“I’ll tell them you went out of town if they come up here,” Huang said. “Do they talk?”
“Yes, they can talk and interrogate you like a professional soldier. Professor, you need to get out of here too. Don’t put yourself in danger. Don’t talk to them. Nobody should talk to them. Try to evacuate the building.” Casmir paused, looking at his desk and the work benches and his satchel. He was throwing things in without rational thought. He’d just stuffed the stapler in his bag.
“Casmir…”
“Just do it, Huang.” Casmir flung his bag over his shoulder. “And be careful.”
He raced for the door, half-expecting to find a crusher looming in the hallway outside.
But the hallway was empty. The knight had come in time. Maybe. Crushers could outrun an auto-cab. If they spotted him…
“You be careful,” Huang called after him.
Casmir waved a curt acknowledgment as he ran down the hallway, already contemplating where to go to get a ride off the planet. Zamek Space Station? Would it be safe? Or would those crushers or whoever had programmed them be waiting there? Was there another place with ships that took passengers off the planet? He had no idea. He’d only been outside of the city twice—for camping trips as a boy. He got seasick and cabsick, so he’d always been certain space would be a miserable experience best left for those with iron constitutions.
He ran down the emergency stairs, accessing the net through his chip and searching for transportation options. But he halted and swore as a realization smacked him in the face like a sledgehammer.
Kim. She would be headed home from work soon if she wasn’t already. If the crushers knew to look for him at his workplace, they would know his home address.
What if they were already there?
2
Bonita “Laser” Lopez flexed her leg under the control panel in her freighter’s small navigation cabin and tried to ignore the ache in her knee. She didn’t have to walk to turn over the cargo and collect her pesos, just have her new assistant open the hatch and let Baum’s loyalists come in and get it. Except they would pay in Kingdom crowns, she reminded herself. She would have to exchange them before leaving the system.
Having money in need of exchange would be a good problem. One she hadn’t experienced in far too long.
Her other knee twinged.
“I’m afraid I have a lot of debt to pay off before considering surgeries,” Bonita muttered to her collection of aching joints, reluctant to admit that the decades of acrobatic chases and joint-wrenching skirmishes to collect bounties were catching up with her. It was work she wished she was still doing. More honorable work than this.
She drummed her fingers, frowning impatiently at the large display stretching across the front of the cabin. Currently, it showed the view from the Stellar Dragon’s forward camera, an abandoned beach two hundred miles north of Odin’s capital, moonlight shining on the waves crashing onto the sand. Farther inland, a few distant lights indicated cabins, but it was early spring and cold out. Campers strolling along the beach in the moonlight weren’t likely. It was an ideal place for an exchange. If only Baum would show up.
The hatch opened behind her, and a soft whir, whir, suck sound came from the deck. Without looking, Bonita lifted her boots and propped them on the control panel. One of the ship’s many, many cleaning robots whirred around her pod, vacuuming up nonexistent dirt and lint as she leaned back into the cushioned full-body seat.
The Ring of the Nibelung floated in from the corridor speakers. Bonita groaned and covered her ears as the robot swished and swept to the rise and fall of the music. She was positive that Viggo had no idea what the words meant in the two-thousand-year-old Earth opera. Unfortunately, that didn’t keep him from playing it over and over and over.
“This isn’t the time for housekeeping, Viggo,” she said.
“Oh, I disagree,” came the voice of the ship’s computer. “While we’re here on Odin, we must take advantage of the planet’s gravity. The dust settles. My filtration systems are without peer, as you know, but the fans can only do so much when it comes to directing the larger particles toward the ionizer. Thank you for finally replacing the filters, by the way.”
“It was the least I could do when they showed up at the cargo hatch, with a fresh charge to my bank account, a bank account that can barely afford food these days, much less air filters.”
