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Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

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BOOK: The Price of the Stars: Book One of Mageworlds
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Beka shook her head. “I don’t believe this.” A buzzer sounded. “Coming out of hyperspace!” she announced with relief.
The stars reappeared. As always, the sudden glory of the sight took Beka’s breath away.
If I ever get tired of seeing that,
she thought,
it’ll be time for me to give up piloting.
The Artat system lay spread out beneath them. “Third planet in’s our target,” she said. “Let’s tell the nice people that we’re here.”
In a few minutes, she had contact with Port Artat over a voice circuit. “Inspace Control, Inspace Control,” she said into the comm link, pitching her voice as low as possible to help out the transmission, “this is
Warhammer
,
Warhammer
, checking into the net, over.”
“Warhammer, Warhammer
, this is Inspace Control, Inspace Control. Roger, over,” came the faint reply.
“This is
Warhammer
. Request permission to orbit Artat, over.”
“This is Inspace Control, roger, permission granted, out.”
“And that,” said Beka, as the link clicked off, “was the easy part.”
Warhammer
drove on toward the cloud-covered world, and began her orbit. Beka activated the link again.
“Inspace Control, this is
Warhammer
. Request permission to land at Port Artat.”
“Warhammer
, this is Inspace Control. Commence your landing approach.”
Turning to the Professor, Beka said, “Here it goes. I’m starting autopilot on
Amsroto
now.” Then, over the comm link: “Inspace,
’Hammer
. I am declaring an in-flight emergency. Stand by, over.”
“What is the nature of your emergency?” squawked the voice from the comm link.
Beka ignored it.
“What is the nature of your emergency? Acknowledge!” insisted the voice link a second time.
Again, Beka ignored it. She watched the split screen of the navicomp—data from the
’Hammer
above, from
Amsroto
below. When
Amsroto
’s half-screen showed the old freighter firmly on course for her appointment with the planet’s surface, and when all the dirtside trackers had locked in on the incoming emergency, Beka released the landing claw.
The navicomp screen went blank as the link with
Amsroto
broke off.
Warhammer
shot away from
Amsroto
at max acceleration to jump speed.
“Now!” said Beka, and jumped the
’Hammer
blind.
Again, she gave it a five-second count before dropping out into realspace, and breathed a sigh of relief when the ship emerged in one piece. She’d worked out the calculations as best she could in advance—but a blind jump taken without a proper run-up still pushed the odds more than she liked.
The navicomp was up again. From the data it was giving her, she’d missed the estimated emergence point by more than just a bit. She thanked whatever deities happened to be listening for not bringing her out of hyper inside a star, and then got to work fixing the
’Hammer
’s location and charting a return course for the Professor’s asteroid.
After the acrobatics with
Amsroto
, Beka was glad to make a normal hyperspace jump for a change. As soon as the stars had gone blue and vanished she engaged the ’
Hammer
’s autopilot. Then, yawning, she unfastened her safety belts and stood up.
“That’s it,” she said, rotating her shoulders to relieve muscles gone stiff from tension. “I’m off to get some sleep.”
 
“Six hundred and fifty credits,” Ari said without preamble as he slid into the booth at the Greentrees Lounge, where Jessan and Llannat Hyfid sat waiting. “By midnight.”
“I hope it’s in small, unmarked bills,” said Llannat with a straight face, “because that’s all we have.” Like the others, the Adept had come in civilian clothes—in her case, a plain coverall in dull black fabric. Her staff was propped ready to hand against the side of the booth.
“It couldn’t hurt,” said Ari. “You have the cash with you, Jessan?”
“The bag’s right here,” said the Khesatan. “But this is going to just about kill the wardroom slush fund. After payday, we’ll probably be able to pick up a little bit more.”
“If we don’t,” said Llannat, “it had better be a very small epidemic.”
“Meanwhile,” said Ari, “we’ve got a lot of time to kill, and this place has the best cheap food in Namport, so we might as well have dinner.”
The sun set over the spaceport as the three junior officers applied themselves to a leisurely meal. “Here’s to riotous living, Namport style,” said Ari, after the waiter had trundled out the first serving dishes. “Broiled groundgrubs and marsh eel soup. There’s certainly nothing like it on Galcen.”
