Starpilot's Grave: Book Two of Mageworlds

by Doyle, Debra; Macdonald, James D.

  Time and place shifted around her as she spoke, and she and her mother weren’t in the house in the Uplands anymore. They were standing in a room, an upper room, she was sure of it, paneled in heavy dark wood. The acrid smell of blaster fire hung like smoke in the air around her, and the floor was awash in blood. Nor were they alone—an older, elegantly dressed gentleman was with them. Blood stained the white spidersilk of his shirt, and he carried a black staff in his hand.

  “My lady,” he said, nodding to Beka-in-the-dream Then, to her mother, he bowed low and said, “I have failed you, Domina, and my fate is in your hands.”

  “Death,” the Domina said, her voice level, and turned back to Beka. “There’s always someone like Tarveet. You just have to put up with it if you want to get anything done.”

  “Who says I want to get anything done?” Beka-in-the-dream demanded. “I’m not on the Council, you are—so why should I have to be the one who dances with Tarveet?”

  The older man had straightened from his bow. “You will walk with me for a while, my lady?” he asked Beka. Then, without pausing for answer, he turned to the Domina. “You will walk with me first—perhaps we will find an exit.”

  “Listen to me, Beka,” said the Domina, seeming not to hear him. The frown line between her eyes had deepened, as though either the conversation or House Rosselin’s iron tiara had given her a headache. She took off the tiara and put it on the scarred plastic tabletop in Warhammer’s common room—they were on the spaceship now, and the older man had vanished somehow in the transition. “Galactic politics is a serious business. People hold grudges for a long time over trivial offenses, and the friends and enemies you make now will be important to you later.”

  “I don’t care,” said Beka-in-the-dream. “And why should I care about politics, either?”

  “You’re the Domina-in-waiting,” her mother said. “The heir to Entibor. Who else is going to fill our Council seat once I decide to give up politics for good?”

  For a moment, Beka was speechless, looking at the Domina. Perada’s face had changed—younger, plainer, with sharper cheekbones and thinner lips, and a red optical-plastic eye patch covering one bright blue eye. Council robes were wrapped around her like a shroud, binding her too tightly to move or even breathe, and the iron tiara was burning the flesh of her skull. But the look on her face was still Perada’s—careful, polished, and calm.

  At last Beka found her voice again.

  “Entibor is gone,” she said, but her mother’s expression never changed underneath the burning crown. Desperately, Beka pressed on. “It’s dead. Slagged. Defoliated. The whole world is nothing but a great big planet-sized melted-glass paperweight. I’ve been in shops where they sell it in chunks for souvenirs. How does a place like that rate a seat on the Council when some of the outplanet colonies have been petitioning for admission ever since the Magewar ended?”

  The Domina had gone very pale, but her voice and her expression were patient as ever. “Entibor still speaks for its colonies. You know that. And there are upwards of five billion planet-born Entiborans resident on various worlds of the Republic. Don’t you think they deserve representation by one of their own?”

  Beka-in-the-dream picked up a cup of cha’a from the table and took a drink. It was hot, scalding her mouth and throat on the way down.

  “Mother,” she said. Her own voice wobbled on the verge of tears. “You make it sound like I belong to all those people, like a—like a hovercar or a desk comp or something.”

  “We do belong to them,” said the Domina. “They need to feel that something is still left of what used to be, that the War didn’t take it all. Things like that are important.”

  “Not to me they aren’t!” Tears of frustration burned in her eyes. “I hate politics, I hate fancy parties, and I hate being nice to people I can’t stand. And I’m not going to spend the rest of my life playing nursemaid to a bunch of people with their heads stuck in the past!”

  She ran out of the common room before her mother could say anything, heading for the pilot’s compartment—but it wasn’t Warhammer’s bridge that was on the other side of the sliding vacuum-tight door, it was the back stairs of the house in the Uplands, leading to the rooftop terrace where the stars shone down, cold and far away and bright.

