Shockwave

by Lindsay Buroker

  She did not like that the other ship hadn’t communicated with them before presuming to lock up, and she had been tempted to raid her small armory for explosives that could hurt even armored soldiers. But the last thing she wanted was to fight a battle in her own cargo hold and have the intruders blow holes in the side of her ship. This trip would end for her extremely quickly if that happened.

  As much as it galled her, it would be better to pretend to be helpless and let them have what they wished. Especially if that was Casmir. She didn’t owe him anything, and it would be a relief to get him off her ship before more of those crushers showed up. With luck, the intruders would leave her alone once they had him.

  A faint clunk-ting emanated from the airlock chamber. They were coming.

  Casmir jogged out of the corridor and across the hold to join her. He didn’t have any weapons, which wasn’t surprising since he hadn’t arrived with any. She was a little surprised he hadn’t asked to borrow something, but she was glad. A passenger on her own ship could blow holes in the hull as easily as an intruder.

  “What are you doing?” Bonita asked.

  “Preparing to give myself up to prevent you and your ship from being troubled further.”

  She squinted at him. She wasn’t positive that was truly what he’d been planning when she’d caught him in navigation earlier. If he was smart enough to build robots, he was probably smart enough to make up a story on the fly. Was it possible he knew more about who was following them than he’d let on?

  “How was my hand-raising earlier?” Casmir lifted his hands over his head, empty palms open. “Sufficient to appease criminals? I want to get it right.” He lowered them, then raised them again, as if she were some cartoon bank robber with a gun poked against his spine.

  “Are you more dangerous than you seem?” Bonita asked him. “Or are you truly a doofus?”

  “I don’t think anyone has ever called me dangerous, but a doofus? I’d like to keep looking for adjectives, if it’s all the same to you.”

  A knock more like the bang of rifle fire came from the hatch. The mirrored faceplate of a helmet and the gray airlock tube extending toward the other ship were all she could see through the small round window. A gloved hand came up, showing a Tac-75 explosive, detonator ready to be set if she didn’t open the hatch.

  Bonita released the lock and stepped back, not bothering to draw her pistol. She had no idea how many enemies were about to stomp onto her ship, but that first one was in heavy combat armor. Her galaxy suit was rated to take some damage, but that man could walk through a field of flying bullets and energy bolts while yawning and scratching his armpit, and he would feel nothing.

  The hatch swung open, and six armored figures strode into the hold.

  Casmir scurried back, lest his foot be stepped on, but he also peered into the airlock chamber and down the tube attaching them to the other ship. Bonita imagined some doofus-counterpart of his leaning out and waving from the other end. Though that was unlikely. Why would pirates, or whatever these people were, tote civilian engineers along on a mission?

  “No, no,” Bonita said as the armored men spread out. “Come right in, I insist.”

  She wouldn’t draw a weapon, but she doubted her situation would get any worse if she drew sarcasm.

  “Captain Lopez,” one of the men said, his voice filtered through a speaker in his helmet. “You made a mistake.”

  “How rare for me. And you are?” Bonita didn’t like that these people knew her name when she had no idea who they were. Nothing had come up when she’d searched for information on their ship. She’d found the layout and specs for the model but nothing about that specific vessel. It didn’t have an ident chip, so that lent credence to her notion of pirates. She wondered who they’d bribed to get on the Odin launch loop.

  “People who will fight to keep advanced weapons out of the Kingdom’s hands. The rest of the galaxy is not going to suffer under their oppressive rule again.”

  “I wasn’t taking any weapons to the Kingdom,” Bonita lied easily, though unease tapped a discouraging beat in her stomach. Maybe they weren’t here for Casmir, after all.

  “Weapons?” Casmir tilted his head. “Does that mean you’re not here for…”

  Bonita willed the kid to shut up. He should have hidden.

  “Are you Casmir Dabrowski?” the speaker asked.

  “Yes.”

