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 (8 page)

BOOK: The Price of the Stars: Book One of Mageworlds
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“We’ve got about an hour’s flight time ahead of us,” said Gil, “and Nammerin to Galcen’s a bitch of a trip however you handle it. So you might as well grab a bit of sleep.”
“Yes, sir,” said the lieutenant again.
 
In the back room of the Painted Lily, the stacks of chips stood just about even.
Neither the Professor nor Morven had spoken more than a few words in the past hour. The game went on in a silence broken only by the riffle of cards, the click and slide of chips counted out and pushed across the tablecloth, and the quiet monosyllables of gamblers intent upon the flow of the game.
Beka had tried to follow the play for a while. She’d stopped after realizing, a bit queasily, that the chips on the table represented more money than she’d ever seen together in one place. Instead, she watched Ignaceu LeSoit, standing relaxed but ready on the opposite side of the room—and when she saw that LeSoit wasn’t watching her, or even the Professor, as much as he was watching Morven, she let her own attention slide casually over to the gambler, and stay there.
It was nearly daybreak by the gilded chronometer over the door when the Professor’s courteous voice broke the silence.
“I trust you will not take it amiss, Gentlesir, if I ask you to count your cards onto the table one by one—slowly.”
“With pleasure, sir,” said Morven, and flipped down the first of his cards. “One.”
I wonder if he really is cheating?
thought Beka. And then,
Let the Professor worry about the damned cards. You worry about LeSoit. He’s been watching for something ever since the stakes reached twenty thousand
.
She heard the sound of another card slapping against the tablecloth.
“Two,” said Morven.
Even then, she almost missed it. Morven laid down a card and counted “Three,” shifting position just a fraction at the count—and LeSoit went for his blaster.
She grabbed for her own weapon.
You don’t have a chance, girl
, the voice of sanity yammered in her head.
He’s moving too fast. You’re a hotshot pilot but a damned lousy gunfighter.
…
LeSoit had his blaster clear already, and she could see it coming up to point at her as he stepped away from the wall.
Her own piece was hung up on the holster or something. She dragged it free.
She watched LeSoit’s blaster coming to bear on the danger he thought she was, and struggled—too slowly, like swimming in mud—to bring her weapon up in time.
I’m sorry, Ignac’
, she thought, with more regret than fear.
It looks like you’re going to kill me after all.
LeSoit’s blaster pointed straight at Beka, but no bolt came. Instead the room echoed to the short, angry buzz of a needler, and LeSoit fell forward, his weapon dropping from his hand.
“The game, I fear, is ruined,” said the Professor, turning up his left hand to reveal his tiny palm-gun.
Beka’s own blaster had finished its upward arc from holster to target, and its blunt muzzle pointed unwaveringly at Morven. She couldn’t tell from where she stood if LeSoit was breathing or not, and right now the gambler looked like a good person to kill if he wasn’t.
“Restrain yourself, Tarnekep,” said the Professor. “Your colleague will survive to find himself a more honest employer.”
He made the needler disappear again, and regarded the gambler with a gentle—almost sorrowful—expression. “What shall we talk about now?” he asked. “Perhaps we should talk about why you were offering heavy odds against a certain freighter captain lifting her ship?”
The gambler swallowed. His face had gone grey-white, like dirty snow. “I take bets on anything people are willing to bet on. Why did you bet that she would make it?”
The Professor smiled a little. “Let’s just say the proposition intrigued me. Who was gunning for her?”
“I don’t have anything to say about that.”
“Scruples, Morven?” asked the Professor. “You amaze me.”
Something small and glittering and knifelike appeared in his hand where the needler had been. Beka saw Morven flinch and close his eyes.
“I see you recognize this little item,” said the Professor. “A relic of the war, like Tarnekep’s blaster there—but a good deal harder to come by. Now, once again: who placed the death mark on Captain Rosselin-Metadi?”
Morven swallowed again, and wet his lips. “All I heard for sure was that Suivi Mercantile Trust was holding the funds.”
“That’s not enough, I’m afraid,” said the Professor. “Tell me more.”
He turned the small bright object so that it caught the light. The gambler flinched again.
“I can tell you who killed the Domina—”
“Old news,” said the Professor. “The blaster man was a psychotic second-generation Entiboran-in-exile named Samos Lerekan, with a grudge against the Republic in general and Perada Rosselin in particular.”
He leaned forward and laid the small object against the side of Morven’s neck. “I was hoping you’d have something better for me.”
The gambler seemed to stop breathing for a second. “I can tell you who switched Clyndagyt for the regular antiseptic at the Council Medical Center,” he said carefully. “But that won’t do you any good.”
“I’m curious,” said the Professor. “Tell me anyway.”
