“Doctor?” one of the women—Tigress, she’d introduced herself—asked as he worked on her chip removal. “Have you seen Rache without his mask? Do you know who he really is?”

  “He’s careful to keep his face covered.”

  “I think that means he has seen it,” one of the others whispered. “Spill the chips, Doc. Is he hideous? Horribly maimed by an explosion? We’re debating his sexiness quotient.”

  “He just doesn’t want anyone to know who he is.” Yas avoided commenting on quotients and dabbed Skinfill onto the spot where Tigress’s chip had been.

  “He’s a horrible villain who’s killed thousands of people.” Qin’s chip had been removed long ago, but she’d come along for moral support. “He’s not sexy.”

  “Villains can be sexy. You don’t know everything, Squirt, just because you’ve had your freedom longer.”

  “I know Rache isn’t sexy,” Qin murmured.

  Yas concurred, but he decided to stay out of it.

  “That stuff stinks.” Tigress wrinkled her nose at the tube of Skinfill. “I don’t want to sleep with Rache or anything. I mean, probably not. He does look super agile when he works out with his men, so you never know. But I was mostly wondering if he might be hiring. He can’t be any worse than the Druckers. After all, he’s helping us rescue your friend, Squirt. Does he molest the women here, Doctor?”

  Yas blinked at that abrupt transition. “To the best of my knowledge, this is a molestation-free ship. I’m not sure if Rache is hiring right now, but he is fair with his people, if that matters.”

  “See, Squirt? Way better than the Druckers.”

  “You can’t leave until we rescue Casmir,” Qin said.

  “Oh, I won’t, but what are we going to do after that? We have to make a living. If we get paid, we can shop. We’ve never been able to do that before, and I look forward to exploring my options.”

  “What are you going to buy?” Qin asked.

  “Clothes. Chocolates. A new grenade launcher.”

  “The necessities.”

  “And I want to decorate.” Tigress clasped her hands together in front of her chest. “I saw the unicorns and candles in your cabin on your freighter. It’s so fabulous that you have a place of your own. I want that. And I want to decorate it and make it mine.”

  “It is nice. Bonita might be able to hire you—anyone who wants to work for her. We’d just have to start getting bigger jobs.”

  Yas eyed Qin—he had seen her beat the tar out of mercenaries and even hold her own against crushers, so he wouldn’t have guessed she was the type to collect something as girlie as unicorns, but maybe it wasn’t surprising. Her nails—claws—were always painted some cute color, and today, she wore a dark purple T-shirt with a large glittery green-and-silver tree on the front that caught the light and sparkled riotously.

  “That might be all right,” Tigress said. “I’m just thinking about our future. Making plans.”

  “Plans for shopping.”

  “And decorating.”

  As Yas finished the last of the chip removals, Rache walked into sickbay. He twitched a finger toward Yas and walked into the office.

  “You ladies are all done here,” he told them.

  “Thank you, Doctor.” Tigress flashed a smile at him, being careful not to show off her fangs, and waved cheerfully. As yet, her claws were not cheerfully painted the way Qin’s were, but Yas guessed it was only a matter of time.

  The group strode out of sickbay, their strides powerful, purposeful, and also graceful, and Yas tossed the bloody chips into the detritus chute with relish, knowing they would be incinerated with the rest of the trash. The women had told him how they had been used, so he’d been more than pleased to take them out. The galaxy was full of despicable individuals.

  As he joined the infamous mercenary Rache in the sickbay office, it bemused him a little that he no longer considered his captain one of those people. Even though he was likely plotting Jager’s murder right now.

  “Are you here for your exam, Captain?” Yas asked what had become his usual greeting for Rache—and for several of the men who failed to show up for the appointments Yas made for them.

  “I’m leaving the ship when we get as close to Odin as we dare—given that one of those warships has a slydar detector now, we’ll have to make sure to stay on the opposite side of the planet from it as we orbit. I have a mission to complete and—”

  “You’re not going to help Kim rescue Casmir?” Yas asked.

