“Once we’re settled on Gazi Sho, we can work out additional passage if that’s something you want. Any questions so far?”
“I need access to power,” Ashla said, “and to equipment and resources I need to fix my ship. I’ll pay if the price is fair, especially if I can work some of the cost off.”
Kol smiled. “Do you know anything about a ship like the Jessamine?”
Ashla smiled back. Her eyes flashed. “It’s a J-Scale superluminal cargo transport. A highly modified version of the civilian Torrence class light freighter.” She turned to Nat and said, “You’ve got, what? A single class-2b antimatter reactor?”
“2c,” Nat replied. She smiled too, now in on Ashla’s joke.
“2c,” Ashla said. Then she looked at Kol.
He wore an impressed smile, a little on the sarcastic side. “You’re hired,” he said. “We’ll discuss the details later.”
“I have one more question,” Kol then said. “For you, Naboris.” Kol stared hard at Gan. Gan got the feeling he was looking for a lie. “I understand why the girl needed to escape the system. I understand the Lanseidis boys wanted to get her away safely. What I don’t understand is a Shaumri assassin with no obvious ties to any of them coming along for the ride.”
Gan took a deep breath. Salazar Kol was a smuggler. Gan had a pretty strong accounting of his actions of the past year after having ripped his link’s files. He had shot his way out of Lodebar Station. But despite all that he had treated Gan and his new friends honorably. If Gan believed Remnant’s Master had sent him to Lodebar to find friends, he had to believe Kol was a part of that appointed path. He gave in.
“I am not Shaumri,” Gan started, “not anymore.”
Kol didn’t protest. He and his officers leaned in.
“About a year ago,” Gan continued, “I was a part of a failed mission for the Shaumri. I remember very little of the event, except that I and a few of my former...” he almost said ‘brothers.’ He cleared his throat. “Colleagues were infiltrating an arcology on Sizon in the Mergoan System. There was an ambush, a fire, an explosion.”
Gan’s mind filled with the sounds of dying men screaming. His eyes saw blazing fire, and in the fire a staggering form in black. The form reached for him, then crumpled into the flames. Then he was back in the galley with ten faces staring at him.
“The explosion knocked me out a window seventeen stories up,” Gan continued. “I woke up in an alley, and she was there.”
“Who?” Tally asked, her eyes wide and curious.
Gan looked at her. “The girl called Remnant.” He took a deep breath. “She healed me of my injuries and then rid me of the Shaumri domination.”
“Wait,” Nix said, “the what?”
“The domination,” Gan said, looking at Nix, “is a powerful hypnotic control the Shaumri have over their agents. It keeps us obedient. It helps us to ignore things like pain, or fear, or morality.”
Ashla gasped. Gan looked at her, but the girl’s shock wasn’t aimed at him.
“I understand they sold a weaker form to the Scions and the Alliance. Anyway, for the past year,” he continued, “I have been serving as Remnant’s bodyguard and companion.”
“So you’re the man the Alliance wants to get their hands on?” Nandine said.
Gan nodded.
“So why is she locked up at the capital and you’re here?” Nat Ginsey asked.
“Governor Vares,” Gan said, “invited her to his palace. But when the ship bringing us was attacked she told me to leave. She said we would see each other again.”
Gan didn’t like discussing Remnant with these strangers. He wished at least Kol’s staff would leave. Talking about Remnant made him feel naked, exposed, like a wound with the scab pulled off.
“You said,” Kol said, speaking slowly, as if he was working out the words as he said them, “that you knew why the station was on lockdown. It was you, wasn’t it?”
Gan took another deep breath. He nodded.
“Gan?” Nix said. Gan looked at him. Nix looked nervous. “I think you should show them.”
Gan nodded.
“Show us what?” Kol asked.
Gan leaned forward, pulled the hardpack off his back and set it on the table. He unzipped the bag and pulled out the stasis cube.
Everyone in the room seemed to lean in closer. Gan applied his thumbprint to the screen and tapped the code in. The stasis cube hissed and then the lid clicked open. Gan lifted the artifact out.
