Read The Price of the Stars: Book One of Mageworlds Online

Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

The Price of the Stars: Book One of Mageworlds (17 page)

BOOK: The Price of the Stars: Book One of Mageworlds
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One corner of Beka’s mouth quirked upward. “Suppose I killed her? Than what, Lieutenant?”
“Then you’re a dead man, Captain.”
The smile Beka gave her brother could have been either wistful or vicious. On Tarnekep Portree’s face, Jessan had to admit, the two would look the same anyway. She shook her head, still smiling.
“For somebody so devoted to his sister, Ari, you’re damned unobservant. What happened—too much time in the Space Force wipe out everything Ferrda taught you?”
Ari just stood looking at her.
Beka’s half-smile twisted and turned nasty. “You’re supposed to be glad to see me, remember?—not acting like I’m about as welcome as a plague of boils.”
After a long moment Ari found his voice. “You’ve really outdone yourself this time, I have to admit that. Kidnapping, flying under false registration, firing on a Space Force vessel in the lawful performance of its duties—there’s absolutely no way I’m going to be able to get you out of this one.”
Beka’s lip curled. “I don’t recall asking you to, big brother.”
“No,” said Ari. His face was bone-white, and Jessan realized unhappily that his friend was even angrier now than he had been before. “Asking for help would mean showing a bit of sense for a change. Tell me something, would you—when you pull these crazy stunts of yours, don’t you ever, even once, think about what you might be doing to the rest of us?”
Beka drew a sharp breath. If someone had shoved a knife into her, Jessan thought, she might have made a sound like that.
“‘The rest of us,’” she said, her lips pulling back from her teeth in a snarl. “All
I
ever wanted from the rest of you was to be left the hell alone—do you really want to hear just how much luck I’ve had with that?”
Jessan stood up abruptly. “I’ve had about all of this that I can stand. Ari—Beka—”
“Shut up, Jessan,” said Ari, without bothering to look around.
“Oh, yes,” said Beka. “Mustn’t have interruptions while little sister is getting scolded.”
Jessan looked from one pale and angry face to the other, and wondered if brother and sister knew how much alike they looked right now.
Well, I wish them joy of it.
“I’m going,” he said. “Llannat?”
The Adept’s dark face had gone the color of a dirty bedsheet, but she shook her head.
No
, said her voice, somewhere near the back of his skull. He jumped, and the voice continued.
Somebody has to stay and make sure nobody gets killed.
“Better you than me,” he murmured, and headed for the door. It opened to let him through, and shut after him on the sound of rising voices.
Jessan walked forward to the cockpit. He wasn’t surprised to find the Professor there, slumped in the copilot’s chair, looking out at the swirling pseudosubstance of hyperspace.
“How are they doing back there?” the Professor asked without looking around.
“They’re having a fight. What are you doing up here?”
“Staying out of it.”
“You knew they’d have one?”
“Let’s say I expected something in that line.” The older man turned to face him. “Do you have any siblings, Commander?”
Jessan shook his head. “No, I’m afraid I don’t.”
“And they let you off Khesat?” asked the Professor, with an expression of mild surprise. “The galaxy has certainly changed since I was young.”
Jessan gave a weary laugh. “Not that much, Professor. My crowd’s a cadet branch, and there’s plenty of cousins left over to take up the slack. Not to change the subject or anything—but how long have we got before we come out of hyper?”
“About four days. We’ll be on autopilot the whole way.”
Over on the control panels, the status light representing the door to the captain’s quarters lit briefly as the door opened and shut.
“Well,” said Jessan, “it looks like round one is over. Shall we go back and aid the wounded?”
Only Llannat was still in
Warhammer
’s common room when they got there. Jessan raised an eyebrow at her. “What, no bodies?”
“I cycled them all out the airlock.”
“That bad?”
“Not quite—but it was touch and go for a moment or two.”
Jessan could hear the Professor busy in the tiny galley nook.
Good idea. We could all use something hot and nourishing right now, and that’s a fact.
“What happened?” he asked.
“Well … once you left, the argument turned mean.”
“
Turned
mean?”
“You heard it here first,” she said. “Finished when Beka slammed into the captain’s cabin and Ari stomped off aft somewhere.”
