Ship of Ruin

by Lindsay Buroker

  “Asger?” Casmir checked the network to get a status report on the robots. Only three of his machine allies remained upright and intact. The others were damaged, many missing limbs, and some were so broken that they no longer registered on the network.

  “I’m prying mercenaries out of their armor,” Asger called back. “While your crusher stomps on them to keep them from moving. For the record, this isn’t the approved use of a knight’s mighty pertundo.”

  “No? Perhaps if you sent me the schematics that explain how exactly that blade pierces combat armor, I could come up with a more appropriate tool for the job.”

  “You’d have to talk to Weaponssmith Ariyoshi in the castle. He’s the keeper of that secret.”

  “If you can get me into the castle, I’ll certainly accept the invitation.”

  Another wrenching sound was his only response. Too bad. A few months ago, Casmir had never dreamed of going to the castle or cared much about talking to the king or anyone in government, but now that he had this gate, he felt obligated to make sure it didn’t fall into dubious hands. He found he wanted to know more about what the king and the Senate were up to. He feared he might regret it if he handed the gate over to the military without knowing more about why they wanted it.

  He already regretted helping to invent the crushers. He thought again of Rache’s words about them being used on people in another system and shook his head.

  “I need time to think. And to research that incident.” Casmir rose to his feet, a plan percolating through his mind. It was one that would most surely get him into trouble—more trouble—but maybe he could make things turn out for the best in the end. Maybe he could even leverage the gate to force government leaders to work harder to get along with each other. “Zee, will you come back here, please? I need a hand.”

  Casmir searched the schematics he still had up for the ship and located two emergency escape pods that could be launched. They were more akin to lifeboats than shuttles and wouldn’t get the occupants very far. But Casmir needed Rache’s shuttle for his plan. He would leave it somewhere the mercenaries could find it later and hope, perhaps vainly, that Rache wouldn’t hold a grudge for all of this.

  Zee strode into view, and Casmir pointed at Rache. “Lift him, please. He and all of his men are going into the escape pods.”

  Wordlessly, Zee hoisted Rache over his head. Casmir followed with the stunner in case he woke up. Sometime very soon, he needed to figure out the last part of his plan, how he was going to hide this ship without anyone seeing where. That was going to be hard with Asger standing at his side, Asger who was loyal to the king and could tell Jager everything he knew.

  17

  Kim didn’t want to give in to sleep, but she finally collapsed on a cot in the lab, unable to continue to function. She had lost all track of time, but she’d barely slept—mostly by dozing off while standing up—since Rache had kidnapped her. No, since she’d volunteered to leave the Stellar Dragon. Three days ago? No wonder she was exhausted.

  Despite that, she dozed fitfully, waking often with a start and glancing at the computers she’d left running, their displays illuminating the dim room. They were monitoring the multiplication of her bacteria. She kept dreaming that they ran out of food and died or that someone opened an airlock and all her work was blown through the corridors of the ship and out into space.

  More than once, she dropped her hand to the deck next to the cot, making sure the rifle was still there. She and Angelico had left the mercenaries locked in that room, but something kept niggling at her weary subconscious. A certainty that they still represented a threat. She’d given them the bacteria, and they might start to feel better soon, if only nominally better until the other treatments were implemented. But good enough that they might be able to conjure up a plan, a way to escape. And she doubted they could accomplish that without hurting people as they fled. They certainly hadn’t managed to kidnap her without doing that.

  But no, they were locked in that room, and she’d made sure they didn’t have any weapons or keys or—

  Her eyes flew open as if someone had dumped a bucket of ice water on her face. They didn’t need keys. She remembered Rache’s muscled chest and forearms. Enhanced muscles. Idiot, she’d forgotten. Half of those mercenaries had some cybernetic enhancements or another. That meant—

  A faint rustling sounded in the corridor outside. Kim lay on her back on the cot, but she eased off it and grabbed her rifle.

