Starpilot's Grave: Book Two of Mageworlds (21 page)

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Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

BOOK: Starpilot's Grave: Book Two of Mageworlds
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The two of them were still at it when Beka passed through the
’Hammer
’s common room on the last ship’s-morning of the transit. She had her long hair tied back in Tarnekep Portree’s beribboned queue, and for the first time since leaving D’Caer’s office she wore the Mandeynan’s ruffled finery and scarlet eye patch.
“Places, everyone,” she said to the card players when they looked up. “We should hit the Inner Net and get pulled out of hyper in about ten minutes.”
She continued on through to the cockpit and strapped into the pilot’s chair. A moment later Jessan appeared. He slid into the copilot’s seat and put on the earphone link to the communications panel.
“Anything new this time?” he asked after they’d finished running through the checklist for dropout.
Beka shook her head. “Not really. We wait for them to hail us, and then we request a direct link to the Commanding General. They’ll probably try to give us the runaround instead; have you got any code words you can whisper into their shell-like ears to get us through?”
“You don’t have to worry about that part,” said Jessan. “It’s covered.”
“Good,” Beka said. “Then we’re all set.”
She watched the chronometer. “Getting pulled out—now!”
 
The orange No Jump light on the panel came up as soon as the
’Hammer
’s hyperspace engines felt the artificial flux of the Net—generated by the matrix of Net Stations in emulation of the natural fields that surrounded worlds like Pleyver. Beka pulled off the hyperdrive and set in the realspace engines.
The stars reappeared, but not in the pristine silence of a regular drop from hyper. The control panel flared into a blaze of red lights, readouts scrolled up monitor screens, and the strident outcry of an alarm buzzer split the air.
“Damn—somebody’s radiating fire control out there!” Beka hit the switch that brought
Warhammer
’s shields up to full strength. “Nyls, where the hell are they?”
Jessan was already busy on his side of the panel, his hands playing the buttons and dials like a keyboard. “I can’t tell. Wherever they are, though, they aren’t locking on to us.”
“Then who—”
Beka stopped. High in the viewscreen ahead of her, a globe of blue-white light flared into existence, then faded to a dull red and vanished. She swallowed.
“That was an explosion,” she said. “A big one. Nyls, do you think this is some kind of Space Force training exercise?”
“No,” Jessan said. “If there’s an exercise of some sort going on, it’s live-fire. I’m picking up a lot of stuff on the frequencies associated with energy beams.”
“Bastards,” muttered Beka. “They’re not supposed to be doing that sort of thing on the regular jump lanes … . Get on the hyperspace comm relays and listen in to what’s happening.”
Jessan was frowning. “I’m already on them, Captain.” He paused. “We have total silence in the hyper bands.”
“How about crypto? Or the data links?”
“Nothing. No transmissions. As far as I can tell, hi-comms are completely silent.”
“Damn. You think our receiver’s gone down or something?”
“It was working fine when we left Eraasi,” Jessan said. “I’ll check the lightspeed comms.”
The alarm buzzer shrieked again.
“Lock on!” Beka’s hands danced over the controls, putting on down vector and feeding power to the dorsal and ventral energy guns. “Active homers, heading this way!”
The guns didn’t respond.
“Damn,”
she said. “We’ve still got the seals up from that blasted customs inspection on our way in.” She switched on the link to the common room. “LeSoit! Get down to the main panel and unseal the guns!”
“On my way, Captain.”
Beka spiraled the ship in an effort to throw off the homers, and diverted more power from the engines to the shields. Jessan was still working over the controls and readouts on his side of the board.
He looked up. “Captain—I think I have something.”
“Put it on.”
A voice came over the console speaker: standard Galcenian in the measured cadence that Space Force training and custom reserved for desperate situations:
“Any station, any station, this is RSF
Nomestor
. I transmit in the blind. I transmit in the clear. Under attack by unknown spacecraft. I say again, under attack by unknown spacecraft. Request assistance. I say again, request assistance.”