“Oh, dear,” said Jessan, subsiding into one of the seats by the mess table. “Not an auspicious beginning.”
“They’ll come around,” Llannat said. “You have to be reasonably fond of somebody in the first place, to light into them like that.”
“Adept’s wisdom?”
She shook her head. “Five brothers and sisters back home on Maraghai.”
The Professor emerged from the galley with a steaming tray in each hand and a third tray balanced across his forearms. “Then you’ll understand, Mistress, how it came about that when the captain saw a need to expand the crew of
Warhammer
, she turned first to her brother.”
Llannat reached up and took the third tray from its precarious balance point. “Mmm, fresh cha’a … thank you, Professor. She ought to have given him some warning, first—he’d just gotten used to the idea that she was dead. The whole thing with the crash on Artat happened while he was in accelerated healing, you know. He went straight from the pod onto a courier ship bound for Galcen, but by the time he got there everything was over but the wake.”
“He never mentioned that in his letters,” said Jessan. The Professor had set the two remaining trays down on the battered surface of the mess table. Jessan reached out and pulled one of them over in front of his own place. “But then, Ari wouldn’t.”
“We’d have liked to be more tactful,” said the Professor to Llannat. “But time was working against us.”
“Count your blessings,” Jessan added. “I got brought along at blaster-point … not that I blame you, Professor. Under the circumstances, I’d probably have shot me out of hand.”
Llannat gave him an appraising look over the rim of her mug of cha’a. “Said the wrong thing at the wrong time, did you?”
“I’d had a long night.”
“Don’t we all, sometimes.” Llannat took a long swallow of the cha’a, then cradled the cup in her hands. “But what if.Ari doesn’t agree to go along with his sister? What then?”
“Don’t worry,” said Jessan. “When he finds out what she’s got in mind, you won’t be able to stop him.”
 
The tractor beam had rattled a few pieces loose in the
’Hammer
’s engine room—nothing dangerous, but stuff that ought to be taken care of while somebody remembered, before it got worse. Blinding rage had brought Ari to that part of the ship in the first place; once the worst of the anger had drained out of him, he went looking for a synch-meter.
He found one in the first spot he checked, in the cramped, out-of-the-way compartment where tools for the
’Hammer’
s internal repair work had always been kept. Then he went back to the engine room to work off the rest of his temper in bringing the hyperspatial reference block back into line.
He’d been at it for a good while when he heard quick, light footsteps on the deckplates behind him. He swiveled around on his heels and looked up. “What are you doing down here?”
His sister dropped down to sit on the deck beside him. “You stole my line,” she said. “I came to see about taking care of the damage, but it looks like you beat me to it.”
“I was down here anyway,” he said. He tightened down the last bolt on the access plate with particular care. “That eye patch,” he said, without looking back around. “Do you really need to wear it?”
She chuckled. “Don’t you like the effect?”
“No.” One-way lenses like that usually covered prosthetic repair work too extensive to disguise any other way. “If you don’t need the blasted thing, could you please take it off?”
“It really does bother you?” She sounded surprised. “Even though you’re a medic and all that?”
“Even though I’m a medic and all that.”
“Funny—it doesn’t bother Jessan.”
“Jessan’s not your brother, damn it!”
Beka made a noise that was almost a giggle. Ari turned back around, and found her looking at him out of a pair of plainly functional blue eyes. She grinned.
“See?” she said. “Two. But I have to wear the patch whenever there’s a chance I might be going dirtside.”
“I understand,” he said. “But—why, Bee? Not just the eye patch, but all of it.”
She drew her knees up and linked her arms around them. “Well, you know how Dadda turned the
’Hammer
over to me in exchange for any information I could pick up about the people who killed Mother.”
Ari nodded. “He gave me the general outline. I thought he was looking for an excuse to give you
Warhammer
without getting the registry papers thrown back in his face.”
“He doesn’t work that way,” said Beka. “Neither do I. Anyhow—there I was with the
’Hammer,
and doing just fine, thank you. Low-bulk, high-speed stuff mostly; there’s good money in that these days. And then somebody put out a contract on me.”
“That can really ruin your day,” Ari agreed.
“You’re not kidding. If the Professor hadn’t stepped in and lent a hand, I’d be dead right now for real. But we rigged a nice piece of theater instead, and I wound up as Tarnekep Portree, merchant captain and part-time paid assassin.”
