If Alejandro had been willing to contact the imperial ships, then they might have had a chance, but if he was objecting to reason, then they had no hope. Poised there in the dark, it was hard not to loathe him. Had Tomich’s people been boarding to get the orb, she had no doubt that he would have done anything within his means to start a brawl so they could slink away. But because the Alliance was here for Leonidas, Alejandro was just going to hide under a console in navigation and do nothing while they took his only ally. As long as they weren’t here for him, he didn’t care. After all the help Leonidas had given him. It was unconscionable.
“Bastard,” Alisa growled.
“Which one?” Mica asked.
“Alejandro. He’s a coward. Unless someone threatens to kick the wheels off his wagon, he doesn’t care about anything except his mission.”
“As opposed to people who needlessly get themselves involved in the affairs of others?”
“I know you’re not sniping at me, Mica, because that would be insubordination.”
“Only on a military ship. We’re civilians now.”
“Damn. I never thought I’d miss the army.”
Mica sighed. “Will you hate me if I admit I would prefer it if our cyborg passenger got himself killed and the doctor got himself captured, so we could go on our way without any more drama?”
“It’s not an illogical thought,” Alisa admitted. “Trust me, I’ve had it myself.”
“And then you imagined the cyborg in bed with you and decided to throw logic to the stars?”
“I did not imagine that. Look, I don’t know what kind of notions you’ve got rattling in your skull over there, but I’m not developing feelings for him. He’s imperial, he’s a cyborg, and he probably killed thousands of our people during the war.”
“You don’t have to have feelings for someone to want to ride him like a comet.”
“He’s not even my type.”
“Please, I saw him with his shirt off in sickbay. He’s a walking fantasy.”
“Only if you’re into ridiculously brawny men.”
“With the kind of delicious delineation of muscle and perfect symmetry that sculptors pay for in their models.”
“Maybe you’re the one obsessed with him,” Alisa said.
“He’s even less my type.”
“Right, I forgot. Yumi is the cute one.”
“Yumi doesn’t have any armies chasing after her. It’s definitely a perk.”
Alisa had thought Mica’s preferences went both ways when it came to relationships, but it wasn’t the time for that discussion. All she said was, “You’ll have to get in line with her. I think Beck is interested.”
“It doesn’t matter where his interests are; it’s where hers are.”
“Could we not talk about this now?” Alisa asked as the sounds of more gunfire drifted down from the deck above them. Her stomach was in knots, and she wished that Leonidas had not locked her cuffs. With her wrists bound together, she would have a hard time getting the door open to climb out. “I’m trying to come up with a plan.”
“Another one? We’ve barely enacted the last.”
“I’m afraid it’s not going to go well. Not unless…” An idea popped into Alisa’s mind, and she dug awkwardly into her pocket for her comm.
“What are you doing?” Mica asked, perhaps hearing the rustle of clothing.
“Kicking the good doctor’s wagon wheels.” Assuming he had his comm on him, Alisa called up his code. She’d gotten them from her passengers when they first boarded.
“Yes?” Alejandro whispered. It sounded like his airway was restricted. Either someone had a hand around his throat, or his neck was scrunched up because he had stuffed himself under a console to hide.
Alisa hoped he was sitting on his orb box, and that it was poking him in the ass. “You three doing all right?”
“So far,” he replied. “Two of them tried to get in here, but they were dragged away before they could break the lock on the hatch. We’re hiding, so they shouldn’t have seen us through the window. I assume that’s Leonidas out there—we can hear the sounds of combat.”
“He’s fighting the intruders single-handedly.”
“I’d help if you all would let me,” Beck said, a few feet away from the comm.
“Hold that thought,” Alisa said. “First, I need to know if you made that call, Doctor.”
Alejandro’s hesitation told her all she needed to know. She ground her teeth.
“No,” he admitted. “As far as I can tell, this isn’t about the artifact. I would like to keep it that way.”
“By letting them have Leonidas? The only person here who cares one iota about you?”
