The Phoenix War

by Richard L. Sanders

  “How’s my miracle patient?” asked Rain cheerfully when Shen entered the infirmary. He walked to the nearest medical bed and took a seat. He didn’t like how happy Rain seemed, as if there was nothing wrong with him anymore. Nor did he like being referred to as a “miracle patient.” Such language only reminded him that medical science had no idea what was wrong with him—and therefore was unlikely to be of any help.

  When Shen said nothing, Rain approached, clipboard in hand—for some reason this doctor preferred old fashioned writing to the absolute superiority of modern technology. She smiled at him. “So, what can I do for you, Shen?” she asked.

  “I—” Shen looked around before making eye contact with Rain. He’d feel a lot more comfortable if there weren’t others in the infirmary. Another patient was being seen to by one of the other medical professionals, and a third medic was organizing the infirmary’s supplies.

  I suppose they have to be here… he thought.

  “Yes, what is it?” Rain asked gently. Her fiery tangle of hair was tied behind her head and her blue scrubs seemed to fit as baggily as ever. Shen liked that Rain dressed this way, that she didn’t see the need to wear a lot of makeup and dress as tightly and attractively as possible. It helped him, it really did. Made it possible for Shen to pretend Rain wasn’t a woman, even though he knew under Rain’s baggy blue scrubs there was an attractive body. The kind of body that belonged to women who always told him no, whether in glances or in words they always made their point—he wasn’t good enough.

  “It’s…” Shen began, trying to think how best to explain his problem. She’s a medical professional, he reminded himself. This is only business. It’s okay. He felt self-conscious about his large gut, and the sloppy way that he was dressed, and the fact that he was here at all… his face flushed and felt warm but he muscled the feeling down, made himself believe he didn’t care. He didn’t need approval. He was what he was. And if that meant he was a Remorii, then so be it…

  As he sat there, his mind doing somersaults, Rain simply smiled at him patiently. If it bothered her that it was taking him so long to get to the point, she hid her impatience perfectly.

  “For starters I injured my foot,” he said; he lifted his leg and removed the socks.

  “Oh dear,” said Rain, examining his foot. She touched it gently with her gloved hands and then called for some cleaning fluids and proper bandages to be brought over. As she gently wiped the injury, applying a paste that would prevent infection, and then wrapped it properly, she asked him how it’d happened.

  “I stepped on a piece of glass,” he explained.

  “That kind of thing happens to everyone,” Rain said, her voice cheerful. “It’s nothing to worry about. Although I’d avoid putting your weight on your right foot for now. And you’ll need to change this dressing once a day, and wash the injury when you do. But it’s nothing to worry about.” She gave him a pleasant, reassuring smile.

  And for a moment, he almost smiled back. Almost.

  “Actually I think it is something to worry about,” he said.

  “If you mean the pain, that’s normal. There are a lot of nerves in the skin—even in an unlikely place such as the arch of the foot—when the skin breaks like this, you’re bound to feel a good amount of pain. It’s perfectly normal, I’ll prescribe you something light to manage—”

  “That’s just it,” said Shen, looking into her big blue eyes. “There wasn’t any pain.”

  “No pain at all?” she asked.

  “None whatsoever.”

  “I see,” she took his foot in her gloved hand and tapped the skin just below his toes.

  “Do you feel that?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Good.” She moved her hand and tapped a different spot. “How about there?”

  “Yes.”

  “There?”

  This went on for some time. Once she established that Shen did indeed have feeling in his foot, and there wasn’t any tingling, she smiled and assured him that it was nothing to worry about. That he was very lucky—probably he had a much higher tolerance for pain than most people.

  Shen nodded, trying to look grateful. But he remained concerned because, from what he remembered about his cuts and scrapes over the years, he’d never had a high tolerance for pain. Not before Remus Nine…

  “Doc,” he said, trying to find the words to ask about what was troubling him most. But feeling scared and foolish to even mention it.

  “Yes, what is it?” she asked, again shooting him a look that seemed almost unnaturally warm and kind.

  “I—” he hesitated. “Earlier today… he showed her his left hand. Expecting to see a bruise on it from breaking the alarm, or a cut, or something. But it looked perfectly fine.

  “Yes?”

  “Never mind,” he said abruptly and left, refusing the crutches she tried to offer him as he walked out the door. He’d made enough of an ass out of himself for one day. The good doctor had other things to worry about, clearly, and truth be told—so did he. He was finally returning to duty today, for the first time since what’d happened on Remus Nine. He was eager to feel useful again, to return to the world he understood best—the world of technology and science and starship systems—but he was less eager to face Sarah. He’d seen her briefly when he’d first awoken, but back then he hadn’t heard a word she’d said. Most likely she’d said something sympathetic and pitying…

  You rejected me, he thought. Remembering his lame attempt to ask her out, and the stupid dinner he’d cooked her, and how she’d pretended to like it. But, as he left, thinking about what he was. And the strange things that were happening to him—and dreading the terrible day when he woke up and finally found himself completely transformed into a Remorii—he knew Sarah had been right to reject him.

