Starpilot's Grave: Book Two of Mageworlds Read online

  He paused. “There were some other files that had to do with what happened to Mother. I gave those to Beka.”

  “Was that wise?” Ransome asked. “Your sister is headstrong, to say the least. The rumors I’ve been hearing say a good deal more than that.”

  “She’s also Domina of Entibor now that Mother is dead—whether she wants the title or not. If anybody has a right to those files, it’s Bee.”

  Owen studied Ransome’s dubious expression for a minute and then added, “If she hadn’t drawn off the armed pursuit, you probably wouldn’t have your data right now. And the fact that all those files were taken while she was on-planet may have sown some useful doubts about exactly who was looking for what in FIL’s data banks.”

  Ransome nodded slowly and tucked the datachip into an inside pocket of his black tunic. “A persuasive argument,” he said. “And I am grateful, both to her and to you. But I need you to go out again as soon as possible … we have another situation that needs attention.”

  Owen’s heart sank. He could feel his longed-for time of quiet safety receding before him like a wave drawing back from the beach. But he was Master Ransome’s apprentice, and had promised long ago that he would serve.

  “How soon?” he asked.

  “Tomorrow.”

  “I was hoping to stay here through the fall and winter at least,” Owen protested. “Teaching a bit, maybe, and meditating. After all those months hiding out on Pleyver, I’m so jumpy I twitch whenever the wind changes.”

  “We don’t have that kind of time left, I’m afraid,” said Ransome. His voice was firm, in spite of the regret and weariness in his dark eyes. “The wind has changed already, and the storm is coming sooner than anyone thinks.”

  Ari had been back at the Med Station for over a week before he remembered to drop by the station post office and pick up his accumulated mail. Being himself a dutiful, rather than an enthusiastic, correspondent, he didn’t expect to find anything of particular interest waiting there for him.

  The crew member on duty had been at the awards ceremony with everyone else. He handed Ari a mixed bundle of printout flimsies and sealed envelopes with nothing more than a half-apologetic “You’ve been gone awhile, so the junk messages had a chance to pile up.”

  Ari glanced at the top item in the stack—a four-color 3-D flyer announcing a special bargain rate on the purchase of ten or more cases of Tree Frog beer.

  “They certainly have,” he said, tossing the flyer into the trash-disposal unit. He hadn’t felt the same about Tree Frog beer since the affair with the Quincunx, when somebody had tried to poison him by slipping mescalomide into a bottle of Export Dark. The gaudy little advertisement made an unpleasant reminder of a night that had begun with fire and attempted murder, and had ended with Llannat Hyfid fighting a black-masked Mage assassin for Ari’s life.

  That particular enemy was long dead, but Llannat herself had said once that the Mages preferred to work in groups … . Ari growled an oath deep in his throat, and distracted himself by sorting through the rest of his mail at the counter instead of taking it to his quarters.

  He recycled five more advertising flyers and the catalog of a firm dealing in exotic herbs; scanned the printout flimsies notifying him of private messages in the electronic files (three from his father and one from Beka’s old school chum Jilly Oldigaard, all six months out of date); and set aside for later reading an equally outdated but probably still amusing letter from his friend Nyls Jessan, formerly of the Nammerin Medical Station and last officially heard from at the Space Force Clinic and Recruitment Center on Pleyver.

  That left the newest item in the stack, a plain envelope with a local postmark and no return address—just his own name and Space Force directing codes, written in a light, even hand.

  Ari worked at the sealed envelope with his thumbnail. Namport’s moist equatorial climate had already weakened the adhesive; after only a little urging the flap peeled back and he was able to extract the square of cheap paper inside.

  The letter had no salutation and no signature, and only three neatly lettered sentences:

  If you think you see me, you’re mistaken. It’s somebody else; I’m not here. Stick with Mistress Hyfid and stay out of trouble.

  Even if the handwriting hadn’t been familiar, Ari thought, the elliptical style would have been a dead giveaway. Out of the entire population of the civilized galaxy, only his brother Owen habitually addressed him with that kind of half-condescending obscurity.

