The Price of the Stars: Book One of Mageworlds (30 page)

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Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

BOOK: The Price of the Stars: Book One of Mageworlds
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His eyes burned as bright outdoor light flooded the small cockpit. Directly ahead, he saw the outline of an armored gun position, its turret swinging toward them as the gunner inside brought his weapon to bear.
“Ari—”
“I see him.”
Ari pulled back a fraction to gain altitude and then cut hard right, following the curve of the drive. For a second or two, he thought the starboard wing was going to drag the ground—but the aircar came around and leveled out just above the gravel.
Not far ahead, manicured lawn gave way to the dense woods of the hunting park, and the drive made a sharp left turn into the trees. Ari didn’t attempt to make the turn. He cut the jets instead, and pulled the nose of the car straight up.
The aircar went into a steep climb, crashing through small branches on its way skyward. Velocity fell off rapidly; soon the aircar stalled and its nose began to fall.
Ari twisted to the left in a half spiral, so that by the time the craft was pointing at the ground he was lined up with the next leg of the drive. He increased thrust back to maximum and pulled the nose up. The aircar leveled out again heading down the drive, mere feet above the gravel.
“Very nice,” murmured Llannat. She sounded rather breathless. “But what do we do for an encore?”
He didn’t answer. The next corner, a half-right, was drawing nearer, and going straight up wouldn’t work this time. The tracery of branches overhead had grown heavier; he felt like he was flying down a tunnel.
So let’s try sideways
, he thought, and swung the tail around to put the aircar into a skid. At the last moment, he made a sharp right roll, so that the aircar was flying down the drive with its belly foremost.
He felt himself pressed down into the seat. Then lift took over and the aircar slowed. He rolled the craft back to the horizontal, and they came out headed down the new direction. Judging by the way the shrubbery flashed past, their speed had hardly diminished.
But shrubbery wasn’t the only thing flashing past. Heavy blaster bolts lit up the undergrowth around them.
“Find the weapon controls!” he called over to Llannat above the roar of the engines and the whine of energy fire. “Make them keep their heads down!”
“I think we’re unarmed.”
He reached down with his right hand and picked up the energy lance. “Use this.”
He felt the weapon taken from his grip, and seconds later heard the sound of shattering glass as Llannat drove the lance butt-first through the window.
Good,
he thought, as careful, unhurried energy-fire started up from the other side of the aircar.
But just once I’d like to do this in something that could shoot back.
Ahead of them on the long drive, he saw a small group of figures: the trailing elements of the caravan guarding Nivome. At the same time, the high outer wall of the estate came into view. Ari pushed the throttle forward again, but this time got no answering roar. The aircar’s engines had already reached maximum thrust.
All the same, the aircar gained rapidly on the large black hovercar and its group of outriders. The last two hoverbike riders in the column skidded to a stop and laid their bikes down in the dirt perpendicular to the road. They stretched out prone behind their bikes and began firing their blasters toward the oncoming aircar.
Few of the shots hit, and even fewer managed to inflict damage.
Either they’re bad shots,
Ari thought,
or we’ve got them really scared.
He could hear Llannat returning the fire with the energy lance. She wasn’t connecting either that he could see, but the lance’s powerful bolts of energy tore up clods of earth all around the pair of outriders, and filled the air with smoke and dirt. Already shaken, and with their aim obscured, the two riders ducked involuntarily as Ari brought the aircar thundering over their heads.
The leading bikes in the flying wedge had cleared the gate, and the hovercar was approaching it. Ari chuckled to himself.
“What’s so funny?”
“You can own a whole planet, but you can’t bribe the laws of physics,” he said. “We’re going to close with him before he makes it through.”
The long black hovercar flashed through the gate and out onto the city streets of Darplex, with the aircar only feet behind it and scarcely higher above the ground. Behind them, the gatekeeper brought the force field up again: too late by a split second to catch the aircar, but in plenty of time to shut off the rest of the cavalcade.
Ari cut the aircar left, then right, out into the open, and brought the copilot’s side of the aircar parallel to the hovercar. From the corner of his eye he could see Llannat on her knees in the other seat, leaning out the broken window to take aim.
“Go ahead!” he shouted. “Shoot!”
The Adept fired a burst from the energy lance.
She hit the car, but the armored vehicle showed no damage. Around it, the remaining outriders were firing as they rode. One beam drilled a hole through the aircar’s port cargo door, and the rush of air across the opening set up an eerie keening sound inside the cockpit.
Llannat leaned even further out the window and fired another burst. She seemed to be getting the hang of the unfamiliar weapon—this time, one of the hoverbikes exploded into flames and tumbled over and over, sending the rider flying through the air.
Ari cut right again, putting them directly above the hovercar. He dropped. The bottom of the aircraft hit the roof of the hovercar with a thump.
He lifted, then dropped again. Once more he smashed into the top of the car. Then a hollow boom shook the air in front of them, and a brilliant light filled the cockpit.
Ari looked up. There was a shadow against the sun. It grew larger and became an atmospheric fighter craft. He saw a twinkling along the wings of the fighter, and a series of explosions rocked the atmosphere around the unarmed aircar.
He pulled back and left on the control yoke, climbing out of the line of fire so that the fighter’s next burst exploded around the hovercar itself. The strange pilot realized his error and turned to dive toward Ari.
A second fighter flashed into view, firing as it came. Llannat leaned out the window with the energy lance and fired a burst in that direction.
“Hold on!” yelled Ari. “We’re going up!”
He pulled back sharply on the yoke, pulling the aircar into a loop. When the car was inverted at the top of the loop, he flipped upright again and nosed down into a shallow dive to gain speed. Now the two fighters were below him, but already snarling upward.
He glanced over at Llannat. The Adept was still there, firing out the broken window at the cockpit of the nearest fighter. He had no idea what she’d used for a handhold during the turn. As far as he could tell, she’d never put on the safety webbing.
“What do we do now?” she asked, still firing.
Never underestimate an Adept,
he thought. Llannat’s ability to stay aboard during the aerobatics of the past few minutes had finally given him something that passed for an idea.
“You’ll have to go find the others and tell them what’s happening,” he said aloud.
“How?”
“You’ll see,” he said. “Get back into the cargo bay, and slide the door open. Leave the lance and the comm link up here with me.”
“Anything you say.”
She headed back toward the cargo bay. Ari pushed the aircar into a steep dive and began to spiral toward the ground.
He pulled out near street level. Tall buildings made blurry grey streaks to either side, and the air was bright with mingled energy fire and projectile explosives as the two fighters came astern of him and started firing.
He began to jink the little aircar about at full throttle, just above the rooftops—pulling up a bit, rolling to a new altitude, and then pushing down again. The two fighter pilots didn’t much like following his smaller craft through the urban maze, but although he drew ahead, he couldn’t shake them.
Never mind,
he thought, and held his course away from central Darplex toward the crowded, utilitarian structures of the warehouse district. Soon.
A few seconds later, he found what he was looking for. In the sections of Darplex bordering on the spaceport compound, moving the Rolny’s freight to market took precedence over landscaping. Here, the narrow streets went beneath, not over, the more important cargo lines. The mouth of one such underpass opened up ahead, and he shot into it without hesitation.
The energy fire from behind him stopped abruptly.
“Llannat!” he shouted, in sudden dimness. “Jump!”
 
