Ship of Ruin

by Lindsay Buroker

  “Did you pay?”

  “I paid. For that and for my brother’s and my parents’ funeral.” Jess disappeared back into the engineering compartment, and a few clanks and thunks sounded. “I knew I’d never play on the tour again, since it’s skins only, nobody with implants, and the implants weren’t such that I could have been competitive on the teched tour. Not that I wanted to play anymore after that anyway. I took what money I had left and hired Rache to kill the terrorists that had masterminded the bombing.”

  “Did he?”

  “Yes. He understands the revenge game very well.”

  Yas kept himself from making a snide comment. He’d never expected her or any of the mercenaries to bare their souls to him, and he didn’t want her to regret it. Besides, his dissent was with Rache, not her.

  “We talked a few times during the process,” Jess went on, “and when he learned I’d graduated with honors from an engineering program before going into soccer full time, he offered me a job. Had I been in a different frame of mind, I probably would have said no, but as strange as it seems, I’d hired a criminal to kill people without giving them a trial, so I was a criminal myself at that point. And with my family all gone… I had nowhere else to go.”

  A few more clanks sounded.

  Yas didn’t know what to say. “I’m sorry,” he murmured, though it was inadequate.

  “I know you don’t think much of Rache or the men,” Jess said, “but they’ve become a family of sorts for me. And even if Rache doesn’t let anyone get close, and I can’t claim that we’re buddies, I know he’d have my back if I needed it.”

  “Does that mean you and he haven’t, ah, had more than coffee?” Yas almost smacked himself as soon as the words came out. Why was he worrying about that? Because he wanted to ask Jess for more than coffee himself? That wouldn’t be appropriate, not when she was essentially a patient. A patient with a problem that he needed to help her address. On a professional level.

  “Rache doesn’t have more than coffee with anyone, as far as I know.” Jess joined him in the mess and pulled out a ready-meal for herself. “But if you’re interested in him, I can try to put in a good word for you.” She winked.

  Yas coughed and dropped his ready-meal. “Er, no, thank you.” He picked it up and tore open the wrapper. “It did cross my mind that if I served him for the five years he asked for, he might be willing to help me find those who killed President Bakas and framed me. I go back and forth on whether to ask him about that or to try to escape and handle it on my own. I’m afraid that if I wait five years, it’ll be too late to find the tracks.”

  “So don’t wait. You could do like I did. Offer to hire him.”

  “How much did that cost?” Yas opened a pouch labeled Masala Vat Lamb Cubes Stew, the contents warming in his hand from the internal heater.

  “In my case, I paid him a hundred thousand Union dollars.”

  “That’s a lot more than I have access to right now. My banking chip was cut off within days of me disappearing from Tiamat Station. My parents… I don’t want to go to them and ask for help hiring mercenaries. I haven’t even contacted them since I was framed. I didn’t want to get them in trouble.”

  Nor was Yas sure they would help. His father, in particular, who had political aspirations, might be doing his best to distance himself from his supposedly criminal son.

  “Noble, but they’re probably worried about you and would like a message.” She pointed a fork with noodles dangling from the tines at him. “Don’t assume your parents will just be alive and well the next time you get around to visiting them.”

  Given the story she’d shared, he couldn’t argue with that.

  “Maybe Rache would take less for that,” she said. “An investigation, followed by an assassination, wouldn’t take his whole ship. Ask him about it.”

  Yas didn’t want people assassinated. He just wanted justice. And to have his name cleared. Could he truly hire criminals to do that? What was the alternative? That those who had killed the president would never be brought to justice? And that he would be a fugitive for the rest of his life?

  The comm beeped.

  “I need you inside, Doctor,” Rache said. “Suit up. I’ll meet you at the hole in the side of the wreck.”

  “What about me, Captain?” Jess asked. “I’ll be bereft without Dr. Yas’s delightful company.”

  “His what?”

