previous | Table of Contents | next

VII. nammerin: central wetlands
galcen: prime base

They entered the farmhouse together. Llannat kept behind him and to the right, Ari noticed, well out of the way of his blaster and with plenty of maneuvering room for two-handed work with a staff.

Ari blinked in the dimness, and the vague interior shapes resolved into typical farmhouse furnishings: a table and benches made out of rough-hewn wood, a red brick floor covered by a rug braided from dried water-grain stalks. Cheap flatpix and a Nammerin Grain Cooperative Standard/Local Integrated Calendar made spots of color on the drab stone walls.

But still no noise. None at all.

Llannat’s left hand closed on his right wrist. “Ari,” she said, her voice hardly more than a whisper, “there’s somebody behind us.”

He tried to turn and bring the blaster to bear, but the hand on his wrist suddenly had more than physical strength behind it. His brother Owen had thrown him against a wall the first and only time they’d ever fought, when Ari had reached almost his full adult strength and his brother had been all of fifteen. Ari didn’t doubt that Llannat Hyfid could do something similar if she chose.

“Ari, no,” she said. “He’s had a blaster on us since we came in the door.”

“Quite true, Mistress,” said a voice behind them. “And very wise.”

The language was Galcenian, but the accent was not. Court Entiboran? Ari thought incredulously as the speaker continued.

“Please put up the blaster, Lieutenant—and the staff, too, Mistress—and walk into the next room. There’s somebody there who wishes to talk with you.”

Ari and Llannat walked ahead of the unseen speaker, going through the large common room to the door of a small tacked-on annex that housed the farm’s comm set and power generator. A red-faced, heavyset farmer sat at the far end of the room, near the comm. To Ari, he didn’t look much like a man worried to distraction over a sick partner.

Come on, Rosselin-Metadi. You quit believing in that delirious Selvaur all the way back out in the courtyard.

“So they got you,” said the farmer, sounding more disgusted than anything else.

They? thought Ari, and realized for the first time that the farmer wasn’t the only person in the room. A slim, fair-haired man in spacer’s work clothes leaned against the right-hand wall, his blaster trained on the farmer. The man had his face turned away—the better, Ari supposed, to keep an eye on his prisoner—but something about that lean build and careless posture nagged for recognition.

Ari made a low growling noise deep in his throat, a noise that Ferrdacorr would have recognized as a thoroughly obscene comment on the whole situation. At the sound, the fair-haired man half-turned toward the door.

“I don’t believe,” he said, smiling, “that I really want to know what that means.”

“You’re supposed to be missing in action,” Ari said before he thought, and then realized how stupid it sounded. Death and damnation, Rosselin-Metadi—couldn’t you come up with anything better than that?

“I don’t quite know how to tell you this,” said Jessan, “but as of now, so are you.”

Ari doubled his right hand into a fist. “Jessan, if this is some kind of joke—”

The Khesatan medic shook his head. “We don’t have time for jokes. Captain Portree is waiting.”

Ari looked at Jessan’s bland and guileless face, and felt a chill run down his spine. “Someone’s put out a contract on you,” the Quincunx man had said.

No. I’m not going to believe that the friend who helped me get out of that fight at Munngralla’s is working with someone who’s been hired to kill me. There has to be another answer.

His fist unclenched, slowly. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go.”

Next to him, he heard Llannat let out her breath in what sounded like a sigh of relief. Jessan looked past them both, directing a silent question toward the stranger they still hadn’t seen. After a second the Khesatan nodded, and turned back toward the farmer.

“I really do apologize for all this,” he said, and fired.

Ari watched, wordless, as the farmer crumpled over and slid out of his chair onto the floor. Jessan stepped carefully around the man’s unconscious body to the comm set.

Behind Ari, the soft Entiboran voice spoke again. “You would have done better to use heavy stun. Once he recovers, he will undoubtedly report our presence on planet.”

Jessan had the access plate open now, and was groping inside the unit. “I don’t exactly worship every dot and comma in the healer’s oath,” he said without looking around, “but I did swear to it, after all. And that farmer’s a textbook example of a candidate for stun-shock syndrome: overworked, overweight, and not as young as he used to be.”

The Khesatan medic came back out of the comm unit with the resonator in one hand. “I’m sorry, Professor, but I’m not risking it. I don’t want to get into an argument I’m probably going to lose, but there it is.”

“I won’t ask you to break an oath,” said the stranger’s voice. “But haste is now imperative. Lieutenant Rosselin-Metadi—Mistress—if you would precede us . . . ?”

