Cleon Moon (7 page)

She waited for him to mention all the times that her sarcastic mouth had utterly failed to endear people to her.

Instead, he sighed and said, “As you wish.”

Maybe he believed she
could
do something to help. Or maybe he just didn’t want to argue with his new employer.

The androids guided them out of the store, one walking ahead, and one walking behind. The spy box floated cheerfully after them.

Chapter 5

“Mica?” Alisa murmured into her comm unit as their android guides—captors—led her and Leonidas up wide stone steps and toward the massive doors of a building that looked more like a bunker than a palace. Rectangular and four stories tall, it had window slits, rather than windows, thick cement walls, and drones and human guards patrolling the roof and the grounds around it. Twilight seemed to have come outside of the dome, and that only lengthened the shadows and made the place appear gloomier.

“Did you get my list?” Mica promptly responded.

“Your what?”

One of the androids looked back at her. So far, they had not tried to take her weapons or asked Leonidas to remove his armor. He still wore his helmet and carried a rifle in addition to all of the weaponry built into the suit.

“My list of supplies,” Mica said. “Refrigerated cargo holds don’t magically appear on ships.”

“Ah. That’ll have to wait. Leonidas and I are being escorted into what I assume is the palace of the mafia boss who controls this city.”

“I thought you were shopping for masks.”

“We did that. We decided to branch out.”

“To a mafia palace?” Mica asked. “That sounds unhealthy.”

“It likely is.”

“If you get killed, who gets the ship?” Mica asked.

“What?”

“Do you have a will made out? People with dangerous jobs are supposed to do that.”

“I haven’t gotten around to it yet, so I’ll just have to live.”

“Easier said than done.”

“Stop being pessimistic. Is Beck back? Can you let him know—”

“He hasn’t come back yet.”

Alisa grimaced. How long did it take to arrange a meeting?

The androids led Alisa and Leonidas through the double doors. A security scanner unleashed a storm of beeps when he walked through it. It gave a mild protest for Alisa, noting the Etcher holstered under her jacket.

“All right, then let Abelardus know…” Her grimace deepened. She hated the idea of relying upon him, but who else did she have on board that could handle it? She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Let him know where we are, and tell him that if we’re not back by dawn, a rescue would not go unappreciated.”

Leonidas’s helmet swiveled toward her, the glower behind his faceplate suggesting that
he
might not appreciate a rescue. “It’s early to ask for that, don’t you think?”

One of the androids turned, removed her Etcher, and took her comm unit.

“No,” Alisa said. “I don’t think it was.”

The other android had moved down the hallway and was murmuring into his earstar. A few robots and drones meandered through the broad passage, but so far, she had not seen any humans inside. Maybe the boss lived here alone, surrounded by mechanical servants. She had always imagined the mafia as having huge family-run organizations, but she had no idea who was in charge of this one.

The second android returned. Alisa expected one of them to order Leonidas to remove his armor and to try to take his rifle.

Instead, the android that had been talking with someone said, “This way,” and continued down the hallway.

Puzzled, Alisa followed in silence. Why would they bother taking her belongings while letting Leonidas walk about fully armed and armored?

They passed several statues and paintings as they headed to an elevator. Alisa knew nothing about the art universe and had no idea if they were reproductions or originals or if they had any value.

Their group stepped into an elevator that took them to the top floor, where they walked out into a loft space with no interior walls aside from a few half walls. The entire fourth floor of the building was someone’s residence with all manner of tables, sofas, fur rugs, lounge chairs, and statuary sprawled across the space. A distant corner held a kitchen that was only partially sectioned off from the rest.

Soft sounds filtered through the vast room, the murmur of voices and the sucking of boots in mud, a noise that did not match with the tile floor. It came from one of the long walls where several live video feeds of the terrain outside the dome were on display. The familiar fungal stalks and swamps proliferated the area. The cameras moved to follow people in each video, sometimes groups of people and sometimes singles. They all carried weapons, everything from assault rifles to swords, and wore clothes and gear similar to what the young men asking about hiring guides had worn. Breathing masks identical to the ones Alisa had purchased covered the people’s lower faces, but all of their eyes were visible and wary as they scanned their surroundings.

