By Honor Betray'd: Mageworlds #3 Read online

  “All you need is practice.” He smiled briefly. “The way things look right now, you’ll get plenty before we’re done.”

  Shifting his staff into his left hand, he moved past her and reached out to open the door. His fingers brushed the panel; he froze for an instant, then drew his hand away.

  “The door,” he said. “Did it feel like this when you touched it before?”

  “I don’t know.” She took a step forward and laid an experimental hand against the surface. The door looked the same, but the metal seemed to bend and deform itself inward against her palm, as if some cold, viscous liquid had filled the hallway outside to the bulging point. “No. When I was leaning against it, it felt like a door.”

  “Then we’d better open it carefully.” He pointed with his staff. “Stand there. And let me go through first.”

  Klea took the position he indicated and gripped her staff with both hands. Her mouth was dry, and her pulse thudded underneath the skin of her throat. Owen touched the lockplate and the door slid open.

  The lights were all out in the hallway, even the dim blue safety glows along the baseboards. In the darkness a darker figure stood, robed and hooded in black, with a molded black plastic mask over its features and a short ebony staff gripped in one black-gloved hand. Light that was not light hung around the figure in a scarlet nimbus, and the staff it carried burned with a cold crimson fire.

  The Mage-Circle … they’ve found us again.

  Owen was already moving, gripping his staff near one end with both hands and bringing it around to smash across the Mage’s throat. He leaped over the blackrobe’s body as it crumpled. A second Mage loomed up out of the darkness beyond the open doorway, staff swinging toward Owen in a blaze of gory light.

  Klea—shocked at last into action—brought up the grrch-wood broomstick that Owen had made into her apprentice’s staff, and thrust forward with the butt end into the Mage’s face. The wood smashed against the mask so hard that her palms stung and the black plastic caved in beneath the impact. The blow that the Mage had aimed at Owen missed by a handsbreadth as the Mage fell backward into the dark.

  Then she and Owen were out in the corridor, and the blue safety glows were back on again—the Mages had put them out, she supposed, though she wasn’t sure how. The two blackrobes lay motionless on the hall carpet. Owen picked up the ebony staves and broke them one at a time.

  When he had finished he straightened and looked at Klea. “Now we can go.”

  “What about … ?” She indicated the Mages.

  “They’re dead.”

  She’d expected that. “So we just leave them here? Let Freling get rid of them?”

  “Why not?” He looked at the bodies for a moment, then glanced back at her with a curious expression. “Of course, you could always burn the whole place down on top of them—it might be tidier, in the long run, and I think you’d enjoy doing it.”

  “I could …”

  “If you wanted to. It’s easy enough.”

  She stared at him, tongue-tied. Part of her remained appalled at the suggestion, but another, deep-buried part of herself stirred to life in response, so that she was filled with a sudden overwhelming awareness of fire. Owen was right, she realized; she could do it, letting that part of Klea Santreny rise up and stretch out nonmaterial hands and pull in as much heat as her heart’s anger could hold.

  Drag it in, she thought, and twist it all together, and then … leave it someplace. With the cleaning rags in the back closet, or the grease in the kitchen, or the loose wires in the climate-control. Leave it, and walk away. And before long, something will start to burn … .

  She swallowed hard, fighting down the image of Freling in his dirty white apron—Freling with his “business proposition” and his “fair split of the take”—Freling with his hot breath and his big, hairy hands—trapped and cooking in the fire of her anger until his skin cracked open and the melted fat ran out like blood.

  “No.” Her voice was a thread of sound, nothing more. “I don’t want to.”

  He looked at her, and his expression was distant and forbidding. “Speak the truth. Falsehood is for sorcerers and stage-magicians, not for someone who wants to be an Adept.”

  “All right,” she said. “I do want to. And it’d be easy, as much as I’ve hated this place. But I’m not going to do it. Knowing I can—”

  “Is enough?” There was no warmth in the question, only a boundless disbelief. “The truth, Klea.”

  “No, blast you, it’s not enough!” She was starting to shake; she took a deep breath and waited until her heartbeat steadied. “But someday it will be, and I’m damned if I’m going to screw all that up just to make myself happy now.”

