Starpilot's Grave: Book Two of Mageworlds

by Doyle, Debra; Macdonald, James D.

  “No,” he said. After his silence before, the words came out in a rush, full of pain and urgency. “I wanted to be there—I asked Master Ransome to let me stay at the Retreat over the winter and teach the new apprentices—but he told me to come here instead. He knew—he must have known!—how close the danger was, but he sent me off to Nammerin instead of keeping me by him where I could help.”

  “Maybe he wanted you to be safe?”

  “I never asked him for safety,” Owen said. He was as pale now as he had been when he first heard the news at the terminal, and his expression frightened her. “For almost ten years I obeyed his word as my teacher and acted to serve the Guild, and the places I went and the things I did were not safe. And then—when the enemy we had watched and followed all that time was getting ready to strike—then he sent me to Nammerin, where he already had an Adept in place, and where in all the time I’ve been on-planet the Mage-Circle hasn’t done anything more than rough me up when they caught me eavesdropping. Something is wrong here, Klea; something is very wrong.”

  IV.

  ASTEROID BASE RSF SELSYN-BILAI: INFABEDE SECTOR

  BEKA HAD made longer hyperspace transits than the one from Galcen to the Professor’s asteroid base, but never one that seemed as interminable. The few repairs that she could handle without needing to work outside the ship were soon taken care of, leaving her with nothing else to do besides monitor the autopilot, pace the ’Hammer’s corridors, and try to get some sleep.

  She didn’t have much luck with the attempt. More times than not she would find herself thrown awake in the middle of ship’s night by some unremembered dream, then lie staring up at the dark overhead until at last, driven by desperation, she would get out of bed, dress herself, and start pacing the corridors again.

  Finally the ’Hammer dropped out of hyperspace inside the asteroid field that masked the location of the Professor’s hideout—if “hideout” was the proper word for such a place. The chambers and tunnels of the secret base extended far into the depths of the asteroid; Beka herself was only familiar with the upper reaches. How her former copilot had acquired the complex, and from whom, she didn’t know—though she’d begun, of late, to have her suspicions.

  The Prof had been Armsmaster to House Rosselin while Entibor was still a living world; when he came to be Warhammer ’s copilot and Tarnekep Portree’s tutor in the assassin’s trade, he had been loyal until death; but before that, he had been a Magelord, and a traitor to his own Circle. And the asteroid base—which perhaps was not and had never been truly an asteroid at all—was Magebuilt from core to surface.

  “You’ll want to be careful while we’re staying here,” Beka said to Ignac’ LeSoit shortly after she had settled the ’Hammer down onto its landing legs in the base’s huge docking bay. Together with Jessan and LeSoit, she was standing at the foot of the ’Hammer’s ramp, prior to giving the ship a postflight walkaround. “Don’t go wandering about by yourself. If you get lost we might not be able to find you in time.”

  The air in the bay was thin and cold. The bay itself was a cavern some distance beneath the asteroid’s outer skin, accessible only by hair-fine realspace shiphandling. Warhammer wasn’t the only starship currently occupying a place on the bay’s metal deckplates. The asteroid base was home to a score or more vintage spacecraft, from a shot-up Resistance fighter to a blue-and-silver pleasure yacht. The Professor had owned, and at one time or another had piloted, all of them; now Beka supposed that, like the base itself, they were hers.

  “How long are we going to be here?” LeSoit asked. Her old shipmate was doing a good job of not seeming impressed by the enormous bay and the collection of antique ships, but she could sense the uneasiness beneath his surface nonchalance.

  Beka shrugged. “I don’t know. As long as it takes to get the hull repaired, for sure. After that—it depends on what’s happening out there. A shooting war is no place for a merch.”

  Jessan, standing close by her right hand, looked troubled. “It’s your decision, Captain.”

  She bit her lip. Hell of a time for Nyls to remember he’s got a Space Force commission. What was I supposed to do, drop him off on Galcen so he could get killed like everybody else?

