Starpilot's Grave: Book Two of Mageworlds (29 page)

Read Starpilot's Grave: Book Two of Mageworlds Online

Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

BOOK: Starpilot's Grave: Book Two of Mageworlds
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Beka turned away to look for more couriers to escort. Over the link, the voices from the gun bubbles went back and forth in her ears: “Homers, close!” … “Locked on.”
… “Fire.” … “Four more hostiles inbound.”
A power satellite exploded in orbit below them. Far away, one of the Space Force destroyers was breaking up, with beams of energy flashing around the pieces.
“I think our side is losing,” said LeSoit. “Time for us to get out of here.”
“Hell with that,” Beka said. “We still have engines and guns.”
A few seconds later an explosion sounded from farther aft, and the loss-of-pressure alarm sounded. The power-level indicator on the control panel showed the weapons systems flat.
“Nyls, Ignac’—report!”
“I’m still here,” said LeSoit; and a moment later Jessan said, “No response from the guns, switching to override.” A pause. “Secondary power available, clear. We’re up.”
Energy beams lanced out from the dorsal bubble as he spoke—Beka saw them connect with a Mage fighter. The warfleet’s transports must have come through and started dropping off space-and-atmosphere craft.
Then another heavy blow made the
’Hammer
groan and tremble. Beka didn’t need to look at the sensors this time.
“Shield hit,” she said. “We’re hurt.”
“How bad?” Jessan asked from the dorsal gun.
“Bad—damage control panels report more compartments open to vacuum, and the rear shields at fifty-percent power. The ventral shield is going up and down erratically. Secondary power for the guns is fading fast, too.”
“Another one like that and we’re gone,” said Jessan. “We can’t protect ourselves and we can’t shoot. I agree with Gentlesir LeSoit—it’s time to get the hell out of here.”
“It was worth taking hits to let the couriers get away,” Beka said. “But if we stay here now, all we can do now is die like the rest of them.”
Her voice caught for a moment in her throat; she mastered it and went on. “Commencing run-to-jump. Clear the way with fire. Here we go.”
 
On the watchtower of the Retreat, the chill of evening deepened. An apprentice came, apparently unsummoned, with cloaks of dark wool for Ochemet and Master Ransome, and then soundlessly vanished again. The night was deep, with a far-off stars showing diamond-bright.
An hour had passed, by Ochemet’s chronometer, before Ransome spoke again. His voice sounded weary, and somehow deeply sad.
“We all must follow the paths of our own choosing. I thought for a while that when I walked this part of my path, I would do so in the company of Jos Metadi, who was my friend and captain before. I see now that it is not to be. But you will accompany me.”
Damnedest invitation to the dance I ever heard.
Ochemet thought. He swallowed and wet his lips. “What path are you talking about?”
“The time has come to fight the Mages again—this time to their complete destruction.”
“You’ll never convince the Grand Council,” Ochemet said. “The Mageworlds have been crippled for decades.”
Ransome shook his head. “We will be pilot and copilot once more, fighting them.”
Ochemet felt cold. Adepts could see into the future, some people said. Adepts didn’t make any sense and they never had, said others; they saw everything from some twisted angle that made everything they told you come out like gibberish.
“I’m honored by the idea,” he told the Guild Master. “But I’m afraid it’s not very likely.”
“As you will.”
Silence fell again. Later, when he thought back on their conversation, Ochemet would remember the Adept’s black-cloaked shoulders stiffening, and his head beginning to turn, an instant before the sudden efflorescence of blue-white light as a new star blossomed in the southern sky.
Now, though, he had no thought for anything beyond his own astonishment and Master Ransome’s voice: “That is what you came here to see.”
Ochemet was already heading for the stairs.
“That was Number Two Power Sat we just saw go up,” he said over his shoulder. “I’ve got to get back to Prime.”
Ransome moved swiftly, and the hand he laid on Ochemet’s arm had a weight to it that halted the general in midstride.
“I’m afraid that’s impossible,” he said gently. “The Retreat has been sealed. We will fight the Mages in a different way than you see now.”
The Adept turned and vanished into darkness, leaving Ochemet dumbfounded and alone on the tower, watching the sky while the hours of the night went past. Toward dawn, a meteor shot across the sky in a trail of glowing flame: Power-Sat Two, he supposed, burning up on reentry. Other than that, he saw and heard nothing else.
 
