“Adepts can’t hold rank, sir. Everybody knows that.”
“Do they?” Gil regarded his aide thoughtfully. “Errec Ransome used to say as much to everybody who asked, and the handful of known Adepts in the service used to make a big point of not wearing any kind of insignia. It strikes me now that if I were Errec Ransome, and wanted to place an observer or two in the Space Force, I’d say the same.”
Jhunnei remained silent.
“Well?” Gil prompted.
“With respect, Commodore, I can’t answer your question.”
“That’s insubordination, you know.”
“Yes, sir.”
Gil paused again, considering. “I don’t want to lose a perfectly good aide,” he said finally. “Can we agree to take your silence as an affirmative?”
“Take it as you please. Sir.”
“Don’t get so stiff,” Gil said. “As far as Waycross is concerned, we’re both civilians anyway.”
“Yes, sir. If you feel you can trust me, sir.”
“Very much so, Lieutenant.”
She seemed to relax then—until he saw the change, Gil had not appreciated the depth of her previous unease—and glanced over at the still-unconscious sniper for the first time since her initial greeting.
“What about him?” she said. “Do we take him home with us and ask him lots of interesting questions?”
Gil shook his head. “He’s not important. Somebody hired him to take a shot at us, is all.”
“Well, yes—but don’t we want to find out who?”
“I don’t think we need to bother. Unless I miss my guess, we’ll find whoever hired him waiting for us at the docking bay.”
“Now you’re the one who’s being mysterious, Commodore.”
Gil smiled. “This is wartime, Lieutenant. A man has to take his pleasures as he can find them.”
By the time Lady LeRoi docked at High Station Pleyver, Klea was more tired of dried, reconstituted water-grain than she would ever have believed possible. To her chagrin, Owen insisted that they wait a day to disembark.
“We’ll leave ship when the crew does,” he said. “No sense in getting ourselves shunted off to transient quarters with all the other refugees.”
“I suppose not,” she said. Until now, she hadn’t thought about what might happen if Pleyver didn’t want all the people the Lady was bringing. Not everybody who’d left Nammerin was going to be better off in a new place.
It wasn’t until the next morning that she collected her belongings—the ancient daypack and the grrch-wood staff—and followed Owen down the Lady’s ramp to the landing-bay deck. The great echoing cave of the bay, with only the shimmer of a force field at the open end to keep hard vacuum where it belonged, looked like nothing she’d ever seen outside of a holovid show. Owen seemed unimpressed, as if he’d seen and done such things enough times to make them commonplace, but Klea stared about like any other tourist.
She’d thought that the Lady looked big when the ship stood on landing legs in the middle of Namport’s otherwise empty field. But that was before she’d had a chance to see what a freighter looked like when it rested in a nullgrav cradle at an orbital dock. The metal side of the ship curved up and away from her as she descended the ramp, seeming to stretch as far as the horizon of a small world. Then she looked out in front of her, and saw the ranks of larger and smaller ships in their cradles, and the moving pinpoints that were the spacers, port laborers, and officials who worked in this part of High Station.
“I hadn’t realized a spacedock was so big,” she said.
Owen glanced back at Klea over his shoulder. “This is one of the smaller bays,” he told her. “Independent merchant craft, mostly—vessels that can do surface landings if they have to. If you want to see something really big, you need to check out the docks on the Space Force side. The cradles over there can handle anything the Republic’s got.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
Nervously, she looked away from the long vista and back to the foot of the Lady’s ramp. There was a distortion in the air down there, too, one that she traced without much trouble to the semicircle of portable force-field generators set out on the deckplates. Two people in uniforms of some kind sat at a folding table just outside the field.
“Customs inspection,” said Owen, before she could ask. “Immigrant processing. High Station’s an artificial environment and they like to keep things orderly.”
“That’s why you waited?”
He nodded. “Yesterday would have been a mob scene. Anybody looking the least bit strange would have gotten shoved up the ladder for somebody more important to decide on, and from there it might take days to get out. Today they’re bored.”