  “It was thoughtful of you to introduce yourself. I don’t know who you are yet, but I asked the lieutenant to look you up and see if there’s a reward.”

  When Casmir arched his eyebrows, they disappeared under his shaggy bangs. “If there is, would you let me know? Because it’s been an extremely confusing week.”

  The helmeted figure stared at him. Maybe he was also trying to decide if Casmir was dangerous or a doofus. Not that the two had to be mutually exclusive.

  “Where are the weapons, Captain?” a second figure asked, a woman.

  That surprised Bonita because the armored intruders were all well over six feet tall. Maybe she was augmented, which was a disturbing thought, because that meant these people might all be the equivalent of Qin.

  “I’m afraid you’re mistaken about weapons,” Bonita said. “There’s nothing like that here. I had a small cargo that I delivered in Odin—I never saw what was inside—but it’s long gone. I can give you the name of the buyer, if you wish.”

  She wondered if her unwelcome visitors were responsible for the robots that had blown Baum’s shuttle out of the sky. She’d assumed the Kingdom Guard had sent those, but maybe not. If the people on this ship had been behind that, would they believe she’d had time since then to unload the cargo?

  “Everything I have now is hooked to that bulkhead over there. You’re welcome to search the crates, but I’d appreciate it if you not take them, as they’re the ship’s necessities, not a cargo for delivery.” Bonita waved to a prominent crate labeled vacuum toilet parts. She’d put that one in front to discourage interest. “Like I said, I’ve nothing left from the other cargo.”

  “Of course not,” the woman murmured. “Stavros, Taylor, search the ship. Thoroughly. These freighters are known to have secret compartments, but they never seem to be mentioned in the factory specs.”

  “Because smugglers add them afterward.”

  Stavros, Taylor. Bonita burned the names into her mind in case she had a chance to look them up later, to figure out who she was dealing with. Vigilantes? Mercenaries? Could these be some of Captain Tenebris Rache’s people? The last she’d heard, he was a one-ship operation, and that wasn’t his ship out there, but maybe things had changed. He was known to loathe the Kingdom, though stopping a shipment of weapons seemed like a small-time job for him.

  “We questioning her?” the man asked. “Easier than having our men tear the paneling off all over the ship.”

  “We should question that one.” The woman pointed at Casmir. “He looks like he’d crack like a Radkin melon left all summer to dry in the sun.”

  “He also looks like he doesn’t know anything.”

  “That would be true,” Casmir said.

  “And if he’s valuable, whoever wants him might not want his pretty face mutilated.”

  “We could just mutilate some fingers. Nobody minds fingers much, even if they’re missing altogether.”

  Casmir lifted his arms but appeared torn between hiding his hands behind his back and raising them overhead, as he’d practiced. Bonita felt a little sorry for him, even if he had brought trouble with him. It wasn’t the current trouble, it seemed.

  “Who are you?” she asked the thugs.

  Information always had value. Maybe she would get lucky and they would chat.

  “Somebody who doesn’t want to see the genophobic Kingdom government in charge of anything more than its own planet,” the man growled. “And maybe not even that.”

  “Genophobic?” Casmir asked. “Afraid of sexual relations? I haven’t met the king, but he does have the three
princes and a princess, so that seems unlikely. If you mean that we’re uncomfortable with genetic engineering, then yes, that has been the policy for centuries.”

  “Shut up.” One of the other men reached for him, while two more stepped toward Bonita.

  Bonita jumped back, her pistol finding its way into her hand by instinct. The armored men laughed when she pointed it at one of their chests.

  “You will tell us where the weapons are,” the leader said. “Nobody cares if you get mutilated.”

  She sprang back again when they advanced, her knee twinging even in low gravity, but the intruders were too quick. Even if they hadn’t been augmented humans, that armor gave them extra speed and strength. She fired, hoping to get lucky, that her energy bolt would find a seam, but it only clanged off a helmet. An armored hand blurred in and clamped down on hers, squeezing.

  She cried out, unable to keep hold of her pistol.