Ari turned around, and got his first glimpse of the stranger as the slight, grey-haired gentleman stood aside to let them pass. The blaster the man still held trained on them looked, in the dim interior light, like a custom-modified Ogre Mark VI—a heavy weapon, and one Ari felt inclined to take seriously.

“Which way do we go once we’re outside?” he asked.

“East,” said the Entiboran. “Toward the trees.”

“I’m afraid,” added Jessan, coming forward from the rear of the room, “that it’s going to be a bit of a hike.”


Whatever else might have happened, Ari reflected, his friend’s penchant for understatement hadn’t changed. The setting sun made a blaze of scarlet at their backs by the time the four of them had slogged their way across a couple of grain paddies to the stand of towering grrch trees east of the farm. “Into the woods?” he asked.

“That’s right,” said Jessan. “It’s not much farther.”

Under the trees, a darkness like night already prevailed. Ari heard once again the farm machinery that he’d noticed from far off during the walk to the farmhouse. Now, though, he recognized the deep trembling in the air and in the earth underfoot as the noise of heavy-duty nullgravs, running on high.

Those things sound big enough to hold up a spaceship, he thought, and then remembered Jessan’s words: “Captain Portree is waiting.

He wasn’t surprised to break out of the woods into a clearing where the grey underbelly of a hovering spacecraft hid all but a scrap of twilit sky. Below, everything was in black shadow where the ship’s bulk blocked off the light. All he could see was an open passenger door and an extended ramp, its end several feet above the muddy ground.

Good move, he conceded, with a nod of respect to the unseen Captain Portree. Anybody who tried to land here would sink.

Jessan grabbed the ramp and scrambled aboard. Ari turned to Llannat. “ ‘A long trip,’ ” he quoted. “I ought to have known right then . . . Do you need a hand up?”

The Adept shook her head. “I’m all right.” She leaped, and stood looking down at him from end of the ramp. Ari shook his head. Catching the edge of the ramp in both hands, he swung himself up onto the strip of metal, then turned and, with a fatalistic shrug, extended a hand to the Professor. The grey-haired gentleman accepted his help with calm dignity, like an aristocrat being handed aboard his private yacht for a pleasure cruise.

“Please follow Lieutenant Commander Jessan forward while I close up for lift,” said the older man. “We haven’t a great deal of time to spare.”

With Llannat once again keeping station slightly behind him and to his right, Ari followed Jessan along a narrow, curving corridor. The metal deckplates rang with the sound of their booted feet, and the note they struck had an oddly familiar resonance.

He looked again at the bulkhead panels. They only confirmed his growing suspicion. This was no brand-new craft, but one that carried the scars and stains of hard use. And he could name every scratch.

“Llannat,” he said, low-voiced, “I know this ship.”

She nodded. “I could tell. How much trouble are we in?”

“I wish I knew,” he said, as they reached the common room. “Right now, I don’t know what’s going on.”

As he spoke, the grey-haired gentleman hurried through the common room in the direction of the cockpit. “Strap in, all,” said Jessan. “We’re going to lift in a couple of minutes.”

Ari found a seat on the acceleration couch and began working the safety webbing with easy familiarity. Jessan and Llannat took longer; the Adept was still closing the last of the fasteners when she looked over at the Khesatan and said, “Isn’t it about time you told us what’s happening?”

“The captain will explain everything, I promise, just as soon as we get out of here. But let me tell you,” Jessan finished with a quick grin, “you two got off easy compared to the way I was recruited.”

“We heard about that,” said Ari. “The rumors, that is.”

“It was . . . interesting,” said Jessan.

“I’ll bet it was. What’s the name of this ship?”

Jessan’s grey eyes met his, wide-open and innocent. “She’s the Free Trader Pride of Mandeyn, Suivi registry.”

“Her real name, Jessan!”

The blond medic shook his head. “I think I ought to let the captain tell you that.”

“I’m looking forward to meeting this captain of yours,” Ari growled.

The ship’s internal comm system gave a premonitory crackle, and a tinny, distorted voice announced, “Stand by for lift-off.”

The background thrum of the engines rose in a deafening crescendo, and Ari felt himself pressed back against the cushions by the steady pressure of the lift.


Beka Rosselin-Metadi looked over at her copilot as Warhammer left Nammerin’s atmosphere behind. “How did it go, Professor?”

“As Lieutenant Commander Jessan predicted,” said the Entiboran. “With one unfortunate exception. Your brother did not answer the call alone.”

