Starpilot's Grave: Book Two of Mageworlds Read online

  The redhead approached the table. “Everything’s clean, sir,” she told the ensign. “And the guns are sealed.”

  “Very good.” The ensign gathered up the signed and dated forms, and returned the registration papers and both of the personal-information folders to Beka—pointedly ignoring Jessan, who was regarding the proceedings in general, and the ensign in particular, with an air of bland amusement.

  When the inspection party had departed and the shuttle had pulled away for Net Station C-346, Beka put the papers and the folders into the ship’s safe. Then, from a snug and very well concealed locker, she removed a compact but effective scanner. Only after she had located and deactivated both of the listen-and-record devices the inspectors had left behind—one in the ’Hammer’s cockpit and the other, somewhat more imaginatively, underneath the bunk in the captain’s quarters—did she allow herself to relax.

  “Trusting souls, those Space Force types,” she observed to Jessan. “Do they plant a snoop or two on every freighter that goes through the Net?”

  “Probably,” said Jessan. “And most of them probably get scanned and deactivated. But if you leave a couple on every ship you inspect, and collect the ones that are still there when the ships come back, eventually you get lucky.”

  “You have a natural bent for this sort of thing … are you sure you were a medic before they threw you out?”

  “It’s all on the record.”

  Beka snorted. “We know how much that’s worth, don’t we?”

  “Not everything in there is fiction,” Jessan protested. “Most of it’s the plain truth, in fact. Easier to keep things consistent that way.”

  She looked at the Khesatan curiously. “Nyls, just what does the record say about the end of your Space Force career? The way that ensign looked at you …”

  “Beautiful, wasn’t it?”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Black-market trafficking in underage sapients,” Jessan said. “Quite a nice little racket.”

  “If you call twenty-to-fifty at hard labor ‘nice.’ How did you get off?”

  “The prosecution was thrown out as void on a technicality, so I was merely discharged with prejudice.” He shook his head mournfully. “It was terrible, really. Pull up a copy of the court transcript, and you’ll see that my quarters were illegally searched, so all the evidence seized was inadmissible.”

  “Very artistic all around,” Beka said. “So that’s what you and Dadda’s aide were cooking up over the secure comm link, our last night on Innish-Kyl. I’d been wondering.”

  “Captain, I’m shocked. Falsifying official records is a criminal offense. Would I accuse a Space Force officer of Jervas Gil’s reputation of suborning a felony?”

  “In a heartbeat,” she said. She juggled the pair of small, button-shaped listening devices in the palm of her cupped hand. “Right now, we have some waiting around to do until the ’Hammer gets jump clearance, and I’ve still got these little knickknacks to dispose of. I think I’ll head down to the forward hold for a bit of target practice.”

  “Mind if I come along?”

  “Not at all. I rather enjoy your company.”

  They made their way along the plain steel decks of the ship and through the hatch into Forward. Beka toggled a switch to bring up the work lights. She glanced about, finding the hold a shadowy and oddly echoing space without the crates and pallets that normally filled it. It was a good thing, she reflected, that the inspection party hadn’t bothered to take measurements and compare them with the real stats for a Libra-class freighter. They might have noticed that the forward cargo bay was considerably smaller than it ought to be—and after that, it wouldn’t take them long to figure out about the engines.

  Warhammer held a number of secrets, but the oldest and best kept went back to the time when General Jos Metadi had commanded her. Early in his privateering days, then-Captain Metadi had put his ship into the yards on Gyffer for an expensive and unrecorded stay. The Gyfferan shipwrights had removed the original engines; then they had filled all the empty space plus a portion of the cargo compartments with the realspace and hyperspace engines of a vessel half again the ’Hammer’s size. Those engines, coupled with newer and heavier energy guns, had turned an armed freighter into a ship of war, strong enough to outfight a dozen Magebuilt fighters and fast enough to outrun the mothership that carried them.

