Oath Breaker (Death of Empire Book 1)

by A. B. Keuser

That wasn’t strictly true. “The people who knew him think he’s dead. Quite a few are glad.”

  “If you were one of them, you would have already attempted to disengage his power termination coupling.”

  “I don’t plan on hurting him.”

  Dani inhaled a calming breath, before she continued. If what she said pissed the ship off….

  “I don’t know if I plan to defrost him, either.” She left the scaffolding and moved toward the hatchway. “Right now, I’m not certain he wouldn’t be more trouble than he’s worth.”

  “Would you like me to return power to the lifts for you ascension?”

  “I can manage the ladderway. No point in putting undue stress on you while we’re in gravity.” Small spaces, alone… she did not want to give the AI any clue to her triggers.

  “I should warn you, Interim Captain. The optimum departure window is about to cross over. You will want to secure yourself and your crew as quickly as possible.”

  Danielle hustled up the ladder to deck one, letting the strain on her muscles, the burn in her chest steal the bulk of her thoughts. She flopped into the captain’s chair out of breath, noting the odd look Lyz slid her way and hoped she didn’t look as flummoxed as she felt.

  Lyz turned to her, a scowl twisting her blue lips. “Did you tell my brother to start the ignition sequence? Because if not, you might want to rein him in.”

  “It wasn’t Gill.” Dani bit her tongue and grimaced as she tried to figure out how to explain.

  “I’m sorry to have alarmed you Elyzabeth. In the future, I will try to make a note of these things in my technical log where you can easily access them.”

  Lyz gaped at the ceiling, a smile of sheer delight fading as her brows knit and she turned to Dani, eyes too wide, shoulders too stiff. “It has a sentient AI?”

  “It wasn’t in the logs. They must have hidden it.”

  “It’s an amazing advance in the field. Why wouldn’t they boast about that?” Lyz’s frustrated whisper was not quiet enough.

  “The makers felt it wise to keep me secret. They did not wish to lose any advantage.”

  Mouth turned down in a sharp frown, Lyz threw her head back and shouted at the ceiling. “I wasn’t’ talking to you.”

  Dani rolled her eyes. “Lyz, she’s a ship. She probably doesn’t know better.”

  “Please prepare for planetary disembarkation. Optimal launch window in T-minus thirty seconds.”

  A chime toned above Danielle’s head and she let out an annoyed sigh. “What now?”

  “Engineer Gloscht and Pilot Mopeña would like to express their displeasure that you’ve chosen to exclude them from this liftoff sequence.”

  She doubted they’d said anything that polite.

  Dani pressed the comm button and spoke before either could get a word in edgewise. “At the moment, the ship feels she knows what’s best for her and for us. She’s handling this lift-off. You can gripe, or you can grab a chair and not bash your heads on the machinery.”

  Cutting off the comm, she sat back and rolled her eyes at the dark ceiling above her head. Her fingers fumbled with the buckle as she strapped in. Between her crew, her employer, the ship, and the frozen war hero down below, she was going to have an aneurism any second now.

  At least she wouldn’t have to deal with the aftermath of the AI’s discovery.

  “All exterior hatches in compliance. Ground lock released. I should warn you, Interim Captain Cholla, there is a large force of men headed this way. Do not be alarmed. Their weapons cannot penetrate the launch shielding, and if they attempt to get closer, they will be terminated by the convection of my engines.”

  As Oath Breaker went through her launch procedure, her mechanical voice began to recite the words in an eerie cadence.

  “Internal pressurization optimal.”

  “Thank Tapanoch our heads won’t explode.” Lyz turned back to Danielle with an uncertain grin before sticking her pierced tongue out.

  “Your brain is probably swimming in red dye by now. If you explode and get that all over the walls, I and Oath Breaker will be offended.”

  “Engines gimbaled to launch position.”

  The ship ignored them both.

  “Ignition.”

  Oath Breaker wobbled as she left the ground for what Dani could only guess was the first time in fifteen years. After a moment’s struggle, she shot skyward as though fired from a rail gun. And the weight of the planet pressed Dani into her chair.

