Gan crouched to leap for the open duct. Then it stopped one floor short. Gan sneered at his own bad luck and watched as a pair of women entered the cage, tapped a button, and the lift cage descended again.
Gan grabbed hold of the duct and pulled himself in as the lift cage dropped away from him. Following the map in his HUD, he crawled through the ducting until he was directly over one of the data storage centers.
He crawled to the closest grate and inspected it. This grate was hot-locked too. Gan frowned. He looked at the forefinger of his right hand and watched as the smartskin produced a thin, cylindrical extension there. As Gan watched, the tool began to glow. Once his suit told him the tool was hot enough, Gan stuck his finger into the four bolts, listened for the tiny pop-hiss, and lifted the bolts out of their housings.
Before lifting the grate, Gan waited for the tool to cool, then told his suit to replace it with a long wire and, at the end of it, a camera. Once done, Gan lowered the wire through the grate, and rotated it around. Gan patched the feed from the camera to his HUD. He could have let his suit detect possible dangers and let him know whether or not it was safe to enter, but he preferred to get a look at the place himself.
The room was a plain rectangle. The floor was covered in thin charcoal-gray carpet. The walls were bare metal. Two doors led out into the corridor over which Gan had crawled. Rows of massive black servers filled the room, looking like massive tombstones, each a meter in width and two meters tall. Cables and pipes ran from sockets in the servers to ports in the wall, a few lay sprawled across the floor from one row to the next. A terminal glowed cheerily in the center of the room.
Gan saw no one in the room. He retracted the camera on its wire, lifted the grate, and set it further into the duct. He reengaged his active camo, then activated the magnetic seals on his hands and crawled out of the hole in the duct, his feet dangling centimeters from the floor. Gan lifted his feet, attached them to the ceiling, pulled the grate back into place and then let his hands dangle.
He walked upside down towards the terminal, ignoring the feeling of blood rushing to his head. He inspected the terminal. Regular contact wouldn’t work here. He noticed a slot beside the terminal where a link might be inserted. Gan put his skin to work again, forming a device of moving nanites in his hand. Once the false link was solid, Gan slid it into the slot but held on.
Gan could feel his suit going to work, rushing to put any security protocols tripped by the illegitimate device to sleep, then mining through the strata of high-level security encryption. He let his suit ignore any sectors of data not belonging to military communications, and then narrowed that down to Alliance military comms, as opposed to local Antarus military. He further narrowed it down to data flagged for the Alliance Navy.
Gan waited there, standing on the ceiling, holding on to the ID card as his smartskin carved through the layers of digital fortification, feeling the blood flowing to his brain. He felt his suit working, rather than saw it, especially since the first thing his suit did was keep the terminal monitor at the default login screen. If someone walked in on him all they would see was an empty room. Gan would have to move only if someone tried to use the terminal.
Pretty soon, though, he realized the need to return to an upright position. Gan commanded his suit to divert a small amount of its processing power to shutting down whatever alarms might sound if he put weight on the floor. Once he checked to make sure there were no active secondary alarms, Gan released the magnetic clamps on his feet spun himself as he fell and landed on his feet. He continued the work.
Hours passed. Like with the external airlock, it wasn’t a matter of if his suit could crack the encryption codes, but when. He had cracked enough of the terminal’s security that he no longer needed the link to keep working. Gan pulled the card from the slot and let it disintegrate into his smartskin.
Another hour passed. The door behind him slid open. Gan felt the presence behind him, heard the approaching footsteps. He leapt, activated his hand and foot magnets and clung to the ceiling once more.
A portly, pale-faced man with drooping eyelids and a round belly protruding from his uniform sat down in front of the terminal. He set a steaming cup into a cupholder beside the terminal, then stretched and yawned. He pushed his link into the slot and logged in. As he did so Gan caught the name he typed: Avrillo.
He wasn’t security, so his presence at least had gone unnoticed. It was possible this was an administrative tech, checking in on a possible breach, in which case Gan hoped his prying had been discreet enough.