  “Right,” she said aloud. “And I’ll decide when I’m ready. Meanwhile you can show Ignac’ around—fix him up with a place to bunk, and make sure the robots know he’s friendly. I’m going to get the repairs started before I go in.”

  She watched the two men heading off across the docking bay, then turned and made a complete circuit, on foot, of her ship, noting each hole and ding in the vessel’s metal skin.

  It wasn’t too bad, she decided after she had finished the inspection. There wasn’t anything broken that couldn’t be fixed at the base, and in fairly short order.

  And then we can take Ignac’ back to Suivi Point, and Nyls and I can see what kind of cargos are available somewhere out of the way of all the fighting … .

  … if there is somewhere out of the way of all the fighting, and as long as Nyls doesn’t decide he wants to go commit suicide along with all the rest of his buddies, and …

  … hell. I’m not deciding anything until the hull’s repaired, and that’s final.

  She clapped her hands once, sharply. The sound echoed off the ceiling and walls of the bay. Out of the shadows in the far reaches of the vast space, a half-dozen black-enameled robots moving forward on silent nullgravs to answer the summons.

  “Welcome back, my lady,” said the first one to arrive. Inside the dark plastic ovoid of its sensor pod, crimson lights moved and flickered. Its voice had an uncanny likeness to that of Beka’s dead copilot; not surprising, since the Professor had built and programmed all the robots at the base. “What are your current needs and desires?”

  “Don’t call me ‘my lady,’” said Beka, out of habit—a pointless order, since the robot, like its builder, would certainly ignore it. “Tell the kitchen to have dinner ready for three at 2040 Standard. A Khesatan, a Suivi Point free-spacer, and me; adjust the menu to suit. Make certain that Nyls and our new guest have everything they need—ask them if you’re not sure. And have the maintenance robots commence repairs on Warhammer at once.”

  “Yes, my lady.” The robot didn’t have a waist; if it had, Beka thought, it would have bowed. “What do you wish done with the household illusions?”

  Beka hesitated for a moment. The holographic systems that masked the utilitarian metal furnishings of the asteroid base had been another of the Professor’s creations—works of art more than decoration, designed and programmed over a long span of years by an eccentric and essentially lonely man.

  “The Prof’s gone,” she said finally. “And he isn’t coming back. Leave them off.”

  “Now that we’ve got all Vallant’s people under restraint,” said Commander Quetaya, “the question is, what should we do with them?”

  Captain Natanel Tyche shook his head. “That’s a question, but it’s not the main question. What I wish I knew was what we ought to do with us.”

  In company with Commander Quetaya, Tyche was going through the files in what had been the CO’s office on board RSF Selsyn-bilai. The Selsyn’s captain hadn’t survived his initial encounter with Admiral Vallant’s troopers, and Commander Quetaya was currently occupying the service-issue stack-chair behind the former CO’s desk, working her way through the comp files while Tyche cleared the hardcopy.

  “That’s up to the General,” Quetaya said. “And we already know that he’s planning to fight.”

  “I’d like to know what with, then,” said Tyche. “A stores ship and a pair of recon craft aren’t exactly what I’d call a fighting fleet.”

  The office door slid open while he was talking. “Neither would I, Captain,” said General Metadi, as he joined the others in the cramped office. “But we have to start with something.”

  Tyche reddened. The General ignored his discomfiture and went on, “How’s the comp search doing, Commander?”

  �
��Nothing useful so far,” Quetaya said. “But it’s still running. How about the prisoners, sir—anything from them?”

  Metadi folded his lean form into another of the stack-chairs and sighed. “Not a hell of a lot. Most of the troopers are the usual article, go where they’re told to go and shoot who they’re told to shoot. About half of them didn’t even know Vallant had mutinied, and most of the rest of them didn’t care. If we break up their units and mix them in with our own people, they’ll do just fine for us. The officers, though—” His expression shifted to one of genuine disgust. “—they’re all Vallant’s handpicked loyalists, and we can’t keep ’em.”

  Quetaya nodded gravely. “Do we shoot them or space them?”

