Star Kingdom Launches! Read Preview Chapters from Book 1, Shockwave

Yes, it’s true. I’ve set the dragons aside (temporarily, mind you) and am back writing science fiction.

This week, my new Star Kingdom series kicks off with Book 1, Shockwave. If you’re excited about a geeky roboticist, a socially awkward microbiologist, a genetically engineered cat woman, a jaded 70-year-old bounty hunter, and a sentient spaceship starring in a book, you can head over to Amazon right now and check it out.

Shockwave (Star Kingdom, Book 1)

Amazon UK | Amazon CA | Amazon AUS | Amazon DE

If you’re on the fence, here’s the prologue and first chapter for you to try. Thanks for taking a look!

Prologue

“When can I eat normal food again?”

“Normal?” Dr. Yas Peshlakai looked toward the vat lamb and rice dish on the bedside table. It was bland, as he’d ordered, but ought to pass for normal on Tiamat Station.

“Yes.” President Sophia Bakas smiled and folded her hands atop the blanket, the silver light of a faux moon streaming in the window and highlighting a surprisingly girlish expression on her timeworn face. “Deep-fried, ice-creamed, and alcohol-filled.”

“Ah. Normal food. Well, I’m not your regular doctor, Madam President, but I recommend you give your liver time to recover from the poison before consuming more. You do have two years left to serve, and the station inhabitants are quite fond of you.”

“Yes, and it is good to be liked. By most people.” Her long fingers curled into the blanket, tendons standing out under her papery skin.

“Star Kingdom zealots aren’t people.”

“My charming young intelligence officers tell me the poisoners were loyal station citizens, irritated that the vote went against them. It seems they hoped to rush along my passing so the more Kingdom-friendly Vice President Martinez would be in charge.” Bakas shuddered, her narrow shoulders hunching. “I don’t understand why anyone would want to live under that backward rule again. Under their draconian laws, half the people here wouldn’t be allowed to breathe the air there. They don’t allow genetic engineering on human beings, not even to cure diseases. They don’t even allow modifications to their plants or food. And their backward stances on marriage and relationships.” Bakas shuddered again, perhaps thinking of her two wives.

“I gather it’s the other half of the people who are a problem.”

“I’m glad you’re not one of those zealots. And that you were able to identify the poison.” President Bakas grasped his hand. “Thank you, Doctor.”

“It was a simple matter, as I knew it would be as soon as I heard the symptoms. During my years at the university, I took several toxicology classes, and for one, I wrote a paper on the ongoing alterations to the archexia family of plants to create potent hallucinogens as well as more deadly substances. It was published in Galactic Plantae, a prestigious peer-reviewed journal in the field. I understand professors at several universities throughout the system are now teaching from that article. It’s shameful that so few doctors are familiar with the less well-known uses for the plants. Your personal physician should have…” Yas made himself close his mouth and shrug. It wasn’t his place to denigrate others. Not everybody had been granted the educational opportunities he had, though it was difficult to fathom that anyone but the best would have been selected to work for the president.

“You’re a touch arrogant for someone so young, aren’t you?” Bakas smiled.

“I’m thirty-five, ma’am.”

He had been a surgeon as well as a toxicology consultant for nearly ten years. The latter was an interest he kept up with, not his main profession, but it pleased him that the station hospitals often sought his advice on tough cases.

“That makes you a mere child, good doctor.”

Since she was approaching a hundred and fifty, he couldn’t argue with her perspective on age. But the rest?

“I merely state the facts, Madam President. I do not, as arrogance would imply, exaggerate my own worth or importance.”

She arched her eyebrows.

“A former girlfriend called me lovably pompous,” he conceded.

“Former? Perhaps your pomposity wasn’t so lovable after all.” Her smile turned into a yawn.

“You should rest, Madam President.”

Yas drew her curtains, eyeing the bright full moon hanging in the starry sky, all of it a technological illusion to hide that the only thing above them was the other side of their habitat. If one hadn’t been to a real planet, one might believe the station was a natural place, with parks and cities and lakes, birds and insects and animals. One might forget that it was a giant cylinder spinning inside a hollowed-out asteroid in System Hydra’s Beta Belt, miles of stone protecting its inhabitants from the sun’s radiation.

“I’ll rest a bit,” Bakas said with another yawn.

Yas made sure she had water, then dimmed the lights as he stepped out of her bedroom. Two presidential bodyguards were posted to either side of the door, and he nodded to them as he passed.

