Cantrel directed his light into the lock chamber, playing the beam all about. “What the—take a look at this, Chief. Someone’s wedged the inside door open, too.”
“I’m recording, sir. But why the hell would anybody want to do a dumb thing like that?” Yance sounded outraged as well as puzzled; for any spacer, deliberately opening the ship to vacuum ranked as a deadly sin.
“I wouldn’t know, Chief. But this job is getting stranger by the minute.”
Yance brought the recorder in close to pick up the details of the inner door. “I didn’t like it when this was just a Mage ship,” he said. “And I definitely don’t like it now.”
You can say that again
, thought Cantrel.
This whole setup stinks so bad that you can smell it in vacuum.
“We’re not getting paid to like it,” he told the chief. He unhooked his energy lance from its carrying clips on the back of his p-suit and moved on into the open lock. The handlamp on his suit sent a beam of white light ahead of him into the blackness inside. “We’re getting paid to board it. Let’s go.”
Back on RSF
Karipavo,
Gil divided his attention between the situation display in the battle tank and the flatvid screen showing realtime pictures from the boarding party. The open airlock of the Magebuilt ship gaped like a dark mouth; to the cold eye of the recorder, Ensign Cantrel was a small and uncertain figure standing on its outer lip.
“Poor kid,” said Lieutenant Jhunnei quietly at Gil’s elbow. “It’s a hell of a thing to know that you’re expendable.”
Gild nodded. “No argument on that, Lieutenant. But we’re in the same position, after all.”
“Who are, sir?”
“All of us in the Mageworlds screening force,” Gil said. On the flatscreen, the ensign unclipped his energy lance and stepped over the rim of the airlock into the dark. “Because if anything bad manages to make it across from the other side of the Net, it’s our job to buy the civilized galaxy as much time as we can.”
“Understood,” said Jhunnei. “In the interest of staving off the day, shall I have the comms tech start compressing the data for a direct hyperspace feed to Galcen?”
“Why not?” Gil said. “They must have gotten the first report by now, and it’s going to have them all hugging the comm links and waiting for more, from the Commanding General down to the tech on duty. No point in disappointing them.”
The interior of the Magebuilt raider was strangely familiar—the result, Cantrel supposed, of expedients forced upon its builders by the physical realities of starflight—but at the same time subtly alien. He could recognize individual details and pieces of equipment when the beam from his handlamp fell on them, things like airtight hatches, accessways, or emergency gear for dealing with the spacer‘s twin demons of fire and decompression, but their location was never quite what he expected it to be.
The chief apparently felt the difference, too. “Screwy setup in here.”
“Blame it on the Magelords. Which way do you figure is the bridge?”
The chief glanced at his inertial tracker. He pointed. “Forward section of the ship is that direction. If the Mageworlders were sensible about their shipbuilding, the bridge should be up there somewhere.”
“That’s a pretty big ‘if,’” said Cantrel. “But I suppose it beats a random walk. We’ll explore forward.”
Slowly, with numerous false starts and jogs, they made their way through the maze of the ship. Some of the areas they passed through seemed to make no sense at all, such as the chamber containing nothing but a circle of white tile in the middle of the deck, but others had the same eerie mundanity as the passageway near the airlock. They passed through a ship’s galley, hazardous with floating cutlery, and shone their handlamps into a compartment where sheets and blankets lay stretched inspection-taut across neatly made bunks, while odds and ends of personal gear—pillows, boots, a writing stylus and its datapad—hung weightless in the endless cold of space.
Finally, the chief indicated a closed door. “If the inertial tracker isn’t lying, then the bridge must be in through there. Because if the bridge isn’t in there, we’ve just run out of places.”
Cantrel was examining the edges of the door. “More funny stuff,” he said, gesturing at Yance to come over and make a visual record. “It looks like things got pretty desperate here for a while—we’ve got a small craft missing, and the crew had to open up both airlock doors at once to get something out through the hatch—but I still haven’t seen anything that looks like battle damage.”