“This is what the Alliance wants,” he said, holding it aloft.
“Me?” Gan shook his head. “I’m just a courier. Separate me from this and the Alliance will forget all about me. This is the thing they fear more than me, more even than Remnant.”
Kol got up, eyes narrowed, and walked around the table to Gan. He held his hands out.
“Please,” Gan said, setting the artifact in Kol’s hands. “Be careful. It’s fragile and precious.”
Kol nodded. He looked at the object in his hands with the furrowed brow of a scientist who looked in his microscope and found something he hadn’t expected. He figured out the nature of the object quickly, and lifted the cover and half of the leaves, opening the artifact like a blooming flower. He thumbed through the thin leaves inside, eyes scanning over them. Gan was sure Kol was holding his breath.
“It’s,” Kol said, “some kind of physical database or a document. But instead of the text being pulled from digital media and displayed on a screen it is printed on these leaves.”
Gan nodded. “That’s right. What you hold in your hands is older than the Great War, older than the Shaumri Empire, older even than the Benefactors.”
“I can’t read it,” Kol said. “I don’t even recognize the text.” To Gan’s chagrin Kol walked away with the artifact and showed it to his crewmates. They all looked, eyes first wide, then narrow, then they shook their heads.
“There is only one who can,” Gan said.
“Remnant,” Kol said, handing the book back to Gan. Gan nodded. Dothin held his hands out now, his eyes a silent request. Gan handed the artifact to him. Ashla got up and peered over Dothin’s shoulder. Kol walked back to his seat.
“Even she can only read parts,” Gan said.
“What does it say?” Dr. Jens asked.
“It is the words and commands of a power Remnant calls ‘the Master.’ A powerful creator older and greater than the Benefactors by a wide margin. It begins, Remnant told me, ‘In the beginning the Master created the Heavens and the Earth.’”
“Odd,” Kol said. “Which earth?”
“The first one,” Gan said. “The one from which all life comes. You see this was written before the Benefactors even left their homeworld, before they considered the stars more than distant dots of light in dome of the evening sky.”
“Okay, but I don’t understand,” Nandine said, “even if this...document is that old, why does the Alliance fear it? What’s so scary about it?”
“To you or me,” Gan said, “nothing. But to those who have power, and want to hold on to it, it is a threat.”
“The Alliance has long been in bed with the Scions,” Dothin said. Gan almost started when he spoke. He’d been quiet so long. Dothin was a listener, Gan knew, and didn’t speak unless he had something worth saying. And when Dothin Lanseidis spoke, one ought to listen. “And if this document proves there’s an older, and greater power than the Benefactors, well, it undermines the Scions’ authority.”
“But if that is all true,” Nix chimed in, “wouldn’t they just change their beliefs?”
Dothin shook his head, handing the artifact back to Gan. “Some might,” he said, “if they really care about the truth. But those in authority will not. They will see this as a direct threat to their authority and will try to destroy it, and they will work to influence the Alliance to help.”
“Remnant told me,” Gan said, “that the same is told within the artifact, that the Master’s servants were always hated by those in au
thority. The same is happening now.”
The room filled with silence. That’s how it felt to Gan, not an emptying of noise but a filling up with meaningful quiet as each person considered the artifact for themselves. Gan had remembered thinking and feeling what they all must be considering now, back when Remnant had told him what he just told them.
“I think,” Kol said at last. “I think you’ve given us all a lot to consider.”
“I hope you and your crew will be discrete on this matter,” Gan said.
Kol nodded. Everyone at the table looked at him. “Not a word of this leaves this room without my permission, understood?”
A few nodded while the rest responded with differing versions of “Yes, Captain.”
Gan set the artifact back in the stasis box and closed it.
“Then you’re dismissed,” Kol said. “Tally?”
Tally Ranjo stood, then looked at Kol. “Yes, Captain?”
“Would you mind showing our guests to their quarters?”
Tally shrugged and smiled. “Of course not.” She turned to Gan and the other passengers. “Follow me please.”
Gan stood and with him Dothin and the kids. Gan started tucking the stasis box back into his pack when Kol walked up to him.
