The Gathering Flame (33 page)

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Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

BOOK: The Gathering Flame
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“
Inform
Central of the situation. Then get me the senior Galcenian commander. Tell him the Entiboran commander desires a face-to-face conference on the subject of unified command.”
 
(GALCENIAN DATING 966 A.F.; ENTIBORAN REGNAL YEAR 30 VERATINA)
 
T
HE PURSER was the last one off
Meritorious Reward.
He turned at the sealed hatch, and, with the help of two of the junior cargo clerks, put a stencil across the metal: THIS SHIP IS NOT TO BE CONSIDERED ABANDONED PROPERTY, SALVAGE, OR WRECK. FORWARD ALL MONIES DUE FOR CARGO TO ACCOUNT 4816576, MERCHANTS’ COOPERATIVE CREDIT UNION, SUIVI POINT, IN NAME OF FT WANDERING STAR. LENAR COVAIN, CAPTAIN, ACTING, MERITORIOUS REWARD; FOR, SMYTT AND TRUBRUK, OWNERS.
“Right, then,” he said. “That’s the last paperwork I’ll do on the
Merry
, I think. Let’s go.”
The little party—less than a third of the
Merry
’s original muster roll, counting those on stretchers—made their way across the field to where
Wandering Star
stood on her landing legs under the crisp sky. As Jos walked across the field, he saw drifts of the red sand around the legs and fins of other ships, and, beside one ship with an open ramp, a half-fleshed skeleton facedown on the hardpack.
A woman, black hair streaked with grey pulled back from her face, met them at the top of
Wandering Star
’s ramp. “Captain Covain?” she said, her outplanets accent making the vowels sound twice as long as they should. “I am Captain Maert. Please to come aboard, you and yours.”
Maert’s clothing was far more informal than anything worn by the party from
Meritorious Reward
. Rather than the customary merchanter’s gear of unicolored coveralls with a ship’s emblem on the sleeve, she wore a velvet waistcoat, a spidersilk shirt, and a scarlet cummerbund over trousers tucked into high boots. Jos had seen her kind around the ports—hard drinking, free spending—the small independents who ran fast, worked armed, and died young.
“I think we should be leaving soon.” she said, her sibilants drawn out into long hisses by the unfamiliar accent. She led the party forward through work-scarred passageways to a vaguely circular common room—mess hall, recreation area, and overflow bunk space all in one, with a miniature galley in a closet-sized nook off to the side.
“Do you have acceleration pads for everyone?” Covain asked.
“No, but we do our best, eh? Sick men get pads. Those with no pads, stand against aft bulkheads and hold on tight. Where is your pilot?”
“Here,” Covain said, indicating the stretcher with Jos standing beside it.
“Him? Can he fly?”
“Not the sick one. The boy.”
“Aye. Well, go you both forward. I see you there soon.”
Jos went forward, strapping the master pilot into one seat behind the forward windows and himself into the other. He looked at the command console. Someone had used red plas-tape to relabel all the controls in a script he couldn’t recognize, but the layout looked standard, if old-fashioned, and the basic functions—throttle, course, turn—were plain. He picked up the clipboard with the launch checklist he had carried over from the
Merry
and began running it down.
“Rated/certified pilot in command seat, check,” he said, looking to his left, where the master pilot lay strapped, eyes squeezed shut, lips moving in a constant, soundless muttering. Jos went down the list. “Engines on-line. Engineering reports ready to reply to all orders. Check.”
Captain Maert walked into the bridge, and began strapping herself into the remaining seat. “Are you ready?” she asked.
“Ready, Captain. Where are we going?”
“We figure that out after we make orbit.”
“Oh.” He paused and glanced at her over his shoulder. “Captain, if I may be so bold, why aren’t you flying yourself?”
“Until last week, I was gunner. First time up here.”
“Right,” Jos said. “Last step on the checklist. Contact inspace, Captain.”
“Do so.”
Jos reached forward and pulled the handset for the exterior comms out of its clip. He keyed on the link.
“Sapne Inspace Control, Sapne Inspace Control, this is Freetrader
Wandering Star
. Request permission to lift ship. Over.”
No answer came back—only the howl of an open carrier frequency. The master pilot cried out as if the noise hurt him, and Jos hastily keyed the link off again.
“They give permission,” Captain Maert said. “Make orbit, pilot.”
Jos looked for the nullgrav switch. Found it, and pressed. The
Star
’s nose came up hard.
“Stand by, everyone,” he said, and pressed the throttles forward to what he hoped was escape position. The engines fired hard, their response far quicker than what Jos was used to aboard the
Merry
with her greater mass and greater inertia. Acceleration pushed him back against the cushions of the copilot’s seat. Then the glow of superheated air cleared, the sky darkened, and the stars came out.
“Make orbit,” Maert said. “When you do, come back to the common room. There is much to discuss.”
But before the discussion could take place, there was another detail that needed attention. Three more crew members on the sick list had died during lift-off, the
Merry
’s master pilot among them. The dead were cycled out of
Wandering Star
’s airlock, and their personal effects were put under seal in number-one cargo bay.
 
