Lost Alliance (Dragonfire Station Books 1-3): A Galactic Empire series

by Zen DiPietro

“You didn’t panic though—you were completely calm and focused. That’s a big deal.” He moved closer to pat her shoulder. “We owe you a lot.”

  “I’ve always said we needed a mech,” Hawk said with a wink. He swung his arms over his head and stretched. Fallon could sympathize with him. A sudden abatement to the excitement left them all with an overabundance of adrenaline. There was no way to just turn it off, and no way to spend the excess. She felt a little jumpy too.

  “Where are we going now?” Kellis asked.

  Fallon glanced at the controls and got a jolt of surprise. Now that was interesting. But she only said, “Away from here, as fast as we can manage. We need to get Blackout off our trail. But first we need to deal with what’s on the other side of the moon.”

  She didn’t mention what she’d seen because she wanted to be completely sure, but as they got closer she knew. She felt highly exasperated even as she experienced a rush of fondness. She fed the image onto a larger, wall-mounted panel for the others to see.

  “Looks like someone wants to rescue us.”

  “The Onari!” Kellis exclaimed as they all stared at the ship hiding on the dark side of the moon. “It was supposed to be long gone by now.”

  Fallon felt a wry smile twisting her lips. “I’m guessing Jerin felt too protective of you, and maybe us as well, to leave as she was supposed to. That woman.” She shook her head. She’d underestimated Jerin’s gumption, and she wouldn’t do so again.

  The Onari was now in danger. If anyone suspected its association with Avian Unit, everyone on board could be in serious trouble.

  Fallon opened a communications channel. “Outlaw to Onari.”

  Demitri Belinsky’s crisp and certain voice replied immediately. “Onari here. Do you need assistance, Outlaw?”

  “No, you need to get your asses out of here now. Ships are on their way. What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Jerin wanted to wait around a little while, just to be sure you all didn’t need help. Said to tell you she expects to get her mech back in good shape. We parked here so the PAC wouldn’t be able to see us on sensors.”

  “Which is exactly why I came here, and also why you’re now in danger of being associated with us. There are plenty of satellites up here and if you crossed one, they’ll know you were in the area.” Fallon calculated the ETA of the PAC ships. Fifteen minutes at most. The Onari and the Outlaw needed to get out of there.

  “I was ducking pirates and mercenaries years before I even started working on a hospi-ship, Outlaw. I know how to avoid a satellite.” Demitri’s voice was smug.

  In spite of the situation, that made her smile. An idea occurred to Fallon and she tried to ignore it. But the opportunity was here, so why not take it?

  “Onari, prepare for emergency quick-dock. Can your pilot do it?”

  Belinsky’s voice snapped back, “Affirmative. Establishing docking attitude.”

  Fallon ignored the surprised and irate sounds of the people behind her. They only had one shot at this. She positioned the Outlaw, as she’d named it on the fly, backward. She precisely matched the Onari’s drift and rotation. She cut the engines and coasted, using only auxiliary positioning thrusters to maintain alignment. She was moving too fast, and it would be a hard linkup, but it would be bang on, dammit. It would be perfect. They didn’t have time to do it any slower if they wanted to stay out of those ships’ visual range. She could fool sensors but she couldn’t fool eyeballs.

  “Brace for impact,” she announced to both her crew and the Onari. “Linkup in five…four…three…two…link.” The Outlaw slammed into the Onari with bruising force. But she’d held it true, without causing damage to either ship.

  She executed the boarding sequence in record time. Before leaving her post, she announced, “Pressurizing. All Outlaw crew evacuating immediately.” She grabbed her VR controls and took off at a run.

  By now, her team had to know what she planned, and they followed on her heels. Raptor had taken charge of Kellis, which freed Fallon from worrying about the engineer’s safety or state of mind. They flung themselves through the airlock and onto the Onari. Fallon dropped to the floor, putting on her VR goggles.

  Hawk ushered everyone through, then closed the hatch.

  “Depressurizing,” she announced.

