THE JITNEY clattered and bumped over the Ruisan streets, trailing a cloud of noxious fumes behind it in the night. At the gate of the port, Jessan and the stranger—who still hadn’t given his name—paid the fare and climbed out. The jitney turned and sputtered back off toward the middle of town, its noise and smell gradually fading into the blackness beyond the lighted gate.
There was a guard at the port entrance, another Pemi. Jessan flourished the stamped gate pass that proved he’d come from within the port area and so had a legitimate reason for going back inside.
Now, he thought as he refolded the gate pass and slipped it back into his pocket, let’s see what our friend Mustache has by way of papers.
The dark man produced an ID card. Jessan looked at it sidelong, trying to catch a glimpse of the name. He was in luck: he could read the printed capitals without squinting.
The stranger claimed to be Lars Olver, a merchant shipping specialist licensed to do business on Ninglin.
That’s probably not his name. And it’s certainly not his job.
After Olver, or whoever he really was, had put his ID away, they passed through the gate. One of the port shuttle buses was waiting inside—bigger than the jitney, and longer, but just as noisy and bad-smelling. Like all the ground transport Jessan had seen on this side of the Net, the shuttle relied on chemical reactions and wheels to get around.
I knew that the Republic destroyed the Mageworlders’ military capacity after the end of the War, he thought uncomfortably. But they never told us back in school exactly how thorough we were when we did it.
Eventually the shuttle bus wheezed to a stop. Jessan and the stranger got off and hiked the rest of the way across the tarmac to where the ’Hammer perched on her landing legs. Jessan paused for a moment at the foot of the lowered ramp. The door at the top was open, but the faint blur of a security force field shimmered across the entryway. That would be the danger point, as soon as the barrier came down.
Rather than chance getting shot from behind, he gestured at the stranger to precede him. Lars Olver hung back and in the end they went up together.
He doesn’t trust me any more than I trust him, Jessan thought as they reached the top of the ramp. And he’s right. But I won’t nail him until he tries to make the payoff.
Jessan punched the code combination into the cipher lock, and stepped through as soon as the force field went down. Lars Olver came with him, like a slighter, darker shadow.
“Through that way,” Jessan said, pointing to the forward part of the ship. “And . . . ”
The sentence curdled in his throat. A black wave rose up in front of his eyes and his legs began to give way beneath him.
A needler, he thought fuzzily. Stupid of me; I should have checked . . .
He didn’t even feel the deckplates when he hit.
RSF Selsyn-bilai had made the jump to hyperspace, and was already out of comms when the high-pri message came out to all units orbiting Galcen: the body of General Metadi’s aide, Commander Rosel Quetaya, had been found inside a garbage hopper at Prime Base. The commander had been dead for approximately twelve hours. Any pertinent information should be sent directly to Space Force Intelligence.
“But I’ll bet you my next pay raise that whoever was responsible is long gone by now.”
Brigadier General Perrin Ochemet’s square, copper-brown face reflected his disgust. He’d once considered his assignment as the CO of Prime Base to be the crowning accomplishment of a long career in the Space Force Planetary Infantry. That had been this morning. Now, with the Commanding General out of the loop and with Metadi’s final order—“if anything comes up, handle it”—burning its way into his brain, Ochemet was beginning to wonder if he should have opted instead for a quiet billet with a reserve training squadron.
He returned to the infantry captain in charge of security at Prime. “Gremyl—any luck contacting the General at his house upcountry? It takes about an hour to get there in a fast aircar; he could have been in transit earlier.”
“No joy on that,” Gremyl said. He was a thin man with an outdoor tan fading to pale after more than a year of base duty. “There isn’t even a record of him leaving the base. You wouldn’t happen to have his last call still on file, would you?”
Ochemet shook his head. “No. When Jos asks for a secure line, he means it. No recordings, no traces, nothing.”
“Too bad,” said Gremyl. “I’d love to see a voice-stress analysis on that message.”