“
I
WONDER how the others are making out,” said Jessan.
Beka picked up the red optical-plastic eye patch from the table and fitted it into place. “Ari learned how to hunt from the Selvaurs on Maraghai,” she said. “And Llannat’s an Adept. They’ll do okay.”
Jessan brought his blaster up and took aim at the playing card taped to the far wall of the abandoned warehouse. A red tracer beam flashed across the intervening space. “Three out of five … I hope you’re right.” He aimed and fired again.
“Four out of six,” Beka said, taking her knife from the table and slipping it into its forearm sheath. “You’re getting the feel of it, I think. Of course I’m right.”
The Khesatan took another shot at the card. “Five out of seven. I’ll quit while I’m ahead.” He lowered the blaster, frowned at it a moment, and then slipped it into its holster. “The real question, of course, is how much the stun-bolt attenuates with distance.”
Beka’s own blaster belt hung on the back of the warehouse’s only chair, next to the black velvet Mandeynan long-coat Tarnekep Portree would be wearing against the late-afternoon chill. She picked up the blaster rig and strapped it on.
“Those models will give you a full stun out to the limit of their effective range,” she said, bending over to tie the leather thong that kept the holster snug against her thigh. “They don’t have the accuracy of an Ogre Mark Six, or even a Space Force Standard, but when it comes to pouring energy out the muzzle, you can’t beat them with a stick.”
“So why did you switch?”
“I learned on a Mark Six,” she said, straightening up again. “This one, in fact.”
Tarnekep Portree’s Mandeynan cravat—a long strip of white spidersilk and delicate lace—lay on the table along with a comm link, a gold and topaz stickpin, and the hand-sized disk of grey plastic that was the collapsor grenade. She picked up the piece of cloth and started to wrap it around her neck.
Jessan came closer. “Here. Let me help you with that.” She shook her head. “I don’t need …”
“I know you don’t,” he said. His hands were already busy arranging the strip of material. “Let me help anyway.”
She stopped arguing. Jessan gave the cravat a final tuck, fastened the folds in place with the topaz stickpin, and then stepped back a pace to survey his handiwork. He tilted his head a little to one side like an art critic appraising the latest item in a fashionable gallery.
“Well?” Beka said.
“I’d call the general effect epicene but nasty.” The corners of his mouth turned up in a wry smile. “Actually, I rather like it.”
The tips of his fingers, their touch warm in the chill of the empty warehouse, still rested on the side of her throat. She smiled back at him in spite of herself.
“And what does that say about you?”
He gave a soft laugh. “Didn’t anybody ever tell you that on Khesat decadence is considered one of the higher art forms?”
She thought about it a moment, while his hand moved from her neck to trace the line of her cheekbone just below the red plastic eye patch. “No,” she said finally. “Nobody ever did.”
“Well, it’s true,” he said, and kissed her.
His lips were warm against her own, like the touch of his hand on her face. She leaned against him, opening her mouth to his—and pulled away, swearing under her breath, at the sound of a first hammering on the warehouse door.
The hammering steadied into a pattern: three quick, two slow, three quick. The recognition code.
“Damn,” she muttered again, moving away from Jessan and slapping the door switch. “If that’s Ari I’ll kill him myself for his lousy timing.”
But it wasn’t Ari. When the doors parted, Llannat Hyfid stood in the gap—her staff in her hand, her breath coming in ragged gasps, and her black coverall dirt-stained and disarrayed.
“Nivome’s on to us,” she said, before Beka could speak. “He’s heading for the Citadel. And Ari’s up there dodging fighters in an unarmed aircar.”
Beka grabbed the black long-coat and pulled it on. With quick, automatic gestures she shrugged the heavy velvet into place across her shoulders and shook out the lace cuffs of her loose white shirt.
“You two take the aircar and look for Ari,” she said, snatching up the comm link and the collapsor grenade and shoving them into the long-coat’s capacious pockets. “I have to go after the Professor. Vector us in on the Rolny as soon as you’ve got him in view.” (
She mounted one of the waiting hoverbikes as she spoke, cut in the nullgravs with a backkick of one booted heel, and switched on the engines.
“Get out of the way!” she shouted at the Adept over the bike’s high-pitched humming, and released the brakes.
 
