The Fallen Empire Collection by Lindsay Buroker

by Discover Sci-Fi Special Edition

  “I wasn’t involved in the fighting here, but I know our people picked their targets carefully.” Alisa’s commanders had kept her away from her home of record, doubtlessly knowing that she would have struggled to fire upon the city where her family lived. Busy preparing for the Dustor mission, she hadn’t even learned about these bombings until after they had been carried out. If she had known, she might have found a way to warn Jonah of the attacks, to tell him to find an underground shelter. “For the most part they did,” she amended quietly. “There were mistakes.”

  Like her family’s home…

  The streets they walked now weren’t nearly as familiar as they should have been. Shells of buildings, sometimes only a wall or two standing, rose like headstones in a graveyard. Some of the streets were in the process of being rebuilt. Others were cracked and riddled with potholes. Still others were gone altogether.

  Off to one side, a group of boys was playing around a crane and a stack of giant pipes, chasing each other in and out of them. One picked up a warped piece of metal and threw it at another. Alisa was tempted to yell at them to go play somewhere less dangerous, but was distracted by looking at their faces, wondering if she had known any of them four years earlier. Jelena had been too young to go out and play unsupervised with the neighborhood kids then, but there had been numerous children who lived in her building. Were any of these boys residents who had survived?

  “Look,” one of them blurted and pointed in her direction.

  Several other dirty faces turned toward her little group. Alisa’s first thought was that they recognized her, but they were pointing at Beck. He still wore his full suit of combat armor, helmet included. He had drawn a few curious looks, but surprisingly, the authorities hadn’t shown up yet to question him about his weapons. During the empire’s heyday, civilians hadn’t been allowed to carry firearms on the more populous and civilized planets, Perun included. From the paucity of the cube-shaped “spy boxes” that usually floated along the streets—years earlier, they had been everywhere, like swarms of bees—Alisa guessed that there weren’t as many resources for monitoring the population as there once had been.

  The boys abandoned their play and raced toward Alisa and the others. She lifted a hand, half-expecting Beck or Leonidas to be alarmed and reach for a weapon. None of the kids looked to be older than ten, but she’d come across many soldiers with twitchy reflexes, and from the way bangs and thumps came from Leonidas’s cabin at night, she suspected that his mind wasn’t always a predictable place to live.

  But neither man reached for a weapon. Leonidas watched the kids approach, but not with any more scrutiny than he watched the rest of the street. His gaze was constantly roaming, alert even here, in what should have felt like a safe harbor for him.

  “Is that real combat armor?” one of the boys asked, skidding to a stop in front of Beck.

  “Of course it’s real,” a gangly kid who could not have been more than eight said. “That’s one of the Bender Farrs, a Dex 7560T. It’s blazing! I’ve got the model. It’s got rear cameras, trans-titanium casing, and quad guns. Nothing’s getting through! Do you have the grenade launcher attachment, mister?”

  The kids gathered around Beck, fearless as they gazed at him. A few dared touch his armored exterior. Leonidas stood back, his arms folded over his chest. Alisa was surprised he was still with them and hadn’t veered off to pursue his own mission, whatever it was.

  “Used to have the grenade launcher,” Beck said. “But it got blown off in some action on a transport ship near Stardock 18. We were fighting—” he glanced at Leonidas, “—fearsome enemies.”

  “Stellar,” several of the boys whispered.

  “Are you planning a hit? Can we watch?”

  “A what?”

  “You know, killing someone.” The boy waved toward a building shell, the windows all blown out and one of the corners crumbled. “That happens sometimes now. The gangs run around here. They perch in the old buildings and ambush each other. But you’d be invincible with combat armor, right?”

  “Against snipers in windows?” Beck asked. “Most likely.”

  Other boys peppered him with questions. Leonidas shifted, like he meant to continue past and wait for them farther on—or perhaps he wouldn’t wait for them—and the young boy who had named the armor stats noticed him. His eyes widened as they locked onto his jacket, on the patch that proclaimed he had been a part of the Cyborg Corps.

