By Honor Betray'd: Mageworlds #3 (5 page)

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Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

BOOK: By Honor Betray'd: Mageworlds #3
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By now a fourth ConSec had joined the other three, and was busy searching Beka for concealed weapons. The captain’s opinion of Suivi Point being what it was, he was finding them—first tearing the seam of her left sleeve from cuff to elbow as he took away the long double-edged knife, then reaching to scrabble around inside the front of her quilted jacket.
Jessan heard the sound of ripping cloth, and the ConSec pulled out a small chunk of glittering metal.
“Needler,” he said. “Oh, naughty, naughty lady.”
Beka stiffened.
“You’re quite mistaken,” she said. “Everything here is perfectly fine.” Her Galcenian accent was even more marked than usual, and the words were pitched to carry. The comm link in her jacket button should be picking them up with ease. “Everything here is perfectly fine.”
That’s the signal
, thought Jessan, as the two ConSecs pinning Beka against the wall brought her arms up higher between her shoulder blades.
Time for a distraction, I think
.
He took a step forward.
“Excuse me,” he said to the first ConSec, who still had his weapon trained on Beka while the others did the search. “May I ask your authority for this intrusion?”
The ConSec hit Jessan across the face with the blaster.
“There’s
my authority.”
Jessan had expected a reaction of that sort, and rolled his head with the blow. All the same, the impact raised a welt along his jaw. Warm blood started trickling from his cheekbone. He ignored it; there would be enough time for first aid later.
“Oh, dear,” he said—his High Khesatan accent more pronounced than ever. If the ConSecs thought they were dealing with a Central Worlds prettyboy straight out of the comedy holovids, so much the better. “In that case, I must insist that you take me into custody as well.”
The ConSec shook his head. “Sorry, buddy, but I don’t have arrest orders for you.”
Jessan glanced over at Beka. The officer searching her was taking his own good time in checking for weapons around her hips and groin. So far, though, he hadn’t found the comm link hidden in the jacket button, still activated and relaying everything back to the ‘
Hammer
and Ignac’ LeSoit.
I don’t like depending on that man
, Jessan thought.
He thinks too highly of the captain for his own good. But one makes use of the tools to hand.
He looked back at the ConSec with the blaster. “You might consider taking me in for resisting arrest.”
“No good. I’m not arresting you, so you can’t resist.”
“I see,” Jessan said. He took a step closer—
I’m going to regret doing this, I can tell that already
—and laid a hand on the ConSec’s arm. “But I do believe that you can arrest me for interfering with a security officer in the lawful performance of his duty.”
Before Jessan could brace himself, the ConSec swung his fist and connected with Jessan’s midsection. It was a short, powerful blow; the man knew what he was doing. Jessan felt the remains of his breakfast coming back up in a wave of nausea as he crumpled onto the glidewalk margin.
The ConSec grinned and kicked him once, perfunctorily, in the face. “Sorry, buddy—you haven’t been any interference at all.” He turned to the others. “Let’s take her in.”
They bound Beka’s hands behind her back. Two of the ConSecs pulled her from the bulkhead. One at each elbow, they started to walk her down the passageway toward the main glidewalk.
The head ConSec looked over at her tattered clothing and tight-lipped expression. “Sorry about that, lady,” he said. “If you didn’t want to show your titties to all of Suivi you shouldn’t have carried a needler under there.”
He scooped up the Iron Crown from where it had fallen during the body search. “Get her down to detention. Move out.”
 
