The Lazarus War (6 page)

“Can you show us a map then?”

Pinder punched some keys on the terminal. A glowing holographic of the surrounding sector appeared. She pointed at the holo.

“We're here,” she said. “Go through the Officers' Lounge. It isn't very far.”

The Comms Room gently shook. Pinder leapt from her terminal, crawled back into her hiding space beneath the desk.

“Lock the door on the way out,” she called.

We left Pinder and the Communications Room as soon as Sheldon had finished treating Daryl. The captain was pumped with painkillers, leg wrapped with a synthetic wound sealant. I broke a piece of plastic from one of the office chairs and we taped that to the outside of his limb to jury-rig a splint.

“He needs a medinanite injection,” Sheldon remarked. “But that will have to do for now.”

“It's the least of my worries,” said Daryl.

“You might lose the leg,” said Sheldon.

“It's still the least of my worries.”

I tended to agree with him.

Sheldon had taken over Daryl's support duties. I walked ahead with Lucina, and she pointed to the ceiling – to the thick black smoke that was gathering there.

“The air scrubbers are failing,” she said. “The atmosphere is fouling.”

I nodded. “Then we should look for respirators. This is a space station; they must have emergency survival gear somewhere. We'll be back aboard the
Edison
before you know it.”

Lucina paused and shook. She looked like she might cry again. I grabbed her elbow, squeezed it.

“Please – stay with it. For Daryl's sake.”

“I will,” she said. “I promise.”

Since when was I in charge?
I asked myself. It was a day for breaking the Pen rules, and I was breaking Rule Two: look out for yourself. I'd lived by those rules for so long that breaking them actually felt good…

I stumbled over something on the floor. I saw that I'd fallen over a body.

Mom?
The fanciful, hysterical idea that this might be my mother occurred to me.
Please no!
I crouched down, illuminated the corpse with my torch. It was instantly obvious that it wasn't her: instead, a man dressed in a khaki uniform, his torso shredded to a bloody mess. I traced the crook of his arm, found a pistol still clutched in the dead man's hand. It was a compact model made of black plastic, with an electronic readout on the body. Similar to the one that Daryl had used in the District.

Although I could've given it to Daryl – he was, as of late, apparently handy with a gun – I decided to keep it. Daryl was injured, wouldn't be able to protect the rest of the group. Breaking Rule Two again, I scooped up the gun. The grip was slick with the deceased soldier's blood. I was mildly disgusted with myself for scavenging from the dead, but I figured that I needed the gun more than the corpse did.

“Have you ever used one of those?” Lucina asked me.

“Not yet. But there's a first time for everything.”

The weapon was small, but like a black hole its mass wasn't proportionate to its size. I had no idea what the gun fired – whether it was a projectile thrower or an energy weapon.

“Everything all right up there?” Sheldon said in a pitched whisper. “We can hardly see.”

I stood from the dead man, flashed my torch over a glowing sign on the wall. It read
OFFICERS' LOUNGE
.

“All good. Lounge is next junction.”

“Let's keep moving,” Daryl grunted.

We emerged into a wide space. It wasn't a bar, but some sort of recreational area. The smoke wasn't as bad here. Tables and chairs in pastel colours; military accolades on the walls. I guess that the place had been somewhere more subdued for senior officers and crew members to rest. Now it was deserted. An enormous, reinforcement-webbed observation port sat at one end of the lounge. I presumed that would usually grant a decent view of the outer rings of the station, based on where the chamber was located, but the protective blast-shutters were down.

“Sheldon and Lucy, look for emergency boxes,” Daryl ordered.

He had regained some modicum of authority. I hoped that meant that the medical tech was kicking in, and that Daryl could take back leadership of the group. I was perfectly fine with being told what to do by someone else rather than make the decisions.

“On it,” Sheldon called as he started searching the walls for breather gear. Two boxes were already plundered, and a third looked like it wouldn't open.

