By Honor Betray'd: Mageworlds #3 (10 page)

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Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

BOOK: By Honor Betray'd: Mageworlds #3
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“Colonel Tyche, what is your verdict?”
“Guilty,” said Tyche at once.
“Very well, Colonel. I accept your verdict.”
The General turned again to Faramon. The entire proceeding had taken, Faramon realized with a shiver, somewhat less than a full minute.
“Captain Faramon,” Metadi said, “you have been found guilty of mutiny, for which the penalty is death or such other sentence as a court-martial may direct. Sentencing is delayed upon the pleasure of the court. In the meantime, Captain—I have a few questions for you.”
 
Grand Admiral sus-Airaalin threw the manacles down onto the bunk. The cuffs were stained red-brown with drying blood, but they were unbroken, and the chain was fixed to the wall of the detention cell.
“He’s done it, Mael.”
“I fear so, my lord.”
“Continue searching.”
“Yes, my lord.” Mid-Commander Taleion hesitated for a moment before continuing. “It would appear, my lord, that Master Ransome departed the
Sword
with the jettisoned lifepods.”
sus-Airaalin had been frowning at the empty restraints; now he lifted his head and regarded Taleion somberly. “You think that, do you?”
“Ransome’s mind is too well guarded for us to touch it directly,” Taleion said, “but the Circle has been able to tap into the scene that General Ochemet sees. He is, in fact, inside one of our lifepods, and Master Ransome is with him.”
“Continue searching the ship anyway,” sus-Airaalin said. “If we lose them, the Resurgency will have us flayed alive—and with good reason. Errec Ransome is dangerous.”
“Perhaps we should have killed him in the first place.”
The Grand Admiral shook his head. “No, Mael. Ransome is too strong, too focused—kill somebody like that without breaking him first, and he’ll barely notice that he’s dead.”
Taleion paled slightly. “
Ekkannikh
,” he said, using the old backcountry term for an unpropitiated ghost.
“Just so,” said sus-Airaalin. “And not the sort that you can buy off with a bit of wine at Year’s End, either.” He frowned again at the manacles. “These restraints should have held the Guild Master, no matter how great his will to escape might have been. They were Circle-forged for that purpose, and more than one life was spent to strengthen them.”
“Then how—?”
sus-Airaalin’s mouth twisted. “We’ve been caught in the web of our own cleverness, Mael. It was the Master of the Adepts’ Guild we feared, the Breaker of Circles who was our scourge and our constant enemy; and we made these chains to his measure. If our prisoner was able to break free of them, it can mean only one thing: Errec Ransome is no longer the Master of the Guild—and the vows and obligations that bound him, bind him no longer.”
 
T
HE SHORT-TERM holding cells in Suivi Point Main Detention were made out of cheap plast-block and painted an unlovely beige. Beka had seen them before, when
Claw Hard’
s chief engineer had gotten himself contracted-in for drunk and disorderly, and she’d been the one who brought down the money to buy him out. Her own brush with what passed for law on Suivi Point had come much earlier, and hadn’t gotten that far.
She’d anticipated staying in the holding area indefinitely, stretched out yawning on the cell bunk and reading the graffiti scratched into the walls—an extensive and informative collection of obscenities in various languages. Instead, she hadn’t been in short-term holding for fifteen Standard minutes before another deputation of armed ConSecs showed up to escort her down several levels to an area she had never seen.
The new cell block had a force field over a cipher lock on a blastproof door. Inside, everything was dull black metal, under a pitiless unshaded light from recessed panels protected by armor-glass. Under the measured impact of her escort’s booted feet, the metal floor plates gave back only the dead, anechoic notes of ultra-heavy soundproofing.
She didn’t need to ask where she was now; Main Detention’s max-pri cell block had been legendary all over the space lanes back when she was a green kid fresh out of a Galcenian finishing school. The narrow corridor was lined with solid metal doors; the ConSecs opened the third one they came to, and pushed her through it. The door slid shut behind her with the solid noise of panels meeting in a blastproof seal.
Beka stood for a moment in the center of the tiny room—no bigger than one of the holding cells up above, and furnished with the same bare essentials—before falling onto the thin mattress in the metal bunk and preparing again to wait until somebody showed up to talk.
Somebody would, eventually. Main Detention charged by the hour, and top security was expensive; if she was in here on a max-pri contract, she had to be worth a lot of money to one of ConSec’s richer clients. Worth it alive, not dead; murder was cheap on Suivi Point.
A longer time went by than she’d expected—several days, counting by the regular arrival of bland but nourishing meals on flimsy trays. She didn’t see anyone, and began to fear that her isolation was the point all by itself.
What the hell is going on out there?
she wondered, and was hard put to keep from pacing back and forth in frustration. But a max-pri cell would have both visual and audio pickups, and she was damned if she’d give the ConSecs a free show.
Why do they need me out of sight if they don’t need me dead?
I hope Ignac’ got the signal. The last thing I need is for Main Detention to seize the ’Hammer for payment of cell fees.
She sat up, hugging her knees to keep from breaking into frantic, random motion.
And Nyls. I really, really hope he isn’t in the next cell over, waiting for that damned family of his to come up with a matching sum.
Cheer up. Security didn’t have a contract to bring him in before; he tried his damnedest to get himself arrested and they wouldn’t do it. He may not know much about how things work on Suivi, but he does know a lot about money. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen him scared.
More time passed, and no one came. She was starting to wonder if Jessan’s murder had been a line item in somebody’s budget after all—
he could be dead already and I’d never even know it
—by the time a force field shimmered into place at the entrance to her cell, and the heavy blastproof door slid open.
 
