Starpilot's Grave: Book Two of Mageworlds

by Doyle, Debra; Macdonald, James D.

  They aren’t just secured for the day, either. They’ve packed up and left. They’re gone.

  Helmeted and pressure-suited, Llannat Hyfid stood in the main airlock of the Deathwing and watched the status light cycling—from yellow to purple, which at the moment struck her as odder and more unnatural than anything else about the derelict ship.

  Not quite a derelict, she thought. Not any longer.

  She wasn’t certain which had done more to convince Lieutenant Vinhalyn that they should bring the Magebuilt vessel back on line—their need to acquire the Deathwing’s potential firepower, or his own overwhelming scholarly curiosity about an artifact from a time long past. The combination, at least, had proved irresistible. Now, after two Standard days of nonstop work, the combined crews of Naversey and the boarding craft had achieved their first success. The Deathwing’s primary life-support systems were back on line.

  The status light flashed rapidly back and forth between yellow and purple for several seconds, then settled on purple and held. A bell-tone sounded. The inner door of the lock cycled open.

  Ensign Cantrel checked the readouts on the sensor pack he’d brought over from the boarding craft. “Mark one! The lock’s tight and we’ve got a good atmosphere.”

  With a gloved hand, Lieutenant Vinhalyn slid aside a bulkhead panel with more of the yellow Eraasian script on it. The space behind the panel was full of dials and gauges.

  “These all seem to agree with you,” the linguist-historian said after a prolonged inspection. “We’ll want some of the techs to double-check them later, but it looks like the old monitoring systems are still working.”

  “It’s safe to breathe in here, then?” asked Llannat.

  “Sure,” said Cantrel. “I can’t vouch for what the air’s going to smell like, but the sensor pack isn’t registering any known biohazards.”

  The ensign was already unfastening his own helmet as he spoke. He lifted it off, revealing a face freshly de-iplated—except for the cherished mustache—and considerably less worn than when Llannat had first met him.

  “Now that we’ve got atmosphere,” he continued, “we can start trying to figure out the gravity system. And after that, we’ll tackle the engines.”

  “The manuals,” Vinhalyn explained to Llannat, “turned out to be very specific on the matter of proper cold-start sequencing.” The linguist-historian had his helmet off by now, and was cradling it in the crook of his arm. “The systems must interlock correctly, or catastrophic failure will result.”

  Llannat undid the last seal on her helmet and took it off. She rubbed her nose vigorously with the back of her free hand; as usual, being inside a p-suit had given her a half-dozen maddening and unscratchable itches.

  “Did the old-time Mageworlders have a problem with their engineering,” she wondered aloud, “or did they just like to watch things explode?”

  “We may never know,” said Vinhalyn, with a faint smile. He turned to Cantrel. “You people were lucky in one thing, though. It appears that whoever abandoned this ship put it through an orderly shutdown first.”

  “That’s what we were thinking, too,” said Cantrel. “Except for—well, except for what we found on the bridge. Looking at that, I still can’t figure out what happened.”

  “Yes,” said Vinhalyn. “The bridge: That’s what Mistress Hyfid and I were intending to investigate. Now that we have atmosphere back, we’ll have to do it quickly, too. They’re going to start to get high pretty soon.”

  Llannat nodded, but without enthusiasm. She’d put off the investigation as long as possible—the all-hands job of bringing the first of the Deathwing’s systems on line had provided an excellent pretext for delay—but there was no getting out of it now. She was an Adept, and she was going to have to walk into a scene of bloody murder on a Magebuilt ship, with a dewy-eyed innocent like Tammas Cantrel watching her and expecting a miracle.

  “This isn’t like picking out a live target on the monitor screen,” she cautioned the ensign. “These were Mages, and it’s a cold trail. We may not learn anything at all.”

  And maybe we’ll learn something we didn’t want to know.

