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VIII. nammerin nearspace
galcen: prime base

Beka looked ahead out of Warhammer’s cockpit window. The big cruiser was still hanging there, just this side of the ’Hammer’s jump point on her current course. At least the shields were holding. So far, the fighters hadn’t been able to close the range.

Time to figure a new jump, Beka told herself. Try for a point barely astern of him. That’s hardest for him to move to cover, and my course change’ll be so small he might not detect it right away.

She heard a hammering sound on the Warhammer’s starboard quarter. On the control panel, a warning light flashed to life.

“Damn,” she said, under her breath. One of the fighters had scored a hit, in spite of the really spectacular light show the Professor was putting on. “Another good idea shot to hell.”

She reversed thrust to put the Warhammer into a sudden slowdown. All six of the fighters sped past, jets glowing. Beka brought the Warhammer back to full forward, throwing in some up vector to keep the fighters bunched on the ’Hammer’s ventral side. That way, they’d foul their own ranges, and have to waste time and power in avoiding collisions.

Besides, this wasn’t the way the drill was supposed to go—maybe the pilots would outrun their own training. Her father always said that most fighter pilots were crazy kids still young enough to think they were immortal. The Republic hadn’t seen any serious fighting since the Magewar; none of these pilots were likely to be combat veterans.

Not that I’m a combat veteran either, Beka reminded herself, but I’ve heard all of Dadda’s stories. Twice.

Ahead of her, Corisydron moved to block the new jump point.

Son of a bitch figures the jump faster than I do. I’m going to have to get a computer upgrade next chance I get.

She caught herself estimating just how far back a comp system fast enough to outthink a cruiser would set Warhammer’s numbered account on Suivi Point, and began to laugh. Later, girl, later.

Now the fighters were coming in again, grouped in two wedges. One fighter began to falter and slow, and a trail of reflected sunlight started forming behind the limping craft—the sloughed-off lining of its jets, condensing in space’s endless cold.

He’s down hard with engine problems, she thought. Only five to goand I can’t shoot them. Or I’ll never be able to go home again.

She put Warhammer onto a new course for yet another jump point beyond and astern of the cruiser. Closer and closer she ran, until finally the huge vessel began to turn—but away from Warhammer, not toward her.

Beka frowned. What’s this?

Still frowning, she began the final tick-down for the run to jump. The cruiser finished its long, looping turn, and began accelerating again on a convergent course. The fighters continued to swarm on Warhammer’s ventral side, firing but doing no real damage at the longer range with their light weapons.

She checked the sensor readouts. Not only had Corisydron paralleled Warhammer’s course; the Space Force vessel had also matched speeds with the freighter. Good thing we’re inside the minimum range of his guns—and the fighters don’t dare shoot us for fear of hitting him.

But he’s so close, his field is interfering with my jump. I can’t jump with him so near, I can’t turn without colliding with the little guys—time to see who’s the fastest. She pushed the throttle lever forward again.

Suddenly, warning lights blazed on all over the panel. Alarms began hooting and beeping. Warhammer’s controls vibrated under her hands, and she could feel the whole frame of the spacecraft starting to buck and tremble around her.

“Damn,” she said aloud, over the rising howl of the freighter’s oversized engines. “The bastard’s got a tractor beam on me.”


“He’s maneuvering again,” said the comptech at the tank terminal. “And he’s fast.”

Gil walked over to the watch officer. “Has he hit us?”

“Not yet.”

Gil took a deep breath. “All right,” he said to the watch officer. “I am ready to relieve you.”

The watch officer stared. “What do you mean? This is my watch!”

Gil met the other man’s incredulous gaze. The maneuvers in the main tank were shaping up as the nicest little space battle Command Control had seen in years—in the watch officer’s shoes, Gil wouldn’t have wanted to let go of it, either. So here I am, about to cycle a perfectly good career out the airlock. Life’s a bitch.

