The Lazarus War: Artefact (35 page)

“Thanks, Martinez. What am I meant to be seeing?”

“Over there,” Martinez pointed.

I scanned the site, maybe a hundred metres away from us. The floor was littered with destroyed sand-crawlers. Not like the transport we had driven down here; these were unmodified civilian models, now just burnt-out wrecks.

“I’ve run a bio-scan,” Martinez said. “No reads.”

“These must have been Kellerman’s pioneers,” I said to myself. “Form up on that nearest crawler. I want to check it out.”

“Why?” Martinez asked. “This is a bad place. Full of
espíritu malign
. We need to move on – make the most of our lead-time. The Krell will be on our tail—”

“Are you questioning my orders, Martinez?” Suddenly, for whatever reason, it was very important that I investigated the crawler.

Martinez shrugged his enormous shoulders.

Both of them followed me down to the crawler. It was extensively blackened, probably by boomer-fire. Unlike many of the crawlers, at least this one was still the right way up.

“Looks dead to me,” Martinez said. “They must have taken a longer route down here.”

Mapping the tunnels, just like Tyler said
.

A noise – scratching, like clawing from an animal seeking release – came from inside the crawler. The entry hatch had been sealed shut by fire, but the noise was loud enough to be audible from outside. I clambered towards the crawler, over rocks and through fetid water pools. The flares were still burning brightly, and threw dancing shadows across the shattered hull.

“I’m going inside.”

“Negative, Cap,” Jenkins said. “Let me go first …”

I had to get inside the crawler, although I didn’t know why. I easily yanked open the hatch, the metal frame creaking as it gave. It was hardly necessary to use the hatch – there were holes in the crawler outer plating, big enough for me to squirm through, and every view-port had been blown out.

“At least let me come in with you,” Jenkins said, following me. She activated her suit-lamps to inspect the interior. “Christo …”

The scene was horrifying and yet strangely calming.

Death comes to us all
, a voice whispered in my ear.
Even those who would deny it
.

There were six still figures in the passenger compartment, eternally harnessed. They wore hostile-environment suits, like mine, with helmets covering their faces. Instead of bodies in the midst of flight – desperate to escape the crawler – the dead were inexplicably tranquil. Like they had known what was coming when their crawler ignited, greeting death without a fight.

“They’ve been dead for a long time,” Jenkins muttered.

“The crawler burnt out,” I said. “They probably suffocated from the smoke—”

“
I miss you
.”

I turned to Jenkins, although it didn’t sound like her voice. She had braced herself in the hatch, unwilling to completely enter. She scowled behind her face-plate.

“You said something.”

“I didn’t,” she said, shaking her head. “Must be hearing things, Cap.”

I placed my pistol on the lap of the nearest corpse. It was propped upright in the seat, poised as though resting rather than dead. Gloved hands sat on the knees. The helmet had completely fogged during the fire, and the originally off-white H-suit had become a dirty, smoky black.

“They strapped in even though they knew they were going to die,” I muttered.

“This is some bad shit,” Jenkins insisted. “We should move out.”

Just then, her lamps illuminated a scrawled message on the crawler cabin wall. I motioned for her to keep the area lit.

Three simple words.

Three familiar words:

I swallowed and recoiled from the wall.

Am I going mad? This can’t be happening
.

“You see that?” I asked Jenkins. She had to be my touchstone, my litmus test against insanity.

“Affirmative. Doesn’t mean anything to me.”

Of course it didn’t, but it meant something to me. Something that Kellerman hadn’t known about.
This isn’t happening
, I insisted.

“Someone wrote that before they died,” I said to Jenkins.

“Looks that way.” Jenkins looked on impassively, unimpressed. “It’s really better if we keep moving – the Krell could be here at any moment—”

But I couldn’t listen to her. This place was something special. Had to be: no one knew of those words, no one but Elena. I had to examine the crawler, whether Martinez and Jenkins wanted me to or not. With irrational determination, I reached over and lifted the helmet of the nearest corpse—

Elena’s face stared back. Big, dead eyes. Mouth open in a scream. She had been dead for years. Face contorted, withered; charred to blackened bone by the extreme temperature. Hair plastered to her head.

