“Perhaps not happily,” he said, one corner of his mouth curving upward. “I appreciate that you cared enough to help.” His head tilted to the side, his expression turning faintly bemused. Apparently, he hadn’t had the same revelation that Mica had shared in regard to why Alisa wanted to help him. He stepped forward and rested a hand on her shoulder. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” she whispered.
She licked her lips, aware of how close he was. She could almost feel the heat radiating from his body. There was nothing sexual about his gesture or the look he was giving her—if anything, his grave nod seemed to be a gesture that one gave to a comrade. An appreciated comrade, perhaps, but nothing more.
That was fine, she told herself firmly. As she had stated on several occasions, he definitely wasn’t her type. He didn’t get her humor, and she didn’t even think he could laugh. Besides, she had not been at Jonah’s funeral, hadn’t had time to formally sit down and say goodbye. It was far too soon to think of relationships with other men. It would feel like a betrayal to his spirit to turn her back on him so quickly.
As logical as her thoughts were, her body did not quite grasp them, and she found herself thinking about how long it had been since she’d had sex. Jonah might not have been gone from the universe for long, but it had been nearly a year and a half since she’d been home on leave. The warmth of Leonidas’s hand on her shoulder made her imagine his touch in other places, and she wondered if kissing him would be similar to or different from kissing another man. What would he do if she tried? Be surprised and step back? Be surprised and enjoy it? Not be surprised? He was perceptive enough in other matters, so it seemed crazy to think that he wouldn’t be aware of the effect he could have on a woman.
A throat cleared in the corridor.
Alisa jumped back, heat flushing her cheeks as if she had been caught doing something she shouldn’t. No, just thinking libidinous thoughts…
Leonidas simply lowered his arm and turned, no hint of red tingeing his cheeks. Probably because he hadn’t been thinking libidinous thoughts.
“Leonidas,” came Alejandro’s voice from the corridor, his tone neutral.
Had he seen Leonidas with his hand on her shoulder? Had he seen her drooling on him?
“May I speak with you?” Alejandro added.
“Yes.” Leonidas gave her that nod again and said, “Goodnight, Marchenko—Alisa.”
She leaned against the back of the pilot’s seat, watching him walk out and once again told herself that she was not developing feelings for him, and she definitely wasn’t melting into a puddle because he had deigned to use her first name.
He and Alejandro disappeared down the corridor toward their cabins. Their conversation wasn’t going to be held anywhere so open as the mess hall.
Alisa checked the sensors and told herself to get that shower she had been thinking about—perhaps there was a reason Leonidas and his enhanced olfactory senses hadn’t given her anything more than a friendly pat on the shoulder. Yet, she found herself glancing at the comm console, thinking of eavesdropping again. It had given her some good intelligence last time—and shown her what an ass Alejandro was. If he was planning something that could affect her and her ship when they got to Arkadius, shouldn’t she know about it? Or was it just that she wanted to know what he was saying about her, if anything?
Grumbling about her questionable morality, Alisa closed the hatch, slid into the pilot’s seat, and flipped through the switches to open the comm in Alejandro’s cabin.
“She said we could stop at Starfall,” Leonidas was saying.
“No mention of an extra fee?” Alejandro asked dryly.
“No.”
“All right, good. I don’t trust the Starseers to have any interest in the empire or want to help us. Having your armor repaired to 100% could be important.”
“I may not be very useful against them,” Leonidas said. “My mind is no different from yours.”
“Some of their attacks and defenses strike the mind. Others strike the body. I’ll do my best not to pick a fight with any of them, of course, but we need to be ready.”
“I’m always ready.”
“The gods themselves can be surprised on a beautiful day,” Alejandro said, quoting scripture.
“Is that supposed to be a warning about letting my guard down?”
“Advice only. I want to part ways from Marchenko and this ship when we reach Arkadius.”