“Dammit,
Nomestor
, what’s your posit?” muttered Jessan. He looked at Beka. “Captain, request permission to respond.”
“Do it. Maybe he can tell us what’s going on.”
Two heavy thuds came from aft.
“Missiles,” she said. She glanced at the damage-control board. “So far the shields are holding.”
LeSoit’s voice came on over the intraship link. “Gun seals removed, Captain.”
“Good,” she said. “Take the ventral gun. I’ll gang them both to your panel.”
“Orders?”
“Fire only in response to attack. We don’t know who’s hostile out there and who isn’t.”
On the other side of the cockpit, Jessan was talking over the exterior comms. “RSF
Nomestor
, RSF
Nomestor
—this is Republic Armed Merchant
Pride of Mandeyn,
standing by to assist you. State your position. I say again, state your position. Over.”
Nomestor
didn’t respond. “Any station, any station,” the distant voice repeated, “this is RSF
Nomestor.
I transmit in the blind. I transmit in the clear. Under attack by unknown spacecraft. Request assistance. I say again, request assistance. Any station, any station …”
The transmission broke off, and the carrier wave vanished with it.
Jessan cursed under his breath in High Khesatan and began to run the board again. “I’m getting a lot of chatter,” he said after a moment. “Mostly reports of enemy action and requests for assistance, and pilot-to-pilot transmissions between fighter craft. All comms lightspeed.”
“All lightspeed?” Beka slammed her clenched fist against her thigh in frustration. “What the
hell
is going on out there?”
“Damned if I know, Captain.” Jessan was frowning. “We’re getting comms in languages I don’t even recognize. Plus some scrambled and some crypto.”
“Anyone close on sensors?”
“No. Lots of junk metal floating around at temperatures above ambient, though.”
She dug her fingernails into her palms. Drifting scrap meant broken hulls and dying ships.
No way to find them, nothing to do, not even anybody to shoot back at …
“Any clue where those homers came from?” she asked.
“Probably missed their target and picked us up instead,” replied Jessan. “I don’t think it was anything personal. There’s firing going on, but judging from attenuation and parallax it’s over by the control stations for the Inner Net.”
“It may not stay over there, though,” Beka said. “And we can’t jump as long as the Net is up.”
She contemplated the orange glow of the No Jump light for a few seconds longer, then made her decision.
“I’m going to make a realspace run for the far side. Nyls, take the dorsal gun and help Ignac’ keep us safe.” She laughed unsteadily. “Dadda always said this ship could outrun anything it couldn’t outshoot. Now’s when we get to find out.”
 
Hours passed. The No Jump light continued to burn as the
’Hammer
pushed onward in realspace. Beka sat alone in the cockpit, listening to voices from ships and stations she had never seen. The occasional time-tick on a message only increased her frustration: all the transmissions had been made long before.
Then the alarm sounded again, and the electronic-warfare board on the control panel began to flash. She flipped on the intraship link to the gun bubbles.
“Nyls, Ignac’—heads up! Someone’s lighting us up with fire control—” She glanced at the board again. “—and it doesn’t match
any
Republic source in the data banks.”
A target appeared on the display of the position plotting indicator. “And there she is. Unknown, inbound.” And, as a scattering of small, up-Doppler targets appeared under the other vessel: “Homers. Aimed at us, this time.”
She pulled more power away from the engines—in the frictionless vacuum of space the
’Hammer
wouldn’t lose any speed—and fed it to the shields. “Keep me safe, guys,” she said over the intraship link. “This looks like it could get rough.”
The other ship fired its guns, transforming in an eyeblink from a barely visible dot moving against the starfield to a dazzling array of light.
“Son of a bitch!”
Beka swung ship and fed power astern to brake and travel in a new direction. The other ship’s weapons—slow plasma bolts, with a target offset calculated on her previous course—missed, but barely.
“Bastard’s got pulsed-port weapons and more power in ‘em than
anything
in Jein’s,” she said over the link to the guns. “And it’s not a Republic ship. Whose?”