“You haven’t really—”
She shook her head. “Not for money.”
That leaves a lot of ground uncovered
, Ari thought. He looked over at Beka. She was hugging her updrawn knees tightly and gazing into the middle distance, somewhere on the other side of the far bulkhead.
“What really happened back on Pleyver?” he asked.
“I made some people mad enough to chase us all the way across Flatlands. And after we’d gone to ground portside at the Space Force Clinic, the sons of bitches sent in a private army.” She smiled briefly. “Your friend Jessan’s got a cool head in a crisis. Too sharp-eyed for his own good, though; he spotted me for your sister just as I was bringing the shuttle into High Station.”
“So you invited him along for the ride.”
“More or less. He’s a cool one, like I said; told us we could either trust him with everything or cycle him out the airlock, but nothing else was going to work for more than a few hours. So we decided to trust him.”
“I’m more interested in why Jessan decided to trust you,” said Ari. “Mind telling me just what it was you said to him?”
“Same thing I’m going to tell you,” she replied. “I know who had Mother assassinated, and I’m going to track the bastard down and kill him. Want to come along?”
 
F
OUR DAYS after lifting from Nammerin,
Warhammer
emerged from hyperspace. By tacit consent, the subject of Beka’s intentions hadn’t been brought up again during the otherwise uneventful trip. There’d be time enough for councils of war, Ari supposed, once the
’Hammer
arrived wherever his sister and her mysterious copilot had in mind.
For his own part, he supposed that he could work with Bee and not wind up throttling her.
Just remember that she’s the captain,
he told himself
, and it’s her ship. If you cared about that sort of thing, you’d have become a line officer, not gone into the Medical Service.
The sigh of the ship’s hydraulic systems taking the strain of planetfall brought him back to the present. The ’
Hammer
settled down onto the landing surface. A minute or so later, Ari heard the noise of the ramp being lowered. Across the common room, Jessan unstrapped and stood up.
“We might as well go on inside,” the Khesatan said to Llannat and Ari. “Your sister and the Professor are going to be a while shutting down the ship. You know how starpilots are.”
Ari stood and stretched. “I know that their brains don’t function under natural gravity, which describes my sister pretty well most of the time. You’ve been here before?”
“Only once, for a few hours,” said Jessan. “But I know how to get in.”
Together, the three of them went out the
’Hammer’
s main passenger door and down the ramp. The freighter stood on her landing legs in the middle of an enclosed docking bay. Ari looked around at the assortment of spacecraft parked under the bay’s echoing dome like so many hovercars, and whistled.
“Impressive, isn’t it?” said Jessan.
Ari nodded. “I know collectors on Galcen who’d pawn their grandmother’s jewelry for some of this stuff.”
“Small-time,” said Llannat beside him. “I know historians who’d hock the old lady herself for nothing more than a chance to prowl around in here for an hour or two. That’s a Magebuilt scoutcraft over here, just for starters.”
So it was—meteor-peeked and ugly and, as far as Ari had ever heard, unique in the civilized galaxy.
Not even the Adepts ever captured one of those
, he thought uneasily.
“Let’s get on in,” said Jessan. “It’s chilly out here—we’re inside an asteroid, or something that does a damned good imitation of one. You two must be freezing.”
“Don’t hurry on my account,” said Llannat. “It’s been almost a year since the last time I shivered, and I’m enjoying the sensation.”
“Same here,” Ari said, but he knew that a tropic-weight uniform wouldn’t keep out the cold forever. When Jessan started off toward one side of the docking bay, he followed. He wasn’t surprised when a section of rough-cut rock wall turned out to be a concealed door opening onto a small antechamber and a larger room beyond. “What about the main door over that way?”
“Don’t try it. That one only looks like a door.”
“What is it, then?” asked Ari, as the sliding panel snicked shut again behind them.
“A burglar alarm,” said Jessan. “Or so your sister tells me. You wake up when the burglar starts screaming.”
Llannat looked curious. “You believe that?”
“Implicitly,” Jessan assured her.
“Probably wise,” said the Adept, her dark face unreadable. Before Ari could speak, her expression changed, and she hurried past him and Jessan into the main room.
