Talk in Warhammer’s cockpit had lapsed as the task of keeping the freighter on course took up more and more of Beka’s attention. Now, with the flight-time clock marking off the few seconds remaining in hyperspace, she looked over at the copilot’s seat. Judging from his closed eyes and even breathing, her passenger had fallen asleep.
“Wake up, Professor,” she said. “We’re about to drop out of hyper and start dodging asteroids.”
He didn’t answer, but Beka had other things on her mind than waiting to see if he’d heard. She took a deep breath to calm herself. We need to lose momentum real fast—there’s going to be a lot of rocks out there. This had better work.
At one second before dropout, she switched in the real-space engines on maximum thrust. Then, as the ship came out of hyperspace, she threw the ’Hammer into a 180-degree skew-flip, and felt herself pressed hard into the pilot’s seat as the freighter backed down at twelve gravities.
The cockpit darkened around her. In the center of her field of vision, the readout on the relative motion sensor showed high velocity astern. The negative numbers unwound toward zero as Warhammer’s main engines fought momentum. Beka was close to blacking out—she couldn’t see the lights and dials around the edge of the control panel—and she needed all her strength to reach for the master power switch.
—2, —1, 0 . . . Cut Power!
The release from deceleration threw her forward against the safety belts. Recovering, she slapped the Shield switch to divert energy to the ship’s passive defenses. “Override, off,” she said aloud, talking herself through the checklist while her head cleared. “Sensors, on. Life support, on. Gravity, on. Let’s have a look and see where we are.”
She switched to the Damage Control readout for an assessment of just how bad the trip had been, and decided that Dadda’s little girl could pat herself on the back. Damage was light, and the cargo hadn’t shifted at all.
“Any one you can walk away from, eh, Professor?”
Her passenger looked a bit groggy—as well he should after a high-G brake—but his imperturbability was still intact. “I’ve seen worse,” he said.
He worked his hand past the safety webbing into an inner coat pocket, and brought out a second slip of paper.
“Broadcast this recognition signal on this frequency,” he said, handing the paper to Beka, “then listen for the directional beacon you’ll find answering it on this channel. The sooner we get to work, the better.”
Beka made the trip through the asteroid field as quickly as she dared, homing in on the source of the beacon—a big, cave-pocked asteroid. “Dock in the third cave from the elevated pole there,” said her passenger. “Just beside the sunset line.”
She took the ’Hammer into the cave at a gentle cruising speed, and watched the rock walls become first smooth stone and then polished metal. Soon the cave was looking more like the docking-bay of a small space station.
“Set her down over there.” Her passenger indicated the area next to another small freighter, one that to an un-practiced eye might have been Warhammer’s twin.
Beka looked the freighter. “Now I understand what you have in mind.”
“That’s right. Ex-Free Trader Amsroto, old Libra class. By the time we get done, nobody’ll ever be able to prove that she wasn’t the ’Hammer.”
“That’s going to be a lot of hardware down the drain,” said Beka, as Warhammer settled onto the floor of the bay. “And you still haven’t told me how I’m going to pay you for?”
Her passenger began unbuckling his safety webbing. “Would you believe me, my lady, if I told you I was doing all this out of a sense of obligation to a member of your House?”
“No,” she said flatly. “That stuff died out years ago.”
She thought she heard him sigh. “So it did, Captain. So it did. Do you have the papers listing your hull number and engine numbers?”
Beka undid her own restraining belts and stretched. “In my cabin,” she said. “I’ll bring them out.”
“Right,” said her passenger. “Then you start shifting your cargo to Amsroto while I stamp the numbers on her. How soon must we lift out of here, to tow Amsroto to Artat on time?”
She checked the cockpit chronometer and punched some figures into the navicomp. “We’ve got six hours forty-nine minutes thirty-five seconds Standard until the jump to hyperspace,” she said. “Make it six hours even to do the job.”
“Let’s move, then.”
