[Mageworlds 5] - The Long Hunt

by Debra Doyle

  Dropouts could be bad as well. If your navicomps had gone sick on you, or if you'd made a mess out of setting the course, you could find yourself drifting someplace off the charts, or burning up in the heart of a star. And not even good piloting and good comps would save you from piracy and ambush.

  Trav knew that his piloting was good. And Captain Amaro kept the Dusty's navicomps repaired and up-to-date—he'd put out good money for a data-file upgrade a couple of Standard months back, and that made the second time since Trav had apprenticed to him. If there was going to be any danger at the Sapne dropout, it would come from outside.

  "What's the inspace situation like for Sapne?" Gentlelady Bindweed asked. She and Captain Amaro were playing kingnote in the Dusty's common room while they talked over the possible hazards of transit. Her partner, Gentlelady Blossom, sat watching the card game from a chair nearby.

  The ship's two owners confused Trav a great deal. It wasn't unheard of in the freetrading community for respectable dirtsiders to be silent partners in a ship's business, or even to own the vessel outright; but such people didn't invite themselves to come along on a less-than-legal run, and they didn't answer to names that even a still-green apprentice could recognize as aliases from half a room away. The fact that either one of the two women could have been Trav Esmet's grandmother only made the situation odder.

  Captain Amaro played a card. "Sapne's been enough every time I've gone by there. No system fleet to worry about, and the Space Force doesn't patrol that sector very heavily most of the time either."

  "I'm not worried about the Space Force." Gentlelady Bindweed considered her hand, then pulled out the three of trefoils and laid it down on the table. "I'm worried about the sort of people the Space Force would scare away."

  Gentlelady Blossom nodded agreement. "Dust Devil has guns; we required them when we made the purchase. Does she have gunners ready to use them?"

  "The purser and the supercargo are cross-trained."

  The gentleladies glanced at each other. "Not cross-rated?" Bindweed asked.

  Amaro played a four on top of the three. "I wouldn't put either of them up on the hiring board as a gunnery specialist, if that's what you mean. But they've both scored above qualifying in the sims."

  " 'Above qualifying.' " Bindweed's voice was rich with scorn. "That's what comes of having your minimum standard fixed by law… pretty soon the minimum's all you're going to get."

  Amaro looked skeptical. "If the minimum wasn't good enough it wouldn't be the minimum. I suppose things were better in the good old days."

  "Oh, I don't know," said Blossom thoughtfully. "Nobody dirtside gave me a qualifying exam before the first time I hit the guns live. I'd been taking lessons from the ship's main gunner in my spare time—playing at it, mostly—and when she got killed and the number two got wounded, there wasn't anyone left to shoot back at the Mages but me. Our ship was still in one piece when the fighting stopped, and the other guy wasn't, so the captain said I was qualified and gave me my papers herself. But it was months and months after that before I was anything I'd call good at the job."

  Bindweed smiled at her partner. "You were always good at the job," she said. "After a few months, though—by then, you weren't just good, you were excellent."

  Blossom laughed. "Flatterer." She turned to Amaro. "What happened in the old days doesn't change the situation here. We've got two gunners with paper qualifications—how about your navigator, have you trained him?"

  Esmet had been studying the Pilot III and II manual at the flatscreen in the corner, and trying to stay invisible; now he blushed as the others all turned to look in his direction.

  "Trav's working on getting his pilot papers," said Amaro. "That's a heavy load already on top of his regular job."

  "This is hyperspace," Bindweed said. "The boy can take his turn at gunnery practice along with everybody else; it'll keep him from getting bored. But Dust Devil is going to have fully-trained gunners on duty when she drops out of hyper, even if it means that Gentlelady Blossom and I have to run make-up classes from now until the end of the transit."

  Chakallakak ngha-Chakallakak had spoken the truth when she said that she had never been in a starship's engine room before in her life. She did, however, possess a thorough grounding in the general principles, thanks to diligent work back on Maraghai in the basic instructional sims.