“Mechanical failure?”
“Maybe,” said Cantrel. “But what kind of mechanical failure forces an abandon-ship and then leaves everything behind intact? Maybe they had some kind of poison in the atmosphere, so they tried to vent to space—but that didn’t work so they took off in that shuttle or whatever that they were carrying. Or maybe it was some Mage-type thing we won’t ever figure out.”
He abandoned speculation for the moment and went back to inspecting the door. “This thing’s locked tight, as far as I can tell. Do you think we’d have trouble cutting through it?”
“Not unless ruining something that we may want later counts as trouble.”
Cantrel sighed. “That’s what I was afraid of. Okay, you push here and I’ll pull. Maybe it’ll move.”
The two men tried to shift the door. The effort soon had Cantrel sweating inside his p-suit, but that was the only noticeable result. The door remained shut.
“Well,” he said, “so much for that idea. Now I
really
wish we had an Adept along. One of those guys could probably open the door for us just by looking at it real hard.”
“She’s locked up, all right,” said Yance. “But every ship I’ve ever been on had some kind of emergency access to the bridge, in case of power failure. Stands to reason this one would, too.”
“If you can count on reason with a Magebuilt raider.” Cantrel paused. “Where do you think it is?”
“It has to be inside one of these bulkheads if it’s here at all,” Yance said. “Let’s see how much stuff we can take out without having to break anything.”
The two worked silently for a while, removing slabs of bulkhead paneling. In the weightlessness of deep space, the scraps of metal and plastic floated around them.
“Hah,” said Yance after several minutes had passed. “Look at this.”
Cantrel moved closer and looked. The last panel to come off had revealed a slot in the interior bulkhead, at about chest height. “Probably for some kind of key,” he said, “and if you try to fool with it, it’ll explode and kill you.”
“That would be a really dumb thing to have on a ship,” said the chief. “The first spacer-recruit who comes along on bulkhead maintenance duty is going to turn you into space dust.”
“These were Mageworlders,” Cantrel said. “I remember reading about the reason why nobody ever boarded one of their warships and came back alive: the damned things tended to blow up. Folks like that would have killed off all their stupid recruits in basic training. Besides,” he added, “I don’t see anything here that looks like it would fit into the slot.”
Yance still held the slab of paneling in one pressure-gloved hand. “I know where
I’d
put the emergency key,” he said, and turned the slab over. Clipped to the inside surface was a flattened stick of plastic, slightly thinner and narrower than the slot in the interior bulkhead. “I’ll bet this is it.”
Cantrel reached out and pried the stick of plastic out of the clip. He brought it close to the lip of the slot in the interior bulkhead, and then paused. “We’re still sending data in realtime back to
Ebannha
, right?”
“Right.”
“Good.” he said. “Then it won’t be a total loss if we’ve guessed wrong and this is the self-destruct mechanism instead of the emergency bridge key. They can always make us part of the training vid on how not to open Magebuilt doors.”
Holding his breath, he pushed the card into the slot and waited for the explosion. Nothing appeared to happen. After a moment he let his breath out again. “Oh, well, another bright idea shot all to pieces.”
“I don’t know about that,” said Yance. “Let’s try pushing the door one more time.”
“Can’t hurt, I suppose.”
This time, when the two men applied pressure, the door began to slide back into the wall to their right. As it slid, it revealed clear armor-glass viewscreens up ahead, with the stars visible through them, and a couple of thickly padded pilot’s couches bolted to the deck.
“It’s the bridge, all right,” said Cantrel. “Looks just like home.”
“Only so many things you can do with a spaceship,” Yance pointed out. The chief was already moving into the small compartment, making a visual record as he went. Suddenly he froze. “Sir,” he said. “I think you’d better look at this.”
Cantrel came forward and joined Yance where the chief stood looking at the pilots’ seats. The couches weren’t empty. The pilot and copilot of the Deathwing raider were still with her, strapped into their seats, their bodies preserved by the endless cold and vacuum of space since the day when somebody had stood beside them and cut their throats.
