Starpilot's Grave: Book Two of Mageworlds Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PROLOGUE - PLEYVER: FLATLANDS

  PART ONE

  I. - NAMMERIN: NAMPORT; SPACE FORCE MEDICAL STATION GALCEN: THE RETREAT

  II. - THE NET: WARHAMMER MAGEWORLDS BORDER ZONE: RSF KARIPAVO

  III. - NAMMERIN: SPACE FORCE MEDICAL STATION DOWNTOWN NAMPORT

  IV. - RAAMET: GEFALON NAMMERIN: NAMPORT

  V. - WARHAMMER: HYPERSPACE TRANSIT TO CRACANTH NAMMERIN: NAMPORT

  VI. - NAMMERIN: DOWNTOWN NAMPORT; SPACE FORCE MEDICAL STATION

  VII. - GALCEN: PRIME BASE NINGLIN: RUISI PORT

  VIII. - NINGLIN: RUISI PORT GALCEN: PRIME BASE; THE RETREAT

  PART TWO

  I. - GALCEN: THE RETREAT; PRIME BASE NINGLIN: RUISI PORT

  II. - THE NET: RSF KARIPAVO; RSF EBANNHA

  III. - GALCEN: PRIME BASE NAMMERIN: SPACE FORCE MEDICAL STATION; NAMPORT ONTIMI SECTOR: PLANETARY INFANTRY BARRACKS, KIIN-ALOQ INFABEBE SECTOR: RSF FEZRISOND

  IV. - GALCEN: PRIME BASE HYPERSPACE TRANSIT: WARHAMMER

  V. - MAGEWORLDS ZONE: ERAASI NEARSPACE; ERAASI PORT

  VI. - THE MAGEWORLDS: ERAASI; ERAASI PORT WARHAMMER: HYPERSPACE TRANSIT TO THE INNER NET

  VII - NAMMERIN: DOWNTOWN NAMPORT RSF NAVERSEY: HYPERSPACE TRANSIT TO THE NET

  VIII. - MAGEWORLDS BORDER ZONE: RSF KARIPAVO; RSF EBANNHA

  PART THREE

  I. - WARHAMMER: THE OUTER NET RSF KARIPAVO: THE OUTER NET

  II. - WARHAMMER: GALCEN NEARSPACE RSF FEZRISOND: INFABEDE SECTOR

  III. - WARHAMMER: GALCEN PATROL ZONE RSF NAVERSEY: THE OUTER NET GALCEN: THE RETREAT

  IV. - RSF SELSYN-BILAI: INFABEDE SECTOR GALCEN NEARSPACE

  V. - WARHAMMER: GALCEN NEARSPACE GALCEN: THE RETREAT

  VI. - NAMMERIN: NAMPORT RSF NAVERSEY: THE OUTER NET

  VII. - GALCEN: THE RETREAT INFABEDE SECTOR: RSF SELSYN-BILAI; RSF FEZRISOND

  VIII. - GALCEN NEARSPACE THE OUTER NET GALCEN: PRIME BASE

  PART FOUR

  I. - GYFFER: PORT OF TELABRYK DEATHWING: THE OUTER NET

  II. - NAMMERIN: DOWNTOWN NAMPORT OPHEL NEARSPACE

  III. - NAMMERIN: NAMPORT OPHEL: SOMBRELIR

  IV. - ASTEROID BASE RSF SELSYN-BILAI: INFABEDE SECTOR

  V. - GALCEN NEARSPACE GYFFER: TELABRYK ASTEROID BASE

  VI. - NAMMERIN: NAMPORT THE OUTER NET

  VII. - THE OUTER NET: NIGHT’S-BEAUTIFUL-DAUGHTER NAMMERIN: NAMPORT

  EPILOGUE - GALCEN NEARSPACE

  Also by

  SNEAK ATTACKS!

  Copyright Page

  For Peregrynne

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Special thanks this time are owed to Cliff Laufer, without whose (former) hard drive the manuscript for this book would have occupied far too many floppy disks; and to Kate Daniel, for checking this volume to see if it would make sense to someone who hadn’t yet read The Price of the Stars.

