Likely, Qin thought, not just possible.

  “This is a menial role,” Zee said. “I will delegate it to the other crushers and be your bodyguard. This door may be booby trapped. I will enter first.”

  “Thank you, Zee.”

  “Will the other crushers not think it’s menial too?” Mouser asked, walking beside Qin.

  “Maybe,” Qin said, “but Zee seems to think he’s in charge.”

  Zee tried the knob, found the door locked, and kicked it open like the heroic crusher he believed himself to be.

  Qin listened for sounds that would warn of a retaliatory attack. All she heard was the wind scraping across the ice and the breathing of her sisters. Zee strode into the building, with Casmir walking in behind him.

  Lights came on automatically when they entered. Qin squinted against the brightness as she stepped in after them. The interior was warmer than the exterior but still cold enough that her breath fogged before her face.

  An open area up front held desks facing walls full of astronomical and meteorological equipment. A hallway in the back led to offices. There was no sign of the gate pieces, nor would they have fit inside. The building smelled strongly of humans, but she didn’t believe any of them were there presently.

  As the group searched around, a message came in from Bonita.

  You doing all right, Qin?

  Yes, Captain. I’m helping Casmir with a mission.

  There was lag, so Qin poked around with the others while she waited for the next part of Bonita’s message. She didn’t know what they were looking for beyond clues to the location of the gate pieces.

  Does that mean you can’t get off the planet and meet me out here?

  Not until this is done. Right now, I’m not even sure I can get out of their world’s Arctic Islands.

  I won’t ask why you’re there, though curious minds want to know.

  Casmir led us here for a plan.

  “Nothing but offices back here.” Casmir came out of the hallway and stopped to consider a control console and displays in a corner.

  From Qin’s position, it looked like a weather-monitoring station for the local area, but something must have caught Casmir’s interest. He poked around and rotated through the displays.

  “Nothing about the gate pieces or anything right around the base,” he said, “but if we leave someone here, we should be able to see if any ships are coming. I’m able to pick up some of the ships in the orbital battle taking place on this side of the planet.”

  Qin didn’t want to volunteer to stay inside and watch a screen while the others possibly went into battle. Especially when it didn’t look like there was anything to see.

  “At least I don’t see any ships coming yet.” Casmir waved for the door. “Let’s check the other building.”

  “What if the gate pieces aren’t here?” Mouser asked.

  “Then we flew up here and wrecked an antique helicopter for nothing.” Casmir headed for the exit. “But I detect other nodes on the network beyond what’s represented by the equipment in this building.”

  Mouser looked at Qin, as if to ask if that addressed their problem. She shrugged back and followed Casmir out.

  That explains nothing and yet explains everything, Bonita continued. Whenever you can get off that planet, if I’m no longer in the system, meet me in System Diomedes. Depending on how the next few hours go, I may have to fly out of System Lion in a hurry.

  That made Qin pause. What? Why? Captain, you’re not trying to get yourself in trouble, are you?

  Once again, Zee led the way into the second building by kicking down the door.

  Someone is paying me a lot of money for a job, Bonita replied.

  Bounty hunting? You should wait until I’m able to join you. Which, Qin admitted, wouldn’t be any time soon, even if she could leave right away. She felt guilty, knowing she’d left her captain without a crew in order to come help Casmir, who hadn’t ended up needing her help to escape. Though it was possible he would need her help tonight.

  Qin stepped into the building after them and peered around, again only smelling evidence that humans had been there in the past. It had been the recent past though, so she stayed alert.

  The front of this building held displays, couches and tables, and bookcases with physical atlases and technical manuals. An even less likely place to find a stack of gate pieces.

  Not bounty hunting, Bonita continued. It’s a long story, but if you see Prince Finn babbling on the news displays there, you’ll know I was responsible.

  You’re getting involved in their politics?

  The money is good. Very good. If I succeed, I’ll be able to pay off the Dragon and hire all of your sisters if they want the job.

