The Price of the Stars: Book One of Mageworlds (15 page)

Read The Price of the Stars: Book One of Mageworlds Online

Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

BOOK: The Price of the Stars: Book One of Mageworlds
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“Well,” said Ari, choosing his words carefully. “You remember the people who helped us with the Rogan’s epidemic?”
The CO nodded. “I remember them—with gratitude, I might add. The latest word from Supply is that we might see the first shipment of tholovine sometime next month.”
“Next month,” Ari said. “Does Supply live in the same galaxy as the rest of us, sir?”
“They claim to,” said the CO. “But I’ve heard otherwise. Anyhow, Rosselin-Metadi—what do you hear from your friends?”
“They say I’ve got a contract out on me.”
“I see,” said the CO, after a second or so of silence. “Did they happen to say why?”
“Because I make such a damned good target, I guess … . No sir, no reason.”
The CO looked sympathetic. “Is there anything you want me to do about it?”
“No, sir. I didn’t get anything solid. Only the warning.”
“Well, write up what you heard, and leave it on my desk when you’re finished. That way, if anything does happen to you, we’ll have a place to start.”
“No problem.”
“Good,” said the CO, nudging the sand snake with the toe of his boot. The snake uncoiled and flowed off in the direction of the inner office. “Another thing, Rosselin-Metadi.”
“Yes, sir?”
“That blaster of yours—I don’t care if it does make you look like Black Brok the Terror of the Spaceways. As of right now, you wear it wherever you go.”
 
After getting his warning from the Quincunx, Ari spent the next two weeks looking over his shoulder and jumping at shadows. Nothing out of the ordinary happened, though, and eventually things like staying away from windows and not turning his back on the door became everyday behavior for him, the way the heavy blaster and its holster became just another part of his uniform.
He was in the Pharmacy dome one afternoon, finishing up the monthly controlled-substances inventory, when the wall comm link sounded his tone sequence.
“Rosselin-Metadi here.”
“Hey, Ari—this is Dispatching. We just got one from a farmer out in the boonies. Looks like a house call.”
“Why me? I’m not on for another two days.” Dispatching sounded amused. “He says he’s got a delirious Selvaur on his hands. And since we haven’t got a squad of commandos and a professional interpreter—”
“You decided to send me instead.”
“Hey, ‘only the best for those we serve,’ right?”
“Right,” said Ari, sighing. “‘Spaceways and away,’ then.”
He closed up the controlled-substances locker and headed for the station’s hangar bay, stopping in at Weather for the current report (“light rain, chance of fog”) and at Control for the coordinates of the farm.
“It’s off at zero-two-zero-five-five-one-zero-zero on the other side of the Divide,” said the comptech on duty. “That’s going to be right on the sunset line by the time you get there, and pure hell to come back from if it’s a bad case.”
“I’m betting it’s fungoid fever,” said Ari. “We’ve seen a couple of cases the past week or so, and it drives the Selvaurs right out of their skulls.”
He went on out to the aircar and gave it a quick walk-around. When he came back to his starting point, he saw that he wasn’t alone any longer. Llannat Hyfid leaned against the cockpit door, dressed in her usual off-duty clothes—a plain black coverall, with the Adept’s staff slung across her shoulders by its leather thong.
“I didn’t know you were on call,” he said.
“I’m not for a couple of days. But you’re in for a long trip, and I thought I’d see if you wanted company.”
“I could use the relief pilot,” he admitted. “Especially if I end up bringing a delirious Selvaur back to base after dark. Did you let anyone know you were coming?”
“You can call it in once we’re on our way,” she said. “But let’s get going—you don’t want to lose any time.”
“Another one of your feelings?” he asked, opening the door and climbing into the pilot’s seat.
Llannat followed. She laid the staff down on the aircar floor and began strapped in for takeoff. “Something like that,” she said.
