By Honor Betray'd: Mageworlds #3 (34 page)

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Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

BOOK: By Honor Betray'd: Mageworlds #3
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“Yes,” said Jessan. “I swear.”
“If this is what my lord baronet requires of me—”
“I ask it of you,” said Gil. “Because it’s needed. And when the fighting is over, if I’m still alive to do it, I’ll take you back to Eraasi myself.”
“Then I will go.”
 
In the observation deck of
Sword-of-the-Dawn,
Grand Admiral sus-Airaalin was pacing again. The armor-glass of the viewports on all sides of him glowed now with the amber and violet glyphs that provided a visual dimension to the reports from the great ship’s array of sensors. All about the amethyst sigil that marked the center of the formation, the glass shimmered with purple flashes: more vessels dropping out of hyper in a spherical screen around the flagship. The display was a thing of beauty and grace, a fragment of the old technology saved from the time of destruction—though sus-Airaalin found himself wishing, sometimes, for one of the Adept-worlders’ holographic battle tanks, to look inward as if from a distance, rather than outward, inescapably part of the scene. He supposed that using a battle tank allowed the Adept-worlders to give without a second thought those orders which otherwise would be unbearably painful.
Mid-Commander Taleion entered the observation deck, message tablet in hand. “My lord, scouts in sector five report enemy scoutcraft.”
sus-Airaalin halted his restless movement. “Good,” he said. “They have come out at last. From their scouts we can find the main body. It won’t be far.”
“Shall I instruct the Circles to begin searching?”
“I fear it would do us little good, Mael. The web of power is tangled here; I can’t see the patterns clearly enough to search them for the enemy.”
At the edge of sus-Airaalin’s vision, the armor-glass window lit up with a shimmering aurora of yellow-amber light as more glyphs appeared. He turned, and Mid-Commander Taleion approached closer, in order to read the display.
“It looks like the Gyfferan scouts have found us first, my lord,” Taleion said.
“Not their scouts,” said sus-Airaalin.
One of the amethyst glyphs changed intensity and configuration, and then another.
Our ships,
sus-Airaalin read the changes;
under attack.
“A message, Mael: sections five and seven, swing to encircle. Launch Vengeance missiles against the Gyfferan drop point. Section four, get a count and a point of origin on the Gyfferans. Send out scouts along their backtrail. Deploy fighters. All units, maintain formation, hold your fire until enemy vessels are at half-range.”
Taleion scribbled madly on his message tablet and jabbed at the Transmit button with his stylus. “Fighters out.”
sus-Airaalin let out a long exhalation of relief. “Now we will see the true mettle of the fleet.”
“We will prevail,” asserted Taleion. “We must.”
“In this encounter, yes. But the real battle has not even begun.”
Another violet glyph changed its shape and position, and glowed brilliantly for a few seconds before darkening to nothing but a trace of grey—
An explosion,
sus-Airaalin read it,
one of ours.
But the instant one of the orange sigils flared and darkened as well, and yet another reconfigured itself.
One Gyfferan destroyed; one with its mobility damaged.
The Grand Admiral shook his head. “This would almost be pretty,” he murmured, “if people weren’t dying out there.”
“Yes, my lord.” Taleion consulted his message tablet again. “Report from Section four, my lord. The enemy is in range—a small force, seemingly. We have a tentative point of origin on them.”
“Destroy them. Direct Captain lekkon’s task force to reconnoiter their presumed origin point in force.”
On the display window, more amber sigils flared and went to grey. At the same time other, different sigils appeared.
Transports carrying fighters, thought sus-Airaalin. Small craft. No matter. Our fighters will handle them. Our shields can take the rest. It’s time to act boldly, or lose all.
“Mid-Commander Taleion,” he said. “Instruct the fleet to make course for Gyffer. Transit in realspace.”
 
