Alisa grinned. "That was almost a laugh, Leonidas. I saw it in your eyes. I"ll get it out of you someday."
"Only if your jokes improve."
"Does that mean you"re not going to take me up on the offer of a ma.s.sage? You"d be a challenge, but I bet I could manage it."
"A challenge?" Leonidas squinted at her, maybe suspecting an insult lurking.
"On account of your muscles being so big and hard." She didn"t mean it as an insult. It was the honest truth. "Who could dig in and find the tense spots with just their fingers? I"d have to use my elbows on you. Maybe some rocks."
"Elbows and rocks. Where do I sign up?"
"Just let me know when the antic.i.p.ation is too much to bear, and I"ll be ready. You will have to strip out of your armor for me, though. I"m pretty sure even elbows and rocks couldn"t help you through all that." She wriggled her eyebrows, wondering if he was the least bit interested in stripping for her.
"Likely so," he said, not offering any hint that notions of stripping inspired lascivious thoughts within him. "I won"t be removing my armor while in this temple. Even though they are most likely to come at me with mental attacks, if someone hurls me across a room, I"m less likely to be injured this way."
"I understand," Alisa said, not showing any sign that she was disappointed that he would not strip down and drape himself across the sofa where she could work on him. She hadn"t truly expected that to happen. Which was for the best, as she kept reminding herself. It was too soon to think about sleeping with other men. Or about ma.s.saging them. Still, she truly did want to know the details about that bounty, even more than she wanted an excuse to strip him. "You could tell me why my government wants you, and I could owe you the ma.s.sage."
"Owe me?"
"Yes, to be collected at your convenience. So long as I"m not busy flying us through asteroids and trying to avoid being captured by pirates, bounty hunters, mafia brutes, law enforcement, or the military."
He sighed. "The list of people after us has grown long, hasn"t it?"
"If Alejandro doesn"t do a better job of charming that Lady Naidoo, we might be adding Sta.r.s.eers to it soon."
His sigh turned into a grimace. "This isn"t how I imagined my retirement going."
"Did you actually want to retire when the war ended? I a.s.sumed your job just went away when there was n.o.body left to sign the paychecks."
He stopped pacing, his gaze turning toward a faded blue carpet on the ice. "It did go away. Perhaps Senator Bondarenko would have hired me if I"d been on Perun in the end, but I was busy elsewhere."
"Such as squatting in an old freighter on Dustor?"
"Among other places." Leonidas raked his gauntleted fingers through his short, black hair. It was tousled after being smashed under the helmet. "In the last few years, there were times when I thought I couldn"t deal with my duty much longer, with losing comrades and the people I was supposed to be able to protect." He turned his hands upward in front of his waist and studied them. "But I also didn"t know what else I would do with myself. Retiring from the service to be some bodyguard or overqualified security officer held no appeal."
Alisa winced, remembering that security officer was almost exactly the job that she had offered him. Still gazing toward his hands, he did not notice.
"And retiring to sit on a beach in the sun while drinking alcoholic beverages, that appealed even less. I"ve been a soldier for twenty years. I don"t know how to be anything else. I never finished my engineering degree, and what I learned would be out of date now, anyway. But I had the thought several times in those last few years that there was one thing I could give up the soldiering for."
"Oh?"
"I was trying to make it happen when I dragged you and your ship out to the T-Belt." He smiled sadly at her.
Alisa held still, only giving the faintest of nods. Would he finally explain what he had been doing out there? Did it have something to do with that warrant?
"When I was taking part in my last mission," he said, "the mission that took me to Dustor, I became more certain than ever that I want-"
A knock sounded at the door, and he stopped.
Alisa nearly fell out of the chair. "Don"t answer that," she said as he turned toward it.
He gave her a confused look. "It could be related to your daughter."
Alisa slumped back in the chair. He was already opening the door, so there was no time to explain that she"d been curious to know what was motivating him since she met him. Of course she wanted information about Jelena, but she wanted him to finish his story too.
Lady Naidoo and Abelardus stood in the hallway. They looked past Leonidas, as if he were furniture, and toward Alisa.
"I will speak with you," Naidoo said, "while Abelardus takes Dr. Dominguez to the library."
"You"re letting him research?" Alisa asked, forcing her mind away from Leonidas and his story to the present.