I sighed to myself, slapped the pistol down on a nearby table. I looked up at the shutters – was taken by the idea that I wanted to see space again. If I was going to die aboard the
Point
, then I wanted to see the stars one last time. My Zeta Ret heritage got the better of me and without explanation I searched out the shutter controls by the main window.

“Good idea,” Daryl called. “Let's get some light in here.”

The blast-shutters slowly retracted. I held my finger over the operating stud, watched the light of outer space spill across the lounge floor.

“By the Holy Stars…” I whispered.

“What is it?” Daryl barked. “Have you found something that we can use…?”

He squinted with his pale eyes at the universe outside.

Liberty Point
was a mess. From our position on the outer ring, we could see the inner elements of the structure: the long hub, the rings housing further decks. All of those were battered and scorched; had recently taken damage just like the Civilian District and surrounding habitats. Some modules had vented. Plumes of frozen liquid, like white geysers, spewed from the inner habs. Inside some of the occupied modules, through the numerous view-ports and observation windows, I could see the erratic glimmer of chemical fires. They were spreading, unchecked, across the
Point
.

But none of those details caused my reaction, because there was something much worse out there.

“Those aren't Directorate ships,” I said.

There were alien warships everywhere, so many of them that they blotted out my precious stars. Hundreds, thousands even – crammed into near-space. Bloated conch-like things for the most part, but smaller vessels also darted among the remains of the station.

“That woman – back in the Comms Room – said that the sensor-suite was down,” I said, working through what I was seeing. “They didn't know that the Krell were coming…”

I'd heard it said that Krell bio-ships were difficult to detect in the void. Something about their energy signatures, the materials from which the ships were built. Those stories had seemed like such rubbish before today. How could anything that big move through space without being seen or sensed? My mind raced with the implications: the unanswered engineering questions that such a scenario surely posed. The ships were enormous; they must put out a ton of spent energy. The sheer impossibility of the
Point
being subjected to an ambush of such scale dawned on me.

And yet, here it was. The facts spoke for themselves.

Sheldon and Lucina had stopped searching now. They stood watching the window. Lucina gasped, hand to her mouth.

“This is the biggest Alliance military station on the QZ,” Sheldon said. “The Navy will fight back.”

It was Sheldon's turn to be hopelessly optimistic. The fleet that we had seen on our arrival – that unstoppable, unbreakable Naval presence – was gone. Whether it had been destroyed, or just fled, was irrelevant. That it wasn't here, fighting the Krell, was the reality. Only a handful of Alliance ships remained. A wing of fighters skated over the body of one Krell ship – their plasma weaponry charging, sending out bright beams of light – but they were being chased down by a hundred times their number. It was a losing battle.

“No point in standing around watching,” I said. “We need to keep moving.” I pointed out some more signage on the wall: the words
CIVILIAN DOCKING FACILITY, BAYS 1 TO 13
. I could even see the bay through the window, positioned along the curve of the outer ring. “The
Edison
is through there – Bay Thirteen. We're almost there.”

A mighty, staggering explosion sounded from somewhere inside the
Point
: a sonorous thump that came in stages. Detonations rippled across a nearby structure, close enough that debris was thrown into the observation window. Yellow light filled the port for a second and I put a hand to my face to protect my eyes.

“What was that?” said Sheldon.

When I looked outside again, the station's outer ring was torn. The hull was open. Big, irregular shapes drifted from inside – tumbling out into space. Some of those exploded as they made clearance from the
Point
, while others just floated off into the nether.

“That was the docking bay,” I said.

Daryl looked from me to the window and back again. “Is the
Edison
still docked?”

“No,” I said. “Not any more.”

The docking bay where our ship had been berthed was a blackened wreck – landing spars torn free from the rest of the
Point
, the remainder exposed to vacuum. Pieces of debris were being hurled from the base, spinning in zero-G away from the destroyed module. Chunks of smouldering wreckage slammed into the observation window. It occurred to me that some of that rubbish was probably the remains of the
Edison.