Avrillo typed, scrubbed at the screen with his fat fingers, opening folder inside folder inside folder. Gan’s worry turned into curiosity. The man wasn’t searching anywhere Gan was prying. What was he doing?
Finally, the man stopped, turned left and right to look behind himself. Then Avrillo opened a folder, typed a password in an informal pop-up window, and expanded the list of files. Most of them seemed to be video, though a few were applications. He tapped one and Gan nearly choked.
A video of a naked woman popped up on the screen. Though she had all the right proportions for an almost-too-perfectly attractive woman she was Baragazi. Her skin was scaly and a dull mustard color. Her pupils were vertical slits over her bright eyes. Her tail drifted tenuously in and out of the shot. She stood in an evocative pose and moved suggestively.
“Oh boy,” Avrillo breathed, rubbing his hands together. He stopped the video, then copied it and all the others in the folder to his link. Avrillo emptied the folder and logged out. He retrieved his link, clipped it to his uniform and then got up and left.
Gan knew the sound of his laughter wouldn’t penetrate his sealed face plate, but he held it back anyway. He could imagine the upbraiding Remnant would have given this man and it steeled him to his task.
Gan returned to the terminal, let his suit finish cutting through security and then moved on to querying the millions of documents, briefings and communications, searching for one key word: Remnant.
He was not surprised to find several hundred transmissions including her name either in text or audio. Once his smartskin had found all of them, he further queried to thin out the results, looking for news of her capture, where she was taken, how she’d been treated. His suit bounced several custom search algorithms at the terminal and found a few dozen files remaining. These he combed through personally.
One transcript of a naval debriefing aboard the ANCS Hamartiya told him Remnant was captured alive and brought aboard that ship. A report from a Navy Lieutenant Kora Digos explained that Remnant stood in a danger zone wherein she was psychologically resistant to methods of physical influence, but without having the constitution to endure such methods. As such she would require a more long-term plan of interrogation in order to weaken her resolve without killing her. Gan shook as he read. His teeth creaked, and he relaxed his jaw. They were torturing her.
He read through each document, copying them to his smart skin in case he needed them again. Then he came upon orders for a squad of marines to escort the prisoner known as Remnant to the gubernatorial palace on Eltar where she will be confined for further questioning.
Gan shook his head. You’re going to Eltar after all. Then he reconsidered No, we’re going to Eltar. I’ll meet you there.
Gan scrubbed through the remainder of the files in case anything else pertinent came up. He was about to dump the lot of them in his suit’s drives and go when his own name came up on a report.
...as the listless spacecraft was found in relative proximity, we can only surmise that the criminal Ganyasu Naboris stowed away on Lodebar Station. This man is to be considered extremely dangerous. If any station staff encounter Naboris, they are not to engage him, but should report it up the chain, monitor the criminal’s movements and wait for the arrival of Alliance Naval Command’s Battlegroup 19, which will apprehend Naboris and...
Gan looked away from the screen, his eyes blurring and refocusing, blurring and refocusing. He sent his smartskin searching
through local security communications, then sighed. They hadn’t found him. No silent alarms have gone off yet, but the battlegroup was en route. Gan disengaged his connection with the terminal, leaving some programming behind so he could re-connect if he needed to. He leapt up to hole in the air duct, climbed in and re-locked the vent in place.
Gan crawled through the ducts back to the lift tube. He had to get back to Nix’s apartment, get the artifact and leave Lodebar Station. He felt the rope tightening around his neck.
Chapter Twenty-One:
The Way of Escape
Ashla resigned herself to pacing her bedroom floor. It didn’t matter that such nervous activity was unbecoming. She couldn’t stand the waiting anymore.
Patience had never come easy for her. She grew up in a palace. She had no memory of a life without maids and servants at her beck and call. She got what she wanted, how she wanted, when she wanted. Ashla had to admit that maybe she was spoiled, just a little bit. But Cel had been gone for hours.
“Where is she?”