  She slipped into the nearest corner where she wasn’t visible from the threshold and further hid behind lab coats hanging on hooks. Soft seconds passed in the dim room, the only light a green digital counter on the computer display, updating the amount of bacteria in the dishes.

  Maybe she hadn’t heard anything. Or maybe one of the doctors was up and working.

  Someone silently stepped into the doorway, the brighter light of the corridor sending a shadow across the deck. Kim didn’t think it was Angelico or Sikou. There shouldn’t have been anyone else out of quarantine—or that locked room.

  She lifted the rifle, pressing the butt into the hollow of her shoulder. Most of her familiarity with firearms came from learning how to disarm someone carrying a prop version, but she’d taken enough of her brother’s kyudo classes to be practiced at hitting a target. She was confident that if she could do it with a bow, she could do it with a rifle.

  Her brother’s voice floated through her mind, and she could see him out behind the dojo, sun shining on his short black hair as he taught, sharing one of his favorite quotations from an ancient Earth sensei. “When shooting, sometimes we will hit the target but miss the self.”

  Another time, she would have happily pondered the philosophical connotations of the line, but now, she willed her mind to empty, to push away the homesickness that plucked at her soul.

  The figure stepped into the room, large, broad, and muscled. And armed.

  The mercenary must have roamed the ship until he’d found some weapons.

  Kim’s finger tightened on the trigger, but she hesitated to fire, to use deadly force. She wished she’d found a stunner among the fallen weapons. She lowered her aim to the big man’s thigh.

  He looked around, and she held her breath, waiting. He’d broken out of his room and armed himself, so she was inclined to mistrust him, but what if he’d come looking for medicine or just wanted to speak with her for some reason?

  A few days ago, she would have shot first and asked questions later, but uncertainty turned her to a statue. This was one of Rache’s men, and that made him… she wasn’t sure. Still an enemy, but she’d implied she would try to help his people, not kill them. And he’d promised a favor if she succeeded.

  But they’d killed Kingdom marines. If she sided with them, she sided by default against her government.

  His gaze lingered on the cot. She was fairly certain this was Corporal Chains. He didn’t seem to see her. The men hadn’t found their armor, so he was relying only on his eyes. Eyes that didn’t have a night-vision enhancement, or he surely would have picked her out among the coats.

  He must have decided the lab was empty because he walked across it to the counter. He reached toward the petri dishes. To steal one?

  “Stop, and drop your weapon,” Kim demanded. She meant for the words to come out with calm authority but heard the alarm in them and winced.

  He whirled toward her, his weapon rising instead of lowering. She fired at her target—his thigh—and dropped into a low crouch. He returned fire, a crimson bolt streaking into the wall above her head. Shards of paneling flew, raining down on her.

  She fired again, not worrying about aiming for a nonlethal target this time, then lunged behind the cot.

  He grunted—with pain? She couldn’t tell, but he swung his rifle toward her again.

  The cot was flimsy and didn’t provide proper cover. She kicked it across the room at him, then fired again. This time, she saw her bolt catch him in the shoulder.

  Instea
d of continuing to fire from the open, he sprinted out the door, limping slightly but still running fast. Too fast. She fired again, but her bolt only slammed into the jamb. He was already gone.

  Kim lunged to her feet, leaped over the cot, and paused to check the dishes before pursuing him. Two were missing. She had more, but those had been farthest along and had grown the most of the bacteria she needed to inoculate the quarantined crew—and anyone else who came in contact with the ancient technology.

  She growled and rushed for the doorway but made herself halt on the threshold, envisioning men waiting in the corridor, ready to shoot. But her quick glance revealed that it was empty. Thundering footsteps rang out in the distance. The corporal.

  She ran after him. Unless Rache had shown back up with his shuttles, the mercenaries didn’t have anywhere to go. Or did they? There were shuttles in the bay here. She remembered from her stultifying perusal of the ship’s camera footage.

  She ran in that direction and made it to a bank of lifts, not in time to see the mercenary run into one, but an indicator showed it descending to the lower decks. To the shuttle bay.