  It clattered to the deck, and she found herself hoisted into the air. She fought, more out of instinct and desperation than because she had a chance at escaping. A hand curled around her throat, and that cut through her panic. She grew very still.

  “Where are the weapons?” the leader asked, his fingers tightening.

  Pain flared at the pressure, and Bonita couldn’t keep tears from springing to her eyes. She hoped they looked like tears of defiance, not tears that suggested she was on the verge of giving in.

  “Already… told you…” she spat out the best she could with her voice box being crushed. And her windpipe.

  Why hadn’t she at least put the helmet up on her galaxy suit? That would have offered some protection from this. Already, her breaths were more difficult to draw up her windpipe from her lungs. Would they kill her if she didn’t talk? Or if she did?

  Normally, she would have simply accepted the loss of the cargo as the cost of working in a risky business, but she couldn’t afford to dump it, not anymore. Damn Jake Pepper for being such an ass and leaving her in this desperate a situation, and damn her for not reading him better, for not seeing his betrayal coming.

  The fingers tightened further. “You will tell us where the cargo is, or you will die. Nobody needs you. We’ve got pilots aplenty, pilots who can fly this ship for us. Which we just might claim for ourselves. After all, if we found a ship adrift, it would be within our right to claim it for the war effort.”

  Nobody needs you. It was a strange time for the words to penetrate deeply and for Bonita to realize how accurate they were. Her parents were long gone, and she’d never had children. Who would even miss her if these thugs killed her?

  “War? What war? Nobody’s at war yet.” That was Casmir.

  He sounded like he was hanging upside down in someone’s grip, but Bonita couldn’t focus on anything other than her fear and the darkness encroaching on her vision. She grasped the single armored arm holding her up and tried to pry the fingers away, but they might as well have been made from graphene.

  “If you believe that,” someone replied to Casmir, “then your news service is even more censored than we thought. Only the Kingdom wouldn’t tell its own people that they killed President Bakas, and now half of the systems are gunning for them.” The man laughed.

  “Let’s make a deal,” Bonita rasped, clawing for a brilliant plan. “Maybe I can go back to Odin and retrieve the cargo for you.”

  The man shook her by the neck. “We know you have it here.”

  Desperate, she kicked out, her boot striking her assailant in the armored groin. It did nothing but hurt her toes.

  “Last time I’m asking, Captain,” the man said. “Where are the weapons?”

  She closed her eyes, aware of hot tears leaking down her cheeks, even as her body used the last of its air. If she passed out, she might not wake again. If she didn’t tell them…

  “Kill her,” the woman ordered before Bonita had finished deciding.

  “No!” Casmir shouted. “I can show you the weapons.”

  The fingers loosened. Her captor didn’t release her, and her feet still dangled three inches off the deck, but she was able to suck in a deep breath through her bruised throat.

  She turned her head as much as she could, intending to shoot Casmir a dirty look—she was positive he didn’t know where they’d hidden the cargo—but she glimpsed Qin crouching in the corridor, her Brockinger anti-tank 350 aimed at Bonita’s captor, as if she’d been about to fire.

  The intruders hadn’t seen her yet. Should Bonita give her the go ahead? The problem was that even with that gun—which might or might not do anything against their armor—Qin was only one person to their six. Further, the explosive round might tear a giant hole in the hull.

  “I mean, I can find them,” Casmir corrected as all the armored faceplates turned toward him. He was, indeed, dangling from one ankle, his hair brushing the deck as he twisted, looking up at people. “She didn’t confide their location to me, because I’m not a trusted member of her crew, or perhaps because I spent the last three days dealing with airsickness—technically, is it airsickness in space where there is no air? Make that space-sickness.”

  The one holding him shook him. “You know where they are or not?”

  “I can find them,” Casmir repeated. “I’m a robotics engineer. There are robots all over the ship for cleaning and various tasks. I can modify one with an infrared camera and have it zip around the ship, looking for spots in the paneling that are cooler than they should be, indicating a lack of insulation behind it.”

