The Lazarus Particle (17 page)

“Alexia?” he rasped down at her. His grip loosened and the life flooded back into her.

“Yes,” she hacked through huge gulps of air. Every word was like coughing out thousands of tiny needles. “Guns… I brought… The others… Have to… hurry…”

They were in the process of opening Soroya’s chamber when the company of soldiers stormed into the brig, rifles at the ready.

“It would appear someone has had a change of heart,” came the amused, softly chiding voice of Poe. “A pity.”

“Indeed,” concurred Gatz with an affected sigh. “Thank you for alerting us to the change in Miss DeCoud’s disposition… Mr. Dumphy, was it?”

At the sound of the name, Alexia felt her blood run cold.

Vron came forward, his sneering swagger in direct opposition to the humble servant role he was playing up for the new bosses. “Oh, y’know. Just doing my bit for the cause.”

“Nevertheless, we are indebted to you. If there is anything we can do for you, please, you need only ask.”

But Vron was already sizing up his reward, his eyes rolling lecherously over Alexia’s prostrate form. “Oh, I think about an hour or so alone with Miss DeCoud here will suit me just fine.”

19 • TURNABOUT

Everything had happened so fast.

So fast. So ugly.

The only consolation Vichante could take from that, from all the lives lost and casualties endured, was that whatever else was coming, it too was coming fast.

With that in mind, he did his soldierly best to stay sharp. The immersion chambers were a formidable deterrent to the civilians and reserves, but for seasoned vets like Vichante and his crew, they were temporary, a nuisance to be endured. They had all spent many hours over their careers in similar non-environments, trained to find ways to keep their minds focused and their bodies attuned. Most importantly, they had been trained to trust their brains.

Don’t feel. Know.

So went the mantra of those prisoners who had endured. It was the techniques they pioneered that Vichante now called upon to help preserve his readiness and sanity.

Know that you are kicking your legs, moving your arms, wiggling your toes, flexing your fingers.

Know that you are praying, talking, humming, singing, shouting.

Know that you are alive. Know that you are missed.

Know that you will be found at any and all costs.

Most importantly, know that every second you persevere, you do exponentially more damage to your enemy than they could ever do to you.

So that’s just what he did.

He flexed every limb and appendage he had, reminding himself that even if the chamber’s dampening field kept him from feeling the actions, his brain was still entirely functional, still sending the signals, still moving the muscles. He hummed military marches, he hummed drinking songs, he hummed latrine hymns and long-forgotten lullabies from childhood. He told himself jokes in the voices of Corliss and Rishi, always pretending not to know the punchline, always roaring with laughter even after the hundredth, the thousandth, the
nth
delivery.

Anything to feel, to keep pace with the lost rhythms of life.

Snick-snack.

The door.

He was on his feet immediately, throwing himself at whoever was on the other side of the door. He wasn’t even sure he’d managed to wrap his hands around that scrawny little throat. The slight, dark silhouette burning against the nuclear backdrop of light flooding into the chamber had been entirely swallowed up within seconds.

Don’t feel. Know.

He willed his fingers to grip, began to feel flesh giving way beneath his strong hands. Then a steady strumming. A pulse. Whoever it belonged to, Gatz or Poe or one of their minions, Vichante had every intention of taking the Oviddian son of a bitch with him.

Slowly, though, a thought began to percolate in the back of his immersion-addled mind. Freed from the mentally confining prison of the chamber, he was starting to think critically again.

Something wasn’t right.

Why had only his chamber been opened? Why was he being allowed to choke out some form of administrator, be it Gatz or Poe or one of their underlings, without being shot or stunned or clubbed into submission by a gang of heavily armed thugs? Why wasn’t the person he was choking trying to fight back?

That’s when he felt the pounding on his shoulder. Three quick strikes.

Vichante reared back suddenly. The terrified form of Alexia DeCoud rapidly clarified itself before his reconstructed vision. She was gasping and spitting out words as quickly as she could form them. Something about guns and others. No time to lose.

He had to admit, she had collected quite a nice little arsenal for herself along the way.