  Sighing, Ari pushed himself away from the wall of the deserted Space Force installation. He wasn’t certain where he ought to go next. Even getting off Gyffer looked close to impossible. The Eldan two-seater had been pushed to its limit and wasn’t going to lift again for anywhere without refueling and a maintenance workover. He’d left the Fezzy in his working uniform, with nothing by way of assets except a Space Force ID card, a Mandeynan quarter-mark coin, and a fully charged blaster.

  A quick message to Galcen Prime would go a long way toward solving his problem. On the other hand, he wasn’t sure that talking to Gyfferan customs was going to be a good idea. If Admiral Vallant’s mutiny had reached as far as Gyffer, the local government might well greet Ari with open arms and march him aboard a courier ship bound straight back for Infabede—or throw him in the local jail as a bargaining chip for their side, whichever side that was.

  I need some local intelligence, Ari thought, scanning Telabryk Field for anything that looked like a source of information. And I need it now.

  The gaudy red and yellow colors of the General Delivery building caught his eye, and he felt a surge of relief. General Delivery had its own fleet of courier ships making high-speed runs all over the galaxy, and maintained its own data net for electronic messages. The company’s entire reputation was built on its ability to keep the farthest elements of the civilized galaxy in touch with each other and with the Central Worlds.

  If anybody can fill me in on how the land lies the G-Del people can. And they’re a Suivi-based firm, so they probably won’t tell the locals that they saw me.

  From the Space Force complex to the G-Del block was quite a hike, especially with the heat of the sun reflecting up from the tarmac at redoubled strength. Ari was sweating before he’d covered half the distance to the red and yellow building. This time, though, the doors opened at his approach, and he stepped through into the cool, dry air inside.

  Most of General Delivery’s Telabryk Field operation was devoted to cargo handling. Employees in more subdued versions of the company colors were sorting through the incoming cargo from the courier, throwing the boxes and envelopes into tubs for delivery to G-Del offices all over Gyffer. Other employees were loading up a skipsled with the outbound mail. A long counter stretched across the front of the big room, separating the workers from the small reception area near the entrance.

  The clerk at the counter was a thin man with worry lines between his eyebrows. He glanced up from his comp screen when Ari came in.

  “I thought you people left already.”

  “They did,” said Ari. “I came in-system from the Infabede sector a little while ago. I want to send a message to Galcen, fastest means available.”

  The clerk pointed to another desk comp at the far end of the counter. “Flimsies and keyboard over there to write a letter. Hardcopy’s the only thing getting out right now.”

  “No voicelink?”

  “No.”

  “What the hell’s going on?”

  “That’s what everybody wants to know,” said the clerk. He looked at Ari with a sour expression. “I suppose you want me to tell you what happened.”

  “That’s right.”

  The clerk tightened his lips briefly and then said, “Okay. First thing, about a week ago all the hi-comms went down. Ours and everybody else’s. We figured it was trouble in the orbital relays at first, and sent a repair crew up to work them over. The repairs didn’t do any good. Meanwhile there’s no word getting into the system that doesn’t come by ship.”

  Ari nodded. “I’d heard a rumor about the hi-comms back in Infabede. Didn’t have time to check it out, though. So what happened to the Space Force?”

  “I’m getting there,” said the clerk. “About three days after the hi-comms died, we got a Space Force courier ship on a fast run from Galcen Prime. And I do mean
fast—she’d overridden her hyperdrive and damn near went nova on the dropout, and she was squawking her news all over the lightspeed bands on her way into the system, just in case she didn’t make it.”

  “News from Prime?” Ari tried to conceal his growing apprehension. He’d been expecting to hear word of trouble in the Infabede sector, not of some unspecified disaster at the heart of the Central Worlds. “How bad?”

  “If it’s true,” the clerk said, “then it’s as bad as it gets. The pilot of the courier said that the Mageworlders were attacking Galcen in force—how the hell they’d managed to get a fleet through the Net he didn’t say—and that with hi-comms down and no help coming Prime was about to go under. That was at about midnight local. By dawn, Space Force was gone.”

  Standing orders of some kind, Ari realized. Somewhere in the CO’s files was an eyes-only folder labeled “What To Do In Case We Lose Galcen Prime,” and now they’ve gone and done it.