“Sorry.”
“Oh, well. You’ve known him for quite a while. When you talked with him, did he seem like he was under the influence of anything? Drugs, beglamourment, any kind of duress?”
“No,” said Ochemet. “He sounded just like he always did. It’s not unusual for him to make himself scarce for a week or two, although most of the time he leaves word with someone about where he’s going to be. But I think we have to assume that Metadi’s absence and Quetaya’s death are somehow related—especially in the light of the security records from outside the General’s office.”
Gremyl looked interested. “What do they show?”
“Nothing,” said Ochemet. “They’re blank. Erased.”
The security chief pursed his lips in a soundless whistle. “Somebody’s hiding their tracks, that’s for sure. Let me have the records. Maybe Technical can find a bit of sound, or an image trace.”
“You’ve got them,” the CO said. “Meanwhile—we’ll have to handle this as a kidnapping and/or a possible assassination. But I’m not going to go public with all of it just now. Give the holovid reporters all you want to about the commander, but fudge the time of death a bit. As far as anybody on the outside is concerned, the General took off for leave at an undisclosed location some hours before she was shot. No point in telling the other side how much we know. Or how much we don’t know.”
“You think it’s a conspiracy, then?”
“Has to be,” said Ochemet. “Do you think that just one person could have snatched Metadi?”
“Before today I’d have said that just one army couldn’t manage it,” Gremyl said. “But it looks like somebody did. We’d better get the Adepts’ Guild in on this.”
“You people in Security trust them?”
Gremyl shrugged. “As much as we trust anybody—”
“Which is to say, not much.”
“—but the Master of the Guild was Metadi’s copilot on the old Warhammer. He may know something we don’t.”
“If you’re thinking along those lines,” Ochemet said, “there’s always Metadi’s last aide . . . Jervas Something-or-other, from Ovredis. Gil, that was his name.”
“Where is he right now?”
“Mageworlds patrol,” said Ochemet. “Commodore of the fleet, no less.”
“He must have impressed the hell out of Metadi during his tour on Galcen,” Gremyl said. “But he’s no good to us—the Net’s a long way off, even in a fast ship. It looks like the Guild or nothing.”
“I suppose so.” The CO still looked doubtful. “But if the situation goes on for longer than a couple of days, I want somebody we can trust handling the liaison.” He picked up the comm link and punched a button. “Ochemet here. Get me a list of all the Adepts who also hold commissions in the Space Force.”
“You won’t find many,” Gremyl told him. “Most of ours who cross over usually resign their commissions first. Just as well, I suppose. Anything else makes for mixed loyalties.”
“We’ll see who Personnel turns up,” Ochemet said. “Meanwhile, we might as well pay a call on Errec Ransome and tell him his old war buddy has gone missing.”
Jessan woke to the feel of a sheet underneath him and a pair of hands kneading the muscles of his naked back. His first, half-hallucinatory impression—that Lars Olver had given him to the Pemi who’d searched him earlier—faded as his mind cleared and tactile memory returned. He was lying on the bunk in Warhammer’s main cabin, and the hands belonged to Tarnekep Portree.
The lacy cuffs of Portree’s Mandeynan-style shirt tickled Jessan’s skin. He turned his head sideways and opened his eyes.
The cabin had a blurred, unstable look, and he didn’t see Lars Olver anywhere. He closed his eyes again.
“ . . . got away,” he muttered against the pillow. “My fault . . . should have checked him for that needler.”
“Don’t worry,” said Tarnekep’s cool tenor voice. “Your friend with the mustache is still with us. I have him stashed where he can’t cause any trouble if he wakes up before you’re on your feet.”
Jessan rolled onto his side and looked at Tarnekep. The starpilot was dressed for visitors—full Mandeynan rig, from lace cravat to high leather boots. The red plastic eye patch made it hard to interpret his expression, but Jessan thought his companion’s angular features seemed paler than usual.
“What happened?” Jessan asked. “Did you stun him after he got me with that needler of his?”