“Beivan Vosebil.”
“Beivan,” said the Professor, withdrawing the small bright object a little. The gambler’s eyes strained sidelong with his efforts to see the weapon—or whatever it was—in the other man’s hand.
The Professor kept the object poised a hair away from the skin of Morven’s neck. “Beivan,” he said again. “One of the best. And why won’t my friend Beivan be able to help me out?”
“He had an accident.”
“I see,” said the Professor. “Well, then …”
Beka listened with an odd empty feeling to the names that her father had given her his ship to find. It insulted the
’Hammer
somehow, she felt, to say that the ship was worth something as cheap and easy as this—threatening a pudgy gambler in the back room of a spacers’ bar.
I can pay you back now, Dadda
, she thought.
I wish this felt like enough.
Maybe because the whole thing did feel too easy, she had to look away from the little object that wasn’t a knife, and from the gambler’s pallid, clammy face. Her gaze wandered to Morven’s trained cardsharp’s hands, and she blinked at an unexpected insight: that a good line of patter was the essence of any con.
“Gilveet Rhos handled the electronics,” Morven said, but Beka wasn’t listening anymore. She had already seen how the Professor rewarded answers by moving the small bright object a fraction farther away from the gambler’s neck each time. By now, Morven’s babbling had gained him a good two fingers’ worth of breathing space.
Beka drew a deep breath of her own and let it out carefully.
If he makes a move at all
, she thought, keeping her eyes on his hands,
he’s going to make it now.
Morven ran a good game, she had to give him that. He kept the scared-witless routine going all the way down to the end, when he gave his right hand the twitch that would release a hand-blaster from its hidden grav-clip, and she shot him for it.
The acrid afterstink of a full-power blaster bolt filled the small closed room, overlaid with the odor of cooked meat. Morven the gambler lay facedown on top of his last hand of cards, with most of his head burnt away.
The Professor picked up the hand-blaster from the tabletop where it had fallen, and held it out to Beka. “Yours, I believe … my thanks, Tarnekep. I grow remiss in my old age.”
Beka nodded; not trusting her voice much or her stomach either, and took the little weapon. She slipped it into the waistband of her Embrigan-style trousers, and was about to return the heavy blaster to its holster when a hand reached up from the floor to make a grab for the far side of the table.
The green tablecloth began sliding, and the hand scrabbled blindly for a better purchase. By the time Ignaceu LeSoit had secured his grip on the table’s edge and pulled himself to his feet, Beka had both blasters leveled and ready.
She looked at LeSoit’s own recovered and half-aimed weapon and shook her head.
Beside her, the Professor chuckled. From the sound of clicking plastic, he was already gathering up his winnings with a fine disregard for the mess on the table. “I’d take Tarnekep’s advice, young man, if I were you—he’s a gentleman of few words, but what he has to say is usually decisive.”
LeSoit’s eyes moved from the large blaster to the smaller one, and then down to the gambler’s body. After a moment he shook his head. “He’s not worth getting killed for.”
Reversing his blaster, he held it out across the table butt-first toward Beka. “You could have burned me, Tarnekep, but you didn’t … I owe you for that.”
Beka shook her head again. “Keep it,” she said, a sudden hoarseness making her voice sound strange even to her own ears. “Nobody owes anybody anything anymore. We’re even.”
 
C
OMMANDER GIL took the aircar up over the crowded buildings of Galcen Prime and turned northward. As the little craft sped toward the more sparsely inhabited uplands, Gil stole another glance at his sleeping passenger and reflected on what little he knew about General Metadi’s oldest son.
Ari Rosselin-Metadi. Born in the last, violent years of the war, when the Magelords bent their entire might against his mother’s world. Sent to live among his father’s allies, the Selvaurs of Maraghai, as the Mageworlders’ battering of Entibor escalated into a steadily tightening siege.
Three years that siege had lasted, under the pressure of the Magelords’ ultimatum: either the Domina Perada surrendered the Resistance Fleet, now a formidable weapon in the hands of her husband the General, or she would see her planet turned into a wasteland. No effort of the Resistance could break the siege; and nothing the Magelords did could break the Domina’s resolve. But when the war at last ended, with the Magelords destroyed and their ships grounded behind the border zone, Ari Rosselin-Metadi came home to Galcen, not to Entibor.
The boy must have been already half a Selvaur by then, Gil reflected; he’d certainly spent more time with the big, predatory saurians than he had with either of his parents. He’d gone back to Maraghai again as an adolescent, for an even longer stay, and this time his Selvauran foster-father had made the adoption official. Gil wondered, briefly, what language the lieutenant thought in, when he found himself alone—and whether that, or something else, was responsible for the faint remoteness behind his eyes.
