Seconds later her father and mother had come in, both holding their links with the screens on flashlight mode, but it hadn’t felt like seconds. It had felt like hours, days of anguished darkness filled only with the sounds of her own terrified screaming.
Cel wanted to scream now, would have been happy to, but the frozen hand squeezing her lungs wouldn’t let her.
“What are you doing?” asked Lita. Cel winced at the sound, her ragged, shivering breath turned into a whine. The voice came from where Cel had laid the body in the corner. Cel squeezed her eyes shut and her shivering wasn’t just from the cold now.
“You heard me, guardswoman,” Lita said, effecting the sharp tones of military command, “what are you doing?”
“You can’t talk,” Cel said into the darkness. “You’re dead.”
“I am dead,” Lita said. “But you’re not.”
“I will be soon,” Cel said. “I’m starving, dehydrated, freezing to death. Soon this won’t be a cell anymore, just a tomb.”
“But it’s not yet,” Lita said. “What the void is the matter with you? Sulking and shivering in the dark. That’s not the Cel Numbar I know. The Cel Numbar who made E-5 in six months. The Cel Numbar who was at the top of the short list for advancement to the Guard. Who was the first woman to be considered for status as a Shaumri warrior.”
None of it made sense. Lita wouldn’t have known those things. Couldn’t have. Evidence that the voice might seem like it was coming in through Cel’s ears, but that it was originating in her own head.
“It’s not enough,” Cel said. She wondered if engaging with her hallucinations might cause her greater long-term mental trauma. Then again, she was going to die, so who cares? She wanted someone to talk to. Might as well talk to the dead. “Even if I was at full strength I couldn’t break out of here. And no one is coming to rescue me. I’m effectively as dead as you.”
“But you’re not dead yet,” Lita said. “What you are is pathetic.”
“Sawk off,” Cel said.
“I used to look up to you,” Lita said. “You were easily the toughest woman in the guard and just as tough as ninety percent of the men. More than that you would work harder, fight harder, than any of us to get the job done. I idolized you.”
Cel thought she might throw up. It was the only way her body could further express her horror. Her skin was all gooseflesh, and she was already shivering. What Cel’s hallucination of the dead woman said didn’t feel like it came from her mind. Cel figured there were people in the Guard who had looked up to her. She had an unusual reputation, after all, and she was a highly regarded member of the Guard. But she’d never thought about it. She wanted to believe that was because she had the quality of humility gained by being raised by loving, decent, blue-collar parents.
“Shut up,” Cel said. But the demand felt more like a cry, amplifying what Lita said about her. She was pathetic. She certainly felt pathetic.
“Come over here and make me shut up,” Lita said.
Cel rolled, grunting at the pain of her sore and exhausted muscles. She pushed herself up off the cold floor. She used to pound out a hundred hand-stand push-ups as a warm up. Now she could barely perform one, and girly-style at that. Cramps lit up in her legs like explosions of agony. Her groan turned into a scream as she pushed herself to her knees. She felt like she’d been beaten up over every inch of her body.
She reached out, hoping to find a wall with her hand. She’d need something for support when she tried to stand. She hoped her hand wouldn’t find Lita, but she was pretty sure she wouldn’t. After depositing Lita in one corner Cel had huddled in the opposite corner before the lights went off and the temperature dropped again.
How long ago had that been, she wondered? Lita smelled but only of urine from when her bladder evacuated. How long did it take for a corpse to smell? They had been in refrigerated temperatures, so longer than usual. Plus, there would be no insects to deal with.
In her mind’s eye, Lita was long decomposed. Her flesh green and gray, and her skin sagging, her face half gone revealing a full eyeball like the zombies in the horror vids. That couldn’t be real though. Cel figured that if they turned on the lights the only way an onlooker would know Lita was dead would be from the pallor.
“Is that all you’ve got?” Lita asked. Cel would have never bought the act if she hadn’t spent time with Lita in combat. For the most part she was calm and professional, pleasant and sincere. When she was in the throes of combat, she opened up and took on a sarcastic, aggressive tone.
