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vii. galcen: prime base
ninglin: ruisi port

GENERAL Jos Metadi looked at the miniature hand-blaster lying on his desk and frowned. At sixty-two percent, the blaster’s energy level was lower than he usually liked. It wouldn’t last through any sort of prolonged encounter with that kind of charge. Most people wouldn’t have worried—nobody expected a holdout gun to take them through an extended firefight—but Metadi hadn’t survived as much as he had by being careless.

He pressed a button on the desktop. Part of the smooth black surface slid aside. The little niche thus revealed held a half-dozen of the small square power packs the Space Force used in its ubiquitous clipboards and datapads. He took one out, then broke open the hand-blaster to remove the low-charge pack still inside. After switching in the fresh pack, he put the old one into the desktop to recharge and pushed the button again. The niche slid closed as Metadi tucked the miniature blaster back into its grav-clip up his sleeve.

That taken care of, he turned his attention to the stack of printout flimsies that had been waiting for his attention ever since he came into the office. His new aide, Commander Quetaya, had already sorted through the morning message traffic and weeded out all those items that could be handled effectively at some lower level. The messages that remained, Metadi knew from long experience, would concern problems so touchy, secret, or complex that they couldn’t be solved, only worried about—and that, by somebody of the very highest rank.

As if I didn’t have enough to deal with already . . . 

Metadi let his gaze drift from the pile of flimsies to the holocube beside them. Three of the four side faces of the cube contained images of his children: Beka at her coming-of-age party; Ari in dress uniform; Owen in the plain garments of an apprentice Adept. The fourth side, and the one currently closest to the General, held the holographic likeness of a slender, fair-haired woman in Councilor’s robes and a tiara of plain black metal.

You drive a hard bargain, my lady. If I’d known thirty-odd years ago where your job was going to lead, I might not have had the nerve to take it.

The Domina Perada Rosselin of Entibor looked back at him from the holocube and said nothing. More and more, these days, Metadi found himself conversing with his late wife as if she were still present. He supposed it meant he was growing old—or maybe he was just running short of people he could talk to.

The family’s all gone now, he told the holopic, and the house is so empty you wouldn’t recognize it. Ari’s off somewhere between Nammerin and Infabede, Beka’s poking around on the far side of the Netstirring up trouble, if I know the girl!—and Owen . . . these days I never know where he is or what he’s doing.

Metadi shook his head. Everything Owen finds out goes straight to the Guild anyway. If I want Errec to know something I’ll tell him myself and get the story right the first time.

He pushed back his chair and stood up. “The hell with it,” he said aloud. “Metadi, what you have to do is get out of town for a while.”

In the next room, the General’s aide was hard at work dealing with yet another stack of message flimsies. Unlike Jervas Gil, who had been so ordinary in his appearance as to be effectively invisible most of the time, Rosel Quetaya was trim and strikingly good-looking, with ivory skin and glossy black curls. She looked up as the General strode into her office.

“Commander,” Metadi said without preamble, “give me a list of sectors that could use a surprise inspection.”

“Yes, sir.” The commander set the messages aside and began keying search criteria into her desk comp. “We have an entire range of possibles,” she told him after a few moments. “Do you want the units in question merely startled, somewhat astonished, or caught with their pants completely down?”

“I’m not interested in the small stuff,” Metadi said. “But if there’s anybody out there with serious bodies buried in their backyard, I want things dug up and straightened out while we still have a chance to do it.”

“Right. We’re talking wrath-of-the-gods time, then.” She tapped a few more keys. The comp extruded a slip of flimsy, which she tore off and handed to the General. “This is the short list based on the extended criteria.”

Metadi scanned the printout. “Hah. Here’s something that could stand looking into. Infabede sector, Admiral Valiant commanding. It says here the last five lieutenants Space Force assigned to staff duty with Valiant all resigned their commissions before the end of their tours.”

Quetaya nodded. “I asked for unusual turnover patterns when I did the search.”

“Good thinking. It could just be that the food on Admiral Valiant’s flagship is bad . . . but I don’t think so.” And Ari’s outbound from Nammerin for the Fezzy, which means if there’s anything wrong on her he’s going to walk straight into it. That boy draws trouble the way a tree draws lightning; I swear I should have let Ferrda keep him on Maraghai. “Let’s go to Infabede and find out.”

