By Honor Betray'd: Mageworlds #3 Read online

  “No good. I’m not arresting you, so you can’t resist.”

  “I see,” Jessan said. He took a step closer—I’m going to regret doing this, I can tell that already—and laid a hand on the ConSec’s arm. “But I do believe that you can arrest me for interfering with a security officer in the lawful performance of his duty.”

  Before Jessan could brace himself, the ConSec swung his fist and connected with Jessan’s midsection. It was a short, powerful blow; the man knew what he was doing. Jessan felt the remains of his breakfast coming back up in a wave of nausea as he crumpled onto the glidewalk margin.

  The ConSec grinned and kicked him once, perfunctorily, in the face. “Sorry, buddy—you haven’t been any interference at all.” He turned to the others. “Let’s take her in.”

  They bound Beka’s hands behind her back. Two of the ConSecs pulled her from the bulkhead. One at each elbow, they started to walk her down the passageway toward the main glidewalk.

  The head ConSec looked over at her tattered clothing and tight-lipped expression. “Sorry about that, lady,” he said. “If you didn’t want to show your titties to all of Suivi you shouldn’t have carried a needler under there.”

  He scooped up the Iron Crown from where it had fallen during the body search. “Get her down to detention. Move out.”

  Ignaceu LeSoit watched Beka and Jessan go down the ’Hammer’s ramp, heading back out to the docking bay and thence to Suivi’s administrative district—better quarters for planetary royalty than a battle-scarred starship, even if Captain Rosselin-Metadi did fret at having to bunk portside.

  Nyls Jessan had been right, though, LeSoit conceded grudgingly. The Domina of Entibor couldn’t set up headquarters right here on the ship. Not as long as it was the only ship her Resistance had.

  Well, that isn’t the problem anymore.

  He turned back to Captain Yevil of the Space Force with an inward sigh. “Right, then, Captain. We’re going to have to get comms and such straightened out now, and work on command and control matters later. Chain of command for your units is the Domina Beka, General Nyls Jessan, then you.”

  “And what is your position in the chain of command?”

  “Acting commander of this vessel in the Domina’s absence.” And fair enough, he added to himself, when that damned Khesatan has got everything else.

  Yevil nodded in comprehension. “A second task unit. Very well.”

  For the next few minutes, she and LeSoit were busy exchanging frequency and phase information for ship-to-ship communications, in both lightspeed and hyperspace environments. LeSoit handed over a set of crypto chips for standard transceivers; Yevil sealed them into the breast pocket of her uniform tunic with a nod of thanks.

  “We’ll be sending ours over as soon as I’m back on board my ship,” she said. “I’m sorry we can’t give you everything, but some of it is classified at a level so high there’s no way I can justify giving it out.”

  “Don’t worry about it. The Domina isn’t handing over everything either.”

  “I see,” said Yevil, without visible surprise, and they moved on to the next item on the agenda, the compilation of a master list of crews, armament, and power plants for all the vessels in the Domina’s newly expanded fleet. As a solitary raider back in her fighting days, Warhammer wasn’t fitted out with many of the comms needed for multivessel coordination—no main battle tank, for example; LeSoit wasn’t even certain whether the Republic had used such things during the Old War—so getting Warhammer fitted out as a flagship looked like it would take some time.

  Several minutes later, the buzz of the ‘Hammer’s entry alarm broke into their work. LeSoit glanced up from his clipboard.

  “Sounds like we’ve got a visitor,” he said. “I’d better go check it out.”

  Still holding the clipboard in one hand, he hurried to the main door. A man was standing at the top of the ramp. The force field was up, but even through the blurring effect LeSoit could make out the newcomer’s ConSec uniform.

  He frowned. If somebody had hired the law on Beka and her crew, things might get expensive. You could buy anything on Suivi Point, including justice, but some varieties would cost you a great deal more than others—under the circumstances, LeSoit decided, he wasn’t going to let down the field.

  “What can we do for you, officer?”

  The ConSec cleared his throat. “I have a message for the master of this vessel.”

