Leonidas led them up a knoll with a charred tree at the top. It looked like it had been struck by lightning—or ship fire.
The knoll gave them a partial view, and he pointed toward the west, the direction they had been heading. Alisa reached his side in time to see a small gray ship rise above the canopy, its engines humming. It turned south, toward the volcanoes, and zipped out of sight.
Alisa groaned. “That was them, wasn’t it?”
“It’s the ship we were tracking, yes,” Leonidas said.
“And the staff,” Abelardus said, clenching his fist. “Damn it. We were so close.”
It occurred to Alisa that the Starseers might not have been alerted to danger had it not been for her kidnapping the Tiangs and leading the Alliance down here. If not for the rush, Alisa could have made her arrival more circumspect and chosen a more distant landing spot.
“I still sense someone there,” Abelardus said. “Just one person, about a half a mile ahead.”
Leonidas nodded and strode down the knoll.
Alisa pulled out her comm, hoping to contact Beck. She had given him almost as ambitious a task as she, Leonidas, and Abelardus had. Wrangling two unwilling guests—who considered themselves captives—into the jungle and keeping them from calling out to searchers would not be easy, especially while carrying Durant. Now that Alisa had seen the denseness of the vegetation, it seemed an even more daunting task. Beck and the others might not have gotten far. Or they might have already been captured.
“Captain?” came a whisper over the comm. Beck.
“Just checking in.” She also spoke in a whisper—if there was a Starseer only a half mile ahead, a stealthy approach would surely be best. “What’s going on?”
“Hiding.”
“Is it working?”
Leonidas popped a laser tool out of his armor and silently cut away brush too high to trample. A tangle of thickets and vines barred the way almost as effectively as bricks. A snake hissed at him from a high branch.
“So far,” Beck said. “There are soldiers tramping around all over the canyon and up on both rims now. We stayed down here. Lots of brush farther up the canyon.”
A giggle came from somewhere near Beck, and Suyin whispered, “There’s a stick poking up my butt. It’s pokey.”
“Are our friends being any trouble?” Alisa whispered.
“No,” Beck said at the same time as Mica leaned close to the comm to say, “Yes. They’re being idiots.”
“I did have to relieve them of their earstars,” Beck said. “The woman wanted to comm her boyfriend to let him know the parameters of our hide-and-seek game.”
As if it were something so innocent.
“It’s possible they received a larger dose than I had intended,” Yumi whispered.
“The good news is that the soldiers are having trouble finding us,” Beck added. “There’s a lot of life in here. It’s probably messing with their readings.”
Something roared from somewhere close to Beck’s comm.
“Need to go,” he said. “Some of that life might be coming to visit.”
“Keep me updated,” Alisa said. “We’ll try to finish here and then join you to…” To what? Her plan to sic the Alliance on the Starseers had gone out the airlock. “Retake our ship in a heroic and clever manner,” she finished. Better to inspire her people than create doubts.
“Can’t wait to see that,” Mica muttered.
Another roar sounded, and Beck closed the channel.
Alisa lowered her comm and moved forward a few steps—that was all the progress Leonidas had made. She looked upward in the direction she had last seen the Alliance ships, but since the group had moved away from the canyon, there were fewer breaks in the canopy.
“Abelardus?” she asked. “Can you tell if anyone chased after that Starseer ship?”
“All of the Alliance ships are still up there, flying around the canyon,” he said. “And don’t call those people Starseers. They’re
chasadski
.”
“Right.”
Leonidas made it through the thicket, and the foliage thinned. They pushed through at a quicker pace, with Alisa wishing again for combat armor of her own as branches and thorny vines clawed at her. Sweat slithered down her face, and her clothes stuck to her body. She wouldn’t have minded a laser knife to cut the humidity, as well as the brush.
“It clears more up ahead,” Leonidas said.
“The person is up there,” Abelardus said.
“Stay here. Both of you,” Leonidas said, though he only looked at Alisa. “I’ll check on it.”
Alisa frowned, wanting to send Abelardus with him. Whoever was waiting probably knew they were coming—Abelardus would.
Not necessarily
, he spoke into her mind.