“Magebuilt,” came Jessan’s voice in reply. “Has to be.”
LeSoit spoke up from the other gun bubble. “Well, now you know what all those resonators and engine parts were for.”
“I could have waited to find out,” said Jessan. “For years, preferably.”
Beka ignored the back-and-forth in the gun bubbles and concentrated on matching course with the Magebuilt vessel. She poured on all the power she could, trying to outrun him. Bit by bit, the sensors on the control panel showed her pulling ahead.
“Come on, girl, you can do it,” she murmured to the ship. On the PPI scope, the dots that were the homers stopped their relative motion toward her and began to show down-Doppler. “This is where you get to shine.”
Warhammer
did indeed have better engines than the pursuing ship, even if her guns were smaller. When the hostile had vanished off the scope astern, Beka turned back onto her original course—a straight-line realspace drive, clean enough to serve as a run-to-jump anywhere but the Net.
Then the No Jump light winked out.
“The Inner Net just went down,” Beka said quietly over the intraship link. “Stand by for hyperspace entry.”
She fed a last burst of power to the realspace engines, then cut in the hyperdrive and jumped for the Outer Net.
 
NAMMERIN: DOWNTOWN NAMPORT RSF NAVERSEY: HYPERSPACE TRANSIT TO THE NET
 
N
OTHING IS the same anymore
, thought Klea, as she moved through the figures of the exercise that Owen called the ShadowDance.
Everything is changing. Even me.
She hadn’t been back to Freling’s Bar since the day she’d found Owen battered and only semiconscious in the alley and had brought him home. The apprentice Adept, if that was what he really was, had returned to his upstairs apartment before the end of the week; but he’d left behind an envelope with her name on it. After she saw how much money the envelope contained, she climbed the stairs to knock on his door.
Owen’s apartment, when he let her in, was tidy and clean, but almost as bare as her own had been when she first rented it. She held the envelope out to him.
“You didn’t have any business leaving all this.”
He made no move to take the envelope from her extended hand. “I think my life is worth at least that much. To me, anyway.”
She let her hand fall back to her side. “What am I supposed to do with all this money?”
He shrugged. “It’s not a lot, really.”
After a moment she realized that he meant it. She tried a second time to explain. “It’s enough to pay the rent for a month.”
“I know,” he said. “You need time to learn, and you’ll never have it while you’re scrabbling to find the rent money.”
“Hooking for it, you mean.”
He shrugged again, unshocked. “Whatever.”
She gave up arguing with him. The next day—or, to be exact, early the next morning—when Owen returned from his nighttime job, she was waiting outside his apartment door.
“You said you could teach me,” she said. “Well, here I am. Let’s see how much I can learn in a month.”
That had been almost three weeks ago, and she already knew that she wasn’t going back to Freling’s when the month was over. What she was going to do instead, she didn’t know yet; she told herself that she would make her plans later, after she’d learned all of whatever it was that Owen had to teach. Meanwhile, she practiced her ShadowDance routines the way he’d taught them to her on the first day, and came faithfully to his upstairs apartment each morning for another lesson.
Sometimes she brought food with her as well, to supplement the frozen or dehydrated quick-meals that were Owen’s idea of cooking. On this particular morning, she’d brought a fresh loaf of grain-meal bread and a packet of thin-sliced tusker-ox sausage from Ulle’s corner store. The bread and sausage were in a straw basket on the counter in the kitchen alcove, waiting for her to finish the lesson.
At the end of the ShadowDance sequence, she turned to where Owen leaned against the counter watching her.
“Well?” she said. “Better?”
“Better,” he said. “Not perfect, but better.”
“What happens when it’s perfect?”
“It’s never perfect,” he told her. “But when it’s as close to perfect as you can make it, then we go on to the second sequence, and after that, to the third. Meanwhile—are you still having trouble with other people’s thoughts?”
“Only sometimes,” she said, thrusting aside the prospect of sequence following after sequence all the way to infinity. “And it’s not so bad when it does happen.”
