At a nod from the lieutenant, the comptech ran his scanner first over the top copy of the orders, and then over the ID plate. The scanner beeped twice.
“Everything checks,” said the comptech.
“Fine.” The lieutenant turned to the runner. “Take Mr. Bandur down to the Supply Department and get him berthed.” Then, to Metadi, “Welcome aboard, sir. I’ll let the chief engineer know that you’re here so he can put you on the watch bill. The skipper doesn’t believe in carrying passengers who don’t work.”
“That’s fine with me,” said Metadi. “Neither do I.”
In a smoky dive in Ruisi, the main port city for Ninglin on the Mageworlds side of the Net, Nyls Jessan stretched out his long legs and leaned back in his seat. When he did so, his shoulders touched the wall behind him. Ever since he’d started working with Tarnekep Portree, he’d found that having a wall at his back made him feel more comfortable than otherwise. Not that he ever truly relaxed these days. He’d lost that easy sense of security months ago, on the night when the Med Station on Pleyver had exploded around him and Beka Rosselin-Metadi had come into his life.
The dive was crowded tonight, mostly spacers from the Republic with a scattering of Ruisans. A local band was on the stage, playing unfamiliar instruments, and a young female Mageworlder was singing in whatever uncouth tongue they used here. Jessan poked at the green paper flower that adorned the glass in front of him. The bartender had folded the many-petaled blossom out of a single sheet while Jessan watched, and then had set it afloat on the slate-colored drink.
Barbarous planet,
Jessan thought, rescuing the now-soggy flower before it sank and setting it down on the napkin to dry.
Wasting art like that on cheap booze.
A young woman wearing blue spangles and very little else slid into the empty chair next to him. “Hello, spacer—new in town? Looking for a good time?”
“I had a good time once,” Jessan said. “I didn’t like it.”
The woman shrugged—an interesting effect, considering the spangles—and moved on to another table. Jessan sipped his drink, harsh with the flavor of raw alcohol, and listened to the strange tones and intervals of the alien music.
The song had ended and another had begun before a man sat down in the chair the woman had vacated. “You brought the ship?” the stranger asked without preamble.
Good,
Jessan thought, careful not to show his relief.
The code phrase worked.
He nodded. “She’s down at the port.”
“That’s all right, then.” The man sat back in his chair. He was shorter than Jessan, dark and wiry, with a thin black mustache and sharp, watchful eyes. “Can you understand what they’re singing?” he asked, nodding at the stage.
“No.”
“‘My name is nothing extra, so that I will not tell,’” the man translated. “‘I’m a stranger in the world that I was born in.’” He paused. “They hate us, you know.”
“So I’ve heard.”
Us,
the man had said. So he was admitting to being—or claiming to be—a citizen of the Republic. To Jessan’s ear, at least, he had the accent, which was good. From the moment Jessan had left the ship, he’d been afraid of meeting someone who expected him to speak a language he didn’t understand.
Logic had told him not to worry. The assassin on board
Warhammer
had spoken Galcenian, even in the last extremity, and the recognition routines he’d surrendered to Jessan implied a meeting of strangers. But logic did little to calm nerves that were still on edge from that macabre interrogation of a man already dead. Jessan had asked as many questions as he could during those last six minutes of brain function—watching the readouts change when he encountered truth, unscrambling the signals from the induction loop around the assassin’s throat to turn subvocalized thoughts into words. But six minutes wasn’t enough, and he knew it.
It’s always the things you don’t have time to ask that come back around and kill you.
Without warning, the lights went up and the music stopped. Jessan blinked in the sudden glare and saw a half-squad of troopers standing at the door. Another uniformed man slipped in through the rear exit to block that way out. Talk stopped at all the tables and nobody moved.
“Damn, it’s the Pemies,” the dark man muttered. “I hope you have good identification.”
Jessan nodded, keeping his attention on the troops. According to the comp files back on
Warhammer,
the Pemies were locals, hired by the Republic to keep the peace and maintain order under the appointed governor of the planet.
Not exactly a setup that I’d appreciate if somebody tried it back home on Khesat. And I can just imagine the sort of recruits they get.
The Pemies left one man at the front door and another at the back. The other four split up into two pairs and went from table to table looking at identification cards. No one put up any resistance. Finally one set of troopers came around to where Jessan was sitting. The stranger pulled out a card and laid it on the table. Jessan extracted his own ID—taken from the assassin aboard
Warhammer,
and altered to show Jessan’s picture in place of the dead man’s—and held it up. The two Pemies squinted at it for a moment.
