Starpilot's Grave: Book Two of Mageworlds (22 page)

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Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

BOOK: Starpilot's Grave: Book Two of Mageworlds
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“Just so,” the historian said. “The Space Force can’t be blamed for drawing as much as possible on its own resources instead of the Guild’s, and one certainly can account for your presence among us on those terms.”
He paused, then went on in quieter tones. “But someone who carries a Magelord’s staff may well bring more to the investigation than convenience alone.”
Llannat stood very still, grateful for the dim light that hid her face. “An Adept’s staff is for the Adept to choose,” she said. “And mine was a legacy from a friend.”
“Not the usual practice on this side of the Net,” Vinhalyn pointed out, “where Adept and staff are all but inseparable, even in death. But in the Mage-Circles a single staff might pass down through severai generations—from friend to friend, or from teacher to student, or from vanquished to victor in one of their ritual duels.”
He looked apologetic for a moment. “That was, in fact, how I thought you had acquired the staff—in combat of some sort. I hope you’ll forgive a scholar’s compulsion to find the solution to an intriguing puzzle, whether the answer’s any business of his or not.”
“I’m not offended,” she said. “But you were right about part of the puzzle, anyhow; Space Force probably tapped me for this assignment because I once managed to fight with a—what did you call them?—with a Circle-Mage and lived to file a report on it afterward.”
It’s a good thing the Space Force doesn’t know the rest of the story, she thought. Because if they knew, then the Guild would be sure to find out eventually. And the service might not mind that I was a renegade Magelord’s last student—but Master Ransome would throw me out of the Guild in a heartbeat.
If he didn’t decide to kill me out of hand before I could contaminate anybody else.
 
The darkness in Klea’s head had weight and pressure to it; it pushed her down relentlessly toward the floor. At the last minute she felt Owen catching her before she hit.
“Klea—are you all right?”
“I don’t know. My head hurts.”
“Here. Sit down. I’ll get you something to drink.” She let him help her over to the room’s only chair, a cheap metal foldable with wobbly legs and a dented back. When her vision cleared, she saw that he was busy over in the kitchen alcove, making up a mug of Nutli’s Instant
Ghil
with hot water from the tap.
“Offworlders,” she muttered. “Don’t you people know that you’re supposed to use boiling water?”
Owen looked back at her over his shoulder, still stirring. “Does it make a difference? I never can tell.” He brought her the mug. “So you’ve guessed my secret. Was it the
ghil
or my accent that did it?”
She sipped at the lukewarm
ghil
, taking comfort from its familiar gritty taste. The mug had a chip in its rim; she wondered if Owen even had another.
He probably found it in the cupboard when he moved in
, she thought.
“It wasn’t much of a secret,” she said. “You just never mentioned it. But there aren’t any Adepts on Nammerin that I’ve ever heard of.”
“Not these days, anyway,” he said. “Are you feeling better now?”
“I’m doing all right.”
“Good,” he said. “Exactly what happened to you back there in the ShadowDance? Can you describe it for me?”
“I think so.” She spoke slowly, searching for the right words to describe an experience that hadn’t really felt like something words could describe. “I was doing the movements, like you said, and trying to keep my eyes open without seeing anything. It wouldn’t work at first, and then it did—everything sort of slid into place, and I was
there
—and then I wasn’t again.”
“Nothing unusual so far,” he said. “In fact, that’s about how it is for most beginners. Go on.”
“Well … just after I dropped out but before I touched the ground, if you know what I mean—”
Now it was his turn to nod. “I know. What happened then?”
“Then something hit me.” She grimaced, remembering. “It was like—like having somebody throw a bag over your head and smash you on the skull with a rock at the same time. Or going straight from feeling-no-pain drunk to hell’s own hangover with nothing in between for a cushion.”
He winced at the comparison, and Klea thought back to how she had found him lying facedown and bloody in the alley mud.
“That was what happened to you, wasn’t it?”
For a moment he didn’t say anything, but regarded her with a considering expression in his hazel eyes. “Something like that. Only what hit you was accidental.”
“It sure didn’t feel like an accident.”
“It wasn’t aimed at you on purpose, though,” he said. “You just happened to be in the way.”
“Happened to be in
whose
way?” she demanded. “Whatever was going on, you’re not going to stand there and tell me it was part of a plot to do somebody good.”
He looked at her for a long time with the same considering expression as before. “You’re right,” he said finally. “Someone is working to cause trouble. It’s the ugly side of what you’re learning—like using the ShadowDance as a weapon, only a lot worse—and any beginner, especially one as empathic as you are, is going to be vulnerable.”
