THE FALLEN EMPIRE COLLECTION

Prequel and Books 1 - 3

Chapter 1

A dark shape scurried through the shadows ahead, disappearing under the belly of a rusted spaceship. Alisa Marchenko halted, tightening her grip on her old Etcher 50. Rustling sounds came from beneath the ship, along with a low growl. Alisa hoped it was just another of the big rodents she’d seen earlier. Those weren’t exactly friendly, but at least they didn’t endanger anything higher up than her calves—so long as she remained standing.

Mica, her fellow scavenger on this self-appointed mission, bumped into her back, jostling her. Alisa caught herself on the hull of the rusty derelict and grimaced when her palm smacked against something moist and sticky. She wiped it on her trousers, glad for the dim lighting in the cavern.

“Sorry,” Mica whispered, the shadows hiding her face, but not the fact that she carried a toolbox almost as big as she was. Alisa ought to have her leading the way—she could sling that box around with the authority of an assault rifle. “Can’t we risk a light?” Mica added. “We might trip over some unexploded ordnance down here and blow ourselves up.”

“I see your pessimism hasn’t faded in the years since we served together.”

“Pessimism is an admirable quality in an engineer. Pessimistic people check their work three times, because they’re sure something won’t be right. Optimistic people check once, trust in Solis-de to keep the ship safe, then blow everyone up.”

“I think you’re mistaking the word optimistic for inept.”

“They’ve got a similar ring to my ear.”

Alisa looked past Mica’s short, tousled hair and toward the mouth of the massive cavern. The skeletons of dozens of junked ships stood between them and the harsh red daylight of the desert outside. She was tempted to say yes to Mica’s suggestion of light, but the sounds of punches and grunts arose less than fifty meters away. A guttural male voice cursed in one of the Old Earth languages, and someone cried out in pain. A juicy and final thump followed, making Alisa think of a star melon splatting open after falling from a rooftop. Men laughed, their voices rough and cruel.

“No light,” Alisa whispered.

Mica shrugged, tools clinking faintly in her box. “You’re the captain.”

“Not unless this works, I’m not.”

“I thought you got promoted at the end of the war.”

“I did, but the war’s over,” Alisa said.

The war was over, and the Alliance had forgotten about her in the aftermath, leaving her in the hands of the dubious medical care available from the local facilities. Alisa had eventually recovered after spending a month in a dilapidated turn-of-the-century regeneration tank and two months learning to walk again, but she had little more than the clothes on her back. Worse, she was stranded on this dustball of a planet, billions of miles from her home—from her daughter.

Her fingers strayed toward a pocket with an envelope in it, one of her few possessions. It contained a letter from her sister-in-law Sylvia, a letter written by hand in a time when most communications were electronic, a letter that had taken weeks to find her in the hospital, a letter that explained that her husband had died in the final bombings of Perun Central. Only knowing that her eight-year-old daughter still lived and was staying with Sylvia on Perun had given Alisa the strength to endure the months of rehabilitation and the weeks of scrounging and planning to reach this place, to come up with a way to get back home.

Mica started to respond to her comment, but Alisa turned her back to end the conversation and continued picking her way through the junk piles. Talking was not wise, not down here.

More noises came from the wreckage all around them, including a chewing sound that Alisa found unnerving. A few more steps, and she heard something being dragged through the fine dust on the cavern floor, dust that drifted upward with her steps, teasing her nostrils, making her want to sneeze. She pinched her nose, having no delusions that the men hiding in here were anything but criminals, criminals who wouldn’t care that she had helped free them from the oppression and tyranny of the empire.

As they drew farther from the entrance, the smell of the junk cavern grew stronger, scents of rust and oil and burned wires, but also of butchered meat and carcasses left to the animal scavengers. Alisa was tempted to keep pinching her nostrils shut.

“Are you sure you know where you’re going?” Mica whispered.

“I know where I left the ship six years ago.”

“That’s a no, right?”

“The engine was smoking by the time I made it in here. I doubt anyone fixed it up to move her.” Another clunk came from the darkness, and Alisa added, “Talk later.”

Soft growls and snarls came from the path ahead. Alisa made herself continue onward. The creatures making the noises did not sound large.

She caught herself reaching toward the side of her head, to tap on the earstar that had hung there like jewelry for so much of her life. Assuming the satellites were still in orbit on Dustor, she could have used it to call up a map of their surroundings, but she had lost it in the crash. Mica did not wear one, either—she’d said she sold hers for food. Apparently, computer and communications tech was easier for her to give up than her tools.

Alisa’s toe bumped into something on the narrow path. It did not feel like a rock or piece of debris. She started to step over it, not wanting to know the details.

A beam of light flashed up ahead, someone heading down the path toward them. Alisa stepped back and grabbed Mica’s shoulder, pushing her toward wreckage to the side of them.

“Hide,” she breathed.

The light was definitely coming in their direction.

Mica found something to crawl under. On the opposite side of the path, Alisa patted around a pile of dusty reels of cable of all different sizes, the mound rising well above her head. She squeezed between it and something large, poky, and metal. There wasn’t room to get more than a couple of feet off the path. She hoped that whoever had the light did not look around.

The beam of light approached, angled down toward the ground from someone’s earstar. The footfalls of several people accompanied it.

Alisa squeezed more tightly into her spot, turning her head from the path, not wanting her eyes to reflect the light. A few male grumbles and curses reached her ears as the men navigated the route, bumping into things, kicking dented cans out of the way.

Before the group reached her, their light played across the thing she had bumped into on the path. A human body, that of a woman. The clothing was ripped, flesh torn away by some hungry animal, but the sightless eyes remained open, an expression of utter terror frozen in them.

Alisa closed her own eyes, not wanting to see, not wanting to wonder if she, too, had been driven down here by desperation, searching for a way off this world.

The men with the light continued down the path without slowing. A faint tink came from the other side, and Alisa winced. She didn’t think Mica had been foolish enough to make noise—there was probably another rat poking around behind her—but the sound might cause someone to look in that direction.

The men stepped over the body without slowing. Alisa watched them out of her peripheral vision, noting the scarred, bearded faces, the greasy hair, the tattoos, and the weapons they carried, a mishmash of daggers, shotguns, BlazTeck energy particle weapons, and rifles collected from who knew where. One carried an e-cannon that looked like it had been torn off one of the ships and modified for hand use. Alisa reminded herself that she, too, was armed, with the Etcher she had traded for, but it carried bullets rather than battery packs, and if she fired it, everyone in the cavern would hear.

The greasy men continued down the path, and she allowed herself to relax an iota. She waited until the light had disappeared and the sounds of footfalls had faded before easing out of hiding. Her long braid of dark brown hair got caught on a protruding piece of scrap, and she resolved to have it cut as soon as she had money. Whenever that would be.

“Blessing of the Suns Trinity,” she whispered for the fallen woman’s soul, then stepped past the corpse. “Mica?”

“I’m here.” Her voice sounded subdued, perhaps because she, too, had seen the body.

The path opened up as they continued down it, hurrying in the opposite direction from the men. An old conveyer belt stretched across a cleared area, with the skeletal shape of a crane rising up from the shadows. Alisa’s heart sped up with anticipation. She remembered walking past this spot on her way out of the cavern years ago.

A gasp came from behind her, followed by the sound of something clunking to the ground.

Alisa whirled around, raising her gun. The darkness lay thick along the path, towers of junk stacked high to either side, and she couldn’t see much.

“Mica?” Alisa risked whispering. That had sounded like her gasp.

A flash came from the side, followed by the scent of burning tar. A homemade fire starter had been thrown to the ground, and flames leaped up, bright enough to reveal Mica—and the big man holding her with his hand around her neck. A wiry man stood at his side, his hand blazer pointed at Alisa. Mica’s toolbox lay on its side in the dust at her feet. She struggled briefly, then grew still as her captor’s grip tightened. An utterly pissed expression contorted the angular features of her face.

Alisa admired her lack of fear, but felt a twinge of disappointment that her comrade had let herself be captured so easily. As a pilot, Alisa had fast reflexes in the sky, but she doubted she could shoot both men before the one with the blazer shot her.

“Thought I heard something,” the big man holding her crooned. He was one of the ones who had walked past them, with so many scars on his bare arms and face that they must have been self-inflicted. Despite his height, his features were gaunt, with no fat under the stringy flesh of those arms. “Got some pretties to add to our collection. This one feels good. Be fun to cut on her a little.” He leered and shifted his grip so he could grope Mica’s breast. “Spider, get that one’s gun. Can’t be having some girl shooting at us while we’re working our art.”

Mica radiated fury, and she tried to bash her head back and hit her captor in the face, but he was too tall. She stomped on his foot, but he wore hard boots and didn’t seem to feel it.

The wiry man grinned, displaying a mouth of missing teeth, and bounced up and down. He did not speak but took a step forward, holding out his free hand as he kept his blazer pointed at Alisa’s chest. She kept her Etcher pointed at his chest, too, assessing him in the dancing firelight. His chest looked stockier than his narrow frame would have suggested. Was he wearing body armor under his clothes? On the chance that it might deflect bullets, she shifted her aim to his eye. He halted, squinting at her, and twitched his free hand toward his big comrade.

“Why don’t you release my engineer and let us go about our business?” Alisa asked, trying to sound calm and reasonable. “We fought for the Alliance. We’re not your enemies.” Or your playthings, she added silently, horrified at the idea. She doubted talking would do any good, but maybe it would buy her a moment to think of something better to do.

“Alliance doesn’t mean worm suck down here,” the big man said. “Empire, Alliance, it doesn’t matter who’s in charge. None of them make it easier to find food around here. Spider, a girl’s not going to shoot you. Get her damned gun.”

Alisa didn’t want to shoot them, not when it would alert everyone in the cavern to their presence. She was also well aware that she wasn’t wearing body armor or anything else that would deflect attacks.

“Oh, she’ll shoot you,” Mica wheezed, not as daunted as one might expect by the hand around her throat. The big man had her arms pinned, but she eased her fingers toward her shirt pocket so she could reach it. “She likes shooting people. Mostly imperial asteroid kissers, but I bet she’ll make exceptions for greasy troglodytes whose only memories of bathtubs come from their ancestors who colonized this hole.”

Spider had started toward Alisa, but he paused at Mica’s words. More the part about Alisa’s willingness to shoot him, rather than that bathtub insult, she wagered.

“Enh, just blow her away, Spider,” the big man said. “Ain’t worth getting killed trying to steal a veruska’s stinger.”

The wiry man nodded firmly, his hand tightening on his trigger. Seeing the determination in his eyes, Alisa fired first, then flung herself to the side. She rolled under the conveyer belt as a crimson blazer bolt streaked through the air where her head had been. Spider shouted in pain, but Alisa knew she’d only struck a glancing blow, if that. She prayed the hulking man wouldn’t break Mica’s neck as she scrambled into the shadows, expecting Spider to fire again.

Instead, a boom erupted from nearby, the noise hammering at Alisa’s eardrums. One of the men yowled, the sound a mingle of frustration and agony.

Alisa couldn’t tell which one it had been. She rose to a crouch behind a support under the conveyer belt, using it for cover as she sought a target. Acrid blue smoke filled the air from whatever explosive had been detonated.

Spider rolled about on the ground, almost smothering the flames from the fire starter. He clutched his ear, blood streaming between his fingers, his mouth open as if he were screaming, but nothing came out. Alisa had landed a better shot than she’d thought.

Despite his pain, Spider hadn’t dropped his gun, and even as Alisa lined up her aim for another shot, he glimpsed her through smoky air. He fired wildly in her direction.

She ducked back and targeted him through the support legs. Though a blazer bolt slammed into the belt a few feet away, sending shards of the machinery flying, she forced herself to find the calm in the chaos, to take a careful second to ensure her aim was true. She fired once.

Her bullet slammed into Spider’s forehead, and his head flew back, striking the earth and sending a puff of dust into the air. His arm fell limp, landing in the flames. He didn’t move it, and the smell of burning clothing and flesh soon scented the air along with the acrid taint of the smoke. Alisa grimaced. The war had taught her to kill, but she would never find it anything but horrifying.

Mica and the big man had disappeared, only her toolbox remaining, along with a dark smudge in the dust next to it. Alisa hopped over the conveyer belt to investigate, aware of shouts coming from all parts of the cavern. Most were inarticulate, a few in languages she couldn’t understand, but an enthusiastic call of, “Fresh meat!” made her shudder.

She couldn’t stay around here, but she couldn’t leave Mica, either. She was cursing herself for not seeing which direction they had gone when she glimpsed the remains of a warped casing on the ground. She picked it up, sniffed it, and dropped it immediately, the pungent scent familiar. Her fingers tingled from the brief contact.

A shuffling came from piles of scrap, and Mica walked into view, rubbing her neck and grimacing. “Animal.”

“Was that a rust bang?” Alisa asked, remembering the explosives the ground troops had often led with when assaulting imperial ships and fortifications. The acidic smoke could corrode even state-of-the-art combat armor. It was not as deadly to skin, but she’d seen people horribly disfigured and even killed from close contact.

“Sort of a homemade version.”

“That you kept in your pocket?”

“I keep lots of useful things in my pockets.” Mica picked up her toolbox, and they moved away from the body and the still-burning fire starter. “Don’t you?”

“I have half a chocolate bar and three tindarks in mine.”

“How’d you get chocolate in this hole?”

“I traded the painkillers the hospital gave me before kicking me out.” The medicine was highly coveted out in the lawless streets of the backwater planet, and Alisa had gotten her Etcher and a multitool out of the deal too.

“You didn’t need the painkillers?” Mica asked.

“Not as much as I needed the chocolate.”

“You’re an odd woman.”

“Says the engineer who carries rust bangs in her pockets. How did you manage to use one of those on that big brute without being hurt yourself?” As they walked, Alisa waved at Mica’s rumpled overalls, as faded and stained as hers—it hadn’t been an easy five months for either of them. Those overalls weren’t any more damaged, however, than they had been when they’d headed into the cavern. “You appear remarkably un-corroded.”

“The rust bang was insulated.”

“How?”

“It went off in his pants.”

“Ah. How did it get in there?”

“Must have fallen in.” Mica’s typically dour expression faded for a moment as she winked. “You rolling around in the dust and shooting people was a suitable distraction for it to do so.”

“Glad to hear it.”

Alisa managed a brief smile, amused that she had been worried her ally couldn’t take care of herself.

Lights flashed on the rocky ceiling far overhead, and the sounds of excited shouts grew closer. Shoes pounded in the dust nearby, reminding Alisa that they had made a lot of noise.

She turned her walk into a run, veering toward an aisle choked with piles of parts and some kind of vine that had no trouble growing in the dark. Though she worried that the half-starved brutes who called this place home would catch up with them, she felt more sure of her route now. The aisle had been a road the last time she’d been in here, with the place slightly more organized back then, and with fewer corpses along the way.

A gun fired behind them, and the sounds of a squabble broke out. Alisa hoped the scavengers would be satisfied that they could search—or eat—Spider’s corpse and wouldn’t look further, but she didn’t slow down. She couldn’t count on that, nor could she count on safety once she reached the Star Nomad. It had been inches from derelict status when she’d seen it last; the Suns Trinity only knew what condition it was in now. She was probably delusional to believe that Mica and her toolbox could fix it.

As they neared the back of the massive cavern, the shouts growing distant behind them, Alisa finally slowed down. Her lungs forced her to, even if her brain didn’t want to acknowledge the need. It was just as well. They ought to return to proceeding with caution.

“Is that it?” Mica whispered, pointing past Alisa’s shoulder.

They had reached another clearing, this one with a slender beam of daylight slashing down from a hole in the cavern ceiling. It provided just enough illumination to make out the hulls of four ships parked around the area. Grease and oil stains smeared the dusty ground in the open space, suggesting a fifth ship had rested there once. If one craft had flown out of here, Alisa hoped that meant another one could.

She stopped to stare at the familiar shape on the far side of the clearing, a tangle of emotions and memories washing over her. This ship had been responsible for her mother’s death, and six years hadn’t changed Alisa’s feeling of aversion toward it. Aversion and resentment. The clunky old freighter was even less impressive than she’d remembered.

The Nomad hadn’t been a beauty even in her heyday, and now dust dulled it further, coating every inch of the boxy hull while cobwebs draped the twin thrusters. Shadows hid the top and the front of the craft from her view, but she knew they would be equally neglected. She and Mica would have to assess the hull carefully, see if it was possible to make the craft spaceworthy again. Alisa ought to be able to advise her engineer on that. She certainly knew the Nomad well enough. Long before her mother’s death, Alisa had grown up on the ship, learning to fly and helping her mother run cargo from planet to moon to space station throughout the system. Under the empire’s rule, her mother had been forced to pay taxes and tolls at each port and had barely eked out enough of a profit to keep her ship in the sky and her daughter fed. But through sheer determination, she had kept Alisa fed. She had been a good mother—a good person—and emotion thickened Alisa’s throat as the years seemed to slip away, and she missed her anew. And she once again resented that the old ship had given out without warning, life support disappearing, her mother unable to—

“Captain?” Mica asked.

Alisa stirred, pushing aside the memories. “Yes. That’s it.”

She took a deep breath and walked through the dust toward the craft. She went slowly, looking left and right as she crossed near the light of the sunbeam. Just because they had left the other scavengers behind didn’t mean there couldn’t be more back here. The hatch was closed on the old freighter, the wide cargo-loading ramp folded away inside.

A bronze plaque had been bolted to the hull next to the hatch. It was too dusty to read, but she knew what it said: Property of Finnegan’s Scrap and Holding Company.

She had been there the day old Finnegan had affixed it, the day she sold the ship to him. Even if she had been grossly underpaid by the unscrupulous businessman, Alisa hadn’t been in the mood to argue back then, not with her mother’s death fresh in her mind. Still, she knew she couldn’t use that for justification of what she meant to do now. Steal it.

But Finnegan had died in the bombings of Dustor’s nearby capital—she’d researched that when formulating this plan—and nobody had come out to claim this junkyard in the year that had passed since then. People had likely been stealing from it for months, ever since the security guards had quit patrolling and the lowlifes had moved in.

As she neared the hatch, a growl came from under one of the other ships. As she turned to look, something furry with a spiky ridge along its back burst out of the shadows. A sand badger. Forty pounds of fangs, fur, and bad temperament. It sprinted straight at her, snarling.

Alisa whipped her Etcher toward it and was an instant from shooting when she remembered the need to be quiet. If she fired, the noise would only draw more scavengers, and she couldn’t simply run and hide now. They had to stay here long enough to fix the Nomad and get it flying.

Jerking the gun up, Alisa met the giant badger’s charge with a side kick instead of a bullet. She pivoted on her left foot, launching her right toward the thing’s bristly snout, glad the hospital had returned her sturdy boots to her upon release. The sole crunched into the badger’s face, halting its charge but not its ferocity. It twisted its neck, snapping at her leg as she retracted it. She launched a second kick without setting down her foot. This time, it saw the attack coming and scuttled to the side more quickly than something with such short legs should have been able to.

As she danced away from another charge, Alisa yanked her multitool off her belt, flicking it to extend the laser knife. Mica ran in behind the creature, an oversized wrench in hand. When Alisa kicked the badger in the snout again, Mica lunged in and clubbed it in the back. The blow probably didn’t do much harm, but it made the sand badger spin around, its spiked tail nearly whipping Alisa in the leg. The creature snarled and charged toward Mica, who scrambled back as she waved the wrench back and forth like a fencer’s foil.

Alisa sprang after the badger, slashing with the laser knife. It cut through the spiked tail, lopping it off and eliciting a squeal of pain from the animal.

She winced at the noise and darted in, hoping to finish it off, but the badger was done fighting. It scurried back into the shadows, leaving a trail of blood in the dust.

Alisa let it go, doubting she could have caught it anyway. As she stood, gun in one hand and multitool in the other, she tried to slow her breathing so she could listen and hear if anyone was coming. All that filled her ears was the sound of her own ragged breaths. She hadn’t recovered her stamina yet, and it annoyed her how long it took for her breathing to return to normal.

Mica returned her wrench to her toolbox and joined her. “Remember how skeptical I was when you told me that if I joined you, we’d find a ship that could take us back to civilization?”

“Yes.” Alisa flicked the multitool again, retracting the laser blade and sticking it back in her belt sheath.

“I wasn’t skeptical enough.” Mica curled a lip at the bloody stump of badger tail lying in the dust, then looked at the freighter and curled her lip even further. “A Nebula Rambler 880? They stopped making those fifty years ago.”

“That just means it’s a classic,” Alisa said, though she couldn’t help but remember how her mother had died and shudder. The ship had gone from feeling like home to a cemetery overnight for her.

But it was the only ship she was going to find that nobody else had a claim on and that might still be spaceworthy. Assuming they could fix it. And assuming it had enough juice left in the battery to open the hatch so they could get in. She wondered if it would still recognize her as an authorized entrant.

“Yeah?” Mica asked. “Does it have shag carpet?”

“Just in the rec room.”

Mica snorted.

Alisa reached for the sensor panel beside the hatch.

A shadow dropped from the sky.

She sprang back, jerking her gun toward the figure that landed beside her. A hand, an impossibly strong hand, clamped onto her wrist, squeezing until she gasped, her fingers loosening. Her gun was torn from her grip, and she was thrust backward before she could contemplate a kick or a punch.

The force of the thrust stole her balance, and she tumbled to the ground. Though she managed to turn the fall into a roll and come up in a crouch a few feet away, it didn’t matter. She’d lost her Etcher, and she was too far away to use the laser knife. Not that it would have mattered. Dread filled her as she recognized her opponent—and the fact that he was pointing her own gun at her.

Chapter 2

He was a cyborg.

Oh, he looked fully human, with icy blue eyes, a strong jaw in need of shaving, and black hair even more in need of cutting, but humans didn’t jump thirty feet from the top of a spaceship, land on their feet next to a person, and proceed to attack so quickly that an Alliance officer with combat training didn’t have time to react. If there had been any question about his enhanced capabilities, the dusty black imperial fleet uniform jacket that he wore would have eliminated them. The rank pins had been removed from the collar, but the front of it was covered with patches that denoted a deluge of training, everything from atmo-parachuting to weapons and demolitions expertise. There was also a round patch with a fist over a sword and a shield. The symbol for the Cyborg Corps.

Alisa had lost colleagues to the Cyborg Corps during the war, and like all Alliance soldiers, she had heard the rumors that they had been responsible for the assassinations of many of their top brass and several political leaders. This cyborg wasn’t young—he had a few gray hairs at his temples—so he had probably been a senior sergeant. He might even have led some of those assassination teams.

There was no warmth in the eyes that stared relentlessly into hers, and they were uncomfortably knowing, as if he could read her mind. Not likely—she had never heard of a cyborg with Starseer capabilities—but that didn’t make her feel any better.

“You’ll have to get him to turn around,” Mica said.

She stood several feet away, her toolbox still in hand. The cyborg hadn’t pointed a weapon at her. Yet.

“What?” Alisa asked, never taking her gaze from her enemy.

She didn’t know what she could do if he decided to shoot—his reflexes and aim would be a lot better than those of the wiry thug they had left burning—but she would face him, regardless, keep her chin high. Whatever skills and abilities he possessed, his side had lost the war. Her people, comprised only of full-blooded humans, had won.

“You know,” Mica said, “so I can club him in the back like I did the badger.”

“Ah,” Alisa said, watching the cyborg’s face, looking for some hint that he might appreciate their humor—or at least that he wasn’t contemplating killing them.

She rose slowly from her crouch, not liking the way he could look down at her. Unfortunately, he still looked down at her. She wasn’t a short woman, standing a couple of inches shy of six feet, but he still had six or eight inches on her. The breadth of his shoulders and solidness of his limbs made her sure he would have been an intimidating man even without the cyborg implants. The imperial fleet doctors had probably loved getting their hands on him.

He tracked her movement, his gaze flicking downward briefly, taking in her uniform jacket, she suspected, not checking out her boobs. He wasn’t the only one wearing signs of his last career. Though her worn trousers and shirt weren’t anything remarkable, she wore the same jacket she had worn throughout the war, a mottled blue and gray Alliance military jacket. She didn’t have as many patches as he did, but the one on her left breast proclaimed her a combat pilot. He might even now be wondering if she’d blown up some of his buddies. She wouldn’t be surprised if she had, but it would have been from the cockpit of her Striker-18, not from the ground.

“Go away,” the cyborg said, his voice as hard as his eyes.

Mica looked at her, her brows rising in surprise. She wore civilian clothes, and the cyborg had barely glanced at her, but she must have noticed him checking out Alisa’s uniform jacket. Maybe she’d expected him to shoot her.

Honestly, Alisa had expected it too. In the brief weeks she had been out of the hospital, she’d noticed that the end of the war hadn’t meant an end in hostilities, not here on a planet that housed both former Alliance and former imperial soldiers, many squabbling over what was no longer claimed or defendable by law.

“Go away?” Alisa asked, not because she hadn’t understood him but because she couldn’t go away. She had come for the ship he was standing in front of, and she wouldn’t leave without it. Would it be better to admit that and try to bargain with him, or to hide in the shadows and watch from a distance, hoping he would leave eventually? “We just got here. We’re interested in…”

She trailed off because the cyborg had turned away from her. He waved his hand at the sensor she had been angling toward earlier, and a hiss-clunk sounded as the hatch opened, and the ramp inside unfolded in three stages, the end coming to rest on the ground.

She didn’t know whether she was more indignant that he’d dismissed her as a nonthreat by turning his back or because he’d somehow gained access to the ship. The latter wasn’t all that hard, but it did suggest computer knowledge she wouldn’t have expected from a ground soldier, cyborg or not. They were usually combat specialists and not much more.

He tossed her gun at her feet and stepped onto the ramp, clearly intending to go inside and shut the hatch on them.

“Wait,” Alisa blurted. She ran and picked up her gun and started toward the ramp. “We came to—”

She halted mid-sentence again, this time because he’d paused, turning back toward her, another weapon in hand. His weapon, this time. A single-barreled destroyer, a handgun that had the nickname “hand cannon” for a reason. It was the first thing in the cavern she had seen that wasn’t dusty and neglected, and it was pointing between her eyes.

“I said, go away,” the cyborg said, his tone and his narrowed eyes promising that he would shoot if she lifted her gun toward him or tried to follow him.

“I can’t,” Alisa said, though she probably should have opted for her earlier thought of hiding and simply waiting for him to leave. But it would take days for Mica to fix the ship, if not weeks, and if he was squatting here, they would have to deal with him one way or another. “We need this ship.” She waved to the Star Nomad, careful to use the hand that wasn’t holding the Etcher. That she kept pointed toward the ground.

“It’s mine,” he said.

“Technically, it’s Finnegan’s,” Alisa said, wondering if he knew anything about the junkyard or the history of the place.

“He’s not here. I am.”

“Look, we plan to fix it.” Alisa didn’t know how wise it was to share their plans, but she waved at Mica and her toolbox anyway. “I’ll happily trade you that lovely ship over there for this one. It’s bigger. I happen to know the living quarters are cramped on this freighter. All of the extra space went to the cargo hold. You’ll find that ship over there much more palatial. You’re a tall fellow, right? Surely a little more headroom would be desirable. My friend there could even fix it up for you, perhaps put in some sparkly lights and heated bunks. You can bring back the ladies and impress them with your fancy lodgings.”

She thought a little humor might draw the cyborg into a conversation—or at least a negotiation—but if anything, his eyes grew even harder at the talk of ladies and lodgings.

“You make me sound like a contractor that builds brothels,” Mica muttered.

“You’re versatile. I’ve seen your work.”

The cyborg turned his back and started up the ramp again, but some new thought must have occurred to him because he paused and pinned Mica with his cool stare. “You’re a mechanic?”

“An engineer. I served in—”

Alisa made a shushing motion. The cyborg already knew what she was, but it would be better not to increase his ire by letting him know Mica had been an Alliance officer too. If he was unaware of that, maybe he would be open to working a deal with her, if not Alisa.

“She’s a mechanic and an engineer,” Alisa said. “She can fix anything. Got a creak in any of your mechanical parts? I bet she can even fix you.”

The cyborg’s eyes narrowed again.

“Your jokes aren’t helping as much as you seem to think they are,” Mica whispered to her. “I believe he’s going to shoot you.”

Alisa thought about mentioning how charming Mica’s pessimism was, but was afraid she was right. Instead of trying to be funny, Alisa met the cyborg’s eyes and decided to make a plea toward his humanity, if he had any.

“Please listen to me for a moment, Sergeant, is it?” she guessed. He definitely had the look of a no-nonsense veteran, and she hadn’t run into many officers among the Cyborg Corps—despite being willing to use cyborgs, the imperial fleet had always seemed to prefer fully human officers in leadership positions. When he didn’t respond to her guess, Alisa pressed on. “This ship used to belong to me. I know it from nose to tail, because I grew up on it. I brought Mica here to see if we can get it fixed up and into the air. As you might have noticed, rides off this planet are scarce right now.”

Alisa figured he had been stranded here after the war, too, left behind because of an injury or perhaps just left behind because there had been nobody left to look after—and pay—the soldiers in the imperial fleet.

“I know exactly what’s wrong with the ship,” Alisa said, pressing on when he once again did not respond, “and I believe fixing it is possible.” If nothing else had been done to it in the last six years. Seeing that the cyborg had access made her worry that others had found access and might have been inside, scavenging every last piece of the ship’s innards. “We want to fix it and take it off this planet. If you’re just making a home inside there, then I was serious in my offer. We’ll help you fix up another place to live, any ship here that you want.”

“To where?” he asked.

It took Alisa a moment to realize he was asking where they intended to go.

“Teravia,” she said, lying. There was no way she was giving him her flight plan.

Those already narrowed eyes closed to slits, and she was reminded that he was pointing his gun at her chest. She expected him to accuse her of lying, but instead, he asked, “You willing to stop in the Trajean Asteroid Belt on the way?”

“On the way? The T-Belt isn’t on the way to anything except the Dark Reaches.”

“You want to get on this ship, you’ll make it on the way. To Teravia,” he added, putting emphasis on the name. Yeah, he knew she was lying.

It didn’t matter if she was lying. The T-Belt wasn’t on the way to her real destination of Perun, either. Taking that diversion would add a minimum of ten days to her trip.

Alisa closed her eyes, seeing her daughter’s face in her mind. Even though it had already been well over a year since she’d been able to get home to see Jelena, she hated the idea of extending that absence any longer than necessary now that the war was over and her service to the Alliance was fulfilled. Especially now that she knew Jonah was gone and that their daughter was staying with an aunt whose inner-city artist’s loft wouldn’t be an ideal place for raising a child.

“Ah, Cap—Alisa,” Mica whispered. “Mind if I have a word with you?” She eyed the cyborg, then jerked her chin toward one of the other ships.

“Give us a moment to discuss our flight plans,” Alisa told the cyborg, then added a, “Please,” remembering that she’d decided to be reasonable with him. Reasonable people said please and thank you, even when dealing with the enemy.

The cyborg said nothing, merely leaned against one of the support posts that lowered the ramp from the side of the ship. He folded his arms, his destroyer still in one hand, his expression one of indifference. Alisa didn’t know if it was a mask or not. He had seemed vaguely interested when he’d learned Mica was an engineer, and it sounded like he wanted a ride. Interestingly, he wanted a ride somewhere specific and remote. Most other people just wanted to get the hells off this dustball.

“You don’t want to go asteroid hopping?” Alisa asked when she and Mica were out of earshot. She didn’t think her colleague would mind the delay since she didn’t have a pressing need to return to Perun the way Alisa did.

“With a cyborg? Are you spaced? What if he decides to shoot us once we get to wherever he wants to go? Or what if he gets an itch and rapes one of us? Both of us. Hells, we can’t outfight him. Did you see how fast he took your gun away?”

“I’m trying to forget, thank you.”

“If we were stuck on the ship with him, we’d have no place to escape. There’s nowhere to run, not like here.” Mica waved toward the shadows.

“On the ship, off the ship, if he didn’t want us to escape, nothing would keep him from running us down,” Alisa pointed out, aware of how fast cyborgs were on foot.

But, even though she made the argument, she had to concede to Mica’s point. There wouldn’t be anything to keep him from taking over once the ship was fixed and they were in the air. And what kind of loon wanted to go to the T-Belt, anyway? There was nothing out there except automated drilling stations and smuggler and pirate hideouts. Showing up there in a clunky freighter without a weapons system wouldn’t be wise. From what she’d heard, even heading to Perun would be a risk these days.

“He’s probably fantasizing about shooting you right now,” Mica whispered, glancing at the cyborg. He hadn’t changed position. He was looking out into the cavern rather than at them. “Whatever he was in the imperial fleet, I bet it wasn’t a homeless vagabond forced to squat in a junkyard full of cannibalistic maniacs. We were on the side that drove him to this. Don’t think he won’t resent us.”

Alisa couldn’t accuse Mica of being overly pessimistic this time. In all likelihood, she was right.

Still…

“I don’t see what choice we have,” Alisa said. “He doesn’t look like he’s moving.”

“We’ll take another ship then.”

“What ship?” Alisa waved at the sea of dust, rust, and shadows surrounding them. “These are all derelicts in here—they probably didn’t fly when they were brought in, and they’ve surely been scavenged to the core and back since then. The Nomad is—was… The engine was still working and the hull was intact. I didn’t sell her because she was in poor condition.”

Mica sighed. “I know. You told me. But that was then. We don’t know what condition she’s in now.”

“She’s the most likely ship in here to ever fly again. Listen, I’d actually been thinking of taking on some passengers, anyway, if we can get her working. We need money for supplies, and people would line up for miles at a chance to get off this world and back to one of the core planets.”

“Oh, I know that, but how many of those people could actually pay? You may not have noticed, but Flint Face over there didn’t offer to drop any tindarks in your purse.”

“I know, but others might, and if we have paying passengers, we could use their money to hire a couple of security men, too. Some beefy brutes who could stand between him and us.” Alisa pointed her thumb toward the cyborg.

“You really think a rent-a-guard is going to be a match for an imperial cyborg?”

“Maybe not, but if we had a crew and passengers, he might be less likely to try something… untoward.”

Alisa couldn’t help but think of Mica’s earlier words of rape and killing. Was she being naive in contemplating this? Did they have any other choice? It wasn’t as if she had the money to buy a ship, even if there had been any available on Dustor. What little she had received from Finnegan all those years ago had gone toward the down payment on the apartment that she and Jonah had purchased, an apartment that had apparently been incinerated by bombs. The virtual financial system was a mess these days, with accounts no longer being accessible across the sys-net, so the three coins in her pocket were all she had to her name. Technically, she ought to still have some money in her bank account on Perun, but what remained of the empire had settled in there, and as an Alliance soldier, she wouldn’t be welcome. She had no idea how she was going to get in to find her daughter, but she had a week’s voyage to figure it out. Now, she would have a week and ten days.

“Untoward.” Mica curled her lip. “You know what’s worse than an optimistic engineer?”

“An optimistic captain?”

“Exactly.”

Alisa left Mica grumbling to her toolbox and approached the cyborg again. “You’ll be pleased to know that we’ve decided that we would be fools not to visit the magnificent wonders of the Trajean Asteroid Belt before heading to our final destination.”

She expected the cyborg to say, “Good,” or something of that ilk. Instead, he grunted and walked inside.

“Oh, yes. It’s going to be fun playing Carts and Chutes with him in the rec room during the evenings.”

Chapter 3

The cyborg never left the ship.

It had crossed Alisa’s mind that if he ever did, she and Mica could maroon him here, assuming they got the Star Nomad working. After all, she hadn’t given her word that she would take him, and it wasn’t as if he had done her any favors. Letting her onto a ship that she had as much right to be on as he did not qualify. But he never left.

He had claimed one of the small crew 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. Nothing’s wrong with life support now.”

“You’re sure?”

“There are patches aplenty. I can see that someone put a lot of work into fixing the system.”

This time, Alisa was the one to glance toward the empty hatchway. “Are you implying that our passenger did it?”

“It wasn’t the rats.”

Alisa rocked back onto her heels. “From what I’ve heard, most soldiers who go into the Cyborg Corps are taken in young, before they’ve earned degrees or had much time to learn a trade. And their superiors don’t really encourage them to educate themselves, not in intellectual subjects, anyway. I always had the feeling that the imperials were afraid of their own creations. Didn’t want them getting thoughts in their heads about turning on their superiors or taking over installations.”

“Maybe I’m not the first engineer he’s had up here, fixing things for him.”

“You’re fixing things for me, not for him. Don’t you forget who’s not paying you a single tindark for your work.”

Mica snorted. “Whatever gets me to a civilized planet. The employment prospects here are horrible.”

“The prospects for everything here are horrible.”

“That’s the truth. I just hope we don’t get off Dustor and find out that it’s the same everywhere.”

Alisa frowned. “Even if things aren’t as smoothly run as they might have been when the empire was in charge, humanity has its freedom now. That’s worth some inconveniences.”

Mica waved her hand in the air. Alisa wasn’t positive that was a sign of agreement.

“Just keep an eye on our brawny buddy,” Mica said. “If he wasn’t the one fixing things, I’d like to know what happened to the last engineer he had in here.”

Alisa’s gaze drifted back to the tidy wires. “Are you sure you want to know that?”

“Maybe not, but it would be good to know how many extra deadbolts I need to install on the hatch to my cabin.”

Alisa smiled, though she had no idea if deadbolts would stop a cyborg. She had been flying over a battlefield once and had seen one lift a tank off a comrade.

“Since the ship is apparently already half-fixed,” Alisa said, “does that mean that we can get out of this junk cave soon?”

“Should be ready by tomorrow.”

“Excellent. I’ll see if I can get enough reception to access the city-net and put out flyers for passengers.”

“Don’t forget about security guards. In case the deadbolts don’t work.”

“Pessimist,” Alisa said.

Mica snorted again. “Optimist.”

Chapter 4

The light of two of the system’s three suns beat down upon Alisa as she weaved through the city, back toward the crowded ship docks, her rented hoverboard hissing and sputtering. She led it along behind her like a dog on a leash. A drunken dog with a limp that liked to bump into passersby. People of white, brown, and mixed skin colors cursed her in an amalgam of Russian and Chinese that was the planet’s native language. Alisa apologized in Standard, lamenting that nobody seemed to notice or care about the Alliance jacket she wore. She’d helped free these people, damn it. A little respect would have been nice, drunken limping hoverboard or not.

At least the storeowner had been sympathetic to war veterans, and after looking at her military ID, he had been willing to give her the supplies on credit. She’d promised to pay him back as soon as their passengers signed on, which, she hoped, would be before the end of the day. If nobody showed up, she would have to find a way to hustle for some coins. She wondered how the cyborg would feel if she asked him to pay his way.

Alisa was relieved when she spotted the Nomad, the suns throwing rays onto its bronze and silver hull. The craft looked old in the harsh desert light, but reputable. It had never belonged in that junkyard with those derelicts, and even though she couldn’t help resent it, and even fear it, for how it had betrayed her mother, she admitted that the ship still 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. Living quarters and navigation lay up top. There was nothing as fancy as an elevator on this old ship.

Some of the men leaned against the bulkhead while others sat on duffel bags or hover cases. Several of them were eyeing Mica’s butt as she worked, though the appraising gazes turned toward Alisa as she walked in.

“Just doing some finishing touches,” Mica said, kneeling back and pushing up the mask. “Your applicants for the security gig have showed up.” A sour twist to her lips suggested she might have been aware of the butt inspections.

“Thanks.” Alisa lowered her voice, walking over to talk privately to Mica before speaking with them. “Have any prospective passengers interested in rides off-world come along?”

“Plenty have come along.” Mica pulled her mask back down. “None that have had coin.”

“Ah.” A queasy feeling crept into Alisa’s stomach. How could she hire security guards when she didn’t have any money and wasn’t guaranteed to have any coming in? As it was, she wouldn’t be able to pay back the storeowner if she didn’t get at least one passenger. She had put an offer out, saying she was available for carrying freight, but she couldn’t imagine what freight someone might have to export from Dustor. The desert planet wasn’t known for its industry. Or anything else. Other than its utter lack of mentions in tourism brochures.

While mulling over her bleak options, Alisa parked the hoverboard for later unloading and walked toward the men. None of them looked like the sort who would appreciate it if she told them she had published the notice in error and that she didn’t have a position open after all.

Movement near the hatch drew her eye, and she paused.

A man in a gray robe was walking up the ramp. He peered inside, tapped a black-and-gray beaded earstar, checked something on a holo that popped up before his eyes, and finally looked back into the hold.

“Are you seeking passage to Perun?” Alisa asked, holding up a finger toward the job applicants. On the chance this man had money and wanted a ride, she wasn’t going to risk letting him wander off to another ship. Most of the craft docked here hadn’t looked spaceworthy—there was a dirigible a few docks down—but she had seen one other freighter, possibly also accepting passengers.

“I am,” the man said, taking a few more steps to the top of the ramp.

“What’s she want to go to Perun for?” one of the applicants muttered. “Empire’s still got its clutches sunk in there.”

“I don’t care, so long as she’s hiring,” another said.

“She’s not the captain, is she? I’m not working for a skirt.”

“A skirt? That looks like a uniform to me.”

Alisa ignored them and headed toward their potential passenger, though she took note of the men who didn’t sound enthused about working for her.

“I’m Captain Marchenko,” she said, touching her palm to her chest, then lifting it toward the newcomer.

“Dr. Alejandro Dominguez,” he said, returning the gesture. He was a handsome man with bronze skin, his hair more gray than black, and she judged him in his early fifties. He carried a satchel and duffel over his shoulder, not bothering with a personal hoverboard.

“A doctor?” Alisa looked down at his long gray robe, a simple rope belt tying it shut. She wouldn’t object to a doctor on board, not in the least, but she had taken him for a monk with that attire. He even wore a silver pendant with the three suns clustered on it.

“I was a surgeon for many years, though I mostly do research now and seek to better understand the path the gods have set us upon.” He lowered his bag so he could press his hands together in front of his chest and bow.

One of the applicants, the one who had been complaining about skirts, muttered something about religion and lectures.

Alisa was curious how a monk doing research had ended up on this dustball, as there weren’t any monasteries or libraries, as far as she knew. Maybe he’d been marooned at the end of the war, the same as she. She wouldn’t ask. She wasn’t going to risk offending a paying passenger.

“It’s two hundred tindarks for the ride,” she said. “Sound reasonable?”

That might be on the high side, but she had little concept of what was fair these days. Her mother had only rarely taken on passengers, and that had been years ago. Since then, Alisa had ridden for free on military transports when she hadn’t flown in her own craft. But she figured she should start high, since people liked to haggle.

“A little steep,” Alejandro said, “but you are the first ship that’s been heading to Perun in the two months that I’ve been seeking passage.” His expression turned wry.

Between that comment and the one the job applicant had made, Alisa was starting to wonder if everyone else knew more about what was going on back on her home planet than she did.

“It’s brave of you to take the trip,” Alejandro remarked, glancing at her jacket. “You won’t be welcome there now.”

“So I expect.” Alisa shrugged. She wasn’t about to explain her situation to a stranger. “You look respectable, but I’m going to have to ask for payment in physical currency and up front. I hope you can understand. Food and a private cabin are included,” she rushed to add, hoping to soften her demands. Besides, it would be easy to offer a private cabin, since she had so few passengers.

“Ah, of course. Give me a moment.” He lifted the flap of his satchel and poked around inside. Given the number of scrolls, books, and pouches stuffed inside, it might take him a while to locate his purse.

Feeling relieved that he hadn’t objected, Alisa returned to the applicants. She could afford to hire one now and to pay back the storeowner. Things were looking up.

Despite their earlier mutterings, they all straightened as she approached, adopting a modicum of professionalism. They were all male, all brawny, and all even scruffier and more disreputable-looking than the cyborg. Maybe her plan to hire one of them to keep him in check was a silly one.

“Who’s got his own combat armor?” Alisa asked.

She had asked for it in the ad, even though she hadn’t known if she would be lucky enough to get it, since a full suit cost thousands of tindarks. Even army veterans rarely had a suit of their own since theirs had been issued by—and returned to—the military. Usually, only well-off mercenaries and security guards working for big companies had the gear. Still, she spotted a couple of men with cases, and that stirred her hopes. A man in a quality suit of combat armor might just beat a cyborg in a fight. She hoped a fight with the cyborg wouldn’t be necessary, but if it was, she wanted someone who could handle him, or at least delay him while Alisa shot him.

Two hands went up. The shoulders of the other seven men slumped.

“Sorry, fellows,” Alisa told them. “It’s going to be a requirement for the position.”

If nobody had shown up with combat armor, it might not have been, but she had to take one of these two men, given the choice. Not only because of her cyborg issue, but because the ship’s spacesuits had long since been stolen, so if they needed any repairs done mid-route, it would be useful to have someone who could tramp around out on the hull. Any combat armor worth its price ought to have magnetic boots and be rated for space. One never knew what kind of trouble would latch onto a ship out there.

The two men lowered their hands as the seven rejected applicants walked past the doctor and headed down the ramp. Mica had come over to talk to Alejandro. Hopefully, she would collect his payment and see him to a cabin.

Alisa turned her attention back to her remaining two applicants. One was a pale-skinned fellow with a smug smirk. He had a handsome face and looked like he knew he had a handsome face. Alisa was fairly certain he had been the one making comments about working for women.

The other applicant was a stocky, brown-skinned man with a wild tuft of blond hair that she assumed was dyed or otherwise modded. “Tommy Beck, ma’am,” he said, slapping a hand to his chest, then holding it out in greeting. “Served four years in the fleet, got out, did some private gigs, then fought for the Alliance for all four years of the war.” He glanced down at the collar of her jacket, taking in her rank. “It’ll be good to work for a real officer, not someone who bought a ship and figures that qualifies him for something.”

The other man snorted. “You don’t have the job yet, Beck. But I see they taught you how to kiss ass real well during that war.”

“You don’t have a problem working for a woman?” Alisa asked the pretty boy before Beck could retort—or do something with the fingers he had just curled into a fist. She was already fairly certain she would reject this clod on principle, but she ought to ask to see their résumés, if they had brought them, and perhaps for a demonstration of their skills.

“Draper,” the man said, his gaze dipping to her chest. Instead of looking at the rank on her collar, he was more interested in studying her breasts. “Done all kinds of work for women,” he said. “I’m sure I can keep you pleased.”

The attention made her wish she still had her wedding ring, but she had always taken it off when she handled the flight stick of her Striker. It must have fallen out of her pocket during the crash, because it hadn’t been there when she had awoken in the hospital and poked into her uniform. Either that or someone there had looted her unconscious form—considering that all of her valuables had been missing, that did seem to be a possibility. Alisa remembered how distraught she had been, worrying that Jonah would be disappointed at the loss of the ring. That had been before the letter had come.

“I don’t think a man whore is what she’s looking for,” Beck said. “At least that wasn’t listed in the job description.”

“Suck my asteroids, Beck.”

Draper stepped forward, raising his arm toward Alisa. To put around her shoulders, she realized with displeasure. She stepped back, but he still got close enough to drop his hand onto her shoulder. She could have scurried away and avoided him completely, but didn’t think it would be seemly for the captain to be seen fleeing the prospective employees.

“Happy to advise you on security matters, Captain,” Draper said, squeezing her shoulder and using his grip like an anchor to ooze closer. “Lots of pirates and gangsters out there these days. It’s not safe anymore to fly between here and Perun. Mafia’s got ahold of one of the Perun moons, you know.” He squeezed her shoulder again.

Alisa dropped her hands to her hips, her fingers an inch from her Etcher. She leveled a flat look at him, trying for the stern authority of an experienced commander even if she’d never led anything more than a squadron of pilots, men and women who had been too busy worrying about peppering the defenses of imperial cruisers and dreadnoughts to challenge her authority. Draper wore a weapons belt, too, and even though he acted like a sleaze, was probably a quick draw. He had muscles, not just a pretty face.

“Why don’t you take your hand off her, Draper?” Beck said, stepping forward.

“Why don’t you contemplate your tiny prick, Beck?” Draper oozed even closer to Alisa, sliding his hand down her back. “How about a tour of the ship, Captain?”

That hand was on its way south to her ass. Alisa’s reflexes overrode her desire to appear cool and nonchalant. She tried to move to the side, her fingers touching the butt of her gun. He moved more quickly than she expected, clasping her wrist before she got the weapon all the way out of her holster.

“No need for impoliteness, Captain. I’m just being friendly. I expect you’ll need a friend out there.” His other hand continued downward to squeeze her ass.

She stomped down on his foot, glad he wasn’t wearing his combat boots now because he winced satisfyingly and released his grip on her butt. He still had her wrist, though, and that wasn’t acceptable.

Something crashed into Draper before she could decide on her next move. Beck.

He rammed Draper with his shoulder, and both men flew away from her, tumbling to the ground. Draper cursed, but that was all he had time for. A punch slammed into his solar plexus. He snarled and returned the attack.

Alisa skittered out of the way as they thrashed about, heads clunking against the metal decking, flesh smacking against flesh. She kept her hand on her Etcher, though she didn’t break up the fight. First off, she didn’t know how she could—they wouldn’t even hear her if she shouted at them to stop, and she had no intention of shooting them. Second, for good or ill, she was getting a preview of their unarmed combat skills.

She looked over at Mica and the doctor, hoping their new passenger wouldn’t be alarmed by the display. His eyebrows were arched, but he didn’t seem worried. Mica didn’t look surprised by the wrestling match. She had probably heard a few more unsophisticated comments from the applicants while she had been waiting for Alisa to return.

“Part of the interview process,” Alisa called over to the doctor. “We’re taking on crew.”

“Of course,” he murmured.

She remembered his religious pendant and hoped the sight of men pummeling each other wouldn’t disgruntle him, at least not until after he had paid. She had never considered herself overly religious—even if she’d caught herself praying right before that crash—and didn’t know all of the rules of the monastic lifestyle, but she was fairly certain violence wasn’t encouraged. Three of the ten edicts handed down from the founders had to do with living peaceably with one’s neighbors.

The men rolled in her direction, cursing and snarling, and Alisa had to move out of the way again. Droplets of blood flew, spattering her deck and making her rethink her decision to let them settle this themselves. Maybe throwing some water on them or hitting one of the ship’s alarms would break them up.

Draper came out on top, straddling Beck’s torso and gripping his neck with both hands. Blood smeared Beck’s face, but he tried to fight back, twisting and bucking, doing his best to thrust Draper away from him. He gripped the other man’s arms, shoving at the hands wrapped around his neck. But Draper had him pinned effectively, and Beck’s face was turning red.

Alisa grimaced. She had hoped the man with manners would prove the better fighter and come out on top. She supposed this was typical of the universe, that the bigger asshole ended up being the stronger man. Draper’s eyes were filled with an alarming glee as he tightened his hands around Beck’s neck. Alisa had the sense that he’d killed plenty of men in his life, and that he liked doing it.

When it became clear that he wasn’t going to stop squeezing Beck’s neck until he passed out—or worse—Alisa stepped forward, coming in from behind him so she would catch Draper by surprise. She pressed the muzzle of her Etcher against the side of his head, suspecting he would ignore her without the authority of a weapon behind her words.

“Interview’s over,” she said, keeping her voice as calm and full of steel as she could. “Let him go.”

Draper eyed her, his hands still around Beck’s neck. Beck’s face had turned from red to purple.

Draper sneered. “You ever shoot anyone, girl?”

“Eighty-seven enemy pilots during the war,” Alisa said, meeting his eyes, “and the asshole in the junkyard the other day who also thought women wouldn’t kill.”

It had been easier out in space, with distance and a cockpit keeping her from looking into the eyes of the person she was targeting, but she could kill in self-defense, and she could do it to keep this creep from murdering someone at her feet.

“Get off my ship,” she said. “I won’t ask again.”

Seconds passed as Draper scrutinized her face—and her gun, probably thinking he might be able to knock it away before she could shoot. In the end, he released Beck. Alisa stepped back so he could get up, but she kept her Etcher trained on his head.

Draper rose to his feet, a knot swelling at his temple. Beck was the worse off, with his split lip bleeding as he wheezed for air. At least he could get that air now. He sucked in deep breaths as he rolled away from the other man.

Alisa, keeping her eyes on Draper, nodded toward the hatch. “Thanks for applying for the job, but you’re not hired. Beck, you’re hired.”

Draper curled his lip. “What, because he didn’t look at your tits?”

“Among other things,” Alisa murmured.

“I’m the better fighter. You let womanly sentiment decide who you hire, and you’ll get screwed by the first pirates you run into.”

“I’ll risk it.”

“Stupid bitch,” Draper grumbled and headed to his case of armor.

Alisa gritted her teeth, half-tempted to shoot him in the leg, if only because letting him disrespect her would make her look weak in front of her people. But this wasn’t the war, and he wasn’t an imperial soldier molesting innocent settlers and supporting an oppressive regime.

Draper slapped a button on the side of his case, and it floated into the air. “Follow,” he said, and walked it out the hatch, not looking back.

Alisa let out a sigh of relief when he disappeared from sight. Beck found his feet, his breathing returning to normal and his skin back to brown instead of red or purple.

“Ah, thanks, ma’am,” he said, wiping his sleeve across his bloody mouth. He wore a sheepish expression, and she could tell she wasn’t the only one concerned about coming across as weak in front of the others.

“You’re welcome. Grab your gear, and I’ll show you where to stow it.” Alisa turned toward the doctor, intending to take him to his cabin at the same time—he had fished out a small pouch of physical currency and was presumably ready to pay.

Movement at the top of the stairs leading out of the cargo hold caught her eye. The cyborg. How long had he been watching from the walkway up there? She didn’t think he had been up there when she had first walked in—maybe the sounds of the fight had drawn him.

He walked down the stairs, his expression as chilly as ever, especially when he glanced toward Alisa and Beck.

Beck stirred, his gaze locking on the cyborg’s uniform—on that patch that proclaimed what he was. The cyborg strode toward Alisa. Beck drew a blazer.

Alisa flung up her hand. “He’s not—”

But Beck was already pointing the blazer, and the cyborg blurred into action before she could finish her sentence. She knew he was fast from her own experience with him, but watching from the side was just as alarming. In the split second it took Beck to raise his blazer, the cyborg burst across the distance between them, disarmed him, and rammed his back against the bulkhead.

“Shit,” Alisa muttered and jumped over to stop the incident before it could escalate, before poor Beck ended up with a hand wrapped around his neck again. “Cyborg,” she said, wishing she had gotten his name, “this is Tommy Beck. I just hired him to help with security, so I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mangle him.”

Those cool blue eyes turned toward her. Beck tried to knee his assailant in the groin, but the cyborg easily deflected the attack by shifting his leg. He didn’t even look at Beck, his eyes remaining fixed on Alisa.

“This ship doesn’t need security,” he said. “It has me.”

It. The ship. He hadn’t said that she had him. That was certainly no promise of loyalty. Alisa would not point out that the main reason she wanted to hire security was to handle him if he decided to betray them. Even if he hadn’t done anything to bother her or Mica so far, she couldn’t forget what he was, someone who had sworn himself to the empire and the imperial fleet, accepting all those implants in exchange for a lifetime of service. What would happen if they ran into ships loyal to the empire? Or even pirates who had been imperial soldiers and were now reduced to surviving by preying on others? She couldn’t know that he wouldn’t turn her and her people over to former imperials if given the chance. It wasn’t as if he had wanted to share this ship with anyone. She just wished she had a Starseer to use against him instead of Beck, who, as polite as he was, had now been bested twice in as many minutes.

She sighed, fearing Draper might have been right, however much of an ass he was. Maybe she was letting sentiment overrule logic.

All she said out loud was, “You’re getting off at the first stop, right?”

The cyborg kept staring at her, and again, she had that uneasy feeling that he could read her mind. Yes, a Starseer would have been the ideal opponent to keep him in line, but those people were rarer than Teravian diamonds, and they didn’t hire on as security on rusty old freighters.

The cyborg released Beck, taking the man’s blazer with him when he stepped back. He clasped it with both hands as he stared Beck in the eyes, then flexed his forearms and bent it in half with a pitiful squeal of metal. The cyborg dropped the broken lump onto the deck and strode back to the stairs leading out of the cargo hold.

“Fucking imperial mech,” Beck growled, glaring after him.

Alisa noticed that he didn’t say it very loudly.

She rubbed a hand down her face and glanced toward Mica and the doctor again, wondering what their passenger’s expression would be this time.

Alejandro was watching the cyborg’s back as he climbed the stairs, his dark eyes closed to thoughtful slits. Alisa couldn’t read the expression, but almost thought there was recognition in it. That made her uneasy because it implied that their passenger might have been associated with the empire. What if he’d been a doctor—a surgeon, he’d said—for the military, and he had seen many cyborgs?

Alisa shook her head. What did it matter now? More than seventy percent of the system had been loyal to the empire, or had at least kept their mouths shut about the draconian laws the empire had imposed. Only fifteen or twenty percent of the system’s population had joined the Alliance openly and fought to put an end to imperial rule. Alisa was proud of what they had accomplished, as were many, but she would have to keep in mind that many people she encountered in the future would not be. She would have to be careful going forward, and it might be smart to stop wearing her uniform jacket.

“Captain, I, ah—I appreciate the job,” Beck said, “especially considering…” He stepped away from the bulkhead, frowned down at his broken blazer, and rubbed the back of his neck. “Well, you haven’t seen my best yet, that’s for sure, but I’m a decent fighter, especially in combat armor. Got a mind for all the connections and wiring in the helmet. My superiors always said so. And I’m decent with a wrench too. You won’t regret hiring me. Oh, and just wait until you taste my barbecue.”

Alisa blinked, looking away from the doctor. “Pardon?”

“I’m an excellent grill master.” Beck managed a smile, though his puffy lip made it lopsided. “Make my own sauces and marinades. Brought my portable grill along too.” He pointed his thumb at a duffel resting beside his armor case. “If you can provide fresh meat, I can work magic on it.”

“I’ll keep that in mind, Beck.” She patted him on the arm. “Grab your gear, and I’ll show you and the doctor to your cabins.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

As she walked away from Beck, she told herself that this would work out. He was polite and respectful and wouldn’t likely be trouble as long as she could keep him from plotting the cyborg’s death. Those traits were worth more than all the fighting prowess in the universe.

When she approached Alejandro, he tossed her the coin purse. Alisa caught it, feeling like they were back in medieval times on Old Earth. She looked forward to returning to a planet with a decent banking system and checking her account to see if she had any money in there. The Alliance hadn’t had much to pay its troops with, but she and Jonah had both had regular jobs before the war.

“Glad to have you aboard, Doctor,” she said.

“You can call me Alejandro,” he said. “As I said, I’m mostly retired. Research, you understand.”

“Of course.” She hoped she could talk him into serving as a medic for them if they ran into trouble. If nothing else, Beck’s lip could use some attention. “I’ll get your bag.”

She reached for the duffel at his feet, but he rushed to step in front of her, blocking her from it.

“Not necessary,” he said quickly. “I’ll get it.”

“Uh, all right.” Alisa quirked an eyebrow at Mica, who shrugged.

As the doctor shouldered the duffel, someone else walked up the ramp, a woman in boots and a simple green dress. She rolled a wood and brass trunk behind her, the sides plastered with stickers featuring everything from razorback ducks to garden plants to DNA double helixes and diagrams of elements from the periodic table. A few customs stamps from different planets were mingled in.

“Is this the Star Nomad?” she asked, pushing one of two long, black braids behind her shoulder.

“Yes, I’m Captain Marchenko. Need a ride to Perun?”

The woman glanced over her shoulder. “I do, indeed.”

The crowd had thinned out on the promenade as the last sun dipped toward the horizon, the desert temperature already starting to drop. Alisa didn’t see anyone following the woman.

“I’m Yumi Moon, a traveling science teacher seeking employment. How much is the fare?”

“Two hundred tindarks. Physical coin.”

Yumi hesitated. “Tindarks? Not morats?”

“Imperial money’s no good here.” Alisa couldn’t imagine that there were many places left where it was.

“I have one hundred tindarks,” Yumi said. “Will you take the rest in trade? I have merchandise worth well more than you’re asking.”

She patted the side of the trunk and smiled hopefully. She looked to be a few years younger than Alisa, in her late twenties perhaps, though her smooth, bronze skin made it hard to pin down.

Alisa almost asked what kind of merchandise, but did she truly care? She would have taken Yumi on for a hundred. Still, a good businesswoman ought to haggle, right? “One hundred in coin and one twenty in trade, since I’m sure it’ll take me a while to find a buyer for whatever it is you’ve got.”

“Probably not that long. Your crew may even be interested.” Yumi smiled again. “But I agree to your terms.” She stuck out her hand, but paused before extending it fully. “Providing you’re leaving soon?”

“Taking off by midnight.” Alisa could have left that moment—nobody here wanted to hurry to Perun more than she did—but she would wait a little longer in the hope that a few more passengers wanted rides. However unrealistic the wish, she hoped someone had taken her up on her offer to haul a load of cargo, too, as freight was easier to manage than people and rarely required food and fresh towels.

“That should be fine.” Yumi rested her trunk on the deck and fished out a few coins. “Here. I’ll be right back. I’m going to get my chickens.”

“Ah, chickens?” Alisa asked.

“They’re absolutely fabulous in space. Did you know chickens came across the expanse from Old Earth? They’re one of the chosen creatures. Their droppings make wonderful fertilizer, and we’ll have eggs every morning. You’ll be delighted.”

“Chickens?” Alisa asked again, horrified at the notion of them running around the cargo hold. Or worse, getting loose and pecking at wires in engineering. Had chickens ever caused a catastrophic engine failure?

“You’ll be delighted,” Yumi repeated and trotted down the ramp.

“They better not fertilize my ship,” Alisa called after her.

All she got for a response was a cheerful wave over the shoulder.

“Chickens?” Mica asked, coming up beside her and gazing out at the reddening sky over the city.

“Looks like we’ll have a cargo, after all.” Alisa grimaced, hoping the woman only had a few chickens. She could fence off portions of the cargo hold in a pinch, but was already wishing she’d haggled and demanded even more of a payment. After all, chickens were passengers too. “Any trouble getting people settled in?” she asked.

“Not really, but Beck refused to bunk next to the cyborg—you get his name yet?”

“No.”

Mica raised her eyebrows. “Are you going to?”

“If he wanted us to know, he would have offered it.”

“Mm. You didn’t mention to the passengers that there’s going to be a ten-day diversion, did you?”

“I thought I’d wait until after we’re in space and their money is in the vault.” Alisa gave an apologetic shrug. “I’m a touch desperate right now.”

“I wasn’t judging you.”

“Are you sure? Your nose wrinkled dubiously.”

“I have a nervous tic.”

“You’re nervous about something right now?”

“No.”

“Oh.” Alisa thought about mentioning what quirky people engineers were, but decided to let it go. “At least things are looking up. We might get more passengers tonight. One more, and we could even turn a profit on this trip.”

“You have a lot of patches that should be swapped out for replacement parts,” Mica said. “Expensive replacement parts. If you want to keep this barge in the sky, you need to sink some money into it.”

“Mica, are you trying to squash my optimism with your pessimism again?”

“Just stating the facts.”

“That was a yes, right?”

Mica’s nose wrinkled again.

A commotion arose among the people passing along the promenade near the base of the Nomad’s ramp. Alisa’s first thought was that Yumi was returning with her chickens, but she didn’t see the woman. She did, however, see two men in gleaming silver suits of combat armor, the square panels on their arms signaling weapons ports that could be lifted for firing. As if that wasn’t enough, they both carried massive assault rifles. One also wore a bandolier of grenades. Thanks to their helmets being tucked under their arms, Alisa had no trouble seeing the thick girths of their necks and their I-can-break-granite-with-my-teeth jaws. She would have believed they were cyborgs, but they might just have been gym enthusiasts. Either way, she hoped they continued past her ship.

They stopped at the base of the ramp and looked up at her.

“Any chance they’re here to apply for the security gig?” Alisa murmured.

“They’re late if they are,” Mica said.

Judging by their matching suits, suits that had likely been issued by some wealthy employer, Alisa doubted they were looking for a job. She thought about hitting the button that would withdraw the ramp and close the hatch, but the men were already halfway up. They would probably tumble inside, exactly where she did not want them.

“You fellows looking for someone?” Alisa asked.

She remembered the nervous glance that Yumi had sent over her shoulder and her desire to leave town quickly. She wasn’t a thief in trouble, was she?

“Yup,” one of the brawny men said.

They stopped a few feet lower than Alisa on the ramp, but even so, they were tall enough to look down at her. The speaker produced a palm-sized netdisc. A holographic display popped into the air above it, and a familiar face with brown skin and blond hair rotated to face Alisa. Tommy Beck.

“We’re looking for this man. You seen him?”

“No,” Alisa said without hesitating. She did not look to the side to see if Mica wrinkled her nose this time. Maybe it wasn’t wise to hide someone that she knew nothing about, but Beck had bowled into Draper on her behalf, and he seemed like a decent fellow. These men seemed like they pummeled sabertooth rawangas to relax, when they weren’t busy ripping people’s heads off and shooting them.

“Boss figures he’s heading off-world,” the speaker said, his gaze scouring the cargo hold behind Alisa. His buddy drummed a beat against the double barrels of his assault rifle. “There are only three ships that have filed flight plans with the dock master that say they’re going to break atmo in the next twenty-four hours.”

The flight plans for the ships docked here shouldn’t have been public information. These men did not look like police, so it made Alisa uneasy to know they had gotten that data somehow.

“Haven’t seen him,” she said with a shrug, refusing to show her unease. “Who do you work for? I can let them know if he comes by before we leave.”

“The White Dragon,” the man said, his tone challenging.

Alisa wished she could say that she hadn’t heard of them, but the mafia organization was large enough—and cruel enough—that it often made the news. She kept her face from showing any expression, but doubts danced in her head. She wouldn’t have pegged Beck as someone who would poke his nose into hornets’ nests, but if he had, then she would be a fool to keep him on her ship. Just because he’d stood up for her wasn’t a reason to position herself in the crosshairs of the mafia.

“Got a contact number?” she asked nonchalantly.

The man poked something in his holodisplay, and the image of Beck disappeared. A laser beam shot out of the disc and burned into the wall next to the hatch controls. Alisa jumped and opened her mouth to protest, but the device finished quickly, leaving a name and comm code etched into her hull.

“Contact number,” the man said dryly. “We’ll be checking the cameras. If we see that he did, indeed, board your ship, we’ll be back.”

The silent man smirked and tapped one of his grenades.

“Great,” Alisa said, “maybe next time, you can etch a Banakka board on my wall, and we can play a few rounds.”

Neither of them smiled. Nobody on this planet appreciated her humor.

“If you’re lying, you’ll regret it,” the speaker said. “Lying isn’t healthy, you know.”

“Yeah, I hear it hardens your arteries and gives you cavities.”

He scowled at her. “You looking for trouble, girl?”

“No. Look, I told you, I’ll let you know if I see the man. I’m helpful.”

After a long glower, the thugs stalked back down the ramp and strode to the next ship docked along the promenade. People skittered out of their way as they passed. If they didn’t, the men shoved them out of the way with enough force to knock them over.

“Why does our trip to Perun keep getting more complicated?” Mica asked.

“I don’t know, but I really don’t want to play Banakka with those two.” Alisa thumped a fist on her thigh. She’d wanted more passengers, but lingering here wouldn’t be a good idea, not now. Besides, the passengers and crew she had already taken on were looking to be trouble enough already. “I’m going to run my preflight checklist. As soon as Yumi gets back with her feathered cargo, let me know. We’re shoving off.” She would have to electronically transfer the funds she owed the storeowner once she had an account set up again.

“No arguments here.”

As Alisa headed for the steps, she spotted the cyborg up on the walkway again, looking down on the cargo hold. Yet another exchange that he had probably witnessed. She supposed it would be pointless to fantasize about him smashing the hells out of those two thugs in their sardine cans. No, he had disliked Beck instantly, so he wouldn’t defend him. The cyborg was probably thinking about tossing him out the airlock at the first opportunity.

Alisa grumbled to herself, taking the steps three at a time. The sooner they got off this dustball, the better.

Chapter 5

The Star Nomad’s compact NavCom cabin would have been deemed small in comparison to the bridge of a dreadnought or other warship, but it felt large after the cockpits of the one-man Strikers that Alisa had flown in the Alliance army. There were seats for the pilot and the co-pilot, and a fold-down seat behind them at the sensor station. The monitoring station for the cargo hold, life support, and fuel management was also back there. Displays and controls were hardwired into the consoles—no fancy holo-nav systems on this old ship.

Memories of her childhood and learning to fly washed over Alisa as she sat in the pilot’s seat, guiding the Nomad toward the clouds. It was comforting that the navigation and thruster controls were so familiar.

As they gained altitude, her thoughts shifted from her memories and into the present. She worried that she had dug her own grave by not tossing Tommy Beck into his armor case and dumping him out on the promenade before taking off. On the way up to NavCom, she had stopped outside of his cabin for a long moment and considered telling him to get out. But who else would stand up to the cyborg if she needed it? A fifty-year-old doctor turned monk? A chicken wrangler? The engineer who’d told her she was spaced if she took the cyborg on to start with?

Besides, Alisa couldn’t get past the fact that Beck had defended her against Draper and his intrusive paws. Handing him over to the mafia would be a poor way to thank him for that. She would take him to Perun and drop him off there. There were billions of people on that planet. He could get lost, disappear. And if the White Dragon mafia caught up with her later and had revenge in mind, she would tell them that he had stowed away. Any camera footage those thugs got ahold of would only show the promenade and possibly her ramp. Even if they’d had spy boxes or other aerial cameras, she doubted they would have been able to record much of what went on inside her ship.

As the Nomad gained altitude, Alisa waited for a communication from the dock master that would clear her to leave the planet. Maybe she wouldn’t get one. Dustor wasn’t that populous, with few ships coming and going, so the likelihood of a crash was small. Still, she spun in her seat enough to check the sensor display, to make sure there wasn’t anyone else intruding upon her flight path. Igniting the thrusters to break out of the atmosphere used a lot of fuel, and she didn’t want to have to abort in the middle of the burn.

Her heart lurched when her eyes locked onto the sensor display. There weren’t any ships ahead of her, but there was one behind her. Directly behind her.

She bit her lip, thinking of the White Dragon thugs. They couldn’t have already checked those cameras, could they have? It had been less than a half hour since they had walked away from her ramp.

Alisa flicked on the ship’s intercom. “Beck, come join me in NavCom, please. Mica, you’ll want to camp out in engineering if you aren’t already there.”

“Where else would I be?” came her immediate response. “Petting the chickens?”

“They are kind of cute,” Alisa said, glad Mica was already at her station.

The ship following them might be nothing, just someone else using her same flight path, intending to head out. But she remembered what the mafia thugs had said, that only three ships were taking off in the next twenty-four hours, and that she was one of them. What were the odds that one of the other two had left minutes after she had? Would the dock master have approved that? Usually they kept a window, to avoid accidents.

“If I find feathers or fertilizer in my engine room,” Mica said, “they’re going in a stew pot.”

Alisa did not respond. The intercom system broadcast ship-wide, and their chicken-loving passenger might not care for the conversation. She glanced at the sensor display again. The other ship had picked up speed and was closing the gap. If it had weapons, it would be within range to use them soon.

She drummed her fingers on the console. If she kept going up, there was nothing but a whole lot of empty space out there. Nowhere to hide.

She shut off all of the autopilot assists and took the flight stick.

“We’re going to take the scenic route,” she mumbled to herself, or maybe to the plush stuffed spider that dangled from a wire above the co-pilot’s seat. It had been her mother’s good luck charm. Alisa had almost torn it down when she had been recovering the body and deciding what to do with the Nomad. Ultimately, she had left it there, taking it to the junkyard along with the ship. It was a testament to the thing’s hideousness that Finnegan had not removed it when he had been selling the spacesuits and other valuables.

“You called for me, Captain?” Beck asked from the hatch.

“Come in. Have a seat.” Alisa did not look at him. She had steered the ship almost straight down, heading for a network of canyons that scoured the beige, sandy landscape south of the city, and she would need her concentration. “Know anything about the White Dragon mafia?”

“Shit.”

“I’ll take that for a yes.”

Alisa checked the sensor display again. The white dot that represented the other ship had changed course. It was following them. No mistake.

She raised the shields and banked, diving for one of the larger canyons. The freighter handled sluggishly compared to her military Striker-18. She reminded herself she was flying a big box, not a small, sleek combat vessel. She also did not have weapons, so there would be no dogfights between the walls of the canyon. The best she could hope for was to find a hiding spot—if they found a ledge they could slip under and turned off all of their power, they might disappear from the enemy’s sensors. Maybe. It depended on how good those sensors were. Some of the high-tech imperial stuff could find a tindark coin dropped on the opposite side of a moon.

“Care to explain?” Alisa asked as they dipped below the rim of the canyon, the pale sandstone walls to either side jagged and dangerous. Whatever river had carved out the terrain feature was dried up now. Unlike on the featureless sandy surface of the planet, an area scoured by wind too often to support plant life, all manner of cactuses rose from the bottom of the canyon. Too bad a fifty-meter long freighter couldn’t hide behind a cactus.

“You want to hear about it now?” Beck asked as he strapped himself into the co-pilot’s seat. He gripped the armrests as he frowned at the striated walls streaking past on the view screen. Here and there, arches and pillars created obstacles for Alisa to weave through.

“Better now than after we crash and die,” she said.

Beck shot her an alarmed look.

She thought about pointing out that she wasn’t doing much yet, just following the contours of the canyon and checking the sensors. Not surprisingly, their pursuer was tracking them from above, flying over the arches instead of dipping under them. Alisa tapped a button and tied into the planet’s satellites to get an idea of the terrain ahead, hoping to find a cave or ledge large enough to hide her ship. She also hoped that the White Dragon pilot wasn’t a native of the planet who knew every nook and cranny by heart.

An alarm flashed on the co-pilot’s station. Weapons locking onto them.

Alisa dipped the craft lower as a sizzling bolt of energy streaked over them. It slammed into a canyon wall, and rock exploded, pelting their shields. Pulverized dust clouded the air until they passed the area.

“I’m sorry,” Beck said. “I didn’t think they’d catch up with me so quickly. I didn’t mean to endanger you.”

“Story,” Alisa said, zigzagging them over the dried riverbed below, trying to make a difficult target.

“The war ended and didn’t leave me bursting with cash,” Beck said. “You know how it was. Fighting for freedom, not coin.”

Alisa knew all too well. She nodded for him to continue. Up ahead, a small canyon converged with their bigger one.

“Well, I’ve been a fighter for a long time,” Beck went on, “but it’s not my passion, not like food.”

“Food?”

“Cooking—grilling especially. I told you I make some fine flavors. It had long been a dream of mine to go commercial with some of my sauces, get them in the groceries on all the main planets, sell enough to retire from fighting.”

Another bolt of energy sizzled after them. Alisa turned abruptly, banking hard to take them around the sharp angle and up into the smaller canyon. She clipped the top of a tall pole cactus, leaving it on its side. Three suns, she’d forgotten what a behemoth the Nomad was. Out in space, where everything was on a galactic scale, it did not matter as much, but she would feel like an idiot if she wrecked her own ship without having suffered a single blow from the enemy.

Beck’s fingers tightened on the armrests, and he paused in his story.

Alisa spotted what might be a ledge on the satellite map. She increased her speed.

“When I got out, nobody was hiring fighters,” Beck said. “I figured that was a sign from the stars, time to take a shot at making my dream happen. I wanted to open a restaurant, to prove that my sauces were brilliant. I’d get people talking about them, figure out which they liked most, which ones would be the most likely candidates to sell on the interplanetary market.”

Alisa tipped the freighter on the side, flying along the wall to avoid fire from above. Another crackling bolt slammed into the middle of the dried river.

The canyon was growing narrower. Piloting would get tougher, but their enemy should have a tougher time shooting down between the walls too. She hoped.

“I didn’t have the funds to open the restaurant on my own,” Beck continued. “I thought about selling my combat armor, but it’s more than ten years old and has some dents and scrapes that won’t buff out. The secondhand place didn’t want to give me anything close to a fair price. A man was there when I was trying to make the sale and asked what I needed the money for, then said he knew someone who might give me a loan if I didn’t mind a hefty interest rate.” Beck flexed his fingers on the armrests as the Nomad dipped below an arch, the shields bumping the bottom edge on the way through. “I was enamored with my idea and figured I could handle the interest. In truth, I could. I took on a partner with experience in restaurants, and we weren’t open a month before we had more business than we could handle. Considering how screwed the economy is on Dustor, I figured that was damned impressive, and it would only be a matter of time before I could start my sauce line.”

If Alisa had not been busy avoiding fire, she would have given him some incredulous looks. It wasn’t that she blamed a man for having dreams, but what kind of combat specialist fancied himself a chef?

“One night, we had a special guest come by, the man who had indirectly financed my business. Weeks had passed, and I never had any idea the mafia was behind it. I thought I’d been taken on by some benevolent angel investor, albeit a greedy one.” Beck snorted noisily. “Turns out, this was one of the six brothers that founded the White Dragon Clan. He loved good food, and I figured things might turn out all right. I’d feed him an excellent dinner, and he would know that he had made a wise decision by investing in my enterprise. That was before some enemy of his decided to poison him that night, using my food to hide the drugs. He—”

“Hold on.” Alisa raised her hand to pause his story and hit the intercom. “Mica? I know we packed light, but is there anything down there you can use to make some explosives? I have an idea that may or may not work.”

She eyed the satellite imagery again, considering a ledge ahead of them. There was no way to tell how thick it was or how much space was underneath it. She might very well reach it and find out it was only a plateau, but the way it thrust out into the canyon and halfway over the riverbed gave her hope.

The “Uh” that Mica responded with did not sound promising.

“I have DZ-4 bombs,” an unexpected voice said over the intercom. The cyborg.

“Get them. I need you to meet Beck at the hatch.” Alisa doubted the cyborg would appreciate taking orders from her, but their pursuer chose that moment to fire again. The energy bolt blasted past without going anywhere near them, but it slammed into the top of a cliff up ahead, and rubble rained down as the Nomad passed. The thumps of the pieces bouncing off the shields resounded throughout the ship.

“I’ll be there in less than a minute,” the cyborg said. He sounded unperturbed, as if he had been fired on a thousand times in his life. He probably had.

“You have any explosives, Beck?” Alisa asked.

“No, but I can blow the hells out of a man with the blazers built into my armor. Might be able to put a dent in some ship’s shields if I have long enough.” He unfastened his harness and stood.

“Go with the cyborg. Help him plant explosives. If my plan works, we won’t need you to go toe to toe with a ship.”

“The mech?” Beck scowled.

“We’re all on the same side. Your side.” Alisa turned a frosty look on him, hoping to remind him that he had brought this upon them. She didn’t want anything except cooperation from him.

“Right. We’ll get it done.” He ran out the hatchway.

Alisa tapped the intercom. The ledge was coming up. She would have to work quickly and hope the shields could take a couple of hits from the mafia ship. The canyon narrowed further up ahead. Good. That should make her actions more believable.

“Brace yourselves, everyone,” Alisa said. “We’re about to get hit.”

“Pardon?” Mica asked.

“Trust me.” Alisa nudged the flight stick and took them upward, hoping it would look like they were giving up on the canyon and fleeing back to the city.

The White Dragon ship reacted even more quickly than she expected, the pilot firing at her with glee. Her fingers twitched, wanting so badly to take evasive maneuvers, but she forced herself to stay on a straight and predictable course.

An energy bolt slammed into their starboard side. An alarm flashed on the console, warning her that the shields had dipped below fifty percent power.

Alisa was too busy with other controls to do more than glance at it. She hit a button to vent exhaust at the same time as she spun artfully, corkscrewing back down into the canyon. She leveled them out just enough to pilot them toward the ledge at the same time as they lost elevation.

Footsteps clanged on the deck behind her, and she glimpsed Alejandro racing to NavCom, gripping the hatchway with both hands as he stared at her. The artificial gravity compensated for the spinning, but the ship still jostled back and forth.

Busy concentrating, Alisa did not acknowledge him. She leveled further just before they slid under the ledge, the thrusters skipping off the ground. Alejandro cursed, nearly tumbling to the deck.

The ledge was barely high enough for the Nomad to slide under. Alisa reversed the thrusters, halting them far more abruptly than the ship was designed to do. This time, Alejandro almost ended up in her lap. Alisa vented more exhaust, hoping it looked like smoke from above.

“Cyborg, Beck, you’re on,” she said, hitting the control to open the hatch even as she settled them onto the ground under the far end of the ledge. Their nose peeked out, but not so much that the White Dragon ship should be able to tell that the Nomad had landed with control instead of in the crash she’d done her best to simulate. “Plant some explosives on the ceiling of the ledge, right behind us, right where you would land if you were an enemy ship coming down to check us out. Set a delay if your bombs don’t have a remote detonation capability.”

The men did not respond, but she flicked on the exterior cameras and saw them running down the ramp in the direction she had indicated.

“You pretended to crash,” Alejandro said slowly, also watching the camera.

“Yeah. Did you come up here to pray for us in case we were really going to crash?”

“Actually, I was going to call you a maniac and try to wrest control of the ship from you.”

“Are you a pilot?”

“No, but I felt desperate.” He shrugged, his hand wrapped around his pendant. “I haven’t been in many battles.”

Alisa thought about pointing out that this was tame as far as battles went, but it wasn’t over yet. They could still end up in pieces littered up and down this canyon for miles.

“They’re hovering over us now,” she said, watching the sensor display. She flicked several switches. “I’m killing all non-essential power so we look dead, but not everything. If they decide to blow this ledge to Old Earth and back, we’ll need to take off. I’m hoping they have orders to bring Beck back alive for his punishment.”

Alejandro scratched his head. “I… feel like a planet that got left off the map.”

“He failed to explain that the mafia is after him before he accepted his new job.”

Alisa watched the camera as they spoke, wincing when she realized how high above them the underside of the ledge was. The Nomad fit with ten feet to spare, and the ship itself was over thirty feet high.

As she was trying to remember if there was collapsible grav scaffolding somewhere in the ship, the cyborg ran to the rock wall. It was vertical with few obvious handholds, but he climbed up it as if there was a rope ladder hanging there for him. Beck could only stand and watch, pointing his rifle vaguely down the canyon at the cactuses poking up on either side of the riverbed.

Alisa glanced at Alejandro. He was watching the camera too and did not appear surprised. She remembered that hint of recognition she’d glimpsed on his face when he had first seen the cyborg. She wasn’t sure if it had been because he recognized him specifically or just that he was familiar with cyborgs.

“You haven’t met him before, have you?” Alisa drummed her fingers as she watched him switch from vertical to horizontal, still finding hand and footholds as he maneuvered far enough out along the ceiling of the ledge that he could plant the bombs where she had requested.

Alejandro hesitated, then shook his head.

She almost pressed him further, but the blip that represented the other ship moved. “They’re coming in to check us out more closely,” she announced. “Or, with luck, to land and try to board us.”

“That’s what you consider lucky, is it?”

“Hurry up, boys,” she muttered, her hand hovering over the external comm. She was about to warn them that they didn’t have much time, but the cyborg let go of the ledge then. He dropped forty feet, twisting in the air to land on his feet. He crouched deeply to absorb the impact of the landing, but anyone else would have broken both legs trying that move. “Must be nice to be able to do things like that,” she mumbled.

“They give up much in exchange for their abilities,” Alejandro said dryly.

The words made her think he might know a lot more about it than she did, but even if there had been more time, she wasn’t sure she would have asked for details. Cyborgs were the enemy. They had been long before the war had started, acting as tools of death for the empire, assassinating those who didn’t precisely obey imperial law. She had no wish to humanize them and think of them as anything except monsters to be avoided.

A shadow fell across the canyon. The other ship coming in. To land, Alisa hoped. They could have fired from up above without dropping into the canyon.

Beck and the cyborg raced up the ramp and showed up on the interior cameras in the cargo hold. Alisa flicked the switch to close the hatch, then moved her hand toward the buttons that would turn main power back on and raise the shields. She was tempted to hit them now, as the enemy ship lowered itself toward the ground, but that would register on their sensors. The Nomad couldn’t play dead in the water and have the shields up at the same time.

Sweat dampened her palms. They could have withstood a few more blows with the shields up, but without them, that energy weapon would blast a hole in the hull and possibly kill them all.

“He better be one damned amazing grill master,” Alisa said. She expected a feast if they got Beck out of this.

“Pardon?” Alejandro asked.

She shook her head. Beck could explain his story to the others later, assuming they survived this.

The enemy ship came into view, a sleek black vessel with dozens of weapons protruding from the hull and a gun turret on the top. It hovered briefly, eyeing them.

Alisa grimaced, wishing she had shoved the Nomad’s nose into the wall and brought down some rocks around them. They probably looked like they had landed instead of crashing. At the least, she should have had the cyborg kick some dirt onto the hull while he had been out there.

“The explosives can be remotely detonated,” the cyborg said over the intercom. “Tell me when.”

“I will,” Alisa said. Reminding herself that he hadn’t agreed to accept her as his captain and follow her orders, she made herself add a “Thank you.”

She wasn’t surprised when she didn’t get a “You’re welcome” in return.

The other ship landed. Ten feet away from the ledge.

“Damn.” Alisa thumped her fist on the console. She had hoped they would creep under the ledge, and that she could bring it down on the ship as the Nomad flew away.

“Now what?” Alejandro asked.

She held up a hand, hoping…

There. A hatch opened in the belly of the black ship, and a ramp lowered to the ground. Six men in combat armor followed by six more men in regular clothing came out. Judging by all the weapons they carried, both sets of men had raided their armory on the way out.

“They really want you, Beck,” Alisa said.

“But they’re not getting me. Right, Captain?” Beck responded from the cargo hold.

“Let’s hope not. Got your rifle ready?”

“Always.”

The squad of men marched toward the Nomad’s hatch.

“This is as good as it’s going to get,” Alisa said. “I hope it’s enough.”

“Captain?” Beck asked.

Alisa waited until all of the men had walked under the ledge and were passing beneath the bombs. “Now, Cyborg.”

The explosives blew before she finished the words, the boom thunderous in the confined canyon. It was a good thing she had already been pounding the button to raise the shields. Power surged through the ship, the thrusters activating as she took them out as fast as she could. Huge boulders tumbled down from above, slamming to the ground around and on top of the White Dragon men. They slammed into the top of the Nomad, as well, a cacophony of bangs sounding as the shields deflected them.

“Fly back over the other ship,” the cyborg ordered over the intercom, “and open the hatch.”

“What?” Alisa balked more at the idea of opening the hatch while they were in the air than in doing whatever it was he had in mind.

“Do it,” he ordered, his voice resonating with the authority of command.

Alisa found herself obeying before she had time to debate whether she should obey or not. He must have a plan to take out the ship. It would keep them from being followed, but…

She swallowed as she flew straight up, did a loop, and twisted to head back in the direction they had come from—it was the only way to turn around in the narrow canyon. She piloted toward the ship parked next to the destroyed ledge, the rocks crumbled atop the men down there. Those in combat armor might have survived. The rest would have been pulverized.

An alarm sounded. The hatch opening. The cyborg had hit the button himself from down there. She could override it, but should she?

The enemy ship hadn’t moved yet. Its pilot was probably staring in horror at the collapsed ledge, but any second, he would realize how vulnerable they were. He would pull their ramp in, shut their hatch, and power up the shields. That could be done in seconds.

Realizing they would only get one chance, Alisa swooped down over the mafia ship. Her momentum took her past it quickly, and at first, she didn’t think that anything had happened. Maybe the cyborg had missed his opportunity.

Then another alarm blared on her sensor panel, warning of an explosion right behind them. Her rear camera caught the inferno that lit up when the bomb blew right on top of the ship, its shields not up to deflect the power. Black smoke billowed, and chunks of the hull flew up and down the canyon, ricocheting off the rock walls.

The ship was likely salvageable, but Alisa doubted it would be flying after them today.

The alarm warning about the lowered ramp stopped going off. The cyborg had pulled it back in and secured the hatch. Alisa set a course into the nav system, more than ready to hand the piloting over to the computer. They shouldn’t need any fancy flying to escape the atmosphere.

She slumped back in her seat, realization setting in. Enough of those people would survive to report back to their mafia bosses, to identify the ship that had attacked them—that had killed some of their people.

They were criminals, and she didn’t believe that what she had done was morally wrong, but she did believe there would be repercussions for this choice.

“We won the war,” she mumbled. “There were supposed to be parades. Instead, I got stuck on this dustball, and now the mafia is going to be after me.” She groaned and scrubbed her hands over her face. Taking on Beck had been a mistake. Not shoving him back out after she’d known about his troubles had been a bigger mistake.

“Parades are for heroes,” Alejandro said. “There are no heroes in war. Just tools being used by one organization or another.”

Alisa had forgotten he was there and regretted speaking aloud, but his words rankled. She turned toward him. “I dare you to say that in front of your cyborg buddy.”

“I doubt he would disagree.”

“Well, I do. I’m not a tool. I wasn’t brainwashed into joining the Alliance and fighting against the tyranny of the empire. I saw that tyranny firsthand. Security everywhere you looked. Supposedly to keep down the bad people, but just as surely oppressing and terrifying good imperial subjects. Subjects afraid to say the wrong thing, afraid they’d be made to disappear. I watched friends disappear when I was in college. Others spoke up and came back with half of their memories gone and a new personality. If you think we were tools to fight that, you’re the delusional one, Doctor, not me. The only semblance of freedom was for those who could take to the skies.” Alisa touched the console of the ship, of her mother’s ship. Mom had known that truth long before she had.

“I simply meant that heroes find a way to change the world for the better without killing.” Alejandro walked out, leaving her alone in the cabin.

Alisa preferred that because tears of frustration, or maybe tears of sorrow, were pricking her eyes. She had lost her husband, she was billions of miles from her daughter, and in the span of a week, her life had gone from confusing and frustrating to terrifying and ominous. She’d assumed that once she reached Perun, she could walk into her sister-in-law’s apartment and retrieve her daughter, but would that just be putting Jelena in danger? After this, the mafia would put a bounty out for the destruction of the Nomad—maybe for her death. She could be looking over her shoulder for the rest of her life.

She dropped her face into her hands. All she wanted was to go home. Why couldn’t home be there, where she had left it?

Chapter 6

As the night cycle deepened, Alisa gazed at the old-fashioned photograph in her hand, the photo she had carried in her flight suit all through the war, the paper now creased and wrinkled. The picture was of her, Jonah, and Jelena, taken four and a half years ago, before the war and back when the universe had made sense. It hadn’t been an ideal universe, but it had been knowable. Understandable. The future was something different now, something uncertain and scary.

She closed her eyes, retreating into the past.

Alisa opened the door to the sound of giggling. She walked into the apartment, a bottle and a box cradled in her arms, her laundry in a bag over her shoulder, the clothes needing attention after her week flying her DropEx delivery route. When she glimpsed Jelena floating in the air on the other side of the couch, her arms outstretched like an airplane, she set her belongings down and walked over to investigate.

Jonah lay on his back on the floor, his bare feet creating a shelf to prop their daughter up as he held her hands and gyrated his hips to give her a ride. Another round of giggles burst out as she swooped low over the coffee table.

“Alisa,” Jonah said brightly, his eyes gleaming with good humor.

“Mommy’s back!” Jelena blurted, wriggling on Jonah’s feet.

“I’m back,” Alisa said, tamping down a grin and trying to look stern. “School starts next week. I thought you two were going to practice reading while I was gone.”

“We’re taking a break. We’ve been working for hours.” Still flat on his back, as Jelena waved at him to make her swoop sideways again, Jonah fished under the couch, pushed a couple of toys aside, and produced a netdisc. “See? We still have a book open.”

“Mmhm, and is it hard to read a book that’s under the couch?”

“Not at all. Jelena has excellent eyes. The delights of youth.”

Alisa’s grin slipped out, and she shook her head. “I got champagne and bonbons on the way home, so we can celebrate your promotion, Professor Chaikin.” She considered his position on the floor and how he appeared to be having as much fun as Jelena. “Perhaps juice bulbs and candy planets would have been more appropriate.”

“Not at all. The champagne is very thoughtful, thank you.” Jonah lowered Jelena to the floor, his eyebrows rising as he looked toward the chocolate box. “Are you sure the bonbons were purchased with me in mind?”

“Of course. You get the ones with the weird fillings that I don’t like.”

Jelena ran around the couch and hugged Alisa’s legs. “Mommy, I was flying. Just like you. Did you see?”

She reached down and picked Jelena up for a hug. “I did see. And if you had a few thousand tons of deliveries in your cargo hold, it would have been exactly like me.” Her tone must have sounded unintentionally wry, or perhaps bitter, because the humor faded from Jonah’s face.

“You’re not feeling restless again, are you?” he asked, coming over to add his arms for a family hug. “Flying an airplane instead of a spaceship?”

Alisa hesitated, but shook her head firmly and smiled. “Not at all. It’s bad enough being away for a week at a time. If I left for months, Jelena would never learn how to read.”

Jonah snorted and kissed her, not denying it.

Footsteps sounded on the deck outside of NavCom, and Alisa slid the photo back into its usual spot in her jacket pocket. Six months after that arrival home, the war had officially started, and the Alliance had sent out its recruiting flyers. Pilots had been in high demand. Even though she had loved spending time with her family, she had not hesitated long before signing up. She’d told herself—and Jonah—that she wanted to ensure a future of freedom and opportunities for Jelena, and she had genuinely believed that, but looking back, she realized she had also been eager for a chance to fly among the stars again. Jonah had understood, probably more than she had at the time.

The hatch opened, and Alisa rested her hands on the controls, pretending to be doing something. It had been several days since they’d escaped their encounter with the White Dragon ship and left Dustor behind, and the first of the asteroids was now visible on the view screen. She truly would have to do something soon, but the cyborg had yet to give her directions beyond the Trajean Asteroid Belt.

“You all right, Captain?” Mica asked, flopping down in the co-pilot’s seat.

“Fine. Why? There some trouble I should know about?”

“Not really, but I think people are wondering if the captain shouldn’t be doing more captaining instead of hiding up here in navigation. Beck was asking if he should be doing something, too, and I’ve heard our two passengers rumbling a few times, wondering how long this delay will be and when we’ll be heading to Perun.”

“You tell them to ask the cyborg?”

“No.” Mica snorted. “You still don’t know his name?”

“I don’t want to know his name.”

If Alisa knew his name, she might have to stop thinking of him as the cyborg, and she didn’t know if she wanted to do that. He had been useful during the fight with the White Dragon ship, and he hadn’t caused any trouble yet. She almost wanted him to cause trouble, wanted him to live up to what she expected from a soldier in the Cyborg Corps. But he just kept to himself, staying in his cabin, not dissimilarly to the way she was staying in NavCom and ignoring the rest of the ship. She didn’t want to captain. She was far more comfortable piloting. Besides, did a crew of three need a captain? Mica seemed to get the job done without anyone telling her what to do, and Beck… well, she supposed she could find some work for him, but in truth, she had only hired him to be an extra gun if they ran into trouble.

“The cute girl with the chickens is wondering when you’re going to collect the second half of her payment. She seems proud of whatever it is. I’m starting to get an inkling.”

“Oh?” Alisa was about to ask for clarification on the payment but found her humor piqued and instead asked, “You think she’s cute?”

“She’s a kook. She had the hatch to her cabin open this morning as I was walking by, and I heard this heavy breathing. My first thought was that she’d dragged Beck inside for a rousing round of sex, but she was just lying on her bed, making herself hyperventilate. She had some quirky drum and flute music going. When I asked what she was doing, she said, ‘experiencing euphoria’ and invited me to join her.” Mica made a disgusted face.

“I don’t know how you turned down an offer like that. Especially from someone cute.”

Mica sighed at her.

“Her name is Yumi,” Alisa said. “That one I know, at least.”

“Congratulations. There’s a smoky sweet smell wafting from her cabin now. Reminds me of the dorms at BKU on Arkadius. I’m guessing your payment will come in the form of special herbs. Or perhaps in psychedelic mushrooms.”

“Probably ones that she grew herself,” Alisa said, not fazed. Who was she to judge when she’d traded her prescription painkillers for a gun and chocolate? “With the help of chicken fertilizer.”

Mica shifted toward the view of the asteroid belt. “Do you know where we’re going in there?”

“No.”

“Shouldn’t you ask?”

“I was hoping the cyborg would come up here and tell me, so I wouldn’t have to go knocking on his hatch. I used to play house with my stuffed animals in that cabin he’s claimed. I don’t want to see what he’s done to it.”

Mica grunted. “You played house?”

“Well, I played ship and made the stuffed animals my crew. We battled smugglers and pirates together.”

“And now you’re doing it in real life.”

Alisa grimaced. “When I was six, and my stuffed crew and I defeated the bad people, vengeful friends of the bad people didn’t come after us later.”

“Six-year-olds tend to be shortsighted.”

“Yeah. Why don’t you go talk to the cyborg for me?”

“No, thanks. You’re the captain.”

“I don’t suppose you’d go if I ordered you to go?” Alisa asked.

“Probably not. We’re not in the military anymore, and I doubt you’re going to fire me. Mostly because you’re not paying me.”

“This is true.” Alisa flexed the tense muscles in her shoulders. She had been sitting up here for too long. “You going to stick with me after we make it to Perun? Or are you getting off there? I know we only talked about getting there, not what would happen after.”

“I figured you’d reunite with your husband and kid and live happily ever after.” Mica frowned at her. “I’m not misremembering that, am I? I thought you mentioned a family back when we were on the Silver Striker.”

Alisa stared numbly at the asteroids looming ahead. She had forgotten that Mica didn’t know. They had fallen into working together easily, as they once had when they had been new lieutenants on a big ship, intending to do big things to stop the empire.

“I’m going back for my daughter,” Alisa said. “My husband was a civilian casualty in the Perun Central bombing.”

“Ah. I’m sorry.”

Alisa flicked a hand in acceptance, not wanting to speak further about it. She had spent the first month of her rehabilitation in denial over his death, until the vid images had come in on the news, showing the devastation to the city, which had prompted her to find pictures of the destruction of her own neighborhood. She’d also found Jonah’s name in an obituary. That had made everything depressingly real. She had spent the second month of rehabilitation mourning his death, regretting that she hadn’t had a chance to say goodbye, and regretting that she hadn’t told him often enough what an amazing person he was. It would take her a long time to stop missing him, but now she needed to focus on the future instead of living in the past.

“After I get Jelena, I’ll figure the rest out,” Alisa said. “I’m not sure what else I’m qualified to do except for piloting, and whether it was entirely legal or not, I do have this ship now.”

“I was planning to look for work,” Mica said. “I’m qualified for a lot.”

“Are you sure? Some people demand optimism from employees.”

“I’ve yet to see that in a job description.”

“You have to read between the lines. It’s there.”

“We’ll see,” Mica said. “I’d like to do something a little more interesting than keeping an ancient freighter smothered in shag carpet in the air.”

“That carpet is only in the rec room.”

“No, it’s in my cabin too.”

“That’s velvet carpet. That room was rented by a—well, I wasn’t supposed to know what she was, but a lady rented it for a while and saw clients when we visited planets and space stations.”

“It’s purple. It’s gross.”

“Stick around, and I’ll let you remodel.”

Mica curled a lip. “It’s not that I don’t appreciate the job offer, Captain, but… you know I’m from a mining colony, right? Grew up on a moon strip-mined half into oblivion.”

“I figured it had to be something like that when you’ve got a name like Mica Coppervein.”

“Yes, we all got named after our colony, not our parents. We weren’t supposed to think too much about being individuals, just about making sure the colony succeeded, that the valuable ore got taken out and sent back to the empire.” Mica sneered slightly. “The empire always took so much, left us so little. There was never enough to go around. We worked hard all day and into the night, and we were always at least a little hungry.”

“But you got out and found yourself an education,” Alisa said, though the latter was an assumption. Mica had been a lieutenant in the war, so she ought to have a degree.

“I won the lottery. The children all got some education, enough reading and math to understand the equipment and fix it if things went wrong. There were tests to select the brighter kids. I was one of those, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. The timing was just right for me. Every few years, the empire came around with some scholarships. They wanted the best and the brightest for the fleet, and they weren’t above finding those kids on remote holes. With the help of the foreman, they picked one kid to go away and get an advanced education. That was me.”

“Were you supposed to go back and help your people one day?”

Mica shook her head. “It was about helping the empire, not my people. Besides, nothing’s changed there in fifty years. Maybe five hundred. They’re not looking for revolutionaries to return and stir up the colony. No, after you finish school, you’re supposed to be so grateful for the opportunity that the empire gave you that you’re eager to go to work for them.” Mica looked at her hands. “I was grateful that fate had given me a chance, but I couldn’t ever love the empire. I just figured I’d take what I’d been given and do some good with it somewhere. First, that was joining the Alliance and fighting for a better way of life. Now… I’m not sure yet, but I have to do something meaningful. I can’t waste what I was given when thousands of my people are never given anything.”

Alisa reached over and squeezed her shoulder. “I understand. We’ll get to Perun, and you’ll find your destiny.”

“A whole heap of trouble, more like.”

Alisa smiled and pushed herself to her feet. “I guess someone has to talk to our cyborg.”

“Good luck. I’m still not convinced he’s not going to kill us all in our sleep.”

Alisa paused with her hand on the hatchway. “Has he done something to make you think that’s likely?” She had not seen it, but she’d also been spending her time isolated in NavCom.

“Besides regarding us all with disdain?” Mica asked.

“Yes.”

“No. I’m just being pessimistic.”

“Rare.”

“Yes.”

Alisa headed into the corridor, turning down the first of two dead-end hallways that led to crew quarters. The hatch to her mother’s cabin was still locked. Alisa had left it that way, not having the courage to go in there and look around six years ago. She still wasn’t sure she had the courage.

Before she made it to the cyborg’s cabin, Beck stepped out of his hatchway, almost running into her.

“Sorry, Captain. I was just cleaning my armor.” He raised his eyebrows, appearing quite eager to please. “You have anything more that needs doing?”

“I don’t know. What can you clean besides armor?”

“I was in the military for a long time. I’ve cleaned just about everything. Not real fond of lavs.”

“Surprising.”

He gave her a salute, not seeming to realize that neither of them were in the Alliance army anymore, and started past her. She continued toward the cyborg’s hatch, but Beck stopped her with a soft word.

“Captain?”

“Yes.”

“I—ah. I just wanted to let you know that I appreciate that you didn’t kick me off the ship.” Beck made a face, his forehead creasing. “I think maybe you should have.”

“I can’t do that until I’ve tasted your grilling.”

“All I need is some fresh meat, and I can make a feast.”

“Maybe there will be something interesting on one of the asteroids.”

Beck scratched his head. “You’ve got an odd sense of humor, Captain.”

“I know. I’m not finding folks as appreciative of that as you’d think.”

“Well, I’m appreciative that you didn’t hand me over to the mafia. I’m not the brightest sun in the galaxy, and sometimes I get a bit impulsive. I didn’t mean to bring my troubles to you, but you just let me know if there’s a way I can repay that favor. Anytime. I’m your man.”

Alisa hadn’t intended to keep him onboard past Perun, and she doubted she would need many favors repaid in the next week, but she smiled and said, “I’ll let you know. Might need someone to stand in front of me if there are any White Dragon thugs waiting for us when we land.”

He grimaced. “Did you have to file your flight path with the authorities before we left? I’ve heard the mafia owns the authorities on Dustor. I’ve heard that now. I was blissfully ignorant of such things a few months ago.”

Yes, and if the mafia brutes had been able to gain access to the security cameras on the docks, who knew what information they could gather?

“I did file a flight path—that’s the law, after all—but I didn’t mention our detour to, uhm.” Alisa waved toward the cyborg’s cabin. “I’m about to find out where.”

Beck curled a lip at the hatch and took a step back, like he wanted to flee in the other direction, but he braced himself. “You want me to go in with you to talk to him?”

Yes, she thought. “No, I doubt he’ll kill his pilot. Before he reaches his destination.”

“Holler if you need me.” Beck saluted again and headed into the lav at the end of the hall.

If he was going to clean it, she would consider giving him a raise. She had unfortunately noticed that someone’s space rations hadn’t been agreeing with him or her overly well.

Alisa continued in the opposite direction, to the last hatch at the end of the hall. She lifted her hand to knock, but paused when a thump reached her ears. Another thump followed and then an abbreviated yell. It almost sounded like people were doing battle inside.

Since Beck wasn’t in there, she couldn’t imagine who else the cyborg would be beating on, but she rushed to knock loudly, hoping to deter him. The noise halted immediately. Several long seconds passed, and Alisa shifted her weight, images of what she might see tormenting her mind. She reached for the latch. Even if it was locked, she had access to all of the spaces on ship.

But the big metal hatch opened before she had more than brushed it. She jerked her hand away as the cyborg’s large form loomed in front of her, and she inadvertently took a step back. He was barefoot and bare-chested, revealing a torso so chiseled with muscles that any bodybuilder would have envied him.

He looked completely human, no sign of machine parts integrated underneath his flesh. If he didn’t give himself away by jumping off buildings or wearing that Cyborg Corps uniform, a person might spend a lot of time with him without ever knowing. A part of her wondered if she would be able to feel the difference between human and cyborg if she ran her hand down the ropy muscles of his arm. Not that she had any wish to do so. Even before she had fallen in love with Jonah, a kind and peace-loving man if ever there was one, she had preferred artists and creative souls to the brawny hulks that hurled weights around the gym.

Realizing she was staring at his pecs as these thoughts flitted through her mind, Alisa jerked her gaze up to look at his face. Only when she saw his ruffled hair sticking up on one side and a pillow crease on his cheek did she realize he had been sleeping. It was late in the night cycle.

Though puzzled as to what that thumping had been about if he had been sleeping, she straightened her spine to address him. “We’ve reached the T-belt. I’ll be needing some more specific directions unless you want to simply tour the rock field. Even if you do, our other passengers might object to that.”

Down the hall, Beck came out of the lav. The cyborg’s gaze flicked in that direction, then he stepped back into his cabin, holding his hand toward the interior.

It took Alisa a moment to realize that he was inviting her in. Her gut knotted at that. She didn’t want to be alone with him. Memories of the Battle for Atlar-Sharr sprang to mind, of the way the Merciless, the ship she had been flying, had been irreparably damaged and then captured, despite all the fancy piloting she’d been able to muster. She and a handful of the command crew from the bridge had made it to an escape pod, but not before they had seen a troop of Cyborg Corps soldiers tramping through the corridors, ruthlessly slaughtering the men who fought back, who tried to buy the captain and the lieutenants time to escape. She remembered feeling like a coward for leaving when others had remained to fight the monsters, but she had been following orders. Besides, she had been too terrified to run off and pick a fight with the stone-faced killers. She would have run, orders or not.

The cyborg was looking down at her, still holding his hand out, the expression on his face somewhere between ironic and impatient.

“You want to talk in private?” Alisa asked. “I don’t think there’s anyone in the rec room.”

Somehow, talking in a common area seemed safer than talking in his cabin. With the hatch closed.

“This won’t take long.” He stepped away from the hatch and grabbed a shirt off the back of a chair tucked into a small, built-in desk. It and the bunk were the only furnishings in the room, though a trunk and a large red case had been secured in a corner.

Alisa’s heart kicked into double-time when she realized what that case was. Combat armor. The crimson combat armor that the Cyborg Corps soldiers wore in battle. The exact armor that those cyborgs who had mown down the crew of the Merciless had worn, the dark color masking the blood that spattered it, the blood of the slain, the crew, people she had worked with, had come to know.

Oblivious to the fact that Alisa was on the verge of hyperventilating, the cyborg opened the trunk and pulled something out of a pocket in the lid. A netdisc. He thumbed it on, scrolled through images on the holodisplay that came up, and set it on the desk. An oblong rock covered in craters—an asteroid—floated in the air.

Alisa took a deep breath to steady her nerves and made herself ease into the cabin.

The cyborg folded his arms over his chest and leaned against the back wall, intentionally giving her space, she sensed. Maybe he knew that he was the stuff of nightmares, of terrifying memories that would never fade completely. Did he care at all? Or did he love the reputation he had?

She glanced at the bed as she drew closer to the desk, at the rumpled sheets, wondering again what he had been doing when she had knocked. Vigorously masturbating? She smirked and almost shared the thought with him, but managed to clamp down on her irreverent tongue before the joke came out. She already knew what he thought of her humor.

“Those are the rough coordinates,” the cyborg said. “And that’s the asteroid.”

Now that Alisa could see it better, she noticed how fuzzy and degraded the image was, as if someone had taken a picture of a holodisplay of an asteroid. She experienced the first inkling that maybe he wasn’t supposed to have this information or be visiting this place. Back in that junk cave, all she had envisioned doing was dropping him off somewhere, but now she wondered if he was going to be even worse than Tommy Beck in involving her and her ship in something dangerous.

No. She wouldn’t allow that. She would drop him off. The asteroid spinning slowly on its axis didn’t look like the kind of place where someone could arrange a transport, but that was his problem.

The cyborg leaned toward the desk and swiped his fingers through the holodisplay, bringing up more images. “I’ve pieced together a map of the inside from various notes and snatches of conversations I heard over the years.”

“Map of the inside?” Alisa stared at him, forgetting her unease in his presence as incredulity replaced it. “You want me to fly into one of those holes?”

“What did you expect?”

“A space station floating around out here somewhere. Or a mining facility on the surface of an asteroid. Someplace to drop you off and get—” She stopped herself from saying get rid of you, though those were surely the words that had been in her mind.

His eyes closed to slits. Yes, he knew what she had almost said.

“My visit won’t take long,” he said. “The person I seek will either be there and have the answers I want, or he won’t.”

“Be there? Inside of the asteroid?”

He nodded once.

“And if he’s there, will you be staying with him?” She resisted the urge to make an innuendo. She didn’t know why sexual comments kept popping into her head. Her humor had odd timing.

“Can’t wait to get rid of me?” He leaned back against the wall, again assuming his relaxed pose with his shoulder against the wall, but his jaw was clenched, his face lean enough that she could see the muscles tightening.

“Look, I just want to get to Perun.”

His gaze flicked down to her jacket. “You’re not going to be welcome there.”

“Better than not being welcome anywhere,” Alisa retorted before she remembered that if there was anyone in the galaxy she didn’t want to irk, it was a cyborg.

He did not move, but that stillness no longer looked relaxed.

“You think you’re so fucking brilliant, don’t you?” he asked softly, his voice hard. “Took down the mighty empire, destroyed three hundred years’ worth of order, tradition, safety. And how did you do it? Not with force, not in honorable battle, but through guerrilla tactics, spying, and treachery.” He took a step toward her, his arms lowering, his fingers curling into fists at his sides. “As if that’s something to be proud of, as if it hasn’t always been easier to destroy than to create, to build.”

Alisa took a step back, but her shoulders bumped against the hatch. She wondered if Beck was still in the corridor.

“Did you ever stop to wonder if you were doing the right thing?” the cyborg demanded, his voice still soft. “If your people had the manpower and wherewithal to replace a stable government? I sincerely doubt it, judging by what’s cropping up in the empire’s absence. Those sadistic morons down in that junkyard that enjoy cutting on visitors and roasting the pieces they cut off over a fire, those are only the tail of the comet. There’s much, much worse out there. Your security guard—” he sneered, putting mocking emphasis on the words, “—found out that the White Dragon Clan rules on Dustor, and they’re not even the worst of the degenerates out there taking advantage of the void, using intimidation and cruelty to cow people, to carve up the system into kingdoms, each more vile than the last.”

He truly looked pissed now, and Alisa wanted to sprint into the hallway and back to NavCom where she could lock the hatch. Not that a pissed cyborg couldn’t tear open a locked hatch. Still, she made herself stay and stare defiantly up at him. She was the captain, damn it. She couldn’t run off with her tail between her legs.

“You think the empire didn’t use intimidation and cruelty to cow people?” she asked. “You’re the fool if that’s the case. Too busy kissing their asses to realize what terror the average person felt. Nobody dared speak their mind. If they did, they disappeared. You walked into the wrong place, talked to the wrong people, and you disappeared. You think we didn’t all know what was happening? That those people were killed or brainwashed? Didn’t any of your loyal cyborg cronies ever say the wrong thing and disappear?”

“Nobody makes a cyborg disappear.”

“Must be nice to be so gods-damned special.”

He was staring at her, far too close for her liking. She couldn’t move back with the edge of the hatch digging between her shoulder blades, but she sure would have liked to. Fury burned in his eyes, and his fists had only tightened as she spoke. She saw for the first time the naked truth in his intense face, that she represented everything he hated. He probably blamed her for ruining his perfect life of being an imperial sycophant, of using his bare hands to kill anyone who dared defy the emperor.

With more audacity than she felt, she made herself lift her chin and ask, “You going to show me the map of the inside of this asteroid, or do I just get to grab my butt with both hands and let the autopilot steer us into a rock?”

Seconds passed without him moving, without him doing anything but staring into her eyes, as if he could make her pay for all the Alliance had done with the power of his mind. She almost told him that he wasn’t a damned Starseer, but she sensed she had already pushed him far enough. She couldn’t assume he wouldn’t hurt her just because she was the pilot. A person could suffer a lot of pain and still be functional enough to fly.

Finally, he stepped back and turned toward the asteroid floating innocuously above the desk. He swiped an irritated finger through the display, and the map grew larger.

“It’s rough, at best, and it may not be accurate,” he said. “I advise that you save the butt grabbing for later and fly very slowly and very carefully. There is a way in, but it may be difficult to navigate.”

“Into what?”

He glanced at her, his lips pressing together.

“If you don’t tell me, how am I going to know when I get there?”

“It’s a research station.”

“For researching what?”

“You don’t need to know that to find it.”

She propped her fist on her hip and almost told him that the empire didn’t need to worry about keeping confidences anymore, that the emperor was dead and there wasn’t anyone left in the organization with the time to care about old secrets. But did she want to pick another fight with him? Next time, he might not keep control of his temper, and a pissed off cyborg would be a very dangerous thing.

“Fine,” Alisa said. “You didn’t answer my other question. Are we dropping you off there?”

He hesitated. “I may need a ride out again. If the person I seek isn’t there or isn’t—” He shook his head. “I may need a ride to Perun.”

It occurred to Alisa that she might have the opportunity to strand him on this asteroid of his. If there weren’t any ships and pilots docked at this research station, he could be stuck there for a very long time. One less cyborg to go back to Perun and help the empire try to reestablish itself. One less cyborg to get in her way.

An alarm blared, making her jump. She cracked her elbow on the hatch and scowled.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Proximity alarm. We’ve got company.”

Chapter 7

When Alisa reached NavCom, Mica was still there, though she was standing now, frowning as she looked back and forth from the sensor display to the view screen. Alisa turned off the alarm and slid into the pilot’s seat. The asteroid field still stretched before them, but a massive ship had come into view in the distance, flying parallel to the edge of the belt. The huge craft stretched miles in length, with all manner of equipment protruding from its hull. It reminded Alisa of all the tools in a dentist’s office, if they had tumbled from their drawers and stuck to a giant rectangular magnet. With an engine.

“Corporate mining ship,” Alisa said. “We shouldn’t be of any interest to them.”

Mica waved at the view screen. “So, it’s just a coincidence that they came out from the asteroid field and are heading straight toward us?”

“Uhm.” Alisa peered at the sensor display, hitting a button so it would play in reverse.

“Perhaps it’s attracted to the scrap potential of this freighter,” the cyborg said, coming to stand in the hatchway.

Having him behind her made Alisa’s shoulder blades itch.

“I hope you’re not implying that all this ship is good for is scrap,” she said, “or I might arrange to have it land on you once we’ve let you out to snoop around on your secret station.”

“Snoop?” Mica glanced back at him.

“I get the impression from the vague directions I’ve been given that our cyborg friend here isn’t an invited guest.” Alisa grimaced as the sensor displayed the last fifteen minutes of readings, readings that showed the mining craft angling toward them until it was close enough to trigger the proximity alarm.

“I’m not uninvited,” the cyborg said.

“Just so long as we don’t get shot at on the way in.” Alisa lowered her voice to mutter, “I’ve gotten more than I bargained for on this trip already.”

“It’s possible there’s no need to head for a secret base in an asteroid field to get shot,” Mica said. “If that ship gets much closer, he’ll be able to shoot us right here.”

“Mining ships don’t have weapons.” Alisa was about to make a comment about her engineer’s pessimism, but the cyborg spoke again.

“That one does.” He stepped forward, leaning past them to point at some of the protrusions on the big ship that Alisa had assumed were mining equipment. “Torpedo launcher, mega blazer, e-cannons, and that’s a new DZ-468-A, less than two years out of the factory.”

“Asteroids must be getting feisty out here for a mining ship to need all that,” Mica remarked.

Alisa slumped back in her seat. “I take it that pirates or something of that nature took over that ship.”

“Pirates would be my guess.” The cyborg lowered his arm and stepped back.

Alisa turned off the autopilot and grabbed the flight stick. “Mica, head down to engineering, will you? Just in case there’s trouble.”

“How can there not be trouble?” Mica slid out of her seat.

“Unless they’ve ratcheted up their engine in a big way, we’ll be faster than them.” Alisa angled them away from the mining ship and toward the asteroid field. They had to go in anyway, and there would be plenty of hiding spots among the rocks. Maybe they could even hide in the cyborg’s secret research facility.

“They’ve ratcheted up their weapons,” Mica said. “What makes you think they won’t have put a new engine or six in there?”

Alisa shook her head and flicked their shields on, though she still hoped the pirates wouldn’t bother with them. “We’ll still be more maneuverable. Piloting that hulk must be like flying a planet.”

“They’re launching a torpedo,” the cyborg said, watching the sensors. “Ship-rated.”

“I see it.”

Alisa dove, twisting the bulky freighter as if she were back in her one-man Striker. She headed toward a small asteroid on the periphery of the belt. The torpedo blew up behind them with a flash of white that lit the view screen. The Nomad shuddered, experiencing the shockwave even though they had evaded the explosion.

They could take a few direct hits to the shields, but Alisa would prefer not to—they might need that shielding when they were flying through the belt. There would be all manner of debris in there, some of it too small and densely packed to avoid, but dangerous to the integrity of the ship all the same.

A second torpedo shot after them as Alisa took them behind the asteroid. She thought it would act as a shield, but this time when the white light flashed, the explosion blew a new hole in the asteroid, and rock debris hurtled everywhere. Shards ranging from head-sized to shuttle-sized battered the Nomad. Even though they did not strike with the devastating force of a manmade weapon, the console lit up with complaints at the assault.

“Ship-rated,” she muttered. “More like asteroid-rated.” An alarm flashed to her right. “Mica, engineering is calling you.”

“As always.” Mica headed for the exit.

The cyborg and his big muscled torso had to turn sideways so she could pass. Alisa hoped he would leave right after Mica did—she didn’t care for critics standing behind her as she flew, definitely not imperial cyborg critics. Instead, he eased into the vacated seat beside her.

Irritated, she hit the comm switch with more force than necessary to call upon the other craft. “Greetings, unidentified mining ship,” she said. “This is Captain Marchenko of the Star Nomad, an unarmed and peaceful vessel on an expedition to gather interesting ore samples for a scientist among us who is seeking a better understanding of the universe. If we’re heading toward your mining claim, we will gladly divert to another location. Please direct us as you wish. Violence isn’t necessary.”

Alisa glanced at the cyborg, half-expecting him to comment on her ruse. It wasn’t as if she expected it to work, but now and then, she had come across men who hesitated to fire on women, some ancient Earth notion of being chivalrous, she supposed. Maybe whoever was at the weapons control console over there would feel that way.

“A better understanding of the universe?” the cyborg asked. “Is that what your female passenger is looking for when she chants to herself in her room?”

At least he wasn’t making comments about Alisa’s wild flying. That flying had kept her and her crew alive many times in the past when they shouldn’t have survived. Only when the odds had been too astronomical, the numbers too great, had she lost battles.

Static spat from the comm. “Puny freighter,” a woman’s voice said, “you’ve entered territory claimed by the Fist of Darkness. Your ship is ours. Slow down and prepare to be boarded.”

So much for finding a chivalrous man in charge of the other ship.

Alisa muted the comm. “Fist of Darkness?” she asked the cyborg. Maybe he had some knowledge of them.

He shook his head. “Must be a new one.”

Alisa flicked the mute off. “If we’ve stumbled into your territory, Fist, we’ll gladly leave.”

“It’s Fist of Darkness, and nobody leaves our territory alive.”

“Charming.” Alisa muted the comm again.

“Given how much trouble you get into,” the cyborg said, “you might want to look into installing weapons on your ship.”

“I’m sure my mother would have installed weapons long ago if the empire hadn’t made it illegal for civilian ships to have them.”

“Your mother?”

Alisa had forgotten that Mica was the only one who knew the history of this ship, that it belonged to her family, or it had before she had junked it. She felt a twinge of guilt for that, but reminded herself that the ship had betrayed her first, not the other way around.

“This used to be her ship,” she said shortly. This wasn’t the time to explain her background in great detail. “I grew up on it, running freight with her. And we ran into trouble back then too. Weapons would have been extremely useful. Too bad having them could get you thrown into jail. Or worse.”

“The empire kept the shipping lanes safe. It wasn’t necessary for civilians to have weapons.”

“The shipping lanes, usually, but not always. And not everyone wanted their cargo picked up or delivered to places on the shipping lanes.”

“If your mother was a smuggler, then—”

“She wasn’t a smuggler,” Alisa snapped. “Your empire wasn’t as infallible or great as you seem to think it was.”

“Nevertheless, I doubt the Alliance will have the infrastructure to maintain the same degree of order.”

“Fine, I’ll put in an order for cannons as soon as I can get ahold of a catalog from the weapons supply store.” And as soon as she had the money to do so.

Pushing the ship to maximum speed, Alisa took them away from what remained of the asteroid—about half of it. The formerly roundish rock now looked like a cheese wheel that had been attacked by rats. The bulky mining ship turned to follow the Nomad. More asteroids loomed ahead, larger now on the viewing screen, a mix of giant rocks, some almost moon-sized and projectiles as small as a fist. Hit either one fast enough, and it would screw up a ship. Any sane pilot would slow down; Alisa tried to get even more juice from the engines.

Another torpedo chased them into the asteroid belt. It blew up just off their tail, and Alisa’s hand tightened on the flight stick, the Nomad rocking as the force brushed the edge of the shields. The sound of chickens squawking in complaint drifted up from the cargo hold. Alisa sighed. At least her two human passengers weren’t up here complaining. Yet.

The Nomad would already have outpaced a regular mining ship. As Mica had suggested, this one must have improved its engines. But Alisa held out hope. The asteroids would be more of an obstacle to the pirates as their big ship struggled to maneuver around them. Unless they just shot them into oblivion.

She glanced at the cyborg. His face was hard to read. Cyborgs probably weren’t allowed to look afraid. “I don’t suppose you’d like to hop on the vid-comm, flex your cyborg muscles, and tell those pirates that a platoon of your kind will be waiting in here in combat armor if they try to board us?”

“My kind?”

“You know, brawny and full of enhanced machine bits.”

Three suns, he wasn’t going to pick this moment to be offended by her irreverent streak, was he? She didn’t like him, but it wasn’t as if she intentionally wanted to irritate him, not now. If they did get caught and boarded, she would need his help.

“I’m just as human as you are, Marchenko,” he said stiffly, then pushed himself to his feet. “I’ll put on my combat armor, but I suggest you not mention I’m here. Let them think Beck is your only defender.”

From the tone of his voice, she couldn’t tell if that was a dig at Beck or not. It probably was.

“Cyborg?” she asked, glancing back, but only for an instant. They were deep within the asteroid field now, and she couldn’t divert her attention for long.

“What?”

“You have a name?”

He grunted. “What do you care?”

A fair enough question, considering they had been on the ship together for more than a week, and she hadn’t tried to get to know him.

“I don’t,” Alisa said, “but if they have cyborgs, too, it could get confusing when I’m yelling, ‘Cyborg, shoot, shoot.’” She threw a smile over her shoulder, though she didn’t know why she bothered. It wouldn’t assuage his prickly feelings toward her.

Indeed, he was staring at her, his eyes hard. She expected him to turn and walk away without answering.

“Leonidas,” he finally said.

Leonidas? What kind of name was that? Something out of Old Earth mythology? She wagered that whatever it was, he had made it up on the spot.

“Great,” was all she said. “Can I call you Leo?”

“No.” This time, he did turn and walk away.

Alisa hoped that seeing him in his big red suit of armor would make those pirates wet themselves if they managed to board her ship. Not that she intended to let that happen.

She dove between two huge reddish-brown rocks, hugging the curve of one and changing direction so that she could dart farther into the field while the asteroid blocked the pirates’ view. She swooped left and right, up and down, putting as many rocks between herself and the mining ship as possible. She thanked the gods that they were a long ways from Opus and Rebus so the gravitational pull wasn’t as much of a tangled mess as it was when flying between the three suns.

Asteroids skimmed past, near misses making her flinch, though her hand remained steady on the stick. A few not-so-near misses bounced off the shields, but they were rare. Alone in NavCom, with nobody’s judging eyes upon her, she found the peaceful relaxed state of mind where her body reacted of its own accord, the ship like an extension of her own nervous system as her brain processed information without conscious effort on her part.

As she had predicted, the mining ship fell behind. Alisa eased back on her breakneck speed and was about to call back that the cyborg—Leonidas—wouldn’t need to dress to kill after all. Before she could, a warning bleep came from the sensor panel. There was a ship ahead of her. No, three ships ahead of her.

“Now what?” she groaned.

Chapter 8

The first ship that appeared, coming over the rim of an asteroid like a sun rising, made Alisa suck in a startled breath. It was a Striker-18, the exact spacecraft she had flown her last two years in the army, the spacecraft she had been flying in the final battle when she crashed. What was the Alliance doing out here?

Thrusters firing, the small but deadly vessel flew toward her. She was of half a mind to open the comm and try to talk to the pilot, but two more ships flew out from behind boulders ahead of and to either side of her. Those two were also one-man craft, but they were imperial bombers, not Alliance ships.

As Alisa dove under the asteroid the first ship had just appeared above, she realized that these all had to be stolen ships, not representative of either Alliance or imperial forces. She streaked downward and away from all three, immediately guessing from their positions that they were with the pirates and that they had been sent out here to cut her off. They either had orders to destroy her or to delay her so the mining ship could catch up. Well, neither was going to happen.

Unfortunately, the one-man ships not only outnumbered her, but they were faster and more maneuverable than the Nomad. They zipped after her, shooting a stream of blazer bolts, peppering her rear shields. The attacks weren’t as powerful as those torpedoes the other ship had fired, but she knew from firsthand experience that a one-man craft could do enough damage to bring down a bigger ship eventually. Worse, the sensors showed the bombers readying torpedoes of their own.

She weaved and dove through the asteroids, her mind not as calm and her reflexes not as instantaneous as before. She was too busy trying to come up with a plan, with a way to outsmart those bastards. That was all she could do, since she had no weapons and no way to outrun them.

She did notice that they did not fly through the asteroids as quickly as she would have in those small, quick vessels. They might not be as experienced as she. She led them into a denser portion of the asteroid field, hoping she might get lucky and one would splat against the rocks. Too bad the pilot’s shields would save him from utter destruction even if that happened.

“Bombers?” Leonidas asked, back in the hatchway, this time in his red armor, his helmet under his arm.

Even though she knew it was him, and that he was the same man—cyborg—he had been a few minutes ago, a jolt of fear ran through her at seeing that armor in her peripheral vision. Odd that memories of cyborgs storming her ship in the past could terrify her more than the attack that was going on right now.

“Yeah,” she said, her voice dry. “Two of them are.”

“You have a gauntlet you can lead them through?” He set his helmet on the co-pilot’s seat and leaned over the back of it, too large to sit in it now that he was suited up.

She was heading into a gauntlet right now, the asteroids small and dense, dust turning the dark space ahead into a pale brown cloud. “I do. What are you doing?”

He had started typing commands on the keyboard nestled into the console amid the switches and buttons. She almost objected out of principle, irritated that he presumed to touch her controls, but she couldn’t spare the attention to speak. Asteroids loomed in all directions, threatening to smash into their shields enough times to wear them out. Already the energy panel read half depleted, and she could feel the ship’s core throbbing through the decking as it tried to create more power to fuel them.

“With luck, lowering their shields,” he said, punching in a long string of numbers and symbols on the keyboard.

“How?”

Alisa banked around a giant asteroid, then dove as she spotted a field of large ones mixed with thousands and thousands of smaller ones. That ought to challenge any pilot. The two imperial bombers chased right behind her, side by side, weapons firing up her ass. Cheeky bastards.

“Command codes.”

“What the hell are those?” Alisa had never heard of some remote code that could force a ship to lower its shields. If there had been such a thing during the war, her people would have been using them left and right.

“Codes designed to keep Alliance thieves from stealing our hardware.” He eyed her out of the corner of his eyes, then tapped a button on his armor. Twin razor prongs popped up above his wrist in a spot where if he punched someone in the face, the follow-through would probably gouge his opponent’s eyes out. “There are codes to lock up the controls on the various imperial ships and other ones to force them to drop shields. They’re hardwired in at the factories.”

“I don’t suppose you can make their controls lock up now?” Though curious as to what the knives were for, Alisa couldn’t focus on him. She banked and slid the Nomad under the belly of an asteroid, still having a notion of losing her pursuers. The Alliance ship had fallen behind, but those two bombers refused to be shaken.

“I don’t remember those codes,” he said dryly. “I’ve never had an occasion to use them. Where’s the scanner? That thing?”

She was too busy flying as close as she could to the crater-filled body of the asteroid to respond. He must have answered his own question, because he used one of the razor prongs to cut his finger. He dribbled a drop of blood onto the scanner. It flashed blue in acknowledgment.

“Now what are you doing?” Alisa left the shelter of the one asteroid, weaved through a field of debris, and headed for two more giant asteroids, these almost hugging.

“Identifying myself.” Leonidas typed something else on the keyboard, then held his finger over the transmit button. “I’m ready. Can you put them into a position where it will matter?”

“Trying.”

Alisa veered straight for the narrow gap between the two massive asteroids. Even as she approached, it seemed to grow smaller, the rocky bodies drifting closer together. She flipped the Nomad sideways to make its profile narrower. The ship shuddered as the shields bumped against rock, and she felt the shimmy in the flight stick.

“Easy,” she murmured. “Easy.”

The two bombers followed right behind her. The gap widened slightly, and Alisa followed the curve of the bigger of the two lumpy asteroids. For a moment, its body hid the bombers from her and vice versa. She flew in a loop, flipping the Nomad and throwing all of the defensive power into the forward shields.

Leonidas sucked in a surprised breath as the bombers raced around the curvature of the asteroid, straight at them. Alisa held her course. The bombers split, one heading left and one right to keep from crashing into her.

“Now,” she ordered, glancing at Leonidas.

He hit the transmit button. The bomber that had gone left steered straight at the asteroid, its pilot clearly flustered by the near miss. He tried to pull up, but not in time. A protrusion on the lumpy surface clipped the bottom half of his ship, and he blew up, a fiery ball leaping from the surface of the asteroid.

The second bomber veered in the other direction and was in no danger of crashing into the big asteroid, but his wing must have clipped one of the smaller rocks. With his shields up, it wouldn’t have mattered, but his velocity made the impact forceful enough that it knocked him off his course. He spun in circles, thrusters flaring orange as he tried to stop himself. Before he managed to slow the craft, it smacked into another asteroid and exploded.

Alisa did not stick around to check for survivors. That Alliance craft was still out there, and she didn’t know any codes that could make it lower its shields. At least the big mining ship had disappeared from her sensors. She had avoided the smaller vessels’ attempts to drive her back toward it, and if it was still following them, it had fallen too far behind now to matter.

Leonidas stepped back, flicking his wrist so that his razor blades disappeared into his armor again. He picked up his helmet and tucked it under his arm. His expression was bland, as if this was all in a day’s work. If he had been impressed at all by her flying, he didn’t show it. Not that she cared one whit about impressing him.

He produced a handkerchief from a pocket inside the back of the helmet lining, spit on it, then wiped the scanner clean of his blood. Next, he put it away and produced the netdisc he had shown her in his cabin. When he activated the holodisplay, the map and coordinates appeared again.

“We may still be on their sensors,” he said. “Take a circuitous route to get to our destination.”

“I’m not an idiot,” Alisa snapped, annoyed that he was presuming to give her orders, even if they made sense.

He turned his bland expression on her, then walked out without another word.

It occurred to her that she should have thanked him for his help. He’d proven himself the most useful member of her crew twice now, first with blowing up that ledge—nobody else could have climbed up to set those explosives, nor had anyone else possessed explosives in the first place—and now here. But, she reminded herself firmly, he wasn’t a part of her crew. He wasn’t on the docket, and he hadn’t claimed any loyalty to her or anyone else here. If he had his way, he would be in charge. From the way he barked orders, he was used to that. Well, not on her ship.

Scowling, Alisa turned her attention back to flying—they were still deep within the asteroid belt, giving her plenty to worry about. Still, she found her gaze shifting over to that scanner. Had he cleaned it because he was polite and didn’t want to leave a mess on her console? Or because he wanted to make sure she couldn’t get a sample of his blood? It wasn’t as if she had access to the imperial census archives that kept track of every subject by DNA and fingerprints.

But if she did… she wondered what she would find if she could look him up. It made sense that the command codes he had typed in wouldn’t have been enough to order an imperial ship to lower its shields on their own. Their headquarters wouldn’t have wanted to give any soldier who happened to get his hands on the codes the ability to do such a thing. Soldiers could be bought or blackmailed, the same as the next person. So, his blood had been part of the key to unlock those shields. Just how many people’s blood had been programmed into those imperial ships for that purpose?

Not many, she guessed. Not many.

Chapter 9

After a couple of hours without further sign of pursuit, everyone on the ship relaxed, and people started wandering into NavCom to look at the asteroid field and ask questions. Alisa thought about locking the hatch and keeping everyone out, but she owed her other two passengers an explanation. Soon after they had left Dustor, she’d explained that there would be a diversion before they headed to Perun, but she hadn’t said anything that would lead them to believe they would be in danger. Of course, she couldn’t have anticipated pirates haunting the T-belt, not when there wasn’t anything out here except ore, and that was only for those with the patience and dedication to mine it out. Not to mention equipment. Still, this far away from the civilized planets, she couldn’t say that running into trouble surprised her.

Yumi and Alejandro came to NavCom together.

“Everyone doing all right?” Alisa asked. Perhaps she should have gotten on the intercom and asked earlier, but she had been too busy navigating through the maze of rocks to leave her seat or worry overmuch about customer service.

“My chickens were alarmed by the battle,” Yumi said. “Out of fear, they squabbled among themselves, and some blood was drawn. Fortunately, the good doctor here had some QuickSkin. While not rated for livestock, it did the job.”

Alejandro inclined his head.

“The girls have quieted down now,” Yumi said.

“That’s good.”

“There may not be eggs in the morning.”

“There’s plenty of oatmeal in the mess.” Alisa admitted that the eggs had been a nice treat. Fresh food was a rarity out here unless one had recently left a planet or a moon.

Yumi leaned on the back of the co-pilot’s chair and eyed the asteroid field. “May I sit at your sensor station? I’ve never been out here before. It would be interesting to take close-up readings of my own instead of relying on textbooks.”

“Close-up? Should have been here two hours ago. I could have given you very close up.”

Yumi tilted her head.

“Never mind.” Alisa pointed her thumb behind her shoulder at the foldout seat. “Read away.”

“Excellent. I’ll take some recordings to use in the classroom for my students.”

“That’s right—you said you’re a teacher, didn’t you?”

“A science teacher, yes. Though I am looking for work. I was a part of a program to start more schools on Dustor, but that was scrapped halfway through the war. Oddly, people aren’t interested in sending their children out in the world to study when bombs are being dropped in the streets.”

Alisa frowned, trying to decide if that was simply a wry observation or if there was a hint of condemnation in there, condemnation for an officer who had been a part of the force that had been behind the bombings. Not that they couldn’t have been avoided had the empire simply accepted its fate and succumbed earlier. It had taken the death of the emperor himself before things had finally fallen apart, and white flags had been raised in surrender.

Yumi continued speaking, not noticing Alisa’s frown. “After that, I found work and refuge in the Red River Sanctuary among the monks seeking a deeper understanding of themselves and of the universe through meditation.”

Alisa resisted the urge to ask if it was hard to meditate with bombs going off in the nearby city.

“I’m surprised I didn’t see you there,” Yumi added, nodding to Alejandro’s robe.

“It wasn’t until after the war that I headed to Dustor for research and to seek a better understanding of the universe,” he said.

“A planet habitually scoured by sandstorms and earthquakes and now run by the mafia being the natural place for those things,” Alisa said, wondering what kind of research one could possibly do there.

“It is a place in need of guidance from the sun gods,” Alejandro said. “I had intended to stay longer, but pressing business back on Perun has demanded my return.” His lips thinned as he regarded the asteroid field. He’d been too polite or cultured to complain about the delay when she announced it, and this was the first glimpse she’d had that it irritated him. “Are we allowed to know why we’ve come to the T-belt and how long we’ll be delayed here?” Despite the brief display of irritation, his tone was as calm and measured as ever. Almost melodious. She wondered if he was a good singer.

“You’ll have to ask Leonidas. This is his mission. Trust me, I didn’t want to come.” Alisa waved to the co-pilot’s seat in case Alejandro wanted to sit down. She would rather have everyone seated than anyone looming over her shoulder.

He lifted his fingers, declining the offer. “Leonidas?”

“The cyborg.”

“Interesting choice,” he murmured so softly Alisa almost missed the words.

“I assume it’s not his real name,” she said, fishing. She recalled that Alejandro had seemed to recognize something about Leonidas when they first saw each other in the cargo hold.

“Likely not.”

Disappointed, she guided them around another asteroid. Was that all she would get from him?

“I figure there are some people who might want him dead if they knew who he was,” Alisa tried, though she hadn’t figured any such thing.

“I’m certain there are many people who want cyborgs dead.” Alejandro clasped his hands behind his back and watched the asteroid field.

They flew past a big one with a refining station taking up a third of the real estate. It wasn’t the first sign they had seen of mining operations as they had passed through. After their run-in with the pirates, Alisa was glad they had all appeared automated thus far. At the least, nobody had hailed them and asked them what they were doing.

“Leonidas?” Yumi lifted her head. She’d had her nose to the sensor display, tinkering with the controls. “That was one of the Spartan kings, yes? The one who died at Thermopylae.”

Alejandro regarded her through his eyelashes. “I thought you taught science, not history.”

“A science teacher can’t read a history book now and then?”

Alisa wished she knew what they were talking about, especially if there was a hint to the cyborg’s identity in it. But her education hadn’t been thorough when it came to history, at least Old Earth history. She knew about the Foundation, of course, and about the colonies, the Starseer attempt to conquer the system, the Order Wars, and the eventual establishment of the Sarellian Empire, but her mother had been more interested in teaching her how to survive flights through the system than about ancient history, and at the university, most of her courses had revolved around mathematics and astronautics. She supposed the cyborg’s past didn’t matter much to her. She was just going to drop him off as soon as she got the chance. Besides, seeing his blood work to lower the shields of an imperial ship told her enough. He’d likely been someone fairly high up in the military command structure. He might even have been someone she had faced in battle before. That thought made her shudder.

She focused on her controls, checking their current location against the coordinates Leonidas had given her. They ought to be getting close.

“Leonidas belonged to the Agiad dynasty, if I recall correctly,” Yumi said, “and they claimed descent from the divine hero Heracles.” She chuckled. “I suppose I could see why a cyborg might wish to be associated with such a representative of masculinity.”

“I will be in my cabin if there is further need of a doctor,” Alejandro said and walked out.

Yumi peered after him. “Did I offend him?”

“He was an imperial. They get offended easily these days.” Losing a war would do that to a person.

“Was he? He didn’t say.”

“I’m just assuming. Most rich and well-educated people are beholden to the system they’re born into and aren’t real appreciative when things get changed and they lose their status.”

“How do you know he’s rich? Your fare wasn’t that extravagant.”

Alisa lifted a shoulder. In truth, it was just a hunch. His robe certainly didn’t denote great wealth, but he had a manner about him, one that spoke of education and being raised in a genteel environment. Maybe because she’d been raised out in the scruff of the system on the battered old freighter, she could sniff out the privileged, even when they hid under monastic robes.

As they skimmed past a red asteroid with a bluish layer carved off the end, a new thought popped into Alisa’s mind. “Say, Yumi, do you want to do me a favor? Can you take some readings and get an idea of what minerals are in the asteroids out here? Especially if there’s anything unusual or rare?”

“I can try. We would need core samples to truly analyze them. Why do you ask?”

Alisa glanced at the hatchway, making sure Leonidas hadn’t strolled up to observe again. He moved quietly for such a big man. Even in combat armor, he hadn’t clomped as much as one would expect.

“Just wondering what kind of research station someone might set up out here,” she said quietly.

“Is that where we’re going? A research station?”

“That’s what I was led to believe.” She looked toward the holodisplay where the oblong asteroid still floated.

“Give me a few minutes, and I’ll see if the rocks themselves have any clues. The area might simply have been chosen for its remoteness. Without directions, you’d never find a particular asteroid in this maze. Even with directions, you would have to take into account the orbit of the asteroids and the Yarkovsky effect, among other things.”

Alisa eyed the holodisplay again. Had Leonidas gotten the map from someone else, perhaps through trade—or force? Or had he figured it out for himself?

“The T-belt is known for containing asteroids rich in gold, platinum, cobalt, iron, nickel, osmium, and ahridium,” Yumi said, her nose to the sensor display. “I see nothing to contradict that so far. As for rare ore, I don’t know. Do you want to stop and take a core sample? I would be happy to examine it.”

“No stopping,” came Leonidas’s voice from the corridor. He walked into NavCom, still wearing his combat armor, and gave cool looks to Alisa and Yumi. “We’re almost there.”

Alisa thought about telling him that it was her ship, and she would stop to be a tourist—or a geologist—whenever she wished, but the truth was that even though she was curious about their destination, she did not want to delay out here. Those pirates could still be looking for them, and who knew what other nefarious entities were lurking out here? Besides, she could have Mica figure out a way to grab samples of the asteroid they landed on—or in—while Leonidas was exploring.

“Your wish is my command, Sir Cyborg,” Alisa said with a smile.

“So glad you asked for my name,” he muttered.

As Alisa piloted them along the curvature of a slowly spinning asteroid, an oblong one came into view, its surface dotted with so many craters that it looked like a block of Boracan eye cheese.

“That’s it,” Leonidas said, his voice calm, though he had to be excited inside. Assuming cyborgs could get excited inside. “Take us to the far side.” He poked at the holodisplay and produced a close-up of a set of three craters. “We’re looking for that configuration.”

“Anything on the sensors, Yumi?” Alisa wanted to make sure there weren’t any ships around to see them slip into the crater. She could easily imagine getting trapped in a dead end.

“Iridium, cobalt, aluminum, nickel…”

“I meant ships. Are there any ships on the sensors?” Alisa leaned back and slapped the button to widen the scan to the field rather than a specific asteroid.

“Ah. Nothing within range.”

Alisa reduced their speed and flew slowly over the surface. The asteroid was about ten kilometers on its longest axis and less than half that wide. A sizable research facility could be maintained inside. She looked for signs on the surface that it had been mined, but did not see any obvious clues.

“There.” Leonidas pointed, the configuration of three craters coming into view, exactly as they appeared on his map.

“Which one do I enter?” Alisa eyed them without pleasure. They weren’t wide, and the spin and the gravitational force of the asteroid could add challenges.

“Any of them. They’re supposed to connect at one central tunnel.”

“Supposed to. Words like that fill a pilot with confidence.”

He grunted. “I haven’t noticed that your confidence is lacking.”

“I’m going to take that as a compliment, though I doubt you meant it as one.”

One of his eyebrows twitched, but he did not disagree.

Alisa chose the upper crater, reversing the thrusters to slow them as they approached it. Already, she could feel the gravitational pull of the massive rock. The dark hole yawned, no hint of manmade influence inside. She flicked on the ship’s searchlight, and a strong white beam illuminated the way. Around the edges, the crater appeared natural, a deep pockmark that extended hundreds of meters into the surface where something had struck the asteroid long ago. Farther in, it narrowed and the walls grew less natural. What should have been the pit of the crater turned into a tunnel, a manmade tunnel. The sides appeared to have been chiseled out by robots, much like one would expect to see in a mining complex.

Leonidas leaned forward, gripping the back of the empty co-pilot’s seat, the first indication that he was excited.

The darkness grew absolute as they flew deeper, the light from the stars and the suns fading behind them. Even though Alisa knew nothing lived out here in the vacuum of space, she half expected a bevy of bats to flap out of the black depths, battering them with their wings.

“Fly carefully,” Leonidas said. “There may be traps.”

“What?” Alisa shot him her best incredulous look. “You didn’t think to mention that earlier?”

“I deem the likelihood low. I heard nothing about traps when I was researching this place. I simply thought it advisable to mention the possibility.”

Alisa would have preferred if he hadn’t.

“This is quite fascinating,” Yumi said, glancing from the view screen to the sensor display. “Had I known the trip would include a tour of the Trajean Asteroid Belt, I wouldn’t have balked at the price.”

“You didn’t balk at it, anyway.”

“In my mind, I did.”

Alisa nudged the flight stick. “Is this asteroid spinning on us, or was this tunnel carved out by a miner high on glowrum?”

“Small asteroids may spin a complete rotation once every few minutes,” Yumi said, “but the large ones spin much more slowly, generally taking many hours to complete a rotation.”

“Glowrum it is,” Alisa said, nudging the stick again. None of the rear cameras showed a view of the exit hole anymore.

Two other tunnels melded into theirs, like streams joining a larger river. Alisa wondered if there was anything in those other tunnels. It seemed strange to dig three entrances to a secret research base. Unless psychedelic alcohol truly had been involved.

“I’m reading an energy source up ahead,” Yumi said.

“A fission reactor will be providing electricity for life support and basic operations,” Leonidas said.

The search beam bounced off metal up ahead. Massive cylindrical tanks—water tanks?—were embedded in the rock to either side of the tunnel, leaving only a tight space to pass through. There wouldn’t have been room for a ship much larger than this one.

Thinking of Leonidas’s mention of traps, Alisa slowed them further, easing toward the gap, her fingers on the maneuvering thrusters.

Yumi stirred. “There’s a surge of power. We—”

Blue light flashed, and Alisa cursed. The harsh light wasn’t just outside, but filled her ship, reminding her of the X-ray search beams she’d had to walk through when entering campus back on Perun. Those had been scanners. She hoped that was all these were.

Even as she had the thought, the ship lurched, as if a hand had reached out and grabbed it. They halted abruptly, hanging in the space between the two tanks.

“Uh, Leonidas?” Alisa prompted.

“Unauthorized personnel,” a mechanical voice announced over the comm. “This is an imperial research station. If you cannot identify yourself as an authorized visitor, you will be destroyed.”

“Uh,” Alisa said again, reaching for the thruster controls, worried she wouldn’t be able to reverse the ship.

Leonidas caught her wrist. “Touch nothing.”

“I sure hope you’re authorized.”

Leonidas hit the comm button with his free hand. “Research Station Blackstar, check again for authorized personnel.”

The wave of blue light washed through the ship again, highlighting their faces as it drove every shadow from the cabin. Alisa spotted dust bunnies under the co-pilot’s seat and told herself to clean that later—if they survived until later.

A red light appeared ahead, seemingly springing out of the side walls. What was that? Some kind of ray of energy that was going to irradiate them all?

Leonidas frowned. Had he expected to be recognized and let in?

The red light increased in brightness in front of them, and an alarm beeped on the console.

“The temperature is rising out there,” Yumi said, her earlier curiosity and enthusiasm for this “tour” replaced by concern as her words came out rapidly. “Quickly. If it continues at its current rate, it’ll reach the melt point for most metals.”

“The shields are up,” Alisa said.

“They won’t hold indefinitely.”

Alisa pulled her wrist away from Leonidas. He let her—she wouldn’t have been a match for his strength otherwise. He wore a puzzled expression, the first one she had seen from him.

“Unauthorized personnel,” the mechanical voice announced. “Prepare to be incinerated.”

Alisa hit the thrusters with the side of her fist. Time to get out of here.

A good idea, but the ship did not move. Whatever was keeping them from continuing farther also kept them from retreating. The red light grew so intense that Alisa couldn’t look at the view screen. Sweat broke out along her brow. She wasn’t sure if it was because the heat was already making itself felt through the shields and the hull, or if she was just panicking. Squawks from terrified chickens floated up from the cargo hold. She wasn’t the only one panicking.

Deep nasal-sounding breaths came from behind her seat.

“What are you doing, Yumi?”

“Placing myself in a state of optimal heart rate variability to reduce my body’s stress response and induce calmness,” Yumi said slowly, her eyes closed to slits. “The Starkowatz Philosophy teaches us to feel less anxious about death through altering our consciousness, but sometimes, it can be difficult to get the mind to cooperate.” She closed her eyes all the way and went back to her breathing.

“I have trouble getting my mind to cooperate all the time. Leo, buddy, last chance to do something, or we’re about to find out what the melt point is for cyborg sprockets.”

Leonidas gave her one of the flat looks he was exceedingly good at, then leaned closer to the comm. “Research Station Blackstar, check for delivery of authorized cargo,” he said, forgoing the mention of personnel this time.

The blue light flashed, scanning them again.

Alisa tried again to move the Nomad. The thrusters activated without a problem—they just couldn’t generate enough of a push to send them anywhere.

Abruptly, the blue light disappeared, and so did the red light outside. The view screen dimmed, though it had been so bright that the red rectangle remained in Alisa’s vision, as if burned there for all eternity. A small price to pay for the cessation of that heat. She might have slumped down in her seat, but the field holding them released them. She nudged the thrusters, and the Nomad ambled forward, as if it had never been held.

Leonidas wore a dyspeptic expression, not looking nearly as relieved as Alisa felt over escaping death.

“Is that you?” she asked, the pieces of the puzzle clicking together. Unless one counted Yumi’s chickens, she didn’t have any other “cargo,” certainly nothing that would have pleased an imperial security checkpoint. “The authorized cargo?”

Leonidas smoothed his expression, ignoring her question. “There’s a docking station. Find a spot for us, then join me in the cargo hold.” He shifted his helmet out from under his arm, gripping it with both hands. “Have your new science officer check and see if there’s oxygen and gravity inside of the station.” He turned, plopping the helmet onto his head as he walked out.

“Anyone tell you that you’re not the captain here?” Alisa called after him.

She wasn’t surprised when he didn’t respond. He’d been irked when she had referred to him as your kind. Being classified as the cargo probably irritated him even more.

Chapter 10

At the end of the tunnel, Alisa found only two docking ports, tubes and connectors dangling out of the wall as if someone had left in a hurry. Maneuvering the Nomad into the cramped spot took a lot of care. She couldn’t imagine that two ships could ever dock at once.

“Guess they don’t invite a lot of people over for game night,” she said to Yumi, who still sat behind her.

One of those tubes looked like it might be for replenishing water tanks and thus, through electrolysis, a ship’s oxygen supplies. Alisa would have to check to see if it was operable. She felt like fate, if not Leonidas, owed her something for what had been a harrowing trip out here.

Near-death experiences hadn’t been uncommon during the war, but she had been fighting for something noble then. To die out here for nothing, with Jelena never knowing what happened to her mother, that would be intolerable.

“Are you going to get out and look around in there?” Yumi asked. “Or is he going in alone?” Her voice was steady. She seemed to have recovered from their close call with that security system. Maybe the noisy breathing had worked to calm her down.

“Oh, he’s definitely going in alone,” Alisa said as she let the autopilot complete the docking procedure. She took the helm when they were cruising through asteroid fields and dodging enemies, but preferred to let the computer line the tabs up with the slots. Besides, she had a headache after the intensity of the last few hours. “I wouldn’t mind exploring a bit on my own though.”

In truth, she wouldn’t mind poking around to see if there might be anything they could salvage and sell. With the empire gone, this research station might be abandoned. A few years ago, she had never imagined herself poking around in wrecks or abandoned facilities, scavenging for parts, but the reality was that she didn’t know what awaited her back on Perun or if her bank account even existed anymore. If she could find a few valuable items to sell, she might be able to replace the parts Mica had mentioned, and she would be in a less desperate situation going forward. She did not want to take custody of Jelena if she couldn’t afford to keep her fed and clothed. Further, for all she knew, it might take a bribe to get onto Perun and find her in the first place. She had no idea if she would be able to communicate with her sister-in-law, or even if she was in the same place as she had been months earlier, when she had mailed that letter.

“It will depend on the atmosphere,” Alisa said as a hiss sounded, the airlock connecting and sealing with the station. “Leonidas has a suit, so he can go in, regardless. Beck should be able to go in too. Though if I send those two in together, I’m not sure both of them will come out.”

No, if Beck went in, she wanted to go in too. It was annoying not to have a spacesuit—not to mention unsafe. If some maintenance issue popped up that required a space walk, Mica would have to send Beck out to do the fixing, something he might not have any experience with. Alisa supposed she should be happy they at least had two people capable of going out, but spacesuits would definitely go on the list of things she would buy if she could find some valuables here that were worth selling.

“I can’t tell from here what the atmosphere is like inside the station.” Yumi waved at the sensor display.

“You might be able to get a reading once the airlock is open. If the men have good combat armor, their suits will also be able to scan the air, see if it’s breathable. They might be able to tell if anyone is home too.”

