Fallen Empire 2: Honor's Flight (34 page)

“You wouldn’t be intimidated by walking into a coffee shop with two cyborgs?” Leonidas asked, realizing she was looking at him and remembering that she had asked a question.

“Intimidated?” Her forehead crinkled.

He snorted. “Never mind. I forgot who I was talking to.” He had yet to see her intimidated by anything, neither cyborgs turned pirates nor imperial warships on their tails. No matter who was after her, she was always ready to fling sarcasm like others flung bullets. “To answer your question, I want to keep him from walking in on a murder investigation where he might be turned into a suspect and held.”

“Ah.”

Alisa looked past him and toward the front of the smithy. “Is the policewoman still in there? I wonder how she knew to come looking. That body didn’t report itself.”

“She may have been sent to investigate the broken spy box,” Leonidas said, though he thought it was interesting that Alisa, too, had noted that there hadn’t been any alarms triggered.

“It was behind the building, not in it. She strode straight to the front door, didn’t she?”

“You sound like you want to go peek in the window.”

She raised a finger, looking interested in the idea, but then lowered it and shook her head. “No, I don’t need to go looking for trouble any more than you do. We’ll just wait for your friend and—” Alisa frowned. “There’s not a possibility your friend is responsible for this, is there? What if he already came by, and the smith tried to gouge him for some reason? Because he was a cyborg, and the smith’s loyalties were with the Alliance maybe.”

Leonidas was shaking his head before she finished speaking. “First off, if he had come already, he wouldn’t have left his armor behind. Second, a cyborg wouldn’t have bothered with a knife when he could simply break a man’s neck.”

Alisa frowned down at his hand where it rested next to the lip of the rooftop. “Thanks for putting that image in my mind.”

He regretted making the comment, not wanting her to feel uncomfortable around him. He had two brothers who’d never gotten over the fact that he’d given himself to the army, mind and body, twenty years earlier. After their mother died, he’d stopped going home. Family gatherings were awkward enough when everyone was… fully human.

A faint whir reached Leonidas’s ears, and he squinted into the gloom at the back of the building. Something stirred in the shadows. He whipped out his destroyer, instantly locking onto the target. It wasn’t a person—he would have seen that—but it took him a couple of seconds to figure out what the squarish thing bobbing along the far side of the roof was. A spy box. One that hadn’t been shot. Yet.

Alisa probably wouldn’t have heard or seen it if he hadn’t been pointing his gun across the rooftop, but she followed his gaze and spotted it.

“You don’t want to just break its neck?” She waved at his big handgun.

“If it had a neck, I’d be glad to do so,” he murmured, keeping his voice low. The devices recorded audio as well as video. That had never bothered him when the imperial police had been monitoring the feeds, but it was different now.

After bobbing along the edge in the back, the spy box floated onto the rooftop, spinning slowly as it headed in their direction.

“They only deviate from their usual routes if they see something suspicious, right?” Alisa asked.

“That’s my understanding. Apparently, we’re being suspicious.”

“We’re just a couple looking for some privacy.”

“On top of a warehouse?” Leonidas asked.

The cube floated closer, one of its lenses focusing on them.

“Don’t get twitchy with those neck-breaking hands.” Alisa scooted closer to him before he could ask her what that meant. She slung her arm across his shoulders and tossed a leg over his.

“What are you doing?” Leonidas whispered.

“
We’re
canoodling,” she murmured back. “And keeping it from getting a good look at our faces.”

Leonidas decided that might, indeed, fool the spy box. It wasn’t as if a sophisticated AI ran the devices. It had probably only come in this direction to investigate the missing unit in the fleet of spy boxes that patrolled the streets collecting footage.