  All the coldness left his face then, and he smiled.

  “Truth spoken truly,” he said. “Let’s get out of here and see about getting off Nammerin before they close the port.”

  IV. INFABEDE SECTOR: UDC VERATINA

  SUIVI POINT: MAIN DETENTION

  GALCEN FARSPACE: SWORD-OF-THE-DAWN

  WARHAMMER: HYPERSPACE TRANSIT

  THERE WAS an instant of frozen disbelief in Veratina’s Combat Information Center as the officers stared at the blackened screen. Then the sensor tech’s voice cut across the silence.

  “Two targets speed up-Doppler. Selsyn has stopped tumbling.”

  Captain Faramon dropped his clipboard and leapt to his feet. “I have the watch! Shields up!”

  “Recon craft still on constant bearing decreasing range.”

  The collision alert began to sound, its steady tocsin beating like a pulse underneath the antiphony of orders and response. Vacuum-tight doors hissed closed all around, and he could feel the slight increase in air pressure.

  “Condition red, weapons free,” Faramon said. “Take those scouts under fire.”

  “Under fire with energy guns,” replied the TAO. “Inside minimum range for missiles.”

  “They aren’t slowing down,” said the sensor tech. Her voice sounded tight, as if she were fighting to keep tension from sending the pitch upward.

  “Impact in five seconds,” said the comptech at the main tank. “Four. Three. Two. One.”

  The impact came without sound, but a shudder ran through the deckplates under Faramon’s boots. His ears twinged with a sudden change in pressure.

  “You wanted a warship,” he snarled at the TAO, as a second, smaller impact rattled underfoot a moment after the first, and the damage-control board began lighting up with red and amber loss-of-pressure lights. “Set general quarters! Damage control—where did those craft hit us?”

  “In the docking bay,” the crew member at the board replied.

  “Scratch our boarding party,” Faramon said to no one in particular. The collision alarm changed to the signal for general quarters.

  “Get me a report,” he said to the damage-control talker. “Investigators out.”

  “Damage reports coming in now,” the talker replied. “Two impacts. One at speed, second made a braked landing.”

  Faramon knew what that meant. “We’ve been boarded. Colonel DeMayt, security alert!”

  A moment later, the intraship comm link gave a pop and a hiss, and began to speak. “Crew of RSF Veratina,” said the voice. “This is General Metadi.”

  “Hell and damnation,” Faramon said. Whoever was talking had the General’s distinctive accent and delivery, that was for sure—Faramon had heard the man speak often enough at the Space Force Staff School in Galcen Prime. Not even three decades of association with the powerful and well-bred had managed to clean the dockyards of Gyffer out of Metadi’s voice.

  “Your officers are in open rebellion against the Republic,” the voice on the link went on. “Their mutiny has failed. Put down your weapons. Don’t resist and you won’t be harmed.”

  “Shut that thing off!” Faramon snapped.

  “Trying, sir,” said the comms tech. “It seems to be coming from Internal Communications Central.”

  “Cr
ew of RSF Veratina,” the voice began again, “this is General Metadi … .”

  “He was supposed to be on Galcen,” said the TAO. He had to raise his voice to make himself heard over the combined noise of the general quarters signal and the voice—recorded? live? Faramon couldn’t tell—of the Commanding General. “Do you think it’s really him?”

  “It’s him all right,” Faramon said. “Either here or on the Selsyn. I don’t know how he got here, but—”

  “No comms with C or D decks,” the damage-control talker said. “Compartment 02-33-277 reports sounds of blaster fire.”

  “Display ship’s status,” Faramon ordered the comptech at the main battle tank.

  We have to win this one, the captain thought, as the blue and red dots in the tank winked out and were replaced by a wireframe model of the ’Tina. Compartment 02-33-277 showed up as bright red, and C and D decks in amber, while the rest of the ship glowed blue. Or else Vallant has Metadi loose at his back.

  The TAO nodded toward the tank display. “Doesn’t look too bad so far. If all they’ve got is ship’s crew off Selsyn, we’re about matched in skill, and we have more people.”

