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

Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

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BOOK: The Price of the Stars: Book One of Mageworlds
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“Launch Control, this is
Warhammer.
I have departure clearance. Over.”
“’
Hammer,
this is Launch Control, roger, you have departure clearance. Lift on my signal, I say again, lift on my signal. Stand by, execute, out.”
Beka pushed the forward nullgravs to max, tilting the ’
Hammer
’s nose skyward, and fed power to the main plant. In a roar of engines, the freighter slid through the atmosphere and out of the planet’s grip—slowly at first, and then steadily faster. At normal speed, Beka aimed for the jump point to Artat, took the run-in, and went into hyperspace. She counted off five seconds on the control-panel chronometer, then dropped back into realspace again, with Mandeyn showing on the sensors as a bright star dead astern.
Following the navicomp leads, she swung the ‘
Hammer
into a tight spiral and commenced a new run-to-jump—much faster this time. She fed power to the hyperspace engines, and the stars blurred and faded through blue to black as the ’
Hammer
broke through.
“Now we see if Dadda’s little girl is half the pilot she thinks she is,” Beka observed to nobody in particular, and switched on the override.
An alarm
whurrpped
. She silenced it with another switch, and then pushed the main control lever all the way forward. The readouts on half a dozen gauges flashed into the red, and danger lights started blinking all over the control panel.
She reached to her right and flipped a third switch. The danger lights began burning steadily.
“You still there, Professor?” she asked, over the ship’s internal comm system.
“Still here, Captain.” Her passenger sounded unruffled by the double jump.
“Then unstrap and get up here to the cockpit. I’m going to cut life support to the rest of the ship in about two minutes.”
“Coming, Captain.”
Beka passed the time waiting for her passenger to appear in taking nonessentials off line—the guns, the galley, the lights. When he arrived, calm as a professor of galactic history showing up for class, she closed the vacuum-tight door behind him and switched off life support to the ’
Hammer
’s after sections.
“Take a seat,” she said, with a nod sideways at the copilot’s empty spot. “I’m going to cut ship’s gravity.”
She waited for him to strap in before taking that last system out. “And now,” she said, “while I fly this thing, you can tell me a story.”
“The first thing I ought to tell you is that you’re going to come out of hyperspace inside an asteroid belt.”
“Lovely,” she said, keeping her eyes on the gauges and readouts in front of her. Her fingers played over levers and knobs as she held the power plant in balance and the ship on course. “Absolutely outstanding.”
“My apologies. But we lack the time for a safer approach. We’re going to a place where I’ve stockpiled a great deal of useful equipment over the last few years, and I wanted to make it hard to find.”
“Congratulations.” A needle wavered. She turned a control rod back half a degree. “Now, tell me more about this price you say I’ve got on my head. I suppose it accounts for the dustup back on the Allee?”
The Professor made a dismissive gesture with one hand. “Amateur talent, as I said. I rather suspect you owe your survival that long to your former shipmate LeSoit. He’s a professional these days—in a minor way, of course.”
“LeSoit,” she said.
He never did say outright he was
crewing on
Reforger, she reminded herself.
Only that his buddy Eterynic was
. “My old friend Ignac’.”
“Don’t be too harsh on him, Captain. The local bullies probably held back as long as they did out of unwillingness to interfere with a professional hit. But when he let you head back to your ship alive …” The Professor shrugged.
Beka frowned at the engine status readouts. “Well, that’s one I’ll have to owe LeSoit—though I must say the bastard might’ve warned me.”
“That,” said the Professor, “would have been thoroughly unprofessional on his part. He came close enough to stepping over the line as it was.”
Beka stole a quick glance at her visitor. “You wouldn’t,” she asked with growing suspicion, “be one of those professionals yourself?”
“At one time or another,” he admitted. “Among other things.”
“Wonderful,” said Beka. A readout that had stayed green so far flickered and went red. She swore under her breath, and backed the power off another hair. “I have better things to do right now than play guessing games. If you’re going to kill me, why didn’t you do it dirtside?”
“I’m not planning to kill you, my lady. Just the opposite.”
“That makes twice you’ve called me ‘my lady.’ Like I said before, the word’s ‘Captain.’”
