“Clever?”
“Back there, inside the library filled with Kez’Erel…”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she replied.
“Oh, yes you do.”
She looked away, but he moved in front of her.
“You obviously know a hell of a lot more about the dynamics of particle weapons in a magnetically shielded environment than they did.”
“So?”
“So…you herded all of them into that chamber deliberately, knowing full-well the active shield would render their little ray guns useless.”
“It was a rapidly evolving environment.”
“And it evolved exactly the way you planned, didn’t it?”
“Perhaps.”
“You turned a gun battle into a fist fight before it even started; without their weapons, they never stood a chance.”
“They were in the way, Darrien.”
“Yes, and you did what you had to do, but Toa…”
“What about him?”
“I’m not complaining, believe me, but you inflicted a lot of pain before he died.”
“He had to answer for seventeen years ago.”
“No one can argue with that, I guess.”
She turned to him and said, “Is there something more? You sound strange, Darrien; what are you keeping from me?”
The sudden and direct tone of her question took Norris by surprise and he looked at her for a moment.
“Before you killed him, you mentioned others—your own people.”
“Yes.”
“Tremmek and Besh?”
She didn’t answer.
“Onallin?”
“Not just them,” she said at last.
He waited for her to finish her sentence, but she looked away. After a moment, Norris understood.
“The interrogators on Voralem.”
She returned a silent nod, but he could see the torment hiding within. The others could not, but Norris watched her in a persistent struggle to defeat the demons of her past.
“You’re not like them, Onallin.”
She started for the ship but Norris held her arm.
“Listen to me! You have to let this go now; what Tremmek wanted was not your idea. You followed your orders, and that’s all.”
Still she stayed silent.
“Let it go,” Norris whispered. “We all have regrets from our past—everyone does—but you can’t go back and undo it, you said so yourself. Please let this go now. I don’t care about those assholes and I wouldn’t mind it if you did the same to them, but we both know this isn’t simply payback.”
“Yes it is! They deserve punishment for what they did; all of them. What else is there?”
“I’m talking about you and a need to make up for those days inside Bera Nima when I was strapped into that goddamn chair! It’s not necessary, Onallin; you don’t have to hunt them down out of an obligation to me. We have better things to do for the rest of our lives than worry about those bastards.”
“I’m not the one who has to worry,” she replied evenly and she moved close. “I know how this must seem to you, but I can’t let them go. Those people at Voralem have hurt many others, but they made the mistake of hurting you.”
“You don’t even know their names!” Norris protested; “how are you going to find them now?”
She stopped and looked at him again.
“The Voralem staff identities were hiding in a document Tremmek kept. I’ll find them easily enough and when I do…”
It was useless to try further and Norris knew it. He pulled her close and held her until he felt the tightness in her body ease. At last, she held his cheek to hers.
“It may seem brutal and needless to you, maybe because you’re human, but this is something I have to do or I’ll regret missing the chance the rest of my life.”
He nodded with a sigh and said, “All right, Onallin; I’ll stay out of it.”
Rantara held his face in her hands and kissed him gently.
“I love you, Darrien; never forget that.”
He smiled sadly and said, “I love you, too.”
THE COMPOUND WAS silent and eerie when they returned. A cold, gentle wind carried swirls of dust over the corpses of Kez’Erel mercenaries scattered across the grounds, but no one seemed to notice as they made their way once more to the library chamber. In the center of its bowl-shaped floor, a circular array of consoles surrounded the structure that was the Merchants’ memory transfer unit. Norris stood for a moment, watching the images from Settis’ memories to orient himself and initialize the first access protocols that would enable the download to begin. They waited while Rantara finished dragging the dead soldiers and Merchant technicians out to pile them in the hallway. At last, and satisfied Banen knew what to do, Norris was ready.
They went quickly to the ship and Norris sat again in a reclining chair placed carefully on the surface of the machine’s pedestal. The process would take little more than an hour, Banen said, but everyone knew the nature of the upload and the result when the bulk of Norris’ memories—and his identity—were removed and stored inside the Transceptor. Though she showed as brave a face as she could manage, Rantara struggled against a growing fear something could go terribly wrong and he reached for her.
“Don’t worry about this. Banen knows what he’s doing and I’ll be back to my old self in no time.”
“I know,” she said softly, moving her fingers through his hair with a delicate touch.
“Are you ready, Darrien?” Banen asked from the Transceptor’s control panel.
A thin tube fed the sedative’s gas directly into Norris’ nostrils and in seconds, his eyelids began to sag. The effect was immediate and with his mouth slightly open, he went suddenly limp. Above, the emitter glowed in its curious, swirling colors until a long tone signaled the proper connections had been made. Banen passed his hands over the surface of the panel and stood back with a satisfied nod; it was working properly.
For the full hour, Rantara stayed close. She wandered around the wide pedestal, watching Norris closely as a parade of images passed through her mind. She smiled at the memories of their first tentative embrace and the happiness that made her feel almost weightless when she woke next to him the following morning in his cabin aboard Premara. As the mysterious, ancient device did its work, she remained silent, watching over him through it all.
