“Turn around,” the MP said. Soma obliged. The MP led him out of the cell.
“What’s going on, Lieutenant?” Soma asked, pointing his question at Garin.
She looked distraught. “You’re being transferred, Sergeant.” By her tone and expression Soma knew it wasn’t good. He pointedly kept his gaze away from the defense minister.
Soma nodded. “Thanks for trying, Lieutenant. You’re alright in my book.”
The MPs led him out of the cell block and out of the building. Another troop carrier truck was parked out back. Half the squad loaded in before him, then helped him up, then the rest joined in. The back of the transport was full by the time they were all aboard. Garin was the last to load in.
“Minister I—” she tried again but Anatheret cut her off.
“Sorry, lieutenant,” he said. “The decision is made and I’m all out of time.” He walked away from the troop transport, to a smaller vehicle. An MP held the door open for him and he stepped into the front passenger seat. Then he sped away. Soma wondered if he would ever see the man again. He hoped so, just long enough to kick that smug grin off his face.
Garin shook her head. An MP lifted the tailgate, locked it into place, and the transport shuddered and pulled out of the alley and back towards the palace.
“So,” Soma said, looking at Garin. “The minister finished another black box, huh?”
Garin looked at him, her expression equal parts sour and sad. She nodded. “Yes. I won’t say I told you so, Cross.”
“You just did.”
She nodded. “But I’m going to do everything I can to get you out of there.”
“Listen,” Soma said. “I screwed up my career, but I don’t want to screw up yours, okay? Don’t do anything stupid. Copy?”
Garin shook her head. In the waxing and waning light of overhead streetlights Soma thought he saw tears on her face. He didn’t want her to pity him, no matter what terrors awaited him in his own version of the black box.
“Maybe put in a word with defense minister Garin for me, okay?” he said. He felt like crying himself, but he kept his voice light.
Garin gave him a confused look and then laughed and shook her head. Soma laughed too.
A distant boom rattled the truck and cut their laughter short. Everyone’s eyes widened.
“That sounded kind of close,” Soma said.
Another boom sounded, much closer.
“Another attack?” One MP asked.
“No way,” another said.
“The insurgency was—”
Garin didn’t talk. She moved. She rushed to the front of the truck and banged on the little window separating the bed from the driver’s cabin.
“Get moving,” she said, “we’re under—”
An ear-splitting boom. A blinding flash. A universe of pain.
Soma woke up with a shout to darkness, fire and pain. The wrecked transport was three meters away. Well, most of it was. One of the tires was half a meter from the wreck and ripped to shreds. The hood lay another meter away, crumpled like a piece of foil. Bodies were everywhere, staining the street with their blood.
“Lieutenant!” Soma called, but he could barely hear his own voice over the ringing in his ears. His hands were still cuffed behind him. His arms burned from what felt like a thousand cuts and scrapes. He felt a searing cut in his head and a stabbing pain in his right thigh. When he turned to look at the latter wound he saw a huge piece of shrapnel sticking out. His wrist felt sprained if not broken. But considering the men around him, Soma was lucky. How had the bomb or mortar shell that killed all these men not also killed him?
Soma, laying on his back, rolled and pushed onto his left knee, screaming as he did. He squeezed his eyes shut against tears. He was not going to cry over anything less than a plasma burn. He focused on his breathing, taking deep breaths that hurt against bruised ribs. Then he tried again.
“Lieutenant Garin!” The ringing in his ears was only unbearable now. No one responded. He pulled at the manacles holding his hands and his left wrist lanced in pain. He shouted again but this time there were no words.
He decided standing would be easier if he used his good leg to push off with. He switched his weight to his right knee, allowed the pitiful cry to come, then lifted his left foot and planted it on the blood-soaked ground. He counted to three and pushed.
He screamed through his gritted teeth but managed to make it to his feet. He thought about pulling on his manacles again but decided against it with his fractured wrist. Instead he looked around for the MP that had bound him. Most MPs likely carried a universal controller for the manacles, but Soma knew the MP who had bound him had one and that he had put the controller in his pocket.
