Shockwave

by Lindsay Buroker

  Qin groaned and shifted on the deck.

  One of the men planted an armored boot on her back and pressed the muzzle of his rifle to her neck. “Don’t think about it, freak.”

  “Freak?” his buddy asked. “She’s better looking than some of the modded things out there. Sometimes, I don’t think the Kingdom’s laws are all that draconian. I mean, they are, but some things shouldn’t exist.”

  “Don’t forget whose side you’re working for.”

  “The side that pays me best.”

  While they were giving more attention to each other than Casmir or Kim, Casmir pushed the handle on the remote and navigated his distraction robot onto their ship’s bridge. It was six times the size of the Dragon’s navigation cabin, but only two men occupied stations inside. Casmir allowed himself to hope that meant there wasn’t a large crew on the enemy ship. Maybe if he made enough trouble over there, the six armored thugs would be called back to help with it.

  “Tie up that woman.” One of the men pointed at Kim. “I don’t know where she came from, but we don’t need trouble roaming free. We’ll tie them all up and apply some pressure to help with finding the cargo. Especially if this idiot can’t patch those parts together into something useful.”

  Casmir smiled. Under the table, he set the distraction robot to squeal like a hundred terrified pigs. Then he set it loose on turbo vacuum mode so that it darted all around the deck. He glimpsed the bridge crew whirling to look for it as it caromed around the stations, and fought back a grin. It wouldn’t do any damage or take them long to nullify—one of the brutes would likely shoot it—but maybe they would be slow to react to a problem in engineering because of it.

  One of the armored men frowned at Casmir. “You doing something under the table?”

  “Nothing I want you to know about.”

  The man strode toward him.

  Casmir toggled to the robot in engineering, but the system lagged, and he didn’t gain access quickly enough. Damn it. He needed more time.

  “Playing with robots gets me excited,” Casmir blurted and tried to smirk, though he was too busy panicking to manage any acting flair.

  The man had been reaching for his arm, but his hand halted in midair. “You telling me you’re yanking your stick?”

  He jerked his hand back.

  “That’s disgusting,” Kim said, either to help make them believe that or as an honest comment. A disapproving I-can’t-believe-you-said-that look accompanied it.

  The video finally resolved so Casmir once again viewed engineering from the camera of the robot on the engine housing. Nobody had moved it. He hit the button, ordering it to detonate the explosive.

  The display went black and so did his view of engineering. Had it worked? He’d thought they might hear something since the ships were connected through the airlock umbilical cord.

  He checked on the robot on the bridge where he still had a connection. The two men must have heard the explosion in engineering, for they raced out, leaving the area empty of crew.

  Maybe Casmir could take advantage and tinker further. For some reason, the grumpy intruder hadn’t reached for his arm again.

  Casmir sent the bridge robot climbing up the side of the environmental-controls station.

  The two men in the lounge with him spun to look toward the hatch. Casmir didn’t know if they had heard shouts or something over their helmet comm units.

  “Stay here and watch them!” one man barked and ran out.

  His buddy, whose boot was still on the back of Qin’s neck, scowled suspiciously at Casmir.

  Shouts came from the cargo hold of the Dragon. Casmir couldn’t decipher them, but he hoped the men were being ordered back to deal with an attacker on their own ship.

  The remaining guard abandoned Qin and strode toward him. “Let’s see what you’re really doing under the table.”

  Casmir looked down at his lap—and the remote—and feigned innocence, but he also got a few more commands in. The robot didn’t have any kind of hand or grasper, but he managed to bump one of the vacuum nozzles against the control for the lights. The bridge went dim. Hopefully, the lights on their entire ship did.

  The man grasped his arm and yanked it up with so much force he pulled Casmir from the seat—and the deck. Once again, he dangled in the air, a flash of agony in his shoulder as his captor almost twisted it out of the socket. The man tore the remote from his fingers and smashed it in a steel grip. Dozens of tiny pieces tinkled to the deck.

