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 (38 page)

BOOK: The Price of the Stars: Book One of Mageworlds
13.23Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
Still too close, damn
it, thought Gil, trying again to aim into the knot of bodies. Another second crawled by, and the Khesatan’s attack pulled Nivome back a few more inches. The Rolny fought to bring the heavy blaster into line for another shot. Gil fired, and Nivome fell dead on top of the General’s daughter, drilled neatly in the temple by the energy beam.
The whole episode had taken about five seconds from start to finish. The sound of blaster-fire had scarcely died before the General reentered the room at a run, his own weapon drawn. Lieutenant Rosselin-Metadi and Mistress Hyfid came charging in close on his heels.
The General made his blaster disappear again. “All right, what happened?”
One glance at Beka and Jessan convinced Gil that he wasn’t going to get any help from that quarter. The Khesatan, oblivious of the corpse at his feet, was holding Beka in a tight embrace and murmuring disjointed phrases under his breath. She, in her turn, stood shaking against him, her face buried in his shoulder and the long knife forgotten in her hand.
Resigned, Gil caught the General’s eye and nodded toward the body. “Shot while trying to escape, sir.”
“Simplifies things a bit,” agreed Metadi. “Looks like I owe you, Commander. If there’s anything I can do—”
Gil slid his hand-blaster back into its grav-clip. “Take me off the cocktail-party circuit before I drown in weak punch?”
The General smiled. “I think I can swing that one. Your tour on Galcen’s almost up anyway: how do you feel about being bumped up one rank, and getting your choice of ships?”
“I’ll take it,” Gil said. “What’s the catch?”
“The catch,” Metadi told him, “is that you’ll be commodore of the Mageworlds fleet. Trouble’s brewing out there, and I want a man on the spot who knows how to make the right decision in a hurry.”
“That’s just fine for you, Dadda,” said Beka Rosselin-Metadi, pulling away from Jessan’s grip and slamming her knife into its sheath. “But now that the Space Force has taken care of everything, why don’t all of you go back home to Galcen Prime and let me get my ship the hell out of Waycross?”
“Because everything isn’t taken care of,” Jessan told her. “Not yet.”
The General raised an eyebrow. “How’s that, Commander?”
“I’m resigning my commission,” said the Khesatan. “Effective immediately.”
In the doorway, Ari Rosselin-Metadi stared, dumbfounded. “What—? Nyls, have you lost your mind?”
“Probably,” Jessan said. “It doesn’t matter.”
Beka caught her lower lip between her teeth. “I don’t understand.”
“You can’t run the
’Hammer
in the Mageworlds without a copilot,” Jessan explained. “And the Professor is gone. So unless you’ve got somebody else lined up for the job …”
“You mean you’re not going back to the Space Force?” asked Beka.
“No,” he said, and kissed her again.
Some time later, the General cleared his throat. “Well, Commander—if you’re convinced that my daughter is worth more than a promising career in the Medical Service, I’m certainly not going to hold it against you.”
Still keeping one arm around the General’s daughter, Jessan inclined his head—very much, Gil thought, in the manner of the Crown Prince of Sapne. “Thank you, sir.”
“You’re welcome, Commander,” said the General. “But I’m not going to accept your resignation, either.”
Beka stiffened. “Dadda!”
Metadi ignored her. “Consider yourself transferred to Space Force Intelligence,” he told Jessan. “Your first assignment is detached duty with
Warhammer
on the Mageworlds border. I’ll take care of all the paperwork.”
Beka was looking at the General as if he had promised her a luxury tour on the pride of the Red Shift Line instead of a hard stint of dirty, dangerous work with little prospect of thanks at the end of it. Gil winced slightly—he knew on whose desk the paper would ultimately fall—but he couldn’t really bring himself to begrudge the effort.
 
