High over the Darvelline system, so high that the central star and all its planets were only brighter spots against the backdrop of the galaxy, the substance of realspace altered for a second as Warhammer popped out of hyper.
“There it is,” Beka said, regarding the starfield before her with satisfaction. “Are we getting anything on the sensors?”
“Defiant entered realspace about a second behind us,” replied Ari from the copilot’s seat.
“We should be getting her on visual soon . . . ah, there she comes.” Beka smiled as one of the specks of light outside the cockpit window grew into the distant shape of the Magebuilt scout. “Are we hearing anything?”
“The Professor sent us a quick-burst message on a tight beam as soon as he came through.”
“Play it back.”
Ari toggled the audio-replay switch. “Replaying now.”
“Emission Control Alpha,” said the console speaker. “Activating cloaking. Follow me close. See you on the ground.”
The transmission broke off short on the last syllable.
“Are we going to reply?” asked Ari.
“No,” Beka said. “He won’t be expecting it. Besides, somebody might hear us.”
“This far out?”
“You never can tell,” she said. “Darvell has its own fleet. Who knows how far out they make a habit of listening?”
Beyond the cockpit window, Defiant wavered and faded from view. Only a blurred and distorted patch of starfield remained to mark the scoutship’s position.
“There she goes,” Ari said. “All our sensor screens read clear.”
Beka nodded, without taking her eyes away from the cockpit window. “Good. Then so should everybody else’s.”
Out against the starfield, the faint blurry patch began to move toward the planetary system. Beka pushed the ’Hammer to the left and down, adding forward vector as she did so in order to bring the freighter closer to Defiant’s position. When the distortion covered ninety degrees of her field of view forward, she slowed the ’Hammer again to match speeds with the scoutship.
“And that’s all there is to it,” she said. “As long as we keep the same distance, we can share Defiant’s cloak and sneak right in behind her.”
“It’s going to be a long slow sneak at this rate,” said Ari. “And hard to do on visual alone.”
She smiled. “Don’t worry, big brother. Between us we can handle it.”
Ari muttered something under his breath in the Selvaur speech he’d learned from Ferrdacorr. The comment—what Beka could catch of it—sounded unflattering; she ignored him and flipped on the ’Hammer’s internal comm.
“Let’s see how the rest of the ship is doing. Mistress Hyfid, is everything all right back aft?”
“Everything’s just fine, Captain Rosselin-Metadi,” came the reply from the common room. “Smooth as spidersilk.”
“Good,” said Beka. “Let’s hope it all stays that way . . . gotten any anonymous notes lately?”
She heard a faint laugh. “Not even a picture postcube, Captain. Sorry.”
“Don’t be,” said Beka. “I just love surprises. For now, Mistress, if you want to see what we’re going to be up against, you can flip down the bulkhead viewer.”
She nodded toward Ari as she spoke. Out of the corner of her eye she saw him begin punching in the codes that would translate the sensor data to a visual signal and feed it to the common-room screen.
Even this far up, the Darvell system made a spectacular sight: planets and moons and a yellow dwarf sun, flung out against interstellar night like jewels on black velvet. But as the ’Hammer and Defiant drew closer, the picture changed. Dim, half-seen shapes of cargo carriers appeared, shuttling among the system’s uninhabited planets to pick up raw materials for Darvell’s ring of massive orbiting factories. Along a narrow corridor guarded by heavy warships, freighters moved to and from then jump points in regular array. More fighting craft orbited the planet itself. A thick layer of satellites circled beneath the patrolling warships—weather and power and communications satellites in familiar domestic configurations, but also the darker shapes of spy-eyes and weapons platforms.
The Master of Darvell took no chances.
On board the ’Hammer , Beka took the conn for the final approach. As her brother had predicted, the run-in to Darvell had been a long one—three Standard days at low speed, with close maneuvering the whole way. She and Ari had stood alternating watches, four hours on and four hours off, during the realspace passage.
Defiant, normally a one-man craft, had also carried a double crew for this run. Nyls Jessan had never mentioned before that he knew his way around a spaceship’s controls, but Beka hadn’t been surprised to learn that he did.
“I’m qualified,” he’d protested, during that last dinner back at the asteroid base. “That’s all.”
“Like you’re only ‘qualified’ with a blaster?” she had asked him, remembering his cool accuracy back in the firefights on Pleyver.
