Gate Quest (Star Kingdom Book 5) Read online

  “You did.” Yas tried to keep any judgment out of his voice, and he didn’t let himself point out that if she’d only come to sickbay and let him help, they might be able to find a better way to deal with her pain. One that didn’t mean giving up her humanity. “Is someone injured?”

  He didn’t see anyone clutching an arm or sitting out of work.

  “I’ve got a headache and need something strong. The first of the Kingdom ships is now orbiting around the moon, with the rest almost here, and the captain wanted these subs ready to go three hours ago. He’s not happy that we’re behind, but it’s not like spaceships are designed to drop off submarines. Yes, the moon’s gravity is low enough that we can fly down to the surface and back without the assistance of a launch loop, but you can’t just hover over a crack in the ice and shove them out the door.”

  Yas was sure his face grew green as he imagined being inside a submarine shoved out the door from hundreds of feet up.

  “They’re designed to withstand the pressure of hundreds of meters of water overhead, but they’re not indestructible. We’ll get ’em in and out, but it’s a lot of work. But, Doc.” Jess patted his shoulder and turned it into a squeeze, a somewhat desperate squeeze. “I’ve got pickaxes trying to bore out the soft tissue in my skull. I need something. I already tried… other medications.”

  “The trylochanix?”

  She met his eyes warily. She’d slipped into sickbay recently and liberated more doses from the medical cabinet with a lock that it turned out engineers could thwart. “Yeah.”

  “If you use the same medication constantly, the body becomes inured to it. It’s better to switch it up.” Or go off it altogether, he thought, and try something less addictive. “After it’s been a while since you’ve been exposed to it, you’ll regain your sensitivity. Caffeine works the same way. At first, it’s a noticeable stimulant, but then you need larger and larger doses to achieve the same effect. After a while—”

  “Pickaxes, Doc.” Jess released his shoulder to point at her skull. “What about this face I’m making—” she grimaced deeply, “—suggested I wanted to hear a medical lecture?”

  “I thought you might find the explanation useful in making drug choices in the future.”

  “Nope.” She glanced toward the doorway out of the shuttle bay, though it was closed. “I just got a message from the captain. He’s on his way. Gimme something good. Please.” She opened her palm and wriggled her fingers.

  Yas sighed and chose a painkiller that operated on different receptors than her trylochanix. He slid an ampule into his jet injector, positive she wanted something fast-acting.

  “If you come to sickbay for your physical and let me run a DNA test,” he said quietly, “we can come up with something optimal for you.”

  “I thought, from the fact that you’ve scheduled three physicals for me and I haven’t shown up for any of them, you might have given up.”

  “Not at all. Corporal Chains has now not shown up for five physicals.”

  “Mercenaries are stubborn.”

  “I’ve noticed.”

  “How many has Rache not shown up for?”

  “When I tried to schedule him for one, he hacked into the scheduling system and had it play a clip from a cartoon vid where a pack of wolves chase down a doctor and devour him. I think it was a joke, but there’s a nugget of truth in all jokes, right?”

  “In the good ones.” She grinned at him, the furrows in her brow already less pronounced as the drug took effect. “Aren’t you glad I just don’t show up?”

  “No. I’m sad that you don’t show up.” Yas smiled, even though it was the truth. He was still trying to be careful not to apply pressure, since he kept thinking that she would see the light on her own and come see him. But would she have to hit the bottom first? He knew he could keep her from dealing with so much pain, but… maybe more pain was what it would take.

  “Because you’re a doctor and can’t stand it when patients don’t comply with your wishes? Or because you want an excuse to fondle my lady bits?”

  Ugh, he wasn’t doing a good job of hiding his attraction to her. “I only fondle my patients after hours.” He winced. That hadn’t come out right. He was bad at jokes. Why did he try them? “I mean, I don’t fondle my patients. That gets you written up by the medical board and kicked out of your profession.”