  “Breached mesosphere, compensating for gravitational anomalies.”

  Able to breathe again, Dani thumbed through the readouts on the screen built into the captain’s chair. What she saw was not encouraging.

  Lyz saw it, too.

  “You’re taking us up too fast. We’re exceeding five Gs.” There was a touch of worry in her voice.

  “Ascension rate is optimal. Breaching thermosphere.”

  The shaking stopped and the glittering blanket of space filled the forward viewport. Something about the momentary loss of gravity in launch always made Dani perfectly calm. She let out a silent sigh as the lights on the far side of the navigator’s console flashed to green and she sank back into her chair.

  “Achieved exosphere. Welcome to space, interim crew.”

  Her peace was as momentary as her weightlessness. Dani was going to have to talk to the ship about this interim crap.

  “Uh… Captain?”

  She sat up straight in her chair. When Lyz called her by her title, things were already half-way to shit-storm.

  “What is it? Hull breach? Improper O2 readings?” She tabbed backward through the screens she’d just checked.

  “No.” Lyz typed in a long list of commands and the cryo-capsules appeared on the large monitor at the front of the bridge. The last casing spewed billowing white clouds.

  A sliver of ice ran down Danielle’s spine and she cast a glare toward the ceiling, “You’re waking him up.”

  “I have kept him in stasis long enough to ensure his safety.”

  Danielle stared at the speaker, unable to do more than gape. They had every reason to keep Osiris in that tube.

  She was already going to be on the Mandall’s shit-list for appropriating the ship without sending them a clear time table. Her employers were the opposite of sympathetic. If they found out Si was alive and she was harboring him, they’d do far worse than kill her.

  Her mind raced through the things they’d threatened to do to him when they thought he was still alive.

  “You have medical training, Interim Captain. Proceed to deck ten and transfer him to the infirmary. I have already activated the lifts for optimal efficiency.”

  “How do you expect me to get him to the lift?” Dani asked slowly, forcing the panic from her voice. “In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m not going to win any Universe’s Strongest Woman contests and your captain hasn’t exactly atrophied while you’ve had him on ice.”

  Her throat threatened to close up and she breathed through her irritation.

  “There is a gurney on deck ten, bolted to the wall near the main cargo hatch for the retrieval of patients coming out of cryonic stasis.”

  Dani rubbed her eyes, and looked at Lyz, though she was still speaking to the ship. “Fine, but this whole ‘Interim Captain’ crap needs to stop. If you refuse to think of me as captain, call me Danielle, Dani, or Cholla.” If the ship’s actions in keeping her captain locked in stasis for this long were any indication, she was not going to accept anyone other than Osiris as her captain.

  “That is acceptable… Danielle.”

  Danielle made her way to the lift with Lyz hot on her heels. She didn’t object, it was clear Oath Breaker wanted to sit in the driver seat for this trip. And even with the gurney, she’d still need help getting Osiris out of the tube.

  Looking at Lyz gravely, she pointed to the ceiling and said, “For now, we’re keeping this whole debacle between the three of us.”

  “Assuming Oath Breaker hasn’t sp
illed the beans to the others, I don’t think that’ll be a problem. I’m praying that the only part that was over all call was the liftoff sequence. I mean, we’re not even a day off planet. I’m pretty sure Stugg and Gill can keep from needing the infirmary for a while. And you know Goo, if she’s been sick a day in her life, I’d dye my hair black, pull out all my metal and have the lasers take these off.” Lyz motioned to the tattoos that ran from her fingertips, up her arms and across her shoulder blades like a cropped ink jacket.

  “The day you do that, is the day I’ll know we’re both ready to go back to the sanitarium,” Danielle laughed mirthlessly as the lift fell toward deck ten.

  Lyz had managed to talk Dani into getting a tattoo. In a system of ink-hacks, finding an needle jockey who did quality work and wouldn’t make you pay with the arm or leg he just turned to art was nearly impossible.

