[Mageworlds 5] - The Long Hunt

by Debra Doyle

  You're an analyst, Miza told herself. You take facts and see the patterns in them that others can't. These are facts. Analyze them.

  She entered a note to herself in the margin of the data display, and read on.

  The log was long on descriptions of gravity wells and short on descriptions of crew. Sometimes the Light had flown with two crew members aboard, sometimes with three—a relative luxury that allowed for one crew member on watch, one on non-flight-related duties, and one on free time. Normally, though, the Elevener's two crew members stood watch and watch, one on duty and one off. And the log entries went on and on.

  "Entered hyperspace, bound for Ghan Jobai. All normal."

  "Fueled. Costs higher on Pleyver since last visit."

  "Navicomp upgrade completed, chipset serial number 151908 installed."

  "Feguot of Andera has put out a call for crallach meat, bonus to fastest delivery."

  "Engineer Wielk paid off, one share of mess fund reimbursed. Hired new engineer, Oredost. Bought into mess."

  Line after line, Miza scrolled through the log. Then, without warning, she came to a name she recognized.

  "Navigator Ransome paid off. Departs for the Guildhouse on Ilarna. We wish him well."

  Miza closed her eyes.

  Ransome the traitor. Errec Ransome, who was pointed out to schoolchildren from one side of the civilized galaxy to the other as the proximate cause of the Second Magewar. Ransome the Adept.

  Guislen was an Adept too.

  She continued on to the end of the log, and the day when the ship had first come into service. No other name struck her. She'd found the connection that she knew had to exist.

  Letting the datapad drift aside, she floated free of her chair and stretched. Now what should I do? she wondered.

  Tell Faral, of course. That was easy. And Jens. Let them know who had brought them this far—a man famous for villainy while he was alive. What would someone like that stick at now once he was dead?

  She found Faral and Jens together in the engineering spaces. Like Miza, they were using their spare time and the ship's old manuals to learn the system. They had several plates removed from the overhead, and Jens was floating near the opening and checking the components while Faral read out the specs from a datapad down below. They looked in Miza's direction as she came gliding in.

  "I think I know who our fourth companion is," she began, "and you aren't going to like it."

  Jens went on tracing a wiring conduit in the overhead with his finger. "So—are you going to tell us?"

  She drew a deep breath. "I think he's Errec Ransome. The traitor."

  "Granda never would let us talk about Ransome like that," Faral said. "Whenever the subject came up, he always said, 'What's done is done, and Errec was my friend.' "

  "Whatever," said Miza impatiently. "But he was also the navigator on Inner Light before he got paid off and went to join the Adepts."

  "Maybe you're right and there's a connection," said Faral. "Or maybe there isn't. What's important is that Guislen is here now, and that he's helped us. Do you want to be the one who tells him, 'By the way, you're the most hated man in the known universe'?"

  "No." She shook her head. The motion made her float away from Faral at a slight angle, and almost bump into Jens. "But I don't think I'll sleep again while he's here."

  "The galaxy is full of dead bad men," Jens said, "and dead good ones too. Sooner or later everyone sleeps."

  He twisted to look directly downward into Miza's eyes. "Whoever Guislen is, or whatever, he's my friend. To be frank, Gentlelady, I've known him longer than I've known you. I don't ask you to like it. But you are going to have to settle your mind to it."

  He turned back to his tracing of the circuits.

  Miza was silent, waiting for Faral to say something. When he didn't, only gave a helpless shrug, she felt her eyes begin to sting. She wiped her eyes with her shirtsleeve—on top of everything else, she didn't need the humiliation of seeing her tears float loose in free-fall—and fled for the sanctuary of the Light's cockpit.

  Once she got there, she dogged the door shut behind her, secured herself in the command chair, then pressed her face against the acceleration padding and wept. After a while, through her sobs, she heard a voice speaking her name.

  "Mizady Lyftingil," it said quietly. "When you named me, I knew. You are right. I should go."

