Fallen Empire 1: Star Nomad (16 page)

“Do Alliance pilots always talk this much on missions?” Leonidas strode through the room, barely glancing at the crates.

“Oh, yes. We’re a chatty bunch.”

Beck and Yumi were discussing something behind her, and Alisa was tempted to fall back to walk with them. They wouldn’t mind her chatter. But Leonidas would probably say her name and order her to heel if she slowed down.

A few passages opened up to the sides, barely noticeable in the darkness. Since the station had gravity and life support, Alisa wondered why the lights were out and if it would be possible to turn them back on. She would prefer fewer shadows about.

She shined her flashlight into the corridors and along the ceilings, picking up cobwebs dangling in the corners. A layer of dust coated the crates. If anyone was still working here, it had been a while since they ran the cleaning robots through the place.

Ignoring the side tunnels, Leonidas opened the door at the far end of the room. He stepped in, but then halted. Alisa almost bumped into him.

“What is it?” she whispered, steadying herself with a hand on the back of his armor.

Though curious, she didn’t try to look past him, not yet. If something was in the next room, he had the better means to deal with it.

Leonidas took a couple of steps, scanning this new room as he had done with the others. Alisa shined her flashlight across the room—it was another space filled with crates, boxes, barrels, and bags of materials. A few of the bags had been cut open, with fine powder spilled out onto the floor. Cement mix, or something like it? If so, someone had not been careful unloading it. A few crates were scattered in the middle of the room, knocked on their sides. Maybe something had happened to the gravity in here too.

Leonidas let his rifle dangle from its strap and lifted his hands to remove his helmet. It came off with a soft hiss of escaping air. After tucking it under his arm, he looked around again. No, he was sniffing the air in short quick breaths, like a hound.

“It smells like some animal’s den,” he said.

Alisa followed his example, sniffing gingerly. There might have been something more than the scent of stale, recycled air, but she couldn’t identify it.

“Rat droppings?” she guessed.

“No. And it’s from more than that,” Leonidas said, pointing at the floor. “Something big and with a strong musky scent has been in here. Recently.” He looked toward a corridor that opened from the side of the room, the dark tunnel uninviting.

“Not that strong,” Alisa muttered, barely noticing a scent.

She pointed her flashlight at the floor, not sure what he’d been talking about when he’d said
that
. Under the light layer of dust, a stain darkened the gray metal. A puddle shape, a couple of feet across.

“What is it?” she asked. Could he tell? Just from looking?

He looked at her, his face not much more telling with the helmet off. But he did look… grim.

Without putting the helmet back on, he walked about the room slowly, his rifle in one hand again, aiming toward the shadows.

“Is that blood?” Beck asked, coming through the door behind Alisa.

Her stomach flip-flopped as he bent over for a closer look at the stain. It
did
look like dried blood. Yumi squeezed in, too, also looking down.

“I don’t know,” Alisa said, trying to sound calm and not disturbed by the eeriness of the station, even if she was wishing she had stood her ground back on the ship and told Leonidas to go explore on his own.

He was now looking down at something between two crates. Alisa debated if she wanted to know what he had found. It wasn’t until he crouched down and poked at something with his rifle that she walked over to join him.

“Might be something valuable,” she muttered, though she knew she was only trying to fool herself.

She saw the ripped shreds of cloth first, the remains of a curtain or tablecloth in a garish floral pattern. No, she realized with a jolt, glimpsing more of it. Not a curtain. A dress. There was the sleeve. It was bloodstained, the same as the floor.

Leonidas held up a single boot with punctures in it. Teeth marks? Claws? Alisa didn’t know if her mind was traveling to ridiculous places—how would some big predator have found its way onto a research station? Still, the punctures did not look like bullet holes or laser burns.

She shone her flashlight around on the damaged items, then farther into the darkness beyond them. The beam caught on something white. She swallowed. A broken bone.

Leonidas walked over and picked it up, then held it toward the light so she could see. “A human femur.”

Alisa had already recognized it. “Broken in half.”

She slid her beam along the floor, wondering where the other half had gone. Maybe she didn’t want to know.

