Asylum, p.16
Asylum, page 16
“So if it was used on Odin, it could be deadly?” Kenji felt that he was in over his head. This was far more than he’d expected to be involved in.
“It’s unlikely that one device could destroy the planet,” Van Dijk said, “but it is a prototype that could be used to make more.”
“So if anyone questions why a terrorist might want it, there’s a plausible reason.” Dabrowski eyed Kenji.
“Yeah,” Kenji said bleakly. He would have liked to think that his father wouldn’t traffic in anything that could kill masses of people—or all life on a planet—but he wasn’t sure. He’d never fully understood the man’s motivations.
“We’d like you to pretend to be a representative for your father, interested in doing some purchasing on his behalf,” Dabrowski added.
“Yes, I understand,” Kenji said, haunted by memories of missions he’d gone along on as a boy.
Van Dijk and Heim exchanged significant looks, making Kenji wonder if it was truly we who wanted to rely on Kenji to perpetrate this ruse, or if this was all Dabrowski’s idea.
“You’d have leeway,” Dabrowski said, “to tell the story in your way, to make it work on the fly. You’ll need a ship, of course, as the thieves won’t likely agree to come back to Odin for a handoff. One that doesn’t have a known link to the Kingdom.”
They were going to get him a ride into space? Kenji thought about how he’d been working for so long to save up the money for a trip to another system. It would be much easier for him to leave Odin forever if he ended up halfway to the gate, thanks to this mission. Could he play his role and then disappear? He wondered how many guards Dabrowski was thinking of sending along to keep an eye on him.
Dabrowski looked toward Sir Bjarke. “I’m tempted to ask if Captain Laser is free. Thieves wouldn’t find a freighter with one old railgun concerning, and the last I heard, she and the Stellar Dragon are visiting Odin.”
“They’re visiting me,” Sir Bjarke said, a smug twinkle in his eyes.
“Both of them? I didn’t know you serviced Viggo as well as Bonita.”
“I’m a man of many talents.”
Van Dijk cleared her throat. “Thanks to Sato’s book, that freighter, and its link to the Kingdom, is now well known.”
“Ah, right,” Dabrowski said. “I’d forgotten Kim said she named it in there.”
“All of the principal characters in that book would have a difficult time going undercover now.”
“Actually,” Sir Bjarke said, “Bonita got a new name and ident chip for her freighter for exactly that reason.”
“She was getting in trouble because of her association with us?” Dabrowski frowned and touched his hand to his chest.
“Not exactly. She was getting requests for tours and star cruises from passengers who wanted to ride on the Stellar Dragon and be a part of history.”
“I can see where Captain Laser Lopez might not see herself as a cruise-line operator.”
“She prefers bounty hunting,” Sir Bjarke said, “especially now that she has access to Qin and several of Qin’s formidable sisters.”
Kenji lifted his brows. Hadn’t one of the two big women with pointed cat ears been named Qin?
“Her ship has also been painted,” Sir Bjarke added. “I gather she still calls it the Dragon when she speaks about it to friends, but the ident chip and the name on the hull now proclaim it the Espada Ancha.”
“Does that also mean teddy bear?” Dabrowski asked.
“It means wide sword in her language. I gather she and Viggo argued over an appropriate name until she put her foot down.”
“Not on a robot vacuum, I hope,” Dabrowski murmured.
Kenji opened his mouth, but he didn’t know what to say to the odd conversation. Maybe he could find a ship of his own. Assuming he meant to help them. Did he? He wouldn’t be betraying his father, and it was possible the old man wouldn’t even hear about this. And if succeeding at this mission could get Kenji pardoned… didn’t he want that? Even if he planned to leave for another system, the idea of not having to spend the rest of his life worrying about Kingdom agents finding him was appealing.
“I’ll talk to Bonita. If Kenji is willing to help us with this mission.” Dabrowski extended his hand toward him and raised his eyebrows. “And willing to work with Mari.”
Kenji blinked. “She’s going along?”
“To retrieve her belongings? Yes. She wants to.”
The idea of working with someone he’d tried to capture not once but twice daunted him. Would she believe him if he said he’d lost interest in collecting her bounty? Would she hold a grudge? What if, at some point during the mission, he had to depend on her to watch his back? She might be tempted to get revenge for all the trouble he’d caused her by letting him get shot.
But, as Dabrowski smiled affably, waiting for his answer, Kenji couldn’t imagine saying no to this opportunity. This was his chance to finally get somewhere in life, or at least get himself into a position where he could enter the races. For so long, he hadn’t even been able to claw his way to the starting line.
“I can work with her if she can work with me,” Kenji said.
“Think she’ll be able to refrain from sticking another needle in your butt?” Lieutenant Hanabusa asked.
Eyebrows arched around the room.
“I’ll try to keep my butt away from her,” Kenji muttered.
“Wise,” Van Dijk said.
“Excellent.” Dabrowski nodded to him and stood up to leave.
“My lord?” Kenji asked.
“Casmir. And yes?”