Starpilot’s Grave
By Honor Betray’d
The Gathering Flame
The Long Hunt
The Stars Asunder
 
“Have you got
Warhammer
’s papers?” he asked.
“Yes,” Beka said. She reached into the right-side pocket of her jacket for the miniature blaster that always lived there, and put the business end of the little weapon against the back of his neck.
He froze. Then, with infinite caution, he lifted both hands and placed them flat against
Amsroto
’s hull.
Beka started breathing again. “Now,” she said. “It’s time you told me what your name really is, and how you wound up with a Mageworld scoutcraft parked in your docking bay …”
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.
 
 
THE PRICE OF THE STARS
Copyright © 1992 by Debra Doyle & James D. Macdonald
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
 
 
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
Tor
®
is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
 
 
Cover art by Romas
 
 
eISBN 9781466802094
First eBook Edition : September 2011
 
 
First edition: October 1992

Read on for a preview of
BOOK TWO OF MAGEWORLDS
The direct sequel to
The Price of the Stars

 

Starpilot’s Grave

By
Debra Doyle and James D. Macdonald

 

“Doyle and Macdonald deliver exactly what I want in an adventure story—
more
.”
(Elizabeth Moon)

 

Now available from Tom Doherty Associates

 

A Tor e-book ISBN 978-1-466802728

 

Copyright © 1993 by Debra Doyle & James D. Macdonald

 
PROLOGUE
 
PLEYVER: FLATLANDS
 
D
ARKNESS HAD fallen over the city. Light from the streetlamps lay in stark white circles against the warehouse walls, with pools of blackness falling in between. Overhead, the fixed star of High Station—Pleyver’s giant orbiting spaceport—burned down through the skyglow. No one saw Owen Rosselin-Metadi pass by like an unheeded thought, skirting the edges of the lamplight and pausing to catch his breath in the safety of the dark.
He wasn’t sure how long he’d been running. Hours, it felt like—ever since leaving his sister back at Florrie’s Palace, in an upper room where the acrid stink of blaster fire mingled with the heavier smell of blood. He didn’t think anybody had followed him out of there; he’d put most of his remaining energy into staying unseen, and Beka had taken care of the rest.
Owen didn’t like the favor he’d asked from her, that she take on the risk of drawing away the armed pursuit, and he didn’t particularly like himself for asking it. But Bee was a survivor, the kind who could fight her way from Florrie’s to the port quarter and blast off leaving a legend behind her. He’d seen that much clearly; far more clearly, in fact, than the outcome of is own business on Pleyver.
Nevertheless, he had lied to her.
Well, not exactly lied. But he
had
let her think that the datachip he’d given her, packed with information from the locked comp-files of Flatlands Investment, Ltd., was unique. He’d never mentioned the other datachip, the one that he’d come to Pleyver to obtain. The information on the second chip belonged.to Errec Ransome, Master of the Adepts’ Guild—or it would if Owen lived long enough to deliver it.
Maybe I should have given it to Bee.
Owen shook his head. He’d briefly considered asking her, but the presence of her copilot had killed that idea. The slight, grey-haired man she called the Professor gave Beka an unquestioning loyalty—that much Owen had perceived without any difficulty—but it was a loyalty that would put Beka first and the Adepts’ Guild a far-distant second.
No, it was better to let the two of them go their own way. From the look of things, Beka had kept her promise to distract the ordinary hired help, the ones who did their fighting with blasters and energy lances. Dodging the others should have been easy, if only he hadn’t been so stupid as to get caught once already tonight … .
 