  “Do you think the story was true?” he asked.

  “If it wasn’t, those pilots nearly fried themselves for nothing,” said the clerk. “And none of our regular cargo runs from Galcen have shown up since the courier came in.”

  “But you’re still sending hardcopy mail back?”

  “We’re sending,” the clerk told him. “It may not get past the sorting depot on Cashel, but we’ll do our best. As long as you realize that under the circumstances, timely delivery isn’t guaranteed.”

  “Right,” said Ari.

  His Mandeynan quarter-mark probably wasn’t enough to pay for a hardcopy message anyway. Just the same, he had to do something with the news from Infabede. After a moment’s thought, he went over to the other desk comp and began keying in a letter:

  View all traffic from COMREPSPAFOR INFABEDE with suspicion. Ari Rosselin-Metadi, LCDR, SFMS, sends.

  He pulled out the sheet of flimsy and took it back over to the clerk.

  “Here,” he said. “This is what I was going to send to Galcen. Make up your own mind what to do with it. I’m going in to town.”

  With the return of basic life-support systems, the interior lighting on the Magebuilt ship had come back as well. The ship’s passageways, while still narrow and mazelike, no longer gaped like dark open mouths in the beam from a p-suit’s handlamp. In the white light of the glows—not quite the same color mix as Space Force’s Galcen-based standard, but close enough for comfort—the Deathwing turned out to be a thing of metal and glass and plastic like any other starship.

  Almost like, thought Llannat. The fact that there was life in the glows didn’t reassure her as much as it should have. Those lights ought to have burnt out centuries ago. Except for the fact that somebody turned them all off.

  That was what made her feel cold, even inside the pressure suit: a picture she couldn’t shake, of a shadowy figure going through the empty ship from compartment to compartment, turning off all the light switches like a thrifty householder bound away for an afternoon in town.

  Somebody was expecting to come back. And they wanted the ship to be working when they got here.

  She wet her lips—the newly awakened systems kept the air in the Deathwing bone-dry—and said, “It looks like most of the compartments we’ve been through so far are pretty standard. Berthing, the galley … I wonder if their space rations were any worse than ours?”

  “I’m not hungry enough to try them,” said Vinhalyn. “We can omit the desperate measures until they become necessary.”

  “I’m with you on that,” Cantrel said. “Before you guys showed up, I was thinking we’d have to crack open some of the packets in the galley and try them out. Not a fun idea, believe me, when you don’t know how to tell the powdered porridge from the stuff that opens up clogged drains.”

  “I suppose not,” murmured Llannat. In spite of the lights and the comforting background hum of a working life-support system, she was finding it hard to shake a continuing sense of oppression. It clung around her as it had from the time she’d stepped aboard, and seemed to intensify as she and Vinhalyn followed Cantrel forward, their magnetic boot soles clicking and shuffling against the deckplates.

  Clearing her throat, she said, “Tammas—did you and the rest of the boarding party come up here much?”

  Cantrel shook his head. “Not if we could help it. Once or twice to see where a power line went, but that’s all. It’s too damned spooky in there.”

  They came at last to the vacuum-tight doors of the Deathwing’s cockpit. The ensign pulled a slice of plastic out of his p-suit’s cargo pouch and gave it to Lieutenant Vinhalyn.

  “This’ll get you in,” he said. “The key slot’s over there. But if you don’t mind, I think I’ll stay outside.”

  Llannat watched uneasily as Vinhalyn put the slice of plastic into the lock. She could feel Ensign Cantrel watching the back of her neck—expecting her to work wonders, no doubt, and provide marvels of explanation. But her sense of foreboding continued to grow.

  She knew that what afflicted her wasn’t the simple prospect of looking at what remained of the Deathwing’s pilot and copilot. She’d seen worse things than that as a medic; she’d done worse things than that herself, when she went with Beka Rosselin-Metadi to Darvell. This was different.

  There’s something waiting for me in there.

