Mica eased along the upper bridge, checking the workstations. Alisa nodded at her, glad she always stuck to business. A beeping came from a communications station, probably someone wanting an update on the capture of Leonidas.
As Alisa looked back to him, she noticed movement on the massive view screen that stretched from deck to ceiling and side to side at the front of the bridge. The Star Nomad was visible in the bottom corner of the screen, her engines silent, the ship adrift. Though she clearly wasn’t going anywhere, one of the warships must have seen that she had broken away from the tug. It was veering toward the Nomad, its massive body moving to come alongside the freighter, blocking out the influence from the sun, leaving her ship in shadow. Despite Beck’s words, Alisa did not see any sign of the imperial ships yet.
“That’s going to be a problem,” she said, wanting to ease past the tableau of Bennington and Leonidas and toward the helm, but she dared not leave his side. “Leonidas, will you tie her and the others up, please? And find a way to secure the doors? I’m sure her infantry soldiers will figure out where we are any second now.”
“She killed an entire platoon of my people,” Leonidas said, that coldness still in his voice, barely contained rage.
“In the war,” Alisa said slowly. “Right? The war is over now. Our peoples signed a treaty.”
“If the war was over, they wouldn’t be trying to capture me,” he said, his finger tight on the trigger of his rifle. “Commander?” he sneered. “She surrendered her last command. Her ship—the Basilisk, wasn’t it?—was all but destroyed, adrift in space. She surrendered to us, said she had hundreds of injured and that her sickbay was inoperable. We accepted her surrender, sent over a team of medics with my people to protect them and secure the ship. Her people were there, but she wasn’t. She fled in the only working life pod, used the cover of wrecked ships in the battlefield to slip away unnoticed. She had a remote and ordered a self-destruct of her ship from a distance, with my people on it. And hers.”
Leonidas never breathed hard, even after running and fighting, but Alisa could hear his breaths now, deep angry breaths as he stood poised, reliving that moment perhaps, debating whether to unleash his rage. Alisa groped for something to say that would calm him down. Just being here, she would be seen as a traitor to her people, but if they killed the commander, if she abetted in that killing in front of witnesses—and there were a half dozen of them conscious, writhing in pain but also watching the confrontation—she might never be able to set foot on an Alliance planet again.
“I had the prime minister and the chief financier backing the Alliance on my ship,” Bennington said slowly, staring defiantly at him and not begging for her life, though maybe she should have. Alisa doubted Leonidas would kill someone pleading for mercy. A soldier defying him might be another story. “I had to get them to safety. I couldn’t let them fall into your hands.”
“And so you blew up your ship?” he demanded. “With your people on it? With my people on it? The fighting was over and you’d surrendered. What you did was reprehensible. Inhumane.”
“It bought us the time we needed to get away, didn’t it? All of my people swore oaths to give their lives if necessary to overthrow the empire.”
“And they rewarded you with a promotion for that?” Leonidas asked in disgust. “For using the lives of hundreds of people to protect your financial backer?”
Alisa wanted to slide into the seat at the helm, to navigate the tug to block the ship easing closer to hers, but she feared if she stepped away from Leonidas, he would shoot. And that it wouldn’t be at a kneecap.
“Leonidas,” Alisa whispered, trying to press down on his arm to move the rifle away from Bennington’s chest. It did not budge. She might as well have tried to move a granite boulder.
“We didn’t have the resources at that point to risk losing anyone who could pay our troops,” Bennington said.
“No need to pay your troops if you kill them all before payday.”
“What do you know about it, mech? You never had to worry about money, you with your hundreds of thousands in implants. How many impoverished workers were taxed to starvation to pay for that?”
Three suns, this woman had the self-preservation instincts of a rock.
“You know, I can see you’re busy,” Alisa said, making her tone light, hoping it would distract Leonidas from his anger. “Why don’t I tie her up?”
