The Price of the Stars: Book One of Mageworlds (42 page)

BOOK: The Price of the Stars: Book One of Mageworlds

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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.