Alisa frowned at the comm station. She would be happy to let Alejandro part ways—he would be lucky if she didn’t fly over one of Arkadius’s many oceans and dump him in. But even with the warrant on Leonidas’s head and the fact that it would make her ship a target, she would regret having him leave.
“Did you get Ms. Moon to agree to come with us independently?” Leonidas asked, making Alisa wonder what kinds of conversations Alejandro, Yumi, and Beck had shared back here on the ship while the soldiers had been tramping around.
“No, but I’ve had enough of the captain interfering with my quest.”
“She’s been ferrying you around to further your quest.”
“Fine, I’ve had enough of her threatening me, then. She knows too much. Leaving her with what’s in her head is almost as unpalatable an idea as staying with her, but I assume your stance hasn’t changed.”
“It hasn’t,” Leonidas said coolly.
“We’ll get what we need to know from Yumi, then hire someone else to taxi us around if need be.” Alejandro grunted. “I suppose it’s too much to hope that what I seek is on Arkadius.”
“Since I still don’t know what you seek, I couldn’t say.”
“I’ll tell you when we get there. You will come with me, won’t you? I can pay you for your time. It is my hope that this can be finished in a few months, and then you can return to your own quest.”
Alisa willed Leonidas to tell Alejandro to stuff his payment and his quest, that he was going to accept her job offer and stay here to help her with her quest. If he helped her find her daughter, she would fly him wherever he needed to go to find what he sought. Damn, she wished she had told him that when they had been alone together. Instead, she’d been thinking about kissing him.
“If the emperor’s dying wish was for you to fulfill your quest,” Leonidas said, “I’ll help you do it. There’s no need for payment.”
She heard the hatch clang softly, and Alisa straightened in her seat, realizing he had walked out. She flicked the comm button off, then looked toward the corridor, hoping Leonidas would return to keep her company. But nobody walked into NavCom to join her. Her heart was heavy at the idea of him going with Alejandro and disappearing from her life once they reached Arkadius, but so be it. She had to find her daughter. Being caught up in the dying wishes of an emperor she had done her best to dethrone would only delay her—or worse.
“This is for the best,” she told herself. “It’s for the best.”
THE END
Turn the page for a BONUS SHORT STORY: Starfall Station
Starfall Station
(a Fallen Empire story)
Hieronymus “Leonidas” Adler waited until late in the space station’s day cycle to walk down the ramp of the Star Nomad, his hover case of damaged combat armor floating behind him. He could have carried the two-hundred-pound case easily, but he was a wanted man—a wanted cyborg—and he did not wish to call attention to himself by displaying inhuman abilities. Not here, not on a space station controlled by the self-proclaimed Tri-Sun Alliance.
His mouth twisted with bitterness. Almost everything was controlled by the Alliance now. When the empire had maintained order over the dozens of planets and moons in their vast trinary star system, Leonidas would have walked proudly onto the station, his head high as he wore his Cyborg Corps military uniform. He wouldn’t have waited until the lights dimmed for night to skulk into the concourse on his errand.
Alert for trouble, Leonidas spotted Alisa Marchenko, the captain and pilot of the Star Nomad,
when she was still hundreds of meters down the concourse. This did not take enhanced vision since she was leading a train of hoverboards, each piled more than ten feet high with crates. Her security officer, Tommy Beck, also walked at her side, his white combat armor bright and undamaged. Why wouldn’t it be? He had spent most of their last battle hiding under the console in the navigation cabin.
Leonidas waited at the base of the ramp for them to approach in case they bore news that could affect him. Such as that squadrons of police officers or Alliance army soldiers were roaming the station, looking for stray cyborgs.
“Evening, mech,” Beck called to him as they approached, his expression more wary than the cheerful tone would have implied. “Are you waiting to help us load these boxes into the cargo hold?”
“No,” Leonidas said, his own tone flat. He would help if Marchenko asked him to, but was a passenger, not crew. Besides, he had little interest in assisting the security officer, a man who had served in the Alliance army during the war and who preferred to call him mech rather than use his name.