  "You could probably qualify for an apprentice's papers, no problem," said Bindweed. She and her partner were drinking hot uffa in the Dusty's common room, and Chaka had encountered them when she came there on a similar mission. "You're doing an apprentice's work, that's for sure."

  *I don't think so,* Chaka said. There's no glory in running somebody else's engines for them.*

  Blossom looked thoughtful. "Ferrdacorr ngha-Rillikkikk got all the fame he needed that way, and then some."

  *There was a war going on,* Chaka said. *Ferrdacorr ran engines for Jos Metadi—and he had fame and to spare for anybody who ever met him.*

  "She has a point," said Bindweed. "There aren't many like our Jos. So, Gentlelady Chakallakak… how were you planning to chase down your own fair share of fame?"

  *Before I started chasing down my thin-skin buddies instead?* Chaka's mug was empty; she filled it with more uffa from the hotpot. *I was going to head for Eraasi and look for something there. Word on Maraghai is that things in the Mageworlds are still fairly loose and exciting, if you know where to look. Fame grows wild in places like that.*

  The Dusty's two owners glanced at each other. "You want to be careful, if you try Eraasi," Bindweed said. "The Mageworlders aren't just another bunch of thin-skins who happen to talk funny. Things are different out there."

  *What do you mean… "different"?*

  "For one thing," said Bindweed, "you can get called out for a duel by a respectable citizen in the middle of downtown Port Eraasi, which is something you don't often see these days on our side of the Gap."

  Chaka bared her teeth in a grin. The Mageworlders sound like sensible people to me. Tell me what sort of thing starts a duel on Eraasi.*

  "So you can make sure to get into a couple?" Blossom asked. She turned to her partner. "Tell me truly, Bindweed, was I ever that young and hotheaded?"

  "You'd calmed down some by the time I ran into you," Bindweed said. "But considering what I heard about you from the friends of your childhood—you were probably worse."

  "It was lies, all of it. But if that's the way that Chaka, here, wants to chase fame, it can be done." Blossom gazed thoughtfully at the bottom of her mug. "I don't know if it's a good idea, though. Another thing they believe in the Mageworlds is that fighting duels for no good reason dooms maybe the loser and certainly the winner to punishment after death."

  Bindweed looked surprised. "You really believe in stuff like that?"

  "I don't believe in betting against myself," Blossom replied. She circled the rim of her mug with her forefinger. "And I gave up fighting pointless duels a long time before I met you."

  *What form does this punishment take?* Chaka asked. *Is there any fame in standing up to it?*

  "You'd have to ask a Magelord about that aspect of the situation," Blossom told her. "But my feeling has always been that making yourself deliberately miserable was a rotten way of going about gaining anything."

  Not much to Faral's surprise, the hyperspace transit from Ophel to Sapne turned out to be profoundly dull. The door to the passenger cabin stayed locked except when the gong rang and Captain Amaro came to escort them to their next meal. Faral supposed that dining with the captain gave them a status somewhat higher than that of ordinary cargo—"but I'd say we were prisoners," he said to Jens and Miza, "if we hadn't paid good money for all of this."

  "At least we've got access to the entertainment library and the unlocked data files," Jens said. "If we were prisoners in here, they'd be making us pass the time by counting rivets in the deckplates."

  "Fifty-four on a side," said Miza. "Twelve plates in the main cabin, two in t
he 'fresher. Since you asked."

  The whooping sound of an alarm broke into their conversation, and the red Strap Down light started blinking over the cabin door.

  "Time to quit worrying about how low we rank on the shipboard social roster," Jens said. "It sounds like we're about to drop out and make orbit."

  Faral strapped himself back into the padded bunk. "The captain could have given us a bit more warning."

  "The captain isn't going to give you anything that you haven't paid for," Miza said. "You bought a passage. Information costs extra."

  "Next time I buy a ticket from the gentlesir," Jens commented from the top bunk, "I'll make sure to purchase the 'jolly camaraderie' upgrade. In the meanwhile, let's hope his piloting holds good."

