Commander Gil took the aircar up over the crowded buildings of Galcen Prime and turned northward. As the little craft sped toward the more sparsely inhabited uplands, Gil stole another glance at his sleeping passenger and reflected on what little he knew about General Metadi’s oldest son.
Ari Rosselin-Metadi. Born in the last, violent years of the war, when the Magelords bent their entire might against his mother’s world. Sent to live among his father’s allies, the Selvaurs of Maraghai, as the Mageworlders’ battering of Entibor escalated into a steadily tightening siege.
Three years that siege had lasted, under the pressure of the Magelords’ ultimatum: either the Domina Perada surrendered the Resistance Fleet, now a formidable weapon in the hands of her husband the General, or she would see her planet turned into a wasteland. No effort of the Resistance could break the siege; and nothing the Magelords did could break the Domina’s resolve. But when the war at last ended, with the Magelords destroyed and their ships grounded behind the border zone, Ari Rosselin-Metadi came home to Galcen, not to Entibor.
The boy must have been already half a Selvaur by then, Gil reflected; he’d certainly spent more time with the big, predatory saurians than he had with either of his parents. He’d gone back to Maraghai again as an adolescent, for an even longer stay, and this time his Selvauran foster-father had made the adoption official. Gil wondered, briefly, what language the lieutenant thought in, when he found himself alone—and whether that, or something else, was responsible for the faint remoteness behind his eyes.
The flight ended with the lieutenant still asleep. Gil brought the aircar down onto a level, grassy field near the General’s house. More small craft were already lined up along the edges of the field, together with an assortment of ground vehicles and hoverbikes.
“Here we are,” Gil said.
The lieutenant blinked, then opened his eyes fully and glanced out at the cluttered field. “I don’t believe it,” he murmured under his breath. “Father must have invited every free-spacer on the planet.”
“It just looks that way,” said Gil. “Most of them are still down portside.”
“Good place for them,” said Lieutenant Rosselin-Metadi. He sighed. “Well, no point in putting it off . . . let’s go.”
The house on the hilltop was big and sprawling, the residence of a family that had been comfortably well off, though not among Galcen’s fabulous rich. The spoils of Jos Metadi’s privateering days had gone into its construction, but the wealth of House Rosselin had not—the Domina Perada had thrown all of her family’s immense fortune into the war against the Mageworlds. Perhaps, Gil thought, she hadn’t believed that she’d survive to need it.
At the front door, Commander Gil paused and reached out a hand to palm the ID plate. As General Metadi’s aide, he was in the building’s temporary recognition files. But the door slid open before he could touch the black plastic square, and he knew the security system had recognized his companion.
The front hall of the General’s house appeared to be empty. As Gil stepped forward, however, a tawny-haired young man in a beige coverall materialized out of nowhere. After a moment, Gil realized that the man had been waiting there all along. What had seemed like invisibility was just a self-effacement so complete as to be uncanny.
The young man and Lieutenant Rosselin-Metadi regarded one another for a moment without speaking. There was a distinct family resemblance between the two, mostly in the clean, arrogant Rosselin profile that had made the Domina Perada beloved of artists all over the galaxy. Once again Gil ran through his mental data base on the General’s family. The young man in an apprentice Adept’s plain garments would be Owen Rosselin-Metadi, the middle child, born at the end of the Magewar when Entibor was already burnt out and lifeless. Not quite twelve months had separated this one from Beka.
Born so near each other, Gil thought, those two must have been close.
Strangely enough, though, it was not Owen but Ari—who by Gil’s reckoning had spent most of his childhood and adolescence on distant Maraghai—who seemed the most affected by his sister’s death. Ari had the bruised, wary look of one who has experienced too many shocks in too brief a time; if his brother felt a similar pain, it was hidden far back behind the cool, measuring expression in the younger man’s hazel eyes.
Finally the lieutenant broke the silence. “Owen. I didn’t expect to find you playing door guard.”
The other shrugged. “I do whatever Master Ransome asks me to. And somebody has to make the holovid reporters go away.”
“Death and damnation,” said Ari. “Have you been getting those up here?”
