The Lazarus War: Legion by Jamie Sawyer Read Free Book Online Page B

moved off towards me. I emptied the pistol power cell – hoping to achieve nothing more than pointless butchery. The primary-form disintegrated under the hail of plasma.
    The lounge had no view-ports and I couldn’t see outside. My suit was trashed – all systems failing, my entire sensor-suite off-line. There was no way for me to know whether Saul had made it off the doomed station.
    I was tired. The bio-toxins were rampant throughout my system. There was nothing else to be done. The secondary-form overhead sneered at me, aiming the grafted boomer in my direction. There was a sea of Krell forming in the room now, watching.
    “I’m Lazarus,” I shouted. “I always come back.”
    The secondary-form opened fire.
      
     
    They say that a man’s life flashes through his mind’s eye as he dies. That you consider all of your regrets, all of your mistakes. People important to you, frozen moments in time, those events that make a man who he is.
    The moment of extraction – although it is not a moment at all, but rather an infinitesimal segment of time – is an interesting one. No scientist can really explain what happens to the human mind, as it extracts from a simulant body: it has to be experienced to be truly understood.
    It’s like dying, because you do see those important milestones – those iconic occurrences that have shaped you – but there is also that niggling suggestion that you will have the chance to change all of this. A second shot: that things can be undone.
    I only saw one face as I made extraction. Snapshots of Elena – as she’d been on Azure, before she left for the Maelstrom. It was a chance to savour those memories that I tried to keep sealed away. I had too many regrets, had made too many mistakes. They would weigh me down, hold me in the dead simulant body, if I allowed myself to dwell on them.
    “I’m sorry, Elena,” I whispered through lips that didn’t even exist any more.
    Then I heard it: the sound. That signal, so fragile that when I concentrated on it the sound evaporated.
    The Artefact.
    It was all over in a picosecond, less than that even, and my consciousness retreated across space into the waiting ship.
      
     
    I woke up in the simulator-tank, aboard the Mallard .
    My hands clawed at my shoulder – where that last secondary-form had fired a boomer into me – but it was an automatic reaction. There’s nothing there, I told myself. It’s done. I steadied myself against the plastic canopy of the tank.
    There were faces out there, watching from the relative safety of the medical bay, but for a long while no one seemed to do anything. They just looked on; slack, emotionless faces.
    No, not emotionless: just uncomprehending.
    I blinked the wash out of my eyes, let the tank purge. With trembling fingers I plucked at the cables from each of my data-ports. The transparent tank door opened and I staggered out.
    “What the fuck’s wrong with you people?” I rumbled.
    My arms, legs, voice – none of it seemed willing to bend to my commands. I glared at the nearest medtech, who jumped and passed me an aluminium blanket – shot me up with a hypodermic of post-extraction recovery drugs. But then she retreated again, and stood in the same stunned silence as the rest of the room.
    The Lazarus Legion were present, as well as Avis and Baker, and their respective teams. All just looking at me.
    “That was…” Martinez broke the silence, shaking his head, “fucking unbelievable…”
    “What are you doing standing around?” I said, uncomfortable with the attention. “There’s a war going on.”
    A communicator blared in the background, broadcasting clipped Naval squawk: “…that’s a confirm on pick-up for the evac-pod…”
    “ Solid copy. Primary asset is in the hold. ”
    “ Issuing retreat order, moving off at sub-light speed. ”
    “Copy that. Breaking orbit now.”
    “Great work, Lazarus,” Baker added. “We were watching the whole thing, through your suit-feeds.