  "Worried, foster-brother?" Faral asked. The alarm was still whooping, and the Strap Down light had stopped blinking and gone to a steady glow. The illumination from the cabin's overhead panels grew slowly dimmer, until the red light over the cabin door glared out into the room like a bright red eye. "You never even broke a sweat when we left hyper on Bright-Wind-Rising."

  "At the risk of stating the obvious, coz, this ship isn't the Wind, and Sapne most definitely isn't Ophel."

  Before Faral could answer, he felt the faint shiver of dislocation that meant the Dust Devil had emerged from hyperspace. The overhead light panels came back up to full intensity, and the steady vibration of the ship changed in pitch and timbre as the realspace engines cut in and began to work. The alarm kept on sounding, though, and the Strap Down light didn't go out.

  Faral experienced a moment of alarm, then forced himself to relax. The odds were that the continued Strap Down mean nothing more than that the Dust Devil's captain had made his dropout close to atmosphere, and wasn't bothering to wait around in orbit before making a landing.

  "This is no way to gain fame, either," he grumbled. "Paying people money and then sitting around in the dark while they do the work for you."

  "So learn how to do your own piloting," Miza said. "That way, if there's a problem, you know exactly who to blame."

  "That's easy for you to say. Do you know how to do your own piloting?"

  "Pleasure craft, limited." Miza sounded smug. "Class B and up."

  Faral heard Jens give a deep sigh from the upper bunk. "Had I but known… this, coz, is what comes of underestimating one's travel companions."

  Captain Amaro brought Dust Devil out of hyperspace himself, and Trav Esmet was glad to let him. After listening to the gentleladies tell their tales of privateers waiting at known drop points to pick off unsuspecting cargo ships, Trav didn't want to take the responsibility. The Dusty made the translation to Sapnean space with her guns fully crewed and ready for action, and Trav had enough to do monitoring the sensor boards for contracts. They'd never had any trouble making planetfall on Sapne before, but as Gentlelady Bindweed had said to the Dusty's purser, it only needed to happen once.

  "The boards are clear," Trav reported to the captain. "Nobody in orbit, nobody in realspace transit."

  "Taking her down," Amaro replied. "I have a visual lock, the altitude bounce is set, we're in."

  The Dusty bucked and shivered as she passed through Sapne's turbulent upper atmosphere. Soon the ground below became visible in the forward viewscreens—a wide expanse of many shades and textures of green, patched with irregular splotches of blackness. Here and there among the luxuriant green, light glittered as the sun reflected off some half-hidden surface of metal or glass.

  A light blinked red on Trav's board. He checked out the signal. "I'm getting a transponder," he reported. "Tradeship Set-Them-Up-Again, out of Ninglin, on the dirt."

  "Pick me a spot close enough that we can chat with 'em, but far enough away they don't get nervous," Amaro said.

  "Landing data coming up on screen," Trav said. "All yours, Captain."

  Almost as much as the run-to-jump, a clean landing was what made a pilot's reputation. Captain Amaro was known in the business as a good but not flashy shiphandler, and Trav Esmet had ambitions toward someday earning the same description. He watched closely Amaro brought the ship down—first slowing the vessel's descent with braking jets, then flipping to landing attitude and bringing up the nullgravs to stabilize the final touchdown.

  The Dusty's landing legs deployed at the last minute with heavy metallic clanks. The ship's nullgravs eased off a bit at a time, and the hydraulic systems sighed massively as they took over the strain of the Dusty's weight. The vessel settled into place without a bump.

  "And we're down," Amaro said, unstrapping and standing. "Stay close while I let our passengers off, then meet me back in the commonroom. Who wants to go visiting with the Mages?"

  The Gentleladies Bindweed and Blossom had been observing the landing from the same seats as before. Bindweed glanced out at the expanse of trees and vines that filled the Dusty's viewscreens.

  "Not us, I think," she said to Captain Amaro. "But if it's customary to pay a courtesy visit, you should by all means do so."

  "It'd look odd if we didn't talk with them," Amaro said. "Maybe we can swap trade goods—they wouldn't have come by Sapne in the first place if their cargo didn't need its pedigree improved."