  A few blood droplets spattered the deck in front of the doors. She’d hurt him. That might make him more likely to hurt her back.

  Too bad. She was not going to let him steal half her work, work that the people here needed.

  Kim gritted her teeth and slammed a button for another lift to come, then flung herself into it. It descended with tedious slowness, and she waited behind cover as the doors opened, again afraid the mercenaries would be lying in wait to stop pursuit.

  More blood droplets dotted the deck, a trail of them, but nobody waited. She raced for the shuttle bay even as she wondered if she should let the man go. Let all of them go. If he hadn’t stolen half of her bacteria, she wouldn’t be chasing him. Why did the mercenaries even want the dishes? She’d already given them each a dose. It was possible they would need more, but they ought to multiply in their bodies without need of more shots.

  But did they know that? She hadn’t told them.

  When she reached the bay door, it was locked. She peered through a porthole in time to see one mercenary help another through an open hatch and into a shuttle. Dr. Peshlakai and Chief Khonsari, her arm slung around his shoulders, stumbled toward the compact vessel with the corporal trying to urge them along more quickly.

  Kim stepped back, tempted to fire at the control pad by the door, but she slapped her palm to the reader, hoping to get lucky. Surprisingly, the door hissed open. Sikou must have added their team to the ship’s security database.

  The corporal in the rear spun toward her, and she fired preemptively this time. Nobody had a stunner. These lunatics would kill her if she got in their way.

  Her bolt slammed into his leg. Just as he returned fire, Yas knocked his arm aside.

  “Get in the shuttle,” he ordered. “Fire it up.”

  The mercenary hesitated, glancing from Yas to Kim.

  “Do it, Corporal,” Jess whispered, her dark skin pale, though she looked better than she had.

  Kim had brought her that medication. Had it been a mistake?

  “You’re not leaving with my bacteria,” Kim said, noticing that Yas held the containers.

  Had he been the one to send the mercenary for them? Or had the corporal simply thought they needed the bacteria?

  “You don’t need more doses, and you’re not giving that man samples of my work,” Kim said.

  Yas licked his lips. “He was going after the people who took the gate.”

  “That means more of our people will have been exposed by now,” Jess said.

  “Because he’s an asshole,” Kim said, frustration welling inside of her.

  She didn’t want people to die when she had something that could save them, but damn it, they could come here if they wanted to be healed. Shouldn’t they have to turn themselves in to be treated? And to accept the consequences of the lives they’d chosen? They deserved to be locked in prison cells.

  The corporal was watching Kim, his body a statue, his weapon pointed toward the deck at her feet, not at her chest. Abruptly, he shifted it, and she almost fired at him. But she wasn’t his target. He fired at a spot high on the wall above the door. The shuttle bay security camera. His aim was accurate, and the small dome on the wall melted.

  Kim scowled. What was that supposed to change? Did they think she would let them go as long as there were no witnesses?

  “I can see why you would think that,” Jess said slowly. “He’s not the most lovable man, but he helped me out, and he saved Dr. Peshlakai’s life.”

  “Yeah, I heard about that winning bargain. We call that indentured servitude in the Kingdom.”

  “It’s better than being dead. And asking for something in trade seems fair when you’re putting your life at risk and getting yourself marked a criminal in a habitat.”

  Yas’s lips thinned, but he didn’t shake his head in disagreement.

  “I won’t argue that he’s a good man or that he doesn’t have a chip the size of the Great Wall of Andovia on his shoulder, but we’re just soldiers.” Jess waved at the corporal and at herself. “Are you going to punish us for that? For following our captain’s orders?”

  “A lot of evil has been done throughout history by soldiers who were just following orders,” Kim said.

  “And what about scientists working for totalitarian regimes?”

