“Parezul’s on the arc to a lot of places. It’s why we’re sitting here.” Brehant moved over to the comp station and called up more of the intelligence reports. “Let’s see what else we’ve got in the civilized galaxy this week.”
Brehant scanned the material for several minutes in silence. Then his eyebrows—dark and bushy, and always mobile—went up toward his hairline. “Here’s an odd one—from Innish-Kyl, no less. A movement report from a Crown courier. In port for under twelve hours, heading to Entibor, in passage from Galcen with a stopover. Do you know how far Innish-Kyl is from being the most efficient course from Galcen to Entibor?”
“Of course I do. But when I run across items like that, I try not to speculate. The Crown doesn’t like snooping.”
Brehant cast a sharp glance in her direction. “So you saw it, then.”
“Of course.”
“Anything else in the traffic?”
She shook her head. “Nothing.”
“Then let’s go have a cup of cha’a. Your galley ought to have the morning supply ready by now.”
“The truth comes out,” said Gala. “You only love us because the cha’a brews up better with natural groundwater.”
Brehant laughed. Over on the communications panel, a message light blinked on and started beeping.
“Courier coming in,” Gala said. “With news.”
A few minutes later, the comm panel beeped and chittered and extruded another curling slip of printout. This time Gala beckoned for Tres to come up and look at it along with her. They read it together in silence. Finally the squadron commander sighed and stepped back.
“That’s it, then,” he said. “What we were both watching for. Mage raid on Tanpaleyn.”
Gala crumpled up the scrap of flimsy, then reflexively smoothed it out again. “Damned poor report. Nothing on strength or type of units. With no more information than that, all we can do is detach a scouting and security force.”
“I can handle that,” Brehant offered. “The squadron hasn’t had enough work lately anyhow. We could use the exercise.”
“Thanks, Tres.” Gala punched the comm button for the duty officer. “Get Lieutenant Verris out of bed and tell him to come in here. I want nearspace monitoring stations up and active.”
“So we watch and wait. Do you think that’s enough?”
“It’ll have to be,” she said. “The Mages’ll be gone from Tanpaleyn by the time anyone gets there anyway. They know what our reaction time is better than we do.”
“Don’t they though.” Brehant straightened his shoulders. “I’d better get back to orbit and start my run out toward the drop points. Later, Gala.”
“Later.”
Gala turned back to the sensor screens. The door snicked open and shut and open again as Brehant hurried out and the newly awakened Lieutenant Verris hurried in, hastily. sealing up the front of his uniform tunic.
“Good,” she said to the lieutenant. “You’re here. Get on the boards—I want the monitors set to extreme range and top sensitivity, and I want somebody watching them every minute.”
“Extreme range and top sensitivity, aye.” Verris began entering the changes as he spoke. Without glancing up from his work, he asked, “What am I supposed to be scanning for, anyway?”
“Anything that looks suspicious. The raiders have hit Tanpaleyn.”
There was a sound as if Verris had bitten off a startled oath. Gala tried to remember if the lieutenant had friends or family on the colony world, but she couldn’t recall. The sensor room fell silent except for the click-clack of Verris’s fingers on the comp-station keyboard.
She watched the lieutenant at work for a little while, then turned away and brought up the massive holochart that filled most of one wall with a schematic representation of Entibor’s colonial space. In silence, the base commander put in the contact report from Tanpaleyn, so that the colony system showed up in the chart as a point of bright red light. Trestig Brehant and his squadron, presumably in hyperspace transit, she marked with a thin line of pale blue dots. Then she waited.
Twenty minutes later, another courier showed up. This one reported a Mage raid at Ghan Jobai. By now the sensor room was full of men and women in uniform, watching the monitors and keeping the communication links open. Gala entered the contact from Ghan Jobai on the chart; behind her, as she punched in the data, she could hear the comm panel spitting out yet another incoming message.
