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 (11 page)

BOOK: The Price of the Stars: Book One of Mageworlds
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“Anyone hurt?” the Professor asked.
“I’m fine,” said Tarnekep. “But we can’t hold this room. Not with all these damned windows.”
“True. Are there any other ways into the building, Commander?”
“No more windows,” Jessan said, working over Namron as he spoke. “Two doors, and the cargo bay in the rear.”
“Then I suggest we fall back.”
A blaster bolt flashed into the room as the Professor spoke, searing the plast-block of the opposite wall. Jessan took that as a hint and began crawling backward, dragging Namron along with him. The other two followed.
Peyte, shaken but unflappable, brought the pillows and blankets into the comm section. The self-powered emergency glows on the control panel had cut in when the power died. By their dim luminescence, Jessan and the comptech bedded Namron down among the equipment—warming him, raising his legs, and putting a pressure bandage over the blaster wound in his side.
“Move that desk in front of the door for a barrier,” said the Professor. “We’re going to see more fighting before the night’s over.”
Jessan nodded at Peyte. The clerk/comptech took up one end of the desk and said, “Seems quiet enough right now.”
“It’ll get noisy again,” said Tarnekep shortly from the desk’s other end. When the table had been moved into place, the Mandeynan wiped the sweat off his face with one bloodstained sleeve and asked, “Where can we cover the other doors?”
“The corridor makes a T branch a little way back from here,” said Jessan. “You can watch both doors from there. And the stairs and elevator from lower stores come up just around the corner.”
Tarnekep nodded. He took the spare blaster from the waistband of his trousers and handed it to Jessan. “Do you know how to work one of these?”
“This may only be the Medical branch,” he said, “but it’s still the Space Force. Yes, I’m qualified.”
“Then you and Peyte go back and hold the rear doors while the Professor and I keep them out of the front.”
Jessan took the blaster and stood up. “Just who are those people out there?” he asked, checking the charge on the weapon. Half-full—it could be worse. “Assuming I make it through the night, having their names is going to make writing the report a whole lot easier.”
“If I told you,” said Tarnekep with a thin smile, “they’d probably want to kill you, too.”
“Namron didn’t know their names, and it didn’t help him a bit.”
The two strangers were silent; Tarnekep bit his lip. After a moment, Peyte said, “They can’t just sit out there and shoot at us all night.”
“No, Peyte,” said Jessan wearily, “they’re probably going to come inside so they can shoot at us even better. Everybody else in the district is closed up, remember, and it’s a long time until morning.”
“Sorry, Doc.” Peyte sounded crestfallen, the way he usually did whenever his knowledge of people didn’t match his handiness with robots and computers.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Jessan. “Come on—looks like we get to guard the back doors.”
He and Peyte walked toward the rear. With the power down and the air circulation off, the corridor smelled of dust and anesthetics. The medical odor gave Jessan an idea.
“Wait a minute,” he said, as they passed one of the treatment rooms, and ducked inside. Working mostly by feel, he picked up three small cylinders of oxygen and a large bottle of antiseptic. Arms full, he hurried back out.
Peyte looked at him curiously. “What’re you going to do with those, Doc?”
“Give somebody a surprise.”
Jessan piled up his loot near the far door and retired with Peyte to the crossing. He settled down on the tile floor, leaning back against the plast-block wall and stretching his long legs out in front of him. A few feet away, he could hear Peyte doing the same.
“Rest while you can,” he said to the clerk/comptech. “I’ll take first watch.”
“Are you kidding, Doc? I joined the Space Force for excitement, and all I’ve done so far is look up the right forms for signing underage semisentients. Do you think a repair crew’s going to be along soon to fix the lights?”
Jessan shrugged. “I don’t know. A crew will probably come out as soon as the Power Service notices a break in the net—but how many crews have to turn up missing before Power gives in and yells for Security?”
“In this neighborhood?” asked Peyte. “At least a dozen.”
Silence for a few moments, then Peyte spoke up again. “Who are those two guys, anyway? That one with the eye patch—there’s something funny about him.”
“A number of funny things, if I don’t miss my guess.”
“Yeah. I was right next to him, trying to work the comms—and Doc, that’s not his blood he’s got all over him.”
“I didn’t think it was,” said Jessan. He frowned a little. There was a noise—or had he imagined it?—down at the end of the hall.
Firing broke out again in the front room. The bolts of energy flowing into the front office lit the whole clinic as far back as the rear corridors in an aurora of multicolored light. The sound of the blasters almost drowned out a hollow booming at the far door.
Never mind the sound-and-light show
, Jessan said to himself, as the door fell inward and half a dozen attackers surged forward into the hall.
You’ve got trouble of your own back here.
