The Lazarus War: Artefact (13 page)

We finally made it to the
Oregon
’s primary airlock. I opened a communication channel to Olsen back in Medical.

“This is Harris. We’ve reached the lock.”

“Receiving,” Olsen said, his voice fluctuating with static. “Captain Atkins reports continued bombardment from the enemy vessel. Godspeed.”

“Solid copy. Harris out.”

The airlock was a sterile white chamber, with one end leading into the belly of the
Oregon
and the other directly into space. An armoured bulkhead, replete with warnings as to the dangers of exposure to hard vacuum, sat at that end of the chamber. That was our destination. A porthole offered a view into the black outside.

The combat-suits allowed for operation in deep-space just as easily as in an atmosphere. Indicators on the inside of my helmet illuminated: my suit was powered up and atmospherically sealed.

“Right, people. Confirm suits are sealed and weapons are primed.”

Shouts of agreement.

I braced my body against the airlock door, clasping the manual locking handle. Without pausing, I twisted the release valve. The door gave way easily, exposing the chamber to vacuum. There was a rush of atmosphere escaping, then absolute calm.

“Initiating EVA,” I said.

A timeline appeared on my HUD: seventeen minutes until life support failed.

Space opened before me. I plodded out of the airlock. The soles of each boot immediately magnetised, attaching me to the ship’s hull. The others followed suit.

The gravity well generated by the
Oregon
did not extend past the inner decks, and as soon as we were outside the ship proper, there was no gravity at all. My plane of balance shifted: where once down had been dictated by the artificial gravity field, now my only point of reference was the activated mag-locks on my boots. The sudden change in gravitational pull brought with it a bout of nausea, but the medical suite on my combat-suit instantly corrected that. Space sickness was a petty concern, of no issue to a simulant.

The
Oregon
’s hull was a vast, barren plain. Bare metal reached for hundreds of metres in every direction, punctuated only occasionally by a communications mast or weapon array. Running lights flickered in the distance, studding the ship’s flank. The airlock was roughly amidships, on the starboard side. As soon as I left the confines of the airlock, my HUD lit up with a tactical map showing me the most direct route to the damage site. I ignored that for a moment, though, and focused on the enormity of the view.

The
Oregon
was positioned in the midst of the asteroid field and rocks drifted by. Beyond, space opened to infinity: a tapestry of brilliant white pinpricks against a silky blackness. Each of those lights represented a star, each circled by a plethora of Krell-occupied planets. We were
inside
the Maelstrom. The idea took my breath away for a second and I felt my suit responding with an injection of sedative. It would be easy to get lost out here, to feel dwarfed by the vastness of space. The thought was intrusive and persistent; not my own.

Below, beyond the curve of the
Oregon
’s polished hull, Helios beckoned. I imagined myself, for just a moment, releasing my mag-locks and drifting off into space – to be sucked down to Helios, by the pull of planetary gravity. Helios itself was an ugly mess of a planet. It was a brown, dusty orb; swathed by yellow cloud cover and angry storm-swirls. No oceans or large bodies of water, the monotonous brown broken only by infrequent mountain ranges. Perhaps there was some grandeur to the planet, but I couldn’t see it. This place held no beauty for me. The Artefact was visible even from space. It was so big that it rose up through the clouds, like an angry finger pointing to God.

But that wasn’t the worst of the view.

“Christo,” Kaminski said over the communicator. Martinez didn’t bother to rebuke him this time. “Just look out there.”

He indicated the
Great White
. From the bridge, viewed via the holo and even the view-port, the
White
looked singularly black. Up close, she was a variety of shades of dark. Her hull had been repaired innumerable times, with new armour plating grown over damaged portions. Ugly welts and scars lined the visible flank of the ship, like this was some huge living beast rather than a constructed starship. The thing looked as though it was
hurting
, and the scarring gave the impression that it had been hurting for a very long time. Even so, she continued to fire bright bio-plasma streams into our ship, igniting lance-beams through the asteroid field. Every impact caused the null-shield to light brightly, and my suit face-plate to polarise. Near-space was like an Alliance Day fireworks display.

