Fallen Empire 1: Star Nomad Read online

  Alisa figured he had been stranded here after the war, too, left behind because of an injury or perhaps just left behind because there had been nobody left to look after—and pay—the soldiers in the imperial fleet.

  “I know exactly what’s wrong with the ship,” Alisa said, pressing on when he once again did not respond, “and I believe fixing it is possible.” If nothing else had been done to it in the last six years. Seeing that the cyborg had access made her worry that others had found access and might have been inside, scavenging every last piece of the ship’s innards. “We want to fix it and take it off this planet. If you’re just making a home inside there, then I was serious in my offer. We’ll help you fix up another place to live, any ship here that you want.”

  “To where?” he asked.

  It took Alisa a moment to realize he was asking where they intended to go.

  “Teravia,” she said, lying. There was no way she was giving him her flight plan.

  Those already narrowed eyes closed to slits, and she was reminded that he was pointing his gun at her chest. She expected him to accuse her of lying, but instead, he asked, “You willing to stop in the Trajean Asteroid Belt on the way?”

  “On the way? The T-Belt isn’t on the way to anything except the Dark Reaches.”

  “You want to get on this ship, you’ll make it on the way. To Teravia,” he added, putting emphasis on the name. Yeah, he knew she was lying.

  It didn’t matter if she was lying. The T-Belt wasn’t on the way to her real destination of Perun, either. Taking that diversion would add a minimum of ten days to her trip.

  Alisa closed her eyes, seeing her daughter’s face in her mind. Even though it had already been well over a year since she’d been able to get home to see Jelena, she hated the idea of extending that absence any longer than necessary now that the war was over and her service to the Alliance was fulfilled. Especially now that she knew Jonah was gone and that their daughter was staying with an aunt whose inner-city artist’s loft wouldn’t be an ideal place for raising a child.

  “Ah, Cap—Alisa,” Mica whispered. “Mind if I have a word with you?” She eyed the cyborg, then jerked her chin toward one of the other ships.

  “Give us a moment to discuss our flight plans,” Alisa told the cyborg, then added a, “Please,” remembering that she’d decided to be reasonable with him. Reasonable people said please and thank you, even when dealing with the enemy.

  The cyborg said nothing, merely leaned against one of the support posts that lowered the ramp from the side of the ship. He folded his arms, his destroyer still in one hand, his expression one of indifference. Alisa didn’t know if it was a mask or not. He had seemed vaguely interested when he’d learned Mica was an engineer, and it sounded like he wanted a ride. Interestingly, he wanted a ride somewhere specific and remote. Most other people just wanted to get the hells off this dustball.

  “You don’t want to go asteroid hopping?” Alisa asked when she and Mica were out of earshot. She didn’t think her colleague would mind the delay since she didn’t have a pressing need to return to Perun the way Alisa did.

  “With a cyborg? Are you spaced? What if he decides to shoot us once we get to wherever he wants to go? Or what if he gets an itch and rapes one of us? Both of us. Hells, we can’t outfight him. Did you see how fast he took your gun away?”

  “I’m trying to forget, thank you.”

  “If we were stuck on the ship with him, we’d have no place to escape. There’s nowhere to run, not like here.” Mica waved toward the shadows.

  “On the ship, off the ship, if he didn’t want us to escape, nothing would keep him from running us down,” Alisa pointed out, aware of how fast cyborgs were on foot.

  But, even though she made the argument, she had to concede to Mica’s point. There wouldn’t be anything to keep him from taking over once the ship was fixed and they were in the air. And what kind of loon wanted to go to the T-Belt, anyway? There was nothing out there except automated drilling stations and smuggler and pirate hideouts. Showing up there in a clunky freighter without a weapons system wouldn’t be wise. From what she’d heard, even heading to Perun would be a risk these days.

  “He’s probably fantasizing about shooting you right now,” Mica whispered, glancing at the cyborg. He hadn’t changed position. He was looking out into the cavern rather than at them. “Whatever he was in the imperial fleet, I bet it wasn’t a homeless vagabond forced to squat in a junkyard full of cannibalistic maniacs. We were on the side that drove him to this. Don’t think he won’t resent us.”

  Alisa couldn’t accuse Mica of being overly pessimistic this time. In all likelihood, she was right.

  Still…

  “I don’t see what choice we have,” Alisa said. “He doesn’t look like he’s moving.”

  “We’ll take another ship then.”

  “What ship?” Alisa waved at the sea of dust, rust, and shadows surrounding them. “These are all derelicts in here—they probably didn’t fly when they were brought in, and they’ve surely been scavenged to the core and back since then. The Nomad is—was… The engine was still working and the hull was intact. I didn’t sell her because she was in poor condition.”

  Mica sighed. “I know. You told me. But that was then. We don’t know what condition she’s in now.”

  “She’s the most likely ship in here to ever fly again. Listen, I’d actually been thinking of taking on some passengers, anyway, if we can get her working. We need money for supplies, and people would line up for miles at a chance to get off this world and back to one of the core planets.”

