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 (9 page)

BOOK: The Price of the Stars: Book One of Mageworlds
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“You’d better believe it. That freighter on Artat had the old Gyfferan Hypermaster engines—standard for the class, so nobody was surprised. But the first thing I did after I got the ’
Hammer
, as soon as I had the cash for a down payment, I had Sunrise Shipyards rip out her old engines and put in the big Hyper King Extras. And just to make certain that particular card stayed hidden up my sleeve, I bribed the yard’s manager to keep all the work off-the-record.”
“So that’s how she got her legs,” murmured the Adept. “I always wondered. You decided to let the ID stand?”
“Somebody went to a lot of trouble to make it look like the ’
Hammer
and her captain had vanished from the spacelanes,” said Metadi. “I didn’t want to disoblige them. If Beka had to set up something like that, she needs all the cover she can get. Only one thing worries me.”
“What’s that?”
“Rigging a crash isn’t impossible—I can figure out two or three ways she might have done it, and an old
Libra-
class freighter isn’t hard to come by if you’re not particular—but I can only think of one way to come up with matching tissue samples.”
“Replication?” asked the Adept.
The General nodded. “And I haven’t heard of anybody working that sort of trick in years.”
“Mageworlds technology? You wouldn’t.”
“It used to be around,” said the General. “More than some people want to let on. But even back then, it cost. And the people who used it …”
“I see,” said the Adept. “It appears your daughter has decided to keep some dangerous company.”
“She knows what she’s doing—I hope,” said the General. “But I tell you one thing: if I live to see this mess cleared up, she’s going to be glad she’s gotten too big to spank.” He stretched, and added, “Right now, though, it’s up to her. What do you say we go inside and and show those young pups what a proper wake looks like?”
Gil watched them go inside. When his chronometer showed that another thirty minutes had passed, he left his seat on the hovercar’s bumper and followed.
He had no doubt that he’d just survived the most dangerous few minutes of his life. The Master of the Adepts’ Guild was a peaceful and gently spoken man, these days, but he’d been something far different in his youth, when he’d fought the Magelords as Jos Metadi’s copilot during the worst years of the war. And nobody—then or now-had ever accused General Metadi of being either peaceful or gently spoken.
Gil knew with a cold certainty that if either man ever learned that he’d overheard their conversation, the Space Force would be short one commander before the echo died.
 
For Ari Rosselin-Metadi, Beka’s wake had been going on for what seemed like forever. He’d been meticulously polite to everyone he’d encountered, from his father’s aide to Beka’s old schoolmate Jilly Oldigaard, but the air of unreality about the proceedings refused to go away. It all felt like a party in a particularly bad dream—a continuation, somehow, of the nightmare he’d been trapped in since his mother’s death. One of these days, he supposed, the nightmare would stop, and he could wake up and start hurting.
His head ached, right now, from the wine and from the presence of too many people and from the lingering aftereffects of his bout with mescalomide poisoning. A hyperspace journey in a Space Force courier ship didn’t count as bed rest, and he knew it. He’d held himself together so far the best he could, but the sounds of the wake had started blurring into an indistinct rumble, and the edges of his vision were turning fuzzy.
I’ve got to get some fresh air
, he thought.
Before I pass out and embarrass everybody.
He left the room as inconspicuously as possible, and found the back stairs up to the rooftop terrace. That part of the house had been shut off for tonight’s wake, of course, but the domestic computers still recognized him as family and opened the doors for him to pass. He wondered, briefly, if anyone had erased his mother’s and sister’s ID scans from the household data bank—or did the house wait, unknowing, for Beka and the Domina to come home, quarreling as usual but still alive, from a day spent together in downtown Prime?
They were too much alike
, he thought, as he walked out onto the upper terrace.
Mother wanted Beka to have the kind of life that the war took away from her—which Mother probably wouldn’t have enjoyed all that much herself—and Beka wouldn’t take it.
The night above the terrace was starry, without a moon, and the scent of evening-blooming flowers drifted on the night breeze. From here, the sound of the wake was indistinguishable from the noises of any other party. He sat down on the ledge surrounding the terrace, and looked out over the Upland Hills.
“You shouldn’t be here.” His brother Owen seemed to materialize out of the shadows beside him. “You look like you’re about to fold up and go tinder.”
