Fallen Empire 1: Star Nomad (12 page)

Pushing the ship to maximum speed, Alisa took them away from what remained of the asteroid—about half of it. The formerly roundish rock now looked like a cheese wheel that had been attacked by rats. The bulky mining ship turned to follow the
Nomad
. More asteroids loomed ahead, larger now on the viewing screen, a mix of giant rocks, some almost moon-sized and projectiles as small as a fist. Hit either one fast enough, and it would screw up a ship. Any sane pilot would slow down; Alisa tried to get even more juice from the engines.

Another torpedo chased them into the asteroid belt. It blew up just off their tail, and Alisa’s hand tightened on the flight stick, the
Nomad
rocking as the force brushed the edge of the shields. The sound of chickens squawking in complaint drifted up from the cargo hold. Alisa sighed. At least her two human passengers weren’t up here complaining. Yet.

The
Nomad
would already have outpaced a regular mining ship. As Mica had suggested, this one must have improved its engines. But Alisa held out hope. The asteroids would be more of an obstacle to the pirates as their big ship struggled to maneuver around them. Unless they just shot them into oblivion.

She glanced at the cyborg. His face was hard to read. Cyborgs probably weren’t allowed to look afraid. “I don’t suppose you’d like to hop on the vid-comm, flex your cyborg muscles, and tell those pirates that a platoon of your kind will be waiting in here in combat armor if they try to board us?”

“My
kind
?”

“You know, brawny and full of enhanced machine bits.”

Three suns, he wasn’t going to pick this moment to be offended by her irreverent streak, was he? She didn’t like him, but it wasn’t as if she intentionally wanted to irritate him, not now. If they did get caught and boarded, she would need his help.

“I’m just as human as you are, Marchenko,” he said stiffly, then pushed himself to his feet. “I’ll put on my combat armor, but I suggest you
not
mention I’m here. Let them think Beck is your only defender.”

From the tone of his voice, she couldn’t tell if that was a dig at Beck or not. It probably was.

“Cyborg?” she asked, glancing back, but only for an instant. They were deep within the asteroid field now, and she couldn’t divert her attention for long.

“What?”

“You have a name?”

He grunted. “What do you care?”

A fair enough question, considering they had been on the ship together for more than a week, and she hadn’t tried to get to know him.

“I don’t,” Alisa said, “but if they have cyborgs, too, it could get confusing when I’m yelling, ‘Cyborg, shoot, shoot.’” She threw a smile over her shoulder, though she didn’t know why she bothered. It wouldn’t assuage his prickly feelings toward her.

Indeed, he was staring at her, his eyes hard. She expected him to turn and walk away without answering.

“Leonidas,” he finally said.

Leonidas? What kind of name was that? Something out of Old Earth mythology? She wagered that whatever it was, he had made it up on the spot.

“Great,” was all she said. “Can I call you Leo?”

“No.” This time, he did turn and walk away.

Alisa hoped that seeing him in his big red suit of armor would make those pirates wet themselves if they managed to board her ship.
Not
that she intended to let that happen.

She dove between two huge reddish-brown rocks, hugging the curve of one and changing direction so that she could dart farther into the field while the asteroid blocked the pirates’ view. She swooped left and right, up and down, putting as many rocks between herself and the mining ship as possible. She thanked the gods that they were a long ways from Opus and Rebus so the gravitational pull wasn’t as much of a tangled mess as it was when flying between the three suns.

Asteroids skimmed past, near misses making her flinch, though her hand remained steady on the stick. A few not-so-near misses bounced off the shields, but they were rare. Alone in NavCom, with nobody’s judging eyes upon her, she found the peaceful relaxed state of mind where her body reacted of its own accord, the ship like an extension of her own nervous system as her brain processed information without conscious effort on her part.

As she had predicted, the mining ship fell behind. Alisa eased back on her breakneck speed and was about to call back that the cyborg—Leonidas—wouldn’t need to dress to kill after all. Before she could, a warning bleep came from the sensor panel. There was a ship ahead of her. No, three ships ahead of her.

“
Now
what?” she groaned.

