Ship of Ruin Read online

  “You think we’ll get to go soon?” Yas asked wistfully. He didn’t want to die down here, but his fate was in Rache’s hands.

  Rache, who was focused on flying, ignored their conversation.

  “It doesn’t sound like he found what he was looking for,” Kim said. “Not much point in staying now.”

  “True.” Yas was about to raise his voice and ask Rache about that when the shuttle landed.

  They had only gone a couple of miles. The canyon had widened slightly but appeared mostly the same, yet he opened the hatch, cycled the airlock, and trotted into the icy darkness outside.

  “What did he find?” Yas wondered, watching the forward display.

  Rache soon came into view of the running lights, jogging toward mounds of snow swept against one side of the canyon.

  “Not what,” Jess said. “Who. One of the original team of archaeologists, he said, though I was a little confused. He had me looking for metal on my hand scanner. Metal outside of the wreck, not in it.”

  “Metal?” Kim lifted her head.

  Rache bent, digging something out of the snow, and Kim left the lab, her gaze locked to the display.

  He withdrew the body of the monkey droid Yas had seen in the video. Most of it. He pulled a detached leg out next, and dug the dismembered head out of another pile of snow.

  Yas caught a stricken expression on Kim’s face before she jerked away, closing her eyes and bringing her fist to her mouth.

  Yas didn’t know the story of how her mother had come to be a loaded droid, but it must have involved the death of her corporeal body. He could only guess at what Kim was feeling and what it would be like to lose a parent not once but twice.

  Casmir knocked softly on Qin’s hatch. Bonita had disappeared into her own cabin to sleep while Viggo handled the flight to the gate, and he hadn’t seen Asger since the incident with Qin. He did know the knight’s shuttle was flying alongside the Dragon, matching its pace.

  Casmir was a little surprised Asger hadn’t insisted on returning to it and sleeping there, staying as far from Qin as possible. But it seemed he’d been serious when he’d said he needed to keep his eyes on Casmir. Even if that would be hard to do from inside his locked cabin. Maybe he felt that was close enough to keep Casmir from getting in trouble.

  “He doesn’t know me very well,” Casmir muttered and stepped back.

  Qin hadn’t answered. She either didn’t want to talk or was sleeping, something he’d only managed to do for a couple of hours himself. It hadn’t helped that he’d dreamed of the attack in the corridor, but in the dream, Asger had succeeded in lopping off Qin’s head. Her body had lain in blood on the deck, cat-like eyes staring accusingly up at Casmir.

  The hatch opened as he was turning away. Qin stood with the lights dimmed behind her, her shoulders slumped, her six-plus feet of height barely seeming greater than Casmir’s five-feet-seven. Her eyes weren’t accusing, but moisture glistened on her cheeks.

  Had she been crying? He promptly felt twice as bad for bringing Asger.

  “I’m sorry.” Casmir lifted an apologetic hand. “You were sleeping. I don’t want to bother you. It can wait.”

  “I wasn’t sleeping.” She forced the briefest half smile he’d ever seen.

  Right, she’d been crying.

  “I came to apologize for bringing someone antagonistic on board,” Casmir said. “I didn’t have much choice since I was on my way to the brig, and he helped me avoid that fate, but I could have warned Captain Lopez sooner. Warned you.” He extended an open hand toward her and met her eyes, hoping she would see his sincerity. “I wasn’t expecting his reaction to be so strong. Combustible, you might say. I mean, I knew he was Kingdom and would probably share our prejudices toward people with genetic modifications, but that caught me off guard.”

  Casmir lowered his hand. He was curious about her past, and was tempted to ask if she’d truly worked for one of the pirate families, but it wasn’t his business, and it shouldn’t matter unless pirates were the ones attacking Kingdom ships at the gate. He doubted it. The pirate families ran small outfits, usually a single ship or a small fleet, and they didn’t pick fights with military vessels. At least from what he’d heard in the news.

