“CAPTAIN.”
“Mmh?” Beka didn’t look up from the comp console. Damned Space Force paper pushers; this checklist is longer than all of Councilor Tarveet’s speeches pasted together.
“Captain, it’s late.”
She nodded absently and flipped to the next screen. “Mm-hm.”
“Captain—”
The change in tone caught her attention. She blinked, wiped a hand across eyes gone bleary from too long at the console, and leaned back in her chair to look at the speaker for the first time.
Warhammer’s gunner/copilot looked back at her in mild concern. Nyls Jessan—lean and fair-haired, with light grey eyes and pleasant if unremarkable features—had the appearance of a small-time free spacer in a dangerous part of the galaxy, all the way down to the war-surplus blaster.
But appearances could be deceiving, especially where Jessan was concerned. Her partner spoke Standard Galcenian with an upper-class Khesatan accent; he played cards and handled weapons like a professional; and he’d abandoned a perfectly good career in the Space Force Medical Service to join Beka on Warhammer after her old copilot had died in the fighting on Darvell.
A man of many talents, is our Jessan, she thought, and smiled in spite of herself. “Now I’m listening. What’s the problem?”
“You,” he said. “You’ve been working over that checklist since 0400, and Warhammer’s not going to get any cleaner than she already is. It’s time you got some sleep.”
“Is that what you had in mind . . . sleep?”
“Absolutely,” Jessan assured her, straight-faced.
She hesitated a moment, watching him, and then shook her head with a faint sigh. “We can’t afford to fail our blockade inspection just because some busybody in a Space Force uniform decides that I haven’t done my paperwork right.”
“Let me handle it,” he offered. “I’m used to the style.”
“No. If I’m going to sign for something, I want to make all the mistakes myself.”
He shrugged and stretched out on the padded acceleration couch on the other side of the common room. “Fine, then. I’ll stay up and keep you company.”
“Your choice,” she said.
She turned back to the screen and worked diligently for a few minutes until a faint snore broke the silence behind her. She glanced over at the couch. Jessan’s head had fallen back against the cushions and his eyes were closed.
“Damned idiot Khesatan,” she muttered, and hit the button to close the comp session.
The console folded itself back into its bulkhead niche, and Beka stood up. She went over to the couch and touched Jessan lightly on the shoulder.
“All right, Nyls,” she said. “You win. Let’s go to bed.”
The chronometer in the captain’s quarters aboard Warhammer sounded its usual wake-up signal at 0500 Standard. Beka slid out from beneath Jessan’s arm and swung her feet down onto the deckplates. The alarm button for the chrono had been set into the bulkhead on the far side of the cabin, and she couldn’t turn it off without getting out of her bunk—which had probably been the designer’s intention in the first place.
Once the alarm had been silenced Beka started getting dressed, but not in the plain shirt and trousers that she’d worn yesterday. Today she wore the lace and ruffles of a well-groomed but somewhat androgynous young man of fashion from Mandeyn’s Embrigan district, with long brown hair braided into a queue and finished off with a black velvet ribbon. This particular Mandeynan, however, carried a double-edged dagger hidden up his sleeve, and had a Gyfferan Ogre Mark VI blaster in a worn leather holster tied down against his thigh.
She finished arranging the folds of her white spidersilk cravat, tucked a lacy handkerchief into one ruffled cuff, and contemplated the result with satisfaction. Beka Rosselin-Metadi, master of Warhammer and Domina of lost Entibor, had all but vanished, replaced by Captain Tarnekep Portree: starpilot, gunfighter, and killer-for-hire.
Now for the final touch.
Beka reached into the storage compartment that held her dirtside gear, took out a red optical-plastic eye patch, and fitted it into place. The patch covered her left eye socket from cheekbone to brow ridge, giving Tarnekep Portree an oddly piebald gaze. Most people found the glittering red plastic disturbing, with its hints of extensive prosthetic work lying hidden underneath; they would flinch and turn away without looking closely at the rest of Tarnekep’s pale and angular face.