She and Owen were both wearing spacer’s coveralls from the Lady’s clothes locker, courtesy of Owen’s work down in the engine room, and she wasn’t surprised when the inspectors waved them past with nothing more than a cursory glance at their papers—which, in fact, did not exist as anything more than imaginary constructs. She’d known for quite a while now that Owen was good at making people see things that weren’t there.
“All right,” she said, after the thick armor-glass doors had shut between them and the docking bay. “We got off Nammerin, and we got off the Lady. Where do we go next?”
“We find a bar,” he said. “And buy a drink.”
She shook her head. “I don’t think I want—”
“Then drink tap water with ice in it,” he said. “But we need to hear all the hot gossip, and hear it fast.”
For such a tense confrontation, the encounter with the sniper had taken very little time. Gil and Jhunnei reached docking bay 358-A, and Karipavo’s shuttle, only a few minutes later than Gil had originally planned. The craft’s ramp was still down but the entry force field was up, with a crew member standing guard down below.
The trooper saluted. “Commodore. There’s a visitor waiting for you inside the shuttle, sir.”
“I rather thought there would be,” said Gil, returning the salute. “Did our visitor say what was wanted?”
“No, sir. Only that he—that it—that you were the only person it was going to talk to. At least, that’s what the chief says that it said.”
“She,” Gil said, as he palmed the security lockplate at the top of the ramp. The force field dissolved to let him and Jhunnei pass through. “If it’s who I think it is.”
It was. Merrolakk the Selvaur sat on one of the acceleration couches in the main body of the shuttle, with the nervous crew members giving her plenty of room. The slit pupils of her yellow eyes narrowed when she saw him.
*D’Rugier.*
Gil thought he detected a note of surprise in the hooting, rumbling voice. “Captain,” he said. “Have you conferred with your associates, then?”
*My associates.* It wasn’t surprise, now, in the Selvaur’s voice, but amusement. *Oh, yes. We conferred.*
“And have you made up your mind about our business deal?”
*I had a few doubts,* Merro said. *But not anymore. I’m throwing in with you, Commodore—my ships, your terms.* She held out a big, green-scaled hand. *Done?*
The Selvaur’s switch to his military title wasn’t lost on Gil. He met her grip to seal the contract in free-spacer fashion. “Done.”
*Good enough,* said Merro. *When do you launch?*
“As soon as possible. You’ll be informed. See Chief Bertyn about codes and comm frequencies; you can pass them around to your own people as you see fit.”
Merro stood, stretching. *I’ll see that everybody’s up to speed before we lift,* she promised. *What’s our first target? *
“I’ll let everyone know after the fleet is formed up,” Gil said. “Spacers in port talk more than they should, and I don’t want the Mageworlders to listen.”
*Fair enough,* said Merro.
The Selvauran captain headed off in the direction of the shuttle’s cockpit, presumably to consult with Chief Bertyn. Gil and Lieutenant Jhunnei looked
at each other. Gil was the first to speak.
“Well,” he said. “Between those twenty-seven ships from the Net, and Merrolakk’s irregulars, it looks like we have a fleet.”
“Merrolakk,” said Jhunnei thoughtfully. “She’s the one who set up that ambush, you know.”
“I know. I didn’t think you did, though.”
“I didn’t—not until we got here. But you knew.”
“I met a lot of Selvaurs when I was with General Metadi,” Gil said. “It’s the way they think. Merro wasn’t about to join forces with someone she hadn’t checked out first. So she arranged for a test.”
“That’s arrogance for you,” said Jhunnei. “Auditioning the commodore of the Mageworlds Fleet like a—like a cabaret act.”
Gil shrugged. “It’s the way they think, is all. If it turned out that I was clever enough, or lucky enough—or in my case, Lieutenant, well-advised enough—to evade Merrolakk’s ambush, she’d be here waiting to make a deal. If I didn’t make it … well, she’d have an amusing time watching a bunch of thin-skins run around getting hysterical.”
“Not for very long,” said Jhunnei.
