Four days after lifting from Nammerin, Warhammer emerged from hyperspace. By tacit consent, the subject of Beka’s intentions hadn’t been brought up again during the otherwise uneventful trip. There’d be time enough for councils of war, Ari supposed, once the ’Hammer arrived wherever his sister and her mysterious copilot had in mind.
For his own part, he supposed that he could work with Bee and not wind up throttling her. Just remember that she’s the captain, he told himself, and it’s her ship. If you cared about that sort of thing, you’d have become a line officer, not gone into the Medical Service.
The sigh of the ship’s hydraulic systems taking the strain of planetfall brought him back to the present. The ’Hammer settled down onto the landing surface. A minute or so later, Ari heard the noise of the ramp being lowered. Across the common room, Jessan unstrapped and stood up.
“We might as well go on inside,” the Khesatan said to Llannat and Ari. “Your sister and the Professor are going to be a while shutting down the ship. You know how star-pilots are.”
Ari stood and stretched. “I know that their brains don’t function under natural gravity, which describes my sister pretty well most of the time. You’ve been here before?”
“Only once, for a few hours,” said Jessan. “But I know how to get in.”
Together, the three of them went out the ’Hammer’s main passenger door and down the ramp. The freighter stood on her landing legs in the middle of an enclosed docking bay. Ari looked around at the assortment of spacecraft parked under the bay’s echoing dome like so many hovercars, and whistled.
“Impressive, isn’t it?” said Jessan.
Ari nodded. “I know collectors on Galcen who’d pawn their grandmother’s jewelry for some of this stuff.”
“Small-time,” said Llannat beside him. “I know historians who’d hock the old lady herself for nothing more than a chance to prowl around in here for an hour or two. That’s a Magebuilt scoutcraft over here, just for starters.”
So it was—meteor-pocked and ugly and, as far as Ari had ever heard, unique in the civilized galaxy. Not even the Adepts ever captured one of those, he thought uneasily.
“Let’s get on in,” said Jessan. “It’s chilly out here—we’re inside an asteroid, or something that does a damned good imitation of one. You two must be freezing.”
“Don’t hurry on my account,” said Llannat. “It’s been almost a year since the last time I shivered, and I’m enjoying the sensation.”
“Same here,” Ari said, but he knew that a tropic-weight uniform wouldn’t keep out the cold forever. When Jessan started off toward one side of the docking bay, he followed. He wasn’t surprised when a section of rough-cut rock wall turned out to be a concealed door opening onto a small antechamber and a larger room beyond. “What about the main door over that way?”
“Don’t try it. That one only looks like a door.”
“What is it, then?” asked Ari, as the sliding panel snicked shut again behind them.
“A burglar alarm,” said Jessan. “Or so your sister tells me. You wake up when the burglar starts screaming.”
Llannat looked curious. “You believe that?”
“Implicitly,” Jessan assured her.
“Probably wise,” said the Adept, her dark face unreadable. Before Ari could speak, her expression changed, and she hurried past him and Jessan into the main room.
“Hey, Ari!” she called back over her shoulder. “You should see the setup in here!”
“Sickbay,” Jessan explained as they followed Llannat into the immaculate tile-and-metal room. “About as far as I got last time. We had to stop here for some quick repair work on the other two.”
“Anything bad?”
“Nothing they couldn’t have handled without me,” said Jessan. “Beka had a torn ligament in her leg, and the Professor had a broken arm—child’s play for a setup like this. I wish I’d had some of this gear back on Pleyver.”
“I wish we had it on Nammerin,” said Ari. “That bone-mender’s the latest model from InterMedical Industries. We’ve got a flatpic of it stuck onto the old one in Emergency, so we can pretend a little sometimes.”
“I’ll tell you something interesting, though,” said Llannat. “Everything new in here is really new, nothing older than a couple of Standard years, and the highest quality that money can buy. But all the other stuff, the little things that don’t lose their potency or become obsolete—they go back to the Magewar, at least. What does that suggest to you?”
“That our friend the Professor has been in business for a long, long time,” said Jessan, with a shrug. “But five minutes in his company will tell you the same thing.”
