“Yes,” she said, reaching up and clasping his hand. Enemy or not, he was a lot more appealing than that monster had been.
Leonidas lifted her as easily as if lifting a feather, rising to his feet and wrapping his other arm around her waist, so he could pull her away from the broken grid. A piece of her jacket hung from the jagged bar that had snagged her on the way down.
Alisa glowered at it, then at the dead monster. Animal. Creature. Whatever it was. It lay between the grid and the broken shelves, cyborg implants littering its body like dead leaves.
Beck leaned against the shelves, catching his breath. Blood spattered his white armor.
“I don’t know who thought it would be a good idea to put an oubliette in the middle of a lab, but I think they should be flogged. I know the empire was more into mental manipulation than flogging people, but there really should be an exception.” Her voice sounded squeaky in her ears, and she forced herself to go back to breathing. She was fine. A few scratches, but she’d had much worse. Funny, though, how much more terrifying it was when her fate wasn’t in her own hands. She much preferred facing death from the pilot’s seat, the flight stick firmly in her grasp.
“I apologize,” Leonidas said, releasing her and stepping back, though he kept a hand close, maybe not certain she wouldn’t fall over.
Considering the blood dripping down her sleeve from somewhere, that was a possibility.
“For the lack of flogging?” she asked.
He wore a serious expression, and she immediately regretted her sarcasm. It had sounded like a heartfelt apology, even though she wasn’t sure what had prompted him to make it. He—and Beck, too, it looked like—had killed the creature that had been intent on killing her. He didn’t owe her an apology. She ought to be thanking him.
Instead of ignoring her joke, or giving her one of his irritated narrow-eyed looks, Leonidas actually smiled faintly. The gesture disappeared so quickly she wondered if she’d imagined it.
“For letting myself be distracted,” he said quietly, his gaze flicking toward Beck. But Beck wasn’t looking at them. He’d knelt down to lift the head of the creature, scrutinizing it. Yumi stood by the wall, her hand to her chest, a woman who, like Alisa, had gotten more on this trip than she bargained for. “I promised I’d protect you,” he added.
His jaw clenched, some of that irritation springing into his eyes. For once, it did not seem to be directed at her, but inward, at himself.
Feeling uncomfortable at seeing that he actually cared about keeping her alive—or at least about keeping his word regarding keeping her alive—Alisa shrugged and looked away.
“The creature is dead,” she said. “That’s all that matters, right?”
It also mattered if there were more of them around. She wondered if there was a way to tell.
“I think it’s an Octarian Blood Bear,” Beck said.
“It is,” Leonidas said. “We had training missions where we had to hunt and kill them with only a knife when I was a young soldier.”
“Guess that’s why you were so quick and efficient at killing it now, eh?” Alisa asked.
“Not that quick,” Leonidas muttered.
“But I helped, right?” Beck smiled at Alisa and stuck one of his boots up on the bear’s shaggy backside. Or maybe that was its butt. If man-eating bears had butts. “You saw me, mech. I hacked the hells out of that back leg and shot it twice.”
“After Marchenko shot it in the chest twice,” Leonidas said dryly. “It would have died from those wounds.”
Maybe, but not before it flattened her. What if it had followed her down through that grid? All it would have had to do was land on her with those four hundred pounds, and she would have been crushed and drowned. She shuddered, glad the men had jumped in.
“Don’t take my victory away from me, mech,” Beck said. “There have been precious few of them this week.”
Leonidas sighed. “Call me Leonidas.”
Beck’s mouth twisted, like he wasn’t sure about that.
Leonidas walked over to the other side of the bear—such an innocuous sounding name for something that had been eating people here for months—and picked up the blazer Alisa had dropped. He thumbed on the safety and tossed it to her.
“Thanks,” she said.
She was on the verge of also thanking him—and Beck—for helping, but stopped when he noticed the bag she had been filling. The bear had half-buried it when it fell, but the top half stuck out from under its body. Not wanting everyone to know she had been pillaging, Alisa hoped the dead bear would be too heavy, and that nobody would be able to extract her bag.
But Leonidas lifted the side of the bear as if it weighed nothing and withdrew it.
“That’s nothing,” Alisa said, reaching for it.
He looked inside.
She winced.
“You planning to make your own cyborg?” he asked, arching an eyebrow.
Three suns, would he believe that if she claimed it? No, he was being wry. She could see it in his eyes. He knew exactly what she had been doing.
“Sell the parts.” She walked over, her stiff and aching body not keeping her from snatching the bag from him. “How else am I supposed to pay for that combat armor?”
He didn’t say anything, and he didn’t try to keep the bag from her. Maybe it was only in her imagination that his eyes seemed to judge her, but she couldn’t keep from defending herself.
“You dragged me here,” she blurted. “Isn’t it fair that I get some compensation for my time?”
Leonidas said nothing, merely looked back toward the lab. Because she wasn’t worth looking at? A sick feeling of disgust welled inside of her. She wanted to be mad at him, but she knew that the problem was within her, not with him. She dropped the bag, though she hadn’t decided yet if she would leave it. Taking things she could sell was logical, damn it. This place was a desecrated mess. The empire was gone. Whoever had done this research was gone. Eaten, probably. If she didn’t take these things, some other scavenger would be along to do the same thing.
