Despite his obvious pain, his fingers inched closer to Abelardus’s throat. Then, in a quick burst of movement, they were around Abelardus’s neck. Leonidas’s expression grew even more pained, and he panted, some invisible force tormenting him. But a very real force tormented Abelardus. Those fingers tightened, cutting off his airway. He grabbed Leonidas’s meaty forearms, fingers digging into that muscle, but he could not push them away.
Alisa stepped forward, though she did not know what she could do, only knowing that this had gone beyond a simple sparring match. The two men were locked in tableau, like a statue of ancient warriors grappling before their gods.
Alisa clapped her hands as she approached. “Lunchtime, boys. Who wants lunch?”
Neither man glanced in her direction. Abelardus wheezed as Leonidas’s fingers tightened. Abruptly, the force holding Leonidas back, the force hurting him, seemed to vanish, as if Abelardus’s concentration had slipped.
Leonidas took advantage. He dropped his head like a viper striking, smashing his skull into Abelardus’s face. Abelardus’s lower body twitched, and he kicked out in pain or frustration, or both. Leonidas was too far up, straddling his torso, for the kick to touch him. He spun Abelardus over, pinning him belly down, face mashed into the hard metal deck.
“Do you yield?” Leonidas demanded, his mouth close to his opponent’s ear, his knee grinding into Abelardus’s spine.
Abelardus roared, trying to lift his head. Blood streamed from one nostril. Fury stamped his face, but he didn’t seem to be able to launch another mental attack from that position. Maybe he was in too much pain to concentrate.
“Do you yield?” Leonidas repeated.
Abelardus clenched his jaw stubbornly, and Alisa worried that he would not say the words—and that Leonidas would not let him go until he did. His face was almost as contorted as Abelardus’s, not in pain now, but he almost looked as if he were lost in some other world, that he was locked in mortal combat in his mind rather than simply exercising in her cargo hold.
“Leonidas, Abelardus,” she said, stopping beside them and hoping she wasn’t being a fool and risking herself by standing so close. “What are your votes for lunch? Leftovers, or shall we have Beck make something fresh?”
For a few seconds, neither man moved, and she thought they would continue to ignore her. Then Leonidas blinked a few times, as if waking from a dream—or a nightmare. He did not let go of Abelardus, but his gaze shifted toward her. He seemed confused, as if he didn’t recognize her.
“Let’s end it, eh?” she said quietly, holding her hands out beside her in a nonthreatening manner.
Finally, he focused fully on her, and recognition returned to his eyes. He looked down at Abelardus, the braids having fallen from their tie and lying tangled about his head. Blood spattered the deck under his face.
Leonidas released him and stepped away. Abelardus slowly pushed himself into a sitting position, as if the fight had gone out of him, but fury still burned in his eyes when he looked up.
Leonidas opened his mouth, and Alisa thought he would apologize—his expression was slightly chagrined, as if he knew he had taken things too far. Before he could speak, Abelardus’s fingers twitched. Once again, an invisible force slammed into Leonidas, the edge of it brushing Alisa. It was like a tornado hitting her, and she stumbled back, barely keeping her feet. Her back struck the stair railing as Leonidas flew across the cargo hold, slamming into another wall.
Abelardus stood up, not sparing a glance for Alisa, and lifted his hand to summon his staff. It flew into his grip. He glowered across the hold at Leonidas. Alisa clenched her fists, irritated by the attack and irritated that she’d almost been knocked on her ass by it. Hells, all she had asked was what he wanted for lunch.
Once again, Leonidas walked away from what must have felt like a ton of bricks being dropped onto his back. He could have charged across the hold, and they could have done it all again, but he only took a few steps before stopping, his eyes locked with Abelardus’s.
“Are we done?” he asked.
“Until next time,” Abelardus said, his voice cold. He ignored the blood dribbling down his lips and from his chin.
Leonidas inclined his head, as if in respect to a worthy opponent, though Alisa could not tell if the gesture was sincere. “I will look forward to it.”
