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

“In the empire, we called that a crash,” Leonidas murmured.

“Who is your customer?” the controller asked, a frown in her voice.

“Chef Jean Pierre Leblanc,” Alisa said, waving down Leonidas’s comment. “We’ve got mushrooms fresh in from Cleon Moon.”

Leonidas lifted his eyebrows.

Alisa muted the comm. “I checked, and he has three restaurants and a warehouse in the city.”

“Does he know you’re using his name for a ruse?”

“Not in the least. But Beck is his new best friend, so I thought he wouldn’t mind overmuch.”

“Understood,
Sky Wanderer
,” the controller said. “Please land promptly if your situation escalates. Laikagrad doesn’t take kindly to dilapidated relics from centuries past crashing in the city.”

“Will do,” Alisa responded tightly, waiting until she cut the comm before saying, “
Dilapidated relics
? Since when are air traffic controllers allowed to snub your ship? Isn’t there a regulation against that?”

“She believed your ruse, and you’re complaining?” Leonidas asked.

“Of course I’m complaining. What kind of captain wouldn’t complain about slights to her ship?”

“You should have tried Leblanc’s name with the planet patrol android. Maybe we wouldn’t have ended up in a battle.”

“No, we would have ended up in a battle sooner when they boarded and didn’t find crates of mushrooms in our cargo hold. Besides, you like battles.”

“True.” His eyes gleamed as he gave her a brief smile.

“You didn’t rip off Delta Five’s arm and throw it on a rooftop, did you?” she asked, remembering what had happened to the last android he had faced.

“Of course not. There aren’t rooftops in spaceships.”

“I fear the Alliance is going to end up wanting you for more than what’s in your head.” Alisa guided the
Nomad
over land, avoiding a coastal suburb full of skyscrapers, elevated trains, and low-flying shuttles in favor of a less densely populated path.

“It wouldn’t be the first time. Do you want me at the sensor station?” Leonidas pointed a thumb toward the monitor behind her seat.

“Why? Expecting trouble?”

“Of course. That controller believed your story too readily. In the empire, a ship without an ident wouldn’t be allowed to roam the airspace over a city.” He pulled out the fold-down seat to sit at the sensor station behind Alisa.

“I’m not sure whether to hope for less efficiency from the Alliance or not,” Alisa said, waving toward the sensors. If he wanted to watch for trouble, let him. “In this case, I believe I will hope for inefficiency, bloated bureaucracy, and administrators distracted by paper cuts.”

Despite Leonidas’s concerns, they passed over miles and miles of suburban terrain without squadrons of police or military ships appearing to chase them. Here and there, craters and destroyed buildings marked the landscape, reminders of the war, but the locals were rebuilding quickly. Automated cargo haulers floated materials down streets, and robots and humans worked together to erect structures. Already, the area appeared far more intact than it had on the news casts from the last year of the war.

One suburb blended into another until the coordinates informed Alisa that they had crossed into Laikagrad proper. She veered toward her chosen landing spot.

“Now you have me conjuring up ways I could lure Admiral Tiang down to a meeting,” Leonidas said dryly, surprising her since they had been flying in silence for a while. “After Alejandro wakes up Durant and you get the information you need from him.”

Though pleased, Alisa kept her smile small and didn’t say anything smug, other than, “Good.”

“If I
do
decide to contact him, I’ll leave you out of it. I appreciate your offer, but I don’t want you getting into trouble. More trouble than usual, I should say.”

Her smile changed to a scowl.

“Trouble because of
me
,” he added quietly.

She kept her face toward the view screen and her back to him, so he wouldn’t see her scowl. On the one hand, it was noble of him not to want her to come to any harm because of her association with him, but on the other, it irked her that he wouldn’t trust her to choose what was best for herself. She
wanted
to help him.

“Who’s going to hold a gun on the admiral while he does your surgery?” she asked calmly. Perhaps appealing to his logical side would help. “You need me for that. I’m fairly certain there would be repercussions for that, regardless of whether I go along with you to meet him and throw a bag over his head in a dark alley.”

