Even in hyperspace, the observation deck on Crystal World offered a view of stars—not the real ones, of course, but more of the Professor’s holographic simulations.
You have to admit it, Ari thought. The man’s an artist.
As soon as Crystal World had left Ovredisi orbit and made her jump, Ari had brought the cha’a pot and a stack of cups from the galley up to the forward dorsal section of the little yacht. Here, a quarter-sphere of spaceworthy armor-glass replaced everything but the rear bulkhead and the deck, and a simulated starscape twinkled outside.
He could have taken his cha’a to the dining salon, a tiny masterpiece of etched glass and silvered-steel filigree work, but the smallness of the room made him feel cramped at the same time as its fussiness made him restless. On the observation deck, at least, he didn’t feel as though his head was always about to crash into the crystal chandeliers.
Ignoring the assortment of wrought-metal chairs, he seated himself on the carpeted deck where he could use one of the sturdier-looking hassocks as a backrest. A moment later, the door in the rear bulkhead slid aside. He looked around.
“Hello, Llannat,” he said as the Adept stepped clear of the doors and let them slide shut again behind her. She’d lost no time in returning to her usual clothing, and “Cousin Lana” had apparently gone into the closet right along with her collection of demure black dresses.
Ari waved a hand at the collection of furniture scattered about the green-carpeted observation deck as if on a manicured lawn. “Have a seat someplace. Want some cha’a?”
She smiled. “So that’s what I heard calling my name out here. Did you bring an extra cup?”
“I brought a whole stack of them,” Ari said. He poured her some of the steaming drink. “The rest of the gang’s probably going to show up fairly soon.”
Llannat took the cup and saucer and sat down in a chair next to Ari. “How’s our passenger?”
Ari shrugged. “You’ll have to ask Jessan. He took over that end of things once we got D’Caer tucked away.”
“Crew berthing?” she asked.
“That’s right.”
“Where are you going to bunk, then?”
The doorway opened as she spoke, and Jessan walked in. “Ari’s in stateroom three, with me,” said the Khesatan. “But if he talks in his sleep I swear I’m going to throw him out here with some pillows and a blanket.”
Ari laughed. “You and who else?”
Jessan picked out a chair within easy reach of the cha’a-pot, straightened the cushion a little, and sat down. “There is that,” he admitted, pouring himself a cup. “Maybe I’ll just move out here myself. I have to check on D’Caer’s condition every few hours anyway, if we’re going to keep him under all the way to base.”
“You don’t have to handle the whole job yourself, just because you’re feeling guilty about living it up while Ari and I waited on you hand and foot,” Llannat said. “We’ll take our shifts, too.”
“Now, that’s an idea I can approve of, Mistress Hyfid,” said Beka. She came up the steep metal stairway from the Crystal World’s bridge, located below the observation deck in the yacht’s forward ventral section. The Professor followed close at her heels. “With three medics tending him round the clock, D’Caer can’t claim he didn’t get quality attention.”
She poured herself a cup of cha’a and carried it over to a chair-and-hassock set that offered a good view of the rest of the deck. Like Llannat, she’d taken the time to change her clothes, and once again wore Tarnekep Portree’s Mandeynan-style clothing. Her yellow hair was tied back from her face with one of Portree’s black velvet ribbons, and of Princess Berran, only a few smudges of makeup remained.
The Professor, not surprisingly, looked much the same as he had before: an elderly gentleman with a great deal of money and quiet, if a bit old-fashioned, good taste. Ari and the rest of the group on the observation deck watched in a sudden stillness as he filled a cup at the cha’a pot and sat down.
The Entiboran looked around the little group. “Captain,” he said, “Mistress Hyfid, Lieutenant Commander Jessan, Lieutenant Rosselin-Metadi—the time has come for us to decide what to do with Gentlesir Ebenra D’Caer.”
“You know what I want to do with him, Professor,” said Beka. She stretched her long legs out on the hassock in front of her and regarded the polished toes of her boots with an expression that Ari found more than a little unsettling. “And I hadn’t heard that it was a voting proposition.”
“No, my lady,” the Professor said. “But our advice, if you wish it, is at your disposal.”