Tarnekep shook his head. “Not exactly.”
“What do you mean . . . ‘not exactly’?”
“He never shot you at all,” said Tarnekep. “That was me.”
Jessan struggled to sit up. “You shot me?”
“No. Not shot. I used the rest of that cylinder of Sonoxate gas our late passenger Vorgent Elimax had in his luggage. Flooded all the passageways and open spaces with it after you left, then sat in the common room for hours wearing one of those damned respirators, waiting for you to get back.”
He nodded. The movement made his head reel. “Good idea. I wish you’d told me first, though.”
Tarnekep bit his lip. “I’m sorry,” he said. “For all I knew, you were going to meet somebody who would tie you up and introduce you to the joys of active interrogation—and there would go our cover on Ninglin. But what you don’t know you can’t tell, so I made certain we had a surprise waiting that you didn’t know about.”
“I suppose you’re right. But next time, could you pick a surprise that won’t leave me with a head full of dirty grey fuzz? This stuff feels worse than a hangover.”
“You didn’t look very good, either,” said Tarnekep. From the way his mouth tightened on the description, it was an understatement. “That’s why I brought you in here.”
“Bad reaction,” Jessan said. He tried to stand up but sank back down onto the bunk, his head spinning. “Muscle cramps and vertigo . . . we haven’t got time for this. If you check the medikit in the locker over there, you’ll see a row of hypo ampules.”
“Got it,” Tarnekep said a few moments later. “I see them.”
“Okay—I need the third one from the left.”
“Orange label, coded six-zero-three-D?”
“That’s it.”
Jessan took the ampule Tarnekep handed him and pressed it against the vein in his arm. He felt the usual brief stinging sensation, and forced himself to breathe slowly and evenly while the medication did its work.
When he stood up again his head was clear and the bulkheads no longer wavered when he looked at them. The cabin air was chilly against his flesh, however, and he realized belatedly that all his clothes were lying in a crumpled heap next to the bunk. He thought about putting back on the garments that Tarnekep had removed, but decided against the effort. Instead, he crossed over to the clothes locker and took out a green velvet Khesatan lounging robe lined in gold spidersilk—a bit overstated for his taste, but appropriate enough for the persona he cultivated these days.
“That was the first time I ever tried breathing Sonoxate,” he said, slipping his arms into the full sleeves. He wrapped the broad silk sash around his waist and tied it neatly. “Just how far under did it put me?”
“Far enough,” said Tarnekep. The pilot’s face, Jessan noted, was still pale, and his whole bearing was tense and edgy. “If I’d known about that six-zero-three-D thing I wouldn’t have wasted so much time.”
“Don’t worry; the stuff in that ampule wouldn’t have worked until I was conscious anyway.” Jessan selected a needler and a wide-beam stunner from the collection of small arms in the locker, and slid them into the pockets of his robe. “Gentlesir Olver is probably awake himself by now. Give me a moment to get the Professor’s little box of horrors out of storage, and we can soothe our nerves by asking him a few questions.”
Tarnekep Portree palmed the lockplate beside the cabin door and the panel slid open. Out in the common room, Jessan sniffed at the air but failed to detect any trace of the gas that had felled both him and Lars Olver.
“You won’t smell it,” Tarnekep assured him. “The stuff is practically odorless. Anyway, I flushed the ship to atmosphere right after I scraped you up off the deckplates and took care of your friend.”
The captain waved one hand at the unconscious form of Lars Olver, strapped securely into an acceleration couch in the common room. The buckles had been pulled well out of Giver’s reach, effectively imprisoning him.
“He’s no friend of mine,” said Jessan. “I never saw him before tonight. Just as well, I suppose. It makes asking the questions a bit easier.”
He ducked briefly into the unused crew cabin that served these days as extra storage, and came out again with the black medikit from the Professor’s asteroid base.
“All right,” he said to Tarnekep. “Let’s do it. Will you want me to bring him round, or shall we wait until he comes to on his own?”