He pushed down the urge to leave the whole thing in the watch officer’s eager hands and asked, instead, “Commander, what’s your lineal number?”

“Seven eight seven two, zero zero two three,” replied the watch officer, in something close to a snarl.

“My number is seven eight seven two, zero zero one six. I’m senior to you, and I’m taking the watch.”

“I protest!”

“Fine. Send a letter to the Board.” Gil raised his voice to carry into the farthest reaches of the space. “In Control, this is Commander Gil. I have the watch.”

The man he’d relieved snapped “Log that!” at the duty comptech. Gil ignored them both and walked over to the battle comm—Space Force’s highest-priority, highest-security communications system.

“Give me the comm.”

The petty officer gave him the handset. Gil keyed it and waited for the double beep of the crypto synchronizing.

Corisydron, this is Space Force Control. Condition White, Weapons Tight. Break off at once, return to base. Acknowledge. Over.”

“Dropped synch, over,” a distorted, faraway voice replied.

Gil’s lips tightened. The CO of the Cory wasn’t any more eager to let go of this one than the watch officer here on Galcen had been. That “dropped synch” was a polite way of asking if the speaker on the other end still had all his synapses firing in order.

“This is Space Force Control,” he repeated. “Break off at once. Return to base. Acknowledge. Over.”

A long pause from the Cory, and then, “Will comply. Out.”

Up in the main battle tank, the blue triangle and the smaller blue pips peeled away from the unknown. The red dot sped on, holding a straight-line accelerating course, then flickered out.

He’s jumped.

Gil let out his breath in a long, shaky sigh. Behind him, he heard the swoosh-snick of the door sliding open and closing again, and then the General’s unmistakable voice.

“Is somebody going to tell me just what’s going on here?”

Gil turned to the officer he had summarily relieved. “You have the watch.”

By now, the junior commander had choked himself nearly purple with suppressed rage. “Why, you—! Sir, he—!”

The General cut him off with a gesture, and kept his eyes fixed on Gil. “I suppose you have an explanation for all this.”

“Yes, sir,” said Gil.

Metadi’s voice was quiet, almost gentle. “Would you like to share it with us, Commander?”

Gil finally found his own voice. “Perhaps we’d better go into your office, first . . . ”


With the dazzle of the jump still hanging before her eyes, Beka punched in a hyperspace course for the safe haven of the Professor’s asteroid base, then leaned back in the pilot’s seat with a sigh.

Time to go aft and straighten things out with Ari, she thought.

But her knees didn’t want to hold her up, and what had started as a trembling in her fingers grew into a case of the shakes that went through her entire body.

You’re amazing, she told herself. A real classic. You can pilot anything with engines, you can hold your own in a knife fight against a man three times your size—and the very thought of walking up to your brother and saying “Hi there, I’m alive” takes all the strength out of your knees.

She put her hands over her face—Tarnekep Portree’s face, with the queued-back hair and the red plastic eye patch—and kept them there until the shaking stopped. Then she took a deep breath, wrapped Tarnekep’s arrogance around her like a protective cloak, and got to her feet.

“All right, big brother,” she said softly, settling Tarnekep’s knife in its sheath and Tarnekep’s blaster in its holster, “here I come.”


In Warhammer’s common room, Nyls Jessan felt the fleeting wave of disorientation as the freighter jumped into hyperspace, and let himself relax.

“Maybe I should have used heavy stun, after all,” he said as he undid the safety webbing. “Oh, well—I suppose even being an interplanetary desperado takes practice.”

Ari gave him a dark look. “Next time you drag me away from work to watch a space battle, Jessan, I expect better seats.”

“I’ll try to oblige,” he said. “Ari, there’s something you ought to know before—”

“No,” said Ari. “I want to hear this Captain Portree of yours explain it to me himself.”

Jessan flinched. This is a fine time to remember that you’ve never seen the big guy get really angry . . . and Ari is not the son of person who’s likely to find Tarnekep Portree amusing. Not at all.