Distant energy blasts sounded over his comm, and Alisa winced at the idea of Leonidas by himself against all of those men. The ship had alcoves and struts and hatches one could take cover behind, but it was not designed like a warship with built-in bottlenecks and bulkheads that could be lowered to thwart intruders.
“He cares about honoring the emperor’s dying wishes,” Alejandro said. “It has nothing to do with caring about me. He would be the first to agree that I should keep silent to keep my mission safe. He would be willing to sacrifice himself for that.”
“Well, I’m not willing to sacrifice him, damn it.” The ferocity in her voice surprised her. By Rebus-de’s fiery left tit, Mica wasn’t right, was she? Alisa wasn’t developing feelings for Leonidas, was she? She shook her head. It was something to worry about later. “You comm those ships right now and get them over here, Doctor, or I’ll comm Commander Tomich on the lead Alliance warship and tell him all about your artifact and what I know of your quest.”
Alejandro hesitated again. Then he scoffed, or tried. It wasn’t very convincing. “I doubt their commander has time to listen to a civilian freighter operator when he’s in the middle of trying to subdue a dangerous cyborg.”
“Guess again, Doc. We served together in the war. We’ve already had a chat today, and he’s concerned that I’m Leonidas’s prisoner. Maybe I’ll tell him that you’re the brains and I’m really your prisoner.”
“Captain…” Alejandro groaned, sounding truly pained.
Alisa supposed it was petty to smile viciously at his distress, but it was dark, and nobody could see her. That made it all right to be petty.
“You going to make that call?” she asked.
He sighed. “Yes.”
“Beck, are you still listening?”
“I’m here, Captain.”
“If our passenger has any trouble getting his comm to work, you help him, understood?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Bangs sounded, dozens of footfalls pounding the deck—reinforcements coming in through the airlock.
“Marchenko out,” Alisa whispered and closed the comm.
She leaned her forehead against the bulkhead again, grimacing more deeply as the footfalls grew louder, heavy combat boots ringing out on the metal deck. The soldiers ran straight for the stairs, clanging up them and into the core of the ship. More soldiers rushing up to help their comrades against Leonidas. How many could he defeat? The darkness and the lack of gravity would not give him that much of an advantage.
“Maybe we should sneak aboard their ship while all of their men are charging onto ours,” Alisa muttered, not truly entertaining the idea. If they were caught over there, and Leonidas wasn’t leading them, they couldn’t pretend they were prisoners.
“Or maybe we should stay in our box and do nothing,” Mica said firmly. “This isn’t our fight.”
“They have my ship.”
“And I’m sure they’ll let go of your ship as soon as they have their cyborg.”
Alisa wanted to argue, but Mica was right. Besides, what were the odds that two women in handcuffs could sneak all the way to engineering on that tug without being seen?
A soft tapping came from the other side of the door. Alisa lost her grip on the wall and spun awkwardly in the zero gravity cubby.
A pop sounded as the panel was tugged free. She groped for something to use to push herself backward in case it was one of the soldiers. Not that hiding farther back in the cubby would save her from them.
“It’s me,” Leonidas whispered, his voice barely audible through his faceplate.
Only after he identified himself did he move the panel fully. Had he expected to find them in here with their guns pointed at the door? Alisa doubted she could even unholster her Etcher with her wrists linked together.
She pulled herself out of the cubby, grabbing Leonidas’s arm to keep from floating away. The darkness was still absolute in the cargo hold—Mica had rigged it so that even the emergency lights had not come on—but it stank of smoke, and Alisa thought she could feel something in the air swirling against her skin.
Energy blasts echoed from up above.
“If you’re here, who are they fighting?” Alisa whispered. Beck hadn’t leaped out into the fray, had he?
“Their imaginations,” Leonidas said. “I had some smoke bombs and rust bangs, so they’re struggling to see. The smoke works on sensors as well as eyes. Still ready to go to the tug?”
Alisa wrinkled her nose. “More than ever. Mica?”