Kenji hesitated, not wanting to ask for more favors, but if anyone would be willing to help him find Kay…
“Like I said earlier, I lost my robot on campus. If you hear of anyone finding a K-45, would you mind collecting him? He’s a…” Kenji, aware of all the important officials looking on, caught himself before saying Kay was a friend. “He helps me repair things. I think he’d be useful on this mission.”
“I understand.” Dabrowski nodded. “I’ll check.”
“Thank you.”
11
“Are you sure you don’t mind sharing?” Mari sat at a table in Sato and Dabrowski’s home, eating candies called chocolate-covered espresso beans out of a bowl while waiting to hear back from Dabrowski on his meeting with his government leaders and the bounty hunter. Kenji Backer, as Mari had since learned his name was.
“I can acquire more,” Sato said.
Mari hesitated, unsure how to interpret that. She hadn’t specifically said no.
Sato also sat at the table while reading on a tablet, as she had through the dinner Mari had consumed with her after Dabrowski dropped her off at the house with instructions to stay there until he returned. Sato hadn’t appeared that comfortable with having a strange astroshaman dinner guest, and Mari wouldn’t have stayed if she’d had somewhere else to go. But without a ship of her own, she couldn’t chase the thieves, and Dabrowski had the political power to help her. Though she couldn’t imagine why he cared, he seemed willing to do so, and she was relieved.
Kim ate a couple of the chocolates, though she’d warned Mari they contained caffeine and might not be an appropriate evening snack, especially for someone unaccustomed to the chemical. Mari was extremely unaccustomed to it. She’d had coffee only once in her life—twice now, since Sato had brewed some of the steaming liquid after their shared dinner. It had smelled wonderful, but Mari had found the taste strong and unappealing. That was when Sato had suggested the chocolate-covered version. It was delightful. The chocolate wrapping the beans was much smoother and more pleasing than the Moon Melters had been, and the beans were strong and sharp but somehow perfect under the layer of sweetness.
It was ridiculous, but a part of her decided it had been worth leaving her people if only to sample sweets. Though she still hoped to experience other human pleasures of the body, that would have to wait until she got her terraformer back.
“Will you require sleeping accommodations?” Sato asked without looking up from her tablet. It was full of graphs and text laden with footnotes.
“I have slept in numerous places without trouble since leaving my people. Outdoors, it is possible to find secluded spots where strangers will not stumble across me during my required rest hours.”
“You’ve been sleeping outside?”
“Since I left, yes. I am able to regulate my body temperature sufficiently to stay comfortable outdoors in all but extreme climates.” Mari knew humans had hotels and various other places where one could rent rooms, but she’d been doing her best to avoid commercial establishments. All establishments.
But Sato was staring at her, so maybe her choice was not considered normal or acceptable.
“I am uncertain if social conventions dictate that I offer you a pillow and blanket and the opportunity to sleep on our sofa. You are…” Sato groped in the air with her hand. “I do not know if I am required to consider you a guest.”
It surprised Mari that Sato, a human who had been born into this society, would be uncertain about its social conventions. “I do not require it.”
“Casmir might.” Sato sounded glum. “I do not like having strangers in my home, and I believe that even well-liked guests should stay in hotels, but Casmir believes that friends and family should be kept close, and he extends those terms to include a great many people. Last month, he invited a student he had five years ago to sleep on our sofa.” Her lips pinched together in disapproval.
“I do not wish to make you uncomfortable.” Mari didn’t even know if she would want to sleep on these people’s sofa. It seemed overly intimate and familiar. Dabrowski had dropped her off here to stick around and enjoy some dinner, as he’d said, while he went to the police station. She hadn’t thought she would stay long. “I do not expect anyone in the Kingdom to consider me a friend or family. Or even a guest. My mother… I believe most in the Twelve Systems who are not astroshamans would believe her an enemy. She does not speak of it, but I know she has committed what would be considered crimes to your people, in addition to…”
“Leading an invasion to our doorstep?” Sato suggested.
“She was coerced by others to do that, but yes. I assumed… I kept expecting Minister Dabrowski to call the police back to get me.” Mari glanced toward the window, still not entirely positive they wouldn’t show up again.
“If he can’t defeat them by hacking into their network or stealing their robots, Casmir prefers to befriend his enemies. Also, I believe he now considers Moonrazor an acquaintance if not an ally.”
Mari noticed that Sato hadn’t implied that she felt that way.
“If she showed up at our doorstep,” Sato added, “I am certain Casmir would offer her a blanket and pillow and our sofa, if not inviting her to use his room while he took the sofa. He would also offer her the use of his reading material, including his comic-book collection.”
“Since they are acquaintances, if not allies, I’ve been a little concerned that he would tell my mother I’m here.”
Sato opened her mouth but didn’t answer right away. “If you asked him not to, I believe he would respect your wish, but he is also a poor liar, so if Moonrazor messages him and outright asks if you’re here, that could be problematic.”
“Then I will hope she believes I’m off Odin by now.” Mari drew more of the chocolate beans out of the bowl and consumed them. Earlier, she had been tired, weighed down by knowing she’d come so close to reacquiring her terraformer only to have the thieves escape right in front of her, but now, she felt much perkier.
“Why have you left your people?”
