Shockwave Read online

  The bird dipped below the level of the desk, and he winced, certain it would crash. But its self-learning neuromorphic chip compensated quickly. The bird tilted slightly and adjusted its wingbeats, then slowly gained altitude.

  Casmir’s wince turned into a grin as it sailed toward the ceiling of his lab, swooping left and right like a songbird seeking seeds. Its flight was so natural, it made his heart ache.

  It—no, she, definitely she—was beautiful. He couldn’t wait to show her off. Maybe the media, not just the university presses, would write up the project. The news would travel through the gate network, and roboticists throughout the Twelve Systems would see his work and realize his home world of Odin wasn’t backward, at least not in this field. No government policies held back these scientific developments.

  “That’s what you’re working on now?” a familiar voice asked from the hallway. A few passing university students peered through the door around the man. “You don’t find that underwhelming after three years at the Kingdom’s top military research and development lab?”

  Hearing the disdain from one of his former instructors made Casmir want to snatch the bird out of the air and hide it in a desk drawer. He told himself there was nothing demeaning about his project, but he couldn’t keep his cheeks from warming.

  “Actually, Professor Huang—” Casmir hoped his voice came out casual and self-confident, even while wondering what it would be like to actually feel self-confident, “—I find it morally refreshing after three years at the Kingdom’s top military research and development lab.” He tapped the remote to command the robot to find a perch. “I never entirely trusted King Jager’s promise that my work would only be used to defend Odin and not to mow down enemies in other systems.”

  Technically untrue. It had taken a while for his trust to falter, for him to realize Jager wanted more than to avoid the assassination plot that had taken down his father. The king had ambitions.

  “I’m sure he’s not going to do that with your combat robots.” Huang walked into the room, his cane clacking on the tile floor. He was known to twirl it like a pirate’s rapier, prodding students who fell asleep in class. “He’ll use them to make sure Odin, bless our beautiful world, is never conquered by foreigners.”

  “So I was told when I started working there. But you hear the same news I do. You know the pushes Jager is making, the sympathizers his agents are cultivating in other systems.”

  “I do my best to ignore the news, in truth. Better for the sanity.”

  When the bird alighted on the desk again, Huang bent to peer at it through his glasses. He murmured something, and the light of a tiny display flashed in one of the lenses. Showing magnification? Or some more in-depth analysis?

  At the same time as he’d had the childhood eye surgery that had failed to fix his strabismus, Casmir had received a neural-interactive chip and contacts with an interface. A lot of the older staff preferred the removable voice-activated lenses to newer technologies.

  “This is just a hobby.” Casmir shrugged, as if the project didn’t mean as much as it did. “My team is working on self-aware medical androids to be deployed to remote habitats and scientific outposts where there aren’t human doctors. This girl—” Casmir gently touched the smooth head of his bird, “—Chaz, Simon, Asahi, and I are going to enter in a realistic-flight competition. Humans have been making drones for ages, but we’ve yet to create a robot that can truly emulate a bird’s flight.”

  “Because there’s not much need, eh?” Huang straightened and adjusted his glasses.

  “I suppose not the need that there is for military robots, but maybe that says something distressing about our society.”

  “War and battling over differences has been the human norm since we first discovered fire back on Earth. Or so the history books tell us.” Huang smiled and wavered his hand in acknowledgment of how much information had been lost between the time the original colony ships had left Earth, arrived in the Twelve Systems, and clawed their way back to a spacefaring level. “I’ll admit it is impressive that you got Simon and Asahi to work together. I thought they were mortal enemies.”

  “They are, but Simon is a stellar programmer, and Asahi is a wiring genius.”

  “Some people pick teams based on compatibility of personalities rather than the brilliance of individuals.”

  “That sounds like a recipe for mundanity.”

  “But fewer explosions in the labs.”

  Casmir was about to point out that he’d succeeded in getting his team to finish the project, but an alert pinged on the wall console. He habitually held up two fingers in the standard hold-please-while-I-answer-a-message-or-access-the-net gesture. The display identified the caller: Kim Sato.