“I’ll be all right.”
“Most people who’ve just come out of a healing pod have the good sense to stay in bed for a while afterward.” Owen paused. “And somebody who’s being hunted by Magelords shouldn’t wander around making himself an easy target.”
Ari glanced at his brother. “Who told you about that?”
Owen looked back at him calmly—Owen was always calm, so calm that Ari wondered sometimes if his younger brother even noticed the real world at all. “Whatever the Magelords do interests the Guild.”
“That wasn’t what I asked,” said Ari. “I want to know how you found out about something that’s classified so secret I’m not even supposed to think about it in public.”
“Stuff like that always finds its way to the Guild eventually,” said Owen. “Master Ransome gets four or five messages every week from public-spirited souls who think they’ve seen a Magelord in their back garden.”
“And he shows all those reports to you.”
Owen nodded. “Somebody has to check out the rumors.”
“I wouldn’t call chasing Magelords a job for the Guild’s oldest living apprentice,” Ari said. His voice had an edge to it, both from the growing ache inside his skull and from the sting of realizing that the Guild’s report had probably come straight from Llannat Hyfid.
His brother didn’t rise to the insult. “‘An apprentice can stand where an Adept cannot.’”
“Is that all you’ve learned in the past ten years?” asked Ari. “How to quote proverbs?”
“No,” said Owen. “Not quite.” He paused again, his hazel eyes going distant as he contemplated something Ari couldn’t see. “But I have learned how to let go of what I can’t help anymore … and you need to do that, I think.”
“Spare me your advice,” growled Ari, nettled. “If you’d been a bit less generous with your advice to Beka, she might still be alive.”
Not even that accusation could ruffle Owen’s perpetual calm. The apprentice Adept only shook his head and said, “You know better than that.”
“If you say so,” Ari said. “But we both know you helped her get that first berth out of Galcen. Didn’t you even try to talk her out of going?”
“Only long enough to see that she’d go whether I helped her or not,” Owen said. “So I did my best to make certain she got a fair start, and then …” He shrugged. “Like I said, you let go of what you can’t change. You need to do the same thing—go downstairs to bed, and don’t think about Beka anymore. Nothing you do tonight is going to help her where she’s gone.”
 
The morning sun over Embrig gave the streets of the port a watery yellow light, but no warmth. Beka hunched her shoulders inside the long coat, and wished she were already back on the
’Hammer—
currently the
Pride of Mandeyn
, with a set of papers to prove it.
So far, at least, Embrig Security didn’t seem to be chasing anybody. Either the Lily’s manager figured that a cheating gambler was no loss to society, or Ignaceu LeSoit had waited a lot longer than the ten minutes he’d promised before officially recovering from the stun-bolt and discovering what had happened. The manager hadn’t been inclined to argue with Tarnekep Portree when he cashed in the Professor’s collection of chips on the way out, either; the former Armsmaster to House Rosselin would be leaving the planet richer by over a hundred thousand credits, as well as by a handful of names.
I ought to feel better about this
, Beka thought.
I’m out from under the death mark, I’ve got a good lead on the bastards who killed Mother and wanted to kill me … I really should be happy right now.
She wasn’t, though—and the feeling that she ought to be only added to her increasing bad temper.
“You can’t imagine how glad I’ll be,” she said moodily, as they turned the corner into the Freddisgatt Allee, “to get off of this lump of dirt and out into clean space again. I still have some debts to pay.” -
The Professor shook his head. “You told me you bought your ship for the promise of names, my lady, and now you have them. Beka Rosselin-Metadi may have died on Artat, but there’s no need for Tarnekep Portree to keep on living. You can adopt a less uncomfortable persona, if you like, and go look elsewhere for a cargo.”
Beka stopped dead in the middle of the Allee. “Shut up,” she said, “and listen to me for a change.”
The Professor didn’t say anything, so she went on.
“All my life,” she said, and a small corner of her mind was shocked by the bitterness in her voice, “I’ve been explaining to people what I want to do, and then listening to them explain back to me why I can’t do it, until I’ve just about had it with explanations. So I’ll tell you this once, and that’s it: names aren’t enough. I’m going to track down the bastard who arranged for Mother’s death, and I’m going to bring him home to Galcen with a ribbon tied around his neck. And
that’s
how I’m going to pay for my ship.”