“You there,” ordered one trooper in heavily accented Galcenian. “Stand.” His mate took a step back, dropping his hand to the grip of his gun—a chemical-energy weapon, Jessan noticed, and not one of the blasters that were universal on the other side of the Net.
Jessan put the ID down on the table and stood, slowly. Chemical-energy weapons were clumsy and noisy and carried only a few charges, but they could kill you just as dead as a blaster.
“Raise your hands.”
He raised them.”
“Turn around.”
Jessan turned to face the wall, feeling his shoulders prickle at the loss of its protection. Hands reached to his belt and removed his blaster from the holster; then the same hands patted him down and took his sleeve gun as well.
“You have a permit for these?”
“It’s on the table.”
“They must be checked, in case they are wanted in a crime. Come tomorrow to headquarters if you want them again.”
Jessan turned back to the two Pemies. His blaster and sleeve gun were already tucked under the first trooper’s belt. “May I please have a receipt for my weapons?”
Before the trooper could answer, a man sitting at a table farther into the room leaped to his feet. He dashed for the back door, hitting the Pemi there in the stomach with his shoulder. The man went down. One of the men standing in front of Jessan drew his weapon and fired—the explosion sounded tremendous in the closed room. Then all the Pemies were sprinting for the back door on the track of the fleeing man.
“Come on,” said the stranger. Jessan could barely hear him above the ringing in his ears. “Let’s get out of here.”
They left by the front door. “What was that all about?” Jessan asked, as soon as they were out on the darkened street and heading in the direction of the spaceport.
“The Pemies keep down subversion and unrest, and investigate crimes against the peace,” the man answered. “I can’t imagine why people don’t want to talk to them. Now suppose you show me the ship.”
“Okay,” Jessan replied. “I’ve got it.”
Silently, he wondered if he should demand to be paid right away, and then vanish. Exactly when the payoff would take place was one of the things he hadn’t gotten around to asking the assassin during those last six minutes.
I hope I don’t blow the game by asking for my money too late. Or too soon.
They continued on, grabbing one of the local jitneys—wheels, no nullgravs, and a noisy engine—for the rest of the journey to the port. During the ride Jessan kept his features calm and his manner schooled to only causal interest, but inwardly he continued to fret.
That raid was a little too convenient Maybe the whole thing was staged to get a look at my ID, or to make sure I got searched and disarmed before we headed back to the ship. Mustache here certainly knew I was going to show up—if not tonight, then some other night.
Jessan allowed himself a faint smile. If the stranger was expecting to deal with an unarmed man in a deserted ship, he was going to have a very unpleasant surprise.
The Space Force Headquarters Building on Galcen presented viewers with an imposing facade—the design had won its architect several distinguished awards—and those members of the public with business inside the structure usually found its upper reaches full of activity. Most visitors to HQ never ventured as far as the sub-basement equipment bay at the rear of the building, an echoing, extremely unaesthetic concrete space where delivery vehicles came and went, minor civilian employees staged their hovercars during bad weather, and the crumpled and shredded trash from the rest of the building was collected and sorted for recycling.
Security Operatives Ryx and Tarrey had the responsibility this week for checking out Space SB-2 at regular intervals. It was a dull job, usually reserved for people on the chief’s scutlist—no danger, nothing to screw up, and no chance for glory—but someone had to walk along rattling the doors and being a presence.
At the moment, though, the only visible activity in the bay was the regular progress of the automatic garbage handler, a big, slab-sided machine more than twice the height of a man. The handler floated on heavy-duty nullgravs a few inches above the floor, while its long robotic arm picked up the trash bins along the side of the bay and dumped their contents into its hopper for sorting. The bins would be filled up again later by the host of inside-collection robots that emptied smaller containers on the floors above. Everything that Headquarters discarded eventually made its way down into Space SB-2.
“Makes you think, doesn’t it?” said Ryx, who tended to wax philosophical on occasion. “All those important people and conferences and things upstairs, and it all comes out as trash in the end.”
Tarrey grunted. “Most stuff does.”