  “She isn’t here. I’m afraid I’ll have to do. Now, what’s the problem?”

  “I’m here to escort you.”

  LeSoit took an automatic step backward in spite of the protective force field. “Escort me where?”

  The ConSec man opened his mouth to say something, but LeSoit’s clipboard gave him an answer first. Its tiny onboard speaker emitted the sharp beep that meant an override-priority message on the ‘Hammer’s main communications system, followed by an unfamiliar voice: “All personnel aboard RSF Warhammer, please report to the portmaster’s office immediately. All personnel aboard Warhammer …”

  “I don’t like the sound of that,” LeSoit said to the ConSec. “Can you tell me what it’s all about?”

  The ConSec shrugged. “Portmaster needs to verify your registry, is all I know.”

  “Sounds like a paperwork drill. Can’t it wait?”

  Over the clipboard speaker the voice was still droning on: “All personnel aboard RSF Warhammer, please report to the portmaster’s office immediately. All personnel …”

  The ConSec officer shook his head. “I’m afraid not. You’ll lose your berthing assignment unless you verify your registry.”

  “Port officials,” said LeSoit in disgust. “Nobody’s ever going to convince them that something might be more important than filling in line seven on page two of form one-twenty-eight-A. I’ve got some urgent business here on board, officer—why not tell the portmaster you couldn’t find me when you buzzed at the door? I’ll be along as soon as I’m done.”

  “Please accompany me now,” the ConSec said.

  Then the clipboard beeped again—louder this time, in the nerve-quickening double rhythm that heralded one of the Domina’s own direct-to-ship universal-override transmissions—and disembodied voices began to speak.

  A Suivan voice first, with the coarse accent of the outer belt: “Are you the woman identified as Beka Rosselin-Metadi, who styles herself Domina of Entibor?”

  Then Beka’s voice, a precise, carefully educated light tenor that, heard in isolation, could have belonged to either a man or a woman—but, at the same time, could never have belonged to anyone else but her: “I am. What is—”

  “You’re under arrest. Submit yourself quietly.”

  LeSoit looked at the ConSec officer. “Registry check,” he said. “Sure. Try another one.”

  The voices over the clipboard speaker continued: “Needler. Oh, naughty, naughty lady.”

  Then Beka again, distinct and forceful: “You’re quite mistaken. Everything here is perfectly fine.” A pause, and then the last phrase again, very clearly. “Everything here is perfectly fine.”

  “Right,” said LeSoit, and turned his back on the ConSec officer. He hit first the Close Door button and then the Raise Ramp lever, and was headed for the ‘Hammer’s cockpit before the ConSec finished scrambling away to safety.

  He passed through the common room at a dead run. Captain Yevil caught up with him at the cockpit door.

  “What’s going on?”

  “The Domina’s emergency lift-ship signal,” LeSoit said, palming the lockplate. “We’re out of here.”

  Llannat finished her cha’a in the galley of Night’s-Beautiful-Daughter and put the cup aside.

  It’s time, she told herself sternly. You can’t put it off any longer.

  She left the galley and made her way through the Deathwing’s corridors toward the heart of the ship. Magebuilt and alien though the raider was, most of the divisions within its hull were recognizable to the Daughter’s current c
rew. Bridge, engine room, galley, berthing spaces … throughout the ship the familiar compartments housed the things that were necessary to move a handful of planetbound creatures from star to star.

  One chamber, however, had no counterpart on any Space Force vessel: a small room lined all in black tile, save for a stark white circle in the middle of the empty floor.

  The meditation chamber, Lieutenant Vinhalyn had named it when she’d asked him. The long-ago assassin who’d turned Night’s-Beautiful-Daughter into a starpilot’s grave had been part of a Mage-Circle, and a Magelord as well.

  One of the Great Magelords, Llannat thought. As if I needed any more proof.

  Only someone that powerful, and that arrogant, would have dared attempt what the Professor had done: reach out across half a millennium to grasp the threads of the universe and work with them according to his own designs. And only a Great Magelord would have stayed alive all the years afterward, through sheer force of will—

  Until he found a student who could finish his work.

