The Price of the Stars: Book One of Mageworlds (13 page)

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Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

BOOK: The Price of the Stars: Book One of Mageworlds
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He hit the Raise Ramp button as soon as his boots touched the deckplates. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Tarnekep slam down the Close Door lever with a doubled fist and vanish in the direction of the cockpit controls.
“This one’s still breathing,” said Peyte, from the floor.
“Great. Let’s get her and Namron strapped down in the passenger compartment.”
They carried first Namron and then the shuttle crew member back into the passenger/cargo area. Namron looked like hell, but he was still alive—barring accidents, he’d probably make it to draw his pension after all. The shuttle crew member had caught the sideshock from the heavy beam that had killed her partner; her burns were nasty but not fatal.
“Watch those straps!”
“Sorry, Doc.”
No time now to pick out cloth from skin … give her a general-purpose antibiotic and a painkiller, and sort things out when we get to High Station.
“Pass me the first-aid kit.”
“I don’t see one, Doc.”
“You’re standing on it, that’s why—pass it over.”
He’d finished taking care of the two casualties and was about to strap in for lift-off himself when the Professor reappeared. “Commander—could you come forward, please?”
“These two need me here.”
“Do you know the passwords and procedure to get us into the Space Force docks on High Station?”
“Yes,” said Jessan. “But—”
“Then these two need you more where you can get at the comm panel.”
He’s got a point
, Jessan admitted to himself. “All right, I’m coming. Peyte, the casualties are all yours. Squawk if anything changes.”
“Right, Doc. Be seein’ you.”
Jessan followed the Professor forward. The older man took the fold-down seat at the right rear of the cabin, which left only the copilot’s seat to the right of Tarnekep. Jessan slid in and strapped down.
“How’s it going?”
“Shut up,” said Tarnekep, without looking away from the control panel. “I’ve never flown one of these before.”
It might have been the first time he’d seen the controls, but the Mandeynan was doing a preflight run-up without benefit of checklist just the same. Space Force would have lifted the certification of any pilot who got caught cutting so many corners—if any Space Force pilot had dared to try it in the first place—but Tarnekep carried it out with an impression of competence that Jessan found oddly familiar.
Now where have I … never mind. He knows what he’s doing, so let him be.
The medic looked away from Tarnekep’s intent profile—with no eye patch visible, the sharply cut features didn’t look so much vicious as plain dead-tired—and watched the external scan screens instead.
He wasn’t encouraged by what he saw. Peyte’s last flare had torched off the cartons inside the bay. The flickering red light illuminated teams of men at work out on the pad. One group was trying to burn through the shuttle’s hull by means of concentrated blaster fire on a single point. Another group was busy at the airlock door with a torch. A third group was doing something just out of sight of the scan, down around the landing legs. Somehow, the fact that exactly what they. were up to wasn’t visible made Jessan more nervous than the activities of all the others put together.
Tarnekep finished his check-and-flip of the major systems and looked up at the scans. “Fry, you sons of bitches,” he said, and hit the jets.
Sudden acceleration pressed Jessan back into his seat—far too much boost for a craft with casualties on board. Just as he was about to protest, Tarnekep cut the power, flipped the craft onto its back, and began a rapid sideslip. Then, just as suddenly, the Mandeynan hit the boosters and headed for orbit.
I haven’t had a ride like this since I left Nammerin
, thought Jessan.
And a good thing, too
. He cleared his throat and asked quietly, “What was that trick in honor of?”
“In case they fired off a heat seeker,” Tarnekep muttered, still intent on the controls.
“Oh,” said Jessan, and abandoned the subject.
The shuttle exited the atmosphere in a pop-up, and then went into a flat dive to orbit, gaining speed all the while. Tarnekep was muttering under his breath. “No sign of High Station—must be farside right now. Commander—what’s the frequency for Space Force Control?”
“One fifty-six point two,” he answered. “Why?”
“Get on it, and tell them that we’re coming in.” The Mandeynan didn’t wait for a reply, but went back to muttering over the console readouts. “Where the hell is High Station … ah, there’s the bastard. Here we go.”
