Starseers: Fallen Empire, Book 3 (25 page)

“I had help getting this ship out. I’m not sure if my guide is interested in helping again. I haven’t heard from him in a while.” Alisa had lost track of which one was the robed pilot’s dart and had no idea if he was still alive.

The comm on the console flashed. “Captain Marchenko? Are you going to work with us? We’re prepared to fly out of range and lower our shields so we can invite you and your captive aboard. We’d hate for him to wake up while you have him behind you. Cyborgs are known to be irritable when they wake up.”

Leonidas did not say anything, not with the comm open, but Alisa sensed him glaring out the canopy and up at the warship.

“Yes, sir, I’ve heard that,” Alisa said, but she did not answer his other question. The warship was still firing down at the temple. Would it even matter if she got one of the ships out of range and out of the battle? There were two other warships.

She shook her head, second-guessing her plan. It seemed that little could be gained, and much could be lost.

Yes, it will matter
, the pilot spoke into her mind.
We’ve got a lock on the other two warships. Do it.

“I’m ready to follow you, Commander,” Alisa said, glancing over her shoulder.

Leonidas’s brow was furrowed as he gazed back at her. He looked like he was second-guessing his choice to acquiesce too.

She held up one finger, then touched it to her temple, hoping to imply that she was in contact with one of the Starseers. Everything would work out. It had to.

The
Nautilus
, as large as the temple below, rose like a small island lifting into the misty sky. Alisa followed in the Striker, contemplating pretending to lose the ship, so she couldn’t actually fly into its bay. Would that take it out of the fight for long enough? Maybe the commander would sit up there, waiting for her for the fifteen minutes the temple needed.

“We got one, we got one,” someone blurted on the Starseer channel amid spitting static.

“Confirmed. One of the warships is going down.”

Alisa swallowed. Was that true? She looked at her sensor display, but the mist had already enveloped her, leaving it an unreliable source. She could make out the ponderous presence of the
Nautilus
, but little else. Just haze and mist and more mist.

Someone else spoke on the Starseer channel, but it came out garbled, and Alisa could not make out the words.

They rose for several moments, Alisa following close enough to keep visual contact with the warship. She wondered how Farrow knew what the range of the temple’s weapons were. Would he fly all the way out of the mists for this?

She glanced at the clock display. Seven minutes had passed. The temple should only need another ten.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Leonidas asked.

“It’s getting one of the warships out of the fight, hopefully for long enough for the temple to get moving,” Alisa said, not answering the question. “I was told it would be enough to help.”

“Told.” He did not sound amused. “By one of them.”

“Yeah, one has decided to speak into my head. He guided us out through the shield too.”

“The same one who came out robed and led us to this ship?” Leonidas asked.

“I think so, yes.”

“You know that’s Abelardus, right?”

Alisa sucked in a breath. She’d
thought
that voice sounded familiar.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but are you sure you’re acting of your own volition, right now?” Leonidas asked. “I suspect he would like it very much if I fell into the Alliance’s hands.”

Alisa licked her lips.
Had
this all been her idea? Or had someone nudged her into it?

“You agreed to this,” she said, her voice uncertain.

He grunted. “Are you sure
I
was acting of my own volition?”

While Alisa debated her new concerns, the belly of the warship came into view, looming huge and dark out of the mists. Alisa switched from vertical to horizontal flight, almost bumping the hull with the top of her canopy.

“Their shields are down,” she said, realizing they had to be if she had gotten that close.

“Alisa,” Leonidas said, an edge of warning in his voice. “While I don’t think they’ll get anything useful from what’s in my head, I would rather not voluntarily put myself in their hands if there’s not a good reason. Interrogation and death are very likely outcomes here.”

Alisa nodded. “All right. You’re right.” Questioning how much of the idea had been hers to start with, she veered away from the ship, diving back down into the mists. “Mica,” she said, tapping her comm, “blow those explosives. We’ll risk the damage. As long as she can still fly, we ought to be able to get to a city and—”

The Striker halted with a shudder and a groan. Alisa gaped at the dashboard and echoed that groan herself. The shields were still up, but the entire Striker was being held in place.