"He will be monitored as he does so." Naidoo nodded to Abelardus, who wore a wry lucky-me expression.
The bedroom door opened, and Alejandro stepped out. He had probably been listening with his ear to the door.
"I"m being invited to use the library?" he asked.
"You"re being permitted to use the library," Abelardus said. "While I babysit."
Alisa thought Alejandro might object-he had certainly objected to her being around when he had spoken of the orb-but he nodded and strode out, a bounce to his step. Maybe he didn"t believe the Sta.r.s.eers would give whatever information he found to the Alliance government. Alisa knew little of the politics and interests here, but she wouldn"t be surprised if they were only letting him look because they hoped he would find something in the library that their academics had missed over the years. She didn"t know how likely that was, but maybe the orb would guide him. They slept together, after all. They had a relationship.
"Leonidas?" Alejandro said, looking back when he reached the door.
Leonidas and Abelardus had been busy exchanging flinty stares, but Leonidas broke his to grab his helmet. Alisa slumped as he walked out the door after Alejandro, wondering if she would ever get his story.
The door shut, leaving Alisa alone in the room with Naidoo, her blind eyes turned toward the door of the other bedroom, as if she could see Yumi in there meditating. Maybe she could.
"Do you have any news for me?" Alisa asked. "I"m not above bribery. I already offered to bring in a cargo of chocolate and coffee for your warriors."
"Oh?" Naidoo smiled slightly. "Were they interested?"
"No, they were too busy glaring at Leonidas."
Her smile disappeared, and her tone went flat. "The cyborg."
"He"s an honorable man."
"Who served the empire. Interesting that you would defend him."
"He"s saved my life a few times since we met."
"I had no idea that the lives of freighter captains were so perilous."
"Things have changed since the war ended." Alisa decided not to mention that things had mostly changed because she had been foolish enough to take on pa.s.sengers who carried all manner of trouble in their luggage.
Naidoo chuckled and leaned on her staff. "I rarely converse with mundane humans anymore. They"re so seldom the same person inside as they display to the outside. You are."
"It gets me in trouble."
"I"m not surprised." Naidoo walked forward and sat in one of the chairs, carefully leaning her staff against the armrest.
Alisa had stood when she and Abelardus came to the door, but she made herself sit down again now, even though she perched at the very edge, the blanket cast aside. Her coldness cast aside. "Did you find out anything about my daughter?"
"She"s not here. I"ve contacted the leaders of our sister temples, and none of the ones who answered promptly have heard of her."
Alisa thumped her fist on the arm of her chair. "Is it possible there was someone who didn"t get your message yet? Someone who might reply that she is there?"
"The ladies at the three temples that run schools for the young, the three in addition to ours, all responded. They would have been the most likely to have received a new student. None of them did. Also, it"s not our policy to kidnap children from their parents." She frowned darkly. "We"re not the empire. They were the ones who often took away Sta.r.s.eer babies, and then they tried to raise them as weapons."
"I don"t mean to imply that you are like them," Alisa said, struggling for patience. It was hard since she was not hearing the answer she wanted. "But I saw the surveillance video in my sister-in-law"s apartment. I saw the people who took her."
"You did not see faces."
It was not a question. Alisa no longer doubted that this woman could read her mind.
"No, but they were wearing your robes, and they clearly had some power. They waved their hands, and made Sylvia halt in place. She just stood there as they walked out with Jelena, and my daughter had this vacant look on her face, like she was being brainwashed."
It had been alarming seeing that expression on Jelena. She was neither meek nor accepting by nature. Alisa remembered multiple conversations in which she had tried to explain that it wasn"t appropriate to stick one"s tongue out at one"s parents, teachers, neighbors, housebots, or the panhandler on the street corner who"d suggested little girls should be seen but not heard. Alisa had struggled to get that lesson to take, perhaps because Jelena had often seen her make sarcastic comments that were even less appropriate than tongues being stuck out.
"Blanked," Naidoo murmured.
"What?"
"That"s the term we use. It"s a barrier we can construct in a person"s mind to keep them from accessing memories and thoughts momentarily."
"Sounds disturbing."
"It"s useful. It often prevents the need for physical violence."
