The Lazarus War: Artefact (17 page)

Elena toyed with the jewellery.

“And, of course,” she said to me, drawing out the words melodramatically, “if you
were
to ask me for a marriage contract, you would definitely need a ring. This would be a very nice start, even if only as a stand-in.”

“Only best jewellery for pretty lady – good price for soldier,” the hawker added excitedly, ignorant of the conversation between us.

I reached for some paper cash – my unicard was no good here, on the grey market – and produced a handful of notes. The hawker became even more animated at the suggestion of money.

“Can take UA dollar or Alliance credits,” he said, gesturing to the ring. “Put it on, please do. Only one hundred credits.”

I paid the hawker, and he left us.

“It is a beautiful thing,” Elena said, nodding towards me. “If you would do the decent thing, Conrad.”

I slid the ring onto her finger. It was predictably too big – Elena had such slender fingers – but the sentiment was there. I focused on her face. She was beaming, happy. Her hand held mine more firmly.

“I would,” she said. There was a bright glint in her eyes, like unshed tears. “If you asked. I think I would. But for now, thank you for bringing me here, for getting me stationed on Azure.” She pushed her plate across the table, now empty. “What do you say about making a start to that contribution? The next generation, I mean.”

I left some crumpled Alliance credit notes on the table, and we swiftly departed the café.

Indig boys watched us from shadowed alleyways, eyeing Elena’s fair skin and my military uniform, as we walked through the city. Not quite children but not yet men; gangly-limbed, upper lips topped with thin moustaches. They observed us suspiciously and carefully: their intentions never quite clear. Something like jealousy, not yet bordering on anger, lurked behind their dark eyes. There was an element of menace to Azure City, at times, that I had only really noticed now that Elena was here with me.

The outside walls of the sandstone buildings were plastered with propaganda posters, loud and tri-D: advertising the Alliance military operation. On some buildings, enormous murals had been painted – faded, just like the rest of the planet. BRINGING PEACE TO THE EASTERN SECTOR, one said, with a picture of a soldier in full combat-armour standing over a dead Krell. A smart-ass had corrected the pastel-coloured wording with bright red paint, so that the words now read BRINGING WAR TO THE EASTERN SECTOR. There were other Alliance propaganda pictures displaying food rationing for local citizens, water supply monitoring.

There were towers, here and there, among the tightly packed residential buildings. Those were always lit; either by cheap electric lights or old-fashioned burning sconces. The azan – the call to prayer – droned from the minarets. The noise was still alien to me; seemingly broadcast night and day. It reminded me that I was a visitor to this world, that whatever Alliance Command thought, we came to Azure as occupiers not guests.

There were several hotels on Azure, but for that night we chose the most expensive – the Weskler-Trump International, right in the middle of the financial district. It was a luxury hotel, much plusher than I was used to, and catered for political visitors and the rich. I felt enormously out of place even checking in, but Elena was as self-assured and confident as ever.

We lay together among the tangle of bedsheets, dwarfed by the enormous hotel bed. It was late now and darkness had fallen hours ago. The suite windows were open wide, allowing a soft breeze into the room. My skin was clammy and sweaty from our lovemaking, frenzied and desperate as it had been. I dozed, Elena under one arm, a shot glass of whiskey in my other hand.

“Will we get in trouble?” she whispered.

“Why?” I asked. My eyes were closed and I drifted into that twilight between sleep and waking.

“It’s nearly twenty-three-hundred hours. That guard – he said we had to return by twenty-two-hundred.”

“What are they going to do, fire me?”

“Won’t you be AWOL or something?” Elena said, fumbling over the unfamiliar acronym. It reminded me that she was not real military.

We laughed together, harmoniously.

“I’m confident that it will slide.”

I felt Elena sit up in bed, propping herself with some of the pillows. She took the shot glass from my hand and noisily sipped the whiskey.

“It’s good stuff,” she said, a throaty edge to her voice. “Must be imported.”