  Frowning, Ari tore the envelope and the note into confetti-sized pieces, then dropped the scraps into the trash disposal unit. “Stick with Mistress Hyfid and stay out of trouble,” he quoted glumly to himself. Good advice … but I don’t think it’s going to help me very much.

  II.

  THE NET: WARHAMMER MAGEWORLDS BORDER ZONE: RSF KARIPAVO

  “CAPTAIN.”

  “Mmh?” Beka didn’t look up from the comp console. Damned Space Force paper pushers; this checklist is longer than all of Councilor Tarveet’s speeches pasted together.

  “Captain, it’s late.”

  She nodded absently and flipped to the next screen. “Mm-hm.”

  “Captain—”

  The change in tone caught her attention. She blinked, wiped a hand across eyes gone bleary from too long at the console, and leaned back in her chair to look at the speaker for the first time.

  Warhammer’s gunner/copilot looked back at her in mild concern. Nyls Jessan—lean and fair-haired, with light grey eyes and pleasant if unremarkable features—had the appearance of a small-time free spacer in a dangerous part of the galaxy, all the way down to the war-surplus blaster. But appearances could be deceiving, especially where Jessan was concerned. Her partner spoke Standard Galcenian with an upper-class Khesatan accent; he played cards and handled weapons like a professional; and he’d abandoned a perfectly good career in the Space Force Medical Service to join Beka on Warhammer after her old copilot had died in the fighting on Darvell.

  A man of many talents, is our Jessan, she thought, and smiled in spite of herself. “Now I’m listening. What’s the problem?”

  “You,” he said. “You’ve been working over that checklist since 0400, and Warhammer’s not going to get any cleaner than she already is. It’s time you got some sleep.”

  “Is that what you had in mind … sleep?”

  “Absolutely,” Jessan assured her, straight-faced.

  She hesitated a moment, watching him, and then shook her head with a faint sigh. “We can’t afford to fail our blockade inspection just because some busybody in a Space Force uniform decides that I haven’t done my paperwork right.”

  “Let me handle it,” he offered. “I’m used to the style.”

  “No. If I’m going to sign for something, I want to make all the mistakes myself.”

  He shrugged and stretched out on the padded acceleration couch on the other side of the common room. “Fine, then. I’ll stay up and keep you company.”

  “Your choice,” she said.

  She turned back to the screen and worked diligently for a few minutes until a faint snore broke the silence behind her. She glanced over at the couch. Jessan’s head had fallen back against the cushions and his eyes were closed.

  “Damned idiot Khesatan,” she muttered, and hit the button to close the comp session.

  The console folded itself back into its bulkhead niche, and Beka stood up. She went over to the couch and touched Jessan lightly on the shoulder.

  “All right, Nyls,” she said. “You win. Let’s go to bed.”

  The chronometer in the captain’s quarters aboard Warhammer sounded its usual wake-up signal at 0500 Standard. Beka slid out from beneath Jessan’s arm and swung her feet down onto the deckplates. The alarm button for the chrono had been set into the bulkhead on the far side of the cabin, and she couldn’t turn it off without getting out of her bunk—which had probably been the designer’s intention in the first place.

  Once the alarm had been
silenced Beka started getting dressed, but not in the plain shirt and trousers that she’d worn yesterday. Today she wore the lace and ruffles of a well-groomed but somewhat androgynous young man of fashion from Mandeyn’s Embrigan district, with long brown hair braided into a queue and finished off with a black velvet ribbon. This particular Mandeynan, however, carried a double-edged dagger hidden up his sleeve, and had a Gyfferan Ogre Mark VI blaster in a worn leather holster tied down against his thigh.

  She finished arranging the folds of her white spidersilk cravat, tucked a lacy handkerchief into one ruffled cuff, and contemplated the result with satisfaction. Beka Rosselin-Metadi, master of Warhammer and Domina of lost Entibor, had all but vanished, replaced by Captain Tarnekep Portree: starpilot, gunfighter, and killer-for-hire.

  Now for the final touch.

