“Are we still thinking of camping out by the entrance so we can shoot at enemies?” she asked, wondering how they would manage that with all the rock formations in the way. She didn’t see a good place to set down for repairs, either. Holes and stalagmites alternated on the tilted floor of the cavern.
Before Brody answered, white light flashed on the rear camera. Something hammered the ship, and the force almost hurled them into a massive rock column.
“Now who’s attacking us?” Jelena growled, searching the sensor display for other ships. Had some Starseer diddled with her mind too?
Movement on the rear camera drew her eye. Boulders tumbled through the space near the entrance. A huge slab fell across it, blotting out the view of the canyon and the stars. Jelena realized they’d been struck by flying rocks, not another ship.
Another slab fell, completely blocking the entrance.
“Guess we don’t have to worry about the other ships, after all,” Brody said, sounding irritated. “We just have to worry about getting out later.”
“That was a precisely timed and placed explosive,” Zhou observed. “We have approximately nine percent of Arkadian gravity in here. The odds of rocks happening to fall precisely to plug up the entrance are minimal.”
“Those two Starseer ships must have set the trap,” Jelena said. “Maybe we were meant to be caught in the rockfall.”
“What’s going on up there?” Erick asked over the comm.
“Those Starseers set an explosion to block the entrance.”
“It may not have been them,” Brody said.
“Who else would it have been?” she asked, though she immediately thought of the “dangers” Abelardus had been told to expect here. “If it was a booby trap set to go off at movement, then wouldn’t those other two ships have triggered it first?”
“I could get back in the turret and shoot the rocks to clear them out of the way,” Austin said over the comm, sounding excited. “It’d be real easy.”
“Or it would bring down the entire cavern on our heads,” Erick said.
“Would that matter?” Jelena asked. “In nine percent gravity? The shields would protect us from pummeling.”
“I was thinking more about the problem of the thrusters getting us out from under thousands of tons of rock. I don’t care what the gravity is. That’s problematic.”
“Ah, right. No shooting, Austin.”
“What if the other ships shoot?” he asked. “From outside.”
Jelena looked at Brody. He had said that more pirates were on their way.
“They’re searching the surface of the asteroid for us now,” he said. “Four of them.”
“Let’s hope they don’t guess where we went. Or shoot anything.” Jelena supposed it was vain to hope the pirates’ sensors wouldn’t be able to pick up the freighter through all that rock.
You will not be permitted to escape, a cool voice announced in her mind.
One of the Starseers from the mother ship? Probably. Either that, or one of Austin’s angry, five-hundred-year-old Starseer ghosts was around, haunting the place.
The voice did not speak again, and Jelena wanted to snort dismissively at the threat, but as she gazed back at the blocked exit and considered the precise timing of that explosion, she had a hard time doing so.
Chapter 10
Jelena flew so slowly that they would have fallen out of the sky if they’d been anywhere with respectable gravity.
The tunnels were creepy. In addition to being dark, tight, and windier than a glowworm, they were draped in some kind of cobweb-like material that reminded her of the haunted mansion in Perun Central. Nothing could possibly live in an asteroid, but she could easily imagine spiders in the nooks and alcoves, spinning webs. The Snapper pushed through the material without resistance, but playing with the exterior camera angles revealed the stuff coating the hull of the ship. Jelena was tempted to raise the shields, if only to keep her freighter clean, but Erick hadn’t gotten main power back online yet, so she had better not draw down the reserves.
Besides, the tunnels might be too tight to add anything to their exterior. As it was, she’d scraped the hull at more than one tight turn. She had no idea what she would do if the tunnels narrowed, and she had to attempt to back them all the way out. The maneuvering thrusters were versatile, but that would be a tall order.
“You’re sure this is the way they went?” Jelena glanced at Brody, who had invited himself to occupy the co-pilot’s seat.
Normally, he was the last person she would want there, but he had retrieved his map and was consulting it. His paper map. No, forget paper. That looked like parchment. What kind of weirdoes had those early Starseers been? Maybe the journey had taken so long that they’d brought crafts along to keep them occupied. Crafts like tanning snagor hides and drawing maps on them.