Owen had shown up outside the portside branch office of Flatlands Investment, Ltd., just before dusk. He’d hoped to get there earlier, but intercepting Beka at the spaceport and convincing her to abandon her own designs on the company’s data banks had taken longer than he’d anticipated.
Beka wanted revenge, plain and simple: revenge on whoever had planned their mother’s assassination and revenge on whoever had paid for it. She’d get it, too; Bee in pursuit of a goal had a straightforward single-mindedness that made a starship’s jump-run to hyperspace look like a sightseeing trip. But that same trait could make her dangerous to be around if your purposes and hers happened to diverge. Owen didn’t think that the Guild’s interest in FIL was going to put him in Beka’s way, but he didn’t want to chance it.
Besides, he reflected as he approached the grey, slab-sided FIL Building, it was easier for one person to work unnoticed than for two. He could slip in, get enough from the files to satisfy Master Ransome and his sister both, and slip out again before Bee was through eating dinner.
The front door of the building was secured by an electronic ID-scan. Owen palmed the lockplate like any authorized visitor. Inside the mechanism, the electric current flowed through its appointed paths and channels as the door made ready to reject the identification. Then, without changing his expression or his physical posture, Owen reached out, using the skills that for more than ten years had made him Errec Ransome’s most valued—and most valuable—apprentice.
The flow of electrons altered its course. The lock clicked quietly and the door slid open.
A stranger waited in the unlit lobby, a thin, hunched man in the plain garb of a low-level office worker. Owen tensed, but the man didn’t make any threatening moves.
“I’ve got the password,” the worker said.
Owen paused. He hadn’t expected anyone to be here at all. But he hadn’t sensed any wrongness as he approached the office building, and the man himself didn’t project any great amount of menace either.
He must be one of Bee’s contacts,
Owen decided.
He’s certainly the type—his coverall might as well have a tag on it saying “Disaffected Employee.”
“Well?” he said aloud.
The man licked his lips. “We need to talk about the money first.”
Money … Owen knew he shouldn’t feel surprised. His sister was a merchant-captain, and dealt in the purchase and sale of whatever goods might find a market. But when Owen worked, as now, in the persona of a down-at-the-heels drifter, he carried as little cash as possible. A spaceport bum with money was a contradiction in terms.
“I’m just the messenger boy,” Owen said. “You can pick up your fee at the General Delivery office.” In addition to handling electronic and hardcopy messages, local branches of the giant communications firm made convenient, no-questions-asked cash drops for all sorts of legal and semilegal business exchanges. “I’m not authorized to carry cash.”
He braced himself for an objection, and made ready to counter it in much the same way as he had dealt with the door. He was mildly surprised when the man only nodded, said, “Right,” and began fishing in the pockets of his coat.
After a few seconds, the man came up with a thin slice of plastic. “The password’s on here.”
He held out the keycard. Owen reached out a hand to take the card, and felt the first undefined stirrings of premonition as their fingers touched.
Something’s wrong. He ought to have made a fuss about the money.
Owen looked at the man again, this time using the physical contact to enhance his perceptions. Under that deeper scrutiny, the patterns of the office worker’s consciousness showed up like a dark and knotted skein, with fear and duplicity and greed tangled into an unlovely network.
Now I see it. He doesn’t mind that he might not get Bee’s money. Somebody else has already paid him more.
Owen smiled inwardly, though the face he presented to the office worker never changed.
Sister mine, it’s a good thing I came to this party instead of you. You were about to walk into a trap.
He tucked the keycard into the breast pocket of his coverall. Then, in a continuation of the same movement, his right arm snapped forward, and he smashed the edge of his hand against the bridge of the other man’s nose. Cartilage and bone crushed inward, and a fine spray of blood misted out.
Owen caught the man as he fell and eased him silently to the floor. On his knees beside the unconscious man, he searched quickly and methodically through the other’s pockets, but found nothing of interest except a second keycard, a twin to the first, equally unmarked. He pocketed it and stood up again.
He looked down for a moment at the sprawled form of the office worker. Perhaps the man would drown in the blood draining from his crushed sinuses, or perhaps not. Owen left the worker there for those who had hired him, and went about his own business.
He took the emergency stairs, not the lift, to the top floor, and paused briefly before the lockplate of the office at the end of the hall. The security system here presented no more challenge than the lock on the outside door. In a moment he was in, with the door closed and secured behind him. He’d probably taken care of any problems by silencing the man below; if he hadn’t, whoever had set this trap for his sister would find more in it than they’d expected.
The desk comp had a slot for the keycard. Owen paused for a moment, considering.
Without a physical card in place to complete the circuits, not even an Adept’s tricks could shunt the electron flow to perform the task he needed. But which card to use? Owen weighed them in his hand, assessing them as he had the office worker below. One of the cards, the one that he’d been given, felt limited, probably crippled on purpose. He discarded it without any more thought and switched to the card he’d taken from the office worker’s pocket.
The password worked. He had Bee’s datachip full within minutes; her need for information was narrow and specific, and easily supplied. Errec Ransome’s chip took longer. The Master of the Guild cast his nets wide, and in strange waters, for the welfare of the galaxy’s Adepts.
Errec Ransome had been a junior Adept in the Guild-house on Ilarna when the Magewar broke out. Those days had seen slaughter done all across the galaxy, but few places had suffered worse than Ransome’s home planet. Only Sapne and Entibor had experienced more destruction than Ilarna. Sapne, depopulated by plagues and reduced to barbarism, had no inhabitants left alive who could remember its ruined cities in their prime; and Entibor was an orbiting slag heap with nothing living on its surface at all.
Seeing all his friends dead and the Ilarna Guildhouse smashed into rubble, Errec Ransome had left the Adepts for a time. He had joined the privateers of Innish-Kyl in their hit-and-run war against the Magelords, fighting other men’s battles for his own purposes. The Mageworlders had been crushed now for twenty years and more, and Master Ransome had long since returned to the Guild; but his vigilance never ceased.
Owen completed his second download and withdrew the keycard. And then—
Danger!
The premonition slammed into him full force. His senses clamored with the awareness of enemies nearby, and he clutched the edge of the desk with both hands.
Danger! Too close
—
He lifted his head to looked around the office, and cursed under his breath at his own arrogance and stupidity.
What had seemed to be alternate exits—windows and an inner door—he saw now were only illusions, holographic projections with their reality enhanced by his own willingness to believe. The trap had closed on him in a room with no escape except by the door through which he had entered. He would have to fight his way out.
He crossed over to the door and put his hand against it, still expecting little more than blaster bravos and hired thugs, the sort of vermin who were his sister’s enemies. Instead …
Worse and worse. His enemies waited for him on the other side.
His
enemies, and not Beka’s at all.
 
