Shockwave

by Lindsay Buroker

  “How did it get into your pocket?” Casmir asked.

  Kim hesitated. “It fell in.”

  “Yes, I can’t tell you how often that happens to me. I’m walking around someone’s quarters, and deodorant, hairbrushes, and priceless data chips spring off dressers and into my trousers.”

  “Funny.” She swatted him.

  “This is definitely trouble.” Bonita leaned back in her chair, wondering if this would affect her plan to set course for the gate.

  “Honestly,” Kim said, “I thought he would search me and take it, but he got distracted.”

  “To death, if we’re lucky,” Bonita murmured.

  A conflicted expression crossed Casmir’s face. That surprised Bonita. Even though he wasn’t bleeding from his eyeballs or awash in contusions, she assumed his stay on the Fedallah had been less than pleasant. Surely, as a Kingdom subject, he had to want to see Rache dead. Or at least in prison for life.

  “There’s not much on the chip,” Viggo said. “Beginning playback.”

  Casmir turned and watched the display intently as video footage of some party’s walk through a deserted ship started up. A crashed deserted ship, Bonita amended, when the team reached a gaping hole in the ceiling with six feet of snow piled below it. They continued to an engineering section where a monkey ran up with a piece of metal.

  Neither Casmir nor Kim appeared surprised, but Bonita couldn’t keep from sharing a bewildered look with them. “What is that?”

  Casmir paused the playback. “That is Kim’s archaeologist mother.” He pointed at the monkey. “And we believe that is from a gate.”

  “Mother? I fail to see the resemblance.”

  “Thank you,” Kim murmured without humor.

  “She had her brain transferred to the monkey droid before her original body died,” Casmir said. “She’s eccentric but not as inexplicable as what they found. If that truly is a piece of a gate, that’s not only incredible, it’s unprecedented.”

  Bonita scratched her jaw. “There aren’t any spare gates—or spare gate parts—in any of the systems, right? Did someone take that from one of the existing ones? That’s strictly forbidden. That’s why the gates are all guarded. Nobody wants someone to tinker and inadvertently cut one system off from the network—and the rest of humanity.”

  “I searched the news,” Casmir said, touching his temple, “and there’s nothing about a gate with a missing part out there.” He glanced at Kim. “We think an archaeology team may have discovered some spare parts or maybe even an entire disassembled gate. Which, if true, would be the find of the millennium. It might be what we need to finally understand who built the gates and create one on our own, one to return to Earth and find out what happened to our ancestral home. And if we knew how to replicate them, we could expand and colonize more of the galaxy. This could be the biggest news story of our lives.”

  “Huh,” Bonita said.

  “I told you she’d be excited,” Casmir told Kim.

  “I see.” Kim’s expression remained grave.

  Maybe she was the one Rache had tortured.

  Casmir let the rest of the footage play, but there wasn’t much more. “We’re not sure how Rache got this, since he didn’t tell Kim anything before we left, but he knew that was her mother, and he implied…” He bit his lip, glancing at his friend again. “We’re concerned that she’s in danger and also that he’s after the gate artifacts himself. To sell to the highest bidder, presumably the highest bidder that isn’t King Jager.”

  “Sell?” Bonita raised her eyebrows. She didn’t want to get caught up in doing something stupid for money—again—but she was in a worse situation than she’d been in at the beginning of this. If there was a chance to make a few pesos to tide her over until she could get another legitimate gig…

  “We believe this footage may have been taken on Skadi Moon,” Casmir said. “Before we knew you’d come back to get us, we were planning to take one of the mining ships to try to reach it. There’s an archaeology ship in orbit there right now.”

  “You’re planning on going on an archaeological dig? Aren’t there still people trying to kill you?”

  Casmir grimaced. “I haven’t forgotten, but I can’t just leave the system and hide forever. I need to stay here and figure out who’s after me and how to make them go away. And Kim needs…” He extended a hand toward her.

