“Is that the ship you were talking about?” Jelena asked.
Brody frowned at Abelardus.
“Did it crash out in the belt somewhere?” she added.
Neither man answered her.
Jelena wanted to wring some necks and get some answers, but Abelardus seemed to consider the discussion over, for he walked out without asking Brody anything else. Thor also turned to walk out. Jelena briefly fantasized about unleashing Masika for some Starseer neck-wringing, but she remembered Thor’s comment that Brody was powerful. If Thor thought someone was powerful, she could only imagine how much stronger he was than she was. Brody might very well be a match for Masika’s genetically engineered speed and strength, especially if she didn’t have much experience battling Starseers. Leonidas had often been able to come out on top against Abelardus, but from the stories she’d heard, he’d also had a lot of experience against Starseers from his military days.
“You’re welcome to stay,” Brody said when Jelena and Masika were the only two remaining in the cabin with him. He was looking at Masika, his words for her. He gestured to the bed. Offering it as a seat? Or suggesting something more bold?
Masika growled for a third time and stalked out.
Jelena followed, closing the hatch behind her. “I’m going to have to find a bone for you to chew if you keep growling like a dog.”
“A dog?”
“Four legs, fur. Like Alfie.”
“I was hoping to come across as fiercer than Alfie,” Masika said. “More like an Octarian Blood Bear.”
Abelardus had disappeared into his cabin or some other part of the ship, leaving only Thor in the corridor with them. Jelena thought he might tease Masika about her hope, but when he met her eyes, it was to say, “You would be wise to stay away from him.”
“If I stay away, how am I supposed to punch him in the eye?”
“He would block such a punch with his mind. And then retaliate. And he would like it.”
“I thought you couldn’t read him,” Jelena said quietly, aware that it would be easy for Brody to enhance his hearing enough to listen to them through the closed hatch.
“His mind, no, but his face is as open as the book in his lap.”
“I don’t have a problem staying away from him, so long as he stays away from me.” Masika stalked to her cabin and shut herself inside with a noisy clang of her hatch.
“This is going to be a fun trip, isn’t it?” Jelena asked.
“Abelardus knows a little more than he’s told us. Admittedly not as much as I’d like—or as he’d like. He was honest about Brody having given him nothing.” Thor tilted his head toward the cargo hold. “Shall we go interview him and get what we can from him? I may be able to dig more out of his mind if he’s thinking about his past conversations with Young-hee. If he actually remembers them. From what I saw in his thoughts, I got the impression he doesn’t listen that closely when she’s talking.”
“So he’s a typical doting husband?”
“He strikes me as a typical asshole.”
“He’s a friend of the family.”
“Does that mean I have to be the one to put a foot on his chest?”
Jelena looked down at their shoes, comparing her rainbow ones to Thor’s black ones. The month before, she’d threatened to sneak into his cabin and glue glitter on his wardrobe, but she hadn’t gotten up the courage to make good on the threat yet. Maybe someday, when he was off the ship and she wasn’t.
I see you’re seriously contemplating the dangers of going off on a mission with a couple of secretive assholes, Thor said, switching to telepathy.
She grinned at him. Maybe I’ll sneak into Brody’s cabin to glitter his shoes. Or his wine glasses. The supplies are in the cabinets under his bunk. I’ve been meaning to do something with the emerald-green glitter I got. It glows in the dark.
Thor shook his head, but gave her a friendly pat on the shoulder. “Abelardus went to the cargo hold.” He nodded in that direction again. “Shall we?”
“Actually, I may have a better resource.” Jelena tilted her head, not toward the hold but toward another of the guest cabins. “One who promised me spreadsheets.”
“Spreadsheets? Is that supposed to get me excited?”
“It would have Erick rubbing his hands with glee.”
“I don’t want to hear about Ostberg rubbing things.”
“Was that a joke, Thor? I’m impressed. We haven’t even gotten you that humor implant yet.” Jelena took a few steps and knocked on Zhou’s hatch while wishing that she’d rearranged things to put her guests at opposite ends of the corridor.
