Knowing Remnant was praying now eased Cel’s worry. It made the walls stop closing in and the noise stop threatening to steal her sanity. Whoever Remnant was talking to had power Cel couldn’t dream of. And yet, that power hadn’t smited the MPs halting their escape, hadn’t kept Cel from getting shot, hadn’t offered a solution to their problems. Cel tried not to think about this. Any shred of hope was worth holding onto, no matter how small.
Cel turned and kept shooting. Minutes passed. The MPs kept coming, though they seemed to be keeping their distance, not pressing so close. Cel couldn’t blame them. She was about to get Soma’s attention and suggest they push forward when she could hear that silent voice start making noise again.
Cel rocked behind cover and turned to Remnant. The girl was yelling but to no avail. Cel shrugged at her and shook her head. Remnant pointed down the corridor they had come from and mouthed a single word, “more.”
Cel screamed at Soma, fighting to be heard over the deafening hale. The MPs on this side must know their allies were about to close the noose. They were pouring the fire on.
Cel waved and jumped and finally Soma looked.
Cel pointed at Remnant and screamed, “Contact! Contact! Contact!”
Soma’s eyes went wide. He turned and ran for the corridor, slowing to scream something at Remnant and point at the bay of supply lockers dug into the wall near the corner. Cel could imagine what he was saying. “Hide in one of the lockers. If something happens to me, stay quiet and keep hiding. And keep praying.”
Remnant nodded, said something back, then ran. She opened one of the lockers and then backed up as a few open boxes of hardware fell down on her. She kicked and shoved the mess back into the closet and then slunk inside and shut the door.
Soma was at the far wall, peeking with his repeater out. He started firing. So, they were surrounded. With no way out unless the MPs decided to kindly cease fire and wait for Cel to mine her way out with the big mining machine.
She’d seen machines like it around her home at Berican Station. They were designed to cut and then clean a smooth, round shaft as they crawled along. Doing so ensured the shaft was stable and could withstand the high-degree of pressure from all the rock on top of it. What they weren’t designed for was speed. They were faster than a team of miners using jackhammers or laser cutters, but not much. They excelled at smooth tunnels ready to be sealed, floored and furnished.
Cel abandoned any ridiculous and certainly suicidal plans involving the dusty old mining machine. The realistic best-case scenario in any of those plans was that the miner was out of power. She turned and continued the grizzly work.
Peek and shoot, peek and shoot, trying to make sure she never peeked from the same spot twice. She’d start standing, then she’d drop to one knee, then up to a crouch, then down, almost to lying prone and never in any order. Once a particle bolt collided with the wall so close to her eye she was blinded by the flash for a few seconds. A second time a bolt came so close to hitting her the heat of it rushing by left a blister on her arm.
Cel reloaded and realized this was her last magazine for the repeater. She wondered how Soma was doing. He was still firing, but in single shots now.
The end of the hypostim came slow, like a lingering note in a horror vid telling you the monster was going to pop out of the closet and eat the teenaged girl. It started with a headache that almost rivaled the pain in her shoulder. The next sign was the sensation that her repeater was getting heavier every time she lifted it to fire, as if someone were attaching weights to the muzzle between shots. Then her legs felt unsteady.
She dropped back behind cover again and leaned against the wall, panting. Her arms ached, and she wondered if she could raise the repeater one more time. She checked the energy gauge and shrugged. Without peeking she released the last two shots it had, then dropped it to the floor and drew her pistol.
The despair was like a physical pain, like a gunshot wound to the heart and spreading like blood pooling under a corpse. She had little hope of getting free, even after the euphoria of her release, she felt certain her chances were miniscule at best. They had gained ground. They had gone a long way. And for a moment it had seemed like she might smell free air again. There would be no recapture for her, no black box again. She would take her own life first.
Sirens blazed and Cel ignored them at first, as they were indistinguishable from the ringing in her ears. She wasn’t alerted to them until she saw the flashing orange lights. She turned in time to see a huge blast door drop in front of Soma so fast it might have cut him in half if he was under it, from his head right down to his boots. The sirens halted but the lights kept flashing. They came from big dome-shaped fixtures in the ceiling covered by steel cages.
Soma turned, looked at Cel and shrugged. They were hemmed in and running out of ammunition fast. Why cut off one side of the attack? It offered Cel and Soma the tactical advantage. Soma jogged back to the wall opposite Cel. As he looked at her, Cel knew that he knew the hypostim was wearing out. His eyes were sad and sympathetic. She narrowed her eyes and shook her head.
“Don’t you dare feel sorry for me,” she said. “Don’t you dare.”
He probably couldn’t hear her but the change in his expression suggested he understood anyway.
But something else odd had happened. The firing had slowed. Remnant popped her head out of the closet and looked around. She didn’t seem to be losing the effects like Cel was. She exited the closet but left the door open and sidled up next to Soma. He racked the last magazine into his repeater. He didn’t have a sidearm to fall back on.
Cel gathered her strength. She imagined raising her pistol, sighting out a target and firing. Quick, strong, precise. She peeked, raised her gun and failed to fire at the sight of an MP flying into the wall a meter away from her. The man was lucky to be wearing a helmet, as his head snapped back against the wall as he flew. He crumpled to the ground, unconscious if not dead.