Finally, a last tone sounded, startling her as it told Banen what he needed to hear; the memories were safely stored and catalogued inside the Transceptor. Slowly, Norris was lifted from the deep sleep, yet he could not move. Rantara looked to Banen.
“Will he understand his name?” she asked with a worried expression.
“Yes,” he replied. “He will seem almost childlike, but he will follow your commands. Haleth said this may be disturbing for us, but there is no reason for concern; simply tell Darrien to move and he will comply. All his autonomic systems are untouched, and he will be able to walk without difficulty, so long as you hold onto his hand and guide him. Haleth believes the experience for Darrien will be equivalent to a very deep, dreamless state.”
Hesset went to one side and Rantara stood on the other, leaning close.
“Darrien, can you hear me?” she said.
Norris returned a feeble nod, clearly unaware of his circumstances in a twilight of semi-consciousness.
“I want you to stand up now.”
With their help, he managed to move a step or two without difficulty, but the face they saw was no longer his. Like a patient in an asylum, Norris’ blank expression showed no emotion, but worse, not the slightest recognition of who or where he was. Rantara and Hesset stayed close, holding his arms to steady him as they walked slowly from the med bay to the open cargo door. It took time, but after a while, they were inside the lift and moving down through the levels of the archive’s central complex to the library’s array chamber. Norris was positioned beneath the Merchants’ huge machine, but Banen refused to admi
nister the sedating agent that was made a part of the system, preferring instead to use a separate, portable unit Haleth had given him. Once more, the agent drifted into Norris’ lungs and his eyes closed slowly until the familiar tone made clear the machine was ready to access the vast data stream and upload it to his vacant mind.
Hesset and Banen worked in tandem with the input codes from Settis’ instructions, searching for the data packets that opened pathways for each selected memory. They watched cautiously as the transfer began, wondering what horrors were passing effortlessly into his brain from long-dead people they would never know. Behind them, Banen’s trusted, battlefield triage unit kept a close monitor on Norris’ vital signs, ready to alert them should anything change and when it returned no alarms, they settled for the long, silent process.
With the emitters flowing memory information automatically, there was little to do. Banen sat next to the control console, watching for any indication of a fault or error, while Rantara pulled an alloy disc container to use as a chair. Neither the Merchants nor their Kez’Erel soldiers had any need of humanoid furniture, but the crate worked well enough. As they watched, Theriani fretted about the complex’s security system, now in ruin after Hesset’s attack run earlier.
“They not hear from Toa, and now it will make for them to come here,” she said.
“Perhaps he was only trying to dissuade us,” Banen replied, “but there is no meaningful difference; the closest habitable world is nearly two days distant.”
Theriani was unconvinced.
“I take the shuttle up, maybe. This the way we leave a sensor pod to orbit and it listen at any others from the long distance.”
Rantara looked at her and smiled.
“She’s right; it’s better to leave a buoy and know for sure we’re not going to be interrupted.”
With a nod, Theriani went quickly to the surface and eased the shuttle from the ship’s bay, lifting quickly through a gathering overcast to deploy a multi-sensor drone in high orbit, configuring the machine to scan the entire Esharam planetary system at twenty second intervals.
Far below, it was nearly silent inside the chamber and Hesset’s typical calm had been shunted aside by a growing restlessness. Finally, she decided to see how far the archive’s computer would allow her to navigate using Kez’Erel language prompts, simply to distract her from the wait and a nervous worry for Norris’ condition. Banen and Rantara stayed at the control console, seemingly content to pass the time inside their own thoughts until suddenly, the machine hummed out an odd, warbling tone they hadn’t heard before. Banen stood at once, studying the status display, only to find the transfer was in its last moments and the tone was merely an alert. It was followed a few minutes later by the standard signal and Rantara paced again until the emitter went dark and Banen nodded to let her know it was safe to go to Norris.
She leaned over him just as Theriani returned to the chamber, but he remained motionless.
“Why is he not awake?” she asked, fighting back against the uneasiness that nagged at her.
“This is necessary,” Banen replied. “Remember, his mind is now filled with memories of those poor people with no way to understand or reconcile the images. If I brought him back to consciousness now, the overload could cause significant emotional damage; it would be similar to a small child, waking suddenly with the memories and experiences of an adult on a distant, unknown battlefield with death and destruction everywhere. He cannot be awakened until these have been uploaded to our Transceptor and his own memories have been restored. It won’t be long now, Onallin; he is in excellent condition and the transfer was completed without difficulty.”
With Banen and Theriani on one end of a litter, Rantara took her place at the other. Carefully and slowly, they carried Norris into the elevator and a slow walk back to the ship. Three hours after he had been submerged again by the sedating agent in the library chamber, the upload was complete as the Transceptor went into idle once more. Banen watched as the status display confirmed to his delight Norris’ physical condition was steady and unchanged. The entire package of memories—those last, terrible moments before the Saroqui civilization was nearly snuffed out—were safely compartmentalized within the machine and Qural would have all she needed to convince a group of suspicious politicians of a far greater threat than any of them could have foreseen. He looked at Rantara.
