“Hm,” Abelardus said, floating up to the crest of the island and peering at the ground.
A single fungal stalk stretched up into the drab sky, but there was not much else in the way of ground cover. Yumi made a disappointed noise, perhaps noting the lack of mushrooms.
“You’re not lost, are you?” Mica asked, frowning at him and then at the skyline over the forest. A pterodactyl flew over the stalks in the distance, its dark body outlined by gray clouds.
“No,” Abelardus said, pulling his staff off the back of the bike, where he had it wedged amid the grisly dinosaur heads. “I just need a moment to…”
He laid it across his lap and closed his eyes while running a hand absently along the dark metal.
“Stroke your staff?” Mica asked.
The runes on the weapon glowed faintly.
“Is it safe to sit next to him when he’s doing that?” Mica muttered, easing her bike closer to Alisa’s.
“I’m not sure it’s ever safe to sit next to him,” Alisa said.
“I am not the one who injured you last night,” Abelardus said, opening his eyes and frowning at them, and then at Leonidas.
Leonidas’s jaw clenched. Alisa regretted making the joke.
Abelardus pointed his staff at the ground. A soft rumble sounded, and a rectangular portion lifted up under Yumi’s bike. She gasped and steered away from it. The section only lifted a few inches, dripping mud off the edges. Then it slid sideways, revealing an opening about six feet wide by ten feet long. A shaft descended into darkness, and Alisa could not tell if it dropped ten feet or fifty. The faint tinkle of dripping water drifted up from the depths.
Leonidas eased his bike forward so he could look down. “It goes under the lake?” he asked.
“Yes. There may be defenses, so a Starseer should lead.” Abelardus lifted his chin. “I’ll go first and let you know when it’s safe.” He touched his temple. “I know how you all love having my gentle caress in your minds.”
“Gentle caress?” Leonidas asked. “Is that what you call it?”
“I’m less gentle with cyborgs. They have hard brains. Sometimes you have to bash your way in.”
Leonidas growled at him, but extended one gauntleted red hand toward the opening in invitation.
Abelardus nudged his bike forward to hover over the hole, then flicked on the headlight and adjusted the controls so that the vehicle descended slowly. Alisa watched as his head dropped below the level of the entrance, his lamp playing over the interior, damp gray cement streaked with water stains. When he reached the bottom, more than twenty feet down, the lamp shone into a tunnel. He hovered into it, the influence of his headlight dimming as he disappeared from sight.
Alisa waited patiently for almost thirty seconds. Even though Abelardus had not spoken into her mind, she eased her bike over the edge. She was too eager to find this outpost and Jelena to wait. She would take her daughter back with them, where she could run up and down the corridors of the ship, laughing and playing with the chickens. Mother and daughter could once again have vid nights. Did Jelena still like Andromeda Android? Or had she grown out of animated shows? A few more years, and she might be ready to watch some of Alisa’s favorite comedies with her, the less raunchy ones, of course.
I see you couldn’t wait for my gentle caress, Abelardus spoke into her mind.
I don’t like waiting on men.
Isn’t that what you’re doing with your cyborg?
Would you quit bringing him up? And stop making snide comments about him.
Anyone who loses his composure and hits a woman deserves snide comments.
If you’ve been surfing in our thoughts, you know that’s not what happened. And someone who forces his affections on a woman is even worse.
For a moment, he did not speak, and Alisa thought the conversation was over. She descended in mental silence, the sound of dripping water increasing as she neared a pool at the bottom. Then he added, I would never hurt you.
Alisa huffed in irritation. She swore that he didn’t even understand how he had offended her.
She had drawn even with the tunnel and could see Leonidas’s bike pulling over the shaft above her, ready to descend. He probably hadn’t received a gentle caress—or hard bash—either, and was simply coming because he was unwilling to fall behind.
Something dripped onto Alisa’s shoulder, and she eased her bike into the tunnel.
