Ship of Ruin

by Lindsay Buroker

  “Hold him there, Zee.” Casmir stepped past Bonita, trying to block her line of sight. She still looked like she wanted to shoot Asger. “Asger, did someone spill fizzop on your circuit board? What are you doing?”

  “What is that doing on this ship?” Asger couldn’t point with his arms pinned, but he jerked his chin at Qin. “That’s one of the Drucker pirates’ modified warrior freaks. They’ve killed hundreds. They’ve killed knights.” He snarled, trying to buck free of Zee’s grip again.

  “No, that’s Qin Liangyu, the captain’s assistant.” Casmir looked toward Qin, feeling responsible for the attack and groping for an apology.

  To his surprise, her shoulders slumped, and she let her captured weapon droop to the deck.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, eyes downcast. “The captain said I shouldn’t come out, that I should stay in my cabin. I was curious.” She glanced at Asger, but the livid anger on his face made her flinch. “I’ll stay out of the way.” She leaned the weapon haft against the bulkhead and fled up the ladder.

  The fury and indignation faded from Bonita’s face, and she lowered her pistol.

  “Is that where she came from?” Casmir had a hard time believing Qin as the killer Asger had described, but he did remember her alluding to pirates in her background.

  Asger continued to stare at the ladder well, his face red, and all of his muscles tense.

  “I’m not sure exactly.” Bonita shrugged. “I know she came from—was, er, commissioned by, I guess—one of the pirate families, but I didn’t ask for details about which one. She’s smart, and she’s an amazing fighter. She doesn’t even care that I can’t always pay her. She’s a good kid.” She glared at Asger, some of her anger returning.

  Casmir held up a hand, silently promising he would find a way to create peace. As soon as he figured out how.

  “Set him down, please, Zee.” Casmir walked up to Asger’s side, the corridor tight with the large knight and the even larger crusher filling the space.

  Zee lowered Asger to the deck without releasing him.

  “Get your thing off me, Dabrowski,” Asger growled, finally looking at him.

  “Zee will be happy to release you if you promise not to attack the crew again. Captain Lopez and Qin—” Casmir waved in the direction she’d gone, hoping to instill in Asger that she had a name, “—are on our side.”

  “That creature is not on my side.”

  “Well, she’s on my side. And so is Zee. I think that means we’ve got you outnumbered.”

  Casmir walked over to pick up Asger’s pertundo while he tried to think of something less antagonistic to say. He was irritated that Asger had attacked Qin and not being even vaguely diplomatic. Hadn’t he prided himself in the past on being able to get enemies to work together? Admittedly, those had been engineers with clashing personalities, not warriors who’d watched friends die in battle.

  Taking a deep breath, Casmir faced Asger and held out the weapon. “Which doesn’t matter all that much to a knight, I suppose.” He forced a smile. “Please agree not to attack anyone on the ship while we’re here. I think it’s very possible Qin isn’t anyone you’ve faced before, but even if she is, we’re all going to be working together for a few days. Qin and Laser have agreed to help the Kingdom with the gate problem, the same as I have. Even though they’re not from our system. I think we should be gracious. You know, knightly. And chivalrous.”

  “Have your robot let me go,” Asger said coolly.

  “Will you give your word first that you won’t attack Qin again?” Casmir gazed into the knight’s icy blue eyes, hoping to find honor there under the anger. Maybe later, once tempers cooled, Casmir would ask what had happened—it sounded like Asger might have lost a friend, a good friend—but this wasn’t the time.

  Asger’s shoulders flexed as he tried to escape the crusher without conceding anything. For good or ill, Casmir had made the robot well. Zee didn’t budge.

  “I will not attack her while I am on this ship and we are working toward a common goal,” Asger said stiffly.

  “Let him go, please, Zee,” Casmir said.

  Zee released Asger.

  Asger stepped forward, toward Casmir and also toward the ladder. Casmir tensed, afraid he would have to shout an order for Zee to grab their new ally again, but Asger only snatched his halberd and jammed it into its holder.