The firing sped up in the corridor, but not aimed at her and Soma. Cel entertained a moment of hope that felt more like elation. Someone had come. The battle had reached the tunnels and her comrades in cyan and crimson were coming to her rescue.
Then another MP flew and in his place the shadows shifted.
“Sawking jin,” Cel said. It sounded like a whine. The MPs were falling back but she had a much bigger problem on her hands.
“Shaumri,” she yelled, but didn’t have to as no one was firing anymore.
A voice boomed out of the corridor like a pronouncement of judgment from an angry god.
“Release the girl known as Remnant now.”
To Cel’s surprise, Remnant responded to this declaration of doom with a smile. For a minute Cel’s exhausted brain wondered if Remnant was being affected by the hypostim in an unprescribed way. That instead of wearing out, it was increasing in strength, making Remnant artificially giddy.
“Wait!” she called. “Gan? Ganyasu? Is that you?”
She ran out into the corridor and for a second Cel’s imagination slashed her in half with an invisible blade, scarlet blood spraying everywhere too bright for the dim lighting. Cel rushed after her.
She grabbed Remnant’s shoulder, pulled the girl behind her and fired three shots at the shimmer in the gloom. The invisible man shifted and roared.
“Stop!” Remnant cried. “Wait! We’re all friends!”
Cel pulled her backwards keeping her pistol pointed forward, searching for the shimmer, the only telltale of Shaumri active camouflage. Unfortunately, the darkness that had helped her with the MPs worked to the man’s advantage.
“Remnant?” the roaring voice came. “Are you alright?”
“It is you, Gan, isn’t it?”
“It is.”
“Cel,” Remnant said. Cel spared a second to look at her but shot her gaze back into the gloom. “That is Ganyasu Naboris. He’s not Shaumri anymore. He’s my friend.”
Cel stopped.
“If that’s true,” she
said, “show yourself.”
“Okay,” the voice said. “I’m coming out. Do not fire.” The last sentence sounded more like a threat than a request.
Cel recognized the Shaumri smartskin, all black and sleek, tightly packing in the man’s long, lean, muscular frame. He kept his hands up but more like a shrug than a surrender. He was unarmed, but then again, a Shaumri in a smartskin is never unarmed.
“Gan!” Remnant called. She tried to run but Cel held her back still. She also kept her pistol aimed at the man’s chest.
“Wait,” Cel said. “Let me see your face.”
The smooth cover of the faceplate melted away, marching away from a central point like tiny columns of parading soldiers. The face behind the mask surprised her. It wasn’t Busan Kail’s face for one. The physical differences were obvious—this man didn’t have Kail’s broad features—but the non-physical ones were even more so.
Had Cel seen nothing of this man but his face, she would never have thought he was Shaumri, or had ever been Shaumri. It was something around the eyes.
Cel released Remnant. The girl ran to the man in Shaumri smartskin and she didn’t explode in a spray of blood. On the contrary he wrapped his arms around her and hugged her.
“Gan,” Remnant said, her voice filled with joy. “It’s so good to see you.”
“I’ve missed you too,” he said. “I’ve done what you said. I met some friends and they helped me get here. Even more they helped me scan the artifact. We’re no longer dependent on the physical copy.”
Remnant released him and turned. “I’ve met some friends too,” she said. “Gan, meet Soma and Cel. They helped me escape.”
When the Shaumri—Gan—looked back at Cel he smiled with authenticity she’d never seen in one of his kind. Cel’s threats, even the shots she’d taken at him, were forgotten.
“I’ll never be able to thank you enough,” he said.
Cel found herself speechless. The sincerity of a man wearing the uniform of a murderer was too much for her brain. She didn’t know to cry along with Remnant, or to shout. Soma made it up for her.
“You’re welcome,” he said, “but if you have a ride out of here, that would be thanks enough.”
Gan opened his mouth, and then paused. He started looking into the distance between himself and the others in the familiar expression of someone listening over a radio channel.
“That’s excellent news,” Gan said. “If you speak to Ashla again, please tell her I found her friend and she’s safe. I’m bringing her to the Jessamine now, along with a few others.” A pause. “I have.” A pause. “Thanks, Dothin. See you soon.”
“Ashla is here?” Cel asked. “And Dothin?”
Gan nodded. “They’re safe. Neither were involved in the battle, but the young lady decided she didn’t trust me enough to find you, so she struck out on her own.”
“But she’s safe?” Cel asked. Her eyelids kept falling and she kept having to heft them back up. “I tried to get her away from here and...” the headache came back and with a vengeance. This was followed by a swell of light headedness. “And I...” she tried again. She felt herself falling, realized her legs wouldn’t hold her anymore under the stress of the prior weeks of torment and the news that Ashla was safe.
She would have pitched headlong into the wall, but Soma got in the way.
“Come on, Cel,” he said. “I’ll help you.”
A cart wasn’t far away, so Soma helped Cel down the corridor to it and into the passenger seat. Soma climbed in beside her and turned the key and the little motor hummed to life. The cart didn’t have a proper back seat, just a rear-facing bench. Gan took this, sitting down on the bench and holding Remnant who had, not long after Cel’s little spell, fainted.
