The Lazarus War (4 page)

I swallowed. There was no prospect that she hadn't seen me. She marched right up to the table.

This is it: the culmination of years of planning. It has to be now.

“Mom—” I started. Even as the word left my lips I knew that it wasn't appropriate.

“Taniya,” my mother said calmly, in apparent contrast to her body language. “I thought that we sorted this out.”

As she spoke, I noted that she'd lost her accent. Such a minor, irrelevant thing, but another distance between us. I stood from the table. All those angry, dark thoughts evaporated. That was the effect that my mother still had on me: reducing a twenty-one-year-old woman to a child.

“I was in hypersleep,” I said, my voice pitching to a higher register, even sounding like a kid. “I didn't get the message.”

“I sent it for a reason.”

“I really wanted to see you. Local comms were down. I went to the visitors' centre…”

“I know, I know. And I wanted to see you too, but now isn't good.”

“All right. Then when? I can get a pass for a few more days.”

I saw Sheldon nodding out of the corner of my eye, and Nate punch him in the arm again.

My mother gave me a condescending look. “I can't guarantee that later will be any good either.”

“Then I'll wait. It's taken me so long to get out here. I need to talk to you. It isn't as easy as just taking a Q-jump to the next star system.”

My mother's face screwed up. I'd seen that look too many times before. It was the same expression that I wore before I was about to blow.

“I sent you a message.”

There was a jagged finality to her voice:
I am your mother and you do not argue with me.

“We had a visit arranged,” I started. “I came to—”

“I told you not to come here,” she shouted, voice raised to be heard above the music.

She looked so angry that it hurt. She was physically imposing, much bigger and taller than me. Her arms were almost as wide as my waist: coiled with colourful holo-tattoos which moved when she did. On her right hand, across her knuckles, the name
ARTEMIS
had been stencilled.

“I didn't get your message! I came here as we arranged—”

“As
you
arranged. You shouldn't have come here.” She sighed and shook her head, struggling to control her anger. She'd always had such a hot temper. “Just go. Seriously: just get off the
Point
. Do it right now. I don't want you here.”

“I'm not a kid any more. I can go wherever I like.”

“If you won't go, then I'll have you removed.”

Why was she so angry? I had expected this to be difficult, knew – after what I'd done – that today would be painful for both of us. This was much worse than just simple rejection. I shook with disappointment. After all of these years, I hadn't expected this level of hostility.

I squared up to her. The noise around me had suddenly dropped away.

“Four years in the Pen, Mom. And when I came out, everyone was gone.
You
were gone. You know how that felt?”

“I'm fed up repeating myself. And now I'm ordering you to
leave
.”

“I don't take orders from you.”

A big, tank-like man with dark, buzz-cut hair and Venusian eyes stirred behind my mother. He was so muscular and well built that he looked of a different species to me, and I had no doubt that he was one of my mother's soldiers. He broadcast violence like a radio signal.

“Everything all right, Artemis?” he said.

“Fine,” my mother said.

“
Artemis?
” I said. “Is that what you call yourself now?”

The other soldier eyed me up. “We got a problem here?”

“Nothing that can't be fixed by moving to another bar,” my mother said.

The tension broke like ice. She backed away.

“Get out of here. Make it today.”

She turned and left.

“What was that all about?” Daryl questioned.

I was rigid with fury, unable to follow my mother even if I had wanted to. As far as anger went, I was certainly my mother's daughter.

“Nothing,” I said. “It was nothing.”

Sheldon snorted and gave me a hard look. “Didn't look like nothing from where we were sitting.”

“So that woman was your mother?” Daryl said. “This was your, ah, appointment?”

“It was the meeting I told you about,” I said as neutrally as I could. “It didn't work out quite as I'd planned.”

I bit my lip; grabbed one of the drinks from the table – didn't care whose it was. I drank deeply from it. The beer tasted foul.

“I haven't seen her since I was fifteen.” I paused, considered how best to put the next part of the story. “We don't really see eye to eye. Not any more.”

“That got something to do with the prison tattoo on your cheek?” Sheldon said.

I thought about just walking away. Considered getting drunk and lost on my own somewhere on the
Point
. Only Nate's dark eyes kept me there; the concerned expression that had settled on his face.

“Look, I got into some trouble when I was a kid,” I said. “Served a little time.”

“That's nothing to be ashamed of,” Lucina said, becoming my unlikely ally. “You don't have to tell us if you don't want to.”

“It's all right. I'd rather just get it out.”

The water lapped against the outside of the aerocar. The plastic window fractured, spraying liquid inside.

“Jesus and Gaia!” I yelled, my hands pressed against the roof.

“We both got into some trouble. My sister and I fell on the wrong side of the dome, so to speak. I did time. End of story.”

“And that's why your mother is so angry?” Daryl inquired.

I shrugged. “I was fifteen objective years old. I did four years in real-time in the Van Drake Penitentiary. It's worse than a shithole; I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. When I got out, my mother had gone.”