“That better not be dino blood falling on me,” she called back quietly, not sure how much noise they should make. Would the Starseers greet them with open arms—or with weapons? Durant and whoever else was involved in this scheme might not want to give Jelena back.
Leonidas did not respond as his bike descended. Humor, inappropriate and otherwise, did not seem to be on his mind today. Too bad. She would have preferred to make light of the incident.
Abelardus was continuing down the passage, the illumination from his lamp growing dimmer. Alisa sailed after him, trusting Leonidas to make sure nothing happened to Yumi and Mica as they descended.
The tunnel extended under the lake and seemed to go even farther, well into the land beside it. The cement walls were uniform, as drab as everything else on the planet. A trickle of water flowed along the floor of the passage, heading back toward the pool at the bottom of the shaft.
Abelardus stopped at what appeared to be a dead end. A single rune was carved into the wall, the design reminding Alisa of the ones on his staff.
“Doorbell?” she asked.
“A warning that those who aren’t invited will be dealt with mercilessly.”
“Cheery. Are we invited?”
Abelardus hesitated. “We’re not un-invited.”
“You said your brother never responded to your message, didn’t you?”
“Correct.”
“So, all we know is that he was here months ago.” Alisa tamped down her hope that they would find Jelena here. If they did, that would be stellar, but she had to brace herself for the possibility that they would not.
“Also correct.” Abelardus waggled his eyebrows at her. “You’re very good at this. Shall we sign up as partners in a trivia game?”
“No.”
Leonidas, Mica, and Yumi joined them at the end of the tunnel. Abelardus pointed his staff at the wall and closed his eyes. The rune pulsed with a silvery blue glow, and Alisa shifted uneasily, not sure whether that was a welcoming acknowledgment or a warning of impending doom.
Another rumble sounded, and the door opened inward.
Abelardus entered without hesitation. A large chamber waited inside, this one dimly lit by smaller runes that glowed from columns of stone that rose up to a ceiling twenty or thirty feet overhead.
A fortress of sorts rose on the other side of an open space, its stone front wall spanning the chamber and rising up almost as high as the ceiling. A few narrow windows overlooked the area. More runes glowed from the wall, and double doors stood open in the center. Alisa would have taken that as an invitation, but one of them hung crookedly on a broken hinge, and scorch marks marred the surface.
Abelardus parked his bike, hopped off, and ran toward something crumpled on the stone near the doors. Not something. Someone.
He crouched next to the figure, but he or she did not move.
Alisa eyed the glowing runes warily, imagining energy beams leaping forth and incinerating her, but she drove her bike closer to the doors before dismounting. Leonidas, Mica, and Yumi parked next to her.
“She’s dead,” Abelardus said grimly, looking toward them.
Alisa’s gut lurched. Her first thought was that he meant Jelena, but the figure was too large to belong to a child. The body lay sprawled face-down, legs tangled in a black Starseer robe. The woman appeared to have been running toward the doors when something struck her in the back. Leonidas pointed to one of the Starseer staffs lying several meters from her. Whatever had struck the woman must have hit hard if her weapon flew so far.
Thinking of the dinosa
urs, Alisa looked around the cavern again, noting the deep shadows behind those support columns. If creatures were down there with them, Abelardus or Leonidas should have detected them, but she couldn’t help but view the place with more concern. Had Jelena been here when this person had been killed? Was she somewhere inside now? Hiding? Afraid? Alisa itched to charge in and look around, but the possible threat of Starseer traps kept her from doing so, for the moment.
Abelardus muttered something that sounded like a prayer or a blessing before rolling the body over. His face was hard to read behind his breathing mask, but his eyes appeared more serious than usual. Maybe it meant more to him when his own people died, or maybe he had known the woman.
Leonidas crouched on the other side of the body from him.
“There are no visible wounds,” he observed.
Abelardus glanced at him in irritation, but did not tell him to go away. “It wasn’t one of the dinosaurs. If it had been, she would have been eaten afterward.”