Finally Vichante nodded, swinging bodily off of her. He quickly picked through the weapons she’d brought with her, selecting a high-caliber pistol with a good heft to it for his sidearm and a nasty looking assault rifle. Slinging the rifle across his back, he hauled ass to the next tube over from his. “C’mon, then, if you want to help so much all of a sudden!”

“I need you to know I didn’t want to betray you, Commander,” Alexia said as she scrambled to his side. The words came at a quick clip, thick and raspy but otherwise intelligible. “I had plenty of time to think while I was in here. Not always all that lucidly, but still. I know Dell’s death wasn’t your fault. I only agreed to back Gatz and Poe because I thought it would give me the best chance at helping you, but then everything happened so
fast
—”

The sharp, machined click of several rifles being brought to bear behind them interrupted Alexia’s mea culpa. Turning to face their captors, Vichante was almost glad they’d failed to revive Soroya. This failure deserved to be absorbed alone, absent any additional suffering on her part.

He stood by impassively as Alexia was more or less sold into the temporary possession of Vron Dumphy. The name rang a bell somewhere far back in his mind. There had been certain allegations against the man, he recalled, but he had been allowed to stay on active duty anyway.

There was a war on, after all.

And now here he was, reaping the spoils without fear of consequence. Vichante’s gut twisted vehemently at the thought. Whatever else Alexia DeCoud was or had done, she didn’t deserve what was coming to her.

To her credit, she allowed herself to be led out without making a scene. Back straight, eyes fixed determinedly forward, she was already in the process of detaching her conscious mind from her body, sending it somewhere else in anticipation of the punishment she was about to endure for daring to question the rule of Gatz and Poe.

“That’s a progressive look for your little revolution,” he said after the doors had closed behind Alexia and Vron. “Institutionalized rape of prisoners of war. Nice.”

“War criminal,” Gatz retorted evenly. “She is a traitor.”

“She’s a soldier! More than I can say for any of you. Even the Tyroshi don’t rape their prisoners.”

“Because they do not
take
prisoners, Commander Harm, not outside of their clan wars. Surely you understand this is not personal. No one appreciates what you have done for our people over the last year more than I, but the facts speak for themselves. Faced with an offer to rid ourselves of the Tyroshi threat once and for all, my compatriot and I would be remiss not to accept. If your lives are the price, I am profoundly sorry, but your movement will go on; victory can still be achieved in the balance of the broader struggle. My people, our planet—we have considerably fewer options. As for Miss DeCoud, she will not be especially missed, I suspect even by yourself. She has served her purpose.”

“In a sense,” Poe offered glibly, “she continues to.”

“Ah. Indeed.” Gatz favored his shadow with a tight-lipped smile. “Well observed, Poe.”

Vichante couldn’t help himself. Dropping his chin to his chest, he hitched with a broad, only half maniacal laughter that rolled through his barrel-chested upper body and rippling shoulders. “You two have it all figured out, don’t you?” he asked, lifting his head just enough to eye them critically. “You’re just going to hand over the Commandant and the rest of us and that’s it? You’ll never hear from the Tyroshi again?”

Poe shifted in place, trading an awkward glance with Gatz. “That is essentially the substance of the arrangement.”

“You ignorant retch. Do you know what the Tyroshi hate more than traitors? Cowards. You think you negotiated with them? All you’ve confirmed is that you’re gutless. That you’re willing to do whatever it takes to sell out your own cause, up to and including the people who rallied around your banner when no one else would.” Grinning morbidly, Vichante leaned forward just so. “They’re going to take me and my people, and then they’re going to rape your moons and slag this planet—
your
planet—into a ball of molten shit. Nothing will ever live on it again. You and your people won’t just die, you’ll be
erased
. So congratulations, you halfwit curs, because you’re half right: my cause, my movement, will go on. But you two, you’ve signed your own death warrants. You and all your people and your shit heap of a planet with you.”