“Yes, I’ve been checking the map religiously. There haven’t been that many turnoffs since the original chamber.”
Brody sat on the edge of his seat, alternating between glancing at the view screen and his unrolled sheet of parchment. The edges were cracked and charred, as if one of those crafty Starseers had applied a candle to them. Jelena hoped they weren’t following a map that some madman had tossed into a bottle and launched as a joke.
“Any idea how far it is to a ledge or flat spot where we can set down for repairs?” she asked.
Erick had pointed out numerous times that he couldn’t fix the damage that had been done to the fission reactor and drive engine without stopping. Right now, they were running on the batteries. He hadn’t even gotten the main lights back on yet.
“At this turtle-crawl pace, at least an hour until our destination,” Brody said.
“I asked about flat spots, not destinations.”
“Your engineer can repair the ship while Abelardus and I go out to retrieve the artifact.”
“Uh, I’d rather the Snapper be fully repaired before we get close to some ancient and possibly booby-trapped Starseer ship.” Not wanting to argue with him, Jelena opened the internal comm. “Zhou, are you doing anything important?”
Erick had recruited him, as well as Thor and Masika, to help with repairs.
“Holding Erick’s large, buzzing tool,” came Zhou’s response.
“Tell him to get a woman to do that and come up here, please.”
“It’s a sonic torsion driver,” Erick said.
“That should get the ladies all kinds of excited,” Jelena said. “I need my scientist.”
“Is that me?” Zhou asked.
“Yes.”
“What a crew,” Brody muttered, stroking a hand across his parchment like one might fondle a lover. At least he was tormenting it instead of Masika.
“Captain?” Kiyoko asked from the hatchway.
“Yes?” Jelena glanced back long enough to catch a concerned expression on her face, but she dared not take her eyes from the navigation display for long. Another bend in the tunnel was coming up.
“Abelardus is… Are those cobwebs?” Kiyoko stared at the view screen.
“I don’t think cobwebs and dust bunnies can grow in asteroids, but when my scientist arrives, I’ll ask him if he knows what they are. The sensors promise they’re inorganic material.”
“Of course they’re inorganic.” Brody gave her an exasperated look. “There’s nothing living here.”
“I didn’t say there was.” Jelena pressed her lips shut before her mouth could add ass to the end of that sentence. Who’d asked him?
“Uhm.” Kiyoko sounded uncomfortable with the exchange. “I wanted to tell you about Abelardus, Captain. He’s stable, and I’ve got nanobots working on repairing the damage, but he had a brain hemorrhage.”
“What? Like bleeding?”
“Yes, an artery burst, causing bleeding in the surrounding tissue. A stroke basically. He came to me quickly, and I think he’ll recover fully, but he’s lost some brain cells.”
“Hells, he needs those brain cells,” Brody s
aid, sounding more disgusted than concerned.
“What happened up here exactly?” Kiyoko asked, ignoring him.
“We were all attacked by a Starseer, everyone in NavCom at least. Abelardus seemed to take the brunt of it.” Jelena touched her head, remembering the stabbing pain. “Do you need to check everyone?”
“I’d better.” Kiyoko turned, perhaps to get her medical kit, but she paused. “Is that something Starseers typically do? Attack people’s brains?”
“No,” Jelena said firmly, certain that Kiyoko was thinking of her little sister and what kinds of skills she might be learning from Grandpa.
“It’s not impossible,” Brody said, turning in his seat to consider Kiyoko for the first time. He looked her up and down, though the saffron robe did nothing to hint at curves. “We learn various tactics for defending ourselves. We have rules about not attacking each other with such tactics, but grubs—” He hitched an indifferent shoulder.
“Grubs?” Kiyoko asked.
Jelena winced. Kiyoko probably would have heard the derogatory term eventually, now that she was spending time with Starseers, but it wasn’t as if Jelena or Erick used it. She didn’t think she’d caught Thor using it, either.
