Ship of Ruin

by Lindsay Buroker

  Casmir looked over his shoulder and met Kim’s grave eyes.

  “They said they’d blow us up,” Bonita said, “not the research ship.”

  “If they’re willing to blow us up for docking with a quarantined ship, I’m betting they already have orders to blow it up. If it truly is quarantined.” Casmir shrugged. “It’s possible he was trying to scare us, but I wouldn’t think a Kingdom ship captain would lie in front of his crew, and it looked like he was on the bridge, didn’t it?”

  “It did,” Bonita said.

  “You may be correct, Casmir,” Viggo, the ship’s computer and a previous owner who’d uploaded his consciousness into the Dragon, said. “I just read the chapter on quarantines that the captain quoted, and the military has the right to destroy both military and civilian vessels suspected of a virus outbreak if the crew and passengers are believed to be deceased. I am currently reading no life forms over there.”

  “Wait, what virus?” Bonita lifted both hands. “This can’t have anything to do with the bioweapon we had. We didn’t come by here. Even if those vials and Rache somehow made it off that refinery, he hasn’t had time to get over here either.”

  Casmir spread his hands. “I don’t know. That’s why we should investigate. Or send someone impervious to viruses to investigate.”

  “Zee?” Kim asked.

  “Zee.” Casmir nodded. “He’s capable of recording what he sees. We can send him over without docking and disobeying Ishii, and he can come back before anyone even notices him. We’ll run him through the Dragon’s decontamination chamber just in case.”

  Kim closed her eyes and nodded slightly. Casmir doubted she’d wanted to ask anyone to get into trouble on her behalf, but she had to be worried that her mother might be over there—and in danger of being blown up. And then there was the mystery of where the rest of the crew had gone. What was going on out here, in the armpit of the system, as Bonita had called it?

  “Me parece una mala idea,” Bonita grumbled as she adjusted their speed again. “I should know better than to listen to passengers.”

  “Even delightful passengers who fix your ship’s robot vacuums?” Casmir asked.

  “Especially them.”

  2

  Dr. Yas Peshlakai sat shoulder to shoulder with Chief Jess Khonsari in the middle row of one of the Fedallah’s two combat shuttles. A harness belted him in, but he felt the g-forces shift as Rache switched from accelerating to decelerating toward Saga’s icy moon, Skadi. Or maybe he was targeting the escaped smuggler ship and his quirky twin that nobody else knew about. Or even the research vessel orbiting the moon. Rache hadn’t said anything of their plans or their destination, just that he needed his doctor along.

  Apparently, he also needed two giant cyborg mercenaries and his assassin along. The hulking men in their combat armor took up the back row of seats. The man named Chaplain was Rache’s size, barely over five and a half feet tall, and sat on Yas’s other side, also in full combat armor, save for his helmet.

  Yas hadn’t seen the man in sickbay yet and didn’t know if he had any cybernetic implants, but he barely looked human, with tattoos swirling and throbbing as they danced across his face with every movement. When he opened his mouth, sharpened metal teeth glinted where human ones should have been.

  Jess’s gloved fingers tapped restlessly on her thigh. Yas wondered when she’d taken her last dose of the trylochanix she’d stolen from sickbay. Knowing she was likely addicted to the potent painkiller and antidepressant had only disturbed him on moral and humanitarian levels when they had been on the Fedallah, a large warship with numerous engineers and numerous failsafes; now that Jess was likely the only one here who knew how to fix mechanical issues, he wished he’d spoken to her about her problem earlier.

  Yas shook his head. With a murderer on one side, a drug addict on the other, and a bunch of gun-stroking meatheads behind him, he had little confidence in his ability to survive the near future. Whatever it would entail.

  “Captain,” Yas said, since none of the others had addressed their putative leader during the first half of the trip, “will you be briefing us before we reach our destination? Or telling us what our destination is?”

  Rache looked over his shoulder, his hair covered and his face masked, as usual.

