Zhou stood a couple of steps behind Jelena, and Kiyoko had appeared behind him with her medical kit in hand. It looked like the whole ship expected trouble and had come to witness it.
Jelena was tempted to leave the Starseers to handle the artifact like a pack of wolves fighting for alpha male status and go off with Zhou to learn about his fossilized organisms, but if those four truly started hurling power around, it could damage the ship and hurt innocent bystanders.
“That artifact doesn’t belong to either of you two relic thieves,” the woman said. “It’s dangerous, and it should be returned to the government, to be protected in a vault where megalomaniacal thugs can’t access it.” She looked pointedly at Thor and Brody. She didn’t acknowledge Abelardus. Was he not megalomaniacal enough for the label?
“You’ve been riding around with pirates,” Brody told her. “As if we’re going to believe you’re here on behalf of the government.”
“I was sent to infiltrate them since this is their territory and they have a lot more ships out here for searching than we do.” Her tone turned dry. “I can show you my ident if you’re concerned about my legitimacy.”
Brody barely glanced at her. All through the discussion, his eyes had been locked with Thor’s. Jelena could still feel them testing each other. She sensed Brody would have already attacked if Thor wasn’t holding the artifact and Brody hadn’t witnessed what it could do.
Erick and Masika looked at Jelena. Expectantly at Jelena.
What was she supposed to do? Yes, she was the captain of the freighter, but Thor was the only one she technically had any sway over—he was the only one in her crew. But they were right that this was her ship, and it wasn’t as if any of them could go elsewhere to have their fight. What she said should go for now.
She lifted her chin, stepped forward, and lifted a hand.
Before she could utter a word, the brain-crawling sensation returned so intensely that she wanted to tear her scalp off to get to it. It was worse than before, and she dropped to a knee, her body going weak again. The energy that had poured into her from that artifact faded, or maybe it just couldn’t help her with this.
“Jelena?” Zhou touched her back. “What’s the matter?”
She shook her head, digging her nails into her scalp and sucking in air through clenched teeth.
Thor turned toward her, physically and mentally. She felt him storming to her defense again with his power, pushing back whatever it was that kept going after her.
Don’t, she whispered into his mind, even though her brain hurt, and she wanted his help. They’ll take advantage.
He dropped that gate around her again, his barrier enhancing her own, and the sensation faded. She looked up to thank him only to see him fly through the air. His back slammed into a stack of crates, and they would have toppled onto him if they hadn’t been secured to the deck.
Brody charged toward him, yanking a pistol out from a holster in his spacesuit.
Masika touched her rifle and took a step after Brody, but hesitated, uncertainty in her eyes.
“No,” Jelena yelled, channeling power at the pistol as Abelardus tried to grab Brody from behind.
“What are you doing, man?” he demanded.
Jelena’s narrow burst of energy struck Brody’s hand, keeping him from firing at Thor. He glared and flung energy at her. She saw it coming and started to raise a barrier, but didn’t get it up fully. His power struck her with enough force to knock her back into Zhou.
Thor found his feet, and he roared, charging at Brody as something crashed to the deck behind Jelena. Zhou’s slides. She flailed her arms to keep her balance—to keep from trampling them.
“Don’t you touch her,” Thor snarled, springing onto Brody.
They forgot their Starseer talents and tumbled to the deck in a writhing tangle, punching and head-butting. Thor had dropped the artifact when he’d hit the crates. The Starseer woman sprang toward it now. Jelena stomped over, her staff in her hand, to intercept her. She didn’t care about the artifact, but she resented that they were all taking advantage of the moment when Thor had helped her.
An orange blazer beam lanced out in front of the woman, making her falter.
“Don’t touch that thing,” Masika said from across the hold. Her hesitation, it seemed, was only in regard to Brody.
The woman ignored the order. She flung up a barrier between her and Masika and ran toward the artifact.
