Starseers: Fallen Empire, Book 3 by Lindsay Buroker

Leonidas as she walked across the cargo hold to close the hatch. She kept her other hand close to her Etcher as she went.
    “Leonidas here,” he responded softly.
    The sound of his voice sent relief through her. The way things were going, she had almost expected him not to answer, for him and Beck to have walked off into the mist, never to return.
    “Did you and Beck come back to the ship?” Alisa opened the panel and looked at the lever for manually opening the hatch. When she had closed it, she had tugged it downward. It was now back in the up position. There was no way it could have fallen upward.
    “No,” Leonidas said, a worried note in his voice. “I just took down the two perimeter guards watching the White Dragon ship. It’s down at the base of a cliff here, and they were expecting trouble.”
    “Beck is still with you, right?” she asked, looking around the foggy cargo hold.
    “Yes. He took out one guard’s rear left haunch.”
    She snorted, remembering Beck’s claim to having helped with the Octavian bear on that asteroid laboratory.
    “I heard that, mech,” Beck growled over the comm. “I was drawing fire. That’s why you got those two so easily.”
    “Is that what you were doing?” Leonidas murmured. He raised his voice. “Is everything all right back there?”
    Alisa hesitated. She wanted to tell him to come back, that unsettling things were happening and that she would prefer big burly men in combat armor next to her, but she did not. “Just a lot of mist and some oddness. We can handle it. What are you going to do next?”
    “Deal with the rest of the people who were trying to crash your ship,” Leonidas said, his tone steely now.
    It made her shiver. She was tempted to ask for leniency on the behalf of the mafia men, but those were not Alliance soldiers. They were bullies and criminals, criminals who had been trying to kill her and everyone on her ship because of one man’s actions. No, not even that. Assuming Beck had told her the truth when they had met, he had been wrongly convicted by the mafia men. Someone else had killed that White Dragon leader, and Beck had been blamed because it happened in his restaurant. Maybe what he ought to be doing instead of making money to pay them off was finding out who was responsible for the crime for which he had been framed.
    “Beck, I’ve got an insight for you later,” Alisa said and threw the lever to raise the ramp and close the hatch again. Maybe she ought to get some of Mica’s gum to stick to it to make sure it did not accidentally fall upward against gravity again.
    The sound of weapons fire came over the comm, and then it was shut off.
    “Great,” Alisa muttered and headed for engineering to check on Yumi and Mica. If nothing else, she could also hold a flashlight.
    A faint tink drifted across the empty cargo hold. She paused, looking toward the chickens, but the noise had come from the direction of the stairs, not their pen.
    “Doctor?” she asked, though she was certain she would have noticed him walking down the stairs if he had entered the cargo hold.
    Silence was the only response. Yumi had taken her candle with her when she left, so the hold was dark except for the weak illumination of the emergency lights in the deck. They brightened the hatchways and a few panels on the walls but did nothing to drive away the shadows in the corners. Or under the stairs and the elevated walkway. The mist made visibility worse, fuzzing the air like fog hugging a pond on a damp morning.
    Her hand on her Etcher, Alisa continued toward engineering, but she kept her eyes toward the stairs.
    Despite her focus, it was the alarmed squawk of a chicken that warned her of trouble. Someone cursed, and the shadows stirred under the stairs.
    Alisa fired more on instinct than conscious thought. Her bullet clanged off metal. She ran several steps and dove, anticipating return fire. If it did not come, she would feel foolish, but she was certain someone was