Ari Rosselin-Metadi yawned and swallowed the dregs of his cha’a. Last night had been a hard night in the Pilot’s Joy, with a restless, short-tempered crowd; the fights he’d broken up had been vicious affairs, a matter of sudden deep grudges settled not just with boots and fists but with knives. He’d long since ushered out those customers who were capable of getting to their feet, and had removed a number of limp and oblivious drunks to the back alley.
Now he sat, slumping, in a corner by the bar—a big, dark-haired man with the quiet manner of someone who has spent most of his life trying to disguise his own strength. Ari had joined the Space Force to stay out of politics, and the Medical Service because most of the time he preferred mending things to breaking them. He disliked the fact that his appearance intimidated some people. They tended to eye him sidelong, as if wondering whether they could trust him not to break the furniture, or the good porcelain, or their bones. Because he disapproved on principle of unequal combat, he disliked even more the fact that his obvious size and strength made other people try to start trouble.
On a shelf behind the bar, a miniature holoset was showing a repeat of last night’s episode of
The Innocence of Ternia.
After everything that had happened to and around Ternia, Ari decided, the fact that she was still innocent proved that she was touched in the head. Ari watched the shifting images for a while, then shook his head.
“The whole thing,” he said finally, “comes down to who gets nervous first—the Mageworlders or Admiral Vallant.”
“Vallant,” the bartender said. He was picking up the dirty glasses and stacking them for the kitchen crew. “You missed him on the news a little while ago—some kind of hi-pri feed straight out of the Infabede sector. Wanted us to surrender to him right away before the Mageworlders got around to asking us first. Is he really as short as he looks in a holovid tank?”
“Shorter,” said Ari, who had served under the admiral on RSF
Fezrisond
for a brief but memorable period, before Vallant’s plans for mutiny had prompted him to make an abrupt departure. “Do you think the Citizen-Assembly’s going to listen to him?”
“Doesn’t look like it.”
“Good,” Ari said. “If you beat Vallant, you can take his ships and use them to fight the Mageworlders when
they
show up. The crews, too, some of them. Not everybody in Vallant’s fleet likes the thought of giving away most of the Republic.”
“Mmph.” The bartender sounded dubious. “Not everybody on Gyffer thinks that fighting is such a good idea, either. Better the admiral than the Magelords.”
Ari shook his head. “It won’t work. The timing on all this is too neat for coincidence—Admiral Vallant’s going to be running the Infabede sector as a wholly owned subsidiary of Mageworlds, Incorporated.”
“Is that so bad?”
“Depends on how you feel about making ships and weapons to help the Magelords take over the rest of the civilized galaxy.”
“Yeah … but if we fight, what’s to stop the Mageworlders from slagging us like they did Entibor?”
“Time,” said Ari. “The Siege of Entibor lasted for three solid years. If what’s left of the Space Force can pull itself back together, and if the other worlds don’t roll over and play dead at the first sight of a Magebuilt ship—”
He broke the speculation off unfinished. The miniature viewing tank behind the bar was showing a stylized Gyfferan sphere with the words “Special Newsbreak” orbiting in bright orange letters around the equator, and a flashing montage of images layered behind it: the golden dome of the Gyfferan State House; the abandoned Space Force installation at Telabryk Field; the orbiting docks where the big merchant ships, seized a few days earlier by the Assembly, waited to be fitted out for war.
“They just broke into the regular programming,” said the bartender nervously. “Something’s going on.”
The news service’s logo glowed for a few seconds longer before fading to an image of Telabryk Field in the early dawn. Against the dark sky—the sun wasn’t above the horizon yet—a set of contrails showed gold as they caught the light. The picture in the globe expanded as the magnification increased, and Ari saw that the holocams were tracking a black spaceship, a sleek and deadly craft with a silhouette like a bird’s wing or a flattened obsidian teardrop.
It was a picture out of the history books, or out of decimal-credit popular romances about the old days before the First Magewar—a Magebuilt Deathwing raider. Four local defense fighters surrounded the alien craft, flying top, bottom, right, and left, swinging in formation onto the landing path for Telabryk Field.
The bartender stared. “What the hell do they think they’re doing, letting that thing in?”
“Maybe it didn’t give them a choice.”
The holocam relaying the picture moved through an arc of clear sky to show another ship, a Republic Space Force courier, following the Deathwing. Belated, the bartender turned up the sound, and the polished, orotund voice of Telabryk’s most popular news broadcaster filled the room.
“ … ETA ten minutes. That is, time of arrival will be six-eleven Telabryk local time. Defense forces identify the vessel as a Mage warship. No word so far on the purpose of this visit. Speculation among knowledgeable sources concerns a peace parley or diplomatic mission. Sources at the Citizen-Assembly give an official statement of ‘No comment,’ but repeat that the public has no cause for alarm.”
“Right,” said the bartender. “Tell that to the folks in the port. Tonight’s going to be worse than last night.”
“Just what we needed.”
“Yeah. What do you think—is it legit?”
Ari shrugged. “Who the hell knows?”
They watched the holoset in silence for a while. Inside the tiny globe, the Deathwing and the Space Force courier settled onto Telabryk landing field. The four Gyfferan fighters circled above the port like watchful, predatory birds.
Another few minutes passed. The broadcaster’s voice rose and fell in practiced inanities that Ari had no trouble recognizing as meaningless time-filler. He ignored them, and waited. At last the metal side of the Magebuilt craft opened, and a ramp swung down to the pavement. A moment later, two people appeared in the open door—a thin man in Space Force uniform, and a small, dark woman in an Adept’s formal blacks.
Ari felt the hair rise on the back of his neck.
I don’t believe it. The universe does not work like that.
Then the holocam recording the events moved in for a close-up of the newcomers’ faces. The man was nobody Ari recognized—a reserve lieutenant from the last war by his insignia and ribbons—but the young woman was Mistress Llannat Hyfid.
He shook his head.
What do you know about it, Rosselin-Metadi? Maybe for Adepts the universe does work that way
.
“Are you all right?” asked the bartender. “You look like somebody hit you over the head with a brick.”
“The Adept,” Ari said. “I know her.”
“Right. And I’m the head of the Grand Council.”
“No, really. We served together on Nammerin … she’s Medical Service too, or at least she used to be … .”
He realized that he was babbling, and fell silent before the bartender could get interested enough to start asking him inconvenient questions. In the holoset, Llannat Hyfid and the reserve lieutenant were entering a sleek hovercar marked with the insignia of the Gyfferan Foreign Ministry. The door of the hovercar slid closed behind them, and the vehicle sped away from the landing field.
Ari stood up.
“I have to find her,” he said. “The two of us need to talk.”
 