  He nudged an older boy next to him with similar dark hair and eyes, a brother perhaps. Before, he had been articulate, but all he did now was whisper, “Peter, mech.”

  The older boy looked at Leonidas’s jacket. He nudged two more boys. Soon the group fell silent aside from whispers and stares. At first, Alisa thought they might treat Leonidas similarly to Beck, being curious about his abilities and whether he was here for “a hit,” but there was fear in their eyes, not awe. Leonidas continued observing their surroundings and pretended not to notice it, or maybe he was indifferent to the reactions.

  “We gotta go,” one of the older boys said, backing away and waving for the others to follow.

  “Hope you get a new grenade launcher soon,” one of the more garrulous ones said, but then they were gone, sprinting off across the dirt lot, as if they expected Leonidas to give chase.

  He did watch as they departed, but not with any menace. A pained expression flickered through his eyes before disappearing, hidden behind a stoic mask.

  “Well, I guess we know who’s not good with kids,” Beck said dryly and started walking, his back to Leonidas.

  Alisa almost said that Leonidas hadn’t done anything one way or another and could hardly be blamed for their reaction, but he, too, started walking, his pace brisk. She hurried to catch up since she was supposed to be the one leading.

  They walked in silence until she rounded a corner and found herself on her old street. She slowed down as the empty lot where her apartment complex had stood came into view. Where once a fifteen-story structure had risen on a busy street full of other such buildings, there was now nothing more than a gaping hole in the earth. A few pieces of rubble remained here and there, but most of it had been cleared. Bulldozers and cranes rested at one corner of the lot, though nobody was working in the area today.

  Her feet rooted to what had once been a moving sidewalk. She stared at the hole, dumbfounded by the destruction. Even though her sister-in-law had described it, and Alisa had looked at news photos during her rehabilitation, it hadn’t truly been real until now. The bodies had been moved along with the rubble, and for that she was thankful, but it didn’t keep her from realizing that hundreds of people had died here. Her neighbors. Her husband.

  “Desolate part of town,” Beck said, giving her a curious look. Wondering why they had stopped?

  “Yeah,” was all Alisa said, not wanting to discuss it.

  She spotted a warped deck chair lying crumpled at the corner of the lot. It had somehow survived the blast and avoided the bulldozers. A deflated ball was smashed into the earth beside it. A toy that might have belonged to Jelena or any of the other children who had lived here. Alisa remembered playing volleyball on the rooftop court with her daughter, trying to teach her that the ball was supposed to go over the net, not be bounced into it so it would rebound and could be hit repeatedly.

  Moisture burned her eyes, but she blinked it away. She would not cry with an audience looking on. Besides, Jelena had not been home when this had happened, so she survived. That was something. It was enough. It had to be.

  Alisa turned, intending to head to her sister-in-law’s apartment, but she bumped into Leonidas. He was gazing at the flattened lots, his jaw tight, irritation in his eyes. He looked down at her, his expression scathing.

  “Sorry,” she muttered, though she doubted he was angry because she’d run into him.

  “You did this,” he said, flicking his hand toward the empty lots. “There was no reason to bomb civilian structures.”

  “I w
asn’t anywhere near Perun when this happened,” Alisa said, stung. Even though she knew he meant the Alliance and not her specifically, it felt like a direct accusation. “I’m sure they were targeting imperial ships. If your people were flying over the city, inviting fire, then that’s hardly our fault.”

  “As if your Alliance ever targeted military ships. They attacked things that weren’t defended, bombed what they could, then slunk away in the night.”

  “There were plenty of all-out-battles with military ships fighting military ships. I know. I was a part of that. War is horrible either way. You think I’m not aware of how shitty a situation this is? This was my home.” Her voice cracked on the last word as she flung her hand toward the smashed ball, the warped chair.