“She’s fine,” he said.

They nodded back.

They had no reason to question him. Yas’s prominent family was known and trusted on the station, and his father had donated to the president’s election campaign. Yas had grown up here, leaving only for a few volunteer medical missions to other parts of the system where people dealt with the vagaries of living on planets and moons.

He passed unbothered through corridors and down lift tubes, his white jacket and white bag with its symbolic red blood droplet on the side identifying him as a doctor. He’d entered the presidential residence through the servants’ entrance and started to depart that way but paused to watch the huge screens in their break room showing the last few points of a zero-g squash game.

Superhumanly agile bodies contorted into impossible positions as the two contestants flung themselves around the enclosed court, ricocheting off the walls almost as fast as the ball. Yas knew the game well, and had played it all the way through school, but he had given up an opportunity to compete on the professional circuit to become a doctor. To become everything his parents had always expected him to be—which didn’t involve bouncing off the walls of a sports court. He didn’t regret channeling his energy into his career, but there were times when he missed the game, the sheer joy of unbridled athletic exertion.

The famous Donahue Dorg scored the final point, and the vid feed cut to a crowd cheering while imbibing beer and the potent sunflower-seed alcohol the station was known for.

Yas waved to the staff still watching—none of them noticed him taking his leave—and headed out the back door. As he stepped into the alley behind the residence, the street lights reflecting softly off the recycled carbon-fiber pavement, four uniformed figures strode out of the shadows to one side. Station Civil Security.

“There he is, right there.”

“Get him!”

Yas looked down the alley in the other direction, certain they meant someone else. But the big men stared right at him as they broke into a run.

“I’m Dr. Yas Peshlakai.” He raised his hands.

A sergeant grabbed his wrist, and meaty fingers bit into his shoulder. “We know who you are. What you just did.”

“You’re going to cuff him, Sergeant? He killed the president. He deserves…” A corporal pointed a DEW-Tek 900 pistol at Yas’s temple.

Yas almost dropped his medical kit.

“Killed?” He gaped at the glaring men now surrounding him. “I was just up in her room. She’s fine. She’s recovering well. She wants ice cream.”

“When Garon walked in, she was dead. You were the last one in there with her, the only one with a bag full of medical poison.” The sergeant with the death grip on his shoulder reached for the flex-cuffs on his utility belt.

“No trial for him, Sarge,” the corporal with the pistol said, his eyes full of rage. “Let’s say he ran, and we had to take care of him, of the Kingdom sympathizer. He’s a Kingdom assassin. He deserves death, not to weasel out of everything with some high-priced lawyer.”

“No lawyer for the assassin,” another corporal growled and slapped Yas’s medical kit away.

It clattered to the pavement, tipped open on its side, and spilled its contents everywhere. A jet injector bounced up and hissed as it struck the sergeant’s leg.

He yelped, his grip on Yas’s shoulder loosening.

Yas doubted anything had pierced the man’s skin, but he took advantage and broke free from his captor. He glimpsed the corporal’s grip tightening on the pistol and ducked. A red bolt of energy seared a chunk of hair from Yas’s scalp and slammed into the wall behind him.

He stumbled, bumped the other corporal, and shouted, “Watch out for the bag. The poison is gaseous.”

As the four men’s gazes lurched to the innocuous medical kit, Yas sprinted away from them. It was probably the worst thing he could have said, an implication that he was guilty, but it took them a few seconds to recover and give chase.

He lunged around a corner and down a main street away from the residence, sprinting past delivery robots and electric auto-trucks zipping along the center rail. There was nothing to hide behind alongside the thoroughfare, no crates or barrels, no parked vehicles.

Yas pumped his legs. Where could he go? Not home. They would be waiting. To the Civil Security station to talk to someone sane? Someone who grasped that suspects weren’t executed on Tiamat, especially not before they’d had a trial?

The security men burst onto the street behind him. Knowing he was in their sights, Yas sprinted for another alley. Something slammed into the back of his knee, and pain roared up his leg.

He grabbed a wall, just keeping from pitching to the ground. More weapons fired with soft buzzes as the energy bolts lanced down the street. Yas lunged into the alley, his leg almost buckling every time he tried to put weight on it. He kept running, but his gait was lopsided, agonized. They would catch him soon.

Or they would shoot him soon.

A drone whizzed past, its camera recording him. There was nowhere to go on the station, nowhere to hide. He was miles from the docks and a ship, even if he could somehow slip past port security and stow away on an outgoing vessel.