  Her brother Owen stood at one end of the terrace, watching the night. Beka-in-the-dream hadn’t seen him leave the party, but here he was, already home and changed out of his good clothes into the plain beige garments he wore every day as an apprentice Adept. The light from the high, distant moon bleached the color out of even those, leaving him a motionless study in different shades of grey.

  She ran to him and grabbed him by the upper arms, shaking him out of whatever reverie held his attention.

  “Get me out of here, Owen,” she said. “Now.”

  He blinked, looking startled. “What?”

  “Get me out of here,” she repeated. “I’ve got to get away from Galcen before they shut me up inside a glass box with ‘Domina of Entibor’ written on the lid. I’m not Mother—I’ll go crazy if I try to live like that.”

  She shook him again, harder. “I mean it, Owen. I have to get out.”

  Owen moved away from her grip without apparent effort. “How do you plan to live?” he asked. “Since you don’t want to be the Domina someday … .”

  She yanked open the drawstring of silver cord that held her evening bag closed, and pulled out the plastic data-wafer with her flatpic on it. “See this? It’s a full-range commercial starpilot’s license, and it’s mine.”

  “You told Mother you were only going to take the sims for ‘pleasure craft, limited.’”

  “So I punched the wrong button when I got into the simulator. Anybody who’s learned piloting from Dadda is good enough to hold down a berth on a regular ship, and you know it.”

  His face, in the pale light, told her nothing. She slipped the license back into her evening bag and went on.

  “The only thing that’s going to slow anybody down about hiring me is my name. I’m going to need your help if I want to get a fair chance … like you helped me that time with the slug in Tarveet’s salad.”

  Owen’s mouth curved upward briefly. “I remember that one. And nobody noticed until he was halfway through eating it.”

  “Even way back then, you were good at fooling people. I’ll bet you’re a lot better at it now.”

  She heard a breath of laughter. “Go get your hair out of those fancy braids and put on your grubbiest coverall,” he said. “We can take the aircar as soon as Mother goes to sleep.”

  He paused, and his face changed again, becoming older and more serious, with tired eyes that had seen more than they should. “The night before you die,” he told her, “you’ll dream about this, and remember.”

  Beka gasped and woke up, tangling her right arm in the sheet as she tried to reach for the knife she wore strapped always to her left forearm.

  “Easy,” murmured Nyls Jessan’s voice in her ear. “It’s all right, you’re awake now.”

  The sounds of the ship’s ventilation systems faded into the background, and Jessan’s hands were warm against her skin as he straightened out the twisted sheet. When that was done, the Khesatan propped himself up on one elbow and lay watching her.

  “You’re still shaking,” he said. “Was it that bad?”

  “Pretty bad.” Her voice was shaky, too. Just be glad this is only you and Nyls, my girl. If Ignac’ ever had any idea of how scared all this was making you, he’d dig in his heels and refuse to go along.

  Jessan’s grey eyes were concerned. “Look, if you feel bad about how we decided to play it, just say so and we can think of another way.”

  “No,” she said. “I’m fine about that. It was mostly my idea anyhow.” She shivered in spite of herself, and pressed closer to Jessan’s warmth. “This was about something else.”

  He put his free arm around her; as always, she felt her trembling ease off with the physical contact
. “It really must have been bad,” he said. “Another couple of seconds, and I’d have had to declare the sheet a casualty of war.”

  “Thanks for saving it.” She leaned her forehead against his chest. He smelled of soap, with a faint salty overlay of clean perspiration. “I was dreaming about the night I left home. I don’t know why.”

  “Point of no return, maybe?”

  “Maybe.” She didn’t look up. “I never saw my mother again after that. Alive, that is, except for the holovids when she was making a speech or something.”

  “Ah.”

  “I didn’t even make it home to Galcen for the funeral.”

  “Not your fault, surely.” His arm tightened around her shoulders. “You’ve said before that you were in hyperspace and out of comms during that whole affair.”

  She shook her head, not meeting his eyes. “It wouldn’t have made any difference if I’d been dirtside at Prime and caught the whole thing in the holoset at a spaceport bar. I still wouldn’t have had the nerve to go home.”

