Origins (26 page)

“There was no Treaty.”

“Yes,” I said. “There was, and you've been gone for ten years…” I stumbled. Despite Elena's condition, now I was the weaker one: brought low by her words. They were wounding me in a way that a physical weapon never could. “The
Endeavour
's mission was—”

“It was… always Command's plan. There never was to be a Treaty.”

“That… that can't be right…”

She's ill
, I told myself,
and she isn't thinking straight.
Except that, as I looked into Elena's pallid face, I knew that she was telling me the truth. I couldn't dispel or ignore her words, because here she was – dying – and there was surely no reason to lie. A cold, constricting feeling clutched me and would not let go. Things that I thought I could rely upon – that were given as true, even though I hated and detested them – were suddenly slipping away from me.

“I'm sorry, Conrad… You have to understand: what I did was only for you…” She swallowed, painfully. I knew only too well what was happening to her body: cell walls bursting, organs beginning to shut down. I'd been there a hundred times before. “I traded my life for yours…”

Elena touched my metal hand. Her eyes swivelled in their sockets; focused on the bionics. The hand extended from my fatigues, the pseudo-muscular articulation reflecting the med-bay lights in a way that was almost malevolent. I fought the urge to withdraw it, to hide it.

“What… what have they done to you, Conrad?” she said.

“It's okay. I'm fine.”

Tears began to fall down Elena's face, streaming across her cheeks. Her fingers probed the metalwork, moving sluggishly, like she had less control over the simulant body than I did over the bionic.

“They have… hurt you…” she whispered. “They will hurt us all, if they have the chance…”

Elena's slender body was racked by a vicious shudder. I suddenly ordered my thoughts. She didn't have long left in this body, and that she was alive at all meant that her real skin hadn't been aboard the
Endeavour
. Right now, somewhere, she was inside a simulator-tank. Even if she was in comparative safety, she must be in the Maelstrom.

“The
Endeavour
is gone,” I said, composing myself. “I need to find you, Elena. I need to save you.”

“I had a simulator… I went through the Damascus Rift… W-we used the Artefact, opened the Abyss.”

I knew all of this: did not want Elena to waste her life-force explaining it to me. With my real hand, I clutched hers a little tighter. I noticed with mounting trepidation that her skin was getting colder, caused by her blood circulation slowing down. Once the death-clock had started, it could not be stopped.

“What was your mission, Elena?” I persisted. “Where did Command send you?”

“We were to do something terrible…” she sobbed.

“It's all right,” I lied.

“It's not… What we found…”

“Where is your real body, Elena?” I said, with more force this time. “We have people aboard this ship. We can help.
I
can find you.”

“The Revenant…” she started.

But whatever else Elena had to say was lost.

She groaned. It was a horrible, tormented sound: a death rattle. I'd seen the reaction before, and knew that she was losing control of the simulant. I could almost feel her pain. She reeked of fresh cryogen, the formaldehyde-like aroma, and her skin was stained so white that it was almost translucent at her forearms, around raised cheekbones and temples.

“We have transport,” I said. “We can follow your signal. Just tell me where you are.”

Elena's eyes were so much harder than I remembered. Her mouth opened to speak. I willed her on, was desperate to hear her voice one more time: drew near to her so close that I could feel her weak breath on my ear.

“Devonia,” she whispered. “Planetary coordinates zero-three, delta nine…” Those were grid coordinates. Not precise, but enough to go on. She swallowed. “I'll be waiting.”

And then it was over.

The machine beside Elena began a steady chirping. Some of her vital signs were spasming.
Shit!
I grabbed Elena's naked shoulder, clutched it as though this would stop her from leaving me. The bio-monitor gave out a loud beep. The previously jagged graphics on the holo began to flatten, indicating only one thing.

The body was still; deathly still.

Empty.

Elena had extracted.

How many times was I destined to watch the woman I loved die?