“This is really something,
compadre
,” Martinez said, as we went. “If just one of those beams hits us, we’re dust.”

“I think that the Krell have more to worry about than us,” Blake said. “Or at least I hope so.”

They were both right. The alien ship probably couldn’t detect us at this range, but if somehow we were caught in the crossfire then death was inevitable.

“Move out. Tight formation,” I said, as we began the spacewalk proper. “Keep together.”

“You heard the man,” Jenkins said. “Stay on it.”

The squad deployed smoothly out, rifles panning the geography. In zero-gravity, every footstep was a struggle. If I overstepped, I knew that I could be propelled out into space, but time was also of the essence. Our combat-suits automatically adapted to the starfield, and the outlines of each trooper appeared to shift. My HUD notified me that active camo was operational. Each squad-member was tagged, aura-codes flagged even though I could hardly see their outlines with the naked eye.

There was a prickle of anxiety at the back of my mind, so deep that no drug could touch it. I’d spacewalked a hundred times before but it had never been an experience I’d enjoyed. The post-transition psych-evals had diagnosed me with borderline agoraphobia, reasoning that my upbringing in the cluttered tenements of Detroit Metro made me more comfortable with confined spaces. I thought that it was deeper than that. I didn’t like being in space simply because death could come so quickly and without warning. Considering my profession revolved around dying, that was saying something. War might sometimes depend on luck but surviving a fight in a vacuum was entirely random. In space, we were robbed of so many advantages of our combat-suits and simulants. That confidence that I had felt back aboard the
Oregon
, when we had made transition, was rapidly ebbing away. We were as vulnerable out here as our fleshy bodies were inside the
Oregon
. A stray piece of debris, a misconnected hose, a fractured face-plate: all of those things spelled death in hard vacuum.

I’d seen men driven wild with panic, out in space, in lesser circumstances than this. The human race was becoming domesticated, more familiar with the darkened interiors of a starship or a space station than wide-open exteriors. There was something to do with the sense of openness, the sense of desolation – of lost hope – that was almost overwhelming.

The universe doesn’t care
, a voice whispered in my ear.
Everything you do is irrelevant
.

“We now have exactly sixteen minutes to reach the damage site,” I said, shaking myself out of it. “I don’t want anything holding us up. Scanner sweeps set for a hundred metres.”

“You expecting some trouble?” Jenkins asked, as she plodded alongside me.

“We’re not taking any chances out here,” I said. “But I sincerely hope not.”

“Scanner isn’t worth shit,” Kaminski said. “The debris is creating ghosts.”

Just then, something drifted past us, and I paused to watch it go. A corpse – a crewman, still dressed in Alliance Navy shipboard fatigues. The body was frozen solid, face held in an eternal rictus of horror. The hands were outstretched, fingers clawing for purchase. In contradiction to the terrible expression on the corpse’s face, the body calmly floated away from us, and into the asteroid field. I realised that much of the debris in our vicinity was actually parts of the
Oregon
, ranging from damaged armour plating through to the bodies of crew.

“Eyes on the prize, people,” I muttered, waving ahead. “The damage site is three hundred metres in that direction.”

The walk seemed to take for ever, and it was difficult not to be distracted by the firefight taking place overhead and around us. I had a prime view of the action. Brilliant rays of energy discharged across the void, tearing into both ships. The primary railgun – enormous, built to level cities – sat a few metres away. Hard to imagine that the gun had been slaved to my will just minutes earlier; as I passed it I felt an unconscious niggle in my spinal-port, in recognition of our pairing. The gun was cold and still now, without an operator.

Above us, dimensionally-speaking, a battery of lasers fired incessantly. The
Great White
had obviously expended her reserve of fighter-ships but her other ordnance appeared unlimited. She constantly fired bio-plasma from organic guns, sending multi-coloured energy discharge into space, leaving behind beautiful rainbow streamers.

