Starpilot's Grave: Book Two of Mageworlds

by Doyle, Debra; Macdonald, James D.

  “Ah,” he said. “That explains it. I used to have the knack myself of falling asleep whenever there wasn’t anything better to do, but I’m afraid I’ve been away from the service for too long. So I improve the hour by working, instead.”

  “Sorry,” she said. “Then I won’t interrupt you.”

  “No, no.” He cleared the datapad with a touch of the stylus. “Grading papers is marginally better than insomnia, but only marginally.”

  “You’re a teacher?”

  He nodded. “To be precise, I hold the Diregis Chair of Contemporary History at Prime University. Unfortunately for the students in my midweek seminar, I also hold a reserve commission in the Space Force—which I had all but forgotten, but which the service apparently did not.”

  “The Space Force never forgets,” said Llannat. “What do they want with a historian, though?”

  “What they want from all of us, I presume,” he said. “Expertise. We are all specialists in one thing or another. In my case, the languages and culture of the prewar Mageworlds.”

  Llannat wondered what Vinhalyn would say if he knew that she herself had once encountered a Magelord. He’d envy me, if I know these academic types.

  “That’s not a very common specialty.” she said. “How did you come to pick it in the first place?”

  He smiled. “Oddly enough, it was because of the War.”

  “You were in the Space Force back then?” She could see from his ribbons that he had been, but asking a question seemed like a good way to get the rest of the story.

  “Oh, yes. I’m Ilarnan, originally, and we were hard hit in the war’s early stages, so like a lot of the young people my age, I joined up as soon as I could. Unlike most of them, I actually got to visit the Mageworlds before my time was over.”

  “That’s what made you decide to be a scholar?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I was there during the pacification period. The Republic was doing its best to reduce the scientific and industrial base of the Mageworlds to a level where they wouldn’t pose a threat to the rest of the galaxy, and the Adepts’ Guild was hunting down the Magelords and the lesser Circle Mages for execution out of hand—and it came to me that I was watching the systematic destruction of a culture fully as complex and as civilized as our own, cognate to ours and yet unimaginably alien.”

  He smiled briefly. “I must apologize for the burst of rhetoric at the end. It’s a speech I’ve found myself having to make a number of times over the past twenty years or so. I’m afraid my academic colleagues find me a bit of a crackpot on that particular subject.”

  “So when the Mageworlds Patrol Fleet runs into an abandoned Deathwing raider,” Llannat said, “you’re naturally on the Space Force’s short list of people to haul back to active duty.”

  Vinhalyn nodded. “Somebody will be needed to translate any documents and records on board the derelict. And the fact that they need my particular skill suggests that the ship is an extremely old one—otherwise a knowledge of contemporary Mageworlds dialects would be enough.”

  He pointed with his stylus at the couch where the younger reservist lay asleep. “Our rather self-important friend over there is in a similar position. Unless his nametag is lying to us, he is in civilian life a top-ranked data-recovery expert, specializing in the retrieval of information from obsolete or alien systems.”

  Llannat looked over at their gently snoring fellow-passenger. “Probably got his start in life as a comptech,” she said without much sympathy. “And now the Space Force, bless its hard little heart, has shown up to collect on the debt.”

  “Precisely,” said Vinhalyn. “Of the rest of us, our two warrant officers are the easiest to explain—a hull technician and a weapons specialist should be able to cover most of the raider’s physical systems between them. The presence of a senior officer in the medical branch is more problematical; that is, until one remembers that prior to the War the Mageworlds had made progress in the biochemical sciences far beyond our own current state of knowledge.

  “Which leaves,” he concluded, “you.”

  “Me?”

  He nodded. “You’re quite a mystery in your own right, didn’t you realize?”

  “Uh … no.”

  “Yes, indeed,” he said. “Since we already have a medic on the team, one must assume that you are here in your role as an Adept, in order to counter any traps or devices the Mages who built and abandoned the Deathwing might have left aboard her. But if that is in fact the case, why should the Guild send a comparatively young and untried Adept when it still has active members with experience from the War?”