  She opened her eyes again. She was alone in the cockpit, and the door behind her was still dogged down.

  Several hours passed. Miza didn't much want to leave Inner Light's cockpit. She knew in her heart that when she did, she'd find no trace of Guislen, or of Errec Ransome, anywhere on board the ship—and now that her naming of him had driven him away, she found the thought of finishing the transit without him almost as unsettling as she had found his presence earlier. Whatever else Ransome might have been and done, he'd made a good teacher in the basics of crewing an antique spacecraft.

  Now there's just the three of us.

  That, too, was a depressing thought. Jens Metadi-Jessan had called Guislen a friend, and he wasn't going to be happy when he found out that his friend was gone. It wouldn't take him long to decide that Miza was to blame, either, and then she could say good-bye to whatever traces of uneasy fellowship they might have had.

  And Faral goes where Jens says to follow. That thought was even more depressing.

  She sat up straighter—or would have, if she'd been actually sitting, and not just anchored to the Light's command couch by the safety webbing. It doesn't matter if neither one of them is speaking to you, she told herself. Once you've gotten them safely to Khesat, you've taken care of Huool's commission and can go back to Ophel.

  With that decision behind her, it was easier to unbuckle the webbing and open the door. She couldn't have stayed inside forever anyway—as a place to withstand a siege, the Light's cockpit lacked some of the basic requirements, food and water being only two of them.

  All the same, she was relieved to see that no one was waiting for her outside the cockpit door. She made her way aft to the 'fresher, then forward again toward the galley.

  A cup of cha'a, she thought, then to the cockpit to get some sleep. Maybe things will look better in the morning.

  The galley wasn't empty. Faral was there already, with a zero-g cha'a cup in either hand. He looked like he was about to leave; she pushed herself backward out of the door to clear the way for him. To her surprise, he didn't go on past her, but stayed where he was and held out one of the zero-g cups like a peace offering.

  "I was going to bring one up to you," he said. "I thought you might want it."

  "Thanks." Miza took the cup and sipped at it. Maybe she was getting used to the wretched quality of space rations in general, but me cha'a didn't taste half-bad. "Where's your cousin?"

  "Down in the cargo hold. He said he was damned if he was going to sleep in crew berthing anymore."

  "Oh." She took another sip of the cha'a. "Frankly, I can see his point. I'm surprised he held out this long."

  "Me too." Faral didn't say anything for a while. Then he said, "We looked all over the ship for Guislen."

  "And you didn't find any trace of him. Right?"

  "Right. Jens isn't real happy right now."

  "I don't blame him," she said. "Not really. I'm sorry I ever—"

  "It isn't your fault. All you did was tell the truth." There was another awkward pause. Then Faral seemed to make up his mind about something. He gestured with his free hand at the door of the galley nook. "Sit out in the common room for a while?"

  After the emotions of the past few hours, the friendly invitation almost undid her all over again. She kept herself from sniffling—she was not going to go all weepy at the slightest provocation!—and said, as lightly as she could manage, "Sure."

  The bolted-down table in the common room wasn't any good without proper gravity. Miza suspected that its main use had been as a surface for doing dirtside paperwork with port officials the captain did
n't want going any farther into the ship. However, the shipwrights who designed the old Gyfferan Elevener had provided the compartment with plenty of handholds and gripping bars. She and Faral found a couple near the table to wrap their legs around for anchors—as close to sitting anywhere as they were likely to get until the Light made planetfall on Khesat.

  Neither one of them said anything for a while. Faral was a good person to sit and be quiet with, Miza decided. And having another person nearby made the Light's chilly silences a great deal easier to bear. She decided that she felt sorry for Jens, down by himself in the cargo hold.

  Her own cup of cha'a, unfortunately, wasn't going to last forever—and ship's-night had come while she and Faral were together. The lights in the common room had dimmed, and the companionway leading forward to the bridge was almost completely black. She pulled her jacket around her—it was too long in the sleeves and too tight in the chest, a chance discovery in the ship's storage locker, but it warmed her. She knew that the feeling of cold was an illusion caused by the dimming of the lights, but ship's-night always seemed to have a greater chill to it than the artificial day.