By the time she’d fetched Warhammer’s papers from the cabin locker and returned to the cockpit, she could see her passenger already waiting by the open entryway of Amsroto.
“Works fast, doesn’t he?” she said aloud, and tucked the bundle of papers inside the quilted jacket she’d picked up to take the place of her still-sodden cloak.
The sound of her footsteps on the ’Hammer’s ramp echoed in the nearly empty bay, and her breath rose in a curl of mist. The Professor—if he was in fact the proprietor of this little hidey-hole—didn’t believe in wasting energy on extra heat.
Out of long habit, she turned to her right at the foot of the ramp. “Let’s have a look at you,” she told the ship. Sensors and damage control comp caught a lot of things a pilot would miss, but . . . “computers go down, and numbers lie,” her father had said many times. “Always check for yourself.”
In the course of her walk around Warhammer, she saw that the hidden bay held a surprising variety of different spaceships. A single-seat fighter, framework tilted at an angle suggesting that its last landing hadn’t been a gentle one, occupied deck space between a meteor-scarred cargo drone and a pleasure yacht decked out like a party cake in blue and silver trimming; and off in a corner beyond a dozen or so other antique craft, a battered-looking Mage-built scoutship hunched on the deckplates of the bay like a scavenger bird on a rock.
Beka stood very still for a moment, then nodded to herself, slowly, and continued her walk around the ’Hammer.
By the time she’d finished and walked over to Amsroto, the Professor was busy smoothing the serial numbers off one of the hull plates with a hydro-burnisher.
“Have you got Warhammer’s papers?” he asked, bending to drop the burnisher into an open tool kit.
“Yes,” she said. She reached into the right-side pocket of her jacket for the miniature blaster that always lived there, and put the business end of the little weapon against the back of his neck.
He froze. Then, with infinite caution, he lifted both hands and placed them flat against Amsroto’s hull.
Beka started breathing again. “Now,” she said. “It’s time you told me what your name really is, and how you wound up with a Mageworld scoutcraft parked in your docking bay.”
“Defiant?” asked her passenger, sounding imperturbable as ever. “I own her. As for names . . . names change, and the galaxy has forgotten mine. But I was Armsmaster to House Rosselin, when Entibor was still a living world.”
“I’ll be damned,” said Beka. “Everybody thinks you’re dead.”
“An excusable mistake,” said the Professor. “I . . . retired abruptly at the end of the war, and didn’t keep up my old acquaintances. My lady, can we abandon this rather awkward conversation for one a bit more civilized?”
“I keep telling you, it’s ‘Captain’,” said Beka, slipping the hand-blaster back into her jacket pocket.
The Professor lowered his arms and faced toward her. “You believe in playing for high stakes, Captain,” he said, turning his right hand palm-up to disclose a tiny single-charge needler.
Beka closed her eyes and let out her breath in a long, shuddering sigh. “My father always said,” she remarked, “that there was no feeling in the galaxy quite like noticing you were still alive after all. Now I know what he meant.”
The Professor slipped the needler into his coat. “Was all that really necessary, Captain Rosselin-Metadi?”
She took the ’Hammer’s papers out from inside her jacket. “Yes,” she said. “I couldn’t think of any other way to learn if I could trust you, except to see whether you killed me or not.”
The Professor took the papers from her outstretched hand—she wasn’t shaking, which surprised her a little—and said, “A bit drastic for most people, but effective. As long as you’ve decided to trust me, Captain, may I trouble you for one thing more?”
“I suppose,” said Beka. “What do you need?”
He made a deprecating gesture with one hand. “Just a small amount of your blood.”
“What the hell for?”
“Additional verisimilitude,” said the Professor. “It’s the little touches that mark the work of an artist. At the same time that I—call it ‘acquired’—Defiant, I came into possession of her medical kit as well. Since she was Magebuilt, the kit included an emergency supply of undifferentiated general-purpose tissue.”
