Read Fallen Empire 1: Star Nomad for Free Online

deserved to be out here in the light of day.
    The hatch stood open and the ramp down, inviting people in. People who could pay. Alisa hurried toward it, hoping numerous well-heeled passengers had signed aboard while she had been shopping for supplies. She supposed it would be foolish—or overly optimistic, as Mica would say—to hope that their cyborg guest had disembarked, changing his mind about riding into space with them.
    As she neared the ship, a commotion broke out in front of one of the merchant tents set up along the open-air docks. A gun fired, and people scattered.
    “Thief!” a woman cried and lunged out of the tent holding a blazer rifle in both hands, a faded yellow dress flapping around her legs as she ran.
    People sprinted away from her. Alisa pulled out her own gun and jumped behind the hoverboard for cover while looking for the thief. A young man was racing down the promenade, zigzagging and gripping his injured arm. Alisa hesitated to shoot since she couldn’t tell if he had truly stolen anything and since she didn’t have a stun gun. The proprietor did not hesitate. She fired, heedless of the nearby people. Her aim was better than Alisa would have expected, and a bolt of energy slammed into the man’s back. He tumbled to the cracked cement walkway. The woman stalked toward him, her head held high, ignoring the people giving her alarmed looks. When she reached the man, she patted him down, pulled a gold chain out of his pocket, and stalked back to her tent.
    Alisa kept expecting the sounds of sirens or at least for a couple of automated police patrollers to show up, both to see if the thief had survived and to take the woman into custody. Killing someone for stealing had never been legal.
    Slowly, as the crowds returned to the promenade and as nobody came to do something about the thief, who was probably dead by now, it dawned on Alisa that imperial law wasn’t being enforced anymore. After all, the empire had fallen. She knew from watching the news holos while she had been recovering that there was a three-planet government that the Alliance had set up on the most industrious and resource-rich planets, but they were a long ways from here. Alisa had no idea what passed for the law out here now or even if the Alliance had influence here. Someone must have stepped in to fill the void of the missing imperial government, but she didn’t know who.
    “That’ll teach you to be unconscious for two months,” she muttered.
    Alisa was lucky to have survived that final battle and to be walking again, but she couldn’t help but feel a little bitter over the mediocre medical care the hospital here had been able to provide. Had she gone down on a more sophisticated world, with all of the modern medical tech, she might have been out in a week or two.
    She tugged the hoverboard into motion again. She was alive now and had her health back. That was what mattered. That and the fact that she was going home to be with her daughter again. Focusing on that made it easier to avoid thinking about the fact that Jonah was gone and that there was no longer a home waiting for her back on Perun. She hadn’t figured out yet what she would do after she had Jelena back.
    When Alisa led the hoverboard up the Nomad’s ramp, she found Mica on her hands and knees in a corner of the spacious cargo hold, a welding mask pulled over her face. She gripped a soldering gun in gloved hands, navigating a seam along an interior bulkhead.
    “Does that mean we’re not as ready for space as I was hoping?” Alisa asked, looking around as she brought the supplies inside.
    She did not see the crowd of passengers she had hoped would be waiting, but perhaps they had already been shown to their cabins? She did see a row of burly men lined up against the bulkhead next to the stairs that led to the upper decks. The big open cargo hold took up the bottom two-thirds of the ship, with only the engine room sharing space with it down on this level.