  “The Star Kingdom is not a totalitarian regime,” Kim snapped, annoyed that they were standing at gunpoint and having this conversation. Another time, she would have willingly debated the various political structures in the Twelve Systems, but she was exhausted and tired of this whole situation. “The king can’t pass any laws without majority approval from the Senate, and citizens of the Kingdom are free to come and go as they please, so long as they obey the bioengineering mandates. I don’t claim to know what’s going on in the rest of the systems right now, but I’m sure it’s not anything simple or propagated by one man. And for the record, I work for a private corporation with headquarters in three different systems. We make sure anyone who wants our work has access to it. It’s not even expensive, not like something out of Sayona Station or the Sun Asteroids Habitats.”

  Jess slumped against Yas and sighed with weariness.

  At first, Kim thought she was being theatrical, but she remembered Jess was dealing with even more than the radiation sickness, and she felt bad for bristling and spewing defensive words.

  “We’re not bad people,” Jess whispered. “Sometimes, the universe just gets screwed up, and you end up losing everything. Everyone.”

  Her eyes were so bleak and haunted. And Kim couldn’t muster the energy to argue further.

  She lowered her rifle. “Just take it, and get out of here.”

  Yas murmured something to the corporal, and he slung his rifle over his shoulder and took Jess, guiding her into the shuttle. Leaving Yas facing Kim, no weapons in his hands, only the stolen petri dishes.

  It crossed her mind that she could probably wrestle him to the deck and take them, but a wave of weariness washed over her, and she only shook her head. She didn’t agree with anything Rache was doing, but Jess’s point that Rache’s soldiers were just following orders and didn’t deserve to die from this poison rang in her mind. Kim didn’t think she was wrong, but she didn’t think Jess was entirely wrong either. One probably had to get shit on a lot in life before ending up soldiering on some mercenary ship, and Jess likely wasn’t the only one for whom it had been a job of last resort.

  “Thank you, Scholar Sato,” Yas said quietly.

  She bowed and tried not to make the gesture grudging. Yas wasn’t who she was angry with.

  Rache’s masked face floated through her mind, and she silently growled at it, willing it to go away. But her brain wasn’t in the mood to comply. She blamed her weariness. Sometime soon, she hoped to sleep for a full day and night. Or three.

  The shuttle engines rumbled to life, but th
e hatch was still open, and Yas was still looking at her.

  “You’re still here,” Kim observed.

  “Yes.” Yas looked to the open hatch, then back to her. “I have no love for Rache, even though Jess is right. He saved my life, but as you pointed out, demanded five years in exchange for it. Five years of serving as a doctor to people who make a habit of slaying other people.”

  “So don’t go back.”

  “I am tempted.” He looked from the shuttle to her again, his gaze wistful. “But I did give my word, however desperate I was at that moment, and even though my life has fallen apart, I can’t bring myself to go back on it. When everything else is lost, honor may still remain, eh? Someone long dead said that, I believe.”

  “Yes, Dr. Kensington Sage. But he was writing about how cultures of honor often develop in regions without central authority, which leads to increased brutality and homicide rates due to a tendency to answer insults and transgressions with violence. His quote is almost always used out of context.”

  Yas chuckled. “I believe quotations are frequently uttered based on the needs of the speaker rather than the intent of the source. For myself… I believe I will do as Jess suggested.”

  Kim had no idea what that was, but Yas nodded, as if he’d made a decision.

  “Rache will probably never thank you for saving the lives of his men, but I will thank you. For them and for myself.”

  “You won’t be in the clear from the bacteria alone.” She waved at the dishes. “You’ll have to take everyone who was exposed to a cryonics lab and get the cellular damage reversed. Otherwise, you’ll all have significantly reduced lifespans.”

  “I understand. I will make sure Rache knows.” Yas lifted a hand in parting and climbed into the shuttle.

  Kim shuffled back to her lab, wondering when her colleagues would figure out that the mercenaries had escaped. And wondering what she would say.

  Casmir exhaled a sigh of relief when the two escape pods shot away from the cargo ship. He’d tranquilized Rache and his men before having the robots dump them inside, so they shouldn’t wake up for a couple of hours. He hoped that would be far too late for them to find him. The cargo ship had been underway for a while, but he’d changed the course again, and he would do so one more time once he knew Asger wasn’t paying attention.