  Her hands melded with the controller, her fingers moving faster than her brain. She undocked the ships and said, “Tell Demitri to get us out of here,” as she moved the Outlaw to a safe distance.

  She had no idea what happened around her body, except for the hardness of the deck plate digging into her tailbone. She saw only the Outlaw’s controls as she aligned everything she needed to do. Timing would be critical.

  She hoped the Onari had escaped notice. She could see it moving away from the Outlaw, which felt odd, considering her actual body was on the Onari. She had the bizarre sensation of being in two places at once. To fight it, she divorced herself from her body and focused hard on the Outlaw.

  When she estimated the PAC ships to be only a minute out, she vented all of the Outlaw’s exhaust. To their pursuers, it would look like a compressor failure. Damage from their sudden takeoff from Earth’s atmosphere. She set a course out of the solar system, not too fast for a damaged ship, but fast enough to keep the PAC pilots on their toes. She clipped past the sun just outside of tolerance for heat and radiation, watching her hull temperature rise and feeling glad she wasn’t inside the ship. Then she vented all of the ship’s irradiated oxygen and blasted it with superheated thruster exhaust—a highly nonregulation procedure that pleased her enormously—leaving a fireball in the Outlaw’s wake. If she were lucky, she’d have prompted a solar flare. She jumped the engines to maximum, followed the sun around to its other side, and cut the engines. Waiting.

  She no longer had any awareness of her body or the Onari. Every exhale she made was into the Outlaw, never mind that it didn’t have life support anymore. All she saw was what the Outlaw saw. Minutes ticked by. Lots of minutes. An hour. No pursuit. She checked the sensors, and no ships were in her immediate vicinity, unless they were playing possum like she was.

  Either she’d toasted the other ships, or they were investigating the supposed destruction of her ship. If she’d managed a solar flare, it would have obliterated any physical evidence, making a more believable impression of a lost ship.

  She set a course away from the solar system. She’d keep watching, but so far, she didn’t see any sign of pursuit.

  She needed to get the Outlaw someplace that they could retrieve it. Or at the very least hide it. No sense in mocking up a fiery death only to have the ship turn up later. She checked her charts, then checked in with her body.

  “Hawk, you out there?”

  “Right here.” His voice came from just behind her ear.

  “I’m headed toward Gamma Oridien. Who do you know who has a shipyard where our little darling can be hidden away? Someone you trust.”

  She heard him making some hard-thinking noises in his throat. “Nothing like that within range. You’d need to refuel and I’m guessing that’s not an option.”

  “No. Raptor’s signal masking program is good, but that much distance would put it out of range and if someone happened by the Outlaw, they might realize it was unpiloted. Besides, that would be too long for me to VR fly it. I need something closer.”

  More rumbling noises. “I do know a scrapyard where something like that would go unnoticed, with a little disguising.”

  “Where?”

  He gave her the coordinates off the top of his head, so either he knew that scrapyard well or he just always had his contacts memorized. Either way, Fallon was impressed. She set a course.

  “More than two days out,” she said. “I’m going to need some help.”

  The next days were a blur for Fallon. She didn’t take off the VR goggles once. She chewed what others put in her mouth. She only let go of the controls long enough for someone to guide her to the necessary, where she did what she
needed to do blindly.

  She didn’t sleep. The hours wore on, and she constantly monitored telemetry readouts and closed the distance between the ship and the scrapyard. The Outlaw had autopilot, but her plan depended on it not being detected.

  The constant vigilance was exhausting. The two parts of herself pulled ever farther apart. The Onari, she knew, flew at a much slower rate back in the general direction of Dragonfire Station, although on a much different path than it had taken on its way to Earth.

  When Fallon finally docked her Outlaw at the scrapyard with automated messaging from Hawk to his contact, she sagged with relief. She pulled the goggles, which seemed to have melded with her face, over her head. And breathed.

  Hawk watched her, all traces of his usual humor wiped clean. “You okay?” His blue eyes shone with worry, rather than their usual cherubic humor.