“Then will you allow me to help you?” the Professor asked after a moment had slipped by.
“Why should I?” she demanded. “What does any of this have to do with you?”
“Call it an old man’s gesture of apology, Captain,” he said, with a melancholy smile. “I was … tired, after the Magewar ended, and sickened by the loss of Entibor. I told myself that my oath was no longer binding, and I left the remnants of House Rosselin to their own devices.”
“Which got my mother killed, is that what you’re say-ting?”
He bowed his head in assent. “If I hadn’t abandoned my responsibilities for so long, her enemies might never have dared … but it’s too late to remedy that. Not too late, though, for making them regret it—and at my age, Captain, it might be a good idea to begin such a project by finding a younger partner with an aptitude for the trade.”
“Meaning me?” she asked.
“You have the reflexes for it,” he said, “and something of the temperament, not to mention a pilot’s skills and a ship like no other. The rest”—he shrugged—“is training and practice.”
“I see,” she said. “Maybe we could work out a compromise. You need a partner. I need a copilot and a gunner if I’m going to push my trade routes out into the frontier worlds—and one or two of those names Morven spilled had an outplanets ring to them. How are you on starship gunnery, Professor?”
“I used to be quite good,” he said. “Of course, that was a war or two ago, and I’m sadly out of practice.”
“You’re hired anyway,” she said. “Let’s get the hell out of town.”
 
B
EKA ROSSELIN-METADI rapped her knuckles against the clear plastic window in the Pleyveran branch office of General Delivery—“open thirty-three hours a day, organic sapient on duty guaranteed.” The two chronometers on the far wall read 1824 Standard and 2520 Local, and the day clerk was drowsing in her chair, with her feet up on the bulk-mail bin and her back to the door.
If she’s sapient
, thought Beka,
I’ll eat my pilot’s license.
After a twelve-hour stretch of tough realspace navigation through the Web, as starpilots called the Pleyver system’s fluctuating magnetic fields, Beka didn’t feel inclined toward sympathy for the bored and planetbound. Even with
Warhammer
securely docked in orbit up at High Station, her tension and exhaustion had yet to dissipate.
Once her business on-planet was taken care of, though, she had hopes. Commercial shuttles lifted regularly for High Station from the surface port, which meant that she and the Professor could relax in Flatlands for a few hours after they’d finished their dirtside business.
Not that the high life in this town is anything to write home about. If the Prof hadn’t gotten word that Flatlands Investment, Ltd., has some stuff in their data banks that we ought to sneak a peek at, I’d have taken the ’Hammer straight on to Innish-Kyl. I hope whatever’s in there is worth it … . With no cargo to pick up or deliver, we’re going to have to eat the docking fees.
Beka rapped on the barrier again, louder. The day clerk unplugged her earphones—from the tinny music that drifted across the comm link to the outer office, she hadn’t been using them to monitor General Delivery’s data net—and turned her chair around.
“Name?” the clerk asked, looking up for the first time at her customer. The pupils of her eyes widened, and after a couple of seconds she wet her lips and added, “Sir.”
“Tarnekep Potee,” said Beka. She ignored the clerk’s hesitation. Tarnekep’s face, with its red plastic patch covering the entire left eye socket from brow to cheekbone, could unnerve people sometimes. The fact that Tarnekep’s angular, thin-lipped features (eye patch and dyed brown hair excepted). were also her own was something that Beka tried not to think about too often.
“Tarnekep Portree,” she repeated, “captain,
Pride of Mandeyn
. Any messages for me or my ship?”
The clerk blinked and came out of her momentary trance. “I can’t check until you enter your password, sir.”
Beka picked up the stylus on its plastic leash and scrawled a sequence of letters and numbers on the counter’s datapad. The line of script glowed for a second as the office comps matched handwriting and pressure patterns against her samples on record. The datapad beeped.
“Will that do?”
The clerk dropped her eyes to the inside comp screens. “Searching now, sir.”
After a moment she shook her head. “Nothing up on the bulletin board or in the private message files, sir.”
“Try the bulk mail.”