He shifted onto his side, facing Alisa and resting a hand on her waist. It had been so long since he’d had sex—or even
canoodled
—that he found the intimacy awkward. Alisa ducked her chin to hide her face under her arm, and he did the same. Their foreheads brushed as she peeked under her sleeve to eye the spy box. He resisted the urge to pull back and put space between them. If he had met her eight months ago, he would have treated her as an enemy—and she surely would have done the same to him—but they were just people now, neither employed by their governments. Neither soldiers, not anymore. After all his years of service, that was hard to accept, but he forced himself to think of her as nothing more than the captain of the freighter he was riding on, a captain who had stuck up for him when the Alliance came looking for him, risking her own reputation—and her life—to help him escape. She deserved to be treated well, like a friend, or at least a fellow officer. Not that he’d made a practice of canoodling with the officers in his all-male cyborg unit. Fortunately, she smelled better than they did, that lavender scent teasing his nostrils.

The spy box floated to their side of the roof, pausing to hover just beyond Leonidas’s feet.

“What’s it doing?” Alisa muttered. “Watching to see if we take off our clothes?”

“Perhaps our ruse isn’t fooling it.”

“Perhaps it’s a perv.”

Alisa lifted her gaze to meet his and quirked her eyebrows. He wasn’t sure if she wanted his opinion on the likelihood of robotic fetishes, or if she was checking to see if he appreciated her humor. Her suggestion that he didn’t know how to laugh anymore trickled into his mind. If it was true, he knew it had nothing to do with his cyborg implants—he refused to believe those had altered his humanity in any way—and everything to do with the war. He’d once laughed with his comrades, not as often as some, perhaps, but he had laughed. Unfortunately, years of being on the losing side of a war, of having his people survive only to lose the frailer humans they had been protecting, had left him with guilt, regret, and the knowledge that he had failed. Humor did not tickle his inner spirit very often anymore, and he did not know how to fix that.

With a faint whirring sound, the box floated toward the rear of the rooftop. Leonidas lifted his head to watch it go while wondering if it had sent its footage to police headquarters and if the patroller investigating the smithy was even now being alerted to nearby spies. He still found it odd that only one person was poking around down there.

As the spy box drifted over the edge, Leonidas heard a click from the street, from the direction of the smithy. He whirled back to his stomach, shedding Alisa’s arm. He was in time to see the top of a man’s headful of short blond hair before the person disappeared inside, the rolling door dropping down behind him with a thud.

Cursing inwardly, Leonidas leaped over the edge of the roof. It might be too late to keep Sergeant Lancer from meeting the policewoman, but perhaps there was still time to help. The last thing he wanted was for one of his people to run afoul of the authorities here for no reason.

After sprinting to the smithy, Leonidas crouched to grab the latch on the bottom of the roll-up door, but he halted in shocked surprise as the faint odor of charred almonds reached his nose. He leaped back, crossing to the far side of the street, his instincts driving his reaction. He forced himself to stop, analyzing the ramifications and his options instead of sprinting several blocks to make sure he wouldn’t inhale too much of that gas.

Tyranoadhuc gas.

At least two years had passed since anyone had used it against him, but he recognized the smell immediately. And he remembered being flat on his back in the middle of combat in a corridor on his ship, his mechanical implants frozen, even his eyes locked open, unable to blink as the gas affected every enhanced body part he owned. That day, his people had been caught unprepared, a secret betrayal turned into a surprise attack, and neither Leonidas nor his cyborg men had been able to take the time to don their combat armor, armor that would have filtered out the gas and protected them. He remembered the smug look of the female commander leading the Alliance troops as she had walked up to his side, looking down at him through the faceplate of her helmet, her left cheek and jaw shiny with an old burn she’d never had grafted. She’d pointed her rifle at his chest, and his instincts had screamed for him to move, but his body had refused to comply.

“Colonel Adler,” she murmured. “We meet again.” Instead of shooting, she had lifted her rifle to her shoulder, barely noticing the energy bolts flying past her, one even glancing off the shoulder of her dented green armor. “I think it will hurt you more to survive when your ship falls, when all of your people are killed. And I believe I shall tell you that one of your own officers was responsible for this betrayal. A Captain Morin. You know him, I’m certain. Cyborgs, it seems, are as amenable to bribes as human men.”

She’d stalked past him without waiting for a response—not that he could have given one. It had taken nearly twenty minutes for that gas to wear off, an eternity in battle. Most of his people had been killed, including the senior command staff on the
Excelsior
, and he’d barely roused in time to grab his combat armor and make it to an escape pod.

