Tym’s words rang out in her mind: Assuming you make it out of here in time…
“Been pushed back,” Leonidas said, his breathing heavy over the mic. “Can’t get back… to the computer room.”
“Go the other way. We were able to circle around and get out to—”
“Blocked,” he said. “They brought down the ceiling behind us. On some of us.” Some of his command calm evaporated, replaced by frustration when he growled, “We can’t get to them to hurt them. We’ve only taken down two.”
“They aren’t truly enemies,” Alisa said, running up the ramp to join Mica. “We don’t want to take them down. Now that the chasadski are gone, is there any chance they’re returning to their normal selves?”
“Nothing to… indicate it… so far.” A thump and a yell sounded before he spoke again. “Yumi wants to knock them out. Talk to her.”
Leonidas didn’t close the channel, and a loud crack sounded. Alisa imagined him being hurled into a wall.
“Yumi?” Alisa asked, trying her channel. “Are you there?” She caught Mica’s eyes and pointed to engineering.
“What do you want?” Mica asked warily.
“Get your tools. You’re disarming a bomb.”
“I make bombs. I don’t disarm them.”
“Time to learn a new skill for your résumé. Go, go.” She swatted Mica on the butt to get her moving. “We might not have much time.” Or any time.
“We could just take off,” Mica yelled as she ran toward engineering.
“You’d leave Yumi to be blown up?” Beck hollered.
“We can rescue them after the bomb goes off and the fortress lands in the lava. It would be heroic and dramatic.” Despite Mica’s argument, the sounds of drawers and cabinets banging open came from engineering.
“Dramatic, right,” Alisa grumbled.
“They’re fighting close enough to that computer room that everyone could be blown up,” Beck said.
“I know.” Alisa raised her voice. “Stanislav, if you’re awake, we could use some powerful Starseer help.”
Mica raced back out with her satchel flapping on her hip. “Let’s go. I don’t want to get there as it blows up.”
“You don’t think that would be dramatic?”
“Bite my asteroid.”
Alisa led Beck and Mica down the ramp again. She glanced back at the cargo hold walkway as they ran, hoping to spot Stanislav, but if he had heard her, he hadn’t gotten up yet.
“Too damned many unconscious freeloaders on this ship,” Alisa said, running for the door they had gone in earlier. Maybe it wasn’t fair to judge him after he had helped them escape the Alliance, but they needed help now too.
Her comm beeped.
“We’re coming,” Alisa yelled into it without checking to see who it was.
“Don’t, Captain,” Yumi blurted, the words tumbling over each other. “Go back into my cabin and get the yinglang.”
“The what?” Alisa slowed down, waving for Beck and Mica to go by her and into the compound.
Beck hesitated at the doorway.
“Go,” Alisa barked, giving him a push. Mica needed a protector more than she did. If that bomb didn’t get taken care of…
“I don’t know where I’m going,” Mica yelled from the corridor.
“Damn it, Captain,” Beck cursed and glared at Alisa, but he ran in to show Mica the way.
“What do you need, Yumi?” Alisa asked, forcing her words to come out calmly.
“It’s a purple powder in a tin in the cabinet over my bunk. It’s painted with orange and blue flowers.”
Alisa ran back toward the ship. “It’s not a poison, is it?”
She couldn’t imagine something deadly being stored in such a container.
“It’s an antagonist to brochurruss tree blossoms,” Yumi said. “I’ve been watching—ompht.” A thud sounded.
Alisa raced up the ramp into the cargo hold and toward the stairs.
Yumi groaned, but kept talking. “I think the devices are affecting these Starseers similarly to the infamous brochurruss tree compound.”
So infamous Alisa had never heard of it. She raced along the walkway toward the crew cabins, glancing in sickbay as she passed. Stanislav was still on his back on the deck. Wonderful.
“The tree’s flowers and pollen possess hallucinogenic chemical substances that can, if they’re inhaled or ingested, eliminate people’s free will and turn them into automatons who can be commanded without inhibitions. The empire—”
“Yumi,” Alisa said as she swung into her cabin, “I appreciate your dedication to teaching, but I can hear blazer fire and screams behind you. I don’t need all the information now. I’m grabbing your tin.”