  Not even Metadi’s copilot of those days, Errec Ransome, had known exactly how fast Warhammer could travel when the need was on her. Beka had pushed the ’Hammer close to that limit more than once—but not since the ship’s most recent visit to the Gyfferan yards, where those outsized engines had been yet another of the items on the upgrade list.

  With no cargo on board, Beka thought, we could probably outrun a dreadnought if we had to.

  The idea pleased her, and she smiled a little as she affixed the pair of snoop-buttons to the bulkhead near the hatch. The two buttons showed up as dark, coin-sized circles against the steel.

  With Jessan following, she crossed to the far side of the hold and pulled out her blaster. She checked the charge—ninety-seven percent—and scaled the setting down to a fine beam at lowest power.

  “No use drilling clear though the hull to vacuum,” she observed. Then she settled the Mark VI into its holster and turned her back on the target.

  Without warning she whirled, drawing the weapon at the same time, and fired twice down the length of the bay. The bolts left glowing trails of ionized air behind them, and the snoop-buttons sparkled briefly. She took a two-handed stance and sent five more bolts into each of the buttons, then switched to a one-handed grip and stood sideways to the target as she fired. Finally, she lowered her arm, thumbing the blaster back up to full power as she did so, and put the weapon away.

  “Whoever that was,” said Jessan, “I think he’s dead.”

  “We’ll see.”

  They walked over to the bulkhead where Beka had placed the snoop-buttons. Both of the recorders were lumps of slag and charred plastic, and tiny pits had been etched into the steel behind them. Beka tapped at the pattern of blaster-points with one close-trimmed fingernail.

  “A decent group,” she said, “but I’m not getting any better. Dammit, I wish the Prof could be with us for this one.”

  “You still miss him, don’t you?”

  “Yeah,” Beka said. “I miss him.”

  She pried the carbonized snoop-buttons off the bulkhead and dropped them to the deck, then ground the bits of glass and plastic into the metal with the heel of her boot. “But he’s dead, so there’s no point in talking about it. Let’s get moving.”

  Jervas Gil—full captain, Republic Space Force—leaned back in the command chair in RSF Karipavo’s Combat Information Center. The comp screens around him showed no activity beyond the usual status reports, and the battle tank, the big holovid setup that displayed any current action, was blank and dim. The cruiser was in peacetime watch sections and the CIC was empty except for Gil.

  General Jos Metadi’s former aide, promoted to captain and commodore of the Mageworlds Fleet, had soon discovered that his new rank presented him with more care and responsibility that it did privacy. He found the deserted CIC an excellent place to think and to be alone, or as alone as anybody ever got on shipboard. Footsteps sounded on the deckplates of the CIC as Gil’s aide—these days, he rated an aide of his own—approached with a clipboard full of flimsies.

  The aide, a young lieutenant named Bretyn Jhunnei, saluted and said, “Daily reports for you, sir.”

  “Anything interesting?”

  Jhunnei had black hair and a long, sallow face. She tilted her empty hand back and forth like a scale coming to a balance. “Same same.”

  “Thanks.”

  Commodore Gil took the clipboard and flipped quickly through the sheets. Most of the reports were generally unsurprising, the same as the day before and the day before that: lists of food endurances on the other ships in the fleet blockading the Mageworlds; fuel-
consumption reports; a daily situation estimate from Space Force Intelligence (based, as far as Gil could tell, on his own reports from the week before); and the record of all civilian ships passing through the Net, with the results of any boarding searches.

  Gil scanned the last set of papers without much interest. Anything portentous or disturbing uncovered as a result of those searches would already have been forwarded to him in a separate message. This would be the leftovers, the little ships doing the sort of decimal-credit trade that made up the Mageworlds’ limited contact with the rest of the civilized galaxy—ships with names like Redstar, Lucky Vi, and Pride of Mandeyn.

  He suppressed a start. Somehow he hadn’t expected anything so normal from the likes of the General’s daughter, just a one-line report two-thirds of the way down the list of ships, an ordinary boarding and search for contraband, with the results listed simply as “routine.”

  Gil forced himself to keep on flipping through the stack of flimsies as if nothing had happened. At last he handed the printouts back to Jhunnei for recycling.