“Leonidas?” Alisa asked softly from the corner of the building—she must have left the warehouse rooftop via that ladder and come around through the alley.

He shook the memories from his head and looked up and down the street, aware that they had consumed him so fully that he hadn’t been paying attention to his surroundings. He could have been an easy target for someone with a grudge against cyborgs. Or for the person who had loosed that gas. The policewoman? She was probably a victim. Maybe someone else had slipped in while Leonidas had been distracted by the spy box? Or maybe he’d been mistaken about who had been entering the smithy? When he had spotted that blond hair, he had assumed it was Sergeant Lancer, but he hadn’t seen the man’s face.

“What’s wrong?” Alisa whispered, jogging across the street.

Leonidas took a step toward the smithy, but halted and thrust his fingers through his hair in frustration. “I can’t go in.” He couldn’t smell the gas from the middle of the street, but he knew his nose hadn’t been mistaken. It wouldn’t take much of a dose for him to be affected, and holding his breath wouldn’t work. The potent stuff had such small molecules that it could enter the bloodstream through the skin. “Tyranoadhuc gas,” he said, catching Alisa’s puzzled expression.

“Ah.” The puzzlement faded.

She recognized the name. He kept himself from asking if she had ever used the stuff, or piloted a team of soldiers who had used it, against his people. What was going on in that building now was more important than the past. If that
had
been Sergeant Lancer, he could be sprawled on the ground in there, helpless.

“It doesn’t bother humans, right?” Alisa pulled out her Etcher. “I’ll go in.”

“No. This isn’t your battle.”

Her eyebrows rose. “I don’t think it’s your battle, either.”

Not true. His unit might have been dissolved, but he would always consider the cyborgs who had served under his command as his people.

Explaining that would take too long. Instead, he lightly gripped her arm to keep her from crossing the street and said, “Stay here. I’ll put my armor on.”

He let go and sprinted for the case, tugging it into the alley so that he could dress with his back to the wall. Whatever was going on, it wasn’t anything innocuous. They didn’t sell that gas at the corner market. It could damage all computers and machinery, not just cyborg implants, and it was illegal for civilians to have it. Military supplies were tightly controlled, or at least they had been when the empire had been in charge.

Growling to himself, he stuffed his legs into the greaves as quickly as possible. Usually, they flexed and conformed around him automatically, fitting precisely and comfortably about his limbs, but every piece of his armor had taken damage during his escape from the Alliance, and some of the servos whined and grumbled as he manipulated them. Under the best circumstances, it took more than five minutes to suit up. Unfortunately, he dared not take any shortcuts. He needed the suit to be airtight before venturing in to deal with that gas. As airtight as it could be. Normally, it was spaceworthy, but he well remembered the leak he had sprung during his brief space walk on the way back to the freighter. That small hole shouldn’t let in enough gas to affect him. He hoped.

Someone shouted, and a clatter arose inside the building. Cursing, Leonidas tried to dress faster. That had been a woman’s voice. The police officer? Something crashed to the floor inside. He wished there were windows, but neither the side nor the back of the building had any, and getting his armor on was more important than running over half-dressed and peering through the front window. Or so he thought, until he heard the front door roll up quietly.

Alisa?

He lunged out of the alley, still fastening his torso armor around his body. “Don’t go in,” he barked.

It was too late. The street was empty.

• • • • •

It took another minute for Leonidas to get his helmet on and the rest of his charred and dented armor into place. An eternity. As soon as he could, he pulled up the roll-up door. He hadn’t heard any more ominous noises from within—he’d heard nothing at all since Alisa disappeared inside. And that worried him.

He made himself open the door slowly, using all of his senses, as well as the ones augmented by the armor, to get a feel for what danger lay within. Whoever had set off that gas had come expecting to deal with cyborgs and would likely have more weapons that could affect him. Somehow, the person inside had anticipated that Leonidas would come. It must be some bounty hunter after him for the reward money—the gas would be perfect for someone who wanted to bring him in alive.