“Hey, Ari!” she called back over her shoulder. “You should see the setup in here!”
“Sickbay,” Jessan explained as they followed Llannat into the immaculate tile-and-metal room. “About as far as I got last time. We had to stop here for some quick repair work on the other two.”
“Anything bad?”
“Nothing they couldn’t have handled without me,” said Jessan. “Beka had a torn ligament in her leg, and the Professor had a broken arm—child’s play for a setup like this. I wish I’d had some of this gear back on Pleyver.”
“I wish we had it on Nammerin,” said Ari. “That bone-mender’s the latest model from InterMedical Industries. We’ve got a flatpic of it stuck onto the old one in Emergency, so we can pretend a little sometimes.”
“I’ll tell you something interesting, though,” said Llannat. “Everything new in here is really new, nothing older than a couple of Standard years, and the highest quality that money can buy. But all the other stuff, the little things that don’t lose their potency or become obsolete—they go back to the Magewar, at least. What does that suggest to you?”
“That our friend the Professor has been in business for a long, long time,” said Jessan, with a shrug. “But five minutes in his company will tell you the same thing.”
“You can read more into it than that,” Ari told him. “We all can. There’s no need to go around it on tiptoe-two years ago something caused the owner of this very professional sickbay to refurbish it and restock it with enough gear to handle a small war. And two years ago somebody killed my mother.”
“Who was the last Domina of living Entibor,” said Llannat, soft-voiced. “And the Professor is Entiboran.”
Ari thought about that for a moment. “It would explain a few things,” he said. “Jessan, I’m suddenly very curious about the rest of this place. What else is there?”
“The door’s right over that way,” Jessan said. “Let’s go.”
After the scrubbed-clean familiarity of the medical bay, entering the next room was like stepping through a doorway into another world.
And that’s not just a phrase,
thought Ari, halting frozen in the doorway.
It’s the truth.
He couldn’t move. He felt afraid to step onto the exquisite parquetry of the wooden floor. The delicate openwork carving on the long central table and the surrounding chairs made him feel large and clumsy, the way fragile or beautiful objects always did—an intruder in a world that was much smaller than it should be, and far too easily broken.
“There’s more,” Jessan said. “Look outside the windows.”
“I am looking,” said Ari quietly. “I see it.”
The windows, tall and casemented, made the room’s far wall into a curtain of glass. Beyond them, the sun was rising over a wide vista of forested hills, flooding the whole room with a ruddy light. Morning mist filled the valleys between the evergreens, and from somewhere outside the chamber came the sound of birds. One darted past the windows as Ari watched, a scarlet streak appearing and vanishing against the dark green of the woods.
“Where are we?” Llannat asked. Her voice, always gentle, now hardly rose above a whisper.
“Entibor,” murmured Ari. “Years ago, while it was alive.”
“One of the private rooms in the Summer Palace,” said Jessan. “But this—did you ever see such a high-quality holovid?” He reached over to the wall, and flipped a switch.
Ari blinked. The table and chairs wavered, and became stark, heavy-duty pieces in plain metal, the sort of thing you couldn’t break if you tried. Where the rows of windows had been, he saw open archways leading off down shadowy passages.
“The furniture,” said Llannat after a moment, “has got to be real this time. Nobody would ever make themselves an illusion that ugly.”
Ari had to agree. Without the holovid, the room and its furniture reminded him of the Namport Detention Center. “Can we have the Palace back?”
“Sure,” said Jessan. He toggled the switch on again, and the dawnlit chamber reappeared. “I’d rather wait here for the others, anyway. I know there’s sleeping quarters down one of the halls, but that’s it—and I wouldn’t want to wander around alone in here. No telling what you might find.”
Ari sat down on one of the chairs. Even knowing what it really was, he half-expected the frail, pretty thing to crumple under his weight. Outside the windows, the sun rose higher over the Entiboran hills.
“Real-time holographic simulation,” said Jessan, taking a seat at the far end of the table. “Whoever did the programming was an artist. You could probably watch it for days and not get an exact repeat.”
“The Professor programmed it himself,” said Llannat. “From memory, after Entibor was lost.”
