Hero Code

by Lindsay Buroker

  “I won’t know until I try.”

  Casmir silently ordered the robot to release Rache as he maneuvered closer to catch him if he fell. As before, the porter-75 let go abruptly. Rache tumbled off its shoulder but twisted in the air like a cat and landed in a light crouch. He didn’t even stub his toe on a log. Show off.

  “I’m a little dizzy, but I can walk,” Rache said.

  “Good. We’re going that way.” Casmir pointed into the tree-filled gloom.

  He expected Rache to say that the forest looked the same in all directions, but he must have already loaded the coordinates onto his own map. “The base is only a mile away?”

  “Or the phone booth where your doctor’s contact made his comm call.”

  “Right. I suppose we won’t know until we get there. I’m surprised we’re that close.”

  “My robot carried you two miles. Don’t forget to tip him.”

  The treaded robots had pulled ahead, so once Casmir was convinced Rache wouldn’t pitch over, he hurried to catch up. A message came in from Kim.

  Casmir, are you able to speak right now?

  Casmir glanced around at the dark forest. Yes. Until something jumps out from behind the trees and starts shooting at us.

  Is that likely?

  We were shot down, and we’re on foot. It seems inevitable. But go ahead and give me your news. Casmir remembered the message that had come in earlier when he’d been airsick. It had been from one of his parents’ colleagues. He’d been too busy to glance at it before, but a feeling of dread crept into his stomach. Was it related to Kim’s contact?

  Scholar Moskowitz messaged me. Your parents are missing, and their apartment was ransacked.

  The dread threatened to turn into panic. Casmir rushed to read the earlier message. It was from Scholar Moskowitz. And yes, it reported the same thing.

  He scrubbed the back of his neck and told himself that he couldn’t have done anything even if he’d read it earlier, but it didn’t matter. He felt guilty for not taking the fifteen seconds to check it.

  Thank you, Kim. I… Casmir didn’t know what to say. He wanted to run over to his parents’ apartment and check it, but he didn’t even have transportation out of this forest, not now. Besides, if they were gone, all he would be doing would be looking for clues. And did he really need clues? Was there any question who had taken them?

  Casmir prayed they had been taken and not something worse. So far, the terrorists had killed everyone in their path.

  I’ll do something as soon as I can, he finished, knowing Kim was waiting for an answer.

  Do you think it’s possible they were taken to the same base you’re trying to find?

  I don’t know. Why would the terrorists want them?

  They know you’re coming, and if they’re not a hundred percent sure Rache is on their side, they may feel they need an additional lever on you.

  Casmir shook his head. All the evidence suggested that the terrorists simply wanted him dead. Why would they need levers to make that happen? Did they think he was such a mastermind at stealthy incursions that they wouldn’t find him unless they dangled his parents as bait? He couldn’t imagine what in his life history would lead them to believe that. The résumé he’d filed with the university didn’t mention stealth.

  I’ll keep my eye out just in case, he told Kim, then grimaced, because that meant he needed to do more than put his hand on the wall of the base and comm Asger to order an attack. He needed to hunt around inside and find his parents before any kind of air strike started.

  Do you need help?

  I’ve got your biological agent and… Rache.

  Neither of those is likely to have your back in a fight.

  Tell me about it.

  I sent Zee with a tracking device to find you. Technically, to find Rache, but it sounds like you’re together. It looks like you’re a couple hundred miles away, and I don’t know his max speed, so I don’t know how quickly he’ll get there… but if you can dawdle, maybe he can have your back.

  Casmir’s first instinct was to protest—if his parents had been kidnapped, surely Kim might be a target too—but she had the Royal Intelligence bodyguards outside of her apartment. She ought to be safe. Besides, how many levers would the kidnappers think they needed against him?

  “Just one,” he muttered, checking the time.

  Zee maxed out at about sixty miles an hour, assuming he ran the whole way here and didn’t find other transportation, and the lack of roads out here would slow even him down. Casmir doubted he would make it out here before dawn. He would have to rely on his other robots.