  “Yet you chose to join the Alliance, knowing you would cause death and destruction.” He shook his head and walked away.

  Beck shifted his weight, but said nothing. He probably didn’t know why Leonidas had blown up. In truth, Alisa didn’t, either. Oh, she had roused his anger before over this very topic, but it had taken some poking and prodding. What had he seen in this empty lot? Something similar to what she saw?

  She probably should have left him to steam on his own, but she jogged to catch up. A seagull soared overhead, not caring that the harbor was miles away and that fish wasn’t likely to be found here.

  “Did you lose someone too?” Alisa asked Leonidas. “Is that why you’re angry?”

  “I’m angry because your war was pointless and made the universe a worse place rather than a better place.”

  “That’s not true. People have freedoms now that they never had under the empire.”

  “Freedoms don’t feed them or keep them safe. You’ll see when you’ve been out in the system more.” His tone was more reasonable now, though his shoulders were still tense. He swept his gaze back over the empty lots before they headed down another street, and she had a feeling he was seeing more than the dirt and the cranes. “You’ll see,” he added softly.

  Alisa wanted to refute him, but since the war ended, she hadn’t been many places except for Dustor, which hadn’t exactly been a paradise even before the fighting began. Her freedom-loving soul appreciated that there were fewer spy boxes floating through the skies here, but she admitted that the boys’ talk of hits was alarming. Such a thing never should have happened in a policed city on an advanced planet. Still, she would wait until she had seen more of the system for herself to consider Leonidas’s words more fully. He was clearly biased, having liked the suffocating imperial system. Of course those who had thrived in it had liked it.

  They entered an area where the buildings still stood, an area Alisa had walked through often before on her way to the university and later to her job at DropEx. The streets were quiet, but people still went about their business, and the moving sidewalks worked here.

  Nerves returned to her stomach as she stepped onto the one that would take them to her sister-in-law’s place. It occurred to her that she hadn’t commed ahead to warn Sylvia that she was coming. She had been thinking about the need to do so as they approached the planet, but then they had been attacked, and she’d forgotten. As an artist, Sylvia worked from home, but that was no guarantee that she would be there now. Alisa almost reached for her comm to make the call, but the idea of knocking on the door and surprising her and Jelena made her stay her hand. If Sylvia wasn’t home, Alisa would comm and arrange a meeting time.

  She stepped off the sidewalk in front of a centuries-old brick building with Old Earth lions roaring down from the edge of the rooftop. A mix of tall windows and roll-up garage doors dotted the front of the structure. A place for an artist. Alisa walked up a set of stone stairs to the door where a comm system waited.

  “I have someone to meet,” she said, realizing Beck was right behind her, as if he expected to be invited in for tea. “Will you wait here?”

  Alisa did not want Jelena to be scared by a man looming in combat armor or another man wearing a cyborg military jacket. At eight, she was probably old enough to recognize an imperial soldier; after living through the war, she might know the significance of the patch too. Not that Leonidas had followed her. He had stopped beside a lamppost, his mouth moving as he talked quietly into his earstar comm.

  “Sure,” Beck said, giving her a salute.

  She pressed the button for her sister-in-law’s apartment, one of only ten loft residences in the building. Unlike most of the struggling artists Alisa had run into on campus, Sylvia had always done well for herself with her paintings and sculpture.

  A long minute passed, and disappointment grew within her. She should have commed ahead.

  Then a distracted, “Yes?” came over the speaker, and a flash of excitement filled her. It had been years, but she recognized that voice.

  “Sylvia? It’s Alisa.”

  “Alisa?” Sylvia sounded puzzled.

  “Yes, I’m through with my obligations to the army now. I’m here to see Jelena, to take her with me, if that’s not a problem.” Alisa doubted it would be. Sylvia would have been caring for her for about six months, but she would surely agree with Alisa’s right to take her. She might agree less with the idea of her niece being taken off to run freight for the rest of her childhood, especially if she was in a stable environment here. Sylvia wouldn’t make a fuss, would she? Alisa dreaded the idea of a legal battle, especially here on Perun, where her position in the war could and would be used against her.

