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 (6 page)

BOOK: The Price of the Stars: Book One of Mageworlds
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Commander Gil, an undistinguished-looking officer whose medium height, medium weight, and thinning hair of a medium shade of brown tended to fade from memory almost before he left the room, was not happy. He had confined himself to plain water from the table carafe, and to three cups of cha’a, strong and dark—not from preference, but because he had the duty—while he unburdened himself to his friend.
“I tell you,” he said, “it isn’t fair. I was set up.”
“What’s not fair?” Florens asked, a bit muzzily.
Commander Gil’s head, if not happy, was clear. He signaled to the waiter for another cup of cha’a and enumerated his grievances.
“Here I am—career Space Force, first ground tour in five years, and what do I get? Flag Aide to the Commanding General! Career enhancing, right? Guaranteed my own command after this, right? Wrong! Dead people don’t get command, and by the time this is over, I’ll be dead.”
Florens poured the last of the Infabede red into his wineglass. “Cheer up. It can’t possibly be as bad as a Mageworlds patrol.”
“Oh, yes, it can,” said Gil. “All day, telling sweet little old ladies that General Metadi absolutely does not speak at flower shows. When I’m not arranging surprise inspections. Or writing holiday greetings to the troops. Or talking to the holovids. I’d take two Mageworlds tours back to back and I’d smile if it meant I never had to talk to another reporter.”
He glanced at his chronometer, gulped the last of his cha’a, and stood up. “Hate to leave you like this, Pel, but I want to get some sleep before I go on watch. If somebody starts a war between midnight and zero-eight-hundred Standard, I’m the lucky son of a bitch who gets to wake up the General.”
 
The flames of G. Munngralla’s Five Points Imports lit up the Med Station scoutcar, hovering on its nullgravs above the muddy street of downtown Namport. Ari and Munngralla hit the door at a run and hurled themselves into the aircar’s cargo bay. Llannat slammed the door back across the opening and dogged it shut. “All right, Jessan,” she shouted, “go!”
The aircar sprang forward and up, leaving the confusion in the street below to dwindle out of sight. Ari pulled himself up to a sitting position on the floor of the cargo bay, and saw Llannat already working over Munngralla’s blaster burns with antibiotic cream and bandages from the aircar’s kit.
“You’re a bit early,” he said. “Not that I’m objecting, you understand.”
“She had a feeling,” came Jessan’s voice from the pilot’s seat. “So we decided to hustle on along. And it does look like you’ve surpassed yourself. What was it—arson?”
“Nobody told me, either,” Ari said, struggling to his feet and making his way up to the empty seat next to Jessan. He collapsed onto the upholstery with a groan, his head ringing. “Damn, I’m tired.”
“Don’t go to sleep yet,” said Jessan. “We have a contact on an intercept course—and he’s not transmitting a Security identifier.”
Ari remembered the blood trail down the staircase. One of the attackers had managed to call for help, and get it.
He cursed under his breath—and then cursed again, more quietly, at the stab of headache that followed. “Try to shake them,” he muttered. “They aren’t very nice people. And I think they’re mad at us.”
Jessan answered with something Ari couldn’t catch. The headache and vertigo were hitting him now with redoubled force, and a deafening roar filled his ears. He closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the seat, and was only dimly aware of the aircar’s increasing speed.
There’s more to this than mixing beer and brandy
, he thought with an effort. The aircar heeled sharply, throwing him sideways against the safety webbing. He groaned.
A hand—cool and professional—touched the side of his face. “You’re worse off than Munngralla,” Llannat Hyfid’s voice said from behind him. “Why didn’t you tell us you’d been hit?”
“Wasn’t.” After his head stopped echoing the syllables, he added, “Thought it was the beer.”
“If you’re drunk,” said Llannat, “I’m a Magelord.”
*He’s not drunk.* The grumble of Munngralla’s Forest Speech was almost inaudible through the roaring in Ari’s head. *But it
was
the beer.*
The hand dropped away from Ari’s face. He sensed, rather than heard, the Adept turn back toward Munngralla.
“Poison? Which one?”
*Mescalomide.*
“How do you know—never mind. We’ll handle it.”
“Mescalomide’s a blood agent.” Jessan’s voice, oddly faint and worried. “He needs a stimulant.”
“He needs a complete blood change. What we’ve
got
is a stimulant.”
“I know, I know … damn!”
The aircar heeled again.
He heard Llannat’s voice. “Keep this damned thing steady for a few seconds, will you?”
