Short Stories from the Star Kingdom Read online

  Viggo had said he wanted to help, and she hadn’t seen the harm in it, but if they got more than a half mile from the ship, he would lose the signal and his ability to control the robots. Then Bonita would be stuck carrying them back.

  An older woman with a shopping bag walked too close and bumped Bonita. She wrinkled her nose at the scent of some loathsome fermented vegetables on the woman’s breath and checked her pistols and knife to make sure that hadn’t been an attempt at pickpocketing. She’d left her freshly earned Union dollars in the vault on the ship with the hatch locked. If someone tried to break in to steal it, Viggo could sic the rest of his robot cadre on him or her.

  “I see one of them,” Qin whispered, her gaze pointed ahead and to the right, toward a kiosk serving exotic vat sausages, as the sign said. Sort of. Alterations had been graffitied on with red paint, changing it to erotic rat sausages.

  An eight-foot-tall man with shoulders half as wide was stuffing his face with a massive sausage on a stick. Bonita recognized him from the bounty pictures. Boom-Boom.

  He bristled with weapons: daggers and pistols at his hips, a DEW-Tek Starkiller rifle on a chest strap, and something that looked like a giant axe across his back. He wore a galaxy suit, which would protect him from a few shots, especially if he put the helmet up, but not the harder to penetrate combat armor. That was something, at least.

  Bonita assumed his buddy wasn’t far off. Her nerves jangled in anticipation of a fight. No matter how many times she’d hunted down a man—or woman—she still got nervous before the moment.

  “He sees me.” Qin faced straight ahead, pretending she hadn’t seen the man looking.

  “Let’s step into that bookstore.” Bonita waved at a storefront, tall aisles of shelves visible through the Glasnax window. They were filled with maps and scrolls for art, desk and office accoutrements, and rows and rows of books. Even the giant Boom-Boom would have a hard time seeing targets around everything.

  “We’re going to start a fight in a bookstore?” Qin asked. “I don’t want to get trapped. Or blow up a bunch of expensive books.”

  “I’ve been to this station before. There are doors in the backs of the shops that lead to maintenance corridors. We can set up an ambush there.” The last time Bonita had hunted someone here, she had ended up chasing him through those exact corridors. Her knees had been better then. She hoped this didn’t devolve into a chase.

  Qin looked dubious, but she followed Bonita inside.

  A chime tinkled, and a robot clerk announced the specials and that they would be incinerated by the security system if they attempted to shoplift. It sounded like a bluff, though Bonita did see a couple of cameras on the walls.

  She and Qin found a spot in the rear where they could keep their backs to a wall and see the entrance.

  “Keep an eye out,” Bonita whispered, then trotted to the back to make sure she had been right about the corridor—and that that door wasn’t locked.

  She almost tripped over one of the robot vacuums and grumbled. The door was not locked. She poked her head into the corridor outside and found the lights out, a broken ceiling panel dangling. There were a few garbage bins and crates stacked against a wall a few yards away. She almost ran over to make sure nobody was hiding behind them—she’d only seen one of the toughs so far—but a quick check revealed that the bookstore door was locked from the corridor side. She grabbed one of the robots, tipped it on its edge, and leaned it in the gap so the door couldn’t close. It whirred indignantly.

  There wasn’t anyone behind the crates.

  “Just being paranoid,” she muttered to herself but also checked around the nearest corner before letting herself believe the corridor was empty. For now. She would use those crates for her ambush.

  When she returned to the bookstore, she tipped the vacuum robot back onto its rollers and rejoined Qin.

  “He hasn’t come in yet,” she reported, her claws gently tracing the spine of a book on Old Earth cultures. “I was sure he saw me.”

  “He’s probably telling his buddy to join him. Or to go around back.” Bonita hoped the thugs didn’t know about the corridor access, but she couldn’t count on it.

  “Hide behind me if any fighting starts,” Qin said.

  “I’ll hide behind anything I can for cover.”

  “I miss my combat armor. I was only able to get away with my guns. They have trackers on the armor suits.”