“A dinosaur wouldn’t have shot up the fortress,” Leonidas said, flicking a hand toward the scorch marks on the doors.
“Nobody shot her though.”
“No,” Leonidas agreed. “Could a mental attack have been responsible?”
“You think one of my people killed her with his mind?” Abelardus sounded incredulous.
That surprised Alisa since she had seen the Starseers crash Alliance ships with their mind powers, and crashes inevitably killed people.
Abelardus frowned at Alisa and spoke into her mind. We do that to defend ourselves and our territory, lest we become targets—which is exactly what happened as soon as the Alliance figured out how to get to our temple on Arkadius. His frown deepened. We wouldn’t attack—kill—defenseless people who were running away from us.
You mean you wouldn’t attack your own people, Alisa retorted silently. I’ve seen Starseers attack Leonidas when he couldn’t fight back. That old man was trying to push him out of that library tower and to his death.
A cyborg isn’t a person.
He’s just as human as you are.
He’s half machine. He’s an aberration. They all are.
Alisa clenched her fist, and her wrist twinged, protesting. And your people aren’t aberrations?
We are superior beings. And we don’t kill each other. Abelardus scowled down at the body for a moment, then stood and strode for the doors.
Though her instinct was to defend Leonidas, Alisa held back on further comments. Abelardus was understandably upset. This wasn’t the time to argue with him, especially since he and the others were here on her behalf.
She followed him toward the open doors, eyeing the way the left one hung free of its top hinge. It looked heavy and like it could fall the rest of the way down any moment.
“Are we leaving our trophies out here?” Mica asked, waving to the bikes.
Yumi wasn’t chancing theft—she had her mushroom collection bag slung over her shoulder.
“You think someone’s going to steal them?” Alisa asked. “It took a Starseer to get us in here.”
“Starseers must not be that rare, because someone else clearly got in here recently.” Mica nodded at the body. “We might be walking into a trap if we go in there.”
“Are you volunteering to stay behind?”
“Not necessarily. Just pointing out that trouble might be waiting for us.”
Alisa sighed. “It usually is.”
She caught up with Abelardus, who had stopped in the doorway to touch the blast marks.
“I don’t think a blazer did this,” he said, glancing at Leonidas.
“It does look less regular and linear than rifle fire,” Leonidas said.
“It could have been an energy blast from a staff,” Abelardus admitted, his voice dropping so low Alisa barely heard it.
“You think your own people attacked a Starseer outpost?”
“I don’t know yet. That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Unless they wanted something—or someone—held inside,” Alisa said, Jelena’s face popping into her mind. But her daughter couldn’t be important enough to kill over. That didn’t make any sense. Even if she had two parents with Starseer blood and might be a distant descendant of Alcyone, that couldn’t mean that much, could it?
“This would still be unacceptable,” Abelardus said, his back stiff as he turned toward a courtyard that lay inside. “Even though some of our people supported the Alliance and others supported the empire, we still didn’t kill each other over our differences. We’re civilized.”
He stalked into the courtyard.
Alisa exchanged a look with Leonidas, half-expecting him to make a comment about Abelardus's civility, but he did not. Instead, he said, “I’m reading filtered, breathable air down here.”
“So we can take our masks off?” Yumi scratched around the side of hers. “Mine is making my face sweaty.”
“If you wish. I can let you know if the air gets questionable again.”
Trustingly, Yumi pushed hers up to her forehead. She crinkled her nose, sniffed, then shrugged. “Smells fine.”
When Yumi did not keel over, Alisa pulled her own mask off. The damp, chill air licked at her face, but nothing more inimical happened. Mica scowled at them and pointedly did not touch her mask.
Leonidas and Alisa followed Abelardus into the courtyard where modest one- and two-story stone structures lined the space, their backs formed by the cavern walls. Here, the windows were larger and open to the air rather than being covered with Glastica or forcefields.