The two operatives watched as the handler’s robotic arm picked up a bin, tumbled its cargo of trash into the gaping hopper, then set back down the empty bin. A second and a third bin were lifted, dumped, and replaced. The arm swung out to pick up a fourth—
“Hey! Waitaminute!”
Ryx dashed across the empty bay to punch the Emergency Stop button on the side of the handler. His partner followed, looking puzzled.
“What’s up?” Tarrey asked. The garbage handler had frozen in place, its arm poised with the last bin half-discharged above the hopper. A few small bits of paper and cardboard were still fluttering down.
“I thought I saw something going into the vat.”
“Yeah. Yesterday’s cha’a cups.”
“No. It was too big for that. Come on, give me a boost up the ladder.”
Ryx clambered up the emergency access ladder on the side of the handler. He peered down over the side of the hopper, swallowed hard, and pulled out his comm link.
“Section, this is patrol two-zero. Evidence of crime detected, lower level section delta, Space SB-2.”
“What’s up?” Tarrey yelled from below.
“Crime scene,” Ryx yelled back to him. “Seal the whole area.” Then, into the common link, “Request major crime task force, forensics, and pathologist. Apparent homicide.”
Fumbling in his jacket, he pulled out the pocket holocorder security operatives at HQ were required to carry while on duty. “Time to start preserving the visual evidence,” he muttered, and pointed the holocorder down at what he’d seen inside the hopper.
His discovery hadn’t gone away. The holocorder’s viewfinder brought it into sharp and unwelcome focus: the body of a woman in Space Force uniform—a Commander Quetaya, by her nametag and collar insignia—with the gold braid of a high-ranking officer’s personal aide looped around one shoulder and the charred circle of a tight-focus blaster burn in the center of her forehead.
NINGLIN: RUISI PORT GALCEN: PRIME BASE; THE RETREAT
T
HE JITNEY clattered and bumped over the Ruisan streets, trailing a cloud of noxious fumes behind it in the night. At the gate of the port, Jessan and the stranger—who still hadn’t given his name—paid the fare and climbed out. The jitney turned and sputtered back off toward the middle of town, its noise and smell gradually fading into the blackness beyond the lighted gate.
There was a guard at the port entrance, another Pemi. Jessan flourished the stamped gate pass that proved he’d come from within the port area and so had a legitimate reason for going back inside.
Now,
he thought as he refolded the gate pass and slipped it back into his pocket,
let’s see what our friend Mustache has by way of papers.
The dark man produced an ID card. Jessan looked at it sidelong, trying to catch a glimpse of the name. He was in luck: he could read the printed capitals without squinting. The stranger claimed to be Lars Olver, a merchant shipping specialist licensed to do business on Ninglin.
That’s probably not his name. And it’s certainly not his job.
After Olver, or whoever he really was, had put his ID away, they passed through the gate. One of the port shuttle buses was waiting inside—bigger than the jitney, and longer, but just as noisy and bad-smelling. Like all the ground transport Jessan had seen on this side of the Net, the shuttle relied on chemical reactions and wheels to get around.
I knew that the Republic destroyed the Mageworlders’ military capacity after the end of the War, he
thought uncomfortably.
But they never told us back in school exactly how thorough we were when we did it.
Eventually the shuttle bus wheezed to a stop. Jessan and the stranger got off and hiked the rest of the way across the tarmac to where the
’Hammer
perched on her landing legs. Jessan paused for a moment at the foot of the lowered ramp. The door at the top was open, but the faint blur of a security force field shimmered across the entryway. That would be the danger point, as soon as the barrier came down.
Rather than chance getting shot from behind, he gestured at the stranger to precede him. Lars Olver hung back and in the end they went up together.
He doesn’t trust me any more than I trust him,
Jessan thought as they reached the top of the ramp.
And he’s right. But I won’t nail him until he tries to make the payoff.
Jessan punched the code combination into the cipher lock, and stepped through as soon as the force field went down. Lars Olver came with him, like a slighter, darker shadow.
“Through that way,” Jessan said, pointing to the forward part of the ship. “And …”
The sentence curdled in his throat. A black wave rose up in front of his eyes and his legs began to give way beneath him.
A needler,
he thought fuzzily.
Stupid of me; I should have checked … .
He didn’t even feel the deckplates when he hit.