  “She has her own plan for that. I have another. If either works, he will survive the week. I don’t know about the rest of his future.”

  “You don’t think you should work together?”

  “I didn’t come for a consultation, Doctor.”

  “Sorry. You still haven’t flogged me for being cheeky, so I feel the urge to express opinions.”

  “I suggest you suppress your urges. If I’m successful in my mission, I’ll allow you and Chief Khonsari to take a short and discreet leave of absence for her spine surgery, if she still wishes it. Do not tell the others. System Lion is too dangerous a place for the Fedallah to dally or for shore leave for the men. I’m making arrangements in the event of my success or failure for them to get the time off they deserve.”

  Rache nodded curtly and walked out before Yas could thank him—or ask exactly what in the event of my success or failure meant.

  “Strange man,” Yas murmured. “And definitely not sexy.”

  Oh, well. He was approving leave. Yas trotted out to talk to Jess in engineering. He would do his best to make sure she wished to have that surgery.

  4

  “Wake up, Professor,” a guard rumbled and flashed the lights a few times before leaving them on.

  Casmir hadn’t been sleeping, merely working on refining his robotic bees, in the event that he ever got to share all of his suggestions with Oku. He had also written long letters to his friends and relatives—several long letters to his parents.

  By the passage of time, he guessed they’d reached Odin’s orbit, and he hoped he would get a chance to connect to the public wireless network and send his messages. He also hoped he could use that access to come up with a crafty way to free himself from his fate. The warship had to have legions of robots and computers he could possibly take over…

  Several more guards stepped into view, one lifting a pair of flex-cuffs. Did that mean the public execution plan was in effect, and Casmir would be transferred down to the planet?

  The guards could simply be taking him to sickbay where his lethal injection was waiting. But a doctor could have come and done that to him in the brig, perhaps the very one who’d injected him with his truth drug—three days in a row.

  After cheerfully babbling everything he knew, while that damn Lieutenant Meister recorded it all into his tablet, Casmir doubted Jager had any use left for him, beyond as bait in his trap. He worried that Kim and his other friends would be more likely to walk into that than Rache and hoped they were safely in another system and not planning his rescue. Unfortunately, his interrogation had included questions about Kim’s relationship to Rache, and his attempts to steer his interrogator away from the topic hadn’t fully worked. Casmir feared that Jager and Military Intelligence now knew everything.

  “Are we going somewhere?” Casmir asked.

  “For a ride.”

  That sounded ominous. None of the guards clarified.

  Before the interrogation, most of the soldiers on the warship had treated him with professional indifference, but since he’d revealed his relationship with Rache, they’d all been icy or outright cruel. One kept calling him traitor along with various derogatory words that were too foul to appear in comic books.

  “Good. My legs have longed for some exercise. I even would have welcomed some time on one of those odious treadmills with the straps that keep you from escaping.” Casmir smiled, trying to be friendly out of habit, but there was little point now.

  The closest guard dropped the cell’s forcefield, then grabbed him, spun him, and cuffed him. Four stunners were pointed at him. Nobody responded to his humor.

  Casmir searched for the ship’s wireless network, hoping for a chance to access it now that he was out of his cell. Before he found anything, the same doctor who’d drugged him stepped into view.

  Casmir jumped. “I thought we were done with our sessions.”

  “No interrogation today. I’ve been instructed to perform a small surgery.” The doctor held up a laser scalpel.

  Panic surged into Casmir. He knew with certainty exactly what the doctor planned to remove. Not any of his organs—he would rather have given up one of those. Instinctively, he tried to jerk his hand up to his temple to protect his chip, but the cuffs held his wrists behind his back.

  “Hold him still,” the doctor told the men as he approached.

  Unfriendly hands gripped Casmir’s arms with the power of crushers. Oh, how he wished Zee were there now to protect him, to fling these guards away.

