Alisa hit the button to open the big cargo hatch and lower the ramp. They had been cleared to land, the air traffic controller making no comment about the battle up in orbit, and she assumed that meant they were cleared to depart the ship, too, but she watched warily as the ramp lowered. She would not be surprised to find an armed escort waiting for them.
The blue sky that came into view made her heart sing, even if it was hazy with pollution. Dustor’s sky had been red and usually full of storm clouds or sand as the wind scoured the surface of the planet. Before that, she had been in space for a year. It was good to see a bright sky again, the sky of one of the few planets in the system that hadn’t required terraforming to be habitable to the occupants of Earth’s early colony ships.
The hordes of people striding through the concourse, hurrying along the moving sidewalks or crossing on hover bridges, didn’t set Alisa at ease the way the sky did, but she expected them. Perun, its capital city included, had been bombed during the last year of the war, but it could not have put much of a dent in the population on a planet that housed billions. The capital city alone held more than ten million people. Somewhere in the crowd, someone or something with a loud mechanical voice promised specials on everything from fresh lettuce to grav boosters at the ZipZipMart on the third level of the embarkation station.
“Captain,” Yumi said, “if you happen to see any chicken feed while you’re out, I could use some. And also some compost for the potted plants and mushroom logs I started in my cabin.”
“You’re sure you’re leaving?” Alisa asked.
Yumi smiled, her cheeks dimpling. “Not entirely.”
“I’ll fetch your feed and compost,” Beck said, smiling at Yumi. How a man managed a shy smile while wearing all that imposing combat armor, Alisa did not know, but he did it.
“Thank you,” Yumi said.
Alejandro flicked his hand in a farewell and strode down the ramp. Alisa supposed it was cowardly, but she watched to see if anyone would leap out to apprehend him before venturing out herself.
The crowds of people did not take any notice of him as he glided into the stream. His gray robe did not stand out among the eclectic attire of the cosmopolitan populace.
“You going to look for cargo, Captain?” Beck asked, stepping up to her side.
“Eventually, yes. I have a personal matter to attend to first.”
“I’ll come with you.” He patted the strap of one of his rifles.
Alisa blinked in surprise. “Thank you, but that’s not necessary. You don’t even need to leave the ship if you wish.” She kept from pointing out that it might be a good idea if he didn’t leave the ship. She did not pay attention to mafia happenings and did not know if the White Dragon had a base here, but she would not be surprised. The news often mentioned that some of the big mafia empires spanned the entire system.
“Might be dangerous out there for you, and you hired me to protect you.”
“I hired you to protect the ship,” Alisa said as Leonidas stepped up to the top of the ramp. His brow was creased as he watched Alejandro’s back as the older man disappeared into the crowd. Had he expected to be invited along? “From pirates trying to force their way aboard and steal my cargo.”
“If you get mauled or kidnapped while walking along the street, who’s going to get us a cargo?” Beck asked.
“I suppose that’s a valid point.” Alisa had never worried about being mauled or kidnapped in the years she had lived here before, but that had been when she had been an imperial subject with no allegiance—at least nothing on paper—to the budding Underground Alliance. Besides, she had no idea if the empire had managed to maintain the police force that had once patrolled the city and protected its people. She didn’t even know if they were still calling themselves an empire. Could a single planet be considered an empire? When the emperor himself was dead?
“I need to pick up some spices for my marinades too,” Beck said, “and some fresh meat. The bear’s about gone.”
“Ah.” Alisa hadn’t planned on a shopping side trip, at least not for minutia such as spices and chicken feed, but she supposed they could stop on the way back. Maybe Jelena would enjoy the Pan-System Market. “I accept the offer of your company then.”
“Gracious, Captain.”
“Someone needs to carry the chicken feed.”
“Easy enough.” Beck pretended to flex his armored biceps.
“Keep an eye on the ship,” Alisa told Mica with a wave, but paused before she started down the ramp. She turned and trotted over to Mica. “You said you’ll be on the computer, right? Looking for employment?”
