Arkadian Skies: Fallen Empire, Book 6 Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Foreword

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Afterword

  Arkadian Skies

  (Fallen Empire, Book 6)

  by Lindsay Buroker

  Copyright © 2016 Lindsay Buroker

  Illustration © 2016 Tom Edwards

  TomEdwardsDesign.com

  Foreword

  Hello, and welcome back! I’m excited to bring you the next novel in the Fallen Empire series, in which we learn such important things as whether Beck can win enemies over with food, how many days science fiction heroes can go without sleep, and if there are any circumstances when Leonidas finds “Leo” to be an acceptable nickname.

  Thank you so much for following along, and please allow me to thank my team for their help too: Shelley Holloway for editing, Tom Edwards for cover art, and Cindy Wilkinson, Sarah Engelke, Rue Silver, and Walt Scrivens for beta reading. Cindy gets the kudos this time for coming up with the title. (I’m not entirely sure what kudos are, but with luck, they involve chocolate.)

  Chapter 1

  Alisa stopped drumming her fingers on the console, certain it was a sign of impatience, nervousness, and apprehension. Captains should be patient, calm, and confident that their ships wouldn’t be blown out of space as they approached populated planets surrounded by Alliance spacecraft. Or, if not confident, at least optimistic. This would work. The Star Nomad would slip through without a challenge, land near a hospital, and Alejandro would find a way to sneak in with his comatose Starseer patient, the one who knew where Alisa’s daughter had been taken.

  Her hand strayed to the pocket where she kept Jelena’s bracelet, the one she had found on Cleon Moon. She also had her daughter’s jacket, carefully folded on a shelf over her bunk. Touching it, even looking at it, brought tears to her eyes, but she would not consider locking it away in a drawer. One only did that with clothes that wouldn’t be worn again for a long time. But she would find Jelena soon and return the jacket.

  “Beck?” Alisa asked, tapping the comm button. “How’s your progress out there?”

  “Did you know there’s a comet headed this way?” Beck responded from his perch on the hull of the Nomad.

  His white combat armor was visible on one of the ship’s exterior cameras as he worked. Despite the hours—days—of work Mica had put into hammering his suit back into shape, Alisa could pick out the dents the mafia thugs had left when they had pried him out of it. She was relieved the suit was spaceworthy, though Mica had suggested he not stay out for long.

  “Yes,” Alisa said, “I’m tracking it on our sensors. The comet will pass by without bothering us. I thought being in its shadow might keep any long range sensors pointed in this direction from noticing us.”

  Arkadius wasn’t yet visible on the Nomad’s cameras, but it registered at the edge of sensor range. Even if it hadn’t, the increased ship traffic in the area would have told Alisa that they were nearing a population center.

  “It’s not the comet’s shadow I’m concerned about,” Beck said. “It’s looking like it’ll come close enough to give me a shave on its way by.”

  “If you weren’t so hairy, it wouldn’t be so tempted,” Mica interrupted from engineering, where she was also monitoring Beck. “Now, are you going to open that panel today, or are you looking to be bronzed and placed out there as a permanent fixture?”

  “You have something more exciting to do?” Beck stopped looking at the comet, his helmet swiveling back toward the ship and the panel underneath him. “Besides denigrate my perfectly normal and desirable amount of body hair?”

  “I’ve got my résumé out to work on again. Maybe this time, we’ll be on Arkadius long enough for me to send it to prospective employers. Careful, don’t let that panel float out into space, or I’ll tie you down in here until you make me a new one.”

  “You’re sexy when you go authoritarian on me, Mica.”

  “Should I put that on my résumé?”

  “I would.”

  Alisa caught herself drumming her fingers on the console again, scowled at the wayward digits, and pulled them into her lap.

  “How are the modifications going?” came Leonidas’s voice from behind her.

  He stepped through the hatchway and into NavCom with a towel draped over his shoulder and a sheen of sweat on his thickly muscled forearms.

  “Slowly.” Alisa waved him to the co-pilot’s seat without ogling him overmuch. She had too many concerns on her mind to dwell on the lack of sex she was getting these days.

  Leonidas rested his hand on the back of the seat, but paused there. “Should I go out and help?”

  Beck had wanted to give the task to Leonidas to start with, but he had been down in the gym, hurling weights the size of space shuttles around. Alisa hadn’t wanted to interrupt his training. He seemed certain they would find the Starseers who had stolen the Staff of Lore from the cargo hold and that there would be challenging battles ahead. Very challenging.

  “I’m confident in Beck’s ability to remove a chip,” Alisa said.

  “Is it this round doohickey?” came Beck’s voice over the comm. “Or the square one?”

  Leonidas arched a single eyebrow.

  “Mostly confident,” Alisa amended.

  “Square,” Mica said. “Quit worrying about that comet, and point your helmet camera at the circuitry so I can see it before you wrench anything out.”

  “Destroying the Nomad’s ident chip may only make patrols more suspicious,” Leonidas said. “Only smugglers and pirates fly without identification.”

