Planet Killer (Star Kingdom Book 6)

by Lindsay Buroker

  A rapping sounded at the exterior hatch.

  “I think we’re being invited out.” Casmir took a deep breath, nervous for his friends and nervous for his crushers too. Other than sparring with Tristan, this would be their first real combat. “We’ll drop the ruse. Let my crushers go out first and handle the robots.”

  Tristan lifted his head, a defiant spark in his eyes. Asger and Bjarke wore similar expressions. They clearly did not want to hide behind robots.

  Casmir shrugged and spread a hand. “It’s why I made them.”

  The rap came at the hatch again. Since a robot was doing the knocking, it was probably only in Casmir’s mind that the second version was more insistent.

  “Go get them, boys.” Casmir nodded, then stepped back so he wouldn’t be in anyone’s—anything’s—line of fire when the hatch opened.

  Bjarke took one last look at the scanner display, but he must not have read any humans heading their way. He jogged back to join Asger and Tristan at the rear of the squad of crushers as Zee opened the hatch. Casmir’s creations tramped out. Bjarke tried to shoulder one out of the way, so he didn’t have to go last, but the crushers were like walls. Walking walls.

  Weapons fire buzzed right outside the shuttle, then heavy thuds and clanks sounded as crushers and robots came together in hand-to-hand combat.

  Casmir resisted the very stupid urge to stick his head out and watch the battle. He put his helmet up and poked into his satchel, hoping he had a few cables along that would work for plugging into Dubashi’s hard-wired network. Would the prince have had some proprietary system constructed over the years? If so, Casmir would have to hunt around for the equivalent of a maintenance or systems administrator’s office so he could find cables designed to work here.

  The thuds and clanks were replaced with squeals and horrible wrenching sounds, along with the clatter of robots—or pieces of robots—hitting the landing pad. Casmir lamented that he couldn’t take over the battle bots instead of destroying them.

  “Not this time,” he whispered.

  The combat noises faded, and a few silent seconds passed.

  “Clear,” Bjarke called from the hangar.

  Casmir ventured out, grimacing at the carnage—it looked like a robot graveyard, with nothing but pieces of the defenders remaining. But he nodded in satisfaction at the twelve crushers standing by the closed metal exit door. Whatever damage they had taken, they had already repaired themselves. There was a reason so many people desired crushers for themselves.

  As Casmir joined the others, he looked along the walls, hoping to spot some network ports, but there were only panels for environmental and hangar controls. Two other ships occupied the cavernous space, but they were powered down, no sign of life inside or outside. As the scanners had told him, neither was one of Rache’s shuttles—Kim hadn’t come this way.

  “Which way first? The conference rooms?” Bjarke waved at his chip—he’d also downloaded the blueprints. “And are you leading or am I, Dabrowski? I’m still trying to figure out where we came in.”

  Yes, the levels and levels of corridors and rooms and hangars and all the wiring and environmental infrastructure made the blueprints more confusing to read than a simple map.

  “They’ll know we’re here soon, if they don’t already,” Asger said. “Casmir shouldn’t go first.”

  Casmir spotted a camera high up on a wall. Yes, if someone was monitoring that, Dubashi would indeed already know that his pirate bounty hunter had turned into a knight invader. Especially since Asger and Bjarke wore their telltale armor and carried their pertundos.

  “Zee and I will lead. If we run into more battle bots, I’ll hide behind him as you all storm past. Let’s try to find Dubashi’s quarters first. I’m curious about… a lot, really.” Casmir looked thoughtfully at Tristan, wondering if Princess Nalini’s new real-estate-development partner would have a good eye when it came to looking over a prince’s finances, assuming Casmir could hack into his records.

  The door didn’t open for them, but the crushers easily forced it aside. Casmir jumped at the squeal of weapons fire as two of them strode into the adjacent corridor. The rest of the crushers rushed inside, and Casmir couldn’t see around them to ascertain who was shooting at them. He trusted the crushers to handle it, even as he felt useless.