Llannat was gone, and the end of the tunnel was coming.
Out with the sky above him, Ari pulled up, then cut left between two blocky grey buildings. The heavier, more powerful fighters might have the advantage in the open air, but down in the canyons of the city the prize would go to the better pilot.
Ari half-smiled.
If I can’t outfly this pair of dirtsiders,
he thought,
I’ll leave the family, change my name, and take up farming.
A near-miss rocked the aircar, and Ari veered left to duck behind a tall building. Workers looked up from desks and tables to stare out the windows at him as he flashed past.
High above the streets, the two fighters circled like frustrated birds of prey, waiting for him to break clear. Ari wondered for a moment at the promptness with which the atmospheric craft had shown up. That promptness argued a high degree of training on the part of Darvell’s planetary defenses—training, and possibly a timely warning passed on by the manager of the Top Five Lounge.
That last thought had a rightness about it that appealed to Ari. He smiled again.
He was certain, now, of what he should do: first, lure the air cover away from Nivome and the Citadel, and then get to the Quincunx man. He knew what sort of sentence the Brotherhood would pass on someone who used their name and their password to bait a trap, but it was likely to be a long time indeed before the Quincunx could get a working agent onto Darvell to take care of the problem.
But that didn’t matter. As Ferrdacorr had taught him long ago, some things you had to take care of yourself.
 