  The door slid open. The Deathwing’s cockpit was still dark; nobody had come by to bring the lights back up after the systems had come on line. Vinhalyn had already stepped inside; she could hear him muttering to himself as he fumbled to locate the switch for the cockpit illumination.

  “Aha!” he said after a moment, and the lights came on.

  Llannat forced herself to step inside, only to find the scene oddly prosaic for something so bloody—it was work for the Med Service pathologist who’d come out with Naversey, not for an Adept.

  “We need to put these two in a stasis box,” said Llannat. “If we’ve got one.”

  “We can rig something, I’m sure,” said Vinhalyn absently. He was standing in front of the Deathwing’s viewscreens, bending closer to peer at the dark, blurry characters scrawled upon the glass. “This, now—this is truly interesting.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s a message,” said Vinhalyn, straightening up again. “Not to just anybody who might come by, either. It’s in the second person familiar, and the writer speaks as an equal to someone who has already been introduced, not to a stranger of unknown rank.”

  Llannat moved to stand beside him. “What does it say?”

  Vinhalyn turned from the viewscreen and gave her a strange and rather wary look. “Roughly translated? Something on the order of ‘Adept from the forest world: Find the Domina; tell her what thou hast seen.’”

  II.

  NAMMERIN: DOWNTOWN NAMPORT OPHEL NEARSPACE

  IT WAS early evening in Namport, and the streetlamps were coming on one by one. In her walk-up apartment in the old quarter, Klea Santreny twitched aside a flimsy gauze curtain and looked out at the corner below. She was glad to be inside tonight. For the past three days, gutter-choking rains had alternated with steaming heat, turning Namport’s mucky thoroughfares into rancid ox-wallows. Tonight was one of the steamers; she could smell the mud from four floors up.

  Nobody ever told me that the big city was going to smell five times worse than the farm ever did. Maybe if they had—

  She turned away from the window. I still wouldn’t have believed it. If there’s anybody on this planet who’s more stupid-stubborn than I was, I haven’t found them yet. Five years at Freling’s Bar, and it took going crazy to make me wise up enough to get out. I just wish I knew where it is I’m getting to … .

  She hadn’t been getting much of anywhere lately, not even in the most literal meaning of the phrase. Ever since the night when she’d seen a star explode against a backdrop of constellations that didn’t shine over Nammerin, she’d been restless and uneasy.

  Owen had taken her uneasiness seriously. “On a planet with a working Mage-
Circle, an Adept has to be careful. And so does an apprentice.”

  “I’m not an Adept,” she’d said. “Or an apprentice either. I’m just—”

  “You’re not ‘just’ anything.” He’d sounded almost angry—and worried, which unsettled her even more. “You’re powerfully sensitive to this kind of stuff, and the Circle knows it. If they decide you’re a threat to them, you’re in trouble.”

  With his warnings fresh in her mind, she’d stayed close to home, not going much farther abroad than Ulle’s All-Night Grocery. Even that, as it turned out, was enough to increase her sense of something formless and imponderable hanging over the city.

  The streets were full of weird rumors: that the hi-comm news feeds from off-planet had been down hard for three days now, and the Namport Holovid Network was patching together old stories from five or six months ago to keep people from noticing; that the Space Force Med Station had closed its gates and canceled all leaves; that Suivi Point had seceded from the Republic and the outplanets were revolting. Even the bad weather was generally conceded to be some kind of plot.

  One more reason to be glad you don’t work at Freling’s anymore, she told herself. This is the sort of night that brings out the real sickos.

  An urgent knocking at the door of her apartment broke into her thoughts. She hurried over to the peephole and looked out. It was Owen, to her considerable surprise; he’d gone off to his job at the laundry more than an hour ago, and shouldn’t have been back until morning. She unlocked the door and let him in.

  “What’s wrong?” she demanded as soon as he was inside.

  He didn’t give her a direct answer. Instead he waited until she’d shut the door behind him before asking, “Do you want to go to the Retreat?”

  She stared at him. “Right now?”

  “That’s right,” he said. “The Planetary Assembly is going to shut down the port at noon tomorrow.”