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epilogue: innish-kyl: waycross

Commander Gil leaned his chair back against the wall and listened to the ice melting in his tumbler of Galcenian brandy.

At least, the cantina’s barkeep had claimed that the pale amber fluid was Galcenian brandy; along with his drink, Gil was nursing a dark suspicion that the liquor had never come nearer to the galaxy’s capital than a holding vat in a middle-planet distillery. Gil’s companion had opted for the local wine instead—but then, Jos Metadi had been drinking that vintage since well before the Magewar ended.

Gil shook his tumbler to hurry up the dilution a little, and smiled in spite of himself. I have to admit, this tour of duty hasn’t been dull. Artat, Pleyver, Ovredis, and now Innish-Kyl . . . where next, I wonder?

This particular outing had started a few days ago, with a message Gil had brought into the General’s office at Prime Base on Galcen.

“Relay from the merchantman Blue Sun, out of Ophel—personal to you, sir.”

The General had looked curious. Ophel was a privately owned planet that fell into the Republic’s sphere of influence, but the Ophelans had some interesting neighbors, and the rumors coming out of that sector had been even more confusing than usual lately.

“What do they say?”

“It’s a bit of an odd one,” said Gil. He quoted by memory from the printout flimsy he held in one hand. “No names, just ‘You sold me something a while back. Want the final payment? Same place as before. We’ll wait for you.’ ”

“Do they mention a date?”

“Yes, sir,” Gil said. “A week from today, Standard.”

“Wait for me, hell,” the General said. “I’ll be there first.”

Gil suppressed a sigh. “Excuse me, sir—but where, exactly, is ‘there’?”

Metadi didn’t answer. He was already clearing his desk by the brute-force method, glancing at each item and tossing it into either the main drawer or the waste-disposal unit.

“Get a ship ready,” he said, still sorting. “And tell the pilot to take some time off. This will just be me flying.”

“Alone?”

The General paused, the folder in his hand suspended between the drawer and the disposal unit. He gave Gil a long look. “Take some leave if you want to, and come along as copilot. You’ve earned it.”

He hadn’t explained any further, though; and so far, Gil had found himself no more enlightened than before.

After a flight to Waycross, of all places, at the General’s habitual speed of faster-than-safe, they’d docked the little unmarked craft in one of the bays, changed into civvies, and headed for the Blue Sun Cantina.

The establishment’s name made Gil’s eyebrows go up a bit—Freighter out of Ophel, did they say? At least, he reflected, he and the General were properly dressed for a spaceport rendezvous: civilian clothing and concealed weapons.

Just what armaments the General had tucked away under his dark jacket Gil wasn’t sure, but he knew for certain Metadi would be packing something. The commander himself had taken to carrying a hand-blaster up one sleeve ever since Beka Rosselin-Metadi’s wake. The figure waiting in the shadows that night had turned out to be a friend—next time, though, they might not be so lucky.

What’s good for the General is good for the aide, Gil reflected, taking a cautious sip of the brandy. I never did think much of going after the villains armed with nothing but an empty beer mug.

The security panel by the cantina doorway beeped once. Along with most of the other customers, Gil let his gaze travel in that direction. Well, now, he thought. What have we here?

The new arrival paused for a moment in the dim interior light. A smallish, dark woman in a plain black coverall, she drew speculative looks from the cantina’s regulars: Not a spacer, Gil could almost hear them thinking, and not a hooker, so what’s a respectable dirtsider doing up there at the bar?

Then the speculative glances hit the black and silver staff tucked into the belt of her coverall, and slid away into the corners of the room.

The General chuckled. “You don’t push an Adept.”

“What in the world is she doing here, though?” Gil wondered aloud.

“She’ll tell us if she wants to,” said the General.

And in fact, the Adept was heading for their table. As she drew nearer, Gil felt another piece of the puzzle clicking into place: he’d last seen this particular Adept on Ovredis, playing duenna to royalty.

She slid into the empty seat at the table, and looked from Gil to the General and back again.

“Good evening, gentlesirs.”

The General nodded. “Good evening, Mistress. Mind telling me what brings you to a place like this?”

“I have a message,” the Adept said. “ ‘Crystal World, Bay One-three-eight.’ ”

“That’s it?”

It was the Adept’s turn to nod. “That’s it. Shipboard’s safer, if you know what I mean.”