  “Probably not here. Especially since none of your patients show up to be fondled.” Jess winked. “Uh oh, gotta run.”

  She raced toward one of the cranes, grabbing a toolbox as she went.

  Yas looked to the door and wasn’t surprised to find Rache walking in. He wore his black combat armor and his equally black hood and mask. He carried his helmet in his hand and wore a lumpy pack and two rifles on straps on his back.

  “Khonsari,” he barked, though he walked toward Yas.

  “We’re almost ready, sir,” Jess called from the crane. “Fly on down to wherever you’re dropping these hounds off. We can deploy them now, and I’ll work on the system for getting them back on board while the teams are away.”

  Rache must have sent an order up to his pilot on the bridge, for the deck rumbled and the noise of the engines shifted. The Fedallah was heading down to the moon.

  “It’s good that you’re here, Doctor,” Rache said, walking up.

  “Do you also have a headache?” Yas waved his injector.

  “No. What I have is a need for a trained surgeon to go along on this mission to fix up anyone who’s injured during the fighting.”

  Yas lowered his arm. “Oh.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m going too. I’ll throw myself in front of any torpedoes heading your way.”

  “Are the odds good that a mercenary in combat armor would keep a torpedo from blowing away what’s behind him?”

  “Oh, probably not.”

  “So we’ll get to die together in a frozen hell under miles of ice?”

  “It’ll be a bonding experience.”

  “Like bonding our exploded particles together in a lumpy mass of blood and bone?”

  “You’re starting to sound like a mercenary, Peshlakai.” Rache sounded like he was grinning.

  “Now you’re just being insulting.”

  “Captain.” The giant-hat-wearing intelligence officer, Amergin, trotted into the shuttle bay. He waved a tablet. “I’ve got something interesting you might want to see before you go down.”

  Rache waved him over. “Show me.”

  Yas knew he should go pack for his impending submarine experience—or impending doom, as his mind wanted to call it—but Rache didn’t move away from him as Amergin approached. Curious what the something interesting was, Yas watched as the tablet display flared to life.

  “I’ve been working on disassembling the latest Kingdom encryption keys so I can snag copies of their communications for us, but this wasn’t even encrypted.” Amergin tilted the tablet toward them as a bald man’s face came up, a red mustache dangling around a smarmy smile.

  “That’s Red Dog Cullen, a bounty hunter,” Rache said. “His stolen and refurbished, as he calls it, ship is in the system. I saw it on the scans earlier.”

  “Yes, it is. And guess who he’s talking to?” Amergin asked.

  “The Kingdom?”

  “One of the king’s ambassadors who’s on the Osprey right now.” Amergin waved at the tablet, and the video played.

  “Captain Ishii,” Cullen said, “I’m delighted you reconsidered and opened communications with me. I haven’t yet sold that frequency to anyone else.”

  “My name is Ambassador Romano,” a cool voice said, the screen splitting to show a heavy-jowled face opposite the bounty hunter. “All further correspondence will go through me, not the captain.”

  “I’ll talk to whoever wants to pay me. And give me Dabrowski.”

  Rache dropped his chin to his fist, but the mask, as always, hid his facial expression.

  Yas was startled to hear some random bounty hunter bringing up t
he robotics professor, but Dabrowski’s fingers had been all over the rise of the new Tiamat Station president, so maybe it wasn’t surprising. Or maybe it had something to do with him working with Rache? If their king had learned of that, the professor could be in trouble.

  “Do you actually want him?” Romano asked. “Or do you just want him dead?”

  “Prince Dubashi wants him dead but also wants to see the body for proof that he’s gone, so I need him. Or his corpse. In such a way that it’s recognizable.”

  “I see. That may be difficult, but if you’re still willing to give me the frequency of the locator that your contact put on one of Rache’s shuttles…”

  Rache jerked his hand down, and his chin came up. “What?”

  “I can probably make sure Dabrowski doesn’t come back from his mission,” Romano finished.