Her hopes of salvaging would go up in smoke if there were residents. It would be one thing to acquire a few items from an abandoned station, but what if Leonidas expected to find people here? As much as she would like new equipment for her ship, she wasn’t going to steal for it.

“Uhh, Captain?” came Mica’s voice over the intercom. “Could you come down to the cargo hold? We have a problem. Specifically, I have a problem.”

The ship was sealed in, so Alisa pushed herself out of her seat and headed toward the lower deck. Her legs felt wobbly after sitting for so long—sitting and facing death.

She found Leonidas standing near the airlock in his crimson armor, his helmet fastened and a rifle and a bag slung over his shoulder. Though Alisa had not asked him to, Beck had suited up too. His armor was white with silver accents, and he also carried an assault rifle. Mica stood near the airlock, too, but as Alisa walked down the stairs, she assumed that whatever problem she had called about was between the two men.

Mica folded her arms over her chest and scowled at Alisa, making her rethink that assumption.

The chickens jittered and squawked at her as she left the stairs. A lot of feathers dusted the decking over in the corner that Alisa had given Yumi, feathers that had managed to fly impressively far from the temporary fencing that kept the birds secured. The poor things probably hadn’t appreciated the heat wave any more than the crew had.

“What’s the problem here?” Alisa asked.

“Your cyborg thinks he’s taking me on a date,” Mica said.

Her cyborg? When had she been given ownership over Leonidas?

“What’s the matter?” Alisa asked. “He’s not cute enough for you?”

Leonidas’s eyebrows twitched behind the faceplate of his armor. They liked to do that even when he offered no other reaction. Tiny rebellious body parts that would not be sublimated.

“Not funny,” Mica said. “I don’t even know what the atmosphere looks like over there. I’m not leaving the ship. Engineers don’t leave the ship. We stay in our engine rooms and cuddle with our machinery. There are centuries and centuries worth of precedents to back me up.”

“You won’t go anywhere you don’t want to go,” Beck said, tapping the barrel of his rifle and eyeing Leonidas, who was standing close enough to him that he could probably knock that rifle out of his hands before Beck could aim it at him.

Alisa looked at Leonidas, his face hard to read—his eyebrows weren’t doing anything now. “Care to explain?”

“You won’t leave without your engineer,” he said, his voice sounding hollow through the helmet’s speaker.

Alisa mouthed the words, trying to understand what he meant. It took her a moment to piece it together.

“You think we’ll strand you here?” she asked.

“I’m certain you’ve considered it.”

Yes, but he wasn’t supposed to know that.

“I would be a fool to leave our best fighter here when there are pirates swarming around out there, probably waiting for the Nomad to leave the belt.” Not that Alisa had any intention of flying out of the belt in the same spot that she had come in, but it seemed a reasonable argument to sway him.

He gazed back at her through the faceplate, not noticeably moved by her argument. Maybe he thought she was a fool.

“She comes with me,” he said.

“I’m not going anywhere, Muscles,” Mica said, taking a few steps away from him to stand beside Alisa.

As if she could do something to stop Leonidas if he decided to grab her. She wasn’t even carrying her Etcher, not that the bullets would do more than bounce off the hard shell of his armor.

“Besides, I don’t have a spacesuit,” Mica said. “Who even knows if there will be air over there?”

Alisa glanced toward the control panel next to the airlock. They could check that now that they were attached.

“The air will be fine,” Leonidas said without turning to check.

“How can you know?” Beck asked, still tapping a beat on his rifle. “You been here before? Whatever your little quest is here, it has nothing to do with them.” He waved toward Mica and Alisa.

Leonidas hesitated. Because he knew it was true? That it was unfair of him to ask for a hostage?

“At least one person lives inside here doing research,” he said, then repeated, “The air will be fine.”

“Then why did you get all suited up?” Mica asked.

“It’s combat armor,” Leonidas said.

Mica’s brow furrowed. “Yes…”

“You’re expecting trouble?” Alisa asked. “From the one person you think is in there? Or from something else?”

“Back before the war ended,” Leonidas said, “this station hadn’t been heard from for months. There were plans to send someone out to check on it, but all of the empire’s resources were otherwise occupied.” His words came out clipped, annoyed. Probably because he was talking to some of the people who had been occupying those resources. “I don’t know what’s been happening since the war ended, and yes, I am prepared for trouble if it should arise.”

Right. He had been busy squatting in her ship in a junkyard full of crazies since the war ended. For the first time, it occurred to her to wonder how he had gotten down there in the first place. She had been left behind because she needed medical attention. What was his story? Had his people simply forgotten to take him home? Or had he volunteered to stay behind when things had fallen apart and the imperial forces had retreated? Had he failed them and been left as a punishment?

“Well, if there’s going to be trouble, how about I go with you?” Beck asked. “I wouldn’t mind a walk to stretch my legs, and I’m suited up. I’m the logical one.”

“You’re not integral to the operation of the ship,” Leonidas said.

“What does that mean?”

“You’re expendable.”

Beck glowered at him. “I really hate you, mech.”

“The engineer comes with me,” Leonidas said.

Alisa sighed. This was ridiculous. Hadn’t she risked the ship in that battle with the White Dragon rather than leaving Beck behind? Did Leonidas truly trust her so little that he thought she would go to extremes to get rid of him? It was true that she had not given him a reason to trust her, and she certainly didn’t trust him, but she still felt disgruntled by the situation. It didn’t help that she had been considering leaving him. It made her feel like she had been caught doing something naughty.

“If the air is acceptable, I’ll go with you,” Alisa said. “The ship isn’t going anywhere without a pilot.”

She expected him to object, since he’d objected to everyone else’s attempts to alter his plans. Instead, he nodded and said, “That would be acceptable.”

“What? No, it wouldn’t,” Mica said, gripping Alisa’s arm. “What if something happens to you? He just said there might be danger waiting in there. You think I can fly this rusty relic? It doesn’t even have gravitational calculation computers. I’m surprised there isn’t an abacus hanging in NavCom next to the plush spider.”

“She won’t be in danger,” Leonidas said. “I’ll protect her.”

Alisa grimaced. She didn’t need a damned protector, certainly not when that protector was basically kidnapping her from her own ship.

“That’s ridiculous,” Mica said. “You know what happens when non-expendable crew get sent out on stupid missions that have nothing to do with them? They get expended. What are we going to do without a pilot? Besides, the captain is…” Mica seemed to grope for the words, turning a distressed expression on Alisa.

Alisa hoped that meant that her engineer would object to her death for more reasons than the logistical.

“What’s going on?” Yumi asked from the walkway over the cargo hold.

“A discussion,” Alisa said, sighing again. She didn’t want to involve the passengers.

“Have you decided whether we can go out there with you? I would be curious to look around.”

Leonidas looked up at her, and Alisa assumed he would reject the notion, but he didn’t say anything.

“Well, I’m certainly going,” Beck said. “Whether the mech wants me or not.” He came to stand beside Alisa, on the opposite side from Mica.

Having people who wanted to watch out for Alisa made her feel appreciated, but she still wished this had played out another way. Going out to explore meant she could keep an eye out for salvageable material, but how was she supposed to gather it with Leonidas hovering over her? He seemed like the type to object to the looting of an imperial station, abandoned or not. Of course, if he expected to find someone here, diligently working along and perhaps not realizing that the war was over, her plans for salvage might be moot.

“I wouldn’t mind having the science officer along,” Leonidas said, ignoring Beck.

“Science officer?” Mica frowned up at Yumi, who smiled and waved back.

“Remember how I said she was a science teacher?” Alisa asked. “It seems Leonidas has promoted her.”

“Leonidas?”

“Yes, we’ve named our cyborg.”

“I miss so much being buried in engineering.”

“I’ll start sending out memos to keep you apprised of these cataclysmic events.”

Leonidas turned toward the airlock, where a green light proclaimed the passage ready for use. Apparently, discussion time was over.

“Let me get my gun and my bag, and we’ll go,” Alisa said.

Chapter 11

Alisa stepped out of the airlock behind Leonidas, taking a few tentative sniffs of the air. The sensors on the ship’s panel had proclaimed the mix to be adequate and for gravity to exist inside of the station, but the place was utterly dark and had a definite creepiness to it. The air smelled stale, and the temperature couldn’t have been more than a degree or two above freezing, but her lungs did not object to the substance she inhaled.

“Should have brought a parka,” Alisa said, not that she had anything heavier than her flight jacket.

Not commenting, Leonidas moved away from the airlock, not hampered by the darkness. He held his rifle in the ready position as he walked a large semicircle, looking out into the gloom of a large room with crates littering the floor in a random mess.

Alisa could barely make them out and pulled her multitool off her belt, thumbing on the tiny flashlight embedded in the tip. The haphazard arrangement of the crates made her suspect the gravity had gone out at some point before being restored.

“Can cyborgs see in the dark?” Beck asked, stepping out of the airlock beside her. “Or does he just have a better model suit than I do? I couldn’t afford the night vision upgrade.”

Alisa would have guessed that the fleet-issued suits were top-of-the-line with every upgrade imaginable, but Yumi offered another possibility.

“They usually can see in the dark,” she said brightly, joining them. She produced a handheld flashlight and shined the beam around the chamber, including the walls and the ceiling. Her light paused on a panel next to large double doors on the far side. They were closed. “In addition to numerous enhancements to their skeletal, nervous, and musculature systems, the imperial military cyborgs often received optical, nasal, ear, and tongue implants to improve their senses.”

“Tongue?” Beck asked. “It’s important that they taste well?”

“To better detect poisons,” Leonidas said, his helmet swiveling back toward them.

Alisa wished he would take it off. He looked too much like an enemy she should be shooting in that crimson armor. An enemy who might shoot back at any moment.

“Maybe he’ll be better able to appreciate your culinary offerings when you get around to grilling something for us,” Alisa said.

“Something I’m planning to do as soon as I can get some fresh meat. Ms. Moon has informed me that the chickens are off limits.”

“We might be able to find you something here,” Yumi said, shining her flashlight over some small animal droppings.

“I have been known to create wonders, even with subpar ingredients,” Beck said.

“I’m not eating space rats,” Alisa said. “I don’t care how amazing the sauce is.”

“The secret is in the marinade. You can tenderize anything with enough acid.”

“Marchenko,” Leonidas said, his voice cutting through their conversation like a knife.

“Yes?” Alisa asked.

He had walked over to the door with the control panel. He pointed to the floor next to him.

“She’s not your dog, mech,” Beck said.

Leonidas ignored him and kept pointing at the spot.

“Guess he thinks he can’t protect me from across the room,” Alisa said, hoping that was the only reason he was presuming to order her around. Since they had been the only ship in the dock, that meant that the Nomad was his only option for getting off this asteroid, so he ought to be invested in keeping her alive.

“Captain,” Beck said softly. “Here.” He pulled a double-barreled blazer pistol from his pack and handed it to her. “I’ve got my rifle and onboard weapons. You keep this. It’s got a lot more kick than your Etcher, and it’ll fire five hundred times before needing a reload.”

Alisa was tempted to ask if it would cut through combat armor, but Yumi’s implication that Leonidas had enhanced hearing made her keep her mouth shut. She tapped the tiny comm unit embedded in her multitool, missing her earstar, which would have allowed her to have a private subvocal conversation with the recipient. A new earstar was definitely on the wish list of things to purchase once she had some money.

“Mica, do you read me?” Alisa asked.

“Yes, Captain.”

“Everything all right in the ship?”

“Fine so far. The doctor and I are having a chat up here in NavCom.”

“Don’t tinker with my controls. I’ve got my equipment set up the way I like it.”

“Yes, he was just commenting on your stuffed animal.”

Alisa snorted. “We’re heading in. Stay in contact.”

“Will do.”

As she finished the conversation, Alisa walked across the room to join Leonidas. She tried to decide if he was irritated that she had taken her time in doing so, but he watched her approach without comment or eyebrow twitches. Beck strode after her, sticking close. Yumi came more slowly, pausing here and there to read the labels on the crates.

When Alisa joined him, Leonidas tapped the control panel with one gauntleted finger. The door beeped and slid aside. He walked into a wide corridor lined with machinery, with wires and tubes disappearing into the walls. Alisa couldn’t tell if it was mining equipment or something to do with life support. Perhaps a mix of both. The equipment appeared eerie and skeletal under the wan illumination of her flashlight. Some of it might have been valuable, but everything was too large to consider unhooking and dragging back to the ship.

Something scurried past a dark corner.

Just a rat, Alisa told herself, or some other small scavenger. Such creatures always seemed to find their way aboard ships and ended up anywhere humans settled, even stations in the depths of space. Or the depths of an asteroid.

Leonidas walked through the wide corridor, pausing to wait when Alisa dawdled. His intention might be to stay close to protect her, but she felt like she had a keeper. She wondered if he knew she had scavenging in mind. If so, he would probably be affronted. He seemed so loyal to the empire. Maybe that had been indoctrinated into him at the same time as he had received his implants. There were many stories about how the empire had manipulated people’s minds. She wouldn’t be surprised if they had done it to their own soldiers.

“Did it hurt?” Alisa asked as she and Leonidas headed for another door.

“What?” he asked.

Behind them, Beck had stopped next to Yumi, who was bent over by the wall, her long black braids falling over her shoulder as she shined her light into a low alcove. Maybe Alisa should tell her to look for valuable materials while she kept Leonidas occupied.

“Getting all those things implanted and enhanced,” she said, not quite sure why she was asking. This probably wasn’t the time for idle chitchat.

“It was a long time ago.” Leonidas hit the controls to open the door, then stepped inside first, once again pausing to scan the new area, his rifle at the ready.

“I guess that’s a yes.”

“I was sedated for a lot of it.”

“But not all of it?” Alisa could not imagine lying on some surgeon’s table—or maybe it had been an engineer’s table—letting someone cut all over her body to stick things in. If his bones had been enhanced, did that mean they’d had some way of doing that with shots? By injecting something? Or had they cut down and removed his organic bones and replaced them with non-organic ones? If the latter, that had to have hurt. Being unconscious for a surgery didn’t help with the pain afterward.

“What made you sign up for that?” she asked. “Bonus?”

She knew the imperial military had offered signing bonuses to people willing to go into high-demand or highly dangerous fields. Turning oneself into a cyborg seemed like it should qualify.

“I’m not reading any life forms in this part of the station, aside from a few rats,” Leonidas said, touching the side of his helmet. “But the walls are thick, with a lot of dense rock behind them, so my sensors are limited with how far they can detect.”

“But you’re expecting someone to be alive here?” she asked, taking the hint that he didn’t want to talk about his past or admit to having experienced pain in his life.

“Ideally.”

“Is that what you’re here for? To talk to someone? Or to take that someone off the station?”

They walked into another room full of crates. They were stacked in neat piles along the walls. These crates were either magnetized, or the gravity hadn’t gone out here, as it had in the other room.

“This isn’t a kidnapping mission, is it?” Alisa asked. “Aside from the kidnapping you’re doing right now in parting me from my ship, that is.”

“Do Alliance pilots always talk this much on missions?” Leonidas strode through the room, barely glancing at the crates.

“Oh, yes. We’re a chatty bunch.”

Beck and Yumi were discussing something behind her, and Alisa was tempted to fall back to walk with them. They wouldn’t mind her chatter. But Leonidas would probably say her name and order her to heel if she slowed down.

A few passages opened up to the sides, barely noticeable in the darkness. Since the station had gravity and life support, Alisa wondered why the lights were out and if it would be possible to turn them back on. She would prefer fewer shadows about.

She shined her flashlight into the corridors and along the ceilings, picking up cobwebs dangling in the corners. A layer of dust coated the crates. If anyone was still working here, it had been a while since they ran the cleaning robots through the place.

Ignoring the side tunnels, Leonidas opened the door at the far end of the room. He stepped in, but then halted. Alisa almost bumped into him.

“What is it?” she whispered, steadying herself with a hand on the back of his armor.

Though curious, she didn’t try to look past him, not yet. If something was in the next room, he had the better means to deal with it.

Leonidas took a couple of steps, scanning this new room as he had done with the others. Alisa shined her flashlight across the room—it was another space filled with crates, boxes, barrels, and bags of materials. A few of the bags had been cut open, with fine powder spilled out onto the floor. Cement mix, or something like it? If so, someone had not been careful unloading it. A few crates were scattered in the middle of the room, knocked on their sides. Maybe something had happened to the gravity in here too.

Leonidas let his rifle dangle from its strap and lifted his hands to remove his helmet. It came off with a soft hiss of escaping air. After tucking it under his arm, he looked around again. No, he was sniffing the air in short quick breaths, like a hound.

“It smells like some animal’s den,” he said.

Alisa followed his example, sniffing gingerly. There might have been something more than the scent of stale, recycled air, but she couldn’t identify it.

“Rat droppings?” she guessed.

“No. And it’s from more than that,” Leonidas said, pointing at the floor. “Something big and with a strong musky scent has been in here. Recently.” He looked toward a corridor that opened from the side of the room, the dark tunnel uninviting.

“Not that strong,” Alisa muttered, barely noticing a scent.

She pointed her flashlight at the floor, not sure what he’d been talking about when he’d said that. Under the light layer of dust, a stain darkened the gray metal. A puddle shape, a couple of feet across.

“What is it?” she asked. Could he tell? Just from looking?

He looked at her, his face not much more telling with the helmet off. But he did look… grim.

Without putting the helmet back on, he walked about the room slowly, his rifle in one hand again, aiming toward the shadows.

“Is that blood?” Beck asked, coming through the door behind Alisa.

Her stomach flip-flopped as he bent over for a closer look at the stain. It did look like dried blood. Yumi squeezed in, too, also looking down.

“I don’t know,” Alisa said, trying to sound calm and not disturbed by the eeriness of the station, even if she was wishing she had stood her ground back on the ship and told Leonidas to go explore on his own.

He was now looking down at something between two crates. Alisa debated if she wanted to know what he had found. It wasn’t until he crouched down and poked at something with his rifle that she walked over to join him.

“Might be something valuable,” she muttered, though she knew she was only trying to fool herself.

She saw the ripped shreds of cloth first, the remains of a curtain or tablecloth in a garish floral pattern. No, she realized with a jolt, glimpsing more of it. Not a curtain. A dress. There was the sleeve. It was bloodstained, the same as the floor.

Leonidas held up a single boot with punctures in it. Teeth marks? Claws? Alisa didn’t know if her mind was traveling to ridiculous places—how would some big predator have found its way onto a research station? Still, the punctures did not look like bullet holes or laser burns.

She shone her flashlight around on the damaged items, then farther into the darkness beyond them. The beam caught on something white. She swallowed. A broken bone.

Leonidas walked over and picked it up, then held it toward the light so she could see. “A human femur.”

Alisa had already recognized it. “Broken in half.”

She slid her beam along the floor, wondering where the other half had gone. Maybe she didn’t want to know.

“Not by a rat.” He walked closer, holding it out toward her. As if she wanted it. But all he did was point to gouges in the bone. Teeth marks.

“No,” she agreed. “Not unless a giant mutated space rat did it.”

He looked at her, once again no hint in his gaze that he appreciated her humor.

“Sorry,” she said. “Was it someone you knew?”

“No.” He laid the bone on top of the closest crate. “The person I seek is a man.”

“I’ve noticed all of the doors are opening for you. Is there a comm? Could you try calling him to see if he’s here?”

“I suspect that if he were here, he would have taken care of this.” He spread a hand, whether to indicate the bloodstains and bones or the mess in general, Alisa did not know.

“You sure? If there was something roaming around killing people in my research station, I’d hide in my lab with a box of ration bars and something heavy in front of the door.”

“This happened a while ago.” Leonidas touched the bone again—it had been completely cleaned of muscle and tendon. “Months ago, likely.”

“A box of ration bars can get you far. So long as you’re bright and don’t open the door when something with claws knocks.”

His eyes narrowed as he looked at her again. “You should get your own set of combat armor if you’ll be out in the system on your own.”

She blinked at the non sequitur. What had prompted that?

“My armor is my ship,” she said.

Much like engineers, pilots weren’t supposed to go tramping around in dangerous places outside of their ships.

“With your mouth, that won’t be enough.”

“Oh, you’re very charming,” Alisa said, understanding his comment now. “How is it there wasn’t a Mrs. Cyborg squatting in my ship with you?”

His jaw clenched, his expression growing frostier than she thought the joke warranted. Unless maybe there had been a Mrs. Cyborg once and he had lost her.

She opened her mouth, intending to apologize, but he spoke first.

“You’re quick to claim ownership of a freighter that was registered to a junk man.”

“You looked up who owned it before squatting in it?”

“To see if the owner was alive and if anyone would come for it, yes. You were unforeseen.”

“Sorry to get in the way of your plans.” Alisa was on the verge of reminding him that he would still be sitting on that dustball if it hadn’t been for her, but Yumi joined them first, Beck walking behind her protectively.

“Do we know who these people were?” Yumi asked.

“People?” Alisa asked. “Is there more than one, or did you just find…” She kept herself from finishing the thought aloud, that Yumi might simply have found more pieces of the dress wearer. It was too bleak to bring up—everything here was bleak.

“There are some more bones over there. A skull.” Beck pointed toward some crates stacked by the entrance to the side corridor. “And a man’s clothing that’s been ripped up. Also found this.” He held up an Etcher, similar to Alisa’s. “It’s out of bullets.”

“Typical armament for imperial scientists manning a research station?” Alisa asked Leonidas.

“No.” Again bypassing the side corridors, he headed for a door at the end of the room. “According to my map, the labs start in here.”

“It might be a good idea to take the women back to the ship,” Beck said before Alisa and Yumi could move off.

“Oh, that sounds like an excellent idea to me,” Alisa said, “but I doubt he’ll allow it.” She waved at Leonidas.

Beck glowered in that direction, his hands tight on his rifle. Leonidas had moved far enough away that Beck might get a shot off before he raced back here to attack him. Of course, Leonidas had his helmet off. One shot might be all it would take to blow his head off. Assuming Leonidas didn’t sense it coming and dodge in time.

Alisa laid her hand on Beck’s armored forearm on the chance similar thoughts were going through his head.

“Let’s just see what’s here,” she said quietly, turning her back so Leonidas would not hear. “If the station has been abandoned by everyone except—” she glanced at the bones, “—rats, we might be able to salvage valuables without incurring anyone’s wrath.”

“That’s probably why they were here,” Beck said, waving his gun at the remains of the dead. “Something sure got wrathful.”

With that feeling of bleakness growing heavier within her, Alisa only shook her head and walked toward Leonidas. If they were close to the labs, this little quest might be over soon. And the labs would be a likely spot for valuables. Probably. She had no idea what kind of research had been going on in them.

Leonidas hadn’t opened the door yet. He was looking at the control panel beside it. Most of the control panel. The face of it hung askew, the screws missing and wires dangling out from inside of the wall.

“Someone tried to hack their way through a locked door?” Alisa asked.

“Hacked may be an apt word.” Leonidas stepped aside so she could study the door itself.

Her flashlight beam highlighted cuts and scorch marks in the door, along with some dents that might represent someone’s attempt to open it with bullets. A couple of dents marred the front of the control panel too. Leonidas looked back the way they had come, waving for Beck and Yumi to step aside.

He startled Alisa by taking her hand, his cool gauntleted fingers wrapping around hers.

“What are you doing?” she asked as he directed her multitool so that the flashlight beam pierced the darkness, landing on the door they had come in, one that had slid shut as soon as they all entered. She hadn’t noticed it when they came in since it had been behind her, but the control panel there had also been shot up.

Once they had all seen it, Leonidas let go of her.

“Next time you want to hold my hand, you should ask,” Alisa said. “I have high standards as to who I let fondle my fingers.” The joke came out of habit more than because she thought there was anything funny about the situation. Quite the contrary. Her unease over everything was growing by the second. But she always found it preferable to make jokes than to admit to fear, to vulnerability. Especially now that she was a captain.

As usual, Leonidas ignored her humor. “I’ll see if I can open this one.”

He turned back to the door, lifting the dangling panel and poking at the wires inside. The consummate professional.

“Someone got trapped in here?” Beck said, looking back and forth from door to door. Alisa hadn’t moved her arm, so her flashlight still shone on the damaged panel on the other side of the room.

“And wanted badly to get out, it looks like,” Yumi said quietly. She stood close to Beck, having perhaps lost some of her interest in wandering off to explore.

“Why wouldn’t they have gone that way?” Beck pointed toward the yawning corridor leaving from the side of the room. There was a door on it.

“Maybe that’s where it came from,” Yumi said.

“You have any idea what it was?” Alisa asked.

“Is,” Yumi whispered.

“Pardon?”

“What it is. There aren’t any animals that can pilot spaceships, so unless someone came and picked it up, it’s still here.”

“Well, that’s comforting,” Alisa said.

Leonidas stepped back from the control panel and considered the door again.

“No luck?” Alisa asked. “Guess we’ll have to leave.”

She was willing to give up her chance at salvage to avoid being eaten by whatever had munched on these people. If they could still leave. The doors had opened to let her team walk into the station, so why had they locked when these people had wanted to leave? Had this all happened at the same time as the gravity failed? Maybe the power had failed on the whole station. Or maybe someone had deliberately turned off the power so that the doors wouldn’t work. But who would do that? Not some animal, certainly.

Leonidas shifted his weight so he could lay both of his palms against the door. Metal squealed as his shoulders flexed. The door slid open a couple of inches, and he let go with one hand, lunging to slip his fingers into the gap. From there, he heaved it open with more squeals of metal. It did not retract all the way flush with the jamb, instead hanging crookedly, a few inches still tilted outward on the top, but when he let it go, the door stayed open like that.

“Guess these people didn’t have a cyborg with them to help them escape,” Alisa said.

“I could have done that with a little help from my armor,” Beck said with a sniff.

Leonidas ignored him and walked into a new room. This time, the lights flickered on, gleaming on the shoulders of his crimson armor.

Alisa turned off her flashlight, relieved that they would not have to deal with more shadows. Before putting the multitool away, she commed the ship.

“Marchenko checking in. Anything interesting happening back there?”

“Aren’t you supposed to say more official things than that?” came Mica’s voice in response. “Like, this is the captain. Status report, crew.”

“You’re thinking of the military. I don’t think things have to be that official on a freighter.”

“The doctor and I got bored in NavCom and are playing video games in the rec room.”

“I’ll assume that’s a no, then. You have nothing of interest to report.”

“I’m close to getting the high score on Space Avenger.”

Alisa snorted. She was amazed Finnegan hadn’t ripped the game console out of the table and sold it, though maybe it was so old that it would have cost him more money to tote it out of the junkyard than he would have gotten for it.

“That’s the shooter game, right?” Alisa asked. “You’ll never touch my score on the piloting one.”

“Probably not, but I’m doing well here. The doctor keeps losing his man in the practice area before you board the ship and try to take it back from smugglers,” Mica said. “I didn’t know you could actually die before you got to Level One.”

“It’s not necessary to report that,” Alejandro’s voice sounded in the background, extremely dry.

“She asked what was interesting. I found that interesting. And amusing.”

“It wasn’t that funny.”

“No? Then why did I laugh so hard that tea came out of my nose?”

“Sounds like a problem with a deviated septum. You should have a doctor look at that.”

“My nostrils aren’t available for study.”

“We’re fine in here,” Alisa said, rolling her eyes. “Thanks for asking.”

“You’re welcome, Captain,” Mica said.

Alisa turned off the comm. Yumi and Beck were looking at her, eyebrows raised.

“The others are fine,” she told them.

“Clearly,” Beck said.

Alisa headed through the doorway and into a rectangular room. Three of the walls held shelves and cabinets, many of them broken. Carbon had scorched the floor, leaving giant black marks, as if someone had set off an explosion in here. The fourth wall was mostly made of glass and had survived whatever bomb had been detonated. Another room stood behind it, one full of desks and workstations and equipment. One of the labs, presumably. It appeared to be mostly intact.

Relieved by the lack of bones and bloodstains on the floor, even if the carbon was puzzling, Alisa walked toward the closest set of shelves that wasn’t mangled. She had to walk around a broken grid in the floor, metal bars warped or completely blown away. Water trickled past down below. She almost pulled out her flashlight again to investigate, but the shelves were far more of a pull.

She did not know what she had expected the lab to hold, but the rows of strangely shaped molds were not it. She stared at a shelf full of pieces of a puzzle that looked like they could be assembled to form a forearm. Another shelf held kneecaps. Another squishy, gelatinous implant of some sort. Her first thought was that they had come to a plant for assembling androids, but she had seen prosthetic limbs before, and this was something different. These looked more like they would be inserted in—

It struck her like a hammer on a gong.

“Cyborg parts,” she blurted, turning toward Leonidas.

He had already opened a door in the glass wall and entered the lab. Beck and Yumi were talking quietly in the other doorway and had not yet entered the room.

It might not be noble or wise to think of scavenging when there were dead people twenty feet away, and their own safety was in question, but Alisa couldn’t help but realize she might have found her moment—and her prize. Cyborg implants ought to be worth quite a bit on the black market. She had no idea how to sell things on the black market, but she could learn.

She slipped her hand into her satchel and pulled out an empty sack. Leonidas had his back to her. Good. He would object to the theft. No, not theft, she told herself. Scavenging. She wasn’t a thief, damn it. She was an opportunist, and there was nothing wrong with that. This place had been empty for months, and the empire wasn’t around anymore, not in anything like its previous incarnation, so it was highly doubtful anyone was going to come out here to claim these items. The cyborg assembly line would probably be on hold indefinitely. Not a bad thing, in her opinion.

Looking for the least damaged items, Alisa turned her back to the lab—and Leonidas—so she could surreptitiously slide some of the implants into her bag.

A soft splash came from behind her, from below that broken grid in the floor. She paused and looked toward it, not certain if it was something to do with the station’s water filtration and plumbing system or if some of the cyborg parts needed to be tested in liquid for some reason.

Another splash sounded. Were those noises a result of the way the water was running through the channel? Or—she swallowed—was something down there?

Her gaze shifted toward the lab, as she wondered if Leonidas and his superior cyborg hearing had detected anything. Her hand shifted toward the blazer Beck had lent her. He and Yumi were still arguing about something by the doorway.

“Beck?” she started to ask.

A thump and a big splash from below made her stop, dropping into a crouch. Something dark and huge flew up through the opening in the grid. It whirled and jumped straight at her.

Chapter 12

Alisa had the impression of fur, fangs, and at least four hundred pounds of muscled bulk before the creature was in the air, springing toward her, and all she could see was her death in its yellow eyes. She fired, shooting it in the chest, and dropped to the floor at the same time, doubting that even Beck’s powerful blazer pistol would slow its momentum.

She meant to roll, to scramble out of the way as fast as she could, but she was too slow. The massive creature slammed into her, smashing her against the shelves.

Its bulk crushed her, and pain exploded from both sides of her body. Shelves and implants tumbled down as fur filled her eyes. She sensed it raising a paw to strike with deadly claws. She shot again, point blank this time, then tried to fling herself to the side. Half-pinned against the broken shelves, she could not go far. She glimpsed light and pushed toward it, trying to escape, but it only spun to follow her. It raised its paw again, as if those blasts had not hurt it at all. She tried to fire again, but the heavy paw smashed against her wrist, thwarting her aim. The blast of energy flew harmlessly wide, slamming into the ceiling.

She dove away, not caring which direction she went, just needing space between her and the monster so she could think, figure out something. Before she could think of anything, the ground disappeared beneath her. The stupid broken grid. She had been too busy fleeing to notice it.

A bar gouged her ribs as she tumbled down, flailing, unable to find anything to grab onto. She splashed into two feet of water.

Afraid the creature would be right behind her, she yanked out her Etcher, ignoring the fresh wounds that shouted out for attention. She’d dropped Beck’s blazer somewhere, so this would have to do.

Shouts came from above. With water rushing past around her legs and blood roaring in her ears, she couldn’t understand them, but she couldn’t see the creature, and that was a good thing. A dark furry paw flopped down onto the grid. She flinched but aimed her gun at it. She almost shot, but it wasn’t moving. The shouts had died down too.

A crimson suit of armor came into view. Leonidas knelt next to the hole and peered into her oubliette.

“You all right, Marchenko?” he asked.

Alisa lowered her Etcher. “I’m alive. Things hurt. I hope our semi-retired doctor doesn’t have cold hands. I hate being worked on by doctors with cold hands.” She clamped down on the stream of words, barely conscious of what she was babbling.

Worrying about cold hands was ridiculous right now, but being hurt and thinking of medics made her flash back to those months in the hospital, those first weeks she had been awake and when she hadn’t been sure if she would live or die. Too many bad memories flooded her brain, threatening to take her over the edge.

She took several deep breaths, struggling to calm herself. Pain came with those breaths, but she welcomed it. Pain was grounding. It meant she was alive, that her body was working as it should. Thankfully, she did not think she had broken any bones. Not this time.

“Can you give me your hand?” Leonidas lowered his gauntleted hand, the red of his armor making her think of blood, of the fact that he was a cyborg, the enemy.

Alisa eyed the dark depths from which the water was flowing. From which that monster had come. What the hell had that thing been? And were there more of them? What if there were more coming right now?

“Yes,” she said, reaching up and clasping his hand. Enemy or not, he was a lot more appealing than that monster had been.

Leonidas lifted her as easily as if lifting a feather, rising to his feet and wrapping his other arm around her waist, so he could pull her away from the broken grid. A piece of her jacket hung from the jagged bar that had snagged her on the way down.

Alisa glowered at it, then at the dead monster. Animal. Creature. Whatever it was. It lay between the grid and the broken shelves, cyborg implants littering its body like dead leaves.

Beck leaned against the shelves, catching his breath. Blood spattered his white armor.

“I don’t know who thought it would be a good idea to put an oubliette in the middle of a lab, but I think they should be flogged. I know the empire was more into mental manipulation than flogging people, but there really should be an exception.” Her voice sounded squeaky in her ears, and she forced herself to go back to breathing. She was fine. A few scratches, but she’d had much worse. Funny, though, how much more terrifying it was when her fate wasn’t in her own hands. She much preferred facing death from the pilot’s seat, the flight stick firmly in her grasp.

“I apologize,” Leonidas said, releasing her and stepping back, though he kept a hand close, maybe not certain she wouldn’t fall over.

Considering the blood dripping down her sleeve from somewhere, that was a possibility.

“For the lack of flogging?” she asked.

He wore a serious expression, and she immediately regretted her sarcasm. It had sounded like a heartfelt apology, even though she wasn’t sure what had prompted him to make it. He—and Beck, too, it looked like—had killed the creature that had been intent on killing her. He didn’t owe her an apology. She ought to be thanking him.

Instead of ignoring her joke, or giving her one of his irritated narrow-eyed looks, Leonidas actually smiled faintly. The gesture disappeared so quickly she wondered if she’d imagined it.

“For letting myself be distracted,” he said quietly, his gaze flicking toward Beck. But Beck wasn’t looking at them. He’d knelt down to lift the head of the creature, scrutinizing it. Yumi stood by the wall, her hand to her chest, a woman who, like Alisa, had gotten more on this trip than she bargained for. “I promised I’d protect you,” he added.

His jaw clenched, some of that irritation springing into his eyes. For once, it did not seem to be directed at her, but inward, at himself.

Feeling uncomfortable at seeing that he actually cared about keeping her alive—or at least about keeping his word regarding keeping her alive—Alisa shrugged and looked away.

“The creature is dead,” she said. “That’s all that matters, right?”

It also mattered if there were more of them around. She wondered if there was a way to tell.

“I think it’s an Octarian Blood Bear,” Beck said.

“It is,” Leonidas said. “We had training missions where we had to hunt and kill them with only a knife when I was a young soldier.”

“Guess that’s why you were so quick and efficient at killing it now, eh?” Alisa asked.

“Not that quick,” Leonidas muttered.

“But I helped, right?” Beck smiled at Alisa and stuck one of his boots up on the bear’s shaggy backside. Or maybe that was its butt. If man-eating bears had butts. “You saw me, mech. I hacked the hells out of that back leg and shot it twice.”

“After Marchenko shot it in the chest twice,” Leonidas said dryly. “It would have died from those wounds.”

Maybe, but not before it flattened her. What if it had followed her down through that grid? All it would have had to do was land on her with those four hundred pounds, and she would have been crushed and drowned. She shuddered, glad the men had jumped in.

“Don’t take my victory away from me, mech,” Beck said. “There have been precious few of them this week.”

Leonidas sighed. “Call me Leonidas.”

Beck’s mouth twisted, like he wasn’t sure about that.

Leonidas walked over to the other side of the bear—such an innocuous sounding name for something that had been eating people here for months—and picked up the blazer Alisa had dropped. He thumbed on the safety and tossed it to her.

“Thanks,” she said.

She was on the verge of also thanking him—and Beck—for helping, but stopped when he noticed the bag she had been filling. The bear had half-buried it when it fell, but the top half stuck out from under its body. Not wanting everyone to know she had been pillaging, Alisa hoped the dead bear would be too heavy, and that nobody would be able to extract her bag.

But Leonidas lifted the side of the bear as if it weighed nothing and withdrew it.

“That’s nothing,” Alisa said, reaching for it.

He looked inside.

She winced.

“You planning to make your own cyborg?” he asked, arching an eyebrow.

Three suns, would he believe that if she claimed it? No, he was being wry. She could see it in his eyes. He knew exactly what she had been doing.

“Sell the parts.” She walked over, her stiff and aching body not keeping her from snatching the bag from him. “How else am I supposed to pay for that combat armor?”

He didn’t say anything, and he didn’t try to keep the bag from her. Maybe it was only in her imagination that his eyes seemed to judge her, but she couldn’t keep from defending herself.

“You dragged me here,” she blurted. “Isn’t it fair that I get some compensation for my time?”

Leonidas said nothing, merely looked back toward the lab. Because she wasn’t worth looking at? A sick feeling of disgust welled inside of her. She wanted to be mad at him, but she knew that the problem was within her, not with him. She dropped the bag, though she hadn’t decided yet if she would leave it. Taking things she could sell was logical, damn it. This place was a desecrated mess. The empire was gone. Whoever had done this research was gone. Eaten, probably. If she didn’t take these things, some other scavenger would be along to do the same thing.

“Stay close to me,” Leonidas said, and headed into the lab again.

She followed him. Even if she hated being ordered around by someone who wasn’t a superior officer in her army, and even if she resented being told what to do under the best of circumstances, she did not want to get hurt again, more because he would blame himself than because of the actual risk to her person. She did not know what that meant. Probably that she was going crazy, caring what a cyborg thought and felt. But he had said himself that he was human. It seemed strange to think of him that way when cyborgs had been nothing but superhuman enemies to her during the war, but he clearly believed it. He admittedly acted as human as the next person.

Yumi pushed away from the wall, gave the dead bear a wide berth, and headed for Alisa’s discarded bag. She opened it and peeked inside.

Alisa paused in the glass doorway of the lab—Leonidas had already gone back inside. She was still waffling over what to do with the parts she had grabbed, but she didn’t want someone else to presume to take them while she was deciding. Was Yumi thinking that she could buy a lot of chicken feed with the latest and greatest in cyborg bits?

Yumi dropped the bag. “You should look for eyes.”

“Uh, pardon?”

“The optical implants. You could fit hundreds of them in your bag, and I bet they’re worth even more than the muscle augmentations. My understanding is that the optical technology was born out of scientists creating new eyes for the blind—if you remember your history, you know that many people went blind when first colonizing Dravon. The human eye didn’t do well there, until the domes were erected. Anyway, replacement eyes are not inexpensive, and there are many who could use them, not to enhance anything necessarily, but for quality of life issues.”

“Have you seen any eyes?” Alisa asked, her interest piqued despite her moral dilemma.

“Not in here.” Yumi shrugged. “Maybe there’s another room.”

Alisa looked toward Leonidas, though she did not expect him to help her shop for items to loot. Still, he was the expert on this place, the one with the map. He was hunched over a computer console facing the glass, his netdisc out again. Planning to copy some files?

“It’s not a QuickMart,” Leonidas growled, not looking at either of them. “I’m not going to look up the inventory to help with your theft.”

No, he wasn’t happy about having this place pillaged. Or maybe he wasn’t happy he had not found the person he’d hoped to find, and that was making him cranky. She almost pointed out that he was being cranky, but she had not forgotten that he had saved her life. She resolved to tamp down her lippy streak. At the least, she wouldn’t snap a retort about theft. Besides, she probably deserved his comment.

She stepped around a workstation, curious about what he was looking up. Would he let her see?

She almost tripped over the torn up remains of another body. More of the bones remained with this one, but they were equally gnawed and scattered about. A shredded white lab coat lay beside what was left of the ribcage.

The sight sobered Alisa, stealing all thoughts of comebacks and lippiness.

“That’s not a thief,” she said, then gave herself a mental kick. A nice stating of the obvious.

“No,” Leonidas said, not taking his eyes from the holodisplay. Columns of text drifted in the air before him, the words too far away for Alisa to read. The little red light flashed on his netdisc. Yes, he was copying files. He opened a second display above another console, and video imagery of the station came up.

“Do you think it’s… the person you were looking for?” Alisa asked.

He did not answer. Perhaps his silence was answer enough. He could have said no without revealing anything to her. But saying yes might mean revealing that they had come all this way and risked their lives for nothing.

Though she was curious as to what he was looking up, she opted to give him his privacy. Everything on that screen would probably go over her head anyway.

But as she backed toward the door, he looked up, pinning her with his gaze.

“Stay,” he said.

“Because you’ve grown to appreciate my company, and you’d be lonely without me?” She hadn’t managed to tame that lippy streak for long.

“Because there may be more of those bears on the station.”

“What makes you think that?” She’d had the thought herself but wondered if his sensors had shown him something. He had not put his helmet back on.

Leonidas held up a finger, his gaze drawn back to one of the displays.

A clang came from the room with the shelves. Alisa jumped, spinning toward the noise and reaching for Beck’s blazer again.

“Sorry.” Beck waved a bloody knife. He had removed his helmet and was kneeling beside the dead animal. “That was just me.”

Alisa curled a lip. “What are you doing?”

“Told you—I’ve been looking for fresh meat.” Beck winked at her.

“I… you’re joking, right?” Alisa leaned out the door and found Yumi. “He’s joking, isn’t he?”

“I’m not sure. He has carved a large sample.”

“If there are more of those around, is it wise to fling blood all over the place?” Alisa asked. “Won’t the others smell it?” She touched her side, aware that she was leaking blood of her own.

“These bears are top-level predators on Octaria,” Beck said. “Each with a large range, a range they keep the competition out of—I doubt there are multiple ones in here. Even if they started out that way, they would have likely killed each other, especially since, ah, food supplies apparently got scarce here after a while.”

Food supplies? Alisa did not want to think about that.

“Are they omnivores?” Yumi asked. “They may have been able to subsist on whatever supplies were here for humans. They may have also hibernated to slow their metabolisms and food requirements.”

“I really don’t want to know about their metabolic needs,” Alisa said. “Leonidas, how much longer do you need? I think we’re all ready to get back to the ship.”

Leonidas was staring intently at one of the displays in front of him. Alisa walked back around the workstation. He’d closed down the one with the text on it and put away his netdisc, but the video display was running, showing footage on cameras around the station. Something moved on one of them, something big with black fur, and Alisa jumped.

“Is that live footage?”

Leonidas enlarged the image, and two more of the great fanged beasts came into view, all three of them shambling along on all fours, passing through the familiar chambers of the research station, rooms Alisa and the others had just passed through. In the video, the crates were neatly stacked, and there weren’t any bones on the floor. That let her relax an iota. She leaned forward and checked the date stamp in the corner.

“Two months ago?” she asked.

“Yes, we’re two months too late,” Leonidas said, cupping his chin with his hand as he continued to watch.

“What brought them here? Can you tell?”

“Not what. Who.”

He poked his finger through the display, and the footage started playing in reverse, the giant bears heading butt first in the direction of the airlocks. In that first room, a person came into view, someone wearing a black robe with a cowl pulled over the head. Leonidas scrolled back further, then let the video play, showing the person—it was impossible to tell if it was a man or a woman—coming out of the airlock behind the three giant bears.

“That’s the one we killed,” Leonidas said, pointing to the bear in the middle.

Alisa had no idea how he could tell. The big shaggy creatures all looked the same to her, the same and terrifying. But she was more curious about the person walking behind them, as if they were domesticated livestock rather than man-eating predators. The bears ambled in front of the cloaked figure without showing any inclination toward spinning around and taking a chomp. Even on all fours, they were as tall as the person’s shoulder, and he or she appeared thin and insignificant next to their bulk.

Leonidas zoomed in on the robed figure’s chest, showing a pendant with a red moon on a silver star background.

“Starseer,” Alisa breathed.

She had only ever seen one in real life before, when she had been a girl walking through a busy concourse on a space station with her mother, but she remembered the dark robe, the cowl pulled over the head, and the pendant. Even though she hadn’t seen the person do anything indicative of mind powers, simply walking along with a metallic staff like some monk of old, she hadn’t forgotten the way people muttered and moved away. Even though Starseers were rare sights in the system anymore, everyone knew their history and what they could do.

As she and Leonidas watched, the cloaked figure opened doors without touching the panels, leading the bears into the room outside of this first lab. He or she waved a hand, and the creatures raced into the corridor, heading deeper into the station—to hunt. That done, the Starseer turned and walked out, the black robe sweeping the floor as he or she returned to the airlock and disappeared from the station’s cameras.

Leonidas’s fingers curled around the edge of the workstation, and a crunching sound came as they dug into the hard material. He glanced down, made an irritated noise, and let go. Alisa backed up when he turned his sour expression toward her.

“The Alliance have any Starseers on the payroll?” he asked, the words sounding like an accusation.

“Not that I know of.”

Admittedly, she wasn’t in the know when it came to decisions from the First Governor and senior military officers. She had been a lowly lieutenant for most of the war, and even when she’d made captain, she had only been in command of a squadron of Striker pilots. Who knew what had been going on among the leadership? Nevertheless, she doubted they had allied with Starseers.

“The Starseers have always been associated with the empire, haven’t they?” she added.

“I heard rumors that some were working with the Alliance. It’s unlikely you people could have overthrown the empire without help.”

Alisa bristled at the implication that normal human beings couldn’t have any effect on a bloated government so full of itself that it hadn’t seen the threat coming until it was too late for them to do anything. “Of course. We people were so inept. How could we have possibly beaten the mighty empire and its cyborg armies?”

“I didn’t say you were inept, but you were outnumbered twenty to one, if not more. We had superior forces, supplies, and the infrastructure for delivering them. If you hadn’t resorted to despicable guerrilla tactics—”

“Tactics aren’t despicable if they’re your only chance for freedom. You think we didn’t know we were outnumbered? That the odds were against us? What were we supposed to do? Toss our infantry soldiers out on a battlefield to face your superior forces in open combat?”

Leonidas stepped toward her, huge and intimidating in that armor, and it was all she could do not to scramble backward. “You were supposed to fight with honor, not bombing civilian buildings and destroying resources that all of humankind relies upon.”

“I never bombed any civilians. I served on the Merciless and the Silver Striker. We were in space, transporting people and engaging in battle to defend our resources. Your warships were the ones that wanted to annihilate us, wipe our rebellion from the system. And don’t act like the empire never did anything morally reprehensible. You think I’ve never heard of what the Cyborg Corps were responsible for? The assassinations you carried out during the war? The way you made powerful people disappear before the war ever started? Everybody knows what that red armor stands for.” She poked him in the chest. She might as well have poked a steel wall—all it did was hurt her finger.

“Everybody knows nothing. I’ve never assassinated anyone. I’ve always fought with honor. The stories you people make up to justify your actions are ridiculous.”

“Stories? Sure, me and millions of other people. We’re just sitting around and making up stories about cyborgs.”

“I have always acted honorably,” he repeated, his nostrils flaring.

“So. Have. I.”

“Yes, you’re a very honorable thief, shoveling imperial goods into your bag.”

“Oh screw you, mech.” Alisa bumped her hip on the workstation as she stalked toward the door, but she barely noticed. She almost crashed into Beck, who had come over to peek inside.

“Problem?” he asked, looking at the two of them.

“No,” Alisa said at the same time as Leonidas. It came out with the fury of a curse word. For both of them.

“That’s good.” Beck gave Yumi one of those long looks of concern. “I’ve got some meat for tomorrow. Just got to do some research and figure out what kind of marinade I need to soften it up a touch. How about we head back to the ship, so I can do that?”

“Fine with me.” Alisa didn’t bother looking at Leonidas to see if he was done with his research. She didn’t particularly care. Instead, she tapped the comm button on her multitool. “Mica, how’s that game going? You beat my high score yet?”

A hiss of static came from the comm, then silence.

“Mica? Dr. Dominguez?” she asked, a sinking feeling spreading through her stomach. She looked toward the dead bear, remembering the two others in the video. They couldn’t have gotten through the airlock and onto the ship, could they? If they had, there was no cyborg on board to make short work of them.

“We have to get back to the ship,” Alisa said. “Now.”

Chapter 13

Alisa was about to step into the airlock, both Beck’s borrowed blazer and her Etcher in her hands, but Leonidas caught up then and stretched out a hand to stop her. She opened her mouth, intending to bark at him to get out of the way, but he only held her up long enough to step in front of her. He strode into the airlock tube, his own rifle pointing down it.

“Stay between us,” Beck whispered from behind her. He shooed Yumi toward Alisa, and they followed Leonidas into the tube.

As soon as she could, Alisa hustled into the cargo hold, searching in all directions, afraid she would spot blood—or worse. The chickens were still there, squawking plaintively. If a bear had stormed onto the ship, would it have gone for them first? Or would it have been drawn by larger prey?

Leonidas must have felt some of Alisa’s worry, her urgency, because he broke into a run, heading for the stairs. With the cargo hold empty, it did not take long to verify that there weren’t any bodies in it, so Alisa hurried after him. She prayed that they would find Mica and Alejandro in the rec room, still playing that game. Maybe something had simply happened to short out the comm system.

They reached the small kitchen and mess hall, and Alisa peeked into the rec room off to the side. The asteroid game hovered in the air over the table, the back of a character’s head and gun in view as he stood in a spaceship, ready to clear more enemies from the level. The game was a little too apt at the moment.

Leonidas continued toward NavCom, but Alisa headed toward the game station. Dread curdled in her stomach as she worried she would find one or more bodies in the back. Nobody was there. The chairs and table were locked to the deck, so they couldn’t be knocked over. Too bad. That might have been a clue to suggest a fight or that Mica and Alejandro had gotten up in a hurry to run and hide.

Clangs sounded as someone checked the sleep quarters. As Alisa finished her circuit of the rec room, something caught her eye. A necklace with a broken chain. She knelt and picked it up—it was the three-starred pendant that Alejandro wore outside of his robe.

Leonidas appeared in the hatchway, his armored shoulders brushing the jamb. “NavCom is empty, as are the cabins. If they’re here, they’re hiding.”

“I don’t think they’re here,” Alisa said quietly, spreading her palm to show him the pendant.

“There’s no hint of the animal den smell I detected on the station, nor did I see any blood.”

“So, it wasn’t the bears.” Alisa felt a modicum of relief at that, but their people were still missing. Mica was the closest thing she had to a friend here, the only person she had any history with. “Then what got them?”

“The pirates, I’d wager.”

Alisa stood up, clenching her jaw. “No, they couldn’t have. I did what you said. I took a circuitous route here. I checked to make sure there weren’t any ships within sensor range before veering into the asteroid. There’s no way they followed us here.”

“I didn’t say that they did. They were here before. Somehow, they knew about the station.”

“How do you know…” Alisa halted the question in the middle, remembering the shredded clothing. “The people who were killed in those storage rooms. You think those were the same pirates from the mining ship? That they came to loot the station?”

“As you and your science officer have noted, cybernetic implants are valuable.”

“But why take my engineer and a passenger?” Alisa looked down at the pendant. “If they’re just thieves trying to get everything they can, why not take my whole ship?”

Before he could answer, the Nomad’s tinny computerized voice spoke, echoing throughout the ship. “Self-destruct will commence in fifteen minutes.”

Leonidas’s eyebrows rose.

“Uh, Captain?” Beck called from the kitchen. “Should that be concerning us?”

Alisa shook her head, confusion swarming her. “There’s no self-destruct option on the Nomad. It’s a freighter, not some warship full of military secrets. There’s no need to sacrifice it if enemies board.”

“Are you sure your engineer couldn’t have rigged something?”

“How could she have had time to do that? They didn’t even have time to call us on the comm. They had to have been taken by surprise. Even if they did have time, all she would have done was set explosives in engineering. I don’t see how she could have tied in the ship’s computer to make announcements.”

“Self-destruct will commence in fourteen minutes,” the computer announced cheerfully.

Great, it must have reached the point where it would warn them on the minute, every minute.

“I’m going to search for explosives,” Beck said.

“Maybe we should just get off the ship,” Yumi said. “How badly will the station be damaged if the ship blows up while in its dock?”

“I don’t know,” Beck said, “but I’m not in a hurry to go back inside and fight two more of those creatures. I’ve got plenty of meat to grill already.”

“Not to mention that we could be stranded in there for a long time if we didn’t have a ship.” Alisa waved Leonidas aside and headed toward NavCom. “I’m going to scan through the camera footage, see what happened.”

“Better scan quickly,” Leonidas said, running after Beck, apparently believing that Mica could have jury-rigged something.

In NavCom, none of the alarms were flashing. The console waited quietly. If there were a self-destruct sequence, there should have been a warning up here.

Alisa found the video footage and scanned back for the last half hour on both the internal and exterior cameras. She groaned, catching something right away. A combat ship about a third of the size of the Nomad. It had docked next to them in the adjoining airlock.

If Mica had been up here in NavCom, she would have seen them coming on the cameras, but the ship’s proximity alarm would not have gone off, not when they were docked. Being docked usually meant they were on a space station or spaceport with all manner of ships around. Nothing to be worried about.

Alisa cursed herself. She should have thought to set some kind of alarm or at least ordered Mica to stay up here instead of wandering around the rest of the ship, looking for games to play.

She checked the time stamps as the footage continued in reverse, showing the pirate ship’s approach. It had only been docked for eight minutes. Long enough for the pirates to get off their ship, storm onto the Nomad, and kidnap Mica and Alejandro. But, as Alisa had already asked, why had they only taken the people instead of stealing the entire ship? NavCom had been wide open. They could have easily come up here, and a halfway decent pilot could have figured out how to steer her out. That big mining ship surely had a landing bay large enough to hold her.

“Self-destruct will commence in eleven minutes,” the ship announced.

“Oh,” Alisa said with new understanding. “Right. They must have heard that and figured they had better get away from this ship and the station while they still had time.”

“Who are you talking to?” Leonidas asked, striding up the corridor and into NavCom, glancing toward the comm panel.

“Myself. I’m an excellent conversationalist.”

“Beck and Moon are still looking, but we’ve seen no sign of explosives yet. We should leave soon and get to the far side of the station. If your ship blows up, it will affect the integrity of Blackstar.” He grimaced. “It may destroy the whole station.”

“That’s one way to get rid of the bears.”

“Your humor is—”

“Inappropriate, I know.”

His eyebrow twitched.

“It’s how I distract myself when I’m scared for my life. Or the lives of others. Especially others that I talked into coming along on this trip. Hells, I even charged Alejandro to come along. He just wanted to go to Perun.” Alisa took a deep breath, immediately regretting her outpouring of honesty. Leonidas was not a confidant.

She turned her back toward him and pulled up the internal camera footage. It did not cover every inch of the ship, but it would show her if people had, indeed, come onboard.

“The responsibility for this situation is more mine than yours,” Leonidas said, coming to stand beside her and look down at the footage. “I will get them back.”

She wasn’t sure how comfortable she felt standing shoulder to shoulder with him, but she did appreciate that he wasn’t dismissing the others as unimportant. She could have imagined him waving his hand at their loss and insisting they continue on to… wherever he planned to go next. Perun, she supposed. She hadn’t agreed to transport him farther.

“All by yourself?” she asked, enlarging the footage of the rec room—only twenty minutes earlier, Alejandro and Mica had been sitting at the table in there, playing the video game.

“If need be.”

“You don’t want Beck? Didn’t he say he was integral in defeating that bear?”

“He was integral in defeating its rear left haunch.” Leonidas pointed at the footage from the cargo hold, of eight armed men storming through the airlock, wearing unmatched collections of combat armor and carrying an assortment of deadly weapons, everything from shotguns to laser rifles to swords.

“Self-destruct will commence in eight minutes,” the ship said.

Alisa had been busy concentrating and had barely noticed the last couple of announcements. Eight minutes was not long, especially if they needed to run to the other side of the station. She brought the footage for the cargo hold and the rec room to the forefront, running them forward in sync while minimizing everything else.

The pirates must have made a sound, because Mica looked toward the entrance to the rec room. She reached for her pocket where she should have had her comm unit. She’d been about to pull it out, but Alejandro raised a finger to his lips. He said something—the cameras did not pick up audio—then ran out of the room.

Mica started after him, but paused, her gaze snagging on the game. To Alisa’s surprise she turned back to it, lifting her hands to touch the holocontrols that hovered below the main video. She glanced toward the exit several times as she maneuvered the avatar forward to kill a virtual enemy, then flick something on a control console within the game. Mica dropped to her knees, pulling open the control panel under the table. From the angle of the security camera, Alisa could not see what wires she was tinkering with, but she knelt back and glanced toward a corner of the rec room up near the ceiling. That spot held a speaker.

“It’s in the game,” Alisa realized.

“What?” Leonidas asked.

On the video, Alejandro ran into the rec room, a baton and a blazer in his hands, weapons Alisa would not have guessed he had. He whirled to push the hatch shut, but was too late. The pirates charged into the room. He raised the blazer and fired, but the crimson bolt splashed uselessly off an armored man’s shoulder. The pirates did not slow down. Alejandro tried to fight, to protect Mica, but there were too many enemies. One armored pirate thrust him to the side, hurling him against the wall. He landed hard, then was picked up by the neck.

Alisa winced in sympathy of the pained expression on his face and slid her hand into her pocket to wrap it around his broken pendant.

The pirates hoisted Mica and Alejandro over their shoulders and toted them out of the rec room. Alisa lifted her hand, about to stop the playback, but paused when the last two pirates stopped before exiting. They spun toward the corner with the speaker, pointed at it, jabbered something to each other, then charged out of the room. A moment later, all of the pirates appeared in the cargo hold. They still carried their prisoners over their shoulders, and several had stolen duffel bags from the passenger and crew cabins, but that was all they had taken. They hustled quickly off the ship.

“We better leave too,” Leonidas said. “With luck, we can—”

“No, we don’t need to,” Alisa said as the computer spoke again, announcing that they were down to six minutes.

She strode past Leonidas, into the corridor, and through the mess hall to the rec room. If she hadn’t played the game before, she might have been fooled, too, but now that she had seen Mica tinkering with the panel, she realized what she had done.

Leonidas followed her and watched as she hit the power on the table, turning off the game.

“If I’m right,” Alisa said, “that’ll be the end of the announcements.”

His gaze shifted from the table to the speaker, then he grunted with understanding. “She fooled them into thinking the ship would blow up.”

Alisa nodded. “A good thing for us—we would have been stranded if the pirates had left in both vessels—but that doesn’t help them at all.”

She closed her eyes. How were they going to get Mica and Alejandro back? If these were the same pirates that had chased them in the mining ship, there could be hundreds, if not thousands, of crew in there, with dozens of smaller ships they could launch at any time. And those pirates would be holding a grudge after she and Leonidas had caused their two bombers to blow up. They might be taking that grudge out on Mica and Alejandro right now.

“We’re going after them,” she said, opening her eyes.

Thankfully, Leonidas did not object or point out that it would be a suicide mission. After all, he had already said he would get them back.

“You have a plan?” he asked.

“Going after them is my plan.”

“It could use refinement.”

“Are all cyborgs so critical?”

“The ones that survive more than five years in the service, yes. We don’t—didn’t—get chosen for the moonpuff missions.”

“No, I suppose you wouldn’t.” Alisa slipped past him and headed for NavCom again. Yumi and Beck were in the mess and watched her go by. “I’m going to get us out of this asteroid before they’re too far away for us to catch on our sensors. Anyone who wants to help me brainstorm a plan is welcome to join me.”

Leonidas followed on her heels.

“What about the countdown?” Beck asked.

“What’s the last number you heard?” Alisa called back as she reached the pilot’s seat. Her fingers flew over the controls as she closed their airlock hatch and maneuvered the ship away.

“Six,” he said.

“How long ago was that?”

“It has been a couple of minutes since the computer made an announcement,” Yumi said.

“That’s because it was a ruse, nothing more,” Alisa said. “And we’re going to need another ruse if we want to get our people back. A big one. I wonder what the odds are that the mining ship is still out at the edge of the asteroid field and that the small attack craft we saw is what they’re flying the prisoners away in. If we could catch it before the pirates reunited with their mother ship…”

“We would still be outgunned,” Leonidas said.

Outgunned, right. A polite way of saying the freighter did not have weapons at all. What she had was two men in combat armor.

“We’ll have to catch them and board their ship,” Alisa said.

Leonidas grunted. “It’s more likely that they’ll see us, catch us, and board our ship.”

“Well,” Alisa said, thinking as she turned the Nomad so it could fly through the tunnel, “that could work too. Maybe certain well-armed and armored people could lie in hiding near the airlock and rush aboard their ship to take it over while their search party is in our ship looking for us.”

The pirates might have superior numbers and superior ships, but Alisa had one advantage, a well-trained cyborg in top-of-the-line combat armor. Unfortunately, her well-trained cyborg was making a sour face at her words.

“How did they get in through the security trap?” Yumi asked, pointing toward the place where the Nomad had been held on the way in.

“Uh, that’s a good question.” With everything else going on, Alisa had forgotten about that. She turned in her seat. “Leonidas? That scan that searched our ship—it let us in because you were on board, right? It was programmed to let cyborgs—or cyborg parts—through? It assumed that whatever imperial ship brought cyborgs in would be delivering them to the scientists to work on?”

He hesitated, as if ingrained instincts told him not to give any information to Alliance pilots, but eventually he nodded. “Delivering them to Dr. Bartosz for upgrades, repairs, or initial installs, yes.”

“But you had never been here before today?”

“No, Dr. Bartosz usually came to the Corps headquarters to do the work. But I’d heard of men being sent here if he was busy with research.”

“Is he the one who initially… made you?”

Leonidas’s lips twisted, and she thought he would object to the term. Instead, he said, “Like Victor Frankenstein himself.”

“Ah.” Alisa remembered him objecting to being called anything other than human, but here he was, making a connection to an Old Earth legend, Frankenstein’s monster. There was a dark expression in his eyes. It was not sorrow, not exactly, but it made her regret calling him a mech earlier when she had been angry. “Is he the one who was dead on the floor in the lab?”

“Yes. I saw the name tag on his lab coat.”

“I’m sorry,” she said quietly.

Surprise flickered across his face, but he sublimated the emotion quickly. “We weren’t close.”

“He was just someone you thought would have answers?”

Leonidas ticked his fingernail on the control panel in front of her seat. “Pay attention to your flying, Marchenko.”

“You’re not the captain here, Cyborg,” she said, crossing her second and third finger in the classic screw-you gesture. It didn’t matter that he was right—she should be watching the tunnel ahead. She didn’t take orders from him.

Surprisingly, he smiled slightly.

“Uhh, so,” Beck said—Alisa had forgotten that he and Yumi were hovering in the corridor, that she had invited them to help come up with a plan. “What did we decide after that little exchange?”

Leonidas’s expression grew grim. “That they might have a cyborg too. Or more than one.”

Just when she had been thinking that Leonidas would be her singular advantage…

“Cyborg pirates? Those exist?” Beck asked.

“With the empire gone, there’s nobody left to pay the salaries of career soldiers,” Leonidas said. “People do what they have to do to survive.”

Alisa thought about asking what had brought him to that junkyard on Dustor, but they had navigated more than halfway through the tunnel. Soon, the distant stars of the galaxy would come into view, and she would have a pirate ship to hunt down. She glanced at the sensor display, wondering if anything would show up yet. She did not see any blips, but the denseness of the ore packed into the asteroid around them might be dulling the sensors’ effectiveness. She would have to wait until they were out in open space.

The stars soon came into sight, along with the body of another asteroid tumbling slowly in the distance. Alisa accelerated toward the opening, eager to have room to maneuver again, the freedom to fly.

A bleep came from the sensor display. She glanced back as they soared out of the asteroid, then cursed. A ship was waiting for them, a huge ship.

She reversed the thrusters to brake, having some notion of flying back into the tunnel, but it was too late. Alarms clamored, and the control panel lit up with warnings as a grab beam clamped onto them.

This time, it wasn’t a trap placed by the security station. The hulking mass of the miles-long mining ship hovered right over the tunnel exit. And it had them in its clutches.

Chapter 14

Bangs and thumps sounded on the other side of the airlock hatch. Alisa stood by herself in the cargo hold, the weapons belt hanging at her waist the only sign that she might put up a fight. She would be foolish to do so, however. It had crossed her mind to station all of her people behind cover and open fire when the pirates charged in, but they would be in combat armor, and would far outnumber her forces.

Besides, a firefight wouldn’t do anything to free Mica and Alejandro. Better for her to stand here, as she was, and be the distraction. She had stuffed Beck, Yumi, and Leonidas into one of the hidden nooks in the cargo hold—the entrance looked like nothing more than a bulkhead to an observer. She hoped that the pirates would take her and not search too hard for others. She had considered climbing into that nook herself, leaving an empty ship for them to find, but the pirates would surely search until they found crew. They would know the ship hadn’t been flying itself.

She smiled, remembering Beck and Leonidas both arguing to have the honor of being the decoy, both saying that being captured might be even worse for a woman. She wouldn’t argue that, but they were the most likely to be able to sneak onto the ship after she was taken and free everyone. As much as she hated the idea of needing to be saved—and in putting her fate in someone else’s hands—this seemed most logical. She just hoped she wouldn’t regret it.

The hatch banged open.

Alisa could have locked it, but then they would have torched their way in, and the ship might not have been spaceworthy afterward. The odds were stacked against her, but she still had the vain hope that she might collect her people and fly away from this.

The boarding party appeared to be the same group of pirates that she had seen on the camera, men wearing a mishmash of combat armor and weapons. Her gut tightened when she spotted something she hadn’t noticed in the footage, tufts of hair adorning several of their belts. Human hair. Scalps.

The pirates charged onto the ship, surrounding her, six blazer rifles and pistols pointed at her.

Alisa stood with her arms spread, struggling to keep from panicking. Maybe she should have asked Yumi about that breathing thing she did. She reasoned that if the men started pummeling her—or worse—right here in the cargo hold that Leonidas and the others would come out to stop it. They couldn’t see what was happening from their hidden niche, but they would hear if she started screaming. She gulped, hoping she was not given a reason to start screaming.

Four more men in armor jogged into the cargo hold. They diverted immediately toward the stairs, charging up to search the rest of the ship. Even if their suits had sensor units, they shouldn’t be able to see the life forms hidden in the walls—that nook was shielded. Alisa’s mother had hidden her meager valuables inside of it. It was likely that some past owner of the Nomad had installed the space for smuggling cargo.

One of the pirates came forward and unclasped her weapons belt, taking her guns and multitool. Then he stepped back, lifting his rifle and aiming at her chest again, as the others were still doing.

Alisa waited for someone to talk, to ask her for the story she had rehearsed, the story that explained that yes, she was the only one left on this ship. No, of course she did not have any allies… The pirates had already taken her people.

Heavy boots clanged in the distance, someone walking across the landing bay that the Nomad had been sucked into by that grab beam. The even tread had an ominous ring to it. As did the way the pirates stood utterly still, waiting for the owner of the tread to arrive.

Alisa’s breath caught when a man in crimson combat armor strode through the hatchway, a rifle cradled in his arms. There weren’t any scalps dangling from the utility belt, but she doubted that meant she would be safe with him.

The owner of the armor wore his helmet, and was not close enough for her to see through the faceplate, but she could not help but think that it was Leonidas, that he had somehow gotten outside of the ship. But no, she had locked him into the cubby not five minutes ago. This was someone else. Someone else in Cyborg Corps armor. She hoped it was just some scruffy pirate who had managed to steal the suit, not someone that could equal—or best—Leonidas in a fight. But she recalled the discussion they’d had about the security trap on the station, about the possibility that the pirates, too, had a cyborg.

The red suit stopped in front of her, the pirates shifting to the side to make room.

“One girl?” a hollow voice rang out from inside the helmet. “I put on all of this for one girl?” The gauntleted hand flicked, gesturing toward the owner’s torso.

“The rest of the men are searching for more, Sublime Commander,” a nervous-sounding pirate said.

Sublime Commander? Alisa almost choked on the ostentatious title. Only a pirate…

The figure lowered his rifle, letting it dangle on its shoulder harness, and lifted his hands, thumbing the buttons that released the helmet. The man—or the cyborg?—lifted it free. He gazed down at her. With short black hair, dark eyes, and bronze skin, nothing about his features reminded Alisa of Leonidas, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t a cyborg. It wasn’t as if those people were genetically related. As far as she knew, they were just men who fit the physical criteria and volunteered for the procedure and the life in the military. This fellow did have a thickly muscled neck, and he would have been tall and brawny even without the armor adding mass.

He quirked a smile at her and stepped forward, lifting a hand. Alisa tried to skitter back, but the muzzle of a rifle poked her between the shoulders. Even if she’d had more room, it would not have mattered. That hand darted in with a viper’s speed—maybe more than a viper’s speed—and grabbed her by the front of her shirt and jacket. He lifted her from her feet, nearly ripping the material of her shirt and half-choking her in the process.

A cruel glint entered his eyes. Apparently, he enjoyed half-choking women.

“You don’t look like an imperial officer,” he observed.

“Nothing gets by those cyborg eyes, does it?” she gasped out, struggling to breathe. Being lippy with this thug was probably even more ill-advised than being lippy with Leonidas, but she had more in mind than annoying him. She wanted to see his reaction, to find out if he was a cyborg. The servos in the combat armor could have given a regular man the strength to lift her—she wasn’t exactly a behemoth.

“Nothing,” he breathed, leaning his face close to hers. “Where is he?”

“Who?”

“The imperial officer who had the command codes to lower the shields on my bombers.”

Oh, shit. If her feet hadn’t been dangling above the ground, Alisa would have kicked herself for her mistake. Why hadn’t she claimed to be an imperial officer? There had been hundreds of thousands of soldiers in the empire’s armies. It wasn’t as if he could have known if she had lied.

“You think other people haven’t gotten those codes?” Alisa tried for a laugh—it came out like more of a strangled cough. What were the odds that this brute would put her down someday soon?

“You couldn’t use them even if you had them, little girl.”

She sneered at him. “I can use a lot of things I’m not supposed to.”

Damn it, that had sounded more clever in her head. Obviously, there was a shortage of oxygen reaching her brain.

More boots clanged on the metal of her walkways.

“Haven’t found anything, Sublime Commander,” one of the pirates reported, the scalps on his belt swaying as he trotted down the steps. “Might be she’s the only one here. We got the engineer and the doctor. Could be her whole crew.”

“She’s not alone. The bears would have gotten her if she had been wandering around that station alone.”

The pirate who had reported touched a scar on his cheek. “That’s the truth. Glad you’re here to go in with us next time, sir. Lost three men last month when we tried. Don’t know how them bastards got on that asteroid, but they’re not looking to let the station go easy.” He looked at Alisa. “Reckon we can go in soon, seeing as this ship hasn’t blowed itself up yet.”

The cyborg—Alisa refused to think of him as the sublime commander—lowered her to the deck. Unfortunately, he did not let her go. Instead, he yanked her close, and her shoulder clunked hard against his torso protector. His hand wrapped around her throat before she could attempt to squirm away. Three suns, she hated feeling helpless, but it was as if his hands were ahridium vises clamped around her.

Elbowing him in the gut or the crotch was out of the question—aside from his head, every inch of him was covered in that armor. And she was too short to thunk her skull into his nose.

“Imperial officer,” the cyborg called, his voice echoing in the empty cargo hold. “If you want this woman to live, show yourself.”

Several of the pirates shifted, pointing their weapons toward the walls of the hold instead of at her. Alisa tried to swallow, but the hand wrapped around her neck prevented it. This wasn’t at all how she had imagined this exchange going. She was supposed to be a diversion that would allow her team to sneak in and strike, not a pawn to be used against them. Why couldn’t the pirates have just dragged her off and thrown her in a cell with the others?

“So slow to respond,” the cyborg said. “Hm, where shall we start?” He pushed Alisa out to arm’s length.

“We could take her, sir,” one of the men offered, leering at her chest. “That ought to flush anyone out. And if there’s nobody to flush, then we’d still have a good time.”

“Take her where?” the cyborg asked.

Alisa stared at him. He couldn’t possibly have missed the man’s meaning.

“You know, screw her, sir.”

“Oh.” The cyborg’s nose wrinkled, as if he was too good for such base actions. “I doubt you want your cock hanging out if a bunch of armed men jump out of hiding.”

“I’d risk it. She’s got a nice ass.”

Alisa gritted her teeth, more annoyed with her helplessness than the conversation—she’d heard worse in the army.

“What are you doing here, Cyborg?” she asked to buy time while she groped for inspiration. What could she do to get herself out of this situation? “It’s lowly working for pirates after being a soldier in the empire, isn’t it?”

Not that she considered the empire any better than a bunch of pirates, but he doubtlessly would.

His lip quirked up in what seemed a regular gesture for him, half smile, half sneer. “You think I’m working for them? I lead this outfit now.”

Alisa looked to the ring of pirates and got a few nods of confirmation.

“Imperial officer,” the cyborg called again. “You’ve had your warning.”

Before Alisa had a chance to brace herself, his thumb dug into the tender flesh under the edge of her jaw. Her body went rigid, her spine stiffening, and a gasp slipped out. His other hand went down to the side of her stomach, digging in like a knife, finding an excruciating pressure point. She couldn’t keep from crying out, especially since the iron bar from that grid had dug a gouge near that spot earlier. She started bleeding again, warmth trickling down her side. She barely noticed, as he switched to other carefully selected points, knowing better than she what would create pain so intense that she couldn’t keep from crying out. And feeling utterly useless. A failure. How had she even ended up in this mess? She just wanted to find her daughter and make a new home, start over with the only family she had left.

Metal clanged.

With the pain hazing her mind, it took Alisa a moment to realize what it signified. The cover on the hidden hatch being kicked out.

The pain lessened as the cyborg loosened his grip on her, letting his fingers merely rest on the pressure points rather than digging in. Warm tears trickled down her cheeks. She hated herself for it, but she was relieved that the others had given themselves up.

The cyborg’s grip tightened again, and she cringed, anticipating more pain. But he wasn’t attacking her. He had stiffened himself, his head turned to the side, toward Leonidas. He was walking toward them slowly, his helmet off, his hands empty at his sides, though he still wore his armor, armor that appeared identical to that which the pirate leader wore.

“You,” the pirate cyborg breathed. He sounded stunned.

Though Alisa didn’t want to look at Leonidas, didn’t want him to see the tears in her eyes or how weak she had been, curiosity made her turn her head. This new cyborg recognized him.

“Me,” Leonidas agreed, his voice cool, his face a mask. His eyes were locked upon the pirate leader; he did not acknowledge Alisa whatsoever.

“Never thought I’d see you hide behind a woman’s skirts, Colonel.”

Colonel? No wonder he had been so comfortable flinging commands around. So much for her initial guess that he was a sergeant. The revelation did not matter much now, though, not unless he had outranked this would-be pirate king and could cow him.

“That wasn’t the original plan,” Leonidas said.

“No shit.” The pirate cyborg laughed. The men stirred, exchanging uncertain glances with each other. “So you’re the one who killed my bombers. Damn, sir, one of those was my own craft that I flew out here. You know, back before I had an enormous ship.” He spread a hand toward the ceiling and walls to encompass the lumbering mining vessel.

Alisa held her breath, finding that “sir” that had slipped out worthy of hope.

“You’re working with pirates now?” Leonidas asked, his tone neutral, not as condemning as Alisa would have expected.

“As I was telling your girl, they’re my pirates.” The cyborg clenched a fist and smiled.

None of the ten men watching said anything to deny the statement.

“I took the ship, made the current leader my lieutenant,” the cyborg continued. “We’re going to start a whole fleet out here. I even thought I might get more of our old battalion to join. You interested, Colonel?”

Alisa nearly choked on his audacity. After Leonidas’s talk of honor and after he had balked at her scavenging that station, she sincerely doubted he would be interested in joining up with people who fired on unarmed freighters and wore scalps on their belts.

“You want me to work under you, Malik?” Leonidas arched an eyebrow.

“I did commandeer the ship and do the hard work whipping these men into shape. I wouldn’t be looking to lord it over you, Colonel. You were always fair. Not like those human officers, all stiff from having their pricks shoved up their asses.”

“We’re human too,” Leonidas said in that familiar dry tone of his. Alisa could read the disapproval in there. She wasn’t sure if the pirate cyborg—Malik—could.

“We’re better than human.”

“I see.”

“Join us, Colonel. Join my team. If you don’t… well, I’m sure you can understand. I’d rather not get in a fight with you, but I can’t have you competing with me, either.” Malik’s dark eyes narrowed, a warning in them.

Alisa lost some of her hope that he might stand down if Leonidas gave an order.

Leonidas tilted his head. “I’d have to consider it. Let’s talk.”

Malik hesitated, his eyes still slitted. “And your people?” He flicked his fingers casually toward Alisa, but she sensed a trap being laid. If Leonidas demanded that she and the others be left alone, would this Malik find it suspicious? How far did he trust what sounded like his old commander?

“My people?” Leonidas grunted. “I needed a ride out here. She’s the pilot of this barge. I’ve known her for a week.”

“So you don’t care about her fate? You rushed out here quickly enough when she started crying.”

Alisa glared at the cyborg. If not for that armor, she would have kicked him. She was tempted to do it, anyway, but she would only end up breaking her toes.

“I’m not an animal, Malik,” Leonidas said, that dryness in his tone again, as if none of this particularly bothered or concerned him. “I don’t want to see a woman tortured.”

“Who cares about human women? You’re too damned noble, Colonel. You think any of them care worm suck about us?”

For the first time, Leonidas looked over at Alisa, meeting her eyes. She held his gaze, but she couldn’t help but think of the way she had called him “cyborg” for most of the week. And “mech,” Beck’s favorite slur, when she had been pissed at him.

“No, likely not,” Leonidas agreed.

“Well, we don’t have to torture them. These craven bastards used to kill people, scalp ’em and make jewelry from their bones before I came along. They were trying to make themselves seem scary, or so they say. I figure let’s make some money. Sell them into slavery. The trade’s picking up nicely without anyone out here policing the Dark Reaches. We can make a lot of money. Carve out an empire of our own. There’d be nobody telling us what to do anymore. Say, were you in the station? Did you find the doctor? I figure the same thing brought us both out here.”

“Oh?”

“The latest parts he was working on—to make us stronger, faster.” Malik clenched his fist again, his eyes lighting up.

Alisa shifted uneasily. Leonidas was hard to read right now. Was that what had brought him to the station? A desire for improvement parts? A little upgrade to the operating system?

“I did come out to see him,” Leonidas said. “He’s dead.”

“Damn. I was afraid of that when I heard from my new men that they’d found the place but half of them had gotten themselves eaten by animals while investigating it.” Malik thumped his fist against his torso, the gauntlets clanging hollowly off the chest plate. “I plan to deal with those animals later, but let’s go talk in private without the goons listening, eh?” He pointed at one of his “goons.” “Take the woman and whoever else is in that bolt hole and dump them in the pens with the others.” He extended a hand toward the open hatchway, an invitation. “Colonel?”

Leonidas inclined his head once and walked toward the hatch with Malik. He did not look back as the pirates closed on Alisa, grabbing her and hoisting her from her feet.

Chapter 15

Beck put up a fight, but he was too vastly outnumbered. Already disarmed, Alisa could not help at all. The pirates searched them, removed their weapons and valuables, hoisted them all over their broad armored shoulders, and took them out of the Nomad and into a bay the size of a hangar in the air yard back on Perun. Four dirigibles could have fit in it with room to spare.

Alisa found herself twisting to give the freighter a long look as they traveled away from it. When she had first decided to find it and refurbish it for the trip to Perun, she hadn’t liked the idea. She hadn’t wanted anything to do with the Nomad. But flying it this last week had stirred up old memories, memories of more than learning of her mother’s death. There had been memories of the past and of good times growing up in the ship, of going on adventures with her mother and of meeting interesting people and seeing interesting places.

As her captors passed another ship and the Nomad disappeared from sight, Alisa felt a twinge of distress that had nothing to do with her injuries. She was afraid she wouldn’t see the freighter again, and that disturbed her more than she would have expected.

As they traveled through the vast mining vessel, Alisa tried to note their route so she could find her way back later. Unfortunately, she did not have the best view as she flopped about on her captor’s shoulder, her pain renewed as the armor banged against her injuries. But she had a sense of massive rows of mining equipment, of an indoor smelter with robots processing metals, and of huge storage rooms of unprocessed ore. Now and then, flying robots zipped overhead on some errand or another.

They seemed to walk a half a mile before they reached corridors filled with what she assumed were crew quarters and the main living areas. All she saw were pirates and more pirates wearing all manner of scruffy clothing with all manner of weapons hanging from their belts. Many of them had scalps dangling from those belts, even boys who could not have been more than thirteen or fourteen. Alisa wondered if Malik truly meant to spare her people’s lives long enough for them to reach some slave auction. And how insane was it that such a fate sounded like an improvement over their current situation? Slaves. What a crazy notion. Slavery had always been outlawed in the empire. She couldn’t even imagine life toiling for someone else with no freedom to be found.

But it was life, and if she was kept alive long enough to be sold, she could find a way to escape. One way or another, she would make it back to her daughter. Of course, she would prefer to do it with her ship and to escape sooner rather than later.

Her captors turned into a narrow corridor with old-fashioned iron bars lining the fronts of a dozen cells. Still dangling from a man’s shoulder, Alisa glimpsed unfamiliar people packed into almost all of them. Most had contusions, scrapes, and other signs of injury. Some of the women were naked. Her gut twisted with unease as she remembered how the one pirate had shown an undue interest in her ass.

A pirate stopped in front of one cell and leaned a garishly beaded earstar toward a reader while others moved to cover him with rifles. The chip in the wall chatted with the chip in his personal device, and the iron bars slid up into the ceiling. Alisa found herself dumped inside, her wounds protesting anew and eliciting a gasp of pain. She rolled to a stop in front of a familiar gray robe as the bars slid back shut. The pirates left without a word.

Alejandro helped her to sit up.

“I’m afraid I can’t say I’m happy to see you here, Captain,” Mica said—she sat against the wall, her knees drawn up and her arms hugged around them.

“Not happy to see you two here, either.” Alisa started to scoot toward a wall as Beck and Yumi were ushered in behind her—she needed something to lean against for support.

Alejandro stopped her with a hand on her shoulder. “Captain, I must ask.” He glanced toward the bars, but the pirates had already shuffled away. He also glanced toward a corner of the ceiling where a dark round smudge might have been a camera. Or a squashed spider. “I must ask,” he whispered, “did they loot the ship?”

“Mica’s ruse fooled them,” Alisa said. “They left in a hurry.”

He slumped back against the wall.

“None of our equipment was scrounged as far as I saw,” she said, “but the Nomad is stuck in their docking bay, I’m afraid. Oh, and I watched the video footage when I was trying to figure out where you all went. They did steal our duffel bags, probably stuffed in whatever looked valuable in our rooms. Which wasn’t much in my…” She trailed off, the horrified expression on Alejandro’s face making her stop.

He lurched to his feet, almost tumbling over her in his agitation. “Shit, shit, shit.”

He paced to the wall, slapped it, and pushed off and paced in the other direction. There was only room in the tight space for four steps. A handful of gaunt, bearded men in the cell opposite from them watched him with hollow eyes.

“Is he allowed to swear when he’s wearing that robe?” Mica asked.

“I don’t fully know the rules,” Alisa said, watching his agitated pacing. She supposed this was not the time to ask him to look at her punctures and gashes. They didn’t have a first-aid kit, anyway.

Alejandro gripped his hair, then shoved his fingers through it with both hands as he turned again. He muttered furiously to himself, and Alisa only caught snatches, “…get caught up in this… a fool… shouldn’t have trusted… fail. Failure. Can’t fail.”

Alisa did not know what to say, or if she should say anything. She already felt guilty for getting everyone involved in this. Oh, Leonidas was truly the one to blame, but she had known they would be taking a detour when she invited her passengers on. And she hadn’t been up front with them. She had waited until they were underway to announce that the Nomad would be heading out to the T-Belt. And now this. If they didn’t find a way off this ship, the time lost for the detour would be the least of their problems.

“Where’s our cyborg?” Mica asked as Alejandro continued to pace.

“Communing with his own kind,” Alisa said. She looked at Yumi, half expecting her to lose her composure the way Alejandro was. At the least, Alisa expected one of her passengers to curse at her and make accusations. She surely deserved them.

But Yumi had found a corner of the cell and was sitting cross-legged, her eyes closed as she practiced some breathing exercise. Interesting time to meditate.

Alejandro stopped in front of one of the walls, placed his palms on the drab gray metal, and thumped his forehead against it. Maybe Yumi could teach him to meditate.

“What’s that mean?” Mica asked.

“Turns out the pirate leader is someone in matching red armor,” Alisa said, scooting over to sit against the wall beside her. “Oh, and they know each other. Malik is the leader’s name, but he calls himself Sublime Commander. He called Leonidas Colonel.”

Alejandro was still leaning his hands against the wall, his head down, but he rotated his neck to look at them.

“But I figure the doctor already knew that,” Alisa said. “That Leonidas was an officer high up in the Cyborg Corps.”

Alejandro dropped his head again. If he knew, he didn’t care. Not right now. What had he been carrying in that bag that was so important? Some secret plans that would magically bring the empire back to full power? That was an appalling thought, but probably a silly one. One man couldn’t undo what had happened, not when it had taken tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people and fifty years of planning and four years of all out combat to bring down the empire.

“What does that mean exactly?” Mica said. “He’s not going to help us?”

“I don’t know,” Alisa said, “but he and Malik walked off practically arm in arm, and he didn’t look back at me. He seemed fine with the idea that we’d be sold into slavery.”

“Slavery?” Mica pointed a finger at Alisa’s nose. “Captain, this is why I’m always pessimistic. Bad things happen all the time. Good things are an oddity.”

“They certainly have been this week.” Alisa let her head clunk back against the wall. It hurt, but not any more than the rest of her body. “Alejandro?” she asked carefully, worried that he would snap at her and blame her for all this. “If you know something about Leonidas that could help us… I mean, should he deign to visit us or if our paths should cross before we leave this ship, if there was something we could say to persuade him—”

“You mean to blackmail him,” Mica interrupted.

“Persuade him,” Alisa emphasized. “If there is something, I’d sure like to know so I could try to use it.”

“I would be open to blackmailing him,” Beck said. The pirates had removed his armor, and he almost looked small without it. It did not help that he wore a sad, defeated expression as he slumped against the wall.

“I only know him by reputation,” Alejandro said, looking at the wall instead of her. “He was around the capital from time to time, getting orders for his troops.”

“The Cyborg Corps?”

“The Cyborg Corps.”

“Was he in charge of them? All of them?”

Alejandro lowered his hands. “Do you have any thoughts as to how to get out of here?”

“Not yet,” Alisa said, surprised he was looking at her. “Why, did you expect some genius ideas to pop out of my head?”

“You’ve done satisfactorily so far. And you seem determined.”

“I’ve got a reason to be determined.” Alisa pictured her daughter’s face in her mind, wishing it hadn’t been so long since she had seen it in more than a photograph.

“Good. As do I.”

“Not just taking the tour of the system and spreading your religiosity then?” Mica asked.

“Not exactly. Though I can prepare a lecture or sermon for you later, if you feel the need.”

“I vote you lecture the pirates, Doc,” Beck said.

“Seconded,” Alisa said.

Yumi pressed her hands together in front of her chest and inhaled noisily through the back of her throat. Alisa wasn’t sure if that counted as a third or not.

Alejandro crouched in front of Alisa, looking her in the eyes. “I have to get my bag back, and we have to escape. There’s something in there—the pirates can’t have it. It cannot be permitted. Our escape has to happen.”

“I’m amenable to that,” Alisa said, though she questioned whether they would truly be able to find the pirates’ booty room in this giant ship. If she got out of this cell, she intended to beeline for the Nomad and pilot it out. Unfortunately, with that grab beam of theirs, it would not be easy. She did not want to escape the bay, only to be sucked back in again. No, they would have to distract the pirates and find a way to disable the grab beam generator. She already had a daunting task without promising to hunt for the pirates’ loot. She didn’t even know yet how they were going to get out of this cell.

“I’ll tell you what I know about Leonidas if you swear to help me get that bag. Swear it.” Alejandro sounded like a boy on the playground rather than a man in his fifties, but it was clear from his eyes that he was utterly serious.

Alisa licked her lips. Hadn’t she just been listing all the reasons why looking for a few duffel bags would be suicidal? Was satisfying her curiosity about Leonidas worth making this deal? She might never even see him again. Even though she would like to think he would not take up with a pirate, he had taken up with her, hadn’t he? Someone he clearly disapproved of, someone he had caught stealing cyborg implants to sell… This Malik had a lot more power and resources to get him to wherever he needed to go for whatever the next step in his quest was.

Aware of Alejandro looking at her, his dark eyes earnest and determined, Alisa took a deep breath. She hated to make false promises, but maybe she could somehow pull this off. With as many other things as had to go right for them to escape, what would adding one more detour to the list matter? Besides, if one of her people found the loot room and threatened to blow it up, maybe it would distract the pirates while the rest got to the ship. The brutes probably had a huge vault of goodies they had stolen from the miners and anyone else who had flown into their web.

Alisa looked through the bars toward their cellmates across the way, wondering if they might be a resource. Eight men were packed in there, and she had seen numerous people in the other cells too.

“If we can get out of here,” Alisa told Alejandro, “I’ll make sure we look for your bag on the way out. I promise.”

Alejandro frowned slightly, no doubt noticing that she had not exactly given a promise to get the bag back, but what could she do? She wasn’t in a position of power here. She wasn’t even sure why he thought she would be more likely to come up with a plan and lead an escape than he. He had to be twenty years older than she was, more experienced in life. But, she reasoned, perhaps not more experienced with getting out of jams.

“As long as we’re making promises,” Beck said, “can we promise to get my combat armor on the way out too? That’s the most valuable thing I’ve ever had in my life, and until my sauce line gets going, I reckon I’m going to have to fight for my tindarks. Can’t fight without a good suit.”

Alisa patted his shoulder. “Maybe they’ll be stored in the same place.”

“Just so long as some slimy pirate hasn’t claimed it for his own. I don’t like another man’s sweat in my suit.”

“I have nothing I need in my trunk,” Yumi said, “but if we can get it, I would also be pleased. After all, half of my fare is inside of it.”

“Can I say,” Alisa said, looking around at her little group, pleased that nobody was curled in a ball on the floor and moaning that the end was near, “that I’m glad that everyone is so certain that we are going to get out.”

“Not everyone,” Mica grumbled. “I expect we’ll be raped and tortured and made to watch, and that half of us will get killed before we get thrown into this slavery ring. And then the other half will wish they had been killed too.”

“Sounds like a good reason to expedite our escape then.” Alisa pushed herself to her feet.

Alejandro stood up next to her.

“About Leonidas,” she said, “should I work him into my plans or not?”

“I probably know less about him than you wish, but he’s known to be an honorable man.”

Alisa lifted her brows. She had already guessed that. The problem was that she didn’t know if Leonidas considered her honorable and worthy of helping out.

“His name is Colonel Hieronymus Adler,” Alejandro said. “I would guess Leonidas is a call sign, though he could have made it up on the spot. He was the commander of the Cyborg Corps for the first couple of years of the war. I’m not sure what he did after that—you have to understand that I wasn’t a military doctor, and I rarely interacted with soldiers—but I believe he may have done some special assignments for the emperor.”

“Oh.” Alisa didn’t know what else to say. If Leonidas had been the emperor’s special man, that meant he was even more of an enemy to her and the Alliance than she had realized. She definitely shouldn’t factor him into her plans or expect him to risk himself for people that he, too, would consider enemies. “Do you know what his mission is? Why he was so determined to go out to that research station? And if he was one of the emperor’s favorites, why was he stranded on Dustor?”

“He hasn’t confided in me. I don’t think he recognized me when we met or considered me someone who might be a confidant.”

Might be a confidant? Was Alejandro saying that he would help Leonidas if he could? Or just that they were both from the empire and could have stuck together?

“Do you think his mission is personal or that someone sent him out here? Is it like Malik said, that the cyborgs were drawn to the research station because they wanted upgraded parts?”

Alejandro hesitated. “After the emperor was killed, I don’t think there was anyone left back home who could have sent him on a special assignment.”

Alisa held back a frown, though she noted that hesitation. Did that mean he was lying?

“So, you think his mission is personal?” she asked.

“I have no way of knowing.”

“All right.” Alisa walked the three steps to the bars, not sure she had gotten any useful information in exchange for her promise. Just Leonidas’s name and confirmation that he was someone she should go on hating, or at least thinking of as an enemy. If he had truly been that high up in the fleet chain of command and that close to the emperor, having him roaming around free out here was a dangerous thing for the Alliance.

She nodded toward one of the men across the way who looked over at her movement. She tapped a bar to make sure it wasn’t charged with electricity, then draped her arms around them. “Any chance you fellows would like to chat?”

“Not unless one of you girls wants to come over and keep us company,” one of the scruffier men said. He was missing an eye. The wound looked recent. “Those bastards didn’t see fit to supply our cell with any women.”

Alisa had seen the women in another cell, and they hadn’t looked like they wanted to be molested by fellow prisoners. They had looked like they had already been molested enough. She shuddered, thinking of Mica’s pessimistic predictions. She needed information, so she forced herself to continue the chat, to be friendly.

“Any preferences as to which one?” she asked.

“You’ll do. They haven’t even uglied you up yet. Come on over.”

Alisa ticked the bar. “It seems the pirates don’t want us commingling.” She pressed the side of her face into the gap between the bars, peering as far up and down the hall as she could see. She spotted someone’s sleeve next to the exit. They had at least one guard.

“I don’t care what those mother-forsaken thugs want,” one of the other men grumbled. “I just want to get out of here.”

“How long have you been in that cell?”

“Months. Sparky and Phan are the only ones who get to go for walks now and then.” The speaker waved toward two men lying on one side of the cell.

“Why are they special?”

“Engineer and mechanic. The pirates aren’t a real educated lot. They’ve got no use for those of us who were just miners, but if something goes wrong with the ship, they come and collect someone who knows how to fix it.”

Alisa moved along the bars so she stood in front of the specialists. Aware of the guard and the cameras, she made a psst sound and waved, hoping one would come closer. One man did not acknowledge her at all. The other one glowered.

“You want them to move, you’ll have to show Sparky some tits,” the man she had been speaking with said, giving her a lurid wink.

“Actually,” someone else said, “I’ve heard Sparky would rather see the tits of her muscleman back there.”

Beck’s eyebrows flew up, and he touched his chest in a self-conscious gesture.

“I’ll arrange that if we all get out of here,” Alisa said.

“Really, Captain. That wasn’t in the job description.”

“I’m positive I asked for open-mindedness and versatility down in the fine print of my recruiting flyer.”

“Which of those things was supposed to imply I’d disrobe for other men?” Beck asked.

“The first, I think.” Alisa nodded to the glowering engineer. “Sparky, how often do they come get you?”

“Every few days. This ship is fifty years old. Things go wrong often, especially since they’re not caring for her like they should.” He sighed and ran the palm of his hand along the wall of his cell in a sad caress.

“And you fix the problems for them?”

“Don’t have much choice.”

“Have you ever thought of—” Alisa lowered her voice, “—creating a problem? Sabotaging something and using the diversion to escape?” She ticked the bars again. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t go away if the power went out. It was too bad the cells did not use typical forcefields.

“The last engineer had thoughts like that,” Sparky said. “They scalped him, then dumped his body into a vat of molten ore.”

“Did the last engineer have a pilot with a freighter in the bay, ready to give you a ride out?”

“Kiss that ship goodbye, girl. They’ve probably already scrapped it.”

Alisa forced herself not to shudder or be daunted by that idea. “So, you wouldn’t be willing to sabotage something the next time you’re out? Even if Beck took off his shirt and danced for you?”

“Captain,” Beck said in a pained voice.

Sparky shook his head.

One of the other miners said, “You’re not going to escape. You think everyone who gets shoved in here doesn’t think about it? Forget it. We’ve tried everything. Chances got even slimmer after the cyborg took over. The guards pay more attention, and you better believe they’re recording you right now. If you make trouble, they’ll kill you. Best to go along with things and hope for a good owner or a chance to escape once you’re sold on the auction block.”

The guard walked into view, as if to emphasize the miner’s point. He banged the muzzle of his blazer rifle against the bars in front of Alisa.

“Too much socializing down here.”

The miners turned away from him, their shoulders hunched. A few of them had holes in their shirts, revealing whip scars on their backs.

“You’re welcome to join in if you like,” Alisa told the guard. She doubted she could establish a rapport with him, but maybe she could get a few drops of information.

“With what?” the man asked. “Looking at your brute’s tits?”

“I’m amazed at how much interest there is in that.”

“Me too,” Beck muttered.

“Options are limited here.” The guard smirked.

“Say, Sparky, what kind of engine runs a ship this big?” Alisa asked.

Sparky looked at the guard, then gave her an incredulous look, as if he couldn’t believe she wanted to continue chatting with the man right there.

“A Molbydam 850,” Sparky muttered.

“Mica,” Alisa said, “that’s a smallish engine for a ship this big, isn’t it?”

Mica gave her a flat why-are-you-including-me-in-your-troublemaking look, but answered. “It’s the factory original for a Tolican Ore Driver. Nobody designed these ships to go fast. They just have to get their load from place to place.”

“This ship is fast enough,” Sparky said, sitting up. “Me and Hemm made plenty of modifications over the years, back when the company paid us well and didn’t make us sleep in cells with a bunch of sweaty men.”

“What kinds of modifications?” Mica stood up and joined Alisa at the bars. “I’ve seen a few ships blow up because some uneducated mechanics thought they were being clever.”

The guard seemed bored with the discussion and walked farther down the corridor, checking on the other cells.

“Keep talking to him,” Alisa whispered. “Make it sound like you know more about engines and this ship.”

“I do know more,” Mica said. “I grew up on a mining moon. I’ve seen every ship and configuration in the business.”

“Then it should be easy.”

“What should be?”

“Proving you’re the one the guards should select the next time they need something fixed.”

Mica’s eyes narrowed.

The guard ambled back toward them. Mica hesitated, but then launched into a lecture for the engineer, calling him a self-taught muck-for-brains who would likely get this ship blown up. Alisa gave her a surreptitious bright sun gesture, hand to chest, fingers splayed.

A door clanged open. Alisa hoped that meant a senior-ranking guard was coming, someone who might pass along word of Mica’s expertise if he heard about it. Instead, a familiar figure strolled into view. Malik.

The so-called Sublime Commander had removed his red armor and wore a sleeveless shirt that revealed thick arms and chiseled muscle, exactly what Alisa expected from a cyborg. He still wore the mottled black and gray uniform trousers of an imperial soldier, along with a flat ID chip on a neck chain. A rifle was slung on a strap across his back, and a long knife hung from a sheath on his belt.

Seeing him up close made Alisa want to step back as adrenaline surged through her veins. She couldn’t help it. After the war, she feared someone like this far more than she ever would one of the grubby pirates. It didn’t matter that both could kill her in exactly the same way.

A second man walked beside Malik. Alisa wished it had been Leonidas. Even if she didn’t think he would be a savior, she had a notion of what to expect from him by now. But it was one of the pirates from the cargo hold. He had also changed out of his combat armor, but she recognized the voice when he exchanged a few words with the guard. It was the one who had wanted to have some fun with her. Great.

She hoped that Malik and his buddy had come down to hand out lunch and had nothing more inimical in mind. Unfortunately, neither one was holding a box of ration bars.

“You.” Malik pointed at Alisa, barely glancing at the others in the cell.

“Me?”

Alisa made herself step back up to the bars, not wanting him to see her fear and also wanting a glimpse down the corridor. Had Leonidas come on this visit? Did he know about this visit? Where was he, anyway? When the two cyborgs had met, she hadn’t gotten the impression that Malik would do anything to make him disappear, but what did she know? Maybe what he had offered Leonidas had been a lie, and he had shot his old commander in the back as soon as he had a chance.

“Got a few questions for you,” Malik said, giving her that discomfiting half smile.

“I expect I know a lot less than you think.” Alisa couldn’t imagine what he thought she knew. Unless he had a question about the Star Nomad—and why would they?—she wouldn’t be the person to ask.

“We’ll find out,” his subordinate said, leering at Alisa’s breasts.

Malik thumped him in the chest. On the surface, it looked like a friendly thump, almost something done between buddies, but the force of it made the pirate stumble back and bump his shoulder blades on the bars across the way. Too bad none of the miners were poised to take advantage. One might have jumped forward, wrapped an arm around his throat, and broken his neck. Not that they would win an uprising with Malik there, but everyone here seemed so complacent, so accepting of their fate. Alisa wished they would fight, if only with words and spirit.

“Not until later for that, Bruiser,” Malik told his subordinate.

Bruiser. What a name.

“Sooner might help get her talking,” Bruiser said, leering again. “I can be forceful.”

The guard smirked. Malik just looked at him like he was an imbecile.

“Open it,” Malik told another guard that Alisa couldn’t see, someone near the door at the head of the corridor.

That meant there were three men and a cyborg out there. Unfortunately, Alisa did not see how her people could come out on top, even if they got a chance to charge out. If Malik hadn’t been there, maybe.

A clank sounded in the ceiling, and the grid of bars disappeared into holes up there. Malik reached for Alisa. Beck pulled her back and tried to step in the way. The guard stepped forward, pointing his rifle at him. Beck lifted his hands, as if to show he was only interested in putting himself between Alisa and Malik, then kicked out before that muzzle fully pointed at him. The rifle flew upward, and Beck flung himself at the man.

Malik lunged forward, moving too quickly to track. He caught Beck by the throat, halting his charge before it got far.

“Don’t,” Alisa yelled, reaching for Malik’s arm, knowing he could snap Beck’s neck easily. “Please.”

Malik paused and looked at her, his fingers wrapped around Beck’s neck but not squeezing all the way. Beck bared his teeth and grabbed his assailant’s forearm with both hands. The cyborg barely seemed to notice.

“He is your lover?” Malik asked Alisa.

“My security officer. I pay him to protect me from thugs. Whatever he does is my fault, so you should blame me, not him. Not his neck.”

Malik snorted. “Whatever you pay him, it’s too much.”

Beck grabbed his forearm and tried to kick him in the balls, but the cyborg lifted one thickly muscled thigh, blocking the attack easily. Alisa made a cutting motion, hoping Beck would pay attention. The odds were too ridiculously against them as long as Malik was there. Besides, she might be able to learn something if they took her someplace for questioning. Assuming she could avoid Bruiser’s attention.

“Did you hire the colonel too?” Malik tilted his head, watching her as he avoided everything Beck attempted.

“No.” Alisa figured she shouldn’t imply any relationship between her and Leonidas. She wasn’t sure if there was one, but just in case, she would not thwart whatever plans he might have. “I didn’t even want him on my ship.”

Malik snorted again. “Because he’s a cyborg.”

“Mostly because he’s imperial and I’m not. Fire and water, you understand.”

“Nobody’s imperial anymore. The war’s over.” Malik flung Beck away from him with no more effort than if he were tossing a wadded up ball of paper into a trash bin. Beck was hurled through the air, knocking Alejandro over before landing hard in the corner. His head struck the wall, and he slid down.

Alisa started toward him, worried that might have broken his neck after all, but Malik grabbed her before she could take more than a step. He yanked her into the corridor with enough force to take her from her feet. Fresh pain came from all the day’s injuries, and she clenched her teeth to keep from gasping. She tumbled against his chest, loathing that he could pull her around like a doll.

“Shut it,” Malik said.

The bars clanged back into place, separating Alisa from her people. Bruiser looked her up and down with a contented smile.

“Where are we going?” Alisa asked, focusing on the cyborg instead of the lusty creep. She feared Malik, there was no doubt about that, but at least he did not act like a sexual predator.

“Bruiser and I are going to have a chat with you.” A gleam of pleasure entered his dark eyes, and she wondered if she’d been too quick to judge his subordinate as the more vile person. “This way.”

Malik shoved her down the corridor with the gentleness of a jackhammer.

Chapter 16

Alisa stood in the center of a space that looked like a cross between a break room and a gym, with a table and chairs surrounded by weight-lifting equipment that had been creatively made from chains, cables, and spare parts that looked like they had come out of the smelter. The two doors leading to the room were shut, leaving her alone with Malik, Bruiser, and a simple wooden box resting on the table. Malik had searched her again, apparently not trusting that his pirates had done a good enough job, then handcuffed her wrists in front of her. She was not sure why he had bothered since he could thwart any attacks she might have come up with, but then the thought came to her that he might intend to leave her alone with Bruiser eventually. She dreaded that, but tried to tell herself that her odds of escaping would be better then.

“The colonel said he thought this was yours,” Malik said, walking to the table and putting a finger on the box.

“I’ve never seen it before,” Alisa said before it occurred to her to wonder why Leonidas had said that. Was it something out of his room? Something he did not want Malik knowing was his? If so, she did not appreciate him putting the onus on Alisa to explain it.

“No?” Malik asked. “It was in one of the cabins on your ship.”

Alisa almost said that one of the passengers had probably brought it on because the Nomad hadn’t had any personal effects left on it when she had gotten it, but she caught herself. If the box had been in someone’s bag, she did not want to get that person interrogated. Maybe this was Yumi’s stash of whatever it was she had intended to trade for her passage. Or maybe it was Alejandro’s missing item that meant so much to him.

“Was it?” Alisa asked. “What is it?”

Malik rested a hand on her shoulder, his fingers digging in slightly. It was more of a warning than an attack, but she had no doubt that he could crush her bones with those fingers. It made her appreciate that Leonidas, even if he had been grumpy on occasion, had never threatened her, physically or otherwise. She found herself wishing he was here, standing at her side, though that was silly. Like she had said, imperials and Alliance did not mix. Malik was wrong. For some people, the war would never be over.

“I believe you may be feigning ignorance,” Malik said softly.

Bruiser was watching from the doorway, and he bit his lip, his eyes gleaming as he leaned forward. Was the sick bastard getting excited at the notion that the cyborg might hurt her?

“Not me,” Alisa said. “I really am this ignorant. All I know how to do is fly. But maybe I can help you figure out whose box it is if you send your thug away.” Feeling audacious, she lifted her cuffs so she could pat Malik on one of his prodigious pecs. It was amazing his shirt did not rip from the strain of holding all those muscles in. She also wriggled her eyebrows at him. She had never been good at flirting her way out of trouble, but since she did not have a weapon or a ship to throw at him, she had to try what she could, so she thrust her chest toward him.

Her friendly pat and waggling eyebrows did not move him noticeably. He did not even give her chest a glance.

“Bruiser has been one of my loyal pirates since I took over,” Malik said. “He helped me overthrow his boss when he saw what I was.”

What he was? A megalomaniacal asshole?

“He knew that someone with my strength deserved to lead here,” Malik continued.

Yes, megalomaniacal asshole was the appropriate term.

“You have to reward your men once in a while to keep them loyal, and he’s taken a fancy to you.” Malik shrugged and stepped toward the table. “But first, I want to know what this is.”

He flicked the lid open, and a golden light filled the room. Alisa stared at it, forgetting thoughts of flirting. A sphere rested on a velvet cushion inside the box, the luminescent material alive with all the colors of the rainbow along with a few more. Within the surface of the orb, clouds and shapes swirled, morphing and changing in front of their eyes. It was beautiful, but Alisa had no idea what it was.

“Is it just a bauble?” Malik asked. “Or does it have some function?”

He picked it up with both hands, though the orb would have fit in one. He twisted it, and it came apart into four pieces, which he laid on the table. They glowed from their inner edges as much as they did on the curved surface, and Alisa had to squint to make out the shapes of those inner edges. They were jagged, with matching pins and holes, the whole thing designed to fit together like a puzzle, but with only four pieces, it was not a very complicated puzzle. It definitely arrested her attention, though, and she found herself wanting to reach out and touch those pieces, to hold them and not let them go. She struggled to focus, to come up with something to say that might improve her situation.

“Pretty, pretty,” came a whisper from the wall. Bruiser. He was staring at the pieces, transfixed.

“I’ve noticed it has some glamour that attracts the weak-minded,” Malik said dryly.

Alisa flushed. It had certainly pulled at her.

Still staring, Bruiser did not seem to notice that he had been insulted. Maybe he would want to sit and play with it all day and forget his interest in her.

Malik put the pieces back together—despite the simplicity, it took some effort for him to align them correctly to make the orb again. He set it back on its velvet cushion and shut the lid on the box.

The beautiful illumination ceased, and a pang of loss came over Alisa. Her fingers twitched toward the box as an urge to open the lid again filled her. She shook her head, trying to rid herself of the spots it had left in her vision and also of the strange longing it had stamped into her mind. Three suns, what was that thing?

“You’ve never seen it before,” Malik said, disappointment tingeing his voice. Whatever her reaction had been, it must have convinced him of what her words alone had not. “But surely you know which one of your crew brought it on board.”

Alisa said nothing, though she was ninety-nine percent certain this had to be the object Alejandro had been so desperate to get back. It must have some religious significance. Maybe it was even tied to whatever had made him decide to retire from his last career and put on that monk’s robe.

“She knows,” Bruiser said, the leer back on his face. “I’m sure she does. Let me find out for you, Sublime Commander.”

“I’d be more likely to tell you,” Alisa said, meeting Malik’s eyes and giving him another suggestive smile, trying to look alluring. “Why don’t you get rid of your friend there, and we’ll talk.”

She could not believe she was thinking of seducing a cyborg, but maybe she could get him to take her to his cabin where he might eventually leave her alone. Escaping from a cabin would be easier than escaping from a guarded jail cell.

Malik’s earstar must have beeped for him, because he touched it and walked away from her, his lips moving as he answered subvocally. Alisa sighed. Even if he hadn’t been interrupted, she doubted her ruse would have worked. He had not appeared noticeably interested in her allure.

With his boss distracted, Bruiser sidled away from the wall.

Alisa appraised him warily. He struck her as an idiot, but he was a big and strong idiot. He wore twin-barreled Chargers on his hips. Fighting him off when her hands were cuffed would not be easy. That knowledge did not keep her from scheming. If she could get one of those guns when he was distracted by his lust, she could shoot him and get out of here, especially if Malik left the room.

She just hoped she could find her opportunity before Bruiser attained his goal. She had never been captured during the war, and she had avoided the realities of what happened to those women who had been. The idea that it might catch up with her here, when she had been on her way home, horrified her. Fear clutched her for a moment, keeping her from reacting as Bruiser slid close enough to wrap an arm around her. Only when his hand came up to mash her breast did a jolt of reason burst through her, reminding her that she had to act if she wanted to stop him and get one of those weapons.

She was about to stomp on his instep, or at least try, when Malik cleared his throat.

Bruiser froze, his hand still on her breast, and looked at the cyborg. His arm tightened possessively around Alisa. “You said I could have her, Sublime Commander.” It sounded like a whine. “I’m not doing anything you didn’t say I could.”

Malik flicked a dismissive hand. “Have her. Just don’t forget to find out whose rock this is.”

He picked up the box and walked out the door. It closed, a beep sounding. The electronic lock being thrown.

“Yes,” Bruiser hissed, shoving her back against the wall and smothering her with his body so quickly that the terror almost overwhelmed her again, keeping her from acting, from doing anything useful. She tripped over a weight that had been left on the floor, and it further flustered her.

No, she growled to herself as he rammed against her, his oversexed cock already hard in his pants. With his body shoved against hers, her arms pinned in front of her as he groped her, she could not reach his guns. His belt mashed against her knuckles, but the butts of the weapons were six inches away. It might as well have been a mile.

She shifted, trying to get a knee up, to put some space between them. The horny bastard was all over her, grabbing and squeezing. He yanked her shirt open, buttons popping off, then bit her on the neck, breaking the skin.

The pain sent a bucket of cold water over her mind, clearing her brain. Just struggling wouldn’t do much—he was too strong. She had to be smarter than he was.

“Hold on there, big fellow,” Alisa said, forcing her voice to come out sultry and interested, rather than pissed and terrified. “Let me help you.”

“Unh?” He lifted his mouth, blood on his lips, and looked her in the face, his own face puzzled.

Yeah, she had a feeling women didn’t have much interest in helping him very often. Still, he appeared intrigued by the idea.

“You’re still wearing all of your clothes,” she said, smiling, hoping he did not see the calculation in her eyes. “Let me help, eh?”

She shifted her fingers, forcing herself to hold that smile and to keep looking into his eyes as she grabbed the fastener of his belt. It wasn’t easy with her wrists bound awkwardly, nor did it help that her fingers were shaking. Any second, he would realize she was planning something. But that befuddled look on his face turned to excitement, probably because she was doing something he had planned to do anyway. She unclasped the fastener and moved her hands to his hip, as if to help push his pants down.

A hint of wariness entered his eyes as her fingers slid closer to one of his guns. It wasn’t going to work. She would only get one chance. If it wasn’t perfect, he would have time to react, to toss his guns across the room where she could not reach them again.

Alisa licked her lips. “Bite me again, big fellow.”

He watched her tongue, then grinned. “Yeah.”

He leaned into her, finding her ear with his teeth, groaning as he ground against her. But this time, her right arm wasn’t completely pinned. She pretended that she was excited and that his bite didn’t hurt like touching a burning pan. She moaned into his ear as she eased her fingers around the butt of the gun. He grabbed the front of her trousers to yank them down. She grabbed his gun and yanked it free.

She got it all the way out, but he noticed. Damn it. She tried to twist it to point at his chest, tugging her other bound wrist along with her right one.

“Bitch,” he growled and leaned back so he could clobber her in the face.

Before his blow landed, she rammed upward with her knee, now having the space to do so. She skittered to the side along the wall, turning so she could finally aim the gun at him. He lunged for it, but his foot caught on the weight on the ground. It only distracted him for a split second, but it was enough. She fired.

She leaped back as he lunged toward her, firing again. He screamed in pain, smoke wafting from his chest. She fired one more time, taking him square in the face, terrified that someone would hear his yells and come to check. The energy bolt hollowed out his eye, and his features froze in a rictus of pain.

He tumbled to the ground, and she backed farther until she ran into a rack of weight equipment. She kept the gun pointed toward him, half expecting him to rise again and come after her. But he wasn’t moving.

Alisa wanted to take a moment to calm herself, to find her equilibrium—and a way to close her shirt—but there wasn’t time. The Charger wasn’t a noisy weapon, but someone could have heard his cries of pain. She could have company at any moment.

She dropped to her knees and made herself touch him, patting him down and hoping to find whatever electronic key opened the handcuffs. If Malik had it, things would be more difficult. But she found a jumble of devices on a ring in his jacket pocket. She tugged it out and started pressing buttons. Most of them did not do anything, not here anyway. She imagined the hangar bay doors lifting on the other side of the ship.

Finally, her cuffs clicked, and she could shake her hands free. She almost left the cuffs on the floor, but grabbed them and stuffed them into her jacket pocket along with the fob that opened them. Maybe she would get a chance to return the favor to one of the pirates.

With her body aching and blood dripping from her ear to spatter the shirt she managed to partially close—a few of the buttons remained—she walked toward the door. Malik had locked it, so she was not surprised when it did not open for her. There wasn’t a control panel on the inside, either. She stepped back, debating if randomly shooting at it would do anything.

A beep sounded, the lock opening, and the door slid aside.

Chapter 17

Alisa jerked the gun up, pointing it at the door as it slid aside. Leonidas stood there. Alone.

Not certain what their relationship was now, she did not lower the weapon. He had removed his combat armor and wore the clothes he’d worn on the Nomad, the partial uniform with the jacket that proclaimed him a member of the Cyborg Corps. The leader of them, she reminded herself. Or at least he had been at one point during the war.

Leonidas glanced at the gun, but then looked to her neck and her torn shirt, the blood spattered on it. His gaze shifted toward Bruiser, then back to her.

“Good.” He nodded. “I thought I would once again be too late to protect you—I don’t have free rein here.”

Leonidas glanced up and down the corridor before taking a step inside. He arched an eyebrow at the gun. He was close enough that he could have used his enhanced speed to rip it from her hand before she could fire, but he didn’t move anything except the eyebrow.

Alisa lowered the weapon. “You weren’t too late last time.”

“Just unforgivably tardy?”

“Not unforgivably so.” She managed a wan smile, though her whole body hurt. She might not know if they had a relationship or not, but she knew she was glad he was the one standing here, rather than Malik. “Besides, I didn’t think that promise of protection extended past our excursion to the research station.”

“You’re always supposed to protect people when you’re in combat armor and they’re not.”

“You’re not in combat armor now.”

He grunted softly. “Yeah, I am.” He lifted a hand toward her, as if to check her injuries or offer support, but lowered it without touching her. “Are you all right?”

No, she wanted to curl up in her bunk on her ship far, far away from any pirates. And for the first time in a long time, she wished her mother would be there to take care of her, as she had been when Alisa had been a child. She would have also been pleased to have Jonah there to take care of her. Why had all of the people who could take care of her left her?

“I’m fine,” was all she said, swallowing the lump in her throat. “Why did you tell them I had a clue about the orb?”

“I needed a chance to talk to you.”

“Been pining away in the absence of my company, eh?” Alisa backed up to the table. Relaxing probably was not a good idea, but she needed a second to gather her wits and recover her strength, so she laid the gun down and sat in a chair.

“Your humor is still intact,” Leonidas said.

“You’re supposed to sound more approving when you make observations like that.”

“Ah.”

Leonidas walked to the table and paused, again lifting his hand like he meant to pat her shoulder or maybe say something reassuring. She must look awful to elicit such feelings from him. He didn’t seem to know if she wanted to be touched, though, because he ended up lowering his hand once more. He pulled over another chair, sitting on the edge and turning it so he faced her and also the door.

“Is the orb the doctor’s?” he asked.

Alisa shot him a wary look. It crossed her mind that Malik might have sent him in to pretend to be a friend and get the answers from her that way. Maybe Malik had known Bruiser would fail.

“I really don’t know,” she said.

“Ah,” he repeated, a hint of sadness in his blue eyes. Sadness that she didn’t trust him? Well, could he blame her? When he sat there in that uniform and when he had, as far as she could tell, joined forces with Sublime Commander Malik? “Let’s get to what I wanted to talk to you about then.” He leaned forward, draping his forearms across his thighs. They were just as meaty as Malik’s. There must be a rule against scrawny cyborgs. “If I can arrange for the gates to open on the cells in the brig, do you think you can make your way to your ship? And will you take the other prisoners with you? Drop them off someplace safe along your way?”

He looked in her eyes, and she sensed that the request meant a lot to him. For some reason, it stung that he was more concerned about getting people he had never met to safety than her. It wasn’t as if she had ever given him a reason to care, but she wished he wanted first and foremost for her and her crew to get out safely.

“If I can get out of here, I will absolutely take everyone I can with me,” Alisa said, pushing aside her silly feelings. She might have to steal some food and water to sustain those people until they got to civilization, but Alejandro already wanted her to go on a trek to find his orb—which Malik was apparently carting around with him—so what was one more stop?

“Good.”

“What about you? You’re staying here?”

“I’m going back to the station with Malik to do a more thorough search. He also seems excited about hunting a few bears.”

“So, you’re buddies now, eh?”

“He was in the Cyborg Corps,” Leonidas said, as if that made everything fine.

“He’s a creep.” Alisa pointed at the dead pirate. “He set that up to happen.”

Leonidas frowned as he looked at the body.

“Not the killing part,” she said, realizing she might not have been clear. “The raping part.”

He flinched at the word. Good. She thought of Alejandro’s claim that Leonidas was an honorable man. Honorable men shouldn’t work with creeps.

“I’m sure it’s not any consolation, but I doubt he cares one way or another about that.”

“Oh, he cares. He likes seeing people hurt. You can see it in his eyes. He enjoys the hells out of being better than human.” Alisa couldn’t keep herself from scowling at him. She did not want to alienate her only ally on this station, but she could not help it. She had to make sure he knew. Maybe Malik and Leonidas hadn’t worked together that much in the past, and he truly didn’t know. Or maybe he had just never seen it because he had been the commander and not the victim.

“You may be right,” Leonidas said slowly, his gaze still toward Bruiser’s corpse. “But we have a common purpose at the moment. Besides—” his eyes shifted back toward her, “—I’m not welcome on your ship. There’s nowhere else for me to go.”

Was that why he had agreed to work with Malik? He didn’t think she would willingly take him with her to Perun? Yes, she might have been thinking of leaving him on that station, but that had been before he’d saved her life from an overgrown bear with bad breath, and before she had come to realize the same thing that Alejandro had said, that even if he had been the enemy, he was an honorable man.

“Shit, Leo, I’ll gladly welcome you back onto my ship if it means you’re not going to combine forces with Malik and set yourself up as some pirate overlord. I’ll even grab Beck and go help you kill the bears on that station so you can root around for whatever you want to find. You know he wants a chance at taking down another left rear haunch.”

He snorted.

“Go ahead,” she said.

“What?”

“Remark on the inappropriateness of my humor.”

“Actually, I was thinking that it’s impressive that you’ve managed to retain it after all this.” He glanced at her torn shirt, then sighed and stood up. “You have my word that I will not become a pirate overlord. But he wants me to be his guide down there—he doesn’t know what he’s looking for. Besides, if I take him down there, he won’t be here.” He spread his hand toward her.

“Meaning we’ll only have to deal with normal human pirate obstacles during our escape?”

Leonidas inclined his head once. For some reason, she had the sense that he was sacrificing himself for her crew—and to get those people out of here. Maybe sacrifice was an overstatement. It wasn’t as if he was helpless. Still, if all of the future slaves escaped imprisonment while Malik was down on the station, and if Malik found out that Leonidas had been responsible…

Alisa frowned deeply. Maybe he was sacrificing himself for them.

Someone banged on the door, and she leaped from her seat. She cursed under her breath. Bruiser’s body was off to the side, but it definitely was not hidden.

“Bruiser?” a man called from the other side of the door. “You done yet? Commander said to take the prisoner back to her cell.”

“Stand there,” Leonidas whispered, pointing to a spot that might block the view of the body from the doorway, then he headed over to answer the call.

“Leonidas?” Alisa asked.

He paused in front of the door and looked at her. She wanted to thank him or to apologize for calling him a mech. Or both. There didn’t seem to be time to express what she wanted to say, though, especially since she would no doubt trip over her tongue doing it.

“Malik was wrong about what he said in my cargo hold. You could get a human woman to care about you. If you wanted to.”

He inclined his head once more, then opened the door.

The pirate outside saw him and jerked back in surprise.

“It’s Sublime Commander,” Leonidas corrected, his voice cold, so different from what Alisa had just heard from him.

“Ye—yes, sir. Is the, uhh, prisoner here?” The pirate glanced past his shoulder and toward Alisa.

She hoped he would not think to ask where Bruiser had gone.

“Take her.” Leonidas waved Alisa forward as he shifted his position to take over blocking the view of the body.

“This way, woman,” the pirate said, making his voice gruff. As if he hadn’t just been knocking his knees together at Leonidas’s unexpected appearance.

Alisa walked into the corridor without making trouble. She looked back at Leonidas, noting the grimness of his face and wishing she had found a way to apologize and thank him, after all. Then the door slid shut, and she lost her opportunity.

Wondering if she would ever see him again, Alisa let the pirate push her through the corridors. There were other men about, perhaps getting ready for the trip down to the station, or she might have tried to get away from her guard. But she was injured, and he kept his rifle pointed squarely between her shoulder blades, not giving her any opportunities to take advantage. He was far more professional than Bruiser and did not leer at her, nor did he look like a leer from her would do anything for him.

Soon, she was pushed back into the short corridor that held the jail cells. She counted all of the faces she passed—their numbers mattered more now that she had agreed to take them all with her.

She was still counting when her cell came into sight, and she frowned when the count came up short. Beck lay on the floor in the back, sleeping or unconscious, and Alejandro sat near him, a hand on his chest. Mica and Yumi were gone.

Chapter 18

Alisa rushed into the cell, barely aware of the bars clanking into place behind her. She dropped to her knees beside Beck.

“What happened?” she asked Alejandro.

“Several thugs came to take Yumi away. Beck flung himself at them, almost overpowered them too. One of them hit him with a stun gun. He’s lucky they didn’t kill him. Slaves are worth money, apparently, so it’s a shame to lose them. But mauling them beforehand is fine.” Alejandro clenched his jaw. “My attempt to steal a gun was not successful, nor did they have an interest in my attempts to sway them into doing the right thing so that they could stand tall and be proud when their Reckoning Day came.”

“If the pirates had scalps on their belt, I suspect they’ve already given up on the notion of their reckoning going well.”

“I fear that’s so.” Alejandro’s eyebrows drew together, as if he couldn’t imagine the concept. “They must be praying that there is no afterlife where they will be held accountable.”

“Can you pray for a lack of religion? Is that how that works?” Alisa rubbed the back of her neck. If Leonidas were there, he would point out that this was an inappropriate time for humor. And he would be right. She couldn’t deal with the idea of Yumi being mauled by pirates. Not just one. Several, Alejandro said. How would she survive that? How could Alisa have brought her into this situation where such an atrocity could happen? “Did they take Mica too?”

“No, she was taken earlier, according to your plan.”

“My plan?” Alisa gave him a bleak look. Nothing here was a part of her plan. None of this. It was all a mistake. They never should have been out here.

Maybe Leonidas felt guilty for having inadvertently caused this, and that was why he was going to risk getting himself killed to free them and the other prisoners. She only hoped he could arrange for the gates to open soon. She should have gotten more specific details from him. What was the timeline they were working with? Had he meant that he would take Malik down to the station later this day? Later this week?

“She argued engineering with that miner in front of the guard and sounded like she knew what she was talking about.” Alejandro spread his hand and shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. But when some pirates showed up down here, needing something fixed, she finagled herself onto the team. They took Sparky too. Told him he’d better watch and make sure she didn’t sabotage anything, and he agreed. He seemed happy to tattle on her if she did do something wrong. But she didn’t appear deterred. She wore a very determined look.”

Alisa rubbed her neck harder, as if that could help with anything. She wished now that she hadn’t come up with that plan. Now, Mica was off who knew where, and Leonidas might arrange for the security failing at any time. How could Alisa lead these miners to her ship when she had to run off and find Yumi and Mica? At least she had an idea as to where Mica would be, but those pirates might have taken poor Yumi anywhere.

“I’m sorry about Ms. Moon,” Alejandro said quietly.

Alisa lifted her head. “It’s not your fault that we’re here.”

“Perhaps, but I always envisioned myself as… someone capable. I ran an emergency room for several years. I was good at my job, so good that I attracted the notice of influential people. I— That’s not important. What I mean is that I always thought that if I had to take care of myself in some less than civilized setting…” He sneered at the old rusty walls of the cell. “I imagined myself being able to handle myself. To be flung aside so easily has been humbling.”

“Don’t be humble, Doc. Be pissed. And then when you get a chance to pay them back, use it.”

“Not entirely injudicious advice, I suppose.”

“Given the source?”

“Given the source.” He gave her a half-hearted smile, one that faded quickly.

Alisa was tempted to tell him that they needn’t give up yet, that if Leonidas acted quickly, there might be time to get Yumi before it was too late, if they could just find her. But she remembered her suspicion that there were cameras monitoring the cells and kept her mouth shut. Instead, she laid a hand on Beck’s cheek, hoping it would rouse him. If the gate opened, she did not want to have to figure out a way to carry Beck. Even without his combat armor, he had to be close to two hundred pounds.

She turned the touch into a poke, then a prod. “Tommy? Wake up, will you?”

“Old Earth fairy tales tell of a princess waking a prince with a kiss,” Alejandro observed.

“Yeah? What do they say about pilots and security officers?”

“I’m not sure working career men and women were mentioned.”

“No? So, you were out of luck if you weren’t a prince or a princess?”

“I believe so.” Alejandro patted Beck’s chest. “He should wake soon. It’s been almost a half an hour.”

A half hour. Already? Alisa worried that Yumi could have already been raped in that time, especially if the pirates had just dragged her to the nearest empty room.

She pushed herself to her feet. There was nowhere to go, but she paced anyway.

Beck groaned.

“It seems you’re the one with the power to rouse him.” Alisa grabbed one of the bars, as if she could push them up into the ceiling with her strength. “And you didn’t even have to kiss him.”

“I have experienced hands.”

Beck rolled over, nearly putting his face in Alejandro’s lap. “Wassit?”

A comm panel beeped at the end of the corridor. Alisa pressed her face to the bars, glimpsing a guard’s sleeve as he answered. She couldn’t hear the conversation, but it was short. A moment later, the door opened, and the guard walked outside, leaving the prisoners alone in their cells.

Alisa rubbed the bars. This might be it. She willed them to retract.

But it was the door that opened again, not the gate. She slumped. The guard had probably just gone to the lav.

A slight form scurried into view, glancing over her shoulder several times.

“Yumi,” Alisa blurted, shocked. She was alone. “You got away?”

The miners across the way, men who had heretofore ignored the goings on in Alisa’s cell, now perked up. A few peered up the corridor, perhaps noticing the missing guard.

“Captain Alisa,” Yumi said, spreading her arms, as if they could hug through the bars.

Since they hadn’t hugged at all before, Alisa found the gesture a tad odd, but she was so glad to see Yumi again that she would have returned it if she could. Yumi did not even appear hurt. Her dress wasn’t torn and dotted with bloodstains. Her eyes, however, were dilated and her cheeks had a flush to them. The pirates hadn’t drugged her with something, had they? Why would they bother?

“Yumi, it’s good to see you. How did you get away from your captors, and is there any chance you can find a button on that control panel over there to let us out?”

Yumi grinned broadly. “I convinced them that sex is far more stimulating when under the influence of rifters. I’m not sure they believed that, but they were intrigued when I promised I could get them some. They just had to take me to my trunk. Which they were happy enough to do. There’s an entire room full of things they’ve stolen from people, did you know?”

Alejandro jumped forward, joining Alisa in gripping the bars. “Did you see my duffel bag?”

“I don’t know. I saw lots of bags. I was only looking for my belongings, and they were getting quite grabby, so I had to act quickly. When they saw the various herbs and mushrooms I keep with me, the pirates were quite excited. And overeager. They overdosed themselves. I may have helped them.” She grinned again. “I had to help myself, too, or they wouldn’t have relaxed enough.”

“Did you kill them?” Alisa asked, patting Alejandro on the shoulder. He looked like he wanted to reach through the gate and shake Yumi by the shoulders until she gave him more information on his bag.

“Not at all. I left them having a very exciting time, all within their own heads. Only one of them noticed that I was leaving.”

“What did he do?” Alisa glanced toward the door.

“He waved and said to enjoy my trip.” Yumi chuckled. “Adolescent humor in grown men. Always a strange thing.” She gripped her chin and walked up the corridor to the guard station. “I don’t see any buttons. There’s nothing up here but a chair and a half-eaten bar of some mysterious and dubious substance. Those words are quite mellifluous, aren’t they? Mysterious and dubious.”

Alejandro thunked his head against the bars. “I’m relieved she’s safe, but this will wear off soon, won’t it?”

“You’re the medical doctor, aren’t you? Don’t you know?”

“My clientele rarely came into the hospital because of overdoses on street drugs. I’m not even sure what rifters are.”

Alisa imagined him presiding over the emergency room of a hospital in a wealthy neighborhood where the presence of the imperial authorities was so strong that a drug dealer wouldn’t dare wander the streets.

“They’re mushrooms,” Yumi called from the guard station. “Most exquisite psychedelic mushrooms.” She giggled, and a cabinet or drawer thumped shut.

“Try the control panel, Yumi,” Alisa suggested again. Had she even noticed it?

Alejandro sighed.

“She’ll find it,” Alisa said. “She not only escaped from a group of pirates but also managed to finagle herself a tour of the loot room. All while drugged. I’m going to make that position of science officer official and offer her a job. When she’s sober.”

“Yes, I’m sure a knowledge of psychedelics will be useful on a long freight-hauling mission.”

“I’ve pressed everything,” Yumi said. “Nothing’s working.”

Alisa peered down the corridor again—Yumi was wandering about near the door. “You’re sure?”

She glanced toward the smudge on the wall that she had worried was a camera. Maybe she had been wrong and the cells weren’t being monitored.

“You can’t open the gates from in here unless you have one of the remotes,” a miner said. “You—”

The door opened.

“There she is,” someone immediately said. “How’d she get out?”

Alisa groaned.

“Hello, pirates,” Yumi said cheerfully, spreading her arms, now offering them a hug.

There were two of them, and they strode through the doorway, pointing their guns at her.

“Get back, Yumi,” Alisa whispered, though it was useless advice. There was only so far she could go before running into a wall.

“I… yes.” Yumi frowned at the fearsome faces of the pirates. They didn’t look pleased that someone was on the outside of the bars. “I’ll just go back here.”

She scooted back until she was even with Alisa and Alejandro. Alisa gripped the bars, as if she could do something. Beck growled and rose to his feet, joining Alisa on her other side.

“How did you get out, girl?” one of the men asked, advancing.

Yumi backed farther, until there was nowhere for her to go. When the guards drew even with the cell, Alisa was tempted to reach and try to grab one of their guns, but her arms weren’t that long. She—

A clang sounded as the gates on all of the doors rolled open.

The guards spun. “What the—”

Beck was the first one out. He bowled into the lead guard, knocking him against a wall with a roar. The second guard aimed at him, but the previously apathetic miners came to life and leaped from their cells. The guard shifted his aim, his gaze jerking from threat to threat.

Alisa kicked the bottom of his hand. His blazer rifle flew out of it and clanged off the ceiling. As she kicked him again, this time in the side of the knee, the weapon hit the ground in front of her cell. The guard tried to spin toward her, but his knee gave out. She snatched up the weapon as he reached for a dagger at his belt. She shot him in the chest.

Beck and the other man were grappling, and Alisa turned the blazer toward them. She needn’t have bothered. Beck had gained the advantage, wrapping his hands around the pirate’s neck and bashing his head into the floor. He finished the abuse with a palm strike to the nose. The pirate’s head clunked against the hard floor, and he did not move again. Beck knelt back, his chest heaving.

“My way seemed easier,” Alisa said, waving the blazer when he looked in her direction.

“I’m a tactile fellow. I like to use my hands.”

“Is that why you took up grilling?”

“That was because the closest thing to a cook we had on my first ship was the private who handed us our ration bars.” Beck stood up, frowning at what was quickly becoming a crowd in the hallway.

There had to be at least forty prisoners. Several were already heading for the door.

“Wait,” Alisa called.

“The hells with that,” several of them growled, their backs to her.

“I have a ship.”

Everyone stopped and turned.

“And I’m a pilot,” she added. “I’m getting off this barge, and I plan to take you with me.”

They cheered. She bit back a grimace, not sure making noise was the best way to go. Leonidas might have gotten Malik off the ship by now, but there would still be plenty of pirates between here and the landing bay. Even though she had been hanging off a man’s shoulder on the way in, that hadn’t kept her from noticing what a long walk it was.

“We like that plan,” someone said. It was the one who had wanted to see Beck’s tits earlier. Lovely.

“Arm yourselves as much as you can. If we run into pirates, we don’t want to leave them free to warn others.”

Another ragged cheer went up, the miners excited at the idea of being armed, or perhaps about pummeling pirates. They turned and headed out the door. Alisa realized they probably had a better idea on how to get to the landing bay than she did. This had been their mining vessel once, after all.

“Alejandro, Yumi, Beck,” Alisa said, waving them over as miners pushed past her. They were going to have to act quickly if they wanted to find Mica and find Alejandro’s orb before their mob was caught and detained again.

“We going to engineering?” Beck asked, having armed himself with a rifle.

“I need my bag,” Alejandro said as they walked after the mob. “Yumi knows where the loot room is.”

“I do,” Yumi said brightly.

“I don’t know if the orb is back with the other loot,” Alisa said.

Alejandro looked at her sharply. “How did you—”

“Malik brought it out to question me about it. He thought it was mine.”

Alejandro’s face closed down, and she had the distinct impression that he was upset that she had seen it. As if having it in Malik’s hands wasn’t worse than her knowing about it. She didn’t even know what it was.

“The last I saw of it,” she said, “Malik was walking out with it in a box.”

Following the mob of prisoners, they came out of a corridor and into a wide four-way intersection with robot ore carts floating past.

“Let’s check the loot room first,” Alejandro said. “Yumi?”

“It’s that way,” Yumi said, pointing to the right.

The miners were all going to the left. To the landing bay, presumably.

“I’m looking to get my underwear and deck of nudie cards back as much as the next person,” Beck said, “but shouldn’t we head to engineering to find Mica first?” He pointed straight ahead—a faded plaque on the wall said that engineering and mining operations lay that way.

Alisa appreciated that he was more worried about her crew than material items, and she almost split them up, but they only had two guns between four people. They might find more weapons in the loot room.

“What about your combat armor?” she asked him.

Beck cursed. “You’re right. I could mow down pirates a lot more easily that way.”

Especially if they ran into pirates who were in combat armor. It wouldn’t take long for them to realize their prisoners had escaped and to gear up.

“Yumi?” Alisa prompted.

“This way.” Yumi took the lead, and Alejandro puffed out a relieved breath.

Beck hurried to catch up with Yumi, walking at her side and watching for trouble. Alisa and Alejandro followed, and she glanced back often, certain pirates would catch up with them any second.

Trouble was waiting in the room Yumi led them to, rather than in the corridor behind them. Voices came from behind the door where she stopped, a pockmarked old metal door with a plaque reading Refining next to it.

“There were four of them when I left,” Yumi whispered.

Her eyes did not seem as dilated now, and some of her effervescence had faded. That meant the pirates should be coming down from their drug highs too.

“We’ll take ’em by surprise,” Beck said, waving his rifle at the door.

Alisa nodded, stepping up to join him, ready to charge in.

He waved a hand at the door sensor on the side. A red light flashed. The door didn’t open.

“Probably need clearance,” he grumbled.

Seeing no better option, Alisa knocked on the door with the butt of her purloined blazer.

“Are we still taking them by surprise?” Alejandro asked.

“Absolutely,” Alisa said. “Perhaps you can give them a surprise lecture.”

A thump came from the other side, followed by curses.

“I’ll give them a surprise crack on the head,” Beck said.

The door opened with a puff of smoke. Unless mushrooms could be smoked, the thugs had sampled some of Yumi’s other wares.

As soon as a man appeared in the haze, Beck leaped inside, firing. Someone cried out. Alisa went in after him, wanting to choose targets more carefully, but a pirate bowled into her in his haste to escape. She stumbled back and stuck her leg out to trip him. He stumbled but didn’t fall, grabbing a gun holstered at his waist and twisting toward her.

Alisa shot him in the chest. He fell on his back in the corridor between Yumi and Alejandro, their eyes wide as they gaped down at him.

“Wait,” someone blurted. “They’re not—”

Gunfire drowned out the rest of his words. Beck moved in a frenzy, shooting and punching and kicking, occasionally stumbling because there was junk all over the floor, bags, boxes, clothes, books, papers, and all manner of personal belongings. Alisa stepped on a hairbrush as she moved farther into the room. She searched for a target, but Beck knocked out the third man as she watched. He spun slowly, his rifle at the ready, making sure nobody rose.

“Good work, Beck,” Alisa said.

“Thanks. I would feel slightly prouder about my abilities if they hadn’t all been spaced out of their minds.”

“I’m sure we can find some sober pirates for you to shoot later.”

Alisa felt uncomfortable about killing addled people, even murdering and raping pirates, but leaving them alive to sound an alarm would not have been acceptable, either.

A clang came from somewhere down the corridor.

“Help me drag that one in,” Alisa told Alejandro. Her team did not need pirates stumbling across dead cohorts while they searched.

His face paler than usual, Alejandro bent to comply.

“They were smoking my jashash,” Yumi said, sniffing as she entered the room. “I did not offer to share that with them.”

“Clearly, they should have come to the brig and asked for your permission before digging in.”

“I’d say so. Look at this mess.” Yumi clambered up a pile of trunks and bags that was scattered with needles, patches, and hand-rolled cigarettes, along with numerous bags and canisters of dried herbs, mushrooms, and who knew what else.

“It looks like a pharmacy exploded,” Alisa said.

“I may struggle to come up with enough product that hasn’t been tampered with to pay the other half of my fare,” Yumi said, snatching up bags.

“Believe it or not, getting paid isn’t my primary concern right now.” Alisa spotted her own duffel slumped near the metal legs of a machine and picked her way toward it. She did not have many valuables left, but she at least had a couple of changes of clothes.

Alejandro was digging furiously through another bag, sending undergarments and shirts flying. Alisa found her gun belt and strapped her Etcher on, then tossed her duffel onto her back, keeping both hands free for fighting.

“Yes,” Beck said, slapping a hand down on his hover case of armor. “It’s here.”

“Get dressed,” Alisa said. “We need to get to engineering.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Alisa itched to get going, but it would take Beck a few minutes to get his gear on. She prayed that the miners would reach the landing bay without being recaptured, especially since Leonidas had specifically asked her to see them out. She felt responsible for them.

“Can I help you search?” she asked Alejandro.

He looked up, a lost expression in his eyes. “It’s not here.”

“Are you sure?” Alisa looked at the messy piles.

“You said Malik had it? He must have recognized its value and decided to keep it on him.” Alejandro surged to his feet. “Or maybe it’s in his quarters.”

Alisa wanted to tell him that they could not go tramping all over the ship, that they would end up captured that way, but she had given her word that she would help him find it.

“Captain,” Alejandro said, touching her forearm. He looked like he wanted to grab it and shake her. “This is more important than you and I or any of this.” He waved his arm toward the ship as a whole. “I was given a task. I can’t fail.”

“Yumi,” Alisa said, “help Beck with his armor and keep the door locked. Alejandro and I are going to find the Sublime Commander’s quarters.”

Beck had been clasping his leg greaves on, but he halted to stare at her. “Wait, you can’t go off alone. This will only take me a few minutes. I—”

“When you finish, head to engineering, and find Mica,” Alisa said. “We’ll meet you there. If you’re not there, we’ll head to the landing bay.”

“Captain, you hired me to—”

“Protect my crew,” she said. “That’s an order, Beck.”

He let out a frustrated huff, but went back to donning his armor.

Yumi joined him and picked up pieces to hand him.

“Alejandro,” Alisa said, waving toward the door.

There was no need. He was already charging for it, not bothering to grab his personal belongings.

“Stuff those in your armor case, will you?” Alisa asked Beck as she headed out, knowing the case had hover capabilities and that he could easily bring the doctor’s gear along.

“Yes, ma’am,” Beck said, his voice hollow as he stuffed his helmet on.

He would be ready soon, and he and Yumi could head to engineering. Alisa just hoped this side errand would not delay her and Alejandro for long. Or get them shot.

As they stepped into the corridor again, an alarm started wailing, and she feared her hopes were in vain.

Chapter 19

None of the plaques at the intersections mentioned crew quarters, nor did Alisa see anything so handy as a map anywhere. With little to go on, she headed back to the break room where she had been questioned, figuring it might be near the personal areas. She and Alejandro had to duck into cabins and hide behind machinery several times to avoid pirates stomping through intersections, some wearing combat armor, some not, but all armed. A siren continued to wail, and she could only assume it had to do with the escapees. She grimaced, imagining a bunch of unarmed and malnourished men and women trying to defend the Star Nomad from murdering pirates while they waited for the pilot to show up.

“I think we’re close,” Alejandro whispered as they headed down one of a dozen narrow door-filled corridors that looked the same.

“How can you know?” Alisa felt like they were going in circles, visiting the same passages over and over.

“Some of them are up here,” came an authoritative voice from an intersection ahead.

Alisa cursed and waved at door sensors along the way until one opened. She and Alejandro slipped into a tight lav, a light flickering weakly overhead. Heavy footfalls pounded past in the corridor outside.

“Can you sense it?” Alejandro whispered, a distant look in his eyes. Had he gotten some big whiffs of what those pirates had been smoking?

“The stench of this lav? Absolutely. I don’t think these people have ever heard of disinfectant.”

Alejandro shook his head. “The map.”

“Map? You mean the orb?”

He blinked and focused on her. “The orb. Yes.”

Someday, Alisa was going to ask him what exactly that map led to, but for now, she said, “I don’t feel anything.”

She pressed her ear to the door.

“I do. I’ve grown attuned to it over the last few weeks.”

Alisa almost accused him of spending too much time with Yumi, but she did remember that the orb had some kind of presence. An effect on weak minds, as Malik had said.

“I think it’s clear,” she whispered, not hearing any more footfalls, though it was hard to be certain with the alarm blaring.

“I’ll lead,” Alejandro said, but she held up her hand and went out first. He didn’t have a weapon and had not asked for one. She did not know if he knew how to shoot.

She eased into the corridor, checking both ways and almost jumping. There weren’t any pirates, but a hover robot floated toward them. It had four sets of arms, a boxy body, and a head with sensor plates that reflected the overhead lights. Two of its claw-like gripper hands held laser tools for melting ore, and the others grasped cutting tools. She had seen several of the robots working in the smelter area when they had first been brought on board. Her first thought was that it would float past, harmless to people as it went about its job, but it stopped, its head rotating toward them.

“Intruder,” it announced from a speaker where a mouth would have been on a person.

Alisa might have ducked back into the lav, but Alejandro had already crept out behind her and was jogging down the corridor in the opposite direction. The robot raised one of its cutting tools, a tiny metal circle with serrated teeth spinning ominously. Sparks leaped from another tool, and an energy bolt streaked out of it. Alisa couldn’t leap out of the way quickly enough, and it bit into the sleeve of her jacket, searing flesh beneath the material.

She yelped and scrambled backward as she fired at it, choosing the pirate’s blazer rifle that she had grabbed since it would be quieter than her Etcher. An orange bolt slammed into the robot’s blocky torso, and it wobbled backward a few feet, but it recovered and started after her again.

Two more similar robots floated around the corner of the nearest intersection and turned in her direction.

Alisa sent a barrage of fire at them, then sprinted after Alejandro. He was disappearing around the corner of another intersection up ahead.

A hum from behind Alisa was her only warning. The hairs on the back of her neck rose, and she dove to the deck, sliding several feet on her belly. She almost felt silly—she was running from smelter robots, after all—but then a huge beam of energy shot over her head, slamming into the wall on the other side of the intersection. It left a smoking crater.

Cursing, Alisa scrambled around the corner on her hands and knees before springing to her feet. Just ahead, Alejandro stood with his back to a door, his hands raised. A long-haired pirate held a pistol to his chest, a knife raised in his other hand.

With adrenaline surging through her veins, Alisa reacted on instinct, firing as the pirate spotted her and shifted his gun in her direction. The man never got a shot off. Her bolt slammed into his forehead, and he toppled back, hands and boots twitching.

Aware of the robots trailing after her, Alisa sprinted for Alejandro, stopping only long enough to grab the pirate’s gun.

“We have to run,” she said, giving Alejandro a shove. “Here, take this. You need to be armed.”

“No. I’m a doctor, not a killer.” He turned back to the door, resisting Alisa’s attempts to move him down the corridor. “It’s in here.” He waved at the door sensor, but nothing happened.

“Are you joking? We can’t stop here.” Alisa flung her hand toward the dead pirate and another toward the intersection as the first robot floated around the corner. Without hesitating, it swung toward them, pointing those tool-filled arms at them.

Alejandro wouldn’t move.

Alisa thought about running and trying to lead the robots astray, but what if they simply stopped and shot him? Alejandro was jabbing at buttons on the sensor panel, but nothing happened. Alisa leaned past him and fired at the panel, sending shards of metal spraying.

A hum of electricity ran along her nerves again, and she shouted, “Down.”

This time, Alejandro listened, dropping into a low squat. The door opened as the robot hurled a red beam of energy down the hall. At first, it cut over their heads, but the construct’s arm lowered, adjusting the aim.

Alejandro dove into the cabin, and Alisa scrambled after him even as she worried that this was a horrible plan. They were going to be trapped, and she had no idea if one could surrender to a robot. Would it simply blast down the door and annihilate anything moving inside?

She glimpsed a second one rounding the corner before making it into the cabin. Despite her tampering, the door slid shut behind them. That was good, but she did not know if she could lock it, not after blasting the panel.

Alejandro helped her to her feet and took the recently acquired pistol from her hand. “On second thought, that does seem useful.”

He sprang for an armoire and a chest on one side of the cabin. Besides a bed and a table, they were the only places where someone might have hidden something, unless one counted the empty combat armor case, its crimson sides neither scuffed nor dented. They gleamed as if they had been recently polished. Malik’s cabin. Alejandro had guessed right. Amazing.

Alejandro flung open the chest. More worried about the approaching robots than finding the orb, Alisa tried to find the door lock, but the panel on this side of the wall beeped angrily at her, the surface hot from her attack on the other side.

She shot it, blasting the face in some vague hope that she might melt the lock. Not trusting that to happen, she jumped for the armoire. Alejandro had it open and was tearing through clothes, but she rammed her shoulder against it and shoved it in front of the door.

“Let’s pretend that will keep out a robot capable of smelting tons of ore.” Alisa looked around the cabin for more obstacles she could add to the roadblock or a way out, but there were no other exits in the room. “Suppose hiding under the bed wouldn’t fool them.”

Alejandro didn’t answer. He was too busy flinging clothing out left and right, enough items that Alisa suspected Malik might have taken over the old commander’s quarters without moving the original contents out.

Clanks sounded at the door, demanding clanks.

Imagining all three robots and maybe some pirates out there, Alisa headed for the armor case, hoping Malik might have left some weapons behind that were more powerful than her handguns. A snap sounded, and she was almost brained in the head with a shelf that went flying over Alejandro’s shoulder.

“I know it’s in here,” he snarled. “I can feel it.”

Alisa’s senses crawled, too, as they had in the break room when she’d been looking at the orb, but she did not take the time to debate it. A hiss and a grinding noise came from the door.

“They’re cutting their way in,” Alisa said. “You might want to finish there quickly, so we can, ah…” She had no idea. Get caught?

Another shelf flew across the cabin, knocking over a display device on the bedside table rotating through holo photos.

Alisa rooted into pockets and sleeves in the sides of the armor case, patting around the indentations built to fit the specific pieces. “Come on, Malik,” she whispered. “You’re a soldier. You must have some—” Her fingers brushed over some hard lumps in a pouch. “Yes, what’s this?”

A screech sounded as metal warped. Stronger light from the corridor flowed in around the armoire. Alisa pulled out two compact canisters. Rust bangs. And not the homemade version Mica had made, but legitimate ordnance from an imperial armory.

“This’ll do,” she said at the same time as Alejandro jumped back, a familiar box in his hands. He flicked open the lid, and golden light shone out.

“Got it.”

“Great. Now get back here, because we’re about to be invaded.”

Alisa had no sooner finished the words than something slammed into the armoire. It skidded forward a foot, wobbling precariously. Using her teeth, Alisa tugged free the tab that armed one of the rust bangs. She forced herself to hold it, recalling that the imperial ones had a five-second delay. The armoire tipped forward, revealing three robots and at least ten pirates crowding around the doorway.

Alisa threw the rust bang as they started to charge inside. The men’s eyes widened, and they stumbled back. One reached out, as if to grab it, but he must have recognized it, because he yanked his hand back and disappeared around the doorjamb. The robots did not sense their impending doom.

“Get down,” Alisa barked, shoving Alejandro toward the corner of the room behind the bed.

An explosion boomed, drowning out the warnings and imprecations of the pirates. Alisa and Alejandro tumbled into the corner, throwing their arms over their heads as corrosive ichor flew out in the corridor and also into the cabin.

The photo display toppled off the bedside table, landing on the floor in front of Alisa. She watched it out of the corner of her eye as shouts and cries of pain came from the corridor, and smoke wafted in through the doorway. The pictures continued to cycle, and she had glimpses of burly men in T-shirts lounging around a table and sharing drinks. Leonidas and Malik were both in the picture, glasses raised. The next photograph was a formal one, rows of men lined up in their army dress garb. She spotted Leonidas in that one, too, standing at the top left and wearing a crisp black imperial uniform bedecked with medals and ribbons, his face cool as he gazed at the photographer from beneath a black hat gilded with gold braids and insignia. Even though she knew what he was, what he had been, seeing that made her insides clench with discomfort.

Or maybe that was the damned orb. She and Alejandro were tangled on the floor, and it had ended up pressed against Alisa’s shoulders. A strange, numbing power coursed through her. Even through the box, it seemed to vibrate with energy.

“What is that thing?” She shifted away from it, half wondering if it was some super weapon despite Alejandro’s earlier slip when he had called it a map.

A spatter of corrosive goo dropped off the ceiling and landed on the picture displayer. The case sizzled, smoke wafting up, then hissed and died. The photos disappeared.

“Something very old,” Alejandro said, lifting his head and looking warily toward the doorway.