“We don’t need to wait.” Tarnekep strode over to the couch and slapped the bound man twice across the face, first with the palm and then with the back of his open hand. “He’s awake.”
The captain moved away from the couch to a chair beside the common-room table. He turned the chair around and sat with his long legs straddling its seat and its back coming up to the frothy lace ruffles on the front of his shirt. Light from overhead glittered off the topaz stickpin in his spidersilk cravat. He pulled his blaster and leveled it at the prisoner.
“Okay, Doc,” Tarnekep said. “If he dies like the last one, he’s all yours. Until then, he’s mine.”
The man’s eyes were still closed, but Jessan thought he saw a faint shiver of reaction on the otherwise immobile face. Tarnekep pressed on, regardless.
“There’s no point in shamming, Olver. I know you can hear me. So make it easy on yourself and everybody else and tell me who you thought you were meeting today.”
Olver’s eyes remained shut, but after a long pause he spoke. “I met someone I was told to meet.”
“You aren’t helping yourself any by dodging the question,” Tarnekep said. “Here’s a different one—who are you?”
“I’m Lars Olver,” the man replied stubbornly. “I’m a shipping agent, and I was trying to meet a man about a cargo.”
“You’re lying,” the captain said. “You screwed this one up big time. Your name is Ignaceu LeSoit, you’re a killer for hire from the other side of the Net, and you just tried to kill me.”
The bound man’s eyes snapped open. For a long moment he and the captain looked at each other, and Jessan saw his expression change: from stoic despair to a shocked and even more hopeless recognition.
Jessan felt a stirring of unease. He already knows Captain Portree. And the captain knows him.
But Olver—or LeSoit, as it seemed his name was—remained silent. Tarnekep hefted his blaster meaningfully. “Come on, LeSoit. Have you forgotten that much about what happened the last time?”
LeSoit shook his head.
“You told me back on Mandeyn that you owed me one,” Tarnekep said. “Remember that, Ignac’?”
“And you said we were even.” LeSoit’s voice was hoarse and he was sweating. “New deal, new hand.”
Tarnekep favored the bound man with a thin smile. “Right—and you lost. Pay up.”
“That’s no good. You’re the one with the blaster, and I’m fresh out of chips.”
The captain regarded LeSoit with a speculative expression. “Maybe you’d be interested in a different game, and a chance to win some of those markers back.”
“Captain,” said Jessan uneasily. “Are you seriously considering—”
Tarnekep turned a dangerously bright blue eye in his direction. “I did something of the sort at least once before, remember? And with a damn sight less to go on.”
“I recall the occasion,” Jessan said. “I believe the alternative I offered was shooting me out of hand. That might be the safer course this time.”
“I thought about shooting him,” said Tarnekep, “back while I was waiting to see if you’d wake up. But right now I’m disposed to be friendly.”
LeSoit moved his head slightly to a position where he could take in Jessan and Tarnekep together. “These days I made a point of not working for my friends,” he said. “It makes professional decisions a lot simpler.”
“Ah,” said Tarnekep. The answer appeared to please the captain, Jessan wasn’t sure why. “Tell me one thing, Ignac’: did you know who you were setting up to get hit?”
LeSoit shook his head. “The captain of the Pride of Mandeyn, is all. Nobody gave me a name, and I didn’t ask.”
“Good enough,” said Tarnekep. He slid his blaster into its holster and stood up. “Okay, Doc, you can let him loose.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
Jessan shrugged. “Your call, Captain. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
He went over to the couch and undid the buckles, leaving their former prisoner to remove the webbing himself. LeSoit pushed himself awkwardly to an upright position—the captain had not been gentle with the restraints—and sat rubbing the life back into his arms.
“Well?” said Tarnekep. “Are you in on the game?”
LeSoit nodded. “With pleasure—Captain Rosselin-Metadi.”