He took careful aim—
Just like a target range, nothing to worry about
—and fired into the stuff he’d left piled up at that end of the corridor. The bolt ruptured at least one of the oxygen cylinders, and the sideshock broke the bottle of antiseptic wide open. Flammable liquid mingled with pure oxygen escaping from the ruptured cylinder, and the resulting fireball rolled up and down the hall in both directions before it faded.
“My, my,” said Jessan, with some satisfaction, as the ceiling gave way and buried the back door under a heap of rubble. “That was impressive.”
From the front, Tarnekep’s rather breathless voice called, “You two all right back there?”
“We’re fine. They won’t be trying that door again, either. How are you two doing?”
“Making it. Do you have a moment to come play medic?”
“It’s what they pay me for.”
Jessan handed his blaster to Peyte. “If anything tries to get in from the outside, shoot it.”
“Got you, Doc.”
Jessan ran toward the front. The table still stood across the inner door, and a quick check reassured him that Namron’s condition hadn’t changed, but the throat-clawing af-tersmell of a blaster fight hung undissipated in the stagnant air. Tarnekep sagged exhausted against one wall, and the Professor sat at the comm station, checking his blaster one-handed with intense concentration. Jessan looked over at Tarnekep, and the younger man made a tired gesture in the Professor’s direction.
“Right,” said Jessan. “Let’s see about you, then—‘Professor,’ did you say to call you?”
“I didn’t,” said the grey-haired man. “But it suffices.”
“Then ‘Professor’ it is,” agreed Jessan. “Tarnekep … if you could be so kind as to bring over one of the extra blankets, I can rig a sling for this arm. There’s no accelerated-healing setup here, I’m afraid, and until the power comes back on there’s no way to mend the bone for you, either. If you like, though, I can give you something for the discomfort.”
Under the cover of the cheerful babble, he examined the injured arm. More than once, the skin and muscles under his fingers tensed in reaction to what must have been considerable pain, but the grey-haired man didn’t make a sound. So he wasn’t surprised, when he’d finished, to see the Professor shake his head.
“Not now, Commander. Perhaps when this is over.”
Jessan took the blanket that Tarnekep held out to him, and began fashioning a sling. “How did you do this to yourself, if the answer isn’t too embarrassing to repeat?”
“I dived into a gutter a bit too hard,” said the Professor. “I’m afraid that city fighting is a game for the young.”
“Everybody to their own amusements,” said Jessan. “Now, this is going to hurt a bit … there. Mind telling me what the fuss is all about, while we’re at it?”
But it was Tarnekep, not the Professor, who answered. “A friend gave us your name.”
“Nice of him.”
“The small army out there wasn’t our idea,” said Tarnekep. “The original plan was to spend a quiet night in the clinic playing double tammani, and sneak out in the morning with your usual shuttle traffic.”
“There’s a supply run coming in at dawn,” said Jessan. “We can leave town with the empty boxes.”
“‘We’?”
“We,” Jessan said firmly. “I don’t fancy staying behind and explaining to all these people just where the two of you went. As far as they’re concerned, high orbit strikes me as an ideal negotiating distance.”
He gave a final twitch and pat to the improvised sling, and stood back. “Now, if you gentlesirs will excuse me, I think I’d better rejoin Peyte in the rear corridor.”
 
B
EKA’S LEGS trembled with exhaustion and the adrenaline surge of the firefight. She propped herself against the support of the comm-room wall, and watched as the blond lieutenant commander made his exit.
He stooped over the wounded man again on the way out, and said something light and cheerful-sounding in reply to a thready question, but the set of his shoulders as he headed out into the corridor gave his voice the lie. She bit her lip hard.
Damn you, Owen. Do you realize just how much your getaway is costing?
The Professor still sat in the comm chair where he’d collapsed at the end of the last bit of fighting. His back was as stubborn-straight as ever—but his eyes were shut and his face looked grey and haggard in the half-light of the emergency glows.
You can put that one on the tab, too, Owen
, she thought bitterly. ‘
City-fighting is a game for the young’—and knocking somebody out of the way of a blaster bolt is a game for romantic idiots, not for old men with brittle bones.
She cursed, and slammed her fist against the wall. Then she put the scraped knuckles into her mouth to suck away the fresh blood on them.
At the sound of flesh hitting plast-block, the Professor opened his eyes and brought his blaster to the ready. “Trouble, Captain?”
She took her hand down again, flexing fingers that ached from gripping a blaster. “That was just me, Professor. They’re still quiet out front.”
“So I thought. And from the sound of things, our medical acquaintance has taken care of the back way for a while. A resourceful young man … a friend?”
She gave a weary chuckle. “He doesn’t even know me. And I didn’t know about the clinic until this afternoon.”
The Professor looked thoughtful. “I take it you heard from your father.”