It was awe-inspiring, in a way. Here were two species, so very unlike one another in many ways but so very similar in many others, expending literally every ounce of their being in an effort to exterminate each other.
Reflections in a dark mirror
. Even more irrationally, in that very instant, I hated the Krell more than ever.

We had broken into a measured bounding motion –
one foot up, one foot down
: sure to always have at least one mag-lock in contact with the
Oregon
’s hull at all times. Kaminski and Martinez at the rear. They carried the repair gear, proofed for use in space, and so needed to be protected. Kaminski was the most technically minded, and he would repair the breach once we reached it.

“Closing in a hundred metres,” Blake declared, on point.

“Cover the objective.”

The metal landscape ahead was broken by a rupture in the armour plating – a gouge, metres wide and deep. Fluid drained from inside, immediately freezing into dirty white snow, and messy cabling was exposed beneath. My HUD informed me that this was the location of the hull breach, even indicating the necessary steps to fix it.

“Wide dispersal around the site.”

My squad responded.

“Twelve minutes until our life support expires.”

Deep within the
Oregon
, our real bodies waited. If the ship went down, so did we. There had never been a more personal motivation to achieve our mission objective.

“Get working, Kaminski.”

“Affirmative, Captain,” he replied, already unshouldering the repair equipment. “Martinez, give me a hand with this shit.”

The pair continued unloading the gear, mag-locking items to the exposed hull. Kaminski clambered down into the breach and started poking the damaged innards.

“You think you can fix it?” I asked.

“I have to,” Kaminski called back. “Don’t worry. I’ve never found a machine that I can’t handle. Someone pass me that sealant spray.”

Except that Kaminski isn’t a starship engineer, and never has been
. He was a specialist-grade sim operator, and the best chance we had at this.

I crouched on the hull, scanning the immediate area. The apparent openness of the artificial terrain was misleading, I decided. If I looked for them, there were hiding places everywhere. The grooves between armour plates were like trenches. The shadows cast by antennae and gun-turrets could’ve concealed an army. Each spinning asteroid, just beyond the overhead glare of the null-shield, might harbour a Krell horde. I breathed hard, activating the auto-targeting feature on my M95 rifle. The only sounds were my own clipped breathing – short, controlled inhalations, as I had been trained to do – and the low hum of the oxygen pack on my back.

Kaminski and Martinez still worked away in the hull breach. I tasted something acid at the back of my throat, like the tang of burning plastic.
Is this the taste of the
Oregon, I wondered,
burning up?
I shook myself out of it again. It was impossible; while I occupied the simulant, there was no way I could experience transference from my real body.

Get a damned grip
.

“Ten minutes,” I said. “You need any more help down there, Kaminski?”

Kaminski appeared at the lip of the breach, reaching for another can of sealant spray. He shook his head.

“Nearly done. Give me another minute.”

“Stay frosty, people,” I muttered, to keep myself talking.

“Hard not to,” Jenkins replied. “It’s damned cold out here.”

“I hear that, Jenkins.”

Even inside the suits it was uncomfortably cold. Partly physical, partly something else: the chill was hard to shake, born out of an aversion that man has to being in space. It was a natural reaction, hard-wired as the need to breathe. I wondered whether the Krell felt the same way. Blake shifted beside me, panning his rifle over a moving shadow. He was edgy, getting too nervous. His biorhythms appeared on my HUD and I noticed his increased heartbeat.

“Blake, activate your medical suite,” I ordered.

I caught a glimpse of his young face behind his face-plate. He looked uneasy, even in his sim. I’d never seen him like that before. Then his face-plate polarised, as the reflection of a far-off energy beam caught the mirrored surface. His rhythms calmed a second later.

“I’m all right,” he said. “I’m with it.”

“Stay that way. Nine minutes!”

“Another minute,” Kaminski muttered. “Martinez, can you pass me that wrench?”

The coolant had stopped escaping from whatever was damaged inside the ship, so that was something. Kaminski tossed away an empty sealant can and it lazily drifted out into space.

I activated my communicator and tried to establish a link to the
Oregon
.

“
Oregon
Medical, this is Captain Harris – do you copy?”