All part of the disguise, she reflected. The Prof knew what he was doing when he thought up this identity. Nobody wants to get close to Tarnekep Portree.
Well, almost nobody. When she turned back toward the bunk, Nyls Jessan was awake and watching her.
“How’s the effect?” she asked.
He smiled. “Excellent as always, Captain. Elegant, but with a distinct aura of indefinable menace.”
“Good. Let’s hope it fools the inspectors.”
Inspection came at 0911.54 Standard, when Warhammer dropped out of hyper at the edge of the Net—the artificial barrier to hyperspace transit that the Republic had imposed upon the Mageworlds at the end of the war. Making a new jump would be impossible until the inspecting officer sent word to the generating station to open a hole and let the ’Hammer pass.
Like a vast spiderweb spun out in magnetic fields from thousands of generating stations, the Net hung between the Mageworlds and the rest of the civilized galaxy. Any starship coming or going had to to drop out of hyper and run in realspace, where the Republic’s Net Patrol Fleet patrolled in force, sensors always alert for vessels trying to sneak undetected across the border.
One could, Beka supposed, go the long way around, skirting the edges of the Net. Space was too big for any artificial construct to enshroud the Mageworlds completely. Even in hyperspace, though, such a journey might take years.
But Ebenra D’Caer believed he could make it to the Mageworlds in a single jump from Ovredis, she thought as she waited with Jessan for the inspection party to arrive. And somebody sure fished him out of his cell back at the asteroid base. Llannat said it was Magework, all the way down the line. “The Mages make long plans,” she said.
And the Professor, too . . . he talked about five hundred years as if it was nothing.
She bit her lip. Thinking about her old teacher and copilot wasn’t going to do her any good, not with a shuttle coming across right now from Net Station C-346—one of the checkpoints where all ships seeking passage had to register and submit to inspection. She concentrated instead on the details of Warhammer’s cover ID as the armed merchantman Pride of Mandeyn (Suivi registry, Tarnekep Portree commanding).
Soon a muffled clunk and a faint tremor in the deck-plates told her that the shuttle had docked. She toggled open the ’Hammer’s dorsal airlock and let the inspection party come in: two Space Force enlisted personnel, one short, redheaded and female, the other dark-skinned, gangly, and male, under the command of a wide-eyed young ensign who had clearly never seen anything like Tarnekep Portree before in his life.
Beka suppressed an urge to laugh. So this product of a sheltered upbringing gets to sit across the table from me while we go over the paperwork with a magnifying glass. If I’m lucky, he’ll be twitching so hard he forgets half his questions.
The wide-eyed young ensign, however, wasn’t one to let his personal opinions get in the way of efficient customs procedure. He consulted the clipboard he carried in one hand, then asked for—and got—the sheaf of printout flimsies that contained the ’Hammer’s pre-inspection paperwork; the official forms that confirmed the vessel’s registry as Pride of Mandeyn, and Tarnekep Portree’s legal ownership of same; and the imitation-leather folders that held all the relevant licenses, ID flatpix, and passports (Mandeynan and Khesatan, one each) for the captain and copilot of the Pride.
He passed the IDs through the clipboard scanner, which beeped quietly as it communicated with the link aboard the shuttle. The shuttle would relay the IDs to the Net Station’s main data banks and pass any relevant information back to the inspecting officer.
“Tarnekep Portree,” the ensign said after the beeping had stopped. “The data net has you down as Wanted For Questioning back on Mandeyn.”
Beka didn’t blink. “This isn’t Mandeyn,” she pointed out. “And a WFQ isn’t a warrant.”
“Granted,” said the ensign. “Nevertheless, the Space Force is legally obligated to pass any word on your whereabouts back to the Petty Council of Embrig Spaceport.”
“Fine. Tell the council I said hello. I love them too.”
The ensign pressed his lips together as if suppressing a hasty reply, and glanced back at his clipboard. When he looked up again at Jessan, his expression had changed from dubious suspicion to active distaste.