  “Delightful company. Has he not delighted you before, Captain? He asked me questions about myself and listened when I answered. That doesn’t happen often with mercs. I practically felt wooed.”

  Yas dropped his face into his hand, not surprised when Rache didn’t respond to that.

  “Stay there,” Rache finally said, “and watch for other ships. We’re not the only ones who know about this wreck.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Yas grabbed an oxygen tank while wondering what Rache had found that required a doctor’s presence. Last time, it had been a body. He had a feeling he couldn’t hope for anything better this time.

  4

  Kim stood quietly on the shuttle, gripping a handhold as her feet floated in microgravity, and wondering what it said about her that she was more worried for Casmir than herself. She was simply going to deal with what she assumed was a potentially horrific and extremely contagious bacteria or virus. So, stuff she dealt with semi-occasionally at work. He was heading into what could turn into a full-fledged interrogation by a high-ranking Fleet officer who clearly didn’t like him.

  A few weeks ago, she wouldn’t have worried about either of them being in the hands of the Kingdom military, but that had been before those bungling oafs at Forseti Station had somehow come to believe that she and Casmir were assisting Bonita in smuggling that bioweapon. It had also been before some unknown entity had started sending crushers to assassinate Casmir. And before she’d known he was, at least according to Rache’s doctor, the genetic twin of a man hated and loathed by the Kingdom. She worried that connection, if it became widely known, could get Casmir into trouble simply because of shared DNA.

  “Scholar Kim Sato?” a woman asked, floating into view.

  She was with a man, both in yellow hazmat suits, and they gripped nearby handholds as the shuttle sailed closer to the research vessel. They had been in the back when Kim first boarded. The man, his broad face visible through his faceplate, settled closer to Kim than she would have preferred, and she wrestled with the urge to push back to the next handhold.

  “Yes,” Kim said, nodding to the woman.

  “I’m the Osprey’s chief medical officer, Dr. Sikou,” she said, bowing awkwardly in the nonexistent gravity, “and this is our surgeon, Dr. Angelico. I’m familiar with your work. I’ve inoculated a number of our crew with your radiation-consuming bacteria. Our ship is part of Phase II testing.”

  Kim returned the bow and groped for an appropriate response. Thank you wasn’t right. Good? For some reason, she always felt awkward when she met people who knew about her or her work.

  “I hope it’s going well,” Kim settled on. She then felt compelled to add, “The radiation-eating bacteria have been the work of many people on my team,” lest it seem she was allowing Sikou to give her too much credit.

  “Yes, extremely so. The crew members have reported evidence of some of the beneficial side effects mentioned in the literature. I wish we had time to discuss it, but…” Sikou looked toward the two pilots guiding them toward the same airlock on the Machu Picchu that Casmir’s crusher had used earlier to board.

  “I haven’t heard of you,” Dr. Angelico said, thrusting a gloved hand toward Kim, “but I look forward to making your acquaintance.” He grinned and winked.

  Kim hesitated, then returned the handshake, trying not to show her reluctance at such familiarity among strangers. She might have grown up in the mixed-culture capital and be used to greetings that ranged from bows to hugs and from handshakes to high fives, but touching always felt uncomfortably intimate to her. At least
the gloves kept her from feeling callouses or hand sweat. Unfortunately, the man held the grip longer than she would have liked, and she was the one to break eye contact, though he continued to look at her through her faceplate.

  “You have experience with outbreaks?” Sikou asked.

  Kim thought about the last time she’d been in a positive-pressure hazmat suit, when the Kingdom Guard had swung by the lab in a panic, bringing a package some terrorists had delivered along with blackmail demands. Typically, military specialists handled problems like that, but her corporation’s lab had been much closer than the nearest base with proper facilities. She’d been brought in as an advisor and had ended up with a nice consulting fee that had covered the cost of paying for an editor for her fantasy trilogy. She snorted softly at the memory, still amused that some terrorist’s attempt to infect King Jager with a designer disease had ended up financing her hobby.

