Starpilot's Grave: Book Two of Mageworlds

by Doyle, Debra; Macdonald, James D.

  “I am Beka Rosselin-Metadi,” she said, “and I want you to give me a direct line to my father. Let me talk to the Commanding General, and we’ll see whose word is and isn’t any good around here. And while you’re thinking about it—ask yourself what happens if the rest of my story checks out too.”

  The pause that followed seemed to stretch out forever. At last Jessan broke the silence.

  “A moment, Captain,” he said. “I am Lieutenant Commander Nyls Jessan, SFMS, lineal number five eight niner niner six three. I am TAD to Intelligence, on detached duty in the Magezone. I have a Link-level clearance. May I have a word alone with you and your security manager?”

  A buzzer sounded. The warship’s captain picked up a handset. “Down? Very well. Have Mr. Yeldin report to the captain’s mess, and keep on trying.” He turned to the other two officers in the mess. “Please escort Captain—ah—Captain Rosselin-Metadi to the wardroom.”

  Beka and the two officers stood and left. Just outside the door to the captain’s mess she almost ran into a third officer hurrying the other way—probably the “Mr. Yeldin” who’d been summoned earlier. The wardroom wasn’t far from the captain’s mess; Beka had no sooner arrived and been offered a cup of cha’a when the attention signal sounded.

  “All officers not actually on watch, muster in the wardroom.”

  The captain of one-zero-niner-seven arrived a moment later himself, accompanied by Jessan and the other officer, whom Beka presumed was the security manager. The captain gestured to an ensign with supply corps tabs on her uniform.

  “Please escort Captain Rosselin-Metadi and Commander Jessan back to their vessel,” he said. “Let them take the shuttle alone.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” Jessan said, and they followed the ensign out.

  Beka didn’t say anything until they were back onto the shuttle and headed for Warhammer. Then she turned to Jessan.

  “All right, Nyls—what did you tell that guy? He looked like he’d seen a ghost.”

  “Nothing much,” said Jessan. “I just filled him in on a few truths. At the same time, he discovered for himself that he had no communications. The combination proved irresistible.”

  LeSoit was waiting for them in the airlock vestibule. “Did you see what that bugger did?” he demanded. “He was already on a run-to-jump before you got halfway back—left his shuttle with us, too. I hope he doesn’t expect us to pay for it.”

  Jessan raised an eyebrow. “Pay for it? Surely not. Neither the captain nor I instructed him to abandon the boarding craft—we merely impressed on him the seriousness of the situation.”

  “Now that you two have gotten the pleasantries out of the way,” Beka said, “let’s turn to. We have some hyperspace engines to repair.”

  Llannat was moving through the ShadowDance exercises as best she could in the cramped space of RSF Naversey’s passenger compartment when the bulkhead speaker crackled to life.

  “All hands secure your personal belongings and strap in. Dropping out of hyperspace in about five minutes.”

  She was surprised by the announcement; none of the passengers aboard Naversey had been expecting dropout for at least another day. Even in a fast courier, one of the speediest ships the Space Force owned, such an early arrival meant that the crew had been pushing things the whole way. And courier schedules were grim enough—the pilot and copilot generally stood watch-and-watch during the entire run as a matter of course—that nobody was going to make one even tighter without a command from above.

  Finding that derelict Deathwing must have put everybody into serious panic, Llannat thought. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the top brass moving so fast over something that isn’t a shooting matter.

  She made certain that her carrybag was properly stashed in the luggage compartment, went back to her acceleration couch, and strapped herself in. Around her in the passenger cabin, the others were doing the same thing. She knew all her fellow-passengers by surname at least by now, after the enforced intimacy of such a long transit: E’Patu and Rethiel, the two warrants; Lury, the med service captain; Govantic, the data specialist; and the linguist-historian Vinhalyn.

  The bulkhead speaker crackled again. “Stand by for hyperspace translation and deceleration.”

  The announcement was a formality; Llannat knew that the pilot’s status board would have flashed an alert signal if anything in the passenger compartment was unsecured. Nevertheless, she checked her safety webbing one more time just to make certain.

