The Lazarus War: Artefact (27 page)

Eventually, Kellerman drifted into a sleep, still propped up in his seat. The exo wasn’t made for sitting or resting. Peters carefully placed a blanket over his lower body, breaking open a crate of emergency supplies. The cabin grew quiet.

Everyone has their demons
, I considered.

I tried to stay awake. I didn’t want to remember any more. But I was so tired, so completely exhausted, that I knew sleep was inevitable. Hours into the journey, I couldn’t resist it any longer.

We’d been on Azure for three years.

I remember the day too well, with a clarity that I wished dimmed with age, but has instead grown.

Our last day
.

I had been operational for three weeks running. By now the Sim Ops Programme had been an unrivalled success and my record of effective missions was unsurpassed. I’d spearheaded a large simulant op out on the Rim; disabled a Krell battleship; rescued the marooned crew of an Alliance space station. The border with the Maelstrom was all-out war, but slowly, so slowly, the Sim Ops Programme was making a difference.

It was a short route between the officers’ habs and the Simulant Operations Centre, but I walked through Fort Rockwell in a sort of daze. My own skin felt uncooperative and unforgiving. The sky overhead was brightening now – pre-dawn light filtering in from the east. Inside the compound, the streets were like a grid, with expected military precision.

I went straight to the base PX. It was open all hours, and I was sure that I would have broken in if it hadn’t been. A young-faced Army clerk served me two bottles of Earth-imported Scotch – raising an eyebrow at me as he rang up the total cost.

“Hard night?” the clerk asked, as he wrapped the Scotch bottles and placed them into a brown paper bag. He had a smug look to him, the blush of fresh acne on his forehead.

I nodded. “Something like that. Let me ask; you ever seen real combat?”

“No, sir,” he said. His expression froze, eyes dropping to the Sim Ops badge on my lapel.

“So you’ve never looked down the barrel of a Krell bio-gun, seen the look in a fish head’s eyes as it takes you apart?”

The kid swallowed. “No, sir. Not sure I’d want to either.”

“Thought so,” I said. “Assumption isn’t good for you. I’ve been working. Bet you supposed I was drunk?”

The clerk looked down nervously. “Apologies, sir. I – I didn’t realise that you were Sim Ops.”

I swiped my unicard and left the store.

Of course, the clerk was right.

Elena was waiting for me when I got back to the hab.

Our domicile was split over two levels, set into a block with twenty other officer suites. Facing the sunrise: affording a decent view as Tau Centauri rose every day. Elena had chosen it because it was quiet – the opposite end of the base to the main spaceport. Two bedrooms. Although one of those had never been used, logistics hadn’t asked us to consider moving.

“Welcome home, Captain Harris,” the household AI chirped, as I stumbled inside. “You have sixteen new messages for approval. I can route those to your wrist-comp if you would—”

“Shh!” I hissed. “Keep it down. And I told you to call me Conrad.”

“As you wish, Captain,” the AI said, voice pitching a little lower but still too loud for this hour of the morning.

“I’m already up, or still up, depending on how you want to look at it,” Elena called from the bedroom. Her voice sounded brittle: accusative. “Are you drunk?”

I didn’t answer but I stopped by the front door, looked at a mirror set into the wall. I’d asked Elena to take this away plenty of times, and looking into it I remembered exactly why. I was tired, with rings under both eyes, but that wasn’t the reason I didn’t like the mirror there. It was because I didn’t recognise the face looking back at me. Because I didn’t
want
to recognise that face any more.

I stalked through the apartment, fetched a glass tumbler from the galley. Elena had gone silent, hadn’t followed me. I didn’t immediately know whether that was a good or a bad thing. Had to face the music. I paced into our bedroom.

The window shutters were open, and the room was filled with pale strands of morning light. Individual shafts fell across the chamber, illuminating drifting dust-motes.

“You couldn’t sleep?” I asked, vaguely registering that the bed was still made, that Elena was sitting on it rather than in it.

“No,” she said, firmly. “I didn’t sleep. I waited up for you.” She wrung her hands on her lap. That was another of her habits, another of her tells. “You said that you were coming off-duty at twenty-hundred hours. I asked you a question: are you drunk?”

“I’ve had a drink.”

“Where have you been? It’s nearly five in the morning.”

