Starseers: Fallen Empire, Book 3 (17 page)

“Remember when I told you cyborgs have fewer physical weaknesses than normal humans but all of the same failings?”

“Yes.”

“It’s true. I have a temper, just like anyone else. Besides… it was
worth
clobbering him.” A tight, vicious smile flashed across Leonidas’s face.

“What did he say?” Alisa asked, knowing Leonidas was sensitive about being called anything less than human.

All trace of satisfaction vanished from his face.

“It’s not important,” he said tersely.

“It was worth clobbering him over something that wasn’t important?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re not being that logical right now.”

“I know.”

Alisa waited to see if he might expound, but he remained quiet. She rubbed her face, then lowered her hand to massage her throat. Her injuries were insignificant next to his, but her neck definitely felt raw and bruised.

“So some Starseers came in and saw you standing at the window next to the puddle of blood,” she said. “What happened then? How did a hole get blown in the wall?”

He looked over at her, a hint of a smirk appearing on his battered face.

“Enjoyed that part, too, did you?” she asked.

“Not as much as I wanted to. The plan was to blow a hole in the ceiling and bring rubble down on all of them so I could escape. They had already plastered me to the wall and were holding me there with their powers while they discussed whether I should be killed outright for my crime or held in a cell. It was a surprisingly heated argument. You’d think they would believe in a trial of some sort, even for a cyborg…”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if whatever passes for justice here only applies to their own people.”

“The old man was there from the beginning, and he was the one lobbying for killing me. He’s the reason I used the grenade launcher. He attacked me with his mind, and I could feel fingers wrapping around my heart, trying to crush it. I swung the weapon, not at him—I knew I’d be in extremely deep takka if I killed any of them—but at the ceiling. The idea of it falling in on them, maybe toppling some bookcases on them, was still a possibility. Then I could fetch Alejandro and get out of the library and back to the ship. It almost worked, but he realized my intent, and flung another attack, knocking my arm to the side. The grenade went toward the wall instead of the ceiling. It made a mess, but not the mess I’d hoped for. Everyone was still standing afterward—and blocking my way to the door. The old man used the incident for more ammunition for his argument, saying I was too dangerous to be allowed to live. Interestingly, two of the younger Starseers were arguing that it would be much more profitable for them to detain me.” Leonidas turned his head again, giving her a flat look.

“You should have answered your comm last night,” Alisa said. “I heard from Mica that Beck was chatting with two of the Starseers he was feeding and that details about your warrant came up.”

Leonidas did not appear surprised as he digested that. Maybe he had already suspected. Alisa hoped it hadn’t crossed his mind for a second that
she
had been the one to betray him.

“Do you know if he was openly plotting against me, or if the Starseers were merely extracting information from him?”

Alisa hesitated. She liked Beck and did not want Leonidas to hurt him—or worse—but if Beck positioned himself as Leonidas’s enemy, it wasn’t her fault. She was already protecting him from the mafia. Wasn’t that enough?

As Leonidas gazed at her with pensive eyes, she found she couldn’t truly contemplate lying to him here or withholding the information. She resented that Beck had put her in the position where she had to choose one of them to be loyal to.

“It is possible that he was coerced,” Alisa said, “but you should know that he approached me back on Perun about trying to subdue you somehow to take you to Arkadius and turn you in for the reward. He thinks he could pay off the mafia with the money. I don’t know if it ever went beyond speculation for him, but I could imagine a scenario where he saw the Starseers and their powers and believed they could nullify your cyborg abilities.” She licked her lips. “I’m sorry. I should have warned you earlier.”

Leonidas touched a lump on his temple. “If I survive this, I’ll have a talk with him.”

“A talk?” Alisa asked warily, afraid for Beck even though Leonidas wasn’t exploding with rage over the betrayal. “Will it involve shoving his celery seed dispenser down his throat?”

“It might.”

He lowered his hand and closed his eyes. The ice had to be bitterly cold through the thin material of his T-shirt, but maybe he would lie there and sleep. Unlike Alisa, he probably had not gotten any the night before.

“Are you wishing now that you hadn’t been so obstinate about retiring after the war? Maybe that tropical island with the beaches and fancy drinks wouldn’t have been so bad.”

“Maybe not,” he whispered, not opening his eyes.

She ought to let him rest, but she was reluctant to stop talking to him in case… in case.

“Before you left last night,” she said, “you almost told me the one thing that would make you consider retirement.”

“I did,” he agreed, “but I will not tell you now.” He lifted his head and eyed the camera briefly.

“Ah. Well, I hope you get a chance to find whatever it is that you seek.”

He turned toward her again. “I believe you do.”

She lifted her hand, wishing she could walk the three steps between them and touch his face, offer him some comfort, if only the warmth of shared body heat to deal with the ice. She must have done more than wish and inadvertently moved closer to the boundary, because her fingertips brushed the forcefield. A painful zap ran up her arm as energy flared white with a snap. She jerked her hand back and glowered at the barrier.

Leonidas shook his head slowly—sadly—and closed his eyes again.

She withdrew to let him rest while she paced around her cell and considered how they might escape, along with what she would do if they
did
escape. Abelardus, the man who might possibly know something about her daughter’s kidnapper, was either dead or missing. She had no idea who else might give her information. Nor did she know if she would be able to fly away from here even if she got the information she sought.

Chapter 12

After two hours, the dent in the ice floor was depressingly small. Alisa glowered down at her fingernails, wishing they were reinforced with steel or came equipped with razors. Whoever was monitoring the camera was probably laughing as she shaved microscopic slivers out of the ice next to the forcefield wall. She’d had a notion of digging her way out underneath it, but at this rate, that would take five years. And as soon as she made progress, someone would come along and pour water into the hole. As cold as the basement was, the floor would refreeze in minutes.

She leaned back, her knees numb from kneeling on the ice. “I don’t suppose cyborgs have enhanced fingernails?”

Leonidas opened his eyes. She hadn’t been bothering him, preferring to let him rest and hopefully heal, but she couldn’t help but wonder if he would have more luck with his extra strength. Maybe it would only take him
two
years to dig out.

“I don’t have fingernail implants,” he said.

“Clearly someone was shortsighted.”

“After they had already removed most of my bones and replaced them with stronger, synthetic ones, I wasn’t in the mood to volunteer for more surgery.”

Alisa shuddered. That could not have felt good. “What made you sign up for that?”

Leonidas sighed, looking up toward the icy ceiling. Maybe it was another story he wouldn’t share with the camera watching. Indeed, his gaze flicked in that direction briefly.

Alisa went back to scraping uselessly at the block of ice, having little else to work on. She couldn’t imagine lying down to sleep with the frigid floor at her back, the cold seeping through her clothing. She already had to get up regularly to pace around to keep warm.

“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.”