“Yes.” Mica squinted at her.
Alisa leaned close, keeping enhanced cyborg hearing in mind this time. “Look up a Colonel Hieronymus Adler, will you?” she whispered. “Find out anything you can. There’s a warrant out for him, and I’d like to know why.”
“Is that our cyborg?” Mica murmured, eyeing Leonidas over Alisa’s shoulder.
He stood at the top of the ramp, looking out at the crowd, and did not appear to be concerned about their conversation.
Alisa nodded.
“Did he become a cyborg out of bitterness that his parents gave him the name Hieronymus?” Mica asked.
“Possibly so.” Alisa waved again before joining Beck.
They headed down the ramp. To her surprise, Leonidas followed them.
“You’re not coming with us, are you, mech?” Beck frowned over his shoulder.
Alisa winced. Even if she had called Leonidas “cyborg” for the first week she had known him, she’d come to think of him as a regular person, and she wished Beck would stop calling him by that name.
“Just heading in the same direction.” Leonidas nodded toward a sign for a transit station at the end of the concourse, not obviously offended.
“You’re probably going somewhere more interesting than we are,” Alisa said, fishing a bit. She doubted he would tell her anything, but she was surprised that he wasn’t heading off to the library with Alejandro.
“Doubtful,” Leonidas said.
So much for fishing.
At the transit station, they ran into trouble when Alisa tried to pay with her four-year-old swipe card. She was not surprised when it was rejected, as she’d suspected her bank account might have become a victim of the war, but there wasn’t a human operator to talk to, nor would the robot at the turnstile accept the physical currency that Alejandro had paid his passage with.
After observing for a moment, Leonidas stepped forward and waved the palm of his hand at the currency scanner. A blue light flashed, reading the subcutaneous chip that most imperial subjects possessed. Because of her itinerant youth and her mother’s fear of being on the grid, Alisa had never gotten one.
“Three,” Leonidas said, paying for fares for all of them. “Looks like I’m joining you, after all,” he said dryly.
“For someone who was squatting in a junked freighter when we first met, you’re certainly bursting with cash,” Alisa said, then wished she had thanked him instead. Why did she have such a hard time doing that?
“Only on this planet,” he said, his blue eyes growing a touch stormy as he pushed through the turnstile.
She shouldn’t have reminded him that his government and his way of life were gone. She wondered again if he knew about the bounty out for him. Should she tell him?
“Think he’ll buy us some chocolate-covered peanuts on the train?” Beck said brightly, apparently not worried about Leonidas’s problems.
“Maybe if you stop calling him mech,” she said, following Leonidas to the floatalator leading up to the elevated boardwalk.
“Not sure peanuts are worth that.”
• • • • •
Alisa got off the train a stop early, wanting to walk past the apartment building her family had once lived in. Maybe she shouldn’t have, since her sister-in-law had warned her that it had been destroyed—the bombing had been what resulted in Jonah’s death—b
ut a morbid need to see the area for herself filled her. Besides, it wasn’t that far from her destination, and the afternoon was young. Jelena would probably still be at school.
“They’re rebuilding quickly, aren’t they?” Beck asked, walking at her side, not questioning her early departure from the train. “I didn’t see nearly as many bombed-out buildings as I’d expected when we rode through the city. Just the capital building. Someone left an impressive crater there.”
Leonidas walked a few paces behind them, not participating in their conversation. She still hadn’t thanked him for paying for their passage, but he hadn’t sat next to them on the train, so the opportunity hadn’t arisen. She had a feeling that Beck was an anti-magnet, at least when it came to cyborgs.
“I wasn’t involved in the fighting here, but I know our people picked their targets carefully.” Alisa’s commanders had kept her away from her home of record, doubtlessly knowing that she would have struggled to fire upon the city where her family lived. Busy preparing for the Dustor mission, she hadn’t even learned about these bombings until after they had been carried out. If she had known, she might have found a way to warn Jonah of the attacks, to tell him to find an underground shelter. “For the most part they did,” she amended quietly. “There were mistakes.”