Abelardus did not go far before stopping again. Two more bodies lay at the back of the courtyard, sprawled similarly to that of the woman, except the robed figures looked like they had been facing the doors when their deaths had come. Both of them gripped staffs in their hands, as if they had been fighting until the very end.
The uneasy feeling in Alisa’s gut returned when she saw that one of those figures was smaller; it wasn’t an adult. With the face down and the hood partially covering the hair, she could not identify the form as male or female.
While Abelardus examined the adult, Alisa walked toward the smaller figure, dread curdling in her stomach. What if she had come all this way only to find that Jelena had been…
She touched the back of the figure’s head, pushing aside the hood. It was a boy of eleven or twelve, not anyone she recognized. He had died with his face contorted in pain.
Alisa closed her eyes, tears threatening. Who could have done this? And why? And would they find Jelena in here somewhere, in a similar state?
“No,” she mumbled, refusing to believe it.
“This is Donika Glazer,” Abelardus said numbly. “She was a teacher at the Arkadius temple when I was growing up there. Lady Naidoo said she was the headmistress here.”
“There are again no signs of what killed them,” Leonidas said. He, too, had come over to look at the dead boy.
“It looks like they were defending the outpost,” Yumi said, her eyes wide as she joined them.
Mica was walking near the buildings, past doors, some of which had been blown open by energy blasts similar to those that marred the front entrance.
“Lady Donika was powerful with telekinesis,” Abelardus said. “Whoever defeated her in battle must have been a true master.”
“Perhaps she—they—went down to superior numbers?” Alisa pointed, including the boy since he, too, appeared to have been defending his people.
“Superior numbers shouldn’t have known about this place.” Abelardus pushed himself to his feet, glowering around at the buildings and perhaps the silence. Save for the noise their group was making and the distant trickling of water, there was not any sound in the chamber. What if everyone here was dead?
If they did not find anyone alive, Alisa would leave with more questions than she’d had before—and less of an idea of a direction to search.
“You’ve admitted it may have been your own people,” Leonidas said. “If you k
now about this place, wouldn’t others?”
“Not many. I had to ask Lady Naidoo.” Abelardus strode toward one of the larger buildings, one with a stove vent coming out of the flat roof. A kitchen or mess hall? Or both?
Mica and Yumi were pointing to the crumbling corner of another building, debating whether the damage had been recent or not. Everyone seemed so cool and analytical. Alisa wanted to frantically race around, hunting for Jelena, but for some reason, her feet seemed rooted to the ground. Maybe because deep down, she was terrified that her optimism would be wrong, that Jelena would still be here, and that Alisa would find her among the dead. The idea of stumbling across her in one of these robes, her small body frozen in death, left alone on some uncaring stone floor…
She noticed herself breathing too quickly and tried to slow it down. She couldn’t lose it. She didn’t even know if Jelena was here yet. Calm. Analytical. She could be those things.
“How long do you think they’ve been dead?” she asked Leonidas, her voice almost sounding normal to her own ears as she tried to ask a useful question. A calm, analytical one. She wasn’t going to turn into a frantic mess.
She gazed around as he finished his examination before answering, and considered where to look when she managed to unroot her feet. There was a two-story structure that had the look of a barracks. It stood on the opposite side of the courtyard from the building Abelardus had entered.
“Three days,” Leonidas said.
Three days. That was it?
She closed her eyes. If the Star Nomad hadn’t diverted to get that staff, the ship would have arrived here more than three days ago. They might have been in time to talk to these people, even to help them.
“Alisa?” Leonidas touched her arm. “Are you all right?”
“No.” She smiled, trying to make it a joke. Even if it wasn’t. “Will you search with me?” She nodded to the barracks. She didn’t want to explain that she had to look but was afraid to, that she didn’t want to be alone if she found…
“Of course.”
With him walking by her side, they headed for the barracks. Unlike with some of the other buildings, the door was shut. The cellulose planks held an old-fashioned knob—nothing in this place had a modern look to it. If there were cleaning robots or computerized facilities, Alisa hadn’t seen sign of them yet.