  “Is something wrong?” Rache had pulled ahead, and he paused to look back.

  “Just reading some messages.” Casmir almost told Rache about his parents, but he reminded himself that they weren’t Rache’s parents. He’d never even met them. What would he care?

  “Well, read faster. The person with the concussion shouldn’t be outpacing you.”

  “Aren’t you genetically engineered to do everything faster than a normal human?”

  “Ride one of your robots if you need to. I doubt we have much time before they make a more serious effort at finding us.”

  Casmir was tempted to make sarcastic comments, but Rache was right. The buzz of engines continued to come and go as their enemies searched from above. Eventually, they would send out men on foot. Or crushers on foot. Casmir’s stomach twisted at the idea of battling them without Zee’s help.

  Rache halted abruptly and looked around, his hand on his pistol.

  “You feel that?” He glanced back.

  Casmir shook his head, but as he walked closer, a sharp buzz of electricity crawled over his skin like ants. He jumped back, and the sensation disappeared. Rache jumped forward and turned around.

  “It’s gone.” Rache looked up. “Some kind of energy field. Something that scrambles signals and hides the base from satellites and ships?”

  “Can you access the network from that side?”

  Rache paused. “No. Can you still?”

  Casmir ran a quick search. “Yes.”

  “This may actually be what you’re looking for then. Not just some small hideout in the woods. Their main base.” Rache turned and strode in the direction they had been heading.

  “Wait.” Casmir held up a hand. “I need to order the rest of my robots delivered before we lose contact with the outside world.”

  “There are more?” Rache looked at the ones trundling across the invisible energy field. None of them reacted to it.

  “Yes.”

  Casmir sent a message to Bonita. Captain, Rache and I are crossing through a barrier and believe we’re close to the enemy base. I know I was supposed to let Asger know when we located it, so he could call in reinforcements, but my parents were kidnapped earlier today, and I’m afraid they may be inside. I need to find them before the Kingdom Guard unloads all their weaponry on the place. Please bring the robots in and deploy them. They have orders on what to do. Don’t let Asger order in the troops yet. Thank you.

  Bonita didn’t respond right away. Casmir hoped they hadn’t also run into trouble, but as long seconds passed, he worried they might have.

  “Come on, Casmir,” Rache called from the trees ahead.

  Reluctantly, Casmir passed through the barrier again. He’d said what he needed to say to Bonita. He hoped she was in a position to get the robots here and that he and Rache weren’t on their own. He wasn’t even positive Rache was fully with him. These people hated the king, and so did Rache. Casmir hoped that Rache was irked after having people try to snoop into his DNA and shoot him down. Though from what Casmir had deduced so far, Rache would likely see the former as far more of a crime than the latter.

  A crunch echoed from somewhere ahead of them. A branch snapping? It sounded like something more substantial than a twig. Casmir’s robots had been making such noises all along, but none of them were that far ahead.

  Rache drew his pistol. “I wis
h I had more firepower.”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t come with an entire armory.”

  “I did. It was in the back of the shuttle our enemies apparently blew up along with my mask.”

  “You sound more irritated about losing the mask.”

  “They won’t need bloodwork to identify me if I’m not wearing it.” Rache tapped over his shoulder, as if to verify that the helmet of his combat armor was still folded against his upper back, ready to deploy.

  It didn’t appear to have been damaged in the crash, but the clear Glasnax faceplate would not hide his identity. Casmir’s borrowed galaxy suit also would not hide his identity, so if they walked into the base side by side, the resemblance would be noticeable. Probably startling to someone who wasn’t expecting it.

  Up ahead, faint blue light appeared through the trees. For a moment, Rache was silhouetted, his short, dark hair an oddity after Casmir had seen him so often with his head hooded. Rache sprang for cover and disappeared from Casmir’s sight.