She ripped open the cabinet and was momentarily flummoxed by all the containers painted in various colors. In the space she used for storing a sweater and heavy socks, the tins were stacked three deep, taking up every inch of space.
“Blue and yellow flowers?” Alisa asked. “Or was it blue and orange? Yumi, you haven’t lived here long enough to have this much stuff.”
“Orange and blue with stars on the lid.”
Alisa spotted the right tin and tugged it out.
“It’s a long shot,” Yumi said, “but I’m hoping that these devices are acting on the brain through the same mechanism as the brochurruss compound, and that the antagonist for that will work on this. The human body finds yinglang extremely appealing and punts lesser compounds out of the cells’ receptor sites in favor of it.”
“Naturally.”
“It’s also a mild sedative.”
“It’s worth throwing at them for that alone.” Alisa sprinted back through the ship and into the courtyard again. “How are you going to get them to inhale it?”
She hadn’t poked into the tin to see how fine the powder was, but if those Starseers still had their shields up—and they must if the soldiers weren’t able to get to them and bring them down—how would her people fling powder in their faces?
“I’ll trust Leonidas to come up with a way,” Yumi said. “He’s wily when it comes to Starseers.”
As Alisa sprinted for the computer room, she slipped on the slick floor. Her boots flew out from underneath her, and she couldn’t catch herself on the equally slick wall. She hit the ground, losing her stun gun and cracking her knee with a jolt of pain, but she managed to cradle the tin to her chest to protect it. The last thing she needed was to lose all of the powder inside.
Another boom sounded, and Alisa’s heart leaped into her throat. The big explosion? The one that would take them all down?
No, it had not been as loud as it should have been for that, at least by her reckoning. Maybe the Starseers were bringing down more of the ceiling.
Grimacing in pain and limping, Alisa lunged through the hole in the wall and into the dim computer room, made dimmer by smoke floating in through the open door on the far side. It seemed to be empty, the fighting having moved deeper into the temple. Beck was pointing his rifle at the doorway, making sure nobody charged in to harass Mica, but looking at a holodisplay hovering in the center of the room. That hadn’t been there before. It was a map, some kind of cross-section that showed their volcano and the land underneath it for miles and miles.
More concerned with the bomb, Alisa joined Mica. She knelt in front of the black box still attached to the wall full of computers, its countless wires snaking into the equipment appearing much more ominous now that Alisa knew what the device could do.
An Alliance soldier lay still in the middle of the doorway under the holodisplay, and Alisa’s stomach knotted. How many of the men she had asked to help had been killed? How many of the Starseers, people who shouldn’t be enemies, had been killed? Three suns, what a mess. Why had the chasadski come here only to park the temple, plant a bomb, and fly away? Maybe the native Starseers had been the ones to direct the temple into the volcano, in the hope of hiding from their enemies. If that had been their goal, it hadn’t worked.
“Yumi, how do I get this to you?” Alisa covered the comm and asked, “Making any progress, Mica?”
“Studying it,” Mica said, not glancing back as she lowered a screwdriver and removed the black casing. “We’re studying something else too.” She tilted the back of her head toward Beck.
“I’m not studying it so much as being terrified of it.” Beck pointed at the big holodisplay. “There’s less than ten minutes on the countdown, Mica.”
“Have to deal with this first,” Mica said, “or none of us will be here for the eruption and earthquake.”
“Earthquake?” Alisa asked. “Explain.”
“—coming, Captain,” Yumi said, her voice barely audible over more weapons firing somewhere nearby.
“What?” Alisa asked.
Yumi did not answer.
“Are you all right, Yumi? How do I get to you? I have your powder. Can I just throw it at—”
Alisa broke off when a shadow fell across the doorway, someone leaping into their room. She spun, raising her stun gun before her brain caught up to her reflexes. Leonidas. In addition to his rifle, he was carrying something bulky with him. Was that the carpet runner from the hallway? What the hells?