The warehouse echoed to the sound of Beka’s departure, and Jessan watched unmoving as the hoverbike roared out of sight. The last he saw of its rider was a fluttering of black velvet on the wind—the open long-coat and the black-ribboned queue of light brown hair, streaming out together behind the captain as she rode.
Good luck, Beka
, thought Jessan, and then shook his head. By the time Llannat had finished gasping out her bad news, Beka Rosselin-Metadi had all but vanished. Only Tarnekep Portree remained—Tarnekep, who had walked into the fire of a dozen blasters for the sake of a clear shot at his enemies.
Jessan shook his head again, and shivered. He felt a hand touch his arm, and looked around.
“We can’t stand here waiting,” Llannat said. “Ari’s in trouble too, remember?”
He drew a deep breath. “I remember. Go on and get in the aircar. I’ll pilot.”
The blaster made an unfamiliar weight on his hip as he climbed up and slid behind the controls. Like his friend Ari, he wasn’t accustomed to going about armed.
Everything changes
, he reflected as he fired up the aircar’s engines.
Even that.
On the other side of the cockpit, Llannat was already strapped into the copilot’s seat. Jessan brought the aircar forward through the warehouse doors in a scream of turbines, and lifted free as soon as they were clear. The ground fell away and the warehouse district spread out beneath them, an aerial vista of chunky grey buildings in a close-set network of narrow streets, with the rails and pylons of the cargo transit system stretching out over everything.
“Get on the comm,” he said to Llannat. “See if you can raise Ari.”
He heard the sound of Llannat disengaging the comm link from the copilot’s side of the console, and then her steady alto voice saying, “Ari, Ari—where are you? Come in, Ari.”
The speaker returned only silence. Jessan took his attention away from the aircar’s control console long enough to glance over at Llannat. The Adept looked unhappy.
She’s got more on her mind than just the comm link;
Jessan thought. Aloud, he asked, “What happened back there?”
“We walked into a trap.”
“And out again?”
She gave a humorless laugh. “Guess again. We flew.” “Ah,” said Jessan. “Whose aircar did you steal?”
“One of the Rolny’s.”
“Any casualties?”
“Two dead.”
Jessan whistled. “Already? Ari isn’t messing around.”
“Ari didn’t kill them,” Llannat said. “I did.”
“Would you mind repeating that?” asked Jessan. “I thought I heard you say that you killed them.”
“That’s right.”
The Adepts were fighters, back in the Magewar
, Jessan reminded himself.
It looks like they still are.
Silence filled the cockpit for a few moments. Llannat seemed to have given up on the comm link as a bad job. Then Jessan heard her draw a sharp breath.
“Look,” she said. “Over there.”
He glanced away from the controls and followed her pointing finger toward the horizon, where a snarl of fighter craft circled like carrion birds above a column of black smoke.
“Somebody’s crashed,” he said. “Can you tell if—”
“No,” she said. “He—goes away—when he’s hunting.”
“Right,” Jessan said. If Ari’s Quincunx contact had played them false, the big Galcenian would certainly be hunting now. If he was still alive.
 
Beka leaned the hoverbike into another turn. How long, she wondered—how long had it been for the Professor, waiting for Ari to signal from Rolny Lodge, before Nivome’s Security troops decided to end the charade and move in? She bit her lip in frustration, and fed more power to the hoverbike’s engines.
From up ahead came the zing of a blaster, and a few seconds later an ambulance rushed past her in the opposite direction, its siren keening. Relief surged through her, and she laughed aloud into the wind.
Small-arms fire and casualties—the Prof’s still in there fighting!
The sound of energy weapons grew louder. She rounded another corner and saw a clot of emergency vehicles in the street ahead, parked behind a temporary barrier marked SECURITY ZONE—DO NOT ENTER. Beyond the barrier, Security enforcers crouched for cover around corners and behind walls, firing down the street ahead of them. The enforcers had their heads well down, and with good reason—red fire flashed back at the Security men as she bore down on the barrier.
She marked the source of the fire with a tight smile, and took her right hand off the bike’s controls to free her own Mark VI from its holster. The Security barrier rose up front of her. She pulled back one-handed on the hoverbike’s control bars and jumped the barricade, firing her blaster into the nearest group of enforcers as she came up and over.
One of the bolts took a man in the back before he could turn. He fell facedown onto the pavement. Some of the others slewed around, warned by his fall or by the noise of the onrushing hoverbike. One or two fired—but they’d crowded themselves when they took cover from the blaster-fire up ahead, and the shots went wide.
Too bad
, thought Beka, without sympathy. She dodged her bike through the security lines, skidding from side to side and firing as she came.
Then she was past them, and saw the muzzle of a blaster poking around a door jamb over on the right-hand wall. A bolt zipped down the street toward a second Security barricade set up at the far corner.
Beka let out a yell. That was the Professor in the doorway, and no mistake. He turned toward her and brought his blaster up to bear. She yelled again and he changed his aim to fire down the street behind her. She pulled to the right and bore down on the slight, grey-haired figure.
The Entiboran held out a bent arm—his left—and fired again down toward the security barrier with the blaster in his right. Beka veered as close to the wall as she dared, and extended her own right arm, also bent at the elbow.
“Grab on!” she shouted.
Don’t drop your blaster, now,
she reminded herself, and then their arms interlocked.
She came close to losing the weapon just the same. At the speed she was going, even the Professor’s light weight was almost enough to pull her sideways off the bike. Then the Professor swung himself up onto the pillion seat, and she was firing her blaster at the Security enforcers ahead as the bike swept them both away toward the far barrier.

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