Home Front: A Space Opera Adventure (Star Kingdom Book 7), page 33
“I’m on the warship,” Asger’s father reported over the helmet comm.
He’d rushed the pirates and disappeared into the airlock tube with half the crushers, letting them tear open their foes’ armor, then coming behind with his pertundo, driving the weapon into exposed flesh and killing them on the spot. He clearly felt no remorse, no need to take prisoners, for the pirates he’d been undercover with for a year.
Knowing they’d tricked Qin, Asger felt no remorse for them either. Nor did he have fond feelings for Qin’s sisters. As soon as he spotted an opening in his attacker’s defenses, he slammed his pertundo into the seam between her arm and torso. The wicked point pierced armor and flesh, and she stumbled back, gasping in pain. Using his pertundo, he knocked her rifle out of her grip.
“Better get to engineering and see if you can sabotage the ship so we can get away.” Asger swung his blade again, hoping to cleave her armor the rest of the way open.
“I’m going to the bridge. The—” A barrage of weapons fire and a snarl of rage interrupted his father’s reply. “We’re taking over the ship,” he panted a second later.
“Father.”
“I’m giving the crushers the time they need to upload the virus. Keep—” His father broke off again, and Asger wanted to tell him to focus on fighting. A never-ending stream of rifle fire buzzed over his comm. “Keep the women busy,” he finished.
“I’ll kill them if I can,” Asger growled, still after the one he’d wounded.
She sprang back again, then leaped in, trying to get around his pertundo to slam a punch into his faceplate. He whipped the shaft of his weapon across to deflect the blow, then kicked her in the knee. She tumbled back as a crusher grabbed her from behind. He hefted her into the air and flung her armored form across the hold. She crashed twenty feet up against the wall.
“That’s not what Qin wants,” his father said.
“These bitches betrayed her,” Asger shouted, wanting them to hear the words.
Two of them glanced at each other, but he didn’t know if it had anything to do with his shout. The crushers were keeping them busy, but they worked together, fighting back to back. A team, a team that Qin had been a part of once, but not today. They were rejecting her. And he would take them down if he could. He yanked up his rifle and fired into the knot of armored women.
“Trust me, boy. They’re brainwashed and probably have stim-chips to electrically punish them if they don’t comply. Gotta go. Another wave of pirates just showed up. And is that gas? What idiots gas someone in armor with thirty robots?” He snarled and the comm fell silent as he closed the channel.
One of the crushers hurled an armored pirate across the hold, keeping him from escaping back onto his own ship. He skipped off the deck and came to a stop right in front of Asger. Startled eyes looked up at him, and Asger recognized the pirate Qin had pointed out. Groggins. One of the men who’d tormented her.
Fury flushed Asger’s face with heat. The pirate tried to scramble to his feet, but Asger lifted his pertundo and drove the point downward too quickly for Groggins to dodge. It drove into the seam between his torso and arm piece, and the pirate screamed, legs bucking on the deck, as energy flowed from the weapon, crackling all around him.
Asger yanked his weapon out. The pirate screamed again.
“Mercy, please!” Groggins blurted.
“You could have had mercy if you’d left her alone—left them all alone.” This time when Asger drove his pertundo downward, he swung with such force that the point broke through the man’s faceplate and drove into his skull. The legs stopped twitching, and the pirate soon lay still.
Weapons fire blasted off Asger’s armor, and there wasn’t time to feel satisfaction over taking out one of Qin’s tormentors. He yanked his pertundo free and spun to face the next threat.
The battle wasn’t over, but the crushers had successfully driven the warrior women back. The path to Qin’s unconscious form grew clear, save for one of her sisters, kneeling over her with that damn stunner.
Asger growled and rushed at her. “Get away from her!”
He fired at the woman’s chest and faceplate, and she leaped to her feet. She started to raise the stunner but saw he wore his full armor and switched to a rifle.
“What does a Kingdom knight care for one of our kind?” she snarled, firing at him.