  “Where are my quarters?” Asger looked from Casmir to Bonita. “I would prefer to keep to myself during the journey to the gate.”

  “This way.” Bonita shot a glare at Casmir as she walked past him. With her back to Asger, she mouthed, “Where are my quarters?” with a mocking face, then raised her voice and spat a stream of words in her native tongue.

  Casmir had no idea what they meant, and Asger must not have either. He followed her up the ladder well without hesitation, and Casmir was soon alone in the corridor with Zee. A couple of the robot vacuums trundled in, cleaning the deck where the fight had occurred.

  Casmir felt the need to apologize to both Qin and Bonita, but he would give them a little time to recover from the incident.

  “Viggo?” Casmir asked. “Are you listening?”

  “I’m always listening,” the ship’s computer replied.

  Casmir decided not to find that creepy or alarming. “How far to the gate? And how soon can we head in that direction?”

  “Approximately eleven hours. The knight’s shuttle is detaching now. I shall ask Bonita if she is prepared to depart.”

  “I have a feeling she’ll want to get this over with as quickly as possible,” Casmir murmured.

  “That is likely true.”

  “Let me know if I can repair or upgrade anything for you while I’m here.” He was tired and should try to sleep while they traveled, but he didn’t know if his brain would turn off.

  “I will do so.”

  Casmir headed up to the cabin where he’d left his tool satchel but paused at the open hatchway to the lounge. It seemed strange to be back here without Kim. She would have already been running on one of the treadmills, he wagered.

  Hoping he was doing the right thing, and hating that they were flying away from Skadi and Kim, Casmir turned into his cabin.

  10

  Yas woke up with a start, almost falling out of the seat bank he was sprawled across. He clawed himself into an upright position, feeling dizzy, flushed, and more tired than when he’d gone to sleep. The disease, or whatever it was, was progressing.

  He spotted Kim Sato studying data in the tiny lab and felt guilty that he’d left her to work while he’d slept for however long it had been. Had she made any progress?

  Yas pushed himself to his feet, wobbling and gripping a seat back for support while he fought off a dizzy spell. Fear charged through his limbs, the fear that he might die down here in some forsaken frozen canyon thousands of light years from home. His parents would never know what had happened, never know that he’d had nothing to do with the president’s death.

  An unexpected sadness came over him at the realization that he didn’t have anyone else except his parents who might lament his death. Shouldn’t there have been a wife by now? Children? He’d always been busy with work and his goals, but deep down, he knew he’d used that as an excuse to explain his solitude. Even though he’d won respect from his peers, he had never been good at enticing women to appreciate his assets. Him.

  President Bakas’s words rang in his mind. Perhaps your pomposity wasn’t so lovable after all. She’d barely known him, but she’d seen right into the heart of his problem. She’d been a good president, good with people. He regretted that he hadn’t had an opportunity to find her killer. Her real killer.

  He rubbed his face. His skin was warm and damp with sweat.

  Needing a distraction from his thoughts, and a chance to be useful, Yas walked over to the makeshift lab. “Any progress, Scholar Sato? Is there anything I can do to help?”

  “Do you know anything about Rache that I don’t?” Kim aske
d without looking up from the computer display. Her voice was flat, hard to read.

  “Probably not. He saved my life, so I suppose I should be grateful to him, but I’m mostly wondering if I’m going to survive this trip down here.”

  “Me too. He’s not affected by whatever is killing the rest of us.”

  “No? Did he give you a blood sample?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’ve been poring over it for hours,” Kim said. “Right now, I’m running tests on antibodies to common illnesses because… I’m grasping at straws. Maybe it’s just his enhanced immune system that’s keeping him from being affected by this. But he said at least one of his men has had the same shots that he’s had.”