“Stay close to me,” Leonidas said, and headed into the lab again.
She followed him. Even if she hated being ordered around by someone who wasn’t a superior officer in her army, and even if she resented being told what to do under the best of circumstances, she did not want to get hurt again, more because he would blame himself than because of the actual risk to her person. She did not know what that meant. Probably that she was going crazy, caring what a cyborg thought and felt. But he had said himself that he was human. It seemed strange to think of him that way when cyborgs had been nothing but superhuman enemies to her during the war, but he clearly believed it. He admittedly acted as human as the next person.
Yumi pushed away from the wall, gave the dead bear a wide berth, and headed for Alisa’s discarded bag. She opened it and peeked inside.
Alisa paused in the glass doorway of the lab—Leonidas had already gone back inside. She was still waffling over what to do with the parts she had grabbed, but she didn’t want someone else to presume to take them while she was deciding. Was Yumi thinking that she could buy a lot of chicken feed with the latest and greatest in cyborg bits?
Yumi dropped the bag. “You should look for eyes.”
“Uh, pardon?”
“The optical implants. You could fit hundreds of them in your bag, and I bet they’re worth even more than the muscle augmentations. My understanding is that the optical technology was born out of scientists creating new eyes for the blind—if you remember your history, you know that many people went blind when first colonizing Dravon. The human eye didn’t do well there, until the domes were erected. Anyway, replacement eyes are not inexpensive, and there are many who could use them, not to enhance anything necessarily, but for quality of life issues.”
“Have you seen any eyes?” Alisa asked, her interest piqued despite her moral dilemma.
“Not in here.” Yumi shrugged. “Maybe there’s another room.”
r />
Alisa looked toward Leonidas, though she did not expect him to help her shop for items to loot. Still, he was the expert on this place, the one with the map. He was hunched over a computer console facing the glass, his netdisc out again. Planning to copy some files?
“It’s not a QuickMart,” Leonidas growled, not looking at either of them. “I’m not going to look up the inventory to help with your theft.”
No, he wasn’t happy about having this place pillaged. Or maybe he wasn’t happy he had not found the person he’d hoped to find, and that was making him cranky. She almost pointed out that he was being cranky, but she had not forgotten that he had saved her life. She resolved to tamp down her lippy streak. At the least, she wouldn’t snap a retort about theft. Besides, she probably deserved his comment.
She stepped around a workstation, curious about what he was looking up. Would he let her see?
She almost tripped over the torn up remains of another body. More of the bones remained with this one, but they were equally gnawed and scattered about. A shredded white lab coat lay beside what was left of the ribcage.
The sight sobered Alisa, stealing all thoughts of comebacks and lippiness.
“That’s not a thief,” she said, then gave herself a mental kick. A nice stating of the obvious.
“No,” Leonidas said, not taking his eyes from the holodisplay. Columns of text drifted in the air before him, the words too far away for Alisa to read. The little red light flashed on his netdisc. Yes, he was copying files. He opened a second display above another console, and video imagery of the station came up.
“Do you think it’s… the person you were looking for?” Alisa asked.
He did not answer. Perhaps his silence was answer enough. He could have said no without revealing anything to her. But saying yes might mean revealing that they had come all this way and risked their lives for nothing.
Though she was curious as to what he was looking up, she opted to give him his privacy. Everything on that screen would probably go over her head anyway.
But as she backed toward the door, he looked up, pinning her with his gaze.
“Stay,” he said.
“Because you’ve grown to appreciate my company, and you’d be lonely without me?” She hadn’t managed to tame that lippy streak for long.
“Because there may be more of those bears on the station.”
“What makes you think that?” She’d had the thought herself but wondered if his sensors had shown him something. He had not put his helmet back on.
Leonidas held up a finger, his gaze drawn back to one of the displays.
A clang came from the room with the shelves. Alisa jumped, spinning toward the noise and reaching for Beck’s blazer again.
“Sorry.” Beck waved a bloody knife. He had removed his helmet and was kneeling beside the dead animal. “That was just me.”
Alisa curled a lip. “What are you doing?”
“Told you—I’ve been looking for fresh meat.” Beck winked at her.
“I… you’re joking, right?” Alisa leaned out the door and found Yumi. “He’s joking, isn’t he?”
“I’m not sure. He has carved a large sample.”
“If there are more of those around, is it wise to fling blood all over the place?” Alisa asked. “Won’t the others smell it?” She touched her side, aware that she was leaking blood of her own.
“These bears are top-level predators on Octaria,” Beck said. “Each with a large range, a range they keep the competition out of—I doubt there are multiple ones in here. Even if they started out that way, they would have likely killed each other, especially since, ah, food supplies apparently got scarce here after a while.”
Food supplies? Alisa did not want to think about that.
“Are they omnivores?” Yumi asked. “They may have been able to subsist on whatever supplies were here for humans. They may have also hibernated to slow their metabolisms and food requirements.”