“Yes, sir,” Quetaya replied. “Will you want me to file the movement report?”

“And give everyone in the galaxy word on where I’m going? I don’t think so.”

Quetaya looked doubtful. “The regulations say—”

“I wrote those regs,” Metadi told her. “The first draft, anyhow. Now get me a list of ships currently in close orbit or on the ground at Galcen Prime.”

“Yes, sir,” Quetaya said again. She turned back to the comp. A few keyclicks more, and a second slip of flimsy appeared. “Departure schedules for all available ships.”

The General scanned the list. “There,” he said, his finger stabbing toward a name. “RSF Selsyn-bilai. Stores ship outbound for Infabede with a fresh loadout of supplies. She’ll do. Now get me a secure line to the base CO, so he won’t have fits when I turn up missing.” The General chuckled. “No sense slipping away undetected if we start a galaxy-wide manhunt in the process. That would ruin our incognito for sure.”

Quetaya looked up from punching a routing code into the comm link. “Incognito?”

“That’s right,” Metadi said. “Visiting brass hats never hear about the down-and-dirty stuff, the sort of things that get handed over to junior officers and enlisted types and then forgotten about. I want to poke around in Valiant’s territory for a few days before I officially turn up.”

“Someone’s bound to recognize you,” Quetaya protested. “Your picture’s all over the place.”

“People don’t see the face, they see the uniform. And if Warrant Officer Bandur down in Engineering happens to look a lot like General Metadi in the holonews broadcasts . . . well, it’s a big galaxy, and Bandur sure would like to be drawing the General’s pay instead of his own.”

“I understand,” said Quetaya. “I’ll get uniforms and ID plates ready for you in the name of Gamelan Bandur.”

“You do that, and think of a name for yourself while you’re at it.” The comm link’s buzzer sounded. Metadi picked up the handset. “Metadi here.”

“Good morning, General.” The commanding officer of Prime Base sounded a bit surprised to be hearing from Metadi at this hour on a secure line. “Any trouble I should know about?”

“No trouble, Perrin. I’m granting myself some leave. If anything comes up, handle it.”

“Handle it, aye,” the CO said. “Enjoy your leave time, General.”

“There’s that,” Metadi said as he switched off. “Now let’s get moving. Selsyn hops out of orbit at 1149.45 Standard, and we have to be aboard her with in-transit orders cut for—let’s make it for the supply depot on Treidel.”

As soon as Commander Quetaya had gone to take care of the uniforms and ID, Metadi reached over and touched another key on the comm panel. “Metadi here,” he said, as soon as the link opened. “Patch me through to the Retreat. And go secure.”

“Secure aye,” said the voice on the other end of the link.

A series of clicks and beeps marked the progress of the transfer, followed by a synthesized voice informing him that he had contacted the Retreat’s information center and inviting him to leave his comm code and a message.

“Private message for Guild Master Errec Ransome,” Metadi told the voice.

“Please enter authorization code for direct messages to that recipient.”

Metadi punched in the code sequence for Ransome’s private message queue. For a moment, he considered using the personal code that would, within minutes, fetch Errec Ransome himself to a direct voicelink from anywhere on Galcen, then decided against it. He’d used that sequence only two times in the past five years—once when the news came in about Beka supposedly crashing Warhammer outside Port Artat; and once before that, on the night that Perada had died.

No point in scaring whatever poor kid’s got the job of monitoring the Retreat’s comm system this morning, he thought, and left a recorded message instead.

“Errec, Jos here. Don’t bother trying to find me for a while . . . I won’t be around. Talk with you when I get back. Metadi out.”

He switched off. Back in his own office, he took his uniform tunic out of the closet and began removing the ribbons and collar tabs. Once his aide brought the proper insignia for an engineering warrant officer, the tunic would do as well for Gamelan Bandur as it had for Jos Metadi. Selsyn-bilai was large enough for him to be just another service member in transit—and large enough, also, that the warrants would have their own mess. That way, Warrant Officer Bandur didn’t have to worry about getting bumped up into the wardroom, where there was always the outside chance he might run into someone who’d met the General in person.

Some time later Commander Quetaya returned, wearing an enlisted crew member’s uniform and carrying an assortment of insignia, nametags, IDs, and orders.

“All cleared,” she said. “I sent the clerk on an errand over to Records and did up the orders and the nametags myself.”