Llannat grinned, and pulled a broiled grub off its skewer with her teeth. “That’s the truth—I haven’t had a meal this good since I left Maraghai.”
Ari dished out a helping of marsh eel soup from the just-arrived pot and presented it to Llannat with a flourish. “They bring out the local beer to drink with this,” he said. “You’re supposed to pour some of it into your soup to punch up the broth a little.”
The Adept looked dubious. “I don’t know—”
“We aren’t on duty, we aren’t in uniform, and we aren’t on an official mission,” Jessan said. “So what’s the worst they can do to us—make us medics and send us to Nammerin?”
“No,” said Ari, after a moment’s thought. “The worst they can do is court-martial us and send us home. Considering that what we’re doing is technically illegal, I for one wouldn’t mind being able to list ‘intoxication’ as a ‘mitigating or extenuating circumstance.’ Here comes the beer now.”
As he spoke, another waiter brought out a tray of beer bottles and began setting up a pair by each place. “One for the soup,” explained Ari to Llannat, “and one to drink.”
She picked up one of her bottles and inspected the label. “‘Tree Frog Export Dark’?”
“Always demand the best,” Jessan said, popping the seal on his first bottle and pouring some into the soup bowl.
The Adept shrugged and opened a bottle. “If my friends could see me now,” she said. “Into the soup it goes.”
“That’s the spirit,” said Ari, pouring a good dollop of Export Dark into his own bowl and stirring vigorously. “All the same, there’s better stuff than Tree Frog, if we’re going to do any serious drinking.”
“Not here in Namport, there isn’t,” said Jessan, “unless you count that aqua vitae they distill from purple mushrooms—which I personally wouldn’t.”
“I wouldn’t either,” said Ari. “But take a look in that bag you’re carrying.”
The Khesatan reached under the table, fumbled for a moment, and brought up a tall, narrow-necked bottle filled with dark amber fluid. Ari nodded toward the bottle.
“Does that look like purple mushrooms to you?” he asked.
Jessan turned it to inspect the label. His eyebrows went up as he read. “Galcenian brandy … prewar Uplands Reserve … I’d say it looks more like a minor miracle. How did you come by this stuff on a lieutenant’s pay?”
“Family cellars,” said Ari, with a shrug. “Before that it was part of
Warhammer
’s liquor supply—and who knows how my father got it. I brought it with me to Nammerin as a consolation prize for getting assigned here, and wound up being too busy to drink it.”
“So what’s an heirloom like that doing in a bar like this?” asked Jessan. “Meaning no disrespect to Greentrees, of course.”
“I dropped it into the carrybag before we left base,” Ari said. “Seeing that you’re leaving for Pleyver, and Mistress Hyfid has just arrived, and you’ve got a promotion that we still haven’t celebrated properly—”
Jessan cut him off. “Are you proposing to share this jewel with us?”
“I am.”
“In that case …” The Khesatan regarded the bottle for a moment before popping the seal. He poured a generous shot into a clean glass, and then repeated the ritual twice more for Llannat and Ari.
“A toast to our beloved Commanding General!” Jessan said. “After all,” he added in an aside, “it’s his brandy.”
Ari laughed, and drained the glass. He held it out to Jessan for a refill. Llannat, meanwhile, had taken a small sip. Now she sat leaning back against the wall of the booth, with the glass cradled between her hands.
“This stuff isn’t booze,” she said, after a few moments. “It’s a religious experience.”
Ari looked at her. “The patterns of the universe as seen through the bottom of a bottle?”
She cocked an eyebrow at him and took another small sip. “Why not? It’s a part of the universe like everything else.”
“Including Tree Frog beer?”
“Sure,” she said. “But this stuff’s like all of autumn caught in a glass: the sun, the breeze from the high slopes, the wineberries after the first frost … .”
The Adept’s dark eyes grew hazy and faraway, looking at something in the middle distance that only she could see. Ari watched her uneasily—she didn’t appear to be the sort who was given to prophecies and visions, but you never could tell. She came out of the reverie without saying anything unnerving, however, and applied herself to the marsh eel soup as though nothing had happened.