Metadi smiled at her. “I was playing this game before your captain was born, Mistress. Finish your beer and let’s go.”

The Adept’s dark skin darkened a bit more. “We can go right now,” she said, pushing the mug away. “I’ve had worse beer than this, but not lately.”

The walk to the docking bays didn’t take long; the narrow alleyways of portside Waycross were almost deserted in the afternoon heat. In the stark, yellow-white glare of Innish-Kyl’s sun, the exquisite little blue and silver yacht in Bay 138 looked to Gil like a spacer’s idea of a bad joke.

The General seemed to think so, too. His brows drew together in a frown, and he followed in silence as the Adept led them up into the spaceyacht by the crew door.

Belowdecks, though, Crystal World was all business—compact, powerful, and discreetly armed. The General’s scowl began to clear as they passed through Crew Berthing, and by the time they’d ascended the steep metal stairs from the bridge and emerged onto the observation deck, he was almost smiling.

The observation deck gave an illusion of spaciousness that the lower portion of the ship had lacked. Holoprojections on three sides of the carpeted area showed a formal garden extending into parkland in the misty distance. White-metal lawn furniture with green plush cushions completed the effect. Lieutenant Ari Rosselin-Metadi rose to his feet from a low hassock as they entered, his massive height a jarring note against the delicate formality of the surroundings.

The General regarded the young man for a moment. “It’s good to see you again in one piece,” he said finally. “Mind telling me what this bit of fancy work is doing in a working spaceport?”

Lieutenant Rosselin-Metadi and the Adept looked at each other. “It’s a long story,” the woman said after a pause.

“In that case,” said the General, strolling over to take a seat in one of the wrought-metal chairs, “the two of you had better get started on it.”


“Beka . . . Captain . . . wake up.”

She pressed her face into the pillow and shook her head. “Too tired.”

“Our visitors are here.”

She sat bolt upright. “Already?”

Her head spun. She felt Nyls Jessan slipping an arm around her shoulders, and leaned for a moment against his unobtrusive support.

“Damn,” she said. “That approach left me in worse shape than running the Web out of Pleyver.”

“You weren’t fresh out of the healing pod when you ran the Web, either,” the Khesatan said. “We should have stayed at the base another week so you could get some rest.”

Beka shook her head. “No. I want to get this over with.”

She straightened up again, and felt his hand tighten briefly on her bare shoulder before relaxing and letting go.

“I’ll have plenty of time on my hands while the ’Hammer is in the yards,” she continued, pushing herself up from the narrow bunk in the captain’s quarters on Crystal World. She stood a few seconds with her feet braced apart on the deckplates; then, satisfied that her legs would hold her, she crossed the tiny cabin to the clothes locker.

She pulled out garments one at a time, tossing each item over onto the bunk until she’d assembled a complete set of dirtside clothing.

“You said ‘visitors,’ ” she commented as she pulled on the trousers. “Who’s the extra?”

“An aide, looks like, or maybe a bodyguard.”

She snorted. “Since when did Dadda have a bodyguard?”

Jessan picked up the loose white shirt from the bunk and held it up for her like a valet. “An aide, then. Llannat says he’s all right.”

As he spoke, he eased first her right arm and then her left into the full sleeves of the Mandeynan shirt. Beka accepted his help without argument. For one thing, the new skin and regenerated flesh in her right side were still tender, and apt to protest at stretching or abrupt movement. For another . . . 

Don’t think about what you can’t help. You knew from the start it was going to finish this way.

“Dadda wouldn’t bring him along if he wasn’t all right,” she said, looking away from Jessan and concentrating hard on tucking her shirttails into the waistband of her trousers. That finished, she picked up the cravat and began tying it. “Where did you put them?”

“On the observation deck. Ari and Llannat are keeping them entertained while you get ready.”

“I can imagine,” she said. She sat down on the bunk and reached for Tarnekep Portree’s high, polished boots.

Jessan took them away from her before she could bend over to pull them on.

“I’ll do that for you,” he said. “You’ll overstress the new muscle if you try to do it yourself.”

The Khesatan knelt down and started working the tight-fitting boots onto her feet and up over her calves. He was deft and gentle about it; she sat looking down at his bent head and bit her lip to keep from saying anything stupid.

You thought losing the Professor was bad enoughshows how much you know, doesn’t it, girl?

Jessan finished with the second boot and rose to his feet. “Are you all right?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” she said, wondering what she’d done that he had noticed.