I’m not humorless, you know, Thor spoke softly into her mind. I’m just… There’s so much to be done. I can’t take my eye off the target for frivolousness.
Did he consider this mission frivolous? Or was it like their mercenary mission on Fourseas, and he was thinking of ways he might manipulate it to his advantage? He was here with her, wanting to gather information. It wasn’t as if he’d holed up in his cabin and checked out on her.
You don’t have to take your eyes off your target to laugh. Men might even be more likely to follow you if you came across as personable.
You don’t think I’m personable?
A thump came from inside the cabin. Had they caught Zhou in his underwear?
You’d be more personable if you smiled more often. And laughed. And came to my cabin to let me glitter you. She imagined sparkly war paint on his cheeks.
I doubt Alexander the Great led his troops on Old Earth with glitter on his face.
Only because it hadn’t been invented yet. Just let me glitter one shoe. Leonidas let me put stickers on his combat armor when I was a little girl.
I remember. That was a horrific thing to do to him. And I hear those stickers are still there.
Yes, Maya and Nika are now of sticker age. They were happy to continue the trend I started.
Poor Leonidas.
He objects but secretly loves it. He knows he can be fierce no matter what he’s wearing.
I’ve seen into his mind. He doesn’t secretly love it. He loves his children, so he endures it.
He’s a good man. Jelena smiled at him, hoping to imply that Thor would be a good man, too, if he endured a few upgrades to his look from the feminine perspective. If nothing else, he needed a haircut. How could he feel fierce with hair dangling in his eyes?
The hatch creaked open before Thor could comment on her thoughts. Zhou leaned out, his hair tousled, his shirt untucked, and his feet in socks. For a man with naturally brown skin, he was impressively pale. He peered at Jelena and Thor, pausing at Thor, who hadn’t donned a shirt after leaving the gym area.
“Oh good. We’re all dressing informally today.” Zhou stuffed his shirt into his waistband, looking sheepish.
“Are you all right?” Jelena asked. “I can get Kiyoko—our doctor.”
“Fine, fine. Just, ah—I do get a touch airsick occasionally. And the time difference—well, your ship doesn’t run on Arkadius standard, does it?”
“Airsick? We’ve gone in a straight line since we left the station.”
“Not entirely. The gravity was struggling to compensate for something as you pulled the ship out of dock. My stomach struggled to compensate too.” Zhou grimaced.
Jelena looked at Thor, trying to remember if anything unusual had happened during their departure.
“You spun,” Thor said. “And did those loops. I believe you were trying to impress that other freighter operator who was coming in to take your slot.”
“Ah, that’s right. But I wasn’t trying to impress him. I was pirouetting to show off the star cannon in the turret because he was crowding me.”
“Pirouetting?” Zhou asked. “You didn’t mention a maneuver by that name when you were studying those practice guides for your flight exam.”
“It was in the bonus section. Let me get you some motion-sickness medicine, and then Thor and I would like to see your spreadsh
eets.”
Zhou brightened, some of his pallor fading. “You would?”
“Very much so. Thor’s learning to get excited by spreadsheets.”
Thor’s eyebrow twitched.
“Who wouldn’t be?” Zhou stepped back, waving for them to come in.
Jelena jogged to the end of the corridor and into sickbay where she found Kiyoko labeling cabinet doors and drawers. Cabinet doors and drawers that gleamed from a recent scrubbing. Everything in sickbay gleamed.
Jelena opened the drawer that usually held a mixed heap of non-prescription medicine. The boxes, bottles, and packets were now in alphabetical order and in tidy rows in homemade drawer organizers.
“You’re overqualified for this job, Doctor,” Jelena said, finding the motion-sickness tablets without the usual rummaging.
“Because I can work a label maker?” Kiyoko held up her tool.
“Because you’re willing to work it.” Jelena saluted and jogged back to Zhou’s cabin, not sure she should leave him alone with Thor for long. The fireworks Erick had anticipated hadn’t gone off yet, but Zhou and Thor also hadn’t been alone yet. Jelena had no idea what Zhou thought about when she was around, or wasn’t around, but knew he’d be another open book for Thor to read.
