The Price of the Stars: Book One of Mageworlds (37 page)

Read The Price of the Stars: Book One of Mageworlds Online

Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

BOOK: The Price of the Stars: Book One of Mageworlds
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“Sunrise, eh?” he asked. “They still do custom upgrades?”
His daughter nodded. “I’m having some done on the
’Hammer
while they’re fixing the engines. Computers, mostly, and some weapons-control stuff.”
Lieutenant Rosselin-Metadi stared at his sister. “Computers—weapons—Bee, what in heaven’s name are you planning now?”
“Don’t worry about it, big brother,” she said. “You don’t need to know.”
The medic reddened. Beka sat watching him with a challenging expression.
I wouldn’t touch a line like that with a pressor beam,
thought Commander Gil; but the lieutenant seemed made of stronger stuff. Gil heard him draw breath between his teeth for a reply.
The General suppressed another smile. “Down, both of you.” Then he looked hard at Beka. “Mind telling your father what you’ve got planned?”
Beka glanced over at Llannat Hyfid. “Did you tell him about D’Caer?”
“He knows about the Mageworlds jump,” the Adept said.
“Not the rest of it?”
The General turned to the big lieutenant.
“What ‘rest of it,’ son?”
“I was getting to that,” he protested.
“If you and Bee keep on squabbling,” the General told him bluntly, “we’ll get to it sometime next week.”
Lieutenant Rosselin-Metadi looked affronted—an impressive sight, but one his father ignored. Instead, Metadi let his gaze rest first on the Adept and then on the Khesatan officer sitting cross-legged on the deck. Finally, he made his choice and nodded at Jessan.
“Finish the story for us, Commander. The rest of you keep quiet and let him talk.”
The captain of the
Crystal World
opened her mouth to say something. Her father silenced her with a quick glance.
“That means you too, Beka my girl. All right, Commander—report.”
Jessan straightened. “Yes, sir. The repair work we did after coming out of hyper from Darvell only brought back enough engine function for one jump, so we picked the planet with the best shipyards. We made it to Gyffer just before all the systems went down hard, and put the
’Hammer
in the yards and the captain in the hospital. As soon as the captain came out of the healing pod, we chartered a vessel for the trip back to base.”
“About that base, Commander—”
“It’s disguised as an asteroid somewhere, sir,” said the Khesatan, with a bland expression, “but I’m afraid I don’t have the foggiest notion of the coordinates. The captain insisted on punching in the navicomp data herself.”
“Understood,” the General said. “I’d have done the same thing in her position. Go on.”
“Yes, well—we’d left for Darvell with Gentlesir D’Caer stashed in Maximum Security. When we got back, he wasn’t there. If all the robots and sensors and intruder-alert systems are telling the truth, then nobody broke in to get him, and nobody knows when he left.”
“I see,” the General said. “And what does your Adept have to say about that?”
“Magework,” the Adept said at once. “Sir. They got a line on D’Caer somehow, and pulled him out before he could talk.”
The General leaned back in his chair and gazed out at the simulated landscape beyond the observation-deck windows. “So the bastard’s still kicking around the galaxy.”
“It’s possible,” said the Adept dubiously. “But the Magelords don’t take kindly to failure—and Ebenra D’Caer failed them at every turn but the first.”
“Want to clarify that a little bit for us, Mistress?”
But it was the General’s daughter who answered, the lace cuff on her Mandeynan shirt falling away from her wrist as she ticked off her statements one by one. “Suivi Point hasn’t been thrown out of the Republic,” she said. “Dahl&Dahl are still as powerful as they ever were. And the Mageworlds involvement isn’t a secret anymore.”
“Space Force Intelligence isn’t totally incompetent,” the General said. “We’ve been getting reports of increased activity in that quarter for quite a while. Nothing this solid, though … and getting the Senate to listen to an old general’s suspicions is next to impossible these days. But if Darvell’s been supplying war matériel to the Mageworlds, the politicians will have to listen for a change.”
