“My mother was diagnosed with Delqua, a not uncommon disease for people who grow up on mining worlds,” he said quietly. “If you haven’t heard of it, just ask Mica. It doesn’t have a cure. Gunther and Ivo were only nine and seven at the time. Our father disappeared right after Ivo’s birth. We didn’t have many relatives, nobody except me to take care of them if she passed away, and I couldn’t see myself raising two little boys. I was nineteen. Besides, I—we—didn’t want to lose her. But the doctors gave her less than a year to live. There was an experimental treatment, but it was very expensive, and our insurance wouldn’t cover it. Neither would my part-time job repairing and maintaining housekeeping robots.” He smiled wryly.
Alisa saw where the story was going and couldn’t manage a return smile.
“So, I looked into the fleet. A lot of the dangerous jobs came with bonuses that you received after your training, but I knew we needed the money quickly, and the cyborg specialty paid the most. You got half of the bonus after the surgery and then half after your combat training. It was enough to pay for the treatment.”
“Did it… How did it go?” Alisa asked, though maybe she shouldn’t have. She remembered him mentioning once that he hadn’t often gone home to visit his brothers after their mother died.
“It wasn’t a cure, but it slowed down the progress of the disease. She had ten years instead of one.” He blinked a few times, his eyes still fixed on the ceiling. “It was worth it,” he said, his voice tight.
Alisa blinked away moisture in her own eyes. “Why don’t your brothers…” She paused as the realization came to her. “They don’t know, do they?”
“No. They were young. They just knew that Mom was sick and had to go to the hospital for a couple of months.”
“You never told them that you paid for it? She didn’t tell them?”
“I didn’t. I don’t know if she ever did. I know she cared about me and was grateful, but she was also uncomfortable with the trade off, that she had been given more life at the cost of her son becoming someone who took the lives of others.” He swallowed. “She was a peaceful woman. She didn’t even eat meat because it disturbed her to think of animals dying for her sake.”
Alisa did not know what to say. She almost wished she hadn’t asked, hadn’t pried. It was such a painful and personal story. What right did she have to know it?
“Do—did the other cyborgs in your unit have similar backgrounds?” she asked, though maybe she shouldn’t have. Did she truly want a reason to develop sympathy for the empire’s overpowered henchmen, men who had so ruthlessly mowed down her colleagues during the war?
“Some did. Some had little other choice. Some just wanted to be super soldiers.” He lifted his head enough to look down at his bare legs, and his lips twisted wryly.
“Is it hard to feel like a super soldier when you’re lying on the ice in your underwear?”
“Somewhat.” He laid his head back on the frozen blocks. “Most of the people who were just there for the sake of their egos backed out when they learned how much painful surgery was involved and what else you would lose.”
Alisa tilted her head. “Such as what?”
He had mentioned the surgery before, but she couldn’t remember him speaking of losing anything else, unless he was talking about the way people saw him now, as something less than human.
Leonidas looked over at her, his face thoughtful, as if he was debating whether to divulge some secret. Was he? She returned his gaze, trying to look attentive and secret-worthy.
“I—”
A door creaked open in the distance. Cursing softly, Alisa jumped to her feet so she could stand in front of her tiny hole and her ice shavings. Leonidas turned his gaze back toward the ceiling and closed his eyes. She hoped that he would get a chance to finish whatever he had been about to say.
Footsteps sounded on the treads of the steps. Alisa was not sure who she expected to visit them, but it wasn’t Yumi and her sister Young-hee. She watched behind them as they walked away from the stairs, certain that a couple of burly guards with staffs would follow them. A third person did walk into the room, but it was Mica, not a Starseer.
“I don’t suppose this is a jailbreak?” Alisa said.
In the cell next to her, Leonidas’s eyes opened. He tracked the women’s approach, but he did not try to get up. She could only imagine what the Starseers had done to him and how much pain he was in. The bastards could at least let someone send him some painkillers.
