Star Nomad (Fallen Empire, Book 1)

  Chapter 13

  Alisa was about to step into the airlock, both Beck’s borrowed blazer and her Etcher in her hands, but Leonidas caught up then and stretched out a hand to stop her. She opened her mouth, intending to bark at him to get out of the way, but he only held her up long enough to step in front of her. He strode into the airlock tube, his own rifle pointing down it.

  “Stay between us,” Beck whispered from behind her. He shooed Yumi toward Alisa, and they followed Leonidas into the tube.

  As soon as she could, Alisa hustled into the cargo hold, searching in all directions, afraid she would spot blood—or worse. The chickens were still there, squawking plaintively. If a bear had stormed onto the ship, would it have gone for them first? Or would it have been drawn by larger prey?

  Leonidas must have felt some of Alisa’s worry, her urgency, because he broke into a run, heading for the stairs. With the cargo hold empty, it did not take long to verify that there weren’t any bodies in it, so Alisa hurried after him. She prayed that they would find Mica and Alejandro in the rec room, still playing that game. Maybe something had simply happened to short out the comm system.

  They reached the small kitchen and mess hall, and Alisa peeked into the rec room off to the side. The asteroid game hovered in the air over the table, the back of a character’s head and gun in view as he stood in a spaceship, ready to clear more enemies from the level. The game was a little too apt at the moment.

  Leonidas continued toward NavCom, but Alisa headed toward the game station. Dread curdled in her stomach as she worried she would find one or more bodies in the back. Nobody was there. The chairs and table were locked to the deck, so they couldn’t be knocked over. Too bad. That might have been a clue to suggest a fight or that Mica and Alejandro had gotten up in a hurry to run and hide.

  Clangs sounded as someone checked the sleep quarters. As Alisa finished her circuit of the rec room, something caught her eye. A necklace with a broken chain. She knelt and picked it up—it was the three-starred pendant that Alejandro wore outside of his robe.

  Leonidas appeared in the hatchway, his armored shoulders brushing the jamb. “NavCom is empty, as are the cabins. If they’re here, they’re hiding.”

  “I don’t think they’re here,” Alisa said quietly, spreading her palm to show him the pendant.

  “There’s no hint of the animal den smell I detected on the station, nor did I see any blood.”

  “So, it wasn’t the bears.” Alisa felt a modicum of relief at that, but their people were still missing. Mica was the closest thing she had to a friend here, the only person she had any history with. “Then what got them?”

  “The pirates, I’d wager.”

  Alisa stood up, clenching her jaw. “No, they couldn’t have. I did what you said. I took a circuitous route here. I checked to make sure there weren’t any ships within sensor range before veering into the asteroid. There’s no way they followed us here.”

  “I didn’t say that they did. They were here before. Somehow, they knew about the station.”

  “How do you know…” Alisa halted the question in the middle, remembering the shredded clothing. “The people who were killed in those storage rooms. You think those were the same pirates from the mining ship? That they came to loot the station?”

  “As you and your science officer have noted, cybernetic implants are valuable.”

  “But why take my engineer and a passenger?” Alisa looked down at the pendant. “If they’re just thieves trying to get everything they can, why not take my whole ship?”

  Before he could answer, the Nomad’s tinny computerized voice spoke, echoing throughout the ship. “Self-destruct will commence in fifteen minutes.”

  Leonidas’s eyebrows rose.

  “Uh, Captain?” Beck called from the kitchen. “Should that be concerning us?”

  Alisa shook her head, confusion swarming her. “There’s no self-destruct option on the Nomad. It’s a freighter, not some warship full of military secrets. There’s no need to sacrifice it if enemies board.”

  “Are you sure your engineer couldn’t have rigged something?”

  “How could she have had time to do that? They didn’t even have time to call us on the comm. They had to have been taken by surprise. Even if they did have time, all she would have done was set explosives in engineering. I don’t see how she could have tied in the ship’s computer to make announcements.”

  “Self-destruct will commence in fourteen minutes,” the computer announced cheerfully.

  Great, it must have reached the point where it would warn them on the minute, every minute.

  “I’m going to search for explosives,” Beck said.

  “Maybe we should just get off the ship,” Yumi said. “How badly will the station be damaged if the ship blows up while in its dock?”

