Starpilot's Grave: Book Two of Mageworlds (33 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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“No voicelink?”
“No.”
“What the hell’s going on?”
“That’s what everybody wants to know,” said the clerk. He looked at Ari with a sour expression. “I suppose you want me to tell you what happened.”
“That’s right.”
The clerk tightened his lips briefly and then said, “Okay. First thing, about a week ago all the hi-comms went down. Ours and everybody else’s. We figured it was trouble in the orbital relays at first, and sent a repair crew up to work them over. The repairs didn’t do any good. Meanwhile there’s no word getting into the system that doesn’t come by ship.”
Ari nodded. “I’d heard a rumor about the hi-comms back in Infabede. Didn’t have time to check it out, though. So what happened to the Space Force?”
“I’m getting there,” said the clerk. “About three days after the hi-comms died, we got a Space Force courier ship on a fast run from Galcen Prime. And I do mean
fast
—she’d overridden her hyperdrive and damn near went nova on the dropout, and she was squawking her news all over the lightspeed bands on her way into the system, just in case she didn’t make it.”
“News from Prime?” Ari tried to conceal his growing apprehension. He’d been expecting to hear word of trouble in the Infabede sector, not of some unspecified disaster at the heart of the Central Worlds. “How bad?”
“If it’s true,” the clerk said, “then it’s as bad as it gets. The pilot of the courier said that the Mageworlders were attacking Galcen in force—how the hell they’d managed to get a fleet through the Net he didn’t say—and that with hi-comms down and no help coming Prime was about to go under. That was at about midnight local. By dawn, Space Force was gone.”
Standing orders of some kind,
Ari realized.
Somewhere in the CO’s files was an eyes-only folder labeled “What To Do In Case We Lose Galcen Prime,” and now they’ve gone and done it.
“Do you think the story was true?” he asked.
“If it wasn’t, those pilots nearly fried themselves for nothing,” said the clerk. “And none of our regular cargo runs from Galcen have shown up since the courier came in.”
“But you’re still sending hardcopy mail back?”
“We’re sending,” the clerk told him. “It may not get past the sorting depot on Cashel, but we’ll do our best. As long as you realize that under the circumstances, timely delivery isn’t guaranteed.”
“Right,” said Ari.
His Mandeynan quarter-mark probably wasn’t enough to pay for a hardcopy message anyway. Just the same, he had to do something with the news from Infabede. After a moment’s thought, he went over to the other desk comp and began keying in a letter:
View all traffic from COMREPSPAFOR INFABEDE with suspicion. Ari Rosselin-Metadi, LCDR, SFMS, sends.
 
He pulled out the sheet of flimsy and took it back over to the clerk.
“Here,” he said. “This is what I was going to send to Galcen. Make up your own mind what to do with it. I’m going in to town.”
 
With the return of basic life-support systems, the interior lighting on the Magebuilt ship had come back as well. The ship’s passageways, while still narrow and mazelike, no longer gaped like dark open mouths in the beam from a p-suit’s handlamp. In the white light of the glows—not quite the same color mix as Space Force’s Galcen-based standard, but close enough for comfort—the Deathwing turned out to be a thing of metal and glass and plastic like any other starship.
Almost like
, thought Llannat. The fact that there was life in the glows didn’t reassure her as much as it should have.
Those lights ought to have burnt out centuries ago. Except for the fact that somebody turned them all off.
That was what made her feel cold, even inside the pressure suit: a picture she couldn’t shake, of a shadowy figure going through the empty ship from compartment to compartment, turning off all the light switches like a thrifty householder bound away for an afternoon in town.
Somebody was expecting to come back. And they wanted the ship to be working when they got here
.
She wet her lips—the newly awakened systems kept the air in the Deathwing bone-dry—and said, “It looks like most of the compartments we’ve been through so far are pretty standard. Berthing, the galley … I wonder if their space rations were any worse than ours?”
“I’m not hungry enough to try them,” said Vinhalyn. “We can omit the desperate measures until they become necessary.”
“I’m with you on that,” Cantrel said. “Before you guys showed up, I was thinking we’d have to crack open some of the packets in the galley and try them out. Not a fun idea, believe me, when you don’t know how to tell the powdered porridge from the stuff that opens up clogged drains.”