The clerk turned her chair around and burrowed through the bin full of cartons and envelopes. “Nothing that I can—wait a minute, how about this?” She held up a thin envelope. “Marked ‘Hold for
Pride of Mandeyn
,’ no return address.”
“That’ll be mine.”
The clerk put the envelope into the security lock and cycled it through. Beka picked up the stiff envelope and pried at the seal with one close-trimmed fingernail. No luck; she shrugged, and drew out the knife she always carried these days, a double-edged blade in a forearm sheath. The ruffled cuff of her white spidersilk shirt fell back over her wrist as she slit open the envelope and pulled out the thin sheet of paper inside.
She eased the dagger back out of sight up her sleeve and scanned the paper, frowning:
Re your last message: Gilveet Rhos, freelance electronics expert, out of circulation past Standard year. Current status unknown. Break; new subject. If you need a bolthole sometime, the Space Force Medical Station and Recruitment Center in Flatlands has its own shuttle pad. The officer in charge is reliable and discreet.
 
“I need to send a reply,” she said, folding the paper and jamming it into a trouser pocket. “Where’s your keyboard?”
The clerk nodded toward a pull-out shelf set into one wall of the little office. Beka activated the keyboard, punched in a series of access codes and a single sentence of text—
Message received; info noted
—and signed off again.
“How much do I owe you?”
“Twenty … wait a minute. There’s a message for you now. Must have been flagged when you signed on. Make that twenty-five, with a printout. Do you want it charged to your account?”
“No, I’ll pay cash.” Beka shoved across two twenty-credit chits, and took the sheet of flimsy and her change. For a second, she thought the brief message might be word of a cargo—even though none of the
Pride’
s usual contacts had known about her side trip to Pleyver—but the printout made no mention of freight charges or shipping dates.
Captain Portree
, she read,
our firm desires to retain your services on a matter of grave import. Our representative will meet you in Florrie’s Palace at 2100 Standard.
“Damn,” she muttered. “There goes the R and R.”
She was still frowning as she left the General Delivery office and headed back toward the shuttle dock to link up with the Professor. The appointment at Florrie’s came uncomfortably soon after the hours when she and the Professor intended to be rummaging through FIL’s computer system.
But we can’t afford to ignore the invitation … . We’ve put too much effort into giving Tarnekep the sort of reputation that gets him mysterious offers like this one.
Outside at the shuttle dock, she paused to lean on a railing overlooking the landing zone half a mile away. Another of the regular shuttles had just come down and let off its passengers. After a few minutes, the Professor came out of the the dock office to join her. She turned away from the activity on the pad.
“All set?”
“Set.”
They headed for the arches leading into the tunnels of the Flatlands transport grid. The Professor, as usual, walked a discreet few steps behind and to her right. From that position he could guard her back; and while neither of them would interfere with the other’s field of fire, they remained close enough together for conversation.
“Anything turn up in the way of a cargo?” she asked as they came out of the tunnel onto the platform for the inbound transitway. “Or do we have to lift empty?”
Another, unexpected voice cut across the Professor’s reply. “Spacer—hey, spacer. Could you help me out with a couple of credits? Just a couple of credits, and I’ll tell you something you want to know.”
The voice had the wheedling tones of a dirtside panhandler, and the pitch was an old standby. Beka turned.
Her brother Owen stood half-in, half-out of the shadows at the end of the transit platform.
Beka looked at him for a moment, saying nothing. She hadn’t seen Owen since the night after her coming-of-age party eight years ago, when they’d gone down to the port quarter in Galcen Prime and found her a junior pilot’s berth on the
Sidh.
He’d been an apprentice in the Guild for three years then, almost ready to take an Adept’s vows although seemingly in no hurry to do so. She wondered if he’d ever taken them; he’d never spoken of the matter in their occasional brief exchanges of correspondence. He certainly didn’t look much like an Adept; even eight years ago he’d possessed the knack of making himself, at need, into an unnoticed fixture of the local landscape, and at the moment he looked like a spaceport bum.
And what do I look like to him?
she wondered.
Does he see his little sister, or does he see Captain Tarnekep Portree?
Or would he tell me there’s no difference?