Leonidas glanced around the corner and gave a final yank, tearing carpet. Something seemed to strike him. He flew into the room and hurtled through the floating holodisplay. Alisa and Beck skittered out of the way as Leonidas twisted in mid-air. He landed on the floor, firing back through the doorway as he hit. He wasn’t shooting at anyone, but instead aiming a sustained blazer beam at the ceiling in the corridor.
A surge of Starseers appeared in the corridor, as if the entire group had been chasing him. Alisa expected them to charge into the computer room, but when they tried to turn in, they skidded into each other and into the walls, arms flailing. Many of them pitched to the floor.
“The powder,” Leonidas called from his back as he continued to fire over their heads, scoring the ceiling. Chunks of ice melted under the assault, water gushing down, and blocks started dropping to the floor, giving the Starseers something else to worry about as they struggled with the slick floor.
Alisa ran forward, but one of the Starseers who had kept his feet noticed her and pointed the tip of his staff at her chest. He faltered before attacking, stumbling to the side and into the doorjamb. The rest of the group, those still standing, also stumbled. Several more slipped on the ice and went down.
Had that been Abelardus? Alisa tore the lid free from the tin and hurled it into the corridor, getting so close to Leonidas’s ongoing blazer beam that she could hear its whine in her ear. She trusted he wouldn’t hit her.
The throw wasn’t as pretty as she would have liked, but the tin flew through the doorway and into the group of Starseers. There was no barrier, not with them worrying about the ice above and below, blazer fire, and an attack from farther up the hallway. Strangely, or laughably, the ice under their feet seemed to be the biggest distraction as people continued to slip and tumble into each other, the carpet Leonidas had stolen presenting the largest hurdle.
Powder flew outward when the tin landed against someone’s chest, a grayish purple cloud filling the air. Finer than flour, it coated the Starseer robes—and their faces.
Alisa backed farther into the room, trying not to inhale it herself.
Several of the Starseers wore dazed expressions, but several more scowled in her direction. A man who remained on his feet took a step into the room.
A green bean can sailed over Alisa’s head as she backed up.
“Beck,” Leonidas barked—censure? A warning? Alisa couldn’t tell.
She skittered farther back as one of the Starseers yelled, “Shield yourselves.”
The can—the bomb—hit the wall behind them, but before Alisa could tell whether they got their barrier up, Leonidas leaped to his feet and wrapped his arm around her waist. He pulled her off to the side, to the computers where Mica worked. He pressed her into the equipment bank next to Mica, shielding both of them with his body.
The wires of the bomb filled Alisa’s eyes, and she almost shouted that they had to move, that they couldn’t be right here in case it, too, exploded, but it was too late.
The boom rattled every ice block in the room. The ceiling collapsed in the corridor with a cacophonous thundering that pounded Alisa’s eardrums—it seemed to pound her entire body.
“Adler!” came a frustrated shout from the doorway, barely audible over the thunder.
Several long seconds passed as the floor and the walls shook. Alisa worried the temple would plunge into the lava. Or that the bomb attached to the computers would explode. But the roar of the explosion and falling ice faded, until only the trickle of water coming from all around them remained.
“I didn’t think the powder worked,” Beck said weakly.
“Yumi?” Leonidas asked over his comm, backing away from Alisa and Mica. “Alejandro? Abelardus?”
Alisa swallowed. If they had been out in the corridor with the Starseers…
“Adler,” someone snarled again, the voice muffled. An armored hand stuck out from underneath the rubble pile that filled the doorway. Far more than ice had tumbled down this time.
Leonidas lunged past Beck, who was coming over to check on Alisa and Mica, and grabbed the hand. He pulled the soldier out, as if the rubble burying him weighed nothing.
Debris half-filled the hallway, but it bulged upward by the doorway, as if it had landed on a convex surface instead of the floor. Had the Starseers gotten up a barrier to protect themselves as the ceiling fell? If so, Alisa hoped they were breathing deeply in the tight powder-clogged space.