“Mundane people without any skills,” Brody said. “Some Starseers choose to treat them as people. Others consider them like animals. Lesser. Few Starseers bat an eye either way if you don’t apply the same laws to grubs as you do to people.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” Jelena said, not wanting Kiyoko to think Hoshi would be raised with such beliefs.
“I hope not. It’s important to show loving kindness to all beings, no matter how superior and evolved you believe you are.” Kiyoko pressed her hands together and bowed, not appearing overly ruffled by Brody’s attitude. Good.
Brody squinted at her, probably trying to decide if she agreed that he was superior and evolved or if she’d been sarcastic. She spoke so serenely that it was hard to tell, and Jelena remembered someone saying that her mind was hard to read, even though she lacked Starseer abilities.
“The tunnel is widening.” Jelena nodded to the view screen as the Snapper swept through a curtain of the hazy webs, and the beams of its lights pierced an open space.
Her claustrophobia got a respite as they flew into the chamber, the walls receding into the darkness. Unlike in the entry cavern, there weren’t any stalactites or columns. This appeared to have been hollowed out by man rather than nature, but as soon as she had the thought, she wondered at it. What men would have been in here? Miners? The Starseers from that old ship? Had they been clearing out these tunnels before whatever had happened to them had happened? If so, why? Zhou had said the asteroid wasn’t comprised of ore that would be of interest to miners.
She shook her head. Nature must have been responsible. It wasn’t as if anyone had ever found evidence of intelligent aliens in the system or anywhere else in the galaxy.
“I’m going to see if we can land somewhere,” Jelena said, steering them downward, hoping for some flat ground.
Brody frowned at her, looking like he might object, but Zhou walked in, and he didn’t speak.
“I wanted your opinion on some strange cobwebs, Zhou,” Jelena said, then spotted a ledge. “Hold on. That looks wide enough and stable enough for us to land on. I want to let Erick do his repairs.”
The ship’s lights illuminated the wall behind the ledge, and she almost changed her mind. A cave or maybe a tunnel opened up behind it, one too small for a ship to fly through but something that could be explored on foot. Did she want anyone to go exploring? Would there be a reason to go out there?
Brody noticed it too. He leaned forward again, consulting his map.
“The main tunnel we need to continue through is over there,” he said, pointing to the darkness to the starboard side of the ship. “There are a couple more down at the bottom of this space too, but this map doesn’t show any more than the openings.”
“This is fascinating,” Zhou said, eyes bright as he gazed at the view screen. He sneaked a peek at Brody’s map too.
“Better than holding Erick’s tool?” Jelena asked.
“Most assuredly. It’s jarring when it vibrates.”
Kiyoko’s eyebrows rose, but all she said was, “I better get back to Abelardus. Captain, please have everyone who suffered that attack come see me. It’s possible others have aneurysms or other damage as well.”
“Aneurysms?” Zhou touched his temple.
“Apparently being the victim of a Starseer attack isn’t good for your health,” Kiyoko told him.
“Can you check me now? I need my brain for school. And chess.”
“You can follow me to sickbay, and I’ll check you first.”
Zhou took a step after her, but paused. “Captain?”
“Go, go. Leonidas and Admiral Tiang would give me a hard time if I returned you home having suffered a stroke.”
Despite the words, Zhou didn’t leave. His gaze had shifted to the view screen, which was focused on the ledge Jelena was steering them toward. And the tunnel. Some of the webs dangled by the entrance, seeming to wave slightly in some breeze. It had to be a trick of the mind. The sensors confirmed that there wasn’t a significant atmosphere out there.
“Are those the cobwebs?” Zhou asked.
“Yes, there are plenty of samples smashed to the Snapper’s nose if you want to examine them.”
“Oh, I’d love to. Is there a way to bring samples in?”
“Not without going out to pluck them off the hull.”
“Can we do that?”
“Ah, technically, yes. Brody and Abelardus brought some fancy spacesuits along. Maybe they’ll let you try one on, especially if Abelardus is going to be busy healing his brain cells.”