  Qin wanted to ask for more details, but Casmir and Zee had searched the back of the building and were returning.

  “There’s nobody in the back,” Casmir said. “Nothing is dusty, and there are people’s belongings in the rooms, so they’re somewhere around here.”

  “At least that means we’re not exploring an abandoned base, right?” Mouser asked.

  “It’s not abandoned. Did you see that satellite dish out there?” Casmir waved toward one of the walls. “It’s transmitting. Or was earlier today. I’ll look out there next.”

  Qin sent a goodbye and a good luck to Bonita, hoping she wouldn’t get herself into trouble, trouble that Qin could have saved her from if she’d been there.

  Outside, Asger, Tristan, and Bjarke were no longer in sight. The night air nipped at Qin’s cheeks, but she walked around with her faceplate retracted, breathing in the scents.

  The icy terrain lacked the variety of climates full of wildlife and foliage, but there were a few variants. A hundred feet from the buildings, she caught a whiff of… humanity. Live humanity. Beard gel, shampoo, and the body odor of a man. The breeze had shifted, and she almost lost it.

  She didn’t see anything, but she walked in the direction the scents had been coming from. She trusted her nose.

  Casmir? She messaged him since he’d headed over to the satellite dish, which was in the opposite direction. I may have found something.

  Weapons fire buzzed near the dish, red DEW-Tek blasts streaking out from the ground.

  Qin spun and raised her rifle, searching for an enemy. Two crushers lay on the ground as the blasts continued all around them. They weren’t coming from people with rifles but from some kind of automatic-weapons system with heads that had popped out of the ice like sprinklers.

  Me too, Casmir replied, though she didn’t see him. Booby traps.

  She lifted her rifle and aimed at one of the little black cylinders that were firing at the intruders. The device blew into dozens of pieces that clattered to the ice.

  Before she could target more of them, several crushers charged out of the building and pounced on them. They tore the heads from their mounts, breaking them into even more pieces than her blast had, then dropped them to the ground.

  The two crushers lying on the ice rolled to the side. Casmir, who’d been completely hidden under them—protected by them—stood up, shaking his limbs and rubbing the back of his head.

  Are crushers as heavy as they look? Qin asked.

  Yes. But fast to respond. Like throwing themselves on a grenade, except the opposite. What did you find? With the defenses destroyed, Casmir poked around the satellite dish as he messaged her.

  I smell someone. Qin noticed Pounce and Swish also walking across the ice and sniffing at the air.

  After finishing a quick inspection of the satellite, Casmir headed toward Qin with the crushers trailing him. He looked toward the two white mounds in the distance, presumably where the knights had disappeared to, but the scents of humanity weren’t coming from that direction.

  “I found a cable going into the ground—the ice—over there,” Casmir said when he reached her. “It’s hard to tell if it goes down five feet or five hundred. From what I read on the way up here, the sheets of ice are over a thousand meters thick in places.”

  “You were reading while you were airsick?” Qin waved for him to follow her toward where she’d caught the scent.

  “Before the turbulence started, yes.”

  A breeze—no, it felt more like an updraft—brushed her nose, bringing the scents of humans again. More than one this time. She was positive. She also smelled the scent of machinery, maybe a generator. A faint hum reached her ears. It seemed closer than the human scents, so she crept toward it. But slowly. Some sixth sense warned her that she was in danger, though she couldn’t see, hear, or smell a reason for it.

  The ice gave way beneath her foot, and she almost fell.

  “Qin!” Casmir shouted from behind her.

  She pitched herself sideways, toward solid footing and gaped at what looked like flat ground but had been a hole.

  “There’s something there that isn’t visible,” she warned, waving for the others to stay back as she heard them rushing closer.

  “Careful, please,” Casmir warned, his voice tight with worry. “Viggo would be terribly upset with me if I lost you.”

