Shockwave Read online

  Shockwave

  Star Kingdom, Book 1

  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

  Foreword

  Prologue

  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

  Foreword

  Eight years ago, when I first started publishing my writing, it was all fantasy all the time. As someone with a degree in Culture, Literature, and Arts, I was leery about venturing into science fiction and “getting it wrong.” I still worry about that, to be honest, even though I’ve since written my Fallen Empire series and some shorter space-opera adventures.

  But it’s a genre I’ve always loved, especially as a kid devouring Star Trek reruns and watching the original Star Wars trilogy over and over and over. (This delighted my parents, since we only had one TV in the house at the time, and it was front-and-center in the living room.)

  I’m delighted to be back in outer space with this new series, Star Kingdom. I’ve been jokingly calling it Big Bang Theory meets Star Wars. I’m not sure how accurate that is, but it is a chance for some smart, geeky heroes to shine. (Because, as we all know, Mr. Spock was way cooler than Captain Kirk in the original Trek.) I hope you have fun with the new crew and enjoy their adventures.

  Before you jump in, please let me thank those who’ve helped me put this book together: my first readers, Rue Silver, Sarah Engelke, and Cindy Wilkinson, and my editor, Shelley Holloway. Also, thank you to Jeff Brown for illustrating the covers for this series.

  Now, let the adventure begin…

  Prologue

  “When can I eat normal food again?”

  “Normal?” Dr. Yas Peshlakai looked toward the vat lamb and rice dish on the bedside table. It was bland, as he’d ordered, but ought to pass for normal on Tiamat Station.

  “Yes.” President Sophia Bakas smiled and folded her hands atop the blanket, the silver light of a faux moon streaming in the window and highlighting a surprisingly girlish expression on her timeworn face. “Deep-fried, ice-creamed, and alcohol-filled.”

  “Ah. Normal food. Well, I’m not your regular doctor, Madam President, but I recommend you give your liver time to recover from the poison before consuming more. You do have two years left to serve, and the station inhabitants are quite fond of you.”

  “Yes, and it is good to be liked. By most people.” Her long fingers curled into the blanket, tendons standing out under her papery skin.

  “Star Kingdom zealots aren’t people.”

  “My charming young intelligence officers tell me the poisoners were loyal station citizens, irritated that the vote went against them. It seems they hoped to rush along my passing so the more Kingdom-friendly Vice President Martinez would be in charge.” Bakas shuddered, her narrow shoulders hunching. “I don’t understand why anyone would want to live under that backward rule again. Under their draconian laws, half the people here wouldn’t be allowed to breathe the air there. They don’t allow genetic engineering on human beings, not even to cure diseases. They don’t even allow modifications to their plants or food. And their backward stances on marriage and relationships.” Bakas shuddered again, perhaps thinking of her two wives.

  “I gather it’s the other half of the people who are a problem.”

  “I’m glad you’re not one of those zealots. And that you were able to identify the poison.” President Bakas grasped his hand. “Thank you, Doctor.”

  “It was a simple matter, as I knew it would be as soon as I heard the symptoms. During my years at the university, I took several toxicology classes, and for one, I wrote a paper on the ongoing alterations to the archexia family of plants to create potent hallucinogens as well as more deadly substances. It was published in Galactic Plantae, a prestigious peer-reviewed journal in the field. I understand professors at several universities throughout the system are now teaching from that article. It’s shameful that so few doctors are familiar with the less well-known uses for the plants. Your personal physician should have…” Yas made himself close his mouth and shrug. It wasn’t his place to denigrate others. Not everybody had been granted the educational opportunities he had, though it was difficult to fathom that anyone but the best would have been selected to work for the president.

  “You’re a touch arrogant for someone so young, aren’t you?” Bakas smiled.

  “I’m thirty-five, ma’am.”

  He had been a surgeon as well as a toxicology consultant for nearly ten years. The latter was an interest he kept up with, not his main profession, but it pleased him that the station hospitals often sought his advice on tough cases.

  “That makes you a mere child, good doctor.”

  Since she was approaching a hundred and fifty, he couldn’t argue with her perspective on age. But the rest?

  “I merely state the facts, Madam President. I do not, as arrogance would imply, exaggerate my own worth or importance.”

  She arched her eyebrows.

  “A former girlfriend called me lovably pompous,” he conceded.

  “Former? Perhaps your pomposity wasn’t so lovable after all.” Her smile turned into a yawn.

  “You should rest, Madam President.”

  Yas drew her curtains, eyeing the bright full moon hanging in the starry sky, all of it a technological illusion to hide that the only thing above them was the other side of their habitat. If one hadn’t been to a real planet, one might believe the station was a natural place, with parks and cities and lakes, birds and insects and animals. One might forget that it was a giant cylinder spinning inside a hollowed-out asteroid in System Hydra’s Beta Belt, miles of stone protecting its inhabitants from the sun’s radiation.

