“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 s
he 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 i
n 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.”