Like her family’s home…
The streets they walked now weren’t nearly as familiar as they should have been. Shells of buildings, sometimes only a wall or two standing, rose like headstones in a graveyard. Some of the streets were in the process of being rebuilt. Others were cracked and riddled with potholes. Still others were gone altogether.
Off to one side, a group of boys was playing around a crane and a stack of giant pipes, chasing each other in and out of them. One picked up a warped piece of metal and threw it at another. Alisa was tempted to yell at them to go play somewhere less dangerous, but was distracted by looking at their faces, wondering if she had known any of them four years earlier. Jelena had been too young to go out and play unsupervised with the neighborhood kids then, but there had been numerous children who lived in her building. Were any of these boys residents who had survived?
“Look,” one of them blurted and pointed in her direction.
Several other dirty faces turned toward her little group. Alisa’s first thought was that they recognized her, but they were pointing at Beck. He still wore his full suit of combat armor, helmet included. He had drawn a few curious looks, but surprisingly, the authorities hadn’t shown up yet to question him about his weapons. During the empire’s heyday, civilians hadn’t been allowed to carry firearms on the more populous and civilized planets, Perun included. From the paucity of the cube-shaped “spy boxes” that usually floated along the streets—years earlier, they had been everywhere, like swarms of bees—Alisa guessed that there weren’t as many resources for monitoring the population as there once had been.
The boys abandoned their play and raced toward Alisa and the others. She lifted a hand, half-expecting Beck or Leonidas to be alarmed and reach for a weapon. None of the kids looked to be older than ten, but she’d come across many soldiers with twitchy reflexes, and from the way bangs and thumps came from Leonidas’s cabin at night, she suspected that his mind wasn’t always a predictable place to live.
But neither man reached for a weapon. Leonidas watched the kids approach, but not with any more scrutiny than he watched the rest of the street. His gaze was constantly roaming, alert even here, in what should have felt like a safe harbor for him.
“Is that real combat armor?” one of the boys asked, skidding to a stop in front of Beck.
“Of course it’s real,” a gangly kid who could not have been more than eight said. “That’s one of the Bender Farrs, a Dex 7560T. It’s blazing! I’ve got the model. It’s got rear cameras, trans-titanium casing, and quad guns. Nothing’s getting through! Do you have the grenade launcher attachment, mister?”
The kids gathered around Beck, fearless as they gazed at him. A few dared touch his armored exterior. Leonidas stood back, his arms folded over his chest. Alisa was surprised he was still with them and hadn’t veered off to pursue his own mission, whatever it was.
“Used to have the grenade launcher,” Beck said. “But it got blown off in some action on a transport ship near Stardock 18. We were fighting—” he glanced at Leonidas, “—fearsome enemies.”
“Stellar,” several of the boys whispered.
“Are you planning a hit? Can we watch?”
“A what?”
“You know, killing someone.” The boy waved toward a building shell, the windows all blown out and one of the corners crumbled. “That happens sometimes now. The gangs run around here. They perch in the old buildings and ambush each other. But you’d be invincible with combat armor, right?”
“Against snipers in windows?” Beck asked. “Most likely.”
Other boys peppered him with questions. Leonidas shifted, like he meant to continue past and wait for them farther on—or perhaps he wouldn’t wait for them—and the young boy who had named the armor stats noticed him. His eyes widened as they locked onto his jacket, on the patch that proclaimed he had been a part of the Cyborg Corps.
He nudged an older boy next to him with similar dark hair and eyes, a brother perhaps. Before, he had been articulate, but all he did now was whisper, “Peter, mech.”
