Remnant

by Dwayne A Thomason

  Sal meandered along one corridor, down a set of stairs, and across to the front starboard airlock. The kid was waiting for him there.

  Vance Gosen or “the Kid” to Sal—though he was hardly that at twenty years old—sat in one of the four padded chairs, strapped into the heavy restraints. He was nodding his nearly-shaven head and tapping his big boot against the decking and Sal could pick up the sound of grinding, whining music emanating from the kid’s earpiece. Sal sat down next to him and pulled the restraint down over his head and locked it into place. The foam pressed his weapon into his ribs, so he adjusted.

  The Kid noticed him and nodded his way.

  “Pause!” he roared, and Sal flinched.

  “Sorry, cap,” Vance said, now with his inside voice. “A few wrecking waves before a meeting always loosens me up.”

  “Are you referring to that gutter-choke coming from your earpiece?” Sal replied. “All that’s going to wreck is your ears.”

  “Whatever, grandma. Maybe you’d prefer--” the Kid said, interrupted by two klaxon bleats and the emergency lights flashing green and then blue. The ship rumbled and whined against the strain of a sudden, steep-angle entry. A moment later a deep howl from above signaled that the ship was discharging coolant to her outer skin.

  Were Salazar and his crew engaged in “legitimate” shipping, they would have broken N-space several minutes ago, kindly requested clearance to enter the planet’s atmosphere, and then glided planetward. Instead, to provide maximum cover, Sabella broke N-space as close to the planet as possible, and dove towards the planet, venting coolant to mask the intense heat signature produced by such a steep entry angle. It was a difficult maneuver and the lives of many smugglers were cut short by poor piloting.

  Sal breathed a silent sigh of relief once the shuttering and groaning ceased. A single cheerful tone sounded. Sal unlocked his restraint and lifted it away. He stood up, stretched as if he’d been sitting there for hours, and then grabbed for one of the ceiling-mounted handholds. The Kid rose too, after pulling a black briefcase from the storage drawer under his seat.

  He had not yet learned Salazar’s style yet. Whereas Salazar was a silk vest and a pair of cufflinks, the Kid was a long matte-black coat and combat boots. Salazar’s hair was long and well-groomed. The kid’s hair was buzzed so short you could see the color of his scalp.

  “Now remember, Kid,” Salazar said. “Chief Lekem is a friend, not just a business associate. Be on your best behavior.”

  “So we shoot him after we get his money then, right?”

  Sal gave his most baleful glare in response. Vance was not cowed.

  “Jin, Sal, relax,” he said. “I know what I’m doing. I’m a professional.”

  “Not yet you’re not,” Sal said, intending the dour warning in his voice.

  The Kid went silent. Sal fell into his own thoughts as he waited for the Jessamine to carry him to the meeting place. Chief Lekem had chosen a well-concealed area of thick deciduous forest, but with a sizeable enough clearing for the Jessamine to land in. As his thoughts wandered, he felt a sudden tap on his left breast.

  He looked at the Kid, who was tapping the part of Sal’s vest that hid the pistol.

  “You still packing that nickle-plated toy?” Vance asked.

  “It’s silver,” Sal corrected, “and it’s not a toy.”

  “Come on,” Vance said. “What if we get into trouble?”

  “I’ve held my own with this weapon more than once,” Sal replied. “And it’s far more discreet than that monstrous plasma shotgun you carry.”

  “Nah, cap,” Vance said. “I had this little sweetheart made up in Cassia.” He set the briefcase on the decking, clenching it in place with his feet, and pulled what looked like a laser sub-repeater from a strap under his coat. On second glance, though, it looked a little heavier than models Sal had seen, and heavily modified.

  “What in the void is that?” Sal asked.

  “This,” the kid said, “is a modified A-17 particle sub-repeater.”

  “I didn’t think they made such a thing.”

  “They don’t,” the kid said, grinning wide. “I took the chassis of an L-12 and installed the accelerator of an A-6.”

  “So it’s a particle pistol in a laser repeater body,” Sal said, trying to keep the growing curiosity from his voice. “How exciting.”

  The Kid shook his head.