Space Force Headquarters at Galcen Prime was a good six hours by aircar from the Retreat, in the high mountains to the far north and west of the spaceport city. The nearest inhabited area of any size, the town of Treslin, didn’t have landing facilities for anything larger than small atmospheric craft. Neither did the Retreat itself, which let out the chance of cutting travel time by taking a suborbital shuttle.
Nevertheless, neither Ochemet nor Gremyl considered telling their unpleasant news to Master Errec Ransome any other way than face-to-face. From a security viewpoint, they didn’t really have a choice. As long as they intended to keep the General’s disappearance secret, no other means of transmission could be considered safe. “I know four or five ways to get around a secure line,” Gremyl said, “and I’m not an expert.”
Nor could they call Master Ransome to Galcen Prime for an emergency conference. Metadi would have done it, and no question, but Ochemet and Gremyl knew their limitations. The Master of the Adepts’ Guild might have obeyed Jos Metadi’s summons for old times’ sake, but the Space Force had no authority over him.
They flew into the sunset out of Prime, and soon overtook the night. For a while they talked of the situation back at Headquarters, and what the forensic reports might reveal about Quetaya’s death, but eventually they exhausted all the possibilities for conversation and sat in silence. Gremyl handled the controls of the aircraft—the need for secrecy had kept them from bringing along a third man as pilot—while Ochemet slept briefly.
The lights of towns and cities underneath them thinned out as they drew closer to the mountains. Ochemet stretched his arms and legs as far as the safety webbing would allow, then reached over to pick up the comm link.
“We’ll be passing over Treslin in a few minutes,” he said. “Time to let the Retreat know we’re coming.” He keyed on the link. “Retreat Field, Retreat Field. This is tail-number two six zero one Delta, request landing instructions, over.”
“This is Retreat Field,” came the prompt reply. “You are cleared for landing on strip one-seven. Wind south five, visibility three in rain. How copy, over.”
“This is two six zero one, roger, over.”
“Retreat Field, roger out.”
The link clicked off. “Well,” said Ochemet, after a pause. “They don’t have much to say, do they?”
“In more ways than one,” Gremyl said. “I’m not getting anything on the landing guidance frequencies.”
“I don’t think there are any up here,” Ochemet said. “Sorry about that, but Retreat Field is one of the oldest on Galcen. Goes back to before they started building aircars with nullgrav-assist—they can handle anything that flies in atmosphere, not just the new stuff.”
“Haven’t they ever heard of upgrading their systems?”
“You don’t know how the Guild thinks,” Ochemet said. “They keep to themselves, and they don’t trust outsiders very much. Old history at work, I guess; they’ve been respected for a long time here on Galcen, but the Guildhouses on the outplanets and some of the Middle Worlds were having local troubles right up to the start of the Magewar.”
Gremyl sighed. “So they don’t believe in making it easy on visitors. Oh, well—if this were a field action somewhere in the boonies, we wouldn’t even have visual beacons to go by. I can handle it.”
A few minutes later the green and white flashing beacon of Retreat Field appeared. Gremyl put them down near the squat concrete control building, landing in the short space needed by a nullgrav-assisted aircar. The unused strip stretched far out beyond them, one of several on different compass bearings. Ochemet supposed that the multiple strips were a relic from truly ancient days, when even the direction of the wind made a difference to the aircraft.
Something else odd about those strips, he realized after a few seconds. Nobody using them is going to pass over the Retreat, whether they’re landing or taking off.
Out of curiosity, he called up the Treslin area on the aircar’s charts, and saw without real surprise that the entire area of the Retreat was marked as restricted airspace. He nodded to himself and wondered how long the restriction had been in place. Somebody in the Galcenian government, or maybe somebody even higher, must have owed the Adepts’ Guild a really big one, in order to do a favor like that.
Ochemet and Gremyl stepped out of the aircar into a cold, drizzling rain. They hurried over to the control building. The main door slid aside to let them into Retreat Field Operations—a large room filled with an impressive array of sensor and communications equipment, staffed by one Adept sitting at a desk next to a galley-sized pot of cha’a.