  Bonita didn’t ask who they were. Whoever had hired Boom-Boom and Sledgehammer, presumably, but it wasn’t her business to pry. In truth, she didn’t want to know who was after Qin, because then she might decide it was very foolish to risk making enemies of them. And she would rather help Qin than abandon her.

  “If this works, we’ll buy you a suit with the bounty money.”

  Qin smiled sadly. “Their bounties aren’t that large. Combat armor is expensive.”

  “I know. I have a set. And their bounties aren’t that large if we turn them in here, but they’re wanted in four systems. Tiamat Station is offering the most.”

  “You’d travel all that way and risk having them on your ship for weeks to collect those bounties?”

  “For an extra thirty thousand Union dollars? Hell, yes. That’s more than I would make running freight in those weeks. A lot more. Though we could probably pick up a cargo to take too. And I have a brig cell—sort of. It’s secure. And you’d be around in case they tried to break out, right?”

  Qin lifted her chin. “Yes, I would.”

  Bonita peered over the bookcase, expecting the sausage-sucking slug to stalk into the bookstore any second. But minutes ambled past. He was definitely waiting for backup.

  The robot clerk came down their aisle to check on them, and Bonita pulled out the culture book, pretending she was considering a purchase.

  “Take your vacuuming outside,” the clerk said, stopping in front of two of Viggo’s robots. “There is no filth in my store.”

  The vacuums whirred away, disappearing under tables and into nooks. The robot huffed and followed them.

  Qin laid a claw on the page Bonita had opened the book to, an old legend of a dragon and a monk back on Old Earth.

  “I don’t know anything about my culture or heritage,” she murmured.

  “You said that before. Does it matter to you?”

  Qin shrugged. “It just seems like having a culture and sharing it with people is part of the human experience. If all you are is intelligent and self-aware, are you still human?”

  Bonita thought it was the fur and the pointy ears that would make Qin’s claim of humanity more dubious, rather than any absence of culture, but she kept the notion to herself. “Yes. And I’m sure that’s not all you are.”

  “But culture is important. I’m sure you came from a family with a religion, and songs, and stories, and a language that isn’t System Trade. And it shaped you and made you who you are. A human being, not a mishmash of hacked-up DNA strands jammed together in a test tube and thrown in an artificial womb for nine months.”

  Bonita checked the front door again, afraid the toughs would stride into the bookshop in the middle of her new assistant’s existential crisis. “I had a father who liked to hit us, a mother who slept around, and a bunch of brothers who ran with the habitat gangs. The only culture that’s left an impact on me decades later was learning to cook our traditional meals at my grandmother’s side.”

  That wasn’t quite true, because Qin’s mention of songs had brought one from her childhood to mind, and even if her family had been dysfunctional, she remembered celebrating Christmases with them, at least when she’d been little. The traditional had fallen off after her father had been shot and her eldest brother had been sentenced to life on a penal asteroid mine.

  “Cooking sounds nice,” Qin murmured.

  “I’ll make my husband-winning posole rojo for you once we take care of your problem and leave this station. Though I have to admit it only wins loser husbands that leave you after five years. T
echnically, I left one of them.” Bonita shrugged, wondering how she’d gotten into this discussion with a kid she’d just met. “Never mind. I—”

  She stopped. Boom-Boom strode through the door, his rifle in both hands.

  The robot clerk squawked a protest. Boom-Boom blew him away, shards of metal tinkling against bookcases and the ceiling.

  Qin and Bonita ducked.

  “Lure him out the back,” Bonita whispered, not wanting to shoot up the bookstore.

  Qin nodded once, her wistful expression gone, replaced by a warrior’s grim determination. She sprang over the bookcase, leaped over three more, and even as the tough whipped his rifle toward her, she crashed into him. They smashed to the floor, a whirl of punching fists and thrusting knees.

  “That’s not luring,” Bonita groaned, but she rushed to the back door, prepared to do her part.