  “Yeah. Most of the mercs are souped-up in one way or another.” Yas thought of Jess and the story she’d shared. She was probably one of the few who hadn’t altered herself to become a better killer. She’d had no other choice. He also regretted that she might die down here. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do. I don’t want to get in your way, but I’m afraid… I’m just afraid, Scholar Sato.”

  “Me too,” she said quietly. “Call me Kim.”

  “I’m sorry that you’re here. It’s my fault.”

  Kim looked at him for the first time since he’d arisen. Her helmet was off, sitting on the counter, and numerous strands of hair had fallen free of her braid. She was on the plain side when compared to Jess’s striking beauty, but he imagined she would be cute with a little make-up and a smile. Not that he should be worried about such things now. What was there to smile about?

  “I told him you were more qualified for this work than I,” Yas admitted, “so he decided to kidnap you.”

  “I see.” Kim turned back to the computer displays. “I had access to a good lab up on the research ship. I’d much prefer to be working on this up there.”

  “I’m sorry.” It sounded inane, and Yas knew it.

  A soft ding sounded, and she shifted her attention to another display.

  “That’s interesting,” she murmured, “but I fail to see what it would have to do with anything.”

  “What’s that?” Yas stepped closer.

  “It seems that the brave and virile mercenary Captain Rache was never inoculated against the Great Plague. Or, I should say, his ancestors never were.”

  “It’s a hereditary vaccine, right? Everyone who received it… oh, about two hundred years ago should have passed it along to their children. Most doctors don’t even check now to make sure it was administered. Back then, there were massive campaigns to make sure that everyone in the Twelve Systems was safe from the virus.”

  “That’s right. So why doesn’t Rache have immunity to that?”

  “Because he was made in some scientist’s laboratory instead of a woman’s womb?” Yas smiled wanly.

  Kim leaned her elbow on the counter and looked contemplatively at the wall. “I suppose that’s possible, since even on Odin, artificial wombs are relatively common these days.”

  “You know I tested his DNA, right? And your friend’s?”

  Kim nodded. “I assumed you were the one. Did you find anything interesting? There’s no DNA sequencer here.”

  “Mostly just that they were identical for the most part. Your friend didn’t undergo gene-cleaning as a baby, and Rache did.”

  “That shouldn’t have anything to do with vaccines. Rache has vaccine-induced antibodies to other typical childhood illnesses, Kingdom illnesses, that is. I checked. I’ve been desperate and checking everything. But as you pointed out, the Great Plague vaccine was hereditary. Technically, it wasn’t a vaccine. It was a genetic modification to our DNA, specifically, the DNA in our mitochondria. A slight alteration that made them less appealing to a virus native to System Hind that, when humans encountered it, decided that our mitochondria were delicious. The virus spread so thoroughly and rapidly that the extinction of humankind was predicted.”

  Yas nodded, remembering reading about the Great Plague in his early years as a medical student.

  “Even the Kingdom, which was as ravaged by the plague as anywhere else, couldn’t object to the genetic tinkering, not when a few slight alterations proved effective at deterring the virus. By then, everyone was desperate for a solution.” Kim tapped a pattern on the counter as she spoke, though she seemed unaware of doing it. “As far as I’ve read, there have never been any negative side effects from the mitochondrial changes. There’s no reason someone would opt to change the DNA back on a baby born today. Or born thirty-two years ago. It would result in that person being susceptible to the plague virus, which doubtless still lurks in pockets out there.”

  Yas wiped sweat from his forehead. “It’s an interesting find, but it doesn’t really help with our problem, does it? Even if we could somehow snap our fingers and change every bit of our mitochondria to match Rache’s, it couldn’t possibly save us, right?”

  “I don’t see how, given that whatever is affecting us resembles radiation far more than bacteria or a virus, but I need to think about it. I feel like I’m missing something key.” Kim covered a yawn, looking as tired as Yas felt, but she went back to drumming her fingers, working over the problem. “How could this cause Rache to be less susceptible to something like radiation?”

