Two ships fired at each other out over the ocean, one barely visible because of fog rolling in. Oku stared, mesmerized by the crimson and orange DEW-Tek bolts they spat at each other, brilliant against the dark cloudy sky. She’d never expected war to come this close.
“Your Highness.” Her bodyguard tugged on her arm, and from his exasperated tone, she feared he would toss her over his shoulder.
“I’m coming,” Oku promised but didn’t move. “Chasca!” She didn’t see the dog anywhere. She couldn’t leave her to spend the night up here, in danger and cowering in fear. With enemy spacecraft so close, it was inevitable that they would target the castle, this ancient symbol of what all the Kingdom stood for.
“Hurry,” the second bodyguard called, holding the door to the castle open. “Bring her!”
“I’m trying.”
“I just need to find my dog. She’s probably under the hedges over there. I’ll—”
Her fear came true, and her bodyguard hoisted her off the ground.
“Damn it, Jordan,” she growled, barely resisting the urge to jam her knee into his groin or pound at his shoulders. These were her protectors, and they were doing their job. She knew that. It was only her fear for Chasca that made her resist.
“I’ll come back and look for her, Your Highness.” Jordan ran for the door.
Oku slumped, no longer fighting, though she strained her neck, hoping to spot her furry gray companion so she could direct Jordan where to look.
A boom sounded, and the ground shook again as he stepped across the threshold and into the well-lit interior.
“I suppose that’s one way to make sure she obeys,” a familiar voice said from the stairs. Her brother Finn. As he trotted down the steps ahead of the bodyguards, he kept speaking over his shoulder. “But if they’d left you outside, and you’d been bombed, there’d be fewer siblings between me and inheriting the crown.”
Oku rolled her eyes. “You’d hate running the Kingdom. You’d actually have to do work. I know how allergic you are to that.”
“I’d just have people do the work for me.”
“That’s not how it goes. With great power comes great amounts of paperwork.”
“Oh? Disappointing.”
Jordan must have decided that Oku wouldn’t fight him further, for he set her down. She let the guards lead her down the stairs—other castle staff were heading the same way, so it would have been a fight to run back up—but she couldn’t help glancing back and hoping Chasca would find her way inside and be safe. She also worried for Casmir’s parents and hoped the planetary defenders would soon fight back the bombers. She would feel horrible if something happened to them when she could have helped them.
“Your Highness,” a woman’s deep voice said, and Oku’s closest bodyguard of more than twenty years stepped out of the masses. Maddie was six feet tall with the shoulders and thick neck of a wrestler, despite being in her fifties now. “You made it. Good. I checked your rooms, where you should have been at this late hour.”
“It’s not that late.” Oku touched Maddie’s arm fondly. “And I’m allowed to stay out past dark these days, you know.”
“Nobody should be staying out late now.” Maddie’s weathered face was glum, but it usually was. Oku could only remember a few times when she’d gotten the stoic woman laughing. “Was Prince Finn bothering you?” Her eyes narrowed.
Oku smiled, remembering the time that eight-year-old Finn had stolen a chart she’d been making for a science presentation, and Maddie had caught him dumping it in a fountain in the courtyard. She had proceeded to dump him in the water. Finn, despite being twenty-two with a decent showing of a beard now, still avoided Maddie. Their parents hadn’t obeyed his wishes to “punish the wayward servant,” not after Oku had shown them her soggy presentation.
“No more than usual.”
Her older brother, Jorg, was the real ass. Oku was glad he was stuck in another system, even if that meant there was no chance of a bomb dropping on his head.
“We’ll be taking the secret tunnels to the Citadel shortly,” came an authoritative voice. It sounded like Senator Andrin, a cousin of the family who worked in the castle. “We hope the bombing will end soon, but King Jager has deemed the castle unsafe. He and Queen Iku are already at the Citadel.”
The rumbles of dozens of conversations echoed through the large chamber, servants and staff and senators and knights with offices in the compound. Oku looked toward the stairs she’d come down, a last few people dribbling into the safe room.