Klea took a long swallow of the
ghil
. “Are we coming to the part where you make me go away so I can be safe?”
“I certainly ought to,” Owen said. “It’s a poor teacher who involves his student in something this dangerous.”
“Dangerous,” said Klea. She gave a short laugh. “I’ve been a hooker in this town for five years, I’ve had things happen to me you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy, and you think I don’t know about ‘dangerous’?”
“Not this kind,” he said. “Listen. What you felt was a Mage-Circle at work here on Nammerin.”
Klea looked at him. “A Mage-Circle. Like in the holovids about the War?” Only vague memories of her lower-school history lessons kept her from putting the Mages and their Circles in the same mental compartment as her grandmother’s tales of marsh-wraiths, or the more improbable episodes of “Spaceways Patrols.” “I thought all the Mages were gone.”
“They are,” he said. “Except for the ones who aren’t. You wondered what I was doing on Nammerin. Well, now you know.”
“You’re working for the Adepts’ Guild,” she guessed. “Hunting for Mage-Circles.”
“Among other things.”
She looked down at the dregs of the
ghil
in her mug, and then back at Owen. “But you told me you were an apprentice, not an Adept. If working Mage-Circles aren’t a good thing for a student to get messed up in, then why did the Guild send you?”
He sighed. “The easy answer is that any Mages inside the Republic are going to be well guarded against Adepts. So it takes somebody who isn’t an Adept to find them.”
More images were coming back to her now, memories of the flatpix and old newsholos that had illustrated her history books. Black masks, black robes … She’d had nightmares about them for a long while afterward, until she’d figured out that life had worse things to be afraid of than imaginary Magelords.
And it turns out I was right the first time,
she thought.
Because the nightmares are coming back, and now they’re real.
“There were Mages in my dream,” Klea said slowly. “A whole Circle of them. They saw me, and I ran away. You were there, too. And later that night I found you half-dead in the alley.”
She looked at him, remembering his bruises and how the blood had caked in his hair, and how her own flesh that evening had carried the marks of injuries inflicted in a dream.
“Was it the Mages who beat you up like that?”
“Yes,” he said. “In a manner of speaking. They thought—or at least I hope they thought—that I was just another local with enough untrained talent to make me sensitive.”
“Like me.”
“Exactly,” he said. “Only you don’t have just a little potential ability, you have a lot of it. Warning you off with a mental beating, like they tried doing with me, isn’t going to work on you either, because you’re going to be able to sense what they’re up to whether you want to or not. Which is why I haven’t sent you off to safety—it wouldn’t do any good.”
“Oh,” she said. “So what are we going to do now?”
“You are going to be careful,” he told her. “And I am going to keep on with the work I came here to do.”
 
MAGEWORLDS BORDER ZONE: RSF
KARIPAVO;
RSF
EBANNHA
 
W
ITH ANY luck, reflected Commodore Jervas Gil, the special investigative team from Galcen should arrive before too much longer. When they did, he could hand over the problem of the Magebuilt derelict to them and get back to his proper job of watching the Net.
Until then, however, he was spending more time than he liked in
Karipavo
’s Combat Information Center. From the CIC, he could keep an eye on the abandoned raider via periodic relays from
Ebannha
, whose boarding party had remained with the empty Deathwing.
Those guys are probably getting pretty bored with that job by now, he thought. If the investigation team doesn’t show up soon, we’ll have to rotate them out of there.
The voice of the executive officer broke up Gil’s train of thought. The XO was excited about something; his outplanets accent was even more pronounced than usual. “Commodore—we have something odd here.”
“Just what we need,” said Gil. “Something else odd. As if the stuff we already had wasn’t odd enough. What’s this one?”
“Looks like a merchantman dropping out of hyper at the Outer Net,” said the XO. “We should have gotten word from the Inner stations before he got here.”
“And we didn’t?”
“Not a peep out of anybody.”
Not a good sign
, thought Gil, and made a mental note to double-check all the Net Control Stations for sloppy procedure. The station crews would complain bitterly about being singled out for attention, but at least they wouldn’t be bored. Boredom, Gil had found, was the primary hazard of blockade duty, and an excellent source of stupid mistakes.
The ’
Pavo
’s captain came over to join the conversation. “Maybe our mystery freighter didn’t come from the Mageworlds in the first place?”
The XO shook his head. “Not dropping out where he did, with that vector on him.”