  Beka reached into the storage compartment that held her dirtside gear, took out a red optical-plastic eye patch, and fitted it into place. The patch covered her left eye socket from cheekbone to brow ridge, giving Tarnekep Portree an oddly piebald gaze. Most people found the glittering red plastic disturbing, with its hints of extensive prosthetic work lying hidden underneath; they would flinch and turn away without looking closely at the rest of Tarnekep’s pale and angular face.

  All part of the disguise, she reflected. The Prof knew what he was doing when he thought up this identity. Nobody wants to get close to Tarnekep Portree.

  Well, almost nobody. When she turned back toward the bunk, Nyls Jessan was awake and watching her.

  “How’s the effect?” she asked.

  He smiled. “Excellent as always, Captain. Elegant, but with a distinct aura of indefinable menace.”

  “Good. Let’s hope it fools the inspectors.”

  Inspection came at 0911.54 Standard, when Warhammer dropped out of hyper at the edge of the Net—the artificial barrier to hyperspace transit that the Republic had imposed upon the Mageworlds at the end of the war. Making a new jump would be impossible until the inspecting officer sent word to the generating station to open a hole and let the ’Hammer pass.

  Like a vast spiderweb spun out in magnetic fields from thousands of generating stations, the Net hung between the Mageworlds and the rest of the civilized galaxy. Any starship coming or going had to to drop out of hyper and run in realspace, where the Republic’s Net Patrol Fleet patrolled in force, sensors always alert for vessels trying to sneak undetected across the border.

  One could, Beka supposed, go the long way around, skirting the edges of the Net. Space was too big for any artificial construct to enshroud the Mageworlds completely. Even in hyperspace, though, such a journey might take years.

  But Ebenra D’Caer believed he could make it to the Mageworlds in a single jump from Ovredis, she thought as she waited with Jessan for the inspection party to arrive. And somebody sure fished him out of his cell back at the asteroid base. Llannat said it was Magework, all the way down the line. “The Mages make long plans,” she said. And the Professor, too … he talked about five hundred years as if it was nothing.

  She bit her lip. Thinking about her old teacher and copilot wasn’t going to do her any good, not with a shuttle coming across right now from Net Station C-346—one of the checkpoints where all ships seeking passage had to register and submit to inspection. She concentrated instead on the details of Warhammer’s cover ID as the armed merchantman Pride of Mandeyn (Suivi registry, Tarnekep Portree commanding).

  Soon a muffled clunk and a faint tremor in the deckplates told her that the shuttle had docked. She toggled open the ’Hammer’s dorsal airlock and let the inspection party come in: two Space Force enlisted personnel, one short, redheaded and female, the other dark-skinned, gangly, and male, under the command of a wide-eyed young ensign who had clearly never seen anything like Tarnekep Portree before in his life.

  Beka suppressed an urge to laugh. So this product of a sheltered upbringing gets to sit across the table from me while we go over the paperwork with a magnifying glass. If I’m lucky, he’ll be twitching so hard he forgets half his questions.

  The wide-eyed young ensign, however, wasn’t one to let his personal opinions get in the way of efficient customs procedure. He consulted the clipboard he carried in one hand, then asked for—and got—the sheaf of printout flimsies that contained the ’Hammer’s pre-inspection paperwork; the official forms that confirmed the vessel’s registry as Pride of Mandeyn, and Tarnekep Portree’s legal ownership of same; and the imitation-leather folders that held all the relevant licenses, ID flatpix, and passports (Mandeynan and Khesatan, one each) for the captain and copilot of the Pride.

  He passed the IDs through the clipboard scanner, which beeped quietly as it communicated with the link aboard the shuttle. The shuttle would relay the IDs to the Net Station’s main data banks and pass any relevant information back to the inspecting officer.

  “Tarnekep Portree,” the ensign said after the beeping had stopped. “The data net has you down as Wanted For Questioning back on Mandeyn.”

  Beka didn’t blink. “This isn’t Mandeyn,” she pointed out. “And a WFQ isn’t a warrant.”

  “Granted,” said the ensign. “Nevertheless, the Space Force is legally obligated to pass any word on your whereabouts back to the Petty Council of Embrig Spaceport.”

  “Fine. Tell the council I said hello. I love them too.”