  “I won’t give you the frequency until I have him,” Cullen said.

  “That’s not acceptable. We need it now so we can find Rache’s ship and ensure he doesn’t get in the way of our mission.”

  “What is your mission, Ambassador?” Cullen drawled. “You know the entire system has noticed your little fleet and is mighty curious why it’s orbiting a barren moon, right?”

  “That’s none of your concern. Send me the frequency, and you have my word that you can have Casmir Dabrowski’s body once the mission is over. But you must agree to send it now.”

  “Are you in such a hurry to do battle with Rache’s warship? The mercenary is wily.”

  “We’ll handle him. Do you agree or not?”

  Cullen tapped his chin with a single long finger. “I agree, but if I don’t receive Dabrowski, alive or dead, within the week… Well, I’m taking someone’s dead body to Dubashi.” He stared pointedly into the camera.

  Romano didn’t appear concerned by the threat. “A week should be fine. I’ll transfer the money now. Don’t comm the ship again, except with the frequency, which you’ll send directly to me.”

  “Needy, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I am. Out.”

  The display went dark.

  “Chief Khonsari,” Rache called.

  “We’re ready to go, boss!” Jess jumped out of the crane and waved for a couple of her men to clamber down from the submarine they’d been hooking up.

  “Good, but I have another task for you. It seems one of our shuttles that visited Tiamat Station may have picked up a tracking device.”

  “Nasty when that happens.”

  “Yes. Find it and destroy it.”

  “You got it, Captain.” She saluted him and jogged off.

  She was so much perkier and more vibrant than when Yas came in. He wished it was due to a love-induced release of endorphins at his presence rather than the drug he’d pumped into her system.

  “What happens if our guys can’t find it, sir?” Amergin asked.

  “Then we’ll have to launch the shuttles so they can’t be used to drag down the Fedallah. I don’t want our bridge crew battling four Kingdom warships while I’m miles under the ice.”

  Neither did Yas. He couldn’t help but imagine a scenario where they were down there in submarines, the Fedallah was destroyed, and there was nobody to retrieve them.

  3

  Casmir’s mood was improving. He was lying on the deck of his cabin with his hands folded behind his head as he watched and re-watched a video that had arrived the last time a courier ship gated into the system. It was from Princess Oku.

  The video started with her hound Chasca rolling on her back in the manicured grass outside of the greenhouse in Drachen Castle’s courtyard. Then Oku had walked inside and recorded soil, seeds, and sprouts in varying degrees of growth on a workbench while explaining her current project. She was working on hybridizing strains of a cereal grain that grew well on the system’s space habitats and stations, hoping to increase yields.

  Casmir found this glimpse of normal life back on Odin refreshing. Nobody was dying. Nobody was getting ready to invade anybody else’s base. It was idyllic.

  And so was Oku. Since she was the one recording the video, there weren’t any images of her face, but he enjoyed hearing her voice, and he caught a few glimpses of her hands patting soil into pots, dirt under her finely trimmed nails. He grinned, still tickled that his princess wandered around in sandals with grass between her toes and thought nothing of dirtying her hands.

  Not his princess. He shouldn’t think of her like that. She was Princess Oku, who happened to have sent him a message that had nothing to do with her bee project and hadn’t requested anything from him. She’d sent it just because. And he was delighted.

  When it started playing for the sixth time, starting with the rolling hound again, he considered what kind of response he might send. He would prefer to share something cute rather than anything about all the death he’d seen on Tiamat Station—or the death that had occurred outside of it.

  “Zee, I don’t suppose you’d like to roll on the deck on your back and playfully wriggle your arms and legs in the air?”

  Zee, who was standing in his usual guard spot by the door, looked down at him without commenting.

  “I’ll take that for a no.”

  “You are lying on the deck. I was debating if you had a seizure. I’ve observed that this can happen without thrashing and flailing, and that atypical words sometimes come out of your mouth afterward.”