  “But that’s not all,” he said. “So, most particle repeaters are pretty bulky, partially to keep the acceleration process ticking away, but mostly to speed up the double-ionization process. Instead, I was able to install a rigged, after-market accelerator and a modified ionizer, sacrificing heat exchange but gaining a fire rate of 8 rounds per second.”

  To finish the exhibition the kid folded out the foregrip, extended the stock, and then tucked the weapon into a ready position.

  Salazar had to admit he was impressed at the kid’s ingenuity. In his line of work, he often found the need for compact but high-powered weapons. Sometimes a drop went bad. Sometimes a buyer decided he didn’t want to pay. Sometimes the local authorities caught wind. Salazar had been in more firefights than he’d like to admit.

  Then again, he didn’t have to admit it.

  “So basically, you’ve got a weapon that will be wildly inaccurate after the second or third shot as the accelerator will be bucking upward, but that doesn’t matter because it’ll probably overheat and explode in your face in the middle of a firefight.”

  The Kid sighed.

  “You take the fun out of everything,” he said, tucking the weapon back under the folds of his coat.

  Sal felt the Jessamine slow, stop and begin her landing descent, even though the G-buffers made such movements unreadable.

  “We’re landing now, Captain,” Sabella said.

  “But there is no one here,” Kahula said. “I’m even bouncing lasers into the foliage and getting nothing.”

  “Oh, they’re here alright,” Salazar replied. “Lanjer, don’t drop the bay until I give the word.”

  “Copy that, Captain,” Jac Lanjer, Salazar’s deck chief replied over the comm.

  “Let’s go,” Salazar said to the Kid.

  Vance picked up the briefcase and then slapped the airlock control. The panel went green and the big airlock door opened, and the stairway extended downward.

  As he led the kid down the stairs, Sal looked into the sunlit glade about them, and the deep, dark forest beyond. If the Jessamine’s ladar system didn’t pick up Lekem’s men, neither would his naked eyes, but he tried anyway. Occasionally his peripheral vision picked up a man’s shadow, he thought, but when he turned towards it he saw nothing but trees.

  Sal stepped out into the thick, lush grass. Vance followed.

  “Send the staircase back up,” Sal said.

  Vance, after donning a pair of mirrored sunglasses gave Sal a funny look. Salazar could see the Kid’s left eyebrow shoot up over the edge of the shades. Vance tapped a button on his link tucked into the sleeve of his coat, and the ladder whined as it rose back up.

  Sal took a deep breath of the forest air. It was perfumed by the scents of wildflowers whose names he didn’t know, and the smell that always follows a summer rain.

  The Kid was about to say something when a bush some fifteen meters in front of him shook and rose. As it lumbered towards them, the bush blurred and changed colors to a plain gray. Then it altered its form, the top becoming a deep hood.

  Chief Amalenus Lekem pulled the hood back, revealing his regulation haircut, his dark, leathery skin and a plain, brown eyepatch over one eye. Sal did not recognize the latter detail.

  Out of the tree line came a second piece of walking greenery, which altered form, color and shape as well. That hood came back revealing a young man of similar color and hair as Lekem, but a thinner build and cheekbones. But this tree was armed. This man held a long civilian hunting bolter.

  “Ka se, Kol nuche!” Chief Lekem said. He was smiling and holding his arm
s out wide as he approached Salazar.

  “Ka se, Lekem tah!” Sal replied. He held his arms out and received the chief with a hug.

  “You’re looking good, Salazar!” The chief said.

  “You look like pig wat,” Salazar replied. “What happened to your eye?”

  “Ah,” Chief Lekem, said, waving Salazar off. “It’s nothing. Caught a piece of shrapnel after me and Yabere here brought down a militia tank.”

  “Ka se, Yabere,” Salazar said to the younger man.

  Yabere nodded in response. His eyes darted back and forth.

  “Chief,” Salazar then said, turning back to Lekem, “this is my protégé, Vance Gosen. Vance, this is Chief Amalenus Lekem.”

  “Ka se, chief,” Vance said. He gave a well-practiced bow.

  “Ka se,” the chief said. “Ka se. Well, we’d better conclude our business, Sal. I’m a wanted man these days.”

  “Of course,” Salazar said.