The trip out wasn’t bad at all. The mountains east of Namport loomed a dark green under the mist, and the grey clouds had thinned enough to allow some watery sunshine to light up the peaks. Once the aircar crossed over the Divider Range, the big water-grain farms of the central wetlands spread out from horizon to horizon in regular squares of pale yellow-green, latticed with silvery drainage canals and blotched with stands of massive, soil-holding
grrch
trees.
In the copilot’s seat next to Ari, Llannat sat without talking. She had a knack of making her silence seem restful, and he wondered if it came from her Adept’s training. Or maybe it was part of the basic model, like dark eyes and a kind heart, or long black hair that always had a few shorter strands curling loose from its regulation up-off the-collar style.
Right now, she sat with her eyes closed and her hands lightly clasped in her lap—meditating, or perhaps just catching up on some sleep. Ari smiled in her general direction, and let the physical pleasure he always got from flying mix with the calm of her presence, putting him more at peace with himself than he’d felt in weeks.
The aircar droned on toward 02055100. The sun was falling down the sky behind them as they approached the landing zone. The control panel beeped, and a readout started blinking.
“There’s the beacon,” said Llannat, opening her eyes and coming back to the here-and-now so smoothly Ari decided she hadn’t been sleeping after all.
“Right,” he said. “Let’s go in.”
The farm’s landing pad was one of the raised concrete strips common out here in the wetlands. Once the aircar had settled to rest inside the markers, Ari powered down the engines and squinted out of the cockpit window at the empty landscape.
“Talk about the back of beyond,” he said. “I thought the upcountry settlements were bad, but at least they usually send out a welcoming committee whenever Medical shows up in town.”
Llannat bent to retrieve the emergency carry pack from its place behind the copilot’s seat, and began giving the contents a quick checkover. “This looks like one of those big machine-worked operations. The farmer’s probably with his partner.”
“How are we supposed to find them?” grumbled Ari.
“A dowsing rod?”
“Go that way,” said Llannat, without lifting her eyes from the kit. She pointed toward the eastern horizon.
Ari followed the line of her gesture to where the ridge of a steep-pitched tile roof showed over the green of the sprouting grain paddies. He looked back at the Adept. Her head was still bent over the open kit, and he could hear her counting ampules of medication under her breath.
“All right,” he said. “That way it is. The kit okay?”
“Just fine.”
They left the aircar—Ari with the carry pack, and Llannat with her staff—and climbed down a rusting metal ladder to the surface. Ari promptly sank three inches into the mud. He pulled one boot free of the black ooze with a heavy sucking noise, and Llannat giggled.
Ari made a face. “Visit scenic Nammerin, where it rains twelve days out of every eleven. Come on, let’s get slogging.”
They started out along the raised earthen track between the water-grain paddies. The
slup-slupp
of their boots in the thick mud sounded loud against the late-afternoon stillness. Ari heard the far-off rumble of farm machinery, and nearby in one of the grain paddies a drum-lizard throated out its deep, resonant
chunkachunk, chunkachunk
. Nothing else besides their footsteps disturbed the quiet at all.
Their shadows stretched out ahead of them as they approached the house, a deep-eaved stone building in a paved yard. “The place looks deserted,” said Ari.
“The farmer’s inside,” said Llannat. “I can sense it.” Her voice sounded strained. Ari wondered if the uncanny lack of noise and activity made her as uneasy as it was making him.
“I hope I was right about this being fungoid fever,” he said. “If I was wrong and it’s a psycho case, who knows what we’ll find.”
Llannat nodded without speaking, and unslung her staff.
Ari shifted the emergency kit to his left hand and drew the blaster from its holster. The door of the stone house was a hinged job of cured
grrch
wood—hard as iron, and almost as heavy. Ari pounded on the dull black wood with the butt of his blaster until the whole yard echoed, but no one answered.
“Try the knob,” said Llannat.
Ari glanced over at the Adept. Her dark face had a tight, unhappy look to it, and her knuckles were bloodless on the hand that gripped her staff.