“Good,” Metadi replied. “I knew there was a reason I grabbed you out of Intelligence. Have you decided who you’re going to be for the trip?”

She waved a flimsy at him. “According to this,” she said, “I’m a clerk/comptech first class named Ennys Pardu, going to help maintain the systems on Treidel.”

“Sounds fine to me. Let’s find some ground transport over to the docks and see about getting back into space.”

Wearing their uniforms as enlisted and warrant, Commander Quetaya and the General made their way to the transit deck just below the HQ building. From there, they took the next glidepod to the main port, getting off at the Orbital Arrivals and Departures section. Rows of flat-displays along the walls listed the shuttles to and from the various ships currently in orbit, including a shuttle lifting for Selsyn-bilai, outward bound for Treidel at 1149.45 Standard.

Metadi and Quetaya made their separate ways through the paperwork drill. Their orders and false IDs passed official scrutiny with ease—the commander had done her work thoroughly—and in short order a warrant officer and a clerk/comptech first class joined the twenty or so other people aboard the shuttle. The craft lifted from Galcen shortly afterward.

The pilot’s acceleration was smooth and the orbits were matched with flawless precision, but Metadi felt his palms itching nevertheless. It had been years since he’d been anywhere during a lift besides the pilot’s seat or somewhere close by it, and he didn’t like the sensation.

They docked first with RSF Margamine, where eight of the passengers shuffled off under that ship’s artificial gravity. Then the shuttle broke free again and boosted to another and, Metadi knew, higher orbit. A little later, they linked up to Selsyn-bilai with a click of magnetic grap nels and a sigh of air systems matching. Metadi and Quetaya—as well as a lieutenant commander in traveling blues, three spacers-first, and a petty officer clutching a thin-fold tool case—unstrapped and walked through the connecting passageway to the Selsyn’s quarterdeck area.

A young lieutenant was on watch, aided by a clerk/comptech and a runner. As the seven new arrivals entered the space, the comptech ticked each one off on a nearby flat-display.

“How’s everything been, Arlie?” the lieutenant commander asked as he emerged from the passageway.

“Nice and quiet,” the lieutenant replied. “Going to be a smooth one this time. How was leave?”

“Outstanding. I’ll move along and let you get on with things here. Later.”

The three spacers-first and the petty officer, like the lieutenant commander, also appeared to be well known to the quarterdeck team. The young lieutenant processed them quickly before turning to the pair of transients—Metadi and Quetaya.

“I don’t have either of you on the manifest,” he said. “Are you sure you’re on the right ship?”

Metadi showed him the orders and the ID. “I’m directed to travel by quickest available means to Treidel.”

At a nod from the lieutenant, the comptech ran his scanner first over the top copy of the orders, and then over the ID plate. The scanner beeped twice.

“Everything checks,” said the comptech.

“Fine.” The lieutenant turned to the runner. “Take Mr. Bandur down to the Supply Department and get him berthed.” Then, to Metadi, “Welcome aboard, sir. I’ll let the chief engineer know that you’re here so he can put you on the watch bill. The skipper doesn’t believe in carrying passengers who don’t work.”

“That’s fine with me,” said Metadi. “Neither do I.”


In a smoky dive in Ruisi, the main port city for Ninglin on the Mageworlds side of the Net, Nyls Jessan stretched out his long legs and leaned back in his seat. When he did so, his shoulders touched the wall behind him. Ever since he’d started working with Tarnekep Portree, he’d found that having a wall at his back made him feel more comfortable than otherwise. Not that he ever truly relaxed these days. He’d lost that easy sense of security months ago, on the night when the Med Station on Pleyver had exploded around him and Beka Rosselin-Metadi had come into his life.

The dive was crowded tonight, mostly spacers from the Republic with a scattering of Ruisans. A local band was on the stage, playing unfamiliar instruments, and a young female Mageworlder was singing in whatever uncouth tongue they used here. Jessan poked at the green paper flower that adorned the glass in front of him. The bartender had folded the many-petaled blossom out of a single sheet while Jessan watched, and then had set it afloat on the slate-colored drink.

Barbarous planet, Jessan thought, rescuing the now-soggy flower before it sank and setting it down on the napkin to dry. Wasting art like that on cheap booze.