The aircar leveled off, and Ari felt Llannat’s fingers pushing up his sleeve. Something cold and sharp pricked his skin, the arm ached for a second or two, and then the chilly sharpness withdrew. Almost at once, his head began to clear.
If I don’t die in the next few minutes,
he thought,
I’m going to spend the next few weeks feeling truly rotten
.
He opened his eyes and squinted at the control panel. He could see the readouts, all right, with an unpleasant, stimulant-induced clarity. “We’re not doing too well.”
“You’re not doing so good yourself,” said Llannat. “You’re close to checking out on us.”
“I’ll try not to.” He ignored the dull ache in his skull and focused on the control panel. “Right now, we’re all in bad shape.”
“I know,” said Jessan quietly. “I’m not good enough to shake them, either.” He paused, and then asked, “Are you up to handling the controls?”
Ari shrugged, and wished he hadn’t—the motion made his headache worse. “I could give it a try, if you don’t mind a rough ride.”
Llannat grabbed his shoulder. “You’re in no condition—”
But Jessan was already unbuckling his safety webbing. “Give him another shot of stimulant. I’m no Adept, but I have a bad feeling about those guys behind us.”
Ari slid into Jessan’s vacated seat. He glanced at the controls and readouts, barely noticing Llannat swearing under her breath as she pushed up his other sleeve and jabbed the needle into a vein. The Sarcan scoutcars used by the Medical Service had the same instrumentation and basic airframe as the Sadani armed scouts; right now he wished this particular Sarcan had a Sadani’s gun as well. “One of you better get on the comm link and start yelling for help.”
“I already tried,” said Llannat. “No joy. Somebody’s jamming our frequencies.”
The row of lights on the lock-on indicator under the long-range scan went out, then turned on again one by one.
“Somebody’s also lighting us up with fire control,” said Ari. He checked the location of the pursuit on the Position Plotting Indicator scope. “Stand by!”
He tilted the aircar’s nose toward the zenith and fired the jets up to maximum. The little aircar stood on its tail and headed skyward.
The Thrust Level Indicator lights shone amber as Ari struggled to gain altitude. On the long-range scanner, the image of the pursuing craft overshot the point where the medical aircar had begun its climb, and skidded clumsily as it began its own climbing turn. The Sarcan’s lock-on indicator went back to its random analysis pattern—the fix was broken.
Jessan cleared his throat. “Ari, the base is the other way.”
“I know. The bad guys expect us to be going there. Why should we make things easy for them?”
“I’ll tell you why,” said Llannat from behind him. “I can’t keep giving you stimulant shots forever. If you don’t get to the Med Station for proper treatment inside of about ten minutes, you’re a write-off.”
“I hear you,” said Ari. The second aircar was gaining again—it looked like a private job built purely for speed. The Sarcan’s lock-on indicator blipped at him as the weapons systems astern tried again for a fix.
“Let’s do something else this time,” he said. “Hold on.” He cut power and emissions, pushed the controls all the way forward, and began a ballistic dive.
Ari was flying blind now, trying not to give himself away with his own electronic signals. And again, the lock-on broke.
“Why hasn’t he fired on us yet?” asked Jessan.
“Maybe because he wants prisoners,” said Ari. “Or maybe because we’ve been dodging him every time he locked onto us.”
*But mostly because he has TurboBlaster 25s and they’ve got nothing for range,* added Munngralla.
“How do you know that?” Llannat asked.
*Because I sold them to him.*
“You sold—who is he?”
*Disgruntled customer.*
“Oh.”
Still accelerating under the pull of gravity, they flashed downward past the other aircar as it climbed. But the pursuit was more alert this time. The mysterious aircar pushed over into a dive as they dropped past, and began gaining on them again.
“Oh, hell,” said Ari. “Time to do something desperate.” He switched on the engines to put the aircar into a power-dive straight for the surface. “Follow me, you bastards, and let’s see who falls apart first.”
The thin red line that indicated the location of the ground reappeared at the bottom of the altimeter. The second craft was sticking close behind, and the lock-on indicator pipped again as the first of the Dangerous Altitude lights lit up. Ari maintained his vertical dive. A burst of light came from astern, and the aircar shook with the
whump
of a grazing hit.
“That was close,” said Jessan. “You might consider dodging them again.”
“Not yet,” said Ari, his eyes on the altimeter. By now, six of the Dangerous Altitude lights had lit. “Not yet.” The dark of the planet’s surface filled the main window. A seventh light flashed on. “Now!”
