was experiencing was not entirely pleasant.

The rest of her presentation gave the lie to any suggestion she was sleeping. Medical dressing had been placed over her right shoulder from collar to breast, and it had turned a putrid black, contaminated by the toxin in Elena's body. Tubes choked with the stuff were attached to her, impotently attempting to flush the poison from her system.

When did it happen?
I asked myself. In truth, Elena could've been shot at any point during the rescue. The Krell had been everywhere, had infested the corridors and passageways. The
Endeavour
had been no place for a non-combatant. That Elena had been injured was completely explicable, likely even, although that made it no easier to accept.
She probably felt nothing
, I insisted to myself.
She probably feels nothing now.

All I could feel was a cold surge of rage. I wanted to turn the
Colossus
into the heart of the Maelstrom; to hunt down every last fish head and destroy them once and for all—

“Are you all right?” Dr Serova asked, gingerly. “You're shaking, Colonel.” She swallowed and looked down at her data-slate. Safety came from numbers – from things quantified and quantifiable. Serova began to reel information off to me. “I've seen your extraction report, and the numbers are worrying. We should get you checked out too—”

“It can wait,” I growled. “You'll go down in Alliance history as the doctor who treated the only survivor of the
Endeavour
expedition. If there's an Alliance to go back to, of course.”

Serova pulled an uncomfortable smile. “I'd rather not have the accolade, if that's all the same.”

“How long does she have?” I asked, my voice breaking.

“Not long. I've run this toxin through the ship's database, and it isn't a strain we've previously encountered. The Krell are evolving so fast, it's difficult to keep track.” She gave an inappropriate laugh; a nervous reaction to my anger. “That she is alive at all shows true determination, but like I said, I'm no expert on this technology.”

I froze. “
Technology
?”

“Yes. It's possible that the connection is being affected.”

“What connection?”

“The neural-link connection,” Serova said. “I think that it what it is called. Do I have the terminology right?”

“What neural-link?”

Understanding dawned on Serova's features. Colour seemed to void from her already pale face.

“The simulant, Colonel,” she said. “The woman you recovered from the
Endeavour
is a simulant. I'm sorry; I thought that you knew.”

And just then, Elena – or more precisely, Elena's simulant – woke up.

The Next-Generation Simulant Project had been an attempt to create simulacra that resembled real humans as closely as possible. That had, by necessity, involved a trade-off between strength, durability and size. The next-gens were built better than a natural body, but they lacked the size and mass of combat-sims. On the other hand, they looked frighteningly similar to their donor-operator: resembled the original body, as of the date of its harvesting, in every single way. This simulant, this copy of Elena, had no protection against the Krell poison. She wore no combat-suit, wasn't equipped with a medi-suite to administer any antidote.

In itself, this moment – Elena in a hospital bed, me watching over her injured body – felt like a repeated simulation.
I've been here before
, I thought. A different world, different circumstances, but the feelings were just the same. I felt the stab of memory, a psychic backlash, as I entered the observation room.

Elena wasn't even on a proper bed. I supposed that those had been reserved for more serious cases. Instead, she was curled up, semi-foetal, on an examination couch – an inert medical scanner on a metal arm still propped overhead. They had put her in a private chamber, just off of one of the ER corridors. The strip-lamp above flickered, waxing and waning.

Without thinking, I reached out and clutched her hand. Even if she was only simulated, I needed to know that she was here: that I hadn't constructed this entire scenario. Her skin was cool and the flesh of her hand was soft. Newborn soft. That told me that this simulant hadn't been used, hadn't been lived in.

The simulant in front of me looked to all intents like an exact replica of Elena's real body: a copy of her, as she had looked when she had left Calico. She'd been thirty-two standard years old then. Physically, she was still that woman, the only variance being the lack of data-ports.
This
Elena's arms were unmarked – the skin unbroken by the ugly black welts that pocked a sim-operator's forearms.

Elena's eyelids fluttered, as though adjusting to a bright light although the observation room was in semi-darkness. She stared ahead for a second, then at me. There was instant recognition there, but no surprise: like she had always known that I would come back for her.

“Conrad?” she asked.

The sound of her voice: it sparked so many emotions in me. Yes, there was love, desire, joy. But much more than that… I felt other, darker responses as well: guilt, remorse, regret. Without Elena, I was a rock. I had no need for emotions, good or bad. With her, I was fallible. She was my motivation but also my weakness. She was my vulnerability.

“It's me,” I said. “I'm here.”

“You came for me,” she said. “You came back for me.”

“I said that I would. I promised.”

“Wh… where are we?”

Her voice was a dry rasp, and even the few words that she had spoken were an obvious struggle. The Elena-sim's lips were almost the colour of her face; her long dark hair a stark contrast to her skin tone. Her entire appearance was drained and debilitated.

“Aboard a starship,” I said. “Aboard the
Colossus
.”

“Your ship?”

“My ship. An Alliance ship.”

“Good. That's good. What happened… to me?”

“We rescued you from the
Endeavour
. The ship was destroyed. There was no one else aboard. The Treaty was agreed ten years ago. You've been in the Maelstrom since then.”

“Treaty…?” she whispered. A fleeting smile passed over her lips, but the expression was sickly. I realised that I had misunderstood her question. “Is that what… they told you?”

“Of course. You went into the Maelstrom to agree the Treaty, with the Krell.”

“There was never a Treaty,” Elena whispered.

“Yes there was,” I insisted. “You're confused—”