  Either Qin would lead the tough into the corridor, or Bonita would run into the second one, trying to sneak up on them. Or both.

  When she reached the door, one of the robot vacuums waited, like a dog hoping to be let out.

  “Yeah,” Bonita whispered, as thuds and clunks echoed from the walls of the bookstore. “You go out first. Good idea.”

  She pushed the door open enough to let the vacuum whir out. A boom sounded in the corridor, and a round blew the little robot to pieces. Smoke billowed, filling the corridor.

  Bonita ordered her galaxy suit’s helmet to unfold from its slot below the back of her neck and leaned out with a pistol in each hand. She spotted movement right away, a man in combat armor, standing beside the crates but not bothering to take cover behind them. He didn’t need cover, not with the armor. He held a gas-operated X10 Drumfire with a bandolier of explosive rounds he could load into it.

  Cursing, she fired at his seams, hoping the armor of some criminal wasn’t in the best repair and that she would find a weakness. He’d been glaring through his helmet at the destroyed robot, but he whipped the Drumfire toward her as she fired. Her shots were accurate, but the crimson energy bolts bounced off the seams. She ducked her head back inside just before he blew the door off its hinges.

  Bonita pulled out one of her smoke grenades and threw it down the corridor without looking. Another boom sounded. Had he fired at the grenade? Good.

  She risked leaning out one more time, certain her galaxy suit could take a hit, and spotted him engulfed in smoke, but he was already striding out of it, toward her doorway. She aimed a pistol, not at his seams this time, but at his weapon’s gas cartridge.

  As he strode out of the smoke and saw her waiting for him, his scarred face lit up. An instant before he pulled his trigger to fire again, the cartridge blew up. The weapon followed.

  Startled, he dropped the pieces, but he wasn’t discombobulated for long. He snarled and sprang for her.

  Bonita jumped back from the doorway as someone else blurred past and into the corridor. Qin.

  She roared, crashing into the thug like a wrecking ball.

  Bonita spun, worried Boom-Boom would be on her heels. But the bookstore had fallen silent. Boom-Boom lay unmoving in the front doorway, two of Viggo’s vacuums ramming against his boots, as if they could push him to the nearest trash incinerator. On a more civilized station, security would be arriving by now, sirens wailing. But only a handful of the passersby even glanced at the fallen thug. A boy ran up and stole his big axe.

  Crashes and thuds and a male cry of pain came from the corridor. Bonita inched toward the doorway, prepared to help, but the noise stopped.

  She leaned out and found the armored man on the floor, his helmet torn off, his armor dented like a tin can that had been run over by a street cleaner—repeatedly—and his eyes lolled back in his head. Qin stood next to him, a foot on his chest, her huge anti-tank gun in hand, though she had never fired it.

  “Thank you for your help, Bonita,” Qin said gravely.

  “I didn’t do much.” Bonita glanced at the robot vacuum shards and realized she would have to use some of the bounty money to replace that, or she could never hear the end of it from Viggo.

  “You and the vacuums distracted them. It would have been difficult if they’d both come at me at once.”

  Bonita looked at all the dents in the unconscious man’s armor. “I’m not sure I believe that.”

  Qin flashed a grin, fangs glinting in the light flowing out of the bookstore.

  “Why don’t you pick up a couple of books before we tote these guys to my brig?” Bonita waved into the store. “I’ll pay for them. I think we owe the owners a purchase since we got their door blown up. And their robot cashier. Uhm, maybe we better make a few purchases.”

  Bonita now regretted choosing the book shop for their ambush. She should have chosen one of the more disreputable stores, like the place that rented sex robots by the hour and had the robots programmed to pickpocket the drunker clients.

  “Books? I love books.” Qin lowered her gun and clasped her hands together in front of her chest. “I never had money or was allowed to own anything before.”

  “Well, you can now. You can have a cabin of your own.”

  “Does this mean I’m hired?”