“Hey,” he said. Gan looked up at him and saw the wheels turning behind Kol’s eyes. He was still processing the things Gan had said. “I don’t suppose you would want to make a copy of the...” he nodded at Gan’s pack, “document, would you?”
Gan nodded. “That’s what we were hoping to do when we got to the governor’s palace.”
Kol nodded, more to himself than to Gan. “Follow me.”
Gan stuck his pack to his back. “Okay,” he said. He looked at Dothin and the kids. “I’ll catch up with you.”
“Sure,” Dothin said, and then he, Nix and Ashla followed Tally out the door. Kol led Gan out the opposite door. The Jessamine consisted of three levels. At the top was the bridge, crew quarters and the galley. The middle story held the infirmary and engineering and certainly other things too, he just hadn’t seen them. The bottom level was cargo, consisting of the loading bay, the docking bay and a few other smaller storage rooms. Kol led Gan down to a room off the loading bay’s port side.
As they walked through it, One of Kol’s men was power washing dark stains from the floor. Kol gave the stain a sad, sidelong glance. Gan kept quiet. Kol tapped a button and the door slid open. Gan found himself in a small antechamber. A simple desk with a large display computer sat in one corner. A second door to Gan’s right opened to another tiny room dominated by a huge machine.
“In my line of work,” Kol said, “I move a lot of cargo. Oftentimes a customer will ask me not to open said cargo.”
“What’s to keep an enemy to pose as a customer, ask you to ship a box sight unseen, and fill the box with a timed explosive?” Gan wasn’t asking, he was showing Kol he followed the logic.
“Exactly,” Kol said sticking up his forefinger. He tapped a screen next to the second door and stepped into the tiny room. Gan followed.
“So, we invested in this,” Kol said, pointing at the machine. To Gan it looked something like a medical diagnostic table. It had a flat table but not person-shaped. Above the table was a massive block of machinery. Thick cables radiated from it towards the walls and ceilings.
“Okay,” Gan said. “What is it?”
“It’s basically a diagnostic table but with lots of extra bells and whistles. It uses a combination of different forms of electromagnetic radiations, magnetic resonance and several other technologies to show what’s inside sealed crates. But it produces images in such high fidelity that it could read the individual sheets inside the document and make high-resolution digital copies of each one.”
Gan felt his eyes go wide and a smile widen across his face. “Then I could have a digital copy of the contents of the document.”
“Exactly,” Kol said back. “You could then borrow some of the Jessamine’s processing power to try and decode the language, but I don’t know how successful that would be.”
“Thank you,” was all Gan could say, staring at the machine. “You don’t know what you’re offering.”
“Jin, Naboris, don’t cry.”
Despite himself, Gan smiled. He wasn’t about to cry, but the idea that he wouldn’t have to defend the extremely fragile artifact anymore, because he’d have an indestructible digital copy he could propogate across the galaxy with a snap of his fingers, it made the weight on his back feel like a helium balloon.
Kol helped Gan set the machine up, tapping on a screen sitting into the side panel. A light bloomed from a series of lenses in the bottom of the overhang, painting a red crosshair on the table. Gan pulled the artifact from its stasis box again and set it on the table, centering it on the crosshair.
“Use those calipers to measure the thickness of the pages,” Kol said, pointing. Gan picked up the calipers. He measured the thickness of the cover and some of the pages. The calipers were digital and sent the information to Kol’s screen.
“Okay,” Kol said. “Come on.” He left the room, waving for Gan to follow. Kol sat down at the desk and swiped on the big screen. It came to life, lighting up the otherwise dim room. Kol started tapping away. “Shut and seal the door,” he said, never taking his eyes from the screen.
Gan turned, tapped the door console to shut the door and then told it to seal shut. He heard a hiss and a click, and the console read ‘Sealed.’ It also reported that the room beyond was still safe with friendly green text.
“Alright,” Kol said, “I think that does it.”
The door console turned red and Gan could hear deep humming and sharp clicks and crackles coming from the room beyond it. He hoped he hadn’t just brought the artifact to its destruction.
