Fallen Empire 1: Star Nomad Read Online Free PDF

cabins for himself, and Alisa hadn’t presumed to open the hatch to peek inside. He didn’t speak to them unless asked a question, and it wasn’t guaranteed even then. After three days, Alisa still did not know his name, though she had asked once, figuring he would be less likely to shoot them later on if he came to know them. So far, he hadn’t shown any interest in knowing them.
    Alisa assumed he had a box of ration bars or ready-meals in his cabin, because he never visited the mess hall, not that there was much reason to. To save power until they could get the main engine online and fueled up, Mica hadn’t turned on electricity to the non-essential parts of the ship, and there wasn’t any food in the refrigerator. All Alisa and Mica had were ration bars and pouches of dehydrated vegetable patties with the texture of sawdust. If they managed to fly the ship into town and find some paying passengers, they could buy better supplies for the trip.
    “Captain?” Mica asked one afternoon when Alisa’s determination to clean all of the dust, cobwebs, and rat droppings out of the ship took her through engineering with a mop. Mica slid out from under a console, her short hair even more tousled than usual, though her worried expression was probably a result of more than hair woes.
    “How’re we doing?” Alisa crouched beside her, a tendril of unease worming through her stomach.
    Even though Mica had done a thorough analysis of the ship on the first day, Alisa kept expecting her engineer to stumble across something that would keep the Nomad grounded indefinitely. Finding parts for the craft hadn’t been easy even before the war, and if it turned out they needed something proprietary that couldn’t be made in the little machine shop in the back of the engineering room, well… the odds of finding it on Dustor were not good. Further, from what she had heard, mail-order was out of the question these days. She was lucky her sister-in-law’s letter had reached her.
    “There are peculiarities,” Mica said, glancing toward the hatchway, as if she expected the cyborg to be lurking there.
    He wasn’t. Alisa had stumbled across him doing pull-ups from a bar in the cargo hold that morning, but he was far scarcer than the rat droppings, and despite his interest in getting off-planet, he hadn’t shown any curiosity as far as the repairs went.
    “Such as?” Alisa asked.
    “A lot of equipment has already been repaired. It’s jury-rigged, so you can tell there was a problem, but the patches are efficient enough that they don’t need me to do anything, at least not until genuine replacement parts can be found.”
    “My mother was good at making do. She was half engineer and half pilot, all self-taught. She had a real knack for keeping this boat in the air. Until the end.” Alisa grimaced.
    Mica sat up and opened a panel. She pointed to a circuit board and a snarl of wires that had been tamed with wire ties. “Do you know if that’s her work?”
    Alisa shrugged. She’d never had much passion or aptitude for fixing things, despite her mother’s attempts to teach her how to maintain the ship, so she didn’t even know what she was looking at. “She might have. The last four years that she flew freight, I was away in college. She was out here on her own, so I don’t know what she had to deal with.”
    “But you said life support was definitely wrecked, right?”
    “Yes,” Alisa said, her voice tight. Life support had been what failed, what had resulted in her mother’s death. Another long-hauler had found the ship adrift and reported it to the authorities. Alisa’s mother had been found dead inside, the carbon dioxide levels off the chart. Angry and devastated, Alisa had almost left it out there, but it had been drifting close to Dustor, so she’d hitched a ride to claim it and had worn a spacesuit to fly it to the planet where she’d sold the old freighter to the highest bidder.
    “I’ve run several tests.