“It’s American, single malt. This hotel has a nice range.”

She paused. I opened an eye. I could tell that there was something else that she wanted to say, that she was hesitant to voice to me.

“And what else?”

“Since when did you start drinking?” she asked me.

“Since I have things I need to forget,” I said, the truth unconsciously slipping out. Inwardly I cringed; this was too much to share. Not a topic for here, for now.

“What sort of things?”

I turned over in bed, facing her, and smiled. “Just things. Nothing.”

“Be careful,
mon cher
,” Elena whispered. The odour of whiskey carried on her breath as she leant in to me. “Don’t take on too much. How many transitions have you made now?”

I quickly calculated in my head. “Sixteen, I think. Three at Jefferson, the others since.”

“That’s more than anyone else on the Programme. Please, promise me you will be careful.”

I had died sixteen times. Even lying in that bed, in the most expensive hotel on Azure, if I closed my eyes I could mentally recall all sixteen deaths. Without even thinking, I took the glass from Elena and knocked back the remainder of the whiskey. The liquid felt hot and churlish in my stomach: reminded me immediately of the burn of Krell bio-acid on my skin, the look on Kaminski’s face as we had been surrounded by primary-forms—

Then I reached over to the bedside cabinet and poured myself another. It was an autonomic response – no thought involved.

Elena’s smooth hands reached onto my torso as I lay back on the bed. I was growing hard again. Her naked breast pushed against me. Her body was soft and exciting; still new to me. A real woman, not fabricated and augmented and modified like those I was used to. Her imperfections were part of her beauty.

We folded in to each other, but instead of realising my hunger, she touched the data-port on my left forearm. Circled the cold steel connector.

“Is this connection sore?” she asked me.

“Perhaps a little,” I said. I really didn’t want to talk about this here, now, but Elena obviously wanted to.

“The skin looks raw.”

I sipped down more of the whiskey. The skin looked raw because I’d had the ports drilled in quite recently. Under general anaesthetic, the military surgeons had gone through muscle, bone and bodily tissue to put the seven connections into me. They were eternal reminders of my new profession.

“Sometimes pain is good,” Elena murmured into my ear. “When you stop feeling it, you are dead. You said something like that to me, a long time ago. It means that you are
alive
.”

Elena stroked each of the data-ports in turn, slowly, curiously: one on each arm, at the top of my spine, on each thigh, two on my chest.

“What is it like, to make the transition?” she asked me. Her voice had dropped again to a husky whisper, and her French accent – usually masked, barely detectable – seemed thicker. “What is it like to be so intimately connected to the simulant? Is it the connection of lovers?”

I laughed softly. “It’s not like that. The simulant is just a machine.”

“But a flesh-and-blood machine.”

“Let’s not talk about it now. It’s work.”

Elena sighed. “You don’t like to open up, Conrad.” She sat up, pulling back the sheets, and clambered out of bed.

“I thought the medic’s orders were two weeks in the suit?”

Elena gave a dry chuckle. “And I said I’d see. Stop changing the subject. We were talking about you opening up.”

“Where are you going?”

She pulled on her underwear and padded to the pile of her clothing, retrieving a packet of cigarettes from inside.

“To the balcony. I need to smoke.”

She gave me a disappointed pout when I didn’t immediately follow her. I unashamedly watched her go: appreciating the gentle swing of her buttocks.

Eventually I followed her through the gossamer drapes of the balcony. The breeze outside felt good against my sweaty skin. Although it was night, Azure was very much awake. Three small bright moons hung on the horizon, casting a light strong enough to read by. Our suite was on one of the upper floors, and allowed a wide view of the city below. That too was a source of light: from the markets drizzled with multi-coloured street lamps, to the flicker of aircraft warning beacons on some of the larger buildings. Then, in the distance, Fort Rockwell itself. The base never slept; starships landed and took off from there throughout the day and night.

Elena leant on the gilded-metal balcony handrail, supporting herself while she gently dragged on the cigarette. She looked unreal, I decided. We had been apart so long that having her here, on Azure, felt incredible.

