Remnant

by Dwayne A Thomason

  “We’re all set,” Captain Kol said, giving him a thumbs up gesture. “Lieutenant Quan’s people are ready to go. I’m heading down there myself to take my place.” He gave a nervous chuckle. “Had to give control to my ship to Bel.”

  “She’s an able pilot,” Gan said, wishing it didn’t sound so unencouraging.

  Kol nodded. His link chimed at the same time an alarm lit up Gan’s HUD. Two minutes to jump. Kol looked at the link on his wrist and then back at Gan.

  “Well,” Kol said. “I guess this is it.”

  Gan nodded. Kol stretched his hand out and Gan shook it.

  “Good luck, Naboris,” Kol said. “I hope you find the girl. I really do.”

  “Thank you,” Gan said. “And good luck to you too.” Saying more would have put him in dangerous territory for discussing his personal views on vengeance. He hoped Kol would make the right choice, but he figured that was best kept to himself. Who was he to preach about murder?

  The Captain unlocked his boots and floated past. Another battery-powered door opened and closed, and Gan was left alone to his own thoughts again. As he watched the seconds tick by on his HUD he decided he couldn’t put off anymore what he needed to do.

  Making sure he didn’t have any open comm channels—that shouldn’t have been embarrassing but it was—Gan prayed.

  “Remnant’s Master,” he said, hating the awkward epithet. “Well, I guess you’re my Master too. I’ve been following your principles for the last year or so, as directed by Remnant, without making a commitment.”

  The seconds ticked down. One minute. He needed to hurry. Remnant wouldn’t have hurried. She would have been praying on and off for hours before the operation. Gan sent the mental command to form the face of his helmet. He watched as the strands of it washed over his view, filling his eyes with darkness, then lighting up again, showing him what he saw before the faceplate formed.

  “So, I’m making that commitment now. I commit my life to you now in return for the hope you offer.” Gan took a deep breath and then let it out in a sigh. “I know,” he said, “bad timing. I’m sorry. But I’ve got to go and rescue Remnant now. Do you think you could make sure my commitment isn’t a short-lived one? For her sake, not mine.”

  Thirty seconds. Gan flicked the switch on the battery and once again the console came to life. He tapped the button to open the airlock and the console flashed a warning. It didn’t have adequate power to cycle the airlock. If he pressed the big red button, it would vent all the air out of the little compartment.

  Twenty seconds. Gan grabbed a handhold, locked the mag in that hand and then hit the override button. In the vids breaching a compartment in a ship always caused minutes of catastrophic wind, blowing people out into the void.

  Fifteen seconds. When Gan hit the override, he indeed experienced explosive decompression that ripped at his hold of the bar and the magnets in the feet of his smartskin. But it only lasted an instant. A hurricane measured in microseconds.

  Ten seconds. Gan leaned over and stepped out onto the belly of the Jessamine.

  Five seconds. He looked up. Eltar’s cerulean atmosphere and swirling clouds filled his view all the way to the periphery. He felt like he was closer to those fluffy white swirls than if he were on the surface, which was crazy.

  One second. Gan crouched.

  Zero. He jumped.

  The Jessamine fell away from him. Gan activated his smartskin’s inertials and sped up, closer and closer to the planet’s atmosphere. He rotated his position so when his body started interacting with the atmosphere he was in the most aerodynamically efficient pose. Then he locked his smartskin. Gan couldn’t move a muscle, not even to twitch a finger. If his skin suddenly malfunctioned or lost power, he would fall like a statue to the earth. Possible, but unlikely.

  Timers filled the bottom of his HUD. One for the big decoy attack, one for the Jessamine’s burn to the palace, one for his expected landing, etc. He focused in on one timer, ticking down towards zero, telling him when he would need to activate the energy shields on his suit. Nat had done the math on these timers, and Gan wanted to see how close she was. He cross-referenced Nat’s timer with an external heat indicator, climbing sharply. He could see through his skin’s external cameras the way the thin air was starting to bend and warp before him, heating up.