He glanced over at Llannat. The Adept shook her head and gave a helpless shrug. The common-room door slid open.

Warhammer’s captain stood on the threshold, surveying the three passengers with a disdainful, bicolored gaze.

Ari rose to his feet. In the cramped space of the ’Hammer’s common room, he looked gigantic, and Jessan realized with a sinking feeling that for once the big medic was making absolutely no attempt to play down his size and strength.

He doesn’t recognize her, thought Jessan unhappily. Now there really will be hell to pay.

“Captain Portree,” Ari said, cold and carefully polite. “Or so I assume.”

Beka favored her brother with a tight-lipped, crooked smile. “That’s what they call me,” she agreed.

She crossed her arms and leaned one shoulder against the bulkhead with an air of casual arrogance. “And I’d say you’re that Lieutenant Rosselin-Metadi I keep hearing about.” She shook her head. “You really ought to be more careful about answering emergency comm calls.”

“In future,” said Ari, “I will be.” The deep, even voice never altered—but Jessan could hear the anger in it just the same. “How did you come into possession of this ship, Captain?”

Beka shrugged one shoulder. “Let’s say I bought her.”

Bloody-minded little bitch, thought Jessan, with a sense of despair. Can’t you see this isn’t the time . . . ?

“Let’s say you didn’t.” Ari had taken a step forward. That much closer to Beka and the doorway, he looked even bigger. “This isn’t Pride of Mandeyn—we both know that, so there’s no point in pretending. It’s Warhammer, that was supposed to have crashed onto the Ice Flats outside Port Artat eight Standard months ago.”

He took another step closer to the doorway. “What did you do to my sister, Captain Portree?”

This has gone far enough, Jessan thought. “Ari,” he said. “Don’t be too—”

Beka glanced in his direction for the first time. “Stay out of this. It’s between Lieutenant Rosselin-Metadi and me.”

Jessan swallowed, feeling a bit sick. This is all my fault. She really did expect him to know her—after I figured out her secret, she must have been certain her own brother could do the same. But Ari just isn’t flexible enough when it comes to looking at some things . . . 

Beka had already turned back to her brother without waiting for a reply. “Concerned about your sister, are you—Lieutenant Rosselin-Metadi?”

Ari clenched one hand into a massive fist. “Portree, if you’ve hurt her—”

One corner of Beka’s mouth quirked upward. “Suppose I killed her? Than what, Lieutenant?”

“Then you’re a dead man, Captain.”

The smile Beka gave her brother could have been either wistful or vicious. On Tarnekep Portree’s face, Jessan had to admit, the two would look the same anyway. She shook her head, still smiling.

“For somebody so devoted to his sister, Ari, you’re damned unobservant. What happened—too much time in the Space Force wipe out everything Ferrda taught you?”

Ari just stood looking at her.

Beka’s half-smile twisted and turned nasty. “You’re supposed to be glad to see me, remember?—not acting like I’m about as welcome as a plague of boils.”

After a long moment Ari found his voice. “You’ve really outdone yourself this time, I have to admit that. Kidnapping, flying under false registration, firing on a Space Force vessel in the lawful performance of its duties—there’s absolutely no way I’m going to be able to get you out of this one.”

Beka’s lip curled. “I don’t recall asking you to, big brother.”

“No,” said Ari. His face was bone-white, and Jessan realized unhappily that his friend was even angrier now than he had been before. “Asking for help would mean showing a bit of sense for a change. Tell me something, would you—when you pull these crazy stunts of yours, don’t you ever, even once, think about what you might be doing to the rest of us?”

Beka drew a sharp breath. If someone had shoved a knife into her, Jessan thought, she might have made a sound like that.

“ ‘The rest of us,’ ” she said, her lips pulling back from her teeth in a snarl. “All I ever wanted from the rest of you was to be left the hell alone—do you really want to hear just how much luck I’ve had with that?”