  “Hello, Kim,” Casmir answered, surprised she hadn’t opted for chip-to-chip messaging rather than the city comm system.

  “Did you complete your bird project?” Kim asked, no visual coming up with the audio.

  “I did. It’s working. For its preliminary flight around the lab, at least.”

  “Congratulations. I will see you at home.”

  “Wait,” Casmir blurted, surprised by the abrupt end of the conversation, though he should have been accustomed to her atypical approach to social conventions by now. “Is that all you wanted?”

  She paused, and he imagined her puzzling out what an appropriate response would be. He waited patiently. He was used to all types of smart, eccentric people, including Kim.

  “I am placing a grocery order to be delivered by dinnertime tonight,” she said. “I am considering whether to simply select our agreed-upon staples or add in a bottle of celebratory wine. There are seven varietals in stock with that adjective in the description. I assume one of them will be appropriate to honor career achievement.”

  “Ah.” Casmir grinned, now reading her pause as a debate on whether celebratory wine should be a surprise or not.

  “Do you have a preference of red or white?” she asked. “Or sparkling?”

  “Red, please. Sparkles optional.”

  “I see an appropriate bottle. Goodbye.”

  Professor Huang arched his eyebrows after the comm ended.

  “Girlfriend? Or android?” Huang smirked. “Or both?”

  Casmir’s cheeks heated again at the suggestion that he couldn’t find a flesh-and-blood girlfriend if he wanted one, even if it had been over a year since he’d had a modicum of success in that department. His left eye blinked a few times of its own accord, and he grimaced, willing the obnoxious tic he’d had since childhood to stop. Contacts corrected his myopia, if not his monocular vision, and medication kept his seizures under control, but some symptoms of his flawed genes defied modern technology and pharmacology.

  “Roommate,” Casmir said firmly. “And not an android. She’s a bacteriologist who has made many excellent contributions to the medical sciences. She’s good with microbes. Humans are more problematic for her.”

  He shook his head, not sure why he was explaining someone Professor Huang was unlikely to ever meet. Mostly because he was still smirking. From his time as one of Huang’s students, Casmir remembered well that the man had a dirty streak, especially considering he was eighty or ninety. Which was old on Odin. It wasn’t like in some of the other systems where genetic tinkering had vastly extended the human lifespan—for those who could afford it.

  “Roommate with benefits?” Huang winked.

  “If you consider that she’s buying me wine a benefit, then yes. As for the rest, I don’t think she ever notices a man’s—or woman’s—anatomy unless she’s poking it with a sword.”

  Huang’s mouth drooped open. “A sword?”

  Casmir, realizing that could be misconstrued as an innuendo, rushed to clarify. “Her father and half-brothers run a kendo dojo. The swords are real swords. Well, no, they use wooden ones, mostly, I think. Uhm—”

  “Professor Dabrowski?” an unfamiliar voice from the doorway said, mangling the pronunciation of the last name.<
br />
  Casmir spun toward the stranger with relief, glad for an excuse to end the conversation.

  “You can call me Casmir. My students all do. I…” Casmir trailed off when he got a good look at the person standing in the doorway.

  The tall, broad-shouldered man wore dark silver liquid armor that covered him from boots to neck, leaving exposed only his strong, lean face and black hair long enough to flap in the wind. Or so Casmir assumed. The knights in the animated law-enforcement posters always had breeze-ruffled long hair and an equally breeze-ruffled dark purple cloak. This man had both, though the building’s ventilation system was not sufficient for ruffling.

  He also wore an imposing weapon on his utility belt, what looked like an Old Earth medieval halberd on a short axe shaft. A pertundo, the legends called them, the traditional knight’s weapon and far more sophisticated than they appeared. With a telescoping shaft, it could be used like a spear, but the long, sharp tip fired energy blasts similar to bolts from DEW-Tek firearms, and the blade could carve into the best combat armor in existence. At least according to the war vids.

  “Can I help you?” Casmir stepped forward, silently commanding his chip to search the network for a match on the knight’s face.

