Relic of Sorrows: Fallen Empire, Book 4 (13 page)

“Leonidas, are you a Starseer repellent?” Alisa leaned over and swatted him on the shoulder. “We need to spend more time together.”

“Hm.” At least he did not glower at her for presuming to swat him.

The pair of ships had come into camera range, so Alisa tapped the controls to bring them up on the view screen. They had correctly identified the salvage tug, but it lacked any markings to suggest imperial or Alliance ownership. The freighter looked like a civilian ship. Scorch marks charred large parts of the hull, and one of its thrusters had been blown off. She doubted it could even fly. Had it wandered into the quarantined area and been attacked by an Alliance patrol ship? Then been left to fend for itself? Perhaps the tug had been flying along the border of the quarantined area, looking for opportunities for salvage. Or maybe it had been the one to attack the freighter.

Either way, the tug did not move away from its prize to chase the
Nomad
. Her route ought to make it clear that she would fly past without bothering them.

“Why did you join the Alliance, Alisa?” Leonidas asked softly, looking over at her.

Her first instinct was to bristle and keep her past to herself, especially since he might be looking for a way to tell her the error of her ways, but he did not appear nosy or calculating. He had put on the T-shirt he wore under his combat armor, but he only had socks on his feet, and his hair was still tousled. He looked approachable, even friendly. Had he ever asked her about her past? She didn’t think so. She hated to rebuff his interest. But she hesitated. He was loyal to the empire. Would he understand?

She bit her lip and gazed at the view screen. “It’s a long story.”

“I’m not leaving until we’re positive that tug won’t come after us.”

“All right.” Alisa leaned back further, pulling her knees into her chest, and resting her feet on the edge of the console. “I think I’ve told you that I grew up on this ship, flying around the system from place to place with my mother, picking up and delivering cargo.”

Leonidas nodded.

“She made sure I kept up with schoolwork and could pass all the usual tests, but she’d always assumed that I would stay with her, share her career, keep to the stars. I enjoyed flying, but I wasn’t enamored with piloting the
Nomad
around. I dreamed of going to flight school and expanding my horizons.” She smiled. “That’s what I used to tell my mom. I really just wanted to fly fast and shoot things.”

“I can imagine.”

“When I was old enough, I applied to a number of universities. Perun Capital had a mathematics and gravities undergrad degree and also a good post-grad flight school. The government recruited top graduates for the fleet.”

Leonidas glanced at her in surprise. “You were thinking of joining the fleet then?”

“Where else would I get paid to fly fast and shoot things? But don’t get too excited. I was also considering becoming a bounty hunter.”

He snorted.

“Anyway, I went to the university there, and the classes were interesting and fun, but it was even more exciting for me because I was an only child and hadn’t had many other kids around to play with when I was growing up. All of a sudden, I was surrounded by people and interesting things to do. I signed up for the forceball team, debate club, martial arts, and even a volunteer dog-walking association. I made friends, including a girl named Tamra, who became my roommate—and a close friend. We were almost like sisters. I’d never had a sister and was delighted. We weren’t very similar people—she was very pretty, very likable, hardly ever abrasive and sarcastic.” Alisa grinned, though she was getting to the part of the story that was painful to share, even after so many years. “She thought I’d had a terribly exotic life and always asked me about the places I’d been. She was very smart, studying to be a doctor. A good person.” Her grin faded. “Around third year, some of the students in the clubs I belonged to were getting into politics and staging protests against the tyrannical oppression of the empire.” She looked at Leonidas, who was listening to her but did not comment on this. “I wasn’t that much of an activist, but I ended up getting involved in a peripheral way. The empire hadn’t offended me personally at that point, but I did remember how hard it was for my mother to make enough to pay her taxes and pay all the tolls along the shipping lanes. I also remembered a couple of times when she had been bullied by some of the officials working in those places, harassed because she was a single woman without a burly man around to protect her. She was as mouthy as I am and could generally take care of herself, but I know there were some moments she wished I hadn’t witnessed.”

“Bureaucratic asses can be found in any government,” Leonidas said.