Just as it’s hard for the computerized sensors to distinguish between human life and non-human life when the forest is so dense with it, it’s difficult for us to do the same.
Alisa wanted to follow as Leonidas walked forward, his red armor standing out against the greens and browns of the rainforest, but she made herself wait. Besides, they were close enough that she and Abelardus could charge in if a fight broke out.
You don’t want to see if he can handle a rogue Starseer by himself first?
Abelardus asked.
He’s been training for it. As if throwing weights around is what you need to defeat those with great mental powers.
He throws
you
around easily enough
, Alisa replied before she could think better of it.
Because I do not use lethal tactics.
The stiffness in his tone came through as clearly as if he had spoken the words.
I could kill him if I wished, but that’s not honorable. I am not chasadski.
Alisa wasn’t sure she believed him, since Leonidas seemed to know how to distract Starseers to keep them from using their powers fully, but it wasn’t something she wanted to argue about. She certainly didn’t want Abelardus trying to prove that he had the ability to kill people with his mind.
Feel free to be dishonorable with these assholes.
She nodded her head toward the clearing.
“Alisa?” Leonidas asked over the comm, a strange note in his voice.
“Yes?”
“I believe it’s safe for you to join me.”
“The Starseer—
chasadski
—isn’t dead, is he?” she asked.
Abelardus shook his head as Leonidas said, “No.”
Alisa started forward, but Abelardus stopped her with a hand and strode into the lead. She let him. As she clambered over a log with ferns growing out of it, an engine roared somewhere overhead. A shuttle flying low in an aerial search.
When Alisa reached the clearing, she found Leonidas standing under an overhang provided by a pile of boulders stacked at one end. His gaze was toward the sky, though the engine sound had already diminished, leaving only a deep blue sky visible above. The canopy thinned here, with few branches blocking the view. Tall grass grew to chest-height all around the boulders. From above, the clearing might look like an oval. Alisa found it strange that neither trees nor brush encroached into the grass in this one spot.
As soon as the sound of the shuttle’s engines faded, Abelardus walked straight toward the center of the clearing. Alisa was about to follow when Leonidas spoke, making her pause.
“Interesting.” He touched a gauntleted hand to one of the big boulders and wiped away dirt and moss.
Not boulders, Alisa decided, and not stacked haphazardly, as she had first thought. The squarish rocks had been carved sometime in the past and stacked deliberately, like some ancient religious shrine. Leonidas’s ministrations revealed words carved into the stone, words that didn’t make any sense to Alisa, though they used the English alphabet that had been brought over from Old Earth. She thought of the nonsensical words the Starseers had made up while isolated on Kir, and was on the verge of asking Abelardus if he could read it, but he had moved away from them. He stood at the far edge of the clearing, looking down at something while his chin rested on his fist.
“We may not need your plan,” he said, glancing at Alisa.
“Plan?” There had been so
many
plans. Which one was he referring to?
She pushed through the grass toward him and came to a large rectangle of flattened grass. The landing spot for the Starseer ship.
“The one where you confront your father about piano recitals,” Abelardus said.
Alisa almost pointed out that he hadn’t been in the room when she had been discussing that, so it was rude of him to bring it up, but she spotted some black through the grass. A Starseer robe.
She pushed through to join Abelardus, who was staring down at a gray-haired man crumpled on his side. A staff was tangled in the tall stalks next to him, but it wasn’t the Staff of Lore.
“It’s him,” Alisa said, recognizing the hawkish nose and trimmed gray beard from the break-in video. “You said he’s not dead?”
She wondered if his allies had turned on him, delivering one of those mental attacks, the kind that either killed people or left them in comas. She scowled. The last thing she needed was another coma victim with answers locked in his head.
“Unconscious,” Abelardus said. “Or sleeping.”
He nudged the Starseer in the shoulder with a boot. Stanislav, Alisa remembered. Stanislav Schwegler. Possibly the man who had left a dedication in one of her mother’s most cherished books.
The man groaned, and Alisa leaped back, nearly falling when her heels caught in the grass. Leonidas appeared behind her, steadying her with hands to her shoulders. He was looking to the sky rather than at the unconscious Starseer.
“Another ship is coming this way, flying low,” he said.
