Crossfire (Star Kingdom Book 4)

by Lindsay Buroker

  Crossfire

  Star Kingdom, Book 4

  Lindsay Buroker

  Copyright © 2019 by Lindsay Buroker

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you for picking up this next installment in my Star Kingdom series. I’m not sure yet how many books there will be in the series, but I’m having a lot of fun writing these characters, and I have at least a few more planned after this one. I hope you continue to enjoy the quirky characters and their equally quirky adventures. No spoilers, but Zee gets a new buddy in this one.

  Before you jump in, please let me thank my editor, Shelley Holloway, for the help with this series, and also my beta readers, Rue Silver, Sarah Engelke, and Cindy Wilkinson for chiming in with helpful suggestions. Also, thank you to Jeff Brown for the fun spaceship cover art.

  Please enjoy the story!

  1

  The squirrel chattered menacing warnings toward a nesting tiktik bird as it scampered across the thick branch of the native zindi tree with a peanut in its mouth. Kim Sato scattered a few more nuts on top of the fence post before padding to the small patio table to sit and enjoy her coffee.

  While she and Casmir had been away in space, the weather had turned warm, and even though the sun wasn’t high enough to shine on her face yet, she sat back and enjoyed the peace of being home again. She wished life were getting completely back to normal, but today, Casmir had to finish packing and get a ride to the launch loop where a shuttle would take him up to the Kingdom Fleet warship the Osprey, commanded by his old robotics camp nemesis, Captain Ishii. They would head off to who knew where—another system entirely, most likely—and if Casmir couldn’t help Ishii find and reclaim the ancient wormhole gate for the king… Kim didn’t know what would happen.

  The sliding door opened, and Casmir walked out in his socks and Robot Remstar pajamas, while holding a huge mug of steaming coffee in his hands. His hair was an unbrushed tangle that the tiktik bird might consider a suitable nesting spot if he wasn’t careful.

  Kim almost shared the thought aloud, but Casmir’s eyes were bloodshot, and the coffee was an atypical choice for him. He looked like he needed it. Badly.

  “You all right?” she asked as he approached the table.

  Casmir paused in the middle of pulling out a chair to stare at her. “I must look wrecked. You never ask me that.”

  “Only because I’m not good at reading faces. The coffee was my main clue that something’s up.”

  “Ah. Yes.” Casmir finished sitting, took a gulp, and made a face. “Rough night.”

  She waited for him to explain further, assuming he would. Casmir was the chatty one. He loved talking. If there was something he didn’t want to speak about, he would simply find something else to burble about, redirecting the listener’s interest elsewhere. But for once, he didn’t do that. He took another gulp of the coffee.

  “Because of the vault?” Kim finally prompted.

  The night before, they had slipped into the Royal Zamek Seed Bank, descended to a storage vault in the basement, and verified what Kim had guessed earlier and what Casmir had apparently never guessed.

  Three hundred years ago, someone had taken cells from the legendary Admiral Tariq Mikita, and they had been kept safe and viable all that time. Thirty-three years ago, King Jager and Queen Iku had used the sample to have two clones made, one who grew up to become notorious criminal and mercenary Captain Tenebris Rache, and one who’d become robotics professor Casmir Dabrowski.

  Casmir shook his head. “No. That was stunning—to me, at least—” he gave her a quick puzzled look, still seeming to find it odd that she hadn’t been surprised, “—but not horrifying. I’m feeling…” He blew out a slow breath. “I wish I had time to go to the synagogue and pray this morning.”

  Kim arched her eyebrows. She knew he was religious and observed all the holidays—when not locked in a dungeon or being chased by bad guys in space—but for him, it always seemed to be about spending time with his friends and family, rather than sitting alone and seeking divine guidance.

  “I keep having this nightmare.” Casmir took another sip, still holding the mug in both hands, as if for warmth. Or maybe support. It wasn’t that cold. “Technically, it’s not a nightmare since it’s something that really happened. But that makes it worse. And sometimes it morphs into things that didn’t happen, but mostly, I keep seeing this… thing over and over.”

  “You haven’t told me exactly what happened when you were in King Jager’s dungeon.” She considered that Casmir was more likely to be distressed about things that happened to other people than to himself and added, “Or in that terrorist base.”

  Casmir shuddered, and she believed she had guessed right, that something there had disturbed him.

  “Not something Rache did, I hope.” Kim knew he was a criminal and had killed countless Kingdom men, but she wanted to believe… she didn’t know what, exactly. That he wouldn’t have done anything terrible while fulfilling a favor for her. It had meant something to her that he had been willing to risk himself on her behalf—even if it shouldn’t have.