  “How long would that take?”

  “Oh, not long at all. The programming would be a breeze. An hour, perhaps, assuming I can get my tools. And be stood upright. A table and some space to work would be ideal, but the upright thing is paramount.”

  In the corridor, Qin raised her eyebrows, seeming to ask if she should wait or start a firefight. If she did the latter, Bonita was highly aware that she and Casmir would end up in the crossfire. They wore their galaxy suits, but neither had their helmets on.

  Not wanting to draw the intruders’ attention to Qin, Bonita only made a slight negative hand gesture. Better that Qin wait until she could leap from hiding and ambush the intruders, ideally one on one. And if Casmir was successful in buying time…

  “He is a robotics engineer,” one of the men said. “The lieutenant said she didn’t see a bounty out for him, but there were a bunch of recent news stories from Odin about him being missing and his university’s parking garage blowing up.”

  “Fine,” the leader sighed. “Throw him in a room where he can work, and round up any other crew members you find, but keep most of our guys looking for the weapons. Easier if we just get them ourselves. I don’t want to be hooked up to this garbage barge all day.”

  “Garbage barge?” came Viggo’s indignant voice from a speaker.

  Someone snorted. “There’s one crew member.”

  “Actually, that’s the ship’s computer,” Bonita said.

  “We’ll see.” The man waved for his team to spread out and search.

  Good, they were splitting up. Maybe Qin would have a chance to set up ambushes.

  The man holding Casmir turned him right side up and dropped his feet to the deck. His face was red, and one of his eyes kept blinking, but he managed a bleary smile for Bonita when their captors trooped them off toward the lounge.

  “If you think I’ll thank you for this,” she growled at him, “you’re wrong.”

  His smile grew sad. “I thought you might not.”

  9

  Casmir alternated between tinkering with the two cleaning robots open in front of him, their circuit boards and wiring exposed, and putting tools in and out of his satchel. He’d already reprogrammed the vacuums—that had been simple—but he lacked something important that he needed, and he didn’t know how to get it.

  He sat in the lounge with a sullen Captain Lopez across the table from him and an armored man looming by the hatch, keeping an eye on them. Or so Casmir assumed. Thanks to those mirro
red faceplates, their guard could have been sleeping or watching a porno vid and they wouldn’t have known it.

  As far as Casmir knew, the intruders hadn’t yet found Qin or Kim. That was a little surprising. Maybe this freighter was better at hiding things—and people—than he would have guessed. The trick he’d promised he could pull off might not have worked even if that was what he’d truly programmed the robots to do.

  He needed an explosive, and sadly, Kim hadn’t left her lighter and deodorant out on the table.

  If he could hunt around in the mess cabinets, he might be able to find some chemicals that could work, though what would be perfect were some of the canisters from that anti-tank gun Qin carried around. Wherever she was.

  “You’re wasting your time,” Lopez said, her voice harsh. “Everybody is. There’s nothing for you—or them—to find.” She glared at the impassive guard.

  “Well, if you ever need to search the hidden holds of other ships, you might find it handy to have a robot for the purpose.” Casmir smiled and tapped one of the vacuums, though he wished he could convey that he’d only been trying to save her life. He hadn’t been convinced that thug had only been scaring her. Her face had been purple, and he swore he’d heard something snap in her neck. This scheme was the first thing he’d come up with, but as he’d selected robots from the impressive collection of cleaning devices in a closet in engineering, he’d come up with a better idea.

  “I don’t invade other people’s ships and steal their hard-won goods.”

  The hatch opened, and the guard swung toward it, his rifle pointing into what turned out to be an empty corridor. Lopez jumped to her feet.

  The guard glanced back at her, but her weapons had been removed, and she couldn’t do anything but crouch, ready in case… what?

  Casmir tried to see around the guard, who was now poking his head into the corridor. Something flew above his helmet and into the lounge. A canister.