“A letter at the mail drop. Some interesting stuff, and the word about this place—in case I needed a bolthole sometime, he said.” She shook her head. “He certainly called that one right.”
 
Jessan returned to the intersection, where Peyte made a shadowy, vigilant shape in the blue-green twilight. The Khesatan settled down in his old position against the wall and asked, “All quiet back here?”
“Like a tomb, sir,” said Peyte. “How’s Namron?”
“Holding on.” Jessan looked down the hallway toward the pile of rubble. “With that way blocked, they’ll try the other door next.”
“Not the cargo bay?”
“No. The outside door down there is blast-armored against launch. It’d take a laser cannon to get through there.”
Peyte was silent for a moment. Then he said, “You know, Doc, we might be better off down in the bay.”
Jessan thought about it. “There’d only be the one door to worry about … give me the blaster, and go back up front. Tell Tarnekep I want to talk with him.”
“Right, Doc.”
Peyte headed up the corridor. Jessan leaned back against the wall, blaster in hand, to wait on developments. After a few minutes he heard footsteps coming from up front—not Peyte’s familiar tread, but a quick, light stride that had to belong to the longer-legged, more slightly built Tarnekep.
The footsteps halted a few feet away. Jessan looked back and saw the tall Mandeynan standing for a second in dim silhouette against the light of the glows, before he moved closer to the wall and became only a vertical shadow.
“Peyte said you wanted to talk with me.” The voice wasn’t promising.
“That’s right. I think we ought to go down below into the cargo bay.”
“That’s what Peyte said.”
“You have some trouble with that?” Jessan kept his own voice as neutral as possible. Already during his tour of duty in Flatlands he’d had to talk a blaster away from a blind-drunk and homicidal spacer, and he was beginning to think of that night as a garden party compared to this one.
“The Professor doesn’t like the idea of leaving the front office unguarded.”
Jessan caught the phrasing. “And you?”
“I can live with it. How close is the cargo bay to the shuttle pad?”
“Just the other side of the blast doors.”
Silence for a moment, then, “Your man Namron. Can he take being shifted that far?”
“If it comes down to a choice between moving him or letting him collect another blaster bolt—” began Jessan. He stopped. “Damn,” he said quietly, as the remaining undamaged door into the upper building tore free of its hinges and slammed onto the floor of the hall.
Massed blaster fire lit up the passage. Jessan dropped to a prone position and started squeezing off shots from the shelter of the corner.
If we didn’t have to discuss everything in committee we’d be down in the cargo bay right now.
“Firing blind’s not going to do any good against so many,” said Tanekep from behind him. “Cover me!”
The lean figure sprang past him into the intersection and ran for the far wall:
Jessan squirmed far enough forward to see the broken door and began firing as fast as he could press the stud. At the same time, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the Mandeynan send three quick bolts down the hall in the course of his dash across the gap. Only one of the shots ended with the harsh sound of a miss against plast-block.
He’s good, conceded Jessan, still firing. But what in the name of all that’s sane and normal is he doing now?
Tarnekep had paused for only a few seconds on the far side. Now the Mandeynan stepped away from the sheltering wall into the center of the junction, turned half right, and brought his blaster up at arm’s length like an old-style duelist. Then he began to fire aimed shots into the broken doorway at a slow, deliberate rate.
He is insane
, thought Jessan, as the blaster fire from down the hall limned the Mandeynan’s unmoving, upright figure in a lurid halo of light.
Nobody in their right mind takes chances like that.
Jessan’s own fire was continuous by now. He had the stud pressed down hard in its socket, and was depending on the blaster’s feedback regulator to keep the weapon from going on overload. Beams of energy played around the far end of the hall like hallucinatory party streamers. Jessan couldn’t tell if he was hitting anything or not, but he hoped that the constant fire might keep the other side from taking time to aim.
Still Thrnekep stood in the center of the hallway, aiming bolt after steady bolt. With each shot, the fire from outside slackened, until there was silence.
Tarnekep lowered his blaster. Jessan waited a moment. When no renewed firing lit up the air, he stood up and faced the shadowy gunfighter.
“Right now, Portree, I could make out a good case for locking you up in a padded room.” The brief, intense firefight had left his professional manner in shreds and he knew it, but he was past caring. “If you get yourself killed, where does that leave the rest of us?”
“I didn’t get killed,” said Tarnekep, then turned and stalked back toward the comm room without another word.
Jessan shook his head slowly, and slid aside the readout cover plate to check the charge on his blaster. The little glowing numbers showed the weapon’s energy level a lot closer to flat than he liked. “The Academy target-shooting team was never like this,” he muttered, and resumed his watch down the hall.
 
Beka got as far as the comm-room door before her legs buckled under her. A grab for the doorjamb stopped her from crumpling to the tiles in the middle of the corridor.