“If I were you, I wouldn’t hold it close to my balls, not if you ever want to have kids.”

“I already have children—they’re grown.”

“Ah, then maybe you’re safe, so long as your wife no longer expects you to perform husbandly duties.”

“We’re divorced—she didn’t understand my dedication to my work. Or my pathological obsession, as she called it.”

Alisa crawled out of the corner, the second rust bang in her hand. “Then by all means, cuddle that orb in your lap. Just don’t touch me with it.”

It had grown quiet in the corridor, and she risked peeking around the doorjamb—most of the door was gone, a giant hole torn out of the middle. The remains lay in the corridor along with the three robots. They weren’t floating anymore. The goo that was designed to eat through combat armor had corroded holes in their carapaces, revealing smoking wiring and gears. The decking also smoked, the acidic substance eating into it too.

Most of the pirates, their skin not as vulnerable as metal in this case, had made it to safety, though a couple lay stunned from the shockwave. She spotted several faces peering in her direction from the intersection. Someone poked a gun around the corner, and she jerked her head back into the cabin. She grabbed her own gun and, using her teeth, armed the second rust bang.

Without risking her head, Alisa hurled it into the corridor, bouncing it off the wall in the hope that it would angle toward the shooters. Blazer rifles squealed and red bolts streaked past the doorway, but the attack was short-lived.

“Move, move,” someone shouted.

“Now’s our chance,” Alisa whispered, waving for Alejandro to join her. He crouched behind her, ready to spring out.

As soon as the corrosive goo stopped flying, she peeked into the corridor. Nobody had a head around the corner now.

“This way,” she whispered and clambered out over the fallen armoire, trying not to make any noise. One of the robots twitched feebly, but none of them looked like they would be smelting ore—or intruders—again.

Alisa waited for Alejandro before turning to run. Unfortunately, they could not head back the way they’d come, not if she wanted to avoid angry pirates. At the first intersection, she let Alejandro choose the way. She had lost all sense of direction and hoped they would come to a sign that proclaimed the way to engineering.

The sounds of a firefight came from somewhere ahead of them, perhaps pointing the way better than a sign. It might be something to do with the escaped miners—some of them could have acquired weapons by now—but she did not think they were close to the landing bay yet.

“You know we’re running toward trouble, right?” Alejandro asked, his pace slowing. He had lost some of his intensity since recovering the orb. He carried the box tucked under his arm, his fingers curled possessively around it.

Alisa did not slow down, well aware that pursuers were after them. “I hate to tell you this, but on this ship, we are the trouble.”

“Maybe that’s part of our problem.”

“Just part?”

She paused before running into an intersection to make sure nobody was coming, robot, human, or otherwise. The way was empty, only the peals of the alarm filling the passage. A plaque pointed the way to engineering. That would have been excellent, except that the sounds of gunfire and ricocheting bullets were coming from that direction. She feared that was Beck, Mica, and Yumi, and that they were at the heart of more trouble.

Alisa picked up the pace. Up ahead, the corridor opened into a larger chamber. A red beam burst past the doorway. A second later, something was hurled from the other direction, a long cylinder, twirling end over end. As Alisa and Alejandro neared the chamber, an explosion ripped through the air.

The decking shuddered under their feet, and Alisa thought of the inadvisability of hurling bombs within a spaceship. Even though this behemoth of a vessel seemed too large to be vulnerable to anything, she knew that was an illusion. A hull breach was a hull breach, no matter what the size of the ship.

At the end of the corridor, Alisa paused to scan the large chamber. A sign said engineering was to the left, but an open space lay in the way. Running out there with people shooting and blowing things up would not be healthy. To her right, she could make out a tangle of mining equipment, towering pumps and holding tanks, some warped and bullet ridden. Smoke hung in the air, and a couple of unmoving men sprawled on the deck. Voices came from her left, familiar voices.

“Now?”

“Now.”

Beck, Yumi, Mica, and Sparky, the engineering miner from the other cell, raced out from behind one of several piles of dirt and rock that appeared to have been freshly acquired from an asteroid. They sprinted for the corridor where Alisa and Alejandro waited. She stepped out and started to wave them in, but a pirate rolled out from behind the smoking equipment to fire at them.

Alisa fired first, shooting him in the shoulder. An instant later, Beck’s blazer bolt hammered the man in the chest. The pirate flew backward, his weapon falling from his fingers.

Sparky reached the corridor first, nearly crashing into Alejandro. Alisa covered the rest of her comrades as they ran over. Beck fired again, a half second before a blue blazer beam streaked out from behind an equipment stack. It struck him in the side, and he grunted and staggered, but kept running, his armor protecting him. He returned fire as he ran, then threw something from his other hand. Another cylinder—was that a pipe?—flew across the chamber.

People shouted and ran away from the equipment stack. Another explosion poured smoke into the air and launched shrapnel in a thousand directions. Some of it pelted Beck in the back as he ran into the corridor, waving for them to hurry ahead of him. It clanged off his armor and the back of his helmet.

“Good to see you, Captain,” he said brightly, ignoring the shrapnel. “I found Mica. She made me bombs.”

“I saw. She’s very useful.” Alisa patted Mica on the back.

“I don’t suppose there’s a ship waiting for my useful backside?” she asked.

“We’re heading there now. Anything we need to know about?” Alisa pointed back the way they had come. Beck was jogging backward, guarding their rear.

“That it would be wise to leave sooner rather than later.”

“You have a diversion coming?” Alisa asked as they ran toward the nearest intersection.

“This ship is going to have some trouble in about fifteen minutes.” Mica glanced at Sparky. “I talked our new friend here into helping instead of reporting that I was arranging a small explosion. Unfortunately, one of the pirates watching over us had a few brain cells and figured out what I was doing. We had an exchange. Beck had good timing in showing up to help.”

While continuing to watch behind them, Beck tossed a salute toward her, revealing a scorched armpit from where that bolt had struck him. It didn’t seem to bother him.

“Landing bay this way,” Alejandro said, pointing at a sign.

For the first time since the day had started, Alisa felt excitement instead of dread and apprehension. Might they actually reach the ship and get out of this?

“Any chance you destroyed the grab beam?” she asked.

Mica shook her head. “The generator isn’t in engineering. But I looked at a map, and it’s accessible from the landing bay.”

“Good, good. Things are going our way.” Alisa thumped Mica on the back. “This is excellent.”

Mica made a dour face. “Don’t get prematurely excited, Captain Optimism.”

“Who, me?”

They turned a corner, following another sign pointing the way. Eventually, the cavernous landing bay appeared at the end of their corridor. Alisa listened for sounds of gunfire or miners being captured, but she did not hear anything other than a few bangs and clunks. Only automated equipment being operated, she hoped.

Alisa picked up her pace, taking the lead, but before she reached the entrance, a tiny light flashed on a wall panel to its left. Three quick beeps sounded, and the thick door swung shut with an ominous thump.

“No,” she blurted, sprinting forward to stop it.

Had someone on the bridge figured out where their prisoners were going? Were they being tracked right now? Halted just before they could reach their destination?

Alisa peeked through a tiny rectangular window, the surface so scratched she could barely see through it. There was the Nomad, right where she had left it, except someone had raised the ramp, and red light throbbed in the bay, reflecting off her hull.

It took her a moment to realize what that light and the closed door signified. Feeling numb, she looked at the panel on the wall.

“Landing bay depressurizing,” a computer voice warned. Coming from inside the bay, the sound was muted.

A row of blue lights that ringed the large rectangular exit at the end of the bay flashed, the stars of open space visible through the forcefield. The Nomad lifted from the deck, thrusters flaring orange. Alisa banged on the door, as if that would help.

“They’re taking my ship,” she groaned. “Those ungrateful bastard miners.”

“Uh,” Mica said. “That’s inconvenient timing.”

“Inconvenient timing?” Alisa whirled toward her. “When is it good timing to steal someone’s ship?”

“When there’s not a bomb ticking down in engineering that could take out life support and several other systems on the ship one’s currently on.”

“Might blow up the whole ship with what you did,” Sparky said, poking Mica in the shoulder.

Alisa’s head thunked back against the wall. “We’re screwed, aren’t we?”

“Sorry, Captain,” Mica said.

“Got some more bad news,” Beck said from the back of their little group. “I hear pirates coming.”

Chapter 20

Alisa spun back toward the door and looked through the window. The Nomad was gliding toward the hangar exit, but there were other ships in there, including a couple that the Alliance had used and that she was familiar with. They were not long-range craft, but if she could use one of them to catch up to the Nomad before it escaped the asteroid field, and if whoever was piloting her freighter wasn’t an asshole, she could connect to the airlock and go aboard. She could not run out there until the landing bay pressurized again and she could open the door, but that should happen as soon as the Nomad was gone.

“New plan,” Alisa announced.

Beck fired his blazer. Alisa spun in time to see two men leaping back around the corner of the closest intersection.

“Does it involve opening that door?” Beck asked. “Because you may have noticed this is a dead end with nothing to hide behind.”

“Eventually,” Alisa said. “Keep them off us, please.”

“Stay behind me.” Beck took a wide stance in the middle of the corridor, using his armored body to provide shelter.

Alisa grimaced. She appreciated the gesture, but even armor would not hold up indefinitely under fire. She thumped on the “open” button on the control panel, even though she knew it would not do anything, that the door would remained locked until there was air and gravity in the landing bay. As she drew her Etcher to help Beck, she looked through the window again, now wishing her ship would fly away more quickly.

As the Nomad closed on the exit, another vessel flew into view, angling in from outside. A four-man craft with a bubble top zipped toward the landing bay. It had to bank sharply to avoid the unexpected freighter ambling toward the exit.

Alisa groaned. “Tell me that isn’t Malik returning already.”

The four-man craft zoomed into the bay, and the flashing lights rimming the exit turned from blue to red.

“Landing bay exit is secured,” the computerized voice announced.

“Don’t ram my ship into that forcefield, you fools,” Alisa grumbled.

But they did, the freighter hitting the invisible barrier with a jolt. The idiotic pilot bumped against it several more times before accepting that he wasn’t going to get out.

Beck fired toward the intersection, and Alisa yanked her attention back to the knot of men trying to kill them. Heads and guns popped around the corner, energy bolts spraying the corridor. Yumi squeaked as one nearly grazed her, and she scooted closer to Beck’s broad back.

“I knew we weren’t going to escape this hell,” Mica growled, pulling a blazer pistol from Beck’s belt and using him as a shield as she joined in the exchange of fire.

Alisa did not have any optimistic words to counter her pessimism, not this time. She also leaned around Beck, firing at the first head that came into view. Her bullets skipped uselessly off the bulkheads. She was distracted, checking the controls and hoping the door would unlock, and they could escape into the landing bay. At least there would be more hiding places in there.

Another of her bullets ricocheted off the corner, not hurting anyone. Beck was more focused and caught a shooter in the forehead as the man leaned out. The pirate flopped to the floor, one arm extended.

The shooting paused after that. Alisa checked the control panel again. The red light flashed to blue.

“It’s unlocking,” she blurted.

She peered through the window, hoping they could run out and get to the grab beam generator, hopefully while the pirates in the other ship were busy trying to apprehend their escaped prisoners. Alisa did not want anyone apprehended, but the distraction could be helpful for her team.

“Look out,” Beck said, shooting at an object hurtling down the corridor.

A bomb? Cursing, Alisa yanked open the door.

Beck struck the spherical object flying toward them. It exploded in yellowish smoke.

“Hold your breath,” he ordered.

“This way,” Alisa whispered before obeying him.

She eased through the doorway, an eye on the two ships near the exit. The Nomad had settled down—she had no choice. The clear bubble in the top of the second ship was opening.

“This way,” Alisa repeated, hustling her people along the wall, hoping the pilot and passengers in the bubbletop craft were too busy glowering at the Nomad to notice them.

“How do I lock this?” Beck growled, as he closed the door.

Mica fired at the locking mechanism, melting metal with a stench that made them all step back.

“Guess that works,” Beck said.

Alisa led them behind a row of mismatched fighters along the back wall. The parked ships could hide them from view from the rest of the landing bay if they hadn’t already been seen. She crouched so she could see under the belly of one of the craft. Crimson boots came into view as someone jumped down from the cockpit of the newly landed ship. She recognized those boots—and the rest of the red combat armor as well.

“Malik is back,” she whispered as her people joined her. “And he’s armored.”

Killing a cyborg would not have been easy under any circumstances, but if he wore his helmet in addition to the rest of the armor, it would take a ship’s e-cannon to bring him down. Alisa’s gaze drifted to the cockpit of the vessel they were hiding behind. As she had thought, it would only hold two.

“Not big enough,” she mumbled.

If she could get her people into a ship, it would be safer for them there. As she had told Leonidas, a ship was her armor. Whether she could start any of them without a positive identity scan was another story. She did know some of the starter codes for Alliance ships…

“How about that one?” Yumi whispered, squatting close to her.

She pointed toward a corner of the landing bay where a six-man Mantis ship crouched like a giant bug. The old combat transports were ugly, but they had armor like a tank and two e-cannons under the cockpit.

“Good choice,” Alisa said.

“I like insects,” Yumi said.

“Who doesn’t?”

Alisa led her group toward the ugly craft, using the other parked vessels for cover. The Mantis had a hatch on the side, but it did not open when she waved her hand at the sensor. She scooted farther along the hull, waving for the others to follow, aware that their feet would be visible if Malik crouched and peered in their direction. She could hear him through his helmet, shouting into his comm and asking what was going on.

Alisa reached a set of rungs built into the hull of the Mantis below the cockpit and climbed up, careful not to poke her head above the translucent bubble. Two pilots could sit inside, and a low hatchway led to the interior of the ship, where four more people could sit. She slid her hand along the back of the bubble, finding the button for it. It might also be locked, but most people went in and out through the side hatch and never opened this. It was possible the pirates did not know about it.

She peeked through the bubble, afraid Malik would hear when it popped open, if it opened. He had removed his helmet and run over to the hatch of the Nomad. He banged on it with his rifle, ordering the escapees to come out. If they did so, he promised he would spare their lives, only sending them back to the brig for a ride to a slaver’s market. What a treat.

Alisa depressed the button, hoping he would not hear the noise over his own yelling, and the bubble popped open with a soft hiss. It was not that loud, but Malik’s head swiveled around, his gaze locking onto her.

She leaped into the cockpit and hit the unlock button for the hatch on the side of the craft. “Get in,” she barked, even as she knew it would be too late.

Malik dropped his helmet and sprinted toward the Mantis, his legs moving so quickly they blurred. A clank sounded over by the transport he had taken to the research station, and Leonidas jumped out, also in his combat armor. Alisa felt a glimmer of hope, that he might be coming to help her, but Malik was too fast. He was already springing into the air, leaping as high as the cockpit with no need for a ladder.

Familiar with the console, Alisa did not hesitate to hit the button that would close the bubble. It started down, but not quickly enough.

Malik landed on the side of the craft, holding on easily even though there was no ladder on that side, no ledge to support him. He caught the bottom of the bubble as it lowered and shoved it upward. Alisa hit the starter, having a notion of lifting off and flying crazily to buck him off. But it was a delusion. She barely touched the button before his hand landed on her shoulder.

It was like being hit by a tornado. She reached up, trying to push him away or at least deflect the oncoming attack, but he yanked her from the seat before she knew what was happening. Her shoulder thudded against the bottom of the bubble, and then she was flying through the air.

She envisioned smashing into the hull of some ship as she arced across the bay, but all that lay beneath her was empty decking. She twisted, trying to land in such a way that she could roll and absorb some of the force. Her feet struck down first. She did not break anything, but a painful jolt slammed her body, and her momentum carried her into a much faster roll than she could control. She went head over heels at least three times before skidding to a stop at the base of the Nomad.

Alisa groaned, every part of her abused body hurting. Why couldn’t the people inside of her ship have lowered the ramp so that she could crawl up it to safety? Instead, the craft was locked up like a clam.

Malik jumped down from the cockpit and raced toward her, rage in his dark eyes. Alisa scrambled to her feet, but knew she could not do anything, that he would pin her—or kill her—before she could move.

A blur of red arrowed in from the side. Leonidas.

He slammed into Malik so hard that they flew twenty feet through the air, a jumble of twisting limbs, the men grappling with each other before they struck down. Neither wore his helmet, so they focused on each other’s vulnerable heads.

Alisa had no idea which man was superior in a fight, but Leonidas was older. Malik might have the edge of youth.

A part of her wanted to watch, to find a way to help Leonidas, but she had no way of damaging Malik through his combat armor unless she could shoot him in the head. A difficult proposition when he and Leonidas were intertwined, wrestling and changing positions faster than cats in a back alley. Besides, if she got a chance to fire, she would prefer it to be with a real weapon, with something that could take Malik down even if it struck his armor.

Her eyes shifted toward the e-cannons on the front of the Mantis.

“Those might work,” she muttered.

Clangs and thuds sounded as the men grappled, occasionally separating for a second to punch or kick or even get off a blazer blast with the weapons built into their armor, and then joining again. It was mesmerizing, their speed amazing, but Alisa made herself run. Giving the combatants a wide berth, she raced toward the Mantis. Her battered body felt like it had been through a blender.

Shots fired from the entrance to the landing bay. The men who had been after them earlier had gotten the door open. They weren’t shooting at Alisa—not yet—but blazer bolts streaked toward the Mantis, toward the side near the wall. Beck must have drawn their fire.

Alisa reached the cockpit, coming at it from the side opposite the firefight. She climbed up and found Mica already buckled into the co-pilot’s seat.

“Ready to leave, huh?” Alisa slithered over her to reach the pilot’s seat.

“The others are in, and Beck is hanging out the airlock door, trying to protect us.” Mica pointed over her shoulder to the passenger area, where Yumi and Alejandro were buckling themselves in. Did they expect Alisa to fly them home in this insectoid bucket? They would be lucky to make it out of the asteroid belt in the short-range ship. No, Alisa only intended to escape Malik and find a way to get the Nomad back from the people she was supposedly rescuing.

A boom came from outside of the ship as Alisa sealed the cockpit. Beck? Or the pirates attacking him? Either way, smoke flowed in through the side hatchway, making her cough. She started the engine. A light flashed on the control panel, alerting her to the open hatch.

“Beck, get in,” Alisa ordered, flicking on the exterior cameras so she could see what was going on beside and behind them. No less than six men leaned out into the landing bay, firing at Beck, half of their shots blasting against the hull of the Mantis. The blows did not harm the thick armor of the transport ship, even with the shields down, but she saw Beck take a blazer bolt to his chest plate, the force knocking him against the hatchway. “Someone grab him,” she added, her hand over the button that would close the hatch.

She craned her neck, looking for Leonidas and Malik. They had rolled out into the middle of the landing bay and were on their feet now, trading punches and energy bolts. Blood ran from Leonidas’s nose, and he looked like he was favoring one leg. His armor was dented in several spots. Three suns, had Malik’s punches done that?

Malik had taken some damage, too, and bled from one ear, and his nose was smashed into his face. Alisa could not believe their powerful punches had not broken each other’s skulls like star melons dropped from skyscrapers, but she remembered that their bones were as enhanced as the rest of them. They probably knew their heads were vulnerable, too, and were protecting them.

Malik rushed in, his armored fists punching at Leonidas’s chest plate in a rapid series of attacks. Leonidas blocked, but was pushed back. The expression of rage on Malik’s face made Alisa shudder. Had this attack come as a betrayal to him?

The hatch on the Mantis’s passenger compartment clanged shut. The light on the control panel stopped flashing, and Alisa activated the thrusters, taking them into the air.

The red lights were still flashing around the forcefield, denying anyone an exit, so she would only have the limited space of the landing bay for maneuvering. That landing bay was cluttered with several other ships, including the Nomad, which took up a quarter of the space, nearly blocking the exit completely. She shook her head. She did not need to exit, not yet. She just needed to stop Malik.

Blazer fire splashed against the clear cockpit bubble. Alisa snarled at a warning that beeped from the control panel and threw up the shields. She needed to deal with the pirates too. Leonidas and Malik were on the ground, grappling again, so she focused on the pirates first. Firing an e-cannon from inside the ship one was on was never a good idea, but she wasn’t overly concerned about the mining vessel surviving this encounter.

“I’m trying to find an override for the exit door,” Mica said, poking at the controls in front of her.

“We’re not going anywhere yet.” Alisa rotated them toward the pirates, flipping the switch to charge the cannons.

“We have to go. That diversion I set up? We’ve got less than five minutes until it goes off. We don’t want to be onboard when it does.”

Alisa clenched her jaw, wishing she had not requested that diversion. They still had to find a way to get onto the Nomad.

“We’ll go soon, but instead of doing that, comm my ship, will you? Tell them—” Alisa almost said that there would be a serious ass-kicking if they did not open the hatch, but rewards might work better than threats. “Tell them we would appreciate it if they’d let us in before they take off, that we’ll take them someplace safe, and that Beck will make them some fancy barbecue on the way.”

“They’re not going to wait. They’re probably doing exactly what I’m doing.” Mica waved at the controls and then at the exit. “They’re not going to be happy about the idea of being recaptured.”

“We’ll take care of our enemies, and then they won’t have to worry about being recaptured.”

Alisa lined up her cannons with the doorway to the interior of the ship. The pirates must have realized what she was doing, because they scurried back into the corridor. She fired anyway. The weapon released with a soft suck-thump, a ball of white energy slamming into the bulkhead next to the door. Metal flew everywhere, the walls inside and around the mouth of the corridor warping, smoke flooding the air as some interior circuitry melted and went up in flames. She did not know if she had hit any of the pirates, but they would think twice about coming out that way again.

She rotated the ship, careful not to knock the back end against the wall or to fly too high and bump against the ceiling. Time to figure out how to help Leonidas.

He came into view just as Malik hurled him across the bay. He struck one of the parked ships ten feet above the deck, and Alisa caught her breath, not sure if he’d hit his bare head. Why hadn’t these fools agreed to take the time to don their helmets before starting this? She could see Leonidas’s on the floor where he must have dropped it when he had charged over to help her.

Malik looked like he would sprint after Leonidas, to continue the attack before Leonidas could recover, but Alisa hit the accelerator on the Mantis. She could not fire without risking hitting the Nomad, but maybe she could scare the piss out of him.

As fast as he was, he could not outrun a ship, and when she roared up behind him, he paused, looking back. She kept going, intending to plow right over him if she could. He sprang away, and she thought he would elude her, but the shoulder of the Mantis’s bulbous body caught him. It knocked him away, and he spun through the air.

Alisa threw on the brakes and pulled her nose up, the bulky body of the Nomad filling her vision.

“Found it,” Mica said. “I think I can override the bay door now.”

“Well, don’t touch it yet,” Alisa said, banking, almost skipping off the hull of the Nomad as she brought them about. “Leonidas is down there.”

“I’m not touching it yet, but you need to hurry. I commed your ship, and nobody answered.”

She needed to hurry? She was already doing everything she could. She touched a finger to the cannon controls as she spun back toward the open part of the bay. With the Nomad behind her, she could risk a shot now.

But Malik had taken cover behind one of the parked ships. He leaned out and fired at her with a blazer imbedded in the arm of his suit. Between the shields and armor of the Mantis, Alisa did not worry about the bolts striking them, but she couldn’t get a clear shot with her cannons, not with him wedged between two ships.

She was on the verge of firing anyway, and not worrying about destroying those craft, but she spotted Leonidas ahead and to the side. He had recovered from being flung against a hull and was creeping toward the wall on a route that would let him circle behind Malik.

Leonidas looked toward her as she flew across the bay, and an idea sprang into her mind. She pointed at him, patted the top of her head, and then pointed toward where he had left his helmet on the deck.

“Get ready to press that button,” Alisa told Mica, then fired at the ships where Malik hid.

Another burst of fiery white energy blasted across the hangar. It clipped the nose of the ship that Malik had been crouching behind, blowing it off and hurling the ship several feet into the air. With shields, it could have withstood such an attack, but not while it stood empty and unprotected in the bay. She had the satisfaction of glimpsing red armor flying backward as she banked the Mantis, keeping them from crashing into a bulkhead.

An alarm sounded in the bay, the same alarm that had gone off a few minutes earlier.

“Did you press the button?” Alisa glared over at Mica.

She lifted her hands. “It wasn’t me.”

“Then who?” Alisa demanded as red lights flashed in the bay, warning of decompression and that the exit forcefield would open soon.

“Whoever’s piloting your ship, probably.”

Alisa glimpsed red armor as one of the cyborgs ran out from behind the parked ships and toward a control pedestal near the door she had partially destroyed. Malik. And she finally had a clear shot at him as he streaked across the bay. But where was Leonidas?

“He’s got his helmet on,” Mica said, pointing.

Alisa rose up in her seat, believing her but wanting to make sure. Yes, there he was. He finished locking it, and gave them a ready sign.

Alisa dove down, lining up her sights with Malik’s back. He arrived at the control pedestal and reached for a button. She did not hesitate to fire. A fiery ball of energy sprang out of her cannon and slammed into his back. She could not tell if he had hit the button or not, but it did not matter. The lights around the exit turned from red to blue, and she felt the pull against her ship as the forcefield dropped, opening the bay to the vacuum of space.

Broken shards of metal flew past the Mantis, bouncing off the cockpit bubble and the hull as Alisa compensated for the pull. To her horror, Leonidas flew past too. He had not been near anything he could grab, and now he was blown out into space. The combat suit should give him air if it hadn’t been too damaged in the fight, but there would be nothing to keep him from tumbling into the empty void.

Snarling with frustration, she looked for Malik. If she had not blown him to pieces already, she would do so now.

He was still by the control pedestal, hanging on to it as his legs flew free. She couldn’t believe he was still alive after she had landed a direct hit with the cannon. He must be close to death. But even as she watched, he lowered one leg, activating the magnetic sole of his boot. Leonidas must have been caught by surprise before he could do the same, or maybe some of the debris had hit him, knocking him free before he fully secured himself. Alisa wished she’d had a chance to warn him about more than the helmet.

“Shoot that bastard,” Mica ordered, thumping her fist on the console.

Alisa had exactly that in mind. She soared down, lining up her cannons again. As his second foot came down, he looked back. Almost on top of him, Alisa fired.

The cannon’s blast slammed into his face, tearing his head from his body, which flew free from the annihilated pedestal and tumbled toward the exit.

Feeling grim satisfaction, Alisa turned the Mantis in the same direction. If Leonidas had not been hurt, just blown out into space, she could go get him. This ship had an airlock, so he could be brought on board.

But the bay exit was blocked—with her ship. No longer trapped, the Nomad ambled out into space.

“I thought you commed them,” Alisa blurted.

“I did. Apparently, the promise of barbecue wasn’t enough to make them stick around. Or maybe they’d rather claim your ship for themselves. That’s usually easier if the captain isn’t onboard.”

“Damn them. We saved them.”

Chapter 21

As Alisa flew out into space, the Nomad flew ahead of them. The freighter had already cleared the mining ship.

“You better hurry if you want to catch them,” Mica said. “You know this thing doesn’t have much range.”

“I know.” But Alisa looked toward the small sensor display between them on the control panel. She tapped a button, asking it to look for lifeforms outside of the ship.

Wreckage pinged off the back of their hull. Leonidas had to be somewhere out here, too, floating along like the debris. No, there he was, clinging to the hull of the mining ship, not far from the bay door. He had caught one of the crane-like protrusions on the side of the craft.

Mica looked at the sensor panel. “If you go after him, we’re not going to catch your ship.”

“Comm them again, will you? Tell them to wait.”

Alisa turned the Mantis to follow the hull of the mining ship toward Leonidas’s position, trying not to wince because the Nomad was heading in the other direction. Even if Leonidas had been less than forthright with her from the beginning, and he had gotten them into this mess, she could not contemplate leaving him behind. He had saved her life. More than once.

“What am I bribing them with this time that’s going to be more valuable than a Nebula Rambler 880?” Mica asked.

“Given that the ship is nearly seventy years old, it shouldn’t take much. You’d think the barbecue alone would have been a fair trade.”

“Not if they found out they would be eating a giant bear that tried to kill us.”

“Tell them there will be side dishes too,” Beck called from the back. “I saw that there was some cabbage and some ready-bread in the kitchen. I can make some galaxy slaw. And don’t forget the eggs, assuming the chickens haven’t fainted from all of this excitement.”

“If they steal my chickens, I’ll be most peeved,” Yumi said.

“Yes, the chickens were my primary concern too,” Alisa said.

Leonidas was pulling himself down the crane and toward the hull, probably intending to crawl along it and back to the landing bay door. That might work if the pirates hadn’t gotten in there yet to close everything down, but then he would be stuck there on a ship that—

A flash of orange erupted from the top of the vast mining ship. An explosion? Leonidas must have felt the reverberations through the hull, because he looked up. More smaller explosions followed the first, a chain reaction destroying parts of the ship.

“That was supposed to go off a minute ago,” Mica said.

“Given that we’ve only been out here for about a minute, I’m glad it didn’t.”

Leonidas looked back as Alisa adjusted the thrusters so that they could come in slowly. His eyes, just visible through the faceplate of his helmet, grew concerned, his features tense. He must have been alarmed to see the ugly Mantis bearing down on him, its cannons pointed at him. Alisa thought they had been through enough that he would trust her not to shoot him, but who knew what went through the minds of career cyborg soldiers?

She nudged the thrusters so the Mantis turned to display the side hatch for him and fiddled with the controls to prepare the airlock chamber. More explosions ripped along the top of the mining craft. They seemed small in comparison to the vastness of the giant ship, but Alisa had no idea what Mica had done and what the final result would be.

Perhaps thinking the same thing, Leonidas pushed off the hull and toward the Mantis. She heard the soft clink of his magnetic boots clamping onto the side. She flicked the outer hatch open as she slowly maneuvered away from the mining craft.

“Make room back there,” Alisa said over her shoulder. “You’re about to have company.” More quietly, she added to Mica, “The whole mining ship isn’t going to blow up, is it?”

“It shouldn’t. I was just trying to make a distraction, not earn the wrath of whatever corporation originally owned that ship. But I thought that if we could disable it, we might get a reward for reporting its location. It shouldn’t be difficult for the original owners to find it.”

“Has anyone ever successfully gotten a reward from a corporation?” Alisa asked.

“Am I being overly optimistic?”

“If so, it will be a first.” Alisa sighed. “Since we may not have a way back to the core of the system now, I’m hoping it doesn’t blow up. We may need you to fix whatever you did so it can take us to a space station.”

More clinks sounded as Leonidas moved into the airlock. Alisa closed the outer hatch and ramped up their speed in what was likely a vain hope that the Nomad would still be around and they could catch her.

“You didn’t mention creating a fixable diversion when you originally brought it up,” Mica said.

“I was planning on riding home in the Nomad then.”

Dented crimson armor came into view as Leonidas crouched to look through the low hatchway and into the cockpit. He had already removed his helmet. Alisa wondered if he’d heard them talking about the fact that they were stranded.

“Afternoon,” she said over her shoulder, though she had lost all track of the hours and did not know what time of day it was aboard the Nomad now. “For a minute there, I thought you were going to think yourself too good to accept a ride with us.”

“For a minute there, I thought you were going to shoot me,” Leonidas said. His left eye was swollen shut, and blood caked the side of his face.

“Nah, I already got one cyborg today. I didn’t feel the need to take out another.”

“I saw Malik fly past. Without his head.” Despite the fierce fight he and Malik had engaged in, Leonidas’s face was far more grim—almost remorseful—than jubilant.

Alisa, remembering the picture of Leonidas’s unit in Malik’s quarters, wiped the smirk off her own face. She might never have known Malik as anything but an enemy, but that wasn’t the case for Leonidas. Maybe he would even come to regret the choice he had made today, to save her in a way that ultimately led to his former colleague’s death.

“I’m sorry,” Alisa said quietly.

Leonidas’s gaze shifted to her face, but Mica spoke before he could say anything—maybe he hadn’t intended to say anything anyway.

“Look,” Mica blurted, pointing.

They had flown around the blocky body of the mining vessel and out into open space. Alisa might have fallen out of her seat if she hadn’t been strapped in. The Nomad was floating there, not moving at all. An equipment malfunction? Or were those people waiting for them?

“Mica, the comm. Can you see if they’re open to talking to us?”

Before she tried anything, the comm light flashed, and a male voice filled the cockpit. “Mantis ship, this is the Rambler. If your work there is done, you’re welcome to latch on and join us.”

A tentative giddiness swept over Alisa. Was something finally going their way? She could scarcely believe it.

“We would love to latch onto you, Nomad,” she said. “Appreciate you stopping to wait.”

“The promise of a real dinner instead of ration bars was too good to miss. Most of us haven’t had anything but dehydrated takka for months.”

“You hear that, Beck?” Alisa asked over her shoulder. “If you can grill up something better than takka, we’ve got a ship to come home to.”

“I would let the mech here chew my leg off with his enhanced teeth before I made something that didn’t taste wonderful.”

Leonidas’s eyebrows twitched, but he did not otherwise comment.

Alisa took the controls and guided them toward the Nomad.

“Home,” she whispered and was surprised she meant it.

Mica arched her eyebrows. “You might not be thinking that after spending a week packed on it with fifty escaped prisoners. I noticed from working with Sparky that hygiene wasn’t encouraged while they were in those cells.”

“I’m sure they can bathe along the way.”

“There’s only one lav. It’s going to be a rough week.”

“We’ve just defied impossible odds to escape with our lives, and you’re worried about a line when you have to tinkle?”

“I’m pragmatic.”

“You’re a pessimist.”

“Yes.” Mica smiled, as if this were a great compliment. “And as a pragmatic pessimist, I’m going to give you a tip: when you’re seeking to establish your authority over your crew and your new passengers, don’t use words like tinkle. Nobody will take you seriously.”

“What if I have a fierce cyborg looming behind my shoulder as I do it?” Alisa wondered what Leonidas would think if she tried to hire him. He hadn’t completed his mission, whatever it was, but maybe once he had, he would consider coming back to work security on the Nomad. Would that be too lowly a position for a former colonel? If she had him on her team, she would feel a lot safer the next time she had to deal with pirates.

“It depends,” Mica said. “While he’s looming, will he be laughing at you for using words like tinkle?”

“I really should fire you.”

“That would be more of a threat if you were paying me.”

Despite her engineer’s pessimism, Alisa smiled as the Nomad’s airlock came into view. Soon, she would be back on her own ship. Soon, she would be home.

Epilogue

“You going to try my barbecue, mech?” Beck asked, waving a spatula as Leonidas made his way through the crowded mess room, the single table packed with scruffy miners who were, as Mica had predicted, in need of baths and fresh clothes. Alisa had nearly been overwhelmed by their collective aroma when she had finished piloting them out of the asteroid belt and left NavCom. Fortunately, the scent of roasting meat and spices was proving predominant as Beck’s grill heated up. And, to Alisa’s surprise, the bear smelled appealing.

Still, it was going to be a long trip to Saranth Three, the space station where Alisa had agreed to drop the miners off. Very few of them wanted anything to do with Perun or the remnants of the empire. Alisa couldn’t blame them. Even though Leonidas was the reason they had been freed, they eyed him warily and made room as he passed.

“It’s almost ready,” Beck added when Leonidas paused. “Sweet spiced ginger marinade. I bet you’ve never had Octavian bear like this.”

“I would be alarmed if he’d had it at all,” Alisa said, leaning against the wall to stay out of the way as she watched Beck work his portable grill at the end of the table.

“I’ve had it before,” Leonidas said. “I told you about our training exercises where I encountered them. We didn’t have any ration bars, so we had to survive on what we could catch. I remember eating the liver raw and not finding it particularly delicious.”

Alisa couldn’t keep from wrinkling her nose in disgust. “You shouldn’t say such things around women, Leonidas,” she said, waving at Yumi, Mica, and a couple of female miners who had found seats at the table.

“Why?”

“You’ll never get one of them to kiss you if they’re imagining your mouth chomping into raw organs.”

“Ah.” He did not appear overly concerned. He continued on his path through the mess and into the crew quarters area.

Going back to his reclusive ways, Alisa supposed. He had been scarce since they had left the mining ship, staying in his cabin for the most part. As far as she knew, he had not mentioned to any of the miners that he had been the one to arrange for their cell doors to open in a timely manner. Maybe it was shallow, but Alisa would want credit if she had saved a passel of people. She was pleased that a few of the miners had come up to her after her team had re-boarded the Nomad and thanked her for ridding the universe of Malik. Apparently, some of them had been watching that final fight on the view screen while their pilot worked on overriding control for the forcefield.

Alisa moved away from the wall and joined Beck by the grill. “Going to have enough for everyone?”

“Enough for a little taste. I removed a fairly substantial cut of meat from that beast, but I wasn’t thinking of feeding fifty at the time.”

“Only forty-seven, including us. I took a census. From what I’ve heard, we didn’t leave anyone behind except pirates, and they got what they deserved.”

“Yes, they did.” Beck grinned at her. “Am I going to get a combat bonus for my help?”

“Bonus? It’s not enough that I’m letting you have the honor of cooking for everyone?”

He snorted. “The honor is all yours. You’ll see. I’ve got some slaw and bread to go with this. You’ll love it.”

“Maybe someone here will taste your brilliance and turn out to have connections back in civilization, know someone who can help you in putting together that sauce line you mentioned.”

“Someone here?” Beck perused the scruffy crowd. “Really, Captain, if you don’t want to pay me a combat bonus, all you have to do is say so.” He slathered some more sauce on his steaks and flipped them.

“You deserve a bonus. I may just have to owe it to you. The cyborg bits I agonized over taking got left behind on the mining ship, and we’ve got a lot of extra mouths to feed for the next few days, so I’m going to be gliding into Perun on fumes.”

“Aw, I understand, Captain. Look, you keep saying you haven’t seen me when the White Dragon people come around, and I can wait to get paid until you’ve finished your business on Perun and found some profitable cargo to run.”

Alisa almost pointed out that running cargo was the last thing on her mind right now, but maybe it was time to start thinking about what she would do after she got her daughter. Beck seemed to think he would be working for her even after they reached Perun, and she had been thinking of giving Yumi a job and offering Leonidas one too. Didn’t that imply that she intended to go on being captain and finding a way to make a living with this ship? There was no reason why she couldn’t bring Jelena into the freight lanes and raise her out here, the way her mother had raised her.

“You’re a good man, Beck,” Alisa said and patted him on the back.

“And a good chef. Want to go tell the others that dinner is ready? I’d hate for the doctor to miss out. These miners look hungrier than Morakkan Glow Snakes coming out of their ten-year hibernation period.”

“That they do. I’ll tell them.”

“Captain?” Mica asked, making Alisa pause before heading to the crew quarters.

“Yes?”

“I heard you’re going to offer Yumi a job.” Mica spread her hand toward Yumi who smiled from the other side of the table. “It sounds like she’s interested.”

“Ah, been talking to Alejandro, have you?” Alisa hadn’t made that invitation official yet, since she was still figuring out her own plans for the future. But anyone who could escape from rapists by getting them high had creative initiative, and if Yumi spent time sampling her own wares, she always did it during the night cycle and in the privacy of her quarters. Alisa did not have a problem with that.

“Briefly,” Mica said. “He disappeared into his cabin to cuddle with that box of his.”

“Yes,” Yumi said, “I would be curious to see the contents of that box someday.”

“The contents are… unique.” Alisa wondered if any of Yumi’s interest in staying on had to do with Alejandro’s orb. Could she feel its presence from across the ship? If anyone would be in tune with that kind of thing, she would. But Alejandro was getting off at Perun. She was sure of that.

Not that it wouldn’t be handy to have a trained surgeon on board. Her hand strayed to the QuickSkin covering the gashes he had treated while she had been piloting them out of the asteroid belt.

“I have no idea what they, or it is though,” Alisa added, since Yumi was looking at her in inquiry, as if she hoped for an in-depth explanation.

“I sense spiritual power emanating from his cabin,” Yumi said.

“Are you sure that’s not his body odor? We’ve all neglected the sanibox the last couple of days.”

“You’re amusing, Captain.”

“I’m glad someone has finally realized that. Yumi, if I can scrounge up some cargo on Perun, I should be able to afford to hire you. Having a science officer might qualify us for more than simple freight hauling.” Alisa had heard of live specimens for labs being shipped and needing someone who could oversee their care. That shouldn’t be hard for a scientist who already tended chickens.

“Thank you, Captain,” Yumi said.

Alisa waved and headed toward the crew quarters to find Alejandro. Surely, his life would be incomplete if he missed out on eating something that had tried to kill the crew.

As she reached the intersection and started around the corner toward the passenger cabins, she halted, spotting Leonidas standing outside the hatchway, talking to Alejandro. He shut his mouth when she appeared. Alejandro leaned out and looked at her. Maybe it was her imagination, but they looked like they’d been caught talking about something illicit. Or at least something that they couldn’t speak of openly.

“Just came to let you two know that Grillmaster Beck’s food is ready,” she said.

“Thank you, Captain,” Alejandro said.

Leonidas nodded once.

They looked at her like they expected her to leave so they could resume talking. She turned and headed toward her cabin, as if she needed to grab something. She didn’t, but maybe she would catch a couple of snatches of their conversation. Leonidas stepped into Alejandro’s cabin, and the hatch shut with a thud.

Alisa frowned down the empty corridor, telling herself that what they chatted about was none of her business. She had come to trust Leonidas, and Alejandro… Well, she didn’t not trust him. He seemed a decent man. But he was on some mission for someone, something that revolved around that orb, and who knew what he might do in order to succeed? She ought to dump him on Perun and forget she had seen anything, but what if some trouble awaited him there, and what if it came his way before he was off her ship? Shouldn’t she know about it ahead of time?

“You’re a snoop, and there’s no justifying it,” she whispered to herself as she headed to NavCom.

Once inside, she shut the hatch, slid into the co-pilot’s seat, and flicked one of a handful of intercom switches, one that connected with Alejandro’s cabin. She muted her end and leaned close to the speaker, hoping to catch what they were saying. Even with the NavCom hatch shut, the noise from the enthusiastic conversations and occasional claps from the mess made it hard for her to hear.

“I have no experience working with biomechatronics,” Alejandro was saying.

“I have his files,” Leonidas said. “You could learn.”

“Not easily, and if you’ll forgive my self-absorption, that’s not where my interests lie right now.”

“It could be studied on the side. It need not interfere with your mission.”

His mission. What mission?

Alisa leaned closer to the speaker, feeling like a dirty eavesdropper, but she couldn’t help herself. She was curious, both about the orb and about Leonidas and what he wanted from the galaxy.

“Mastering bioengineering isn’t a hobby, my friend,” Alejandro said. “You need someone like Dr. Bartosz, someone who has advanced degrees in medicine and also in engineering. And who has experience working with cyborgs.”

“Dr. Bartosz is dead,” Leonidas said bluntly.

Bartosz, that was the man whose remains had been on the floor in that lab, wasn’t it? Leonidas had mentioned him before.

“He’s the only one I knew of who had those qualifications,” Leonidas added.

“I’m afraid I can’t help you in this manner. Even if the tenets of the sun gods didn’t proclaim it an abomination to manipulate men so, it’s not as if you’re dying. I would try if that were the case, but this is…”

“Important to me,” Leonidas said.

Alisa could hear the quiet plea in his usually stolid voice, and she winced, feeling guilty once again about eavesdropping. As curious as she was, this wasn’t meant for her to hear. She moved her hand toward the switch to turn off the intercom, but froze at Alejandro’s next words.

“It’s not paramount to the revival of the empire,” he said.

Alisa’s breath caught. She had been right. That orb had to do with something huge. Something so huge it could reunite the empire and give them the boost they needed to fight the Alliance again? The emperor’s fall had been the death knell for the empire, but there were rumors that the ten-year-old prince might not have been in the palace when it was destroyed. Alisa did not know if there was any truth to them, but there was always the possibility that loyalists would rally around the boy if he were found.

“Help me,” Leonidas said, “and I’ll help you with your quest.”

“You won’t help me anyway?” Alejandro asked. “To return the empire to power?”

“We’ll see. Maybe I’ll follow Malik’s example and go build a pirate fleet of my own.”

“I highly doubt that.”

“You don’t know me, Doctor. Do not presume.”

“Very well, but—”

A knock sounded on the NavCom hatch. Alisa flicked off the switch, spinning to face her visitor. Beck stood outside and held up a platter of food to the circular window in the hatch.

Alisa almost waved him away so she could continue eavesdropping in private, but her stomach whined at the sight of that food. She couldn’t remember the last time she had eaten. Besides, that conversation had sounded like it was winding up. She was glad Leonidas had not outright agreed to help the doctor. Whatever Alejandro was up to, it couldn’t be good for the Alliance. As a former soldier and a current citizen, she ought to report everything she knew about him and his orb to the government. But that would take a trip to Arkadius, and she wasn’t going to plan any more stops until she had Jelena. Maybe later, she could try to find cargo that needed to head in that direction.

Alisa opened the hatch to let Beck in. “They let you leave the grill?”

“Just for a delivery.” He strolled in and set the platter on the console. There was food enough for three or four, and she thought he might want to join her, but he lifted a hand in parting. “Got the next round of steaks on. Just wanted to make sure you ate. When I sent you to round up the others, I meant for you to come back afterward.”

“Thank you, Beck.”

Leonidas appeared in the corridor behind Beck, and he jumped. “Damn it, mech. How can someone so big be so stealthy?”

Leonidas’s eyes narrowed. Alisa remembered the way Alejandro had implied the gods thought cyborgs were an abomination and wished Beck would stop calling Leonidas a mech. Not that she had been any better a few days ago. But since then, they had been through a lot together.

“Cybernetically enhanced sensors on the soles of my feet,” Leonidas said.

“Really?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

“You want something to eat, Leonidas?” Alisa asked, waving at the platter.

“Hm.”

“It’s not poisoned, I swear,” Beck said. “Since I had the captain in mind when I made that plate. And since poisons are expensive.”

“I would detect them anyway,” Leonidas said. “I do have enhanced taste buds.”

“To detect poisons?”

“Yes.”

“Huh. Bet you’d win a spice contest.”

“A what?” Leonidas looked at Alisa.

She shrugged at him. It sounded like something Yumi might do to her crops or batches or whatever they were called.

“A blind spice tasting,” Beck explained. “You have to identify everything by taste alone, and they always have some exotic stuff.”

Leonidas regarded him like something sticky one might find on the bottom of one’s shoe.

“I’ll get back to my grill,” Beck said, waving to Alisa and easing past Leonidas while being careful not to touch him.

Alisa wondered what Beck would think if she made that job offer to Leonidas and he accepted it. She had originally only been thinking of her own needs in considering it, but if Leonidas was working for her, he wouldn’t go off with Alejandro to help with a quest that might not be good for the Alliance. But would Leonidas be interested in the gig? And how would she pay all of these people if she managed to hire them?

“You’re wearing a pensive expression,” Leonidas observed, as he reached over to pick up a piece of meat from the platter and gave it a sniff.

“I was contemplating deep thoughts,” Alisa said, picking up a piece of meat.

“Not inappropriate humor? Odd.”

“Well, we’re relaxing over food. Humor wouldn’t be inappropriate now, would it?” While she debated on how to raise the subject of employment, or perhaps on how to gauge his interest first, she pointed to the food in his hand. “Are you going to try some? It’s not a raw liver, but it’s tasty.”

He took an experimental bite.

“I haven’t had a chance to say it yet,” Alisa said, “but I appreciate that you hauled Malik off me and that you were willing to fight him so that we could escape.”

“There was never a question.”

“That you would choose to save an Alliance pilot and a bunch of scruffy miners over someone you used to command?”

His eyebrows rose, and she remembered that he had never spoken of his command.

“While Alejandro and I were dodging the fire of irate pirates and overzealous attack robots, I saw some pictures on display in Malik’s quarters,” Alisa said. “You were all drinking beer in some bar.”

“Ah.”

“You know,” she said, watching as he took another bite, “the stories all say that cyborgs don’t need food or drink. Or alcohol.” There hadn’t been any mentions of colleagues sharing a beer either. Belatedly, it occurred to her that the words might offend him—he wasn’t as obviously proud of being super human as Malik had been.

“Yes, we’re supposed to get by on engine oil,” he said, giving her a dry look. “We’re human, Marchenko. Until I was twenty, I was just like you. I played sports, ran around the neighborhood with friends, studied engineering at the university. We’re human. Fewer weaknesses perhaps, but all of the failings.”

“I’m beginning to see that.”

“That I have failings?”

“That you’re human.”

She expected him to snort, but all he said was a soft, “Good.”

“So… engineering at the university, huh? I guess that explains one of Mica’s mysteries.”

He lifted his eyebrows.

“We were wondering who had been fixing the ship before we got on board,” Alisa said. “I expected that we would have to do a lot more repairs before we could get the Nomad in the air.”

“It was the most promising vessel in the junkyard.”

“Were you also going to pilot it if I hadn’t shown up?”

“It crossed my mind. I’ve flown helicopters and air hammers.”

“But not spaceships?”

“No, but I was optimistic about my capabilities. And the effectiveness of the autopilot.”

“The autopilot doesn’t know how to handle pirates,” Alisa said. “And it would have beeped incessantly at you if you tried to order it into an asteroid field.”

“You’re saying I should consider myself lucky that you came along?”

“Oh, that’s a given.” She grinned at him.

He didn’t exactly grin back, but the corners of his mouth did twitch slightly.

“Leonidas… do you want a job?”

“A what?”

Perhaps that hadn’t been the best segue. “It’s like what you were already doing this week, except with payment. You beat up pirates, smugglers, mafia, gangsters, and anyone else who gives my ship the squinty eye, and I’ll pay you for it.”

He looked into her eyes as if trying to decide if she had been inhaling something from Yumi’s trunk. “Will you be paying me with stolen cyborg implants?”

“No, those got left behind unfortunately. I would pay you a legitimate split from carrying cargo and passengers.”

Leonidas clasped his hands behind his back and gazed at the starry blackness displayed on the view screen.

“Even though you’re the sole reason my ship and my people were attacked again and again this week,” Alisa said, “I’ve come to realize that you’re more appealing as an ally than as an enemy.”

“Not the sole reason,” he said. “I had nothing to do with the White Dragon ship.”

“That’s true. You’re only mostly the sole reason.” She spread her palm upward. “Are you interested? I could perhaps be talked into taking you wherever you’re heading next for your quest.” Alejandro hadn’t been willing to help him, but she would. Maybe that would make a difference to him.

“I’m heading to Perun next.”

“That’s perfect, since I’m heading to Perun next.”

He snorted.

“And after you finish your mission there?” she asked. “You’re too young to retire, and clearly if you fly around with us, you’ll get lots of opportunities to flex your muscles and shoot things. On account of my mouth.”

“Of that I have no doubt.”

Alisa raised her eyebrows and smiled. She wouldn’t push further, but hoped he would consider it even as she decided it was crazy that she wanted a former commander of the Cyborg Corps to join her crew.

“Do I get to outrank Beck?” Leonidas asked.

Her smile turned into a grin. “Probably. He may get laterally transferred to the position of chef. This bear is amazingly un-disgusting.”

“An accolade like that on the side of his sauce bottles will make him a millionaire.”

“Alas, I doubt he’ll put me in charge of his marketing.”

“I’ll think about it,” Leonidas said.

“Marketing slogans or the job?”

“The job.”

That was more than Alisa had expected.

“Good,” she said.

THE END

HONOR’S FLIGHT

Fallen Empire: Book 2

by Lindsay Buroker

Copyright © 2016 Lindsay Buroker

Chapter 1

Alisa Marchenko, captain of the Star Nomad, the only Nebula Rambler 880 in the galaxy that hadn’t been scrapped decades earlier, fiddled with the flight stick as the planet Perun grew larger on the view screen. Nothing had happened yet to justify the queasy feeling in her stomach, but anticipation was making her hands sweat.

This had been home once, the planet where she had gone to school and met her husband, but that had been before she had chosen to join the Alliance army, serving as a fighter pilot to help take down the empire. Perun was all the empire had left of the dozens of planets and moons it had once controlled. Odds were they wouldn’t be happy with her, knowing she had flown for the Alliance. But Alisa had no choice but to land on the planet. Somewhere down there, amid the vast oceans and the populous cities that sprawled across several continents, her daughter waited for her.

A clang sounded behind her, and a tall figure stooped and came through the hatch and into NavCom. Tommy Beck, her security officer, wore his white combat armor, the full body suit and magnetic boots, everything save for the helmet.

“Are you planning to take a walk?” Alisa asked, waving outward to indicate the exterior of the ship.

Beck turned, his nose to the window as he slid the hatch shut, and he didn’t notice her gesture. “Mind if I make some privacy for us, Captain?”

“I don’t know. You’re not really my type, Beck.”

From the way he turned his head and wrinkled his brow, he either didn’t get the joke or hadn’t ever considered her in a sexual manner. She decided not to find the notion of the latter depressing, especially since dating was the last thing on her mind. It had only been five months since she had woken from weeks in a medical regeneration tank to learn that her husband had been killed during an attack on Perun. They had been married for nearly ten years, and she hadn’t expected to ever have to think of dating again.

“Oh?” Beck said. “What’s your type?”

“My husband was a slender scholar rather than a big muscly man. He was smart, quick-witted, and always made me laugh. His jokes never had an edge. They were never designed to make a person hurt.” Her voice lowered, and her gaze shifted toward the dark side of the planet that they were approaching, the clumps of city lights growing visible. “Not like mine. He was a better person than I am.”

“Was? He’s gone?”

Alisa winced, reminded that she hadn’t shared the details of her past with anyone except Mica, neither mentioning Jonah’s death nor that her daughter was the reason she had come to Perun.

“Yes,” she murmured, her response barely audible.

“Sorry about that,” Beck said, “but I’m closing the door so that Lord Colonel Enhanced Ears doesn’t hear us.”

Alisa pushed away her memories. “Oh? Are we going to have a secret conversation about Leonidas?”

“Leonidas.” Beck grunted. “Right.”

He came forward and perched on the edge of the co-pilot’s seat, clunking the broad shoulders of his armor on equipment as he did so. He nearly clunked Alisa with one of his knees too. Combat armor was spaceworthy and meant to withstand a lot of damage in battle; it wasn’t meant for helping a man into tight spaces.

“Why are you wearing that now?” Alisa asked, ignoring the comment about Leonidas.

As she had found out about a week ago, his real name was Colonel Hieronymus Adler, but she preferred to think of him by his call sign. A call sign wasn’t a constant reminder that he had been the commander for the imperial Cyborg Corps. The enemy. A very feared enemy. Leonidas had saved her life back in the Trajean Asteroid Belt, and even if she sometimes still felt uneasy around him, she had offered him a permanent place on her crew as another security officer. Of course, he hadn’t accepted that job offer yet, and she did not know if he ever would.

“I’m not stepping foot on Perun without proper protection,” Beck said. “We’ll be lucky if they don’t shoot us as soon as we walk off the ship.”

“I wasn’t planning to announce that we were Alliance soldiers during the war.”

“The imperials will find out.”

Alisa had that fear, as well, but she hoped they might slip down there under the guise of merely being a freighter crew. Was that naive? She, Beck, and her engineer Mica Coppervein had all fought for the Alliance. If the imperials found out, would they arrest them? The Star Nomad had been sitting in a junkyard during the war, so it wouldn’t rouse suspicions, but what if the imperials demanded IDs? Should she have looked into buying altered ones?

“We’ll do our best not to tell them,” Alisa said. “It’s not like they have the resources of an entire system at their disposal anymore. They probably don’t even have sys-net access anymore.”

A couple of satellites showed up on the sensors, but who knew if they were connected to the system-wide grid? Alisa certainly would have removed the imperials’ access if she had been in charge after the war.

“I wouldn’t count on it,” Beck said glumly, rubbing the breastplate of his armor. “But I want to tell you what I’ve learned about Leonidas.” He put that emphasis on the pseudonym again as he laid a netdisc on the control console in front of him. “I looked him up.”

“Is he your type?” Alisa asked.

It was a bad joke, and she wasn’t surprised when Beck gave her an incredulous look.

“Never mind,” she said.

“No, and I hope he’s not yours either.”

“He has even more muscles than you do.”

“Thanks for the reminder.” Beck grimaced.

He tapped the disc, and a holodisplay appeared above it with Leonidas’s head and shoulders floating in the center. He looked a couple of years younger than the forty or so that Alisa guessed him to be now. He wore a black imperial army officer’s uniform, and his hair was very short, very military. In the picture, his blue eyes were intense with determination, harder than they were in person. Or perhaps it was his attitude that had changed in the intervening years. He was still intense, still determined, but she had caught a wistful, almost morose expression on him from time to time.

“Colonel Hieronymus Adler,” Beck said, swiping a finger along the bottom of the image so that the name popped up, along with a paragraph of text underneath it. “Former commander of the 22nd Infantry Battalion. Cyborg Corps.”

Alisa nodded. “I know this. I was there when Doctor Dominguez told us, remember?”

“Yes, but he didn’t mention this.” Beck enlarged the small text under Leonidas’s picture. “Wanted alive, two hundred thousand Alliance tindarks. This alert was issued by our government.”

Alisa’s mouth dangled open as she realized she was looking at a wanted poster. “There’s a reward for him?”

“A big reward.” Beck glanced toward the hatch, perhaps reassuring himself that Leonidas was not standing there and looking in the window. “With that kind of money, I could pay off the White Dragon mafia. Get them off my back. I might even have another shot at starting a restaurant.”

Alisa rubbed the back of her neck, floored that someone was willing to pay that much for Leonidas, and bemused that her security officer thought that turning bounty hunter was a good way to fund his culinary ambitions.

“Does the Alliance even have that much money?” she wondered. “I know our government gets some of the taxes that once went to the empire, but only on the three planets and handful of stations we had the resources to secure. And during the war, we were poorer than a depleted asteroid after three centuries of mining. Remember the ships we had to fly? Some of them were practically museum pieces.”

Beck’s gaze flicked toward the ceiling, but he did not point out that the Nomad could also be in a museum. Wise choice.

He pulled up some more text in the holodisplay. “It says here that they have the money. If you bring him in, no questions will be asked. They’re offering physical coin for him.”

“How old is that poster?” Alisa peered closer to read the text. “Maybe it was something put out at the beginning of the war, when he was commanding the Cyborg Corps.”

Even as she spoke, she wondered if that made sense. Would someone pay that kind of money just to take an enemy officer out of the equation? Leonidas might have been good at his job, but surely the imperials would have replaced him with another officer if he had disappeared.

“Nope.” Beck prodded a line, enlarging the text. “The issue date is less than six months ago.”

He was right. This hadn’t come out until three days after the treaty had been signed and the war had officially ended.

“It doesn’t say what he did? Or why he’s wanted?”

“Nothing about it.” Beck shrugged. “We don’t know what he was looking for in that cybernetics lab, but it might have been something a lot more important than a few parts upgrades.”

Alisa leaned back in her seat. It was true that Leonidas had never explained what he sought there, only that he had wanted to talk to the head research scientist, a man they had found dead on the floor of his lab. Leonidas had collected some files from the computer before leaving, but he had never shared what they were about.

“Two hundred thousand, Captain,” Beck said. “If you helped me, we could split it. You could buy a brand new ship with that, or at least put a real substantial down payment on one. A bigger one. One that would let you haul a lot more freight in a single run and make more money.”

As if money was what motivated Alisa. Oh, she wouldn’t mind having more of it, especially since her Perunese bank account had likely disappeared along with everything else after the war, but for now, all that mattered was getting Jelena back. Something that should finally happen soon. It made her giddy to realize that by this time tomorrow, she should have landed and found her sister-in-law and her daughter.

Would Jelena like the cabin Alisa had made up for her? Remembering how much she had enjoyed Andromeda Android, Alisa had downloaded some stencils, printed them out, and painted the walls with characters from the cartoons. The family had chatted over the net as often as possible when Alisa had been away, and she thought she recalled Jelena still quoting the heroine in their most recent exchange, but that had been months and months ago, so she could not be sure. She worried that Jelena’s tastes might have changed and that she would be too mature for cartoon characters now.

Realizing Beck was gazing intently at her and waiting for a response, Alisa said, “How would we subdue a cyborg and transport him to an Alliance planet? He could kill either of us any time he wanted. Surely, you remember how your first time trying to shoot him went.”

Beck had the self-awareness to squirm in his armor and flush a deep red, which was noticeable even with his bronze skin. “I do remember that, Captain. That’s why I came up here to enlist your help.”

“You want him to bend my gun in half too?”

She wasn’t even wearing her Etcher, having left the holster in her cabin. Though she did not fully trust Leonidas or Dr. Alejandro Dominguez—someone else who had admitted to being loyal to the empire—she doubted either would charge into NavCom and strangle her while she piloted. One of the perks of being the only pilot on board was that people who wanted to see land again rarely threatened her.

“No, but you’re a schemer,” Beck said. “You could come up with something. Maybe we could drug his food and strap him down, lock him in his cabin until we got to Arkadius.”

Given the athletic feats that Alisa had seen Leonidas perform so far, she doubted a locked hatch or chains would keep him immobile for long. And the Star Nomad, designed only to transport cargo and a handful of passengers, did not have a brig with forcefields. The old freighter did not even have weaponry—it had always been illegal on civilian ships when the empire had reigned.

“I’ll think about it,” Alisa said, more because she didn’t want Beck to come up with some harebrained idea on his own than because she wanted to betray Leonidas.

A beeping sound came from the sensor display to the left of her seat. Three ships had broken orbit and were heading in their direction.

Alisa licked her lips, her nerves jangling anew. She tapped a button to bring up the starboard camera feed on the view screen, so they could watch the ships’ approach. She glanced at the comm panel, expecting one of them to contact her. Those were imperial warships, one dreadnought and two escort cruisers, all heavily armed. She tried to tell herself that there were signs of old battle damage on the hulls, maybe even a rusty patch or two, but it might have been her imagination. From what she had heard, the empire still claimed ten or fifteen warships with which to defend its sole remaining planet.

“It’s hard not to see those big ships without getting a little twitchy,” Beck said, his gaze locked on the view screen. “The last time I saw them… well, my last battle didn’t go well.”

“Mine, either. Technically, we won—it was the battle for the Dustor 7 Orbital Shipyard—but my little Striker got pulverized by a kamikaze imperial Cobra right at the end. The bastard was determined to do as much damage as he could and go out in a fiery mess. His people had already surrendered at the time.”

Alisa gritted her teeth as the memory of that Cobra hitting her leaped out of the recesses of her mind. She had lost control of navigation and crashed soon after. She remembered nothing after that, except waking up on Dustor weeks after the war ended, the primitive medical facilities there taking their time in rejuvenating her macerated organs and spine and getting her off life support.

“You look even grimmer than me, Captain.”

“Maybe we can swap war stories sometime.” That crash had been a nightmare, one she had no wish to relive, but she had other stories that she would gladly share, stories where her flying had kept her alive and destroyed enemies attacking key personnel. Those were worth remembering.

“To be honest, I’d rather swap barbecue recipes.”

“You’re a strange security officer, Beck. Anyone tell you that?”

“Lots, but usually while they were asking me to make ribs and my famous honey-glazed biscuits. You get the oven in the mess working, and I’ll make a pile of them.” His words were coming out rapidly, nervously, his eyes still locked on the approaching ships.

Alisa noticed that her own palms were sweating. Speaking of nerves…

She wiped them while glancing at the comm again. What if the empire had quarantined Perun and was not going to let anyone in? What if they somehow knew that half of her crew had fought in the war? What if—

The comm light flashed, and a beep sounded.

Even though she had expected it, Alisa twitched with surprise. She reached for the button slowly, composing herself so that her voice would come out as calm and indifferent. She had no reason to sound nervous, right?

“State your purpose for approaching Perun, unidentified Nebula Rambler,” a cool female voice said. Was that a haughty sniff at the end of the statement? Maybe she knew about the shag carpet in the rec room and wasn’t as impressed as Alisa that there was a Rambler still flying.

“This is the captain of the Star Nomad,” Alisa said, deliberately not using her name in case they had a list of Alliance army officers in their database somewhere. “We are a peaceful freighter with passengers to drop off in Perun Central. We’re also hoping to pick up some cargo if that’s allowed.” She made a note to herself to later check and see if anyone was trying to get goods off the planet. Once she had her daughter, she would have to turn into a legitimate businesswoman and find a way to pay for fuel and food.

“What is your name, captain of the Star Nomad?” the woman asked dryly.

Alisa blew out a slow breath.

Did she lie and hope for the best? That the empire was, indeed, cut off from the system as a whole and wouldn’t have access to the global database of imperial subjects that had once existed?

“Alisa Marchenko,” she ultimately said.

Life would only get more difficult if she lied and was found out. Besides, the war was over. Part of the treaty said that there would not be reprisal against civilians, former military or not, by either side. Of course, that apparently didn’t apply to everyone since there was a warrant out for Leonidas’s capture.

“Access to Perun is denied,” the woman said scarce seconds later. Had she even had time to look up Alisa in a database?

“Pardon?” Alisa asked. “We have passengers that paid good money and traveled all the way from Dustor to land here. They’re imperial subjects.” She thought about pointing out that she had lived on Perun for more than ten years, but she did not want them snooping into her past. Or her present.

“Access is denied,” the woman repeated. “You will turn around and leave the vicinity, or we will force you to do so.”

Alisa muted the comm and muttered, “Very brave of you to threaten an unarmed freighter, assholes.” She turned off the mute and tried to force a smile into her voice. “May I inquire as to why? Our passengers didn’t inform us that there was a quarantine or any reason that we wouldn’t be allowed to land.”

Though… now that she thought about it, she remembered that none of the other ships that had been leaving Dustor at the same time as the Nomad had been heading to Perun. She distinctly remembered Alejandro mentioning that he had been waiting a while for a ride.

“Only loyal imperial ships are allowed access to our world.”

“We could be loyal,” Alisa said. “I just want to run freight. Is there a license I can apply for?”

“A loyalty license?” The woman really did have the driest voice. Even Leonidas, who did dry quite well himself, would have been impressed.

“Yes, I’ll take one. I want to run freight all over the system. May I land and apply?”

A new voice came over the comm, and Alisa had the impression of a senior officer leaning over the communications officer’s shoulder. “Was that lippy mouth appreciated by your superiors in the Alliance army, Captain Marchenko?” he asked, his tone as dry as the woman’s.

Alisa had the distinct impression that the man referred to her military rank rather than her status as a freighter captain. It seemed someone had looked her up.

She should have shut up, but she could not resist responding. “Oh, absolutely. My wit regularly left the senior officers in guffaws.” She ignored the incredulous look Beck shot her way. “It’s well known that the ability to appreciate humor was what won us the war.”

“Alcyone knows it wasn’t honor,” the man muttered darkly.

Alisa sighed and leaned back, muting the comm again.

“What?” she asked to the stare Beck was still leveling at her. “It’s not like they were going to let us in, anyway.”

“Access denied,” the man repeated. “Leave now.”

Alisa resisted the urge to add that the utter lack of humor had surely been what resulted in the empire losing the war. But, in truth, her senior officers had not truly appreciated her wit that much. They had appreciated her piloting skills, but that was about it. Only Jonah had regularly laughed at her jokes, whether they were funny or not.

A knock at the hatch kept her mind from traveling down tunnels of nostalgia and regret.

“It’s Leonidas,” Beck said, grabbing the netdisc off the console, even though he had turned off the holodisplay several minutes before. There was no condemning evidence floating around to alert Leonidas to the treachery in his mind.

Alisa punched a couple of buttons to alter their course—not away from the planet, not yet, but along a lateral trajectory that would not take them any closer. Then she rose to open the hatch. Like most of the doors and controls on the old ship, everything had to be done manually. She unlocked it and slid it open. Leonidas and Yumi, one of the passengers who had paid in advance for a ride to Perun, stood in the corridor.

“Any chance you can dress up in your red armor and get us an invitation down to the planet?” Alisa asked Leonidas, not ready to give up yet.

Even without his combat armor, Leonidas was intimidating: tall, broad-shouldered, and brawny. His bulging arm muscles were on display in the sleeveless vest that he wore today. As Alisa had noted before, he looked entirely human, albeit extremely fit and developed for a human, but she’d seen him hurl big men twenty meters across a shuttle bay and drop from great heights to land easily on his feet. There was no doubt as to what he was.

His gaze flicked toward the ships on the view screen. “The doctor’s name might be more likely to gain you entrance. I’m not anybody anymore.”

Uh huh. And that was why someone had a ridiculously large bounty out for him.

“You didn’t try giving them my name already, did you?” Leonidas added.

“No, I gave them my name, and they didn’t like it,” Alisa said. “Given what a fine name it is, I couldn’t imagine anyone else’s performing better.”

He frowned down at her, probably not sure if that was pure sarcasm or if there was a useful answer in there.

“I see you haven’t learned to appreciate my humor yet,” Alisa said.

“Was that what that was? Humor?”

Yumi snickered softly, her dark eyes twinkling. Those eyes looked a little odd, the pupils dilated, and Alisa wondered what she had been smoking, chewing on, or snorting this time.

“I’ll work on my jokes,” Alisa said. “Would you mind asking the doctor if he’ll come up here and talk to the imperials?” She stopped herself from saying that she would get him herself if his brawny bigness were not blocking the corridor. She didn’t truly want to annoy him. It was her reflex to be snarky to the enemy—better than letting the enemy see one’s fears and weaknesses. But somewhere between the T-belt and here, she had stopped thinking of him as an enemy. She hoped that was not a mistake.

Leonidas lifted a hand and headed toward the passenger cabins.

“Same offer goes for you, Yumi,” Alisa said.

“Pardon?”

“If you have any sway on Perun and can get us down there…” Alisa extended her palm toward the ships filling the view screen.

“Ah. I don’t think the empire has reason to dislike me, but unless they’re in need of science teachers, I’m not certain what value I would have in their eyes.”

“You do have that flock of chickens in the cargo hold.”

“You think there’s a chicken shortage on Perun?” She smiled, pushing a long braid of black hair behind her shoulder.

“It does have a large population with cities stretching for hundreds of miles along the coasts. I wouldn’t be surprised if food became a problem for them eventually.”

“A problem my ten chickens can doubtlessly help them with.”

“I’ve heard chickens like to make more chickens.”

“Not with the way that Tommy is demolishing their eggs in the mornings.”

Beck lifted his hands. “You said they were free for all. And I’ve shared my large omelets.”

The comm light flashed on the console again. Even though Alisa had altered her course, the imperial ships were shadowing her. She expected another threat, or for someone to point out that flying parallel to a planet was not the same as flying away from a planet.

Leonidas returned. “The doctor says he’ll request that they let us through, but he wishes to communicate from the privacy of his cabin.”

“Does he,” Alisa murmured, wondering what secretive things Alejandro intended to say. She supposed it did not matter. Once they landed, he wouldn’t have a reason to return to her ship. He would depart and do whatever he needed to do here, he and that strange glowing orb that he protected like a mother with a newborn babe. After that, she would never see him again.

Alisa flicked a couple of switches to give Alejandro comm access from his cabin. He could be the one to deal with the imperial officer’s insults too. Then she slid into the pilot’s seat and drummed her fingers. It crossed her mind to eavesdrop, and she might have done just that if she hadn’t had so many witnesses. Nothing like witnesses to help one rein in tendencies toward moral ambiguity. Still, she wouldn’t have felt that wrong for eavesdropping, not when she suspected Alejandro and his orb were at odds with the Alliance. More than once, it had crossed her mind to report him and what she had seen once she reached an Alliance world.

Leonidas stepped to the side, and Alejandro appeared behind him.

“Any news?” Alisa asked.

“We’re to be allowed to land at the Karundula Space Base. A civilian station.” Alejandro said those last words firmly, making Alisa wonder if there had been an argument over that matter. Had the imperials wanted to direct them to a military facility? Where they would be more easily monitored or even locked down?

“That’s excellent,” Yumi said, clapping her hands together. “The girls will enjoy getting out.”

“Yes, finding sunlight for your chickens was my primary concern too,” Alisa said, watching as the dreadnought veered away. The two cruisers moved toward her, assuming a flanking position. “Oh, goody. We get escorts.”

“Better than being shot at,” Leonidas said and headed toward the rear of the ship.

Beck pushed himself to his feet and rapped his knuckles on his breastplate. “Guess I better find my helmet.”

Yumi wandered away, too, leaving only Alejandro gazing at the planet, a mix of emotions on his face, none of them easy to read.

“What did you say to convince them to let us land?” Alisa asked.

“I simply gave them my name.”

“No mention of the specialness of your orb?” She smiled and quirked an eyebrow.

Alejandro frowned at her. “If they interview us, speak nothing of that.” The order seemed strange coming from him, a mild-mannered man in the gray robe of a disciple of the sun gods. Perhaps he realized it, because he added, “Please.”

Alisa waved an indifferent hand. “I’m just relieved they’re letting us land. Yumi’s chickens need sun, you know.”

“Is that why they’ve been complaining so much,” he murmured.

“Either that, or because Beck is stealing all of their eggs.”

Movement on the screen drew Alisa’s attention back to the controls. The two imperial cruisers were veering off. As the Star Nomad angled toward the surface of the planet, they shifted into an orbiting path again.

“I guess they decided we weren’t interesting enough to escort, after all,” Alisa said, more relieved than concerned. She hoped the imperials would not call ahead to the base and alert the locals about suspicious Alliance sympathizers en route.

Alejandro frowned but did not reply.

A couple of minutes passed, the imperial ships turning into white dots in the distance. As Alisa took them down toward the largest of Perun’s continents, something slammed into the freighter. She did not have her harness on and was hurled forward, the flight stick smashing into her stomach as her head nearly cracked the view screen.

“What in the hells?” she blurted as she hit the button for the shields.

Alejandro lay crumpled on the floor between the seats and only groaned as a response. She checked the sensors. If there had been a ship or any type of object that could hit them, the proximity alarm should have gone off.

“What’s going on up there?” Mica asked over the comm. “You’re bruising my ship.”

“As soon as I figure it out, I’ll let you know.” Alisa’s hands flew over the controls, getting damage reports and also cycling through the exterior cameras, trying to see with her eyes what the sensors had missed. “And it’s my ship. You said you were leaving me for a better job as soon as it came along.”

Something struck them again. This time, the Nomad merely shuddered slightly, the shields protecting them, and on one of the cameras, Alisa glimpsed a blast of blue energy striking them.

“E-cannon,” she growled. “Someone’s firing at us.”

She squinted into the darkness of space, trying to see where the blast had come from.

Alejandro pulled himself into the co-pilot’s seat and fastened his harness. Alisa should have done the same, but she was too busy scowling and peering.

“The imperial ships?” Alejandro asked, bewildered.

“No. Though they sure departed in a timely manner. Look. Do you see that? That dark, angular blob?”

“Angular blob?” From the way he still sounded dazed, he might have hit his head.

“Yes, there’s definitely something there.”

As if to agree with her, the sensors finally gave a tenuous beep.

“Twenty tindarks says that’s a Stealth Fang.” Alisa had fought against them during the war. They were usually imperial ships, but they were also popular with the criminal element since they did not show up on sensors until they were right on top of an enemy.

“I don’t take bets, Captain.” Alejandro had recovered enough to grip the console and peer at the screen.

“Because your religiosity forbids it?”

“Because my financial acuity forbids it.”

“What’s going on?” Leonidas asked, walking up the corridor with Beck.

Something made the ship shudder again. This time, Alisa did not see the fire from an e-cannon, but her control panel lit up in complaint.

“Beck may get to use his armor,” Alisa said, nudging the Nomad to maximum speed, hoping to escape their near-invisible pursuer.

Leonidas looked sharply at her. “Someone’s trying to board us?”

“That was a grab beam. They’re going to have to get closer to catch us, but…” Alisa eyed the sensors where their enemy now showed up as a fuzzy green blip. “They’re faster than we are, so it seems likely that could happen.”

“Can we get down to Perun first?” Alejandro asked.

She did not need the computer to run the calculations comparing the distance, their speed, and her speed. “No.”

Chapter 2

They couldn’t make atmosphere and definitely couldn’t reach Karundula Space Base before the other ship caught up. Alisa changed their course, all too aware of the agile way the Fang followed them. The angular ship was hard to see, its body all black with no running lights, and a sensor-dampening system camouflaging it until it was close enough to strike. But she knew what she was dealing with. The triangular craft was as sleek and maneuverable as a Delgottan cheetah. She knew its range for that grab beam too. Another minute or two, and it would be close enough to get the beam to stick, to capture the Nomad.

Leonidas and Beck had charged back to their quarters to fully suit up. Having a cyborg on their side should help even the odds if they were boarded, but Alisa would prefer not being captured at all. Where had those imperial ships gone?

“You doing all right, Alejandro?” she asked.

His eyebrows were pinched together, and he gripped his waist, like he might have clunked his ribs hard when he fell.

“You’re not going to die, are you?” she added, wishing she had a field full of asteroid debris to fly through so it might slow down their pursuers.

“Rebus-de teaches us not to fear death, that our souls live on for eternity, floating in the Dark Reaches and finding peace with the cosmic essences that were born with the universe and that shall continue on forever.”

“I think you can find cosmic essences in Yumi’s cabin, if you want to commune with them preemptively.” Alisa should not have mocked him, especially if he was quoting scripture to reassure himself, and raised an apologetic hand as soon as the words came out.

“I do not believe you,” Alejandro said.

“Pardon?”

“When you said that your Alliance superiors appreciated your wit, I do not believe that you spoke the truth.”

“You imperial folk are so mistrustful.” Alisa grinned at him, but it was a short-lived gesture. Their pursuers tried to envelop them with their grab beam again.

The ship lurched as a tenuous hold grasped them. Alisa accelerated, decelerated, and dove downward, trying to shake them. The Fang wasn’t close enough yet. That grip shouldn’t be a solid one.

There. Adding a clumsy barrel roll to her dive did the job.

“Shook them for the moment,” Alisa said. “But that slowed us down too.”

She corrected their course, heading in the direction the imperial ships had gone instead of down toward the planet. Unfortunately, she could not see those ships anymore. They had taken off quickly. It was as if they had been running from the trouble. Or intentionally leaving the Nomad to its fate.

“Should we try communicating with them?” Alejandro asked.

“The imperial ships?”

“The people chasing us.”

“I think they effectively expressed what was on their minds when they fired at us,” Alisa said.

Something they hadn’t done again, interestingly. The Fang was close enough. It could have fired numerous times by now. The Nomad had sturdy shields, but they would not hold up indefinitely. But the Fang did not want to obliterate Alisa’s ship. Clearly, it wanted to capture them. Maybe the Fang’s crew had hoped to disable the Nomad with that first surprise strike. The helmsman over there probably was not too concerned that it had failed. There was no need for concern. They had the faster ship.

Alejandro hesitated, looking at her, then pushed the comm button. Was he worried she would object? If he wanted to chat up the people chasing them, that was fine with her. She was too busy flying to care. Ah, there were those two imperial ships. The white dots that represented the cruisers had come into view.

“Unidentified ship that is attacking us, this is Dr. Alejandro Dominguez. Please explain your actions. We are a peaceful and unarmed freighter.”

Alisa thought of Beck and Leonidas. They were not entirely unarmed, though the handheld weapons would be of no use until intruders forced their way onto the ship.

Alejandro received a response by way of a red beam of energy that lanced past the starboard wing. It did not strike them, but it might have shaved some paint off the hull.

“I don’t think they want to talk,” Alisa said. “Why don’t you see if you can raise those cruisers? Tell them that you’re about to be captured or killed or tortured or worse and that we could use an ominous imperial presence to loom scarily at our backs.”

Alejandro hesitated, and she wished she had eavesdropped on his conversation with the imperials. If they were buddies, as she had suspected, he shouldn’t hesitate to ask for help now, should he? And they would gladly give it… They wouldn’t veer away and pretend he wasn’t in trouble. Such as they were doing now. Hm, he hadn’t blackmailed or otherwise coerced them, had he?

Alejandro tapped the comm, directing the signal ahead of them. “Captain Ravencraft? This is Dr. Alejandro Dominguez. There are unfriendly ships in your planet’s orbit, and we’re being attacked. We are in need of—”

The comm beeped at him, and a red warning light flashed.

Alisa cursed and thumped her fist on the console, as if that would help. “The Fang is jamming our communications.”

“Is there a way to override them?”

“Not unless you want to climb up on the roof and realign the comm dish.”

He looked at her, maybe thinking she was serious.

“It’s a joke. That wouldn’t help. Besides, you might interfere with my reception of The Fiery and the Glamorous. We’ve already missed two weeks’ worth of episodes by being way out on the edge of the system.”

“Perhaps they’ll see that we’re in trouble,” Alejandro said, ignoring her joke.

The white imperial ships had grown on the screen, their cylindrical details now visible.

“Oh, they can see.” Even if the Fang was still invisible to their sensors, the imperials would have detected those energy shots being fired, and they would see Alisa’s evasive maneuvers. “I think they’re just not interested in helping. Do people here not love you as much as I thought?”

“Politics are always complicated.”

She glanced at him. “Are you implying that the Fang is from a different faction on the same side? Another imperial ship?”

“I can’t know that. I only know that some people may not be pleased about the existence of the orb, as you call it.”

“What do you call it?”

Alejandro pressed his lips together and said nothing.

Another beam of energy shot out, this time hammering into their aft shields. An alarm flashed the percentage of shield power remaining. Apparently, the warning shots were over. Maybe the Fang had realized where they were running and worried that Alisa might get help.

“Mica,” she said over the internal comm. “Can you get any more power out of the engine? Going faster would be excellent for our health right now.”

“I gathered that.” Some clanks and a grunt followed Mica’s words.

Alejandro glanced at Alisa.

“That’s the Alliance equivalent of yes ma’am,” she explained.

“Sometimes it seems unfathomable that your side won the war.”

“Even though you say things like that, I’ll still offer to buy you a drink after we land.” Another energy beam slammed into the back of the Nomad, this time with enough force that the ship bucked, even with the shields up. “If we land.”

The shield power dropped below fifty percent.

Alejandro clasped the three-suns pendant that dangled down the front of his robe and closed his eyes.

A little more juice filtered into the power display next to the flight stick. Alisa did not hesitate to boost their expenditure and push them into the red. The deck plating rattled under her feet, and the ship’s voice promised dire consequences if she did not ease back, but the imperial ships grew closer, their white and gray hulls filling the screen.

As soon as she was close enough, Alisa zipped past one’s thrusters, slowing enough to maneuver. She weaved between them, as if claiming them for dance partners at the Tri-Eclipse Ball.

“What are you doing?” Alejandro asked. “Trying to annoy them?”

“Not exactly.”

The Fang did not follow her, instead slowing down at the edge of the cruisers’ firing distance. Good. If Alisa had to, she would hide between the two ships until their pursuer got bored and left, or she would go with them all the way down to the planet if that was where the imperials were headed.

Unfortunately, the Fang did not hesitate for long. The sleek ship swooped into the view of her rear cameras again, and she could tell it was trying to target her without bothering the cruisers. The other captain’s audaciousness floored Alisa, and she thought Alejandro might be right, that these ships were all on the same side. The Fang certainly did not seem worried that the imperials would see it and fire.

Alisa guided them in close to one of the cruisers, almost bumping wings as she kicked up the acceleration. The cruisers raised their shields, and the Nomad shivered as her own energy field bumped against theirs. Giving them a little more room, Alisa piloted her craft in front of one cruiser’s nose an instant before the Fang fired. A red energy beam streaked through the air between the imperial ships. Had she remained where she had been, it would have struck them, but it zipped past without hitting its target.

As she took the Nomad under the belly of the same cruiser, the comm panel flashed.

“How much do you want to bet that’s the imperials, whining about us using them as asteroids in a Seek and Find game?” Alisa asked.

“I told you, I don’t gamble. But if I did, I wouldn’t take that bet.” Alejandro tapped the comm button. “Captain Ravencraft, are you now interested in coming to our assistance?”

“Who in the hells are you?” a man’s voice snarled.

“As I informed you previously,” Alejandro said calmly as Alisa continued diving and weaving, “I am Dr.—”

“Admiral Benton said we can’t fire on you, but if you don’t get your loathsome tick of a ship off my belly, I’m going to knock you into the farthest sun.”

“Loathsome?” Alisa snarled, almost missing another attack from the Fang. She danced toward the belly of the other ship to avoid it. “The Nomad isn’t loathsome.”

“If you would simply deter the Fang from attacking us further, we would be delighted to leave,” Alejandro said.

“More than delighted,” Alisa grumbled.

A new plan jumped into her head. Maybe the imperials needed more of an incentive to attack the Fang.

So far, she had been using the other ships to stay out of their attacker’s line of sight, but now she swooped out from underneath one and drew closer than wise to its thrusters. Making sure the Fang could see them, she pretended to get too close to one of the big housings. As if they had clipped the hull of the ship, or perhaps the shield, she threw the Nomad into an artful roll. The view spun, but in her mind, she kept precise tabs on where the cruiser was and where the Fang was. For a moment, their attacker had an easy shot.

“Captain?” Alejandro asked, gripping the console with both hands.

She couldn’t tell when the Fang was about to fire, so she had to guess. Where was the perfect spot? Her belly would be most vulnerable, so when it was exposed to them, she reached for the thruster controls. She waited, trying to time it just right, to judge when the weapons person over there would shoot. The ruse would only be good for one shot.

“Now,” she whispered and summoned full power.

The Nomad surged forward, losing the roll as she streaked into space. Alisa decelerated almost immediately, not wanting to be too far from cover if this failed.

The rear cameras caught the red beam lancing out and striking just where she had wanted—one of the thruster casings of an imperial ship.

“Hah,” she said.

The shields were up on the cruisers, and that shot would not do any damage, but she hoped…

A fiery ball of orange shot out from the cruiser’s rear e-cannon. It slammed into the side of the Fang, briefly lighting up all of its black contours.

Alisa grinned. The Fang would have shields, but those cruisers were big, powerful ships with big, powerful weapons. At that close of range, that cannon blast should have made quite a dent. To her delight, second and third shots followed after the first.

The Fang veered away, its tail between its legs. With that sensor-dampening camouflage, it soon disappeared from sight—and from the sensors—but in her imagination, Alisa pictured plumes of smoke wafting from its scorched hull.

“All right,” she said, adjusting their course, “I’m taking us down to dock before any more trouble finds us.” Such as if the irritated captains of the cruisers turned their cannons on the Nomad.

“A good idea.” Alejandro tapped the comm. “We thank you for your gracious assistance, Captain Ravencraft.”

“Get your tick off our belly,” came the less than gracious response.

Alisa sneered at the comm, remembering the days when she had flown a combat ship and could have sent a few torpedoes up his nose for saying such snide things about her vessel. Alejandro closed the comm channel without comment.

“Are you done dogfighting up there, Captain?” Mica asked over the comm.

“Yes, thank you for your help. Are you sure you want to leave my ship to take an engineering job down on Perun?”

“More sure than ever.”

“You wound me, Mica. Nobody else will appreciate you the way I do.”

“If that’s not a lie, it’s an awfully depressing truth.”

Alisa looked at Alejandro. “I’m not sure if I was just insulted or not.”

“Alliance,” he muttered, gazing at the view screen as they flew down toward the city-lit continent on the dark third of the planet.

She brushed away the insults, implied and perceived, and focused on getting them down to land. She had no idea if reaching Karundula Space Base would provide any measure of safety. Someone was after Alejandro and his orb, a mafia outfit wanted her security officer dead, and Leonidas had the kind of reward on his head that could buy a person a small island. Even Yumi, Alisa recalled, had cast a few nervous backward glances over her shoulder when she had first boarded the Nomad back on Dustor. How in all three hells had she ended up with so much trouble on board? She and Mica might be the only ones here that nobody wanted dead, at least not badly enough to do something about it. And Mica was threatening to leave her.

Alisa should have felt exhilarated after escaping an uncertain fate with that Fang, but it was bleakness that rode down to the planet in her heart.

Chapter 3

Alisa trotted down the metal steps into the cargo area, anticipation and trepidation warring for prominence in her mind. She worried about stepping foot on the planet and about the trouble that her crew and passengers were carrying with them. But she also felt nearly giddy as she pictured walking up to her sister-in-law’s apartment, smiling brightly, and saying she was there to pick up her daughter.

It had been so long since she had seen Jelena in person, well over a year since her last leave and her last time visiting. And more than four years since she, Jelena, and Jonah had lived together as a family. The video chats had helped to keep Alisa up to date on the goings on back home, but it had been nine or ten months since the last one, and Alisa worried that Jelena would feel she had been abandoned. Alisa hoped they could make up for lost time in the future. They could travel among the stars together, share in Jelena’s studies, play games, and find the ingredients to make chocolates by hand, as they had often done before the war. Alisa had done similar things with her own mother when growing up on the Star Nomad. Sometimes, it had been a lonely life for a girl, but there had been interesting passengers now and then, and she had played with other children when they’d been in dock or planet-side for a few days. Alisa had many good memories of those days and hoped Jelena wouldn’t begrudge her new future, that she would learn to appreciate it.

Alejandro turned toward Alisa as she reached the bottom of the steps. He stood by the hatch, a satchel slung over his shoulder but not his duffel bag.

“You’re not taking everything with you?” Alisa asked.

He hadn’t left that orb in his cabin, had he? She couldn’t believe that, not when she was fairly certain he slept with the thing. He must have it in the satchel. She did not feel it, though, not the way she had on that pirate ship, when it had lain on the table, the four interlocking pieces glowing like miniature suns and raising the hair on her arms as it pulsed with some strange power she could only guess about.

“Not unless you’re denying me further use of the ship,” Alejandro said mildly.

“No, the cabin’s yours until we leave. But if you’re still here then, I’ll have to charge you for the next leg of our journey.” Alisa smiled, not expecting him to take her up on the offer. He’d been waiting weeks, if not months, to come to Perun.

But he tilted his head curiously. “Where are you going next?”

“I had Arkadius in mind.” The seat of the Tri-Sun Alliance government and a planet as populated as this one. No place for an imperial loyalist.

“Arkadius is reputed to have an excellent library,” he mused.

“Uh, yes, and the Floating Gardens of Scinko Terra too. One of the thirty-seven wonders of the system.” Or so the tourism pamphlets promised. Alisa was fairly certain it was the orgies that happened in the heated pools that rested on those floating terraces that made the place popular.

“I’ve seen the wonders. I haven’t seen all of the libraries.”

“Is that where you’re heading here? To the library?” Since they were in the capital, she assumed he would go to the university’s Staton Hall Library. It boasted forty levels filled with books and computer terminals stuffed with data from centuries past, some of the systems dedicated to reading formats that had long ago been forgotten, information that nobody had bothered scanning and modernizing.

“Perhaps,” Alejandro said noncommittally and smiled.

The lack of trust went both ways around here. Not that she could blame him. Whether the war had ended or not, she was Alliance, and he was imperial.

“Make sure to stop at the Black Bomber on the first floor. They put adreno-shots in their espresso. The students love it. It makes your hair stand on end.”

Much as his orb did. She didn’t mention that.

“When I was a surgeon, I occasionally had to perform emergency heart procedures on people who drank too many drinks like that,” he said.

“Students will go to great lengths to buy themselves more time to study,” Alisa said.

“I suppose open-heart surgery would pass for a medical bye. How long do you plan to remain here?”

“On Perun? Assuming the imperials don’t kick me out, a few days probably.” In addition to collecting her daughter, she needed to find cargo and buy supplies for the ship. She was well aware of the paucity of her funds and how she had to pay Beck with them as well as keeping the Nomad in the sky. She would soon have another mouth to feed, as well, but she smiled, not thinking of Jelena as a burden.

Clanks sounded on the steps, Beck tramping down in his full combat armor, including the helmet, with two rifles slung over his back in addition to the built-in weaponry of his suit. Oh, yes. The authorities were going to let him walk off the ship and into the world without any trouble whatsoever.

Leonidas appeared on the walkway and came down the steps after him. He wasn’t wearing his armor, carrying only his destroyer in a hip holster, the weapon barely noticeable under his old military jacket. Apparently, he wasn’t worried about people shooting at him as he walked off the ship. Did he even know about the bounty? Alisa wagered a lot of loyal imperial subjects would be happy to turn on one of their own for two hundred thousand tindarks.

Interestingly, Leonidas had not packed up and also was not carrying his belongings. Was he still considering her job offer? Alisa had the impression that he had business here on the planet, but not surprisingly, he hadn’t spoken of it.

Mica and Yumi walked down the steps after him. The chickens penned in the corner of the voluminous hold squawked with excitement at Yumi’s appearance, even though she did not head toward their feedbag. She wore her dress and boots, but not a purse or anything that might suggest she intended to go out.

Was it odd that none of Alisa’s passengers were in a hurry to leave? Given all the danger they had been in during the last two weeks, she would have expected them to bolt as soon as the hatch door opened.

“Not going out?” Alisa asked as Yumi strolled up with Mica.

“Not currently,” Yumi said. “Mica and I are going to scour the planetary network and hunt for jobs.”

“You’re not going to take my offer of a job as science officer, eh?” Too bad. It had crossed Alisa’s mind that Yumi might be talked into tutoring her daughter. Oh, she might not be the best influence on a young girl with her interest in psychedelics, but so far, she had proven knowledgeable and useful, and she kept to her cabin when she was pursuing non-academic hobbies.

“I don’t think so,” Yumi said. “You hardly need a science officer on a freighter going back and forth in the shipping lanes out there. Though I must admit that traveling with you thus far has been stimulating.”

“Likewise. I’ll figure out a way to pay your salary if you change your mind.”

“Thank you. I’ll see what the job market is like here. It’s a populous planet, I understand, so teachers should be in demand.”

“You’ve never been?”

“No,” Yumi said. “I grew up in a small village on the northern continent of Arkadius. I’ve traveled to many places to further my education and explore, but I’ve rarely been drawn to the great metropolises. I hope to find something in a smaller country here on Perun.”

“Not me,” Mica said. “I want a job in the city here. I imagine they’re rebuilding, so there should be chances to put a stamp on the infrastructure of the capital that could last for centuries to come.”

“You’re not staying with the ship?” Leonidas asked Mica.

Alisa wondered if his interest—or was that concern—stemmed from the fact that he was seriously considering her job offer. She had made it before learning about that warrant. Should she revoke it? Having a wanted man on the ship where she intended to bring her daughter would not be a good idea.

“Jelena first,” she murmured to herself. She could worry about the rest later.

Leonidas looked to her, his brow creased. She had forgotten about his enhanced hearing.

“Mica doesn’t think keeping the Nomad in the air is intellectually stimulating enough,” Alisa said, “so I’ll be looking for a new engineer while I’m here.”

“Oh?” Leonidas asked. “Your ship is attacked regularly. It seems that an engineer would find a great deal to stimulate her here.”

“I’m hoping those days have come to an end,” Alisa said, glancing at Beck and Alejandro and thinking of the Fang. Maybe her hopes were delusional.

Alisa hit the button to open the big cargo hatch and lower the ramp. They had been cleared to land, the air traffic controller making no comment about the battle up in orbit, and she assumed that meant they were cleared to depart the ship, too, but she watched warily as the ramp lowered. She would not be surprised to find an armed escort waiting for them.

The blue sky that came into view made her heart sing, even if it was hazy with pollution. Dustor’s sky had been red and usually full of storm clouds or sand as the wind scoured the surface of the planet. Before that, she had been in space for a year. It was good to see a bright sky again, the sky of one of the few planets in the system that hadn’t required terraforming to be habitable to the occupants of Earth’s early colony ships.

The hordes of people striding through the concourse, hurrying along the moving sidewalks or crossing on hover bridges, didn’t set Alisa at ease the way the sky did, but she expected them. Perun, its capital city included, had been bombed during the last year of the war, but it could not have put much of a dent in the population on a planet that housed billions. The capital city alone held more than ten million people. Somewhere in the crowd, someone or something with a loud mechanical voice promised specials on everything from fresh lettuce to grav boosters at the ZipZipMart on the third level of the embarkation station.

“Captain,” Yumi said, “if you happen to see any chicken feed while you’re out, I could use some. And also some compost for the potted plants and mushroom logs I started in my cabin.”

“You’re sure you’re leaving?” Alisa asked.

Yumi smiled, her cheeks dimpling. “Not entirely.”

“I’ll fetch your feed and compost,” Beck said, smiling at Yumi. How a man managed a shy smile while wearing all that imposing combat armor, Alisa did not know, but he did it.

“Thank you,” Yumi said.

Alejandro flicked his hand in a farewell and strode down the ramp. Alisa supposed it was cowardly, but she watched to see if anyone would leap out to apprehend him before venturing out herself.

The crowds of people did not take any notice of him as he glided into the stream. His gray robe did not stand out among the eclectic attire of the cosmopolitan populace.

“You going to look for cargo, Captain?” Beck asked, stepping up to her side.

“Eventually, yes. I have a personal matter to attend to first.”

“I’ll come with you.” He patted the strap of one of his rifles.

Alisa blinked in surprise. “Thank you, but that’s not necessary. You don’t even need to leave the ship if you wish.” She kept from pointing out that it might be a good idea if he didn’t leave the ship. She did not pay attention to mafia happenings and did not know if the White Dragon had a base here, but she would not be surprised. The news often mentioned that some of the big mafia empires spanned the entire system.

“Might be dangerous out there for you, and you hired me to protect you.”

“I hired you to protect the ship,” Alisa said as Leonidas stepped up to the top of the ramp. His brow was creased as he watched Alejandro’s back as the older man disappeared into the crowd. Had he expected to be invited along? “From pirates trying to force their way aboard and steal my cargo.”

“If you get mauled or kidnapped while walking along the street, who’s going to get us a cargo?” Beck asked.

“I suppose that’s a valid point.” Alisa had never worried about being mauled or kidnapped in the years she had lived here before, but that had been when she had been an imperial subject with no allegiance—at least nothing on paper—to the budding Underground Alliance. Besides, she had no idea if the empire had managed to maintain the police force that had once patrolled the city and protected its people. She didn’t even know if they were still calling themselves an empire. Could a single planet be considered an empire? When the emperor himself was dead?

“I need to pick up some spices for my marinades too,” Beck said, “and some fresh meat. The bear’s about gone.”

“Ah.” Alisa hadn’t planned on a shopping side trip, at least not for minutia such as spices and chicken feed, but she supposed they could stop on the way back. Maybe Jelena would enjoy the Pan-System Market. “I accept the offer of your company then.”

“Gracious, Captain.”

“Someone needs to carry the chicken feed.”

“Easy enough.” Beck pretended to flex his armored biceps.

“Keep an eye on the ship,” Alisa told Mica with a wave, but paused before she started down the ramp. She turned and trotted over to Mica. “You said you’ll be on the computer, right? Looking for employment?”

“Yes.” Mica squinted at her.

Alisa leaned close, keeping enhanced cyborg hearing in mind this time. “Look up a Colonel Hieronymus Adler, will you?” she whispered. “Find out anything you can. There’s a warrant out for him, and I’d like to know why.”

“Is that our cyborg?” Mica murmured, eyeing Leonidas over Alisa’s shoulder.

He stood at the top of the ramp, looking out at the crowd, and did not appear to be concerned about their conversation.

Alisa nodded.

“Did he become a cyborg out of bitterness that his parents gave him the name Hieronymus?” Mica asked.

“Possibly so.” Alisa waved again before joining Beck.

They headed down the ramp. To her surprise, Leonidas followed them.

“You’re not coming with us, are you, mech?” Beck frowned over his shoulder.

Alisa winced. Even if she had called Leonidas “cyborg” for the first week she had known him, she’d come to think of him as a regular person, and she wished Beck would stop calling him by that name.

“Just heading in the same direction.” Leonidas nodded toward a sign for a transit station at the end of the concourse, not obviously offended.

“You’re probably going somewhere more interesting than we are,” Alisa said, fishing a bit. She doubted he would tell her anything, but she was surprised that he wasn’t heading off to the library with Alejandro.

“Doubtful,” Leonidas said.

So much for fishing.

At the transit station, they ran into trouble when Alisa tried to pay with her four-year-old swipe card. She was not surprised when it was rejected, as she’d suspected her bank account might have become a victim of the war, but there wasn’t a human operator to talk to, nor would the robot at the turnstile accept the physical currency that Alejandro had paid his passage with.

After observing for a moment, Leonidas stepped forward and waved the palm of his hand at the currency scanner. A blue light flashed, reading the subcutaneous chip that most imperial subjects possessed. Because of her itinerant youth and her mother’s fear of being on the grid, Alisa had never gotten one.

“Three,” Leonidas said, paying for fares for all of them. “Looks like I’m joining you, after all,” he said dryly.

“For someone who was squatting in a junked freighter when we first met, you’re certainly bursting with cash,” Alisa said, then wished she had thanked him instead. Why did she have such a hard time doing that?

“Only on this planet,” he said, his blue eyes growing a touch stormy as he pushed through the turnstile.

She shouldn’t have reminded him that his government and his way of life were gone. She wondered again if he knew about the bounty out for him. Should she tell him?

“Think he’ll buy us some chocolate-covered peanuts on the train?” Beck said brightly, apparently not worried about Leonidas’s problems.

“Maybe if you stop calling him mech,” she said, following Leonidas to the floatalator leading up to the elevated boardwalk.

“Not sure peanuts are worth that.”

• • • • •

Alisa got off the train a stop early, wanting to walk past the apartment building her family had once lived in. Maybe she shouldn’t have, since her sister-in-law had warned her that it had been destroyed—the bombing had been what resulted in Jonah’s death—but a morbid need to see the area for herself filled her. Besides, it wasn’t that far from her destination, and the afternoon was young. Jelena would probably still be at school.

“They’re rebuilding quickly, aren’t they?” Beck asked, walking at her side, not questioning her early departure from the train. “I didn’t see nearly as many bombed-out buildings as I’d expected when we rode through the city. Just the capital building. Someone left an impressive crater there.”

Leonidas walked a few paces behind them, not participating in their conversation. She still hadn’t thanked him for paying for their passage, but he hadn’t sat next to them on the train, so the opportunity hadn’t arisen. She had a feeling that Beck was an anti-magnet, at least when it came to cyborgs.

“I wasn’t involved in the fighting here, but I know our people picked their targets carefully.” Alisa’s commanders had kept her away from her home of record, doubtlessly knowing that she would have struggled to fire upon the city where her family lived. Busy preparing for the Dustor mission, she hadn’t even learned about these bombings until after they had been carried out. If she had known, she might have found a way to warn Jonah of the attacks, to tell him to find an underground shelter. “For the most part they did,” she amended quietly. “There were mistakes.”

Like her family’s home…

The streets they walked now weren’t nearly as familiar as they should have been. Shells of buildings, sometimes only a wall or two standing, rose like headstones in a graveyard. Some of the streets were in the process of being rebuilt. Others were cracked and riddled with potholes. Still others were gone altogether.

Off to one side, a group of boys was playing around a crane and a stack of giant pipes, chasing each other in and out of them. One picked up a warped piece of metal and threw it at another. Alisa was tempted to yell at them to go play somewhere less dangerous, but was distracted by looking at their faces, wondering if she had known any of them four years earlier. Jelena had been too young to go out and play unsupervised with the neighborhood kids then, but there had been numerous children who lived in her building. Were any of these boys residents who had survived?

“Look,” one of them blurted and pointed in her direction.

Several other dirty faces turned toward her little group. Alisa’s first thought was that they recognized her, but they were pointing at Beck. He still wore his full suit of combat armor, helmet included. He had drawn a few curious looks, but surprisingly, the authorities hadn’t shown up yet to question him about his weapons. During the empire’s heyday, civilians hadn’t been allowed to carry firearms on the more populous and civilized planets, Perun included. From the paucity of the cube-shaped “spy boxes” that usually floated along the streets—years earlier, they had been everywhere, like swarms of bees—Alisa guessed that there weren’t as many resources for monitoring the population as there once had been.

The boys abandoned their play and raced toward Alisa and the others. She lifted a hand, half-expecting Beck or Leonidas to be alarmed and reach for a weapon. None of the kids looked to be older than ten, but she’d come across many soldiers with twitchy reflexes, and from the way bangs and thumps came from Leonidas’s cabin at night, she suspected that his mind wasn’t always a predictable place to live.

But neither man reached for a weapon. Leonidas watched the kids approach, but not with any more scrutiny than he watched the rest of the street. His gaze was constantly roaming, alert even here, in what should have felt like a safe harbor for him.

“Is that real combat armor?” one of the boys asked, skidding to a stop in front of Beck.

“Of course it’s real,” a gangly kid who could not have been more than eight said. “That’s one of the Bender Farrs, a Dex 7560T. It’s blazing! I’ve got the model. It’s got rear cameras, trans-titanium casing, and quad guns. Nothing’s getting through! Do you have the grenade launcher attachment, mister?”

The kids gathered around Beck, fearless as they gazed at him. A few dared touch his armored exterior. Leonidas stood back, his arms folded over his chest. Alisa was surprised he was still with them and hadn’t veered off to pursue his own mission, whatever it was.

“Used to have the grenade launcher,” Beck said. “But it got blown off in some action on a transport ship near Stardock 18. We were fighting—” he glanced at Leonidas, “—fearsome enemies.”

“Stellar,” several of the boys whispered.

“Are you planning a hit? Can we watch?”

“A what?”

“You know, killing someone.” The boy waved toward a building shell, the windows all blown out and one of the corners crumbled. “That happens sometimes now. The gangs run around here. They perch in the old buildings and ambush each other. But you’d be invincible with combat armor, right?”

“Against snipers in windows?” Beck asked. “Most likely.”

Other boys peppered him with questions. Leonidas shifted, like he meant to continue past and wait for them farther on—or perhaps he wouldn’t wait for them—and the young boy who had named the armor stats noticed him. His eyes widened as they locked onto his jacket, on the patch that proclaimed he had been a part of the Cyborg Corps.

He nudged an older boy next to him with similar dark hair and eyes, a brother perhaps. Before, he had been articulate, but all he did now was whisper, “Peter, mech.”

The older boy looked at Leonidas’s jacket. He nudged two more boys. Soon the group fell silent aside from whispers and stares. At first, Alisa thought they might treat Leonidas similarly to Beck, being curious about his abilities and whether he was here for “a hit,” but there was fear in their eyes, not awe. Leonidas continued observing their surroundings and pretended not to notice it, or maybe he was indifferent to the reactions.

“We gotta go,” one of the older boys said, backing away and waving for the others to follow.

“Hope you get a new grenade launcher soon,” one of the more garrulous ones said, but then they were gone, sprinting off across the dirt lot, as if they expected Leonidas to give chase.

He did watch as they departed, but not with any menace. A pained expression flickered through his eyes before disappearing, hidden behind a stoic mask.

“Well, I guess we know who’s not good with kids,” Beck said dryly and started walking, his back to Leonidas.

Alisa almost said that Leonidas hadn’t done anything one way or another and could hardly be blamed for their reaction, but he, too, started walking, his pace brisk. She hurried to catch up since she was supposed to be the one leading.

They walked in silence until she rounded a corner and found herself on her old street. She slowed down as the empty lot where her apartment complex had stood came into view. Where once a fifteen-story structure had risen on a busy street full of other such buildings, there was now nothing more than a gaping hole in the earth. A few pieces of rubble remained here and there, but most of it had been cleared. Bulldozers and cranes rested at one corner of the lot, though nobody was working in the area today.

Her feet rooted to what had once been a moving sidewalk. She stared at the hole, dumbfounded by the destruction. Even though her sister-in-law had described it, and Alisa had looked at news photos during her rehabilitation, it hadn’t truly been real until now. The bodies had been moved along with the rubble, and for that she was thankful, but it didn’t keep her from realizing that hundreds of people had died here. Her neighbors. Her husband.

“Desolate part of town,” Beck said, giving her a curious look. Wondering why they had stopped?

“Yeah,” was all Alisa said, not wanting to discuss it.

She spotted a warped deck chair lying crumpled at the corner of the lot. It had somehow survived the blast and avoided the bulldozers. A deflated ball was smashed into the earth beside it. A toy that might have belonged to Jelena or any of the other children who had lived here. Alisa remembered playing volleyball on the rooftop court with her daughter, trying to teach her that the ball was supposed to go over the net, not be bounced into it so it would rebound and could be hit repeatedly.

Moisture burned her eyes, but she blinked it away. She would not cry with an audience looking on. Besides, Jelena had not been home when this had happened, so she survived. That was something. It was enough. It had to be.

Alisa turned, intending to head to her sister-in-law’s apartment, but she bumped into Leonidas. He was gazing at the flattened lots, his jaw tight, irritation in his eyes. He looked down at her, his expression scathing.

“Sorry,” she muttered, though she doubted he was angry because she’d run into him.

“You did this,” he said, flicking his hand toward the empty lots. “There was no reason to bomb civilian structures.”

“I wasn’t anywhere near Perun when this happened,” Alisa said, stung. Even though she knew he meant the Alliance and not her specifically, it felt like a direct accusation. “I’m sure they were targeting imperial ships. If your people were flying over the city, inviting fire, then that’s hardly our fault.”

“As if your Alliance ever targeted military ships. They attacked things that weren’t defended, bombed what they could, then slunk away in the night.”

“There were plenty of all-out-battles with military ships fighting military ships. I know. I was a part of that. War is horrible either way. You think I’m not aware of how shitty a situation this is? This was my home.” Her voice cracked on the last word as she flung her hand toward the smashed ball, the warped chair.

“Yet you chose to join the Alliance, knowing you would cause death and destruction.” He shook his head and walked away.

Beck shifted his weight, but said nothing. He probably didn’t know why Leonidas had blown up. In truth, Alisa didn’t, either. Oh, she had roused his anger before over this very topic, but it had taken some poking and prodding. What had he seen in this empty lot? Something similar to what she saw?

She probably should have left him to steam on his own, but she jogged to catch up. A seagull soared overhead, not caring that the harbor was miles away and that fish wasn’t likely to be found here.

“Did you lose someone too?” Alisa asked Leonidas. “Is that why you’re angry?”

“I’m angry because your war was pointless and made the universe a worse place rather than a better place.”

“That’s not true. People have freedoms now that they never had under the empire.”

“Freedoms don’t feed them or keep them safe. You’ll see when you’ve been out in the system more.” His tone was more reasonable now, though his shoulders were still tense. He swept his gaze back over the empty lots before they headed down another street, and she had a feeling he was seeing more than the dirt and the cranes. “You’ll see,” he added softly.

Alisa wanted to refute him, but since the war ended, she hadn’t been many places except for Dustor, which hadn’t exactly been a paradise even before the fighting began. Her freedom-loving soul appreciated that there were fewer spy boxes floating through the skies here, but she admitted that the boys’ talk of hits was alarming. Such a thing never should have happened in a policed city on an advanced planet. Still, she would wait until she had seen more of the system for herself to consider Leonidas’s words more fully. He was clearly biased, having liked the suffocating imperial system. Of course those who had thrived in it had liked it.

They entered an area where the buildings still stood, an area Alisa had walked through often before on her way to the university and later to her job at DropEx. The streets were quiet, but people still went about their business, and the moving sidewalks worked here.

Nerves returned to her stomach as she stepped onto the one that would take them to her sister-in-law’s place. It occurred to her that she hadn’t commed ahead to warn Sylvia that she was coming. She had been thinking about the need to do so as they approached the planet, but then they had been attacked, and she’d forgotten. As an artist, Sylvia worked from home, but that was no guarantee that she would be there now. Alisa almost reached for her comm to make the call, but the idea of knocking on the door and surprising her and Jelena made her stay her hand. If Sylvia wasn’t home, Alisa would comm and arrange a meeting time.

She stepped off the sidewalk in front of a centuries-old brick building with Old Earth lions roaring down from the edge of the rooftop. A mix of tall windows and roll-up garage doors dotted the front of the structure. A place for an artist. Alisa walked up a set of stone stairs to the door where a comm system waited.

“I have someone to meet,” she said, realizing Beck was right behind her, as if he expected to be invited in for tea. “Will you wait here?”

Alisa did not want Jelena to be scared by a man looming in combat armor or another man wearing a cyborg military jacket. At eight, she was probably old enough to recognize an imperial soldier; after living through the war, she might know the significance of the patch too. Not that Leonidas had followed her. He had stopped beside a lamppost, his mouth moving as he talked quietly into his earstar comm.

“Sure,” Beck said, giving her a salute.

She pressed the button for her sister-in-law’s apartment, one of only ten loft residences in the building. Unlike most of the struggling artists Alisa had run into on campus, Sylvia had always done well for herself with her paintings and sculpture.

A long minute passed, and disappointment grew within her. She should have commed ahead.

Then a distracted, “Yes?” came over the speaker, and a flash of excitement filled her. It had been years, but she recognized that voice.

“Sylvia? It’s Alisa.”

“Alisa?” Sylvia sounded puzzled.

“Yes, I’m through with my obligations to the army now. I’m here to see Jelena, to take her with me, if that’s not a problem.” Alisa doubted it would be. Sylvia would have been caring for her for about six months, but she would surely agree with Alisa’s right to take her. She might agree less with the idea of her niece being taken off to run freight for the rest of her childhood, especially if she was in a stable environment here. Sylvia wouldn’t make a fuss, would she? Alisa dreaded the idea of a legal battle, especially here on Perun, where her position in the war could and would be used against her.

“It’s good to see you, Alisa,” Sylvia said slowly, and the video display above the buttons came on. A woman of forty, Sylvia had gray mixed in with her dark hair, a lean face, and a smear of yellow paint on her cheekbone. “Did you get my letters?”

She didn’t sound that excited to see Alisa. There was wariness in her face that filled Alisa’s belly with unease.

“Letters?” she asked. “Plural? I got one, just a couple of months ago when I was released from the hospital on Dustor.”

“The one about Jonah?”

Alisa nodded.

“But not the one I sent three months ago? About Jelena?”

Alisa’s feeling of unease increased to one of dread. “It might not have had time to reach me. What happened?” she asked, her mouth suddenly dry.

Sylvia sighed. “You better come in.”

A soft buzz sounded, and the door lock released. Feeling numb, Alisa might not have opened it in time, but Beck grabbed the handle for her. His face was somber behind the faceplate of his armor. She hadn’t told him about Jelena, but he was clearly catching the gist of the conversation.

Alisa stumbled over the raised threshold as she entered and had to catch herself on the wall. She found her way through the wide hallway, not seeing the polished wood floors or architectural details now. The door at the end opened, and Sylvia stood there, her face even graver than it had been seconds before.

“What happened?” Alisa repeated, searching her eyes as if the answer was within them, as if she could tear out the information with telepathy instead of waiting for an explanation.

“They came,” Sylvia said. “Three months after the war ended, when we all thought we were safe, when we were rebuilding… I was here with her. But they came, and I couldn’t stop them. They took her.”

Chapter 4

Sylvia kept gesturing to chairs, but Alisa couldn’t sit.

“What do you mean they took her?” she asked. “Who took her? The empire?”

Why would the empire want her daughter? Wasn’t it enough that she had lost her husband? There was nothing special about her family, no dynasty or money for anyone to inherit. It didn’t make sense.

“Men in black robes. There were four of them.” Sylvia perched on the edge of the sofa. “I tried to stop them, but they easily got past me. One waved his hand and made it seem… I don’t know. For a few minutes there, while they were invading my home, I thought it wasn’t such a bad thing. I’m sure this wasn’t my own thought.”

“Not your own thought?” Alisa gaped at her, her mind refusing to put together the puzzle pieces, even though the robe alone would have suggested the identities of the kidnappers.

“I believe they were Starseers.” Sylvia reached for a computer console built into the coffee table, the modern black interface looking strange set into the solid wood, the legs artistically turned, the surface elegantly engraved. “I can show you the video from the hallway. I got security to give it to me. I was trying to catch faces, to try and get enough to identify them.”

Alisa rubbed the back of her neck, but nodded. She wanted to see for herself, to try and understand. Maybe it had simply been people dressed up as Starseers. They could have counted on Sylvia being too daunted by their presumed identity to chase after them. After all, she was alone. But now that Alisa was back, it would be a different story. She would chase them. But if this had happened three months ago, where could she start? Tears threatened for the second time that afternoon, but they were tears of tension and frustration this time, not of sorrow.

“Here it is,” Sylvia said, and a video of the hallway near the front door began to play above the table. “I’ve shown the police. They put out a missing person report, and I added a reward to it for her safe return.”

“Thank you,” Alisa made herself mutter, though gratitude wasn’t the emotion at the surface of her mind. She wanted to blame Sylvia for allowing this to happen. How could she have let strangers in to steal her little girl?

Alisa managed to keep the accusations from tumbling from her lips. Sylvia had been kind enough to take Jelena in; to throw that in her face would be unacceptable. No matter how much Alisa wanted to lash out at someone. She found herself wishing Leonidas had come in, if only so she could pick a fight with him and let out her anger.

“Unfortunately, they haven’t had any leads other than the name I gave them along with the video,” Sylvia said as the footage played. At first, the hallway stood empty, with nothing but four apartment doors and the front door visible, with the darkness of night pressing against a tall window next to it. “I heard some of them refer to the one who appeared to be the leader as Durant—I’m not sure if it was a first or last name. Durant. It’s not common, but it’s not uncommon, either. I checked the imperial and Alliance databases. There are tens of thousands of them out there. I’ve called the police every few days, but if the Starseers truly took Jelena, they have the power to disappear well and fully.”

“That doesn’t make any sense at all,” Alisa said. “There are hardly any Starseers left in the galaxy, and there’s nothing about Jelena that would make them want her.”

Sure, her daughter had scored well on intelligence tests, thanks more to her bright father than her mother, Alisa was sure, but she had not been an exceptional genius. It wasn’t as if she had been floating dishes around the kitchen or whatever it was Starseer children did before they formally started studying to control their powers.

At least, that was what Alisa thought. The strangest look came over Sylvia’s face, and she opened her mouth and closed it twice without saying anything.

Before Alisa could question her, movement in the video caught her eye, and she shifted her attention to it. The front door had opened and four figures in black robes filed in, one after the other. Large heavy hoods drooped low, creating shadows that hid their features, even in the well-lit hallway. Alisa leaned down, peering in close, hoping to glimpse a face. Even if one only appeared for an instant, it ought to be enough to run it through the police databases and hope for a match. But the men either knew about the cameras or just knew that they had to keep their hoods low to remain hidden. They walked slowly, their faces turned downward, their hands in their sleeves, not revealing so much as a wedding ring that might be used for identification. All four of them wore pendants that reminded Alisa of Alejandro’s, but his was the three-sun symbol of the Sun Trinity. These were the red moon and silver star symbol of The Order, the special Starseer religion about which she knew very little.

The figures disappeared from the lobby camera’s field of view. Sylvia’s door was at the opposite end of the hall from the front entrance, and it wasn’t visible. Alisa shifted from foot to foot, waiting for them to come back into view. It only took a minute. The leader walked back toward the front door, a familiar girl with him. Her rowdy hair was tamed into two brown pigtails, there was a mole on the side of her face below her ear, and she had a cute, pert nose. Jelena.

She was older and taller than the last time Alisa had seen her, but there was no mistaking her. And there was no mistaking that she was walking side by side with the man as he held her hand and led her to the door, almost as if she knew him. How could that be?

Two more robed figures walked into view, heading for the entrance, but the last one stopped, turning back toward the apartment. Sylvia charged into view, pushed past him, and ran toward Jelena. The camera had not recorded sound, but from the contorted way Sylvia’s mouth opened, it was clear that she was yelling. Jelena paused and turned, wearing an oddly vacant expression. Her young face crinkled as Sylvia yelled, as if she was trying to remember something. The man tugged at her hand, but she turned in the other direction, almost tripping as she stepped back toward Sylvia, who had almost reached her.

The figure behind the man leading Jelena away lifted a hand toward Sylvia. Alisa thought he would halt her physically, but Sylvia jerked to a stop before she reached him. She froze like a ship caught in a grab beam.

The man leading Jelena touched her shoulder, and she turned around to follow him out the door, but not before Alisa saw that vacant expression reaffix itself on her face. It was chilling, all trace of her daughter’s playful spirit—all trace of her personality and who she was—gone.

As the men filed through the exit, Sylvia remained frozen in place. The door closed, the hallway empty except for her.

“Not my finest moment,” Sylvia murmured from the sofa, wincing as long seconds passed.

Finally, the Sylvia in the video stirred. She looked behind her and forward, confusion stamping her face. Then she ran to the entrance, disappearing out the front door.

On the sofa, Sylvia leaned forward and stopped the video, leaving the image hovering above the table. “I ran up and down the block after that, looking for sign of them,” she said. “They just disappeared. I asked the neighbors if anyone had seen them. There were people on the street coming home from work. Nobody remembered seeing them or Jelena.” She swallowed and met Alisa’s eyes. “Alisa, I’m so sorry.”

“I don’t understand,” Alisa said, losing her earlier certainty that posers pretending to be Starseers had kidnapped her daughter. “You’d never seen them before? There was no previous contact?”

“Not with me, no.”

Alisa frowned. “What does that mean? I’m sure Jelena didn’t comm them to come get her.”

“No, I doubt that.” Sylvia’s brow crinkled, as if she hadn’t considered the possibility but now was. That was ludicrous. How would an eight-year-old know who to comm even if she was unhappy and wanted to leave? Had she been unhappy? With her father dead and her mother billions of miles away?

Alisa opened her mouth to ask, but Sylvia spoke again first.

“I was thinking that Jonah might have had some contact with one of their temples before his death.”

“Why?” Alisa rubbed her head. “She wasn’t…” It seemed a ridiculous thing to ask, but she made herself say, “She wasn’t showing any Starseer tendencies, was she?”

She didn’t see how that could be when everyone knew those abilities were hereditary, something that the colonists who had originally settled Kir had developed during the centuries they had lived there in isolation. These days, with Kir long since rendered uninhabitable during the Order Wars, fewer and fewer Starseers were born each generation, and not everyone with the genes inherited the abilities. Alisa certainly couldn’t move objects around with her mind—or daze and kidnap defenseless children. Nor had Jonah ever done anything like that, at least not when she had been observing. Besides, children born on the core worlds in imperial hospitals were tested at birth for the gene mutations that signaled the potential to gain those abilities. Nothing unusual had come up on Jelena’s tests.

“She is about the age when those things start to come out,” Sylvia said carefully. “I know Jonah was always careful to keep his talents a secret, but I’m surprised… He never told you?”

Suddenly, the apartment seemed very still, very quiet. Alisa grew aware of a mechanical clock ticking in a distant corner of the loft.

“No,” she whispered.

“I never manifested the abilities. As you can clearly see.” Sylvia grimaced as she waved to the frozen video. “But Jonah used to play with his talents on the farm as a boy. We were lucky we were in such a rural area and that he wasn’t born in an imperial hospital.”

“But Jelena was born here, tested here…” Alisa spoke slowly, trying to wrap her mind around the idea that Jonah had kept secrets from her. Big secrets. He had been so open, always laughing, always friendly. Surely, those were not the traits of a member of a sinister and secretive order.

A teakettle whistled in the kitchen. Sylvia got up, held up a finger, and walked to attend to it. Alisa wanted to leap on her back and strangle the answers out of her. An interminable amount of time seemed to pass before she returned with two cups in her hand. She offered one to Alisa, who only shook her head. She wanted answers, not tea. Jelena had been tested. She remembered the doctors doing a cheek swab.

Sylvia sat back down and sipped from her own cup. “A few days before you went to the hospital to deliver her, Jonah came to me. As a scholar, he didn’t have much money then. As I’m sure you remember.”

Alisa nodded tersely, barely keeping from growling a, Get to the point.

“He asked to borrow some from me. He was nervous and wanted physical coins, nothing traceable by the banking system. I had an inkling as to what it was about, though he wouldn’t speak of it or say who it was meant for.”

“You gave him the loan?”

“Yes. I suspect he was paying someone off at the hospital, either arranging for those tests to disappear or perhaps for there to be a mix-up. Another baby would have been retested if she came up positive.” Sylvia lifted her shoulders. “Jonah wouldn’t have done anything to harm anyone, but you understand the dangers, the chance that he—both of you—would have lost your daughter if she had tested positive. Even though there were Starseers in the imperial line, the government has always been fearful of those with the powers.”

“With good reason,” Alisa blurted out before realizing that she wasn’t just talking to her sister-in-law anymore, but with someone whose ancestors had apparently come from Kir. It was as if the woman she and Jonah had shared coffee with on a weekly basis was a stranger now. “I mean, I wouldn’t have wanted to risk our daughter being taken away, either. Is that what always happens? Happened?” She reminded herself that the empire wasn’t in charge anymore, and she had no idea what kind of policy her own people were establishing.

“The children were often taken away to special orphanages, yes. If the parents weren’t aware of the risk beforehand and didn’t find a way to hide them. Sometimes the parents had no idea. In our case, several generations had passed since anyone in the family had shown any talents. From my limited understanding of the science, the genes are dominant, so they’re passed on easily, but the Starseer abilities themselves rely upon epigenetic triggers to manifest, and despite much speculation and a couple of studies involving those in the imperial bloodline, nobody’s quite sure what exactly those triggers are. Stress is believed to be a component, a major stressor undergone at the appropriate age.”

“Such as the stress of having your home bombed and your father killed?” Alisa asked bleakly.

“Perhaps. I remember Jonah first displayed talent after recovering from a bout with pneumonia. But there’s much that even modern science does not know. The Starseers themselves are very secretive, and few outside of the imperial bloodline have come forth over the centuries to volunteer themselves for studies.”

“What did the empire do with those it took and sent to orphanages?”

“From what I’ve heard, they wanted to use those with Starseer potential to their own advantage and raised them with the idea of indoctrinating them to be loyal subjects, but since so many children never developed abilities, the empire most likely ended up with a bunch of normal children who grew up bitter that they had been taken from their parents.” Sylvia lowered her voice. “Some speculate that they just got rid of the babies.” Her grip tightened on the teacup. “Jonah didn’t want to risk that.”

“No. Hells, no. I understand that, but why didn’t he ever tell me?”

Sylvia smiled slightly. “You used to tease him for being overly bookish when you two first met.”

“I tease everybody. Myself included. It’s part of my charm.”

Sylvia snorted. “Indeed. But Jonah was sensitive. We studious, artistic types often are.” She waved her hand toward an easel set up in the corner. Alisa had been too distracted to look at what she was working on and did not notice now, either.

“So?”

“You already thought him a tad odd, and he had a huge crush on you as soon as you sat together in Professor Lingenbottom’s class. He worried that if you found out about his heritage, you would think him tainted. Besides, our family has been here, growing wheat and corn out in the hinterlands for generations. It’s not as if anyone remembers that we originally came to Perun as refugees from Kir after the Order Wars. Also, Jonah had very little interest in learning about his heritage. I still remember when we were children and a Starseer came to visit after Jonah first started demonstrating his powers. I’m not sure what the gist of the private conversation they had was, but Jonah ran screaming out to the corncrib and wouldn’t climb down until the man left.”

“The Starseers don’t have reputations for benevolence and kindness.” Alisa shuddered, horrified to know her daughter had been taken by them. They operated off the grid, hiding from the empire and everyone else most of the time. Even if a face had shown up on that video, it probably wouldn’t have been in the Perun police database. How could Alisa ever find the people who had taken Jelena if they didn’t want to be found? The name Durant wasn’t much to go on.

“No, our first contact with them, after centuries of isolation, was when they regained spaceflight, left their planet, and tried to take over the rest of the system,” Sylvia said dryly.

“What do you think they want with Jelena?”

“I would guess to raise her as one of their own.”

Alisa slapped her palms against her thighs, then stalked around the room, distress and horror giving way to fury. “Well, they don’t get to,” she said. “Presumptuous bastards. She’s my daughter, and I’m going to raise her. I already gave up too much for the Alliance, four years of my life and hers. They promised it would only be for a year, Sylvia. And it was four. Four. If I hadn’t been gone so long, this never would have happened. Jonah—”

“Would probably still be dead,” Sylvia said with a sad sigh. “And if you had been in the apartment when the bomb went off, you would be dead too.”

Alisa pushed her hands through her hair, almost tearing off a chunk. “Logically, I know that, but I can’t help but wonder if—fear—I did the wrong thing, made the wrong choice. The Alliance would have won without me. I shot down a few ships, flew some people around, but that’s it.”

Sylvia spread her hand, palm up. She wasn’t going to deny Alisa’s self-recriminations. Maybe she agreed with them.

Alisa’s comm beeped. She ignored it and stalked over to the window, scowling out at the building behind this one, the hint of blue sky visible above it. Earlier, she had been admiring that blue sky, but now, its cheery brightness seemed to mock her. Stormy gray clouds would have been better. She felt so lost. Where could she start looking for her daughter? Was Jelena even on the planet? Three months had passed, and Alisa had no leads. Nothing.

The comm beeped again.

Alisa snatched it off her belt clip and roared, “What?”

“Uhh, got a problem, Captain,” Beck said.

“If you have to take a piss, just come inside and do it.”

“No… the combat armor takes care of that.”

“Ew.” She scowled at her unit, still irritated. She forced herself to take a deep breath. “What’s the problem?”

“Someone’s spying on us.”

“Are you and Leonidas looking suspicious and intriguing?”

“I’m definitely not. The mech… he always looks suspicious. He’s been chatting up old girlfriends since you left.”

Alisa blinked, the image so startling that she forgot about her own problems momentarily. “Really?”

“Nah, I don’t think so. I did hear a woman’s voice come from his earstar, but not much more than that. He’s been whispering and keeping his back to me. I caught him agreeing to meet someone at a certain time, but that’s it.”

“Who’s doing the spying?” Alisa asked.

“One of the kids from the field.”

“I was imagining mafia thugs.”

“Don’t underestimate kids, Captain. They make good lookouts since nobody pays attention to them. They work cheaply too.”

“It’s probably just the one that was intrigued by your armor. Maybe he wanted to look more closely.”

“I had that thought,” Beck said, “but I’m not the one the kid was staring at.”

“Leonidas?”

“Leonidas. I’m not sure if he ever saw his spy—or if he’s paying attention to me now. The kid was quick and stayed out of sight, but I glimpsed him looking at the mech and comming somebody. I think he might have taken a picture too. If I hadn’t been wearing my helmet with the built-in cameras, I wouldn’t have spotted him behind me.”

“It must not have been the boy who knew your specs so well.”

“It wasn’t. It was one of the older ones. I turned around to look, and he darted out of sight. I ran back to the alley I think he went into, but he had disappeared. I’m sure he knows this neighborhood a lot better than I do.”

Alisa grumbled under her breath. She didn’t particularly care if people were spying on Leonidas, not now. But she didn’t know what else could be gained by staying here, either. She had already learned far more than she expected. More than she wanted. The idea of her sweet Jelena having Starseer powers was creepy, but it probably made it more important than ever that she was raised by someone who loved her, someone who cared.

“Me, damn it,” she muttered.

“Pardon?” Beck asked.

“Nothing. I’m coming out.” Alisa turned to Sylvia. “I need to go.”

Sylvia rose to her feet. “Can I do anything to help?”

“Not now.” Alisa didn’t even know what could be done yet. She closed the comm channel and lowered the device. “Before I go… I’ve wondered. Can you tell me, is there any possible way that everyone was mistaken and that Jonah wasn’t home when the apartment building was bombed?” The idea of searching for her daughter alone daunted her. By all the gods in all the galaxies, she wished Jonah were alive to help her. More than that, she wished he were alive, period. “Is there any way he might have made it?”

Sylvia was shaking her head before Alisa finished. “No. I was called in when they scanned the remains.” She turned toward a window, blinking a few times as her eyes grew damp. “I saw them, watched them do the test, and verified that the genes matched up. He’s gone.”

Alisa’s legs grew weak, and she groped for the back of the sofa for support. She had not expected anything else, and yet, a silly part of her had hoped that she would not only find Jelena when she arrived on Perun, but that somehow, Jonah would be there, too, that it all would have been a mistake.

She brushed the back of her hand across her eyes. This was as much Sylvia’s pain as hers, and she managed to utter a soft, “I’m sorry.”

“So am I.” Sylvia came around the sofa and hugged her.

Alisa had never been that comforted by human contact, but she returned the hug.

“Do you need any money?” Sylvia asked. “A lot of the banks crashed in the last months of the war, and nobody has much—we’ve been clinging to physical assets and coin. You’ve probably noticed the imperial morat tanked and is barely worth anything in the rest of the system.”

“I’m fine,” Alisa said, even if she wasn’t, not in any sense of the word. But she didn’t want to take money from her sister-in-law, especially if she was struggling too. Money seemed so unimportant now, anyway. She stepped back, wiped her eyes again, and forced a smile. “Thank you.”

With her legs feeling numb, she walked back out to the front of the building.

As Beck had implied, Leonidas was on the comm, but they weren’t separated. They were both by the lamppost now, their heads tilted together. Leonidas had taken off his earstar and held it so they could both listen.

“What is it?” Alisa asked when the men turned in her direction, Leonidas reaffixing the earstar.

“Dr. Dominguez needs my help,” Leonidas said. “He’s run into trouble at the library. Someone is stalking him.”

“Someone more ominous than a twelve-year-old boy?” Alisa glanced at Beck.

“Apparently.”

“Are you going to help?” She remembered that Leonidas had asked Alejandro for help, something related to studying cybernetic implants and performing a surgery on him. Alejandro had refused, saying that he did not have the necessary knowledge, though it had sounded as if he did not want the knowledge. She did not bring this up, since she’d been eavesdropping and was not supposed to have heard the conversation.

“Yes,” Leonidas said without hesitating. He gave her an assessing look that she wasn’t sure how to read. “Come with me.” He waved for her to follow and started back toward the train station.

“Uh, I don’t respond well to commands,” she said, making him pause. “Unless that was your way of asking me out on a date. But if that was your intent, I would expect flowers and chocolate. Definitely chocolate.” Three suns, she could use some chocolate about now. “Oh, and perhaps use a more diffident tone.”

Beck smirked. Leonidas simply looked exasperated.

“You’ll be safer with me if Beck’s spy turns into something more dangerous,” Leonidas said, wriggling his fingers again, an order to follow.

“My spy?” Beck protested. “That kid was snapping pictures of you, buddy. And I can take care of the captain just fine. We’ve got chicken feed to buy.”

Leonidas’s eyes closed to slits. “You will not come to assist Dr. Dominguez?”

“What do you think we can do that you can’t, mech?”

Alisa agreed with the sentiment—all she had was her old Etcher in her holster, and her fighting skills were meager without the cockpit of a combat ship around her. But Leonidas’s question made her wince, feeling guilty. Even though Alejandro and his orb weren’t on her radar now, as far as problems went, he had patched her up after they escaped the pirate ship, and she felt a degree of debt toward him for that. His solicitude was one of the reasons she hadn’t seriously contemplated sending word about him and his orb off to Alliance headquarters.

“Stay then,” Leonidas said coolly and resumed walking.

“We better help,” Alisa said with a sigh. “Though you’re probably right in that there’s not much we can do that he can’t. Especially me.” She rapped a knuckle on Beck’s armored shoulder and started after Leonidas.

“After a few good jobs, when you’re flush with cash, you can get some combat armor, too, Captain.”

“I suppose being able to pee wherever you’re standing would be useful.”

Beck snorted. “That’s really only for emergencies.”

“Like when you’re in battle and get so scared that you lose control of bodily functions?”

“Basically. Or when an overly muscled mech stalks up to you, disarms you, and breaks your favorite gun.”

“You weren’t in your armor then.”

“No, but I wished I was. You get what you needed in that building?” Beck pointed his thumb over his shoulder as they followed Leonidas away from Sylvia’s apartment.

Alisa’s humor drained away. “No.”

“Maybe you’ll find what you need at the library.”

It was possible. Assuming that whatever was vexing Alejandro didn’t turn out to be that serious, she could make time for some research there. Alisa doubted any imperial subjects could help her locate the men who had taken her daughter, so there was little use in talking to the authorities here—as Sylvia had already found. From everything that Alisa had heard, the Starseers operated outside of governments, answered to nobody, and had ties to few who weren’t in the Order. That meant she would have to find a Starseer to get information on Starseers. There had to be at least a few here on Perun. Maybe the library would have data about a monastery or group residence or whatever they called their homes.

“Maybe I will,” she replied, nodding to herself.

Of course, even if she found a Starseer, there was no guarantee the person would talk to her, and it wasn’t as if she could coerce someone with prodigious mental powers into answering her questions. Maybe Leonidas could. After all, the imperial army had originally created their cyborg soldiers as an answer to the Starseer warriors, pitting physicality, endurance, and the ability to take a lot of damage against the mental powers of the Order.

“Beck, next time you hear me making sarcastic comments to Leonidas, stop me, will you?” She should dull the edge on her sharp tongue if she wanted his help. Of course, that might be moot until she actually located a Starseer. Still, she probably shouldn’t be so sarcastic with him. He had a knack for making her feel silly and immature about her comments.

“Stop you? I’m usually cheering for you. When that bastard orders you around, you should definitely tell him to balls off.” Beck quirked his eyebrows at her. “Or to bring you chocolate.”

“Chocolate is the way to my heart. And also to my compliance. Especially the good dark stuff. None of that wimpy cow or jakloff milk diluting the flavor.”

“Well, I’m not telling him that. Nobody wants you complying with the mech, Captain.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

Chapter 5

To Alisa’s surprise, nobody rushed out to stop Beck from walking onto the open tree-filled campus of Morgan Firth University in full combat armor. Students in sandals and sarongs, strolling from class to class and enjoying the warm day, did give their group strange looks. Most of them veered away. A few glimpsed Leonidas’s jacket and veered far away. The reactions here—and of those boys in her old neighborhood—surprised Alisa. Even though she supposed she’d never wanted anything to do with cyborgs, even before the war started and they officially turned into enemies, she had not considered that the imperial subjects—Leonidas’s own people—would ostracize him.

Their luck ran out at the Staton Hall Library, its two intertwining towers spiraling up to great heights from the rounded base of the main building. As they walked up the wide marble stairs leading to the open double doors, an armed man in the blues of campus security stepped onto the center of the landing to block their way.

“No weapons allowed in the library,” he said, frowning at all of them and especially Beck, as he tapped a perky teal earstar hooked over his ear. Opening a comm? Or starting a video recording? “Or on campus at all.”

“We’re here to assist a colleague who’s in trouble inside,” Leonidas said.

“What kind of trouble could someone be in in the library?” the security guard asked. “They don’t shoot you if you don’t pay your late fees.”

“Unknown, but he was adamant.” Leonidas walked toward the door, making it clear he would go around the guard.

Beck followed, but the guard pulled out a stun gun and leveled it at his chest. “Stop or I will call for police robots.”

The stunner probably wouldn’t have affected Beck through his armor, especially since he still wore his helmet, but he did stop, looking to Alisa for orders.

“You are an alarming figure in all that armor,” she told him. “Why don’t you wait out here and chat up the security officer until we’re done?”

Beck scowled fiercely.

Leonidas, perhaps noticing that the guard was more focused on Beck, continued toward the open doors.

“Wait,” the man blurted. “Are you armed?”

He glanced toward the hip where Leonidas kept his destroyer and toward a similar spot on Alisa. She was about to ask if she could turn her weapon in to the front desk person to hold, but Leonidas glared at the guard and said, “Yes.”

“Then you can’t—”

Leonidas turned his back on him and strode inside. The guard’s stunner twitched, but he opted to keep it aimed at Beck’s chest. An alarm at the door beeped with indignation as Leonidas passed through. Whether it was reading his gun or all of his cybernetic parts, Alisa didn’t know.

“I’m with him,” she said and walked after Leonidas, giving Beck a wait-here signal, and hoped the guard would not stun her, either.

“I’m calling headquarters,” the guard growled and turned toward Alisa, his stunner leaving Beck’s chest.

She was watching over her shoulder and tensed, expecting to have to dive to the side if she didn’t want to be hit. But Beck’s hand darted out, and he caught the man’s wrist. With the servo-enhanced strength of the armor, the guard did not have a chance of escaping that grip.

“That’s not necessary,” Beck said, nodding after Alisa. “Why don’t we chat about it?”

Alisa worried that the campus police truck would be waiting for them when she and Leonidas came out of the library, but she hustled to catch up with him, hoping they would have time to find Alejandro and also hoping that she could do her research. Maybe security would be more likely to remember and hunt down the men, and she could slip unnoticed into the stacks.

Leonidas paused on the sprawling marble tile floor of the grand foyer and tapped his earstar, murmuring something. A few students using the physical materials check-out stations glanced at him, but unless one noticed his military jacket and Corps patch, he was not as strange of a sight as Beck in his armor.

“Which floor?” Leonidas was asking as Alisa joined him.

She glanced back toward the entrance. She had set off the door alarm, too, and doubted it was a good idea to linger so close.

“Basement Three,” came a hushed whisper that she could barely hear. “Two of them are blocking the door, so I can’t get back to the elevator. There are at least two more looking for me in here.”

“On my way.”

Leonidas did not immediately start walking, so Alisa assumed he had not been here before and needed to call up a map.

Glad to be semi-useful, she said, “This way,” and headed around the corner to where the closest elevators waited.

Several students were already waiting. When the chime dinged and the doors opened, Leonidas glared at them and strode inside. A couple of boys started after him, but he hardened his glare and flexed his muscles to make his looming stance even more intimidating than usual.

“We’ll get the next one,” one of the boys said, both of them scurrying back.

Leonidas looked at Alisa and pointed at the floor next to him.

She walked inside, but to be contrary, she stood on the opposite side of him from where he had pointed. Silent rebellion. He hit the button for the appropriate basement level and drew his destroyer.

Alisa eyed the big handgun, imagining the charges that would be brought against them if they shot up the library, not to mention leaving bodies on the carpet. “You think that will be necessary?”

She expected him to glare and tell her to leave the combat to him, but he looked down at the weapon and seemed to reconsider. He holstered it.

“Perhaps not. I don’t know who exactly is targeting the doctor.” As the elevator neared the basement level, he added, “Stay behind me.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, giving him a perky and completely insincere salute.

He glared at her. “Did the Alliance truly promote you to captain?”

“War makes for desperate times.”

He grunted. “I see.”

Leonidas stood to the side of the elevator doors as they dinged and opened, waving for her to stand against the wall behind him. She did so. She might be insouciant, but she wasn’t willfully stupid. Or at least, she tried not to be willfully stupid.

The lights were out. They shouldn’t have been. There were lots of archives in the basement, and the rooms weren’t as populated as the upper levels of the library, but Alisa had retrieved materials down here as a student and remembered lights.

After looking and listening for a few seconds, Leonidas eased out of the elevator. Alisa did not hear a thing, but he burst into motion and disappeared from her view. She rested her hand on her Etcher and held the door open, but did not step out. The area around the elevator lay open for several meters in all directions before the rows of desks and towering bookcases started up. She didn’t want to be exposed, especially when all she could glimpse were shadows and the vague outlines of the furniture. Dots of red emergency lighting lined a walkway on the floor, but nothing brighter came on.

Thumps, grunts, and a short broken cry of pain came from her right. The noises did not last for more than three seconds, and then it grew utterly quiet again.

Trusting that Leonidas had been the one inflicting the damage rather than the one receiving it, Alisa eased out of the elevator. He stood in the shadows to the side, two unmoving men in unremarkable clothing lying at his feet. Alisa assumed they were not dead, but she didn’t ask, not positive she wanted to know the answer.

The doors closed behind Alisa, the elevator being called up to another level. She found the basement room unsettling without the lights on, but told herself Leonidas could handle any trouble they came upon. She joined him, stepping over someone’s legs to do so. It was too dark to see much of the man’s face, but she doubted she would recognize him even if she pulled out the flashlight on her multitool.

After listening intently for a few seconds, Leonidas waved two fingers at her, gesturing for her to follow. This time, she didn’t salute him or make any snarky comments about his propensity for taking command and giving orders. She doubted they were alone down here, so she stayed quiet.

He followed the wall away from the elevators, around a corner, and past dark aisles of old books, the air having a musty and dusty smell, even though Alisa knew that robotic cleaners kept all of the library’s floors tidy. One couldn’t tidy up age. She had been told that some of the original books brought from Earth on the first colony ships were in Staton Hall, preserved and protected throughout the centuries. She was glad her people hadn’t bombed this building.

Something stirred down one of the dark aisles they passed, and Alisa jumped, reaching for her Etcher. Leonidas caught her wrist before she could draw it, his calloused hand rough against her skin, though his grip was not tight. He held up his other hand to his lips.

A soft beeping came from down the aisle, and two beady red lights swiveled into view a foot off the floor. Alisa let go of the hilt of her gun. It was one of the floor cleaning robots she had just been thinking about—she would have felt like an idiot for shooting it.

A thud came from deeper within the library, like a book falling to the floor.

Leonidas released Alisa and veered down the next aisle, heading in the direction of that noise. Alisa followed more slowly, careful to tread softly. As large as Leonidas was, he was good at running without letting his combat boots make a sound.

He turned at an intersection created by rows of bookcases, and Alisa lost sight of him. Though she didn’t want to make noise, she picked up her pace, having no doubt there were things more inimical than floor-polishing robots down here.

More thuds sounded, then something akin to a crash.

“Got you,” a man with a deep voice blurted.

Another crash came from the back of the room, and someone gasped in pain. Alisa hurried, trying to pick her way through the aisles toward the source. That had sounded like Alejandro.

She turned down an aisle, no longer trying to follow Leonidas since she did not know where he’d gone, and flashlight beams came into view, streaking about, cutting through the darkness. Someone was standing at the end of the aisle she had picked, his broad back silhouetted against the lights in front of him. Whoever he was, he wasn’t wearing a robe or a military jacket, and the way he crouched back from the mouth of the aisle made him look like a spy, or someone skulking and preparing a surprise attack. Alisa hesitated, not sure whether to backtrack and go down another aisle, or to rush forward and try to surprise him.

More thumps came from somewhere ahead of the man. Alisa could see something in his hand, but she wasn’t sure what it was. A weapon? Maybe a flashlight that wasn’t turned on? He switched it from his right hand to his left so he could reach for something at his belt. A blazer pistol.

Alisa crept forward as quickly and quietly as she could. The man slid his weapon out of his holster, lifting it to aim at someone.

She gave up on silence and sprinted the last five meters, tugging out her Etcher as she ran. As the man stepped forward, about to fire, Alisa clubbed him in the back of the head with the hilt of her weapon. Unfortunately, he did not conveniently crumple into an unconscious pile.

He grunted and whirled toward her, his blazer still in his hand. She knocked his arm aside before he could aim it at her, then lashed out with a straight kick. The toe of her boot cracked him in the knee hard enough that it buckled. He snarled and tried to grab her as he went down, but she leaped back, adrenaline giving her speed she had rarely claimed in the army unarmed combat practices. As soon as her feet touched down, she launched another kick, this one taking him in the chin. His head snapped back, and he pitched to the floor. This time, he did not move again.

A second dark figure loomed into view at the end of the aisle. Alisa started to bring her Etcher up again, leaping back to give herself more room to fire.

“It’s me,” Leonidas said, crouching to spring away in case she shot.

Alisa lowered her gun and took a deep breath, trying to calm herself in the aftermath of the skirmish. Funny how she could maintain her cool easily while weaving among enemies and fighting for her life in the cockpit of a combat ship, but turn into a nervous mess during a flesh-on-flesh fight.

“Thanks for taking care of him,” Leonidas said, waving toward the unconscious man.

“It seemed like the thing to do.” Alisa crept past her victim, not wanting to be anywhere nearby when he woke up.

Leonidas removed the fallen man’s gun and searched him before following her out into a wider aisle that bisected the rows of bookcases. Alejandro leaned against a table nearby, his graying hair damp with sweat. Someone’s earstar rested on the table next to him, the tiny embedded light shining brightly enough to reveal a contusion on the side of his face and a swollen lip. Six men lay sprawled on the floor between Alejandro and Alisa. She allowed herself to think that Leonidas had needed her help and might have been shot if not for her distracting the seventh man, but she doubted that was true.

Alejandro pushed away from the table, looking shaky. Alisa couldn’t blame him. He had proven himself an able doctor when helping her and many others after the pirate ship incident, but he was no warrior. He seemed like someone who had gone through his whole life without anyone throwing a punch at him—or drawing a weapon on him. Until recently.

He stepped over two fallen men, one still groaning and clutching his belly, and stopped at a third. The downed figure wore a familiar satchel slung over his shoulder, Alejandro’s satchel. Alejandro did not hesitate to pry it off and return it to his own shoulder after peeking inside.

“A lot of people are interested in that orb,” Alisa observed.

“Yes.” His lips flattened into a line. “I’m not sure how so many have learned about its existence and that I have it.” He looked at her, his eyes closing to slits, his lips still pressed together in irritation.

“I didn’t tell anyone,” Alisa said, reading an accusation in that gaze. It was true that she had considered sending a message to someone in the Alliance government, but she hadn’t. Not yet.

Alejandro continued to hold her gaze, not breaking it until Leonidas finished removing the fallen men’s weapons and joined them.

He held out a blazer. “Doctor?”

“No, thank you.” Alejandro lifted a hand, refusing it. “I wouldn’t know how to shoot it even if I could stomach the idea of firing at people.”

Leonidas opened his mouth, but a soft ding sounded in the distance, and he did not speak, instead holding up a hand and cocking an ear toward the noise. Alisa was fairly certain that had been the sound of the elevator arriving. Had one of Alejandro’s assailants escaped and called down reinforcements?

She did not hear anything else, but Leonidas’s expression grew grimmer. He pointed at the flashlights. Alisa did not know what he wanted at first, but when he started turning them off, she got the gist. She called up the holodisplay on the earstar on the table, intending to turn off its beam. It asked for a passcode. She dropped it on the floor and ground it under the heel of her boot. The light went out.

Leonidas frowned at her, or perhaps the noise she had made.

“Just giving it my passcode,” she whispered.

Alejandro flicked off the last flashlight, and darkness returned to the area.

A touch came at her shoulder. Leonidas. He took her arm, linked it to Alejandro’s, then led both of them toward the back wall of the library, far from the elevators.

Alisa had not heard anything since the ding, nothing to suggest that someone had come onto the floor instead of leaving, but she had learned to trust Leonidas’s superior hearing, so she was confident that he had detected something ominous. She was, however, surprised that he did not tell them to wait there and go confront whoever it was. Her own meager martial contributions notwithstanding, he could clearly handle whoever these thugs were.

Yet he led them deeper into the library, through two more aisles of bookcases and to the back wall. The tiny red emergency lights lined the floor along a perimeter walkway, and Alisa could see him when he stopped to look both ways. He pointed toward a door lit with an exit sign that glowed a soft green in the darkness.

Alejandro walked that way without objecting, his hand clutched possessively over his satchel. Leonidas paused before following, tugging a small device out of his pocket. He tapped a couple of buttons, twisted something, then tossed it into the air. The tiny device flew off of its own accord. An aerial camera?

Alisa started to ask what he was doing, but he pressed a finger to his lips before she could speak. The presumptuousness would have irked her, but his face was grave in the faint red light illuminating it from below. He touched his ear and pointed again toward the door.

Silently, Alisa crept after Alejandro. He opened the door, and it creaked faintly. Alisa glanced over her shoulder, wondering if that had been too much noise. Who did Leonidas think was following them?

He shook his head grimly and waved for her to go through. The landing outside was just as dark as the library. Leonidas followed them out, closing the door softly behind them.

“We have a problem,” Alejandro whispered, turning his flashlight on.

“Silence,” Leonidas breathed. “He’ll hear.”

“Who?” Alisa mouthed.

His back to Leonidas, Alejandro directed his flashlight upward. This was an emergency exit, and there should have been stairs leading back up to the above-ground levels, but they were missing. A sign strung across the empty space read: Please use the west exit. East exit basement levels 0-2 closed for repairs. They were very closed. The doors were there, higher up in the dark well, but the metal stairs and landings had been removed for several levels. Alejandro’s flashlight beam bounced off the bottom of the landing three floors above. Thanks to the library’s high ceilings, it had to be close to forty feet. The stairs leading downward were intact, but Alisa had little interest in traveling deeper into the bowels of the library. Unfortunately, she doubted they could reach the west exit right now.

A holodisplay popped into the air at her shoulder, surprising her. Leonidas had his netdisc out, and it was projecting the view of a moving camera displaying the room they had left. Familiar dark aisles swept past, the view from above the bookcases. Alisa would not have guessed that Leonidas had spy equipment with him. Maybe he had intended to use it with whoever he had been making plans to meet later.

The camera slowed down as it neared people, a group moving away from the elevator, following one of the red-lit walkways. There was just enough illumination to make out military uniforms, not the plain black of the imperial army, but black highlighted with crimson. Alisa sucked in a breath. She hadn’t seen those uniforms often during her time in the military, but she knew them well. They belonged to—or had belonged to—the emperor, specifically, his imperial guard, bodyguards as well as a battalion of soldiers that worked closely with him, doing his work. Their reputation wasn’t quite as forbidding as that of the Cyborg Corps, but they were known to be very good at their jobs. These men all carried assault rifles on their backs and blazers in belt holsters. Apparently, the security guard hadn’t had any success keeping them out of the library, either.

A single man not in a uniform walked beside the group, his neck thick and muscular, his dark hair cut short. Though most of his clothing was plain, he wore a jacket similar to the one Leonidas always had on. Alisa could not make out what the patches were, but his look alone was enough to make her whisper, “Cyborg?”

He nodded once.

“Someone you know?”

The cyborg in the video halted, raising a hand to stop the soldiers. He tilted his head, as if he had heard something. Them? Could he hear her whispers even across the library and through the thick metal exit door?

“No,” Leonidas breathed. “He’s young, probably a first-or second-year recruit. Nobody who served in my unit of veterans.”