  She wasn't eager to face the trip back through the dark, tunnel-like passage to the Light's cockpit. Not while there was still someone to stay with here.

  I'll wait until Faral leaves, she thought. Then I'll go.

  She glanced over at Faral. He'd secured his empty cup in a bin by the table, and now his hand was floating—casually, as if his will had played no part in the decision—so close to hers that it would be a simple matter for her fingers to link with his.

  She didn't precisely will it, but when her hand floated toward his, she didn't snatch it back. She felt the warmth of contact—casual, accidental—and then more warmth as he took her hand lightly in his, and held it as if it were a bird that would be killed by too tight a grasp.

  Miza relaxed, enjoying the human contact. A ship on loan from the dead was no place to turn down the pulse of life. She leaned back into the zero gravity and closed her eyes. Soon enough she slept.

  She awoke to the sound of relays clicking over in the gently brightening light of ship's-dawn, and found herself floating in the middle of the common room with her head against Faral's shoulder. Sometime during the night they must have moved closer together for warmth, then embraced to keep from drifting apart.

  She opened her eyes and saw that Faral was awake also. Looking at him from this distance—it was no distance at all, really, with her arms wrapped around him and his around her—she noticed for the first time that he had almost absurdly beautiful eyelashes. They made a curious, touching contrast to the muscular body she was currently holding.

  "Good morning," he said. He sounded somewhat tentative, as if none of the lessons in good manners he'd learned at home had covered what to say to the person you woke up with.

  On Artha, fortunately, the lessons covered everything.

  "Good morning," Miza replied, and hugged him briefly before letting go.

  "You made supper last night," she added, feeling oddly cheerful. "I'll fix breakfast for us this morning."

  Chapter XVI.

  Khesat

  « ^ »

  "We're almost to dropout," Jens said to Miza. The two of them currently occupied the pilot's and copilot's positions in the Light's cockpit, white Faral hung weightless in the cramped space behind them. "Do you have any idea how you're going to land this thing?"

  Faral scowled at his cousin. *Take it easy, will you?*

  Jens had been in a foul mood for some days now, ever since Guislen/Ransome's departure, but in Faral's opinion that was no reason to make their only pilot nervous. The navicomp alarm rang as he spoke.

  "Stand by for dropout," said Miza.

  She cut in the Light's realspace engines and took down the hyperdrives. Faral held his breath and hoped for the best. A Gyfferan Elevener was a long way from a light touring craft with an idiotproof navigational interface.

  Stars appeared in the narrow slit of the viewscreen ahead, shifting rapidly from red to their normal color as the grey dazzle of hyperspace departed. Faral saw Miza relax a little in the cradle of her safety webbing.

  "Before we talk about landing," she said—speaking to him, he noted, and not to Jens—"let's talk about where we are. I'm no expert on these things, even if I have read most of the tech manuals. Most of the ones in Galcenian, anyway."

  She glanced at the console in front of her, then up at the navicomp where it was welded to the bulkhead just abaft the viewport. "I think that I have to do this," she said, and flipped a switch that looked like it might have been labeled "locate" if it hadn't had a scrawl of Ilarnan beneath it instead.

  "Now what?" said Faral.

  "Now we wait until either the machine tells us that it has a fix, or it doesn't. I don't know about you, but I can't tell one part of the universe from another by eye."

  Jens regarded the navicomp with disapprobation. "I suppose you've already considered that this thing is looking for aids to navigation that may not have been maintained, and that may or may not have been changed, and that may have been relocated or drifted off course during the last sixty years, or been blown up in either of two different wars?"

  "The thought was never far from my mind the whole way," Miza said. "If I recall correctly, this part of the process could take several hours. I'm going to spend the time having lunch. When I come back, either the navicomp will have a posit waiting for us on the readout, or it won't."