She caught me watching her, and gave me a small smile. “What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

“I didn’t mean to upset you.”

She pursed her lips. “It’s all right. I understand.”

“I do want to open up to you. I mean it.”

“Then tell me something about yourself, Conrad. Tell me something that matters. Something that you have never told anyone else.”

I sighed. For a long while we just stood and watched the city below. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to tell her something. It was that there was so much I could say.

“When we first met,” I started, haltingly, “you asked me lots about my family. About my upbringing, where I was from.”

Elena nodded patiently.

“And you asked me about my father. About what had happened to him. I didn’t tell you. It isn’t in the records, isn’t logged by the military so far as I know. I told you all about my mother, about how she was in the Alliance Navy. She died back when I was a kid.”

Elena listened solemnly now. She could tell that this was difficult for me. I fixed on a point on the horizon, on the flicker and flash of incoming air traffic.

“My father was in the military as well. You know about his record. Both of my parents were away for most of my childhood. Busy enough keeping ration-packs on the table, keeping Carrie and me fed. When my mother died, my father lost it.”

“Did he leave the Army?” Elena asked. Her tone was unobtrusive. She was a psych, after all.

“Nothing so easy. He loved my mother, I think, although near the end of her life they barely saw each other. When they were on shore-leave together, all we ever heard of them was the shouting from their bedroom. The tenements – they had thin walls. She would cry lots, my mother.

“So, my mother died fighting the Directorate. A while afterwards, father came home on shore-leave. Carrie and I had already moved in with an aunt and uncle. They tried to do good by us, but they had children of their own and there wasn’t much space or money to go around. There were lots of aunts and uncles in those days; and if you asked me now, I probably couldn’t name most of them.

“When my father came home for shore-leave, he stayed in a basement room in Aunt Beth’s tenement. We couldn’t afford to pay the rent on another apartment, and even the cubes were out of our price range. So he rented this tiny, dismal chamber from the caretaker. Aunt Beth tried to encourage him to see us, to spend time with us, but it was no good. I think that he was lost, then.”

Elena gently gripped my arm. Gave me a reassuring smile.

“One day I went down to the basement to see him. The door was locked, but I knew he was inside: the tri-D television was blaring away on full volume.” I gave a long sigh. “So Carrie and I knocked the door in.”

“It’s okay,” Elena said. “You don’t need to tell me any more if you don’t want to.”

“You’ve opened the gates now,” I whispered. “I do want to tell you. I want to. My father was in the room, lying over the caretaker’s workbench. He still had his gun in his hand. The viewer had cloaked the shot, I suppose, and no one above him had even heard it. The medics reckoned that he had killed himself the night before: taken the gun and placed it under his chin, fired it. Both hands on the trigger – he must’ve been pretty determined.”

Elena’s eyes were wet with tears, and she gripped my arm more firmly now. I grimaced, waved her off. Nothing more to be said; his death hadn’t been recorded in his military record as a gift to Carrie and me.

“Death follows me, Elena,” I said. Suddenly eager to move on from the memory: to avoid recalling my father’s cold body, that pool of black blood around his head. “See, doesn’t matter where I run – it follows me. Always has, always will. That’s why I don’t have anything to fear from this job: I already know death.”

Elena clasped her body against mine.

“This war won’t last for ever,” she said. “And when it’s over, when the Krell are done, you won’t need to fear anything.”

Pain.

Real, unsimulated pain.

I tried to move. My right leg erupted in agony, and I cried out. There was pain all along my right side, concentrated on my ribcage. I’d felt the sensation before:
broken ribs
. Multiple. My fatigues were stuck to me, wet in places.
Blood
.

Worst of all was the intense ache that dwelt behind my eyes, deep in my head. Rolling thunder; a pressure headache like a tactical nuke firing in my skull.

For a long while I just lay there.

I wanted to sleep so badly.