A hand latched onto Alisa’s shoulder. “If it’ll get me out of zero grav, I’m ready. Three suns, I get sick in this crap.”
“Turn your head if you’re going to throw up.”
“We don’t have much time.” Leonidas started walking across the hold, his boots keeping him affixed to the deck.
Alisa felt silly floating along behind him like a tethered balloon. Mica, attached to her instead of Leonidas, probably felt the same way.
“Check down there,” came an order from above, near the head of the walkway.
Alisa tightened her grip on Leonidas’s shoulder. If someone stepped out on the walkway, all of the cargo hold would be in view if that smoke wasn’t as thick as he had implied. Unable to see or walk, she felt utterly helpless.
Leonidas quickened his pace, though he was careful not to make any noise, and he set each foot down carefully before lifting the other. It wouldn’t do for them all to be floating around down here.
The control panel inside the airlock hatchway came into view, an irritated red button flashing that something had been damaged when the soldiers forced their way in. At least their tube was securely attached. A camera display on the panel showed suction lines like octopus arms holding the two ships together, the tube stretched in the middle of them.
Boots clanged on the walkway, followed by a thump and a noisy grunt. “Will someone figure out how to get the suns-cursed gravity and lights back on? And clear this damned smoke.”
Must have been an officer. Someone who didn’t want to do things himself.
Leonidas pulled Alisa and Mica into the airlock tube. Usually, Alisa’s stomach did not object to zero grav, but there was a weird mix inside, gravity wrestling with null gravity and creating currents. Mica made a gagging sound, one she immediately tried to smother.
“Who’s down there?” the officer barked.
Alisa found herself pulled farther into the tube, as Leonidas brushed past her and Mica. He fired at the same time as the man on the walkway did. Alisa banged into the hatch that led into the tug. The lighting in here wasn’t much better than in the cargo hold, but she groped her way to a control panel.
“Let me,” Mica whispered, shouldering her aside.
Alisa let her take over and pushed herself up so she could peer through the small circular window in the hatch. She should have expected that someone would be guarding it, but surprise and fear lurched through her when she found someone staring back at her.
“Help us,” she mouthed, remembering that she was supposed to be a prisoner. She lifted her cuffed wrists to the window while widening her eyes and glancing back. She didn’t have to feign her fear much, because red beams splashed against the rim of the hatchway on the Nomad’s side of the tube.
“Can you get that open?” Leonidas asked, ducking back into the shelter of the airlock tube as more beams ricocheted off the floor and the jamb. For now, the men on the walkway did not have a good angle to fire straight in, but if that changed, Alisa and Mica, lacking any kind of armor, would be much more vulnerable than Leonidas. “They know where I am now,” he added. “They’ll all be down here in a second.”
“How many?” Mica asked, fiddling with the controls.
“All of them,” he said grimly. “Since I wasn’t shooting to kill.”
On the other side of the window, the armored soldier was talking to someone.
Alisa shook her wrists again and mouthed, “Please. Help us.”
No need to specify that the help she needed was in escaping her own people. The soldier glanced over his shoulder. Four armored men appeared in the distance, trotting around a corner and into his corridor, all carrying blazer rifles that looked big enough to blow a hole in Leonidas’s chest plate. The closest soldier gave her a firm nod, but held up a finger.
“I’m trying to get them to open the hatch for us,” Alisa said, making sure to hide her mouth from the window. No need to let the Alliance men know she was helping her cyborg captor.
“How’s that working?” Mica grumbled.
The soldier turned away, looking at the oncoming men again.
“We may need to look more helpless and needy,” Alisa said.
No less than eight beams of red energy struck the hull and deck all around Leonidas, forcing him away from the hatchway. Alisa grimaced. The hull of the Nomad could take a lot of abuse, but if the flexible material of the tube was struck, she and Mica might be sucking space dust.