Jessan, meanwhile, had bowed to local custom and was washing down the strong-flavored soup with more Tree Frog beer. After Llannat’s brief excursion into mysticism, Ari found himself unwilling to spoil the memory of that first taste of brandy, and contented himself with refilling his water glass.
The soup was followed by tusker-ox steaks in red spore sauce, and then by a jellied fruit pie. At last, midnight drew near. Ari stood, and Jessan handed over the bundle of cash.
“There you are,” the Khesatan said. “Remember—try to keep a low profile. As low as possible, that is.”
“Very funny,” said Ari. “Just make sure that you two have the scoutcar ready to pick me up at fifteen after. I’d hate to have to walk all the way home.”
 
T
HE AIR outside the Greentrees Lounge hit Ari like a wet towel. Clouds obscured the night sky, and a warm mist hung in the air and made hazy circles around the streetlights. Despite his relative abstinence at dinner, Ari found himself light-headed—probably, he decided, some sort of interaction between the Tree Frog Export Dark and the Uplands Reserve. He shrugged and started walking.
Greentrees and Munngralla’s curio shop were on opposite sides of town, with the port area sprawling between them. Ari took the long way around, swinging in a half-circle through streets that were for the most part lighted but empty. Even in a galactic backwater like Nammerin, portside on a LastDay night could get rough—and while the Mark VI blaster could probably settle any trouble that didn’t answer to mass and strength alone, the combination would be sure to get him noticed.
The CO’s entitled to a little discretion,
he thought.
And anyhow the long way is faster
.
The district of seedy rooming houses and small shops where G. Munngralla’s Five Points Imports did business was far enough away from the spaceport to close down at night. Most of the storefronts in the buildings along the muddy streets had grillwork up over their darkened windows—this wasn’t a district that could afford security force fields and all-night displays. Streetlights here came one to a corner, making the intersections into puddles of bright light that never reached far enough to illuminate the middle of the block. The random glow from upstairs windows cast odd blocks of light and shadow onto the rutted streets; but not even that light reached the sidewalks under the shop awnings.
Ari kept one hand near the holstered blaster and moved as quietly from shadow to shadow as he knew how. He might not be able to disappear from plain view in broad daylight like his brother Owen the apprentice Adept, but he’d learned to hunt like a Selvaur in the forests of Maraghai, stalking the fanghorn and the rock hog on foot and bringing them down barehanded.
Now he moved in silence down the street leading to Munngralla’s shop, and cast his mind back to the hunting lessons of his adolescence. *Watch everywhere, youngling, * Ferrdacorr had told him. *And listen, always. You humans have no noses, but better eyes than the Forest Lords—and you personally, at least, have something that passes for a sense of hearing.*
Nothing out of the ordinary seemed to be happening in the street itself. Something scaly and four-legged was digging through an overturned trash barrel; and upstairs in the building on the next corner a woman’s voice berated somebody named Quishan for an unspecified, but apparently habitual, offense. But Five Points Imports was as quiet and dark as its neighbors to either side.
Ari reached out a hand to give the door a gentle push—mechanical hinges could make more noise than a feedback regulator about to go down hard—and got no result at all. Munngralla had locked up the shop.
Careless of him,
thought Ari. He checked his chronometer.
I’m right on time
. And then, still standing with one hand reaching out to touch the doorknob,
He’d never be that careless. Not with a deal coming up that might lead to a long-term contract. Somebody else must have locked the door.
He moved closer to the door, and put one ear to the crack between it and the jamb. Deliberately, he blocked out the scrabbling and rustling from the overturned trash barrel, the shrill voice with its accusations against the luckless Quishan, and the ever-present rumble from the port … and listened.
He heard nothing at first, then something: a distant, arrhythmic thumping and bumping from deep within the shop. If Munngralla had good soundproofing in his back rooms and upstairs apartments—which as the local agent of the Quincunx he more than likely did—those bare hints of noise implied that all hell was breaking loose somewhere.