“She came out here,” Nate completed. “She left you in the Pen.”

“Yes,” I said. “I wanted to see her. I've been writing to her for years, but she never responded. Then she agreed to meet me. I wanted to make peace with her.” I almost added:
to explain myself
. Instead I laughed. “That didn't exactly work out.”

“You could've just told us,” Lucina said. “Plenty of starship crews have their demons.”

I drank hard from the bottle. I hadn't drunk since the night of the incident, and the taste brought back fragments of memory – recollections that I wished I could completely erase, could wind back. It had never proved to be that easy.

“It's okay,” Sheldon said. “You got some closure, yes? Maybe that's all you needed.”

“Maybe,” I said. I wasn't convinced by that. “I just wanted—”

“Hey!” someone yelled from across the bar. “You assholes want to keep it down over there?”

“We're trying to have a private conversation…” Daryl replied.

It was then that I realised, as did the rest of the crew, that Blake's Last Stand had fallen almost completely silent. The music had stopped. Patrons were clustered around the view-screens set up on the walls. It was eerie how the character of the place had suddenly changed. I'd been so engrossed in my own drama that I hadn't even noticed.

She told me to leave
, I suddenly thought.

I was about to express that concern when the lights went out around us.

A blackout on a space station is never a good thing.

When your atmosphere, gravity and heat depends on a regular supply of juice, a power outage can be crippling. Going dark usually meant some catastrophic systems failure. For the lights to go out on a station like
Liberty Point
was bigger than most. This wasn't some ramshackle mining outpost run by amateurs; by the Holy Stars, this was the
Point
! There had to be a hundred redundancies in place to ensure that things like this didn't happen. I instantly knew that this wasn't a regular occurrence, that this was something far more serious.

The bar was completely black. There were no portholes or view-screens of space. Nothing to provide any light. For several seconds, it was utterly silent, all occupants wrapped in the dark, paralysed by panic.

Then Daryl started to talk. The words flowed out of him so fast that I could barely understand him. “It's going to be okay. Probably just a drill. Nothing to worry about. I'm sure that it's going to be fine. Nobody panic…”

I felt for Nate's shoulder. He grabbed my arm in return.

“That you, Taniya?”

“Yeah. It's me.”

“Stay with me. I won't leave you.” To the rest of the table: “No one leaves anyone behind, all right?”

“I got you,” Sheldon said, leaning in on my other shoulder. I felt the heat of his breath against my cheek. “Daryl, Lucina?”

“We're here,” Lucina said.

Daryl was still babbling.

“What's happening out there?” someone shouted. “Can anyone get a link to Control…?”

There was a deep, throbbing chug somewhere underfoot: reverberating through the soles of my sneakers. It was an unhealthy sound, the sort of noise produced by an abused chemical engine pushed too far. The engineer in me identified it as a breaker resetting; a hard reboot of the station's autonomic functions.

Then the lights cycled on. Not the regular, soft-focus lighting that this particular bar forced on its customers: this was clinical, brilliant emergency light. In sequence, the racks of overhead LEDs dowsed the bar until it was fully and uncomfortably lit.

I blinked away the dark – glad to be free of it – and scanned the room. Everyone looked to be in the same state of shock. To my surprise, that included the soldiers and sailors.

“No one knows what's happening out here,” I said aloud.

The rational part of my brain insisted that all was well. We were, after all, on the biggest space station in Alliance territory. These people were professionals; they were military. The
Point
was probably one of the safest stations on which to experience such an emergency.

But although I wanted to believe that, I just couldn't persuade myself.

A siren began wailing overhead: a tri-tone, distinctive emergency klaxon. I'd heard the sound before – when I was a child, during a blow-out on one of the Arcology's domes. It was a universally recognised alarm for serious structural damage; a sound specifically pitched so that it travelled well through a thin atmosphere. An electronic voice accompanied the alarm.

“Evacuate station. Proceed immediately to the nearest evacuation point. This sector has suffered a catastrophic systems malfunction. Evacuate station…”

That decided it.

“You still think that this is a drill?” I barked at Daryl. I was up. “We have to get back to the
Edison
.”

Too many things of too great a significance seemed to be happening in far too short a time. I'd finally made it to
Liberty Point
. I'd seen my mother for the first time in years, and that meeting had pretty much gone as badly as it could. Now, on top of all that, the station was suffering some unknown systems malfunction. The situation seemed unreal.

“Maybe Taniya is right,” Nate said. “Captain, ma'am, we should go.”

A chain reaction started by the patrons closest to the door. Panic crashed all around me like a wave. Tables were suddenly upturned, chairs thrown aside. The clatter of furniture against walls and floors was almost as deafening as the yelling and shouting of the crowd. Bodies began to push and press for the limited exits from the bar. Dancers in glass tubes were scrabbling for release: I saw one girl being carried out of a broken tube, another clawing at the exit handle to no avail. Very few people stopped to help them.