As Soma searched, another explosion erupted in another part of the town. He guessed they came from ground-based artillery. Bombers would have been audible, and also, picked up by the palace’s sensor suite and shot down or countered by fighters.
In the time Soma had spent at the palace there had been small and dwindling attacks. All leading to the expectation that the insurgency was dying out. This was big, though.
Soma found the MP that had bound his hands. The man lay under a shredded bumper, his upper half twisted in an unnatural angle. His eyes were wide open, staring at nothing.
Soma worked with his boot, trying to nudge the controller out of the MP’s pocket. It wasn’t working. The pocket was twisted, and the thing wouldn’t come out. Soma turned and dropped down onto the MP. His body gave Soma the impression of laying on a liquid-filled mattress. The image of a waterbed filled with blood and guts filled his mind. Then he imagined something cutting it and the partially-congealed blood oozing out, and for the first time in Soma’s time in the military he felt like he might vomit.
He twisted at his manacles, pulling his hands closer to the pocket, and then inside. He could feel the controller with his fingertips. He pushed harder. The pain in his wrist screamed. He screamed. He grasped the controller, lost it, grasped again and then yanked it from the pocket. His shout was both victory and agony in equal doses. He pushed at the buttons on the controller until he found the one to disengage the binder. Then he ripped his arms out in front of him, grasping his bad wrist.
His arms were covered in blood, but he found no visible shrapnel. The blood all looked superficial but it was dark out and there was little light coming from the dying flames of the transport wreck. He’d need to reassess the wounds under better light.
Soma lifted the controller again, found the right button and tapped it. The manacles fell off his wrists. He lay there for a minute on his blood-filled waterbed, catching his breath. He couldn’t afford much time. He pushed himself to his feet. Just as painful this time, but much easier with the use of his hands. He tried one last time.
“Lieutenant!”
A dislodged door shifted, scraping loudly against the concrete. A bloody hand rose from the wreckage. Soma breathed a sigh of relief, even though it was just as likely to be an MP as Lieutenant Garin. More likely, in fact. Soma pocketed the controller, then staggered over to the door. He shoved it away and pulled Garin away from the bulk of the wreckage.
She was a mess. All her rumor-spinning beauty was ruined. A blood-soaked metal pole protruded from her abdomen. Her left leg was nothing but tattered and bloody fabric below the knee. Her face was burned and a large flap of skin from her scalp was gone.
She tried to speak, but her words were a whisper, less than a whisper. She tried harder and Soma thought she was trying to say, “run.”
Her eyes flitted, glazed over, and then stared.
“If you hadn’t been trying to save my career, you wouldn’t have been here,” Soma said to the corpse. “I’m sorry, Lieutenant. I’m sorry.”
Another explosion erupted, and Soma knew it was time to go. He stood and searched through the wreckage, only willing to take a moment. Most of the MPs had been carrying only sidearms, but one of them had a particle repeater. Soma found the man still gras
ping the weapon. Soma pulled it out of the MP’s frozen hands, slung it over his shoulder, then fished through the man’s gear for extra magazines. He pulled three of them and stuffed them in his pockets.
What he found beneath another dead MP was even more valuable.
“It can’t be,” Soma said. The heavy first aid pack was lying under the dead man’s head like a pillow. A full aid pack was more valuable to him than the repeater slung over his shoulder. Soma pulled it, ignoring the thick thud the MP’s head made when it hit the concrete beneath, then he staggered away from the crash.
The street was surrounded by buildings, but none of were lit. Offices, Soma thought at first. It was the middle of the night after all. Soma smashed the butt of his repeater through the glass door of the closest building and then stumbled inside. Holding the weapon up at firing position was difficult with a bad wrist, and ultimately meaningless. The building was empty, at least this floor was.
