Crossfire (Star Kingdom Book 4)

by Lindsay Buroker

  Casmir pointed at Zee and nodded, though he didn’t believe Ishii would try to beat him up. He did expect Ishii to push harder on the “secret” he’d been made aware of but not brought in on.

  As the door slid shut, leaving them alone, Casmir debated again if he should share it.

  Was this why Rache never told anyone? He didn’t want them to have expectations that he feared he couldn’t live up to? Not that Rache probably experienced feelings of inadequacy. His desire to keep his progenitor a secret might have more to do with the very clear tie to the Kingdom that it would show. Since he always worked for people who were against the Kingdom, he might not want to give them a reason to be suspicious of him. Though it had also sounded like he hadn’t wanted Jager to know who Tenebris Rache truly was.

  “You find anything yet?” Ishii waved at the computer displays.

  “A number of possible locations of astroshaman bases. We could try checking them one by one, but I’m still hoping a clue at Modi Moon will give us more to go on. And I’m also debating if the astroshamans are ultimately behind our troubles—the terrorists on Odin and also the theft of the gate—or if they were working with or for someone else.” Casmir wondered if this Prince Dubashi was tied in somehow. It almost seemed like he had to be. Why would some random stranger put a bounty on Casmir’s head?

  His left eye blinked, and he rubbed it.

  “Following the politics of who’s involved in what always gives me a headache,” Ishii said. “I prefer the logic of machines to the machinations of men.”

  “And yet you became a commander of hundreds of men.”

  “I wanted to be an engineer. But my father was a Fleet admiral, and so was my grandfather. It was assumed that I would follow in their footsteps and take the command track. The weight of family expectations.”

  At least Casmir hadn’t had to deal with that. His parents had always told him he could be whatever he wished. Maybe if he’d grown up in the nobility with some generations-old tradition to follow, these new expectations would feel less onerous.

  “We’re three days from Modi Moon. I hope you find what you need there. All I’m worrying about is getting the gate, but…” Ishii frowned at the deck, took a breath, and looked into Casmir’s eyes. “I apologize that two of my men attacked you on my ship. That’s inexcusable. All of the men here are under my command, so I take full responsibility for this. They will be detained until we return to Odin, at which point they will be handed over to the military police and held for a court-martial. I don’t know what the outcome of that will be, but I’m positive they’ll at least be dishonorably discharged from the service. It’s likely that they’ll also serve time in a military prison. Which, I’m told, is an unpleasant experience.”

  Casmir almost joked that it couldn’t be much worse than being on the kitchen staff, or those men wouldn’t have been so easily enticed, but Ishii was making a serious apology, so he kept himself from being flippant.

  “Thank you. And it’s fine. I mean, not fine, but we weren’t hurt, so…” Casmir shrugged, not sure how to explain that he didn’t particularly wish unpleasant experiences on the men, even if they had tried to kill him. If they had managed to hurt Kim, he might feel different, but he liked to think he wouldn’t. “As long as they’re not free to do it again, that’s all that matters to me.”

  Ishii’s eyebrows drew together, and Casmir thought maybe he hadn’t given the right answer. Or at least not the expected answer.

  “It will not happen again. Not on my ship.” Ishii bowed stiffly and walked out.

  Casmir hoped that Ishii wouldn’t get in trouble with his superiors because they shared his belief that a commander was responsible for everything that happened on his ship. It sounded like Ishii was already in trouble because of actions Casmir had taken. He couldn’t help but think about how Ishii’s current assignment would be going a lot better for him if Casmir had never come into his life again.

  He gazed at the door and resolved that he would help Ishii find the gate and, if at all possible, regain favor with his superiors. He made the same resolution in regard to Asger. Maybe hoarding the gate for the Kingdom wasn’t the right thing to do, but neither was ruining the careers of those two men.

  5

  “Report to the bridge, Dabrowski,” Ishii’s voice came over the speaker in the computer cabin.

  It had been almost three days since the attack, but Casmir still had Zee enter the corridor first, and poked a wary head out before committing himself. A female corporal in combat armor stood on one side of the door. Asger was waiting on the other, his hand wrapped in a bandage.