“You can read more into it than that,” Ari told him. “We all can. There’s no need to go around it on tiptoe—two years ago something caused the owner of this very professional sickbay to refurbish it and restock it with enough gear to handle a small war. And two years ago somebody killed my mother.”
“Who was the last Domina of living Entibor,” said Llannat, soft-voiced. “And the Professor is Entiboran.”
Ari thought about that for a moment. “It would explain a few things,” he said. “Jessan, I’m suddenly very curious about the rest of this place. What else is here?”
“The door’s right over that way,” Jessan said. “Let’s go.”
After the scrubbed-clean familiarity of the medical bay, entering the next room was like stepping through a doorway into another world. And that’s not just a phrase, thought Ari, halting frozen in the doorway. It’s the truth.
He couldn’t move. He felt afraid to step onto the exquisite parquetry of the wooden floor. The delicate openwork carving on the long central table and the surrounding chairs made him feel large and clumsy, the way fragile or beautiful objects always did—an intruder in a world that was much smaller than it should be, and far too easily broken.
“There’s more,” Jessan said. “Look outside the windows.”
“I am looking,” said Ari quietly. “I see it.”
The windows, tall and casemented, made the room’s far wall into a curtain of glass. Beyond them, the sun was rising over a wide vista of forested hills, flooding the whole room with a ruddy light. Morning mist filled the valleys between the evergreens, and from somewhere outside the chamber came the sound of birds. One darted past the windows as Ari watched, a scarlet streak appearing and vanishing against the dark green of the woods.
“Where are we?” Llannat asked. Her voice, always gentle, now hardly rose above a whisper.
“Entibor,” murmured Ari. “Years ago, while it was alive.”
“One of the private rooms in the Summer Palace,” said Jessan. “But this—did you ever see such a high-quality holovid?” He reached over to the wall, and flipped a switch.
Ari blinked. The table and chairs wavered, and became stark, heavy-duty pieces in plain metal, the sort of thing you couldn’t break if you tried. Where the rows of windows had been, he saw open archways leading off down shadowy passages.
“The furniture,” said Llannat after a moment, “has got to be real this time. Nobody would ever make themselves an illusion that ugly.”
Ari had to agree. Without the holovid, the room and its furniture reminded him of the Namport Detention Center. “Can we have the Palace back?”
“Sure,” said Jessan. He toggled the switch on again, and the dawnlit chamber reappeared. “I’d rather wait here for the others, anyway. I know there’s sleeping quarters down one of the halls, but that’s it—and I wouldn’t want to wander around alone in here. No telling what you might find.”
Ari sat down on one of the chairs. Even knowing what it really was, he half-expected the frail, pretty thing to crumple under his weight. Outside the windows, the sun rose higher over the Entiboran hills.
“Real-time holographic simulation,” said Jessan, taking a seat at the far end of the table. “Whoever did the programming was an artist. You could probably watch it for days and not get an exact repeat.”
“The Professor programmed it himself,” said Llannat. “From memory, after Entibor was lost.”
Ari turned his head, and saw the Adept standing just behind his right shoulder. She was watching the changing holographic landscape, and her eyes looked sad. He didn’t ask her how she’d known about the room’s programming. Being an Adept, she’d probably pulled the knowledge out of the air somehow. Instead, he ran a hand along the cool metal tabletop that looked like carved blond wood, and said, “Mother was just the opposite. She never let anything Entiboran into the house at all if she could help it.”
The room’s outer door slid open again before Llannat could answer him. Beka entered, followed closely by the Professor.
“Now do we find out what you’ve got planned?” Ari asked.
“We’ll talk about it tomorrow over breakfast,” Beka replied. “Nobody’s committing themselves to anything until we’ve all gotten some sleep.”
Ari spent the period of rest surrounded by more luxury than he’d thought existed outside the Central Worlds. The bathroom attached to his sleeping quarters was, by itself, a thing of wonder—black marble and tile, with a sunken tub that looked long enough to swim laps in. After two years on Nammerin, he admitted as he lowered himself into the steaming water, and four days on the ’Hammer, it would take far less than this to impress me.