  “I don’t know … I’d say you had enough nerve to do anything you wanted to.”

  “Not enough for that.” She bit her lip for a moment; her breath steadied, and she went on. “They’d have caught me then for sure, and I’d never have gotten back out.”

  “‘They’?”

  “The ones who wanted to make me into the next Domina of Lost Entibor,” she said. “If the old one’s broken, you just slide in the replacement, like fixing a dead light panel. You don’t bother asking the new one whether it wants to be a light panel at all.”

  Jessan leaned his face against the top of her head. His breath sighed gently through her hair. “I far prefer you as a disreputable starpilot.”

  “You’re probably the only person in the galaxy who does.”

  “But I have excellent taste.”

  She laughed in spite of herself. “Oh, Nyls. What would I do without you?”

  “Sleep alone, I hope … .” He paused. “But don’t worry—I won’t go away.”

  “Good,” she said. She put her arms around him, feeling the smooth muscles of his back under her hands. “I need you here.”

  He bent his head further, pressing his lips against the hollow of her neck and shoulder. “Now?”

  “Now.”

  Later, she lay with Jessan’s head on her shoulder and contemplated the light panels over her bunk. Finally she sighed. “Time to take our places for the next act,” she said. “We’ll be coming out of hyperspace before very long.”

  Jessan rolled away from her. “True, alas.”

  She got out of bed and began dressing in Tarnekep Portree’s dirtside rig. In the small mirror on the bulkhead, she could see Jessan moving about the cabin behind her, getting his own clothes together. A free-spacer’s plain shirt and trousers took less time and attention than the ruffles and lace of a Mandeynan dandy; he finished well before she did, and sat on the edge of the bunk watching her.

  She fastened the topaz stickpin into place in her cravat, and put on the red optical-plastic eye patch. “Will this do?”

  Jessan stood and gave her an appraising scan. “As the basis for some artistic makeup work, it’ll pass.”

  “Fine,” she said. He was already moving toward the cabin door. She lifted a hand to stop him. “One more thing, Nyls.”

  He halted a step short of the doorway. “Yes?”

  “The asteroid base. It used to be that just the Professor and I knew the coordinates, but the Professor is dead.”

  “Yes.”

  “And I may not be in any shape to pilot Warhammer on our way out of here.”

  This time he only nodded. His grey eyes were dark. She went on. “The coordinates are in a locked file in the navicomp, keyed to my ID. And to yours, now. If you need to, you can take Warhammer home without me.”

  RSF Naversey (CS-1124) turned out to be already in port and on the ground, halfway across the Space Force side of the complex, with a departure time marked on the schedule display as “late and holding.” After one glance at the blinking red letters, Llannat picked up her carrybag and ran for the transbase hoverbus. The rest of her luggage would have to fend for itself. She had a feeling close to certainty that the “hold” on Naversey’s departure was intimately related to her own unexpected change of orders.

  Her luck was in. Or, as Master Ransome would have said, her actions were meshing with the patterns of the universe: the bus was pulling away from the shuttle terminal as she came running out, but the driver saw her and stopped for her to leap into the open door and swing aboard.

  “Landing Field Ten West?” she asked breathlessly, still standing with one hand around the bus’s overhead grab bar. “Or do I need to change buses somewhere?”

  “This one’ll get you as close as anything can,” said the driver. “But you’ll have to walk the last bit, or else catch a ride out on one of the cargo sleds.”

  “That’s all right,” Llannat said. “Thanks.” She slid into a seat near the front of the bus and rested her carrybag on her lap. The hoverbus swayed gently on its nullgravs and moved on out into the ground traffic of Prime Base.

  This is getting odder by the minute, she thought. What use could the Space Force possibly have for a med service lieutenant-equivalent that’s so important they need to rush the new orders out to me on the shuttle field, and—probably—put a departure hold on a courier ship?

  The answer, of course, was: none. If the Space Force needed an officer-grade medic in a tearing hurry, Prime Base and South Polar had plenty of those and to spare.