Gil looked at his aide—who was, it seemed, probably an Adept and probably one of Errec Ransome’s deep-cover operatives as well—and shook his head. “I think our Captain Merro is luckier than she knows.”
“There’s no such thing as luck, sir. Not really.”
“Too bad,” said Gil. “Because from now on, we’re going to need a lot of it.”
Portside on High Station was cleaner and better behaved than Klea had expected. The bars all had OPEN 33 HOURS signs on them, and they all came fully staffed with the usual complement of hookers and joyboys, but nobody seemed to be offering anything more exotic than the standard services. The dancers in the zero-g bubbles at the Web-Runners’ Grill looked like only that—dancers—and when one of the free-spacers drinking at the bar pointed at the nearest bubble and asked the bartender a question, the bartender shook his head. The free-spacer shrugged and went back to his drink.
Owen must have seen Klea’s change of expression. “This is High Station,” he said. “Nobody comes here for the night life. Any lonesome spacer who wants some real entertainment can take a shuttle dirtside to Flatlands Portcity.”
“You sound like you’ve been here before.”
“I worked in Flatlands for a while.”
She looked at him. “Like you did in Namport?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve gone a lot of places—”
“—and done a lot of things,” he finished for her. “All for the sake of the Guild. At least, I thought so at the time.”
“Did you like it?”
“‘Like’ isn’t the right word. But I was good at my work, and it gave me satisfaction to do it well.”
“Don’t you like it anymore?”
“Times have changed,” he said, “and not just because the Mages took Galcen. But don’t worry about it. You’re a free-spacer on port leave. Lean back, enjoy yourself, and listen for two things: what’s happening on Pleyver, and what ship is leaving next for Suivi Point.”
Klea leaned back obediently, and tried to open her ears, but in spite of its cleanliness and good order the bar reminded her too much of Freling’s place for her to relax. Instead, she found herself growing fearful that if she let down her guard she’d once again start seeing and hearing other people’s thoughts. That way was madness, and she’d barely escaped falling into it back on Nammerin.
“I’m sorry,” she said finally. “I’m not going to be any good at listening for stuff in here.”
He didn’t look surprised. “Go walk around for a while, then, and pick up what news you can that way.”
“Is it safe?”
“This is High Station,” he said. “As long as you stick to the docking bays and the main concourse you’ll do fine. I’ll meet you at the free-spacers’ hostel on this level.”
Klea left the Web-Runners’ Grill and walked for a while through the big portside concourse—only one of many, if the holomaps in the information kiosks could be believed. It was a new experience, looking at the licensed establishments as an off-worlder and a possible customer, instead of as part of the merchandise. After a while, though, exploration palled—even with the holomaps she didn’t dare to go very far—and she headed back toward the docking bay.
Another ship had come in while she was with Owen, a much-battered freighter that lay in the next cradle to Lady LeRoi. The massive doors of the ship’s cargo hold stood open, and crew members and dockside workers were loading cargo on nullgrav pallets.
Klea felt a sudden intense interest in the freighter’s comings and goings, a sensation like the thoughts of others impinging on her own, but without the associations of pain and fear. She wandered closer to the new arrival, trying to imitate Owen’s trick of looking like someone who always belonged wherever he happened to be.
“What ship?” she asked the nearest crew member.
“Claw Hard, out of Kiin-Aloq,” said the spacer. “Just in, and going to be out again as soon as we get her unloaded.” He looked at Klea speculatively. “All we need’s a couple of hands for the engineering watches. You ever stood realspace control?”
“My partner has,” Klea said truthfully. “I’m training.” She made haste to divert the conversation before she had to tell an outright lie. “Where are you going from here?”
“The outplanets, probably—as far from the fighting as we can get. Accardi is where the cargo’s bound.”
“Thanks,” she said. She’d never heard of Accardi—didn’t know whether it was a sector, a planet, or just a port—but the same inner prompting that had pulled her over to the ship was urging her to action again. “Listen, my partner and I are looking for a ship out of here ourselves. I’ve got to go tell him.”