“Going to get your armor fixed, Leonidas?” Captain Marchenko asked, giving him a warm smile and waving at his case.
Alisa, he reminded himself. She had asked him a couple of times to use her first name, though he found the familiarity difficult. She, too, had been in the Alliance army, and she’d referred to him simply as “cyborg” for the first week after they had met. Still, they had been through a lot since then, and she had fought to keep the Alliance from capturing him during the Perun battle. She’d said that he had paid his fare for a ride on her freighter and that was that, but she had risked her life, doing far more than most civilian captains would do to protect a passenger. For that, he could certainly address her by her first name.
“I am,” Leonidas said. “I made a late-night appointment with an excellent tech smith in Refinery Row.”
“Better watch out for yourself, mech,” Beck said, lingering instead of leading the train of cargo into the hold. “When we were out, looking for cargo-hauling deals, I saw lots of sleazy villains and opportunists skulking in the back alleys. And the not-so-back alleys. This station is rougher than it was the last time I came through here.”
Leonidas was tempted to point out that the empire had likely ruled the last time Beck had visited. Of course the station had been safer and more orderly. The Alliance had been so busy overthrowing the throne that it hadn’t worried about how well it could govern the system once it achieved its objective. But he didn’t want to engage in a conversation with the security officer, so all he said was, “I’ve heard.”
“I could go with you,” Alisa said, still smiling at Leonidas.
He blinked slowly, perplexed as to why she made the offer. Something to do with his warrant?
“For my safety?” he asked.
She chuckled. “Yes, with my prodigious muscles and state-of-the-art weaponry—” she patted the bullet-slinging Etcher pistol in its holster under her jacket, “—I’ll be your bodyguard.”
“There’s an image,” Beck muttered. “Your head only comes up to his shoulders. Do you even weigh half as much as he does?”
Leonidas wanted to order Beck to trot up the ramp to unload the hoverboards and to butt out of his conversation with Alisa, but he wasn’t a colonel anymore. Once, he had commanded a battalion and undertaken special missions for the emperor. Not anymore. He was nobody now. Except a man wanted for information he didn’t have.
“I don’t know,” Alisa said. “We haven’t jumped on a scale together and made comparisons. Why don’t you get Mica to help load our cargo, Beck? She’s got a hand tractor in engineering.”
“Sure, Captain.” He saluted, an Alliance army salute that came naturally to him, reminding Leonidas of what Beck and Alisa had been in the war, a noncommissioned officer and an officer. Alisa didn’t act much like an officer, preferring flippancy and irreverence to stately shows of decorum and authority, so he could forget sometimes that she had been a captain and had flown ships against his people. Perhaps even against him.
“I just meant that I’d keep you company if you want it,” Alisa told Leonidas as Beck ambled up the ramp, the hoverboards of crates barely fitting through the wide hatchway at the top. “You’ll have to wait several hours while the smith repairs your armor, won’t you? We could grab some dinner.”
“I ate on board,” Leonidas said before it occurred to him that she was making an offer of camaraderie rather than one of necessity.
In his youth, he would have caught that sooner, navigating the relationships between men and women without any more trouble than the average teenager, but twenty years with cyborg implants, in addition to the physical and biological changes the army had made to him, had left him a stranger to male-female relationships. He hoped to change that one day, perhaps even to have a family, but his quest to find an appropriate cybernetics specialist had been waylaid.
“Ah,” Alisa said, her smile faltering. She turned to head past him and up the ramp.
“Coffee, perhaps?” Leonidas suggested.
“If I get a mocha this late at night, I’ll be swinging from the catwalk,” Alisa said, waving toward the elevated walkway in the cargo bay. Despite the words, she returned to his side and nodded toward the concourse. “Perhaps a decaf. Also, did you know that there’s a shop in there that specializes in nothing but chocolate?” Her eyes gleamed. “It’s open around the clock.”