He had the grace to look apologetic. “In this case, Captain, all ‘qualified’ means is that I’ve got a license.’
“A license is more than Mistress Hyfid’s got,” she told him. “You’re crewing on Defiant.”
Beka hadn’t expected, at the time, to miss having the Khesatan around for the hyperspace transit. Better get used to missing him, she told herself. Remember, you have to give him back to the Space Force when this is over.
Stifling a sigh that threatened to turn into a yawn, she shook her head impatiently and squinted at the control panel readouts. This low-velocity, follow-the-leader approach was hard enough as it was. She didn’t need thoughts like that to distract her.
Defiant led them in slow and easy, making planetfall just before dawn in the mountains of Darvell’s northern hemisphere. Beka put the ’Hammer down on the other side of the small clearing a few minutes later. The Defiant’s electronic cloak made a wavery dome of visual distortion over the two ships—somewhat attenuated, by comparison with the invisibility the field generated in deep space, but good enough to disguise their presence from orbital spies.
The bit of sky visible overhead had gone from dull grey to pink by the time she finished shutting down the ’Hammer. The Professor’s ship, a one-man craft not meant to carry cargo, had taken less time. When she came down the ’Hammer’s ramp with Ari and Llannat close behind, the Entiboran and Jessan were waiting.
Jessan’s glance went to the others for a second, and then came back to her. “You look like you haven’t slept in a week.”
Beka found herself a place to stand that would allow her to lean back against the ’Hammer’s comforting bulk, then crossed her arms and grinned at him. “Flattery gets you nowhere, my friend. I got my beauty sleep four hours ago—can’t you tell?”
“Not really.”
“I can,” growled Ari. “She woke me up to get it.”
Beka ignored him and turned toward the Professor. “What happens next?”
“We wait,” said the Entiboran. “If the locals mount a systematic air search at full daylight, we’ll know for certain that somebody spotted us coming in.”
“And if they don’t start searching?”
“The lack of any obvious activity will not, unfortunately, prove that the contrary is true.”
“Now that,” said Jessan, “is what I call really helpful.”
Beka snickered, and swallowed another yawn. “Seriously, people,” she said, “one of us needs to head into town and pick up some information.”
She heard Llannat sigh. “I’m the only person here who doesn’t need a whole day of sleep to be functional. I’ll go.”
“Sign me up, too,” Jessan said. “All I did on the way in was stand by while the Professor handled the tricky stuff.”
Beka looked from the Khesatan to Mistress Hyfid and back, blinking her eyes against her own fatigue. One or the other of them, or maybe both, was lying about being rested. Just the same, without local knowledge we’ll all be stuck, and the Professor and I are about to drop. She looked at her brother for a second, and gave an inward shake of her head. Ari probably had another solid week of work left in him—but unless everybody on Darvell was a giant, her brother was guaranteed to stand out in a crowd.
“All right,” she said to the volunteers. “You two have it.”
After his trip aboard Defiant, Jessan found himself enjoying the hike downslope to the nearest road. The air had a clean, resinous tang to it, another welcome change from life aboard ship, and he had to suppress an urge to whistle as he strolled along. This is no time to be feeling cheerful, he reminded himself. Spying is serious work.
All the same, he couldn’t help smiling. After a few minutes, he became aware of Llannat’s eyes on him, and turned the smile in her direction.
The Adept gave him a curious look. “You’re on top of the galaxy this morning.”
“Sorry,” he said. “It comes from being out in the open.”
“You—the outdoor type? Tell me another, Jessan.”
He laughed. “Making a hyperspace transit as the second body in a one-man scout will do that to you.”
They walked on. About local noon, they emerged from the trees and picked up a steep-shouldered road that followed the curve of a valley between two peaks. Up on the wooded mountainside, the air had begun to feel almost warm, but here a brisk wind blew through Jessan’s hair and made him grateful for the jacket he’d pulled out of his locker.
Llannat, for her part, had ended up wearing a black sweater from Beka’s old collection of dirtside gear. “I don’t care whether it fits or not,” the Adept had told the captain, “so long as it’s warm.” And warm it certainly was, not to mention somewhat snug around the chest. Llannat was considerably shorter than Beka Rosselin-Metadi, but the Adept couldn’t have passed for male even in a dim light.
“The town should be downhill from here,” Llannat said after a moment’s consideration.
