Gate Quest (Star Kingdom Book 5)

by Lindsay Buroker

  “I’ve been working on a project for Princess Oku. I also didn’t expect to see you again so soon. Every time we part ways, I’m reasonably certain there’s no logical reason I’ll run into you again. Yet you’re becoming a more predictable fixture in my life than Salad Saturdays.”

  “You should sound delighted, not perplexed, about seeing me frequently. What are Salad Saturdays?”

  “Casmir usually goes over to his parents’ for the Sabbath, and I’m recovering from an arduous work week, so I don’t bother cooking. For lunch, I walk to the Garden Gate on campus where an actual human chef makes these amazing custom salads with more than a hundred ingredients to pick from and fantastic dressings that they mix on the spot.”

  “I’ve never heard anyone sound so excited about salads.”

  “I always hated them as a kid. Until I was ten, I liked and was willing to eat… about three foods that were good for me. And all manner of junk food and sweets. It wasn’t until I saw the effects of high-sugar diets on intestinal bacteria that I realized I would be better off consuming fewer sweets and more fiber.”

  “You realized this at ten.”

  “At eight, truth be told. But I was stubborn, and it took me a while to come around to the idea.”

  “By ten you were wiser.”

  “Naturally. It got easier when I started at the university and found the Garden Gate. Their dressings and the ability to pick all the good toppings while avoiding suspicious vegetables made me a fan.”

  “And what are suspicious vegetables?” Rache sounded amused by this conversation.

  She wasn’t sure if she should also find it amusing or if she should punch him.

  “Anything that takes too long to chew or has a weird texture or strong taste. There are even more suspicious seafoods.” She curled a lip at memories of her father’s attempts to get her to like various rubbery or slimy—sometimes rubbery and slimy—seafood offerings over the years. Her brothers had always been willing to chomp down anything placed in front of them. As usual, she was the odd one in the family. She had no idea if her android-body-inhabiting mother had ever been like her when it came to food.

  “You’ll have to make me a list of what’s allowed at dinner.”

  “Why, are you going to cook for me?”

  “If we survive this, certainly.”

  “Can you cook?” Kim thought of the picture she’d seen of the young nobleman David Lichtenberg with a haughty tilt to his chin as he held his air-bike helmet under one arm. He hadn’t looked like someone who’d ever had to prepare his own meals.

  “I can find a video demonstration with a recipe and follow the steps. Though your palate sounds like it may throw a few more obstacles than usual in the path.”

  “Yes, you’ll have to apply filters to your recipe search. It’ll add at least five seconds. I’ll have to ooze gratefulness when I sit down to the meal.”

  Rache laughed, then glanced at the hatch and cut himself short. Nefarious villains probably weren’t supposed to laugh when they were questioning prisoners. Not with amusement. Perhaps with maniacal glee.

  She smiled, feeling pleased that she’d prompted the response.

  “Do you know why I like you, Kim?” he asked quietly.

  No, she thought promptly and lost her smile, worried this was about to go to some serious romantic place that she wasn’t ready to visit. Especially not now, when they were on their way to infiltrate an enemy base. She needed her adventures to end for a time and for her life to return to normal before she could analyze how she felt. And act on those feelings.

  Which wasn’t logical because, as she’d already admitted, he could never be a part of her normal life. He could never return to Odin, not for more than a visit, and even then, he would have to hide from the Kingdom Guard the whole time.

  Rache looked back at her—she was still standing near the hatch while he sat in the pilot’s seat, checking gauges and monitoring their path.

  “Because of my perky exuberance, I assume,” she said, the first thing that came to mind.

  “You have an impressive deadpan delivery on lines like that.”

  On most lines. She had never been good at showing a lot of emotion or gesticulating passionately. Whenever she’d tried, usually because some acquaintance had been teasing her about sounding like an android, she had always felt like an actor putting on a show. It was exhausting.

  Kim shrugged, feeling a familiar self-consciousness that she’d never quite grown out of, despite all her accomplishments in her field.

