by Audrey Faye
“You’re going to offer me a job,” she said, tugging me out of my thoughts. She dropped herself into a chair and sipped from a dirty glass. The drink had to have been paid for by her mark, given that everything she owned was back on her dismantled ship.
“I am?”
“Payback for saving you from getting sand in all those hard-to-reach places.”
I smiled into my drink. She was right. Again. I had considered offering her a job as my second-in-command. A second meant Starscream could make non-stop runs. I’d double my profits even after her share. I’d had seconds before, but they didn’t last. Most quit. The rest I’d fired before they could quit. I’d gotten used to flying solo.
“What did you whisper to Jin when you stabbed him?” I asked. The fact she’d filled Jin’s last seconds with her words seemed important, and I’d been mulling it over in my mind. Whatever she’d said, I’d seen the look in her eyes, she’d made sure of that. Those words meant something.
Her dark lashes fluttered, the only outward sign she felt anything about killing a man. “Cuando en medio de lobos, hay que aullar,” she replied, her voice softer than before. The smooth roll of her foreign words licked pleasure way down low and had me shifting in my seat. It’d be worth riling her just so she dusted off the Spanish and I got a cheap thrill.
“Which means?” I cleared my throat.
She rapped her fingernails on the tabletop and skipped her gaze away too quickly for me to read. “‘When among wolves, we must howl.’”
I could assume she meant that when trapped, she had to do what was necessary to escape—a parting explanation for the poor bastard she’d just stabbed in the gut. Or a reflection on her joining the ranks of predatory assholes, like me? Both, maybe. I’d sworn off curiosity, but in her case, I was having a hard time ignoring its siren call. I’d never know merchant-daughter-turned-smuggler Fran if I left her on Ganymede. My gut told me that was probably for the best. Keep it simple. Get away clean.
“My ship. My rules.” She’d have a hard time following orders, but she’d tell it to me straight. Maybe that was what I needed. Someone not afraid of the truth. Speaking of the truth… “Exactly why were you smuggling in Jotunheim?”
She smiled and looked at me as though she already knew she’d gotten the job. “Easy credits. I fly faster, harder, and better than anyone else. Jotunheim’s rep doesn’t frighten me.”
Leaning in closer, I said quietly, “What is it you’re flying faster and harder from?”
She wet her lips. “A lot of things, Captain. Some you’d understand. Some you wouldn’t.”
“Try me.”
“Mistakes, for one.”
Now that I could understand. We all had our secrets. She’d scratched at some of mine. What I couldn’t figure out was why she’d want to run with me. Ganymede’s port was riddled with folks she could hitch a ride with.
“I’m a fixer.” I relaxed back in my seat. “Pay me enough and I’ll fix anything, from running illegal weapons to making someone disappear. If you wanna fly with me, check your morals at the airlock.”
She sipped at her drink, eyeing me in a way that had me wondering who should be warning who off.
“Why me? Why not some other asshole? Ganymede is full of ’em. Your skills? You could get a sweet deal running legit cargo.”
“You need me.”
“Right.” She had an ego bigger than mine. Impressive. I tipped my drink to salute her. “There are a lot of things I need, honey. A mouthy second on my back in the black ain’t one of them.”
Her know-it-all smile was back. She twisted in her seat, draped an arm over its back and nodded at the bar. “The guy I was talking with? Someone tipped him off there’s a Captain Shepperd frequents Tink’s. Apparently, Shepperd is a wanted man in Niflheim and there’s a rich sum offered for his capture. I guess you wouldn’t know anything about that?”
I frowned and checked the bar, but her mark had gone. “Where is he?”
“Took him out back for a bit of R ’n’ R.”
Shit, had she killed him?
“Not that.” She grinned, easily deciphering the fear on my face. “He’ll come around with one hell of a hangover.” She leaned forward, bringing her close enough to whisper. “You might also like to know I heard on intra-system chatter that some hotshot ex-fleet captain should be in Asgard. Fancy that. Maybe fleet will come looking, maybe they won’t. Maybe you need me, maybe you don’t. I’m not afraid to fly with you, Shepperd. But you are afraid to fly with me.” She leaned back. “Or are you just afraid of falling?”