“Does that mean he’ll be inexperienced?”

“It means he’ll have all of the latest technology, the best and most modern cybernetic implants,” Leonidas whispered, that grim expression on his face again.

“Oh. Does that mean he would win if you two fought?”

His chin came up, his eyes hard. “It does not.”

In the video, the cyborg turned toward the camera and looked up at it. He had hard, dark eyes. The flying spy device had stopped, as if sensing possible discovery, and probably was not making any noise as it lurked near the ceiling. That did not keep the cyborg from lifting his rifle and blasting it. The holodisplay above Leonidas’s netdisc turned black.

Leonidas stuffed his computer back into his pocket. “We have to get out of here.” He glanced upward—Alejandro had turned his flashlight toward the steps leading down, but Leonidas could probably see all the details of the missing stairs. His eyes were supposed to be as enhanced as his ears. “I can make that jump.”

“Congratulations,” Alisa whispered. “We can’t.”

“I have no rope.” Alejandro patted his satchel.

“What kind of researcher doesn’t bring rope to the library?” Alisa asked.

He gave her a dry look.

“I could boost you up,” Leonidas said, still considering the landing above. Far above.

“You are not hurtling us forty feet in the air,” Alisa whispered.

She was sure he imagined them easily grabbing on after being tossed up there like a ball, but she imagined getting conked in the head by the metal floor and passing out. And Alejandro seemed even less athletic and agile than she.

“I—” Leonidas pressed his ear against the door, then backed away and shook his head. “They’re coming. We go down. Our only choice.”

Alejandro hurried down the steps, not hesitating. Alisa suspected he knew far more about who had sent those people than she did. She hustled after him, with Leonidas following more slowly, guarding their rear as they descended. How had she gotten herself into this? She had just wanted to come to the library to do some research. Her battle was with the Starseers, not whoever had taken charge of the remnants of the empire.

“We’ll go down a couple more levels,” Alejandro said, as he continued past the landing on the floor below, “then cut through to the elevator, try to go back up without them noticing us.”

“Assuming they don’t have people posted in the elevators,” Alisa said.

“There’s no other choice, unless you know a way out. We’re fifty feet under the ground now.” He glanced at a sign by the next doorway they passed, denoting this was B5. “Maybe more.”

Leonidas did not override his suggestion, and Alejandro continued to B6 before trying a door. It was locked.

“Of course,” he said.

A clang came from above them. The door on B3 opening.

Wordlessly, Alejandro continued down. At first, he walked softly, keeping his shoes from ringing on the metal steps, but the thunder of boots pounding on the stairs above echoed down the well. Alejandro hurried, no longer worried about sound. It probably did not matter. Their footfalls would be lost in the cacophony in the stairwell now. Flashlight beams slashed down through the passage, seeking targets. Alejandro tried a door on B7, but it, too, was locked.

“Leonidas?” he whispered, pointing at it. “Can you open it?”

“Down one more,” Leonidas barked, passing them and pointing at a sign. It claimed that an environmental room was on the next level, probably the last level in the basement. Alisa did not know. She had never been down this far. “There’ll be machinery making noise,” he added. “Easier to hide.”

The stairs ended on a cement pad, a door the same as the others the only way to continue on. Leonidas tugged at it. Like the others, it was locked. He braced one hand against the wall, then tugged harder, one swift motion. Metal snapped, and the door opened.

Movement came from the landing above. Someone leaned over a railing and shouted. Leonidas waved Alejandro and Alisa through. She had no sooner than crossed the threshold when a blazer sounded, a beam of red brightening the air behind them.

“They’re shooting to kill,” Alejandro blurted as overhead lights flickered on in the vast environmental control room.

Leonidas lunged inside, shutting the door behind him. Since he had broken the mechanism, there was no way to lock it. Not that locking it would help if the soldiers had a cyborg like him with them.

A large cylindrical piece of machinery was bolted to the wall next to the door. Alisa had no idea what it was, but it looked to weigh a ton. Leonidas grabbed one of its legs and pulled upward, his broad shoulders and back flexing. The sound of warping metal filled the cavernous room, drowning out the hums and beeps of machinery. Rivets snapped. He went to the other side, pulled up the other leg, and shoved the massive cylinder sideways. It toppled as someone tried to open the door.

Bangs came from the stairwell. Someone shouted an order, and it grew silent on the other side of the door. In a second, the cyborg would probably be there, doing his best to move the blockage.

“Go,” Leonidas barked, waving Alejandro and Alisa toward the far side of the room.

Machinery filled the space, towering pumping stations, water heaters, snarls of pipes, and other items she could not identify. Alisa could not see the elevators through it all, but she ran in the direction where they should be. There was no way she was going to let herself get killed over Alejandro’s orb.

As she ran, loud clangs and clanks and thumps sounded from the door. She had not yet heard the screech of that big piece of machinery sliding across the floor. Maybe Leonidas had found a way to wedge it against something so that the other cyborg could not easily push it. Easily. She snorted, finding it crazy to attribute that word to something that weighed hundreds of pounds or more.

She and Alejandro, who was sticking close behind her, ran through an open area in the center of the room. Even though the lights were on in the control room, they weren’t strong lights, and deep shadows lurked all around the towering machinery. She glanced toward a large square drain in the center of the floor. A couple of pipes came through from the ceiling, plunging into the cement floor near it. Sewage.

She wrinkled her nose and ran on, being careful not to get lost in the maze of equipment. The elevator doors came into view, and the sounds of banging faded behind her. She ran and hit the button, relief washing over her. They were going to make it.

The button flashed at her, and a holodisplay appeared in front of the wall, a simple map showing the status of the cars. Only one descended all the way to the bottom level of the basement, a cargo elevator instead of the normal passenger ones, and the level it was currently on throbbed. B3.

“They’ve held up the elevator,” Alejandro said as Leonidas joined them. “Unless we can climb the shaft, we’re stuck.”

Leonidas shook his head. “We would be blocked by the car even if we could go that way.”

He did not point out the slim likelihood of Alisa and Alejandro being able to climb up an elevator shaft, but Alisa certainly thought of it.

“We’re trapped then.” Alejandro’s shoulders slumped.

“The sewer,” Alisa blurted, even as she cringed at the idea of trying to escape into the waste stream for the entire library.

“We can try,” Leonidas said, turning back the way he had come.

A thunderous bang came from the far side of the control room, the screeching of metal along the floor accompanying it. Leonidas’s run turned into a sprint. Alisa raced after him, even as she felt crazy for doing so—the soldiers and the cyborg had made it out of the stairwell, and she was running back in their direction.

By the time the grate came into sight again, Leonidas knelt beside it, gripping the crisscrossing bars. He probably could have torn it from its hinges easily, but he took his time, focusing on the lock.

“This way,” someone called as footfalls pounded across the cement floor.

Alisa dropped down next to Leonidas. “Problem?” she whispered.

She had drawn her Etcher, but the last thing she wanted was to get in a firefight with someone who was Leonidas’s equivalent—or more than his equivalent. Besides, if she fired at imperial soldiers on the imperial home world, she had no doubt that she would be arrested and never let off the planet again. Or maybe they would simply kill her outright.

“Trying not to make it obvious,” Leonidas said.

He tugged once, the gesture short and effective. The lock popped.

He lifted the grate enough for them to squirm through. Alejandro did not hesitate. He slithered through and dropped, even though they could not see what awaited them in the darkness below. Alisa went after him, nearly kicking him as she fell. She realized he was bracing himself against the sides, his feet and hands planted. As she dropped past him, her heart leaping into her throat, she stuck her legs and arms out, trying to do the same thing. His caution was understandable. Who knew how far this dropped?

But her hands wouldn’t reach. She plunged into darkness, unable to stop herself.

Chapter 6

Alisa wasn’t sure how far she fell, but the square of light up above grew small before she splashed down. Cold water enveloped her and washed over her face. Only the memory that people were hunting for them kept her from sputtering and cursing. Judging by the smell—or lack of smell—she had landed in water and nothing more, but she rushed to find her feet and get her head out. It came up to her chest.

Someone splashed down beside her, making less noise than she would have expected. She was sure she had struck on her back, slapping water all over the place. She reached out and found a shoulder that was too broad to belong to Alejandro.

“Leonidas?” she whispered.

“They didn’t see me,” he whispered back, his voice barely audible over the flowing water. Pipes somewhere to the side emptied into this area, and the current tugged at Alisa’s waist. “I closed the grate before I let go. It may take them a moment to figure out where we went.”

Alejandro, who had made his descent in a more controlled manner, walking his hands and feet down the walls, slid into the water next to them.

“This way,” Leonidas said, striding away from the drainage chute—and the only source of light.

“You know where you’re going?” Alisa asked, surprised. He hadn’t even known where the elevators were when they had entered the first floor.

“Away from them.” He found her back with his arm and pulled her along faster than she could have walked in the deep water. She might have objected, but she sensed he was doing the same thing with Alejandro on his other side. “I don’t want to shoot imperial soldiers.”

“I don’t want to be shot by imperial soldiers,” Alisa said.

“Then leaving is a good idea.”

“I’ll agree with that,” Alejandro muttered.

They followed the current deeper into the darkness, Leonidas striding forward fearlessly. Alisa wanted to pull out her flashlight to get a better feel for their surroundings. She could imagine inimical things down here. White alligators, fang fish, poisonous water snakes…

“Can you see?” she asked Leonidas.

“Not much. We’ve gotten too far from the light.”

“So, you can’t see in complete darkness? You’re like a cat?”

“I’m a human with eye implants,” he said, his tone taking on that faintly miffed quality it had whenever someone implied he wasn’t entirely human.

“Too bad. I was going to offer to rub your ears later if you were like a cat.”

That did not earn her a response, and she had no idea if he was shooting her a scathing look. Probably.

The sound of rushing water increased up ahead, making Alisa wish he had said he could see. There were supposed to be centuries’ worth of old channels for storm water and sewage that snaked around under the city, and she remembered stories of people living down here, too, in abandoned transportation tunnels that were deeper than the existing lines, that came from a time before the capital had been built up, newer levels atop older.

Something brushed past Alisa’s shoulder, bouncing off before flowing along with the current. Maybe it was good that none of them could see. The odor grew fouler as they continued on, and she feared the water dumping into their channel from the nearby pipes was true sewer water.

“I’m sorry you’re involved in this, Captain,” Alejandro said, sounding weary as he slogged along with Leonidas’s help. “I didn’t expect Leonidas to bring you.”

“He said I would be safer with him than staying behind with Beck,” Alisa said, aware of Leonidas’s muscled arm wrapped around her back. One could easily feel safe in his arms, but their current situation was too bizarre for her to feel much more than discomfort, especially when something slithered past her leg. She jerked her foot away, thoughts of snakes returning.

“It’s possible he has an inordinately high opinion of himself,” Alejandro said.

“I just assumed he had an inordinately low opinion of Beck.”

“That is also possible.”

“Usually,” Leonidas said, “people talk about me behind my back, and I’m forced to use my enhanced auditory faculty to hear what disreputable things they’re saying about me.”

“We didn’t want you to strain yourself,” Alisa said.

His arm tightened around her briefly, and she wasn’t sure if it was a fond squeeze of acknowledgment—he sounded more amused than irritated by their commentary—or a reminder that he could break her in half with his pinky.

“If they catch up with us,” Alejandro said, “you should veer off in another direction if possible, Captain. This isn’t your fight.”

Water full of clumps of questionable material flowed in from a pipe, splatting onto Alisa’s shoulder, and it was a moment before she could respond. Her last meal was too busy trying to come up.

“You’re not going to make a similar suggestion to me?” Leonidas asked, turning them around a bend that Alisa had not seen in the darkness. The dreadful aroma was getting stronger, threatening to sear the nose hairs out of her nostrils. “I know nothing about your secret treasure,” he added.

“I know, but you’re… we’re… on the same side.”

“The war is over, Doctor,” Leonidas said. “The empire has fallen.”

Alisa punctuated this somber statement with gagging sounds. Rebus-de’s river of decay, she was going to end up puking all over Leonidas. What would his enhanced cyborg senses think about that? She took deeper breaths, trying to calm her queasy belly, doing her best not to breathe through her nose.

A distant clang sounded.

“Any chance that’s not related to us?” Alejandro asked. He didn’t seem affected by the stench. Maybe doctors were used to all manner of human excrement and grossness.

“They found the grate,” Leonidas said.

Wonderful. Their cyborg probably wouldn’t be slowed down by shepherding two civilians along.

“Any chance you know where we’re going and that we’ll be out soon?” Alisa asked, sucking in gulps of air between the words. It did not help. Her belly roiled with discontent.

“I know the direction to the harbor,” Leonidas said. “There should be a sewage treatment plant there, perhaps a way to climb out.”

“The harbor is miles from the library,” Alejandro said.

“I know.”

Alisa lost it. Maybe it was the suggestion that they had to travel miles in this, with sewer sludge flowing all the way to their chests, or maybe she was just succumbing to the inevitable. Either way, she turned to the side and threw up. Her only consolation was that the water was flowing in that direction, so it would not come back and hit them. A small consolation. There were worse things than vomit in the channel.

Leonidas continued to carry her along. Apparently, they couldn’t risk slowing down for regurgitation breaks.

“I’m sorry, Captain,” Alejandro said again when she was done.

He sounded miserable. At least she wasn’t the only one.

“I think there’s a tunnel ahead without water in it,” Leonidas said. “It may tilt upward, an old subway passage perhaps.”

“It’s pitch black in here,” Alejandro said. “You can’t possibly see anything.”

“I can hear auditory changes, get a sense of the layout based on the echoes.”

“Like a bat?” Alisa managed to rasp, not trusting her voice.

At first, Leonidas did not answer, and she thought he would ignore her, but then he said, “I think I preferred it when you compared me to a cat.”

“Perhaps he was intrigued by the proffer of an ear rub,” Alejandro said.

“Yeah,” Alisa said. “I’m sure the idea of being rubbed by someone who just puked on him gets him excited.”

“One hopes you would shower first.”

“Shower? I’m going to need the top layer of my skin cells lasered off to feel sanitary again.”

Another clang sounded in the distance. They all fell silent. Alisa had the uneasy feeling that their pursuers knew exactly which way they were going and were catching up.

Her foot scuffed the bottom of the channel. As Leonidas turned them to the side, the ground rose, slick with slimy growth under her boots. She stuck her hands out in front of her and found the rough stone of a crumbling wall. By feel, they climbed into a higher passage that connected to the main one. Leonidas let go of her as she pulled herself out of the water. The scent had not lessened any, but she felt better being out of the grimy sludge.

“Hurry,” Leonidas urged as Alisa clambered to her feet, leaning against the wall for support.

Now, voices were audible in the distance. She did not know how the soldiers were tracking them, but they seemed to know exactly where they were.

Alisa forced her legs into motion, first walking and then, at Leonidas’s light touch on her back, running. She kept her hands outstretched, one in front of her and one using the wall to the side for guidance. She did not want to smack into another wall with her nose. Leonidas ran soundlessly at her side, clearly pacing himself so that he would not leave her and Alejandro behind. She could hear Alejandro both by the sound of his breathing and by the thump of his satchel against his side as he ran.

The tunnel curved, then connected with another in what she guessed, by the sudden disappearance of her wall, was a cross-shaped intersection. Leonidas kept going straight. Alisa was completely lost and had no idea which way the harbor was or even if she could have found her way back to the library. She wondered if Leonidas had truly kept his bearings or if he was just guessing.

They had run for about five minutes, with their passage widening, when two pinpricks of light appeared up ahead. Alisa’s first reaction was one of relief as she believed they had reached the surface, but as the lights grew larger and brighter, she realized that they hadn’t traveled upward enough to be anywhere near the surface. A faint rasping came from the direction of those lights.

“Run faster,” Leonidas said, touching Alisa’s back again to urge greater speed.

“What is that up there?” Alejandro asked, panting from his exertions.

“An automatic sewer cleaner,” Leonidas said.

Normally, that would not have sounded ominous, but it was coming straight toward them.

“Will we… be able to… get around it?” Alisa asked, her legs burning.

“There’s an intersection between us and it,” Leonidas said, not even slightly winded. “If we make it in time, we can turn off and avoid it.”

“That… sounded like… a no,” Alisa said.

“Just keep running,” Leonidas said.

She did not try to speak again after that, siphoning all of her energy into her legs. The lights grew larger, appearing to be several feet off the ground, giving her a sense of the size of the cleaning machine. It might fill the entire tunnel.

It rasped and ground as it continued toward them, and Alisa realized it was coming at a good speed. Images of being flattened under huge wheels and spinning brushes filled her head, and she ran faster, looking for the intersection Leonidas had promised. She could make out the gore-covered gray walls now, the light of the cleaner stealing some of the darkness of the tunnels.

A grunt sounded behind her. Alejandro had fallen behind, his robes heavy with water and pulling at his legs. Leonidas threw him over his shoulder, then easily caught up with Alisa. He did not offer to pick her up, merely pointing ahead of them.

“There.”

Alisa could barely see the spot. She was squinting now, half-blinded by the bright lamps of the cleaner. Leonidas ran ahead of her, then disappeared from the light, jumping into a side tunnel. She sprinted toward it on leaden legs, the towering body of the cleaner filling her vision, giant brushes and whirring circular blades that cut away the grime on the walls to either side of it. There was no way someone could run past it, and its huge body would be capable of crushing anything in its path.

She made it to the intersection and leaped after Leonidas, her ears full of the rasping and grinding. Thinking they were safe now, she paused, leaning forward and gripping her knees as she gasped for air. But Leonidas grabbed her.

“Keep going,” he ordered.

“What?” she blurted, feeling betrayed.

The headlight beams swung into their dark passage, driving away the shadows. The cleaner was turning here too.

Chapter 7

“Climb,” Leonidas barked as the light beams of the massive tunnel cleaner flared, nearly blinding Alisa.

“Climb what?” she demanded, scrambling backward, away from the machine. Not that it would matter. It was turning slowly around the corner, but it would pick up speed soon—it must have been zipping along at twenty-five miles per hour in the other tunnel. Leonidas might be able to outrun it, but Alisa and Alejandro never could.

“The side of the tunnel.” Leonidas gripped her and lifted her from her feet, thrusting her at the wall.

The ancient stones were jagged and uneven, but she would hardly consider them a ladder. But she did not argue. She did her best to find a grip. Would it be enough? The cleaner rolled toward them, nearly touching the ceiling with its bulky automatic control cab. Brushes and blades whirred, sweeping and chipping away the accumulated sediment and organic matter. With the ominous grinding in her ears, Alisa scrambled up the rough wall, her toes wedging into gaps between the stones where mortar had cracked and fallen away in pieces.

The cleaner rumbled toward her, picking up speed as it moved away from the corner. She slipped, cursed, and recovered, nails breaking painfully as she dug them into the crumbling mortar.

“Isn’t there an override or command to turn that thing off?” Alisa asked in frustration. “Surely even the empire doesn’t want its city sewer workers getting eaten by the machinery.”

“If you were a legitimate worker down here, you would have a remote control to deactivate the automatons,” Alejandro said from the wall beside her. He was slipping even more than she, struggling to find hand and toeholds.

Alisa glanced behind her. Leonidas stood in the center of the tunnel, facing the oncoming mechanical beast.

“What are you doing?” she blurted as she climbed higher, imagining him being smashed beneath the massive construct. Even with his enhanced cyborg bones, he surely could not withstand being run over by a five-ton machine.

“Go,” he ordered, almost yelling to be heard over the noise. “To the ceiling, to where the arch starts.”

“Arch?” Alisa glanced up.

She was close to the top of the wall now. It did arch in the middle, rising a few feet higher there than at the sides of the tunnel. Maybe there would be room if she reached that gap and could somehow hang upside down as the cleaner swept past below. All she needed was to turn into a spider to manage the feat…

Cursing, she climbed as high as she could, to the point where she could see over the cab of the cleaning vehicle. With the headlights blinding her and utter darkness behind it, she couldn’t see much else, but thought the machine dipped down in the back. Maybe there was a cargo area?

Bits of mildew and slime sheered from the walls and smacked her face as the huge swirling brushes approached. She tried to climb higher, but her foot slipped, and she almost fell off the wall. With terror surging through her limbs, she found the strength to hang on.

As the top of the cab drew closer, she sucked everything in, hugging the wall. She prayed it would rumble by below her instead of knocking her from her perch.

The lights passed first, and Alisa thought she might be safe. Then the corner of the cab hammered her in the back. She tried to hang on, ignoring the pain of the blow, but gravity fought against her. She tumbled backward, horror coursing through her body as she imagined the blades and brushes sweeping her under the machine where she would be crushed. If she died down in this nameless hell, her daughter would never know what had happened to her.

But she only fell inches, onto the top of the cab, then bounced off something protruding from it, some vent pipe. She tumbled away and fell, not down in front of it and into the sweepers but down behind it. She landed on a flat metal surface.

She held her breath, expecting some giant cleaning appendage to smash into her. Bits of slime and shards of mineral deposits struck her, plastering her face, but nothing larger came near her. Corrugated metal vibrated beneath her back. She was in a cargo bed.

A grunt of pain came from above her, followed by someone tumbling down from the arched ceiling, almost landing on top of her. Alejandro. He slammed into the bed next to her, his foot clobbering her leg. Given that she had thought she would be pulverized under a machine a moment earlier, it was a small pain to endure.

“Apologies,” Alejandro said.

“You’re forgiven.”

A soft clank sounded, something landing on top of the cab.

“Leonidas?” Alisa asked.

She spotted him crouching up there. He must have jumped and landed on top of the cleaner. He slid around the vent pipe and joined them in the cargo bed.

Gradually, Alisa’s hammering heart slowed as she realized that none of them were going to be smashed. More than that, they were getting a ride.

She scooted out of the middle of the bed and put her back to the cab so she could see behind them—not that she could glimpse anything in the blackness back there. A soft breeze tugged at her wet hair and clothes, created by the cleaner. It had returned to full speed and was cruising down the tunnel. Alisa had no idea where it would take them, but she would settle for anywhere away from the people trying to catch them.

No, not catch them. The soldiers had been shooting at them in that stairwell.

One of the men scooted over to sit beside her, his back also to the cab. Alisa wrinkled her nose. They might be in a dry tunnel for the moment, but the stench of the sewer clung to them all.

“To think,” she said, “I was feeling bad for Beck because he got left outside of the library. Now I think he was the smart one, deliberately getting himself in trouble with security so he could avoid this.”

“Better than getting in trouble with the imperial army,” Leonidas said dryly. He was the one who was sitting beside her.

Alejandro grumbled something from the other end of the cargo bed, though she couldn’t make it out over the continuous grinding of the machine.

“I believe he’s thanking us for coming to help,” Alisa said, offering a possible translation.

“Actually, he was cursing,” Leonidas said.

“Cursing us?”

“No, cursing in general.”

“I didn’t think holy men were allowed to do that,” Alisa said.

“I wasn’t thanking you,” Alejandro said, “but you’re right that I should have been. You both risked your lives to help me. I appreciate that. I’m just frustrated that I’d barely started to use the library when those men showed up, following me around. It was alarming enough when it was plainclothes people. But having soldiers after me is worse. And somewhat perplexing. Although, now that I think about it, perhaps it isn’t.”

“Care to explain?” Leonidas asked.

“This… mission of mine, it’s not anything I would have chosen for myself. It was someone’s dying request. I am, quite frankly, a poor candidate for it, given my background. I thought that at the time, and I believe it even more now that so many people know about it and are after me.”

Alisa shifted her weight uneasily, hoping he wouldn’t imply again that she was the reason people knew about him and his orb.

“He knew it, too, I think,” Alejandro continued. “That I was a less than ideal candidate. But I was the doctor with him there at the end, and he had few options.”

“Who?” Alisa asked.

Maybe she should have kept her mouth shut so Alejandro might have forgotten she was there. Even though they had been through numerous binds now, he always seemed to remember that she was Alliance, through and through. Not someone to be trusted with secrets.

Leonidas surprised her by repeating the question. “Yes, who?” he asked.

Alejandro hesitated. “Do you truly need to know? Here?”

Here was probably code for: with the former Alliance officer listening.

“They may still be after us,” Leonidas said. “If we get into a shootout… Those are my former colleagues, Doctor. I don’t want to shoot them, not for something I don’t understand. I’ve trusted you to a degree thus far because I know you worked for the emperor’s family once, but if you’re on some quest for personal gain…”

Alisa blinked. Alejandro had been the personal physician to the emperor’s family? Had Leonidas known that all along? Or had Alejandro admitted it to him somewhere along the journey?

“I’m not. As I said, it was a dying man’s wish.” Alejandro sighed. “It was the emperor’s dying wish.”

Leonidas did not respond right away, and only the sound of the perpetual grinding of the sewer cleaner filled the air.

“I suspect we had similar reasons for ending up on Dustor,” Alejandro went on. “Were you not also fulfilling a final order before the war ended?”

“I cannot speak of that,” Leonidas said.

“As I cannot speak of my mission.” Alejandro glanced at Alisa, his face just visible in the light that reflected from the tunnel walls.

“Not with me here, eh?” Alisa asked. “Want me to put my fingers in my ears so you two can talk?”

Alejandro did not smile. “I was sworn to keep the mission a secret until I completed it and could hand the result over to the proper person.” He spoke vaguely, but now he met and held Leonidas’s eyes. Leonidas nodded back once, solemnly, and Alisa suspected the words hadn’t been quite so vague to him. “You have my word,” Alejandro continued, “that none of this is for personal gain. I own a lovely house by the seashore in Farmington, and there’s physical gold and diamonds there, enough that I can retire and needn’t worry about exchange rates or the fate of the imperial morat. My wife had me set everything up, back when I was making good money as a surgeon.”

“You’re still married?” Alisa asked, eyeing his sodden robe. Weren’t Sun Trinity monks supposed to be celibate? Or was that robe just a disguise? Maybe he had chosen it in the hope that people wouldn’t suspect him of being on some clandestine mission.

“No. It’s been over for ten years. My wife did not appreciate my long hours and my dedication to my work.”

Silence fell, Leonidas not asking any more questions. Had Alejandro given him enough? He seemed so loyal to the empire that Alisa would not be surprised if he would give his life to help Alejandro with his quest, even when Alejandro had refused to help him with his quest, whatever it was. Leonidas was a good man. The fact that he was loyal to the other side didn’t change that. She wondered what it would be like to have someone like that loyal to her. Or at least working for her for a fair amount of pay.

A silly thought perhaps. He would probably leave soon, perhaps going with Alejandro to help him with his orb quest, even though he knew nothing about it. And what would she do once they left? Report everything she had seen and heard to her own government? It seemed disloyal, since she was starting to think of these men, especially Leonidas, as friends. But what if Alejandro’s mission could help the empire regain control? What if he sought some ancient Starseer artifact with great power? There were legends of such things, though they hadn’t been seen for centuries and might not exist at all.

“Who do the soldiers belong to now?” Leonidas asked. “The emperor and his son are dead. I’ve been off world for too long and haven’t had a chance to read up on the news. Who’s in power on Perun?”

“Is he dead?” Alejandro asked. “The son? I’ve wondered that.”

Leonidas’s shoulder moved next to Alisa as he shrugged. “They say he didn’t get out when the palace was bombed. Even if he did, he’s ten. Far too young to rally troops around him and try to take back some of the stolen planets.”

Stolen? Liberated was more like it.

Alisa managed to keep her mouth shut, hoping the men would forget her allegiance and speak freely, but barely.

“No, if he was still alive and safe, he would need a regent to advise him,” Alejandro said, “and I don’t know who that would be. The corporations all had their hooks in the emperor, their smooth-talking representatives insinuating themselves as advisors. There was nobody Markus could have trusted, which I think he knew, in the end. Perhaps that’s why he didn’t name a regent. Or maybe he just never expected to die.” Alejandro lifted an arm, a resigned gesture. “To answer your question, Senator Bondarenko is in charge of Perun and commands those troops now. He toyed with naming himself emperor, but I don’t think he could get the support. A lot of the factions are holding out, thinking the prince might be found and that a new government could be formed around him.”

“And Bondarenko would be against that happening,” Leonidas said.

“Oh, I’d say so. The rumors suggest that he had a hand in betraying the emperor, in handing the location of the off-world hidden palace to the Alliance so they could launch a surprise strike at him.” Alejandro looked toward Alisa.

“Don’t look at me. I was just a pilot. I wasn’t a part of that attack.” Granted, she had heard about it and had been a part of the epic assault on the chain bases that had distracted all of the imperial forces, drawing them away from defending the emperor.

“Bondarenko knows about the orb then,” Leonidas said.

“Apparently.”

“And he wants it for himself.”

“Apparently,” Alejandro repeated.

Alisa thought Leonidas might press him again, trying to find out what the orb was for, but he did not. No, he was a good soldier, probably used to obeying orders and being a pawn of the higher-ups. Even though none of this had anything to do with her, it irked her that Alejandro wouldn’t tell Leonidas the whole story when he had proven his loyalty to the emperor and even to him, coming to help Alejandro simply as a favor.

She leaned against Leonidas’s shoulder, in part because she was tired, and it was easy to do so, but in part because she wanted him to know… she didn’t know what exactly. That she supported him? Could she? So long as it didn’t involve betraying her own government, perhaps she could.

He shifted, looking down at her. Maybe he would tell her to move, that he didn’t want her support—or for some scruffy Alliance pilot to lean on his shoulder.

Instead, he said, “I apologize.”

“What?” Alisa frowned up at him.

“For losing my temper with you back on the streets, when we were looking at the destroyed lots.” He paused, gazing into the darkness behind the cleaner. “It reminded me of the early years of the war, of being a ground officer and walking through devastation left by the Alliance. There were many other places like that, places where the bodies hadn’t yet been moved away, the rubble cleared. People were dead and dying, some soldiers but some civilians caught in the middle of the fighting.”

“Oh,” Alisa said, not sure what else to say.

He had apologized, but he also made her feel to blame, because her side would have been responsible for the horrors he had seen. She had seen atrocities perpetrated by his side, and knew the empire had been no less destructive, but she hadn’t been a ground troop. She hadn’t often seen buildings razed, people left to die in the ruins. She had seen destruction of ships in space, but distance had always made those deaths seem less real.

“I used to live in an apartment building on that empty lot,” she said. “My husband was there when the bombs dropped. I didn’t learn about his death until months later, from my sister-in-law.”

She wasn’t sure why she blurted the confession. So far, she had kept her losses to herself. Bitterly, she realized it had been more of a desire to one-up what he’d seen in the war than a need to tell him for the sake of telling. He shouldn’t blame her, because she had lost more than he had, at least more than he was describing. Seeing strangers dead was horrible, but losing one’s family was worse. He shouldn’t be blaming her for anything, damn it. Not when worse had befallen her because of the war.

Alisa swallowed and looked away, wishing she could retract the confession. She didn’t want sympathy or anything else from him. Her reason for sharing had been petty. It seemed to cheapen Jonah’s death.

Leonidas shifted to put his arm around her. By the three gods, she hadn’t been fishing for comfort. She hadn’t even expected him to be someone who would offer it. She wiped her eyes, tears lurking there for all the wrong reasons.

“War is ugly,” he said quietly. “Even if your side comes out on top, nobody wins.”

“Yeah,” she whispered, having nothing wiser to contribute.

She thought about pushing his arm away and saying she was fine, but after the day she’d had thus far, she found herself reluctant to do so. She doubted he truly cared, but it felt good to have someone offering an arm. She probably should have sat in silence and appreciated it, but her inappropriate humor was piqued when more sewer gunk flew off the brushes to spatter them on their faces, and she imagined how disgusting the arm around her must be.

“This would be cozier if you didn’t smell so bad,” she said.

He grunted and withdrew his arm. “You smell just as bad.”

“I know.” Alisa bit her lip, regretting the comment. He was still sitting next to her, but the world felt lonelier with the arm retracted. “But I have grand plans to bathe soon,” she said, hoping to salvage the situation or at least make him feel that she hadn’t been rejecting him. “I hope you do, too, before you show up for your ear rub.”

“My what?”

“I thought you sounded intrigued by the idea of an ear rub earlier. Didn’t you say you would prefer to be treated like a cat rather than a bat?” Hm, that had sounded funnier in her head.

Leonidas did not seem to know how to answer the question. Or maybe he did not think it was worth answering. He eventually said, “You’re an odd woman, Marchenko.”

“I know.”

Somehow, she had ended up being the one feeling rejected. Her and her big mouth.

Light flashed in the darkness behind them, and she stiffened. Leonidas bolted to his feet, jostling her.

“Another cleaning machine?” Alejandro asked, turning to look.

“No,” Leonidas said. “It’s their cyborg.”

The light was far in the distance—it had been some time since the cleaner turned a corner—and it was moving. Alisa could not see anything around it, but from the way it jerked about, it seemed like someone might be running with a flashlight.

“You can see him?” she whispered.

“Yes, and he’ll catch us soon.”

Alisa pulled out her Etcher, hoping it would still fire after being doused in the sewer. A blazer weapon would have, but she had bullets with gunpowder inside them. Did it even matter? Would a bullet stop a cyborg?

She scrambled to her feet. She would at least try.

“Leonidas?” Alejandro asked, worry in his voice.

“You two stay here,” Leonidas said, stepping toward the rear of the cargo bed. “I’ll keep him busy so you can get away.”

“No,” Alisa said, surprising herself with her concern for him. He had said the young cyborg had newer implants than he did. And he might have denied that they would automatically mean he would lose in a fight, but she worried that would be the case, that youth and greater powers would win out against age and experience. “We can all fight him, shoot at him. There’s nothing for him to hide behind, right?”

Alisa bit her lip, ragged and tired nerves flaring to life again. Even with the cleaning machine rolling along quickly in the tunnels, the flashlight was already twice as close as it had been when she first spotted it. Alejandro did not have a weapon, and hers might not fire until she got new bullets. What help could they truly be?

“There’s nothing for either of us to hide behind,” Leonidas said fiercely, and then he sprang away, leaping off the back of the cleaner and sprinting toward the light.

Alisa crouched at the rear of the cargo bed, staring back, frustrated that she could not do anything. It was too dark to risk shooting at their enemy. She would be just as likely to hit Leonidas. Besides, the cleaning machine kept rumbling along, quickly taking them away from where the men would collide.

Alejandro rose to his knees, also looking back. “I didn’t mean for him to sacrifice himself,” he whispered.

A blazer beam flashed crimson. Alisa thought Leonidas dropped into a roll to avoid the attack, but only because it continued past him. It was too dark to tell much more. A bang sounded, and smoke filled the tunnel, obscuring the flashlight beam.

The sounds of flesh striking flesh came from within the smoke, the cyborgs meeting in a flurry of blows. Alisa couldn’t tell what was happening, other than that the soldier had stopped advancing. Then the cleaner came to an intersection and turned a corner. Leonidas and the battle completely disappeared from sight.

Chapter 8

Alisa slogged through the salty night air with Alejandro, following a boardwalk along the harbor, her head throbbing with each step. The headache was only one of her physical complaints. They had been denied access to the late-running trains and trolleys thanks to their stench, and she had a blister from walking in wet shoes. A moving sidewalk had carried them for a while, but even then, guards and off-duty soldiers had given them suspicious squints. Apparently, anyone smelling of the sewers was up to something fishy—or, more likely, did not belong in the nicer parts of the city.

As they passed a sign proclaiming that the space base lay a mile ahead, Alisa glanced back for the hundredth time. She and Alejandro had both lost their comm units in the sewers, so she couldn’t check on Beck or Leonidas until she reached the Nomad, but she kept expecting to see Leonidas jogging up behind them, even though it had been several hours since they had parted ways. She and Alejandro had ridden the cleaner until it arrived at the sewage treatment plant near the harbor, and it had taken them some time to find a way up to the surface. They had covered more miles since then, and Alisa’s battered body sagged with weariness. She wanted a long shower and her bunk, but she doubted she would sleep, worrying instead about Leonidas’s fate and about how she would find her daughter. Somehow, she doubted she would be allowed in the library again tomorrow if she showed up at the door. The imperial soldiers would probably be watching the entrance, and she might have been marked as a member of Alejandro’s orb-carrying party.

“I shouldn’t have told him,” Alejandro said quietly, noticing her glance. His voice was weary, his shoulders slumped.

“What?”

“It was calculating to do so, and I knew exactly what would happen when I made the choice. But… I’m regretting it.” He sounded like someone confessing to a priest rather than someone who carried the wisdom of a religious order with him at all times.

“You mean telling him about the emperor?” Alisa asked quietly, glancing around. It was late enough that few people were out, and most of those who were favored the public transportation options over walking. “That your mission had been assigned by him on his deathbed?”

“Yes. I knew that Leonidas, as a loyal former fleet officer, would feel duty-bound to help me if I told him. He’d worked for the emperor’s staff before, if not directly for the emperor himself, and I know he received a few awards that the emperor personally pinned on his jacket. I needed his help, even though I didn’t want to need it, if that makes sense.”

“He’s a powerful ally.” Alisa thought of the way she had tried to hire him.

“Yes. And my odds for success go up a lot with his help, something that wasn’t guaranteed until I told him about my mission. But I didn’t mean for him to get killed.”

“We don’t know that’s what happened.” Alisa refused to believe that Leonidas was dead. It was too soon to start thinking that way. He could have simply lost track of the cleaning machine after dealing with the other cyborg and been forced to find his own way out of the sewers. “Besides, I think you’re wrong.”

“About what?”

“That you had to tell him that to gain his help. He seems like someone who would be loyal to his friends, even those recently made, as well as his old emperor.” Alisa thought about pointing out that Leonidas had gone to the library to help Alejandro before he had known the rest of Alejandro’s story.

“Yes, you’re probably right. I do hope he’s all right. I would not wish to carry his death on my conscience.”

They finished their walk in silence. To Alisa’s relief, nobody stopped them when they entered Karundula Space Base. The automated security scanner at the doorway recognized them as passengers and crew that left earlier in the day and had nothing to say about the dried sewage decorating their clothes. It was fortunate that Alisa’s ship was docked in an exterior berth. They might have had more trouble walking into the main building where lights remained on and security guards patrolled the concourses.

When the Star Nomad came into view, Alisa was so relieved to be back that she nearly ran forward and hugged the hull. Her relief was short-lived because she soon remembered that when she had left, she’d thought she would return with her daughter at her side.

Swallowing a lump in her throat, she hit the button to open the hatch and lower the ramp. Since it had been dark for hours, she expected the others to be asleep, but Mica and Yumi sat cross-legged on the floor of the cargo hold, candles scattered about them and the overhead lights off. They were engaged in some kind of fast-breathing exercise—or maybe a séance.

“Job hunting going well?” Alisa asked as she walked in, Alejandro behind her.

She looked around, hoping to spot Beck lounging somewhere.

“We gave up on that a couple of hours ago,” Mica said, crinkling her nose as Alisa drew closer. Yumi’s eyes were closed, and she did not seem to notice that anyone had come in. “Given that the imperials are now cut off from the rest of the system, they have surprisingly good records of their former subjects who chose to become Alliance soldiers. A tip for you: that’s not a selling point when applying for positions here.”

“I’m surprised you were denied so quickly,” Alisa said. “You’d expect applications to sit for days in a quagmire of a virtual queue somewhere.”

“Robots. They reject you quickly. Some messages came in for you while you were gone.” Mica waved in the direction of navigation.

“Thanks. Has Beck been back?” Alisa asked. “I lost my comm.”

Mica shook her head. “I thought he left with you.”

“He did. We were separated.”

“Did it have something to do with the stench you’re wearing like a dreadful perfume?”

“No, and Alejandro stinks too. You needn’t look straight at me when you say such things.”

“Were you two bonding in a sewer together somewhere?”

“You got the location right.” Alisa considered Alejandro, his filthy robes and his usually clean-shaven chin dark with stubble. He looked like he had a headache too. “I don’t know about the bonding. Do you feel bonded to me now, Doctor?”

Alejandro rested his palm against his stomach. “I feel like I may throw up.”

“Apparently, we’re not bonded, Mica.”

“Unfortunate.”

“The stench is far more dreadful in here, isn’t it?” Alejandro asked. “I’m going to scrub myself in the sanibox. And perhaps burn my robe.” He shambled toward the stairs, looking like he had been run over by the sewer cleaner. More than once.

“Rough night?” Mica asked.

“Very much so. You haven’t heard from Leonidas, by chance, have you?”

Mica shook her head. “I haven’t seen him since he left with you. You seem to be losing crew and passengers left and right.”

“The mind is peaceful and calm,” Yumi intoned. “The breath is the center, the core, the focus. The—” A round of coughing, or maybe that was gagging, interrupted her litany, and her eyes opened. “Captain, your fecal aroma is disturbing our meditation.”

“I think our passenger is telling me to take a shower, Mica.”

“An accurate interpretation, I believe.”

The ship had a couple of heads, but only one sanibox. Alisa would have to wait for Alejandro to finish, but she supposed she could be polite and take her fecal aroma to another part of the ship. She dreaded the idea of smelling up NavCom or her cabin. Maybe she would wait outside of Alejandro’s cabin. This night of misadventure had been his fault.

Mica’s gaze shifted past Alisa’s shoulder, toward the still-open hatch. Alisa turned, worried that the soldiers might have already figured out where Alejandro and his orb had fled. But a familiar figure limped up the ramp.

“Leonidas,” Alisa blurted and rushed forward to help him.

She had never seen him limping or showing any sign of pain, even after his fight with the cyborg Malik. Now, blood saturated the shoulder of his jacket, cuts slashed his sleeve, contusions darkened his cheeks and jaw, and a cauterized gouge in the side of his neck marked a spot where he had been hit with a blazer—had that beam cut an inch to the right, it might have killed him.

He looked like he might collapse when he reached the top of the ramp, but he stood straight and lifted his chin as she rushed up. “He was not the superior fighter.”

“Does that mean he looks even worse than you?” Alisa did not know if he would be too proud to accept help, but she slid her arm around him without asking and waved toward the stairs. “You can lean on me, if you want. Let’s get you to sickbay. Alejandro owes you some bandages and a tube of QuickSkin for the help you gave him tonight.”

At first, Leonidas merely gazed curiously down at her and did not move. Did he object to her offer of help? Or the implication that he needed it? Eventually, he stirred, walking at her side. He did not lean on her, but he didn’t push her arm away, either.

“Perhaps it’s selfish,” Leonidas said, “but I’d like to think that I deserve more than bandages and tubes.”

“Like what? Money? Medals?”

He paused at the base of the stairs, either to collect himself or to wonder why Mica and Yumi were sitting amid all those candles. “To be honest, I’d like some cookies right now.”

Alisa almost laughed, though she supposed it made sense. It had been a long and arduous night, more so for him than for her and Alejandro, and he must be craving carbohydrates. With all those muscles of his, he probably burned through energy stores quickly.

“I have some chocolate in my cabin,” she said.

“Oh? That might do.”

Yumi sighed noisily and stood up. She wrinkled her nose, made a gagging sound again, and stooped to blow out and pick up her candles.

“Is our meditation session over?” Mica asked blandly.

“We cannot be expected to reach a state of higher consciousness with all of these distractions. We will try again when—” She made another gagging noise, abandoned the candles, and pushed past Alisa to sprint up the stairs. She tripped, then disappeared into the core of the ship, the gagging sounds continuing.

“I hope she makes it to the head,” Alisa said. She didn’t have any cleaning robots currently, thanks to everything of value having been taken from the ship during the years it had resided in a junkyard. “Especially since Beck is missing. He’s the only one here who’s volunteered to clean for me.”

“He’s the only one here that you actually pay,” Mica said, picking up discarded candles.

“I’ll gladly give you a salary if you agree to stay on board and officially take the position of ship’s engineer.”

Mica sighed at her.

“No, no, you needn’t overwhelm me with displays of gratitude. Having you here is reward enough.” Alisa tilted her head toward the stairs. “Ready, Leonidas?”

“Yes.” He still would not lean on her, but he did lean on the railing as they climbed.

Alisa could have let go of him since there were railings all the way to sickbay, but he had been willing to sacrifice himself so that she and Alejandro could get away. She found herself reluctant to let go, as if it would be abandoning him. Even through his clothing, she could feel the hard muscles of his torso. It was almost as if he wore combat armor even when he didn’t. Sleeping with him would be like sleeping with a particularly angular boulder. She smirked, imagining the poor wives of cyborgs waking up in the morning with bruises from having rolled over and bumped against those granite bulges.

“Are you experiencing inappropriate humor?” Leonidas asked, eyeing her smirk as they reached the top of the stairs.

“Yes, but I’m keeping it to myself.” She turned him up the walkway, toward the interior of the ship. “I thought you would approve.”

He grunted.

“Do many cyborg soldiers get married?” she asked.

“No.”

Alisa kept herself from asking if it was because of bruises suffered in bed. She doubted she could ask the question in such a way that wouldn’t be misinterpreted as being insulting. Actually, it was probably insulting even if interpreted correctly.

“Too busy blowing people up to have time to seek love?” she asked.

“The empire was a demanding employer.”

“If you worked for me, I’d give you time to seek love.”

“It seems I’m not yet done working for the empire,” he said quietly, an unexpected bleakness taking over his face.

Alisa bit her lip, wanting to go find Alejandro and slap him. Leonidas wasn’t his to command, damn it. Alejandro was right—he’d been selfish to suck Leonidas into his mission.

When they reached the sickbay door, Leonidas extracted himself from her grip, looking relieved to slip away. He had never mentioned being married now or in the past, so maybe it was a touchy subject for him. Or maybe he’d just had enough of her closeness. She had to admit that the aroma only intensified when two of them were together, and he did have those enhanced nostrils.

“I’ll get Alejandro out of the sanibox and send him your way,” Alisa said, deciding to give him his peace rather than going in and continuing to inflict her help on him. Alejandro would be far more qualified to treat him—and probably wouldn’t ask nosy questions about cyborg personal lives. He definitely wouldn’t think about being in bed with a cyborg.

• • • • •

Alisa almost felt human again when she stepped out of the sanibox, but her head still ached, so she would return to sickbay for a painpro before crawling into her bunk. She needed to give Leonidas some chocolate too. The man certainly deserved it.

The built-in netdisc on her desk flashed, signaling the messages Mica had mentioned, but she got dressed and headed to sickbay first, leaving her soiled clothes for the automatic washer, though she was afraid they would simply have to be burned. She delved into her drawer for her stash of sweets and poked through the small assortment of choices. It was odd to be selecting one of her precious dark chocolate bars to share. They were expensive and often hard to come by in the freight lanes and on space stations. She grabbed the pecan and raisin one, figuring Leonidas might appreciate a few extra calories.

“I apologize for causing you to miss your appointment with your contact,” Alejandro was saying as Alisa approached sickbay. The hatch door stood open, bright light slashing out into the night-dimmed corridor. She slowed her steps, listening.

“I’m beginning to think that the gods don’t want me to—”

The way he broke off made Alisa think he’d heard her coming. Trying not to feel guilty for eavesdropping—again—she continued to the hatchway.

Inside the small sickbay room, Leonidas sat on the single medical table, his shirt off as Alejandro worked on him, using skin binders to hold gashes together while the QuickSkin sealed the wounds.

He hadn’t gotten to a gash on Leonidas’s forearm yet, and Alisa started, glimpsing a hint of metal and circuitry revealed by the flesh and muscle that had been laid open. Even though she had logically known that Leonidas had cybernetic implants, it was jolting to actually see machine bits inside of someone that she had started to think of as human. As normal. A person. Maybe even a friend, not a machine.

“Marchenko,” Leonidas said, a guarded greeting.

Blushing because she had been caught staring, Alisa jerked her gaze up to his face. “I brought your chocolate,” she blurted, waving the bar. Maybe he would forget that she’d been gaping at his cybernetic innards.

“Thank you.”

Alejandro kept working and did not seem to notice the exchange. He had taken the time to finish his shower and change clothes before coming to sickbay, this robe identical to the last, except with a paucity of sewage clinging to it. Alisa found it strange to see a man in a gray monk’s robe wielding medical tools. She wondered if he knew how to fix cybernetic pieces if they were damaged, but she did not want to pry.

“Will he live, Doc?” she asked, coming forward to hand Leonidas the bar.

“Yes, but he should refrain from tangling with younger cyborgs.”

“He wasn’t that much younger,” Leonidas grumbled, accepting the bar and opening it with delicate precision that seemed at odds with the bulky muscles of his arms.

“Fifteen years, I’d guess,” Alejandro said.

Leonidas made a face. “Damn, I’ve gotten to the age where fifteen years doesn’t seem that long of a time.”

“Must be rough getting old,” Alisa teased, though fifteen years also wasn’t quite the eternity for her that it had seemed when she had been younger. The forty she judged him to be would have been ancient to her when she had been in school. Now it didn’t seem that far off. “Though at least you’re not as ancient as the doctor. Doc, your hands steady, there? That’s not an age-related tremor, is it? Can I get you something?”

He shot her a dirty look. “Do you have a purpose here, besides delivering chocolate and admiring Leonidas’s physique?”

The blush that had warmed her cheeks earlier returned. “I wasn’t admiring anything. I was—” She broke off, not wanting to admit to gaping at his machine parts.

Leonidas’s eyebrows rose, but he did not say anything, merely snapping off the end of the chocolate bar and putting it in his mouth.

“I was coming to see if you two are staying on or want to try another city on the planet, or what you plan to do,” Alisa said. “I still need to hunt down cargo and resupply, but after today, I think I better try another metropolis. The idea of staying here makes me twitchy, now that I know the imperial army is hunting for your orb.”

“I’m surprised you haven’t asked me to leave yet,” Alejandro said quietly, his gaze back on his work.

“There hasn’t been enough time to cogitate and realize the wisdom of doing that.”

“Are you asking now?”

“No. I mean, not exactly. I need money, and if you’re willing to keep paying, you can stay aboard.” Even as the words came out of her mouth, Alisa wondered at her offer. What was she thinking? She had her own mission ahead of her, one that would be hard enough to accomplish without people constantly attacking her ship because of Alejandro’s presence. But if she sent him packing, Leonidas would go with him, and she found herself reluctant to say goodbye to him forever.

Leonidas broke off a piece of the bar and offered it to her.

“Thanks,” she said, accepting it. Maybe it would help with her headache. Leonidas was not the only one who had expended a lot of energy tonight.

“Have you decided yet which city you’ll go to next?” Alejandro asked.

“No. I’m open, so long as I can get a cargo. I’ll put out some feelers, see what’s out there tonight before I go to bed. I need a few hours of sleep before I trust myself to fly us anywhere. Besides, I don’t want to leave without Beck. I need to figure out what happened to him.”

Alisa grimaced. She liked Beck, but he was someone else who was making her life more complicated than it needed to be. If she found out he had gotten into trouble with campus security, she would help him get out of it, but if he was simply out shopping and carousing, maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to leave him here and look for another security officer, one who wasn’t wanted dead by the mafia.

Leonidas offered Alejandro a piece of chocolate, but he refused it, moving around his patient to seal the gash on his arm.

“Will your implants heal on their own?” Alejandro asked. “Or do I need to do something?” He waved at the exposed circuitry.

That answered Alisa’s earlier question as to whether he had any experience with cyborg surgery.

Leonidas gave her a wary look before answering, as if he anticipated that she would mock him or make a snide comment. She bit her lip, distressed that she and her sharp tongue had made him expect that.

“If the implants are seriously damaged, they need to be replaced,” Leonidas said, “but they do have self-regenerating capabilities that will be adequate for this.” He pointed his chin at the gash.

“Good.” Alejandro pulled the ragged edges of the wound together, making the cybernetics disappear. “Captain, I still need the use of a comprehensive library. Would you consider putting down in New Dublin?”

Alisa nodded. “I’ll see what’s available in the way of cargo there.”

With her daughter missing, it seemed inane to worry about something as prosaic as cargo, but she had rejected Sylvia’s offer of a loan. Perhaps that had not been wise, given her predicament. She hated to be beholden to anyone, but she would need money to keep her ship in the air so she could hunt for Jelena. She had no idea if her daughter was even here on Perun, or if they had taken her to another planet altogether. She would head to that library, too, and do what she had wanted to do earlier, look up where the local Starseers could be found. Maybe she could get a lead from them.

“Good. I will continue to pay for my cabin,” Alejandro said. “And I will pay for Leonidas’s too.”

Leonidas arched his eyebrows. “I can pay my own way.”

“I insist.”

“Oh? What do you expect from me in return for such largesse?”

“Maybe he expects you to perform sexual favors for him,” Alisa said, the joke coming out before she could think better of it. This was why Leonidas expected mockery from her. She sighed.

“That seems unlikely,” Leonidas said dryly. At least he did not seem offended.

“I’ll go check on Beck.” Alisa left them, feeling like she was fleeing. For some reason, she was not that comfortable in her skin around Leonidas. Maybe she should rethink her offer once again and ask them both to leave at the next stop.

The sickbay hatch clunked shut softly behind her, and she paused, frowning back at it. They hadn’t bothered shutting it before. What were they about to say that they didn’t want people to overhear? Or was she just being paranoid? Maybe Leonidas simply did not want anyone else to walk in and stare at his naked chest. Or maybe Alejandro needed him to take his trousers off to treat wounds on his lower half.

In her cabin, Alisa slid into the swivel chair bolted to the floor in front of the desk, the computerized mesh adjusting to cup her body comfortably. She reached for the comm, the flashing light catching her eye again. She should have checked her messages right away since one might be from Beck, but she found her fingers straying as the holodisplay popped up. The captain’s cabin was tied into the controls in NavCom, so she could check the course and the sensors from her bed if she woke up in the night. She also had access to the master internal communications controls. She tapped a couple of buttons, and turned on the comm in sickbay, then leaned back to listen. She felt like a creep for eavesdropping again—intentionally—but that didn’t make her turn off the speaker.

“Think we can trust her?” Leonidas was asking.

Alisa felt her heart speed up as adrenaline surged through her veins. Even though she had only activated the comm in one direction, she kept her breathing soft, afraid she might get caught listening if she made a noise.

“No,” Alejandro said. “She’s made it clear her loyalties are to the Alliance.”

A silent moment stretched, and Alisa wished Leonidas would say something to defend her. Alejandro’s words were true, but she had been helping them, hadn’t she? She had nearly been killed multiple times now because she had first taken Leonidas to that secret laboratory and then gone with him to the library to assist Alejandro. It seemed unfair of them to condemn her.

“I would actually prefer it if she was simply motivated by money,” Alejandro said, “because I could pay her for her silence, but when she talks of fares, it’s usually an afterthought.” He sighed. “I’m uncomfortable with how much she knows.”

“She doesn’t know any more than I do,” Leonidas said, his tone dry again. “Which isn’t much.”

“I’m concerned that she’ll report what she does know to her government.”

Alisa swallowed. Yes, she had been considering doing just that. The main reason she hadn’t done it was that they were on Perun, and she had no idea who she would report to from here. This didn’t seem like the type of information she should beam across the system to a customer service representative accessible through the virtual government site.

“I suppose it would be terribly Machiavellian of me to ask if you would be willing to make her disappear.”

If Alisa’s heart had been racing before, it nearly leaped out of her chest now. From Alejandro’s tone, it had almost sounded like a joke, but she could imagine the man watching Leonidas, seeing if he got an amenable reaction, in which case he might consider it more seriously…

“It would be evil and villainous,” Leonidas said coldly.

“I suppose so.” Alejandro sighed again. “I just feel that I can’t fail in this, and it’s making me paranoid. I don’t sleep. I lay awake all night and worry.”

“Prescribe yourself something then,” Leonidas said, his voice still cold.

Alisa managed a faint smile, pleased that he rejected the idea of doing something heinous to her, but it didn’t last. It was chilling to hear that Alejandro, a man wearing a monk’s robe, damn it, would even consider making her “disappear.” Were those robes even real? Had he sworn any oaths?

Alejandro chuckled. “You’re a better man than I am, Colonel. All right, we’ll stay aboard, at least until I can do the library research I need to do.”

“I’ll remind you that I have my own quest, Doctor. I don’t need you to pay my way here, nor do I appreciate you assuming that I’m yours to command.”

Alisa silently cheered for him. She was glad he still sounded irked at Alejandro. Maybe he would decide to abandon the doctor and his mysterious quest and stay aboard, accepting her offer of employment.

“I don’t assume that,” Alejandro said quietly. “But surely you must agree that my mission is of more importance than your personal quest. You have plenty of time for that later.”

“Not if I get killed protecting your ass from people who should be my colleagues, not my enemies,” Leonidas said, his tone going from cold to hot. “And I still don’t know what your mission is, what you and your little artifact hope to accomplish.”

“I’d think that should be obvious. The goal is to put the empire back together.”

Leonidas snorted. “It’s not a disassembled assault rifle that can simply be reassembled.”

“It can be carved out again, with the proper tools and the proper leader.”

“And who might that be?”

“You know exactly who I’m talking about.”

“The boy? He’s ten. He can barely tie his shoes. And we don’t know if he’s alive.”

“You know that’s not true,” Alejandro said quietly. “He already has the power to tie your shoes. From across the room. And I know as well as you do that the emperor got him out of the palace in time.”

The emperor’s son? That had to be who they were talking about. The media had reported him dead. It wouldn’t shock her to find out that he had been squirreled away somehow, but how could Alejandro be so sure? Had he been there at the end? Seen the boy taken? And what was the tying shoes bit supposed to imply? That he had Starseer abilities? Alisa was hearing too damned much about those people these days.

“He’s still ten,” Leonidas said. He did not sound surprised by anything Alejandro was saying. “Armies aren’t going to follow him.”

“Not now, no, but in eight, ten more years? Our people will have had time to rebuild and gather more resources by then, and the system will have seen what a farce the so-called Tri-Suns Alliance is. It’ll be our time to move then, and I plan to do my part to facilitate that.”

Alisa leaned back farther in her chair, her nerves calmer now that they weren’t talking about her, but the conversation was still chilling. It also occurred to her that Alejandro might start to think about getting rid of her again if he had any idea that she was listening in.

“If you’re done here,” Leonidas said. “I’m going to bed.”

“Yes, with your accelerated healing, you should be fine in a couple of days. Go ahead.”

Alisa reached for the button that would turn off the sickbay comm—the last thing she needed was for Leonidas and his enhanced ears to walk by her cabin and hear her listening to Alejandro puttering around in there. But she paused as the men spoke again.

“I wouldn’t get too attached to her if I were you,” Alejandro added. “I can understand not wanting to kill someone in cold blood, but if she proves herself willing to betray us for the sake of her Alliance…”

“I’m not attached,” Leonidas said coolly.

The hatch clanged as he shut it.

Chapter 9

Alisa sat at her desk and stared at the holodisplay of her netdisc. The brightness of the visual had dimmed since several minutes had passed since she had touched it. She’d heard the hatch to Leonidas’s cabin shut out in the corridor, followed by a second clang shortly after. Alejandro finishing up in sickbay and going to his room, perhaps. She hoped so. She had forgotten to get headache medicine and did not want to run into him if she went out for some. After what she had heard, she had no idea how she would look him in the eye without glaring daggers at him.

The idea that he thought she was expendable chilled her. Even if Leonidas wouldn’t be Alejandro’s henchman, a doctor could easily kill someone. He would know just how to make it look like an accident. A simple injection from a needle, and she might never wake up.

She shuddered, wondering if she should arrange his death first. But she had never done something like that, and she did not know if she could. The mere idea of murder made her stomach churn. She’d shot ships down in battle, and that had resulted in people’s deaths, but she was no coldhearted killer. She liked to think she had a few shreds of honor, eavesdropping tendencies notwithstanding. She would have to hope that the mild-mannered Alejandro did not have the balls to kill someone himself.

The only thing she had appreciated about listening to that conversation had been realizing that Leonidas was no coldhearted assassin, either. She doubted she could trust him to choose her over Alejandro and the empire, if it ever came to that, but at least he wouldn’t stab her in the back. No, if he ever killed her, he would shoot her in the chest. She wished that were more comforting. She did not want him to kill her at all. She wanted him to be someone she could trust. An ally. A friend.

She groaned and sat straighter in her chair, rubbing her eyes. With her mind spinning so much, she did not know how she would ever sleep, but she needed to try to find Beck first, regardless.

When she swiped her hand through the holodisplay, the messages light flashed again. Someone had commed the Nomad twice, both shortly before she had returned. A late hour to be making calls.

She poked the number, bringing up a face she didn’t recognize, but that did not mean much, given that she had been gone for so many years. With short brown hair, old-fashioned spectacles, and a lean, almost gaunt face, the man was neither handsome nor memorable. He did wear an Alliance military jacket with major’s pins on the collar, and that got her attention.

“Captain Marchenko,” the officer said. “I’m certain you’re busy, so I’ll keep this short. My name is Major Mladenovic, 14th Intelligence Division. I’m aware that you’ve recently returned home and found that your husband is dead and your daughter is missing. My condolences on your husband. His passing was regrettable.”

Alisa shifted in her seat, uncomfortable with how much the man knew. Intelligence Division. Spies, essentially. She doubted the Perunese knew this man was down here on their planet. She couldn’t imagine that the empire was inviting Alliance officers down here with open arms.

“I want you to know that even though the war is over,” Mladenovic continued, “and your contract was up even before it ended, you have friends in the Alliance army. Though we are a little concerned that you’ve taken on some imperial passengers with dubious credentials.”

Alisa was glad she was listening to a recorded message and did not have to come up with a response immediately. The man’s knowledge of her affairs was unsettling, Alliance army jacket or not.

“We would like to give you the opportunity to serve the Alliance once more, even as you’ve now phased into the civilian life. One of your passengers has an ancient and valuable artifact that you may or may not be aware of.”

“No kidding,” Alisa muttered, as the major arched his eyebrows and stared directly at the camera pickup.

“This artifact could ultimately be used against the Alliance. It doesn’t look threatening on the surface, but I’m told it could lead to something powerful and dangerous. I’m sure you can understand why we would prefer to have it in Alliance hands rather than grubby imperial paws.”

“Everyone wants it in their hands,” Alisa said, rubbing her arms, remembering the way her hairs had stood up when the orb had been out of its box.

“Since you are in a position to get it, I’d like to offer a trade with you. I can give you information on your daughter’s whereabouts if you’ll simply bring the artifact to me at the dawn of the first sun—6:43 in the morning, the computer tells me. Meet me at the Spaceman’s Wharf. It’s just outside of the base where I believe you’re docked.” He continued to stare into the camera—straight at her. “I urge you to come, Captain. We can’t let the imperials have anything that might let them gain back any control of the system. You remember what their rule was like. Please, do what’s right.”

“Do what’s right?” she asked as the message ended, and blackness replaced his face. “Like coercing a woman into doing something illegal, such as say, stealing, by dangling information about her missing daughter in front of her for bait?”

She closed her mouth, remembering that Leonidas’s cabin wasn’t far away and that he had that special hearing. But it was hard not to talk, to shout, to rail. First, the major had told her that she had friends, but then he’d implied he would only give her information if she stole something for him. What kind of friend was that? Damned superior officers. He doubtlessly only saw her as a pawn, someone to be manipulated for his gain. Maybe for the Alliance’s gain, too, and while she could support that, this was not right. Was he even acting on behalf of his superiors? Or had he somehow caught wind of the orb himself and was now trying to get it to further his own career?

Alisa pushed herself to her feet. The captain’s cabin was larger than the other ones on the ship, but not so large that she could pace comfortably. She walked four steps, pushed off the wall, then walked the same steps in the opposite direction. She would be a fool to trust this major, and yet… he was an Alliance officer. Or at least he claimed to be. She eyed her computer, almost sitting back down to look him up, but then realized she wouldn’t have access to the Alliance military database from here. She probably couldn’t look him up.

Besides, what would she do if she found out he was a legitimate officer? Do as he asked?

It would be foolish, even if she could get away with it. She wouldn’t be that worried about dealing with Alejandro, but with Leonidas? After he had defended her, or at least been unwilling to assassinate her, she hated the idea of him thinking she was a traitor.

“But I’m not a traitor,” she muttered. “They’ve openly admitted that they’re working for the empire.” And they had admitted in secret, unaware of her eavesdropping, that they wanted to see the emperor’s son returned to power, to see the empire returned to power.

Alisa shuddered, almost feeling betrayed that they could want that. But they had clearly been people of power in that system, people who had been rewarded for their loyalty. Maybe they had no idea how rough things had been for the average subject—or for anyone who had a mind and wanted to speak it.

She found herself slipping out of her cabin and padding down the corridor. She glanced warily at Leonidas’s hatch as she passed it, wishing he and his superior ears were down in the cargo hold with the chickens. At least Mica’s cabin was on the opposite end of the corridor. When Alisa reached it, she knocked softly. In the silence of the night, she could hear soft music through the hatch to Yumi’s cabin next door. With luck, she would be too busy meditating to press her ear to the wall and listen to a conversation. Not that Yumi was likely to care about orb plots. Alisa hadn’t gotten the impression that she was particularly loyal to one faction or another. She seemed like someone who stayed out of the way and pursued her own interests.

Alisa had to knock three times before the hatch opened.

“I’m not lighting any more candles today,” Mica grumbled, rubbing her eyes and squinting into the dim light of the corridor.

“That’s good, because open flame shouldn’t be allowed on a spaceship.” Alisa waved toward the dark cabin. “Can I come in?”

“Of course. I can see from the clock—” Mica glanced at a digital display embedded into the wall, “—that it’s well into social hour.”

Ignoring the sarcasm, Alisa stepped inside. The clock promised it was only four hours until dawn and that major’s meeting time. She didn’t have long to make up her mind.

“I need advice, Mica,” she said softly, closing the hatch behind her. Darkness fell upon them, broken only by the faint glow from the clock.

“Does it require there be lights on?” Mica yawned and shambled back to the bunk set against the far wall.

“Not necessarily, but I want to show you a message I got.”

Mica fumbled on the desk, and a holodisplay popped up, providing more light for the room. “Go ahead.”

“I also need to tell you about what happened to me today before the sewer incident.” Alisa patted her way to the chair at the desk, sat down, and explained the trip to her sister-in-law’s apartment. She hadn’t fully confided to Mica before about her family problems, but she was the only one on the Nomad that Alisa had known for more than a month. And she was Alliance. They had served together on the same ship for a year. They had some history together.

“I’m sorry, Alisa.” Mica was sitting on her bunk, leaning against the wall with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders. “I wish I could help, but I doubt I know any more about Starseers than you do. It’s too bad you couldn’t use the library, even though I doubt you would find anything useful in public records.”

“I see you’re as optimistic as ever.”

“What optimism I have in my reservoir gets divided by half for every hour after midnight it is.”

“Right. Sorry to keep you up, but that’s not the end of my story.” Alisa took a breath and logged into the computer. She pulled up Major Mladenovic’s message and played it again.

Mica listened in silence, waiting until it finished before she spoke. “He’s familiar. We had an intelligence unit on one of the ships I served on near the end of the war, and I think he might have been the commander some of the men spoke of, the one sending orders.”

“Well, that answers one question. I was wondering if he was a legitimate Alliance officer or if he’d just beaten someone up for a jacket.”

Mica snorted. “He doesn’t look that athletic.” She ruffled her hand through her short, tousled hair. “He looks like an asshole honestly. Most majors are.”

“Guess it’s good I didn’t stay in long enough to get promoted to such a lofty rank.”

“Definitely.”

“Mica.” Alisa leaned forward. “Should I do it? What do you think? I don’t trust him, but if there’s even a chance that he could lead me to my daughter, how can I ignore it?”

“The Intelligence Division probably knows more about the Starseers than anyone else in the army,” Mica said slowly, “but maybe it would be better to comm someone else. Don’t you have the comm numbers for any superior officers you liked that you served with? Maybe someone could point you to a friendly intel officer who could help.”

“I suppose, but it would be days, if not weeks, to get a response here. The Perunese may even be blocking or editing outgoing communications. My sister-in-law had to physically mail a letter through a private service to get word to me about my husband.”

“A problem that is easily solved by leaving the planet and taking me somewhere with more employment prospects.”

“So glad your job hunt is taking precedence over your sympathy for my plight, Mica.”

“Sorry. It’s not that. You know, I’m just…” Mica scooted to the edge of her bunk and put a hand on Alisa’s shoulder. “I’m not good at sympathy and being womanly and caring and such. You’re not, either, you know. I figure that’s why we ended up drinking together back on the Silver Striker so often.”

“I thought that was just because nobody else would drink with us.”

“That too. We have the kind of wit that not everybody appreciates.”

“And that starts wars.”

“Probably true.” Mica smiled and squeezed her shoulder before sitting back against the wall again. “I don’t think you should trust him, but I think you’re already planning to sneak into the doctor’s cabin and steal the orb.”

“Why are you so sure?”

“Because Mladenovic is the only lead you’ve got.”

Alisa thought of the conversation she had overheard, of the proof that Alejandro did not care one way or another about her and wouldn’t mind if she were dead. She had to admit that she felt less bad about the idea of stealing from him after that. Oh, she did not think anything she was contemplating was truly honorable, but her choices were limited.

What worried her more than the questionable morality of what she was considering was incurring Leonidas’s wrath. He would be a terrifying enemy, and if she did take the orb and hand it off to someone, he would be back here at the ship, waiting for her to return. Or he might track her down before she had a chance to reach Major Mladenovic. She would have to figure out a way to get him and Alejandro off the ship, at least for a few hours, so she could fly away. If she could get off planet, she guessed—hoped—that they wouldn’t come after her. They ought to be too busy trying to find the orb. They might go after Major Mladenovic, but if he could not take care of himself, that was his problem. She didn’t owe anything to a man who was bribing her.

“You better watch out for Leonidas if you go through with it,” Mica said. “He could break you in half with his pinky fingers.”

“I’m very aware of that.” The memory of his exposed implant popped into Alisa’s mind. “That’s why I need help.”

“Help? I thought you were here for sympathy.”

“Sympathy, advice, help… We can’t try to get the doctor off the ship and search his cabin, because he takes that orb everywhere he goes. I need to sneak in and get it from him while he’s sleeping, and then I need to hustle off to this meeting. At some point, he’ll wake up and realize it’s missing.” Hopefully not until she had already made the trade. “I would guess that he’ll get Leonidas and that they’ll leave the ship. Can you rig something so that once they leave, they can’t get back in?”

“With the doctor, it’s that way now. You and I are needed to unlock the hatch. Or Leonidas. Remember how he was on the ship for weeks before we got to that junk cave?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’m fairly certain now that he was the one doing those repairs. He also gave himself access to a lot of the ship’s systems, so he can go anywhere he wants.”

“Can we revoke that access?”

“You can. You’re hardwired in as the ship’s original owner.”

Was she? Her mother must have done that years ago.

Mica pulled up a different program on the holodisplay. “Here, authorize this, and I’ll see what I can do about revoking his access. Then you can steal the orb and go.”

“We can go,” Alisa said as she typed in the passcode for the computer, then leaned forward so it could grab a retina scan.

“Eh?”

“If you’re here when they wake up, they might question you.”

“I can lock myself in here or in engineering. Probably engineering so I can monitor what they’re up to on the rest of the—”

“Mica, I’ve seen him tear open locked metal doors and grates. I wouldn’t be surprised if he could get to you through a locked hatch.” Alisa eyed the one in the cabin. It was sturdy and thick, like something found on a submarine that had to withstand thousands of pounds of pressure underwater, but Leonidas’s arms were even thicker.

“In other words, you’ve determined that I’m not getting any sleep tonight,” Mica said.

“You could have slept earlier instead of praying to candles on the cargo hold floor.”

“We weren’t praying. She was teaching me how to meditate and relax my mind and my body. Apparently, I don’t do that.”

Alisa wondered if Mica’s willingness to subject herself to meditation had anything to do with her finding Yumi cute, something she had mentioned before in passing.

“Did you not find the meditation as rejuvenating as a full night of sleep?” Alisa stood up and rubbed her hands together. She would have to do the next step of her plan by herself.

“Oddly not. People who stank of the sewers came in and interrupted us.”

Alisa headed for the hatch. “How long will it take you to revoke his access?”

“Not long.”

“Can you meet me at the cargo hatch in an hour? I want to give Alejandro more time to settle into a nice deep sleep.”

“It’s your plan,” Mica said, not sounding enthused about it or her night of lost sleep.

Chapter 10

Alisa thumbed on the flashlight on her multitool, choosing the red lens out of some vague hope that the color would be less likely to wake someone up than white. Not making noise probably mattered more. She hoped she could manage that. She knew these cabins well, but if Alejandro was sleeping with the orb under his pillow, all of her knowledge would be useless.

She slipped out of her cabin into the corridor—she had turned off the usual nighttime lights, so utter darkness filled the passage. She eased out into it, guiding herself by touch. She wore soft boots and a jacket warm enough for venturing out into the night. If she succeeded in escaping with the orb, she would head straight out.

She walked past Leonidas’s hatch as quietly as she could, regretting that she’d assigned Alejandro a cabin right next to his when the doctor had first come aboard. A thump came from within it as she passed, and she froze, expecting the hatch to burst open. She would be caught before she even started. Dozens of excuses whirled through her mind, but then she reminded herself that she hadn’t done anything yet. For all Leonidas knew, she could be going to use the head.

Another thump sounded inside of his cabin, but the hatch did not open. The noises sounded like they were coming from the back of the room, where the bunk lay, and she remembered that she’d heard such noises coming from Leonidas’s cabin before at night. He wasn’t a quiet sleeper. Maybe someday, if they met again and he didn’t kill her for stealing the doctor’s orb, she would ask him what cyborgs dreamed about. If. An optimistic thought. She doubted they would meet again. That made her sad. She liked him a lot more than she liked Alejandro. But not enough to foolishly try to keep in touch with him after she betrayed them. The system was a large place, and she could not see herself returning to Perun. With her husband dead and her daughter gone, there was nothing left for her here.

She forced herself to continue past the room, shaking away the feelings of loss. What she did tonight was for Jelena. Alisa had to believe that it would get her closer to finding her daughter.

When she reached Alejandro’s hatch, she pressed her ear against the cool metal. No sounds came from within. Despite his words to the contrary, he must not have that much trouble sleeping.

Alisa turned off and pocketed her flashlight, then pressed her hand to the lock pad. It lit briefly, blue light brightening the corridor. The lock disengaged with a faint clunk. She lowered her hand and pressed her ear to the hatch again. The noise had not been loud, but if Alejandro was a light sleeper—or one paranoid about losing his orb—he might wake easily.

Again, she did not hear anything. Knowing she was about to cross the threshold, she gripped the old-style latch and slid it to the side. After this, she would not be able to claim that she was simply going to the head.

It was dark inside, the sounds of soft, even breaths coming from the back. The clock on the wall glowed a faint green. It did not provide enough light to see much, but she could make out the outline of the bunk and Alejandro’s form on it. She tried to see if anything lay on the floor, both because she didn’t want to step on his belongings and because it would be handy if his orb satchel was simply leaning against the wall by the door. It was too dark to pick out anything against the dark carpet.

Reluctantly, she withdrew the flashlight. Using it should save her time, keep her from patting around and possibly knocking something over. But she kept a nervous eye toward Alejandro’s form as she flicked it on. She skimmed the red beam along the carpet, but did not see anything. The desk and chair were also empty. There were built-in drawers and cupboards that she could open, but the metal latches and doors weren’t that quiet—there were identical ones in her cabin, so she knew. Besides, she suspected Alejandro was too paranoid to sleep that far from his precious orb.

She inched across the room and risked running the beam over his blanketed form. He slept on his side, facing the exit—facing her. His even breathing continued, but she worried that his eyes would pop open at any moment. She kept from running the beam close to his face and angled it down toward the carpet as soon as she had seen what she needed to see. He was not using the satchel for a pillow as he slept.

Alisa was about to head to the cabinets when she remembered the presence that the orb had. She had been able to feel it, like energy humming in the air during an electrical storm, when it had been out of its box on the pirate ship. Apparently, the box provided some insulation, because she had not noticed it other times, but she also had not tried to notice it. The thing—an artifact, the major had called it—disturbed her and made her want to stay away. But she could not do that now. She backed to the center of the room and flipped off the flashlight. Though she hated taking her attention from Alejandro, she closed her eyes and tried to open up her other senses. The even rhythm of his breathing comforted her slightly.

Alisa had no idea how to use her sixth sense or whatever it was that was involved in these things. Maybe she should have joined Mica and Yumi for meditation. An altered state of consciousness might be helpful for this.

After a few seconds, she thought she sensed something. Her imagination? Gooseflesh rose on her arms. The feeling seemed to originate from the direction of Alejandro’s bunk. Maybe he did have it under his pillow. Or under his blanket.

Flicking her flashlight on again, she eased back to his side. Carefully, she lifted the edge of his blanket. A bead of sweat ran down her spine. Searching the room was one thing, but risking touching him? That was sure to rouse him.

She crouched down to look under the blanket without lifting it higher, sweeping the flashlight through the space. She couldn’t keep from imagining Alejandro waking up and staring at her, his face less than two feet from hers. But all of her worries disappeared when she spotted the satchel nestled under the blanket and against his chest, the strap hooked around his wrist with his arm draped over it. Three suns, a lover would be jealous of the thing.

She couldn’t detect the sewer odor, so he must have laundered it since they had returned earlier. Or maybe he had showered with it. Paranoid bastard.

There was no way she would try to get that strap off his wrist, but she put away the flashlight and risked poking her hand under the blanket. From the way he held it, she might be able to lift the flap and extricate the box without bumping him. Maybe.

Even as she tried, she could not believe she was doing this. There was absolutely no excuse she could make to explain herself if he woke up. No, she would have to club him over the head and hope for the best. She did have her Etcher in her holster. But she didn’t want to kill him, and everyone would hear that gun going off. This would have been much less crazy if she had a stunner. She made a note to herself to buy a wider variety of weaponry someday—if she ever had time to go look for legitimate work.

She slid her hand under the flap and felt the corner of the box, the hard wood slightly warm under her fingers.

Alejandro grunted, his even breathing stopping. Alisa froze. His arm moved, and she yanked her hand out, dropping to the floor beside the bunk. He stirred further, the blankets rustling slightly. She lay on her back, looking up at the dark ceiling, her heart pounding against her rib cage. If he woke fully and decided to use the lav, he would step on her on his way out.

More rustling came, then a quiet pause. His even breathing started up again, fainter than before. Even though he sounded like he had fallen back to sleep without fully waking, she waited for several minutes before risking sticking her head up. She slumped with relief when she realized that he had turned over. Not only that, but he faced the wall now, and the satchel remained on the bunk behind him, his arms no longer around it, the blanket no longer covering it fully. Maybe one of the sun gods was looking down upon her and wanted to help. The strap might still be hooked to his arm, but she could easily reach the flap, and she did so, opening it. She eased the box out, her hands shaking as she backed away with her prize.

Alisa wanted to sprint for the corridor and the cargo hold so she could get off the ship as quickly as possible, but she made herself step slowly, quietly. She would still be in trouble if he woke up.

She eased into the dark corridor, looking both ways.

A thump came from her left, and she nearly dropped the box. She whirled, turning on the flashlight, expecting to find Leonidas standing there.

The corridor was empty. The noise had come from inside his cabin, not outside of it. Good.

Alisa hustled in the other direction, more eager than ever to get off the ship. She barely kept from sprinting down the steps and into the cargo hold. A few lights were on, and Mica waited near the hatch, yawning as she fiddled with something on her netdisc.

“Open the door,” Alisa said. “We’re going.”

Mica eyed the box tucked under her arm. “I see that.”

She wasn’t moving quickly enough for Alisa’s tastes, so Alisa leaned past her and thumped the button for the hatch. Cold salty air rushed in as the ramp lowered. Not waiting for it to settle, Alisa grabbed an empty shopping bag and hurried outside.

“How long do we have?” Mica asked, jogging to catch up.

Alisa waved at the sensor to close the hatch, then turned toward the empty walkway outside. At least, she expected it to be empty at this time of night, but she almost crashed into someone striding past a lamppost. For the second time in as many minutes, she nearly dropped the box.

A hand reached toward her, and she leaped back, her nerves on edge, before it registered that she knew who this was. How many people ambled along the concourse in full combat armor?

“Beck,” Alisa blurted. “Where have you been?”

She felt guilty that she had forgotten about him ever since the major’s message had come in. She had meant to look up his comm number and try to reach him.

Beck glanced over his shoulder. He wasn’t wearing his helmet and had it tucked under his arm. He did not carry bags of chicken feed or anything that would suggest he had been out shopping. “Extricating myself from trouble.”

“With campus security?”

“First with them, yes, but all I got was a warning there for walking onto campus with weapons. But on the way back, a truck screeched out from an alley and two men with rifles tried to take me down. I can’t prove it, but I think they were White Dragon. They must have people on this planet—and the word must be out that I’m wanted dead.” He grimaced. “I was wearing my helmet too. I shouldn’t have been easy to identify. All I can assume is that they’ve got me tagged somehow. I’ll have to take my armor to a master smith, see if he can figure it out.”

“A good quest for you for tomorrow. Why don’t you come with us now?” Alisa gripped his arm and turned him away from the ship, pointing down the dark concourse. She glanced back at the hatch, making sure it was still closed. Alejandro could wake up any moment and come storming out of the ship.

“Now?” Beck blinked and looked from her to Mica. Then his gaze snagged on the box under her arm. “Uhh, what’s that?”

“A long story,” Alisa said, relieved he had started walking. She stuffed the box into her bag so it would be less obvious. “But your timing is impeccable. We could use someone burly and intimidating for this meeting.”

“And you chose me instead of the mech?” Beck lifted his head, sounding pleased.

“Of course.”

Mica twitched an eyebrow in her direction but kept her mouth shut. Maybe she was too tired for sarcasm or pessimism tonight. Alisa certainly was.

She looked back a final time before a bend took the Star Nomad out of sight. She dreaded returning, not knowing if Leonidas and Alejandro would have left and been locked out, or if they would still be there, waiting to punish her for her betrayal.

No, she told herself once again. It wasn’t a betrayal. They were enemies, both of them. She was Alliance. She needed to find her daughter. All of this was perfectly logical.

The words did not keep her from feeling that she had left her honor in shreds on the floor of Alejandro’s cabin.

Chapter 11

“Someone’s coming,” Beck whispered, nudging Alisa with his elbow.

She blinked, coming fully awake, hardly able to believe that she had dozed off while standing against a stack of shipping containers. She, Beck, and Mica were in a rail yard across the parking lot from the Spaceman’s Wharf, the restaurant Major Mladenovic had picked for their meeting place. The sky had lightened a few shades since the last time Alisa had opened her eyes.

Numerous cars were parked on the asphalt around the restaurant, while fliers perched in a separate rooftop lot. People walked in and out of the building, the scents of eggs and baking bread wafting out, but Beck wasn’t pointing in that direction. He was looking toward their left, at dark shadows inside the rail yard between two rows of shipping containers stacked three high and towering thirty feet above the asphalt.

Alisa had decided to wait here, where cargo was removed from ships and put onto trains to transport across the continent, rather than in a booth inside the restaurant, because she hoped to see Mladenovic walking in. More specifically, she hoped to see Mladenovic and however many men he brought with him walking in. He shouldn’t need more than a couple of people to ensure she cooperated and to give her the information she needed. If he brought an army, she would assume it was a trap.

Following Beck’s pointing arm, Alisa spotted a man in unremarkable civilian clothes walking out of the shadows. It was the major, his glasses reflecting the light of a lamp near the edge of the rail yard. Two men in mismatched combat armor strode after him.

“Thought you said this fellow would be wearing an Alliance uniform,” Beck said.

Alisa had summarized the message for him on the way over here, leaving out the details about her daughter. Beck had assumed she was turning the orb in for money, or just because the Alliance had ordered her to, and it had seemed simpler to let him believe that than explaining the truth.

“I’m not surprised he isn’t,” Alisa said.

“He would have the police or imperial soldiers jumping on him if he wandered around here in one of our uniforms,” Mica said, pushing away from the post she had been sitting on and yawning. She might have been dozing too. “There’s a police flier parked over there in the restaurant lot,” she added.

“Hope that means that they’ll come out to help if those two thugs in combat armor try to get rough,” Alisa said, debating whether she should step out of the shadows to greet the major or wait for him to cross the street and go into the restaurant. She wasn’t likely to have trouble with him in an eatery full of people.

“Are you making implications about the kinds of people who wear combat armor, Captain?” Beck asked.

“Just that they probably get crabby if they spend all day and all night in all that gear.”

“Actually, the padding inside mine is quite comfortable. I’ve been known to lock the leg servos and take a nap while standing up.”

“That’s a revelation that’ll make me feel particularly safe with you guarding my back in the future.”

“I don’t nap while guarding people, Captain.”

They weren’t talking loudly, but one of the men in armor caught up to the major and tapped him on the shoulder. He pointed at Alisa’s group. So much for the safety of a booth in the restaurant.

The three men veered in her direction. Mladenovic’s mouth moved as he murmured something. It might have been to his men or he might have had an earstar. It was too dark to tell. Alisa did not like the idea of him reporting to some superior that he had located her. Nor did she like the idea that he might have other men around that he could be checking in with. When she and Mica and Beck had arrived, Alisa had led them on a stroll around the rail yard and the restaurant, looking for any hidden trouble—such as squads of men poised to leap out and grab her. They hadn’t seen anything, but it had still been fully dark then, leaving plenty of hiding spots, especially among the shipping containers.

“Want me to look tough and menacing, Captain?” Beck asked, shifting closer to her.

“Is that hard to do when you’re outnumbered two to one?”

Technically, they were three to three, but Alisa did not have anything with her that could hurt someone wearing combat armor. She did not know what Mica had. She wore her big purse and was known for carrying homemade explosives and smoke bombs in it.

“Yes, but I can manage,” Beck said. “I’m a veteran.”

When he got close, Major Mladenovic lifted a hand, and the two armored men stopped. He continued forward a few steps, his eyes locking onto the bag Alisa had slung over her shoulder.

“Captain Marchenko,” the major said, his gaze shifting to her face.

“Major,” she said.

“You’re early. And not in the Wharf.”

“I assumed clandestine deals went on in shadow-filled places like this rather than at cheerful booths with yellow-flowered tablecloths.”

“You’ve been watching too many spy vids.” His gaze again shifted toward her bag, but he also eyed Mica’s big purse.

She was leaning against the post, her arms across her chest, looking calm. It was hard to tell if Beck was flexing his shoulders and thrusting his chest out when he was in that armor, but either way, he was looming effectively. Too bad the major’s men were just as good at looming. They carried rifles as well as their built-in weapons, and in the dim lighting, she thought she saw a grenade launcher poking up over one man’s shoulder. Interesting choice for a meeting at a restaurant.

“One has to entertain oneself somehow during long flights.” Alisa shrugged. “While I’m enjoying the small talk, you said—”

Her comm beeped, startling her. Out of habit, she almost reached for it, but she did not want to talk now. Besides, it might be Alejandro, having woken up and realized that she, Mica, and his orb were missing.

“Not going to answer that?” Mladenovic asked mildly when it beeped again, quite insistently.

“No, it’s possible that’s the owner of something I recently acquired.”

His gaze sharpened. “You stole it? You didn’t kill the monk?”

The monk? Was that what he thought Alejandro was? Interesting that an intelligence officer wouldn’t know the full story, that Alejandro had been a doctor working for the emperor’s family. Of course, maybe he did know and assumed that she did not.

“You didn’t mention that as a requirement,” Alisa said, boggled that he seemed to find the idea of theft more unappealing than killing people. And then taking their stuff. “Look, I have what you asked for. You said you have information to trade.”

Beck’s helmet swiveled toward her, but only briefly before he returned to glowering at his counterparts.

“The Starseers took her,” Mladenovic said.

“I know that. But where?” Alisa’s fingers curled into a fist. If all he had was the same information she had… Hells, maybe he’d seen the same video she had seen and that was it. All of this stress would have been for nothing.

“We can help you find her, but I need to see the artifact first.” He held out his hand.

Alisa did not move. She needed time to consider. Was this truly the right thing to do? So many people wanted this thing. Did the Alliance have more right to it than the remnants of the empire? Maybe neither of them should have it. If it was some Starseer artifact, maybe they should have it. The thought that she could possibly trade it for her daughter if necessary jumped into her mind. Not that it was hers to trade. Three suns, what was happening to her morality? Before this night, she had never considered stealing. She had always believed she was an honorable person, someone who did the right thing. But what was the right thing in this situation?

“Captain,” Mladenovic said, his voice growing cold. “If you think you’re going to keep it for your own personal gain—”

“I don’t care anything for personal gain. I just want my daughter, damn it.”

Mladenovic took a step forward, his hand still out. “And I told you: we can help you find her.”

The men in armor took a few steps forward too.

“Captain?” Beck whispered, lifting one of his arms, readying the embedded weapons.

“Can you help me, Major?” Alisa asked. “I don’t think you know anything more about her kidnappers than I do.”

“Not now perhaps, but I have the resources of a battalion of intelligence officers at my disposal. I can help. Once you give me the artifact.”

“I fought for the Alliance for four years, nearly died more than once. One would think the army would offer to help me with this situation whether I give them anything or not.”

Mladenovic’s jaw tightened. “Enough of this.” He lifted a hand toward his men. “Take it.”

Beck stepped in front of Alisa, the energy weapons on both of his forearms popping up from their ports. “Don’t even think of touching her.”

One of the men fired at Beck as Major Mladenovic tried to lunge around him, reaching for her. Alisa leaped back, her shoulder blades brushing the shipping container behind her, and pulled out her Etcher. She glimpsed Mica ducking behind her post and throwing something to the ground behind the major and in front of his armored men.

As Mladenovic lunged for Alisa, smoke spewed forth from Mica’s weapon. Alisa pointed her Etcher at the major, but he threw something as he lunged to the side. She fired, but was distracted by the object he’d thrown, and her shot went wide. Black threads snapped out, and something akin to a giant spider’s web smacked into the front of her body, the strands sticking to her skin and her clothing. An ugly version of a fluidwrap.

She jerked her arm toward Mladenovic as he approached from the side, fighting against the restrictive embrace of the web to aim her Etcher at him. An instant before she fired, he kicked out, his boot striking the bottom of her hand. She kept her grip on her gun, but pain exploded where he’d struck her, and the sticky strands stuck to the barrel. She could not aim her weapon except by turning her entire body around. She got off another shot, but it again flew wide.

The major sprang at her, crashing into her and taking her to the ground. Alisa was aware of Mica shooting from behind her post and of Beck now grappling with one of the armored men. The second one was running toward Mica, her bullets bouncing uselessly off the chest plate.

Alisa yelled, enraged that she had allowed herself to be taken down, that she couldn’t help. Mica had no way to defend against an armored man. Not only was Alisa helpless to do anything, but worse, the major had her pinned. He pulled out a dagger with a serrated blade, and fear surged through her. Would he truly stab her in the chest?

No, he sawed at the strands wrapped around her—around the shopping bag. He meant to cut it out and run off with it.

Growling, Alisa bucked, trying to knock him off her.

“Stay still, you dumb bitch,” he growled, grabbing her neck with one hand while he kept cutting with the other. “You should have just given it to me, you imperial traitor.”

“Traitor?” she roared, too furious with her stupidity in getting herself into this to be afraid of the fingers clasped around her throat. “I risked my life to take this. For the Alliance. I’ve always been loyal to the Alliance. I just want my daughter back.”

Mladenovic kept cutting, his face utterly impassive at her plight.

A gust of wind came down from above, some ship flying overhead. Alisa did not pay it any attention—she was too busy trying to figure out how to get out of her predicament—until it swooped lower, right over their row of shipping containers. A hatch in the back opened, and people starting firing.

“Alcyone’s wrath,” the major cursed, looking away from her and toward the sky.

She finally managed to land a useful blow, driving her knee upward and into his groin. He yowled and rolled away, grabbing his crotch.

Bullets and blazer bolts slammed into the ground all around them, stealing Alisa’s momentary feeling of satisfaction. She couldn’t get up—the cursed strands were sticking her arms to her torso—so she rolled toward the sturdy wall of the shipping container, hoping it would provide some shelter.

Wind caused by the blades of a rotary ship whipped her hair free of its braid —and the netting—so that it lashed her in the eyes. No less than four men in black with masks pulled over their faces leaned out of the hatch, shooting at the people on the ground, her people and Mladenovic’s. The snipers seemed to fire without aiming, not caring who they hit.

Someone cried out. Mladenovic? It was a horrible thought, but Alisa hoped so. Better him than Beck or Mica. Or her.

A white form lunged in from the side, blocking Alisa’s view of the sky. Beck.

He grabbed her and slung her over his shoulder, netting and all. She lost sight of the ship and of everything as her face was mashed against his armored back. He took off at a sprint, racing deeper into the rail yard. He fired backward as he ran, alternating between shooting at Mladenovic’s men and shooting at the ship.

“Mica?” Alisa yelled, not able to see her as she bounced along on Beck’s shoulder.

“She’s ahead of us,” he blurted, still firing. He raced around a corner and then another one. “There she is,” he added, pumping his legs harder.

All Alisa could see was his back and the asphalt blurring past underneath them. A boom sounded, rattling the ground and the stacks of shipping containers.

“What was that?” Alisa asked.

“Grenade launcher.”

One of Mladenovic’s men had been carrying that.

“Were the people on that ship there to get him?” Alisa asked, trying to think even as her brain was rattled by her bumpy ride. Could the imperials have spotted the major skulking about and come after him? If they had, wouldn’t they have come in a military ship and with uniformed men? Those people in black had seemed more like—

“I don’t think so,” Beck said. “That ship was white with a dragon snout painted on the front.” He kept running as he spoke, weaving through the maze of shipping containers. “They aimed at me first, I think. Then probably fired on the major’s soldiers because they fired at them. I’m not complaining, but we need to get inside somewhere. Hide until they go away.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Alisa said.

What else could she say? She couldn’t even demand to be set down, not until she figured a way out of the web. What a mess. She still had the orb, for all the good it had done. She didn’t know any more about her daughter’s whereabouts than she had the night before.

Chapter 12

“You’ve definitely gotten yourself in a mess, Captain,” Beck said as he carefully cut away the horrible black strands that seemed to stick to every inch of Alisa’s body.

“I wish I could say that it was the worst mess I’d experienced in the last twenty-four hours, but I think the sewer wins the contest.”

“Yes,” Mica said, wrinkling her nose.

They stood together in a family lavatory in the space base, the door locked to keep out others—the concourse had grown increasingly busy as the morning progressed. Mica leaned against a diaper-changing table while examining the remaining explosives in her purse. They were certainly a strange “family.”

“This is perhaps more humiliating than the previous mess,” Alisa added. “I hate being helpless. And needing to be saved.” Technically, Leonidas had saved her in the sewers too. This was not her day.

“Aw, I like saving people, Captain. It’s my job.”

“And I do appreciate that you were quick to do it, but that doesn’t make me feel better about myself.”

“Well, Captain—” Beck tugged some of the sticky netting off her back, “—that’s not my job. Maybe you could hire a therapist for the crew.”

“For a crew of three?”

Alisa arched her eyebrows at Mica, realizing that her entire crew of three was spending time in a family lavatory together. If she hadn’t been in a dour mood, she might have laughed. But she didn’t laugh. Seeing her entire tiny team there only made her realize that nobody she truly trusted was on her ship right now, and that men who were probably in the mood to shoot her right now might be there instead. She hoped Leonidas and Alejandro had run down the ramp to look for her and had been locked out, as she and Mica had planned. She also hoped that, after they had realized they had been locked out, they had taken off looking for her, ideally in the wrong direction.

Mica waved toward the sink. “You may need to stick your head in water to get that goop out of your hair.”

“No opinion on the therapist, eh?” Alisa asked.

As Beck continued to cut the threads away, Alisa grabbed some of the sanitizing gel in the dispenser and rubbed it into her hair, hoping it would break the bonding agent.

“I’m sure Yumi can give you something if you want to improve your state of mind,” Mica said.

Alisa smiled bleakly. She had never experimented with drugs, unless one counted the occasional secondhand dosage acquired from walking through the rec room in the dorm at school, but the idea of using something to numb her aching brain—and ego—right now did have some appeal.

Her eyes ached, too, tired and gritty from lack of sleep. While it might have been wiser to wait a few hours—or a few days—before returning to the ship, she wanted to curl up in her bunk and pass out. She also had the notion that if Alejandro and Leonidas were still aboard, they might react less harshly if she returned the orb of her own free will.

Just took it out to get some fresh air, boys. You’re welcome…

“Think that’s as good as I can get with my knife, Captain,” Beck said, stepping back and eyeing her from head to toe. “Might need a woman’s touch to deal with the rest.” He looked at Mica.

Mica raised a frank eyebrow. “I have paint thinner and a welding torch in engineering.”

Alisa held up her hand. “I can manage the rest on my own. At least I can walk now.”

“Might need to run if your cyborg buddy is waiting at the ship for you,” Mica said.

Alisa picked up her bag and slung it over her shoulder, still hoping that Leonidas and Alejandro would be gone when she returned. But maybe it would be better if they weren’t gone. Then they would take back the orb, and that would be the end of her criminal career. If they were not there, she might be tempted to enact that plan she had envisioned, of finding the Starseers and trying to trade the orb for her daughter.

They left the indoor facilities, Alisa’s stomach rumbling as they passed a robot vendor selling freshly baked cinnamon stars, frosting dribbling from their points. Reluctantly, she reminded herself that she had cereal in the ship. Too bad money was in short supply. The pastries smelled fabulous.

She did veer off the path briefly when she spotted an ambulatory vending machine selling chocolate bars. They weren’t the high-quality bars that she preferred, but her stash was low, and if she had to take off soon, she might not get a chance to resupply. There was no way she would risk going into deep space without chocolate.

The vending machine stopped as soon as it detected her interest, swiveling on its wheels to turn its wares toward her. She waved her chip card at its sensor before remembering that her bank account seemed to have disappeared.

“Funds inaccessible,” the vendor announced brightly. “Physical cash or barter?”

Surprised it accepted physical coin, Alisa dug into her pocket, glad she had made Yumi and Alejandro pay her that way. A twinge of guilt ran through her as she wrapped her hand around a couple of the coins, realizing that Alejandro surely hadn’t expected her to steal his belongings when he’d paid her for passage.

“Barter?” Mica asked.

“The team at Vendomatic Satisfaction is collecting raw materials and valuable items for the rebuilding of Perun. If you have such items, please place them on my tray for consideration. I am programmed to analyze them and offer a fair trade.”

Mica plucked off some of the sticky strands still wrapped around Alisa’s sleeves and back.

“I’m sure that’s not what it has in mind for raw materials,” Alisa said as Mica wadded them up and wiped them on the tray.

“I’m out of metals and plastics.”

The vending machine sucked in its tray and hummed to itself. A scraping came from within it, and Alisa imagined the machine trying to figure out a way to dispose of the sticky strands.

“0.57 morats in credit,” it announced, and lights flashed inside its case, signifying the items she could purchase.

“Huh,” Alisa said.

“If you let me work on your legs, you might be able to get a bottle of FizzBurst too.”

Alisa tapped the display in front of the chocolate she had been eyeing. “No, thanks. That stuff tastes like lemon-flavored takka, and I’d never get to sleep.”

“Do you really want to sleep when an irate cyborg is after you?”

Alisa sighed, accepting the chocolate and heading for the door. She wished she could deny that anyone might be after her, but the bag weighed heavily against her hip as she stepped outside.

The sea air smelled of rain, and storm clouds lurked over the harbor. That did not keep people from busily streaming along the concourses, on their way to and from ships. Alisa watched the passersby for familiar faces. Beck, walking behind her and Mica, was doing the same thing, though he was surely watching for White Dragon representatives instead of Leonidas and Alejandro.

“Any idea how you can buy them off, Beck?” Alisa asked.

“Who? The mafia?”

“Yes. Surely, they have some price that they would consider acceptable.”

“My life,” he said glumly. “That’s the price they have in mind.”

“It must be costing them a lot of resources to keep sending people after you. Maybe you could bargain with them.”

“I doubt they’ll accept a wad of sticky webbing. As I told you before, if I could turn in a certain cyborg for an extremely handsome reward, I might have enough to pay them off.”

Alisa grimaced, wishing she hadn’t brought the subject up again. It just seemed that they ought to be able to come up with a way to get Beck out of his trouble. A way that did not involve betraying anyone else.

“He’s too dangerous,” Alisa said. “Got any other ideas?”

“If I could make it big with my sauce line, maybe I could eventually make enough money, but that’ll take years, especially since I’m not able to actively work on it now. I don’t have anything else of value.”

Beck glanced toward Alisa’s bag, but did not suggest that she give him the orb to trade. She was not surprised the idea crossed his mind. Who wouldn’t be tempted by a little theft in order to get out of trouble?

“You’re welcome to work on your project in your spare time on the ship,” Alisa said as they stepped onto the moving walkway that would take them to the Star Nomad’s berth.

“Making sauces?”

“The mess kitchen is a good size.”

“The appliances don’t work, the utensils are rusty, and there were cockroaches nesting in the stock pot when I first came aboard.”

“My kitchen has a stock pot? Huh.”

Beck gave her a sour look.

“At least the price is right. You would have to pay to rent a commercial kitchen.”

“I suppose. When are we leaving? Maybe I could take my wages and order some ingredients for the next stage of our trip.”

“Leaving might be difficult,” Mica said, pointing toward Dock 87, where the Nomad rested at the end of a concrete pier.

The ramp was down, with the hatch open and Yumi standing at the top of it. Leonidas stood at the bottom wearing his crimson combat armor, all save the helmet, which rested under his arm. That meant Alisa had no trouble seeing the fearsome expression on his face as his gaze locked onto her. It was much different from the calm face he’d had in sickbay, looking almost innocuous as Alejandro tended his wounds. Now he looked like… an enemy.

Alisa did her best not to squirm as the moving sidewalk took her closer. His hard gaze never left her face. His mouth moved as he spoke, probably to his earstar rather than to Yumi, who was tinkering on her netdisc. Three suns, she wasn’t holding the door open for him, was she? To ensure he wasn’t locked out? Maybe he had figured out the problem and had forced her to do so, though she appeared calm as she poked at a holodisplay, not under any duress.

“It’s not too late to turn around and run the other way, Captain,” Beck observed, apparently also the recipient of Leonidas’s flinty gaze.

Alisa sighed. “Yes, it is.”

She had seen Leonidas run. He could catch them easily.

As Alisa stepped off the sidewalk and headed down the pier toward their ramp, she glimpsed Alejandro running toward them from farther up the concourse, pushing past people as he raced the wrong way on the moving sidewalk. His expression was more panicked than flinty, and she shrank within herself, feeling guiltier than ever for taking his artifact. Even if it wasn’t his and had only been lent to him on behalf of the empire. She imagined how she would have felt if something of such value had been taken from her. Hells, she felt that way now, about Jelena.

She reached Leonidas first, who, thankfully, was not pointing any weapons at her. Not that he needed a weapon to strangle someone. She removed her shopping bag and offered it to him—Alejandro was still running in their direction, his robe flapping around his ankles.

“Couldn’t get the price you wanted?” Leonidas asked coldly.

“That’s… more accurate than you know. Here, take it.” Alisa tossed the bag to him and took a step toward the ramp, not wanting a lecture from him or from Alejandro.

Leonidas caught the bag, but he also caught her arm, his steel grip keeping her from escaping into the ship.

“If you make a habit of stealing from your passengers—”

“I don’t.” She tugged at her arm, though she well knew that she wouldn’t get it back unless he let go.

Beck stepped forward, though hesitantly. He did not want to tangle with Leonidas, and she could not blame him.

“Don’t let her go,” Alejandro blurted, racing down the pier toward the ramp. “We’ll turn her in to the army headquarters here in town. They can question her, find out what she’s told the Alliance.”

Alisa spun toward him, as much as she could with Leonidas holding her arm. “Look, I brought it back. I haven’t told anyone anything. You’re passengers on my ship, my guests. You don’t get to turn me in to anyone.”

Beck intercepted Alejandro before he could run up the ramp, catching him by the arm.

“You brought it back,” Leonidas snarled. “That makes it acceptable that you snuck into the doctor’s cabin and stole it out from under him while he slept?”

“I didn’t have a choice, all right?” She yanked at her arm again, hating the disappointed look that he turned on her. “Get off me, mech.”

It was the wrong time to use that derisive term, and she knew it as soon as his blue eyes clouded over, as stormy as the sky above the harbor. She didn’t care. Panic swelled in her breast as she imagined them carting her off to some imperial interrogation headquarters.

“Yes, I’m sure someone made you steal it,” Alejandro said. “While aboard your own ship, a ship you could simply fly away in at any point. We can play the cameras, but I highly doubt armed men stomped onto the craft and held guns to your head and told you to take it.” He tried to yank his arm away from Beck, but with his combat armor, Beck was just as immovable as Leonidas.

“Mladenovic said he knew where my daughter is, damn it,” Alisa growled. “I don’t have any other leads. I had to do it, all right? But he lied. Just like everyone on this damned planet lies. He’s probably been brainwashed into being an asshole by too much time down here in the empire.” She scowled fiercely at Leonidas and Alejandro, the scowl of the righteous. The scowl of the wronged. Or the wrong. She was being defensive because they had a case, and she knew it, but she didn’t care. She just wanted to get out of this hole and find her daughter. “Beck, let him go. You two don’t like how things work on my ship, then get off. Maybe you shouldn’t have lingered here so long. It’s not a suns-damned hotel.”

To her surprise, this time when she tried to yank her arm away, Leonidas let her go. She almost fell on her ass. She flailed her arms and kept from toppling, then spun and stalked up the ramp. Yumi was watching it all, her mouth open, her eyes wide.

“The empire has your daughter?” Leonidas asked, his tone masked now, hard to read. “Why?”

Alisa almost chose not to answer, having the urge to keep walking, to hide in the cargo hold and shut the hatch before Alejandro could make another attempt to have Leonidas cart her off to the imperials. Yet, in her frustration, she answered before she could debate the wisdom of doing so. And maybe a part of her hoped they would understand why she had done it if they knew, that they wouldn’t continue to think of her as a lowlife thief.

“Not the empire. The Starseers. I saw the video myself. They took her right out from under my sister-in-law’s nose. And I have no idea where to even start looking. It was months ago. Mladenovic said… Oh, it doesn’t matter. It’s all lies.” Her frustration was threatening to bubble over into tears. This time, she did stalk inside, turning her back on all of them and fleeing to her cabin.

Nobody stopped her. She locked the hatch and dropped onto her bunk, yanking the blankets over her head.

Chapter 13

It was hunger rather than a desire to see anyone that eventually drove Alisa to contemplate leaving her cabin. She had slept some, having nightmares of Jelena in a dark, cobweb-filled monastery being indoctrinated by the Starseers and turned into a monster who did not recognize her own mother. She’d woken from those horrible dreams, eaten the chocolate bar, then lay on her bed awake, her knees curled to her chin as time ticked past, barely noticed.

Twice, someone had knocked at her hatch, but she had ignored it. With so many dangerous enemies looking for the people aboard her ship, she ought to be making plans to leave, but she had not felt like being that mature. She also wasn’t sure that Alejandro was not out there, plotting a way to drag her away and turn her over to his imperial thug allies.

Her stomach growled, longing for real food, the chocolate forgotten. The smell of something cooking drifted through the vents, making her notice her hunger even more.

Alisa rolled out of bed and headed for the lav. In the future, she would keep food and water stashed in her cabin for the days when she wanted to lock herself in and sulk like a toddler. She washed up, putting on her last change of clothing and hoping that the laundry machine could get the rest of that sticky stuff off the things she wadded up and stuck in the chute.

When she ventured farther afield, she did so quietly, hoping she would find that Leonidas and Alejandro had packed up their belongings and left. She did not want to deal with either of them, did not want to see that disappointed expression in Leonidas’s eyes again. Better if she never saw either of them again. All they had brought was trouble. If they both left, then all she would have to deal with was Beck and his mafia issues. Even though the White Dragon people had tried to shoot them all just that morning, it seemed a simple problem in comparison to the artifact and the empire and all that Alejandro wanted to do.

The tantalizing smell of freshly grilled meat and vegetables led her to the mess hall. Voices came from the room, and she was tempted to turn around, to wait a couple of hours more and hope for leftovers. But the food smelled too good to resist.

Beck had his portable barbecue unit out, some kind of seasoned burgers cooking over the flames. A few were finished cooking and rested on a plate in the center of the table where Yumi and Mica sat. Leonidas was also there, leaning against the wall, no longer in his combat armor but no less intimidating in plain clothes. Alisa groaned to herself. If he was still here, Alejandro was probably still here too. What did she have to do to get rid of these people?

Avoiding his gaze, she ducked past him to grab a bun and a burger. She avoided Mica’s and Yumi’s gazes, too, beelining for the rec room. The wide hatch usually stayed open, but she unhooked the chain and closed it behind her.

She sat down at the table, ignoring the flashing lights on the surface that invited her to play one of the games programmed into it, and made it halfway through her meal before someone knocked. She closed her eyes, tempted to ignore it, to stay quiet and pretend she wasn’t in there. But she had walked past three people, and it was not as if there was a back door she might have escaped through.

The knock came again, not hard and demanding but a soft rap, such as one might make with a couple of knuckles.

Hoping it was just Mica—she did not want to talk to Alejandro—Alisa called, “It’s not locked.”

She could not bring herself to offer more of an invitation. She did not want company. She knew she had done a dishonorable thing, and she did not need anyone pointing it out. If she had gotten her daughter’s location, or at least some concrete information on who had her, it might have been worth it. But she hadn’t.

The hatch opened. She focused on her burger, taking another chomp. Battered morals or not, she hadn’t eaten much in the last twenty-four hours, and her stomach would not stand for being ignored. Even so, she almost lost her appetite when she saw who loomed in the hatchway. It wasn’t Mica.

“Figured you’d be gone by now,” Alisa said, staring straight ahead at the table.

Leonidas looked at her, then looked over his shoulder—Yumi’s and Beck’s voices floated in, along with the scent of a fresh round of charbroiled meat. Lamb, Alisa had decided as she had been eating, heavily spiced with orakesh. It was a favorite dish from the southern continent here, though Beck had added an interesting twist, a hint of orange and pepper.

Leonidas stepped inside and closed the hatch.

Alisa licked her lips for reasons that had nothing to do with the spices. She remembered Alejandro’s statement that she should be interrogated. He had suggested dragging her off to some imperial facility for it, but maybe he had decided to settle on having his local cyborg do it. The day before, Leonidas might have objected to the idea of assassinating her, but that had been before she had stolen the doctor’s orb.

She kept her gaze forward, pretending indifference to this enforced privacy, but she watched him out of the corner of her eye. She picked up the burger for another bite, not wanting him to think she was worried.

“Yumi gave us some interesting information after you went to your cabin,” he said. His voice was level, not threatening. He walked to the opposite side of the table and sat across from her. If he was still angry, he was hiding it.

“Oh?”

“She says she knows the location of one of the main Starseer temples.”

Alisa froze, her burger held in the air before her, juices running down her wrists. Was it possible? That Yumi of all people might be a resource in this? “I wouldn’t have guessed that she knew the location of more than the closest colony of jashash growers.”

It was a snide thing to say, and Alisa was glad the hatch was closed. Yumi had proven she had knowledge about more than her quirky hobbies.

“I wouldn’t have guessed, either,” Leonidas said, “but she claims one of the largest temples is on Arkadius.”

“On Arkadius? The Alliance seat of power and one of the oldest and most populated planets in the system? I think someone would have noticed during the Order Wars if there was a Starseer base there.”

“The Starseers are good at not being found.”

“Tell me about it.” Alisa set her burger down with more force than required, and crumbs tumbled off the plate and onto the table. She had not even started looking for her daughter yet, and she was already frustrated with the Starseers.

“I’ve spoken to Alejandro, and he believes the Starseers may have the answers he seeks since the artifact is of Starseer origin. Getting those people to give him the answers without taking the orb from him will be a challenge, but he thinks it’s worth the risk. He could spend the next five years researching in libraries, assuming he can get close to any more libraries without being captured by soldiers, and not find what he’s looking for.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Alisa finally met his eyes, more than a little worried about the sharing of information that they had heretofore been secretive about. Maybe they had plans to kill her, after all, and figured it didn’t matter what she knew now.

“It’s not obvious? We need a ride.”

“A ride?” she mouthed. How could they possibly want to continue on with her now? Surely, there were other ships heading that way, and if not, it seemed that Alejandro had money enough to bribe someone to change course for him. “Alejandro wants to continue to be my passenger?”

“No, but he’s realized, or he did after I pointed it out to him, that the reason we were likely allowed down to the planet in the first place was not because of some special stature he has among the remaining imperials. Someone knew he had the orb and wanted a chance to get it.”

Someone. Senator Bondarenko?

“I didn’t figure it was the doctor’s winning personality or ability to quote scripture that got him invited down,” she said. “But why fly with me? There are other ships.”

“We’re here already. And Yumi’s here. She’s the one with the map to the temple in her head. Oddly, she wishes to stay aboard while she looks for employment.”

Alisa snorted. “Did you try to bribe her to get her to leave with you?”

“Alejandro may have.”

She snorted again. Alisa could not imagine why Yumi cared one way or another who she rode with, other than that her chickens were settled in here, but she found herself smugly pleased that Yumi had turned down Alejandro’s bribe.

“There’s also an implication that she can get us an invitation in to see the Starseers,” Leonidas said. “Since their usual modus operandi is to diddle with the minds of the people who try to find them, causing them to become lost, that could be useful.”

“You believe she has this knowledge and these connections? When you don’t know anything about her?”

“We have no reason not to trust her.” His tone chilled a few degrees. “It’s not as if she’s tried to steal from us.”

“Not us, him,” Alisa growled. “I haven’t taken anything from you.”

“I have nothing of value. Unless you count what’s under my skin, and those implants wouldn’t be worth much these days. Old tech, you understand.”

“You act like I’d slice you open to make two tindarks.” For some reason, his disdain affected her more than it should have, and she found her throat tightening with emotion, a mix of frustration and something else she couldn’t identify. “Look, I’m not a thief. I’m just—”

She swallowed and looked away, unable to get more words out. It would have been an excuse, anyway. Wasn’t she a thief now? It did not matter that she’d brought the orb back. She wouldn’t have if the original plan had worked out.

“Never mind,” she said when she found her voice again. “Fine, whatever. You want a ride, it’s another two hundred tindarks each. I need to pay Beck and get supplies for the voyage.”

“Don’t forget to save for a down payment on your combat armor.”

She smiled bitterly, remembering how he had said that with her mouth, she would need a set. He probably believed that now more than ever. Tears threatened to form in her eyes, and she looked away, waving him toward the hatch, hoping he would accept that the conversation was over and leave. She let out a breath of relief when he stood and headed toward the mess room.

Still looking toward the far wall, she lifted her hand and wiped her eyes. She didn’t want anyone to see her cry, not when she had no one to blame but herself for her current mess. If she hadn’t joined the Alliance four years ago—

“You never mentioned you have a daughter,” Leonidas said quietly from the hatch.

He hadn’t opened it yet.

Alisa swallowed, lowering her hand, not wanting him to guess at her tears. “It’s nobody else’s business.”

“How old is she?”

She meant to harshly say, “Why do you care? Go away.” What came out was a sniffle and, “Eight.” She hated bothering other people with her problems, but a part of her wanted him to know so that he might understand, so he would not condemn her for the choice she had made. “It’s been a year and a half since I’ve seen her in person. I was a pilot and made the choice to help the Alliance when they sent out the recruiting papers. I left Jelena and my husband because I thought I was joining a worthy cause, doing something that would make her life better. And his too. He didn’t have the freedom to do the research he wanted, and I know it ate at him, frustrated him. But it was a hard choice—what kind of mother leaves her daughter for four years when she’s that young? At the time, I didn’t know it would be that long, but… I’ve regretted the choice many times since then.” She wiped her hand down her cheeks, smearing away the tears that had escaped, keeping her head turned away from him. She wagered that cyborgs never cried.

“We all make choices we regret,” Leonidas said quietly.

A part of her wanted to stay silent, in the hope that he would go away. A part of her was curious and didn’t want him to go away.

“What do you regret, Leonidas?” she asked.

He hesitated. Not sure he wanted to share with a thief? Her mouth twisted as she looked down at her plate—she was tired of looking at the wall.

“Among other things,” he said, “I have no children.”

“You still have time for that, if you don’t let Alejandro get you killed.”

“Perhaps.” He said it the way someone says something to be agreeable, not because they really mean it.

Odd. It wasn’t as if he was ugly. Alisa was sure there were plenty of women who would drool over his big muscles, and he had a handsome face when he wasn’t glowering.

“She might like you,” Alisa said.

“Who?”

“My daughter. Her favorite cartoon character is Andromeda Android.” Realizing he might take offense to being compared to an android, Alisa hurried to add, “If you haven’t seen the show, Andromeda was created by the empire to do its bidding. She broke free from a mad scientist’s laboratory and now lives in the underworld on Perun, solving crimes and helping the downtrodden. She has a psychic cat named Boo. That’s possibly the reason Jelena liked the show so much, especially when she was four. Hm, you should probably get a cat, Leonidas.”

She glanced at him to check his reaction. His brow was wrinkled as he gave her one of his I-find-your-humor-perplexing looks. Well, at least he did not appear offended.

“Jelena and I used to watch the cartoon together when I was home from my delivery runs. In the middle of the day, while Jonah was at work. It was our time.”

“I see.” He waited, perhaps to see if she would say more, and then tugged on the handle to open the hatch.

“Leonidas?” she asked.

He paused. “Yes?”

“I’m sorry I called you a mech.”

“You’re not the first.”

“No, but…” Alisa groped for a way to say that she had come to think of him as a friend—whether that was wise of her or not, all things considered—but she found that hard to admit. Perhaps because she doubted he would admit it back, not now. Maybe not ever. “I always thought of myself as honorable. But I guess it’s easy to be honorable when your life is normal and your needs are met. It’s when you get desperate that your morality really gets tested, isn’t it?”

“It is,” he agreed.

“Do you have any family, Leonidas?” She wasn’t sure why she kept using his name when there was nobody else in the room. Maybe as an apology for calling him something else earlier, implying he was less than human.

“My parents are gone. I have two younger brothers.”

“I was an only child. I always wanted brothers or sisters. Someone to play with on the ship during the long voyages. I never knew my father, and when my mom didn’t make it back from her last freight run—well, that was hard. I was glad I had Jonah by then. It seems wrong that now, years later, I have less than I had before. Aren’t you supposed to accumulate more things—more friends, more family—as life goes on?”

“Not in my experience.” Was that a hint of regret in his voice? If he truly wanted children, why hadn’t he tried to find someone? Had he been too busy with his career as a military officer?

“Are the brothers at least good company?” Alisa met his gaze, this time for more than a second. Her eyes had dried, and it seemed safe to do so.

He scoffed.

“Surely, they don’t pick on you.” She waved at his brawny arms.

“Neither of them have any interest in talking to their half-machine brother.” He smiled, as if in indifferent dismissal, but it did not look that sincere. “One of them joined the Alliance.”

“That is a crime.”

He glowered at her, though it seemed more of a mock glower this time. It made her smile. She doubted he would forgive her for taking the orb, or trust her going forward, but at least he wasn’t threatening to pull her toenails off to make her talk.

A knock came at the hatch. Leonidas opened it, and Mica poked her head in, eyeing them warily. She leaned back out again.

“They both have their clothes on,” she announced.

Alisa felt her eyebrows fly up. That was what people had been speculating about out there? Not that she was in here being tortured for information?

“Really,” Leonidas said dryly and walked out.

Mica came in and took his vacated spot. “I ordered supplies today while you were hiding—”

“I was sleeping.”

“Where no one could reach you. Our groceries and the parts that were available have been dropped off. I’ll have to make do with some things until we have time to wait for delivery of a special order. That’s all fine, but what I came to tell you is that we may have trouble.”

“How extraordinarily novel for us.”

“Yes.” Mica slid her netdisc onto the table and thumbed the holodisplay to life. “That’s the camera by the hatch.”

Two men were standing at the base of the Star Nomad, poking at the controls next to the hatch. Someone had raised the ramp, so they had no way to get in, but Alisa did not like the looks of them. They wore bland, forgettable khaki and white clothing, but they had the lean faces and short hair of soldiers.

“Are they trying to comm us or get in?” Alisa asked.

“Both. They started out comming. We haven’t answered.”

“That’s antisocial of us.” Alisa grabbed her plate and stood. It looked like it was time to take off.

“Nobody wanted to share the lamb burgers.” Mica followed her into the mess hall.

“Last one out of the mess hall does the dishes,” Beck announced. He was cleaning his grill, but a stack of crumb-filled dishes sat on the table. Yumi and Leonidas had disappeared.

“I have to fly us somewhere,” Alisa said.

“Oh? Where?”

“Apparently, we’re going to visit a Starseer temple on Arkadius.”

“Well, that’s one place where the White Dragon thugs won’t likely find me.”

“I don’t think anyone finds you in a Starseer temple,” Mica muttered.

“You have reservations about going?” Alisa asked, assuming she had heard Yumi sharing her information earlier since she did not sound surprised by the announcement now.

“Many. Want a list?”

“Not really. I need to talk to any Starseers I can find.”

“What’s the point when they’ll just wipe your mind of the conversation later?”

“You sound like you have personal experience.”

Mica hesitated, then shook her head.

“I’m surprised we’re going,” Beck said. “Why would the doc believe Yumi could lead us to a Starseer temple? It’s not as if she’s been waving her hands and doing magic.”

“You didn’t see him take her napkin?” Mica asked.

“Huh?”

“The doctor was sly about it, but he slid it off her lap while she was eating. I wouldn’t be surprised if he went straight to sickbay to analyze her DNA.”

“We don’t have a gene sequencer in sickbay,” Alisa said. “You’re lucky if you can find bandages.”

“Maybe he has one in his cabin. He brought a big duffel aboard.”

“I assumed it was full of gray robes.”

“Either way, he came back a few minutes later and told Leonidas they were going to Arkadius,” Mica said.

Alisa grimaced, more at the idea of Leonidas going along with Alejandro than at the notion that Alejandro might have found Starseer genes in Yumi’s spit. She wanted him on her side, damn it, not on the side of the imperial lackey who kept implying that he wanted to get rid of her. Except when he decided he wanted her to fly him somewhere. Then Alejandro did not seem to mind her presence.

She supposed she would be safe as long as he could keep using her. After that, she would have to watch her back.

Chapter 14

The stars were muted, outshone by the city lights sprawling along the harbor. Alisa did not care. They would be much brighter soon. She’d taken off a few minutes earlier, leaving those two men banging at the hatch and ignoring a couple of comm messages flashing on the console. Maybe she would answer them once the Nomad had broken atmo and the chance of the authorities catching up to them dwindled. Maybe she wouldn’t.

She was relieved at the idea of escaping some of her problems by shooting off into space, but she did worry that Jelena was with Starseers here on Perun and that she would be taking an extra journey for no reason if she headed to Arkadius. Instead of rocketing straight up into the atmosphere, she cruised over the ocean, waiting for the person she wanted to question to join her before committing to this new route. Unless her passengers had their noses pressed to the portholes, they should not notice that she was flying mostly laterally for now.

Alisa tapped the internal comm. “How are things looking in engineering, Mica? We got enough gas to make it to Arkadius?”

“Gas? This is an RG-classic mobile fission reactor. It uses—”

A soft knock came at the open hatch to navigation, and Alisa cut the lesson short with a question of, “Well, we got enough of it?” She waved for her visitor to enter.

“We have enough, but don’t plan any side trips.”

“Who, me?” Alisa murmured, thinking of the research-lab-pirate-ship fiasco.

Yumi walked into NavCom and sat cross-legged in the co-pilot’s seat, arranging her dress over her knees and tucking her boots underneath her. “You wanted to see me, Captain?”

“Just wanted to have a chat with my unofficial science advisor.”

Yumi gave her a wary look.

“Who it now seems may potentially be an advisor on Starseers as well as chemistry and the metaphysical,” Alisa added.

“I know a few things,” Yumi said, that wariness creeping into her tone too. It was strange to hear from the bubbly and open woman. So far, she had been willing to talk about any topic.

“You heard me mention that four men in Starseer robes and with some interesting mental powers kidnapped my daughter from my sister-in-law.”

“You didn’t get into specifics when you were hollering at Leonidas, but yes.”

“I wasn’t hollering. I was arguing defensively.”

“Of course.”

“Can you think of any reason why the Starseers would take an eight-year-old girl?”

“Only if they wanted to train her as one of their own.” Yumi looked curiously at Alisa, scrutinizing her as if she could see through her skin and into her DNA to check for gene mutations.

“I don’t have any Starseer blood,” Alisa said. “I’m positive about that.”

“Your husband?”

Alisa hesitated, still not certain she could quite believe Sylvia’s revelations on that matter. How could she have known Jonah for more than ten years and never have stumbled across that secret?

“The main order of Starseers has a government and laws they abide by,” Yumi said when she didn’t answer. “They’re not necessarily the same as imperial laws—or now, Alliance laws—but they aren’t without morality and structure.”

“Are you saying that my daughter shouldn’t have been kidnapped?”

“I’m saying that those may have been rogue operatives. Or they may have had permission to come get her.”

Alisa frowned. Permission? Surely, Jonah would not have given that. They had both signed legal documents before she shipped out to join the army. At the time, they had been more worried about assigning custody if she didn’t come back alive, but he’d also given her full custody of everything they had if something happened to him, and they had named Sylvia as Jelena’s guardian, should something happen to both of them. She was damned sure there hadn’t been anything in those documents about Starseers being given permission to tote their daughter away.

“I understand you told Alejandro that a Starseer temple on Arkadius would be the place to look for information, both for him and for me,” Alisa said.

“It’s where the seat of their government is, and there’s also a teaching academy there for youths.”

Alisa chewed on that. Did that mean it was the kind of place where a kidnapped girl would be taken to be trained?

The lights of an island passed below them, its population sprawling all the way up the side of an active volcano. If what Yumi said was true, would Alisa be safe in plotting a course to Arkadius now?

“There’s no such teaching academy here?” she asked.

“Not that I’m aware of. There are Starseers that live here—you can find them on any planet of sufficient population—but they’re likely spies watching over the government. It was the empire, after all, that was instrumental in rendering their world uninhabitable and killing thousands and thousands of them in the Order Wars.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that some of them hold a grudge, even centuries later.” Alisa gave Yumi a sidelong look, wondering where her passenger/science advisor fit into the Starseer community. She had already said more than was common knowledge.

“That is true,” Yumi said softly. “Even those who don’t hold grudges are often aloof with… the non-talented.” She gazed toward the view screen, watching the dark ocean sail past beneath them.

“Would you care to explain how you know so much about them?”

Yumi continued to watch the ocean, not speaking, her hands resting on her knees. If her eyes hadn’t been open, Alisa might have thought she had lapsed into one of her meditation sessions.

“Is it necessary?” Yumi finally asked. “Will you trust my guidance without knowing?”

Alisa snorted. Trust was in short supply around here right now, but she assumed that she was the one most people were questioning. Yumi hadn’t stolen anything from anyone.

“You seem to have given Alejandro enough that he’s convinced that you know what you’re talking about,” Alisa said.

“Is his opinion something that would sway yours?” Yumi smiled slightly, the blue, green, and white glow of the console buttons and displays highlighting her face. “I wouldn’t have guessed that.”

“At the moment, we both seem desperate to gain information that the Starseers may have, so I guess so.”

Alisa studied the controls for a minute, then pulled back on the flight stick. The ocean disappeared from view as they shot toward the starry night sky.

“You can go if you want,” Alisa said, flicking her fingers toward the hatchway. “Thanks for coming up to talk to me.”

Yumi looked toward the corridor, then back toward the view screen, and finally over to Alisa.

“My mother was—is—a Starseer,” she said quietly.

“But you’re not?” Alisa asked, not surprised by the revelation at this point.

“I never manifested the abilities, despite trying very, very hard as a girl. And later too.” Yumi’s expression grew wry, and sad as well. “My mother wasn’t around much when I was growing up—Father didn’t have powers, either. It’s not that uncommon for Starseers to have relationships with normal humans, since there are so few of their people left, but the powers often cause rifts and resentment, especially if the woman is more powerful than the man.”

“So your mother left when you were young?”

“She came around a lot until I was about ten. The records tell us that’s the latest age any children have come into their power. If they don’t display any abilities by then, it’s unlikely that they ever will. Some people have a bit of prescience and the like, but no telekinesis or mind manipulation abilities.”

Mind manipulation. Alisa shuddered, remembering the way those men had caused Sylvia to freeze in the hallway, to let Jelena be taken in front of her eyes.

“I thought my mother was a very glamorous and amazing person,” Yumi said, “so I tried very hard to develop those powers, hoping she would come back permanently, or that she would take me away to train me. My father was a good man, mind you, a scientist who taught me to love biology, chemistry, and the other branches, but I thought it would be incredible to join her and visit her world.”

“Have you ever been? To the temple you’re directing us to?”

“No. What I know is from the stories she told.”

Stories that would be at least twenty years out of date now, Alisa judged with a sinking feeling coming to her stomach.

As if guessing her thoughts, Yumi added, “My understanding is that the temples have been where they are for hundreds of years, so it’s not likely much has changed.”

“Ah,” Alisa said neutrally.

Yumi unfolded her legs and stood up. “Once you’ve allowed the computer pilot to take over, you should join me for some meditation. It could help you with your anxiety.”

“So would shooting the people who took Jelena.”

“Meditation is more easily achievable.”

“I don’t know about that.” Alisa remembered trying a guided meditation exercise after a class once. She had not been able to keep her mind from racing all over the place when she’d been supposedly focusing on her breath and stilling her thoughts. She glanced back as Yumi started toward the hatch. “Say, is that why you got into the mind stuff? To try and find some powers?”

Yumi turned back, that sad smile on her face again. “Yes. The meditation, the psychedelics. I thought that perhaps if I could alter my way of thinking, the power that lay untapped within my genes might be released.”

“Has it ever?”

“A few times I’ve thought…” Yumi shrugged. “Not in any significant way, no.”

“Maybe you should try fondling Alejandro’s orb. It oozes power when it’s not in its box.”

“I gather that he doesn’t want anyone touching that artifact. And I know—I can feel its power even when it’s in its box.” Yumi tilted her head. “Can’t you?”

Alisa remembered the way she’d felt it in his cabin, but only after closing her eyes and thinking about it, almost having to be in a meditative state herself. “A little bit. But it’s really noticeable when the lid on the box is open.”

“I should like to see it sometime.”

“Do you have any idea what it is?”

Yumi hesitated. “I have ideas. Nothing solid.”

Alisa opened her mouth, intending to ask Yumi to share if her ideas became more solid, but the proximity alarm went off, and she cursed, spinning back to the controls.

An imperial ship loomed up ahead of them in a high orbit. It looked like one of the ones she had played cat and mouse around on the way into Perun. She hoped its crew wasn’t holding a grudge.

She changed her course to take them past it at an angle. A casual angle. She didn’t want to screech off in another direction and draw attention, but she knew they would have grab beams, more powerful ones than that Fang had possessed. If the captain had heard about the orb and was also on the hunt, he could easily catch them.

Intent on the view screen and the sensors, Alisa barely noticed when Yumi slipped out. She sat tensely, sending glances at the comm, expecting to be hailed any moment. The sensors showed another imperial ship in orbit farther away. She wasn’t sure how many they kept up here, protecting the planet, but in a fight—or more accurately, a flight—the Star Nomad wouldn’t be a match for even one of them.

The closest ship continued along its path, not detouring as Alisa piloted her freighter past them. Only when it switched from being in her side cameras to her rear cameras did she let out the breath she hadn’t realized she had been holding. Either one hand wasn’t talking to the other in their fleet, or it was the night shift up there, and whoever was on the bridge had not gotten the message that clunky old freighters were trouble and should be detained.

As the blackness of space stretched ahead and the imperial ship grew smaller in her rear camera, Alisa allowed herself to slump back in her chair. They had made it off planet with less trouble than she had expected. Maybe her luck would hold, and they would make it to Arkadius without trouble too. They had to fly across the system first, since Arkadius orbited Opus instead of Novus Solis, but thanks to Mica, they had supplies. Maybe she would be able to relax and catch up on some sleep. Beck could stop wearing his armor around and take her up on the offer of turning the mess into a commercial kitchen for his sauce making. So far, everything he had created had been good, so she wouldn’t mind tasting the results of his experiments.

The proximity alarm beeped again, and Alisa sat upright.

“I knew it,” she grumbled. “I knew it couldn’t be that easy.”

She expected to find that one of the imperial ships had turned to pursue them, but the sensors detected another vessel up ahead, coming out of the shadow of Draco, Perun’s green moon. It was a big ship, larger than the imperial cruisers and even the dreadnought, and she thought of the mining craft that the pirates had taken over.

Alisa altered her course. On the unlikely chance that it was simply flying to Perun, she would give it a wide berth.

Her shoulders sagged when it altered its course. To cut her off.

She changed course again. Some of her sense of defeat vanished when it grew close enough for the sensors to identify. It wasn’t a mining ship; it was a big salvage tug. It would have the speed of a Perunese legless toad.

The comm flashed. Alisa highly doubted she wanted to talk to anyone hailing her, but she was bolstered by the knowledge that she should be able to outrun that vessel.

She answered it with a terse, “Captain Marchenko, commanding the Star Nomad.”

“Good evening, Captain,” a female voice replied. “This is Commander Bennington of the Alliance salvage tug Laertes.”

Alliance? Alisa wanted to feel relief, but after her dealings with Major Mladenovic, she wasn’t sure she could trust her own people, not with this orb nonsense.

“Nice to see you, Commander,” Alisa said, keeping her tone cordial in case these people might have good, or at least neutral, intentions. “Is there a reason you’re heading in my direction? We’re not in need of a tow, though I can see why you might think that, given the Nomad’s slightly advanced age.”

A chuckle came over the comm. “She does look like she could have brought the first colonists over from Earth.”

Alisa’s tone lost some of its cordialness when she said, “She’s not that old.”

“We’re not coming to tow you. Simply to be in position if you accept my offer to trade.”

“What kind of trade?” Alisa doubted she would like the answer, but found it slightly promising that the captain was offering to barter rather than simply demanding to take the orb. Bennington probably knew she couldn’t catch the Nomad, old ship or not.

“I’ve been informed by an operative on Perun that you have something the Alliance has been looking for.”

Yeah, she had something everyone had been looking for.

“Since you’re a former Alliance officer yourself,” Bennington went on, “I’m hoping you’ll be amenable to a fair trade. I have been authorized to barter. I can’t give you the entire price, of course, since I’ll be taking on the security risk of taking it back to Arkadius myself, but what would you say to a hundred thousand tindarks? In exchange for us relieving you of your burden?”

Alisa felt her mouth gape open. A hundred thousand tindarks for the orb?

With that much money, she could buy information on her daughter’s whereabouts. Well, maybe not. Would the Starseers care about money? With their mental powers, they could simply arrange to win at the casinos on Primus 7 if they needed coin. Besides, while money might make her life a little easier, it wasn’t exactly her heart’s desire. She wanted her daughter, and she wanted to keep the empire from rising again. If she gave up the orb to the Alliance, it would be to help with the latter. Still, she almost hated to lose the thing, having the notion that she might somehow barter it to the Starseers if necessary. And then there was the complication that she didn’t truly have it. It was back in Alejandro’s quarters, and she couldn’t turn it and Alejandro over without making an enemy of Leonidas. As it was, she was surprised Leonidas was still talking to her. She would hate to lose that forever.

“Can you be more specific on which burden you want?” Alisa asked, realizing she hadn’t responded and that Bennington might find that suspicious. “I’m not trying to be funny here, but I have several burdens right now.”

The tug was still angling toward the Nomad, moving to overtake it—or come up beside it for an airlock transfer perhaps. Alisa could have shot straight out into space and left the Alliance craft behind, but she did not alter her course again, not yet. She was within the tug’s firing range—salvage ship or not, it had likely been used during the war and would be outfitted with weapons—and she did not want to take a butt full of buckshot if she could help it. Besides, she was curious about the commander’s offer.

“Your life sounds complicated,” Bennington said, her tone still friendly. “Why don’t you let us simplify it?”

“How?”

Alisa was debating on mentioning that Alejandro had the orb and wouldn’t let her simply walk it to the airlock when Bennington responded with the unexpected.

“Let us come alongside you, attach to your airlock, and bring some men over. We have an aerosol sedative that will knock out your passenger. I assume you have him chained or otherwise restrained somewhere?”

Alisa snorted. She wouldn’t mind chaining up Alejandro, but that hardly seemed necessary. It wasn’t as if he was a fighter. She could probably just lock him in his cabin. The real threat was Leonidas.

Thinking his name sent a jolt through her, and she felt like a dunce as she realized what “burden” the commander wanted to relieve her of.

“You’re looking for Leonidas?” she blurted before she could stop herself. That tone of surprise would tell Bennington too much, that she had something else of value on board.

“I assume you know that’s a pseudonym, Captain,” Bennington said, some of the friendliness disappearing from her voice, “and that you’re harboring Imperial Cyborg Corps Commander, Colonel Hieronymus Adler aboard your ship.”

“No. I mean, yes. I mean, he paid his fare.” Alisa rubbed her face. Could she possibly sound more daft? This was throwing her off balance; she had been so certain they wanted the orb. “And he neglected to give me his real name.”

Alisa didn’t hear a noise behind her; it was more a sense of being watched that made her turn in her chair.

Leonidas stood in the hatchway, his arms folded over his chest as he leaned against the jamb. His face was impassive as he listened.

“I’m not surprised,” Bennington said, “though I am a little surprised that you took a cyborg on as a passenger, knowing fully well that they serve the empire.”

“Well, he didn’t advertise what he was,” Alisa said, glancing at Leonidas’s jacket with the Cyborg Corps patch on the front. It was the same jacket he had been wearing the day they met, the day he leaped thirty feet off the top of the Nomad and landed in the dust as if he’d hopped down from a curb.

Leonidas raised a single eyebrow.

“Captain, I hope you’re not implying that he’s walking around your ship of his own free will. Cyborgs are extremely dangerous, and he’s one of the most dangerous. The war crimes he’s committed…”

Alisa hardly felt in the position to judge anyone for war crimes. Especially Leonidas. Since she had known him, he’d acted much more honorably than she had. Admittedly, she hadn’t known him long, and she had no idea what caused those nightmares he seemed to have on a regular basis.

“You’re right that he’s dangerous, Commander,” Alisa said, now wishing she had been smoother and faster to think when the officer had first revealed what she wanted—things might have been easier if she’d just said that Leonidas had gotten off on Perun. “And I’m afraid I can’t accept your offer. Especially since I know the bounty on his head is two hundred thousand tindarks.”

Leonidas’s other eyebrow rose. He didn’t seem surprised to hear about the bounty, but was perhaps mildly surprised to hear that Alisa had known about it. Granted, she hadn’t known about it long, and it had slipped her mind during all the chaos on Perun.

Bennington huffed out a breath. “I knew you knew who he was.”

“I’m sorry I can’t accept your offer.” Alisa wasn’t sorry at all. She would hand Alejandro and his orb over if it would help the Alliance and keep the empire from regaining power, but she couldn’t betray Leonidas. Her conscience wouldn’t let her. More than that, she was certain he wouldn’t let her, not when he was standing right there listening to all this. Had he been there since the beginning? She wouldn’t be surprised if he had.

“Is that your final decision, then, Captain?” Bennington asked. “You won’t accept… one hundred and fifty thousand tindarks for him?”

“Not to be impertinent, Commander, but do you even have that kind of money to offer? I know the Alliance isn’t that flush with cash yet, being too busy recovering from the war, and quite honestly, I don’t understand why this cyborg is worth that much.” This time, she was the one to raise an eyebrow, directing the gesture at Leonidas.

He didn’t give her anything in return. He merely gazed at the tug on the view screen, his face a mask.

“I assure you that I am authorized to provide the funds,” was all Bennington said.

Alisa doubted it very much. She adjusted the Nomad’s flight path and increased to maximum speed. It was time to leave that tug back there kissing the moon. “Sorry, Commander, but I want the full two hundred thousand.”

“You greedy little smuggler,” Bennington growled. “You would extort the Alliance? Even after you served in the war?”

“I’m not extorting anyone. You just can’t have him. He’s mine.” Feeling a little silly for not having a better excuse than that, Alisa shut off the comm before the officer could answer. Having Bennington think her greedy and that she wanted the full bounty for herself was better than having her know the truth, that she liked Leonidas and didn’t want to hand him over to her government or anyone else’s. And honestly, it made her feel like more of a traitor than just wanting the money would have. Cyborgs were imperials, and imperials were enemies. She wasn’t supposed to like them.

“So, it turns out that the Alliance is looking for you,” Alisa told Leonidas, as if it would be news to him. She didn’t look back at him to check his reaction. She was watching the tug in the camera as the Nomad sped away.

The big Alliance craft was lumbering right after her. But, as she had guessed, the Nomad was faster. Alisa raised her shields in case the tug tried to fire. She didn’t think they were close enough for the vessel to use a grab beam, but it would have a lot of range and power for towing, so she couldn’t be sure.

“I know,” Leonidas said.

He stepped into navigation and surprised her by laying a hand on her shoulder. She was too busy flying to analyze how the gesture made her feel, but it seemed to be one of thanks, and she appreciated it. He could have easily threatened her during that conversation, but he must have known that he didn’t need to. But had he believed it was because she wouldn’t be foolish enough to try to make a deal for him while he stood there listening, or had he realized that she’d come to care about him and wouldn’t have betrayed him even if he hadn’t been there listening? She wished she could find a way to let him know it was the latter, but she didn’t know how. Even if she tried, would he believe her, after she had stolen from Alejandro?

Leonidas removed his hand and sat in the co-pilot’s seat. She was just thinking that it would be nice to have some company for a while when the proximity alarm went off again.

“Now what?” she groaned. “I do not have enough chocolate on board to deal with all of these hassles.”

The tug was still following them, but it had fallen behind, so that wasn’t the source of the alarm.

“If you had a crate of chocolate, would that be enough?”

She snorted, wondering if he would be willing to bribe her with chocolate if she avoided the Alliance ships that were after him all the way to Arkadius.

Not one but three large blips appeared on the radar. They flew out from behind the moon, as the salvage ship had done earlier. These weren’t slow, bulky vessels, and Alisa groaned again as she recognized them. Alliance warships.

“No,” she whispered. “Not even a crate would be enough.”

Chapter 15

Leonidas saw the warships and immediately headed for the hatchway.

“Any chance you’re going to get me chocolate?” Alisa asked, scanning the space around them, wishing a comet or a rogue band of meteors would stray into range so she would have something to hide behind, someplace to run from those ships. But the green moon was the only body nearby, and the Alliance warships, coming from that direction, would easily intercept her. The featureless sphere held few hiding spots, anyway, and she doubted the domed moon stations would invite her to dock.

“I’m getting my combat armor,” Leonidas said, his voice grim.

“Leonidas.” Alisa turned toward him. “Even if I had weapons, I couldn’t… I can’t get in a fight with Alliance warships.”

It was cheeky of them to all show up this close to Perun and that orbit full of imperial warships, but there they were, nevertheless.

“I’m not asking you to. They want me alive. They’ll have to come get me.” A fiercely defiant expression crossed his face before he ducked out of view, jogging to his cabin.

The comm flashed, and Alisa sighed. Was there any point in answering? It was probably Commander Bennington again, prepared to be smug now that her backup had arrived.

It flashed relentlessly as the warships closed, no question as to their destination. Like the tug, they were on an intercept course with the Star Nomad.

Feeling cranky, Alisa swatted the button. “What?”

“What?” an amused male voice on the other line asked. “Is that really how you answer the comm now that you’re a civilian, Marchenko?”

Alisa gaped at the console. The man’s voice was familiar, as was the way he had said her name, but it took her a few seconds to place it. “Captain Tomich?”

“It’s Commander Tomich now. There were lots of promotions after the war ended and the temporaries mustered out. Look at what I got.”

Alisa linked the comm signal with the ship it had come from, the Viper-class warship in the lead. She was a beauty, newer and bigger than the two trailing it, though any one of those ships could have pulverized the Nomad in seconds.

“Not that you’re smug about it,” Alisa said.

“Not at all,” Tomich said, a familiar grin in his voice. It had been two years since they had served together—he had been her squadron leader when she’d been assigned to the Merciless. He was practically the one who had taught her that snark was expected from military pilots, not that she hadn’t already had a knack for it.

“I can’t believe they gave you a ship that big. You could barely land your cobra without scraping the paint off on the hangar bay doors.”

“This ship has bumpers.”

Alisa snorted.

“So, are you truly a greedy little smuggler these days,” Tomich asked, quoting Bennington, “or are you in an awkward situation?”

“Awkward doesn’t even begin to describe my week,” Alisa replied before she had fully parsed the nuances of the question. She realized he might be asking if she was a prisoner on her own ship, with Leonidas being the one in charge.

“I see,” he said, annoyance replacing the smile in his voice.

He was not, she sensed, annoyed at her. It pleased her that Tomich thought well enough of her to assume she was not a traitor, but it didn’t necessarily change anything for her. Well, it might if she was willing to sit back and let them board and take Leonidas. If she did, they might let her go on her way after that. But it would be intolerable to hand him over to the army, even if it was her army, to be interrogated for who knew what reasons. What did he know that they wanted to know? It had to be information that they sought or they wouldn’t care if he was turned in alive or dead. That warrant specifically said he had to be brought in alive for the reward.

“Is he there with you now?” Tomich asked quietly.

Alisa leaned out of her seat so she could see through the hatchway. The short corridor was empty.

“He’s… around,” she said. She would not say that Leonidas was putting on his combat armor, though it probably didn’t matter. Surely Tomich would expect that.

“Is the boy with you?”

“Boy?” She was sure the puzzlement came through in her tone. All she could think of was Alejandro, but the retired surgeon was surely not a boy.

“I’ll take that for a no.” Tomich sighed. “Unfortunate.”

“I’ll pretend I know what you’re talking about, so we can move on to the more personally pertinent part of this conversation. Is there any chance I’m going to get out of this alive?”

“The Alliance has no quarrel with you or your… I’ll be generous and call that a freighter. Is it hard to fly that after a Striker?”

“Is this really the time for you to be mocking my ship?”

“No, perhaps not.” Tomich lowered his voice to a whisper. “Lay low, Alisa. Stay out of the way, and don’t let yourself get turned into a meat shield. We have to get him.”

She dropped her face into her hand, feeling utterly helpless. She highly doubted Leonidas would use her as a shield, so that wasn’t her concern. Sitting here and doing nothing and letting them take him was. But what choice did she have? Even now, with the Nomad cruising away from the moon at top speed, the other ships were closing on her, moving to flank her. There was nowhere to run.

And as much as she had come to like Leonidas, a selfish part of her admitted that her life would become much, much simpler if the Alliance simply took Leonidas and Alejandro and the orb off her hands. It wasn’t as if they had paid her to protect them. All they had paid for was fare. Granted, she would feel a little bad if she kept their money after they’d been hauled off by the army less than two hours after taking off, but again, what choice did she have?

“None,” she muttered.

“Pardon?” Tomich asked.

“I’ll do my best to cooperate,” she told him.

“Just keep yourself from getting hurt. I have a lot of young twitchy infantry boys with big guns that I’m sending over there.”

“Thanks for the warning.”

“I’m sorry I can’t do more.” He sounded like he meant it. “The tug is coming to lock onto you and keep you in place, so you don’t fly off. I remember your skills well.”

“You needn’t worry about them. There’s no place to hide, and this freighter doesn’t have any weapons.”

“Doesn’t it? You should have retrofitted it. I don’t think the Alliance is going to be as anal when it comes to civilians with weapons, especially when we don’t yet have the people and resources to patrol the entire system.”

“I wasn’t planning to have such controversial passengers. I’m a freighter, Tomich. A freighter. There are chickens in the cargo hold.”

“We’ll try not to disturb them.”

Sure, they would sleep right through the blazer bolts zipping over their feathered heads.

Disgusted with the entire situation, Alisa closed the comm. She turned in her seat and found Leonidas standing in the hatchway, his crimson armor gleaming, everything except his helmet on.

“Meat shield?” He sniffed. “Cyborgs do not hide behind civilians.”

“What about behind other cyborgs?”

“That’s slightly more acceptable. I don’t suppose you have any on board?” He smiled at her. Out of all of the emotions she would have expected from him in his present situation, amusement was not one of them.

“No, and I think my tendency toward inappropriate humor is rubbing off on you.”

“You may be right. That’s disconcerting.” He smiled again.

Three suns, he wasn’t looking forward to going into battle against those young twitchy infantry boys, was he? Alisa didn’t think she had ever seen him in such a good mood.

But why not? Those Alliance soldiers were enemies to him. He probably enjoyed the idea of taking out as many of them as he could. After all, they had destroyed his empire.

They were not enemies for her, though. The thought of this confrontation horrified her. She could not expect him to let them take him without a fight, but with the way he fought, he would likely take out twenty of their people before they managed to subdue him, especially since they wanted him alive. If she had a doctor who was on her side, she could have asked him to come up with a concoction to knock Leonidas out, as the tug commander had implied they had. But her gut twisted at the idea of doing that to Leonidas, even if she could. She didn’t want to hand him over. She wanted to go on her way, find Jelena, hire Leonidas to work for her, and proceed to live a normal life.

White flashed on the view screen, and the Nomad shuddered. The tug’s grab beam wrapped around them. The warships had caught up, too, and fenced them in, one in front, one behind, and one to the side. With the tug on the other side, she felt like a lion in a cage in a zoo.

“I’ll wait at the airlock and charge onto their ship if I can,” Leonidas said. “I suggest you call the rest of your people up here and lock the hatch. The soldiers shouldn’t have a reason to harass the rest of you. Most of you.” He looked down, checking the battery pack on the blazer rifle slung over his chest. “I know you must have thought about handing Dr. Dominguez over, too, but since they haven’t inquired about him and the artifact, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t volunteer anything about him. Of course, I can’t stop you if you do.” He inclined his head and turned toward the hatchway.

“No, damn it.”

Leonidas looked back, his eyebrows raised.

“Stay right there. Let me think a second. This is ludicrous. There has to be an alternative.”

“We’re clearly trapped.” He waved toward the view screen full of ships. “But once they have me, they should leave your ship alone.”

“I’m not worried about my ship. Those are my people you’re about to blast into. I don’t want them killed. And you’re my passenger. You paid your fare. I don’t want you killed, either.”

“There’s no alternative,” he said softly, holding her gaze with his.

Maybe it was her imagination, but she thought she read regret in that gaze. Despite his eagerness to leap into battle, maybe he regretted that he had to go out this way. Maybe he even wished he could stay on the Nomad and accept her offer of employment.

“Sure, that’s it,” she muttered with a snort.

“What?” Leonidas asked, even though he had probably heard her.

“We’re making an alternative.” Alisa hit the internal comm button. “Stay,” she told Leonidas, pointing at the deck as if commanding a dog.

His eyebrows twitched.

“Mica, you keeping abreast of the situation?” Alisa asked.

“I have a porthole down here.”

“I’ll take that for a yes. How familiar are you with that tug over there?”

“It’s an IM-7 Digger-class salvage tug with the imperial numbers filed off and Alliance paint covering the hull. It has improved power systems over the IM-6, with twin Z-drive 3619C engines that have a towing capacity of over 100,000 tons.”

“So, you’re vaguely familiar with it.”

Maybe she, like the gangly young boy Alisa had met on Perun, had a model of it.

“Vaguely,” Mica agreed.

“If you got aboard it, would you know how to break the grab beam?”

“I can break anything on any ship.”

“How is it that employers weren’t storming our hatch, trying to get you on their team? All right, good. Get whatever tools you need and meet us at the airlock.”

“The airlock that’s already getting a tube and clamps extended toward it?” Mica asked.

Alisa winced. “Yes, hurry. Leonidas?”

“Yes?” he asked warily.

“I need you to talk pretty to Alejandro. Tell him to get on the horn and call those imperial ships we passed on the way out of orbit. Tell him to let them know that his orb is about to fall into Alliance hands, so they might want to come out here and make sure that doesn’t happen.”

“I don’t think—”

“I don’t care. Do it anyway. Go. Shoo, shoo.” She waved her hands at him, then turned back to her console. She doubted Tomich would tell his people to bother her ship, but she would lock down the controls so nobody but she could access them.

“You really want those imperial ships to come over here?” came Mica’s voice from the corridor. She stepped past Leonidas as he was going the other way. “You’re not trying to start another war, are you?”

“No, but we need some chaos if we’re going to have any chance of escaping. There are three other ships out there with grab beams. Didn’t I tell you to meet me at the airlock?” Alisa added, her hands flying over the controls.

“I got ready more quickly than you.” Mica patted her satchel, but looked over her shoulder. “You sure this is worth it? Does the Alliance care about us, or do they just want the doctor?”

“Leonidas.”

“Pardon?”

“They want Leonidas. Remember that warrant?”

“I remember him being a colonel in the army that spent four years trying to blast us out of the sky and, oh, a lifetime oppressing us so that we lived in fear of spitting.”

“You’re not going to get pessimistic on me, are you?”

“Of course not. What’s there to be pessimistic about?” Mica waved at the various camera displays, all of them full of warships. “I’m just saying that maybe we should give him—both of them—to our people.”

A clank sounded against the hull. The ship shivered, and Alisa imagined giant talons wrapping about the hull, grasping it tightly to the tug’s side.

She finished and pushed away from the controls. “They paid their fare. We’re not giving anybody to anyone.”