Cel put both hands on the walls and tried to push herself to her feet. Since she didn’t have anything to grab onto, she pasted her palms to the wall and hoped she could produce enough friction to help her up. The first time her hand slipped, and she smacked her face into the wall before she realized what was happening. Her vision flickered with a flash of light and she could now add a throbbing headache to her list of pains.
“Come on, wimp. I thought you were a real fighter. Maybe you are just a kank, an overrated rent-a-cop.”
Cel didn’t have the energy to tell Lita’s corpse off and stand up at the same time, so she focused on getting to her feet. Her groan turned into a breathless scream again as she pushed herself to her feet. Once she got there, she leaned into the corner for a minute. Her legs felt like wet noodles or bundles of power cables, yet somehow, they still held her, for now at least.
“Good,” Lita said. “Good. You can lie down when you’re dead. For now, you need to stand.”
Cel panted and shivered at the same time.
“I don’t know,” Cel said, “how much longer I can.”
“Can what?”
Cel was about to answer when she realized the voice didn’t come from her hallucinated version of Lita. It came from the hidden speakers in the room. It was a man’s voice and she thought it might have sounded familiar, like it belonged to someone she had known in her old life. The one she had lived before the black box, so long ago.
She noticed the air was changing, warming up. The ceiling lit up and it registered in her eyes as pain. “Ah,” she called out, shutting her eyes and shielding them with a hand. “Bright.”
“Sorry,” came the voice. “I don’t know how to dim it, hopefully your eyes will adjust.”
“What the void is going on?” Cel asked. “Who is this? Are you another hallucination?”
“I hope not,” the man’s voice said. It was a nice voice, deep and earnest. “I don’t have a lot of time. My name is S...my name is Soma.” Cel recognized the halt in his voice not as a stutter but a self-correction. He was going to call himself something else. Maybe a military rank, Cel didn’t know.
“It was my team that captured you,” Soma went on, then, “Sorry. Had I known they were going to do this to you, I might have let you go.”
“Apology accepted,” Cel said, “is there a point to this?”
“Yes, sorry.” The man chuckled. “I’m going to free Remnant. Get her out of here. I could use some help and I know you’re tough and well-trained. You kicked half of my fireteam’s tails before we even knew what happened. I’m going to open the doors...as soon as I can figure out the command board. I’m letting you out even if you’re not going to help but don’t get in my way, okay?”
Cel gasped out a laugh, the last halted breath before the icy hand loosened its grip on her lungs.
“I appreciate it,” she said. “Even five minutes of freedom would be worth it, but I’m not much use to anyone now.”
“I know,” Soma said. “They’ve been wearing themselves out jumping through every loophole in the Alliance’s anti-torture agreements with you and you’ve suffered a lot. But I’ve got a military-grade hypostim here with your name on it.”
Cel opened her mouth to make some pithy, clever remark, but all that would come was a sob. She blinked rapidly, trying to force her eyes to get used to the light. She figured that if she looked in a mirror her eyes would be all black, the irises filling the space where
her mother’s blues should be.
“Okay,” Soma said, “here goes.”
The wall to the right of Cel’s periphery opened with a hiss. In walked a man she vaguely recognized. Tall, broad and dark skinned with a tight-cropped military haircut. He wore the standard MP trousers, but with only a tan sleeveless shirt under a tactical vest, which failed to hide his thick, corded muscles. He looked like he had just been dragged down a gravel road. His arms were covered by the pink splotches of dried first-aid spray. There was a similar splotch on his forehead. He had a cast on his wrist and a heavy bandage wrapped around one thigh. He was covered in flecks and blobs of reddish brown stains. Dried blood.
He saw Lita and stopped.
“What in the...” he started but didn’t finish.
“They killed her,” Cel said. “Because I wouldn’t talk. They killed her and left her to rot in my cell with me.”
The man, Soma, shook his head.