“Quite the diplomat, aren’t you, ‘Uncle’?” Beka said. “But you’re right, I suppose . . . so who’ll go first? How about you, Ari? You look like you’re just bursting with things you’d like to say to me.”
Ari counted to ten, slowly. You knew she might get like this, he reminded himself. You thought you could handle it, remember?
Aloud, he said only, “Go easy, Bee. You don’t know for certain yet if he’s guilty.”
“Do you seriously think he isn’t?” she demanded.
Before he could think of anything else to say, Llannat’s gentle voice spoke up from the chair beside him. “We haven’t got proof.”
Jessan looked across at the Adept with a curious expression. “The comps back at the asteroid put his guilt at ninety per cent probable,” he said. “Isn’t that enough?”
Llannat shook her head. “Not for a private trial and execution.”
An uncomfortable silence followed. She had, Adept-like, put her finger on the problem. Jessan had never taken his eyes away from Llannat during the interchange, and when he spoke again his voice was low and unwontedly sober.
“What if D’Caer confesses?”
Beka gave a short laugh. “Him? You’ve got to be kidding.”
Jessan glanced over at her as she spoke, and shook his head. “We’ve already got him doped to the gills—just vary the dose a little, and he’ll answer anything.”
“It’s not quite that simple,” said the Professor, “but the suggestion has merit.”
Ari shook his head. “No. No chemicals.”
Beka fixed him with a cold blue stare. “I don’t care what sort of philosophical objections you picked up from your scaly buddies on Maraghai. This is no time to get particular.”
He shook his head again. “If you want a confession that badly, I can always try reasoning with him.”
She cocked her head. “Reasoning, big brother?”
“Strenuously, if necessary.”
They gazed at one another across the observation deck, and Beka began to smile. “Sounds good to me.”
“But inelegant,” the Professor said. “Confessions gained in that manner always have a taint to them.”
The grey-haired Entiboran looked directly at Llannat, and there was a long pause before he spoke again. “You could help us get the proof, Mistress Hyfid, if you would.”
Ari expected to hear an angry denial from the Adept. Instead, she looked down at her hands and answered without raising her eyes. “No Adept has been trained as an interrogator since the end of the war.”
“I have some small skill in the art,” the Professor said. “With your assistance, I think we can get the confirmation we need without doing violence to D’Caer’s person.”
There was another drawn-out silence before Llannat said, “Or to his mind?”
Beka slammed her empty cup down on the glass-topped side table at her elbow with a violence that threatened to break cup and tabletop both. “Damnation take it, Mistress Hyfid! What the hell else do you want?”
“Gently, my lady,” said the Professor. “Mistress Hyfid and I understand one another, I believe.” He looked back again at Llannat. “I give you my word, Mistress. Neither invasion nor compulsion.”
“And what if D’Caer does admit his guilt?” Beka asked hotly. “Then what am I supposed to do? Give him shuttle fare and send him home?”
Nobody else spoke, and Llannat was looking back down at her hands again. Finally, the Adept lifted her head and met Beka’s challenging gaze.
“Captain Rosselin-Metadi,” she said, “if Ebenra D’Caer condemns himself out of his own mouth and of his own volition, then you can do whatever you want with him and I won’t lift a hand to stop you.”
Someone was knocking at the door . . .
Ebenra D’Caer let fall the arm that he’d slid around the Princess of Sapne’s shoulders. His bodyguard stuck his head into the room.
“Your pardon, sir, but there’s a call for you.”
D’Caer scowled. “Can’t you see that I’m busy?”
“It’s important.”
“Oh, very well.”
He turned back to Princess Berran. “Excuse me, Your Highness, but I’ll have to leave you alone here for a moment.”
She smiled at him. Her blue eyes were bright and eager in spite of the modest blush that pinkened her pale cheeks. “I understand, Gentlesir D’Caer—but hurry back. Uncle will scold me dreadfully if I’m gone too long.”
He kissed her hand. “I live for your smile, Your Highness,” he said, and followed the bodyguard out.