Some hours after
Night’s-Beautiful-Daughter
had taken her assigned position, a new message came in—this one for the
Daughter’s
own action rather than for relay to other, farther, units. Vinhalyn turned to Ari.
“We’re directed to take station farther out,” he said, “and requested to determine ’by special means’ the Mages’ location and intentions. Rosselin-Metadi, will you request Mistress Hyfid to prognosticate for us?”
Ari sighed. “She’ll love this,” he said, but he headed aft anyway, to the cabin he and Llannat shared. She was there, as she usually was during her waking hours—working on the ShadowDance, this time. She stopped when he came in, and walked over to lean her head against his chest. He could see beads of sweat on the back of her neck, even in the chill shipboard air.
“Hello, Ari,” she said. Her voice was muffled by the fabric of his tunic. “What’s the news?”
“No news,” he said. “But the high command wants you to perform another miracle for them.”
She muttered something that sounded like one of his sister Beka’s favorite oaths. “All right, give me a mo—”
The ship jerked violently, throwing them against the bulkhead. No sooner had they recovered their balance than the Mechanical Breakdown alarm began sounding over the speakers in the room and in the corridor outside. Ari dropped a kiss on Llannat’s forehead before he let her go, and headed off at a run for his station in the Deathwing’s engineering spaces.
“We’ve lost a tube on starboard-ventral,” Chief Yance, the engineering watchstander, said as Ari entered the compartment. “Bridge has been informed.”
“Engineering, bridge,” came a call over the bulkhead speaker. “Interrogative status?”
“Shutting down all engines preparatory to damage assessment,” said the chief.
“Roger,” said the pilot. “Standing by.”
Ari busied himself with checking the readout logs, correlating the levels on the antique Mage-calibrated gauges against his knowledge of how similar Republic-built engines ran. What he saw didn’t look good.
What he heard next didn’t sound better.
“Engineering, bridge. Stand by to provide maximum power.”
“Negative, bridge,” Yance called back. “We require repair.”
“Give me what you’ve got. Maximum thrust on all available tubes,” came the response. “We’re under orders to fall back.”
“I’ll give you what I can,” the engineer said. Ari was already helping him cut out the damaged tube and shut off its opposite number, so that thrust would be balanced on both sides of the Deathwing’s axis—but the throttle call for power came in even faster and harder than they had expected. Ari watched the readouts all over the board start to flash at him in bright yellow instead of the usual violet.
“Ease back! Ease back!” the engineer called to the pilot over the internal comm. “We’re going to lose it down here.”
“We are under pursuit,” the pilot replied, voice tense. “I need jump speed
now.
”
More lights flashed yellow, and an alarm started hooting. Two more of the tube linings blew out, and
Night’s-Beautiful-Daughter
started to tumble.
“Goddamn piece of junk antique Mageborn son of a bitch!” the engineer said, shutting down systems.
The speaker clicked on. “Lieutenant Commander Rosselin-Metadi, bridge.”
Ari left the engineer cursing behind him as he sprinted forward. Vinhalyn and Llannat were both in the cockpit, along with the pilot and copilot.
“We’re in trouble,” Vinhalyn said as Ari entered. “No engines. Guns unreliable, assuming they work at all.”
“We have cloaking,” Llannat said.
Vinhalyn looked dubious, and the pilot said, “Untested.”
“You wanted advice from an Adept,” Llannat said. “I have some. Test it now.”
“I’ll have to see what we can do with it,” said Vinhalyn. “Give me a few minutes to find the manuals … . I hope I can translate the technical jargon … .”
He headed back aft, still muttering under his breath. Ari and Llannat looked at each other.
“I don’t like this,” Llannat said. “I felt something—something’s looking for me.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. It isn’t an Adept. And it isn’t a friend. But it knows who I am.”
“I’m shutting down and going passive,” the pilot said. “Make ’em slow down and look hard if they want to find us.”
“They’ll find us,” Llannat said. “They’re close. And they want me.”
 