  “Stores ships don’t carry long-range recon craft,” said Colonel DeMayt. “I’d say Metadi brought along some infantry.”

  “That could make things a bit more difficult,” Faramon admitted. He turned to the active-sensor tech. Of the crew members in CIC, she was closest to the sealed bulkhead compartment where the small arms were kept. He passed over the keycard. “Open the weapons locker. Hand out arms to all officers in CIC.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  The sensor tech was already moving as she spoke, inserting the keycard and sliding the locker door aside. A moment later she was standing with her back braced against the bulkhead, a blaster clasped in both hands.

  Colonel DeMayt reached for her sidearm—she was Planetary Infantry of the old school, and always went armed. It didn’t do her any good this time, though; the sensor tech shot her before she could bring the weapon to bear. DeMayt collapsed backward across a worthless hi-comms panel. The tech swung the muzzle of her own weapon back to point at Faramon’s head.

  “Nobody asked me if I wanted to join a mutiny,” she said. Her voice had risen several notes in the stress of the moment, but her grip on the blaster, Faramon noted with an odd feeling of detachment, was quite steady. “Put your hands up.”

  “Five—four—three—two—” Ignaceu LeSoit counted off the seconds in hyperspace as the digits flicked by on the navicomp chronometer. “—one, dropout!”

  His hand stabbed down on the console to initiate the dropout sequence. The grey pseudosubstance of hyperspace, which had swirled briefly outside the cockpit viewscreens, gave way again to the diamond-studded blackness of a starfield.

  LeSoit sat back in the pilot’s chair with an explosive sigh of relief. Blind-jumping from a shortened run-up was tricky stuff; tricky enough that he didn’t care what the Space Force captain thought about his piloting. The fact that they were still alive—and that no new alarm lights had joined the ones already flashing—was the only testimonial he needed.

  A few seconds of relaxation were all he granted himself, however, before leaning forward again to check their position. The navicomp had already finished cross-referencing beacons and starfields and assorted other aids to galactic navigation, and the result put them safely beyond the range of anything on Suivi that didn’t have hyperspace engines.

  He turned to the woman in the copilot’s seat. “Captain Yevil, it’s time for you to signal your ships. Let them know that you’ve sworn to the Domina, and tell them not to make a move until they hear from you—or from her, or the General of the Armies, directly. Anyone else gives them orders, they say no, and shoot if they have to.”

  Yevil reached out for the comm link handset. Then she paused. “We will be joining up with them, won’t we?”

  “Not immediately,” LeSoit said. “First I have to check things out and see how badly we’re hurt. And I’m going to do some repairs.”

  “I can read a status board, even on a merch, and this isn’t a p-suit job. You’re looking at spacedock work.”

  “So I’ll get the ’Hammer into a spacedock.”

  “Where?” asked Yevil. “You sure as hell can’t go back to Suivi Point. And the way things are right now, there’s no guarantee that anywhere else will take you either.”

  “I know,” LeSoit said. “Don’t worry. I’ve got a place I can take us.”

  “Gyffer?”

  LeSoit shook his head. “Not Gyffer,” he said. “Someplace where they owe me—you don’t need to know where.”

  “Ah,” said Yevil, looking knowledgeable. “That kind of place.”

  “Right,” said LeSoit, not entirely truthfully. He didn’t think the Space Force captain would consider even the outbreak of war a sufficient excuse to ignore some things—and what he intended to do was certainly one of them. “But first, let me go see if we’re in shape to get anywhere at all.”

  They were, it turned out, but just barely. LeSoit’s walk through the ship—those areas that weren’t sealed because of pressure loss—showed him that conditions were fully as bad as he’d expected. The hyperspatial reference block had shaken itself out of alignment during the ’Hammer’s fight against the tractor beam, and their breakout from the docking bay had left gaping wounds in the freighter’s hull.

  But the old Libra-class freighters were built tough, LeSoit reflected, designed for long-haul runs with high-risk cargo back when the civilized galaxy was a lot less civilized than it was now. And this particular Libra-class had been modified until she was even tougher. She had the strength and the heart for one more jump, and then—

  Then Ignac’ LeSoit would see what kind of credit he had these days.

