“Kim… I.” Casmir rubbed his face—hard. “I don’t even know what to say. That’s mashugana. Who would intentionally create someone like me more than once?” He waved at his own body, probably indicating the various medical issues he had. “Even if it seemed like a good idea to make a—a—robot whisperer, as Laser called me, then why fix Rache after he was born and not me?” He started pacing, hands jerking in frustration. “What, was I the byproduct? An extra to keep around just in case? I wouldn’t even be good for spare parts. Who wants a brain prone to seizures?”
Kim lifted placating hands, wishing she hadn’t said anything. Maybe she had misunderstood Rache. Maybe she was wrong about it all.
“Easy, Casmir, or I’m going to have to get you a paper bag to breathe into.” She stepped in front of him to stop his pacing and patted him on the shoulder, wishing she weren’t so clumsy at comforting people.
“We’re in a sickbay full of advanced laboratories and medical equipment, and you’re offering me a paper bag?”
“You want a sedative?”
“Maybe a few shots of vodka.” Casmir looked around for somewhere to sit, but he eschewed her cot and sank down on the deck against the wall. “Sir Asger said the queen sent Sir Friedrich, the knight who was killed by the crushers in the parking garage, to warn me to get off the world, and that she later sent him to protect me. From some terrorists called the Black Stars who want me dead because of something I might do in the future. That’s his hypothesis. I thought he was wrong, that it must have to do with the crushers, but he seemed doubtful.”
“Did you get a chance to talk to Rache?”
Casmir snorted. “Not about his home life and where he came from, like you suggested. He was busy threatening me and making demands.” Casmir hesitated. “He actually did offer to tell me things about myself… if I agreed to come work for him.”
Kim stared at him. “As a mercenary?”
“I guess. I think he was impressed by how many times he’d utterly defeated Zee, only to have him keep showing up. He wanted me to make him a crusher army of his own. Of course, I couldn’t say anything but no, especially when he’d just kidnapped you, but a part of me wishes there had been a way to play along, if only for a while… Long enough to find out what he knows.”
“I have a feeling that would have been a Faustian deal that you would have regretted.”
“Oh, I have no doubt.” Casmir leaned his head back against the wall.
“You don’t need him. I think the answers are back on Odin. You said you’re getting an audience with the queen?”
“Sir Asger said he would try to set something up. I… hope I can trust him. I did tranquilize him. Twice.”
“You left that out of the messages you sent me.”
“Did I? Huh.”
Kim shook her head slowly. She hoped Casmir wasn’t going home to a trap. Especially when she planned to return with him.
“The queen has the answers,” Casmir murmured. “She must. She’s the one who set all of this in motion. I just have to convince her to tell me. Without being shot or thrown into a dungeon along the way. That’s doable, right?”
His eyes had an uncharacteristically bleak cast when they met hers.
“I hope so, Casmir,” Kim murmured. “I hope so.”
Kim wanted to stand and look over Casmir’s shoulder while he reassembled her mother’s droid body and attempted to fix her damaged circuitry and chips, but maybe it was better that there were more treatments to give and two new people who needed the bacteria injection. She’d been told that the Machu Picchu’s scanners had picked up Captain Ishii’s warship leaving the gate and heading their way, so neither of them had time for distractions.
“Are you sure this will work with my body?” Qin asked, clasping and unclasping her hands, as Kim prepared a dose. “And not kill me? You may not have noticed, but I’m not entirely human.” She held up one of her clawed fingers.
“It didn’t escape my notice. I’ve run a few tests from the blood sample you gave me earlier, and I think you’ll be fine.” Kim smiled, though she felt leery at injecting her new strain directly into people—there should have been years of testing first—but when the alternative was letting someone die… she had little choice. “The original bacteria was tested on rats, cats, and dogs without ill effects, and this new change just slightly adapts its preferred energy source.”
“Good.” Qin nodded, but she continued to pace back and forth, her six-foot-plus frame making the lab seem cramped.