GYFFERAN FARSPACE:
NIGHT’S-BEAUTIFUL-DAUGHTER
; LDF #97
 
B
EKA ROSSELIN-METADI looked around the
’Hammer
’s common room and suppressed a sigh.
This isn’t going to be easy.
Even allowing for the fact that Councillor Tarveet was locked back up in number-one crew berthing and likely to stay there for the duration, the compartment felt hot and crowded. It wasn’t so much the number of people gathered around the table—after all, her father had run
Warhammer
with a full crew back in the old days—as the way they spread out to take up the space.
With the exception of Nyls Jessan, who’d slid without comment into his usual place beside her at the table, nobody seemed to want to come within arm’s length of anybody else. The two Adepts, Master and apprentice, made a single black-clad unit sitting as far away as possible from Inesi syn-Tavaite, who looked, for her part, as though she didn’t think the distance was far enough. Ignaceu LeSoit hadn’t sat down at the table at all, but stood leaning against the partition between the common room and the galley.
Beka drew a deep breath, then put her fingertips together and leaned back in her chair. The lace cuffs of her Mandeynan-style shirt fell back from her wrists. She’d taken off Tarnekep Portree’s eye patch and changed her hair back to yellow as a gesture toward resuming her proper identity, but she hadn’t felt inclined to go any farther.
“All right,” she said. “We’re on course for the Prof’s old base.
My
base, now. And I intend to use it.”
“Oh, dear,” murmured Jessan.
Beka suppressed a smile. “Exactly.”
She looked at the others one by one, and continued. “It’s like this. We know that the Professor had a replicant made, not long after the Domina Perada was killed. He didn’t use it for anything that I know of—if I’ve got the timing figured right he joined up with me immediately afterward—so he had to keep it someplace. And I don’t think he put it in a safe-deposit box on Suivi Point.”
Jessan looked at Beka. “You think there’s an unawakened—”
“Empty,” syn-Tavaite corrected quietly. She looked down at the tabletop as if trying to hide the fact that she’d d spoken.
“—an empty replicant hidden on the base.”
“That’s right,” Beka said. She turned to Klea Santreny. “Owen said a while back that you had a vision or something like that, about a grey-haired man who was defending someone.” When the young woman nodded, Beka went on. “How did the guy in your vision compare with that picture the commodore showed us, back on Innish-Kyl?”
“It was the same man.” Klea paused. “He looked older, though. And tired. I think he’d been fighting the shadows for a long, long time.”
“Maybe he had been,” said Beka. She hesitated before going on—the next question would settle whether she really did have a plan, however crazy.
If I’m wrong, then I made a fool of myself in front of the commodore and everybody. Worse than that—if I’m wrong, the civilized galaxy doesn’t have a prayer.
“Gentlelady Santreny,” she said at last, “what did the woman with him look like?”
“Like you,” Klea said. “But she wasn’t you.”
“Glad to hear it,” said Beka under her breath. “Sometimes I’ve wondered.” Then, to Klea: “Close enough for kin?”
Klea nodded. “Oh, yes.”
“Good,” Beka said, feeling more relief than she dared to show. “Owen, you’re the full-fledged Adept here. Could that mean the Professor is keeping Mother safe in some place … some place like what Doctor syn-Tavaite called ‘out-of-the-body’ …until someone comes to help him bring her back?”
“It’s been a long time,” Jessan protested. “Three years. Even if someone could.”
Owen passed a hand over his face and sighed. For the first time since the start of the commodore’s garden party, he looked tired and uncertain.
“All times and all places meet in the Void,” he said. “And the Void is where Klea saw them. It’s no place for the living to venture. I’ve been there. I know.”
“‘No place for the living,’” said Beka. “But Mother’s dead, and so is the Prof; he knew all along he was going to die in the raid on Darvell. Hell, I wouldn’t put it past him to have arranged things that way.”
syn-Tavaite looked up from the table and spoke directly to Ignaceu LeSoit—in Eraasian, Beka supposed; it certainly wasn’t any language she’d ever heard on the Republic side of the Net.
“Nemeis-dai oach?”
“Nemeis-de,
” LeSoit replied curtly in the same language. “Yes. Tell.”
syn-Tavaite knotted her hands together and looked down at the tabletop again. “This man you speak of … the Great Lords are hard to keep in the grave, and in stories have been known to pass through the death of the body for no more reason than that they wished to travel where the living cannot go. To protect someone weaker from the shadows of what you call the Void—one of the Great Lords might find that a good enough reason to die.”
“All right,” said Beka. “Another question, then: how, exactly, would someone go about ‘filling’ a replicant?”
syn-Tavaite shook her head. “That is a thing for the Masked Ones, not for such as me. I have watched, only.”
Beka looked at Owen. “Sounds like your line of work.”
“You’re talking about Magecraft.” Owen was looking pale again. “Sorcery. No Adept has ever … Bee, even if I wanted to do it, I wouldn’t know how.”
“Then you’d better figure it out in a hurry,” she told him. “Because if Grand Admiral sus-Airaalin was oath-sworn to the Domina Perada, then the Domina Perada is the only person in the civilized galaxy who can make him call off his attack.”
 
In the Combat Information Center of Gyfferan Local Defense Cruiser #97, the situation grew tenser as the watch continued.
“Lost contact with scouting parties one and two,” said the communications tech. “Negative comms with task force reserve.”
“Hell,” said the captain. “Do you have a track on any of the Mage units?”
“Negative location, negative track.”
“Report contact data to Central,” the CO said. “Estimated Mage strength, estimated armament—”
“Sir! We’ve lost contact with cruiser #22,” broke in the sensor tech. “Pulse data consistent with engine failure.”
“Very well. Where are the goddamned Mages?”
“Unknown, sir.”
“Get me tentative marks. Hell, get me guesses.”
“Aye, aye, s—”
He never finished. The walls of the Combat Information Center buckled inward, as the compression from an explosive hit heated the air instantly to over a thousand degrees. A moment later the fires ignited by the superheated blast went out like snuffed candles—the oxygen that should have fed them dispersed into vacuum through a massive hole in the metal skin of the ship. One by one, the 97’s bulkheads exploded outward as the weakened areas lost structural integrity.
Far aft, in the engineering spaces, the surviving crew members could hear the crunching sounds as the damage progressed toward them. As they had done a hundred times before during loss-of-pressure drills, some donned p-suits while others waited their turn and still others began the orderly shutdown of the cruiser’s power plant.
Moments later, as the hull damage reached them, the engines released their energy in a catastrophic second blast. Cruiser #97 continued on, maintaining course and speed, dark and lifeless among the glittering stars.
 