Owen paused again in the deeper shadows beside a trash bin and looked around. Still no visible pursuit. Closing his eyes and drawing a deep breath, he centered himself and cleared his senses as best he could.
Nobody near. I’ve lost them. I hope.
He couldn’t be certain; he didn’t have enough energy left to make certain and still keep himself hidden. The fight at the Flatlands Investment Building had taken too much out of him—single-handed and unarmed against too many opponents, while most of his inner resources were diverted into hiding the datachips in his coverall pocket.
He’d lost the hand-to-hand fight, but he’d won the other struggle: he still had both datachips concealed when his enemies dragged him off to Florrie’s Palace. There was somebody at Florrie’s, they gave him to understand, who was slated for the honor of finishing him off.
He’d never expected to find his sister Beka waiting for him at the other end of a blaster. Once he saw her face, he thought for a few seconds that she was going to kill him after all. But she shot the guard instead, and cut another man’s throat, and then surprised Owen even further by agreeing to draw away the inevitable pursuit.
If Master Ransome’s datachip ever made it back home to Galeen, Owen reflected, it would be mostly Beka’s work. For his own part, he’d been half-blind from the moment he came here.
The blindness wasn’t entirely his fault, he supposed. The enemy must have been clouding his vision ever since he showed up on Pleyver—the old enemy, the ones who had laid siege to the planet of Entibor for three years, and not abandoned it until Entibor was dead; who had broken every fleet the civilized worlds had sent against them except the last; who had massacred the Adepts of Ilarna and half a hundred other planets besides.
There were Mages on Pleyver, and not mere apprentices or self-taught dabblers in the ways of power. The great Magelords had returned.
BOOK: The Price of the Stars: Book One of Mageworlds
13.23Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

The Amish Blacksmith by Mindy Starns Clark
For Love or Money by Tara Brown
Long After Midnight by Ray Bradbury
Rebound by Cher Carson
05 - Warrior Priest by Darius Hinks - (ebook by Undead)
Love Storm by Houston, Ruth
Timmy in Trouble by Holly Webb