  Beka told me to lift ship, he thought. She didn’t tell me where to go.

  All the same, LeSoit took his time putting the reference block back in synch. He checked again to make sure that the airtight doors and bulkheads were keeping what remained of the ‘Hammer’s atmosphere inside the ship where it belonged. When he couldn’t put it off any longer, he headed back to the cockpit, where Yevil was waiting.

  “Can we make it?” the Space Force captain asked.

  “As long as we don’t try anything fancy. You have your signal ready to transmit?”

  “I’m ready,” Yevil said. “How long is our little side trip going to take, anyway? I have some people who need to know.”

  “They don’t need to know that bad,” said LeSoit. “They can wait until we show up again. Besides, I won’t know how long the repairs will take until I get there.”

  “I see,” Yevil said. She picked up the handset again. “Hi-comms or lightspeed, do you think?”

  “Lightspeed.” It was good to have an easy question for a change, LeSoit reflected. “It’s the only sure means. Hi-comms are unreliable as hell right now; the Mages are probably jamming them wherever they can. With lightspeed, if the wrong people use the message to get a directional fix on us, we’ll already be long gone.”

  Yevil shrugged. “On this vessel you’re the captain.”

  “In the Domina’s absence,” LeSoit said. “Don’t forget that part. If you’ve got your message ready, go ahead and transmit.”

  “Sending,” Yevil said. She began to speak code groups over the lightspeed link. “All vessels in Suivi Space Force Detachment, this is Suivi SF Det, I transmit in the blind, immediate execute, Link, Alfa Echo, Two Mike, Echo Five, Delta Sierra, Niner Six … .”

  A few moments later she finished, saying, “Unlink, standby, execute,” and keying off the link. “That’s it, then,” she said to LeSoit. “They aren’t going anywhere without orders from either me or the Domina. And the Steering Committee of Suivi Point can go straight to hell.”

  “Sounds like a good idea to me,” said LeSoit. He fed power to the ‘Hammer’s realspace engines and put the freighter onto a straight-line course. “Commencing run-to-jump.” />
  Warhammer made her run-up without setting off any more alarms. The stars blazed beyond the cockpit windows, then gave way to the swirling iridescence of hyperspace. LeSoit set the autopilot, unbuckled his safety webbing, and stood. He stretched, feeling his shoulder joints cracking from the tension of the past hour. “Well, we’re in. All we have to do now is stay on course.”

  “Without probing too deeply into embarrassing specifics,” Yevil said, “‘stay on course’ to where?”

  “A place I know of. If it still exists.”

  “Beka Rosselin-Metadi,” said Jessan patiently. “Domina of Lost Entibor, of Entibor-in-Exile, and of the Colonies Beyond. Also master of record for the armed merchantman Warhammer, Suivi registry.”

  He waited on the other side of the armor-glass barrier while the clerk on the fifth level of Suivi Main Detention checked his request against the records of the desk comp. Getting this far had exhausted a good part of the petty cash supply in his day-robe pocket, and had gone a long way toward explaining why no motion in Council to throw Suivi Point out of the Republic had ever failed to find a seconding voice. Most worlds in the civilized galaxy at least theoretically offered equal justice under the law; here on Suivi, nobody even bothered pretending. Jessan hoped he hadn’t been working under a false assumption in coming here first. Real Contract Security officers would have turned Beka over to Detention Services, but if those four thugs back on the glidewalk hadn’t been the genuine articles she could be almost anywhere in the Belt by now. On the other hand, Mages or Mageworlds agents would have taken him as well, instead of leaving him free and essentially unharmed.

  Finally the clerk looked up from her comp screen and once again recognized his presence. “Gentlesir Jessan—we do indeed have an indefinite holding contract on your associate.”

  Jessan tried to remember what the Academy’s crash course in galactic law for medics had said about contract justice, Suivan style. I think the “indefinite” means they’ll hold on to someone forever if the contractor keeps on paying their fees.