  “I warrant an escort?” Casmir asked him. “I’m honored.”

  “You should be. Not everybody receives personal attention from a knight.” Asger pointed toward the lift at the end of the corridor, and they started walking.

  “You’re clearly a better than average knight. I’ll have to ask my mother to buy more tubes of your underwear to support you. Maybe my father needs some.”

  The guard remained by the door, but she gawked after them—and glanced at Asger’s butt.

  “It’s not my underwear. I was simply paid a fee so they could use pictures of me in their advertisements. And on the packaging, apparently. My agent failed to mention that part.”

  “Is something wrong with your hand?” Casmir pointed to the bandage.

  “Just a bad punch in a sparring match at the gym. Dr. Sikou said she could fix it up later, but I wanted to make sure you weren’t in trouble.”

  “Thoughtful, thank you.”

  They stepped into the lift for a brief ride to the upper deck and then walked onto the bridge, which was full of newer and fancier-looking pods than the ones on the Stellar Dragon. There were far fewer fluctuations in gravity on the Osprey, but Casmir knew from his experience on that cargo ship, which had also had artificial spin gravity, that things could get hairy during combat maneuvers.

  A familiar moon marked by brown, tan, and gray striations dominated the forward display. Asger led Casmir onto the command platform that held the captain’s pod.

  “We’ve arrived at the moon,” Ishii said without preamble, “and I’ve had the scanner team scouring its orbit for the last four hours.”

  “Find anything interesting?” Casmir assumed he hadn’t been brought up here to admire the view.

  “Have you got the mag-lock on it?” Ishii asked an officer manning a station to the side.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Put it on the display.”

  The distant view of the moon was replaced by what Casmir thought was a human body. He flinched at the sight of stiff legs and outstretched arms, clothes frozen solid, and a hand missing on one side. He didn’t have a good view of the face, only a partial profile, but something about it seemed familiar.

  “Is that a dead body?” Asger asked.

  “A dead android body,” Ishii said. “It’s not giving off a heat signature or anything to indicate it’s operational on any level. It’s possible it’s a piece of space trash that’s been out there for who knows how long, but it was in a low enough orbit, and Modi’s gravity is strong enough, that it would have ended up as a splat on the surface within a day.”

  “Can you rotate it so I can see the face?” Casmir pointed at the display.

  “Adjusting the mag-lock,” the officer said without checking with Ishii. He sounded young and eager to please.

  The android shifted, and Casmir sucked in a startled breath. “That’s Tork-57.”

  “Tork-what?” Ishii asked.

  “It’s the android that brought me to the cargo ship, hoping that I could fix the dead astroshamans on the bridge.”

  Asger tilted his head sideways. “You’re right. It is. Someone dented in the side of its head, though, didn’t they? Qin and I tossed it around a lot, but I don’t remember it looking that bad. We didn’t rip off its hand—or cut it off. That looks like a neat slice there.”

  “No, he wasn’t that badly damaged wh
en we left.” Casmir closed his eyes, thinking of the last time he’d seen the android.

  He’d deemed Tork-57 too dangerous to turn back on and add to his robot army, so he’d left him disabled on the bridge. Was it possible Rache’s men had brutalized the android out of frustration? They’d been on the bridge trying to hack into the navigation computer. No, Casmir had seen Tork-57 again after he and Asger had dumped the mercenaries into escape pods. This was damage that had happened since then. Meaning…

  “Someone was there after I hid the ship,” Casmir said, then snorted, realizing it was a statement of the obvious. It wasn’t as if the android would have powered himself up, mutilated his own limb, and jumped out an airlock.

  “Whoever came to grab the ship?” Ishii asked.

  “That’s a fair assumption. But why would they have thrown away a good android?”

  “It can’t be that good,” Asger said. “It’s missing a hand.”

  “A simple repair, especially if the cut is as clean as it looks.” Casmir gripped his chin as he gazed at the display. “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Androids record everything they witness,” Ishii said, “until they need more space, and then they delete some of the old nonessential stuff. Since this couldn’t have happened more than a couple of weeks ago, it should have a recording of who did that. And maybe it can tell us where the cargo ship went.”