  Seconds passed, crunches and crashes and thuds echoing from the corridor. Casmir worried they would have to fight all the way to Dubashi’s quarters, which were several levels down from this hangar, and that Dubashi would come up with something more daunting to throw at them. How he longed to get to a computer station so he could plug in and, he hoped, gain access to everything.

  No, not everything. He wouldn’t be able to control these robots or anything that wasn’t itself hard-wired in. And he wouldn’t be able to locate Kim, even knowing her chip ident. He hoped that wherever she was, she wasn’t in trouble.

  “Clear,” Bjarke barked.

  Casmir entered the corridor, stepping around more broken pieces of robots on the floor, and headed toward a lift. Zee and another crusher walked beside him, with Bjarke, Asger, and Tristan right behind. The remaining crushers trailed after. He felt like a general leading an army.

  Not surprisingly, the lift doors did not open for them. Zee startled Casmir by lifting an arm he’d torn off one of the robots. He waved it at a sensor, and the doors opened.

  “How’d you know there was a security chip in there?” Asger asked Zee.

  “My creator, in his vast wisdom, uploaded schematics for all of the common military robots that we might encounter,” Zee said.

  Vast wisdom, hah. Casmir had forgotten what all was in the original programming.

  “Casmir, why do all robots talk about you like you’re a particularly fine lover?” Asger asked.

  “I didn’t get that from Zee’s comment.” Casmir stepped into the lift, noting the size of its interior and the size of his army. “We have a platonic relationship.”

  Asger, Tristan, and Bjarke followed him inside.

  “Casmir Dabrowski cannot produce offspring with a robot,” Zee announced. “He seeks to court Princess Oku.”

  “What?” Asger blurted, gaping at Casmir.

  “No, no.” Casmir groaned—this was not the moment he would have chosen to admit that to Asger, who was besotted with the princess, or had been at one time. “I’m just hoping to ask her for coffee when we get home. And to discuss her bee project.”

  “Princesses don’t have coffee with commoners,” Asger said stiffly.

  “Casmir Dabrowski is a delightful coffee companion,” Zee stated.

  “Please stop helping,” Casmir whispered as Zee stepped in beside him.

  “We’re not all going to fit,” Bjarke said, indifferent to coffee dates.

  But Asger kept staring at Casmir. Glaring at him?

  The crushers outside of the lift morphed and half walked, half flowed into the car. They flattened and molded themselves to the walls, and one stuck himself to the ceiling, the light dimming as he covered the panel.

  The doors slid shut after the last one was inside. Being surrounded by their tarry black re-formed bodies made it feel like they were in a large coffin.

  “Those things are creepy as hell,” Bjarke said.

  “They’re versatile, nearly indestructible, and an asset to our team,” Casmir corrected him.

  “I don’t think it’s that much of a mystery why they like him,” Tristan murmured to Asger.

  Asger, a pensive glower still on his face, did not respond.

  Zee waved the robot hand at the sensor on the panel inside the door. The panel had a display, but nothing came up. There weren’t any physical buttons to press.

  “Tell me we aren’t trapped in here with two thousand pounds of metal,” Bjarke said.

  “Better than two thousand pounds of sweaty enemy troops,” Tristan offered.

  “Actually, the crushers weigh more than that combined.” Casmir scooted his way to the control displ
ay and used a screwdriver to open a panel underneath. There, he found his first network port. And it used one of the four universal connectors from around the Twelve Systems, one he had a cable for. “Hah.”

  Casmir would have hugged it if he could. He plugged in with his cable, the other end inserted into his tablet.

  The system was locked tighter than a bank vault. Fortunately, more by accident than design, he had his hacking programs backed up on the tablet. Unfortunately, this was much clunkier and slower than interfacing directly.

  “This will take some time,” he said.

  “We could force the doors open and look for stairs or a ladder,” Bjarke said.

  “We could split our forces to cover more ground and have a better shot at finding Dubashi,” Asger said.

  “We could wait and let Casmir finish what he’s doing,” Tristan said.

