Arkadian Skies: Fallen Empire, Book 6 (3 page)

“Are you talking this much because you’re trying to prove to me that you’re a science teacher and not an anarchist?” Alisa asked, wrinkling her nose and turning off a burner with her foot—her arms were full—as they passed through the mess hall. “Or because you’re nervous about having planet patrol come aboard?”

“Let’s just say that I’m thinking about hiding in the cubby with Leonidas,” Yumi said as they stepped out onto the walkway overlooking the cargo hold.

“I’m sure he’ll appreciate being educated on portentous comets.”

“Do you think so?”

“Of course.”

Leonidas stood near the airlock entrance with Beck and Abelardus, not in the cubby. He frowned up at Alisa and Yumi.

Alisa would have elbowed Yumi, but her arms were too full. “Remember,” she said, “it’s not hiding. It’s preparing an ambush.”

“Yes, of course.”

Alisa’s step faltered when she took a second look at Leonidas. He had something on his chin. A… beard? And a mustache. He had done something to the rest of his face, too. Applied some makeup or costume contouring to change the shadows and make him appear like someone else. He had also changed out of his armor and wore dark trousers, boots, and a black snagor-hide jacket over a gray T-shirt. A bulge under the jacket might have been the big destroyer he’d wielded when Alisa had first met him. Alisa had her Etcher holstered under her own jacket, but hoped she would not need it.

She walked down the stairs, pausing to open the secret door to the cubby, so she and Yumi could insert the boxes and bags. Then she joined the men, not bothering to hide a puzzled expression.

“You’re not in the cubby,” Alisa observed, glancing toward Beck and Abelardus too.

“I am not,” Leonidas agreed.

Beck had not changed out of his combat armor, though he had removed his helmet and wasn’t carrying as many weapons as he sometimes did. Abelardus wore his fitted hide trousers and vest. He must have left his black Starseer robe and staff in his cabin.

“Are we all incognito today?” Alisa asked.

A chicken squawked, one of twenty-one that now resided in the coop. Yumi promised there were no roosters and all of the eggs had been sterile, but somehow the
Nomad
kept acquiring more chickens.

“Not me,” Beck said. “I’m a good and noble Alliance citizen with no reason to worry about the planet patrollers.”

“Did you know you left sauce burning, noble citizen?”

“Asteroid sucking—I forgot!” Beck sprinted for the stairs, the rest of his cursing lost in the thunder of his footsteps.

“Would you recognize me?” Leonidas rubbed the hair of the short beard. “I anticipated needing to wear a disguise to move about freely if we returned to Alliance space, so I picked this up before we left Cleon Moon.”

“You’re still cyborgy looking.” Alisa demonstrated by wrapping both hands around one of his upper arms.

“You’re supposed to sound more disapproving when you say that,” Abelardus said, leaning his shoulder against the bulkhead, his arms crossed over his chest. His long braids were artfully arranged over his pectoral muscles. The vest accented them noticeably. Maybe he hoped to impress the android.

“I’m not a Starseer,” Alisa said.

“Your pappy is, and your daughter is. It’s a family crime for you to fondle a cyborg arm.”

Before Alisa could retort, a clang sounded from outside the airlock. Not only had the planet patrol team attached their airlock tube, but one of them was already knocking at her hatch.

“Has everyone hidden everything that might be considered illegal or suspicious?” Alisa asked quietly, reaching for the button to open the outer hatch.

“I’ve nothing to hide,” Abelardus said.

Leonidas lifted his chin, silently saying he was
not
going in the cubby.

Alisa sighed. A man with bland, forgettable features entered the
Nomad
’s airlock chamber and peered through the inner hatch window at them.

“Is having a Starseer unconscious in sickbay suspicious or illegal?” Mica asked, leaning out of the hatchway to engineering.

“No, just inconvenient.” Alisa shooed Mica back into engineering and asked Abelardus, “Is Ostberg out of the way somewhere?”

She had almost forgotten about their young Starseer tagalong. He had kept out from underfoot on the voyage to Arkadius, mostly watching over Durant and helping Yumi with the chicken tending when asked.

“He’s with the doctor and my brother in sickbay,” Abelardus said.

Not exactly out of the way…

“Is he also robeless and inconspicuous?”