  “If my mother is on that ship or on that moon,” Kim said, “I need to warn her that Rache may be coming for her and her team.” If it’s not already too late, her solemn eyes seemed to add.

  “And I need to help Kim, because she’s been helping me all month, and it’s my turn.” Casmir smiled, though it had a worried edge.

  “What do you want me to do?” Bonita asked.

  “Will you give us a ride over there and comm the ship and see if we can transfer over to join them?” Casmir asked. “If Kim’s mother is there, they should take us. And if they say yes, you can finally get rid of us.”

  “Well, that would be a relief.”

  “I thought so,” Casmir said. “Will you do it?”

  “Yes, but you should know that some military ships are on their way. Two days out. I’m hoping they’re coming because of Rache and the refineries, but… they may see us and veer off.”

  “Well, two days is a long time, right?” Casmir asked.

  “Oh, ages,” Bonita said.

  “If they prove to be overly interested in us, we’ll come up with something. Or hide down on Skadi Moon.”

  “Hide? Where?”

  Casmir waved to the display. “Wherever that derelict ship has been hiding for centuries.”

  Bonita snorted but said, “I’ll try to contact the archaeology ship.”

  “Thank you, Captain.” Casmir bowed, and they walked out.

  Bonita stroked her chin and wondered if there could be any money to be made from the news story of their lives. If there were numerous chunks of a gate, could she slip away with a piece and sell it? Would someone pay for footage of the wreck site? Since it looked like she was going to live a little longer, she had to get back to thinking about how to keep her ship flying and fund her retirement.

  It was some time later that Bonita realized she hadn’t apologized to Casmir.

  Casmir tensed when Bonita walked into the lounge, worried she had bad news about the archaeology ship or that she would report that the Fedallah had repaired itself and was shooting after them at top speed.

  “We’re en route to that research ship and the moon.” Bonita glanced at Kim, who was jogging on the treadmill, but walked up to Casmir.

  He was standing at the porthole, looking toward Skadi Moon. Zee, who stood guard from a few feet away, shifted slightly, prepared to defend him if needed. Casmir smiled slightly, pleased Zee had escaped the refinery.

  “I commed them, but they haven’t answered,” Bonita added. “Not even an automatic message.”

  “Oh.” Casmir glanced at Kim. “Maybe their whole crew is down on the moon checking out their find.”

  “Maybe.” Bonita shrugged easily, but they all knew it was unlikely an entire ship’s crew would leave the ship for any reason. “We’ll be there in about ten hours. Do you have time to help with some repairs?”

  “Does Viggo have more vacuums in need of service?” Casmir smiled.

  “We took damage as we flew away from the refinery.”

  “To… the vacuums?”

  “To the ship. Some of the shrapnel was large and hit us hard, and I want the Dragon to be in good shape in case—” She shrugged again. “Just in case. I know you can do more than tinker with robots.”

  “Yes.” Casmir turned from the porthole. “Do you want me to start now? What’s most urgent?” He suspected she was worried about the military ships en route, and he didn’t blame her. Since that knight on Forseti had seemed certain he was involved with the bioweapon, he was potentially in as much trouble as Bonita until he figured out how to clear suspicion from his name.


  “Not yet.” Bonita held up a hand. “I also came to say something I forgot to say earlier.”

  She took a deep breath—a bracing breath?—and Casmir wondered if she had truly come to talk about repairs.

  “All right,” he said warily.

  “This is hard.” Her gaze shifted to the porthole. “I don’t know why. Maybe because you’re half my age. It’s hard to admit you’re wrong to a kid. And it’s frustrating to realize that life can deal you a set of cards that leaves you desperate enough to set your morals aside. I always figured I’d have it all worked out by the time I was this age, but I’ve got a history of making bad choices. My mother was like that too. Maybe it’s in my genes, and it’s too late to change that. Maybe it was always my fate.”

  Casmir realized she was apologizing to him—or getting to that—and he clasped his hands behind his back and did his best to appear nonjudgmental.