“Not by a rat.” He walked closer, holding it out toward her. As if she wanted it. But all he did was point to gouges in the bone. Teeth marks.

“No,” she agreed. “Not unless a giant mutated space rat did it.”

He looked at her, once again no hint in his gaze that he appreciated her humor.

“Sorry,” she said. “Was it someone you knew?”

“No.” He laid the bone on top of the closest crate. “The person I seek is a man.”

“I’ve noticed all of the doors are opening for you. Is there a comm? Could you try calling him to see if he’s here?”

“I suspect that if he were here, he would have taken care of this.” He spread a hand, whether to indicate the bloodstains and bones or the mess in general, Alisa did not know.

“You sure? If there was something roaming around killing people in my research station, I’d hide in my lab with a box of ration bars and something heavy in front of the door.”

“This happened a while ago.” Leonidas touched the bone again—it had been completely cleaned of muscle and tendon. “Months ago, likely.”

“A box of ration bars can get you far. So long as you’re bright and don’t open the door when something with claws knocks.”

His eyes narrowed as he looked at her again. “You should get your own set of combat armor if you’ll be out in the system on your own.”

She blinked at the non sequitur. What had prompted that?

“My armor is my ship,” she said.

Much like engineers, pilots weren’t supposed to go tramping around in dangerous places outside of their ships.

“With your mouth, that won’t be enough.”

“Oh, you’re very charming,” Alisa said, understanding his comment now. “How is it there wasn’t a Mrs. Cyborg squatting in my ship with you?”

His jaw clenched, his expression growing frostier than she thought the joke warranted. Unless maybe there had
been
a Mrs. Cyborg once and he had lost her.

She opened her mouth, intending to apologize, but he spoke first.

“You’re quick to claim ownership of a freighter that was registered to a junk man.”

“You looked up who owned it before squatting in it?”

“To see if the owner was alive and if anyone would come for it, yes. You were unforeseen.”

“Sorry to get in the way of your plans.” Alisa was on the verge of reminding him that he would still be sitting on that dustball if it hadn’t been for her, but Yumi joined them first, Beck walking behind her protectively.

“Do we know who these people were?” Yumi asked.

“
People?
” Alisa asked. “Is there more than one, or did you just find…” She kept herself from finishing the thought aloud, that Yumi might simply have found more pieces of the dress wearer. It was too bleak to bring up—everything here was bleak.

“There are some more bones over there. A skull.” Beck pointed toward some crates stacked by the entrance to the side corridor. “And a man’s clothing that’s been ripped up. Also found this.” He held up an Etcher, similar to Alisa’s. “It’s out of bullets.”

“Typical armament for imperial scientists manning a research station?” Alisa asked Leonidas.

“No.” Again bypassing the side corridors, he headed for a door at the end of the room. “According to my map, the labs start in here.”

“It might be a good idea to take the women back to the ship,” Beck said before Alisa and Yumi could move off.

“Oh, that sounds like an excellent idea to me,” Alisa said, “but I doubt he’ll allow it.” She waved at Leonidas.

Beck glowered in that direction, his hands tight on his rifle. Leonidas had moved far enough away that Beck might get a shot off before he raced back here to attack him. Of course, Leonidas had his helmet off. One shot might be all it would take to blow his head off. Assuming Leonidas didn’t sense it coming and dodge in time.

Alisa laid her hand on Beck’s armored forearm on the chance similar thoughts were going through his head.

“Let’s just see what’s here,” she said quietly, turning her back so Leonidas would not hear. “If the station has been abandoned by everyone except—” she glanced at the bones, “—rats, we might be able to salvage valuables without incurring anyone’s wrath.”

“That’s probably why
they
were here,” Beck said, waving his gun at the remains of the dead. “Something sure got wrathful.”

With that feeling of bleakness growing heavier within her, Alisa only shook her head and walked toward Leonidas. If they were close to the labs, this little quest might be over soon. And the labs would be a likely spot for valuables. Probably. She had no idea what kind of research had been going on in them.