Jelena hadn’t stopped striding toward it, and she reached it as the woman was bending down to get it. Sensing that her barrier was a flat wall between her and Masika, Jelena found an opening and lashed out with her staff. She smacked the Starseer’s wrists away before she could grab it.
The woman jumped back and growled. Jelena, feeling her drawing upon her power, wrapped a barrier around herself. She gripped her staff in both hands, ready to club her foe whether she was some government representative or not. She also created a wall around her mind.
The woman lifted her hand, as if she meant to punch Jelena, but attacked more subtly. A vice seemed to clamp around her chest. Jelena winced and wanted to back away—she sensed the woman trying to get her to back away—but she stepped forward and lifted her staff instead.
Alfie raced up to Jelena’s side and barked as ferociously as she’d ever seen—she seemed on the verge of sinking her teeth into the woman’s leg, spacesuit and all. The woman jumped back, throwing a startled glance at the dog.
Jelena lashed out then, jabbing the staff at her face to distract her. As the woman reflexively lifted her arms, Jelena crouched, spun, and swung her leg. She swept the woman off her feet. Not hesitating, she sprang after her, forcing her to her back and pressing the tip of the staff against her throat. The woman froze.
“I don’t know who you are,” Jelena said, “but I let you jump into my ship. I could have kept you from getting in here. You would have been buried in that rockfall. As long as you’re on my ship, you’ll obey my orders and follow my rules, or I’ll lock you in the brig. Do you agree?”
Jelena narrowed her eyes and tried to look menacing, like an experienced captain with a reputation of steel, not an eighteen-year-old kid. She was aware of Thor and Brody to one side. They had stopped wrestling, but they crouched, facing each other, only a couple of feet between them as they glared into each other’s eyes. Masika must have tried to stop someone, but she’d been flung across the hold. She rose to her feet, glaring. The men ignored her.
Thor had drawn his sword, and Brody had a dagger, but neither of the weapons would matter if they only battled mentally. Sweat dripped down their faces, and they wore expressions of utter concentration.
“You have a brig on a freighter?” the woman asked.
“Technically, it’s the lav, but I assure you that you won’t enjoy your time in it.”
“Really?” Erick asked. “I’ve found it quite pleasant since Dr. Ogiwara started cleaning it all the time. It smells like lemons.”
Jelena glared at him. It was hard to come across as having a reputation of steel when her engineer was talking about lemon-fresh lavatories.
The woman shifted, as if she might roll away from Jelena and make another grab for the artifact. Jelena thumped her in the chest with the tip of her staff—not hard, but enough to make her think about it—then picked up the thing herself.
“Like I said, it’s my ship,” Jelena said, “and since it’s my ship, I get to have the creepy red paperweight on the desk in my cabin for now. Once we get out of this asteroid belt, we can figure out who has the legitimate claim.” Not that she wanted the artifact glowing its blood red color while she slept at night. She would put it in the closet or a drawer and hope the crimson light wouldn’t leak out through the cracks. Maybe she would make Erick sleep with it.
For the first time, Thor and Brody looked away from each other. Brody straightened and frowned at her. Thor also looked over. She thought he might smile at her for getting it, but he also frowned, looking at it instead of
her. Abelardus had crept closer to her, and she thumped her staff on the deck and glared at him. Was he going to try to take it now?
He lifted his hands and didn’t try to come closer.
“Right now, this doesn’t matter.” She held the teardrop in her palm, not tickled by the warmth it exuded. Creepy, indeed. At least, she couldn’t sense it having any kind of influence on her. It certainly didn’t seem to draw her the way it did the men. “What matters is figuring out how to unbury the ship and get us out of here. Anyone have any ideas?”
She looked around the hold at all of them, expecting a bunch of Starseers to simply move piles of boulders or pulverize enough of them with their minds to allow them to escape. If nothing else, Jelena would go up to NavCom and try some short bursts of blazer fire to cut through the boulders. The Snapper wasn’t exactly a tunnel-boring ship, but the weapons should be powerful enough to break up some rocks. With luck, the pirates were already working on clearing that passage.