“As you wish. But I was a confidential agent of your House for many years. A certain sentimental regard for the niceties is hard to avoid.”
“Entibor’s an orbiting slag heap,” said Beka, “and Mother sold off all House Rosselin’s assets to finance the war. I’m
Warhammer
’s captain, and that’ll have to do.”
“For some things, perhaps,” said her passenger. “But simple freighter captains don’t merit assassins tailing them across half the civilized galaxy. You have a dangerous hobby, my lady: the word is that Captain Rosselin-Metadi asks too many questions in the wrong places.”
“Do I, now?” She forced herself to keep her attention on the controls.
“Far too many questions,” said the Professor, “for someone who carries your not exactly inconspicuous name. Such inquiries were bound to cause talk, coming so soon after what happened to your mother.”
Beka bit her lip, hard. She still didn’t like to think about that.
All those years, I kept promising myself that someday I’d go back home and tell Mother the real reason why I couldn’t stand it on Galcen anymore. It wasn’t her, it was all the rest of them, the Council and the Space Force and the damned Entiborans-in-exile. Mother let them drain her dry, year after year after year, and I could tell they’d do the same thing to me if they could … .
She shook her head to clear it, and concentrated on keeping her ship on course.
“I began asking questions myself,” her passenger continued, “as soon as I learned of the Domina’s death. And the first thing I heard was that the family’s footloose daughter had a ship of her own at last.” He paused. “I’m probably not the only person to wonder if the ’
Hammer’
s new captain got her ship on the promise of future services.”
“Explains why people I’ve never met are shooting at me,” she said. “Any idea who put them up to it, Professor?”
“At the moment,” said her passenger, “no. Later, once we’ve shaken the hunters off your trail, we can look into that.”
She stole a second or so away from the control panel to turn her head and look at him directly. “‘We,’ huh?”
“If you don’t mind the idea of assistance.”
“I like the idea of improving my chances,” she said, most of her attention already back on the ’
Hammer
’s engine-status display. It still showed the same, but the steady thrumming—felt, more than heard—of the freighter’s metal skeleton had smoothed out a bit.
She chanced easing the power back up, and added, “But what you’re talking about doesn’t come cheap.”
 
Back on Mandeyn, a pallid sun rose over the streets of Embrig Spaceport, and the Freddisgatt Allee stirred to reluctant life. Massive ground transports trundled up to the loading doors of the huge warehouses, the heat of their heavy-duty nullgravs melting the ice that had formed on the slushy street in the cold hours just before dawn.
If the Allee’s business day was just beginning, the Strip—that narrow, rowdy buffer between the docks and the stolid, well-behaved city of Embrig beyond—was only now shutting down its operations. The Painted Lily Lounge, like all the other establishments, switched on the CLOSED sign and swept out the last of the drunks along with the dirt off the floor.
The door of the Lily’s back room slid open with a faint whine. Inside, Gades Morven the gambler sat alone amid the litter of the night’s business, practicing false cuts with a deck of playing cards. He looked up at the new arrival, a thin, dark-mustached man with a heavy blaster.
“I wondered when you were going to show up,” Morven said. “There’s people out there who aren’t happy with you at all.”
The newcomer shrugged. “You hired me. They didn’t.”
“They may not see it that way,” said Morven, dealing out hands faceup onto the dark tablecloth. His pale grey eyes watched the cards as they fell.
“Damn it, LeSoit,” he said as he dealt, “do you have any idea how many people saw their credits go out the airlock when
Warhammer
lifted off?”
“I just do my job and draw my pay,” said LeSoit. “It’s not my business if people place the wrong bets.”
“Well, you may have to make it your business soon enough,” the gambler said. “Somebody’s bound to claim I rigged the deal on this one, the way you stuck with that bitch from the moment she made port.”
LeSoit’s dark eyes narrowed. “Your money buys you protection,” he said, “and that’s all it buys. Who I socialize with is my own business, and the
lady
used to be my shipmate.”
Morven gave the spread of cards one quick, colorless glance, and gathered them up again with practiced fingers. He shuffled the deck and held it out for the cut.
“Still, LeSoit, people are going to talk.”