“Nyls Jessan,” he said. “Formerly of the Space Force Medical Service. Lieutenant commander, no less. Cashiered.”
Jessan bowed. “The same.”
The ensign’s lip curled. He turned his back on Jessan completely and spoke to Beka. “Captain Portree, I’ll be going over the Pride’s paperwork with you. Please direct your . . . associate . . . to assist my people in a physical inspection of the vessel.”
“Sure.” Beka waved a hand at Jessan. “You heard the nice man, Doc. Show our friends around.”
“My pleasure, Captain.”
Jessan headed off into the depths of the ship with the two enlisted personnel trailing after him, and Beka sat down at the common-room table with the ensign. The young officer ran through the paperwork line by line, consulting frequently with his clipboard.
“Energy guns dorsal and ventral, shields bow and stern—you carry a lot of firepower for a merch, Captain.”
Beka raised an eyebrow. “We’re an armed freighter, like the registry says. When you work in the outplanets, you can’t always depend on the Space Force to show up in time.”
The ensign looked offended. “This isn’t a war zone, Captain Portree. I’m afraid we’ll have to seal your guns for the duration of your stay in the Mageworlds.”
Beka had been expecting to hear something of the sort; the ’Hammer’s guns were latest-generation technology, newly upgraded at the shipyards on Gyffer. Nevertheless, she scowled. “What am I supposed to do if somebody over there across the border starts taking potshots at me? Yell for help and hope the fleet comes running?”
“You’re not in the outplanets any longer, Captain. The Mageworlds aren’t in any shape to give you trouble.” He glanced at his clipboard again. “You don’t have a cargo listed.”
“I’m going in empty and looking to pick up a cargo once I get there,” Beka said. “Like it says on the form, I’m interested in rare earths and botanicals for the medical-research trade.”
“Any Republic currency you’ve got has to stay on this side of the border,” said the ensign. “Sorry if it complicates your business dealings, but that’s the law.”
You’re not the least bit sorry, you little bastard, thought Beka. Well, I’ll fix you. Just watch me do it.
She emptied the money from her trouser pockets onto the table: five or six decimal-credit pieces, a rumpled ten-credit chit, and a silver Mandeynan mark with a pinpoint blaster hole through the middle.
“Here you go,” she said. “Maybe Doc has a couple of ten-chits on him, but otherwise that’s the lot.”
“How do you plan to pay for your cargo, Captain?”
“I don’t,” she said. “I’m a pilot. Other people pay me.”
The ensign looked like he’d bitten down on something sour. He went on with the paperwork, going back and forth between the Pride’s forms and the data appearing on his clipboard.
Hunting for something else he can call me on, thought Beka. Aha—now he thinks he’s got it.
“About your crew, Captain. You have only yourself and the copilot listed, but you have berthing space for at least six.”
Beka shrugged. “The Pride’s a Libra-class freighter; she was built to run with a full crew. She’s been upgraded a lot since the old days, but nobody ever bothered to take out the extra berthing. We use it for slopover storage mostly, when we’ve got a lot of cargo on board.”
The ensign made a note on his clipboard. “Understood. But Mageworlds nationals can’t pass through the Net in civilian vessels, so don’t plan on picking up any passengers.”
“Don’t worry. The damned Mages can rot on their side of the Net for all I care. I’m looking for a cargo that doesn’t talk back.”
“Wise of you, Captain Portree. We don’t tolerate the other sort.”
I’ll bet you don’t, Beka thought, as the ensign continued his way through the stack of printout flimsies. It’s a good thing I’ve got work to do, or I’d smuggle an entire Mage-Circle out through the Net just to prove that I could.
Eventually the paperwork came to an end. Beka signed the several forms, in triplicate, in Portree’s angular, slashing hand, and the ensign stamped and dated all the signatures. He was down to the last one when Jessan came back with the two enlisted personnel.
The redhead approached the table. “Everything’s clean, sir,” she told the ensign. “And the guns are sealed.”