  “Well,” he said under his breath, “it’s begun.”

  “What’s begun, sir?” Jhunnei asked.

  Gil looked at the fresh young lieutenant—first in her class, the pride of the Service Academy, no combat experience.

  A whole generation, he thought. Has it really been so long?

  “The Second Magewar,” he said. After a pause, he added, “Not a word of that to anyone, eh?”

  Jhunnei’s expression didn’t change. “Word of what, sir?”

  Gil regarded the lieutenant with approval. Discretion was one of the chief marks of a good aide, and Jhunnei was shaping up nicely. For a fleeting moment he thought back to his own recent tour as aide to General Metadi, and wondered if the General had ever thought the same thing about him.

  “Nothing, Jhunnei,” he said. “Nothing. But I’d like to make this month’s training schedule concentrate on combat readiness. Write a message to the fleet instructing all captains to exercise their crews at General Quarters.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And work up a fleet training plan.”

  She nodded. “Will that be all, sir?”

  “For the moment. And forget what I just said about the war. The action really started over two years ago. It’s just that no one noticed at the time. That’s all.”

  Jhunnei saluted and left. Gil sat alone for a while, thinking, then leaned over and punched the call button for the commanding officer’s quarters on the ’Pavo.

  “Captain,” Gil said as soon as the red “listening” light came on. “Please put your vessel in Condition Three.”

  “Aye aye, Commodore,” the captain’s voice replied. “Anything I should know about?”

  “No,” Gil replied. “There’s nothing to know.”

  He relaxed back into his seat and waited while the clean-cut young men and women of the ’Pavo, those whose Wartime Cruising watch stations were in Combat, filed into the CIC and brought the display screens and status boards to life. Commander Erne Wallanish, the ’Pavo’s executive officer, walked up to the command chair.

  “XO reporting,” Wallanish said. He was a stocky, sandy-haired man with a strong outplanets accent—Pleyver, Gil thought, or maybe Innish-Kyl. “What’s the situation?”

  “Apparently peaceful,” Gil replied. “Carry on.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Gil stood and stretched. One good thing about shipboard routine was that it had enabled him to recommence his exercise regimen and to watch his diet. He’d gotten rid of most of the flab that five years of dirtside duty had put on him.

  “I’ll be in my quarters,” he said. “Any messages can reach me there.”

  The vacuum-tight door sighed shut behind him as he walked quickly from the space. Once in his cabin, he opened the fold-out desk beside the bunk. He pulled over a sheet of flimsy and began to write a report—in longhand, using the service-issue stylus he carried in his uniform pocket to initial reports and sign messages.

  The General had insisted that anything of the supremest importance needed to be encrypted before transmission, without entering it into anything electronic. “Too many ears, Gil,” he’d said. “Electrons have no friends; they’ll work for anyone as easily as they’ll work for you.”

  Gil constructed the code grid from memory and encrypted his message. With luck, even broken down into plaintext the brief sentence would have meaning for only one person. “Vessel of interest entered Magezone” was all it said. And remembering the Mages and what rumor claimed they had been able to do, Gil wished that he hadn’t needed to think about those words as he wrote them down.

  What were the odds, Gil wondered, that the Magelords had a spy somewhere in the fleet? Nearly a hundred percent, he decided. The Adept who had gone with Warhammer to Darvell and back—Mistress Hyfid, that was her name—claimed that Ebenra D’Caer had been working for the Mageworlders all along, and that the Mages had extracted him without a trace from his prison cell on Beka Rosselin-Metadi’s asteroid base.

  Right, thought Gil. And what Mistress Hyfid knows, the Master of the Adepts’ Guild also knows. He’ll have his own agent somewhere in the fleet, I’m sure. The Guild isn’t supposed to run intelligence operations, but “not supposed to” never stopped anybody yet.

  Gil shrugged, and put both the Magelords and the Adepts’ Guild out of his mind. Let the Mages and the Adepts play their metaphysical game of hide-and-seek With any luck, they would neutralize each other. He had another mission: to keep the Mageworlds from rearming; and if that effort failed, to keep the war from touching the Republic.