  Yas did not point out that he knew what the man looked like now, in part because he doubted anyone else in the shuttle did, and in part because it was possible he didn’t truly know. He’d seen Rache’s twin brother, Casmir Dabrowski, but Rache might be hiding some disfigurement that had nothing to do with genetics. The mystery around Rache’s origins puzzled Yas. The fact that he had some Odinese robotics professor for a twin brother didn’t seem that significant. Especially since they apparently hadn’t been raised together and hadn’t known of each other’s existence until recently.

  Was it the fact that the brother was from Odin? Because it implied Rache was from Odin? Or at least the Kingdom? That wasn’t surprising. Rache had a Kingdom accent, so Yas suspected his origins were common knowledge. What Odin had done to kindle such hatred in him was another story. Yas could only guess.

  “With luck,” Rache said, “we’re going to retrieve something before that research vessel sends a team down to get it or that warship gets here and sends soldiers down to get it.”

  “That circuit board thing?” Yas asked before considering if Rache would be irritated that he’d hinted of the video they had watched together. “Aren’t we assuming they already pulled it up? And it’s what they were killed for?”

  Jess eyed him curiously.

  “That particular piece I’m sure they took. But I’m guessing there’s a lot more down there.” Rache tapped the control console, and the display shifted from the frosty white moon to an image of the monkey-droid holding up her find. He zoomed in until the screen filled with just the circuit board. Then it zoomed out, far out, and a great circular shape filled a dark background.

  Yas had no trouble recognizing that. It was one of the twelve stationary wormhole gates that linked the Twelve Systems humanity had colonized two thousand years earlier.

  “Shit,” Jess said. “Is that a piece of one of the gates?”

  “A piece of a gate,” Rache said. “Probably. We’re only going by the video. Videos can be faked. But I suspect this one was not.”

  Yas made a strangled noise. Yes, probably not, given that he’d pulled the chip containing it out of a capsule in a man’s colon. The engineer clearly hadn’t wanted the information to fall into the wrong hands. Such as Rache’s?

  Yas grimaced, not wanting to see that. He’d promised to serve as the mercenary’s ship doctor for five years, in exchange for Rache saving his life, but he hadn’t promised his loyalty beyond that.

  “That first picture looked like it was taken in a ship,” Jess said. “Is there a wreck down there, sir? A very old wreck?”

  “We’re going to find out. The Fedallah needs extensive repairs and to hide from the Kingdom warships while it undergoes them. It’ll be four or five days before it can leave the system. I’m giving us that much time to find the wreck and anything valuable it might contain.”

  “I didn’t know treasure hunting was one of your hobbies, Captain,” Yas said, keeping his tone polite.

  As much as he didn’t want to bow and scrape before the man, he’d fallen into addressing him in the same respectful manner that his mercenaries did. It seemed safest. Rache always had an air of danger around him, like an old-fashioned stick of dynamite ready to explode if mishandled. Someday, when he did snap, Yas didn’t want to be standing next to him.

  Back home, Yas had been a respected surgeon and toxicologist. Until he’d been framed for murder. Here, he was… not nothing, but certainly nobody with resources and friends to stand up for him. It was depressing to admit, but all he had was Rache.

  “I’ll do much to keep King Jager from getting ahold of the gate technology,” Rache said. “The Kingdom is not going to duplicate the gates, build new r
outes to new systems, and colonize and spread their antiquated beliefs and prejudices to the rest of the galaxy. Nor will they turn it into a weapon to be used against people in other systems. They have enough weapons already.”

  “Nobody knows who made the gates or how to replicate the technology, right?” Yas whispered to Jess. As a doctor, he wasn’t the most up-to-date person when it came to space-travel technology.

  “That’s right, Doc,” she replied, not bothering to whisper. “Some people think it was aliens that have been hiding ever since humans have had telescopes strong enough to see other planets.” She lifted her hands, fingers curling like claws, as if to emulate some evil predatory aliens—or maybe boogeymen from children’s closets. “Others think humans were the ones to make and place the gates before sending out the colony ships, and that we’ve since lost the technology. Disassembling the existing gates to try to better understand them is strictly forbidden since if we broke something, we’d be cutting off an entire system from the other eleven. It’s possible that breaking one could even bring down the entire network.”

