To study at the Retreat was a privilege granted to very few, to teach there, an honor granted to even fewer. For Owen Rosselin-Metadi, who had done both, the Retreat was home. The longer he had been away, the more its high grey walls seemed to beckon to him on his return, promising shelter and the company of friends and a chance to let go of the everlasting watchfulness that his work demanded.
This time, as always, he left his rented aircar in the valley below and went the rest of the way on foot. He could have stayed in town and called for someone to come get him—the Retreat had excellent aircar and comm link connections, and the hike up from Treslin was an all-day proposition—but he preferred not to advertise his comings and goings.
The apprentice Adept who stopped him at the gate was new since Owen had left for Pleyver, and painfully young-looking.
The boy can’t be a day over sixteen,
Owen thought, forgetting for the moment that he had come to the Retreat himself when he was even younger.
Master Ransome is really robbing the cradle these days.
The apprentice couldn’t have been long on gate duty, either. He stumbled over the traditional greeting. “Welcome, friend. What is your name, and have you—have you—”
“‘—have you come to seek instruction?’” Owen finished for him. “My name’s Owen, and I’m an apprentice in the Guild already. Could you tell Master Ransome that I’ve come back?”
The youth stared at him for a moment. Owen wasn’t particularly surprised by the reaction. It wasn’t often that an apprentice showed up at the Retreat looking like an out-of-work day laborer and asking for the Master of the Guild by name.
“Uh—right,” said the boy after a pause. “You wait here and—I mean, let me call somebody to take you to him.”
Owen waited patiently while the apprentice spoke over a comm link to an unfamiliar voice farther inside the Retreat. In time another, somewhat older apprentice showed up. Owen didn’t remember her, either.
He let her lead the way through the stone-walled passages to the room that served Master Ransome as an office. Like everything else about the Retreat, the room was immeasurably old—so old that its tall, narrow windows had no panes, not even glass ones. In the wintertime, a force field kept out the driving wind and snow, and a ceramic heat bar glowed on the granite hearth. But this was summer; the hearth was bare, and a cool breeze blew through the chamber unimpeded.
A slight, dark-haired man dressed in tunic and trousers of dull black stood at one of the windows, looking out. The apprentice cleared her throat.
“Master Ransome. An apprentice calling himself Owen is here to—”
She got no further than the name before the man turned. At the sight of Owen, Ransome’s face broke into a smile of delight that made him look twenty years younger. He strode forward and clasped Owen tightly by the shoulders.
“It’s good to see you home,” he said.
Owen returned the hug. “Believe me, sir, it’s good to be here.”
The apprentice spoke up again, somewhat diffidently. “Will you need anything else?”
“Not at the moment,” Ransome told her. . As soon as she had left, the Master of the Guild drew Owen over to a pair of chairs beside the empty hearth. The momentary happiness that had passed across Ransome’s features was already fading, leaving his face as somber and weary as before.
Owen saw the change come and go, and felt a chill, like the feather of some dark bird drawn across the back of his neck. Errec Ransome was a good ten years younger than Owen’s father, but there was something about him these days that made him look all of General Metadi’s years and more.
“I’d almost given you up for dead this time,” Ransome said as soon as they both were seated. “And Jos was starting to ask some awkward questions.”
All trace of welcome was gone now. If Owen hadn’t seen the Guild Master’s momentary change of expression and felt the strength of his embrace, he would have stiffened himself to endure a spectacular tongue-lashing, as befitted an apprentice who’d fallen below his expected standard.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I almost got caught.”
He looked away for a moment at the bare stone of the hearth—some of the memories from Pleyver were still vivid enough to be painful—then turned his head back to meet Ransome’s dark, inquiring gaze. “I did get caught, in fact. My own stupid fault, and if Beka hadn’t been in town I’d never have gotten away. I couldn’t make it off-planet, though; I had to hide out dirtside until everybody forgot about me. It took a while.”
Ransome smiled, a quirk of the mouth that scarcely touched his eyes. “That’s an understatement,” he said. “We have apprentices at the Retreat who’ve never seen your face—two seasons’ worth of them at least.”
“I know; I met a couple of them just now. A bit young, aren’t they?”