I held her hand until it had become ice, watched the guttering light in her dark eyes. Around me, the
Colossus
rang out with the occasional warning chime, and I was repeatedly summoned to the briefing room by the ship's AI. The announcements were gradually becoming more persistent, but I ignored them.

This was the horror. This was the deep hurt.

I'd lost her in Damascus, watched her fall from the Atefact's Hub, having been shot by Williams' Warfighters: a brief and terrible agony. Now I had seen her die from a Krell bio-toxin, body ravaged by alien venom. But I'd lost Elena twice even before then: once on Azure, when she had left me to join the
Endeavour
's expedition, then again on Calico Base when she had gone into the Maelstrom. It seemed that history was destined to repeat itself indefinitely: that I was trapped in the spiral of Martinez's Nine Hells.

I leant forward and kissed Elena on the lips, reached for the bed sheet, and folded it very precisely over her. Her open eyes were the last thing I saw of her face.

“I… I'm sorry. We heard what happened.”

I turned to see Kaminski standing at the door. I'd been so wrapped in this moment that I hadn't even heard him enter.

“Seeing her like that…” he said. “Next-generation sims creep me out. Too close to the real thing.”

I noticed that Kaminski was doing his best to avoid looking at the outline of the body on the bed, eyes flitting between the ground and me. He had known Elena too; had been recruited by her in the early days of the Sim Ops Programme. The three of us were locked into this unholy triumvirate: we'd been there at the start, but were we going to be left standing at the end?

I stared back at Elena's body. “It's not like I haven't been here before.”

Kaminski nodded. He still carried the simulation stigmata: blood-red slashes across his shaven head and, with his uniform unbuttoned at the neck, visible across his collarbone too.

“I read the Damascus debrief,” he said. “She really wants you to find her, Harris. This is the second time that she's done this, and it must've taken some serious planning. Think about it for a moment: how did Elena know that we were on that ship?”

“What's your point?”

Kaminski looked pleased with himself, a big kid who had worked out a homework problem. “You're forgetting that tech is my speciality. I accessed the
Endeavour
's mainframe from the Data Deck, before she went down. When we entered the ship, we tripped a silent alarm, and the ship's AI activated the neutrino array.”

The neutrino array: the faster-than-light communications suite.

I rubbed a hand over my unshaven chin. “She knew that we were on that ship…”

“She knew that
someone
was on the ship. Martinez has told me that he saw bodies in cryogenic suspension. I guess that those were simulants kept in storage for too long: turned sour.”

I nodded at Kaminski, felt a swell of purpose inside me. Elena had heard the signal, made transition into the new simulant body… Provided she was in the same galactic neighbourhood, the neutrino array would've sent a signal to her within seconds. I guessed that, alerted by the signal, she had made transition to make contact with us. It was an audacious plan, but no more so than what she had done in Damascus, and it had worked.

“Thanks 'Ski,” I said. “You did good.”

“I try,” he said, “but I don't know where the signal was directed.”

“You might not, but I do.”

“Then maybe you should come tell us,” Kaminski said. “The Legion is waiting for you.”

The Legion, Professor Saul, Lieutenant James and Admiral Loeb all occupied the briefing room: quiet and still, awaiting my appearance.

“That must've been rough…” Mason said. She sighed, her slender body shivering.

That was far from an adequate description of what I was feeling, but Mason was only trying to be kind. I grimaced and nodded away the comment. I took the head of the chamber.

“Elena is gone,” I said, flatly. “But we've got work to do. Anyone want to tell me what happened out there?”

Loeb's anger from back in the SOC still simmered, though I could tell given present circumstances he wasn't going to confront me. “We should've pulled out, Harris.”

“I had to save her. Surely you can see that.”

Loeb nodded warily. “But that was still a very dangerous thing to do.”

“We're alive,” Kaminski said, coming to my aid. “Let's just be thankful for that.”