“So what? I haven’t been anywhere.” I hoped that this wouldn’t be another argument. We had been having too many of those lately, and always over the same things. “Just venting some energy. I’m due shore-leave in two days. Only one more op to go.”

Elena wouldn’t meet my gaze. She knew that shore-leave meant nothing to me, and I think that it had started to mean less than that to Elena. She sat so rigidly, upright. Dressed in a formal smart-suit, her hair clipped back from her face.

“And what will you do with your shore-leave?” she asked.

“You mean what will
we
do. Look, we’ll talk about this later. I’m tired. It’s late, or early, or whatever.”

I sat the Scotch bottle down on the bedside cabinet, unwrapped it. The cap seal clicked off, and I poured a finger into the glass.

“Are you listening to me?” Elena said. “What’s the point of shore-leave? When you’re not working, all you ever want to do is work. You’ll be consumed by running checks, thinking about your next operational period.”

I knocked back the Scotch. Focused on the tri-D caricature on the side of the bottle: a black-and-white dancing cowboy, the words YANKEE MALT. An ashtray on the bedside cabinet literally brimmed with cigarette butts: Elena must have been smoking all night.

“You only ever take minimum downtime between transitions,” Elena went on. “And don’t think that I haven’t seen your psych-evals.”

“Those are confidential. Between me and whatever tech—”

“I’m on the Programme, Conrad! I can see whatever I want. And I’ve accessed your files. I’m not a fool, so please don’t take me for one. Your most recent report recommends a year to eighteen months’ shore-leave, and a rehabilitation and adjustment course.”

Elena had, I suddenly realised, lost weight in the last few weeks. It pained me not to have seen that before now. She had been crying. Her pale skin – always pale, despite the heat – was streaked red. Even then, I didn’t want to talk about this – didn’t want to do anything except think about that next transition, think about skinning up.

“It’s too light in here,” I decided. “Those shutters should be closed.”

As I passed Elena, I noticed that she was rubbing the ring on her finger. She slid it off smoothly, covering the motion – almost apologetically – with her other hand. That was the ring that I had bought her when she had first followed me out to Azure. I hadn’t seen it in months, but the memory of her arrival came flooding back. I stifled it, buried it away. The window shutters adjusted, casting light like energy beams across Elena’s legs.

“There is something that I need to tell you,” she muttered.

“Can’t it wait? I’ll have some proper downtime after the next op. Oh-eight-hundred tomorrow. Another battleship raid. Command thinks that this will break the back on the second advance—”

“It
can’t
wait,” she hissed. “It can’t.”

I poured another drink and downed it. The warmth in my gullet, spreading to my stomach, from the Scotch, was in stark contrast to the chill growing in my heart. A paralysing realisation hit me:
this isn’t just another argument. This is a different and more serious beast
.

Elena sighed and looked away from me – fixing her glassy eyes on a particular spot on the empty wall opposite where she sat. Our hab had taken on a strangely anonymous feel; there were no ornamentations or personal objects left here.
How long has it been this way?
Had I just noticed the change, or had Elena removed them months ago? Even Elena’s holo-pictures of home, of Normandy, had been taken off the walls.

“I’m not happy here. I gave up everything to come out here with you. Whatever happened to getting married, settling down, having children?”

“What difference would a marriage contract make to our relationship? You know that we wouldn’t get a licence for a child, let alone children. It was just talk. Maybe one day.”

“
One day
will be too late!”

“It was all easy talk. You never wanted any of those things, anyway.”

“How the hell would you know that? I
did
want those things. And there was a time when you did too.” Elena abruptly threw up her hands, becoming animated again. “When did things change?”

I traced the edge of the glass with my index finger. Said nothing. Maybe I could get out of this by just letting her blow off some steam; maybe leave the hab, come back tomorrow—

“We both know when things changed,” I said. “And we both know why things changed.”

“How many times do I have to tell you?” she continued. Her voice was raised to a shrill pitch and her face had reddened. “Let me spell it out: I did not know. You think I would have hidden that from you?”

We hadn’t learnt much from the medics after the terrorist attack. Elena had been two months’ pregnant, still in the early stages. Did I blame Elena for our loss? I didn’t want to blame her, I really didn’t. But I needed
someone
to blame.