“You find me inconspicuous? Usually, I stand out in a crowd. People notice my superior attributes.” Abelardus wriggled his eyebrows and flicked a few braids behind his shoulder.

Judging by the look Leonidas gave him, Leonidas was thinking of wrapping those braids around his neck and throttling him.

Alisa ignored Abelardus and slapped her palm to the control panel.

The inner hatch unlocked with a thunk, and she reached for the handle, but Leonidas got there first and blocked the way while opening it. He stepped back without reaching for a weapon or doing anything threatening, but he pointedly stood in front of Alisa in a bodyguard-like manner.

An android in a white uniform that Alisa did not recognize walked in, followed by two men and a woman in similar attire, each carrying various inspection tools. One man also held a triangular drone bedecked in sensing equipment. The patrollers appeared less intimidating than soldiers, with the men possessing potbellies and unshaven jaws. The woman’s hair was down in a loose braid. Definitely not regulation, at least for the Alliance army, but Alisa did not know the rules for the planet patrol. All four of the agents wore recent-model white earstars.

“Your uniforms have changed since the last time I saw them,” Alisa said by way of greeting, assuming the leader was the bland-faced Delta Five.

The android was looking Leonidas over. Alisa wished he had done as she asked and hidden. She tried not to fidget, but she couldn’t help but worry that Delta Five had already seen through his disguise and identified him. An android would have a brain full of storage drives and databases rather than measly cells capable of forgetting things. And since Leonidas had changed out of his combat armor, he would have a harder time battling one, if it came to that.

“The Arkadius Planet Patrol has been outsourced to a civilian security corporation,” Delta Five informed her, taking in Abelardus without comment, then finally facing Alisa. “You are the captain? Captain… Stokes?”

“I am,” Alisa said, trying to decide if that pause indicated disbelief. Did androids pause for dramatic effect? “You have my permission to begin your search.”

“Ah,” the android said, and she doubted he had been worried about receiving her permission.

Delta Five waved for the team to spread out. The woman strode toward engineering with some kind of detector on a telescoping stick. One man walked around the cargo hold and the other headed toward the steps. Before he reached them, he tapped a button on the drone and tossed it into the air. It hovered for a moment, then buzzed off, zipping from strut to post to bulkhead like a sugar-filled toddler on a playground.

Alisa avoided glancing toward the cubby. The space was designed to look like there wasn’t anything there, and the door had elements in it that were supposed to interfere with sensors, but it had also been created back when her mother had captained the ship, perhaps long before. Who knew how well it held up to modern equipment?

“Abelardus,” Alisa murmured once the android walked up the stairs to join his other man and ought to be out of earshot, even
enhanced
earshot. “Why don’t you follow the woman with the detector and see if you can convince her that her readouts are
extremely
boring?”

“What if she finds
me
fascinating?” He wriggled his eyebrows, as if Alisa might be bothered by the idea of some other woman being interested in him.

“So long as she’s not paying attention to those readouts,” she said. Having him use his abilities to mentally coerce people to do things bothered her, but it seemed wise in this case.

As Abelardus turned toward engineering, a new idea popped into Alisa’s head.

“Wait,” she added, “can you tell me if anyone else is aboard their ship? Or did they bring everyone except the pilot over to search?”

He tilted his head, squinting toward the bulkhead. “Actually, there’s not even a pilot there. Looks like an automated system.”

Alisa usually would have curled her lip at such a thought, even if there was no reason an automated system wasn’t fine for orbital flight, but in this case, she found the news good.

“No other androids?” she asked.

“I don’t think so. Those are harder to detect.”

“All right, good. Thank you.” She waved for Abelardus to continue to engineering. “Leonidas—”

He lifted his chin. “I will stay with you.”

“I may have something more interesting for you to do. I’m going to follow them up top to monitor the android and see who he questions.” Alisa could see their thirteen-year-old Starseer getting ruffled and letting information slip. “And you…” She ignored Leonidas’s suspicious squint and turned on her comm unit. “Mica? Can you talk?”

“There’s a woman poking her head into the drive coils.”

“Is that a yes?”

“She better not break anything,” Mica growled.

“I’m not sure my engineer understands what the primary concern is here,” Alisa whispered to Leonidas, watching as the man in the cargo hold poked into a handful of crates secured to the wall. Nothing but food for the crew—and the chickens—in there, but he was getting close to the location of the cubby.