  “I’ll rest a bit,” Bakas said with another yawn.

  Yas made sure she had water, then dimmed the lights as he stepped out of her bedroom. Two presidential bodyguards were posted to either side of the door, and he nodded to them as he passed.

  “She’s fine,” he said.

  They nodded back.

  They had no reason to question him. Yas’s prominent family was known and trusted on the station, and his father had donated to the president’s election campaign. Yas had grown up here, leaving only for a few volunteer medical missions to other parts of the system where people dealt with the vagaries of living on planets and moons.

  He passed unbothered through corridors and down lift tubes, his white jacket and white bag with its symbolic red blood droplet on the side identifying him as a doctor. He’d entered the presidential residence through the servants’ entrance and started to depart that way but paused to watch the huge screens in their break room showing the last few points of a zero-g squash game.

  Superhumanly agile bodies contorted into impossible positions as the two contestants flung themselves around the enclosed court, ricocheting off the walls almost as fast as the ball. Yas knew the game well, and had played it all the way through school, but he had given up an opportunity to compete on the professional ci
rcuit to become a doctor. To become everything his parents had always expected him to be—which didn’t involve bouncing off the walls of a sports court. He didn’t regret channeling his energy into his career, but there were times when he missed the game, the sheer joy of unbridled athletic exertion.

  The famous Donahue Dorg scored the final point, and the vid feed cut to a crowd cheering while imbibing beer and the potent sunflower-seed alcohol the station was known for.

  Yas waved to the staff still watching—none of them noticed him taking his leave—and headed out the back door. As he stepped into the alley behind the residence, the street lights reflecting softly off the recycled carbon-fiber pavement, four uniformed figures strode out of the shadows to one side. Station Civil Security.

  “There he is, right there.”

  “Get him!”

  Yas looked down the alley in the other direction, certain they meant someone else. But the big men stared right at him as they broke into a run.

  “I’m Dr. Yas Peshlakai.” He raised his hands.

  A sergeant grabbed his wrist, and meaty fingers bit into his shoulder. “We know who you are. What you just did.”

  “You’re going to cuff him, Sergeant? He killed the president. He deserves…” A corporal pointed a DEW-Tek 900 pistol at Yas’s temple.

  Yas almost dropped his medical kit.

  “Killed?” He gaped at the glaring men now surrounding him. “I was just up in her room. She’s fine. She’s recovering well. She wants ice cream.”

  “When Garon walked in, she was dead. You were the last one in there with her, the only one with a bag full of medical poison.” The sergeant with the death grip on his shoulder reached for the flex-cuffs on his utility belt.

  “No trial for him, Sarge,” the corporal with the pistol said, his eyes full of rage. “Let’s say he ran, and we had to take care of him, of the Kingdom sympathizer. He’s a Kingdom assassin. He deserves death, not to weasel out of everything with some high-priced lawyer.”

  “No lawyer for the assassin,” another corporal growled and slapped Yas’s medical kit away.

  It clattered to the pavement, tipped open on its side, and spilled its contents everywhere. A jet injector bounced up and hissed as it struck the sergeant’s leg.

  He yelped, his grip on Yas’s shoulder loosening.

  Yas doubted anything had pierced the man’s skin, but he took advantage and broke free from his captor. He glimpsed the corporal’s grip tightening on the pistol and ducked. A red bolt of energy seared a chunk of hair from Yas’s scalp and slammed into the wall behind him.

  He stumbled, bumped the other corporal, and shouted, “Watch out for the bag. The poison is gaseous.”

  As the four men’s gazes lurched to the innocuous medical kit, Yas sprinted away from them. It was probably the worst thing he could have said, an implication that he was guilty, but it took them a few seconds to recover and give chase.

  He lunged around a corner and down a main street away from the residence, sprinting past delivery robots and electric auto-trucks zipping along the center rail. There was nothing to hide behind alongside the thoroughfare, no crates or barrels, no parked vehicles.

  Yas pumped his legs. Where could he go? Not home. They would be waiting. To the Civil Security station to talk to someone sane? Someone who grasped that suspects weren’t executed on Tiamat, especially not before they’d had a trial?

  The security men burst onto the street behind him. Knowing he was in their sights, Yas sprinted for another alley. Something slammed into the back of his knee, and pain roared up his leg.

  He grabbed a wall, just keeping from pitching to the ground. More weapons fired with soft buzzes as the energy bolts lanced down the street. Yas lunged into the alley, his leg almost buckling every time he tried to put weight on it. He kept running, but his gait was lopsided, agonized. They would catch him soon.

  Or they would shoot him soon.

  A drone whizzed past, its camera recording him. There was nowhere to go on the station, nowhere to hide. He was miles from the docks and a ship, even if he could somehow slip past port security and stow away on an outgoing vessel.