Kim thought it might be good to distract her. “Are you and the captain leaving the system next? Or sticking around?”
“I’m not sure yet. Casmir gave the captain some sort of schematic patent… thing, and she’s afraid the only place she can sell it is Odin. Or maybe that’s the only place Casmir has the connections to get someone to buy it. I’m a little fuzzy on what exactly their deal was.”
“Well, we’re planning to head that way soon. Before the Fleet comes back here to retrieve its doctors. I think Casmir’s knight offered to give us a ride back to Odin, but I’m not sure we can trust he won’t deliver Casmir to the Kingdom Guard as soon as we land. Do you think Captain Lopez would be willing to transport us? If you’re going that way anyway?” Kim pressed the jet injector to Qin’s lightly furred arm.
“Casmir’s knight tried to kill me the first day we met.”
“Sir Asger?”
“He called me a freak and blamed me for something someone else did. Someone who looked like me, I guess.” Her lip curled. “He just assumed it was me, that I’d been there. He labeled me an enemy before I’d even said a word.”
“Ah.” Kim decided she should have left negotiating for transportation to Casmir. She also decided she shouldn’t refer to the knight as Casmir’s, not if Qin loathed him. “I’m sorry.”
“I hope his balls wither up and fall in the toilet and get flushed out into space where they’re sucked into a black hole.”
“That sounds unpleasant.”
“Good.”
Kim set the jet injector aside. “Your next stop needs to be the cryonics lab, two levels up. Dr. Sikou will be waiting for you.” She hoped Sir Asger had already finished up so Qin wouldn’t run into him. He was in too weakened a state to risk losing his manhood to a black hole. “I’m going to check on Casmir’s progress with my mother, but comm me if you feel strange. You shouldn’t, but take a nap after the treatment. It’s tiring for the body to rejuvenate itself.”
“All right. Kim…?”
Kim paused in the doorway. “Yes?”
“Do you think there are any friendlier knights on Odin? Or are they all… jerks?”
“Uh.” Kim had no idea how to give advice on romance—she wasn’t even sure if that was what this was about. “I’m sure you can find someone who thinks you’re wonderful. I don’t know if he will be a knight. You might want to cast a wider net.”
And look beyond Odin, Kim thought silently—and sadly.
“I guess,” Qin said. “Thanks.”
Kim found Casmir in a laboratory near engineering, her mother’s droid body on a work table, already reassembled with wires running to an open access panel. Toolboxes and meters sprawled across the counters, and he had a schematic up on one display while he ran tests, sure fingers shifting competently from one tool and task to the next, almost eerily efficient. As she watched—he didn’t seem to notice her arrival—he performed repairs on a memory chip with the easy precision of a surgeon.
She couldn’t guess whose DNA he might have been cloned from, but she had an easier time imagining the scenario than he did. He was gifted at his profession, and if anything, the medical issues had probably helped keep him humble all of his life. Rache could use some of that humbleness.
After Casmir slipped the repaired chip back into the droid head, he touched something just inside the access panel. Her mother sat up abruptly, eyes opening.
Casmir breathed a soft “Ha!” and stepped back.
; Kim gripped the doorjamb.
Would her mother retain her memory? Or had it all been wiped? If it had… Kim had no idea if she had a backup in some storage center on Odin. They’d had so few conversations since she’d reached adulthood. Kim barely knew anything about her mother or what she’d been doing for the last ten years. It had been a mistake on her part to get so wrapped up in her work that she didn’t take the time to communicate. Even if her mother was the same way. Kim should have made the effort.
“Ms. Erin Kelsey-Sato,” Casmir said. “Do you remember anything?”
Kim’s mother looked up at him. “You are Casmir Dabrowski. You’ve visited my apartment in Zamek three times, and you’ve never been able to remember to use a coaster. I had to clean sticky rings off my coffee table.”