Soma made nervous talk on their short drive to the central lift shaft, stating he thought Cel was joking when she said the carts were slow. Cel could do little more than smile in response and even that seemed to drain her of more energy.
When they came to the lift Soma helped Cel into the cage and Cel spotted Gan carrying Remnant in after them. The miracle girl’s cheek rested against the murderer’s chest. Remnant’s face was gaunt and pale with dark circles under her eyes, but the girl smiled in her unconsciousness. The tenderness in the man’s face as he looked at Remnant took Cel’s breath away.
The lift cage came to a stop and the doors opened out to the bombed-out foyer that led to the garden. As Soma helped her out of the lift cage Cel caught her first glimpse of light not created by an LED. At the same moment Ashla stepped into the foyer from the hallway, holding hands with a young dark-haired boy with a nose she could have hung her pistol on.
When Ashla turned and saw Cel, her already bloodshot eyes teared up and she let go of the boy’s hand and ran to her. She was talking but Cel had a hard time grasping the string of words and only tried to mutter back that she was okay and that it was good to see Ashla.
Ashla lifted Cel’s wounded arm over her head to help her and the pain was exquisite but overcome by what happened next.
The only thing that remained over the entry to the garden was the nano-carbonate endoskeleton of the palace. The brick, the mortar, even the floor tiles had been slagged. Melted bits of brick, shattered marble and blood carpeted the foyer floor. But the sun was high in the sky when Soma and Ashla helped Cel out onto the glassed earth of the garden.
Cel’s eyes poured tears, partly from the emotion of the experience and partly from her new sensitivity to the sunlight. She didn’t even try to cover them or hold them back. Soma and Ashla led her under the shadow of a sleek, pale ship and though the sun was no longer visible the air was still bright and warm, so Cel didn’t mind.
They brought her to a pallet on the lowered deck of the ship and, for the most part, kept her from tumbling to the floor. Her eyes were still blurry from tears and exhaustion but the face that appeared over her could only have been one person.
“Hey Cel,” Dothin said. He had blood on his face, but his smile told Cel it wasn’t anything to worry about. “How are you?”
Cel smiled. She wanted to say she was free. She wanted to say she had never been better. She wanted to say something about their difference in age. Instead she closed her eyes and found no fear for the darkness behind her eyelids.
Epilogue
“As the seventh governor of the Sovereign Antarii System, nominated by Antarii parliament, chosen by Antarii citizens, ratified by the Antarii constitution, I, Kirrenen Jokun Tiz, am ordering all elements of the Conservation of Allied Systems military, to cease operations in Antarii space and leave the system immediately,” said the handsome, middle-aged man on the viewscreen. Beneath him ran a marquee stating “Antarii Assembly swears in seventh governor after contentious Alliance occupation.”
Remnant sat in one of the chairs in the Jessamine’s galley. She turned her attention away from the big viewscreen and down to the tablet Gan had shown her, the one with the entirety of the Master’s text scrolling before her eyes. On the table next to her sat a cooling plate of food and the original artifact sitting on its stasis cube.
People came and went in and out of the galley. Some she recognized as the soldiers who had fought to retake the palace. Some she knew were part of Captain Kol’s crew. Others were more familiar faces and some that were becoming familiar. It was a strange place to set up shop while she borrowed a sizeable percentage of the Jessamine’s processing power to decode the ancient document before her, but fitting, she thought, and comfortable in a way.
Remnant had just spent the past two weeks by herself in a box smaller than this galley, all alone. She smiled. Well, not all alone. The Master was with her throughout the torturous time in the black box, sustaining her through the days when no one put food in her cell, and encouraging her through the long hours of cold and heat and darkness and noise. But still, she came to after passing out in Gan’s arms yearning for human contact and that was what she was getting.
“Oh,” she said, pointing at the tablet
, “this one.” She found the same point in the physical text as well but tried to handle it as little as possible. A side window of the viewscreen pointed to the same section of text. “This says, ‘Haven’t I commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the Master your Benefactor will be with you wherever you go.’”
Remnant pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes. “Yeah,” she said to the screen, to the ship, to whatever computer was listening with its hidden microphones and processing her commands. “I still don’t like the word ‘benefactor.’ I don’t like connecting the Master with the Scions.”
The computer didn’t respond. Remnant realized she hadn’t made a command yet. “Just flag the word and I’ll come back to it.” The computer gave a friendly-sounding chime in response and went back to cross-referencing the text.
Remnant looked at the string of text she’d revealed again. It was funny how the words managed to appear to her more in her mind than on the page. A word of knowledge, she thought, and appropriate.
“That’s something I thought about a lot before Soma captured me. Before the Elpizio. You were with me. I hope I made you proud.”
She smiled, realizing she had ceased talking to the computer and started talking to the Master.
“I don’t want you to do that ever again,” came a voice through one of the halls connecting to the galley. Remnant had asked the computer to leave the doors open while she sat there. She thought she might be avoiding closed doors for a long while after her time in the little black box.
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