Lita Tarquin sat holding the big gun Cel had given her, peering out the doorway.
“I don’t know,” Lita said, not looking at her. “It’s odd.”
“It’s ridiculous!” Ashla corrected, halting her pacing to stick a menacing forefinger at Lita. “You should have shot her when you had the chance. You...”
Ashla’s voice died as Lita looked at her. Those eyes, swathed in epicanthi, accused her.
“Is that really what you think?”
Ashla shrugged, shedding anger like a diver in cold water sheds heat. “No. But, what did she do? Is she a traitor? We don’t know if she’s helping them plan an attack on us right now.”
Lita shook her head and looked back into the stairwell beyond. “Officer Numbar might be a traitor, but she cares a lot about your safety, so for now I’ll call her an ally.”
“How do you know she cares?” Ashla plunked down on the bed as she said it and dropped her chin onto the palms of her hands.
“I know what happened at the station,” Lita said. “Furthermore, she fought her way to us last night. She had multiple opportunities to shoot me in the back and do what she wanted with you.”
“Why do they want to talk to her then? How do they even know her? She has to be a traitor!” Ashla stood up again, her anger refueled.
Lita shook her head. “I don’t know. Cel first joined the guard a few years before me. I don’t remember ever serving close to her and—”
“Wait.” Ashla frowned. “What do you mean when Cel ‘first’ joined the guard?”
Lita sighed and shot Ashla a guilty look. “Cel spent a few years in the guard several years ago, when you were very young.”
“Too young to remember her?”
“No, but at the time she wasn’t assigned to you.”
Lita’s words slowed, became cautious. Normally Ashla wouldn’t care, but brewing paranoia, fear and plain boredom meant she had to know.
“What are you not telling me?”
Lita shook her head. “Only what I don’t know besides rumors.”
Ashla sat down again, leaned forward. “What rumors?”
“Ms. Vares, I don’t think it’s wise to—”
“Just tell me.”
“I don’t think it’s appropriate.”
“Then you definitely need to tell me.”
Lita was quiet for a moment. Her eyes were pointed out the hall without seeing it. At last she shrugged.
“Rumors tell that when Cel first joined the guard she had an affair with your father.”
“A what?”
“She had—”
“I know what an affair is, I’m not eight years old.”
“Well, again, its only rumor, but that’s why she left the guard to join the Shaumri.”
“My father kicked her out?”
Lita shook her head. “I don’t know. Some say she broke it off and left of her own will.”
Ashla blinked. Her vision went foggy. “I can’t believe it.”
Lita looked at her. “Everybody makes mistakes.”
Movement and talk down the stairwell changed the subject.
“Lita?”
“Bathroom, now.”
“Lita?”
“Now!”
Ashla ran towards the bathroom, which Cel had determined was the safest place in case the firefight got out of hand.
“It’s me!” Cel called, and Ashla stopped running. “I’m coming up and I’m bringing a friend. Don’t shoot.”
“Come on up, Officer Numbar,” Lita called. Despite the fact that Lita had tried to encourage Ashla that Cel wasn’t a traitor, Ashla heard an edge to her voice.
Lita didn’t look at Ashla but waved her into the bathroom. Ashla stepped inside the bathroom but peaked her head out to see what happened.
Cel pushed the door aside and stepped into Ashla’s bedroom. She looked tired as ever but unharmed. She had changed but not into a Meritine Officer’s uniform. Instead she wore a simple rugged pair of trousers with a gray tank top. The muscles on her arms and shoulders were more pronounced than ever before, but so were the wounds.
The moment Ashla saw her, the anger took hold. She ran at Cel and landed the first punch she had ever thrown in her life, striking Cel in the stomach.
“Ah! Ashla! What?” Cel shouted. She backed away as Ashla threw punch after punch. Cel dropped into a guard and blocked Ashla’s punches without throwing any of her own.
As Ashla pressed her impotent attack she shouted. “Where have you been? What took you so long? Why did you betray us? Where is my father?”