The hallway and atrium of Marchen Bres’s country estate buzzed with the sound of sociable chatter. The bodyguard walked ahead, making a path through the crush of party-goers as the two men made their way to a quiet alcove off the maui atrium.
D’Caer followed his bodyguard into the alcove. The guard pressed a stud set into the wainscoting, and the back wall slid aside to reveal a secure comm-lmk console, its red “call waiting” light flashing on and off. D’Caer picked up the handset and the light went out.
“Get away at once,” a rough voice whispered over the link. “They know everything.”
“What do you mean?” he demanded. “Who are you?”
The rough voice didn’t answer, but hurried on, sounding breathless and afraid. “Space Force Intelligence knows about the Council assassination. They’ve sent a man to Ovredis to arrest you.”
D’Caer looked out into the main room. A Space Force commander lounged against the far wall, resplendent in his dress blues. He hasn’t moved since I came in. Is he the one?
The commander glanced to left and right. D’Caer followed the glances. Now that he knew what to look for, he could count half a dozen muscular young men with military haircuts dispersed in key positions around the room.
A chill ran down D’Caer’s spine. He set the handset back down without looking at it, and forced himself to gaze about the atrium with a casual air. After all, he reminded himself, this isn’t the worst scrape you’ve ever been in.
Wait . . . there was the Princess again, standing just outside the alcove. He’d all but forgotten about that interrupted bit of diversion.
He frowned. “You shouldn’t have come here, Your Highness.”
“I was bored, sitting all alone,” she said. “So I came looking for you.”
He had no time now for royal fluffbrains, no matter how entertainingly innocent; he was about to send her back to her uncle when an idea struck him, and he smiled.
He stepped up to her and took her arm. “Then we can go together, Your Highness.”
Her blue eyes widened. “Oh, but I couldn’t do that—Uncle would be so very angry!”
D’Caer pressed his other hand against her waist, then tilted it up to show her a tiny hand-blaster. “We’re going.”
The fine blue vein in her throat leaped with the sudden race of her pulse, but she made no resistance as he guided her firmly through the press of bodies to the front door.
“Summon your vehicle,” he whispered.
The Princess of Sapne tilted her head. The doorman said a few words over the in-house comm circuit to the parking bays, where the ranks of hovercars waited with their chauffeurs.
The royal family’s hovercar was waiting when they reached the bottom of the steps. The driver, a huge man in Sapnish livery, leaped out to open the rear door and stand beside it.
“No tricks, Your Highness,” D’Caer whispered in the girl’s ear. “Or I will hurt you. Badly.”
The girl gasped and bit her lip. D’Caer could feel her whole body trembling against him as they climbed into the hovercar’s private rear compartment.
“The spaceport, and hurry,” he commanded the driver.
The chauffeur inclined his head and shut the door behind them, then took his place behind the controls. The hovercar purred forward. D’Caer watched the countryside flowing smoothly past the windows for a moment, and then turned to the Princess.
“Ah, well,” he said, and shifted the miniature blaster over to his other hand. “No reason why the moment should be wasted. Shall we resume where we left off, my dear?”
The Princess shook her head wordlessly, and shrank against the seat back in a useless attempt at evasion. D’Caer contemplated the fearful young woman for a moment. Then, still smiling, he reached out with his free hand to cup one of her breasts, firm and warm under the fabric of her gown.
“It’s a good thing,” Jessan said, “that you made Beka leave off her knife for this little charade. Otherwise we’d have to wash Gentlesir Ebenra D’Caer out of that hovercar with a hose.”
“She’s well in control of herself,” the Professor replied, without looking up from the control panel of the asteroid base’s main holoprojector.
“You hope,” said Jessan.
He stood watching at the Professor’s shoulder, one hand tapping out a restless rhythm on the panel’s edge while the older man created an unrolling landscape around the mock-up hovercar shell. Llannat Hyfid sat cross-legged on the cement floor of the projection room at some distance from them both, a small figure in Adept’s black, eyes closed and features immobile as she held D’Caer in the beglamoured state that made him more susceptible to the Professor’s holographic illusions.