  “Me too,” Qin whispered, glancing toward the cabin Asger had been given. “I just wanted to see a knight. Viggo said he was here, and I’d been trying to see one for a while, to see if they’re as brave and noble as they say in the vids and books.” She dropped her gaze to Casmir’s boots. “I know it’s silly, but I guess I thought they’d be chivalrous even to me. In the stories, they’re always protecting and rescuing ladies and risking their lives on their behalf. But it’s not like I’m a lady. I’m a freak, like he said.”

  “Qin, you most certainly are a lady.”

  He resisted the urge to point out that she was quite beautiful to anyone who could see past the fact that her arms had fur instead of hair. Maybe she needed to hear that, but not from him. He was fairly certain she was younger than most of his students, despite the muscles and enhanced ability to kill, and he would feel weird saying anything that could be construed as flirting.

  She looked up, her eyes wary. Almost as if she expected a blow and was prepared to flinch.

  “And you’re not a freak. I would know if you were. I can recognize my own kind, you know.”

  Her eyebrows rose with skepticism.

  “It’s true. You may not be able to tell from the handsome and suave gentleman I am now—” he wriggled his eyebrows, hoping to lift her spirits, “—but I’ve occasionally been ostracized. At school, at the synagogue, in sports—dear God, sports—I was that guy who didn’t fit in. I may not have fur and pointed ears, but it seems to be part of human nature, or perhaps the nature of a crowd, to be able to home in on those who are more than a standard deviation or two from the norm. And make sure they never forget it.”

  “Yeah.” She hung her head, looking so dejected that his heart ached.

  That had been more honest than he’d intended, and he feared he’d only reinforced her feelings of chagrin and despair instead of helping. He reached out and rested a hand on her shoulder. “It’s not your fault. And it’s nothing wrong with you. And you really can’t expect much from us backward Kingdom guys. We practically live in caves. Even my mild-mannered and scholarly father throws his head back and beats his chest with his fists when his favorite sports team scores goals.”

  “Well, everybody does that.”

  Casmir snorted but was glad she gave him a more sincere smile.

  Once again, it faded quickly. “I didn’t do what he said, Casmir. Maybe the others did, the older cohort. I don’t know. I did fight for the Druckers—that’s what they trained me to do from the day the scientists handed me over to them. They paid for me to be made, so it’s not like I had a choice, especially when I was younger. But I’d never seen a knight before today, not in person. I’ve definitely never killed one.”

  “I believe you.”

  “Good.” She stepped from the safety of her hatchway and hugged him. Strongly.

  He returned the hug, trying to react like a friend and not someone who was terrified she would snap his spine. He wasn’t sure why his opinion mattered, but he was glad she seemed more at ease. He was tempted to promise her he’d help find her a nice open-minded knight if she stuck around in his system, but he feared that would be difficult to accomplish. He didn’t know that many for starters, and he thought it might be challenging to find one who wasn’t deeply indoctrinated in Kingdom beliefs. Perhaps some of his students would be a better match for her. If she ever ended up back on Odin. He’d recognized a few kindred spirits among them, young men who knew what it was like not to fit in.

  Qin released him and stepped back, wiping her eyes.

  “How old were you when—uhm?” He waved vaguely.

  He hadn’t intended to pry, but he wanted to know what bastard scientists made kids-to-order for criminals. They were probably too many light years
away for him ever to have the power to do anything about it, but he liked to think he could start some network boycott or something. How much did it cost to have a tailored human being—or not quite entirely human being—made from scratch and raised?

  “When they took delivery of me?” Qin asked. “Almost twelve. Old enough for training and for sex.”

  “For what?” he blurted.

  She shrugged again. “I didn’t care that much about that. They made us not-ugly enough that they could get their money’s worth in bed as well as on the battlefield. I had seven sisters too, so the pirates’ demands were kind of spread out. And then there was an older cohort that was delivered a couple of years before us. Not many of them are still alive. We all hated it there, even if some of us were quieter than the others and didn’t complain much. Liangyu Two and Seven led a mutiny, though, and killed a lot of the pirates. Then they were killed themselves, and everyone who’d sided with them was punished or killed. There are a lot more Druckers than there were of us. You know them? It’s a huge and powerful family. Hundreds of them, and they’ve got five ships now. It’s not a good idea to cross them. That’s why I used to wish…” Her eyes grew distant as her focus drifted toward Asger’s cabin, and then to the deck again. “Never mind. It’s silly.”

