Hero Code

by Lindsay Buroker

  “Do you want me to do it?” Kim asked from his side.

  “Yes.” Casmir imagined Kim getting in trouble when her fingerprints were found on the card and promptly changed his mind. “No. I’m ready.”

  She shrugged, and they headed up the sidewalk. The security robot whirred toward them, and Casmir held up the keycard. He didn’t know if that would be enough to satisfy it, or if it would tell them to come back during the building’s listed “open” hours. Which were three hours one day a week. Apparently, a custodian came in to make copies of seeds and embryos for those with the proper paperwork. She was a noble and a distant relative of the royal family. As Casmir had learned, few people who weren’t members of the royal family were ever allowed in.

  A red beam flashed across the card as the robot scanned it. Without a word, it returned to its circuit.

  “I guess we’re allowed in,” Casmir said.

  “It’s a good thing photo ID isn’t required. Even a robot without eyes could tell you’re not Princess Oku.”

  “Not much of a resemblance, eh?”

  “She’s prettier than you.”

  “Yes, I noticed that too.”

  Kim gave him a long look, and for some reason, his cheeks heated. Casmir hadn’t meant to imply anything with that statement.

  “It’s allowed, right? To notice?” He shouldn’t have said anything. Kim hadn’t said anything. Yet he heard himself adding, “It’s not like I’m going to ask her on a date.”

  They had reached the front door. Kim faced the lobby without commenting.

  “Asger likes her.” Casmir inserted the keycard into the slot. “He’d probably see it as a betrayal if I tried to ask her on a date. When I suggested robot bees for her space habitat project, Asger pointed out that I was a janitor mopping the arena floor and that she’s in the royal boxes.”

  He wondered what it said about his sense of self-worth that he kept repeating that to people.

  “That doesn’t seem entirely accurate,” Casmir added. “I’m at least the guy who builds the robots who mop the arena floor.”

  The card reader beeped, and the door swung inward. He glanced at Kim again as they walked inside the lobby.

  “You’re not saying anything. Is it because you get bored discussing these topics or because you’re silently supporting me and think that if I possibly someday do want to ask the princess on a date, I might be charming enough to convince her to say yes?”

  “I am silently supporting you in your various endeavors.”

  He squinted at her, searching for sarcasm, but she seemed sincere. She was probably indifferent to who he dated or how he embarrassed himself.

  Unexpectedly, she added, “I told our dinner guest that I would have a private dinner with him if he took off his mask.”

  Casmir dropped the card. He cursed and tried to pick it up, but it was difficult on the smooth marble floor. Either that, or he was so flustered that he couldn’t use his fingers properly. Finally, he pulled it up and stared at Kim.

  “Please tell me you’re talking about Asger.”

  “Does he wear a mask?”

  “Maybe a slumber mask so he doesn’t get eye wrinkles.”

  “You’re thinking of cucumbers.”

  “I’m so confused.” Casmir couldn’t stop staring at Kim, but her face was as impassive as ever.

  “Cucumber juice can reduce swelling, soothe damaged skin, and stimulate antioxidant activity.”

  “I meant about R—him.” At the last second, he realized there might be cameras in here—it was highly likely there were. They couldn’t talk about this here. He didn’t want to talk about it anywhere. Was it possible she was teasing him? Kim could deliver a joke in the most deadpan tone. She excelled at it.

  “I’m unsure about his soothing and stimulating effects,” Kim said.

  That was a joke. Her eyes glinted with humor.

  But Casmir was too horrified to find anything humorous about this. “There aren’t any. Kim.”

  He rubbed his face, almost poking himself in the eye with the keycard. She couldn’t be serious about going on a date with Rache. She didn’t even date. She hated sex. If she ever procreated, she wanted it all to be handled in a lab with test tubes. She’d told him that. Many times. In the seven years they had been roommates, he’d never seen her go out on a date. And he had seen her turn down offers from men. Nice, attractive men. Not psychopaths!

  She sighed. “I suppose you can’t be silently supportive.”

  “No.”

  She gave him a sad look, and he felt like someone who’d kicked a kitten.

  “I’m sorry.” His apology was for not being able to be silently supportive. He couldn’t make himself rescind his objection to Rache. That man was evil. There was no reason to have dinner with someone like that, unless it was to talk him into helping do a good thing.

  Kim pointed to a computer terminal built into the wall next to a pair of heavy steel doors without handles or knobs. “Perhaps we should start there.”

  She walked over first. Casmir took a deep breath and steadied himself before following her. He found some peace in knowing that Rache had left the planet. Kim was here and would hopefully return to her regular life and her regular work soon, and she would forget all about him. And Rache would realize he couldn’t risk coming back to Odin for a dinner date.

  “It shows records of people who entered and whether they checked out or made copies of materials.” Kim scrolled down a screen. “Maybe just made copies. It doesn’t look like anyone is allowed to leave with the original material, even if there’s a field for it.”

  Casmir made himself focus as the names of people listed for the past few months scrolled past. Oku was the last listed for today—their entry.