She glanced at the view screen. Her window of opportunity for intercepting the warship was closing. Soon, it would be close enough to clamp onto the Nomad, to fasten its own airlock tube and send more troops over. Alisa would never be able to get her team to engineering to disable the grab beam on that warship. Meant for battle of every kind, it would have five times the troops that the tug claimed.
Yet, she did not lunge for the helm, too afraid of what would happen here if she did. With her hands shaking from fear and uncertainty, she knelt and eased between Leonidas and Bennington. As she grabbed the woman’s hands, intending to pull her up, she was well aware that she had put the muzzle of his weapon right between her shoulder blades. The spacesuit would do nothing to deflect a blast from the blazer rifle.
Leonidas made a disgusted noise and pointed his weapon toward the ceiling. “You’re a maniac, Marchenko.”
“And you would have already fired if you believed killing her was the right thing to do,” she said, her voice sounding more confident than she truly felt. She hauled Bennington to her feet. “I don’t think you have it in you to shoot someone who is defenseless.”
He grunted. “Don’t think too highly of me. I’m just a man.”
Bennington’s lip curled at that proclamation, as if she wanted to protest him being a “man,” but she was finally smart enough to hold her tongue.
“Man enough to find some rope and tie these people up?” Alisa asked, glancing again to the view screen.
This time, Leonidas glanced at it, too, finally seeing her problem. “Yes. Do what you mean to do.” He shouldered his rifle and grabbed Bennington’s arm. He ripped the front of her jacket off, making her gasp in pain, though her pain was surely less than that of the men and women he had shot. Swiftly, he tore the jacket into shreds to fashion makeshift ropes.
Trusting that the moment had passed and that he wouldn’t use one of those ropes to strangle her, Alisa leaped into the main pilot’s seat, clunking her oxygen tank on the back. Though she was far more familiar with one- and two-man Alliance fighter craft, she got the gist of the console layout quickly.
“Any luck over there, Mica?” she asked, calling up power from the engines. She did not want to ease into position the way the warship was. Instead, she gently fired the port thrusters, shifting the alignment of the tug’s blunt nose.
“I’ve pulled up the controls for the suits,” Mica said. “I can see where their people are on our ship.”
“Did you say our ship? Does that mean you’re staying with it instead of job hunting elsewhere?”
“After this? You are a maniac.”
“Was that a no?” Alisa had the nose of the tug lined up perfectly. She buckled her harness. They would probably just bounce off the warship’s shields, but with luck, her surprise would be enough to divert the craft away from the Nomad before it could clamp on.
“I think I’ve found the controls to do what we talked about,” Mica said, ignoring Alisa’s question. “To demagnetize their boots. I wonder if—hm, maybe I can short something out and make it permanent. I’m not sure. But either way, I’ll have to do it one at a time.”
“Hold that thought. And brace for impact.”
“Impact?” Mica blurted, spinning in the chair she had claimed.
Alisa did not pause to explain further. The warship might have noticed their movement by now. She brought the thrusters to maximum for a short burst.
The tug did not surge forward like a racehorse springing from the gates, but it moved quickly enough to take everyone by surprise, including her target. The warshi
p did not have time to veer away as the tug roared in. It slammed into the side of its sister craft with a jolt that would have thrown Alisa from her seat if she hadn’t buckled herself in. Someone did hit the deck behind her as the sound of the crash, warping and crumpling metal, filled her ears.
They had not simply hit the warship’s shields and bounced off, as Alisa had expected. The other ship must have lowered its shields so that it could latch onto the Nomad. She smiled viciously as her console lit up, and alarms started wailing in the tug. That warship wouldn’t be latching onto anything now.
Barely checking the alarms, she reversed the thrusters, planning to back them up so she could maneuver the tug alongside the Nomad. She, Mica, and Leonidas still had to get back, so they needed to be close enough to extend the airlock tube.
But the tug did not move. The painful grinding of metal on metal sounded, and that was it.
“Alisa,” Mica groaned. “You got us stuck.”