ENTIBORAN REGNAL YEAR 3 PERADA
 
F
ROM THE window of her twentieth-floor apartment in the Celadon Towers housing block, Mistress Anije Vasari could see smoke rising from the Palace Major.
She stood and watched for some minutes as aircars and gyroflits circled the palace complex. At first the majority of them bore the insignia of the Ministry of Internal Security; then the white and grey of the IS craft gave way to the brighter hues of Fleet On-Planet units. Had this been an ordinary disaster—a kitchen fire gone out of control, say—she’d have expected Domestic Security and Emergency Response instead.
“I wonder if our pals in the black robes had a hand in this?” she wondered aloud.
The local newsreaders hadn’t been much help. Vasari could recognize a security-imposed blackout when she saw one. A few hours ago she’d caught a brief flurry of stories about a Galcenian ship landing at Wippeldon under Fleet escort—and after that, nothing. The holovids, for their part, barely acknowledged the existence of trouble at the palace; their reporting, done at a discreet distance from the Security lines, would have served equally well for a pod-rail crash or an explosion in a fuel refinery.
She turned away from the window and went back to her desk comp, where she’d been drafting an interim report for Master Otenu when the first news stories began to break. A copy of the unencrypted plaintext filled the main screen.
… I haven’t yet convinced Errec Ransome to sever his ties with Jos Metadi and return to the Guild, but I believe that I’ve planted the idea in his mind. I’ll keep working on it whenever the opportunity presents itself, but there’s a limit to what I can do. Even if the idea of coming back isn’t, strictly speaking, his own, the decision will have to be.
 
She contemplated the final paragraph for a moment, then sat down at the desk and added a few more lines.
There currently appears to be a civil disturbance in progress at the Palace Major. I don’t know who is responsible—possibly the situation is nothing more than Entiboran politics as usual, which is to say, vicious—but considering the level of known Mage activity on this planet, I think a bit of personal investigation is in order.
I’ll encrypt this and send it before I leave my apartment. If all goes well I should be able to send a follow-up within the next three local days.
 
A few more commands to the desk comp, and the encrypted message began its journey through the mail nodes to the commercial data-transport service that would carry it to Galcen. Vasari wiped all traces of the plaintext and set the comp to cycling the apartment through a looped facsimile of its daily routine. With her absence hidden at least from casual snoopers, she left the Celadon Towers and started out on foot for the Grand Plaza and the Palace Major.
 