Casmir’s eyebrows drifted upward, but then he grinned. He noticed Kim standing in the doorway and waved her in.
“Your mother remembers me,” he reported.
“Fondly, I see.”
“Accurately, anyway.” His brow creased, and he looked a little embarrassed. “I get intimidated and nervous sometimes meeting notable people, and I forget my manners.”
“You leave drink rings on the coffee table at our house too. That grape fizzop stains.”
“Oh? I’ll work on that.” Casmir smiled and backed away to pack up some tools.
Kim took a deep breath, feeling nervous herself as she came around the table to face the only mother she’d ever known in the only body she’d ever known. She’d seen photographs of her mother as a human, pale-skinned and blue-eyed, and had often struggled to find herself in that face. She’d always thought she looked a lot more like her darker-skinned and darker-eyed half-brothers, but her father had often noted that they were similar in other ways.
“I’m glad you’re in working order, Mother.” Kim winced at how formally her words came out, but they’d always been formal with each other, and she didn’t know how to be anything else. “We’re on the Machu Picchu. We found you outside on Skadi Moon next to the wreck that had held the gate. It was gone by the time we got there.”
Kim wasn’t sure why she was including herself in the we of Rache and his people. As if they had been a cheerful team working together. It was easier, she supposed, not to explain the story of how she’d been kidnapped by pirates. Besides, it seemed a failing to have allowed that to happen, and she was reluctant to admit to it.
“Outside?”
“Buried in snow drifts. In pieces.”
“Yes…” Her mother looked to the schematic on the display, a schematic of her body. “I suppose I’m not surprised that those miscreant astroshamans tore me to pieces. They’ve all the power of androids, all the manners of animals. The others—my team—got away before they showed up and headed up to the ship to comm the military and show a piece of the gate to the crew up here. Did they make it, do you know? I tried to delay the astroshamans, to keep them from going after the others, but I had no weapons or the inclination to use them. I suppose they’re the ones who got the gate.” She tilted her head. “What are you doing here, Kim?”
“It’s a long story,” she said, finding herself echoing Casmir’s earlier words.
When she looked up and met his eyes, he raised his brows and pointed toward the doorway, silently asking if he should leave.
Kim shook her head. They didn’t have much time, and Casmir had mentioned wanting to ask her mother some questions.
“I’m afraid… We don’t believe the rest of your team made it,” Kim said. “Also some of the crew here passed on. Some of the scientists successfully quarantined themselves and can likely answer any more questions you have.”
“I see.” Her voice sounded more android than human, devoid of emotion, but Kim had been called a robot more than once in her life, so she didn’t know how much of this was an effect of her mother’s droid body and how much was just… how they were.
“I’ll explain everything I know as soon as I get a chance,” Kim said, “but Casmir has a few questions for you. He’s the one with the gate. Sort of. I gather he’s hidden it and wants advice on what to do next.”
Kim nodded at Casmir, inviting him to take over.
“Hidden it?” Her mother’s droid did not have eyebrows in the human sense, but she could make an impressively surprised face.
“Yes. I didn’t want the mercenary Rache to have it, but I also wasn’t certain I should just hand it over to the Fleet, and ultimately the king.” Casmir came forward and, speaking animatedly and with a lot of hand gestures, relayed the story in his rambling style.
Kim would have been more succinct and used fewer adjectives to describe Rache’s dastardliness.
“So, I’m basically wondering what the best course of action is going forward,” Casmir said. “I’m afraid I’ve put myself, and maybe also Kim, in some danger, which would not have been my first choice, but the Kingdom is using some of my prior work to hurt inhabitants of other systems, and I’m a little gun-shy about trusting Jager’s military right now.”
Kim wondered if Rache had told him about the crushers attacking that station. She hoped Casmir had looked that up and confirmed it for himself.
“The simplest thing to do, and the easiest thing for your career and welfare, would be to hand it over to the military,” Kim’s mother said.
Casmir nodded. “Yes. Is that what you think I should do?”