  “Yes, some,” was all she said, not wanting to explain everything.

  “Good. Angelico and I have had the basic training courses, but we’re far more often called upon to remove bullets and repair damage from DEW-Tek bolts. ” Sikou waved to a couple of hulking figures that appeared more like robots than people, since they wore combat armor under their hazmat suits. “The captain sent a couple of marines in case there’s any physical danger we need to worry about.”

  Kim almost mentioned that Casmir’s crusher hadn’t found any danger, but what kind of bandit—human or robot—would leap out and pick a fight with Zee? She truly had no idea what to expect and looked forward to speaking with the people in quarantine. Had they placed themselves in there? Or been thrust in by someone else?

  Gravity returned with a lurch as the shuttle latched onto the research ship, and Kim felt a twinge of vertigo as they started rotating along with the vessel, the stars outside appearing to move past the portholes.

  As soon as the marines ran out and assured them there wasn’t any immediate danger, the rest of the group hurried into the Machu Picchu, where the interior was aligned so that the spin gravity pushed them toward the deck instead of a random wall.

  “We don’t know what to expect, I admit,” Sikou said, walking beside Kim. “A few days ago, Headquarters got a message from this ship’s captain, speaking about the archaeological find of the century and also a mysterious illness that a team may have brought back from a wreck on the moon. Our warship, along with two others, had just been dispatched to address a threat, the pirate Rache blowing up first one and then the second of Saga’s refineries. Run-of-the-mill stuff for us. But as we were en route, we received an update that the crew on this ship was sick.” Sikou waved to the walls of the ship. “Our original orders were to divert and give assistance. That later changed to blow up the ship. We were told it had been confirmed at that point that there weren’t any survivors. We were also supposed to blow up the wreck on the surface, but we don’t even know where it is. Our scanners couldn’t pick it up.”

  “Ours didn’t either.” Kim wondered if Captain Lopez had taken off or would stick around. Given how quickly the situation had escalated, the military might not appreciate a civilian lurking nearby.

  “Then your ship commed ours, saying there were survivors on board. The captain was livid that you’d disobeyed his orders to avoid the ship.”

  “He told us not to dock. We didn’t. My friend sent a robot over to look around.”

  “Right, but it’s a quarantined ship. Nothing should have been sent, certainly not by civilians.”

  “The captain,” Dr. Angelico added from behind them, “was going to blow you up just to be sure you couldn’t spread whatever this is around the system. Your presence, Scholar Sato, and Sikou vouching for you, was the only reason he didn’t.”

  Kim wasn’t that surprised by the statement and didn’t argue against the notion. If her mother hadn’t been missing, she would have waved away Casmir’s curiosity and argued to avoid the Machu Picchu.

  The marines led the way deeper into the ship, asking the computer for directions a couple of times—it was a large vessel with numerous levels. They passed a couple of bodies that Zee had missed earlier. Kim shook her head grimly. She had been afraid more than that bridge officer would be found dead.

  “Can we get one of these to autopsy?” Kim asked the big men, though they seemed more inclined to hurry past them.

  The marines hesitated. “You want us to pick them up?”

  One wiped a gloved hand on his suit, as if he already worried he’d caught something.

  “Maybe there’s a hov-gurney somewhere,” Kim suggested. “Or we can find some medical androids willing to do the job.”

  “I’ll get one,” one of the men said with a grunt and hefted a body over his shoulder.

  Kim glimpsed a woman’s features through the faceplate, her hair fallen into her eyes. She looked like she was sleeping rather than dead. Perhaps thinking the same thing, Dr. Sikou pulled out a scanner for a quick check, then shook her head.

  “I don’t think anyone here has been dead for that long,” she murmured.