The Adept was a youngish man in a plain black coverall, with eyes that looked older than the rest of his face. A long staff of polished wood leaned against the wall beside his desk. If the rank insignia on Ochemet’s uniform startled or impressed him, he didn’t show it, but his greeting was cordial enough.
“Welcome to Retreat Field, General—”
“Ochemet. I’m the CO at Prime Base, and this is Captain Gremyl, my chief of security.”
The Adept inclined his head politely. “General Ochemet, Captain Gremyl. Is there some way I can be of service?”
“Not you, precisely,” said Ochemet. “Is there a shuttle between here and the Retreat?”
The Adept looked amused. “Most of the time, we walk.”
“How far away is it?” Gremyl asked.
“About three hours in good weather.”
“Right now it’s raining,” Ochemet pointed out. “And we need to speak with Master Ransome on an urgent matter.”
The Adept was serious again. “In person?”
Ochemet nodded. “Yes.”
“Then wait here with me until my relief shows up, and we can ride back together. It’ll be about an hour.”
“Any other choices?”
The Adept shook his head. “Not really.”
“We’ll wait,” said Ochemet. “It’s been six hours already, another hour won’t hurt.”
“With pleasure—Captain Rosselin-Metadi.”
Beka froze. Damn you, Ignac’. Do you want to die?
LeSoit hadn’t moved or looked away. He sat watching her intently, and she forced herself to relax.
You don’t have to kill him yet. Find out what he’s doing here first.
She didn’t look at Jessan. She didn’t need to; she could feel the tension in him from where she sat. One word, one signal from her, and Ignaceu LeSoit would be in no shape to betray her secret to anyone but the dead.
“Good guessing, Ignac’,” she said finally. “When did you figure it out?”
“Just a few minutes ago. While you were talking.” He paused. “I thought they’d killed you when the ’Hammer crashed outside Port Artat.”
Beka raised an eyebrow. “They?”
“The ones who wanted you dead.” Another pause. “I’m working for them these days.”
“Are you indeed?” Jessan’s voice was level and uninflected, a sure sign that the Khesatan was in a dangerous mood. “How interesting. Captain—”
“No,” she said flatly, without looking around. “If I want him dead I’ll kill him myself. But first I want to know what’s making him so eager to sell out his friends.”
LeSoit smiled faintly. “I thought I told you, Captain Rosselin-Metadi. I don’t work for friends anymore.”
“If you’re expecting money—”
“Better to kill him,” Jessan cut in before LeSoit could answer. “In the long run, it’s cheaper than paying blackmail.”
But LeSoit was already shaking his head. “I don’t need your money, Captain Rosselin-Metadi.”
“You know my first name,” she said. “Doc isn’t going to shoot you just for using it.”
“Beka, then. I thought you were dead, you understand.”
“So you told us.” Jessan again, with a knife-edged calm in his voice. “That doesn’t explain what you’re doing here.”
“Following a trail,” LeSoit said. “I didn’t want to know who sabotaged the ’Hammer—that’s what I thought had happened, when I heard the news about the crash—because all I’d find was people like me, doing the job somebody else hired them to do. I wanted to know who was paying.”
“Why?” she asked.
“I was going to kill him. Or her, if it came to that. I’m not particular.”
“I can see you aren’t,” said Jessan. LeSoit’s admission seemed to have mollified the Khesatan somewhat. “I can even sympathize with your position. The question is, why haven’t you done it yet?”
LeSoit shrugged. “There’s a lot more rungs in the ladder than I expected, and I need to be certain I’ve reached the top. I won’t get more than one shot, and I don’t intend to waste it.”
Brilliant plan, thought Beka. Absolutely brilliant. Are all men suicidal idiots, or just all the ones in my life?
“We’re not going to waste it,” she said aloud. “Or you either. You’re playing in my game now, and the stakes are higher than you know.”