  “That’s all true, though I think it’s more that the typical words just get a little slurred. I did not, however, have a seizure. The deck looked comfortable. Princess Oku sent me a video of her dog rolling on the grass. Crushers, of course, are far more intelligent and sophisticated than dogs, so I didn’t truly expect you to roll around on your back.”

  “Also, there is no grass here.”

  “Which is the main reason you’re not entertaining the idea.”

  “It is approximately .13 percent of the reason.”

  Casmir grinned. “That’s a higher percentage than I would have guessed.”

  A new message came in, this one local and therefore present time.

  Professor Dabrowski, scrolled President Nguyen’s text. Are you available to speak for a few minutes?

  Greetings, President Nguyen. I’m trying unsuccessfully to get Zee to roll around on the deck for my love letter, but otherwise, I’m not busy. Other than all the gate research he’d been doing, and the scanner he was trying to put together to read the pseudo radiation, but he couldn’t mention those things to the leader of a foreign government who was probably wondering why the Kingdom warships were still in her system.

  He would have to be careful with what he said, since he felt like he’d come to know Nguyen in the short time he’d been on Tiamat Station, and he wasn’t good at keeping things back from people that he liked. Or from loathsome enemies. He needed to learn more restraint.

  Zee? Wasn’t that the large naked black robot trailing you around?

  He’s a little more sophisticated than a robot, but he is large. And naked. Kim hasn’t yet convinced me to buy him a pink bow tie.

  Is she the one who’ll be the recipient of your love letter?

  No, that’s— someone else.

  Someone who appreciates your robot’s antics?

  I do hope so. What can I help you with, ma’am? Is Tork doing well? Did he get a chance to explore your telescope?

  He’s fixing it right now, as there was some damage during our civil war. He seems well, though, and says it will give him an opportunity to make improvements. As for myself, I’ve called representatives from all of the governments in the system to Tiamat Station to discuss issues that face us.

  Casmir wondered if the Osprey and the other three Kingdom warships loitering only a couple of days from her station were considered the “issues.”

  Many of them want to know why your fleet is skulking around Xolas Moon. Her dryness came through even with text only, and he had the answer to his question. We can’t believe that you’ve been invited down to visit the astr
oshaman base that nobody is supposed to know about. They’re supremely unwelcoming to visitors without cybernetic implants.

  It’s not my fleet, ma’am. Casmir wasn’t surprised that she knew about the astroshamans since the moon was so close to Tiamat Station, but he dared not speak of it, since it tied into the real reason the Fleet was here. I am merely a civilian advisor.

  Of course, I believe that.

  Casmir scratched his jaw, not certain what to say. What did she think he was?

  I assume you won’t tell me what your fleet is up to, Nguyen continued, and that’s not why I sent a message. I wanted to ask if you’d be available to return to the station to help negotiate, as a neutral third party.

  Er, neutral in what manner?

  I’m proposing that we unite the system to better face any threats that may come in the future. Not under one government but in a solid alliance that shares people and resources with each other as needed.

  That seems logical. Casmir wondered how she could consider him neutral, when he was a part of the largest threat she likely had in mind. But I’m not at liberty to leave the Osprey—technically, I wasn’t at liberty to do so last time either. The Kingdom Fleet gets huffy if its civilian advisors wander off.

  Are you sure? I could send a ship to pick you up.

  And spy on what we’re doing on the moon?

  Of course not. But don’t be surprised if the ship has a lot of portholes. And scanners. You might recall that I’m an academic. We’re a curious sort.

  I know that well, ma’am. Perhaps after the mission, I’ll have the freedom to come and go as I please. As soon as he mentally typed the words, he doubted the likelihood of them. But I don’t have any negotiating or diplomacy experience, so I don’t feel qualified to help with your goal.

  Are you sure? You managed to get me to like you even though I was slung over your knight’s shoulder.

  I’ve heard from some women that Asger’s shoulder is an appealing place to be.

  It’s more likely that you heard that from him.