“I bet you will. Asshole.” Abelardus grabbed his robe and stalked up the stairs.
Yumi and Mica watched him warily, but he headed back toward the common areas and crew cabins.
“Are you all right?” Leonidas asked Alisa, joining her at the base of the stairs. Had he seen her stumble away as he’d flown across the hold?
“Am I all right?” she asked. “You’re the one who hit the wall. Twice. You’re going to have bruises. If not hernias. Do you want me to walk you to sickbay?”
He snorted, his back straight and his chin high. “That’s hardly necessary. He fought fairly.”
Fairly. Right.
“If you say so. You cyborgs aren’t very good at making friends.” Alisa regretted the words as soon as they came out. Abelardus had been the bigger ass in that encounter, at least in her eyes.
“It’s not a good idea to make friends with people you might have to kill one day,” Leonidas said.
“Oh? Are you planning a disagreeable end for our Starseer passenger?”
“It’s just a general comment.”
His eyes grew distant, almost haunted, as he gazed toward a wall, and Alisa was tempted to ask if he’d had to do that before, kill someone he considered a friend. She decided she did not want to know, especially since she had started to consider him a friend, and she’d hoped he considered her one too.
A couple of alert beeps came from the ship’s speakers.
“So much for lunch,” Alisa said, swinging onto the stairs.
“Is that trouble?” Leonidas asked.
“Considering how my luck has been lately? Probably so.”
Chapter 2
Alisa passed Alejandro as she jogged through the mess hall and toward NavCom. The comm alert continued to beep softly and insistently. Alejandro followed her, his expression between curious and wary. He was probably worried someone else was after his orb. Alisa wouldn’t be surprised, though they were a long way from any planets or stations. She had taken them out of the shipping lanes the day before to head toward the coordinates Alejandro and Leonidas wanted to check. The coordinates that were adding yet another delay to her mission to find her daughter. If she actually knew where Jelena was, she never would have agreed to the detour, but Abelardus was the only one who had a clue, and it wasn’t much of a clue.
“Is it the proximity alert?” Alejandro asked.
“No,” Alisa said, sliding into the pilot’s seat and tapping the comm. “Someone wants to talk to us.”
“That doesn’t sound too bad.”
“We’ll find out. I don’t know who would be out here in comm range.”
Alejandro entered NavCom, and Leonidas also appeared, his big frame filling the hatchway. Alejandro looked at his sweaty bare chest and lifted his eyebrows. Alejandro was, as usual, in a gray monk’s robe, the pendant of the Divine Suns Trinity dangling from his neck.
“Workout,” Leonidas explained.
Workout. That was an innocuous term for it.
“…in need of assistance,” a woman’s voice came over the comm. She sounded harried. “To any who hear this message, this is the captain of the passenger transport, the Peace and Prayer. We are pilgrims on a journey to visit the holy landmarks, but our engine has failed, and life support will follow. We need help. If you hear this, please respond. We are in need of assistance.”
Alisa turned down the volume as the message repeated.
“That a ship you’ve heard of, Doctor?” she asked, turning toward the sensor panel.
“No.” Alejandro gave her a puzzled look, as if to wonder why she would ask.
She waved at his robe and pendant.
; “Pilgrims don’t report in to me,” he said. “I am a lowly acolyte in the order.”
She looked to Leonidas, wondering if she would catch an eyebrow twitch or anything that would suggest Alejandro wasn’t even that. For a while now, she had suspected he was using the robe as a costume and did not truly have a tie to the religion. Especially since monks were supposed to be peaceful, and he’d proven that he would do just about anything to finish his mission and keep it a secret, even contemplating the murder of nosy pilots.
Leonidas did not react to Alejandro’s statement. He nodded at the sensor display. “Can you see the ship? Does the story fit?”
Alisa gave him a sharp look. “Did something make you think it’s a trap?”
