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ii. the net: rsf karipavo; rsf ebannha

“COMMODORE. COMMODORE, wake up.” Gil felt a hand on his shoulder, shaking him out of a comfortable sleep. He turned over and opened his eyes to the dim red light of his cabin’s off-shift illumination.

“I’m awake,” he said, swinging his legs over the side of the bunk. “What is it?”

His aide, Lieutenant Jhunnei, was standing in front of him, holding a mug of steaming cha’a. She pressed the mug into his hand before speaking.

“We’ve picked up a contact,” she said. “Quadrant N-seven-outer, moderate sublight speed. Appears to be artificial. Not responding to hails.”

Gil cradled the mug in his hands, breathing in the warm vapor that rose off the surface of the liquid. He knew from his own experience as aide to General Metadi that waking the commodore wasn’t something to be undertaken lightly; there had to be more to the contact than Jhunnei’s demeanor let on.

“Where’s she coming from?” he asked.

“Straight out of the Mageworlds.”

“Ah,” said Gil. That explained a lot of things, including why Jhunnei had brought the news herself. “Thanks, I’ll be in CIC directly.”

“Yes, sir.” Jhunnei turned and departed, the door seal sighing gently shut behind her.

Gil took a sip of the cha’a—it had the unmistakable flavor of something that had been brewing in a hotpot for entirely too long—then put the mug down while he pulled on a set of undress coveralls with the stars of his rank embroidered on the collar. He added a pair of the soft boots that went with the coveralls, and a knit cap. The Space Force had long since discovered that crews were more alert, and electronic systems more efficient, when the air was on the chilly side, so the big ships were always about forty degrees below blood temperature.

Gil picked up his mug of cha’a, took another swallow, and headed for the door. Just as he reached it, the General Quarters alarm sounded. Mug in hand, Gil picked up speed in the direction of the Combat Information Center. He’d drink the rest of his cha’a when he got there.

In CIC, the main battle tank displayed a holographic representation of the situation in progress. A dot of red light shone in the center of the tank, surrounded by three smaller blue dots: single-seat fighters in open formation, none of them fouling the others’ ranges, and all of them, he was sure, locked on target and ready to fire.

Gil found the ’Pavo’s executive officer standing midway between the tank and the comm board. “What do you have, Erne?”

“We’ve got a ship, all right,” the XO told him. “Constant course and speed. No delta-vee. She’s not radiating anything—stone cold with all systems shut off by the looks of it. The CO of RSF Ebannha, Captain Inifrey, is the on-scene commander.”

Gil nodded in the general direction of the blue dots. “Those his people out there?”

“That’s right.”

“You have an approximate origin?”

“We’ve been working on it,” said the XO. He gestured, and the tactical action officer came over to join the group. “I’ll let Patel fill you in.”

“Right,” said Gil. He turned to the TAO. “Tell me what you know.”

“Working back from where she is right now,” said the TAO, “and assuming constant course and speed, the vessel’s point of origin was definitely in the heart of the Magezone, some while before the war really got started.”

Before Gil could answer, one of the comms techs looked up from the board. “Ebannha signals he’s detailed a boarding and salvage party,” the tech said.

Gil nodded. “Roger, keep me informed.”

The captain of RSF Karipavo strode over, his own cha’a cup in hand. “Update?” he inquired of the XO.

“We’re not really sure,” the XO responded. “All we have right now is a spaceship not responding to signals.”

“What’s your situation, Captain?” Gil asked.

“We went to GQ as soon as I got word there was a stranger,” the ’Pavo’s captain replied. “We’re manned up and ready. At the best it gives us a good chance for a drill, and at worst—” A fourth blue dot winked into existence inside the main tank as the holo updated in realtime. “Looks like Ebannha’s boarding party just got there,” the captain said, interrupting himself.

“Boarding party is on station,” the comm tech said. “Shall I put their transmission on audio?”

“Yes,” Gil said. “I’d like to hear this.”

The tech pressed a button, and the voice of the boarding party’s talker came over the speakers in CIC, the words slurred by the slight fuzziness of a decrypted transmission.

“ . . . and commencing scan at this time. Standard spiral, aft to fore.”

“Stand by ready two,” replied another voice on the same circuit—Ebannha, talking to the boarding party. “Copy.”

The fourth blue dot in the tank began to circle the unknown ship, moving forward, while the three single-seat fighters maintained their watchful positions.

“Are you getting the pictures?” the first voice said.

‘That’s a roger.”

“Do they match anything in the library? I don’t recognize this class.”

“Searching, wait, out,” the second voice replied. The transmission broke off, then returned. “Tentative analysis,” it said, “first approximation only. Vessel matches known exterior configuration of Mage Deathwing raider.”

“Roger, understand possible Mage Deathwing.”