Brody’s mouth twisted. “There’s no need to sample anything. We’re here to retrieve an artifact from a wreck, nothing else.”
Zhou was still gazing at the webbing.
“Do you think that tunnel is man-made?” Jelena asked him softly.
Zhou opened his mouth, but glanced at Brody before answering.
Brody gazed coolly back at him.
“Man made? No.” Zhou shrugged. “If this was part of a planet, there could be all manner of natural tunnels that were once hollowed out by the rivers I speculated existed.”
Jelena thought about challenging Brody, telling him not to bother Zhou, but it probably wasn’t worth a fight. She could draw Zhou aside later and talk to him. Or she could speak to him telepathically any time, though that might startle him. She also wouldn’t be comfortable trying it with Brody right there. He might have the power to eavesdrop.
The Snapper set down with a soft bump, landing legs settling on the ledge. A green glow emanated from the ground, and Jelena almost fell out of her seat.
“What’s that?” Zhou gripped her backrest, glancing from the view screen to the sensor panel. “Some kind of chemical reaction? Chemiluminescence?”
“I don’t know.” Jelena stared at the phosphorescent glow coming from the ledge, a solid circle of light that extended a few meters on all sides of the Snapper. “But I doubt rivers were responsible for it.”
Thor walked into NavCom, looked at the view screen, and then gazed at Brody’s open map.
“Erick couldn’t get you to hold his tool?” Jelena asked him.
He didn’t respond.
Brody noticed him looking at the map and rolled it up.
“Get this ship repaired, Captain, and let me know when we can fly again.” Brody stood and bumped Zhou as he walked out. He paused in the corridor. “Might I remind you that pirates and Starseers are out there? They know what asteroid we’re on, and they may get tired of waiting for us to reappear.”
“You better go check on Abelardus,” Jelena told him, not appreciating his orders or his reminders. “Since he’s the only one you’re willing to explore with. You might get lonely in that relic ship all by yourself.”
“Doubtful.” Brody sta
lked around the corner toward his cabin.
“All right, Jelena,” Zhou said. “You enticed me with the prospect of sampling asteroid cobwebs, but I have to see what’s causing that glowing.”
A part of Jelena wanted to go out with him to investigate, just to spite Brody, who clearly didn’t want them to explore, but a larger part of her suspected it would be safer if they all stayed in the Snapper while repairs were underway.
“What if that’s what the five-hundred-years-dead Starseers said?” she asked.
“Their ship isn’t here.” Zhou pointed to the sensors. “We’d be able to detect it if it was in the chamber.”
“That doesn’t mean that whatever killed them isn’t here.” Jelena eyed the glow. It hadn’t faded yet. She hoped it wasn’t melting off the bottoms of the landing legs. “Why don’t you take some sensor readings from here?” She patted her seat and offered it to him. “We’ll get you a sample of the web when Brody and Abelardus go out.”
Zhou slid into the seat. “Do you have spacesuits in here?” he asked casually. “Aside from the two they brought?”
She thought about telling him no, but he probably wouldn’t believe her. “There are some suits for going out and doing repairs, yes.”
“So if I find that there’s nothing dangerous out there via my scans, then you wouldn’t mind if I went out for samples?” Zhou waved at the sensor panel.
I’ll go with him, Thor spoke into her mind, startling her.
What makes you think I’d worry less if you were with him?
Because I’m extraordinary.
Extraordinary? Who told you that?
Some truths are self-evident.
Uh huh. Why do you want to go out there? Don’t you share my concerns? That something in this asteroid is the reason those original Kirians didn’t make it home?
If that’s true, then we have to be careful not to make the same mistakes they did. But it might be the Kirians themselves who came here and hollowed out the tunnels and this chamber. They may have been setting up a base for some reason.
A base with glowing lights?
Maybe so, Thor said. I can’t detect power emanating from the ground the way I can sense the artifact, but making something glow wouldn’t take much energy. I could do that.