“In addition to the spreadsheets,” Zhou was saying when she walked in, “I’ve created a Tesserman Grid. Here it is.” He tapped his netdisc, and a fifth display popped into the air alongside the rows and columns of coordinates and notes already floating around them. “The spreadsheets represent hard numbers. These are just guesses based on the clues I’ve received by listening to those two talk, but they’re logical guesses. I’ve pulled in historical and current news stories in regard to the Trajean Asteroid Belt to gather further data.”
“And what does your data lead you to believe we’re going out there to do?” Thor asked. “Besides hunting for an artifact?”
Jelena thought he might be impatient or bored by Zhou’s spreadsheet enthusiasm, but he didn’t show it if he was.
“There’s a Starseer ship that was lost several centuries ago, five hundred and twenty-seven Arkadian standard years ago to be precise. The Zyrgioth. I looked it up. The word—it’s a symbol in Kirian, actually—seems to roughly mean protector. Do you concur?” Zhou looked at Thor, as if he expected him to be a wise old Starseer scholar.
“Sky protector, yes,” Thor said. “The term specifically refers to the warriors who went out on ships, expecting to have to defend Kir from the descendants of the human colonists on other planets. At the time, the Kirians didn’t yet know they were the first people to regain spaceflight capabilities.” Thor looked at Jelena and silently added, You don’t have to be old to be a scholar.
Your tutors didn’t let you play vid games or do anything fun with your free time, did they?
I had some puzzles.
How exhilarating.
One of them had a space battle on it.
Were you able to contain your excitement as you assembled it?
Barely.
“Good, thank you.” Zhou hesitated, looking back and forth between them.
Jelena worried he knew they were talking telepathically. Obviously they were, but it wasn’t anything to do with him. Would he think they were using their powers to talk about him behind his back? She wouldn’t want to do anything to hurt his feelings.
“I wonder if that’s relevant or if they just chose noble-sounding names for their ships at random?” Zhou tapped a box on the grid, and it enlarged so he could murmur some notes into it. “Regardless, the Zyrgioth flew out to the Trajean Asteroid Belt but never returned. There’s nothing in the public sys-net record that mentions its intent. Actually, there’s nothing in the public record about it at all. I found the name and a description of it in the records of an early Perunese observatory. Perun didn’t have spaceflight capabilities at the time, but they had put a couple of satellites into orbit and were monitoring the system. They took pictures of the ship as it flew past on its route. I had to turn to Kirian lore to learn the rest. That’s not in the sys-net, either, but I dug up some resources online.”
Zhou smiled at Jelena, appearing proud of himself, perhaps because this had nothing to do with his usual field of study. But he did like chess, so he liked games of strategy. Maybe assembling these clues was something similar for him.
“I’ve never heard of the ship before,” Thor said, “and I’m more familiar with Kiran history than most.”
“I ran into some roadblocks while doing my research,” Zhou said, “and I got the impression that the ship and the journey it took are not only mostly forgotten topics, but that someone wanted them to be forgotten. Someone high up in the Starseer government may still want it forgotten. I’m a little surprised that the archaeologists were permitted to put together this expedition.”
“Are we sure they were?” Thor asked.
“I’ve wondered that same thing actually,” Zhou said.
“Why?” Jelena asked, not catching on as quickly and a little irritated by that.
“Why would the Starseers, who are known for being insular and reclusive, be hitching a ride on a random civilian freighter for a top-secret archaeological mission that’s digging into their own past?” Zhou asked. “A past they may not want the rest of the system to know about. They don’t share anything about themselves with outsiders, even when there’s nothing juicy to hide.”
“Well, we’re not truly a random freighter,” Jelena said. “Mom and Leonidas have a past with Abelardus and Young-hee, and Erick and I are Starseers too.” Albeit Starseers who had nothing to do with the rest of the community and who had zero knowledge of ancient secrets.