He stretched out at full length in the tub and soaked until his fingertips began to wrinkle. Sonics might get you antiseptic enough to meet hospital standard, but they still couldn’t make you feel clean. And the public bathhouses in downtown Namport, besides being strictly off limits to Space Force personnel, were in general good places to lose your wallet while picking up an eclectic assortment of the local diseases.
Enjoy it while it lasts, he told himself. Whatever Beka’s got in mind is almost certainly not going to be this much fun.
He ducked under the surface to rinse the soap out of his hair, then stood and let the water run off his body. Stepping out of the tub, he wrapped himself in a nubbly bath towel roughly the size of a landing pad and returned to the bedroom.
Four of the bath towels might have stretched to make a coverlet for the bed itself, an enormous expanse of mattress between swagged-back velvet curtains. It looks like a holoset for “Spaceways Patrol,” he thought. All that’s missing is Sinister Serina in a glued-on gown.
He shook his head regretfully over the omission and slid between the cool spidersilk sheets. The room lights slowly dimmed. Ari burrowed his head into the large feather pillow and fell asleep.
Light awakened him, streaming into the room from a source outside something that looked like a window but probably wasn’t. Semitransparent glassweave curtains gave a hazy impression of manicured lawns and formal gardens stretching out beyond the leaded panes. He sat up in bed and looked around the room.
A dark, silent figure stood motionless in an alcove near the door. Ari tensed, then let out his breath in explosive relief. What he’d taken at first for an intruder was only some sort of robot, vaguely human in its general outlines, its black-enameled body surmounted by an ovoid of dark plastic. A red light flashed briefly within the sable depths of the mechanism’s featureless mask.
“Good morning, sir.” Despite the machine’s outward appearance, the synthesized voice was pleasant and well modulated. “I trust you slept well. I shall fetch your clothing while you bathe, sir.”
“Right,” said Ari, rolling out of the wide bed. The carpet felt springy and cool under his bare feet, like freshly mown grass. When he emerged from the bathroom some time later, the bed had been made, and the robot had laid out a handsome suit of burgundy cloth.
He frowned at the garments. “Where’s my uniform?”
“Being cleaned and repaired, sir. Do you require it?”
“No,” Ari replied. “I don’t suppose I’ll be needing it for a while. But can’t you find something that won’t make me look like the bouncer in a high-class bar?”
“Something more subdued, then,” said the robot. “If you would be so kind as to wait a moment . . . ”
The robot picked up the pile of cloth and left the room with it, returning a minute later with another armload of fabric that turned out to be an otherwise identical suit in a quiet shade of forest green.
Ari wasn’t at all surprised when the garments turned out to fit him perfectly. He sealed the last fastener and turned back to the robot. “Tell me—can a man find a cup of cha’a somewhere hereabouts?”
“The others are waiting in the breakfast nook, sir.”
“Lead on,” said Ari. He followed the robot down a passageway to a sweeping staircase, and from there to a balcony overlooking something that looked for all the galaxy like a waterfall in a woodland glade. A milk white durnebeast drank, head bent, from the pool some thirty feet below. The slim, long-legged creature looked up as he appeared, then fled into the undergrowth.
Out on the balcony, three more members of the ’Hammer’s crew sat together around a glass-topped breakfast table. Beka still wore Tarnekep Portree’s clothing, but she’d left off the red plastic eye patch and had done something to her long hair to turn the single braid back to its familiar yellow. The others had clearly taken at least partial advantage of the valet robots’ services. The Professor had switched from his free-spacer’s outfit to a plain white shirt and black trousers cut in the old Entiboran style, and Nyls Jessan carried off a pale blue Khesatan lounging robe with an air of having just arrived from an early-morning session of birdsong and flute music.
Ari slid into one of the empty chairs and began filling his plate with shirred eggs and slices of grilled meat. “Where’s Llannat?” he asked.
Beka shrugged. “Still asleep, I suppose. What does the robot assigned to Mistress Hyfid have to say?”
The valet robot that had escorted Ari to breakfast paused for a moment before responding. “My series-mate reports that Mistress Hyfid dressed and left her chamber some time ago.”
