The Price of the Stars: Book One of Mageworlds (20 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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The grey-haired Entiboran inclined his head. “I did, Mistress. But that was long ago … five centuries and more.”
Ari poured a cup of the now-cool cha’a and passed it to Llannat. She drained it in one swallow and held it out again.
“More, please … ahh, thank you, Ari. Time doesn’t mean much to the Magelords. This year, next year, a hundred years from now … they make long plans.”
She set the cup down in its saucer and turned to face Beka. “You’ll need an Adept where you’re going, Captain Rosselin-Metadi. Will I do?”
 
I
KNOW
how I’m going to die,thought
Commander Gil.
They’re going to find me bored stiff at a garden party, with a polite smile frozen on my face and a too-small glass of wine in my hand.
Though it was high summer in the southern hemisphere of Ovredis, the day was pleasant and cool. Gil steered his rented Silver Streak hovercar up the long, curving drive toward the country house of Marchen Bres, head of the Ovredisi Bankers’ Guild, and tried to convince himself that he’d been lucky.
Back at the Prime Base, after he’d taken control of the space battle over Nammerin away from the watch officer and let the unknown
Libra-class
freighter slip away into hyper, Gil had thought for a few unpleasant seconds that he really was done for. The door of Metadi’s office had clicked shut behind his heels, and the General himself stood there looking at him with a cold light in his eyes that Gil didn’t like at all.
“Talk fast, Commander,” the General invited.
Gil complied.
To his relief, the chilly, measuring look eased off as soon as he mentioned
Pride of Mandeyn.
By the time he got around to identifying the
Pride
as the mystery freighter over Nammerin, the General’s expression had shifted to one of wintry approval.
The hard part had been explaining his conviction that both the
Pride
and the unknown were in fact the old
Warhammer
, without admitting to having overheard the General’s private conversation with Errec Ransome. Gil scraped through that one by dint of fast talking and blurred logic, and concluded with a detailed comparison between a holocube likeness of the General’s daughter at her coming-of-age party and the Security flatpic of Tarnekep Portree, for which he made up most of the key points as he went along.
Finally he ran out of ideas for improvisation, and finished by saying, “Sir, my report can’t include any of that, and I can’t prove a word of it. But I’m morally certain that’s the way it happened.”
“I think I have to agree with you, Commander,” said Metadi gravely. “Have you discussed your conclusions with anyone other than me?”
“No, sir.”
“Don’t. My compliments, by the way, on an excellent piece of work.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Gil. He wasn’t going to ask for clarification on that comment, he decided, not now or ever.
The General sat down at his desk with a faint sigh. “It’s at times like this,” he said, “that I really wish I could have some unbiased advice. What do you think I should do with you?”
“Accept my resignation?”
“Wouldn’t work,” said Metadi. “There’d be too much talk. No, Commander, I think the best thing to do is classify all the log entries for tonight, and let everybody in Control think it was one of Intelligence’s little ploys.”
“And what do we let Intelligence think, sir?”
“If they come around asking,” said the General, “I’ll just point out that the third victim ‘kidnapped’ by our mystery freighter was an Adept. Then I’ll tell them they’re welcome to ask the Master of the Guild for more information any time they feel like it.”
Gil blinked. “But the Guild doesn’t run intelligence operations, sir—do they?”
For a second Gil wondered if he had finally managed to go too far—but the General only gave him a quizzical look and said, “Commander, that’s one of the questions I’m careful not to ask. Now, about that report of yours—”
“Yes, sir,” said Gil with relief. “I’ll have the hard copy ready by morning, but to sum it up: as far as the Pleyveran affair goes, and leaving Lieutenant Commander Jessan’s whereabouts out of the discussion, the
Pride’s
crew don’t seem to have been the villains of the piece at all.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“We have an eyewitness for most of the night’s events,” Gil said. “He insists that the conflict involved the clinic staff plus the two strangers on one side, and an undetermined but large number of unknown attackers on the other.”