“Knowing you’re not crazy is the first step,” he told her. “Discipline is the second.”
“Discipline. Is that what this ShadowDance stuff is for?”
He looked pleased, the way her teachers back in lower school had used to look when she figured out something without being told the answer. “Discipline, yes. Among other things.”
“What sort of other things?”
“It depends on how you do it,” he said. “Watch.”
He stepped away from the counter into the center of the room and ran through the first few steps of the routine she had been doing only a few moments earlier.
“Do it like that,” he said, “and you have the basic move, just like I’ve been teaching you.”
She nodded. “I see it.”
“But you can also do it like this.” Almost before she saw it, he had gone through the entire sequence again—not just faster, but harder as well, with an edge to it that she didn’t entirely understand. “If you do, whoever happens to be standing in the way is going to be badly hurt.”
She thought for a moment about the ShadowDance’s other movements; now that she knew what to look for, she could see that all of them had the same ability to do harm.
“Useful,” she said finally. “I think I liked the routine better when I thought it was all just for pretty, though.”
She half-expected him to disapprove, but to her surprise he smiled again. “The Dance for its own sake is always the best. Which brings us to the third reason for learning it.”
“
Another
one? How many reasons are there, anyway?”
“As many as there are Dancers,” he said. “Most Adepts find that the moves themselves can function as an aid to meditation.”
“A what?”
He laughed under his breath. “It’s just a matter of doing the moves very slowly—about one-quarter speed—and not thinking of anything else at all while you’re doing them.”
Klea considered the idea. Coming from most people, the instruction not to think about anything else would be just another way of telling her to concentrate on what she was doing. But Owen wasn’t most people; if he said “don’t think about anything else,” then that was what he meant.
“It sounds hard,” she said finally.
“Do you want to try? I think you’re ready.”
She hesitated. “What happens if I don’t get it right?”
“Happens? Nothing. You try again, or try something else, whichever works better.”
“Oh.” She looked down at the floor for a moment, then lifted her head and began the Dance. A second later, she broke off in midmove. “Do I need to keep my eyes closed?”
“You can if it helps,” Owen told her. “The real trick, though, is to leave them open but not see anything.”
After a few more moves she felt the pattern of the Dance grow smoother. Time, always her enemy until now, seemed to float away from under her, leaving only the Dance moving like motes of dust in a sunbeam. Then she was losing touch with the pattern, dropping back into time—and heavy darkness, sudden and unexpected, came down on her like the weight of all the world’s despair.
She cried out and gripped her head with both hands.
 
On board the courier ship, Llannat Hyfid stretched and swung her legs down off the acceleration couch.
Naversey
was in the subdued-lighting portion of the ship’s day; the passenger compartment was dark except for the lighted alcove holding the cha’a pot and the water cooler, and the blue safety lights that dotted the floor and bulkheads. Other than Llannat, the only passenger awake was the reservist with service ribbons from the Magewar, who sat with his head bent over a lighted datapad.
At the sound of Llannat’s boots hitting the deckplates he looked up from his work. “Still awake, Mistress—?”
He made the title into a question, and she realized that he couldn’t see her nametag in the dim light.
“Hyfid,” she supplied for him, while squinting to make out his name in return. The tag on his tunic pocket read VINHALYN, in block lettering of an older style than she was used to seeing. She suspected that the tag was a relic of his active service, saved over the years while the rest of his uniform was lost or discarded. “I was asleep, but I woke up again—I’ve been in transit for so long that my sleep patterns don’t know nap time from breakfast.” .
“Ah,” he said. “That explains it. I used to have the knack myself of falling asleep whenever there wasn’t anything better to do, but I’m afraid I’ve been away from the service for too long. So I improve the hour by working, instead.”
“Sorry,” she said. “Then I won’t interrupt you.”
“No, no.” He cleared the datapad with a touch of the stylus. “Grading papers is marginally better than insomnia, but only marginally.”
“You’re a teacher?”