“I’d been hoping their grab beam wouldn’t work in the mists,” she said.

Leonidas sighed. She winced, certain he was judging her for being weak-minded, for letting herself be manipulated. Damn it. What had she been thinking?

“Do you have a handkerchief?” Leonidas asked.

“Uh?” Alisa patted herself down. In her flight suit, she would have had something—you couldn’t have bodily fluids dripping from your nose and distracting you during combat—but she hadn’t thought to grab anything on the way out of the
Nomad
. “Did my creative flying give you a nose bleed?”

“Something like that.”

She poked into the dusty first-aid kit fastened to the side of the pilot’s seat. The lid opened with a creak, and she suspected it hadn’t been opened since the rusty old craft had first been commissioned. She pulled out a piece of gauze and handed it back to him.

“Any Torovax in there?”

“You want me to take an inventory right now?”

“You’re not needed at the controls.”

“Don’t remind me.” Alisa unfastened the first-aid kit and handed it back to him. She was vaguely familiar with the contents and suspected he would be a lot more likely to find a drug that would charge him with adrenaline rather than a muscle relaxant.

“Thank you. Here,” Leonidas said as the Striker started moving, being pulled inexorably toward the hangar bay doors that were sliding open on the side of the warship. Something touched her shoulder. Her belt with her multitool and Etcher.

“You got my belongings?”

“I grabbed everything on my way out of the basement and visited the armory too.” He patted the bag he had been carrying all along. “Where do you think those smoke grenades came from?”

“I had no idea. Are we, uhm, putting up a fight in there?” Alisa glanced back, wondering what he had wanted the gauze for.

He had already made it disappear somewhere. She did not see any fresh blood dripping from his nose.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “I think they’ll be ready for it. I didn’t get the sense that the commander believed your story about stealing ships and drugging cyborgs. I may end up having to chat with him, whether I want to or not.”

“I’m sorry, Leonidas,” Alisa said as the grab beam pulled the Striker closer to the open hangar bay doors, the vast interior reminding her all too much of the maw of some ancient mythological beast that ate overly curious sailors.

“It’s not your fault. For a couple of minutes, I was oddly amenable to the idea of going in too.” He growled deep within his throat. “Next time I see Abelardus, I
will
throw him out a window.”

The voice that had been speaking into her mind was quiet now. Why wouldn’t it be? It had gotten what it wanted, one of the warships out of the fight and Leonidas delivered into the hands of his enemies.

Chapter 17

Still in the cockpit as the Striker drifted into the
Nautilus’s
hangar bay, Alisa unfastened the seat harness and awkwardly buckled her belt around her waist, so that her Etcher once again rested on her hip. She did not know why she bothered when the Alliance soldiers would simply remove all her weapons, and maybe all of her clothes and all of her dignity, before tossing her into the brig. They would do no better to Leonidas.

Guilt gnawed at her, and she looked over her shoulder at him as the Striker settled to the deck with a soft bump. His knees were still up around his ears, his armored body almost folded in half to fit into the snug seat. She tried to manage a smile. “At least you’ll be able to stretch your legs now.”

He was checking his weapons and only glanced at her. Alisa did not think he was angry with her, but she wished she had never told him to join her in the Striker. She had fought without a gunner on numerous occasions. She could have done so this time too. He would not necessarily have been safe if he had gone in the
Nomad
, but he wouldn’t have been lining up for an interrogation, either.

The sensors still were not working well on the Striker’s control panel, so Alisa could not scan the atmosphere out in the bay, but she saw the big doors slide shut, and she felt the grab beam release her. A red light flashed in the distance. Any second, it would switch to white, letting the soldiers know they could come out and inspect their prize.

“Marchenko,” Leonidas said. She was about to correct the name usage when he did it himself, saying, “Alisa.”

“Yes?” Alisa started to look back again, but movement drew her gaze to the left.