  The Heart Man was an artist who found a way to walk the thin line between overcharging and a fair deal, but he was the best artist Dani had ever seen. And because of him, and Lyz… Dani had a chest piece anyone could envy. The two crows bound at the feet with a wreath of roses peeked out from the drab v-neck, an intricate lock resting between their feathered heads at the top of her sternum. She clenched the lapels of her jacket together nervously, knowing she couldn’t hide it.

  When the lift door sighed opened, cold fog rolled in around them.

  Pointing to the equipment locker near the exterior hatch, Dani turned to Lyz. “Go get the gurney. I’ll see what I can do about putting him back to sleep.”

  She made her way across the deck, everything below her knees vanishing in the vapors.

  She sucked in a deep breath as a flashback threatened to drag her under, gripping at her legs like the poorly-named ugbeast.

  “I am not back there.” Her legs didn’t slosh in the muddy water beneath vapor. Clean white, the mist was nothing like the brown-gray murk that smelled of rotting cabbage and clung to her skin. There were no vague outlines of hunchbacked trees in the distance. She was on board a ship, not running for her life through a Korelean swamp. “The Pääom doesn’t know where I am.”

  Blue light emanated from inside the tube, brighter than she remembered from before. “Cryo tubes try to imitate sunrise for their static inhabitant.” She recited the textbook information to help ground herself inthe present as she grabbed hold of the scaffold railings and wrenched herself up the stairs and out of the cold fog. She paused, trying to steady shaky breaths as she slapped the feeling back into her legs – dry. Her fingers clutched at the fabric, grasping at a reminder of what was real.

  The panel blinked at her, displaying Osiris’s vitals. Whatever encryption had kept Lyz from messing with the tube’s controls was gone now. Dani scrolled through her options, but there was no button clearly marked to tell her how to gput him back in stasis. Her training was theoretical and for units far more current than this obsolete piece of junk.

  Suddenly Lyz was at her side. The gurney moved slowly toward them. In the vapors, it appeared to float across a milky white sea.

  “Any luck?” Lyz asked, her fingers already clicking through a dozen commands.

  Dani shook her head in defeat. “The tube’s going to crack any second. Doesn’t that thing have an accelerator?”

  Lyz didn’t answer, she knew a rhetorical question when she heard it. Old fashioned gurneys were slow, no exceptions. They were designed to get patients from point A to point B without further trauma.

  The only experience she’d had with the damn things was trauma.

  The tube hissed and Lyz frowned at it, tapping in another code. Danielle let out a groan of relief as the gurney’s rubber feet climbed the ramped sides of the stairs in a fluid march and sighed to a stop beside them, just in time.

  According to the last vid she’d seen on modern-day cryonic stasis, the seals were supposed to open with a hard pop. To Dani, this archaic version sounded more like a cat caught in the unbalanced blade of a lawn mower.

  The casing split in two, sliding backward into the tube.

  Osiris Bowlin was a formidable man, even in this state. His eyelids parted, unconsciously staring for a moment before they closed again and he pitched forward. The tubes in his arms tugged away from the unit as both Lyz and Dani stepped in to catch him. Dani pulled a knife from her pocket and cut the tubes as quickly as she could.

  He dropped against them and Lyz grunted as Dani gritted her teeth.

  “Get him on the gurney, quick. We don’t get points for presentation!” Dani screamed the commands at Lyz as her knees threatened to buckle underneath her.

  The hulking captain sagged onto the gurney, a helpless pile of man.

  In every way, he was a dormant threat; a hornet’s nest placated by smoke.

  Dani leaned in as close to Lyz as she could get and whispered, “When we’re around him, call me anything but captain. He might be a more cooperative patient if he doesn’t think I’m trying to take his ship from him.”

  “Bossy McBossyship wouldn’t like that either.” Lyz let her grumble fall to the vapors as she slid around the gurney and let it follow her to the lift.

  Dani, no longer holding a man with her shoulder or her heart in her throat, was able to follow behind and start the long process of unhooking the feeder tube ends.

  They stuck to him like leeches with long, pale tails. Dangling from his hands, they writhed as though in pain while the gurney crawled toward the lift. The settling vapors thinned and the dangling lines drew dark streaks in the white fog.

  Dani didn’t know if it was relief or bile rising in her chest when the doors closed on them.

