The Phoenix War (5 page)

And then Rain will take care of it
, he
told himself. Even though he doubted medical science knew enough
about Remorii physiology to fix him—should the worst happen.

He was about to leave his quarters, his towel
wrapped around his waist, when he noticed smears of red on his
carpet. They looked like blood.

It is blood!
he realized upon closer
inspection. He’d been tracking blood all through his quarters
without even realizing it. He lifted his right foot to find the
culprit, a jagged piece of glass stuck out of his arch. He removed
it, with some revulsion at the sight of blood squirting everywhere.
The shard of glass, which had originally belonged to his alarm—he
recognized it as part of the display—had managed to sink almost an
inch into his foot. And yet he hadn’t noticed it until now.

I definitely should have felt that…
he
shuddered at the realization, wondering if this meant his body was
going numb. Perhaps losing feeling permanently.

I’ve always been ugly, but now I’m truly a
monster
…
incapable even of feeling
.

He dressed into shorts, a shirt, and socks—he
put three socks over his right foot, to prevent it from bleeding
all over the ship—and then made his way to the infirmary, deciding
his shower would have to wait.

As he passed others in the corridors and on
the elevator, he avoided their glances. And, rather fortunately, he
didn’t run into anyone he knew. As an added bonus no one tried to
engage him in unwanted conversation. Though Shen took care to avoid
eye-contact and kept his eyes on the floor as much as possible,
since that usually did the trick.

“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.

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.

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?