“That’s not quite how I imagine a meeting going. But as for the rest…” He paused, perhaps debating whether he truly needed her, or perhaps considering whether he would feel safe allowing an enemy to operate on him without supervision. “I could tell him that I forced you to work for me. Or I could take my chances alone with him, and he’d never have to see you or the
Nomad
.” His gaze shifted toward the landscape, the houses and streets blurring past below them.

“Leonidas, I
want
to help you,” Alisa said, the calmness escaping her. “You can’t protect yourself when you’re unconscious, and there are people who want you dead. Or worse. If your admiral is loyal to the Alliance now, you might wake up with some truth-telling torture implants in your brain and someone demanding to know where the prince is.”

“
If
I go through with this, I wouldn’t want you to—”

She turned in her seat. “Stop trying to protect me from
loving
you, damn it.”

Leonidas blinked.

This time, Alisa
did
scowl where he could see it. Not at him but at herself. She hadn’t been ready to admit to—or use the word—love. It had slipped out. She wasn’t even sure if she meant it in the sense of emotional love or just caring or—suns’ hells, she didn’t know.

“Listen,” she said, groping for words even as she asked him to pause to consider them. “I may not have known who you were when we first started working together, but I do now, and I know what I’m getting into when I volunteer to help you with things. Or when I want to sleep in your bed.” He opened his mouth, but she stretched out her finger and placed it on his lips. “I know you would feel guilty if you hurt me or believed yourself responsible for the situation in which I was hurt, but you have to realize that I’m my own person, responsible for my actions, and I’m damned stubborn. Sometimes foolish too. If I get myself hurt or killed, that’s because I wanted to live life and enjoy it. And I wanted to love and enjoy that too.” She lowered her finger. He looked faintly stunned—or maybe horrified. “I can’t spend my life hiding behind someone’s armor.”

“Alisa…” He sighed and dropped his chin to his chest, appearing more stunned than enlightened as he laid his forehead against the back of her seat.

“Leonidas,” she said, and pushed her fingers through his thick hair, the strands tickling her skin. She leaned her own head down, her mouth close to his ear. “I want to help you find your expert, someone who can fix
all
of your problems. Even though it would be nice if you had functioning sex organs, it would be even
better
if you could sleep through a night without nightmares. So you could have a family and not worry about hurting them. So you could have
all
of your dreams. If that means kidnapping some admiral, then so be it.”

A beep came from the console, and Alisa turned in her seat, adjusting their course and starting their descent.

A soft breath warmed the skin on the back of her neck, and a sweet tingle ran down her spine. Leonidas shifted her braid aside and kissed her, letting his lips linger. He touched the side of her head with his hand, combing his fingers through her hair. She promptly wished it were down so he could more easily do so.

“It’s wrong of me to be pleased that you want to commit crimes on my behalf,” he murmured against her skin, “but I can’t help it. It gratifies me, and… it titillates me.”

Alisa swallowed, not quite trusting her voice. “I didn’t know you could be titillated.”

“Intellectually if not physically.”

“I
do
like intellectual men.”

She also liked the feel of his lips against her skin, the light touch of his fingers against the side of her head. If she hadn’t been trying to find a spot to land amid towering piles of wreckage, tires, and the hulls of airplanes, autos, and trains, she would have twisted in her seat to kiss him. She had meant what she’d said, but she
would
be disappointed if he got his wheel fixed and didn’t let her roll it out for a spin.

“Oh?” he murmured. “Why are you letting a thugly cyborg kiss your neck then?”

“It feels good. And he’s not as thugly as he looks.”

“Even if I can’t be aroused,” he said, speaking so quietly that she barely heard him, “I have longed for this kind of intimacy with someone for a long time. It’s different from… You’re close to your comrades in battle, of course, and sometimes in a way you can never be with people who you haven’t gone through war with, but it’s not… tender.” He kissed her neck again before leaning back.

Disappointed with the coolness of the air that replaced his lips, she caught his hand before he could withdraw it too. It was probably foolish since she was guiding them in for a landing with her other hand, but she kissed it and held it in her grip.

“Tender is nice,” she said when she found her voice, “but just to warn you, I still want to shove you up against some walls and ravish you.”

“It’s not easy to ravish a cyborg.”