“You want to replicate me?” Beka backed off a step, shaking her head. “Oh, no, you don’t!”
The Professor made an exasperated noise. “A Mageworld biochemist with a full laboratory setup might have been able to coax a replicant out of that glop, but I can’t. It’s nothing but first-aid stuff—doesn’t know whether it wants to be a liver or a leg, but slap it onto an open wound instead of tape or synthaflesh, and you’ll heal overnight without a scar.”
“Handy,” said Beka. “But the blood—”
“It’s one way to initialize the match,” said the Professor. “Amsroto still needs a pilot, after all—or at least, the convincing remains of one.”
Beka nodded, and began to smile. “Professor, I like the way you think.”
A little over sixteen hours later the ’Hammer—with the newly renamed and reloaded Amsroto attached to her belly by landing claw—approached the dropout point for the Artat system. Beka had kept Warhammer’s hyperspace velocity down to normal or a little below for this leg of the trip, and the control panel showed mostly green, with only occasional blinks of amber and red in protest at the ship’s doubled mass.
The lights blurred as Beka fought down a massive yawn. She counted back—yes, it had been close to forty-eight hours since the last time she’d gotten any sleep, back when the ’Hammer had been running on autopilot for Mandeyn.
Good thing there isn’t much more of this. I’m nearly seeing double already.
“Are you sure this is going to work?” she asked the Professor, more to keep her mind from wandering than for any other reason.
“Of course it’ll work,” said her passenger. “No one puts a contract out on a corpse. And every holochannel in the galaxy will carry the news when the rich, famous, and beautiful Beka Rosselin-Metadi spatters herself and her father’s historic spacecraft all over some backworld.”
When Dadda finds out I’m still alive, Beka thought, he’s going to kill me for doing this to him. Aloud, she said, “I’m not rich. Or famous. Or beautiful, either.”
“You will be by the time the news announcers get through with you,” the Professor promised. “As soon as the obsequies are officially over we can go back to Mandeyn and pick up the trail. Whoever wanted you dead, Captain, is almost certainly connected to the one who ordered your mother’s assassination.”
She gave him an inquiring look. “What makes you think you can find either of them?”
“I’ve been a number of other things in my time besides Armsmaster to your house,” the Professor said. “As a professional myself in that line of work—I can find them.”
For a moment there was no sound besides the ’Hammer’s own ambient noise. “So,” Beka said, when the pause had stretched out long enough, “how do we go about finding our assassin? It’s a big galaxy out there.”
“The easy part,” said the Professor, “is going to be finding the person who actually engineered the job. Only about six people in the business could handle an assassination that subtle—and I didn’t, which leaves five to check on.”
“What’s in all this for you? Last I heard, hired killers didn’t take charity cases.”
She heard her passenger sigh. “Archaic as it sounds, my lady, I swore an oath of loyalty to your House. And no matter what your occupation, you’re still the Domina of Entibor.”
Beka shook her head. “I don’t believe this.” A buzzer sounded. “Coming out of hyperspace!” she announced with relief.
The stars reappeared. As always, the sudden glory of the sight took Beka’s breath away. If I ever get tired of seeing that, she thought, it’ll be time for me to give up piloting.
The Artat system lay spread out beneath them. “Third planet in’s our target,” she said. “Let’s tell the nice people that we’re here.”
In a few minutes, she had contact with Port Artat over a voice circuit. “Inspace Control, Inspace Control,” she said into the comm link, pitching her voice as low as possible to help out the transmission, “this is Warhammer, Warhammer, checking into the net, over.”
“Warhammer, Warhammer, this is Inspace Control, Inspace Control. Roger, over,” came the faint reply.
“This is Warhammer. Request permission to orbit Artat, over.”
“This is Inspace Control, roger, permission granted, out.”
“And that,” said Beka, as the link clicked off, “was the easy part.”
Warhammer drove on toward the cloud-covered world, and began her orbit. Beka activated the link again.