“Still,” the Entiboran conceded, as the overhead monitor showed D’Caer’s hand sliding down below Beka’s waist, “it might be wise to abridge the ‘trip to the port’ sequence. I doubt that he’ll notice.”
The hovercar whirred through the spaceport gates, flashed arrogantly past the commercial craft on its way to the private docking bays, and pulled up with a whine of nullgravs at the entrance ramp of a yacht painted in the blue and silver of the Royal House of Sapne. The driver pulled the side door open.
“Here so soon?” asked D’Caer. Briefly, he considered compelling the Princess to board the yacht with him, as a combination of insurance and entertainment for the journey, but something about the look of the huge chauffeur stopped him.
Loyal family retainer to the core, that one, he thought. If I tried to abduct Her Royal Silliness, he’d pound me into the pavement before he noticed I’d shot him dead. As it is, I’ll be in hyperspace by the time he’s done calming her hysterics.
“Thank you for the loan of the yacht, my dear,” he said instead. “This will only take a little while.”
He gave the Princess a farewell kiss that she bore with only a faint whimpering noise in her throat, and then slid out of the hovercar. “Good-bye, Your Highness.”
He strolled up the boarding ramp and shut the hatch behind him.
“High time,” Jessan muttered, as Beka and Ari climbed out of the mock-up hovercar and headed over toward the lift doors. Behind them, the appearance of the “spaceport” shifted and changed. The only parts that remained were those visible from the windows of Crystal World, docked back in the asteroid base’s chilly, echoing bay.
Readouts flickered on the console screens. “There’s his lift-off now,” said the Professor.
The Entiboran touched a sequence of keys on the console control panel. The ship pulled down under heavy tractor beams, imitating the acceleration of launch, and the holoprojections outside the windows showed Ovredis dwindling away.
“I hope he enjoys the trip,” Jessan said absently, most of his attention on the monitors that showed Beka and Ari’s progress across the floor of the bay. Beka seemed mostly disgusted—she wore the expression of someone who’s just found a dead insect at the bottom of the cha’a pot—but the look on Ari’s face made the Khesatan shake his head.
Somehow I don’t think Beka was the one on the edge of breaking back there.
The big medic had himself under control, though, by the time he and his sister stepped out of the lift into the projection room and came up to the control panel. “How did it go?” he asked.
Jessan shrugged. “You’ll have to ask the Professor. But it looked good from out front.”
“It damned well better have,” Beka said. “As far as I’m concerned, the only question left is whether I give him to Dadda for a solstice present or cycle him out of an airlock with a space suit and half an hour of air.”
“Perhaps we shouldn’t be so hasty, my lady,” the Professor said. A new light on the console had begun to flash. “Our friend wants to make a long-distance comm call through the planet’s orbiting link stations.”
“Interesting,” said Jessan. “Are we able to oblige him?”
The Professor smiled. “Fortunately, we are prepared for the eventuality. At the moment, the comm links on Crystal World connect only to this panel.”
The flashing red light changed to yellow as the Professor picked up a handset, and the speaker crackled. “This is Ebenra D’Caer on Ovredis,” said a scratchy voice. “I want to talk to Nivome.”
Nivome, thought Jessan. I knew this felt too easy.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the Professor said. A readout panel beside the handset showed two wave patterns superimposed, indicating a distorter in operation at the Professor’s end of the link. “Nivome isn’t talking to anyone.”
“He’ll talk to me,” said the scratchy voice. “Get him.”
“If you insist, sir.”
The imitation of an offended family servant had Jessan suppressing a laugh in spite of himself. Then the Professor switched off the comm link and turned to the others.
“Gentlesir D’Caer can stay in suspense for a few minutes,” he said. “Meanwhile, we have trouble.”
Beka bit her lower lip and regarded the monitor views of Crystal World with an expression that made her look more like Tarnekep Portree than the Princess of Sapne. Next to her, Ari shook his head in frustration and scowled at the comm set.
“Who’s this Nivome?” he asked.
“Like the Professor said—trouble,” Jessan answered. “If he’s who I think he is—and the name’s not all that common—he heads the Five Families of Rolny and makes D’Caer look like a pauper. Owns a couple of planets outright, that sort of thing. I met him a few times, back home on Khesat.”