Standing up, she took her blaster rig off its hook and strapped it on. The knife and its leather sheath, of course, hadn’t left her arm in the first place. Jessan stood by the cabin door watching her, his grey eyes troubled.

She bit her lip again and reached out for the red plastic eye patch. Then she drew back her hand. She’d gotten into this as Beka Rosselin-Metadi, not Tarnekep Portree, and that was the way she was going to get out again—“maybe not quite the same as before,” she admitted, under her breath. “But then, who is?”

“Who indeed?” inquired Jessan. The Khesatan bowed, and held out an arm in his best Crown-Prince-of-Sapne manner. “Come, my lady. Your family awaits.”


“ . . . so Bee pointed Warhammer at the sun, and jumped us as soon as gravity pulled the ship up to speed.”

Some people, Commander Gil reflected, could make even melodrama sound routine and prosaic. Lieutenant Rosselin-Metadi clearly worked hard to be included in that category. His tale of the ’Hammer’s adventures had enough holes in it to make a lace curtain, and the big medic hadn’t even tried to disguise the gaps.

The General only smiled. “Are you sure that’s all?”

Lieutenant Rosselin-Metadi shrugged. “What else is there to tell? We popped out of hyper in open space. There’s more of that around than anything else, so you can’t even say we were especially lucky. And the rest was easy.”

“Don’t believe him,” said a Khesatan-accented voice from the metal stairway. “Qualification in field surgery is no help at all when it comes to repairing starship engines.”

“Whatever works, Commander,” said the General. “How’s the patient?”

“Still in Intensive Care at Sunrise Shipyards on Gyffer.” The reply came not from Lieutenant Commander Nyls Jessan, but from the remaining member of Crystal World’s complement, the one who was coming up the stairway a step or two behind the Khesatan. “But she’ll make it.”

Beka Rosselin-Metadi stepped out onto the observation deck. The General’s daughter appeared paler and thinner than Gil remembered her, either as Tarnekep Portree or the Princess Berran of Sapne. But that’s not surprising, Gil told himself, if even half of what her brother says happened is true.

Beka sat down in the deck’s remaining empty chair, and Lieutenant Commander Jessan settled himself cross-legged on the carpet not too far away. The General smiled again.

“Sunrise, eh?” he asked. “They still do custom upgrades?”

His daughter nodded. “I’m having some done on the ’Hammer while they’re fixing the engines. Computers, mostly, and some weapons-control stuff.”

Lieutenant Rosselin-Metadi stared at his sister. “Computers—weapons—Bee, what in heaven’s name are you planning now?”

“Don’t worry about it, big brother,” she said. “You don’t need to know.”

The medic reddened. Beka sat watching him with a challenging expression.

I wouldn’t touch a line like that with a pressor beam, thought Commander Gil; but the lieutenant seemed made of stronger stuff. Gil heard him draw breath between his teeth for a reply.

The General suppressed another smile. “Down, both of you.” Then he looked hard at Beka. “Mind telling your father what you’ve got planned?”

Beka glanced over at Llannat Hyfid. “Did you tell him about D’Caer?”

“He knows about the Mageworlds jump,” the Adept said.

“Not the rest of it?”

The General turned to the big lieutenant.

“What ‘rest of it,’ son?”

“I was getting to that,” he protested.

“If you and Bee keep on squabbling,” the General told him bluntly, “we’ll get to it sometime next week.”

Lieutenant Rosselin-Metadi looked affronted—an impressive sight, but one his father ignored. Instead, Metadi let his gaze rest first on the Adept and then on the Khesatan officer sitting cross-legged on the deck. Finally, he made his choice and nodded at Jessan.

“Finish the story for us, Commander. The rest of you keep quiet and let him talk.”

The captain of the Crystal World opened her mouth to say something. Her father silenced her with a quick glance.

“That means you too, Beka my girl. All right, Commander—report.”

Jessan straightened. “Yes, sir. The repair work we did after coming out of hyper from Darvell only brought back enough engine function for one jump, so we picked the planet with the best shipyards. We made it to Gyffer just before all the systems went down hard, and put the ’Hammer in the yards and the captain in the hospital. As soon as the captain came out of the healing pod, we chartered a vessel for the trip back to base.”