  Nat was less than half a second off. One half second before the countdown timer ended his HUD told him the temperature of his smartskin was too high. With a mental command, Gan activated his energy shields.

  As friction with his body heated the air beneath and before him, the gases in the atmosphere turned into glowing plasma. Gan felt his mouth fall open. His viewport was filled with bright green and yellow plasma, speckled with the occasional orange flame. It was beautiful, like standing in the middle of his own polar aurora or getting a point-blank range view of an exploding firework.

  “Wow,” he said. “Remnant, if you could only see this.” She would have loved the display.

  His second timer ticked down to the end of the entry blackout phase, the point at which he would have decelerated enough that he wasn’t heating the air in front of him to a plasma anymore. A bar on his HUD showed his additional energy reserves sinking fast. Nat hadn’t planned this to be so close to the wire. In this case, it was better to add in some buffer time.

  The timer ticked to zero, the air beneath him faded back to darkness and he still had five percent on the bar. Gan sent the mental command to jettison the kit. His body shunted as the parachute deployed, ripping the kit off his back.

  Gan released the lock on his smartskin. He slapped his hands to his sides and his feet together and with another mental command spread himself wide. The wingsuit glider followed. The wingsuit unfolded, and Gan could feel another, gentler deceleration. He placed his hands in the handholds of the glider. His HUD displayed an empty diamond in the darkness of the far horizon, and to his left. That was his objective: the Meritine Palace. Gan angled and steered the glider with hands and feet in that direction. He rationed a section of his suit’s remaining power to occasionally activate his inertials to keep him flying. With the glider he was still descending at something like twenty meters per second, but he was soaring at closer to forty meters per second. Gan routinely grabbed the glider’s handholds, pulled his feet up to shape his glider into a lifting body and then ran the inertials for a few seconds, granting him a few dozen meters of altitude each time.

  In this way he flew to the palace, a shadow in the night sky only visible if someone was looking for a few stars to be blotted out in his passing. As he flew, he thanked the Master for a safe entry. He hadn’t burned up in Eltar’s atmosphere. Then again, he felt sure the most dangerous part of the mission would be getting Remnant to the Jessamine. Gan could become, effectively, invisible and even if someone spotted him, he could defend himself.

  Getting Remnant out safely felt like protecting a wildflower in the middle of a stampede. She didn’t have his smartskin, nor armor, nor combat skills. And if any part of the plan fell apart, if the Jessamine couldn’t land in time, if he and Remnant got cut off, the danger only increased.

  The palace loomed before him, a silhouette against the darkness, blotting out the stars behind it. The comm tower was the tallest point. A pair of red lights blinked, showing out the extent of its antenna array. Gan put his hands in the handholds and twisted, making a minor course correction. Soon he was over the lower town. Using the sensors of his smartskin Gan checked the layout of the town against Ashla’s map and recorded any differences. There weren’t any major discrepancies. All the buildings were the same basic shape, size and placement, so his suit predominantly picked up and recorded damage and defensive fortifications.

  The town below was lit but quiet. Marshall Law. Curfew. There would be MPs making patrols down there, and probably a few brave rebellious types scrounging, smuggling, etc. The palace loomed over it. Gan lifted his feet again and activated his inertials for one last climb. The comm tower rose
from one of the palace’s four round turrets. It was dark besides its blinking warning lights, but Gan’s HUD lit it up and outlined its columns and support girders.

  Gan angled himself for a collision course. Another countdown timer ran closer to zero. The attack timer. If Gan could knock out communications before the timer hit zero, or soon after, he could ensure a potent surprise for his allies. A greater surprise gave him a better chance at getting to Remnant and getting her out.

  The diamond pointing out the tower’s location in his HUD started displaying a shrinking number, distance in meters. Gan pulled his hands out of the glider’s holds and readied them to grab at the tower, and then lifted his feet, the glider looped upward, gaining altitude but shedding speed. He straightened out the glider by straightening his legs, then gave the mental que to release his feet from the glider controls. He kicked his legs out, hands and feet forward, ready to catch the tower, ready to stop himself. His glider stalled and slowed.