  “To be rescued by a knight?” he guessed.

  “Maybe.”

  How disappointing it must have been for her to meet her dream man in real life and have him attack her and call her a freak. Casmir wiped moisture from his own eyes.

  “I’m sorry, Qin. I’ll let Asger know he mistook you for someone else. Maybe he’ll be a little less of an ass.”

  She shook her head. “Thank you for caring, but don’t worry about it. It was my stupid fantasy that was the problem. The galaxy is what it is.”

  “The galaxy, yes, but the human beings who live in it have the ability to change and be changed. I’d like to think there’s hope that we can encourage people to change for the better.”

  “Thank you for caring,” she said again and kissed him on the cheek before stepping back into her room and closing the hatch.

  Casmir slumped against the wall, wondering when he’d shifted from being happy building robots to help a few people here and there to wishing he had the power to change the system—all of the systems. He’d enjoyed his life at the university and thought he was doing everything he’d dreamed of as a boy, but it had been a small life, hadn’t it? Maybe when he solved his immediate problems—he refused to put an if in there—and could go back home, he would get involved in politics, try to get elected to one of the positions open to people who weren’t of the nobility. Maybe he could at least help change the viewpoints of Kingdom subjects.

  A hatch creaked open.

  He looked up, half expecting Asger and already preparing words for him. But Bonita was the one to step out of her cabin.

  She raised her eyebrows, doubtless wondering why Casmir was lurking in the corridor, but all she said was, “Good,” and gestured toward the ladder leading up to navigation. “This is your problem. You’ll want to see what’s going on.”

  “I’m sure I will.” Casmir followed her as she climbed the ladder, favoring one of her legs. “Which problem is it?”

  “Viggo updated me on the gate.” She plopped down into her pod in navigation.

  The front display came to life, first showing a field of stars and then zooming in to the gate and two large warships placed to block access to it. They were almost side by side, but one listed a bit, and Casmir grimaced. Was that a strategy, pretending to look damaged, or was it genuinely damaged?

  Smaller ships whipped around, almost like the robot vacuums had been doing around his feet earlier, firing at the large vessels. As they watched, one of the warships fired a huge weapon, one that resulted in a flash of white light. Two of the small vessels blew into pieces, but that didn’t change anything. There had to be a hundred of them.

  And what of the cargo ship? Casmir couldn’t even see it. Ishii had mentioned stealth technology that might be beyond a slydar hull plating. Was the enemy ship appearing and firing and then disappearing again? Continuing to battle until the Kingdom ships gave up and let it through the gate? Or until they’d been destroyed and had no choice but to let it through the gate?

  If the cargo ship blew up the already-damaged warship, it could likely slip past the other one, depending on its size. Whatever that was. Casmir had no idea. The term cargo ship conjured notions of something big in his mind. The gates were all uniform in size, a couple of miles across, which seemed massive on paper, but theirs didn’t look that large with the big warships in front of it.

  “Those are the warships that were investigating Rache’s mercenary actions.” Lopez pointed at the vessels blocking the gate. “The regular ships that guard the gate are either missing, or they’ve been blown to pieces. If your friend Ishii’s ship doesn’t get there before that one is blown up or knocked out of the way—” she pointed to the listing vessel, “—then the enemy ship is going to escape before we get there.”

  “Are there any other Kingdom ships en route?”

  “Two more warships heading toward the gate from Forseti Station, but it’ll take them days to get there.”

  Another ship appeared on the display, and Casmir sucked in a breath. It was every bit as large as the Kingdom soldiers had described, spinning to create gravity for its crew, with turrets and railguns and weapons platforms he couldn’t identify visible all over the rotating hull. The porcupines in the Zamek Zoo had fewer protrusions.

