Fallen Empire 2: Honor's Flight (27 page)

Alisa pressed her back to the wall and eyed the rifle propped next to her. Even though she didn’t want to fight against Alliance people, she felt cowardly for hanging back while Leonidas risked himself over and over again.

“Don’t even think about it,” Mica said, her voice punctuated by weapons fire from beyond the doors.

A streak of orange shot past, escaping into the corridor, and making Alisa glad she had her back to the wall. “I’m not,” she said.

The sounds of weapons discharging ceased, replaced by gasps and sobs of pain. Alisa winced. If she got out of this, she was going to find the money to outfit the
Nomad
with an armory full of stun guns. If they’d had any, Leonidas would not need to be blasting the kneecaps of everyone on board the tug.

“Captain Bennington,” his voice came from within the bridge, an unexpected iciness to his tone.

Alisa did not know if it was safe, but she crept through the doors. Several men and women were down around the room, many whimpering and clutching at injuries. Others were unconscious. She hoped they were
only
unconscious.

In the middle of it all, Leonidas towered in his red armor, a rifle pointed at the chest of a woman sprawled on the deck at his feet. From the doorway, Alisa could not see his face, but the chill that had been in his tone made her rush forward.

“Problem here?” she asked, carefully laying a hand on Leonidas’s armored forearm. “Ah, her kneecap is lower. And I believe she’s Commander Bennington now. We chatted earlier.”

Leonidas did not acknowledge her humor—or her. Standing next to him, she could now see inside his faceplate, to the ice in his blue eyes, and she felt certain that he was contemplating shooting.

“Leonidas?” Alisa whispered, glancing around to make sure nobody was grabbing for a weapon or leaping to their feet while Leonidas was distracted. Bennington, her graying red hair clipped short around an angular face full of terror, lay unmoving as she stared up at Leonidas. Nobody else was moving either, not yet.

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 warship 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.