Leonidas backed farther, forcing Mica and Alisa against the tug’s closed hatch. Mica was still fiddling with the control panel. Leonidas turned toward the similar control panel next to the Nomad’s entrance. He punched a button, and the hatch swung shut with a clang and a sucking noise, the seal activating to make the ship airtight.
“Uhh,” Alisa said, not sure they wanted to be trapped in the airlock tube with enemies on either side.
A hiss-suck came from behind her, and the tug’s hatch opened, sliding sideways. Since she was still leaning on it, Alisa would have tumbled through, but Leonidas leaped past her, pushing her down. Mica joined her on the floor of the tube as he sprang through the hatchway, slamming into the soldiers waiting there with the speed and deadly power of a lightning bolt.
Alisa felt that she should help, but as soon as those rifles started going off, she grew acutely aware of how vulnerable she was with nothing but clothing to protect her. Some protection. She rolled to the side and curled up in the corner of the tube, trying to make herself small enough that the exterior of the ship’s hull would protect her. Mica occupied a similar spot on the other side of the hatchway, glancing up at the control panel over her head, perhaps thinking about shutting the door.
A bang came from the Nomad’s hatch, barely audible over the fight in the corridor of the tug, Leonidas battling the soldiers hand-to-hand, intentionally staying close enough to prevent them from aiming weapons at him. The faceplate of an armored soldier appeared in the window of the Nomad’s hatch. Alisa couldn’t see the man’s face through two layers of glastica, but she held her cuffed wrists in front of her and tried to look helpless. It wasn’t hard.
She hoped the soldiers would not charge in and start firing with two civilians hunkered in the tube. They could probably get the hatch open, since they had already forced their way onto the ship once. At the least, the locking mechanism would be broken.
The soldier on the Nomad watched the battle taking place in the tug’s corridor and must have seen something he didn’t like. He waved someone over, and from the way his head bent, Alisa knew he was working on the controls, trying to get the hatch open. So much for not charging in with civilians in the way.
“Got a plan, Captain Optimism?” Mica asked, almost shouting to be heard over the clangs of gauntleted fists and boots striki
ng armored torsos. One man flew against the corridor wall, his helmet striking it with such force that his head must have been ringing like the clapper in a bell. He slumped to the deck, not moving. Another man leaped on Leonidas’s back, an arm snaking around his neck.
“We’re going to have to get in there.” Alisa waved at the corridor where the men fought. “Then withdraw the tube, so the rest of them can’t join in.”
“That strands us on the tug. And leaves all of those angry soldiers on your ship.”
“No choice.”
Alisa made sure nobody was aiming at the open hatchway, then slipped around the corner. A fallen soldier, still alive as evinced by the moans coming from his cracked faceplate, lay sprawled on the deck. His rifle had fallen from his fingers, and Alisa was tempted to pick it up. But if she did, and if she did not then aim it at Leonidas…
She bit her lip. She wanted to help him, but she could not shoot Tomich’s people—her people.
Instead, she lunged across the corridor to the controls inside the hatchway. She doubted she could release her ship from here, as the grab beam still held it tight to the belly of the tug, but—yes, there was the button for the tube. She jabbed it, hoping it wouldn’t demand a passcode.
The hatch on the Nomad flew open at the same time as the hatch on the tug slid shut. The soldiers—there had to be at least twenty of them crowded at the airlock now—started forward before they realized what was happening. Red light flashed inside the tube, and they skittered backward, nearly falling over themselves to get back to the Nomad’s cargo hold. They managed to get inside and slam the hatch shut a half second before the tube detached, the darkness of space visible as it withdrew back into the hull of the tug.
Realizing it had grown quiet behind her, Alisa turned around. Mica was staring at her from a spot pressed against the wall with a soldier moaning at her feet. Leonidas stood in the center of the corridor, dents and black burn marks in his crimson armor. The rest of the soldiers were down around him, some moaning, some not. She hoped he was still trying not to kill anyone, as her conscience was already in knots over this mess. She told herself that if she had let Leonidas go without helping him, and without extracting his promise to try not to kill, it would have been worse.