Sheldon held my arm. I stumbled on, avoiding broken glass, weaving between other escapees. Daryl, Lucina and Nate were around me, grabbing at each other to stay together.

“It's got to be some sort of attack!” Daryl shouted. His earlier optimism had been shattered, replaced by blind dread. “They've come here!
They've
found me.”

In the press of bodies, I didn't question that remark. I was being crushed and could barely breathe. Elbows jabbed me in the ribs, someone pushed me hard from behind. I followed the herd and it burst out onto the concourse outside – into the District's main corridor. Where previously the zone had been ablaze with neon and other light sources, now it was drenched by red emergency lamps, like everyone and everything had been coated in blood. The image was not an endearing one.

Every establishment on the concourse was emptying. Thousands of off-duty military, civilian hauliers and service crew all clamouring for release. Bodies were being trampled underfoot, limbs tangled.

The idea that I might be left behind suddenly occurred to me. I grabbed Sheldon's hand tighter, caught him looking back at me. Daryl was clutching at Lucina – the younger woman doing her best to stay upright among the crowd. Nate was somewhere alongside me, ruthlessly pushing people aside. I'd never seen him like that before, and I wasn't sure that I liked this new side to him.

“The sector exit is ahead!” Sheldon yelled.

The enormous bulkhead door was shut, and a yellow security light flashed overhead.

“Let's hope that the door isn't locked,” I said.

We were still twenty or so metres from the portal, surrounded by a crush of fellow escapees, when – as though in answer – it peeled open.

When I saw what was on the other side, I wished that it had stayed shut.

For just a second the crowd froze.

All eyes fixed on the door.

The new arrivals were revealed by parts, and it wasn't until the whole had become visible that I realised what I was looking at.

Three soldiers, silhouetted by the light of the corridor beyond the door. They were armoured in sleek black suits with faces covered by bulky helmets, respirators attached to the chin and nose. The red light of the emergency lamps played off the angles of their armour, made them look cruel. Each carried a large rifle, muzzle up and pointed at the crowd. Having never been remotely interested in weapons tech, I had no idea what the guns were. I only knew that I did not want the devices pointed in my direction.

Are they cops?
I asked.
A military rescue team?

Something deep-seated and primal told me that
no, they are neither of those things
. I recoiled, back the way that we had come, toward Blake's. Without even thinking, I jammed myself against the man or woman behind me. Where before Sheldon had been dragging me along, now I tugged at his arm. I grabbed for Nate with my other hand and started pulling him back too.

“It's okay!” Sheldon said. “They're soldiers! They're here to help…”

Were Nate and Sheldon seeing what I was? Maybe it was the press of people, the horror of the day.

“They aren't!” I implored.

The nearest soldier took a step into the District's concourse, his weapon still up. He looked down the scope or whatever that thing on the top of the gun was.

“Get back!” I shouted to anyone who would listen. “Get away!”

Then Sheldon stumbled with me. He had finally seen what I'd seen.

The soldiers had insignia and icons all over their armour. The largest was also the most chilling: the moon and sword formation of the Asiatic Directorate.

I felt like I was teetering on the edge of a cliff; like this shit was about to get hysterical. The crowd began to reverse from the door. Slowly at first, but quickly accelerating, repelled by the trio of Directorate soldiers like an adverse magnetic reaction.
Where are the Alliance troops?
I wondered.
This is a military station! Where are the police?
For probably the first time in my life, I would've been grateful for a genuine law enforcement agent. There had to be at least one good guy in this sector. I scanned the bodies around me – desperate to find some symbol of authority.

With a detached calmness, the lead Directorate soldier raised his weapon.

The gunfire was loud and lethal. I'd never heard a kinetic weapon being fired before. On the domes, we don't have kinetics: they are outlawed on pain of life imprisonment. For good reason – pressurised environments and sharp projectiles are incompatible. That's not to say that the citizens of the burgs haven't found other ways of killing each other that are just as deadly, but that seeing a real gun fire – hearing that harsh bark as it spat rounds – was completely alien to me.

Hysteria broke out.

I immediately dropped to the ground and kept low, scrambling through bodies. Someone exploded not far from me, caught by a bullet to the head. Sheldon went down too, although I was pretty sure that he wasn't injured. Nate braced himself behind a woman – I saw her catching a chestful of bullets – then slugged another man to get a better position on the floor. Something wet and hot sprayed across my face. I hoped that it wasn't my blood but couldn't tell; just now, my entire body was a numb, trembling mess.

My mind was back in the Penitentiary. I remembered how to keep my head down, to stay out of trouble and under the guards' radar. I let my body do the work without any conscious thought.

It felt like the Directorate were firing for an age, but it was probably only a couple of seconds. In that space of time, the lucky had retreated into the bars and clubs. The unlucky were in piles around me, dead or bleeding out. I just lay there. Played dead. What more could I do? I wasn't a soldier.

Sheldon held my hand tight. There was genuine worry in his eyes, which were fixed on mine. “It's going to be okay, girly. It's going to be okay.”