  Llannat sighed. That was where thinking about the Professor always took her—to the knowledge that something unfinished was waiting for her, something she had to find or learn or do, and that she had but one place and one way to go asking about it.

  The door of the meditation chamber slid open at Llannat’s approach. She entered, and the door closed again behind her. She still wasn’t sure how the mechanism functioned. At first the door had opened and shut for everyone on board, like the door in a fashionable shop; now it only worked for her.

  For a moment the room was dark. Then light came from diffuse and concealed sources to fill the chamber with a dim underwater glow. Llannat went to the center of the white circle and knelt there, breathing slowly and letting her awareness go loose to float into darkness.

  Power.

  It moved strongly here, in the complex artificial patterns that betrayed the presence of Magework. Sorcery, the Adepts called such uses of power—their own strength came from riding the flow of the universe, rather than from manipulating it. Llannat had found the room oppressive enough at first to make her physically ill.

  Time had changed all that. Now she moved with ease among the wrought and knotted threads of the Professor’s long-ago workings. Sometimes she seemed to glimpse fragments of a greater—and still unfinished—design.

  Silver cords, she thought. Underneath everything, the silver cords tie it all together. If you dare, you can reach out and touch them. Work with them. Change the way things are, and the way that things might be.

  The moment of insight frightened her. If Master Ransome knew what she was doing these days, and how she was doing it, he would surely declare her a sorcerer and a traitor and an enemy of the Guild.

  He’s wrong. I know I haven’t done anything to betray the Republic, and I don’t think I’m working against the Guild … .

  In her mind Llannat seemed to hear her own voice reciting the Adept’s vows, as she had spoken them before Master Ransome himself at the Retreat.

  “ … to speak truth, to do right, to seek always the greater good … .”

  She shook her head. Nothing in there about loyalty to anything. In the healer’s oath, yes; in my commissioning oath, oh yes; but I haven’t broken either one of those.

  Magework, on the other hand …

  Llannat forced the thought aside. Gradually, her mind grew still again, and she waited, not thinking, until she became the question she had come to this place to ask.

  As soon as LeSoit reached the ’Hammer’s cockpit—with Captain Yevil close behind him—he started working the safety webbing of the pilot’s seat into place with one hand. With the other hand he snatched up the comm and flipped it to the Port Control link.

  “Portmaster, this is Warhammer. Berthing assignment no longer required. Request permission to lift ship.”

  “Negative, Warhammer. Permission to lift denied. Report with your entire crew to the portmaster’s office.”

  “Unable to comply. Request permiss—”

  The sudden tug of a tractor beam cut him off in midword. The ’Hammer began to lurch and sway on her landing legs as the beam—normally used to assist a vessel into its assigned berth—kept on pulling the ship downward.

  On the other side of the cockpit, Yevil was already strapping herself down into the copilot’s seat. “Guess they don’t want us to leave.”

  “We knew that already,” LeSoit said. He picked up the comm link again. “Portmaster, this is Warhammer. Release your tractor beam and open the bay. I’m leaving.”

  “Negative, Warhammer. Come to the office.”

  LeSoit could feel the strength members of the ’Hammer’s frame vibrating under the tractor beam’s relentless pull. He keyed on the link again.

  “Portmaster, Warhammer. You have five seconds to release me. Four. Three. Two. One. Out.”

  He reached for the main control console and pulled on the forward nullgravs. The ’Hammer should have tilted toward the vertical in preparation for lift-off, but nothing happened—only the steady throb of overstressed metal, hovering just below the threshold of audibility.

  “They have the entire Suivan grid to draw on,” said Yevil. “All we’ve got is ship’s power.”

  “I’ll give them ship’s power, all right.” LeSoit hit the console again—first main power, and then, with a tremendous deep-throated roar, the heavy realspace engines. Power that should have driven Warhammer’s mass up to near-lightspeed from the bottom of a gravity well poured out of the ship’s engines into the confined space, turning the deckplates of the bay to slag beneath them. All over the console, warning lights burned red. “This is it—either we shake apart fighting their beam, or we burn it out and break free.”