Soldiers in blue and gray Alliance combat armor were striding toward them, followed, several meters back, by a trio of officers in solid blue uniforms with uninspired gray earstars hooked over their ears. They did not have armor or rifles, but a couple wore stunners on their belts, and one of them was carrying a medical kit and something that looked like a tranquilizer gun. She thought of the gas that she had encountered with Leonidas on Starfall Station, gas specifically designed to paralyze a cyborg.

“Don’t get yourself into trouble—more trouble—on my account,” he said. “If you can save yourself—and your reputation—by coming up with a story to explain why I’m not drugged and drooling, do so.”

“Unless you want to take off your armor now and artfully dribble down your chin, I think it’s too late for that,” Alisa said, remembering how the Alliance had thought she was Leonidas’s prisoner back at the skirmish near Perun’s moon. She suspected the odds of fooling anyone a second time were nonexistent. By now, the entire Alliance had probably figured out that Leonidas was her passenger, not her captor.

“Maybe, but you have a scheming mind and may come up with something to explain this to your benefit. If you can do so, do. Don’t risk more for me.” His seat creaked as he leaned forward, laying a hand on her shoulder.

The gesture made emotion swell in her throat, and she reached up, resting her hand on his. His was armored, so it wasn’t exactly an intimate touch, but she held her palm on the cool metal anyway.

She wondered if he had figured out that there was a reason she kept risking herself for him—and offering massages. He seemed a little slow when it came to dealing with flirtations, or perhaps he simply was not interested. For all she knew, he could prefer men. But even if he didn’t want romance, he did seem to care about her. And that made her feel all the worse for having led him here.

The armored soldiers were drawing close so Leonidas extracted his hand.

Alisa took a deep breath and popped the canopy. Several rifles swung in her direction. No, not
quite
in her direction—in the direction of her back seat. She almost felt affronted that nobody was worried about her. Just because she was wearing a fifty-year-old, bullet-slinging gun from some backwater world where there were no facilities for manufacturing BlazTech weapons did not mean she wasn’t a threat…

“Get out,” a woman in armor said, standing slightly ahead of the rest of the squad, her rifle trained unerringly on Leonidas.

“No please?” Alisa asked. “No thank you for coming and we hope you enjoy your stay? Alliance hospitality has deteriorated since I served.”

She worked in that mention of serving in the vain hope that it would make the men less likely to shoot her. Neither the woman who had spoken, nor any of the other soldiers acknowledged her. Their stares never wavered from Leonidas. The three officers had stopped several meters back and also watched him tensely—the one in the lead had gray hair and commander’s tabs. So, Commander Farrow himself had come down for this. That was surprising, given the situation outside.

Her back seat groaned again as Leonidas pushed himself to his feet. He did not seem too worried about making the soldiers twitchy or accidentally drawing fire as he hopped to the deck. Of course, he was as armored as they were and could take a few hits. Alisa did not have that luxury. She eased out of the cockpit slowly, turning around and sliding down to the deck—clearly, none of their hosts thought it would be polite to push one of the mobile ladders over. Deteriorating hospitality, indeed.

“Remove your weapons, power down your suit, and take off your helmet,” the woman in charge said, a sergeant, Alisa assumed. Her armor carried no designation of rank. None of their armor did. Nobody wanted to make it easy for enemies to pick out the leaders in the field.

Leonidas stood calmly, his arms at his sides. He kept his hands away from the rifle hanging across his chest by a strap, but he did not do any of the things the woman ordered. Maybe he was waiting for a please.

“Colonel Adler,” Commander Farrow said after a tense minute passed with neither side doing anything else. “Are you going to be difficult, or are you going to make this easy on all of us?”

Leonidas did not move, but his helmet swiveled a couple of degrees, his faceplate toward the doctor with the medical kit and tranquilizer gun. Alisa had the feeling he might be stalling. Was he trying to buy time for the Starseers? Did he truly care what happened to them? Or maybe he wanted the
Nomad
to get its chance to escape. Or maybe he just dreaded the inevitable.

“Cyborgs aren’t generally in the business of making life easy for Alliance soldiers,” Leonidas said, his faceplate shifting toward Farrow.