“Don’t let the deckplates rust under your boots,” the spacer advised. “If we’re still here when you get back, talk to Captain Osa about a berth—you can say that Ragen sent you.”
Klea headed for the free-spacer’s hostel almost at a run. Owen was there as he’d said he would be, sitting on one of the lobby couches and paging through the flatscreen newsreader that a trusting management had bolted to the end table. He looked up as she hurried in.
“There’s a ship about to depart,” she said. “For Accardi. And they need a couple of hands in the engine room.”
“Accardi. Damn. That’s a long way from anywhere. But we can’t stay.” He tapped the screen of the newsreader with one finger. “The Pleyveran Senate declared for the Mageworlds at 3200 yesterday, Flatlands local time. At 0425 Standard, which is 3251 Flatlands local, High Station proclaimed itself a separate—and loyal—member of the Republic. Qualified oddsmakers are giving the standoff a fifty-fifty chance of turning into open warfare before the Magefleet even shows up.”
Ochemet was no longer certain how much time had passed since he had entered the lifepod with Errec Ransome.
There was no viewscreen in the tiny survival craft, only what looked like a rudimentary monitor of some sort, and a few equally rudimentary controls, all labeled in what Ochemet presumed was the Mageworlds alphabet. Ransome wasn’t touching any of them. The Master of the Guild—the former Master of the Guild, Ochemet reminded himself—sat with his eyes closed and his head thrown back against the padding of the acceleration couch. His face was pale under the streaks of dried blood.
Finally, Ochemet broke the silence. “I hope you’re expecting somebody to retrieve us.”
“No,” said Ransome.
“I see.” Ochemet looked at the control panel. Its handful of buttons and readouts meant nothing to him. He was Planetary Infantry, not a starpilot; he’d only worked in atmosphere, and never with anything more complicated than a scoutcar. Ransome, though, had flown with General Metadi in the ’Hammer, during times almost as bad as these. “If that’s the case, hadn’t you better start trying to figure out the instrumentation on this thing?”
Ransome didn’t open his eyes. “No. Be silent.”
Ochemet gritted his teeth to keep from demanding a better answer. The Adept—Ochemet supposed Ransome was still an Adept, even if he was no longer the Master—was clearly doing something that required intense concentration, even if he wasn’t ready to explain what it was.
More time went by; Ochemet didn’t know how much more. The Mages had taken his chronometer from him when they captured him, and in the tiny lifepod there was nothing that could be used to measure the passage of hours, or even of days. Finally Ransome gave a long, shuddering sigh and opened his eyes.
“There,” he said. “It’s done.”
“What’s done?”
“Making us safe,” Ransome said. “Hiding us from the eyes of the Magelords and the prying of their Circles.”
Ochemet took a deep breath. “That’s very good,” he said carefully. “But where, exactly, are we going?”
Ransome gave another of his unsettling smiles. “Nowhere.”
“I thought you were planning on escape,” Ochemet said.
“If I’d known it was suicide you had in mind, I’d have stayed put and let the Mages waste their energy on keeping me.”
“An admirable devotion to duty,” said the Adept. “But unnecessary. We have not, in fact, left the ship—though it pleases our former captors to believe that we have done so.”
Ochemet stared at him. “I saw you launch the pods!”
“The launch was a necessary diversion. Actually entering one was never a requirement. Nor are we in one now.”
“But we’re in a pod right now. I felt this one cutting loose. I’ve got a bruise coming on my ribs from not getting strapped down in time.”
“A simple illusion,” said Ransome. He made a waving-away gesture with one hand. “If Lord sus-Airaalin or any of his minions probed your mind during our escape, they saw as truth what you believed to be true. By now, they count us as long gone, drifting somewhere in Galcenian space and waiting in vain for a rescue.”
“I see,” Ochemet said. He was angry again. If Ransome hadn’t been the only other citizen of the Republic within range of lightspeed comms, he would have struck the older man. “I suppose you have a plan ready for what we do next?”
By Honor Betray'd: Mageworlds #3 Page 11