  “Dropout in ten seconds,” said the speaker. “Five seconds. Four. Three. Two. One. Now.”

  Llannat felt the faint shock of discontinuity that marked the transition from hyperspace to the normal universe. Once out in realspace again, Naversey began decelerating smoothly. From here it shouldn’t take long to rendezvous with RSF Ebannha and the Deathwing.

  I hope they let us unpack and eat a proper meal before we start investigating, she thought. I’m getting tired of low-mass space rations. And I seriously need a shower. And laundry … .

  “Senior line officer present, please come to the bridge.”

  Startled out of her reverie, Llannat glanced first at the bulkhead speaker and then at her fellow-passengers, trying to determine who was meant by the summons. She herself was out on two counts—as a member of the medical service, she was support, not line; and as an Adept she was barred from holding formal rank.

  Lury’s out, too, she thought, and both warrants. That leaves our two reservists. Lieutenants, both of them—this could get sticky.

  By now the others had all worked through the same or similar lines of reasoning, and Govantic and Vinhalyn were eyeing each other speculatively. The younger man started to unstrap the safety webbing on his acceleration couch.

  “Excuse me,” Vinhalyn said quietly.

  Govantic paused. “You heard what the man said. I’m wanted up in the cockpit.”

  “Not necessarily,” said Vinhalyn. “Our pilot called for the senior line officer present—and since I served in the late War, I believe my commission predates yours.”

  Govantic sank back onto his couch, looking disgruntled. Lieutenant Vinhalyn unstrapped and made his way forward through the vacuum-tight door to the cockpit, leaving an uneasy silence behind him. Several minutes passed, and then the bulkhead speaker came on again.

  “Mistress Hyfid, please come to the bridge.”

  Llannat wondered nervously what the pilot—and Vinhalyn, she reminded herself; nobody called you until he was up there—would be wanting an Adept for, out here in the middle of nowhere. Obediently, she got out of her seat and went forward. The vacuum-tight doors opened for her and sighed shut again as she entered the cockpit.

  Please come up to the Retreat at once. There is something I have to show you. Ransome.

  Brigadier General Perrin Ochemet had found the cryptic summons waiting on his desktop when he returned from lunch. His eyebrows had gone up. The Space Force didn’t need anything from the Guild at the moment, and he certainly hadn’t asked. Then he’d shrugged (Maybe Ransome wants something from us for a change) and made arrangements for one of the duty atmospheric-craft pilots to fly him into the mountains beyond Treslin, and up to the massive stone pile that was the Retreat.

  Unlike the first trip he’d made, this one was almost relaxing. Nothing urgent required his attention at the moment; the only crisis, the disappearance of General Metadi and the death of the General’s aide, had been ongoing for a while now with no change—and as Metadi himself was fond of saying, “Anything that lasts more than a week isn’t a crisis, it’s a situation.” Ochemet could lean back against the padded seat and take an afternoon nap with a reasonably clear conscience.

  This time, the airfield at the Retreat had a hovercar waiting for him when he arrived. Ochemet rode up the narrow switchback road to the citadel, and found the Guild Master waiting again in the courtyard.

  “Well,” Ochemet said, as the hovercar purred away to wherever the Adepts at the Retreat kept such things, and
the massive ironwood gates swung closed, “I got your message. Here I am. Where is this thing I’m supposed to see?”

  “Come with me,” said Ransome. He turned and began climbing the narrow stone steps that led up from the courtyard onto the walls. Ochemet shrugged and followed.

  Once on the battlements, Ransome led the way to another stair, this one spiraling upward inside a dark, thick-walled tower. They emerged at the top to walk along more battlements to where a second, even higher tower reared up over them, and then climbed yet another spiral stair up to the highest point in the Retreat. Nothing but the dull blue sky of late evening remained above them on this topmost level, not even the banners that might have flown over such a fortress in the ancient days; the Adepts flew no one’s banner, and had none of their own.