  “I’ve been worse. I think. But I feel like all kinds of ass.” She rubbed her hands over her face, blinking rapidly. Her eyes teared, adjusting to the brightness of her quarters. Her skin, where the goggles had been, felt raw.

  “What can I do for you?” Hawk asked.

  “A shower. I stink.” She wished it could be a hot, steamy water shower, but the Onari’s sonic showers ought to do.

  “You got it.” He clamped an arm around her and guided her to the necessary. Efficiently, he stripped her out of her clothes so that she was bare of everything but the silver bracelet on her wrist and the tattoo on her stomach.

  She considered telling him she could manage on her own, but it was so much easier to just exist as a passive lump of exhaustion and let him do all the work. So she did. He helped her shower with all the tender care of a parent. Then he wrapped her up in a robe and carried her to bed. A familiar-looking bed. The one from the quarters she’d previously used. Funny. She hadn’t expected to see this place again. It felt like an odd step backward.

  “Want some food?” he asked.

  “Nah. Just sleep. Lots of sleep.” She curled into the pillow.

  “Want me to stay, or leave?”

  She pried her eyes open. “Is it nighttime?”

  “No.”

  She wasn’t even sure it mattered. “Stay, please.” After days of hypervigilance and VR burning into her brain, she felt both raw and isolated.

  “You got it.” He lay down on the bed, facing her.

  She opened her eyes one last time. “Thanks.”

  “Don’t worry about it. You’ve done the same thing for me.”

  She remembered the first time she’d met him, as far as her memory was concerned. He’d had a big slash in him and she’d sat up with him most of the night. There was no keeping The Machine down, though. He’d rallied in no time. She tried to answer him, but her tongue was too heavy, and the bed was pulling her in.

  After a solid fourteen hours of sleep, Fallon dragged herself out of bed and dressed. It took some effort to correct her hair’s straight-up-on-top-of-the-head attitude, but she managed to complete the maneuver successfully.

  A good rest had cured her strain. Now she could use a good meal. Hawk had left at some point, but she’d expected that.

  She felt strange, walking the decks of the Onari again. It was familiar, but in an odd way, as if she’d taken a step back in time. She’d assumed that once she stepped off the ship for Earth, she wouldn’t see it again for a very long time.

  The menuboard in the bar offered blistercakes and fried orritch eggs. So she ordered those, some lemon tea, and a cup of Bennite stew. Just in case. She didn’t mind having both breakfast and dinner for lunch. She had some catching up to do.

  With her belly full and her energy returned, Fallon had a duty to attend to. When she called Kellis, she found that the engineer had taken the day off, but was happy to receive Fallon in her quarters. That suited Fallon just fine. She hadn’t worked out exactly what to say to the woman who had been pivotal in getting Raptor out of the PAC base with all of his original parts intact. That was a big debt to owe.

  Kellis wore a concerned expression when the door to her quarters swished open. As Fallon stepped in, Kellis asked, “How are you feeling?”

  “Back to normal. No worries.” She hesitated. “Actually, that’s not a hundred percent true. The truth is, I feel awkward. I don’t know how I’ve handled assets in the past, but I feel like I owe you something before I go, and I have no idea how to repay that debt.”

  Kellis looked as awkward as Fallon felt. “Oh. Well, I didn’t actually volunteer to help you. I kind of demanded it. I was actually feeling like I owed you something for letting me tag along.” An impish grin brightened her features. “It was a heck of an adventure. Not something most people ever see.”

  Fallon’s discomfort eased. “I suppose that’s true. When you put it that way, maybe we should charge some sort of admission price.” She chuckled at the idea. “Really, though, I wanted to thank you for your help. Both for the devices you helped Peregrine make and the help on the base. You were remarkably courageous to take it all on.”

  Kellis shrugged away the compliment. “Not really. That was nothing compared to living on Atalus. I was in the pilot’s chair, having chosen to be on that base. I mean, sure, I was terrified, but I wasn’t just a helpless victim. I was glad to be able to do something useful.”

  “Even though you still have no idea what’s going on?” Fallon asked, impressed.

  “I have some theories. But yes. I was glad to score one for the good guys.”