He pulled back on the controls, wrenching the aircar out of its power-dive and into a vertical climb. Once again, the other pilot overshot the turnpoint. But this time he hit mud and rocks instead of air, and a column of flame rose up through the forest canopy.
“Should have watched his height instead of watching me,” said Ari, and put the aircar back onto the approach to base.
A klaxon hooted. The energy level indicator showed in the red zone, a hair above empty. “Damn! That hit ruptured the fuel tank. I’ve got to land this thing now.”
Setting the aircar down on the closest flat piece of ground was harder work than he’d expected, but he managed. “End of trip,” he said, leaning back against the seat. “The base perimeter should be right through those trees. Sorry about cutting things so close.”
He shut his eyes. The stimulants and the adrenaline boost of the chase had already begun to fade, and the backlash was setting in. He fumbled with the buckles of the safety webbing, but Llannat’s capable hands took over and released him.
“You have to get to Emergency right now,” she said. “Can you walk?”
“Never mind that,” said Jessan. “Get on the comm link, and tell them to send out some orderlies with a stretcher.”
Llannat tried the comm link. “It’s still down,” she said.
Jessan took over the link, and tried again. “Damn. I don’t like this. Llannat—take Munngralla and walk the perimeter until you find a gate or a guard or a comm booth, and tell them to send help. I’ll stay here with the Terror of the Spaceways, and try to keep him from checking out for good.”
“No,” said Llannat. “You go with Munngralla while I stay here—please. I have a feeling about this.”
The aircar’s cargo door slid open with a metallic scrape and a heavy clunk. Ari heard Jessan and the Selvaur climb out and go crashing off through the underbrush. The door didn’t slam closed behind them, and after a few moments he turned his head enough to see back into the cargo bay.
Llannat stood in the open door of the unlighted bay, looking out at the night. Her right hand went to the clips beside the door and recovered the staff she had stowed there. She held it loosely at her side, but something in her posture made the hairs rise on Ari’s neck.
She spoke—not in a whisper, which would carry, but in an almost subvocal murmur. “Whatever happens, stay in the aircar.”
“What’s wrong?” Ari asked.
Llannat replied without turning her head, and in the same low murmur as before. “A bad smell in the winds of the universe, my friend. Somebody earnestly desires your death.”
 
S
OMEONE WANTS to kill me
, Ari thought.
Well, I’d figured that out already. The question is … why?
He saw Llannat stiffen. Something had moved out of the trees and into the open ground by the aircar—something that made no sound, and that he could track only by watching Llannat shift position fractionally as she followed its progress.
A voice spoke from the darkness. “Adept. Give me Ari Rosselin-Metadi.”
Llannat didn’t move from her position in the open door. “Lieutenant Rosselin-Metadi isn’t mine to give anybody.”
“Let us abandon playing with words,” said the strange voice. “What matters is that nobody is here to guard a dying man but you—and who can say, afterward, whether help that comes too late might have arrived in time? Stand aside.”
“No.”
“Then on your own head be it, Adept.”
A globe of scarlet light sprang out of the blackness beyond the cargo doors, illuminating a shadowy figure that seemed to have no face.
It’s a mask
, Ari told himself.
Or a hood. Nothing more
. He didn’t want to think about how much power the stranger must be wielding, to have it show up so plainly against the night—or about what the poison in his blood must be doing, to make him of all people aware of the patterns and currents of power.
Owen said once that I was so dense I’d need to be halfway dead before I’d notice power at work
.
He was mad at me when he said it … but it looks like he was right after all
.
The stranger threw the scarlet globe toward the aircar. In the same instant, the darkness surrounding Llannat Hyfid flared into an aurora of vivid green. When the red fire struck that barrier, it faded and died, and the green aurora vanished as suddenly as it had come.
Ari heard Llannat release a long, shaky breath. Then the Adept seemed to draw herself together. She leapt down from the open door into the clearing with a scuffle of wet leaves, and brought up her staff two-handed before her as she landed. Streamers of green fire followed her movement across the darkness beyond.
Scarlet lightning blazed up as the black-robed stranger lashed out at the Adept with a staff of his own—this one short enough to grip one-handed, rather than in both hands after the fashion of Galcen-trained Adepts. Wood cracked against wood as Llannat blocked the blow. Then the combat moved out of Ari’s range of vision, leaving him nothing to go by except the mingled sounds of scuffling footsteps and heavy breathing, punctuated by sudden flares of green and crimson light.