“I did bring a file,” Mica said, patting a satchel that was probably full of tools, “but Yumi tells me that won’t be necessary. At least for you.” She looked at Leonidas and frowned at him, or perhaps at the way he was covered with livid bruises. Mica was even less likely to display her feelings than Alisa, but there seemed to be sympathy in that frown.
“Oh?” Alisa asked, not enthused about being released if Leonidas had to remain.
“We talked to Lady Naidoo,” Yumi said, nodding toward her half-sister. “We had to wait until after she got reports from a number of people about the ‘incident,’ as she’s calling it.”
“A lot of the warriors are calling it murder,” Young-hee pointed out.
“Naidoo, at least, hasn’t passed judgment yet,” Yumi said. “She’s got a team examining the ice down there and looking for a body. It’s not clear why people are so certain that Abelardus was killed. Someone said he saw it in Leonidas’s thoughts, that he got in a fight with the Starseer again and threw him out the window.”
Young-hee was nodding, and Yumi frowned at her and then at Leonidas.
“That’s not really what happened, is it?” Yumi asked.
“No,” Alisa said firmly, glad that Yumi was not quick to condemn Leonidas. He had saved the Nomad and all of them enough times in the last month that he deserved some understanding.
“You can’t know that,” Young-hee said. “Whatever he said, he could be lying to you.”
“Then look for yourself. You people like to dance around in our skulls at your leisure as it is. I don’t know why anyone who wants to know the truth hasn’t come down to poke around in his head.”
“Nobody wants to poke into a cyborg’s head,” Young-hee said with a distasteful frown.
That did not jive with what Leonidas had said the night before. It seemed the Starseers had been scanning him left and right since he stepped off the ship.
“Poke anyway,” Alisa said.
“Please,” Yumi said. “We need to find out the truth.”
“We’re not a part of the judicial system,” Young-hee said. “We’re just here to let your captain go since she didn’t have anything to do with the murder and hasn’t committed a crime. Not a major one, anyway.” She quirked her eyebrows at Alisa.
“Is flavoring someone’s fish a crime here?” Alisa asked. “I didn’t realize.”
“Flavoring.” Young-hee snorted.
Yumi’s cheeks turned pink.
While this discussion was going on, Mica had sidled over unnoticed to a control panel near the bottom of the stairs. Alisa avoided looking in her direction, since Young-hee wasn’t paying her any attention, but she silently urged her to find a way to drop the controls on both cells.
Leonidas placed his hand on the ice and carefully pushed himself into a seated position. Young-hee watched him warily.
“I invite you to look into my mind,” he told Young-hee, looking steadily into her eyes. “I won’t do anything cyborgy.”
“Cyborgy?” Alisa asked. “What would that look like exactly?”
“I don’t know, but I assure you it’s very menacing.”
She smiled, relieved he was managing a modicum of humor.
Young-hee sighed and walked over to stand in front of his cell. She avoided his eyes and looked at his collarbone, her face growing still with concentration.
“Alisa?” Yumi asked quietly, glancing at Mica, who was casually leaning her shoulder against the wall while eyeing the control panel less casually.
/>
“What is it?” Alisa walked to the front of the cell, careful not to touch the forcefield and give herself another zap.
“The orb is gone. Alejandro didn’t see who took it, but he says it happened while Leonidas was being detained by the Starseers. He’s stomping around the ship, railing at anyone who will listen.”
Alisa was not surprised, but the revelation promptly made her suspect that all of this had been part of some ruse to get Leonidas out of the way and distract Alejandro so the orb could be slipped away. The confusing part was the why. Why bother with a ruse? The Starseers could have simply flattened Alejandro and Leonidas and walked up and taken the orb. And why would Abelardus have been murdered, if indeed he had been? At the least, someone had lost a lot of blood in that library.
Alisa remembered Ji-yoon’s mention that there were different factions here. Perhaps this was the end result of some political morass that had stopped someone from acting openly.
“We’re all supposed to go back to the ship too,” Yumi added. “Young-hee has the clearance to let you go, and she’s supposed to escort us back. Then we’ll be released and we can leave. They insist that we leave.”