Alisa tried the thrusters again, but the console only beeped alerts at her. The ship itself was unresponsive.
“Something that will be sure to delight them,” Mica added, pointing at the screen.
The damaged Alliance warship filled most of the view, but a swath of starry space was visible in the corner. Another ship was coming into sight in that space. An imperial dreadnought.
Chapter 19
The screech of blazer fire shook Alisa from the stare she had locked onto the imperial ship. She leaped from the pilot’s seat, ignoring the alarms wailing and the lights flashing all over the consoles on the bridge. Leonidas stood to the side of the double doors, shooting down the corridor. If the tug’s soldiers hadn’t known where their intruders were before, they surely did after that crash.
“Mica?” Alisa ran to her station, both to check on her progress with the suits and because it would get her out of the line of fire from the doorway.
“I disabled two of them,” Mica said. “I’m not sure if it’s permanent or not. I tried to make it that way.”
“How many men left to do?” Hiding in the dark cubby on the Nomad, Alisa had gotten the impression of close to twenty men stomping around, engaging in cat and mouse with Leonidas.
“Nineteen.”
“Ah.” Alisa had hoped she had overestimated—that would be a lot of angry soldiers waiting in the cargo hold upon their return. Even though Leonidas had clearly shown he could play cat and mouse with the best of them and that he could handle superior numbers, that seemed a lot to ask, even for a cyborg.
“There are more of them coming,” Leonidas said over his shoulder as he ducked behind the wall to avoid fire. Crimson and orange beams lanced through the doorway, one striking the view screen. It exploded with an angry snapping of electricity. Smoke streamed into the air, and the view went black.
“Can you fight a way through them so we can get to the lift?” Alisa asked. She looked around the bridge, hoping to spot some back door that she had missed, but there was only the one exit.
“Not a chance,” Leonidas said, “but we might be able to get to the first intersection there. They haven’t advanced that far yet. If I remember the layout of this ship correctly, there are some maintenance ladder wells that could take us back down to the airlock level.”
Alisa winced at the idea of trying to navigate rungs in the clunky spacesuit. Would Leonidas even be able to fit inside a ladder well in that big armor of his?
“We better go soon if we want to have a chance,” he added. “Their whole crew will be here in a minute.”
Another red beam sizzled through the doorway, this time smashing into the helm.
“Mica?” Alisa asked. “How much time do you need?”
“Ten minutes and a foxy lady,” Mica said, her hands flying over a set of holo controls.
“I’d get you one if I could. Ah, you are referring to the drink, right?”
“Yes.”
Leonidas unleashed another barrage of fire while muttering something about having used up all his rust bangs on the Nomad. He raised his voice. “They’re regrouping, and I think more men just arrived. Marchenko, we have to go now.”
“Come on, Mica.”
“Just three more.”
Alisa pulled Mica out of the seat. “It’ll have to be good enough.”
They joined Leonidas beside the doorway, staying out of the soldiers’ line of sight. Leonidas fired a couple of shots down the corridor, but he also held something in his left hand, a blazer pistol he had snatched from a fallen bridge officer. In the seconds when nobody was firing, Alisa could hear it humming softly.
“What are you doing?” she whispered, gripping Mica’s arm because she kept glancing back toward the station she had been using.
“Overloading it,” he said as the humming increased. His mouth moved, like he was counting, then he leaned out, and fired his rifle several times before throwing the pistol down the corridor.
It skidded along the deck like a hockey puck belted across the arena. Just before it reached the corner where the soldiers were firing from, it blew up, exploding with enough force to make the walls tremble.
“Come on,” Leonidas said. “Stay right behind me.”
He charged into the corridor, not waiting for a response.
Trusting Mica to follow, Alisa raced after him, running as fast as she could in the awkward spacesuit. She did her best to keep up with Leonidas, who blitzed toward the black smoke filling the corridor, firing as he went. Return shots zipped toward him. One slammed into his shoulder. That one might have struck Alisa if he hadn’t been there.