  “I’m starting to like you, Tristan,” Casmir murmured distractedly. He took the robot hand Zee still held, flipped it to find a serial number, and then tapped it into the lift program for access. Their car started moving. “It’s going to take time to get into the secure portion of the network where everything important is, but the lifts and most doors require only that someone be a human or robot resident of the base.”

  The lift car creaked ominously as it descended. Protesting the weight of all the crushers? Just because they could squeeze themselves into small spaces as effectively as a cat didn’t mean it lessened their overall mass.

  The car groaned to a stop on the level Casmir had plugged in, and the doors slid open. Crimson energy bolts shot into the lift, bouncing off armor and crushers and the walls.

  A bolt ricocheted off Bjarke’s chest and slammed into Casmir’s shoulder. Zee yanked him farther away from the door as he gasped. Even though the galaxy suit provided moderate protection, it felt like a hammer against his muscle. He stumbled as the crushers and knights rushed out, jostling him as much as the energy bolt had.

  Zee remained inside, acting as a shield between Casmir and the exit. He also kept his foot in the way so the door wouldn’t close.

  Casmir used the time to work on the network. He couldn’t stay plugged into the lift port all day, but if he could get in once, he could create a log-in and passcode for himself and jump on more easily the next time.

  A grinding sound floated over the din of the battle. Someone cried out in pain. It sounded like Asger.

  Since their enemies weren’t firing into the lift now, Casmir risked peeking around Zee. Something that looked like a large grenade hurtled through the air toward Bjarke, who jerked aside, avoiding it by scant centimeters.

  It struck the wall behind him. Instead of bouncing off, spider-leg-like grippers sprouted, and it suctioned to the wall. The grinding noise sounded again as a powerful drill protruded from the object’s body and drove into the metal wall. Smoke wafted from the hole.

  Asger hollered from farther down the corridor, “Get it off me!”

  Casmir couldn’t see him through the crushers and battle bots—there had to be another dozen out there attacking his team—but he could guess that one of those flying drills had struck him. Or stuck to him. And was burrowing through his armor?

  Bjarke pushed his way past the crushers to reach him. “Hang on, William!”

  Asger roared in anger and pain.

  One of the battle bots fired something akin to Qin’s anti-tank gun. Casmir didn’t see the shell land, but the explosion boomed, and the floor in the lift quaked. Bits of one of his crushers flew in all directions. The view cleared long enough for him to glimpse more robots with more anti-tank guns striding toward their group.

  Casmir thought the crusher would be able to reassemble itself and regain its integrity and form, but if they were struck enough times with explosives in rapid succession, it could overwhelm their ability to repair. It was also possible the blows would knock out the nanites and thus the programming instructing the crushers how to reassemble.

  Zee gently pushed Casmir’s helmet back so that he couldn’t see out—and a stray energy bolt couldn’t come in and hit him. “Trust in the crushers to take victory from those inferior robots, Casmir Dabrowski.”

  “I know. I will. Thank you, Zee.” Casmir believed the crushers could win. He worried more about his knight friends. It would be better if they stayed back and let the crushers take the brunt of the attacks, but that didn’t seem to be in their DNA.

  Casmir forced himself to return to his tablet and the network. He’d gained access to an interface for a systems administrator.

  “Making myself an account,” he murmured to himself—or perhaps to Zee. “Want me to download any network games while I’m in?”

  “I believe this should not be a priority now.”

  “True.”

  “Did I make a mistake by speaking of your interest in Princess Oku, Casmir Dabrowski?” An energy bolt bounced off Zee’s chest as he finished that sentence, but it didn’t faze him.

  Speaking of things that shouldn’t be a priority now…

  “No, it’s fine. Asger will remember that he’s intrigued by Qin, and he’ll get over any disgruntlement. I hope.”

  “Clear,” Bjarke called back.

  Casmir reluctantly unplugged the cable—at least he’d made some progress—and hurried out after Zee. Several of those projectile drills were stuck into the walls, holes gouged out, and as Casmir passed, one of the crushers reshaped his body away from one sticking into him. The drill clunked to the floor. The crusher stomped it into a thousand pieces.