Well, double shit. Tink’s bar just took on a whole new sinister edge. When was Fran ever not right? If I stopped running—stopped flying, even just for a little while—I’d fall. And she knew it. She’d probably known it since the silo. I downed my drink and peered over the rim at Fran—the best damn pilot in the nine systems. “Welcome aboard Starscream.”
~END
Read more from Caleb and Fran in the Girl From Above series, the space opera adventure readers are comparing to Firefly and Ex Machina! Available now at all good online retailers.
About the Author: Born in Tonbridge, Kent in 1979, Pippa's family moved to the South West of England where she grew up among the dramatic moorland and sweeping coastlands of Devon & Cornwall. With a family history brimming with intrigue, complete with Gypsy angst on one side and Jewish survivors on the other, she draws from a patchwork of ancestry and uses it as the inspiration for her writing. Happily married and the mother of two little girls, she resides on the Devon & Cornwall border.
Sign up to her mailing list here.
Starfall Station
A Fallen Empire Story
Lindsay Buroker
After the empire falls, cyborg soldier Leonidas Adler must avoid the Alliance operatives who want him for secrets only he knows, but that’s easier said than done. Worse, his past threatens those he’s traveling with, including Alisa, the freighter captain he has come to care about.
I
Starfall Station
Foreword: Thank you for checking out “Starfall Station,” a fun side adventure in my Fallen Empire series (all right, it may not have been much fun for the heroes, but I enjoyed writing it!). It takes place between Books 2 and 3, but I’ve designed it to work as a stand-alone. If you’re a new reader, I hope you will be intrigued by this introduction to my two main characters and that you might even want to check out the rest of the books. Thanks, and enjoy the adventure!
Hieronymus “Leonidas” Adler waited until late in the space station’s day cycle to walk down the ramp of the Star Nomad, his hover case of damaged combat armor floating behind him. He could have carried the two-hundred-pound case easily, but he was a wanted man—a wanted cyborg—and he did not wish to call attention to himself by displaying inhuman abilities. Not here, not on a space station controlled by the self-proclaimed Tri-Sun Alliance.
His mouth twisted with bitterness. Almost everything was controlled by the Alliance now. When the empire had maintained order over the dozens of planets and moons in their vast trinary star system, Leonidas would have walked proudly onto the station, his head high as he wore his Cyborg Corps military uniform. He wouldn’t have waited until the lights dimmed for night to skulk into the concourse on his errand.
Alert for trouble, Leonidas spotted Alisa Marchenko, the captain and pilot of the Star Nomad, when she was still hundreds of meters down the concourse. This did not take enhanced vision since she was leading a train of hoverboards, each piled more than ten feet high with crates. Her security officer, Tommy Beck, also walked at her side, his white combat armor bright and undamaged. Why wouldn’t it be? He had spent most of their last battle hiding under the console in the navigation cabin.
Leonidas waited at the base of the ramp for them to approach in case they bore news that could affect him. Such as that squadrons of police officers or Alliance army soldiers were roaming the station, looking for stray cyborgs.
“Evening, mech,” Be
ck called to him as they approached, his expression more wary than the cheerful tone would have implied. “Are you waiting to help us load these boxes into the cargo hold?”
“No,” Leonidas said, his own tone flat. He would help if Marchenko asked him to, but was a passenger, not crew. Besides, he had little interest in assisting the security officer, a man who had served in the Alliance army during the war and who preferred to call him mech rather than use his name.
“Going to get your armor fixed, Leonidas?” Captain Marchenko asked, giving him a warm smile and waving at his case.
