Arkadian Skies: Fallen Empire, Book 6 (13 page)

Abelardus must have realized he couldn’t do anything from the back of the big robot, because he leaped away, rolling and jumping to his feet. Leonidas turned his blazer on that robot. It rotated toward him, but he destroyed it, piece by piece. Uncharacteristic tears ran down his cheeks from the gas.

“Mica?” he said into his comm. “Did you send the—” A cough racked his throat. He must have already been forced to inhale some of the tainted air. “Directions?” he finished with a rasp.

“On your netdisc,” came Mica’s response.

Trusting that he had it handled, Alisa ran toward Alejandro. Where had Leonidas said to go from the ramp? She poked her light into the darkness. More coughing came from behind her. Leonidas and Abelardus. She needed to breathe, but didn’t know if she dared. She felt lightheaded, and panic welled in her chest, the desperate need for air.

Alejandro pointed up the ramp, and she stepped up beside him. She saw why he had halted. Several faces were pressed against the window in the big double doors at the top of the stairs. She saw sky behind the faces, but her team would have to mow through soldiers if they went that way, soldiers who were clearly waiting for them.

“This way,” Leonidas said, running up behind them, tears streaking his face. He glanced at the soldiers, but did not acknowledge them in any way as he ran to the side of the ramp, following the wall.

Alisa couldn’t hold her breath any longer. Knowing she was running deeper into the basement instead of toward an exit stole her willpower to keep holding it. She tried not to gasp in deep amounts, and held her sleeve to her mouth as she inhaled, hoping it might filter out some of whatever gas particles plagued the air. The harsh gas seemed to burn her throat, searing her from the inside out.

Alejandro stumbled at her side, bending over and coughing. Alisa offered him an arm, though she wasn’t in much better shape. The gas tore at the insides of her throat.

“Here,” Leonidas called from the back of a blocky vehicle parked in the corner. He’d thrown open a back door, revealing a cargo hold halfway filled with boxes of laundry detergent.

“We’re stealing the laundry truck?” Alisa rasped, her throat raw.

“It’s a laundry
ship
,” Leonidas said.

“That makes it more acceptable?”

Ignoring her in favor of coughing, Leonidas waved for Alisa, Abelardus, and Alejandro to run inside. Though Alisa couldn’t see charging through a military barricade in a laundry truck—or ship—she raced into what passed for a cockpit in the clunky vehicle. What other choice did they have?

Clanks came from the core of the basement, more robots heading their way.

Leonidas slammed the back door shut, foisted Durant toward Alejandro, and leaped into the seat beside Alisa. Alisa was looking at the unfamiliar control panel, hunting for the power button.

Leonidas thrust a netdisc onto the console, a display already up. “Mica sent the directions,” he rasped, his voice sounding as raw as hers.

Later, she might ask if anyone knew what awful gas they were breathing. Right now, she didn’t want to know.

“Found it,” she said, hammering the button.

To her relief, the vehicle started up without checking to see if the driver was authorized. Because who would steal a laundry barge?

Barely glancing at the directions, Alisa found the hover thrusters, snorting as the craft clunked and clanked as it rose a few inches from the ground. Or maybe that was the robots banging at the door, trying to figure out how to get at them.

There’s a whole platoon of soldiers waiting outside that door
, Abelardus spoke into her mind as Alisa backed the vehicle up and turned it around, just avoiding taking out a support column.
Barge
was the right word. This thing made the
Star Nomad
feel as sleek and maneuverable as a Striker.
They think their gas will smoke us out eventually. If the robots don’t get us.

How many ships do they have waiting for us?
Alisa flew them through the basement, taking the long route so she could use the approach to the ramp like a runway and pick up some speed.

There are ships all over the hospital grounds and on the roof.

Wonderful.
Even if Alisa could pilot the barge past the armed troops without it being shot down, it wouldn’t take long for faster ships to catch up with them. They would have to ditch it right away, take to the streets, and hope they could somehow lose their pursuers.
I sure hope Alejandro got something that will let him wake up your brother.

Me too
, Abelardus replied, none of his usual irreverence in his tone.