Gritting his teeth, Yas stumbled out of the alley next to a café, outdoor tables dotting the sidewalk.  A scattering of people sat in the chairs, their faces turning curiously toward him. He meant to run past them and into the café to hide, but he twisted his injured knee and tumbled to the pavement. A fresh wave of pain shot up his leg, and tears sprang to his eyes.

“There he is!” one of his pursuers cried from the alley.

Yas rolled to the side an instant before a red energy bolt skimmed past, slamming into the side of a store across the street.

Panting, he rolled again, angling toward the tables and hoping to get out of the line of sight. He bumped into a chair and tried to rise, to scramble farther away, but his leg wouldn’t support him. It only sent more agony blasting through his body.

Yas raised his hands and flopped onto his back. If he appeared helpless and surrendered, maybe they wouldn’t kill him. Maybe they would follow proper procedure and arrest him for a trial. This was insane.

As soon as the shooting had started, most of the people sitting outside the café had lunged for the door or run off down the street. But a dark-skinned woman with short black hair peered calmly down from the table right above him, one of her eyes glinting unnaturally in the lights shining through the window. A coffee cup hung poised in her gloved hand.

“Is this because we didn’t tip?” She tilted her head toward Yas and quirked an eyebrow toward the man sitting opposite her at the table.

Yas assumed it was a man. He wore a cloak with a hood pulled up and some kind of mask on his face. A DEK-Tek pistol and a double-barreled SK-Ram hung in holsters from his belt.

Yas’s fingers twitched. He could have reached for the Ram. But it was a weapon of deadly force, and he couldn’t shoot to kill, not even to save himself.

But as footsteps thundered in the alley, a squeak of “Help?” escaped his lips before Yas could debate the wisdom of the request.

“Dr. Yas Peshlakai,” the man said dispassionately, as if he were reading the name off a report. He had probably already run a quick facial identification search, the results scrolling down his contact display or whatever networked implants existed behind that hood. “A renowned surgeon and toxicology expert. Huh.”

“And not a criminal.” Yas feared the news bots were already circulating the false story.

The speaker gazed down at him, his features, his thoughts, hidden behind that mask.

The security men jogged into view, slowing as they saw Yas so close to two other people. Yas prayed they were done flinging weapons fire wantonly around, but as they stalked closer, fury in their eyes, he knew they were only getting close enough to ensure they couldn’t miss. There were three of them. There was no sign of the one sane man, the sergeant who’d only wanted to arrest him.

“You’ll serve me for five years if I save your life,” the masked man said calmly, as if Yas wasn’t a second from being shot, as if his blood wasn’t staining the pavement under the table.

“Yes,” Yas blurted in agreement, even though it had been a statement, rather than a question.

“Excellent.”

The masked man sprang from the table and charged the security officers with the speed of a bullet. His opponents fired at him, but he somehow anticipated the shots in time to fling himself into an agile roll across the pavement, one that brought him up between the men. They tried to fan out, to find spots where they could shoot him without endangering their comrades, but he blurred around them, movements too fast to track without augmented eyes. Yas gaped as one man flew into a wall, his head striking hard enough to knock him senseless.

Someone fired wildly, and a red bolt burned through the base of a nearby table, hurling the top into the air. It landed with a resounding clatter on the pavement.

A hand grabbed Yas’s shoulder. The woman.

She pulled him to his feet with a grip hard enough to hurt. His leg threatened to give way again, but she supported him, tugging him away from the melee, from the pounding of fists and cries of pain. Yas pressed his back to the wall, gasping for air and for the strength to keep his legs under him.

“Who—” Yas started to ask, but three precise shots boomed, echoing from the walls of the now-empty street. The SK-Ram, firing bullets instead of directed energy bolts.

They had an alarming finality, and all sounds of the battle ended. The masked man walked around the corner, his cloak flapping around his ankles as he holstered the Ram.

“Come, Doctor.” He extended a hand toward the street. “I have a ship with a sickbay in need of a surgeon.”

“What ship?” Yas asked as the woman and the man gripped him by either arm, lifting him into the air as they walked at his side, his feet dangling an inch above the ground, his injured leg leaving a trail of blood. “Who are you?”

“The Fedallah,” the man said. “Tenebris Rache.”

If Yas had been walking, his legs would have given out again.