  “Better to be suspected of smuggling than of having a wanted cyborg on my ship.” Alisa prodded one of his forearms, knowing that cybernetic implants lay buried beneath the flesh. “Besides, they won’t have proof that we’re doing anything illegal. With all the damage on the hull, our story should be believable, that the ident chip was simply damaged in an attack.”

  Leonidas did not move his arm away from her prodding finger, but he also did not acknowledge it. Alisa missed the brief time when they had been dating, in a manner of speaking.

  “The Alliance likely has a bulletin out for a Rambler 880,” he said, gazing toward the view screen at Beck, or perhaps past him and to the stars.

  “You’re being pessimistic. Have you been spending time with my engineer?”

  “I heard that,” Mica said over the comm. “Beck, it’s that chip to your right. Use the mag-driver right on top of it to break the bond, and then pry it out. It’ll be difficult. Those chips aren’t designed to be removed. You might have to get fierce with it.”

  “I can do that. I’m a fierce armored warrior, remember?”

  “He was fiercely beating eggs for an omelet this morning,” Alisa murmured.

  “The Alliance will have discovered by now that we tricked them out of the Staff of Lore,” Leonidas said, ignoring the other conversation and gazing steadily at her. “And they’ll want it back.”

  “Since we don’t have it, that shouldn’t be a problem.”

  “You think the Alliance won’t capture and interrogate us to learn of its whereabouts?” His eyes narrowed into a squint, and she knew he
was thinking about how the system was run better when the empire ruled, and that her old Alliance army buddies would be as likely to use forceful methods for acquiring information as the imperial army had been.

  Alisa wished she could deny that, but the Alliance had proven… determined of late, at least when dealing with her. “I’m planning to avoid them altogether so we don’t have to find out.”

  “Got it,” Beck said. “Want me to bring it in or just flick it out toward the comet?”

  “Bring it,” Mica said. “I’ll deactivate it and keep it in here. The captain may want to reactivate it someday. If she ever gets rid of her questionable passengers.”

  Leonidas’s eyebrow went up again.

  “Must be hard hearing yourself classified as questionable after all those years of loyal service to the empire,” Alisa said.

  “You don’t think she’s talking about the Starseers?”

  “Mica,” Alisa said, ignoring the question, “is there any chance that you could reprogram the chip to display a different ident?”

  “A ship’s ident is hardwired into the chip,” Mica said. “It’s not meant to be removed or reprogrammed.”

  “I think that’s true of a lot of things that get removed and reprogrammed.”

  “I’m not a hacker or a forgery expert.”

  “Maybe you should expand your skill set, so you have more things to put on your résumé.”

  Alisa watched as Beck replaced the panel. Having him working outside of the ship made her nervous. If any of the other spacecraft on her sensors headed their way, the Nomad would have to depart quickly. She should have thought of this chip scheme days ago, when they had been in the quiet space between planets.

  “I’ll look for a correspondence course,” Mica muttered.

  “What school offers courses on forgery and hacking?” Beck asked. He had affixed the panel and was making his way along the hull toward the airlock.

  “One with a very liberal curriculum, I imagine,” Alisa said.

  An alarm beeped from the sensor station.

  Grimacing, she turned to check it. “Hope the computer is just informing us about the comet,” she said, though she knew it wasn’t. She had already silenced the alert on that. “There’s a ship heading in our direction. It’s not on a direct course, but it will pass close to us. Close enough to give our butts a good sniff.”

  Leonidas’s eyebrows went up again, both of them this time.

  “Are you working those out?” Alisa asked, waving toward his forehead.

  “What?”

  “Your eyebrows. They’re moving up and down a lot. Eyebrow lifts. Twenty reps, go.”

  He gave her one of his scrutinizing looks, the kind that meant he was either trying to figure out her joke… or he understood it and didn’t find it appropriate. Still, he humored her by responding, however stuffily.

  “I’m a cyborg, not an android,” Leonidas said. “We’re allowed to have facial expressions.”

  “Oh? I would have thought eyebrows like that would have gotten you in trouble in the imperial army. The commanders there didn’t seem the types to appreciate riotous facial expressions from their subordinates.” Alisa grimaced as the identity of the ship on the sensor display came up, an Alliance cruiser.

  “Riotous. Really.” He reached up and touched an eyebrow.

  “Admit it. When you were a commander, you would have pummeled a private whose eyebrows danced around while you spoke.”

  “That’s an Alliance ship,” Leonidas observed.

  “Yeah, I noticed. But I don’t think they’ve spotted us yet.”

  There was a reason Alisa had snugged up to a comet for this. The gas and dust particles trailing them tended to obscure ships that stuck close to them. At least from a distance.

  “Beck?” she said. “Hurry inside, will you? We’re going to get closer to that comet. I don’t want you to get your perfectly normal and desirable body hair shaved off.”

  “That’s thoughtful of you, Captain. Almost in.”

  Alisa guided them deeper into the tail of the comet. Its course would take them past Arkadius if she had to stay with it, but she hoped the other ship would zip by without batting an eye at them. Then she could return to her original course, to the planet itself—and a good hospital.