“There’s about fifty feet of rocks on top of us,” Thor said. “And we’re a good mile below the surface of the asteroid.”
“I asked for ideas, not a status report.”
His eyebrows arched.
“I can share what I’ve discovered,” Zhou said, picking up his fallen slides. “It may prove interesting.”
“Interesting as in oh-that’s-some-nice-trivia-to-pull-out-at-bars or interesting as in it-may-provide-us-with-a-way-to-escape?”
“Well… both, I think.”
“Then I’m very open to listening. Thor, will you show our guests to their cabins, please?”
“We’re not going to our cabins,” Brody growled. “This isn’t settled.”
“You will go to your cabin,” Masika said, walking toward him, her eyes narrowed. She had the look of someone who was tired of being flung around and was ready to pulverize somebody. “Or you’ll go to sickbay.” She wasn’t holding her rifle, instead letting it hang from its strap while she held up a fist. “Your choice.”
“Woman, get out of here before you get hurt,” Brody growled. “This isn’t your affair.”
“I’m security on this ship, and you’ll do what the captain says, or I’ll make you.”
He scoffed and lifted a hand. Jelena started to raise a barrier to protect Masika, but Masika sprang with the speed of lightning. With her enhanced legs, she reached Brody before he could attack, bowling into his chest and toppling him to the deck faster than he could blink. Straddling him, she slammed a punch into his gut with the weight of a wrecking ball.
He gasped and tried to curl into a ball to protect himself, but she punched him again, this time in the nose. Droplets of blood flew, and Jelena sensed Brody’s pain exploding across his face. Too distracted to call upon his power, Brody shoved at Masika with his hands.
He was bigger than she, but with her engineered musculature, he couldn’t find the strength or leverage to dislodge her. Instead, she rolled him over, yanked his upper body off the deck and wrapped her arm around his throat from behind.
“You try any of your damned Starseer tricks on me,” she whispered into his ear, “and I’ll break your neck.”
Her eyes were wild, and Jelena sensed that this was payback for whatever tortures the man had inflicted upon her, mentally as well as physically. There was a hint of surprise in Masika’s wild eyes, too, as if she couldn’t believe her attack was working, that she hadn’t yet been flung away with a burst of power.
Jelena wasn’t surprised. She knew exactly how difficult it was to marshal one’s powers while distracted by pain and terror. Right now, with Masika applying pressure to his throat and cutting off his air supply, Brody had to be too scared to concentrate. Jelena made a note to send Masika to have a chat with Leonidas one day. He could have given her tips like this, let her know that if she could use surprise, speed, and strength against Starseers, she could come out on top, even against powerful ones.
Brody flailed helplessly, his hands flapping against Masika’s ahridium-strong arms. His face turned red, then purple.
Nobody stepped forward to help him, though Abelardus glanced at Jelena.
“She’s not going to kill him, right?”
“No,” Jelena said, hoping she wasn’t wrong to feel so confident.
But Masika could have broken his neck if she had wanted to. She was simply depriving him of air now, presumably to knock him unconscious. With Kiyoko and her medical kit nearby, there wasn’t too much danger that he would die.
As Jelena had the thought, Kiyoko stepped up beside her. She had removed an injector from her kit. She thumbed it to one of the numerous selections and walked toward Masika and Brody. The two stood frozen in tableau, some strange centerpiece for the cargo hold.
“Let’s do it this way,” Kiyoko murmured, her eyes concerned as she looked at Brody’s purple face and the way his flailing was growing feebler.
Masika didn’t object as Kiyoko pressed the injector to the side of Brody’s neck, just above her arm. It probably wasn’t the ideal spot to deliver drugs, but it did the job. Soon, his eyes rolled back in his head, and he went limp.
Masika let him go, stepping back as he flopped to the deck at her feet. She met Jelena’s eyes across the cargo hold, her chin up, as if to say she wasn’t afraid to deal with him anymore.