Chapter 8

The first ship that appeared, coming over the rim of an asteroid like a sun rising, made Alisa suck in a startled breath. It was a Striker-18, the exact spacecraft she had flown her last two years in the army, the spacecraft she had been flying in the final battle when she crashed. What was the Alliance doing out here?

Thrusters firing, the small but deadly vessel flew toward her. She was of half a mind to open the comm and try to talk to the pilot, but two more ships flew out from behind boulders ahead of and to either side of her. Those two were also one-man craft, but they were imperial bombers, not Alliance ships.

As Alisa dove under the asteroid the first ship had just appeared above, she realized that these all had to be stolen ships, not representative of either Alliance or imperial forces. She streaked downward and away from all three, immediately guessing from their positions that they were with the pirates and that they had been sent out here to cut her off. They either had orders to destroy her or to delay her so the mining ship could catch up. Well,
neither
was going to happen.

Unfortunately, the one-man ships not only outnumbered her, but they were faster and more maneuverable than the
Nomad
. They zipped after her, shooting a stream of blazer bolts, peppering her rear shields. The attacks weren’t as powerful as those torpedoes the other ship had fired, but she knew from firsthand experience that a one-man craft could do enough damage to bring down a bigger ship eventually. Worse, the sensors showed the bombers readying torpedoes of their own.

She weaved and dove through the asteroids, her mind not as calm and her reflexes not as instantaneous as before. She was too busy trying to come up with a plan, with a way to outsmart those bastards. That was all she could do, since she had no weapons and no way to outrun them.

She
did
notice that they did not fly through the asteroids as quickly as she would have in those small, quick vessels. They might not be as experienced as she. She led them into a denser portion of the asteroid field, hoping she might get lucky and one would splat against the rocks. Too bad the pilot’s shields would save him from utter destruction even if that happened.

“Bombers?” Leonidas asked, back in the hatchway, this time in his red armor, his helmet under his arm.

Even though she knew it was him, and that he was the same man—cyborg—he had been a few minutes ago, a jolt of fear ran through her at seeing that armor in her peripheral vision. Odd that memories of cyborgs storming her ship in the past could terrify her more than the attack that was going on right now.

“Yeah,” she said, her voice dry. “Two of them are.”

“You have a gauntlet you can lead them through?” He set his helmet on the co-pilot’s seat and leaned over the back of it, too large to sit in it now that he was suited up.

She was heading into a gauntlet right now, the asteroids small and dense, dust turning the dark space ahead into a pale brown cloud. “I do. What are you doing?”

He had started typing commands on the keyboard nestled into the console amid the switches and buttons. She almost objected out of principle, irritated that he presumed to touch her controls, but she couldn’t spare the attention to speak. Asteroids loomed in all directions, threatening to smash into their shields enough times to wear them out. Already the energy panel read half depleted, and she could feel the ship’s core throbbing through the decking as it tried to create more power to fuel them.

“With luck, lowering their shields,” he said, punching in a long string of numbers and symbols on the keyboard.

“How?”

Alisa banked around a giant asteroid, then dove as she spotted a field of large ones mixed with thousands and thousands of smaller ones. That ought to challenge any pilot. The two imperial bombers chased right behind her, side by side, weapons firing up her ass. Cheeky bastards.

“Command codes.”

“What the hell are those?” Alisa had never heard of some remote code that could force a ship to lower its shields. If there had been such a thing during the war, her people would have been using them left and right.

“Codes designed to keep Alliance thieves from stealing our hardware.” He eyed her out of the corner of his eyes, then tapped a button on his armor. Twin razor prongs popped up above his wrist in a spot where if he punched someone in the face, the follow-through would probably gouge his opponent’s eyes out. “There are codes to lock up the controls on the various imperial ships and other ones to force them to drop shields. They’re hardwired in at the factories.”

“I don’t suppose you can make their controls lock up now?” Though curious as to what the knives were for, Alisa couldn’t focus on him. She banked and slid the
Nomad
under the belly of an asteroid, still having a notion of losing her pursuers. The Alliance ship had fallen behind, but those two bombers refused to be shaken.