She snorted. “Tell me about it.” Since she needed her hands for the final landing, she reluctantly let his go in favor of taking the controls. “For the record, you can sit at my sensor station anytime without asking for permission if your intent is to sit back there and kiss my neck.”

“That wasn’t my intent,” he said. He laid his hand on the side of her neck, rubbing the base of her scalp with his thumb. “I was overcome.”

If she could have purred, she would have.

“With tender feelings?” she asked. “I should offer to kidnap people for you more often. Though perhaps it wouldn’t be a bad idea to do a search in this hospital’s databases to see if there’s someone else who might be knowledgeable and skilled enough to perform that surgery. You have the information from the cybernetics research laboratory, don’t you?”

“I do, but I’ve done many such searches. The surgeries performed for the military cyborg program weren’t the same as simple cybernetic implants for those who have lost limbs or function in a part of their body, or who simply had the money to pay for the upgrades available to civilians.”

No, Alisa thought bitterly. Those people hadn’t been neutered as a part of
their
surgeries.

“And since it will likely involve cutting into my brain, I would like someone who has experience. I know I asked Dr. Dominguez if he might consider studying the research and doing it, but I may have chickened out in the end, even if he had accepted.”

“Open-brain surgery? Are you sure that would be needed?” Alisa settled the
Nomad
between two towering rust piles of debris, tilting the ship so that it lay angled at the base of the larger pile. The deck also tilted, but not so alarmingly that people would have trouble navigating the ship. Nonetheless, a protesting squawk drifted up from the cargo hold. “Maybe nanobots could be programmed,” she added.

“They weren’t twenty years ago. Unless the technology has advanced enough to allow that…”

Alisa thought he trailed off for dramatic flair, but he was looking back toward the corridor.

“Captain,” Mica said from the hatchway, “are we in a
junkyard
?”

“Yes,” Alisa said.

“Was it on purpose, or is it because a cyborg was distracting you by rubbing your neck?”

Leonidas squeezed Alisa’s shoulder and released her. Alisa shot Mica a dirty look, in part for the comment, and in part for interrupting what had been some delightful touching.

“Where better to hide a decades-old ship that people keep calling a relic than in a junkyard?” Alisa asked.

“You’re not going to send me out there to drape sheets and towels over it to make it look like its been here a while, are you?” Mica squinted at her.

“I hadn’t planned to, but that’s a good idea. Thank you for volunteering.” Alisa’s smile might have had a slightly vicious aspect as she considered this excellent revenge for her interrupted neck rub. “But don’t use our sheets and towels. I don’t want them stolen.”

“Yeah, wouldn’t want to lose those luxurious monogrammed silks.”

“See if you can find some nearby junk to toss artistically onto the hull. Take Beck,” Alisa added magnanimously.

“You’re not getting rid of us so you can be alone with Pretty and Muscled, are you?” Mica cocked an eyebrow at Leonidas, who merely gazed back.

“Of course not. I’d shut the hatch if I wanted that.”

Mica grunted and walked out, hollering for Beck as she went.

Leonidas rose to his feet. “I’ll check with Alejandro to see if he’s refined his plan yet.”

“Leonidas?” Alisa checked the sensors to make sure nobody had followed them, then tapped a few controls to power down the engines and the exterior lights, so the
Nomad
would appear to be a dead hulk to anyone flying past. Then she hopped to her feet and caught him before he could walk out.

“Yes?”

She pushed the hatch shut and slipped her arms around his waist, feeling the warmth of his skin through his T-shirt. She wished it
was
time for ravishing, but she settled for hugging him and pressing her face to his shoulder.

“What’s this for?” he murmured, though he accepted the hug, one hand returning to her neck for a languid rub.

One day, she would let him know how good that felt. “I just want you to have memories of tender moments in case we get out in the city and you start thinking that luring your admiral away from his ship and going off to have him operate on you without me to keep an eye on him would be a good idea.”

Leonidas did not say anything, but his fingers paused in their massage. Damn, he
was
thinking about that, wasn’t he? If he was, it was her fault. A half hour ago, he had given up on the idea of that surgery. She’d been the one to change his mind. Wonderful.