[Fallen Empire 00.5 - 03.0] Star Nomad Honor's Flight Starfall Station Starseers Last Command

by Lindsay Buroker

  Trusting she would be fine there with her mother, Alisa strode after Young-hee. She wanted to run, but her guide did not feel her sense of urgency, either. Alisa clenched her fist and might have tried pushing her along, but her guard was also following along, watching suspiciously.

  “Brenner?” a voice said over his comm. “Report to the library. We have an incident and need backup.”

  The guard passed Young-hee and took off at a run. Alisa sprinted after him, not caring if Young-hee kept up or not. An incident? That could only be Leonidas. How in all three hells had he ended up accused of murder? Had someone else tried a mental attack on him, causing him to defend himself with force? Enough force to kill?

  The guard charged up a wide set of stairs with ice pillars on either side, animals and mythological creatures carved into them. Another time, Alisa would have admired the artwork. Now, she was too busy chasing after the big man. They burst through the double doors at the top together.

  At first, she did not see the trouble. A cavernous, carpeted room spread out before her, more carved pillars reaching up to a high ceiling and rows and rows of bookcases stretching toward a distant, window-filled wall. But shouts came from the side, from a round room that looked to be the base of one of the ubiquitous towers. Someone roared in pain, and hair rose on the back of Alisa’s neck. She had never heard such an anguished cry come from Leonidas’s throat, but that sounded like him.

  She sprinted toward the tower, running so fast that she passed the guard. Her Etcher found its way into her hand, even though the logical part of her brain informed her that it would be idiotic to shoot anyone here. She ran through the door and turned toward the noise, almost crashing into someone’s back. Several robed figures were lined up, and one of the robes was gray instead of black.

  “Doctor,” Alisa blurted as the guard caught up with her, gripping her arm from behind.

  Barely noticing, she was about to demand an explanation from Alejandro, but saw that two men were gripping his arms too. These were the young Starseer warriors, some of whom she had seen waiting outside of the Nomad. Alejandro was not wearing his satchel. Had they taken the artifact from him?

  Two of the Starseers turned to look back at her, opening up the view of the room in front of them. Leonidas was on his hands and knees on the floor, his helmet off and blood dripping from his nostrils and ears. The entire wall behind him had been blown away, and an alarmingly huge puddle of blood saturated the rubble-littered carpet in front of him. Wounded men groaned from the floor off to the side, one rolling and gasping, grabbing his ribs through his robe.

  “Leonidas,” Alisa blurted, trying to pull away from the guard so she could go to him.

  The Starseer did not let go of her arm, and her Etcher was clenched in that hand so she couldn’t bring it to bear. Instead, she whirled and slammed her boot into his kneecap. He clearly hadn’t expected her to attack, and the blow made him gasp, releasing her. She pushed between the two men who had turned to look back, thinking she might squeeze past them and throwing a few elbows to put them off guard, but they recovered and caught her.

  Then some unfamiliar force restrained her further, a pressure on the inside of her skull that took control of her body away from her. She couldn’t continue forward. Her limbs simply would not work. She couldn’t even feel them. It was as if they had been frozen in ice.

  Still on his hands and knees, Leonidas lifted his head. He met her eyes briefly, his own eyes squinting with pain, but he turned his head slightly and focused on an older man a few feet from Alisa. The gray-haired, pale-skinned Starseer’s hand was out, fingers splayed as he pointed his palm at Leonidas. Utter concentration was stamped on his face as he looked from Leonidas to the hole in the wall, to the drop beyond it, a hundred feet to the sea of ice below.

  Alisa was no mind reader, but she knew without a doubt what he was thinking. To use his mind to shove Leonidas out, to cause him to fall to his death. She doubted that even Leonidas could survive a drop that far.

  She tried to cry for him to stop, to distract him somehow, but her voice box would not work. The pressure in her skull seemed to build, causing pain, making her want to crumple into a ball and wrap her arms around her head instead of fighting further. Yet she struggled, trying to find a way to move, to break the hold on her.