The long fingers played over the shuttle’s controls. With a touch of the lateral jets, the craft was falling around the planet along a new and fractionally different orbit.
Jessan pulled his attention away from Tarnekep’s disturbingly familiar piloting to pick up the shuttle’s external comm link. He keyed in the Space Force restricted channel.
“High Station Pad, High Station Pad, this is Medical Station Pleyver actual, over.”
“Roger Medical Station, go,” replied the tinny voice of the comm link.
How do I put this? he wondered. Oh, well—details now, explain later.
“Pad, I’m in trouble. I have casualties on board. Request you call dirtside Security and ask them to investigate the site of the former Space Force Medical Station. Over.”
Silence from the comm link.
“Do we have a problem?” asked Tarnekep.
“Shouldn’t have,” said Jessan. “Right now, they’ll be matching my call against my voicefile to see if I’m really me.”
The comm link spoke up again. “Med Station, this is High Station Pad. Request you authenticate. Over.”
“Pad,” Jessan said again, “this is Med Station Pleyver. I authenticate one-five-seven. Request you authenticate. Over.”
“I authenticate three-five-two,” said the comm link. “Commander, are you all right? Over.”
“I’m fine,” said Jessan, “but I’ve got four casualties—”
The Professor’s quiet voice came from behind him. “Two casualties—we won’t be staying.”
“Correction, two casualties, and there’s been an attack on the clinic. Recommend you go to General Quarters. Over.”
“We are going to General Quarters at this time,” said the comm link. “Awaiting your report, out.” The link clicked off.
Jessan gave a deep sigh. “And that should get us home safe … but I hate to think of the paperwork.”
Tarnekep laughed briefly. “If you don’t like paperwork, you’re working for the wrong firm.” A pause, and then, as the massive artificial moon came up over the rim of the planet, “There she is: Pleyver’s better half.”
High Station Pleyver had been one of the first of the orbiting communities built in the economic boom that followed the end of the Magewar. By now the enormous, gaudy globe housed everything from spacedocks to luxury hotels, and had only historical ties to the world below. Most of the time, in fact, the planet and its late-born satellite competed for the lucrative spacing trade.
Tarnekep looked at the station, and then at the console readouts. He did calculations in his head—if he did any at all—and fired the aft and lateral jets. The shuttle skidded obediently into a matching orbit for the approach.
It was a maneuver held at a higher speed than Jessan had ever seen, and done with casual, almost unconscious ease. He’d only known one other pilot who worked with such effortless assurance—and his friend Ari had gotten both his technique and his reflexes from the Magewar’s most famous starpilot.
“If I didn’t know better,” Jessan said aloud, “from the way you fly this ship I’d say your last name ought to be Metadi.”
The quiet in the shuttle cockpit congealed into a profound stillness. Jessan felt a cold sensation growing in the pit of his stomach.
I think I’ve just said something very stupid
. Next to him, without looking away from the forward screens, Tarnekep drew the blaster he’d taken from Jessan earlier and pointed it at the medic’s head.
“I meant that as a compliment, you know,” Jessan said, holding himself perfectly still. “The suggestion was only figurative.”
The muzzle of the blaster didn’t waver. On the other hand, he was still alive, which counted for something. Jessan looked more closely at the pale, intense profile of the man on his left.
Ari Rosselin-Metadi, who was bigger than just about anybody, would stand at least a foot taller than the Mandeynan, with a massiveness of bone and muscle lacking in the slim and wiry Tarnekep. In both men, though, the arrogant line of nose and chin could have come off any Entiboran coin ever struck—which let out any chance that the gunfighter might have been one of the General’s youthful indiscretions come home to roost.
Ari’s only brother is an apprentice Adept back on Galcen, I remember him saying so—and whatever this one may be, he’s certainly no Adept. That leaves … no, that’s impossible.
Jessan looked again. The Mandeynan’s accent—pure aristocratic Galcenian, mixed with Gyfferan whenever he swore or talked piloting—could have been Ari’s; but Tarnekep’s voice was a light, clear tenor, instead of Ari Rosselin-Metadi’s rumbling bass. And the gunfighter’s loose Mandeynan shirt, with its elaborate cravat and ruffled cuffs, masked the lines of the torso and hid the betraying structures of neck and wrist.