“They come and go,” Owen replied. “We’ve only had three so far this evening. I told them to leave, and they left.”
Gil said nothing, but he suspected there had been more to it than that. Ari’s brother had that air about him, just as Errec Ransome had it—a stillness overlying something strange and possibly dangerous. About Ransome there was no question; these days he was Master of the Adepts’ Guild, but during the Magewar he’d made quite a name for himself among the privateers of Innish-Kyl.
The General’s younger son was a more puzzling case. Gil didn’t know much about him. For the last ten years, since he’d turned fifteen, he’d been apprenticed to the Guild, spending most of his time in their Retreat far back in the Galcenian mountains. Just the same, that elusive quality of danger was there. The holovid reporters would have gone away without question, if Owen Rosselin-Metadi had told them to.
Ari, however, didn’t seem impressed. The big lieutenant only shook his head and stepped past his younger brother into the main part of the house.
Time to find the General, Gil thought, and report.
He nodded politely at the lieutenant’s brother, and moved out of the soundproofed entry way into a confusion of smells and noises. The big room downstairs was full of men and women—and a handful of assorted aliens whose sexes Gil didn’t feel qualified to guess—all talking at once in at least three languages and a dozen or more different accents, from pure Galcenian to unadulterated Portside. In one corner a couple of junior officers from Prime Base played double tammani with an elderly woman in Entiboran court dress and a diamond tiara; in another, a young lady Gil recognized as Councillor Vannell Oldigaard’s granddaughter flirted tearfully with a muscular free-spacer who’d somehow made it up from the port.
The air was dim and hazy, and heavy with the smells of perspiration and spilled beer. Gil looked about for the General, and finally spotted him: a tall figure in dark civilian clothes, leaning against the wall in a corner of the crowded room and regarding the procedings with a sardonic eye.
Gil made his way through the crowd to the General’s side. “Mission accomplished, sir,” he said. “I picked your son up at the Base, no problems. Is there anything else you need me to do?”
The General shook his head. “Not at the moment. Take it easy for the rest of the evening. Consider yourself off duty.”
“Yes, sir,” said Gil dubiously, and went off to the long table laden with kegs of beer and bottles of other potables.
Ari Rosselin-Metadi was already there, pouring himself a glass of the rough local vintage. Bad idea, Gil commented to himself. Uplands wine was harsh, flinty stuff—far better distilled into brandy than drunk—and the commander didn’t think a man just out of accelerated healing had any business going near it. But Lieutenant Rosselin-Metadi didn’t look like someone who would appreciate helpful suggestions.
Make that one more thing I have to watch out for, Gil thought, resigned. If he manages to kill himself or start a fight or something, the General won’t remember I was on liberty.
Lieutenant Rosselin-Metadi wasn’t the only person who’d decided to drink now and worry about a hangover tomorrow. By this time quite a few of the guests were more than a little drunk, and some of them were singing.
“Now stand to your glasses
steady—
The galaxy’s nothing but lies.
So here’s to our
friends dead already,
And here’s to the next one who
dies.”
Gil regarded the vocalists with displeasure. He knew the song, of course—just about everybody in the Space Force did—but he’d been hoping to get through the night without having to listen to it.
I should have known better, he thought. The ballad was a staple of occasions like this, when the mortality of flesh and the fallibility of machines preyed heavily on the mind.
But Gil had read the accident report on Beka Rosselin-Metadi’s crashed lifepod, and as the singers moved on to another verse, he found the morbid images too accurate for comfort.
“Take the carbon rods out of my kidneys,
Take the
navicomp out of my brain,
Take the hyperdrive switch from my
larynx,
And assemble my starship again.”
Nothing had been left of Jos Metadi’s daughter but a smear of pulped flesh mixed with metal fragments. Commander Gil had spent several sleepless nights trying to forget the pictures the singers had just called back to mind.
The hell with it, he decided suddenly. If I crack under the strain of arranging a state funeral and two wakes, the General will have to break in a new aide a year early. Can’t have that.
He drew himself a foaming mug of beer from one of the kegs on the table, and began threading his way through the crowd to the door. Outside in the night air, his spirits began to improve almost at once. He settled himself on the front bumper of a conveniently parked hovercar, one of a dozen or so littering the grass in front of the house, and set about making the beer last awhile.