  He searched impatiently for the network again, knowing he only had seconds, but there wasn’t a signal. He feared the entire brig was insulated, not the individual cells.

  He didn’t bother trying to buck or push his guards away, but he was soon panting nonetheless, pure panic driving his body into a state of terror. He couldn’t lose his chip. It had all of his work for the last twenty years on it, everything from homework assignments for students, to schematics for prototype projects he hadn’t yet built, to the plans for the crushers. All of his work on Oku’s robot bees was on there! And all of the videos she’d sent him.

  Tears threatened at the thought that he would never be able to access those videos again.

  “Quit hyperventilating, traitor.” The guard holding him squeezed him tighter, painfully so.

  Casmir’s fingertips were numb. Would he have a seizure? For once, his guards had let him keep his medication, so he’d been on his regular dosage while confined, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t still have one…

  Unfortunately, he doubted that would keep the doctor from removing his chip.

  “How about you say you took it but don’t really do it?” Casmir asked as the doctor’s face leered close, the laser scalpel even closer. “I won’t tell anyone. And I’ll send you a delightful holiday present. How do you feel about cinnamon babka? I know my mother would make you some if you didn’t deface the side of my head.”

  “Shut up,” the guard growled again.

  Casmir tried to twist his head away, desperate to somehow keep his chip. Of all the torments they could think up for him, this was one of the worst.

  A strong hand gripped the back of his head and forced him to look forward. The laser’s cold bite cut into his temple. The doctor hadn’t applied a local anesthetic, but it didn’t hurt that much, not as much as it should have considering all that data that was being ripped from Casmir’s head.

  Despite the fledgling panic attack, he didn’t have a seizure. He didn’t know whether to feel relief or not. As much as he hated appearing weak in front of others, a peevish part of him would have liked to inconvenience his tormentors. Not that a seizure would have fazed a doctor. He probably would have played network games to kill time while Casmir writhed on the floor.

  When the doctor finished removing the chip, he carefully placed it in a baggie. Casmir’s first thought was relief—at least he didn’t drop it and grind it under his heel—but glumness replaced the feeling as he realized they were only saving the chip so Military Intelligence could download all the data on it.

  Well, they could try. He had dozens of encryption and protection protocols on there. For most of his life, that had only been a habit, to keep out the nosy hackers in the world, but then he’d started working on the crusher project. He’d made sure nobody could get ahold of those plans.

  Warm blood dribbled from the side of his temple as the guards marched him through the ship—every officer they passed along the way gave him icy glowers—and to a door outside of a shuttle bay.

  Casmir wondered if everything Meister had learned from the interrogations would end up on the Kingdom news. What would his parents think about the choices he’d made? The relationship with Rache that he had developed, however inadvertently, and later leaned on?

  He was positive the soldiers hated him most for that. Messing up the gate mission wasn’t quite the crime in their eyes that associating with Rache was. What would Captain Ishii think? He’d seemed to understand Casmir’s choices regarding the gate and Tiamat Station, but could a link to Rache ever be forgiven?

  The guards didn’t lead him straight into the shuttle bay but instead waited outside.

  Casmir stood on tiptoe to peer through a Glasnax porthole in time to see the bay doors open and a shuttle taking off. In the distance, the curve of Odin’s green and blue surface was visible. His stomach hadn’t bothered him much during the trip from the gate, with the spin gravity of the ship remaining a constant, but the sight of the planet far below them prompted a twinge of vertigo and nausea. Bleakly, he wondered if his shuttle pilot had been warned about his tendency toward space sickness.

  Another shuttle took off for the exit.

  “I suppose there’s no point in wishing there won’t be one left for us?” Casmir mused.

  “Do you want to stay here?” one guard asked.

  “Not particularly. The hospitality has been somewhat lacking.”

  “Traitors don’t get hospitality.”

  Casmir sighed.