Wrong. It’s not impossible. If it were impossible, she wouldn’t be pointing a blaster at your head right now.
“Beka Rosselin-Metadi,” he said. “I sent your brother a Card of Grief when I learned of your death.”
She didn’t say anything. The shuttle held on its course for the High Station Pad, and what he could see of the pilot’s face was as closed and unreadable as before.
He felt no surprise, only a kind of inevitability, when he heard the Professor speak up behind him. “Commander,” said the soft, polite voice, in an accent he recognized too late as prewar Court Entiboran, “I’m afraid you’ll be coming with us.”
 
T
HE PASSENGER liner
Gravity’s Rainbow
, four days out of Galcen and the sleekest commercial ship in the Red Shift Line, slid into the spacedock at High Station and began discharging passengers. For most of the elderly trippers and too-wealthy young people coming down the ramp, Pleyver was only the first stopover on
Rainbow
’s Outplanets Adventure Tour. Commander Jervas Gil, however, had come to High Station on business.
He turned his back on the
Rainbow
and her tour group and headed for High Station’s Customs and Immigration checkpoint. The carrybag in his left hand held enough changes of uniform to last him for two weeks, and the dispatch folder tucked under his right arm contained a letter.
Gil knew the letter by heart. It began: “FROM: COMMANDING OFFICER, REPUBLIC SPACE FORCE. TO: COMMANDER JERVAS GIL, RSF, 7872-0016. SUBJECT: INVESTIGATION. 1. YOU ARE HEREBY DIRECTED TO TRAVEL BY THE FIRST AVAILABLE MEANS TO PLEYVER, THERE TO INVESTIGATE THE CIRCUMSTANCES SURROUNDING THE LOSS OF SPACE FORCE MEDICAL CLINIC AND RECRUITING COMMAND ON THAT WORLD … .”
The rest of the letter directed him to present his findings of fact, his opinions, and his recommendations to his commanding officer within twelve days. Since the commanding officer in this case was General Jos Metadi, whatever Gil decided to recommend was guaranteed attention at the very highest levels.
Highest levels … right
, he thought, as the Customs and Immigration man looked at his passport and his orders.
If I’d known two years ago what it was going to be like up here on the ‘highest levels,’ I’d have gone down on my knees to my detailer and asked for orders to a Reserve Force Retrofit Stores Ship instead … .
He’d been in his office back at Prime Base, drafting the General’s testimony for the upcoming session with the Council’s Appropriations Committee, when Metadi had come in and tossed a folder of message flimsies onto his desk.
“How’d you like a few days away from politics, Commander?”
“If you can spare me, sir.”
“I can write my own speeches for a week or two,” said the General, “and you look like a man who could use a break.”
“Frankly, sir,” Gil told him, closing down the testimony file on the desk comp, “I could.”
The General nodded at the folder full of messages. “Well, this will give it to you if anything can. How do you feel about Pleyver this time of year?”
“I’ve already started packing,” said Gil. He began keying in a search of the port complex’s data base for vessels outbound toward the Pleyveran system. The news from Flatlands Portcity had been the talk of Prime Base all morning, ever since the first message had come in from the Supply Detachment on High Station. “What’s the latest on that mess?”
“Nothing good,” said the General. “One dead, one missing, two still in healing pods—and all they can see from upstairs is a pile of smoking rocks where the clinic used to be.”
“That’s bad.”
“Damned straight it’s bad. I want to know who did it, and I want to know why. Go out there, Commander, and find out just what the hell did happen.”
“I’ll get right on it, sir,” said Gil. “Any other instructions?”
“It’s all in the folder,” Metadi told him. “If anybody bothers to ask, you can tell them you’re acting for me personally—that might get you a word or two extra out of some of the old-timers, even these days. Don’t try it on the local law, though. For all I know, they’ve still got a warrant out for me in Flatlands Portcity.”