  “Stop it,” Alejandro said. “He’s done nothing.”

  “He killed Abelardus and wounded three of my warriors,” the old man snarled, not taking his gaze from Leonidas as he spoke.

  Abelardus? The one who knew Durant? Her only lead?

  As soon as she had the thought, Alisa felt despicably selfish. Leonidas was writhing on the floor, maybe being killed before her eyes, and she was worried about her own problems?

  “No,” she rasped, barely able to get the syllable out. She wanted to say that Leonidas wouldn’t have done that, that he wouldn’t have killed any of the men here, but an invisible hand tightened around her throat, and she could not utter the words.

  Her eyes, the only things she could move, darted from side to side in her head as she tried to identify the person who was using this power on her. She did not know what she could do to stop it, but she wanted to know who was tormenting her so.

  “If you can see his thoughts, then you know that’s not true,” Alejandro said. “He’s an honorable man. He wouldn’t have thrown someone out the window to his death.”

  “What window?” the old man asked. “He blew up the window and the wall.”

  “To try to disrupt the concentration of the people attacking him!”

  “Of course we’re attacking him. He’ll kill us if he gets the chance, just like he did Abelardus.” The old man’s fingers twitched, and some force shoved Leonidas, heavy armor and all, toward the gaping hole in the wall.

  Other men in the line smiled, though their faces were full of concentration too. They were all ganging up on Leonidas, bullying him.

  Leonidas glared at them through the pain contorting his face, but he could not resist the invisible force pushing him toward the hole.

  “If he’d wanted to kill you, he would have aimed the grenade at you,” Alejandro said, arguing more forcefully than Alisa would have expected from him. Despite his impassioned words, the Starseers were not listening. The old man continued to push Leonidas across the carpet, inch by inch. Wind swept through the hole in the wall and plucked at Leonidas’s sweat-drenched hair.

  Realizing that physically fighting whatever held her was not working, Alisa tried going limp, slumping against the Starseer closest to her. He seemed startled, and for a second, the force around her throat disappeared as he caught her with his arms, keeping her from hitting the ground. Before she could move, the force around her body reasserted itself.

  She hissed in frustration. The toe of Leonidas’s boot slipped over the edge of the hole. A piece of rubble from the wall was pushed through and tumbled free, falling too far for her to hear it land.

  “That’s my security officer,” she blurted, startling herself because she hadn’t realized she would be able to speak. She immediately wished she had come up with some more useful argument. How was that going to sway them to let him go? Several faces turned toward her, and she felt foolish, but she pressed on. “I need him to fly my ship, to protect us from pirates. He’s… he’s integral, damn it. You have no right to—”

  The force reapplied itself to her throat, cutting off her ability to speak and half of her air as well.

  “No,” the old man said, lowering his hand. Leonidas still looked to be flattened to the floor, but he wasn’t being pushed farther toward the hole. “Let her speak.” His cold, soulless eyes locked onto hers. “Are you saying that the cyborg works for you, Captain?”

  She recognized the trap as soon as he asked the question and realized her mistake in making the claim. She’d been looking for an argument that might sway them to leave him alone, but this could get her into as much trouble as he was in.

  Leonidas managed to lift his head
up. His eyes were wide, full of concern. Not for himself but for her. He looked like he wanted to shake his head wildly, but all he could get out was a slight gesture of the negative. “Don’t,” he mouthed, blood spilling down his chin when he moved his lips.

  Seeing him in such pain, seeing him being bullied, made Alisa want to cry. And to rage. She struggled again against the invisible bonds that held her, longing to lash out, to shoot these cruel idiots.

  “Because if that’s the case, Captain,” the old man said, “you’re responsible for his actions and just as much to blame for this murder as he is.”

  Alisa looked toward the huge bloodstain. She did not see a body anywhere in the room. Had someone gone out the hole in the wall? She didn’t understand fully what had happened or how Leonidas had ended up in a brawl with someone here. His grenade launcher and blazer pistols were on the floor near the stain, too far away for him to reach now, but nobody else’s weapons were there, no sign of torn robes or coins that might have fallen out in a scuffle. There was just the blood.