“Compare structure, identification ninety percent.” The second speaker’s tone shifted abruptly. “Watch yourself out there. Those guys were mean.”

“Roger, watching my ass,” the boarding party’s talker said. “Spiral scan complete. Unless otherwise directed, I intend to dock with unknown.”

“Classify unknown hostile,” Ebannha responded. “Positive ID Mage Deathwing.”

Gil looked about for Lieutenant Jhunnei. He hadn’t noticed his aide’s presence when he entered the CIC—like all good aides, she had a talent for blending into the background—but he wasn’t surprised now to find her waiting nearby.

“That’s your signal, Lieutenant,” Gil said. “Transmit to CO Republic Space Forces, flash precedence, Commodore’s Situation Report, contact made with Mage Deathwing raider. Enemy intentions unknown. Amplifying info to follow.”

Jhunnei was over at the comm board almost before he’d finished speaking. Gil turned back to the watch officer and the ’Pavo’s captain.

“There,” he said. “That should definitely wake them up back on Galcen. And if they don’t have an amplifying report from us within about fifteen minutes, half the civilized galaxy should be underway for our location.”

“How much harm can one ship do?” the watch officer asked.

“These are Mages we’re talking about,” said the ’Pavo’s captain. “Who knows what they might be capable of?”

“That’s right,” Gil said. “No one’s ever been aboard a Deathwing. Not until today.”


Ensign Tammas Cantrel had no illusions about why he’d been picked to command Ebannha’s boarding party. He’d had plenty of experience at boarding merchant ships for inspection before they crossed the Net—and if things went horribly wrong, the loss of a single ensign wasn’t going to hurt anybody very much.

He maneuvered his ship, a Pan-class short range surveyor-scout, over the forward end of the hostile target until he could match the other vessel’s course and speed. “Hostile target” doesn’t half cover it, he thought. I’m about to become the first person on this side of the Net to see the inside of a Deathwing raider andmaybelive to tell the tale.

I think I could do without the honor.

Cantrel glanced over at his mate in the copilot’s seat, Chief Hull Mechanic Wyngar Yance. “Did you catch any anomalies on visual, Chief?”

“I got a couple,” Yance replied. “If we’re assuming lateral symmetry on these things, that is.”

“Might as well assume it,” Cantrel said. “Gross symmetry anyhow—it certainly looks like they’ve got it. I picked up a depression on the centerline aft that looks like a docking port of some kind. What about you?”

“I’m seeing a shadow under the ventral ridge that isn’t matched on the other side.”

“Right,” said Cantrel. “So what do you think we’ve got?”

“Best bet’s an empty dock for some kind of small craft, and an open airlock.”

“Meaning the crew might not be at home?”

“I sure hope they aren’t home,” said Yance fervently. “I’m too close to retirement to get into a gunfight on board someone else’s ship.”

You and me both, thought Cantrel. A whole career away from retirement is too close for something like that, if you ask me.

But the Space Force hadn’t asked him, so he squared his shoulders. “We’re ready,” he said to Communications Technician Elligret Saben. “It’s time to tell ’em we’re going in. I’m going to try for the airlock, see if that’s what it really is, and come in the front.”

Saben looked up from the comm console, where she’d been trying broad-frequency hailing. “Still no reply from the target,” she said. “Regular starpilot’s grave over there—no emanations of any kind.”

“ ‘Starpilot’s grave’?”

“What the merchant spacers call a drifting wreck,” she said. “Most of those guys, they don’t want to leave their ships until they have to be carried out feet-first—and some of them don’t ever get to leave, period. Me, I plan to spend my pension money dirtside somewhere, thank you.”

“So we’ve got a target that looks like it’s been dead for a while,” Cantrel said. “Or might it be in some kind of deliberate shutdown for silent running?”

Saben shrugged. “Could go either way, sir.”

Just what we needed, Cantrel thought. I love playing the stick that springs the trap, I really love it.

“Times like this,” he said aloud, “I wish we had an Adept.”

He turned to the boarding craft’s engineer. “Falkith, take us to the anomaly I’ve identified on your screen. Chief, come with me and suit up. We’re going for a walk.”

“I wish you didn’t sound so enthusiastic about the idea,” the chief complained as he unstrapped and walked over to the pressure-suit locker. “I can think of lots better ways to make it into the history books.”

“So can I, Chief. But they didn’t ask me for suggestions.”

Under Falkith’s direction the boarding craft changed vector slightly, and ended up floating just above the dark patch that the chief had thought might be an open airlock. Waiting in pressure suits inside their own airlock compartment, Yance and Cantrel watched the light over the outer door cycle from red to green. Finally the lock clicked open.

Cantrel went out of the airlock first, a lifeline tied around his waist, jumping across to the Magebuilt craft. Once his magnetic boots had made safe contact, he made the line fast to a grabpoint on the raider’s surface and signaled the chief.