  “Why would he be floating out there?” Casmir asked. “Especially if he has that information. Whoever took the ship wouldn’t have wanted us to find it.”

  He winced, still wondering how someone had found the ship in the first place. He’d left the stealth generator on when he parked it in orbit, and he’d disabled the communications systems and tracking chip, so nobody should have been able to find it. Even he would have had to calculate its position based on the orbit he’d left it in and how often its thrusters had been programmed to fire to keep that orbit from deteriorating.

  The bridge doors slid open, and Kim and Dr. Sikou walked in. Nobody batted an eye at their entrance. Kim’s position of civilian advisor definitely allowed more wandering of the ship than Casmir’s.

  Dr. Sikou pointed at Asger’s hand, waved her medical kit, and drew him off into a briefing room.

  “You think it’s a trap?” Ishii was looking at Casmir, not his newest visitors. “Or a diversion?”

  “Maybe they—” Casmir waved nebulously to indicate he didn’t know who they were, “—suspected the Fleet would be along and wanted to distract you. Or send you off in another direction. Maybe Tork does have footage, but it’s been altered. Maybe the cargo ship went to a system with a water world, but the android will show someone programming in a course to System Cerberus, and when we follow, we’ll spill out into the waiting hands of pirates.”

  “Pirates don’t scare me. Wasting time does.” Ishii rose from his pod and walked over to the scanner station. “I want as complete an analysis of that thing as you can give me,” he told the officer working there. “If it’s painted with an explosive substance or seems to be anything but an android, I want to know.”

  “Are you thinking of bringing it on board, sir?” The officer brought an interface arm to his embedded chip and tapped a few controls on the panel.

  “Yes. And I’m thinking of having Grunburg and our civilian advisor take a close look at it.”

  “Is he talking about me or you?” Kim asked, stepping up to Casmir’s side. It didn’t sound like a joke, but it was often hard to tell with her.

  “I assume me,” Casmir said, “but why do you ask?”

  “I thought he might want an analysis of the bacteria present inside it to possibly help determine its system of origin.”

  “You can do that?”

  “It would be easier with a human, and if it hadn’t been floating frozen in space for weeks, but I’m sure I can find some evidence of dead bacteria. Dormant endospores, if nothing else. Each of the Twelve Systems has its own signature ratio of common bacteria that humans brought with them from Earth mingled with native bacteria from the various planets and moons that had microbial life when the first colonists arrived. There’s some commingling due to space travel, but it’s usually still possible to identify a person’s home system, if they haven’t been away for too long. Odin was a bacterial paradise when humans arrived, in addition to having all manner of native flora and fauna. I could identify a Kingdom subject within seconds, simply by looking at a cheek swab under a microscope.”

  “Are you saying… if I’d thought to bring back a sample of the bacteria living on that cargo ship when I was there, you could have told me where it originated?”

  “Very likely.”

  Casmir slapped a palm to his forehead. “Damn, Kim. If I’d known that, I would have licked the deck while my face was smashed against it, and then you could have cultured my tongue.”

  One of her eyebrows twitched. “A clean swab inserted into a properly labeled tube of sterile nutrient broth would have been preferable.”

  “I didn’t have any of those in my tool satchel.”

  “A deficiency you should remedy.”

  “Absolutely.” Casmir turned as Ishii walked back to his command pod. “Captain, your bacteriologist-on-loan wants to swab that android.”

  Ishii’s eyebrows did an only slightly more expressive twitch. “Does that mean you think it’s safe to bring on board?”

  “Oh, not at all. I think it’s a trap. But I bet its bacteria won’t lie.”

  “Aren’t its bacteria as frozen as it is?”

  “Bacteria are regularly frozen for preservation,” Kim said. “It would likely be possible to revive specimens collected in space. However, I don’t need to revive them to identify them and make an educated guess where the android and the cargo ship originated.”

  “Which we would then hope is where they returned to and where we can now find them?” Ishii asked.