Silence reigned on the deck in the wake of Vichante’s bleak prediction. Even the rifle-toting grunts were starting to show signs they were no longer entirely sure they had thrown in with the right lot. Glances were exchanged; rifle discipline began to degrade ever so slightly. It was nothing Vichante could make use of directly, not with the number of barrels trained on or about him, but if he could just plant a seed…

“That’s right. You all hear me. Those are your families I’m talking about, your friends and loved ones. You think it’s only my people they’ve doomed? Do you honestly think it ends here? This easily?” He fixed Gatz and Poe with a deadly stare. “These two, what are they telling you? That you don’t have the fight in you! That you should throw in the towel, sell out your allies! I’m telling you you’re better than that! That together, we can still snatch victory from the jaws of—”

Vichante doubled over as a rifle stock came down hard between his shoulders, sending him crashing to his knees. Several shouts rang out then, followed by even more shots. Realizing he was caught in the middle of a firefight, he curled up and kept as low a profile as possible until the shooting came to a stop.

Just as quickly as it had begun, the firefight came to an abrupt halt. The deck was wreathed in silence, the air smoking with the stench of burnt cordite and ozone. Someone moaned nearby. Vichante waited for the sound of killing shots to start ringing out, but none came. Instead, a shadow passed over him, turning him urgently onto his back.

“Commander? Commander Harm?! Are you alright, sir?”

“Fine,” he answered, though his ears were still ringing. “I don’t think I was hit. Who the hell are you, soldier?”

The woman hovering above him was short but broad-shouldered, with a hard, slightly pinched face and dark, coffee brown eyes. She reached down, and for the second time in as many days he allowed himself to be hauled to his feet. “Sergeant Rios, sir,” she said, checking him for any obvious signs he’d been hit in the close-range exchange of fire.
 

“You in charge of these men?”

“Am now, sir,” she said once she finished. She gestured with a nod to a body sprawled a few feet behind him. From its positioning, it was obviously that of the man who had struck him. “That’d be First Sergeant Garland. Always a bit of a hard-ass, but I never thought he… that it would come to this. We had no idea how fucking crazy these lunatics actually were, sir.” She glared down at Gatz and Poe, the two of them cowering shamefully beneath the leveled rifles of two of her men.

“That’s not important right now, Sergeant.” The First Sergeant was dead, along with four others from the dozen that had streamed in with Gatz and Poe. That didn’t mitigate what he could only imagine was happening even now, though. “I need your two best men to go find and secure Alexia DeCoud. You saw what we all saw; you know how much danger she’s in.”

“God damn right I do,” she hissed. “Breed, Torrance, hop to! Non-lethal force, preferably. I have a feeling Miss DeCoud is going to want to have a word with Mr. Dumphy after all this.”

“Understood.”

“Copy that.”

Breed and Torrance lined up on either side of the double-doors, checked each of their sight lines methodically, then set off at a careful but purposeful clip. This assignment clearly fell well within their wheelhouse.

Vichante looked to Rios. “Your men are loyal, no question, but how about the others? What’s your reputation among the grunts?”

“Not to brag, sir, but I believe I command a certain amount of respect. With yourself and the command staff in tow, I think most everyone else will fall in line. We can sort out the true-believers from the fair-weatherers once we have the station back. With your permission, I’ll be the first one to submit to review afterward, sir.”

“When the time comes, Sergeant. Who’s your second?”

“Sir, that would be Specialist First Class Capazian.”

“Specialist
Capazian, step forward.”

“Sir.”

“Would you second your Sergeant’s assessment of her pull with the grunts?”

“Sir, yes, sir. Sergeant Rios is a soldier’s soldier if ever there was one. Speaking only for myself, I’d follow her to hell and back.”

The surviving majority of what was now Rios’ company offered a clamorous grunt of approval. Vichante waved them down, though the enthusiasm and the veracity of their support was as good as any shot of adrenaline. “Good to know; I have a feeling we’re going to need it.”

“We stand ready, Commander Harm. Tell us what we can do to make this right.”

Vichante gratefully accepted the weapons he had been stripped of just minutes earlier, the weight and feel of the lethal hardware as intimately familiar as Soroya’s embrace.

Soroya…
 

“Let’s get the rest of the command staff out of immersion and see them armed. They’re not going to want to miss this party.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Remember,” he told Rios and Capazian, “they’re probably going to come out fighting, so when you pop the hatch, stand well clear. Of any of us, I stand the best chance of getting through to them. We’ll start with the Commandant.”