Arkadian Skies: Fallen Empire, Book 6

by Lindsay Buroker

  “No, we would have ended up in a battle sooner when they boarded and didn’t find crates of mushrooms in our cargo hold. Besides, you like battles.”

  “True.” His eyes gleamed as he gave her a brief smile.

  “You didn’t rip off Delta Five’s arm and throw it on a rooftop, did you?” she asked, remembering what had happened to the last android he had faced.

  “Of course not. There aren’t rooftops in spaceships.”

  “I fear the Alliance is going to end up wanting you for more than what’s in your head.” Alisa guided the Nomad over land, avoiding a coastal suburb full of skyscrapers, elevated trains, and low-flying shuttles in favor of a less densely populated path.

  “It wouldn’t be the first time. Do you want me at the sensor station?” Leonidas pointed a thumb toward the monitor behind her seat.

  “Why? Expecting trouble?”

  “Of course. That controller believed your story too readily. In the empire, a ship without an ident wouldn’t be allowed to roam the airspace over a city.” He pulled out the fold-down seat to sit at the sensor station behind Alisa.

  “I’m not sure whether to hope for less efficiency from the Alliance or not,” Alisa said, waving toward the sensors. If he wanted to watch for trouble, let him. “In this case, I believe I will hope for inefficiency, bloated bureaucracy, and administrators distracted by paper cuts.”

  Despite Leonidas’s concerns, they passed over miles and miles of suburban terrain without squadrons of police or military ships appearing to chase them. Here and there, craters and destroyed buildings marked the landscape, reminders of the war, but the locals were rebuilding quickly. Automated cargo haulers floated materials down streets, and robots and humans worked together to erect structures. Already, the area appeared far more intact than it had on the news casts from the last year of the war.

  One suburb blended into another until the coordinates informed Alisa that they had crossed into Laikagrad proper. She veered toward her chosen landing spot.

  “Now you have me conjuring up ways I could lure Admiral Tiang down to a meeting,” Leonidas said dryly, surprising her since they had been flying in silence for a while. “After Alejandro wakes up Durant and you get the information you need from him.”

  Though pleased, Alisa kept her smile small and didn’t say anything smug, other than, “Good.”

  “If I do decide to contact him, I’ll leave you out of it. I appreciate your offer, but I don’t want you getting into trouble. More trouble than usual, I should say.”

  Her smile changed to a scowl.

  “Trouble because of me,” he added quietly.

  She kept her face toward the view screen and her back to him, so he wouldn’t see her scowl. On the one hand, it was noble of him not to want her to come to any harm because of her association with him, but on the other, it irked her that he wouldn’t trust her to choose what was best for herself. She wanted to help him.

  “Who’s going to hold a gun on the admiral while he does your surgery?” she asked calmly. Perhaps appealing to his logical side would help. “You need me for that. I’m fairly certain there would be repercussions for that, regardless of whether I go along with you to meet him and throw a bag over his head in a dark alley.”

  “That’s not quite how I imagine a meeting going. But as for the rest…” He paused, perhaps debating whether he truly needed her, or perhaps considering whether he would feel safe allowing an enemy to operate on him without supervision. “I could tell him that I forced you to work for me. Or I could take my chances alone with him, and he’d never have to see you or the Nomad.” His gaze shifted toward the landscape, the houses and streets blurring past below them.

  “Leonidas, I want to help you,” Alisa said, the calmness escaping her. “You can’t protect yourself when you’re unconscious, and there are people who want you dead. Or worse. If your admiral is loyal to the Alliance now, you might wake up with some truth-telling torture implants in your brain and someone demanding to know where the prince is.”

  “If I go through with this, I wouldn’t want you to—”

  She turned in her seat. “Stop trying to protect me from loving you, damn it.”

  Leonidas blinked.

  This time, Alisa did scowl where he could see it. Not at him but at herself. She hadn’t been ready to admit to—or use the word—love. It had slipped out. She wasn’t even sure if she meant it in the sense of emotional love or just caring or—suns’ hells, she didn’t know.