“Come on over. Got your recorder working?”

Yance’s voice came to him over the comm link in the helmet of his p-suit. “Roger, it’s up. Let’s do it.”

Yance joined Cantrel on the skin of the raider. Then—with the chief walking a little behind the ensign to make a visual recording of their transit, and with the data being relayed to Ebannha in realtime via the boarding craft—they walked along the Magebuilt vessel’s surface to the opening that the chief had identified as a possible airlock.

Yance aimed his recorder at the airlock. “There it is.”

“Small opening,” Cantrel said, for the benefit of the watchers back on Ebannha and the boarding craft, who wouldn’t have a clear idea of the scale. “Probably personnel only.”

He drew a deep breath. “Well, time to go in. I wouldn’t like to get caught in one of those, though. And I seriously hate the idea of coming through a lock with unfriendlies on the other side.”

“You and me both,” said Yance. Abruptly the chief pointed at something. “Hey, look at that.”

“I’m looking,” said Cantrel. He saw at once what Yance was talking about: the outer door to the airlock was not just standing open, it had been wedged. “What do you make of it?”

“Damned if I know, sir.”

“Me neither. Just make sure you get lots of pictures.”

Cantrel directed his light into the lock chamber, playing the beam all about. “What the—take a look at this, Chief. Someone’s wedged the inside door open, too.”

“I’m recording, sir. But why the hell would anybody want to do a dumb thing like that?” Yance sounded outraged as well as puzzled; for any spacer, deliberately opening the ship to vacuum ranked as a deadly sin.

“I wouldn’t know, Chief. But this job is getting stranger by the minute.”

Yance brought the recorder in close to pick up the details of the inner door. “I didn’t like it when this was just a Mage ship,” he said. “And I definitely don’t like it now.”

You can say that again, thought Cantrel. This whole setup stinks so bad that you can smell it in vacuum.

“We’re not getting paid to like it,” he told the chief. He unhooked his energy lance from its carrying clips on the back of his p-suit and moved on into the open lock. The handlamp on his suit sent a beam of white light ahead of him into the blackness inside. “We’re getting paid to board it. Let’s go.”


Back on RSF Karipavo, Gil divided his attention between the situation display in the battle tank and the flatvid screen showing realtime pictures from the boarding party. The open airlock of the Magebuilt ship gaped like a dark mouth; to the cold eye of the recorder, Ensign Cantrel was a small and uncertain figure standing on its outer lip.

“Poor kid,” said Lieutenant Jhunnei quietly at Gil’s elbow. “It’s a hell of a thing to know that you’re expendable.”

Gild nodded. “No argument on that, Lieutenant. But we’re in the same position, after all.”

“Who are, sir?”

“All of us in the Mageworlds screening force,” Gil said. On the flatscreen, the ensign unclipped his energy lance and stepped over the rim of the airlock into the dark. “Because if anything bad manages to make it across from the other side of the Net, it’s our job to buy the civilized galaxy as much time as we can.”

“Understood,” said Jhunnei. “In the interest of staving off the day, shall I have the comms tech start compressing the data for a direct hyperspace feed to Galcen?”

“Why not?” Gil said. “They must have gotten the first report by now, and it’s going to have them all hugging the comm links and waiting for more, from the Commanding General down to the tech on duty. No point in disappointing them.”


The interior of the Magebuilt raider was strangely familiar—the result, Cantrel supposed, of expedients forced upon its builders by the physical realities of starflight—but at the same time subtly alien. He could recognize individual details and pieces of equipment when the beam from his handlamp fell on them, things like airtight hatches, accessways, or emergency gear for dealing with the spacer’s twin demons of fire and decompression, but their location was never quite what he expected it to be.

The chief apparently felt the difference, too. “Screwy setup in here.”

“Blame it on the Magelords. Which way do you figure is the bridge?”

The chief glanced at his inertial tracker. He pointed. “Forward section of the ship is that direction. If the Mageworlders were sensible about their shipbuilding, the bridge should be up there somewhere.”

“That’s a pretty big ‘if,’ ” said Cantrel. “But I suppose it beats a random walk. We’ll explore forward.”

Slowly, with numerous false starts and jogs, they made their way through the maze of the ship. Some of the areas they passed through seemed to make no sense at all, such as the chamber containing nothing but a circle of white tile in the middle of the deck, but others had the same eerie mundanity as the passageway near the airlock. They passed through a ship’s galley, hazardous with floating cutlery, and shone their handlamps into a compartment where sheets and blankets lay stretched inspection-taut across neatly made bunks, while odds and ends of personal gear—pillows, boots, a writing stylus and its datapad—hung weightless in the endless cold of space.

Finally, the chief indicated a closed door. “If the inertial tracker isn’t lying, then the bridge must be in through there. Because if the bridge isn’t in there, we’ve just run out of places.”