  “It’s because I knew from day one that I didn’t have to worry about you seducing me.” He sounded like he was smiling behind his mask.

  Kim relaxed. It didn’t sound like this was going to be the serious talk about romantic feelings that she’d feared.

  “You do not have to worry about that,” she agreed. “The first few times we met, I wanted to punch you.”

  “When did you stop feeling that way?”

  “I didn’t.”

  He snorted.

  “I was almost there, and then you kidnapped me again.”

  “Damn. Does it help if I say I only wanted to kidnap Casmir and that you just happened to be on the same sub?”

  “No, I don’t like it when villains kidnap my friends either.”

  “I can see it’s going to be an uphill battle to win your love.”

  Hearing the word love made her uneasy again, so she switched subjects. “You’ve alluded to people trying to seduce you and kill you before.”

  “Yeah.”

  He didn’t continue, so she thought that was as much as he would admit. She wouldn’t pry and ask for more. It wasn’t like his life was any of her business. He’d already shared more of it than she’d expected, including the reason why he hated Jager so much.

  “There’s an energy beacon ahead. Maybe a buoy is the more accurate term. I think it’s anchored in place.” Rache tapped a couple of instruments. A hint of excitement entered his voice as he added, “We might have reached a monitoring perimeter that the astroshamans have in place.”

  “Do you want me to go back there and send your pilot up?”

  “No. I don’t need him yet. And he doesn’t tell me stories about salads.”

  “A lack you didn’t realize you had in your life.”

  “Not until recently, no.” He looked back at her, not a glance but a long look.

  “If you’re gazing affectionately at me, let me know so I can modulate my facial expression appropriately. The mask makes it impossible to tell.”

  “It might be worth taking it off to see this modulation.”

  “I might even offer to hold your hand.”

  Rache tore his hood and mask off in a split second and held out his palm.

  This time, she laughed. She kept it soft, positive there were no circumstances in which prisoners were supposed to chuckle during an interrogation. And she clasped his hand. He wasn’t wearing his gauntlets, so she felt the calloused warmth of his palm.

  “That came off far more quickly than I would have expected,” she said.

  The corners of his mouth quirked upward in a hesitant smile. He did not have laugh or crinkle lines around his mouth or eyes, like Casmir was starting to get, and the smile seemed foreign to him, or maybe something he hadn’t done for a long time. That made her sad, and she touched the side of his face.

  “It’s not like the armor. That takes far more of a commitment.” He rubbed his thumb against the back of her hand, and it wasn’t… unpleasant.

  Maybe it was even nice, she admitted somewhat reluctantly. Better than the urgent groping and grabbing that she remembered from her peer-pressure-induced experimentation with sex in school. She still couldn’t imagine liking it, but maybe some touching wouldn’t be so bad. With someone who understood that she wasn’t that into it. But would he? Normal people with normal sexual urges never seemed to grasp that some people were different and weren’t going to change because they met some romance-novel stud wi
th all the right moves.

  He was very still and watching her, and she wondered what he was thinking. She’d forgotten how intense his eyes were.

  Maybe he guessed that his gaze was disconcerting, for he tilted his head forward, looking down at the deck. She shifted her fingers to his dark brown hair. It was soft, despite a short military cut that made it stick up and made his face seem more angular than it was.

  “There have been a few assassins sent by Royal Intelligence,” Rache said. “I usually ferreted them out—I’ve gotten good at self-preservation—and dealt with them.”

  She swallowed, not wanting to deliberate on what dealt with them meant.

  “But there was one, toward the end of Chief Superintendent Bernard’s time heading the office, that he and Jager probably picked together.” His voice turned hard even though his touch on her hand remained gentle, and he didn’t pull away from her stroking his hair. “A beautiful woman, the most dangerous kind, of course. She was trained to be a spy and an assassin, and her weapons skills were excellent. I know because when she applied for a position with my mercenaries, I tested her myself. I thought it might be a trap of some kind, but her background files had been forged exquisitely. I didn’t have Amergin running my intelligence department then, or maybe he would have sniffed out the inconsistencies, but she appeared to have been born in a system far, far from the Kingdom, and she had an accent that backed that up, and she’d been a bounty hunter for years… It doesn’t matter. We’ll say the setup was good and leave it at that.”

