Crossfire (Star Kingdom Book 4)

by Lindsay Buroker

  “It’s not that bad,” she added, in case he expected clarification. “There’s a private balcony.”

  Asger pushed his hand through his hair, tearing out a few strands. Maybe that wasn’t the clarification he’d sought.

  “You’re staying here, Asger,” Ishii said. “There won’t be any assassins out there.”

  “What if that android has been programmed to be an assassin and kill whoever brings it in?” Asger pointed his pertundo, the telescoping shaft extended, toward the closed shuttle-bay doors and the frozen enemy that floated somewhere beyond them. “That is the android that we battled on the bridge of the cargo ship—the one you tricked, Casmir. Even if it wasn’t programmed to kill you, it may make an exception because it’s annoyed with you.”

  “The scanners showed that it’s powered down,” Ishii said. “As long as they don’t activate it, it can’t assassinate anyone. Probably.”

  “Probably.” Asger thumped the shaft of his weapon on the deck. “Casmir…”

  “You should stay here, Asger.” Casmir stepped away from the shuttle and put a hand on his arm. “While I appreciate your willingness to protect me, it’s better not to endanger more people than necessary, just in case there is a booby trap.”

  “Booby traps are the precise reason I should be there.”

  “You have experience with nullifying explosives and biohazard weapons?” Casmir asked.

  “No, but I can stand in front of you if they go off, so you don’t die.”

  Casmir’s mouth opened and closed again. He didn’t seem to know what to say to that.

  Ishii squinted at Asger. “Do you actually have orders to do that?”

  “The queen has always wanted him protected, and it’s my understanding that the king does, at the moment, too. Until the gate is recovered.”

  Kim didn’t miss that at the moment or the connotation that the king’s preferences could change with the wind.

  “Must be nice to get a knight for a personal bodyguard,” Ishii said.

  Grunburg poked his head out of the shuttle’s open hatch. “Do you think he’d jump in front of me?”

  “No, because he’s not coming,” Casmir said.

  The doors opened once more, and Zee strode into the shuttle bay carrying several toolboxes.

  “He is.” Casmir smiled.

  “I find it disconcerting that you prefer a robot’s presence over mine,” Asger said.

  “Only because he bounces back better from explosives thrown at him and boulders landing on his back.” Casmir waved for Zee to hop into the shuttle with the toolboxes.

  “You’re underestimating me, Dabrowski. Haven’t you seen my calendars?”

  Ishii rolled his eyes again. He did that a lot for the supreme commander of a warship.

  “Calendars?” Casmir asked. “There’s more than one?”

  “One for each year. Ask Qin the next time you see her. She can attest to the sturdiness of my physique.”

  Casmir’s lower lip drooped. “You gave her a calendar? Of your… sturdiness?”

  “I signed it. I thought she would like it.”

  “You should probably run your future gift ideas past me. For refinement suggestions.”

  “I didn’t think giving her underwear would be appropriate.”

  “Get in the shuttle!” Ishii roared, making both men jump.

  Kim also jumped and stared at him. His face was red.

  “It’s like being in a frat house. Go do your damn mission so we can figure out where to find the gate.” Ishii stepped toward Casmir, as if he meant to personally heft him into the shuttle.

  But Casmir scrambled in on his own, joining Zee and Grunburg inside. Asger’s fingers twitched as the hatch lowered, as if he meant to stop it and leap in, but maybe Zee’s appearance had convinced him that Casmir didn’t need another bodyguard. He grumbled something under his breath and stalked out of the shuttle bay.

  “Scholar Sato.” Ishii extended a hand toward the door in invitation.

  Knowing they would have to leave for the bay to depressurize and the shuttle to launch, she walked out with him, but she lifted a hand as soon as they were in the corridor.

  “There was something I meant to tell you earlier, Captain,” she said.

  “What?” He eyed her warily.

  “When we actually find the gate, I believe Casmir is the best person to study it and figure out a way to turn off its defensive mechanisms, i.e. the emitting of the deadly pseudo radiation.”

  “Why him?”

