The Fallen Empire Collection by Lindsay Buroker

by Discover Sci-Fi Special Edition

  “Someone who looks like she might be here to investigate the death of a smith,” Alisa said. “It’s a woman, and she’s wearing a police uniform.”

  “We better leave then.” Leonidas nodded toward the back door.

  “Don’t forget your box.”

  “Never,” he murmured.

  The armor case floated after him as he moved away from the counter. He stepped past the body, experiencing a twinge of regret at leaving the smith’s killer at large without trying to help, but it wasn’t his responsibility to enforce order here, and he doubted the police would appreciate his assistance. Besides, if a patroller was on the way, she would be more useful here than he.

  Leonidas held the back door open for Alisa and his case to exit. He heard someone lifting the roll-up door. He slipped outside, shutting the back door softly, noticing his bare hand on the knob. He should have taken more care not to leave fingerprints, but maybe it didn’t matter. The Alliance was already after him. He’d probably be on the run for years to come. If they didn’t catch him first.

  Alisa did not make any jokes as they retraced their steps through the alley, and for that he was glad. He wasn’t in a good mood and didn’t want to make the effort to be good company. Uncranky company. His helplessness here on the station—in the system as a whole—grated on him more than it had in the previous months.

  As Alisa turned up an alley heading toward the street, Leonidas paused, a ladder catching his eye. It led up the side of a warehouse to a third-story rooftop.

  “Alisa,” he said softly, waving for her to come back. He gave a subvocal command for the case to stay put by the side of the building, then told her, “Side trip.”

  “Oh? Somewhere exotic?” She arched an eyebrow toward the ladder.

  “It depends on how exotic you consider rooftops.”

  “Not very,” she said as he started up.

  “Then this side trip may disappoint.”

  As he climbed, Leonidas listened for noises back at the smithy or out in the street. He did not hear anyone walking or talking, but if the policewoman had verified the existence of a body, a violently murdered body at that, she might have called for backup. He wondered how she had learned of the smith’s death, since he hadn’t seen a flashing alarm or anything of that nature.

  Once he reached the top of the warehouse, he had to drop to his belly to crawl across it. The arched ceiling that had seemed high when down in the street, had its beginning at the wall behind the buildings, and it stretched only a few feet above the warehouse rooftop. Pipes and ducts rose in spots, too, further tightening the space as they disappeared into the station above. The hum of machinery reached his ears, reverberating through the rooftop. In spots, colorful graffiti adorned the ceiling.

  He crawled to the far side of the warehouse so he could peer into the street. An inebriated couple crossed at an intersection several buildings away, leaning on each other and laughing too loudly. Targets for muggers, Leonidas supposed. He didn’t yet see any other police, though he scanned the shadows closely in case others lurked in the recesses.

  Alisa scooted up beside him, eyeing the white outline of a penis and balls graffitied above them. As a military officer, she had doubtlessly seen worse, but he found himself hoping that it was too dark for her normal human eyes to pick out the details.

  “If I’d known you would bring me someplace so cozy, I would have brought a blanket and a picnic basket.”

  Apparently, she had better-than-average normal human eyes.

  “Do you have one? A picnic basket?” He couldn’t imagine her bare bones freighter possessing such comforts, not when it had been huddled in the back of a junkyard cavern a month earlier. The lavatories didn’t even have towels, something that might have compensated for the fact that the body dryers only worked intermittently.

  “Not presently, but for you, I would have bought one.”

  “I had no idea I rated special consideration.”

  “Yes, the specialness of braided wicker.” She grinned at him, surprising him since he hadn’t thought his comments that witty. “You’re bantering with me. That’s excellent. I have hope that you might one day laugh, after all.”

  He returned his attention to the street. With a man dead a few buildings down, Leonidas did not think this was the time for laughter. Or banter.

  “Are we looking for anything in particular?” Alisa asked, not visibly chagrined by his lack of a response.

  “Sergeant Lancer. His armor will be ready soon, and if it were me, I wouldn’t be late to pick up such a precious item. He may have deliberately asked for a late-night pickup so he could avoid walking through the station during prime hours.”

  “Is there a warrant on his head too?”

  “I don’t know, but if he’s toting a case of red armor around, people will know what he is. Most former imperial soldiers can change out of their uniforms and blend in. It’s not so easy for cyborgs, even without the armor.”

  “You look completely human when you’re not cut up with your implants showing.” She waved to his arm, where he’d received such a cut a couple of weeks earlier. Dr. Dominguez had sealed it, leaving only the faintest of scars, one of many after so many years in the military. “An overly muscled human who spends four hours a day in the gym,” she added, grinning again, “but a human.”

  “Overly?” He twitched an eyebrow.

  Her grin widened. “Depends on your tastes, I suppose. I have a fondness for lanky scholars who appreciate my irreverent humor.” Her grin faded, and he wondered if that described her late husband.

  “Which is why you’re on a rooftop, shoulder to shoulder with me,” he said, thinking that responding to her banter might distract her from uncomfortable memories. The three gods knew he had his share of uncomfortable memories and understood about needing distractions.

  To his surprise, her cheeks reddened. Someone else wouldn’t have noticed in the shadows, but he had no trouble picking up the flush.

  “I just wanted an excuse to go out for a mocha,” she said, scooting closer to the edge of the building and peering into the street. “Will you be inviting your friend along if he shows up?”

  That wasn’t what he’d had in mind, though the image of Alisa walking arm-in-arm with a big, brawny cyborg on either side of her amused him for some reason. She wasn’t that short of a woman, standing roughly five-foot-ten, but the top of her head only rose an inch over his shoulder, and he wasn’t even that tall for a cyborg. The imperial army had enforced strict recruiting standards, picking men that had rated highly on athletic tests and had also already been physically imposing. They had been fussy about who they invested in for the expensive surgery necessary to turn a human into a cyborg—or killing machine, as Leonidas’s recruiter had said all those years ago. He remembered being unimpressed by the rhetoric. Yet here he was.

  “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 pe
ek 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—n
ot 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.