Leonidas didn’t share her obsession with the sweet stuff, but he burned a lot of calories even when inactive, so he wasn’t opposed to the occasional carbohydrate bomb. He subvocally ordered the case of armor to follow them as they left the ship. The earstar that hugged his lobe, awaiting his commands, relayed the order to the smart interface on the case, and it hummed along behind them.
The concourse was quieter than it had been during the day cycle when they had first landed, but the people they passed seemed more disreputable than the ones he’d observed then. Many wore hats and hoods that shadowed their faces, with few efforts made to conceal the BlazTeck firearms that they carried. Weapons had been illegal for civilians to carry, especially on ships and space stations, when the empire had maintained order.
More than one of those armed men eyed his armor case, but nobody approached him openly. A good set of combat armor was worth thousands, and even damaged, his would fetch a high price. But it had been issued by the imperial army, the crimson color of the case matching that of the armor inside, a color used predominantly by the men in the Cyborg Corps. Those who had served in the military, both imperial and Alliance, knew the meaning of that color, and many who hadn’t knew it too. He doubted anyone here would be foolish enough to assault him.
Alisa cast a wistful look toward the restaurants and shops in the kitschy Castle Arcade, a wide walkway lined with faux cobblestones, the buildings to either side and on the levels above ensconced in gray brick. If any castles on Old Earth had flashing cloud lights in obnoxious colors such as these, it would be news to the historians. Leonidas supposed the chocolate shop was down there.
Presuming she would be fine with waiting to visit until after he dropped off his armor, he guided her to one of the floating bridges that created tunnels between the two massive cylinders that marked the different halves of the station, separating the shopping and entertainment region from the refinery that this station had first been built to house. The tech smith’s shop was on that side.
The number of shoppers and passersby dwindled significantly as they stepped off the bridge and into a night-dimmed corridor. His ears, sharper than those of any unmodified human, caught the whisper of clothing rubbing together from around a corner at an intersection ahead. That wouldn’t necessarily have alarmed him, but then he heard the snap of a battery pack being secured in a blazer rifle.
He shifted from walking beside Alisa to walking in front of her.
“Does this mean you’re not open to hand-holding?” she asked.
He lifted a hand, hoping the ge
sture would be quelling. Her sense of humor came out at the oddest and most inappropriate times. Granted, she didn’t have his hearing and likely did not sense the possible threat ahead.
Feet shuffled around the corner. The ceiling lamp over the intersection, already dimmed for night, flickered and went out. Suspicious timing.
Leonidas rested his hand on the butt of his destroyer, a deadly handgun some referred to as a hand cannon. It wasn’t useful in stealth situations, but he had a feeling that making a statement might be ideal if muggers waited around the corner.
By the time he reached the intersection, his senses had informed him of three people waiting, two on one side, one on the other. The single person had light footfalls and sounded like someone small, perhaps a woman or a child. Leonidas drew his destroyer and with his left hand, removed a fluidwrap from his pocket. He wasn’t as well armed as he would be for going into battle, but with the warrant the Alliance had out for him, he had assumed he might run into trouble.
Before entering their line of sight, he glanced back at Alisa, this time lifting his palm in a stay-there gesture. Inappropriate humor or not, she had drawn her Etcher and appeared ready for a confrontation. That was good, but he had no desire for her to risk herself in some minor squabble.
Not making a sound, he burst around the corner. He threw the fluidwrap across the intersection at the smaller person while sprinting for the other two. He was tempted to shoot them, but they hadn’t yet committed a crime. Also, he doubted the punishment for mugging was death on this station, and even if it was, he no longer had the authority to help enforce the laws.
Two big, fat tattooed men with long hair bound with beads scrambled back, their eyes widening. One carried an old shotgun more appropriate for hunting Arkadian ducks than men. The other had the blazer rifle Leonidas had heard being loaded.
Fallen Empire 2: Honor's Flight Page 24