  “In addition to his immunity, he’s good at solving engineering problems.”

  “Wait, his what? He’s immune?”

  Kim cocked her head. “You didn’t know that?”

  “Nobody told me. Why is he immune?”

  Kim opened her mouth to give the full explanation but caught herself, realizing that would mean explaining that he had been cloned from a man who’d lived and died three hundred years earlier, before the Great Plague.

  “He has unique mitochondria,” she said.

  “Lucky him.”

  “Only if we don’t encounter the Great Plague virus in our travels.” She worried about that now that they were heading out of System Lion. Even if the virus no longer ran rampant among human civilizations, she was sure pockets still existed out there, surviving in less desirable hosts, ever ready to pounce at an opportunity.

  Ishii started to ask a question but shook his head and switched to another. “Is his immunity the reason the king and queen have given him a bodyguard?”

  “That’s tangentially the reason.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Tangentially? In a way that relates only slightly to a matter. Peripherally.”

  Ishii chopped the air with his hand. “I know what the word means. What I want to know is does this mean it’s more important to keep him alive than I realized because of that?”

  Kim wanted to state that it would be important to keep him alive under any circumstances, but all she said was, “Yes.”

  “It would have been nice if my orders had said that.”

  “Maybe your superiors believed you would do your best to keep civilian advisors alive, regardless, and did not feel the need to state that it was important.” She couldn’t keep her words from coming out cool and accusatory.

  “I have a whole ship to worry about and a mission to complete.” Ishii bowed stiffly. “Good day, Scholar Sato.”

  Kim frowned as he walked away, not sure her words would affect the way Ishii treated Casmir. She hoped he considered Grunburg invaluable and would do his best to keep both men alive.

  There was no gravity on the shuttle. Casmir had known there wouldn’t be, and he’d taken an anti-nausea pill before heading to the shuttle bay, but he’d forgotten about it until they launched and flew away from the Osprey and its spin gravity. He sat wrapped in a pod, cradled like an egg, but that didn’t keep his stomach from feeling the effects of their acceleration, turns, and deceleration as the craft’s autopilot took them around some space junk and toward the abandoned android.

  “Do you get space-sick, sir?” Grunburg asked, his face not visible through the side of his pod.

  “Yes.”

  “Me too. I got an injection of some gut bacteria when I first started space training, and that’s helped lots.”

  Casmir snorted, remembering his conversation with Kim. “Is injection really the accurate word there?”

  “Uh, perhaps not, but it worked pretty well.”

  “I wonder if Kim made the strain they used.”

  “I’m not sure. Dr. Sikou would know. There’s the android. Let me have the shuttle’s external mag-gripper snag it.” Grunburg adjusted his pod forward and tapped a few controls.

  Casmir was glad to let someone else handle the shuttle, since he didn’t have any familiarity with the model—or shuttles in general. With his depth perception, he’d make a farce of grabbing something out of space.

  “The captain said to run it thr
ough decon and bring it on board. Do you think that’s wise?”

  “No, but we’re going to be limited with what we can do without direct access to it.”

  “Right. Bringing it in.”

  Casmir activated his helmet, and it sealed over his head. Just in case the android had been given some awful virus that the decontamination system didn’t catch. And would that decon protocol destroy the bacteria Kim needed to look at? It hadn’t sounded like she needed the bacteria alive to identify them.

  A few clunks reverberated through the shuttle as tools extended, clamped onto Tork, and pulled him into the airlock. Casmir tried to wait patiently. Behind him, Zee gripped a handhold, his legs floating free in zero-g.

  “We’ve got it on board,” Grunburg announced. “Running decon.” He leaned forward and eyed a display. “It’s still not showing any heat signatures or anything to suggest it’s powered up. The captain wants it to stay that way. Think we can find the footage without turning it on?”

  “Maybe. We’ll have to look under the hood to see if Tork is powered down because a switch was flicked or because of damage. Or if he’s just playing dead.”