The dark man cut the cards and handed back the deck. “Tell them to talk to me,” he said. “I can handle them.”
He watched as Morven, without answering, began dealing out a new table full of cards.
“Besides,” LeSoit added, as the crown, coronet, scepter, and orb of trefoils fell one by one onto the tablecloth in front of the gambler himself, “it’s not the people who lost money that I’d be worried about.”
 
L
IEUTENANT ARI Rosselin-Metadi crossed the open ground to the Med Station’s Number Two aircar with easy, unhurried strides. A hard rain was falling on the landing field, but only newcomers to the station tried to escape bad weather. Here in Nammerin’s equatorial region, rain fell every day for half the year, and violent storms roared through at least twice a week during the other half. This was the drier-but-stormy season, and the downpour plastered Ari’s thick black hair against his skull.
In the shelter of the aircar, a lean, fair-haired man stood waiting. His uniform was less rain-soaked than Lieutenant Rosselin-Metadi’s, but only because there was less of it to get wet. By most standards Nyls Jessan would be considered tall, but Ari was nearly seven feet in height and massively built, with powerful muscles overlying long, heavy bones—the legacy of a paternal grandfather whose name not even Jos Metadi had ever known.
“Our chariot awaits,” said Jessan, with a theatrical flourish toward the aircar’s open door. “We’ve got a civilian casualty requesting an assist at gridposit seven-two-eight-three-four-nine-two-five.”
His speech carried faint traces of a Khesatan drawl. Nobody at Nammerin’s Medical Station could figure out what an aristocrat from the most elegant and civilized of the Central Worlds was doing in the Space Force, and Lieutenant Jessan, in spite of his ready flow of light chatter, had never volunteered the information.
Ari climbed into the waiting aircar. In a few minutes, with Jessan at the controls, they were flying in and out of drifting patches of grey cloud, with the lush vegetation of the equatorial zone spread out beneath them.
Nammerin was a young world, plagued by constantly shifting weather patterns, but the civilized galaxy was hungry and expanding in the aftermath of the war. So—to keep the agricultural machinery on Nammerin’s vast water-grain farms from rusting untended while other worlds went hungry—the Space Force’s medical and disaster relief teams worked overtime on behalf of the planet’s scattered population.
“Well,” said Ari, as soon as they’d leveled out. “What do you think is waiting for us?”
“Could be anything,” said Jessan. “While you were up-country on leave we got three cases of Rogan’s Disease at the walk-in clinic.”
“We shouldn’t be seeing Rogan’s here at all,” protested Ari. “It’s a dry-world problem.”
Jessan shrugged. “We’ve got it anyway, and tholovine’s scarce in this sector. It’s not even part of the standard kit.”
“You can thank the Magelords for that,” Ari told him. “Tholovine was a big part of their combat chemistry. Ever since the war ended and word got out, none of the major supply firms will handle the stuff. The dry worlds make just enough to handle their local problems, and that’s it.”
The Khesatan lieutenant raised an elegant golden eyebrow. “Sounds like you’ve been hitting the journals.”
“I had an interest,” said Ari shortly:
Jessan opened his mouth and then shut it again. The Domina’s murder had rocked the civilized galaxy only a few Standard weeks after Ari first reported for duty on Nammerin. Around the Med Station, by unspoken agreement, the subject was never discussed.
The wind picked up as the aircar continued on. On the ground below, tall trees bent and tossed like stems of grass, and drainage ditches raged like turbulent rivers. Stiff gusts buffeted the craft as it flew.
Ari was the first one to break the silence. “It’s going to be a wild ride coming back.”
Jessan glanced over at him. “Are you trying to talk yourself into a piloting job?”
“Who, me?” Ari contrived to look innocent. “I wouldn’t think of spoiling your fun.”
But to himself, he had to admit that Jessan’s comment had the ring of truth. The Khesatan was a good pilot, one of the Med Station’s best, but Ari was better. Flying, after all, was in his blood. His crazy sister Beka—wherever she was right now—might be better at deep-space piloting, but she’d never cared much for working with the smaller atmospheric craft.
Her loss
, thought Ari.
Flying’s not really flying if gravity doesn’t have a chance to get you when you’re careless.