RSF
Selsyn-bilai
had made the jump to hyperspace, and was already out of comms when the high-pri message came out to all units orbiting Galcen: the body of General Metadi’s aide, Commander Rosel Quetaya, had been found inside a garbage hopper at Prime Base. The commander had been dead for approximately twelve hours. Any pertinent information should be sent directly to Space Force Intelligence.
“But I’ll bet you my next pay raise that whoever was responsible is long gone by now.”
Brigadier General Perrin Ochemet’s square, copper-brown face reflected his disgust. He’d once considered his assignment as the CO of Prime Base to be the crowning accomplishment of a long career in the Space Force Planetary Infantry. That had been this morning. Now, with the Commanding General out of the loop and with Metadi’s final order—
“if anything comes up, handle it”
—burning its way into his brain, Ochemet was beginning to wonder if he should have opted instead for a quiet billet with a reserve training squadron.
He returned to the infantry captain in charge of security at Prime. “Gremyl—any luck contacting the General at his house upcountry? It takes about an hour to get there in a fast aircar; he could have been in transit earlier.”
“No joy on that,” Gremyl said. He was a thin man with an outdoor tan fading to pale after more than a year of base duty. “There isn’t even a record of him leaving the base. You wouldn’t happen to have his last call still on file, would you?”
Ochemet shook his head. “No. When Jos asks for a secure line, he means it. No recordings, no traces, nothing.”
“Too bad,” said Gremyl. “I’d love to see a voice-stress analysis on that message.”
“Sorry.”
“Oh, well. You’ve known him for quite a while. When you talked with him, did he seem like he was under the influence of anything? Drugs, beglamourment, any kind of duress?”
“No,” said Ochemet. “He sounded just like he always did. It’s not unusual for him to make himself scarce for a week or two, although most of the time he leaves word with someone about where he’s going to be. But I think we have to assume that Metadi’s absence and Quetaya’s death are somehow related—especially in the light of the security records from outside the General’s of fice.”
Gremyl looked interested. “What do they show?”
“Nothing,” said Ochemet. “They’re blank. Erased.”
The security chief pursed his lips in a soundless whistle. “Somebody’s hiding their tracks, that’s for sure. Let me have the records. Maybe Technical can find a bit of sound, or an image trace.”
“You’ve got them,” the CO said. “Meanwhile—we’ll have to handle this as a kidnapping and/or a possible assassination. But I’m not going to go public with all of it just now. Give the holovid reporters all you want to about the commander, but fudge the time of death a bit. As far as anybody on the outside is concerned, the General took off for leave at an undisclosed location some hours before she was shot. No point in telling the other side how much we know. Or how much we don’t know.”
“You think it’s a conspiracy, then?”
“Has to be,” said Ochemet. “Do you think that just one person could have snatched Metadi?”
“Before today I’d have said that just one army couldn’t manage it,” Gremyl said. “But it looks like somebody did. We’d better get the Adepts’ Guild in on this.”
“You people in Security trust them?”
Gremyl shrugged. “As much as we trust anybody—”
“Which is to say, not much.”
“—but the Master of the Guild was Metadi’s copilot on the old
Warhammer.
He may know something we don’t.”
“If you’re thinking along those lines,” Ochemet said, “there’s always Metadi’s last aide … Jervas Something-or-other from Ovredis. Gil, that was his name.”
“Where is he right now?”
“Mageworlds patrol,” said Ochemet. “Commodore of the fleet, no less.”
“He must have impressed the hell out of Metadi during his tour on Galcen,” Gremyl said. “But he’s no good to us—the Net’s a long way off, even in a fast ship. It looks like the Guild or nothing.”
“I suppose so.” The CO still looked doubtful. “But if the situation goes on for longer than a couple of days, I want somebody we can trust handling the liaison.” He picked up the comm link and punched a button. “Ochemet here. Get me a list of all the Adepts who also hold commissions in the Space Force.”
“You won’t find many,” Gremyl told him. “Most of ours who cross over usually resign their commissions first. Just as well, I suppose. Anything else makes for mixed loyalties.”
“We’ll see who Personnel turns up,” Ochemet said. “Meanwhile, we might as well pay a call on Errec Ransome and tell him his old war buddy has gone missing.”
Jessan woke to the feel of a sheet underneath him and a pair of hands kneading the muscles of his naked back. His first, half-hallucinatory impression—that Lars Olver had given him to the Pemi who’d searched him earlier—faded as his mind cleared and tactile memory returned. He was lying on the bunk in
Warhammer
’s main cabin, and the hands belonged to Tarnekep Portree.