At the last question Ashla lost the strength to keep fighting. She dropped to the floor saying, “Where is my father?”
Cel knelt before Ashla. “I’m sorry, Ashla. I tried to find out where your father is. I promise I won’t quit until I find him. But in the meantime, you need to go.
Ashla looked at her. Cel’s face was blurry from tears. “Go?”
Cel nodded. She pointed and Ashla turned around. In her sudden burst of rage, she hadn’t seen the man who entered the room. He was an older man with gray hair, wrinkled skin and a sad smile on his face. He knelt down as well, and his jacket made a gentle creak, the sound of old but well-maintained leather.
“Hi,” he said. “My name’s Dothin. You probably don’t recognize me, but I am sort of a friend of your father’s.”
Ashla shook her head. “You look familiar, but I don’t know you. You can say you’re a friend of my father’s but if you know Cel you might be part of a trap.”
Dothin nodded, his expression unaffected by her insult. “Do you still have that little wooden music box with the dancing ballerina inside and the mirror in the lid?”
Ashla was so taken aback by this question she pointed without thinking, at a drawer in her vanity. “It doesn’t work anymore.”
“It doesn’t?”
Ashla shook her head.
“Well, if you don’t mind, it’s not proper for a man to go through a young lady’s things, but if you bring it here I’ll fix it.”
Ashla’s fear turned to curiosity. If anger was fire, curiosity was a vacuum. She couldn’t stay angry in the face of this stranger who knew about things she hadn’t played with in years.
Ashla got up, opened the drawer in the vanity, and pulled out the little box. It was stained pale with white scrollwork in the top resembling a flower blossom of a kind she’d never seen before. Ashla had used the design as a basis for Luna’s emblem, putting a crescent moon around the flower.
Ashla brought it to Dothin. Hadn’t she heard that name before? He took it and then pulled a strange multitool in a lacquered wooden shell from his back pocket. He sat down on the floor right there, legs crossed.
“Wonder why your dad didn’t tell me it was broken,” he said as he thumbed the little latch and pressed the button, and out popped one of several tool heads.
“Why would he tell you?” Ashla asked. She sat down across from him.
> Dothin lifted one eye on her and smiled. “Because I made it.”
Ashla screwed her face up in surprise. “You made my music box?”
Dothin nodded. He turned the box upside down and pulled a corner of the felt bottom away, revealing a metal screw. He unscrewed it, repeated the process at a different corner, and then folded out the bottom of the box, revealing a maze of tiny, shiny metal mechanisms within.
“Ah, this is an easy fix.”
Dothin swung the tool back into the shell, thumbed the button and another one folded out. He poked the tool into the mechanism and twisted.
Ashla found herself unable to dislike Dothin. As he worked he hummed and Ashla realized that he was humming the music box’s tune.
“Did you really make it?” Ashla asked. She found herself leaning closer, scooting over so she could better see the man’s work. He smelled like pinewood, lacquer and paint.
Dothin nodded. “Mm hmm. It was your dad’s first time commissioning my work and I found out he was having a baby girl. I had a little extra time because my workload was otherwise light and so I made this for you.”
Dothin switched the multi-tool to a different head and went back to working on the mechanism. “I offered it as a gift, a thank-you for his business but he demanded that I accept payment, even invited me to stay in the palace. We hit it off pretty well.”
“But I mean you designed it?”
Dothin nodded. “Designed it, cut it, stained and painted it. I used a laser cutter to cut the gears but then assembled them by hand.”
“Wow.”
There was a click and an off-key note. “There we go.” Dothin screwed the bottom back on, then put his multitool away. He set the music box on the floor, wound it up, and opened the lid. Out came a little dancing ballerina, twirling to the tinkling tune of a lullaby. Ashla had a visceral flashback of her mother playing the box the last night Ashla had ever seen her. Then another of her father, his face streaked with tears, playing the box the night after.
“I’m sorry,” Cel said. Ashla looked at her. Cel looked nervous. “I don’t mean to ruin the moment, but we’ve got to move.”
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