The General looked thoughtful. “No idea who the attackers might have been?”
“Somebody’s private army, sir,” Gil said. “You know how Pleyver is.”
“I know how it used to be,” said the General, “and I hadn’t heard of it changing much. Anything else?”
Gil shook his head. “Not much, sir. All I got when I went dirtside was the runaround. To hear the local authorities talk, there wasn’t even a traffic jam in that sector on the night in question.”
“Don’t sound so offended, Commander,” said Metadi. “A good con job’s a work of art. How’d they explain away the rubble?”
“‘Explosion in the flammables locker due to improper storage of volatile substances,’” quoted Gil. “But they forgot to sand away the blaster pocks.”
“What about casualties? How’d they explain those?”
“There weren’t any,” Gil said. “Not officially. Unofficially, our eyewitness puts the killed and injured in the dozens. And even allowing for his youth and inexperience, I’m still inclined to put the actual number around twenty.”
“It must have been quite a night,” said the General. “Any idea what started it?”
“No, sir,” Gil said. “The trouble seems to have begun in a dining establishment in the Portcity. But beyond the fact that the incident was both brief and violent …” Gil shrugged. “Nothing, sir.”
“And no idea who sent in the private troops?”
Gil hesitated. “No, sir”
Metadi raised a skeptical eyebrow. “All right, Commander,” said the General. “What else are you morally certain of, even if you can’t prove a word?”
Gil took the plunge. “We can eliminate most of the local bosses right away. They wouldn’t take on the Space Force in the first place. If they did, they’d lose what little goodwill they’ve got with the rest of the Republic. That leaves us looking at the off-world combines. They could risk losing one world without betting their entire bankroll.”
The General looked thoughtful. “You’re talking big fish there, Commander—Dahl&Dahl, Suivi Mercantile, the Five Families Group—folks like that.”
“Exactly, sir,” Gil said. “With its power base safe off Pleyver, a combine might undertake a local operation if the stakes were high enough.”
“Makes sense,” the General said. “Do you have enough to haul somebody in for questioning?”
“No, sir,” said Gil, with regret. “Just having power isn’t an actionable offense.”
“Sometimes I think it ought to be.” The General sat for a moment looking at the flatpic of Tarnekep Portree displayed on the desk comp. Finally he turned around again. “As of now, Commander, you’re on special assignment. Find out who was behind that attack, and get what you need on them—I don’t care how, so long as what you get holds up in court.”
Armed with that sweeping authorization, Gil had spent the remainder of the night making an electronic tour of the Republic’s data bases. Some time near dawn, he found what he was looking for: the Pleyveran tax records for the “entertainment complex” known as Florrie’s Palace, which listed the owner of record as Flatlands Investment, Ltd. Working back through a chain of several intermediaries, Gil came at last to a name that made his eyebrows go up.
“Well, well,” he said to himself. He closed down the file and punched up a code on the desktop comm link.
“Space Force Intelligence, External Operations, Lieutenant Miya speaking.”
“Miya, this is Gil. How soon can you people get onto Rolny and plant some surveillance on the head of the D’Caer Combine?”
“How heavy?” Miya asked.
“Heavy,” said Gil. “If he talks in his sleep, I want a transcript in the morning.”
“Hold on.” A minute or so passed; then Miya’s voice came on again. “Rolny’s a tough nut to crack. Analysis shows we’ve got a fifty percent chance of losing any operative we send there to put in the equipment, fifty percent for losing whoever monitors it once it’s in place. That’s a seventy-five-percent probability of coming up dry before we even start, with no second chances.”
“Any way to bring that down some?”
“Just a minute.” Another pause, and then, “We might be able to pull it off under a couple of conditions. According to projections, the chance of failure goes down to twenty percent if the head man isn’t home while we’re wiring the place for sound.”
“Is that acceptable to your people?”
“It’s no summer picnic,” said Miya. “But we’ve handled worse.”
“Fine. Is he planning to be off-planet any time soon?”