Then Ari was sure of it, because faintly through the other sounds came a deep, ragged-edged roaring—the war cry of a Selvaur outnumbered but refusing to go down.
“Right,” Ari said aloud, and took hold of the doorknob again. One quick, sharp jerk, and the door swung open without further trouble. Munngralla would have to repair the doorjamb and replace the lock.
Inside the shop, the noises were more distinct, though still muffled. Ari ran for the beaded curtain at the back of the shop, snatching up a pugil stick from the display rack as he passed. By night, the beaded curtain hid a solid metal door—thick enough for soundproofing, but still not strong enough to hold against a well-placed kick. It caved inward, leaning drunkenly from the only remaining hinge. Ari slid past it and into the back hall.
He ran up the steps three at a time, to where a slanting rectangle of light shone out into the upstairs hallway. The last door wasn’t locked. Munngralla must have come upon the intruders before they could secure that final barrier against unexpected interruption. As Ari reached the last step, a body flew out the open door and slammed against the opposite wall.
From the looks of it, Munngralla was still fighting. Ari hefted the pugil stick, let loose his own version of Ferrda’s fighting-roar, and charged in.
The Selvaur stood with his back to the far wall of a cabinet-lined workroom, swinging a length of metal shelving in murderous arcs that kept his attackers from closing. Munngralla’s enemies—whoever they might be—hadn’t stinted on the manpower. Not counting the casualty out in the hallway, Ari saw at least five humans still pressing the fight with clubs and knives.
He swiped the butt end of his pugil stick across the back of the nearest skull. The man collapsed onto the tile floor, fouling the footwork of two other attackers as he fell. Munngralla caught one of them along the side of the head with his length of shelving, and Ari heard the crack of shattering bone. That man also went down, his head bloody. The leading edge of Munngralla’s piece of shelving showed a red stain.
One of the men turned and came at Ari with a knife angled low to slash across the gut. Ari blocked with the butt of the pugil stick, striking the knife man’s forearm so hard that the wood shivered against his hands like an electronic shock.
The knife hit the floor with a metallic clatter. The man went grey-white but kept coming forward.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” said Ari, who had no desire to get the man’s left-hand knife in the belly at close quarters. He smashed the haft of the pugil stick against the man’s nose. The knife man screamed once before going down.
Blood from the man’s broken face made the stick slippery under Ari’s fingers. He shifted his grip a little and moved in toward the only attacker still standing. Munngralla swung his piece of shelving into the man’s ribs as Ari cracked the same man over the head from behind.
Then the sound and heat and smell of a blaster bolt tore through the air, and Munngralla let out a roar of pain.
Ari swore. They’d both forgotten the second of the two men who had stumbled earlier. Smaller than the others, and possibly more prudent, he’d rolled sideways and come up under one of the worktables. Firing from that refuge, he managed to get off a second shot, but the bolt went wild as Ari tore the table loose from the floor and hit him with it.
Nobody fired any more blasters after that, and only Munngralla moved. The big Selvaur dragged himself to his feet, and Ari saw that most of the grey-green scales along his left arm and side had been burned away.
“It’s going to be a day or so in accelerated healing for you, I’m afraid,” Ari said, as soon as he had breath.
*Never mind that,* growled Munngralla. *We have to get out of here fast.* “You think somebody called Security?”
*I know what was on the shelf that idiot hit with his second bolt,* said the Selvaur. *Heat starts the reaction—we’ve got about five minutes before it all explodes.*
“I wondered why they held off so long with the fireworks,” said Ari. Habit already had him checking to see if any of their fallen adversaries were alive. Most of them looked past help, but both his first victim and the man he and Munngralla had taken out together were still breathing. “We can’t leave these two here.”
*Why not?*
*Because I
said
not,* snarled Ari, in Selvauran. *Are the Forest Lords hunters, or do they murder like the thin-skins? *
The Selvaur grumbled an obscenity, but nevertheless picked up one of the survivors with his good arm, as lightly as if the limp body were a rag doll. Ari knelt to lift the second surviving attacker. It took more of an effort than he’d expected, and his head spun as he rose again to his feet. He closed his eyes for a second or so, and the dizziness subsided.