  He paused, and she asked, “She tried to kill you?”

  “Eventually. The seduction part happened first, though I admit, she didn’t have to try that hard. It had been more than five years since Thea’s death. I hadn’t been entirely chaste, but never anything serious. I knew it would be a mistake to have a relationship with a subordinate in any case, but after a few months and a few battles, it seemed she was a real part of the crew and admittedly someone I liked, even though she never brought up salads.”

  He looked up, his forehead creased.

  Was he worried she would be offended if he spoke of past lovers and caring for them? She found herself more curious about him and what drove him than upset that he’d loved other women before. And she still wasn’t sure she wanted him to love her. Because then, she would have to love him, and that would have been complicated even if he weren’t a hated criminal of the crown.

  “I’ve heard bounty hunters aren’t overly concerned with the health of their intestinal microflora,” she said, because it seemed like she should say something. As soon as the words came out, she feared they were wrong, that this was the time for a concerned nod rather than a joke.

  But one corner of his mouth twitched upward. “Nor spies nor assassins.”

  “A strange group of people.”

  “No doubt.”

  He lowered his head again. “Anyway, we eventually had a physical relationship. I knew it wasn’t smart, and that the men would talk, but I’d been alone for a long time.” He shrugged a shoulder.

  You’ve been alone for a long time again, Kim thought.

  “She didn’t try to assassinate me right away,” Rache said. “I would have been more ready for it then. It was some weeks before she tried to poison my food. And, when that was a miss, tried to stab me in bed while I was sleeping. It wouldn’t have seemed like so much of a betrayal if she hadn’t— Well, she made me care. And think… Oh, it doesn’t matter now, I suppose. I’ve just come to realize that someone like me doesn’t get to have a normal life, relationships. I guess I knew that from the beginning, when I chose revenge instead of running away to start a new life somewhere. But I couldn’t imagine not retaliating. Someone had to—I’m not the only person Jager has screwed. I’m just the one who was his own creation, the one most appropriate to kill Frankenstein.”

  Kim lowered her hand. She had asked him about this, so she couldn’t begrudge him sharing his story, but she’d been more comfortable when it had been about his past rather than his need for revenge. “I assume you recall that the monster killed everyone around Frankenstein but not him.”

  She didn’t doubt that he’d read the Old Earth classic.

  “Yes, Frankenstein was trying to destroy his creation when he fell into the arctic ocean and later died of pneumonia, and the monster went off to commit suicide. And Ahab never killed the whale. He was caught in the harpoon line and dragged to his death. Revenge never works out the way literary heroes plan, does it?” Rache lifted his head, showing a lopsided smile.

  There was no joy or pleasure in it. As poor as Kim was at reading facial expression, she could guess that it was partially wry and partially fatalistic.

  “I’ve thought about assassinating him,” Rache said bluntly. “In the beginning, that was why I got all the enhancements. So my odds would be better of getting past castle security and to him, so I could do to him what his femme fatale later tried to do to me. But with all these literary examples guiding me, I can’t help but fear I’d get myself killed before killing him. I’d be willing to trade my life for his, but the thought of dying before completing the mission…”

  He looked toward the dark, lifeless water outside, an ocean devoid of even bacteria, from what the network entry on the moon said. “I’ve gone off to fearlessly risk my life for other missions. I’m not sure why I have such a hang-up about risking my life to get to him. I’ve told myself that it’s enough to torment him, to take away his resources and his ships, to make him hate the sound of the name Tenebris Rache. But that’s a justification, and I know it. The Twelve Systems would be a better place if he were dead. But I’d have to hope someone would come along and assassinate Jorg too. He’s too much of a spoiled snot to be left in charge of a marble collection, much less billions of lives. Why does history keep repeating itself, Kim? Hereditary rule, democracy, socialism, capitalism… For thousands of years, we’ve kept trying them on and they’ve kept failing us, but we continue to default to one or another, and we can’t figure out a system of governing ourselves that really works.”