Get up
, I told myself.
This is real. Fuck this up, and you won’t wake in the simulators
.

Vision came back to me in snapshots of the outside world. I was in the wreckage of the medical bay, still strapped in by the safety harness. Fabric straps bit into my shoulders. I struggled to move an arm. Fumbled with a release buckle, but it was too much for me to get myself free of the webbing.

Need to sleep.

Don’t. Stay awake!

I was awake for a few seconds, then unconscious again.

I breathed deeply, feeling the tang of alien atmosphere in my mouth. Gravity and atmosphere felt wrong. Medical was at the wrong angle. The floor was slanted, and parts of the external structure had punched through the walls of the module. An emergency lamp set in the ceiling flashed red. Dirty light streamed in from holes in the outer hull. Every window, every view-port, had been shattered during the crash. Parts of the bay had come away during the evacuation, and the entire structure yawed and creaked with the motion of the wind outside.

If I sleep now, Death comes later
.

Good enough.

I was on Helios.

I awoke again to a sharp, urgent pain.

“Get away from me!” I yelled, twisting my arm in the safety harness.

Jenkins’ face came into focus above me. She held my left arm, and I realised that the pain was from my outer forearm. My fatigue shirt was rolled up and Jenkins held a hypodermic to the skin. A small well of blood told me that she had just injected me with something.

“It’s me, Cap.”

I rubbed my arm, groaning to myself.

“Just some painkillers and a stimulant cocktail,” Jenkins said. “It’ll help with the pain and keep you awake for a while.”

I pulled myself into a more comfortable position. The chemical rush hit my bloodstream very quickly and the fog of pain dispersed. I felt mildly more alive – I could operate, at least.

“Take it easy,” Jenkins said. The concern in her face was enough to make me pause. I looked down at my right leg and grasped the ripped fatigues. They were caked in hot, sticky blood. Something metallic and sharp had penetrated my fatigues. It had pierced tissue and muscle, part of it still protruding from my leg above the knee. I looked in disbelief at the injury.

Why hasn’t it started healing yet?
I asked myself.

Then a sick realisation hit me. I was in a real, fallible human body: not an improved simulant. I would bleed and I would die – maybe for good.

“Are you all right?” Blake asked, standing beside me.

He was dressed in shipboard fatigues but his hair was still slick with amniotic fluid from the simulator-tanks.

“I’ll live, I think. Have I been out for long?”

“Couple of hours,” Blake said, noncommittally. “Give or take.”

I could tell that he was lying.

“How does that leg feel?” Jenkins said. “We need to get it bandaged. I tried while you were out, but you kept moving around.” She frowned at me. “You were talking while you were unconscious – something about Elena.”

“Just help me out of here,” I said, struggling free of the remainder of the safety-webbing.

Jenkins and Blake assisted me. I ground my teeth against the pain. My entire body hurt; I felt bruised and battered on every level. Standing from the harness was a mission. I could see Martinez and Kaminski getting their bearings. All four of my team had made it, at least.

“I feel about as bad as you look,” Jenkins said, wiping a cut on her head. “But it could be worse.”

She motioned towards the back of the medical bay. In the dim light, I made out bodies pierced by support struts and squashed beneath heavy equipment. A couple of the techs were no more than smears on the walls, thrown about so viciously during the landing.

“Welcome to Helios.” Kaminski spread out his arms, encompassing the med-bay. “Hot towels and drinks will be served at your seats. If you require any assistance disembarking please await a hostess. As our regular attendants are either dead or about to be eaten by fish heads, you will have to make do with Jenkins – she scrubs up okay if don’t look too hard. This is totally FUBAR.”

“Leave it, tech boy,” Jenkins said, punching Kaminski in the arm. “This isn’t the time or place.”

“I guess being inside the simulators during the crash saved us,” Martinez said. “Acted as a cushion, or something. We got lucky.
La gracia de Dios
.”

“Olsen was the only other survivor,” Jenkins said. “He took a bad knock to the head, but he’ll live.”