  “There’s no need to be bloodthirsty,” said Metadi. “I thought we might strip them down to their undershorts and drop them off on the next inhabited world we come to. Giving some planet a good laugh at Vallant’s expense might pay off in the long run anyway.”

  “What about Galcen?” Tyche asked.

  “Nothing good.” Metadi looked very tired. “Judging from what our prisoners have to say, the admiral has pretty much ceded Galcen to the Mageworlds in advance.”

  Quetaya had gone back to working with the desk comp while they talked; now she looked up.

  “I think I just got something here,” she said. “Key word Purple Cloud. CO’s eyes only. Encrypted.”

  Metadi sat up straight. “Can we break it?”

  “Not a problem, sir. Here it comes now.”

  “What do we have?”

  Quetaya was smiling broadly. “Standing orders in event that the Republic loses control of Galcen Prime.”

  “Those vary sector by sector,” Metadi said. “Summary?”

  “The orders are fairly detailed,” she said. “But essentially they call for all units not exclusively ground-based to leave their assigned positions and rendezvous at a designated point somewhere in Infabede. I’m no starpilot, but it looks like they picked some patch of deep space with nothing to recommend it besides being a long way from anything.”

  “Harder for the bad guys to find you that way,” said Metadi. “Do we have the coordinates?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” Metadi said. “Then so will every other Space Force unit that’s trying to figure out what to do now that they can’t call Prime for help anymore. That’s one way to get yourself a fighting fleet, Tyche. Collect all the pieces.”

  Tyche sighed. “I hate to dampen people’s enthusiasm, but there’s a small problem. Admiral Valiant has a copy of the standing orders in his comp files, too. In fact, he probably issued them.”

  Quetaya’s face fell. “Damn. That means he’ll take the rendezvous point first thing.”

  “Not necessarily,” Metadi said. “Think about the kind of man we’re dealing with. Valiant doesn’t want to win a war; he wants to be King or Dictator or Grand High Something of the Infabede sector. He’s going to be concentrating most of his forces on nailing down the planets, not on patrolling the blank spaces in between them.”

  “So what do you think he’ll do?” Tyche asked.

  “My guess,” said Metadi, “is that he’ll hand over the job of watching the rendezvous to somebody he thinks he can trust—a tough guy in a tough ship. Cruiser or better is my guess. Then the admiral’s buddy can sit in the middle of nowhere snapping up ships as they drop out, while Vallant takes the rest of his fleet on a grand tour of Infabede, spreading the word about Galcen and making sure all the planetary governments know who’s the new man in charge.”

  Metadi gave his aide and Captain Tyche a grim smile. “In the meantime, people, we have a chance to take ourselves a capital ship while Admiral Vallant is looking the other way. And with a cruiser and a stores ship, anything is possible. Even taking back the galaxy.”

  “Well,” said Jessan to LeSoit, “that’s about all you need to know for now. Stick to the top levels and the public rooms, and you should be safe.”

  The two men were standing in the long entrance hall of the asteroid base. In the Professor’s day, the room had been a masterpiece of elaborate real-time holovid programming, a painfully accurate likeness of the Summer Palace of House Rosselin on long-dead Entibor. Now, with the illusions turned off, it was just a spare, undecorated room.

  “Don’t worry,” LeSoit said. “If you want the truth, this place gives me the creeps.”

  “You aren’t exactly seeing it at its best,” Jessan told him. “I’d have left the holovids up, myself, but the decision wasn’t mine to make. The captain dislikes ‘fake scenery,’ as she calls it.”

  “She would,” said LeSoit. He paused a moment, then asked, “Do you have any idea what she’s going to do next?”

  Jessan shook his head. “I wish I did. I’m just as glad she didn’t stick around Galcen and try to fight off the entire Mage warfleet by herself—but this kind of indecision isn’t her usual style at all.”

  “Probably means she’s working up to something crazy,” LeSoit said. “I could tell you a couple of stories … . Are you planning to stick around after she makes up her mind to go flying off and get herself killed?”

  There was a moment of intense silence.