  “I don’t know,” Beck said, “but I’m not in a hurry to go back inside and fight two more of those creatures. I’ve got plenty of meat to grill already.”

  “Not to mention that we could be stranded in there for a long time if we didn’t have a ship.” Alisa waved Leonidas aside and headed toward NavCom. “I’m going to scan through the camera footage, see what happened.”

  “Better scan quickly,” Leonidas said, running after Beck, apparently believing that Mica could have jury-rigged something.

  In NavCom, none of the alarms were flashing. The console waited quietly. If there were a self-destruct sequence, there should have been a warning up here.

  Alisa found the video footage and scanned back for the last half hour on both the internal and exterior cameras. She groaned, catching something right away. A combat ship about a third of the size of the Nomad. It had docked next to them in the adjoining airlock.

  If Mica had been up here in NavCom, she would have seen them coming on the cameras, but the ship’s proximity alarm would not have gone off, not when they were docked. Being docked usually meant they were on a space station or spaceport with all manner of ships around. Nothing to be worried about.

  Alisa cursed herself. She should have thought to set some kind of alarm or at least ordered Mica to stay up here instead of wandering around the rest of the ship, looking for games to play.

  She checked the time stamps as the footage continued in reverse, showing the pirate ship’s approach. It had only been docked for eight minutes. Long enough for the pirates to get off their ship, storm onto the Nomad, and kidnap Mica and Alejandro. But, as Alisa had already asked, why had they only taken the people instead of stealing the entire ship? NavCom had been wide open. They could have easily come up here, and a halfway decent pilot could have figured out how to steer her out. That big mining ship surely had a landing bay large enough to hold her.

  “Self-destruct will commence in eleven minutes,” the ship announced.

  “Oh,” Alisa said with new understanding. “Right. They must have heard that and figured they had better get away from this ship and the station while they still had time.”

  “Who are you talking to?” Leonidas asked, striding up the corridor and into NavCom, glancing toward the comm panel.

  “Myself. I’m an excellent conversationalist.”

  “Beck and Moon are still looking, but we’ve seen no sign of explosives yet. We should leave soon and get to the far side of the station. If your ship blows up, it will affect the integrity of Blackstar.” He grimaced. “It may destroy the whole station.”

  “That’s one way to get rid of the bears.”

  “Your humor is—”

  “Inappropriate, I know.”

  His eyebrow twitched.

  “It’s how I distract myself when I’m scared for my life. Or the lives of others. Especially others that I talked into coming along on this trip. Hells, I even charged Alejandro to come along. He just wanted to go to Perun.” Alisa took a deep breath, immediately regretting her outpouring of honesty. Leonidas was not a confidant.

  She turned her back toward him and pulled up the interna
l camera footage. It did not cover every inch of the ship, but it would show her if people had, indeed, come onboard.

  “The responsibility for this situation is more mine than yours,” Leonidas said, coming to stand beside her and look down at the footage. “I will get them back.”

  She wasn’t sure how comfortable she felt standing shoulder to shoulder with him, but she did appreciate that he wasn’t dismissing the others as unimportant. She could have imagined him waving his hand at their loss and insisting they continue on to… wherever he planned to go next. Perun, she supposed. She hadn’t agreed to transport him farther.

  “All by yourself?” she asked, enlarging the footage of the rec room—only twenty minutes earlier, Alejandro and Mica had been sitting at the table in there, playing the video game.

  “If need be.”

  “You don’t want Beck? Didn’t he say he was integral in defeating that bear?”

  “He was integral in defeating its rear left haunch.” Leonidas pointed at the footage from the cargo hold, of eight armed men storming through the airlock, wearing unmatched collections of combat armor and carrying an assortment of deadly weapons, everything from shotguns to laser rifles to swords.

  “Self-destruct will commence in eight minutes,” the ship said.

  Alisa had been busy concentrating and had barely noticed the last couple of announcements. Eight minutes was not long, especially if they needed to run to the other side of the station. She brought the footage for the cargo hold and the rec room to the forefront, running them forward in sync while minimizing everything else.

  The pirates must have made a sound, because Mica looked toward the entrance to the rec room. She reached for her pocket where she should have had her comm unit. She’d been about to pull it out, but Alejandro raised a finger to his lips. He said something—the cameras did not pick up audio—then ran out of the room.