  More crunches came from up ahead. It sounded like vehicles or moving machinery. The snapping of wood echoed through the forest. Casmir envisioned logging robots sent out to attack them.

  A touch to his shoulder made him jump. Rache had circled back to stand near him.

  “I’m not able to use my chip to message you, so we’ll have to stick to voice,” Rache whispered, the words barely audible over the snaps and crunches. “Can you send your robots out for a distraction? I’m going to scout ahead, but I assume someone up there will be able to detect heat signatures and will be gunning for me.”

  “I suppose there’s no chance that they’re not looking for us and we can sneak in the back door.”

  Rache gave him a scathing look before ordering his helmet into place. “They shot us down on their doorstep, Dabrowski. They know we’re here.”

  “I was afraid of that.”

  “Hide behind a tree and stay out of trouble.” Rache flicked a finger at Casmir’s galaxy suit. “If they have serious firepower, that won’t save you.”

  “Oh, I know. Hiding is always an integral part of my plans.”

  “I bet.”

  Rache left, his black armor helping him disappear into the shadows. Or maybe it was whatever elite stealth abilities mercenaries learned when they became wanted by the law.

  Casmir stepped behind a tree, hiding from the blue light, though he didn’t yet know the source of it. Things were moving in front of it. Long, ominous shadows shifted through the trees.

  “Begin Plan B,” Casmir told his robots, realizing he couldn’t send instructions to them via the global satellite network any longer. That barrier kept him from accessing it. Fortunately, they had auditory sensors, and he’d preprogrammed the robots with routines to follow that should be sufficient for Rache’s distraction. “Do not deploy the vials yet.”

  There was no point in that until they were inside of… whatever was up there. A building, he hoped. A building with his parents in it, ideally right up front in some foyer, so they would be easy to rescue. Did terrorist lairs have foyers?

  It didn’t matter. He would find them. Casmir clenched his fist as the robots shambled off toward the light.

  The bzzt of a DEW-Tek weapon drifted back. Rache? Or someone firing at Rache?

  Casmir shifted his weight behind his tree, tempted to get closer so he could see what they faced. It would be wiser to stay back and let Rache handle this, but he didn’t know how fully he could trust his twin.

  Hoping he wasn’t being an idiot, Casmir moved closer, darting from one tree to the next. The blue light and whatever was moving around up there made uneven shadows, and he tripped more than once. Somehow, he was certain Rache never tripped when he was sneaking about.

  It didn’t take long to reach the edge of the trees. They stopped abruptly as if they had been clearcut by logging machines. Maybe his earlier guess hadn’t been far off.

  But the machines tramping around in front of a cliff and firing into the woods weren’t for logging. They were Quasar Stalker combat robots, deadly on land and in space. He’d never seen one in person, as they were manufactured in another system, but he’d seen videos on the network. They looked like bipedal insects with heavy armored carapaces and weapons for arms and antennae.

  He counted ten of them stomping about, each more than twice the size of a man in combat armor. They made Zee seem small, and he was positive they would give crushers a good battle. But what were they out here guarding? That cliff? He didn’t see a building or a tunnel entrance.

  Casmir, only when he was certain none of the Stalkers were pointed in his direction, eased his head out far enough to look left and right along the base of the cliff. The ground was cleared for hundreds of meters along the base of the rock face. Branches and a few fallen logs had been left behind, but it would be difficult to cross the area without being seen by the robots and whoever else was out there.

  He looked up, expecting to find drones with cameras and weapons zipping around. That was when he spotted the structure built into the side of the cliff up above, the stone walls almost matching the surrounding dark gray rock. It looked far more like some ancient fortress than a modern base. Casmir realized that was exactly what it was.

  When the colony ships had landed, most people had stayed and created the civilizations that eventually evolved into the Kingdom on the northern continent and the various city-states on the southern land masses. But splinter groups had gone off into the wilds, some creating settlements that had never attained modern sophistication. Some still remained out there, and some had been abandoned.