  “I wish I knew,” said Llannat uncomfortably. “All I can figure is that I was easy for Space Force to get hold of—just a little matter of changing my orders at the last minute, and no need to ask Master Ransome for any special favors.”

  “Quite a plausible theory,” said Vinhalyn. “Errec Ransome and Jos Metadi are friends of long standing, but the same can’t be said about the Adepts’ Guild and the High Command. Mutual mistrust, I’m afraid, is more the order of the day.”

  She thought about how Ari had always regarded her a trifle askance whenever she chose to wear Adept’s blacks instead of her Space Force uniform. “I’ve run into that myself.”

  “Just so,” the historian said. “The Space Force can’t be blamed for drawing as much as possible on its own resources instead of the Guild’s, and one certainly can account for your presence among us on those terms.”

  He paused, then went on in quieter tones. “But someone who carries a Magelord’s staff may well bring more to the investigation than convenience alone.”

  Llannat stood very still, grateful for the dim light that hid her face. “An Adept’s staff is for the Adept to choose,” she said. “And mine was a legacy from a friend.”

  “Not the usual practice on this side of the Net,” Vinhalyn pointed out, “where Adept and staff are all but inseparable, even in death. But in the Mage-Circles a single staff might pass down through severai generations—from friend to friend, or from teacher to student, or from vanquished to victor in one of their ritual duels.”

  He looked apologetic for a moment. “That was, in fact, how I thought you had acquired the staff—in combat of some sort. I hope you’ll forgive a scholar’s compulsion to find the solution to an intriguing puzzle, whether the answer’s any business of his or not.”

  “I’m not offended,” she said. “But you were right about part of the puzzle, anyhow; Space Force probably tapped me for this assignment because I once managed to fight with a—what did you call them?—with a Circle-Mage and lived to file a report on it afterward.”

  It’s a good thing the Space Force doesn’t know the rest of the story, she thought. Because if they knew, then the Guild would be sure to find out eventually. And the service might not mind that I was a renegade Magelord’s last student—but Master Ransome would throw me out of the Guild in a heartbeat.

  If he didn’t decide to kill me out of hand before I could contaminate anybody else.

  The darkness in Klea’s head had weight and pressure to it; it pushed her down relentlessly toward the floor. At the last minute she felt Owen catching her before she hit.

  “Klea—are you all right?”

  “I don’t know. My head hurts.”

  “Here. Sit down. I’ll get you something to drink.” She let him help her over to the room’s only chair, a cheap metal foldable with wobbly legs and a dented back. When her vision cleared, she saw that he was busy over in the kitchen alcove, making up a mug of Nutli’s Instant Ghil with hot water from the tap.

  “Offworlders,” she muttered. “Don’t you people know that you’re supposed to use boiling water?”

  Owen looked back at her over his shoulder, still stirring. “Does it make a difference? I never can tell.” He brought her the mug. “So you’ve guessed my secret. Was it the ghil or my accent that did it?”

  She sipped at the lukewarm ghil, taking comfort from its familiar
gritty taste. The mug had a chip in its rim; she wondered if Owen even had another. He probably found it in the cupboard when he moved in, she thought.

  “It wasn’t much of a secret,” she said. “You just never mentioned it. But there aren’t any Adepts on Nammerin that I’ve ever heard of.”

  “Not these days, anyway,” he said. “Are you feeling better now?”

  “I’m doing all right.”

  “Good,” he said. “Exactly what happened to you back there in the ShadowDance? Can you describe it for me?”

  “I think so.” She spoke slowly, searching for the right words to describe an experience that hadn’t really felt like something words could describe. “I was doing the movements, like you said, and trying to keep my eyes open without seeing anything. It wouldn’t work at first, and then it did—everything sort of slid into place, and I was there—and then I wasn’t again.”