  Mica started after him, but paused, her gaze snagging on the game. To Alisa’s surprise she turned back to it, lifting her hands to touch the holocontrols that hovered below the main video. She glanced toward the exit several times as she maneuvered the avatar forward to kill a virtual enemy, then flick something on a control console within the game. Mica dropped to her knees, pulling open the control panel under the table. From the angle of the security camera, Alisa could not see what wires she was tinkering with, but she knelt back and glanced toward a corner of the rec room up near the ceiling. That spot held a speaker.

  “It’s in the game,” Alisa realized.

  “What?” Leonidas asked.

  On the video, Alejandro ran into the rec room, a baton and a blazer in his hands, weapons Alisa would not have guessed he had. He whirled to push the hatch shut, but was too late. The pirates charged into the room. He raised the blazer and fired, but the crimson bolt splashed uselessly off an armored man’s shoulder. The pirates did not slow down. Alejandro tried to fight, to protect Mica, but there were too many enemies. One armored pirate thrust him to the side, hurling him against the wall. He landed hard, then was picked up by the neck.

  Alisa winced in sympathy of the pained expression on his face and slid her hand into her pocket to wrap it around his broken pendant.

  The pirates hoisted Mica and Alejandro over their shoulders and toted them out of the rec room. Alisa lifted her hand, about to stop the playback, but paused when the last two pirates stopped before exiting. They spun toward the corner with the speaker, pointed at it, jabbered something to each other, then charged out of the room. A moment later, all of the pirates appeared in the cargo hold. They still carried their prisoners over their shoulders, and several had stolen duffel bags from the passenger and crew cabins, but that was all they had taken. They hustled quickly off the ship.

  “We better leave too,” Leonidas said. “With luck, we can—”

  “No, we don’t need to,” Alisa said as the computer spoke again, announcing that they were down to six minutes.

  She strode past Leonidas, into the corridor, and through the mess hall to the rec room. If she hadn’t played the game before, she might have been fooled, too, but now that she had seen Mica tinkering with the panel, she realized what she had done.

  Leonidas followed her and watched as she hit the power on the table, turning off the game.

  “If I’m right,” Alisa said, “that’ll be the end of the announcements.”

  His gaze shifted from the table to the speaker, then he grunted with understanding. “She fooled them into thinking the ship would blow up.”

  Alisa nodded. “A good thing for us—we would have been stranded if the pirates had left in both vessels—but that doesn’t help them at all.”

  She closed her eyes. How were they going to get Mica and Alejandro back? If these were the same pirates that had chased them in the mining ship, there could be hundreds, if not thousands, of crew in there, with dozens of smaller ships they could launch at any time. And those pirates would be holding a grudge after she and Leonidas had caused their two bombers to blow up. They might be taking that grudge out on Mica and Alejandro right now.

  “We’re going after them,” she said, opening her eyes.

  Thankfully, Leonidas did not object or point out that it would be a suicide mission. After all, he had already said he would get them back.

  “You have a plan?” he asked.

  “Going after them is my plan.”

  “It could use refinement.”

  “Are all cyborgs so critical?”

  “The ones that survive more than five years in the service, yes. We don’t—didn’t—get chosen for the moonpuff missions.”

  “No, I suppose you wouldn’t.” Alisa slipped past him and headed for NavCom again. Yumi and Beck were in the mess and watched her go by. “I’m going to get us out of this asteroid before they’re too far away for us to catch on our sensors. Anyone who wants to help me brainstorm a plan is welcome to join me.”

  Leonidas followed on her heels.

  “What about the countdown?” Beck asked.

  “What’s the last number you heard?” Alisa called back as she reached the pilot’s seat. Her fingers flew over the controls as she closed their airlock hatch and maneuvered the ship away.

  “Six,” he said.

  “How long ago was that?”

  “It has been a couple of minutes since the computer made an announcement,” Yumi said.

  “That’s because it was a ruse, nothing more,” Alisa said. “And we’re going to need another ruse if we want to get our people back. A big one. I wonder what the odds are that the mining ship is still out at the edge of the asteroid field and that the small attack craft we saw is what they’re flying the prisoners away in. If we could catch it before the pirates reunited with their mother ship…”

  “We would still be outgunned,” Leonidas said.