“I’m sure, but the empire always seemed to have more than its fair share. But that’s not what turned me into an Alliance sympathizer.” She closed her eyes, remembering the campus, the idealistic young students organizing protests, certain they would change the system for the better. “There was a big protest planned that spring. We wanted free speech, something that people have fought for all throughout history and that has often been considered an unalienable human right. Something that the empire seemed to fear. I don’t have to tell you that there were fines for disparaging the emperor and the government, and that people who did it repeatedly sometimes disappeared or were brainwashed and came back… different.” She remembered a favorite professor, a grumpy white-haired chemist who’d said whatever came to mind, heedless of the consequences. She liked people like that.

This time, Leonidas did not argue with her. He had to have seen such things himself. Maybe as one of the empire’s soldiers, he’d even gone in to grab people. Probably not, though. Alisa imagined cyborgs being reserved for trickier situations. How hard was it for an armed soldier to stalk into someone’s classroom and take him away? Oh, usually, it had been campus security that had done the removals, but sometimes, if someone was believed to be dangerous, the soldiers had come.

“Tamra told me not to go to the protest,” Alisa said, “that I was only a year from graduating and that I’d never get into the fleet to fly if I had a record as a dissident. She was right. I told you she was smart, didn’t I? Much smarter than I. But I had friends who were going, and I wanted to support them. Also, we were all going out to drink afterward. That’s what passes for priorities in school, you understand.”

“I remember,” he said quietly, his tone somber. Maybe he could tell what was coming.

The
Nomad
was passing the salvage tug and the wreck, and the camera zoomed in on movement. Several people were out in spacesuits, hunting for items to collect. A giant hole had been blown in the hull of the wreck’s belly.

Alisa stared bleakly at it, still worried the same fate could befall the
Nomad
in the quarantine zone.

Leonidas looked over at her, so she made herself pick up the story again. She always dreaded telling this part.

“So, I went to the protest. The turnout was huge, students with signs, face paint, wild clothes, hover bots screaming our message. We took over the entire campus and walked out into the streets, created traffic jams. Spy boxes floated thick in the air above us, recording our movements, but we thought we were invincible since there were so many of us. They’d never be able to arrest us all, and the news cameras were recording. We thought we were getting our message out.” Alisa shifted in her seat, eyeing her feet. “Tamra ran up out of nowhere and found me. She grabbed my arm and said that I had to get out of there, that she’d been watching the news and that the fleet was being sent in to stop everything.

“I didn’t truly think we were in any danger—I figured, at most, they might gas us—but I let her lead me out of the middle of it. I didn’t truly want
protester
on my record, not since I was still thinking of becoming an officer and flying for the fleet then. Well, just as we got to the edge of the crowd, chaos came down on us. Drones, soldiers in shuttles and choppers, people rappelling out of the skies, as if we were enemy hordes raping and pillaging our way through the city. More troops ran in from the sides, humans, robots, armored vehicles.”

Alisa paused to take a deep breath. This had happened more than ten years ago, but for some reason, these memories were much clearer than many others from back then. She recalled the scared shouts, the cries of pain, and even the smell of the horrible smoke the soldiers had launched into the crowd.

“People broke up quickly when that happened,” she said, “and everyone was trying to get away. Tamra and I ran smack into a tank. Someone shouted that we had a weapon. We didn’t. I think I had my backpack. That’s it. I pulled on Tamra’s arm to get her out of the way, but we were jammed in, couldn’t run. Soldiers fired into the crowd. I kept pulling on her. I couldn’t figure out why she wouldn’t move.” Alisa touched her chest, remembering the blood, the scorch marks, the terrified and betrayed expression on her friend’s face.

Alisa cleared her throat, figuring she didn’t need to spell it out for Leonidas. “She wasn’t even a protester. She was a good student who never bucked authority. She only came because she was worried about me.” She blinked a few times, looking toward the sensors so Leonidas would not see the moisture in her eyes. “That was the day I went from disliking some of the empire’s policies but being willing to live with them to actively wanting to overthrow the government.”