“What is wrong with us?” he asked. Cel didn’t respond. The question seemed rhetorical. He turned back to Cel and his eyes had compassion. “Come here,” he said. “I’ll help you.”
He put her arm around his neck and walked her out of the little black box. Logically Cel knew there was no noticeable difference between the air in the box and the air in the hallway. Emotionally, the free air smelled sweet, like fresh berries in the hydroponics beds back home. The corridors outside her cell were loops of modular section, all dark and eerily lit, but right now they were as nice as her own bed.
Soma lowered her to the floor where she could sit in the corner. No one else was around so far as she could see, just the battered MP and the battered Meritine Guardswoman.
He crouched down before her and winced like he regretted the motion, but only for a second. “We don’t have much time,” he said, pulling out a long, plastic ampule. It was orange with big black type. “Do you want to do the honors or should I?”
Cel thirsted for the strength in his hand like a dying woman thirsted for water, or like she herself thirsted for water, but she put it off, her curiosity was too much.
“Who the void are you?” she asked. “Are you an MP going AWOL? Are you an insurrectionist?”
Soma smiled. “I’m a, well, I used to be a marine with the Alliance Navy, Seventh Marine Division, Raven Squad. I,” he paused, and a deep sadness fell over his face, and maybe confusion too. “I captured the girl called Remnant. I brought her to these evil black boxes. I brought you here too. I’m tired of being some DM’s bagman. So, I’m fixing my mistakes. I’m setting you free and I’m getting her out of here.”
“Why?” Cel asked.
Soma nodded. “Good question. I guess because I believe her. And, maybe more importantly, because she’s an innocent bystander whose been tortured and terrorized for no good reason I can find.
Cel smiled despite herself. “You sure you’re a marine?”
Soma’s thick, black eyebrows rose. “Yeah, was, why?”
“You sure don’t talk like one.”
Soma smiled. “A story for another time.” He ripped the safety seal off the cap of the hypostim and held it out to her. Cel took it, put her thumb on the button and injected herself in the neck.
A second later she considered the possibility that this man could be poisoning her, that she could have poisoned herself. She didn’t think so, or maybe she didn’t care. If he wasn’t who he said he was she was better off dead anyway.
“It takes a minute or two to kick in,” Soma said. “Wait here. I’ll go get Remnant.”
Cel dropped the empty hypo on the floor and grabbed Soma’s pant leg as he stood up. He turned back to her.
“Do you know how long I’ve been in there?” Cel asked him.
Pain mangled his expression. “Fourteen days.”
Cel let him go and nodded, blinking against the first jolts of the stim.
Cel’s mind played a snippet of a cartoon she had watched as a child. In it, the kids, a brother and sister, watched their parents make and drink coffee and marked the changes in them. Cartoon mom and dad were zombies before drinking their coffee, but for the rotting, and after they took even the first sip, everything changed. They became normal, pleasant. Their color returned, and the bloodshot effect of their eyeballs disappeared.
So, one night the kids got up and made this special stuff for themselves. The cartoon never hinted that the coffee would have tasted awful, which is what kept Cel from drinking it until adulthood required it. Instead the kids took one sip and then the watchers, like Cel, started laughing.
First the kids’ eyes went huge, their pupils dilating to tiny dots. Then their round little stylized bodies started doing all kind of impossible aeronautics while floating in the air, their legs and arms moving so fast they became a blur.
Cel felt the same was about to happen to her. She felt the hallway getting brighter and brighter. Her fingers trembled long after the refrigerated cell had warmed up. Her legs felt uncomfortable, restless, like they might enjoy spinning into a blur. Energy coursed through her body like she was struck by lightning and the little forks of light wanted to turn her into a puppet. Worst of all, she needed to urinate. Where the water came from, she had no idea.
She pushed herself to her knees and then dropped her pants and did her business. Only one thing was worse than being stoned in a firefight and that was having to leak in a firefight. No better place to do it. She considered going back into the cell, but she knew she couldn’t. When she was done she stood to her feet. It was a lot easier now with the heavy cocktail of uppers and synthetic adrenaline flooding her bloodstream. Her hands still jittered, and her legs felt rubbery, but she felt strength like she hadn’t in, well, fourteen days.