A robot rolled in front of them as Alisa turned around a post, lining up the blunt nose of the laundry barge with the ramp. Would this clunky ship even fit up it? It must. How else would it have gotten down here to deliver its load? She ran over the robot. It clunked off and disappeared from the windshield—yes, windshield. This thing didn’t have anything so high tech as a view screen.

“Did you look at the instructions on flying the ship?” Leonidas asked mildly, despite the tears streaming from his eyes.

“Ha ha. Brace yourselves, everyone. We’re going.”
Abelardus
, she added silently.
Can you throw open the door up there before we get to it? Maybe the soldiers will fire prematurely and be surprised when we charge out in this.

Premature firing would be an embarrassment for a soldier.

Uh huh. Just fling those doors open.

If he didn’t, she would be charging through them. That might work to surprise the soldiers, also, but it would be an embarrassing end to their escape if the barge didn’t have the power to make it through them and got stuck. If they had the chance, would the soldiers capture everyone for questioning? Or would they simply blow up the barge and everyone in it?

“Look for a way to filter the air, will you?” Alisa glanced at Leonidas.

Her throat was tight from more than nerves. Her chest was tight, too, and it seemed she had to take big breaths to get the air she needed. If that was from the gas, she hoped it went away as soon as they were outside in clean air.

“I don’t think it matters at this point,” Leonidas said, gripping a bar on the door. She had told him to brace himself.

“You know something about this gas that I don’t?”

“It’s a bronchoconstrictor,” Alejandro said from the back. “We all need breathing treatments to open our airways.”

“Or what?” Alisa asked.

“Take a guess.”

Growling, Alisa hit the accelerator, and the barge rumbled forward, not nearly as quickly as she would have liked. The columns ambled past to their sides. At the ramp, she tilted the nose of the craft upward. The doors were still closed, the soldiers still peering through the windows.

A grunt of exertion sounded from behind her seat—Abelardus—and the doors flew open as Alisa was bracing herself to crash into them. Soldiers were thrown back. The barge barely fit through the exit—a scrape sounded as the jamb gouged into one side. Seeing vehicles and armored soldiers waiting all over the parking lot outside, Alisa pulled up as soon as she cleared the building.

Rounds hammered into the belly of the barge, and cracks and snaps erupted from all over the hull. Something broke in the back, and Alejandro yelped in surprise—or pain. Alisa called upon full power and tore away from the hospital at top speed. Unfortunately, top speed for the barge wasn’t much more than that of a drunk stumbling out of a bar at the end of a long night.

Smoke filled the cockpit, giving Alisa more reasons to cough. Her eyes teared up, and she swiped a sleeve over them. The barge bucked, and something cracked up front.

“Hope that’s not the engine,” she muttered, coughing again. Three suns, she was wheezing now. She struggled to focus on the escape rather than worrying about the gas, but it was getting harder to breathe.

Leonidas pulled up a real-time map on his netdisc.

Alisa found a rear camera display, a crack through the lens bisecting the view. It didn’t matter. She could see enough. The Alliance ships were taking off—
all
of them.

Chapter 7

“We need to crash this boat somewhere and escape on foot,” Alisa said as the barge bumped and gurgled, clearly on its last leg. She was flying above rooftops, barely able to clear them. “Anyone have any ideas?”

Too bad the ocean was forty miles away. They would never make it.

“So reassuring when the pilot talks about deliberately crashing the ship,” Abelardus muttered behind her.

“A crash is going to happen whether I’m deliberate about it or not,” she said, fighting the controls. The barge wanted to die. Badly.

Leonidas was scanning his map, but he glanced at a lever on the console between them. “Hang onto something,” he ordered loudly, his voice still raspy. All of their voices were. “You have Durant, Doctor?” He glanced back.

“Yes.”

“Hang on,” he repeated, and he hit the lever.

Light flooded the ship from the back, as a cool breeze smacked Alisa in the neck. He had opened the cargo doors. Boxes of laundry detergent toppled out.

“Great,” Alisa said. “Littering. Another crime for us to get in trouble for.”

“Trying to lighten our load,” Leonidas said, pushing the lever back to its original position. “We were over a rooftop. Nobody should get hurt.”