“I suppose not,” murmured Llannat. In spite of the lights and the comforting background hum of a working life-support system, she was finding it hard to shake a continuing sense of oppression. It clung around her as it had from the time she’d stepped aboard, and seemed to intensify as she and Vinhalyn followed Cantrel forward, their magnetic boot soles clicking and shuffling against the deckplates.
Clearing her throat, she said, “Tammas—did you and the rest of the boarding party come up here much?”
Cantrel shook his head. “Not if we could help it. Once or twice to see where a power line went, but that’s all. It’s too damned spooky in there.”
They came at last to the vacuum-tight doors of the Deathwing’s cockpit. The ensign pulled a slice of plastic out of his p-suit’s cargo pouch and gave it to Lieutenant Vinhalyn.
“This’ll get you in,” he said. “The key slot’s over there. But if you don’t mind, I think I’ll stay outside.”
Llannat watched uneasily as Vinhalyn put the slice of plastic into the lock. She could feel Ensign Cantrel watching the back of her neck—expecting her to work wonders, no doubt, and provide marvels of explanation. But her sense of foreboding continued to grow.
She knew that what afflicted her wasn’t the simple prospect of looking at what remained of the Deathwing’s pilot and copilot. She’d seen worse things than that as a medic; she’d done worse things than that herself, when she went with Beka Rosselin-Metadi to Darvell. This was different.
There’s something waiting for me in there
.
The door slid open. The Deathwing’s cockpit was still dark; nobody had come by to bring the lights back up after the systems had come on line. Vinhalyn had already stepped inside; she could hear him muttering to himself as he fumbled to locate the switch for the cockpit illumination.
“Aha!” he said after a moment, and the lights came on.
Llannat forced herself to step inside, only to find the scene oddly prosaic for something so bloody—it was work for the Med Service pathologist who’d come out with
Naversey,
not for an Adept.
“We need to put these two in a stasis box,” said Llannat. “If we’ve got one.”
“We can rig something, I’m sure,” said Vinhalyn absently. He was standing in front of the Deathwing’s viewscreens, bending closer to peer at the dark, blurry characters scrawled upon the glass. “This, now—
this
is truly interesting.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s a message,” said Vinhalyn, straightening up again. “Not to just anybody who might come by, either. It’s in the second person familiar, and the writer speaks as an equal to someone who has already been introduced, not to a stranger of unknown rank.”
Llannat moved to stand beside him. “What does it say?”
Vinhalyn turned from the viewscreen and gave her a strange and rather wary look. “Roughly translated? Something on the order of ‘Adept from the forest world: Find the Domina; tell her what thou hast seen.’”
 
NAMMERIN: DOWNTOWN NAMPORT OPHEL NEARSPACE
 
I
T WAS early evening in Namport, and the streetlamps were coming on one by one. In her walk-up apartment in the old quarter, Klea Santreny twitched aside a flimsy gauze curtain and looked out at the corner below. She was glad to be inside tonight. For the past three days, gutter-choking rains had alternated with steaming heat, turning Namport’s mucky thoroughfares into rancid ox-wallows. Tonight was one of the steamers; she could smell the mud from four floors up.
Nobody ever told me that the big city was going to smell five times worse than the farm ever did. Maybe if they had—
She turned away from the window. I still wouldn’t have believed it. If there’s anybody on this planet who’s more stupid-stubborn than I was, I haven’t found them yet. Five years at Freling’s Bar, and it took going crazy to make me wise up enough to get out. I just wish I knew where it is I’m getting to … .
She hadn’t been getting much of anywhere lately, not even in the most literal meaning of the phrase. Ever since the night when she’d seen a star explode against a backdrop of constellations that didn’t shine over Nammerin, she’d been restless and uneasy.
Owen had taken her uneasiness seriously. “On a planet with a working Mage-Circle, an Adept has to be careful. And so does an apprentice.”
“I’m not an Adept,” she’d said. “Or an apprentice either. I’m just—”
“You’re not ‘just’ anything.” He’d sounded almost angry—and worried, which unsettled her even more. “You’re powerfully sensitive to this kind of stuff, and the Circle knows it. If they decide you’re a threat to them, you’re in trouble.”
With his warnings fresh in her mind, she’d stayed close to home, not going much farther abroad than Ulle’s All-Night Grocery. Even that, as it turned out, was enough to increase her sense of something formless and imponderable hanging over the city.