Leonidas hadn’t opened the door yet. He was looking at the control panel beside it.
Most
of the control panel. The face of it hung askew, the screws missing and wires dangling out from inside of the wall.

“Someone tried to hack their way through a locked door?” Alisa asked.

“Hacked may be an apt word.” Leonidas stepped aside so she could study the door itself.

Her flashlight beam highlighted cuts and scorch marks in the door, along with some dents that might represent someone’s attempt to open it with bullets. A couple of dents marred the front of the control panel too. Leonidas looked back the way they had come, waving for Beck and Yumi to step aside.

He startled Alisa by taking her hand, his cool gauntleted fingers wrapping around hers.

“What are you doing?” she asked as he directed her multitool so that the flashlight beam pierced the darkness, landing on the door they had come in, one that had slid shut as soon as they all entered. She hadn’t noticed it when they came in since it had been behind her, but the control panel there had also been shot up.

Once they had all seen it, Leonidas let go of her.

“Next time you want to hold my hand, you should ask,” Alisa said. “I have high standards as to who I let fondle my fingers.” The joke came out of habit more than because she thought there was anything funny about the situation. Quite the contrary. Her unease over everything was growing by the second. But she always found it preferable to make jokes than to admit to fear, to vulnerability. Especially now that she was a captain.

As usual, Leonidas ignored her humor. “I’ll see if I can open this one.”

He turned back to the door, lifting the dangling panel and poking at the wires inside. The consummate professional.

“Someone got trapped in here?” Beck said, looking back and forth from door to door. Alisa hadn’t moved her arm, so her flashlight still shone on the damaged panel on the other side of the room.

“And wanted badly to get out, it looks like,” Yumi said quietly. She stood close to Beck, having perhaps lost some of her interest in wandering off to explore.

“Why wouldn’t they have gone that way?” Beck pointed toward the yawning corridor leaving from the side of the room. There was a door on it.

“Maybe that’s where
it
came from,” Yumi said.

“You have any idea what
it
was?” Alisa asked.

“Is,” Yumi whispered.

“Pardon?”

“What it is. There aren’t any animals that can pilot spaceships, so unless someone came and picked it up, it’s still here.”

“Well, that’s comforting,” Alisa said.

Leonidas stepped back from the control panel and considered the door again.

“No luck?” Alisa asked. “Guess we’ll have to leave.”

She was willing to give up her chance at salvage to avoid being eaten by whatever had munched on these people. If they
could
still leave. The doors had opened to let her team walk into the station, so why had they locked when these people had wanted to leave? Had this all happened at the same time as the gravity failed? Maybe the power had failed on the whole station. Or maybe someone had deliberately turned off the power so that the doors wouldn’t work. But who would do that? Not some animal, certainly.

Leonidas shifted his weight so he could lay both of his palms against the door. Metal squealed as his shoulders flexed. The door slid open a couple of inches, and he let go with one hand, lunging to slip his fingers into the gap. From there, he heaved it open with more squeals of metal. It did not retract all the way flush with the jamb, instead hanging crookedly, a few inches still tilted outward on the top, but when he let it go, the door stayed open like that.

“Guess these people didn’t have a cyborg with them to help them escape,” Alisa said.

“I could have done that with a little help from my armor,” Beck said with a sniff.

Leonidas ignored him and walked into a new room. This time, the lights flickered on, gleaming on the shoulders of his crimson armor.

Alisa turned off her flashlight, relieved that they would not have to deal with more shadows. Before putting the multitool away, she commed the ship.

“Marchenko checking in. Anything interesting happening back there?”

“Aren’t you supposed to say more official things than that?” came Mica’s voice in response. “Like, this is the captain. Status report, crew.”

“You’re thinking of the military. I don’t think things have to be that official on a freighter.”

“The doctor and I got bored in NavCom and are playing video games in the rec room.”

“I’ll assume that’s a no, then. You have nothing of interest to report.”

“I’m close to getting the high score on Space Avenger.”

Alisa snorted. She was amazed Finnegan hadn’t ripped the game console out of the table and sold it, though maybe it was so old that it would have cost him more money to tote it out of the junkyard than he would have gotten for it.