She never did have time to go for a cup of cha’a. Eventually a runner from the galley brought in a carafe of fresh-brewed. She poured some into one of the unwashed mugs left in the sensor room from the night before, and drank it down without tasting it while she stood with Lieutenant Verris and contemplated the holochart.
The lieutenant said, “I don’t like the looks of this, Captain. They’re attacking in too many places all at once. Raiders don’t—”
“If these were raiders, we’d have a report of at least one of them breaking off. No—” Gala pointed at the spangle of systems in Entibor’s colonial protectorate. More than half of them were flashing red. “This time they’re moving in to stay. It’s the big push.”
The lieutenant nodded. Whatever the news of the first attack had meant to him, by now he had himself well under control. “That’s what I thought. What do we do now?”
“They want us to split up,” Gala said. “Which means it’s the single worst thing we can do. We’re going to take the entire fleet and hit one of their groups, then do it again for the next one. And the next.”
A siren began hooting in the hall outside the sensor room, and a voice came over the audio link.
“Mage raid,” it said. “Mage raid.”
“Where?” she demanded—though she knew, already, what the answer was going to be.
“Right here!”
An exclamation from one of the technicians at the sensor screens drew Gala’s attention, and she strode over to see what had caused the reaction. It was as bad as she’d imagined. The entirety of nearspace was full of Magebuilt warships, and more of them were dropping out of hyper every minute.
Gala grabbed up the link handset for the base comms and flipped the setting to All.
“Launch, launch, launch,” she said. “Duty courier, make for Entibor. Inform Central of our situation and status. All hands report to your vessels. All ships on the ground, make orbit as soon as your crews are aboard.”
She turned to Lieutenant Verris. “You have control on the ground. Keep comms up; coordinate task elements and evaluate data as available. I’m taking command on-scene.”
That taken care of, Gala left the sensor room at a dead run, heading for the launching field and a shuttle to take her up to her flagship, the Entiboran Fleet Cruiser Opal Wind. She had reached the main doors of the headquarters building when a series of powerful blasts from the field outside jammed the doors open and filled the passageway with curling dust. Where the nearest shuttle had stood on landing legs a minute before, only a crater remained.
“Bastards!” she yelled at the unseen raiders, somewhere up above the stratosphere of Parezul. The energy strike had taken out not just that one shuttle but every vessel remaining on the surface at Parezul command.
Gala turned back toward the inner recesses of the building, hoping that communications were up. Because whether they were up or not, it looked like she was going to have to fight her fleet from right here.
“The problem is,” Tillijen said, after the silence in Warhammer’s common room had drawn out long enough to become awkward, “we all got shorted on our portside liberty.”
“Damn straight,” said Nannla. “I don’t know about you, Errec, but Tilly and I had a room booked downtown for two nights—at a good hotel, too, none of your sleazy shank-halters—and somebody owes us a party.”
Tillijen nodded. “It’ll be a while before we hit Pleyver … plenty of time to relax and make ourselves some of the fun we didn’t get a chance to have back in Waycross.”
Errec smiled sl
ightly. “If the captain agrees, why not?”
“Agrees to what?” The door leading to the cockpit slid shut behind Captain Metadi. “If it’s a party you’re talking about, I say we haven’t had a good one in a long time. Somebody go tell Ferrda, and I’ll break open the grog locker.”
It might have been a drill, Perada reflected. The ‘Hammer’s crew responded with practiced ease: Errec headed off toward the engineering section; Nannla and Tillijen disappeared into number-one crew berthing and emerged burdened with what looked like half their collection of musical instruments. Captain Metadi, meanwhile, opened a cabinet in the galley and brought out the first of a whole series of bottles. By the time he was finished, there was a small thicket of them in the center of the mess table—Felshang claret from Entibor and straw-colored spring wine from Low Khesat; amber-tinted brandy from the Galcenian up- lands; a square unlabeled bottle of something purple, stoppered with an ugly spongewood plug.