  “I’m here to help you.” The knight glanced both ways down the hallway before stepping inside and palming the sliding door shut. “I’m Sir Friedrich of His Majesty’s royal knights.”

  As he said his name, Casmir’s net search came back, displaying the man’s face, name, and address. Daniel Friedrich, knighted eight years earlier. Residence: Drachen Castle.

  “Shit, Casmir,” Huang whispered. “What did you do?”

  Casmir shook his head. All he could think was that this had something to do with his old job. He’d seen a couple of knights at the military research facility in his years there, but the elite defenders of the crown’s interests were spread across the system, and even some of the non-Kingdom systems. They didn’t stroll into the world of academia often.

  The knight strode toward Casmir, his face hard and determined.

  Casmir lifted his hands, fearing he was about to be arrested. But for what?

  “I bring a message.” Friedrich halted in front of him and glanced at Huang.

  Huang leaned his hip against the desk and folded his arms around his cane, not looking like he intended to leave.

  “You must flee,” Friedrich said, focusing on Casmir again. “Get off the planet. Out of the entire system, if you can.”

  “Uh. Any particular reason?” If anyone else had been making this suggestion, Casmir would have scoffed, but if this man truly was a knight who lived in the castle… “Are you entering the robotic flight simulation contest? You’re not my competition trying to get rid of me, are you?”

  Friedrich gripped his arm, his lean face humorless. “This isn’t a joke, Dabrowski. Knights don’t get sent out for pranks.”

  No, Casmir knew that. But cracking jokes was easier than accepting the fear starting to roil in his gut. Fear and confusion. He was shocked a knight would have been sent out for him under any circumstances. Even a squire would be an oddity.

  “Who sent you?” Casmir asked.

  “Your mother.”

  Casmir would have fallen over backward if the knight hadn’t still gripped him. “My… you mean my adoptive mother? Irena Dabrowski?”

  “No.”

  Casmir opened his mouth, but he couldn’t find words. He didn’t know who his real mother was. His parents—his adoptive parents—hadn’t told him. They’d always said they didn’t know, and in the thirty-two years he’d been alive, he’d never found anything to suggest his real mother lived.

  “Someone wants to ensure you do not see another sunrise,” Friedrich said. “She told me to tell you to get off-world. Don’t return to your house before you go. Just take what you have and find passage on a ship. Don’t use your banking chip. Take your ID chip offline.”

  “My mother spoke to you? Today? I don’t even know—” Casmir gripped the knight’s arm back and shook it, as if he had the strength to affect the large fit man. “Who is she?”

  “She—” Friedrich broke off and frowned, his eyes unfocused as he received some message. He cursed and stepped back, easily shaking off Casmir’s grip. “They’re coming. Two of them.” He opened a rectangular pouch on his utility belt and pulled out a folded disk. “I’ll do my best to delay them so you can escape.”

  “Escape? This is where I work.”

  “Not anymore.”

  Friedrich strode not toward the door but toward one of the windows. It was an old-fashioned casement window with real glass, so he could open it and peer out onto the streets and walkways of the campus eight stories below. Without pausing, he hopped onto the windowsill.

  “Sir Knight.” Casmir lifted a hand and started toward the man.

  Friedrich looked over his shoulder, his eyes intent. “If you value your life and the lives of your friends, get off Odin now. Get out of the system altogether. Go.”

  Friedrich sprang out the window.

  For a second, Casmir could only gape in surprise as the knight disappeared from sight, the wind whipping his hair and his cloak. Casmir rushed to the window in time to see Friedrich flick his wrist and the disk unfold into a driftboard.

  The knight maneuvered it under his feet as he fell, his cloak streaming above him. Scant feet from the pavement, the board’s thrusters fired, and he slowed. But not for long. Board and rider zipped across the street and mag-rails, barely missing an auto-cab delivering students. On the other side, he disappeared inside the four-story cement parking garage.

  “Are you going to listen to him?” Huang asked.