Captain Tenebris Rache was the most notorious pirate in the Twelve Systems. And Yas had just sworn to serve him.

Chapter 1

“Fly, little birdie, fly,” Professor Casmir Dabrowski whispered.

He stepped back with his kludgy remote control, promising to build something better once his prototype proved successful. He tapped a button, and the robot bird sprang off his desk, delicate wings flapping furiously as it attempted to fly.

Casmir bit his lip. Would it work this time?

The bird dipped below the level of the desk, and he winced, certain it would crash. But its self-learning neuromorphic chip compensated quickly. The bird tilted slightly and adjusted its wingbeats, then slowly gained altitude.

Casmir’s wince turned into a grin as it sailed toward the ceiling of his lab, swooping left and right like a songbird seeking seeds. Its flight was so natural, it made his heart ache.

It—no, she, definitely she—was beautiful. He couldn’t wait to show her off. Maybe the media, not just the university presses, would write up the project. The news would travel through the gate network, and roboticists throughout the Twelve Systems would see his work and realize his home world of Odin wasn’t backward, at least not in this field. No government policies held back these scientific developments.

“That’s what you’re working on now?” a familiar voice asked from the hallway. A few passing university students peered through the door around the man. “You don’t find that underwhelming after three years at the Kingdom’s top military research and development lab?”

Hearing the disdain from one of his former instructors made Casmir want to snatch the bird out of the air and hide it in a desk drawer. He told himself there was nothing demeaning about his project, but he couldn’t keep his cheeks from warming.

“Actually, Professor Huang—” Casmir hoped his voice came out casual and self-confident, even while wondering what it would be like to actually feel self-confident, “—I find it morally refreshing after three years at the Kingdom’s top military research and development lab.” He tapped the remote to command the robot to find a perch. “I never entirely trusted King Jager’s promise that my work would only be used to defend Odin and not to mow down enemies in other systems.”

Technically untrue. It had taken a while for his trust to falter, for him to realize Jager wanted more than to avoid the assassination plot that had taken down his father. The king had ambitions.

“I’m sure he’s not going to do that with your combat robots.” Huang walked into the room, his cane clacking on the tile floor. He was known to twirl it like a pirate’s rapier, prodding students who fell asleep in class. “He’ll use them to make sure Odin, bless our beautiful world, is never conquered by foreigners.”

“So I was told when I started working there. But you hear the same news I do. You know the pushes Jager is making, the sympathizers his agents are cultivating in other systems.”

“I do my best to ignore the news, in truth. Better for the sanity.”

When the bird alighted on the desk again, Huang bent to peer at it through his glasses. He murmured something, and the light of a tiny display flashed in one of the lenses. Showing magnification? Or some more in-depth analysis?

At the same time as he’d had the childhood eye surgery that had failed to fix his strabismus, Casmir had received a neural-interactive chip and contacts with an interface. A lot of the older staff preferred the removable voice-activated lenses to newer technologies.

“This is just a hobby.” Casmir shrugged, as if the project didn’t mean as much as it did. “My team is working on self-aware medical androids to be deployed to remote habitats and scientific outposts where there aren’t human doctors. This girl—” Casmir gently touched the smooth head of his bird, “—Chaz, Simon, Asahi, and I are going to enter in a realistic-flight competition. Humans have been making drones for ages, but we’ve yet to create a robot that can truly emulate a bird’s flight.”

“Because there’s not much need, eh?” Huang straightened and adjusted his glasses.

“I suppose not the need that there is for military robots, but maybe that says something distressing about our society.”

“War and battling over differences has been the human norm since we first discovered fire back on Earth. Or so the history books tell us.” Huang smiled and wavered his hand in acknowledgment of how much information had been lost between the time the original colony ships had left Earth, arrived in the Twelve Systems, and clawed their way back to a spacefaring level. “I’ll admit it is impressive that you got Simon and Asahi to work together. I thought they were mortal enemies.”

“They are, but Simon is a stellar programmer, and Asahi is a wiring genius.”

“Some people pick teams based on compatibility of personalities rather than the brilliance of individuals.”

“That sounds like a recipe for mundanity.”

“But fewer explosions in the labs.”

Casmir was about to point out that he’d succeeded in getting his team to finish the project, but an alert pinged on the wall console. He habitually held up two fingers in the standard hold-please-while-I-answer-a-message-or-access-the-net gesture. The display identified the caller: Kim Sato.

“Hello, Kim,” Casmir answered, surprised she hadn’t opted for chip-to-chip messaging rather than the city comm system.

