“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 draw
ing 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 s
oldiers 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.”