“About that base, Commander—”

“It’s disguised as an asteroid somewhere, sir,” said the Khesatan, with a bland expression, “but I’m afraid I don’t have the foggiest notion of the coordinates. The captain insisted on punching in the navicomp data herself.”

“Understood,” the General said. “I’d have done the same thing in her position. Go on.”

“Yes, well—we’d left for Darvell with Gentlesir D’Caer stashed in Maximum Security. When we got back, he wasn’t there. If all the robots and sensors and intruder-alert systems are telling the truth, then nobody broke in to get him, and nobody knows when he left.”

“I see,” the General said. “And what does your Adept have to say about that?”

“Magework,” the Adept said at once, “Sir. They got a line on D’Caer somehow, and pulled him out before he could talk.”

The General leaned back in his chair and gazed out at the simulated landscape beyond the observation-deck windows. “So the bastard’s still kicking around the galaxy.”

“It’s possible,” said the Adept dubiously. “But the Magelords don’t take kindly to failure—and Ebenra D’Caer failed them at every turn but the first.”

“Want to clarify that a little bit for us, Mistress?”

But it was the General’s daughter who answered, the lace cuff on her Mandeynan shirt falling away from her wrist as she ticked off her statements one by one. “Suivi Point hasn’t been thrown out of the Republic,” she said. “Dahl&Dahl are still as powerful as they ever were. And the Mageworlds involvement isn’t a secret anymore.”

“Space Force Intelligence isn’t totally incompetent,” the General said. “We’ve been getting reports of increased activity in that quarter for quite a while. Nothing this solid, though . . . and getting the Senate to listen to an old general’s suspicions is next to impossible these days. But if Darvell’s been supplying war materiel to the Mageworlds, the politicians will have to listen for a change.”

“They’ll want hard proof,” the General’s daughter pointed out. “Which means you need somebody out there where it’s all happening.”

Her brother surged to his feet. Standing, he towered over everybody and everything else on the observation deck, and his voice, when he spoke, was a controlled roar. “The Mageworlds? Bee, you’re crazy!”

Commander Gil—already busy calculating which of Darvell’s regular trading partners could be counted on to answer discreet inquiries—tended to agree, and thanked heaven that his own sisters had never shown any desire to leave Ovredis. But Jos Metadi only shook his head.

“No, son,” the General said. “Your sister isn’t crazy. Her mother used to get the same look in her eye whenever she decided it was up to her to save the galaxy.” He turned to Beka. “Am I right, girl?”

“Tarnekep Portree’s a merchant captain,” she answered, a flush of bright color coming into the pale skin over her high cheekbones. “Why shouldn’t he work the Mageworlds if he wants to? As for his other profession—word of these things gets out. Nobody is ever going to believe that the raid on Darvell was a private grudge match. I expect that Captain Portree is going to get some very interesting offers over the next couple of years.”

“I wouldn’t be a bit surprised,” agreed the General dryly. “So your mind’s made up?”

She nodded.

“The last time we struck a bargain,” said her father, “all I asked for was a couple of names. By the time I got them, you’d left a trail of dead bodies and missing persons across five systems, blown the top off the strongest private fortress in the known galaxy, and damn near flown Warhammer through the middle of a sun. I’m afraid to ask you for anything else.”

Beka’s chin went up a fraction higher. “Who’s asking anybody anything? I’m going to try my luck around the Mageworlds for a while, that’s all.”

“Then I’ll take whatever intelligence you can dig up, my girl, because I have a feeling the galaxy’s going to need it one of these days.” The General’s expression hardened a little. “While you’re out there, keep an ear open for word of D’Caer. If he’s alive, he still owes the family one.”

“My pleasure,” Beka said. “I’ll see that he pays up.”

The General rose to his feet and extended a hand toward his daughter. “Done, then?”

Beka rose also, but kept her hand at her side. “Not quite yet. There’s a bit of leftover business from our last deal that we have to take care of first.”

Now the Adept was on her feet as well, her dark features flushed with agitation. “Captain, you can’t just—”

Beka’s fists clenched. “Dammit, Mistress, don’t tell me what I can and can’t do!”

The Adept met Beka’s angry blue gaze without flinching. Time stretched out interminably as the two women faced one another in silence. Then Gil saw the captain’s clenched fists slowly relax.

In a calmer tone, Beka went on, “We all agreed, remember? This one is for Dadda to decide.”

“I don’t think I like the sound of that,” the General said. “What ‘bit of business’?”