“I can’t tell you what you should do, but I will admit that I would have been uneasy putting such powerful technology into King Jager’s hands. I’ve been around, in one form or another, since before he took the throne, and I’ve seen the changes over the last thirty years, the evidence of his ambition. I’ve traveled to many other systems for my work, and I’ve heard stories from the denizens there of knights and Kingdom agents quietly going about, taking advantage of the existing discontent out there. I do believe he wants to see the Twelve Systems reunited and back under Kingdom rule, and he wants that to happen in his lifetime. I don’t believe he’s inherently evil, but he is definitely ambitious and manipulative.”
“And am I overblowing the potential importance of discovering this new gate?” Casmir asked. “Could it tip the scales as much as I fear? I know Captain Rache was desperate to make sure that Jager doesn’t get it, but he’s hardly an unbiased party.”
“Rache the pirate? I can imagine.” Kim’s mother rose on the table and flexed her knees and articulated her arms and rotated her shoulders. Testing her body?
She swished her tail in a circle while looking over her shoulder and nodded, as if pleased it was still there. Not for the first time, Kim wondered what had possessed her mother to choose an animal droid instead of an android body.
“I don’t think you’re blowing anything out of proportion,” her mother said. “With the gate—and the promise that it could be reverse-engineered, replicated, and the gate network extended—that would definitely give King Jager more to build on, as far as establishing his platform and his case with the other governments of the systems. Join the Kingdom, and we’ll colonize the entire galaxy—and reap the benefits of its resources.”
Casmir appeared morose at the answer. Kim wished her mother had told him to hand over the gate. She had no doubt that the moral concerns were real, but it wasn’t their place to judge the king or risk themselves over vagaries. She’d endured enough risks and enough adventures in the past weeks. She wanted her old life back and to return to the work she enjoyed. She wanted to go home.
“Thank you, Ms. Kelsey-Sato. I’m going to—”
Kim’s mother held up a hand. “You’ve already told me more about your plans than you probably should have. If the military shows up here and starts questioning everyone, it would be better for you if nobody knows where you are headed and what your goals are.”
“A consideration, to be certain, but I’d think you would be immune to truth drugs.” Casmir smiled.
“Unfortunately, I’m not immune to being deactivated and having some overly smart p
rogrammer poking around in my head.”
Had that happened with the astroshamans? Had they downloaded everything she knew about the gate before tearing her into pieces and hurling her out the hatch? Kim grimaced in sympathy. Even if her mother could no longer feel pain, that couldn’t have been a pleasant experience.
“We could add some layers of security to your brain emulator,” Casmir offered.
She considered him thoughtfully while fiddling with her tail. “I actually wouldn’t mind that. How much time do you have?”
“Enough,” he said firmly.
Kim thought of the approaching warships but said nothing.
“Good,” her mother said. “I accept your offer.”
Casmir nodded and went to work again. Kim’s mother spoke to him, asking questions about software, automated security updates, and hardwiring failsafes. Casmir answered with knowledge and enthusiasm that seemed to satisfy her. The robot whisperer, indeed.
Kim stepped out into the corridor, disappointed that she hadn’t gotten to catch up more with her mother—and that her mother didn’t seem to mind—but telling herself there would be another time.
Casmir had to get off the ship before the military showed up, lest he truly be thrown into a brig cell this time and tortured until he revealed the gate’s location. And she… She wasn’t sure how much danger she was in now, but she couldn’t imagine leaving Casmir to fend for himself. She would help him defeat those terrorists, or at least figure out how to get them off his back.
As she walked back to her lab, she wondered if Yas and Jess and the other mercenaries would rendezvous with Rache and find treatment in time. If they survived, Rache should concede that he owed her a favor. It might have to be simply asking the man not to avenge himself on Casmir, but she hoped she could help Casmir find out whose DNA imprinted his cells.
THE END
The adventure continues in Book 3, Hero Code.
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