“Then she ought to have gotten here by now,” said Ari.
“Maybe not,” said Jessan. He turned to the robot. “Did Mistress Hyfid have an escort when she left?”
Another pause. “She refused one, sir.”
“There you have it,” said Jessan. “She’s lost.”
The Professor shook his head. “An Adept? Unlikely. Mistress Hyfid is undoubtedly going about her own business—but what it is, I wouldn’t venture to guess.”
After a night full of confused and disturbing dreams about the gentle-voiced Professor, with his illusory windows onto an Entibor long dead, Llannat Hyfid had awakened to a room flooded with light—and to the knowledge that she needed to make up her mind before she went any further.
All right, she demanded of the universe, as the shower room’s multiple jets and sprays of water sluiced the night sweat off her body. Here I am. Now what do I do?
She didn’t get an answer. She never did, when she tried to push things that way. The prompting she’d gotten unasked on Nammerin had been so strong that she’d pulled away from a conversation in midsentence to make a dash for the hospital airfield, but that inner sureness had left her as soon as the ’Hammer lifted out of atmosphere and headed for hyperspace.
She turned off the shower room, twisted her long hair up into its customary out-of-the-way knot, and padded back into the sleeping chamber to get dressed. The robot had brought her a set of formal Adept’s blacks while she showered: trousers and tunic and a clean white shirt, laid out in proper order on the new-made bed.
“I wish,” she said, as she fastened the high collar of the black broadcloth tunic, “that whatever’s pushing me around would tell me where I’m heading.”
“I don’t understand, Mistress,” said the robot.
“Never mind,” she said. “I was talking to myself.”
It was close enough for truth, she supposed. The robot seemed to think so, anyhow. It hesitated a second before asking, “Would you care for breakfast, Mistress?”
She shrugged. “Why not?”
“If you would follow me, then . . . ”
“No,” she said. “I’ll find my own way. Thank you.”
The robot made demurring noises. She said no a second time, more forcefully; the robot gave up and rolled away, still clicking with disapproval.
She sighed, and went out into the passage.
It looks like the decision is all yours, she told herself. If you say you want out of whatever they’re planning, they’ll honor the request. The Professor’s old-fashioned enough to understand an Adept wanting to keep her hands clean, and Captain Rosselin-Metadi wishes you hadn’t come along in the first place. And those two are the ones who count.
She didn’t need the machine to tell her that breakfast was down the hallway and to the left. The rich, eye-opening aroma of fresh-brewed cha’a reached her nose even more distinctly than the mingled aura of the ’Hammer’s crew came to her other senses. She swallowed once, and headed in the opposite direction.
“Mistress Hyfid’s absence need not delay us any longer,” said the Professor. “The robot can record and replay as needed. So—my lady?”
“Right,” said Beka. “The latest bit started with a letter from Dadda. I’d set up a mail drop through General Delivery on Pleyver not too long after the Prof and I rigged that crash outside Port Artat, so I thought it was time to make a side trip to Flatlands and check it out. There was a message confirming something I’d asked about, and he told me about the new Space Force clinic in Flatlands. The officer in charge, he said, was discreet and reliable.”
“Considering the source,” Jessan said, pouring more cha’a into the translucent porcelain cups, “I’m flattered.”
“As well you should be,” said the Professor. “Pray continue, my lady.”
“Right,” said Beka. “Besides the word about the clinic, Dadda passed along what he’d learned: Gilveet Rhos, the man who did the electronics work when they killed Mother, hasn’t been in circulation since then. It sounded like somebody wasn’t happy with the way that job went down, which tallies with what out late friend on Pleyver had to say.”
“Which friend was that?” asked Ari. The only Pleyveran he could name offhand was Tarveet, and the councillor had still been alive and making long-winded speeches the day before the ’Hammer hit Nammerin.
“The one who was hiring me to kill you, big brother,” said Beka, with a crooked smile. “He never did give me his name . . . but he certainly was generous with everybody else’s.”
Something about her expression sent a cold finger tracing down the back of Ari’s neck. “What did you do to him, Bee?”