“We got out of the blast radius, if that's what you mean, but only just.” Loeb looked back to me: “I warned you about the
Endeavour
's energy core. A ship that size, equipped with a goliath-pattern power module, is just about the most dangerous weapon in the galaxy.”

“You got to fight some Krell,” Jenkins added. “Isn't that what you've always wanted?”

“We were on top of the
Endeavour
when that damned Krell bio-ship turned up,” Loeb said. “We were neutered! Our null-shields were down. The
Endeavour
's energy core cooked off. Spilled its payload across local space, and so far as we can tell it took out the Krell war-fleet with it.”

“How exactly did the Krell get the jump on us?” Martinez asked.

“That's a good question,” Loeb said, “but it's one that I can't answer. They had no energy trail, and we barely saw them on the scopes until they were right in front of us.”

Professor Saul leant forward across the table. “They're evolving, Colonel. Science Division has found the same thing across the Quarantine Zone. They're evolving all aspects of their bio-technology: able to respond more quickly, equipped with better stealth tech.”

So turns the cycle of war…
I thought.

“That'd explain all those tertiary-forms,” Jenkins groaned. “The bastards on that ship were bigger and faster than anything I've ever seen before.”

Jenkins sat back in her seat, awkwardly and uncomfortably. She was still suffering, and her reaction reminded me that I was too: every fibre of my body ringing out with ghost-pains from the extraction.

Loeb continued the explanation. “From the CIC, we saw what was coming – saw the
Endeavour
's drive core beginning to bleed off. We started to pull out…” The Buzzard's words trailed off, and though he avoided looking in my direction the criticism was implicit.

“Guess the Krell didn't see what was coming,” Kaminski said, with an empty laugh. “Those stupid fishes aren't so clever after all.”

“So what's the damage?” I asked Loeb.

He shoved a data-slate in my direction and I took a second to focus on the holo-projection. It showed a green wireframe schematic of the
Colossus
, populated with red icons from port to stern.

“In summary,” Loeb said, “there are numerous systems damaged as a result of the operation. A munitions store was compromised; the contents are now spread across near-space. Two water tanks have been ruptured. Deck A-11 was breached; that contained our long-range communications apparatus. Our port-side thrust control has been lost.”

“And the good news?” Jenkins said, with another painful wince.

Loeb glowered at her. “Our energy core is stable, Lieutenant. That's some very good news, as far as I'm concerned. That means that we aren't in danger of exploding in the immediate future.”

“
Immediate?
” Mason asked.

“As in within the next few days,” Loeb said. “I can't be any more specific than that. We suffered a hit on the life-support module, and we've lost climate control on most decks.”

The temperature had noticeably dropped, but I had assumed that was a side-effect of my last extraction. Heating was an essential component of any starship's life-support system; necessary to protect life as we crossed the void.

“Can't we jury-rig it?” I suggested.

Loeb nodded grimly. “We can, but that'll involve suspension of all non-essential systems: something I'd rather not do in the Maelstrom.”

James cleared his throat from across the room. In a fresh sim, he was about the only member of the crew in fighting shape. Everyone else, I realised, carried the stigmata of the extraction: the welts and scars that their simulated counterpart had suffered during the operation.

“But worse than any of this,” he muttered, “is the fact that we've been
detected
. The Krell know that we're out here.” There were rumbles of agreement across the board, even from Jenkins. “Those were scoutships, and every fish head in this quadrant is going to be out here looking for us. Based on what the Professor says we probably won't even see them coming.”

James was right. Retribution might not be immediate, but by interstellar standards the Krell's reaction would be swift. That was one of the many unknowns of the Krell intelligence network: exactly how a Collective was able to share information quite so quickly. It was hypothesised that deep within the bellies of those bio-ships were Krell specialised to communicate across the vastness of space, whose only role within the wider shoal was to speak to fellow fishes. Such an advanced fish head had neither been seen nor captured, but Sci-Div were sure that they existed.

“Then we better get moving,” I said. “When the fish heads get here, we'll be long gone.”