  Casmir patted his tool satchel, making sure the bulge in the side was still there. He’d swung by the ship’s small robotics lab in engineering and been fortunate enough to find a spare hand for the android models the Osprey employed. It wouldn’t be a precise match, but with a little tinkering, Casmir thought he could outfit Tork with it. If it made sense to do so. He had an idea, but he wasn’t sure it would prove viable. Or that it was wise.

  “That’s an alarming thought,” Grunburg said. “Do you really think the android is booby-trapped?”

  “I am suspicious of Tork’s presence here instead of inside his cargo ship.”

  “Right. I’m going to get it and strap it down in the back.”

  Grunburg left his seat and pushed himself toward the airlock. Casmir, telling himself that it would be wrong of him to advise from his pod while Grunburg did all the work, took a few breaths to steady his stomach, then hit the release tab.

  The pod’s embrace lessened, and he maneuvered himself toward a worktable in the rear where Grunburg was strapping down the inert Tork-57. The walls were full of wide, thin drawers of tools, in addition to the boxes Zee had brought on board and secured. This particular shuttle must have been used for repairs rather than sent out on combat missions. If nothing else, it would have everything they needed to tinker with the android.

  “Its power switch is turned off.” Grunburg had a panel in the back of Tork’s neck open. “I’m going to see if I can get any data without switching it on, but that’s probably not going to work.”

  “I doubt it. Let’s search his physical body thoroughly first before we risk it.”

  Casmir grabbed a scanner and ran it over Tork as Grunburg finished strapping him to the table. The android’s hand was missing, as they’d been aware, and his overalls were torn, the fabric frozen in rucked-up positions, and there were gouges and a dent in the side of his head. Some of the damage Casmir recognized from the battle, but the hand had definitely been there the last time he’d seen the android. He peered down and examined the severed arm. It had been a clean cut, as if by a bladed weapon, like Asger’s fancy halberd. Had whoever collected the cargo ship been carrying a sword?

  “No sign that he’s online in even a backup capacity now.” Casmir set an alert on the scanner, so it would inform them if that changed, and tried to set it on the table. It promptly floated away, and he grabbed it and found a place to wedge it into. It wasn’t only his stomach that needed to get used to zero-g. “I’m pulling up his model schematics from the network so we can check all of the orifices for explosives or any other foreign material.”

  “If there’s one thing I never expected to do with an old instructor, it’s check orifices.”

  “Yeah, that’s an activity the school board doesn’t encourage professors to do with students.” Casmir pulled out his drill and put in a tiny bit to open a hidden panel in Tork’s side that he would have missed if he hadn’t had the schematics.

  “Weird. How’s one supposed to prepare for a career in customs?”

  “I can’t believe that sense of humor fits into the military.”

  “It doesn’t,” Grunburg said.

  Casmir carefully removed the panel, checking the scanner to make sure he didn’t trip some virtual wire and cause the android to power up. And attack them. He glanced at Zee and was relieved to find him nearby, paying close attention.

  He maneuvered himself lower so he could peer into the panel. There was a spare power pack inside, a few wires, and… a small rectangle of gray matter that looked a lot like a Mark-Pak amalgam explosive.

  “We may have a problem,” Casmir said.

  “I am detecting electronic activity in the android,” Zee said, just before the scanner beeped a warning.

  Casmir couldn’t tell if the activity was coming from Tork or from the explosive. He pulled out a flashlight and examined the gray rectangle, trying to tell if it had been wedged into the only available space or was hard-wired to Tork’s insides.

  “Uh, I didn’t turn it on.” Grunburg had hooked a tablet and data transfer cables to the ports near the ON/OFF switch. “Maybe some defensive security measure we triggered?”

  “Maybe,” Casmir said. “There’s a chunk of Mark-Pak in here with a single wire going into the android. It was definitely jury-rigged. I don’t see a detonator. I think Tork probably is the detonator.”

  Grunburg cursed. “Better get it out of there before the android fully powers up.”

  “Right.” Casmir pulled out wire cutters, cursing when he tried to set his flashlight down and it floated away. Well, it couldn’t go far.