The aircar flew on. Soon a raised concrete strip came into view on the ground below, and Ari abandoned his private thoughts in favor of checking the chart screen.
“That’s our posit, all right,” he said to Jessan. “Looks like a farmer’s landing pad.”
“I bet somebody stuck his hand in a seed hopper again,” replied Jessan absently. Already, the descent was taking most of the Khesatan’s attention. The low-altitude winds appeared determined to push the craft off its approach and land it in the thick, soupy mud surrounding the pad. At last the aircar came to a halt on the concrete surface, and Jessan let out a satisfied sigh. “So far, so good. Now, where do we go from here?”
“Where” turned out to be a nearby line shack, a windowless prefab structure crowded with farm equipment and sacks of seed grain. A pocket glow-cube, set high up on a metal shelf, cast a pitiless white light down onto the floor where a human lay beneath a pile of blankets, sweating and shivering both at once. A hulking, grey-scaled being crouched beside the pallet. The creature rose to its feet as Air and Jessan walked in.
Just my luck
, thought Ari.
We’re dealing with a Selvaur
. The saurian—a male, from the crest of green scales rising off his domed skull—stood as tall as Ari himself, and bared a predator’s fangs at the two medics. The voice that came from his chest was a deep rumble, speaking not in Galcenian but in a growling, inhuman tongue.
*About time you guys showed up.*
“Sorry,” said Jessan, as he went down on one knee beside the man on the pallet. “We came as fast as we could.”
Most humans on Nammerin had picked up the trick of “hearing” the Selvauran language, since there were almost as many of the big saurians on Nammerin as on the creatures’ home world of Maraghai. Actually speaking the seemingly wordless, rumbling language was another matter—few humans had either the patience or the vocal range to manage the task.
*Sorry’s not the word,* the Selvaur growled in reply to Jessan’s apology. *This human is my sworn brother. If he dies, you die.*
“I’ll keep that in mind,” said Jessan, without looking up. He’d already opened the medikit from the aircar, and was working over the ailing man. “Talk some sense into him, will you, Ari?”
“My pleasure,” Ari said. He stepped past the kneeling Jessan to stand in front of the Selvaur. This close, their eyes were on a level. Ari took a deep breath and pushed his voice down to the bottom of its range. *If this man dies, it’s the will of the Forest, and not the work of anyone here.*
The Selvaur’s vertical pupils dilated for a moment in surprise. Then the big saurian recovered his composure. *Who taught you to speak like a Forest Lord, thin-skin?*
*Ferrdacorr son of Rrillikkik taught me the Forest Speech,* Ari said. *He fostered me among his own younglings in the High Ridges, and brought me into his family as a son.*
Again, startlement showed briefly in the Selvaur’s yellow eyes. It wasn’t unknown for a Selvaur and a human to swear blood-brotherhood, but formal adoption was almost unheard of. *Have you gone on the Long Hunt, then, and made your Kill?*
Ari thought of the white scars along his back and ribs, and the double row of white puncture marks in the flesh of his left arm—only part of the price he’d paid to call himself part of Ferrdacorr’s clan. *I have,* he said.
The Selvaur shook his head, a gesture he must have picked up from the humans he worked with on Nammerin. *Ahh.* He looked over at his partner, and then back at Ari. *Will he be all right, now that you’re here?*
*I don’t know yet,* Ari said.
He moved away from the Selvaur, and knelt down beside Jessan. “What have we got?”
Jessan shook his head. “We’ll need the lab work to confirm it, of course—but if this isn’t third-stage Rogan’s I’ll toast my commission and eat it for breakfast.”
“Rogan’s,” said Ari. “Damn.”
The Selvaur made a nervous sound deep in his throat. *Is he going to die?*
*Maybe,* said Ari. It was unbecoming for one Forest Lord to lie to another, even in kindness. *Help us move him to the aircar. If we get him to the hospital, he may have a chance.*
The return trip was every bit as bad as Ari had feared, with the wind picking up, and the sick man shaking with chills and screaming in delirium the whole way. At last, though, they got the farmer checked in and under care, and made their way, wet and muddy, to the Junior Officers’ staff lounge for a cup of hot
ghil
. Off-worlders found the local drink sludgy and bitter, but like everybody else at the medical station, Ari had been on Nammerin so long the stuff was beginning to taste good.