“Without Leonidas?”
“Without Leonidas. He’s to be held here until the incident can be resolved.”
“Oh, that’s frozen takka on a stick. If we leave him—” Alisa thrust her finger toward him, “—he’ll disappear, just like that orb.”
Yumi spread her arms helplessly. Leonidas gazed over at Alisa but did not say anything. She hoped he wasn’t resigned to his situation. Maybe he was simply too wounded to think of fighting now. She remembered the way he had, despite his injuries, swept her over his shoulder as he had run out of the library to escape the smoke and the Starseers. He had chosen her instead of Alejandro. She couldn’t even think of abandoning him here to these people.
Alisa glanced at Young-hee, whose eyes had narrowed to slits as she continued to stare at Leonidas. “You said she has the clearance to let me go. Does she have the clearance to let Leonidas out?”
“No,” Yumi said.
“Are you sure? Did you ask?”
“They’re not going to let him go. I’m certain of it. They believe—”
“I know what they believe. They’re assholes.”
Yumi’s eyebrows lifted.
“You’re better off not having their powers, Yumi. You didn’t see the way they were hurting him, bullying him. Enjoying it.”
“I…”
“He didn’t do it,” Young-hee said, her eyes opening fully. She truly sounded surprised.
Alisa resisted rolling her eyes. Barely. She could not believe all these people thought cyborgs were deceitful animals because of centuries-old bad blood.
“Good,” was all she said. “How about letting him out?”
“I don’t have the authority to do that.”
A series of loud and irritated beeps came from the control panel by the stairs.
“It seems I don’t, either,” Mica said, lifting her hands in innocence as Young-hee whirled and frowned at her.
“Maybe you should have gone with the file,” Alisa said.
“Lady Naidoo or one of the other senior Starseers will have to let him out,” Young-hee said. “The panel is retina and fingerprint encoded.”
“What are the odds that Lady Naidoo will come down and look into his brain to see that he’s innocent?” Alisa asked.
Young-hee hesitated. “I’m not sure. She’s a busy woman.”
“I bet. And it doesn’t hurt that none of the Starseers want a cyborg to be innocent.”
Young-hee frowned, but did not deny the words. She walked past Mica and to the panel.
“Alisa,” Leonidas murmured, stepping as close to the forcefield between their cells as he could. He did not say anything else but tilted his chin toward the camera. Did he think she could do something about it? Maybe Mica could.
A holodisplay popped out of the wall in front of the control panel below it, and Young-hee leaned forward for the scans. The forcefield at the front of Alisa’s cell made a buzzing noise and flashed once. Alisa poked the area with the toe of her boot before committing to walking through. It was down.
“I was instructed to show you to your ship, Captain,” Young-hee said, placing a foot on the bottom step of the stairs.
“All right.” Alisa glanced at Leonidas again. A big part of her wanted to refuse to go anywhere without him, but that would be pointless. From within the Nomad, maybe she could come up with a plan to rescue him.
He tilted his chin toward the camera again.
“Mica,” Alisa murmured, lifting a hand to keep her from starting up the steps. “Got anything in your bag to fuzz that lens?”
She did not know what Leonidas could do against the forcefield—or the ice—to escape, and whoever was monitoring the camera would probably come down quickly to fix any problems he made, but she hoped to be wrong.
Mica dug into her satchel, patted around, and came out with a tiny aerosol bottle. “Give me a quick boost,” she whispered.
Alisa hurried to do so, threading her fingers together to create a step. Mica stuck her heel into them and stretched toward the camera. Yumi was following Young-hee up the stairs, but Young-hee’s back was still in sight. She could notice any second that Mica and Alisa were not trotting obediently after her.
A soft hiss sounded as Mica sprayed something onto the lens. She hopped down as Young-hee reached the top of the stairs and frowned down at them.
“You won’t be able to get the control panel to release him,” Young-hee said, thankfully not poking into their thoughts.
“I’m just saying goodbye,” Alisa said, waving to Leonidas.
