Free Relic of Sorrows: Fallen Empire, Book 4 by Lindsay Buroker Page A

time to spend with Sylvia, time to go out to the farm to see the rest of Jonah’s family, and time to truly say goodbye. After she found Jelena, perhaps they could do those things. Or hold a memorial of their own.
    That thought made her reach for the comm controls. She wanted to know if Abelardus had sent messages to his brother, or if he was lying, telling her what she wanted to hear. After all, why would he care about Jelena? He was here for the orb and the staff, the same as the rest of the galaxy.
    Mica looked at her hand, and Alisa hesitated. She usually reserved eavesdropping and snooping for when she was alone. Oh well. Mica knew she wasn’t a paragon of virtue.
    She pulled up a list of all the outgoing comm messages from the last week, the headers of everything everyone had sent since the ship left Arkadius. Most people encrypted their communications, or had mail services that did it automatically, but she could see the side of the videos and messages that had been recorded here, before they were encrypted and sent, since they had to be boosted through the Nomad’s transmitter. She wouldn’t necessarily get the other side of the message, but they hadn’t had real-time communication since they had moved away from the core worlds, so any recent messages would be one-way, regardless. Besides, all she needed to see was one side of Abelardus’s message to know if he had commed his brother.
    “You’re reading people’s mail?” Mica asked as Alisa skimmed through the accounts.
    “Not everyone’s.”
    Alisa glanced at the hatch to make sure nobody had a nose pressed to the window, then selected the messages on Abelardus’s account.
    “Good, because mine is private. I don’t want people knowing about the smutty romances I order.”
    “Do engineers watch romances that don’t involve tools and machinery?”
    “Who says mine don’t?”
    Alisa waved her fingers in a semblance of a salute. “I wasn’t looking at your vid collection or opening your messages, though I did notice a lot of mail going out to engineering firms and exploratory mining operations. Résumés?”
    “Résumés. I need to get out of here before I get irradiated.”
    “I’m wounded that you’re so determined to leave. Once we get rid of our artifact hunters, life would be normal again. Just me helping Jelena with her schooling while cargo sits in the hold as we carry it from moon to planet to station.”
    “Will that schooling involve teaching her how to hurl cyborgs against the wall?”
    Alisa grimaced. “I hope not. But she probably will need to learn about her new talents. Maybe I can hire her a Starseer tutor. An innocuous one.”
    “Is there such a thing?”
    “Yumi’s sister seemed decent. Maybe she would like to have adventures in space for a while and teach Jelena the fine art of not being an ass.”
    “Adventures? See, I knew you had more planned than simple cargo hauling.”
    “Don’t you think you would be bored at a job that didn’t have at least some adventure?” Alisa ignored several messages that Abelardus had sent to Lady Naidoo, though she might watch them later. It would be good to know if Abelardus or the other Starseers had been alerting people to the coordinates they were heading out to explore. “After all, your time in the army couldn’t have been that sedate. I know we had excitement on the Silver Striker .”
    “The fighter pilots had excitement. The engineers sat inside the heavily shielded warship and waited for the wrecked remnants of that excitement to come in for repairs.”
    “Hm.”
    Alisa spotted the name Durant Shepherd in one of Abelardus’s earlier messages, and her heart seemed to thud harder in her chest. She glanced at the hatch again as she pulled it up. She did not know why she bothered to check it. Abelardus would find out later that she had been spying. The next time he surfed through her thoughts, he would pluck out the information. She wouldn’t feel bad about it either. He