  The shuttle bay doors closed, unfortunately leaving one more vessel inside.

  “Where’d those other ones go?” It was a habit to try to gather information, though Casmir had no way to send it along to anyone now. “Down to the planet?”

  “To set a trap.” That was Meister’s voice. He came around a corner with two soldiers in combat armor.

  “For whom?” Casmir asked.

  “Anyone stupid enough to try to rescue you.”

  Fresh concern hollowed a pit in his stomach as he wondered if Military Intelligence knew more about where his friends were than Casmir did. If they were out there and did try to rescue him, would they be smart enough to outsmart Meister and Jager and whoever else was setting this up? He hoped so, but it pained him that he couldn’t warn them.

  A control panel binged, showing that oxygen and pressure had been returned to the bay. One of the armored men grabbed the back of Casmir’s neck and steered him inside and toward the last shuttle.

  Meister followed as far as the open hatch, but he didn’t step in.

  “Any parting messages for anyone on the Osprey?” he surprised Casmir by asking.

  Casmir almost said to tell Ishii and Grunburg that it had been good to get to know them better, but he closed his mouth before he could utter the words. Anyone he admitted that he’d liked working with might find themselves in more hot water for the association.

  “Would you actually relay the messages if I had them?” he asked.

  Meister shrugged. “Sure. You’re supposed to deliver last wishes from men about to die.”

  He said it casually, without a villainous sneer or addendum of traitor. Somehow, that casualness made it worse, and made Casmir wonder if he was truly being taken down to the planet or simply out to walk the plank and freeze in the icy vacuum of space.

  “You’ve probably got a few days left though,” Meister added. “The king wants to make sure you live long enough to work as bait for his trap. So you’ve got time if you want to pray for your sins or whatever your religion suggests.”

  “Thoughtful,” Casmir murmured.

  “We do appreciate that you took out Dubashi,” Meister offered.

  “I hope his virus died along with him and that Odin isn’t in danger.”

  Meister’s eyes narrowed. “Do you have reason to think that it didn’t?”

  If he did, Casmir wondered if he could leverage that into a reason for them to keep him alive. He could promise to look for it if the king just let him have a shuttle to go off on his own…

  But he wasn’t an expert on such things, and he doubted Jager would make that deal with him again.

  “Not really.” Casmir shrugged as casually as Meister had earlier. “But there was one canister that was never accounted for.”

  The other had blown up along with Reuben on Stardust Palace Station. Remorse stirred anew in him for the crusher’s death, along with concern for what would happen with all the other crushers now that he wasn’t around to lead them and ensure they protected innocent people instead of slaying them.

  Meister’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully, but all he said was, “Take him away.”

  The soldiers secured him in a pod in the shuttle. Casmir had just enough freedom to drop his head into his lap and pray that his friends were safe and that they wouldn’t fall for whatever trap Jager had set.

  Kim strode down the corridors of the now familiar Fedallah toward the shuttle bay. The craft Rache had promised to lend them was already packed, and Asger had messaged to let her know that their entire team was inside and ready. He’d also said it was cozy, which she took to mean jammed wall to wall with broad-shouldered knights, crushers, and genetically engineered warriors.

  She had swung by sickbay to finagle medical supplies from Yas in case this went badly. Or in case they succeeded in retrieving Casmir, only to find that he’d been tortured or horribly beaten by his guards. She would like to think there was no possibility that Kingdom soldiers would treat a prisoner so poorly, but they’d had him long enough to question him under the influence of a truth drug he wasn’t allergic to, which probably meant they’d learned all about his encounters with Rache.

  If the enemy of one’s enemy was one’s friend, was the corollary that the friend of one’s enemy was one’s enemy? She believed the Kingdom would see it that way.

  Rache waited in the corridor outside the shuttle bay in his combat armor and with several weapons, including a rocket launcher with the firepower to put a hole in the side of a ship—or possibly the side of a mountain.