  “Maybe because we keep trying to found our civilizations on the logical and rational, and forget that we evolved from animals and are dominated by emotions and instincts, whether we want to accept it or not.” She spread her hand, not sure how to address his concerns and fears, and feeling strange that he was confessing so much to her. This was what she got for not being a seductress and putting him on edge. Instead, she’d become the confidante for a man she shouldn’t have anything to do with.

  “You don’t seem to be. If you’re ever ruled by your emotions, it would shock me.”

  “They’re there. I’m poor at demonstrating them, but I feel—”

  A beep came from the control panel, and Kim fell silent as Rache turned to it.

  He sighed.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “The Waddler destroyed that buoy.”

  “Which will alert the astroshamans that we’re coming for them?”

  “I’m sure they already knew, but this is like flicking their noses and then trying to sneak up from straight in front of them. I’d hoped they would expect us to go in through the crevice where we encountered their drones last week.” Rache rose to his feet and grabbed his hood and mask. “I need to talk to Casmir and give him his assignment.”

  “More than deactivating the gate’s defenses?”

  “We have to get to the gate first.” He faced her before donning the mask. “Thank you for the therapy session.” The lopsided smile returned. “And for fondling my head. If you would like anything of yours fondled, let me know. I believe in fair trades with the opposite sex.”

  “That’s egalitarian of you.”

  He bowed his head, then put his mask on and walked out.

  Kim gazed at the dark waters ahead, wondering what was waiting for them and if any of them would survive this.

  10

  “He’s who?” Bonita gaped.

  “He says he’s
Sir Bjarke Asger, which I assume would make him our Asger’s father.” Qin blushed a little at calling William Asger hers. Or theirs. It wasn’t as if she would likely see him again.

  “Bjarke. What the hell does that mean?”

  Qin shrugged. “What does Johnny mean?”

  They were on the Dragon’s middle deck, having put the injured people in the ship’s small sickbay and given bunks and cabins to the others. Fortunately, the woman with the broken leg was a medical researcher with hospital experience, and she’d volunteered to tend to the burned man. The refugees were all quiet and subdued—so few of their comrades had survived.

  “He asked if he could have his bag of weapons back,” Qin added.

  “What, so he can stay there by himself and fight Captain Amazing’s entire crew?”

  “Scholars Kelsey-Sato and Beaumont are staying aboard the Machu Picchu with him. But I’m not sure if they know how to use weapons. They’re both loaded droids. And academics.”

  “Kelsey-Sato? That’s Kim Sato’s mother, isn’t it? The monkey woman? I’m sure she’ll scare off the enemy when she hoots and fluffs up her fur.”

  As someone with fur of her own she could fluff up, Qin declined to comment.

  “They’ll all get themselves killed.” Bonita shook her head. “Viggo, how long do we have until Captain Amazing gets here?”

  “A little over an hour and a half. Scholar Kelsey-Sato wandered into the cargo hold, found a stunner in our armory, and wandered back to the other ship.”

  “If Sato thinks that’s going to do anything to armored men, she’s not as smart as you’d expect for a Scholar So-and-so,” Bonita said. “And is anyone else here confused? Now we have two Scholar Satos and two Sir Asgers. We’ll have to use nicknames. Johnny can continue to be Toes, and this Scholar Sato can be Furry Sato.”

  Qin raised her eyebrows. “It’s Kelsey-Sato.”

  “That’s a mouthful.”

  “And Furry Sato isn’t?”

  “Good point. Viggo, next time someone wanders into the armory, you should deter him or her. It’s not a library. Random people don’t get to check out weapons.”