  “Energy guns!” Yevil shouted at him over the racket of the engines. “That’s what they’ll do. They’ll bring in energy guns and take us out right here.”

  “Not if they don’t want to lose half of Suivi when we blow,” LeSoit shouted back. “The hell with all of them. Max power, override.”

  The noise of the ’Hammer’s engines rose in a bellowing, many-voiced crescendo. Yevil swore.

  “Are you trying to kill us both?”

  “The Domina gave me the signal to lift ship. We’re lifting.”

  “What about the goddamn dome?”

  “Hell with the dome. We mass more than it does. Let Suivi worry about it after we’re gone.”

  Then the docking bay tractors went off. Warhammer tilted back on her nullgravs with neck-snapping speed, hurtling upward and smashing through the closed dome of the docking bay. Loss-of-pressure alarms shrilled and whurrped, and the damage-control panel lit up in a matrix of red and amber lights. Warhammer kept on driving upward.

  “Lost integrity in number-one hold,” LeSoit recited as he turned switches all over the panel. “Lost integrity in number two. Closing airtight doors to maintain pressure in critical areas. Commencing jump run now.”

  III. INFABEDE SECTOR: RSF SELSYN-BILAI; UDC VERATINA

  GYFFERAN FARSPACE: NIGHT’S-BEAUTIFUL-DAUGHTER

  SUIVI POINT: ENTERTAINMENT DISTRICT; RESISTANCE HEADQUARTERS

  NAMMERIN: NAMPORT

  RSF SELSYN-BILAI waited in the darkness between the stars. With hyperspace communications down hard all over the galaxy, and Admiral Vallant claiming Infabede Sector in defiance of the Republic, no word had come out of Galcen Prime for over two weeks—no instructions from headquarters to continue prosecuting the war, or to surrender.

  Not that Jos Metadi intended the latter. Chance might have brought the Commanding General of the Space Force to this remote area of space; but chance had also provided him with a ship. The Selsyn was only a glorified cargo vessel that in better days had spent her time ferrying supplies from Prime Base to Infabede, but at the time of the war’s outbreak she had been the temporary home of a fully-armed company of Planetary Infantry and a pair of long-range reconnaissance craft.

  “Damn, but it gripes me to leave you on this one,”
General Metadi said to the commander of the infantry detachment.

  “There’s no help for it,” Captain Tyche said. The Planetary Infantry officer checked the charge on his blaster and slipped it into the molded-plastic holster of his light battle armor. His troopers, already boarding their recon craft in the docking bay, would be wearing heavier gear, hardshell p-suits with integral weaponry that could take out vehicles and knock down walls. “If you get killed, then it’s all over for us. But as long as you’re safe, even if we lose the battle—”

  “—the war goes on,” Metadi finished for him. The General, his aide, and the det commander had gathered in the office of the Selsyn’s late CO for a final conference before the ship dropped out of hyperspace. “I know. I agree. It was my idea. But I don’t have to like it.”

  “Console yourself, sir,” said Commander Quetaya. Rosel Quetaya was a trimly built woman with a loose cap of black curls and dramatic rose-and-ivory coloring—but Metadi had chosen his aide for other reasons than her looks. “You could still die bloody in hand-to-hand. No guarantees.”

  “That thought will have to keep me warm,” Metadi said. He began to pace about the cramped compartment. “All right, Tyche, we’re going to drop out at the rendezvous point in less than an hour. Keep those recons inside our sensor shadow for as long as you can. If there’s anything out there waiting for us, assume it’s one of Vallant’s pickup ships and commence your attack. Meanwhile, I will remove this vessel to a safe location and await your signal. If you don’t make it … well, that’ll be my problem, not yours.”

  “Too true, General. I wouldn’t want to trade you for it, either.” Tyche looked thoughtful. “What about any loyalists that might be mixed in with Vallant’s people? It’d be a pity to lose them.”

  Quetaya nodded. “If we want to make up a fleet, we’ll need all the crews we can get.”