Mica grabbed her before she could head through the hatchway. “Alisa, don’t be ridiculous. If we openly side with them, the Alliance won’t forgive us. I don’t want my family suffering for the choices I make here. I already spent four years worrying about that during the war.”

“We’re not openly siding with them,” Alisa said. “We’ll be…”

“My prisoners,” Leonidas said, returning to NavCom.

They turned together to look at him. He had donned his helmet, and one of his hands rested on the blazer rifle strapped to his torso. As it always did, seeing him in full combat armor—the armor of the enemy—made Alisa uneasy.

“If you insist on coming along, that is,” he added, his frown making it clear that he didn’t think that was a good idea.

“We do,” Alisa said, as Mica shook her head. Alisa nudged her with an elbow. “Some intellicuffs for our wrists would be good, though. Then if we’re spotted, it would be obvious we’re prisoners.”

She did not like the idea of making Leonidas seem like a villain—more of a villain—in the Alliance’s eyes, but Mica was right. It would be foolish of them to make themselves enemies of the Alliance on his behalf. She had no trouble snubbing the remnants of the empire, but this was different. As she had said, these were her people.

Mica sighed. “I have some old-fashioned metal handcuffs in my cabin. I’ll get them.”

“That’ll have to do,” Alisa said, stepping past Leonidas to follow her to the crew quarters. He came right behind her.

“I’ve put together something special too.” Mica dug a small device out of her pocket—a remote control?

Before Alisa could ask what it controlled, Beck ran out of his cabin, his combat armor on. “We’re getting boarded, right?” he asked as Yumi poked her head out of her own cabin across the way. “I assume you want me to wait somewhere, fully armed and ready to spring into action when they come in?”

“Actually, I was hoping you could give yourself a black eye, then tie yourselves up.” She nodded toward Yumi and also waved toward Alejandro’s hatch, which had just opened.

“These aren’t the usual requests made to a security officer.”

“I’m an unusual employer.”

“Not arguing, Captain. Not arguing.” Beck did look like he wanted to argue about staying out of the fighting, but Yumi stepped forward and took his arm.

She started to guide him back toward the cabins, but Mica called out from her own room, “Have anyone who’s not involved in this scheme stay in NavCom with the hatch locked. I’ve got a surprise rigged.”

“A surprise we’ll like?” Alisa asked.

“A surprise those boarding us won’t like.”

“You heard her.” Alisa waved Beck toward NavCom.

“There’s no place in this freighter we could hide?” Alejandro asked from farther down the corridor, his satchel clutched to his side. “That cubby in the cargo hold, perhaps? I’m sure navigation will be the first place they look.”

“They’ll be busy looking at me,” Leonidas said.

“Because you’ll be shooting at them?” Alisa asked. “Or because of your blinding handsomeness?”

He frowned at her, no hint of a smile on his face.

“If it’s the first thing, I’d prefer we do this without killing any Alliance soldiers,” she said, holding his gaze.

“What are we doing exactly?” he asked.

“Boarding them while they’re busy boarding us,” Alisa said, “disabling their grab beam, making a messy distraction on their ship somewhere, perhaps with explosives, and then coming back to the Nomad and flying away. Without killing anyone.”

Leonidas stared at her, and she thought he would say something along the lines of, “That’s ludicrous,” or “If they shoot me, I’m shooting them back.” Instead, he said, “If they’re in armor, I may be able to break it down without killing them.”

“What if they’re not in armor?”

“I can target their knees.”

Alisa grimaced, remembering that both of her kneecaps had been shattered in that last crash on Dustor. She had passed out before enduring the pain for long, but she vividly recalled those few minutes before she had.

“Better than their heads, I guess,” she murmured.

Mica stepped out of her cabin. “His and her models.” She waved the two pairs of metal handcuffs at Alisa. “Which do you want?”

“Well, you’re the one with short hair and a surly disposition.”

“Ha ha. If we had more time, I’d clobber you for implying you’re more feminine than I am.” Mica tossed a set of cuffs into Alisa’s hands.

“I’m not sure that statement corroborates your claim of femininity.”

A clank sounded, and an alarm went off, the warning that someone was forcing the airlock door. Alisa hurried toward the cargo hold.

“Are there keys to these?” she asked, noting the physical keyhole.

“I don’t have them anymore,” Mica said, “but if you get them lubricated enough, you can slip out.”

“Ew.” Alisa clasped one side of the cuffs around her wrist, leaving the other free for now.

“Maybe your new cyborg buddy can help you.”

Despite the direness of the situation, Alisa flushed with embarrassment. She hoped that wasn’t why Mica thought she was taking this risk. Alisa just wanted to protect her people and the Alliance soldiers.

“I can break them easily,” Leonidas said, either ignoring or completely missing the innuendo.

“You must be fun in bed,” Mica said dryly.

His brow wrinkled behind his faceplate. Alisa almost laughed, but there was no time. They had reached the airlock door, and the bangs and thumps coming from the other side promised it would be open soon.

“They’re going to burst in here with their guns on autofire, aren’t they?” Alisa asked, noting with some amusement that Yumi had found the time to stack crates all around her chicken pen and reinforce the netting stretched atop it with more layers. She couldn’t blame her and hoped nothing happened to the birds.

“Likely.” Leonidas pointed to a corner protected by a beam and more crates. “I’ll charge into them. You hide.”

“I have a better idea.” Alisa grabbed his arm. “We’ll all hide.” She tugged him toward a concealed door in the bulkhead, the same spot where they had hidden when the ship had been boarded by pirates. “Just long enough for them to come in and spread out.”

Mica did not hesitate to rush to the spot and open the door. Alisa followed her, crouching to squeeze in behind her, but she paused when Leonidas did not follow. A hiss-clank came from the airlock. The soldiers would force their way in any second.

“Leonidas, come on.” Alisa jerked her thumb into the dim storage space.

He must have objected to the tone of her voice, or the order itself, because he said, “You’re not my commander, Marchenko.”

“I’m the captain of this ship, and you’re on this ship. Look, I’m trying to save all of our butts. Get over here. Please.”

“It’ll be easier to make those kneecap shots when they’re spread out and you can sneak up on them,” Mica added.

“You can’t sneak up on a man in combat armor.” Leonidas waved to the back of his helmet, probably indicating the camera embedded there.

“Oh, I think you’ll be able to,” Mica said cryptically.

“Come on, Leonidas,” Alisa said. “I’ll rub your ears if you join us.” Maybe bribery would work better with him than commands, since he seemed to believe his former military status as a colonel meant he outranked her, even on her own ship.

After a long look back toward the airlock, he finally strode across the hold. The doorway to the hidden compartment was just large enough for his broad armored shoulders to fit through. As soon as he squeezed in, Alisa pulled the door closed behind him. Darkness fell in the cubby, a spot meant for hiding valuables in case of a pirate boarding, not for hiding people. The door did not have a peephole or any way to see what was happening in the cargo hold, though the clangs from the airlock reached Alisa’s ears.

“Despite your interest in comparing me to a cat, a bat, or some other animal, I prefer shoulders,” Leonidas said.

“Pardon?” Alisa asked.

“Shoulder rubs.”

“Oh. I’ll keep that in mind.”

“I bet you will,” Mica muttered.

Alisa might have flushed again—she would definitely have to set Mica straight in regard to her feelings toward Leonidas—but a final ominous clang came from the airlock. After that, silence fell. Alisa imagined soldiers in combat armor streaming into the hold, rifles pointing in every direction as they searched for enemies.

Something touched her hand, Leonidas’s gauntleted fingers. He gently but firmly snapped the second side of her handcuffs around her wrist. A faint click sounded as he did the same to Mica.

Soft thuds came from the other side of their door. Someone walking past—or walking toward them. Alisa held her breath. She knew the door concealed this cubby from plain sight, but she had also heard that some models of combat armor had special visual sensors that gave the wearers access to night vision and thermal vision. What if the door panel was not insulated enough and their body heat registered to such a scanner?

“Unleashing the surprise,” Mica whispered, her voice so soft that Alisa was not sure she had heard correctly.

Not wanting to make any noise, she did not ask for clarification.

A startled exclamation, the voice muffled by a helmet, came from the other side of their door. Someone barked an order from the far side of the cargo hold. Alisa, crouched with her back to the wall and Leonidas between her and the door, felt her feet lighten. A hint of vertigo washed over her as they went from feeling light to lifting off the floor.

“Your surprise was to cut gravity?” Alisa breathed, bracing herself with a hand on the ceiling of the compartment and a foot against something else.

Was that Leonidas? If so, he hadn’t moved. He still crouched in front of the door. His combat boots would have magnetized soles for fighting on the exterior of a ship or in situations without gravity. So would those of the men outside. Alisa grimaced, doubting Mica’s surprise would do anything, other than to warn the soldiers that someone was up to no good on the ship.

“And the lights,” Mica whispered. “I left power on in NavCom, but that’s it.”

Thinking of helmets with night vision, Alisa did not know how much help that would be.

“I like it,” Leonidas breathed, but did not explain further. He shifted closer to the door, almost dislodging Alisa’s foot. Maybe it would add a degree of uncertainty or confusion to the other side, and he would have an easier time sneaking up on them. And if he tackled someone, it might knock the person’s magnetized boots free from the deck.

“Did Alejandro comm the imperial ships?” Alisa murmured.

“I don’t think so,” Leonidas whispered. “He said he wouldn’t. I pointed out that any help would be useful, even that of Senator Bondarenko’s people. He may change his mind.”

Leonidas did not sound confident on that last note, and Alisa’s stomach sank with a feeling of defeat. If the imperial ships did not come over to at least make threatening noises in the direction of the Alliance ships, nothing they did on the tug would matter. Even if they managed to free the Nomad, the warships would simply recapture it.

The squawks of alarmed chickens came through the door, and Alisa imagined them floating up into the netting above their pen, terrified and confused. Poor things. As much as she had enjoyed the morning omelets, she didn’t think livestock should be riding along when the Nomad had been encountering trouble so often. She hoped none of the young idiots with guns would find it amusing to shoot the chickens.

A couple of minutes passed, and Alisa did not hear anything besides the squawks. Had the men moved to search the rest of the ship? Their cubby was near the steps, so she ought to have heard people clanging up the metal treads, but they might be stepping carefully—softly—if they were worried about flying up into the zero gravity air.

“There are only two left in the cargo hold,” Leonidas whispered. “I’m going out. Stay here until I come for you.”

“Kneecaps,” Alisa told him, though if the soldiers were all in combat armor, she knew he would have to do more than that. “And be careful,” she added.

It was too dark to see anything, but she imagined Mica giving her a curious look.

Alisa did not hear him open the door, nor could she see anything outside, but he moved away from her foot, leaving her scrabbling for another hold, and she knew he was gone. She had barely registered it when the squeals of blazer fire erupted near the airlock. Streaks of crimson lit up the cargo hold briefly, but from her spot, she could not see anyone or tell who was firing.

The fight ended almost as soon as it had begun. Alisa was tempted to poke her head out, not that there would be anything to see in the dark, but a touch to her shoulder made her twitch in surprise.

“Stay,” Leonidas said. “The others will be here any second.”

Not waiting for her response, he refastened the door, leaving Alisa and Mica alone in the dark.

Chapter 16

The sounds of fighting had drifted away, perhaps moving up toward navigation. Alisa, her feet and hands braced awkwardly so she could stay in place, leaned her forehead against the cool metal of a bulkhead. It seemed foolish to hope or believe that Leonidas could take care of all of the soldiers who had boarded without killing any of them. Or without being killed himself. Tomich knew exactly what he was dealing with. He must have sent a couple of squadrons of his best men, and if they reported that they needed backup, he certainly had the means to send more over.

If Alejandro had been willing to contact the imperial ships, then they might have had a chance, but if he was objecting to reason, then they had no hope. Poised there in the dark, it was hard not to loathe him. Had Tomich’s people been boarding to get the orb, she had no doubt that he would have done anything within his means to start a brawl so they could slink away. But because the Alliance was here for Leonidas, Alejandro was just going to hide under a console in navigation and do nothing while they took his only ally. As long as they weren’t here for him, he didn’t care. After all the help Leonidas had given him. It was unconscionable.

“Bastard,” Alisa growled.

“Which one?” Mica asked.

“Alejandro. He’s a coward. Unless someone threatens to kick the wheels off his wagon, he doesn’t care about anything except his mission.”

“As opposed to people who needlessly get themselves involved in the affairs of others?”

“I know you’re not sniping at me, Mica, because that would be insubordination.”

“Only on a military ship. We’re civilians now.”

“Damn. I never thought I’d miss the army.”

Mica sighed. “Will you hate me if I admit I would prefer it if our cyborg passenger got himself killed and the doctor got himself captured, so we could go on our way without any more drama?”

“It’s not an illogical thought,” Alisa admitted. “Trust me, I’ve had it myself.”

“And then you imagined the cyborg in bed with you and decided to throw logic to the stars?”

“I did not imagine that. Look, I don’t know what kind of notions you’ve got rattling in your skull over there, but I’m not developing feelings for him. He’s imperial, he’s a cyborg, and he probably killed thousands of our people during the war.”

“You don’t have to have feelings for someone to want to ride him like a comet.”

“He’s not even my type.”

“Please, I saw him with his shirt off in sickbay. He’s a walking fantasy.”

“Only if you’re into ridiculously brawny men.”

“With the kind of delicious delineation of muscle and perfect symmetry that sculptors pay for in their models.”

“Maybe you’re the one obsessed with him,” Alisa said.

“He’s even less my type.”

“Right, I forgot. Yumi is the cute one.”

“Yumi doesn’t have any armies chasing after her. It’s definitely a perk.”

Alisa had thought Mica’s preferences went both ways when it came to relationships, but it wasn’t the time for that discussion. All she said was, “You’ll have to get in line with her. I think Beck is interested.”

“It doesn’t matter where his interests are; it’s where hers are.”

“Could we not talk about this now?” Alisa asked as the sounds of more gunfire drifted down from the deck above them. Her stomach was in knots, and she wished that Leonidas had not locked her cuffs. With her wrists bound together, she would have a hard time getting the door open to climb out. “I’m trying to come up with a plan.”

“Another one? We’ve barely enacted the last.”

“I’m afraid it’s not going to go well. Not unless…” An idea popped into Alisa’s mind, and she dug awkwardly into her pocket for her comm.

“What are you doing?” Mica asked, perhaps hearing the rustle of clothing.

“Kicking the good doctor’s wagon wheels.” Assuming he had his comm on him, Alisa called up his code. She’d gotten them from her passengers when they first boarded.

“Yes?” Alejandro whispered. It sounded like his airway was restricted. Either someone had a hand around his throat, or his neck was scrunched up because he had stuffed himself under a console to hide.

Alisa hoped he was sitting on his orb box, and that it was poking him in the ass. “You three doing all right?”

“So far,” he replied. “Two of them tried to get in here, but they were dragged away before they could break the lock on the hatch. We’re hiding, so they shouldn’t have seen us through the window. I assume that’s Leonidas out there—we can hear the sounds of combat.”

“He’s fighting the intruders single-handedly.”

“I’d help if you all would let me,” Beck said, a few feet away from the comm.

“Hold that thought,” Alisa said. “First, I need to know if you made that call, Doctor.”

Alejandro’s hesitation told her all she needed to know. She ground her teeth.

“No,” he admitted. “As far as I can tell, this isn’t about the artifact. I would like to keep it that way.”

“By letting them have Leonidas? The only person here who cares one iota about you?”

Distant energy blasts sounded over his comm, and Alisa winced at the idea of Leonidas by himself against all of those men. The ship had alcoves and struts and hatches one could take cover behind, but it was not designed like a warship with built-in bottlenecks and bulkheads that could be lowered to thwart intruders.

“He cares about honoring the emperor’s dying wishes,” Alejandro said. “It has nothing to do with caring about me. He would be the first to agree that I should keep silent to keep my mission safe. He would be willing to sacrifice himself for that.”

“Well, I’m not willing to sacrifice him, damn it.” The ferocity in her voice surprised her. By Rebus-de’s fiery left tit, Mica wasn’t right, was she? Alisa wasn’t developing feelings for Leonidas, was she? She shook her head. It was something to worry about later. “You comm those ships right now and get them over here, Doctor, or I’ll comm Commander Tomich on the lead Alliance warship and tell him all about your artifact and what I know of your quest.”

Alejandro hesitated again. Then he scoffed, or tried. It wasn’t very convincing. “I doubt their commander has time to listen to a civilian freighter operator when he’s in the middle of trying to subdue a dangerous cyborg.”

“Guess again, Doc. We served together in the war. We’ve already had a chat today, and he’s concerned that I’m Leonidas’s prisoner. Maybe I’ll tell him that you’re the brains and I’m really your prisoner.”

“Captain…” Alejandro groaned, sounding truly pained.

Alisa supposed it was petty to smile viciously at his distress, but it was dark, and nobody could see her. That made it all right to be petty.

“You going to make that call?” she asked.

He sighed. “Yes.”

“Beck, are you still listening?”

“I’m here, Captain.”

“If our passenger has any trouble getting his comm to work, you help him, understood?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Bangs sounded, dozens of footfalls pounding the deck—reinforcements coming in through the airlock.

“Marchenko out,” Alisa whispered and closed the comm.

She leaned her forehead against the bulkhead again, grimacing more deeply as the footfalls grew louder, heavy combat boots ringing out on the metal deck. The soldiers ran straight for the stairs, clanging up them and into the core of the ship. More soldiers rushing up to help their comrades against Leonidas. How many could he defeat? The darkness and the lack of gravity would not give him that much of an advantage.

“Maybe we should sneak aboard their ship while all of their men are charging onto ours,” Alisa muttered, not truly entertaining the idea. If they were caught over there, and Leonidas wasn’t leading them, they couldn’t pretend they were prisoners.

“Or maybe we should stay in our box and do nothing,” Mica said firmly. “This isn’t our fight.”

“They have my ship.”

“And I’m sure they’ll let go of your ship as soon as they have their cyborg.”

Alisa wanted to argue, but Mica was right. Besides, what were the odds that two women in handcuffs could sneak all the way to engineering on that tug without being seen?

A soft tapping came from the other side of the door. Alisa lost her grip on the wall and spun awkwardly in the zero gravity cubby.

A pop sounded as the panel was tugged free. She groped for something to use to push herself backward in case it was one of the soldiers. Not that hiding farther back in the cubby would save her from them.

“It’s me,” Leonidas whispered, his voice barely audible through his faceplate.

Only after he identified himself did he move the panel fully. Had he expected to find them in here with their guns pointed at the door? Alisa doubted she could even unholster her Etcher with her wrists linked together.

She pulled herself out of the cubby, grabbing Leonidas’s arm to keep from floating away. The darkness was still absolute in the cargo hold—Mica had rigged it so that even the emergency lights had not come on—but it stank of smoke, and Alisa thought she could feel something in the air swirling against her skin.

Energy blasts echoed from up above.

“If you’re here, who are they fighting?” Alisa whispered. Beck hadn’t leaped out into the fray, had he?

“Their imaginations,” Leonidas said. “I had some smoke bombs and rust bangs, so they’re struggling to see. The smoke works on sensors as well as eyes. Still ready to go to the tug?”

Alisa wrinkled her nose. “More than ever. Mica?”

A hand latched onto Alisa’s shoulder. “If it’ll get me out of zero grav, I’m ready. Three suns, I get sick in this crap.”

“Turn your head if you’re going to throw up.”

“We don’t have much time.” Leonidas started walking across the hold, his boots keeping him affixed to the deck.

Alisa felt silly floating along behind him like a tethered balloon. Mica, attached to her instead of Leonidas, probably felt the same way.

“Check down there,” came an order from above, near the head of the walkway.

Alisa tightened her grip on Leonidas’s shoulder. If someone stepped out on the walkway, all of the cargo hold would be in view if that smoke wasn’t as thick as he had implied. Unable to see or walk, she felt utterly helpless.

Leonidas quickened his pace, though he was careful not to make any noise, and he set each foot down carefully before lifting the other. It wouldn’t do for them all to be floating around down here.

The control panel inside the airlock hatchway came into view, an irritated red button flashing that something had been damaged when the soldiers forced their way in. At least their tube was securely attached. A camera display on the panel showed suction lines like octopus arms holding the two ships together, the tube stretched in the middle of them.

Boots clanged on the walkway, followed by a thump and a noisy grunt. “Will someone figure out how to get the suns-cursed gravity and lights back on? And clear this damned smoke.”

Must have been an officer. Someone who didn’t want to do things himself.

Leonidas pulled Alisa and Mica into the airlock tube. Usually, Alisa’s stomach did not object to zero grav, but there was a weird mix inside, gravity wrestling with null gravity and creating currents. Mica made a gagging sound, one she immediately tried to smother.

“Who’s down there?” the officer barked.

Alisa found herself pulled farther into the tube, as Leonidas brushed past her and Mica. He fired at the same time as the man on the walkway did. Alisa banged into the hatch that led into the tug. The lighting in here wasn’t much better than in the cargo hold, but she groped her way to a control panel.

“Let me,” Mica whispered, shouldering her aside.

Alisa let her take over and pushed herself up so she could peer through the small circular window in the hatch. She should have expected that someone would be guarding it, but surprise and fear lurched through her when she found someone staring back at her.

“Help us,” she mouthed, remembering that she was supposed to be a prisoner. She lifted her cuffed wrists to the window while widening her eyes and glancing back. She didn’t have to feign her fear much, because red beams splashed against the rim of the hatchway on the Nomad’s side of the tube.

“Can you get that open?” Leonidas asked, ducking back into the shelter of the airlock tube as more beams ricocheted off the floor and the jamb. For now, the men on the walkway did not have a good angle to fire straight in, but if that changed, Alisa and Mica, lacking any kind of armor, would be much more vulnerable than Leonidas. “They know where I am now,” he added. “They’ll all be down here in a second.”

“How many?” Mica asked, fiddling with the controls.

“All of them,” he said grimly. “Since I wasn’t shooting to kill.”

On the other side of the window, the armored soldier was talking to someone.

Alisa shook her wrists again and mouthed, “Please. Help us.”

No need to specify that the help she needed was in escaping her own people. The soldier glanced over his shoulder. Four armored men appeared in the distance, trotting around a corner and into his corridor, all carrying blazer rifles that looked big enough to blow a hole in Leonidas’s chest plate. The closest soldier gave her a firm nod, but held up a finger.

“I’m trying to get them to open the hatch for us,” Alisa said, making sure to hide her mouth from the window. No need to let the Alliance men know she was helping her cyborg captor.

“How’s that working?” Mica grumbled.

The soldier turned away, looking at the oncoming men again.

“We may need to look more helpless and needy,” Alisa said.

No less than eight beams of red energy struck the hull and deck all around Leonidas, forcing him away from the hatchway. Alisa grimaced. The hull of the Nomad could take a lot of abuse, but if the flexible material of the tube was struck, she and Mica might be sucking space dust.

Leonidas backed farther, forcing Mica and Alisa against the tug’s closed hatch. Mica was still fiddling with the control panel. Leonidas turned toward the similar control panel next to the Nomad’s entrance. He punched a button, and the hatch swung shut with a clang and a sucking noise, the seal activating to make the ship airtight.

“Uhh,” Alisa said, not sure they wanted to be trapped in the airlock tube with enemies on either side.

A hiss-suck came from behind her, and the tug’s hatch opened, sliding sideways. Since she was still leaning on it, Alisa would have tumbled through, but Leonidas leaped past her, pushing her down. Mica joined her on the floor of the tube as he sprang through the hatchway, slamming into the soldiers waiting there with the speed and deadly power of a lightning bolt.

Alisa felt that she should help, but as soon as those rifles started going off, she grew acutely aware of how vulnerable she was with nothing but clothing to protect her. Some protection. She rolled to the side and curled up in the corner of the tube, trying to make herself small enough that the exterior of the ship’s hull would protect her. Mica occupied a similar spot on the other side of the hatchway, glancing up at the control panel over her head, perhaps thinking about shutting the door.

A bang came from the Nomad’s hatch, barely audible over the fight in the corridor of the tug, Leonidas battling the soldiers hand-to-hand, intentionally staying close enough to prevent them from aiming weapons at him. The faceplate of an armored soldier appeared in the window of the Nomad’s hatch. Alisa couldn’t see the man’s face through two layers of glastica, but she held her cuffed wrists in front of her and tried to look helpless. It wasn’t hard.

She hoped the soldiers would not charge in and start firing with two civilians hunkered in the tube. They could probably get the hatch open, since they had already forced their way onto the ship once. At the least, the locking mechanism would be broken.

The soldier on the Nomad watched the battle taking place in the tug’s corridor and must have seen something he didn’t like. He waved someone over, and from the way his head bent, Alisa knew he was working on the controls, trying to get the hatch open. So much for not charging in with civilians in the way.

“Got a plan, Captain Optimism?” Mica asked, almost shouting to be heard over the clangs of gauntleted fists and boots striking armored torsos. One man flew against the corridor wall, his helmet striking it with such force that his head must have been ringing like the clapper in a bell. He slumped to the deck, not moving. Another man leaped on Leonidas’s back, an arm snaking around his neck.

“We’re going to have to get in there.” Alisa waved at the corridor where the men fought. “Then withdraw the tube, so the rest of them can’t join in.”

“That strands us on the tug. And leaves all of those angry soldiers on your ship.”

“No choice.”

Alisa made sure nobody was aiming at the open hatchway, then slipped around the corner. A fallen soldier, still alive as evinced by the moans coming from his cracked faceplate, lay sprawled on the deck. His rifle had fallen from his fingers, and Alisa was tempted to pick it up. But if she did, and if she did not then aim it at Leonidas…

She bit her lip. She wanted to help him, but she could not shoot Tomich’s people—her people.

Instead, she lunged across the corridor to the controls inside the hatchway. She doubted she could release her ship from here, as the grab beam still held it tight to the belly of the tug, but—yes, there was the button for the tube. She jabbed it, hoping it wouldn’t demand a passcode.

The hatch on the Nomad flew open at the same time as the hatch on the tug slid shut. The soldiers—there had to be at least twenty of them crowded at the airlock now—started forward before they realized what was happening. Red light flashed inside the tube, and they skittered backward, nearly falling over themselves to get back to the Nomad’s cargo hold. They managed to get inside and slam the hatch shut a half second before the tube detached, the darkness of space visible as it withdrew back into the hull of the tug.

Realizing it had grown quiet behind her, Alisa turned around. Mica was staring at her from a spot pressed against the wall with a soldier moaning at her feet. Leonidas stood in the center of the corridor, dents and black burn marks in his crimson armor. The rest of the soldiers were down around him, some moaning, some not. She hoped he was still trying not to kill anyone, as her conscience was already in knots over this mess. She told herself that if she had let Leonidas go without helping him, and without extracting his promise to try not to kill, it would have been worse.

“We’ll have to get to engineering to release the grab beam,” Mica said. “What you want to do after that, I have no idea, because we won’t be able to get back to the ship.”

“We’ll just have to take over the tug,” Alisa said.

“Oh, I’m sure that will be easy.”

“This way,” Leonidas said. “You can talk on the way.”

He turned down the corridor, not asking for directions. Maybe he had the specs for all of the Alliance and imperial ships in the system memorized.

“Better keep your prisoners in front of you,” Alisa whispered, striding after him. “If there are cameras, someone might wonder why we’re not wandering off.”

Leonidas paused, waving for them to pass him. Alisa glanced at a fallen rifle again, this time wondering how good of an idea it was to leave all these men behind, still armed. If all they were was wounded, they could get up and join the fight again. But taking their rifles probably would not matter, since they had extra weapons built into their suits, and it wasn’t as if she could simply tie a rope around someone in combat armor. The men would easily break free. Besides, she didn’t have any rope.

Worried they would end up facing those people again, she hustled to join Mica in the lead. Her face was bleak, but she strode quickly down the corridors, presumably heading toward engineering. Alisa had never been on a tug and had no idea where anything was.

Her comm beeped. She might have ignored it, but that was Beck’s number.

“What?” she whispered, glancing down corridors as they passed through intersections. The passages stood empty now, but she doubted it would take long for the tug’s commander, that Bennington woman, to realize what had happened and to send down reinforcements.

“Some angry-looking soldiers are trying to force their way into navigation,” Beck whispered. “Is Leonidas dead? Where are you?”

“We’re with him on the tug. We had to pull the airlock tube.”

“Leaving all these pissed soldiers with us?”

“Sorry. They might be less pissed if you just let them in and they don’t have to break down the hatch. And I would appreciate it if there weren’t any more broken doors on my ship than necessary.”

“Not like you’d be the one fixing them,” Mica grumbled.

“Tell them you’re prisoners and that you were hiding up there to avoid the fighting.”

“I’m in my combat armor, Captain.”

“So?”

“You think they’ll believe I’m a prisoner?”

“You can point out that Leonidas can best you whether you’re in combat armor or not and he wasn’t worried about it.”

“That’s not a thing I’m eager to point out to people, Captain.”

“Just make up a plausible story.” Alisa followed Mica into a lift, where she pressed a diagram of the ship, the big section at the bottom marked engineering. The doors shut. “I don’t have much time to talk, but stay safe and be careful. Tell them you fought for the Alliance in the war.”

Banging sounds came over the comm.

“And am I telling them that our doctor fought in the war too?” Beck asked quietly. “He’s sitting on his box and looking concerned.”

“Did he comm the imperials?”

The doors opened, and Alisa glimpsed a large open room with high ceilings before Leonidas stepped in front of her, waving for her to stay put as he slipped out.

“He did,” Beck said. “But he’s not sure if they’re coming, or if they believed him.”

“That’s reassuring. Tell him to hide the box under my seat and lie to them. I’m sure he can manage that.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Weapons fired somewhere in front of Leonidas, and Alisa cut off the comm. Once again, she felt helpless as she pressed herself to the wall next to the lift doors. Mica had her thumb on the touch-display, keeping those doors from closing.

A bolt of energy sizzled between them, slamming into the back wall. Alisa crouched and threw her arms over her head and neck.

Silence soon fell outside, only the hum of machinery and computers breaking it.

“Clear,” Leonidas called.

Alisa eyed the smoking and melted wall at the back of the lift, then stepped out. Mica turned left and strode straight toward a workstation.

Alisa joined Leonidas in the middle of engineering. He had disarmed two men in uniforms, ripping up one’s shirt to make strips of material to tie them together, back to back in the middle of the deck. From the way their heads lolled, neither appeared conscious. Leonidas kept them in his peripheral vision, but he watched the lift and another door that must lead into the rest of the ship.

“If this works, what’s next?” he murmured, not looking directly at her. Maybe he had cameras on his mind too.

Alisa feared that someone who sat and watched a video of this would immediately be suspicious of how easily she and Mica were going along with Leonidas, especially since he had not pointed a weapon at them once. A stranger might simply think they were cowed, but Tomich knew her. If he saw this, he would wonder why she wasn’t trying to get away—and also why she wasn’t making rude gestures and throwing sarcasm and insults at Leonidas.

What’s next, Leonidas had asked. Alisa feared it would be an arrest warrant for her, assuming they somehow managed to get away. She wasn’t sure how that would happen right now, unless she left her ship and her people behind and stole the tug. That would definitely result in an arrest warrant. Or more likely a shoot-on-sight warrant.

“Marchenko?” Leonidas prompted.

“I think you can call me Alisa now.”

“Seems overly familiar for a captor-prisoner relationship.”

“What about for a captain-passenger relationship?”

“Are you going to keep Dominguez and me as passengers if we get out of this? I thought you might make us walk the plank.”

“He paid your fare to Arkadius. You’re staying.”

“You’re an interesting woman, Captain Marchenko.”

He said that in the way a scientist spoke of an unexpected result from a specimen rather than in the way a man spoke of a woman he wanted to get to know better, perhaps over dinner and subsequent recreational activities. She told herself that was fine and looked around the engineering space, searching for inspiration. Their predicament was slightly more important than thoughts of dinners.

They couldn’t steal the tug. Even if it did not have a crew of dozens, if not hundreds, it would not have been logical. No, they had to force the tug to release the Nomad, disable the grab beam, and somehow get back to her ship. Oh, and they would still have to deal with the squadrons of soldiers that were currently banging at the door to NavCom.

“What are the odds of finding spacesuits that fit us down here, Mica?” Alisa asked.

Mica, busy cursing and scowling at a console, did not answer the question. Instead, she said, “This is locked down. I need a retina scan from someone with access. Or a computer hacker.”

Leonidas promptly strode toward his tied men. Alisa headed for the first storage cabinets she spotted. She was certain there would be spacesuits somewhere on the ship, as exterior repairs sometimes needed to be done, but she worried they would be close to an exterior hatch rather than here in engineering. Still, engineers would be the likely ones to go out on repairs. Maybe she would get lucky. She could use some luck this week.

“They should have attacked by now,” Leonidas said from the console—he had toted the two men over, lifting both rather than untying them—and had one’s face turned toward a scanner. A slender beam shot out as he pried the man’s eyelid open.

“I’m pleased that they haven’t,” Alisa said.

“They must know we’re here.”

“Might be planning some other trouble for us,” Mica said.

“How about some optimism here?” Alisa asked as she poked through cabinets. “Maybe they’re confused as to what’s going on. Maybe they think we’re still on the Nomad, and they haven’t figured out that we’re here molesting their engine room.”

A click sounded, followed by a faint hiss.

Leonidas’s helmet spun toward the direction of the noise, his gaze locking onto a vent near the ceiling.

Mica scowled at Alisa. “I hate optimism. It has no place in space.”

Chapter 17

“Gas,” Leonidas barked. “It won’t affect me, but—”

“We’re dead takka?” Mica demanded, glaring toward the vent.

Alisa could not see anything coming out of it, but she trusted that Leonidas’s helmet sensors told him it was there. “Can you identify it?” she asked, rummaging through another cabinet as efficiently as possible with her hands cuffed. She was on the verge of asking Leonidas to break the chain, but she didn’t want to waste the time.

“No.”

“So it might be knockout gas, or it might be more deadly?”

Alisa tried to breathe lightly. The engineering room was big, so it should take a while to disseminate, but if it was something extremely potent, even a small amount could affect them. Affect them, or kill them.

She hoped that the commander wouldn’t choose such a drastic measure when two of her own people were in here. Of course, the commander might believe that her people had already been killed.

Leonidas strode to the lift doors and waved at the sensor to open them. Nothing happened. He roared and forced them open, metal screeching and warping.

“While we’re impressed with your strength, I doubt the lift is going to work now,” Mica said. “If anyone cares, I’ve disabled the grab beam.”

“You’re right,” Leonidas said with disgust, poking at buttons.

A computer voice informed him that the damage to the doors made the lift inoperable.

Mica coughed and wiped her eyes as she glowered at the vent. She was closer to it than Alisa and moved to the opposite side of the room.

Finding the cabinet empty, Alisa ran to a pair of doors between two workstations. One with giant warning labels on it led to the reactor. The second was unmarked. She tugged that one open, and the gleam of light reflecting on faceplates met her eyes.

“Mica, over here.” Alisa practically leaped into the closet space to paw at the uniforms, hoping to find ones that would fit women, though she would risk shambling around in something twice her size as long as she could make it airtight.

“I’m checking the door,” Leonidas said, running out of the lift and toward the other exit. Alisa wagered it, too, would be locked. Likely guarded as well. The soldiers out there might expect him to be able to force his way out.

Mica crowded the closet doorway behind her. “Shove one out here,” she rasped, coughing again. “I think that’s prienzene in the air.”

Alisa did not recognize the name of the drug. “Is it deadly?” She grabbed the two smallest suits and pushed them out of the closet.

“If the dose is high enough and unless the antidote is administered in a timely manner, yes.”

“Great. Leonidas—we need your strong hands.” Alisa thrust her cuffed wrists into the air. She would not be able to climb into the suit with her hands fastened together.

Leonidas stood with the side of his helmet pressed against the door—listening to troops in the corridor outside? He left his position and raced across the room to grab her chain. He snapped it easily, not hurting her at all, then turned to do the same for Mica.

“They have men lined up in the corridor outside the door,” Leonidas said. “They’re certain we’ll charge out to escape the gas.”

Alisa did not answer. She was trying not to breathe since she could feel indicators of the gas, a dry tickle in the back of her throat, a burning in her nostrils. She dove into the suit she had selected, fumbling with the fasteners, not sure whether her hands were shaking as a side effect of the gas or out of fear. Who knew if the commander would bother administering the antidote to the prisoners who had just broken her grab beam?

Leonidas stayed beside them, helping with the suits and helmets. Mica was dressed first—she was probably more experienced at donning spacesuits for exterior repairs—and she strode off to poke into one of the cabinets Alisa had searched earlier. She must have seen something useful inside, though Alisa couldn’t remember what. She’d had a singular purpose in mind.

As soon as her helmet was in place, she activated the internal life support system, hoping she hadn’t already breathed in too much of the tainted air. How long until one passed out after exposure? The rough tickle in the back of her throat worried her, reminding her of an allergic reaction to something. If her airway closed off, all the oxygen in the suit’s tank would not matter.

Alisa leaned on Leonidas to tug on the boots and tried not to worry about the rest.

“Stay behind me when we go out,” he said, plucking at the flimsy material of her sleeve. “This won’t stop weapons fire.”

“Is going out a good idea?” Alisa asked. “When there’s a squadron of soldiers waiting out there? You can’t play cat and mouse with them when they’re expecting you.” She eyed the burn marks on his suit. How much more damage could it take? “Unless Mica can find the lights and gravity controls for this ship too.”

“I found something better,” Mica said, backing away from a cabinet full of tools.

She grinned wolfishly at them through the faceplate of her helmet. In both hands, she gripped a big tool with a tank and fuel hose and nozzle.

“Is that a flame thrower?” Alisa asked.

“A blowtorch for welding breaches in the hull.” Mica strode toward the workstation she had been at before. An orange flame flared from the muzzle of the tool. Without any apparent discretion, she torched the controls.

“I see that retina scan was crucial,” Leonidas said, eyeing the tied men on the floor beside the workstation. One watched Mica’s blowtorch with woozy concern.

“It was,” Mica said. “That was to make the tug let go of our ship. This is to ensure it won’t be able to reacquire our ship.”

A clank came from the door, and Leonidas turned his rifle in that direction.

“They’ll soon grow impatient with waiting and simply walk in,” he warned.

After she finished destroying the station, Mica jogged to a wall opposite the door and the lift. “There should be a corridor back here.” She glanced at Leonidas, as if for verification.

He nodded. “Yes, and there’s another lift that way, too, but I don’t know if you’ll be able to burn through—those walls are full of conduits and wires.”

“I can do it.” Mica laid into the bulkhead. “And they can bill my captain for the damages.”

“Lucky me,” Alisa murmured.

The door to engineering slid to the side. Leonidas fired instantly, reacting before it fully opened. He stepped in front of Alisa, blocking her view—and blocking her from harm. She peered around his shoulder in time to see armored men jump out of the way out in the corridor. The door slid back shut again.

“That won’t stop them for long,” Leonidas said. “They’ll realize I just have a blazer rifle and that they can charge it with their armor on.”

“It might not be your gun that they’re afraid of,” Alisa said.

He gave her a wolfish smile, his eyes gleaming.

“Working as quickly as I can,” Mica announced.

Leonidas took Alisa’s arm and led her to the bulkhead where Mica was working, wielding the blowtorch like a professional. That did not mean the process was quick. The bulkhead was thick, and as Leonidas had said, she was cutting through insulation and conduits too.

The lights flickered, then went out.

“Was that you?” Alisa asked. “Or are they trying to confuse us?”

Something snapped inside the wall, and flames leaped from the bulkhead. Alisa stumbled back, her movements awkward in the spacesuit. It lacked the balance servos of combat armor.

“It might have been me,” Mica admitted, waving away smoke.

Alisa could see it by the light of the blowtorch, but she couldn’t smell it. That was good, reassuring her that the gas should not be getting inside of her suit, either.

Mica ignored the dancing flames and went back to melting a hole in the bulkhead. A thump came from the door. Were the soldiers preparing to charge in?

“That’s enough,” Leonidas said, when Mica had cut a semicircle into the bulkhead. He planted a hand on her shoulder and pushed her to the side.

“Really,” she said, eyeing him like she was considering applying the torch to his armor.

He ignored her, slipping his gauntleted fingers into the gap she had made. He found a grip he liked and pulled. Metal squealed and ripped as he tore open a piece of the bulkhead. Wires and broken conduits spilled out, along with a flame retardant insulation. He tore it away, shreds of metallic fluff flying into the dim light.

“I’ll have to burn a hole in the other side too,” Mica said, waving the blowtorch.

“No time.”

Leonidas turned sideways and slammed a side kick into the bulkhead. His boot went through the wall, the noise making Alisa jump. His foot got caught, but he maintained his balance, extracted it, and kicked three more times, battering a bigger opening. Then he grabbed it and tore the metal away further, making the hole large enough so he could wedge his armor through. Light streamed in from the corridor on the other side.

“You’re a beast, Leonidas,” Alisa murmured.

He looked back at her for a second, giving her that expression she had seen before, the wistful one he got sometimes when he told her he was as human as she was.

She groped for a way to say she had meant the words as a compliment, but he was already climbing through the hole. He fired at something—or someone—in the corridor, so Alisa hesitated to follow him.

“Clear,” he said a couple of seconds later.

Alisa pulled herself through the hole, her oxygen tank catching on the ragged rim. She managed to wriggle through and fell out on the other side without any grace. She almost landed on someone in a uniform who was rolling around on the deck, grabbing his knee. Leonidas picked up the rifle that the soldier must have dropped.

Alisa climbed to her feet, wincing in sympathy at the man’s gasps of pain. Mica clawed her way out, still carrying the blowtorch.

“This way to the lift,” Leonidas said, pointing for them to lead the way, as he walked sideways beside them, watching both ways, a rifle in one hand and a pistol in the other.

Alisa and Mica jogged through the corridor, likely sharing similar thoughts, that they weren’t cuffed anymore, that Leonidas was clearly protecting them, and that the odds of anyone thinking they were prisoners were slim. It couldn’t be helped now. They would just have to get out of here and back to their ship as quickly as possible. Alisa wished she had figured out how they would do that.

They made it to a lift without encountering anyone else, but shouts from behind them suggested the soldiers had burst into engineering and found them missing. It would not take long for them to figure out which way their intruders had gone.

“We’re heading back to the airlock, right?” Mica asked, reaching for the lift controls. “To see if we can reattach to the Nomad?”

“Wait,” Alisa said.

“I don’t think this is the time for that.”

“All those soldiers will still be on the Nomad, probably back in our cargo hold, ready to shoot at whoever presses a nose to the window of the hatch,” Alisa said. Further, she had no idea if the imperial ships were on the way. For all she knew, one of the Alliance warships might already have noticed the Star Nomad adrift and latched onto it. She doubted Beck, Alejandro, or Yumi had tried to pilot it anywhere.

“I don’t see what we can do about that from here,” Mica said.

Alisa faced Leonidas. “I was never in the infantry, but I seem to remember there being master controls for the Alliance and imperial combat armor, so that someone on their ship could walk the suit back to safety if a soldier was knocked out.”

“Many ships’ armor sets have such controls,” Leonidas said.

“Is there any way we could do something to disable all of the soldiers’ suits at once? Even if it wouldn’t do anything to the men inside, they would be forced to get out of their armor if it didn’t work, right? And then they would be easier targets for you if you charged into the cargo hold.”

He was shaking his head before she finished speaking. “The operators can override those auxiliary commands. No man would want to potentially be a puppet for a puppeteer.”

Alisa resisted the urge to point out that all imperial soldiers had been puppets for their emperor, deciding he might not appreciate that. “Is there any way to break something before they have a chance to recover and take control?”

“What if you demagnetized their boots?” Mica suggested. “Assuming the gravity is still out over there, they’d float away from the deck, and even if they got control back quickly, it would take them some time to get reoriented again and back to a surface they could grip.”

“Not that much time,” Leonidas said. The lift buzzed. He had his thumb on the button keeping the doors shut, and he frowned down at it. “It wouldn’t be a bad tactic if I was at the hatch, about to charge in, but if even a minute passed, they would be able to recover. They’d also be able to fire from free fall. That wouldn’t affect their ability to shoot.”

“But it would discombobulate them,” Alisa said, “give you an advantage.”

“Yes. Briefly.”

“So someone has to stay at the suit controls while you run back down to the airlock.”

“Splitting up would not be wise,” Leonidas said firmly.

“No, but I can’t think of anything wiser.”

Mica muttered something under her breath. It sounded pessimistic.

Alisa clung to the hope that they would be able to think up something creative to do to the soldiers’ combat armor that would buy her team more of an advantage. “Any idea where that master control panel would be?”

“The bridge,” Mica and Leonidas said at the same time.

“Oh,” Alisa said. “Any chance the way there won’t be well guarded?”

“No.” Leonidas sighed and hit the button for the bridge.

Chapter 18

The route to the bridge wasn’t as heavily guarded as Leonidas had suggested, perhaps because half of the ship’s complement of troops were on the Nomad and the other half were still on the engineering level, trying to figure out where their intruders had gone. Alisa doubted that would take long. The tug wasn’t exactly state-of-the-art, but it would have better internal sensors than the Nomad. She wagered the crew would be able to pick out the lone cyborg running around the ship.

Leonidas took out two more soldiers’ kneecaps on the way to the bridge, but that was the only resistance they faced as they ran through the long corridors. Double doors at the end of one of those corridors came into sight, and Alisa’s comm beeped.

“Now isn’t a good time, Beck,” she said as a greeting.

“Just thought you should know that the doc’s imperial buddies are on their way.”

“How many ships?”

“Three. Big ones too. They look like an even match for the Alliance warships.”

“All right, thanks. We’re trying to figure out a way to get back over there to join you so I can fly us away.”

“We’d appreciate that, Captain,” Beck said. “The doctor, especially. He’s fiddling with his pendant and praying. Or that might be cursing. Not quite sure. He likes to mix the two.”

“He’s not the paragon of religiosity that we first thought,” Alisa said, slowing down as they approached the bridge doors and Leonidas strode into the lead. “I’ll talk to you later.”

Leonidas paused before the double doors, a firearm still in each hand, but he had traded the pistol for a rifle he had taken from a soldier. Between the two weapons and his armor, he looked like the scourge of death. Alisa was glad she was behind him and not in his way. It was not a good day to be an Alliance soldier. She wished he were mowing down imperials instead.

“Stay here,” he said, nodding to the wall beside the doors.

They had not opened at his approach. He lowered the rifle attached to him with a strap and leaned the second against the wall next to Alisa and Mica. He didn’t hand it to them, perhaps still trying to help them by pursuing the prisoner ruse, but he put it within their reach. Now that they were in spacesuits instead of cuffs, Alisa doubted anyone would mistake them for prisoners. Unfortunately.

Leonidas stood so he could flatten his hands against the door and pull. He ripped it open as if it were made from rice paper. He charged inside, his rifle back in his hands. Shouts and blasts from blazers went off inside.

Alisa pressed her back to the wall and eyed the rifle propped next to her. Even though she didn’t want to fight against Alliance people, she felt cowardly for hanging back while Leonidas risked himself over and over again.

“Don’t even think about it,” Mica said, her voice punctuated by weapons fire from beyond the doors.

A streak of orange shot past, escaping into the corridor, and making Alisa glad she had her back to the wall. “I’m not,” she said.

The sounds of weapons discharging ceased, replaced by gasps and sobs of pain. Alisa winced. If she got out of this, she was going to find the money to outfit the Nomad with an armory full of stun guns. If they’d had any, Leonidas would not need to be blasting the kneecaps of everyone on board the tug.

“Captain Bennington,” his voice came from within the bridge, an unexpected iciness to his tone.

Alisa did not know if it was safe, but she crept through the doors. Several men and women were down around the room, many whimpering and clutching at injuries. Others were unconscious. She hoped they were only unconscious.

In the middle of it all, Leonidas towered in his red armor, a rifle pointed at the chest of a woman sprawled on the deck at his feet. From the doorway, Alisa could not see his face, but the chill that had been in his tone made her rush forward.

“Problem here?” she asked, carefully laying a hand on Leonidas’s armored forearm. “Ah, her kneecap is lower. And I believe she’s Commander Bennington now. We chatted earlier.”

Leonidas did not acknowledge her humor—or her. Standing next to him, she could now see inside his faceplate, to the ice in his blue eyes, and she felt certain that he was contemplating shooting.

“Leonidas?” Alisa whispered, glancing around to make sure nobody was grabbing for a weapon or leaping to their feet while Leonidas was distracted. Bennington, her graying red hair clipped short around an angular face full of terror, lay unmoving as she stared up at Leonidas. Nobody else was moving either, not yet.

Mica eased along the upper bridge, checking the workstations. Alisa nodded at her, glad she always stuck to business. A beeping came from a communications station, probably someone wanting an update on the capture of Leonidas.

As Alisa looked back to him, she noticed movement on the massive view screen that stretched from deck to ceiling and side to side at the front of the bridge. The Star Nomad was visible in the bottom corner of the screen, her engines silent, the ship adrift. Though she clearly wasn’t going anywhere, one of the warships must have seen that she had broken away from the tug. It was veering toward the Nomad, its massive body moving to come alongside the freighter, blocking out the influence from the sun, leaving her ship in shadow. Despite Beck’s words, Alisa did not see any sign of the imperial ships yet.

“That’s going to be a problem,” she said, wanting to ease past the tableau of Bennington and Leonidas and toward the helm, but she dared not leave his side. “Leonidas, will you tie her and the others up, please? And find a way to secure the doors? I’m sure her infantry soldiers will figure out where we are any second now.”

“She killed an entire platoon of my people,” Leonidas said, that coldness still in his voice, barely contained rage.

“In the war,” Alisa said slowly. “Right? The war is over now. Our peoples signed a treaty.”

“If the war was over, they wouldn’t be trying to capture me,” he said, his finger tight on the trigger of his rifle. “Commander?” he sneered. “She surrendered her last command. Her ship—the Basilisk, wasn’t it?—was all but destroyed, adrift in space. She surrendered to us, said she had hundreds of injured and that her sickbay was inoperable. We accepted her surrender, sent over a team of medics with my people to protect them and secure the ship. Her people were there, but she wasn’t. She fled in the only working life pod, used the cover of wrecked ships in the battlefield to slip away unnoticed. She had a remote and ordered a self-destruct of her ship from a distance, with my people on it. And hers.”

Leonidas never breathed hard, even after running and fighting, but Alisa could hear his breaths now, deep angry breaths as he stood poised, reliving that moment perhaps, debating whether to unleash his rage. Alisa groped for something to say that would calm him down. Just being here, she would be seen as a traitor to her people, but if they killed the commander, if she abetted in that killing in front of witnesses—and there were a half dozen of them conscious, writhing in pain but also watching the confrontation—she might never be able to set foot on an Alliance planet again.

“I had the prime minister and the chief financier backing the Alliance on my ship,” Bennington said slowly, staring defiantly at him and not begging for her life, though maybe she should have. Alisa doubted Leonidas would kill someone pleading for mercy. A soldier defying him might be another story. “I had to get them to safety. I couldn’t let them fall into your hands.”

“And so you blew up your ship?” he demanded. “With your people on it? With my people on it? The fighting was over and you’d surrendered. What you did was reprehensible. Inhumane.”

“It bought us the time we needed to get away, didn’t it? All of my people swore oaths to give their lives if necessary to overthrow the empire.”

“And they rewarded you with a promotion for that?” Leonidas asked in disgust. “For using the lives of hundreds of people to protect your financial backer?”

Alisa wanted to slide into the seat at the helm, to navigate the tug to block the ship easing closer to hers, but she feared if she stepped away from Leonidas, he would shoot. And that it wouldn’t be at a kneecap.

“Leonidas,” Alisa whispered, trying to press down on his arm to move the rifle away from Bennington’s chest. It did not budge. She might as well have tried to move a granite boulder.

“We didn’t have the resources at that point to risk losing anyone who could pay our troops,” Bennington said.

“No need to pay your troops if you kill them all before payday.”

“What do you know about it, mech? You never had to worry about money, you with your hundreds of thousands in implants. How many impoverished workers were taxed to starvation to pay for that?”

Three suns, this woman had the self-preservation instincts of a rock.

“You know, I can see you’re busy,” Alisa said, making her tone light, hoping it would distract Leonidas from his anger. “Why don’t I tie her up?”

She glanced at the view screen. Her window of opportunity for intercepting the warship was closing. Soon, it would be close enough to clamp onto the Nomad, to fasten its own airlock tube and send more troops over. Alisa would never be able to get her team to engineering to disable the grab beam on that warship. Meant for battle of every kind, it would have five times the troops that the tug claimed.

Yet, she did not lunge for the helm, too afraid of what would happen here if she did. With her hands shaking from fear and uncertainty, she knelt and eased between Leonidas and Bennington. As she grabbed the woman’s hands, intending to pull her up, she was well aware that she had put the muzzle of his weapon right between her shoulder blades. The spacesuit would do nothing to deflect a blast from the blazer rifle.

Leonidas made a disgusted noise and pointed his weapon toward the ceiling. “You’re a maniac, Marchenko.”

“And you would have already fired if you believed killing her was the right thing to do,” she said, her voice sounding more confident than she truly felt. She hauled Bennington to her feet. “I don’t think you have it in you to shoot someone who is defenseless.”

He grunted. “Don’t think too highly of me. I’m just a man.”

Bennington’s lip curled at that proclamation, as if she wanted to protest him being a “man,” but she was finally smart enough to hold her tongue.

“Man enough to find some rope and tie these people up?” Alisa asked, glancing again to the view screen.

This time, Leonidas glanced at it, too, finally seeing her problem. “Yes. Do what you mean to do.” He shouldered his rifle and grabbed Bennington’s arm. He ripped the front of her jacket off, making her gasp in pain, though her pain was surely less than that of the men and women he had shot. Swiftly, he tore the jacket into shreds to fashion makeshift ropes.

Trusting that the moment had passed and that he wouldn’t use one of those ropes to strangle her, Alisa leaped into the main pilot’s seat, clunking her oxygen tank on the back. Though she was far more familiar with one-and two-man Alliance fighter craft, she got the gist of the console layout quickly.

“Any luck over there, Mica?” she asked, calling up power from the engines. She did not want to ease into position the way the warship was. Instead, she gently fired the port thrusters, shifting the alignment of the tug’s blunt nose.

“I’ve pulled up the controls for the suits,” Mica said. “I can see where their people are on our ship.”

“Did you say our ship? Does that mean you’re staying with it instead of job hunting elsewhere?”

“After this? You are a maniac.”

“Was that a no?” Alisa had the nose of the tug lined up perfectly. She buckled her harness. They would probably just bounce off the warship’s shields, but with luck, her surprise would be enough to divert the craft away from the Nomad before it could clamp on.

“I think I’ve found the controls to do what we talked about,” Mica said, ignoring Alisa’s question. “To demagnetize their boots. I wonder if—hm, maybe I can short something out and make it permanent. I’m not sure. But either way, I’ll have to do it one at a time.”

“Hold that thought. And brace for impact.”

“Impact?” Mica blurted, spinning in the chair she had claimed.

Alisa did not pause to explain further. The warship might have noticed their movement by now. She brought the thrusters to maximum for a short burst.

The tug did not surge forward like a racehorse springing from the gates, but it moved quickly enough to take everyone by surprise, including her target. The warship did not have time to veer away as the tug roared in. It slammed into the side of its sister craft with a jolt that would have thrown Alisa from her seat if she hadn’t buckled herself in. Someone did hit the deck behind her as the sound of the crash, warping and crumpling metal, filled her ears.

They had not simply hit the warship’s shields and bounced off, as Alisa had expected. The other ship must have lowered its shields so that it could latch onto the Nomad. She smiled viciously as her console lit up, and alarms started wailing in the tug. That warship wouldn’t be latching onto anything now.

Barely checking the alarms, she reversed the thrusters, planning to back them up so she could maneuver the tug alongside the Nomad. She, Mica, and Leonidas still had to get back, so they needed to be close enough to extend the airlock tube.

But the tug did not move. The painful grinding of metal on metal sounded, and that was it.

“Alisa,” Mica groaned. “You got us stuck.”

Alisa tried the thrusters again, but the console only beeped alerts at her. The ship itself was unresponsive.

“Something that will be sure to delight them,” Mica added, pointing at the screen.

The damaged Alliance warship filled most of the view, but a swath of starry space was visible in the corner. Another ship was coming into sight in that space. An imperial dreadnought.

Chapter 19

The screech of blazer fire shook Alisa from the stare she had locked onto the imperial ship. She leaped from the pilot’s seat, ignoring the alarms wailing and the lights flashing all over the consoles on the bridge. Leonidas stood to the side of the double doors, shooting down the corridor. If the tug’s soldiers hadn’t known where their intruders were before, they surely did after that crash.

“Mica?” Alisa ran to her station, both to check on her progress with the suits and because it would get her out of the line of fire from the doorway.

“I disabled two of them,” Mica said. “I’m not sure if it’s permanent or not. I tried to make it that way.”

“How many men left to do?” Hiding in the dark cubby on the Nomad, Alisa had gotten the impression of close to twenty men stomping around, engaging in cat and mouse with Leonidas.

“Nineteen.”

“Ah.” Alisa had hoped she had overestimated—that would be a lot of angry soldiers waiting in the cargo hold upon their return. Even though Leonidas had clearly shown he could play cat and mouse with the best of them and that he could handle superior numbers, that seemed a lot to ask, even for a cyborg.

“There are more of them coming,” Leonidas said over his shoulder as he ducked behind the wall to avoid fire. Crimson and orange beams lanced through the doorway, one striking the view screen. It exploded with an angry snapping of electricity. Smoke streamed into the air, and the view went black.

“Can you fight a way through them so we can get to the lift?” Alisa asked. She looked around the bridge, hoping to spot some back door that she had missed, but there was only the one exit.

“Not a chance,” Leonidas said, “but we might be able to get to the first intersection there. They haven’t advanced that far yet. If I remember the layout of this ship correctly, there are some maintenance ladder wells that could take us back down to the airlock level.”

Alisa winced at the idea of trying to navigate rungs in the clunky spacesuit. Would Leonidas even be able to fit inside a ladder well in that big armor of his?

“We better go soon if we want to have a chance,” he added. “Their whole crew will be here in a minute.”

Another red beam sizzled through the doorway, this time smashing into the helm.

“Mica?” Alisa asked. “How much time do you need?”

“Ten minutes and a foxy lady,” Mica said, her hands flying over a set of holo controls.

“I’d get you one if I could. Ah, you are referring to the drink, right?”

“Yes.”

Leonidas unleashed another barrage of fire while muttering something about having used up all his rust bangs on the Nomad. He raised his voice. “They’re regrouping, and I think more men just arrived. Marchenko, we have to go now.”

“Come on, Mica.”

“Just three more.”

Alisa pulled Mica out of the seat. “It’ll have to be good enough.”

They joined Leonidas beside the doorway, staying out of the soldiers’ line of sight. Leonidas fired a couple of shots down the corridor, but he also held something in his left hand, a blazer pistol he had snatched from a fallen bridge officer. In the seconds when nobody was firing, Alisa could hear it humming softly.

“What are you doing?” she whispered, gripping Mica’s arm because she kept glancing back toward the station she had been using.

“Overloading it,” he said as the humming increased. His mouth moved, like he was counting, then he leaned out, and fired his rifle several times before throwing the pistol down the corridor.

It skidded along the deck like a hockey puck belted across the arena. Just before it reached the corner where the soldiers were firing from, it blew up, exploding with enough force to make the walls tremble.

“Come on,” Leonidas said. “Stay right behind me.”

He charged into the corridor, not waiting for a response.

Trusting Mica to follow, Alisa raced after him, running as fast as she could in the awkward spacesuit. She did her best to keep up with Leonidas, who blitzed toward the black smoke filling the corridor, firing as he went. Return shots zipped toward him. One slammed into his shoulder. That one might have struck Alisa if he hadn’t been there.

Firing wildly, he stopped just past the intersection he had mentioned. Thanks to the explosion, pockmarks damaged the deck ahead of him, and soot coated the walls. The smoke still clogging the air did not keep the soldiers from firing. Alisa sprinted around the corner, ducking as a blazer bolt streaked past Leonidas. As she went, she waved frantically for Mica to follow. She needn’t have bothered. Mica crashed into her in her haste to avoid more blazer bolts lancing down the corridor.

“This way,” Mica said, passing her to take the lead.

Leonidas ducked around the corner, but did not follow them. Instead, he kept leaning out and firing at the soldiers, keeping them from charging up to the intersection.

Alisa hesitated, not wanting to leave him behind. His shoulder smoldered from where he had taken that direct hit, and a dozen other dents and scorch marks marred his armor. Had any of the attacks reached flesh? How injured was he under that armor?

“Go,” Leonidas barked, pointing his chin toward Mica’s retreating back.

Reluctantly, Alisa obeyed. Even if she stayed, what could she have done to help? Besides, he knew the layout of the ship and where they were going. He could catch up.

Mica led them around two turns, almost sprinting past the ladder well.

“Here,” Alisa called, pointing to the compact hole in the side of a corridor.

Mica cursed as she skidded to a stop and backtracked. “Your armored buddy will never fit in that.”

Alisa, staring at the narrow ladder well, was thinking the same thing.

“He’ll have to find another way down then,” she said, though she hated the idea of leaving him where he would be forced to fight so many, forced to kill if he wanted to avoid capture. That was everything she had hoped to avoid by coming along.

Someone cried out in the distance, and the sounds of the firefight continued to echo through the corridors.

Mica swung onto the rungs, her large, awkward spacesuit boots slipping off more than once as she descended. Her oxygen tank banged against the wall behind her, and the welding blowtorch she still carried caught in the ladder.

“You might want to leave that behind,” Alisa said.

Mica grunted, freed it, and continued down, not relinquishing the tool. Maybe she planned to make more doors along the way. Alisa followed her, having little more luck navigating in the spacesuit. More than once, she almost fell, but they made it to the bottom deck, the one that held the airlock hatch.

They did not run into anyone as they raced through the long, white corridors. All of the soldiers must have been on the bridge level, trying to get to their commander, trying to defeat Leonidas. Alisa did not see how he could find his way back down here to join them, especially if he could not fit inside the ladder well. She blinked back tears, focusing on the way ahead. This wasn’t the time to mourn. She needed to get back to her ship.

Mica ran around a corner and came to the dead end where they had boarded earlier. Drying blood stained the deck, but the soldiers Leonidas had shot had disappeared, dragging themselves to sickbay or up to join the fight.

Mica pressed her palms to the hatch on either side of the window, clunking her faceplate as she peered out.

“Can you see the Nomad?” Alisa asked, crowding behind her.

“Yes, but there’s no way the tube will reach over there. You should have been steering us closer to the ship instead of crashing into another one.”

“That other one was about to lock its grab beam onto the Nomad. We wouldn’t have had any chance of getting to it if they’d hauled it away.”

“What chance do we have now?” Mica demanded, stepping back so Alisa could look.

“Plenty. We’re in spacesuits, and that’s space.” Alisa waved at the gap between them and the Nomad.

“Are you crazy? We don’t have rocket packs. We can’t steer ourselves over there. We’ll just end up floating helplessly until our oxygen runs out and we die of asphyxiation.”

“Quit being so dramatic. All we have to do is make sure we push off in a straight line.”

“A straight—that ship must be a thousand meters away, easy. Nobody can jump that straight.”

“It’s not like we need to land on a half tindark coin,” Alisa said. “Anywhere on the freighter, and we can grab on, magnetize our boots, and walk along the hull to the hatch.”

“You are crazy. What happens if we miss?”

Shouts sounded down the corridor behind them, along with the firing of weapons. They had left that noise behind as they descended the ladder well, so if they were hearing it again now, that meant that soldiers were down here, on this level. Alisa and Mica didn’t have much time.

“And what happens if we make it?” Mica demanded, grabbing Alisa’s arm. “There’s a huge squadron of very irritated soldiers with boot problems in there. They’ll shoot the first thing that comes in the door.”

Heavy footfalls thundered in a corridor near them, someone running in their direction.

“Inside,” Alisa whispered, tugging open the hatch to the airlock. The outer hatch remained shut—it would take a minute for the ship to depressurize the inside so they could jump off. She hoped they had that minute.

Mica unleashed a stream of curses as she shoved herself into the airlock. As Alisa stepped across the threshold after her, a familiar figure raced around a corner and sprinted toward them. Smoke wafted from the back of Leonidas’s crimson armor, his faceplate was cracked, and he was limping. None of that slowed him down.

Someone fired around the corner toward his back, but he spun and loosed a few bolts, driving the soldier back into hiding. He lunged into the airlock, barely keeping from knocking Alisa over as he hit the button that made the hatch slide shut behind him.

“Cycle the lock,” he barked.

“Already on it,” Mica said.

Alisa made sure her magnetic boots had a hold on the deck as air hissed out of the chamber.

“I can’t help but notice the tube isn’t extended and that your freighter is way over there,” Leonidas said, breathing only slightly heavily after his crazy run.

“That’s because cyborgs are extremely observant,” Alisa said. “We’re jumping.”

A red beam streaked down the corridor, slamming into the thick door.

“Soon, I hope,” Alisa added. “Mica?”

“Any way to keep them from overriding the hatch controls?” Leonidas said, facing the window.

His shoulder blocked most of Alisa’s view, but she glimpsed armored soldiers sprinting down the corridor now that Leonidas couldn’t shoot them.

“Move,” Mica said, hefting the blowtorch.

Wordlessly, Leonidas did so, flattening his back to the wall. Mica welded the metal around the spot where the hatch slid into the wall. The first of the soldiers reached the controls on the other side.

“I’m opening the door,” Leonidas said, shifting to the outer hatch while Mica continued to work.

Alisa knocked on the window. The soldier trying to open the inner hatch looked at her. She had absolutely nothing to say to him and was only trying to buy Mica time, so the metal would melt—or harden. Alisa didn’t know exactly what Mica was doing, but she widened her eyes and pointed behind the man. He scowled at her and returned to the controls.

“Well, that bought us almost a second,” Alisa muttered.

Mica backed away, turning off the blowtorch as the outer hatch opened, and the vastness of space stretched before them. Since the airlock chamber was already depressurized, there was no tug or any sensation of currents stirring. However, a faint hiss reached Alisa’s ears.

She crept up behind Leonidas, touching a hand to his back. “Is that you? Is your suit damaged?”

“Is it damaged?” Mica asked, joining them at the outer hatch. “He looks like he got run over by a herd of Senekda buffalo.”

Clunks and thuds came from the hatch behind them. Mica must have succeeded in jamming it. Either that, or the men realized they couldn’t open it now, not with the outer hatch open. Of course, they might be able to override the interior controls and close that outer hatch.

“I’m venting air,” Leonidas agreed. “We’re jumping? Is that the plan?”

“Yes, how’s your aim?” Alisa asked.

“Probably better than yours. Hang on to me.” He grunted and stepped to the edge, gripping the jamb with both hands and looking back at them.

“Your cyborg isn’t modest, Captain,” Mica said.

“I don’t think modesty is listed as a desirable attribute on cyborg recruiting posters.” Not sure where to grab him, Alisa opted for the strap of the rifle slung across his torso. He wouldn’t let that fall off, she was sure.

Mica, still carrying the blowtorch, wrapped her free arm around his neck and climbed onto his back. Alisa almost made a comment about her revising her bedroom fantasies, but more thuds came from behind them, and Leonidas crouched to push off. Alisa swallowed, fear riding in her chest despite her proclamation that the freighter was huge and hitting it would be easy.

Leonidas pushed off more gently than she expected, stretching his arms out above his head, like a swimmer diving into a pool. They sailed into the blackness of space, stars suddenly visible in all directions. The view took Alisa’s breath away even as it terrified her.

If Leonidas miscalculated and they missed…

Fortunately, they seemed to be on track to hit the freighter. It grew larger as they sailed across the void, the other Alliance warships, along with two imperial vessels, coming into view to the sides.

“We’re going to make it,” Alisa said.

She gripped Mica’s arm with her free one and caught an amazed expression on her engineer’s face as she gazed around them. Alisa felt that same sense of wonder. She knew they still had to deal with the soldiers inside the Nomad, but for now, utter peace and silence surrounded them, their suits protecting them from the cold.

Until Alisa felt something pop.

Alarm surged through her. Had something happened to her suit? No, a reverberation came through her hand where she was touching Leonidas. A tiny stream of air shot out from his damaged suit.

Alisa’s first thought was to worry that he wouldn’t have enough oxygen to make it. Then Mica patted her frantically on the shoulder and pointed ahead of them. That tiny stream of air, released under pressure, was altering their path slightly. And they were still far enough from the Nomad that a slight change of angle mattered.

Alisa’s earlier alarm turned into terror as their path changed—it would take them over the top of the ship and out into space. She shifted her grip so she could clamp her hand over the leak, but it was too late.

They would overshoot the Nomad and be stranded until someone noticed them and picked them up. Or didn’t.

Leonidas’s helmet swiveled toward Mica. As they continued to sail through space, he reached back and grabbed her arm. Alisa frowned in confusion. Then she realized it wasn’t her arm that he had snagged but the blowtorch. She let him have it. He must have pressed something because a razor popped out of the wrist of his armor. He jabbed it into the gas tank on the blowtorch, then twisted it and his arm back at an awkward angle. The force emitted from the tank must have been greater than what was coming out of his suit, because their course soon adjusted. Once again, the Nomad lay within their path.

Mica grinned and thumped him on the shoulder.

Alisa smiled smugly at her, wishing she could say that her cyborg, as Mica had referred to him, had no need to be modest.

They approached the hull of the freighter, Leonidas angling them toward the back of the craft. Alisa lost all feeling of smugness, of anything except for shock, when the cargo hold hatch came into view. It wasn’t shut, as it should be. Instead, it gaped open, the dark interior of her ship open to the elements of space.

Chapter 20

Alisa crawled as quickly as she could along the exterior of the Nomad without losing her boots’ magnetic grip on the hull. She had to get to the cargo hold, see why the hatch was open, and figure out if the rest of the ship had been closed off or if… it hadn’t. If it hadn’t, everything would have been blown out into space. Even if it had, everything in the cargo hold would be gone. She grimaced, thinking of Yumi’s chickens.

Leonidas, who was leading their crawl along the hull, stopped, tapped her shoulder, and pointed down. Though impatient, Alisa paused to look. And gape. A soldier in combat armor drifted past, arms waving, a rifle still gripped in his hand. She tensed, thinking he might manage to shoot, but he appeared too distressed by his situation to notice them.

Leonidas continued toward the hatch, maneuvering around the edge and disappearing from sight. Mica and Alisa reached the spot at the same time. Alisa poked her head around the edge, not sure what to expect. She glanced at the dim corner where the chicken pen had been kept. The birds and the makeshift fencing and netting Yumi had erected were gone, as were some items that hadn’t been bolted down.

Shaking her head, she climbed down the edge of the hatch until she could set her boots on the deck. Leonidas was already halfway across the hold, heading for the stairs leading up to the walkway. Landing behind Alisa, Mica planted her feet, then hit the button to close the hatch.

Alisa barely noticed. She strode after Leonidas, trying to see up to the corridor leading into the crew areas. Was the hatch up there open? Closed?

With his long legs, Leonidas made it up the stairs first. Alisa scrambled after him, almost tripping. She cursed the awkward suit, even if it had kept her alive so far in the vacuum of space.

She caught up with Leonidas at a hatch that was thankfully closed. He was knocking at it with the butt of his rifle, probably ready to spin the weapon around if anyone unfriendly came to check on them.

Mica had headed toward engineering instead of joining them. Lights flickered on, and machinery clanked, the oxygen regeneration system being activated and gravity being restored. Alisa appreciated her dedication to getting the ship in working order again, but she was currently more worried about Beck and Yumi. She bumped Leonidas inadvertently as she tried to see through the small window in the hatch.

He stepped aside so she could peer through. Alisa almost laughed at what she saw. Two chickens were running amok in the corridor as Yumi chased after them, trying to gather them up. Beck stood in his combat armor, leaning against the wall, holding up a finger toward the window. He held a rifle in his other hand. Had he played a role in getting rid of the soldiers? He must have.

“Life support has been returned to the entire ship,” came Mica’s voice over the comm speakers.

Beck ambled forward and opened the hatch.

“What happened?” Alisa blurted, rushing in and gripping his shoulder. She would have given Yumi a squeeze, too, but one of the chickens escaped and was heading toward the cargo hold. Yumi groaned and chased after it.

“A little chicanery,” Beck said, “and some time spent going over the operations training videos for a Nebula Rambler 880 to learn how to override the ship’s safety system and open the hatch to space when people are inside the cargo hold. People that were oddly floating around and cursing a lot even before we got the doors open.” He tilted his head and raised his eyebrows toward her. “Do you have any idea how hokey and out-of-date those videos are?”

“Yes…” A chicken ran past Alisa’s boots. “How did you get the chickens out of the cargo hold while not letting the soldiers out?”

“Yumi said she had to feed them a while back.” Beck shrugged. “The soldiers weren’t really mad at us. They did pry us out of navigation so we couldn’t fly anywhere, as if those horrible videos could have shown us how. Did you know the woman speaking in them wears striped polyester pants and has collar lapels that flare out almost to her elbows? Was that what passed for fashion in the last century?”

“All you need to do is look at the rec room carpet to know the answer to that.” Alisa frowned. “How did Yumi go from feeding the chickens to getting them up here?”

“She took them up one at a time, saying they needed their medication.” Beck shrugged again. “She’s got a sweet and innocent smile. They believed her. I did feel a little bad sending the soldiers out into space after they were fairly reasonable with us—even if they were swearing up and down that they were going to strangle the mech and anyone sympathizing with him—but I figure their armor will keep them alive long enough for their ships to pick them up.”

“Captain?” Alejandro said, leaning out of the hatchway to NavCom. “I’d appreciate it if you saved the briefing for later and piloted us out of trouble before anyone figures out what’s going on.”

“It’s good to see you, too, Doctor,” Alisa said dryly. “By the way, is there any chance you have the antidote to prienzene gas in your medical kit? Mica and I breathed some in.” She did not know if it had been enough to cause long-term damage, but she could still feel the uncomfortable swelling in the back of her throat along with a dull ache behind her sternum.

“The antidote? No.”

“Not enough room in your bag after packing that orb?” She did not manage to keep the bitterness out of her voice. What had she expected? That he would anticipate running into people that would hurl poisonous gases at him during his journey?

“I can make a compound to accelerate and enhance your body’s ability to flush exogenous toxins,” Alejandro said. “You don’t look that bad, so that should suffice.”

Should. Alisa was not sure if she should find that word comforting but decided to do so. She also decided not to think about how he had been contemplating that her death might be convenient for his mission. He shouldn’t have a reason to want Mica out of the way, so with luck, he would make the same substance for both of them.

“Good,” she said and gave him a warm smile in case it would help endear her to him. “Thank you.”

Alisa patted Beck on his armored shoulder—he was looking concerned over this talk of poisonous gas—then headed to NavCom. If Alejandro would fix up a special compound for her, the least she could do was comply with his suggestion to pilot them out of the area. Besides, she agreed with the sentiment. The sooner they got out of here, the better.

“We’re glad to have you back, Captain,” Beck said firmly, waving at his chest and pointing in the direction Yumi had gone—he also waved to include the wayward chicken darting around. “I’ll prepare a celebratory dinner if you can get us away from all of these party crashers.”

“I’ll do my best.”

In NavCom, Alisa slid into the pilot’s seat—she wanted to collapse and take a few minutes to gather herself, but there was no time. Her fingers flying, she steered them away from the tug and the warship she had crashed the tug into. The warship was in the process of extricating itself, and Alisa wanted to be far away when it regained room to maneuver. She had no doubt that its commander would be livid with her as soon as he or she found out who had been responsible for that mess.

The other two Alliance warships still flanked the Nomad, but they did not attempt to pursue, nor did they maneuver to use their grab beams, not with the three big imperial ships looming in a triangular formation in front of them. Any ship that wanted to grab the Nomad would have to lower its shields to do so. Alisa’s plans for escape hinged on the hope that neither side would trust the other enough to risk that. She wasn’t about to comm anyone to ask. She simply guided her freighter downward, away from both sets of ships. The green orb of Perun’s moon filled the space ahead, and she headed for it, figuring she would disappear behind it and get out of the other ships’ lines of sight—and out of their commanders’ minds—before once again setting a course for Arkadius.

The proximity alarm beeped as one of the imperial cruisers charged away from the pack. It flew past the Alliance ships, arrowing straight after the Nomad.

“Damn it,” Alisa cursed, pushing the engines to maximum, no longer worrying about stealthily sneaking away.

The cruiser surged to its maximum, which was far greater than the freighter’s. Alisa weaved as she flew toward the moon, hoping vainly that providing a busy target would give their grab beam operator a hard time. Something brushed against the Nomad’s shields, a first attempt to snatch them. She flew like a drunk, a calculating drunk. Maybe if she could reach the moon’s orbit and—

The second attempt to latch onto them worked, and the Nomad halted with an alarming jolt.

“Not again,” she groaned, slamming her fist against the console.

“More trouble?” Leonidas asked, walking into navigation, his helmet under his arm, his crimson suit so battered and soot-marked that it looked like he had dragged it out of a junkyard. Or a dumpster.

“You could say that. Any chance I can talk you into rolling down a window and throwing the doctor’s orb outside for them?”

Leonidas lifted an eyebrow.

The comm flashed, and she slapped her palm on the button, giving it a surly glower.

“Captain of the civilian freighter Star Nomad,” a male voice said. “As you are no doubt aware, we have restrained your ship.”

“Must be your people,” Alisa muttered, not bothering to mute the comm. “They have the bureaucratic gift for using a lot of words to state the obvious.”

“You will be permitted to fly away, despite damages done to our university library, but we require that you leave behind a sphere-shaped artifact. We are preparing to board and pick it up. If you wish our generous offer to release you to remain in effect, you will have it waiting and will not resist us.”

Not surprisingly, Alejandro showed up in the hatchway behind Leonidas to hear this. Alisa scowled at him, then ignored both men to reply to the imperial bureaucrat.

“This is Captain Marchenko,” Alisa said. “If you try to board my ship, I’ll blow up your sphere-shaped artifact. It’s been a nice paperweight for my desk, but I’m sure I can replace it with a moon rock.”

Alejandro smacked a palm to his forehead and ran his hand down his face. The faintest hint of a smile curved Leonidas’s lips upward.

“If you destroy the artifact,” the imperial speaker said, “we will destroy your ship.”

“Then it’s going to be a bad day for all of us.” Alisa leaned back in her seat, prepared to wait out his bluff. She hoped it was a bluff.

“Captain,” Alejandro said slowly. “May I suggest—”

“No.”

Alejandro’s eyebrows rose.

“Leonidas, I do wish you’d accept my offer of employment,” Alisa said, “because I’d love to be able to order you to carry wayward passengers out of NavCom for me.”

Alejandro scowled at Leonidas, as if he’d been the one to make the impertinent comment. Alisa did not see if he returned the scowl, because her sensors showed one of the other ships moving away from the cluster. It was one of the Alliance warships.

The grab beam disappeared as the imperial ship raised its shields, rotating to turn its weapons toward the newcomer.

Alisa did not question her luck. She immediately reengaged the thrusters, returning them to her original course. The other ships would have trouble locking onto her if there was a moon in the way.

“They let us go?” Alejandro asked.

“Clearly, my threat made them tremble in distress,” Alisa said.

Focused on the path ahead, she did not look back to see if he rolled his eyes at her or made a rude gesture.

The comm flashed again. Alisa thought about ignoring it, but the call was coming from one of the Alliance ships rather than the imperial craft.

“Yes?” she answered.

“Well, that’s slightly more professional than answering with, ‘What?’” a familiar voice said. Tomich.

Alisa did not know whether to be relieved by his contact or not. She had left him with a mess.

“Commander,” she said carefully. “Are you going to let us go?”

She realized that it was his ship that had advanced on the imperial vessel. They were now facing each other, posturing.

“Us,” Tomich said, his voice flat.

He must have seen enough or heard enough in his reports to believe she had been working with Leonidas. She did not see any point in denying it now. He would think less of her if she lied. They had been colleagues once, sharing more than a few drinks over lost comrades, and she did not want to intentionally give him a reason to feel distaste toward her.

“For the moment. They paid their fare. I’m taking them to—” Alisa glanced at Alejandro, “—where they want to go.”

Tomich was silent for so long that she glanced at the comm to see if the channel was still open. She also checked the sensors to make sure he hadn’t decided to give chase, imperial ships notwithstanding.

“The next time we meet,” Tomich finally said, “you owe me one.”

“I will be glad to buy you a sake while we watch a forceball game.”

“One sake? That’s it?”

“Two? I’m just a lowly freighter operator now, you know. I don’t have a regular Alliance paycheck to rely on.”

Tomich grumbled something under his breath, then sighed. “I have a feeling I’m going to regret this day.”

“Thank you, Commander,” she said, taking all hints of sarcasm and irreverence out of her voice.

The comm light winked out. Alisa suspected that the next time she ran into Tomich, he would be as likely to punch her as accept a drink from her. It was also possible that his superiors would punish him for letting the Nomad go—and put out a warrant for her arrest.

She sighed and looked back at the two men in her hatchway, wondering about her sanity for continuing on with them.

Epilogue

Alisa stood up, turning the autopilot on to navigate the start of their journey to Arkadius. The stars were bright and clear, and the sensors showed no sign of pursuers, imperial, Alliance, or otherwise. She decided she could risk a shower. Maybe even bed. The lights had dimmed a while ago, signaling the ship’s night cycle, and she had finally stopped having to run to the lav. Apparently, Alejandro’s toxin-clearing potion had involved kicking her kidneys into overdrive.

It had been a couple of hours since they had cruised away from Perun’s moon, leaving the damaged Alliance ships glaring across the stars at the imperial ships. She trusted they wouldn’t start a war with each other. The Alliance could call in a lot of allies, and with the Star Nomad—and Leonidas and Alejandro—gone, the imperials had nothing left to fight over. She just hoped she would be allowed to approach Arkadius when they arrived in a week. Just because Tomich had let her go didn’t mean that his superiors would not put out the word for her capture.

“Marchenko,” Leonidas said, stepping out of the dim corridor and into NavCom.

He wore soft black gym pants and a gray T-shirt, no sign of his uniform jacket tonight. The T-shirt fit him like a second skin, and Alisa made herself look away, thinking of Mica’s admonitions about letting her feelings get them into trouble. As if Alisa couldn’t get into plenty of trouble without feelings ever coming into play. She admitted that her actions might not have been the wisest, even if they had possibly resulted in less loss of human life than if she had simply let Leonidas charge onto the Alliance ship with rifles blaring, no thoughts of choosing non-vital targets in his mind.

“Still not calling me Alisa, eh?” she asked.

“If I did, you might take it as a sign to call me Leo.” His mouth twisted with distaste. “You’ve defaulted to that a couple of times.”

She had defaulted to “mech,” too, which she regretted. “I could call you Hieronymus,” she offered, since that was the name on his arrest warrant, even if it was a mouthful.

His mouth twisted further. “I don’t know if I’d answer to that. It was my grandfather’s name, and I always thought it was horrible. My fellow officers just called me Adler.”

“What do your brothers call you?”

“Mech.”

Alisa blinked. “Seriously?”

He had said that he and his brothers did not get along fabulously, that one had even joined the Alliance, but this sounded like outright antagonism. How could they feel that way about him? Even if he was supposed to be the enemy to her, she couldn’t imagine him ever acting with anything but honor. She wished she could look at her own record and know she had always acted so.

“Not to my face,” Leonidas said, “but I’ve heard them talking to each other about me when they thought I couldn’t hear.”

“They sound like lovely people.”

“They’re quite a bit younger than I am. They don’t know why I joined.” His hand flicked toward his forearm, maybe to indicate more than joining, but also the implants.

“Why did you?” she asked, looking into his eyes.

He did not meet her gaze, instead staring at the stars on the view screen. Alisa knew there wasn’t much exciting to see out there—she had checked and double-checked before allowing herself to think of showering.

“I need to stop at Starfall Station on the way to Arkadius,” Leonidas said. Pretending he hadn’t heard her question? “There are tech smiths there. I need to get my armor repaired and thought it would be good to do so before we visit Starseers unannounced.”

Alisa nodded. “That’s not a problem. As you said, it’s on the way.”

The Nomad could use some new parts, too, as Mica was quick to point out on a daily basis. And the airlock hatch needed repairs. They were lucky the ship was still spaceworthy after the soldiers had forced their way in.

“The doctor seems certain that we’ll find trouble on Arkadius,” Leonidas said dryly.

“Trouble finds him wherever he and his orb go.”

“Odd. He said the same thing about you.”

“Me? As if getting waylaid in the library was my fault. Or getting jumped by Alliance ships trying to leave the planet.”

He winced. “No, that was because of me.”

“I just try my best to improve uncomfortable situations.” Alisa shifted and patted the seat of her chair, where a stretch of engineer tape held a rip together.

“Uncomfortable situations? That’s an understatement, isn’t it?” His gaze shifted from the stars to her face.

“Not to an optimist. Right now, I’m optimistically being positive that we’ll reach the Starseer temple on Arkadius and both find what we’re looking for.”

“You believe your daughter is there?”

She wished that were the case, but she was tempering her optimism on that matter. “That would be ideal, but at the least, I believe they’ll know where I can find her.”

He was holding her gaze now, his eyes warm with sympathy. She hadn’t seen that from him, and she didn’t know what to say. Maybe she wasn’t expected to say anything. The urge to lean against him for support crept into her, but she did not give in to it. She was the captain. Captains did not lean on others for support, certainly not their passengers.

“I spoke with Dominguez earlier,” he said quietly. “He told me about how you threatened him on my behalf.”

“Oh?” Alisa wouldn’t have been surprised if Alejandro had lied to Leonidas, implying he hadn’t wanted to abandon him. But then, she hadn’t quite figured Alejandro out yet. One moment, he was pretending religion meant something to him, and the next, he was proving that he would do anything and sacrifice anyone to complete that mission of his. “And are you annoyed? He said you would happily sacrifice yourself for him and his orb quest.”

Leonidas did not appear annoyed. He looked mellower than she had ever seen him. Maybe because the lighting was dim, and he was wearing the clothes he probably slept in. Except he would take the shirt off to sleep. She remembered the time he had answered the door in the middle of the night with only pants on, then found herself blushing at the memory for some reason. Perhaps because it was easy to picture him that way again with that T-shirt hiding little of his musculature.

“Perhaps not happily,” he said, one corner of his mouth curving upward. “I appreciate that you cared enough to help.” His head tilted to the side, his expression turning faintly bemused. Apparently, he hadn’t had the same revelation that Mica had shared in regard to why Alisa wanted to help him. He stepped forward and rested a hand on her shoulder. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” she whispered.

She licked her lips, aware of how close he was. She could almost feel the heat radiating from his body. There was nothing sexual about his gesture or the look he was giving her—if anything, his grave nod seemed to be a gesture that one gave to a comrade. An appreciated comrade, perhaps, but nothing more.

That was fine, she told herself firmly. As she had stated on several occasions, he definitely wasn’t her type. He didn’t get her humor, and she didn’t even think he could laugh. Besides, she had not been at Jonah’s funeral, hadn’t had time to formally sit down and say goodbye. It was far too soon to think of relationships with other men. It would feel like a betrayal to his spirit to turn her back on him so quickly.

As logical as her thoughts were, her body did not quite grasp them, and she found herself thinking about how long it had been since she’d had sex. Jonah might not have been gone from the universe for long, but it had been nearly a year and a half since she’d been home on leave. The warmth of Leonidas’s hand on her shoulder made her imagine his touch in other places, and she wondered if kissing him would be similar to or different from kissing another man. What would he do if she tried? Be surprised and step back? Be surprised and enjoy it? Not be surprised? He was perceptive enough in other matters, so it seemed crazy to think that he wouldn’t be aware of the effect he could have on a woman.

A throat cleared in the corridor.

Alisa jumped back, heat flushing her cheeks as if she had been caught doing something she shouldn’t. No, just thinking libidinous thoughts…

Leonidas simply lowered his arm and turned, no hint of red tingeing his cheeks. Probably because he hadn’t been thinking libidinous thoughts.

“Leonidas,” came Alejandro’s voice from the corridor, his tone neutral.

Had he seen Leonidas with his hand on her shoulder? Had he seen her drooling on him?

“May I speak with you?” Alejandro added.

“Yes.” Leonidas gave her that nod again and said, “Goodnight, Marchenko—Alisa.”

She leaned against the back of the pilot’s seat, watching him walk out and once again told herself that she was not developing feelings for him, and she definitely wasn’t melting into a puddle because he had deigned to use her first name.

He and Alejandro disappeared down the corridor toward their cabins. Their conversation wasn’t going to be held anywhere so open as the mess hall.

Alisa checked the sensors and told herself to get that shower she had been thinking about—perhaps there was a reason Leonidas and his enhanced olfactory senses hadn’t given her anything more than a friendly pat on the shoulder. Yet, she found herself glancing at the comm console, thinking of eavesdropping again. It had given her some good intelligence last time—and shown her what an ass Alejandro was. If he was planning something that could affect her and her ship when they got to Arkadius, shouldn’t she know about it? Or was it just that she wanted to know what he was saying about her, if anything?

Grumbling about her questionable morality, Alisa closed the hatch, slid into the pilot’s seat, and flipped through the switches to open the comm in Alejandro’s cabin.

“She said we could stop at Starfall,” Leonidas was saying.

“No mention of an extra fee?” Alejandro asked dryly.

“No.”

“All right, good. I don’t trust the Starseers to have any interest in the empire or want to help us. Having your armor repaired to 100% could be important.”

“I may not be very useful against them,” Leonidas said. “My mind is no different from yours.”

“Some of their attacks and defenses strike the mind. Others strike the body. I’ll do my best not to pick a fight with any of them, of course, but we need to be ready.”

“I’m always ready.”

“The gods themselves can be surprised on a beautiful day,” Alejandro said, quoting scripture.

“Is that supposed to be a warning about letting my guard down?”

“Advice only. I want to part ways from Marchenko and this ship when we reach Arkadius.”

Alisa frowned at the comm station. She would be happy to let Alejandro part ways—he would be lucky if she didn’t fly over one of Arkadius’s many oceans and dump him in. But even with the warrant on Leonidas’s head and the fact that it would make her ship a target, she would regret having him leave.

“Did you get Ms. Moon to agree to come with us independently?” Leonidas asked, making Alisa wonder what kinds of conversations Alejandro, Yumi, and Beck had shared back here on the ship while the soldiers had been tramping around.

“No, but I’ve had enough of the captain interfering with my quest.”

“She’s been ferrying you around to further your quest.”

“Fine, I’ve had enough of her threatening me, then. She knows too much. Leaving her with what’s in her head is almost as unpalatable an idea as staying with her, but I assume your stance hasn’t changed.”

“It hasn’t,” Leonidas said coolly.

“We’ll get what we need to know from Yumi, then hire someone else to taxi us around if need be.” Alejandro grunted. “I suppose it’s too much to hope that what I seek is on Arkadius.”

“Since I still don’t know what you seek, I couldn’t say.”

“I’ll tell you when we get there. You will come with me, won’t you? I can pay you for your time. It is my hope that this can be finished in a few months, and then you can return to your own quest.”

Alisa willed Leonidas to tell Alejandro to stuff his payment and his quest, that he was going to accept her job offer and stay here to help her with her quest. If he helped her find her daughter, she would fly him wherever he needed to go to find what he sought. Damn, she wished she had told him that when they had been alone together. Instead, she’d been thinking about kissing him.

“If the emperor’s dying wish was for you to fulfill your quest,” Leonidas said, “I’ll help you do it. There’s no need for payment.”

She heard the hatch clang softly, and Alisa straightened in her seat, realizing he had walked out. She flicked the comm button off, then looked toward the corridor, hoping Leonidas would return to keep her company. But nobody walked into NavCom to join her. Her heart was heavy at the idea of him going with Alejandro and disappearing from her life once they reached Arkadius, but so be it. She had to find her daughter. Being caught up in the dying wishes of an emperor she had done her best to dethrone would only delay her—or worse.

“This is for the best,” she told herself. “It’s for the best.”

THE END

STARFALL STATION

Fallen Empire, a short story

by Lindsay Buroker

Copyright © 2016 Lindsay Buroker

STARFALL STATION

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,” Beck 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 he 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 handholding?” 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 handgun 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 informed 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.

He did not scurry away quickly enough to outrun a cyborg. Leonidas caught him around the neck and lifted him in the air, his feet dangling six inches above the floor. The man gasped and gurgled even though Leonidas was careful not to completely cut off his airway. His foe kicked futilely, the efforts so puny that Leonidas did not bother blocking them. His torso and thighs, enhanced with subcutaneous implants as well as ridges of hard muscle, could take a lot of abuse.

As he glanced toward the intersection to make sure his fluidwrap had, indeed, caught the third person—it had—the dangling man reached for a pistol holstered at his belt. Leonidas reacted instantly, tearing away the belt as well as the trousers it held up. He wouldn’t normally rip off an opponent’s pants, but he didn’t want to hurt these people more than he already had and thought humiliation might do as much to end the fight as brutality.

“Are you done resisting?” Leonidas asked the man, chilling his voice to ice, an art he had mastered as an officer commanding hundreds of young, strong idiots.

His adversary’s eyes grew round at the realization that his hairy legs were dangling, exposed to the alley and its occupants. Or maybe he realized that he was the only one capable of responding. His nearest ally was unconscious, and the young man on the other side of the intersection lay pinned by a net. The mugger’s own net had flown uselessly wide and now plastered the wall, lighting it with electric blue tendrils that crackled and zapped. They would deliver a stun charge to a trapped person, but they had no effect on the wall.

“Leonidas?” Alisa asked from the corner, an odd note to her tone.

He looked to her, worried that she had spotted some other trouble. Her head and her firearm stuck around the corner, her gaze turned toward him.

“Am I disturbing you?” she asked, a smile quirking the corners of her lips. “I can leave you two alone if you want to take more of his clothes off.”

Leonidas gave her a sour look. Of course she would make a joke. He should have known.

“I’m… done… resisting,” his captured thug wheezed, Leonidas still using his throat as a handle by which to hold him up.

As he lowered the mugger to his feet, Alisa strode over to the one flattened on his back by the net. His features were hard to make out under the crackling blue energy of the net, but he looked young, fifteen or sixteen perhaps with an attempt at facial hair tufting his chin.

“What was the plan?” she asked him, tapping him on the chin with the muzzle of her Etcher. “Rob anyone who came this way?”

“Slavers are around,” the boy said.

“On Starfall Station? Really? This used to be a respectable place.”

“Always around,” the boy mumbled, “and paying good right now.”

“For cyborgs?” Alisa looked at Leonidas.

Leonidas barely glanced at them. He was searching his captive and removed a small pistol from his jacket pocket—amazing how a man with no belt or trousers could still be armed.

“For women,” the boy said.

Surprise blossomed on Alisa’s face.

“We were just going to shoot the cyborg.” The boy’s gaze slid toward Leonidas. “And take his armor.”

“You’d just kill him? For no reason? Why, because he’s not human?” Her tone had turned impressively frosty.

Leonidas watched her indignation with some bemusement since just a few weeks earlier, she’d been calling him cyborg and hadn’t seemed to believe he was fully human. He did appreciate that once someone shifted from enemy to ally for her, she was loyal to that person. He hadn’t experienced a lot of that from those outside of his unit, those who weren’t cyborgs and didn’t understand what it was like to be human, but different. Mostly, he encountered fear and uneasiness, even from men he had worked beside for years.

“Uh, because he had big guns,” the boy said, wilting under her glower. He looked toward Leonidas, his expression hopeful, as if he might help him. Hardly.

Leonidas had been debating whether to let his captive go since the muggers hadn’t actually managed to do anything to them, but that comment, along with the fact that they had wanted to sell Alisa to slavers, hardened his heart. He ripped off the man’s shirt, drawing another look of surprise from Alisa, and tore it into strips. He used them to tie the mugger’s ankles and wrists together, then moved onto the unconscious man to give him the same treatment.

“I suppose you’d find it unseemly if I made a joke about how you like to strip your captives and then tie them up.”

“Yes.” He didn’t even know what she was implying. Something sexual, he had no doubt, but most such jokes went over his head.

“You’re good to have along for a fight—or a mugging—but we need to work on your sense of humor.”

“We?” After tying the first two men, Leonidas started for the third, but something on the ceiling behind the light fixture caught his eye. He berated himself for not noticing it earlier, but the fixture nearly blocked it.

“I’ll help,” Alisa said. “I like projects. In truth, I just want to see you laugh now and then.”

“I laugh. When it’s appropriate.”

“You haven’t laughed since I met you.”

“We’ve been fighting enemies and fleeing for our lives since you met me.”

“What about after we escaped from the pirates? Remember? Beck barbecued that bear meat. We were relaxing, chatting, and drinking Yumi’s fermented tea since that was the closest thing we had to alcohol. Everyone was enjoying themselves, and Beck told jokes while he grilled.”

“Beck isn’t funny.”

Alisa squinted at him.

Three suns, she didn’t think Beck was a comedian, did she? Please.

“I laugh,” Leonidas repeated sturdily.

“I don’t believe you. Unless you do it alone in your cabin at night. Which I doubt, because I’ve heard you thumping around in there, presumably having nightmares.”

He’d had an argument poised on his lips, a suggestion that maybe he did laugh when he was by himself in his cabin, but it froze before coming out. He hadn’t realized that he made noise when he slept. That he had nightmares was no surprise—he remembered them well when he woke up with a jolt, memories of battles gone wrong and lost comrades and guilt rearing into his mind. But he felt chagrined to learn that others were also aware he had them.

Not knowing what to say, and certainly not wanting to linger on this topic, he returned his attention to the light fixture. He stood on tiptoes to pull an item down from the ceiling.

“What’s that?” Alisa asked, thankfully changing the topic.

He flipped it to her. “A small mirror.”

She caught it easily, perhaps not with a cyborg’s enhanced reflexes but certainly with a pilot’s reflexes. He’d seen her fly a few times when it counted, such as when they were being chased through asteroid belts, and she was good at her job.

“Low tech way to see who’s coming, eh?” Alisa tossed it onto the boy’s chest, shaking her head as she looked down at him. “Slavery. I’m not sure whether to be horrified or flattered. I would have thought I was too old to attract slavers.”

Leonidas raised his eyebrows. He knew she had an eight-year-old daughter and guessed her to be in her early thirties. Since he was edging up on forty, he would hardly call someone in her thirties old. The muggers—slavers—probably hadn’t looked beyond her face and the curve of her hips when determining her potential as a slave. While she wasn’t gorgeous, she was attractive and had an appealing smile. Too bad she was usually mouthing off when she made that smile. The Alliance had probably encouraged mouthiness, considering it a promising trait in someone signing on to help overthrow the government.

“You’re supposed to say something like, ‘You look fabulous, Alisa, and you’re not too old to attract slavers.’”

“You want to attract slavers?”

“No, that’s not my point. Never mind. Are you collecting your net?”

“Yes.” Leonidas stepped past her and found the casing for the ball, which had split open into several segments to release its electric cargo. He deactivated the energy aspect, then tugged the slender tendrils of the net off the supine figure. The boy leaped up and tried to dart off. Leonidas caught him by the collar of his shirt. As he proceeded to tie the kid up, he asked Alisa, “If I call the police, what are the odds that they’ll get here before someone comes by and mugs our muggers?”

“If you call the police, someone will probably come for you, wanting to collect—” She cut herself off, glancing at the boy, who was listening. “They’ll probably come for you,” she finished.

He appreciated that she hadn’t mentioned the warrant. Even if these three weren’t a threat, who knew who they knew?

“I can call them,” she said, slipping a comm unit off her belt. She never wore an earstar comm-computer, as was common. “No idea on the mugging the muggers part. Beck was right. The station seems rougher than the last time I was through here.”

“I’ll wager that the last time you were here, the empire controlled the station and maintained order.” He hadn’t brought it up with Beck, but he couldn’t help himself this time. He supposed he wanted Alisa to see reality, to realize that she’d fought on the wrong side, that her people had made the system a worse place, not a better one.

Alisa grimaced. “Yes, the empire was excellent at maintaining order.”

“That order meant you wouldn’t be mugged on the way to a coffee shop.”

“We’re not on the way to a coffee shop. We’re on the way to some smithy located on the dubious side of the station. Besides, under the old regime, I would have been arrested for walking around after curfew, and my gun would have had to stay on my ship, a ship that has no weapons of its own because the empire forbade civilians to be armed, even if they were lugging freight through pirate-infested space. Even you have to admit it’s been inconvenient that we haven’t had a way to defend ourselves this past month.”

“Pirate-infested space was rare when the empire ruled, unless you were way out near the border worlds.”

“People on those border worlds like freight delivered to them too. My mom and I had more than our share of run-ins when I was growing up on the Nomad.”

“That was your mother’s choice to go somewhere unsafe, to take a child somewhere unsafe.” Leonidas couldn’t stifle the distaste in his voice, though it was directed more toward his resentment that the Alliance had destroyed the empire without having anything sufficient to instate in its place. If the war had created a better universe, perhaps he could have accepted being on the losing side more easily, but it hadn’t.

“My mother,” Alisa said coolly, “flew freight because she couldn’t stand the stifling rules of living on an imperial planet, which was all of them in the last century. She should have been allowed to defend herself out in the system.”

“Rules exist for a reason. They keep people safe.”

“Safe.” Her lip curled, and she said it as if it were a curse. “You can get arrested, be thrown in a jail cell, and be safe as a bramisar in its den, but you’ll never see the stars again. People love to give up their freedoms for safety. Pretty soon, you can’t walk where you want, when you want, and you might as well be a dog instead of a human being.” She issued a disgusted noise somewhere between a grunt and a growl, then stalked down the corridor in the direction they had been headed before the attempted ambush.

“The Alliance is overflowing with freedom-seeking idealists,” Leonidas called after her, though he doubted she was listening. “It takes a few pragmatists to run a government. You’ll see. When the entire system collapses and your government is replaced by chaos, you’ll see.”

Alisa did not look back. Leonidas glared down at the tied-up muggers.

“You sure you don’t want to let us go so we can catch her and sell her to slavers?” the boy asked.

Leonidas grunted and walked away, hoping Alisa would remember to comm the police to pick them up. If police even existed on Starfall Station anymore. Star fall, indeed.

• • • • •

Leonidas put out a hand to stop Alisa. They were in the wide corridor leading to the smithy—it was more like a street with buildings to either side, a high ceiling arching about thirty feet overhead. The area was very quiet, considering how many of the shops kept night hours. To their left, a window display showed all manner of netdiscs and personal comm assistants, and floating holosigns promised inexpensive repair rates. Two buildings ahead, the roll-up door of the smithy was closed, though a glowing sign shed light from the window beside it.

A faint odor reached Leonidas’s nostrils, that of a butcher shop—or a battlefield.

“More muggers?” Alisa looked down at his hand.

“Perhaps,” he said, scanning the buildings more intently than he had when they first turned onto the street.

“You’ve accused me of being someone whom trouble always finds, but I think it’s even more likely to find you.”

“I believe I said you’re someone who makes trouble wherever she goes. You’re quick to mouth off to people, even those it’s unwise to be mouthy with.”

“Like cranky cyborgs?” She smiled, her irritation from ten minutes earlier apparently forgotten.

After years of outranking most of his peers and having them defer to him, he was never quite sure how to handle her irreverence. This time, he said, “I’m not cranky,” and regretted that it sounded petulant rather than authoritative.

Her smile only widened.

He sighed and walked down a maintenance passage between the computer repair building and the next structure, checking to see if the shops had back doors. He couldn’t yet tell where that smell was coming from, but striding through the front entrance of the smithy might be unwise.

A waist-high, bug-shaped trash robot rolled through the alley that ran parallel to the street, sucking debris into its proboscis, incinerating it in its carapace, and shifting the ashes to a bin in the rear. It reminded him of the chase that he’d been on with Alisa and Dr. Dominguez in the sewers below the university library on Perun. They had temporarily escaped pursuit by catching a ride on an automated sewer-cleaning vehicle. He and Alisa had sat side by side in the cargo bed, their shoulders touching. It hadn’t exactly been pleasant since they’d both stunk of the sewers, but she hadn’t been mouthy then, perhaps being too tired to make quips. For some reason, the image came to mind now with a feeling of fondness. Odd.

His memories faded as he turned into the alley and saw the robot trundling toward a charred box lying on the floor. A hole burned in the side displayed destroyed interior circuit boards and wires.

“That’s an imperial spy box, isn’t it?” Alisa asked, stopping beside him.

His armor case stopped, too, just shy of bumping into his back.

Leonidas nodded. “Yes.”

The boxes were usually floating through the air when one saw them, built-in cameras observing from above and sending the feed to police monitors.

“Guess the Alliance decided they didn’t want to use them when they took over,” Alisa said.

“No.” Leonidas shook his head as the trash robot widened its nozzle and sucked the box in, the same way it had the other debris. “That was shot down today, not months ago when the Alliance took this station.”

“Good point,” she said quietly, looking up and down the dim alley. “Someone was doing something they didn’t want observed, eh?”

“So it would seem.”

Leonidas waited for the trash robot to incinerate the box and continue down the alley, then walked to the back door of the smithy. Unlike the vehicle-sized, roll-up door in the front, this was a simple door for humans. There were no windows on the back of the building, so he couldn’t see inside, but he caught that butcher-shop scent again.

He paused, looking down at Alisa. “You may wish to wait outside.”

“Oh?” Judging by the curiosity in her eyes, waiting outside wasn’t what she had in mind.

Even though he had served with some female soldiers and knew they could be tough, his instinct was to protect women from gruesome experiences.

“I don’t think my armor case will fit through this narrow doorway,” he said. “Perhaps you could watch it for me.”

“Afraid the trash bot will come along and suck it up? I don’t think it’ll fit inside its maw.”

“Nevertheless, I’ll purchase your chocolate beverage later if you wait here.”

He thought that might draw an agreeable smile from her, but her eyes closed to suspicious slits. Still, she leaned her shoulder against the wall and nodded for him to go inside.

The door was locked with an old latch-and-bolt system, rather than with electronics. He gave a quick tug on the handle, snapping the mechanism. If he was wrong and nothing had happened inside, he would pay the smith for the damage.

The area he stepped into was dark, but his eyesight was better than human, and he could make out most of his surroundings. An aisle ran the length of the back wall, with tools, crates, and unidentifiable clutter rising over his head and blocking the view of most of the building. All manner of machinery towered at one end, a mix of modern and computerized with old-fashioned and antiquated. At the other end, laser smelting equipment dangled from a ceiling beam, the tip resting against an anvil and a rack of mallets of various size. Heat radiated from a furnace behind the equipment.

Leonidas stood quietly and listened before venturing away from the door. The scent of blood was stronger inside.

When he did not hear anything, he walked down the aisle and turned toward the front of the building. The holosign glowing in the window, proclaiming the business open, shed some extra light. To his eyes, it clearly illuminated the prone person lying on an open stretch of floor near a front counter and payment machine. It was a man, blood pooling on the floor next to him, a rivulet of it leading to a drain nearby. It had dried, but only partially. This hadn’t happened long ago.

Though he shouldn’t have disturbed a crime scene, curiosity drove him forward. He knelt, careful to avoid the blood, and rolled the body over. With his keen night sight, he easily saw the hole in the man’s clothes. Something—most likely a knife—had punctured deep into his flesh, slipping between his ribs and piercing his heart. It had only taken one stab to kill him. Someone had either gotten lucky or had known exactly what he was doing.

A draft stirred the hair on the back of Leonidas’s neck, the door he had used opening. He sniffed, then sighed as he caught Alisa’s scent, a mix of simple, warm feminine skin and the lavender hand soap in the lav on the ship. She bumped against something in the dark, but otherwise moved quietly as she maneuvered through the shop toward the front of the building.

He turned to face her, his nose and ears having already determined that they were alone in the shop, aside from the dead man. Whoever had stabbed him had since left.

The holosign must have provided enough light for Alisa to see his outline in the front of the room, because she lifted a hand toward him. “Turns out your armor case fits through the door fine if you tilt it on its side.”

“Ah.” He stepped toward her, thinking she might not notice the body, the shadows being thicker along the floor. Maybe he could usher her away from it. But her gaze fell upon it before he reached her.

“Uh, not your work, I assume?”

She didn’t appear overly squeamish about the body. He supposed he shouldn’t be surprised. If she’d fought in the war, she must have seen plenty of death, even as a pilot.

“No,” he said. “I believe this is Master Tech Camden Meliarakis, the owner of the smithy.”

“The one who was going to fix your armor?”

“Yes. I spoke directly to him about six hours ago and made the nocturnal appointment.” Leonidas lowered his voice to murmur just for his earstar, “Time?”

It responded by speaking a soft, “Twenty-three twenty-seven, Starfall Station time,” into his ear.

“I’m three minutes early for my appointment,” Leonidas told Alisa.

“Very punctual of you.” Alisa frowned as the armor case floated to a stop beside her, almost bumping her arm, as if it wanted attention. Or maybe it wanted to know when the armor inside would be repaired.

Leonidas started to wonder who else he could contact for the job, but that made him feel selfish—and guilty. So he walked around the shop, thinking he might figure out what had happened. It wouldn’t matter to the dead smith, but it would make Leonidas feel better about thinking of his own needs first. Besides, it was hard to forget that he’d had a hand in keeping the peace for a long time. It was hard to shed that responsibility. Granted, he’d been more of an interplanetary peacekeeper than a police officer, but he’d always fought to protect civilians.

“Shall I call the police again?” Alisa asked. “Or should we just disappear without touching anything? Reporting a mugging was one thing, but I’d hate to be detained because we were suspects in a murder. You, especially, shouldn’t be caught here.”

“No,” Leonidas murmured, peering at the closed roll-up door. Since the lock in the back had been intact, he presumed the murderer had come in through the front. Given the shop’s around-the-clock hours, the door had likely been unlocked at the time.

He confirmed that it was still open without touching anything. Leaving fingerprints behind wouldn’t be a good idea for exactly the reason Alisa had alluded to. He did not need the Alliance adding civilian murders to the list of reasons they wanted him arrested.

“Unlocked,” he said. “The murderer may have come in, pretending to be a customer. The smith was stabbed in the front, so he might have even known the person. At the least, I bet he didn’t expect trouble.”

As Leonidas moved away from the door for a closer look around the premises and the counter, he was aware of Alisa watching him.

“Are you going to attempt to solve the crime?” she asked.

“You don’t approve?”

“Well, I don’t mean to belittle this man’s death, but you investigating it won’t get your armor fixed, and I’m worried that if we’re found here, you’ll be in a lot of trouble.” She walked to the window and peered out into the street, her gaze flicking upward, as if to look for spy boxes.

Leonidas could now guess why the one in the back had been shot down. Had the murderer gone out that way? So as not to be seen? Locking the door as he went?

“You don’t think you’ll be in trouble too?” he asked.

“Oh, I reckon my mouth could also get me into trouble—” Alisa flashed him a quick smile, though it appeared more distracted than heartfelt, “—but you’re the one my people want.”

“Your people.”

“The Alliance people.” She shrugged. “The ones with two hundred thousand tindarks on your… not your head, exactly, because they want you alive. That’s one boon for you. I can’t imagine less than an army taking you in alive. Even that army would need some tanks and armor-piercing rounds.”

Cyborgs were not quite as invincible as that, but Leonidas did not correct her. No need to educate her on the various poisons and chemicals that could act on his unique mecho-biology. And it wasn’t as if he was impervious to blazer bolts or bullets. In his armor, he nearly was, but that armor was in shambles now. He needed to get it fixed, one way or another. Was it selfish to hope the smith had an apprentice that he might contact? He leaned around the clerk’s counter to eye the shelves and display screens.

“Hm, what is this?” Leonidas mused, pulling a large case out from behind the counter. The case was familiar, since one very similar to it floated in the middle of the room. This one was resting on the floor rather than hovering, but it was the same size as his.

“Combat armor?” Alisa asked.

“Red combat armor.”

“You mean crimson,” she said quietly. “And only cyborgs have that, right?”

“The color isn’t—wasn’t—forbidden in the private quarter, but it’s somewhat infamous, yes, since it was issued to soldiers in the Cyborg Corps.”

The case was unlocked, so Leonidas opened it, wondering if he would know the owner. He also wondered what had brought one of his people here after the war ended and the imperial army largely dissolved. He supposed Starfall Station was as likely a place as any to move on and look for work. He’d heard rumors that some of his cyborg colleagues had become mercenaries, others bodyguards and heads of security for wealthy civilians. It seemed demeaning employment after working for the empire for so many years, maintaining order and keeping the people safe. Though it was not as demeaning as piracy—he’d already run into one of his people engaged in that, planning to carve out an empire of his own in territory no longer being patrolled.

“Sergeant Lancer,” Leonidas read off the plate fastened to the inside of the lid.

An image of a big farmer turned soldier came to mind. Sandy blond hair and freckles, a boyish look even after more than ten years in the army. Yes, Leonidas remembered him, and a twinge of excitement ran through him at the idea of reconnecting with someone from the unit. Even if Lancer had been along for many of the battles that were the fodder for Leonidas’s nightmares, he still wanted to see the man. He hadn’t had a chance to say a proper goodbye to anyone when the empire had lost and the unit had been disbanded. He had been too busy on a last mission for the emperor.

“Anyone you know?” Alisa asked.

“Yes, I remember him. We fought together on many occasions.” Leonidas found a receipt on the top of the set of armor and read it. “This was just finished. He’s scheduled to pick it up at midnight station time.”

“That’s not far off, but I’m not sure waiting here for him would be wise.” Alisa leaned closer to the windowpane. “Someone’s coming.”

“Someone who looks like he might need the services of a smith? Or someone who might be a smith?” Leonidas hoped it would be the apprentice, though it might not help him if it was. The man would be too distraught over his master’s death to fix armor tonight. Besides, Leonidas twitched at the idea of an apprentice handling his most prized possession—and one of the few possessions he had left. He would have to do some research to find out if anyone else on the station was qualified.

“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 peek 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—not 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.

“It doesn’t bother humans, right?” Alisa pulled out her Etcher. “I’ll go in.”

“No. This isn’t your battle.”

Her eyebrows rose. “I don’t think it’s your battle, either.”

Not true. His unit might have been dissolved, but he would always consider the cyborgs who had served under his command as his people.

Explaining that would take too long. Instead, he lightly gripped her arm to keep her from crossing the street and said, “Stay here. I’ll put my armor on.”

He let go and sprinted for the case, tugging it into the alley so that he could dress with his back to the wall. Whatever was going on, it wasn’t anything innocuous. They didn’t sell that gas at the corner market. It could damage all computers and machinery, not just cyborg implants, and it was illegal for civilians to have it. Military supplies were tightly controlled, or at least they had been when the empire had been in charge.

Growling to himself, he stuffed his legs into the greaves as quickly as possible. Usually, they flexed and conformed around him automatically, fitting precisely and comfortably about his limbs, but every piece of his armor had taken damage during his escape from the Alliance, and some of the servos whined and grumbled as he manipulated them. Under the best circumstances, it took more than five minutes to suit up. Unfortunately, he dared not take any shortcuts. He needed the suit to be airtight before venturing in to deal with that gas. As airtight as it could be. Normally, it was spaceworthy, but he well remembered the leak he had sprung during his brief space walk on the way back to the freighter. That small hole shouldn’t let in enough gas to affect him. He hoped.

Someone shouted, and a clatter arose inside the building. Cursing, Leonidas tried to dress faster. That had been a woman’s voice. The police officer? Something crashed to the floor inside. He wished there were windows, but neither the side nor the back of the building had any, and getting his armor on was more important than running over half-dressed and peering through the front window. Or so he thought, until he heard the front door roll up quietly.

Alisa?

He lunged out of the alley, still fastening his torso armor around his body. “Don’t go in,” he barked.

It was too late. The street was empty.

• • • • •

It took another minute for Leonidas to get his helmet on and the rest of his charred and dented armor into place. An eternity. As soon as he could, he pulled up the roll-up door. He hadn’t heard any more ominous noises from within—he’d heard nothing at all since Alisa disappeared inside. And that worried him.

He made himself open the door slowly, using all of his senses, as well as the ones augmented by the armor, to get a feel for what danger lay within. Whoever had set off that gas had come expecting to deal with cyborgs and would likely have more weapons that could affect him. Somehow, the person inside had anticipated that Leonidas would come. It must be some bounty hunter after him for the reward money—the gas would be perfect for someone who wanted to bring him in alive.

The faintest of footfalls came from the back of the smithy. Leonidas eased inside, putting his back to the wall. Data scrolled down the side of the glastica display of his faceplate, not interrupting his line of sight as it informed him that gas had been detected in the space. No kidding.

The same Open sign that had allowed Leonidas to see before was enough to glimpse the smith’s body still on the floor near the counter, but there were too many crates and too much equipment in the way to see Alisa or whoever was making noise in the back. It might be she. But he was certain they weren’t alone. He imagined the policewoman’s body in an aisle somewhere while a powerful bounty hunter stalked Alisa, prepared to kill her for daring to intrude.

As he strode silently along the wall, Leonidas listened for sounds of distress—sounds of any kind at all. But the footfalls had halted.

The armor made his shoulders even broader than usual, so he had to pick his route carefully past machinery and tools. He did not want to bump or scrape against anything, nor knock anything over. Combat armor wasn’t made for stealth, but he could step carefully, keeping his footfalls silent.

A gun cracked, black powder igniting. Alisa’s Etcher. An instant later, a second weapon loosed a sizzling bolt of energy, the orange beam blasting out of the darkness at the rear of the building. It slammed into and through the wall it struck. Hand cannon.

Knowing Alisa didn’t have such a weapon, Leonidas gave up stealth and sprang in the direction where the bolt had originated. He leaped over a fifteen-foot-high vat, hardly worrying if he landed on the ground or on something else.

As he dropped onto a stack of crates, he spotted Alisa and another woman. Alisa was charging, trying to bowl her opponent over before the hand cannon could fire again. Her foe leaped to the side while launching a kick. With surprising reflexes, Alisa reacted, dodging while grabbing the leg from the air. The other woman did something Leonidas couldn’t see from his position, and they both tumbled to the ground, grappling with each other.

He crouched to spring over another stack of crates and to their aisle, but noticed something out of the corner of his eye and paused. A man lay on his back on the floor by the furnace. He wasn’t moving. The face and blond hair were familiar. It was Sergeant Lancer. And he’d been shot in the chest with that hand cannon. He lay there bleeding, unable to even lift a hand to staunch the flow of blood.

The sound of a thump pulled Leonidas’s attention back to the women. He jumped twenty feet to land in the aisle beside them. The woman—it was the one they had dismissed as a police officer earlier—had gained the advantage, rolling atop Alisa, her hand cannon clenched and ready to use.

She glanced toward Leonidas as he landed and shifted her aim. He reacted too quickly for her. He surged forward, grabbing her by the back of the uniform and hoisting her into the air. His knuckles brushed against something hard and skin-tight beneath her clothing—fitted body armor. It wasn’t as tough as his combat armor, but it would deflect bullets and energy bolts from most hand weapons.

Furious about Sergeant Lancer, Leonidas hurled her across the room. Let the armor deflect that.

The woman hurtled toward a wall and should have crashed shoulder-first, but she twisted in the air with impressive agility. The soles of her feet struck the wall as she crouched deep to absorb the impact, and she sprang off before gravity dropped her to the ground. She landed lightly on her feet like a cat. A cat with a thief’s set of impact boots.

“You’re no police officer,” Leonidas said, only pausing long enough to make sure Alisa wasn’t gravely injured—she lifted her head and made a rude gesture toward their foe. Then he strode toward the woman.

“And you’re the cyborg I’m after.” She flicked a dismissive hand in Lancer’s direction. “Why don’t you take off your helmet and breathe deeply for me, Colonel?”

“Who are you?”

She grinned, not showing any sign of fear as he strode closer. “Someone who would love an extra two hundred thousand tindarks.”

Instead of lifting her big hand cannon again, she flung a black ball at him, a fluidwrap. Leonidas fired one of the miniature blazers built into his armor. A beam of energy struck the ball just as it started to unfurl. The net never reached him, instead bursting into a tangled mess in the air.

Leonidas leaped toward the wall to avoid it and jumped off at an angle that took him straight toward her. She was already moving, dropping a pellet that exploded in smoke at her feet. As Leonidas landed, she dove to the side, rolling behind the furnace. He lost sight of her, the chemical-laced smoke interfering with his helmet’s cameras and sensors as well as his eyes. Static burst across his helmet display.

It didn’t matter. He anticipated her path, his ears telling him what his eyes could not. She was quiet, but not quiet enough. Her sleeve caught against the edge of the furnace, and he leaped, powerful legs taking him through the air faster than she could run. He landed behind her as she came out of the smoke, and grabbed her with both hands. Furious with the woman—the damned bounty hunter—for mistaking Lancer for him, Leonidas wrapped his hand around her neck even as she kicked backward, trying to fight him. He squeezed once, and bone snapped. She thrashed a few more times, then fell limp in his grip.

“The threat is gone,” Leonidas said for Alisa’s sake.

A soft groan came from the aisle behind him.

“Good.” Alisa came into view as she staggered to her feet, grasping her ribs. “I nearly had her defeated, but a little help never hurts. Besides, I was holding back because I thought she really was a police—” She caught sight of the woman hanging from Leonidas’s hand, and her humor evaporated, her face growing grim.

Leonidas did not respond. He dropped the woman and ran around the building, turning on all of the vent fans and opening the doors. As soon as he finished, he raced to Sergeant Lancer’s side. His old comrade’s eyes were open, his face scrunched with pain. He didn’t seem to be able to turn his neck or move his hands yet, but his eyes were a window to his agony.

When Leonidas knelt beside him, Lancer smoothed his features, trying to hide the pain. His fingers twitched, as if in a salute. Saluting was the last thing he should be worrying about now. The hole in his chest was like a crater—that damned woman hadn’t hesitated to fire, probably shooting him point blank as soon as the gas froze him in place. All he had been doing was coming to pick up his armor. He’d had no chance of defending himself.

Leonidas knew a fatal wound when he saw one, but he whispered, “Hospital,” and a map with a flashing blip rose on his helmet’s interior display. It was on the far side of the station from here. Leonidas growled and slipped his arms under Lancer’s body, prepared to lift him up and carry him there.

Lancer winced and shook his head. “Too late for that, sir,” he whispered, sadness and regret replacing the pain in his eyes. “Wasn’t… alert. Didn’t expect trouble here. Should have. Trouble everywhere. Not a good time… to be a cyborg.” That regret seemed to deepen, as if he was talking about far more than his death, far more than this night.

“I know,” Leonidas said, his voice thick. He was aware of all the blood on the floor, the blood still flowing from that wound. His sergeant was right. It was too late. Even if he sprinted to the hospital, they wouldn’t make it in time. “I’m sorry, Sergeant. Todd,” he corrected, remembering the man’s first name from the personnel reports, even if he’d never used it. “She was after me, not you.”

“Ah.” Lancer’s brows rose slightly. A mystery solved? “After she shot me… said I wasn’t the… right one.” His gaze flicked toward a hover pallet floating near the wall. The woman must have intended to roll Leonidas onto it to take him in. She’d just shot Lancer because—for no good reason, damn it. “Makes sense,” Lancer added.

“Because I’m an ass that everyone wants to kill?” Leonidas asked, trying to smile, to make Lancer forget about his impending death, at least for a moment. He eased one of his hands out from under him and pulled off his helmet. To hells with the gas—he wanted his sergeant to see his eyes, not just the reflection of his own pained expression in the faceplate.

“Because you’re important.” Lancer managed the grin that Leonidas couldn’t.

Leonidas snorted. “Hardly that. It’s because the Alliance thinks I know where someone is, someone I haven’t seen in six months.” His throat closed up again, refusing to let him speak further. It was just as well. Lancer didn’t need to know that his death had been for absolutely nothing. That the Alliance wanted Leonidas for information that was six months out of date and growing staler by the day.

“Sir?” Lancer whispered, his voice barely audible now. His fingers twitched again. “Will you—” He broke off and coughed, blood dripping from his mouth. His eyes closed, and Leonidas feared that was the end.

Leonidas clasped his hand. “What is it, Todd?”

His eyes did not open again, but Lancer’s fingers wrapped around Leonidas’s hand weakly. “Let my mother know I’m—let her know… what happened. Only make it sound heroic. At least… respectable.”

Leonidas tried to swallow down the lump in his throat. “I will.”

“Thank you, sir.” Lancer managed another faint smile before taking his last breath, before dying in Leonidas’s arms.

After a moment, Leonidas eased back, resting his man on the floor. He rose and stepped away, anger and frustration replacing his sorrow. He punched the wall, his armored fist knocking straight through it. He might have destroyed the whole place, but when he turned, thinking of kicking that hover pallet into pieces, he glimpsed Alisa standing near the front counter. She had risked herself to fight the bounty hunter, and none of his anger was for her, but he eyed her warily, anticipating some inappropriate display of humor.

“I think I understand now,” she said quietly.

“What?”

“Why you don’t laugh.” She looked toward Lancer’s body, then back to him, moisture glistening in her eyes. “Do you want me to wait outside?”

He groped for an answer. Did he? He needed to take care of the body, arrange to send Lancer home for a proper funeral if he could, and he still needed to find someone to fix his armor. This wasn’t her mission. She’d just come along for a coffee.

Alisa walked over to him, eyeing him a little warily, then reached up and put her arms around his shoulders and leaned against his chest, not seeming to care that he was wearing his armor and covered in blood. He returned the hug, figuring he must look like he needed it. Maybe he did.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Thank you.”

She reached up, resting her hand against the back of his head, fingers lightly touching his hair. He’d never thought of himself as someone who needed comforting—he would go forward, dealing with the realities of being a soldier, as he always had—but he found himself appreciating having someone close. Having someone care. It almost startled him to realize that she did, considering what he was and especially considering he had pointed a gun at her chest the first time they met. She probably cared about a lot of things and just didn’t let it show. Usually.

Alisa stepped back, resting the palm of her hand on his cheek before letting go. “I’ll wait outside.”

She looked over her shoulder at him, holding his gaze as she walked out the door. As he stood in the dark smithy, it slowly dawned on him that she had come along for reasons that had very little to do with coffee. He doubted he should encourage that, and didn’t know how he felt about it, but he admitted that at least for now, it was good not to be alone.

THE END

STARSEERS

Fallen Empire: Book 3

by Lindsay Buroker

Copyright © 2016 Lindsay Buroker

Chapter 1

Smoke wafted up from the barbecue grill cheerfully charring cubes of Arkadian duck just outside the airlock tube that led from the Star Nomad onto the space station. Captain Alisa Marchenko watched as her security officer, Tommy Beck, whistled and turned the skewers with tongs. He wore two blazer pistols in holsters on his belt, along with a sheathed knife with a blade large enough to shave a Senekda buffalo, but a loose apron was draped over it all. Bright letters on the front of the apron proclaimed the availability of free samples, with a caricature of a dog in a chef’s cap flipping burgers below the offer.

“Don’t you think you should charge for those samples?” Alisa asked, nodding toward the crowd of people milling through the open concourse of Arkadius Gamma, one of several space stations in orbit around the planet. The owner of her current cargo was supposed to be on the way to make payment and pick up his goods, and he couldn’t show up soon enough for her liking. Beck might be enjoying himself, but Alisa expected trouble of all kinds to find her ship on Arkadius, and she wouldn’t be surprised if that trouble took the extra effort to extend its radius to the stations in orbit. “You’ve got mafia leaders to pay off, after all,” she added.

Beck grimaced and waved his tongs in the air. “Don’t remind me, Captain. I’m not even sure I can pay them off. They have plenty of money. What they don’t have is my dead head mounted above a fireplace.”

“A desirable trophy, I’m certain.” Alisa eyed his short, pale blond hair, the contrast to his bronze skin almost alarming, made more so by the quarter inch of dark roots showing.

“Besides, I’m trying a new spice blend made from herbs that can easily be grown in a shipboard aeroponics system. I mostly want opinions now. I’ll charge when I know I’ve got it mastered.” Beck flipped the skewers again, the smell of roasting meat teasing Alisa’s nostrils.

Though she appreciated his ability to cook—she had enjoyed his meals on numerous occasions over the last month—she wondered if she should have let him set up here. She intended to leave as soon as the merchant picked up his cargo. Further, she doubted that drawing attention to her docked freighter was a good idea, and a crowd was forming, thanks to his offers of samples.

A white-haired lady with a parrot perched on her shoulder accepted one of his skewers and tossed a copper eighth-tindark coin into the cup beside the grill. She took a bite and offered her bird a bite as she walked away. It pecked the meat with its beak, screeched, and leaped from her shoulder, flying up toward the translucent domed ceiling over the concourse, the greens, browns, and blues of Arkadius’s continents and oceans visible from their current position.

“Critic,” Beck said, watching the bird as if he wouldn’t mind plucking it and throwing it on the grill.

“Maybe it knew you were cooking a relative.”

Beck picked up the cup, shook it, and sighed. “I may have two whole tindarks here. That almost covers the cost of the skewers.”

“You’re lucky you’ve got anything at all. How many people run around with physical currency?”

“You do.”

“Only because my bank account disappeared into the ether after the war.”

“That’ll teach you to bank on planets that are imperial strongholds.”

“Yes, I should borrow money from the mafia instead,” Alisa said. “That’s much safer.”

“Keep teasing me, Captain, and I won’t save you any duck.”

The sound of chickens squawking floated through the airlock tube, and Alisa rubbed a hand down her face as a few of Beck’s munching visitors cast curious looks in that direction. She didn’t mind that one of her passengers had a cargo of her own, but the chickens had gotten a taste for freedom somewhere along the way and kept escaping their pen. Alisa had found one pecking at cracker crumbs on the floor of NavCom that morning.

Movement in the airlock tube drew her eye. It wasn’t a chicken. Instead, Leonidas and Dr. Alejandro Dominguez were walking out. Leonidas was dressed in plain civilian clothes today, not wearing his favorite military jacket, the one with the big Cyborg Corps patch on the front. He must have decided that blatantly announcing what he was—and what he had been for the empire—wasn’t a good idea on a space station owned by the Tri-Sun Alliance.

Alejandro was dressed in his gray monk’s robe, a robe Alisa was increasingly convinced was nothing but a costume for him, and wore his satchel over his shoulder, his hand cupped protectively over a bulge inside of it.

“Taking your orb for a walk, Doctor?” Alisa asked as they approached.

She gave Leonidas a respectful nod while wishing that he would walk at her shoulder instead of at the doctor’s. She had tried to hire him a couple of times now, but he was determined to help Alejandro with his mysterious mission, one that apparently involved fulfilling Emperor Markus’s dying wishes.

Leonidas nodded back at her, a polite comrade-to-comrade gesture, as usual. If he had figured out that thoughts of kissing him had popped into Alisa’s mind lately, he never showed it. It was just as well. Those thoughts felt like a betrayal to her late husband, who had only been gone for eight months.

Alejandro pressed his palms together in front of his chest, bowed, and said, “Trust thy neighbor, but lock your door.”

The gray robe might be a costume, but he certainly had his Xerikesh memorized, front to back.

“It’s my door, Doc,” Alisa said.

He gave her an edged smile and continued on.

“Here, mech, try this will you?” Beck asked, sticking out his tongs to stop Leonidas, a slightly charred cube of duck grasped in the tips.

Leonidas paused to frown over at him. Alejandro stopped to wait, but his gaze was toward the crowd, and Alisa wondered if he also had a contact to meet here. Maybe he was looking for someone else to ferry him around the system. Thanks to a bit of eavesdropping, Alisa knew he believed she had too much knowledge of his quest—and that he had not-so-jokingly asked Leonidas if he would consider making her disappear. It was all she could do not to curl a lip at Alejandro’s back and growl every time he walked past.

“If you’re thinking of poisoning me,” Leonidas said, “it’s unlikely that it will work.”

“Because you have enhanced taste buds, I know. You told me.” Beck waved the duck at his nose. “That’s why I want you to try my spice blend. Tell me what you think.”

Alisa arched her eyebrows. Beck and Leonidas had anything but a cordial relationship—indeed, Leonidas was eyeing those tongs suspiciously and looked like he was contemplating breaking them, as he’d broken Beck’s handgun on the first day they met. She was surprised at this new turn, at least on Beck’s part.

With gingerliness that was amusing from a man with arms like tree trunks, Leonidas plucked the duck cube from the tongs. He held it to his nose, letting his nostrils thoroughly examine the scent, that suspicious squint never leaving his face. Who could blame him? There was a prodigious warrant out for Leonidas’s arrest, something that Beck had originally brought to Alisa’s attention. As amiable as Beck was, he had been intrigued by the idea of collecting two hundred thousand tindarks. He had even brought up the idea of sedating Leonidas with his food. And now that they were orbiting Arkadius, Beck would not have to travel far to turn him in.

“Celery seed?” Leonidas lifted his eyebrows.

Beck grinned. “One of my secret ingredients.”

“On duck?”

“It’s not like those are Old Earth ducks. Arkadian ducks are fierce and need fierce seasonings. Did you know they’re tall enough and tough enough to bite your asteroids off? Assuming they didn’t enhance those for you when they were doing the rest. Are cyborgs susceptible to kicks in the gonads?”

Leonidas glanced south, then skewered Beck with a look that was more unfriendly than Alisa thought the conversation called for.

“Listen,” Beck said, waving at the duck and ignoring the glare, “are you going to condemn it before you’ve even tried it?”

“You know imperials are hard to please,” Alisa said.

Leonidas turned his unfriendly look on her, and she lifted her hands in innocence. Imperials were touchy, too, it seemed. Just because they had lost the war—and control of the fifty-odd planets and moons in the trinary star system…

Leonidas sighed and dropped the duck into his mouth. He chewed thoughtfully—or perhaps with thoughts geared toward detecting hints of poison or otherwise suspicious substances.

“Leonidas?” Alejandro prompted, an irritated frown on his face as a woman heading for the grill jostled his satchel. “The captain said she’s leaving as soon as her cargo is picked up and that we need to be back quickly if we don’t want her to leave without us.”

His irritated expression turned a touch wistful, as if he wouldn’t mind that. Well, Alisa wouldn’t mind that, either, but for the moment, their missions were intertwined. Alejandro needed to talk to the Starseers about his artifact quest, and Alisa needed to find out why a group of them had stolen her daughter—and how to get her back.

Leonidas swallowed and strode toward Alejandro. “Too much celery seed,” he said over his shoulder to Beck, “and way too much salt.”

“Salt brings out flavors,” Beck called after him. “Not everyone’s tongue is as sensitive as yours.”

Leonidas walked away at Alejandro’s shoulder, looking like a bodyguard towering beside him, his tall, broad, and muscled frame dwarfing Alejandro’s slighter form. Nobody jostled the doctor again as they crossed the concourse. Maybe Alisa should try harder to woo Leonidas over to her side, imperial touchiness or not.

As she was gazing out toward the crowd, she caught sight of a familiar face and blinked in surprise. It wasn’t the man she had been expecting to come retrieve his cargo. The tall, lanky woman had tousled black hair and wore a blue snagor-hide Alliance flight jacket identical to the one in Alisa’s cabinet. With her height, she spotted Alisa over the heads of other people, smiled toothily, and offered a big wave.

Even though Alisa had not expected to run into any former colleagues here, she returned the smile and the wave. Lieutenant Khazan had flown a Striker-18 in the same squadron as Alisa during the last year of the war—she’d even been at the Dustor battle where Alisa had crashed and ended up in the hospital. The unit had moved on, the ships doing mop up for the Alliance in the aftermath of the treaty signing, but Khazan had sent several messages of well wishes that Alisa had received after she had been removed from the regeneration tank.

“What are you doing here, Captain?” Khazan asked, weaving through the crowd in front of the grill and saluting Alisa while giving Beck a curious glance.

Alisa did not return the salute since she was not in the military anymore, instead, touching her palm to her chest, then raising it outward in a more typical civilian greeting. “I’m running cargo,” she said, not willing to get into any of the more detailed reasons that had brought her here with so many ears around. “What are you doing here?”

“Got a few hours of shore leave. They’ve got hairy toad races on the port authority building’s mezzanine, you know. I do love to gamble.”

“I remember that.”

“I came in on the Final Impact,” Khazan said, pointing a thumb toward the other side of the station. “You must have seen our big warship in dock. I’m part of the fighter squadron there now.”

Yes, Alisa had seen the big ship. There was a reason she had docked on the opposite side of the station. After the little kerfuffle she had participated in—and largely arranged—back on Perun, she wasn’t sure how the Alliance felt about her. She wouldn’t have been surprised if she had been denied permission to dock or even to learn there was an arrest order out for her. She and Leonidas might end up with matching warrants. Wouldn’t that be cozy?

“Nice,” Alisa said. “Did it come with a promotion?”

“It did. It’s Captain Khazan now, if you can believe it.”

“If they gave Tomich a ship, anything is possible.”

For the first time, Khazan’s easy smile faltered. “Er, yes. As long as I’m here…” She looked at Beck again, who was sneaking glances toward her. Khazan’s height intimidated some men, but she had high cheekbones and striking features that attracted most. “Could we talk in private for a moment, Marchenko?”

“Private?” Beck asked. “Wouldn’t you ladies like some duck before you go?” He plucked a fresh skewer from the grill since all of the ones on the platter beside it had been taken by the crowd. He looked down and frowned when he saw that his stack of napkins had disappeared, but he poked around in the basket he’d brought everything out in. “I’ll even put it on a plate for you,” he said.

“You civilians sure live the life of luxury, don’t you?” Khazan said, accepting the skewer before Beck found his plate.

“There’s sauce too,” Alisa said, pointing toward a bottle balanced precariously on a corner of the grill. “You never saw the cooks on the Merciless put out sauce.”

“No, but they did have those squeeze packages of ketchup, mustard, and ponzu. They were fun to play with during zero gravity drills.”

“Fun to make a mess with, you mean.”

“Cleaning the ceilings gave the privates something to do during down time.”

Beck made a face, and Alisa recalled that he had been an enlisted soldier. His crush on Khazan might already be on the wane.

Alisa was on the verge of telling Khazan that she could discuss whatever she wanted to bring up in front of Beck—she had a notion this might be a warning that there was, indeed, a warrant out for her. But she was still watching the crowd for her contact, and she spotted a dark figure lurking next to a support post at the other side of the concourse. Her stomach sank. She could not see the person’s face, thanks to a hood pulled low, but she recognized that black robe. Who wouldn’t? It was the Starseers’ favorite garb. Nobody wanted to be mistaken for a Starseer, so few wore it for simple fashion purposes. The figure gripped the end of a six-foot-long black staff, using it like a walking stick. The legends said Starseers used those staffs like weapons, having incorporated some of their technology or power to make them strong enough to deflect bullets and blazer bolts.

The figure was not looking in her direction, but Alisa was immediately suspicious that her ship had acquired a spy. Maybe someone watching them because of Alejandro and his orb? If so, the word had gotten out quickly. The Nomad had only been in dock for an hour.

“Marchenko?” Khazan asked. “Did you hear me?”

Realizing she was staring at the Starseer, Alisa turned back to her old colleague. “Sorry, what?”

A part of her was tempted to charge through the crowd and confront the robed figure, to ask him—if it was a him—if he knew anything about her daughter’s abduction. But the odds of that were unlikely. Her daughter had been kidnapped on Perun, all the way on the other side of the system, and this was probably some lackey who had been sent on a spy mission. She could have approached him, anyway, but Yumi had claimed she could take them to a hidden Starseer temple down on Arkadius and perhaps get them invited inside. Alisa would be more likely to get her answers there.

“I asked if we could talk in private,” Khazan said. “And also if I have sauce on my nose.”

“Your nose is fine,” Beck said.

“Why, thank you.” Khazan winked at him. “Your chef flirts well, Marchenko.”

“Actually, he’s my security officer.”

Khazan looked at the slender wooden skewer Beck was threading through the next batch of meat. “He looks very dangerous.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Beck frowned.

“Nothing.” Alisa put her hand on Khazan’s shoulder and nodded toward the airlock tube. “Yes, we can talk in my cabin. That way.” She pointed, indicating that Khazan should go first as she leaned close to Beck to whisper, “There’s someone in a Starseer robe on the far side of the concourse. Let me know if he does anything suspicious.”

“Like what?” Beck scanned the crowd until he noticed the figure, then made a hasty circle over his heart, a superstitious gesture that those from the moons of Aldrin made to call the sun gods for protection. The early inhabitants had been certain the giant green spot on the gas planet looming in their sky had been emitting harmful gases as well as general bad mojo.

“If he comes over to sample your duck and ask questions about me or the doctor, I’d consider that suspicious.”

“Maybe he’ll just be unable to resist the aroma of my perfectly cooked meat, which is also, I might add, seasoned with the ideal amount of celery seed.”

“I’m certain. Let me know if he comes for either reason.”

Alisa jogged to catch up with Khazan in the cargo hold. She had walked around the stacks of crates taking up half the space and paused by the stairs. She was looking to the corner where Yumi Moon stood in a green, ankle-length dress and bright yellow boots while tossing dried corn into the makeshift chicken pen. Netting draped over the top kept the birds from flying out—sometimes.

“That-a-girl, Isabel,” Yumi crooned. “But let Alcyone have some too.”

“I can see why you got out of the army, Marchenko,” Khazan said. “The exotic allure of being a civilian freight operator couldn’t be resisted.”

Yumi looked curiously at Khazan and gave Alisa a tentative wave. The chickens complained at this pause in their feeding. Alisa waved back, trying to combine an ignore-our-guest gesture in the mix before she led the way up the stairs.

“I’d tell you about how my life has been a lot more exotic than I’d like of late,” Alisa said over her shoulder, “but I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve already heard about that.”

“I’ve heard some.”

Khazan waited until they were seated in Alisa’s private cabin to expound. She plopped down at the fold-down desk sticking out from the wall, leaving Alisa to sit on the edge of the bed.

“I would offer you a drink,” Alisa said, “but all I have is water. My operation just got started and isn’t that flush with tindarks yet.”

“No? Ferrying chickens around doesn’t pay well?”

“Actually, the chickens ride for free.”

“You should have stayed in the army if that’s all the business savvy you have,” Khazan said.

“I forgot how endearing your tongue is.”

“I seem to recall we had matching tongues. And that they irritated Tomich to no end when they made him our squadron commander.”

“This is true,” Alisa said, expecting the mention of Tomich to lead Khazan into sharing her news, since he had been the one to help the Nomad escape from a bunch of posturing Alliance and imperial ships a couple of weeks earlier.

“I got a message from him a couple of days ago,” Khazan said, tapping a red and yellow earstar cupping the helix of her ear.

Alisa thought she might command the device to share a holo vid, but she merely lowered her hand to her lap and kept speaking.

“You might have trouble landing your freighter on Arkadius, at least if you’re going to a legitimate civilian or military space base.”

Alisa doubted the Starseer temple would count as either, but she saw no reason to inform Khazan of her destination. Even if she had come here as a friend warning a friend, that did not mean she wouldn’t relay what she learned back to Tomich. He had been the commander for both of them, after all.

“I’m a little surprised I was allowed to land here, honestly,” Alisa said, waving in the direction of the concourse.

“Must have been someone sleeping in the port authority office.” Khazan sniffed. “Civilians.”

Alisa smiled at the dig. The fact that Arkadius Gamma was a corporate-owned station rather than a military one was the reason she had chosen it. “Yes, we’re so inept, aren’t we?”

“I hope you haven’t gotten soft enough for that word to apply to you.” Khazan’s face grew serious as she leaned forward, resting her elbows on the desk. “Listen, I don’t know what your business is here or on the planet, but if you’re still harboring fugitives, you better not linger for long. I hear both of them are hot commodities for the government.”

“They’re not fugitives as far as I know,” Alisa said. Sure, Alejandro and Leonidas had been responsible for the shooting up of a library—and Alisa might have helped in that endeavor too—but that had been on Perun, the imperial planet. The Alliance shouldn’t care about that. Even that crime had been a matter of self-defense.

“Whatever they are, the government wants them.”

Them. When the Nomad had encountered the Alliance near Perun’s moon, it had been Leonidas they had been after. Somewhere along the way, they must have learned about Alejandro and his mysterious orb.

“And it doesn’t look too good that you’re taxiing them around the system,” Khazan added.

“They pay more than the chickens.”

“This isn’t a joke, Marchenko—Alisa.” None of Khazan’s typical humor was in her eyes now. “Tomich said he was vague in his reports to his superiors, and implied you might have been a hostage on your own ship, but he wasn’t sure himself, and he’s afraid your status is about to go from Alliance war hero to imperial sympathizer, maybe worse. Arrest may be the least of your concerns if you’re captured.”

Alisa sighed. “I’m not sympathizing with anyone. They just paid for rides, and I’m giving them rides. They’re getting off at Arkadius, and then I’m done with them.”

Her wistful thoughts about hiring Leonidas sauntered to the forefront of her mind, but she shook her head. Even though she had come to like him, and he had saved her backside a couple of times, she had known for weeks that it would be foolish of her to keep him on her ship and in her life. Alisa did not want to find her daughter only to end up in jail or on the run as a fugitive.

“I’m glad to hear that,” Khazan said, leaning back, her hands sliding into her lap again. “I probably don’t have to tell you, but this is a precarious time for the Alliance. They’ve openly claimed Arkadius and several other key planets, but there are imperial sympathizers aplenty, and the higher-ups know they’re vulnerable right now. We spent a lot to win that war, and our people are spread thin. If I were you, I’d figure out how to turn those imperials in, not just part ways with them. That’ll show the government you can be trusted. And you could even come back into the army if you can pass the medical tests and the physical. We still need good pilots.”

“I’ll think about it.” Alisa made a show of nodding. She couldn’t truly imagine betraying Leonidas, but it had crossed her mind many times to turn Alejandro in, or at least record a detailed message to send to someone who could use the information to apprehend him. Hells, if that Major Mladenovic had been willing to help her find her daughter instead of stringing her along, Alisa might have already handed over the orb.

“For your sake, I hope you do. It would be good flying with you again.” Khazan stood up. “And I sure wouldn’t want to fly against you.”

Khazan grinned, probably meaning it as a compliment, but the words made Alisa’s stomach turn to stone. The idea of flying against her old comrades disturbed her even more than the idea of faceless police officers chasing after her. That was a future she did not want, not for herself and certainly not for her daughter.

Chapter 2

Alisa piloted the Nomad away from the space station and toward the ice-smothered north pole of Arkadius. When they got closer, she would call Yumi to NavCom for more specific directions, but Yumi had already said the temple was located near the pole. That was fine with Alisa, because habitations were sparse above the arctic circle. She hoped the military patrol ships that protected the planet would be sparse in that area too.

Leonidas ducked into NavCom and slid into the co-pilot’s seat. Since nobody except Alisa knew how to fly the ship, she supposed she should re-dub that the passenger’s seat. She sat there when she needed to plot a course for the autopilot, but that was about all that station was for, other than holding a backup helm in case her station exploded. Or she exploded.

The grim thought made her glance to the side to check the sensors. Satellites and ships in orbit lit it up at the edge of its range, but nothing was close at the moment. More important, nothing was following them. According to Beck, the Starseer on the station had walked away shortly after Alisa had gone inside with Khazan. She hoped that meant that her suppositions had been wrong, that the robed figure had simply been passing through and hadn’t been sent to spy on her ship. Or her interesting passengers.

She looked toward Leonidas, debating whether she should tell him about the person. “Can I help you with anything?” she asked, since he had not spoken yet.

It was not uncommon for the others to come up and chat with her about something or another while she was flying, but he rarely did. During the long days in space between planets, he kept to himself, exercising in the cargo hold or doing who knew what in his cabin. He had seemed even quieter since their stopover on Starfall Station, where he had gotten his combat armor repaired—and where he had watched an old comrade die in his arms. Alisa had been along for that, and she could understand why the events might have left him feeling pensive. He was well aware of the bounty out for his arrest, and now he was aware of what might happen to those who stood close while bounty hunters took shots at him.

“I don’t need any help,” Leonidas said quietly, gazing at the view screen where icecaps floated in the frigid northern sea. He turned toward her, meeting her eyes. “I did wish to come and thank you.”

“I—what?”

“The proper response is, ‘You’re welcome,’” he said dryly.

“I know. I mean, you are. But for what?”

“For not turning me over to the Alliance when you had the chance.”

Alisa almost pointed out that he had been standing behind her when she’d had that chance, and that he could have wrung her neck if she’d truly considered plotting against him, but she kept her mouth shut. Having him appreciative for something she had done—or not done—was new. And she liked it.

“Both back near Perun,” he said, “and since then. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find Alliance soldiers waiting on Starfall Station or on Arkadius Gamma.”

“If they had been, they would have been there for Beck’s free duck.”

“Ah.”

Alisa smiled. “You’re welcome.”

His eyebrows rose. “That’s it?”

“Did you expect something else?”

“From you? I’ve come to expect inappropriate humor whenever it would be… inappropriate.”

“I don’t always make a joke,” Alisa said.

“Huh.”

She wondered if he had waited two weeks to voice his gratitude for her involvement in the Perun escapade because he had worried that she would respond with sarcasm. That thought made her feel bleak.

“I’m not certain if the Starseer temple will be a place from which we can depart,” Leonidas said, “but the doctor and I plan to leave your ship there or at the next possible stop.”

That statement made her feel even bleaker. Which was stupid. Not an hour earlier, she had been thinking about how both men needed to move on. She should have said a hearty, “Good!” Instead, what came out of her mouth was a bitter, “Did you two have a nice field trip together on the station? Find a better pilot to ferry you around?”

One of his eyebrows twitched upward. “He wished to use a private comm terminal for a long-distance message. I wasn’t privy to it, and I don’t know who he spoke to.”

A private terminal. Meaning one that she couldn’t monitor. If he’d trusted her, he could have made that call from the ship. But could she truly be surprised that he didn’t trust her? Why should he? She’d already proven that they had different agendas and that she would betray him if it would further her agenda.

“He needed a bodyguard along to do that, huh?” she asked.

“I’m not a bodyguard,” Leonidas said coolly.

“No? You loom nicely.”

Alisa clamped her mouth shut, annoyed with herself. Why was she mocking him? She was irritated with Alejandro, not Leonidas. Hells, she wasn’t even irritated with Alejandro. It was more the fact that Leonidas was choosing Alejandro and his mission over her offer of employment. Over her. She fully admitted that her feelings were irrational. Having them both out of her life would be the best thing for her and for her daughter.

“I’m sorry,” she mumbled an apology, aware that his gaze had grown flinty, even though he had directed it back at the view screen. “And I appreciate your thank you. I also appreciate that you didn’t kill all those soldiers on the Alliance tug.”

He nodded once, his expression shifting to what was probably considered command aloofness. It was better than flint or frost.

“Their kneecaps might not appreciate it,” Alisa said, “but I do.” She tried a smile, hoping to ease any tension that her words had driven between them.

He gave her that faintly puzzled look he sometimes did when she made jokes. The Cyborg Corps must not have been a very fun place to work.

The proximity alarm beeped, and Alisa groaned.

“I don’t suppose that’s just an iceberg,” she muttered, turning toward the sensor panel. She knew it wasn’t. They were still forty thousand feet above the sea of ice and icy water hugging the pole.

Leonidas leaned back in his seat, also checking the sensors. Another ship had appeared behind them.

“Have you gotten to try out your combat armor since you got it repaired?” Alisa asked.

“No.”

“This may be your chance.”

“That looks like a civilian ship.”

Alisa fiddled with the Nomad’s external cameras until she could get a visual on it. A white craft with four wings was swooping down from the atmosphere, heading in the same direction as they were.

“Yeah, a civilian ship that is coincidentally in the shape of a white dragon,” she said. “Well, technically, I’d call that more of a butterfly shape, but I think those are e-cannons protruding from its nose, so I won’t quibble.”

“They are.”

Alisa pressed the thrusters for greater speed and dipped toward the sea and ice below. There were also mountains that poked up here and there, the remains of a mostly submerged range that cupped one side of the pole, and she headed toward those, having a notion of finding a hiding spot. Fuzzy gray clouds smeared the horizon beyond them.

“It was unwise to let Beck barbecue in front of your ship,” Leonidas said. “The White Dragon mafia has outposts throughout the system and has its talons in numerous government systems.”

“He’s his own man. If he wants to let the universe know where he is so that he can earn two tindarks in tips, who am I to stop him?”

“His captain.”

“That doesn’t give me the right to keep him chained in his cabin when we’re in dock.” Alisa hit the comm button. “Mica, are you in engineering? We might have trouble soon. Yumi, if you’d come to NavCom, this would be a good time to give us more specific coordinates as to the location of the Starseer temple.”

“I’m always in engineering,” came Mica’s voice over the comm. “Where else would I be besides cuddling with the new deuterium tank you got me?”

“I told you to install it, not cuddle with it.”

“I like to enjoy myself while I work.”

“If I had time to think about it right now, I’d be concerned for you, Mica.” Alisa guided them around the first of several mountains, the sea changing from water to ice around its base. The white, jagged peaks were far apart, and she feared they would not offer as many hiding spots as she had hoped. “Give me all you can for shield power, please. And send Yumi up here if you see her.”

“I’m right here, Captain.” Yumi gripped the hatchway jamb on either side as she leaned into NavCom.