“I’m going to kill you, Adler,” the armored man said weakly. That was Hawk’s voice.
“I told you not to follow me.”
“What can I say?” Hawk climbed to his feet, though he appeared wobbly. “Your ass is sexy in that red getup.”
Alisa snorted. Who knew the admiral had a sense of humor?
Leonidas didn’t seem to know what to make of it. All he did was make sure Hawk was steady enough to stand without support and speak into his helmet comm again.
“Yumi? Alejandro?”
“We made it,” Yumi said. “The soldiers were able to clear the other pile of rubble for us before your explosion went off.”
“That was Beck’s explosion,” Leonidas said dryly.
“Oh sure, blame me,” Beck said. “I was trying to save your cyborg hide.”
“Abelardus is leading us through the back corridors,” Yumi said. “Me, Alejandro, Ostberg, and some of the soldiers. He says we’ll meet you in the courtyard.”
“Good,” Leonidas said.
“Is my… did the Starseers make it?”
Leonidas considered the concave rubble pile. A few faint groans came from underneath it.
“I believe so,” Leonidas said, striding to the blocked doorway. “I’ll dig them out.”
“Make sure they inhale the drug,” Yumi said.
“I’m hoping they already have,” Leonidas said.
“I’m hoping it works,” Alisa muttered.
“Everyone else needs to get out of here,” Hawk said, waving toward the hole in the wall. “Back to the ship in case your engineer can’t disarm that bomb.”
“If she doesn’t, being in the ship might not matter,” Beck said grimly.
“What does that mean?” Alisa asked. Her words were partially drowned out by Leonidas hurling huge pieces of ice aside as he unburied people.
Beck must have heard enough because he came to stand beside her and pointed at the holodisplay. Not only was the volcano visible, but the image showed the temple floating above the lava in the caldera at the top. The gray smudge appeared tiny compared to the volcano and the miles of rainforest around it, but Alisa was certain it represented them. As Beck touched it, the map zoomed out and tilted, almost nauseating her. Suddenly, she was looking at the entire continent, the green forests and gray mountains in the middle
, and the cities along the coasts. A jagged black line ran under their volcano, intersecting with other crooked lines that stretched across the continent.
“It was doing some animations when we first walked in,” Beck said. “It showed the temple blowing up and dropping into the lava and triggering a bigger explosion. That starts a chain reaction. The volcano blows up, the whole continent shakes like a paint mixer, and then it sinks into the ocean.”
“The temple blowing up can’t possibly cause all that,” Alisa said. “Can it, Mica?”
“Normally, I would say no, but if our mad Starseers did something to the fault lines with the staff, who knows? Its specialty seems to be earthquakes. Maybe the planet Kir shook itself into oblivion when it was destroyed.”
Alisa rubbed her face, wrinkling her nose as an astringent smell rose above the ever-present sulfur. She had some of that purple stuff on her palm. Great. Being sedated was just what she needed now, after forty hours without sleep.
“Then you better disarm it, Mica,” Alisa said.
“It’s complicated.”
That did not sound promising.
Hawk and Leonidas were pulling Starseers out of the ice fall, but they both looked over, then exchanged glances with each other. Alisa did not know when they had started doing that—or commenting on each other’s asses—but at least they weren’t shooting at each other.
Beck ran over to help the two men. As they pulled out a groaning Starseer woman, setting her down next to three other people they had extracted, the holodisplay started showing the animation Beck had explained. At a loss as to what she could do, Alisa tapped her stun gun. Maybe shooting everything in the room would help.
Mica glanced back, sweat dripping down her face. “This is a hodgepodge, Alisa.”
“What does that mean?”
“I have no idea which wire does what. I think the best I can do is cut it away from the computer, so we can throw it into the lava.”
Alisa grimaced. She’d wanted to throw the staff into the lava, not bombs. “Won’t that just do what that cartoon there is showing?”
“I don’t know. They may have put it here for a reason, because something in here would act as fuel and increase the explosive power of the bomb when it’s ignited.”