“Excellent,” said the Professor, his face brightening. “Can you imitate his voice?”
“Not very well.”
“Do the best you can, Commander. It’s a long way from Ovredis to Rolny, and our friend won’t be surprised to find himself contending with interference on the hyper-space relays.”
“Indeed.” Jessan reached for the handset. “I’ll provide Nivome for you, then—but you’d better make that ‘heavy interference.’ ”
“Ion storms, I think, in the Arcari sector,” the Professor murmured, bending over the control panel once more. “Over to you, Commander.”
Jessan closed his eyes for a second, calling up everything he could remember about Nivome’s speech patterns from a handful of long-ago casual meetings. Just a touch of the accent should do the trick for something this short. And don’t worry about timbre and pitch. The Professor’s ion storms can handle that. All right, then—here we go.
“Rolny here,” he said over the comm link. “D’Caer, this had better be important.”
“It is. Space Force is onto us.”
“Calm yourself, D’Caer,” said Jessan. “What is there for them to find out?”
“You know damn well what!” snarled D’Caer’s voice over the link. “And if they know I arranged the Domina’s assassination, how much do you want to bet they don’t know who put me up to it—and why?”
Out of his own mouth, Jessan thought with satisfaction. And willingly, too.
The Khesatan glanced over at Llannat, still deep in her trance. He wondered if the Adept knew what Beka had endured to fulfill her part of that bargain the two women had struck back aboard Crystal World.
“Are you sure about all this?” he said to D’Caer over the comm link by way of encouragement.
“It’s true,” the scratchy voice replied. “There was a Space Force man here to arrest me, but I got clear. You’d better do the same.”
Time for a touch of panic, Jessan decided. “You can’t show up here, D’Caer!”
“What kind of fool do you think I am? I won’t go near Darvell. Just watch yourself.”
Damn, thought Jessan. If Nivome’s holed up on Darvell then nothing can touch him. That place is worse than Rolny.
“I can handle things on my end,” he said over the link. “Is there anything else you want to tell me?”
“Nothing. Out.”
The link clicked off.
“Now that,” said the Professor, “was certainly informative. My congratulations, Commander, on an inspired performance.”
“One manages,” Jessan said. “What next?”
“The ’Hammer and I are going to Darvell,” Beka said. “Anybody who wants to come along, can—but I’m going regardless.”
“And I, my lady,” said the Professor. “Lieutenant Rosselin-Metadi?”
Ari ignored him. “You know I’m with you, Bee.”
“Ari,” she said, “you don’t know what Darvell is like. It’s not even part of the Republic.”
The big medic shook his head and growled one of his Selvauran oaths deep in his throat. “I told you once already—I’m coming along. How about you, Jessan?”
“Of course,” he said. Darvell. Now I know I’ve gone crazy. “I wouldn’t miss it for all the worlds.”
“Thanks,” Beka said. “All three of you. I suppose we can ask Mistress Hyfid when she comes out of her trance.”
“Are you taking volunteers for something?” came a voice, faint but clear, from across the projection room.
Jessan turned his head, and saw Llannat getting stiffly to her feet. The Adept looked like a good candidate for a hot bath, a solid meal, and twelve hours of sleep, but her step was firm enough as she came up to join the others at the console.
“We’re planning to go visit Darvell and get ourselves killed,” Ari explained. The prospect didn’t seem to be bothering him much. “Want to come along?”
“You’re all crazy,” Llannat said. “Am I invited?”
The Professor made the Adept a formal bow. “Your presence, Mistress, would do our campaign great honor.”
She smiled at the Entiboran. “Then how could I refuse?”
The console beeped.
“Hyperspace jump calculations coming in from Crystal World,” Beka said. “Professor?”
“Let’s see where he wants to go,” said the Entiboran. In silence, they watched the numbers scroll up the console screen. Beka was the first to speak.
“I’ll be damned,” she said, as the Professor keyed in more commands, and the star-rush of hyperspace entry appeared in holoprojected glory before the cockpit windows of Crystal World. “The son of a bitch thinks he’s jumping for the Mageworlds!”