“Downhill it is, then,” agreed Jessan. “Let’s go.”
The road maintained its general downward trend, broken only by occasional steep upgrades as it wound through the foothills of the mountain range. As they neared the crest of one such hill, Jessan became aware of a low, subterranean growling from somewhere, behind them—a sound not so much heard as felt through the soles of the feet.
“Heavy ground transport,” said Llannat, at the same moment. “Heading this way.”
“Time to blend back into the trees for a bit, I think,” said Jessan, stepping off the road.
He found himself a patch of ground in the shadow of a tall conifer. Moments later, the transport crawled into view, engines roaring as they fought the upward slope. The vehicle’s nullgravs whined under the weight of bulging brown sacks piled high in the open-topped cargo compartment.
Jessan felt an idea forming in his mind, and looked over at Llannat. From the expression on the Adept’s face, she’d already been thinking the same thing.
“As soon as it goes past,” she murmured. “One, two, three—”
They sprinted around behind the laboring transport. Jessan jumped, and found a handhold on the first try—just as well, since as far as he could tell Llannat wasn’t using a handhold at all. He scrambled over the top of the cargo compartment, and landed with a lung-emptying thud on a dirt-covered fabric bag that turned out to feel even knobbier than it looked.
“Oof,” he muttered. “What are we sharing a ride with, anyhow?”
Llannat poked an experimental finger at the bag she sat on. “Edible roots of some kind, I’d say.”
“Thanks for reminding me we didn’t wait around for breakfast.”
“Cultivate a philosophical outlook,” she recommended.
“I’d sooner cultivate a hot meal. Oh, well—it’ll give me something else to look for when we hit town.”
They made themselves as comfortable as they could. Llannat curled up in a compact bundle, and within moments her chest began to rise and fall in the slow, even rhythm of sleep.
Jessan wondered, yawning, if dropping off that fast on a mattress this lumpy constituted some kind of galactic record, but couldn’t keep his own eyes open long enough to decide. The warm sun shone down on the cargo compartment; the transport’s engines grumbled in a deep, comforting monotone; and the edible tubers in the sacks piled around and under him breathed out a not unpleasant vegetable odor. He pillowed his head on his arm and slept.
He woke to the touch of a hand on his forehead, and a familiar voice speaking—almost shouting—somewhere inside his skull.
We’re coming up on a checkpoint. Hide.
He drew breath to ask a question, but the hand moved to cover his mouth.
Don’t worry about me, said the voice again. Just get out of sight!
The transport was indeed slowing to a halt. He abandoned Llannat to her own devices and started burrowing. As soon as he’d gotten himself well-hidden under what felt like a hundred pounds or so of nourishing fibrous vegetables, he risked peering out through between two of the sacks. Llannat wasn’t anywhere in sight.
“May I see your transportation request and vehicle log, please?” said an unfamiliar voice in a bored monotone.
Standard Galcenian, thought Jessan. That takes care of the language problem, anyhow.
“Sure,” said another voice from the transport’s cab. “Just a second . . . here they are.”
“Hmmm . . . stamps from checkpoints BX-BY and BY-zero-two-seven dash zero-two-eight . . . you’re carrying garrutchy from District BX-one-four-three to Central Storage?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, everything looks in order. I’ll just do a quick visual, and then you can go on.”
Boot heels rang on asphalt, and Jessan shrank even deeper into the hiding place he’d excavated. Down among the sacks of garrutchy, loose dirt tickled his nostrils, and he felt a sudden overwhelming desire to sneeze. He quit breathing instead.
The booted footsteps came around to the rear of the transport. Jessan heard the tailgate lower partway, and felt the bags about him begin to shift. The guard must have noticed the movement, too—there was an oath, and the tailgate slammed back up again. Under cover of the noise, Jessan exhaled and gulped another lungful of air.
“Looks all right,” said the guard’s voice. Jessan heard the dull, irregular thudding of an official stamp being pounded down in all the required locations on a set of forms in triplicate. Then the guard’s voice said, “Here you go now. Move along,” and the transport’s engines growled back into life.
Jessan waited until the noise was back up to its earlier level before squirming out from under the bags of garrutchy. Sometime in there, Llannat had reappeared as well. The Adept was leaning back against the side of the cargo compartment with her eyes closed.
“Welcome back,” he said. “Where’d you go?”