 
At the far edge of the home system, a courier ship blip-ped out of hyper into Entiboran space. The vessel began driving in toward Entibor, transmitting Ophelan identification signals continuously as it went. Before it could cross the orbital plane of the sixth planet, however, the Entiboran warship
Songwind
ripped an energy bolt across the courier’s bow, lit the vessel up with fire control, and locked all guns and missiles on the target.
“Ophelan vessel,” came the message—all frequencies, in the clear—“start braking now.”
“This is CS-Ophel-178,” the courier ship transmitted in reply. “We are carrying urgent messages for Entiboran Fleet Central Command.”
“Come dead in space and transfer your message packets to us. We will see the messages delivered from this point.”
“Braking now.”
The Ophelan’s pilot wasted no time. On “now,” the vessel performed a skew-flip and lit off its main realspace engines—a fast and showy way of dumping velocity, and one that
Songwind
was hard put to match in time. A podlike minishuttle detached from the Ophelan ship, to be pulled across the space between the two larger craft by Songwind’s tractor beam before docking at the Entiboran’s access hatch.
The airlock cycled, then opened to let out three officers in Entiboran Fleet uniforms.
Songwind
’s junior officer of the watch, who’d expected to log aboard folders of unaccompanied hardcopy, stared for a few seconds and then recovered himself enough to salute.
“You’ve got the messages?” he asked as soon as the formalities were done with.
“We
are
the messages,” said the senior officer, a lieutenant-of-ships with a Ghan Jobain accent. “There was a Mage attack on Tanpaleyn. We made it out to Ophel, and asked for the courtesy of a courier to help us bring the word home.”
“Your own ship—”
“Shot up,” the lieutenant-of-ships said. “And too slow even if it wasn’t”
“Bad news?” asked the JOOW, though he had a hard time imagining what could be worse than a Mageworlds attack.
“The raiders have changed their tactics. They took out the comm relays first—and then they went for captures instead of kills. They were sacrificing their own ships if it meant they could take undamaged Fleet units.”
The JOOW whistled. “The captain’s got to hear about this.”
“
Central
had better hear about this,” said the lieutenant-of-ships. “From now on, we’ll have to assume that the raiders have all of the Fleet’s crypto and recognition signals—and anything that looks like one of ours could just as well be one of theirs.”
 
Mistress Vasari made her way through the crowded streets toward the Palace Major. She listened as she went to the voices and the undervoices of the nervous people she saw around her. The local newsreaders might not be talking much about the events at the palace, but the populace had no such scruples.
“It’s the inheritance wars all over again,” said one overheard citizen … . “It was a setup by Internal Security,” said another, “so the minister could put down a coup and get back in favor.” … “Galcenians,” said a third. “My sister works at the spaceport, and she says the Galcenians have landed and taken over.”
Vasari, when she heard the last, suppressed the urge to break into un-Adeptlike snickers. If Galcenians—herself included, oh, yes!—were even half as devious and omnicom-petent as Entiboran prejudices gave them credit for, they’d be running the galaxy already and the Mages would be licking their wounds at home.
The narrow street opened into the wide expanse of the Grand Plaza, and she saw the high, ornamented façade of the Palace Major looming up ahead. Much closer, and a more immediate problem, were the security lines that held back the gawking crowd. Whatever had happened at the palace was still going on. Flames licked intermittently at windows and doorways, and red and green bolts of blaster fire sliced back and forth across the open space between the Internal Security barricades and the building proper.
Vasari contemplated the prospect without enthusiasm. Then, with a sigh of resignation, she effaced herself to the best of her ability and continued forward. She was taking a risk, she knew that—stray blaster bolts didn’t have eyes and minds that she could influence and turn aside as she could the eyes and minds of the crowd—but she had work to do.
She crossed the Plaza, her shoulder blades tingling with the moment-to-moment expectation of a blaster bolt, and found entry to the palace at one of the lesser doors. Once inside she could relax her guard a little, though not completely, and devote a portion of her attention to other things. Magework, for one—she didn’t have the infallible knack for sensing it that Errec Ransome was said to have, but she could follow a bad smell when the dirty rag was shoved close enough to her face.
She extended her senses, tracing the paths of all those who had gone in and out of the palace in the recent hours. And there it was, under the stink of blasters and explosives, beneath the smell of blood and pain. She traced it, following first one path and then another, seeking along each one for the distinctive touch of Magery.
Most of the trails she followed ended in death … but then, in an undamaged corridor, she found a servant in the palace livery, hurrying along like a man with an important errand. Vasari felt the hair on her neck rise up. This was the one: the taint of Magework was strong upon him.
She kept herself out of his mind and sight. Coming up behind him as he walked, she reached around his neck and applied a choke hold. The man collapsed, his legs no longer able to support him as the lack of oxygen affected his brain and rendered him temporarily unconscious. Vasari put her arms under his shoulders and began dragging him off backward, his heels rucking up the carpet as she tugged him along.
Subtle and discreet as a roadway flare
, she thought.
What can I possibly say if Domestic Security or an IS trooper finds me?
—“
Oh, dear, I’m afraid that my friend has taken ill?”—I don’t think so.
She didn’t have to go far. There was an empty room with a closed door a little farther along the corridor. She bumped the lockplate with her shoulder. The door stayed closed. She exerted her will and pushed against the lockplate again.
This time the door opened. She dragged her liveried burden into the room and dropped him onto the floor as the door closed behind her. The man lay on the flowered carpet, breathing wheezily. She stood over him, waiting, until his eyes came open and focused on her face.
“All right,” she said to him. “I’m not as good at this as some, but I’m better at it than anyone else
you’ll
ever meet.”
She knelt beside him and touched one finger, delicately, to the center of his forehead. “I am an interrogator, my friend, and you’re going to tell me everything you know.”
 