“Did you complete your bird project?” Kim asked, no visual coming up with the audio.

“I did. It’s working. For its preliminary flight around the lab, at least.”

“Congratulations. I will see you at home.”

“Wait,” Casmir blurted, surprised by the abrupt end of the conversation, though he should have been accustomed to her atypical approach to social conventions by now. “Is that all you wanted?”

She paused, and he imagined her puzzling out what an appropriate response would be. He waited patiently. He was used to all types of smart, eccentric people, including Kim.

“I am placing a grocery order to be delivered by dinnertime tonight,” she said. “I am considering whether to simply select our agreed-upon staples or add in a bottle of celebratory wine. There are seven varietals in stock with that adjective in the description. I assume one of them will be appropriate to honor career achievement.”

“Ah.” Casmir grinned, now reading her pause as a debate on whether celebratory wine should be a surprise or not.

“Do you have a preference of red or white?” she asked. “Or sparkling?”

“Red, please. Sparkles optional.”

“I see an appropriate bottle. Goodbye.”

Professor Huang arched his eyebrows after the comm ended.

“Girlfriend? Or android?” Huang smirked. “Or both?”

Casmir’s cheeks heated again at the suggestion that he couldn’t find a flesh-and-blood girlfriend if he wanted one, even if it had been over a year since he’d had a modicum of success in that department. His left eye blinked a few times of its own accord, and he grimaced, willing the obnoxious tic he’d had since childhood to stop. Contacts corrected his myopia, if not his monocular vision, and medication kept his seizures under control, but some symptoms of his flawed genes defied modern technology and pharmacology.

“Roommate,” Casmir said firmly. “And not an android. She’s a bacteriologist who has made many excellent contributions to the medical sciences. She’s good with microbes. Humans are more problematic for her.”

He shook his head, not sure why he was explaining someone Professor Huang was unlikely to ever meet. Mostly because he was still smirking. From his time as one of Huang’s students, Casmir remembered well that the man had a dirty streak, especially considering he was eighty or ninety. Which was old on Odin. It wasn’t like in some of the other systems where genetic tinkering had vastly extended the human lifespan—for those who could afford it.

“Roommate with benefits?” Huang winked.

“If you consider that she’s buying me wine a benefit, then yes. As for the rest, I don’t think she ever notices a man’s—or woman’s—anatomy unless she’s poking it with a sword.”

Huang’s mouth drooped open. “A sword?”

Casmir, realizing that could be misconstrued as an innuendo, rushed to clarify. “Her father and half-brothers run a kendo dojo. The swords are real swords. Well, no, they use wooden ones, mostly, I think. Uhm—”

“Professor Dabrowski?” an unfamiliar voice from the doorway said, mangling the pronunciation of the last name.

Casmir spun toward the stranger with relief, glad for an excuse to end the conversation.

“You can call me Casmir. My students all do. I…” Casmir trailed off when he got a good look at the person standing in the doorway.

The tall, broad-shouldered man wore dark silver liquid armor that covered him from boots to neck, leaving exposed only his strong, lean face and black hair long enough to flap in the wind. Or so Casmir assumed. The knights in the animated law-enforcement posters always had breeze-ruffled long hair and an equally breeze-ruffled dark purple cloak. This man had both, though the building’s ventilation system was not sufficient for ruffling.

He also wore an imposing weapon on his utility belt, what looked like an Old Earth medieval halberd on a short axe shaft. A pertundo, the legends called them, the traditional knight’s weapon and far more sophisticated than they appeared. With a telescoping shaft, it could be used like a spear, but the long, sharp tip fired energy blasts similar to bolts from DEW-Tek firearms, and the blade could carve into the best combat armor in existence. At least according to the war vids.

“Can I help you?” Casmir stepped forward, silently commanding his chip to search the network for a match on the knight’s face.

“I’m here to help you.” The knight glanced both ways down the hallway before stepping inside and palming the sliding door shut. “I’m Sir Friedrich of His Majesty’s royal knights.”

As he said his name, Casmir’s net search came back, displaying the man’s face, name, and address. Daniel Friedrich, knighted eight years earlier. Residence: Drachen Castle.

“Shit, Casmir,” Huang whispered. “What did you do?”

Casmir shook his head. All he could think was that this had something to do with his old job. He’d seen a couple of knights at the military research facility in his years there, but the elite defenders of the crown’s interests were spread across the system, and even some of the non-Kingdom systems. They didn’t stroll into the world of academia often.

