By Honor Betray'd: Mageworlds #3 (18 page)

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Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

BOOK: By Honor Betray'd: Mageworlds #3
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“Right,” said Jessan. “Walking around is best. Finish your cha’a, and I’ll give you two the galactic diplomat’s decimal-credit tour of downtown Suivi Point. We have a lot to discuss.”
 
SUIVI POINT: ADMNISTRATIVE DISTRICT
RSF
KARIPAVO
: MAGEWORLDS SPACE
 
T
HE GYFFERAN Local Defense Force was one of the handful of planetary fleets that hadn’t merged into the Space Force at the end of the First Magewar. That independence had caused a great deal of comment at the time. Gyffer’s unswerving loyalty to the Resistance—and the fact that even after a long and devastating conflict the planet remained self-sufficient enough to opt for neutrality if pushed too hard—eventually silenced the opposition. Gyffer kept its own fleet, and policed its own system space, with only a minimal Space Force presence.
Since the fall of Galcen, even that much of the Republic’s protection was gone. Gyfferan scoutships patrolled the distant reaches of local space, out beyond the sensor range of the farthest unmanned watch stations, relaying their messages back to Telabryk via the local links once hi-comms had returned.
So far, the reports had all been the same:
No activity in this sector. Continuing patrol.
“What everyone’s hoping they’ll run into,” Ari said to Llannat, “is at least some of the Space Force.”
Llannat shook her head. “Don’t count on it.”
The two of them were in the officers’ club at the Gyfferan LDF’s Telabryk base. They’d been extended privileges along with the rest of the people off
Naversey
and the
Daughter,
and the club’s dining room at least provided hot meals made from actual ingredients, instead of reconstituted and reheated space rations.
Under normal circumstances, the Telabryk club would probably have been a cheerful, gossipy place, with cold buffet and salad tables every day at lunch, half-price bar from local twilight until full dark, and live entertainment every LastDay night. These days, the circumstances were anything but normal. Tense, harried-looking men and women in LDF uniforms ate their meals too fast, talked too much or not at all, and didn’t look at the flatscreen monitor set into the wall beside the dining-room door.
Until recently, Ari suspected, the screen would have displayed the Telabryk base’s Plan of the Day, or the club’s list of upcoming social events. Since the fall of Galcen, though, and the Citizen-Assembly’s decision to resist both the Mages and Admiral Vallant, the dining-room screen and others like it had changed their displays. Now the screen showed a continuously updated roster of the LDF’s long-range scoutships, by mission status: in the launch queue, on patrol, and safely home to Gyfferan nearspace. According to the local newscasts, a roving scoutship would detect the approaching enemy—whether Vallant’s mutinous forces out of Infabede or the Mageworlds warfleet fresh from the conquest of Galcen—and warn Gyffer of the impending attack.
None of the people in the Telabryk officer’s club expected real life to be anything like the newscasts predicted. Sooner or later, one of the scouts would fail to make its scheduled report. That failure might be all the warning the LDF would ever get.
“
Naversey
’s headed back in,” Ari said. “I checked.”
“Good.” Llannat poked at her salad with her fork. “I was worried. It’s hard to tell, sometimes, what’s true and what’s just nerves.”
“Can’t you stop it?”
“Not the true stuff,” she said. “And not the nerves either, mostly.” She poked at the salad again, turning over the shreds of unfamiliar Gyfferan greenery as if she expected to find something crawling there. “I wish …”
“Wish what?”
She shook her head. “Nothing. It’s just that seeing the future isn’t enough, even when you can trust it. You can dodge things a little, take precautions here and there, but it’s all too slippery. There’s nothing solid that you can grab hold of—no way to reach out from where you are and make the change.”
“Now you’re starting to talk like my brother.”
“It only sounds that way,” she told him. “Owen wouldn’t even
think
some of the things I just said—and I wouldn’t be saying them if he was around. He works very closely with Master Ransome; everybody in the Guild knows it.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” Ari demanded. “Seeing the future can’t be against the rules; you told me once that Ransome does it himself sometimes.”
Llannat was starting to look a bit tight around the mouth, as if she’d gone further into something than she’d intended to. Ari waited. Most people would keep on talking if you didn’t say anything; and Llannat seemed to trust him, which was a warming thought all by itself.
“It isn’t seeing the future that Master Ransome doesn’t like,” she said after a while. “It’s the idea of doing something about it.”
“That’s stupid,” said Ari. “Anybody can change the future. Everybody does. What we do now changes it all the time.”
Llannat appeared doubtful. “Maybe. But what if, sometimes, what you do
now
is reach up ahead and do something
then
… what if you take what you’ve seen and make it over into what you want to happen?”
Adepts
, he thought, and suppressed a sigh. Between having Owen for a brother, and Errec Ransome for an old family friend, he’d grown up listening to stuff like this.
Sooner or later, they all drift loose from reality.
“Now is now,” he said aloud, “as far as I could ever tell. And change is change.”
“Oh, Ari.” She reached across the table and caught his hands in her own. “That’s what the Mages do, in their Circles. And the Guild calls it sorcery.”
“Damned if I know why,” he said. Her hands were cold. “Is that really all the difference there is?”
“There’s other stuff. But that’s the important one.”
She seemed to know a great deal, Ari reflected, about things that Adepts were supposedly forbidden to deal with. Not that the knowledge was making her any happier, as far as he could tell. And Llannat Hyfid had been his friend on Nammerin, during a time when he had desperately needed friendship.
“If it isn’t anything you can help,” he said, still holding her hands, “then don’t let it worry you.”
“I wish things were that simple. But they aren’t.” She paused, then looked straight at him. “What if … what if the time comes when there is something I can do to help—only it’s the wrong kind of thing?”
The answer to that one, he thought, was surprisingly easy; maybe it wasn’t so easy if you were an Adept.
“Help first,” he said. “Explain later. And if somebody tries to give you trouble, tell them to complain about it to me.”
 