The flight ended with the lieutenant still asleep. Gil brought the aircar down onto a level, grassy field near the General’s house. More small craft were already lined up along the edges of the field, together with an assortment of ground vehicles and hoverbikes.
“Here we are,” Gil said.
The lieutenant blinked, then opened his eyes fully and glanced out at the cluttered field. “I don’t believe it,” he murmured under his breath. “Father must have invited every free-spacer on the planet.”
“It just looks that way,” said Gil. “Most of them are still down portside.”
“Good place for them,” said Lieutenant Rosselin-Metadi. He sighed. “Well, no point in putting it off … let’s go.”
The house on the hilltop was big and sprawling, the residence of a family that had been comfortably well off, though not among Galcen’s fabulous rich. The spoils of Jos Metadi’s privateering days had gone into its construction, but the wealth of House Rosselin had not—the Domina Perada had thrown all of her family’s immense fortune into the war against the Mageworlds. Perhaps, Gil thought, she hadn’t believed that she’d survive to need it.
At the front door, Commander Gil paused and reached out a hand to palm the ID plate. As General Metadi’s aide, he was in the building’s temporary recognition files. But the door slid open before he could touch the black plastic square, and he knew the security system had recognized his companion.
The front hall of the General’s house appeared to be empty. As Gil stepped forward, however, a tawny-haired young man in a beige coverall materialized out of nowhere. After a moment, Gil realized that the man had been waiting there all along. What had seemed like invisibility was just a self-effacement so complete as to be uncanny.
The young man and Lieutenant Rosselin-Metadi regarded one another for a moment without speaking. There was a distinct family resemblance between the two, mostly in the clean, arrogant Rosselin profile that had made the Domina Perada beloved of artists all over the galaxy. Once again Gil ran through his mental data base on the General’s family. The young man in an apprentice Adept’s plain garments would be Owen Rosselin-Metadi, the middle child, born at the end of the Magewar when Entibor was already burnt out and lifeless. Not quite twelve months had separated this one from Beka.
Born so near each other
, Gil thought,
those two must have been close.
Strangely enough, though, it was not Owen but Ari—who by Gil’s reckoning had spent most of his childhood and adolescence on distant Maraghai—who seemed the most affected by his sister’s death. Ari had the bruised, wary look of one who has experienced too many shocks in too brief a time; if his brother felt a similar pain, it was hidden far back behind the cool, measuring expression in the younger man’s hazel eyes.
Finally the lieutenant broke the silence. “Owen. I didn’t expect to find you playing door guard.”
The other shrugged. “I do whatever Master Ransome asks me to. And somebody has to make the holovid reporters go away.”
“Death and damnation,” said Ari. “Have you been getting those up here?”
“They come and go,” Owen replied. “We’ve only had three so far this evening. I told them to leave, and they left.”
Gil said nothing, but he suspected there had been more to it than that. Ari’s brother had that air about him, just as Errec Ransome had it—a stillness overlying something strange and possibly dangerous. About Ransome there was no question; these days he was Master of the Adepts’ Guild, but during the Magewar he’d made quite a name for himself among the privateers of Innish-Kyl.
The General’s younger son was a more puzzling case. Gil didn’t know much about him. For the last ten years, since he’d turned fifteen, he’d been apprenticed to the Guild, spending most of his time in their Retreat far back in the Galcenian mountains. Just the same, that elusive quality of danger was there. The holovid reporters would have gone away without question, if Owen Rosselin-Metadi had told them to.
Ari, however, didn’t seem impressed. The big lieutenant only shook his head and stepped past his younger brother into the main part of the house.
Time to find the General,
Gil thought,
and report.
He nodded politely at the lieutenant’s brother, and moved out of the soundproofed entryway into a confusion of smells and noises. The big room downstairs was full of men and women—and a handful of assorted aliens whose sexes Gil didn’t feel qualified to guess—all talking at once in at least three languages and a dozen or more different accents, from pure Galcenian to unadulterated Portside. In one corner a couple of junior officers from Prime Base played double tammani with an elderly woman in Entiboran court dress and a diamond tiara; in another, a young lady Gil recognized as Councillor Vannell Oldigaard’s granddaughter flirted tearfully with a muscular free-spacer who’d somehow made it up from the port.
The air was dim and hazy, and heavy with the smells of perspiration and spilled beer. Gil looked about for the General, and finally spotted him: a tall figure in dark civilian clothes, leaning against the wall in a corner of the crowded mom and regarding the procedings with a sardonic eye.
Gil made his way through the crowd to the General’s side. “Mission accomplished, sir,” he said. “I picked your son up at the Base, no problems. Is there anything else you need me to do?”
The General shook his head. “Not at the moment. Take it easy for the rest of the evening. Consider yourself off duty.”