“We have only the memories from Toa’s private archive to retrieve; Marelle’s identity is a brief shuttle ride to the far side of the complex.”
One last time, Theriani sped them quickly to Toa’s launch bay and the access tunnel leading them to his abandoned residence. In moments, a small interface unit—little more than an abbreviated, desktop version of the Transceptor—made its connection. They watched for a while, knowing with a deep satisfaction Marelle would be made whole again with the memories Norris would pass through to the waiting storage units inside the Transceptor. In less than an hour, it was done.
THE SYSTEM’S TWIN suns were well below the horizon when they settled Norris into the Transceptor for the final upload. As nightfall returned to the archive complex, now as silent, cold and lifeless as most of Esharam, the machine came to life, accepting without incident the entire memory cache that had once been the bulk of Marelle Embree’s adult identity. While Banen prepared the device to restore Norris’ own memories, Hesset left the others and made her way below to the archive chamber once more. Within it, she said, was an odd series of access protocols that seemed to be a control system for monitoring multiple uploads from sources other than the library’s huge Transceptor. With nothing to do while Norris slept, she wanted to investigate against the possibility other information they might find valuable could be culled from additional storage arrays.
Despite Banen’s firm assurances, the upload’s seemingly excessive time to complete was wearing on Rantara’s patience. She paced again, punctuating a near constant gaze at Norris with furtive glances at the Transceptor’s control panel, uncaring that she had no idea what the strange characters meant. At last, Banen could take no more, ordering her to a cabin and a short rest. She reluctantly obeyed, but not before making him promise to call her when Norris was about to wake.
For her part, Theriani was content to remain at the ship’s navigation and communications consoles, ever watchful for an alarm from the sensor pod she had taken into orbit earlier. At last, the Transceptor blinked an alert from its panel, telling Banen the upload had been a success; Norris’ memories were once again restored to their proper place and he could be moved one last time to the med bay. Rantara waited in nervous silence, absent-mindedly rubbing her index finger against a thumb, but the last of her torment was over; the sedating agent would be removed.
She watched closely as Banen restricted the flow of gas in precise increments and Norris began to stir with an application of pure oxygen. She tried to hide the nervous anticipation and worry, but Theriani and Banen saw it clearly. In the final moments as Norris’ eyes blinked open, Rantara felt as if she would burst. She leaned over him, inspecting closely as she cradled his cheeks with each hand to take away the chill.
“Darrien, can you hear me?”
He swallowed hard, wincing at the discomfort from his parched throat.
“I’m here.”
“How do you feel?”
As he sat up, his eyes closed tightly from the pounding sensation inside his head.
“Did anyone get the number of that freight train?” he asked in a low, feeble voice.
No one understood what it meant and Rantara felt a panic rising within that something had gone wrong until Norris looked at her, squinting into the harsh light of an examination lamp above.
“Please tell me the Transceptor did its thing because I feel like shit,” he said with a grin, only to grimace once more from the headache’s effects.
Rantara took in a deep, satisfying breath, knowing he had been returned to her intact; he was safe at last.
“Are you in
pain, Darrien?” Banen asked, reaching for a medical scanner to read out the vital signs.
“It wasn’t bad the first time in Qural’s lab, but it’s worse now.”
Banen administered a mild pain reliever and the effect was immediate.
“Ah, that’s better,” he said, closing his eyes as he reached for Rantara’s hand.
Suddenly he sat forward and said, “Did it work? Are all the memories uploaded?”
“Indeed they are,” Banen answered as he handed Norris a water tube. “I am pleased at how easily the transfer took place, and I owe a debt of gratitude to Haleth for the training he provided. You are in excellent condition and the Transceptor reports a complete and error-free transfer; it has them.”
“What about Marelle—did you get hers, too?”
“We have it all,” Rantara replied with a broad smile. “Qural and Tindas will bring everything they need to hold their summit, and when you’re ready, we can make the trip to Earth; you did it, Darrien!”
They waited while Norris sipped at a concoction Haleth prepared to aide in his recovery from the transfer. In minutes, the soothing effect seemed to revive him as if by the hand of a skilled alchemist. He tried to wave off Rantara’s repeated attempts to warm him in a soft blanket, but she won the battle by simply forcing him as she would a restless child. When he gave up the struggle at last, Hesset called from the library below but there was more in her tone than just the delight and relief at the news of his recovery.
“Darrien, do you feel well enough to walk? You need to see this,” she said; “all of you should come down here right away.”
“I would rather he sat quietly for a while, Hesset,” Banen replied, “Darrien is well, but still weak from the experience.”
Norris shook his head and said, “I’m okay, Doc; don’t worry about that. What do you have, Hesset?”
Echoes of Esharam Page 19