Alisa, he reminded himself. She had asked him a couple of times to use her first name, though he found the familiarity difficult. She, too, had been in the Alliance army, and she’d referred to him simply as “cyborg” for the first week after they had met. Still, they had been through a lot since then, and she had fought to keep the Alliance from capturing him during the Perun battle. She’d said that he had paid his fare for a ride on her freighter and that was that, but she had risked her life, doing far more than most civilian captains would do to protect a passenger. For that, he could certainly address her by her first name.
“I am,” Leonidas said. “I made a late-night appointment with an excellent tech smith in Refinery Row.”
“Better watch out for yourself, mech,” Beck said, lingering instead of leading the train of cargo into the hold. “When we were out, looking for cargo-hauling deals, I saw lots of sleazy villains and opportunists skulking in the back alleys. And the not-so-back alleys. This station is rougher than it was the last time I came through here.”
Leonidas was tempted to point out that the empire had likely ruled the last time Beck had visited. Of course the station had been safer and more orderly. The Alliance had been so busy overthrowing the throne that it hadn’t worried about how well it could govern the system once it achieved its objective. But he didn’t want to engage in a conversation with the security officer, so all he said was, “I’ve heard.”
“I could go with you,” Alisa said, still smiling at Leonidas.
He blinked slowly, perplexed as to why she made the offer. Something to do with his warrant?
“For my safety?” he asked.
She chuckled. “Yes, with my prodigious muscles and state-of-the-art weaponry—” she patted the bullet-slinging Etcher pistol in its holster under her jacket, “—I’ll be your bodyguard.”
“There’s an image,” Beck muttered. “Your head only comes up to his shoulders. Do you even weigh half as much as he does?”
Leonidas wanted to order Beck to trot up the ramp to unload the hoverboards and to butt out of his conversation with Alisa, but he wasn’t a colonel anymore. Once, he had commanded a battalion and undertaken special missions for the emperor. Not anymore. He was nobody now. Except a man wanted for information he didn’t have.
“I don’t know,” Alisa said. “We haven’t jumped on a scale together and made comparisons. Why don’t you get Mica to help load our cargo, Beck? She’s got a hand tractor in engineering.”
“Sure, Captain.” He saluted, an Alliance army salute that came naturally to him, reminding Leonidas of what Beck and Alisa had been in the war, a noncommissioned officer and an officer. Alisa didn’t act much like an officer, preferring flippancy and irreverence to stately shows of decorum and authority, so he could forget sometimes that she had been a captain and had flown ships against his people. Perhaps even against him.
“I just meant that I’d keep you company if you want it,” Alisa told Leonidas as Beck ambled up the ramp, the hoverboards of crates barely fitting through the wide hatchway at the top. “You’ll have to wait several hours while the smith repairs your armor, won’t you? We could grab some dinner.”
“I ate on board,” Leonidas said before it occurred to him that she was making an offer of camaraderie rather than one of necessity.
In his youth, he would have caught that sooner, navigating the relationships between men and women without any more trouble than the average teenager, but twenty years with cyborg implants, in addition to the physical and biological changes the army had made to him, had left him a stranger to male-female relationships. He hoped to change that one day, perhaps even to have a family, but his quest to find an appropriate cybernetics specialist had been waylaid.
“Ah,” Alisa said, her smile faltering. She turned to head past him and up the ramp.
“Coffee, perhaps?” Leonidas suggested.
“If I get a mocha this late at night, I’ll be swinging from the catwalk,” Alisa said, waving toward the elevated walkway in the cargo bay. Despite the words, she returned to his side and nodded toward the concourse. “Perhaps a decaf. Also, did you know that there’s a shop in there that specializes in nothing but chocolate?” Her eyes gleamed. “It’s open around the clock.”
Leonidas didn’t share her obsession with the sweet stuff, but he burned a lot of calories even when inactive, so he wasn’t opposed to the occasional carbohydrate bomb. He subvocally ordered the case of armor to follow them as they left the ship. The earstar that hugged his lobe, awaiting his commands, relayed the order to the smart interface on the case, and it hummed along behind them.