Jessan stood up abruptly. “I’ve had about all of this that I can stand. Ari—Beka—”

“Shut up, Jessan,” said Ari, without bothering to look around.

“Oh, yes,” said Beka. “Mustn’t have interruptions while little sister is getting scolded.”

Jessan looked from one pale and angry face to the other, and wondered if brother and sister knew how much alike they looked right now. Well, I wish them joy of it.

“I’m going,” he said. “Llannat?”

The Adept’s dark face had gone the color of a dirty bedsheet, but she shook her head. No, said her voice, somewhere near the back of his skull. He jumped, and the voice continued. Somebody has to stay and make sure nobody gets killed.

“Better you than me,” he murmured, and headed for the door. It opened to let him through, and shut after him on the sound of rising voices.

Jessan walked forward to the cockpit. He wasn’t surprised to find the Professor there, slumped in the copilot’s chair, looking out at the swirling pseudosubstance of hyperspace.

“How are they doing back there?” the Professor asked without looking around.

“They’re having a fight. What are you doing up here?”

“Staying out of it.”

“You knew they’d have one?”

“Let’s say I expected something in that line.” The older man turned to face him. “Do you have any siblings, Commander?”

Jessan shook his head. “No, I’m afraid I don’t.”

“And they let you off Khesat?” asked the Professor, with an expression of mild, surprise. “The galaxy has certainly changed since I was young.”

Jessan gave a weary laugh. “Not that much, Professor. My crowd’s a cadet branch, and there’s plenty of cousins left over to take up the slack. Not to change the subject or anything—but how long have we got before we come out of hyper?”

“About four days. We’ll be on autopilot the whole way.”

Over on the control panels, the status light representing the door to the captain’s quarters lit briefly as the door opened and shut.

“Well,” said Jessan, “it looks like round one is over. Shall we go back and aid the wounded?”

Only Llannat was still in Warhammer’s common room when they got there. Jessan raised an eyebrow at her. “What, no bodies?”

“I cycled them all out the airlock.”

“That bad?”

“Not quite—but it was touch and go for a moment or two.”

Jessan could hear the Professor busy in the tiny galley nook. Good idea. We could all use something hot and nourishing right now, and that’s a fact.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Well . . . once you left, the argument turned mean.”

Turned mean?”

“You heard it here first,” she said. “Finished when Beka slammed into the captain’s cabin and Ari stomped off aft somewhere.”

“Oh, dear,” said Jessan, subsiding into one of the seats by the mess table. “Not an auspicious beginning.”

“They’ll come around,” Llannat said. “You have to be reasonably fond of somebody in the first place, to light into them like that.”

“Adept’s wisdom?”

She shook her head. “Five brothers and sisters back home on Maraghai.”

The Professor emerged from the galley with a steaming tray in each hand and a third tray balanced across his forearms. “Then you’ll understand, Mistress, how it came about that when the captain saw a need to expand the crew of Warhammer, she turned first to her brother.”

Llannat reached up and took the third tray from its precarious balance point. “Mmm, fresh cha’a . . .  thank you, Professor. She ought to have given him some warning, first—he’d just gotten used to the idea that she was dead. The whole thing with the crash on Artat happened while he was in accelerated healing, you know. He went straight from the pod onto a courier ship bound for Galcen, but by the time he got there everything was over but the wake.”

“He never mentioned that in his letters,” said Jessan. The Professor had set the two remaining trays down on the battered surface of the mess table. Jessan reached out and pulled one of them over in front of his own place. “But then, Ari wouldn’t.”

“We’d have liked to be more tactful,” said the Professor to Llannat. “But time was working against us.”

“Count your blessings,” Jessan added. “I got brought along at blaster-point . . . not that I blame you, Professor. Under the circumstances, I’d probably have shot me out of hand.”

Llannat gave him an appraising look over the rim of her mug of cha’a. “Said the wrong thing at the wrong time, did you?”

“I’d had a long night.”