The knight strode toward Casmir, his face hard and determined.

Casmir lifted his hands, fearing he was about to be arrested. But for what?

“I bring a message.” Friedrich halted in front of him and glanced at Huang.

Huang leaned his hip against the desk and folded his arms around his cane, not looking like he intended to leave.

“You must flee,” Friedrich said, focusing on Casmir again. “Get off the planet. Out of the entire system, if you can.”

“Uh. Any particular reason?” If anyone else had been making this suggestion, Casmir would have scoffed, but if this man truly was a knight who lived in the castle… “Are you entering the robotic flight simulation contest? You’re not my competition trying to get rid of me, are you?”

Friedrich gripped his arm, his lean face humorless. “This isn’t a joke, Dabrowski. Knights don’t get sent out for pranks.”

No, Casmir knew that. But cracking jokes was easier than accepting the fear starting to roil in his gut. Fear and confusion. He was shocked a knight would have been sent out for him under any circumstances. Even a squire would be an oddity.

“Who sent you?” Casmir asked.

“Your mother.”

Casmir would have fallen over backward if the knight hadn’t still gripped him. “My… you mean my adoptive mother? Irena Dabrowski?”

“No.”

Casmir opened his mouth, but he couldn’t find words. He didn’t know who his real mother was. His parents—his adoptive parents—hadn’t told him. They’d always said they didn’t know, and in the thirty-two years he’d been alive, he’d never found anything to suggest his real mother lived.

“Someone wants to ensure you do not see another sunrise,” Friedrich said. “She told me to tell you to get off-world. Don’t return to your house before you go. Just take what you have and find passage on a ship. Don’t use your banking chip. Take your ID chip offline.”

“My mother spoke to you? Today? I don’t even know—” Casmir gripped the knight’s arm back and shook it, as if he had the strength to affect the large fit man. “Who is she?”

“She—” Friedrich broke off and frowned, his eyes unfocused as he received some message. He cursed and stepped back, easily shaking off Casmir’s grip. “They’re coming. Two of them.” He opened a rectangular pouch on his utility belt and pulled out a folded disk. “I’ll do my best to delay them so you can escape.”

“Escape? This is where I work.”

“Not anymore.”

Friedrich strode not toward the door but toward one of the windows. It was an old-fashioned casement window with real glass, so he could open it and peer out onto the streets and walkways of the campus eight stories below. Without pausing, he hopped onto the windowsill.

“Sir Knight.” Casmir lifted a hand and started toward the man.

Friedrich looked over his shoulder, his eyes intent. “If you value your life and the lives of your friends, get off Odin now. Get out of the system altogether. Go.”

Friedrich sprang out the window.

For a second, Casmir could only gape in surprise as the knight disappeared from sight, the wind whipping his hair and his cloak. Casmir rushed to the window in time to see Friedrich flick his wrist and the disk unfold into a driftboard.

The knight maneuvered it under his feet as he fell, his cloak streaming above him. Scant feet from the pavement, the board’s thrusters fired, and he slowed. But not for long. Board and rider zipped across the street and mag-rails, barely missing an auto-cab delivering students. On the other side, he disappeared inside the four-story cement parking garage.

“Are you going to listen to him?” Huang asked.

“I… I don’t know.”

As Casmir gripped the windowsill, the salty breeze of the Arashi Sea tickling his nostrils, a boom erupted from the parking garage. Flames sprang through the windows on the bottom level, and smoke flooded out through the entrances.

“Did he do that?” Huang asked.

“I don’t know.”

Casmir ran to his desk and waved a hand to activate the built-in computer, wondering if his staff position would get him access to the parking-garage cameras. Already, sirens wailed outside, ambulances or police coming.

“Show me the parking garage, ground level,” Casmir ordered as the desktop display came to life.

“People are running out,” Huang said from the window, his gaze locked on the garage. “There’s smoke everywhere.”

The computer took an eternity to complete a retina scan on Casmir, then showed him the hazy bottom floor of the garage. Wreckage lay everywhere, including in the stall where he’d parked his scooter that morning. He groaned. It was gone, completely destroyed.

A breeze gusted through the garage, stirring the smoke and revealing Friedrich crouched amid the wreckage. He’d put away his driftboard and drawn the pertundo, the shaft extended to more than six feet, and gripped it in both hands. In the legends, knights were always slicing and perforating enemies into bloody pulps with them, usually while balancing on train trestles over rivers or some other ludicrous place for a fight. But Friedrich wielded it like a rifle and fired green bursts of energy into the smoke.