“No more than the usual,” Ransome told him. “You, of course, are about to grow a long grey beard.”
Owen gave a short laugh. “After the last few months, I feel like it.”
He paused, hating to destroy the Guild Master’s good humor, however faint—but it had to be done. He drew a breath and went on. “They were Magelords, you know, on Pleyver.”
Master Ransome’s features grew very still, and his dark eyes seemed to focus on something long ago and far away. “So,” he said. “It begins again.”
“I’m afraid so,” Owen said. “We’re not dealing with half-trained agents smuggled through the Net to do a bit of spying, or with a few talented locals who’ve put together a Mage-Circle out of what they’ve seen in the holovids. At least one of them on Pleyver was a Great Magelord in the old style—as strong by himself as any Adept I’ve ever known, even without the power of the others to back him.”
“The First of their Circle, he would have been,” said Ransome. “If they’re working as they did in the old days.” His voice sounded as though he had tasted something bitter. “How did you slip past?”
Owen shook his head. “I didn’t. I spent the past two seasons on Pleyver working as a cargo handler down at the spacedocks. Eventually the First gave up looking for me, and the rest of them weren’t strong enough to give me any trouble.”
“The First gave up looking for you,” Ransome said. “Do you have any idea what happened to make him stop?”
“No,” Owen said. “But the whole time he was looking for me I could feel it, even in my sleep. Once or twice he backed off a bit, trying to fool me into making a run for the port, but he was too strong to be very good at hiding. Then one day he just wasn’t around anymore.”
“Off-planet?”
Owen sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe. But Pleyver wasn’t a total loss, anyway. I still have this.”
He pulled the datachip out of the breast pocket of his coverall and handed it to Master Ransome.
“I thought about smuggling it out to you,” he said, “but I couldn’t think of any way safer than carrying it myself.”
Ransome’s hand closed over the coin-sized slice of plastic. Another time, Owen thought, he would have looked pleased; but now he barely seemed to notice that he held it. “Is the information still good?”
“Most of it, I think.” Owen leaned back in his chair and gave a tired sigh. The datachip had weighed on him more than he’d known. This was the first time in months that he didn’t have it somewhere on his person, and its absence left him feeling almost light-headed. “There’s a lot of trade and economic data—it looks like we’ve got stuff crossing the border zone into the Mageworlds that would give the Grand Council fits if they knew about it—plus a bunch of encrypted files I didn’t have time to break.”
He paused. “There were some other files that had to do with what happened to Mother. I gave those to Beka.”
“Was that wise?” Ransome asked. “Your sister is headstrong, to say the least. The rumors I’ve been hearing say a good deal more than that.”
“She’s also Domina of Entibor now that Mother is dead—whether she wants the title or not. If anybody has a right to those files, it’s Bee.”
Owen studied Ransome’s dubious expression for a minute and then added, “If she hadn’t drawn off the armed pursuit, you probably wouldn’t have your data right now. And the fact that all those files were taken while she was on-planet may have sown some useful doubts about exactly who was looking for what in FIL’s data banks.”
Ransome nodded slowly and tucked the datachip into an inside pocket of his black tunic. “A persuasive argument,” he said. “And I am grateful, both to her and to you. But I need you to go out again as soon as possible … we have another situation that needs attention.”
Owen’s heart sank. He could feel his longed-for time of quiet safety receding before him like a wave drawing back from the beach. But he was Master Ransome’s apprentice, and had promised long ago that he would serve.
“How soon?” he asked.
“Tomorrow.”
“I was hoping to stay here through the fall and winter at least,” Owen protested. “Teaching a bit, maybe, and meditating. After all those months hiding out on Pleyver, I’m so jumpy I twitch whenever the wind changes.”
“We don’t have that kind of time left, I’m afraid,” said Ransome. His voice was firm, in spite of the regret and weariness in his dark eyes. “The wind has changed already, and the storm is coming sooner than anyone thinks.”
Ari had been back at the Med Station for over a week before he remembered to drop by the station post office and pick up his accumulated mail. Being himself a dutiful, rather than an enthusiastic, correspondent, he didn’t expect to find anything of particular interest waiting there for him.
