“Like what?”
Remnant shrugged. Was there a hint of shyness in her expression? A touch of blushing? “He said though you are a marine and you have killed, it was never out of hatred, never outside of the bounds of your duty as a soldier. He showed me a vision of you as your men were leaving the Elpizio. You were, call it praying, that no more defenders would come through the smoke because you didn’t wish to needlessly kill them.”
Soma closed his eyes and sighed. He felt dizzy. He remembered what she described to him, remembered wishing or praying that the Meritine marines would stop coming. But he hadn’t spoken it aloud. And he hadn’t discussed it with anyone or put it in any report.
He shook his head. “That’s impossible.”
“Nothing is impossible with the master.”
Soma sighed, turned, ran his fingers over his head. He turned back to her. “So what do you want from me?”
“I want what he wants.”
“So what does he want from me then? What do you expect? For me to turn away from my allegiance to the Alliance so I can try to bust you out and get us both killed? Is that what you want?”
“What I want is for you to trust my master. He doesn’t just speak to me. I’m nothing special. He would speak to you, guide and protect you as he has me.”
“Some protector. You’re here, aren’t you? Imprisoned, undignified, tortured.”
“I am here,” Remnant said, “because I have been chosen to reveal the Master’s power through my suffering. He has delivered me into your hands, and he will deliver me out of the hands of those who persecute me.”
“You’re talking about the whole Alliance.”
“No.” Remnant shook her head. “Certain individuals in the Alliance hierarchy are using people like you as resources to wage their own war against my master.”
“But I don’t—”
Remnant shook her head. “You have to go.”
“What? I have—”
“Please, go now.”
Soma felt his shoulders sag. Still no concrete answers. He looked up into the corners and seams between wall and ceiling. The views from Bix’s feeds looked down into the cells. He knocked on the wall he had come through, or at least he thought it was the right wall.
“Oh, how’s Emerin?”
Soma turned. He shook his head. “Doff’s fine. Despite perfect health they still shipped him home to his family due to the damage taken.”
Remnant closed her eyes and smiled. Soma stepped towards her. “When they cleaned him up he had nothing but an old scar. The doctors said there were signs of an old wound that had healed long ago but Doff had never suffered any such wound. What did you do to him?”
Her eyes fluttered open. Her voice was weak and breathy. “I prayed for him, and my master healed him, as he promised. He said Emerin would see his family again.”
“Please stand facing a corner with your hands on the walls.” Bixley’s voice boomed and echoed through the room.
Remnant adjusted herself on her knees, struggled to her feet and stood in the corner. Soma felt that urge stronger than ever. She needed him. He had to protect her. She was starving, suffering dehydration, mistreated. She needed him.
The door slid open. Soma stepped through, back into the corridor, now filled with MPs. They held stunners in their hands and surrounded him. Behind them stood Bixley, looking deflated.
“Sorry, Cross. I was ordered to call in if someone asked to talk to the prisoner.”
“Sergeant Major Cross,” called one of the MPs behind him, “place your hands on your head.”
Soma did as he was told. “It’s okay, Bix. You followed orders. No dishonor in that. Sorry I put you in a bad position.”
The MP snapped a pair of manacles on Soma’s wrists, then brought his hands behind him and bound them together. As he did so, Soma heard the voice he dreaded more than all others.
“If only you, Sergeant Major, had followed your orders. Then you would have no dishonor,” the defense minister said. Soma turned to look at him, found the slicked-black hair and non-descript expensive suit he expected. The MOD man glowered at him, his eyes only darkened. “Take him away.”
Chapter Thirty-Two:
Struck Them with Blindness
Ganyasu jogged down another corridor, following the station layout on his HUD. It was leading him, he hoped, to the Landing Bay 94 control room. As a squad of Alliance marines passed him he felt a surge of gratitude for the relative invisibility offered him by his smartskin’s active camouflage. He went still as they passed by. No one paid him any heed.
Gan watched them pile up into a nearby lift cage, en route to cause trouble for his friends heading to Kol’s ship. He waited for the lift doors to close, then stepped up to the lift control panel and pressed his palm against it.
Halting and locking down a lift car was a minor task for his smartskin. Once it was done, he turned and ran on.
This whole section of the station was filling up with marines and Gan did what he could to help keep them off of his co-conspirators downstairs, even if it meant sending more his way. He had the active camouflage, not to mention Shaumri stealth and avoidance training. They didn’t.
He came upon another emergency console. He pressed his palm into it and waited a few seconds. These were tougher to crack than the lift controls, but he only needed to numb the station’s nerves, slow its ability to send security to where his friends were. Through the console he mixed up the frequencies of various marine channels, alerted station security to firefights on seven different decks, and told the station’s automated weapon fire sensors to shut down in his sector.
He wanted to do more, maybe tap the local marine comm channels, but the sound of clomping magnetic boots sent him jogging again.
He wasn’t picking anything up from Nix or Ashla. Maybe there was some kind of radio damping in No Man’s Land. He was getting everything from Dothin, Kol and Gosen. They were still together. According to Gan’s layout, and the tracking software he implanted in their links, they were close. This meant he needed to get to his position soon.