  They reached sickbay, and Kim headed straight for the quarantine room that Zee had found. The people who’d been sleeping before must have been expecting more company. Most of them stood, facing Kim and the newcomers. One pointed to a comm panel on the wall. It hadn’t shown up in Zee’s video, but Kim had been certain it would be there, and she nodded and activated it. She glanced toward Sikou, wondering if she would want to take charge and do the introductions, but she and Angelico were instructing the marine to lay out the body on an exam table.

  The people inside the quarantine room watched with grim expressions. Interestingly, they weren’t wearing galaxy suits or any kind of hazmat suits. They were clad in a mix of civilian clothing, styles typical of Odin.

  “I’m Kim Sato, a medical researcher,” she said into the speaker, “and these are doctors from the Kingdom warship Osprey. They received some of the crew’s comm messages about an illness, but we need to be updated on everything so we can help you. Have you been afflicted?” Kim tried to poke what appeared to be a Glasnax quarantine wall and was surprised when her gloves met resistance before touching the wall.

  “As far as we know, we haven’t,” a man inside said. “The team that went down to the moon warned us as they were flying back up to the ship that they were experiencing some anomalous health readings. They didn’t think it was a virus, or that they could have possibly encountered something living on Skadi, but the captain decided to quarantine nonessential personnel and only leave out the crew necessary to run the ship. Nobody’s come down here in two days.” The man looked at the body on the table, then swallowed and licked his lips. “Is that… Is everybody who was left out dead? We know some pirates came by and took advantage, and that most of the original team launched another shuttle, trying to lure them away from the Machu Picchu.”

  Pirates? Kim would have scratched her head if she hadn’t been wearing a helmet. She never had gotten the story of how Rache had come to have that video.

  “We haven’t had an update for days,” the man continued, “so we don’t know what’s going on. We’ve been stuck here, hoping someone would come by.” He raised his eyebrows hopefully.

  “Are you all civilians? Researchers?” Sikou asked, coming over.

  Angelico was removing the dead woman’s suit to begin performing an autopsy.

  “Yes,” the man said as others nodded. There were thirty-two people inside. “We have a mix of scientists, civilian engineers, and archaeologists. I’m Erden Ayik, archaeologist. I specialize in underwater and under-ice investigations. I was supposed to go down to the moon with the original team, but I had a cold. Who knew that would save my life?” He laughed, but it had a hysterical edge to it.

  “Was an Erin Kelsey-Sato on your ship?” Kim asked.

  “Yes, she went down with the original team, and she stayed down there, from what I was told, since she couldn’t be infected with anything. Wait, what did you say your name is?
Sato? Are you related?”

  “She’s my mother.”

  Sikou gave Kim a sharp look. Maybe nobody had given her that detail. Kim had a feeling there were a lot of details that weren’t being shared around.

  “So, she might still be down on the moon?” Hope blossomed in Kim’s chest. She hadn’t realized she’d already been bracing herself for the worst when it came to her mother, fearing she’d have to deliver the news to her father that she was truly gone this time. “I’ve tried sending her a number of messages, but she hasn’t responded. Is there network access on Skadi?”

  “Technically, there should be some delayed access from the Saga satellite, but we had trouble comming back and forth with our team after they landed. They may have been down in one of the fissures in the ice.”

  “Dr. Sikou.” Angelico waved her over.

  “You’ll find a great deal of cellular damage,” Ayik said, “and nothing to account for it. Our ship’s doctor was trying to figure out the problem before she disappeared—succumbed, we fear. She thought some intense radiation at first, and that’s why our engineering friend, David—” he waved to someone in the back of the group who waved back, “—rigged a magnetic field around the quarantine chamber, in case the team had accidentally brought something radioactive back on the ship, but that never made sense. First off, our people should have had equipment to detect radiation, and it’s not like anyone would be stupid enough to bring a radioactive artifact on board, and second, the way people died is similar to but not the same as getting an intense burst of cosmic radiation. It’s more like their natural aging process was ratcheted way up, and their bodies didn’t have a shot at repairing it.”