  The sun was setting—in Prime, Ochemet reflected, it would be close to midnight by now—and a chill wind blew down across the watchtower from the icy face of the mountains beyond the Retreat. Master Ransome looked out at the ragged skyline and said nothing.

  “Well?” said Ochemet again. “Where is it?”

  Ransome shook his head. “I don’t know. All I know is that there is something here tonight that you and I will see. And I know that you and I are together when we see it, and that it will be important to us both.”

  This, Ochemet reminded himself, was why you wanted someone else to handle liaison with the Guild.

  “Do you know what this thing is?” he asked.

  The Adept made an impatient gesture. “If I knew, I would tell you.” He smiled briefly, without much humor. “Unless, of course, you shouldn’t know it.”

  “That’s not especially helpful,” said Ochemet. “And if I wasn’t sure that you were on our side, I’d worry.” He paused. “I’m waiting.”

  Ransome was silent for a while longer. Then, still looking out across the darkening landscape, he asked, “What do you know about the Mages?”

  The question caught Ochemet off guard. “Not much more than anybody else does,” he said after a moment. “A bit more than some people, maybe—I was around for the tail end of the War.”

  “Then you saw the end of their hegemony and the destruction of their works,” said Ransome. “But you know almost nothing of their philosophy.”

  “I leave that to your people.”

  Ransome laughed; Ochemet thought he heard a faint note of bitterness in the sound. “My people. Things would be easier for me if they really were. But no one controls anyone else, ever. No one is possessed by another, ever. No matter what the Magelords think.”

  “If you say so,” Ochemet said uneasily. “I wouldn’t know.”

  “No,” said Ransome. “I suppose you wouldn’t. But have you heard anything … unusual … from the Mageworlds lately?”

  Ochemet thought about the Magebuilt raider that was even now gliding through the Outer Net, and about the team of specialists traveling out to examine it. Their courier ship would drop out of hyper soon; their first report might come as early as tonight or tomorrow. The team—including an Adept. Had she reported to Ransome, Ochemet wondered, and if so, how? For that matter, how did Adepts do any of the things they did?

  He decided to hedge. The formal report hadn’t yet shown up on his desk, which as far as the regs were concerned made him still officially ignorant. “Nothing’s happened lately that hasn’t happened before.”

  Ransome turned toward him. “Don’t trifle with me,” was all the Guild Master said, his words as soft and mild as ever. Then he turned away again, and was silent.

  The tension in Naversey’s cockpit hit Llannat like a physical blow; she had to grab at one of the zero-g handholds to steady herself.

  What’s wrong? Everything looks okay … .

  She took a deep breath to restore her equilibrium, then glanced about the cockpit. The starfield that glowed outside the cockpit viewscreens appeared normal, at least as far as she could tell; if there was a problem, it wasn’t close enough to see. Vinhalyn and the two pilots were looking at the control-panel readouts instead, and the very air around them was full of the dark colors of dismay.

  Llannat cleared her throat. “Mistress Hyfid reporting as ordered. Is there some kind of problem?”

  The pilot nodded. “Ebannha’s not here.”

  “Not here. You mean you can’t find her?”

  “I’ve already been through this with Lieutenant Vinhalyn,” said the pilot; his voice had a ragged edge to it. “I mean she’s not here. These are the coordinates we were given; we should be close enough already to pick her up as a bright star on visual. And she isn’t here. No visual, no comm signals, no ID signals, nothing.”

  “Not quite nothing,” Vinhalyn said. The academic had a tight-lipped expression quite unlike anything Llannat had seen on his face before. “The sensors are picking up a great deal of hot drifting metal. And hi-comms are completely down—our attempts to contact Prime, or anyone else, have been in vain.”

  “Hot drifting metal.” Llannat shook her head. “What’s been going on out here?”

  “I don’t know,” said the pilot. “And I don’t like it. I think we ought to head back to Galcen. But I’m just the taxi driver for this expedition—Lieutenant Vinhalyn has the final call. And he says we ought to consult with you first.”

  “Me?” She looked at Vinhalyn. “What am I supposed to know that you guys don’t?”