  “What did you—”

  An arm snaked around the man’s helmet and yanked him backward, halting his words.

  Qin.

  She leaped onto his back and wrapped her legs around his waist, one arm around his throat. That throat was armored, but the man still dropped Casmir and whirled to deal with her.

  As Casmir rolled away, hoping to avoid the skirmish—and being crushed by giant combat boots—Qin slammed her free fist into the man’s faceplate. If a normal human had done that, nothing would have happened, but Casmir heard a faint crack. Was she strong enough to shatter Glasnax? He hadn’t thought that was even possible.

  Lopez rose to her feet and rushed to the kitchen area. The man tried unsuccessfully to tear Qin off his back. Even though his armor enhanced his strength, she had much better leverage.

  As Casmir joined Kim beyond the far side of the table, Lopez leaped up and ran to Qin’s side. Orange light flared—a blowtorch.

  “Hold him still,” Lopez barked.

  “Easier said than done,” Qin replied as the man ran to a bulkhead and spun to ram her against it.

  Lopez followed and held the blowtorch to one of his thigh seams. He didn’t seem to feel the heat, but if she had time, it might melt through his armor.

  After a few seconds, the man shrieked. He’d been too busy wrestling with Qin to pay attention to Lopez, but now he released Qin’s arms and lunged for the blowtorch.

  Qin took advantage of his distraction and rearranged her grip to hook a leg over his shoulder and pin one of his arms. She was like a spider, immobilizing him from behind. A massive crack sounded.

  Qin moved so quickly that Casmir didn’t see what happened until the man’s helmet was bouncing across the deck, the faceplate shattered. He cursed and bucked, flailing to try to get rid of her and the blowtorch burning its way into his thigh seam.

  With his head exposed, Lopez shifted the blowtorch to his face, holding the flame an inch from his eyes. He froze.

  “Strip,” she ordered.

  A shudder went through the deck. Casmir grimaced. He hoped the damage he’d done to the other ship wouldn’t cause its course to shift. If it ricocheted off them at the speed they were going… the explosion would be the last thing any of them ever saw. Nothing but shrapnel would arrive at Forseti Station.

  The man’s eyes bulged as he stared at the blowtorch.

  “Strip!” Lopez said again. “Or we’ll do it for you.”

  “Get your she-cat off my back,” he growled. “I’m not a damn scratching post.”

  Lopez’s eyes were icier than a comet as she brushed the blowtorch flame across the man’s cheek.

  He screamed and jerked his head back, clunking it against the bulkhead. “All right, all right, you bitch.”

  “Tranq him,” Lopez told Qin.

  Qin sprang off his back—neither of them appeared as wounded as Casmir had thought they were when they’d been dumped in here—and ran to a cabinet that he’d assumed was part of the pantry. She pulled out a first-aid kit with a jet injector, loaded a cartridge, and ran back and jammed it against the man’s neck. A soft hiss sounded. He was in the middle of removing his torso piece, per Lopez’s order to strip, but he swore and grabbed his neck.

  “What the—” He only had time to glower at them before tipping to the deck, unconscious.

  “In retrospect,” Lopez said, “we should have waited for him to get the rest of the armor off before tranqing him.”

  Despite the words, the two women se
t upon the unconscious man and soon had him out of the rest of his gear.

  As they patted him down, removing everything from grenades to daggers to malleable explosive material, Casmir asked, “Did you get them to dump you in here on purpose, knowing there was a blowtorch in the kitchen cabinet?”

  “That was the idea.”

  “And, uhm, why was there a blowtorch in the kitchen cabinet? Are there any weapons in the breadbox or refrigerator that we should know about?”

  “It’s a tortilla keeper.”

  “What?” Casmir asked.

  “That’s not a breadbox; it’s a tortilla keeper. And no, there are no more weapons. The blowtorch is there because now and then, I take a break from my standbys of chocolate and orejas—and chocolate-dipped orejas—and make a crème brûlée.” Lopez grabbed twine from a drawer and started tying their prisoner’s hands behind his back.