It would be harder to slip out once she was in the modern and well-fortified Citadel. If she was going to find Chasca—and Casmir’s parents—she needed to do so now. She could order her bodyguards to let her go, but she feared she would come up against the limits of her power—any order her father had given in regard to his family would supersede anything she said.
“Maddie.” Oku drew her bodyguard into a corner and lowered her voice. “I need to get out of the castle and into the city to collect a couple of friends and bring them with us to the Citadel. I also need to find Chasca. Will you help me slip out?”
Maddie frowned. “Friends from the university?”
“Not this time.” Oku thought her research compatriots from the botany and biology departments would be safe on their own, since the university had its own underground safe rooms, and most of them lived on or near campus. “These friends live in the Brodskiburg District.”
“You will get me in grave trouble with the king and queen if we don’t show up at the Citadel tonight.”
“You say this as if it hasn’t happened before.” Oku smiled. She’d always taken the blame, telling her parents she’d ordered Maddie to assist her with whatever plot had later forced them into a mandatory visit to her father’s throne room.
Maddie sighed. “Less often in recent years. I’d thought you’d matured.”
“This is important. It’s not about getting unadulterated native soil from the forests beyond the city limits or trapping wild pollinating insects to study.”
Another sigh. “I will help. What do you want me to do?”
Senator Andrin walked past with another senator that Oku had seen in meetings with her father, but they were deep in conversation and didn’t glance her way.
“…can’t believe this is happening,” Andrin said.
“We should have let him start his war,” the other said. “It would have been taking place on someone else’s home turf then.”
“Maybe. Or our forces would have been spread thin—thinner—when this happened.”
The two men tramped up the stairs. Going to look for someone who was missing?
“We’ll follow them,” Oku whispered, “and pretend we need to help them do… whatever they’re doing.”
“Very well, Your Highness.”
“You needn’t look so glum when you trail after me.”
“Trust me, it’s warranted.” But Maddie managed a quick smile.
Oku hugged her, then lifted her chin and strode after the senators, as if she had every right to do so. Finn noticed and frowned but didn’t try to stop her. Maybe he still hoped for a bomb to drop on her head. Jordan also noticed, and he took a step in her direction, but he saw Maddie and must have decided she could handle Oku.
Good. Oku pulled up a database from the network so she could look up Casmir’s parents’ address, frowning at how slow the connection was. Had one of the server centers been hit?
As they climbed, the rumble of thunder and booms of explosives grew audible again, and Oku shivered with fear, with the knowledge that she could get killed out there tonight. She kept going anyway.
Asger knew alcohol wasn’t a proper post-workout beverage, but Bonita had left it out after putting it in the chicken meal she’d made for dinner, and after eyeing it from the treadmill for an hour, he’d decided to indulge. And maybe take the edge off the knowledge that he was getting himself deeper into trouble. Again.
He couldn’t blame Ki
m for not wanting to make a weapon capable of killing thousands—if not millions—but why couldn’t she have stowed away on someone else’s shuttle? What would he do if he was ordered to leave the knighthood?
Occasionally, the thought surfaced that maybe being kicked out would be for the best if he was serving the kinds of people who ordered the development of bioweapons, but it would feel like such a failure. And it would mean giving up everything he’d worked for, and maybe having to walk away from the beauty of Odin forever. The idea made him feel like his throat was closing up and suffocating him.
He remembered Ishii lamenting that this wasn’t the best time to be a soldier in service to the king. Asger wondered what it would have been like in the old days, serving under Admiral Mikita. But he had knowledge that Ishii lacked, and it was hard for him to imagine Admiral Mikita without seeing Casmir, smiling up from under the console he’d sabotaged, with dusty cobwebs draping his shaggy bangs.
From the beginning, Asger hadn’t had any trouble being Casmir’s protector—even before he’d gotten so sick, he’d looked like someone who needed protecting—but following him into war was another story. Whatever he was, he wasn’t some great leader.
