Someone 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 witih 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 tight-lipped, 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.
The General didn’t seem to notice the weather at all. He stood by the Base’s aircar with the cold wind whipping his hair around his face, and fixed the station CO with a look that was even colder than the wind. “Who’s in charge of the investigation on-site?”
“Petty Officer Ilesh, sir,” said the Base CO. “Do you want to talk to him?”
The General nodded, once. “Bring him over.”
The Station CO signaled to a serious-looking young man dressed in dirty fatigues. He approached the General and saluted smartly.
The General regarded Ilesh with the same cold eye he had given everything else on-planet so far, and asked, “What makes you think that this is my ship?”
“Mostly circumstantial evidence, sir.”
“Show me what you have.”
“There isn’t much to show,” Ilesh said. “Witnesses identified pictures of Warhammer as the ship that they saw coming in. We found part of the keel, with serial numbers, and the log recorder with the last three flights, and we have the engines: Gyfferan Hypermasters, standard for the class.”
Gil saw a corner of the General’s mouth quirk in what might have been a bleak smile. “Very good, Ilesh. Satisfy an old man’s morbid curiosity—where’d you dig up the specs on a ship that was fifty years out of date when I got hold of her?”
“Back volume of Jein’s Merchant Spacecraft, sir. Station library.”
Again the bleak smile. “Good thinking. Have you towed the wreckage away yet?”
Ilesh shook his head. “No, sir. It’s right over there.”
He pointed at a tangle of metal pieces that looked to Gil like nothing so much as one of the more tasteless monuments to the Siege of Entibor. The General looked at the pile for a moment, and then began a slow walk around it. In silence, he made one complete circuit, then stooped and picked up something that Gil recognized as part of a starship’s main control panel.
Metadi turned the bit of metal over and looked at the chips and wiring on the back. One or two chips he even pried loose and rubbed free of soot with his thumb for closer examination, before dropping the panel back onto the pile. Then he moved on to another fragment of metal, this one too large and heavy to lift. He knelt beside it on the icy ground, and ran his finger over the weld that had joined it to the main hull.
Then he rose to his feet and glanced over at Petty Officer Ilesh. “Where’s the rest of the engines?”
“That’s all there ever was, sir.”
The General stood looking at the pile of blackened metal for a little while longer, and then turned away. “I’ve seen enough,” he said. “Let’s go back to town.”
At the base, he was terse with the Commanding Officer. “I want the completed investigation in my hands by ten-hundred Local, tomorrow. It will show that the ship that crashed was the ’Hammer , and that the cause of the wreck was nonspecific mechanical failure rather than pilot error. It will further show that Warhammer’s captain was Beka Rosselin-Metadi, and that she did not survive the crash. I will accept that investigation as complete and correct, and announce the results to the news channels fifteen minutes later. After that, the investigation will be closed. Do you follow?”
The station CO looked like a man who’d just taken a half-dozen stun-bolts in the midsection, but he nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“Good. Commander Gil!”
Gil abandoned the attempt at invisibility he’d been earnestly cultivating for the past several hours. “Yes, sir?”
“The personal details—if you could take care of those . . . ”
Gil felt a surge of sympathy. “Of course, sir. Do you have any specific instructions?”
After a moment, the General nodded. “As soon as the investigation’s closed, do whatever you can to pry the . . . remains . . . away from the pathologists, and see that they’re—that she’s—shipped home to Galcen for a proper funeral.”
“And the wreckage of the ’Hammer , sir?”
“Put the pieces into low orbit and let them burn up on reentry,” came the curt reply. “I don’t want parts of my ship showing up in every souvenir shop from here to Spiral’s End.”
Two weeks after the fight in the clearing—or so the date stamp on his medical chart informed him—Ari Rosselin-Metadi came out of the accelerated healing pod in the Medical Station’s hospital dome. Llannat Hyfid was waiting beside his bed in the convalescent ward, which surprised him a little. She appeared uneasy about something, which also surprised him. After the cool head she’d shown during the aircar chase and what followed, such nervousness seemed out of character.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. “Are you all right?”
“Look who’s talking—it’s going to be two weeks of bed rest before you’re fit for light duty. Jessan almost didn’t make it back in time.”
He nodded. Even the slight movement made his head swim, and he had to wait a moment before going on. “Close?”
“In more ways than one,” she said. She looked away, seeming unwilling to meet his eyes. “For a moment back there I thought I was a write-off, too. Thanks.”
“Call us even.” He paused again, and then went on. “I thought that all the Magelords were dead.”
Llannat appeared to be contemplating something in the far corner of the ward beyond him. “The great Magelords are as dead as the Adepts could make them,” she said, after a long silence. “But they left their spies and their apprentices behind, especially in the outplanets. With the war lost and the Mageworlders stuck behind the border zone, there isn’t much for the leftovers to do but cause petty trouble. The Guild usually takes care of them as soon as they show up.”
“I’ll bet your particular Mage had something to do with that outbreak of Rogan’s,” said Ari thoughtfully. “At a guess, the Quincunx furnished him or his boss with a mutated form of the dry-world virus—and the customer didn’t like it when Munngralla turned right around and tried to sell us the cure.”
He stopped. When Llannat didn’t take up the conversation again, he went on, “How is Munngralla anyway?”
The Adept seemed relieved by the change of subject. “Gone,” she said. “Just as soon as we got you into the pod and stabilized.”
“Didn’t want to stick around for explanations,” guessed Ari. “Since he probably also furnished your friends with the mescalomide for my beer.”
There was another long pause. Then Llannat shrugged. “Maybe. But you seem to have earned his gratitude somehow. He left the tholovine behind when he disappeared. Two more packets have shown up on the CO’s desk since then, and the Rogan’s cases are responding nicely.”
She fell silent.
Ari waited a moment, and said, “It sounds like everything’s worked out for the best. So what’s the problem?”
The pause this time stretched out even longer than before—so long that Ari began to feel the first touches of a faint, indefinable dread.
And then, reluctantly, as if she’d delayed it as long as she could before speaking, she told him what had happened to Warhammer on the Ice Flats of Port Artat.