He had just finished draining the mug and was pondering, undecided, whether to go back in for another one or stay outside in the warm spring night, when the front door of the house slid open. A familiar figure paused for a moment, silhouetted by the light, and stepped out.
The door closed again. The General moved away a little from the lighted doorway and stood looking up at the stars.
Gil never saw the second shadowy form detach itself from the darkness and move to the General’s side. He only knew that it was suddenly there. Gil tensed, and for the first time regretted that he’d never adopted the General’s well-known habit of always going armed.
But the voice that broke the silence was a familiar one: the Master of the Adepts’ Guild was well known to the officers at Prime Base.
“Looking for the ’Hammer?”
“Errec! Sneaking up on people like that is going to get you shot someday. By me, if you’re not careful.”
Gil heard the Adept’s quiet laugh. “I’m not worried about it,” Ransome said. “If you were planning to shoot me, you’d have done it a long time ago. We need to talk about Beka.”
“I didn’t think you’d stay fooled for long,” said the General. “How’d you guess?”
Master Ransome sounded impatient. “My apprentice’s sister, my best friend’s child—did you think I wouldn’t feel it if something like that had really happened?”
“I suppose not,” said Metadi. “Who else knows about this?”
“Owen, I think—he and Beka were always close—but he isn’t saying anything, and I’m not going to ask. Beka, of course, and whoever with her. You and me. No one else.”
“Beka’s got someone with her?” asked Metadi sharply.
“Yes,” said the Adept. “But I can’t see anything clearer than that. I want to know what tipped you off—and don’t try to convince me you’ve started seeing visions at your age.”
Perched on the bumper of the hovercar, empty beer mug clutched in one sweating hand, Commander Gil shut his eyes and shivered. He’d thought Artat was cold, but that planet was nothing next to the temperature of his blood right now. His somber-hued clothing, and the moonless night, had kept him from being noticed so far—but the Adept Master, so rumors ran, could see in the dark. And this was not a conversation the General’s aide was meant to overhear.
“I looked at that wreck, Errec,” General Metadi said. “Not just the pictures and reports. And that ship wasn’t Warhammer.”
“You’re sure?”
“You can bet on it. They’d found a piece of the main control panel—not much, but enough. I couldn’t find any of the rewiring I did on the ’Hammer—and believe me, I did plenty, between the secondary gun controls and the combat override. But the real kicker is the engines.”
“Special modifications?”
“You’d better believe it. That freighter on Artat had the old Gyfferan Hypermaster engines—standard for the class, so nobody was surprised. But the first thing I did after I got the ’Hammer, as soon as I had the cash for a down payment, I had Sunrise Shipyards rip out her old engines and put in the big Hyper King Extras. And just to make certain that particular card stayed hidden up my sleeve, I bribed the yard’s manager to keep all the work off-the-record.”
“So that’s how she got her legs,” murmured the Adept. “I always wondered. You decided to let the ID stand?”
“Somebody went to a lot of trouble to make it look like the ’Hammer and her captain had vanished from the space-lanes,” said Metadi. “I didn’t want to disoblige them. If Beka had to set up something like that, she needs all the cover she can get. Only one thing worries me.”
“What’s that?”
“Rigging a crash isn’t impossible—I can figure out two or three ways she might have done it, and an old Libra-class freighter isn’t hard to come by if you’re not particular—but I can only think of one way to come up with matching tissue samples.”
“Replication?” asked the Adept.
The General nodded. “And I haven’t heard of anybody working that sort of trick in years.”
“Mageworlds technology? You wouldn’t.”
“It used to be around,” said the General. “More than some people want to let on. But even back then, it cost. And the people who used it . . . ”
“I see,” said the Adept. “It appears your daughter has decided to keep some dangerous company.”
“She knows what she’s doing—I hope,” said the General. “But I tell you one thing: if I live to see this mess cleared up, she’s going to be glad she’s gotten too big to spank.” He stretched, and added, “Right now, though, it’s up to her. What do you say we go inside and and show those young pups what a proper wake looks like?”