Klea Santreny didn’t much care for Suivi Point. She’d thought at first, before she left
Claw Hard
with Owen, that a dome settlement on an asteroid would be something like High Station Pleyver—clean and well behaved and loyal to the Republic. She hadn’t been portside for an hour before she figured out that if Suivi Point was any of those things, it was only up on top where it showed.
The “galactic diplomat’s decimal-credit tour” that the man called Jessan had promised them didn’t change her opinion. She stuck close to Owen—
Owen Rosselin-Metadi,
she told herself firmly;
if he won’t remember it then somebody’s going to have to remember it for him
—while Gentlesir Nyls Jessan took them from one end of Suivi Point to the other.
She wasn’t sure what to make of Gentlesir Nyls Jessan himself, for that matter. He dressed like a rich Khesatan do-nothing straight out of the midafternoon holodramas, and he certainly had the accent for the part, but his hands were all wrong. They looked like they knew things the rest of him didn’t.
After listening for a while to his conversation with Owen, she felt inclined to believe what the hands were telling her.
“ … being held in Suivi Main Detention on a max-pri contract,” Jessan said, as he pointed out the ten-story-high mosaic depiction of the Spirit of Enlightened Mercantilism on the front wall of the Suivan headquarters of Dahl&Dahl, Ltd. “Notice, if you will, the particularly garish color scheme and the awkward poses of the main figures … .”
Klea craned her neck up at the pictures. “It’s part of the building,” she said. “And the way that things feel … I don’t know much about art and all, but that picture is just right for the people here.”
Jessan lifted an eyebrow. “A banker with a sense of irony? I suppose it’s possible.”
Owen said, “Is there some reason why you didn’t attempt to buy her out? I realize that a max-pri contract would represent a considerable sum of money—”
“Indeed,” said Jessan. He gestured gracefully at a multilevel shopping gallery on the other side of the concourse. “Observe, also, the renowned Crystal Arcade, a favorite picture-postcube subject all over the civilized galaxy … considerable sums of money are not, in this case, the problem. The problem is that Tarveet of Pleyver has a seat on the Steering Committee of Suivi Point, and we do not.”
Owen closed his eyes. “Tarveet. Oh, damn.”
“Exactly. The esteemed councillor from Pleyver has petitioned the committee for your sister’s summary termination.”
“On what grounds?” Owen’s voice and expression didn’t change, but the surge of anger that came out from him struck Klea like a physical blow. Jessan must have felt it as well, because he shook his head.
“Calmly, Master Rosselin-Metadi. Calmly. On the grounds that she deliberately and willfully endangered the settlements of the Suivan Belt.” He paused. “And we aren’t aided in the Steering Committee by the fact that, on the face of it, the accusation is perfectly true.”
Owen let his breath out slowly; Klea could feel him subduing the anger, holding it in check. “Do we have any friends on the committee?”
“This is Suivi Point,” said Jessan. “There’s not a lot of friendship to go around. But there are certain individuals and corporate entities with varying amounts of self-interest which we can call upon. Dahl&Dahl”—he gestured again at the Spirit of Enlightened Mercantilism—“being one of the most prominent.”
Owen glanced up at the mosaic without expression. “What kind of help were you planning to ask them for?”
“I’ve already asked them for the favor of presenting a counterpetition,” Jessan said. “It remains to be seen whether or not they will do so. However, if you and your apprentice can convincingly portray a pair of off-planet bodyguards—”
“Easily,” said Owen.
“—we can go into the office behind that extraordinarily tasteless façade and make inquiries concerning their decision.”
 
The life of a commerce raider, Commodore Jervas Gil reflected, would be considerably more fun if there were any worthwhile commerce to raid. So far, the gold and diamonds of the Mageworlds trade had mostly turned out to be medicinal herbs and small spacecraft parts. Nobody in his hastily patched-together fleet was going to retire rich on stuff like that; and the Mageworlds weren’t likely to miss it.
It wasn’t as if Gil hadn’t tried. He’d used the classic raiding tactics from the first Magewar, taught in the service schools: either drop out well away from a world, lie there silent and dark until a merchant ship lifted, then swoop in and intercept before the merch could jump to hyper; or watch the known dropout points and intercept vessels as soon as they appeared. Then—depending upon whether you intended to search ships and take prisoners, or just wanted to seize the major cargo and wreak general havoc—you had your choice of grappling with tractors and boarding, or taking the ship apart from a distance with guns and picking through the broken pieces at your leisure.
The first way was riskier, but realized more profit for the victors. The second method was a lot safer, at the price of all the uncontainerized cargo and small loose items that could be found on board an intact vessel, not to mention the salvage value of the ship itself. Both ways still worked. But the resistance in force that Gil was hoping for never materialized.
“Nothing,” he said gloomily to Jhunnei, after several weeks of more-or-less fruitless endeavor. He and his aide had just spent a dispiriting two hours taking inventory of the spoils to date, and had come up with a probable resale value not quite equal to their current expenditures on fuel and supplies. “No armed response whatsoever. Do you suppose the Mageworlders came through the Net with every single warship that they had?”
“It’s possible,” said Jhunnei. “We’ve done all we could to draw them out, short of actually hitting dirtside targets, and that’s probably our next step.”
“I don’t want to do that,” Gil said. “There’s no point in inflicting random damage if we can’t take a world and hold on to it. And if blowing up their ships and stealing their cargoes isn’t good enough to make the Mageworlders send a task force after us, I doubt that a planetary attack would do any better.”

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