Fourteen days? Is that what he said? Was that all? She was ready to die after only fourteen days of imprisonment. To be fair to herself, she figured this was as much due to the awful conditions than any lack of resolve she had. Cel walked the hall, looking for Soma, and passed the shallow, open airlock to her cell. The doorway might have had an energy shield on it, so hard it was to even think of taking one step inside. If she did, MPs would flood out of hidden doorways and put her back in, she just knew it.
She turned to leave, trembling from the drugs and the deepest fear she’d ever felt in her life. As she did, she saw Lita again and she nearly collapsed.
Lita sat in the corner right where Cel had put her. Cel only wished she had taken the time to lay her down and face her away. As she was now, Lita looked like she was having a relaxing sit. The only thing off about her was her bloodstained uniform and her staring eyes.
Her eyes drew Cel’s attention. They weren’t the terror-filled eyes of someone who had died in fear, and they didn’t have the creepy stare of the dead in vids. Her eyes seemed resilient, resigned. They seemed to say something. “Make this count,” they said. “Make my death be worth something.”
“I will,” Cel said, aloud. “I promise. And I keep my promises.”
Chapter Forty-Eight:
Wings of Eagles
Gan clamped the backup battery to the bulkhead beside the dead airlock control console. It stuck there on four inset magnetic feet. He pulled the cable out of the side of the battery and jacked it into the console’s emergency power input port. He flicked the battery’s big switch on and the console flashed to life, offering illumination in the darkened airlock compartment. Gan flicked the battery back off and the console died with it. Just a test. Timing was critical, and he had to know the console would power up when he turned the battery on or he would miss his crucial window.
The Jessamine, zipping through the vacuum of space in a low orbit above Eltar, was dark and quiet. Nat, the engineer, had pulled the fuel from the ship’s reactor and powered down everything besides basic life support. This was it. The big attack. In less than four or five hours Gan would have Remnant safely aboard the Jessamine, flying far from the system. Or he’d be dead. He didn’t add captured to that list. He didn’t want to give himself any reason to s
hoot for anything less than his goal. He would save Remnant, or he would die trying. All or nothing.
With the last vestiges of his connection to Lodebar Station’s communications relay, Gan hid the text from Remnant’s artifact there with a function set to broadcast it in twelve hours if he didn’t send a kill command. Even if he died, even if Remnant died, the message would get out. Someone would crack the code, decrypt the ancient language even without Remnant’s help and the message would get out. If they died. He hoped they wouldn’t.
Down in the loading bay, strapped into a bunch of fold away emergency chairs was thirty of the Eltaran insurrection’s toughest men. Gan had seen them, and he was impressed. He expected many of them had come from the defunct Meritine Guard. They were grizzled, battle-hardened and ready for action. Gan wished them well, if only because they ensured Ashla would get some justice, if only to set things right, if only because they would further mask his own mission.
He had his re-entry kit on his back but didn’t feel it. Artificial gravity was another non-essential system the ship’s engineer had turned off. He could have floated but he opted to stand with his feet mag-locked to the floor. He would have plenty of time to float after he jumped out of the Jessamine.
A door slid open, slowly, powered by the same kind of battery backup pack Gan was about to use. Captain Kol floated into the airlock, guiding himself along on the handholds of the ship. He continued holding on to the bars and then, a second later, touched his boots to the floor, locking them in place. Ships like his were almost never in null-G and the man was probably not used to wearing shoes with magnetic locks on them. He wasn’t dressed like usual. Instead of keeping his fancy silver-plated pistol on a magnetic holster under his vest, he had it slung at his hip with extra cylindrical magazines slotted into a belt. He wore a ceramic breastplate and carried an open-faced helmet. He wore big, black boots suited for combat. Not quite full-on soldier gear but prepared for battle in his own way.
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