NAMMERIN: NAMPORT RSF
NAVERSEY
: THE OUTER NET
 
K
LEA SANTRENY lay on her back and looked up at the ceiling over her bed. The room was dark, but she couldn’t sleep. Too many years of working by night and sleeping by day had made a night person of her. If she lived to be a hundred and twenty—if she somehow managed to do what Owen claimed she could, and transformed herself from a backwater farm girl and working-class whore into Mistress Klea Santreny, Adept—even then she would still find herself restless at midnight.
The weather in Namport wasn’t helping any. All the windows in her small apartment stood open, as did the louvered wooden doors to the pocket-sized balcony, but no wind stirred. The thick, humid air felt the same temperature when she drew it into her lungs as when she let it out again; and in spite of the shower she’d taken before going to bed her skin felt slick with body oil and sweat.
Outside, the atmosphere was wet and hazy, without the cooling relief of a true rain. Light from the streetlamps made the sky beyond the windows into a dark grey smear. In the still air, the noises of the city had a distant, muted clarity: the steady background purr of traffic from the center of town; a drift of voices mixed with dance music; the deep boom and long, growling rumble of a ship landing at the port.
Sighing, Klea pushed aside the sheet and got up. She went to the kitchen nook and filled a glass with cold water from the sink. After a moment’s thought she took a couple of ice chunks from the cool-box and dropped them in as well. She drank half the water straight off, then carried the glass with her over to the balcony—the air was a little cooler there—and set it on the wooden railing while she stood looking at the night sky.
Between the low haze and the glare from the port, she couldn’t see any stars. Thinking back, she realized that she hadn’t seen them properly more than a handful of times in the years since she’d left the farm. In the hinterlands, where the farms were miles apart and the houselights went out early, you could look up on almost any clear night and see all the stars you wanted. Not here, though. You had to look at the flat grey-blackness overhead and take it on faith that somewhere past it the starfield glittered … .
Glittered in constellations whose names she could still remember after all these years in the city: the Yoke, the Tree, the Leaping Frog.
And now the clustered stars broke apart. The patterns above her altered and took on shapes she’d never seen before. She was looking at the sky of another place—she knew this, somehow—but whether it represented time past, time present, or time to come she didn’t know.
As she watched, an insignificant star suddenly flared into a ball of blue-white light. Reflexively, she threw up her arm to shield her eyes … .
The glass of water she’d put down on the balcony railing tipped over when her elbow struck it, and a second later she heard it smash against the sidewalk below. Slowly she brought her arm down again to her side. The sky over Namport looked as flat and hazy as ever.
Klea gripped her rough wooden railing with both hands. “That wasn’t just somebody’s stray nightmare,” she whispered.
Her voice sounded tight and shaky, even to her. She had a right to be scared; she could tell the difference between the hallucinatory images that meant she was picking up on the thoughts of other people, and something like this.
“I need to talk to Owen.”
But Owen wasn’t home yet; he was still at the portside bathhouse, operating the big laundry machine that kept the establishment supplied with clean sheets and towels. She went back into her apartment, brewed a pot of hot
ghil
, and sat at the kitchen table drinking cup after steaming cup in spite of the humid weather.
Something bad is happening somewhere. Something really bad, and I just watched it begin.
 
Llannat was doing the ShadowDance again in the Naversey’s passenger compartment. She knew that the others were watching her—either covertly, like the med service captain and the two warrants, or openly, like Govantic the data specialist—but she went through the familiar movements anyway. If things in the Net had happened as she feared, keeping herself calm and well practiced was more important than what people thought.
Lots of floating metal. Ebannha gone. Nobody answering on comms. Only one thing it could be, and we all know it
.
The Mages have broken through the Net.
The voice on the bulkhead speaker cut through her concentration. “All hands, strap in for a high-g burn. We’ve spotted something promising and we’re going to scoot over for a closer look.”
Clipping the staff back onto her belt, Llannat made her way to the acceleration couch and strapped herself in. The bulkhead speaker said, “Stand by for acceleration,” and a second later inertia pressed her down into the cushions.
Pilot doesn’t believe in messing around
, she thought breathlessly. Her weight increased and increased until she could feel each separate bone in her body.
Five gravities, maybe even six
. The weight stopped for a moment as the pilot executed a skew-flip, came back again as the courier ship decelerated, then ceased.
The speaker crackled on again. “Lieutenant Vinhalyn, Mistress Hyfid, to the bridge.”
She unstrapped and accompanied the reservist-historian forward to the
Naversey
’s cockpit. The starfield outside the viewscreens appeared the same, to her untrained eye, as the one she’d seen when the courier popped out of hyper, but the pilot and copilot were looking considerably more sure of themselves.
Vinhalyn, it seemed, had noticed the change as well. “What have you got?”
“Well,” said the pilot, “when we couldn’t find
Ebannha
anywhere we started doing a helical scan Netward—Mistress Hyfid said ‘go on,’ and that was about as ‘on’ as we could come up with—”
“Yes, yes,” the historian said. “And?”
“Now we’re picking up some more scrap metal on the scans. We thought maybe you could give us some guidance on which bits we should look at.”
Vinhalyn glanced over at Llannat. “Mistress?”
I don’t know anything about interpreting sensor data,
Llannat thought.
I got “familiarized” with the readouts in basic training, but that doesn’t count for much … .
She stepped forward and looked at the monitor anyway. Several different contacts were showing up, and all of them looked about the same.
“There,” she heard herself saying. She tapped the screen with her fingernail. “That one.”
“That’s outside of the path we’re checking,” the pilot protested. He indicated two other marks. “I was thinking of these two things, here and here.”
She shook her head. “No. You need to check the other one.”
“It’s only a little out of our way,” said Vinhalyn to the pilot. “Take the time and look it over.”
“Your call,” said the pilot. “Here we go.”
He changed
Naversey
’s course to bring them closer to the sensor contact. A couple of minutes later the target showed up in the courier’s viewscreens, first as a bright dot, then as a shape that grew darker and lighter in the starlight as it tumbled.
“Fighter,” the pilot said. “No emissions. Another damned starpilot’s grave.”
“One of ours, too,” said the copilot. “Poor bastard. Let’s get back onto our scan path.”
“No,” said Llannat. She touched the sensor readout screen again. “What’s this new bit of stuff here?”
“Probably just another chunk of scrap metal,” said the pilot. “But we might as well check it out too.”
This time, when the courier ship came into visual range, the sensor target wasn’t tumbling in space. It was stable and undamaged, a sleek, dark-hulled starship with a shape like a flattened teardrop: a Magebuilt Deathwing.
 
