Ship of Ruin

by Lindsay Buroker

  “So they might want gate bits to make sure they’re the ones to control the next evolution of humanity into the galaxy.”

  “Gate bits?” Bonita glanced at him. “Is that what they’re carrying?”

  “What they’re stealing from our system, I gathered. Though I’m not sure if anyone is quite sure or if they’re guessing.”

  Casmir questioned whether Royal Intelligence or Fleet Command had seen a version of the video Rache had gotten hold of, but it made sense that the archaeologists would have sent preliminary results home. Someone back there had to know what they’d found. And that someone else wanted it.

  “If it’s the Union,” he mused, “do they just want to be first to install a new gate so they can stake out a place in the history books? Or do they already have a profit angle in mind?”

  “If it’s the Union, profit is more than an angle. Those people live and die by capitalist rule. You want to become a prince, you have to have the money to buy a private asteroid station, minions to serve you, and a harem.”

  “I didn’t know harems were a requirement for rulers.”

  “It shows everyone how wealthy and important you are.” Bonita sneered. “I wouldn’t object to their methodology if there were any Union princesses. The princes always seem like misogynistic assholes.”

  Casmir thought about pointing out that a princess who could afford harems and private asteroid stations might not be a delightful person either, but he had little experience with the breed, either self-made or hereditarily appointed. The media always portrayed King Jager’s twenty-something daughter, Princess Oku, as pretty but dim, using Kingdom resources to fly about the Twelve Systems, collecting flowers for her garden.

  “Ready to record, Viggo?” Casmir leaned against the back of the co-pilot’s pod.

  “Ready.”

  “To the captain of the Union ship, my name is Professor Casmir Dabrowski from Zamek University on Odin. I am a mechanical engineer who’s long studied the gates from afar and found them fascinating. I’ve won numerous awards, been published in dozens of journals and periodicals, and have an aptitude for deciphering engineering mysteries. I understand you’re about to successfully leave this system with part or all of a previously undiscovered wormhole gate in your hold. I’ve been eager to leave the Kingdom for ages, and I’m willing to offer my services to the research and development team that you must certainly have waiting at home. I’m even willing to forgo pay, providing I receive an author byline on any papers published and credit for any discoveries made. Please let me know if I can transmit my résumé.”

  Bonita waited until he was done recording to let out a snort that echoed from the walls of the small navigation chamber.

  “Careful. I think you blew your tonsils out through your nostrils.” Casmir pointed at the deck. “Are those them?”

  “Did you just offer to send your résumé to the enemy vessel trying to blow up your government’s military warships?”

  “Yes. I would send a message to the king to let him know it wasn’t a sincere offer, since I am fond of Odin and my job in Zamek, but it’s unlikely he reads mail from random subjects. I will inform Sir Asger, in case he has the capacity to pass messages along to His Majesty.”

  Bonita shook her head. “Was any of that true, or are you just hoping they don’t decide to research you?”

  “I have been published numerous times, and I have won awards.” Just none that had anything to do with gates, an area about which he was completely ignorant. If someone from the enemy ship actually replied, he would have to take a crash course on astrophysics and wormhole theory. Or was it wormhole hypothesis? The last he’d heard, nobody understood how the gates worked, and the scientific community had no trouble labeling wormhole travel as impossible at the same time as they booked flights to other systems.

  “Was the award for creating a robot girlfriend to take to that school dance?”

  “No. Most recently, I was recognized for excellence in leadership in the robotics industry.”

  “Huh, maybe you are good at bamboozling people.”

  Casmir opened his mouth to object to her interpretation, but Viggo interrupted them.

  “The enemy ship has made another reappearance.”

  Casmir grimaced, facing the display, though he feared they would only see more of the vessel getting the best of the Kingdom warships. He had zero experience with military maneuvers or spaceship battle tactics, but he decided right away that being on the defensive was awful. What was his backup plan if this didn’t work? There was no way the Dragon could get close enough to force-board, not with the cargo ship appearing and reappearing and all manner of what looked like drone fighter ships whipping around to protect it.

  After another round of exchanging fire—this time, the Kingdom warships clipped the enemy vessel before it disappeared—Viggo said, “I’ve sent your message, Casmir.”

  “Thank you, Viggo. I shall be eagerly waiting to see if they send a request for my résumé.”

  “Your résumé that says nothing about gates?” Bonita asked.

  “Yes. Do you think I should spruce it up a bit, just in case?” He highly doubted anything would come of his attempt at a ruse, and if some Union miner asked for his résumé, he would be flabbergasted. Mostly, he was curious to hear what kind of response he did get. Surely, if he learned who they were dealing with, he could come up with a better plan than the one currently in effect: taking potshots at each other.

  “I would,” Bonita said.

  11

  As Rache led the way from the shuttle to the wreck, Kim paused and looked up at the stars visible through the narrow slit of their canyon. She had queued a long letter to Casmir to go out whenever there was enough of a signal—she suspected that wouldn’t be until Rache gave up on this place and flew the shuttle back up to orbit.