  The ensign pressed his lips together as if suppressing a hasty reply, and glanced back at his clipboard. When he looked up again at Jessan, his expression had changed from dubious suspicion to active distaste.

  “Nyls Jessan,” he said. “Formerly of the Space Force Medical Service. Lieutenant commander, no less. Cashiered.”

  Jessan bowed. “The same.”

  The ensign’s lip curled. He turned his back on Jessan completely and spoke to Beka. “Captain Portree, I’ll be going over the Pride’s paperwork with you. Please direct your … associate … to assist my people in a physical inspection of the vessel.”

  “Sure.” Beka waved a hand at Jessan. “You heard the nice man, Doc. Show our friends around.”

  “My pleasure, Captain.”

  Jessan headed off into the depths of the ship with the two enlisted personnel trailing after him, and Beka sat down at the common-room table with the ensign. The young officer ran through the paperwork line by line, consulting frequently with his clipboard.

  “Energy guns dorsal and ventral, shields bow and stem—you carry a lot of firepower for a merch, Captain.”

  Beka raised an eyebrow. “We’re an armed freighter, like the registry says. When you work in the outplanets, you can’t always depend on the Space Force to show up in time.”

  The ensign looked offended. “This isn’t a war zone, Captain Portree. I’m afraid we’ll have to seal your guns for the duration of your stay in the Mageworlds.”

  Beka had been expecting to hear something of the sort; the ’Hammer’s guns were latest-generation technology, newly upgraded at the shipyards on Gyffer. Nevertheless, she scowled. “What am I supposed to do if somebody over there across the border starts taking potshots at me? Yell for help and hope the fleet comes running?”

  “You’re not in the outplanets any longer, Captain. The Mageworlds aren’t in any shape to give you trouble.” He glanced at his clipboard again. “You don’t have a cargo listed.”

  “I’m going in empty and looking to pick up a cargo once I get there,” Beka said. “Like it says on the form, I’m interested in rare earths and botanicals for the medical-research trade.”

  “Any Republic currency you’ve got has to stay on this side of the border,” said the ensign. “Sorry if it complicates your business dealings, but that’s the law.”

  You’re not the least bit sorry, you little bastard, thought Beka. Well, I’ll fix you. Just watch me do it.

  She emptied the money from her trouser pockets onto the table: five or six decimal-credit pieces, a rumpled ten-credit chit, and a silver Mandeynan mark with a pinpoint blaster hole through the middle.<
br />
  “Here you go,” she said. “Maybe Doc has a couple of ten-chits on him, but otherwise that’s the lot.”

  “How do you plan to pay for your cargo, Captain?”

  “I don’t,” she said. “I’m a pilot. Other people pay me.” The ensign looked like he’d bitten down on something sour. He went on with the paperwork, going back and forth between the Pride’s forms and the data appearing on his clipboard.

  Hunting for something else he can call me on, thought Beka. Aha—now he thinks he’s got it.

  “About your crew, Captain. You have only yourself and the copilot listed, but you have berthing space for at least six.”

  Beka shrugged. “The Pride’s a Libra-class freighter; she was built to run with a full crew. She’s been upgraded a lot since the old days, but nobody ever bothered to take out the extra berthing. We use it for slopover storage mostly, when we’ve got a lot of cargo on board.”

  The ensign made a note on his clipboard. “Understood. But Mageworlds nationals can’t pass through the Net in civilian vessels, so don’t plan on picking up any passengers.”

  “Don’t worry. The damned Mages can rot on their side of the Net for all I care. I’m looking for a cargo that doesn’t talk back.”

  “Wise of you, Captain Portree. We don’t tolerate the other sort.”

  I’ll bet you don’t, Beka thought, as the ensign continued his way through the stack of printout flimsies. It’s a good thing I’ve got work to do, or I’d smuggle an entire Mage-Circle out through the Net just to prove that I could.

  Eventually the paperwork came to an end. Beka signed the several forms, in triplicate, in Portree’s angular, slashing hand, and the ensign stamped and dated all the signatures. He was down to the last one when Jessan came back with the two enlisted personnel.