She hadn’t suspected that from the message, but maybe he had heard something in the background to make him suspicious.
“Not necessarily,” he said, “but—”
“It wouldn’t be the first time pirates have feigned needing help to set up an ambush,” Alejandro said.
“True,” Alisa said, “but we’re on the way to your coordinates that are halfway between nowhere and nowhere. This wouldn’t be a logical place to spin your web if you wanted flies to chance into it.”
“A valid point,” Leonidas said.
Alejandro only screwed up his face into a dubious expression.
“Really, Doctor,” Alisa said, “I’d expect you to be the first person to want to go help some pilgrims.” Or she would if he was truly a disciple of the Suns Trinity.
“If they are true pilgrims, I am very open to helping them,” Alejandro said.
Alisa located a ship at the far edge of the Nomad’s sensor range. It did appear to be a passenger transport, one capable of carrying twenty or thirty people. It was a civilian model, nothing she recognized from the war.
“That part of their story checks out,” she said, turning back toward the comm.
The woman’s message was playing on a loop, being broadcast out to the maximum range. Alisa wondered if anyone would be at the comm station in that ship.
“Peace and Prayer,” she said, managing to say the name without making a face, “this is the Star Nomad. We’ve received your message. Are you still in need of assistance?”
Leonidas pulled down the foldout chair behind the pilot’s seat and sat at the sensor station, tapping a couple of buttons.
“You’re not getting cyborg sweat on my seat, are you?” Alisa asked quietly while waiting for a response to her call.
“I’m trying to see if I can detect the engine failure they reported.” He arched his eyebrows at her. “And are you sure it’s logical for you to mock my ability to make friends?”
“You don’t think my propensity for cracking jokes and teasing people can win over friends?” She smiled, pleased when he teased her back instead of merely frowning at the inappropriateness of her humor.
“So far, I’ve mostly seen it get you into trouble.”
“Maybe we’re a good match then, Leonidas.”
Alejandro, who remained standing near the hatchway, frowned at this exchange.
Leonidas looked to the sensor display. “We need to get closer to get a better read on them.”
“I know.” Alisa disengaged the autopilot and adjusted their course to head in the direction of the passenger ship. Nobody had responded to her hail so she tried again on another channel. “Let me know when you can tell if their engines—and their life support—are working.”
She grimaced at the idea of coming upon a ship full of corpses. Even though she hadn’t been the one to originally find the Star Nomad adrift, with her mother’s body inside, she couldn’t help but think of that moment and what it must have been like for the freighter captain who had discovered her. Almost seven years had passed, but Alisa distinctly remembered what it had been like when she had been brought in to make arrangements for the body.
Alisa tapped the internal comm. “Mica, are you in engineering?”
“Where else would I be?” came the prompt answer.
“I thought you might have gone with Beck to help pick out lunch.”
“We got a comm message. I assumed that meant trouble.”
“It is possible for two ships to simply pass each other, chat in a friendly manner for a few minutes, and then head on their separate ways without trouble ever coming into the equation.”
“Uh huh. And is that what’s happening?”
“No.”
A chicken squawked in the corridor outside of NavCom. Alisa turned, intending to tell Alejandro to shut the hatch, but Yumi had come to poke her head inside.
“I was wondering what was happening,” she said. “And if you needed a science teacher at the sensor station.” She considered the back of Leonidas’s head.
“I’ve got a cyborg there now. And he’s leaving a sweaty butt print, so you may not want to sit there after him.”
Leonidas ignored her—maybe he was reading something interesting on the sensors—and Alejandro was the one to sigh at her. “We are paying passengers, you know.”
“I know.” It was the only reason Alisa had been able to afford supplies for this next leg of their trip. “Does that mean I’m not supposed to comment on your sweat?”
“One expects a certain amount of decorum from those in customer service positions.”
Alisa resisted the urge to make a rude gesture at him. She was the captain, not his servant, and if he didn’t like the way she ran her ship, he could get off at the next stop. In fact, she would be thrilled if he did so. It was easier for a dog to shake a tick than it was for her to get rid of him.