  Asger was still standing and, with Bjarke’s help, had removed the drill assaulting him. But blood dripped down the front of his silver armor, a hole revealing a gouge in Asger’s shoulder. The armor appeared to have thickened in that spot, the intelligent sensors reacting to the threat, but it must not have been enough. Maybe the weapons had been built precisely for this, to stick to armor long enough to drill holes.

  “The prince’s quarters are supposed to be up here.” Bjarke led the way, running now that they were close.

  Asger didn’t acknowledge his pain, only hurried after his father.

  They had to fight a few more robots before they reached the prince’s quarters, with Casmir flattening himself to the wall behind an ornamental column and Zee. He was surprised they hadn’t yet run into any people. Did Dubashi live here alone with that female officer? That was hard to believe. Casmir would expect a prince to have a huge family around him, like Sultan Shayban did, and to have his palace—or moon base—filled with servants attending to his every whim. Admittedly, robots could do that, and perhaps an astroshaman preferred mechanical company, but the utter lack of people seemed odd. Maybe they were all hiding. Or were at that meeting.

  They turned a couple of corners and into a corridor that only had one set of double doors at the far end. Dubashi’s quarters. The doors were framed by the most ornate columns they’d seen with an architrave and frieze above, battling spaceships carved into the marble. Old spaceships. They looked like relics from the Kingdom’s first expansion, reminding Casmir of Dubashi’s supposed age.

  Bjarke stopped in front of the doors. They looked like wood but were made from a hard metal that didn’t budge when he pushed at them. Or when Tristan joined him and they both pulled.

  “I’ll open them,” Casmir said, noticing a panel with a port.

  “I hope so, because this is a dead end until we can get in.” Bjarke made room for him to squeeze in with his tablet.

  Casmir didn’t point out that it would probably be a dead end even after they were open, unless secret passages led out of the prince’s quarters. Secret passages that they could find.

  Not surprisingly, the account he’d made for himself in the system didn’t give him access to the lock on Dubashi’s doors. He’d given himself full administrator powers, but there had to be a special level above that, one he hadn’t found on his first perusal. He needed full prince powers.

  A rumble emanated from the corridor behind them.
<
br />   “Now what?” Asger groaned.

  “We’ll soon find out,” Bjarke said, sounding fearless until he added softly, “I wish I’d kissed Bonita before I left.”

  “I wish I’d kissed Nalini,” Tristan said.

  “I wish I’d kissed…” Asger glanced at his father and must have decided he didn’t want to say. “Someone.”

  Casmir was busy and felt no need to point out that he had no one to kiss.

  “Any chance you’re almost in, Casmir?” Tristan murmured as the rumbling grew louder. The floor reverberated under their feet.

  “There’s a chance,” Casmir said.

  “A good one?”

  “No.”

  29

  Kim donned a biohazard suit over her galaxy suit, already certain before she looked at the first slide or computer display that such was a wise course of action. Viruses aside, there were doubtless things in this facility that could eat through SmartWeave and kill her.

  General Kalb, who had yet to speak, wore only her military uniform, but unless Kim found Scholar Sunflyer’s work and dumped it on the floor, it shouldn’t matter. If a completed virus was in here, it would likely be in one of the biosafety level-four labs with alarms that would squeal if someone tried to take it out.

  If Kim’s case had made its way in here, she could have tried to get one of the knockout grenades out to use on Kalb, but the robots had disappeared with it. Unfortunately.

  Kim did her best to ignore Kalb and the guard robots as she poked into one of the lab computers. Though she was tempted to mulishly do nothing, she had better find out what she was dealing with. This was why she had come, why she had delivered herself into the enemy’s hands. How far along had Scholar Serg Sunflyer gotten in developing his bioweapon before his conscience had turned fatal on him?

  None of the workstations had passcodes or required retina scans. Maybe it was assumed that if one got this deep into the base, one was expected to be here.

  Scholar Sunflyer had taken meticulous notes, and dread sank deeper and deeper into Kim’s gut as she read them. He’d been modifying the Orthobuliaviricetes virus, which was horrifically scary and deadly even in its natural form, if not as readily transmitted as something like the Great Plague.