  Casmir, deciding he didn’t believe her, wondered if the twine was for trussing roasts, or for this precise purpose.

  “What happened to get them all riled up?” Lopez asked when she was done. “Half their team ran back to their ship.”

  “I believe a robot exploded in an inconvenient location in engineering,” Casmir said. “Perhaps you should take advantage of the chaos.”

  “Right.” Lopez waved for Qin to follow, and they ran out, the hatch clanging shut behind them.

  “You’re welcome,” Casmir called.

  He looked sadly down at the shards on the deck, all that remained of his remote. By now, he wagered that was all that remained of the robots on the other ship too. The one in engineering must have blown into a million pieces. One of the crew—had they implied they were mercenaries?—might have blown the one on the bridge into a similar state.

  “So…” Kim eyed the unconscious man. She was still leaning against the cabinets. “Are you worried we’ve gotten ourselves involved with people in even more trouble than you are?”

  “I don’t know. Crushers were trying to kill me. What degree of trouble would be worse than that?”

  “These people were talking about a war, which tends to involve mass killing and the annihilation of entire cities. Or planets.” Kim grimaced.

  Casmir did find the talk of war alarming, but he was preoccupied with his own problem now, so he had no trouble staying focused on that. Kim’s eyes were troubled though—maybe she was thinking of her family back home.

  “You’re not worried about your book collection again, are you?” He smiled, hoping to distract her from dark thoughts. He doubted Odin was in danger of an invasion anytime soon.

  “I haven’t stopped worrying about that. If those crushers molested my shelves, I’m going to find whoever sent them and force them to replace every missing book.” Her eyes widened at some new thought. “What if we’re not back in time to pay next month’s rent? What if the landlord takes all our stuff and sells it? At some sidewalk sale? My first editions could be pawned off on teenagers for pennies.”

  “That won’t happen.” Casmir winced. He’d meant to make her feel better, not worse. “The rent is taken out of my account automatically every month.”

  “You think the university is going to keep depositing money in that account if you’re not at work?”

  “One would hope I’d get a paid leave of absence, at least for a while.”

  “You have to put in for that, don’t you? If you skip town—or the planet—it doesn’t just automatically come.”

  “Have I mentioned how cheerful and inspiring it is to travel with you?” Now Casmir was worried about more than the crushers.

  “No.”

  11

  A faint hum reverberated through the deck as the Stellar Dragon increased its acceleration. Taking advantage of the commotion, Bonita and Qin had captured the second mercenary that had been left behind to guard them. The rest had all charged back to their ship to deal with the problem over there. Bonita had forcefully removed their airlock docking tube and shut the Dragon’s hatch before rushing to navigation, her knees aching every step of the way. She prayed she was done with running and twisting and lunging for her life for a while.

  She slung herself into the piloting pod, wanting to put distance between her freighter and their ship. With luck, whatever had happened over there would force the mercenaries to stop to fix it, but she couldn’t count on that.

  “What did happen?” she asked aloud.

  With her pod sealed around her, she couldn’t look at Qin but knew she had claimed the other seat.

  “What made them run back to their ship?” Bonita added.

  Casmir had said something as she and Qin ran off to deal with the other intruder, but she’d barely heard it.

  Viggo was the one to answer her. Qin, who had been feigning unconsciousness alongside Bonita, probably didn’t know any more than she did.

  “Two of my newer model cleaning robots were utterly destroyed,” Viggo said. “Do not be surprised to find a charge to your account when I order replacements on Forseti Station.”

  “That didn’t answer my question as much as you seemed to think it would.”

  Bonita remembered Casmir promising the mercenaries that he would modify a robot to help find the hidden cargo. Had that been a ruse? She’d been ready to knock his head off when he’d said that.

  “At his request, I left one of my 350 rounds behind for Casmir,” Qin said.