  Lekem, waved his lieutenant over and the younger man pulled from the heavy folds of his cloak two sacks. Vance lifted the briefcase, opened it, and then held it out to Yabere. Yabere pulled from the bag rows of platinum coins printed with the CAS emblem. He lay the rows into the briefcase, and the case calculated the value of its contents. Once the first bag was empty, he opened the second bag and did the same. When the second bag was empty, the total on the case read 252,720 Alliance credits.

  “Hmm,” Salazar said. “It’s too much.” He took one of the rows of coins, pulled a coin from the row and handed it out to Lekem.

  “No, no,” Lekem replied. “It will be too little then. I would never short change you.”

  “What’s 100 credits between friends?” Salazar said. “Please.”

  “100 credits are a lot to me now,” Lekem said. “Thank you.”

  “Okay, Mr. Lanjer,” Sal said over the crew channel. “Open the bay.”

  “Copy that, Captain,” Lanjer said back.

  Sal put a hand on Lekem’s shoulder and guided him towards the Jessamine’s aft. As they walked, Sal noticed more of Lekem’s men coming out of the tree line. They were all armed but that was expected. They were rebels on their own planet.

  A large section of the Jessamine’s under belly descended, guided downward by groaning hydraulics. When the section of hull was about a meter from the ground, three wide gates rotated downward, turning into ramps onto the loading bay. Three of Sal’s deckhands stood on the bay floor, bathed in an odd mixture of the bay’s artificial lights and the cool illumination of a real sky. They all had weapons holstered or harnessed. Deckhands on a smuggler’s ship always carried arms to a drop. As long as Sal’s men kept their arms put up, Lekem and his troops wouldn’t consider them offensive. Pallets of stacked black containers stood on the bay floor, along with a few pallet jacks.

  As Sal, Lekem, Yabere and the Kid climbed one of the ramps to the bay, Lanjer was taking the ladder down onto the bay floor. He hit the decking and grabbed his hip and cursed quietly.

  “You okay there, Chief?” Sal asked.

  Lanjer turned around. He was Baragazi, a reptilian species hailing from the Gazi system. Morphologically he was identical to Sal: one head, two arms, two legs, etc. His scaly skin was a sharp ochre color. His fingers were long and spidery, and bulbous at the ends. In the pain of his injury his shiny black nictitating membranes slid over his big eyes.

  No one knew how old Lanjer was, only that time had not been kind, but as deck chiefs went, he was the best.

  “Right as a clear sky, Captain,” he said in his husky voice.

  “Well, Chief Lekem,” Sal said, turning his attention. “It’s all here. Twenty A-27 assault bolters with five magazines each. Ten L-12 laser sub-Rs, same. Four P-140 heavy plasma repeaters with two tank loaders each. Two M-80 rocket launchers with ten rockets each. Forty plasma grenades. Four personal hard-light shields.”

  Salazar pointed to the plain containers as he recited the manifest from memory. Lekem nodded, at one point whispered to his lieutenant, and then smiled.

  “Excellent,” he said.

  “I inspected them all myself,” Salazar said, “but you’re welcome to try anything you want.”

  “As always,” Lekem said, “I will take your word for it. Yabere.”

  Yabere nodded, turned and pointed to a place in the treeline. An old transport truck, emerged from the foliage, sticks and leaves caught in its grill. It trundled through the grass, turned away from the Jessamine, and then backed up to the ship’s loading bay, with a few of Lekem’s men guiding it with hand signals. Yabere dropped the tailgate.

  “Captain!” Kahula yelled in Salazar’s earpiece. Sal flinched. “We’ve got incoming fast movers on the long-range suite. They’re heading right for us.”

  “What?” Sal asked, feeling like he was waking from a dream. “How far?”

  “70 klicks and closing. ETA eight minutes.”

  “Chief!” Sal called. Lekem was now chatting with Yabere and Lanjer while Sal’s deck hands and Lekem’s men were loading the pallets onto the transport.

  Both Lekem and Lanjer turned to Sal and said, “What?”

  “I think someone caught wise to our little meeting,” Sal said. “We’re about to-“

  Chief Lekem’s heart exploded with a gruesome spray of blood. Sal flinched as drops of his friend’s blood splattered on his shirt, his silk vest, his face.

  For a second Sal felt listless, disembodied. Lekem’s body fell to its knees, then its face. Lekem’s expression was one of surprise and dismay before it plunged into the growing puddle of blood.