“I really don’t want to know about their metabolic needs,” Alisa said. “Leonidas, how much longer do you need? I think we’re all ready to get back to the ship.”
Leonidas was staring intently at one of the displays in front of him. Alisa walked back around the workstation. He’d closed down the one with the text on it and put away his netdisc, but the video display was running, showing footage on cameras around the station. Something moved on one of them, something big with black fur, and Alisa jumped.
“Is that live footage?”
Leonidas enlarged the image, and two more of the great fanged beasts came into view, all three of them shambling along on all fours, passing through the familiar chambers of the research station, rooms Alisa and the others had just passed through. In the video, the crates were neatly stacked, and there weren’t any bones on the floor. That let her relax an iota. She leaned forward and checked the date stamp in the corner.
“Two months ago?” she asked.
“Yes, we’re two months too late,” Leonidas said, cupping his chin with his hand as he continued to watch.
“What brought them here? Can you tell?”
“Not what. Who.”
He poked his finger through the display, and the footage started playing in reverse, the giant bears heading butt first in the direction of the airlocks. In that first room, a person came into view, someone wearing a black robe with a cowl pulled over the head. Leonidas scrolled back further, then let the video play, showing the person—it was impossible to tell if it was a man or a woman—coming out of the airlock behind the three giant bears.
“That’s the one we killed,” Leonidas said, pointing to the bear in the middle.
Alisa had no idea how he could tell. The big shaggy creatures all looked the same to her, the same and terrifying. But she was more curious about the person walking behind them, as if they were domesticated livestock rather than man-eating predators. The bears ambled in front of the cloaked figure without showing any inclination toward spinning around and taking a chomp. Even on all fours, they were as tall as the person’s shoulder, and he or she appeared thin and insignificant next to their bulk.
Leonidas zoomed in on the robed figure’s chest, showing a pendant with a red moon on a silver star background.
“Starseer,” Alisa breathed.
She had only ever seen one in real life before, when she had been a girl walking through a busy concourse on a space station with her mother, but she remembered the dark robe, the cowl pulled over the head, and the pendant. Even though she hadn’t seen the person do anything indicative of mind powers, simply walking along with a metallic staff like some monk of old, she hadn’t forgotten the way people muttered and moved away. Even though Starseers were rare sights in the system anymore, everyone knew their history and what they could do.
As she and Leonidas watched, the cloaked figure opened doors without touching the panels, leading the bears into the room outside of this first lab. He or she waved a hand, and the creatures raced into the corridor, heading deeper into the station—to hunt. That done, the Starseer turned and walked out, the black robe sweeping the floor as he or she returned to the airlock and disappeared from the station’s cameras.
Leonidas’s fingers curled around the edge of the workstation, and a crunching sound came as they dug into the hard material. He glanced down, made an irritated noise, and let go. Alisa backed up when he turned his sour expression toward her.
“The Alliance have any Starseers on the payroll?” he asked, the words sounding like an accusation.
“Not that I know of.”
Admittedly, she wasn’t in the know when it came to decisions from the First Governor and senior military officers. She had been a lowly lieutenant for most of the war, and even when she’d made captain, she had only been in command of a squadron of Striker pilots. Who knew what had been going on among the leadership? Nevertheless, she doubted they had allied with Starseers.
“The Starseers have always been associated with the empire, hav
en’t they?” she added.
“I heard rumors that some were working with the Alliance. It’s unlikely you people could have overthrown the empire without help.”
Alisa bristled at the implication that normal human beings couldn’t have any effect on a bloated government so full of itself that it hadn’t seen the threat coming until it was too late for them to do anything. “Of course. We people were so inept. How could we have possibly beaten the mighty empire and its cyborg armies?”
“I didn’t say you were inept, but you were outnumbered twenty to one, if not more. We had superior forces, supplies, and the infrastructure for delivering them. If you hadn’t resorted to despicable guerrilla tactics—”
“Tactics aren’t despicable if they’re your only chance for freedom. You think we didn’t know we were outnumbered? That the odds were against us? What were we supposed to do? Toss our infantry soldiers out on a battlefield to face your superior forces in open combat?”
Leonidas stepped toward her, huge and intimidating in that armor, and it was all she could do not to scramble backward. “You were supposed to fight with honor, not bombing civilian buildings and destroying resources that all of humankind relies upon.”
“I never bombed any civilians. I served on the Merciless and the Silver Striker. We were in space, transporting people and engaging in battle to defend our resources. Your warships were the ones that wanted to annihilate us, wipe our rebellion from the system. And don’t act like the empire never did anything morally reprehensible. You think I’ve never heard of what the Cyborg Corps were responsible for? The assassinations you carried out during the war? The way you made powerful people disappear before the war ever started? Everybody knows what that red armor stands for.” She poked him in the chest. She might as well have poked a steel wall—all it did was hurt her finger.
“Everybody knows nothing. I’ve never assassinated anyone. I’ve always fought with honor. The stories you people make up to justify your actions are ridiculous.”
“Stories? Sure, me and millions of other people. We’re just sitting around and making up stories about cyborgs.”