Shockwave

by Lindsay Buroker

  “Did the captain make it?” Casmir asked. “We saw… We were being questioned when the crushers showed up. We saw them head to the ship.”

  “She lay low while the authorities fought it, so she’s fine for the moment.” Qin pointed at him. “But you are not.”

  “This is not news.” Casmir felt better with the big crusher looming behind him, but Zee wasn’t a solution to all of his problems.

  “How about the fact that there’s a bounty on your head?”

  “Uh, are you sure? I recall those mercenaries looking me up and saying there wasn’t one.”

  “That was five days ago. This popped up yesterday.”

  “Are you sure you can’t make an army of these?” Kim poked the crusher’s arm and seemed surprised that it had no give.

  “I could if I had time, access to that machine shop down there, and someone to deliver more materials. But I didn’t pay for the raw materials I used. Someone is going to figure that out eventually. And probably send a bill to the house.”

  “The captain is still in trouble,” Qin said. “Casmir, we need you to figure out how to disable the station’s weapons. Just temporarily.”

  Casmir gaped at her. “That’s illegal.”

  “Not if they don’t figure out you did it.”

  “No, I’m pretty sure it’s still illegal.”

  “In exchange, the captain says she’ll take you out of the system. You’re not going to be able to stay here with a bounty on your head. And it looks like you can’t go back to your planet yet, right?”

  “Unfortunately, that’s correct.”

  Kim shook her head bleakly.

  The lift came to a stop, but Qin pressed a button to hold it.

  “Are you in?” Qin asked. “I’ve been wandering the station all night looking for you. I passed the airlock and shuttle bay traffic-control center, so I can show you how to get there. Before, I thought maybe you could remotely hack into their computer from a closet somewhere, but between me and your new friend, maybe you could simply barge in and deal with anyone who objects.”

  “They’ll definitely be able to figure out who did it if we take that route.” Casmir pushed a hand through his hair. The idea that he could hack into a secure government traffic computer from a random closet was ludicrous. Everything about this was ludicrous. “Why does Lopez need the weapons turned off? She’s not—” He dropped his hand. “She still has the bioweapon, doesn’t she?”

  “Not intentionally. I wasn’t there, but I gathered things got out of hand. Her only hope now is to flee to another system where the Kingdom doesn’t have any jurisdiction. And she’s offering to take you with her. It’ll take whoever is chasing you a lot longer to find you then. The gate can go to any of the eleven other systems without leaving any trace of a ship’s passage.”

  “I know how the gate system works,” Casmir grumbled. “As much as most people know, anyway. Which is admittedly not much.”

  He met Kim’s gaze, wondering what she thought about this. She’d been silent, watching the exchange through slitted eyes. She was always suspicious of strangers or anyone who seemed to want something. He was quick to trust, wishing to believe the best in people, and knowing from experience that people performed better when they knew they were valued and trusted. But Qin wasn’t one of the young engineers on his robotics team. She was a warrior loyal to Captain Lopez who was, as far as he knew, loyal only to herself.

  “Isn’t your captain a bounty hunter?” Kim asked Qin.

  Qin shrugged. “She used to be. She hasn’t collected a bounty in as long as I’ve been with her. I assume she retired because it got too dangerous.”

  “Whereas smuggling is like an afternoon sunning yourself in Castle Park.”

  Qin shrugged again. “If you want to stay here, we’ll figure something out. I can try to force the airlock-control officers into helping, or keep them distracted while my captain escapes.”

  She nodded, as if she’d already decided to sacrifice herself.

  If Casmir had to pick one of them to escape and one not, he would have chosen the other way around. Lopez was jaded and hard to like. Qin could probably break his neck by blowing fiercely, but she was a more amenable soul.

  “Let me pull up a map,” he said with a sigh.

  “I can take you to—”

  “I want to find out where the weapons are physically located and fired from. It would be easier to tamper with them than hack into a secured system. From a closet.”

  Qin beamed a smile at him, the gesture sincere if alarming, since it displayed her fangs. Maybe she knew that, because the smile faded quickly, and she gave him a more formal nod. “Good. Thank you.”

  “Wait until we see what I can actually do,” Casmir said.

  Kim had a finger to her lips, and when he met her gaze, she shook her head slowly.

  Because she thought Qin was lying? Or because he was about to do something that would get him into more trouble with the law?

  Judging by the graveness of her expression, probably both.

  16

  The heavy sliding door to the weapons room was locked, the control panel beside it requiring a retina scan for entry. An eyeball was a lot harder to forge than a keycard.

  “This is the place?” Qin asked, watching the corridor in both directions with her hulking gun in her arms.

  Casmir expected a squad of Kingdom Guards to rush in to apprehend them at any moment. Their odd little group hadn’t gone unnoticed. They had been forced to stun two guards who’d tried to stop them on the way out of the lift on this level. Even though they’d tied up the man and woman and stuffed them into a server closet, it was only a matter of time before someone raised an alarm.

  “It’s one of two torpedo rooms, according to the station’s schematic.” Casmir waved toward his temple, where he was keeping his embedded chip offline most of the time, out of fear that security could use it to track him. “I dug up and downloaded that instead of the map for the general public. It’s proving accurate so far.”