Salazar would be pinned down and killed under his own ship if Gan couldn’t unlock it before the marines caught up with them. The clock was ticking. He picked up the pace.
According to the layout, there was a central command station for each level of small ship landing bays. Small being a relative term, of course. The Jessamine, according to the files he pulled from Salazar’s link, was a J-scale ship at under sixty meters in length. But there were also control booths overlooking each of the bays. These would have all the controls he needed to free Kol’s ship and hopefully keep navy fighters off their collective backs long enough to meet up with Ashla’s ship and jump away.
Gan would never have gone through with such a treacherous plan before he met her. To Shaumri standards Gan was doing the most pathetic back-heel improvisation. Remnant had offered him opportunities to take some things on faith. “Do what you can do,” she had said, “and leave for the Master what you cannot.”
Well that was a long list today. He couldn’t look after Nix and Ashla. He couldn’t fight alongside Dothin and Kol. He couldn’t stand around and wait for his smartskin to cut through layers of highly encrypted security. He could keep tying the marines in knots, and get the lockdown on the Jessamine released, so he did.
He passed another emergency console and tapped it on his way, using the second of contact to let his smartskin do what it could. He leapt to the ceiling, activated his mags and let another squad of marines pass underneath him. Once they passed he dropped down, found a nearby console, and used it to convince the marines’ section of corridor that it was losing pressure. Pressure doors slid shut, locking the marines in. It wouldn’t last long, but it was something he could do.
A station as large as Lodebar depended on multiple forms of ingress and egress between levels. That meant lots of lifts and stairways all spread out. Gan avoided the lifts. They weren’t consistent, and the marines would h
ave uninterrupted priority access.
Gan ran into a young intern, hands full with loaded cupholders. The intern kicked the button on the console again. The console gave an angry buzz and displayed the words “Out of Order.”
“Come on! I can’t carry all this up three floors of stairs!” His self-pity was palpable. He didn’t notice Gan passing by.
Gan followed another stairway up to a locked door. He touched the console, expecting his suit to take a little longer to unlock it. The door slid open and Gan stepped into a broad hallway. The hall curved in on Gan, stretching out and around him. It was decorated in that sterile way he expected from administrative décor. The walls and ceiling were a shiny white ceramic and capped in a curved crown of the same material. The ceiling extended a few inches from the crown and yellow-white lights erupted from the gaps. The floor was made of taupe-gray carpet squares.
Gan stepped through and then locked the door behind him with his smartskin. He then stalked down the hallway. There were several doors in both walls. The doors outside the curve went to control booths looking down over landing bays. Those inside went to the central command station as well as restrooms, break rooms, etc.
Despite the fact that there were to be no ships in or out, this area of the station seemed busy. Several men and women in uniforms passed him by, as well as a few members of station security. These were not heavily armed or armored, but Gan hugged a wall or clung to the ceiling as they passed anyway. Even an unarmed janitor could sound the alarm.
That thought had come from someone else, one of his mentors in the Clan, maybe. All his memories from the Shaumri were cloudy, a good amount of that was due to his intentions. Once he had met Remnant, seen the truth of her convictions, all he wanted was for his past in the Shaumri to be nothing more than a bad dream.
He came to the doors marked ‘94.’ He touched the console and let his smartskin consider the possibility of gaining access to a camera inside the booth in order for him to see if it was occupied. The sound of a dozen sets of pounding boots halted him. They couldn’t be for him, could they? More likely they had discovered all the attempts at tying them in knots and considered the control booth an easy way to get to Dothin, Kol and the others.
Gan switched his suit to unlock the door. The door slid open and three men turned around and looked through him. One was a control technician with a beer belly and two days of beard on his plump face. The other two were station security, one an officer. Gan stepped in, shut the door, and encoded his own lock on it. He couldn’t maintain invisibility and take down three men, so he disengaged his camoflage and stepped up to the fight.
The men had not been idol. The enlisted man unholstered his pistol and stepped towards the door. At the same time the officer pointed at the tech and said, “Sound the alarm and lock the—”
Gan struck as he came out from under the camo. The security man gasped and raised his pistol. “Sha—” was all he got out before Gan got his left hand onto the safety of the pistol, and his right connecting with the guard’s jaw. The man let loose of his pistol, did a wobbly half-spin and then crumpled.
Gan stepped past him and spun into a sliding kick. He knocked the tech’s feet out from underneath him. The tech hands, face and considerable belly slapped onto the big console screen. He let out a pitiable groan and slid down the console to join the guard on the floor, buttons and controls blinking in confusion at his contacts.
The officer lifted his own pistol. Gan was too far to keep it safe so instead, still on the floor, he kicked the officer’s weapon hand and the bolter went flying. Gan swung his legs over and behind him, spinning himself back to his feet, and blocked a series of skillful blows from the officer.
Gan, clock ticking in his head, feinted to the gut, and slammed his fist up into the officer’s chin. The officer fell backward, legs peddling to keep him upright before his head smacked into the wall. His eyes swam, seeing nothing, then shut.
Gan turned to the console, pressed both hands on it, and prayed to Remnant’s Master that the tech hadn’t had the chance to lock him out.