The concourse was quieter than it had been during the day cycle when they had first landed, but the people they passed seemed more disreputable than the ones he’d observed then. Many wore hats and hoods that shadowed their faces, with few efforts made to conceal the BlazTeck firearms that they carried. Weapons had been illegal for civilians to carry, especially on ships and space stations, when the empire had maintained order.
More than one of those armed men eyed his armor case, but nobody approached him openly. A good set of combat armor was worth thousands, and even damaged, his would fetch a high price. But it had been issued by the imperial army, the crimson color of the case matching that of the armor inside, a color used predominantly by the men in the Cyborg Corps. Those who had served in the military, both imperial and Alliance, knew the meaning of that color, and many who hadn’t knew it too. He doubted anyone here would be foolish enough to assault him.
Alisa cast a wistful look toward the restaurants and shops in the kitschy Castle Arcade, a wide walkway lined with faux cobblestones, the buildings to either side and on the levels above ensconced in gray brick. If any castles on Old Earth had flashing cloud lights in obnoxious colors such as these, it would be news to the historians. Leonidas supposed the chocolate shop was down there.
Presuming she would be fine with waiting to visit until after he dropped off his armor, he guided her to one of the floating bridges that created tunnels between the two massive cylinders that marked the different halves of the station, separating the shopping and entertainment region from the refinery that this station had first been built to house. The tech smith’s shop was on that side.
The number of shoppers and passersby dwindled significantly as they stepped off the bridge and into a night-dimmed corridor. His ears, sharper than those of any unmodified human, caught the whisper of clothing rubbing together from around a corner at an intersection ahead. That wouldn’t necessarily have alarmed him, but then he heard the snap of a battery pack being secured in a blazer rifle.
He shifted from walking beside Alisa to walking in front of her.
“Does this mean you’re not open to hand-holding?” she asked.
He lifted a hand, hoping the gesture would be quelling. Her sense of humor came out at the oddest and most inappropriate times. Granted, she didn’t have his hearing and likely did not sense the possible threat ahead.
Feet shuffled around the corner. The ceiling lamp over the intersection, already dimmed for night, flickered and went out. Suspicious timing.
Leonidas rested his hand on the butt of his destroyer, a deadly weapon some referred to as a hand cannon. It wasn’t useful in stealth situations, but he had a feeling that making a statement might be ideal if muggers waited around the corner.
By the time he reached the intersection, his senses had inf
ormed him of three people waiting, two on one side, one on the other. The single person had light footfalls and sounded like someone small, perhaps a woman or a child. Leonidas drew his destroyer and with his left hand, removed a fluidwrap from his pocket. He wasn’t as well-armed as he would be for going into battle, but with the warrant the Alliance had out for him, he had assumed he might run into trouble.
Before entering their line of sight, he glanced back at Alisa, this time lifting his palm in a stay-there gesture. Inappropriate humor or not, she had drawn her Etcher and appeared ready for a confrontation. That was good, but he had no desire for her to risk herself in some minor squabble.
Not making a sound, he burst around the corner. He threw the fluidwrap across the intersection at the smaller person while sprinting for the other two. He was tempted to shoot them, but they hadn’t yet committed a crime. Also, he doubted the punishment for mugging was death on this station, and even if it was, he no longer had the authority to help enforce the laws.
Two big, fat tattooed men with long hair bound with beads scrambled back, their eyes widening. One carried an old shotgun more appropriate for hunting Arkadian ducks than men. The other had the blazer rifle Leonidas had heard being loaded.
He surged across the five meters between them and bowled the first man over, even as he registered that the second was lifting his arm to throw a fluidwrap of his own. Leonidas ducked as he hurled his first adversary aside, the ball-shaped projectile flying over his head, its energy netting unfurling too late. The shotgun clunked to the floor as the first man struck the wall so hard that he might have cracked his skull.
Leonidas realized he had used too much force, a constant problem for a cyborg capable of bending steel bars with his hands, but he did not feel much regret in this case. Realizing his net had missed, and perhaps what he was up against, the other man dropped his blazer and tried to back up, to flee.