Fuck no – please don’t tell me that she died like this! She was never on Helios—

I shuddered and withdrew from the body.

It wasn’t Elena’s face. I rubbed the H-suit chest-plate clean, looking for some means of identifying the body. A name was printed on a stitched ID tag: S TYLER.

“Tyler’s sister. So she made it this far.”

With a determination that I couldn’t explain, I tore off the ID tag. Jenkins watched on with an uneasy grimace, but I ignored her. I stuffed the tag into another pouch on my belt.

You’ll go mad just like Sara and her people. Just a matter of time
.

“Cap, we should go,” Jenkins implored.

“It didn’t do her any good,” I said, taking a final look around the cabin. “We need to remove the body, do something to consecrate her passing.”

But there was nothing I could do, in the circumstances.
I’ll come back here
, I thought to myself,
and see that she is properly sanctified. She should have a proper burial
. Even as the thought formed, I knew that it wouldn’t happen.

“No time. We need to move.”

“Double-time it in there,” Martinez said over the comm. “I’m getting some ghost signals on the scanner.”

Martinez’s voice brought me crashing back to reality. We were in enemy territory, surrounded by potential hostiles. He and Jenkins were right – we needed to keep moving. I was being irrational, and I couldn’t explain it.

“Affirmative on the withdraw,” I finally said, nodding to Jenkins. She looked relieved at my command. “Let’s get moving.”

We backed out of the crawler. Jenkins jumped down first, and her boots cast up plumes of dust. Her head bobbed as she covered the nearby rock formations and natural permutations of the cavern floor, searching for targets. Content that the area was clear, I clambered down from the transport, and followed Jenkins. Martinez had deployed away from the crawler. He had thrown out some more flares, creating a lighting perimeter hundreds of metres around the destroyed vehicles.

“Holy Christo,” I muttered.

There were bodies, just like those inside the crawler, in every direction. Many were sprawled out on the floor, face down, and all were crawling away from something. In the same direction, I realised: back the way that we had come.

“The suits are from Helios Station,” Martinez said, crouching to examine one of the bodies.

All of the H-suits were emblazoned with crew and station badges from the outpost. There were hundreds of them down there, but it didn’t look like they had all died at the same time. Some were crumbling, ancient corpses, while others were still old, but fresher.

“It goes on like this for some way,” Martinez said, motioning out into the darkness beyond the flare light. “They must’ve put up a good fight. They were probably running from something.”

“But they didn’t stand a chance,” I said. “Look at the injuries.”

There had been multiple causes of death. Some of the corpses were torn to shreds by Krell weaponry – puckered with stinger-spines, swollen by exposure to bio-toxins and boomer-fire, torched by Krell flamers. Jenkins prodded at one of the more desiccated corpses, bone and fabric crumbling on contact.

“Mostly Krell weapons, but some of them died from standard-issue tech,” she said, rising up to full height. Her face looked pale. “The impact wounds look like shots from a carbine or pistol.”

“They shot each other.” Among the tangle of bodies, there were even human weapons; all civilian-issue, the sort of gear we had seen back at Helios Station. “They either went mad, or decided it was better to die down here than go on.”

Martinez crossed himself. The action looked bizarre in his combat-suit. “
La misericordia de Dios
.”

Then I saw something else. I scraped the floor with my glove, brushing aside an age of dust and small debris. The floor underneath was smooth, machined. Even in the twitchy light of the flares, I could see that it was a dark metallic compound.

“These caves aren’t natural.”

“Gets worse up ahead,” Martinez declared, pointing into the dark. “No rock at all.”

I paced over to Martinez, stepping through the minefield of corpses. Careful to avoid touching their outstretched arms, careful not to look on their terror-filled faces.

He was right. The tunnels became much narrower, and the rock-hewn walls gave way to the same metal.

“So something made these tunnels,” I muttered, cautiously eyeing our route through the cavern.

“What are your orders?” Martinez asked. He was just ahead of Jenkins and me, caught in the jumpy light of the flares: red on one side, green on the other. “I’m just going to say this once: I think that you should go back,
compadre
. We can get the ship, fly to the Artefact, and you can sit tight down here – maybe track back to the crawler—”

“We go on through the tunnels,” I said. “Nothing else that we can do.”