Alerts lit up on his faceplate display, warning him of hits that would threaten his armor’s integrity. He fired back, hardly caring. He could take as much as she could.
“She’s my Qin. And she came to help you, you ungrateful snots.” Aware of the crushers plowing into the other women, breaking up their back-to-back formation and hurling them about the hold, Asger focused on this one enemy. He fired and pushed her back until he stood above Qin, making sure nobody would step on her unprotected head or—worse—shoot her by accident.
Surprisingly, the woman stopped firing. Qin’s exact face peered at him, save for a green bow dangling from a clump of hair beside her cheek. She glanced around the hold.
The pirates who’d come aboard had all fallen, and her sisters were losing to the crushers. They lacked the experience that Asger and Qin had with the sturdy killing machines—if they’d expected them, they would have brought explosives. That was the only thing Asger had ever seen knock them to pieces, however temporarily.
“We’re not ungrateful,” the woman with the bow said. “We didn’t want to do this, but we had no choice.”
“No? You’re the only ones in this hold now. You’re fighting for them voluntarily. You betrayed Qin voluntarily.” Asger struggled to get his rage under control. He’d made it through to Qin and was protecting her, and his side had gained the advantage, at least in here.
He expected the woman to say she had no choice or to say that Qin had betrayed them by leaving.
Instead, she asked, “You care about her? A knight from the Kingdom? We are—” she kept hold of her rifle, kept it pointed at him, but she jerked one hand down her body, “—freaks. That is what your people say.” Her voice lowered. “That is what many people say.”
One of the women roared, and a crusher went flying over Asger’s head to slam into a stack of shipping containers. The fight wasn’t over yet.
He couldn’t believe the one he faced was bringing this up now, but maybe it was worth responding to her. If she stopped fighting, would the others? If she was like Qin—his Qin—she might genuinely care about the answer, care about being regarded as a freak by the outside universe.
“I’ve known Qin—Qin Liangyu Three—for months, and we’ve fought together many times,” Asger said. “She’s not a freak. She’s a loyal friend.” Friend? More than that, but he wasn’t going to bring up his love life with strangers, even strangers that knew Qin and looked just like her. “Put down your weapons and surrender, and come with us, with Qin. I promise you’ll have a place with us.”
“In the Kingdom?” the woman asked skeptically.
“Wherever you want to go. Qin works for a bounty hunter on the Stellar Dragon. You must have learned about her ship if you were planning this trap.” Asger couldn’t keep the sneer off his lips or the snarl out of his voice. “They’ll have a place for you. And if you do come to the Kingdom, you can stay at my father’s castle. We’ll sic the guard alligators in the moat on anyone who gives you a hard time about visiting.”
“You have a castle?” She sounded wistful, as if she’d forgotten they were in the middle of a battle.
“Seven!” one of the other ones yelled. She was pinned against the wall by two crushers, the chest plate of her armor torn off. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing!” The woman Asger faced put both hands back on her rifle and pointed it at his chest. “They’ll come after us if we leave, if they believe we’ve betrayed them. That’s why we’re here now. They wouldn’t let even one of us go. They found out Squirt—Three—was here and insisted we get her. They’ll come after all of us if we try to leave. They paid a fortune for us.” Bitterness infused her voice. “As they always remind us, we belong to them. They’ll never let us go.”
“They will if they’re dead.” Asger pointed at the crushers, making sure she saw that her side had almost lost. “Our friend made those, and they’re helping my father take over your warship right now.” He hoped that was what was happening.
“There are four other warships,” she said.
“We’ll take those over too.”
She snorted. “Your people are only on board that one because we tricked you.”
“Or we tricked you. No, not you. We came to get you. We tricked them.” Asger flung a hand toward the pirate ship and Groggins’ unmoving body. “And we will take over the other ships.” Or the one other ship, at least. He didn’t see how they could do anything to the three in System Cerberus from here, but if they took these two ships back to System Lion as war prizes, he truly doubted the Druckers would come after them, not against the Kingdom. As long as the Kingdom came out victorious in the war… “We have a powerful ally who made those crushers, and he can make a lot more.”