“A warrant,” said Gil, without much surprise. Most histories of the Magewar claimed that before the start of his privateering days, Jos Metadi had been an independent merchant captain. A few of the less laudatory texts, however, went so far as to point out that such a designation often covered a great deal of questionable activity. “If it’s not a breach of etiquette, sir—what for?”
“Not much,” said the General. “The last time I put in there—a couple of years before the Resistance recruited me, it would have been—one of the locals decided he didn’t like my number two gunner. The gunner got mad and punched him out, and that would have been the end of it, except that the big guy with a blaster at the other end of the bar turned out to be the local’s bodyguard. One thing led to another, and then we ran like hell for the spacedocks and left town in a hurry. Wound up threading the Web in something like six hours instead of twelve, because somebody dirtside whistled up a squad of Security fighters to chase us all the way to hyper. And I haven’t been back to Pleyver since.”
“Probably wise, sir,” murmured Gil. “Six hours through the Web?”
“Well,” said the General, “I used to round it down to six in those days for bragging purposes, but from high orbit to hyperspace jump it was probably closer to seven. I’ve turned respectable since then,” Metadi finished, “so I’ll say it was six-and-a-half.”
Six or seven
, Gil thought, remembering the conversation as High Station’s lift system took him from the commercial docks to Space Force’s section of the orbiting structure,
if he really did it, I’m impressed.
Gil had taken advantage of professional courtesy, and observed the
Rainbow
’s realspace progress through the Web from the liner’s bridge: twelve hours of what he recognized as tricky piloting even in the hands of an expert.
Give me a courier ship running empty, and I might try doing it in eight-point-five … but seven’s right out. And as for six …
Gil shook his head.
The lift opened, and he stepped out in front of a pair of armor-glass doors marked with the Space Force crest.
Time to get to work.
 
Halfway through second lunch shift at the Space Force Medical Station on Nammerin, Llannat Hyfid checked her chronometer and frowned.
Bors Keotkyra caught the motion and looked up from his bowl of nut-butter soup. “What’s wrong?”
“If Ari’s working through lunch again—”
She paused, looking across the tables toward the door of the mess dome. She’d thought for a moment … yes. A familiar pattern was making itself felt among the varied presences in and around the crowded building. She relaxed and smiled a little in relief. “It’s all right. Here he comes.”
Bors gave her a nervous look that didn’t change when the doors of the mess hall opened and Ari walked in.
Llannat suppressed a sigh. She knew that expression. It was the reason Adepts took great care not to make the rest of the civilized galaxy nervous—whether over outworn tales of dark sorcery or the real fear of abuse of power. For that same reason, the Guild forbade its fully-trained Adepts to hold rank in the Space Force, although still allowing them to serve.
Llannat herself had never planned to wind up in such an awkward position, doing an officer’s work without an officer’s place in the chain of command, but when Ensign Hyfid’s latent sensitivity to the currents of power had unexpectedly ceased to be latent and became impossible to ignore, her superiors had sent her to the Adepts for basic instruction. They hadn’t thought that Master Ransome would go further, offering her an apprenticeship in the Guild—but he had, and she had accepted.
So what do I get for all my hard work?
she thought.
Stared at like I had two heads because I knew who was on the other side of that door.
“Good morning, Ari,” she said aloud, tilting her head back to look the big lieutenant in the eye. “I thought for a while we weren’t going to have the pleasure of your company.”
Ari put down his tray on the table across from her and pulled out the chair. “I was packing crash-trauma kits for Emergency,” he said, sitting down. “They’ve got the sterilizers back on line again, so we spent the morning playing catch-up.”
He started to work on a plate of steamed gubbstucker. Once you got used to the texture—which admittedly took some doing—the fibrous root had a flavor not unlike good Maraghite mud eel. After a few mouthfuls, he stopped chewing long enough to ask, “Any hot gossip?”
Llannat shook her head. “Not today—sorry.”
It didn’t take a Adept to guess what Ari had really been asking about. Nyls Jessan had been stationed on Nammerin before getting the nod to start up the new Space Force clinic on Pleyver, and the whole staff had been hit hard by the news from High Station. Ari, though, was taking it harder than most.