“Very good.” The ensign gathered up the signed and dated forms, and returned the registration papers and both of the personal-information folders to Beka—pointedly ignoring Jessan, who was regarding the proceedings in general, and the ensign in particular, with an air of bland amusement.
When the inspection party had departed and the shuttle had pulled away for Net Station C-346, Beka put the papers and the folders into the ship’s safe. Then, from a snug and very well concealed locker, she removed a compact but effective scanner. Only after she had located and deactivated both of the listen-and-record devices the inspectors had left behind—one in the ’Hammer’s cockpit and the other, somewhat more imaginatively, underneath the bunk in the captain’s quarters—did she allow herself to relax.
“Trusting souls, those Space Force types,” she observed to Jessan. “Do they plant a snoop or two on every freighter that goes through the Net?”
“Probably,” said Jessan. “And most of them probably get scanned and deactivated. But if you leave a couple on every ship you inspect, and collect the ones that are still there when the ships come back, eventually you get lucky.”
“You have a natural bent for this sort of thing . . . are you sure you were a medic before they threw you out?”
“It’s all on the record.”
Beka snorted. “We know how much that’s worth, don’t we?”
“Not everything in there is fiction,” Jessan protested. “Most of it’s the plain truth, in fact. Easier to keep things consistent that way.”
She looked at the Khesatan curiously. “Nyls, just what does the record say about the end of your Space Force career? The way that ensign looked at you . . . ”
“Beautiful, wasn’t it?”
“I’m serious.”
“Black-market trafficking in underage sapients,” Jessan said. “Quite a nice little racket.”
“If you call twenty-to-fifty at hard labor ‘nice.’ How did you get off?”
“The prosecution was thrown out as void on a technicality, so I was merely discharged with prejudice.” He shook his head mournfully. “It was terrible, really. Pull up a copy of the court transcript, and you’ll see that my quarters were illegally searched, so all the evidence seized was inadmissible.”
“Very artistic all around,” Beka said. “So that’s what you and Dadda’s aide were cooking up over the secure comm link, our last night on Innish-Kyl. I’d been wondering.”
“Captain, I’m shocked. Falsifying official records is a criminal offense. Would I accuse a Space Force officer of Jervas Gil’s reputation of suborning a felony?”
“In a heartbeat,” she said. She juggled the pair of small, button-shaped listening devices in the palm of her cupped hand. “Right now, we have some waiting around to do until the ’Hammer gets jump clearance, and I’ve still got these little knickknacks to dispose of. I think I’ll head down to the forward hold for a bit of target practice.”
“Mind if I come along?”
“Not at all. I rather enjoy your company.”
They made their way along the plain steel decks of the ship and through the hatch into Forward. Beka toggled a switch to bring up the work lights. She glanced about, finding the hold a shadowy and oddly echoing space without the crates and pallets that normally filled it. It was a good thing, she reflected, that the inspection party hadn’t bothered to take measurements and compare them with the real stats for a Libra-class freighter. They might have noticed that the forward cargo bay was considerably smaller than it ought to be—and after that, it wouldn’t take them long to figure out about the engines.
Warhammer held a number of secrets, but the oldest and best kept went back to the time when General Jos Metadi had commanded her. Early in his privateering days, then-Captain Metadi had put his ship into the yards on Gyffer for an expensive and unrecorded stay. The Gyfferan shipwrights had removed the original engines; then they had filled all the empty space plus a portion of the cargo compartments with the realspace and hyperspace engines of a vessel half again the ’Hammer’s size. Those engines, coupled with newer and heavier energy guns, had turned an armed freighter into a ship of war, strong enough to outfight a dozen Magebuilt fighters and fast enough to outrun the mothership that carried them.
Not even Metadi’s copilot of those days, Errec Ransome, had known exactly how fast Warhammer could travel when the need was on her. Beka had pushed the ’Hammer close to that limit more than once—but not since the ship’s most recent visit to the Gyfferan yards, where those outsized engines had been yet another of the items on the upgrade list.