“Yes, sir,” said Gil dubiously, and went off to the long table laden with kegs of beer and bottles of other potables.
Ari Rosselin-Metadi was already there, pouring himself a glass of the rough local vintage.
Bad idea
, Gil commented to himself. Uplands wine was harsh, flinty stuff—far better distilled into brandy than drunk—and the commander didn’t think a man just out of accelerated healing had any business going near it. But Lieutenant Rosselin-Metadi didn’t look like someone who would appreciate helpful suggestions.
Make that one more thing I have to watch out for,
Gil thought, resigned.
If he manages to kill himself or start a fight or something, the General won’t remember I was on liberty.
Lieutenant Rosselin-Metadi wasn’t the only person who’d decided to drink now and worry about a hangover tomorrow By this time quite a few of the guests were more than a little drunk, and some of them were singing.
“Now stand to your glasses steady—
The galaxy’s nothing but lies.
So here’s to our friends dead already,
And here’s to the next one who dies.”
 
Gil regarded the vocalists with displeasure. He knew the song, of course—just about everybody in the Space Force did—but he’d been hoping to get through the night without having to listen to it.
I should have known better
, he thought. The ballad was a staple of occasions like this, when the mortality of flesh and the fallibility of machines preyed heavily on the mind. But Gil had read the accident report on Beka Rosselin-Metadi’s crashed lifepod, and as the singers moved on to another verse, he found the morbid images too accurate for comfort.
“
Take the carbon rods out of my kidneys,
Take the navicomp out of my brain,
Take the hyperdrive switch from my larynx,
And assemble my starship again.”
 
Nothing had been left of Jos Metadi’s daughter but a smear of pulped flesh mixed with metal fragments. Commander Gil had spent several sleepless nights trying to forget the pictures the singers had just called back to mind.
The hell with it,
he decided suddenly.
If I crack under the strain of arranging a state funeral and two wakes, the General will have to break in a new aide a year early. Can’t have that.
He drew himself a foaming mug of beer from one of the kegs on the table, and began threading his way through the crowd to the door. Outside in the night air, his spirits began to improve almost at once. He settled himself on the front bumper of a conveniently parked hovercar, one of a dozen or so littering the grass in front of the house, and set about making the beer last awhile.
He had just finished draining the mug and was pondering, undecided, whether to go back in for another one or stay outside in the warm spring night, when the front door of the house slid open. A familiar figure paused for a moment, silhouetted by the light, and stepped out.
The door closed again. The General moved away a little from the lighted doorway and stood looking up at the stars.
Gil never saw the second shadowy form detach itself from the darkness and move to the General’s side. He only knew that it was suddenly there. Gil tensed, and for the first time regretted that he’d never adopted the General’s well-known habit of always going armed.
But the voice that broke the silence was a familiar one: the Master of the Adepts’ Guild was well known to the officers at Prime Base.
“Looking for the ’
Hammer?
”
“Errec! Sneaking up on people like that is going to get you shot someday. By me, if you’re not careful.”
Gil heard the Adept’s quiet laugh. “I’m not worried about it,” Ransome said. “If you were planning to shoot me, you’d have done it a long time ago. We need to talk about Beka.”
“I didn’t think you’d stay fooled for long,” said the General. “How’d you guess?”
Master Ransome sounded impatient. “My apprentice’s sister, my best friend’s child—did you think I wouldn’t feel it if something like that had really happened?”
“I suppose not,” said Metadi. “Who else knows about this?”
“Owen, I think—he and Beka were always close—but he isn’t saying anything, and I’m not going to ask. Beka, of course, and whoever’s with her. You and me. No one else.”
“Beka’s got someone with her?” asked Metadi sharply.
“Yes,” said the Adept. “But I can’t see anything clearer than that. I want to know what tipped
you
on—and don’t try to convince me you’ve started seeing visions at your age.”
Perched on the bumper of the hovercar, empty beer mug clutched in one sweating hand, Commander Gil shut his eyes and shivered. He’d thought Artat was cold, but that planet was nothing next to the temperature of his blood right now. His somber-hued clothing, and the moonless night, had kept him from being noticed so far—but the Adept Master, so rumors ran, could see in the dark. And this was not a conversation the General’s aide was meant to overhear.
“I looked at that wreck, Errec,” General Metadi said. “Not just the pictures and reports. And that ship wasn’t
Warhammer.
”
“You’re sure?”
“You can bet on it. They’d found a piece of the main control panel—not much, but enough. I couldn’t find any of the rewiring I did on the
’Hammer—
and believe me, I did plenty, between the secondary gun controls and the combat override. But the real kicker is the engines.”
“Special modifications?”
BOOK: The Price of the Stars: Book One of Mageworlds
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