  “He would forgive you if you bought him a new vacuum.” Qin scooted closer on her hands and knees and swept her fingers back and forth, searching for the hole that her eyes told her wasn’t there.

  “I don’t know if that’s true.”

  “He does like me. You might have to get him a dozen vacuums.”

  Ah ha. There was her hole. More like a cliff. She still couldn’t see it, but she felt the edge. A drop-off ran in roughly a straight line for who knew how long, and she’d almost walked right off it.

  Much more careful now, she followed the invisible cliff and found the generator she’d heard and smelled, a compact device hidden under white camouflage netting with snow mounded atop it.

  She opened a panel on the side, and the hum grew louder. A few indicator lights blinked around a bunch of switches. None of them said anything as obvious as ON/OFF.

  Casmir knelt beside her and tapped two buttons, then flipped a switch without a label.

  “Do you know what you’re doing?” Qin asked.

  “Sometimes.”

  The generator turned off, and several clicks sounded all along the cliff they’d been following and farther out from it as well. The other side?

  What had appeared to be solid ground wavered and disappeared. Qin gaped at the fissure that was revealed. No, not a fissure. More of a wide and deep, deep chasm.

  Casmir scooted forward on hands and knees. The crushers loomed behind him, hands outstretched, as if to yank him back if the ice gave way.

  “Good work, Qin,” Casmir said. “I believe you’ve found where the gate pieces may be hidden.”

  Qin peered over the side into darkness so absolute that even her enhanced eyes couldn’t see all the way to the bottom. “How do we get down?”

  “That remains a mystery. Is this where the human scents are coming from?”

  She sniffed the air again, realizing that the scents came and went, depending on the drafts. There. She detected them again.

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe there’s an elevator somewhere.”

  “A crusher could jump many hundreds of feet and survive the fall,” one of Casmir’s bodyguards said.

  “Could a crusher also climb back up with a giant gate piece on his shoulder?” Casmir asked.

  “We are very strong, but climbing ice may be difficult, even for us.”

  “Let’s find that elevator then. The troops have to be getting in and out somehow.” Casmir squinted into the dark chasm. “Unless a ship or aircraft flew down there and dropped them off.”

  Weapons fire came from the other side of the camp, from the two mounds the others had been investigating. Qin scooted back and jumped to her feet.

  “Watch him,” Qin told the crushers and rushed toward the noise in case Asger and the others needed help.

  By the time she reached the mounds, Asger and Tristan were scrambling out from under what appeared to be more camouflage netting. They dragged two men in cold-weather military uniforms and parkas behind them, neither man moving.

  “Good news,” Asger said, though he appeared distracted as he stared at the newly revealed chasm, a long dark scar in the white and blue ice impossible to miss. “We’ve verified that there are two ships under the camouflage. Bad news, at least one of them had a small crew aboard. We took care of these guys. My father is checking on the other ship.”

  Casmir jogged up, slipping and flailing on the ice—one of the crushers steadied him—in time to hear this.

  “Did you stun them?” He pointed to the men.

  “Yes. We’ll need to lock them up somewhere, and someone should stay and keep an eye on them.”

  “That building.” Casmir pointed to the first one they had explored. “There’s a monitoring station inside that can let us know if—when—ships are coming. Our guard can watch two things at once while the rest of us go down and look for the gate pieces.” He pointed toward the chasm.

  “Who gets that scintillating job?” Asger asked.

  Casmir smiled at him and Tristan.

  “I think that means we flip a coin,” Asger told Tristan.

  “I’ll do it.” Tristan eyed the newly revealed chasm, night making its dark depths even more ominous. “I’m not so enamored with heights that I want to climb down the side of an ice cliff.”

  “We’re hoping for an elevator,” Qin offered.

  “Given the sparseness of what we’ve seen here so far,” Tristan said, “you’ll be lucky to find a rope.”

  “How big are the ships?” Casmir asked. “Would one of them fit down there?”