Alisa hadn’t heard anything yet, but she trusted his senses. “Then we should go… uh, somewhere.”
Leonidas considered Stanislav briefly, then picked him up and draped him over his shoulder. Abelardus grabbed the staff.
The roar of an engine sounded as Alisa followed the men into the trees. A cruiser swept over the clearing, so low that it rattled the leaves and stirred the grass. Alisa ought to check in on Beck again, but Stanislav groaned as he bounced on Leonidas’s shoulder.
“He’s injured,” Leonidas said, holding out his hand so Alisa could see it. The red of his armor and the poor lighting made it hard to pick out the blood on his palm, but not impossible.
“That’s usually the case when people are unconscious,” she said, refusing to feel worried about the man. He might be a relative, but he wasn’t an ally. He was on the other side. If he died, it would probably be better for the universe.
Leonidas gave her an unreadable look, pushed a few more steps into the jungle, and set Stanislav down, holding him upright against a tree. Alisa wanted to say they should keep going, rejoin the others, and figure out a way to board their ship and sneak away, but how likely was it that they could do that with soldiers all over the place? It was getting dark, but that wouldn’t necessarily make it easy to sneak away from an armada of military ships. Maybe gathering intelligence from Stanislav was the best thing they could do right now.
She pulled out her multitool and shined the flashlight at his face. His eyes fluttered, trying to open, and he winced. There was blood in his beard, and he reached for his abdomen with another wince. One of his eyes was swollen shut. After touching his stomach, his hand coming away damp with blood, he reached for his shoulder, but his fingers clunked against an unyielding cyborg arm. If not for Leonidas’s hand holding him against the tree, Stanislav might have crumpled to the ground. It took a few seconds for his one eye to focus on Leonidas.
“You survived,” he said, staring through Leonidas’s faceplate. He had a pleasant enough baritone, but his voice was hard to read. The words could have denoted disappointment or intrigue or utter indifference.
Leonidas did not respond, merely glancing to Alisa, as if to hand the responsibility to her.
Stanislav slowly turned his head to one side, taking in Abelardus, who stood a few feet away, and then to the other. His gaze locked onto Alisa, and she fought the urge to squirm, mostly because his eyes were very similar to the ones that looked her in the mirror every day. His nose was sharper than hers, his features more angular than rounded, but she uneasily thought she could see a resemblance, a leaner and more bearded version of herself. Maybe it was her imagination. She would prefer not having a father to having one who was an asshole.
Stanislav winced again. She wasn’t sure if it was because of his injuries or because he was reading her thoughts. She had to remember that all of these damned Starseers could do that.
“I didn’t know,” he said quietly, glancing at Leonidas again, then looking back to her.
“That it was rude to break into someone’s ship and steal a powerful ancient artifact?” Alisa said, hiding behind flippancy, since that had always been so much easier to do than admitting to unpleasant truths. “Well, it is. In fact, I think there are some system-wide laws about it. Not that they’re enforced overmuch out on the border planets, but it’s still rude.”
Stanislav closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “That is… a long story.”
“I’ll bet.”
“I would have reached out to you if I had known about you, if Oksana had told me. I could have—”
“Save it for someone you haven’t stolen from,” Alisa growled.
Maybe she should have been polite with him in the hope of getting useful information—hells, he might have a lead on where Jelena had been taken—but she couldn’t keep from bristling. As a girl growing up with just her mother, on long freighter voyages that had sometimes been lonely, she had often mused about who her father might be and what it would be like to have him around, but she had long ago accepted that whoever he was, he would never be a part of her life. She didn’t need some stranger coming into her world now, pretending her existence mattered to him.
“Are you keeping me upright?” Stanislav asked Leonidas, his gaze shifting to the hand pinning him to the tree. “Or keeping me from escaping?”
“Whatever my captain requests,” Leonidas said, his tone cool.
Once again, Stanislav looked from him to her. “Then I shall address my concerns to you, Captain Marchenko.”
He didn’t pretend not to know her name. She wondered if he had known it when he showed up at the
Nomad
to steal the staff. He must have recognized the ship if he had known her mother, if he had been
intimate
with her.