  Gan caught the comm tower with hands and feet, bending his legs to cushion his collision. His face came to within an inch of a girder before stopping. The tower swayed in response to his landing. He clung to it, thinking he might have looked something like an enormous bat stretching his wings in preparation for flight.

  Instead his wings folded and retracted. The tiny pneumatic servos hissed. Soon his two-meter long glider was the size of a thin backpack clinging to his back. Gan looped one of his arms around the girder and pulled the glider off his back with the other. Then he tied the straps to the tower. He wouldn’t need it again, and if he did, it wouldn’t do him any good. He couldn’t carry Remnant with the glider on, so it wasn’t a valid mechanism for escape. And no one would notice it here, just one more dark shape among the various electronics mounted about the tower’s length.

  Gan climbed down the tower and then stepped onto the roof of the turret. The photovoltaic tiles didn’t make a sound as he stepped across them to the access hatch. The hatch didn’t have a lock on it, not on this side. They didn’t want technicians getting stuck on the roof and then flung off by the high winds. Gan lifted the lid to the hatch slowly. It didn’t make a sound. He climbed down the access ladder and closed the hatch behind him.

  Not for the first time, Gan felt a flash of fear, like waking up from sleep with the sensation of falling. The usual burden of the artifact was gone. He felt a split second of panic, wondering if he’d left it somewhere, like forgetting one’s link at a diner, then he remembered where it was, sitting in his quarters on the Jessamine, plugged into a socket and set to a constant charge. Gan shook his head at himself and then cued his active camouflage.

  He let himself drop into the room at the bottom of the little access shaft, then turned. He found himself in an odd room, shaped something like a slice of pie with the tip cut off. The ladder he dropped down was near one corner. A single door was at the cut-off tip. The rounded wall, fitting the form of the round turret it was part of, was covered in metal racks wherein communications devices were slotted and bolted in. Lights flickered in a rainbow of colors across the various devices. Screens showed data traffic info in the form of graphs and spooling text lines. Beneath it all were several data processing cores in sleek black cases. Wires and cables connecting the cores, the screens and the equipment to each other and the array of ports in the walls gave Gan the impression that they all belonged to some kind of giant jellyfish devouring the room.

  Gan expected to find someone sitting in the chair before the screens and equipment, but no one was there. Maybe they didn’t need a tech watching over the equipment, or maybe the technician was out to use the bathroom or get coffee. It didn’t matter.

  Gan considered locking the door to the room, so no one could walk in on him, but decided against it. It would be better for him to risk someone walking in on him, than someone raising the alarm before it was time. Instead he got to work and told his skin to watch his back.

  Gan stepped up to the equipment, found the primary power node and put his skin to work. Like he had to at Lodebar station, Gan had his suit replicate a hard contact point in the form of a data stick. Once done, he plugged it into one of the central communications processing devices, and held onto it, letting his smartskin begin the complicated process. The intention was to confuse and expose Alliance transmissions while providing added security to those of his allies.

  He had already created the encrypted and modulating channels like he had during the escape from Lodebar, but in order to run it amidst so many different people, so many nodes of transmission and reception, required more processing power than his smartskin could offer.

  At first, he felt a thrill of impatience at how long it took his smartskin to cut through the usual heavy security and then rewrite the basecode needed to get the job done. Then again, if it was long and intensive for him, it was also long and intensive for the Shaumri.

  They used this technology not for good, not to save lives, but to take lives away, to kill. Gan thanked the Master that their technology wasn’t so powerful that doing this would be easy.

  Then the Master, it seemed, made him rethink himself.

  The door behind Gan swung open. This wasn’t a starship or a space station. It was a palace on a habitable planet, which meant it had old swinging doors. No need for everything to be sealed for pressurization.

  Gan’s smartskin showed him a video feed in the corner of his HUD. In it a stocky man with caramel skin and full lips pushed the door open, a mug of something in his hand. Coffee break then, Gan thought. And a long one. Gan remembered he was invisible when seeing the man’s blank, un-surprised expression, but also knew he wasn’t incorporeal. Gan leapt up, spinning to plant his feet on the ceiling and remembered in the blink of an eye that it wasn’t made of metal and his hand- and foot-mags wouldn’t hold him to it.