“You have a hand free,” he said. “You try it.”
He watched, blaster at the ready, as she worked the knob with her left hand, and gave the door a shove. It swung open.
They waited in tense silence for a few seconds. Nothing came out through the door—and as far as Ari could see or hear, nothing moved inside.
 
T
HEY ENTERED the farmhouse together. Llannat kept behind him and to the right, Ari noticed, well out of the way of his blaster and with plenty of maneuvering room for two-handed work with a staff.
Ari blinked in the dimness, and the vague interior shapes resolved into typical farmhouse furnishings: a table and benches made out of rough-hewn wood, a red brick floor covered by a rug braided from dried water-grain stalks. Cheap flatpix and a Nammerin Grain Cooperative Standard /Local Integrated Calendar made spots of color on the drab stone walls.
But still no noise. None at all.
Llannat’s left hand closed on his right wrist. “Ari,” she said, her voice hardly more than a whisper, “there’s somebody behind us.”
He tried to turn and bring the blaster to bear, but the hand on his wrist suddenly had more than physical strength behind it. His brother Owen had thrown him against a wall the first and only time they’d ever fought, when Ari had reached almost his full adult strength and his brother had been all of fifteen. Ari didn’t doubt that Llannat Hyfid could do something similar if she chose.
“Ari, no,” she said. “He’s had a blaster on us since we came in the door.”
“Quite true, Mistress,” said a voice behind them. “And very wise.”
The language was Galcenian, but the accept was not.
Court Entiboran?
Ari thought incredulously as the speaker continued.
“Please put up the blaster, Lieutenant—and the staff, too, Mistress—and walk into the next room. There’s somebody there who wishes to talk with you.”
Ari and Llannat walked ahead of the unseen speaker, going through the large common room to the door of a small tacked-on annex that housed the farm’s comm set and power generator. A red-faced, heavyset farmer sat at the far end of the room, near the comm. To Ari, he didn’t look much like a man worried to distraction over a sick partner.
Come on, Rosselin-Metadi. You quit believing in that delirious Selvaur all the way back out in the courtyard.
“So they got you,” said the farmer, sounding more disgusted than anything else.
They?
thought Ari, and realized for the first time that the farmer wasn’t the only person in the room. A slim, fair-haired man in spacer’s work clothes leaned against the right-hand wall, his blaster trained on the farmer. The man had his face turned away—the better, Ari supposed, to keep an eye on his prisoner—but something about that lean build and careless posture nagged for recognition.
Ari made a low growling noise deep in his throat, a noise that Ferrdacorr would have recognized as a thoroughly obscene comment on the whole situation. At the sound, the fair-haired man half-turned toward the door.
“I don’t believe,” he said, smiling, “that I really want to know what that means.”
“You’re supposed to be missing in action,” Ari said before he thought, and then realized how stupid it sounded.
Death and damnation, Rosselin-Metadi—couldn’t you come up with anything better than that?
“I don’t quite know how to tell you this,” said Jessan, “but as of now, so are you.”
Ari doubled his right hand into a fist. “Jessan, if this is some kind of joke—”
The Khesatan medic shook his head. “We don’t have time for jokes. Captain Portree is waiting.”
Ari looked at Jessan’s bland and guileless face, and felt a chill run down his spine.
“Someone’s put out a contract on you
,” the Quincunx man had said.
No. I’m not going to believe that the friend who helped me get out of that fight at Munngralla’s is working with someone who’s been hired to kill me. There has to be another answer.
His fist unclenched, slowly. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go.”
Next to him, he heard Llannat let out her breath in what sounded like a sigh of relief. Jessan looked past them both, directing a silent question toward the stranger they still hadn’t seen. After a second the Khesatan nodded, and turned back toward the farmer.
“I really do apologize for all this,” he said, and fired.