“Inspace Control, this is Warhammer. Request permission to land at Port Artat.”
“Warhammer, this is Inspace Control. Commence your landing approach.”
Turning to the Professor, Beka said, “Here it goes. I’m starting autopilot on Amsroto now.” Then, over the comm link: “Inspace, ’Hammer. I am declaring an in-flight emergency. Stand by, over.”
“What is the nature of your emergency?” squawked the voice from the comm link.
Beka ignored it.
“What is the nature of your emergency? Acknowledge!” insisted the voice link a second time.
Again, Beka ignored it. She watched the split screen of the navicomp—data from the ’Hammer above, from Amsroto below. When Amsroto’s half-screen showed the old freighter firmly on course for her appointment with the planet’s surface, and when all the dirtside trackers had locked in on the incoming emergency, Beka released the landing claw.
The navicomp screen went blank as the link with Amsroto broke off. Warhammer shot away from Amsroto at max acceleration to jump speed.
“Now!” said Beka, and jumped the ’Hammer blind.
Again, she gave it a five-second count before dropping out into realspace, and breathed a sigh of relief when the ship emerged in one piece. She’d worked out the calculations as best she could in advance—but a blind jump taken without a proper run-up still pushed the odds more than she liked.
The navicomp was up again. From the data it was giving her, she’d missed the estimated emergence point by more than just a bit. She thanked whatever deities happened to be listening for not bringing her out of hyper inside a star, and then got to work fixing the ’Hammer’s location and charting a return course for the Professor’s asteroid.
After the acrobatics with Amsroto, Beka was glad to make a normal hyperspace jump for a change. As soon as the stars had gone blue and vanished she engaged the ’Hammer’s autopilot. Then, yawning, she unfastened her safety belts and stood up.
“That’s it,” She said, rotating her shoulders to relieve muscles gone stiff from tension. “I’m off to get some sleep.”
“Six hundred and fifty credits,” Ari said without preamble as he slid into the booth at the Greentrees Lounge, where Jessan and Llannat Hyfid sat waiting. “By midnight.”
“I hope it’s in small, unmarked bills,” said Llannat with a straight face, “because that’s all we have.” Like the others, the Adept had come in civilian clothes—in her case, a plain coverall in dull black fabric. Her staff was propped ready to hand against the side of the booth.
“It couldn’t hurt,” said Ari. “You have the cash with you, Jessan?”
“The bag’s right here,” said the Khesatan. “But this is going to just about kill the wardroom slush fund. After payday, we’ll probably be able to pick up a little bit more.”
“If we don’t,” said Llannat, “it had better be a very small epidemic.”
“Meanwhile,” said Ari, “we’ve got a lot of time to kill, and this place has the best cheap food in Namport, so we might as well have dinner.”
The sun set over the spaceport as the three junior officers applied themselves to a leisurely meal. “Here’s to riotous living, Namport style,” said Ari, after the waiter had trundled out the first serving dishes. “Broiled groundgrubs and marsh eel soup. There’s certainly nothing like it on Galcen.”
Llannat grinned, and pulled a broiled grub off its skewer with her teeth. “That’s the truth—I haven’t had a meal this good since I left Maraghai.”
Ari dished out a helping of marsh eel soup from the just-arrived pot and presented it to Llannat with a flourish. “They bring out the local beer to drink with this,” he said. “You’re supposed to pour some of it into your soup to punch up the broth a little.”
The Adept looked dubious. “I don’t know—”
“We aren’t on duty, we aren’t in uniform, and we aren’t on an official mission,” Jessan said. “So what’s the worst they can do to us—make us medics and send us to Nammerin?”
“No,” said Ari, after a moment’s thought. “The worst they can do is court-martial us and send us home. Considering that what we’re doing is technically illegal, I for one wouldn’t mind being able to list ‘intoxication’ as a ‘mitigating or extenuating circumstance.’ Here comes the beer now.”