“We’re being chased by a ship that either wants a close-up look at my butt or is going to fire at us as soon as it’s in range. Which should be soon. It’s faster than us.” The other craft had disappeared from her camera’s view, and Alisa glanced at the sensors to check its progress, hoping vainly that it had veered off, not wanting to play Seek and Find among the mountains. No such luck.

“Is there anything that isn’t faster than this ship?” Alejandro asked from the corridor behind Yumi.

“I didn’t ask for everyone to come up for a visit,” Alisa growled. “You better find seats and buckle yourselves in.”

“Is it an Alliance ship?” Alejandro asked as Yumi pulled out the fold-down seat behind Alisa.

“I don’t think so.”

Alisa hadn’t intended to go into more specifics, but Leonidas did it for her.

“White Dragon, we believe,” he said.

Alisa didn’t have to look back to see the irritated expression on Alejandro’s face. It was all right if the orb got them in trouble, but not when Beck’s past came nipping at their heels.

As Alisa headed for a series of three peaks that rose about a thousand feet above the sea of ice, the enemy ship took its first shot. The icy blue beam of an e-cannon glanced off one of the Nomad’s wings, sending a shudder through the craft even through the shields.

“Are they going to try to board us?” Alejandro asked.

Alisa weaved, trying to make a challenging target as more fire raced after them. “I think they’re more interested in crashing us. Yumi? Any chance that you could give us some coordinates so we could swoop into a well-armed Starseer temple that would love to defend you from aggressors, on account of your cute wholesomeness and your slightly auspicious blood?”

“They won’t start a battle because of my blood,” Yumi said, “and even if they would, I don’t know exactly where the temple is. I just have some directions that my mother gave me in a story when I was a little girl.”

“Uh, what kind of directions?” Alisa had expected a map or specific coordinates. A description of directions remembered from a story told twenty years in the past was not what she wanted to hear about right now.

The firing stopped temporarily as she guided the Nomad through the mountains, weaving in between the peaks and hugging the rugged slopes to keep them out of their enemy’s sights.

“Seventh peak from the whale, keep right into the mists of forever,” Yumi said.

Alisa groaned. What in the hells did that mean? “If we make it there and meet your mother, make sure to point her out to me so I can strangle her.”

“She’s a Starseer,” Yumi said. “Attacking her wouldn’t be wise.”

“I haven’t done much that would qualify as wise this month. Why would I want to start now?”

A blue beam sliced through the view from the port camera, and Alisa took them even closer to the icy contours of the mountain, practically scratching the Nomad’s belly on the frozen slopes and ridges as she used the terrain for cover. For now, the other ship was following them at the same altitude, but it was only a matter of time before the pilot realized he could simply climb higher and take shots at them from above the mountain. She tried to tempt him into flying recklessly right behind her, on the chance that he might miscalculate and crash, or at least nick something that would damage his ship and slow him down.

Leonidas activated one of the navigation monitors in the console in front of him.

“Pull up a map, will you?” Alisa asked.

“That’s what I’m doing,” he said.

“The sensors are all right for flying around asteroids, but they’re not good at differentiating flat ground from poky ground.”

“Reassuring,” Alejandro murmured.

“You got a harness on, Doctor?” Alisa asked.

“There don’t seem to be any more seats available.”

“Plenty in the rec room.” Alisa banked hard as the enemy ship came into view on the rear camera, cannons firing.

A grunt came from the corridor.

“Rec room, right,” Alejandro said. “Keep me apprised.”

“Yeah, that’ll be my first priority,” Alisa muttered.

Leonidas glanced at her.

“Find me any hiding spots?” she asked. “Or places where I can arrange to shave this wart off my ass?”

“I had no idea pilots were so profane,” Yumi said.

“We’re tame compared to infantry,” Alisa said. “I’m sure Leonidas cussed every other word when he was in the fleet.”

“I was an officer,” he said.

“So you were more refined? You only cussed every third word?”

Leonidas turned his attention back to the display. “I’m looking for a whale.”

“A whale? Under the ice?”

“The whale in Yumi’s directions.”

Alisa scowled. Currently, she was more interested in finding a hiding place than in finding a temple full of reclusive mystics who may or may not help them.

“That was a nursery rhyme, not directions,” she said.

“Fly north,” Leonidas said, running his finger along the display.

“Because you’ve found something promising up there or because you’re getting tired of me flying circles around this mountain?”

“Perhaps some of both.”

“There’s a lot of flat ice to the north,” Alisa said, glancing at the sensors and then at their shield status. Just under seventy percent remained. “The Dragon ship will have a lot of clear sky to target us.”

“There’s a string of exactly seven peaks up there.”

Alisa had concerns about shooting out into open air, but the enemy ship hadn’t followed her around the last turn, perhaps growing sick of chasing her around and around the mountain. Its thrusters flared orange, and it tilted its nose upward. The pilot must be planning to climb above the peaks and fire at her from above, as she had feared he would.

“Heading north,” Alisa said. “We’re going to take some hits.” She tapped the comm. “Mica, put everything you can into the shields.”

“What do you think I’ve been doing?”

“I thought you were cuddling with the equipment.”

“Cuddling is for after the action, not during it. I thought you were experienced in these matters.”

“I haven’t had much experience like that lately,” she grumbled, pushing the engines as much as she dared planet-side. They broke the sound barrier, and she imagined polar bears and ice turtles being terrified as a boom erupted behind the freighter.

The White Dragon ship streaked after them, two e-cannons blazing. Alisa gritted her teeth as powerful energy blasts slammed into the rear of the freighter. The series of seven mountain peaks came into view ahead, but she worried they would not make it before the shields failed.

Since the other craft had no trouble keeping up with them, Alisa slowed down enough to make evasive maneuvers. Once again, she weaved and banked, even looping behind the enemy to try and stay away from his weapons. She tried not to feel ridiculous entering into a dogfight with a freighter that had no weapons.

“The Northern Mists, also known as The Hells’ Leftovers, refers to a six-hundred-thousand square mile phenomena at Arkadius’s north pole in which air and sea ships often lose their way and occasionally disappear under mysterious circumstances,” Leonidas said. He had his netdisc out now, a holodisplay open before him. “Various paranormal and superstitious explanations are offered, including that it’s a pickup zone for aliens hunting for humans to abduct for scientific experiments. Scientists only acknowledge that there’s thermal activity under the sea that causes temperature changes and accounts for the mists.”

“Are you reading?” Alisa asked, twisting the clunky freighter into a semblance of a barrel roll to avoid the enemy ship. She kept heading them toward the mountains, but she was doing her best to avoid taking more fire along the way. The shields had dropped to fifty percent power.

“Yes, cyborgs are capable of that, you know.”

“I didn’t mean to imply you couldn’t, just that I couldn’t believe you are. Now. Aren’t you airsick?” Alisa asked as she spun them in a corkscrew, the view screen alternately showing white ice and blue sky as they streaked over the frozen sea. The Nomad creaked and groaned, feeling the unaccustomed stress of gravity as she did her best to contort the craft to avoid fire.

“I don’t get airsick,” Leonidas said.

“I do,” Yumi groaned from behind them.

Leonidas squinted at the view screen. “Straighten us out for a few seconds.”

“Whose side are you on?” Alisa asked, but she complied.

The view screen settled with the white ice on the bottom and the first of the seven peaks looming up ahead. Only one sun remained in the sky, and it was low on the horizon, casting an orange fiery glow over the ice.

“See that rock formation jutting up over there?” Leonidas pointed. “That could be a whale.”

Alisa was more interested in something else she saw in the distance, starting to the right of the mountains. Those clouds. They were even thicker and lower than she had realized, a bank of gray floating over the ice. Fog. Or maybe that was considered mist. She didn’t care as long as it would obscure visibility. She hoped she would get lucky and that it would obscure the enemy’s sensors too.

Ignoring the “whale,” which looked like a jumble of rocks to her, she veered straight for the fog. She also ignored the distressed gags coming from Yumi’s seat. They would all be making distressed noises if the shields gave out.

The White Dragon ship picked up speed, and she had a feeling its pilot knew exactly what she had in mind—and wanted to stop her from reaching the fog.

“Mica,” Alisa said over the comm, “if you could fondle some extra energy out of that deuterium tank, now would be a good time.”

“I was cuddling with the tank, not fondling it.”

“Whatever gets me more power.”

Cannon blasts slammed into the back of the Nomad, the jolt throwing Alisa against her harness.

“Should have gotten some big guns for the ship instead of toys for engineering,” she growled. If only her cargo delivery had provided her with more funds. As it was, it would take her five years to get through the list of replacement parts that Mica had given her. And weapons were not on that list.

“You need to head more to the west if you’re going to follow that peak,” Leonidas said.

“I cannot tell you how much I don’t care about whales or peaks right now,” Alisa said, weaving, hoping to avoid taking another blast straight on. She did not want to slow too much for maneuvers, though. The bank of fog was growing on the horizon, blocking the rays of the setting sun.

“I thought our goal was to find the Starseer temple.”

“Something I’ll worry about fully once we get rid of this asteroid kisser.”

“I agree with the captain,” Yumi said. “I don’t think it would be a good idea to lead an enemy ship to the Starseers.”

“You don’t think they’ll have weapons to defend themselves?” Leonidas asked.

“Perhaps not in the traditional sense.”

“I would not have a problem with them using their mind powers to make that ship crash,” Alisa said.

“From what I know of them,” Leonidas said, “it’s more likely that they’ll make both ships crash. They’ve kept their temple a secret for centuries by—” a cannon blast struck them, jolting the ship, “—keeping ships from finding them, not helping the ones that do.”

“Yes, but we’re banking on them liking Yumi,” Alisa said. “Everyone likes Yumi. She’s sweet.”

A retching noise came from the seat behind her.

Alisa grimaced and did not look back. It was bad enough cleaning up the deck when the chickens escaped.

She flew into the fog bank, grayness enveloping them and obliterating the view, and immediately pulled up on the flight stick. She did not fly far in that direction, not wanting to come out of the mist, but she wanted to make sure they were no longer in the enemy’s line of fire, at least for the moment. She flattened them out and veered deeper into the fog before checking the displays. The cameras showed nothing but fog. The sensors displayed the location of the ground and also showed the other ship. It was still following them.

Alisa went back to evasive maneuvers, flying deeper into the fog and hoping that their sensors would become less effective, that whatever mystic mumbo jumbo Leonidas had been reading about happened. She would gladly risk losing her own sensors, so long as the other ship lost hers too.

A huge, dark shape loomed out of the fog.

Cursing, Alisa pulled up again. She got a close-up of a rocky slope, the Nomad’s thruster casings practically skidding off of it before they achieved a vertical course.

“Nobody mentioned mountains inside of the mists,” Alisa said, aware of Yumi’s fingers gripping the back of her seat like talons.

“The encyclopedia article neglected to mention them,” Leonidas said calmly. He was watching the view screen, his eyes intent, but he lacked Yumi’s tense and stressed expression. Maybe he had experience flying with pilots even crazier than she.

“Well, mystery solved as to why ships don’t come back out of here,” Alisa said. For some reason, that mountain hadn’t shown up on the sensors.

Leonidas grunted noncommittally.

Alisa leveled out again, flying forward much more slowly than before. The enemy ship still showed up on her sensors, but it came and went, the blip disappearing from time to time. She hoped that meant that it was falling behind, or having trouble tracking her. Or both. She turned them to fly deeper into the mist again, or at least in the direction she thought would be deeper. She no longer trusted the sensors, and the cameras were showing nothing but fog, so she was flying on instinct. The digital compass kept changing its reading, even when the Nomad was cruising straight.

“This is remarkable,” Yumi breathed. Her airsickness must have calmed, because she had turned her attention to the sensor station and was taking readings. “I’ve read about the Northern Mists, but I’ve never been here in person.”

“Have you always known this was the location of the Starseer Temple?” Alisa asked, never taking her eyes from the view screen and the route ahead.

A distant screech and a boom sounded. The White Dragon ship was still firing, which meant it hadn’t fallen that far behind.

“Yes, but I didn’t know if the Starseers were exploiting a natural phenomenon or doing it all themselves. I believe it’s the former, because if my memory is correct, documents of the strangeness of the Northern Mists date back to the first or second century after colonization, before the Starseers left Kir and possibly before they had even evolved into advanced human beings.”

“Advanced human beings. Please.” Alisa grunted. “They have gene mutations from whatever whacky radiation was sprouting from their planet.”

“Hm,” was all Yumi said, and Alisa remembered her admitting that all of her experiments with meditation and drugs had started because she’d hoped to find a way to access the Starseer power that lay dormant in her own genes.

And why not? Who wouldn’t want to be an advanced human being?

Alisa glanced over at Leonidas.

His head was tilted, his eyes half-closed. “I can still hear them,” he said, noticing her look. “They’re above us and firing randomly, hoping to get lucky.”

“Above us? You think they’re flying high enough to be out of the fog?”

“Possibly.” He held up a finger, and a couple of long seconds passed. “The sound is muffled now. Either they went behind a mountain or we did.”

Alisa slowed down, taking that as a warning that another obstacle might be ahead. If they crashed out here, she doubted any medical ships would find them and rush to their aid.

Even with Leonidas’s warning, the appearance of jagged, ice-covered rocks surprised her, seeming to spring out at them as the fog faded to reveal them at the last moment. She jerked the Nomad upward, then cursed, remembering that the White Dragon ship might be waiting up there. She adjusted their route to fly along the side of what was definitely looking like a mountain even though she could only see the closest twenty-five meters of it as they cruised along.

“Flying blind is fun,” she said.

Something tickled the back of her mind, almost an itch. She scowled and ignored it, keeping her focus on the screen ahead. But an uneasy feeling came over her, the certainty that something bad would happen.

Alisa took them around a curve in the terrain and almost leaped out of her seat in distress as the nose of the White Dragon ship came into view, almost on top of them. She tried to veer away, but the other pilot veered at the same time, trying not to hit them. It was an accidental game of chicken, and they both went in the same direction. They struck each other’s shields with enough force that each ship bounced in opposite directions. The White Dragon craft spun toward the mountain, its back end striking a cliff.

Before Alisa could whoop or gloat, blue lit up her starboard camera, the bright glow of an e-cannon muzzle visible even through the fog.

“Shields down,” the computer announced.

“What?” Alisa cried, glancing at the controls even as she veered away from the other ship. The power was still at forty percent, but the shields had dropped, as if someone had flipped a switch to turn them off.

An e-cannon blast slammed into the Nomad. The force hurled Alisa to the side. Her harness kept her in her chair, but not without wrenching her shoulder. Her head almost struck the sensor station, and she glimpsed green fuzz on the display even as the world spun around her. She managed to keep her hold on the flight stick, but the ship did not respond to her attempts to stop the spin.

Another jolt came as the Nomad’s belly struck something. The ground? No, the ice, she corrected, another horror piling onto the dozens of others jumbled in a heap in her mind. They were on top of the ocean, not solid land.

She tried vainly to pull them up, but the Nomad struck down again, this time staying down and skidding. White shards of ice flew up, spattering the external cameras. Alisa bounced around in her seat as the ship scraped and bumped across the lumpy surface. A cry of pain came from somewhere within the ship.

The Nomad jerked to a halt, and the lights went out.

Chapter 3

Images flashed through Alisa’s mind of the last time she had crashed. Too many ships, too much going on at once. Pandemonium. Dodging debris and other ships. Flying recklessly. Firing. And then hearing the imperial message that was relayed throughout every Alliance ship: “We surrender.” A surge of relief. Until the kamikaze fighter came out of nowhere, streaking toward Alisa, taking her out even after the surrender had been promised. The stars disappearing. The desert spinning below. Red sand everywhere. Red sun. White light. Pain. So much pain.

Alisa drew in a shuddering breath and blinked away the memories. The blackness of the present replaced the harsh red light in her mind. She grew aware of her seat on the Nomad and the shivers still coursing through the ship around her.

“Did you turn off the shields?” Alisa demanded as soon as the world grew still. The lights had not come back on, and the cameras and view screen were out too. A few blinking red alerts came from the dashboard, but did not provide enough illumination for her to see much. She could barely make out Leonidas in the co-pilot’s seat.

A groan came from behind her. Yumi.

“Me?” Leonidas asked. As indomitable as he was, he also sounded shaken from the crash. Or from something. Alisa remembered that strange tingle that she had felt before running into the other ship.

“You’re the only other person with access to the helm controls,” Alisa said, but even as she spoke, she realized how ridiculous it sounded. Why would Leonidas have shut down the shields? He could have been killed in that crash too.

“No, I don’t—at least I don’t remember…”

The confused way his words came out, so unlike the confident way he usually spoke, sent a shiver of unease down Alisa’s spine.

“I’m not sure what happened,” he said. “I remember seeing the other ship and hitting it, and then it’s fuzzy. We—” A snap sounded, his harness unbuckling. He jumped to his feet. “The other ship. They’re out there, and they’re not far from us. Beck,” he called and charged out of NavCom.

Alisa reached for her own harness fastener, but her hands were still shaking. She fumbled with it unsuccessfully.

“Captain?” Mica’s shaky voice came over the comm, none of her usual brusque sarcasm present.

“I’m here,” Alisa said.

“I don’t know what—for a minute there, I couldn’t concentrate on anything, and then we hit something. We hit everything.”

“Yeah, we had the same experience up here. We’re not far from the mafia ship, and I don’t know what their status is. Beck and Leonidas are going out to meet them if they try to board us.” Alisa assumed that was what Leonidas had been planning when he charged out of NavCom. “Can you get me a damage report, find out if we can get back in the sky? Or in the fog, as the case seems to be.”

“I thought I’d try to get the lights turned on first,” Mica said, a hint of her usual dry humor returning, though she still sounded shaky. Alisa hoped she hadn’t hit her head.

Worrying about other people and their injuries helped Alisa steady herself, and she finally got her harness unfastened.

“Yumi?” she asked, standing up.

“I’m alive,” Yumi said quietly, still sitting in her seat. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

“Why don’t you check on your chickens? Go check on Alejandro, too, will you, please?”

“Yes. Where are you going?”

Alisa dropped her hand to her holster. “To make sure no mafia thugs board my ship.”

Following the emergency lighting lining the walkways, Alisa made her way down the corridor toward the cargo hold. She paused at the intersection that branched to the crew and passenger quarters, hearing several thumps coming from the direction of Leonidas’s room. He was probably getting his armor on. Since she had no armor, she continued to the cargo hold.

Irritated squawks greeted her before she reached the stairs. The poor chickens. It was a wonder they were laying any eggs at all with the constant stress of living on a spaceship. On this spaceship, at least. In the last month, the Nomad had seen more action than an Alliance warship during the war.

“Captain?” came a muffled voice from the deck of the cargo hold.

Alisa gripped the railing to guide herself down the stairs. “That you, Beck?”

He sounded like he was already in his combat armor.

“Yes, ma’am. By the hatch. The mech said we should go out and check on the other ship, said they might have crashed too. That right?”

“I’m not sure. Sensors and cameras are down. I did see them hit a cliff, but unless their shields also suspiciously dropped right before that, it wouldn’t necessarily have damaged them.”

“Suspiciously?”

“Talk later,” Leonidas said, startling Alisa as he came up behind her. His voice was gruff, but he put a gentle hand on her shoulder. A gentle armored hand. “Beck and I will go check. Stay here.”

He tried to guide her to the side, so he could pass her on the stairs.

Alisa stubbornly continued down. “There’s nothing I can do here. I’m going with you.”

“You won’t be able to see much out there without a helmet with night vision, Captain,” Beck said. “I think we flew past the terminator into night.”

“Unless your helmets have fog vision, you won’t be able to see much out there, either,” she said.

“Oh.”

Guided by the squawking of the chickens, Alisa found her way to the hatch, almost smacking against Beck’s armored shoulder on the way. With his night vision helmet, he saw her and stepped out of the way, stopping her with a hand out.

“It will be cold out there too,” Leonidas said from behind her shoulder.

Alisa remembered her earlier thoughts—had it just been a few hours ago?—about wishing that he was her bodyguard, or worked for her in some capacity if body guarding was too lowly for him, and that he would loom at her shoulder. This wasn’t quite how she had imagined the scenario.

“Let us go,” he added. “You’ve got your comm unit? We’ll report in to you.”

“Let’s just see what we’re dealing with. If we can get the hatch open.” Alisa found the bulkhead with her hands and patted her way to the hatch controls. The button wouldn’t work without power, but there was a mechanical override behind a panel, if she could find it in the dark. Why hadn’t she stopped in her cabin to grab her multitool and a jacket? Maybe it wasn’t too late to get them. She just hated to delay because her instincts were itching, suggesting that delaying might be a bad idea.

A beam of light appeared on the wall where she was patting around.

“Oh,” she blurted, almost ridiculously pleased. She smiled over her shoulder and found that Beck was the one providing the illumination with a flashlight built into his suit. “Thank you.”

Leonidas was a few feet farther down the wall, the panel Alisa had been searching for already open in front of him. He looked over at them, frowning slightly for some reason.

“See,” Beck said, “I’m useful, Captain.”

“I never said you weren’t useful. You make excellent duck.”

“Stand back.” Leonidas tugged on the latch, and a hiss sounded as the seal on the hatch released. He crouched by the side of it as it rose and the ramp automatically unfolded and extended.

The temperature seemed to drop thirty degrees in a second. Fog rolled into the ship, hazing over the pricks of emergency lighting on the deck of the hold.

An alarming crack came from outside, and Alisa jumped. Her first thought was that someone had fired a weapon, but she shivered when she realized what she had heard. Ice snapping. As she had noted earlier, they had landed on the frozen sea, not solid ground. Her ship, which weighed thousands of pounds, even without cargo in it, was resting on a sheet of ice. She had no way of knowing if that ice extended downward for hundreds of meters or if they were on a shelf only inches thick.

“How is there mist when it’s so cold out?” Beck asked. “The thermometer in my suit says it’s forty below out there. Isn’t mist or fog droplets of water?”

“Part of the charm of this place, maybe,” Alisa said. “You could ask Leonidas. He was reading the encyclopedia entry.”

Leonidas had started down the ramp and did not look back. It was dark outside, not as absolute as inside the ship, but Beck was right. They had left the sun behind, with twilight descending upon them. The fog did not help. It was so thick that Alisa could not see past the end of the ramp.

She started down, thinking to catch up with Leonidas before he disappeared. Outside of the ship, the temperature dropped drastically, and she rethought the wisdom of going out without a jacket. Without a jacket, mittens, scarves, boots, snow pants, and three or four blankets.

Leonidas halted at the base of the ramp and unslung the rifle on his shoulder. “Get out here, Beck.”

“Something you want me to see?” Beck was walking right beside Alisa.

“I hear people, not far from here. We’re not alone out here.”

“White Dragon people?”

“We’ll go ask with our rifles,” Leonidas said, “unless you plan to hide behind Marchenko.”

Beck lifted his head. “I do not.” He slapped his own rifle. “If they are White Dragon, they’re my problem.”

Very true, Alisa thought but did not say. She was surprised Leonidas was willing to lead the way to deal with mafia thugs who presumably wanted nothing to do with him. Though, upon reflection, she wasn’t sure why she was surprised. She had yet to see him shy away from any battle. It even seemed to put him in a good mood.

“Alisa,” Leonidas said, “close the hatch and wait inside. We’ll let you know if it’s safe to come out for repairs if they’re needed.”

Alisa bristled at receiving orders and also at the idea of hiding inside, but she reluctantly admitted that her Etcher wouldn’t do much good if the White Dragon crew was wearing combat armor. And without the protection of a climate-controlled suit of armor, she could freeze before she reached the other ship. Already, she was shivering as the frigid air needled right through her clothing. There wasn’t a wind—of course not, or the mist would dissipate—but the bite to the air had her stuffing her hands into her armpits.

“He calls you Alisa now?” Beck murmured from her side.

“I told him to,” she said.

“Oh.”

“I bet he’d call you Tommy if you called him Leonidas.”

“What a treat that would be.”

“You’re not bitter about his suggestion about the celery seed, are you?”

“Yes, I am. Is that immature?”

“You did ask for his opinion.”

Beck grunted.

Leonidas walked away from the ramp, apparently trusting his ears or his sense of direction when it came to where the other ship had landed. The fog soon swallowed the bright red of his combat armor. It felt like they were on some unexplored alien world rather than Arkadius with its billions of residents. Billions of residents who were not crazy enough to live anywhere around here.

“I better go see if I can get the White Dragon more pissed with me,” Beck said with a sigh and trotted off after Leonidas.

Alisa grimaced, realizing he was right. Every time he defended himself from them, he destroyed some of their equipment, and he might have killed some of their men by now. Alisa thought back to her first encounter with them when she had dropped a cliff onto the heads of a squad of men. After that, she could not be certain that the mafia clan was only after Beck now. She might be on the list of people they were hunting for too.

“They’ll have to get in line,” she muttered and returned to the cargo hold.

The lights were still off, and it was not much warmer inside than outside. Even though she hated the idea of closing the hatch while her men were out there, she shuddered to imagine enemies sneaking into the ship while everyone was working on repairs. Alisa liked to think she could take care of herself in a fight, but she wouldn’t be a match for men in combat armor, and she knew it. With a tug of the handle, she activated the ramp mechanism, drawing it in and closing the hatch.

A lit candle appeared on the walkway above, Yumi coming to the cargo hold. Both she and the flame appeared blurry—some of that pervasive mist had found its way inside the ship and lingered in the air.

“Coming to check on your chickens?” Alisa asked.

“Yes. I didn’t know our flights would be so incident-filled when I decided to bring them along with me.”

“Sorry about that. Maybe you can sell them to a friendly Starseer who wants the insides of her ship fertilized regularly.”

Alisa wondered if the mist surrounded their temple. If so, and if they never had sun shining on them, maybe it wouldn’t be an ideal place for critters. Did Starseers keep animals for pets or livestock? She knew so little about them. Except that they did not have a reputation for being friendly toward outsiders. She remembered that tickle in her mind before she had struck the White Dragon ship. Maybe she just wanted to give herself an excuse for that crash, but she couldn’t help but think that the Starseers had seen the two ships coming into their territory and had arranged it. Was someone paying that close of attention to their borders? Or had they set up the obstacle course and now trusted in that to keep people from finding them?

“Really, Captain,” Yumi said, making her way down the stairs, “you bring up fertilizer often, but I clean their pen regularly, and I have a compost tumbler in my cabin. I’m turning their droppings into a wonderful medium for growing things.”

“You’re composting poop next to your bunk? My mom didn’t even allow passengers to eat in their cabins.”

“Sounds draconian.” Yumi smiled and crossed to the chickens, who had grown oddly quiet since Leonidas opened the hatch. Maybe they were cold.

A curse and a clank came from the direction of engineering. Alisa headed that way to check on Mica. She was surprised the lights were not back on yet, especially since the crash had been fairly controlled, all things considered. They had landed on their belly, after all. But the shields had been down for that last blast from the enemy ship. Alisa hoped the hull had not been breached.

A moan sounded, not from within the ship but from outside. It seemed to float across the frozen sea, as if some animal was out there and in pain. A snap echoed up from below, from the ice.

Alisa quickened her pace, rubbing her arms as she went. The sooner they were airborne again, the better.

“Mica?” Alisa asked, opening the hatch and poking her head into engineering. Several lanterns were propped on consoles and machinery, driving the shadows back from the room. “You might share some of your lights. Yumi is using a candle to check on her chickens.”

Mica lay on her back on a rolling platform tucked under the engine, and she pushed herself out to scowl up at Alisa.

“Judging by the expression on your face, the news is not good,” Alisa said. “Either that, or Beck’s duck skewers aren’t agreeing with you.”

“The skewers were excellent. The news is that I can’t figure out why the lights and non-emergency systems are out. I’m sure the hull is dinged up after that landing, but the engine is fine. All the connections I’ve checked are fine. The gum I’ve got holding the oxidizer valve in place is even still there.”

“Gum? That doesn’t sound ideal. Did you mention needing valve holder thingies on your shopping list?”

“Thingies?”

“Thingies.”

“I didn’t mention them on the last list, no,” Mica said. “I wanted to make sure I got my new tank.”

“I guess a tank is more exciting to cuddle with than a valve.”

“Infinitely more so, yes.” Mica pushed herself to her feet, looked around, and frowned. “Where did all this fog come from?”

“I opened the cargo hatch a few minutes ago. Beck and Leonidas went out to look around, possibly to shoot people.”

“Well, tell them to shoot the fog out of my engine room when they get back.” Mica swatted at the air. “What is this stuff? Is it corrosive?”

“I hope not.” Alisa tried to decide if the mist was denser than it had been in the cargo hold, or if she could simply see it better since there was more light in here. “Is there anything I can help you with?”

“That depends.” Mica grabbed a flashlight and pointed it into an open panel. “On a quiz, how many things in engineering would you label as thingies?”

“No more than fifty percent, I should think.”

“I don’t need your help.”

“You’re a charming woman, Mica. We need to find you a soul mate.”

Mica stuck a wrench in the panel and grunted as she pried at something and the tool slid off, clanking on the side. “I’d settle for a good job.”

“I thought you wanted a challenging job, not a good one. What could be more rewarding than a mystery to troubleshoot?”

Mica sneered and waved at the fog.

“No need to answer that,” Alisa said. “I’ll go check on Alejandro and be back to pat you on your back when you get my lights back on.”

Mica responded, but her head was stuffed into the access panel again, and Alisa could not make out the words. Perhaps that was good. She doubted they were flattering.

Another eerie cracking of ice sounded as Alisa headed back through the cargo hold and toward the walkway. She winced and found herself stepping more lightly.

“Any idea how thick the ice is up here, Yumi?” she asked as she passed the chicken pen.

“If memory serves, the ice at Arkadius’s north pole averages from three to five meters in thickness, with ridges up to twenty meters thick.”

“Three meters?” Alisa paused with her hand on the stair railing. “That’s, uh, not as thick as I would like for it to be, considering my entire freighter is parked on it.”

She waited, hoping Yumi would tell her that the ice was plenty thick to support them, but another snap sounded outside, and Yumi gave her a bleak look. “Due to the size of the cargo hold, there’s a lot of air inside your ship. It’s highly likely that we would float once in the water.”

“Float?” Alisa stared at her. “While that’s slightly more encouraging than news that we would plummet to the bottom of the ocean, how in the hells would we take off if the thrusters are half underwater? And for that matter, what happens if the ice refreezes around us? It’s cold enough to kick spit out there.”

Yumi shrugged helplessly. “I suggest we pray that the ice remains stable.”

“Who are we praying to? The sun gods or the Starseers who may have arranged that crash as a way of implying we’re not welcome here?”

Alisa expected Yumi to defend the Starseers and say the crash didn’t have anything to do with them and could only be blamed on the strange weather phenomenon. Instead, she shrugged again, offering another bleak look.

Alisa walked up the stairs very carefully. The mist seemed to follow her, as if whatever had come in during the short time the hatch had been open was being fruitful and multiplying. She reached for her comm unit, thinking to check in on Beck and Leonidas as she headed for Alejandro’s cabin, but her hand did not make it to her belt. A creepy sensation came over her, and the hairs on her arms stood up.

“I’m really starting to dislike this place,” she whispered and continued on, turning up the corridor to the passenger cabins.

The feeling of discomfort increased as she walked closer to Alejandro’s cabin. Maybe it wasn’t the mist bothering her, after all. Maybe he was playing with his orb.

“Odd timing for it, if so.” She knocked on his hatch.

He did not answer. She tried the latch and was glad it was not locked, since the electronic override would not have worked. When she tugged the hatch open, she found bright golden light flaring from the floor in the center of the cabin. She squinted, almost blinded after the dimness of the corridor.

Alejandro sat cross-legged next to the orb, staring down at the rainbow lights swirling within its depths, unaware that his hairy legs were on display above his shoes. He seemed mesmerized by the orb, which lay nestled on its velvet cushion inside the box, its luminescence pouring out, reflecting against all of the metal surfaces in the cabin.

“Doctor, you’re supposed to invite the captain in when she knocks at your door,” Alisa said. “It’s polite.”

He did not answer, nor did he tear his gaze from the orb. After that first cursory inspection, Alisa avoided looking at it. That was harder than it should have been. The glowing surface called to her, inviting her to look, even as gooseflesh arose all over her body, and her instincts said to get out of the cabin. She remembered the cyborg pirate Malik’s words about weak minds being affected by the artifact.

“Doctor,” Alisa repeated, forcing herself to step into the cabin to nudge his shoulder.

He still did not move. His eyes were open, but they were not blinking.

Alisa kicked the lid shut. Alejandro flinched. The light lessened considerably, but to Alisa’s surprise, some continued to leak out through the seam in the wooden box. It hadn’t been doing that before. Previously, when the lid had been down, the strange energy it emitted had not been nearly as noticeable, and since she had been in a dark room to steal it before, she knew that light had not escaped the box.

“What?” Alejandro asked, finally looking at her, squinting up with confusion in his eyes.

“We’re in a jam right now,” Alisa said. “This isn’t the time for communing with eerie spheres.”

“I just checked on it…” He touched the deck on either side, further confusion wrinkling his brow, as if he was not sure how he had gotten down there.

“It’s fine, other than being extra uppity right now. Why don’t you leave it under your pillow and come help us in engineering. We need to get the power back on so we can take off before we break through the ice and become a boat.” She doubted Mica wanted to see Alejandro in engineering any more than she wanted Alisa and her thingie-lexicon there, but it might be good to get him away from that box for a while.

“Ice?”

“We’re in The Hells’ Leftovers. You’ve heard of it?”

“I—yes.” Alejandro blinked around the room, which was still partially illuminated by the box. “Where did this fog come from?”

“The hells, apparently. Maybe all three of them combined to muck up this corner of the planet.”

Alejandro picked up the box and climbed to his feet. “Yes, I remember now. The Starseer temple. It must be nearby. Maybe that’s why the artifact is responding.”

“Responding?”

“Getting uppity, as you said,” he said dryly, his usual demeanor returning.

“You think just being in the presence of Starseers could cause it to intensify its strangeness?”

“From my research, I believe—” He broke off with a frown for her. “You’ll get no further information out of me, Captain. Please do not pry.”

“I didn’t know it was prying to walk into someone’s room and keep a creepy artifact from taking over his mind.” Alisa waved and strode back into the corridor. “Come make yourself useful, Doctor. We need all hands.”

The ice cracked again, the snap sounding as if it came from directly below the Nomad.

Alisa scowled, wishing she knew a way that she could be useful.

“It’s colder than death in here,” came Mica’s voice over the intercom. “Who opened the hatch?”

“What?” Alisa ran to the walkway. The wide cargo hold hatch was open, the ramp once again unfurled, almost obscured by the thick mist rolling into the ship. “Yumi?”

Alisa peered toward the corner. The chickens were still in their pen, still being oddly quiet.

“Yumi’s in here,” Mica said, leaning out of the hatchway to engineering. “Making herself useful by holding flashlights and not calling pieces of sophisticated equipment thingies.”

“She didn’t open the hatch?” Alisa walked slowly down the stairs. Her arm hair was not standing on end now that she had shut the orb box and moved away from it, but another feeling of unease crept over her as she stared at the open hatch, the mist and cold air rolling in.

Yumi stepped out of the engine room. “It wasn’t me.”

“Then who opened it?”

Chapter 4

Alisa commed 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 in 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 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 over there.

As her shoulder hit the deck and she rolled in a somersault, the squeal of a blazer sounded. She glimpsed a bright orange bolt slicing through the dark air just behind her as she jumped to her feet. She fired again, not aiming and not caring, just hoping to make her attacker duck for cover as she raced toward the engine room. She dove again, this time aiming for the hatchway, the lanterns inside calling like a beacon.

Mica stepped into the opening as Alisa rolled across the threshold. Mica yelped, jumping back in surprise.

“Intruder,” Alisa blurted, scrambling to her feet.

“So we deduced,” Mica said as she tossed something into the cargo hold.

Blazer fire shot out of the darkness under the stairs and also from the opposite side of the hold, from the alcove of the airlock. Alisa cursed, realizing she had been standing by the hatch and chatting openly with spies watching on. Spies who wanted her dead.

Alisa snugged up to the wall just inside of the hatchway. “Put out the lanterns, Yumi.”

“Thought you wanted the lights on, not off,” Mica growled, jumping back to stand opposite of Alisa on the other side of the hatchway.

“Not when they’re highlighting us for the enemy,” Alisa said, waiting for Yumi to scramble around the room, shutting off lanterns and flashlights while staying out of sight of those in the cargo hold. If she leaned out too soon, she would be an easy target with her body limned by the light.

Deadly orange beams lanced through the opening between Alisa and Mica, splashing against the far wall. One almost took out a bundle of conduits. Another burned a scorch mark in the bulkhead.

“If you bastards hit my new deuterium tank, I’m going to scrag you good,” Mica hollered, leaning out and shooting.

“Aren’t we all scragged if they hit that?” Alisa asked.

A cough came from out in the hold. An acrid smell tickled Alisa’s nostrils, so she assumed Mica had thrown a smoke grenade.

“Nah, it’s triple-shielded, but I don’t want it scuffed.” Mica leaned out and fired. “You hear that, you ugly comet humpers?”

Unlike Alisa, Mica had a blazer pistol, and her streaks of crimson flashed through the hold, brightening it as if lightning were flashing. For an instant, Alisa had a good look at the person crouching under the stairs, someone wearing a big, shaggy fur coat. She couldn’t target the man in the airlock alcove from her position, but she could shoot at this one. She leaned out just enough to line up her shot, but the hold had gone dark again, smoke and mist further obscuring her target.

“Shoot again,” Alisa whispered to Mica.

“Who gets to repair the pock holes later?” Mica growled, but she complied, dumping a barrage of fire in the direction of the airlock.

In the light from her blazer bolts, Alisa spotted her man again. He spotted her too. He had a blazer out, the muzzle pointed straight at her.

She fired first and lunged back behind the protection of the bulkhead. The man returned fire, but his bolts did not sizzle past her ear as she expected. They must have flown wide.

“We’ll make Beck fix the holes,” Alisa said. “These are his mafia men.”

“I’ll have a putty knife and a paintbrush awaiting his return.”

Alisa risked peeking out again. When blazer bolts lit up the hold, Mica trading fire with the man in the airlock, Alisa spotted the figure by the stairs, flat on his back and not moving. Good.

“Got a plan for the one in the airlock?” Alisa whispered. She couldn’t target him or even see him, and she didn’t think Mica could hit him effectively, either. In that alcove between the two hatches, he would be well protected.

A cough came from the airlock.

“That’s my plan,” Mica said. “Hoping he pukes his lungs all over the deck.”

“Beck’s going to need more than a putty knife to clean that up.”

“He can—”

A boom erupted from somewhere outside, and the ice heaved underneath the Nomad. The ship lurched to the side, hurling Alisa back from the hatchway. She skidded into a console as snaps and cracks erupted outside, echoing ominously inside of engineering. She accidentally kicked someone as she rolled to her hands and knees. Yumi? It was too dark to see anything.

“Did one of those idiots set off explosives?” Mica demanded from flat on her back. She had also been thrown away from the bulkhead and lay in open view of the hatchway. “On ice?”

Afraid Mica did not realize she was a target right then, Alisa scrambled toward her and grabbed her shoulder. Shudders wracked the Nomad, but she could easily imagine the mafia man taking advantage. She found her feet and started to pull Mica out of the way. A thump came from outside the hatchway, and she heard someone’s heavy breathing.

Alisa could barely see, darkness still reigning on the ship, but she whipped her Etcher across her body and fired as a man appeared out of the shadows. The figure froze, framed by the hatchway, then toppled forward with a thump.

Before Alisa could recover her breath and string two thoughts together, a bang came from out in the cargo hold. Icy air swirled into engineering.

“Is that damned hatch open again?” she growled, even as she and Mica scrambled to the side where they would not be easy targets.

Footfalls thundered across the cargo hold. Alisa leaned her back against the engine housing and aimed her Etcher. She hoped that in the dark, the reinforcements would trip over the mafia thug crumpled in the hatchway.

Another dark figure came into sight, a huge one this time.

“Alisa?” came Leonidas’s voice a split second before she fired.

She yanked her Etcher up, not trusting her twitchy trigger finger. But she reacted quickly enough to keep from shooting.

“We’re here,” she said, trying to sound calm and professional and definitely not frazzled.

A flashlight came on. It belonged to Yumi, who was crouching near the shield generator, trying to stay out of the way.

Leonidas stood in the hatchway, a couple of fresh scorch marks on his crimson battle armor. He looked down at the man at his feet, then stepped over him and into engineering. He walked straight toward Alisa as Beck stepped into the hatchway, blood spattering his white armor.

“I told you to keep the hatch closed,” Leonidas said, pinning Alisa with his gaze.

“No, we’re fine here. Thanks for asking. How was your day?” She stuffed her Etcher into its holster.

His lips thinned.

“I didn’t open the hatch,” Alisa said, “just as I assume you didn’t hit the button to lower our shields right before the other ship fired. Weirdness is happening here.”

“Yes, and my vote is to get out of here, especially since—”

Another snap sounded from under the ship, and the deck lurched, dropping a couple of inches.

“This situation is making it very difficult to maintain a serene state of mind,” Yumi announced. Her flashlight beam wavered. Her hand might have been shaking.

Alisa didn’t blame her. She was trying very hard not to look at the man she had very likely killed—or the blood spattered on Beck’s armor.

“What happened out there?” Mica asked. “You didn’t blow up the other ship, did you?”

“In the midst of a frenetic battle on their ship, we may have inadvertently shot something important in engineering,” Beck said. “Something that cracked, smoked, and caused men to shout, ‘Abandon ship, abandon ship.’ Which we then decided would be a good idea for us too.”

“There was an explosion, and the ice under their ship cracked,” Leonidas said. “It was sinking as we ran away, and we barely escaped before a massive chunk of ice broke, sank, and took them all down with it.”

“Their ship didn’t float?” Alisa frowned at Yumi, more alarmed than ever by the sounds of ice snapping outside. “You said a ship would float, like a boat.”

“I said this ship probably would, since it’s got a lot of air on the inside.”

“Well, let’s see if we can get it fixed before we have to test that theory, shall we?” Alisa pushed herself away from the console she had been leaning against, though she had no idea where she would go. The ship was still broken and without power, so she couldn’t even check the cameras in NavCom. Maybe Mica would need another flashlight holder. She stopped beside Leonidas. “I assume we were right and that those were White Dragon people?” she asked him. “The ones in here didn’t introduce themselves before they started firing. We have some rude enemies.”

“They were White Dragon,” he said. “When I charged onto the bridge, the captain tried to bribe me with ill-gotten mafia booty.”

“And you said no?”

“I shot him.”

“That’s the equivalent of a no, I suppose.”

His brow furrowed slightly, that look that meant he didn’t understand how she could make jokes when she did. She sighed, not wanting to try and explain. She could easily imagine him striding onto a bridge in that red armor, an implacable executioner arriving to deliver death. She found the image disturbing. She found this whole situation disturbing. Making jokes and avoiding thinking about it was easier than dwelling on grim reality.

“You did well to defend yourselves here,” Leonidas said, the praise surprising her.

She almost made a flippant comment, especially since she felt her defense had been anything but spectacular, but she bit her lip before it came out. She said, “Thank you,” instead, guessing he would appreciate that answer more.

He rested his hand on her shoulder, and she decided she had guessed correctly.

“Uhh, Captain?” came Beck’s voice from the cargo hold. “We have a problem. Well, technically, the problem may have us.”

Alisa started for the hatchway, but Leonidas kept his hand on her shoulder long enough to make sure he could walk out first. A thunk, thunk, thunk came from a panel that Mica had opened. Yumi, once again holding the flashlight for her, looked curiously toward the hatchway, but Mica remained focused on her work, as if she hadn’t heard Beck speak.

“Keep working,” Alisa said softly as she walked out. She had a hunch they weren’t safe yet.

“Count on it,” Mica replied as she continued to thunk.

Beck stood in the cargo hold, his rifle cradled in his arms as he looked toward six robed figures standing at the top of the ramp, mist curling about their legs. Two carried black staffs, like the one Alisa had seen on the station. The others merely had their hands folded into the sleeves of their robes. All had their hoods pulled low, hiding their faces in shadow.

One of those shadowed faces turned toward the stairs and the walkway. A moment later, Alejandro appeared up there. Alisa shivered, having the impression that he might have been somehow compelled to do so, especially since he wore his satchel on his shoulder, the orb box probably tucked inside.

Alisa licked her lips and stepped forward. “I’m Captain Marchenko,” she said, addressing them all since she had no idea which one was in charge. “Can I help you?”

She wanted to say, “Did one of you asteroid kissers kidnap my daughter?” But that seemed like a confrontational way to start a conversation with strangers. She did take some reassurance from the fact that Leonidas, through chance or design, stood at her shoulder, looking fierce in his armor as he glared over at the newcomers.

“We will speak to Yumi Moon,” one robed figure said, one with a feminine voice.

Before Alisa could decide if she wanted to point the way—or protest the fact that the woman had come onto her ship and was making demands—Yumi walked out of engineering.

One of the other Starseers stepped forward, lifting brown-skinned hands and pushing back his hood. His black, wiry hair was pulled back from his face in a hundred thin braids, and he had dark eyes that seemed to bore straight into Alisa’s mind. Maybe that was exactly what they were doing. She would have called him handsome, with a straight nose and full lips, but she was too busy being discomfited by that stare to make more than a note of it. She did not know how she knew, but she was almost positive that this was the same man who had been watching her ship from the station.

“Yumi’s my flashlight holder,” called Mica from engineering, not noticeably intimidated by their guests. “You don’t get her unless you replace her with someone else.”

The male Starseer lifted his eyebrows, looked to someone standing at his side for a long moment, as if they were communicating somehow, and then moved his staff in a slow gesture. The lights came on, and hums and beeps sounded as the ship restarted after its power down.

A clank-thunk came from engineering, followed by Mica swearing.

“My engineer thanks you,” Alisa said calmly, refusing to show any fear or apprehension at the display of power—or the realization that these people were likely the reason the power had not been working in the first place. They had facilitated her crash, a crash in which her people could have been hurt or killed. She worried that Yumi’s name might not be as much of a password to safety as she had hoped.

Leonidas folded his arms over his chest, his expression clearly saying that he was not afraid of these people, either.

Yumi Moon will speak with Ji-yoon, the man said, ignoring Alisa’s comment. The rest of you will come with us.

With a jolt, Alisa realized he had spoken directly into her mind.

Chapter 5

Alisa hated flying with people watching over her shoulder, so having a Starseer standing by her chair, guiding her through the fog, did nothing to improve her mood.

Leonidas also stood near her chair, his armor still on. He was watching the Starseer rather than Alisa or her controls. He was the same man who had spoken in the cargo hold. Leonidas stood closer to him than was probably comfortable for either of them, and she wondered if it was so he would have time to reach out and grab the Starseer’s throat if he tried anything. If so, his brazenness impressed her. She couldn’t imagine lifting a weapon against someone who could turn the ship on and off with a thought. It boggled her mind that normal humans had fought against the Starseers centuries earlier in the Order Wars. They had won, so it was possible, but the idea of flying against someone who could cause her to crash her ship with a thought was definitely unsettling.

“So,” Alisa said, groping for a way to gather some information from their uninvited guest. “How come you can wave your big stick and turn the power on in my ship, but you can’t clear this fog away to make flying easier?”

“It is a Staff of Power,” the man said coolly.

“Not a big stick?”

“No.”

“Okay, so your staff has a name. Do you have a name? I’m perfectly capable of referring to you as the Starseer for the next week—just ask Leonidas here—but since there are multiple Starseers, that might get confusing.”

He continued to stare at the back of her head. Maybe there was something interesting going on back there. She hadn’t looked in a mirror for a while, and crashes weren’t known to be friendly to hairstyles, even simple braids.

The Starseer did not look at Leonidas for confirmation of her tendencies. In fact, she was fairly certain he hadn’t looked at him since they had entered NavCom. He seemed to be doing his best to ignore Leonidas’s existence. The military cyborgs, Alisa recalled, had specifically been designed to fight the Starseers back during the Order Wars.

“Lord Abelardus is my name,” he finally said.

Lord? Was he kidding? What she said out loud was, “Abelardus? I bet that’s fun to rhyme with in a poem.”

It occurred to her that she might want to find someone more diplomatic than she to try to get information from the Starseers. Maybe Yumi would do it. Alisa had a paucity of diplomats on her ship. Mica was even more likely to offend someone with her mouth than she was.

“So, Abelardus. Any chance you can wave your Staff of Power and clear the way ahead so I can see where we’re going?”

“We have no wish to clear the mists. They serve us well. I will ensure that you do not crash. Veer now to the northwest. There’s another mountain ahead.”

Alisa could not see anything but the fog, and her instruments were spinning uselessly, but she obeyed. She had no desire for more close-up encounters with ice-smothered cliffs.

Her cameras were back online, and she glimpsed the six hover sleds turning to follow her. Abelardus and the female Starseer—Ji-yoon—had remained on the ship when the Nomad had taken off, Ji-yoon to speak with Yumi. Alisa wondered if that was her mother. They hadn’t shared a hug or even acknowledged each other back in the cargo hold, but Ji-yoon also hadn’t lowered her hood. The other Starseers had returned to their own transportation, the one-person sleds. Four of those sleds had riders and two were flying themselves, following along with the pack. Even though automated cars and ships were not uncommon, Alisa couldn’t help but think those people were controlling the unmanned sleds with their minds.

“Why do they call you Starseers?” Alisa asked.

“With our mind’s eye, we can gaze into the suns in a way that would blind our physical eyes, and we can see them turning hydrogen into helium and creating massive energy.”

“I guess they didn’t have vid dramas on Kir in the early days, huh?”

Alisa could feel the man gazing at the back of her head, but she was focused on guiding them slowly through the mist and did not turn to gauge his expression. He had the look of a warrior with that staff, and he was probably another one, like Leonidas, who did not appreciate her humor. Whether he did or not, he did not respond. Out of the corner of her eye, she did catch the faintest of smiles from Leonidas. Maybe he appreciated her sarcasm more when it was directed at somebody else.

“Turn back to the southwest,” Abelardus said.

Alisa did so, skimming along about twenty feet above the ice. She was relieved not to be on the ice. She had seen the gaping black hole where the White Dragon ship had been. It had, indeed, sunk. Now that she was in the air, and unlikely to suffer the same fate, she allowed herself to feel slightly relieved about that. Since the ship had disappeared in The Hells’ Leftovers, she hoped the White Dragon wouldn’t necessarily blame Beck—or her. After all, hundreds, if not thousands, of ships had disappeared in these mists over the centuries, at least according to Leonidas’s encyclopedia article.

Up ahead, the mist cleared slightly. Alisa leaned forward, as if being a couple of inches closer to the view screen would help her see better. A few stars came into view above them. As they continued forward, more of the frozen sea came into view, a tundra of ice stretching ahead and to the sides of them before disappearing into a horizon of gray fog. The gray was farther away now, but it was still there, and even the stars seemed hazy.

Abelardus directed her to turn the ship a few degrees, and something different came into view, a sprawling structure that floated a hundred feet above the ice. It reminded Alisa of pictures she had seen from Old Earth, part medieval castle and part Taj Mahal, with decorative spires and domes mingling with blocky towers, all surrounded by a bluish-white crenellated wall. Most of the structure had that coloring, as if it were made from ice. Maybe it was.

On one side, a landing dock paralleled the base of the wall with piers sticking out for shuttles and small spaceships to land on. An imperial warship would not have fit into any of the berths, but the Nomad should be able to come down on one of the larger piers. A small squadron of rusty old Strikers, Cobras, and bombers that looked like they had been purchased from a military surplus auction perched on the end of the dock. Apparently, the inhabitants did not use only their minds to defend themselves if someone got through the mists. There were also some small combat ships that Alisa wasn’t familiar with, having hulls the bluish-white of the sea of ice far below. All in all, it was not a huge force, but she could imagine it being sufficient when combined with their mental powers. She wondered how many of the ships that had disappeared over the centuries had actually been shot down.

“Dock there,” Abelardus said, pointing to the landing facility.

As they drew closer, Alisa noticed sophisticated automated artillery weapons along the walls. For people who wandered around the system in robes and sandals, they had some fancy tech here.

She glanced at her comm as she piloted them toward the pier Abelardus indicated, expecting someone to more officially give her permission to land—or not. But maybe the Starseers were chatting back and forth in each other’s heads, and the ones inside already knew all about the Nomad’s arrival.

With Abelardus and Leonidas watching on, Alisa was glad she piloted them onto the pier smoothly. Gravity had challenges that open space did not, and her freighter was anything but aerodynamic and maneuverable. They settled in with a soft thump, open air visible on the cameras to either side. She had no idea what held the floating temple in place. She hadn’t seen any thrusters or typical signs of hover technology under the structure.

“Let’s go,” Abelardus said, striding away from Leonidas and toward the cargo hold and the exit. “Bring your artifact, Dominguez,” she heard him say from the walkway. “My people will want to see it.”

“He may rethink bringing it here,” Leonidas said quietly.

“Because it’s theirs, and they may want it back?”

“If I’m right about its origins, it’s been centuries since it was in their hands, but possibly, yes.”

Alisa unfastened her harness and stood, though she took a few minutes to lock down her controls so nobody else could fly the ship. Maybe it didn’t matter when these people could think the power on and off, but there was no reason to make it easy for someone to steal the Nomad—or tinker with her.

“I’m going to grab a few more weapons from my quarters,” Leonidas said. “Wait for me before following the Starseer.”

“More?” Alisa eyed the rifle slung over his shoulder, the blazer pistols at his hips, and she knew he had a lot more weapons built into his combat armor. He had removed his helmet since returning from the White Dragon ship, but he still wore everything else.

“More,” he said firmly, and strode toward his cabin.

Alisa finished locking down the ship, taking a moment to touch the stuffed spider hanging over the co-pilot’s seat. Her mother had always touched it for luck before takeoff and landing. Alisa had found that silly and superstitious, but she touched it now and thought about how Jelena had never seen it. Once, Alisa had resented the freighter and never expected to see it again. Somehow, the last couple of months had changed her perspective, and she hoped that she got a chance to share it with Jelena. The ship and the spider. Assuming a Starseer in training wasn’t too sophisticated for stuffed toys. Her musings turned uncomfortable as she imagined Jelena speaking into her mind, and maybe even reading her thoughts, the way Abelardus had.

“Alisa?” Leonidas asked from the corridor, his voice muffled slightly by the helmet that he once again wore. Whatever he expected from the temple, it wasn’t someone greeting him with open arms.

Alisa strode out to join him. She had Starseers to question. This was not the time to delay.

“Nice grenade launcher,” she said, noting the largest of the weapons he had added to his panoply. “If they don’t tell me where they took my daughter, maybe you can blow up one of their pretty spired towers.”

Leonidas’s eyebrows rose behind his faceplate.

“That’s the kind of thing a gentleman does for a lady. And if you don’t consider me a lady, then that’s also the kind of thing a good passenger does for his pilot.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he said as they headed for the exit.

Alisa did not see the robed woman skulking in the cargo hold, but Yumi was at the pen, cooing to her chickens as she refilled their water dish. Alejandro stood next to the ramp, grimacing as the birds squawked enthusiastically, sending feathers flying. They seemed particularly jubilant. Maybe they were making up for their subdued hour spent in the mists.

Someone had opened the hatch already and lowered the ramp. Thankfully, eerie mist was not seeping into the ship this time. Had Abelardus already gone out to meet with his people? Alisa did not see him.

Alejandro turned toward Leonidas as he and Alisa approached, looking a touch relieved. Alisa wagered that wasn’t the expression most people wore when they saw a cyborg in combat armor striding toward them while carrying a grenade launcher. Alejandro probably hoped to hide behind him out there.

“Leonidas has agreed to blow up a tower for me,” Alisa said. “If you say nice things to him, he may blow one up for you too. To facilitate cooperation from the Starseers.”

Alejandro frowned at her attempt at humor. “I don’t think you can strong-arm these people.”

“But can you strong-grenade them?”

“You’re an eccentric woman, Captain.”

“And yet you keep flying places with me. Is it possible you’re not the most normal soul yourself?”

“No.”

Beck appeared on the walkway and jogged down the stairs. He wore three jackets and a fluffy fur cap that looked like it might have been forgotten in a remote corner of the Nomad by a passenger decades earlier. He was not in his combat armor, carrying only his knife and a pair of blazer pistols. He looked at Leonidas in his gleaming red suit and seemed surprised.

“We dressing up for a fight?” Beck asked.

“I’m hoping that won’t be necessary,” Alisa said.

Leonidas rested his hand on his grenade launcher and said nothing.

“Maybe the mech just wants to stay warm.” Beck eyed the open hatch, then rubbed his arms through his multiple layers of sleeves. “It’s cold enough to breed polar fangcats out there.”

“What?” Alejandro asked.

“You haven’t heard that expression?”

“Polar fangcats only mate at temperatures of negative fifty degrees and below,” Yumi said, finishing with her chickens and walking over to join them. “It’s believed it’s because of the length of their gestation period. Mating in the dead of winter ensures their babies will be born in the warmth of summer, when the temperature averages negative twenty. That’s in the south pole though. The north pole is balmy in comparison.”

“Balmy. Sure.” Beck rubbed his sleeves and eyed Leonidas’s armor again. Climate-controlled armor.

Yumi headed down the ramp, waving to someone. Was the female Starseer waiting for her?

A clang came from engineering, and Alisa called, “Mica, are you going to join us for this friendly meeting with interesting people?”

“You don’t pay me enough to deal with Starseers,” Mica called back.

“I did get you that new tank.”

“You got that for yourself. It’s your ship.”

“Are you sure? You’re the one who cuddles with it.”

Perhaps talking about their distaste for Starseers wasn’t a good idea with the hatch open. Alisa could not see anyone from her position—the ramp led down to a landing pad that appeared to be made from variegated glass tiles—but she heard voices murmuring to each other. Yumi had already gone off to the side.

Alejandro sighed, either at the magnitude of what he was about to do or at the silly conversation. “Let’s go, Leonidas.”

He started down the ramp, but he paused to look back and make sure Leonidas was following before going far.

“Such a brave man,” Alisa muttered. “Beck, unless you’re itching to see if any of the Starseers keep fangcats for pets, why don’t you stay here and keep an eye on Mica and the ship?”

“Can I do that with the hatch closed and the heat on, Captain?”

“Yes. In fact, I’d prefer the hatch to be closed. If anyone tries to get on the ship, let me know about it.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He gave her a brief salute before sticking his hands under his armpits.

Alisa hurried to catch up with Leonidas and Alejandro and followed them down, pulling her jacket tight since the air was every bit as chilly as one would expect from the north pole.

The people who she had heard talking came into view. Six tall, fit men in Starseer robes stood in a row to the side of the ramp, each one holding one of those black staffs, the butts resting on the ground. Other Starseers that Alisa had seen in person or on vids had worn the black robes in such a way that they fully obscured their bodies, usually with the hoods up. The hoods were down on these men, and the robes were open in front, revealing fitted gray or white vests that showed off muscular chests. Alisa had always imagined the Starseers as crazy old men who relied upon their minds for everything and did not bother lifting so much as a pen with their fingers, so seeing people who clearly exercised surprised her. They weren’t as thickly muscled as a cyborg, but they definitely looked like warriors rather than scholars. More than warriors, she realized, as they scrutinized her, Alejandro, and Leonidas—especially Leonidas. Guards. These people looked like they were here to deal with trouble if it arose.

Abelardus stood slightly to the side of the group, his robe also open to display a similar tight vest and muscular torso. Was he the leader of the squad? He looked a little older than the others, in his thirties perhaps, instead of his twenties like the younger warriors.

Off to the side, Yumi stood with another Starseer, this one still wearing a hood.

“Have you come to deliver that artifact to its rightful home?” one of the young warriors asked, looking at Alejandro. Maybe they weren’t the mind readers the stories said they were. If he knew what was in Alejandro’s thoughts, he would know the answer.

The warrior frowned up and down Alejandro’s body—not impressed by the monk’s robe and pendant? The Starseers were reputed to be followers of the suns, like most in the system these days, but they had their own variation on the religion and might not be respectful of what Alejandro’s robe represented. Or maybe they could see into his mind and knew what Alisa suspected, that the robe was no more than a costume for him, a way to keep people from molesting him while he was on his quest. It hadn’t worked that well so far.

“I have come in the hope that your people can help me research it,” Alejandro said, measuring his words carefully. “My understanding is that it may lead to a useful tool that could help return the system to a time of peace.”

Abelardus snorted. “Perhaps in the way that the invention of the atomic bomb brought peace to Old Earth for a time.”

Alisa’s Old Earth history was rusty, and she did not quite understand the statement, but she did get the hint that her suspicions might have been correct, that Alejandro sought a weapon, something that could be used to his people’s advantage. She scowled at him, though neither he nor Leonidas was paying attention to her. Neither were the Starseers. Aside from the one who had addressed Alejandro, the warriors were all glaring blazer bolts at Leonidas. He hadn’t said a word yet, nor had he pointed a weapon at them, but tension seemed to crackle in the air between them.

Alisa hopped off the side of the ramp. She would help Leonidas if she could, but she didn’t want to be lumped in with Alejandro and his quest, especially if these people thought the orb should belong to them. Besides, she had a quest of her own. While the men glared at each other, she sidled over to Yumi, hoping that her Starseer might be someone with whom Alisa could start a dialogue.

“A tool is only as good or evil as the man who wields it,” Alejandro said before Alisa could speak.

“Says the man smithing a sword,” Abelardus responded.

“I do not seek to wield that sword myself, nor do I expect you to go out of your way to do me any favors. All I ask is to be allowed to use your library to do some research. I will gladly pay a fee or compensate you in a fair manner for the time you let me access it.”

“The answers you seek aren’t in the library. Others have sought them before.”

“I may have insights that they did not.”

The young warrior who had spoken before, a pale-skinned man with brown hair pulled back in a bun, stirred again and looked at Abelardus. “He doesn’t seriously think we’re going to let him keep the Toriphant, does he? How did he even get it? We’ve had an eye out for it for two hundred years.”

Alejandro shifted uneasily. Leonidas remained still, like a boulder unmoved by the power of the river flowing around it. Abelardus watched both men and did not respond to his colleague, not out loud.

Abruptly, the warrior strode forward, lifting a hand as if to grab Alejandro’s satchel. At the same time, he glared at Leonidas, twitching a finger in his direction. Alisa was not sure what he intended to happen, but Leonidas lunged forward so fast she barely registered it. One instant, he was standing at Alejandro’s side. The next, he had wrapped his gauntleted hand around the Starseer’s throat.

Abelardus took a step forward. He did not do anything else that Alisa could see, but both the Starseer and Leonidas were hurled from the ramp, flying ten feet in the air before landing.

The blow was probably meant to knock the men free of each other, but Leonidas kept hold of his captive, twisting in the air to land on his feet, his hand still wrapped around the Starseer’s throat, the other gripping his arm to hold him upright too. They came down in such a way that the Starseer’s body was between Leonidas and the other warriors, all of whom had also surged forward, lifting their staffs as if they meant to charge in and pummel him.

Alisa found her Etcher in her hand, but she did not aim it at anyone. She didn’t even remember grabbing it, but she kept it down, firmly reminding herself that this wasn’t her fight. Besides, what could she do that Leonidas could not? Further, the Starseer woman next to Yumi was looking at her and had probably noticed the gun in her hand.

“Erick,” Abelardus said with a sigh, “if you’re going to launch a mental attack on a cyborg, you have to be faster than that. Especially if you’re doing it with one who seems like he’s had experience fighting our people before.” Abelardus’s eyes narrowed as he frowned at Leonidas.

Leonidas stood frozen in his position, neither letting the Starseer go, nor applying pressure to hurt him. Alisa knew full well that he could have crushed the man’s throat.

The man with the hand around his throat rasped a, “Sorry. But if these arrogant bastards think they’re going to fly into our temple and make demands for help researching an artifact that their people stole from ours… that’s preposterous. I don’t care if that one is a monk with a leashed cyborg at his disposal.”

Behind him, Leonidas’s knees flexed, almost as if they were in danger of buckling from some attack. He grimaced in pain, the expression just visible through his faceplate. But instead of falling, it was the Starseer, Erick, who cried out, making a wheezing noise and reaching for his throat. Leonidas straightened and growled something in the man’s ear.

“Yumi,” Alisa whispered. “Is there any chance you have any influence here and can do something?”

Yumi glanced at the Starseer woman and shrugged. “I don’t have any influence, no.”

“Is this your mother?” Alisa looked at the woman. Maybe she had influence.

With her face hidden, who knew what she was thinking, but the woman twitched in surprise. Then she turned and walked away. Er, maybe Alisa should not have blurted that question. She stopped at a control panel on a wall next to double doors that led from the landing pad into the temple.

“She’s made it clear that while she doesn’t mind seeing me,” Yumi said quietly, her tone morose, “it was foolish of me to come here and that I won’t be welcomed. None of us will.”

“I’m getting that impression.” Alisa eyed the warriors, all still in fighting stances and facing Leonidas, but nobody advancing farther while he held their man.

“Usually, a Starseer can use a mental attack to force someone to leave them alone,” Yumi whispered, like a game commentator explaining a sport to a viewer who had never seen it played before. “They can even stop your heart or cause a blockage that leads to a heart attack. But cyborgs react so quickly that if they’re close, they can kill a Starseer before he’s able to put together a mental attack. Also, Starseers are still human, and if they’re nervous or feel threatened, they have trouble focusing enough to put together attacks and defenses. From afar, it’s different. If the cyborg is far enough away that there isn’t risk of reprisal, then he’s just like any other human facing a Starseer, as vulnerable as any other human.”

“So, Leonidas needs to be careful just walking around the temple here?” Alisa asked. “In case someone has a grudge?”

“Very careful.”

Assuming he got out of the next thirty seconds.

Chapter 6

Alisa walked slowly toward the Starseers, not knowing what she meant to do, only that someone had to break the stalemate before Leonidas ended up killing that man to protect himself. If that happened, she had no doubt that Alejandro wouldn’t get to do his research and she wouldn’t find out what had happened to her daughter. They would be lucky if they weren’t all killed. Since the Starseers had no problem with crashing people’s ships, she doubted they worried overmuch about morality when it came to disposing of plain old humans.

“Hello, everyone,” she announced with a cheery wave. “I’m Captain Alisa Marchenko. These two are my passengers. I know they look thuggish, especially the cyborg there, but they’re both reasonable men. Nobody wants any trouble here, and I’m sure we can all agree that Leonidas is practicing excellent restraint by not harming his captive, given that he’s now been attacked twice. Or was it three times? My boring old non-cyborg and non-magical eyes have a hard time seeing what’s going on.”

Abelardus was the only one who glanced her way, and it was a brief glance. Leonidas happened to be facing her, and she thought his eyebrows twitched at the word thuggish, but his concentration remained focused on the squad of Starseers facing him.

“Is there perhaps someone in a position of authority that we could talk to?” Alisa pressed on. “I have a few questions I need to ask, and I’m also on the lookout for cargo to haul in case you want to ship anything to another planet, moon, or space station. Or perhaps you’re looking to have some cargo delivered? Do you ever have the urge for a hot cup of coffee? A delicious bar of chocolate? Perhaps some fresh fruit? I can’t imagine you can grow much at this latitude.”

“Is that woman trying to sell us something?” one of the warriors muttered.

Alisa beamed him a smile. “Just offering my services as a freighter captain. Given the unfriendliness of your mists out there, I don’t imagine you see freighters often.”

“Usually just smashed against the rocks,” another muttered.

Alisa was beginning to see why her ancestors had fought so hard to ensure the Starseers failed in their bid to rule the entire system.

“Stand down,” Abelardus told his warriors.

The staffs slowly lowered, but the icy glares remained locked on Leonidas. After a moment, he released his captive. Erick stumbled but quickly straightened and strode away, his chin up. He wore a sneer and did not acknowledge that the red marks on his neck must have hurt. Alisa wondered if Leonidas wore any similar bruises on his insides anywhere.

“We’ll go see Lady Naidoo,” Abelardus said. “Unless Lady Ji-yoon has something to say.”

The aloof woman Yumi had identified as her mother walked back over, finally pushing her hood back as she did so. She had long black hair with a few strands of gray in it and a round face physically similar to Yumi’s, though it shared little of Yumi’s curiosity or cheerfulness. Not that Yumi looked that cheerful now. She watched her mother’s approach with wariness.

“I do not,” Ji-yoon said, her dark gaze sweeping over Alisa and her crew, lingering on Alejandro’s satchel. Not surprisingly, Alejandro protected it with his arm.

The group of warriors turned toward the doorway Alisa had noticed earlier. They strode together in a line, apparently expecting their visitors to follow. Ji-yoon murmured something to Yumi, and they walked after the men. Alisa waited for Leonidas and fell in at his side, opposite of Alejandro. She was surprised none of the Starseers took up the rear so they could keep an eye on their visitors. If Alisa saw a spot in the temple that looked like it might house kidnapped children, she would veer off without hesitating.

Leonidas touched her back briefly as they headed for the door. Alisa looked up at him, not sure if it had been an accidental touch or if it was a sign that he appreciated that she had intervened. It wasn’t as if she had done much. He nodded down at her.

“The Starseers don’t seem to like cyborgs much,” she said, taking the nod as an invitation to chitchat. He probably had not meant it that way.

“No,” he agreed.

They entered a wide corridor not much warmer than the outdoor landing pad had been, perhaps because the walls were made from blocks of ice. Alisa supposed other building materials might be scarce up here.

“Is there anywhere you go where people adore cyborgs?” she asked, remembering how even the boys on Perun, a planet still ruled by the empire, had feared him. It was the one place where she had expected former cyborg soldiers to be welcomed, maybe even treated as heroes.

“Are you saying you don’t adore me?” Leonidas asked.

She gaped at him. “Was that a joke?”

“I suppose if you have to ask, it wasn’t a good one.”

“No, it’s not that. It’s just that your humor is so scarce.” Alisa had yet to see him laugh. She’d told him on Starfall Station that she hoped to make it happen someday. That had been before she watched one of his old comrades die in his arms. She was beginning to see why not much in his life amused him.

“Cyborg adoration is scarce, too,” he said. “In the empire, the subjects were glad you were there, fighting for them, and the same was true for other soldiers in the fleet. They were always bolstered to have a cyborg on their side. But when the fighting was over…” He seemed to shrug, but it was hard to tell under all the armor. “They didn’t know what to do with you. Or how to treat you.”

“Someday, you’ll have to tell me why you signed up for that.”

“Perhaps.”

They had passed a couple of intersections, and the Starseer procession took a turn at the next one, heading toward a set of wide stairs leading upward. They passed two older men in robes who nodded to their brethren, ignored Yumi, Alejandro, and Alisa, and faltered when they spotted Leonidas. They stopped to glare at him. He watched them warily as he continued walking, like a panther thinking that he might have to spring and attack to avoid the bullets from a hunter’s rifle. Abelardus looked over his shoulder at the men, shook his head, and continued on. The two older men glared a moment longer before continuing on their way.

“The Starseers seem even less likely to adore you than others,” Alisa observed, thinking of the video they had seen on the cybernetics station, where a Starseer had been releasing deadly Octavian bears into the labs, presumably to eat the researchers.

Alejandro, walking close enough to hear their conversation, grunted at this statement of the obvious. Alisa ignored him, though she thought it would have been fitting if Abelardus had used his mind powers to throw him from the Nomad’s ramp instead of Leonidas.

“They have a lot of reason to hate us. And to sabotage our livelihoods.” He gave her a sidelong look, perhaps also thinking of that video. “Cyborgs turned the tide in the Order Wars. It was after the government started creating them and molding them into soldiers that our ancestors were able to come out ahead in physical battles. That’s also where the assassination stories come in,” he added, giving her another long look as they started up the stairs. She remembered mentioning to him that she’d heard stories of cyborgs assassinating Alliance leaders during the war. “Cyborgs were sent in to kill Starseer leaders, often in their sleep. It was the only way to ensure they couldn’t use their mind powers. A Sergeant Callahan was reputed to have assassinated everyone in a temple with a knife in one night, almost a hundred people. In their sleep, Starseers are as human and vulnerable as the next person.”

“Good to know,” Alisa said, though inside, she found the casual way he spoke of such events chilling. She knew from personal experience that Leonidas was an honorable man, and she could not imagine him accepting such an assignment, but he was also practical and did not shy away from being blunt about the realities of war.

“They committed atrocities of their own,” Leonidas continued. “Putting aside the fact that they thought they were superior to all other humans and were trying to take over the entire system, they captured some cyborgs and kept them in a lab. They experimented on them, refining their methods for fighting—and killing—us. There are stories that they used to bring in their children, Starseers in training, and teach them to torture their prisoners with their minds.”

Alisa swallowed. Nobody was at war now, and the Starseers had not even been major players in the battle between the empire and the Alliance, so she hoped such practices were not needed, but she shuddered to think of her daughter being trained to be such a person, to have such skills.

“But that was all centuries ago,” she said as the procession crossed a landing and approached huge double doors that stood open to a cavernous room with holodisplays in the air and flat-screen monitors on the walls. “Nobody who was alive during the Order Wars is alive now.”

“Old grudges die hard,” Leonidas said. “And there have been incidents since then.” He let his hand rest on his grenade launcher.

Nobody had yet tried to take his weapons from him, nor had anyone searched Alisa or Yumi. Perhaps because the man who had attempted to poke into Alejandro’s bag had received a hand around his throat. Or maybe the Starseers did not see Alisa and her crew as serious threats, grenade launchers included.

“Are you thinking of the Starseer who was responsible for killing that research scientist?” Alisa asked quietly.

“Among other things.”

The procession stopped, and Alisa let the conversation drop. With all of the displays and monitors showing news feeds from all around Arkadius, maybe all around the system, it took her a moment to realize they had walked into what might be the equivalent of a castle’s throne room. A wide, blue carpet runner stretched across a floor made of ice blocks—the blocks were textured so as not to be slippery—and it ended at a raised dais. There were three stout ice chairs there, each with a blue cushion on the seat, perhaps to keep one’s butt from freezing. Behind the dais sat a long ice table with built-in monitors that were also on, and normal wooden chairs around it. Command central, Alisa decided. Where the leaders came to mull things over and keep track of the system as a whole. The thrones were probably for formal meetings among their people, or maybe they were relics from a past era.

Abelardus stopped in front of the thrones, though nobody was sitting at them. He turned toward a side door in a wall under a large monitor where news was playing, an anchor talking about a recent earthquake in Mindar, one of the planet’s southern continents. A bystander in front of a crumbled building was being interviewed, claiming that the earthquakes had become frequent since the Tri-Sun Alliance took control of the planet, and that they might be signs that the gods were angry with the change.

“Please,” Alisa muttered.

Another interviewee posited that the Starseers were behind the earthquakes, that they were trying to take advantage of the change in government to catch people by surprise and drive them from Arkadius so they could claim the rich planet for themselves.

Surprised by the argument, Alisa looked at the squad of warriors. They had lined up to face the door beneath the monitor, their chests thrust out and their robes open again, their staffs held at their sides. Their focus was on the door rather than the monitor.

Alisa had heard various conspiracy theories that involved the Starseers before, but she was amazed that none of them reacted. As she looked around at the other monitors and holodisplays, some muted, but all with the words spoken scrolling along the bottom, she saw other mentions of Starseers. Maybe they had their computers programmed to pick up any news about their people that was being played in the various parts of the system, so they could be alert to trouble that might come their way. If her guess was correct and these feeds were running like this all day, she could see why the men did not react.

The door opened and a gray-haired woman in the ubiquitous black robe walked out, milky white eyes turned toward the ceiling, her bronze face weathered. A pendant dangled on a chain from her throat, the red moon and silver star symbol of the Starseer religion. Like the men, she carried a staff, but hers had glowing blue runes running along the side and gold caps on either end. She used it more like a walking stick than a weapon, which was probably necessary if she could not see out of those white eyes. Most people had blindness corrected with optical implants, but maybe someone who could see into suns with her mind had no need of something as prosaic as working eyeballs.

The Starseers, Yumi’s mother included, dropped to one knee as the woman entered.

“Uh?” Alisa looked at her passengers, wondering if they were supposed to do the same.

Alejandro dropped to one knee. She wasn’t sure if she should use him as a guide. He would go down on a knee to anyone who might help in his quest.

Yumi dropped to one knee, bowing her head. Leonidas folded his arms over his chest and remained standing. Alisa stuck her hands in her pockets and waited to see what happened.

“Rise, Abelardus,” the woman—Lady Naidoo, presumably—said. The runes on her staff flashed.

Any kid with an electronics kit could have made something that could do that trick, but Alisa found it disconcerting, nonetheless. She understood that the Starseers themselves had power, but she hadn’t realized they could make things that had power independent of them. Thinking of Alejandro’s orb, she decided she should have.

“I am Panita Naidoo,” the woman said, not looking at Leonidas or Alisa, but instead addressing Alejandro. “I have been informed as to what you wish, and I must deliberate on it.”

Erick, the bruises on his throat now darkening, scowled and glared over at Leonidas. Apparently, he had wanted more of a dismissal. Perhaps an execution order.

Alejandro opened his mouth, like he might protest or argue his point further, but he closed it and nodded. “Please let me know if I can offer any information to help in your deliberation.”

Information? More like a bribe.

“I already visited the ruins of the Starseer temple on Dustor,” Alejandro went on, “but I found it abandoned. I hope your people there were not disturbed by the war or affected by the bombing.”

Leonidas stirred slightly. With his helmet turned toward the Naidoo woman, Alisa couldn’t see his face. Maybe he just had an itch.

“Your concern for our people is touching,” Naidoo said, a hint of dryness in her voice.

Maybe she could read minds. Not that it would take a mind reader to see through Alejandro’s flattery.

For the first time, Naidoo looked over at Alisa and smiled slightly.

Uh. That was creepy.

Alejandro spread his arms. “I fully admit that my motives are single-minded, Lady Naidoo, but I work toward a greater good.”

“The empire’s greater good, yes, I have no doubt.”

“I thought… It was my understanding that the Starseers, at least some of them, have a vested interest in the empire’s greater good. Though I have also heard that some helped the Alliance win when there was no apparent reason for them to get involved. I must plead ignorance when it comes to Starseer politics.”

“We’re not a fully united people,” Naidoo said, her voice still dry. “Were there not imperial subjects who had different political views? Of course there were, or there never would have been an alliance and a rebellion. It’s not as if those people came from another galaxy.”

“No, my lady. I understand.”

“You will be shown to quarters where you may rest while I deliberate.”

“If it’s at all possible, I would prefer to rest in your library, my lady,” Alejandro said.

“I’m sure you would. I must consider if I will allow that. Outsiders have not been permitted to study our ancient tomes for many decades. And, quite frankly, I do not know why you feel you should be so entitled, especially when you came here with a machine man, an enemy to the Starseers from centuries past.”

Leonidas stood ramrod straight and did not react to the glower that Naidoo sent in his direction. Alisa found it disturbing that she was blind and yet knew exactly where they all were. And what they were.

Naidoo looked toward Yumi, who straightened alertly. Alisa again thought of how she had admitted to badly wanting to develop Starseer talents, to become one of them. She almost looked like a dog hoping for a pat from its master. “Yumi Moon, it is good to meet the daughter of one of our esteemed archivists, but you should not have presumed to come to this private home of ours, and you should not have brought outsiders.”

Yumi’s shoulders sagged, her gaze dropping to the icy floor. “I apologize, Lady Naidoo,” she said, almost a whisper.

“Abelardus, show them to the guest quarters.”

“Yes, my lady.”

Alisa cleared her throat and raised a finger. So far, things were not going well for anyone in her party, but she might never see this Lady Naidoo again, clearly someone who was in charge or at least near the top of the power structure here. She had to speak now.

“Excuse me, uh, Lady Naidoo,” Alisa said, feeling silly referring to someone as a lord or lady. How archaic. Did these people think they were special descendants of the gods because of some gene mutations? “I’m here on a different matter. Which you probably already know about. Along with my opinions on people who call themselves lords and ladies.”

“Captain,” Yumi whispered in a warning.

“Starseers kidnapped my daughter,” Alisa said. “I can make some guesses as to why, but quite frankly, I don’t think there are any acceptable reasons. I’m her mother. She belongs with me. I intend to get her back.”

Yumi put her hand over her face. Apparently, one was not supposed to be blunt with Starseers. Alisa did not see why not. If they truly could read her thoughts, then what was the point of playing word games?

“I know from a reliable witness that a man named Durant was one of the kidnappers,” Alisa continued. “Is there any chance he’s here or that you know him?”

Naidoo merely frowned thoughtfully, but Abelardus shifted his weight. He had looked sharply in her direction when Alisa said the name.

“What is the name of your child?” Naidoo asked, ignoring the additional information and giving no indication whether she was irked with Alisa or not over her lack of reverence.

“Jelena Chaikin. Though my husband is gone now, so she’ll be Jelena Marchenko.”

“Chaikin.” Naidoo nodded to herself. “I shall look into it personally while I am considering your friend’s request.”

“He’s my passenger, that’s it,” Alisa said, thinking once again of the way Alejandro had casually mentioned that Alisa knew too much and maybe it would be better if she disappeared.

“I see,” Naidoo murmured, her face turning from Alisa’s to Alejandro’s and back.

Alisa grimaced, wishing she hadn’t brought that up, even in her thoughts. She was not a hundred percent certain that the woman was reading her mind, but if she was, Alisa had given her information that she did not want to share.

“Abelardus, the guest quarters,” Naidoo said.

“Yes, my lady.” Abelardus went down on one knee again before turning toward Alisa and the others. “This way.” He pointed back toward the entrance to the throne room.

Alisa went along quietly, questioning whether to feel pleased with the results thus far or not. Naidoo hadn’t been as openly irked with her as she had been with Alejandro, but she also had not appeared affronted by the idea that her people had been responsible for a kidnapping. She could have been lying about looking into things. She also could have silently commanded Abelardus to take them all to a dungeon or executioner’s room rather than guest quarters.

Chapter 7

There was neither an executioner’s axe nor a dungeon in the suite of rooms that Alisa and her party were left in, only two bedrooms and a common room with sofas, chairs, and tables. The walls, floor, and ceiling were made of ice, the structural theme for the entire temple, it seemed, but at least the furnishings were normal.

After arriving, Alisa had plopped down onto a padded chair so her butt was not in danger of freezing. Neither was the rest of her since she had found a stack of furs and quilts and pulled several over her.

Leonidas paced in front of the door, his combat armor presumably keeping him warm. Yumi had gone into one bedroom and sat cross-legged with her eyes closed, her face pointed toward a corner. Alejandro had closed the door and locked himself in the other bedroom.

“This is better than the dungeon I imagined them throwing us in,” Alisa said, “but I would have preferred to wait on the ship.”

“As would I,” Leonidas said. He paused, touched his temple, then scowled and started pacing again.

“Is someone bothering you? Or are you just feeling vulnerable here?”

“Several people have… I would guess the right term would be that they’ve scanned me. Sometimes in a rough enough manner that I’ve been very aware of it. To say I have a headache is an understatement, but it could be worse, so I shouldn’t complain.”

“I would,” Alisa said. “Either my thoughts aren’t interesting enough for anyone to care about or I’m too obtuse to know when someone is scanning me.”

Leonidas paced and did not respond. It would have been nice if he had told her she wasn’t obtuse. She was beginning to learn that he wasn’t the best person to go fishing for compliments around. Admittedly, in her experience, most men who went out of their way to compliment her were hoping to get her into bed. Leonidas seemed depressingly uninterested in that.

“Are your thoughts interesting?” she asked. “Or are the people scanning you simply being hostile because you’re a cyborg and enjoy wrapping your fingers around Starseer throats?”

“I don’t enjoy that, Marchenko,” he said, giving her an aggrieved look. He had removed his helmet, and it sat on a bookcase by the door, so she could see his expressions more clearly now. “He was on the verge of attacking me and taking the doctor’s artifact.”

“I know. It was a joke. I’m sorry.”

Leonidas went back to pacing. “I doubt my thoughts are interesting to them unless they’re curious about the same thing the Alliance is curious about.”

Alisa sat straighter in the chair, wondering if he might finally reveal why there was a two-hundred-thousand-tindark warrant out for his arrest. “Such as?”

He raised an eyebrow in her direction.

“If you tell me, I’ll give you a massage.”

“What?” He bumped the bookcase with his elbow, and it wobbled impressively, threatening to dump his helmet, along with some of the books.

“You look tense.”

“Everyone here wants me dead.”

“That’s probably why you look tense.”

He snorted.

Alisa grinned. “That was almost a laugh, Leonidas. I saw it in your eyes. I’ll get it out of you someday.”

“Only if your jokes improve.”

“Does that mean you’re not going to take me up on the offer of a massage? You’d be a challenge, but I bet I could manage it.”

“A challenge?” Leonidas squinted at her, maybe suspecting an insult lurking.

“On account of your muscles being so big and hard.” She didn’t mean it as an insult. It was the honest truth. “Who could dig in and find the tense spots with just their fingers? I’d have to use my elbows on you. Maybe some rocks.”

“Elbows and rocks. Where do I sign up?”

“Just let me know when the anticipation is too much to bear, and I’ll be ready. You will have to strip out of your armor for me, though. I’m pretty sure even elbows and rocks couldn’t help you through all that.” She wriggled her eyebrows, wondering if he was the least bit interested in stripping for her.

“Likely so,” he said, not offering any hint that notions of stripping inspired lascivious thoughts within him. “I won’t be removing my armor while in this temple. Even though they are most likely to come at me with mental attacks, if someone hurls me across a room, I’m less likely to be injured this way.”

“I understand,” Alisa said, not showing any sign that she was disappointed that he would not strip down and drape himself across the sofa where she could work on him. She hadn’t truly expected that to happen. Which was for the best, as she kept reminding herself. It was too soon to think about sleeping with other men. Or about massaging them. Still, she truly did want to know the details about that bounty, even more than she wanted an excuse to strip him. “You could tell me why my government wants you, and I could owe you the massage.”

“Owe me?”

“Yes, to be collected at your convenience. So long as I’m not busy flying us through asteroids and trying to avoid being captured by pirates, bounty hunters, mafia brutes, law enforcement, or the military.”

He sighed. “The list of people after us has grown long, hasn’t it?”

“If Alejandro doesn’t do a better job of charming that Lady Naidoo, we might be adding Starseers to it soon.”

His sigh turned into a grimace. “This isn’t how I imagined my retirement going.”

“Did you actually want to retire when the war ended? I assumed your job just went away when there was nobody left to sign the paychecks.”

He stopped pacing, his gaze turning toward a faded blue carpet on the ice. “It did go away. Perhaps Senator Bondarenko would have hired me if I’d been on Perun in the end, but I was busy elsewhere.”

“Such as squatting in an old freighter on Dustor?”

“Among other places.” Leonidas raked his gauntleted fingers through his short, black hair. It was tousled after being smashed under the helmet. “In the last few years, there were times when I thought I couldn’t deal with my duty much longer, with losing comrades and the people I was supposed to be able to protect.” He turned his hands upward in front of his waist and studied them. “But I also didn’t know what else I would do with myself. Retiring from the service to be some bodyguard or overqualified security officer held no appeal.”

Alisa winced, remembering that security officer was almost exactly the job that she had offered him. Still gazing toward his hands, he did not notice.

“And retiring to sit on a beach in the sun while drinking alcoholic beverages, that appealed even less. I’ve been a soldier for twenty years. I don’t know how to be anything else. I never finished my engineering degree, and what I learned would be out of date now, anyway. But I had the thought several times in those last few years that there was one thing I could give up the soldiering for.”

“Oh?”

“I was trying to make it happen when I dragged you and your ship out to the T-Belt.” He smiled sadly at her.

Alisa held still, only giving the faintest of nods. Would he finally explain what he had been doing out there? Did it have something to do with that warrant?

“When I was taking part in my last mission,” he said, “the mission that took me to Dustor, I became more certain than ever that I want—”

A knock sounded at the door, and he stopped.

Alisa nearly fell out of the chair. “Don’t answer that,” she said as he turned toward it.

He gave her a confused look. “It could be related to your daughter.”

Alisa slumped back in the chair. He was already opening the door, so there was no time to explain that she’d been curious to know what was motivating him since she met him. Of course she wanted information about Jelena, but she wanted him to finish his story too.

Lady Naidoo and Abelardus stood in the hallway. They looked past Leonidas, as if he were furniture, and toward Alisa.

“I will speak with you,” Naidoo said, “while Abelardus takes Dr. Dominguez to the library.”

“You’re letting him research?” Alisa asked, forcing her mind away from Leonidas and his story to the present.

“He will be monitored as he does so.” Naidoo nodded to Abelardus, who wore a wry lucky-me expression.

The bedroom door opened, and Alejandro stepped out. He had probably been listening with his ear to the door.

“I’m being invited to use the library?” he asked.

“You’re being permitted to use the library,” Abelardus said. “While I babysit.”

Alisa thought Alejandro might object—he had certainly objected to her being around when he had spoken of the orb—but he nodded and strode out, a bounce to his step. Maybe he didn’t believe the Starseers would give whatever information he found to the Alliance government. Alisa knew little of the politics and interests here, but she wouldn’t be surprised if they were only letting him look because they hoped he would find something in the library that their academics had missed over the years. She didn’t know how likely that was, but maybe the orb would guide him. They slept together, after all. They had a relationship.

“Leonidas?” Alejandro said, looking back when he reached the door.

Leonidas and Abelardus had been busy exchanging flinty stares, but Leonidas broke his to grab his helmet. Alisa slumped as he walked out the door after Alejandro, wondering if she would ever get his story.

The door shut, leaving Alisa alone in the room with Naidoo, her blind eyes turned toward the door of the other bedroom, as if she could see Yumi in there meditating. Maybe she could.

“Do you have any news for me?” Alisa asked. “I’m not above bribery. I already offered to bring in a cargo of chocolate and coffee for your warriors.”

“Oh?” Naidoo smiled slightly. “Were they interested?”

“No, they were too busy glaring at Leonidas.”

Her smile disappeared, and her tone went flat. “The cyborg.”

“He’s an honorable man.”

“Who served the empire. Interesting that you would defend him.”

“He’s saved my life a few times since we met.”

“I had no idea that the lives of freighter captains were so perilous.”

“Things have changed since the war ended.” Alisa decided not to mention that things had mostly changed because she had been foolish enough to take on passengers who carried all manner of trouble in their luggage.

Naidoo chuckled and leaned on her staff. “I rarely converse with mundane humans anymore. They’re so seldom the same person inside as they display to the outside. You are.”

“It gets me in trouble.”

“I’m not surprised.” Naidoo walked forward and sat in one of the chairs, carefully leaning her staff against the armrest.

Alisa had stood when she and Abelardus came to the door, but she made herself sit down again now, even though she perched at the very edge, the blanket cast aside. Her coldness cast aside. “Did you find out anything about my daughter?”

“She’s not here. I’ve contacted the leaders of our sister temples, and none of the ones who answered promptly have heard of her.”

Alisa thumped her fist on the arm of her chair. “Is it possible there was someone who didn’t get your message yet? Someone who might reply that she is there?”

“The ladies at the three temples that run schools for the young, the three in addition to ours, all responded. They would have been the most likely to have received a new student. None of them did. Also, it’s not our policy to kidnap children from their parents.” She frowned darkly. “We’re not the empire. They were the ones who often took away Starseer babies, and then they tried to raise them as weapons.”

“I don’t mean to imply that you are like them,” Alisa said, struggling for patience. It was hard since she was not hearing the answer she wanted. “But I saw the surveillance video in my sister-in-law’s apartment. I saw the people who took her.”

“You did not see faces.”

It was not a question. Alisa no longer doubted that this woman could read her mind.

“No, but they were wearing your robes, and they clearly had some power. They waved their hands, and made Sylvia halt in place. She just stood there as they walked out with Jelena, and my daughter had this vacant look on her face, like she was being brainwashed.”

It had been alarming seeing that expression on Jelena. She was neither meek nor accepting by nature. Alisa remembered multiple conversations in which she had tried to explain that it wasn’t appropriate to stick one’s tongue out at one’s parents, teachers, neighbors, housebots, or the panhandler on the street corner who’d suggested little girls should be seen but not heard. Alisa had struggled to get that lesson to take, perhaps because Jelena had often seen her make sarcastic comments that were even less appropriate than tongues being stuck out.

“Blanked,” Naidoo murmured.

“What?”

“That’s the term we use. It’s a barrier we can construct in a person’s mind to keep them from accessing memories and thoughts momentarily.”

“Sounds disturbing.”

“It’s useful. It often prevents the need for physical violence.”

“Well, these kidnappers knew how to blank people then. They were definitely Starseers. Are you able to look up your kind in a database? Could you search for the name Durant? I’m not sure if that was a last name or a first name, but surely some matches would come up, and we could narrow things down. I already checked the sys-net, and there are tens of thousands of Durants out there, thousands just on Perun. There was no way to tick a checkbox and only get the Starseer ones, not that the empire or Alliance has thorough records involving your people.”

Naidoo shook her head. Frustrated, Alisa sat back in the chair, her shoulder blades thumping against it.

“I’ve already searched,” Naidoo said. “Nothing came up. It’s possible that those you saw were mundane people using a few tricks to make it appear that they were Starseers, to put the blame on our organization and distract searchers.”

Alisa scowled, not believing that. What tricks could have done what she had seen? Nothing that wouldn’t require instruments or drugs, and the camera hadn’t shown anyone using any tools.

“It’s also possible,” Naidoo said, “that they were rogue Starseers. We are not a completely united organization. Some people develop some of the talents without receiving any formal training. Others are trained in our schools but then go their separate ways.”

“What, they don’t want to pay the membership dues?”

“Differences of opinion mostly.” Naidoo chuckled. “The dues aren’t that high.”

Alisa was not in the mood to chuckle.

“It’s rare for those people to work in concert once they leave the temple, but it’s certainly possible that some of them chose to do so for a joint goal.”

“What kind of joint goal could involve an eight-year-old girl? It’s not like our family was special. We’re not heirs to the imperial throne. You can probably tell just by looking at my ship.”

Naidoo smiled. “I hear it’s rustic.”

Rustic, right.

“I regret that I cannot help you further. You are welcome to remain here until you’re rested and your engineer has completed any repairs necessary to your ship.” Naidoo stood up, reclaiming her staff. “If you won’t find my advice presumptuous, I suggest you leave as soon as your repairs are complete. I also suggest you part ways from Dr. Dominguez and the cyborg. What they seek is nothing that you want to return to the system.”

“Yeah, I’ve already figured that out.”

Naidoo tilted her head, regarding her curiously. “Then why stay with them?”

Alisa blushed as thoughts of massages and Leonidas with his shirt off entered her mind.

“Ah,” Naidoo said. Fortunately, she walked out without further commentary.

Alisa rubbed her face. “I’m an idiot.”

After the door shut, Yumi walked out of the bedroom. Alisa had almost forgotten she was in there. Her eyes were red. Maybe she had been crying instead of meditating.

“This trip wasn’t quite what I hoped for,” Alisa said.

“I should have known… not to have hopes.”

“I guess it could have been worse.” Alisa thought of the White Dragon ship, it and its dead crew now at the bottom of a frozen sea.

“True.” Yumi looked toward the door Naidoo had walked out. “Do you believe her?”

“I… haven’t had time to consider everything fully yet. Why, don’t you?” Even as Alisa asked the question, she remembered the way Abelardus had reacted when she’d said the name Durant. Naidoo might not have shown anything, but he had seemed to recognize it. Was it possible he had known this person, someone who had left the organization, as Naidoo had suggested? Maybe Naidoo had lied about not knowing who Durant was.

“Given the modern, mission-control-central feel of the throne room, with those feeds coming in from all over the system, carefully sorted to display mentions of Starseers…” Yumi raised her eyebrows as she trailed off, perhaps asking if Alisa had noticed that too.

Alisa nodded.

“It seems that they would have ways to keep track of their own people,” Yumi continued. “Current members of the organization or not.”

“So, you’re saying I should try to make arrangements to go snooping around the facility, perhaps into that computer room or into the library where the doctor is researching?”

“Ah,” Yumi said. “Did I say that? I don’t think so.”

“It was implied.”

“There’s a guard outside of our door.”

“Is there?”

Alisa hadn’t noticed when Naidoo and Abelardus arrived. She stood and walked over to open the door—it was made of wood instead of ice. She poked her head into the hallway. Sure enough, one of the young, muscular Starseer warriors stood out there, looking alert and fierce as he returned her gaze, his staff in hand.

“Any chance of getting some refreshments?” Alisa asked.

He frowned at her, then focused on the extremely exciting opposite wall. Which was made of ice. Naturally.

Alisa closed the door and stepped back into the room. “You’re right. We are guarded.”

She drummed her fingers on the back of the sofa. A minute ago, she had been content to stay in this room until Alejandro finished his research, but now, she felt like a caged animal, itching to escape and have the freedom to roam the forest. Or the icy temple, in this case.

“My mother is going to come get me for breakfast shortly after dawn,” Yumi said. “I suppose that doesn’t help you with your snooping, but I could ask her about Naidoo and try to ferret out how trustworthy she is.”

“Do you think she would answer honestly?” Alisa hadn’t heard Ji-yoon speak more than a couple of words and had the impression that the woman wasn’t tickled that Yumi had come here and brought strangers.

“I don’t know. It’s been nearly twenty years since we spent time together, but I would probably have an easier time telling if she was lying than I would if we were dealing with a total stranger.”

“Assuming she doesn’t diddle with your mind.”

“I have a drug along that temporarily changes the chemical composition of the human brain and makes your thoughts harder for a Starseer to read. It was used by the military during the Order Wars. I believe the cyborgs even tried it, though they metabolized it quickly, making the window of potency short for them.”

“You’re going to drug yourself for your breakfast with your mother?”

Yumi smiled. “It crossed my mind, but perhaps not, since we have a guard. I didn’t know about the breakfast beforehand, so the substance—qui-gorn—is in my cabin on the ship.”

Alisa clasped her chin in her hand as she gazed at Yumi, ideas percolating through her mind. “Yumi, Naidoo referred to your mother as an archivist. What does she do exactly?”

“Archives things.” Yumi shrugged. “You might actually have a lot to talk to her about, though, since she’s also a pilot. I believe she was one of the Starseers friendly to the Alliance who participated in the war, flying around and providing intelligence for your side.” Yumi sighed wistfully. “I would so like to know her better. I wish she had an interest in knowing me.”

“She invited you to breakfast,” Alisa said, though she was rubbing her chin and thinking furiously, more intrigued by Yumi’s mother’s position as an archivist than the fact that she might have been an Alliance sympathizer. “Maybe she’s more interested than you know.”

“Actually, I suggested coffee or a meal,” Yumi said.

“Well, she said yes.”

“Reluctantly. She sounded like she had work to do.”

“Small victories, Yumi. Small victories.” Alisa lowered her hand and propped it on the back of the sofa. “What would your mother think if you invited your good friend, Captain Marchenko, to breakfast?”

“Good friends, Captain? I had no idea you felt that way about me.”

“I did offer you a job.”

“I heard you offered Leonidas a job too.”

“I did. As well as Mica. But sadly, Beck is the only one who’s officially agreed to employment. I can only assume that I’m a tyrannical shrew that nobody wants to work for.”

“I just don’t want to take your money. You seem to need it.”

Alisa acknowledged that truth with a wriggle of her fingers. “Whatever our relationship, I would consider it a favor if you would invite me along to breakfast with your mother.”

“I can certainly try. Like I said, you two have something in common as pilots, so she may be interested in talking to you.”

“Excellent. I would also consider it a favor if you would slip something into your mother’s meal to make her more amenable to telling the truth.”

“Uh, you want me to drug my mother?”

“Yes, will that be a problem?”

Chapter 8

“This isn’t going to work,” Yumi whispered.

“Just follow my lead,” Alisa whispered back, her hand on the doorknob. Since Yumi’s stockpile of herbs, powders, and dried mushrooms was back on the ship, they needed to get the guard to let them visit. So long as the man was reasonable and didn’t go rifling through their minds, Alisa hoped it would be possible.

“When we’re close to him, empty your mind and keep from focusing on your deceit,” Yumi said. “Even a warrior will have rudimentary telepathy and be able to read your surface thoughts.”

“Telepathy, is that what they call their weird skills?”

“As children, most of them learn telepathy, telekinesis, and something they call long-seeing.”

“Is that the thing where they see into stars?”

“Yes,” Yumi said. “Some of the specialists have other talents, such as precognition, matter manipulation, and pyrotechnics, but those are the basics. The ones trained as fighters usually aren’t as mentally adroit as the scholars, but most of them will be able to glimpse your surface thoughts. More skilled telepaths can dig in and find memories you’ve long forgotten.”

“Charming.”

“They are powerful enemies.”

“Good thing I don’t want to start a war with any of them,” Alisa said.

“You just want to drug them.”

“Drugs are happy-makers. Who could object?”

Yumi’s expression was dubious.

“Let’s do this,” Alisa murmured and opened the door.

The same guard stood outside, still staring at the opposite wall. Maybe he was practicing his mental skills. He turned his head to gaze indifferently over at them.

“When are those refreshments coming?” Alisa asked. “I’m dying to know what you people eat and drink up here.”

“Nourishment will be provided when it’s deemed necessary.”

“We actually can’t wait here indefinitely. My passenger has a flock of chickens on my freighter. She needs to go back to feed them. And I forgot to eat dinner since I was busy being chased and shot at by a mafia ship, so I’d like to raid my chocolate stash too.”

“I’ve been instructed to keep you in your rooms.” The guard had blue eyes that were similar in color to the icy walls, something Alisa noticed as they locked onto hers.

Her skin crawled as she sensed—or maybe just imagined him—probing into her thoughts.

Emptying her mind and trying not to think about something, as Yumi had suggested, was difficult. She decided to try to think about something else instead. What might repulse the man and make him want to stay out of her thoughts? Images of death? Of the atrocities she had seen in the war? No, he’d probably just wonder why she was thinking about these things. Instead, she smiled slightly as she found something more recent to contemplate.

In her mind, she went back to her conversation with Leonidas, the conversation about massages. She also remembered the times she had seen him with his shirt off, his thick, muscular torso on display, once in sickbay when Alejandro had been patching him up and once in his cabin, when she had woken him from his sleep. His hair had been tousled then, a pillow crease on his face, and the dim lighting of the corridor creating interesting shadows between his muscles. Before she got to the point of imagining herself giving him a massage, the guard’s lip curled up.

He looked over at Yumi. Whatever she was thinking about must not have come across as duplicitous, because he grunted and said, “Fine. I’ll escort you there and back. No detours.”

“Thank you,” Alisa said, tamping down the triumphant smile that wanted to curve her lips.

She kept her thoughts on Leonidas as they walked through the corridors, just in case the guard chose to dip back in to see what other clothes might come off.

She expected to find the Nomad’s cargo hatch closed, the ramp drawn up, and Beck inside with the heat cranked up as he snoozed in his bunk. It was well into the middle of the night and even colder than it had been when they first landed. The temple itself, with its ice walls, was cold, but the outdoor docks and landing pads, being open to the elements, were even more frigid.

When they reached the ship, Alisa was surprised to find the ramp down and Beck at the bottom, his grill set up with more skewers of duck sending smoke wafting into the crisp air as they cooked. Two men in black robes stood in front of his portable kitchen, chatting with him as they waved around skewers of half-eaten meat.

“Beck,” Alisa greeted, walking up.

He flinched when he noticed her, or maybe it was the fierce guard walking behind her that extracted the reaction. The expression of surprise faded quickly, and he smiled. “Hello, Captain. You’re up late.”

“The chickens needed to be fed,” Alisa said, pointing her thumb to Yumi and widening her eyes slightly, hoping Beck would notice the sign and not point out that they had been fed right before the group first went into the temple. “Got enough to share there?”

“Of course.” Beck handed skewers to Alisa and Yumi, then waved one toward the guard. “Are you interested, sir? The food is free, but I accept tips.” He pointed to his cup, which held far more coins than it had when they had been on the space station. It was nearly full of whole tindark coins.

Perhaps noticing her surprise, Beck leaned close to Alisa and whispered, “This has been brilliant. The Starseers are flush with cash and have nothing to spend it on up here. I don’t think they pay taxes, either.”

Alisa snorted. “Are you going to pay taxes?”

“Of course, Captain. I’m a law-abiding Alliance citizen.”

“Uh huh. Feed our friend there, will you?” Alisa tilted her head toward the guard, hoping the man would not insist on following her into the ship. Holding her own skewer, Alisa started up the ramp with Yumi, taking a bite as she walked. She paused at the top. “Beck?”

“Yes?”

“This is even better than last time. Did you make any modifications to your spice blend?”

Beck’s lips twisted with distaste. “Yes.”

“Based on someone’s suggestion, perhaps?” She did not use Leonidas’s name, not wanting to mention him in front of the Starseers. The less they thought about him, the better.

“Yes,” Beck admitted, “but don’t tell him that, all right?”

“Maybe you should tell him. And invite him to be your permanent taster.”

Beck’s lips turned downward so deeply that the corners were in danger of falling off his chin.

As soon as they were in the ship and out of the guard’s line of sight, Alisa shooed Yumi toward her cabin. “Get what you need. I’m going to check on Mica. I’m sure we won’t have much time.”

The chickens squawked happily at their appearance, or maybe they were complaining that the hatch was open, with cold air flowing over their pen. At least the heat was on inside. The noisy chickens should lend credence to their story. Even so, Alisa kept her thoughts away from her intentions as much as possible, in case the guard was still monitoring them.

Yumi hustled up the stairs toward the passenger cabins. Alisa found Mica in engineering, though she had switched from working on things to sprawling on a cot in the corner and watching a vid on her netdisc. Or maybe she had been sleeping while it played in the background. The lights were dimmed, and she yawned impressively when Alisa walked in.

“Ship all fixed?” Alisa asked.

“I’ve got the shields regenerating themselves,” Mica said. “Beyond that, it was mostly cosmetic damage when we crashed.”

“When mental manipulation of our tools and our minds forced us to land abruptly,” Alisa corrected, refusing to add that incident to her record as a crash.

“Land abruptly? We skidded across the ice on our asses for a mile.”

“Either way, we ready to leave any time now?”

“Uh.” Mica slung her legs over the edge of the cot. “There’s nothing wrong with the ship that would keep us grounded. But…”

Alisa grimaced. She didn’t want to hear about a but. She wanted to drug Yumi’s mom, find out where her daughter was, and leave without further trouble. If Alejandro finished up his orb research and wanted a ride out of here, fine, but she wouldn’t be that upset if she had to part ways with him here.

“Follow me,” Mica said, yawning again. She padded out of engineering in her socks and led the way through the cargo hold and up the stairs, pausing to glower at the cold air coming in through the hatch.

“You do have a cabin with a bed in it,” Alisa commented.

“I like to keep an eye on the equipment, especially when odd things might happen.”

“Odd?”

Mica stepped into NavCom and prodded a monitor to life. The feed from one of the cameras on the undercarriage of the ship filled the display. Alisa had a view of the pier underneath them, a water line that someone must have allowed Mica to hook up, and—

“Uh, what is that?” She pointed at some kind of metal frame just visible on the side of the video pickup.

“Docking clamps. Two big ones holding us in place.”

A chill went through Alisa that had nothing to do with the polar air. She shouldn’t have been surprised after the way they had been invited to the temple, but it was alarming to see evidence that the Nomad was being held. Alisa had landed the ship fully on the pier. There was no safety reason for those clamps to be there.

“Naidoo said I could leave as soon as the ship is repaired,” Alisa said.

“You trust her?”

“Not really.”

“Comforting.”

What if the Nomad was being held as an assurance that Alejandro did not fly off with the orb? Maybe he would be allowed to research it but not to keep it.

Even if that was the reason for the clamps, it did nothing to cheer Alisa up. She had been contemplating leaving Alejandro behind, but she hated the idea of being forced into doing so. And what if Leonidas was part of that package? What if the Starseers had no intention of letting him go?

“I went out for a look earlier and didn’t see a manual release,” Mica said. “I didn’t even see anything that hinted of an electronic component. Maybe they manipulate the clamps with their minds.” She snorted. “I don’t know. Did you see a control room inside those doors?”

“No, but our tour has been limited.” Alisa thought of the monitor-filled throne room, but those displays had all been showing news feeds, not cameras of the temple or docking area. “Wandering around on your own isn’t encouraged. There’s a guard standing outside, waiting to take Yumi and me back to our guest quarters.”

“Guest quarters? At least they didn’t dump you in a dungeon cell.”

“If you don’t mind the cold, the rooms are fine.” Alisa shrugged. “The beds are cushy, and there are plenty of chairs and blankets, but a prison is a prison. You know how I hate to be trapped.”

Mica shared a nod and a knowing look with her. There was no need to mention how freedom had been an illusion in the empire and how that had chafed them both. They knew why they had signed up to fight.

“Me too,” Mica said.

“I don’t think we’re going to have to leave immediately,” Alisa said, thinking of Yumi’s breakfast date with her mother and Alejandro’s research, “but in the morning, why don’t you spend some more time contemplating those clamps and how to release them in case we need to leave in a hurry later on?”

“I’ve already contemplated them with a screwdriver and a laser knife. Further contemplation would likely involve explosives.”

“I’m not opposed to explosive contemplation, so long as it doesn’t harm the Nomad.”

“That would be the challenging part.”

“It’s a good thing my engineer enjoys challenges.”

Mica only scowled at her.

“I better head back out before that guard comes looking for me,” Alisa said. “Have there been any other problems?”

Mica glanced toward the corridor outside of NavCom. It was empty.

“Not big problems, but I went out to get some of Beck’s food earlier. He’s been chatting with the Starseers, making friends over chargrilled duck.”

“That’s a problem? I’m actually impressed if he’s making friends with those people. I’ve been looking for someone on the crew that has a diplomatic streak, since neither friends nor enemies appreciate my bluntness or my jokes.”

“I’m not sure he was being diplomatic when he was discussing your cyborg with them.”

Another chill went through Alisa as new concerns instantly popped into her mind.

“What do you mean?” she asked, though she could already make some guesses.

“I only heard a small portion of the conversation before they noticed me walking down the ramp. The Starseer man immediately stopped talking, and Beck looked guilty too. Beck had been explaining in detail the warrant out for Leonidas’s arrest.”

“I see.”

It was possible the Starseer had come to extract information on Leonidas from the crew, perhaps using mind manipulation talents on Beck to do so, but it was also possible Beck had instigated the conversation. Back on Perun, he had tried to entice Alisa into helping him turn in Leonidas to collect the two-hundred-thousand-tindark reward. All she had done was point out the reasons why subduing a cyborg for a trip to the government seat on Arkadius, the place where the bounty originated, would be next to impossible for the two of them. Maybe Beck had realized that things would be easier now that they were actually on Arkadius. A Starseer ally could make it even more feasible.

“Turning Leonidas in for a bounty would be a poor way to reward him after he helped improve Beck’s recipe,” Alisa murmured.

Mica’s eyebrows rose.

“Freighter captain,” the guard called from the cargo hold. “Your chickens have been fed. It’s time to return to your quarters.” His words were not hostile, but his voice was cool. Maybe he had an inkling that he had been fooled.

“Comm me if Beck and his new buddies go off for a chat, will you, Mica?”

“Yes, but I might be distracted by my explosive contemplations.”

“Do your best.” Alisa patted her on the arm, then hurried to the cargo hold, not wanting to give the guard reason for further suspicion.

Yumi was already waiting, nothing but her purse draped over her shoulder, the same one she had worn on the way into the ship. Good. The guard surely would have questioned her if she had dragged her entire trunk’s worth of supplies into the temple. Yumi gave the slightest of nods when Alisa approached.

“I’m ready any time,” Alisa told the guard. “I was just checking with my engineer. It seems our ship acquired some unexpected attachments.”

The guard grunted and headed for the ramp.

“He’s a chatty fellow,” Alisa muttered to Yumi.

Yumi followed him, not responding. She fidgeted with a flap on her purse as she walked. Nervous about the idea of drugging her mother? That was understandable, and Alisa felt guilty for making the request, but she would not retract it. She wasn’t going to leave here without finding out where those men had taken her daughter.

Beck whistled cheerfully as they walked past him. Because people were enjoying his food, or because he was contemplating his two hundred thousand tindarks?

Alisa wanted to warn him not to do anything foolish—or greedy—but in addition to the guard, there were three Starseers in front of his grill now, enjoying skewers of meat. This wasn’t the place to bring up Leonidas. She shouldn’t even be thinking about him when these people could read minds. But she couldn’t resist saying something, making a quick attempt to persuade Beck not to do anything that he would regret—or that she would regret.

“I really like the new spice recipe,” Alisa said, meeting his eyes. “You’re a good cook, and I think that with someone’s help, you could become even more successful. I’m sure you’ll make it eventually and earn far more than two hundred thousand tindarks in the years to come.”

One of the diner’s eyes closed to slits at the specific mention of the money. That disturbed Alisa for more reasons than one. First, because that amount meant something to him—Beck likely had been out here discussing specifics. And second, because the man knew she was trying to dissuade Beck… and it seemed he did not like it.

Beck only scratched his head. “I’ll keep that in mind, Captain. Glad you like the food.”

As the guard led Alisa and Yumi away, Alisa vowed to comm Leonidas and warn him about this development as soon as she had some privacy. She knew he was already on guard, but he should know that Beck might have given the Starseers more information on him. She hated to put a further rift between Leonidas and Beck, but if Beck had volunteered that information without coercion, he was bringing this on himself.

“I always thought that my life would be simple after the war ended,” Alisa muttered to herself. “Apparently, pilots are delusional.”

Chapter 9

Four hours and a nap later, a different guard came to the guest quarters to collect Yumi. Yumi informed the man that she had invited Alisa along for the breakfast date. Alisa filled her mind with images of Leonidas’s naked chest again, hoping to dissuade the male guard from surfing in her thoughts. Instead of curling a lip in disgust, his eyes widened, and he smiled slightly. Maybe he found the idea of massaging muscular men attractive instead of repulsive. Either way, he did not object to Alisa’s presence, nor did he demand to search the purse that Yumi was once again fidgeting with.

Alisa shut the door to the guest quarters on the way out. Neither Leonidas nor Alejandro had been back since Abelardus had taken them to the library, but that was not surprising. Given his obsession with the orb, Alejandro might spend days researching without eating or sleeping. And since he had often been a soldier out in the field, Leonidas was probably experienced at spending days without eating and sleeping, too, with the added discomfort of drone bomber shells and artillery rounds sailing overhead.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” Yumi whispered as they turned into a corridor they hadn’t been down before and the guard stopped to talk to another robed Starseer.

Everyone here seemed to be a Starseer, at least going by the robes. Alisa wondered what happened if children were born here and did not display talents. From her brief chat with Sylvia, she had received the impression that was more the norm than not.

“Just hope for scrambled eggs or porridge,” Alisa whispered back. “It ought to be easy to mix something into that. Or juice. Can your stuff dissolve in juice?”

Yumi nodded and wiped sweat from her brow.

“If you want, give it to me, and I’ll do it.” Alisa had no idea what the penalty was for trying to get a Starseer high, but since she had no relationship to Ji-yoon, she doubted she would be as nervous about it as Yumi.

Relief blossomed on Yumi’s face, and she dipped into her purse.

“Did you get any of that other concoction you mentioned?” Alisa murmured, standing in front of Yumi so the guard would not see what they were doing if he turned. Right now, he was busy talking to his buddy about the earthquake she’d heard about on the news the night before. She hoped they couldn’t talk to each other and mentally probe prisoners’ minds at the same time.

“Yes, but I don’t think we should use it,” Yumi whispered as she pressed a small sealed bag into Alisa’s palm. A couple tablespoons of a fine brownish gray powder were tucked inside. The color made it look about as appealing as takka, maybe less so.

“Why not?”

“If she’s not able to read us the way she usually would, she’ll know something is blocking her, and then she’ll wonder why we’re blocking her. She’ll think we have something to hide.”

“And that’s worse than thinking the wrong thing at the wrong moment and letting her know that we have something to hide?”

“Probably. I don’t think my mother is a strong telepath, so she may only read us briefly at the beginning. Unless we say something suspicious and she has reason to believe we’re lying, I doubt she’ll poke around in our thoughts.”

The guard swatted his friend on the back—actually, that was the butt—and turned back to his charges. Maybe he did prefer male massage partners.

“Let’s go, you two,” he said, with a yawn. Bored with his duty, was he?

A bored guard was preferable to an alert one. Alisa smiled agreeably, slid the packet of powder into her pocket, and followed him.

Soon, he led her and Yumi up a set of stairs and out onto a patio atop a tower. The crenellated half wall let them see in all directions, into the interior of the temple, to the docking area that held the Nomad and the other ships, and out toward the sea of ice a hundred feet below. The air was clear for a radius of a few hundred meters around the temple, but then the omnipresent gray mists started up on all sides, including overhead. Alisa thought she remembered glimpsing stars on their way in, but maybe they had been part of an illusion. The dense hazy gray mists blocked out the sky. If a ship flew over the area, it would not be able to see down to the temple, nor, she wagered, would a satellite be able to get imagery of the temple.

“Uhh,” Yumi whispered, halting as soon as she stepped out the door.

A few tables with chairs were set up on the ice-block patio atop a rug, and a couple of hovering patio heaters hummed softly as they shed warmth on the area, but Alisa doubted it was the decor that made Yumi pause. She was staring at the only occupied table. Three people sat at it instead of the expected one: Ji-yoon, her gray-threaded black hair pulled back in a braid, and two younger women in their late teens or early twenties. They shared Ji-yoon’s almond-shaped eyes and black hair. In fact, as Alisa looked back and forth between them and Yumi, she decided they all shared a lot of features. Small noses and round faces, along with average to slender builds.

“Do you want me to stay or give you some privacy, Lady Ji-yoon?” the guard asked.

“We’ll be fine,” Ji-yoon said, though she did frown slightly at Alisa before waving to her daughter. “Please come join us, Yumi. And, ah, this is your captain, isn’t it?”

“Alisa Marchenko, ma’am,” Alisa said while doing her best not to think about the drugs in her pocket.

It seemed like a silly time to think of shirtless cyborgs, so she thought of the Nomad instead and of flying the craft away from the Starseer temple, of the freedom of soaring through space and perhaps testing her skills by sailing through an asteroid field or through the tricky interstellar gravity wells that made navigating at the center of the trinary system a challenge. Perhaps Ji-yoon would have similar memories that she found appealing.

“Yumi said that you’re a pilot too,” Alisa said, “and that you worked with the Alliance during the war. I was just twiddling my thumbs in my room, so I invited myself along to your breakfast. Hope you don’t mind.”

“Ah, I see. Come join us then.” Ji-yoon pointed to extra chairs at the nearest table.

Before Alisa could head over to grab one, the older of the two girls tilted her head, and the chair scooted across the carpet on its own.

“Handy,” Alisa remarked.

“Allow me to introduce Young-hee,” Ji-yoon said, waving at the girl responsible, “and my other daughter, Soon-hee.”

“Daughters?” Yumi mouthed.

“Yes,” Ji-yoon said. “Even though your appearance here was unexpected, I’m glad you can all finally meet.”

The younger women regarded Yumi curiously. The older of the two wrinkled her nose slightly. In disdain? Maybe she just had an itch.

“I didn’t realize…” Yumi looked to Alisa, as if she might have some light to shed on the situation.

While she could sympathize with Yumi’s discomfort, all Alisa was thinking was that she was either going to have to find a way to get rid of the girls for a while or that she now had three meals that she had to drug. There were not any beverages or plates on the table yet, so she could not gauge how feasible that would be.

“You know your father and I never married,” Ji-yoon told Yumi while one of the girls waved her hand over a sensor on the table. A holodisplay popped up, presenting a menu with pictures of food. “He was a good man and a soldier. Noble, appealing.” Ji-yoon smiled, and the older girl rolled her eyes.

Alisa leaned in to look at the menu, hoping to find it full of porridge, mashmeal, scrambled eggs, and other items in which it would be easy to mix powdered drugs.

“I knew Dad was a soldier, yes,” Yumi said.

That likely meant Yumi’s father had been in the imperial fleet. Thirty years ago, or whenever she had been conceived, that would have been the only military service out there, aside from private guards and mercenary units. Thus far, Yumi had seemed indifferent to news of the Alliance and the empire, not speaking of allegiance to either side. Had she grown up with tendencies one way or another?

“And quite the romantic,” Ji-yoon said. “He definitely caught my attention.”

“I’m telling Father about this, Mother,” the younger girl said with a somewhat nervous giggle.

Ji-yoon waved her hand in dismissal. “He knows my past.” She turned back to Yumi. “Despite an attraction, we were never a good match. Not enough common interests.” She waved toward the temple all around them, and Alisa wondered if that was a polite way of saying he hadn’t been a Starseer and thus was not good enough to marry her. “It was never my intention to have a child with him, but we were off on… I guess you could call it an adventure.” Ji-yoon smiled at some memory. “You were the result. But we separated soon after you were born, and I returned to my home. I made sure he had the means to care for you—he was quite insistent that you stay with him, and I…”

“Didn’t care since I never displayed Starseer talents?” Yumi asked. She didn’t sound that bitter, but she looked out toward the frozen sea as she spoke, her eyes bleak.

“I cared,” Ji-yoon said quietly. “But he wanted a reminder of our time together.”

Gee, way to make Yumi feel like a souvenir tchotchke picked up on a shared vacation. Alisa kept her mouth shut since this conversation had nothing to do with her. Besides, she was busy perusing the menu and groaning inside because every entry involved fish. Where were the eggs? The porridge? Couldn’t these people import any staples? Eight different kinds of fish steaks. How was she supposed to mix brown powder into a fish steak?

“I noticed you stopped visiting once I was ten,” Yumi said, “the latest age when Starseer children manifest their talents, I’ve read.”

“That wasn’t why I stopped visiting,” Ji-yoon said firmly.

“No? It’s not as if Dad was dating anyone else. He never married, never seemed to fall in love again.”

“I’m sorry he never found anyone, but I was back here, and I did marry. And I had more children. When they were small, they were a handful, and it was hard to get away for weeks for cross-system visits.”

“A handful,” the younger one said with a sniff. “Really, Mother.”

“They’re still a handful,” Ji-yoon said.

The older one rolled her eyes again. Alisa would have taken Yumi over either of these twits for daughters.

Ji-yoon looked in her direction, frowning slightly. Hells, was she mind surfing?

Alisa pointed at the last item on the menu and the only one without “steak” or “fillet” in the description. “Is the fish stew good? I’m going to try it.”

She prodded the picture of it in the display. The selection flashed. The girls picked two items of their own, a fillet and a steak. Ji-yoon looked toward Alisa for another long moment before shifting her gaze to the menu. She selected a dragonfish steak. Great.

Alisa turned a grim expression toward Yumi, wondering how she was going to make this work, but Yumi did not look at her. She was frowning down at the table where her hands were clasped tightly.

“Yumi?” Ji-yoon asked softly. “Are you going to eat? You don’t have to worry about paying here. You’re my guest.”

Yumi’s lips thinned. “Thank you, but I assure you I can afford my way. I’ve held several prestigious teaching positions, and I’ve worked as a private tutor for wealthy families. I’m smart with my money. Just because I’m choosing to travel now—”

Ji-yoon held up a hand. “I didn’t mean to offend you. It’s just that we don’t use money here. Those who have jobs outside of the temple often get paid, but here, as long as you contribute in some way, your room and board and other needs are provided. Those of your guests, too, though given the strict policies about outsiders, few of us entertain.” Her smile actually looked a touch sad.

“Oh.” Yumi’s cheeks flushed pink, and she poked at the fish stew option.

Alisa cleared her throat. “What is it that you do for the temple, ma’am? You’re a pilot, I understand, but also an archivist, was it?” She glanced to Yumi for confirmation, but Yumi was studying her hands again. Alisa was starting to wish she had another accomplice along to rely on.

“Yes, I keep records.” It was a terse answer, and Ji-yoon looked back to Yumi as soon as she shared it.

Alisa scratched her ear. How many of her thoughts had the woman glimpsed? Was this plan already hopeless?

“You should also know that your father and I had a difference of opinion when it came to politics,” Ji-yoon said. “He was working for the imperial fleet and believed in the status quo, whereas I was an advisor to the burgeoning Tri-Sun Alliance.”

“Did you help the Alliance during the war then?” Alisa asked, still trying to find a way to get the woman speaking more. She had no idea if she was going to get a chance to drug her food, but maybe she could draw out a few useful tidbits.

“I did.” Ji-yoon lifted her chin. “Starseers aren’t all loyal to the same factions, and many don’t care one whit about what mundanes are doing out in the system, but there are a lot of us who haven’t forgotten that the founders of the empire were those who destroyed so many of our people in the Order Wars, that they were the ones to force us into hiding.”

Alisa did not mention that the Starseers might not have been forced into hiding if they hadn’t been trying to take over the entire system, but Ji-yoon must have seen some of her thoughts, because her face grew more unfriendly. If she was a weak telepath, as Yumi had said, Alisa did not want to encounter a strong one.

The door opened, and a robot rolled out carrying plates, bowls, and a coffee pot and mugs.

“Do you ever have trouble among your own people?” Alisa asked. “Because of your allegiances? If some supported the empire and some supported the Alliance, I imagine there were some brawls here in the temple. What happens when you fight each other? Do walls come down?” She tried a smile.

“We’re not savages, Captain.”

“No, I didn’t mean to imply that.” Alisa covered her discomfort—three suns, she was making a mess of this—by selecting her dish from the tray as the robot rolled around the table. Maybe she should drug her own food. Would that make this breakfast less awkward?

“Political discussions often come up at meals,” Ji-yoon said, “but even heated debates remain civilized. If people are too passionate one way or another and can’t remain civilized, they’re encouraged to leave the temple for a time.”

“Like those spoilsports who had to leave last summer,” the younger daughter said, digging into her meal. “Remember, Young? When Jason left with his dad? They were imperial loyalists and kept saying that there’d be no living on Arkadius now.”

Alisa ate a spoonful of her stew while fiddling with the packet in her pocket. “Last summer? When was that here? A few months ago?”

“Oh, seven, eight, maybe. It was right after the war ended.”

The girl’s gossip had nothing to do with Alisa’s daughter, but she found herself thinking about how people who had left Arkadius then could have stopped for a few errands along the way and made it to Perun about the time that Jelena had been kidnapped. Would Starseers who had left for political reasons be considered rogues, as Naidoo had mentioned? But even if they were, why would such people have targeted Jelena? It wasn’t as if Jonah had been an imperial sympathizer. He had been smart enough to keep his mouth shut about his opinions when at work and in public, but he had shared most of Alisa’s political beliefs, and he had supported her when she left to fight with the Alliance.

“Mom?” Yumi said, looking toward a spire rising from the wall not far from their patio perch.

“Yes?”

“You know I’ve always been interested in science. I was quite curious, as we flew up, how the temple stays afloat, especially since I didn’t see evidence of hover technology underneath. Do you know?”

“Maybe they keep some of their people chained in a tower who are responsible for keeping it up with their mind powers,” Alisa said.

Ji-yoon frowned at her again—she liked to do that. But her youngest daughter giggled.

“I actually had a teacher threaten me with that task once if I didn’t pay attention in school,” she said.

“There are hover engines, but they’re not underneath the structure. They’re built into the towers.” Ji-yoon pushed her chair away from the table. “I think you can see the housings from here on a couple of them. I’ll show you.”

Alisa hadn’t realized what Yumi was doing with her question until Ji-yoon walked away from the table and Yumi stood, giving Alisa a significant look as she pushed her chair in and followed. Yumi was trying to give her a chance.

The younger daughter got up, too, a skip to her step as she joined them. “I’m taking engineering courses right now. I can tell you all about the engines. Yumi, what kind of science do you study?”

Under the table, Alisa slid the packet out of her pocket and looked at the older daughter, willing her to get up and join the adventure. Instead, Young-hee pulled up the menu again, swiping her finger to bring up a beverage section. Alisa wanted to suggest that she join her mother, but that would be too obvious. She opened the packet and eyed Ji-yoon’s plate. It was across the table from her. There was no way she could stretch over to dump powder on it without Young-hee noticing, especially since she needed to do something creative to disguise it. There was a buttery orange sauce on the fish that she might mix it into, but that would take a few seconds.

As the girl poked through a selection of sugary coffee drinks, Alisa looked at the plate to her immediate right. That one belonged to Soon-hee. She was the chattiest one there and might give up information even without a drug. Whether that information would be useful was questionable, but maybe she knew more about the men who had left last summer, such as what their itinerary had been and if any of them had been named Durant.

“That one sounds good,” Alisa said, pointing to something called a Galaxy Arkadia. “Is there a list of ingredients?” She used her arm to block the view of Soon-hee’s plate and slid her free hand out to sprinkle some of the powder onto the buttery fish and seaweed salad. Without looking at it, she did her best to stir the sauce around with her finger and dissolve the gray-brown powder. The butter did not hide much, as her first glance revealed. She grimaced, realizing she had created an entirely unappealing spotted fish fillet.

“It’s a tropical drink,” Young-hee said. “Just coconut cream, coffee, and moolithika syrup.” She frowned at Alisa’s arm, probably wondering why it was still outstretched.

“I love sweet drinks. I’ll take one.” Alisa prodded the menu as she flipped the fish fillet over with her other hand.

She leaned back, again grimacing as she eyed the results of her clumsy legerdemain. Turning the fillet over had hidden the spots, but it was crooked on the plate, and there were still spots on that seaweed salad. Maybe the girl would think it was a seasoning. Celery salt, perhaps.

Young-hee was frowning at her, the expression similar to the disapproving one her mother wielded often, and Alisa remembered the problematic telepathy skills. Alisa put the shirtless Leonidas at the forefront of her thoughts again, imagining him enjoying a coffee with her after a morning of amore. She felt silly for using him so, and a little bad that she wasn’t using her memories of Jonah when it came to sexual thoughts, but this was the first thing that popped into her head.

Young-hee’s eyebrows pinched together, and Alisa had no idea if her mental subterfuge was working. Had she been too late in sticking that image into her head? Or was the girl powerful enough to see through it?

Still looking irritated, Young-hee turned back to the menu, scrolling through the drinks again.

“How many engines does it take to hold up the entire temple?” Yumi asked, glancing back at Alisa. She raised her eyebrows.

Alisa shook her head slightly. Yumi made a hurry-up face. As if Alisa wasn’t trying.

“I have to go to the lav,” she announced.

Young-hee shrugged indifferently at her. Alisa moved around the table in the direction that would take her by Ji-yoon’s plate on the way to the door. She not-so-accidentally brushed the sleeve of her jacket over a fork and knocked it onto the rug.

“Oops. I’ll get it.” Once again using her body to hide her movements, she dumped some of the powder onto the plate. A breeze kicked up, batting at the packet and unleashing more of the drug than she had intended. Cursing to herself, she picked up the fork and groped for a way to fix her mess. The powder was clearly lying atop the orange sauce on the fish steak. “Guess she won’t want to use that.” Alisa leaned across the table and dropped the fork in the middle while stirring the sauce with her finger.

She inadvertently bumped Young-hee and caused the menu to close.

“What are you doing?” Young-hee asked, frowning at her and also in the direction of her mother’s plate.

“Just trying to help,” Alisa said with forced cheer. She lifted both hands, curling her fingers down to hide the orange sauce on one tip, and backed away from the table. “Be back in a minute.”

She turned for the door, trying not to feel like she was fleeing from a crime scene. As she opened it to hustle out, Young-hee left the table and walked toward her mother. She must have seen what Alisa was doing, if not with her eyes then with her mind.

Groaning, Alisa hurried away from the patio. It crossed her mind to flee all the way back to the ship and maybe, if Mica had figured out how to break those clamps, all the way back into space. But the guard was leaning against the wall at the top of the stairs. He gave her a frank look.

“Can you point me to the lav?” Alisa asked, trying to blank her thoughts, though it probably did not matter now.

He grunted and pushed away from the wall. “This way.”

They did not have to go far. He pointed to a door, and Alisa rushed in, expecting a squad of Starseers to come charging down the corridor any moment to arrest her or whatever it was they did to people who committed crimes here. She pulled out her comm unit and looked at it, tempted to call Leonidas. But what was he going to do? Come loom threateningly at her shoulder as she attempted to explain why she’d thought it would be fun to drug a Starseer? Even if he would leave Alejandro to help her, he had enough trouble with the Starseers already, just for being a cyborg. She did not need to bring him into her problems.

She almost commed him, anyway, since he had not answered earlier, when she had intended to warn him about Beck’s conversation with his grill customers. But the door opened, and she stuffed the unit into her pocket, turning to face her visitor. It wasn’t a squad of warriors, but it was Young-hee.

Chapter 10

Alisa smiled at Young-hee, though she was sure it was a grim and insincere gesture.

“If you’re a spy, you’re a clumsy one,” Young-hee said, frowning sternly at her.

Alisa found it strange being frowned at sternly by a woman at least ten years younger than she was, but Young-hee had been the one to move the chair with her mind. Who knew what all she could do?

“I’m not a spy. I’m a mother, and I’m desperate.” Alisa highly doubted that she would gain anything by being honest with the girl, but also doubted there was a point to lying now. “A group of Starseers kidnapped my daughter several months ago. I’m trying to find her and get her back.”

“So naturally you’re drugging my mother and my sister.” Young-hee gave her an are-you-really-this-stupid look.

Unfortunately, Alisa felt the look was well deserved. “I would have preferred to drug Lady Naidoo, but she didn’t invite us to breakfast.”

To her utter surprise, Young-hee threw her head back and laughed.

Alisa raised her eyebrows. By the blessings of the sun gods, had she finally found someone who appreciated her humor? Or maybe the girl was amused by the idea of her stately and venerable leader on drugs.

“It’s not anything toxic, is it?” Young-hee asked, recovering. “I didn’t get that from your thoughts.”

“No, I asked Yumi for a truth serum. I doubt she has military-grade interrogation drugs, though, so it’s more likely some kind of dried mushroom powder that lowers inhibitions.”

“Does it go well with fish?”

“I’m not sure. I fled before they tried it. Did you warn them?”

“Not exactly. I said you were being suspicious and that I was going to investigate.”

“Ah.” Alisa was not sure what else to say. This was not going as badly as she had feared, but she doubted she could trust Young-hee.

“What were you going to ask my mother?”

“If, as the temple archivist, she was familiar with a Starseer named Durant.”

“Durant Shepherd?”

“I didn’t catch the last name in the security vid,” Alisa said, letting herself feel a tiny tendril of hope that this unexpected resource would give her useful information.

“Well, it might not be the same person then, but Durant Shepherd was one of the men who left in a huff last summer. They were all friendly to the empire and distant relatives of the emperor himself. You could ask Abelardus about it. He would know a lot more.”

“Abelardus? The big warrior brute with all the braids?”

“Brute? Please. He’s gorgeous.” Young-hee sighed and rested a palm against her heart.

“Er, yes. Why would he know about Durant?”

“Because they’re brothers.”

The tiny tendril of hope in Alisa’s heart swelled to a thick vine. Abelardus had gone to the library with Leonidas and Alejandro. Finding him would be easy. Would he answer her questions? If not, maybe she could convince Leonidas to put his grenade launcher to use on her behalf. No, that would only get him in trouble. Alisa still had about a third of the brown powder left. Maybe she could spike a Galaxy Arkadia and offer him a drink.

Young-hee laughed again, the sound echoing from the walls of the small lavatory.

“Are you reading my mind?” Alisa asked.

“Of course. Would you trust anything that comes out of your mouth?”

“Perhaps not in this case, no.”

“Shall we go see if my mother and sister have tried the fish?” Young-hee smirked. “You may want to trial your drug on them before going after Abelardus. He’ll hurt you if he figures out what you’re up to.”

“Uhm, sure,” Alisa said, though she was more interested in running straight to the library. Unfortunately, that guard was still out there, and she doubted Young-hee was going to send him away so Alisa could have free run of the temple.

“I was dreading this meal when my mother brought it up,” Young-hee said as they stepped back into the hall, “but it’s turned out to be more interesting than expected.” The guard was, indeed, still out there, and he looked curiously at her, but she merely led the way up the stairs to the outdoor patio.

Yumi, Ji-yoon, and Soon-hee were at the table again, all leaning back in their chairs, all gesturing expansively with their arms and laughing as Yumi told a story that involved chickens and engines. Yumi should not have been drugged, but she was certainly acting it up, displaying as much cheer and enthusiasm as the other two women. Soon-hee waved her fork in the air, a piece of her half-eaten fish on the tines, and tried to pop it into her mouth. She missed, the fish fell on the table, and she giggled so hard that tears leaked from the corners of her eyes.

Young-hee stopped outside the door, her mouth dropping open as her mother nearly fell out of her chair laughing before catching herself on the table and righting herself. Young-hee gave Alisa an incredulous look.

“Yumi did this to pirates, too,” Alisa said. “She helped us escape that way.”

“She drugged pirates?”

“She did.”

“Huh, I always assumed from her profession that she would be stodgy. Maybe we’ll have to become pen pals.”

“I’m glad I could facilitate that,” Alisa said, “but is there any chance you could—”

Alisa’s comm beeped, and she jumped.

“Yes?” she answered, expecting it to be Mica reporting on her progress with the docking clamps.

“Captain?” a male voice asked.

“Doctor?”

“Yes. I need some help.”

Alisa felt her lips press together. Alejandro was the last person on her ship she cared about helping.

“Technically, Leonidas needs some help,” he said.

“What happened?” she asked, much more interested now. She barely noticed Soon-hee’s ongoing fork problems.

“There’s been a murder. He’s the suspect, and he’s resisting arrest. I don’t blame him, but they’re going to—”

A thunderous boom sounded.

Alisa heard it over the comm unit and from the other side of the temple. A mushroom cloud of smoke billowed up from a tower across the courtyard from their patio.

“Tell me that wasn’t Leonidas,” Alisa said.

“You shouldn’t have told him to blow up a tower for you.”

“Damn it, Doctor,” she said, turning toward the door, hardly caring if the guard tried to stop her. “What’s going on? Are you still in the library?”

“I have—” Alejandro broke off with a startled gasp.

“Doctor?” Alisa demanded. “Doctor, are you there?”

The comm line sounded like it was still open, with angry shouts sounding in the distance, but nobody responded.

• • • • •

Alisa implored Young-hee to take her to the library—she would have tried to break free of the guard and find the place on her own if the girl hadn’t agreed. To her surprise, she did, though they had to leave Yumi and the other women behind, since none of them seemed to grasp the need for urgency. From the way Yumi was being as silly as the others, Alisa suspected she had been tasting the spotted fish.

Trusting she would be fine there with her mother, Alisa strode after Young-hee. She wanted to run, but her guide did not feel her sense of urgency, either. Alisa clenched her fist and might have tried pushing her along, but her guard was also following along, watching suspiciously.

“Brenner?” a voice said over his comm. “Report to the library. We have an incident and need backup.”

The guard passed Young-hee and took off at a run. Alisa sprinted after him, not caring if Young-hee kept up or not. An incident? That could only be Leonidas. How in all three hells had he ended up accused of murder? Had someone else tried a mental attack on him, causing him to defend himself with force? Enough force to kill?

The guard charged up a wide set of stairs with ice pillars on either side, animals and mythological creatures carved into them. Another time, Alisa would have admired the artwork. Now, she was too busy chasing after the big man. They burst through the double doors at the top together.

At first, she did not see the trouble. A cavernous, carpeted room spread out before her, more carved pillars reaching up to a high ceiling and rows and rows of bookcases stretching toward a distant, window-filled wall. But shouts came from the side, from a round room that looked to be the base of one of the ubiquitous towers. Someone roared in pain, and hair rose on the back of Alisa’s neck. She had never heard such an anguished cry come from Leonidas’s throat, but that sounded like him.

She sprinted toward the tower, running so fast that she passed the guard. Her Etcher found its way into her hand, even though the logical part of her brain informed her that it would be idiotic to shoot anyone here. She ran through the door and turned toward the noise, almost crashing into someone’s back. Several robed figures were lined up, and one of the robes was gray instead of black.

“Doctor,” Alisa blurted as the guard caught up with her, gripping her arm from behind.

Barely noticing, she was about to demand an explanation from Alejandro, but saw that two men were gripping his arms too. These were the young Starseer warriors, some of whom she had seen waiting outside of the Nomad. Alejandro was not wearing his satchel. Had they taken the artifact from him?

Two of the Starseers turned to look back at her, opening up the view of the room in front of them. Leonidas was on his hands and knees on the floor, his helmet off and blood dripping from his nostrils and ears. The entire wall behind him had been blown away, and an alarmingly huge puddle of blood saturated the rubble-littered carpet in front of him. Wounded men groaned from the floor off to the side, one rolling and gasping, grabbing his ribs through his robe.

“Leonidas,” Alisa blurted, trying to pull away from the guard so she could go to him.

The Starseer did not let go of her arm, and her Etcher was clenched in that hand so she couldn’t bring it to bear. Instead, she whirled and slammed her boot into his kneecap. He clearly hadn’t expected her to attack, and the blow made him gasp, releasing her. She pushed between the two men who had turned to look back, thinking she might squeeze past them and throwing a few elbows to put them off guard, but they recovered and caught her.

Then some unfamiliar force restrained her further, a pressure on the inside of her skull that took control of her body away from her. She couldn’t continue forward. Her limbs simply would not work. She couldn’t even feel them. It was as if they had been frozen in ice.

Still on his hands and knees, Leonidas lifted his head. He met her eyes briefly, his own eyes squinting with pain, but he turned his head slightly and focused on an older man a few feet from Alisa. The gray-haired, pale-skinned Starseer’s hand was out, fingers splayed as he pointed his palm at Leonidas. Utter concentration was stamped on his face as he looked from Leonidas to the hole in the wall, to the drop beyond it, a hundred feet to the sea of ice below.

Alisa was no mind reader, but she knew without a doubt what he was thinking. To use his mind to shove Leonidas out, to cause him to fall to his death. She doubted that even Leonidas could survive a drop that far.

She tried to cry for him to stop, to distract him somehow, but her voice box would not work. The pressure in her skull seemed to build, causing pain, making her want to crumple into a ball and wrap her arms around her head instead of fighting further. Yet she struggled, trying to find a way to move, to break the hold on her.

“Stop it,” Alejandro said. “He’s done nothing.”

“He killed Abelardus and wounded three of my warriors,” the old man snarled, not taking his gaze from Leonidas as he spoke.

Abelardus? The one who knew Durant? Her only lead?

As soon as she had the thought, Alisa felt despicably selfish. Leonidas was writhing on the floor, maybe being killed before her eyes, and she was worried about her own problems?

“No,” she rasped, barely able to get the syllable out. She wanted to say that Leonidas wouldn’t have done that, that he wouldn’t have killed any of the men here, but an invisible hand tightened around her throat, and she could not utter the words.

Her eyes, the only things she could move, darted from side to side in her head as she tried to identify the person who was using this power on her. She did not know what she could do to stop it, but she wanted to know who was tormenting her so.

“If you can see his thoughts, then you know that’s not true,” Alejandro said. “He’s an honorable man. He wouldn’t have thrown someone out the window to his death.”

“What window?” the old man asked. “He blew up the window and the wall.”

“To try to disrupt the concentration of the people attacking him!”

“Of course we’re attacking him. He’ll kill us if he gets the chance, just like he did Abelardus.” The old man’s fingers twitched, and some force shoved Leonidas, heavy armor and all, toward the gaping hole in the wall.

Other men in the line smiled, though their faces were full of concentration too. They were all ganging up on Leonidas, bullying him.

Leonidas glared at them through the pain contorting his face, but he could not resist the invisible force pushing him toward the hole.

“If he’d wanted to kill you, he would have aimed the grenade at you,” Alejandro said, arguing more forcefully than Alisa would have expected from him. Despite his impassioned words, the Starseers were not listening. The old man continued to push Leonidas across the carpet, inch by inch. Wind swept through the hole in the wall and plucked at Leonidas’s sweat-drenched hair.

Realizing that physically fighting whatever held her was not working, Alisa tried going limp, slumping against the Starseer closest to her. He seemed startled, and for a second, the force around her throat disappeared as he caught her with his arms, keeping her from hitting the ground. Before she could move, the force around her body reasserted itself.

She hissed in frustration. The toe of Leonidas’s boot slipped over the edge of the hole. A piece of rubble from the wall was pushed through and tumbled free, falling too far for her to hear it land.

“That’s my security officer,” she blurted, startling herself because she hadn’t realized she would be able to speak. She immediately wished she had come up with some more useful argument. How was that going to sway them to let him go? Several faces turned toward her, and she felt foolish, but she pressed on. “I need him to fly my ship, to protect us from pirates. He’s… he’s integral, damn it. You have no right to—”

The force reapplied itself to her throat, cutting off her ability to speak and half of her air as well.

“No,” the old man said, lowering his hand. Leonidas still looked to be flattened to the floor, but he wasn’t being pushed farther toward the hole. “Let her speak.” His cold, soulless eyes locked onto hers. “Are you saying that the cyborg works for you, Captain?”

She recognized the trap as soon as he asked the question and realized her mistake in making the claim. She’d been looking for an argument that might sway them to leave him alone, but this could get her into as much trouble as he was in.

Leonidas managed to lift his head up. His eyes were wide, full of concern. Not for himself but for her. He looked like he wanted to shake his head wildly, but all he could get out was a slight gesture of the negative. “Don’t,” he mouthed, blood spilling down his chin when he moved his lips.

Seeing him in such pain, seeing him being bullied, made Alisa want to cry. And to rage. She struggled again against the invisible bonds that held her, longing to lash out, to shoot these cruel idiots.

“Because if that’s the case, Captain,” the old man said, “you’re responsible for his actions and just as much to blame for this murder as he is.”

Alisa looked toward the huge bloodstain. She did not see a body anywhere in the room. Had someone gone out the hole in the wall? She didn’t understand fully what had happened or how Leonidas had ended up in a brawl with someone here. His grenade launcher and blazer pistols were on the floor near the stain, too far away for him to reach now, but nobody else’s weapons were there, no sign of torn robes or coins that might have fallen out in a scuffle. There was just the blood.

“It’s not a military ship, Osmond,” someone said dryly. “She can’t be held responsible for a civilian employee going crazy.”

“Of course she can,” the old man snapped.

“He doesn’t work for her,” Alejandro said, meeting her gaze across the intervening Starseers. “She’s lying. We’re just passengers.”

More of the Starseers were focused on her now, her and Alejandro and the old man. In her peripheral vision, Alisa saw Leonidas’s fingers inching toward his opposite arm, toward some small panel in his armor. She immediately tried to think of something else, afraid someone monitoring her thoughts would notice her noticing his slight actions.

“Passengers that paid their fare,” Alisa said, filling her mind with images of the Nomad and her passenger cabins. “I aim to get them to their destination.”

No need to mention that this technically was their destination and that nobody had made arrangements for further passage. She hadn’t even made plans as to where she intended to go after this.

“Then it’s a shame your passenger chose to murder one of our people,” the old man said, shifting his attention back to Leonidas.

“He didn’t,” Alisa cried, though she had no way of knowing that. She hoped to give Leonidas the few more seconds he needed to do whatever he was trying to do.

The old man frowned at her, but lifted his hand and stepped toward Leonidas.

Leonidas flicked something toward the Starseers, a thimble-sized canister that started spewing bluish-gray smoke as soon as it rolled across the carpet. The powerful stuff had an immediate impact. Horrible smoke curled down Alisa’s throat and into her nostrils, feeling like acid burning away her cilia. Tears streamed from her eyes.

The Starseers stumbled back, and the man holding her let her go. The invisible force wrapped around her also disappeared. Coughs filled the air all around her as the smoke thickened.

Alisa tried to stumble toward Leonidas, even though she could no longer see him in the dense haze, but she was too busy choking on snot and heaving, feeling like her body was trying to cough her lungs out into a pile on the carpet.

A hard arm went around her, and she found herself flung across someone’s shoulder. Leonidas?

As she was swept away from the smoke, her mind filled with an image of those docking clamps under her ship. How would they get away if Mica hadn’t found a way to deal with them yet? How would they get away even if she had? Wouldn’t the Starseers cause them to crash in the mists again?

Leonidas charged for the doors of the library, pushing robed men to the side, men clutching their noses and mouths, snot all over their fingers. They were too distracted by their own discomfort to stop him. He raced through the doorway into air that was thankfully clear of smoke.

Alisa expected him to keep going, to run down the stairs and all the way back to the ship. But he halted before starting down. Being draped over his shoulder limited her view, and she twisted, trying to see around his broad torso. She saw just enough to make her stomach sink.

Lady Naidoo stood at the bottom of the stairs with Young-hee at her side and six Starseer warriors lined up behind her, some with their staffs raised, others with plain blazers pointed at Leonidas. Naidoo herself held the tip of her staff toward him, and energy seemed to crackle in the air around it as the runes carved into the side glowed fiercely.

From the very still way that Leonidas stood, not even seeming to breathe, Alisa feared that he was being restrained by their power again. She wished he had simply run out without stopping to grab her. Maybe he would have made it farther alone. Though where he could have gone from here, she did not know.

“Take them to the prison area,” Naidoo said, lowering her staff.

Leonidas sighed, shifting his weight. He must have been released so he could walk. He did not attempt to fight again.

Other robed figures stumbled out of the library and onto the landing, some coughing, some throwing up. The old man leaned over the railing and heaved his breakfast onto the floor beside the stairs. Alisa felt a modicum of satisfaction at seeing his discomfort, but it did not last long. Someone lifted her from Leonidas’s shoulder, and robed warriors swarmed all around them. She was thrown over someone else’s shoulder like a sack of flour.

If you fight me, I will make this walk unpleasant for you, an unfamiliar voice spoke into her mind.

“I’m gagging on my own snot, and my eyes feel like they’re being clawed out by acid,” Alisa said, her voice raspy. How much more unpleasant could it get?

She did not, however, try to wriggle free or fight her captor as she was carried down the stairs. With so many enemies around—yes, she had to consider these people enemies now—what was the point?

Chapter 11

Alisa was not surprised that the theme of ice ceilings and floors continued in the basement dungeon where she and Leonidas were dropped off. They were deposited in adjoining cells with translucent forcefields on all sides acting as walls to separate them and keep them from escaping. The cells themselves were part of a block of similar cells in the center of a large room that was also used for storage. Casks of wine and beer and sake were stacked against a back wall. Alas, nobody saw fit to roll one into Alisa’s cell. She could have used a stiff drink.

Once the forcefields were up, the Starseers that had walked their prisoners down en masse all left. A camera on a wall near the bottom of the stairs was turned toward the cells. Alisa did not see any obvious way to escape unless she could dig a hole in the ice floor. Unfortunately, the Starseers had searched her and removed her weapons and multitool. Unless she could dig her way out with her teeth, the odds did not look good. They had also forced Leonidas out of his combat armor, leaving him in nothing more than the underwear and thin T-shirt he wore underneath.

Alisa smiled without humor, thinking of the times she had been imagining him scantily clad in order to distract the Starseers poking in her mind. This was not how she had envisioned seeing him. Blood crusted his face and the sides of his neck from where it had run out of his ears, nose, and mouth, and large bruises mottled the skin on his arms and legs, probably on his torso under his shirt too. Somehow, the Starseers had injured him badly, even with his armor covering him. Armor was designed to defeat weapons, not mental attacks.

She watched Leonidas through the forcefield, wishing she could offer him a hug. She also wanted to ask him what had happened, but he was still sitting on the floor where they had deposited him, his shoulders slumped, his chin to his chest. He looked like he wanted to curl onto his side and pass out. It was probably only the chill of the ice under his butt that kept him from pressing more skin against it. There were no carpets here in the basement to alleviate the cold, and there wasn’t any furniture in the cells, not even a pot for going to the bathroom. Not that Alisa would want to do that in front of Leonidas or the camera.

“Are you going to be all right?” Alisa asked softly.

She did not want to bother him, but she did want to know what had happened and if she should be yelling at that camera, pleading for Alejandro or some other doctor to be sent to attend to him. Wherever Alejandro was. The Starseers must have decided he was not enough of a threat that he needed to be locked up.

“You shouldn’t have been thrown in here with me,” he mumbled, his chin still to his chest. He definitely sounded like he was in pain, like it hurt just to breathe. Had they broken some of his ribs?

“What can I say? I missed your company. Drugging Yumi’s family wasn’t as fun as I thought it would be.”

He turned his head, looking at her for the first time. “Is that inappropriate humor or did you actually do that?”

“Yes, and yes.” She managed a smile for him, even though his face looked as bad as the rest of him, and she wanted to break into tears. His strong features were bruised, his lips split and swollen, and his eyes so dark and puffy that she was surprised he could see out of them. “I don’t know if it will help anything, but if it doesn’t hurt too much, I’d appreciate it if you told me what happened.”

“Hells if I know.”

She frowned. What did that mean? He’d been there, hadn’t he?

“In the beginning, I watched over the doctor’s shoulder as he researched, and I tried to give him ideas. I thought he might want to investigate old Starseer nursery rhymes since that seemed to be what Yumi had remembered and used to find this place. He told me to go away and stop bugging him.” He paused and took in a slow, deep breath before continuing. “So I wandered through the library, poking into books about the history of the Starseers and some of the artifacts they had created, though my attempt at research was handicapped by the fact that the doctor still hasn’t confided in me about what exactly that orb is or what it’s supposed to lead him to—he’s given the impression that it’s a map or a puzzle, but that’s it.”