A young woman wearing blue spangles and very little else slid into the empty chair next to him. “Hello, spacer—new in town? Looking for a good time?”

“I had a good time once,” Jessan said. “I didn’t like it.”

The woman shrugged—an interesting effect, considering the spangles—and moved on to another table. Jessan sipped his drink, harsh with the flavor of raw alcohol, and listened to the strange tones and intervals of the alien music.

The song had ended and another had begun before a man sat down in the chair the woman had vacated. “You brought the ship?” the stranger asked without preamble.

Good, Jessan thought, careful not to show his relief. The code phrase worked.

He nodded. “She’s down at the port.”

“That’s all right, then.” The man sat back in his chair. He was shorter than Jessan, dark and wiry, with a thin black mustache and sharp, watchful eyes. “Can you understand what they’re singing?” he asked, nodding at the stage.

“No.”

“ ‘My name is nothing extra, so that I will not tell,’ ” the man translated. “ ‘I’m a stranger in the world that I was born in.’ ” He paused. “They hate us, you know.”

“So I’ve heard.”

Us, the man had said. So he was admitting to being—or claiming to be—a citizen of the Republic. To Jessan’s ear, at least, he had the accent, which was good. From the moment Jessan had left the ship, he’d been afraid of meeting someone who expected him to speak a language he didn’t understand.

Logic had told him not to worry. The assassin on board Warhammer had spoken Galcenian, even in the last extremity, and the recognition routines he’d surrendered to Jessan implied a meeting of strangers. But logic did little to calm nerves that were still on edge from that macabre interrogation of a man already dead. Jessan had asked as many questions as he could during those last six minutes of brain function—watching the readouts change when he encountered truth, unscrambling the signals from the induction loop around the assassin’s throat to turn subvocalized thoughts into words. But six minutes wasn’t enough, and he knew it.

It’s always the things you don’t have time to ask that come back around and kill you.

Without warning, the lights went up and the music stopped. Jessan blinked in the sudden glare and saw a half-squad of troopers standing at the door. Another uniformed man slipped in through the rear exit to block that way out. Talk stopped at all the tables and nobody moved.

“Damn, it’s the Pemies,” the dark man muttered. “I hope you have good identification.”

Jessan nodded, keeping his attention on the troops. According to the comp files back on Warhammer, the Pemies were locals, hired by the Republic to keep the peace and maintain order under the appointed governor of the planet. Not exactly a setup that I’d appreciate if somebody tried it back home on Khesat. And I can just imagine the sort of recruits they get.

The Pemies left one man at the front door and another at the back. The other four split up into two pairs and went from table to table looking at identification cards. No one put up any resistance. Finally one set of troopers came around to where Jessan was sitting. The stranger pulled out a card and laid it on the table. Jessan extracted his own ID—taken from the assassin aboard Warhammer, and altered to show Jessan’s picture in place of the dead man’s—and held it up. The two Pemies squinted at it for a moment.

“You there,” ordered one trooper in heavily accented Galcenian. “Stand.” His mate took a step back, dropping his hand to the grip of his gun—a chemical-energy weapon, Jessan noticed, and not one of the blasters that were universal on the other side of the Net.

Jessan put the ID down on the table and stood, slowly. Chemical-energy weapons were clumsy and noisy and carried only a few charges, but they could kill you just as dead as a blaster.

“Raise your hands.”

He raised them.

“Turn around.”

Jessan turned to face the wall, feeling his shoulders prickle at the loss of its protection. Hands reached to his belt and removed his blaster from the holster; then the same hands patted him down and took his sleeve gun as well.

“You have a permit for these?”

“It’s on the table.”

“They must be checked, in case they are wanted in a crime. Come tomorrow to headquarters if you want them again.”

Jessan turned back to the two Pemies. His blaster and sleeve gun were already tucked under the first trooper’s belt. “May I please have a receipt for my weapons?”

Before the trooper could answer, a man sitting at a table farther into the room leaped to his feet. He dashed for the back door, hitting the Pemi there in the stomach with his shoulder. The man went down. One of the men standing in front of Jessan drew his weapon and fired—the explosion sounded tremendous in the closed room. Then all the Pemies were sprinting for the back door on the track of the fleeing man.

“Come on,” said the stranger. Jessan could barely hear him above the ringing in his ears. “Let’s get out of here.”