Ignaceu LeSoit watched Beka and Jessan go down the ’
Hammer
’s ramp, heading back out to the docking bay and thence to Suivi’s administrative district—better quarters for planetary royalty than a battle-scarred starship, even if Captain Rosselin-Metadi did fret at having to bunk portside.
Nyls Jessan had been right, though, LeSoit conceded grudgingly. The Domina of Entibor couldn’t set up headquarters right here on the ship. Not as long as it was the only ship her Resistance had.
Well, that isn’t the problem anymore.
He turned back to Captain Yevil of the Space Force with an inward sigh. “Right, then, Captain. We’re going to have to get comms and such straightened out now, and work on command and control matters later. Chain of command for your units is the Domina Beka, General Nyls Jessan, then you.”
“And what is your position in the chain of command?”
“Acting commander of this vessel in the Domina’s absence.”
And fair enough
, he added to himself,
when that damned Khesatan has got everything else.
Yevil nodded in comprehension. “A second task unit. Very well.”
For the next few minutes, she and LeSoit were busy exchanging frequency and phase information for ship-to-ship communications, in both lightspeed and hyperspace environments. LeSoit handed over a set of crypto chips for standard transceivers; Yevil sealed them into the breast pocket of her uniform tunic with a nod of thanks.
“We’ll be sending ours over as soon as I’m back on board my ship,” she said. “I’m sorry we can’t give you everything, but some of it is classified at a level so high there’s no way I can justify giving it out.”
“Don’t worry about it. The Domina isn’t handing over everything either.”
“I see,” said Yevil, without visible surprise, and they moved on to the next item on the agenda, the compilation of a master list of crews, armament, and power plants for all the vessels in the Domina’s newly expanded fleet. As a solitary raider back in her fighting days,
Warhammer
wasn’t fitted out with many of the comms needed for multivessel coordination—no main battle tank, for example; LeSoit wasn’t even certain whether the Republic had used such things during the Old War—so getting
Warhammer
fitted out as a flagship looked like it would take some time.
Several minutes later, the buzz of the ‘
Hammer’
s entry alarm broke into their work. LeSoit glanced up from his clipboard.
“Sounds like we’ve got a visitor,” he said. “I’d better go check it out.”
Still holding the clipboard in one hand, he hurried to the main door. A man was standing at the top of the ramp. The force field was up, but even through the blurring effect LeSoit could make out the newcomer’s ConSec uniform.
He frowned. If somebody had hired the law on Beka and her crew, things might get expensive. You could buy anything on Suivi Point, including justice, but some varieties would cost you a great deal more than others—under the circumstances, LeSoit decided, he wasn’t going to let down the field.
“What can we do for you, officer?”
The ConSec cleared his throat. “I have a message for the master of this vessel.”
“She isn’t here. I’m afraid I’ll have to do. Now, what’s the problem?”
“I’m here to escort you.”
LeSoit took an automatic step backward in spite of the protective force field. “Escort me where?”
The ConSec man opened his mouth to say something, but LeSoit’s clipboard gave him an answer first. Its tiny onboard speaker emitted the sharp beep that meant an override-priority message on the ‘
Hammer’
s main communications system, followed by an unfamiliar voice: “All personnel aboard RSF
Warhammer
, please report to the portmaster’s office immediately. All personnel aboard
Warhammer
…”
“I don’t like the sound of that,” LeSoit said to the ConSec. “Can you tell me what it’s all about?”
The ConSec shrugged. “Portmaster needs to verify your registry, is all I know.”
“Sounds like a paperwork drill. Can’t it wait?”
Over the clipboard speaker the voice was still droning on: “All personnel aboard RSF
Warhammer
, please report to the portmaster’s office immediately. All personnel …”
The ConSec officer shook his head. “I’m afraid not. You’ll lose your berthing assignment unless you verify your registry.”
“Port officials,” said LeSoit in disgust. “Nobody’s ever going to convince them that something might be more important than filling in line seven on page two of form one-twenty-eight-A. I’ve got some urgent business here on board, officer—why not tell the portmaster you couldn’t find me when you buzzed at the door? I’ll be along as soon as I’m done.”
“Please accompany me now,” the ConSec said.
Then the clipboard beeped again—louder this time, in the nerve-quickening double rhythm that heralded one of the Domina’s own direct-to-ship universal-override transmissions—and disembodied voices began to speak.
A Suivan voice first, with the coarse accent of the outer belt: “Are you the woman identified as Beka Rosselin-Metadi, who styles herself Domina of Entibor?”
Then Beka’s voice, a precise, carefully educated light tenor that, heard in isolation, could have belonged to either a man or a woman—but, at the same time, could never have belonged to anyone else but her: “
I am. What is
—”
“You’re under arrest. Submit yourself quietly.
”
LeSoit looked at the ConSec officer. “Registry check,” he said. “Sure. Try another one.”
The voices over the clipboard speaker continued: “
Needler. Oh, naughty, naughty lady.”
Then Beka again, distinct and forceful:
“You’re quite mistaken. Everything here is perfectly fine.
” A pause, and then the last phrase again, very clearly. “
Everything here is perfectly fine.
”
“Right,” said LeSoit, and turned his back on the ConSec officer. He hit first the Close Door button and then the Raise Ramp lever, and was headed for the ‘
Hammer
’s cockpit before the ConSec finished scrambling away to safety.
He passed through the common room at a dead run. Captain Yevil caught up with him at the cockpit door.
“What’s going on?”
“The Domina’s emergency lift-ship signal,” LeSoit said, palming the lockplate. “We’re out of here.”
 
Llannat finished her cha’a in the galley of
Night’s
-
Beautiful-Daughter
and put the cup aside.
It’s time
, she told herself sternly.
You can’t put it off any longer
.
She left the galley and made her way through the Deathwing’s corridors toward the heart of the ship. Magebuilt and alien though the raider was, most of the divisions within its hull were recognizable to the
Daughter
’s current crew. Bridge, engine room, galley, berthing spaces … throughout the ship the familiar compartments housed the things that were necessary to move a handful of planetbound creatures from star to star.
One chamber, however, had no counterpart on any Space Force vessel: a small room lined all in black tile, save for a stark white circle in the middle of the empty floor.
The meditation chamber, Lieutenant Vinhalyn had named it when she’d asked him. The long-ago assassin who’d turned
Night’s-Beautiful-Daughter
into a starpilot’s grave had been part of a Mage-Circle, and a Magelord as well.
One of the Great Magelords
, Llannat thought.
As if I needed any more proof.
Only someone that powerful, and that arrogant, would have dared attempt what the Professor had done: reach out across half a millennium to grasp the threads of the universe and work with them according to his own designs. And only a Great Magelord would have stayed alive all the years afterward, through sheer force of will—
Until he found a student who could finish his work.
Llannat sighed. That was where thinking about the Professor always took her—to the knowledge that something unfinished was waiting for her, something she had to find or learn or do, and that she had but one place and one way to go asking about it.
The door of the meditation chamber slid open at Llannat’s approach. She entered, and the door closed again behind her. She still wasn’t sure how the mechanism functioned. At first the door had opened and shut for everyone on board, like the door in a fashionable shop; now it only worked for her.
For a moment the room was dark. Then light came from diffuse and concealed sources to fill the chamber with a dim underwater glow. Llannat went to the center of the white circle and knelt there, breathing slowly and letting her awareness go loose to float into darkness.

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