Cantrel was examining the edges of the door. “More funny stuff,” he said, gesturing at Yance to come over and make a visual record. “It looks like things got pretty desperate here for a while—we’ve got a small craft missing, and the crew had to open up both airlock doors at once to get something out through the hatch—but I still haven’t seen anything that looks like battle damage.”

“Mechanical failure?”

“Maybe,” said Cantrel. “But what kind of mechanical failure forces an abandon-ship and then leaves everything behind intact? Maybe they had some kind of poison in the atmosphere, so they tried to vent to space—but that didn’t work so they took off in that shuttle or whatever that they were carrying. Or maybe it was some Mage-type thing we won’t ever figure out.”

He abandoned speculation for the moment and went back to inspecting the door. “This thing’s locked tight, as far as I can tell. Do you think we’d have trouble cutting through it?”

“Not unless ruining something that we may want later counts as trouble.”

Cantrel sighed. “That’s what I was afraid of. Okay, you push here and I’ll pull. Maybe it’ll move.”

The two men tried to shift the door. The effort soon had Cantrel sweating inside his p-suit, but that was the only noticeable result. The door remained shut.

“Well,” he said, “so much for that idea. Now I really wish we had an Adept along. One of those guys could probably open the door for us just by looking at it real hard.”

“She’s locked up, all right,” said Yance. “But every ship I’ve ever been on had some kind of emergency access to the bridge, in case of power failure. Stands to reason this one would, too.”

“If you can count on reason with a Magebuilt raider.” Cantrel paused. “Where do you think it is?”

“It has to be inside one of these bulkheads if it’s here at all,” Yance said. “Let’s see how much stuff we can take out without having to break anything.”

The two worked silently for a while, removing slabs of bulkhead paneling. In the weightlessness of deep space, the scraps of metal and plastic floated around them.

“Hah,” said Yance after several minutes had passed. “Look at this.”

Cantrel moved closer and looked. The last panel to come off had revealed a slot in the interior bulkhead, at about chest height. “Probably for some kind of key,” he said, “and if you try to fool with it, it’ll explode and kill you.”

“That would be a really dumb thing to have on a ship,” said the chief. “The first spacer-recruit who comes along on bulkhead maintenance duty is going to turn you into space dust.”

“These were Mageworlders,” Cantrel said. “I remember reading about the reason why nobody ever boarded one of their warships and came back alive: the damned things tended to blow up. Folks like that would have killed off all their stupid recruits in basic training. Besides,” he added, “I don’t see anything here that looks like it would fit into the slot.”

Yance still held the slab of paneling in one pressure-gloved hand. “I know where I’d put the emergency key,” he said, and turned the slab over. Clipped to the inside surface was a flattened stick of plastic, slightly thinner and narrower than the slot in the interior bulkhead. “I’ll bet this is it.”

Cantrel reached out and pried the stick of plastic out of the clip. He brought it close to the lip of the slot in the interior bulkhead, and then paused. “We’re still sending data in realtime back to Ebannha, right?”

“Right.”

“Good.” he said. “Then it won’t be a total loss if we’ve guessed wrong and this is the self-destruct mechanism instead of the emergency bridge key. They can always make us part of the training vid on how not to open Magebuilt doors.”

Holding his breath, he pushed the card into the slot and waited for the explosion. Nothing appeared to happen. After a moment he let his breath out again. “Oh, well, another bright idea shot all, to pieces.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Yance. “Let’s try pushing the door one more time.”

“Can’t hurt, I suppose.”

This time, when the two men applied pressure, the door began to slide back into the wall to their right. As it slid, it revealed clear armor-glass viewscreens up ahead, with the stars visible through them, and a couple of thickly padded pilot’s couches bolted to the deck.

“It’s the bridge, all right,” said Cantrel. “Looks just like home.”

“Only so many things you can do with a spaceship,” Yance pointed out. The chief was already moving into the small compartment, making a visual record as he went. Suddenly he froze. “Sir,” he said. “I think you’d better look at this.”

Cantrel came forward and joined Yance where the chief stood looking at the pilots’ seats. The couches weren’t empty. The pilot and copilot of the Deathwing raider were still with her, strapped into their seats, their bodies preserved by the endless cold and vacuum of space since the day when somebody had stood beside them and cut their throats.

“That’s nasty,” said Cantrel, swallowing hard.

“Look what’s nastier.”

The chief pointed, sending a bright swash of illumination from his handlamp onto the raider’s viewscreen. Someone had left a message there, scrawled on the armor-glass with some kind of dark, blurry marker. Cantrel stared at the writing for a long minute before he realized what the chief had been driving at: the angular, unfamiliar characters had been smeared across the viewscreen with a finger dipped in blood.



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