Ari watched, wordless, as the farmer crumpled over and slid out of his chair onto the floor. Jessan stepped carefully around the man’s unconscious body to the comm set.
Behind Ari, the soft Entiboran voice spoke again. “You would have done better to use heavy stun. Once he recovers, he will undoubtedly report our presence on-planet.”
Jessan had the access plate open now, and was groping inside the unit. “I don’t exactly worship every dot and comma in the healer’s oath,” he said without looking around, “but I did swear to it, after all. And that farmer’s a textbook example of a candidate for stun-shock syndrome: overworked, overweight, and not as young as he used to be.”
The Khesatan medic came back out of the comm unit with the resonator in one hand. “I’m sorry, Professor, but I’m not risking it. I don’t want to get into an argument I’m probably going to lose, but there it is.”
“I won’t ask you to break an oath,” said the stranger’s voice. “But haste is now imperative. Lieutenant Rosselin-Metadi—Mistress—if you would precede us … ?”
Ari turned around, and got his first glimpse of the stranger as the slight, grey-haired gentleman stood aside to let them pass. The blaster the man still held trained on them looked, in the dim interior light, like a custom-modified Ogre Mark VI—a heavy weapon, and one Ari felt inclined to take seriously.
“Which way do we go once we’re outside?” he asked.
“East,” said the Entiboran. “Toward the trees.”
“I’m afraid,” added Jessan, coming forward from the rear of the room, “that it’s going to be a bit of a hike.”
Whatever else might have happened, Ari reflected, his friend’s penchant for understatement hadn’t changed. The setting sun made a blaze of scarlet at their backs by the time the four of them had slogged their way across a couple of grain paddies to the stand of towering
grrch
trees east of the farm. “Into the woods?” he asked.
“That’s right,” said Jessan. “It’s not much farther.”
Under the trees, a darkness like night already prevailed. Ari heard once again the farm machinery that he’d noticed from far off during the walk to the farmhouse. Now, though, he recognized the deep trembling in the air and in the earth underfoot as the noise of heavy-duty nullgravs, running on high.
Those things sound big enough to hold up a spaceship,
he thought, and then remembered Jessan’s words:
“Captain Portree is waiting.”
He wasn’t surprised to break out of the woods into a clearing where the grey underbelly of a hovering spacecraft hid all but a scrap of twilit sky. Below, everything was in black shadow where the ship’s bulk blocked off the light. All he could see was an open passenger door and an extended ramp, its end several feet above the muddy ground.
Good move
, he conceded, with a nod of respect to the unseen Captain Portree.
Anybody who tried to land here would sink.
Jessan grabbed the ramp and scrambled aboard. Ari turned to Llannat. “‘A long trip,’” he quoted. “I ought to have known right then … . Do you need a hand up?”
The Adept shook her head. “I’m all right.” She leaped, and stood looking down at him from end of the ramp. Ari shook his head. Catching the edge of the ramp in both hands, he swung himself up onto the strip of metal, then turned and, with a fatalistic shrug, extended a hand to the Professor. The grey-haired gentleman accepted his help with calm dignity, like an aristocrat being handed aboard his private yacht for a pleasure cruise.
“Please follow Lieutenant Commander Jessan forward while I close up for lift,” said the older man. “We haven’t a great deal of time to spare.”
With Llannat once again keeping station slightly behind him and to his right, Ari followed Jessan along a narrow, curving corridor. The metal deckplates rang with the sound of their booted feet, and the note they struck had an oddly familiar resonance.
He looked again at the bulkhead panels. They only confirmed his growing suspicion. This was no brand-new craft, but one that carried the scars and stains of hard use. And he could name every scratch.
“Llannat,” he said, low-voiced, “I know this ship.”
She nodded. “I could tell. How much trouble are we in?”
“I wish I knew,” he said, as they reached the common room. “Right now, I don’t know what’s going on.”
As he spoke, the grey-haired gentleman hurried through the common room in the direction of the cockpit. “Strap in, all,” said Jessan. “We’re going to lift in a couple of minutes.”