  There is no place for me.

  He thought of his dreams. The dreams that kept haunting him. Always Tristan was there. Waiting to embrace him. To take him to another land. Another life…

  Shen shuddered at the thought.

  Chapter 4

  Nimoux spent the days in the blistering heat, quietly observing, taking great care to maintain a low-profile. It wouldn’t serve to draw attention to himself. That would only complicate things.

  He spent his time probing the fence for weaknesses, counting the guards and the other prisoners, and making mental notes of everything he could. He even tried to memorize the faces and names of his fellow prisoners to the best of his ability.

  Who was behind the prison remained a mystery. Many of the prisoners were high profile, he recognized a few military and civic leaders. Others told him about the corporations and investment firms they managed before they’d ended up here. Seemingly everyone had come from a position influence. Nimoux guessed that was the reason they’d been taken. If what’d happened to Director Edwards was happening to each of them, then they’d all been replaced by an elaborate decoy. Their friends and family didn’t even know they were missing. Meanwhile whoever was behind the decoys was fast becoming the most powerful person in the Empire, provided they had a means of control.

  Perhaps that’s why we’ve been kept alive, Nimoux mused. Maybe we represent some sort of leverage; so long as our replacements behave, we—the originals—remain in the dark. But should they stray from their master’s plan, perhaps we are then toted out and used to expose the fraud.

  Nimoux decided it was best not to assume his usefulness to his captors would keep him alive indefinitely. For that matter, his usefulness seemed a matter of some doubt. No one had ever been dragged off for questioning. The guards didn’t even put the prisoners to work. They simply kept the inmates in the large, sandy yard during the day and corralled them into their cells at night. Twice during the day they were counted, and once at night. Periodically the prisoners were given directives over the loudspeakers installed throughout the yard but otherwise their captors kept laissez faire attitude. Fights between prisoners were often ignored.

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nbsp; They’re just keeping us here for now… They don’t really need us. They just need the idea of us… and even that might soon prove insufficient to keep us alive—we’re liabilities so long as we’re still breathing and can act as potential witnesses against them.

  The safest assumption was that eventually the prisoners would be rounded up in the yard and eliminated, perhaps sooner than later. Which meant Nimoux had no time to waste sitting around, waiting for the conflict playing out on the higher stage to resolve itself.

  He had to free himself, and sooner was better than later.

  Since his arrival, Nimoux had given himself three directives. First, he must determine his location. Second, he must establish a means of contacting help. And third, he must escape the prison and avoid recapture.

  To achieve his directives, he needed to gather intelligence.

  He kept track of the guards’ rotation patterns, peeked into guardrooms whenever he could, he even looked through windows to figure out what function each of the portable structures had. He eavesdropped on every conversation between the prison’s staff that he could and instructed Harkov and Edwards instructions to do the same. They didn’t spend nearly as much time gathering intelligence as he did—the two were romantically involved and spent most of their time together. But one afternoon Harkov made a crucial discovery.

  She’d been listening in on some of the guards when one of them complained about a message he’d received from Capital World during vehicle patrol. Harkov hadn’t stuck around to hear any more but she’d gleaned exactly what Nimoux needed: there was a portable means of contacting other worlds. From this Nimoux deduced what it had to be. An X-H kataspace all-purpose “pedestrian” transmitter, such devices were often used by deployments of shore parties that needed to remain in contact with a control ship that was unable to remain in the system. If Nimoux was right, the device was a backpack-sized apparatus that he could take with him when he escaped. Directive two complete; he had a means of communication.

  In the days that followed, coming and going in such a way they felt both fleeting and eternal, Nimoux found directives one and three much more difficult than two. He grappled with the questions of where he was and how to escape. I’ll break into the guardroom and take the pedestrian transmitter, he thought, and then head into those mountains. But I’ll still need to figure out where I am so I can tell my rescuers where to find me.

  As the hours and days passed, he made every effort to divine his location. He noted what he could about his surroundings such as the blue sky and the yellow sun and he took into account the climate and vegetation. It was hard to make judgments about the planet overall from just the area around the prison but he worked with what he had. All he could definitively say was that it was a planet that could support life. Unfortunately life-capable planets were not nearly so rare as humans once believed, and the Empire, which stretched over a vast swathe of space, had colonized many—and claimed far more. And that was assuming he was even inside Imperial space. Which was far from a forgone conclusion.

  He had a rough idea of the region of space he had to be in, based on the position where he’d been taken aboard the ISS Wolverine and that ship’s speed and the time it had taken to get here, but that still left him with a long list of possibilities.

  To his surprise, the other prisoners proved no help. Some of them have been here so long, surely they must have determined where we are, he’d thought. But they’d claimed everything from Rotharia, to the Forbidden Planet, to a secret prison on Capital World… and none of those seemed possible. Of the three, only the Forbidden Planet was mysterious enough that it could’ve conceivably fit the profile of this world. But somehow Nimoux doubted the holiest site in the Polarian religion—a place so sacred that no human or Rotham had ever found it, less yet set foot there—was an empty planet near the border with nothing on it but a prison full of abducted humans. No, this another world. But which?