Ari turned his head, and saw the Adept standing just behind his right shoulder. She was watching the changing holographic landscape, and her eyes looked sad. He didn’t ask her how she’d known about the room’s programming. Being an Adept, she’d probably pulled the knowledge out of the air somehow. Instead, he ran a hand along the cool metal tabletop that looked like carved blond wood, and said, “Mother was just the opposite. She never let anything Entiboran into the house at all if she could help it.”
The room’s outer door slid open again before Llannat could answer him. Beka entered, followed closely by the Professor.
“Now do we find out what you’ve got planned?” Ari asked.
“We’ll talk about it tomorrow over breakfast,” Beka replied. “Nobody’s committing themselves to anything until we’ve all gotten some sleep.”
 
Ari spent the period of rest surrounded by more luxury than he’d thought existed outside the Central Worlds. The bathroom attached to his sleeping quarters was, by itself, a thing of wonder—black marble and tile, with a sunken tub that looked long enough to swim laps in.
After two years on Nammerin
, he admitted as he lowered himself into the steaming water,
and four days on the
’Hammer,
it would take far less than this to impress me.
He stretched out at full length in the tub and soaked until his fingertips began to wrinkle. Sonics might get you antiseptic enough to meet hospital standard, but they still couldn’t make you feel clean. And the public bathhouses in downtown Namport, besides being strictly off limits to Space Force personnel, were in general good places to lose your wallet while picking up an eclectic assortment of the local diseases.
Enjoy it while it lasts,
he told himself.
Whatever Beka’s got in mind is almost certainly not going to be this much fun.
He ducked under the surface to rinse the soap out of his hair, then stood and let the water run off his body. Stepping out of the tub, he wrapped himself in a nubbly bath towel roughly the size of a landing pad and returned to the bedroom.
Four of the bath towels might have stretched to make a coverlet for the bed itself, an enormous expanse of mattress between swagged-back velvet curtains.
It looks like a holoset for “Spaceways Patrol
,” he thought.
All that’s missing is Sinister Serina in a glued-on gown.
He shook his head regretfully over the omission and slid between the cool spidersilk sheets. The room lights slowly dimmed. Ari burrowed his head into the large feather pillow and fell asleep.
Light awakened him, streaming into the room from a source outside something that looked like a window but probably wasn’t. Semitransparent glassweave curtains gave a hazy impression of manicured lawns and formal gardens stretching out beyond the leaded panes. He sat up in bed and looked around the room.
A dark, silent figure stood motionless in an alcove near the door. Ari tensed, then let out his breath in explosive relief. What he’d taken at first for an intruder was only some sort of robot, vaguely human in its general outlines, its black-enameled body surmounted by an ovoid of dark plastic. A red light flashed briefly within the sable depths of the mechanism’s featureless mask.
“Good morning, sir.” Despite the machine’s outward appearance, the synthesized voice was pleasant and well modulated. “I trust you slept well. I shall fetch your clothing while you bathe, sir.”
“Right,” said Ari, rolling out of the wide bed. The carpet felt springy and cool under his bare feet, like freshly mown grass. When he emerged from the bathroom some time later, the bed had been made, and the robot had laid out a handsome suit of burgundy cloth.
He frowned at the garments. “Where’s my uniform?”
“Being cleaned and repaired, sir. Do you require it?”
“No,” Ari replied. “I don’t suppose I’ll be needing it for a while. But can’t you find something that won’t make me look like the bouncer in a high-class bar?”
“Something more subdued, then,” said the robot. “If you would be so kind as to wait a moment …”
The robot picked up the pile of cloth and left the room with it, returning a minute later with another armload of fabric that turned out to be an otherwise identical suit in a quiet shade of forest green.
Ari wasn’t at all surprised when the garments turned out to fit him perfectly. He sealed the last fastener and turned back to the robot. “Tell me—can a man find a cup of cha’a somewhere hereabouts?”
“The others are waiting in the breakfast nook, sir.”
“Lead on,” said Ari. He followed the robot down a passageway to a sweeping staircase, and from there to a balcony overlooking something that looked for all the galaxy like a waterfall in a woodland glade. A milk white durnebeast drank, head bent, from the pool some thirty feet below. The slim, long-legged creature looked up as he appeared, then fled into the undergrowth.
BOOK: The Price of the Stars: Book One of Mageworlds
8.58Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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