Ari found a seat on the acceleration couch and began working the safety webbing with easy familiarity. Jessan and Llannat took longer; the Adept was still closing the last of the fasteners when she looked over at the Khesatan and said, “Isn’t it about time you told us what’s happening?”
“The captain will explain everything, I promise, just as soon as we get out of here. But let me tell you,” Jessan finished with a quick grin, “you two got off easy compared to the way I was recruited.”
“We heard about that,” said Ari. “The rumors, that is.”
“It was … interesting,” said Jessan.
“I’ll bet it was. What’s the name of this ship?”
Jessan’s grey eyes met his, wide-open and innocent. “She’s the Free Trader
Pride of Mandeyn
, Suivi registry.”
“Her real name, Jessan!”
The blond medic shook his head. “I think I ought to let the captain tell you that.”
“I’m looking forward to meeting this captain of yours,” Ari growled.
The ship’s internal comm system gave a premonitory crackle, and a tinny, distorted voice announced, “Stand by for lift-off.”
The background thrum of the engines rose in a deafening crescendo, and Ari felt himself pressed back against the cushions by the steady pressure of the lift.
 
Beka Rosselin-Metadi looked over at her copilot as
Warhammer
left Nammerin’s atmosphere behind. “How did it go, Professor?”
“As Lieutenant Commander Jessan predicted,” said the Entiboran. “With one unfortunate exception. Your brother did not answer the call alone.”
Beka shrugged. “Those are the breaks. What did you do with the extra?”
“She came with us, my lady.”
She bit her lip. “Damn it, Professor—I wanted to keep this a family affair. I’d counted on Ari being able to square things on his end once he knew the score, but we’re probably already in the data net for kidnapping Jessan. If we start making a habit of snatching Space Force medics, not even my father is going to be able to get us out of it.”
“Understood, my lady.”
Her copilot sounded almost apologetic. Beka sighed. “All right, Professor. What is it you aren’t telling me?”
“Our passenger is an Adept, my lady.”
. “An Adept,” said Beka. Her mouth felt sour. “Lovely. As if my brother Owen hadn’t gotten us into enough trouble already. How the hell did an Adept get mixed up in all this?”
“What her relationship is to Lieutenant Rosselin-Metadi,” said the Professor, “I do not know. But she appears to feel a commitment toward his personal safety, and I am not such a fool as to test the strength and mutuality of that commitment under pressure.”
“So we’ve got Ari’s girlfriend along for the ride,” Beka said. “That should make for an interesting trip … oh, damn.” The electronic detector panel had started blinking red. “Someone’s scanning us.”
She watched, chewing her lower lip, as ship’s memory worked on a matchup for the scanner pattern. What came up wasn’t good. “A Space Force cruiser—probably the same one we spotted on our way in. What’s the odds he’ll let us pass without asking awkward questions?”
“Not good, I’m afraid,” said the Professor. “He’s dropping off fighters.”
“I see them,” said Beka, as the external comm began to scratch and crackle with the sound of a local broad-frequency signal. “Sounds like they want to talk a bit first, though.”
“Freighter lifting from Nammerin,” crackled the comm link, “this is RSF
Corisydron.
Come to neutral power and zero your guns, over.”
Beka looked over at her copilot and raised one eyebrow. The Professor shook his head. She nodded, and turned her attention back to the control panel. Sensors showed that the cruiser had dropped off a total of six fighter craft, and was now accelerating on a matching course with
Warhammer.
“Unknown freighter, unknown freighter, heave to. Stand by to be boarded, over.”
She had
Corisydron
on visual now, a bright blob of light getting bigger every second. At any moment, the blob would resolve into the long, deadly triangle of a ship-of-war. She couldn’t see the much smaller fighter craft yet, but the sensors could pick them up just fine, coming in three up top and three below.
Somebody’s taking us real seriously
.

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