"Well, these kidnappers knew how to blank people then. They were definitely Sta.r.s.eers. Are you able to look up your kind in a database? Could you search for the name Durant? I"m not sure if that was a last name or a first name, but surely some matches would come up, and we could narrow things down. I already checked the sys-net, and there are tens of thousands of Durants out there, thousands just on Perun. There was no way to tick a checkbox and only get the Sta.r.s.eer ones, not that the empire or Alliance has thorough records involving your people."
Naidoo shook her head. Frustrated, Alisa sat back in the chair, her shoulder blades thumping against it.
"I"ve already searched," Naidoo said. "Nothing came up. It"s possible that those you saw were mundane people using a few tricks to make it appear that they were Sta.r.s.eers, to put the blame on our organization and distract searchers."
Alisa scowled, not believing that. What tricks could have done what she had seen? Nothing that wouldn"t require instruments or drugs, and the camera hadn"t shown anyone using any tools.
"It"s also possible," Naidoo said, "that they were rogue Sta.r.s.eers. We are not a completely united organization. Some people develop some of the talents without receiving any formal training. Others are trained in our schools but then go their separate ways."
"What, they don"t want to pay the membership dues?"
"Differences of opinion mostly." Naidoo chuckled. "The dues aren"t that high."
Alisa was not in the mood to chuckle.
"It"s rare for those people to work in concert once they leave the temple, but it"s certainly possible that some of them chose to do so for a joint goal."
"What kind of joint goal could involve an eight-year-old girl? It"s not like our family was special. We"re not heirs to the imperial throne. You can probably tell just by looking at my ship."
Naidoo smiled. "I hear it"s rustic."
Rustic, right.
"I regret that I cannot help you further. You are welcome to remain here until you"re rested and your engineer has completed any repairs necessary to your ship." Naidoo stood up, reclaiming her staff. "If you won"t find my advice presumptuous, I suggest you leave as soon as your repairs are complete. I also suggest you part ways from Dr. Dominguez and the cyborg. What they seek is nothing that you want to return to the system."
"Yeah, I"ve already figured that out."
Naidoo tilted her head, regarding her curiously. "Then why stay with them?"
Alisa blushed as thoughts of ma.s.sages and Leonidas with his shirt off entered her mind.
"Ah," Naidoo said. Fortunately, she walked out without further commentary.
Alisa rubbed her face. "I"m an idiot."
After the door shut, Yumi walked out of the bedroom. Alisa had almost forgotten she was in there. Her eyes were red. Maybe she had been crying instead of meditating.
"This trip wasn"t quite what I hoped for," Alisa said.
"I should have known... not to have hopes."
"I guess it could have been worse." Alisa thought of the White Dragon ship, it and its dead crew now at the bottom of a frozen sea.
"True." Yumi looked toward the door Naidoo had walked out. "Do you believe her?"
"I... haven"t had time to consider everything fully yet. Why, don"t you?" Even as Alisa asked the question, she remembered the way Abelardus had reacted when she"d said the name Durant. Naidoo might not have shown anything, but he had seemed to recognize it. Was it possible he had known this person, someone who had left the organization, as Naidoo had suggested? Maybe Naidoo had lied about not knowing who Durant was.
"Given the modern, mission-control-central feel of the throne room, with those feeds coming in from all over the system, carefully sorted to display mentions of Sta.r.s.eers..." Yumi raised her eyebrows as she trailed off, perhaps asking if Alisa had noticed that too.
Alisa nodded.
"It seems that they would have ways to keep track of their own people," Yumi continued. "Current members of the organization or not."
"So, you"re saying I should try to make arrangements to go snooping around the facility, perhaps into that computer room or into the library where the doctor is researching?"
"Ah," Yumi said. "Did I say that? I don"t think so."
"It was implied."
"There"s a guard outside of our door."
"Is there?"
Alisa hadn"t noticed when Naidoo and Abelardus arrived. She stood and walked over to open the door-it was made of wood instead of ice. She poked her head into the hallway. Sure enough, one of the young, muscular Sta.r.s.eer warriors stood out there, looking alert and fierce as he returned her gaze, his staff in hand.
"Any chance of getting some refreshments?" Alisa asked.
He frowned at her, then focused on the extremely exciting opposite wall. Which was made of ice. Naturally.