One of the pterodactyl-like creatures flew toward a group of four men and women, and Alisa jumped.

Whatever camera was tracking them zoomed in close to follow the action. The people saw it coming—a screech sounded from integrated speakers that Alisa could not see—and stood back to back, raising their weapons. They fired, eliciting more screeches from the creature, but not deterring it. It flapped in, extending bird-like legs with long, sharp talons on the ends. It lunged for a woman with a blazer rifle. A man standing next to her dropped his firearm and hacked at the creature with a sword as its talons wrapped around her arm. He struck one of its wings, drawing a thick ichor that might have qualified as blood, but the creature did not let go. It battered him in the head as it flapped its wings, then it lifted into the air, carrying the woman with it, as if she were a mouse instead of a human being.

The displays changed until all of them showed this particular party, now down to three people. They were running after the winged creature and firing at it, but it kept flying away. Another camera zoomed onto the scene, then took off after it. Three suns, it wasn’t going to watch as the dinosaur
ate
that woman, was it?

Alisa turned away, her stomach churning with disgust and distress. She noticed Leonidas’s cool gaze—he, too, had paused to watch. His jaw was clenched, his eyes hard. It was the look he got whenever he realized that the system had turned into a less pleasant place since the empire had been ousted. She expected him to turn his hard eyes on her, with accusation clear in them.

He
did
look at her, but only to murmur, “It might be difficult to leave the dome without being observed.”

Alisa frowned. Did every party that walked or rode out of the city get cameras following after it? Or was this something reserved for those who went monster hunting? She cringed to imagine some mafia vid network tracking her team as she went to search for a secret Starseer outpost.

A woman cleared her throat in the middle of the room.

It took Alisa a moment to spot the figure settled on a chaise lounge with an iced drink in her hand. Tawny haired and tan skinned, she watched their approach with the air of a predator. A sleeveless and low-cut dress hugged her form, revealing the tops of breasts that Alisa suspected had been augmented. Perhaps the rest of her had been too. Her eyes seemed old to belong to someone who was the thirty or thirty-five she appeared to be. Alisa could not tell if she was the boss or some boss’s mistress, but either way, she looked like she wielded power here. The androids headed straight toward her.

As Alisa and Leonidas followed them, his helmet remained forward, so she could not see his face or guess what he was thinking. The woman smiled as he approached, but her smile faltered when she took in Alisa. A dismissive frown turned her lips briefly, but she soon shifted her attention back to Leonidas.

She produced a remote and tapped a button. The speakers muted, though the people fighting and dying on the vid displays continued.

“Welcome to my humble home, Colonel Adler,” she said, removing any doubts they’d had as to whether the mafia people here knew who he was. Would they want the information in his head? About the whereabouts, or former whereabouts, of the prince? Or would this woman simply be interested in turning him over to the Alliance for the bounty?

Alisa tried to step up next to Leonidas, but the androids took a position on either side of him, blocking her. Even though they had not drawn weapons, their stances made it clear they would stop him if he tried anything aggressive toward their employer. They dismissed Alisa completely.

She eased to the side so she could watch everyone’s faces—and so she could put her back to the distressing displays on the wall. Neither the woman nor the androids paid her any attention. She folded her arms over her chest and leaned her hip against a fancy cabinet filled with dozens of ceramic and glass eggs.

“Who are you?” Leonidas asked.

“If I tell you, will you remove your helmet?”

He gazed at her in silence.

She chuckled. “I’ve seen your holo of course, and when I learned you’d landed in my humble city, I looked up some videos of you in action.” She smiled as she took a sip from her drink, ice globes jangling as the glass tipped. “I liked what I saw.”

Alisa blinked slowly, realizing this might not be what she expected. Oh, Leonidas could still be in trouble, but perhaps for different reasons.

The woman’s gaze slid down his armor, as if she were trying to see through it to the musculature—and various other things—underneath. Alisa resisted the urge to roll her eyes. Just because this mafia lady was intrigued by cyborgs, or Leonidas in particular, did not mean she wouldn’t hand him over to the Alliance if she didn’t get what she wanted.