“But they have their own ships,” Thor said. “They could have easily flown their own people on this expedition. And Abelardus… I understand that Young-hee is one of the archaeologists who was studying this, but does that entirely explain why Abelardus might have been chosen? I get the feeling he’s just the muscle for Brody. Even then, they have a very small team if they’re expecting any kind of trouble. Why wouldn’t they have sent more people?”
“And why would this Brody have allowed a friend of Abelardus’s to choose the scientist that they took along? To choose me, for that matter. I’m hardly established in my own field, much less in a field that has anything to do with the history of the Starseers, the system, or that asteroid belt. I’m…” Zhou shrugged. “Not sure why I’m here.”
“But you came willingly,” Thor said.
“Wouldn’t you?” Zhou smiled shyly at Jelena.
Jelena’s return look had to be more akin to that of a scaled rothrat caught on the runway rather than a smile, but he didn’t seem fazed. By all three suns, was he flirting with her? Why? They’d stopped seeing each other almost twelve months ago. He must know… well, no. She considered their last week together. She hadn’t technically told him they were breaking up, had she? She’d simply passed her exams, given him a hug goodbye, and gone back to the Nomad. But they hadn’t truly been dating. They’d done things together, and had some fun, but there’d only been that one kiss. Which he’d initiated. And she’d stood there, utterly surprised by it, which was a little silly, given her ability to read minds. But she hardly ever read the minds of other humans. Her mom had always told her it was polite to give people their privacy, damn it. She was polite.
“To keep Jelena out of trouble?” Thor asked. “Of course.”
“I don’t need anyone to keep me out of trouble.”
She wasn’t heartened by the identical way their eyebrows rose in skepticism.
“I guess I’ll fall for the first man who realizes I want someone who’s eager to get into trouble with me, not keep me from anything I want to do.”
This time, only one of Thor’s eyebrows rose. Jelena couldn’t tell if the expression was dismissive or contemplative.
“I can get into trouble,” Zhou offered. “I’m considered something of a rogue among my contemporaries, you know.”
?
??Your contemporaries?” Jelena asked.
“In the chess world. I’m known to be reckless with my rooks.”
Jelena snorted, smiling despite herself. “You’re a good man, Zhou.”
“Do you want to see my spreadsheets?”
“Just show me the one that tells us what’s in that lost Starseer ship and if it’s dangerous.”
Zhou slumped. “I have no idea. I couldn’t find any reference to artifacts—or what would have been considered perhaps powerful weapons or super technology at the time.”
Jelena met Thor’s eyes. “Is it possible there’s another Staff of Lore out there? There were twelve at one time, weren’t there?”
She shivered, remembering her one encounter with Tymoteusz when he’d been wielding that staff. He’d used it to collapse a space station that had been carved out of rock inside an asteroid. She’d been inside at the time. If not for her mother protecting her under her combat armor, she would have been flattened.
“There were, according to legend,” Thor said. “Also according to legend, all except Alcyone’s were destroyed.”
“According to legend.”
How much could they rely on legend?
Thor hitched a shoulder. “Ten years ago, I sensed the Staff of Lore from a long way off, maybe from when it first reappeared in our dimension. I don’t sense anything similar out there now.”
“Dimension?” Zhou mouthed.
“It’s a long story,” Jelena said. One his great uncle Tiang apparently hadn’t shared with him.
“I hope you’ll tell me.”
“I will. Thor, let me know if that changes, please. If you sense anything odd. We’re still quite a ways out from the belt.”
“Of course. I do know Abelardus is expecting trouble when we reach the area. Young-hee warned him that there could be dangers, and not just from possible competitors.”
“Like what? Booby traps?”
“Possibly.”
“I’ll keep hunting for information,” Zhou promised.
“Good,” Jelena said. “Thank you.”
She left him to his spreadsheets, her gut clenching at the thought of booby traps that had taken down a ship full of Starseers, a ship that had apparently been built and crewed with the specific intent of protecting a planet. Even if the Snapper was far more modern, she couldn’t help but feel it—and her crew—wouldn’t be the equals of those ancient warriors. They also didn’t have any special artifacts along to use against whatever they would face.