 
The blastproof door slid closed, but the force field stayed up, making a waver and a shimmer like the ghost of a hot day in the chill air of Beka’s cell.
She could see through the field well enough. “You,” she said. “I should have known.”
Tarveet of Pleyver looked aggrieved. He was a thin man, with a sagging face and watery grey eyes and a tight, puckered mouth. When he spoke, his lips came loose enough to show the wet pink lining. “You don’t seem very happy to see me, my lady.”
“I’m not your lady,” she said. “Unless Pleyver is planning to swear allegiance to Entibor.”
“That wouldn’t be workable, I’m afraid.” Tarveet licked his lips. “Actually, I had another sort of proposition in mind.”
Beka sat motionless on the edge of the bunk, her hands flat on her thighs.
Here it comes. This is where he tries to buy me.
“Talk,” she said. “But don’t expect me to feel very positive about anything under the circumstances.”
He didn’t even pretend to look ashamed. “I felt that you would do better for having some time alone to think things over.”
“Considerate of you.” She paused. “You said you had a proposition. Let’s hear it.”
“Ah,” he said. “Yes. Well … there are a number of charges laid against you in the arrest and detention contract, beginning with an incident some ten years back at a portside eating and drinking establishment—”
“It was self-defense. A cheap buyout, if there’s anybody on Suivi who misses the son of a bitch.”
Tarveet shook his head regretfully. “I never knew him, alas, but I find myself concerned over his untimely demise. So much so that I consider the usual blood price in such cases to be almost an insult to my integrity.”

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