  Zee stepped forward. “Let me remove this explosive device while you humans take cover.”

  Casmir hesitated. He hated to foist something dangerous off on someone else, but Zee had a good chance of surviving an explosion and even reassembling himself back to his original state. Casmir’s and Grunburg’s odds of that were far less. “All right. Here.”

  Casmir tried to hand Zee the wire cutters before he fully remembered what his creation was capable of. Zee lifted his hand, and two of his fingers morphed into scissors.

  “Right. Grunburg?” Casmir tilted his head toward the pods in front of the navigation console. Unfortunately, the small shuttle didn’t have any separation between the front and back—no bulkheads to hide behind. Not unless he and Grunburg wanted to squeeze into the lav together.

  “Hiding?” Grunburg glanced at Zee but didn’t object. He removed his tablet, leaving the cables dangling from the back of Tork’s neck, and followed Casmir up front.

  “Go ahead, Zee,” Casmir said as they crouched behind the pods. “Remove the Mark-Pak and throw it out the airlock.”

  “I suppose we can’t get the footage the captain wants if we just throw the android out the airlock,” Grunburg muttered.

  “He already spent enough time out there.” It was silly, especially since Tork belonged to their enemies, but Casmir felt sorry for the rejected android. “Wait,” he blurted, an idea coming to him. “Hold on, Zee. If the guy who last tinkered with him wasn’t wearing gloves…”

  Casmir rummaged in his satchel again, snorting when he saw Kim’s kit for swabbing bacteria samples. He would do that later. For now, he pulled out a brush with fine bristles.

  He opened the bank of drawers near the worktable, items secured inside so they wouldn’t float away, and found some clear tape and what looked like charcoal powder in a jar. It wasn’t labeled. Hoping for the best, he grabbed it.

  “Professor?” Grunburg asked. “Do you think we have the time to do… whatever it is you’re doing?”

  “What I’m doing is wondering why I don’t carry lycopodium powder in my toolkit. That’s what the detectives always use in the old murder-mystery comics.”

  Casmir took his borrowed goods back to the niche in the android’s side, opened t
he jar of powder, and did his best to dust it over the interior with the brush before it floated away. Blowing while wearing a helmet did nothing useful, and he snorted as he caught himself doing it, glad the Glasnax faceplate had anti-fogging properties.

  “Professor…”

  “Almost done. I’m hoping to get lucky and snag a fingerprint. The oil left behind by fingers would have frozen in space, but it should still be here, right? In a crystalized form?” Casmir decided not to explain that he’d only read about lifting fingerprints, and it tended to involve identifiable powders, better brushes, and gravity-filled crime scenes.

  “You’re doing that now?” Grunburg asked instead of answering the question. He was still crouching behind the pilot’s pod. “While there’s a bomb ticking down?”

  “Well, if it blows up, it’ll be much harder to get fingerprints.”

  “You’re a loon, Professor.”

  “You can call me Casmir.”

  Casmir worked quickly, sweat dribbling from his hairline even though the galaxy suit created a perfectly conditioned environment. In the nonexistent gravity, the bead of sweat floated away from his face and splashed against his faceplate.

  He carefully brushed away the excess powder, stuck his clear tape inside, and hoped for the best. There were a few smudges on it. Fingerprints? Maybe. He smashed the tape to a white piece of cardboard and stuck it in his satchel.

  “Done.” Casmir dove behind the pod next to Grunburg. “Your turn, Zee.”

  As the seconds passed, Casmir kept his head down, afraid to watch Zee’s progress in case the explosive blew.

  Grunburg, crouching in a similar position, peered over at him. “When I became a military programmer, I didn’t envision myself being flung into dangerous situations very often.”

  “When I became a robotics professor, I also didn’t envision myself being flung into dangerous situations. I’m positive it wasn’t mentioned in the job description anywhere.”

  “Well, you’re working for the military now. When you sign the enlistment contract, there are a lot of lines about possibly dying and your family not being able to sue the government for a settlement.”

  “I didn’t sign any contracts. I’m a civilian advisor.”