  Faral, Miza, and Jens stood at the top of the Dusty's main ramp, ready to go out into the forest that covered Sapne's old spaceport. Captain Amaro had escorted them up from the passenger cabin himself, and now stood in the open hatch to say good-bye and wish them luck.

  "A word of advice," he said. "You might want to take a portable generator with you. You'll need to get into the filing system, and there's no guarantee that you'll find any power out there to do it with."

  "Right," said Faral. "And where do we get a portable generator?"

  Amaro glanced at Faral's carrybag. Its soft leather sides bulged with most of the Ophelan money they'd gotten at the cambio in Sombrelír. "I just happen to have one for rent."

  Several minutes later, the carrybag was lighter by a pile of cash for a security deposit. Amaro, in return, produced a generator—a small one, built into a box not much bigger than the case Faral was carrying, and fitted with a backstrap.

  "This should give you all the power you'll need," he said. "Once you've taken care of your business in the port, we can talk again about Khesat."

  "Until later, then." Jens shouldered the portable generator. "Faral, Miza—let's go."

  The three of them went down the Dusty's ramp and out between the vessel's landing legs, onto the surface of Sapne. The ground wasn't as level as it had appeared from higher up. Though the area had been used lately as a landing zone, most of the tiny plants that would have been scoured away by the fires of a working spaceport still covered the rocky ground with sprawling patches of green and blue.

  Faral took a deep lungful of the warm outdoor air. It carried the scents of fresh vegetation and recent rain.

  "Smells good," he said to Jens. "I hope it's safe."

  "If it wasn't, I don't think Captain Amaro would have opened the hatches. Besides, it's been a long time—two or three generations—since the plagues hit."

  "People trade here all the time," said Miza impatiently. "And a lot of them bring stuff in to Huool's. If this were still a plague port, I'd have heard about it."

  Faral looked around. The trees and the underbrush were full of life. Brightly feathered birds darted in and out among the trees, a garland of flowers uncoiled itself from a lower limb and became a snake with garish, many-colored scales, and the insects whirred and stridulated everywhere. "I don't see any people here right now."

  "They stay clear of the port," said Miza. "The files at Huool's talked a lot about that."

  "Then we're heading in the right direction," Jens said. "Presumably we'll find what we're here for when it's ready to let us find it."

  Faral tried to work that statement out as they made their way across what had once been, from the look of things, a landing field. The stony surface underfoot might have been baked earth or concrete or tarmac; it was hard t
o tell. Tree roots thrusting upward from beneath the surface had heaved and broken the formerly level expanse.

  "Does either one of you know which way to go?" Miza asked after a little while longer.

  "Not the slightest," admitted Jens. He didn't sound particularly worried. "But if we follow a straight line we're sure to get somewhere."

  "There was a map of the old port area in Dust Devil's files," Faral said. "I got a good look at it during transit."

  "No fair doing research," Jens said. "Are we going in the right direction?"

  "More or less."

  "You understand," said Bindweed to Chaka, "what it is we want you to do."

  The woman and the Selvaur stood in the shadows of the Dusty's landing legs. Chaka glanced out at the forest into which Jens and Faral and the redheaded female had recently disappeared.

  *You don't trust my agemates out loose without a keeper, it sounds like to me.*

  "Not exactly," said Bindweed. "We have entirely too much confidence in those two. They've ditched the perfectly good plans older and wiser heads have made for them at least once already, and I've got a bet going with my partner that they're going to figure out some way to do it again."

  Chaka grinned, taking care not to show her teeth— Bindweed was an elder, as thin-skins reckoned age, and deserved a semblance of respect no matter what she was asking. *I don't believe in messing with other people's wagers.*

  "Neither do I, hothead." Bindweed laughed. "Our boys will do whatever they decide to do. But Blossom and I don't want to lose track of them, either. So…"

  *So if they do something stupid like stow away for the Mageworlds on Set-Them-Up-Again, I don't have to stop them, I just have to watch.*