As soon as the sun came up Klea began watching for Owen. She didn’t want to go out onto the balcony again; she was half-afraid that if she did, she’d have another uninvited vision like the last one. Instead she listened for Owen’s footsteps on the stairs—nobody else in the building had his characteristic light, even tread—and as soon as he had come home, she left her own apartment and hurried up to knock on his door.
He opened it almost the moment her knuckles struck against the wood. “Klea—what’s wrong?”
“I saw something last night.”
“‘Saw’?” he said. “Are you sure?”
He moved aside to let her come into his apartment as he spoke, and closed the door behind her. The room was just as bare as the last time she’d been in it, and still didn’t have any furniture that hadn’t come with the lease. Even the sheets and towels, although clean, had a threadbare look to them, as if they’d been purchased secondhand as an afterthought.
Klea sat down on the wobbly chair. Owen leaned against the counter in the kitchen nook and said again, “Are you sure?”
She could tell from the way he spoke that he meant something more than the usual kind of seeing. “It wasn’t a hallucination,” she said. “I haven’t had one of those in weeks, not since you showed me how to keep other people’s thoughts from leaking into mine. This was different.”
“How did it happen?”
“I was on the balcony,” she said. “It was hot, and I couldn’t sleep, so I was out there drinking ice water and looking at the stars—at where the stars would have been, anyway, if you could see them—and then I really
was
looking at them, only the patterns were all wrong. Then one of the stars went all bright and too hot to look at, and I was back on the balcony again. But that wasn’t what scared me. What scares me is that I know it really happened. Or will happen, or is happening. But I don’t know the time, and I don’t know where.”
He looked at her for a while without saying anything, his expression serious. “That was a seeing, all right,” he said finally. “Congratulations. You’ve got a rare and very inconvenient talent.”
“Inconvenient?”
He nodded. “An Adept I once knew used to compare it to getting anonymous notes in the mail. Reliable enough to be upsetting, but not trainable enough to be useful.”
“Can you … ‘see’ … like that?”
“No,” he said. “I can follow chains of probability and tell you which way they lead, and I can tell you when somebody is or isn’t in synch with the flow of things—what most people would call having good luck, or bad—but when it comes to
knowing
something, the way you just did, then I’m as future-blind as the next person.”
“Oh,” she said.
She sat without talking for a moment, one hand rubbing the old white scars on the other wrist, and wondered why she got to see trouble coming for people somewhere she’d never even been, when she couldn’t see it for herself.
If I’d known what I was heading for when I left the farm, I’d probably have stayed home and done the cooking and mending like a good girl … no food and no place to stay and nothing I knew how to do except for the damned farmwork, and then along comes Freling with his “business proposition” …
“‘Inconvenient talent,’” she said. “Yeah.”
His eyes were dark and sad, as though he’d caught a glimpse of her thoughts without meaning to. “I’m sorry,” he said.
She shrugged. “Not your fault.”
She paused, and spoke aloud the other thought that had come to her while she sat there. “The thing is—now that I know that something bad is going on, what am I supposed to
do
?”
 
The Deathwing for which
Naversey
had come so far was hanging in the courier’s viewscreens like a nightmare given shape. In spite of the name, Llannat Hyfid saw nothing avian about the Magebuilt vessel. It made her think instead of some dark, hungry creature of the deep ocean, gliding silently through the cold water and searching for prey.
“There it is,” she said.
The pilot nodded. “Whatever you say. Let’s hope it’s the one we’re looking for, and not part of whatever took out
Ebannha
.”
“Visual configuration and sensor profile match the data we got from the first investigation.” said the copilot. “So it’s either our ship, or another one from the same class.”
“It’s an archaic design,” Lieutenant Vinhalyn said. “A raid-and-reconnaissance vessel—similar to the ones the Mageworlders used at the start of the last war, but much older.”
“‘The last war.’” said the pilot. “I don’t think I like the sound of that … . We’ll make a standard spiral pass around the thing and investigate. See if we get our silly heads blown off.”

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