  “Listen,” she said, groping for words even as she asked him to pause to consider them. “I may not have known who you were when we first started working together, but I do now, and I know what I’m getting into when I volunteer to help you with things. Or when I want to sleep in your bed.” He opened his mouth, but she stretched out her finger and placed it on his lips. “I know you would feel guilty if you hurt me or believed yourself responsible for the situation in which I was hurt, but you have to realize that I’m my own person, responsible for my actions, and I’m damned stubborn. Sometimes foolish too. If I get myself hurt or killed, that’s because I wanted to live life and enjoy it. And I wanted to love and enjoy that too.” She lowered her finger. He looked faintly stunned—or maybe horrified. “I can’t spend my life hiding behind someone’s armor.”

  “Alisa…” He sighed and dropped his chin to his chest, appearing more stunned than enlightened as he laid his forehead against the back of her seat.

  “Leonidas,” she said, and pushed her fingers through his thick hair, the strands tickling her skin. She leaned her own head down, her mouth close to his ear. “I want to help you find your expert, someone who can fix all of your problems. Even though it would be nice if you had functioning sex organs, it would be even better if you could sleep through a night without nightmares. So you could have a family and not worry about hurting them. So you could have all of your dreams. If that means kidnapping some admiral, then so be it.”

  A beep came from the console, and Alisa turned in her seat, adjusting their course and starting their descent.

  A soft breath warmed the skin on the back of her neck, and a sweet tingle ran down her spine. Leonidas shifted her braid aside and kissed her, letting his lips linger. He touched the side of her head with his hand, combing his fingers through her hair. She promptly wished it were down so he could more easily do so.

  “It’s wrong of me to be pleased that you want to commit crimes on my behalf,” he murmured against her skin, “but I can’t help it. It gratifies me, and… it titillates me.”

  Alisa swallowed, not quite trusting her voice. “I didn’t know you could be titillated.”

  “Intellectually if not physically.”

  “I do like intellectual men.”

  She also liked the feel of his lips against her skin, the light touch of his fingers against the side of her head. If she hadn’t been trying to find a spot to land amid towering piles of wreckage, tires, and the hulls of airplanes, autos, and trains, she would have twisted in her seat to kiss him. She had meant what she’d said, but she would be disappointed if he got his wheel fixed and didn’t let her roll it out for a spin.

  “Oh?” he murmured. “Why are you letting a thugly cyborg kiss your neck then?”

  “It feels good. And he’s not as thugly as he looks.”

  “Even if I can’t be aroused,” he said, speaking so quietly that she barely heard him, “I have longed for this kind of intimacy with someone for a long time. It’s different from… You’re close to your comrades in battle, of course, and sometimes in a way you can never be with people who you haven’t gone through war with, but it’s not… tender.” He kissed her neck again before leaning back.

  Disappointed with the coolness of the air that replaced his lips, she caught his hand before he could withdraw it too. It was probably foolish since she was guiding them in for a landing with her other hand, but she kissed it and held it in her grip.

  “Tender is nice,” she said when she found her v
oice, “but just to warn you, I still want to shove you up against some walls and ravish you.”

  “It’s not easy to ravish a cyborg.”

  She snorted. “Tell me about it.” Since she needed her hands for the final landing, she reluctantly let his go in favor of taking the controls. “For the record, you can sit at my sensor station anytime without asking for permission if your intent is to sit back there and kiss my neck.”

  “That wasn’t my intent,” he said. He laid his hand on the side of her neck, rubbing the base of her scalp with his thumb. “I was overcome.”

  If she could have purred, she would have.

  “With tender feelings?” she asked. “I should offer to kidnap people for you more often. Though perhaps it wouldn’t be a bad idea to do a search in this hospital’s databases to see if there’s someone else who might be knowledgeable and skilled enough to perform that surgery. You have the information from the cybernetics research laboratory, don’t you?”

  “I do, but I’ve done many such searches. The surgeries performed for the military cyborg program weren’t the same as simple cybernetic implants for those who have lost limbs or function in a part of their body, or who simply had the money to pay for the upgrades available to civilians.”