  “You keep saying radiation. Is it possible this is some new radiation that we haven’t encountered before and don’t have a meter capable of registering?”

  “That’s what I’ve been wondering. If it originated with that wreck—that ship out there… who knows what star systems and empty space it sailed through before it arrived in our system? Maybe it encountered something deadly out there and is emitting it, and we’re all standing around like idiots, sucking it up.”

  “Sounds like a good argument for leaving,” Yas said, “but that’s what those archaeologists did, and they still died.”

  “The team from the video?” Kim frowned at him.

  “Yeah. We found them all dead on that refinery.”

  “Something else Rache didn’t feel was important to share with me.”

  “I’m sorry. I should have realized you couldn’t have known about that and told you earlier.” Yas tilted his head. “Does knowing that help with anything?”

  Kim closed her eyes. “I don’t think so. If you got acute radiation poisoning, you could easily die a few days later, after you’d been removed from the exposure. Maybe that’s what happened to them. What’s more puzzling is that people have died who weren’t down here. The crew of the Machu Picchu is dead, maybe affected or contaminated somehow by the team that went back there before presumably leaving and ending up on that refinery.”

  “With someone chasing them. We saw that on one of the refinery cameras.”

  Kim opened her eyes and issued an exasperated noise, and he realized he hadn’t told her about that either. Yas shrugged apologetically, now wishing he’d taken the time to carefully go over everything with her from the beginning. He’d already been feeling sick then and hadn’t been at his best.

  “I care less about that,” Kim said. “I’m just trying to figure out why the crew died. Could it have been that circuit board? I suppose the team could have taken that with them back to the research ship. Yes, if they weren’t aware that the wreck down here was oozing some… pseudo radiation, they might not have considered that piece of the gate or the ship or whatever to be dangerous. I mean, I’m sure they examined it with every scanner they had before taking it back…”

  “But if it emits something we can’t read, it wouldn’t have been enough,” Yas said.

  “Right.”

  “Everyone up on the research ship died, then?”

  “Not everyone. A bunch of the civilian researchers quarantined themselves in sickbay behind Glasnax—and a magnetic field.”

  “A magnetic field would protect against radiation as we know it.”

  “That may be the answer then, though…” She grimaced.

  “That doesn’t hel
p those of us who’ve already been exposed,” Yas finished.

  “No.”

  “And it doesn’t explain why Rache’s mitochondria are making him immune.”

  “No. And I admit, we don’t know if that’s the reason he’s thus far been immune. It’s just an anomaly present in his blood that isn’t present in anyone else’s down here.”

  The hatch opened, and Rache and Jess walked in.

  “Take a seat,” Rache said. “We’re going for a short ride.”

  Jess flopped down with a weary groan. By now, she had to be feeling as poorly as Yas.

  “Find anything interesting in the wreck, Jess?” Yas asked.

  She shook her helmeted head as Rache headed for the pilot’s seat.

  “I think we arrived too late, Doc,” she said. “It looks like someone cleared out all the good stuff. There’s not so much as a screw from a gate anywhere in there. Whoever it was, they may have had a spy in the archaeologists’ camp. I don’t think this wreck has been visible for that long. Some tectonic shift revealed it. I’m assuming that’s why someone finally found it, even though archaeologists and treasure hunters have been searching for centuries.”

  Rache fired up the thrusters, and the shuttle rose into the night. He stayed in the canyon, lights playing over the forest of ice stalagmites ahead of them.

  “If every piece of the gate is gone,” Kim murmured, “what’s emitting our pseudo radiation? The wreck itself?”

  “It must be,” Yas said. “Like you said, the ship probably traveled through something weird, and the whole thing is contaminated, including everything that was in it.”

  “Hm.” Kim squinted at the back of Rache’s head.

  Still thinking about his quirky mitochondria?

  “Maybe I should take that tour of the wreck now,” Kim said. “I’d like to take some pictures before we go.”