“Quite a collection,” she said, after he had gone into the galley again, this time for a half-dozen glass tumblers. “You didn’t buy them all in Waycross, surely.”
“Only a fool buys any more liquor in Waycross than it takes to get drunk there,” the captain said. “Most of these are souvenirs.”
Errec Ransome came back into the common room, followed by Ferrda. The ship’s engineer carried what looked like a bundle of sticks under one arm; on closer inspection, the bundle turned out to be a kind of bellows-pipe. Perada had heard similar instruments before, at traditional-music festivals on Galcen, and schooled herself to smile—without showing her teeth—no matter how badly the Selvaur played.
She needn’t have worried. Ferrda handled the instrument like a master. The first tune he played was one that she recognized. Nannla had been singing it earlier. Now the dark-haired woman used a small hand drum of animal hide stretched over a pottery base—Perada had seen it, tied up behind zero-g webbing in the unused bunk, and had wondered what it might be—to beat out a rhythm behind the Selvaur’s melody while the others sang.
“After moving your cargo with infinite pains,
You find that your debts are the whole of your gains—
Just buy yourself guns with the cash that remains
And finish your life as a pirate.”
“I’ll drink to that,” said Tillijen, when the song was finished. “What do you say, Captain—full glasses all round?”
“Sounds good to me,” Metadi said. He lined up the six tumblers in a row on the mess table. “Let’s see … the Entiboran first, I think, in honor of our passenger.”
He poured out a half dozen equal portions of the claret and handed one to Perada. “You’ll have to tell me if it’s any good or not,” he told her. “I’ve never had enough of it to judge.”
She inhaled the scent of the claret. “It’s certainly not rotgut,” she said. She took a sip and let the taste warm her before going on. “I’m not that knowledgeable myself—enology wasn’t a formal part of the school curriculum any more than sharpshooting was—but I’d say you made a good investment. Where did you pick it up?”
Jos and Errec glanced at each other. “Off a Mage cargo carrier,” the captain said finally. “Somewhere beyond Ninglin. I don’t know where they got it—none of us could read their manifests.”
“Oh,” Perada said. She gazed at the claret a while longer, then tilted back her glass and drank it all. She set the tumbler down on the mess table with a thud. “Better us than them.”
Ferrda rumbled something approving, and the others laughed. Tillijen refilled the empty tumblers, then tilted her. chair back and started singing a rousing ballad in a language that Perada didn’t recognize, though Metadi apparently knew it well enough to join in with Nannla on the chorus. Errec Ransome didn’t sing this time, only smiled and poured Khesatan spring wine into the empty tumblers.
The spring wine had bubbles in it, and a taste like an explosion of flowers. At formal receptions on Galcen, during her last year at school, Perada had sipped it out of thimble-sized crystal glasses after the Khesatan fashion. The experience hadn’t prepared her for dealing with Warhammer’s more generous portions. She decided that she didn’t care.
She drained her glass and let the bubbles float upward and go off in her head like fireworks, while the music went on and on. Errec Ransome was singing now, and the drink in the tumblers was Galcenian Uplands brandy, harsh and powerful like the northern hills it came from. Errec’s song was one that Perada recognized from her schooldays; it came from those same hills, and she wondered where and when he had learned it.
“Oh three they drew and two he slew
And one he wounded deep.
The youngest one threw down his blade
And bitterly did weep.
“He’s taken out his little knife,
He’s gripped it fast and high.
‘And though you were my own blood kin
This night you’d surely die.’”
It was an old song, one of the dark and bloody ones, and he sang it alone, with no accompaniment except for a wandering countermelody on Ferrda’s pipes. He finished, and drank off the tumbler of brandy that had waited on the mess table in front of him while he sang.
The glasses were empty again. Nannla unstoppered the square bottle of purple liquor and poured out six equal portions. Perada noticed the others looking at her expectantly.