  Gan activated his inertials and used them to tumble back, behind the newcomer. He passed over the man’s head so close and so fast the man’s thick, black hair fanned. Gan landed behind him and crouched, ready to do any of a hundred incapacitating moves if he noticed anything.

  The man ran his hand through his hair as if looking for something there, then looked up. “Sawking bugs,” he muttered, then sat down in the chair. Gan tiptoed out of the line of the door in case the tech had a partner.

  Gan prayed that the technician wouldn’t notice his data stick plugged into the port. Maybe one little black box would go unnoticed amidst a thousand black boxes. At the same time, he maintained his link with the stick and let his smartskin continue working. Another countdown timer ticked closer to zero. The big attack on the town. Fifteen minutes remained on that timer. Fifteen minutes to finish rewriting hundreds of complex communications protocols. There was no countdown timer telling him when his smartskin finished. It was done when it was done. Impossible to tell how long, just not much longer.

  The tech seemed disinterested in Gan’s little device. He tapped at the screens, going over a few line items centered on the middle one. Gan wondered if his intrusion had raised any alarms in the system. Maybe the tech didn’t sit here but came because the system told him something was awry. Not likely but possible.

  The technician made a dull, wordless noise, a downturned note, confusion, maybe. He stood up, ran his finger across the text on his screen and then looked up at the racks of equipment. He flicked a few switches here and there, twisted a dial and then another. He might have been countering some of Gan’s work, he might have been mindlessly tweaking. Gan didn’t understand how the comm systems functioned. His smartskin did all the work. Gan was a glorified chauffer as far as this part of his mission went.

  Something boomed far away. A distant explosion or collision.

  “What the void?” the tech said.

  There was another boom and then another. In this windowless room it was hard to tell where they were coming from. Gan’s timer hadn’t counted down to zero yet. Someone was jumpy and started the attack early. The tech ran out of the room, leaving the door to swing
lazily behind him.

  A moment later Gan’s smartskin finished changing the protocols. He opened up the main command channel.

  “This is Ganyasu Naboris,” he said in the channel. “Encrypted channels 072, 078, and 084 are now as safe as I can make them, how copy?”

  “This is Meritus Actual,” a grizzled voice replied. “Solid copy. All units check in and report.”

  “This is Jessamine Control,” Tally said over the channel. Her sweet, shy voice seemed out of place. Gan smiled. “We are powered up and en route. ETA one hour.”

  “This is Meritus Alpha,” another voice said. Gan recognized it as belonging to the leader of the platoon going in on the Jessamine. “Checking in and standing by.”

  Several more voices checked in and reported, the commanders of the different forces involved in the decoy attack.

  “What’s our status,” Gan asked while, at the same time, digging through the comm system’s records for any mention of Remnant. “Did we start the attack early?”

  “Affirmative,” a heavily filtered voice replied, his voice tinny as the communications software worked to make him heard against ear-splitting weapons fire. “Enemy patrol caught wind of us and we had to start early, over.”

  “All units attack,” Meritus Actual said. “All units attack.”

  Gan found a communique tagged with Remnant’s name and dated recently. He opened it and scanned the text version.

  The subject known as Remnant is secure in a newly developed holding cell on the north end of sublevel seven. She has shown minimal psychological response to any of the stimulus we’ve tried but is weakening physically. It may be that we will need to more carefully monitor the subject’s health, or we will break her body before we can break her mind.

  Gan felt his fingers flexing and relaxing, flexing and relaxing, so intensely that they ached. ‘Stimulus’ they called it. A safe replacement for torture. Gan then queued the system for the names Ashla had given him. Cel Numbar. Lita Tarquin. Annister Vares. He found an official report stating that Annister Vares had been executed. Nothing in the report disclosed the location of his body. Gan sighed. He had hoped to gain Ashla’s confidence by bringing her father to her. That was no longer possible.