It turned out to be a school of some kind. Drawings dotted the colorful walls. The doors were all decorated with animals and balloons. Soma let his eyes adjust to the darkness, then pushed deeper in. He passed the first few doors, making sure he was well into the building before picking one. The door was locked. Soma smashed the butt of his repeater into the knob and the whole assembly came undone and fell to the floor with a hollow clatter.
Soma pushed into the room, closed the door, and turned the light on. It looked like a teacher’s lounge. There was a small kitchen area with a table covered in a colorful plastic tablecloth. A few small couches surrounded a coffee table. The door didn’t shut well so Soma dragged one of the chairs and wedged it under the remaining knob. It might buy him a second if someone tried to get in. No more than that.
Soma dragged himself to the kitchen table. He dropped his repeater onto the nearby counter, then pulled the first aid kit from his back and laid it on the table. He unzipped it, opened the flap and smiled. It had everything he needed.
Soma started with his arms. He hosed them both down with what his squaddies used to call “grunt spray,” a combination disinfectant and coagulant booster in one spray can. He then injected his bad wrist with bone repair aid nanites and then wrapped it in an auto-cast. He could only hope the bones weren’t too bad, or unset, but at least with the cast on and the wrist immobilized it didn’t hurt.
He couldn’t think of what to use as a mirror to look at the cut in his head, so he sprayed some more first-aid spray at it, covering his eyes with the other hand. Finally, he looked down at the elephant in the room.
The shrapnel had to come out. Soma set out the tools he would need: a set of heavy forceps, a fresh can of grunt spray, some large bandages, a painkiller hypo and something called an IBN hypo. Soma read from the label that this would search out and fix any internal bleeding. That sounded important.
Soma pushed the aid kit to the side and sat down on the table, with his wounded leg up on a chair. He jabbed himself with the painkiller hypo. Then he affixed the forceps to the shrapnel bit. He started taking slow, shuddering breath. Before pulling, he went into the aid kit for something else. Inside were a few sterilized towels. He rolled them up and bit down on them.
He counted out loud. His words were inscrutable coming through the mouthful of towels.
“Wum, hoo, wree.”
Soma yanked at the forceps. The shrapnel ripped out of his leg. For one panic-stricken second Soma waited with expectation for the pain. It didn’t come. Then he realized he was sitting there while his thigh spewed blood.
He dropped the forceps and grabbed the first-aid spray in one hand and a bundle of bandages in the other. He sprayed down the spurting wound, then applied pressure with the bandages. He fumbled for the second hypo, grabbed it, then jabbed himself with it.
Soma groaned, feeling sick again, now with a side of dizzy. He shoved the aid kit off the table and then laid down on it with his feet on one of the chairs. He laid his head back, wondering if he would pass out when a terrifying thought sent fresh lightning up his spine. He reached down and grabbed a roll of gauze from the kit. He was sweating now and really ready to faint. He pulled at the edge of the gauze with his teeth, then wrapped it around his leg, pressing the bandage down on the wound. After wrapping his leg three or four times he ripped the rest of the roll off, tossed it, and then rubbed the end of the strip until it adhered to the rest.
Then he laid his head back, breathing in and out, in and out, in and out.
To his surprise, his breathing regulated and instead of passing out, he started to feel better. He gave himself a few more seconds, then slowly sat up.
He planted his boots on the floor and tried putting weight on his right leg. He found it caused him no trouble at all. Of course, once the painkillers had run their course, he might be telling a different story, but for now he was sure he could walk fine. He lifted his repeater and slung it over his shoulder again but stopped before leaving the room behind.
Soma stepped back over to the aid kit, lifted it back to the table and started rifling through it. Images of his meeting with Remnant fueled his search. She was sick, and starving and dehydrated and exhausted. He could carry her out if he needed to, but hoped it wasn’t necessary.
He realized he was putting his plans to free Remnant into action and it scared him a little. Nothing for it, though. The aid kit was well packed. It had two of the hypos he was looking for. They were covered in bright orange labels with crisp black type. He shoved them both in his pocket, and then walked to the door.