The streets were full of weird rumors: that the hi-comm news feeds from off-planet had been down hard for three days now, and the Namport Holovid Network was patching together old stories from five or six months ago to keep people from noticing; that the Space Force Med Station had closed its gates and canceled all leaves; that Suivi Point had seceded from the Republic and the outplanets were revolting. Even the bad weather was generally conceded to be some kind of plot.
One more reason to be glad you don’t work at Freling’s anymore,
she told herself.
This is the sort of night that brings out the real sickos.
An urgent knocking at the door of her apartment broke into her thoughts. She hurried over to the peephole and looked out. It was Owen, to her considerable surprise; he’d gone off to his job at the laundry more than an hour ago, and shouldn’t have been back until morning. She unlocked the door and let him in.
“What’s wrong?” she demanded as soon as he was inside.
He didn’t give her a direct answer. Instead he waited until she’d shut the door behind him before asking, “Do you want to go to the Retreat?”
She stared at him. “Right
now
?”
“That’s right,” he said. “The Planetary Assembly is going to shut down the port at noon tomorrow.”
“They’re going to—where did you hear that?”
“At work. One of the bathhouse regulars is a clerk in the Customs Office. Klea, you’re going to have to make up your mind tonight. Do you want to go or stay?”
“Go,” she said without stopping to think. Now that she had to choose, the choice was surprisingly easy.
“Then pack what you need. We have to get to the port as soon as possible. It’s going to be a mob scene by morning.”
She was already stuffing clean clothes and underwear into the ancient day pack that she’d brought with her from the farm all that long time ago.
I kept telling myself I ought to throw it out,
she thought somewhat dizzily;
it’s a good thing I never listened.
“Is there a ship in for Galcen?” she asked aloud.
“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. Once we manage to get off-planet, then we can start thinking about Galcen.”
“What are we going to do about money?”
He made an impatient gesture with one hand. “Don’t worry about the money—I’ll take care of it. First we have to find a ship.”
She sealed up the pack and slung it onto her shoulders. “Whatever you say. Let’s go.”
“One more thing first,” he said. He looked straight at her, and his hazel eyes were so dark a green they seemed almost black. When he spoke again, his voice took on a more formal cadence. “Kela Santreny—do you come to the Adepts for instruction only, or will you take the apprenticeship that is offered to you?”
“What do you mean, ‘take the apprenticeship’?”
“Answer yes or no,” he said. “Please. It’s important.”
She stood there for a minute, feeling her life changing around her like a forest whipped by the wind.
Everything else I’ve ever done, I could back out of. What I say now is going to make things different forever.
She drew a deep breath.
“Yes,” she said.
Owen let out an exhalation of relief. “Good. Now that you’re a Guild apprentice, if anything happens to me or we get separated, you can ask for help from any Adept or Guildhouse in the civilized galaxy.”
He paused, and glanced about her small apartment as if searching for something. “You’ll need a staff.”
“What for? You don’t have one.”
“That’s different … my teacher on Galcen keeps mine.”
He crossed the room to the kitchen nook in a couple of quick strides, and picked up the broom that stood in the corner: a plain, local-made thing, the sort of broom that farmers put together out of
grrch
wood and grain-straw and sold for a quarter-credit apiece when they came to town.
With seeming ease he snapped off the brush and offered the stick to Klea. She wasn’t surprised to see that both ends appeared equally smooth and even; anybody who could break
grrch
wood bare-handed could probably make the broken part look like anything he wanted it to.
“Take this,” he said. Once again the words sounded like part of a formal ceremony. “Hold it and cherish it as you do your honor. Wield it in truth and justice, and as the patterns of the universe direct it and you together. By the staff an Adept is known; let neither one disgrace the other.”
She took the broomstick—the staff, she supposed she ought to call it now—and held it awkwardly before her in both hands. “What am I supposed to do with this?”
“The ShadowDance, to begin with,” he said. “It also makes a decent walking stick. And more things, that you can learn when you have time. But now we have to hurry. If the port gets too crowded the Assembly may decide to close it early.”
 
Above the plane of the Opheline system, far to the Netward of the Central Worlds, the fabric of realspace stretched and shifted as two ships dropped out of hyper. Several tense seconds later, a third ship followed.
In RSF
Karipavo’s
Combat Information Center, the duty sensor analyst looked up from his board and announced to the compartment at large, “
Lachiel
’s made it through.”
A ragged cheer went up, and Commodore Jervas Gil, the ’Pavo’s acting CO, let out a sigh of relief. If three ships were all that was left of his squadron, they were at least his, and he was still their commodore.