“What do you want?” Mica whispered. “She’s not close.”

“When she finishes in there, or when Abelardus has her suitably distracted, I want you and Leonidas to take a walk through this airlock and visit their ship. If they left their hatch open, or if it can be
forced
open—” Alisa touched one of Leonidas’s biceps, “—it might be convenient if some manner of mechanical error occurred to make the patrollers need to hurry back to check on it.”

“You want me to sabotage a government ship?”

“Apparently, the government has outsourced planet patrol to a private agency.”

“So I only spend thirty years in jail as punishment instead of forty?”

“Leonidas won’t let you get in trouble,” Alisa said.

Leonidas’s squint had only deepened as she laid out this dubious plan.

Alisa closed the comm. “Come back if there’s trouble or you spot cameras that she can’t black out. But it’s worth a try, and easier done
before
they find something incriminating. I think that android is already suspicious of us.”

“Did Abelardus tell you that?”

“No, I have a hunch.” Alisa patted his arm before he could object, and strode for the stairs. Maybe it was foolish to send Mica over to commit sabotage before they knew if they were in trouble, but she did not like the long look that Delta Five had given Leonidas. She also didn’t think the android had believed the name she had given him.

Alisa found Delta Five and his man in sickbay, about to start questioning Alejandro. Ostberg was with him, fortunately not wearing his robe or carrying his staff. As far as she knew, Starseers weren’t illegal passengers, but she wouldn’t be surprised if the patrol had orders to detain them or keep them from landing on the planet. She hadn’t kept up with the news, but anti-Starseer sentiment had led to that attack on their temple the last time she had been here. She wouldn’t be surprised if it had escalated since then.

“I see you found our patient,” Alisa said. “The one we’re in a hurry to take down to Arkadius. As you can see, he needs better medical care than our ship can provide.” She gestured to Durant’s unconscious body on the exam table, tubing and wires sticking out from under his blanket.

“What is his ailment?” the android asked while his man poked in cabinets and drawers.

Alejandro frowned at the heavy-handed searching—numerous tools and kits and bandages were left out on the counter instead of being returned to storage—but he answered the question. “He’s in a coma, and I’m not able to bring him out of it.”

“He was injured in the same battle where your ship’s identification chip was damaged?” Delta Five asked.

“I don’t know anything about chips. I’m just the doctor.”

“What is your function on this ship?” the android asked, turning toward Ostberg.

“He’s my uncle,” Ostberg said, not exactly answering the question as he pointed toward Durant. It was doubtlessly the answer he had rehearsed.

The android looked back and forth between the two, and Alisa tamped down a wince. There wasn’t much of a resemblance. Durant had Abelardus’s bronze skin and black wiry hair, whereas Ostberg had blond hair, freckles, and pale skin. Maybe he should have said tutor instead of uncle, since it was true.

“Captain Stokes,” Delta Five said, facing her again. “There are only three Gillian Stokes registered in the system database, and you do not match the age, body mass, or physical features of any of them.”

“I was born off-the-grid. Mom was a gypsy and flew freight between the border planets. I—”

She paused because the android had touched the earstar hooked over his helix. He listened for a couple of seconds and said, “Coming.”

His man kept searching sickbay, but Alisa followed Delta Five, worried about what had been found. Had some AI informed him that Leonidas and Mica had boarded his ship? Or had one of his people found something aboard the
Nomad
?

Delta Five headed toward the mess hall instead of back toward the cargo hold. He eyed Beck, who had his armored back to them, helmet bent over the burner as he scraped at his pot, but walked toward the passenger cabins without slowing down. Alisa imagined one of the patrollers in Yumi’s room, flinging drug-making paraphernalia about. But the android turned into Leonidas’s cabin instead.

Alisa had not been in it for several days, not since the night she had fallen asleep in his bunk, only to wake as he had, in the throes of a nightmare, knocked her across the room. It hadn’t changed much, and at first, she couldn’t guess what the planet patroller might have found in there—possessing weapons wasn’t illegal, not on one’s own ship, just ship-mounted weapons capable of damaging other spacecraft. Then she saw the man standing over Leonidas’s crimson case, the one that held the similarly colored armor he had worn in service to the imperial army.