Mari had placed another chocolate in her mouth, but she paused before chewing it. This was the first personal question Sato had asked, and it was the last one Mari wanted to answer. Voicing how she felt seemed almost as much a betrayal to her people—to her mother—as sharing technological secrets.
“I do not require that you answer,” Sato said, “but I am trying to determine if you are yourself a threat or if your actions will bring trouble to Casmir and our people. As far as I know, he is the only one in the government—perhaps on the planet—who considers Moonrazor something of an ally, and he is occasionally naive in wanting to believe the best about others. As a more cynical person, I can’t help but wonder if your actions, your request for asylum, would cause Moonrazor to use force to retrieve you—or prompt her to wish to retaliate.”
“I do not believe she would blame your people for my choice,” Mari said quietly. “I left because our plans were thwarted when the AI ship took the gate, and it will be much longer before we are able to settle in a new system that humanity hasn’t yet touched. My work as an agronomist and terraforming expert will not be needed by my people for a long time now.”
“You could not train in a new field?” Sato’s flat voice made it difficult to determine if she was suspicious or not.
In truth, she spoke a lot like many of the astroshamans, with little inflection—little emotion—and Mari wondered if her mother had ever offered her a place among their people. She knew her mother had invited Dabrowski to join them, even offered to help him obtain a position of leadership among them. The reclusive astroshamans occasionally accepted outsiders with cybernetic parts, especially those with desirable skills to further the goals of their community, but it was rare for them to recruit outsiders.
“I could,” Mari said, “but I also wished to experience… human experiences.”
Sato’s only reaction was a slight raising of her eyebrows.
“For as long as I can remember, I have lived in our community, usually on spaceships or in reclusive habitats with little interaction with human civilizations. There are some astroshamans who go back and forth, working and trading with people in normal human habitats, but my mother has always kept us—my siblings and me—close, not wanting us to be tainted by outside influence. Our inception was not originally her idea, but once she acquired us, she decided we would be raised to be the best scientists and engineers possible—and loyal to our people and the goals of our society.”
“Your inception was not her idea?”
“For a time, she had a lover—our father—who was an intelligent and creative engineer, and who apparently admired her intelligence. He lived on Jotunheim Station in System Hydra and enjoyed his work there building medical equipment. He had always wished to have children, and suggested they get married, but he did not want to join the astroshaman community. Over time, my mother had been more and more drawn into it, and she’d recently taken a leadership position. She was unwilling to leave, even for him, and eventually, her duties called her away, so they ended their relationship. Unbeknownst to her, he took a sample of her genetic material and had us made—me and two sisters and three brothers. We were less than a year old when pirates attacked Jotunheim Station. My father was killed. We were found in the aftermath, and his will dictated that we be taken to our mother. I do not know what her response was, but she took us in and raised us and trained us to be assets to our community and to help further its goals to leave humanity and the Twelve Systems behind and settle elsewhere among the stars.”
Mari clasped her hands on the table to refrain from eating more of the stimulating chocolates. “She has never been cruel to us or even unkind, but she is not… loving in the human sense of the word, and she has been stifling by not allowing us to leave, even for brief adventures, to experience other types of civilizations. I suspect she worries that if we ever left, we would not want to come back. It is understandable when people who were raised in human societies decide they want something else and join the astroshamans, but it is not fair to force us to choose that way of life before we’ve had an opportunity to try others. And especially now that our mission is on pause…” Mari shook her head. “There was no reason for her to insist we stay, other than concern that we would be seen as enemies in the Kingdom.”
“You keep saying human society, as if you are not human. Many humans have replaced some of their biological parts with cybernetic ones, either to give them an advantage or to solve medical maladies. And more of us are chipped than not these days.” Sato waved at her temple.
“I understand this, but a core tenet of our people is that we wish to become less and less human over time and to give up emotion and irrational feelings in order to become more like machines. Approximately half of our people have forsaken their biological forms to upload their knowledge and memories into android bodies. Some have placed themselves directly into computer systems.”
“Yes, my mother is a loaded droid.”
“She is?” Mari blinked, surprised since that wasn’t common outside of the astroshaman society.
“Her death was imminent, and she chose that path.”
“Many of our people do it even if their deaths are not imminent.”
“Yes. I understand the differences and that there is a religious component.”
Mari remembered Sato saying they were a cult. It wasn’t entirely inaccurate, but humans put a negative connotation on that word. Mari wouldn’t know if she wanted to return to her people until she’d experienced what it was like elsewhere, but she would hate to not have the option to return. She did not feel ill will toward her mother or siblings; she simply wanted the freedom to choose her fate.
The front door opened, and Mari tensed and turned, still expecting the police to come again for her.
Minister Dabrowski walked in, trailed by a clunky robot that looked like something Mari’s brother would have made from spare parts as a toddler. The much sleeker and more elegant crusher followed after it.
“Hello, Kim. Mari.” Dabrowski lifted a hand. “Is there any food left?” He looked toward the bowl of chocolates on the table. “Food without hidden bitter beans in the middle?”
“Mari Moonrazor likes my chocolate-covered coffee beans,” Kim said.
“Probably because she’s had a long day, and they’re like eating caffeine pellets.”