“It’d be easier to show you,” Beka said. She started for the sliding doors at the rear of the observation deck. “Just come this way.”

Lieutenant Rosselin-Metadi and the Adept remained behind—partners in disapproval, Gil suspected—but everybody else trooped along as the General’s daughter led the way down a narrow, exquisitely paneled corridor. She didn’t take them for before halting to palm a lockplate set into the bulkhead. A gilt and ivory panel slid aside, and she stepped through the doorway. One by one, the others followed.

Like the hallway they’d left, the stateroom was tiny, but elegant in its design and appointments. On two walls, mirrors in artful positions reflected the room’s furnishings in such a way as to stretch its apparent size, and on the unmirrored walls Gil saw blank holoprojection windows. For a different passenger, the captain of Crystal World Blight have let the ship’s computer run landscapes like the one up on the observation deck. But not for this passenger, thought Gil.

Hands caught tight in metal binders, Nivome the Rolny lay on spidersilk sheets in the middle of the bed, and stared out ahead of him at nothing. Not even the appearance of the General brought any reaction to the Rolny’s grizzled, jowly features.

Metadi frowned. “I can see your Adept friend’s problem. What happened?”

“I stowed him in the hold while we made our run to jump,” his daughter said. “And we lost our pressure down there from a hit we took. I think the oxygen deprivation got to him.”

The General glanced over at Jessan; the Khesatan shrugged. “That’s a possibility. Then again, it could be stun-shock syndrome, or it could be that his mind snapped under the stress and he’s blocking out reality.”

“Whatever you say,” the General said. “You’re the medic.” He turned back to Beka. “Well, girl—you’ve got him. What do you want to do with him?”

Beka looked at Nivome for a long time. At last, she shook her head. “If I’d seen him like this right after we came out of hyperspace, I’d have told the gang to cycle him out the airlock and get it over with. But I didn’t, and they didn’t, so I’m sticking to the original plan.”

She pulled her blaster out of its holster, and handed it butt-first to the General. “He’s all yours.”

I don’t believe I’m watching this, thought Gil.

Metadi took the blaster. He checked the weapon over and brought it up to point at the bound form of Nivome the Rolny.

Something—the talk, the blaster, the crowd in the little stateroom—had finally gotten through to the man on the bed. His eyes focused on the muzzle of the Mark VI, and then on the face above it. Gil saw the Rolny’s eyes go wide with fear and recognition.

Metadi smiled. “That’s right, Nivome, it’s me. You should have stuck to hunting wuxen and left my family alone.” He thumbed the blaster’s safety over to Off.

In the tiny space, the click of the toggle-switch flipping over sounded louder than an explosion. Nivome closed his eyes and whimpered. Gil felt sick.

The General looked down at Nivome for a moment longer. “The hell with it,” he said suddenly, and lowered his arm. “Shooting’s too good for him. Take the binders off, and drop him in the alley out back of the Blue Sun. Then tip off local Security that they’ve got an incompetent vagrant cluttering up the street.”

The General’s daughter looked at her father for a moment. Her lips began to curve upward. “And the Master of Darvell can spend the rest of his life in a public mental-health ward. Dadda, I like your style.”

“Good,” said the General curtly, handing her back the blaster. “See to it, then.” He turned on his heel and left the stateroom without another word.

Beka stood looking down at the blaster in her hand. For a few seconds Gil thought she was going to shoot the Rolny anyway. He wondered if he should try to stop her if she did.

But she gave Nivome one more disgusted look and shoved the Mark VI back into its holster. “You heard the man—he goes out back of the cantina.”

“Right,” Gil said. He turned to Jessan. “Commander, you and I are going to have to do the drunken-buddy routine through the back streets for this one.”

“Let me get the binders off him first,” Beka said. “The lock’s keyed to my thumbprint.”

She took a step to the head of the bed, and reached out to key the binders open. Gil heard the faint snap of the metal parting, and then all hell broke loose in the crowded room. Somehow, Nivome had the Mark VI—Grabbed it when she undid the binders, Gil thought—and was bringing it up to fire. But Beka Rosselin-Metadi was the General’s daughter in more ways than one. Light flashed off something steely and wicked-looking that appeared in a blur out of her left sleeve, and she drove the dagger in toward the Rolny’s gut.