The staff lounge was a converted storage dome, furnished with a half-dozen stackable chairs and a lumpy couch that someone had picked up secondhand at a flood sale. A holoset stood in the center of the dome atop its packing crate. Jessan clicked on the set, and the latest episode of “Spaceways Patrol” flickered into view, its colors dulled and its outlines fuzzied by atmospherics.
Ari sat back on the couch and gave his mug a gentle shake before taking the first sip—
ghil
was warming and filling and a natural stimulant, but it did tend to leave sediment in the bottom of your cup.
“Rogan’s Disease,” he said. “What next?”
“You never can tell on this planet,” said Jessan. “The week after I got here—two years ago this LastDay morning, but who’s counting?—the CO’s pet sand snake got mildew. Had to freeze-dry the beast to kill the stuff.”
“Wouldn’t that kill the sand snake, too?” asked Ari. You never could tell about Jessan’s wild stories. He told them all with the same straight face, and it was usually the unlikely ones that turned out to be true.
“Oh, no,” said Jessan, shaking his head. “Just sent it into premature hibernation.”
“And then, I’ll bet,” said a woman’s unfamiliar voice from the doorway, “he had to put it under the ultraviolets to reset its clock. Come on, Jessan, tell us another one.”
Ari rose, ducking out of habit even though the lounge’s ceiling provided ample headroom, and turned toward the door. He saw a human female of about his own age, a small, plain-featured person whose thick black hair was twisted up into a knot at the back of her head. She wore a Medical Service uniform without insignia.
“Gentlelady,” Ari began, and then saw the polished wooden staff slung across her back on a leather cord. “Mistress,” he corrected himself.
Jessan chuckled. “Llannat, this is Ari Rosselin-Metadi. Ari, this is what else showed up while you were gone—Llannat Hyfid, our brand-new Adept. She’s my relief.”
Ari gave her the full Entiboran bow of respect, just as his mother had taught him years ago. “Mistress Hyfid.”
She made a face. “Call me ‘Llannat,’ please. I’m from Maraghai, and the ‘Mistress’ bit makes me uncomfortable.”
There weren’t a lot of humans living on Maraghai, but the Selvauran distaste for human ranks and titles tended to rub off on the few who did. Ari looked at Llannat with a bit more interest. *Do you understand Forest Speech?* he asked.
The answering smile lit up the young woman’s dark, bony features like a lantern on a cloudy night. “Oh, yes—but I can’t manage two words of it without having a sore throat for a whole day afterward. How did you learn it so well?”
“There was a Selvaur who knew my father during the Magewar,” said Ari. “I was fostered with him on Maraghai. It was part of some agreement he and my father made before I was born, back when my father talked the Selvaurs into joining the fight.”
Ari watched Llannat Hyfid putting the pieces together as he spoke. “That’s right,” he told her, “Rosselin-Metadi as in the late Domina and the Commanding General. And you probably know my brother Owen—he’s an apprentice in the Guild. Me, I’m about as sensitive as a brick.”
“He has the manners of one sometimes, too,” said Jessan. “It comes from talking with too many holovid reporters.”
“You probably wondered,” said Ari, “why I took my leave here on Nammerin instead of going home. I’ll tell you why—Galcen probably has more holovid cameras than this planet has water-grain seeds.”
“I still call it a waste of good leave time, roughing it in the backwoods on this quaking mudball,” said Jessan. “But there’s no accounting for taste. Speaking of roughing it—I finally got my orders this morning, and do you know where they’re sending me next?”
“No,” said Ari, smiling a little. “Where?”
“Pleyver,” said Jessan. “Flatlands Portcity.”
Ari whistled. Flatlands wasn’t Waycross, but the Pleyveran port had been wide open enough in the bad old days to serve as one of his father’s best ports of call. “I didn’t know Space Force had a station there.”
“We don’t,” said Llannat. “Don’t listen to his griping, Ari—they’re making him a lieutenant commander and putting him in charge of setting a place up.”
BOOK: The Price of the Stars: Book One of Mageworlds
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