  “Smart.” Qin smiled at him.

  Casmir made himself bob his head in thanks for the compliment, though he was skeptical that they were truly on the same side.

  “Shall I blow it open?” Qin patted her big gun.

  “That sounds noisy,” Kim said.

  She hadn’t spoken much since Qin explained the plan in the lift, and Casmir ached to pull her aside for a private chat. But there hadn’t been a chance. Qin hadn’t threatened them, but her mere existence next to them with that gun and her enhanced muscles was a threat, if a silent one. Casmir could sic Zee at her if he needed to, and he and Kim could run, but then he might lose the only asset he had. Whoever had placed a bounty on his head—and he didn’t doubt Qin about that—and sent the crushers… it wasn’t Qin or Lopez.

  “Zee?” Casmir waved at the door. “Could you open this, please? Ideally without making a lot of noise.”

  “What would a human consider a lot of noise?” Zee asked.

  “Uh, below seventy-five decibels would be good.”

  “How do you know how loud that is?” Qin whispered.

  “Kim’s coffee grinder has a warning label on the side that lists its output.”

  “My coffee grinder,” Kim murmured. “How I miss it.”

  Zee reshaped his arm from its human dimensions into something akin to a mattock, then slid the sharp wedge under the door and heaved upward. Metal crunched and snapped, and the door rose. Casmir winced at the noise, though it was far less than Qin would have created with an explosive round—and probably not any louder than Kim’s coffee grinder.

  “Secure the area, please.” Casmir pointed inside. “No killing,” he added, though it shouldn’t have been necessary, as he’d instilled that in the crusher’s programming, to defend without killing if at all possible. He had wanted to program that into the original military crushers, but the knight-general overseeing the project had laughed and vehemently denied his request. That had been one of Cas
mir’s first inklings that he was building robots for more than defensive purposes.

  Zee strode into the room. DEW bolts shot out of flush-mounted weapons in the wall, weapons they hadn’t been able to see from the door.

  Casmir jumped and blurted a useless warning as red beams sliced into the crusher. Zee turned toward one of the weapons, sprang, and smashed a fist into the control panel. The bolts halted abruptly. He repeated the action with the panel on the other side of the door.

  The energy bolts left holes in his torso, but they re-formed into a solid mass within seconds. Zee strode around the room, seeking more threats.

  “Handy,” Kim remarked from the door. “Was the robot bodyguard you made as a kid like this?”

  “No.” Casmir laughed at the idea. “My knowledge of robotics was a little more rudimentary then, and I only had access to the building materials I could scrounge around the apartment. Kitchen pans were involved.”

  “I’m sure your mother was delighted.”

  “Do delighted people usually scream at you and threaten to withhold dinner?”

  “That hasn’t been my experience.”

  “Then that may not be the correct adjective.”

  “The threats have been eliminated,” Zee announced.

  Casmir jogged in and found the four torpedo bays and a locker full of warheads. The station didn’t appear to house nuclear weapons, but the charges in the warheads could easily destroy a ship. It would take too long to sabotage the torpedoes themselves—and his eye twitched at the thought of handling explosives when he didn’t have experience working with them—so he headed straight for the launch tubes. He hoped it wouldn’t take much to disable them.

  A weapon buzzed behind him, and he sucked in a startled breath.

  “Just disabling the cameras,” Qin said, waving a pistol. “Keep working.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” As Casmir removed an access panel, again thankful that he’d managed to retain his toolkit through all this, he wondered how much the cameras had caught before she zapped them. How many corridor cameras along the way had recorded their passing?

  He thought about the way they had been walking, with Qin leading and Zee following behind them. To an outsider, might it look like Kim and Casmir had been hostages? Forced to go along with this scheme? Someone smart would probably figure out that Casmir was the only one of them who could have built a crusher, but he could have also been forced to do that. It sure would be nice if someone on the outside would decide that he was innocent and that all he’d been doing since fleeing his home was trying to stay alive.

  But was that true at this point? Maybe up until this point. If he disabled the weapons and escaped on the Dragon with Lopez and Qin, he would be sealing his fate.

  The station authorities already believed he was part of a crime revolving around the bioweapon, but wasn’t it possible that if he went to them and helped them, his name might be cleared?

  Whereas if he followed his current trajectory, he would be digging himself deeper into the icy core of a comet from which he’d never escape.

  He kept working as the bleak thoughts spun around in his mind, his hands slow and methodical and almost without input from his brain, but he couldn’t stop worrying. He considered again the cameras and how things might look to an observer. Even now, with Qin and Zee standing near the door, alternating between watching the corridor and watching him work, it might appear that they were his captors rather than his allies.

  What if he left a message while he was tampering? A simple text note informing whoever found it that he hadn’t been acting of his own free will. Might that save him when the law eventually—and what seemed inevitably—caught up with them? Or was it already too late?

  He wished he knew if Lopez actually intended to do what she’d relayed to Qin. Did she plan to help him get out of the system? Or was it a ruse so she could collect his bounty herself? And who had put a bounty on his head? Was it the same person who’d been sending the crushers?