The crew member on duty had been at the awards ceremony with everyone else. He handed Ari a mixed bundle of printout flimsies and sealed envelopes with nothing more than a half-apologetic “You’ve been gone awhile, so the junk messages had a chance to pile up.”
Ari glanced at the top item in the stack—a four-color 3-D flyer announcing a special bargain rate on the purchase of ten or more cases of Tree Frog beer.
“They certainly have,” he said, tossing the flyer into the trash-disposal unit. He hadn’t felt the same about Tree Frog beer since the affair with the Quincunx, when somebody had tried to poison him by slipping mescalomide into a bottle of Export Dark. The gaudy little advertisement made an unpleasant reminder of a night that had begun with fire and attempted murder, and had ended with Llannat Hyfid fighting a black-masked Mage assassin for Ari’s life.
That particular enemy was long dead, but Llannat herself had said once that the Mages preferred to work in groups … . Ari growled an oath deep in his throat, and distracted himself by sorting through the rest of his mail at the counter instead of taking it to his quarters.
He recycled five more advertising flyers and the catalog of a firm dealing in exotic herbs; scanned the printout flimsies notifying him of private messages in the electronic files (three from his father and one from Beka’s old school chum Jilly Oldigaard, all six months out of date); and set aside for later reading an equally outdated but probably still amusing letter from his friend Nyls Jessan, formerly of the Nammerin Medical Station and last officially heard from at the Space Force Clinic and Recruitment Center on Pleyver.
That left the newest item in the stack, a plain envelope with a local postmark and no return address—just his own name and Space Force directing codes, written in a light, even hand.
Ari worked at the sealed envelope with his thumbnail. Namport’s moist equatorial climate had already weakened the adhesive; after only a little urging the flap peeled back and he was able to extract the square of cheap paper inside.
The letter had no salutation and no signature, and only three neatly lettered sentences:
If you think you see me, you’re mistaken. It’s somebody else; I’m not here. Stick with Mistress Hyfid and stay out of trouble.
Even if the handwriting hadn’t been familiar, Ari thought, the elliptical style would have been a dead giveaway. Out of the entire population of the civilized galaxy, only his brother Owen habitually addressed him with that kind of half-condescending obscurity.
Frowning, Ari tore the envelope and the note into confetti-sized pieces, then dropped the scraps into the trash disposal unit.
“Stick with Mistress Hyfid and stay out of trouble,”
he quoted glumly to himself.
Good advice … but I don’t think it’s going to help me very much.
THE NET:
WARHAMMER
MAGEWORLDS BORDER ZONE: RSF
KARIPAVO
“C
APTAIN.”
“Mmh?” Beka didn’t look up from the comp console.
Damned Space Force paper pushers; this checklist is longer than all of Councilor Tarveet’s speeches pasted together.
“Captain, it’s late.”
She nodded absently and flipped to the next screen. “Mm-hm.”
“Captain—”
The change in tone caught her attention. She blinked, wiped a hand across eyes gone bleary from too long at the console, and leaned back in her chair to look at the speaker for the first time.
Warhammer
’s gunner/copilot looked back at her in mild concern. Nyls Jessan—lean and fair-haired, with light grey eyes and pleasant if unremarkable features—had the appearance of a small-time free spacer in a dangerous part of the galaxy, all the way down to the war-surplus blaster. But appearances could be deceiving, especially where Jessan was concerned. Her partner spoke Standard Galcenian with an upper-class Khesatan accent; he played cards and handled weapons like a professional; and he’d abandoned a perfectly good career in the Space Force Medical Service to join Beka on
Warhammer
after her old copilot had died in the fighting on Darvell.
A man of many talents, is our Jessan,
she thought, and smiled in spite of herself. “Now I’m listening. What’s the problem?”
“You,” he said. “You’ve been working over that checklist since 0400, and
Warhammer
’s not going to get any cleaner than she already is. It’s time you got some sleep.”
“Is that what you had in mind … sleep?”
“Absolutely,” Jessan assured her, straight-faced.
She hesitated a moment, watching him, and then shook her head with a faint sigh. “We can’t afford to fail our blockade inspection just because some busybody in a Space Force uniform decides that I haven’t done my paperwork right.”
“Let me handle it,” he offered. “I’m used to the style.”