Alisa almost opened her mouth to agree with that assessment, but couldn’t remember if she had learned that information during one of the times she had been eavesdropping on Alejandro and Leonidas. She did not want to confess to that.

“I asked my guard what he thought it was,” Leonidas said, “but he wasn’t talking.”

“Your guard being Abelardus?”

“Yes. He chose to follow me around the library, glaring at the back of my head instead of staying with the doctor. Maybe he thought I was going to leave graffiti on the walls.”

“You do have the look of a delinquent.”

His eyebrows rose. “Really, Captain.”

“Alisa.”

“I’m supposed to call you by first name when you’re calling me a delinquent?”

“You’re supposed to always call me by first name.” She smiled at him. “What happened to Abelardus?”

Leonidas took another deep breath, but it turned into a round of coughs. He winced and rotated his face away from her, as if he did not want her to see that he was in pain. She bit her lip, again wishing she could go over there and wrap her arms around him. It would not do anything to alleviate his pain, but maybe he would find human contact comforting.

Leonidas wiped his mouth and turned his face back toward her. She swallowed when she saw the fresh blood on the back of his hand. Three suns, he needed a regeneration tank, not a prison cell.

“I was reading some old scrolls when Abelardus left. He’d been at the head of the aisle, keeping a close eye on me. I assumed he was going to check on the doctor. About ten minutes passed with nothing happening. I heard people coming in and out of the library, of course, but Abelardus did not return. Then I heard the sound of breaking glass—real made-out-of-sand-and-breakable glass, not glastica. Even though I could tell it had happened in a different part of the library from where the doctor was researching, I ran to look. The window, the one where you saw that hole in the wall, was completely smashed open, most of the glass knocked out. There was blood all over the carpet. You saw that.”

Alisa nodded, the first uneasy inkling entering her mind that Leonidas had been set up.

“I looked out the window—that tower hangs out over the parapet—and down to the ice. There was a big hole in the ice with blood smeared on the side.”

“Wait a minute.” Alisa held up her hand. “A hole in ice that is so thick that the Nomad crashed onto it and didn’t fall through?”

“The White Dragon ship fell through.”

“After you caused a huge explosion inside of it.”

“The ice isn’t uniformly thick over the water.”

“Leonidas, nobody fell out of that window and broke through that ice. You’ve been set up.”

He sighed. “I suspect that, too, yes. I pointed out the lack of a body to the first Starseers who ran in and started shouting murder accusations at me. They weren’t interested in listening to me. I realized someone might want to get me out of the way so it would be easier to take the doctor’s artifact. Or maybe someone wanted me out of the way just because he or she had a grudge against cyborgs.”

Alisa grimaced in sympathy. The more she traveled the system with Leonidas, the more she had seen that his kind were either feared or hated. It had made sense for the Alliance to fear cyborg soldiers, after the numerous encounters they had lost to the powerful warriors, but even former loyal imperial subjects seemed uncomfortable around him. Even his own family apparently was.

“As I said, they refused to listen to me. It didn’t help that…” Leonidas glanced over, almost looking embarrassed.

“That what? Can’t they see into your mind? They should be able to see that you didn’t do anything, right?”

“They see what they want to see, like anyone else. And… I did get into an altercation with Abelardus on the way to the library. There were numerous witnesses, and Alejandro had to shout in my ear to get me to let go.”

“Why? Was he trying to strangle you or hurt you with his mind?”

“Not exactly.” Leonidas sighed again and lay back on the ice, grimacing as he settled his body. One hand cupped the side of his ribcage. “He was invading my mind, sifting through my memories, and using them to taunt me.”

“To taunt you? You couldn’t… I mean, I’m nobody to judge, since I’ve been known to unleash my tongue at people who irk me, but I thought you were more mature than I am.” Alisa imagined Leonidas getting tired of dealing with insults and whirling to attack Abelardus. In front of witnesses who wouldn’t have heard the insults if they were delivered mentally. They must have been some serious insults.

“Remember when I told you cyborgs have fewer physical weaknesses than normal humans but all of the same failings?”

“Yes.”

“It’s true. I have a temper, just like anyone else. Besides… it was worth clobbering him.” A tight, vicious smile flashed across Leonidas’s face.

“What did he say?” Alisa asked, knowing Leonidas was sensitive about being called anything less than human.

All trace of satisfaction vanished from his face.

“It’s not important,” he said tersely.

“It was worth clobbering him over something that wasn’t important?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re not being that logical right now.”

“I know.”

Alisa waited to see if he might expound, but he remained quiet. She rubbed her face, then lowered her hand to massage her throat. Her injuries were insignificant next to his, but her neck definitely felt raw and bruised.

“So some Starseers came in and saw you standing at the window next to the puddle of blood,” she said. “What happened then? How did a hole get blown in the wall?”

He looked over at her, a hint of a smirk appearing on his battered face.

“Enjoyed that part, too, did you?” she asked.

“Not as much as I wanted to. The plan was to blow a hole in the ceiling and bring rubble down on all of them so I could escape. They had already plastered me to the wall and were holding me there with their powers while they discussed whether I should be killed outright for my crime or held in a cell. It was a surprisingly heated argument. You’d think they would believe in a trial of some sort, even for a cyborg…”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if whatever passes for justice here only applies to their own people.”

“The old man was there from the beginning, and he was the one lobbying for killing me. He’s the reason I used the grenade launcher. He attacked me with his mind, and I could feel fingers wrapping around my heart, trying to crush it. I swung the weapon, not at him—I knew I’d be in extremely deep takka if I killed any of them—but at the ceiling. The idea of it falling in on them, maybe toppling some bookcases on them, was still a possibility. Then I could fetch Alejandro and get out of the library and back to the ship. It almost worked, but he realized my intent, and flung another attack, knocking my arm to the side. The grenade went toward the wall instead of the ceiling. It made a mess, but not the mess I’d hoped for. Everyone was still standing afterward—and blocking my way to the door. The old man used the incident as more ammunition for his argument, saying I was too dangerous to be allowed to live. Interestingly, two of the younger Starseers were arguing that it would be much more profitable for them to detain me.” Leonidas turned his head again, giving her a flat look.

“You should have answered your comm last night,” Alisa said. “I heard from Mica that Beck was chatting with two of the Starseers he was feeding and that details about your warrant came up.”

Leonidas did not appear surprised as he digested that. Maybe he had already suspected. Alisa hoped it hadn’t crossed his mind for a second that she had been the one to betray him.

“Do you know if he was openly plotting against me, or if the Starseers were merely extracting information from him?”

Alisa hesitated. She liked Beck and did not want Leonidas to hurt him—or worse—but if Beck positioned himself as Leonidas’s enemy, it wasn’t her fault. She was already protecting him from the mafia. Wasn’t that enough?

As Leonidas gazed at her with pensive eyes, she found she couldn’t truly contemplate lying to him here or withholding the information. She resented that Beck had put her in the position where she had to choose one of them to be loyal to.

“It is possible that he was coerced,” Alisa said, “but you should know that he approached me back on Perun about trying to subdue you somehow to take you to Arkadius and turn you in for the reward. He thinks he could pay off the mafia with the money. I don’t know if it ever went beyond speculation for him, but I could imagine a scenario where he saw the Starseers and their powers and believed they could nullify your cyborg abilities.” She licked her lips. “I’m sorry. I should have warned you earlier.”

Leonidas touched a lump on his temple. “If I survive this, I’ll have a talk with him.”

“A talk?” Alisa asked warily, afraid for Beck even though Leonidas wasn’t exploding with rage over the betrayal. “Will it involve shoving his celery seed dispenser down his throat?”

“It might.”

He lowered his hand and closed his eyes. The ice had to be bitterly cold through the thin material of his T-shirt, but maybe he would lie there and sleep. Unlike Alisa, he probably had not gotten any the night before.

“Are you wishing now that you hadn’t been so obstinate about retiring after the war? Maybe that tropical island with the beaches and fancy drinks wouldn’t have been so bad.”

“Maybe not,” he whispered, not opening his eyes.

She ought to let him rest, but she was reluctant to stop talking to him in case… in case.

“Before you left last night,” she said, “you almost told me the one thing that would make you consider retirement.”

“I did,” he agreed, “but I will not tell you now.” He lifted his head and eyed the camera briefly.

“Ah. Well, I hope you get a chance to find whatever it is that you seek.”

He turned toward her again. “I believe you do.”

She lifted her hand, wishing she could walk the three steps between them and touch his face, offer him some comfort, if only the warmth of shared body heat to deal with the ice. She must have done more than wish and inadvertently moved closer to the boundary, because her fingertips brushed the forcefield. A painful zap ran up her arm as energy flared white with a snap. She jerked her hand back and glowered at the barrier.

Leonidas shook his head slowly—sadly—and closed his eyes again.

She withdrew to let him rest while she paced around her cell and considered how they might escape, along with what she would do if they did escape. Abelardus, the man who might possibly know something about her daughter’s kidnapper, was either dead or missing. She had no idea who else might give her information. Nor did she know if she would be able to fly away from here even if she got the information she sought.

Chapter 12

After two hours, the dent in the ice floor was depressingly small. Alisa glowered down at her fingernails, wishing they were reinforced with steel or came equipped with razors. Whoever was monitoring the camera was probably laughing as she shaved microscopic slivers out of the ice next to the forcefield wall. She’d had a notion of digging her way out underneath it, but at this rate, that would take five years. And as soon as she made progress, someone would come along and pour water into the hole. As cold as the basement was, the floor would refreeze in minutes.

She leaned back, her knees numb from kneeling on the ice. “I don’t suppose cyborgs have enhanced fingernails?”

Leonidas opened his eyes. She hadn’t been bothering him, preferring to let him rest and hopefully heal, but she couldn’t help but wonder if he would have more luck with his extra strength. Maybe it would only take him two years to dig out.

“I don’t have fingernail implants,” he said.

“Clearly someone was shortsighted.”

“After they had already removed most of my bones and replaced them with stronger, synthetic ones, I wasn’t in the mood to volunteer for more surgery.”

Alisa shuddered. That could not have felt good. “What made you sign up for that?”

Leonidas sighed, looking up toward the icy ceiling. Maybe it was another story he wouldn’t share with the camera watching. Indeed, his gaze flicked in that direction briefly.

Alisa went back to scraping uselessly at the block of ice, having little else to work on. She couldn’t imagine lying down to sleep with the frigid floor at her back, the cold seeping through her clothing. She already had to get up regularly to pace around to keep warm.

“My mother was diagnosed with Delqua, a not uncommon disease for people who grow up on mining worlds,” he said quietly. “If you haven’t heard of it, just ask Mica. It doesn’t have a cure. Gunther and Ivo were only nine and seven at the time. Our father disappeared right after Ivo’s birth. We didn’t have many relatives, nobody except me to take care of them if she passed away, and I couldn’t see myself raising two little boys. I was nineteen. Besides, I—we—didn’t want to lose her. But the doctors gave her less than a year to live. There was an experimental treatment, but it was very expensive, and our insurance wouldn’t cover it. Neither would my part-time job repairing and maintaining housekeeping robots.” He smiled wryly.

Alisa saw where the story was going and couldn’t manage a return smile.

“So, I looked into the fleet. A lot of the dangerous jobs came with bonuses that you received after your training, but I knew we needed the money quickly, and the cyborg specialty paid the most. You got half of the bonus after the surgery and then half after your combat training. It was enough to pay for the treatment.”

“Did it… How did it go?” Alisa asked, though maybe she shouldn’t have. She remembered him mentioning once that he hadn’t often gone home to visit his brothers after their mother died.

“It wasn’t a cure, but it slowed down the progress of the disease. She had ten years instead of one.” He blinked a few times, his eyes still fixed on the ceiling. “It was worth it,” he said, his voice tight.

Alisa blinked away moisture in her own eyes. “Why don’t your brothers…” She paused as the realization came to her. “They don’t know, do they?”

“No. They were young. They just knew that Mom was sick and had to go to the hospital for a couple of months.”

“You never told them that you paid for it? She didn’t tell them?”

“I didn’t. I don’t know if she ever did. I know she cared about me and was grateful, but she was also uncomfortable with the trade off, that she had been given more life at the cost of her son becoming someone who took the lives of others.” He swallowed. “She was a peaceful woman. She didn’t even eat meat because it disturbed her to think of animals dying for her sake.”

Alisa did not know what to say. She almost wished she hadn’t asked, hadn’t pried. It was such a painful and personal story. What right did she have to know it?

“Do—did the other cyborgs in your unit have similar backgrounds?” she asked, though maybe she shouldn’t have. Did she truly want a reason to develop sympathy for the empire’s overpowered henchmen, men who had so ruthlessly mowed down her colleagues during the war?

“Some did. Some had little other choice. Some just wanted to be super soldiers.” He lifted his head enough to look down at his bare legs, and his lips twisted wryly.

“Is it hard to feel like a super soldier when you’re lying on the ice in your underwear?”

“Somewhat.” He laid his head back on the frozen blocks. “Most of the people who were just there for the sake of their egos backed out when they learned how much painful surgery was involved and what else you would lose.”

Alisa tilted her head. “Such as what?”

He had mentioned the surgery before, but she couldn’t remember him speaking of losing anything else, unless he was talking about the way people saw him now, as something less than human.

Leonidas looked over at her, his face thoughtful, as if he was debating whether to divulge some secret. Was he? She returned his gaze, trying to look attentive and secret-worthy.

“I—”

A door creaked open in the distance. Cursing softly, Alisa jumped to her feet so she could stand in front of her tiny hole and her ice shavings. Leonidas turned his gaze back toward the ceiling and closed his eyes. She hoped that he would get a chance to finish whatever he had been about to say.

Footsteps sounded on the treads of the steps. Alisa was not sure who she expected to visit them, but it wasn’t Yumi and her sister Young-hee. She watched behind them as they walked away from the stairs, certain that a couple of burly guards with staffs would follow them. A third person did walk into the room, but it was Mica, not a Starseer.

“I don’t suppose this is a jailbreak?” Alisa said.

In the cell next to her, Leonidas’s eyes opened. He tracked the women’s approach, but he did not try to get up. She could only imagine what the Starseers had done to him and how much pain he was in. The bastards could at least let someone send him some painkillers.

“I did bring a file,” Mica said, patting a satchel that was probably full of tools, “but Yumi tells me that won’t be necessary. At least for you.” She looked at Leonidas and frowned at him, or perhaps at the way he was covered with livid bruises. Mica was even less likely to display her feelings than Alisa, but there seemed to be sympathy in that frown.

“Oh?” Alisa asked, not enthused about being released if Leonidas had to remain.

“We talked to Lady Naidoo,” Yumi said, nodding toward her half-sister. “We had to wait until after she got reports from a number of people about the ‘incident,’ as she’s calling it.”

“A lot of the warriors are calling it murder,” Young-hee pointed out.

“Naidoo, at least, hasn’t passed judgment yet,” Yumi said. “She’s got a team examining the ice down there and looking for a body. It’s not clear why people are so certain that Abelardus was killed. Someone said he saw it in Leonidas’s thoughts, that he got in a fight with the Starseer again and threw him out the window.”

Young-hee was nodding, and Yumi frowned at her and then at Leonidas.

“That’s not really what happened, is it?” Yumi asked.

“No,” Alisa said firmly, glad that Yumi was not quick to condemn Leonidas. He had saved the Nomad and all of them enough times in the last month that he deserved some understanding.

“You can’t know that,” Young-hee said. “Whatever he said, he could be lying to you.”

“Then look for yourself. You people like to dance around in our skulls at your leisure as it is. I don’t know why anyone who wants to know the truth hasn’t come down to poke around in his head.”

“Nobody wants to poke into a cyborg’s head,” Young-hee said with a distasteful frown.

That did not jive with what Leonidas had said the night before. It seemed the Starseers had been scanning him left and right since he stepped off the ship.

“Poke anyway,” Alisa said.

“Please,” Yumi said. “We need to find out the truth.”

“We’re not a part of the judicial system,” Young-hee said. “We’re just here to let your captain go since she didn’t have anything to do with the murder and hasn’t committed a crime. Not a major one, anyway.” She quirked her eyebrows at Alisa.

“Is flavoring someone’s fish a crime here?” Alisa asked. “I didn’t realize.”

“Flavoring.” Young-hee snorted.

Yumi’s cheeks turned pink.

While this discussion was going on, Mica had sidled over unnoticed to a control panel near the bottom of the stairs. Alisa avoided looking in her direction, since Young-hee wasn’t paying her any attention, but she silently urged her to find a way to drop the controls on both cells.

Leonidas placed his hand on the ice and carefully pushed himself into a seated position. Young-hee watched him warily.

“I invite you to look into my mind,” he told Young-hee, looking steadily into her eyes. “I won’t do anything cyborgy.”

“Cyborgy?” Alisa asked. “What would that look like exactly?”

“I don’t know, but I assure you it’s very menacing.”

She smiled, relieved he was managing a modicum of humor.

Young-hee sighed and walked over to stand in front of his cell. She avoided his eyes and looked at his collarbone, her face growing still with concentration.

“Alisa?” Yumi asked quietly, glancing at Mica, who was casually leaning her shoulder against the wall while eyeing the control panel less casually.

“What is it?” Alisa walked to the front of the cell, careful not to touch the forcefield and give herself another zap.

“The orb is gone. Alejandro didn’t see who took it, but he says it happened while Leonidas was being detained by the Starseers. He’s stomping around the ship, railing at anyone who will listen.”

Alisa was not surprised, but the revelation promptly made her suspect that all of this had been part of some ruse to get Leonidas out of the way and distract Alejandro so the orb could be slipped away. The confusing part was the why. Why bother with a ruse? The Starseers could have simply flattened Alejandro and Leonidas and walked up and taken the orb. And why would Abelardus have been murdered, if indeed he had been? At the least, someone had lost a lot of blood in that library.

Alisa remembered Ji-yoon’s mention that there were different factions here. Perhaps this was the end result of some political morass that had stopped someone from acting openly.

“We’re all supposed to go back to the ship too,” Yumi added. “Young-hee has the clearance to let you go, and she’s supposed to escort us back. Then we’ll be released and we can leave. They insist that we leave.”

“Without Leonidas?”

“Without Leonidas. He’s to be held here until the incident can be resolved.”

“Oh, that’s frozen takka on a stick. If we leave him—” Alisa thrust her finger toward him, “—he’ll disappear, just like that orb.”

Yumi spread her arms helplessly. Leonidas gazed over at Alisa but did not say anything. She hoped he wasn’t resigned to his situation. Maybe he was simply too wounded to think of fighting now. She remembered the way he had, despite his injuries, swept her over his shoulder as he had run out of the library to escape the smoke and the Starseers. He had chosen her instead of Alejandro. She couldn’t even think of abandoning him here to these people.

Alisa glanced at Young-hee, whose eyes had narrowed to slits as she continued to stare at Leonidas. “You said she has the clearance to let me go. Does she have the clearance to let Leonidas out?”

“No,” Yumi said.

“Are you sure? Did you ask?”

“They’re not going to let him go. I’m certain of it. They believe—”

“I know what they believe. They’re assholes.”

Yumi’s eyebrows lifted.

“You’re better off not having their powers, Yumi. You didn’t see the way they were hurting him, bullying him. Enjoying it.”

“I…”

“He didn’t do it,” Young-hee said, her eyes opening fully. She truly sounded surprised.

Alisa resisted rolling her eyes. Barely. She could not believe all these people thought cyborgs were deceitful animals because of centuries-old bad blood.

“Good,” was all she said. “How about letting him out?”

“I don’t have the authority to do that.”

A series of loud and irritated beeps came from the control panel by the stairs.

“It seems I don’t, either,” Mica said, lifting her hands in innocence as Young-hee whirled and frowned at her.

“Maybe you should have gone with the file,” Alisa said.

“Lady Naidoo or one of the other senior Starseers will have to let him out,” Young-hee said. “The panel is retina and fingerprint encoded.”

“What are the odds that Lady Naidoo will come down and look into his brain to see that he’s innocent?” Alisa asked.

Young-hee hesitated. “I’m not sure. She’s a busy woman.”

“I bet. And it doesn’t hurt that none of the Starseers want a cyborg to be innocent.”

Young-hee frowned, but did not deny the words. She walked past Mica and to the panel.

“Alisa,” Leonidas murmured, stepping as close to the forcefield between their cells as he could. He did not say anything else but tilted his chin toward the camera. Did he think she could do something about it? Maybe Mica could.

A holodisplay popped out of the wall in front of the control panel, and Young-hee leaned forward for the scans. The forcefield at the front of Alisa’s cell made a buzzing noise and flashed once. Alisa poked the area with the toe of her boot before committing to walking through. It was down.

“I was instructed to show you to your ship, Captain,” Young-hee said, placing a foot on the bottom step of the stairs.

“All right.” Alisa glanced at Leonidas again. A big part of her wanted to refuse to go anywhere without him, but that would be pointless. From within the Nomad, maybe she could come up with a plan to rescue him.

He tilted his chin toward the camera again.

“Mica,” Alisa murmured, lifting a hand to keep her from starting up the steps. “Got anything in your bag to fuzz that lens?”

She did not know what Leonidas could do against the forcefield—or the ice—to escape, and whoever was monitoring the camera would probably come down quickly to fix any problems he made, but she hoped to be wrong.

Mica dug into her satchel, patted around, and came out with a tiny aerosol bottle. “Give me a quick boost,” she whispered.

Alisa hurried to do so, threading her fingers together to create a step. Mica stuck her heel into them and stretched toward the camera. Yumi was following Young-hee up the stairs, but Young-hee’s back was still in sight. She could notice any second that Mica and Alisa were not trotting obediently after her.

A soft hiss sounded as Mica sprayed something onto the lens. She hopped down as Young-hee reached the top of the stairs and frowned down at them.

“You won’t be able to get the control panel to release him,” Young-hee said, thankfully not poking into their thoughts.

“I’m just saying goodbye,” Alisa said, waving to Leonidas.

He lifted a solemn hand of his own. Her gut clenched at the thought that she might not see him again.

No, she wouldn’t believe that. She would come up with something, and she would do it quickly. In fact…

Alisa charged up the stairs as an idea came to mind. “Young-hee, I’m ready to go back to the ship, but I need to stop in the library on the way.”

“Why?”

Why, indeed. Young-hee had stopped again to frown at her, perhaps to read her mind.

Hells, might as well try the truth. “You said Abelardus was handsome, didn’t you?”

Her frown deepened at the random question.

“She said he was gorgeous,” Yumi said. “Several times.”

Young-hee blushed.

“Then I assume you would prefer for him to be alive rather than dead.”

“Of course,” Young-hee said, puzzled. “But—”

“The same people who lied about what was in Leonidas’s thoughts are the ones who said he was dead, right? What if he’s not dead? What if he’s in trouble somewhere? A part of some plot?”

Alisa didn’t believe that would be the case—if anything, Abelardus was probably the instigator of a plot to blame Leonidas, but the notion seemed to catch Young-hee’s imagination. Her mouth formed a soft, “Oh.”

“Just give me a quick couple of minutes to look around the library before we head back to the ship,” Alisa said.

“I don’t know what you believe you can find, but very well.”

Chapter 13

The library was empty. The entire place still stank of the smoke grenade that Leonidas had released. That might explain why it was empty.

Alisa hurried into the tower where the confrontation had taken place, doubting Young-hee would give her much time to dawdle. She had already reported in to someone along the way, letting them know that she was taking Alisa, Yumi, and Mica to the library before heading to the ship docks. Alisa wouldn’t be surprised if a squad of guards charged in at any moment to take over the escort.

Cold air blew in through the hole in the tower wall. Alisa walked straight to the stain on the floor.

“Mica? Bring your tool bag in here, will you?”

“Are we futzing with more cameras?” Mica asked, walking into the room.

“I doubt there are any in here. If there were, people would know what happened, and they’d have a harder time blaming Leonidas.” Alisa glanced at the ceiling as she knelt beside the stain, double-checking her assumption. If there was camera footage somewhere, maybe all they would have to do was get it. Unfortunately, she did not see any small lenses peeking out of the corners.

“There’s no reason to monitor our people using the library,” Young-hee said in a puzzled tone.

“Do you have some kind of container in there, Mica?” Alisa waved at her bag. “Something like a vial?”

Mica frowned but poked around inside of it.

Alisa scraped at the dried blood with a fingernail, but hesitated, not sure if that might add some of her own DNA to the mix. “And I’ll take that file too.”

“You’re a demanding captain. Perhaps you should get a tool purse of your own.”

“They would have taken it from me when they took my Etcher and multitool.” Alisa accepted a small folding file while lamenting the loss of her own goods. Neither her gun nor multitool had been high quality—she had traded her painkillers for them back on Dustor—but she had used them often in the last month, and they had come in handy. “Did you just call that a tool purse? I don’t think that’s actually a thing, is it? Purses are supposed to be for bank cards, hairbrushes, and makeup.”

“What would I do with makeup?”

“I don’t know, but you could tame that mop of hair with a brush.”

“Keep insulting me, and you won’t get your vial.” Mica unscrewed a small round lid, dumped out some screws, stuffed them in her pocket, and offered the container.

“That’s not what I had in mind for a vial.” Alisa imagined handing the screw box to Alejandro asking for a medical analysis.

“If you’re going to be fussy about it, I’ll keep it.”

“No.” Alisa snatched it from Mica’s hands. She did her best to scrape flakes of dried blood from the carpet weave and into the container.

“Captain?” came Yumi’s uncertain call from the main doors to the library. “You may want to hurry.”

Alisa wiped the file on the side of the container, took the lid from Mica, and screwed it on. She had hoped to have the opportunity to look around at the crime scene for a few minutes, too, to see if she might find anything suspicious that had fallen into any cracks or nooks, but several robed figures strode through the doorway.

“Hello,” Alisa said with as much cheer as she could manage as she slipped the container into her pocket along with the file.

Mica folded her arms over her chest and glared at the four men, all of whom had their robes thrown back to reveal their muscular chests beneath their fitted vests. Mica hadn’t spent much time off the ship yet, but she looked like she had already gotten the gist as to what the Starseers were about—and she’d decided she did not like them. Alisa resisted the urge to point out that Leonidas’s muscled chest was bigger than their muscled chests.

“This area is off limits,” one said with a sneer. It was the same man who had picked a fight with Leonidas on the ramp, the one who had ended up with a hand wrapped around his throat. Erick.

“Is it?” Alisa asked. “We didn’t see any signs.”

He glared at her.

“We were just on the way to my ship,” Alisa said. “Anyone hungry? I can see if Beck is still grilling.”

Alisa envisioned him barbecuing skewers of meat, filling her mind with that thought instead of contemplating the container in her pocket. There was no reason these people should object to getting some answers, unless they already knew the truth and simply did not want her to know.

“Stay out of this investigation,” Erick said. “You’re lucky Lady Naidoo is letting you leave. If not for your relation to some of our people…” He frowned at Yumi and Young-hee. “Most intruders disappear in the mists.”

“They’re not intruders,” Young-hee said, surprising Alisa by standing up for them. “Yumi is my sister.”

“A mundane nobody of a sister.” Erick curled his lip.

“Leonidas should have crushed your windpipe,” Alisa snapped before she could think better of it. “Maybe not being able to talk would improve your personality.”

I don’t need my windpipe to talk, bitch, the man snarled into her mind.

Before she could respond, a wave of power smashed into her chest. She was hurled across the room, slamming into the wall before she registered what was happening. Pain lanced through her body as she slid to the floor. A cold breeze stirred her hair, a breeze coming through the hole in the wall. She was less than two feet from it. Icy terror washed through her as she saw how close she had come to being hurled from the tower.

Erick strode forward, his hand lifting. Three suns, was he going to finish the job?

Alisa pushed away the pain and scrambled to her feet, reaching for her holster. But it was empty. She didn’t have any way to fight him.

“Erick,” Young-hee said. “Stop being an ass.”

The man kept walking toward Alisa. I’ll teach you to respect a Starseer, he growled into her mind.

Alisa found her feet and stared defiantly at him. She clenched her fists and was on the verge of leaping for him—weapons or not, she refused to go down without a fight—but something seemed to strike him. He flew abruptly, almost comically, to the side. Just as Alisa had done, he slammed into a wall. This one was full of shelves of books, and heavy tomes tumbled out, landing on his head.

Growling, he pushed himself to his feet. This time, his glare was for Young-hee. She glared right back at him, and then she glared at the other three warriors who had come in with them, a challenge in her eyes.

“You should be ashamed of yourself, Erick. All of you.” Young-hee snapped her fingers and waved at Alisa, Mica, and Yumi. “Come on.”

Normally, Alisa would object to being ordered around, but with her back aching and Erick glowering at her, she had no problem with rushing to obey Young-hee.

“I’m starting to like your sister, Yumi,” Alisa whispered as their small group followed Young-hee through the corridors.

“I think she likes you,” Yumi whispered back.

“Really? She called me a clumsy spy.”

“But you drugged our mother and made her giggle like a schoolgirl while waxing philosophical over the qualities of forks. I gather that Young-hee found that even more amusing than I did.”

“The things I miss by staying in engineering,” Mica murmured.

“I did invite you along,” Alisa said.

“If you hadn’t been beaten up and thrown in a dungeon, I might have regretted passing on that invitation.”

They walked out of the temple and into the docking area, the cold air extra frigid with night on the verge of falling again. Maybe Alisa would join Leonidas on a tropical beach somewhere after this. If only she could find Jelena and take her to that beach too. She had always loved the water. They had visited the shore often during the summers in Perun Central since the harbor had only been a few miles from their apartment. She and Jonah had strolled along, wet sand under their bare feet, as Jelena zigzagged all over the place, hunting for rainbow stones and sea spirals. They had used the sea spiral shells as inspiration for a chocolate mold during one of their candy-making adventures.

Alisa blinked a few times and put the memories aside as she strode toward the Nomad’s ramp. If she got out of here with Leonidas at her side, her odds would be much better of surviving the dangers of the system and finding her daughter.

She touched the container in her pocket, hoping her hunch about the blood proved to be right.

Beck jogged out of the open cargo hatch and almost ran into them on the ramp. He had put away his grill and was now clad in full combat armor, his helmet and two rifles included.

“Captain,” he blurted in surprise.

“Going somewhere?” Alisa asked, a twinge of suspicion running through her as she imagined him off to meet some fellow conspirator to plan how to extricate Leonidas and take him off to collect that reward.

“Yes, to rescue you. I just heard you were in jail.”

Some of her suspicion faded. He sounded utterly sincere. But…

“You just heard? Weren’t you here when Young-hee came to get Mica and Yumi?” Alisa looked at the women, realizing she did not know how they had all come to be together.

“He wasn’t here,” Mica said quietly.

“No, I just got back from—” Beck started to wave toward the temple, but paused, and his arm dropped to his side. “Uhm, an errand.”

“An errand to betray Leonidas?” Alisa asked coolly.

“No!” Beck lifted his hand to his head, as if to push it through his hair, but it only clunked against his faceplate. “I mean… it’s not a betrayal, Captain. You must see that. He’s a mech. He did horrible things during the war. The Alliance wouldn’t want him if that weren’t true. I don’t understand why you don’t want to work with me to turn him in. And having him on the ship, it’s a danger to you too. We’ve had people come after us already because of him.”

“We’ve had even more people come after us because of you.”

“Captain…” A truly anguished expression contorted his face. He lifted his hand to the fasteners for his helmet and tugged it off, his tousled blond hair as much in need of a brush as Mica’s. “I know that, and I hate that I’m putting you in harm’s way. I hate it, I swear. That’s why I want his reward money, so I can try to pay off those thugs, get them to leave me alone. Or hire an outfit even bigger and scarier to threaten them on my behalf.” This time, he succeeded in pushing his hand through his hair in a quick, agitated gesture. “I don’t want to be a burden on you, but I swear that with me, it was entirely accidental. Whatever money they’ve got on my head, it’s not fair. I was wrongfully accused.”

“And how do you know Leonidas wasn’t?” Alisa felt for Beck, she truly did, but she could not have him gunning for Leonidas. “He’s a good man, Tommy. He’s saved the ship—saved our lives—several times.”

“But we don’t know what he did in the war, and there’s got to be a reason the Alliance wants him. There’s got to be.” He sounded like he was trying to convince himself.

“Would you be so eager to turn him in if there wasn’t money involved?”

Alisa could see his shoulders slump even with the armor encasing them.

“Listen, Beck. I don’t know his war history any more than you do, but we all did things we regret. We all committed what would be considered crimes during peacetime. But that doesn’t matter right now. They want him alive. You know what that means? That he knows something they want to know. If all the Alliance wanted was for him to die for war crimes, then his warrant would say you could bring him in dead or alive, but preferably dead. Instead, it’s very clear that he’s wanted alive. It even says that in the fine print, doesn’t it?” Alisa knew it did because she had read that digital wanted poster several times now. “The reward will only be given if he’s brought in alive.”

“I figured it was because they wanted to torture him before they killed him.”

“Trust me, he’s been tortured enough,” Alisa said, thinking both of his current wounds and of those he had received in the past.

The soft murmur of Young-hee’s voice came from the doorway where she had stopped. She finished a comm conversation and walked over.

“You should go now,” she said. “Erick is whining to Lady Naidoo that I violated Order law by striking him.”

“Is he always this much of a pussy?” Alisa asked.

“Yes. He used to cry in school if he had to share his toys.”

“Thank you for your help, Young-hee,” Yumi said, clasping her sister’s hands. “I hope you won’t get in trouble for it.”

“No more than usual.” Young-hee smiled and returned the handclasp. “To think I wasn’t going to go to that breakfast this morning.”

Alisa waved a goodbye to Young-hee, even though she had no intention of leaving, and headed up the ramp. Beck, Mica, and Yumi followed behind her. She hit the button to withdraw the ramp and close the hatch, not wanting to be disturbed further.

“Think they’ll let us fly out of the mist without messing with us again?” Beck asked.

“If so, I will have wasted my time planting explosives on their docking clamps,” Mica muttered, almost sounding disappointed.

“You may still get to blow those up,” Alisa said, heading for the stairs.

“Oh? Why? Yumi’s sister said they’re letting us go.”

“They may change their minds after we rescue Leonidas. Especially if fiery explosions and lots of melting ice are involved.”

“This promises to be an interesting night,” Beck said.

Mica only grumbled with displeasure.

Chapter 14

After checking his cabin, Alisa found Alejandro ensconced in her small sickbay. She almost missed him because he was sitting on the floor behind the medical table, his knees pulled up to his chest, his elbows propped on them as he gripped the back of his head. The lights were off, and he did not look up when she turned them on.

“Doctor,” Alisa said, “I understand that you’re distraught by the loss of your artifact, but I aim to save Leonidas from what I fear may be his death in that temple, and I could use your help. It won’t take long.”

“Go away,” Alejandro muttered, his voice barely audible.

“I’ll be most happy to do so once you assist me in this small matter.”

“What was I thinking? Coming here was idiotic. I knew it. But I didn’t have any other leads, and I was afraid I’d be chased—or shot—out of every civilized library along the way.”

He was still muttering, and Alisa had a feeling he wasn’t talking to her. She wasn’t even sure he had heard her. She looked at the counters. She would not be above stabbing him with a needle or something else pointy to rouse him from his stupor. Maybe a shot of adrenaline would do it. Or a slap to the cheek.

“Doctor,” she said, stepping around the table. “You can wallow in here later, but I need you. Let me be more specific. It’s not just that I would like your help: I require it. I need some blood analyzed, and they didn’t teach us how to do that in flight school.” She crouched in front of him and gripped his shoulders. “Please, Doctor.”

He finally looked up at her, his eyes bloodshot, a beard shadow darkening his jaw. “They’re not going to let him go,” he said.

“That’s why we have to go in and get him. But before launching a full-scale assault, which we probably can’t win, I’d like to apply logic, try to make them see the truth. If the person he’s been accused of murdering isn’t dead, they have no grounds to hold him.”

“They don’t need grounds. This temple doesn’t even exist as far as imperial—or Alliance—laws are concerned. Nobody knows they’re here. Nobody’s going to enforce due process.”

“They’re not all asteroid kissers,” Alisa said, thinking of Yumi’s sister. “And he’s not dead yet. He’s in a cell. I think if we prove that his supposed victim is still alive, that Naidoo lady might let him go.” She was not sure why she thought that, especially since Naidoo had looked her in the eye and lied about knowing a Durant, but Alisa wanted to believe it was the truth. And if the woman wouldn’t let him go… she would find another way to get him out.

Alejandro’s gaze dropped back to his lap. “I was a fool to bring it here. They’re the last people who need powerful artifacts, and I let them have it. I might as well have handed it to them.”

Alisa gripped his stubbled jaw, forcing him to look up again. “Doctor, the one person who might be strong enough to help you get it back is in a jail cell in there. Why don’t you help me get him out, so he can help you?” She didn’t care a whit if Leonidas helped Alejandro when he got out, but it was the only argument she could think of that might stir him to action.

“Even he can’t fight them.”

“Are you positive? He wasn’t trying his hardest, that’s for sure. He was going out of his way not to kill anyone—he didn’t even want to hurt them.”

“Except that fool Abelardus.” Alejandro lifted his hand to her wrist and pushed her arm away. He kept looking at her, so she let him. “Captain, I’m not positive that Leonidas didn’t kill him. He was livid about those comments.”

“Comments?” She frowned.

“About you.” His tone turned dry. “I heard a couple of them. Judging by the way Leonidas’s face was turning red, I think others were delivered telepathically.”

“I’m the one Abelardus was insulting?” Alisa remembered Leonidas’s refusal to go into detail about that. She had assumed the Starseer had been denigrating Leonidas for his non-human parts.

“Congratulations, Captain. You’ve earned yourself a knight in shining armor.”

“I…” She had no idea what to say. “I don’t understand. I haven’t even talked to Abelardus. Why would he bother with insulting me?” Now if it had been that Erick, she would understand.

Alejandro twitched a shoulder. “I think he just wanted to irritate Leonidas. He found a button to push that got results.”

Alisa felt guilty if she had truly been that button, but a selfish part of her acknowledged a sense of satisfaction that he had cared enough to defend her honor. Unfortunately, that would not do anything to help either of them now.

“I don’t believe he would kill anyone over some insults,” she said firmly. “You’ve said it yourself: he’s an honorable man.”

“An honorable man who killed a lot of people during the war. I doubt it’s that hard for him anymore.”

Alisa preferred not to think about that side of Leonidas. Besides…

“He told me he didn’t do it.” She dug into her pocket and rattled the container with her sample in it. “Let’s find out together if this is real blood, Doctor. If it’s not, then we search the temple and find where Abelardus is hiding to prove that Leonidas did nothing to him.”

“Is that a screw box?”

“Mica didn’t have any sample vials.”

Alejandro accepted it, but he sighed deeply and did not rush to get up. “I failed, Captain.”

“It happens to all of us.”

“Not… all the time. I failed with my wife, too, you know. She couldn’t understand why I worked so much, why I was so driven to advance my career, why that sometimes mattered even more than saving people. I didn’t have an answer for her, not one she could accept. She left. I failed with my children too. They’re grown now, and it’s been years since any of them even talked to me. I was gone so often when they were growing up. I can’t blame them. Now, I look back and wonder why I made work so important, a priority over family. What do the house by the beach, the overflowing bank accounts, and the yacht and aeroflyer mean now? I failed with my family. And then, when the emperor was in my arms, bleeding from a hundred injuries with his organs crushed, I failed with him too. I couldn’t save him in the end. He was still a young man, a man who knew his mistakes and could have rectified them. But I failed to save him.” He rubbed his hand across his eyes. “I can’t fail at this. This is my last chance to make a difference, to matter for someone. But I let myself be distracted for a second, and someone stole the artifact that could lead the empire back to…” He shook his head as he trailed off.

“Maybe it’s because you’re so driven that you fail,” Alisa suggested.

“No. I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”

She shrugged. She didn’t want to understand. She just wanted the blood analyzed.

Alisa took Alejandro’s hand and curled his fingers around the container. “I only need your help for a few minutes, Doctor,” she said, forcing herself to remain patient.

He finally pushed himself to his feet. She backed up, knowing she would only be in the way.

“What do you want to know?”

“For starters, if it’s actually blood or if someone dumped paint on the floor.”

“I’ll get my tools. Your sickbay is woefully under-equipped.”

“My entire ship is under-equipped.” Alisa did not know if he had heard the story about how she’d recovered it from a junkyard, but she decided not to bring it up.

He returned from his cabin with his duffle and withdrew prayer beads, a worn copy of the Xerikesh, and a sack of dried ka’tah petals for consecrating holy water. A handheld microscope came next.

“Someday, you’ll have to let us know if you’re really a monk, or if your ruse is just elaborate in its details,” Alisa said.

“We can start holding sermons on Stars Day if you wish.”

“I’m not sure your ability to bore the crew once a week would verify or deny your monkly status.”

He gave her a dark look and unscrewed the container.

“Captain?” Mica stood in the hatchway, waving to her.

“Trouble?” Alisa joined her in the corridor, figuring Alejandro would prefer it if she did not hover over his shoulder.

“Do you even have to ask?”

“I suppose not.”

“We have attracted tourists.” Mica walked to NavCom, pointed to one of the camera displays, and brought it up on the view screen. Four Starseer warriors stood on the landing pad, talking and eyeing the Nomad.

“Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like Yumi’s sister is out there to hurl them into walls,” Alisa said.

“No, but I wouldn’t mind seeing that again.”

“Have they tried to comm yet?” Alisa hoped Alejandro would finish his analysis of the blood first so she would have something to talk with them about.

“No, but one of them keeps pacing. Like he’s waiting for someone. Or a response to something.”

Alisa grimaced. “A response to the question, ‘Can we blow them back out into the mists?’”

“I’m watching them to make sure they don’t snoop around under the ship and see the explosives I set. The docking clamps are still fastened, I noticed.”

Yes, just because Young-hee had said they were free to go did not mean that all the Starseers felt that way.

“Are your explosives set in such a way that they won’t damage the ship?” Alisa asked.

Mica hesitated. “They’re too close in for us to raise the shields for protection. The clamps themselves are fastened to the hull.”

“So, your explosives will damage the ship?”

“Probably, but we don’t have to head into orbit right away. Just fly to a more civilized part of the planet, and we can set down for repairs. That’s better than staying here.”

“All we have to do is survive a flight through those mists.”

“I suggest going straight up. They may extend across the surface for thousands of square miles, but I bet you can fly out of them within a mile if you go up.”

“Maybe.” Alisa had never studied satellite imagery of this part of the planet, but she remembered Leonidas’s encyclopedia article. She doubted all of those airplanes would have crashed if the mists only affected the first few thousand feet above the surface.

She reached for the computer console, thinking of taking a look at the satellite imagery now, if she could pull it up. Most of her instruments had gone wacky when they had first entered the mists.

The comm light flashed first.

“It’s not paint, Captain,” Alejandro said when she answered it.

“What is it?”

“Blood.”

So much for her theory.

“Human blood?” Alisa asked. Maybe the Starseers had sacrificed some animal for their plot, though she hadn’t seen anywhere in the temple where livestock had been kept.

“Human blood.”

“Can you tell if it’s Starseer blood?”

Mica lifted her eyebrows. “Is that possible?”

“Yes,” Alisa said. “The empire tests—used to test babies at birth—to see if they had the gene mutations.”

“Huh. Our legends of them just say they were blessed by the gods and were given magic.”

“Please. Those people are about as blessed as warts on your toes. As far as I’ve heard, humanity is still looking for proof that gods and magic exist. If you’re interested in the search, maybe you can sign up for one of the explorer missions.”

Mica snorted. “To be cryogenically frozen for two hundred years to wake up in another star system? One that might be horrible? You’d have to be a wacko. No, thanks.”

“It’s how our ancestors ended up here.”

“They were wackos.”

“You’re so respectful of the dead.”

“I found my DNA sequencer,” Alejandro said, interrupting the conversation. “For a minute, I thought those pirates with their grubby fingers had taken it.”

“I don’t think they had a sickbay or cared about keeping people alive.” Alisa remembered the scalps those thugs had worn on their belts.

“I have forty thousand tindarks’ worth of equipment in here, Marchenko.” His tone chilled a few degrees. “Don’t tell Beck.”

Alisa closed the comm. “I’m surprised he’s telling me,” she muttered.

“You only steal ancient artifacts, not medical equipment. Unless there’s something you’re not telling me.”

“There’s not. You’re my engineer and confidante.”

“Am I? Then as your confidante, I think we should try our best to leave now before those Starseers outside decide they want to do more than talk about our ship. Leonidas is a war veteran. He can take care of himself.”

“A confidante is someone who receives scintillating secret information, not someone who gives advice.” Alisa failed to see how Leonidas could take care of himself when he was inside a jail cell and injured.

Movement on the camera distracted her from saying as much. Six more Starseers jogged out, four male and two female, all carrying staffs. Some also wore weapons belts around their robes with the latest BlazTech pistols in holsters—the Starseers were definitely not techno-phobes. The warriors lined up in front of the closed cargo hatch of the Nomad, not facing the ship but facing outward, toward the door that led back into the temple.

The comm light flashed again. It wasn’t Alejandro this time.

Reluctantly, Alisa answered. “Captain Marchenko’s traveling circus. Can I reserve you a seat at our late-night show?”

Mica rolled her eyes. “It’s too bad you’re not accepting advice. You really need it.”

Alisa held a finger to her lips.

“Captain,” a woman’s irritated voice came over the comm. “The docking clamps holding your ship in place are being withdrawn. You have five minutes to leave or—” Voices sounded in the background. “What?” It sounded like the speaker turned away to talk to other people in hushed whispers.

A clank-thunk came from under the Nomad. Mica cycled through the camera images and pulled up the one showing the undercarriage. The clamps were retracting, disappearing into the pier underneath them.

“I’m so glad I wasted good explosives on that,” Mica grumbled.

Alisa muted the comm. “Can you still detonate them?”

“I imagine so, but to what end?”

“Just thinking ahead in case we need to create some chaos to facilitate our escape.”

“Our escape? I don’t know if you noticed, but they’re trying to kick us out.”

Alisa eyed the people lined up outside, noting how they were not facing the ship to keep her and her crew inside. No, they were facing the doors leading into the temple, clearly expecting a visitor, a visitor they wanted to keep out.

“I have no idea how he did it,” Alisa said, “but I think Leonidas might have escaped.” She thought of that nod he had given her, silent instructions to blur the camera lens.

“How could he have done that?” Mica asked.

“Maybe he lied and has enhanced fingernails after all.”

“Captain Marchenko,” a new voice said over the comm. Was that Lady Naidoo? “If you know anything about this, I will use my mind to personally slay you where you stand.”

“Uh.” Alisa did not want to, but she un-muted the comm. “Anything about what?”

She could only assume Leonidas had escaped and was making trouble for the Starseers as he sought a way back to the ship.

“All of these damned ships heading straight toward us,” the woman said, exasperation lacing her voice.

“What? I mean, I genuinely don’t know anything about any ships.” Alisa prodded her sensor panel, trying to get a reading through the mists, but it merely bleeped at her in confusion. “You must have better equipment than I do, because I can’t see anything through that murk.”

“We can see the whole planet, and we can see an armada of Alliance craft heading this way, craft that are oddly impervious to the mists. It looks like they’re following a beacon. I can only assume they have something to do with you.”

“I swear I don’t know anything about them. Maybe they want the orb you stole from my doctor.”

“We didn’t steal anything,” Naidoo snapped. “Even if we had taken it, our people made that map centuries ago. It belongs to us.”

Mica nudged Alisa and pointed at the view screen. The door leading into the temple had opened. Several of the Starseers lifted blazer pistols while others hefted their staffs in both hands.

“Did you see—” Alisa started to ask, but then a flash of red appeared at the doorway, and a compact canister was hurled out. Smoke spewed from both ends of it.

One of the Starseers lifted his staff, as if to knock it aside physically, but the canister flew sideways well before it reached the group. It fell over the edge of the pier, tumbling toward the ice far below. Even so, smoke had already escaped, and it hazed the air between the warriors and the door. More than one of the Starseers crinkled his nose and stepped back. The flash of red came again, and something else was flung out. It, too, was sent over the side, but not before it launched more smoke into the air.

“Is that Leonidas?” Alisa asked.

“Who else has red armor?”

“But how would he have gotten it? And smoke grenades? For that matter, how could he have gotten out of his cell?”

“Maybe you can ask him if he makes his way here. That seems to be his goal.”

Leonidas appeared in the doorway, armored from head to toe. This time, he wasn’t attacking. His movements were jerky, as if a puppet master were controlling his arms and legs. Maybe that was exactly what was happening.

The men with the blazers took aim. One crimson bolt caught Leonidas in the armored shoulder. A couple of the Starseers started coughing, waving at the smoke. The hold on him must have lessened, because Leonidas jumped to the side of the doorway, taking cover behind the wall. Another small canister flew out, spewing more smoke. It looked to be the same color as the horrible concoction he had used in the library.

“He’s using the smoke to irritate their senses,” Alisa said, “make them distressed enough that they struggle to concentrate on messing with him. We have to help him.” She turned her head and hollered, “Beck!”

“You will not help him,” came Naidoo’s stern voice over the comm.

Alisa flinched. She had forgotten the woman was on the line.

“He didn’t murder anyone, Lady Naidoo,” Alisa said, forcing herself to be polite and use her title. It seemed like a good time for politeness. “Our doctor should have confirmation in a moment that your Abelardus is still alive. If you don’t want to wait, you can question Young-hee. She looked into Leonidas’s thoughts and can verify that he didn’t kill anyone.”

“The thoughts of a cyborg delinquent cannot be trusted. He may believe his own lies.”

Alisa hissed in frustration and called back, “Doctor? Have you got any more on that blood?”

Beck was standing in the corridor, still armored.

This time, Alisa remembered to mute the comm. “Beck, Leonidas has a problem.” She pointed at the view screen where he was once again being puppet-danced out into view. “If you help him with it, maybe he’ll forget that you’ve been plotting to turn him in.”

“Aw, Captain,” Beck said, his shoulders slumping. “I don’t want to pick a fight with Starseers. All they would have to do is knock me over the ledge, and I’d fall all the way to the ice down there. That’s a long drop, and this armor isn’t that indestructible.”

“We have to do something to help,” Alisa said firmly. “If only to distract them.” She snapped her fingers. “Mica, you said you could still detonate the explosives?”

“Yes, but it will only damage their docking machinery down there.”

“And maybe cause a nice earthquake under the feet of the people standing right next to it?”

“An earthquake that could also cause the entire pier to break off and dump your ship a hundred feet.”

“Are you being pessimistic or realistic?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll try it anyway.”

Mica sighed. “I’ll get the remote.”

She jogged through the hatchway, pushing past Beck.

“Good.” Alisa thumped her fist against her thigh. She was tempted to fly away from the landing pad now that the clamps had been withdrawn, but how would they get Leonidas onboard then? Besides, she worried about someone dithering with her mind while she had them in the air, especially if she flew around in a way designed to distract the Starseers.

“Captain,” Alejandro said, walking into view, Mica almost bouncing off him as she passed. “I’ve analyzed the sample.”

“And?”

“It does appear to be Starseer blood.”

Alisa scowled. She’d wanted to hear that it couldn’t possibly be a match for Abelardus’s blood. “Leonidas said he didn’t do it, that the blood was there when he got to that spot, and that the window was already broken.”

Alejandro only spread his arms, palms up.

“Is it possible the blood was synthesized in a medical facility? I know that can be done in hospitals, and the Starseers don’t seem rustic and remote, despite the fact that they live in an ice palace at the north pole.”

“It is possible, but it would take more sophisticated equipment than I have here to tell the difference between synthesized blood and real blood.”

A boom came from somewhere outside, and the Nomad shuddered.

Alisa gripped the console for support. “What was that?” She did not think Mica had found time to detonate her explosives yet. “Leonidas?”

He had disappeared from view again, and more smoke than before clouded the landing pad between the Starseers and the temple. Two of the warriors broke ranks and ran toward the open door. Leonidas leaned out to fire at them. Orange blazer bolts lit the smoky air, zipping toward their robed chests.

Since they did not wear armor, Alisa thought they were dead, but the bolts bounced off invisible shields in front of them. A second series of bolts raced toward them, and one man spun his staff, knocking them out of the air as if that weapon were made of the strongest metal rather than the wood it appeared to be. Leonidas kept firing, forcing them to defend themselves. He also rolled out another smoke canister.

Realizing that the skirmish had nothing to do with the boom she had heard, Alisa tore her gaze from Leonidas and the Starseers and checked the sensors. She cursed at what was coming into view. The mists were still making it all but impossible for her sensors to detect what lay beyond, but they could detect things that were close without much trouble, especially in this clear area around the temple. Three massive Alliance warships were closing in on the Starseer compound.

Even as she watched, they fired e-cannons and torpedoes. Orange and yellow bursts of energy blazed through the mists, streaking toward the temple. Alisa winced, expecting them to strike, to blow the icy walls into pieces. But the attacks halted before reaching the structure, much as Leonidas’s blazer bolts had been deflected by invisible shields that the Starseers had raised.

“Are they defending this place with their minds?” Alisa wondered.

“Might be energy shields around the temple, Captain,” Beck said.

She didn’t look back at him. She was still peeved that he had refused to go out and help Leonidas.

More shivers ran through the ship, emanating up from the pier below. This time, it was the artillery weapons stationed on the tower walls. The Starseers were firing at the descending warships, who were firing back. Small one-man Strikers and Cobras shot out of the hangar bay in the rear of one of the Alliance ships. It was about to be a full-blown battle out there. And the Nomad was in the middle of all of it.

Alisa adjusted the sensors. Yes, they were reading a lot more energy around the temple than had been there previously. “I think you’re right about the shields, Beck. The question is what do we do about it?”

“Hope the Starseers win?”

Alisa had no idea if they could. The Alliance had brought in a lot of firepower. Even as she watched, another warship disgorged its fighter unit, and another two-dozen Strikers streaked into the fray. Alisa, who had flown in just such a squadron, was intimately familiar with their tactics and how effective they could be.

The comm lit up again.

Alisa smacked it. “I’m sorry. I don’t have the answers you want. I don’t know anything.”

“An alarming admission from a ship’s captain,” a male voice said.

Alisa did not recognize it. Had another Starseer taken over for Naidoo? She took a closer look at the comm panel and realized one of the warships had hailed her.

“I’m a special captain,” she said. “Who is this?”

“Commander Farrow of the Star Nautilus.”

Alisa sank down into the pilot’s seat. She had never met the man, but she had heard of the commander and the ship.

Tremors coursed through the Nomad as more weapons fired, the temple aiming at the warships swooping back and forth in the sky overhead. How had they found this place through the mists? And how were they navigating their craft so easily now?

No, not easily, she realized, glancing toward her other camera displays. One of the Strikers was going down, crashing into the ice. Alisa did not think it had been struck, not by a physical weapon. Smoke spiraled up from the mangled craft. But how many could the Starseers drop like that before their shields went down? The Alliance had brought plenty of ships to play. It could survive a few casualties.

“Is there a reason you’re contacting me, Commander?” Alisa asked as she fiddled with the sensors, trying to learn more about the fleet.

“Commander Fujimoto of the Final Impact pointed out that it would be polite to thank you and give you a chance to escape before we destroy the Starseer compound.”

“Final Impact?” Alisa mouthed. That had been the ship in dock at Arkadius Gamma at the same time as the Nomad had been there. It was Khazan’s ship. “Why do I have a feeling that’s not a coincidence?” she muttered.

“What was that, Captain?”

“I was wondering why you’re thanking me,” she said.

“You’re the reason we were able to find this place. The Arkadians have suspected it was here all along, and they’ve been blaming the Starseer presence for many of the recent natural disasters. They’ll be pleased with the Alliance, and quit blaming us for their problems, when the Starseers on Arkadius are no more.”

“You’re attacking them because of public gossip?”

“We’re attacking them because of crimes they’ve been committing against normal, good human beings for centuries,” Farrow said coolly. “This is your last warning. Leave now or you’ll be destroyed along with the temple.”

Leave? How were they supposed to leave with an energy shield surrounding the temple? The very thing that was keeping the enemy fire out would keep the Nomad in.

Alisa looked toward the doorway of the temple again, hoping Leonidas was on the verge of pushing through and joining them. She would gladly open the hatch for him. More smoke than ever covered the landing pad, making it hard to even see the door. Some of the Starseers had gone closer while others still blocked the way to the Nomad. Blazer fire flashed somewhere behind the smoke-filled doorway. Was he fighting inside now?

She clenched her fist, tempted to grab one of Beck’s weapons and run out to help, but she could not refute his logic, that one of the Starseers could simply flick her off the pier with a thought.

Another volley of e-cannon fire slammed into the temple’s shields. The warriors out on the pier looked toward the sky, and several spoke into comms, or maybe they were yelling to each other.

“We need to get out of here,” Beck said.

“I know that, but I’m still not leaving without Leonidas.” Alisa realized that since he was in his armor, he ought to have access to the comm unit integrated into his helmet. Distracting him might not be a good idea now, but she had to know his status and if there was anything she could do to help him with the Starseers.

But as she reached for the comm panel, a clank-thunk sounded from under the ship.

“What was that?” Beck asked.

Alisa pointed at the undercarriage camera, where one of the docking clamps was once again in view. The explosives that Mica had planted on them earlier were nowhere in sight. “I believe our invitation to leave was just revoked.”

Chapter 15

“Leonidas?” Alisa asked, calling his helmet comm from the Nomad. “Are you—”

A stab of pain erupted inside of her skull, the power making her suck in a sharp gasp. Something that felt like a dire hawk’s talons raked through her brain. Memories of the last several days flashed through her mind—no, they were taken from her mind.

She had no idea which Starseer was scouring her brain, but it was someone powerful. This was a lot more than the reading of surface thoughts that Yumi had spoken about. She relived the stopover on Starfall Station, the cargo drop-off on Arkadius Gamma, the flight down to the planet, the pursuit by the White Dragon ship and the crash, everything that had happened over the last week before the Starseers had appeared to guide them to their temple. Captain Khazan’s face flashed in her mind, and then the memories disappeared. Unfortunately, the presence in her head did not.

You led them here with a tracking device, someone spoke into her mind.

Lady Naidoo? Alisa could not be sure.

“I didn’t know,” she blurted.

Alisa was vaguely aware that she had fallen out of her seat and lay flat on her back on the deck. Beck crouched next to her, his eyes wide with concern. “Captain?” he asked. “Captain, are you all right?”

His voice sounded far away.

I see that, Naidoo said, but you have brought trouble down upon us, nonetheless. More trouble. Those words came as a growl, and Leonidas’s armored figure flashed into Alisa’s mind.

“I didn’t mean to,” she whispered, wincing. The sensation of having talons raking through her brain had lessened, but her head still throbbed with pain. It was as if Naidoo’s very presence caused distress.

“Captain?” Beck asked again, his voice still very distant. “Who are you talking to?”

Alisa could not respond to him. She twitched a finger. It was all she could manage.

Command your cyborg to stand down, Naidoo ordered. My people must get to our fighter ships so they can defend the temple. We are targeting the warships, but they are well armored, and their small fighter craft are harrying us. There is a limit to what we can do with our large artillery weapons. The smaller ships are too maneuverable for us to easily target.

Alisa could imagine. She had flown similar craft all throughout the war.

A silence came after her thought, though she sensed that Naidoo had not left her mind.

We must take down the pilots one-by-one with our mental powers. There are many, many craft up there. We need our own pilots in the air. Call off your cyborg. He’s too damned crafty, keeping our warriors distracted and under attack so they’re struggling to focus their mind powers on them.

Alisa resisted the urge to think a firm Good in response. This wasn’t the time to be smug, not when she was in the same boat as the Starseers right now. If the Alliance succeeded in destroying the temple, the Nomad would surely be destroyed right along with it.

I must have your word that your people will not harm Leonidas if I ask him to get out of the way, Alisa thought back, then wondered if she should have spoken out loud. How in the hells did telepathy work? She decided that if Naidoo knew who she had spoken to days ago at the station, then she ought to be able to hear these thoughts.

He has injured many of my people, Naidoo growled into her mind, not sounding like she wanted to issue that order.

Well, he’s not going to stand down so they can injure him right back. Again. Alisa tried to make her own voice a growl. They’ve been treating him badly since he arrived. Have you even knocked on Abelardus’s door to see if he’s in his room? Or done a scan of the station? I sincerely doubt he’s been murdered. If only Alejandro’s look at the blood had helped confirm that notion.

He is one of our best pilots, and we’ll be missing him in this battle, but one man is not what’s important now. Call off your cyborg.

You’ll give the order that he won’t be attacked? And you’ll let us go? Alisa asked.

Naidoo did something akin to a snort in her mind. Your fate should be intertwined with ours, since you led these people here.

How do you know that’s true?

Alisa couldn’t rule out that Khazan might have done something, but if she didn’t know that for sure how could Naidoo possibly know it? Or was this more jumping to conclusions, as they had done with Abelardus’s supposed murder?

Your fate is tied to ours, Naidoo repeated. You’re not going anywhere. Unless you want to help with the battle.

What?

Your cyborg has robbed us of one of our pilots, and I saw in your mind that you have experience with fighter craft.

“I’m not fighting the Alliance,” Alisa blurted, so appalled by the notion that it came out through her lips rather than from her mind.

A light shone into her eyes. Alejandro had joined Beck in kneeling to check on her, and was peering at her pupils.

“She’s clearly conscious,” Alejandro told Beck.

The Alliance is trying to destroy us, Naidoo said. And you may have noticed that they’re not overly concerned about taking you down with us. If not for our shields, your ship would already have been destroyed. We all would have been. Your precious cyborg too.

Alisa wanted to argue, to say that Naidoo was wrong, but she couldn’t. It would be a lie. Farrow didn’t care if the Nomad went down with the temple. He’d given her a chance to escape, but if she hadn’t taken it, that wasn’t his problem. What did he care if extenuating circumstances had kept her from fleeing?

Just help us drive them off, Naidoo said. Once they leave, we’ll move our temple so they can’t find us again. You’ll be free to go.

And Leonidas?

Naidoo sighed.

I need him. Realizing that was not likely to sway the woman, Alisa added, I need him to go up and fight, to help you. Most of what you’ve got that I can fly are two-man fighters. I need him to be my gunner.

A boom rattled the Nomad—it must have rattled the entire temple. The warships were hurling more than torpedoes and e-cannon blasts now. Alisa thought of what might happen if the engines that held the temple aloft were damaged.

Very well, Naidoo said. Take him. Help us fight off the intruders, and we will let you and your freighter go afterward. I will also tell you what I know of Durant if we’re successful.

Alisa sucked in a breath. Before, Naidoo had denied knowing who Durant was. How much did she truly know? Enough to help Alisa finally find her daughter? Would Naidoo keep her word?

Yes, came the firm response.

The pressure in Alisa’s mind eased, and she was able to sit up. Beck and Alejandro helped her.

“Captain, are you all right?” Beck asked. “What happened?”

“I… just agreed to fight the Alliance.”

Beck rolled back on his heels. “I don’t think that will go well.”

“Nor do I, Beck. Nor do I.”

• • • • •

Alisa inched down the Nomad’s ramp, well aware of the smoke still clouding the chilly air and of the Starseer warriors in the middle of it, some of them crouching behind the landing pylons of her ship, some of them boldly facing the doorway into the temple with their staffs or firearms raised. Their backs were to her. She did not know if Naidoo had relayed her orders to them, but she found it encouraging that nobody was shooting at the moment. She could not see Leonidas, but she assumed he was still near that door.

“Leonidas?” she whispered, tapping her comm. “Has anyone talked to you yet?”

She had not told him about Naidoo’s words yet. After her conversation with the woman, Alisa had simply grabbed a spare blazer pistol out of Beck’s cabin and hustled for the cargo hatch. She missed her Etcher. She should not need a handgun of any sort in the cockpit of a Striker or whatever they put her in, but if she was captured, it could be a different story. Maybe. Her stomach churned at the idea of firing on her own people, on fellow pilots she may have flown with in the war.

When she flew up there, would they know it was she shooting at them from the cockpit of a Starseer craft? She wished she could think of a way to help end this battle without actually hurting anyone.

Fiery blue and white streaks rained down overhead, bouncing off the translucent dome-shaped energy shield that protected the temple, at least for now. A torpedo exploded with a thunderous boom and a flash of white light that made her cover her eyes. Alisa shivered from more than the cold air. When those shields failed, as she imagined they inevitably would, those projectiles would slam into the towers and spires—and the landing pad. As she stared at the attack pouring down from the mists above, she imagined Jonah watching from the balcony of their apartment as bombs tumbled from the sky and into their neighborhood. Had he seen it coming? Had he watched the inevitable, knowing there was not time to escape?

“I’m here,” Leonidas said finally, sounding bewildered.

Alisa jerked her thoughts back to the present.

“The woman who came and let you out of your cell is here with twenty people in flight suits,” he said, “and she’s telling me I’m supposed to stand down, that she won’t fire.”

“I negotiated a deal.” Alisa was surprised Yumi’s young half-sister had been chosen to talk to Leonidas, but maybe it made sense. They probably thought he wouldn’t harm a woman who was somewhat familiar to him.

“A deal that involves me standing down?”

“They want to get by you and out to their fighter craft so they can defend the temple. You’re a minor inconvenience now.”

“Minor. Really.”

A couple of the Starseers in the smoke had noticed her murmuring from the ramp. One woman faced her, lowered her staff, and waved for her to come the rest of the way down. Tears streaked the woman’s cheeks, and her wave turned into a nose wipe. That smoke was potent. Even here on the edge of it, Alisa could feel her eyes starting to water.

“Go get him, will you?” the Starseer woman asked. “We won’t bother you.”

Alisa licked her lips, nervous despite the promise and despite Naidoo’s words, but she walked down the ramp and turned for the door. She held her breath on the chance that it would help against Leonidas’s smoke. The Starseers, many of them wiping their noses and eyes—one looked to have vomited on his robe—stood aside to let her pass. They appeared more relieved than irritated, at least when it came to her. They were probably happy to let someone intervene with Leonidas.

Alisa poked her head through the doorway to the temple and found him standing against the wall in his armor, a lumpy black bag she had not seen before slung over his back. The tip of a rifle poked out of it, and he carried another rifle in his arms. He also had more of those grenades hooked to the belt built into his armor.

The ice-block corridor stretched ahead of him, several faces leaning around a corner at the first intersection. Alisa glimpsed the shoulders of someone wearing an orange flight suit rather than the usual robes. He looked like a normal human being, someone she would go flying with and then share a drink with afterward.

As she reached Leonidas’s side, Alisa smiled up at him, hoping to put him at ease. She was also relieved to see him alive. She laid her hand on the barrel of his rifle and pushed it down so the tip pointed at the floor. He arched an eyebrow but let her.

“We’re standing down here,” she called to the Starseers.

Someone’s touch brushed her mind, and she stiffened. Next to her, Leonidas growled low in his throat. But the touch was brief—checking to see if they were telling the truth? Then the men and women in flight suits raced around the corner. They did not make eye contact with Alisa or Leonidas as they ran through the doorway. They sprinted straight for the one-and two-man craft docked at the far end of the landing pad from the Nomad. Their urgency made Alisa wonder just how much power those shields had left.

Thwumps reverberated through the temple as the Starseers fired more of their artillery weapons from the tower tops.

“How did you get out of that cell?” Alisa asked.

“I pulled down the ice blocks in the ceiling to access the conduits there. I crossed a few wires and shorted out the forcefield.”

A faint thrumming started up, reverberating through her shoes and up her legs. It was not the same as the abrupt thwumps of the big artillery weapons. Something to do with the hover engines that held the temple aloft? Were they being overtaxed because of the barrage?

“Conduits in the ceiling?” Alisa hadn’t noticed conduits up there. She knew his vision was better than hers in the dark, but could he see through things she couldn’t? Or had he just been paying more attention than she had? “Is that what you were studying when you were flat on your back? I thought you were taking a nap.”

“Cyborgs don’t nap,” Leonidas said.

“I thought you were human. Humans nap.”

“Not when they’re military officers—former military officers—trapped in an enemy stronghold.”

“The ice pressing through your skimpy underwear kept you awake, huh?”

His helmet rotated toward her, his eyes closed to slits behind the faceplate.

“You don’t have to be embarrassed that I saw you in such a state,” Alisa said, undaunted. “It gave me time to map out my massage plans for when we get out of this and you come visit me. I plan to shop for some nice rocks at our next stop.”

Leonidas’s gaze shifted upward and out the door where another round of fire streaked down from above to slam into the temple’s shield. He did not correct her “when we get out of this” to “if we get out of this,” but it had to have crossed his mind.

Several of the sleek, ice-colored combat craft lifted off, wind gusting across the landing pad in their wake. The engines on many of the other ships were firing up, preparing to follow their comrades into the air. They must know a way out through the shielding, or perhaps those manning the temple controls would lower it briefly for them.

Alisa wondered if Lady Naidoo expected her to simply hop into one of the two-man craft and take off. Would the Starseer ships respond to a stranger pilot climbing in? Usually, craft were keyed to their pilots and the maintenance crew. Maybe Naidoo would forget about Alisa, and she wouldn’t have to go up.

“You won’t be able to pilot your freighter out of here as long as the shields are up,” Leonidas said, stepping outside. “But they may not last much longer. If they falter, we may have an opportunity to lift off before we’re obliterated. With luck, those warships won’t waste time targeting a harmless freighter when their goal is close enough to taste.”

“Unfortunately, that’s not the deal I made. Even if the docking clamps weren’t holding the Nomad down, I promised that you and I would join their pilots and defend the temple.”

“We’re going to attack the Alliance?” Leonidas stared at her.

“Are you stunned or pleased?”

“Both. But why would you—”

Back in the temple, a robed figure wearing a bulky satchel and carrying a staff ran around the corner, heading straight at them. Leonidas dropped his hand toward his rifle, but it stopped midair, two inches above it. The Starseer flicked a finger as he continued toward the doorway. A grimace of defiance crossed Leonidas’s face, and his fingers quivered, but he could not touch the weapon.

“You’re going up with us, right?” the Starseer asked, his hood pulled low to shadow his features. He was tall and broad, and the voice seemed familiar.

She nodded. “That’s the deal.”

The shadowed face regarded Leonidas briefly, but the Starseer did not pause for long. “This way,” he said, and raced for two of the remaining combat craft. “The dart is mine.” He pointed to the last of the ice-colored ships, a one-man craft with an arrow shape. “You can take the Striker over there.”

Alisa eyed the rusty Alliance craft docked at the end. A Striker-13 rather than the 18 she had flown in the war, it looked like it hadn’t been taken out for a run in a long time. In fact, judging by the patches along the side, it had survived a crash.

It did, a voice spoke in her head, and Alisa jumped. The Starseer voices all sounded alike in her head, but she assumed this was the robed pilot speaking to her. He had already jumped into his own craft, the dart, and was lowering the clear canopy of the cockpit. It wasn’t entirely wrecked, so we brought it in off the ice and fixed it. Several of our ships were acquired that way.

What happened to the pilot? Alisa asked as she popped the canopy.

She didn’t make it.

Alisa wagered most of the pilots—and the crew—of the ships that flew into the mists didn’t make it. She now suspected that had less to do with natural phenomena and more to do with the Starseers’ almost obsessive efforts to guard their secrets, even if it meant murder. Three suns, was she truly going to defend these people? What if the Alliance ships were justified in what they were doing? What if the Starseers had been fiddling with the tectonic plates beneath the continents of Arkadius? What if they did want to take over the planet?

We just want to be left alone, the other pilot assured her. There are too few of us left to think of war or taking over anything.

Alisa did not know whether to believe him or not. Naidoo had lied to her once, and what of the way they had treated Leonidas?

“Marchenko, do you expect me to fit back here?” Leonidas asked.

She had slid easily into the cockpit, as if she were slipping into a favorite old pair of pants—the 13 was noticeably older and less sophisticated than the 18, not to mention the rust edging the seams that made her doubt its spaceworthiness, but the cockpit size was identical to the model she had flown. The back seat was big enough for a soldier in a flight suit, but had not been designed for a tall, brawny cyborg, certainly not one in combat armor.

“Alisa,” she corrected him, “and wouldn’t you rather be in the air than down here, helpless to have any effect on your fate?”

“What I want won’t do anything to make me smaller.”

“Just try to wedge yourself in. You should be able to scoot the seat back for a little more leg room.”

Hurry, the other pilot said, his dart taking off with a noisy flare from its thrusters. We need all the help we can get. It will be another… twenty-three minutes before the temple’s engines are fully online and can move the structure.

Working on it, Alisa thought, fastening her harness.

Grunts and clunks came from behind her as Leonidas tried to draw all of his armored limbs into the seat.

“I’ve got control of the blazers up here,” Alisa said, fastening her harness and hitting the button to lower the canopy. “Assuming this thing is fully loaded, you should have the e-cannons and two torpedoes.”

“I’m familiar with Alliance ships.”

Right, he had probably helped destroy plenty of them.

“Are you familiar with how to get your elbow all the way inside?” she asked, waving at a red light flashing on the control panel. “Because the canopy refuses to close with bits of you hanging out.”

“It’s as uppity as its pilot,” he muttered amid more clunks and grunts.

The canopy was finally able to close fully, and the alarm light went out. Alisa hit the button to fire up the engines. Much like the Nomad, this older model did not have holocontrols, and forget about a surround-flow display for her peripheral vision. As the ship flared to life, she looked back to check on Leonidas, to see if he would be able to access the weapons while he was stuffed in there like pickled degafish in a jar.

His broad shoulders pressed against the clear walls of the cockpit, his knees were almost pushed up to his ears, and he was glowering at her from inside his helmet, but he did have his hands resting lightly on the weapons’ targeting controls.

“I see you would have been disappointed if I hadn’t finagled things for you to be allowed to come along with me,” Alisa said.

“After what my body has been through in the last twenty-four hours, getting massaged by rocks is starting to sound less distressing.”

“Good. We’ll make it a date then.” She winked.

He arched an eyebrow.

The console binged, signaling ready. Alisa turned her focus back to the control panel and guided them into the air. She gave the Nomad a long look as she lifted off, worried she would not see her freighter again.

“Did you see how the other ships got through the shield?” Leonidas asked.

“Uh.” That would have been a smart thing to pay attention to. “No. Did you?”

“They all flew down after they took off, under the temple.” A thud sounded as he tried to point under the landing pad, and his elbow struck something.

“Then down we go too. And hope for a big glowing, obvious door.”

Alisa eyed the tiny sensor display on the control panel. It had the power and range of a mouse running on a wheel. She could see the contours of the energy field, but nothing that hinted of a safe zone or a way out. Had the Starseers in the control room briefly lowered the gate so their pilots could fly out? If so, would they do the same for her? It would be a shame if she and Leonidas had to hide under the temple for the entire battle. Her conscience wished that would happen, even as her mind accepted that she would likely have to help if she meant to get the Nomad and her crew to safety somehow. For good or ill, her fate was tied in with the temple’s right now.

As she dipped below the edge of the landing pad, flying under the Nomad and toward the belly of the sprawling temple, another fighter craft came into view. It was one of the silvery darts, probably the one that had taken off right before her. It remained in the air under the structure, hovering near the center of it. Waiting for her?

Follow me, the pilot said into her mind. Your ship doesn’t have the safe route programmed in. I’ll have to take over your controls to get you out and into the battle.

Oh, wouldn’t that be fun. Alisa frowned at the idea of her ship being controlled by some Starseer. It had not gone well the last time she had been at the helm when that happened.

We rarely try to crash our own ships, the pilot said dryly.

“Marchen—Alisa,” Leonidas said, probably concerned that they were heading straight toward the energy shield, which, according to the sensors, wrapped under the temple as well as curving above it. Beyond the invisible field, ships from both sides flew about, weaving in and out of the mists as they engaged each other. The Alliance forces tried to focus on the temple, but the Starseers were fighting back now, harrying the small fighters and the warships.

“Yes, I’m talking to someone about it,” Alisa said.

“Talking?” he asked darkly, and she suspected he knew exactly what she meant.

“To the fellow in the robes, I believe.”

“You know who that is?” From his tone, it sounded like he did.

Before she could answer, her comm unit beeped.

“Captain?” Mica asked.

“Here,” Alisa replied.

“I’m setting more explosives. I tried to detonate the first round, but it’s as if they disappeared. The detonators certainly did. I assume you want us to get the Nomad out of here if I can destroy those clamps and get a chance to slip through the shields. Since you’re in a ship now, we can try to meet up away from the battle and find a way out of here.”

“Ah, yes,” Alisa said, hoping the Starseer pilot wasn’t monitoring her thoughts or her communications. Ahead of her, his ship had started moving again, the nose dipping down, his craft almost vertical as it headed toward the ice. “That would be ideal, assuming one of you can pilot her out of the dock. Can you?” She had never seen Mica fly anything, but wouldn’t be surprised if she had done maintenance on ships that required her to maneuver them around a space station.

“Beck and I are arm wrestling to see who gets the honor of trying.”

“That sounds reassuring.”

“We figure the ship will crash on the way through the mists, no matter who’s flying. If we keep it close to the ice, it can’t crash far.”

“I’m not as enthused with this plan as you would think,” Alisa said.

Crashes aside, how would she find the Nomad out there with all the damned mist? On the way in, she’d barely been able to find her ass with her hand.

“Then you can come up with a better one.”

The flight stick moved of its own accord. Alisa started, grabbing it harder.

Let go, the voice in her mind instructed.

Though that was the last thing Alisa wanted to do, she forced herself to lean back, lifting her hands from the stick.

“Should I be alarmed?” Leonidas asked quietly, watching over her shoulder as the Striker surged forward, following the dart as it continued downward, as if it would fly straight into the ice.

“I am,” she said.

“Dr. Dominguez wants a word with you, Captain,” Mica said over the comm.

“Is he jealous that you didn’t include him in the arm wrestling match?”

“No, he knew he would lose.”

“Captain,” Alejandro said, “I finished analyzing the blood.”

“Oh? I thought you had already finished analyzing it before.” Alisa resisted the urge to grab the flight stick as the Striker picked up speed, and the sea of ice filled her vision.

“I had another idea when I saw Beck chewing on his leftover duck.”

“I’m glad he’s treating our imminent death as a snack time,” Mica muttered from somewhere off to the side.

“We’re not going to die,” Alisa said firmly. “I’m coming up with a better plan as we speak.” She wished that were true. She kept hoping inspiration would strike her. Right now, the ice was the only thing that looked like it might strike her.

“Well, it couldn’t get much worse,” Mica said.

“Just work on those explosives in case there’s an opportunity to escape,” Alisa said. “What did you find, Doctor?”

“A DNA match.”

“You figured out which Starseer that blood belonged to?”

Her Striker veered to one side and then the other. As they neared the frozen sea, the craft shifted to a horizontal path and skimming along a few feet above the ice.

“Not precisely, but I do know that it was one of the people who came to eat Beck’s food. I found his trash bin full of skewers and used the saliva dried on them to run scans. I found a match on the third one.”

“How many people did Beck feed?”

“He says a couple dozen at least.”

Alisa frowned. “That doesn’t narrow it down much.”

“No, but he says he did not feed Abelardus. Whoever died, if anyone, it wasn’t him. He never returned to the Nomad after escorting your team into the temple.”

“Ah,” Alisa said, her frown disappearing. “That’s something, then.”

“You’re welcome,” Alejandro said, sounding like he wanted some gratitude.

“Thank you,” Alisa managed. She hadn’t forgotten that he had asked Leonidas about getting rid of her once, but she supposed scraping spit off used skewers was a demeaning job for someone who had once been a chief ER surgeon.

“I could have told you Abelardus is still alive,” Leonidas said.

Control is yours again, the Starseer spoke into her mind as his dart surged ahead, leaving the shadow of the temple and shooting up to join other darts swooping in between Strikers and Cobras. You may join our squadron, but you may also be able to get in close and do damage with your torpedoes since you’re in an Alliance ship.

I don’t think they’re going to mistake this rusty museum piece for one of their own, Alisa thought as she zipped along the ice. She didn’t want to stay low for long, since she would be an easy target for anyone flying above, but she needed to get far enough away from the temple to better gauge everything that was going on, especially since the craft lacked a surround-flow display.

“They had better tech than this back on Old Earth,” she grumbled, alternating between watching the sensor display and the view out her canopy.

They may at least hesitate to fire upon you, the other pilot said. You haven’t trained with our people, so you would be in the way as a part of our formations.

“Great.”

“Problem?” Leonidas asked as Alisa took them to the edge of the mist field, then flew upward, trying to stay on the periphery of the battle, avoiding the dozens of explosives and bolts of energy filling the sky.

“They want our help, but they don’t want us anywhere near them while we do it.”

“Just point me toward something I can shoot.”

From the sound of his voice, he wasn’t particular about what that might be. She knew he wouldn’t mind shooting down Alliance ships under any circumstances, but after the last day and night, he might happily blow some Starseer ships out of the sky too.

She, on the other hand, did not want to fire at any of the targets. It crossed her mind to disappear into the mist, but that would not help the Nomad escape.

Sighing, once she had flown high enough to see the ships below, she turned toward a squadron of Alliance ships that were peppering the temple shield. Before she made it halfway to them, two of the Strikers abruptly veered downward. She had not seen either get hit, and there was not any smoke coming from their engines, but they spiraled toward the ice below as if they had been hit dead on.

“That’s chilling,” she muttered.

One of the Strikers managed to recover, the nose turning up out of the dive at the last second. The belly almost scraped the ice as the craft swooped back upward. The second ship did not recover. It smashed into the ice so hard that it broke through. Pieces of the ship flew free as the smashed fuselage plunged into the black water below.

Alisa flicked on the comm in her Striker, assuming it was tied in with the rest of the Starseer squadron and that she could hear their chatter. If they chattered. Maybe they were all communicating with their minds up here.

“That one’s out of it,” someone was saying.

“Good, but focus on what’s going on around you too. You’ve got a cat on your tail.”

“I see it.”

“Focus on the warships,” another voice said. “If we can crash them, it’ll matter a lot more than dropping the one-man ships. Those are just flies pestering us.”

“We’ve been trying, but they’re rotating through pilots up there. As soon as we affect one, another pushes him aside and takes the helm. I did manage to find a weak-willed mind and start a fight up there.” The speaker sounded smug. “He tried to punch his C.O.”

“Just fly,” someone with a hard voice said. “Let Naidoo and those in the temple worry about mind links.”

“Look out, Nile!”

A torpedo slammed into one of the Starseer darts, crushing through its shields and utterly obliterating it.

“Shit,” several voices said at once.

“Should have stopped that,” one said, with the slam of a fist striking a console. “There’s so damned many of them.”

More rounds launched from the temple below, coming close to shaving the wings off one of the darts. Alisa arced behind the Alliance squadron that had been distracting the Starseers when that torpedo had struck and she fired a few half-hearted shots at their backs.

A faint reverberation pulsed through her vessel as one of the e-cannons fired. She had almost forgotten Leonidas was back there and twitched with surprise as their projectile streaked away, engulfed in fiery energy. It slammed into the wing of one of the Alliance ships. Normally, the craft’s shields should have been able to deflect a couple of e-cannon blasts, but they must have already taken damage. They fell away, letting the projectile tear through the wing, knocking it off.

The pilot had no chance at compensating. He brought his nose up, trying to land instead of crashing, but two darts arrowed in, taking advantage. They riddled the hull with blazer fire, and smoke wafted up from the craft. It tumbled downward, eventually smashing into the frozen sea. This time, the ice did not break. Alisa almost wished it had, because seeing the craft shattered, pieces flying all across the white ice, was as sobering as a knife to the heart.

“You have deadly aim,” she said quietly. It wasn’t a compliment so much as a realization that she wouldn’t be able to half-heartedly join in the battle, not with Leonidas back there, eager to take down Alliance ships.

“Line me up for another one,” he said.

Alisa swallowed. That was the last thing she wanted to do.

Chapter 16

Alisa was almost relieved when two Alliance ships diverted from their route to target her. It gave her an excuse not to line up another target for Leonidas. She swooped and dove, trying to lose them. They stuck with her. They must have seen Leonidas take down their comrade, and now they wanted revenge. She couldn’t blame them. She wouldn’t accommodate them, but she couldn’t blame them.

She put the creaky old Striker through a series of evasive maneuvers, banking to the port side and then up, making it hard for both of the Alliance ships to stick to her. One turned to follow while the other looped off in the other direction, probably hoping to meet her as she finished her loop. She twisted, coming out of it early and cutting back and across. One stuck with her, but she caught the other upside down in the middle of his own loop. She strafed him, knowing she could not hesitate to fire, not this time. She wasn’t going to get her and Leonidas killed out here. He bided his time on the cannons, waiting for her frenetic turns to slow, to reveal an opening. Now on the tail of the Alliance craft, having switched from pursued to pursuer, she pulled close, lining up the shot. Leonidas did not hesitate. With reflexes even quicker than hers, he fired.

The Alliance ship’s shields held, the energy ball exploding against them, but she knew that had drained them. She lanced out with her guns, peppering his flank until he spun away, avoiding further fire.

She would have raced right after him, but his buddy had found her backside, and was now firing at her. The old Striker had shields, but she did not know how much faith to put in them, so she veered away immediately. The more modern craft had rotating guns, and they followed her. She cursed and flew straight upward, toward the mist above the battlefield. The Alliance craft followed her, his friend also coming around to get behind her again.

As soon as she hit the mists, she banked to the port side, dipping into a sideways loop. She whipped the craft up as quickly as possible, trying to come about fast enough to catch the lead ship as it entered the mist. It zipped by too rapidly, a blip lurching across a sensor screen that had half-filled with static as soon as they hit the mists. She was relying upon her eyes. The second ship came in higher than she expected, the pilot also having made a quick adjustment, but she surged up and fired from below.

Leonidas did not hesitate to loose another cannon shot. They were targeting the same ship they had struck earlier, and this time, its shields did not hold. The cannon charge exploded against its side. The ship’s flight turned into a tumble, and it spun out of control as it streaked toward the ice.

Alisa turned her attention to the second vessel, weaving and trying to find it in the mist. It found her first. The nose emerged from the mist, cannons and guns all pointed at her. She whipped her Striker downward, but not before Leonidas fired, and not before the other pilot fired. Streaks of red slashed through the air, right at the canopy. If not for the shields, they would have struck. She took a relieved breath even as the control panel lit up, informing her that shields had dropped to fifty percent.

“Got him,” Leonidas said, and Alisa glanced back to see the smoking craft spiraling downward before it disappeared into the mist.

“Good,” Alisa said, though her enthusiasm was still tempered by how little she wanted to be a part of this battle.

Taking a deep breath, she guided them back out of the mist. She gulped at the carnage that stretched out before her. No less than twenty of the small combat craft lay mangled on the ice. Most of them were Alliance, but a few of the Starseer darts had also been destroyed. Smoke wafted up from more than a dozen spots. Several holes in the ice hinted that even more ships had gone down than were now visible, some plummeting through and sinking.

The three warships remained in the air, swooping back and forth above the temple, powerful shields deflecting everything the Starseer ships threw at them while seeking to avoid the larger and more dangerous artillery fire from below. The temple also remained intact, though a ripple of white flashed and outlined the curving contour of its big shield, as a huge round exploded above one of the towers.

“We need eighteen minutes,” someone spoke over the Starseer comm channel. “The engines are halfway to ready, but the temple shield is down to twenty-five percent power.”

“We’re doing our best,” a pilot responded. “Is there no chance of diddling with the minds of the captains on the warships? Those ships are the ones decimating the shield power, right?”

“Yes, and we’ve been trying, but again, they have numerous people on the bridges up there. We’ve knocked out a few of the higher-ranking officers, but the lieutenants are keeping things running. They all know the plan. We’ve had more luck causing equipment failures, but there’s so much redundancy on those ships that they’re nearly impossible to bring down from mechanical issues alone.”

“Figure something out. The shields are not going to last another eighteen minutes.”

“Seventeen now.”

“So much better. Can’t anyone down there manipulate the mists? Bring them in closer to mess with everyone’s sensors?”

“We mess with our own equipment, too, if we do that. The last thing we want is for the temple to crash.”

Alisa drummed her fingers on the control panel. She could engage with other small combat ships all day, but if the warships were the main problem, nothing she did would matter overmuch.

“Leonidas, what can we do to put an end to this fight?” She did not truly expect him to have an answer—nor did she know if he even cared which side won—but nothing useful was popping into her mind.

“It sounds like someone needs to buy the temple seventeen minutes,” he said.

“Yes, but how? Pipe the latest episode of the Hot Twilight Nights onto all of their monitors to transfix them?”

“Perhaps something else might transfix them.”

An idea trickled into her mind, and the hairs on the back of her neck rose. Could it work? Would it entice the Alliance commander into ceasing fire momentarily? And, more importantly, could she talk Leonidas into going for it? Did she truly want to talk him into it? With a certainty that almost seemed to come from without, she nodded to herself. Yes, if she did it, she might save many lives.

“I don’t suppose you would like to be the transfixing thing, Leonidas?” Alisa asked.

“What do you mean?” he asked warily.

Alisa was guiding the Striker along the edge of the mist, trying not to engage with anyone while she debated her options. She fiddled with the comm to see if she could reach out to the Alliance ships from her craft. “To buy time, I could tell them I have a prisoner that I know they want.”

“A prisoner,” Leonidas said, his tone flat.

“With the way you’re wedged in there, I doubt you’ll get out in less than seventeen minutes.” She smiled back over her shoulder.

He gazed steadily at her, no hint of amusement in his eyes. The carnage down below probably did not bother him. After a lifetime as a soldier, he had to be inured to it. She had to figure out how to turn him to her way of thinking. Even if that seat was a tight fit for him, there was no way she would be able to turn him in against his will.

“What if I offered you up as a prisoner if they agreed to stop firing?” Alisa asked. “At the least, one of those warships would have to move away and lower its shields to let us fly into their shuttle bay. Once there, we could figure out how to get out again before they could actually collect you and torture you, or whatever they have in mind. At this point, they would probably torture me, too, since I’ve been seen in your company so often. So, I have a motivation to make sure we can get out again. Maybe I can jury-rig this ship to—”

“You said the Starseers got the doctor’s orb?” Leonidas asked.

“They did,” Alisa said, not sure what that mattered to him at this moment. “He’s distraught.”

Leonidas looked down at the wrecks as they flew over them, then toward the temple. Another charge exploded against its shield, and it flashed again. Wavering. Weakening.

Alisa glimpsed the Nomad, still stuck in its docking spot, as they flew around the back of the temple.

“Do it,” Leonidas said.

“What?” Alisa twisted her neck to look back and see his face. “Really?”

“I don’t know if it will work, but you can try. What I know is more than six months out of date. It won’t help them, but if they believe it will and you can use it to your advantage, do it.”

“All right. Good. Thank you.” Alisa sat straight in her seat and tapped for the comm channel she had already identified. “If they go for it, we’ll find a way back out again before they get a chance to question us.” Had she already said that? For some reason, her thoughts seemed a tad scattered. “This could work,” she said with determination. “We just need to buy a little time. Enough for the Starseers to move their temple and enough for Mica to figure out how to extricate the Nomad so it can sneak away in the mists.” Admittedly, the latter motivated her far more than the former, but she didn’t want to see the Starseers obliterated, either. Whether they deserved it or not did not matter to her. They still had the answer to the question of where her daughter had gone.

Leonidas grunted noncommittally.

“Commander Farrow?” Alisa asked, sure she had the right ship targeted but doubtful as to whether he would be the one to answer. If the Starseers had been muddling people’s minds, he might not even be alert enough to answer. “This is Captain Marchenko. I need to talk to you. Sapphire Status,” she added, referring to the system of color codes for assigning priorities and threats.

Several long seconds passed. Would they ignore her altogether? Maybe they knew how depleted the temple’s shield was, and they were completely focused on defeating it.

“You’re not in your usual ship, Captain,” a male voice finally responded. Commander Farrow.

“No, sir. The Starseers have my freighter locked down. But I’ve escaped from the temple with a prisoner.”

“Unless you have that Naidoo woman in your backseat, I’m not interested.”

On the other side of the temple, another Alliance Cobra was hit. It was only a glancing blow. The ship wobbled once and started to recover, but abruptly the thrusters turned off. It plummeted to the ice, crashing alongside another wreck.

Alisa’s plan to help the Starseers made her uneasy, especially when they could do that. Further, she did not know all the politics here. Was the Alliance justified in this attack? Even if it was, they were losing so many fighter ships. Was it truly worth it to tangle with Starseers?

“I have someone else that I know you’ve been looking for, Commander,” Alisa said, almost as if a mental nudge had prompted her.

“Such as?”

“Colonel Hieronymus Adler. I’ve heard the Alliance wants him.” Alisa had no idea if the commander knew why the Alliance wanted him. The three suns knew she didn’t. But even if Farrow didn’t, he ought to be aware of how much the government was willing to pay for his delivery. She assumed he would attempt to move all the suns and all their hells to obtain him.

“He’s your prisoner?” Farrow sounded skeptical.

“I’ve got him in this very Striker with me,” Alisa said, adding indignation to her voice, as if she could capture a cyborg easily any time she wished and it was offensive to imply otherwise. She pointedly did not look over her shoulder to see Leonidas’s reaction. “He’s drugged out of his mind and drooling like a baby. I don’t know how long that will last, so you might want to invite me in so I can deliver him.”

“You’re offering to deliver him to our back door?”

“Your front door if you want.”

“What’s in it for you, Marchenko?”

“I told you. My freighter is down there, and the Starseers aren’t letting it go. You blow up that temple, and the only thing I own in the universe gets blown up with it. I’ve got crew and passengers on there, Commander. Watching them get blown up, that’s a problem for me.”

“What do you want from me?” Farrow did not sound overly moved by the plight of her crew and passengers.

“Cease fire while I drop him off. Cease fire from all of your vessels.”

“You want those Starseer bastards to get away?”

“I want my ship to get away. Look, my engineer is planting some explosives to break their docking clamps. She just needs more time to make that happen. Then you can go back to pummeling the Starseers into the ice.” Alisa hoped the commander did not know that the temple was ambulatory and could eventually escape. “You think I care about them? We were prisoners down there until you came along and they got distracted. My ship is still imprisoned.”

“Odd how you got a different ship.”

“Odd? I’m good, Commander. Look up my record. This isn’t the first enemy ship I’ve stolen.”

Alisa slapped the comm to cut the channel. Let him think about her words and mull them over. Then if he was intrigued, he could contact her. She just hoped he didn’t know exactly what had happened back on Perun, that she had risked a lot to keep Leonidas from being captured there. If he had that whole story, he might not be inclined to believe that she had imprisoned him now.

“You’ve stolen other ships before?” Leonidas asked dryly.

“Don’t tell me you’re surprised.”

“Not really. I wouldn’t mind hearing the story.”

It was a silly time to worry about what he thought, but she couldn’t help but smile, pleased that he wanted to hear about her exploits.

“Perhaps I can share it while I’m digging those rocks into your back,” she said.

He snorted. “Perhaps.”

Alisa switched to the Starseer comm channel in time to hear someone say, “The eight are united. They’re targeting one of the warships. Just keep the fighter craft busy, boys.”

“And girls,” a woman added.

“Boys and girls, yes.”

As the Starseer darts kept harrying the Alliance fighters, Alisa flew up toward the top of the mist where the Star Nautilus, Farrow’s warship, lurked. It was still shooting relentlessly at the temple, but as she drew close, one of the ship’s e-cannon ports exploded in a smoky flash of white. That was when she noticed that three other weapons’ ports had also been damaged, if not outright destroyed.

The Alliance had the superior numbers by far in this battle, and the temple’s shield was weakening, but would they truly win? Even if they did, how much would they lose in the process?

The comm flashed, and Alisa switched back to the warship’s channel.

“Yes, Commander?” She tamped down her natural tendency to sound perky and insouciant with the words.

“I’m taking the Nautilus up into the mist to get out of their range. Come join us in our hangar bay.”

Alisa thought about pointing out how hard it was to navigate in the mists, but she was more concerned about getting her deal and not simply flying into the enemy’s hands. She grimaced, hating that she was now in a position to think of an Alliance ship as “the enemy.”

“And you’ll cease fire?” Alisa asked.

“If your story is true, and you do, indeed, have a drugged Colonel Adler for us, we’ll help you get your ship back.”

Alisa scowled. That would not do anything to stop the fighting. And she did not see how Farrow could guarantee the safety of her ship when they were firing at the shield currently protecting it.

Alisa muted Farrow and switched to her regular comm unit. “Mica, are you there? What’s the Nomad’s status?”

“We’re still here. Enjoying the light show.”

“And working on a way to get out of there, I hope?”

“I’ve planted more explosives, and I’m ready to detonate them, but we have the same problem as before. If I blow them, it will most likely damage the hull of the Nomad. And it’s also unlikely that we can escape through the shield unless you can guide us out the same way you went. The sensors here read it as a solid barrier.”

“I had help getting this ship out. I’m not sure if my guide is interested in helping again. I haven’t heard from him in a while.” Alisa had lost track of which one was the robed pilot’s dart and had no idea if he was still alive.

The comm on the console flashed. “Captain Marchenko? Are you going to work with us? We’re prepared to fly out of range and lower our shields so we can invite you and your captive aboard. We’d hate for him to wake up while you have him behind you. Cyborgs are known to be irritable when they wake up.”

Leonidas did not say anything, not with the comm open, but Alisa sensed him glaring out the canopy and up at the warship.

“Yes, sir, I’ve heard that,” Alisa said, but she did not answer his other question. The warship was still firing down at the temple. Would it even matter if she got one of the ships out of range and out of the battle? There were two other warships.

She shook her head, second-guessing her plan. It seemed that little could be gained, and much could be lost.

Yes, it will matter, the pilot spoke into her mind. We’ve got a lock on the other two warships. Do it.

“I’m ready to follow you, Commander,” Alisa said, glancing over her shoulder.

Leonidas’s brow was furrowed as he gazed back at her. He looked like he was second-guessing his choice to acquiesce too.

She held up one finger, then touched it to her temple, hoping to imply that she was in contact with one of the Starseers. Everything would work out. It had to.

The Nautilus, as large as the temple below, rose like a small island lifting into the misty sky. Alisa followed in the Striker, contemplating pretending to lose the ship, so she couldn’t actually fly into its bay. Would that take it out of the fight for long enough? Maybe the commander would sit up there, waiting for her for the fifteen minutes the temple needed.

“We got one, we got one,” someone blurted on the Starseer channel amid spitting static.

“Confirmed. One of the warships is going down.”

Alisa swallowed. Was that true? She looked at her sensor display, but the mist had already enveloped her, leaving it an unreliable source. She could make out the ponderous presence of the Nautilus, but little else. Just haze and mist and more mist.

Someone else spoke on the Starseer channel, but it came out garbled, and Alisa could not make out the words.

They rose for several moments, Alisa following close enough to keep visual contact with the warship. She wondered how Farrow knew what the range of the temple’s weapons was. Would he fly all the way out of the mists for this?

She glanced at the clock display. Seven minutes had passed. The temple should only need another ten.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Leonidas asked.

“It’s getting one of the warships out of the fight, hopefully for long enough for the temple to get moving,” Alisa said, not answering the question. “I was told it would be enough to help.”

“Told.” He did not sound amused. “By one of them.”

“Yeah, one has decided to speak into my head. He guided us out through the shield too.”

“The same one who came out robed and led us to this ship?” Leonidas asked.

“I think so, yes.”

“You know that’s Abelardus, right?”

Alisa sucked in a breath. She’d thought that voice sounded familiar.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but are you sure you’re acting of your own volition, right now?” Leonidas asked. “I suspect he would like it very much if I fell into the Alliance’s hands.”

Alisa licked her lips. Had this all been her idea? Or had someone nudged her into it?

“You agreed to this,” she said, her voice uncertain.

He grunted. “Are you sure I was acting of my own volition?”

While Alisa debated her new concerns, the belly of the warship came into view, looming huge and dark out of the mists. Alisa switched from vertical to horizontal flight, almost bumping the hull with the top of her canopy.

“Their shields are down,” she said, realizing they had to be if she had gotten that close.

“Alisa,” Leonidas said, an edge of warning in his voice. “While I don’t think they’ll get anything useful from what’s in my head, I would rather not voluntarily put myself in their hands if there’s not a good reason. Interrogation and death are very likely outcomes here.”

Alisa nodded. “All right. You’re right.” Questioning how much of the idea had been hers to start with, she veered away from the ship, diving back down into the mists. “Mica,” she said, tapping her comm, “blow those explosives. We’ll risk the damage. As long as she can still fly, we ought to be able to get to a city and—”

The Striker halted with a shudder and a groan. Alisa gaped at the dashboard and echoed that groan herself. The shields were still up, but the entire Striker was being held in place.

“I’d been hoping their grab beam wouldn’t work in the mists,” she said.

Leonidas sighed. She winced, certain he was judging her for being weak-minded, for letting herself be manipulated. Damn it. What had she been thinking?

“Do you have a handkerchief?” Leonidas asked.

“Uh?” Alisa patted herself down. In her flight suit, she would have had something—you couldn’t have bodily fluids dripping from your nose and distracting you during combat—but she hadn’t thought to grab anything on the way out of the Nomad. “Did my creative flying give you a nose bleed?”

“Something like that.”

She poked into the dusty first-aid kit fastened to the side of the pilot’s seat. The lid opened with a creak, and she suspected it hadn’t been opened since the rusty old craft had first been commissioned. She pulled out a piece of gauze and handed it back to him.

“Any Torovax in there?”

“You want me to take an inventory right now?”

“You’re not needed at the controls.”

“Don’t remind me.” Alisa unfastened the first-aid kit and handed it back to him. She was vaguely familiar with the contents and suspected he would be a lot more likely to find a drug that would charge him with adrenaline rather than a muscle relaxant.

“Thank you. Here,” Leonidas said as the Striker started moving, being pulled inexorably toward the hangar bay doors that were sliding open on the side of the warship. Something touched her shoulder. Her belt with her multitool and Etcher.

“You got my belongings?”

“I grabbed everything on my way out of the basement and visited the armory too.” He patted the bag he had been carrying all along. “Where do you think those smoke grenades came from?”

“I had no idea. Are we, uhm, putting up a fight in there?” Alisa glanced back, wondering what he had wanted the gauze for.

He had already made it disappear somewhere. She did not see any fresh blood dripping from his nose.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “I think they’ll be ready for it. I didn’t get the sense that the commander believed your story about stealing ships and drugging cyborgs. I may end up having to chat with him, whether I want to or not.”

“I’m sorry, Leonidas,” Alisa said as the grab beam pulled the Striker closer to the open hangar bay doors, the vast interior reminding her all too much of the maw of some ancient mythological beast that ate overly curious sailors.

“It’s not your fault. For a couple of minutes, I was oddly amenable to the idea of going in too.” He growled deep within his throat. “Next time I see Abelardus, I will throw him out a window.”

The voice that had been speaking into her mind was quiet now. Why wouldn’t it be? It had gotten what it wanted, one of the warships out of the fight and Leonidas delivered into the hands of his enemies.

Chapter 17

Still in the cockpit as the Striker drifted into the Nautilus’s hangar bay, Alisa unfastened the seat harness and awkwardly buckled her belt around her waist, so that her Etcher once again rested on her hip. She did not know why she bothered when the Alliance soldiers would simply remove all her weapons, and maybe all of her clothes and all of her dignity, before tossing her into the brig. They would do no better to Leonidas.

Guilt gnawed at her, and she looked over her shoulder at him as the Striker settled to the deck with a soft bump. His knees were still up around his ears, his armored body almost folded in half to fit into the snug seat. She tried to manage a smile. “At least you’ll be able to stretch your legs now.”

He was checking his weapons and only glanced at her. Alisa did not think he was angry with her, but she wished she had never told him to join her in the Striker. She had fought without a gunner on numerous occasions. She could have done so this time too. He would not necessarily have been safe if he had gone in the Nomad, but he wouldn’t have been lining up for an interrogation, either.

The sensors still were not working well on the Striker’s control panel, so Alisa could not scan the atmosphere out in the bay, but she saw the big doors slide shut, and she felt the grab beam release her. A red light flashed in the distance. Any second, it would switch to white, letting the soldiers know they could come out and inspect their prize.

“Marchenko,” Leonidas said. She was about to correct the name usage when he did it himself, saying, “Alisa.”

“Yes?” Alisa started to look back again, but movement drew her gaze to the left.

Soldiers in blue and gray Alliance combat armor were striding toward them, followed, several meters back, by a trio of officers in solid blue uniforms with uninspired gray earstars hooked over their ears. They did not have armor or rifles, but a couple wore stunners on their belts, and one of them was carrying a medical kit and something that looked like a tranquilizer gun. She thought of the gas that she had encountered with Leonidas on Starfall Station, gas specifically designed to paralyze a cyborg.

“Don’t get yourself into trouble—more trouble—on my account,” he said. “If you can save yourself—and your reputation—by coming up with a story to explain why I’m not drugged and drooling, do so.”

“Unless you want to take off your armor now and artfully dribble down your chin, I think it’s too late for that,” Alisa said, remembering how the Alliance had thought she was Leonidas’s prisoner back at the skirmish near Perun’s moon. She suspected the odds of fooling anyone a second time were nonexistent. By now, the entire Alliance had probably figured out that Leonidas was her passenger, not her captor.

“Maybe, but you have a scheming mind and may come up with something to explain this to your benefit. If you can do so, do. Don’t risk more for me.” His seat creaked as he leaned forward, laying a hand on her shoulder.

The gesture made emotion swell in her throat, and she reached up, resting her hand on his. His was armored, so it wasn’t exactly an intimate touch, but she held her palm on the cool metal anyway.

She wondered if he had figured out that there was a reason she kept risking herself for him—and offering massages. He seemed a little slow when it came to dealing with flirtations, or perhaps he simply was not interested. For all she knew, he could prefer men. But even if he didn’t want romance, he did seem to care about her. And that made her feel all the worse for having led him here.

The armored soldiers were drawing close so Leonidas extracted his hand.

Alisa took a deep breath and popped the canopy. Several rifles swung in her direction. No, not quite in her direction—in the direction of her back seat. She almost felt affronted that nobody was worried about her. Just because she was wearing a fifty-year-old, bullet-slinging gun from some backwater world where there were no facilities for manufacturing BlazTech weapons did not mean she wasn’t a threat…

“Get out,” a woman in armor said, standing slightly ahead of the rest of the squad, her rifle trained unerringly on Leonidas.

“No please?” Alisa asked. “No thank you for coming and we hope you enjoy your stay? Alliance hospitality has deteriorated since I served.”

She worked in that mention of serving in the vain hope that it would make the men less likely to shoot her. Neither the woman who had spoken, nor any of the other soldiers acknowledged her. Their stares never wavered from Leonidas. The three officers had stopped several meters back and also watched him tensely—the one in the lead had gray hair and commander’s tabs. So, Commander Farrow himself had come down for this. That was surprising, given the situation outside.

Her back seat groaned again as Leonidas pushed himself to his feet. He did not seem too worried about making the soldiers twitchy or accidentally drawing fire as he hopped to the deck. Of course, he was as armored as they were and could take a few hits. Alisa did not have that luxury. She eased out of the cockpit slowly, turning around and sliding down to the deck—clearly, none of their hosts thought it would be polite to push one of the mobile ladders over. Deteriorating hospitality, indeed.

“Remove your weapons, power down your suit, and take off your helmet,” the woman in charge said, a sergeant, Alisa assumed. Her armor carried no designation of rank. None of their armor did. Nobody wanted to make it easy for enemies to pick out the leaders in the field.

Leonidas stood calmly, his arms at his sides. He kept his hands away from the rifle hanging across his chest by a strap, but he did not do any of the things the woman ordered. Maybe he was waiting for a please.

“Colonel Adler,” Commander Farrow said after a tense minute passed with neither side doing anything else. “Are you going to be difficult, or are you going to make this easy on all of us?”

Leonidas did not move, but his helmet swiveled a couple of degrees, his faceplate toward the doctor with the medical kit and tranquilizer gun. Alisa had the feeling he might be stalling. Was he trying to buy time for the Starseers? Did he truly care what happened to them? Or maybe he wanted the Nomad to get its chance to escape. Or maybe he just dreaded the inevitable.

“Cyborgs aren’t generally in the business of making life easy for Alliance soldiers,” Leonidas said, his faceplate shifting toward Farrow.

“I suppose that’s true, but this needn’t be a bloodbath. We just want to know where the boy is, Colonel. The war’s over, and there aren’t any war crimes listed on your record that you should be held accountable for. Just the usual—” the commander already had thin lips, and they almost disappeared when he pressed them together, “—but understandable grievances.”

Alisa wondered if that was a lie. While she believed Leonidas wouldn’t have done anything atrocious, she wondered if her people would truly let him walk after this.

“I haven’t seen the boy in over six months,” Leonidas said. “I have no idea where he is now.”

The commander looked at his medical officer, who shrugged in return. “I can’t tell if he’s lying without dosing him, sir.”

“Where was he when last you saw him?” Farrow asked Leonidas.

“You’re going to drug me regardless of what I tell you.” Leonidas sighed and lifted his hands toward his helmet.

The soldiers all tightened their fingers on the triggers of their weapons.

Leonidas didn’t even acknowledge them as he pulled off his helmet. Alisa was surprised that he did it, since it made him vulnerable, but maybe he sensed that the soldiers would start firing and find a way to peel him open like an old-fashioned sardine can if he did not.

Or maybe a certain Starseer was influencing his actions. She shivered.

Leonidas tucked the helmet under his arm. He wore his stoic, difficult-to-read face, but Alisa thought she saw some of his pain and weariness in the tightness at the corners of his eyes. Thinking of how much the Starseers had worked him over before throwing him into his cell, she worried that the armor was the main thing keeping him upright. Once again, she regretted that her actions had brought him here. Dealing with an interrogation while at full health would be bad enough.

“What planet did you last see him on, Colonel?” Farrow asked, waving his fingers for the doctor to step forward. “And who did you hand him off to?”

“He’s just a boy,” Leonidas said softly. “Will you go after him with a squadron of armed soldiers and fighter pilots?” His gaze flicked briefly to Alisa—remembering that she had been an Alliance fighter pilot not that long ago?

For the first time, Farrow looked at Alisa. She had been standing quietly in the shadow of the old Striker, having puzzle pieces click into place as she listened and finally started to realize why the Alliance wanted Leonidas. The boy. The only boy they could possibly be talking about who would be of such interest was the emperor’s son. Prince Thorian. Had Leonidas been there at the end? The imperial palace had been destroyed days before the emperor’s actual death out on an asteroid base where a hidden palace had been his final refuge, a place the Alliance never would have known about if not for a spy. Had the elite Cyborg Corps been there in the final battle, defending it? And if so, had Leonidas been called away when the fall became inevitable and when the emperor wanted to make sure his only surviving son escaped?

“He will be captured,” Farrow said. “We have no intention of killing a child, if that’s what you’re worried about, but he will be made to disappear, and we’ll let the press believe he was killed. I’m sure you can understand why we don’t want him secreted away somewhere so that your people can trot him out later on, using him as a figurehead to rally around.”

Leonidas gazed back at him, his face giving away nothing.

“Doctor,” Farrow said, tilting his head toward Leonidas.

“Do you want me to question the woman too?”

Alisa felt her eyebrows fly up. Being questioned with drugs wouldn’t be as bad as being questioned by having fingernails and toenails ripped out, but she couldn’t imagine it would be pleasant. And what did they think she knew? What could she possibly know? She hadn’t been there when the emperor’s hidden refuge was destroyed. She had been across the system, engaged in the chain battles, taking down the Dustor 7 Orbital Shipyard.

“I’ve told her nothing of this,” Leonidas said. “She’s someone I hired to give me a ride, nothing more.”

Alisa knew the words were for the sake of the officers and weren’t true for him any more than they were for her. Farrow squinted at him, perhaps suspecting the same thing, and met Alisa’s eyes.

“You won medals for fighting the empire during the war, and now you’re ferrying around its officers, Captain Marchenko?” he asked.

“We met at gunpoint,” Alisa said, thinking of Leonidas’s admonition that she should save herself if she could. She loathed the idea of lying to do that, but this wasn’t a lie. “And technically, he didn’t pay me for that ride. He had a big destroyer pointed at my nose.” Granted, he had been telling her to go away when he’d been pointing his gun at her, not ordering her to take him anywhere. “What’s a girl to do when that happens?”

“I’ve seen the reports,” Farrow said. “You refused to give him up at Perun.” He nodded to the doctor. “Question her too. He may have confided in her.”

“Why would I confide in an Alliance officer?” Leonidas asked.

“A former Alliance officer. One you seem oddly interested in protecting now.”

“You’re supposed to protect civilians from the enemy,” he said without hesitating. “It’s what soldiers do.”

“We’re not her enemy,” Farrow snapped.

Alisa bit her lip to keep from pointing out that he hadn’t seemed to have a problem with blowing up the Starseer temple while the Nomad was stuck in its docks.

“We needn’t be your enemy, either,” Farrow said. “The war is over. Your unit was disbanded. We just need to find the boy.”

“And annihilate a temple full of Starseers?” Leonidas arched an eyebrow.

“Are you also concerned about protecting them? One wonders what you were doing down there.”

“Research.”

“Question them on that too,” Farrow told the doctor. “We thought she would lead us down to a city where we could catch up with the cyborg once he departed. This—” he flexed his hand in the direction of the deck and the battle going on far below, “—was an unexpected bonus.”

Leonidas’s jaw tightened, the first sign that he was worried with the way things were going.

“You’re welcome,” Alisa said. “Perhaps as a sign of your gratitude, you could refrain from sticking giant drug-filled needles in my neck.”

“It’s only a medium-sized needle,” the doctor said.

“I’m sure that’ll make it far more comfortable.”

The ship shuddered, and Farrow frowned slightly. Even though Alisa knew the battle continued on while this meeting was happening, this was the first sign that the Nautilus was currently being targeted. Either the shields had absorbed previous impacts so she had not noticed them, or the Starseers had flown up and found the warship in the mist. It was also possible the Nautilus had descended and rejoined the fray as soon as it had Alisa and Leonidas on board.

Farrow’s lips moved as he communicated subvocally to someone via his earstar. Alisa could not hear the response, but Leonidas stirred slightly at her side.

“I need to get back to the bridge,” Farrow told the doctor. “Where would you prefer to do your interrogation? The brig or sickbay?”

“The brig, and I want him out of his armor,” the doctor said firmly, his wary glance toward Leonidas promising that he wouldn’t underestimate him. “I have an injectable form of tyranoadhuc gas to immobilize him for the trek down—” he lifted what Alisa had taken for a tranquilizer gun earlier, “—but it will have to wear off before I can question him, so I’ll want him somewhere we can fully restrain him before then.”

“You heard my doctor, Colonel,” Farrow said. “Drop your drawers.”

“You needn’t sound so excited at the idea of getting him naked,” Alisa muttered.

Farrow ignored her.

Leonidas regarded the armored men and women lined up in front of him, along with the weapons they carried. Alisa had seen him fight against more people, and she wondered if he was contemplating it now. He might have been thinking to wait and bide his time for an escape, but if the doctor meant to immobilize him with that drug, this could be his last chance to do something.

His gaze paused on her, and he frowned. She hoped he wasn’t worried that she would be caught in the crossfire. She didn’t want him sacrificing himself because of her. She glanced toward the cockpit, trying to let him know that she would jump up and lock herself in if he took action.

“Sergeant,” Farrow said, backing up, “have your men grab him and hold him for the doctor. We’ll remove his armor once the drug has been administered.”

“Yes, sir.”

The ship shuddered again, the deck lurching beneath Alisa’s feet. Farrow tapped his earstar and mumbled a question as four of the armored men surged forward. The doctor lifted the tranquilizer gun, aiming at Leonidas’s head.

At first, Leonidas did not move. He held his arms away from his rifle, as if he meant to give up. He waited until two of the soldiers were close enough to grab him. Then, using their bodies as cover, he attacked.

With the soldiers in front of him, Alisa could barely see what happened, but two hulking armored men went flying, crashing into those who had stayed back. Weapons fired, and she jumped, catching the lip of the cockpit. The idea of fleeing from the fight rankled, but without armor, she was like a mouse among stampeding Senekda buffalo. Besides, once inside the cockpit with the canopy closed, she might be able to get the Striker in the air so she could use the weapons.

She had only managed to pull herself up and sling one leg inside before something struck her in the back and a nimbus of white light flashed around her. Stun gun. Her entire body clenched, muscles spasming in a second that lasted a small eternity, and then everything relaxed. Her eyelids fell shut. She had no control.

She lost her grip on the hull, and gravity dragged her down. She expected to hit the floor hard. Instead, she landed in someone’s armored hands. Unfortunately, that armor was gray instead of crimson. Someone wearing a uniform jerked her upright, and she felt something cool press against the side of her neck. The muzzle of a weapon?

Blazers had been going off all around her, but they halted abruptly, and silence fell in the hangar bay.

It took a Herculean effort for Alisa to wrestle her eyelids open. She had no control over her arms or legs.

She found herself looking straight at Leonidas, his red helmet back on, his rifle in his hands. He was less than a meter from her, but he froze, staring at her—and at whoever held her. The muzzle of the weapon pressed deeper into Alisa’s neck. She had no trouble feeling it, even though it would take several moments before she was able to move.

Leonidas did not try to reach her. Regret and defeat flashed in his eyes. Alisa wanted to tell him not to give up for her sake, that the Alliance men wouldn’t kill her, but perhaps it was good that she couldn’t speak, because she was not positive it would have been the truth. If Farrow believed he could get his hands on the heir to the empire, he might believe that sacrificing her was worth it. Bile rose in her throat. She did not know if it was an effect of the stun gun or just how her body felt at this betrayal, at knowing her people would possibly kill her.

The Alliance soldiers that Leonidas had hurled aside rolled away from him, collecting their weapons and pushing themselves to their feet.

“Back up and remove your helmet again, Colonel,” Commander Farrow said, his voice beside Alisa’s ear.

She hadn’t realized he had been the one to grab her. She had no idea what the future would bring, but she hoped one day, she would have the opportunity to press a gun to his neck.

“No delays this time,” Farrow added.

Leonidas met Alisa’s eyes, though she could not read the message in them. Then he stepped back, removed his helmet, and tossed his rifle and the other weapons not built into his suit to the floor.

“Strip,” Farrow said.

A soft clack sounded near Alisa, the doctor fumbling to load another tranquilizer dart. She imagined one sticking out of the wall somewhere in the bay. He needn’t have bothered. This time, Leonidas obeyed the order.

Something else hit the ship, making enough of an impact to be felt through the shields. Farrow cursed softly, his breath stirring Alisa’s hair.

You’ve provided us a suitable distraction, a voice spoke into her head, the same Starseer who had been communicating with her all along.

I’m so glad for you, she snarled in reply. Any chance you want to come up here and help us out of our predicament?

In front of her, Leonidas removed his armor in pieces, unfastening the chest plate and boots as the soldiers looked on, once again stationed around him and pointing their rifles in his direction. Their faces held more irritated expressions than before, and more than one looked like he wanted to club Leonidas in the head—or maybe just shoot him. The doctor edged forward, that tranquilizer gun at the ready.

“Think you can handle him from here, Sergeant?” Farrow asked, his tone dry as he looked toward Leonidas, who now wore little more than the snug underwear and T-shirt that he wore under his armor.

Even through her faceplate, the embarrassed flush to the female squad leader’s cheeks was visible. “Yes, sir.”

Alisa could wiggle her fingers but not much more. Reaching her Etcher was out of the question. Someone might have already removed it, anyway.

“Doctor?” Farrow asked.

The doctor leveled his tranquilizer gun toward Leonidas’s chest. Leonidas saw it and tensed, as if to spring, but the gun muzzle gouged deeper into Alisa’s neck. He met her eyes again and sighed. When the doctor fired, Leonidas did not try to dodge. A small dart thudded into his chest.

Alisa growled in indignation for him as he dropped to one knee, catching himself on the deck with his fingers. They needn’t have dropped him like an animal on the tundra. He would have let them walk up and inject him. Because he worried about the repercussions to her if he continued to fight, he would have let them. She blinked away tears of frustration as the drug took effect, and he tipped onto his side. His eyes found Alisa’s again. Though he did not try to say anything, and there was no betrayed wrinkle to his face, she couldn’t help but feel that he was silently accusing her, blaming her for what was about to befall him.

Farrow handed her off to someone else and strode toward the door. Alisa sneered after him and hoped he found utter chaos waiting for him on the bridge.

Her new captor hoisted her over his shoulder. The last thing she saw of the landing bay was the armored soldiers walking forward to pick up Leonidas’s inert body. They lifted him—he was as stiff as a plank—leaving his pile of armor on the floor. She imagined the Strikers returning to their bay, the doors opening, and that armor flying out into the void of space, lost forever.

Chapter 18

The mobility returned to Alisa’s limbs as she was carted through the corridors of the vast warship. Careful not to move so much that her captor noticed, she flexed her fingers and toes. She couldn’t see much from her position over his shoulder, but now and then, she caught glimpses of the squad of soldiers carrying Leonidas. They hadn’t bothered to find a hover gurney, and she hoped they were getting cramps from toting his heavy, muscled form. Probably not. Their armor would compensate and give them more strength. Too bad.

As they went around a corner, she turned her head enough to peer under her captor’s armpit. She could see the uniformed back of someone walking ahead of them. The doctor? She thought she felt the heft of her Etcher still in its holster, but she could not see it from her position. The soldiers either had not considered her dangerous—or they hadn’t considered the antiquated border world weapon dangerous. She wished she could show them the error of their ways, but she could not see how.

If she contorted herself quickly enough, maybe she could shoot the doctor, but she doubted her life would continue on for long if she managed to kill one of Farrow’s officers. Without Leonidas, there was little she could do, and he was still stiffer than a corpse back there. She had seen the tyranoadhuc gas used on cyborgs before and believed it would immobilize his machine parts—and effectively his entire body—for at least twenty minutes before it started to wear off. She groped for ways that she might delay the procession and tie up the doctor so he could not simply dose Leonidas again.

The ship shuddered, and the lights flickered.

“The Deadelus is down,” one of the soldiers carrying Leonidas grumbled.

“Commander better break this off soon. HQ was spaced sending us out to fight Starseers.”

“Can’t have them skulking about, making trouble right here on our planet. Besides, our fighters are through their shield, last report I heard. Their little fortress is about to be dead in the sky. If it isn’t already.”

A boom echoed through the warship, followed by a jolt much stronger than the previous ones. The man carrying Alisa stumbled as the lights flickered again, then went out completely. This time, they stayed out for a few seconds before emergency lighting popped on, the reddish illumination dull by comparison. An alarm siren went off.

“What?” came a surprised blurt from behind Alisa’s captor, followed by a gasp of pain.

As she lifted her head, trying to see what was happening, the man carrying her whirled around. Her feet struck the wall. She found herself dumped off his shoulder like a bag cast aside. She curled up, trying to protect her face as she hit the floor. Her captor sprang away, grabbing his gun and shouting.

Keeping her back to the wall, Alisa reached for her Etcher as she rose. It wasn’t there. Damn it, they must have disarmed her, after all. Her legs wobbled as she straightened fully, the muscles still stiff. The sounds of blazer fire burst out, filling her veins with adrenaline. Thumps, clanks, and cries of pain mingled with the weapons fire.

Between the poor lighting and the press of gyrating bodies in the corridor, Alisa could barely see what was happening, but Leonidas had to be free. Later, she would wonder how the drug had worn off so quickly, but for now, she was torn between wanting to get out of the way of stray energy blasts and wanting to help.

A uniformed figure ran toward the fray. The doctor. She lifted her fists, wishing she had a better weapon.

He glanced at her even as he lifted his tranquilizer gun. He was aiming at the snarl of armored men ahead of him, doubtlessly hoping for a shot at Leonidas, but when he saw her, his weapon shifted toward her.

Though she was still muzzy from the stun gun, she reacted quickly, distracting him by lifting a hand as if to grab his gun, then lashing out with a straight kick. She caught the bottom of his fist with the toe of her boot, cracking him hard. The tranquilizer gun flew free, clanging off the bulkhead behind him. He reached for a stun gun at his waist, but she attacked first, lunging in close. She curled her fingers and launched the palm of her hand at his face for a heel strike. His head jerked to the side to avoid the blow, even as he grabbed for her with one hand. Better than grabbing for the stun gun.

She whipped up a block to avoid the snatch and drive his arm wide, then curled her fingers further, this time for a punch. Her knuckles plowed into his unprotected belly. She followed that with a knee to his groin and a stomp to his instep. Picking on an aging medical officer probably wasn’t a great test for combat prowess, but she wasn’t above taking down an unchallenging target. He should have had the same basic training that she’d had, after all.

Under her barrage of blows, he stumbled back to the wall, his shoulders striking it. She grabbed the stun gun off his belt and yanked his medical kit out of his hands. What she planned to do with the latter, she did not know; she just knew she did not want him to have it.

With the stun gun in hand, she whirled toward the fight. As with so many weapons, combat armor would deflect its force, so she did not know how she would help or who she would shoot. The question soon became moot. Leonidas stood in the center of the corridor, still in his T-shirt and underwear, with two rifles slung over his torso on straps and two more in his hands. The armored men were on the deck, either lying still or rolling around, groaning. Some of their faceplates were cracked. All of the neck guards were dented, several in exactly the same spots, making Alisa wonder if he knew of some vulnerability in the armor that he had exploited.

“That shouldn’t be possible,” she said, dazed by the sight. “I know you’re a cyborg, but combat armor—”

“Doesn’t make a man invulnerable. For the most part, it’s designed to withstand impacts. The neck is particularly vulnerable to twisting pressure, assuming you’re strong enough to apply it.”

“I’ll keep that in mind in case I ever start carrying a hydraulic press on my back.”

“This way.” Leonidas jerked his thumb back the way they had come.

“You don’t want to stay around for the tour?” Alisa forced her legs into motion, her feet coming down in sync with the wailing of the alarm. The red emergency lighting stayed on.

“No.” Leonidas ran ahead of her, leading the way around a corner.

“How did you come back to life so quickly?” she asked, grunting when the deck lurched as the ship took another hit. “I thought you’d be out for twenty minutes.”

“I would have been. If the doctor had actually hit me.”

Alisa frowned at his T-shirt. “I saw the dart sink in.”

“Yes. I thought he was more likely to hit me in the neck, but I couldn’t have prepared for that. The heart was my second guess. My chest is a big target.”

“No kidding, but didn’t the dart go in?”

Leonidas juggled the rifles so he could reach under his shirt and pull something off his skin with the faint rip of a bond breaking. “Do you want your gauze back?” He held a wad of gauze and bandages toward her, his eyes gleaming.

“Uh, no. Especially not if it’s full of drugs and cyborg sweat.”

“The drug wouldn’t harm you. Tyranoadhuc was created with us in mind.”

“What about the sweat?”

“I can’t promise that’s innocuous.”

She snorted. “So you didn’t absorb any of the drug at all?”

“No, it was a ruse.”

“I had no idea cyborgs were such good actors.”

“I had a brief acting career in school,” he said as they rounded another corner. He fired at someone who jogged into an intersection ahead, faltering and gaping when he saw them. Leonidas’s blazer bolt streaked past the man’s ear, and he dove out of sight.

“What kind of acting career?” Alisa asked. He’d mentioned studying engineering before signing up for the army.

“I agreed to play the part of a tree in fourth year. To get out of penmanship class.”

“A tree?” She eyed him up and down, wondering if he had been tall even as a kid. “I guess that explains your convincing topple to the ground.”

“Indeed.”

“Did you use the Torovax?” she asked, still wondering why he had wanted it.

“No, I still have it. I was hoping that if the doctor shot me in the throat or jabbed me in a vein in the arm, I might have a chance to inject myself with a large dose before it took effect. In theory, it’s not supposed to have any effect on cyborg implants, but we found through unscientific methods that some of the men taking the muscle relaxer for pain shook off the effects of tyranoadhuc gas more quickly. So I might have come out of it after fifteen minutes instead of twenty.” He shrugged. “It could have made a difference.”

“Where are you storing it?” Alisa flicked her hand toward his bare legs and fitted underclothes. It wasn’t as if he had any pockets.

“Where it would have been found in a thorough search but perhaps not in a quick pat down.” Leonidas glanced toward his crotch.

“Ah.”

“I was hoping for luck.”

“And that whoever searched you wasn’t enthused at the idea of groping cyborg bits?”

“Bits?” His eyebrows rose.

“You prefer more anatomically correct terms?”

“I prefer terms that don’t imply diminutive proportions.”

“Oh? I would have thought that a man mature enough to be a colonel would be beyond being concerned about such labels.”

“Not really.”

She grinned as the hangar door came into view. He handed her one of the rifles and ran ahead.

There was not a window in the door. He waved the rifle at a sensor on the wall. When the door did not open, he switched tactics, turning a stream of fire onto the panel. Alisa jumped at the noise and destruction, then put her back to the wall and watched down the hall while he worked. The door did not respond well to having the sensor shot up. It bleated angrily at him. The panel smoked and sputtered.

“Problem?” Alisa asked.

When the door did not open under this barrage, Leonidas shouldered his rifle, gripped it with both hands, and pulled sideways. It opened with a moan, sliding into the jamb.

“No,” he said, holding it open with his back as he readied a rifle and checked the hangar bay.

Alisa edged closer, afraid the Strikers might have been recalled and the bay would be full of men. Whatever was going on out there, this warship was in trouble if it was on emergency lighting. The soldiers had implied the temple had been defenseless with the shields down, but maybe the Starseer darts had found some way to harm this craft.

The bay was still empty, Leonidas’s armor in a pile where he had left it. Alisa spotted her Etcher next to it.

After ensuring nobody was out there waiting to fire at them, he raced toward his gear. Alisa jogged after him, slowing to eye a shiny Striker-18 that remained in the bay. It might even have been a 20, one of the new models that she’d heard the Alliance had been rolling out. She had never flown one.

“Want to steal a better ship?” Leonidas asked, positioning himself so he could watch the doors while he donned his armor.

“Steal?”

“You could demonstrate the theft skills you spoke of.”

“No, the Alliance is already irritated enough with me,” Alisa said, veering to the pile to grab her Etcher. “But if we’re ever imprisoned on a nice imperial ship, I’ll be happy to steal something for you.”

He made a face as he fastened his torso armor. “If we’re ever on an imperial vessel, we won’t have to steal any ships. I can just order someone to give you one.”

“My husband used to give me chocolates, but a ship would be nice too.”

“Which would you prefer?”

“Probably for the ship to be made from chocolate.” Alisa started for the Striker-13, but then she realized they might have to take the new ship, after all. It would have a sensor key that would let it out the bay doors. If they flew away in the 13, someone would have to remain behind to open the doors manually.

“I don’t think the melting point of chocolate makes it sufficient to withstand the friction of entry into a planet’s atmosphere.” Leonidas snapped his helmet on.

“I’ll just fly it in space. I’m not that excited by land.” Alisa detoured to the Striker-20 to see if she could get into the cockpit. It opened in the same way as an 18, and it wasn’t locked. “I lied, Leonidas. We’re going to practice theft.”

She slid into the pilot’s seat, giving the gleaming new control panel a loving stroke. A holodisplay leaped to life, cupping her head as a half-dozen readings appeared in her forward and peripheral vision.

“Any chance the back seat is larger than on the last one?” he asked, running over in his armor to join her.

A door to the ship’s interior sprang open before she could answer.

“Company coming, Leonidas,” she said in case he couldn’t see the door through the Striker—this was a different entrance from the one they had used.

“I see,” he said, crouching to fire under the nose of the Striker. “Get the engines started.”

“Already on it.”

Blazer fire squealed, orange and crimson blasts lancing across the bay, half drowning out her words. Alisa fired up the engines and scrunched low in the cockpit. Leonidas could probably keep the soldiers from shooting her, but there was no need to take chances.

She ignored the preflight checklist and hurried through the minimum requirements to get the Striker off the ground. The men trying to get at them were problematic, but she worried even more about officers on the bridge. If they were being kept abreast of what was happening, they would override the hangar bay door access, and it would not matter if the 20 had a sensor key.

“Let me know when you’re ready,” Leonidas called up as he fired, keeping the soldiers pinned in the doorway.

“The Striker is ready,” Alisa called back. “Whether we can get out the doors is more questionable.”

“I’ll risk it.”

He fired several more times, red streaks melting dents in the corridor wall behind the open door and all of the soldiers ducking for cover. Then he sprang directly into the back seat, as easily as if it were two feet off the ground instead of ten. As soon as his butt touched down, Alisa swiped through the holo button to close the canopy.

As it descended, the soldiers leaned out the doorway, not hesitating to fire. A crimson beam burned past, inches above her head, and she cursed, scooting down even further in the seat. A second beam splashed against the canopy. Glad for its sturdiness, she raised the shields even as she took them into the air.

“Comfortable back there?” she asked.

“No.”

“I’ll have a stewardess start our drink service soon.”

“Ha ha.”

“I’m still waiting for you to realize how delightful my humor is, Leonidas.”

He did not answer. She might be waiting a long time.

Alisa spun the Striker toward the bay doors as the soldiers raced inside, firing relentlessly. The weapons fire bounced off her shields, not doing any damage, and she didn’t think it would. It surprised her that they were racing forward, armed only with the hand weapons, but then someone lobbed something else into the bay.

She whipped the Striker about, delighted by how quickly and agilely it responded. As the object hurtled through the air toward her cockpit, her fingers danced through the holodisplay. A neural interface would have been ideal, but this craft was matched to some other pilot, someone probably injured and out of the action. Still, her fingers were fast enough. She targeted the object as it drew close and fired before it struck her shields. The grenade, or whatever it was, exploded with a spattering of tiny liquid particles.

“Ugh, ship-rated rust bang,” she said, trying to bank without accelerating forward. The liquid particles would eat through shielding, much as the small ones could chew through armor. That would affect her ship far more than the blazer blasts.

She scooted for the doors, knowing that at least some of the particles had struck the craft. She shook the wings, as if she could shake off the attack, like a bird flinging water from its feathers. It probably wasn’t effective.

The soldiers ran back toward the door, and she hoped that meant they had given up, or at least that they knew the bay would depressurize and they needed to get out before it did. They did not stop firing as they retreated. Two men were bent over something, perhaps preparing another rust bang. The shield monitor bleeped, letting her know that the power was at eighty-five percent and dropping. Plenty of juice left for now, but if they landed a rust bang more solidly, it would not be good.

Alisa hunted for rear weapons as the Striker crept closer to the bay doors, doors that showed no sign of opening yet. They should have passed the automated sensor station. Any second, the bay alarms would go off, warning of depressurization. Or they should.

She found rear e-cannons, but she hesitated with her finger on the controls. She did not want to kill the men. All she wanted was to keep them from firing at her. She adjusted her aim toward a clunky life pod resting on the deck near the door. The Alliance should not mourn its loss too greatly.

As the soldiers preparing the rust bang lifted their heads, one pointing at her, she fired. Whatever they planned to do next, she didn’t want it to happen.

The cannon bolt launched, brightening the bay as the crackling white-blue energy streaked away. The soldiers dove for the doorway as the bolt slammed into the life pod. The unarmored and unshielded ship disappeared in fire and smoke.

“Are you able to open the doors from here?” Leonidas asked.

“It should have been automatic in one of their fighter ships.” Alisa hunted through the holo control screens, looking for a way to request that they open in a more demanding manner.

Her comm light flashed, and a familiar voice said, “You’re not going anywhere, Colonel.” It was Commander Farrow.

“It’s Captain Marchenko,” Alisa said, “and I really think you should reconsider. Your hangar bay is full of smoke already. I’m sure you don’t want to lose more equipment.”

Alisa had reached the hangar bay doors, and they remained depressingly closed. She had to sit the Striker down in front of them.

The smoke was clearing back at the remains of the life pod, and she could see more soldiers crowding the doorway. Men had come to the other doorway as well.

“Don’t they have a bigger enemy to fight?” she grumbled, worried that someone on the bridge would find a way to override the Striker’s controls next.

“If the warship’s shields are up, we won’t be able to fly out, right?” Leonidas asked.

“Right, but I don’t think the shields are up anymore, not with the jolts we’ve been feeling.”

Abruptly, the lights in the bay flashed, and the blaring of a new alarm joined the one that had been sounding. The clashing noises hurt Alisa’s eardrums, even through the barrier of the cockpit’s canopy. In her cameras, she saw soldiers who had crept back into the bay race for the doors. A computer voice spoke, but she could not hear it. Sooner than she could have expected, the hangar bay doors opened.

She hadn’t done anything to cause that to happen, but she was quick to take advantage. She piloted the Striker straight toward the opening.

You’re welcome, the Starseer voice spoke into her head.

Thanks, she replied, even though she did not know how grateful to feel, especially if this was the same person who had been responsible for them being captured in the first place.

Regardless, she guided them out of the bay and shot into the mist. It was disorienting, especially since she had forgotten that this entire battle was going on a couple hundred meters above the surface of Arkadius, rather than in space.

An explosion brightened the murky air behind her, a fiery orange ball so intense that it drove away the mist. The nose of the warship drooped, the craft tilting downward, and it started to descend toward the ice.

Alisa swallowed, realizing how close she and Leonidas had been to being trapped inside and going down with it. She forced herself to focus on finding the Nomad and nothing more. Already, the mist was returning, swallowing the warship, hiding its descent and crash from view.

She had no idea where her people were, and the modern Striker-20 controls had no more luck in reading her surroundings through the mist than the older craft had. If not for the tug of gravity, she would not have even known up from down. She guided them slowly toward the ground—the sea of ice. From there, she hoped to fly around slowly, searching for the temple and the Nomad. Even though she was skeptical of Mica’s flying skills, she hoped her crew had found a way to escape the docks. She’d had enough of Starseers, at least for now. Later, she would find a way to find the ones who had taken her daughter.

“You didn’t open the doors, did you?” Leonidas asked quietly.

“No, I think that was one of the Starseers,” Alisa said.

“If they helped us, it was for a reason.”

“You don’t think they knew how sad of a place the universe would be without my humor in it and were responding accordingly?”

Leonidas did not respond, accordingly or otherwise.

“You’re supposed to chuckle and agree when I say things like that,” she pointed out.

He stirred, the shoulder of his armor clunking against the canopy. That seat wasn’t any more spacious for him than the last one had been. “I did not wish to distract you from your piloting,” he said. It sounded like a polite way to say her humor wasn’t worth responding to.

“I didn’t know your chuckles had the potential to be distracting, but since I haven’t heard you laugh, I’ll accept that as possible. I might fall out of my seat in surprise if it ever happened.”

“I, on the other hand, am not in danger of falling out of this seat, even if a shoehorn were applied.”

She glanced over her shoulder. “It would take a very large shoehorn to move a cyborg.”

“Yes.”

The blue-white of the ice came into view through the mist, and Alisa pulled up to skim slowly along it. Inside the warship, she had lost all concept of direction, so she had no idea where they were in relation to the temple. All she could do was fly a search pattern and hope to stumble across something. She glanced at the holo map and the sensors, hoping something might slip through the interference. It did not, but the mist grew less dense ahead and to the right. She veered in that direction. It cleared slightly.

“Any chance that’s the temple?” she murmured.

“You know more than I do,” Leonidas said.

“Glad to hear you admit it.”

As the vista opened even further, Alisa saw the first of the wreckage. It was a massive amount of wreckage, and she thought it was the temple, smashed down into the ice with craters blown in its sides and the towers destroyed. But she picked out the mangled shape of one of the warships. She did not think it was the Nautilus.

Cracks stretched from the ice all around it, but it had not broken through completely, and soldiers were out on the frozen water, waving as if she could fly down and rescue them. Here and there, Alliance Strikers also lay, mangled and broken on the ice.

“This was the site of the fighting,” she reasoned, though she did not see the temple anywhere. The visibility was not as great as it had been earlier, with some of the mist creeping in from the sides, but she should have been able to see the temple. It had been huge and in the center of the cleared area.

“They must have moved it,” Leonidas said.

With a jolt, she realized he was right. She did not know how much time had passed, but she was sure it was more than the seventeen minutes the Starseers had needed.

“So, which way did it go?” Alisa asked. “And is the Nomad still with them? Or did something happen to my ship? My crew?”

She knew Leonidas did not have the answers to her questions, but muttering them aloud seemed more comforting than keeping them to herself.

Another massive wreck came into view, another Alliance warship. This time, the vessel had broken through the ice as it landed. The nose and front half of the hull had already disappeared into the black water underneath. There were not any people out on the ice. This had just happened. Alisa flew close enough to read the letters on the side: Star Nautilus.

“We didn’t escape that by much,” she said grimly as the craft continued to sink into the water. “Blessing of the Suns Trinity,” she muttered, hoping the crew found a way to escape.

In the little Striker, there was nothing she could do to help ensure that happened.

“Can you plot a course that will be likely to take us out of the mist?” Leonidas asked.

“I—” She jerked, as the holodisplay disappeared, and the ship started flying on its own. The autopilot indicator was off. “No,” she said slowly, “I don’t think I can.”

She leaned back in the seat and lifted her hands. The ship continued to cruise above the ice, turning toward the mist and heading into it.

“This might be bad,” Leonidas muttered.

Considering they had ended up prisoners the last time the Starseer had taken control, Alisa could not disagree.

Chapter 19

Long moments passed as the ship flew into the mist, skimming along a few meters above the ice. Alisa sat tensely, tempted to wrestle back control of the flight stick, but she doubted she could. At least there weren’t any mountains looming up for them to crash into.

The mists grew thicker as they traveled farther from the crash site—crash sites. If their Starseer controller was going to fly them all the way out of the Northern Mists, then his range was more impressive than she had thought.

A couple more minutes passed, and the Striker veered to the right, descending slightly. It wasn’t until the ship slowed almost to a hover that Alisa could make out something ahead of them in the gloom. Her heart soared as the bulky shape of the Nomad came into view. It was resting on the ice, the hatch open and the ramp down. It did not look like it had crashed. There was no sign of the temple, nor any other ships.

The Striker settled into a hover before lowering to the ice. Alisa had the canopy popped before the landing struts touched down.

“Mica?” she called. “Beck? Yumi? Is everyone all right?”

She scrambled out of the cockpit, aware of Leonidas landing beside her, his crimson boots bright against the ice. As she trotted toward the Nomad, he strode after her, one of his purloined rifles in hand.

A figure stepped out of the mist near the base of the ramp. Alisa halted so quickly that she skidded on the ice. She recognized the robed figure even before he pushed back his hood. He carried the same staff and satchel as the pilot had. Abelardus.

He looked at her briefly, but his gaze soon shifted toward Leonidas, locking onto his face. Leonidas stopped a few feet away, and they glared at each other, shooting blazer bolts with their eyes. Abelardus may have opened the hangar bay doors so they could escape, but he was also the reason they had thought it was a good idea to go up there in the first place. Leonidas, Alisa suspected, would not forget that.

A feeling of unease wormed its way into her stomach. The Starseer wouldn’t have done anything to her crew and passengers, would he have?

“They are fine,” Abelardus said, inclining his head, then looking toward the open hatch.

Mica and Beck appeared at the top and hustled down the ramp. Beck reached Alisa first, surprising her by wrapping her in a bear hug.

“Glad you made it back, Captain,” he said, lifting her from her feet before setting her back down.

Leonidas stepped close, his eyes narrowed, but the cool gaze was only briefly for Beck, or perhaps for his presumptuousness. It settled onto Abelardus instead.

Mica came in close enough to pat Alisa on the shoulder. She gave Abelardus a wary look, too, but smiled at Alisa. “That’s not the ship you left in,” she observed.

“I thought I’d upgrade while I was out.”

“It’s too bad it won’t fit in the cargo hold.”

“Technically, it could fit inside. I’m less certain about getting it through the door.”

“Maybe if your cyborg pushed from behind.” Mica nodded over Alisa’s shoulder. “Welcome back, Leonidas.”

Without looking away from Abelardus, he gave her a curt return nod.

Yumi and Alejandro came into view at the top of the ramp, both wearing thick coats over their clothes.

“What happened, Abelardus?” Leonidas asked. “You were supposedly dead, and I was imprisoned for your murder.”

“You seem to be a man who doesn’t stay imprisoned for long,” Abelardus said, brushing a few of his long, thin braids over his shoulder.

“You tried to frame me.”

“Not me. I was drugged and unconscious in my colleague’s room when all of that was going on.”

Leonidas’s eyes closed to skeptical slits.

“I think your chef knows more about the whole incident than I do,” Abelardus added.

“Uh, I know less than you think,” Beck said, stepping back from Alisa and lifting his hands.

“You were plotting with my colleagues to turn in your own crew mate,” Abelardus said, meeting his gaze. Alisa couldn’t read his feelings. Was he angry? She doubted he cared one way or another what befell Leonidas, but being drugged could have irked him.

“Not all of those ideas were mine, I swear,” Beck said. “And besides, he’s not my crew mate. He’s a passenger.”

“Only because I haven’t managed to hire him yet,” Alisa murmured.

“As I said, I had no role in that fiasco,” Abelardus said. “I was as much of a victim as he was.” He waved a few fingers toward Leonidas.

“My injuries—and your lack of injuries—suggest otherwise,” Leonidas grumbled.

Alisa did not point out that he had been hale enough to knock out six soldiers in combat armor while wearing just his underwear. There were bags under his eyes, and he looked like he should grab some of Alejandro’s strongest drugs and crawl into his bunk for a week. Or perhaps onto the table in sickbay for a week.

“Savage and Malhotra knocked me out,” Abelardus said, “and left me in Savage’s room so the others wouldn’t find me if they searched my room. Then they took a sample of my blood so they could synthesize enough for that scene in the library. Once the cyborg was imprisoned, they intended to visit him during the next sleep cycle, knock him out, and tote him off to collect the bounty money.”

“Where Beck would get a cut?” Alisa asked.

“I didn’t know anything about it,” Beck protested, hands lifting again. “I remember one of those names. I think they both may have come by for duck. And maybe I mentioned Leonidas and his bounty, sort of hoping, uhm.” He glanced at Leonidas, whose hard stare was now pointed in his direction.

“That they could do what you, as a mundane human, could not,” Abelardus finished for him.

“I didn’t want anyone to do anything for me,” Beck said hotly, indignation replacing his chagrin as he jerked his hands down. “I was just hoping for an ally.”

“A Starseer would be a dangerous ally,” Alisa murmured, eyeing Abelardus again. “And a cyborg is a dangerous enemy. I think you’d be wise not to have dealings with either, Tommy.”

Leonidas left Alisa’s side and stalked toward the ramp. She thought he would stop to deck Beck, but he walked past without speaking, punching, or looking at him at all. As he strode up the ramp, Alejandro said something to him quietly. Leonidas shook his head once and disappeared inside.

“Are you going to be that wise, Captain?” Beck asked quietly, looking in the direction Leonidas had gone and then back toward Abelardus.

A good question. One she didn’t have an answer for. She had no intention of kicking Leonidas off her ship, and she did not yet know what Abelardus wanted. What would he require in exchange for information on his brother, Durant?

“Guess we’re ready to leave this icy hole?” Mica asked, rubbing her arms and stamping her feet.

“Assuming someone gives us directions out of the mist, I’m more than ready,” Alisa said, though that was not the entire truth. She and Abelardus needed to have a chat first.

Mica, Yumi, and Beck headed up the ramp and into the cargo hold. Alejandro turned to follow, but he paused when Abelardus spoke.

“Dr. Dominguez,” Abelardus called up, his hand dipping into his satchel. He pulled out a familiar wooden box, and the hairs on the back of Alisa’s arms stood up.

Alejandro froze, his gaze locking onto it. “You stole it back?”

“Savage and Malhotra took it when they were setting up the cyborg and gave it to Lady Naidoo. They wanted the bounty money to start some project of theirs, but they had no interest in absconding with priceless Starseer artifacts.” Turning to Alisa, he explained, “Naidoo had been monitoring your doctor’s research and thought he might be on to something with the nursery rhymes.”

“Nursery rhymes?” Alisa looked to Alejandro, who had jogged down the ramp to join them as soon as he’d seen the box. That had been Leonidas’s idea, hadn’t it? From the way he had spoken about it, she had assumed it was fruitless.

“Yes,” Alejandro said, stopping in front of Abelardus, his fingers twitching at his side, as if he could barely keep from lunging for the box. “After some childhood verse led us through the mists, Leonidas thought it might be worth looking into the Starseer database of nursery rhymes and songs for children for clues.”

“What exactly are we looking for?” Alisa asked. There had been enough slips that she knew the orb was some kind of puzzle or map, but a map to what, she had no idea.

Alejandro pressed his lips together.

“Alcyone’s staff,” Abelardus said.

“Alcyone? The saint?”

“The Starseer woman who turned against her people and helped what became the Sarellian Empire to win the war over our kind,” Abelardus said, his lips curling with distaste.

“We consider her a saint,” Alejandro murmured.

“Of that I have no doubt.”

“The Xerikesh Amendments devote a chapter to her.” Alejandro clasped the religious pendant hanging from his neck, his face taking on a reverence that did not appear feigned.

“She carried the last of the twelve original Staffs of Lore, powerful tools from the early Starseer days,” Abelardus said. “Our legends imply that our people were much more powerful in the first centuries after the colonization of Kir, before we went out into space and began diluting our lines by mating with mundane humans.” His lips curled again.

Alisa kept from rolling her eyes. Barely.

“Your big mission is to look for some old stick?” she asked Alejandro, feeling disappointed. She had expected something more epic.

He stiffened, and she thought he might continue to ignore her questions about the artifact. But he must have realized that Abelardus had already let the bramisar out of its den.

“As Abelardus said, it’s a powerful tool that can be wielded by someone with Starseer blood,” he said.

“A tool that can be used as a weapon,” Abelardus said. “A weapon much more powerful than anything else in the system now. Legend says Alcyone was wielding it when she single-handedly destroyed Kir, leaving nothing except the Kir Asteroid Belt in its place.”

“Oh.” Alisa had never read the Xerikesh or the Amendments, so she was only vaguely familiar with the story. She knew that some of the history books reported that a concerted effort from the allied forces of all the other planets had destroyed the planet. Others said that seismic activity on the planet itself had been exploited by an invasion team. “Staff of Lore seems like an innocuous term for such a weapon.”

“The staffs weren’t built to be weapons,” Abelardus said. “They were tools for our leaders. They also act like computer databases containing vast repositories of knowledge, for those able to access them.” He touched his temple.

“Starseers,” Alisa said.

“Starseers,” he agreed.

“Then why,” she started to ask Alejandro, but halted mid-sentence as realization struck her like an iceberg. “You’re the one Commander Farrow should have been questioning,” she said slowly.

Alejandro’s eyebrows rose.

“Do you know where the emperor’s son is?” she asked.

“No.”

“But once you find this staff, if you can find it, you’d go looking for him? Or maybe it could even help you locate him?” Alisa glanced at Abelardus. Would he know if that was possible? If the staff could destroy a planet—she shuddered at the notion—finding people with Starseer blood did not seem like much of a stretch.

Alejandro clenched his jaw and said nothing. Belatedly, Alisa wondered if she should have kept her mouth shut or walked away from the conversation before revelations had been made. Was he even now considering if he should try harder to talk Leonidas into making her disappear? Or maybe he would consider hiring someone else to port him around the system. One couldn’t have pesky Alliance loyalists learning about plans to deposit the ultimate weapon into the hands of a ten-year-old.

She rubbed her face, wondering just how loyal she was to the Alliance after the last twenty-four hours. Or the last six months, even. She had been abandoned on Dustor instead of being given transport home for medical care in a modern facility, she had been captured by Alliance ships near Perun and accused of greed and harboring fugitives, she’d been visited by a former ally for the purpose of tagging her freighter, and here, Commander Farrow had been willing to kill her to stop Leonidas. Oh, that might have been a bluff, but she touched her neck, the memory of the muzzle pressed to it fresh in her mind. It also might not have been a bluff.

Even though she had reasons to resent the Alliance now, that did not mean she wanted to see the empire back in charge. She cringed to imagine some boy with access to the kind of power Abelardus had spoken about. She ought to do everything in her power to keep that from happening. A weapon like that should be hurled into the nearest sun, not brought out to be used by men.

“Why did you bring that out here?” Alejandro asked, waving to the box in Abelardus’s hand.

“Lady Naidoo thought that perhaps it would be a good time for the Staff to return to the universe, and as odd as it seems, you seem to have more of an idea of where to find it than we do.”

“The emperor had a team of historians researching it for years,” Alejandro murmured, “if not decades. His predecessors may have been the ones to start the hunt.”

Abelardus nodded once.

Alisa started to ask a question, but closed her mouth. She had already asked enough questions, questions that a lowly freighter captain should not know the answers to. Her involvement in this could only land her in trouble. More trouble. Yet, she could not help but wonder at Abelardus’s motives. She highly doubted that he or Lady Naidoo cared about the prince or who was on the imperial throne. They didn’t even seem to care that much about who governed in the system, so long as they were left alone. Of course, the Alliance had decided not to leave them alone. She grimaced, thinking of the crashed warships and the countless smaller craft scattered across the ice. A part of her wished she knew more about the politics—and now open conflict—between the two peoples. A part of her wanted to know nothing, to stay out of everything. This was all over her head.

“We will hunt for the Staff together,” Abelardus said, nodding to Alejandro, then surprising Alisa by nodding to her as well.