She jerked a thumb towards Olsen’s body, hanging in one of the wall-mounted safety harnesses. His smock was shredded at the front and a huge egg-shaped lump had already formed on his temple. His skin was an ashen grey colour but his chest was just perceptibly moving.

“Jenkins sedated him,” said Blake. “He was becoming hysterical. The others … Well you don’t need to be a medic to realise what has happened to them. I guess that some might’ve escaped from the
Oregon
, like us, in evac modules.”

In my mind’s eye, I remembered the fleeing evac-pods. There was no way that anyone else had made it down to Helios: the Krell had mercilessly dispatched everything that had left our ship. I closed my eyes. Nightmare images of the evac were painted inside my eye-lids as well. I wouldn’t be able to escape those memories easily; the experience would be one I would relive again and again.

“I saw what happened,” I said, “on the way down. There won’t be anyone left. No point in setting a distress beacon, at least not yet. There was another Krell warship. The asteroid field – I think it was a trap.”

I swallowed, recalling the cold of space as it claimed my body. That had felt significantly worse than I did now, but I’d known that pain was fleeting. I wouldn’t be able to get away from
this
pain anywhere so swiftly.

“We saw it too,” Jenkins said. “The
Oregon
didn’t stand a chance. We’ve been awake for a while, and I ordered a stocktake of our supplies. Most of the spare simulants made it.”

“
Most?
” I questioned. Jenkins was holding something back.

“Just rest,” she said, holding my shoulder. “No need to worry about that now.”

“I need to know everything,” I said.

Jenkins bit her lip, and I pushed past her: scanned the destroyed interior of the module.

Sweet Christo
.

At the back of the med-bay, among shattered storage tubes and twisted metal, sprawled parodies of my real body. What little strength I still had seemed to ebb from me. Most of the simulants were a sickly, fish-belly white colour. Several of them had bled out. Although they were incredibly resilient, the bodies had been thrown about like trash. The inactive simulants hadn’t stood a chance.

Snuffed out as easily as the medical team
.

I gingerly picked my way through the wreckage to investigate. It was like looking at myself, in a variety of different poses: each corpse killed in a different way. One had been pierced by a support strut through the gut, leaving an eruption of intestines and other internal organs. I involuntarily touched my own stomach; felt my own intestines twist in psychosomatic sympathy. Another had been cleanly decapitated. Then another had been caught up in electrical cabling that had come loose from the ceiling, lighting it and leaving it blackened and burnt.

I grappled with an upturned console, steadying myself. It was sickening. I was trapped inside this damaged, imperfect body: trapped on Helios, surrounded by Krell. Even if we had the right equipment with which to do it, I was quite sure that none of the bodies were salvageable. The idea of being on Helios, without a simulant to hide inside, filled me with dread. I felt physically drained.

No point in going on any more. If you can’t use your simulants, what sort of a soldier are you?

“I told you not to look,” Jenkins whispered.

Blake sighed. “At least the others made it, although the tanks are in a bad way.”

The simulants for the rest of the squad sat in their pristine glass storage capsules. They were still clad in combat-suits, dull-eyed and ready for activation. The simulator-tanks themselves weren’t so well-preserved; spider-web fractures marked the outside of each tank. Several of the delicate connection-cables had been torn from their moorings.

“Looks like those tanks will need work before they’re operational again,” I said. Needed to concentrate, for the good of my squad if nothing else. “I want to get this place secure, and scout the immediate—”

Thump. Thump
. A series of percussive booms echoed through the abandoned module.

“What the hell was that?” Jenkins asked.

Something was on the roof outside, and had hit the hull hard.
Thump. Thump
.

“A survivor?” offered Blake.

“More likely Krell,” I said. This had suddenly stepped things up; we had to act fast. There was no prospect of staying in the crashed module if we were about to be swarmed by Krell. “Have we got weapons? Are they useable?”

