Origins (38 page)

It would be so easy to sleep.

To sleep, and never get up.

To just let this happen.

I woke up in my simulator, surrounded by noise and activity.

The SOC was in a state of panic, but on a whole other level. The overhead lights flickered, power fluctuating, and white noise was being piped into my ear-bead. I tore that free, rested against the inside of the tank, and realised that the noise was also coming from the ship's PA: broadcast throughout the vessel.

The Shard are here.

With the noise came a cold that seared through me. Something more than just temperature: a soul-scathing chill. I struggled to breathe, forced air from the respirator into my lungs. My body shook, quaking in time with the rest of the ship, and gravity shifted around me.

Every limb burnt. Blazing welts – where the fall had just killed me – lined my body. Bright streamers of blood rose from wounds across my back, my chest, my face – wounds that should've been simulated.

Begrudgingly, the tank emptied, and as it did – in the flittering, unreal half-light – I saw Elena standing in front of me. She mashed her small fists against the outer canopy, her beautiful face stained red. The door slid open and amniotic fluid spilled onto the SOC floor.

“You're hurt!” Elena cried. “He's been injured!”

She dragged me from the tank, still trailing cables, and held me to her. Kissed me on the mouth: her lips invigorating, drawing me back to the now. I couldn't reciprocate, but then I couldn't do much. I was slick with both blood and amniotic: an adult newborn. Even the touch of her lips to mine was searing; sent ripples of pain through me. I slumped to the floor.

This was no normal extraction.

Elena sat on the deck of the SOC and cradled me in her arms. Dressed in a new
Colossus
crewsuit, deep blue now stained black by the simulator fluids.

“I… I made it,” I said. “But I failed.”

“That you made it is enough,” she whispered. Her voice broke with emotion, and though it pained my eyes I focused on her face: saw tears rolling down her marble cheeks. “You tried, Conrad. You did what you could.”

I felt the prick of a hypodermic on my forearm, the swell of medi-nano in my bloodstream. Dr Serova was beside me, taking readings – reeling off requests to the sci-med team.
None of this will do any good
, I thought.
Not if they are here.
Other faces swam into view around me: the Legion, Loeb, James.

“He's bleeding,” Elena said. “This isn't normal! What's happening to him!”

Dr Serova shook her head. “I don't know! I've already told you people, I'm no expert on this technology!”

This was not the stigmata. This was something different, something more
real
. My data-ports – the connections in my limbs, chest, spine – were all wet with real, honest-to-god blood, and my chest was covered in lacerations. Whatever had happened to me down there on Devonia, I'd brought a little of it back with me. And a little of this pain: that was all I needed.

Hunt warned me of this.

“He's dead, and I'm not,” I said, my voice garbled and defiant. “I'm fine.” My vision was wavering, jumping. “Ky… Kyung: she did it.”

“We know,” Loeb said, his craggy features sullen, the weight of defeat on his brow. “It's over.”

“No…” I insisted. I struggled to my feet, Elena's hands supporting me. That I could stand at all was a miracle. “It isn't until I say so.”

A minute or so later, dressed but no more recovered from the ordeal on Devonia, we assembled in the CIC.

“This is it,” Loeb declared. “Take it all in people: we're the ones here at the end.”

Elena's arms were wrapped around me, keeping me upright. Her aura was like a beacon; despite our situation, her strength was somehow keeping me going. This was the first time in ten years that our real bodies had been together, I realised. So many near-misses, simulated meetings, and now here we were, watching the end of things.

“By Gaia,” Saul whispered. “It's incredible.”

“That's one word for it,” Kaminski said.

The
Revenant
was in orbit around Devonia.

It was created from a substance so dark that it was the epitome of night – that it sucked in all available light, like the Artefacts. The Shard ship was enormous – much bigger than any of the Krell bio-ships in Devonian space, than even the
Colossus
– and only occasionally could I focus on it. The ship's outline was jagged, uncompromising: no bridge, no engine even – vaguely star-shaped, just layer upon layer of detail, sprawling and ramshackle and ancient. Reality seemed to warp around the vessel as it moved: gliding almost serenely through the destruction. A rock of calm among the madness.