  Her letter included wishes for her remains, messages to her family, what she’d learned—or hadn’t learned—about the strange energy attacking their bodies, and that she’d found her mother’s broken droid remains. It was possible Casmir or another engineer could repair her and get the droid powered back up again, but she wasn’t working now. Kim had no idea if that was permanent or not. There had been damage to the head, aside from it being ripped from the body, which may have broken chips and circuits. All that her mother was might now be irretrievably lost.

  Even though they had never been close, that filled her with a sense of bleakness and regret. She wished she’d had a chance to say goodbye, to have known her better before having to say goodbye.

  “Scholar Sato?” Rache said from the hole in the side of the wreck that his team used as a door. “Are you coming?”

  “Yes.”

  Kim forced her heavy legs to work. She could feel the affliction progressing and her weariness increasing. Dr. Peshlakai was sleeping again, and several of Rache’s men had gone into the shuttle, peeled off their helmets, and collapsed on the seats or the deck. Only Rache remained unaffected.

  She added that as a postscript to her letter to Casmir. That neither Rache nor his ancestors had received the Great Plague treatment and that he wasn’t being affected by this cellular destruction, that maybe someone with more time could run experiments with mitochondria. If she’d had bacteria or viruses to work with, something she could have isolated, it would have been a simple matter to place them in solutions with both types of mitochondria and see if they preferred one over the other. But she had no way to capture whatever this was, not yet. Nor did it make sense to her that something akin to radiation would care one whit about a person’s mitochondria.

  She wished she had some of her radiation-eating bacteria with her to see if they might make a difference. It was possible they would be able to detect what human instruments couldn’t. And if it was compatible, maybe they could even consume it.

  But she didn’t have them. She’d never planned to leave Odin, so she hadn’t inoculated herself with them.

  She wondered if Dr. Sikou had
been inoculated with them. She’d mentioned the Osprey being in Phase II testing. If she had been, it might be possible to extract and isolate some of the bacteria from her body.

  Kim had no idea if they would be useful against this threat, but it would be worth trying. She composed a quick message to Sikou, not surprised when all it did was sit in the queue with Casmir’s, unable to go out until she had network access.

  Rache shifted his weight, then stepped into the wreck. Kim ought to be arguing for them to go back to the research ship where she was far more likely to be able to find a solution. Instead, she followed Rache inside.

  She wanted to take pictures to send to Casmir along with her letter, to hear what his thoughts were on the wreck. Rache’s immunity nagged at the back of her mind, and she couldn’t help but feel she was close to grasping the reason for it. And that in it, there might be something to help the rest of them.

  “Just looking at the stars,” she murmured to Rache when she caught up with him. “In case I don’t get another chance.” She didn’t mention the messages saved in her chip, waiting to go out. “I cannot tell you how much I wish there was a coffee house here.”

  The idea that she might die without ever having had one last good cup of coffee distressed her almost as much as everything else.

  “I admit,” Rache said quietly, “when I decided to come down here, I thought at least some pieces of the gate would still be here. I also thought that if some killer virus lurked within the corridors of the wreck, I’d be as likely to die from it as anyone else.”

  “Does it not sit well with you that everyone around you will die while you live?” Kim had a hard time believing he truly cared.

  “It doesn’t, no. I’ve always known my choices would get me killed.” He gestured toward the stars, maybe including his ship, wherever it had gone, named for a character from Moby Dick. “And those who signed on, well, they knew the job would likely get them killed eventually. They get good hazardous-duty pay. But you and Dr. Peshlakai…”

  He didn’t finish the thought, merely extending his hand toward the shadowy interior of the wreck.

  “Did you also kidnap him?” Kim shone the flashlight built into her helmet around as she walked slowly into a strange, alien place full of harsh angles and exposed circuitry covered in layers of frost. There was a mathematical precision to those angles, and she thought that if she’d felt better, she might have stood there and picked out patterns.

  “I saved his life, actually.” As Rache walked at her side, he nodded toward a wide tube that led deeper into the ship—and deeper under the glacier. “He collapsed at my feet with his station’s security chasing and shooting at him. Shooting to kill, oddly. That’s not their modus operandi on Tiamat Station. I offered to help him if he would work for me for five years. I’d recently lost my previous surgeon. When he appeared, it seemed like fate, though it’s a cruel fate that would place a hapless man in my path.”

  “You know and acknowledge that you’re a villain?” She glanced at him. “But you choose that path anyway?”

  “King Jager is the villain,” Rache said, the frost crystals they walked on now lacing his tone. “If you haven’t met him and aren’t familiar with him enough to know that, consider yourself fortunate.”

  And naive, his unspoken words seemed to be.

  “What did he do to you?” Her skin was flushed with fever, and sweat dribbled into her eyebrows.

  “It’s a long story.”

  “I guess I don’t have time for that. Nobody except you does.”

  She’d put her helmet and oxygen tank back on to come outside, and already, the gear felt cumbersome, stifling. She wanted to be back home, reading in bed, feeling well, getting ready for work the next day. If fate did exist, her version was surely as cruel as Dr. Peshlakai’s. She never should have been out here, wrapped up in this hell.