“Doesn’t matter if you did, because she’s gone now anyway,” I blurted, before thinking about the hurt my response would cause.

“What? And you blame me for that?” Elena roared, standing from the bed. “I did not know I was pregnant. There, I’ve said it. There was nothing that I could do that night.”

I slammed the tumbler onto the cabinet top, producing a loud crash. The glass immediately broke with the force of the impact. A shard slit my thumb.
Concentrate on the pain. Pain is good
.

“And there was nothing I could do either. Nothing I could do to save you or her. Do you know how that felt, Elena?”

“Don’t you dare use her against me! What would have been different about that night if you had known about it?”

“The bomb – the monorail,” I stumbled. “We would never have been on that train. We’d have caught an autocab, sat out the ceremony.”

“Bullshit.”

“I wanted to make a difference. I wanted to make this place safe for you—”

“You’re a war junky,” Elena proclaimed, stabbing a finger into my chest. “And if you can’t get over what happened that night, then how will I? I’ve given up everything for you. For what? Check your personnel file: over the last twelve months, you’ve spent more time in a Christo-damned simulant than your real body. You’re never here. Always out there – in the Maelstrom – fighting a war we’ll never win. At least, not like this.”

She was shaking.

Just let her vent
, I repeated to myself.
She’ll get over it. We’ll sort this out tomorrow—

“When you’re here, all you want is to be back out
there
! And when you are
there
, you are alive! I’ve lost you to the war. I can’t face that any more. I’m leaving.”

I was silent. There was no intelligent answer that I could give. The voice in my head, telling me that this could be resolved, had suddenly and irrevocably silenced.

“I’ve decided to take up a long-term placement on a new project,” Elena said. Her words tumbled out as though she was reading from a script: I could tell that she had practised this, had worked on it, for some time. “I’m going to be a shipboard psychiatrist for a new Alliance initiative.”

“All right. Do that if you need to, and then come back—”

“It isn’t that straightforward.”

“If it’s local space, even with the dilation you can be back in a few months. Take the job – it might be good for you.”

Of course, I didn’t want her to take any such placement. But I was too damned tired to argue, and if it would placate her then maybe it was best.

“You won’t like it,” Elena said, “but I have to do this.”

The firmness in her voice told me that this was not a standard placement at all, that this was something different. Elena sat back on the bed, exactly as she had done before, and fidgeted awkwardly. There was something that she didn’t want to tell me.

“The UAS
Endeavour
is going outside of registered space. I’ll be gone for a long time.”

“Tell me.
Now
.” Panic gripped me.

“I can’t. It’s classified.”

I slammed a fist into the wall; the pain in my knuckles suddenly felt good.

“Tell me. You owe me that much.”

She swallowed, ran her tongue over her teeth. “The Alliance is seeking a truce with the Krell. A Treaty. There has been communication between Command and senior members of the Krell Collective—”

“You want to make peace with those monstrosities?” I shouted.

“I’m sorry that I ever drafted you into this. The Programme has destroyed you!” Elena shouted back. “You’re never happy unless you are in a sim. I need you. I
needed
you. I need to be with you. Not an echo of you, not a simulation of you!”

I slammed the same fist into the wall. Where it struck, I left a bloody knuckle print.

Elena continued on autopilot, desperate to tell me the details of the scheme. “It’s highly classified. A delegation of human staff will be meeting with the Krell in an effort to establish a Quarantine Zone – between the Maelstrom and us. The team will require a long-term psychiatrist to evaluate performance while away from the Core Systems. I applied for the job and got it.”

The words wounded me like knives. Every syllable a gut-punch, every sentence a gunshot. Anger overrode any logical thought process, obliterated neural pathways.

“It’s a promotion for me,” she said, tears streaming down her face. “I’ll be in the Maelstrom for a year, objective, but possibly much longer. Then the team will return to the Core Systems. The project will be unveiled publicly very soon. It will be a huge step for all of us.”

“We will never have peace with the Krell. Mark my words. You walk out that door, it will be the last time I see you. I can promise you that.”

Elena hung her head, but her decision had already been made. I watched, seething with anger and hurt and pain, as she clutched a carry-all. She brushed past me, and I smelt her scent, felt the touch of her hair against my face. She slowly and deliberately dropped the ring onto the bedside cabinet.