Warhammer’s
hyperspace transit continued as the ship fell into the usual routine of watches and maintenance checks. The days consisted of the thousand tiny details, mixed with boredom, that filled a spacer’s time. On the twelfth day, Beka passed through the common room, where Jessan and LeSoit were playing double tammani and trying to teach syn-Tavaite the rules, while Owen and Klea looked on. It wasn’t the easy camaraderie of a close-knit crew, but at least it was an improvement.
“Expect dropout in a few minutes,” Beka said. “I’m going to be dodging asteroids when it happens. So don’t bother me.”
She went on forward into the cockpit, the airtight doors snicking shut behind her, and toggled on the intraship comm.
“Strap down, people—I’ll be doing some heavy braking on dropout. That means you, too, Owen.”
She clicked off the comm and sat watching the navicomp chronometer reel down the numbers to dropout.
When the 0:00 flashed red, the automatic dropout sequence started. Beka switched on the realspace engines. As soon as the stars reappeared, she threw the
’Hammer
into a skew-flip—putting the engines on the starship’s leading edge—and pushed the throttles up to maximum. Inertia pressed her back in her seat as the vessel lost velocity.
As soon as speed got reasonable, she flipped again to bring the cockpit forward, and started searching for the recognition signals and beacons hidden in the asteroid field to bring her to the base. At last there it was, on visual. Beka felt both exultation and dread as it came into view. The base was safety and comfort. But what was waiting for her there, and what would she do if she was wrong?
Wrong’s easy. We aren’t any worse off than we were before.
The big question is, what do I do if I’m right? Everybody thinks I’ve got this figured out down to the last move—even Owen believes that I know what I’m doing, and he damned well ought to know better, considering how Mother grounded us both for a month after that time with the slug … .
The crater appeared that marked the entrance to the asteroid’s hidden landing bay. She brought the
’Hammer
into it slowly, working the nullgravs as much as the realspace engines. The walls turned from rough stone to smooth, then to polished metal, before opening out into the huge, cavernous bay filled with its assortment of spacecraft. Beka brought
Warhammer
down onto her landing legs and cut all exterior power.
She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes.
Home
.
After a few moments she stood up and went back to the common room. Klea and Doctor syn-Tavaite—neither one of them accustomed to high-g braking maneuvers—still looked a bit greenish, but nobody seemed to have suffered any actual harm.
“Warm clothing, everyone,” she said. “It’s chilly outside.”
Back in her own cabin she pulled a quilted jacket out of the locker—and recognized, with a start, the garment she’d worn the first time she’d come here, when she’d thought at first that the Professor intended to replicate her.
Odd that I thought of something like that. He must have had syn-Tavaite’s brand-new replicant Domina tucked away somewhere in a stasis box the whole time we were talking.
What had he said, exactly, when she’d accused him of planning her own replication?
“A Mageworld biochemist with a full laboratory setup could … but I can’t.”
Not a lie. The Professor had never lied if he could possibly avoid it; she’d never figured out whether his reasons were aesthetic or moral. And that time he’d told her the literal truth.
“Stupid,” she muttered. “If I were looking for. the one place in the civilized galaxy most likely to have that kind of lab setup, where’s the first place that I should have looked?”
She hurried back through the common room—“Wait here,” she said to the others as she passed by—and went outside into the echoing bay. A walkaround told her that
Warhammer
had made the trip in fine form, though the bay itself was chillier than she’d remembered. She shivered inside her jacket and went back up the ramp.
“All right, everyone, come on,” Beka said when she reentered the ship. “You don’t need to pack—anything you could possibly need is inside.”
Beka led the way through the entrance door into the sickbay and through there into the Entibor room. A touch on the switch brought up the holographic illusions. The plain, undecorated chamber became a room from the Summer Palace of House Rosselin, as it had looked before the Mageworlders’ attacks had turned the whole planet into broken, poisoned rock. Beyond the high, arched windows, the sun was just setting over the trees and the mountains beyond.
“I remember this place,” syn-Tavaite said. “We dined here.”
One of the black-enameled household robots floated up on silent nullgravs. A crimson light flashed inside its ovoid sensor pod.
“Welcome back, my lady,” it said to Beka. “Lieutenant Commander Jessan, Gentlesir LeSoit, Doctor syn-Tavaite. Will you be wishing the same quarters as before?”

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