Beka shrugged. “Those are the breaks. What did you do with the extra?”

“She came with us, my lady.”

She bit her lip. “Damn it, Professor—I wanted to keep this a family affair. I’d counted on Ari being able to square things on his end once he knew the score, but we’re probably already in the data net for kidnapping Jessan. If we start making a habit of snatching Space Force medics, not even my father is going to be able to get us out of it.”

“Understood, my lady.”

Her copilot sounded almost apologetic. Beka sighed. “All right, Professor. What is it you aren’t telling me?”

“Our passenger is an Adept, my lady.”

“An Adept,” said Beka. Her mouth felt sour. “Lovely. As if my brother Owen hadn’t gotten us into enough trouble already. How the hell did an Adept get mixed up in all this?”

“What her relationship is to Lieutenant Rosselin-Metadi,” said the Professor, “I do not know. But she appears to feel a commitment toward his personal safety, and I am not such a fool as to test the strength and mutuality of that commitment under pressure.”

“So we’ve got Ari’s girlfriend along for the ride,” Beka said. “That should make for an interesting trip . . . oh, damn.” The electronic detector panel had started blinking red. “Someone’s scanning us.”

She watched, chewing her lower lip, as ship’s memory worked on a matchup for the scanner pattern. What came up wasn’t good. “A Space Force cruiser—probably the same one we spotted on our way in. What’s the odds he’ll let us pass without asking awkward questions?”

“Not good, I’m afraid,” said the Professor. “He’s dropping off fighters.”

“I see them,” said Beka, as the external comm began to scratch and crackle with the sound of a local broad-frequency signal. “Sounds like they want to talk a bit first, though.”

“Freighter lifting from Nammerin,” crackled the comm link, “this is RSF Corisydron. Come to neutral power and zero your guns, over.”

Beka looked over at her copilot and raised one eyebrow. The Professor shook his head. She nodded, and turned her attention back to the control panel. Sensors showed that the cruiser had dropped off a total of six fighter craft, and was now accelerating on a matching course with Warhammer.

“Unknown freighter, unknown freighter, heave to. Stand by to be boarded, over.”

She had Corisydron on visual now, a bright blob of light getting bigger every second. At any moment, the blob would resolve into the long, deadly triangle of a ship-of-war. She couldn’t see the much smaller fighter craft yet, but the sensors could pick them up just fine, coming in three up top and three below. Somebody’s taking us real seriously.

“Professor, time to man the guns.”

“On my way,” said Warhammer’s gunner/copilot, and left the cockpit at a run.

“Unknown freighter, unknown freighter. This is your final warning. Cut power. Over.”

Blue fire lanced through space across Warhammer’s bow.

“Shields, full,” Beka whispered to herself, and suited the action to the word. Then, over the internal link to the guns, “Professor, are you there?”

“In place, my lady.”

“Under the circumstances, let’s make it ‘Captain,’ ” she said. “Listen, now. I have all the guns ganged to your panel. I don’t want you to hit anyone—just scare the pants off them. Got that?”

“Understood, Captain.”

“On my signal, then.”

The external comm crackled again. “Unknown freighter, unknown freighter, have your personnel move forward. I am about to destroy your engines.”

“Like bloody hell you’re going to destroy my engines,” muttered Beka. She grabbed the external comm. “RSF Corisydron, be advised that on my ship I tell my people where to stand!”

She shoved Warhammer’s throttle to full forward and cut hard right.

“Professor—now!”


Commander Gil had seen worse days than this one, his first back at Prime Base on Galcen, but not lately. He’d gotten in from Pleyver at the end of the base’s regular working day, and Metadi had been waiting for him.

“Well, Commander?” the General had asked.

“I’ve got everything from Pleyver, sir,” said Gil. “But I’m still waiting for a couple of reports from Intelligence.”

Which was true, as far as it went. What rankled was that after two weeks he didn’t have any firm conclusions to report.

Except that the clinic’s a pile of rubble, which we knew; and Lieutenant Commander Jessan is missing, which we also knew; and the dirtside establishment on Pleyver is in this up to their fat necks, which might surprise some people but I don’t think a moderately reformed ex-privateer is going to be one of them.

“Don’t look for miracles from Intelligence,” said the General. “You’re not likely to see any. I’ll read your report tomorrow—maybe something will have turned up by then.”