  That was enough of a job for one man, and if he did it, he would have done enough.

  III.

  NAMMERIN: SPACE FORCE MEDICAL STATION DOWNTOWN NAMPORT

  THE SUN had not yet risen. In the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters of the Med Station, most of the rooms were still dark and their occupants asleep. Except for the fading starlight coming in through one unshaded window, Room 231A was as dark as the rest; its occupant, however, was awake and had been for some time. Llannat was alone—the room had bunks and closet space for two, but Housing hadn’t seen fit to assign her a roommate—and she stood in the middle of the bare floor with a short ebony staff in her right hand, fighting against shadows.

  Here, she thought, blocking where her imagined opponent struck. And here. And the counterstrike—now!

  Faster and faster she went through the sequences, until the ebony staff became only a dark blur, almost invisible against the night. Llannat was sweating, and the dark coverall she wore clung to her back and shoulders, but her breathing was steady. She practiced every day, if not always for so long or at such an early hour. This morning, though, she’d awakened in the silent time before dawn and hadn’t been able to sleep.

  She’d been dreaming again—not of Darvell, with its blood and fire, but of Beka Rosselin-Metadi’s hidden base in an uncharted belt of asteroids, and of the soft-spoken, grey-haired Entiboran who had bequeathed it to her. Llannat had never known the man’s true name. Beka had called him “Professor,” which suited his demeanor; he had called Ari’s sister “Captain” and “my lady” in return, and had given her loyalty until death.

  Nor had Llannat ever learned the Professor’s true age. He was older than he looked, impossibly old; she’d heard him speak of centuries as though they were nothing. He had been Armsmaster and confidential agent to House Rosselin for a long time when the Magewars began. And before that he had been something else.

  “ … I foreswore sorcery long ago, when I gave my oath to House Rosselin.”

  “Adepts don’t practice sorcery.”

  “No. Adepts don’t.”

  But the Mages did, and the silver and ebony rod the Professor had carried with him to Darvell was a Magelord’s weapon and badge of office. The Professor hadn’t returned from that journey, but his staff had. Beka had picked it up, either not knowing or not caring about its true nature, and had given it to Llan
nat without understanding what she did.

  Llannat’s own staff, the long one of plain wood that marked her as an Adept, had vanished somewhere in the grey nothingness that those who worked with power called the Void. Some people—Ari’s sister, for one—might think it was chance that had brought Llannat the Professor’s staff in exchange.

  But I know better, Llannat thought. If this staff came to me, it’s because the Professor wanted it to.

  She hadn’t told Master Ransome about the staff. She’d spoken with the Guild Master more than once in the aftermath of the Darvell affair, but she’d left the staff at Prime Base with her luggage every time. Nor had she told Master Ransome anything about the Professor, except in his role as Beka’s copilot. The omissions worried her. She ought to have told the Master of the Guild everything that had to do with the Magelords and the use of power.

  It looks like I inherited the Professor’s secrets along with his staff. He never told anyone what he was, except me—and what am I, now? What would the Guild Master call an Adept who carries a Magelord’s staff, and who acknowledges a Magelord as her teacher?

  She didn’t need any special wisdom to answer that one. Errec Ransome had never forgotten what the Mages had done to the Guildhouse on his homeworld of Ilarna; nor, so far as Llannat could tell, had he ever forgiven it. He dealt ruthlessly with those remnants of the old Mage-Circles that still surfaced from time to time, and he would not be gentle toward an Adept who had betrayed the Guild by choosing to learn from the enemy.

  But you can’t always pick your teachers, Llannat thought. Sometimes the universe picks them for you.

  The learning didn’t always stop just because the teacher was dead, either. In her dream, she and the Professor had been practicing staffwork in one of the corridors deep beneath the surface of the asteroid base. Sometimes in these dreams she won the practice bouts, and sometimes she lost them, but almost always the Professor talked with her as they fought.