  The former academic shrugged. “Perhaps nothing. But I learned during the Magewar that it never hurts to ask.”

  “Right,” she said. She looked out at the starfield again, a myriad glowing dots against the black. So now I’m supposed to make like some kind of oracle … what do I tell him, that I can’t do that sort of thing on order? Better at least give it a try first.

  Closing her eyes, she tried to sense the patterns that flowed through the universe beyond the cockpit. Nothing at first; she had trouble working with the immensity that was realspace between the stars.

  Relax, she told herself. Don’t push it.

  She let the patterns move for a while without watching them, letting herself float and grow accustomed to this new experience. Abruptly there was a shifting sensation, much like dropping out of hyper, as her awareness flexed and changed, leaving her newly at ease with the scale of things. And, in the next instant, certain of what she was seeing.

  Magework. Magework and dark sorcery.

  Not since the raid on Darvell, when Magelords and Circle-Mages had manipulated the fabric of the universe to fight both her and each other, had she felt the patterns twisted and knotted like this. And nowhere out there was any spark of light. It was all dead … .

  No. Not quite.

  “On.”

  Her voice came out in a hoarse croak. She didn’t have any idea how long she’d stood with her awareness turned away from her physical surroundings; her knees would have given way if Vinhalyn hadn’t steadied her.

  “We need to go on.”

  IV.

  RSF SELSYN-BILAI: INFABEDE SECTOR GALCEN NEARSPACE

  BY THE time RSF Selsyn-bilai reached the dropout point for the Infabede sector, the engineering warrant officer who currently answered to the name Gamelan Bandur was more than ready to see realspace again. A stores ship like the Selsyn took its time about getting from one place to another, spending several weeks in hyper for the same journey a courier ship could make in a couple of days. Such unhurried progress irritated a man who had always preferred his starships fast and dangerous. On the other hand, the Selsyn had been going back and forth between Infabede and the supply depots of the Inner Worlds for several years now, and the warrant officers’ mess was full of very interesting gossip. Bandur had listened, contributing now and then a humorous anecdote from the shipyards of Galcen Prime, and had taken copious mental notes.

  Elsewhere aboard the Selsyn, he supposed, CC1 Ennys Pardu had been pursuing similar interests. Except for occasional brief glimpses, he hadn’t seen the clerk/comptech since they’d both come aboard, but he remembered her efficiency ve
ry well. If RSF Selsyn-bilai’s record files held something she considered important, stopping her would take more data security than a stores ship was likely to be able to muster. Bandur hoped that she was equally competent at covering her tracks afterward.

  On a large vessel like the Selsyn, artificial-intelligence routines in a ship’s memory handled most aspects of the the dropout from hyperspace, but the engineering spaces kept up full crews just the same, in case of emergencies. Both the realspace and the hyperspace engines underwent considerable stress at the moment of transition, and the systems of a vessel with the mass of a stores ship were orders of magnitude more complex than those of a small cargo vessel.

  Bandur had a station in Main Control, monitoring the datalink that transmitted the conning officer’s helm and throttle commands from the bridge down to the AI systems in Engineering. The smooth functioning of the Selsyn’s machinery and the performance of her transition-detail team impressed him, in spite of his long-standing preference for fighting ships—and in spite of the fact that where shiphandling was concerned, he’d never been an easy man to please.

  He listened to the speaker on the IC panel as it echoed the words of the bridge team:

  “Stand by for realspace.” … “Standing by.” … “On my mark, drop out, mark.” … “Realspace transition.”

  On the panel, the power readouts flickered as the realspace engines cut in, and the accelerometer began to show negative during deceleration. Bandur nodded to himself in satisfaction and verified the log entry showing time of dropout.

  “Right, then,” the chief engineer said. “Secure from hyperspace running.”

  Shortly afterward the speaker on Bandur’s panel came to life again, this time relaying the voices of the junior officer of the watch and the officer of the deck:

  “Two contacts, close aboard. Friendlies.” … “Roger, prepare arrival report for transmission.” … “Aye, aye.”