Two weeks in a healing pod, however, make poor conditioning for a close-in fight. Nivome seized Beka’s knife wrist as it came forward. She blocked out and upward with her left forearm, and the Mark VI went off like a lightning bolt and scorched the mother-of-pearl frame of the nearest mirror.

Nivome was already coming up off the bed, pushing the General’s daughter over backward under his weight. Gil felt his own grip closing on something small and deadly, and realized that he’d flicked his concealed hand-blaster out of its grav-clip without even thinking.

He raised it and took aim, but the struggling bodies were too close together. Before he could move to get a clearer shot, another figure vaulted over the bed and onto the Rolny’s back: Lieutenant Commander Nyls Jessan, wrapping a bent arm around Nivome’s throat, pulling the heavier man backward and up.

Still too close, damn it, thought Gil, trying again to aim into the knot of bodies. Another second crawled by, and the Khesatan’s attack pulled Nivome back a few more inches. The Rolny fought to bring the heavy blaster into line for another shot. Gil fired, and Nivome fell dead on top of the General’s daughter, drilled neatly in the temple by the energy beam.

The whole episode had taken about five seconds from start to finish. The sound of blaster-fire had scarcely died before the General reentered the room at a run, his own weapon drawn. Lieutenant Rosselin-Metadi and Mistress Hyfid came charging in close on his heels.

The General made his blaster disappear again. “All right, what happened?”

One glance at Beka and Jessan convinced Gil that he wasn’t going to get any help from that quarter. The Khesatan, oblivious of the corpse at his feet, was holding Beka in a tight embrace and murmuring disjointed phrases under his breath. She, in her turn, stood shaking against him, her face buried in his shoulder and the long knife forgotten in her hand.

Resigned, Gil caught the General’s eye and nodded toward the body. “Shot while trying to escape, sir.”

“Simplifies things a bit,” agreed Metadi. “Looks like I owe you, Commander. If there’s anything I can do—”

Gil slid his hand-blaster back into its grav-clip. “Take me off the cocktail-party circuit before I drown in weak punch?”

The General smiled. “I think I can swing that one. Your tour on Galcen’s almost up anyway: how do you feel about being bumped up one rank, and getting your choice of ships?”

“I’ll take it,” Gil said. “What’s the catch?”

“The catch,” Metadi told him, “is that you’ll be commodore of the Mageworlds fleet. Trouble’s brewing out there, and I want a man on the spot who knows how to make the right decision in a hurry.”

“That’s just fine for you, Dadda,” said Beka Rosselin-Metadi, pulling away from Jessan’s grip and slamming her knife into its sheath. “But now that the Space Force has taken care of everything, why don’t all of you go back home to Galcen Prime and let me get my ship the hell out of Waycross?”

“Because everything isn’t taken care of,” Jessan told her. “Not yet.”

The General raised an eyebrow. “How’s that, Commander?”

“I’m resigning my commission,” said the Khesatan. “Effective immediately.”

In the doorway, Ari Rosselin-Metadi stared, dumbfounded. “What—? Nyls, have you lost your mind?”

“Probably,” Jessan said. “It doesn’t matter.”

Beka caught her lower lip between her teeth. “I don’t understand.”

“You can’t run the ’Hammer in the Mageworlds without a copilot,” Jessan explained. “And the Professor is gone. So unless you’ve got somebody else lined up for the job . . . ”

“You mean you’re not going back to the Space Force?” asked Beka.

“No,” he said, and kissed her again.

Some time later, the General cleared his throat. “Well, Commander—if you’re convinced that my daughter is worth more than a promising career in the Medical Service, I’m certainly not going to hold it against you.”

Still keeping one arm around the General’s daughter, Jessan inclined his head—very much, Gil thought, in the manner of the Crown Prince of Sapne. “Thank you, sir.”

“You’re welcome, Commander,” said the General. “But I’m not going to accept your resignation, either.”

Beka stiffened. “Dadda!”

Metadi ignored her. “Consider yourself transferred to Space Force Intelligence,” he told Jessan. “Your first assignment is detached duty with Warhammer on the Mageworlds border. I’ll take care of all the paperwork.”

Beka was looking at the General as if he had promised her a luxury tour on the pride of the Red Shift Line instead of a hard stint of dirty, dangerous work with little prospect of thanks at the end of it. Gil winced slightly—he knew on whose desk the paper would ultimately fall—but he couldn’t really bring himself to begrudge the effort.



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