“A lamentable situation,” he said.

She gave him a dark look. What an understatement.

“As I recall,” Leonidas said slowly, “the government—and the emperor—considered that a horrible debacle. The soldiers were supposed to break it up, nothing more, but tensions were high. There had been recent terrorist attacks on Arkadius and Haywire Station. The rebellion was already growing back then.”

“Know all about it, do you?” Alisa turned back toward him, not able to keep the bitterness out of her voice. Hundreds of students had been killed that day, and the emperor had considered it a horrible debacle? Gee. Everyone there had been unarmed, protesting only for the right to speak their minds. “You weren’t there, were you?”

She did not remember any red combat armor—her nightmare encounters with soldiers wearing
that
had come later, after she had been flying for the Alliance.

“No, I was on a ship orbiting Arkadius. We were hunting for the bombers who tried to blow away the floating gardens in the capital.”

“I would have signed up for the Alliance that day, if things had been more organized then and I’d known how. But like you said, they were just some crazy rebels back then, attacking whatever they could get close to. I’ve heard that what they started calling the Perun Arcade Massacre was one of the catalysts that unified people.”

“Yes.”

“I finished school—it was amazing and horrifying that things just went on. There was a memorial, but that was it, at least on the surface. I went to flight school, as I’d planned, but there was no way I would join the fleet after that. They even tried to get me. I didn’t have the highest test scores in my class, but I was good in the cockpit. I told them to balls off. They didn’t try to recruit me again. I did some tourism stuff right out of school, but I’d met and married my husband by then. We talked about having a family, so I went for the stable delivery gig. It was as boring as watching a moon spin. But it was responsible. Adult. I never forgot Tamra and the others that died that day. When someone approached me about joining what was becoming a respectable rebel force… it didn’t take much convincing. It didn’t hurt that I still wanted my chance to fly, to
really
fly. It was selfish, leaving Jonah and Jelena, but I thought I could make a difference too.”

She checked the sensors. They had moved out of camera range of the wreck. Interestingly, the other ship she had detected, the one that had kept her from veering off to the side as far as she would have liked, had altered its path and was cutting toward the salvage tug now.

“I understand why you joined the Cyborg Corps, Leonidas,” she said, having heard his story about needing money for his mother’s illness, “but why did you stay? After events like that—and it’s not like that’s the only atrocity that occurred—didn’t you ever question what you were doing? How could you remain loyal to the empire?”

“It was less about being loyal to a government and more about being loyal to a person. Governments are always problematic. The bigger and more bloated they get, the more opportunity there is for corruption, and the empire was no exception. When I met Markus—the emperor—I was probably about the age you were when you lost your friend. He chatted very candidly to my platoon in the Cyborg Corps—I was just a corporal then—and thanked us for being there and for enduring the surgery to be able to better serve. He was only a few years older than I was and had only recently lost his father to assassins. He had the responsibility of running an empire spanning more than fifty planets and moons on his shoulders. I saw him now and then over the years, more frequently when I was commanding the Corps, and he was always straight and honest with us. When things went wrong, he tried to fix them, but the throne is—was—an illusion. An illusion of power. In the early days of the empire, it was real, especially when some of those emperors had Starseer powers, but the corporations have been running things for decades, if not centuries. Markus met resistance at every turn when he tried to make real changes. Many of the men around him had been placed there by his father’s regime, and they were puppets with strings, owned by money. I know one of his regrets in the end was that he sometimes let them pull his strings, too, that he gave up ground in exchange for small victories. When his sons showed Starseer powers, first the eldest and then the youngest, he hoped that might be what would allow his family to finally turn things around, to have real power that could fight back against financial power.”

Leonidas waved his hand. “I know, this isn’t the story you asked for, but the answer to your question is that sometimes all options are unpalatable, all you can do is choose the lesser of two evils and try to be the voice of reason within a system that isn’t always reasonable. If there’s nobody left on the inside that cares, then the fall into atrocity is swift and horrible. To
not
support Markus would have been unthinkable.”