“That must be an imperial custom,” she said. “In the Alliance, we didn’t have a lot of time to spend on decorum.”
“Obviously.”
“I’m not reading any engine activity,” Leonidas said. “It could have been powered down manually.”
“Or it could have failed, as she said,” Alisa said.
She turned her back to Alejandro, feeling bad for sniping with him when there were people out there who needed help. The Nomad had flown close enough to bring the pilgrim ship up on the cameras, so she did so, putting the image on the big view screen.
The transport vessel had an unimaginative oblong body with portholes lining the side and three thrusters bunched at the rear. It was an older ship with scuffs and peeling paint, but there were no signs of battle damage. It had not been attacked. And it still cruised along at a decent speed, its nose pointed forward, so nothing had struck it or derailed it from its path, at least at first glance.
“Science teacher, do you want to plot their course for me?” Alisa waved Yumi to the co-pilot’s seat. “See if their current route would take them somewhere interesting.”
“Certainly, Captain.” Yumi squeezed past Alejandro and Leonidas, but paused to look at the co-pilot’s seat before sitting down.
“It should be butt-print free, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Alisa said.
Alejandro sighed again.
Yumi offered a sheepish smile. “I was contemplating if I should find a towel.”
“It would be a small miracle if you could,” Alejandro said. “The lav is perpetually out.”
“The water removers in the sanibox work fine,” Alisa said, still studying the other ship. She didn’t see any running lights, and again had the concern that they might be too late.
“They pucker my skin,” Alejandro said.
“Was it hard being an ER doctor when you’re such a delicate doily?”
“No. At the hospital, we had normal water removers, not noisy behemoths from the turn of the century that suck half your skin off as they dry it.”
Alisa punched the button to comm the Peace and Prayer again, silently pleading for them to answer, not only because she wanted the pilgrims to be alive, but because she wanted a reason to end the chitchat in NavCom.
“They are noisy,” Yumi said.
Alisa scowled at her. “You got that course plotted yet?”
/> Yumi slid into the seat and tapped the controls. “Almost.”
Leonidas cleared his throat. “The engines are off, as I said, but I am reading life support and minimal power. It looks like they’re on the battery backup.”
Alisa sat straighter. “Oh, good. But then why isn’t anyone answering?”
“Perhaps they find your lack of decorum off-putting,” Alejandro muttered.
“Doctor, I think Mica needs your help in engineering.”
“I find that unlikely.”
“Get out of my navigation cabin, anyway,” Alisa said, using her best don’t-screw-with-me command tone.
Alejandro looked at Leonidas, as if he expected him to rough Alisa up for being mouthy. Leonidas was looking at the sensors and ignored him.
“I can’t tell where they came from,” Yumi said, tapping a star map on a computer display. “There’s nothing behind them, not in a direct line. They must have changed course since they originally took off.”
Alisa nodded. It happened. Sometimes, one ran into unexpected debris—or even the expected debris of an asteroid field—and had to alter course. And navigating the gravitational tangle in the space between the three suns thwarted even experienced pilots’ attempts to lay predictable courses.
“They are, however, on a direct heading toward Primus 7,” Yumi said.
“A space station full of casinos?” Alisa asked. “Seems an unlikely place to find holy landmarks.” She looked at Alejandro, who had retreated into the corridor but had not gone away fully.
“There are medical facilities on Primus 7,” Leonidas said. “Perhaps the closest ones to where we are.”
“They didn’t mention needing a doctor in their message,” Alisa said.
“Would you announce your weaknesses when sending out a general distress signal? In a system that’s much fuller of pirates and scavengers than it was a year ago?”
Alisa frowned back at him, not wanting to get into another argument about how degenerate the system was now that the empire wasn’t in charge. Instead, she asked, “Do you see anything on the sensors that would indicate a medical emergency?”