  “But if we had a spare…”

  “We might be able to reverse-engineer it and finally learn the technology. There’s no known physics, such as we understand it, that would allow for wormholes. And yet…” Jess waved a hand toward the stars. “Three weeks ago, we were in System Hind, ten thousand light years away.”

  Jess leaned forward in her seat and tapped a display built into the hull beside her. “Sir, how are we going to find the wreck? Nothing shows up on the scanners except for a couple of crashed robotic explorers that look as dusty and old as the Kingdom’s beliefs.”

  “I’ve got a search algorithm crosschecking publicly available references to the moon with the existing maps of Skadi, looking for trenches and fissures in the icy surface large enough to hide a ship. It’s compiling a list of some likely spots to check first. If there are too many for us to search quickly, we’ll try the research ship in orbit. The Machu Picchu, its ident transmitter says.”

  “If they’re the ones who originally sent that team to the surface, it seems like they must know where the wreck is.” Yas didn’t want to recommend Rache go interrogate people, but he was a little surprised the mercenary hadn’t opted for that from the start.

  “If they’re alive, I’m sure they do.”

  If they’re alive. Yas remembered the mysteriously dead team on the refinery. Did Rache believe the crew of the research vessel had suffered the same malady? Was that why he wanted to avoid it?

  “You think the people we found dead on the refinery originally came from there?” Yas asked.

  “They were in a short-range shuttle. It had to come from somewhere, and I don’t see any other research vessels in the area.”

  “Probably because there are other less inhospitable and boring places in the system to research,” Jess suggested.

  Chaplain watched the exchange but said nothing. The grunts might as well have been sleeping for all the input they gave.

  “If we find this wrecked ship on the moon,” Yas said slowly, “we could still have to deal with whatever killed those researchers.”

  Rache glanced back. “Do you deem that likely?”

  Yas hesitated. He had never identified a pathogen or poison or anything else under the microscope. He’d only seen the cellular damage itself. Damage that had killed all of those people within days. But had it originated at their dig site? Or was it that they’d found something important, and someone else had killed them in a creative way so they could take the secret for themselves without anyone linking the murders to them?

  “It’s two hundred degrees below zero on the surface of Skadi,” Rache added, “and there’s never been any life discovered there.”

  “I agree it’s unlikely that there’s a virus or bacterium down there,” Yas said.

  “It looks like your two prisoners are heading to the research ship, Captain,” Jess said, tapping the scanner display.

  “I know,” Rache said.

  “I admit, sir, I thought we were going after them when you ordered us all to the shuttle.” Jess waved toward the big armed men in the back row and at Chaplain. “To pay them back for all that damage the ship took before we got out of there.”

  Chaplain flashed a fang-filled grin. Someone in the back cracked his knuckles. The grunts were awake, after all.

  “It crossed my mind,” Rache said.

  His tone wasn’t as icy as it got when he talked about the Kingdom. Yas didn’t know if Sato and Dabrowski had been responsible for the premature explosions on the refinery—he hadn’t been there—or if the crew of the smuggler ship had handled that as part of a rescue attempt, but he’d witnessed Rache grow irked before at his own mistakes. He seemed more inclined to blame himself than whoever had bested him, whether smuggler captain or robot sentry. Which again made Yas wonder how the Kingdom had gotten so deeply under his skin. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be something that Rache considered at least partially his fault.

  “We’ll capture them and interrogate them if we need to,” Rache said. “That’s a Kingdom research vessel, and the dead on the team hiding in the refinery were Kingdom engineers and archaeologists. And like I said, I’m not letting the Kingdom claim the secrets of the gate for itself.”

  Kim caught herself clenching a fist as she stood at Casmir’s shoulder in navigation, watching the video footage transmitted back to them from the crusher he’d made and dubbed Zee.

  The six-and-a-half-foot tar-colored and nearly indestructible robot existed as a liquid or a solid, depending on its needs, and was currently in humanoid form. It—he, Casmir always called it—had timed the spin of the research vessel, sprung from the Dragon’s airlock chamber, arrowed hundreds of meters over to the other ship, and forced open a hatch to gain access. He had done it in less than thirty seconds, fast enough that the Kingdom warship, still some eight hours away, may not have noticed.