“That’s nasty,” said Cantrel, swallowing hard.
“Look what’s nastier.”
The chief pointed, sending a bright swash of illumination from his handlamp onto the raider’s viewscreen. Someone had left a message there, scrawled on the armor-glass with some kind of dark, blurry marker. Cantrel stared at the writing for a long minute before he realized what the chief had been driving at: the angular, unfamiliar characters had been smeared across the viewscreen with a finger dipped in blood.
GALCEN: PRIME BASE NAMMERIN: SPACE FORCE MEDICAL STATION; NAMPORT ONTIMI SECTOR: PLANETARY INFANTRY BARRACKS, KIIN-ALOQ INFABEBE SECTOR: RSF
FEZRISOND
I
N COMMAND Control at Prime Base, the main battle tank showed RSF
Ebannha
as a bright blue triangle standing off at a safe distance from the red dot that signified the Deathwing raider. Much closer,
Ebannha
’s boarding craft and the trio of single-seat fighters made a cluster of blue dots around the Magebuilt ship.
Karipavo
, the relaying vessel, wasn’t in the tank at all.
Brigadier General Ochemet watched the lights in the realtime display and waited for the “amplifying info” that Commodore Gil had promised. The first twinges of what felt like becoming a truly spectacular headache throbbed in his temples. It was bad enough to have Commander Quetaya dead and General Metadi missing—in the company of what Security Chief Gremyl, at least, thought was a replicant imposter; now they had to have trouble on the Mageworlds border as well.
Over at the comm console, a flatvid screen beeped and came to life. “More real-time data, sir,” said the tech on duty. “Sound and pictures from
Ebannha
’s boarding party, relaying via
Karipavo
.”
Ochemet moved closer to the flatvid. The pictures there were dark and grainy—partly the effect of data compression and expansion, partly the effect of coming from a small built-in camera on somebody’s pressure suit—but they were clear enough for him to follow the progress of the boarders. When Ensign Cantrel and Chief Yance reached the locked door, Ochemet tensed. He’d been a junior officer in the Planetary Infantry during the mopping-up stages of the last war. and had witnessed firsthand the Magebuilt ships’ practice of self-destructing rather than permit intruders.
“Orders used to be to blow those things up with standoff weapons,” he commented to the watch officer. “Deep space or on the ground, it didn’t matter.”
Unfortunately for the two from
Ebannha
—and, halfway across the civilized galaxy, for Ochemet’s ever more insistent headache—current standing orders called for boarding and inspection of all vessels passing through the Net. Ochemet watched the flatscreen with ill-concealed anxiety as Cantrel and Yance began yanking sheets of paneling off the raider’s bulkhead, and relaxed only slightly when the key that they found there did nothing more than release the slide mechanism for the bridge door.
The flatvid picture shifted to the interior of the bridge. Next to Ochemet, the watch officer bit back a startled oath as the seated figures of the Deathwing’s pilot and copilot filled the screen. Even with the poor image reproduction, there was no mistaking exactly how the two Mageworlders had died.
“That’s nasty,”
said the flattened, off-key voice of Ensign Cantrel over the relays; and Yance’s voice replied,
“Look what’s nastier.”
Again the picture shifted. This time the bad light and the relayed transmission failed to show clearly what had drawn the boarders’ attention. A few seconds later, Cantrel’s voice came over the link again:
“We’re looking at writing on the main viewscreen. I don’t know what the language is. But it looks like whoever killed these two left a message.”
An even fainter, more distorted voice came through—somebody back on the boarding craft, apparently:
“What makes you think that. sir?”
And Cantrel’s reply:
“Because he used their blood to write it with, that’s why.”
Ochemet, listened. frowning. A Magebuilt ship emptied to vacuum and set on a course for the Republic side of the Net would be unusual enough; this latest discovery made the derelict into something that might require serious investigation.