He lifted a solemn hand of his own. Her gut clenched at the thought that she might not see him again.
No, she wouldn’t believe that. She would come up with something, and she would do it quickly. In fact…
Alisa charged up the stairs as an idea came to mind. “Young-hee, I’m ready to go back to the ship, but I need to stop in the library on the way.”
“Why?”
Why, indeed. Young-hee had stopped again to frown at her, perhaps to read her mind.
Hells, might as well try the truth. “You said Abelardus was handsome, didn’t you?”
Her frowned deepened at the random question.
“She said he was gorgeous,” Yumi said. “Several times.”
Young-hee blushed.
“Then I assume you would prefer for him to be alive rather than dead.”
“Of course,” Young-hee said, puzzled. “But—”
“The same people who lied about what was in Leonidas’s thoughts are the ones who said he was dead, right? What if he’s not dead? What if he’s in trouble somewhere? A part of some plot?”
Alisa didn’t believe that would be the case—if anything, Abelardus was probably the instigator of a plot to blame Leonidas, but the notion seemed to catch Young-hee’s imagination. Her mouth formed a soft, “Oh.”
“Just give me a quick couple of minutes to look around the library before we head back to the ship,” Alisa said.
“I don’t know what you believe you can find, but very well.”
Chapter 13
The library was empty. The entire place still stank of the smoke grenade that Leonidas had released. That might explain why it was empty.
Alisa hurried into the tower where the confrontation had taken place, doubting Young-hee would give her much time to dawdle. She had already reported in to someone along the way, letting them know that she was taking Alisa, Yumi, and Mica to the library before heading to the ship docks. Alisa wouldn’t be surprised if a squad of guards charged in at any moment to take over the escort.
Cold air blew in through the hole in the tower wall. Alisa walked straight to the stain on the floor.
“Mica? Bring your tool bag in here, will you?”
“Are we futzing with more cameras?” Mica asked, walking into the room.
>
“I doubt there are any in here. If there were, people would know what happened, and they’d have a harder time blaming Leonidas.” Alisa glanced at the ceilings as she knelt beside the stain, double-checking her assumption. If there was camera footage somewhere, maybe all they would have to do was get it. Unfortunately, she did not see any small lenses peeking out of the corners.
“There’s no reason to monitor our people using the library,” Young-hee said in a puzzled tone.
“Do you have some kind of container in there, Mica?” Alisa waved at her bag. “Something like a vial?”
Mica frowned but poked around inside of it.
Alisa scraped at the dried blood with a fingernail, but hesitated, not sure if that might add some of her own DNA to the mix. “And I’ll take that file too.”
“You’re a demanding captain. Perhaps you should get a tool purse of your own.”
“They would have taken it from me when they took my Etcher and multitool.” Alisa accepted a small folding file while lamenting the loss of her own goods. Neither her gun nor multitool been high quality—she had traded her painkillers for them back on Dustor—but she had used them often in the last month, and they had come in handy. “Did you just call that a tool purse? I don’t think that’s actually a thing, is it? Purses are supposed to be for bank cards, hairbrushes, and makeup.”
“What would I do with makeup?”
“I don’t know, but you could tame that mop of hair with a brush.”
“Keep insulting me, and you won’t get your vial.” Mica unscrewed a small round lid, dumped out some screws, stuffed them in her pocket, and offered the container.
“That’s not what I had in mind for a vial.” Alisa imagined handing the screw box to Alejandro asking for a medical analysis.
“If you’re going to be fussy about it, I’ll keep it.”
“No.” Alisa snatched it from Mica’s hands. She did her best to scrape flakes of dried blood from the carpet weave and into the container.
“Captain?” came Yumi’s uncertain call from the main doors to the library. “You may want to hurry.”
Alisa wiped the file on the side of the container, took the lid from Mica, and screwed it on. She had hoped to have the opportunity to look around at the crime scene for a few minutes, too, to see if she might find anything suspicious that had fallen into any cracks or nooks, but several robed figures strode through the doorway.