Gil watched them go inside. When his chronometer showed that another thirty minutes had passed, he left his seat on the hovercar’s bumper and followed.
He had no doubt that he’d just survived the most dangerous few minutes of his life. The Master of the Adepts’ Guild was a peaceful and gently spoken man, these days, but he’d been something far different in his youth, when he’d fought the Magelords as Jos Metadi’s copilot during the worst years of the war. And nobody—then or now—had ever accused General Metadi of being either peaceful or gently spoken.
Gil knew with a cold certainty that if either man ever learned that he’d overheard their conversation, the Space Force would be short one commander before the echo died.
For Ari Rosselin-Metadi, Beka’s wake had been going on for what seemed like forever. He’d been meticulously polite to everyone he’d encountered, from his father’s aide to Beka’s old schoolmate Jilly Oldigaard, but the air of unreality about the proceedings refused to go away. It all felt like a party in a particularly bad dream—a continuation, somehow, of the nightmare he’d been trapped in since his mother’s death. One of these days, he supposed, the nightmare would stop, and he could wake up and start hurting.
His head ached, right now, from the wine and from the presence of too many people and from the lingering aftereffects of his bout with mescalomide poisoning. A hyper-space journey in a Space Force courier ship didn’t count as bed rest, and he knew it. He’d held himself together so far the best he could, but the sounds of the wake had started blurring into an indistinct rumble, and the edges of his vision were turning fuzzy.
I’ve got to get some fresh air, he thought. Before I pass out and embarrass everybody.
He left the room as inconspicuously as possible, and found the back stairs up to the rooftop terrace. That part of the house had been shut off for tonight’s wake, of course, but the domestic computers still recognized him as family and opened the doors for him to pass. He wondered, briefly, if anyone had erased his mother’s and sister’s ID scans from the household data bank—or did the house wait, unknowing, for Beka and the Domina to come home, quarreling as usual but still alive, from a day spent together in downtown Prime?
They were too much alike, he thought, as he walked out onto the upper terrace. Mother wanted Beka to have the kind of life that the war took away from her—which Mother probably wouldn’t have enjoyed all that much herself—and Beka wouldn’t take it.
The night above the terrace was starry, without a moon, and the scent of evening-blooming flowers drifted on the night breeze. From here, the sound of the wake was indistinguishable from the noises of any other party. He sat down on the ledge surrounding the terrace, and looked out over the Upland Hills.
“You shouldn’t be here.” His brother Owen seemed to materialize out of the shadows beside him. “You look like you’re about to fold up and go under.”
“I’ll be all right.”
“Most people who’ve just come out of a healing pod have the good sense to stay in bed for a while afterward.” Owen paused. “And somebody who’s being hunted by Magelords shouldn’t wander around making himself an easy target.”
Ari glanced at his brother. “Who told you about that?”
Owen looked back at him calmly—Owen was always calm, so calm that Ari wondered sometimes if his younger brother even noticed the real world at all. “Whatever the Magelords do interests the Guild.”
“That wasn’t what I asked,” said Ari. “I want to know how you found out about something that’s classified so secret I’m not even supposed to think about it in public.”
“Stuff like that always finds its way to the Guild eventually,” said Owen. “Master Ransome gets four or five messages every week from public-spirited souls who think they’ve seen a Magelord in their back garden.”
“And he shows all those reports to you.”
Owen nodded. “Somebody has to check out the rumors.”
“I wouldn’t call chasing Magelords a job for the Guild’s oldest living apprentice,” Ari said. His voice had an edge to it, both from the growing ache inside his skull and from the sting of realizing that the Guild’s report had probably come straight from Llannat Hyfid.
His brother didn’t rise to the insult. “ ‘An apprentice can stand where an Adept cannot.’ ”
“Is that all you’ve learned in the past ten years?” asked Ari. “How to quote proverbs?”
“No,” said Owen. “Not quite.” He paused again, his hazel eyes going distant as he contemplated something Ari couldn’t see. “But I have learned how to let go of what I can’t help anymore . . . and you need to do that, I think.”
