Alisa pulled herself through the hole, her oxygen tank catching on the ragged rim. She managed to wriggle through and fell out on the other side without any grace. She almost landed on someone in a uniform who was rolling around on the deck, grabbing his knee. Leonidas picked up the rifle that the soldier must have dropped.
Alisa climbed to her feet, wincing in sympathy at the man’s gasps of pain. Mica clawed her way out, still carrying the blowtorch.
“This way to the lift,” Leonidas said, pointing for them to lead the way, as he walked sideways beside them, watching both ways, a rifle in one hand and a pistol in the other.
Alisa and Mica jogged through the corridor, likely sharing similar thoughts, that they weren’t cuffed anymore, that Leonidas was clearly protecting them, and that the odds of anyone thinking they were prisoners were slim. It couldn’t be helped now. They would just have to get out of here and back to their ship as quickly as possible. Alisa wished she had figured out how they would do that.
They made it to a lift without encountering anyone else, but shouts from behind them suggested the soldiers had burst into engineering and found them missing. It would not take long for them to figure out which way their intruders had gone.
“We’re heading back to the airlock, right?” Mica asked, reaching for the lift controls. “To see if we can reattach to the Nomad?”
“Wait,” Alisa said.
“I don’t think this is the time for that.”
“All those soldiers will still be on the Nomad, probably back in our cargo hold, ready to shoot at whoever presses a nose to the window of the hatch,” Alisa said. Further, she had no idea if the imperial ships were on the way. For all she knew, one of the Alliance warships might already have noticed the Star Nomad adrift and latched onto it. She doubted Beck, Alejandro, or Yumi had tried to pilot it anywhere.
“I don’t see what we can do about that from here,” Mica said.
Alisa faced Leonidas. “I was never in the infantry, but I seem to remember there being master controls for the Alliance and imperial combat armor, so that someone on their ship could walk the suit back to safety if a soldier was knocked out.”
“Many ships’ armor sets have such controls,” Leonidas said.
“Is there any way we could do something to disable all of the soldiers’ suits at once? Even if it wouldn’t do anything to the men inside, they would be forced to get out of their armor if it didn’t work, right? And then they would be easier targets for you if you charged into the cargo hold.”
He was shaking his head before she finished speaking. “The operators can override those auxiliary commands. No man would want to potentially be a puppet for a puppeteer.”
Alisa resisted the urge to point out that all imperial soldiers had been puppets for their emperor, deciding he might not appreciate that. “Is there any way to break something before they have a chance to recover and take control?”
“What if you demagnetized their boots?” Mica suggested. “Assuming the gravity is still out over there, they’d float away from the deck, and even if they got control back quickly, it would take them some time to get reoriented again and back to a surface they could grip.”
“Not that much time,” Leonidas said. The lift buzzed. He had his thumb on the button keeping the doors shut, and he frowned down at it. “It wouldn’t be a bad tactic if I was at the hatch, about to charge in, but if even a minute passed, they would be able to recover. They’d also be able to fire from free fall. That wouldn’t affect their ability to shoot.”
“But it would discombobulate them,” Alisa said, “give you an advantage.”
“Yes. Briefly.”
“So someone has to stay at the suit controls while you run back down to the airlock.”
“Splitting up would not be wise,” Leonidas said firmly.
“No, but I can’t think of anything wiser.”
Mica muttered something under her breath. It sounded pessimistic.
Alisa clung to the hope that they would be able to think up something creative to do to the soldiers’ combat armor that would buy her team more of an advantage. “Any idea where that master control panel would be?”
“The bridge,” Mica and Leonidas said at the same time.
“Oh,” Alisa said. “Any chance the way there won’t be well guarded?”
“No.” Leonidas sighed and hit the button for the bridge.
Chapter 18
The route to the bridge wasn’t as heavily guarded as Leonidas had suggested, perhaps because half of the ship’s complement of troops were on the Nomad and the other half were still on the engineering level, trying to figure out where their intruders had gone. Alisa doubted that would take long. The tug wasn’t exactly state-of-the-art, but it would have better internal sensors than the Nomad. She wagered the crew would be able to pick out the lone cyborg running around the ship.
Leonidas took out two more soldiers’ kneecaps on the way to the bridge, but that was the only resistance they faced as they ran through the long corridors. Double doors at the end of one of those corridors came into sight, and Alisa’s comm beeped.
“Now isn’t a good time, Beck,” she said as a greeting.
“Just thought you should know that the doc’s imperial buddies are on their way.”
“How many ships?”
“Three. Big ones too. They look like an even match for the Alliance warships.”
“All right, thanks. We’re trying to figure out a way to get back over there to join you so I can fly us away.”
“We’d appreciate that, Captain,” Beck said. “The doctor, especially. He’s fiddling with his pendant and praying. Or that might be cursing. Not quite sure. He likes to mix the two.”
“He’s not the paragon of religiosity that we first thought,” Alisa said, slowing down as they approached the bridge doors and Leonidas strode into the lead. “I’ll talk to you later.”
Leonidas paused before the double doors, a firearm still in each hand, but he had traded the pistol for a rifle he had taken from a soldier. Between the two weapons and his armor, he looked like the scourge of death. Alisa was glad she was behind him and not in his way. It was not a good day to be an Alliance soldier. She wished he were mowing down imperials instead.
“Stay here,” he said, nodding to the wall beside the doors.
They had not opened at his approach. He lowered the rifle attached to him with a strap and leaned the second against the wall next to Alisa and Mica. He didn’t hand it to them, perhaps still trying to help them by pursuing the prisoner ruse, but he put it within their reach. Now that they were in spacesuits instead of cuffs, Alisa doubted anyone would mistake them for prisoners. Unfortunately.
Leonidas stood so he could flatten his hands against the door and pull. He ripped it open as if it were made from rice paper. He charged inside, his rifle back in his hands. Shouts and blasts from blazers went off inside.
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 l
ined 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.