Gan sighed. He didn’t even have to cut through any major security to access the lockdown controls. His smartskin prioritized assignments, cutting off the main control room first. His suit was halfway done with that when a loud crack echoed through the room and a bolt of white-hot pain shot through his side a few inches from his spinal column.
Gan half-imitated the tech’s splat on the console but he already had both hands on it. He turned. Never leave a variable alive when you could kill them. That little piece of advice also came from his now-misty days as a Shaumri.
He spun and found the enlisted man he thought he knocked out standing and pointing his pistol at him.
“Unlock this door right now or I will—"
The Ganyasu that knew Remnant, the one that had spent time with her was pushed to the back of his mind. His old self, red-eyed and lusting for revenge, took over.
Gan leapt, turned his suit’s inertials on and used them to push him to the side as the guard fired again. The maneuver sent agony through his body, but the old Ganyasu was undisturbed by pain. Gan launched a roundhouse kick and the weapon went clattering against the wall. He recognized the mental command that created a six-inch blade in his hand, remembered the familiar overhand stabbing motion.
Gan’s eyes went wide. He turned the blade away from the security guard’s carotid artery. Gan still stabbed him, though. Not a faceless threat or a “variable.” Gan stabbed a young man, scared and wide-eyed as his neck dribbled blood.
Gan made the knife disappear. “No! No! I’m sorry. I...” He ran over to the red and white case and ripped it off its mount in the wall. He knelt beside the man, and grunted against fresh pain. He noticed his name tag: Nilo Rixeli.
“You’re going to be okay, Nilo. I promise.”
The door chimed. Gan looked up to see a half-dozen marines filling the console’s screen.
Nilo opened his mouth but couldn’t manage words.
“Just a minute,” Gan called to the marines. “There’s a little problem with the door control. I’m working on it.” He didn’t think it would work but it cost him nothing but a little breath. He didn’t hear a reply.
Gan opened the case and told his smartskin to instruct him. It pointed to an aerosol spray can. Gan sprayed it over the wound. The blood bubbled and turned white.
“I’m sorry, Nilo. I didn’t mean to stab you. I’ll fix you up. You’ll be okay.”
He didn’t consider using any of the tools on himself. His smartskin would disinfect and close the wound. Even now it was injecting him with a cocktail of analgesics, soothing the burning pain in his side.
Next his HUD pointed to a pair of hypos. One was full of medical nanites that would manage internal damage. The second was for pain. Gan broke the security cap on the first and applied it to Nilo’s neck. Then he did the second.
“This might knock you out, Nilo, but I promise I won’t hurt you anymore.”
Nilo’s eyes glassed over. He blinked several times then his eyes fluttered closed. Gan pulled him over to the side wall and tucked him as close to it as he could. A squad of marines was about to plow through here.
Gan looked at the door. The marines would quit trying to crack his lock soon and would start cutting. As the thought occurred to him, a distant sound hissed at him through the door. Gan noticed the unusual gap between the door and his end of the frame. He touched the console and smiled as a set of blast doors slid shut. That would slow them down.
Gan turned back to the console and put his hands on it again. The big desk-sized console screen became a mess of colors, symbols and text as his skin used it to cut off control to the landing bay everywhere else but here. While he waited, he sent a single protocol to control the room-wide electrochromic window into the bay. With a thought, the window went from an opaque gray to clear.
A sleek, white ship glared defiantly up at him: the Jessamine. The window angled downward such that Gan c
ould look down and see the firefight commencing beneath him. The marines were using heavy defense screens and were crawling forward behind them.
Gan’s smartskin alerted him that it had blocked all other control sources for landing bay ninety-four. Gan considered ending the lockdown now but stopped. Instead he set his suit to doing for the space forces what he had been doing for the marines in the station: numbing their senses, weakening their ability to communicate.
His suit worked to block security alerts going to any on-station fighters. Gan had learned from his connection with the communications network that the blockade had been effective and all ships were standing down for now. The station would be apt to call the navy when the Jessamine was free. Gan set his smartskin to severing or dampening communications leaving the station. This would normally be impossible, but since he still had a connection to the station’s central comm relay, it took almost no time at all.
He set the lockdown protocols to be disabled remotely, on his command. He didn’t want to disable it until the last second. Partly because it would offer he and his friends a few more seconds before the station security recognized the breakdown and started looking for creative ways to call for help. Partly. He took Kol for honorable despite his profession but Gan would not risk the safety of the artifact, let alone his friends, on his own judgment. He would make sure Dothin and the artifact were safely aboard, then he would send the order.
All was ready. Gan opened the channel but before he could speak, Kol spoke first.
“Naboris!” It was a scream. Gan felt a chill. Someone had died. Dothin? He hoped not.
Gan cut him off.
“Okay,” Gan said, letting his smartskin gauge the ease at which he could break through the window. “On my mark, cease fire and take cover.”
“What?”
Gan stepped back and put a hand to the blast door. It was warm. The marines were cutting their way through. “I said, on my mark cease fire and take cover.”
“Why?”
Gan took a deep breath. “Mark!”
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