Pariah by Jamie Sawyer

Author:Jamie Sawyer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Science Fiction, War
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2017-09-26T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

HOSTILES

They say that the Shard were machines. From what little evidence we have of their original form, Science Division insists that they were a type of life-form that was born of a violent and completely alien ecosystem.

But what hell breeds machines like this?

Machines that feel.

As the Santa Fe went through the wormhole—that’s still the best we can do to describe the interstellar Network—I felt a wave of emotion crashing over me. So intense and complex that I could barely comprehend it.

Colours, lights, visions of things that might or might not be real.

A string of stars blazing with such intensity that they must surely now be dead.

A trio of worlds that had once been green. Now no more than blackened nubs, trailing their atmosphere to the void.

Then nothing.

Nothing.

Only the endless expanse of space, and the cold—empty—reassurance that no matter what we did out here, no matter what we did to each other, none of this really mattered, and the universe did not care.

No. I couldn’t accept that the Shard Network was built by machines, that it was the result of an analytical or a logically ordered mind. The Shard Gates touch something in us all, something dark and irrepressible.

As we entered Shard Space the Santa Fe, and everything and everyone aboard her, ceased to exist.

After such a brief, infinitesimal segment of time that it could only be described by Science Division as “instant,” we were back.

One moment we were in the Drift, on the edge of human space.

The next we were in the Maelstrom, coordinates unknown.

The Santa Fe erupted into real-space. The sensation was nauseating but thankfully also brief. Maybe it was easier on me because I knew what to expect; I’d been through it a handful of times before. Even so, I couldn’t resist grasping the arm of my crash-couch—trying to maintain some semblance of normality, to anchor myself to reality.

Not everyone had such a painless reaction. Even in a simulant, this was no easy ride.

Lopez was monumentally sick, pouring the contents of her guts onto the deck. Given that she was in a simulant, and hadn’t eaten anything in that body, that turned out to be a stream of stomach acid and green bile. The odour was strong enough that it made my own gorge rise, and I stifled the urge to join her. Vomit splattered her combat-suit.

Novak still had his eyes pinned shut, as though he was frightened to look at the view-screens around him. The image was vaguely comic: the trooper made enormous by his combat-suit, but humble by the expression on his battered face.

Riggs shook uncontrollably.

“Can’t stop falling,” he murmured. “Just can’t stop falling…”

“That’s a common reaction to a Shard Gate translation,” Zero said. She looked more excited than shaken—another experience to be quantified and considered. “Extreme loss of balance has been recorded in several cases.”

“Why are we being affected like this?” Lopez said, wiping a hand across her chin. “We’re in sims!”

“It’s the crossover from the effect that the jump is having on your real bodies,” I explained.

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