The Lazarus War: Artefact Read Free Page B

bail out to the APS. If the Krell were still onboard, we might be able to extract before contact. I activated my communicator: “Jenkins – you copy?”
    “Jenkins here.”
    “We’re on the bridge, downloading the black box now. What’s your location?”
    “We’re in the hypersleep chamber.”
    “Give me a sitrep.”
    “No survivors. It isn’t pretty down here. No remains in enough pieces to identify. Looks like they were caught in hypersleep, mostly. Still frozen when they bought it.”
    “No surprises there. Don’t bother IDing them; we have the ship’s manifest. Proceed to the Q-drive. Over.”
    “Solid copy. ETA three minutes.”
    The black box data took another minute to download, and the same to transmit back to the Liberty Point . Mission timeline: ten minutes. Then we were up again, moving down the central corridor and plotting our way to the Q-drive – into the ugly strip-lit passage. The drive chamber was right at the aft of the ship, so the entire length of the vessel. Olsen skulked closely behind me.
    “Do you wish you’d brought along a gun now, Mr Olsen?” asked Blake.
    “I’ve never fired a gun in my life,” Olsen said, defensively. “I wouldn’t know how to.”
    “I can’t think of a better time to learn,” Kaminski replied. “You know—”
    The overhead lights went out, corridor section by corridor section, until we were plunged into total darkness. Simultaneously, the humming generated by the life-support module died. The sudden silence was thunderous, stretching out for long seconds.
    “How did they do that?” Olsen started. His voice echoed off through the empty corridor like a gunshot, making me flinch. On a dead ship like the Haven , noise travelled. “Surely that wasn’t caused by the Krell?”
    Our shoulder lamps popped on. I held up a hand for silence.
    Something creaked elsewhere in the ship.
    “Scanners!” I whispered.
    That slow, pitched beeping: a lone signal somewhere nearby …
    “Contact!” Blake yelled.
    In the jittery pool of light created by my shoulder-lamp, I saw something spring above us: just a flash of light, wet, fast—
    Blake fired a volley of shots from his plasma rifle. Orange light bathed the corridor. Kaminski was up, covering the approach—
    “Cease fire!” I shouted. “It’s just a blown maintenance pipe.”
    My team froze, running on adrenaline, eyes wide. Four shoulder-lamps illuminated the shadowy ceiling, tracked the damage done by Blake’s plasma shots. True enough, a bundle of ribbed plastic pipes dangled from the suspended ceiling: accompanied by the lethargic drip-drip of leaking water.
    “You silly bastard, Kid!” Kaminski laughed. “Your trigger finger is itchier than my nuts!”
    “Oh Christo!” Olsen screamed.
    A Krell primary-form nimbly – far too nimbly for something so big – unwound itself from somewhere above. It landed on the deck, barely ten metres ahead of us.
    A barb ran through me. Not physical, but mental – although the reaction was strong enough for my med-suite to issue another compensatory drug. I was suddenly hyperaware, in combat-mode. This was no longer a recon or salvage op.
    The team immediately dispersed, taking up positions around the xeno. No prospect of a false alarm this time.
    The creature paused, wriggling its six limbs. It wasn’t armed, but that made it no less dangerous. There was something so immensely wrong about the Krell. I could still remember the first time I saw one and the sensation of complete wrongness that overcame me. Over the years, the emotion had settled to a balls-deep paralysis.
    This was a primary-form, the lowest strata of the Krell Collective, but it was still bigger than any of us. Encased in the Krell equivalent of battle-armour: hardened carapace plates, fused to the xeno’s grey-green skin. It was impossible to say where technology finished and biology began. The thing’s back was awash with antennae – those could be used as both weapons and communicators