That’s what you get for mixing Galcenian brandy with Nammerin beer
, he told himself.
File that away for future reference
… .
*Come on!* roared Munngralla from the hall outside. *The whole upstairs is going to blow in about two minutes. *
Ari took a firm hold on the unconscious man and started out after the Selvaur. At the top of the stairs, he paused. “What about the tholovine?”
*Under the counter,* snarled Munngralla from the foot of the stairs. *But we haven’t got all night.*
“I know, I know,” Ari said, starting down. The staircase looked steeper and more rickety than it had when he was charging up it a few minutes ago. A streak of drying blood ran down the plastered wall opposite the stairwell. It looked like that early casualty who’d come flying out through the door had made it away under his own power.
In the shop, Munngralla paused only long enough to shift his burden and pull a small, tidily wrapped brick from behind the Changwe temple gong before running on out through the ruined doorway. Ari followed at a breathless lope.
He jumped off the raised sidewalk to get a running start for the far side of the street—and then, in a roar of sound and a blinding light, came the explosion. Scraps of brick, plaster, and flaming wood rained down, setting the shop awning afire in several places. Five different burglar alarms in nearby shops went off in a jangling discord. Someone in the next building started having hysterics. And all up and down the block the doors flew open, discharging people in every imaginable state of dress and undress.
Ari picked himself up from his knees in the mud. The man he’d brought out still breathed, for a miracle; Ari half-carried, half-dragged him the rest of the way to the far sidewalk. Munngralla was already there, sitting on the edge of the raised walkway and watching the flames reaching skyward from the blown-out windows of his shop.
The force of the explosion, and the frantic overburdened run, made Ari’s head start spinning again. He laid his man down on the wooden sidewalk next to the man Munngralla had carried out, then sat down himself and waited for the vertigo to stop.
“What,” he asked aloud as soon as he had breath, “was all that about, anyway?”
*They didn’t like the way I operate.*
“Complaining to the Small Business Board wasn’t good enough for them, I suppose.”
The Selvaur gave a sardonic growl of laughter and pushed himself to his feet. *We’d better leave before Fire and Security show up.*
“What about—?” Ari flapped a hand at the two casualties stretched out behind them on the sidewalk.
*Let Security handle them.*
“I suppose that is easier that explaining,” agreed Ari. Rising seemed to take almost more effort than he had energy for at the moment, and his head reeled. “Damned if I’m ever going to touch your local booze anymore.”
*Come on—we haven’t got much time left.*
The sound of an aircar’s engines came to them on the night breeze, and Air shook his head. “Correction. We don’t have any time left. Here they come.”
But the scoutcar that settled on its nullgravs in the center of the street had Space Force markings. The side door slid open and a dim figure appeared, beckoning wildly.
“Come on—hurry!” shouted Llannat Hyfid from the open door.
“Here’s our ride,” said Ari to the Selvaur, and ran for the aircar with Munngralla at his heels.
 
On Galcen, the first blue shadows of evening gathered over Prime. From the old waterfront district beside the bay, the twilight spread up through the government buildings and commercial towers of the city proper, then out into the sprawling suburbs and over the city-beyond-the-city that was Prime Spaceport Complex.
The commerce of the civilized galaxy passed through Prime Complex—water-grain from Nammerin, raw minerals from Lessek, wool from the Galcenian highlands, passengers from everywhere. The Republic’s Space Force maintained its central administrative headquarters there as well. South Polar Base might do better for planetary defense, but when it came to keeping an eye on the rest of the galaxy, Prime was the only place to be.
In keeping with Prime’s importance, the Officers’ Club there boasted the best food of any Space Force base on Galcen, which wasn’t saying that much—and the best wine cellar of any base in the galaxy, which was saying a great deal. Commander Pel Florens, whose ship left orbit in the morning for a long, dry patrol of the Mageworlds border zone, had already accounted for most of a bottle of prewar Infabede red while listening to his onetime Academy roommate Jervas Gil.
BOOK: The Price of the Stars: Book One of Mageworlds
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