“Get away from the windows,” I said. “This area isn't safe any more.”

I flinched as more debris pattered against the reinforced plastic. The glass in one panel began to fracture, a haze spreading over the portal.

Sheldon darted towards the exit, towards the sector signed CIVILIAN DOCKING. Very solemnly, he said to me, “Tan, if we don't make it out of this alive, I just want you to know—”

I looked through Sheldon.

His face dropped; from where I was, I could already smell the stink. He was ten or so metres from me, at the other end of the lounge. For him, the odour must've been overpowering.

Days old fish.

He half turned over his shoulder, and let out a surprised shout. The response was cut short as a taloned limb punched right through his stomach.

Where is my gun? Where is my fucking gun?!

The weapon sat on the end of the nearest table but for all the good it would do me it might as well have been back on Zeta Reticuli.

Lucina was screaming, over and over.

The corpse – because it wasn't Sheldon any more, not the asshole of a ship's medic who I'd actually realised was an okay guy – slammed against the inside of the observation window, slid down to the floor. He left a bloody trail on plasglass.

His attacker paused, took in the room.

A Krell.
I'd never seen one in person before. The way I understood it, very few did. That was why the
Point
was here; that was what the military and the Quarantine Zone and all this other shit was for.

As a kid, we'd passed vid-files around the burgs – traded them like candy. Stolen feeds from military cams, downloaded from the network. It had been a phase among my friends – a challenge to get hold of the most violent, most sickening combat scene.

I'd found the pictures terrifying and fascinating.

In reality, the Krell was only one of those things.

No image could compare to what I was seeing. The Krell were often likened to fish or sharks, but the resemblance was passing. This creature was beyond any Earth-like comparative: a combination of aquatic, insectile and arachnid features. It had six limbs – two arms, two legs and two bladed appendages – and lurched from wall to wall so fast that I could barely see it. The xeno moved wrong, every joint bending at inhuman angles.

Rule Three: never fight unless you're sure that you'll win. That rule had kept me alive more than enough times in the Pen. I never fought the older, more experienced or bigger inmates. The lifers and the long-termers: they had survived so long because they had weapons, they had friends, they had the guards in their pay. My fights had always been with the freshmeat, the new inmates. Fights that proved I wasn't to be messed with, but were for show more than any other purpose.

The Krell was no freshmeat. It was a killer. I wasn't sure that I could win this fight. On the contrary, I was quite sure that I was going to die in that lounge. I knew in my bones that nothing I did would be enough to fend this thing off.

But I had to try.

Move!
I dropped my torch –
shit, shit, shit
– and reached for the pistol with both hands. I had it! I aimed at the Krell, or at least in the xeno's direction, and pressed a finger down on the firing stud—

It suddenly occurred to me that the gun might not be loaded.

– the Krell was gone –

– the gun let out a loud
beep
and the ammo reader flashed red –

Lucina was still screaming, and the Krell cleared the lounge, was on top of her. Her head hit the floor with a loud
thump
; her scream abruptly muted.

“
No!
” Daryl roared. “Leave her alone!”

– I fumbled with the pistol, thought about grabbing the torch to better see where I was shooting the weapon –

“Work, bloody hell!” I yelled.

The pistol readout flickered green –

With an effortless leap, the Krell slammed into Daryl and sent him sprawling, face-down to the floor. It had its back to me now and I could see its tail whipping across the ground. It lifted a clawed foot over the captain's torso, ready to bring its huge weight down on his chest. I just knew that if it did that, Daryl was dead. He'd be killed by the thing that he feared most, which seemed both unfair and ironic.

I fired.

The pistol was some sort of energy weapon. A bright pulse shot from the muzzle, sailed over the Krell's elongated head. The air sizzled and there was a brief hiss as the gun discharged.