  “Rache did mow down a bunch of people, but there’s not much else he could have done at that point. The terrorists knew we were there, and they were trying to kill us. While he went in the front and fought them straight on, I dragged myself through a crawlspace and knocked out the stealth generator. After I did that, I went looking for him—and my parents, because that was right after you’d messaged me that they had been kidnapped. I was worried they might be inside.” He gazed at the coffee in the mug, not batting an eye as the chubby squirrel returned, jumping from the branch to the fence post, then back to the branch with a new treasure purloined. “Rache had gotten captured—or allowed himself to get captured so he would be taken to the leader.”

  Kim nodded, well aware of the great risk Rache had taken in helping, especially since he loathed King Jager and probably hadn’t been that bothered by the terrorist attacks on a planet he’d abandoned long ago. Or so she assumed. Now that she knew Rache’s real first name, maybe she would dig up more information and figure out what happened to him, how he’d been raised and what had caused him to take up arms against Jager. Or maybe she wouldn’t dig up that information. He was gone now, and she was back on Odin where she belonged. It would be best for her career if she never had anything to do with Rache again.

  “I crawled up to where he was being questioned about me—heard some interesting things about his past if you’re ever curious.” Casmir’s eyebrows rose.

  Kim hesitated. She was curious, but… “No.”

  “Good.” Casmir smiled faintly, but the haunted look never left his eyes. “The men around Rache weren’t
in armor so I threw the vials, and that distracted them.”

  Kim almost said that she’d heard about that from Rache but was reluctant to admit they had communicated after the event. She only nodded.

  “Those worked very well. Thank you. The leader was in armor. Alexandre Bernard. I looked him up after the battle. He was a Kingdom man and the former chief superintendent of Royal Intelligence, but something obviously happened to make him change sides big time. He had some implants and seemed to be committed to working with the astroshamans—there were a bunch of them in that base, so the working assumption is that they’ve been behind the terrorist group from the beginning. I need to do some research en route, figure out if the terrorist activity started before or after they could have learned about the gate. I’d assumed the gate was found very recently, but maybe they suspected it was in our system and wanted us distracted at home? Or maybe they wanted us distracted for other reasons and just happened to be in the system when the gate was discovered. I am guessing Royal Intelligence has a mole, maybe someone who used to be loyal to Bernard. Remember how we were given coordinates to land at, and then surprise, we were attacked there?”

  Kim nodded and sipped from her own mug, aware that Casmir was doing what she’d been thinking about earlier, talking about something else to distract his listener from the uncomfortable thing he didn’t want to discuss. Maybe she should let it pass without comment. If he didn’t want to talk about his nightmares, who was she to pry? He was a grown man, two years older than she, even, Robot Remstar pajamas notwithstanding.

  “I hope I’m left alone, preferably in a cabin and not a brig cell, and allowed to do a lot of research on the way to… wherever they take me first. Probably Modi Moon, where I originally hid the cargo ship, so we can double-check to make sure it isn’t there and to see if we can find any clues about where it went. I’m also hoping I can get someone to give me access to the government network. I’ve thought about trying to hack my way in a few times, but if I were caught… I’m already in enough trouble with Jager.”

  “I think,” Kim said, “for the sake of your life, your career, and your friends and family, you should go along meekly with the Fleet on this mission and do exactly what Jager wants. Even if he’s done things of questionable morality, that’s true of almost every political leader that’s ever existed. This is our home, and we can’t do anything about the leadership, not without starting a war. We’re not in the nobility and couldn’t get a seat on the Senate, even if we wished, and there’s only been one king in all of Odin’s history who was so loathsome that the Senate acted to get rid of him.”

  “I know.”

  “Although…” She tilted her head as a new thought stirred. “Are you of the nobility? I’m not sure how much of the Kingdom’s revisionist history to trust when it comes to Admiral Mikita—as you pointed out, that’s not your face in the history books, not in the digital ones, anyway—but he supposedly was born common and through deeds was granted noble status during his military career. We might have to hunt through the legal records to see if there’s a precedent for people cloned from noblemen being granted the rights and status of noblemen. Cloning people hasn’t been going on for long, not here on Odin, and there’s a stigma against it, at least for people.”

  Casmir twitched a shoulder. “Rache seemed to think we would be considered noble, but he also said there wasn’t much, if any, of a precedent. He was probably raised to believe he was noble—I remember Asger making a comment about how he knew how to fight knights. Like maybe he’d been trained to fight as one himself. I don’t care about him, though. He’s blown up his chances to ever have a place here on Odin or in any of the Kingdom habitats.”

  It was silly, but Kim found that thought bleak. Was Rache destined to live and die in the cold of space? Killing for a living and one day meeting a violent end himself? Could a man like that ever change? He’d have to want to change, and Kim had a hard time imagining that.

  “I better finish packing.” Casmir pushed back his chair. “I promised my mother I’d take changes of underwear this time.”

  “I’m sure she’s vastly relieved.”

  As he headed for the door, Kim heard herself ask, “Casmir?”

  “Yeah?” He turned, a hint of wariness in his eyes.