  By the time they reached deck two, vapors spilled out ahead of them the same way they poured from the cryo-capsule. Clinging to their ankles it followed them, stretching itself thin until only a wisp of a trail followed them through the doors of the infirmary.

  “Help me lay him out on the table so I can make sure none of his fluids are pooling.”

  Lyz nodded and pressed a series of buttons on the side of the gurney. It rose to the height of the hospital-style diagnostic table that was bolted to the infirmary decking. She moved to the far side and Dani pushed Osiris from the gurney, rolling him onto his back.

  His limbs were a tangle, but they quickly got him unraveled. Danielle pulled the diagnostic dome over him and turned back to Lyz.

  “Thanks,” She said and then pointed to the gurney. “Take that back down to its mounting bracket and see what you can do about venting those vapors.”

  “Are you sure you can deal with him alone?” Lyz studied him closely, mistrust apparent in her eyes.

  Dani studied him, too. Pressing her hand to her forehead, she scrubbed at her skin, trying to figure out how she was going to get through this.

  “He’s a melting popsicle. I’ll be fine.”

  Lyz eyed their patient warily, but did as she was told, leading the empty gurney away like an obedient dog.

  Dani let the diagnostic dome run through its program. Pulling off her coat, she tossed it on the swiveling chair near the medic’s control console and adjusted the heat in the room. She had time, so she checked the supplies. Luckily Oath Breaker had been outfitted with static medical storage cabinets, otherwise every vial of medicine would have expired and every bandage would have moldered by now.

  The Abolitionists must have had astronomically deep pockets for his ship to be outfitted like this. She’d only ever seen units as sophisticated as these in the elitist museums that charged a pair of Korelean quarters for entry, or the hospitals on Pääoma.

  She herself had only seen them because she’d briefly worked for one museum with a medical collection—strictly in a legal capacity—and she’d taken a few crates of supplies off a hospital’s hands—strictly in an illegal capacity.

  She pulled the lever that allowed a temporary pause in the storage cabinet’s self-regulating stasis. Anything she thought she’d need, she set on a tray alongside the medical palmet. She hoped Oath Breaker had had th
e decency to update her medical info as soon as the ship had fully come online.

  Being a field medic during her half year of the three mandatory years of indentured service in the Pääom Army was not a viable substitute for a fully trained doctor, but she didn’t need José just yet. She couldn’t deal with his reaction just yet.

  If Si’s brains were scrambled, she’d spare her uncle that gruesome memory of his friend.

  The diagnostic dome chirped a happy tune at her as she reinitialized the static storage.

  She looked at the readout on the dome and let out a sigh of relief. He’d live.

  No fluid in his lungs, his musculature showed no lasting effects, and best of all: no sign of brain damage.

  The computer pulled up a record on file and though his current scan did show discouragingly low activity, it was within the normal parameters of a man who had just been pulled from a cryo-capsule.

  His hand dropped from the table and grabbed her pant leg at the knee. She gently pried it away and looked at his deep umber skin—at least he’d gone into the tube clean—and pressed the buttons allowing the dome to return to its alcove in the ceiling.

  She looked down at his slack face.

  This was once the most revered man in the galaxy. A man others would follow to war even knowing that most wouldn’t survive. And here he lay: alone, vulnerable and friendless—unless you count the ship—and Dani really didn’t.

  She wouldn’t even count José until she saw his reaction.

  She placed a stim patch on Osiris’s arm, sending the equivalent of a cup of hot jitter juice into his system.

  Waiting, she watching the subtle changes in his face as he woke up. He opened his eyes again slowly, blinking away the soft lights over his head. Danielle leaned over him, letting her posture block out most of the light.

  “Good morning, Captain,” she said with a quiet smile. She hoped it looked genuine.

  His voice filled her ears in a confused string of croaked gasps. “The tube… Mandall… I’ll kill….”

  “Remain calm. You’re out of cryo. Do you know the effects of prolonged stasis?”

  His only answer was to reach one hand around the back of her head and grab her by her hair. He dragged her closer and his other hand caught her throat.