“Spare me your advice,” growled Ari, nettled. “If you’d been a bit less generous with your advice to Beka, she might still be alive.”
Not even that accusation could ruffle Owen’s perpetual calm. The apprentice Adept only shook his head and said, “You know better than that.”
“If you say so,” Ari said. “But we both know you helped her get that first berth out of Galcen. Didn’t you even try to talk her out of going?”
“Only long enough to see that she’d go whether I helped her or not,” Owen said. “So I did my best to make certain she got a fair start, and then . . . ” He shrugged. “Like I said, you let go of what you can’t change. You need to do the same thing—go downstairs to bed, and don’t think about Beka anymore. Nothing you do tonight is going to help her where she’s gone.”
The morning sun over Embrig gave the streets of the port a watery yellow light, but no warmth. Beka hunched her shoulders inside the long coat, and wished she were already back on the ’Hammer—currently the Pride of Mandeyn, with a set of papers to prove it.
So far, at least, Embrig Security didn’t seem to be chasing anybody. Either the Lily’s manager figured that a cheating gambler was no loss to society, or Ignaceu LeSoit had waited a lot longer than the ten minutes he’d promised before officially recovering from the stun-bolt and discovering what had happened. The manager hadn’t been inclined to argue with Tarnekep Portree when he cashed in the Professor’s collection of chips on the way out, either; the former Armsmaster to House Rosselin would be leaving the planet richer by over a hundred thousand credits, as well as by a handful of names.
I ought to feel better about this, Beka thought: I’m out from under the death mark, I’ve got a good lead on the bastards who killed Mother and wanted to kill me . . . I really should be happy right now.
She wasn’t, though—and the feeling that she ought to be only added to her increasing bad temper.
“You can’t imagine how glad I’ll be,” she said moodily, as they turned the corner into the Freddisgatt Allee, “to get off of this lump of dirt and out into clean space again. I still have some debts to pay.”
The Professor shook his head. “You told me you bought your ship for the promise of names, my lady, and now you have them. Beka Rosselin-Metadi may have died on Artat, but there’s no need for Tarnekep Portree to keep on living. You can adopt a less uncomfortable persona, if you like, and go look elsewhere for a cargo.”
Beka stopped dead in the middle of the Allee. “Shut up,” she said, “and listen to me for a change.”
The Professor didn’t say anything, so she went on.
“All my life,” she said, and a small corner of her mind was shocked by the bitterness in her voice, “I’ve been explaining to people what I want to do, and then listening to them explain back to me why I can’t do it, until I’ve just about had it with explanations. So I’ll tell you this once, and that’s it: names aren’t enough. I’m going to track down the bastard who arranged for Mother’s death, and I’m going to bring him home to Galcen with a ribbon tied around his neck. And that’s how I’m going to pay for my ship.”
“Then will you allow me to help you?” the Professor asked after a moment had slipped by.
“Why should I?” she demanded. “What does any of this have to do with you?”
“Call it an old man’s gesture of apology, Captain,” he said, with a melancholy smile. “I was . . . tired, after the Magewar ended, and sickened by the loss of Entibor. I told myself that my oath was no longer binding, and I left the remnants of House Rosselin to their own devices.”
“Which got my mother killed, is that what you’re saying?”
He bowed his head in assent. “If I hadn’t abandoned my responsibilities for so long, her enemies might never have dared . . . but it’s too late to remedy that. Not too late, though, for making them regret it—and at my age, Captain, it might be a good idea to begin such a project by finding a younger partner with an aptitude for the trade.”
“Meaning me?” she asked.
“You have the reflexes for it,” he said, “and something of the temperament, not to mention a pilot’s skills and a ship like no other. The rest”—he shrugged—“is training and practice.”
“I see,” she said. “Maybe we could work out a compromise. You need a partner. I need a copilot and a gunner if I’m going to push my trade routes out into the frontier worlds—and one or two of those names Morven spilled had an outplanets ring to them. How are you on starship gunnery, Professor?”
“I used to be quite good,” he said. “Of course, that was a war or two ago, and I’m sadly out of practice.”
“You’re hired anyway,” she said. “Let’s get the hell out of town.”