  It was hard not to feel sorry for herself, but she berated herself in irritation when a sniffle slipped out. No doubt, the comm would pick it up, and Rache would know she was on the verge of tears. She didn’t want him witnessing her weak moment.

  He looked over at her as they continued, transitioning from the large outer chamber into a maze of tubes. “I would offer you a hug, but I think you’d find that particularly offensive coming from me. And hypocritical, since I brought you here.”

  Ugh, he had heard the sniffle. Damn it.

  “Yes,” she said. “I don’t even encourage people I like to hug me.”

  They entered another open chamber, this one full of massive empty molds. Kim ordered her chip to take pictures of the walls, the ceiling, the deck, and the molds via her contact interface.

  “We believe the gate was stored in here in sections,” Rache said, walking among them. “A full gate, at least at one point. I’m not sure if it was all here when the archaeology team arrived, but I added up the dimensions of all the molds, all five hundred and twelve of them.”

  “And?” Kim looked around, curious about the gate even in her fevered haze, though she couldn’t imagine what here would enlighten her when it came to fixing their health.

  “There were almost exactly enough pieces to match the known dimensions of each of the gates in our gate network. There were two left over. I’m hypothesizing that this ship brought a couple of extras in case something broke in transport.”

  “Transport from where? Earth?”

  “Possibly,” Rache said. “Nobody has discovered an intelligent alien civilization yet—Odin is the only planet in the Twelve Systems that had higher-order animals, insects, and plants—but…”

  “The gate technology is more advanced than we are now, two thousand and more years after humans came to the Twelve Systems. I know. I’ve heard the speculation. From my mother.”

  Kim leaned a hand against one of the molds, watching it to see if any mysterious waves of light crawled onto her glove. They did not. The cold seemed to emanate through the material, even though she knew that was unlikely. The galaxy suit adjusted to keep her body at the perfect temperature, fingers and toes included, but her brain felt hot. Her entire face did.

  “I think we should get away from here,” Kim said. “If whatever is wrong with us—with most of us—is exposure related, then maybe we’ll buy ourselves a little more time.”

  “Any suggestion on where to go that might help?” he surprised her by asking. “I’ve been in contact with my ship off and on, and they’re finishing up the repairs we can do outside of a shipyard. There’s more lab equipment and space up there, but probably still not what you need.”

  What she needed. Did he still think she could master this somehow? Even if she figured out what was happening and how to stop it, the damage would still be there. Every hour here probably took five years off their lives.

  “Judging by how quickly the archaeology team died,” Rache added, “I doubt there’s time to get anywhere with really good medical facilities.”

  “Your willingness to go must mean your men have finished searching the wreck and didn’t find anything.”

  “Someone was here first. I wouldn’t have guessed anyone could have cleared out so much so quickly.” He waved to the empty molds, the giant empty molds. “But I think that whoever blew up the escape ship those archaeologists were in got the gate. Or however much of the gate was here.”

  Kim knew she was missing some information—what ship had been blown up when and by whom?—but she couldn’t muster the energy to care. Her mother hadn’t been on it. Her mother was back in the shuttle in pieces.

  She wished she’d gotten another chance to speak to her before they both passed away, to ask her something she’d always wondered, why her mother had bothered having Kim when she’d had so little to do with Kim’s upbringing. More than once, she’d wondered if she had disappointed her mother or not been what she’d expected, what she’d hoped for, and that had been the reason for the distance. Or had she simply realized motherhood didn’t suit her?

  Kim didn’t think she’d eve
r wrapped up her own self-worth in her mother’s approval, but… there were definitely things she would like to have known. She longed for the frank conversation they’d never had.

  “I’ll gather my men, and we’ll head up to the Fedallah,” Rache said. “Unless there’s more of the wreck that you want to see?”

  “The Machu Picchu would be better. It has excellent labs.”

  He gazed at her, and she expected him to object, to suspect duplicity.

  “Very well,” he said.

  Kim nodded, pleased he hadn’t argued. “I’ll take a few more pictures and be ready to go back to the shuttle.”

  “Pictures? For what?” He sounded suspicious again. Was he still worried clues would get out and someone else would get to the gate first? Too late, buddy. Someone already had.

  “Not what, whom.” Kim was too tired for subterfuge. She waved to the walls. “It’s computer-y. I thought it wouldn’t hurt to get Casmir’s opinion on the wreck, assuming I get somewhere with reception, so I can send the files.”

  “Ah.”

  Rache strode off without forbidding her to take the pictures or commenting further on it. She walked around and had her contact record some footage as well as take close-up shots of anything that looked interesting. Unique.

  She wondered if she would still be alive when Casmir got the letter and files.

  The Union ship hadn’t responded yet. It had been two hours. Another hour, and the Stellar Dragon would be in firing range. Technically, they already were in firing range, but this far out, they could maneuver and get out of the way if the enemy sent nukes at them. Assuming they weren’t heat-seeking nukes.

  Casmir sat in the co-pilot’s pod and alternated between nibbling on his fingernails and cracking his knuckles.