That was good, though Jelena worried about what would happen when Brody woke up. He could attack Masika from across the ship. But maybe Kiyoko could keep him strapped down and unconscious in sickbay until the Snapper could drop him and Abelardus off back on Dalaran 5.
“As I was saying,” Jelena said, realizing all eyes had turned toward her again, “I’d like our guests delivered to their cabins. Or sickbay.”
Maybe they could strap Abelardus down too.
Masika hefted the limp Brody over her shoulder as if he were a sack of dehydrated takka and strode toward the corridor. Thor glared at Abelardus and the female Starseer, and they both walked after her, though they appeared more concerned by what Masika would do to them than by Thor’s glare.
Once everybody except Thor and Zhou had left the cargo hold, Jelena said, “Let’s set up in NavCom, Zhou,” and pointed to his microscope. “Oh, and I have something else for you to look at when there’s time.” She dug the recording device from the captain’s cabin out of her bag.
“You’re taking the artifact with you?” Thor asked.
“It won’t make an effective desk paperweight if it’s in the cargo hold.”
He looked like he would object, but Jelena walked toward NavCom, tired of arguing about the thing. She wished she could lock it away in the hope that nobody would worry about it until after the Snapper escaped.
So long as you agree that it’s mine after we get out, Thor spoke into her mind. I found it first.
You found it first? You sound like Nika did when she was five. It’s creepy. Why do you want it?
It’s powerful. It’s the kind of thing that could help me convince people to work for me, to join my cause.
You don’t need some red rock to convince people of that, but fine, it’s yours. You can spend your life running from the Starseer government if you want. I don’t want that for my ship and my crew. Or myself. She couldn’t help but lament what had already been done, that she might already have been proclaimed an enemy to the Starseer community.
Alfie followed Jelena and Zhou to NavCom. Since Jelena didn’t trust that it would stay there if she left the artifact in her cabin, she plunked it down on the console between the stations. Alfie barked at it and dropped down into a bow, as if she wanted to play. Apparently, she’d gotten over her fierce moment.
“It’s not a dog toy, girl,” Jelena said, waving Zhou to the co-pilot’s seat. “Is this all right? We can go to the mess hall if you need to spread out more.”
“It’s fine.” Zhou set his microscope down. “I want to show you a couple things.”
Erick and Austin stepped into NavCom.
“Austin has an idea,” Erick said.
“Not this time.”
“I was thinking that we could use the ship’s power to set up a kinetic pulse generator that would send out waves of energy strong enough to break the rocks into small pieces,” Austin said. “Sort of like how you Starseers do it. But with the ship’s power, we could break a lot of rocks at once. We’d basically be shaking the asteroid with earthquakes.”
Jelena wasn’t sure that sounded wise when they were inside the asteroid, but they had to break or move the rocks to get out of here. “You think it could work, Erick?”
“Maybe in conjunction with our weapons, yes.”
“Good, then get on it, please.”
“Couldn’t Starseer powers break the rocks too?” Zhou asked as he made adjustments on the microscope.
“Possibly,” Erick said, “but there are a lot of rocks out there. I also think it might be wise to try things that the Starseers five hundred years ago didn’t try. Because clearly, they didn’t make it out.”
“No, they didn’t,” Jelena said. “It looked like… I don’t know. They died in the middle of doing things, and then there were just the skeletons. Like it all happened really quickly.”
“We saw the footage,” Erick said grimly. He touched Austin’s shoulder, and they ducked out of NavCom.
“I actually have an idea about those skeletons,” Zhou said. “And a lot of the oddness here.”
“I’m glad someone does. I’m tired of being haunted.”
“Haunted?”
“No, not by Austin’s ghosts. By… I don’t know. Something has been getting into my head and flashing threats or maybe warnings into my mind.”
Zhou chewed on his lip and studied her face.
“I’m not crazy and imagining things,” she told him. “It hurts when it happens. Thor witnessed the attacks. He was able to use his power to push away whatever’s transmitting those images. Temporarily.”
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