He was actually going to try this. It filled his belly with fear, but it also lit his brain up like speed. He shut the light off before removing the chair from the door, then stepped out, repeater up and ready. He snuck out of the school the way he had come. By now he could hear small arms fire, coming from all directions it seemed, all but one.
Soma turned, putting the black form of the palace dead ahead and started jogging.
Chapter Forty-Three:
Established by Counsel
Gan sat in the Jessamine’s machine shop at one of the workstations. Laid out on the workstation screen was a comprehensive blueprint of a Shaumri atmospheric entry kit. The design came from his smartskin’s data stores. He’d been tinkering with it for hours.
The problem was simple. The Jessamine didn’t have Shaumri tech, so Gan had to come up with a similar design that was compact and wouldn’t let him burn up in atmosphere or splat onto the surface.
“So what’s this sup posed to do again?” Nix asked from behind him. Gan turned to look at Nix. He was sitting on one of the work tables holding the kit’s prototype casing and looking closely at its heat-hardened tiles.
“It’s a re-entry kit,” Gan said.
“Oh,” Nix said. “I’ve seen one of these, where the inflatable dome of ablative shielding pops out and surrounds the wearer, so they don’t burn up in reentry, right?”
Gan gave a sideways nod. “Sort of,” he said, swiping and sliding at the screen to move the configuration of the power cells. “Except this one is designed to be stealthier, and it piggy-backs off of the technology of my smartskin.”
“How so?”
Gan shrunk the size of the O2 cannister. The workstation told him it would lose him ten minutes of air. How much air did he need, though? Gan shook his head and kept working the puzzle.
“Well,” Gan said, “one big thing is that Shaumri smartskins already have the capability for thermal shielding, though not the energy resources to sustain it. A Shaumri re-entry kit contains extra energy cells to power the shield.”
“Really?”
Gan nodded. “Yes. But I also have to prepare for a more controlled fall. The kit will need to contain a flexible, deployable wingsuit.”
“Wow,” Nix said. “That’s pretty swag.”
“I suppose so,” Gan said. The wingsuit was easy enough. Nycar was a material used in lots of applications and Kol would be able to secure him some once they reached Gazi.
“So you’re going to f
ly to the palace, huh?”
Gan bit back his irritation. He liked Nix. He was probably Gan’s second actual friend in living memory. But Nix was bored and feeling useless. Gan understood the feeling.
Salazar, Ashla and Gan were all working out separate parts of the same plan. Ashla was planning to fly her own ship to the palace to find her friends. Salazar was working towards contacting the local insurgency on Eltar to see if they had any fight left in them. Gan was working on his re-entry kit.
Dothin was older. He didn’t have Nix’s nervous energy. He spent the time on the ship reading, watching the news or chatting with the Jessamine’s crew. The man seemed to have an inborn capacity for turning acquaintances into friends. And acquaintances from a wide variety of lifestyles. Gan knew Remnant would like Dothin. He hoped she would get the chance to meet him.
Nix on the other hand was like a can of soda someone had shaken up and then opened in null-G. He was all over the place and making a mess of everything.
“Yes,” Gan said. “Fly into the communications tower, hijack the palace’s databanks, and then use them to find out where Remnant is.”
Gan was sure he didn’t let even a touch of his frustration into his voice. He was wrong.
“I’m sorry, Gan,” Nix said. He sighed. “I never thought a person could be so bored. I got here from driving Ashla nuts while she’s trying to fix Luna. I’ll leave you alone.” He put the re-entry kit’s shell back down and walked out the door. Gan didn’t say anything. He let Nix go, promising himself he would make it up to the boy.
Gan turned back to the workstation and returned to work. If he added a rebreathing device, he could increase his air supply by a few minutes. Gan swiped through a few designs, found one that fit his kit, and dropped it in place. With that, he could drop to one O2 cannister which gave him more room for extra power cells. But that would cut out the space he’d separated for the parachute. Gan groaned. He switched back to two O2 cannisters, put the rebreather in the middle at the bottom, and then returned the parachute to its position in the center.
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