  “If,” said Jessan slowly, after several seconds, “by that rather offensive question you meant to inquire about the permanence of my affections for Captain Rosselin-Metadi—”

  “Touchy, aren’t you? Yeah, that’s what I was asking.”

  “—then the answer is yes.”

  “Fine. Just as long as there’s somebody.”

  “I’m glad you seem to think I qualify,” said Jessan. He regarded LeSoit for a moment and added, “Although, frankly, I’m not certain who you are to judge.”

  “The captain was a shipmate of mine once,” LeSoit said. “She was a good pilot and a damned good friend, and she flat didn’t care about being the heir-apparent to Entibor. But I couldn’t shake the idea that her family was going to come and fetch her back home again someday, so I took off before I had to watch it happen. Looks like I was wrong, though.”

  “No,” said Jessan. “You weren’t wrong—what do you think that business with D’Caer was all about if it wasn’t a family fight? But when the family needed her, she came back on her terms, and not on theirs.”

  When the communications center in the asteroid base was working, it could pull in hi-comms from all over the Republic, and provide everything from a direct voicelink to a planet on the other side of the civilized galaxy, to the late-night rerun of “Spaceways Patrol.” At the moment, however, hi-comms were still down, and the base was too far off the normal transit lanes to pick up anything on the lightspeed bands that wasn’t already several centuries old.

  While the robots in the docking bay labored over Warhammer’s torn hull, Beka spent several fruitless hours in the comm center trying to pull in a signal—any kind of signal—from Galcen Prime. Nothing came, and she bit her lip in frustration.

  They could all be dead by now and I’d never know it.

  “I did everything I could,” she said aloud. “I brought them the warning. I made sure their messengers got away to spread the word. I nearly blew myself up in hyper and damn near got myself shot to pieces in realspace. There wasn’t anything more I could have done if I’d stayed.”

  She clenched her fist and struck it against the arm of her chair. The galaxy’s going all to hell around me, she thought, and I haven’t got the faintest idea what I’m supposed to do next.

  “There’s always going back to Galcen once the ’Hammer’s repaired,” she said aloud. “That’s where the fighting is, and Dadda is sure to be the thick of it. But the fleet action is probably all done with by now, and an armed freighter can’t do any good in a war on the ground. And if the Mages have everything, dropping out of hyper in the wrong place at the wrong moment could get me in big trouble.”

  She shook her head. It looked like the safest bet for a small fast merch with only two gunners was to lie low for a while, until the fighting was
over. No matter who won, there would always be a dirtsider somewhere with a cargo the ’Hammer could carry.

  “I’ll be all right. With this base to hole up in, and the ’Hammer to make my living, I can handle whatever comes along.”

  The statement was true, but somehow it failed to reassure her. She fell silent again, and sat moodily running the lightspeed comm bands for another half-hour without result. She didn’t look up from the board again until the familiar voice of the base’s chief robot broke into her reverie.

  “My lady, if I may presume to interrupt …”

  She spun the chair around to face the robot. “Why not? Right now I’ve got plenty of time on my hands and nothing to do with it.”

  “If you say so, my lady. The matter concerns the maintenance of your ship.”

  Her voice sharpened. “There’s a problem with the repairs?”

  Damn, if we’ve got to take the ’Hammer to a yard right now, we’ve had it.

  “No, my lady,” said the robot, to her intense relief. “The procedures are simple, and we have all the necessary supplies here at hand.”

  “Then what’s the hangup?”

  The robot seemed to pause a moment to collect its thoughts—an illusion, Beka knew, part of the Professor’s artful programming. The robots had been his only company for a long time after the Magewar ended, and he had been a perfectionist in small matters as well as in large ones.

  “In the course of performing routine maintenance on your ship,” the robot said at last, “it has always been our practice to back up Warhammer’s log recordings into main base memory.”

  Beka frowned. “I never told you to do that.”

  “The order was not yours, my lady.”

  “The Prof? Damn and blast him, that was a hell of a liberty to take without my permission! What did he want a copy of my log recordings for, anyhow?”

  “My series-mates and I were never told such things,” said the robot. “But if I may conjecture—”