The Krell had taken immediate offensive action.

Bio-ships swarmed the enormous Shard vessel, were peppering its hull with seeker missiles and more esoteric living ammunition. Occasionally, and with no regularity or frequency at all, did the underside of the ship light up with a nearby explosion. Then the ship's skin would ripple with runic impressions, as though the metal skein had a life of its own. Every surface was covered in Shard cuneiform, a billion lines of nightmarish hieroglyphics.

“I don't have any answers,” Saul said.

“How can anyone answer that?” Elena said, her small shoulders sagging.

Saul nodded. “Whatever Command and Sci-Div thought they could achieve with this thing…” He gave a dry swallow. “They were wrong.”

“What's it doing?” Mason asked.

“Always with the questions…” Jenkins muttered.

“It'll reap that planet,” Elena said, flatly. “It'll scour Devonia until only the Artefact remains, and then it'll do what all living things do: replicate.”

Professor Saul nodded, knowingly. “Yes, yes. I expect that the Creep, as Corporal Martinez calls it, will become rampant. The contagion, for want of a better word, will consume all bio-matter on the surface: tip the atmosphere into an unstoppable spiral of decline.”

“How long do we have?” Mason asked. “Until the, ah, end.”

“Days? Hours?” Elena said, noncommittally. “Maybe less.”

“Enough time to make peace with our maker,” said Martinez.

“The Krell will be dead,” Jenkins said, with no pleasure whatsoever. “But so will we.”

“We tried,” Kaminski said. He shook his head, exhaling slowly. “This is the end, my friends. The end.”

Beyond the view-port, the
Revenant
fired dark lances of energy across space. A Krell orbital-station – tiny alongside the enormous machine-ship – exploded, caught a wing of Needlers in the blast-wave. When multiple Krell ships launched at the Shard vessel, it responded with just as many lance weapons, gun-turrets forming from its hull. There seemed to be no end to the machine's capabilities.

“We should bug out…” Mason offered.

That's just surviving
, I thought, as I looked at Elena.
And it's never going to be enough.
She grasped my trembling hands. The shadow of fear lurked behind her eyes. It struck me that it was the first time I'd seen Elena genuinely afraid since we'd come to Devonia.

I can't let her die out here.

“We have to end this,” I said. “We have to stop that ship from leaving Devonia.”

“That's great and all,” Kaminski said, “but based on what I've just seen there's no way that we can get off this ship, let alone deal with the Shard…”

The communicator beside Kaminski flashed with signals; emitted a primitive beeping.

“What's that?” I asked.

Admiral Loeb tossed his head dismissively towards the comms officer in the crew-pit. “It's the damned Directorate. They've been sending us an SOS signal since… well, since Kyung bought it.”

Just then, the shattered remains of the
Shanghai Remembered
glided across both the tactical display and the observation window: a broken black hulk of a warship, her running lights flashing red to signal an emergency. Her hull had been breached in numerous places, with extensive new damage. She had discharged most of her evac-pods.

“They must've been desperate, if they think being lost out here is any better than staying on-ship,” Kaminski said. “I've already been there.”

“Kyung was slaved to the
Shanghai
,” I said. “But whatever happened to her…”

“That ship is operational,” Elena completed. “The engine is still hot.”

Someone, or something, was trying to correct the ship's course vector; to stabilise her orbit. It was a hopeless and extremely optimistic manoeuvre – the
Shanghai
was going down, no matter what – but the corrections were delaying the inevitable. The ship's thrusters fired irregularly even as we watched.

Loeb glared at me. His old eyes shone with something dangerous.

Hope.

“If Kyung is dead, or neutralised,” he said, “her ship will be especially vulnerable. The officers are probably slaved and there will still be crew on board…” He shrugged, as though unwilling to accept responsibility for the plan. “Her engines are working. Your call, Lazarus, but in our current circumstances the
Shanghai
's energy core is the biggest weapon we have at our disposal.”