The senior fleet officer on duty at Entiboran Central Command Headquarters was not a happy man. The day had begun badly and had grown steadily worse.
The Galcenians had been trouble enough. In spite of their unannounced arrival, Captain-of-Corvettes Graene had seen fit to pass them through to the surface—along with their refusal to call upon the current ambassador for accommodation, and the resulting need to house them in the Orgilan Guesthouse at Fleet expense. A few days cooling their heels in high orbit would have done wonders to put them in a less demanding frame of mind … but the Galcenians had only been the beginning. For the same day to see an attack on the Palace major was, in the senior fleet officer’s opinion, intolerable.
The Fleet’s Quick Reaction Team had arrived on-scene adequately fast, if not in time to keep the Interior Ministry from taking over the situation on the ground. Domestic Security had gotten stuck with the dirty job in this case, working with Fire and Emergency to bring out the dead and injured: palace servants, stray members of the nobility, and a bunch of kids from a choral group who’d been singing madrigals in the informal reception room where the first explosions had hit.
The senior fleet officer rubbed his forehead. At least the choir members, both living and dead, matched up properly with existing records. Some of the other, adult bodies didn’t—the likeness was superficial only—which had implications that the senior fleet officer didn’t want to think about. He’d been hearing rumors for months now that the raiders from the Mageworlds had other weapons besides their black ships and their black-masked sorcerers, weapons founded in a technology that could engineer plagues and duplicate human bodies at will.
If anybody we meet could be working for the enemy …
He shuddered.
But if the Mages were behind at least part of the attack on the Palace Major, that made the rest of the story look even worse. Based on the scanty reports Domestic Security was allowing to leak out, at least part of the planning had been executed right here in Central Headquarters, by former Fleet Admiral Pallit. Word was that a number of former officers who’d been part of Pallit’s personal clique were even now in the basement of the Internal Security building—and the senior fleet officer knew what
that
meant.
He thanked Fortune that he’d always had the good sense to keep his head low and his mouth shut.
Better them than me
, he thought, and picked up the sheet of message flimsy that had caused his current headache.
Mage raiders on Tanpaleyn
, he thought.
How hard did they get hit, if our people had to beg a ride on an Ophelan courier to bring the news here fast enough?
He tried to imagine what the attack had been like, and failed.
But the Mages were going after whole ships. Were taking them. Which means that anything we’ve got, they’ve got, too.
It was damned suspicious, all of this stuff going down while the Consort and the fleet admiral were off doing the diplomatic on Maraghai, and Tres Brehant was inspecting Fleet defenses at the opposite edge of Entiboran space from Tanpaleyn. The Mages couldn’t have been any luckier if they’d planned the schedules themselves.

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