  “It’s the same people over and over,” Kim said. “Members of the royal family and a couple of well-known scientists of noble blood. It looks like almost everybody gets copies of seeds, but here’s someone who got a frozen frog embryo. And a couple of years ago, the princess checked out some bee embryos.”

  “Yeah, she mentioned starting from scratch a couple of times.” Casmir lifted a finger, intending to key in a search, but his hand was shaking. He almost laughed, embarrassed. For some reason, he was nervous about what he would find. “I have a birthday coming up. Can you look up who was checking out what thirty-three years ago? Er, thirty-three years and nine months?”

  “It would have been closer to six months if they used artificial wombs. They speed up gestation.”

  “Right.” He waved for her to run the search. “I’m sure that’s how it—how I—was done.”

  His mind still boggled at the notion that he was someone’s clone. In part because it seemed weird that someone would choose to clone a progenitor plagued with all of his genetic idiosyncrasies. And in part because it was difficult to accept as being core to his identity—it shouldn’t be, since it happened all around him, albeit more often with animals than people, but it meant he was exactly like someone else who had already lived. At least on the genetic level. It was surprising that he and Rache were so different, even with the gene cleaning Rache had received.

  “Here.” Kim pointed to the screen.

  There had only been a handful of entries that year. She pointed straight to one set of names, not even considering any of the others.

  Prince Jager and Princess Iku—it had been two years before the old king was assassinated and Jager crowned. They had checked out…

  “Embryo 7J?” Casmir scrunched up his nose. “That’s not super enlightening.”

  Kim tapped a couple of buttons, and a map appeared. “It’s in the basement.”

  They stepped up to the intimidating doors, and Casmir imagined a legion of security robots waiting to mow them down for presuming to sneak into the facility. Or maybe the doors wouldn’t open at all. He slipped the keycard in another slot. Would Princess Oku’s access get them all the way to this embryo basement?

  The doors opened, and lights flic
kered on, revealing a large room devoid of robots or any other type of security. Corridors headed off in several directions, and there was an elevator at the back. Nothing impeded them as Kim and Casmir walked through, though he did notice light glinting off the lens of a security camera. Eventually, someone would know they had been here.

  They stepped into the elevator, and it descended without input. Because it only went one place, or because the computer system knew what they had been looking at and assumed that was where they wanted to go? Normally, intelligent and intuitive computers didn’t bother Casmir, but he found the idea strangely ominous tonight. Maybe this trip had been a mistake.

  “If my guess is right,” Kim said apropos of nothing, “I will find that conversation about the princess to be a quite literal example of history repeating itself. I suppose it’s impossible for the Kingdom to experience a sense of collective déjà vu, but it’s hard at times not to personify institutions.”

  Casmir stared at her. “Does that mean I shouldn’t ask her to dinner?”

  “No. But if she accepts and your identity becomes widely known, it could prompt prophesying.”

  “You already know what I’m going to find down here?”

  The elevator stopped, and the doors slid open on a dark room with an icy chill.

  “I have a suspicion,” Kim said. “There aren’t many old dead people that I could imagine Jager wanting to clone.”

  Old. A reminder that his progenitor had lived in a time before The Great Plague, that his mitochondria had never been altered to thwart the virus that had decimated humanity.

  “Someone else might have chosen a renowned scientist or engineer,” Kim said. “I highly doubt he did.”

  She stepped out. This time, the lights didn’t come on. Casmir joined her and waved a hand, in case motion sensors had failed to register. Nothing happened.

  He dug into his toolkit and pulled out a compact flashlight. It was for peeking into robot housings, not illuminating rooms, and a laughably narrow beam came on.

  Fortunately, there wasn’t far to go. There was a single room—a vault—and it wasn’t as large as Casmir would have expected. The walls were full of what looked like drawers with keyholes. Whatever was in them—frozen cells, presumably—he wasn’t going to be able to extract. That was fine. He already had what was in the drawer he wanted to see.

  Casmir swallowed and walked forward, looking for Row 7. His mind was oddly blank, refusing to process Kim’s words and make guesses. In a few seconds, he would know.

  Kim walked behind him, not saying a word.

  Row 7. Casmir’s hand shook, the beam bouncing on the drawers, each one labeled with a plaque, a name. He passed the kinds of names he might have expected, award-winning scientists and scholars from the last hundred years. It hadn’t occurred to him that anyone would save tissue samples from those people, but he supposed it made sense. None of them were old enough to predate the Plague. Not until he reached… J.

  His mouth went dry. Admiral Milos Mikita.

  A famous warrior?

  Casmir checked the row and letter again. 7J. Admiral Mikita. The man who had, over three hundred years ago, almost singlehandedly united the Twelve Systems under Kingdom rule for King Dieter. King Dieter and his daughter, Princess Sophie, Casmir amended silently, Kim’s elevator comment coming to mind. The princess had supposedly been his inspiration, the one whose love he’d sought to prove himself worthy of.

  Casmir looked at Kim. Was this truly what she had guessed?

  She nodded once.