Never would Asger have thought he’d call Casmir a powerful ally, but he had made the crushers, and each one was worth a knight. He’d also wrangled that astroshaman computer virus into submission and was using it against Kingdom enemies now. He was powerful, in his own way. Funny that it had taken Asger so long to realize that.
At his feet, Qin groaned.
Her sister flinched. She’d been keeping her weapon aimed at Asger but not firing. Asger kept his weapon aimed at her while he bent to help Qin up. An energy net had her legs bound, and her eyes were glassy, so she needed help standing. He wrapped an arm around her to support her and held her as he faced the sister.
The woman’s mouth gaped open.
“Seven!” came another protest from the woman the crushers had pinned and now disarmed.
All except two of the other sisters were down on the deck, trapped by crushers and unconscious or groaning at their injuries. Seven looked from Asger to Qin and back to Asger. Different expressions warred for dominance on her face, and he couldn’t tell if she would surrender or try one last time to defeat him, maybe to grab Qin and run back to her ship.
“We surrender,” she finally whispered.
“Seven?” came her sister’s startled and distressed response.
But Seven wasn’t looking at her. She was looking at Asger and Qin.
“We surrender, and we’re all going to go together to this knight’s castle.”
“Did you get hit in the head?”
“Three or four times, yeah.”
“Shit.”
“We surrender,” Seven said more firmly this time. She tossed her rifle to the deck. “All of us.”
The remaining conscious women slumped, and those who still had their weapons dropped them. Maybe Seven was their leader.
“Crushers,” Asger said. “Take their weapons and…” And what? Lock them up? Give them a guest cabin? Put them in navigation with Jemadari and his crew? “A few of you stay here in the cargo hold and keep an eye on them. Try not to hurt them further. They are our prisoners for the moment, but we’re also here to collect them and protect them. The rest of us will go help my father on the warship.”
Seven hesitated. “Do you want us to help too?”
She sounded uncertain. Asger doubted she wanted to go up against the Druckers. If Asger’s side ended up losing, they would be punished worse for betraying their keepers.
“No.” Asger patted Qin on the back—she was still groggy from the stun and staring blearily at him. “I want you to stay here with Qin—my Qin—and keep her safe and let me and my father and the crushers handle the pirates.”
“Your Qin,” Seven mouthed.
Asger couldn’t tell if it was a question or a statement of surprise.
“Yes. Get the net off her, will you, please?” Asger wouldn’t have trusted any other enemy he’d just been fighting to take care of Qin, but it had been clear they meant from the beginning to capture her, not kill her. The worst he had to worry about was them trying to escape and take Qin to the pirate ship, but if he removed all their weapons and left some of the crushers to guard them, he shouldn’t have to worry about that.
“Yes.” Seven came forward and took his place holding Qin up. “We will.”
“Good. Thank you.” Asger backed away, told five crushers to stay—they were already gathering the sisters’ weapons—and ordered the others to follow him into the airlock tube.
He hoped his father was doing all right and truly could capture the pirate vessel. Because if they didn’t succeed, Qin and all of her sisters would be back in the Druckers’ torture chamber of a ship at the end of the day.
28
“Don’t get any closer,” Nalini told her pilot, her gaze locked on the forward display showing what they believed was Dubashi’s vessel—more a warship than the yacht so many of the Miners’ Union leaders had—and the dozen ships protecting it. “We’ve seen what we needed to see. We can’t take them on.”
Casmir nodded in reluctant agreement. Their ship wouldn’t have the firepower to go up against Dubashi’s craft one on one, and if all the other mercenaries piled on, they would be dead in a second. Still, if that vessel held the virus-laden rockets that Dubashi meant to use on Odin, would it be worth a kamikaze run to try to take it out? But even if they meant to sacrifice themselves, which he would prefer not to do, he doubted they could get close before they were mowed down.