“You’ll thank me later. I bet you already feel better in the mornings. I was growing concerned for your health. And Qin’s, though she’s admittedly sturdy in the constitution department. But if I were still flesh and blood, I’m sure I would have been coughing my way through the nights. There were mold spores on the B Deck filter. Mold spores, Captain Bonita.”
She almost snapped at him to call her Laser, since no self-respecting bounty hunter was named Bonita, even a semi-retired one, but she’d been trying to get him to do that for almost ten years, and it hadn’t stuck yet.
“Were you really a smuggler, Viggo?” she asked for what had to be the thousandth time.
“Certainly. I was an excellent smuggler.”
A throat cleared in the hatchway, and Qin Liangyu walked in, giving Bonita a curious look, as if it was odd to have a conversation with the ship’s computer.
Qin had only been Bonita’s co-pilot for a couple of months and didn’t seem to fully grasp yet that Viggo had been a human being once, before some of his enemies had caught up with him, and his doctor friend had fulfilled the then-captain’s last wishes, to upload his consciousness into the Stellar Dragon’s computer.
At least that was the story Viggo had told her. It had all happened nearly a hundred years ago, and she was the fourth owner of the ship since then, so she didn’t have a way to verify it.
“I have unsecured the cargo and stacked it by the hatch. Any sign of the buyers yet, Captain?” Qin clasped her hands behind her back as she faced Bonita, her skin bronze under a light layer of fur, her black hair pulled back into a clasp, revealing pointed ears. When she smiled, fangs were visible, but she didn’t smile often, not as often as a nineteen-year-old kid should.
“Still waiting.” Bonita waved to the empty beach, then to the second pod in navigation.
Qin considered it but didn’t sit down. She was armed, with the muzzle of a huge DEW-Tek Starhawk 5000 sticking up over her shoulder, a stunner and dagger hanging from her belt.
“Perhaps I should wait outside?” Qin asked. “Is it possible their ship already arrived and cooled down sufficiently so we’re unable to read the heat signature?”
“My scanners are too advanced to be fooled by that,” Viggo said with a sniff. “There are no ships or humans in the immediate vicinity. There are naknaks and numerous field mice in the grasses above the beach, an owl in a tree, and a pod of whales being trailed by two orchastas swimming parallel to the shore approximately one mile away.”
“Odin got Noah’s full ark, didn’t it?” Bonita asked.
“Some of those creatures are native to Odin, but yes, the planet was a near-match to Earth and therefore able to sustain most of the reptiles, animals, and endothermic vertebrates that were brought on the colony ships.”
“The endothermic what? Did you talk like that when you were human?”
“Naturally.”
“Did you get beat up often?”
“I fail to see how that’s relevant now.”
The cleaning robot zoomed out on its sweepers. Leaving in a huff? Fortunately, the music grew quieter with the vacuum’s departure.
Qin listened to the exchange impassively. Her genetically modified face would have been hard to read under any circumstances, but she had a knack for keeping it in a neutral expression, her yellow cat’s eyes with their slitted irises changing little. A survival mechanism, probably.
“I detect an aircraft approaching,” Viggo said.
“Finally.” Bonita faced the display again.
“It appears to be a hawk-class hover shuttle with the markings scru
bbed off.”
“Not surprising. It’s not like the castle would openly send knights out to pick up weapons that aren’t legal yet in the Kingdom.”
“Too bad,” Qin said in a wistful tone. “I would like to see a knight.”
“I’m afraid a knight wouldn’t want to see you. They don’t even let their apples get modified on Odin.”
“I know. It’s just that they always sound so romantic in the stories.”
Bonita blinked, surprised to learn that her fierce new assistant had a romantic side or read anything but Guns and Grenades Monthly.
“When I was young and enduring all my training and… other things, I used to dream that one would come save me,” Qin added softly.
“You don’t need saving, kid. You saved yourself in the end, right?” Bonita thumped her on the shoulder. She didn’t know much about Qin’s history, since she’d been evasive about her past, but gathered that one of the pirate families had ordered her created and raised her to be a killer for them.