  Which means it’s not a medic they’re after. It’s an Adept.

  Llannat thought about that idea for a while. It raised a number of possibilities, all unnerving.

  Galcen has all the Adepts anybody could need, up at the Retreat. But none of them are in the service.

  And face it, you’re not exactly the Guild’s most impressive member, either.

  But you are somebody who’s faced down a Mage, and gone into the Void and come back out again alive, and survived Tarnekep Portree’s raid on Darvell … .

  The bus sighed to a stop at the edge of Landing Field Ten West, a wide expanse of flat tarmac with the silhouettes of grounded spacecraft showing like foothills in the distance. She stood up, thanked the driver again, and left the vehicle. Carrybag in hand, she started hiking toward the ships.

  A hoversled loaded with boxed cargo came humming up behind her before she had gone very far. She waved a hand, and the yard worker steering the hoversled slowed it to match her pace.

  “Going to Naversey?” she called out.

  “No—Lysith. Naversey’s on my way, though, if you’re headed for her. Hop on up with the boxes.”

  “Thanks,” said Llannat. She rode the rest of the way out to the row of spacecraft.

  Most of the ships in this section of the port were couriers. They looked big as they rose up above the tarmac, but were minuscule in comparison with vessels like the huge starcruisers that never got closer to the ground than high orbit. The courier ships reminded her of smaller-scale versions of Beka Rosselin-Metadi’s Warhammer, mostly engines and cargo space, with barely room aboard for the crew.

  CS-1124—the number was displayed on its side in large block characters—had its ramp down and its hatch open. One of the crew members, probably the copilot, stood at the top of the ramp, leaning against the side of the open hatch and gazing out over the spaceport. When the cargo sled for Lysith swerved toward Naversey, the crew member straightened suddenly.

  They’re waiting for somebody, all right.

  “Thanks for the ride,” Llannat said to the yard worker. She hopped off the sled and walked, as quickly as possible without actually running, over to the foot of the ramp. Dropping her carrybag to the tarmac, she held out her orders to the copilot with in her left hand while saluting with her right. “Llannat Hyfid, reporting as ordered.”

  “Roger,” the copilot said. He motioned her on up the ramp and punched the comm bu
tton beside the door. “Last one’s aboard.”

  “Raise ramp,” replied a scratchy voice over the link.

  Llannat grabbed her carrybag, then hurried to join the copilot. “Follow me,” he said as the ramp eased up and the exterior door slid shut behind them with a sigh of hydraulics. “We’ve got to strap in.”

  “What’s going on?” Llannat asked him as they walked forward through the narrow passageway. The carrybag in her hand bumped against the bulkhead as she went along. Compared with RSF Istrafel the courier ship was insect-sized; it could have fit into one of the big cruiser’s cargo bays with enough room left over for a scoutcar and a couple of hoverbikes.

  “That’s what everyone’s wondering,” the copilot replied. “Sealed orders—hurry up and wait—you know the drill. Here we are.”

  Courier ships in general lacked the space for refinements like private cabins. The main compartment on this one had been rigged to carry passengers; in place of cargo pallets, it held a half-dozen acceleration couches bolted to the deckplates. All the couches but one were occupied.

  Talk about your odd lots, Llannat thought as she shut her carrybag into the compartment’s baggage locker and strapped herself into the empty couch. We look like somebody picked us out by poking a stylus blindfolded at the personnel rolls.

  Vainly, she tried to make sense of the strange assortment: a pair of warrant officers whose collections of medals, ribbons, and patches marked them out as both extremely senior and thoroughly experienced; a full captain in the medical service; and two reserve officers whose uniforms were new and unrumpled enough to have been purchased just this morning.

  One of the reservists—the younger, stockier one, with staff tabs on his shoulders—looked angry. The older, thinner one, whose service ribbons indicated that he’d last seen active duty during the pacification of the Mageworlds, merely looked resigned. Seems like a couple of people had their commissions reactivated, Llannat thought. If the Space Force grabbed them like it did me, no wonder they’re not happy.