  “Nothing unusual so far,” he said. “In fact, that’s about how it is for most beginners. Go on.”

  “Well … just after I dropped out but before I touched the ground, if you know what I mean—”

  Now it was his turn to nod. “I know. What happened then?”

  “Then something hit me.” She grimaced, remembering. “It was like—like having somebody throw a bag over your head and smash you on the skull with a rock at the same time. Or going straight from feeling-no-pain drunk to hell’s own hangover with nothing in between for a cushion.”

  He winced at the comparison, and Klea thought back to how she had found him lying facedown and bloody in the alley mud.

  “That was what happened to you, wasn’t it?”

  For a moment he didn’t say anything, but regarded her with a considering expression in his hazel eyes. “Something like that. Only what hit you was accidental.”

  “It sure didn’t feel like an accident.”

  “It wasn’t aimed at you on purpose, though,” he said. “You just happened to be in the way.”

  “Happened to be in whose way?” she demanded. “Whatever was going on, you’re not going to stand there and tell me it was part of a plot to do somebody good.”

  He looked at her for a long time with the same considering expression as before. “You’re right,” he said finally. “Someone is working to cause trouble. It’s the ugly side of what you’re learning—like using the ShadowDance as a weapon, only a lot worse—and any beginner, especially one as empathic as you are, is going to be vulnerable.”

  Klea took a long swallow of the ghil. “Are we coming to the part where you make me go away so I can be safe?”

  “I certainly ought to,” Owen said. “It’s a poor teacher who involves his student in something this dangerous.”

  “Dangerous,” said Klea. She gave a short laugh. “I’ve been a hooker in this town for five years, I’ve had things happen to me you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy, and you think I don’t know about ‘dangerous’?”

  “Not this kind,” he said. “Listen. What you felt was a Mage-Circle at work here on Nammerin.”

  Klea looked at him. “A Mage-Circle. Like in the holovids about the War?” Only vague memories of her lower-school history lessons kept her from putting the Mages and their Circles in the same mental compartment as her grandmother’s tales of marsh-wraiths, or the more improbable episodes of “Spaceways Patrols.” “I thought all the Mages were gone.”

  “They are,” he said. “Except for the ones who aren’t. You wondered what I was doing on Nammerin. Well, now you know.”

  “You’re working for the Adepts’ Guild,” she guessed. “Hunting for Mage-Circles.”

  “Among other things.”

  She looked down at the dregs of the ghil in her mug, and then back at Owen. “But you told me you were an apprentice, not an Adept. If working Mage-Circles aren’t a good thing for a student to get messed up in, then why did the Guild send you?”

  He sighed. “The easy answer is that any Mages inside the Republic are going to be well guarded against Adepts. So it takes somebody who isn’t an Adept to find them.”

  More images were coming back to her now, memories of the flatpix and old newsholos that had illustrated her history books. Black masks, black robes … She’d had nightmares about them for a long while afterward, until she’d figured out that life had worse things to be afraid of than imaginary Magelords.

  And it turns out I was right the first time, she thought. Because the nightmares are coming back, and now they’re real.

  “There were Mages in my dream,” Klea said slowly. “A whole Circle of them. They saw me, and I ran away. You were there, too. And later that night I found you half-dead in the alley.”

  She looked at him, remembering his bruises and how the blood had caked in his hair, and how her own flesh that evening had carried the marks of injuries inflicted in a dream.

  “Was it the Mages who beat you up like that?”

  “Yes,” he said. “In a manner of speaking. They thought—or at least I hope they thought—that I was just another local with enough untrained talent to make me sensitive.”

  “Like me.”

  “Exactly,” he said. “Only you don’t have just a little potential ability, you have a lot of it. Warning you off with a mental beating, like they tried doing with me, isn’t going to work on you either, because you’re going to be able to sense what they’re up to whether you want to or not. Which is why I haven’t sent you off to safety—it wouldn’t do any good.”