“I did escape on my own, but…”
“You don’t need romance, either. Trust me. I’ve been married three times, and the last bastard—that hijo de perra…” Bonita grimaced, thinking again of her deficient bank account and the fact that this ship was all she had left, a ship with the registration taxes overdue back in Cabrakan Habitat. “Men are decent company now and then, but don’t enter into a contract with any of them. You just end up screwed. Every time.”
“I am now detecting heat signatures in the grass a mile up the beach,” Viggo said, not commenting on her rant. It was one he’d heard countless times.
“That’s not the direction Baum’s shuttle is coming from, right?” Bonita asked.
“It is not.”
“Maybe someone set out mouse traps for the naknaks.” Bonita went back to drumming her fingers on the control panel, not liking that her deserted beach had grown busy.
“It is likely they are robots or some other type of machinery,” Viggo said. “I believe they are ambulatory.”
“Are they ambulating right now?”
“They are.”
“Heading this way?”
“Yes.”
Bonita rubbed her knee. “Wonderful.”
She had expected this handoff to be easy. Baum’s loyalists were supposed to be on the same side as the Kingdom, even if they had vigilante tendencies and used less than legal methods of fighting their battles. Would the Kingdom Guard or the knights truly care about them acquiring new weapons?
Lights appeared as Baum’s shuttle flew over them, its thrusters hurling sand against the Dragon’s hull. After it passed them, it rotated and lowered itself to the beach. Bonita wondered if its pilot had detected the heat signatures.
“We’ll let Baum’s men come to us. Qin, head back to the hold and prepare to let them in if I give the all-clear. Don’t let them know it’s just the two of us.” Bonita wiped her palm on the leg of her galaxy suit, caught herself, and stopped. She didn’t want Qin to see her nerves. She was the hardened professional, after all, a woman just shy of seventy years who’d been dealing with all types of unsavory people for more than fifty.
Normally, she wouldn’t feel uneasy about this setup, but having a modded assistant on a planet that forbade genetic tinkering already had her on edge—she’d casually lied about being alone to the customs android that had chatted her up. And Viggo’s ambulatory heat signatures weren’t helping her nerves. The quicker she handed off the cargo and got paid, the better.
“Yes, Captain.” Qin hopped through the hatchway and glided toward the ladder well, as graceful as the cat from which someone had sourced her genes.
Outside, the hatch on the side of Baum’s shuttle opened, and a squad of six men in combat armor filed out, rifles slung over their shoulders, hands on pistols at their belts. They looked around warily before heading toward the Dragon.
“Are you planning to deal fairly or not, Mr. Baum?” Bonita wondered to herself, watching the men advance.
It was a large team, but that didn’t necessarily mean Baum intended to use force. The cargo case that Bonita had pushed around by herself up in space weighed hundreds of pounds here in Odin’s heavy gravity.
The comm light flashed.
“Captain Laser,” Baum said, saying the name with the same sarcasm he’d used during their first contact.
Bonita gritted her teeth, reminding herself that she hadn’t spent much time in this system. The Kingdom people didn’t know her reputation well, the fact that she could shave a man’s balls with a laser or any other projectile weapon known to man.
“What?” she replied.
“My sergeant has the payment. Once he inspects the goods, he’ll give it to your people, and my crew will unload the cargo.”
“Agreed, but you know there’s a lock code on the box, right? Does your sergeant know it?”
“We know it. We ordered the weapons, after all.”
“That’s good, because I paid to pick them up, and Sayona Station wouldn’t give it to me.”
“You paid a balance due, a small percentage of the total, and will be compensated shortly. Baum, out.”
“Ass,” Bonita muttered, not caring that the channel was still open.
She closed it and switched to the ship’s internal comm. “Qin, put your helmet on when you open the hatch, and don’t show off your uniqueness. Baum doesn’t have the Kingdom accent I expected, but if his people are from here, they’re not going to like you.”
