Read The Lazarus War for Free Online

starship crews have their demons.”
    I drank hard from the bottle. I hadn’t drunk since the night of the incident, and the taste brought back fragments of memory – recollections that I wished I could completely erase, could wind back. It had never proved to be that easy.
    “It’s okay,” Sheldon said. “You got some closure, yes? Maybe that’s all you needed.”
    “Maybe,” I said. I wasn’t convinced by that. “I just wanted—”
    “Hey!” someone yelled from across the bar. “You assholes want to keep it down over there?”
    “We’re trying to have a private conversation…” Daryl replied.
    It was then that I realised, as did the rest of the crew, that Blake’s Last Stand had fallen almost completely silent. The music had stopped. Patrons were clustered around the view-screens set up on the walls. It was eerie how the character of the place had suddenly changed. I’d been so engrossed in my own drama that I hadn’t even noticed.
    She told me to leave
, I suddenly thought.
    I was about to express that concern when the lights went out around us.
     
    A blackout on a space station is never a good thing.
    When your atmosphere, gravity and heat depends on a regular supply of juice, a power outage can be crippling. Going dark usually meant some catastrophic systems failure. For the lights to go out on a station like
Liberty Point
was bigger than most. This wasn’t some ramshackle mining outpost run by amateurs; by the Holy Stars, this was the
Point
! There had to be a hundred redundancies in place to ensure that things like this didn’t happen. I instantly knew that this wasn’t a regular occurrence, that this was something far more serious.
    The bar was completely black. There were no portholes or view-screens of space. Nothing to provide any light. For several seconds, it was utterly silent, all occupants wrapped in the dark, paralysed by panic.
    Then Daryl started to talk. The words flowed out of him so fast that I could barely understand him. “It’s going to be okay. Probably just a drill. Nothing to worry about. I’m sure that it’s going to be fine. Nobody panic…”
    I felt for Nate’s shoulder. He grabbed my arm in return.
    “That you, Taniya?”
    “Yeah. It’s me.”
    “Stay with me. I won’t leave you.” To the rest of the table: “No one leaves anyone behind, all right?”
    “I got you,” Sheldon said, leaning in on my other shoulder. I felt the heat of his breath against my cheek. “Daryl, Lucina?”
    “We’re here,” Lucina said.
    Daryl was still babbling.
    “What’s happening out there?” someone shouted. “Can anyone get a link to Control…?”
    There was a deep, throbbing chug somewhere underfoot: reverberating through the soles of my sneakers. It was an unhealthy sound, the sort of noise produced by an abused chemical engine pushed too far. The engineer in me identified it as a breaker resetting; a hard reboot of the station’s autonomic functions.
    Then the lights cycled on. Not the regular, soft-focus lighting that this particular bar forced on its customers: this was clinical, brilliant emergency light. In sequence, the racks of overhead LEDs dowsed the bar until it was fully and uncomfortably lit.
    I blinked away the dark – glad to be free of it – and scanned the room. Everyone looked to be in the same state of shock. To my surprise, that included the soldiers and sailors.
    “No one knows what’s happening out here,” I said aloud.
    The rational part of my brain insisted that all was well. We were, after all, on the biggest space station in Alliance territory. These people were professionals; they were military. The
Point
was probably one of the safest stations on which to experience such an emergency.
    But although I wanted to believe that, I just couldn’t persuade myself.
    A siren began wailing overhead: a tri-tone, distinctive emergency klaxon. I’d heard the sound before – when I was a child, during a blow-out on one of the Arcology’s