  “At no pay besides room and board and nail polishing? You got it, kid.” Bonita smiled, though if nothing went wrong with turning in the thugs for their bounties, she would be able to afford to pay her new assistant, who, bless her, didn’t look at all perturbed by these stipulations. “Why don’t you get that book on culture stuff? And then pick a culture that sounds interesting and claim it for yourself.”

  One of Qin’s pointed ears rotated uncertainly. “I don’t think it works that way. You have to be born into a culture.”

  “Says who? The culture police? Look, most of human history is the story of people getting conquered by other people and having some new culture forced on them. Just find one you want to learn about, and we’ll make it yours. I’ll help you celebrate the holidays.”

  “I’ve never celebrated a holiday before.”

  “Then you better find a culture that has a good one coming up pronto.”

  Qin grinned shyly and walked into the bookstore.

  * * *

  THE END

  The Main Event

  The Main Event

  Author’s note: Just a reminder that this story takes place after the events of Layers of Force (Star Kingdom, Book 8), so there are major spoilers. I recommend waiting to read it until after you’ve finished the series!

  * * *

  • • • • •

  * * *

  10 years ago…

  * * *

  As he lay recuperating from the third of what would be four surgeries, David Lichtenberg decided he needed a new name.

  Why?

  Here on Jotunheim Space Station in System Hydra, far from the home he’d fled in System Lion, he didn’t need to worry about anyone recognizing him. Nobody here knew that back in the Star Kingdom, he’d been raised as the ward of a nobleman and trained to be an elite knight, nor would anyone care if they did know. But he didn’t intend to stay here for long. Once his cybernetic upgrades were complete, he would return to System Lion and enact vengeance upon King Jager, the man responsible for the torture and death of David’s beloved fiancée.

  It would be easier to reach the ensconced and heavily guarded king if David was disguised and had a convincing fake identification. He felt compelled to choose a serious name, appropriate to his goals, but one that wouldn’t telegraph them. It had to be just right.

  “That’s a lot of hardware you’re getting, kid. You planning to rob banks?”

  David turned a cool gaze on the grizzled, scarred man recuperating in the hospital bed adjacent to his, one of several in the bay. How disappointing that the Kingdom crowns he’d scrounged up before staging his death hadn’t been sufficient to buy him a private room. In hindsight, he should’ve known that space would be at a premium on a station spinning in the middle of an asteroid. It wasn’t as if the famous Twelve Star
s Biotechnological and Immunological Enhancements Clinic had room to expand.

  “No.” David hoped his flat tone would deter his nosy neighbor.

  “Impress a girl?”

  David couldn’t keep from wincing as Thea’s face flashed into his mind. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the image of her face that he longed to remember, with her lips spread in a smile and her blue eyes twinkling as they walked on the beach. Instead, the memory branded into his mind was of her face twisted with agony as she lay dying in his arms after being raped repeatedly by those pirates.

  The pirates that Jager had hired to kidnap them. As some manipulative megalomaniacal test for David to pass. He’d gotten away… but he hadn’t been able to save her. He’d failed.

  He wouldn’t fail again.

  “No.” David made his tone even colder. “Do not speak to me further.”

  “You look too grim and brooding to be a sports star upgrading his body for the cybernetics league. I’ll assume you’re going to be a bounty hunter. Maybe an assassin.”

  The speculation was so close to the mark that David found himself staring suspiciously at the man instead of ignoring him, as he wished to do.

  Maybe he’d been wrong to assume that nobody here would care about him. How could this stranger know his plans?

  Not that David planned to become a professional assassin. There was only one man he wanted to kill. If he survived that, he didn’t know what he would do with his life, but he did know one thing: once his enhancements were complete, no cursed pirates would get the upper hand against him ever again. Nobody he cared about would suffer because he wasn’t strong enough to save them.

  “Over here, sweet cakes.” The man lifted his arm toward one of the female android nurses. “I need my fix.”

  His other arm, a newly installed prosthesis, hung in a cradle, wiring and a computer display hooked up to it. The day before, he hadn’t had an arm there at all, having lost it to who knew what accident or enemy.