The older boy looked at Leonidas’s jacket. He nudged two more boys. Soon the group fell silent aside from whispers and stares. At first, Alisa thought they might treat Leonidas similarly to Beck, being curious about his abilities and whether he was here for “a hit,” but there was fear in their eyes, not awe. Leonidas continued observing their surroundings and pretended not to notice it, or maybe he was indifferent to the reactions.
“We gotta go,” one of the older boys said, backing away and waving for the others to follow.
“Hope you get a new grenade launcher soon,” one of the more garrulous ones said, but then they were gone, sprinting off across the dirt lot, as if they expected Leonidas to give chase.
He did watch as they departed, but not with any menace. A pained expression flickered through his eyes before disappearing, hidden behind a stoic mask.
“Well, I guess we know who’s not good with kids,” Beck said dryly and started walking, his back to Leonidas.
Alisa almost said that Leonidas hadn’t done anything one way or another and could hardly be blamed for their reaction, but he, too, started walking, his pace brisk. She hurried to catch up since she was supposed to be the one leading.
They walked in silence until she rounded a corner and found herself on her old street. She slowed down as the empty lot where her apartment complex had stood came into view. Where once a fifteen-story structure had risen on a busy street full of other such buildings, there was now nothing more than a gaping hole in the earth. A few pieces of rubble remained here and there, but most of it had been cleared. Bulldozers and cranes rested at one corner of the lot, though nobody was working in the area today.
Her feet rooted to what had once been a moving sidewalk. She stared at the hole, dumbfounded by the destruction. Even though her sister-in-law had described it, and Alisa had looked at news photos during her rehabilitation, it hadn’t truly been real until now. The bodies had been moved along with the rubble, and for that she was thankful, but it didn’t keep her from realizing that hundreds of people had died here. Her neighbors. Her husband.
“Desolate part of town,” Beck said, giving her a curious look. Wondering why they had stopped?
“Yeah,” was all Alisa said, not wanting to discuss it.
She spotted a warped deck chair lying crumpled at the corner of the lot. It had somehow survived the blast and avoided the bulldozers. A deflated ball was smashed into the earth beside it. A toy that might have belonged to Jelena or any of the other children who had lived here. Alisa remembered playing volleyball on the rooftop court with her daughter, trying to teach her that the ball was supposed to go over the n
et, not be bounced into it so it would rebound and could be hit repeatedly.
Moisture burned her eyes, but she blinked it away. She would not cry with an audience looking on. Besides, Jelena had not been home when this had happened, so she survived. That was something. It was enough. It had to be.
Alisa turned, intending to head to her sister-in-law’s apartment, but she bumped into Leonidas. He was gazing at the flattened lots, his jaw tight, irritation in his eyes. He looked down at her, his expression scathing.
“Sorry,” she muttered, though she doubted he was angry because she’d run into him.
“You did this,” he said, flicking his hand toward the empty lots. “There was no reason to bomb civilian structures.”
“I wasn’t anywhere near Perun when this happened,” Alisa said, stung. Even though she knew he meant the Alliance and not her specifically, it felt like a direct accusation. “I’m sure they were targeting imperial ships. If your people were flying over the city, inviting fire, then that’s hardly our fault.”
“As if your Alliance ever targeted military ships. They attacked things that weren’t defended, bombed what they could, then slunk away in the night.”
“There were plenty of all-out-battles with military ships fighting military ships. I know. I was a part of that. War is horrible either way. You think I’m not aware of how shitty a situation this is? This was my home.” Her voice cracked on the last word as she flung her hand toward the smashed ball, the warped chair.
“Yet you chose to join the Alliance, knowing you would cause death and destruction.” He shook his head and walked away.
Beck shifted his weight, but said nothing. He probably didn’t know why Leonidas had blown up. In truth, Alisa didn’t, either. Oh, she had roused his anger before over this very topic, but it had taken some poking and prodding. What had he seen in this empty lot? Something similar to what she saw?
She probably should have left him to steam on his own, but she jogged to catch up. A seagull soared overhead, not caring that the harbor was miles away and that fish wasn’t likely to be found here.