With no cargo on board, Beka thought, we could probably outrun a dreadnought if we had to.
The idea pleased her, and she smiled a little as she affixed the pair of snoop-buttons to the bulkhead near the hatch. The two buttons showed up as dark, coin-sized circles against the steel.
With Jessan following, she crossed to the far side of the hold and pulled out her blaster. She checked the charge—ninety-seven percent—and scaled the setting down to a fine beam at lowest power.
“No use drilling clear though the hull to vacuum,” she observed. Then she settled the Mark VI into its holster and turned her back on the target.
Without warning she whirled, drawing the weapon at the same time, and fired twice down the length of the bay. The bolts left glowing trails of ionized air behind them, and the snoop-buttons sparkled briefly. She took a two-handed stance and sent five more bolts into each of the buttons, then switched to a one-handed grip and stood sideways to the target as she fired. Finally, she lowered her arm, thumbing the blaster back up to full power as she did so, and put the weapon away.
“Whoever that was,” said Jessan, “I think he’s dead.”
“We’ll see.”
They walked over to the bulkhead where Beka had placed the snoop-buttons. Both of the recorders were lumps of slag and charred plastic, and tiny pits had been etched into the steel behind them. Beka tapped at the pattern of blaster-points with one close-trimmed fingernail.
“A decent group,” she said, “but I’m not getting any better. Dammit, I wish the Prof could be with us for this one.”
“You still miss him, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” Beka said. “I miss him.”
She pried the carbonized snoop-buttons off the bulkhead and dropped them to the deck, then ground the bits of glass and plastic into the metal with the heel of her boot. “But he’s dead, so there’s no point in talking about it. Let’s get moving.”
Jervas Gil—full captain, Republic Space Force—leaned back in the command chair in RSF Karipavo’s Combat Information Center. The comp screens around him showed no activity beyond the usual status reports, and the battle tank, the big holovid setup that displayed any current action, was blank and dim. The cruiser was in peacetime watch sections and the CIC was empty except for Gil.
General Jos Metadi’s former aide, promoted to captain and commodore of the Mageworlds Fleet, had soon discovered that his new rank presented him with more care and responsibility that it did privacy. He found the deserted CIC an excellent place to think and to be alone, or as alone as anybody ever got on shipboard. Footsteps sounded on the deckplates of the CIC as Gil’s aide—these days, he rated an aide of his own—approached with a clipboard full of flimsies.
The aide, a young lieutenant named Bretyn Jhunnei, saluted and said, “Daily reports for you, sir.”
“Anything interesting?”
Jhunnei had black hair and a long, sallow face. She tilted her empty hand back and forth like a scale coming to a balance. “Same same.”
“Thanks.”
Commodore Gil took the clipboard and flipped quickly through the sheets. Most of the reports were generally unsurprising, the same as the day before and the day before that: lists of food endurances on the other ships in the fleet blockading the Mageworlds; fuel-consumption reports; a daily situation estimate from Space Force Intelligence (based, as far as Gil could tell, on his own reports from the week before); and the record of all civilian ships passing through the Net, with the results of any boarding searches.
Gil scanned the last set of papers without much interest. Anything portentous or disturbing uncovered as a result of those searches would already have been forwarded to him in a separate message. This would be the leftovers, the little ships doing the sort of decimal-credit trade that made up the Mageworlds’ limited contact with the rest of the civilized galaxy—ships with names like Redstar, Lucky Vi, and Pride of Mandeyn.
He suppressed a start. Somehow he hadn’t expected anything so normal from the likes of the General’s daughter, just a one-line report two-thirds of the way down the list of ships, an ordinary boarding and search for contraband, with the results listed simply as “routine.”
Gil forced himself to keep on flipping through the stack of flimsies as if nothing had happened. At last he handed the printouts back to Jhunnei for recycling.
“Well,” he said under his breath, “it’s begun.”
“What’s begun, sir?” Jhunnei asked.