  Like this one?

  Vines and foliage draped down from the tree-filled bluff high above, and Casmir wondered if this stone fortress had been lost and forgotten until the terrorists had found it.

  Half of a large satellite dish was visible at the edge of the cliff, the only sign of modern tech other than illumination coming from openings halfway down the rock face—windows. They were about fifty feet above the ground. And so, he realized, numbly, was the entrance. The only entrance, at least that he could see. Those windows were more like arrow slits than something a man could crawl through.

  Two guards stood on a platform that extended out a meter from the entrance, watching the robots below tramping around and firing into the woods. There was enough light for Casmir to make out faces that weren’t fully human. They appeared a mix of metal and skin. He didn’t think they were androids. They reminded him of the people who’d died in those pods on the cargo ship. Astroshamans.

  He groaned. He’d been thinking earlier that it would have taken a robotics expert to reprogram the crushers. But these people, half machine and half man, could have likely done it with ease.

  Had they been hired by the terrorists? Or were the astroshamans the ones behind the terrorism?

  An explosion roared to one side, and metal flew in all directions. Casmir slumped against the tree he hid behind. It was one of his robots. The Stalkers had blown it up. Easily.

  Casmir couldn’t remember if that robot had been carrying one of Kim’s vials, but he put up his helmet, hoping for a modicum of protection, in case it had been. He didn’t start drawing on the small oxygen tank he’d brought, not yet. Kim had said the biological agent would disperse quickly outdoors.

  Another of his robots exploded, some ordnance striking it with unerring accuracy. Casmir leaned his forehead against his tree. He had a feeling this attempt at an incursion wasn’t going to last long.

  What else could he try? If he failed, his parents might be killed.

  16

  “I’ve lost his signal,” Bonita said.

  “What?” Qin leaned forward in the co-pilot’s pod, frowning at the display, dark trees whizzing past below the ship. They had been flying inland for more than a half hour, tracking Casmir’s transponder chip. “That doesn’t mean he’s dead, does it?”

  “No, it just means that I’ve lost his signal. If he were dead, the chip would st
ill be transmitting. Unless he died horribly by being pulverized or incinerated in such a manner that the chip was destroyed too.”

  “An explosion might have done that,” Asger murmured from the hatchway. “Or the terrorists might have captured him, scanned him, found the transponder, and yanked it out and zapped it.”

  “He was flying a minute ago,” Bonita said. “He would have to have been captured and de-transponder-ized at record speed.”

  “That’s not a word.”

  “It is now. I’m going to keep heading in the direction he was going. Maybe he passed into a shielded area.”

  “They also could have crashed,” Asger said. “That could have resulted in an explosion that destroyed the transponder.”

  “I had no idea knights were more pessimistic than bounty hunters,” Bonita said. “The Kingdom doesn’t have any kind of invisible barrier that could cause us to crash if we hit it, does it? I’ve never heard of such a thing, but I hadn’t seen anything like the stealth generator that astroshaman cargo ship had either.”

  “Whoever these terrorists are,” Asger said, “they’re not Kingdom subjects.”

  Bonita glanced at Qin, as if wondering if that had been an answer to her question.

  “I’m tempted to call in my backup now.” Asger eyed the corner of the display, which showed the last spot where they’d received a signal from Casmir’s transponder. “And send them to search that area.”

  “I thought we were the backup.” Bonita waved toward the deck, toward the army of robots in the cargo hold two levels below.

  “Just the distraction. My knight colleagues and the Kingdom Guard are waiting to be called in. But we better check out that spot first.” Asger waved at the tiny frozen blip. “Make sure Rache didn’t kill him and throw him out the hatch.”

  “Again with the pessimism. Qin, can’t you perk up our knight?”

  Qin eyed the grim-faced Asger. “I’m not sure how.”

  “I’m disgruntled because we didn’t get to go along,” Asger said. “And I’m afraid Casmir is going to get himself killed because he trusted that villain.”