“Few do,” came the quiet, sad reply.
Bonita winced, wishing she’d chosen her words better. It had been a long time since she’d had to be circumspect with anyone.
“The heat signatures are close, Captain,” Viggo said.
Bonita reached for the comm, intending to warn Baum in case his scanners weren’t as good, but red flares of light burst out of the grass. An alarm went off as one of the attacks struck the Dragon’s hull. The deck lurched, and rattles came from all around her.
Bonita cursed. Her freighter was better armored than most private vessels, but whatever that was had been big.
The red energy bolts slammed into the shuttle, and pieces of the hull blew off. The team of armored men fired into the grasses as they turned and ran back to their ship.
“No!” Bonita blurted, alarmed that the deal might not go through.
Tanks rolled out of the grass, and attack drones zipped out of the dark sky, raining down crimson energy bolts. Two of Baum’s men were struck and flew sideways into the sand. The others grabbed them, dragging them toward their hatch. The hover shuttle fired its thrusters, preparing to depart.
Another blast struck the Dragon.
Bonita raised the ship’s shields, but they were designed to deflect space trash in flight, not directed-energy weapons.
“Bonita,” Viggo said. “We must abort. Those are—”
“I know, I know,” she snarled, flinging herself back into the pod and pulling the neural navigator over her eye. The cool kiss of the interface pressed against her temple where her chip was embedded under the skin.
As she ordered the thrusters to fire, more energy blasts struck the hull. Her ship lurched wildly, and her pod tightened protectively, cushioning her like glass in a shipping container.
“You betrayed us,” came Baum’s angry cry over the comm channel.
“It wasn’t me!” Bonita barked. “If you didn’t want to pay for the weapons, you should have just said so.”
“That’s the most idiotic thing I’ve—”
Baum’s shuttle exploded, and the channel went dead.
“Find a pod,” Bonita yelled over her shoulder to Qin, not bothering to use the comm system. “If those drones follow us, we’re going to be scragged.”
The Dragon cleared the beach and accelerated over the Arashi Sea, Bonita zigzagging to make a hard target. But not hard enough. A round from one of the tanks struck them, the solid projectile tearing through the ship’s hull. An alarm flashed on the en
gine panel. The round was lodged in the housing for the fusion drive. She prayed it wasn’t an explosive that would detonate.
“Fusion drive compromised,” Viggo said.
“I know that too.” Bonita tried to dash sweat from her eyes, but the pod held her tight as the craft whipped about, swooping and banking and accelerating unpredictably, the framework of the old freighter creaking and groaning under the g-forces. “This night is getting to be more and more delightful.”
They didn’t need to fire up the fusion drive until they were in space, but there was no way they would get to the gate at the outer edge of the system without it.
The drones did not follow her out over the sea. That was one good thing, but if that robotic menagerie down there had been sent by the local law—or even the damn Kingdom knights—the Dragon’s presence might already have been reported. And she couldn’t break orbit on this backward gravity well without using the very public and very monitored launch loop.
“Captain?” Qin asked from the hatchway, gripping the jamb with strong hands and bracing herself against the erratic accelerations of the ship. “Are you all right?”
“Yes.”
“Are we all right?” Qin’s gaze shifted toward the flashing engine alarm.
After confirming that the drones had fallen out of range, Bonita steadied the ship and freed her arm from the pod’s embrace so she could wipe sweat out of her eyes. “I don’t know. We have to find a place that will help us with repairs and that isn’t going to report us to the law.”
“Do you know where that is?”
“Not yet,” Bonita said grimly.
3
The honking, blaring, grinding, and whirring of rush hour in the city battered the university campus from all sides as dusk descended, but faculty housing was in a quieter interior nook. Stout oaks and prickly ciern trees lined the streets, spreading acorn-filled branches and thorny vines over the walkways. A few squirrels skittered from tree to tree, making final rounds before bedding down for the night.
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