  Alejandro wanted her to take them to a system-renowned one located in Laikagrad, the educational capital of the southern continent. He had spent the trip observing Durant and had tried a couple of injections of nanobots, programming them with instructions to repair damaged brain material, but nothing had worked to bring the Starseer out of the coma. Alejandro said he needed to do a thorough brain scan before he dared try anything else, and his chosen hospital in Laikagrad reputedly had some of the best equipment anywhere.

  “They haven’t changed their course yet,” Alisa murmured, alternating between watching the sensors and the view screen display where the comet’s gas particles blurred the distant stars.

  The airlock alert flashed, signaling that Beck was back inside.

  Leonidas sat in the co-pilot’s seat and brought up a live holomap of Arkadius. Copious satellites in the area allowed real-time sys-net access, a welcome change after the delays and lack of access farther out in the system.

  “If this were still an imperial planet, I could get a report on where all the military patrols are,” Leonidas said wistfully.

  “If this were an imperial planet, and they still had control of the entire system, I doubt you’d be flying with me and entertaining me with your eyebrows.”

  “I would miss that,” he said quietly, turning that wistful gaze on her and adding a sad smile.

  Alisa let herself gaze back for a moment and bask in the admission before turning her attention to the sensor display again. “I think bathing in this comet’s gas is working,” she said. “Too bad we can’t convince it to head to the planet with us.”

  “If it abruptly shifted onto a collision course with Arkadius, it would attract more notice than you would want.”

  “Notice and a barrage of rocket fire.”

  “Yes.” Leonidas pointed toward the map of the planet. “I suggest approaching from the south pole. There’s less air and space traffic in that area. Once near the ground, you can set a course over the ocean.”

  Alisa waited until the Alliance cruiser was nearly out of range before abandoning the comet and shifting toward Arkadius. She might have stayed with it even longer, but they would have had to backtrack later if she did, and that would mean more time during which the Nomad would be visible to other ships out there.

  Alisa kept her gaze locked onto the space traffic as they flew closer to the planet. She spotted another freighter and thought about flying up to its side, so an outsider might think she was a part of a merchant convoy, but then the captain would want to know what she was doing. As a fellow freighter operator, he or she might be sympathetic and let her ride along without objecting, but the captain might report her too. Besides, that freighter looked to be heading for one of the populous continents in the northern hemisphere.

  “I’m taking us toward the south pole,” Alisa said, plotting a direct course.

  Leonidas stood up.

  “You and your eyebrows aren’t leaving me, are you?” she asked.

  “I’m going to change into my combat armor.”

  “You’re that sure we’ll be captured and boarded?”

  “It also crossed my mind that we might be fired upon and crash.”

  “In which case, your combat armor would save you?”

  “It can take a lot of damage. We need to order you a set when we’re finally staying in one place long enough for a delivery.” He laid a hand on her shoulder before heading for the hatchway.

  “Your concern for my welfare is endearing,” Alisa said over her shoulder. “Your belief that I’ll crash the ship is less so.”

  Alisa watched the space traffic warily as the greens, blues, and browns of Arkadius’s oceans and continents came into v
iew on the screen, with the polar-capped south pole at the bottom. As far as she knew, it did not possess any strange misty phenomena such as her ship had encountered when visiting the Starseer temple near the north pole. Instead, the sky was clear, the ice gleaming. Comm chatter lit up the channels, but thus far, nobody had hailed her ship.

  “Maybe it’s so busy out there that nobody will notice us,” she said, half-expecting Mica to still be monitoring the internal comm and to make a comment about overzealous optimism.

  Her ongoing sensor scans showed two Alliance warships orbiting near the equator, one of which had a familiar ident. The Storm Fury. Tomich’s ship, already back from Alcyone Station.

  A twinge of unease poked at Alisa’s gut. Had the research on the dimensionally shifting space station been completed? Or had the Storm Fury been called back to hunt for the stolen staff? Either way, word of everything that had transpired there must have made it back to headquarters by now. The existence of an Alliance bulletin requesting the capture of the Star Nomad seemed likelier and likelier.

  She wondered if Admiral Tiang had returned with the Storm Fury. The last Leonidas had informed her, he wasn’t planning on kidnapping the man or going through with the surgery that might return the functions the fleet had taken from him, but she was still arguing with him about that. She did not agree that he should give up on his dreams of having a family. And sex. If she could find a way to bring that admiral to him, she would.

  The comm light flashed.

  Alisa sighed. She thought about ignoring it, but if she didn’t say anything, whoever was trying to contact her would know she was up to something. There was still a chance that her story might work, assuming that wasn’t Tomich comming her.

  “Greetings,” Alisa said. “This is Captain Gillian Stokes of the peaceful and unarmed freighter Sky Traveler.” This time, she had thought up her fake name before she was called upon to use it. She remembered encountering a Sky Traveler when she had been a girl, so there ought to be a record of it in a database somewhere. It had been one of the last Rambler 880s she had seen, the rest having been traded in for newer models as they became too difficult to find parts for and to keep flying. “Can I help you?”