  “Oh, I know that, but how many of those people could actually pay? You may not have noticed, but Flint Face over there didn’t offer to drop any tindarks in your purse.”

  “I know, but others might, and if we have paying passengers, we could use their money to hire a couple of security men, too. Some beefy brutes who could stand between him and us.” Alisa pointed her thumb toward the cyborg.

  “You really think a rent-a-guard is going to be a match for an imperial cyborg?”

  “Maybe not, but if we had a crew and passengers, he might be less likely to try something… untoward.”

  Alisa couldn’t help but think of Mica’s earlier words of rape and killing. Was she being naive in contemplating this? Did they have any other choice? It wasn’t as if she had the money to buy a ship, even if there had been any available on Dustor. What little she had received from Finnegan all those years ago had gone toward the down payment on the apartment that she and Jonah had purchased, an apartment that had apparently been incinerated by bombs. The virtual financial system was a mess these days, with accounts no longer being accessible across the sys-net, so the three coins in her pocket were all she had to her name. Technically, she ought to still have some money in her bank account on Perun, but what remained of the empire had settled in there, and as an Alliance soldier, she wouldn’t be welcome. She had no idea how she was going to get in to find her daughter, but she had a week’s voyage to figure it out. Now, she would have a week and ten days.

  “Untoward.” Mica curled her lip. “You know what’s worse than an optimistic engineer?”

  “An optimistic captain?”

  “Exactly.”

  Alisa left Mica grumbling to her toolbox and approached the cyborg again. “You’ll be pleased to know that we’ve decided that we would be fools not to visit the magnificent wonders of the Trajean Asteroid Belt before heading to our final destination.”

  She expected the cyborg to say, “Good,” or something of that ilk. Instead, he grunted and walked inside.

  “Oh, yes. It’s going to be fun playing Carts and Chutes with him in the rec room during the evenings.”

  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.”

  Chapter 4

  The light of two of the system’s three suns beat down upon Alisa as she weaved through the city, back toward the crowded ship docks, her rented hoverboard hissing and sputtering. She led it along behind her like a dog on a leash. A drunken dog with a limp that liked to bump into passersby. People of white, brown, and mixed skin colors cursed her in an amalgam of Russian and Chinese that was the planet’s native language. Alisa apologized in Standard, lamenting that nobody seemed to notice or care about the Alliance jacket she wore. She’d helped free these people, damn it. A little respect would have been nice, drunken limping hoverboard or not.

  At least the storeowner had been sympathetic to war veterans, and after looking at her military ID, he had been willing to give her the supplies on credit. She’d promised to pay him back as soon as their passengers signed on, which, she hoped, would be before the end of the day. If nobody showed up, she would have to find a way to hustle for some coins. She wondered how the cyborg would feel if she asked him to pay his way.

  Alisa was relieved when she spotted the Nomad, the suns throwing rays onto its bronze and silver hull. The craft looked old in the harsh desert light, but reputable. It had never belonged in that junkyard with those derelicts, and even though she couldn’t help resent it, and even fear it, for how it had betrayed her mother, she admitted that the ship still deserved to be out here in the light of day.

  The hatch stood open and the ramp
down, inviting people in. People who could pay. Alisa hurried toward it, hoping numerous well-heeled passengers had signed aboard while she had been shopping for supplies. She supposed it would be foolish—or overly optimistic, as Mica would say—to hope that their cyborg guest had disembarked, changing his mind about riding into space with them.

  As she neared the ship, a commotion broke out in front of one of the merchant tents set up along the open-air docks. A gun fired, and people scattered.

  “Thief!” a woman cried and lunged out of the tent holding a blazer rifle in both hands, a faded yellow dress flapping around her legs as she ran.

  People sprinted away from her. Alisa pulled out her own gun and jumped behind the hoverboard for cover while looking for the thief. A young man was racing down the promenade, zigzagging and gripping his injured arm. Alisa hesitated to shoot since she couldn’t tell if he had truly stolen anything and since she didn’t have a stun gun. The proprietor did not hesitate. She fired, heedless of the nearby people. Her aim was better than Alisa would have expected, and a bolt of energy slammed into the man’s back. He tumbled to the cracked cement walkway. The woman stalked toward him, her head held high, ignoring the people giving her alarmed looks. When she reached the man, she patted him down, pulled a gold chain out of his pocket, and stalked back to her tent.

  Alisa kept expecting the sounds of sirens or at least for a couple of automated police patrollers to show up, both to see if the thief had survived and to take the woman into custody. Killing someone for stealing had never been legal.

  Slowly, as the crowds returned to the promenade and as nobody came to do something about the thief, who was probably dead by now, it dawned on Alisa that imperial law wasn’t being enforced anymore. After all, the empire had fallen. She knew from watching the news holos while she had been recovering that there was a three-planet government that the Alliance had set up on the most industrious and resource-rich planets, but they were a long ways from here. Alisa had no idea what passed for the law out here now or even if the Alliance had influence here. Someone must have stepped in to fill the void of the missing imperial government, but she didn’t know who.