Fallen Empire 1: Star Nomad (4 page)

“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.

“That’ll teach you to be unconscious for two months,” she muttered.

Alisa was lucky to have survived that final battle and to be walking again, but she couldn’t help but feel a little bitter over the mediocre medical care the hospital here had been able to provide. Had she gone down on a more sophisticated world, with all of the modern medical tech, she might have been out in a week or two.

She tugged the hoverboard into motion again. She was alive now and had her health back. That was what mattered. That and the fact that she was going home to be with her daughter again. Focusing on that made it easier to avoid thinking about the fact that Jonah was gone and that there was no longer a home waiting for her back on Perun. She hadn’t figured out yet what she would do after she had Jelena back.

When Alisa led the hoverboard up the
Nomad’s
ramp, she found Mica on her hands and knees in a corner of the spacious cargo hold, a welding mask pulled over her face. She gripped a soldering gun in gloved hands, navigating a seam along an interior bulkhead.

“Does that mean we’re not as ready for space as I was hoping?” Alisa asked, looking around as she brought the supplies inside.

She did not see the crowd of passengers she had hoped would be waiting, but perhaps they had already been shown to their cabins? She
did
see a row of burly men lined up against the bulkhead next to the stairs that led to the upper decks. The big open cargo hold took up the bottom two-thirds of the ship, with only the engine room sharing space with it down on this level. Living quarters and navigation lay up top. There was nothing as fancy as an elevator on this old ship.