Leonidas did not react to the woman checking him out. He’d said that one of the reasons the fleet had tinkered with the cyborg sex drive had been so that they could not be seduced or suborned by pretty women. Alisa liked to think that Leonidas would have been indifferent to this woman, regardless. She wasn’t exactly subtle.

“You weren’t the first cyborg military officer,” the woman said, “but you were the first one to rise so high among the ranks. I understand that the fleet didn’t want to put many cyborgs in leadership positions over its lowly human soldiers, lest they object to being ordered about by supermen.” She smiled and sipped from her glass. “My name is Solstice. I’ve been reading up on you, Hieronymus.”

“Why?” Leonidas asked flatly.

“You’re a cyborg colonel. One of a kind.” The woman—Solstice—spread her hand toward the various art pieces mounted on the ceilings and walls and cluttering every flat surface in the room. “I collect objets d’art, preferably one-of-a-kind items.”

“He’s not an
item
,” Alisa said, not caring that she hadn’t been invited into the conversation.

“I enjoy surrounding myself with wondrous variety,” Solstice said, ignoring Alisa and keeping her predatory gaze on Leonidas. “And if the items in my collection have function, all the better.”

Leonidas said nothing. This woman should have been drooling over Abelardus.
He
would have responded with a cheerful smirk, probably extolling all of his functions.

“My husband runs this little town,” Solstice said, not noticeably bothered by Leonidas’s lack of participation in the conversation—or the fact that she had a husband. “But it’s a hobby for him, secondary to his galactic operations, and he’s rarely here.
I
do most of the work, including maintaining a suitable security force. A lot of money flows into and out of the dome from the various industries here and gambling, of course.” She waved toward the wall display, glancing through Alisa without seeing her. “It’s important to have good security. I assume you’re not in the military anymore since the empire can’t afford to keep much of a fleet running these days. I happen to be in need of a security chief. A former military officer would certainly have the necessary qualifications. Would you be interested? I pay well. And there are fringe perks.” Her lips curved upward in a smile as she looked him up and down again.

“Are you sure being pawed over by you is a perk?” Alisa asked, before she could think wiser of it. She ought to keep her mouth shut—it wasn’t as if Leonidas couldn’t handle himself—but everything about this woman made her want to leap to his defense. If not by clawing her eyes out, then at least by delivering withering words.

Solstice frowned at her androids and pointed at Alisa. “Who is this?”

“An unidentified companion, ma’am,” one said.

The frowned deepened. What, was she annoyed that they had let Alisa come along?

Too bad.

“I’m his employer,” Alisa said. “He’s not looking for another job.”

“You’re the scruffy freighter captain?” Solstice asked.

“I’m a freighter captain. My scruffiness is debatable.”

Solstice sniffed and gave her a quick once-over. “No, it’s not.”

The woman’s disdain should not have meant anything to Alisa, but she caught her cheeks warming. Her clothes
were
on the verge of tatters, her Alliance flight jacket, in particular. It had been repaired too many times to look anything like the original. There had not been time or money for clothes shopping since she had left Dustor. Her limited wardrobe was in a sad state, and she knew it. She wished she were standing in front of this woman in that sleek blue combat armor. The sanctimonious bitch would think twice about insulting Alisa then.

Solstice turned her attention back to Leonidas. “Hieronymus—may I call you that?”

“No.”

“Ah, very well, dear Colonel. As I was saying, I’ll pay you well, and you’ll have a position commensurate with your skill level. Surely, commanding an entire city’s security force is more in line with your experience and abilities than—goodness, what do you do for this woman exactly? Guard widgets? I’m certain what I offer you will be more fulfilling.”

“Actually, I guard chickens.” Leonidas met Alisa’s eyes and smiled faintly.

“Yumi will be pleased that you’re watching out for Isabel and Alcyone,” Alisa said, then closed her mouth, not wanting to mention anything even vaguely related to Alcyone’s staff, even if in this case, Alcyone was the name of one of the chickens. If Solstice got a sniff of that artifact—speaking of one-of-a-kind items—she had the resources to make a lot of trouble. All she would have to do was keep her forcefield shut, and the
Nomad
would be stuck in this dome indefinitely.