With that, the General had departed for his aircar and the roomy, sprawling house in the northern uplands where he lived alone these days; and Commander Gil had headed—by way of a shower, a shave, and a change of uniform in lieu of a meal—for his own smaller office and an all-night job of writing.

He poured himself a cup of cold cha’a from the office urn and carried it over to his desk. The stack of datadisks and printout flimsies hadn’t vanished while he was away. Draining the cup and setting it aside, he laid out his notes on his desk and began shuffling them. He was still shuffling when the office comm link buzzed.

“Commanding General’s Office, Commander Gil speaking; this is not a secure line; may I help you?” he recited, his mind still on the slips of paper with their scribbled jottings.

“Is the General there? He’s needed in Command Control at once.”

“Sorry. He’s on his way home. I’ll patch you through to his aircar.”

Gil punched the button to complete the connection, then stood and stretched. He’ll expect me at CC when he gets there, so I might as well go now and find out what’s up.

Command Control, when Gil arrived, looked the same as always—dim red lights, winking comp displays, and hushed activity—but he hadn’t felt so much tension in the air since the time a spaceliner had suffered explosive decompression on its jump-run off Peygatai. Rescue efforts on that one had been a bitch; if the trouble now was even half as bad, this was going to be one of the nights when the Space Force earned its pay.

That’s interesting, he thought, as the big holodisplay monitor in the center of Command Control winked into life. They’re lighting up the main battle tank. That particular display meant only one thing: somebody out there in the civilized galaxy was doing some shooting, and the Space Force was planning to shoot back.

A comptech worked at one of the tank terminals, keying in a yellow sun and a ten-planet system. In the tank, the fourth planet out began to blink. That would be where the action was. Gil looked at the nearest comp for information.

The readout identified the blinking planet as Nammerin. Where have I heard of that place recently? Gil wondered, before remembering that Nammerin had been the missing Lieutenant Commander Jessan’s last duty station before Pleyver. Close by the planet, a tiny blue triangle and a swarm of blue dots marked RSF Corisydron and six of her fighter craft. The lone red dot in the swarm would be the unknown/hostile vessel.

At the watch officer’s command, the display in the battle tank enlarged to show only Nammerin and its moons, instead of the entire star system. Gil saw that the Cory was using the classic setup for blocking a jump to hyper. Right now, the Cory’s fighters were swarming the unknown, trying to prevent the hostile ship from maneuvering. Meanwhile the Cory herself would sit on the unknown’s projected jump point, and let the fighters keep the hostile craft from finding another point for as long as it took to disable her.

The tactic worked most of the time, but not always. As Gil watched the battle tank, now being updated in real time by datalink from the cruiser, he saw the unknown moving ahead faster than the Cory’s fighters.

He pursed his lips in a soundless whistle. Whoever that guy is, he must have hell’s own power plant.

Corisydron reports her fighters under fire,” announced the duty comm tech.

“Roger. Pass to Corisydron, Condition Red, Weapons Free,” called the watch officer.

Gil strode over to the log comp to catch up on what had led to this point: Scanning the entries, he saw that the Cory, responding to a planetside distress call relayed through the Space Force Medical Station, had reported an unknown contact.

What’s this? Probable kidnapping of two Space Force officers by the unknown . . . Mistress Llannat Hyfid and Lieutenant Ari Rosselin-Metadi. Damn. Not again.

So far, Commander Gil had been enjoying the situation more than not. As the General himself had said during the spaceliner mess, somebody who couldn’t appreciate a good disaster had no business being in their line of work. Now, though, the nervous, adrenaline-rush excitement went out of him like air out of a punctured balloon.

He advanced the log screen. First contact—Libra-class freighter, not responding to signals. A shot across the freighter’s bow. Then, at the point where Gil had walked in, the fighters’ return fire and her increase in speed.

Gil stared at the comp screen. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the blue lights blocking and surrounding the red one in the main battle tank, as the red dot side-slipped out of yet another of the fighters’ trapping patterns.

A Libra-class freighter. Same as Warhammer. Same as Pride of Mandeyn. Those ships haven’t been made for almost a hundred years; and now I’ve run into three of them. And each one faster than the stats allow.

A cold sensation started in the pit of Gil’s stomach, and began spreading outward. The commander was hearing a voice in his mind—General Metadi’s voice, speaking to Master Errec Ransome on a spring night eight months or more ago: “I had Sunrise Shipyards rip out the old engines and put in the big Hyper King Extras.

A second later, the comptech working the battle-tank terminal let out a yell. “We hit him!”



previous | Table of Contents | next