  “It’s not a military ship, Osmond,” someone said dryly. “She can’t be held responsible for a civilian employee going crazy.”

  “Of course she can,” the old man snapped.

  “He doesn’t work for her,” Alejandro said, meeting her gaze across the intervening Starseers. “She’s lying. We’re just passengers.”

  More of the Starseers were focused on her now, her and Alejandro and the old man. In her peripheral vision, Alisa saw Leonidas’s fingers inching toward his opposite arm, toward some small panel in his armor. She immediately tried to think of something else, afraid someone monitoring her thoughts would notice her noticing his slight actions.

  “Passengers that paid their fare,” Alisa said, filling her mind with images of the Nomad and her passenger cabins. “I aim to get them to their destination.”

  No need to mention that this technically was their destination and that nobody had made arrangements for further passage. She hadn’t even made plans as to where she intended to go after this.

  “Then it’s a shame your passenger chose to murder one of our people,” the old man said, shifting his attention back to Leonidas.

  “He didn’t,” Alisa cried, though she had no way of knowing that. She hoped to give Leonidas the few more seconds he needed to do whatever he was trying to do.

  The old man frowned at her, but lifted his hand and stepped toward Leonidas.

  Leonidas flicked something toward the Starseers, a thimble-sized canister that started spewing bluish-gray smoke as soon as it rolled across the carpet. The powerful stuff had an immediate impact. Horrible smoke curled down Alisa’s throat and into her nostrils, feeling like acid burning away her cilia. Tears streamed from her eyes.

  The Starseers stumbled back, and the man holding her let her go. The invisible force wrapped around her also disappeared. Coughs filled the air all around her as the smoke thickened.

  Alisa tried to stumble toward Leonidas, even though she could no longer see him in the dense haze, but she was too busy choking on snot and heaving, feeling like her body was trying to cough her lungs out into a pile on the carpet.

  A hard arm went around her, and she found herself flung across someone’s shoulder. Leonidas?

  As she was swept away from the smoke, her mind filled with an image of those docking clamps under her ship. How would they get away if Mica hadn’t found a way to deal with them yet? How would they get away even if she had? Wouldn’t the Starseers cause them to crash in the mists again?

  Leonidas charged for the doors of the library, pushing robed men to the side, men clutching their noses and mouths, snot all over their fingers. They were too distracted by their own discomfort to stop him. He raced through the doorway into air that was thankfully clear of smoke.

  Alisa expected him to keep going, to run down the stairs and all the way back to the ship. But he halted before starting down. Being draped over his shoulder limited her view, and she twisted, trying to see around his broad torso. She saw just enough to make her stomach sink.

  Lady Naidoo stood at the bottom of the stairs with Young-hee at her side and six Starseer warriors lined up behind her, some with their staffs raised, others with plain blazers pointed at Leonidas. Naidoo herself held the tip of her staff toward him, and energy seemed to crackle in the air around it as the runes carved into the side glowed fiercely.

  From the very still way that Leonidas stood, not even seeming to breathe, Alisa feared that he was being restrained by their power again. She wished he had simply run out without stopping to grab her. Maybe he would have made it farther alone. Though where he could have gone from here, she did not know.

  “Take them to the prison area,” Naidoo said, lowering her staff.

  Leonidas sighed, shifting his weight. He must have been released so he could walk. He did not attempt to fight again.

  Other robed figures stumbled out of the library and onto the landing, some coughing, some throwing up. The old man leaned over the railing and heaved his breakfast onto the floor beside the stairs. Alisa felt a modicum of satisfaction at seeing his discomfort, but it did not last long. Someone lifted her from Leonidas’s shoulder, and robed warriors swarmed all around them. She was thrown over someone else’s shoulder like a sack of flour.

  If you fight me, I will make this walk unpleasant for you, an unfamiliar voice spoke into her mind.