  Outgunned, right. A polite way of saying the freighter did not have weapons at all. What she had was two men in combat armor.

  “We’ll have to catch them and board their ship,” Alisa said.

  Leonidas grunted. “It’s more likely that they’ll see us, catch us, and board our ship.”

  “Well,” Alisa said, thinking as she turned the Nomad so it could fly through the tunnel, “that could work too. Maybe certain well-armed and armored people could lie in hiding near the airlock and rush aboard their ship to take it over while their search party is in our ship looking for us.”

  The pirates might have superior numbers and superior ships, but Alisa had one advantage, a well-trained cyborg in top-of-the-line combat armor. Unfortunately, her well-trained cyborg was making a sour face at her words.

  “How did they get in through the security trap?” Yumi asked, pointing toward the place where the Nomad had been held on the way in.

  “Uh, that’s a good question.” With everything else going on, Alisa had forgotten about that. She turned in her seat. “Leonidas? That scan that searched our ship—it let us in because you were on board, right? It was programm
ed to let cyborgs—or cyborg parts—through? It assumed that whatever imperial ship brought cyborgs in would be delivering them to the scientists to work on?”

  He hesitated, as if ingrained instincts told him not to give any information to Alliance pilots, but eventually he nodded. “Delivering them to Dr. Bartosz for upgrades, repairs, or initial installs, yes.”

  “But you had never been here before today?”

  “No, Dr. Bartosz usually came to the Corps headquarters to do the work. But I’d heard of men being sent here if he was busy with research.”

  “Is he the one who initially… made you?”

  Leonidas’s lips twisted, and she thought he would object to the term. Instead, he said, “Like Victor Frankenstein himself.”

  “Ah.” Alisa remembered him objecting to being called anything other than human, but here he was, making a connection to an Old Earth legend, Frankenstein’s monster. There was a dark expression in his eyes. It was not sorrow, not exactly, but it made her regret calling him a mech earlier when she had been angry. “Is he the one who was dead on the floor in the lab?”

  “Yes. I saw the name tag on his lab coat.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said quietly.

  Surprise flickered across his face, but he sublimated the emotion quickly. “We weren’t close.”

  “He was just someone you thought would have answers?”

  Leonidas ticked his fingernail on the control panel in front of her seat. “Pay attention to your flying, Marchenko.”

  “You’re not the captain here, Cyborg,” she said, crossing her second and third finger in the classic screw-you gesture. It didn’t matter that he was right—she should be watching the tunnel ahead. She didn’t take orders from him.

  Surprisingly, he smiled slightly.

  “Uhh, so,” Beck said—Alisa had forgotten that he and Yumi were hovering in the corridor, that she had invited them to help come up with a plan. “What did we decide after that little exchange?”

  Leonidas’s expression grew grim. “That they might have a cyborg too. Or more than one.”

  Just when she had been thinking that Leonidas would be her singular advantage…

  “Cyborg pirates? Those exist?” Beck asked.

  “With the empire gone, there’s nobody left to pay the salaries of career soldiers,” Leonidas said. “People do what they have to do to survive.”

  Alisa thought about asking what had brought him to that junkyard on Dustor, but they had navigated more than halfway through the tunnel. Soon, the distant stars of the galaxy would come into view, and she would have a pirate ship to hunt down. She glanced at the sensor display, wondering if anything would show up yet. She did not see any blips, but the denseness of the ore packed into the asteroid around them might be dulling the sensors’ effectiveness. She would have to wait until they were out in open space.

  The stars soon came into sight, along with the body of another asteroid tumbling slowly in the distance. Alisa accelerated toward the opening, eager to have room to maneuver again, the freedom to fly.

  A bleep came from the sensor display. She glanced back as they soared out of the asteroid, then cursed. A ship was waiting for them, a huge ship.

  She reversed the thrusters to brake, having some notion of flying back into the tunnel, but it was too late. Alarms clamored, and the control panel lit up with warnings as a grab beam clamped onto them.

  This time, it wasn’t a trap placed by the security station. The hulking mass of the miles-long mining ship hovered right over the tunnel exit. And it had them in its clutches.