  The good guys. That depends on who you ask, Fallon thought. Everyone always thought they were the good ones.

  “Well,” Fallon said, “if there’s anything we can do for you, let us know.”

  “Whenever you’re done doing what it is you need to do, will you look me up? I don’t want to leave the Onari, at least not yet, but…” Kellis trailed off. “I just have this feeling that I should do more, you know?”

  Well, that was something they could revisit in the future, assuming Fallon and her partners didn’t get themselves killed. “Yeah. I do know, actually. And I think you could, too. So we’ll talk. Another day.”

  Kellis nodded, satisfied. “Another day.”

  “For now, I think I’ll go give Dr. Yomalu a surprise knife-throwing lesson. I overheard in the bar that he nearly brained himself.”

  Kellis laughed. “I hadn’t heard that yet.”

  “I’d better intervene before he tries again and succeeds.”

  “Sounds like it. Thank you for stopping by. And for what you said.” Kellis smiled. She was an odd mix of strength and vulnerability.

  “Thank you.” Fallon loaded as much sincerity as she could fit into two words. “I’ll be in touch.”

  As she walked away from Kellis’ quarters, Fallon felt paradoxically unburdened by her promise. She tried not to think too far ahead, but she couldn’t help but feel a twinge of hope for the future.

  Fallon checked Kellis off her mental to-do list. Before she caught up with the clumsy Dr. Yomalu, she needed to check in with Raptor, to see if he had any updates for her. It was probably too early to hope that he’d have critical data already, but she at least wanted his initial impressions.

  She found him in his quarters. When he saw her, he smiled, and she was reminded of how good-looking he was.

  “You look way better than the warmed-over mess you were when I last saw you.” He stepped back to let her in.

  “Thanks,” she said sourly. “Hello to you too.”

  He grinned. “Good job with that ship. Not many could have remote flown like our Fury did.”

  She was surprised to find she didn’t mind the code name so much anymore. It wasn’t really a code name. It was more of a pet name, assigned by family. “Thanks, but I’d just as soon not do it again,” she admitted, settling herself on the floor in front of his couch. “Any updates? Anything I should know?”

  He hesitated, which immediately put her on alert.

  “What?”

  He opened his mouth, then closed it. Picked at
a fingernail. “Okay, I’m not sure exactly how to go about this. I had two data chips I was able to save. One, I can’t look at until I get some more equipment. The other, I managed to put something together with a combination of my equipment, some Onari parts, and something I got from Peregrine.”

  “And?”

  “I don’t know how you’re going to take this, so I’m just going to say it. I found some data on your past. Your first life.”

  The news struck her hard, like an invisible blow. She blinked twice. “Tell me.”

  “Your birth name was Kiyoko Kato. You grew up in a variety of places because your family moved around a lot. You have parents, Yumi and Hiro, and a brother, Kano.”

  “Have?” she asked.

  “Yes. They’re all on Earth. Alive and well.”

  That took the air out of her for a moment. She’d unknowingly been so close to a piece of her past. She’d been on Earth, with answers right under her nose. What a missed opportunity.

  His face told her that there was more.

  “What?” she demanded.

  “Your parents are PAC officers. They actually work at the Tokyo base.”

  She stayed quiet for a long time thinking that through. She saw Raptor’s sympathy, which she didn’t want. She didn’t need anyone’s sympathy.

  “Positions and titles?” she finally asked.

  “Your mother is a commander, diplomatic corps. Your father is a captain. Intelligence.”

  She set her shoulders. “Do you think that means he knows where I am now? Where I’ve been?”

  “I don’t know. He doesn’t seem to have any Blackout ties. He seems straight-up PAC intel. So he may very well not know.”

  “But he started teaching me to fight when I was a toddler, from the sound of it. That doesn’t seem like something a desk-sitter would do.”

  “It doesn’t,” he agreed. “But it doesn’t tell us anything, either. Not really.”

  “And my brother?”

  He said, “A city planner. A stand-up citizen who does a lot of volunteer work.”

  “At least one of us is just a normal person.”