  A morbidly curious part of him wondered how much it was for. How much was his head worth?

  “Is there anything I can do to help?” Kim crouched next to him, her back to Qin.

  He almost said no but realized she might want to talk. Unfortunately, Qin probably wasn’t far enough away for them to speak privately. If she had normal ears, she would be, but Casmir remembered some childhood trivia about house cats being able to hear things four or five times farther away than humans.

  He shook his head slightly but pointed to the tiny display that he’d tampered with while disabling the first torpedo launcher.

  My apologies, station personnel, but I am being forced to temporarily disable your weapons. Full control will return in twelve hours, if you do not override the programming sooner. I have been chased and shot at since leaving Odin. Please see Sir Friedrich at the castle in the capital for details, as he knows far more than I do.

  Kim’s brow furrowed—she hadn’t met Friedrich, but he had probably told her the man had died fighting the crusher in the parking garage—but all she did was nod slightly.

  Casmir hoped the authorities had no way to know that he knew Friedrich was dead. He hoped that if he sent them sniffing around the knight’s death, they would find someone else close to Friedrich that knew the truth. Like his mother. Whoever and wherever she was.

  As Casmir replaced the panel, hiding the condemning message from Qin’s eyes, he worried he was adding evidence to the list of crimes that had to be mounting against Captain Lopez. That made him feel guilty—no matter what Lopez planned in the next few days, she had let him and Kim onto her ship, and they might not have escaped the crushers if she hadn’t.

  That guilt didn’t keep him from programming the same message into the rest of the torpedo launchers.

  Yas finished cleaning and organizing every tool and piece of equipment in sickbay, and he completed a list of items he needed restocked to keep the mercenaries alive. He needed to send it to Rache, since the captain handled the outfit’s finances himself, but he was reluctant to disturb him.

  The ship hadn’t left the refinery, and Rache had been scarce outside of his quarters. Was he buried in research? Whatever that archaeology team had found seemed significant, and Yas worried Rache would decide he didn’t like it that his new doctor had watched the video diary with him.

  The sickbay door opened, and Yas spun toward it, thinking the captain might have come for a chat about that very thing. But Chief Jess Khonsari strolled in with an easy smile, her hands in the pockets of her greasy coveralls.

  Yas glanced at the case that held sickbay’s various medications, wondering if she would try to angle for trylochanix again. And if she did, what would he do? Demand she have an examination first and that they try a number of less potent—and less addictive—medications before going back to that? Or simply assume that the previous doctor had done all that and had known his trade? Yas wasn’t a surgeon in a hospital with rules governing the distribution of prescription drugs, not anymore. He was a thug with a scalpel, a criminal among more criminals.

  “How’s the shoulder?” he asked, deciding not to cast judgment yet.

  “Oh, it’s doing fine, Doc.” Jess rotated it to demonstrate a full range of motion and gave him a radiant smile. “I came up because I lost the draw.”

  “The what?”

  “To see who in engineering would come talk to you. The grunts were in on it too. Oh, and Chaplain.”

  “This ship has a chaplain?” He’d had no idea.

  Jess wavered a hand in the air. “Sort of. He was studying in some monastery, went crazy, and killed everybody there, or so the stories say. He’s one of Rache’s assassins now. Good at it too.” She ambled over and leaned against the medicine case. “The crew calls him Chaplain. I’m not sure you want to confess any sins to him.” Her forehead screwed up. “Is that the right religion for that? I get so confused with all of the options these days.”

  “I take it you’re not overly theistic.”<
br />
  “Not overly, no. A friend suggested I become an astroshaman now—” she waved her prosthetic hand and gestured to her cybernetic eyes, “—but I’m not interested in meditating until I can spiritually fuse my human and cyborg bits.” Her mouth twisted in a dismissive expression.

  “What did these various venerable people wish to speak with me about?” Yas asked, not wanting to get into a discussion of the merits of the new and old religions out there.

  “We were all wondering if you knew why we’re still here. Seeing as you’re buddies with the captain now.”

  “Buddies?” Yas hadn’t spoken to the captain in days—and infrequently before then.

  “Sure. He saved your life. And he told the guys not to pummel you or he would pummel them.”

  Yas blinked slowly. “When did he do that?”

  “Right after you came aboard with your nose up in the air like you were better than everyone here.”

  “I didn’t intend to convey that message.”

  “Well, Ox and Chains and Chaplain thought they’d help you see the error of your ways. The captain said no, and nobody crosses him. He may not be as big as a lot of the men, but he’s dangerous.”

  “Given his reputation, I would assume so.”

  “Anyway. The refinery. We’re still here, and we haven’t blown it up like we did the other one. Usually, we’re in and out. Lingering in one spot for long isn’t a good idea, even with the slydar hull plating. An hour ago, our lookout spotted three Kingdom warships on course for Saga.”

  “How far away are they?”

  “Four days, but it’s possible they’ll realize we’re loitering in the area. If they get a hint that it’s actually possible to catch Rache this time, I bet they’ll divert forces from the gate. One of those ships could be here in just over a day.”

  “Do you think they’re aware that the first refinery was destroyed? It was all automated. Maybe those ships are just making a supply run.”