She made it to the wall, sliding quietly down that instead, and sat there, head between her knees, until the black fog cleared out of her skull. She’d almost fainted once already, back where the hallways crossed, when fatigue had slammed into her like a high-G lift-off as soon as the firing stopped. Pride alone had kept her back straight and her voice steady long enough to get past the lieutenant commander without collapsing; she was surprised that she’d made it this much farther.
Be honest. You’re surprised that you’re still alive.
She pushed herself back onto her feet, hanging on to the doorjamb again for support, and took a couple of deep breaths. Tired … she’d never been so tired … threading the Web for twelve hours straight, and then all this. She knew that if she collapsed a second time she wouldn’t be able to get up again until she’d slept herself out.
Keep moving, my girl. Onward and upward.
Shoving away from the wall, she straightened her shoulders and strode into the comm room with a fair imitation of Tarnekep’s usual arrogance. The Professor was still sitting in the control chair, but the clammy grey look that had frightened her into yelling for the medic was gone. Petty Officer Namron didn’t look any better, but he didn’t look much worse either. She supposed that would have to do.
The desk still lay across the outer door, and the young comptech—Peyte, that was his name—kept watch at the improvised barricade. He looked round as she came in; so did the Professor, who would normally have risen to his feet like the stickler for proper behavior that he was.
“Time to pull back,” she said. “I’ve looked, and there’s a chance we can get down into the cargo bay.”
The Professor nodded toward Namron. “What about him?”
“We’re taking him with us.” She looked at Peyte. “You take his right side, I’ll take the left. We’ll have to leave the bedding here.”
“Right,” said the clerk/comptech, standing up. Beka switched her blaster to her left hand and followed Peyte over to the corner where Namron lay in the shelter of the heavy hyperspace comm setup. He was pale, but conscious.
“This isn’t going to be pleasant,” she told him. “But it beats staying behind to get shot at.”
Namron blinked, and shook his head from side to side on the pillow. “Just leave me one of the blasters and I’ll do fine,” he said faintly. “You don’t have to—”
“Don’t argue,” she said. “You can’t spend Hostile Fire Pay if you don’t stay alive to collect it. Ready, Peyte?”
“Ready.”
Together they picked up Namron, Peyte supporting him on one side and Beka on the other. “Let’s go,” she said, and they started off down the hall like some awkward, six-legged beast, with the Professor hanging behind to cover the rear.
 
Jessan heard the thump and shuffle of footsteps approaching from up front—Peyte and Tarnekep, supporting Namron between them. “Any trouble back here?” asked Tarnekep, when the little procession had drawn even with the junction.
“Not a peep.”
“Well,” said the Mandeynan, “either they’re waiting for us down below, or they’re not. Is your cargo lift tied in to the main power lines?”
Jessan nodded. “We’ll have to use the auxiliary stairs.”
“Lifts, stairs, doors all over … if I didn’t know better, I’d say you people
wanted
to make this place easy to get into.”
“Well, as a matter of fact—” Jessan caught the irony just a second too late and stopped, shaking his head in disgust. The Mandeynan gave a brief snort of laughter. Peyte snickered.
“Gentlesirs.” The Professor sounded patient but tired. “Commander—are these back stairs normally kept locked?”
“Of course. There’s a lot in here worth stealing.”
“Then you’ll have to lead the way. Tarnekep and I aren’t keyed to your locks.”
“Come on, then,” said Jessan. “Easy with Namron, now.”
Blaster at the ready, Jessan stepped around the corner. He more than half expected to get his hair parted by an energy beam as soon as he appeared in the hall, but nothing happened.
The stairs were halfway down the hall. Beyond them, at the far end, the outside door yawned blackly into the night. Jessan covered the distance in a dozen quick strides, the others hurrying behind him with no attempt at quiet. Once at the stairway door, he switched his blaster to his left hand long enough to palm the ID plate. The lock clicked open, and Jessan gave silent thanks to the designer who’d thought to make the auxiliary door panels self-powered.
Self-power didn’t run to working a slide mechanism, though. Like most auxiliaries, this door was mounted on hinges instead. He shoved the door hard, and had his blaster pointed down the unlit stairwell before the swinging panel slammed against the inside wall.
Nothing happened. “Just like a holovid herd,” he muttered, feeling a bit silly.
“Shut up, damn you,” said Tarnekep’s voice in his ear. “And get on in there.”
Pinched a nerve, did I?
thought Jessan, stepping through the door and standing aside to let the two men carrying Namron come past, with the Professor on their heels.
I wonder how.
He shut the door behind the older man, and locked it. “Peyte,” he said into the solid darkness, “do you still have that hand torch?”
BOOK: The Price of the Stars: Book One of Mageworlds
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