“What would the energy output on that thing be?” I said.

“Planet-killer,” Loeb muttered, definitively. “Shard or otherwise: if the ship's energy core breaches down on Devonia, everything will go with it.”

“Artefact and all…” Jenkins said, under her breath. “You don't run a whole planet without a pretty big power source, after all. And if that went up too…”

We'd destroyed an Artefact on Helios with plasma warheads. The
Shanghai Remembered
was probably packed with nuclear and plasma munitions: that, combined with the energy core, would make it a sizeable explosives package.

“What are you going to do?” Elena asked. “You can't go back down there!”

“I'd advise against it,” Dr Serova joined in. “In your state, I don't know whether you'll survive another extraction. I've never seen anything like those readings on your last—”

I spoke over the doctor. “Is the second Dragonfly docked?”

Lieutenant James emerged from the crowd. “Yes, Lazarus. She's refuelled and ready to go.”

“Back into the tanks?” Kaminski offered.

“You got it,” I said.

Elena followed me all the way. Clawing at my uniform, begging me to stop, telling me not to go. Not to leave her here, among the madness. Tears and realisation mingled across her delicate features. What else could I do? I
had
to end this. Had to do something to give Elena the life that she deserved.

Back in the ravaged Simulant Operations Centre, medtechs rapidly jacked me into the tank. By the time I was hooked up, ready to make transition, Elena had calmed to a bitter acceptance.

“I'll be back,” I said. “I promise.”

She bit her lip, clutched my naked shoulders. “I wish that I could believe you.”

“Like you said: the Directorate will never leave us alone, not while the Shard are still out there. I can't let this thing live.”

“There has to be another way,” she said, repeating words that she had been screaming a few moments ago.

“There isn't. It has to die, has to be finished here.”

Elena knew it, too: was just desperate to say anything to stop me from getting back into the tank. She pursed her lips and backed away, arms crossed over her chest, rubbing her elbows anxiously.

“We ready to do this?” I asked.

One by one, the Legion called in.

I hooked up each data-cable in turn, fresh blood whipping about me as it polluted the amniotic. Every muscle and bone, fibre and atom of my body was aching – singing with injuries of two hundred and thirty-nine simulated deaths.

I always knew that you would get me in the end.

The Dragonfly launched through space at maximum thrust. In the cramped passenger cab, the Legion were pinned to crash couches as we made hard-burn.

“Transition confirmed,” I rumbled across the comm-link.

“I hear you,” came back Elena's voice, static-riddled, barely audible. “Admiral Loeb is here too.”

“Elena…” I whispered. “I hadn't expected you to be on the CIC.”

“Special concession,” she said, voice brimming with emotion. “Admiral Loeb says that it's the least he could do. How are things out there?”

I watched the scene unfolding both on the tactical scanner-suite and in real-time via the Dragonfly's view-ports.

“Pretty bad,” I said. “The
Revenant
is destroying anything that comes near it. Although it could just be me… it looks like it's getting
bigger
.”

Helixes of dark matter – the Creep – spiralled from the surface of Devonia, extended like fragile space elevators to the
Revenant
in high orbit. The ship was literally sucking the world dry. The process was horrifyingly simple: a biomass to nano-mass conversion.

“It's not just you,” Elena said. “The ship is gaining mass, and fast. Admiral Loeb thinks that we're still at a safe distance, but he doesn't know for how long.”

The vast, monolithic
Revenant
was rapidly increasing its territory, destroying Krell vessels that trespassed too close.

“As it gains in size,” Elena said, her voice sounding painfully distant now, “it'll begin to eradicate all threats within weapon-range.”

“What are the range of its weapons?” I asked, rhetorically. “Tell Loeb to be ready to pull out. Tell him to leave as soon as the
Shanghai
crashes.”

Elena gave a short intake of breath. Stifled a cry. “Yes.”