  “Oh,” she said. “So what are we going to do now?”

  “You are going to be careful,” he told her. “And I am going to keep on with the work I came here to do.”

  VIII.

  MAGEWORLDS BORDER ZONE: RSF KARIPAVO; RSF EBANNHA

  WITH ANY luck, reflected Commodore Jervas Gil, the special investigative team from Galcen should arrive before too much longer. When they did, he could hand over the problem of the Magebuilt derelict to them and get back to his proper job of watching the Net.

  Until then, however, he was spending more time than he liked in Karipavo’s Combat Information Center. From the CIC, he could keep an eye on the abandoned raider via periodic relays from Ebannha, whose boarding party had remained with the empty Deathwing.

  Those guys are probably getting pretty bored with that job by now, he thought. If the investigation team doesn’t show up soon, we’ll have to rotate them out of there.

  The voice of the executive officer broke up Gil’s train of thought. The XO was excited about something; his outplanets accent was even more pronounced than usual. “Commodore—we have something odd here.”

  “Just what we need,” said Gil. “Something else odd. As if the stuff we already had wasn’t odd enough. What’s this one?”

  “Looks like a merchantman dropping out of hyper at the Outer Net,” said the XO. “We should have gotten word from the Inner stations before he got here.”

  “And we didn’t?”

  “Not a peep out of anybody.”

  Not a good sign, thought Gil, and made a mental note to double-check all the Net Control Stations for sloppy procedure. The station crews would complain bitterly about being singled out for attention, but at least they wouldn’t be bored. Boredom, Gil had found, was the primary hazard of blockade duty, and an excellent source of stupid mistakes.

  The ’Pavo’s captain came over to join the conversation. “Maybe our mystery freighter didn’t come from the Mageworlds in the first place?”

  The XO shook his head. “Not dropping out where he did, with that vector on him.”

  “Contact Net Station Twenty-three,” said Gil. Twenty-three was the closest unit on the Inner Net to the ’Pavo’s current position, and the one most likely to have passed the stranger through. “Ask them what’s going on.”

  He glanced at the tactical action officer’s monitor screen. “And get an ID on that freighter.”

  “We’re querying him right now,” the TAO said. Then, abruptly, “What’s this?”

  Gil looked close
r. The screen was picking up a cloud of garbage around the contact, on a slightly divergent course.

  “He’s jettisoning his cargo, it looks like,” said the ’Pavo’s captain. “A smuggler, maybe?”

  “Get a boarding party ready for him,” Gil said. “And collect some of whatever he’s kicking out.”

  “Muster the duty fighter team,” the TAO said to the CIC Watch Officer. “Hail him and halt him.”

  “Duty fighter, aye.”

  A crew member at the comms panel looked up. “In combat, we’re being hailed.”

  The ’Pavo’s captain said, “Who?”

  “The merch, would you believe it?”

  This, thought Gil, is getting stranger by the minute. Honest traders don’t jettison cargo. And smugglers don’t stop to trade gossip with a battlecruiser.

  “What’s his call sign?” he asked the comms tech. “Can you put him on audio?”

  “Audio, aye.”

  The link by the tactical action officer’s watch station crackled and began to speak. Lightspeed comms tended to distort pitch and timbre, but the accent came through—the pure, unmistakable Galcenian of the Galcen-born and Galcen-schooled.

  “Any station this net, any station this net, this is Reserve Merchant Vessel Warhammer. Patch me through to Commander Patrol Screen, over.”

  Gil went cold. As far as the galaxy was concerned, both Warhammer and Beka Rosselin-Metadi were dead. If this transmission was genuine, then whatever news General Metadi’s daughter had for the Net Patrol Fleet was serious enough to make her break her cover identity into irreparable pieces.

  “He just keeps on repeating that message, sir,” the comms tech said.

  “It’s got to be some kind of trick,” said the XO. “To find out who’s in command.”