Star Nomad (Fallen Empire Book 1) Read online

  Chapter 3

  The cyborg never left the ship.

  It had crossed Alisa’s mind that if he ever did, she and Mica could maroon him here, assuming they got the Star Nomad working. After all, she hadn’t given her word that she would take him, and it wasn’t as if he had done her any favors. Letting her onto a ship that she had as much right to be on as he did not qualify. But he never left.

  He had claimed one of the small crew cabins for himself, and Alisa hadn’t presumed to open the hatch to peek inside. He didn’t speak to them unless asked a question, and it wasn’t guaranteed even then. After three days, Alisa still did not know his name, though she had asked once, figuring he would be less likely to shoot them later on if he came to know them. So far, he hadn’t shown any interest in knowing them.

  Alisa assumed he had a box of ration bars or ready-meals in his cabin, because he never visited the mess hall, not that there was much reason to. To save power until they could get the main engine online and fueled up, Mica hadn’t turned on electricity to the non-essential parts of the ship, and there wasn’t any food in the refrigerator. All Alisa and Mica had were ration bars and pouches of dehydrated vegetable patties with the texture of sawdust. If they managed to fly the ship into town and find some paying passengers, they could buy better supplies for the trip.

  “Captain?” Mica asked one afternoon when Alisa’s determination to clean all of the dust, cobwebs, and rat droppings out of the ship took her through engineering with a mop. Mica slid out from under a console, her short hair even more tousled than usual, though her worried expression was probably a result of more than hair woes.

  “How’re we doing?” Alisa crouched beside her, a tendril of unease worming through her stomach.

  Even though Mica had done a thorough analysis of the ship on the first day, Alisa kept expecting her engineer to stumble across something that would keep the Nomad grounded indefinitely. Finding parts for the craft hadn’t been easy even before the war, and if it turned out they needed something proprietary that couldn’t be made in the little machine shop in the back of the engineering room, well… the odds of finding it on Dustor were not good. Further, from what she had heard, mail-order was out of the question these days. She was lucky her sister-in-law’s letter had reached her.

  “There are peculiarities,” Mica said, glancing toward the hatchway, as if she expected the cyborg to be lurking there.

  He wasn’t. Alisa had stumbled across him doing pull-ups from a bar in the cargo hold that morning, but he was far scarcer than the rat droppings, and despite his interest in getting off-planet, he hadn’t shown any curiosity as far as the repairs went.

  “Such as?” Alisa asked.

  “A lot of equipment has already been repaired. It’s jury-rigged, so you can tell there was a problem, but the patches are efficient enough that they don’t need me to do anything, at least not until genuine replacement parts can be found.”

  “My mother was good at making do. She was half engineer and half pilot, all self-taught. She had a real knack for keeping this boat in the air. Until the end.” Alisa grimaced.

  Mica sat up and opened a panel. She pointed to a circuit board and a snarl of wires that had been tamed with wire ties. “Do you know if that’s her work?”

  Alisa shrugged. She’d never had much passion or aptitude for fixing things, despite her mother’s attempts to teach her how to maintain the ship, so she didn’t even know what she was looking at. “She might have. The last four years that she flew freight, I was away in college. She was out here on her own, so I don’t know what she had to deal with.”

  “But you said life support was definitely wrecked, right?”

  “Yes,” Alisa said, her voice tight. Life support had been what failed, what had resulted in her mother’s death. Another long-hauler had found the ship adrift and reported it to the authorities. Alisa’s mother had been found dead inside, the carbon dioxide levels off the chart. Angry and devastated, Alisa had almost left it out there, but it had been drifting close to Dustor, so she’d hitched a ride to claim it and had worn a spacesuit to fly it to the planet where she’d sold the old freighter to the highest bidder.

  “I’ve run several tests. Nothing’s wrong with life support now.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “There are patches a-plenty. I can see that someone put a lot of work into fixing the system.”

  This time, Alisa was the one to glance toward the empty hatchway. “Are you implying that our passenger did it?”

  “It wasn’t the rats.”

  Alisa rocked back onto her heels. “From what I’ve heard, most soldiers who go into the Cyborg Corps are taken in young, before they’ve earned degrees or had much time to learn a trade. And their superiors don’t really encourage them to educate themselves, not in intellectual subjects, anyway. I always had the feeling that the imperials were afraid of their own creations. Didn’t want them getting thoughts in their heads about turning on their superiors or taking over installations.”

  “Maybe I’m not the first engineer he’s had up here, fixing things for him.”

  “You’re fixing things for me, not for him. Don’t you forget who’s not paying you a single tindark for your work.”

  Mica snorted. “Whatever gets me to a civilized planet. The employment prospects here are horrible.”

  “The prospects for everything here are horrible.”

  “That’s the truth. I just hope we don’t get off Dustor and find out that it’s the same everywhere.”

  Alisa frowned. “Even if things aren’t as smoothly run as they might have been when the empire was in charge, humanity has its freedom now. That’s worth some inconveniences.”

  Mica waved her hand in the air. Alisa wasn’t positive that was a sign of agreement.

  “Just keep an eye on our brawny buddy,” Mica said. “If he wasn’t the one fixing things, I’d like to know what happened to the last engineer he had in here.”

  Alisa’s gaze drifted back to the tidy wires. “Are you sure you want to know that?”

  “Maybe not, but it would be good to know how many extra deadbolts I need to install on the hatch to my cabin.”

  Alisa smiled, though she had no idea if deadbolts would stop a cyborg. She had been flying over a battlefield once and had seen one lift a tank off a comrade.

  “Since the ship is apparently already half-fixed,” Alisa said, “does that mean that we can get out of this junk cave soon?”

  “Should be ready by tomorrow.”

  “Excellent. I’ll see if I can get enough reception to access the city-net and put out flyers for passengers.”

  “Don’t forget about security guards. In case the deadbolts don’t work.”

  “Pessimist,” Alisa said.

  Mica snorted again. “Optimist.”