He heard the stranger laugh. “You’re overmatched, Mistress.”
There was silence, and then a blaze of green light washed over the clearing.
“I’m still alive,” said Llannat’s voice. “You have to win this fight. I only need to keep from losing it too soon.”
Ari heard the stamping footsteps again, and the crack and swish of the staves.
I wish Owen was here
, he thought. For somebody who acted like he wasn’t interested in reality most of the time, his younger brother was surprisingly dangerous in a fight. But Owen the apprentice Adept was safe up on a mountaintop away from it all, where he hadn’t needed to fight anybody in earnest since he was about fifteen, and outside the aircar the sound of Llannat’s footsteps had begun to falter and drag.
That leaves you, Rosselin-Metadi.
Ari pushed himself to a more upright position with an effort, and tried to focus his night vision on the aircar’s medical kit, lying open on the deck just behind the pilot’s seat. Yes … there was still one hypo-ampule of the stimulant. He reached down—almost fell over—caught himself on the edge of the control panel—and then he had it. He straightened, head spinning and vision fading to black, and propped his right shoulder against the seatback while he fumbled in search of a vein in his left arm.
There!
He paused for a second—this might kill him, as surely as mescalomide or the stranger’s crimson fire.
If Llannat goes down
, he reminded himself,
you’ll be scavenger bait anyway
. He shoved the ampule home.
The needle stung in his flesh for a moment, and the false clarity of the stimulant returned. He pushed himself to his feet, standing bent-over under the aircar’s low ceiling, and braced his left hand against the wall of the cargo bay for balance. With his right, he pulled the heavy blaster from its holster. Then he began to move in silent, careful steps toward the open door.
He didn’t know how he was going to handle climbing down. His knees were obeying him, for the moment, but he wasn’t inclined to depend on them very much. When he reached the door, he held on to the edge of the opening with his left hand and looked out.
The fight was still going on. Llannat and the stranger moved like shadows within the brilliant auras of red and green that suffused the entire clearing with an uncanny, pulsating glow. Against that light, the dark lines of the staves crossed and recrossed in a pattern Ari didn’t know well enough to follow, except to see that Llannat was being forced back, step by step, toward the aircar.
Ari saw her bring her staff up to block a swiftly falling blow, and heard her footsteps catch and slide. Then the Adept went down; but she kept her staff between herself and her opponent until the ground knocked it out of her hands.
The stranger struck again as Llannat went sprawling, but she had her feet under her and was rolling away. The blow bit into the earth instead, and Ari saw Llannat struggle upright—empty—handed, but still between her adversary and the open door.
The stranger took an easy step forward, holding his staff in a loose, almost careless grip. Ari saw Llannat brace herself, heard her draw a long, shaky breath—
The hell with this
, he thought, and fired.
He saw the bolt reach its target. The scarlet light in the clearing faded as the stranger fell backward, hit the ground, and disappeared.
Nice trick, that
, Ari thought. Then the backlash of the stimulant hit him, and he collapsed forward out of the open door onto the wet ground.
 
“ …
I’m the lucky son of a bitch who gets to wake the General.”
Halfway through the midwatch at Galcen Prime Base the message came in from Port Artat, and Commander Gil’s words came back to haunt him.
At least the General was sleeping here at the base, Gil reflected as he reached for the comm link to the General’s quarters, rather than out at the family’s house in the country. Not that there was much family living there anymore, which was probably the reason the General had taken to spending more and more of his nights at the base … .
Gil told himself to stop stalling, and activated the link. He drew a deep breath, and started talking as soon as the buzzing on the other end stopped.
“General Metadi. General Metadi—wake up.”
“I’m awake, Commander. What’s the problem?”
Gil swallowed. “Sir, it’s—there’s been an accident with a merchantman, sir. It requires your personal attention.”
“The hell you say! I’ll be down in Control in five minutes.”
In fact, only about three minutes had passed before the General stalked in—wide awake, fully dressed, and looking for answers.
“What’ve you got, Commander?”
Commander Gil picked up the message printout. “The CO’s Situation Report from the Station on Artat, sir.”
“Artat,” the General said. “Brief me.”
Gil compiled. “It’s a small, cold world in the Infabede sector, population nine hundred million. Second Mech-wing is based there—SERVRON Five’s people. Nearest inhabited neighbor is Mandeyn, about thirty hours’ distance in hyper.”
The General looked unimpressed. “So what the hell has Artat come up with that’s worth getting me out of bed?”