They left by the front door. “What was that all about?” Jessan asked, as soon as they were out on the darkened street and heading in the direction of the spaceport.

“The Pemies keep down subversion and unrest, and investigate crimes against the peace,” the man answered. “I can’t imagine why people don’t want to talk to them. Now suppose you show me the ship.”

“Okay,” Jessan replied. “I’ve got it.”

Silently, he wondered if he should demand to be paid right away, and then vanish. Exactly when the payoff would take place was one of the things he hadn’t gotten around to asking the assassin during those last six minutes.

I hope I don’t blow the game by asking for my money too late. Or too soon.

They continued on, grabbing one of the local jitneys—wheels, no nullgravs, and a noisy engine—for the rest of the journey to the port. During the ride Jessan kept his features calm and his manner schooled to only causal interest, but inwardly he continued to fret.

That raid was a little too convenient. Maybe the whole thing was staged to get a look at my ID, or to make sure I got searched and disarmed before we headed back to the ship. Mustache here certainly knew I was going to show upif not tonight, then some other night.

Jessan allowed himself a faint smile. If the stranger was expecting to deal with an unarmed man in a deserted ship, he was going to have a very unpleasant surprise.


The Space Force Headquarters Building on Galcen presented viewers with an imposing facade—the design had won its architect several distinguished awards—and those members of the public with business inside the structure usually found its upper reaches full of activity. Most visitors to HQ never ventured as far as the sub-basement equipment bay at the rear of the building, an echoing, extremely unaesthetic concrete space where delivery vehicles came and went, minor civilian employees staged their hovercars during bad weather, and the crumpled and shredded trash from the rest of the building was collected and sorted for recycling.

Security Operatives Ryx and Tarrey had the responsibility this week for checking out Space SB-2 at regular intervals. It was a dull job, usually reserved for people on the chief’s scutlist—no danger, nothing to screw up, and no chance for glory—but someone had to walk along rattling the doors and being a presence.

At the moment, though, the only visible activity in the bay was the regular progress of the automatic garbage handler, a big, slab-sided machine more than twice the height of a man. The handler floated on heavy-duty nullgravs a few inches above the floor, while its long robotic arm picked up the trash bins along the side of the bay and dumped their contents into its hopper for sorting. The bins would be filled up again later by the host of inside-collection robots that emptied smaller containers on the floors above. Everything that Headquarters discarded eventually made its way down into Space SB-2.

“Makes you think, doesn’t it?” said Ryx, who tended to wax philosophical on occasion. “All those important people and conferences and things upstairs, and it all comes out as trash in the end.”

Tarrey grunted. “Most stuff does.”

The two operatives watched as the handler’s robotic arm picked up a bin, tumbled its cargo of trash into the gaping hopper, then set back down the empty bin. A second and a third bin were lifted, dumped, and replaced. The arm swung out to pick up a fourth—

“Hey! Wait a minute!”

Ryx dashed across the empty bay to punch the Emergency Stop button on the side of the handler. His partner followed, looking puzzled.

“What’s up?” Tarrey asked. The garbage handler had frozen in place, its arm poised with the last bin half-discharged above the hopper. A few small bits of paper and cardboard were still fluttering down.

“I thought I saw something going into the vat.”

“Yeah. Yesterday’s cha’a cups.”

“No. It was too big for that. Come on, give me a boost up the ladder.”

Ryx clambered up the emergency access ladder on the side of the handler. He peered down over the side of the hopper, swallowed hard, and pulled out his comm link.

“Section, this is patrol two-zero. Evidence of crime detected, lower level section delta, Space SB-2.”

“What’s up?” Tarrey yelled from below.

“Crime scene,” Ryx yelled back to him. “Seal the whole area.” Then, into the common link, “Request major crime task force, forensics, and pathologist. Apparent homicide.”

Fumbling in his jacket, he pulled out the pocket holocorder security operatives at HQ were required to carry while on duty. “Time to start preserving the visual evidence,” he muttered, and pointed the holocorder down at what he’d seen inside the hopper.

His discovery hadn’t gone away. The holocorder’s view-finder brought it into sharp and unwelcome focus: the body of a woman in Space Force uniform—a Commander Quetaya, by her nametag and collar insignia—with the gold braid of a high-ranking officer’s personal aide looped around one shoulder and the charred circle of a tight-focus blaster burn in the center of her forehead.



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