  On the video, the empty corridors of the Machu Picchu passed quickly, the crusher running instead of walking, the ship’s spin gravity making it easy. Zee reached the bridge—and the first body.

  Kim’s shoulders slumped. She’d had a niggling suspicion they would find everyone dead.

  Was this the captain or first mate? Whoever it was had died on the deck next to a command chair. The woman wore a galaxy suit with the helmet on.

  “I was afraid of that,” Casmir whispered. “I wasn’t being rejected earlier. They weren’t answering the comm because they’re dead.” He rubbed his face. “Maybe there is a deadly virus.”

  He looked at Kim.

  She could only shrug. “You should have asked Rache more questions when you were chatting with him.”

  “I was distracted by his doctor shoving a giant needle in my jugular to take a blood sample.”

  Bonita looked back at him, and he fell silent, waving a dismissive hand.

  Casmir had told Kim all about his new knowledge of the twin brother he’d never known he had, but she didn’t think he’d told the captain or her assistant, Qin. Who wanted to admit to sharing identical DNA with an infamous pirate loathed by the entire Kingdom?

  The crusher walked around the bridge, recording everything.

  Kim didn’t see any other bodies. “You’d think there would be more people up there if they all died at their duty stations.”

  “Maybe they died in their bunks,” Bonita said. “Or puking out their guts in the lav.” She slanted Kim a hard look.

  Kim refused to feel bad that she’d infected her with a virus, not when Bonita had been in the middle of enacting her plan to hand Casmir over to Rache for two-hundred-thousand crowns.

  “Zee, please check the computer banks for logs and to see if the Machu Picchu has shuttles that were launched.” Casmir glanced at Kim. “Also keep your eye out for a monkey-shaped droid.”

  The crusher was capable of speech, but it complied without comment. The robots seemed designed to be silent killers rather than conversationalists.
Kim hadn’t known the things could speak at all until Casmir created Zee, and he had introduced himself.

  She noticed something as Zee walked near the command chair again. “That dead woman is wearing an oxygen tank. Isn’t the life support working on the ship?”

  “Ah?” Casmir held up a finger as he checked something—he was linked to the crusher through his embedded chip. “Zee shows the temperature is a pleasant twenty degrees Celsius over there, with the air set to the same mix as in Odin’s atmosphere. Environmental controls appear to be working fine.”

  “So, for some reason, she was relying on independent oxygen.” Kim grimaced, afraid the virus scenario looked more and more likely. But why hadn’t that woman’s galaxy suit protected her? Had she donned it too late? Kim hadn’t noticed any damage that would have allowed an airborne pathogen to penetrate the self-contained suit.

  “The ship’s computers are protected by passwords and require retina scans,” Zee said. “I am unable to gain access.”

  “Right.” Casmir didn’t sound surprised. “Head to the shuttle bay and do a manual check to see if they were launched. And then check sickbay and engineering to see if anything is amiss. I guess we’ll do a check of crew quarters last if there’s time.” He met Kim’s eyes. “I don’t suppose your mother is the type to keep a diary.”

  “She has a computer brain, so she remembers everything she sees.”

  “I guess that’s a no.”

  “I don’t even know if she ever did.” Kim shrugged. “She’s my mother, but… she had me delivered in an artificial womb after she—her human body—died. And she handed me over to my father for care when I was young. She visited regularly, but I honestly don’t know her well. My father says I’m like her, or like she was when she was human, but—”

  She shrugged again. She was here, trying to find her mother out of a familial sense of obligation, not because she felt great love for the woman. She wasn’t sure she’d ever loved anyone. She never felt completely comfortable around her father and half-brothers even though she usually saw them every week. That, she also did out of a sense of obligation. And because it pleased her father when she came to workouts at the dojo. She’d long suspected that part of her was broken, the part that felt love and other strong human emotions. Sometimes, she felt like the one in an android body.