The hatch opened, and Asger looked back, hoping for Qin. He knew he shouldn’t—he’d told himself that their kiss had been a mistake, that he shouldn’t lead her on when he couldn’t stay here and be a part of her life—but he couldn’t help it that his heart wished for her company. He felt bad that he’d pulled away from her touch in the cargo hold. But he was more worried about what would happen if he didn’t pull away.
Maybe it was for the best that it was Casmir who walked in. He carried a towel and headed straight for the two treadmills pulled out, but he paused when he spotted Asger sitting on the front of one, tequila bottle in hand.
Casmir waved. “I don’t think you’re putting that to its proper use.”
“The treadmill or the tequila?”
“The treadmill. Kim assures me they’re designed for self-torture, not sitting on, standing on, or hanging clothes from.”
“I’m sure the words she used involved getting in shape. Or possibly growing cojones.”
Casmir grinned. “Those were Bonita’s words.”
He draped his towel over the bar, stepped on, and grabbed the waist strap. “Sorry to interrupt your drinking session, but I am attempting to regain my health, and I’m told laboring on gym equipment is the way to do it.”
“Labor away. I’m just…” What was he doing? Feeling sorry for himself? Yes. Did he want to admit that? No. “Pondering how I’m going to walk up to a man I respect and ask for his pertundo. We’re arriving tomorrow.”
“Since I’ve already been accused of being a delinquent this week, I won’t feel naughty suggesting that you sneak into his cabin while he’s not there and take it.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Oh, is there a security code on his door? I could come along to help if you like.”
Asger gave him a dark look, though he knew Casmir was joking. Probably. “You’ve got a theft of your own to plan. You’ll be busy.”
“This is true. I’ve been researching Sultan Shayban, the ruler of Stardust Palace and millions of people who have flocked to his nebulous nation in the last few decades. He controls Stardust Palace Station, three habitats, and has exclusive mining claims on two of the three asteroid belts in this system. Guess who has the other asteroid belt, as well as six belts in other systems? Yes, the nemesis I did not want but seem to have, Prince Dubashi. It seems he’s got a lot of nemeses. Did you know that the reason Sultan Shayban was willing to betroth his daughter to Prince Jorg was that he wanted an alliance with the Kingdom, because Dubashi has been encroaching on his mining territory and trying to steal some of his big contracts?”
“I did not.”
“I’m hoping I can use that. The enemy of my enemy and all that. I plan to talk to him and try to make a deal rather than stealing anything.”
“You are going to make crushers for Jorg then?” Asger sipped from the bottle as Casmir started up the treadmill at a brisk walk.
“I’ll try to make crushers. It’s one of the few things I can do that could potentially help with the war. Obviously they’d have to get close enough to enemy ships to board them in order to be useful, but that’ll probably happen. I’m not convinced Jorg is the proper commander for them, but I can at least make them, and then… we’ll see.”
Asger squinted at him. “We’ll see?”
“I’m mulling over possibilities. I’m worried about my family back home.”
“Me too. Though my closest family is here in System Stymphalia.”
“The way you said that makes me feel like I should pat you on the shoulder and say comforting words.”
Asger snorted. “You’d fall off the treadmill if you tried.”
“Yes, but that could happen regardless.”
Asger scraped at the corner of the label on the bottle. “You know he’s never said he’s proud of me?”
As soon as the admission came out, he grimaced and acknowledged that he was soundly on his way to getting drunk.
“Your father?”
“Yeah. He wasn’t around much, and we didn’t have that many conversations, so I’d remember if something like that had slipped out. But what I remember are a lot of stern lectures about how I wasn’t measuring up to expectations.”
“That had to be rough on you.”
Asger shrugged.
“It’s hard to feel like you’re enough,” Casmir said, “when someone you respect is looming over you telling you that you aren’t.”