Gil looked at the fresh young lieutenant—first in her class, the pride of the Service Academy, no combat experience.
A whole generation, he thought. Has it really been so long?
“The Second Magewar,” he said. After a pause, he added, “Not a word of that to anyone, eh?”
Jhunnei’s expression didn’t change. “Word of what, sir?”
Gil regarded the lieutenant with approval. Discretion was one of the chief marks of a good aide, and Jhunnei was shaping up nicely. For a fleeting moment he thought back to his own recent tour as aide to General Metadi, and wondered if the General had ever thought the same thing about him.
“Nothing, Jhunnei,” he said. “Nothing. But I’d like to make this month’s training schedule concentrate on combat readiness. Write a message to the fleet instructing all captains to exercise their crews at General Quarters.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And work up a fleet training plan.”
She nodded. “Will that be all, sir?”
“For the moment. And forget what I just said about the war. The action really started over two years ago. It’s just that no one noticed at the time. That’s all.”
Jhunnei saluted and left. Gil sat alone for a while, thinking, then leaned over and punched the call button for the commanding officer’s quarters on the ’Pavo.
“Captain,” Gil said as soon as the red “listening” light came on. “Please put your vessel in Condition Three.”
“Aye aye, Commodore,” the captain’s voice replied. “Anything I should know about?”
“No,” Gil replied. “There’s nothing to know.”
He relaxed back into his seat and waited while the clean-cut young men and women of the ’Pavo, those whose Wartime Cruising watch stations were in Combat, filed into the CIC and brought the display screens and status boards to life. Commander Erne Wallanish, the ’Pavo’s executive officer, walked up to the command chair.
“No reporting,” Wallanish said. He was a stocky, sandy-haired man with a strong outplanets accent—Pleyver, Gil thought, or maybe Innish-Kyl. “What’s the situation?”
“Apparently peaceful,” Gil replied. “Carry on.”
“Yes, sir.”
Gil stood and stretched. One good thing about shipboard routine was that it had enabled him to recommence his exercise regimen and to watch his diet. He’d gotten rid of most of the flab that five years of dirtside duty had put on him.
“I’ll be in my quarters,” he said. “Any messages can reach me there.”
The vacuum-tight door sighed shut behind him as he walked quickly from the space. Once in his cabin, he opened the fold-out desk beside the bunk. He pulled over a sheet of flimsy and began to write a report—in longhand, using the service-issue stylus he carried in his uniform pocket to initial reports and sign messages.
The General had insisted that anything of the supremest importance needed to be encrypted before transmission, without entering it into anything electronic. “Too many ears, Gil,” he’d said. “Electrons have no friends; they’ll work for anyone as easily as they’ll work for you.”
Gil constructed the code grid from memory and encrypted his message. With luck, even broken down into plaintext the brief sentence would have meaning for only one person. “Vessel of interest entered Magezone” was all it said. And remembering the Mages and what rumor claimed they had been able to do, Gil wished that he hadn’t needed to think about those words as he wrote them down.
What were the odds, Gil wondered, that the Magelords had a spy somewhere in the fleet? Nearly a hundred percent, he decided. The Adept who had gone with Warhammer to Darvell and back—Mistress Hyfid, that was her name—claimed that Ebenra D’Caer had been working for the Mageworlders all along, and that the Mages had extracted him without a trace from his prison cell on Beka Rosselin-Metadi’s asteroid base.
Right, thought Gil. And what Mistress Hyfid knows, the Master of the Adepts’ Guild also knows. He’ll have his own agent somewhere in the fleet, I’m sure. The Guild isn’t supposed to run intelligence operations, but “not supposed to” never stopped anybody yet.
Gil shrugged, and put both the Magelords and the Adepts’ Guild out of his mind. Let the Mages and the Adepts play their metaphysical game of hide-and-seek. With any luck, they would neutralize each other. He had another mission: to keep the Mageworlds from rearming; and if that effort failed, to keep the war from touching the Republic.
That was enough of a job for one man, and if he did it, he would have done enough.