“Nothing more than he deserved,” she said. “Owen was in Flatlands—Guild business, I think; he was doing a passable imitation of a spaceport bum—and the bad guys caught him. I don’t know how, and I didn’t ask. But I’d just finished shaking hands on the original deal when a couple of goons dragged Owen into the room, and the head man wanted me to do him, too.”
She paused. “So I shot a goon and cut the head man’s throat, and after that things got violent.”
There was a moment of silence. Ari didn’t doubt that his sister had done everything she described—lying had never been one of Bee’s particular vices—but he was damned if he’d give her the satisfaction of knowing that she’d shocked him. When he was fairly certain he could match Beka’s offhand manner, he asked, “What happened to Owen?”
Beka looked worried, “I don’t know. He stayed in Flatlands—unfinished business, he said. But he needed somebody to draw away the hired guns, which is how the Prof and I wound up ruining your friend Jessan’s evening.”
“Believe me,” murmured Jessan, “the night had its moments.”
Beka cast a quick glance sidelong at the Khesatan, but Jessan’s bland face was an noncommittal as ever. With only a faint—and uncharacteristic—pinkness in her pale cheeks to show that the exchange had taken place, Ari’s sister went on.
“After everything fell apart,” she said, “we were, well, busy for a while. But later on, I had some time to think. And the longer I thought, the more the affair on Pleyver started to smell like a setup. Like a whole damned series of setups, in feet, all the way back to the start.”
Ari set his knife and fork aside; the conversation had killing his appetite a long time ago. “A setup? How?”
Beka leaned back and steepled her hands, tapping the fingertips together. “Try this on for size, big brother. Somebody wants to smash Dahl&Dahl and the Suivi lobby so hard there isn’t even a damp spot left on the pavement afterward.”
“It’s conceivable,” the Professor commented. “The Dahls of Galcen are a powerful clan—as are their Suivi cousins.”
“Powerful,” said Jessan, “but not well-loved.” The Khesatan surveyed the breakfast table’s array of jams and preserves, took a spoonful of something clear and green, and began spreading it on a torn-off bit of fresh bread. “Power and popularity,” he continued, “don’t usually go hand-in-hand. Your mother the Domina was a notable exception to the rule.”
“And that’s why someone killed her,” said Beka.
She picked up the silver butter knife from the side of her plate and frowned at it for a moment. Then she changed her grip in a single quick, blurred motion, and started turning the blade first one way and then another.
“It’s how I’d do it,” she went on, her blue eyes following the glint of the breakfast nook’s artificial daylight on the polished metal, “if I wanted to make somebody squirm and bleed.”
“What do you mean?” Ari growled.
His sister smiled—not at him, but at the edge of the knife. “Work it out for yourself. First, you get debates going hot and heavy in the Grand Council over Suivi Point.”
“Tarveet of Pleyver,” said Ari, remembering. “He introduced the original Expulsion Bill. Mother cut it to ribbons on the Council floor.”
“The slug-eating idiot deserved it,” said Beka, and went on. “Step two—assassinate the beloved public figure who happens to be the most passionate voice against expulsion. And step three—make certain your killers get caught, to lay the blame on Dahl&Dahl.”
She tossed the knife from hand to hand for a few seconds, then flicked it out to take up a pat of butter from the crystal dish. “But they didn’t count on Dadda,” she finished. “And their assassin wound up too dead to interrogate.”
Ari scowled into the depths of his cha’a. “Why would anybody believe that Suivi Point wanted to get kicked out of the Republic?”
“In order to gain freedom of action,” said the Professor, who’d been listening to Beka with grave approval, like an instructor in keyboard and the voice at a favorite student’s graduation recital. “And a release from the constraint of law.”
“That would make sense to most people, you have to admit,” said Jessan. “Your mother was hitting the ‘how can we control them if we expel them’ note pretty hard in her speeches.”
Ari growled an obscenity under his breath in the Forest Speech—a language he’d always found more satisfying than Galcenian for such purposes.
“You won’t get any argument on that from me,” said Beka. “But think about it, Ari. If I’m right, and the original plan was a putup job, then so was everything else.”