  “Get down!” The Kid called. Yabere fell next. As he turned and tried to raise his weapon a laser beam cracked, and the young man dropped.

  Vance tackled Salazar to the decking behind one of the pallets of weapons still sitting on the loading bay.

  Salazar slammed into the deck and as his breath rushed away his mind came back to him. He struggled for air, reached for his laser pistol, and fought his way to his knees. Weapons fire cracked and exploded all around him. The closest was from Vance’s modified bolter. The kid had the foregrip down and the stock extended and was now blasting away with the thing, struggling to keep the weapon from bucking wildly upwards.

  “Alliance?” Sal asked when the first hint of air came back to his lungs.

  “Negative,” Vance said. “Local security, but lots of it.”

  “Fish!” Salazar shouted over the crew channel. “I need you on the keel turret now!”

  “Captain,” Fish Belcom, second engineer, sniveled over the comm. “I am an engineer and—”

  “Shut up and do what the Captain said, Fish!” shouted Salazar’s Chief Engineer.

  “Thanks Nat,” Sal said, catching his breath. Nat Ginsey didn’t respond. She didn’t have to.

  Salazar peeked his head over the pallet to scope out the situation. He guessed a whole platoon of local security troopers hunkered down beyond the tree line.

  Sal lifted his pistol and fired twice. The air along the beam lit up and cracked. One of the troopers under the shadow of the canopy fell.

  Half of Lekem’s men were dead or dying on the field or around the vehicle they’d brought. The other half were hunkered down and firing into the tree line. To Sal’s relief, all of his men were on the loading bay and firing back. None looked hurt.

  “Captain!” Kahula shouted again in his ear.

  “Sawking void, Ms. Kai,” Sal shouted back. “Stop screaming in my ear!”

  “Four minutes, Captain,” she replied in a much calmer tone of voice. The volume was much more comfortable but held no less of an edge.

  “Okay,” Sal said. “Jac!” he called. “You here chief?”

  “Here,” Lanjer shouted.

  “You got bay controls on your link, right? Raise it back up, now!”

  “I can’t,” his deck chief replied. He lifted his left arm. It was stained red. “They hit my link, lucky kanks.”

  “If they were lucky,” Sal said, “they would have hit you
r head. We’ve got to get to the bay control station.”

  Salazar looked up and surveyed the four meters of empty bay to the ladder, then the three meters of unconcealed ladder to the control station.

  “Half of Lekem’s men are out there and still alive,” Vance said, barely audible after the deafening cacophony of his overpowered weapon. “We can’t just-“

  “They’ll have reinforcements on us in less than four minutes,” Sal replied. “We can’t let them take the ship. I-“

  Out from the foliage roared an armored personnel carrier, hovering on unseen contragravity engines. A huge particle cannon on its roof turned towards the bay and let loose. The cannon fired so fast Sal couldn’t make out individual sounds. It made one contiguous roar.

  “Fish!” Sal screamed over the comm.

  As if in reply, a hatch split open in front of the loading bay, and out from it dropped the chassis of a point defense turret. The four barrels of the turret extended, then it made a quick turn, spotting its first target right away. Fish blasted away at the APC. His shots erupted in green fire as they collided with the vehicle’s energy barrier, then impacted on its heavy, ablative armor.

  Fish must have damaged the c-grav engines. The APC, still rushing towards the Jessamine, listed to the right. Soon, the right side of the blackened and battered vehicle was cutting a runnel of grass and black earth. Then it toppled, fire and smoke spouting out of three or four holes in its plating.

  “Cover me,” Vance said.

  “What?” Sal asked, shooting at the security troopers as they stumbled from the wreckage of the APC, imagining each one had killed Lekem.

  “Cover me,” the Kid repeated. “I’m going to make a run for the control station.”

  “You’ve got to be-“

  “You said we need to go, that means now. Cover me!”

  “Fine,” Sal shouted in a huff. “Cover him, guys.”

  “Sawking right, Captain,” Yuki said from behind him. Sal turned in time for the big, dark-skinned man to rip open one of the containers and pull out a heavy plasma repeater. He loaded it from one of the tube-loaded magazines and yanked back on the feed handle.