  “Which he installed in one of my cleaning robots along with a detonator,” Viggo said, “and remote-controlled it over to the other ship. I could not see where it went once it left, but, judging by the sudden surge of heat in their engineering section, it was somewhere crucial to the ship’s operation.”

  Bonita grimaced. “Does that mean I owe him? I hate owing people.”

  “You helped him escape the trouble that was following him on Odin,” Qin said. “Perhaps that means you’re now even and don’t owe him anything.”

  “You helped him escape that. He probably owes you something.”

  “I was going to ask him more about knights and if they’re as noble as the stories say, but we were interrupted.”

  “Maybe he’ll kiss your hand later,” Bonita said. “Even the non-knights from Odin have notions of chivalry.”

  “I’m not sure he’s… my type.”

  “It’s the hair. Nobody could daydream about a man with such shaggy hair.” Bonita ordered her pod to release her. “I’m going to make sure the men we knocked out aren’t going to escape my makeshift brig and find their armor. Let me know if anything up here demands my attention.”

  “I am already searching the catalog of a small-robots dealer on Forseti Station,” Viggo said. “I shall inform you promptly if I find robots suitable for insertion into my maligned cadre of troops.”

  “That’s not the anything I imagined demanding my attention.” Bonita headed into the corridor. “You must have thirty of those things. Why worry about two?”

  “Cleaning efficiency will go down.”

  “There’s not so much as a speck of dust anywhere on this ship.”

  “Now.”

  Bonita dropped down the ladder to the next level and paused at the closed hatch to the lounge. She ought to thank Casmir, but maybe a nod of gratitude and a handshake when he departed would do.

  She continued past the lounge and checked on her prisoners, as she’d said she would. They were both sedated, and she might leave them that way for the rest of the trip. She doubted it would kill them, and she didn’t want to risk having to deal with any heroic escape attempts from them.

  After that, she swung into the mid-level lavatory. The Dragon could carry a crew of ten, plus passengers, so there were enough amenities to accommodate a few people at a time. The amenities weren’t what interested her now; rather the bulkhead behind the toilets held her attention. She found the secret sensor at the edge of the panel and leaned in for a retina scan.

  After the beam verified her identity, the panel slid open. She tapped a button, and layers of insul
ation receded, revealing an eight-foot-long by four-foot-wide case. She carefully tugged it out. There was no way she could have hefted it on Odin or another high-gravity planet, but she managed to manhandle it to the deck where she considered the computerized lock thoughtfully.

  The dealer on Sayona Station had given her the case without the code. At the time, she hadn’t thought much about it, since it was Baum’s merchandise, and he’d paid most of the purchase price. Most of it but not all of it. Now that he was gone and nobody from his organization had contacted her, she considered it hers to sell as she wished. There was just the problem of the code. And the fact that she was starting to wonder if state-of-the-art weapons were truly what lay nestled inside. The items on the list of contents she’d been given seemed like they would fit in this size case, but a lot of other things could be nestled in there too.

  Until those thugs had boarded the ship, she’d assumed that list of merchandise accurate. But now…

  “If you are wondering if the mercenaries found the cargo,” Viggo said, “you could have asked.”

  Bonita jumped, clunking her elbow on one of the wash stations.

  “Viggo. We’ve had this conversation before. You’re not to speak with me when I’m in the lav.”

  “But you’re not doing the things people do in a lavatory. Things that I can’t say I miss having to be concerned with. I do miss food and eating. Do enjoy that whenever you get a chance.”

  “Thanks for the tip.”

  Bonita ran her hand over the lock pad panel. It lit up with a request for a code. The display formed into a keyboard with letters, symbols, and numbers, creating more combination possibilities than she could imagine. She pulled out a handheld scanner, but it couldn’t read anything through the case’s hard exterior.

  “Any chance your big computer brain can open this, Viggo?”

  “Perhaps if there were a means for me to interface with it and run a few code-breaking routines, I could, but I don’t see an access port, and it’s not responding to my wireless signal. It appears to be fully self-contained. Perhaps your new ally would have some ideas.”