  She left the cockpit, swimming downward toward the galley and leaving Faral and Jens to watch over the console.

  "You're certainly putting yourself out to be charming this morning," Faral told his cousin. "And you probably know even less about landing a spaceship than she does."

  "Khesat had an in-system fleet eight years ago," Jens said. "I suppose it still has one. They kept watch for distress calls from ships in trouble."

  "Are we in distress?"

  "I'll tell you after lunch," Jens said, and followed in the direction Miza had gone.

  Faral remained behind, gazing out moodily at the brilliant stars glittering just beyond the viewscreen. A light began to blink on the main console panel, immediately below a handset.

  Comm link? thought Faral, and picked the handset up.

  A voice speaking in what he supposed was Khesatan came from beyond a grille in the overhead. Faral waited for the voice to go silent and the carrier wave to drop before speaking into the handset.

  "This is Inner Light, last port of call Sapne. Please wait while I call the captain."

  Rhal Kasander hated leaving the planet's surface.

  He disliked the undignified nature of a shuttle ride to orbit, with its couches and webbing and uncomfortable physical effects. Zero-g was not kind to a man with a delicate stomach and a precisely calibrated sense of balance. The presence of disposal bags for dealing with the results merely sufficed to make the Exalted of Tanavral feel condescended to by those with coarser natures than his own.

  The artificial gravity of Khesat Orbital Reception provided only physical relief. The builders of the planet's main space station and manufacturing hub had followed their own governing aesthetic during its construction, and that aesthetic was not the one that ruled on the world below. Even the public and diplomatic areas were clean and spare, and stripped deliberately of ornament. They gave the eye nothing to delight in, only the gleam of polished metal and the dazzle of light on sheets of armor-glass.

  Working areas like the salvage docks declined to make even those concessions. The lines in such places were those of function alone and not of art. Nevertheless, when the heavy blastproof and vacuum-tight doors of Salvage Dock Number One groaned open, Rhal Kasander—attended as always by his slipper-bearer—was there in person to greet the three young people who came out.

  Politics, after all, was the art above all arts, and the Exalted of Tanavral was its most zealous practitioner. Let the others, Hafelsan and the rest, wait on the arrival of that fre
etrader from Sapne, even now grounding at Port of Diamond. Not there but here, Kasander was positive—based on faith and a comm call that had roused him from his bed the moment the ship entered system space—here was his Worthy.

  He cast an appraising eye over the two young men and the young woman as they approached. The golden-haired youth… that would be the cadet-Jessani himself, a few years older than when Kasander had last seen him, and still more than sufficiently personable. His companions made a charming matched set in their own right—male and female, dark and fair—undoubtedly chosen for their good looks as well as for whatever practical skills they might possess.

  But the clothes! Common Galcenian-style travelers' garb, at best, and that would have been before whatever misfortunes had added all the dirt and snags and wrinkles. Something would have to be done about that, the Exalted decided, as soon as the proper courtesies had been observed.

  The cadet-Jessani and his companions were halfway across the distance from the open door of Dock Number One. Kasander hurried forward with both hands extended.

  "My dear boy! My very dear boy!" He spoke in Galcenian, since who knew what languages the companions might speak, and it was unwise to alienate such people prematurely. "Forced to travel in circumstances I hesitate even to imagine…"

  The cadet-Jessani—Jens Metadi-Jessan D'Rosselin, Worthy scion of a Worthy lineage—answered him with a touch of amusement. "It was nothing, honored cousin-once-removed. I came as soon as I got word."

  "You got—?" Kasander began before catching himself. "Oh, yes, of course. I've prepared a place for you in my own house, while we await the Day of Change."

  The cadet-Jessani nodded as if he'd expected nothing less. He gestured toward his companions. "And my staff?"

  "The same, of course."

  "My thanks for your consideration," the young man said. "It's a pleasure to see you again after all these years. But now, shall we repair to the surface… perhaps, even, to the shops? As you can see, we were forced to abandon our luggage, and have become far too well acquainted with our present garments."