  “In light of recent revelations,” he said, “I’m inclined to think, now more than ever, that there’s no such thing as a genetic fate or predestination. A person’s upbringing and life experiences do a lot to shape them. A lot.”

  Bonita waved a dismissive hand, but Kim squinted at Casmir from the treadmill, paying attention even if she remained silent.

  “Whatever,” Bonita said. “I just want to say I’m sorry. I told myself that whoever put that bounty out for you had to want your brain, or some top-secret information you might have in it. Not that they wanted to kill you. Not that it was devil-spawn Captain Rache. If I’d known that, I never would have… Well, I did, and I’m sorry.”

  “I forgive you,” Casmir said, thinking she wanted to hear that. And he’d never truly blamed her, not when he’d brought trouble onto her ship from the beginning and hadn’t thought to warn her beforehand.

  “You do?” Bonita sounded surprised.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, good. Thank you. Now if Rache will just turn up dead, my month will be looking up.”

  Casmir nodded, even though he didn’t know if he wished that fate for Rache or not. He deserved it, no doubt, but Rache had the answers to some of the questions burning in Casmir’s mind. He might be the only one who did. Casmir wished their conversation had not been interrupted.

  “I’ll keep trying to comm the ship.” Bonita lifted a hand and left the lounge.

  “What was that about?” Kim asked when she was gone. “Your eyes got haunted when you talked about genes and predestination.”

  Casmir held up a finger, realized Rache had held up a finger in the same way, then jerked it down.

  He removed a second treadmill from a cabinet, placing it beside Kim’s and setting it up with the straps. If he was going to keep roaming the system at a fraction of Odin’s gravity, he had better start exercising. He remembered Rache’s arm muscles, and his mind boggled at the thought that his own could be anything but scrawny. Of course, he didn’t know what kind of cocktail of drugs and growth hormones Rache took to go along with his cybernetic implants.

  “Casmir?” Kim prompted.

  “While you were in Rache’s quarters, he and I had a chat.” He strapped the treadmill belt to his waist.

  “About why he put a bounty on your head?”

  “That was curiosity, I believe.”

  Casmir nibbled on his lip and walked, his muscles promptly protesting the extra force exerted by the straps. He couldn’t imagine not telling Kim everything, but he remembered the subtle threats Rache had given to his doctor. For whatever reason, the man didn’t want anyone knowing about his DNA. Which made Casmir want to go back to Odin, take a sample of his own blood, and compare his DNA to every record in the public and university databases. Maybe Kim could compare it to all the medical records on file with the hospitals.

  “He had my blood taken,” Casmir said. “And he had his blood taken.”

  Kim missed a step on the treadmill and grabbed the bar.

  “We are either twin brothers or I am a clone of him. Or he is a clone of me. If either of those, it would have to have been done at a very young age. I saw him with his hood off, and we looked the same age.”

  We looked the same, his mind corrected silently. Somehow, that notion bothered him a lot more than the possibility that he could be a clone. That was a little unsettling—and how would Sir Friedrich have spoken to his mother if he was a clone?—but it was a thing that people did occasionally on Odin and even more than occasionally in the rest of the systems.

  Kim stared at him, her legs moving, but her brain appearing stuck.

  “Yes, I found the revelation rather alarming myself,” Casmir said. “I’m trying to figure out what it means for me, if it changes anything.”

  “You’re sure?” she finally asked. “You saw the DNA test results?”

  “No, but I saw Rache’s face. I think I may be the only one who has in a long time. The doctor acted like he’d never had access to Rache’s blood before and didn’t know anything about him.”

  Kim walked in silence for a while. “Why would anyone clone a baby?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You clone a person or animal after they’ve proven their value.”

  “Right. Like my colleague Professor Althaus, who’s had the same dog all of his life. Except they’re not all the same dog. He’s admitted that. They look the same and have similar personality traits, but…”

  His throat tightened, as if he were having an allergic reaction. No, a distressed reaction. He didn’t want to be similar in any way to Rache. It horrified him to think that any situation, any upbringing, could have prompted him to turn into a cold-hearted killer. A murderer.