“Contact Net Station Twenty-three,” said Gil. Twenty-three was the closest unit on the Inner Net to the
’Pavo
’s current position, and the one most likely to have passed the stranger through. “Ask them what’s going on.”
He glanced at the tactical action officer’s monitor screen. “And get an ID on that freighter.”
“We’re querying him right now,” the TAO said. Then, abruptly, “What’s this?”
Gil looked closer. The screen was picking up a cloud of garbage around the contact, on a slightly divergent course.
“He’s jettisoning his cargo, it looks like,” said the
’Pavo
’s captain. “A smuggler, maybe?”
“Get a boarding party ready for him,” Gil said. “And collect some of whatever he’s kicking out.”
“Muster the duty fighter team,” the TAO said to the CIC Watch Officer. “Hail him and halt him.”
“Duty fighter, aye.”
A crew member at the comms panel looked up. “In combat, we’re being hailed.”
The
’Pavo
’s captain said, “Who?”
“The merch, would you believe it?”
This
, thought Gil,
is getting stranger by the minute. Honest traders don’t jettison cargo. And smugglers don’t stop to trade gossip with a battlecruiser.
“What’s his call sign?” he asked the comms tech. “Can you put him on audio?”
“Audio, aye.”
The link by the tactical action officer’s watch station crackled and began to speak. Lightspeed comms tended to distort pitch and timbre, but the accent came through—the pure, unmistakable Galcenian of the Galcen-born and Galcen-schooled.
“Any station this net, any station this net, this is Reserve Merchant Vessel
Warhammer
. Patch me through to Commander Patrol Screen, over.”
Gil went cold. As far as the galaxy was concerned, both
Warhammer
and Beka Rosselin-Metadi were dead. If this transmission was genuine, then whatever news General Metadi’s daughter had for the Net Patrol Fleet was serious enough to make her break her cover identity into irreparable pieces.
“He just keeps on repeating that message, sir,” the comms tech said.
“It’s got to be some kind of trick,” said the XO. “To find out who’s in command.”
“Not a very bright trick, either,” agreed the ’
Pavo
’s captain. “Everyone knows
Warhammer
crashed on Artat over two years ago.”
“Never mind that,” Commodore Gil said. “Give me the comm link.” He keyed the handset. “Space Force Reserve vessel, this is Patrol Screen Actual, over.”
Nearly twenty seconds went by before a response came from the unknown, meaning a ten light-second distance between that ship and the
’Pavo
.
“Patrol Screen, this is
Warhammer
. I transmit in the clear. The Inner Net is down. I say again, the Inner Net is down. You have fifteen minutes, twenty at the outside, before hell’s own horde of Mage warships is all over you. I only got here first because I’m faster than they are.”
“That’s impossible,” muttered the XO. “We’d have heard when they hit the Inner Net.”
“Get on hi-comms,” said Gil to the TAO. “Raise anyone on the Inner Net. Do it now.”
Then he keyed the link. “Roger,
Warhammer
. Come dead in space. I intend to board you.”
“No time for that, Commodore. I’ve got to get the word back to Galcen.”
In the background, Gil could hear the TAO and the CIC watch officer conferring in muttered undertones: “Whoever he is, he sure is fast.” … “Do you think he’s planning a run-to-jump?” … “Where’ll he end up if he’s running now?” … “Galcen’s on the arc.” … “Then he could be telling the truth.”
Gil ignored them. “I can get word back to Galcen faster than you can,
Warhammer,
” he said over the link. “Come dead in space and let me board you.”
“No thanks, Commodore. Nobody can get the word there faster than I can—and somebody’s got to bar the door behind me. Open the Net and let me jump.”
Behind Gil, the hushed conference continued, this time in exchanges between the duty comms tech and the ’
Pavo
’s captain: “Sir, I can’t raise Net Station Twenty-three.” … “Get
Shaja
, then, or
Lachiel
; they’ve got picket duty in Twenty-Three’s area.” … “No joy at all on hi-comms, sir.” … “How’s the internal test?”
The link crackled again. “Commodore, it looks like the Magelords have figured out how to jam the hyper-relays. All anybody’s got left is lightspeed line-of-sight comms.”
“Is that possible?” Gil asked—more of the duty comms tech than of
Warhammer
’s captain, but the voice over the link spoke again anyway:
“It’s possible, Commodore. I saw a Magelord take down a whole. building full of electronics once. And that was just one guy, working on the run, with no prep.”
“Sir,” said the
Pavo
’s captain, “we can’t raise anyone in the Inner Net.”