“They’ll want hard proof,” the General’s daughter pointed out. “Which means you need somebody out there where it’s all happening.”
Her brother surged to his feet. Standing, he towered over everybody and everything else on the observation deck, and his voice, when he spoke, was a controlled roar. “The Mageworlds? Bee, you’re crazy!”
Commander Gil—already busy calculating which of Darvell’s regular trading partners could be counted on to answer discreet inquiries—tended to agree, and thanked heaven that his own sisters had never shown any desire to leave Ovredis. But Jos Metadi only shook his head.
“No, son,” the General said. “Your sister isn’t crazy. Her mother used to get the same look in her eye whenever she decided it was up to her to save the galaxy.” He turned to Beka. “Am I right, girl?”
“Tarnekep Portree’s a merchant captain,” she answered, a flush of bright color coming into the pale skin over her high cheekbones. “Why shouldn’t he work the Mageworlds if he wants to? As for his other profession—word of these things gets out. Nobody is ever going to believe that the raid on Darvell was a private grudge match. I expect that Captain Portree is going to get some very interesting offers over the next couple of years.”
“I wouldn’t be a bit surprised,” agreed the General dryly. “So your mind’s made up?”
She nodded.
“The last time we struck a bargain,” said her father, “all I asked for was a couple of names. By the time I got them, you’d left a trail of dead bodies and missing persons across five systems, blown the top off the strongest private fortress in the known galaxy, and damn near flown
Warhammer
through the middle of a sun. I’m afraid to ask you for anything else.”
Beka’s chin went up a fraction higher. “Who’s asking anybody anything? I’m going to try my luck around the Mageworlds for a while, that’s all.”
“Then I’ll take whatever intelligence you can dig up, my girl, because I have a feeling the galaxy’s going to need it one of these days.” The General’s expression hardened a little. “While you’re out there, keep an ear open for word of D’Caer. If he’s alive, he still owes the family one.”
“My pleasure,” Beka said. “I’ll see that he pays up.”
The General rose to his feet and extended a hand toward his daughter. “Done, then?”
Beka rose also, but kept her hand at her side. “Not quite yet. There’s a bit of leftover business from our last deal that we have to take care of first.”
Now the Adept was on her feet as well, her dark features flushed with agitation. “Captain, you can’t just—”
Beka’s fists clenched. “Dammit, Mistress, don’t tell me what I can and can’t do!”
The Adept met Beka’s angry blue gaze without flinching. Time stretched out interminably as the two women faced one another in silence. Then Gil saw the captain’s clenched fists slowly relax.
In a calmer tone, Beka went on, “We all agreed, remember? This one is for Dadda to decide.”
“I don’t think I like the sound of that,” the General said. “What ‘bit of business’?”
“It’d be easier to show you,” Beka said. She started for the sliding doors at the rear of the observation deck. “Just come this way.”
Lieutenant Rosselin-Metadi and the Adept remained behind—partners in disapproval, Gill suspected—but everybody else trooped along as the General’s daughter led the way down a narrow, exquisitely paneled corridor. She didn’t take them far before halting to palm a lockplate set into the bulkhead. A gilt and ivory panel slid aside, and she stepped through the doorway. One by one, the others followed.
Like the hallway they’d left, the stateroom was tiny, but elegant in its design and appointments. On two walls, mirrors in artful positions reflected the room’s furnishings in such a way as to stretch its apparent size, and on the unmirrored walls Gil saw blank holoprojection windows. For a different passenger, the captain of
Crystal World
might have let the ship’s computer run landscapes like the one up on the observation deck.
But not for this passenger
, thought Gil.
Hands caught tight in metal binders, Nivome the Rolny lay on spidersilk sheets in the middle of the bed, and stared out ahead of him at nothing. Not even the appearance of the General brought any reaction to the Rolny’s grizzled, jowly features.
Metadi frowned. “I can see your Adept friend’s problem. What happened?”