He nodded. “To be precise, I hold the Diregis Chair of Contemporary History at Prime University. Unfortunately for the students in my midweek seminar, I also hold a reserve commission in the Space Force—which I had all but forgotten, but which the service apparently did not.”
“The Space Force never forgets,” said Llannat. “What do they want with a historian, though?”
“What they want from all of us, I presume,” he said. “Expertise. We are all specialists in one thing or another. In my case, the languages and culture of the prewar Mageworlds.”
Llannat wondered what Vinhalyn would say if he knew that she herself had once encountered a Magelord.
He’d envy me, if I know these academic types
.
“That’s not a very common specialty.” she said. “How did you come to pick it in the first place?”
He smiled. “Oddly enough, it was because of the War.”
“You were in the Space Force back then?” She could see from his ribbons that he had been, but asking a question seemed like a good way to get the rest of the story.
“Oh, yes. I’m Ilarnan, originally, and we were hard hit in the war’s early stages, so like a lot of the young people my age, I joined up as soon as I could. Unlike most of them, I actually got to visit the Mageworlds before my time was over.”
“That’s what made you decide to be a scholar?”
“Yes,” he said. “I was there during the pacification period. The Republic was doing its best to reduce the scientific and industrial base of the Mageworlds to a level where they wouldn’t pose a threat to the rest of the galaxy, and the Adepts’ Guild was hunting down the Magelords and the lesser Circle Mages for execution out of hand—and it came to me that I was watching the systematic destruction of a culture fully as complex and as civilized as our own, cognate to ours and yet unimaginably alien.”
He smiled briefly. “I must apologize for the burst of rhetoric at the end. It’s a speech I’ve found myself having to make a number of times over the past twenty years or so. I’m afraid my academic colleagues find me a bit of a crackpot on that particular subject.”
“So when the Mageworlds Patrol Fleet runs into an abandoned Deathwing raider,” Llannat said, “you’re naturally on the Space Force’s short list of people to haul back to active duty.”
Vinhalyn nodded. “Somebody will be needed to translate any documents and records on board the derelict. And the fact that they need my particular skill suggests that the ship is an extremely old one—otherwise a knowledge of contemporary Mageworlds dialects would be enough.”
He pointed with his stylus at the couch where the younger reservist lay asleep. “Our rather self-important friend over there is in a similar position. Unless his nametag is lying to us, he is in civilian life a top-ranked data-recovery expert, specializing in the retrieval of information from obsolete or alien systems.”
Llannat looked over at their gently snoring fellow-passenger. “Probably got his start in life as a comptech,” she said without much sympathy. “And now the Space Force, bless its hard little heart, has shown up to collect on the debt.”
“Precisely,” said Vinhalyn. “Of the rest of us, our two warrant officers are the easiest to explain—a hull technician and a weapons specialist should be able to cover most of the raider’s physical systems between them. The presence of a senior officer in the medical branch is more problematical; that is, until one remembers that prior to the War the Mageworlds had made progress in the biochemical sciences far beyond our own current state of knowledge.
“Which leaves,” he concluded, “you.”
“Me?”
He nodded. “You’re quite a mystery in your own right, didn’t you realize?”
“Uh … no.”
“Yes, indeed,” he said. “Since we already have a medic on the team, one must assume that you are here in your role as an Adept, in order to counter any traps or devices the Mages who built and abandoned the Deathwing might have left aboard her. But if that is in fact the case, why should the Guild send a comparatively young and untried Adept when it still has active members with experience from the War?”
“I wish I knew,” said Llannat uncomfortably. “All I can figure is that I was easy for Space Force to get hold of—just a little matter of changing my orders at the last minute, and no need to ask Master Ransome for any special favors.”
“Quite a plausible theory,” said Vinhalyn. “Errec Ransome and Jos Metadi are friends of long standing, but the same can’t be said about the Adepts’ Guild and the High Command. Mutual mistrust, I’m afraid, is more the order of the day.”
She thought about how Ari had always regarded her a trifle askance whenever she chose to wear Adept’s blacks instead of her Space Force uniform. “I’ve run into that myself.”

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