  “I don’t see how.” Casmir’s voice cracked, and he cleared his throat. “He was a great warrior. And he was eight feet tall. And handsome. Someone like Asger, not like me.” Casmir waved his hand over his scrawny five feet and seven inches of height.

  “He was an officer who led warriors. Eventually. He came out of the common class and somehow finagled his way into the knighthood but was only made a noble after a number of victories. You’ll have to find one of the history books to read. An old physical history book. I suspect there’s been some revisionist history over the last couple of centuries, at least in regard to his physical appearance.”

  Casmir stared at the drawer, as if it could show him what the real admiral had looked like.

  “Remember that comment Qin made after we first met her?” Kim asked. “When she said you kind of looked like Mikita? Maybe you should check her bookcase. Whatever she has wouldn’t have come out of our system.”

  “Have you known that long?” Casmir couldn’t believe Kim wouldn’t have said something.

  “No. I didn’t think anything of the comment at the time. I didn’t have a clue until I saw Rache’s unaltered mitochondria. But now it makes sense.”

  “It does?”

  “That Jager would try to make his own Admiral Mikita? Yes. Two of them, technically, though I suppose…”

  “I was a mistake?” Casmir snorted. That he could believe. “That the artificial womb flubbed up with my genes, and they had to make another one? Would that make me Rache’s older brother, do you suppose?”

  “Artificial wombs don’t work like that. My guess is that they threw you in the stewpot without doing any gene testing, in part because modifying genes is illegal in the Kingdom, and in part because they assumed nothing would be deleterious in Mikita’s genes. And then at some point, a doctor did a checkup and called them in.”

  “And said this kid’s eye is in the socket sideways and he’s going to have seizures all over the place when we let him out of this box?”

  Kim snorted. “Your eye isn’t that bad.”

  “I’ve seen pictures from before the surgery.”

  “Mm. Anyway, at that point, they may have decided to start over with Rache and had the doctor do some less than legal gene cleaning.”

  “So I should feel lucky they didn’t flush me down the toilet?”

  Casmir pushed a hand through his hair. He wondered if he had the queen to thank for that. He couldn’t imagine Jager having a soft spot in his heart for a mistake. Maybe Queen Iku had been the one to hand him off to the foster parent system. As a kinder alternative to death? Someone had made sure his education was funded. His adoptive parents didn’t know anything about his birth or where he’d come from, but they had been given enough money to pay for all the years of school it had taken to earn an advanced degree.

  “I wish I’d gotten a chance to talk to her,” he murmured.

  “Who?”

  “The queen. But now I’m off on some new mission tomorrow, and I don’t even know… God, that’s why Jager is letting me do this stuff, isn’t it? He thinks somehow my genes are going to allow me to perform great heroics, even if I was a reject. Like there’s some magic or code in someone’s DNA that makes them capable of amazing things.” Casmir thought of Rache, of what it had been like following him into that base and watching him singlehandedly mow down killer robots, astroshamans, and enhanced humans. Had all of that been due to his cybernetic enhancements? Or had some of it just been potential based on genes that had been fixed?

  “I think you’ve spent the last ten years proving you’re capable of amazing things, Casmir,” Kim said dryly. “Don’t get hung up on the physical. I know what the pictures in the history texts show—today’s history texts—but it’s not like an admiral on a spaceship would have fought enemies hand to hand. He would have been crafty and smart—and probably very good at getting people to work well together.”

  “Yeah.” Casmir tried to make his agreement heartfelt, but lately, he felt more like a screwup than anything special. Maybe if he could find the gate and do what he’d wanted from the start, figure out a way to ensure all of humanity could come together to study it… he would feel more adequate.

  “And I’m skeptical that you were the reject.”

  Casmir frowned at her.

  “Oh, not that Jager rejected you, but it makes more sense that you’re the real deal and Rache is the altered copy. I don’t think we had gene cleaning ba
ck when Mikita lived. Our medical advancements lagged behind the regaining of spaceflight and some of the simpler sciences. Physics is the same across the universe, but biologically speaking, Odin isn’t Earth, despite being the closest match in the Twelve Systems, and some of the things that worked in the human body back on Earth had to be altered or changed altogether to work in this biome. I’ve often wished I could see Earth—and take my microscope there.” She thumped him on the back. “You should locate that gate and get it working, so humanity can find its way back to its origin system and see if anything is left alive back there.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  Casmir stepped back from the drawer, though the plaque with its simple letters was burned into his memory. He wasn’t sure he could imagine Mikita accomplishing all that he had accomplished if he’d had Casmir’s gene mutations, especially if medicine had been less advanced back then, but at least he now knew where he’d come from. And that he should probably be extra careful around King Jager, whose interest in him was now rekindled after thirty-three years.

  He shelved the thought for later and forced a smile. “Thank you for the support. Silent and otherwise.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  THE END

  Look for Book 4, Crossfire, in July.

  In the meantime, if you’re enjoying the Star Kingdom series, please consider leaving reviews for the first three books:

  1. Shockwave

  2. Ship of Ruin

  3. Hero Code

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