  “They’re not the same,” Casmir whispered, aware of Kim looking over. “And neither are we. Genes aren’t all that make a man, right? Just because he’s a psychopath…”

  “I see why you’re disturbed, but whatever Rache has become, it’s not a disease. You’re not in danger of catching it.”

  “If it’s genetic… Psychopathy is, isn’t it?”

  “You’ve chosen that label for him. That doesn’t make it accurate.”

  “Actually, the media is fond of it.”

  “That definitely doesn’t make it accurate.”

  Casmir squinted at her. “You were in his quarters.”

  “For far longer than it took to watch that video, yes. The door was locked. I was beginning to fear he’d show up later in a negligee and expect sex.”

  “Usually, the woman wears the negligee.”

  “Oh, is that how it works? You know this isn’t my area of expertise.”

  “What were his quarters like?” Casmir didn’t want to be curious or to care at all about Rache, but he couldn’t help it.

  “Not what I would have expected. Normal. No weapons collections on display. No notches in the wall of people he’s killed. He had books. A sketch pad in a drawer. Art on the walls.”

  “Weird art of grotesquely mutilated bodies?”

  “No. Landscapes mostly. From different worlds. There was one that I thought might be the coast outside of the capital, but I wasn’t sure. They were all empty of life. Lonely. Except there was a framed photograph of a beautiful woman.”

  “Huh.” That wasn’t what Casmir would have expected either. A sketch pad? What kind of villain drew? And what did he draw?

  “A sociopath might be a more accurate label if you truly do share identical genes with him.” Kim sounded skeptical. “I’d want to see the results of that DNA test myself before making assumptions. If your genes are identical, a twin brother seems more plausible than a clone, especially since you don’t know who your parents are. Does he?”

  “It didn’t come up.”

  “Who raised him?”

  “That also didn’t come up. Our chat wasn’t that long, despite you having time for negligee fantasies.”

  “Regardless, I can’t believe you have it in your genes to have turned out as a psychopath under any circumstances. You empathize with people, animals, robots, inanimate objects, an
d even red-headed step lizards.”

  “It was a red-headed rock agama. And I don’t empathize with inanimate objects.” He couldn’t argue about the rest.

  “I’ve seen you apologize to the couch, Casmir.”

  “Only when I’m absent-mindedly thinking about work and don’t realize what I bumped into.”

  “Also the coat rack. And the ottoman. You bump into a lot of things around the house.”

  “I’m absent-minded a lot.”

  “I won’t argue with that.” She grinned and swatted him on the shoulder.

  “Thanks. I’d swat you back, but it would be a lot of effort, and I’m already panting here.” Casmir waved to the treadmill.

  “That’s because you haven’t been exercising all along. You’ll probably wither up like a salted slug when we step foot back on Odin.”

  “Have I mentioned how delightful it is to have such a supportive friend?”

  “Not as often as you should.”

  “Well… it is.” Casmir managed to return her grin, even if his mood was somber. Concerned.

  He was glad she was here with him, that he wasn’t facing all of this alone. He’d once described Kim to his adoptive mother as mishpokhe—family. At the time, he’d been explaining her as not-a-girlfriend-but-a-very-good-friend. It still seemed apt. He had always been aware of the sense of family that transcended blood ties—for him, how not?—and it seemed to be more important than ever for him.

  “Pardon the interruption,” came Viggo’s voice from the nearest speaker, “but the captain wishes to inform you that a combat shuttle has departed from the vicinity of the destroyed refinery. It appears to have originated at the mercenary ship.”

  “Which way is it heading?” Casmir asked, afraid he didn’t want to know, afraid Rache was alive and aboard it.

  “The same direction as we are.”

  Casmir slowed the treadmill and gripped the railings for support.

  “If we see him again,” Kim said, “you should ask him about his parents and who raised him.”

  “If we see him again, I think he’s going to kill us.”

  THE END