  PROLOGUE

  PLEYVER: FLATLANDS

  DARKNESS HAD fallen over the city. Light from the streetlamps lay in stark white circles against the warehouse walls, with pools of blackness falling in between. Overhead, the fixed star of High Station—Pleyver’s giant orbiting spaceport—burned down through the skyglow. No one saw Owen Rosselin-Metadi pass by like an unheeded thought, skirting the edges of the lamplight and pausing to catch his breath in the safety of the dark.

  He wasn’t sure how long he’d been running. Hours, it felt like—ever since leaving his sister back at Florrie’s Palace, in an upper room where the acrid stink of blaster fire mingled with the heavier smell of blood. He didn’t think anybody had followed him out of there; he’d put most of his remaining energy into staying unseen, and Beka had taken care of the rest.

  Owen didn’t like the favor he’d asked from her, that she take on the risk of drawing away the armed pursuit, and he didn’t particularly like himself for asking it. But Bee was a survivor, the kind who could fight her way from Florrie’s to the port quarter and blast off leaving a legend behind her. He’d seen that much clearly; far more clearly, in fact, than the outcome of is own business on Pleyver.

  Nevertheless, he had lied to her.

  Well, not exactly lied. But he had let her think that the datachip he’d given her, packed with information from the locked comp-files of Flatlands Investment, Ltd., was unique. He’d never mentioned the other datachip, the one that he’d come to Pleyver to obtain. The information on the second chip belonged.to Errec Ransome, Master of the Adepts’ Guild—or it would if Owen lived long enough to deliver it.

  Maybe I should have given it to Bee.

  Owen shook his head. He’d briefly considered asking her, but the presence of her copilot had killed that idea. The slight, grey-haired man she called the Professor gave Beka an unquestioning loyalty—that much Owen had perceived without any difficulty—but it was a loyalty that would put Beka first and the Adepts’ Guild a far-distant second.

  No, it was better to let the two of them go their own way. From the look of things, Beka had kept her promise to distract the ordinary hired help, the ones who did their fighting with blasters and energy lances. Dodging the others should have been easy, if only he hadn’t been so stupid as to get caught once already tonight … .

  Owen had shown up outside the portside branch office of Flatlands Investment, Ltd., just before dusk. He’d hoped to get there earlier, but intercepting Beka at the spaceport and convincing her to abandon her own designs on the company’s data banks had taken longer than he’d anticipated.

  Beka wanted revenge, plain and simple: revenge on whoever had planned their mother’s assassination and revenge on whoever had paid for it. She’d get it, too; Bee in pursuit of a goal had a straightforward single-mindedness that made a starship’s jump-run to hyperspace look like a sightseeing trip. But that same trait could make her dangerous to be around if your purposes and hers happened to diverge. Owen didn’t think that the Guild’s interest in FIL was going to put him in Beka’s way, but he didn’t want to chance it.

  Besides, he reflected as he approached the grey, slab-sided FIL Building, it was easier for one person to work unnoticed than for two. He could slip in, get enough from the files to satisfy Master Ransome and his sister both, and slip out again before Bee was through eating dinner.

  The front door of the building was secured by an electronic ID-scan. Owen palmed the lockplate like any authorized visitor. Inside the mechanism, the electric current flowed through its appointed paths and channels as the door made ready to reject the identification. Then, without changing his expression or his physical posture, Owen reached out, using the skills that for more than ten years had made him Errec Ransome’s most valued—and most valuable—apprentice.

  The flow of electrons altered its course. The lock clicked quietly and the door slid open.

  A stranger waited in the unlit lobby, a thin, hunched man in the plain garb of a low-level office worker. Owen tensed, but the man didn’t make any threatening moves.

  “I’ve got the password,” the worker said.

  Owen paused. He hadn’t expected anyone to be here at all. But he hadn’t sensed any wrongness as he approached the office building, and the man himself didn’t project any great amount of menace either.

  He must be one of Bee’s contacts, Owen decided. He’s certainly the type—his coverall might as well have a tag on it saying “Disaffected Employee.”

  “Well?” he said aloud.

  The man licked his lips. “We need to talk about the money first.”

  Money … Owen knew he shouldn’t feel surprised. His sister was a merchant-captain, and dealt in the
purchase and sale of whatever goods might find a market. But when Owen worked, as now, in the persona of a down-at-the-heels drifter, he carried as little cash as possible. A spaceport bum with money was a contradiction in terms.