  “I’ve narrowed down some likely spots,” Casmir said. “If one happens to be in the system that matches Kim’s bacterial analysis…”

  “All right, good. We’ll check all that, and I also want whatever footage that android recorded. Dabrowski, since you’re sure it’s not safe to bring it aboard, I’m going to send you to visit it.”

  “Uh.” Casmir’s one and only spacewalk had been when he’d leaped from the exploding refinery out to the Stellar Dragon with Qin and Zee. “Do I get an oxygen tank?”

  “If you want. I was going to send you in a shuttle supplied with air.”

  “Oh. That sounds very reasonable. Thank you.”

  Ishii looked at Kim.

  “Captain Rache took us onto an airless refinery without giving us tanks,” she explained.

  “That’s criminal,” Ishii said. “But that’s not what I intended to ask. I was wondering if you want to go with him, but now that I think about it, you’re too important to risk. I’ll send my programmer, Grunburg, along with him, and they can bring you back a sample. Or the whole android if they deem it’s not dangerous.”

  “That would be acceptable,” Kim said.

  Casmir thought about protesting the fact that he wasn’t too important to risk, but he was so relieved he wasn’t being forced out an airlock without an oxygen tank that he didn’t mind. If Ishii was going to send one of his own men along—a programmer sounded like a promising colleague—he must not think it too dangerous a task.

  “Shall I supply you with appropriate swabs and tubes?” Kim asked Casmir.

  “Are you going to put some in my tool satchel whether I say yes or not?”

  “Yes. You horrified me with the idea of trying to isolate exogenous bacteria from the endogenous microbiota of your tongue.”

  “Sorry. That was inconsiderate of me.”

  “Yes.”

  Casmir grinned. He wasn’t sure, but he thought there might have been a glint of humor in Kim’s eyes.

  Yas sat at a table in the Fedallah’s mess hall, eating dinner, which consisted of bland vegetables, oddly texture
d vat chicken, and a lumpy brown sauce of indeterminate flavor. Supposedly, the concoctions served on board were optimized to be nutrient-dense with the ideal mix of fat, protein, and carbohydrates. Now and then, the meals neared the decent mark, but most of the time, Yas suspected the dubious flavors and textures were intentionally chosen to make the mercenaries grumpy and mean. And they were working, if the shouts and fist banging coming from the group two tables down were an indicator.

  As always, he’d thought about dining in his cabin or sickbay, but that would have required an extra trip to return the dishes. As far as he’d seen, the ship lacked the service robots that had been typical on Tiamat Station. Or, if not typical, easily affordable on what he’d made as a surgeon there.

  Jess Khonsari walked into the mess hall with her usual swagger, her high cheekbones and full lips as striking as always. More than a few of the men’s gazes drifted in her direction. Yas hoped she would ignore them and join him, but he kept himself from making pleading puppy-dog eyes and pointing vigorously at the seat next to him.

  He focused on the tablet he’d opted to do research on instead of his embedded chip and contact interface, mostly so he would look busy and nobody would bother him. A vacant expression seemed to be an invitation for a mercenary to stride up, thump him on the back, and shove up a sleeve or pull off a boot to get an opinion on some fungal growth or skin irritation around a cybernetic implant.

  “How’re you doing, Doc?” Jess slid into the seat across from him.

  A few of the men looked over, either disappointed by her choice or hoping for something gossip-worthy to share in the gym.

  Yas ignored them and focused on Jess, noting that her warm brown skin didn’t quite hide the dark bags under her eyes. It was a wonder that she still managed to look beautiful, but the form-fitting galaxy suit tended to ensure men barely noticed her eyes. Some men. He wasn’t that shallow.

  “Doc?” she prompted.

  “Yes,” he blurted, realizing he’d been studying her… shallowly. “I am, at the captain’s request, researching poisons that might have particular efficacy against astroshamans, though it’s hard to find anything that wouldn’t also affect all humans. I’m focusing on agents that attack the nerves, since those are usually altered during cybernetic surgery to network the new parts in with the human system.”