I knew that there was danger out there in the dark, and I knew that there was sense to what Martinez was suggesting. But
something
drove me on: something indescribable, beyond human terminology.

“Move out.”

Mission timeline: fifteen hours.

The tunnels became narrower. There was no way that we would have fitted a crawler through them.
The Artefact is a rotten tooth
, I considered.
Beneath the gumline, the root is immense and infected
. We were in that root, now somewhere below the rotted structure.

My head felt like it was going to explode, and I had to focus on what Jenkins and Martinez were saying to me, or my mind was quickly dominated by the Artefact’s signal. The impossibility of my plan – the idea of making it all the way to the Artefact – dawned on me during the trek.

Can’t give up. Got to keep it together
.

So many dead bodies. Not enough to account for the two thousand missing staff, but enough to demonstrate that the tunnels had been the site of an unmitigated massacre. We didn’t even stop to inspect them.

“I hate this place,” I whispered. “It offered me so much, but has taken everything.”

“What do you mean?” Jenkins asked, panning the area behind us with her rifle. When she turned away from me, I immediately panicked, desperately looking ahead to make sure that Martinez was still with me.

“Elena. It offered me Elena.”

“Don’t worry about that now,” Jenkins said. There was pity in her voice. It made me angry; not just with her, but with Kellerman, with the whole damned cosmos. I was so drained from being angry.

“A long time ago, I tried to follow her,” I went on. Easier to just recite past glories, to remember what had come before, than to think about what was going to happen next. “Command wouldn’t authorise the mission. Too expensive, too risky. Not without star-data.”

I wanted to keep talking. Jenkins’ voice was a comfort in the darkness, something real in the midst of this nightmare.

“That was where I went wrong. I let Elena go. I should have tried to stop her, should have told her that I loved her.”

“We all have to make choices,” Jenkins said. “But it isn’t the good choices, the easy ones, that define us. It’s the bad choices, the hard decisions.”

“Hindsight is a wonderful thing.”

“I suppose so. Sometimes a bad decision isn’t obvious until it’s too late.”

Now, I was paying for that decision, that choice. Elena had gone out into the cold, hungry stars. I had let her go. She had been alone, desperate and separated from the rest of the human race. And now I was too.

“It’s ironic,” I said. “Elena always wanted me to live a
real
life, to enjoy
unsimulated
reality. All those years ago, I couldn’t do that.”

Maybe she blamed herself for inducting me into the Sim Ops Programme. Maybe she felt that was her bad choice. She was wrong about that; she might’ve inducted me, but I was the one who became addicted. I kept going back out into space for more, simply because I craved it.

The anticipation of making transition
.

The rush of inhabiting a new simulant body
.

The gratification of doing things that no natural human being was capable of
.

And yes, even the horror of extraction. Even the pain of dying, again and again, became like a drug to me eventually.

“Elena knew that none of it was real,” I said, shaking my head. “She tried to warn me against becoming addicted. Tried to warn me that I was losing touch with reality, losing her.”

“Just remember who you are, Harris,” Jenkins said. “
Lazarus
. You always come back. We’re all going to get through this.”

She didn’t sound convinced at all.

The tunnels became wrinkled, scarred with ancient cuneiform. Consoles of black obsidian lined the walls. I approached one of them, and the controls glowed green in reaction. Martinez and Jenkins tried to do the same, but they couldn’t reproduce the effect.

My head ached worse than ever before. Even death by vacuum had been more pleasant than this. Whatever Kellerman had fed me to overcome the pain caused by the beating I’d suffered back at Helios Station, it had now completely worn off. I was in the throes of a chemical comedown. I limped on. My data-ports burnt. I’d never felt this sort of hurt in a simulant, let alone my own skin.

Something flashed red on my wrist-comp display. I stared down at it for a long time. TRANSPONDER TRACKING ACTIVE.
So Kellerman still has his talons in me, even now
.

I didn’t bother telling the others.

Martinez’s bio-scanner chirped a regular warning, letting us know that there were hostiles out in the dark.

It had been making the same noise for hours.

The Krell were following us.

Mission timeline: twenty hours.

“The floor is rising,” I said to the others.