Firing wildly, he stopped just past the intersection he had mentioned. Thanks to the explosion, pockmarks damaged the deck ahead of him, and soot coated the walls. The smoke still clogging the air did not keep the soldiers from firing. Alisa sprinted around the corner, ducking as a blazer bolt streaked past Leonidas. As she went, she waved frantically for Mica to follow. She needn’t have bothered. Mica crashed into her in her haste to avoid more blazer bolts lancing down the corridor.
“This way,” Mica said, passing her to take the lead.
Leonidas ducked around the corner, but did not follow them. Instead, he kept leaning out and firing at the soldiers, keeping them from charging up to the intersection.
Alisa hesitated, not wanting to leave him behind. His shoulder smoldered from where he had taken that direct hit, and a dozen other dents and scorch marks marred his armor. Had any of the attacks reached flesh? How injured was he under that armor?
“Go,” Leonidas barked, pointing his chin toward Mica’s retreating back.
Reluctantly, Alisa obeyed. Even if she stayed, what could she have done to help? Besides, he knew the layout of the ship and where they were going. He could catch up.
Mica led them around two turns, almost sprinting past the ladder well.
“Here,” Alisa called, pointing to the compact hole in the side of a corridor.
Mica cursed as she skidded to a stop and backtracked. “Your armored buddy will never fit in that.”
Alisa, staring at the narrow ladder well, was thinking the same thing.
“He’ll have to find another way down then,” she said, though she hated the idea of leaving him where he would be forced to fight so many, forced to kill if he wanted to avoid capture. That was everything she had hoped to avoid by coming along.
Someone cried out in the distance, and the sounds of the firefight continued to echo through the corridors.
Mica swung onto the rungs, her large, awkward spacesuit boots slipping off more than once as she descended. Her oxygen tank banged against the wall behind her, and the welding blowtorch she still carried caught in the ladder.
“You might want to leave that behind,” Alisa said.
Mica grunted, freed it, and continued down, not relinquishing the tool. Maybe she planned to make more doors along the way. Alisa followed her, having little more luck navigating in the spacesuit. More than once, she almost fell, but they made it to the bottom deck,
the one that held the airlock hatch.
They did not run into anyone as they raced through the long, white corridors. All of the soldiers must have been on the bridge level, trying to get to their commander, trying to defeat Leonidas. Alisa did not see how he could find his way back down here to join them, especially if he could not fit inside the ladder well. She blinked back tears, focusing on the way ahead. This wasn’t the time to mourn. She needed to get back to her ship.
Mica ran around a corner and came to the dead end where they had boarded earlier. Drying blood stained the deck, but the soldiers Leonidas had shot had disappeared, dragging themselves to sickbay or up to join the fight.
Mica pressed her palms to the hatch on either side of the window, clunking her faceplate as she peered out.
“Can you see the Nomad?” Alisa asked, crowding behind her.
“Yes, but there’s no way the tube will reach over there. You should have been steering us closer to the ship instead of crashing into another one.”
“That other one was about to lock its grab beam onto the Nomad. We wouldn’t have had any chance of getting to it if they’d hauled it away.”
“What chance do we have now?” Mica demanded, stepping back so Alisa could look.
“Plenty. We’re in spacesuits, and that’s space.” Alisa waved at the gap between them and the Nomad.
“Are you crazy? We don’t have rocket packs. We can’t steer ourselves over there. We’ll just end up floating helplessly until our oxygen runs out and we die of asphyxiation.”
“Quit being so dramatic. All we have to do is make sure we push off in a straight line.”
“A straight—that ship must be a thousand meters away, easy. Nobody can jump that straight.”
“It’s not like we need to land on a half tindark coin,” Alisa said. “Anywhere on the freighter, and we can grab on, magnetize our boots, and walk along the hull to the hatch.”
“You are crazy. What happens if we miss?”
[Fallen Empire 00.5 - 03.0] Star Nomad Honor's Flight Starfall Station Starseers Last Command Page 46