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    Lightrunner's Gambit
    Lightrunner's Gambit
    Lightrunner's Gambit
    Ebook57 pages32 minutes

    Lightrunner's Gambit

    By Rem Wigmore

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    About this ebook

    Bria loves nothing more than running the lightways, the luminal network used to carry sensitive messages through the Nuit System. Never one to look before she leaps, Bria ignores her old mentor's warnings about a risky mission. But he's proven right when the Speaker Elect of Osiris takes Bria's bad news personally.

    Now stranded on an enemy planet, Bria will need all her wits—and the help of some unlikely allies—to get out alive.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRem Wigmore
    Release dateJan 5, 2024
    ISBN9798224041428
    Lightrunner's Gambit
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    Author

    Rem Wigmore

    Rem Wigmore is a speculative fiction writer based in Aotearoa New Zealand, author of the solarpunk novels Foxhunt and Wolfpack. Rem’s other works include Riverwitch and The Wind City. Their short fiction appears in several places including Capricious Magazine, Baffling Magazine and two of the Year’s Best Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction & Fantasy anthologies. Rem’s probably a changeling, but you’re stuck with them now. The coffee here is just too good.

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      Book preview

      Lightrunner's Gambit - Rem Wigmore

      Lightrunner's Gambit

      Rem Wigmore

      Copyright © 2023 Rem Wigmore

      All rights reserved

      First published by Rem Wigmore under the name Ozzie Porter

      The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

      No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

      Lightrunner’s Gambit

      If Bria stumbled or took a wrong turn on the branching network of lightways, she’d risk oblivion. Nobody knew what happened to lightrunners who strayed from the road while incorporeal, because no one ever heard from them again.

      But Bria hadn’t put a foot wrong yet.

      The Path between Hathor Lightport and Osiris Lightport wasn’t the longest in the Nuit System. Two hours’ run, perfectly doable. Bria aimed to chip a few minutes off that time.

      Her helm chimed softly. She was clad head to toe in her lightsuit, ionised smartplate armour protecting her body—well, her form. The matter of her body was made energy.

      You weren’t meant to take calls on a run. Acknowledged, she said.

      A familiar and unwelcome voice filled her ears. Your brain is curdled.

      The voice was less raspy than in the material world; higher pitched, a little younger. No one asked you, Surge.

      But you take my calls! Interesting. My theory is that deep down, you have a self-sabotaging streak. A tendency to let your life explode just to see what happens.

      Bria scoffed. That was hardly a secret. No one joined the lightrunners because they were the stable, stay-at-home sort.

      Surge continued, It’s because you know you’re not cut out for this.

      Nuh-uh, Bria said instantly. She was coming up on a junction now. I mean, end call.

      Only other runners could call when you were running the lightways. Them and the conductors back at the lightports. No one else was in quite the same dimension, technically. Marching to a different rhythm, was how Bria thought of it.

      She focused on the unspooling tube of shifting colours ahead of her, the soundless pounding of her boots against the ground.

      Too soon, the hum of the Path shifted in pitch, signalling that she was nearing her destination. Osiris, first settled and most glorious planet of the Nuit System.

      How people envisioned the tunnels they traversed—as beams of light, as pure energy—varied from person to person. A lot came down to will, as in all things. Bria saw the lightways as most runners did, a tube of pulsing light like an enormous cable, and she an impulse borne along by it. Well, sprinting through it.

      Approaching Osiris, the tube branched: half a dozen Paths led off from the planet to the rest of the system. They blinked in the corner of her eye as she jogged to the glittering highway to Osiris.

      A beam of light danced past her, a runner heading the other way. Bria saluted, though they were long past and gone.

      The tube ended ahead. The pitch raised to a shrill shriek.

      Re-incorporating was always a challenge. Bria was as used to it as anyone could be, but it was still disorienting, like being dragged back down to solid ground from far-flung flight. The sensation of having limbs again, a physical body on which gravity worked instead of only the concept of her body, felt like her suit was being pumped full of concrete.

      She weathered it on her knees, head bowed, teeth gritted. Once the blinding pulse of visual input blurred into a star-struck but coherent view of a lightport much like every other lightport, she forced herself to her feet.

      The effort was titanic. Bria did weight training in her scant spare time to get more used to this feeling: pushing against an unimaginable weight—in this case, gravity. She was in the Emanate Gate, where runners were corporated back into their physical forms. Runners had been known to collapse there before, for a minute or an hour, until their weak muscles remembered

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