The lacy cuffs of Portree’s Mandeynan-style shirt tickled Jessan’s skin. He turned his head sideways and opened his eyes.
The cabin had a blurred, unstable look, and he didn’t see Lars Olver anywhere. He closed his eyes again.
“ … got away,” he muttered against the pillow. “My fault … should have checked him for that needler.”
“Don’t worry,” said Tarnekep’s cool tenor voice. “You’re friend with the mustache is still with us. I have him stashed where he can’t cause any trouble if he wakes up before you’re on your feet.”
Jessan rolled onto his side and looked at Tarnekep. The starpilot was dressed for visitors—full Mandeynan rig, from lace cravat to high leather boots. The red plastic eye patch made it hard to interpret his expression, but Jessan thought his companion’s angular features seemed paler than usual.
“What happened?” Jessan asked. “Did you stun him after he got me with that needler of his?”
Tarnekep shook his head. “Not exactly.”
“What do you mean … ‘not exactly’?”
“He never shot you at all,” said Tarnekep. “That was me.”
Jessan struggled to sit up. “
You
shot me?”
“No. Not shot. I used the rest of that cylinder of Sonoxate gas our late passenger Vorgent Elimax had in his luggage. Flooded all the passageways and open spaces with it after you left, then sat in the common room for hours wearing one of those damned respirators, waiting for you to get back.”
He nodded. The movement made his head reel. “Good idea. I wish you’d told me first, though.”
Tarnekep bit his lip. “I’m sorry,” he said. “For all I knew, you were going to meet somebody who would tie you up and introduce you to the joys of active interrogation—and there would go our cover on Ninglin. But what you don’t know you can’t tell, so I made certain we had a surprise waiting that you didn’t know about.”
“I suppose you’re right. But next time, could you pick a surprise that won’t leave me with a head full of dirty grey fuzz? This stuff feels worse than a hangover.”
“You didn’t look very good, either,” said Tarnekep. From the way his mouth tightened on the description, it was an understatement. “That’s why I brought you in here.”
“Bad reaction,” Jessan said. He tried to stand up but sank back down onto the bunk, his head spinning. “Muscle cramps and vertigo … we haven’t got time for this. If you check the medikit in the locker over there, you’ll see a row of hypo ampules.”
“Got it,” Tarnekep said a few moments later. “I see them.”
“Okay—I need the third one from the left.”
“Orange label, coded six-zero-three-D?”
“That’s it.”
Jessan took the ampule Tarnekep handed him and pressed it against the vein in his arm. He felt the usual brief stinging sensation, and forced himself to breathe slowly and evenly while the medication did its work.
When he stood up again his head was clear and the bulkheads no longer wavered when he looked at them. The cabin air was chilly against his flesh, however, and he realized belatedly that all his clothes were lying in a crumpled heap next to the bunk. He thought about putting back on the garments that Tarnekep had removed, but decided against the effort. Instead, he crossed over to the clothes locker and took out a green velvet Khesatan lounging robe lined in gold spidersilk—a bit overstated for his taste, but appropriate enough for the persona he cultivated these days.
“That was the first time I ever tried breathing Sonoxate,” he said, slipping his arms into the full sleeves. He wrapped the broad silk sash around his waist and tied it neatly. “Just how far under did it put me?”
“Far enough,” said Tarnekep. The pilot’s face, Jessan noted, was still pale, and his whole bearing was tense and edgy. “If I’d known about that six-zero-three-D thing I wouldn’t have wasted so much time.”
“Don’t worry; the stuff in that ampule wouldn’t have worked until I was conscious anyway.” Jessan selected a needler and a wide-beam stunner from the collection of small arms in the locker, and slid them into the pockets of his robe. “Gentlesir Olver is probably awake himself by now. Give me a moment to get the Professor’s little box of horrors out of storage, and we can soothe our nerves by asking him a few questions.”
Tarnekep Portree palmed the lockplate beside the cabin door and the panel slid open. Out in the common room, Jessan sniffed at the air but failed to detect any trace of the gas that had felled both him and Lars Olver.
“You won’t smell it,” Tarnekep assured him. “The stuff is practically odorless. Anyway, I flushed the ship to atmosphere right after I scraped you up off the deckplates and took care of your friend.”