Screams sounded, not from the display but through the window. The knight hadn’t gone crazy and started shooting innocent students, had he?

Huang cursed at something outside. Casmir almost ran over to look, but on the display, the smoke cleared enough for him to see the knight’s opponent.

A faceless, tarry black humanoid figure strode toward Friedrich with deadly intent. It carried no weapons—it didn’t need them.

“No,” Casmir whispered in horrified recognition.

The figure sprang forty feet, more like a panther than a human. Friedrich fired bolts that would have killed a man into its torso, but they bounced off. He didn’t appear surprised. He shifted his grip on the weapon as his foe came into melee range.

“What is that?” Huang came to Casmir’s side and looked at his face. “You know.”

Casmir nodded mutely, unable to take his gaze from the scene playing out.

Friedrich lunged and thrust his pertundo into his attacker’s black torso, the point sinking in and branches of white lightning streaking out and wrapping around it. His foe did not slow at all, merely striding forward to deliver an attack of its own.

Friedrich dodged an impossibly fast punch, the knight displaying speed and agility that would have made him a match for any human, maybe even a genetically enhanced one from another system. But this was no human, and it caught Friedrich on his second attempt to dodge, hefting him into the air.

The knight shortened his pertundo and swung it like a one-handed axe, even as he dangled, his feet well above the pavement. His foe held him at arm’s reach, but one of the swipes landed, the blade cleaving deeply into its side, more lightning coursing around it.

Casmir held his breath, hoping the legendary weapon might be a match for the deadly construct. But a tarry black hand came down and yanked the blade out. The wound in its torso closed, melting together as if it were made from molten wax, and re-hardening into its original form.

Friedrich snarled and tried to land another blow, but his enemy hurled him through the smoke and into a cement wall. He struck with bone-crunching velocity.

“Casmir.” Huang gripped his shoulder. “There’s another one on the mag-rails outside, throwing people around as if they weigh nothing. What are they?”

Casmir swallowed. “Crushers.”

“The robots you helped develop?”

“Yes.”

Huang ran back to the window. “Shit, that one’s coming this way. Casmir, get out of here. If they really are after you…”

“I know,” he croaked numbly.

On the display, the crusher stalked toward Sir Friedrich, who was stirring, but not quickly. Casmir made himself tear his gaze away. For whatever reason, that man out there was buying him time.

He rushed around the lab in a panic, grabbing the bird robot and a bunch of tools and materials, anything that seemed like it might be useful. He stuffed them into his satchel with his lunchbox and a half-full bottle of fizzop, then laughed shortly. Almost hysterically. Was this what he was going to flee the planet with? He had to go home first. This was ludicrous.

“I’ll tell them you went out of town if they come up here,” Huang said. “Do they talk?”

“Yes, they can talk and interrogate you like a professional soldier. Professor, you need to get out of here too. Don’t put yourself in danger. Don’t talk to them. Nobody should talk to them. Try to evacuate the building.” Casmir paused, looking at his desk and the work benches and his satchel. He was throwing things in without rational thought. He’d just stuffed the stapler in his bag.

“Casmir…”

“Just do it, Huang.” Casmir flung his bag over his shoulder. “And be careful.”

He raced for the door, half-expecting to find a crusher looming in the hallway outside.

But the hallway was empty. The knight had come in time. Maybe. Crushers could outrun an auto-cab. If they spotted him…

“You be careful,” Huang called after him.

Casmir waved a curt acknowledgment as he ran down the hallway, already contemplating where to go to get a ride off the planet. Zamek Space Station? Would it be safe? Or would those crushers or whoever had programmed them be waiting there? Was there another place with ships that took passengers off the planet? He had no idea. He’d only been outside of the city twice—for camping trips as a boy. He got seasick and cabsick, so he’d always been certain space would be a miserable experience best left for those with iron constitutions.

He ran down the emergency stairs, accessing the net through his chip and searching for transportation options. But he halted and swore as a realization smacked him in the face like a sledgehammer.

Kim. She would be headed home from work soon if she wasn’t already. If the crushers knew to look for him at his workplace, they would know his home address.

What if they were already there?

~

Pick up Shockwave for 99 cents (currently exclusive to Amazon), and continue the adventure…