“Get me Space Force Command on Galcen, then,” Gil said.
“No joy, sir,” said the comms tech, after a minute. “Looks like that’s down, too.”
Gil sighed.
Time to start earning your pay, Commodore
.
“Open the Net,” he said. “Pass one.”
“What?” said the ’
Pavo
’s captain.
“You heard me,” said Gil. He spoke into the comm link. “
Warhammer
, you have clearance. My respects to your father.”
“Roger,” replied the voice over the link. “Out.”
Gil turned to the captain of the
Karipavo
. “Captain, pass the following signal to all ships in the fleet in lightspeed comms—”
“Hi-comms would be faster!” the
’Pavo
’s captain protested.
“We don’t have hi-comms. Do as I tell you. Signal follows. ‘Set General Quarters, condition red, weapons free. Mageworlds attack imminent. All vessels in Patrol Screen detached effective immediately. Permission granted to act independently. Net Control Stations, maintain the Net as long as physically possible.’”
“Message being sent now,” said the captain.
“Very well,” said Gil. “Captain, at your pleasure—come to General Quarters.”
At the sound of the General Quarters alarm, vacuum-tight doors throughout the
’Pavo
cycled shut, the gentle sighing of increased air pressure barely audible in the din. In CIC, going to General Quarters automatically brought up the lights in the main battle tank, but nothing showed in the display except
Karipavo
’s own position. Gil wasn’t surprised. If the Magelords were jamming hi-comms as Captain Rosselin-Metadi claimed, realtime updates from other ships in the fleet would have stopped as well.
“Datalink’s down,” said the CIC watch officer to the tactical action officer.
“Then we’ll make do the best we can.” the TAO replied. “Set up everybody’s last-known positions in manual mode, and update the display as info is available. What’s the status on weapons and shields?”
“All normal.”
“Very well. Go active on all lightspeed sensors. Maybe we’ll get something.”
A few feet away, the duty comms tech had the front panel entirely off the bulky hi-comms unit. In company with an electronics tech, he had been poking around inside for some minutes. The captain and the executive officer of the ’
Pavo
stood nearby, watching the pair at work.
Gil shook his head.
Check it out as much as you want
, he thought.
You aren’t going to find anything
.
Indeed, the electronics tech was already looking up with a frustrated expression. “So far, sir, all readouts and tests are normal,” she said to the captain. “We’re producing signal.”
“Only one problem,” the comms tech added. “We can’t hear ourselves when we do it.”
“Could the receiver be down?” the XO wondered aloud. “No, sir,” the electronics tech said. “When we have a direct connection, everything tests out sat. All internals normal on the receive end. Sir, this is weirder than hell.”
At the other end of the CIC, a crew member looked up from the flatscreen monitor for the sensor arrays. “Anomaly on visual, sir.”
The
’Pavo
’s captain strode over to see the monitor for himself. “Where away?”
“Quadrant N-seven-outer, Sector Red One.”
Toward the Mageworlds
, thought Gil.
The closest point of approach to the Inner Net. Captain Rosselin-Metadi’s lead was shorter than she thought.
“What do you have?” the captain asked.
“Multiple contacts, small, spectrum analysis shows realspace engines in use.”
The XO came over to join the group at the screen. “Any friendlies out that way?”
“Negative, sir,” said the crew member. “And these contacts aren’t identifying themselves, either.”
“Ah,” said the XO. “I see.”
He stepped away from the monitor. Then, without haste and without changing expression, he pulled a miniature blaster from the pocket of his coverall and shot the
’Pavo
’s captain neatly in the back of the skull. Continuing the same motion of arm and body, he brought the blaster around toward Gil.
Gil sidestepped, feeling the heat of a blaster bolt brushing his ear, and flicked the grav-release on his own sleeve-mounted blaster. He missed—but another shot connected, and Gil found himself looking across CIC at the usually inconspicuous Lieutenant Jhunnei, who was holding a blaster of her own.
The compartment smelled of blaster fire and blood. Everybody seemed frozen, shocked into immobility by what they had just seen. Gil knew he only had a few seconds before they gave way to hysteria. If that happened, the battle was lost before it even began.
He slipped the miniature blaster back into its hidden grav-clip, then swept the room with a glance. He had their attention now—good.
“In Combat,” he said in a carrying voice, “this is Commodore Gil. I am assuming command.”
A shaky chorus of “aye”s arose from the crew. Gil gave an internal sigh of relief as they all turned back to their duties. Jhunnei, meanwhile, was already bending over the XO’s body.

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