“I stowed him in the hold while we made our run to jump,” his daughter said. “And we lost our pressure down there from a hit we took. I think the oxygen deprivation got to him.”
The General glanced over at Jessan; the Khesatan shrugged. “That’s a possibility. Then again, it could be stun-shock syndrome, or it could be that his mind snapped under the stress and he’s blocking out reality.”
“Whatever you say,” the General said. “You’re the medic.” He turned back to Beka. “Well, girl—you’ve got him. What do you want to do with him?”
Beka looked at Nivome for a long time. At last, she shook her head. “If I’d seen him like this right after we came out of hyperspace, I’d have told the gang to cycle him out the airlock and get it over with. But I didn’t, and they didn’t, so I’m sticking to the original plan.”
She pulled her blaster out of its holster, and handed it butt-first to the General. “He’s all yours.”
I don’t believe I’m watching this
, thought Gil.
Metadi took the blaster. He checked the weapon over and brought it up to point at the bound form of Nivome the Rolny.
Something—the talk, the blaster, the crowd in the little stateroom—had finally gotten through to the man on the bed. His eyes focused on the muzzle of the Mark VI, and then on the face above it. Gil saw the Rolny’s eyes go wide with fear and recognition.
Metadi smiled. “That’s right, Nivome, it’s me. You should have stuck to hunting
wuxen
and left my family alone.” He thumbed the blaster’s safety over to Off.
In the tiny space, the click of the toggle-switch flipping over sounded louder than an explosion. Nivome closed his eyes and whimpered. Gil felt sick.
The General looked down at Nivome for a moment longer. “The hell with it,” he said suddenly, and lowered his arm. “Shooting’s too good for him. Take the binders off, and drop him in the alley out back of the Blue Sun. Then tip off local Security that they’ve got an incompetent vagrant cluttering up the street.”
The General’s daughter looked at her father for a moment. Her lips began to curve upward. “And the Master of Darvell can spend the rest of his life in a public mental-health ward. Dadda, I like your style.”
“Good,” said the General curtly, handing her back the blaster. “See to it, then.” He turned on his heel and left the stateroom without another word.
Beka stood looking down at the blaster in her hand. For a few seconds Gil thought she was going to shoot the Rolny anyway. He wondered if he should try to stop her if she did.
But she gave Nivome one more disgusted look and shoved the Mark VI back into its holster. “You heard the man—he goes out back of the cantina.”
“Right,” Gil said. He turned to Jessan. “Commander, you and I are going to have to do the drunken-buddy routine through the back streets for this one.”
“Let me get the binders off him first,” Beka said. “The lock’s keyed to my thumbprint.”
She took a step to the head of the bed, and reached out to key the binders open. Gil heard the faint snap of the metal parting, and then all hell broke loose in the crowded room.
Somehow, Nivome had the Mark VI—
Grabbed it when she undid the binders
, Gil thought—and was bringing it up to fire. But Beka Rosselin-Metadi was the General’s daughter in more ways than one. Light flashed off something steely and wicked-looking that appeared in a blur out of her left sleeve, and she drove the dagger in toward the Rolny’s gut.
Two weeks in a healing pod, however, make poor conditioning for a close-in fight. Nivome seized Beka’s knife wrist as it came forward. She blocked out and upward with her left forearm, and the Mark VI went off like a lightning bolt and scorched the mother-of-pearl frame of the nearest mirror.
Nivome was already coming up off the bed, pushing the General’s daughter over backward under his weight. Gil felt his own grip closing on something small and deadly, and realized that he’d flicked his concealed hand-blaster out of its grav-clip without even thinking.
He raised it and took aim, but the struggling bodies were too close together. Before he could move to get a clearer shot, another figure vaulted over the bed and onto the Rolny’s back: Lieutenant Commander Nyls Jessan, wrapping a bent arm around Nivome’s throat, pulling the heavier man backward and up.

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