  “I’m gagging on my own snot, and my eyes feel like they’re being clawed out by acid,” Alisa said, her voice raspy. How much more unpleasant could it get?

  She did not, however, try to wriggle free or fight her captor as she was carried down the stairs. With so many enemies around—yes, she had to consider these people enemies now—what was the point?

  Chapter 11

  Alisa was not surprised that the theme of ice ceilings and floors continued in the basement dungeon where she and Leonidas were dropped off. They were deposited in adjoining cells with translucent forcefields on all sides acting as walls to separate them and keep them from escaping. The cells themselves were part of a block of similar cells in the center of a large room that was also used for storage. Casks of wine and beer and sake were stacked against a back wall. Alas, nobody saw fit to roll one into Alisa’s cell. She could have used a stiff drink.

  Once the forcefields were up, the Starseers that had walked their prisoners down en masse all left. A camera on a wall near the bottom of the stairs was turned toward the cells. Alisa did not see any obvious way to escape unless she could dig a hole in the ice floor. Unfortunately, the Starseers had searched her and removed her weapons and multitool. Unless she could dig her way out with her teeth, the odds did not look good. They had also forced Leonidas out of his combat armor, leaving him in nothing more than the underwear and thin T-shirt he wore underneath.

  Alisa smiled without humor, thinking of the times she had been imagining him scantily clad in order to distract the Starseers poking in her mind. This was not how she had envisioned seeing him. Blood crusted his face and the sides of his neck from where it had run out of his ears, nose, and mouth, and large bruises mottled the skin on his arms and legs, probably on his torso under his shirt too. Somehow, the Starseers had injured him badly, even with his armor covering him. Armor was designed to defeat weapons, not mental attacks.

  She watched Leonidas through the forcefield, wishing she could offer him a hug. She also wanted to ask him what had happened, but he was still sitting on the floor where they had deposited him, his shoulders slumped, his chin to his chest. He looked like he wanted to curl onto his side and pass out. It was probably only the chill of the ice under his butt that kept him from pressing more skin against it. There were no carpets here in the basement to alleviate the cold, and there wasn’t any furniture in the cells, not even a pot for going to the bathroom. Not that Alisa would want to do that in front of Leonidas or the camera.

  “Are you going to be all right?” Alisa asked softly.

  She did not want to b
other him, but she did want to know what had happened and if she should be yelling at that camera, pleading for Alejandro or some other doctor to be sent to attend to him. Wherever Alejandro was. The Starseers must have decided he was not enough of a threat that he needed to be locked up.

  “You shouldn’t have been thrown in here with me,” he mumbled, his chin still to his chest. He definitely sounded like he was in pain, like it hurt just to breathe. Had they broken some of his ribs?

  “What can I say? I missed your company. Drugging Yumi’s family wasn’t as fun as I thought it would be.”

  He turned his head, looking at her for the first time. “Is that inappropriate humor or did you actually do that?”

  “Yes, and yes.” She managed a smile for him, even though his face looked as bad as the rest of him, and she wanted to break into tears. His strong features were bruised, his lips split and swollen, and his eyes so dark and puffy that she was surprised he could see out of them. “I don’t know if it will help anything, but if it doesn’t hurt too much, I’d appreciate it if you told me what happened.”

  “Hells if I know.”

  She frowned. What did that mean? He’d been there, hadn’t he?

  “In the beginning, I watched over the doctor’s shoulder as he researched, and I tried to give him ideas. I thought he might want to investigate old Starseer nursery rhymes since that seemed to be what Yumi had remembered and used to find this place. He told me to go away and stop bugging him.” He paused and took in a slow, deep breath before continuing. “So I wandered through the library, poking into books about the history of the Starseers and some of the artifacts they had created, though my attempt at research was handicapped by the fact that the doctor still hasn’t confided in me about what exactly that orb is or what it’s supposed to lead him to—he’s given the impression that it’s a map or a puzzle, but that’s it.”