  No, Alisa thought bitterly. Those people hadn’t been neutered as a part of their surgeries.

  “And since it will likely involve cutting into my brain, I would like someone who has experience. I know I asked Dr. Dominguez if he might consider studying the research and doing it, but I may have chickened out in the end, even if he had accepted.”

  “Open-brain surgery? Are you sure that would be needed?” Alisa settled the Nomad between two towering rust piles of debris, tilting the ship so that it lay angled at the base of the larger pile. The deck also tilted, but not so alarmingly that people would have trouble navigating the ship. Nonetheless, a protesting squawk drifted up from the cargo hold. “Maybe nanobots could be programmed,” she added.

  “They weren’t twenty years ago. Unless the technology has advanced enough to allow that…”

  Alisa thought he trailed off for dramatic flair, but he was looking back toward the corridor.

  “Captain,” Mica said from the hatchway, “are we in a junkyard?”

  “Yes,” Alisa said.

  “Was it on purpose, or is it because a cyborg was distracting you by rubbing your neck?”

  Leonidas squeezed Alisa’s shoulder and released her. Alisa shot Mica a dirty look, in part for the comment, and in part for interrupting what had been some delightful touching.

  “Where better to hide a decades-old ship that people keep calling a relic than in a junkyard?” Alisa asked.

  “You’re not going to send me out there to drape sheets and towels over it to make it look like its been here a while, are you?” Mica squinted at her.

  “I hadn’t planned to, but that’s a good idea. Thank you for volunteering.” Alisa’s smile might have had a slightly vicious aspect as she considered this excellent revenge for her interrupted neck rub. “But don’t use our sheets and towels. I don’t want them stolen.”

  “Yeah, wouldn’t want to lose those luxurious monogrammed silks.”

  “See if you can find some nearby junk to toss artistically onto the hull. Take Beck,” Alisa added magnanimously.

  “You’re not getting rid of us so you can be alone with Pretty and Muscled, are you?” Mica cocked an eyebrow at Leonidas, who merely gazed back.

  “Of course not. I’d shut the hatch if I wanted that.”

  Mica grunted and walked out, hollering for Beck as she went.

  Leonidas rose to his feet. “I’ll check with Alejandro to see if he’s refined his plan yet.”

  “Leonidas?” Alisa checked the sensors to make sure nobody had followed them, then tapped a few controls to power down the engines and the exterior lights, so the Nomad would appear to be a dead hulk to anyone flying past. Then she hopped to her feet and caught him before he could walk out.

  “Yes?”

  She pushed the hatch shut and slipped her arms around his waist, feeling the warmth of his skin through his T-shirt. She wished it was time for ravishing, but she settled for hugging him and pressing her face to his shoulder.

  “What’s this for?” he murmured, though he accepted the hug, one hand returning to her neck for a languid rub.

  One day, she would let him know how good that felt. “I just want you to have memories of tender moments in case we get out in the city and you start thinking that luring your admiral away from his ship and going off to have him operate on you without me to keep an eye on him would be a good idea.”

  Leonidas did not say anything, but his fingers paused in their massage. Damn, he was thinking about that, wasn’t he? If he was, it was her fault. A half hour ago, he had given up on the idea of that surgery. She’d been the one to change his mind. Wonderful.

  The neck rub resumed, and he said, “I doubt Alejandro will need your help to get into the hospital—and he may have trouble getting extra people in—so I suggest you resume your shopping for combat armor while you’re waiting for him. You liked the suit you tried on back on Cleon Moon, right?”

  The deliberate change of topic made her scowl into his shoulder, but what more could she do to sway him from his pigheadedness? She wondered if all of the imperial cyborg soldiers had been afflicted so. Maybe stubbornness was a desirable trait in someone who fought for a living. A refusal to give up and die. A refusal to let those he was protecting get killed. He had admitted that he had lost people he was in charge of before—how could he not have, when his side had lost the war?—and logically, she understood that it must have shaped the person he was now, but she couldn’t help but find such thinking exasperating, especially when he had originally agreed that it would be good to have her at his back. What had happened since then? He’d realized the kidnapping had gone from theoretical to possible?