“Yeah, they made it down fine,” Jenkins said with an empty laugh. “Proper Alliance-issue, made to last. Or something like that.”

Jenkins opened the metal crates of unused M95 plasma rifles and grenades. She quickly distributed the weapons, and we each took a rifle and a pistol.

I held a rifle in both hands, felt the weight of it.
We won’t stand a chance out there
, I thought to myself. I loaded the power cell into the stock – even that looked ridiculously oversized in human hands. Like the rifles were made for adults, and we were only children, playing at being soldiers. I lifted the M95 and fumbled, could barely operate the heavy weapon. There was no way that I would be able to carry the gun for any protracted period of time, let alone operate it.

“Isn’t there anything more appropriate?”

“The armoury went down with the
Oregon
,” Jenkins said. “This gear was an overstock. Just happened to be in the med-bay during the attack.”

Then I saw my pistol, hanging from the holster beside the crushed remains of my simulator. Perfect condition, the burnished metal grip gleaning, ammo clips still loaded into the webbing. Taunting me. I hobbled over to it, strapped the gun and ammo to my leg.

No time to argue. There was more thumping outside, only now it sounded like it was coming from all around the module – as though there were attackers all around us. I considered our choices. The module was unpowered and there was no way we could set up the simulator-tanks without Olsen. In any event, they’d been badly damaged – I didn’t know what sort of repair work was necessary to get them running again. Olsen still lay comatose in his harness, eyes tightly shut; he was out of action for now. Whatever was outside, we would have to confront it. I swallowed back fear and staggered over to the exit door.

“You might say you feel okay,” Blake said, frowning at me, “but you sure don’t look it. Maybe you should stay inside, while we go investigate.”

More pounding on the hull. The screeching of metal on metal somewhere outside.

I waved Blake away. “I’ll be fine. Form up on me; I’ll pop that hatch and then we move out together.”

The main entrance door to the med-bay acted as a bulkhead but had become deformed by the force of the impact, and broken free of its frame. I kicked it with my good leg and it came open easily. The squad deployed smoothly out of the ship, rifles aimed into the unknown.

A storm seethed. The wind was a roaring inferno, carrying with it sharp, angry sand. The landscape was a blurred orange-red, almost burnt. Huge sand dunes shifted and lapped like waves, topped by a deep red-brown sky. Through the intense wind, it was impossible to gain any sense of geography or scale: Helios just looked like endless, unforgiving desert. Bulbous, low-lying clouds filled the sky. Barely visible were two huge suns. They sat bloated on the horizon, just beginning to rise from their slumber. Dawn was coming.

“I thought that Olsen wasn’t expecting the storm yet,” Blake shouted, over the wind.

“I don’t think that the storm has hit,” I said. “This is Helios on a good day.”

“Ah, shit,” Blake replied.

Just then, there was an enormous thunderclap and a brilliant flare lit the sky. Lightning streaked down from the pregnant clouds in angry red forks. The ground shook violently as each clap sounded. The sky flashed again and again. In those brief seconds of illumination, I made out shapes all around me. I backed down into the door.

There were figures out in the storm and they were rapidly moving towards the wreckage. Kaminski fired once, twice, three times with his rifle. Every shot missed, but the nearest figure dropped into a prone position. Another took its place, turning glowering red-and-green eyes towards us.

“This is all we need!” Kaminski shouted, sending more bright plasma shots into the miasma.

His aim was off; outside of a simulant, such heavy ordnance was very difficult to operate. I wasn’t doing any better with my rifle. I fired several times, every shot going wide. The rifle was meant to slave with a combat-suit, not to be fired manually. I jammed my finger on the firing stud, aware that warning lights illuminated on the rifle control panel. Without a tactical helmet, I couldn’t even tell what the warnings were. I dropped the rifle to fire it from the hip, but the dimensions were all wrong, and the ugly metal stock jarred against my broken ribs.

Damn it!
I tossed the rifle away.
This isn’t going to work
. The muzzle was red-hot, smoking.