The Lazarus War: Redemption: A Lazarus War Novella by Sawyer Jamie

Author:Sawyer, Jamie [Sawyer, Jamie]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2015-11-02T16:00:00+00:00

There was a woman under the terminal, curled up with her arms crossed over her knees so that she couldn’t be seen without searching. It was obvious that she wasn’t Directorate; she wore the deep blue uniform of an Alliance technician. Like us, she’d been caught up in all of this – whatever this actually was.

Everyone paused and stared down at her.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she whispered.

I began, “Something terrible has happened down in the District. They need medical attention. A monorail has—”

“I know. I saw it on the security cameras, before they went down. Fire suppression is offline.”

“Can you summon help?”

“No one will be coming,” the tech said. “Try not to make too much noise.”

The woman was about my height and build – that’s to say, thin and short. She grudgingly crawled out from under the desk, pressing down her uniform with both hands and wiping at her face. Her eyes were teary. The words K PINDER, SYSTEMS ADMINISTRATION were stencilled on her blouse pocket.

“They came here as well,” she started, swallowing. “They came here and killed them.”

“The Directorate?”

She nodded. “Special Operations.”

Pinder leant over a console, started to call up vid-feeds. There was something almost manic in the way that she was working. Soon she’d called up a dozen different holos and scattered the feeds across her workspace. She waved at the nearest visual.

“The bastards have taken control of Liberty Point’s sensor-suite. The grid went down yesterday; no one could explain why. Since then, we’ve been flying dark. We didn’t see them coming.”

“Where are they now?”

Pinder stared at the vid-feeds. “They have hundreds of troops and they’ve occupied the docking stations. Before I knew it they were here as well; they just came in and shot everyone.” She shook, looked away awkwardly. “I hid.”

“The things that people do to each other…” Daryl whispered. “Christo bless the Alliance.”

“Or what’s left of it,” Lucina said.

“Can you get us comms to the rest of the Point?” I asked Pinder. “Maybe call in some soldiers?”

“I’ve tried,” she said. She shook her head. “We’re cut off down here. I suppose that there might be survivors on some of the upper decks, but I can’t reach them, and they can’t reach me.” Pinder shrugged. That manic aspect returned to her eyes. “Like I said, no one is coming.”

I thought of my mother in all of this. Was she already dead, or was she locked down somewhere else on the station? She was literally all I had left now. I wondered whether she was thinking of me, whether I factored into her thought processes at all. Had she been trying to warn me back at the bar? Did she know what was going to happen…?

“We need to get out of here, off-station,” I decided. “Right now. Can you help us get to Civilian Docking?”

Pinder gave me an empty look. “I’m staying here.”

“You’ll die like the others.”

She remained pan-faced. “I’ll take my chances. You can take yours.”

“Can you show us a map then?”

Pinder punched some keys on the terminal.

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