“What do you think?” he asked the watch officer. “Mutiny? Somebody going space-happy after too long in hyper?”
The watch officer shrugged. “So he cuts their throats and writes ‘No more fried sausages for lunch, ha-ha!’ in blood on the viewscreen, then takes off in the ship’s shuttle? It could happen, I suppose.”
Ochemet sighed. “We can’t get away with blowing this one in place,” he decided with considerable regret. His life was complicated enough right now without adding an abandoned Deathwing raider to the list of his problems. “But I’m damned if I want to see that ship brought any closer to Galcen than it is right now, either. We’ll send an investigating team out to the Net instead.”
The comms tech spoke up again. “We’ve got a text-only message coming through from
Karipavo
now, sir, along with the feed from the boarding party.”
“Put the message up on screen three,” Ochemet said. He moved closer and read the paragraphs as they scrolled. They turned out to be Commodore Gil’s recommendations for handling the abandoned raider—which, Ochemet was pleased to note, largely paralleled his own decision. Only the final paragraph was unexpected:
“Since we are dealing with a Magebuilt ship on the border of the Magezone, I strongly recommend that there be an Adept with the investigating party.”
“An Adept,” Ochemet murmured, half to himself. “Where do we get an Adept?”
He could, he supposed, ask Master Ransome for the loan of one, but Ochemet was reluctant to put himself and the Service into the Guild Master’s debt.
Bad enough we’re having to deal with him over the other problem.
But thinking about Commander Quetaya’s death brought to mind the list Captain Gremyl had made up a few days earlier, of fully-trained Adepts holding Space Force commissions. As the security chief had predicted, there weren’t many. But there’d been one, an ensign in the medical service before going to the Guild, who was still with the Space Force as a lieutenant-equivalent and stationed on not-too-distant Nammerin. She was also—according to a recent and highly classified entry in her personal file—the only member of the service to have actually seen and fought with a Magelord since the end of the War.
Which makes her the closest thing to a current expert we have
, Ochemet thought.
She’s already under orders for Galcen, so we can redirect her on arrival. It’ll mean doing without a liaison officer to work with the Retreat on the Metadi/Quetaya situation, but I can do that job myself if I have to.
We need Mistress Hyfid out in the Net.
With Ari gone, Llannat found Nammerin a dull place. From time to time she was aware of Owen’s continuing presence as he went about whatever errands Master Ransome had given him—but one rebuff was enough, and she didn’t try to make contact again. She carried out her usual duties with routine professionalism, watched reruns of “Spaceways Fatrol” on the staff-lounge holoset, and listened, with all the patience she could muster, to Bors Keotkyra’s unending line of cheerful talk.
“So how’s Ari doing on the
Fezzy
?”
Llannat swallowed the last bite of her salad and set the empty plate down on the table beside the lumpy couch. In the holoset’s picture tank, the final credits for the lunch-hour replay episode of “Spaceways” dissolved and reformed themselves into a commercial for Nutli’s Instant Super-Enriched
Ghil
(“warm, stimulating, and guaranteed nutritionally adequate!”).
“He’s probably doing all right,” she said finally.
Bors looked curious. “I thought for sure you’d have heard from him by now.”
“Me?”
“Hey,” said Bors. “You two were always running around together while he was here. I’m surprised he hasn’t kept in touch.”
“He’s old-fashioned in some ways,” she said. “If he says he’ll write a letter, he means ink and paper and an envelope and postage money for the bulk mail, not compressed-text or a voice chip. And bulk mail travels slower than glaciers.”
As she spoke, she found that she could see the letter clearly in her mind: the stiff paper, the ink, and Ari’s strong, broad hand wielding the pen, filling the page with graceful lines of Maraghite script. The image had the sharp edge of reality to it; she knew at once that the letter indeed had been—or perhaps would be—written. Then the mental picture winked out, replaced by a sudden, insistent conviction that she ought to be someplace else.