  Gritting his teeth, Yas stumbled out of the alley next to a café, outdoor tables dotting the sidewalk. A scattering of people sat in the chairs, their faces turning curiously toward him. He meant to run past them and into the café to hide, but he twisted his injured knee and tumbled to the pavement. A fresh wave of pain shot up his leg, and tears sprang to his eyes.

  “There he is!” one of his pursuers cried from the alley.

  Yas rolled to the side an instant before a red energy bolt skimmed past, slamming into the side of a store across the street.

  Panting, he rolled again, angling toward the tables and hoping to get out of the line of sight. He bumped into a chair and tried to rise, to scramble farther away, but his leg wouldn’t support him. It only sent more agony blasting through his body.

  Yas raised his hands and flopped onto his back. If he appeared helpless and surrendered, maybe they wouldn’t kill him. Maybe they would follow proper procedure and arrest him for a trial. This was insane.

  As soon as the shooting had started, most of the people sitting outside the café had lunged for the door or run off down the street. But a dark-skinned woman with short black hair peered calmly down from the table right above him, one of her eyes glinting unnaturally in the lights shining through the window. A coffee cup hung poised in her gloved hand.

  “Is this because we didn’t tip?” She tilted her head toward Yas and quirked an eyebrow toward the man sitting opposite her at the table.

  Yas assumed it was a man. He wore a cloak with a hood pulled up and some kind of mask on his face. A DEK-Tek pistol and a double-barreled SK-Ram hung in holsters from his belt.

  Yas’s fingers twitched. He could have reached for the Ram. But it was a weapon of deadly force, and he couldn’t shoot to kill, not even to save himself.

  But as footsteps thundered in the alley, a squeak of “Help?” escaped his lips before Yas could debate the wisdom of the request.

  “Dr. Yas Peshlakai,” the man said dispassionately, as if he were reading the name off a report. He had probably already run a quick facial identification search, the results scrolling down his contact display or whatever networked implants existed behind that hood. “A renowned surgeon and toxicology expert. Huh.”

  “And not a criminal.” Yas feared the news bots were already circulating the false story.

  The speaker gazed down at him, his features, his thoughts, hidden behind that mask.

  The security men jogged into view, slowing as they saw Yas so close to two other people. Yas prayed they were done flinging weapons fire wantonly around, but as they stalked closer, fury in their eyes, he knew they were only getting close enough to ensure they couldn’t miss. There were three of them. There was no sign of the one sane man, the sergeant who’d only wanted to arrest him.

  “You’ll serve me for five years if I save your life,” the masked man said calmly, as if Yas wasn’t a second from being shot, as if his blood wasn’t staining the pavement under the table.

  “Yes,” Yas blurted in agreement, even though it had been a statement, rather than a question.

  “Excellent.”

  The masked man sprang from the table and charged the security officers with the speed of a bullet. His opponents fired at him, but he somehow anticipated the shots in time to fling himself into an agile roll across the pavement, one that brought him up between the men. They tried to fan out, to find spots where they could shoot him without endangering their comrades, but he blurred around them, movements too fast to track without augmented eyes. Yas gaped as one man flew into a wall, his head striking hard enough to knock him senseless.

  Someone fired wildly, and a red bolt burned through the base of a nearby table, hurling the top into the air. It landed with a resounding clatter on the pavement.

  A hand grabbed Yas’s shoulder. The woman.

  S
he pulled him to his feet with a grip hard enough to hurt. His leg threatened to give way again, but she supported him, tugging him away from the melee, from the pounding of fists and cries of pain. Yas pressed his back to the wall, gasping for air and for the strength to keep his legs under him.

  “Who—” Yas started to ask, but three precise shots boomed, echoing from the walls of the now-empty street. The SK-Ram, firing bullets instead of directed energy bolts.

  They had an alarming finality, and all sounds of the battle ended. The masked man walked around the corner, his cloak flapping around his ankles as he holstered the Ram.

  “Come, Doctor.” He extended a hand toward the street. “I have a ship with a sickbay in need of a surgeon.”

  “What ship?” Yas asked as the woman and the man gripped him by either arm, lifting him into the air as they walked at his side, his feet dangling an inch above the ground, his injured leg leaving a trail of blood. “Who are you?”

  “The Fedallah,” the man said. “Tenebris Rache.”

  If Yas had been walking, his legs would have given out again.

  Captain Tenebris Rache was the most notorious pirate in the Twelve Systems. And Yas had just sworn to serve him.

  1

  “Fly, little birdie, fly,” Professor Casmir Dabrowski whispered.

  He stepped back with his kludgy remote control, promising to build something better once his prototype proved successful. He tapped a button, and the robot bird sprang off his desk, delicate wings flapping furiously as it attempted to fly.

  Casmir bit his lip. Would it work this time?