Bors Keotkyra made another try at conversation. “Hey, Ari. Did you catch last night’s episode of ‘Spaceways Patrol’?”
Ari shook his head. “I was working late over in the Isolation dome.”
“You should have seen it. I thought Serina’s dress was going to fall right off her this time.”
Llannat tried not to wince. Bors had a good heart and he was trying his best, even if his methods did lack subtlety. “You guys think Serina’s dress is going to fall off her every time,” she said. “Haven’t you ever heard of glue?”
Bors grinned. “Not for that.”
“I missed the show last night myself,” she said, “but I’m planning to catch the late rerun when I come off watch this evening. Black Brok’s about to take over the galaxy again, and I want to watch.” She turned to Ari. “How about you?”
“No, thanks,” said the Galcenian. “I was thinking of spending time studying up for the re-quals. I haven’t cracked a micro text since I got out of school.”
“Yeah—you were too busy doing micro.” Bors took up the familiar complaint. “That’s the thing about those exams. They’re slanted against all us people out here working at medicine instead of sitting home memorizing it.”
The comm link on the wall gave its usual blink-and-beep to get the room’s attention, followed by a three-tone sequence. Ari shoved back his chair and stood up.
“Death and damnation. I can’t even get a quiet lunch around here.”
Llannat watched, frowning, as he went over to the link and punched the Respond button. The sound of Ari’s signal sequence had sent a wave of foreboding washing over her, but the feeling refused to verbalize itself or resolve into anything specific. “Visitor for you, sir, over in Outpatient,” said the crackling metallic voice over the link.
“Roger, I’ll be there, out.”
Ari was already halfway to the door by the time the link clicked off.
“Don’t let them throw my food away,” he said over his shoulder as he went out. “I’ll be back as soon as I take care of this.”
The door shut behind him. After a couple of seconds Bors said, “Do you think the big guy’s all right?”
“What do you mean?” Llannat asked. Her sense of disquiet deepened.
“He’s pushing himself awful hard. And it’s like pulling teeth to get him to talk these days.”
“Look, Keotkyra,” she said patiently, “the man’s seen his mother assassinated and his sister killed in a messy spaceship wreck, he’s doing a tour of duty on a planet where somebody’s already tried once to kill him, and now he’s found out that his best friend is missing in action. Just because a man’s built like a brick wall doesn’t mean he is one.”
“Hey, Jessan was my friend, too,” protested Bors. “What I meant is, I’m worried about Ari. He’d probably punch me out for saying so, but he ought to have somebody looking after him.”
Llannat glanced over at her tablemate. “Don’t sweat it, Keotkyra,” she told him. “Somebody probably is.”
 
Ari walked past the central lab and pharmacy domes toward the field hospital’s outpatient wing. The day was shaping up to be a nice one by local standards, with just enough light rainfall to make the compound’s force field glow a faint pink overhead. The storms of high summer were still months in the future, and the winter floods had subsided to nothing but a soggy memory. There hadn’t even been an earthquake lately.
Inside the Outpatient dome, Esuatec had the desk watch. “I just got a strange one,” she told him. “Said he had to talk to you personally, and then he couldn’t wait. Left a present for you, though.”
“A present?”
Esuatec nodded. “A pair of dice.” She dropped the white cubes into Ari’s hand. “I didn’t know you gambled.”
“I don’t,” he said. “Was that all?”
“No, there was a message, too: ‘The same as before.’ Mean anything to you?”
“Absolutely nothing,” said Ari. “And for this I’m missing lunch. What did the guy look like?”
“Little bitty spacer type. Not a local.”
“One of ours?” asked Ari. RSF
Corisydron
had been on maneuvers in the Nammerin system for a week now, and they’d seen one or two crew members in Outpatient already.
But Esuatec shook her head. “Not Space Force, no.”
“Could you recognize him if you saw him again?”
“Only if he was wearing the same clothes,” said Esuatec. “He looked just like everybody else, if you know what I mean.”

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