She’d experienced those feelings before, and had learned not to ignore them. “Sorry, Bors,” she said before he could ask any more questions, and left the staff lounge at a near-run.
Outside in the Med Station compound, she let her feet carry her where they thought best. Their destination turned out to be the communications dome, which housed the planetary and system links and the big, heavy hyperspace comms. The duty comms tech looked up, startled, as she came in.
“I just got a message for you,” he said.
She nodded, not particularly surprised. “What kind of message?”
“Orders.”
“Orders?” It was a possibility she hadn’t even considered. “Why me? I’m not due to rotate out of here for another year.”
The tech shrugged. “They don’t look like rotation orders, if that means anything. Here, you want to carry them to the skipper? He’ll need to sign for ’em anyway.”
“Sure.”
Llannat took the folder and opened it to scan the brief message on the single sheet of flimsy. There wasn’t much to read—just her name, a string of accounting data, and a couple of sentences in Standard Galcenian. Taken together, they pulled her away from Nammerin and sent her, via the quickest available means, to Space Force Headquarters on Galcen for assignment to general duty.
She shook her head, confused. “Damned if I know what they think they’re up to.”
The CO of the Medical Station was equally nonplussed when she brought him the orders for signing. “It’s an odd one, that’s for sure. I’d have expected you to get detailed to the hospital or the clinic, not the general-assignment desk.”
He scrawled his initials on the sheet of flimsy. “You’ll have to run this through Disbursing and Admin before you can be certain, but if I read the accounting codes right, you aren’t being authorized any leave en route, and the travel and proceed time is consistent with some extremely high-priority seating.”
Pausing, he regarded her gravely for a moment. “It isn’t any of my business, of course, but it looks like someone wants you on Galcen immediately if not sooner, and doesn’t want to say why. If I didn’t know better, I’d guess this had something to do with the time you … no, on second thought I won’t even try to guess. I don’t have need to know, or the clearances.”
He pushed the folder back over to her. “Go start checking out of the station. RSF
Istrafel
departs the Nammerin nearspace training area tomorrow, en route direct to Galcen Prime, and you’ll want to be on her.”
Down in Accounting and Disbursing, where the clerk on duty transformed the string of accounting data into actual readable orders, the results came back as the CO had predicted.
The clerk looked impressed. “You must really rate,” she told Llannat. “You’re getting patched through as fast as they can get you in. According to these codes, you can bump full commanders if necessary to obtain a berth back to Galcen.”
“Thanks,” Llannat said. “I just wish I knew what was going on that was so important. The last time I left Nammerin in this much of a hurry, I was being kidnapped.”
“At a guess, someone punched in the wrong number when they were writing these things up. It happens.”
Nevertheless, orders were orders. Still puzzled, Llannat stood next morning by the Med Station gate, her orders in one hand, a small carrybag in the other, and a larger case holding the rest of her possessions by her feet. The short black staff with its silver tips hung from her waist.
The shuttle bus from Namport arrived on humming nullgravs, and the latest group of spacers needing groundside medical attention came off. Llannat threw her bags into the luggage compartment and climbed onto the bus. The morning was wet and cloudy, but not at the moment raining; she looked out at the low grey sky and the heavy green-and-brown landscape, and wondered if Master Ransome was behind this latest development.
It doesn’t feel like his work, though … the general-assignment desk and the high-pri orders. That reads a lot more like the Space Force trying to be subtle about something.
Halfway to Namport the rain started again, streaking the bus windows. By the time she reached the Space Force shuttle field, the rain had become a solid downpour—an appropriate good-bye to the planet, she decided, and one unlikely to foster a state of false nostalgia.
Llannat ignored the rain, since only newcomers tried to keep dry, and put her large bag onto the cargo handler for RSF
Istrafel
. She kept hold of the folder and the carrybag, and went into the main building to wait for a shuttle to orbit. By midmorning one was announced, and before the sun had made its meridian passage she was aboard
Istrafel
and heading for hyper.