“I don’t remember those codes,” he said dryly. “I’ve never had an occasion to use them. Where’s the scanner? That thing?”

She was too busy flying as close as she could to the crater-filled body of the asteroid to respond. He must have answered his own question, because he used one of the razor prongs to cut his finger. He dribbled a drop of blood onto the scanner. It flashed blue in acknowledgment.

“
Now
what are you doing?” Alisa left the shelter of the one asteroid, weaved through a field of debris, and headed for two more giant asteroids, these almost hugging.

“Identifying myself.” Leonidas typed something else on the keyboard, then held his finger over the transmit button. “I’m ready. Can you put them into a position where it will matter?”

“Trying.”

Alisa veered straight for the narrow gap between the two massive asteroids. Even as she approached, it seemed to grow smaller, the rocky bodies drifting closer together. She flipped the
Nomad
sideways to make its profile narrower. The ship shuddered as the shields bumped against rock, and she felt the shimmy in the flight stick.

“Easy,” she murmured. “Easy.”

The two bombers followed right behind her. The gap widened slightly, and Alisa followed the curve of the bigger of the two lumpy asteroids. For a moment, its body hid the bombers from her and vice versa. She flew in a loop, flipping the
Nomad
and throwing all of the defensive power into the forward shields.

Leonidas sucked in a surprised breath as the bombers raced around the curvature of the asteroid, straight at them. Alisa held her course. The bombers split, one heading left and one right to keep from crashing into her.

“Now,” she ordered, glancing at Leonidas.

He hit the transmit button. The bomber that had gone left steered straight at the asteroid, its pilot clearly flustered by the near miss. He tried to pull up, but not in time. A protrusion on the lumpy surface clipped the bottom half of his ship, and he blew up, a fiery ball leaping from the surface of the asteroid.

The second bomber veered in the other direction and was in no danger of crashing into the big asteroid, but his wing must have clipped one of the smaller rocks. With his shields up, it wouldn’t have mattered, but his velocity made the impact forceful enough that it knocked him off his course. He spun in circles, thrusters flaring orange as he tried to stop himself. Before he managed to slow the craft, it smacked into another asteroid and exploded.

Alisa did not stick around to check for survivors. That Alliance craft was still out there, and she didn’t know any codes that could make it lower its shields. At least the big mining ship had disappeared from her sensors. She had avoided the smaller vessels’ attempts to drive her back toward it, and if it was still following them, it had fallen too far behind now to matter.

Leonidas stepped back, flicking his wrist so that his razor blades disappeared into his armor again. He picked up his helmet and tucked it under his arm. His expression was bland, as if this was all in a day’s work. If he had been impressed at all by her flying, he didn’t show it. Not that she cared one whit about impressing him.

He produced a handkerchief from a pocket inside the back of the helmet lining, spit on it, then wiped the scanner clean of his blood. Next, he put it away and produced the netdisc he had shown her in his cabin. When he activated the holodisplay, the map and coordinates appeared again.

“We may still be on their sensors,” he said. “Take a circuitous route to get to our destination.”

“I’m not an idiot,” Alisa snapped, annoyed that he was presuming to give her orders, even if they made sense.

He turned his bland expression on her, then walked out without another word.

It occurred to her that she should have thanked him for his help. He’d proven himself the most useful member of her crew twice now, first with blowing up that ledge—nobody else could have climbed up to set those explosives, nor had anyone else possessed explosives in the first place—and now here. But, she reminded herself firmly, he
wasn’t
a part of her crew. He wasn’t on the docket, and he hadn’t claimed any loyalty to her or anyone else here. If he had his way, he would be in charge. From the way he barked orders, he was used to that. Well, not on
her
ship.

Scowling, Alisa turned her attention back to flying—they were still deep within the asteroid belt, giving her plenty to worry about. Still, she found her gaze shifting over to that scanner. Had he cleaned it because he was polite and didn’t want to leave a mess on her console? Or because he wanted to make sure she couldn’t get a sample of his blood? It wasn’t as if she had access to the imperial census archives that kept track of every subject by DNA and fingerprints.