  “It’s good to see you, Alisa,” Sylvia said slowly, and the video display above the buttons came on. A woman of forty, Sylvia had gray mixed in with her dark hair, a lean face, and a smear of yellow paint on her cheekbone. “Did you get my letters?”

  She didn’t sound that excited to see Alisa. There was wariness in her face that filled Alisa’s belly with unease.

  “Letters?” she asked. “Plural? I got one, just a couple of months ago when I was released from the hospital on Dustor.”

  “The one about Jonah?”

  Alisa nodded.

  “But not the one I sent three months ago? About Jelena?”

  Alisa’s feeling of unease increased to one of dread. “It might not have had time to reach me. What happened?” she asked, her mouth suddenly dry.

  Sylvia sighed. “You better come in.”

  A soft buzz sounded, and the door lock released. Feeling numb, Alisa might not have opened it in time, but Beck grabbed the handle for her. His face was somber behind the faceplate of his armor. She hadn’t told him about Jelena, but he was clearly catching the gist of the conversation.

  Alisa stumbled over the raised threshold as she entered and had to catch herself on the wall. She found her way through the wide hallway, not seeing the polished wood floors or architectural details now. The door at the end opened, and Sylvia stood there, her face even graver than it had been seconds before.

  “What happened?” Alisa repeated, searching her eyes as if the answer was within them, as if she could tear out the information with telepathy instead of waiting for an explanation.

  “They came,” Sylvia said. “Three months after the war ended, when we all thought we were safe, when we were rebuilding… I was here with her. But they came, and I couldn’t stop them. They took her.”

  Chapter 4

  Sylvia kept gesturing to chairs, but Alisa couldn’t sit.

  “What do you mean they took her?” she asked. “Who took her? The empire?”

  Why would the empire want her daughter? Wasn’t it enough that she had lost her husband? There was nothing special about her family, no dynasty or money for anyone to inherit. It didn’t make sense.

  “Men in black robes. There were four of them.” Sylvia perched on the edge of the sofa. “I tried to stop them, but they easily got past me. One waved his hand and made it seem… I don’t know. For a few minutes there, while they were invading my home, I thought it wasn’t such a bad thing. I’m sure this wasn’t my own thought.”

  “Not your own thought?” Alis
a gaped at her, her mind refusing to put together the puzzle pieces, even though the robe alone would have suggested the identities of the kidnappers.

  “I believe they were Starseers.” Sylvia reached for a computer console built into the coffee table, the modern black interface looking strange set into the solid wood, the legs artistically turned, the surface elegantly engraved. “I can show you the video from the hallway. I got security to give it to me. I was trying to catch faces, to try and get enough to identify them.”

  Alisa rubbed the back of her neck, but nodded. She wanted to see for herself, to try and understand. Maybe it had simply been people dressed up as Starseers. They could have counted on Sylvia being too daunted by their presumed identity to chase after them. After all, she was alone. But now that Alisa was back, it would be a different story. She would chase them. But if this had happened three months ago, where could she start? Tears threatened for the second time that afternoon, but they were tears of tension and frustration this time, not of sorrow.

  “Here it is,” Sylvia said, and a video of the hallway near the front door began to play above the table. “I’ve shown the police. They put out a missing person report, and I added a reward to it for her safe return.”

  “Thank you,” Alisa made herself mutter, though gratitude wasn’t the emotion at the surface of her mind. She wanted to blame Sylvia for allowing this to happen. How could she have let strangers in to steal her little girl?

  Alisa managed to keep the accusations from tumbling from her lips. Sylvia had been kind enough to take Jelena in; to throw that in her face would be unacceptable. No matter how much Alisa wanted to lash out at someone. She found herself wishing Leonidas had come in, if only so she could pick a fight with him and let out her anger.