  He had to know she was going to ask about the dream. Even if she shouldn’t pry if he was reluctant to speak of it, she had a hard time setting aside her curiosity. And if it was possible she could offer some advice or say something comforting that might help him, she wanted to do that. She hated to think about it, but there was a possibility this mission would be so dangerous that he wouldn’t survive it, and she would never see him again.

  “What happened after you threw the vials and everyone except Rache and the leader—and you—were exposed?”

  Casmir leaned against the door jamb. “Actually, Rache’s armor had been damaged and his helmet was off, so he was exposed too.”

  Ah, yes. Rache had admitted that in his letter.

  “Probably the only time I’ll ever see him with tears in his eyes.” Casmir looked at the patio, one socked toe prodding a seam where moss grew. “He got some weapons from the sick guards, including a grenade. The other guy—Bernard—had a grenade too. Rache was going to throw his, and I could see it bouncing off Bernard’s armor and not being as effective as if…” Casmir swallowed. “Well, my brain was just trying to solve the problem of something not being effective. I had this duct tape I’d grabbed, and I threw it to Rache and told him to stick it to our enemy.”

  “Oh.” Kim could imagine where this was going.

  “They grappled, and I didn’t see everything, but then the grenades went off. Rache had stuck it to the back of Bernard’s helmet. And when it blew, it was graphic.” Casmir rested a hand on his stomach. “There wasn’t much time to parse it then, since the explosions started a rockfall and I was just trying to stay alive, but that’s the moment I keep seeing again and again. I suggested something—and provided the tool to make it happen—that resulted in a man’s head being blown off.”

  He eyed her warily again, and she realized she might have misread the first look like that he’d given her. Maybe it wasn’t that he hadn’t wanted to talk about it, but that he had feared she would judge him.

  Kim shook her head. She was more likely to judge herself, because she felt he’d done the logical thing. Sometimes, it disturbed her how easy it was for her to rule in favor of logic over emotion.

  “I can see where that would be extremely disturbing, especially for someone like you, but I’m sure Rache was going to kill that man anyway. It was probably a relatively quick and painless way to go. And I assume he was trying to kill you.”

  “Yes, and I know those things, but you arrest criminals, Kim. You don’t blow their heads off. Other people died in there too. All those guys who weren’t armored and were puking on the floor when the ceiling collapsed… They didn’t have a Zee to protect them. Thank you for sending him, by the way.”

  “You’re welcome.” The last she’d seen Zee, he had been standing in the living room next to the coat rack, observing the neighborhood for potential threats. She hoped the Fleet soldiers would allow Casmir to take his stoic bodyguard along on his mission. “And those are the people who were setting bombs, kidnapping your parents, and killing Kingdom citizens. I’m afraid I can’t share your distress at their deaths. If they’d been arrested, Jager would have had them executed or sent to one of the prison asteroid mines. Rehabilitation laws are for citizens, not enemies from another system.”

  “Enemies from another system are supposed to be extradited for their own governments to deal with.”

  Kim waved her hand. She knew the law, but when she’d been doing research for her thriller novel, she’d learned that those laws were usually only obeyed if the prisoners in question were prominent enough in the other nation’s society that returning them might be used as a bargaining chip at a future date. Maybe it hadn’t always been like that, b
ut it was like that under Jager’s rule.

  Casmir started to turn again to go inside, but he paused, his face scrunching in an odd expression. “Someone like me?”

  “I didn’t mean that as an insult. You have a gentle soul, Casmir.” She knew how much it bothered him that the crushers, which he’d helped make out of some notion that they would be deployed as guardians for the planet, were being used to kill people.

  “Well, my parents wouldn’t let me play violent network games as a kid.” The faint smile returned, however fleeting. “My father even lectured me if I slammed the checkers pieces down too hard on the board.”

  “Your parents are good people.”

  “Yeah. I’d hate to turn into someone they were disappointed in.”

  “You won’t. I promise.”

  He gave her another quick smile, but his eyes still looked haunted.

  Kim leaned back in her chair, wondering if she’d helped him at all.

  She also wondered who had raised Rache. Not Jager and Iku, she was fairly certain. If Rache had been a fixture in the castle, she couldn’t imagine that the media would have been unaware of him. Unless he’d been locked in some cell and forbidden to go out where anyone might see him. She doubted that. If Jager had wanted his future war hero to be loyal to him, he wouldn’t have been too much of an ass. At least not initially.

  She drummed her fingers, wishing she’d asked Casmir to tell her what he’d overheard.

  The doorbell rang. Since Casmir had gone inside, she assumed he would answer it. It was probably some Fleet soldier, making sure he didn’t decide at the last minute to flee the city. Poor Casmir. He’d gotten himself into this situation, but only because he was skeptical about Jager’s intentions. Most people wouldn’t put their necks out in front of the king’s carriage—or air bike—but Casmir wasn’t most people.