  White-yellow light flashed, obscuring the gate and all the ships for long seconds, and then the ship disappeared again. A volley of missiles fired from the warships blasted toward the space it had occupied. The enemy ship’s weapons—nukes?—arched toward the gate. The warships maneuvered, trying to shift out of the way, but Casmir realized the problem right away. They had to stay in front of the gate to keep it blockaded, so they were extremely limited in how far they could move.

  A projectile slammed into the edge of one of the warships, and the hull seemed to shatter, shards flying in a thousand directions. Meanwhile, the missiles they had launched flew through empty space. They turned—were they heat-seeking?—but merely flew around, not finding a target. It was as if the enemy ship had shifted to another dimension. Casmir highly doubted that was happening, but it unnerved him that the experienced military captains were having trouble figuring it out.

  “What a farce,” Bonita said. “You really want us to get involved in that? One of those missiles flying around, not finding its real target, could find us, and we’d be dead.” She snapped her fingers. “Like that.”

  “I wasn’t planning to engage them in a firefight.”

  “What were you planning? Because I refuse to get close to that mess without a plan that ensures the Dragon won’t be fired on.”

  “Understandable. Will you comm them for me?”

  “Oh right, because it goes so well whenever you chat with the enemy.”

  “We might as well try. We might learn something if they answer, such as who they are. It didn’t sound like the Fleet ships knew, at least not when I was over there. Did you get a shot of it when it appeared? Viggo, do you mind looking up that ship and trying to identify the model and what system it’s out of?”

  “I did scan it,” Viggo said, “and I am looking for a match now.”

  “We can’t comm them if they’re invisible,” Bonita said. “They’re not showing up on the scanners any more than they are visually on the cameras.”

  “It looks like they have to appear to fire—or firing causes them to appear. I’ll record a message that you can send the next time they pop up. And, Viggo, would you mind scanning for life on there when you get a chance? It would be nice to know how big the crew is.”

  Casmir thought of Asger’s comment that an army of crushers might be useful if they could get them over there. As he’d admitted, there was no way he could build more crushers here, but if
he and a team of elite fighters—specifically, Asger, Zee, and Qin—could somehow board that ship, maybe they could do something. Distract the bridge crew, at least, and give the warships time to home in on it.

  He hadn’t figured out how they would get aboard it yet. The Kingdom ships had squads and squads of combat marines, so if a forced boarding were achievable, they would have surely done it already.

  He also wasn’t sure why he was imagining himself leading that team. Not when he had the combat abilities of a slug. Maybe his subconscious was feeling frisky since it had been almost two days since he’d thrown up from space sickness.

  “We’re still too far away to scan for life,” Viggo said, “but I can send a message once you prepare it.”

  “Your buddy is closer,” Bonita said. “Maybe his people have done a scan and would share the results.”

  “My buddy? Is that Captain Ishii?”

  “Do you have so many friends that you lose track of them?”

  “Only the ones who threaten to throw me in the brig.”

  “Record your message so Viggo can send it,” Bonita said. “If they can tell us to go away, we can save ourselves some time and turn around now.”

  “If I turned around every time someone told me to go away, I wouldn’t have had a date to the Grad Night Dance when I was eighteen.”

  “I didn’t know robots were that choosy.” She waved impatiently at the comm panel.

  “We know what kind of ship it is yet? From which system?”

  “It is a modified Union-5 Cargo Hauler,” Viggo said, “originally constructed in the Lunar-5 factory at Belt Station Etium. Greatly modified somewhere else. Some of its weapons are out of System Cerberus. Some are not listed yet in public records.”

  “Union? It was used in mining then?” Casmir groped for ways that might be helpful.

  “To haul ore, maybe,” Bonita said. “But not necessarily. The Union has a lot of power across multiple systems, with stakes in almost all of the asteroid belts out there. They have plenty of ships that are involved in trade and passenger transport, in addition to their mining fleets. But if that was originally an ore hauler, the Union princes definitely have the money to pay for modifications to ships. They have the money to buy planets and moons if they want.”