As if people having laundry powder dropped on their heads was Alisa’s main concern right now.

One door shut. The other didn’t, instead flapping obnoxiously in the wind. She would have glared at Leonidas, but the ship
did
respond slightly better with less weight in the back.

“Door, please, Abelardus,” Alisa said.

“I’m not your butler.”

“Noted. Close it anyway.”

“Such a bossy captain.” Abelardus staggered back through the now-empty hold, passing Alejandro, who had strapped himself to the wall and had his arms and legs wrapped around Durant so neither of them would fly out.

Behind them, as the city ambled past agonizingly slowly below the barge, the first of the Alliance ships cleared the hospital and turned its nose in their direction.

“Leonidas?” Alisa glanced at his map. “I’m going to pick a wide alley unless you have any better ideas. Is there a sewer access point or anything near here?”

“Not the sewers again,” Alejandro groaned.

“Better than being dead.”

“We all need to get back to sickbay on the ship.”

“That’s the ultimate goal, but I can’t lead the military straight to the
Nomad
.”

“Head two miles north-northeast,” Leonidas said. “See that mountain in the park? There are mines in it.”

“
Mines
? In the middle of a metropolis?” Despite her skepticism, Alisa turned them in that direction.

“Old ones. This says they’re a tourist attraction now. There’s a ride that goes into them.”

“So you want us to crash into an amusement park?”

“There are hundreds of miles of tunnels,” Leonidas said, pointing at his holodisplay.

Alisa glimpsed words such as haunted, history, and exciting.

“Escaping into old mines is not going to get us to sickbay,” Alejandro growled. “If we don’t receive treatment soon—”

“We’ll jump out the back before the crash.” Leonidas glanced toward the flapping door. Abelardus was back there but hadn’t managed to close it yet. The frame must be warped.

Alisa raked the control console with her gaze. “This ship doesn’t have a hover option.”

“Just put us on a crash course, fly low, and curve around the mountain. When we’re out of the other ships’ sight, we’ll jump.”

“Onto
pavement
?” She doubted they would be out of sight for long. More Alliance ships were in the air, and the lead one had already halved the distance between them.

“I’ll look for something soft to land on. Be ready to jump.” Leonidas hit a button on his map, leaving the netdisc there as he sprang from his seat. He ran to the back, grabbing Durant from Alejandro’s arms, and headed for the flapping door.

Alisa cursed him, the barge, the Alliance, and the entire situation as she flew them low, heading toward a flashing dot on the map. The mine entrance, she presumed.

At the base of the mountain, antigrav towers, roller coasters, and countless rides she couldn’t name rose from pavement bedecked with tents and kiosks. Signs pointed toward the haunted mines. The barge was flying low enough that people looked up, shielding their eyes from the suns as it roared over the park.

As Alisa took them around the contours of the mountain toward the mine entrance, she spotted a river winding down the slope. With the way it snaked and curved as it flowed into the flatter area, she wagered it wasn’t natural. People were riding inflatable tubes down the center, and fake-looking trees thrust up from either side of the channel.

“We’ll jump out over the water,” Leonidas called back. “Set the ship to crash and get back here.”

“Who doesn’t love those moments when your cyborg is crazier than your pilot?” Alisa muttered, lining the barge up with the mine entrance. She tilted the nose up, deciding that slightly higher on the mountain would be better. The crash would be less likely to hurt innocent people then.

Though her instincts cried out for her to stay at the controls and try to land them safely, she leaped from her seat and ran to the back. Alejandro, Abelardus, and Leonidas, with Durant in his arms, were already there. Someone had opened the other door. For the moment, only the slope and the amusement park and the winding river were visible. The Alliance ships hadn’t rounded the mountain yet.

Leonidas looked back at her, meeting her eyes, and she could tell he was wondering if he should try to jump with her in his arms in addition to Durant.

“Go,” Alisa ordered, glancing back. The mountainside filled the view through the windshield. They only had a few seconds.

“We’re over it,” Abelardus barked, and jumped first.

Alejandro went after him. Leonidas waited for Alisa to creep up to the edge. They were about thirty feet above the water. Alisa hoped it was deeper than it looked.

“Ready?” he said. “Go.”