“Uh?” She looked at the two men. Abelardus’s expression was calm and knowing—and superior, as if he believed he was in charge here.

Alejandro scowled. He had planned to part ways with her here. He must dread the idea of continuing on with a mouthy former Alliance officer.

“You have a ship,” Abelardus said blandly.

She was about to point out that there were lots of ships on the planet and that Alejandro seemed to have plenty of money for hiring transport, but if Abelardus was going on this mission, didn’t she need to go too? He had the information she needed.

“Yes, I do,” Alisa said. “And it’s an extremely fine ship.”

Alejandro made a nasal noise that could have either been a protest or a sign of a sinus infection.

“I’m prepared to offer you free passage to wherever that orange rock thinks you should go, providing you can tell me about Durant. I understand the name is familiar to you?”

“I haven’t seen my brother in almost a year, so I don’t know what he’s up to,” Abelardus said, “but yes, Lady Naidoo instructed me to help you get in touch with him.”

“She did? Huh.” Alisa was surprised the woman had remembered their deal and planned to keep her word.

“I will send a message from your ship and try to get in contact with him. He’s fallen off the grid, at least as far as we know, so it may take time to answer. When last I heard from him, several months ago, he was visiting Cleon Moon.”

“What’s on Cleon Moon?”

“That would interest our people? I can’t presume to know what Durant was up to there, but… there is a Starseer school in the mushroom forests there. They often take orphans.”

“Jelena isn’t an orphan,” Alisa snapped.

Abelardus spread a hand. “Nevertheless, it would be the logical place to drop an unattached Starseer child. And it’s also… off the grid.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s been a while since anyone has been able to communicate with them.”

“Cleon Moon,” Alisa said with a nod. It wasn’t exactly a solid lead, but at least it was a direction to fly, a starting point. “We better go inside, get out of the cold and off the ice.”

Neither man objected when she led the way up the ramp, though Abelardus did gaze into the mist before following her. She wondered if he was looking toward where the temple had been or perhaps where it was moving to. She also wondered how much truth he had told her. Lady Naidoo had lied to her once. And Abelardus had been willing to use her and Leonidas, if not sacrifice them, to buy time for his people to escape. Dare she hope that what he said would actually help?

“We’ll find out,” she murmured. “We’ll find out.”

Epilogue

Alisa walked into her cabin, propped her fists on her hips, and scowled around at the interior.

As soon as they had flown out of Arkadius’s orbit and she had been able to leave the Nomad in the hands of the autopilot, she had finagled her crew into helping her check all the areas that Captain Khazan had walked through on her way in to chat. Chat and plant a homing device, apparently. Beck and Yumi and Mica were still searching the cargo hold. Alisa had checked the handful of niches and crevices in the corridor leading to her cabin, peeking behind all the hatches along the way.

She headed for the desk. That had been where they had spoken, though Khazan could have stuck something tiny and innocent-looking on any wall. She might have simply flicked it into the bed sheets. She had been sitting right next to the bunk, and it wasn’t as if Alisa had found a lot of time to do laundry lately.

Grumbling, she grabbed the soft minkling blanket and shook it, listening for the clink of something falling out.

A knock sounded at the hatch behind her.

“Come in,” Alisa said, tossing the blanket into a heap on the floor as Leonidas walked in.

He looked down at it and raised his eyebrows.

Alisa, rummaging through her sheets, only glanced at him.

“If you’re not too busy eviscerating your bedding, the doctor and I have come up with a promising set of coordinates to check.” Leonidas held up his small netdisc.

“We’re going to Cleon Moon before we check anything.” Alisa shook out the top sheet, managing to avoid snapping the corners at him.

“This is nearly on the way.”

“As nearly on the way as the Trajean Asteroid Belt was to Perun?” Alisa tossed the sheet onto the pile with the blanket and patted down the bottom sheet.

“That was more of a scenic detour.”

“I’m not sure that’s what I’d call a mining ship overrun by pirates wearing scalps like jewelry.”

“I was thinking of the asteroids. Some of them had aesthetic interest.”

“If you say so.” Alisa stopped searching for long enough to stick her hand on her hip and look at him. She had taken Abelardus on as a passenger, since he had given her more information on finding Jelena than anyone else had, but she was not enthused about using her ship to hunt for an artifact capable of destroying planets.

Leonidas was wrinkling his nose. “I believe you have dust mites in here.”

“Are your cybernetically enhanced nostrils telling you that?”

“I can see them floating in the light from your lamp.”

“Those are motes, not mites.” Or so Alisa hoped. The ship did need new mattresses, especially in the crew cabins. But the ship needed new everything, and other systems were far more critical than beds.

“Hm,” Leonidas said noncommittally.

“Does this mean you’re going to refuse to have your massage done in my cabin?”

She expected him to dismiss the comment without answering. After all, he hadn’t seemed any more enthusiastic over the idea of a massage than he had been about the ear rub she had offered him a few weeks earlier.

“I hadn’t considered appropriate locations for such things,” he said. “Have you collected suitable rocks?” He peered toward the foot of the bed, as if a nice collection of river stones would be piled there.

“Not yet, but I exfoliated my elbows in the sanibox this morning.” She pushed up her sleeve and displayed one for his perusal.

“I’m certain they would make interesting tools.”

“Careful, Leonidas. You keep calling my body parts interesting, and I’ll be so overcome with ardor that I’ll throw myself at you.”

He opened his mouth, then closed it again. Well, banter wasn’t his strong suit. She should be tickled he had played along for a while. Further, it had been many days since he called her humor inappropriate. Maybe it was growing on him.

“Let’s see the netdisc,” Alisa said, waving him to the seat at the desk.

Leonidas nodded, a hint of relief entering his eyes. She tried not to find it depressing that he would rather talk about the doctor’s mission than her throwing herself at him.

He laid the flat disc on the desk, choosing to stand rather than sit, and waved a hand over it to call up the holodisplay. It opened to a star map and coordinates.

“How did you already find a location?” Alisa sat at the desk so she could call up her own netdisc and type in the digits.

“We scoured the Starseer database files that Dominguez copied while he was in the library. There were only six nursery rhymes and one old ballad that referred to the Staffs of Lore, with only two being nonsensical enough that we thought clues might be buried within the words.”

“Only one in three nursery rhymes were nonsensical? Those numbers seem low.”

“I’m certain a lot of the old nursery rhymes that came over from Old Earth are only nonsensical to us because we don’t know the context. These seem truly silly, with one mentioning old names for the constellations suitable for racing around on a dragon’s back. We immediately thought the lines might be directions.”

“We or you?” Alisa asked.

Leonidas hesitated. “I’m the one who analyzed the rhyme.”

“You’re not the brains behind this operation, are you?”

“Only when it comes to math. Dominguez’s pre-medical degree was in biology. Appropriate for a future surgeon, but he admitted he chose it because it involved less math than the other sciences.”

“Well, your math-loving brain came up with coordinates that are in the middle of nowhere.” She pointed at the holodisplay that now floated above the desk next to his, the image that had come up when she plugged in the coordinates.

“I know, but we can go take a look. The doctor suggested I apply force on you if you resist my suggestion.” He smiled faintly, and she had little fear that he would follow through with that.

“The doctor can sit on his balls and bounce on them,” she said. “Leonidas, there’s nothing to take a look at. Not even an asteroid. According to my computer, your coordinates are halfway between nothing and nothing.”

“Then it shouldn’t take long to look at them.”

“To detour to them on the way to Cleon Moon would add an extra four days to our flight plan.”

“I could tell Dominguez that you’re only willing to go if he buys you chocolate. And a new mattress.”

“There’s nothing wrong with my mattress.” She scowled at him while avoiding the temptation to ask how much chocolate they were talking about. “Besides, don’t you think I need combat armor before I shop for bedding and munchies?”

“You do need combat armor.” Leonidas leaned his hip against her desk and scratched his jaw. “It’s expensive, though, and I don’t know how much money the doctor has to spend on this mission. There’s nobody back home refilling our coffers. That’s a certainty.”

“What happened to your mission? The one that required you to drag my ship to the T-Belt before you ever met the doctor or his orb?”

Leonidas lowered his hand, his blue eyes growing wistful. “It is… not a priority.”

“Because it’s personal, and you think it’s more important to put a super weapon into the hands of a ten-year-old boy?”

His brow creased.

“After you stormed inside, I got some intel from Abelardus,” Alisa said.

“I did not storm. I strode.”

“Stormily. By the way, I’ve already had a talk with Beck, but you might want to have another one with him, preferably not the kind where you bend all of his weapons in half. I’d prefer not to have treachery going on among my crew and passengers. It’s bad enough that we now have a Starseer onboard.”

“I will speak with Beck.”

Alisa waited to see if he would discuss his plans for the orb, the staff, and the prince, but he merely gazed down at his feet. He was wearing faded running shoes. They did not look that fascinating to her.

“I would like a chance to resume my mission, as you call it, someday soon,” he said quietly.

“Does it involve ancient artifacts or super weapons?”

“No.”

“Then I’d much prefer to help you with it than I would to help the doctor or the Starseer. You know the odds are against Abelardus having the same goal as the two of you, right?”

“I’m aware. I don’t trust him. You may wish to be wary about the information he gives you as well.”

Oh, she would be. And if Abelardus got in contact with Durant through her ship’s comm system, she would not feel remotely bad about recording that message for her own perusal.

“I’m wary about everything these days,” she said. “Even, thanks to you, my mattress.”

“I apologize for that.” He smiled at her, the sadness of the expression making her think mattresses were not the primary thing on his mind. “In addition to bringing you the coordinates, I came to thank you.”

“You’re welcome. For what?”

“For facilitating my escape from the Alliance by attacking that doctor.”

“Somehow, I doubt you needed my help. And I don’t feel all that magnificent about knocking out an old man who’d forgotten all of his military combat training.”

“He wasn’t that old. And he was aiming more tyranoadhuc at me.”

Still holding her gaze, Leonidas lowered himself to one knee beside the desk. Since Alisa was seated, it put them closer to eye level. And not that far apart. What did he have in mind? Her heart rate sped up at the thought that it might involve lips. Both of their lips. She knew she shouldn’t be thinking of romance or even flirting with him, but her body sometimes overruled her brain when it came to propriety.

She leaned her elbow on the desk, stealing some of the inches between them. He also leaned forward. His fingers brushed her knee as he reached under the desk. A knee had to be the least erogenous zone on a human being, but the light touch made her body flare with heat. She would regret sleeping with him, and feel it a betrayal to her late husband, but she knew right then that she would do it if she got the chance.

“Leonidas?” she whispered.

“Yes?”

A few faint thumps and scuffs sounded under the desk, and she looked down.

“What are you doing?”

He leaned back, pulling out a flat metal sticker. “I believe I’ve located your tracking device.”

“Oh.” Alisa doubted she had ever uttered the syllable with more disappointment.

Yet, when he leaned back and stood up, her body stopped tingling in anticipation, and rational thinking found its way back into her mind. Too soon. It was too soon to think about sex with other men. And he still wasn’t her type. Too damned many muscles.

“Khazan must have stuck it under there when we talked. When she was so kindly warning me that I might be in danger.” Alisa sneered. “Some days, I almost miss the war. At least then, I knew who my enemies were and who my allies—my friends—were.” She looked up at Leonidas. These days, she saw the man instead of the cyborg, but she hadn’t forgotten what he was—who he had been. “I guess you know all about that, huh?”

He was returning her regard, his eyes still holding a touch of sadness.

“Yes,” he said, and lifted his hand, brushing her cheek with his knuckles.

Three suns, what did that mean? Did he care about her, after all? No, she knew he cared, but did it mean he more than cared? That he did have romantic feelings toward her, but that he was avoiding acting upon them for some reason?

He lowered his arm, and she wished she had let herself appreciate the gesture, and maybe even reached up to hold his hand, instead of overanalyzing it.

“Leonidas,” she said, “do you—”

Footsteps sounded in the corridor, and Alisa broke off. He held her gaze for a moment longer, then turned toward the hatch as Yumi and Mica stepped into view.

“Hello,” Mica said brightly, waving. “Are we interrupting anything?”

Yes, Alisa thought. “No,” she said.

Leonidas folded his arms over his chest and leaned against the desk.

Mica looked back and forth from Alisa to Leonidas, and Alisa fought down a blush. Mica had figured out sooner than she had that she had feelings for their cyborg passenger. But it wasn’t as if they had been caught kissing. She had nothing to defend. Even if they had been kissing, she would have nothing she had to defend. Except that she had started to care very much about a man who was her enemy, an enemy who apparently wanted to find a super weapon for the young emperor and facilitate the empire reconquering the entire system.

Alisa massaged her temple. When had her life grown so complicated?

“We’ve looked everywhere,” Mica said. “We couldn’t find the tracking device.”

“That’s because Leonidas just found it,” Alisa said.

Leonidas held up the slender disk.

“You could have told us,” Mica said.

“What are you going to do with it?” Yumi asked.

Leonidas held it between his fingers and squeezed, crushing the device.

“I’d been thinking of sticking it on the next ship we crossed paths with,” Alisa said, “so the Alliance would hare off on a wild glow worm hunt, but I suppose utterly destroying it works too.”

Leonidas ground it between his fingers, as if they were a mortar and pestle, then tossed the mangled pieces on the desk.

“Thanks,” Alisa said, “I’ll make a note for the cleaning service to handle that.”

“The cleaning service?” Yumi asked. “Is that Beck?”

“He’s chef and security.”

“Right now, he’s not being either,” Mica said. “He’s hanging his head and feeling guilty after trying to help betray your cyborg.”

“Your cyborg?” Leonidas asked mildly, arching an eyebrow at Alisa, as if she were responsible for that term.

Alisa tried to brush it off with a nonchalant wave. “Engineers aren’t good with remembering names unless the things involved have sprockets and gears.”

His other eyebrow rose. Mica looked at his arms. This time, Alisa could not sublimate her blush. She wished she could retract the comment. For one silly second, she had forgotten that Leonidas had… if not sprockets and gears, certainly machine parts.

“And wheels,” she added lamely, as if she could fix the thoughtless joke.

“Hm,” Leonidas said.

Mica and Yumi shifted their weight, both looking almost as uncomfortable as Alisa felt. It had been so much easier when Leonidas had clearly been the enemy and they hadn’t worried about offending him. But when he had been the enemy, he hadn’t bantered with her and touched her cheek.

“As I was saying,” Yumi said into the awkward silence, “this might be the time to ask Beck to clean the latrines, since he’s feeling guilty.” She smiled.

“Cleaning the latrines,” Mica said. “Just the job I want the man who handles my food to have.”

“We don’t have a large crew,” Alisa said. “People have to be versatile and do numerous jobs.”

“What job is the Starseer going to do?” Mica asked.

The job of staying in his cabin and not pestering her with intrusions into her mind, Alisa hoped. “He’s a passenger. He doesn’t have to do a job.”

“Must be nice.”

“Speaking of that, are you planning to stay on a little longer?” Alisa hoped the answer was yes, since she was still low on funds and could not imagine taking the time to find and hire a decent engineer. It was bad enough her passengers wanted to take another side trip.

“What choice do I have?” Mica asked. “You didn’t exactly set down in one of the employment hubs of Arkadius.”

“You don’t think the Starseers would have hired you?”

“Maybe to clean latrines. From the brief contact I had with Beck’s dinner guests, they didn’t seem overly impressed with people who can’t tie cherry stems in knots with their minds.” Mica looked toward the maps still hovering in the air over Alisa’s desk. “Where are we going next?”

Alisa gave Leonidas a wry look. “The middle of nowhere, apparently.”

He returned her gaze blandly. She wondered if he was thinking about sprockets and wheels.

“I guess that’ll give me time to update my résumé,” Mica said.

THE END

LAST COMMAND

Fallen Empire, the prequel

by Lindsay Buroker

Copyright © 2016 Lindsay Buroker

Part 1

Colonel Hieronymus “Leonidas” Adler spotted the grenade as it zipped through the smoky corridor toward his group of men. He ran toward it, even though his combat armor would not likely save him from the power of the explosion if he miscalculated. He swung his rifle, striking it against the small, blinking sphere. The force sent the grenade shooting back down the corridor like a rocket.

It exploded as it reached the invaders, the flames brilliant even through the smoke. The walls and floor quaked. The ceiling collapsed under the weight of the tons of rock above it, and men’s screams were audible over the cacophony of falling rubble. Leonidas’s enhanced cyborg hearing picked out each individual cry of pain. He grimaced, but turned his back, leaving the men to their deaths. He had no sympathy for the Alliance invaders, not now, not when the emperor’s life was in jeopardy.

“Nice hit, sir,” one of his men, Sergeant Kearney, blurted over the comm. “We need to put together a forceball team for next year’s battalion picnic. You can be on my side.”

The sergeant waved from the smoky corridor ahead, smoke curling about his crimson combat armor, the full body suit dulled by the dust clinging to it. Dust and someone else’s blood.

“Make jokes later, Sergeant,” Leonidas said, jogging to join him. “That was the only way to the hangar bay.” He didn’t know how they were going to get the emperor out now, and he ground his teeth in irritation. This was supposed to be a secret palace. How in the suns’ fiery hells had the Alliance found out about it?

“Might not be a later, sir,” Kearney said. “Got to get all my jokes in now.”

“The timing is inappropriate. Tibilov, Stein, you still have the pilot?”

“Yes, sir, but the computer says there’s nothing left for him to fly. All the tunnels that lead to the hangar bay are gone, and it looks like the Alliance collapsed the bay itself. On top of our ships. How’re we going to get out of here?”

“It doesn’t matter if we get out of here. Just if the emperor does. I’m sure he has backup ships somewhere.” Leonidas sure hoped that was the case. “Keep that pilot alive.”

“Trying, sir. The Alliance drilled themselves a new door into the palace. They keep lobbing explosives through it. It’s terribly inconsiderate.”

“The colonel will show you what to do with their grenades when we get there,” Kearney said. “We’re putting him up for captain of the new forceball team. Think he’ll mind a demotion?”

“Retreat if you have to,” Leonidas said, ignoring the banter. “There’s no point in keeping that intersection clear now. Thomas, are you still in Command and Control?”

All of his men were on the same channel, and Thomas should have heard—should have responded—but he did not.

Leonidas growled, increasing his speed. Kearney, younger and with more recent and more advanced implants, was outpacing him. Trying not to feel all of his forty years, and the countless battle injuries he had received during them, Leonidas drove himself faster.

Another explosion came from behind them, someone trying to clear that rubble. The floor rocked and tilted, as if they were aboard a ship instead of deep within an asteroid. The lights flickered, and artificial gravity faltered momentarily. Leonidas flicked an eye to activate the neural interface within his helmet and ordered it to magnetize his boots. He caught Kearney before he could float upward, and pushed him back down to the floor.

“Boots,” Leonidas barked, barely slowing his run.

“Got ’em, sir. Thanks.”

Leonidas led the way down another corridor, heading toward the sounds of shouts and the squeals of blazer bolts. Alcoves lined the passage, places where men could find cover as they made a stand, protecting the interior of the hidden palace from intruders. They were empty. There was nothing left in this wing to defend. Even if there had been, Leonidas wouldn’t have had enough people. Only six cyborgs and twenty-five soldiers had been sent to guard the emperor and his command staff. The rest of his team—and the entire imperial fleet—were spread out, defending the chain bases, Perun, and the command outpost on Arkadius. He had no idea where the Alliance had come up with enough people for all the battles they had started this week, but reluctantly admitted it was proving effective.

“Colonel Adler?” a voice said over the channel.

“Yes?”

Another explosion ripped through the complex, almost drowning out the man’s next words.

“We need you to report to Command and Control.”

“Now?” Leonidas asked. “Who is this?”

He and Kearney finally reached the others, the men defending the large intersection with six corridors leading from it, several to key places such as Environmental Controls and Command and Control. And the now-destroyed hangar bay.

Rubble lay strewn about in mounds, and Alliance soldiers were firing from two of the tunnels, pinning the imperial soldiers against the back half of the large intersection. Leonidas’s men knelt behind the rubble piles, returning fire. Dozens of Alliance soldiers in blue-and-gray combat armor lay in the corridors, some buried under collapsed ceilings, and some simply still on the floor, the faceplates or chest plates of their armor torn away, all likely dead. But still more were coming. They must have brought hundreds if not thousands of men for this infiltration. They knew what a prize waited for them if they won.

“This is Governor Zhou,” the man ordering him to Command and Control said. “Hurry, Adler. There isn’t much time.”

“I can’t leave my men now, sir,” Leonidas said, dropping behind a rubble pile where two cyborgs in crimson armor knelt over a man in a black uniform, dust coating the material, blood smearing his face. His eyes were open, not blinking. “Damn it, Tibilov. Is that our pilot?”

Leonidas fired as he spoke, blazer bolts streaking down the corridors, keeping the Alliance soldiers from advancing into the intersection. He spotted another grenade hurtling toward them. This time, he shot it. It exploded in the air well before it reached them, but the already damaged infrastructure quaked again, and more rubble rained down, slamming into the floor—and into people’s helmets.

“It was our pilot, sir, yes. A piece of ceiling got him.”

Someone nearby cursed. “We can’t get to our ships, and don’t have a pilot to fly even if we find another ship? We’re going to die on this rock.”

“Stow that, soldier,” Leonidas said. “We’re going to charge them, press them back, and take one of their ships. Do you understand?”

First, he had to get the emperor and as many of the government officials as he could. That wouldn’t be easy with so many corridors collapsed, but they weren’t out of options yet.

“Yes, sir.”

“Adler, now,” Zhou’s voice came over the comm again, sounding breathless—and in pain.

“Sir, was Command and Control attacked?”

“Just get back here.”

Leonidas hesitated. Someone would need to lead the charge to push back the soldiers and take one of their transports. These were his men. He ought to be the one to do it. He hated obeying civilians, as they usually had their own asses in mind, not the mission, but if the Alliance had somehow sneaked into Command and Control, the emperor would be at risk.

“Our spy knew right where to hit us,” Zhou said. “I think I know who it was.”

“I’m on my way, sir,” Leonidas said. Maybe Zhou needed him to find that spy if he was still on the asteroid. This wouldn’t be the first time he had done special missions for the emperor and his staff. “Captain Stein, lead the charge. Get us a ship, and then hold it. The emperor’s going to need a ride out of here.”

One of the men in red, firing from another rubble pile in the middle of the intersection, turned back for long enough to nod and say, “Yes, sir.”

Leonidas gave Kearney a pat on the shoulder and took off down the corridor opposite of the invading force. Running away from the enemy made him feel like a coward, even if someone had commanded him to do it.

He sprinted around a corner, the servos in his leg armor giving him even more speed than cyborg implants alone would have, and he almost crashed into a boulder blocking the passage ahead. He reacted quickly, coming to a stop in front of it and whipping up his blazer rifle. He flicked it to sustained-fire mode and pulled the trigger. An orange beam lanced out, cutting into the rock. He growled at the time it took, trying to shear off enough that he could break the boulder and squeeze past.

Halfway through, he dropped the rifle, letting it hang from its strap across his torso, and assaulted the boulder with his gauntleted hands. He pushed against both sides of the line he had scored, his shoulders heaving within his armor.

The boulder snapped so loudly it sounded like a grenade exploding. He did not hesitate. He planted his feet and shoved at the smaller half. It skidded across the floor, thousands of pounds of rock fighting him. Finally, he was able to push it past the other half, leaving a small passage. Later, he could use those rocks for cover if he needed to defend this corridor.

He continued his sprint, leaping over rocks and broken ceiling panels, and finally turning down the last corridor, a short and unlabeled one that looked like it ought to lead to a storage closet instead of the command core of the empire, of all that was left of the empire.

A soldier stood guard at the door, but he stepped aside when he saw Leonidas coming. A couple of broken Alliance spy drones lay crumpled at his feet, smoke wafting from their destroyed metal entrails, proving that the soldier had been doing his job.

Leonidas gave him a curt nod as he raced past and burst into Command and Control. He halted almost as quickly as he had for the boulder. The high-tech office with its walls of monitors and holodisplays stood in ruin, control consoles crushed beneath rubble and shattered screens leaking smoke. The bodies of the dead, at least ten men and women, were strewn about the area, several civilian staff and also a handful of intruders in gray sensor-scrambling body suits. A tunnel had been drilled down from above, its dark mouth yawning open in the ceiling.

“Zhou,” Leonidas barked, looking around. The chamber was empty of life, but he heard voices coming from one of several side rooms. “Where are you? Why didn’t you call me sooner? You didn’t tell my men about this attack.”

“You were already swamped,” came the weary reply. Governor Zhou leaned out of a doorway and waved for him to come. Blood caked his bald head, and a gash in his jaw leaked more blood onto his clothes, on what had been a high-end suit, probably from some expensive tailor back in Perun Central. “The emperor wants to see you.”

Leonidas walked through another short corridor, past a demolished kitchen and toward a bedroom suite. The emperor’s suite. More broken drones and Alliance bodies littered the floor.

Fury simmered inside of Leonidas. He should have been called in. Protecting the emperor and his family meant more than protecting a damned hangar bay.

The suite had escaped the devastation thus far, and Leonidas could pick out all manner of reinforcements to the walls behind the black and silver curtains decorating the place. Emperor Markus paced back and forth on a blue rug in the center of the outer chamber, dictating orders to whoever listened on the other end of the silver earstar hooked to his ear. A small holodisplay hovered in the air before his eyes as he paced. Three of the command staff were in the chamber in addition to Markus, and Leonidas could hear voices coming from the bedroom too. The emperor appeared uninjured, and this room lacked the bodies of the dead. A small relief.

Markus turned toward the doorway and Leonidas saluted, fingertips to the corner of his faceplate, while wondering if he should remove the helmet. That was proper protocol, but protocol had to be bent when ceilings were in danger of collapsing.

“Adler,” Markus said. Instead of returning the salute, he waved his fingers for him to come closer. “You’re here. Good.”

“You should have called for me sooner, Sire,” Leonidas said, managing not to let the feeling of betrayal creep into his voice. Barely. He regretted that he had hesitated when Zhou first commed.

“I agree.” Markus walked forward and gripped Leonidas’s arm, the touch barely noticeable through the armor. Leonidas appreciated it, nevertheless. Markus never looked at the cyborgs as if they were strange and alien. He always remembered that Leonidas and the others had grown up as human as he had until they had agreed to serve in the fleet and to undertake the surgeries that gave them greater strength, stamina, and agility. “It was a mistake,” Markus added, grimacing.

“Sire,” one of the civilians said. “If we can leave, we should go now. There’s nothing left for you to command, nothing left to be done. We have to retreat while we still can.”

“What’s the matter, Tage? Afraid your stockholders won’t pay the ransom if the Alliance gets ahold of you?”

“Of course not, Sire.”

“The satellites are still online.” Markus waved at his earstar. “My men are still able to hear my voice. They need to hear my voice.”

Leonidas did not recognize the man—Tage—or any but the key members of Markus’s staff. Nearly a hundred staff members had come with the emperor, fleeing the main palace when it had been attacked, some of them, Leonidas suspected, because they had bought or bribed their way along. The Alliance would be after anyone who had been integral in the running of the government.

Markus turned back to Leonidas. “I have one last mission that I need to send you on, Colonel. It may be the most important mission of your life. You’ll be in charge. Everything, all of my hope and all of the empire’s hope, rides with you.”

“Send, Sire?” Leonidas said. “I’m yours to command, as always, but I belong here. Protecting you.” He couldn’t help but frown toward the command chamber, again feeling frustrated that he hadn’t been called in to deal with those intruders. “I’ve ordered my men to fight their way to an Alliance ship and claim it for our own. We can get you out of here.”

Markus smiled sadly. “There’s nowhere left for me to go. Besides, my people are fighting and dying down on Perun. They need to hear my voice, to know who they’re fighting for. If we can at least keep this planet…”

“Yes, Sire, but you can give them your voice from a ship.”

“Been trying to tell him that,” Tage said.

“The Alliance would find me as easily on a ship in orbit as they would here. They’re everywhere, an infestation left unchecked for too long. It’s become too great to eradicate now.”

“Sire,” Leonidas said, well knowing the man’s philosophical streak and his ability to lapse into quoting historians and pundits from ages of old. “You don’t need to sacrifice yourself.”

“Ah, but the sacrifice has already been made.” Markus pushed up his sleeve, revealing twin puncture marks in the vulnerable flesh of his inner arm. It looked like he had been bitten by a viper. “It was a drone,” he said. “One of the ones that came down with the intruders, the intruders that took us completely by surprise. I wish there had been time to call you. I wish I’d thought to have some of your people in Command.”

“What is it, Sire?” Leonidas asked, his gaze locked on the wound. The marks were swollen and oozing clear fluid.

“A fancy custom-made poison. The doctor has already analyzed it. He’s in there trying to find a cure—” Markus waved toward one of the suite’s side rooms, “—but he’s never seen anything like it, so he’s not hopeful that there will be time.”

“Sire…” Leonidas did not know what else to say.

“I have a day or two more. Long enough to do my best to rally our people.” Markus smiled, though it appeared forced. “There’s still hope.”

Leonidas clenched a fist. “You want me to go after the spy? Zhou said you knew who betrayed us, who blabbed the location of this hideout to the Alliance.”

That had to be the mission. What else could it be?

“No. She is… It doesn’t matter now.” Markus turned his head toward the bedroom. “Thorian? It’s time.”

“Go to your father,” a woman said quietly from that room.

“I don’t want to, Mother,” a boy replied. “You’re sick. I can’t leave you. I have to protect you.”

Sick? The emperor’s wife? Three suns, had she also been poisoned? Or was this something else?

“That’s very brave of you, but there’s nothing you can do, love.”

“I can. I have Starseer powers. I just have to concentrate, and I can figure out how to heal you. I know I can. I just need time.”

“Time is something we have little of right now,” his mother said. “It’s speeding away faster than light. Give me a hug before you go.”

“I’m not going,” the boy said stubbornly, his voice muffled, as if his face was pressed into her shoulder.

Markus closed his eyes, moisture glinting on his lashes. His face, always older than it should have been for a man who hadn’t yet seen fifty years, seemed ancient now, lines made deep by too many years of stress, too much on his shoulders for too long. He appeared in danger of collapsing.

Leonidas, looking again toward those puncture wounds, held out a hand to grip his shoulder, to hold him up if need be.

“Thank you,” Markus murmured, then took a deep breath and opened his eyes. “Thor, I need you to come now. Major Sadangi, are you ready?”

The officer appeared first, exiting from the same room that held the doctor researching a cure. A wiry, dark-skinned man, he wore a flight suit rather than armor, a helmet tucked under his arm. He frowned at Leonidas and pushed a hand through his short gray-speckled black hair.

“Sire, he’s huge,” the major said, a plaintive note in his voice.

Leonidas returned his frown, not knowing what this was about and not caring. Like the emperor’s wife, he felt the press of time as explosions continued to go off in the distance. His men, he knew, would give their lives to keep those Alliance soldiers from passing that intersection and getting back into these tunnels, but even cyborgs were not indestructible.

“All cyborgs are huge, Sadangi,” Markus said. “We like them that way.”

Judging by the major’s lip curl, he did not agree. “He’s not going to fit in the ship. And I don’t need him. I can get the boy out of here by myself. And there’s room, too, if you’ll change your mind.” Sadangi glanced at Markus’s sleeve, then looked away, swallowing noticeably.

“You would have me flee and leave my wife and my staff here?” Markus asked.

“Everyone should flee. If those cyborgs can get some of the Alliance ships…” Sadangi must have been listening in to the comm chatter.

“We’ll flee if and when it makes sense to do so. But for now…” Markus lifted his hand toward the bedroom, where a thin ten-year-old boy with sandy hair, freckles, and tear-streaked cheeks stood in the doorway, a personal bag clutched to his chest. Despite his youth, he wore a weapons belt with a small blazer pistol in the holster.

Sadangi sighed. “I’m ready, Sire.”

Markus faced Leonidas again, and Leonidas struggled not to wilt noticeably as he got the gist of what this special mission would be. Protecting a boy? What did he know about children? Nothing. Surely there was someone better qualified for this.

“Adler,” Markus said, “I need you to get my son, the prince and heir, away from here. There are Starseers on Dustor who will hide him away. Sadangi has the coordinates. The Starseers aren’t all with us—some are blatant Alliance supporters—but these are distant relatives. We can trust them. They’ve agreed to shelter and train Thor until it’s time for him to make his appearance in the system again. For now, my team is going to feed the news the story of his death.”

“Sire, it sounds like all you need is a bodyguard,” Leonidas said, “to make sure Thorian and the pilot make it to these Starseers.” He barely kept himself from shuddering at the idea of handing the boy off to the eccentric and arrogant people with their disturbing mental powers.

“We don’t need a bodyguard,” Sadangi snapped. “Definitely not a cyborg bodyguard.”

Markus lifted a hand toward him. “They need the best, Adler. Leonidas. That’s you.”

“Sire, I’m in command here. I can’t leave my men. They need me. I can comm Kearney or one of the other cyborgs to—”

“You are my choice,” Markus repeated. “Thor is my only remaining son. That he survive is more important than anything that could happen here. This isn’t up for debate.”

Leonidas shut his mouth.

“From either of you,” Markus added, glaring at the major.

“Yes, Sire,” Sadangi said, shrinking under that glare.

“The ship is ready?” Markus asked.

“Yes, Sire. Assuming the Alliance hasn’t found the backdoor yet.” Sadangi grimaced. “They’ve found everything else. They’ve had plenty of help.”

Leonidas wished someone would tell him who, so he could try to find and kill that spy. While he could understand the emperor wanting to protect his heir, any of his men could do that. He hated the idea of skulking away in some escape ship while the rest of his soldiers fought and died in this base.

“Thor?” Markus crossed the room, hugged the boy, and whispered into his ear.

Leonidas tried not to hear the private conversation, instead looking over at Sadangi, wondering if he would have trouble with the pilot. The major was eyeing him back, open distaste on his face, despite the fact that Leonidas outranked him.

“You have a problem with cyborgs?” Leonidas asked. “Or is it me in particular that you find unappealing?” He didn’t care if the man liked him or loathed him. He just wanted to know that Sadangi would follow orders when given them.

“Got a problem with cyborgs who think they’re better than humans,” Sadangi said as Markus continued to speak to his son—the boy was making one more plea, asking to stay here, to help his parents with the poison. “Heard they were planning on making you a general, so you could lord it over whole brigades of soldiers. Human soldiers.”

“I doubt anyone is getting promoted anytime soon,” Leonidas said. “As to the rest, I don’t think I’m better than anyone.”

Sadangi snorted. “Haven’t met a cyborg yet who didn’t.”

Markus returned with Thor, his arm around the boy’s shoulder. “He’s ready.”

Already familiar with Sadangi, Thor did not do more than glance at him, but he gave Leonidas a long look from boots to helmet. They had never met before, not in person.

At more than six and a half feet in height, Leonidas towered over the boy. He towered over a lot of people. He did not know if it would help, but he removed his helmet, so he might appear less intimidating. He did not know if his short, sweat-soaked black hair would help, but he at least ought to look human. The implants were all underneath the skin, so he did look fully human when in clothes or naked, but he knew the red armor scared people. There had been many instances during the centuries that the empire had existed when the Cyborg Corps had been called in to deal with dissenters and rebels, so history was full of stories of red-clad soldiers annihilating people in the name of the fleet and the empire.

“He’s scary,” Thor whispered to his father, the boy apparently not realizing that Leonidas heard most whispers.

“That’s why he’ll be the perfect person to protect you,” Markus said.

The boy’s face wrinkled up with skepticism.

“He’s also a good man. Go, Thor. It’s time.” Markus pushed the boy, not toward Leonidas, but toward Sadangi.

Leonidas told himself that made sense, and it was because Thor was more familiar with the pilot, not that it was a slight or rejection.

“Time to go,” Sadangi said, leading the boy toward the door. “You better keep us alive, cyborg colonel.”

“I will, Major,” he said, giving the rank emphasis to remind the pilot of their respective positions in the fleet hierarchy.

Sadangi ignored him, saluted the emperor, and walked out. Thor gave his father a long look as he left, and Leonidas thought the boy might cry, but he kept his chin up and followed the pilot.

Another chain of explosions went off in the distance, and Leonidas put his helmet back on. He, too, gave the emperor a long last look as he strode out, knowing he would never see the man again. After working for him indirectly, and sometimes directly, for nearly twenty years, the idea did not sit well with Leonidas. But he did not know what he could do. He was no physician, and it sounded like Markus had one working on the problem. Leonidas could not fault the emperor’s decision to remain in contact with his troops, his people.

Markus gave him a solemn salute before touching his earstar and returning to work, to reassuring his people. As if the end wasn’t near for all of them.

Part 2

Leonidas let Major Sadangi lead the way. He had not been told the location of this escape ship. He only hoped the Alliance did not know about it, either.

Thorian tagged along right behind Sadangi, keeping up with the man’s longer legs, his bag clutched to his chest. He kept glancing back, not at Leonidas, but at the corridors behind him, perhaps wishing he could run back to his parents, or hoping that they would catch up. Leonidas was surprised that Markus hadn’t arranged for his wife to escape to safety too. But if she had been bitten by whatever drone had delivered that poison, then it made sense for her to stay with a doctor.

Another round of explosions went off in the distance, and Leonidas almost turned on his comm to contact his men. But if they were in battle, his voice would only distract them. He wasn’t there and didn’t know the situation anymore. Captain Stein was in charge.

Voices spoke quietly from somewhere up ahead, and Leonidas pulled his thoughts back to the here and now. He increased his speed, touching Sadangi’s shoulder as he surged past. He also held a finger in front of his lips, hoping the gesture would be understood through the faceplate. The voices were too soft to hear, and he doubted the major had heard them at all.

Sadangi nodded curtly, not protesting as Leonidas ran ahead.

“Ssh, Your Highness,” Sadangi whispered, turning toward Thorian. “Try to keep your bag from clanking. There may be enemies ahead.”

Thorian held it tighter to his chest and slowed down.

Leonidas wanted to race far ahead, to make sure he eliminated the trouble well before the prince arrived, but he was the only true combatant here, so he also had to worry about someone coming up from behind Sadangi and the boy.

The voices grew quiet, and he suspected their approach had been detected.

Up ahead, the corridor ended in a large, dark chamber. A hangar?

Leonidas slowed as he approached the entrance, stepping as quietly as possible in his big combat boots. His eyes were as enhanced as his hearing, but even he struggled to see details in the dark hangar bay. All of the lights were off inside, a contrast to the brightly illuminated corridor. He grimaced, knowing he would be an easy target when he reached the entrance and was silhouetted against the lights.

He stopped in the mouth of the corridor, where he could use the corners for partial cover, and squinted into the gloom. He could pick out the frame of a single imperial bomber facing a pair of double doors. If that was their escape ship, no wonder the emperor had not sent more people along. It had more room for bombs than for passengers, and its cockpit was only designed to hold two comfortably. Thorian would have to ride in the small cargo space behind the seats. Leonidas hoped there were provisions for a long trip. He assumed the craft, usually a short-range vessel, had been modified for interplanetary transport.

A few crates were stacked to one side of the small hangar, and Leonidas pointed his rifle in that direction. He did not see anyone, but he thought he heard the soft inhalations and exhalations of several people over the thuds of footsteps coming from behind. It was a logical hiding place. The rest of the bay was empty, with nobody crouching in the dark near the walls—his eyes could tell that much. He did notice a large rectangular spot on the ceiling above the ship—a vent?

It might be nothing, but he kept his eye on it and on the crates as he held his palm out behind him to keep Sadangi back. Movement stirred in the shadows, someone leaning out from behind the crates for an instant. A man in combat armor. He chucked something before ducking back behind protection.

Leonidas fired, not at the man, though he was tempted. Instead, he targeted the projectile hurtling through the air. His blazer bolt streaked through the bay, briefly lightening the darkness, and slammed into the object. It exploded, the brilliant white flash blasting away all the shadows. His faceplate automatically darkened to protect his vision.

“Wait here,” Leonidas barked over his shoulder, then sprinted toward the crates.

The grenade had blown up closer to them than it had to the doorway, so he expected the people to be taking cover, their hands above their heads. He sprang into the air, leaping over the ten-foot stack of crates. Four Alliance soldiers in dark combat armor came into view as he descended.

“Look—” was all one had time to shout.

Another jerked his blazer up to shoot at Leonidas, but he kicked it out of the man’s hands as he landed. Instead of firing, he jammed the butt of his rifle into the closest man’s chest, sending him flying. He grabbed another with his armored hand and hurled him into the crates. Though heavy and large, the crates tumbled down all around the man, knocking into others at the same time. One struck the back of Leonidas’s shoulder, but he barely noticed. He batted aside a rifle pointed at him as it went off. The bolt grazed the side of his helmet and was deflected. The rifle flew out of the soldier’s hands and across the bay, striking a wall on the far side. Leonidas grabbed him by the seams of his chest plate before he could skitter backward. He heaved the man from his feet, hurtling him into the wall with enough force to smash in the side of his helmet. The soldier did not rise again.

The men’s armor would protect them from blazer fire; being smashed into a wall by a cyborg was another matter.

Leonidas spun, looking for the remaining men. The one under the crates was not moving, but two others had backed up and opened fire on him. The display scrolling down the sides of his faceplate lit up as his armor took damage. He snatched up his rifle again and fired at one man as he charged toward the other.

“Go, go,” Sadangi’s harsh whisper sounded from the middle of the bay, barely audible over the firing of weapons.

Had he and Thorian left the cover of the corridor? Why, damn it? They would be at risk now.

Knowing he had to finish his foes soon, especially since there could be other dangers in the bay, Leonidas bowled into his target like a wrecking ball taking down a building wall. The man tried to spring away, and almost made it, the servos in his leg armor giving him faster than average speed and strength, but Leonidas read his movements and compensated, striking the soldier when he was in midair. He wrapped his arms around his foe, turning him and bringing the man down over his armored knee. A crunch sounded as the soldier’s chest plate cracked. Leonidas hurled him into the last man standing.

The soldier dove out of the way. Leonidas started to charge after him, but the sound of weapons firing filled the bay. It wasn’t from any of the men he had been dealing with.

“Cyborg!” Sadangi yelled, then lowered his voice to bark, “Leave it!”

Leonidas sprang over the jumbled pile of crates and soldiers, and the bomber came into view. Sadangi crouched behind one of its wheels, gripping Thorian’s wrist to keep him still while they dodged fire that came down from above. Blazer bolts glanced off the spaceship and splashed to the deck. One of Thorian’s hands was outstretched toward a bag on the floor, the bag he had been clutching as he ran.

A rifle poked out from the dark spot in the ceiling, the damned vent Leonidas had noticed earlier.

“Hells of an ambush,” he muttered, firing.

Even though only a couple of inches of the rifle barrel stuck out of the vent, his blazer bolt slammed into it. A yelp came from the opening, from some ductwork that must stretch above the ceiling, and the weapon tumbled down, clacking off the cockpit canopy and falling to the deck. Leonidas made sure Sadangi and Thorian were not in immediate danger, then leaped into the air. The ceiling was more than thirty feet above them, but he cleared the bomber and flew up, catching the lip of the duct.

Trusting his armor to protect him from a couple of shots if need be, he pulled himself into the hole. There was only room for one person to crawl around inside, and he spotted the sniper scooting away from him as fast as possible.

Leonidas almost let him go, since the man had been disarmed, and he wasn’t sure his broad shoulders, made even broader by his armor, would fit into the duct. But the fleeing figure hadn’t gone that far, so Leonidas tried to lunge after him. His opponent also wore combat armor, so he would struggle in the limited space too.

Metal screeched in his ears as his shoulders rubbed the sides, but Leonidas caught the soldier when he was trying to turn around a corner in the ductwork. His gauntleted fingers wrapped around the man’s armored ankle. He yanked back, and more metal squealed as his prey was hauled back around the corner.

The soldier flipped open a blazer mounted in his arm plate and fired as Leonidas hauled him closer on his back. Leonidas lunged up and, with his free hand, grasped his foe’s arm. He squeezed with all of his strength, and the blazer snapped and stopped firing. The man screamed under the crushing strength of Leonidas’s grip. He kicked, but even the armored boots were not enough to hurt Leonidas through his chest plate.

“You were going to shoot a ten-year-old boy?” he growled, though he doubted the man heard him.

He let go with one hand, but only so he could grab his rifle again. He flicked it to sustained fire and aimed at the soldier’s faceplate. The armor would have deflected numerous bursts, but Leonidas, furious at the sniper’s coldhearted audacity, kept the energy beam focused on the helmet. Eventually it burned through. The man’s dying screams tore through the duct. Only when they ended did Leonidas release his foe and scoot back to the opening.

He dropped down, landing on the deck beside the bomber where Sadangi and Thorian still crouched. Sadangi gripped his pistol, as did Thorian, but none of their enemies were moving.

“Fire up the bomber,” Leonidas said, and jogged to the bag lying on the deck.

He picked it up and returned it to the boy, holding it out for him.

Thorian gaped at him for a moment before moving. Leonidas did not know if it was a gape of thanks and appreciation or one of fear. As often as Leonidas had worked for the emperor, he had never interacted with Markus’s family. Depending on what Thorian had heard of cyborgs, he might think of Leonidas as a tool to be used or as a monster to be avoided.

Thorian closed his mouth and accepted the bag. “Thank you, Colonel Adler.”

“You’re welcome, Your Highness,” he said as the bomber’s engines came on.

Leonidas waved the boy to the cockpit where Sadangi already sat, and boosted him up on the passenger side. He took a long look around the hangar before following him inside. A groan came from the direction of the crates, but Leonidas doubted that soldier would be a further problem.

A beep sounded. Sadangi must have hit a remote to depressurize the hangar bay. The power had come on and lights were flashing around the doors.

Leonidas jumped up and had barely settled into the seat beside Sadangi before the canopy came down, almost catching his hand as it closed. He thanked his cyborg reflexes when he evaded that fate, especially since the bomber was already lifting off. A few seconds later, the double doors slid open, and the rough stone, concave walls of a crater on the asteroid came into view. The craft glided out, and the doors slid shut behind them, seeming to disappear into the shadowy contours of the rock. Perfectly camouflaged.

It might not matter. As soon as they cleared the crater, they would come into view of any ships waiting outside. And Leonidas had no doubt that the Alliance ships would be there, waiting for their soldiers to need a pickup and to eventually finish off the asteroid with bombs. Getting out of here would not be easy. The night side of Perun was visible in the distance, clumps of city lights illuminating much of the visible continent, but that was not their destination.

“You weren’t in that duct long enough, cyborg,” Sadangi said as Thorian crawled between the seats and settled into the cargo space behind them, amid supplies for the multi-day trip to Dustor. A surround-flow holodisplay hung in the air, cupping Sadangi’s head as it showed him the asteroid and space around them, along with other data relevant to the ship.

“Oh?” Leonidas thought about pointing out that a major should call him sir or colonel, but the man knew that already and was choosing to be insolent. Ah, well. Leonidas had endured far worse in his career.

“Thought you might get stuck, and we could leave you there.” Sadangi grinned at him before returning his focus to the field of stars ahead of them.

“Wouldn’t that be a stellar way to reward a man who helped you get to your ship,” Leonidas murmured.

“Well, you did tell the emperor you wanted to stay there. And I was prepared to be vastly entertained by a grunt in combat armor stuck in a duct, his ass-end hanging out, thirty feet above the deck.”

Leonidas gave him a flat look, rethinking his decision not to comment on the insolence. It was one thing for the pilot to forget to call him sir; it was another to talk about his “ass-end.”

Sadangi cursed and flicked a finger at the sensor panel as they approached the rim of the crater. A display rose in the air, showing dozens of blips—other ships—dotting the space around the asteroid.

“They’re going to be on us like flies on a horse’s ass in a second,” Sadangi said. “Hang on, Your Highness.” He did not tell Leonidas to do the same.

“You have a preoccupation with asses,” Leonidas said, fastening his harness, the straps stretching to encompass his armor. He glanced at Thorian, wondering if his parents allowed such language to be used around him.

The boy did not appear distressed or disturbed. Rather, his expression was oddly vacant, his gaze unfocused.

“I like what I like.” Sadangi offered another grin, though it was a quick one. He returned his focus to flying and called up the navigational holodisplay. The computer projected it around him, ships and stars floating in the air.

One of those ships was changing course, heading in their direction.

“Already got company coming,” Sadangi said, taking them over the rim of the crater. At first, he followed the massive body, hugging bumps and dipping into craters, probably intending to use the asteroid for cover for as long as possible before shooting into space. “He’s not moving quickly, though. Maybe he’s not sure he spotted us.”

Leonidas reached for the console, unfolding the secondary weapons platform, a stick and buttons that always made him feel like he was playing a video game rather than helping with combat. He much preferred the ground to the sky, and fighting in close quarters rather than sniping at enemies miles away. That didn’t mean he wasn’t capable of doing it. He tapped a display to life so he could see what kind of ammunition they had available.

“A Stealth Fang would have been useful here,” Sadangi grumbled, swooping through another crater.

“I’m surprised the emperor’s people didn’t have one standing by.”

“They did. That was supposed to be our escape ship. This was the backup to the backup. We were completely sold out by those corporate bastards, cyborg. After working arm-in-arm with the empire for fifty years, they decided they’d have more opportunities for riches if the upstart Alliance was in charge. It’s going to be chaos out there with the empire gone.” Sadangi lowered his voice. “Maybe that’s what they wanted.”

Since Leonidas had not been told who the traitor was, he did not comment. Nobody ever told the Cyborg Corps anything about politics and internal machinations and power struggles. They were the fleet’s tools, nothing more. He witnessed glimpses here and there, and paid attention to the news, but knew that much more went on behind closed doors.

Up ahead, a squadron of Alliance Cobras and Strikers dropped out of orbit and aimed for the back end of the asteroid, the end where the collapsed hangar bay lay. Hadn’t they already damaged that enough? Apparently not, because they strafed the asteroid, blasting it with torpedoes and e-cannons. Leonidas gritted his teeth, wishing to attack all of them, to punish them for their audacity. It was as if they wanted to annihilate the emperor and everything that remained of the government. Maybe they did. Leonidas had not heard any demands for surrender come over the comm.

Sadangi eyed Leonidas’s hands on the weapons controls and veered them in another direction. “Don’t get any ideas. We can’t take them on. We’re just getting the boy out of here.”

“That’ll be hard with that one following us.” Leonidas pointed at the ship that was turning again to follow them.

“I’m surprised there’s only one. That could change in a second. I’ve skipped along, licking the rocks, as long as I can.” Sadangi lifted the bomber’s nose, and a field of stars filled the view.

The Alliance craft, a short-range, one-man fighter that bristled with weapons, was faster than the bomber. It swooped down and jumped onto their tail.

“We’re going to have to deal with it before we can head into space,” Sadangi said, waving at Leonidas’s weapons console.

“I’m attempting to do so,” Thorian said, his expression less distant now and full of concentration.

“Uh, sure you are, Your Highness. Maybe you can throw some of those blocks at it.”

Thorian frowned at him for a second before the expression of concentration returned. Leonidas was ready to use the bomber’s weapons if Sadangi got him a shot, but he watched the boy out of the corner of his eye. Markus had never spoken of it openly, but there were rumors that his two sons had both developed Starseer talents, the first in the imperial dynasty to do so in six generations. Erik, the older boy, the one being groomed for the succession, had died in the early years of the war. Leonidas might have believed the young man could do some of the Starseer tricks, such as telekinesis and telepathy, but Thorian was only ten. Was it possible, or was he being delusional? There had to be a reason Markus was sending him off to hide amid the Starseers.

The fighter fired at them, and a thud reverberated through the bomber as the e-cannon blast thumped their shields.

“Turn back, so I can target him,” Leonidas said.

“I can’t. Look—” Sadangi swiped a finger through the display filling the cockpit. “There are four, no, six more ships leaving their formation. He’s already reported us. If we slow down or turn back, they’ll be on us like blood fleas on a bramisar’s hairy—” he glanced at Thorian, “—neck.”

Leonidas squeezed the stick. He couldn’t do anything from his current position, and that frustrated him.

The weapons console beeped and flashed at him. He loosened his grip on the stick.

“You break my ship, and I’ll make you get out and ride on the thrusters,” Sadangi said.

“Your ship? Did you know it existed a half hour ago?”

“No, but I’ve been in it ten seconds longer than you, and I’m flying. That makes it mine for now.”

“I need silence for concentration,” Thorian said, and clamped his tongue between his teeth, his young forehead furrowing.

Leonidas snapped his mouth shut, feeling chastised. The boy was right. Whether he could do anything or not, arguing was pointless now.

“He’s veering away,” Sadangi said, his gaze locked to a rear camera display.

Thorian smiled slightly. “He believes someone else shot us and we’re floating destitute.”

“Destitute? That’s a big word for a kid. And what are you talking about?” Sadangi flicked a few controls. “He may just be going back to join his buddies. Maybe he saw the size of the brute manning my weapons and got scared.”

Leonidas watched Thorian’s face—it had relaxed now, his eyes focused on the cockpit instead of some inner vision.

He had encountered Starseers before and knew some of what they were capable of, so he suspected the boy had, indeed, influenced that pilot. It was alarming, especially since Starseers and cyborgs had centuries of bad blood between them, but he had to consider this a good development for now.

“The other ones are still coming,” Sadangi said. They had moved away from the asteroid and into open space, which did not leave any hiding places. “I’m pushing the engines to maximum, but it looks like this ship lost some of its speed when it was retrofitted for interplanetary travel. Those short-range fighters will all be fast. And yes, here come those six. Odd, the one that was on our tails earlier isn’t flying over to join them.”

“Can you make that pilot fire at his own squadron?” Leonidas asked.

“I can’t make him do anything,” Sadangi said. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking to the prince. Thorian?”

“I… don’t think so. It’s hard to make people go against their nature. Sometimes you can nudge them with a distraction, or make them believe they saw something they didn’t, but that’s all I can do.”

A beep came from the sensor display.

“Another ship coming into range,” Sadangi said. “A big one. It’s up ahead. I’ll try to get out of its path, hope they don’t notice us.”

The six ships were closing from behind, nearing firing range. Sadangi angled the bomber downward, trying to fly under the one heading toward them. The sensors showed it as a large vessel, a warship probably. Unless they lucked out and it ended up being an imperial craft, Leonidas did not see how they could get out of this.

“I don’t suppose you can convince those other six fellows to change course?” he asked quietly.

“I can’t do that many at once.” Thorian bit his lip. “I can try to influence the leader.”

Sadangi groaned. “Those tricks aren’t going to matter. That’s an Alliance warship. And it’s changing its course to intercept us.”

“Is it faster than we are?”

“Yes.”

The view shifted as the bomber flowed into a loop. It turned and straightened itself, heading straight back toward the six fighters pursuing it.

“What are you doing?” Leonidas asked.

“You’re trained for combat. I thought you’d recognize it.” Sadangi waved at his side of the console. “Get those weapons hot.”

“This may not be the best tactic, considering the value of your passenger.”

“Who told you that you were valuable, cyborg?”

Leonidas returned his hand to the weapons controller. “Negotiation may be our best bet. If we lose the prince, the empire loses… that which it can’t afford to lose.”

“It’s already lost more than it can afford to lose. I’m not going down without a fight. But by all means, comm them for a chat if you want.”

Leonidas tapped the communications button and tried to hail the approaching warship. He assumed its commander outranked all the pilots in the smaller craft and could order them to stand down. He just did not know how to convince the commander to do that.

Meanwhile, weapons fire streaked toward them, the lead fighters firing with abandon as their target drew closer. Sadangi swooped, spun, and dove, evading the barrage as best he could as he got closer, aiming to fly the bomber right between them. It seemed suicidal, but Leonidas understood the tactic. He had used it often enough in hand-to-hand combat against greater numbers. They might hesitate, worried they would shoot their allies rather than their enemy, and the closer the combat, the harder it was for people to react in time to dodge.

A one-man fighter came into Leonidas’s sights as Sadangi gyrated around like a drunken Delgottan cheetah. Leonidas did not hesitate. He tapped the trigger, and a soft thud vibrated through the bomber as its starboard e-cannon fired. A white ball of energy leaped forth and struck the other ship even as it attempted to evade fire. The projectile struck its shields, exploding with a flash. Unfortunately, the ship’s shields held.

Blazer fire pattered against the bomber’s rear shields, and a damage report streamed through the data floating near Sadangi’s head. The ship rattled and shuddered as he darted between enemies, trying to shake loose one right behind them.

Thorian gripped the back of Leonidas’s seat, fear quickening his breath. But the boy did not break down. He drew in a long breath and closed his eyes, as if to focus on some other Starseer trick. Leonidas did not know what he might do in this chaos, but hoped he could contribute again. Even though he had originally not wanted to be responsible for a child, he was already starting to see Thorian as an ally that could be relied upon.

A blast of static came over the comm.

“That’s the warship,” Sadangi said, taking them under the bellies of two fighters, nearly leaving his opponents in knots. “Guess they don’t want to talk to you.”

“Rude.”

Leonidas fired again and let out a short, triumphant grunt when he hit an enemy center mass. This time, it was too much for the shields to handle. Something exploded on the rear of the ship, and the pilot immediately dipped its nose, trying to steer away from the fight. Like an Octarian bear scenting blood, Sadangi dove after it, firing his own weapons as Leonidas launched another e-cannon blast.

The fighter blew up, and small bits of wreckage pinged off the bomber’s shields as they flew through the debris field.

“One down,” Sadangi said.

Something slammed into them hard, and the computer bleated a warning. Their shields dropped twenty-five percent.

“Damn it,” Sadangi said.

He lined up another shot, and Leonidas fired again. He doubted they could win, but he refused to give up. Another fighter sped away from them, smoke spewing from one of its thrusters.

Abruptly, all of the fighters turned, streaking away from the bomber.

“Uh, did we scare them?” Sadangi asked.

A shadow fell across them, blotting out the light from the two nearest suns. The Alliance warship.

“No,” Leonidas said, trying the comm again, hoping negotiation might yet be an option.

With the weapons on that warship, it could take this bomber down in one hit.

Sadangi’s hands flew across the console as he tried to escape, tried to take them away from the massive spacecraft. But the bomber halted with a lurch that threw Leonidas against his harness.

“Grab beam,” Sadangi groaned and slumped in his seat. “They’ve got us. There’s nothing we can do.”

Thorian’s eyes grew round as he watched the massive ship looming above them. Then he also slumped in defeat. And fear.

A knife sliced into Leonidas’s heart, the bitter cut of failure. Thorian had been taken from his parents, and now the men Markus had trusted to get him to safety were letting his enemies come take him.

Part 3

Leonidas could feel the power of the grab beam locked onto them even if he could not see the energy. The bomber lurched and was pulled sideways. Sadangi fought it, gunning the engines, but the invisible beam held them, drawing them toward the belly of the massive warship where a rectangular forcefield marked the entrance to one of its large hangar bays.

Sadangi cursed colorfully and thumped the side of his fist repeatedly on the canopy over his head.

“The control console doesn’t complain when you take your aggressions out on the ship,” Leonidas noted, remembering the irritated beep he had received from the weapons station.

“Because my puny human hands aren’t going to do any damage.”

“My hands are also human,” Leonidas said.

As he had so many times before, he told himself that this man’s opinion of him did not matter, but it was always hard to deal with the statements that implied he wasn’t human, just because of some implants and surgeries.

“Sure they are. That’s why you left dents on the stick there.”

“We don’t have much time before we land in their bay,” Leonidas said, forcing his feelings aside. “We need to figure out a course of action. I can leap out and attack, try to drive them out of the bay and find the forcefield controls so you can fly back out, but there would be nothing to keep the grab beam from catching you again.”

“Drive them out? Cyborg, you’re just one man, not a fleet. They’ll have a legion of armored soldiers waiting for us.”

“A legion? To deal with a two-man prisoner craft? That seems unlikely.”

“Fine, half a legion. And it’s not like we’ve been damaged so much that we can’t fight. I bet they know we have the prince with us. Otherwise, they would have blasted our ship out of the stars.”

“They shouldn’t know who we have, just that we were fleeing the base. They may believe we have the emperor himself.”

“I don’t see how that improves things. Or reduces the likelihood of dealing with legions.”

Leonidas turned in his seat to look at Thorian. “Is there any chance you could fiddle with the equipment that operates the grab beam? Turn it off so we can escape?”

Thorian licked his lips. “My abilities… are all right when I’m looking at something, and it’s familiar. And I do know lots about mechanical things—they’re easier than people’s brains. But we’re physically a long ways from the engine room, if that’s even where it is. I don’t know. I haven’t been on any Alliance ships.” His gaze dropped. “My brother would have known. He had all the ships memorized—ours and theirs. Nobody thought… I mean, he wasn’t supposed to die. I wasn’t supposed to—”

Leonidas reached over and rested his hand on the boy’s shoulder. He did not know anything about being fatherly and had little experience with children in general, but if Thorian somehow had the talent to do something neither he nor Sadangi could, he had to try. Leonidas had to convince him to try.

“I know everything about Alliance warships,” he said. “I can tell you exactly where it is. Or show you on a map.”

Thorian lifted his gaze.

“We’re getting close to that bay,” Sadangi said. “If anything’s going to be done, it would have to be soon.”

“Could you show me in your head?” Thorian whispered.

“What?” Leonidas asked.

“That would be easiest, to see the map and also what the room looks like from the inside. Have you been inside an Alliance warship?”

Leonidas thought of the boarding parties he had been on, the battles he and his men had waged in the corridors of ships just like the one hovering over them.

“Many times,” he said, though the idea of having someone looking into his mind made him uneasy. Had the boy been properly trained in these talents? What if he did some kind of damage to Leonidas’s brain? Was that possible?

“I will just look,” Thorian said. “Think of it, please. Show me.”

It came out as a command, and Leonidas realized that was perfectly acceptable. Markus may have told him to get this ship to safety, but Thorian was the heir, the future emperor—if any of the empire remained after the Alliance was through.

“Go ahead,” Leonidas said. “I’m thinking of it.”

Thorian closed his eyes and reached out and touched the side of Leonidas’s helmet. Leonidas almost offered to remove it, but he did not want to break the boy’s concentration. Besides, assuming this didn’t work, he would have to fight soon. He could not let them have Thorian, no matter how inevitable the odds.

Thorian’s touch was curious and inquisitive, not like that of Starseer enemies Leonidas had met in battle in the past, men and women who had forced their way into his thoughts, stealing critical intelligence and raking their mental talons painfully through his brain as they did so. Thorian was nothing like that. His touch was gentle, almost as if he cared if he made Leonidas uncomfortable. They barely knew each other. It would be surprising if he did care, if he had that kind of empathy. And yet Leonidas sensed that he did.

For some reason, the closeness of the connection left Leonidas wondering what it would be like to have a relationship with a child, with a son or daughter. Occasionally, he had contemplated the possibility of having children and a wife, in those quiet moments when he felt a sense of loneliness and longing. He’d wondered if a family might fill that void in his heart in a way that comrades in arms could not. But he belonged to the fleet, body and soul. The empire had seen to that. A family was not an option.

Remembering the mission and the danger, Leonidas forced his thoughts to pertinent matters. He thought about the last time he had been in a warship’s engine room, of the men he had commanded to charge inside, to cripple the ship from within. They raced in, weapons firing, laying waste to the instrument panels as well as to the soldiers trying to protect their engines. He saw the grab beam panel in his mind, remembered firing at it to destroy the ship’s hold on an imperial transport. Alliance soldiers in combat armor raced in, distracting his men from their destruction, forcing an all-out battle in engineering. His troops overpowered the Alliance men, but not before Court, one of his sergeants, went down, a rust bang spattering and eating through his armor, making him vulnerable to blazer fire. Three years later, Leonidas could still distinctly recall the utter pain on Court’s face as he died under a barrage of Alliance fire.

He tried to shift away from those thoughts, instead returning to the image of the panel in his mind, especially when he remembered that a ten-year-old boy was experiencing these bloody, gruesome memories with him. With decades of such memories, his mind could not be the best place for a child to explore.

The bomber shuddered, and Thorian drew back, lowering his hand.

“If anyone is going to do something brilliant, it should be soon.” Sadangi pointed to the massive rectangle in the hull, queues of Strikers and Cobras now visible in the hangar bay. The forcefield had dropped, inviting the bomber in. As if it wanted to go in.

“I’ll try,” Thorian whispered.

Sadangi eyed Leonidas, his look making it clear he expected him to do something, not the prince.

“If you don’t like my plan to jump out and attack, we can shoot up the bay once the grab beam lets go of us,” Leonidas suggested, touching the weapons stick. He was in command here, but he had a dearth of good ideas and was open to hearing better ones. “They haven’t damaged this ship yet.”

“Yet.” Sadangi’s gaze shifted to the display blinking the shield power. “We can also keep our shields up when we get in there, but they’ll have the firepower to take us down eventually. Look, see those cannons on the far wall? This isn’t their first captured enemy ship, I’ll wager.”

“Likely not.”

“If we get into a firefight with them, we risk being blown up. We risk our cargo being blown up.” Sadangi looked back at Thorian.

“Yes,” Leonidas said. “My natural inclination is to go down fighting, but more than our lives are at stake here. We’ll see what they have to say before committing to battle. If there is to be battle, I’d rather be on the ground for it.”

Sadangi snorted. “I’d rather be in a cockpit.”

“I’ll go out first, talk to them. See if I can find an opportunity. You stay low, out of sight and out of mind. I’ll keep them focused on me. If a fight breaks out, I’ll battle them on the deck. You shoot from the ship. Thorian will stay behind your seat and out of sight. Unless he can dither with their grab beam ahead of time, I’ll have to charge into the ship and find it and disable it.”

“By yourself?”

Leonidas nodded. “If I can get there and disable it, you may be able to fly away with the prince. What happens to me after that matters little.”

Sadangi shoved a hand through his hair. “Does anything we do matter anymore? The end is…”

“Not inevitable. Never give up. You never know when you’ll catch the other side unprepared. Thorian?” Leonidas looked at the boy’s face, which was scrunched with concentration as the bomber was drawn through the hangar bay opening. If he was going to do something, it had to be soon.

Thorian gasped, as if he’d been holding his breath. He opened his eyes and shook his head. “I’m sorry. I’m not strong enough. I couldn’t find it. It must be too far. I’m good with mechanics, better than with people, I swear. But even with your memories, it’s hard for me to pinpoint the grab beam panel. We have to go there, so I can sabotage it in person.”

“If we’re there in person, I can sabotage it myself,” Leonidas said. “And that will be my goal.”

“Oh.” Thorian’s small shoulders slumped. “I’m sorry I’m not useful. A prince should be useful. My brother would have been able to disable it.”

Leonidas lifted a hand toward the boy, but the bomber clacked down, distracting him.

“Pressurization in progress,” Sadangi said glumly, looking toward a bank of Glastica windows overlooking the bay.

Uniformed soldiers watched from the control room up there, and Leonidas clenched his fist as he realized something. “This isn’t a Viper-class warship 880-A, it’s an 880-B.”

“How does that matter?” Sadangi asked.

“I was remembering an A.” Leonidas met Thorian’s eyes. “The grab beam generator isn’t in engineering on this model. It’s up there, in the hangar bay control room. That’s why you couldn’t find the right panel, Thorian.”

“Does that change anything now?” Sadangi asked. “Company’s coming.”

He pointed at one of three doors that were opening on the flight deck level, all of them spitting armed soldiers in blue-and-gray combat armor into the bay. The forcefield had gone up behind the bomber, sealing them in.

“It means we don’t have to go as far to disable the grab beam,” Leonidas said.

“Just through that legion,” Sadangi said.

“That’s barely a company of men.”

“Oh, is that all?”

Leonidas gripped Sadangi’s arm. “Listen, Major. We make a deal right here.” He was aware of the soldiers closing, three long squadrons coming out to check on their new prize. “No matter what happens, we don’t let them capture Thorian. Agreed?”

He expected a sarcastic response from the irreverent pilot, but Sadangi clasped his arm and met his eyes. “Agreed.”

“They’re rolling in mobile cannons,” Thorian whispered, looking between them and toward the closest door.

“They’re not sure if we’ll surrender or if they’ll have to peel us out of the bomber,” Sadangi said.

“Lower the shields before they get too set on that. Let them think we’ll surrender.” Leonidas checked his helmet fasteners and his weapons. “It’s time for me to go out and talk.”

“Uh huh, and when I do my talking, do you have any particular targets in mind?”

“Just keep these men busy. I’ll handle the rest.”

“Cocky bastard,” Sadangi muttered.

“Imperial bomber,” came a snotty voice over a speaker. “Lower your shields and surrender. If you attempt to use your ship’s weapons, we will annihilate you.”

Sadangi tapped the comm button, ordering it to broadcast externally. “You sure you want to do that? An annihilation will make a huge mess in your hangar bay.”

Leonidas pushed Sadangi’s arm away from the comm controls. “I said I’ll handle the talking.”

“They might not appreciate your cyborg stuffiness.”

“We have privates on here to clean up messes,” the voice said over the speaker. “And we like to keep them busy, make sure they earn their pay.”

Sadangi snorted. “I thought these people were all volunteers. Do Alliance rebels get salaries now?”

“Maybe they do when the war is going well for their side,” Leonidas said grimly. “Lower the shields, so I can get out.”

“You’re in charge,” Sadangi said, not looking happy as he swatted a button.

“Now you acknowledge it,” Leonidas murmured.

The shields lowered as a second mobile cannon was floated into the hangar bay. Leonidas tapped the button to open the cockpit, nerves tangling in his belly. He had fought in hundreds of battles over the years, but he still got nervous before a fight. It was also hard not to worry that the Alliance might choose the annihilation option without waiting to talk. But no, they could have done that outside. They had captured the bomber for a reason.

Dozens of rifles pointed up at Leonidas as he climbed out of the cockpit. He twitched a finger, waving for Sadangi to slump down in his seat so he would be out of sight from the deck. Thorian was already curled into a ball. Leonidas wondered if his Starseer abilities gave him insight into the thoughts of the Alliance soldiers. If so, he could not decide if that was a good thing or not.

Leonidas picked out one of the squadron leaders and said, “Are you looking for our surrender? If so, what are your terms?”

“Drop your weapons, and strip your armor, cyborg.” It was the voice from the speaker again instead of the soldier he had addressed.

Leonidas looked toward the windows and picked out someone wearing captain’s rank pins. “I don’t care for those terms.”

“Search the ship,” the captain ordered. “Find out if he’s even aboard.”

Several soldiers walked toward the bomber, approaching the cockpit on the far side from where Leonidas stood. He watched, debating whether to stop them. He could put up a fight, even against this many men, but they would ultimately be able to blast through his armor and kill him unless Sadangi could distract most of them by firing into the bay. As soon as he was pulled out of the cockpit, that would not be an option.

A couple of soldiers in the rear of one of the squadrons lowered their weapons and dug into their belts. Leonidas did not look directly at them, keeping his gaze instead toward the ones approaching the bomber, but he watched them with his peripheral vision. One was pulling out rust bangs. Another produced a couple of fluidwraps, balls they could hurl that would unfurl into energy netting, something that even Leonidas would struggle to break free of.

One of the armored men pulled himself up to the cockpit and climbed over Sadangi to look in the back. He was blithely unconcerned that Sadangi might produce a weapon that could hurt him.

“Ouch, you metal buffoon,” Sadangi growled. “My balls are not the proper resting place for your foot.”

“It’s not the emperor,” the soldier called out, turning toward the windows. “It’s a boy.”

Leonidas had wondered if they’d thought the emperor was their passenger. That would explain why they had wanted the ship captured. The emperor could be compelled to order all of his forces across the system to stand down, to end this war earlier, with fewer losses of men and equipment from the Alliance. The soldiers might also find Thorian valuable, but he wouldn’t be able to do the same thing. They might think to use him to force his father to comply with their demands. Leonidas supposed it was vain to hope that they wouldn’t recognize him or his significance.

“A boy?” the captain asked. His head bent toward a console, and a holodisplay appeared in the air over the flight deck. Thorian’s face was centered in it. In the display, he was a year or two younger and wearing a quasi-military uniform as he gazed at the camera, but he was still easy to identify. “This boy?”

So much for the Alliance men not recognizing him.

“Yes, sir,” the soldier said, after a couple more glances. “That’s him.”

The captain murmured something to the other officers in the control room with him. Even with his enhanced ears, Leonidas could not hear the words through the Glastica. Thus, he was caught by surprise when the captain spoke his next words.

“Kill him. Kill them all.”

The soldier must have been surprised, too, because he hesitated. Leonidas had time to spring into the cockpit and grab him.

Dozens of rifles started firing as he did so, and the soldier tried to jerk up his own weapon to shoot Leonidas. He was too slow. Leonidas hurled the man to the flight deck.

“Canopy and shields,” he barked to Sadangi, who was shrinking even lower than before as blazer bolts bounced off the nose of the bomber. “Keep him safe.”

As Sadangi hit the button to lower the canopy, Leonidas leaped down, landing next to the soldier he’d just thrown out. The man had found his feet and once again tried to bring his rifle to bear, but Leonidas was too fast. He grabbed the soldier and threw him into the closest squadron of soldiers.

Fire from all over the bay pelted Leonidas’s armor, and the internal display lit up like fireworks, flashing warnings. He ignored them and charged for the squadron of men closest to the control room. He did not know if he could break through the Glastica windows, but if he could, it would be easier than making it to the door and running through two levels of corridors.

A boom sounded, Sadangi firing from the cockpit. He’d gotten the canopy down and, Leonidas hoped, the shields up. The e-cannon blast coursed through the air and slammed into one of the mobile artillery weapons. The second artillery weapon returned fire, blasting its ammunition between the rows of soldiers to hammer into the bomber’s forward shields.

With dozens of problems of his own to deal with, Leonidas had to leave the bomber to Sadangi. He plowed into soldiers, pummeling them but also getting in their way, hoping they would shoot each other as often as they struck him. Like an asteroid, he created chaos wherever he landed, but two warnings flashed, telling him his suit had been breached. His rear helmet camera showed two-dozen men firing at his back, finding spots between their comrades.

He ducked as one of the cannons took aim, the artilleryman pulling the trigger. The blast scorched the air inches above his helmet before slamming into one of the walls.

Leonidas lunged to his left, again trying to push his way toward that bank of windows. Smoke wafted from a charred dent in his back piece, and he could feel the heat on his flesh, the promise of armor failure, of pain.

An armored soldier in front of him pitched over, one Leonidas had not touched.

He threw an elbow strike into a man’s chest to his right and kicked out at someone who was closing from the left, but he puzzled over that fallen man as he fought. The figure’s legs and arms twitched, as if he were having a seizure. Leonidas had not seen any of Sadangi’s rounds blasting into troops on this side of the bay. For all his talk of leaving cyborgs behind, he was being careful not to fire into anyone too close to Leonidas.

Another soldier toppled, legs and arms again twitching. It cleared the path in front of Leonidas.

Not questioning his luck, he sprinted for the metal wall below the bank of windows. He leaped into the air, jumping twenty feet to smash his fist against the translucent barrier. Glastica could withstand bullets and blazer fire, and as hard as a cyborg could punch, his first try only caused a slight crack deep within the material.

When he landed, he whirled, expecting more attackers. But several more armored men were down, all of them thrashing about as if in their death throes.

No, Leonidas realized. That wasn’t it. They were fighting with their armor. The computerized equipment must not be obeying their commands.

Sadangi had lifted the bomber into the air, and he was spinning and firing, the powerful weapons of the spacecraft sending men for cover. But he wasn’t the one affecting their armor. Thorian was just visible as he peered out from the back of the cockpit, his face crinkled with concentration. He’d said he was good with mechanical items. If he was responsible for so many armored men thrashing about, Leonidas would not disagree.

A few people were shooting at Leonidas from behind the cover of other ships, and he returned fire briefly, sending them diving for safety. A lull surrounded him, so he faced the windows again. This was his chance. His enemies were more distracted than they would ever be, especially with the bomber swooping around, wreaking havoc.

Leonidas leaped again, twisting his hips in the air to add power to his punch. This time, his gauntleted knuckles smashed into and through the Glastica. The armor protected his hands from the blow. Before he could fall back to the deck, he wrapped his fingers around the bottom of the hole he had made.

Alarmed shouts came from within the control room, and as he hung there, men and women lunged for rifles. Few of the officers inside wore combat armor. They hadn’t expected to face him.

Leonidas threw his other fist, smashing the window further, making a hole large enough that he could pull himself through. The memory of that officer saying, “Kill him,” about Thorian gave him extra fury and strength. He made short work of the window and hauled himself inside.

A barrage of blazer fire met him, crimson blasts slamming into his helmet and chest plate. For the most part, they bounced off, but one caught a seam and fire seemed to explode in his armpit.

Roaring, he threw himself at the officers. The pain stole some of his sanity, leaving enraged battle fury behind, and he barely knew what he did over the next thirty seconds. He tore men’s weapons out of their hands, sent soldiers flying into walls, and beat down all of those who fired at him. Several people dove for the door. He let them escape, but only because the grab beam was his priority.

Somewhere in the chaos, he had dropped his rifle, and he chastised himself for that, but there was no time to worry about it. He flicked his wrist to extend one of the guns embedded in his arm piece. Two men hurled themselves under consoles. Leonidas spun, not toward them but toward the door leading into the room. It was closed now, having slid shut after the fleeing soldiers escaped. He fired at the panel that controlled it, blasting it to pieces and leaving a melted, smoking mess.

Hoping that would keep it from opening again, he spun toward the console overlooking the flight deck. It had already taken fire, with components smoking and alarms flashing. He found the grab beam generator and blasted at it, melting through the protective outside and into the circuitry inside.

He eyed the controls for the forcefield and almost hit the button to open it, but the bomber and everything else that wasn’t magnetically locked down would be blown out into space if he did that now. Instead, he studied it carefully for several long seconds before springing back through the window and to the flight deck.

Several more soldiers were down, their armor malfunctioning so that they could no longer control it. Leonidas ran past them and waved toward the bomber, trying to catch Sadangi’s eye. The pilot was laying waste to some of the neat queues of Strikers parked near the wall. If there were soldiers taking cover there, Leonidas did not see them. Maybe Sadangi simply wanted to do as much damage as he could.

One of the doors slid open, and a new squad of armored men stormed into the bay. Sadangi hadn’t noticed Leonidas yet, so he sprinted for the bomber. He leaped into the air and landed atop it. He expected to bounce off the shields and succeed only in gaining Sadangi’s attention, but he thumped down onto the hull behind the canopy. The shields had been depleted.

Sadangi flinched, staring up with wide eyes. Leonidas knocked on the canopy, flattening himself to the hull as those new soldiers fired in his direction. His armor could not withstand many more blows.

“Open it,” he ordered, just in case his ally was thinking of leaving him behind.

But Sadangi was already reaching for the controls, and the canopy snapped up. Leonidas pulled himself in, feeling like an armored eel sliding over a rock. He nearly clobbered Sadangi in the tight space as he maneuvered into the passenger seat. That did not keep the pilot from lowering the canopy promptly. The bomber kept moving, swooping about the bay as Sadangi struggled to avoid the blows from the one remaining mobile cannon. If the bomber’s shields had been depleted, it could not withstand another hit from such a powerful weapon.

“The forcefield is up,” Sadangi said, his voice impressively calm, considering the chaos all around them. “We can’t get out as long as it is.”

“I’m hoping Thorian can do something about that,” Leonidas said, leaning toward the boy in case he wanted to touch his helmet again.

“What?” Sadangi blurted, still not grasping what the boy could do.

Thorian was gazing at Leonidas but did not reach for his helmet. It was as if he already knew exactly what he had in mind. Maybe he did.

“Done,” Thorian said.

“It’s down,” Sadangi shouted in wonder.

He did not hesitate. He zipped for the exit as soon as the forcefield dropped.

“What’s next?” he asked, glancing at Leonidas’s smoking armor as they escaped the hangar bay. “Unless you disabled their weapons, they’re going to fire at us as soon as we clear the ship.”

Leonidas shook his head bleakly. “I believe I destroyed the grab beam, but the weapons generators aren’t in that room.”

“Then they’re just going to blow us up. They thought we had the emperor and wanted him alive. They don’t seem to feel the same way toward his heir.”

“No,” Leonidas said softly, meeting the boy’s eyes. “I noticed.”

• • • • •

Leonidas tried to get his bearings as Sadangi flew them away from the hangar and into space. The warship had moved while the bomber had been held prisoner within its bay. He caught sight of the asteroid where the not-so-hidden palace lay and realized the Alliance ship had been heading closer, probably intending to help finish it off. Leonidas almost groaned. They were back where they had started. Once again, he felt a failure for not succeeding in getting Thorian away. Worse, his body ached, and his charred and dented armor smoked. Neither he nor the bomber could withstand more battle.

“They knocked out our shields, but our ship is still spaceworthy,” Sadangi said as he swiped a finger through the surround-flow display, getting a damage report. “I’m putting us on course to Dustor, just in case their helmsman is picking his nose and didn’t notice that we escaped. Which isn’t very damned likely.”

Leonidas looked at Thorian. “I don’t suppose you can encourage nose-picking.”

“Not with someone that far away who I’m not familiar with, no.”

Leonidas felt like he had been trampled by a herd of Senekda buffalo, but he managed a smile for the boy. Though his experience with children was limited, he suspected Thorian was mature for his age. And surprisingly reasonable. Someone born into such privilege could have been a snot. Leonidas supposed that the last few years of the war might have bled any such tendencies out of him. He’d lost his brother, and he also might never see his parents again unless Solis-de, the god of hope, interfered with the Alliance’s plans.

Leonidas shifted his gaze toward the rear camera, which was displaying the asteroid and all the ships surrounding it. Such a hope seemed doomed to be squashed.

“The warship is locking weapons on us,” Sadangi said, slumping back in his seat.

Leonidas met his eyes, but said nothing. What was left to say? The bomber still had some weapons, but what could they do to the massive warship? They were already at the edge of the small craft’s range. Unfortunately, the warship had a much larger range.

“Guess you’re now wishing that you’d gotten stuck back in that duct after all, eh, cyborg?” Sadangi reached over and thumped him on the arm.

Leonidas arched an eyebrow.

Movement on the rear camera drew his eye, a lot of movement. Huge pieces of the asteroid were flying in all directions, tumbling out into space. Leonidas stared in stunned silence as the reality of what was happening registered.

“Shit,” Sadangi said. “They blew it up.”

Thorian gaped at the display as the asteroid broke up, pieces spraying in a thousand directions. Moisture gleamed in his eyes as reality also sank in for him. His chin, which had thus far been firm and brave, quivered. He blinked and looked away, hiding his face behind Sadangi’s seat.

Leonidas did not know if he should leave him alone or not. After hesitating, he removed his gauntlet and laid a hand on Thorian’s back, wishing he knew how to offer some comfort. The boy’s shoulders trembled as he wept.

“Well,” Sadangi said, “they haven’t fired at us yet, and we’re almost out of their weapons’ range. Maybe they’ll forget about us.”

“Maybe they’re staring at their view screen and realizing that the war is over,” Leonidas said, feeling numb.

It was possible that some of his people had made it out, especially if they had managed to take over an Alliance ship, but it was more likely that all of them—Stein, Kearney, Tibilov, and the others—had still been on that asteroid. If so, there would be no more battles fought together, no more jokes for him to brush aside, no cyborg forceball team to captain.

Leonidas swallowed and closed his eyes. After all the battles he had fought in, after all the skirmishes he had endured, it was hard to believe that it was over. Nor did it seem fair that his men were gone, and he was still alive.

Early on in his career, when he’d been a reckless young corporal, always rushing into battle and not believing in his own mortality, a captain had given him the nickname Leonidas, after the Ancient Greek king who had led his troops to Thermopylae to fight back the Persian invaders. Those men had been heroic, history said, but they had all gotten themselves killed in the end, King Leonidas included. His captain had been certain that he would suffer the same fate someday, dying heroically, but dying all the same, on a battlefield full of death and carnage. Leonidas had believed it too. And to be here at the end of the war, alive when so many others had fallen, did not seem right. What would he do with himself if the fleet was no more? If the empire truly fell?

“All I care about,” Sadangi said, “is that they’re not paying attention to us right now.” He glanced over his shoulder to where Thorian wept quietly. “Well, that may not be all I care about, but it’s prime in my mind at the moment.”

Leonidas tore his gaze from the destroyed asteroid and looked to the space ahead of them. “You think the ship is in good enough condition to make it to Dustor, if they don’t chase after us and destroy us in the next ten minutes?”

“I hope it is. We don’t have a lot of other options. The Alliance took all of the space stations around here already. Nobody’s going to let us stop for repairs.”

Leonidas sighed, suspecting the Alliance would have Dustor too. The last he had heard, the battle for the bases and shipyard in its orbit had not been going well.

“We’re out of their weapons’ range,” Sadangi reported. “Another five minutes, and we’ll be out of their visual range. I’ll tinker with our course and make it hard for them to find us again.” He kept glancing at the displays, perhaps not believing that the warship would forget about them. “They shouldn’t be able to guess our destination. The emperor didn’t tell anyone except me right up until the end.”

“Thorian,” Leonidas asked quietly. “How much do you know about the Starseers? Do you know if they’re expecting you?”

He wondered if they could count on them for help getting down to the planet. Perhaps it was too early to start worrying about the next obstacle when their escape was not yet assured.

“I don’t know,” Thorian whispered, his head buried against his knees. He sounded like he didn’t care, not now.

Leonidas could not blame him.

Part 4

By the fifth day of flying in his combat armor, Leonidas was more than ready to escape it and also the compact bomber. Spending days in a vessel meant only for short-term flights was unpleasant—the less said about the lavatory accommodations, the better. And even though his armor was designed to be comfortable, it wasn’t meant to be worn for days. It took up a lot of room stowed, though, so the most efficient place for it in the cramped cockpit was on him. Besides, he could lock it down when he slept, which was useful since he always had nightmares, sometimes ones where he lashed out and damaged his surroundings. He would never forgive himself if he hurt Thorian, or even Sadangi.

Still, it would have been nice to store the pieces in his armor case during waking hours, since it would have sanitized them and performed repairs on the more moderate damages. But it had been left in his barracks on Perun, back when this chaotic last defense of the imperial palace—first the official one and then the hidden one—had first begun. He would have to see if he could find a secondhand case on Dustor. He did not know if his barracks existed anymore, or if they had been annihilated like everything else in the empire.

Sadangi had been picking up the sys-net broadcasts for the last couple of days, news talking of the Alliance celebrations, of the death of the emperor and the fall of the empire. For Thorian’s sake, they had stopped listening.

“What an ugly dustball,” Sadangi muttered, gazing toward the brownish-red planet growing larger in the star-dotted space ahead of them. Snarls of red clouds covered half the surface, promising unpleasant weather for those who lived down below. “Made even uglier by all the wreckage floating around,” he added with a growl, changing course again to avoid a charred piece of hull. “Those used to be our bases, you know. And there was a shipyard in orbit here.”

“I know,” Leonidas said quietly.

He did not need a news reporter to tell him what he had known since he’d seen that asteroid explode. The empire had not been ideal or even fair sometimes—what government that large ever could be?—but it had represented peace and stability. Leonidas had no idea what the Alliance would represent, but he feared that it had put all of its efforts into tearing down the existing government and wouldn’t have the resources to create any kind of stability in the system, at least not in the first few years.

“There are Alliance ships all over the place,” Sadangi said, pulling up a holo of the sensor display. “I’m going to do my best to avoid them and set us down near the coordinates. Or maybe right on top of them. They look like they’re in the middle of the desert. We won’t want to wander around down in the heat. We’re low on water as it is. I sure hope these Starseers want to see us.” He glanced at Thorian.

The boy did not respond. Since the destruction of the asteroid, he had been a quiet passenger, resisting attempts to be drawn into conversation. He sat cross-legged in the cargo area now, a set of interconnectable building blocks strewn across the flat surfaces. He was clicking the pieces into a model of a space station. Over the days, the blocks had been everything from bridges to buildings to castles to flights of the imagination that Leonidas could not identify.

“Is that Primus 7?” he asked, waving to the current project.

Thorian nodded. “The station is elegant.”

“Not the word usually used for a cesspit full of drunks and gamblers,” Sadangi said.

Thorian frowned at the back of his seat, but continued locking pieces together. “From the outside, it’s elegant. People sometimes mess up the insides of structures.”

Sadangi snorted. “Can’t argue with that.”

“Can I help build the lower tower?” Leonidas asked, waving at the blocks. Most of the times he had succeeded in getting the boy to talk in the last few days had been by asking about his projects.

“Yes, but it’s real complex. Most people aren’t able to do it without blueprints,” Thorian said.

Was that a hint of arrogance? Leonidas smiled faintly. Thorian had said he was good with mechanical things, so he must know where his talents lie.

“I didn’t have time to download any blueprints before… before,” Thorian finished glumly.

“I’ll try, anyway.” Leonidas twisted in his seat and pulled some blocks over for his own use.

Sadangi raised his eyebrows at seeing his brawny cyborg soldier passenger playing with blocks, but he did not say anything. He was scanning the readouts, looking for trouble ahead. Leonidas would not be surprised to find that trouble waiting for them. The Alliance soldiers might have been distracted by their victory at the asteroid, but someone on that warship would have remembered the bomber eventually, and the fact that it carried the emperor’s son on it. He was still shocked that someone in the Alliance considered the boy too important to let live. Or too dangerous, perhaps, he amended, thinking of those mental powers.

“You’re doing it,” Thorian said, surprise in his voice.

Leonidas had barely been paying attention to what his hands were doing, so it took him a moment to realize Thorian referred to his block structure. “It’s not my first tower.”

“You’ve played with Klikblocks before?”

“No, but I designed towers with software in school,” Leonidas said. “Whole buildings and even a space station, in fact.”

“In school?” Thorian wrinkled his nose, looking over his dented, sooty armor. “You went to school?”

Sadangi made a noise that sounded like a muffled giggle. “He had to, Your Highness. He’s an officer. He’s got a degree, though I would have figured it was in something like Mutilation and Maiming rather than building things.”

“I switched from a mechanical and civil engineering major to military science once I joined the fleet,” Leonidas said. He sometimes regretted that choice. The military degree had been useful, and easier to fulfill via the distance learning that his job required, but he wondered sometimes what it would have been like to see some of his designs turned into actual projects.

“Were there at least some Mutilation and Maiming electives?” Sadangi asked.

“A few.”

Leonidas handed Thorian the tower to add to the rest of the space station, though he did not know if there were enough blocks to complete the project. As he watched the boy lock the pieces together, he wondered what it meant that of all the things Thorian could have grabbed to take with him, he had chosen the box of blocks. Had he, too, had dreams of becoming an engineer or perhaps an architect someday? Dreams that had died at the same time his older brother had? Before, when he had not been the heir, he might have pursued some personal interest for a career, but now, he would be expected to step into his father’s role.

Or, Leonidas realized numbly, perhaps he wouldn’t. If the empire had truly fallen, what role would be left for the boy? Hiding and surviving until the Alliance forgot about him, or stopped worrying about him as a threat, and then attempting to live a normal life?

“I’m glad you can build a tower, Colonel,” Thorian said, nodding in satisfaction as the structure came together. “It’s important not to just…” He hesitated and bit his lip.

“Mutilate and maim?” Sadangi suggested.

Leonidas snorted, but Thorian nodded.

“Building things is better than destroying them,” he said solemnly.

“I agree,” Leonidas said, “but unfortunately, the latter is far easier for human beings to do.”

“Someone’s trying to hail us,” Sadangi said, pointing to a flashing indicator on the console.

“Unless the Starseers are telling us where to land, I don’t think we want to talk to anyone else here.” Leonidas eyed the blips representing the Alliance ships, some coming and going, some orbiting Dustor. For a backwater planet, it was a busy place right now.

“We’re not even close enough to enter orbit yet,” Sadangi said. “I doubt anyone from the planet is hailing us.”

“Any chance it’s our people? Are the orbital shipyards still in imperial hands?”

“Uh.” Sadangi eyed the sensor display. “The orbital shipyards are gone.”

“Is there anything the Alliance didn’t blow up?” Leonidas growled, thinking of Thorian’s words. And his own. Easier to destroy, indeed.

“The planet is still there. No telling who’s controlling the cities.”

“Just ignore the hail and take us down to land.”

“You don’t think we should check in with the port authority down there?” Sadangi asked.

“If memory serves, most of this planet was run by the mafia and dubious corporations even when the empire was at its height of power and control. The throne never cared much about the resourceless dustball.”

“So you don’t think there is a port authority?” Sadangi asked.

“Oh, there are probably twenty of them.”

“All right. I’m going to try to slip in on the night side of the planet. Maybe everyone there will be sleeping. Or distracted by that storm. Those clouds are ugly. Uhm.”

“Problem?” Leonidas asked.

“There are three ships coming our way.”

Leonidas left Thorian to his blocks and turned his attention to the planet ahead of them and the display floating in the air around the pilot’s seat. Sadangi pointed toward three separate blips, all of which were heading in the bomber’s direction.

“Maybe you better set us down anywhere you can,” Leonidas murmured.

“Maybe.”

Sadangi pointed the nose of the bomber straight toward a snarl of red clouds covering the night side of Dustor. Flying in through that storm would not make for a pleasant ride, but neither would being fired upon.

“You may want to put your blocks away,” Leonidas said, watching as the ships kept coming. The planet grew larger in front of them, blocking out the stars and everything else that had been in their view. “It’s going to get bumpy.”

“I didn’t get to finish the solarium dome,” Thorian said, his voice more sad than argumentative. He started unfastening the station in chunks, returning the blocks to the box in his bag.

Leonidas imagined a future for him where he was constantly on the run, constantly having to disassemble or abandon half-started projects, and all he could feel was sorrow. Maybe the Starseers would be good enough at hiding that they could give him some stability.

The comm panel flashed again, insistently.

“Is the same ship hailing us?” Leonidas asked.

“No, that’s someone else. We’re popular.”

“A rare experience for me.”

“I’ve heard cyborgs don’t get invited to many parties.”

Thorian looked at Leonidas curiously. Leonidas did not intend to explain that people were too busy fearing the fleet’s cyborg soldiers to invite them to social events.

“Only those thrown by other cyborgs,” was all he said.

“Sounds insular,” Sadangi said.

“Sometimes it’s just easier.”

“Two Strikers and a dreadnought,” Sadangi said, pointing out the three ships closing on them. “The dreadnought’s weapons are already hot. I guess they’re irked that we didn’t respond to their party invitation.”

“Our shields are at full capacity again, right?” Leonidas had helped with those repairs, which had involved wedging as much of his body as possible into the cargo area so he could reach the panel in the back.

“Yes, but it won’t take many hits from that big ship to drain them.”

“Then you better fly faster.”

“Thanks for the tip.”

Leonidas eyed the flashing comm and finally tapped the button to answer it. He doubted anything good would come of a conversation with the Alliance, but maybe it would buy them a few more seconds.

“This is the gypsy ship, Taymount 4,” Sadangi said before Leonidas could speak. “Is there a reason you gentlemen are chasing us?”

A woman answered, sounding prim and unamused. “Your ident matches that of an imperial bomber that fled Perun a few days ago, gypsy ship.”

“Does it? I knew this deal was too good to be true. We picked it up at a swap meet on Delta 43. Grandma, didn’t I say this deal was too good to be true?” Sadangi’s gaze flicked toward Leonidas, as if he would answer as “Grandma.”

Leonidas gave him a flat look.

Sadangi muted the comm. “What’s the matter, cyborg? Can’t give me a falsetto?”

The ship jolted, pitching them sideways against their harnesses. The dreadnought had come into range and was shooting at them.

“If you lower your shields and surrender the boy, we will let you live, gypsy captain,” the Alliance woman said.

Sadangi un-muted the comm. “What guarantees do you give? And what about my other gypsy passenger? Does he get to live too?” He glanced at Leonidas.

Leonidas arched his eyebrows. He assumed Sadangi was playing the same game that he had thought to play, buying time, but even the hint that he might be willing to give up Thorian made him uneasy.

“The cyborg?” The woman snorted.

Sadangi muted their side again. “I think that was a no. You must have pissed them off when you broke their windows.”

“You broke some of their ships.”

“What can I say? People hate cyborgs more than they hate pilots.” Sadangi smirked, as if it was a joke. Leonidas found too much truth in it and only frowned in return.

To his surprise, Sadangi thumped him on the chest. “Sorry. We’ll—”

“You have ten seconds to decide, gypsy ship,” the woman said. “Surrender or we’ll destroy all of you.”

“Ten seconds?” Sadangi asked. “That’s it? This is a moderately large decision, don’t you think?”

The woman did not answer.

Leonidas reached forward and muted the comm. “Can we reach that storm and lose them in the clouds?”

“Possibly,” Sadangi said, “but storms on Dustor aren’t anything to sniff at. That’s covering a third of the planet, and I can tell it’s wicked from here. We could crash.”

“I assumed that was likely, regardless.”

“Because we’re being pursued or because you don’t trust my flying skills?”

A white light flashed behind them as an e-cannon blast struck their rear shields, throwing Leonidas against his harness.

Sadangi cursed. “I guess our ten seconds are up.”

“Take us down,” Leonidas said. “Best possible speed.”

“You’re the boss.”

“Nice of you to notice.”

“You’re not feeling uppity because I haven’t been sir-ring you, are you?”

“It would have been appropriate.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” Sadangi gripped the flight stick with both hands, his face locked in a visage of concentration as they raced toward the dark swath of clouds. The Alliance ships, with the dreadnought leading, followed on their tail, all three craft firing now.

Leonidas had the feeling that the Alliance hadn’t truly wanted them to surrender.

He looked back at Thorian, hoping they hadn’t condemned the boy to his death. Thorian’s face was grave, but Leonidas could not tell what he was thinking.

The bomber trembled as it flew into the gravitational pull of the planet and picked up speed. The heat waves from their friction seemed to roll away from the nose of the craft.

“That storm is uglier than a snagor’s cud,” Sadangi said, as they passed into the lower atmosphere. “Bumpy doesn’t begin to describe what flying through it is going to be like. We’ll hit the edge in thirty seconds. Brace yourselves.”

Leonidas gripped the console in front of him, hating having his fate in someone else’s hands. Poor Thorian did not even have a harness. He wedged himself in behind the pilot’s seat.

The bomber jerked again as another blast struck it from behind. The dreadnought was sticking with them.

“Down to thirty percent shield power,” Sadangi said quietly.

The entire ship quaked. It felt like it might be ripped apart by their rapid descent even before the weapons could finish them off.

“They’re not slowing down at all,” Sadangi said. “Those daredevils are going to follow us right into the storm.”

The ship lurched, and Leonidas’s seat tried to launch him, helmet first, into the canopy. This time, it wasn’t weapons fire that was responsible. They had crossed into the clouds, the stormy air causing turbulence that bucked and rocked their craft like a leaf in the wind. Gusts screeched past outside, raking the hull, thunderously loud, especially after the quiet of space.

Sadangi muttered something to himself—counting?—then slowed down and banked. Wind buffeted them, throwing them around in their harnesses.

A pained grunt came from the cargo area.

“Here,” Leonidas said, gesturing to Thorian. He pulled the boy into his lap and locked his arms around him.

Thorian would probably believe himself too old to sit in someone else’s lap, but nothing would break Leonidas’s grip short of his own death. It would be safer this way.

Another jolt pitched the entire ship sideways. Leonidas was careful not to make his grip too tight. As he had learned early on after the surgery where he had received his implants, it was easy to underestimate his strength.

“They’re still firing,” Sadangi said, taking them through a series of evasive maneuvers, the wind fighting him at every turn. “I’m trying to lose them.”

Lightning flashed somewhere nearby. For a second, the swirling black clouds lit up, but that light soon disappeared, smothered. It had been dark the whole time since they had approached on the planet’s night side, but now it was like being stuffed inside a coffin.

The holodisplay flickered around Sadangi’s head, the view of the terrain below and the ships behind alternating with flashes of white static. Rain beat at the cockpit, reducing visibility outside. Without the sensor display, they were effectively blind.

The wind rocked them, turning them halfway onto their side. Sadangi ground his teeth so loudly that Leonidas heard it, even over the screeching gales. Lightning flashed again, revealing the tendons tensed in his neck, the death grip with which he held the stick.

“Where’s the damned bottom to this storm?” he growled. “We should be—”

Something loomed out of the thick clouds ahead and lights appeared. The dreadnought. Thorian jerked in surprise.

“They’re going to fire,” he blurted.

Cursing again, Sadangi pushed on the stick, diving, trying to take them under the dreadnought. Leonidas also cursed, grabbing the weapons controls around Thorian.

He rotated the guns up and fired as they flew under the belly of the dreadnought. The bomber’s weapons were tiny and inadequate against the much larger ship. Bolts of energy struck the dreadnought’s shields and disappeared without piercing them. He might as well have been firing at a moon.

The clouds thickened, and the Alliance ship disappeared from sight. Leonidas thought they might escape without taking a hit—maybe the dreadnought had been as surprised to see them as they had been to see it.

Then something slammed into them so hard that the bomber flipped end over end. An alarm shrieked in the cockpit, battering Leonidas’s eardrums as he was hurled left and right in his harness. His helmet clunked the side of the canopy.

“Shields are down,” Sadangi yelled.

“Get us on the ground,” Leonidas said, even though he knew Sadangi was trying to do just that.

Lightning flashed, the branches so close that he could see the fuzzy blur of their energy. The light disappeared, then reappeared as they spun out of control. Something else hit them—or maybe that was turbulence. A distinct snap sounded from the control panel.

“I can’t pull us up,” Sadangi cried.

Smoke filled the cockpit. Leonidas could not smell it with his helmet on, but Thorian coughed and pressed his face against his chest plate.

He let go of the weapons stick and simply held Thorian, his gauntleted palm against the boy’s back. What else could he do?

Not a damned thing.

The clouds cleared, and Leonidas briefly felt hope, but Sadangi was frantically batting at the controls. Smoke flowed out of the panel, nearly obscuring him. The bomber plummeted straight downward. Lightning flashed again, and sand, rocks, and mountains came into view below, the stark outline of the desert landscape coming up rapidly.

“Trying to get the nose up,” Sadangi whispered. “Trying…”

Leonidas cupped the back of Thorian’s head and did his best to cradle him, to protect him from the inevitable.

They crashed so hard the wings tore off with an ear-splitting crack-crunch. Leonidas glimpsed them bouncing off to the sides, then disappearing into the night as the fuselage skidded and bumped along the hard earth.

The safety foam deployed, and white fluff filled the cockpit, pressing against Leonidas from all sides. It did not keep him from feeling every bounce and bump, and he heard every snap and crack as pieces flew off the bomber. They must have skidded a mile or more before finally crunching into a mountain or some other unmoving obstacle. If not for the foam, the jolt might have broken Leonidas’s harness. As it was, he worried about the injuries his companions would take, neither of whom had armor or synthetic bones.

Silence and stillness finally fell.

“Thorian?” Leonidas pushed through the gelatin-like foam that now filled the cockpit, groping for the canopy release. He could hear rain striking the remains of the bomber, but he could not see a thing. “Sadangi?”

Neither person answered him. Leonidas could feel the weight of Thorian still against his chest, but he could not tell if the boy breathed, not with the armor blocking the contact. If he hadn’t made it… all of this would have been for nothing. Leonidas could have died with his men in the battle defending the emperor, as it had been meant to be.

Emotion thickened his throat, and he growled it away. This wasn’t the time. He was alive, and the others might be too. Assessment and survival. That was what was important. And finding the button to open the damned canopy.

There.

He pushed it, and the canopy finally rose upward. The foam expanded to take up more space, but that meant he was able to shove it away. He found enough freedom to unclasp his harness, and his heart grew lighter when Thorian stirred against his chest.

Leonidas shoved aside the straps, wrapped one arm around the boy, pushed himself to his feet, and climbed out of the cockpit. He slid to the ground, rain pelting his helmet and dark clouds roiling overhead. He did not see any of the Alliance ships anywhere, but visibility was horrible, even with his faceplate doing its best to adapt to the lighting.

Jammed into the base of a cliff, the bomber looked like a tin can that had been crushed against a wall, completely collapsed in upon itself, the wings nothing but a memory. The tail was also missing.

Shaking his head, Leonidas wiped foam off himself and off Thorian, then jogged a couple dozen meters before laying him down in the shelter of the cliff. He did not know if the bomber was in danger of exploding, but he would not take any chances.

The boy lifted a shaky hand to wipe his face. Blood dribbled from his nose, but his eyes blinked open. He grimaced in pain, but he appeared conscious and alert. Good.

“I’ll be right back,” Leonidas said, lifting a finger. “Stay there.”

He ran back around the wreckage so he could approach the cockpit from the pilot’s side. He thrust aside foam in irritation, finally finding Sadangi’s hair as he dug down. He cleared the foam away from the man’s face and started to dig down for the harness, but paused, a sinking feeling entering his stomach.

Sadangi’s eyes were open, staring upward. Blood dribbled out of the corner of his mouth, mingling with rainwater.

“Major?” Leonidas whispered, then spoke again more loudly, to be heard over the thunder and rain.

The man blinked slowly. Alive, but he barely breathed. Leonidas pushed away more foam, reaching down for his harness, but his fingers clunked against something hard. The console. The seat had been thrust forward even as the framework of the cockpit crumpled and pushed back against him. Leonidas could shove it away, but he paused, frowning as he saw that Sadangi’s entire ribcage had been crushed inward. Every bone had to be broken, every organ damaged. Perhaps an emergency room surgeon could have saved him, but they were in the middle of nowhere.

“Bad, huh?” Sadangi rasped, wheezing.

“Bad,” Leonidas agreed. He had never been able to lie to men, even when they were dying. He’d always said he would have preferred that only the truth be spoken to him in that situation. Better to know and have time to say one’s last prayers, make a final plea to Rebus-de for a place of honor in the afterlife.

“Boy… get away?” Sadangi tried to move his head to look toward the passenger seat, but he could barely flicker his eyes in that direction. Tears filmed them, and Leonidas doubted he could see.

“He did.” At least Leonidas did not have to contemplate lying about that. He rested his hand gently on Sadangi’s shoulder. “We saved him.”

Sadangi managed the slightest nod, though his face contorted with pain from the effort. He wheezed several ineffective breaths and looked at Leonidas.

Leonidas unfastened his helmet and tugged it off. A man should look into another man’s eyes as he lay dying, not some damned faceplate.

“It was…” Sadangi wheezed. “An honor… to serve with you… sir.”

Leonidas blinked away tears in his own eyes. Why didn’t this ever get any easier? “You are an excellent pilot, Sadangi.” He regretted that he did not know the man’s first name.

But the words seemed to bring Sadangi peace. He smiled slightly before he gasped his final breath, and his eyes grew dim.

Part 5

Leonidas’s armor could withstand bullets and blazer fire and the freezing vacuum of space, keeping him alive and comfortable inside, but somehow, it couldn’t keep the sand out. He blamed himself. He’d taken his helmet off a couple of times, both to be sociable and because it seemed unfair that he be protected when the prince was not.

He let out a relieved breath when the sand stopped skidding sideways, and two of the system’s three suns came out, bright orange spots burning in the red-tinted sky. Everything on this planet was some shade of red. He wouldn’t want to grow up here.

He eyed his stoic young companion. Thorian trudged along, refusing to let Leonidas carry his bag, as usual. They had been trekking for two days, Leonidas’s helmet tied into the sys-net satellites and led them toward the coordinates the emperor had given Sadangi. Since that first storm that had sent them scurrying for cover under an overhang in the cliff, they had scarcely been able to walk two hours at a time without a sandstorm coming up to make travel miserable. He had done his best to find shelter, to protect his young charge, even if it only meant using his own armored body to do so.

“We’re almost there,” Thorian said, glancing over at him.

“You’re sure?” Leonidas wondered if he looked like someone who needed reassuring. Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

“I’m sure.”

Thorian adjusted his bag. His cheeks were red from sunburn and his lips cracked from the dry air. They had water and some meal bars, but they were being careful to ration them out. The storms could make what should have been a journey of a couple of days last for a week.

“I miss Major Sadangi,” Thorian said.

“So do I.”

“He was funny.” He did not offer the same accolade for Leonidas, though he considered him, as if trying to find some other appropriate one.

Leonidas shrugged in his armor. It wasn’t necessary. He knew he wasn’t a comedian. He’d been more easily amused and more likely to crack jokes in his youth, before the fleet, before learning how to kill and watching so many comrades fall around him. Somewhere along the way, he had lost the knack for jokes.

“You’re brave,” Thorian decided on.

“Thank you.” Leonidas decided that was an acceptable impression to have made on a boy. Were he a father, he would be honored to have his son think him brave.

“You don’t have any children of your own?” Thorian asked, almost as if he had been reading Leonidas’s thoughts. Maybe he had.

“No.”

“You’d be a good dad.”

“Oh? What makes you say that?” Leonidas asked, genuinely curious. He mostly felt awkward around Thorian, like he should be entertaining him or teaching him or doing something more than handing him water and walking slowly enough for him to keep up. He ought to be doing something parental. Whatever that was.

Thorian scratched his nose as he considered how to articulate his answer. Or perhaps his nose simply itched.

“You can build a good tower,” he finally said.

Leonidas snorted softly. It wasn’t one of the usual reasons people found him valuable, but he supposed it wasn’t a bad one.

“Maybe I’ll find a way to have children someday,” he said, cheered by the fact that this one representative of the category found him promising. He did not go into the difficulties that he would have in fathering children or in finding someone who wished to procreate with him. It seemed too strange a conversation to have with a ten-year-old.

“Good,” Thorian said, then turned his attention to the red dunes ahead of them. “They’re coming.”

“Who?” Leonidas flicked the blazers out of his armor sleeve.

Thorian patted the air in a stand-down motion. “The Starseers.”

“Are you sure?” Leonidas listened hard and peered into the distance, not used to anyone detecting other people before he did. “We’re still ten miles from the coordinates.”

“I’m sure.”

Several more minutes passed before the first person came into view, a black-robed figure walking over one of the dunes, his hood up against the desert sun. Three more men followed him, each carrying staffs that might have been made from metal or some dark wood. Leonidas only guessed at their sex based on their size. Their hoods shadowed their features, hiding them even from his keen eyes.

He kept walking toward them—the Starseers’ path would take them straight toward Leonidas and Thorian, regardless—but his stomach knotted in the way it did before he went into battle. He had fought Starseers before and well remembered the way they could use telekinesis to hurl him against walls and try to crush his internal organs with their minds. The powers had not bothered him when they had been wielded by a ten-year-old boy and the heir to the throne he’d sworn his life to protect. But these people had their own agenda. He had no idea what deal Markus had worked with them or whether they would appreciate a cyborg in red combat armor striding up to them in the desert.

Thorian walked steadily at his side, not a hint of hesitation in his step or on his face, though there was a sadness in his eyes. Leonidas did not know if it was for all that he had lost in the last week or if it represented resignation for his fate. Would these Starseers let him build space stations with blocks? Or would they train him to be one of them and perhaps to become some future general who might retake the empire?

Even though Leonidas knew that leading troops and wrangling politicians and corporate sponsors had been in the stars for Thorian since his older brother’s death, he couldn’t help but feel sad that his fate would be chosen for him. Leonidas knew what it was to make choices about one’s future for the sake of others. He knew what it was to cast one’s dreams aside and to accept what must be.

Thorian gazed over at him, those sad eyes tugging at Leonidas’s heart. He groped for something to say, something wise or something comforting, but the Starseers arrived before the words found his tongue.

The men stood silently, without speaking. Or maybe they were speaking to each other telepathically. One stepped to the front and looked at Leonidas. He could just make out pale skin and a hawkish nose beneath the drooping hood.

“You have done your job adequately, cyborg,” the man said, his voice raspy, as if he hadn’t used it for a long time. “We will take the prince now.”

Adequately. Sadangi had given his life, they had lost their ship, and Thorian was lucky to be alive. To explain away the last week as adequate seemed a snub. Maybe it was intended to be.

“I would like your names,” Leonidas said, not that the names would mean anything to him, but it seemed he should know who had the prince. Surely, his people would ask when he reported back to…

His thoughts trailed off. To what? To whom? The emperor was gone. The war was lost. Headquarters had likely been demolished. How many of his superiors were even left alive? Did the fleet exist in any capacity anymore?

“It is safer for the prince if you do not know our names and aren’t able to describe us,” the Starseer said.

Leonidas bristled at the idea that he could be captured and interrogated for information on Thorian’s whereabouts, but he reluctantly admitted that it was a possibility and that the Starseer could be right. But the idea of turning his back and letting them take Thorian without any reassurances rubbed him the wrong way.

“It would be safer still if he had a good bodyguard,” Leonidas said, inspiration striking him. “Let me go with you.” Where else would he go? He had nothing left. And Thorian needed a protector, someone he could trust.

Thorian looked over at him. Was it Leonidas’s imagination that his eyes brightened, that he seemed less glum? Perhaps he wouldn’t mind having a cyborg bodyguard.

“We have no need of a cyborg,” the Starseer said, saying cyborg in the same tone that one described the taste of the mushy takka meal that miners ate. “Our people can protect him.” The man lifted his hand. “Come, Thorian.”

Thorian hesitated, looking back and forth from Leonidas to the Starseers.

“Couldn’t he come?” he asked.

“He is mawqua. Not human. A tool, nothing more. Forget him.”

Leonidas gritted his teeth. He had heard the term and variations of it many times before. “I’m just as human as you, Starseer.”

“We are more than human. You are less.”

Leonidas went from gritting his teeth to grinding them back and forth and was tempted to leap into the knot of men and tear them all into pieces for the scavengers to eat. He had learned from his previous encounters with Starseers that he could defeat them if he could get in close and keep them too distracted to use their mind powers.

You make my point for me, the Starseer said, speaking into his mind this time.

Leonidas growled.

Animal.

He hated the idea of these people teaching Thorian to be arrogant asses like them. He didn’t even know if he would be safe with them.

“Time to go, Thorian,” the Starseer repeated, his voice sterner. He waved again, the gesture impatient.

Thorian walked to Leonidas instead of going immediately to the man. He stuck out his hand.

“Thank you for your help, Colonel,” he said solemnly.

After what they had been through the last few days, Leonidas had the urge to hug the boy. Instead, he accepted the handclasp while wondering if he would ever see Thorian again. Would the Starseers succeed in keeping him hidden away and training him to be a leader one day? Or would some Alliance assassin catch up to him before he was old enough to take care of himself? The Starseers’ refusal to accept Leonidas’s help was shortsighted; he was certain of it.

Thorian released his hand, shouldered his bag, and walked over to join the robed men. Without a word for Leonidas, they led him back the way they had come.

He stood and watched, pretending he meant to let them go, but he was considering whether he could follow them from a distance and see where they took Thorian.

As soon as they crested the first dune and disappeared from sight, Leonidas started after them.

Do not follow, the same Starseer who had spoken to him before said into his mind. Your kind is not welcome among us, and as I said, it is better if you do not know where we take the prince. He is our kin. He will be safe with us.

Leonidas halted mid-step, not because he wanted to, but because his leg suddenly stopped working. He stood there, his foot dangling in the air, unable to press it down. He glowered in the direction the Starseers had gone.

Long minutes passed before the invisible power holding him released him. Ignoring the warning, Leonidas ran to the top of the dune. Tracks remained in the sand, so he could follow from a distance as long as a storm did not come up.

But when he reached the crest, he found himself staring after five hover bikes zipping away toward the horizon. Even Leonidas could not keep up with such craft, and they would not stir the sand with their passing or leave any tracks.

He slumped in his armor, somehow feeling this defeat more than the others of the week. The smallest figure raised a hand before his hover bike raced over a dune, and he once again disappeared from sight.

Leonidas took some solace from the fact that Thorian had gone with them willingly, but the sense of defeat lingered. He had lost his emperor, lost the prince, and for all he knew, his entire battalion may have been destroyed in the last days of the fighting. Those defending the asteroid palace certainly had been killed. It slowly dawned on him that with his last mission complete, he had nowhere to go, no one left to report to.

He turned in the direction of what his helmet map told him was the nearest human settlement. Perhaps it was time to think of himself again, of personal wishes and desires, of what he wanted from life, since he had, against all odds, survived his career. He gazed back in the direction that Thorian had gone, wondering what children of his own blood would be like.

THE END

FALLEN EMPIRE BOOK 4:

RELIC OF SORROWS

(PREVIEW)

Chapter 1

The medicine ball slammed into Alisa’s chest with enough force that she nearly tumbled to the deck. Nobody would ever accuse her engineer of throwing like a girl. Alisa tossed the ball back, aiming to the side of Mica, so she would have to twist and work different muscles to catch it. Mica did so without so much as a grimace to suggest effort was required.

She tossed it back, flexing her bare arms and glancing toward the walkway above. Yumi sat up there with her legs dangling over the side as she read a book on her netdisc. Two chickens pranced around behind her, having escaped from the makeshift coop in the corner of the cargo hold. Again. Yumi cooed at them, paying more attention to the birds than Mica. Alisa almost made a joke about her engineer’s unrequited love, but decided to rein it in since she hadn’t had any luck finding love lately, either. Not that she was looking. Recently widowed women weren’t supposed to look. It was a rule.

“Yumi, want to join us?” Mica called up, as the ball went back and forth.

“No, thank you,” Yumi said. “My breathing exercises provide me with all the workout I require, with no sweating involved.”

“Breathing exercises?” Mica arched a skeptical eyebrow.

“A combination of stretching and powerful, forceful breathing that increases your oxygen intake, which boosts circulation, strength, and metabolism. I could show you, if you like.”

“Uh.” Judging by Mica’s wrinkled nose, she thought that sounded like a bunch of mumbo jumbo. It was a testament to her interest in Yumi that she didn’t outright say so.

“Can’t be any worse than the candlelit séance you let her lead you through a few weeks ago,” Alisa said.

Mica frowned at her. “That was a meditation session.”

“Oh? Did you call up any ghosts to chat with while you did it?”

“Ha ha.”

Mica threw the ball hard enough that catching it almost knocked Alisa off her feet. It did pummel her in the chest with a solid thump.

“You’re bruising my boobs,” Alisa said, hiding a grimace as she positioned the ball to throw it back. Wasn’t the idea to give her muscles a pummeling?

“Unless you and the cyborg have a date later,” Mica said, “I don’t see how it matters out here.”

Alisa’s cheeks warmed, and she looked toward the other side of the empty cargo hold where a barefooted and bare-chested Leonidas was sparring with a fully armored Tommy Beck. They appeared to be too busy to listen in on Alisa and Mica’s conversation, but Leonidas had that enhanced cyborg hearing, so who knew?

Neither of them looked in her direction. Leonidas launched a flurry of palm strikes and kicks at Beck, who did his best to block them, but still ended up scrambling backward until his back was against the wall. With Beck in full armor and Leonidas barehanded punching, it had to be like striking solid metal, but no hint of pain ever crossed Leonidas’s determined face. He’d explained once that most of his bones had been replaced with nearly indestructible synthetics, but even so, Alisa couldn’t imagine punching armor felt good.

Leonidas lowered his arms and stepped back several paces, waving for Beck to come back to the center of their impromptu sparring arena. The very empty sparring arena. Since Alisa and her passengers had missions that consumed their focus, she hadn’t taken the time to look for any freight to haul, so the hold held little more than the chicken coop. Unfortunately, a lack of freight meant she hadn’t had the funds to fix up the Star Nomad with weapons or any of the other upgrades the seventy-year-old freighter desperately needed.

“You barely dented my armor that time, mech,” Beck said, thumping a fist to his chest plate as he walked back into their arena. His voice sounded muffled through the faceplate of his helmet. He had dressed in his full kit for this sparring match.

“You know who gets to hammer out those dents, don’t you?” Mica muttered to Alisa, throwing the medicine ball again.

“Beck trusts you to do that? You’re not an armor smith.”

“I have a big hammer. That’s all it takes.”

“A big hammer, huh? Does Yumi know? Maybe she’d be more interested.”

Mica’s eyes narrowed as she received the ball. “Watch yourself, Captain, or I’ll bruise more than your boobs.”

“Your lack of job offers is truly puzzling,” Alisa said, referring to her engineer’s desire to find more challenging and auspicious work than the old freighter offered.

This time, when the ball came hurtling at her chest, Alisa was ready and absorbed most of the impact. Still, she wouldn’t have minded a set of combat armor for herself. Like weapons and parts for her ship, it was on her wish list.

Leonidas sighed as Beck danced around with his gauntleted fists up. “I’m not trying to dent your armor. With the speed and power that suit gives you, you ought to be fast enough to attack me, not just scurry out of the way.” He wriggled his fingers in invitation. “Don’t be intimidated. You’re not when you’re fighting other enemies. I’ve seen you in combat. You’re adequate.”

“Adequate?” Beck lowered his fists to his hips. “Is that the kind of effusive praise you gave your soldiers when you were a military commander?”

“Only if they deserved it. And didn’t use words like effusive.”

“I had no idea cyborgs frowned upon vocabulary words.”

“We’re dumb brutes that like to keep things simple.”

Alisa snorted. Leonidas was anything but dumb.

He wriggled his fingers in invitation again.

This time, Beck complied, springing at Leonidas, the servos in his leg armor whirring. A normal man probably wouldn’t have been able to dodge out of the way quickly enough to avoid him, but Leonidas seemed to blur whenever he moved. In the split second it took Beck to reach him, he’d dodged to the side and moved forward, so he could attack. Even as Beck landed and tried to spin to meet him, Leonidas struck hard enough to send him flying. Beck landed in a backward roll and came to his feet, but Leonidas was already atop him. The encounter ended with Beck lying on his back like a turtle, raising his hands in surrender.

Leonidas sighed again, backing away so Beck could rise. For the first time, he looked toward Alisa.

“I don’t suppose you’d consider taking on another cyborg so I would have a sparring partner,” he said.

“If you know any who would like to work for what I’m paying you, I would consider it,” Alisa said.

“You’re not paying me anything.”

“That’s because you haven’t accepted my job offer.” Alisa smiled and raised her eyebrows.

She still hoped that Leonidas would one day tell Alejandro to finish his orb quest on his own, and accept the position of security officer that she had offered him. True, it would be a lowly position for someone who had once been a colonel in command of a battalion of cyborgs, but with the way her ship had found trouble lately, it was sure to keep him busy.

“Maybe you could spar with the Starseer,” Mica said. “I hear he has muscles under his robe.”

Leonidas shifted his gaze up to the walkway, not toward Yumi but toward someone who had strode out of the corridor overlooking the cargo hold. Abelardus.

He gazed down, his angular face aloof, showing nothing of his thoughts—or whether he had heard Mica’s comment. As far as Alisa had heard, Starseers were fully human, with a few quirky gene mutations, and did not have superior hearing, but since they could read minds, maybe Abelardus still knew what everyone had been talking about down here. His eyes locked onto Leonidas’s and his lip curled slightly.

“That looks like a challenge acknowledged and accepted to me,” Mica said.

“Uhm.” Alisa did not think they should encourage “sparring” or anything else between Leonidas and Abelardus, both because cyborgs and Starseers had a history of bad blood and because Leonidas and Abelardus had gotten into a fight once before already. She hadn’t seen it, but she had heard about it—and that some insults or derogatory comments about her had started it. “Actually, I think the sparring arena should close for the day. Beck, what’s on today’s lunch menu? It’s been nice having such good food. Makes it seem like we’re on one of those fancy luxury star cruisers instead of on an old freighter.”

“I will spar with you, mech,” Abelardus said, ignoring Alisa as his eyes remained locked on Leonidas.

Alisa, remembering how many injuries the Starseers on Arkadius had inflicted on Leonidas without ever touching him, shifted uneasily. Their doctor, Alejandro, had spent hours in sickbay with him as soon as they had left the planet, and for the first few days of their journey, Leonidas had been scarce. It had only been in the last couple of days that he had returned to his exercises.

He had to have reservations, but he promptly said, “I accept,” his gaze never wavering from the Starseer.

Abelardus lifted his hand, his fingers splayed back toward the corridor behind him. Before Alisa could do more than puzzle over why he was doing that, his black staff flew into sight. It landed in his hand with a smack.

“Anyone else find that creepy?” Mica asked.

“Yes.” Alisa looked up at Yumi.

Yumi only sighed wistfully. She had the Starseer genes, but had never manifested any talents, something that disappointed her. It relieved Alisa. It had chilled her to learn that her daughter, thanks to her husband’s blood, was developing Starseer abilities. Alisa still wanted to find Jelena and bring her back into her life—and make sure she knew her mother was alive and cared about her very much—but she was no longer certain as to what that life would look like. If Jelena truly could move objects with her mind now, she would need someone to help her develop her talents and teach her the control needed to manage such talent. Alisa imagined a child with the ability to hurl things with her mind being very dangerous if she was untrained. Could Jelena be happy growing up on a freighter with her mother, as Alisa once had? She rubbed her face, not having an answer for that. She only knew that she had to find Jelena before she could figure all of this out.

“Think I’ll get out of the way,” Beck said and rolled to his feet. He removed his helmet and walked over to join Mica and Alisa in the shadow of the stairs. “You want leftovers, Captain? Or something fresh?”

One of the chickens squawked. It might have been because of Beck’s comment or because Abelardus was walking down the stairs, looking imposing in his black robe, his long braids of hair dangling to either side of his bronze face.

Leonidas eyed his staff as he approached, but he did not say anything about it. After all, he had allowed—or perhaps encouraged—Beck to wear his armor to even out the odds. Alisa did not know who would have the advantage in this matchup. Abelardus shouldn’t be able to move any more quickly than a normal human being, but he might be able to use his mind powers to keep Leonidas from reaching him.

“Captain?” Beck prompted.

“Leftovers are fine,” Alisa said. “Thanks.”

Beck trotted up the stairs, either in a hurry to get to his barbecue or in a hurry to get out of the way.

“Should we go up there too?” Mica had stopped tossing the ball, perhaps because Alisa wasn’t paying any attention to it anymore, and had it propped against her hip. “Are there likely to be bodies flying everywhere?”

She spoke lightly, but Alisa did not find the idea amusing.

Leonidas looked at her as Abelardus stopped to lean his staff on the railing at the bottom of the stairs while he removed his robe and tied his hair back. Leonidas gave her a single nod. Mica tossed the ball into a crate secured to the wall and trotted up to the walkway. Instead of following after Beck, she sat down beside Yumi where she would have a good view.

Abelardus wore fitted, blue snagor-hide trousers and a sleeveless vest under the robe, one that was tight over his chest, showing off his musculature. He wasn’t as brawny as Leonidas, but he had a lean, defined form that would catch many women’s eyes. He had a handsome face to go with it, though there was always an arrogant tilt to his chin that Alisa found off-putting. She also found it off-putting that he had used her and Leonidas to buy time for his people to escape an Alliance attack, not caring if they ended up in a brig or dead as a result.

“You’re not going to hurl any smoke canisters at me, are you, mech?” Abelardus asked, picking up his staff again.

“Where would I be carrying smoke canisters?” Leonidas flicked a hand at his bare chest and feet. His loose gi trousers did not appear to have pockets.

“How should I know what you keep in your pants?”

“I trust you’ve seen an anatomy book at least once in your life.”

Abelardus smirked and spun his staff as he approached the arena. “I’ve heard some cyborg anatomy is broken.”

Alisa frowned, not understanding the joke—the insult. Leonidas glanced at her, but his expression was closed now, giving away little.

“No smoke grenades or other tricks,” Abelardus said, lowering into a fighting crouch, his staff held in both hands before him. Despite his cocky swagger, Alisa thought he looked nervous, with a tense set to his shoulders. He had stopped several feet from Leonidas, leaving himself time to react—or throw a mental attack—before his adversary could strike.

“Fine,” Leonidas said. “No trying to give me heart attacks or make my kidneys burst.”

Abelardus scoffed, as if it hadn’t crossed his mind, but Leonidas’s specificness made Alisa suspect he had experienced those things at the hands of a Starseer. She remembered that old man in the library, the pleasure in his eyes as he had tried to hurl Leonidas through that hole in the wall and to the ice a hundred feet below.

“Ready?” Leonidas asked. He was simply standing, his arms loose and relaxed, but Alisa knew he could strike in an instant.

“Ready,” Abelardus said.

Leonidas surged into motion, crossing the distance between them faster than an eye could blink. Abelardus had his staff out and started a swing, but it did not matter. It was like swatting at a wrecking ball.

Leonidas bowled into him, and Abelardus went flying. He soared several meters through the air before landing. If that had been Alisa, she would have crashed down butt-first, but Abelardus managed to turn the fall into a roll that put more distance between him and his opponent. He came up facing Leonidas, who gave him a second to recover, but then charged after him.

Abelardus flung his hand out before Leonidas reached him. This time, Leonidas flew backward, as if he’d been the one to encounter the wrecking ball. Even though Abelardus had not physically touched him, Leonidas was hurled across the cargo hold until he struck the bulkhead.

“Shit,” Mica mumbled from the walkway above Alisa. “Beck’s armor isn’t the only thing I’ll be hammering dents out of.”

Leonidas slid down the wall and landed on his feet. The blow had to have hurt—it would have shattered a normal person’s ribs, if not broken his back—but he merely strode back toward Abelardus, his blue eyes intense and determined. Abelardus dropped back into his ready crouch, his staff in his hands. He pointed the tip toward Leonidas, as if it were a rifle instead of a seven-foot-long stick.

The hairs on the back of Alisa’s arms rose. She stepped closer to the stairs, as if they might protect her from whatever power Abelardus conjured.

Leonidas dove to the side, as if a bullet were coming out of that staff. Alisa did not see it release anything, but something invisible clipped him on the shoulder, turning his flight into a strange shimmy. Somehow, he got his legs curled under him and turned the dive into an opportunity to spring off the deck and toward Abelardus, who was bringing his staff to bear again. He was not quick enough, and Leonidas reached him first, bowling into him again.

This time, they went down in a tangle of limbs. The staff flew free like a rocket, skidding across the deck to clang off the base of the stairs near Alisa’s feet.

She jumped, startled, but she did not take her gaze from the battle. Leonidas had hold of his prey now and was not letting go. They wrestled briefly, Abelardus crying out once in a mixture of fury and pain, before Leonidas came out on top. Abelardus bucked, his movements frantic rather than calculating, as he tried to throw off his foe. But Leonidas pinned him and reached for his throat. Abelardus ceased struggling, and his eyes grew fierce, full of concentration. Before those powerful cyborg fingers wrapped around Abelardus’s throat, Leonidas’s head jerked back. His eyes bulged and his face contorted in agony, the tendons in his thick neck standing out.

Despite his obvious pain, his fingers inched closer to Abelardus’s throat. Then, in a quick burst of movement, they were around Abelardus’s neck. Leonidas’s expression grew even more pained, and he panted, some invisible force tormenting him. But a very real force tormented Abelardus. Those fingers tightened, cutting off his airway. He grabbed Leonidas’s meaty forearms, fingers digging into that muscle, but he could not push them away.

Alisa stepped forward, though she did not know what she could do, only knowing that this had gone beyond a simple sparring match. The two men were locked in tableau, like a statue of ancient warriors grappling before their gods.

Alisa clapped her hands as she approached. “Lunchtime, boys. Who wants lunch?”

Neither man glanced in her direction. Abelardus wheezed as Leonidas’s fingers tightened. Abruptly, the force holding Leonidas back, the force hurting him, seemed to vanish, as if Abelardus’s concentration had slipped.

Leonidas took advantage. He dropped his head like a viper striking, smashing his skull into Abelardus’s face. Abelardus’s lower body twitched, and he kicked out in pain or frustration, or both. Leonidas was too far up, straddling his torso, for the kick to touch him. He spun Abelardus over, pinning him belly down, face mashed into the hard metal deck.

“Do you yield?” Leonidas demanded, his mouth close to his opponent’s ear, his knee grinding into Abelardus’s spine.

Abelardus roared, trying to lift his head. Blood streamed from one nostril. Fury stamped his face, but he didn’t seem to be able to launch another mental attack from that position. Maybe he was in too much pain to concentrate.

“Do you yield?” Leonidas repeated.

Abelardus clenched his jaw stubbornly, and Alisa worried that he would not say the words—and that Leonidas would not let him go until he did. His face was almost as contorted as Abelardus’s, not in pain now, but he almost looked as if he were lost in some other world, that he was locked in mortal combat in his mind rather than simply exercising in her cargo hold.

“Leonidas, Abelardus,” she said, stopping beside them and hoping she wasn’t being a fool and risking herself by standing so close. “What are your votes for lunch? Leftovers, or shall we have Beck make something fresh?”

For a few seconds, neither man moved, and she thought they would continue to ignore her. Then Leonidas blinked a few times, as if waking from a dream—or a nightmare. He did not let go of Abelardus, but his gaze shifted toward her. He seemed confused, as if he didn’t recognize her.

“Let’s end it, eh?” she said quietly, holding her hands out beside her in a nonthreatening manner.

Finally, he focused fully on her, and recognition returned to his eyes. He looked down at Abelardus, the braids having fallen from their tie and lying tangled about his head. Blood spattered the deck under his face.

Leonidas released him and stepped away. Abelardus slowly pushed himself into a sitting position, as if the fight had gone out of him, but fury still burned in his eyes when he looked up.

Leonidas opened his mouth, and Alisa thought he would apologize—his expression was slightly chagrined, as if he knew he had taken things too far. Before he could speak, Abelardus’s fingers twitched. Once again, an invisible force slammed into Leonidas, the edge of it brushing Alisa. It was like a tornado hitting her, and she stumbled back, barely keeping her feet. Her back struck the stair railing as Leonidas flew across the cargo hold, slamming into another wall.

Abelardus stood up, not sparing a glance for Alisa, and lifted his hand to summon his staff. It flew into his grip. He glowered across the hold at Leonidas. Alisa clenched her fists, irritated by the attack and irritated that she’d almost been knocked on her ass by it. Hells, all she had asked was what he wanted for lunch.

Once again, Leonidas walked away from what must have felt like a ton of bricks being dropped onto his back. He could have charged across the hold, and they could have done it all again, but he only took a few steps before stopping, his eyes locked with Abelardus’s.

“Are we done?” he asked.

“Until next time,” Abelardus said, his voice cold. He ignored the blood dribbling down his lips and from his chin.

Leonidas inclined his head, as if in respect to a worthy opponent, though Alisa could not tell if the gesture was sincere. “I will look forward to it.”

“I bet you will. Asshole.” Abelardus grabbed his robe and stalked up the stairs.

Yumi and Mica watched him warily, but he headed back toward the common areas and crew cabins.

“Are you all right?” Leonidas asked Alisa, joining her at the base of the stairs. Had he seen her stumble away as he’d flown across the hold?

“Am I all right?” she asked. “You’re the one who hit the wall. Twice. You’re going to have bruises. If not hernias. Do you want me to walk you to sickbay?”

He snorted, his back straight and his chin high. “That’s hardly necessary. He fought fairly.”

Fairly. Right.

“If you say so. You cyborgs aren’t very good at making friends.” Alisa regretted the words as soon as they came out. Abelardus had been the bigger ass in that encounter, at least in her eyes.

“It’s not a good idea to make friends with people you might have to kill one day,” Leonidas said.

“Oh? Are you planning a disagreeable end for our Starseer passenger?”

“It’s just a general comment.”

His eyes grew distant, almost haunted, as he gazed toward a wall, and Alisa was tempted to ask if he’d had to do that before, kill someone he considered a friend. She decided she did not want to know, especially since she had started to consider him a friend, and she’d hoped he considered her one too.

A couple of alert beeps came from the ship’s speakers.

“So much for lunch,” Alisa said, swinging onto the stairs.

“Is that trouble?” Leonidas asked.

“Considering how my luck has been lately? Probably so.”

Chapter 2

Alisa passed Alejandro as she jogged through the mess hall and toward NavCom. The comm alert continued to beep softly and insistently. Alejandro followed her, his expression between curious and wary. He was probably worried someone else was after his orb. Alisa wouldn’t be surprised, though they were a long way from any planets or stations. She had taken them out of the shipping lanes the day before to head toward the coordinates Alejandro and Leonidas wanted to check. The coordinates that were adding yet another delay to her mission to find her daughter. If she actually knew where Jelena was, she never would have agreed to the detour, but Abelardus was the only one who had a clue, and it wasn’t much of a clue.

“Is it the proximity alert?” Alejandro asked.

“No,” Alisa said, sliding into the pilot’s seat and tapping the comm. “Someone wants to talk to us.”

“That doesn’t sound too bad.”

“We’ll find out. I don’t know who would be out here in comm range.”

Alejandro entered NavCom, and Leonidas also appeared, his big frame filling the hatchway. Alejandro looked at his sweaty bare chest and lifted his eyebrows. Alejandro was, as usual, in a gray monk’s robe, the pendant of the Divine Suns Trinity dangling from his neck.

“Workout,” Leonidas explained.

Workout. That was an innocuous term for it.

“…in need of assistance,” a woman’s voice came over the comm. She sounded harried. “To any who hear this message, this is the captain of the passenger transport, the Peace and Prayer. We are pilgrims on a journey to visit the holy landmarks, but our engine has failed, and life support will follow. We need help. If you hear this, please respond. We are in need of assistance.”

Alisa turned down the volume as the message repeated.

“That a ship you’ve heard of, Doctor?” she asked, turning toward the sensor panel.

“No.” Alejandro gave her a puzzled look, as if to wonder why she would ask.

She waved at his robe and pendant.

“Pilgrims don’t report in to me,” he said. “I am a lowly acolyte in the order.”

She looked to Leonidas, wondering if she would catch an eyebrow twitch or anything that would suggest Alejandro wasn’t even that. For a while now, she had suspected he was using the robe as a costume and did not truly have a tie to the religion. Especially since monks were supposed to be peaceful, and he’d proven that he would do just about anything to finish his mission and keep it a secret, even contemplating the murder of nosy pilots.

Leonidas did not react to Alejandro’s statement. He nodded at the sensor display. “Can you see the ship? Does the story fit?”

Alisa gave him a sharp look. “Did something make you think it’s a trap?”

She hadn’t suspected that from the message, but maybe he had heard something in the background to make him suspicious.

“Not necessarily,” he said, “but—”

“It wouldn’t be the first time pirates have feigned needing help to set up an ambush,” Alejandro said.

“True,” Alisa said, “but we’re on the way to your coordinates that are halfway between nowhere and nowhere. This wouldn’t be a logical place to spin your web if you wanted flies to chance into it.”

“A valid point,” Leonidas said.

Alejandro only screwed up his face into a dubious expression.

“Really, Doctor,” Alisa said, “I’d expect you to be the first person to want to go help some pilgrims.” Or she would if he was truly a disciple of the Suns Trinity.

“If they are true pilgrims, I am very open to helping them,” Alejandro said.

Alisa located a ship at the far edge of the Nomad’s sensor range. It did appear to be a passenger transport, one capable of carrying twenty or thirty people. It was a civilian model, nothing she recognized from the war.

“That part of their story checks out,” she said, turning back toward the comm.

The woman’s message was playing on a loop, being broadcast out to the maximum range. Alisa wondered if anyone would be at the comm station in that ship.

“Peace and Prayer,” she said, managing to say the name without making a face, “this is the Star Nomad. We’ve received your message. Are you still in need of assistance?”

Leonidas pulled down the foldout chair behind the pilot’s seat and sat at the sensor station, tapping a couple of buttons.

“You’re not getting cyborg sweat on my seat, are you?” Alisa asked quietly while waiting for a response to her call.

“I’m trying to see if I can detect the engine failure they reported.” He arched his eyebrows at her. “And are you sure it’s logical for you to mock my ability to make friends?”

“You don’t think my propensity for cracking jokes and teasing people can win over friends?” She smiled, pleased when he teased her back instead of merely frowning at the inappropriateness of her humor.

“So far, I’ve mostly seen it get you into trouble.”

“Maybe we’re a good match then, Leonidas.”

Alejandro, who remained standing near the hatchway, frowned at this exchange.

Leonidas looked to the sensor display. “We need to get closer to get a better read on them.”

“I know.” Alisa disengaged the autopilot and adjusted their course to head in the direction of the passenger ship. Nobody had responded to her hail so she tried again on another channel. “Let me know when you can tell if their engines—and their life support—are working.”

She grimaced at the idea of coming upon a ship full of corpses. Even though she hadn’t been the one to originally find the Star Nomad adrift, with her mother’s body inside, she couldn’t help but think of that moment and what it must have been like for the freighter captain who had discovered her. Almost seven years had passed, but Alisa distinctly remembered what it had been like when she had been brought in to make arrangements for the body.

Alisa tapped the internal comm. “Mica, are you in engineering?”

“Where else would I be?” came the prompt answer.

“I thought you might have gone with Beck to help pick out lunch.”

“We got a comm message. I assumed that meant trouble.”

“It is possible for two ships to simply pass each other, chat in a friendly manner for a few minutes, and then head on their separate ways without trouble ever coming into the equation.”

“Uh huh. And is that what’s happening?”

“No.”

A chicken squawked in the corridor outside of NavCom. Alisa turned, intending to tell Alejandro to shut the hatch, but Yumi had come to poke her head inside.

“I was wondering what was happening,” she said. “And if you needed a science teacher at the sensor station.” She considered the back of Leonidas’s head.

“I’ve got a cyborg there now. And he’s leaving a sweaty butt print, so you may not want to sit there after him.”

Leonidas ignored her—maybe he was reading something interesting on the sensors—and Alejandro was the one to sigh at her. “We are paying passengers, you know.”

“I know.” It was the only reason Alisa had been able to afford supplies for this next leg of their trip. “Does that mean I’m not supposed to comment on your sweat?”

“One expects a certain amount of decorum from those in customer service positions.”

Alisa resisted the urge to make a rude gesture at him. She was the captain, not his servant, and if he didn’t like the way she ran her ship, he could get off at the next stop. In fact, she would be thrilled if he did so. It was easier for a dog to shake a tick than it was for her to get rid of him.

“That must be an imperial custom,” she said. “In the Alliance, we didn’t have a lot of time to spend on decorum.”

“Obviously.”

“I’m not reading any engine activity,” Leonidas said. “It could have been powered down manually.”

“Or it could have failed, as she said,” Alisa said.

She turned her back to Alejandro, feeling bad for sniping with him when there were people out there who needed help. The Nomad had flown close enough to bring the pilgrim ship up on the cameras, so she did so, putting the image on the big view screen.

The transport vessel had an unimaginative oblong body with portholes lining the side and three thrusters bunched at the rear. It was an older ship with scuffs and peeling paint, but there were no signs of battle damage. It had not been attacked. And it still cruised along at a decent speed, its nose pointed forward, so nothing had struck it or derailed it from its path, at least at first glance.

“Science teacher, do you want to plot their course for me?” Alisa waved Yumi to the co-pilot’s seat. “See if their current route would take them somewhere interesting.”

“Certainly, Captain.” Yumi squeezed past Alejandro and Leonidas, but paused to look at the co-pilot’s seat before sitting down.

“It should be butt-print free, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Alisa said.

Alejandro sighed again.

Yumi offered a sheepish smile. “I was contemplating if I should find a towel.”

“It would be a small miracle if you could,” Alejandro said. “The lav is perpetually out.”

“The water removers in the sanibox work fine,” Alisa said, still studying the other ship. She didn’t see any running lights, and again had the concern that they might be too late.

“They pucker my skin,” Alejandro said.

“Was it hard being an ER doctor when you’re such a delicate doily?”

“No. At the hospital, we had normal water removers, not noisy behemoths from the turn of the century that suck half your skin off as they dry it.”

Alisa punched the button to comm the Peace and Prayer again, silently pleading for them to answer, not only because she wanted the pilgrims to be alive, but because she wanted a reason to end the chitchat in NavCom.

“They are noisy,” Yumi said.

Alisa scowled at her. “You got that course plotted yet?”

Yumi slid into the seat and tapped the controls. “Almost.”

Leonidas cleared his throat. “The engines are off, as I said, but I am reading life support and minimal power. It looks like they’re on the battery backup.”

Alisa sat straighter. “Oh, good. But then why isn’t anyone answering?”

“Perhaps they find your lack of decorum off-putting,” Alejandro muttered.

“Doctor, I think Mica needs your help in engineering.”

“I find that unlikely.”

“Get out of my navigation cabin, anyway,” Alisa said, using her best don’t-screw-with-me command tone.

Alejandro looked at Leonidas, as if he expected him to rough Alisa up for being mouthy. Leonidas was looking at the sensors and ignored him.

“I can’t tell where they came from,” Yumi said, tapping a star map on a computer display. “There’s nothing behind them, not in a direct line. They must have changed course since they originally took off.”

Alisa nodded. It happened. Sometimes, one ran into unexpected debris—or even the expected debris of an asteroid field—and had to alter course. And navigating the gravitational tangle in the space between the three suns thwarted even experienced pilots’ attempts to lay predictable courses.

“They are, however, on a direct heading toward Primus 7,” Yumi said.

“A space station full of casinos?” Alisa asked. “Seems an unlikely place to find holy landmarks.” She looked at Alejandro, who had retreated into the corridor but had not gone away fully.

“There are medical facilities on Primus 7,” Leonidas said. “Perhaps the closest ones to where we are.”

“They didn’t mention needing a doctor in their message,” Alisa said.

“Would you announce your weaknesses when sending out a general distress signal? In a system that’s much fuller of pirates and scavengers than it was a year ago?”

Alisa frowned back at him, not wanting to get into another argument about how degenerate the system was now that the empire wasn’t in charge. Instead, she asked, “Do you see anything on the sensors that would indicate a medical emergency?”

“Perhaps.”

While she waited for him to explain further, Alisa guided the Nomad alongside the Peace and Prayer, matching their course and speed. She also lined up her airlock port to theirs in case they decided to go over. If the crew was unable to respond because of a medical problem, then she should take people over to help, assuming it wasn’t a situation where a quarantine would make sense. She didn’t have the facilities or tech for dealing with that, and somehow, she doubted Alejandro would risk himself to go check on people carrying a deadly disease. For a doctor, he definitely had a selfish streak.

“There’s nobody chasing them, by chance, is there?” Alisa asked.

“No other ships are in range,” Leonidas said.

“There aren’t any nearby stations or known pirate hangouts,” Yumi said. “As I said, plotting their back-route just shows a bunch of nothingness.”

“Nothingness?” Alisa frowned over at her, then back at Alejandro and Leonidas. Leonidas was tapping the sensors, probably trying to figure out if anyone was left alive over there.

Alisa dipped into her pocket for her netdisc. She had the coordinates that Leonidas had provided at the beginning of their journey, coordinates he’d used some Starseer nursery rhyme to come up with, coordinates she had pointed out were in the middle of nowhere. She doubted there would be a link between them and the pilgrim ship’s course, but she pulled up the local map, nevertheless.

The gas giant Aldrin and some of its inhabited moons, including Cleon, popped up at the far edge, and distant stars were visible in the background. The three-dimensional holodisplay was easier for looking at objects in space than the flat built-in monitor that Yumi was using.

“Humor me and see if their route went anywhere near that dot there,” Alisa told Yumi, swiping her finger to zoom in.

“Why would this ship have visited the coordinates that Leonidas gave you?” Alejandro asked, suspicion in his voice.

What, did he think that Alisa had commed ahead and told some pilgrims to check out his secret spot first?

“It probably hasn’t,” Alisa said, “but there’s nothing else out here, so I’m checking. Maybe someone else likes Starseer nursery rhymes.”

It was also possible that Abelardus, even though he hadn’t been invited to any of the meetings, had plucked the coordinates out of Alejandro’s or Leonidas’s thoughts. He could have been the one to comm ahead to someone. Admittedly, Alisa could not imagine him choosing to communicate with pilgrims. Unless there happened to be a Starseer on that ship.

Alisa shook her head. Her mind was dancing without a partner. The odds of there being a relation were—

“That’s interesting,” Yumi said.

“What is?”

Yumi tapped a few buttons on the console screen, sending information to the netdisc. A dotted line bisected the star map. It went directly through the blue dot that represented the coordinates Leonidas had shared.

“That was their route?” Alejandro asked, stepping back into NavCom.

“If they haven’t changed it.” Yumi shrugged.

“Shit.” Alejandro glared at Leonidas and then glared even harder at Alisa. “Someone leaked the information, and someone else got there first.”

“Nobody in here leaked anything,” Alisa said. “You’re the only one who even wants that Staff of Whatzit.”

“I assure you, everyone would want it if they knew it still existed.”

“Not everybody. The only use I’d have for a big stick is clubbing irritating passengers.”

Alejandro looked like he wanted to club her. Well, he was welcome to try.

“Abelardus could have gotten the information from us,” Leonidas said quietly.

“Why would a passenger ship on a pilgrimage be sent to investigate a Starseer artifact?” Yumi asked, scratching her head.

“Maybe there’s a Starseer onboard,” Alejandro said, echoing Alisa’s thoughts. “The pilgrimage could simply be a ruse.” He curled his lip in distaste.

Alisa almost looked at his robe and said he would know all about that, but Leonidas spoke first.

“I only read two people alive on there,” he said.

“Two people would be enough to fly a ship like that,” Alisa said, “but that message made it sound like there would be more. A bunch of pilgrims.”

“If they were there before, they’re not there now.”

“We should take a look,” Alejandro said.

“Because you’re worried people are wounded or because you’re worried someone over there got your staff?” Alisa asked.

“I hardly think you have the right to take the moral high ground with me, Captain.”

“I need to keep the hatch to NavCom locked more often,” Alisa muttered to Yumi. “Leonidas, is there anything else over there that we need to be concerned about? Engine leaks? Gas leaks?”

He looked over at her. “You do realize I’m using your sensor system, right?”

“You’re not picking on my ship, are you?” Alisa asked.

“Just pointing out that its scanners are limited.”

“Because freighters aren’t supposed to scan things. They’re supposed to deliver things.”

Leonidas stood up, forcing Alejandro to back into the corridor again. “Then you can deliver me to that ship, and I’ll go take a look. The sensors in my armor will tell you what you want to know as soon as we open up the hatch to their ship.”

“I was hoping to learn that information before we opened the hatch and sent people over,” Alisa grumbled, as he headed to his cabin to change.

She turned in her chair to see what readings she could get from the old sensor equipment. Unfortunately, Leonidas was right, and there wasn’t much. She was surprised he had finessed it into reading life signs.

“Perhaps you could upgrade the ship with more scientific equipment one day,” Yumi said, “since you seem to go to a lot of interesting places.”

“Right, I’ll put it on the list, right after the lav upgrades. We wouldn’t want the doctor’s fragile skin to have to deal with harsh water removers.”

Alejandro opened his mouth, no doubt to comment on her decorum.

Alisa hit the internal comm button and spoke first. “Beck, suit up. We’re flying alongside a ship that’s in trouble. There might be some people that need to be brought over here for medical attention. Leonidas would be devastated if you didn’t join him to help.”

Yumi smiled.

“Doctor,” Alisa said, bracing herself for an objection, “why don’t you get a medical kit ready in case someone over there needs treatment?”

“Very well,” he said and walked out.

Alisa turned back to the controls. She would have to line them up even more precisely if they were going to extend their airlock tube and lock on. She hoped one of the two people who were alive over there would be able to answer the door. The idea of forcing their way in made her feel like a pirate, like all those people who had forced their way onto her ship. But they might have to do just that. If nobody was in a position to answer the comm over there, chances were they also wouldn’t show up when the doorbell rang.

Her comm flashed. Alisa thought it might be the other ship, finally responding, but it was Mica.

“Is this other ship going to need repairs?” she asked.

“Maybe,” Alisa said. “They mentioned an engine failure in their distress call, and our sensors do show that it’s offline. They appear to be running minimal life support off the battery.”

“We don’t have any spare parts, certainly nothing that would match the needs of that ship.”

“You’ve got gum and cable ties. Won’t that do?”

“Funny.”

“We’ll worry about it after Leonidas and Beck report.” Alisa finished lining up the Nomad with the pilgrim ship and stood up. “I’m going down to the cargo hold, Yumi. Will you let me know if anything happens? Such as the other ship suddenly veering away and breaking our tube in the process?” She grimaced at the thought.

“Uhm, is that likely?”

Alisa shrugged. “I hope not.”

“Maybe you should stay up here.”

“Oh, I have no doubt of that, but I’m too curious not to peek around Leonidas’s shoulder as he goes in.” She wished she could go explore, even though pilots weren’t supposed to wander off and explore. Neither were captains.

“I’m sure he’ll report whatever he finds,” Yumi said, “though I understand being curious.”

Alisa started for the hatchway but jumped when Abelardus appeared there.

“We’re boarding that ship?” He looked toward the star map floating over Yumi’s half of the console. The line through the coordinates remained in the air. If he recognized its significance, it did not surprise him.

“We’re checking it out, yes,” Alisa said.

“That’s not a good idea.”

“There are a couple of people still alive over there. At the least, we need to see if they need help.”

“It’s too late for them,” he said quietly.

“What does that mean? What do you know?”

A distant clang echoed up from the cargo hold—the airlock hatch being opened? Alisa glanced at the console. Yes, the tube had been extended and secured. Leonidas and Beck could already be crossing over.

Abelardus turned and strode away.

“Damn it, Abelardus.” Alisa leaped to her feet. “What do you know?”

~

Afterword

Thank you for reading the first three Fallen Empire books. Relic of Sorrows and the rest of the books in the series are out now if you want to continue on. You can find the reading order for the complete series on my website: Fallen Empire Reading Order

Please sign up for my newsletter to get the bonus short story “Saranth Three” and epilogues for Books 4 and 8.

You can also follow me on Twitter or Facebook. Thanks for reading!