Martinez and Jenkins nodded in agreement. The incline was almost imperceptible, but the tunnels were coiling back, taking us to the surface.

To the site of the infection
.

“How far do you think we have to go?” I asked. Forming the words took such immense effort.

“Maybe a few hundred metres,” Martinez declared. “But it’s difficult to say—”

Suddenly, Martinez’s bio-scanner began an urgent trilling. I could envisage his sensor-feed: a mass of fast-moving hostiles converging on our position. An amorphous signal-blob, indistinct, impossible to quantify. Behind me, Jenkins fell to one knee, rifle up. I clutched my plasma pistol.

In the dark, Martinez spun about-face, rifle up, searching for targets. I felt the prickle of fear on my spine: the Krell were here, even if we couldn’t see them yet.

“Keep all approaches covered,” I yelled, my voice echoing down the tunnels. “Watch the six!”

“Conta—” Martinez managed.

Something enormous swooped from the ceiling, accompanied by a claws-on-metal squeal. It came from a shaft above Martinez, and had been hidden until it chose to reveal itself. The primary-form sank its forearms into Martinez’s torso. Both blades pierced his combat-suit, lifting him off his feet. All happening so damned fast, too quick for my unaided senses to properly digest, let alone react. The xeno dropped from the shaft, hitting the ground with an enormous boom.

“Help me!” Martinez howled.

“Jenkins!” I shouted. “It has Martinez!”

I’m going to be next—

I started firing. Unguided, incensed. Plasma pulses tore into the xeno’s body, sent boiling alien blood over the walls and floor. The thing screamed, scrabbling around on the smooth floor for purchase, forearms still in Martinez’s twitching body. It wasn’t going to let him go, no matter what I did.

Jenkins immediately joined my fire. It took a couple of shots from her M95 to put the thing down – one to the body, another to the head. Guts and brain matter slid from the cauterised wounds, and the two corpses collapsed to the floor.

Martinez was gone. His body crumpled, huge wounds slewing his internal organs. His face-plate had smashed. No prospect of revival: extraction complete.

“Good journey,
compadre
,” I muttered.

I just hoped that he had safely made extraction, back at Helios Station. And as with Kaminski, there was no telling whether his extraction made his real death any more or less likely.

“Oh shit!” I yelled.

Another xeno came out of the shaft. I stumbled backwards, away from the attacker. This one landed on its feet, immediately launching at Jenkins.

Then two more slid from the ceiling. Back the way we had come, I saw the flash of wet bodies in the dark. Boomers and stingers wildly stitched the metal walls and floor.

“Get down!” Jenkins yelled. Behind her face-plate, she was a picture of sheer determination: mouth set, eyes wide.

She pumped the grenade launcher on her rifle. I lowered my head, covered my face. Even slammed my hands to my ears, although I was already wearing my helmet and it would do me no good.

An incendiary grenade sailed down the corridor. It exploded almost immediately – star-bright, scattering Krell body-parts. That wasn’t good enough for Jenkins. She pumped the rifle again, fired another grenade. That exploded too. The sound was so loud, amplified by metal walls and floor.

Fuck, fuck! This is really happening
.

I was shaking inside my suit. Even using the respirator atmosphere-supply, I tasted the reek of sweat and fear in the back of my throat.

“Press on down the corridor,” Jenkins barked at me. “Now! Stay back.”

I sheltered behind her. I was in no position to argue; she had the authority now. She fired again and again. Despite her enormous agility and strength, she cleared each sector carefully and cautiously.

They kept coming, and this time there were more of them. Again from the shafts above, from sub-corridors with no apparent use. Every shadow spawned them.

A primary xeno-form hurled itself at her.

Then: a ball of teeth and claws and talons and muscle.

Now: a blazing wreck of dead tissue.

I almost crawled after her. I fired when I could – both hands wrapped around the grip of my pistol. The pain in my head was overwhelming. The Artefact’s song was so clear that it was crippling me.

“Stay with me, Harris!” Jenkins called. Her helmet had been torn off, thrown into the mass of invading bodies.

The tunnels became tighter still. The walls were covered in scripture, the characters running like melted wax over metal, dripping and flowing. I brushed a hand against the wall, and icons suddenly flared to life.