“I’m pretty sure he regards me as a disappointment, if not an outright mistake. Definitely an obligation. If you’re noble, you’re supposed to have an heir. I wonder if he ever really wanted a kid.” Asger decided he might regret all of this honesty later and attempted to shift the focus. “You ever have any problems with your father, Casmir?”
“No. When I was growing up, he was—both of my parents were—always very supportive and accepting. My problems were generally at school with my peers, whom my parents couldn’t protect me from. I got teased and pushed around and made to feel inferior, mostly by large angry kids who probably felt they weren’t living up to their fathers’ expectations.”
Asger snorted. “The circle of life.”
“The circle of feeling ashamed and belittled and worthless. It’s something we should work on collectively as human beings. Maybe then, we wouldn’t all be driven to prove ourselves by beating on our chests and starting wars.”
“I’m buzzed enough that I’m not going to feel awkward because we’re talking about this.”
“Ah. I’ll pretend I do feel awkward, since manly men don’t talk about feelings, right? And I’m manly, not damselly, despite what Rache says.”
“You’re… special.” Asger wondered how much Casmir remembered of being carried through that compound by his crusher. Even if Asger had been sick, he doubted his ego would have allowed him to be placed in a position that connoted such weakness. Why it mattered, he wasn’t sure. Casmir was the only reason any of them had made it out of there. Maybe it was unfair of Asger to say that he wasn’t a leader. He just wasn’t the kind of leader that Asger was accustomed to—or that the Kingdom would recognize.
“Evolved, a woman once told me.”
“Was it your mother?”
“My grandmother, actually. She’s wise, witty, and makes the best sufganiyot. You should always listen to her.”
Asger took another drink. “You shouldn’t admit to others that your best compliments from the fairer sex came from your grandmother. We’ll pretend this conversation didn’t happen.”
Casmir cocked his head as he plodded along. “Do you need for it not to have happened?”
“Maybe. Knights don’t talk about—” Asger waved vaguely, as if his thoughts and emotions floated in the air around them, “—insecurities. We’re strong. We’re bricks. Bricks aren’t vul
nerable.”
“Unless you drop them from a moderate height, and then they shatter all over the place.”
Casmir said it lightly, jokingly, but Asger stared glumly at the deck. Lately, he had sometimes felt like he was on the verge of shattering.
“I’m sure you’ll be fine,” Casmir said apologetically.
“I’ll figure it out. I’m just tired of being on the wrong side of what my superiors want. I’m trying to do the right thing, but it never turns out right in their eyes, even when it feels like we had a victory. I can’t catch a break. I feel more like a felon than a noble.”
“I’m sorry. I’m not helping that. It’s your bad luck that you keep getting stuck with me.”
Asger shook his head. Maybe it was bad luck, but he didn’t believe that Casmir was truly a delinquent. Jorg, Romano, and maybe even Jager were the problem. They were asking for things that went against Asger’s upbringing, against the morality that had been drilled into him as a boy and a squire and finally as a knight.
“I’m beginning to think they’re wrong, Casmir. Not us. But I don’t know how that helps me.”
“You’ve read the great philosophers. Sometimes, governments need to change. We act like they’re these monolithic immutable things, but in the end, they’re just people, and people are fallible.”
“You’re talking about rebellion. I can’t be a part of something like that.” Asger shied away from the idea. “I swore my loyalty to the Kingdom. I gave an oath.”
“Oaths should be given to people, not governments, not systems. And don’t you think you should get to know the people before swearing fidelity?”
“Even if I wanted to, it’s too late to take it back. Oaths are forever.”
“Well, I never swore an oath. I hope you’ll forgive me if I fail to follow orders to the letter to make robots to kill people. And I hope you’ll forgive Kim if she refuses to make some horrible bacteria to kill people on an even grander scale. I can’t blindly follow rulers who order such things. I’m only sad that it’s taken this upheaval in my life for me to look beyond my simple existence to realize people like that were in charge of us all.”
Planet Killer (Star Kingdom Book 6) Page 9