She shook her head. “Nowhere. You just didn’t happen to look where I was. Time to start tidying up, I think—that checkpoint probably means we’re getting close to town.”
Jessan began brushing the dirt off his clothing. “Right. You drop off first, then.”
A few minutes later, the transport slowed to go through an intersection. Llannat got a secure grip on the side of the cargo compartment, then swung over and out of sight.
Now it’s your turn, Jessan told himself. Think of it as another round of amateur theatricals—and you’ve got the part of a garrutchy grower in town for the weekend.
The flight of fancy made him laugh a little under his breath. He scrambled over the tailgate before he could get stage fright, and lowered himself down to the pavement.
Beka woke up with a start. What was that?
She levered herself up on her elbows and listened, trying to catch again the anomaly that had awakened her, but she heard nothing—no engine irregularities, no noises of impact on the hull, only a deep and unnatural silence.
Right. We’re grounded. And the power’s off.
She looked over at the glowing face of the chronometer bolted to the bulkhead next to the bunk, where a turn of her head on the pillow could give her the time. Thirteen-thirty-point-five-one Standard. Not a real useful piece of information.
She got up, stretching to work the kinks out of her back and shoulders, and dressed by the dim blue light of the self-powered emergency glows. The question of persona had her chewing her lower lip for a moment in front of the clothes locker; then she nodded to herself and pulled open the section that held Tarnekep Portree’s dirtside outfits.
Better safe than sorry, she reflected, tying the high cravat with an ease gained over months of practice. Beka Rosselin-Metadi is dead, and Darvell is no place for her to be spotted among the living.
She fitted the red eye patch into place and walked out through the silent ship.
Outside, the long golden light of late afternoon slanted down through the tops of the tall trees. Near the middle of the clearing, her brother sat next to a small fire. A cookpot dangled from a stick above the flames, and Ari looked around from stirring it as she came down the ’Hammer’s ramp. “So you’re up.”
She yawned. “More or less. Did I sleep all day?”
“That’s right. The sun’s starting to go down.”
“Where’s everyone else?”
“The Professor is still asleep,” her brother said. “Llannat and Jessan haven’t come back yet, but I think it’s too early to worry. I wrestled our hoverbikes out of the cargo hold and then went hunting—mostly to see if anything Ferrda taught me stuck. Something must have, because we’ve got dinner.”
“Why the outdoorsman routine?” she asked, as the savory smell of game stew reached her nostrils.
“The Professor cut the power levels on both ships to minimize energy leakage around the masking field. That left the power too low to run the galleys. He says we won’t be staying here long anyway.”
Ari tasted the stew, nodded to himself, and turned away from the fire. Beka followed the motion, and saw a heavy blaster lying with its belt and holster near his right hand.
“Is that what you went hunting with?” she asked.
Ari shook his head. “No. If I shot something with that, there wouldn’t be enough left for the stewpot. Besides, I never was any good with one of these things.”
He picked up the bolstered weapon by its belt and held it out toward her. “Speaking of which—I think that you’re the one who should have this.”
Beka took the belt, then pulled the blaster out of its holster and hefted it—not as weighty as the government-surplus models she’d been using lately, but heavier than the new Space Force standard issue. “Gyfferan,” she said, after a moment. “Dadda’s?”
“That’s right. He gave it to me when I left the Academy. Said I might need it someday.”
“Everybody needs something,” Beka said. “Was he right?”
“What do you think?” asked her brother. “Sometimes I wonder about those hunches of his, let me tell you.”
Beka grinned. “Trust an old starpilot. You know what they say—Adepts have power, and pilots have luck.”
“And what does that leave the rest of us?”
She looked at him for a moment—damn near seven feet tall with his boots off, and all of it muscle. Not her style, but Jilly Oldigaard had daydreamed for weeks after the time he’d come home for a visit in his Academy uniform. “The rest of us? Well, big brother—you may not have power, but you certainly do have plenty of mass times acceleration.”
“Very funny,” he growled. “Do you want the blaster or not?”
“I’ll take it, I’ll take it.”
She unbuckled the heavy leather belt that held her own sidearm and laid it aside, then strapped on the Gyfferan weapon. Not surprisingly, the belt was far too large for her. It settled low on her hips, sagging even lower on the weapon side.
“Needs work,” she said. She caught a glimpse of Ari’s face. “One laugh and I’ll kill you.”