My turn, she realized. They want to see if I can fit in, or if I’m nothing but a passenger who happens to own a couple of star systems.
She picked up the tumbler and sipped at the purple liquid—it had a strong, almost medicinal flavor, and it stung going down—while she tried to think of some tune that wouldn’t be more suited to a garden party than to a shipboard singalong. In the end she gave up trying—Can I help it if everybody I used to know was respectable?—and sang “Bindweed and Blossom” as she’d learned it from Gentlelady Wherret in music class at school. Nobody laughed, and she wasn’t surprised to hear Tillijen singing the chorus along with her.
Most of the purple liquor had vanished from her tumbler while she did her thinking earlier. She swallowed the drop or two remaining, and looked over at Jos Metadi.
“It’s your turn,” she said.
He shook his head. “Not me. I’m the only one on board with no voice.”
“You can’t get away without doing something.” She turned to Nannla and Tillijen. “Isn’t that right?”
Tillijen nodded solemnly. “That’s right.”
The number-two gunner was definitely tipsy, Perada decided—well, so were they all by now, even the captain.
Even me.
She looked at Metadi. “You said that everything in your cabin was at my disposal.”
“That’s right.”
“Then come and prove it to me,” she said. “Now.”
For a long moment he said nothing, and she feared that she’d lost her gamble at the very beginning—He’s an off-worlder, remember; you can’t expect him to understand—but then he rose and held out his hand.
“Whatever you say, Domina.” His Gyfferan accent made the word into two syllables—“Dom’na”—but she found that she didn’t mind. “And whatever you want. Now.”
PERADA ROSSELIN: GALCEN
(GALCENIAN DATING 963 A.F.; ENTIBORAN REGNAL YEAR 27 VERATINA)
PERADA HAD never seen any place like the spaceport at Galcen Prime. Nothing on Entibor came close. The immense dome of the Grand Concourse covered an area so big that she could scarcely see the edges of it. Everywhere she looked, she saw signs—flat ones displayed on the walls and the floor and the kiosks that rose up from the concourse like a field of mushrooms; brightly colored half-rounds in shop windows; and free-floating holos filling up the air beneath the dome like pictures painted with light. A lot of the signs had writing on them that she couldn’t read, which frustrated her; she’d known how to read signs back home on Entibor for over a year, and it looked like she was going to have to start all over again.
She
tugged on Dadda’s coat sleeve and pointed at the nearest sign. “What does that say in real writing?”
“It is real, babba—it’s in Galcenian, that’s all.”
“But what does it say?”
Dadda said something that sounded like “frunds kovitten atteki,” and Perada shook her head. Her two braids—down to her shoulders now—swung back and forth with the motion.
“No. I want to hear what is says.”
Dadda sighed. “It says ‘ground transportation this way.’”
“Then why don’t they write that?”
“Because we’re on Galcen, babba, and they write the signs in Galcenian.”
“Am I going to have to learn that, too?”
“You’ll have to, I’m afraid. The school you’ll be going to takes its students from all over the galaxy, so they all have to speak Galcenian in classes and with each other.”
“Why?”
“Because otherwise nobody would be able to talk at all.”
“No,” she said. “I mean, why don’t they talk real talk, like at home?”
“Everybody talks real talk,” Dadda said. “But the talk is different in different places. So they use Galcenian when they’re not at home.”
Perada thought about this for a while. She was about to resume the argument—why should all these people she’d never met talk to each other in Galcenian, which sounded funny, instead of learning how real people talked?—when the glidewalk came to an end. The archway ahead of them had a greyish shimmer across the opening and a scanner set into the wall beside it; Dadda showed a wafer of white plastic to the scanner and the force field came down.
The hairs on her arms rose up and her skin tingled a little when she passed through the opening. On the other side of the archway was a room with a couple of chairs, a low table, and a green plant in a pottery tub. A thin, white-haired woman in a black dress rose from the nearest chair as they entered.
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