But there was also a light at the end of the tunnel, I realised. At first, I only saw it in the afterglow of Jenkins’ rifle muzzle, still flaring brightly from the firefight.

Jenkins fell to a knee again, and fired another grenade. The corridor shook violently. I stole a glance back the way we had come.

I didn’t dare think about how many Krell were packed into that space. Clawing and shrieking, desperate to break open Jenkins’ armoured body and rip her insides out.

And once Jenkins is gone – me too
.

Stinger-spines sailed overhead, impacting the walls and leaving studded reminders.

One hit Jenkins hard in the chest. It cleanly spiked through her combat-armour.

“Oh
fuck
!” she said, letting out a surprised grunt. She half turned to me: “Just run! Just fucking get out of here!”

She managed to stay upright; no doubt her combat-suit was compensating for the toxins entering her bloodstream. Just one of those envenomed fragments would be enough to kill me – to drain my body of all life, to wither the
real
heart in my chest.

Jenkins grasped her grenade harness, enormous hands fumbling for an explosive—

Every possible sub-tunnel and shaft was rammed with aliens, and they had already choked the corridor from which we’d come. They were encircling us – now so close they were pressing in. No way back: the only possible route out of this mess was the light at the end of the tunnel.

A primary-form separated from the Collective, and leapt towards Jenkins. Unfurled to full height, it struck mantis-quick: knife-tipped forearms piercing her shoulders, right through her.

“Jenkins!” I shouted, paralysed.

Two or three further attackers descended on her, excited by the scent of blood, sharks following the kill. In such close confines, she couldn’t bring the rifle up to fire, and futilely struggled to pull herself free from the talons.

She’s already finished
, I told myself.
Nothing that I can do
.

“Go!” she managed. Her voice was wet and broken, like Blake’s before he had died out in the desert.

I watched in hypnotic terror, detached from the scene. I’d seen this so many times before, seen the Krell kill Blake, Martinez, Kaminski. Even my own death, on vid-feed recordings. Yet this was different: now the Krell had a new purpose. Something almost ceremonial.

Like frenzied piranhas at feeding time, the Krell took Jenkins
apart
. With an inhuman shriek, ear-splittingly loud in the enclosed tunnels, the main attacker ripped through her combat-suit. Her body was split in two. The other primary-forms tore at her torso, pulled limb from limb. Artificial blood splashed the walls, coated alien carapaces. The remains of Jenkins’ simulated body disappeared beneath the tide of Krell.

The carnage was over in a fraction of a second. Then the Krell lost interest in Jenkins, and moved to surround me. Every xeno-form, every possible mutant strain. I felt their hot, wet alien breath through my helmet, impossible as that was. I was completely encircled.

Is this how it ends, this time?
I asked myself.

A big xeno-form loomed over me. Strands of alien mucous, acting with a life of their own, darkened my vision. Simple motions like lifting my gun required so much mental strength that I could barely focus—

Lazarus, they called me. Except that there won’t be any resurrection from this
.

—and the singing: so glorious and terrible in my head, so strong that I clenched my teeth to ride it out – every static-squeal making the bones of my skull vibrate—

The explosion on the train. That same lost frequency
.

“Fuck you!” I screamed at the universe in general.

I was lifted off the floor, caught in the scything talons of a leader-form. It was an ancient and scarred Krell, coated heavily with dust. Eyes burning like dark coals: so alien. Did this thing recognise – through a collective, racial memory shared with the rest of the Krell species – that I had been responsible for executing so many of its kind? I think that it did – in some way that I couldn’t fathom and the human race could never understand.

I fumbled with my pistol, eager to fight until the last. There was no way that I was going down without a fight. I aimed it under the leader-form’s ribcage, fingers probing the trigger stud, and I ground my teeth. I pulled the trigger, again and again.

Nothing happened. There was no response from the weapon, no physical feedback as to why it wasn’t operating.

Please no!

The power cell was already empty, and the LED display flashed in warning. When had that happened? I hurled the pistol at the leader and it bounced, harmlessly, off the creature’s carapace. Both of my arms were free, and I patted my suit down – searching for something,
anything
– to use as a weapon.