“Signal
Lachiel
,” he told the communications tech. “Ask if the voyage repairs to their realspace engines are holding up well enough for them to make Ophel.”
It would be good for
Lachiel
’s pride, he reflected, if the crew could bring their ship in without assistance—but in the long run it wouldn’t matter if they needed the help of a spacedock tug. After the battle at the Net, when
Lachiel
had taken a crippling hit to the realspace engines and lost airtight integrity in over half her compartments, what counted was that the third ship of Gil’s much-diminished fleet was here at all.
“
Lachiel
reports that she can make it all right if we take it low and slow,” reported the comms tech.
“Very well,” said Gil. “Low and slow it is. How are we doing on a hi-comms link to Prime?”
“No joy, sir,” said the tech. “Whoever took down hi-comms is still keeping them that way.”
“Keep trying,” Gil said. “The minute they come back I want to know. For now, get me Ophel on the lightspeed comms.”
From this distance out, patching through the connection took several minutes. Gil waited, frowning with barely restrained impatience. Ophel hadn’t been his first choice for a dropout point. It was a neutral world, friendly enough but not bound to the Republic by an treaties that Gil knew of; and ever since the First Magewar it had been a major transshipment point for trade back and forth across the Net.
But Ophel was in range of
Lachiel
’s hastily repaired and barely functioning engines, and Ophel’s shipyards, the biggest between the Net and the Central Worlds, were capable of handling the refit. Of course, Gil reflected further, those yards meant Ophel would be high on the Mageworlders’ strategic priority list when they got around to mopping up after—
Not after,
he corrected himself,
if
—the Central Worlds fell.
“We have Opheline Inspace Control on lightspeed comms, sir,” reported the communications tech.
“Put it on audio,” Gil said.
“Audio, aye.”
A moment later a crackly, attenuated transmission came on over the speakers in CIC:
“Unknown ship, this is Inspace Control, Ophel. Identify yourself. Opheline law requires that all inbound vessels provide their planet of registration and their last port of call; the name and homeworld of their master, captain, or commander; and a summary of their cargo before receiving permission to approach, orbit, dock, or land. Over.”
Gil picked up the handset for the lightspeed comms and keyed it on. He paused for a moment, trying to put into order all the things he needed to say. Working with lightspeed comms from this far out was awkward and slow, with a lag time of minutes between a message and its reply.
“Inspace Control,” he said finally, “this is RSF
Karipavo,
in company with RSF
Shaja
and RSF
Lachiel.
We request permission to orbit and perform repairs. I am Jervas Gil, captain, Republic Space Force, and commodore of this squadron; my world of origin is Ovredis. I am declaring an in-flight emergency and claiming the right of innocent passage. I regret that I cannot provide details of our cargoes and ports of call; I request a direct connection to the Republic’s embassy as soon as possible. Over.”
Gil keyed off the handset. Again, there was the long wait. He paced, fretting; then realized he was pacing and made himself stop. Dealing with Inspace Control was going to be only the first of his problems. All three of his ships needed repairs, not just the much-battered
Lachiel,
and he had no idea whether any of Ophel’s yards would be willing to do the work.
One thing at a time,
he told himself.
The
’Pavo’
s not as banged up
as Lachiel or Shaja;
I can probably find a yard that’s willing to take her. That’ll give me one fully operational ship to work with while I figure out how to fix up the others.
And after that, I still have to come up with some way to pay for all this—because if there’s one thing you can depend on when you’re dealing with civilians, it’s that absolutely nothing comes free.
Finally, the speaker crackled again. “RSF
Karipavo,
this is Inspace Control. You have permission to approach and orbit with three vessels.”
Gil’s tension subsided by a fractional amount. His deepest fear, firmly suppressed during the slow hyperspace transit from the Net, had been that the Ophelines would want nothing to do with him or his ships at all. That would have meant scuttling the crippled
Lachiel
—transferring the crew to
Shaja
and
Karipavo,
destroying the engines, the weapons, and main ship’s memory, then leaving the hulk to drift—before the squadron could go on. At least he was going to be spared that much.
Meanwhile, Inspace Control was still talking.
“Karipavo, Shaja, Lachiel:
Make your orbit in compliance with the following data … .”
The voice halted for a second, then continued in a slightly altered tone—as if, Gil thought, somebody had handed the talker at Inspace Control an unexpected addition to the standard message.

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