  “I… I don’t know.”

  As Casmir gripped the windowsill, the salty breeze of the Arashi Sea tickling his nostrils, a boom erupted from the parking garage. Flames sprang through the windows on the bottom level, and smoke flooded out through the entrances.

  “Did he do that?” Huang asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  Casmir ran to his desk and waved a hand to activate the built-in computer, wondering if his staff position would get him access to the parking-garage cameras. Already, sirens wailed outside, ambulances or police coming.

  “Show me the parking garage, ground level,” Casmir ordered as the desktop display came to life.

  “People are running out,” Huang said from the window, his gaze locked on the garage. “There’s smoke everywhere.”

  The computer took an eternity to complete a retina scan on Casmir, then showed him the hazy bottom floor of the garage. Wreckage lay everywhere, including in the stall where he’d parked his scooter that morning. He groaned. It was gone, completely destroyed.

  A breeze gusted through the garage, stirring the smoke and revealing Friedrich crouched amid the wreckage. He’d put away his driftboard and drawn the pertundo, the shaft extended to more than six feet, and gripped it in both hands. In the legends, knights were always slicing and perforating enemies into bloody pulps with them, usually while balancing on train trestles over rivers or some other ludicrous place for a fight. But Friedrich wielded it like a rifle and fired green bursts of energy into the smoke.

  Screams sounded, not from the display but through the window. The knight hadn’t gone crazy and started shooting innocent students, had he?

  Huang cursed at something outside. Casmir almost ran over to look, but on the display, the smoke cleared enough for him to see the knight’s opponent.

  A faceless, tarry black humanoid figure strode toward Friedrich with deadly intent. It carried no weapons—it didn’t need them.

  “No,” Casmir whispered in horrified recognition.

  The figure sprang forty feet, more like a panther than a human. Friedrich fired bolts that would have killed a man into its torso, but they bounced off. He didn’t appear surprised. He shifted his grip on the weapon as his foe came into melee range.

  “What is that?” Huang came to Casmir’s side and look
ed at his face. “You know.”

  Casmir nodded mutely, unable to take his gaze from the scene playing out.

  Friedrich lunged and thrust his pertundo into his attacker’s black torso, the point sinking in and branches of white lightning streaking out and wrapping around it. His foe did not slow at all, merely striding forward to deliver an attack of its own.

  Friedrich dodged an impossibly fast punch, the knight displaying speed and agility that would have made him a match for any human, maybe even a genetically enhanced one from another system. But this was no human, and it caught Friedrich on his second attempt to dodge, hefting him into the air.

  The knight shortened his pertundo and swung it like a one-handed axe, even as he dangled, his feet well above the pavement. His foe held him at arm’s reach, but one of the swipes landed, the blade cleaving deeply into its side, more lightning coursing around it.

  Casmir held his breath, hoping the legendary weapon might be a match for the deadly construct. But a tarry black hand came down and yanked the blade out. The wound in its torso closed, melting together as if it were made from molten wax, and re-hardening into its original form.

  Friedrich snarled and tried to land another blow, but his enemy hurled him through the smoke and into a cement wall. He struck with bone-crunching velocity.

  “Casmir.” Huang gripped his shoulder. “There’s another one on the mag-rails outside, throwing people around as if they weigh nothing. What are they?”

  Casmir swallowed. “Crushers.”

  “The robots you helped develop?”

  “Yes.”

  Huang ran back to the window. “Shit, that one’s coming this way. Casmir, get out of here. If they really are after you…”

  “I know,” he croaked numbly.

  On the display, the crusher stalked toward Sir Friedrich, who was stirring, but not quickly. Casmir made himself tear his gaze away. For whatever reason, that man out there was buying him time.

  He rushed around the lab in a panic, grabbing the bird robot and a bunch of tools and materials, anything that seemed like it might be useful. He stuffed them into his satchel with his lunchbox and a half-full bottle of fizzop, then laughed shortly. Almost hysterically. Was this what he was going to flee the planet with? He had to go home first. This was ludicrous.