  Leonidas lowered his hand and gazed down at her. Waiting for a response.

  “I think Alejandro needs all the help he can get,” Alisa said, reluctantly going along with the topic change, “but I will look for armor. Especially since we agreed that wearing a full suit is the only logical way for me to sleep with a cyborg afflicted with nightmares.”

  “We agreed on that?”

  “You were in the room when I talked about it.”

  “I see. And that denotes agreement?”

  “Absolutely.” Alisa laid a hand on his cheek. “You’ve never been married, so you’ll have to trust me. This is how it works.”

  “Huh.”

  She kissed him, releasing him much sooner than she would have preferred, and opened the hatch. As she walked out, she schemed about far more than armor shopping.

  Chapter 4

  Alisa walked into sickbay to see if Alejandro had come up with a better plan. He was pacing and talking to someone on his comm, the hem of his gray robe snapping as he made irritated turns when he ran out of room in the cramped space. Durant lay on the exam table, as usual, wired up as if he were in a hospital. Ostberg was bent over the patient, shaving him with a laser razor. He was doing an admirable job of taking care of his “uncle.”

  Alisa paused to eye Durant, as usual, feeling a mixture of hope and irritation toward the comatose man, the man who had kidnapped her daughter from her sister-in-law. But since he was also the only person she had access to who knew where Jelena had been taken, she tried to think charitable thoughts.

  “How far are we from the hospital, Captain?” Ostberg asked, meeting Alisa’s eyes.

  “About five miles to the one our doctor here picked out. It was hard to find closer parking.” She didn’t mention that they were in a junkyard, and that Beck and Mica were outside now, doing their best to camouflage the Star Nomad.

  “If I’d brought a thrust bike, I could have gotten him there quickly. Do you think we could borrow a bike and I could pull him there on a hover gurney? I’d be in and out, real fast. The grubs would never
see me.”

  “I, ah, the grubs?”

  “Er, uhm.” Ostberg glanced to Alejandro. For help?

  Alejandro, still pacing and speaking to someone else, did not acknowledge him.

  That’s a term we have for mundanes, Abelardus spoke into her mind dryly. So thoughtful of him to monitor her frequently.

  Sounds derogatory, Alisa replied silently, wondering where in the ship he was.

  Only if you are one.

  Gee.

  “The doctor could ride behind me,” Ostberg said, apparently deciding that expounding on this daring plan was better than explaining the word. “I could get him there faster than a solar flare.”

  “I’m not sure where we would find a thrust bike here,” Alisa said, thinking that sounded like a polite way to reject the idea of a thirteen-year-old boy careening through the streets with a coma patient bouncing along behind him.

  Ostberg’s shoulders slumped. “Wish I could have brought the one I was racing. It was mega-stellar. But it belonged to my corporate sponsor. She knew my secret and knew I could win. She took half my earnings, else I could have bought a bike.” His forehead wrinkled, and he looked at Alisa. “Oh, uhm, but I still have some money. In case—you never said if we need to pay.”

  Ostberg had been tense and wary when they first met him, but he had grown more bubbly as the trip to Arkadius had progressed and he’d gotten used to them. Maybe he felt safer now, since Alejandro was taking care of Durant, and because everything Alisa had told him had turned out to be true. She had no idea if the things Abelardus had told him were true. Or if what Abelardus told her was true.

  Really, Abelardus shared. Such suspicion.

  Ignoring him, she told Ostberg, “You don’t have to pay. These days, the Nomad gets its money from the brave dinosaur hunters on board.”

  “Yes, I believe you’ll find it an interesting case,” Alejandro said, after listening to what must have been a long medical diatribe on the other end. Or maybe someone had put him on hold. “My patient is the victim of a Starseer attack…. Yes. Completely unresponsive.… I tried nanobots, but they are, of course, limited with what I could program them to do, and since I haven’t done extensive scans… Very limited, yes. This ship is extremely antiquated. I might as well be making splints out of branches and bandages out of caveman furs.”