“This, sir,” said Gil unhappily.
He handed over the printout, and let the brief message answer the General’s question for him. A spaceship identifying herself as
Warhammer
had declared an emergency prior to landing at Port Artat. The ship had crashed and burned. A lifepod had been seen to eject, but the jets on the pod had failed to ignite and the chutes had failed to deploy. The pod had exploded on impact. There appeared to be human remains. The sketchy report ended with the words “amplifying info to follow.”
Gil busied himself at the message terminal. Not for all the worlds in the galaxy would he have stood and watched the General read that printout. He waited until he heard the unmistakable sound of a message crumpling inside a clenched fist before he turned around again.
“Do you wish to convene a Board of Inquiry, sir?”
“Damn right I want an Inquiry,” said the General. “I want to head it. We’re going to Artat. Let’s move.”
The trip out, in the fastest vessel available at Prime, proved every bit as bad as Gil had feared. He had all he could do at the outset, just keeping the General from taking the controls himself. Even under happier circumstances Metadi liked to push engines closer to redline that Gil cared to think about; and as for the present, Gil wouldn’t have ridden in a hovercar with a driver who looked like General Metadi did.
The rest of the trip the General spent pacing the passageways of the craft—in a bad temper and not afraid to let everyone know it—while officers and crew scrambled to stay out of his way.
The arrival at Port Artat’s Space Force Station was, if anything, worse. The station itself held no more than a pair of local defense fighters and a scoutcraft; and judging from all the posters and holodisplays, the only building spent most of its time as a recruiting office. At the sight of his office doorway sliding shut behind General Metadi himself, the commanding officer gave a visible shudder, then pulled himself together with such force Gil fancied he heard bones clicking.
If the General saw the shudder, he ignored it. “All right, Commander—what do you have?”
Wisely, Gil thought, the CO decided to follow the General’s lead and dispense with formalities. “All bad news, sir, I’m afraid. There … ah … wasn’t much left.”
“There usually isn’t,” snapped the General—Gil saw the CO wince. “Let me see the paperwork.”
The station CO punched up a file on the desk comp. “We have the preliminary field investigation and the results of the lab reports. I’m afraid that’s about it, sir … I’m sorry.”
The reports showed that there hadn’t been much left at all: a field of fragmented, burned
crallach
meat (with a note that the last known cargo of the
’Hammer
had been
crallach
, insurance claim appended); serial numbers taken from parts identified as having been at one time engines, and a serial number from the main hull structural member (numbers matched to the registration papers of Free Trader
Warhammer
, data from the Galcen Ministry of Ships and Spacecraft); pathologist’s report from the wreckage of the lifepod, showing that tissue samples from the mess inside matched the gene type of one Beka Rosselin-Metadi as recorded in Central Birth Records on Galcen (copy of same appended); official notice taken that Beka Rosselin-Metadi was listed as captain of
Warhammer
, next of kin listed as General Jos Metadi (record of emergency data [page two] appended).
Commander Gil swallowed, feeling a little sick, and turned away from the comp screen to stare out the office window at Port Artat’s flat grey landscape.
From behind him came silence, filled only by sporadic clicking from the comp keys. The General was taking his own sweet time with that report. Gil shook his head. Money could not have paid him to look closely at some of the stuff in that file. A crashed lifepod is not pretty.
“I want to examine the site of the wreck.”
When the General’s harsh voice broke the silence, Gil jumped. He turned around and saw Metadi, pale and tightlipped, regarding the Station Commander with a look of grim impatience.
“The site of the wreck,” said the Station Commander, sounding to Gil like a man trying very hard not to start babbling. “That would be the Ice Flats, sir.”
“I read that,” said the General, with a gentleness that made Gil shiver. “I said, I want to examine the site of the wreck.”
“Yes, sir,” said the Station CO, in the voice of one who has decided that nothing worse could possibly happen. “I’ll see to it, sir.”
The trip out was by aircar, and in very deep silence.
The Ice Flats—a vast expanse of open ground extending beyond Port Artat to the north and west—had all the scenic charm their name implied. Except for a large pit surrounded by a larger blackened area, nothing distinguished the crash site from the rest of a blank landscape. Pieces of twisted metal littered the Flats in every direction, and a freezing wind blew across the site, cutting through Gil’s Galcenian spring uniform and his borrowed Artatian cold-weather jacket like a laser cutting through bone.
BOOK: The Price of the Stars: Book One of Mageworlds
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