  The length of days and nights helped even though they were impossible to calculate exactly. He knew the day-night periods were shorter than standard and he estimated the rotational period of the planet was about eighteen hours total. This ruled out many more candidate worlds, but several dozen remained. And he didn’t feel that much closer to knowing where he was in the galaxy.

  As each day passed, both Harkov and Edwards, usually together, would come and ask him about how planning their escape was going. Nimoux’s reputation as an Intelligence Wing super-sleuth had given them a tremendous, and probably undeserved, amount of confidence in his ability to create a miracle and vanish them all away to safety. Meanwhile he was stuck, doing all he could think of, to determine what planet they were on. And when that grew frustrating he spent his time planning how he would steal the transmitter and get past the electrified fence.

  He tried to blend in with the other prisoners but it was difficult. Some of the guards recognized him and so did many of the other prisoners. Hero of the Empire they often referred to him, sometimes in joking tones. He ignored them. Perfectly aware of the danger his newly tanned—but still very recognizable—face put him in.

  During his walks around the yard, he did note several important things about the prison’s design. Most importantly, it wasn’t a permanent establishment. All of the buildings, including the barracks and command station, were portable structures that had been dropped from orbit and were designed for easy retrievability. The towering electrified fence was too high to climb even if he could switch off the electricity, and it reached deep into the earth so tunneling wasn’t an option either. The fence had several small gates that were just large enough to let one person through at a time. The guards frequently used these gates to go in and out of the prison facility, making sure to keep the prisoners far away as they did, but Nimoux watched them whenever he could. Making note of the combinations of buttons they entered. The gates required a valid thumbprint and a six digit code. The number pad was three by three and the guards never keyed the bottom row of numbers. He got a sense of the pattern: Left. Left. Up. Right. Right. Up. But it wasn’t enough to determine exactly what the code was, at least not yet.

  As he talked with the other prisoners, trying to pick up any useful information they had and also memorize their names and faces in case he ever got out of here, he considered involving some of them in his escape effort. He only entertained the thought fleetingly though and ultimately threw it out, knowing that most of the other prisoners would only be liabilities. And it was already going to be difficult enough bringing Harkov and Edwards along.

  I’ll come back for you all, though, he silently promised his fellow prisoners as he looked at them. None of them deserved to be here.

  That night he decided to determine his location once and for all. So when dusk settled, and the loudspeaker ordered the prisoners to form up and return to their cells, Nimoux chose not to join the others in their rows and columns. Instead he hid in the yard and waited, lying prone.

  It wouldn’t be until all the prisoners were in their cells, with the count coming up one short, that his absence would be noted. And then the yard would be searched and he’d certainly be found. Punishment would follow, that was an unfortunate reality—though he didn’t know how severe it would be. Hopefully, if the guards were dim enough, they’d believe his ruse.

  He waited for the sky to dim and fill with stars, all the while listening intently to the clamor of the prisoners being locked away and counted. Ever alert, in case his absence was noticed sooner than he anticipated.

  When the night set on, and the planet was sufficiently dark, he got to his feet and took in the sky. It was breathtaking. He immediately took note the unique stars, a large-red one here, a bright-blue one there, and so on. Most were tiny white specks, far too small and ordinary to stand out. An ocean of pinpricks poking through a vast black tapestry. But they were still useful.

  If he’d been on Capital World, or another major planet, he would have seen familiar constellations—different, of course, depending on
which planet’s surface he stood—but famous and recognizable nonetheless. Here, though, he saw none. All of the patterns that jumped out at him from the stars were his own.

  Another consideration was the concern that the starlight he saw belonged to stars so vastly distant that the stars had lived and died in the time it took for the starlight to arrive, and thus the stars staring down at him were no longer around, and therefore not useful points with which to orient himself. Fortunately he could rely on the fact that most of the stars he could see with his naked eye were visible precisely because they were near.

  He searched the sky. Remembering his list of potential planets he could be on, keeping in mind the region of space he thought was possible, and then he tried to match those possibilities against the star pattern before him.

  A red giant star… Alpha Vici perhaps. But wait, then the blue one just under it would be wrong… No blue star should be visible there, since none was near Alpha Vici, and any beyond it, as the one before him looked, would not be so dominant.

  It was surprisingly dizzying for him to try to imagine what the star patterns should look like, on each of the potential planets he might have been standing on. Especially when he had to compensate for the question of which stars would be visible based on which hemisphere he stood in. But he did manage to rule out some of the candidate worlds right away.

  He spun around, searching the heavens in every direction. Noting a bright yellow star. Just under it was a blue star. Vego and Columbia? he wondered. He spun back around, looking again at the largest red star. That would have to be Ares, and if that’s Ares… He turned ninety degrees, searching the sky for what was sure to be a faint blue light indicating Lambda—it should be just in the center.

  An alarm sounded. His absence had been noted.