She didn’t like that idea at all. Living inside Tarnekep’s skin for so many months had already brought the Mandeynan gunfighter’s personality too close to her own comfort. The last thing she wanted to hear was that she’d pulled Tarnekep out of herself in the first place.
She kept her eyes on her brother. “All right, spacer—start talking.”
Owen nodded. “You’re looking for the portside office of Flatlands Investment, Ltd. Is that right?”
Startled, Beka forced herself to maintain Tarnekep Portree’s cool regard. There was no point, she knew, in trying to figure out how her brother had come by his information.
He’d say he had a dream, or a feeling, or something. And it might even be true. Or maybe Master Ransome eavesdrops on the same messages the Professor does.
“What if I am looking for them?” she asked.
“Then you shouldn’t go there tonight.”
She stiffened and looked down her nose at him. “I don’t even know you, spacer,” she said, very much in Tarnekep’s voice. “Who the hell are you to say what I should and shouldn’t do?”
“Gently, Tarnekep,” murmured the Professor. “Gently. The young man wishes you well. Our appointment can be as easily kept by one as by two—wait for me at Florrie’s, Captain, and I’ll handle our business at FIL alone.”
“No,” she said flatly. “I take my own risks.”
“Not this time,” said Owen. Her brother paused, as if weighing how much he ought to say next. “There’s more going on here than you know, or than I can tell you. I have a visit of my own to pay FIL.”
“Ah,” said Beka.
Guild business
, she thought, but knew better than to say it out loud. “I need the information FIL has in its computers,” she told Owen. “I was counting on getting it out of there tonight.”
“I think I can guess what you’re after,” said her brother. “I can get it for you if you let me.”
She still didn’t like the idea. “How will you know what’s important and what isn’t?”
“We can rely on the young man’s judgment, I think,” the Professor cut in. “If I’m wrong, another chance can always be found, or can be made.”
Beka made up her mind. “You’ve got it,” she told Owen. “I’ll be having dinner at Florrie’s.”
“At Florrie’s,” echoed her brother. He stepped back into the shadows as a glidepod slid up to the platform, and then he was gone.
 
Florrie’s Palace was what the Professor in one of his primmer moods would have referred to as a house of ill repute: the biggest, busiest, most red-plush-and-gilt-trim-bedecked whorehouse in Flatlands Portcity. Upstairs, the Palace’s employees plied their specialized arts. Downstairs, however, the Portcity’s finest chef supervised a restaurant crew whose expertise made respectable hoteliers weep with envy.
So you might as well relax and enjoy your dinner,
Beka told herself.
And remember to thank your brother for the favor someday. You wouldn’t have had time for a meal like this if Owen hadn’t shown up.
At the dinner’s end, Beka poured the last of the wine into the crystal goblets and leaned back in her chair.
“This is good … . I’m glad we got the chance to relax and take some of the edge off things.” She gave a tired sigh. “That Web approach is a bad one. My father claims he made it in six hours once, but I wouldn’t like to try. And I wish whoever’s meeting us knew enough to let a pilot get some rest after a run like that.”
“The message you received sounds like someone is hiring for a professional assignment,” said the Professor. “We can’t afford not to show interest.”
“I’m a merchant-captain,” complained Beka. “How did I get myself into somebody’s files as a hired killer on the side?” She held up one hand to stop the Professor before he could speak. “Never mind, I already know who to thank. And our contact’s about to show up.”
The contact—a florid, beefy type—plopped himself down at their table without invitation. “You boys enjoying yourselves?”
Beka turned Tarnekep Portree’s piebald gaze—one eye bright blue and the other a blank patch of red one-way optical plastic—onto the newcomer, and watched him wilt a little under that unspeaking regard.
“I’m Captain Portree,” she said, after the silence had drawn out long enough. “You sent a message about a job?”
“Sure did,” said the contact, recovering his enthusiasm. “We’ve heard all kinds of good things about you—a real pro, is the word—and I’ve got a sweet deal lined up for you.”
The Prof’s rumor-machines certainly have been busy,
Beka thought. She smiled, and let their contact sweat for a few moments. “Indeed,” she said finally, without inflection. “What exactly is your deal? And who are ‘we’?”
“This isn’t the best place to talk,” said the contact. “Why don’t you come along upstairs?”
BOOK: The Price of the Stars: Book One of Mageworlds
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