As he spoke, another waiter brought out a tray of beer bottles and began setting up a pair by each place. “One for the soup,” explained Ari to Llannat, “and one to drink.”
She picked up one of her bottles and inspected the label. “ ‘Tree Frog Export Dark’?”
“Always demand the best,” Jessan said, popping the seal on his first bottle and pouring some into the soup bowl.
The Adept shrugged and opened a bottle. “If my friends could see me now,” she said. “Into the soup it goes.”
“That’s the spirit,” said Ari, pouring a good dollop of Export Dark into his own bowl and stirring vigorously. “All the same, there’s better stuff than Tree Frog, if we’re going to do any serious drinking.”
“Not here in Namport, there isn’t,” said Jessan, “unless you count that aqua vitae they distill from purple mushrooms—which I personally wouldn’t.”
“I wouldn’t either,” said Ari. “But take a look in that bag you’re carrying.”
The Khesatan reached under the table, fumbled for a moment, and brought up a tall, narrow-necked bottle filled with dark amber fluid. Ari nodded toward the bottle.
“Does that look like purple mushrooms to you?” he asked.
Jessan turned it to inspect the label. His eyebrows went up as he read. “Galcenian brandy . . . prewar Uplands Reserve . . . I’d say it looks more like a minor miracle. How did you come by this stuff on a lieutenant’s pay?”
“Family cellars,” said Ari, with a shrug. “Before that it was part of Warhammer’s liquor supply—and who knows how my father got it. I brought it with me to Nammerin as a consolation prize for getting assigned here, and wound up being too busy to drink it.”
“So what’s an heirloom like that doing in a bar like this?” asked Jessan. “Meaning no disrespect to Greentrees, of course.”
“I dropped it into the carrybag before we left base,” Ari said. “Seeing that you’re leaving for Pleyver, and Mistress Hyfid has just arrived, and you’ve got a promotion that we still haven’t celebrated properly—”
Jessan cut him off. “Are you proposing to share this jewel with us?”
“I am.”
“In that case . . . ” The Khesatan regarded the bottle for a moment before popping the seal. He poured a generous shot into a clean glass, and then repeated the ritual twice more for Llannat and Ari.
“A toast to our beloved Commanding General!” Jessan said. “After all,” he added in an aside, “it’s his brandy.”
Ari laughed, and drained the glass. He held it out to Jessan for a refill. Llannat, meanwhile, had taken a small sip. Now she sat leaning back against the wall of the booth, with the glass cradled between her hands.
“This stuff isn’t booze,” she said, after a few moments. “It’s a religious experience.”
Ari looked at her. “The patterns of the universe as seen through the bottom of a bottle?”
She cocked an eyebrow at him and took another small sip. “Why not? It’s a part of the universe like everything else.”
“Including Tree Frog beer?”
“Sure,” she said. “But this stuff’s like all of autumn caught in a glass: the sun, the breeze from the high slopes, the wineberries after the first frost . . . ”
The Adept’s dark eyes grew hazy and faraway, looking at something in the middle distance that only she could see. Ari watched her uneasily—she didn’t appear to be the sort who was given to prophecies and visions, but you never could tell. She came out of the reverie without saying anything unnerving, however, and applied herself to the marsh eel soup as though nothing had happened.
Jessan, meanwhile, had bowed to local custom and was washing down the strong-flavored soup with more Tree Frog beer. After Llannat’s brief excursion into mysticism, Ari found himself unwilling to spoil the memory of that first taste of brandy, and contented himself with refilling his water glass.
The soup was followed by tusker-ox steaks in red spore sauce, and then by a jellied fruit pie. At last, midnight drew near. Ari stood, and Jessan handed over the bundle of cash.
“There you are,” the Khesatan said. “Remember—try to keep a low profile. As low as possible, that is.”
“Very funny,” said Ari. “Just make sure that you two have the scoutcar ready to pick me up at fifteen after. I’d hate to have to walk all the way home.”