  “I’m just the messenger boy,” Owen said. “You can pick up your fee at the General Delivery office.” In addition to handling electronic and hardcopy messages, local branches of the giant communications firm made convenient, no-questions-asked cash drops for all sorts of legal and semilegal business exchanges. “I’m not authorized to carry cash.”

  He braced himself for an objection, and made ready to counter it in much the same way as he had dealt with the door. He was mildly surprised when the man only nodded, said, “Right,” and began fishing in the pockets of his coat.

  After a few seconds, the man came up with a thin slice of plastic. “The password’s on here.”

  He held out the keycard. Owen reached out a hand to take the card, and felt the first undefined stirrings of premonition as their fingers touched.

  Something’s wrong. He ought to have made a fuss about the money.

  Owen looked at the man again, this time using the physical contact to enhance his perceptions. Under that deeper scrutiny, the patterns of the office worker’s consciousness showed up like a dark and knotted skein, with fear and duplicity and greed tangled into an unlovely network.

  Now I see it. He doesn’t mind that he might not get Bee’s money. Somebody else has already paid him more.

  Owen smiled inwardly, though the face he presented to the office worker never changed. Sister mine, it’s a good thing I came to this party instead of you. You were about to walk into a trap.

  He tucked the keycard into the breast pocket of his coverall. Then, in a continuation of the same movement, his right arm snapped forward, and he smashed the edge of his hand against the bridge of the other man’s nose. Cartilage and bone crushed inward, and a fine spray of blood misted out.

  Owen caught the man as he fell and eased him silently to the floor. On his knees beside the unconscious man, he searched quickly and methodically through the other’s pockets, but found nothing of interest except a second keycard, a twin to the first, equally unmarked. He pocketed it and stood up again.

  He looked down for a moment at the sprawled form of the office worker. Perhaps the man would drown in the blood draining from his crushed sinuses, or perhaps not. Owen left the worker there for those who had hired him, and went about his own business.

  He took the emergency stairs, not the lift, to the top floor, and paused briefly before the lockplate of the office at the end of the hall. The security system here presented no more challenge than the lock on the outside door. In a moment he was in, with the door closed and secured behind him. He’d probably taken care of any problems by silencing the man below; if he hadn’t, whoever had set this trap for his sister would find more in it than they’d expected.

  The desk comp had a slot for the keycard. Owen paused for a moment, considering.

  Without a physical card in place to complete the circuits, not even an Adept’s tricks could shunt the electron flow to perform the task he needed. But which card to use? Owen weighed them in his hand, assessing them as he had the office worker below. One of the cards, the one that he’d been given, felt limited, probably crippled on purpose. He discarded it without any more thought and switched to the card he’d taken from the office worker’s pocket.

  The password worked. He had Bee’s datachip full within minutes; her need for information was narrow and specific, and easily supplied. Errec Ransome’s chip took longer. The Master of the Guild cast his nets wide, and in strange waters, for the welfare of the galaxy’s Adepts.

  Errec Ransome had been a junior Adept in the Guild-house on Ilarna when the Magewar broke out. Those days had seen slaughter done all across the galaxy, but few places had suffered worse than Ransome’s home planet. Only Sapne and Entibor had experienced more destruction than Ilarna. Sapne, depopulated by plagues and reduced to barbarism, had no inhabitants left alive who could remember its ruined cities in their prime; and Entibor was an orbiting slag heap with nothing living on its surface at all.

  Seeing all his friends dead and the Ilarna Guildhouse smashed into rubble, Errec Ransome had left the Adepts for a time. He had joined the privateers of Innish-Kyl in their hit-and-run war against the Magelords, fighting other men’s battles for his own purposes. The Mageworlders had been crushed now for twenty years and more, and Master Ransome had long since returned to the Guild; but his vigilance never ceased.

  Owen completed his second download and withdrew the keycard. And then—

  Danger!

  The premonition slammed into him full force. His senses clamored with the awareness of enemies nearby, and he clutched the edge of the desk with both hands.

  Danger! Too close—

  He lifted his head to looked around the office, and cursed under his breath at his own arrogance and stupidity.