“Don’t we all, sometimes.” Llannat took a long swallow of the cha’a, then cradled the cup in her hands. “But what if Ari doesn’t agree to go along with his sister? What then?”

“Don’t worry,” said Jessan. “When he finds out what she’s got in mind, you won’t be able to stop him.”


The tractor beam had rattled a few pieces loose in the ’Hammer’s engine room—nothing dangerous, but stuff that ought to be taken care of while somebody remembered, before it got worse. Blinding rage had brought Ari to that part of the ship in the first place; once the worst of the anger had drained out of him, he went looking for a synch-meter.

He found one in the first spot he checked, in the cramped, out-of-the-way compartment where tools for the ’Hammer’s internal repair work had always been kept. Then he went back to the engine room to work off the rest of his temper in bringing the hyperspatial reference block back into line.

He’d been at it for a good while when he heard quick, light footsteps on the deckplates behind him. He swiveled around on his heels and looked up. “What are you doing down here?”

His sister dropped down to sit on the deck beside him. “You stole my line,” she said. “I came to see about taking care of the damage, but it looks like you beat me to it.”

“I was down here anyway,” he said. He tightened down the last bolt on the access plate with particular care. “That eye patch,” he said, without looking back around. “Do you really need to wear it?”

She chuckled. “Don’t you like the effect?”

“No.” One-way lenses like that usually covered prosthetic repair work too extensive to disguise any other way. “If you don’t need the blasted thing, could you please take it off?”

“It really does bother you?” She sounded surprised. “Even though you’re a medic and all that?”

“Even though I’m a medic and all that.”

“Funny—it doesn’t bother Jessan.”

“Jessan’s not your brother, damn it!”

Beka made a noise that was almost a giggle. Ari turned back around, and found her looking at him out of a pair of plainly functional blue eyes. She grinned.

“See?” she said. “Two. But I have to wear the patch whenever there’s a chance I might be going dirtside.”

“I understand,” he said. “But—why, Bee? Not just the eye patch, but all of it.”

She drew her knees up and linked her arms around them. “Well, you know how Dadda turned the ’Hammer over to me in exchange for any information I could pick up about the people who killed Mother.”

Ari nodded. “He gave me the general outline. I thought he was looking for an excuse to give you Warhammer without getting the registry papers thrown back in his face.”

“He doesn’t work that way,” said Beka. “Neither do I. Anyhow—there I was with the ’Hammer, and doing just fine, thank you. Low-bulk, high-speed stuff mostly; there’s good money in that these days. And then somebody put out a contract on me.”

“That can really ruin your day,” Ari agreed.

“You’re not kidding. If the Professor hadn’t stepped in and lent a hand, I’d be dead right now for real. But we rigged a nice piece of theater instead, and I wound up as Tarnekep Portree, merchant captain and part-time paid assassin.”

“You haven’t really—”

She shook her head. “Not for money.”

That leaves a lot of ground uncovered, Ari thought. He looked over at Beka. She was hugging her updrawn knees tightly and gazing into the middle distance, somewhere on the other side of the far bulkhead.

“What really happened back on Pleyver?” he asked.

“I made some people mad enough to chase us all the way across Flatlands. And after we’d gone to ground port-side at the Space Force Clinic, the sons of bitches sent in a private army.” She smiled briefly. “Your friend Jessan’s got a cool head in a crisis. Too sharp-eyed for his own good, though; he spotted me for your sister just as I was bringing the shuttle into High Station.”

“So you invited him along for the ride.”

“More or less. He’s a cool one, like I said; told us we could either trust him with everything or cycle him out the airlock, but nothing else was going to work for more than a few hours. So we decided to trust him.”

“I’m more interested in why Jessan decided to trust you,” said Ari. “Mind telling me just what it was you said to him?”

“Same thing I’m going to tell you,” she replied. “I know who had Mother assassinated, and I’m going to track the bastard down and kill him. Want to come along?”



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