Kol turned and stood up from the desk. “Considering how much detail we’re asking from the machine, it will probably take several hours to scan through the whole thing.”
“I’ll wait,” Gan said. “Again, thank you. Whatever money I have, it’s yours.”
Kol gave a good-natured laugh. “Now why do I think you’re near to dirt poor?”
Gan chuckled with him. Kol left the room. Light spilled in from the loading bay as the door opened, then died again when the door closed. Gan sat down at the desk and watched the little light spin in circles. A minute later the screen showed him a picture of the front sheet of the document. Nine big, block symbols filled the screen, four, a gap, then five more. A minute later the first sheet started spooling onto the screen, filled with tiny text.
“This is it, Remnant,” he said aloud. “Your dream is coming true.”
Gan leaned back and watched the pages spool.
Chapter Forty:
A False Witness
Ashla tossed her pack on the floor and dropped onto the bed in her new cabin on the Jessamine. It was surprisingly comfortable. She stretched and twisted and didn’t mind letting out a choked groan as her joints clicked and popped. Then she lay still. Her breathing evened into slow, deep breaths. Her eyes closed.
It had been a sleepless and fear-stricken...what? Couple of days? A week? Ashla tried to count the days since the attack on the palace, but it was hard. She kept dozing off and losing count and days kept melding together in her head. It was also difficult because she didn’t spend many of them on Eltar. Out in space the sun didn’t rise or set. Well, the sun didn’t technically rise or set on Eltar either but viewing it from the surface made it seem like it did.
She resolved herself to four days. First day was the attack, the second day she escaped with Dothin, the third day she spent on Lodebar Station, the fourth day...the fourth day...the...
Ashla woke with a gasp at the sound of an electronic chime. She sat upright and glanced around. For half a second, she felt the terror of not knowing where she was. The chime rang again, and she remembered. She was on the Jessamine. She got up off the bed and walked over to the door. The console beside it showed a video f
eed of the corridor outside. Dothin and Nix stood in it, looking at her door.
“Just a minute,” Ashla called. She switched on the forward-facing camera on her link and used it as a mirror and then said. “Ew.” Her eyes were bloodshot. The skin around them was puffy and red. Her hair was a mess. She had a stain on her cheek. How long had that been there?
Her room was like a tiny studio apartment. It consisted of a fold-out bed, fold-out table, a chair, a toilet, a sink with real water tap and a shower. It was small but clean, and well cared for.
Ashla went over to the sink. She splashed cold water into her face and then lifted a handful of the nanite bath in the sink basin and scrubbed her face with it. Then she ran her fingers through her hair.
“That ought to do it,” she said. She tapped the button on the console and the door slid open. One look from Dothin and Nix showed that she had failed to hide her sleep. They on the other hand looked fresh, showered and were wearing different clothes.
“Sorry kiddo,” Dothin said. “Didn’t mean to wake you.”
“We thought you might want to go to the galley with us and grab a bite.”
Ashla frowned. Her stomach rumbled. She wondered what time it was and wished she had checked when she was using her link as a mirror.
“Sure,” she said. “Um, you mind if I change?” She was still wearing the borrowed coveralls over her flightsuit.
“Not at all,” Dothin said. “We’ll wait right here.”
Ashla smiled and closed the door. Then she switched off the console that showed Nix and Dothin. Even though she knew it was a one-way connection she felt weird getting naked in front of it.
Ashla dropped her coveralls and flightsuit in a corner and jumped into the shower. As the daughter of a wealthy governor, Ashla was used to bathing with real water. But she knew how to use the nanite-shower. She stepped in, pulled the door closed and flicked on the shower. She grabbed the poseable shower head and started spraying the nanites all over her skin and hair. The flow didn’t feel like water and it was neither hot nor cold. Nanite showers weren’t designed for luxury.
Once done she hopped out of the shower and pulled some clothes out of her pack. She picked out a short-sleeved sundress with red-pink and charcoal gray designs and a matching pair of charcoal leggings. She brushed her hair out. When she felt clean and dressed she left her room behind.
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