  What had seemed to be alternate exits—windows and an inner door—he saw now were only illusions, holographic projections with their reality enhanced by his own willingness to believe. The trap had closed on him in a room with no escape except by the door through which he had entered. He would have to fight his way out.

  He crossed over to the door and put his hand against it, still expecting little more than blaster bravos and hired thugs, the sort of vermin who were his sister’s enemies. Instead …

  Worse and worse. His enemies waited for him on the other side. His enemies, and not Beka’s at all.

  Owen paused again in the deeper shadows beside a trash bin and looked around. Still no visible pursuit. Closing his eyes and drawing a deep breath, he centered himself and cleared his senses as best he could.

  Nobody near. I’ve lost them. I hope.

  He couldn’t be certain; he didn’t have enough energy left to make certain and still keep himself hidden. The fight at the Flatlands Investment Building had taken too much out of him—single-handed and unarmed against too many opponents, while most of his inner resources were diverted into hiding the datachips in his coverall pocket.

  He’d lost the hand-to-hand fight, but he’d won the other struggle: he still had both datachips concealed when his enemies dragged him off to Florrie’s Palace. There was somebody at Florrie’s, they gave him to understand, who was slated for the honor of finishing him off.

  He’d never expected to find his sister Beka waiting for him at the other end of a blaster. Once he saw her face, he thought for a few seconds that she was going to kill him after all. But she shot the guard instead, and cut another man’s throat, and then surprised Owen even further by agreeing to draw away the inevitable pursuit.

  If Master Ransome’s datachip ever made it back home to Galeen, Owen reflected, it would be mostly Beka’s work. For his own part, he’d been half-blind from the moment he came here.

  The blindness wasn’t entirely his fault, he supposed. The enemy must have been clouding his vision ever since he showed up on Pleyver—the old enemy, the ones who had laid siege to the planet of Entibor for three years, and not abandoned it until Entibor was dead; who had broken every fleet the civilized worlds had sent against them except the last; who had massacred the Adepts of Ilarna and half a hundred other planets besides.

  There were Mages on Pleyver, and not mere apprentices or self-taught dabblers in the ways of power. The great Magelords had returned.

  PART ONE

  I.

  NAMMERIN: NAMPORT; SPACE FORCE MEDICAL STATION GALCEN: THE RETREAT

  WHEN THE courier ship from Galcen Prime arrived on Nammerin, a light but steady rain covered the entire Namport landing field like a fine mist. Lieutenant Ari Rosselin-Metadi ducked out through the hatch of the courier, cast a resigned glance upward at the low grey sky, and climbed down the steep ramp to the ground.

  The metal creaked under his boots as he descended. Along with his father’s dark hair and his late mother’s elegantly chiseled features, Ari
had inherited the size and strength of some unknown ancestor on the Metadi, or spaceport-mongrel, side of the family. As a result, he was considerably taller and heavier than the average Space Force trooper the ramp was designed to support.

  With both feet planted on the tarmac, he reached up a hand to steady the courier’s other passenger as she emerged. It wasn’t a long stretch; his head brushed the side of the courier vessel in spite of the landing legs that raised the ship a good seven feet off the ground. His traveling companion—a short, brown-skinned woman with long black hair twisted into a knot at the nape of her neck—took the offered hand and paused for a moment in the open hatch.

  “Rain,” she said. “Why am I not surprised?”

  “Because it always rains in Namport,” said Ari. “The Space Force ‘Welcome to Nammerin’ booklet says that this part of the planet has a wet season and a dry season, but that’s a lie. The only two seasons I’ve ever noticed are rainy and rainier.”

  The young woman laughed and jumped down to the tarmac, ignoring the ramp completely. Ari didn’t feel her weight as she came down, even though her small, trim body carried more muscle than the appreciative eye might suspect. She’d taken his hand as a courtesy only, and he knew it.

  Like Ari, the woman wore the uniform of a member of the Space Force Medical Service, but where he wore a lieutenant’s bars, she wore no marks of rank at all. Mistress Llannat Hyfid was an Adept, and while the rules of her Guild allowed her to serve in the Republic’s Space Force, they barred her from holding formal rank.

  As far as anyone could ever tell, Llannat Hyfid accepted her in-between status with cheerful equanimity. Most of the time, Ari himself almost forgot that she was anything more than a fellow-medic and a good friend. Almost, but never quite.