“If we could lure that ship close to the asteroid somehow…” Tristan mused.
“What’s left of Father’s base defenses might have the firepower to destroy that ship,” Nalini agreed, “but those weapons platforms are being whittled away even as we sit here.” She lifted a finger, as if to give the order to go back to helping fight the mercenaries doing that whittling, but Tork spoke first.
“I have marked several of the slydar-hulled ships. Shall I mark those craft?” He pointed at Dubashi’s ships.
Nalini snorted. “That isn’t quite what I had in mind as far as luring them back, but maybe they’ll be so pissed that they’ll chase us. Or—” she looked at Casmir, “—would they notice us doing that?”
“They would notice. The mercenaries might not have realized the ramifications yet, but Dubashi would guess right away, especially since we’re using some astroshaman technology.” Casmir waved at Tork, then shrugged. “We can be cheeky and do it anyway.”
“I’m willing to be cheeky if he’ll give chase and we can lure him back to the asteroid.”
“Sounds like a way to get ourselves killed,” Tristan said.
“We have to do something,” Nalini said. “Some of our allies are edging away from the battle. If they’ve heard that the gate is open, they might give up on us altogether.”
“Let’s tag them,” Casmir said. “Two Kingdom warships are on the way. They might have the power to deal with Dubashi and his protectors.”
“Aren’t they almost a day out?” Nalini asked.
“Yes, but—” Casmir spun toward Tork, realizing this might be the answer. Even if he couldn’t save the station, maybe he could protect the Kingdom. “How long will that tracker last?”
“For some time—days at least—if they do not remove it,” Tork said.
“Which they might be able to do.” Casmir clenched his fist. “It’s still worth trying. If the Osprey and the Eagle get here in time…”
Nalini squinted at him, probably realizing he was prioritizing getting Dubashi over finding a solution for their station. But she nodded to Tork. “Go ahead and do it. He’s my father’s mortal enemy.”
“Proceeding,” Tork said.
“I am assisting,” Zee said, “until such time as I may go into battle and excel at that which I was made to do.”
“Clubbing enemies with those big mallet fists?” Tork asked.
“Defending my people and battling nefarious foes,” Zee said.
“Clubbing enemies.” Tork nodded.
“Are your robots squabbling, Casmir?” Tristan’s eyes were tense—everybody on the bridge was tense—but he managed a quick, bemused smile.
“Yes. They do that. They’re kind of like a husband and wife. Or gender-neutral mates, I suppose you could say.” Casmir kept waiting for Zee to realize that Tork might be the mate he’d been looking for all this time.
“Tork is an inferior android,” Zee said, “not my mate. My mate will be another crusher like myself.”
“Another clubber of enemies,” Tork said. “I have no wish to have a killing machine for a mate.”
Nalini sank deeper into her pod and dropped her face into her hand.
“Maybe you can discuss it later,” Casmir told them.
“We are working as we debate,” Tork said. “I have tagged six of the twelve ships surrounding Dubashi’s. I will finish that task and also tag his vessel.”
Your obvious tactics will not work a second time, clone, a message appeared on Casmir’s contact.
There was no identification, but he quickly traced it to its origin. The large ship they believed belonged to Dubashi.
Are you certain, Prince Dubashi? he replied. What else would you suggest? I would dearly like to keep you from killing the people who live in this station and also all the people who live on Odin. I’m open to bargaining with you if you’re open to not doing those things.
Jager sealed your planet’s fate when he threatened to wipe me and my followers out of the Twelve Systems. I’ll give him no leniency now.
Why would he have done that? Is it possible you misunderstood? Casmir remembered that clip of a message he’d pulled up on Dubashi’s personal computer. It had practically been his screensaver.
I did not misunderstand. He came to me in person last year. I am not an idiot, though I suppose you think most people are, given your progenitor’s supposed brilliance. The sneer came through loud and clear, even though it was only a text message.