  Asger eyed the chasm with a lack of enthusiasm. “We’ll have to do some measurements.”

  “There’s more bad news, Casmir.” Tristan glanced at Asger. “We walked in on these men comming someone, warning them that the base had been compromised and asking for backup.”

  Casmir peered up at the starry night sky. “We had better hurry then.”

  “Into that chasm?” Asger asked.

  “Into that chasm,” Casmir said.

  “Hell.”

  24

  After messaging Kim to warn her—far too late to be useful—that Finn was on his way to the Asger estate, Oku leashed up Chasca and headed for Van Dijk’s office.

  The guard coming back from walking the dog was what had roused Oku from her drug-induced sleep. She was still groggy, but not so groggy that she didn’t plan to do anything. Guilt and worry propelled her into a run, Chasca bounding along with her. Oku had not only foolishly let her brother in to drug her, but she’d betrayed Casmir’s family.

  Kim had mentioned tunnels they were hiding in, but Finn’s lackeys would probably find them and drag them out at gunpoint. And it would be her fault. She’d specifically told Casmir that he and his friends wouldn’t be in trouble because Van Dijk didn’t care enough to look for them. She hadn’t factored Finn into the equation.

  Two tense-looking guards stood outside of Van Dijk’s office. They exchanged wary glances with each other as Oku approached, but they didn’t stop her when she rushed up and pounded on the door.

  “I’m busy,” came Van Dijk’s cranky call.

  Oku went in anyway.

  “That meant go away, not invite yourself in.” Van Dijk was standing at her desk, hammering at a tablet while glancing at the numerous displays on the wall, and she looked up with an exasperated scowl. “Oh, it’s you.”

  Oku had been prepared to snap back, but Van Dijk waved her in.

  “Who were you expecting?” she asked.

  “The legions of troops who now want to strangle your brother.”

  “Because… he drugged me?”

  How would the troops have found out? And why would they care that much?

  “No. Because of this.” Van Dijk pointed at a display showing Finn locked in a brig cell and sent a command via her chip to raise the volume.

  Oku watched, riveted and distracted from her mission as Finn appeared to make a deal to hire Rache to kill their father. By now, Oku wouldn’t be surprised if this had actually happened, though she highly suspected Rache of engineering the situation. Who had recorded this? Him?

  “Where did this come from?” she wondered.

  “Our broadcast station out at Forseti. It broadcasted to the entire system before they lost power.”

  “Before the studio lost power?”

  “No, all of Forseti Station is without power. As is every ship, habitat, and station that the AI ship has flown anywhere near on its path toward Odin. It’s transmitting something we can’t detect that’s knocking out power for more than a hundred million miles in every direction. So far, none of the ships have managed to get their power back online. They’ve got no life support, nothing. You can imagine how quickly that will become devastating. The AI ship makes this mess with Finn seem insignificant, but it’s not like I can ignore him. I’m already hearing rumors of our citizens wanting to lynch him. And they’re not the only ones. That Captain Marchetti—Sir Slayer—has disappeared from his base with shuttles and a bunch of his Protectors of the Future minions.” Van Dijk gripped the edge of her desk. “I think they’re as pissed that he negotiated with Rache as that he wants to kill Jager—or you.”

  “I don’t imagine the general populace knows me that well to be offended on my behalf.” Oku also guessed that working with Rache was the greater crime in many of their eyes.

  “We’ll find out who sent it as soon as we can. For now, I need to figure out where Finn went, since he disappeared from his apartment, so I can send loyal troops to protect him.” Van Dijk threw her head back and groaned in frustration. “If I survive this, I’m retiring to another system.”

  “Asger Castle.”

  Van Dijk lowered her head. “What?”

  “That’s what I came to tell you. Finn drugged me and questioned me about Casmir. He thinks he’s still there and is going out to Asger Castle after him. Kim and Casmir’s parents are still there. Can you send someone—and me—to help them? To make sure he can’t hurt them?”