“Hard to tell,” Miya said. “He goes back and forth a lot between Rolny and his branch operations on Ovredis, but his schedule’s unpredictable.”
“I’m from Ovredis,” Commander Gil said. “But you probably knew that already.”
“Opened up your file at the same time I did his,” agreed Miya. “And if you could be in place on Ovredis to tell us when D’Caer gets there and when he leaves, and maybe delay him a little …”
 
Two weeks later, Gil brought the Silver Streak hovercar to a stop under the portico of the Bres estate. Keeping an eye on the comings and goings of the head of the D‘Caer Combine had so far been a matter of watching a series of reception halls and office buildings in the daytime and a string of casinos and pleasure complexes at night. Today, however, promised to be something different. Ebenra D’Caer had promised the head of the Bankers’ Guild that he would, faithfully, attend the garden party this afternoon.
A footman opened the driver’s-side door of the hovercar with a flourish. Gil left the vehicle floating on its nullgravs and stepped out onto the driveway, gravel crunching under his mirror-polished boots. He nodded at the footman, who slid into the seat Gil had just vacated. The craft purred off to the parking bays.
Gil headed for the broad marble stairs leading up to the double doors of the entrance hall. Pausing on the top step, he straightened his uniform jacket and brushed a speck of imaginary lint from the gold braid at the shoulder. Under cover of the motion, he took the opportunity for a quick scan of the grounds.
Now, what do we have here? Duty footmen out front; young couples flirting in the topiary orchard; a bunch of chauffeurs and menservants lounging around back by the parking bays—swapping gossip about their employers, if I know the type. Damn, but that one’s big; he probably doubles as a bodyguard when the boss is on the road.
Gil climbed the steps and went in. As he stepped over the threshold of Marchen Bres’s country estate, the doorman bellowed above the chatter that filled the atrium.
“The Right Honorable Jervas Gil, Baronet D’Rugier!”
Heads turned here and there among the fashionably overdressed people crowding the atrium’s ornamental garden. Gil reminded himself that he wasn’t on Galcen any longer. Back here on Ovredis, the local nobility still counted for something, especially with the wealthy but untitled mercantile families who actually ruled the planet.
After one quick glance at his dress uniform, however, the fashionable people turned back to their conversations. Gil knew what they were thinking, and smiled to himself.
That’s right—good family but no money to speak of. Having the right ancestors got me into the gentry, and having no money got me into government service.
At least, though, the nineteenth baronet hadn’t fallen so low as to depend on the buffet tables of the Bankers’ Guild for his meals. Gil’s Space Force dress uniform, with the shoulder loop of gold braid that marked him as a high-ranking officer’s personal aide, served to make that much abundantly clear. Besides, if Gil had chosen to attend the party in mufti, the occasion would have demanded that the nineteenth baronet dress in a manner befitting his station—and Gil’s old court-formal clothes, unworn since his last home leave, had grown distressingly snug in the waist.
Too much high life on Galcen,
Gil thought.
And too much time behind a desk. I need to get out into space again, soon.
He nodded amiably at a friend of his sister’s, secure in the knowledge that for years he hadn’t been connected with a party like this in anything besides an official capacity. He got a perverse pleasure, in fact, out of knowing that he wasn’t in charge of this one.
Some other poor slob has to worry about running out of canapés and insulting the guest of honor.
A brightly costumed waiter—the height of vulgar ostentation, but Marchen Bres didn’t have breeding, only money—passed by with a tray of glasses filled with something pink and sparkling. Gil snagged a glass with the ease of long practice and continued his stroll through the atrium, sipping as he went.
Wide arches opened off the atrium on three sides. Gil made his way through the central arch into a long passage. At the far end, beyond a narrow cross-corridor, glass doors opened onto the formal gardens behind the house. To his right, beyond a scarlet ribbon stretched between carved marble newel posts, a sweeping staircase led to the private rooms above. Off to his left, in the Grand Ballroom, music and the drone of voices poured out together on the air, like honey with flies in it.

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