“No. If I’m going to sign for something, I want to make all the mistakes myself.”
He shrugged and stretched out on the padded acceleration couch on the other side of the common room. “Fine, then. I’ll stay up and keep you company.”
“Your choice,” she said.
She turned back to the screen and worked diligently for a few minutes until a faint snore broke the silence behind her. She glanced over at the couch. Jessan’s head had fallen back against the cushions and his eyes were closed.
“Damned idiot Khesatan,” she muttered, and hit the button to close the comp session.
The console folded itself back into its bulkhead niche, and Beka stood up. She went over to the couch and touched Jessan lightly on the shoulder.
“All right, Nyls,” she said. “You win. Let’s go to bed.”
The chronometer in the captain’s quarters aboard
Warhammer
sounded its usual wake-up signal at 0500 Standard. Beka slid out from beneath Jessan’s arm and swung her feet down onto the deckplates. The alarm button for the chrono had been set into the bulkhead on the far side of the cabin, and she couldn’t turn it off without getting out of her bunk—which had probably been the designer’s intention in the first place.
Once the alarm had been silenced Beka started getting dressed, but not in the plain shirt and trousers that she’d worn yesterday. Today she wore the lace and ruffles of a well-groomed but somewhat androgynous young man of fashion from Mandeyn’s Embrigan district, with long brown hair braided into a queue and finished off with a black velvet ribbon. This particular Mandeynan, however, carried a double-edged dagger hidden up his sleeve, and had a Gyfferan Ogre Mark VI blaster in a worn leather holster tied down against his thigh.
She finished arranging the folds of her white spidersilk cravat, tucked a lacy handkerchief into one ruffled cuff, and contemplated the result with satisfaction. Beka Rosselin-Metadi, master of
Warhammer
and Domina of lost Entibor, had all but vanished, replaced by Captain Tarnekep Portree: starpilot, gunfighter, and killer-for-hire.
Now for the final touch.
Beka reached into the storage compartment that held her dirtside gear, took out a red optical-plastic eye patch, and fitted it into place. The patch covered her left eye socket from cheekbone to brow ridge, giving Tarnekep Portree an oddly piebald gaze. Most people found the glittering red plastic disturbing, with its hints of extensive prosthetic work lying hidden underneath; they would flinch and turn away without looking closely at the rest of Tarnekep’s pale and angular face.
All part of the disguise,
she reflected.
The Prof knew what he was doing when he thought up this identity. Nobody wants to get close to Tarnekep Portree.
Well, almost nobody. When she turned back toward the bunk, Nyls Jessan was awake and watching her.
“How’s the effect?” she asked.
He smiled. “Excellent as always, Captain. Elegant, but with a distinct aura of indefinable menace.”
“Good. Let’s hope it fools the inspectors.”
Inspection came at 0911.54 Standard, when
Warhammer
dropped out of hyper at the edge of the Net—the artificial barrier to hyperspace transit that the Republic had imposed upon the Mageworlds at the end of the war. Making a new jump would be impossible until the inspecting officer sent word to the generating station to open a hole and let the
’Hammer
pass.
Like a vast spiderweb spun out in magnetic fields from thousands of generating stations, the Net hung between the Mageworlds and the rest of the civilized galaxy. Any starship coming or going had to to drop out of hyper and run in realspace, where the Republic’s Net Patrol Fleet patrolled in force, sensors always alert for vessels trying to sneak undetected across the border.
One could, Beka supposed, go the long way around, skirting the edges of the Net. Space was too big for any artificial construct to enshroud the Mageworlds completely. Even in hyperspace, though, such a journey might take years.
But Ebenra D’Caer believed he could make it to the Mageworlds in a single jump from Ovredis,
she thought as she waited with Jessan for the inspection party to arrive.
And somebody sure fished him out of his cell back at the asteroid base. Llannat said it was Magework, all the way down the line. “The Mages make long plans,” she said. And the Professor, too … he talked about five hundred years as if it was nothing.
She bit her lip. Thinking about her old teacher and copilot wasn’t going to do her any good, not with a shuttle coming across right now from Net Station C-346—one of the checkpoints where all ships seeking passage had to register and submit to inspection. She concentrated instead on the details of
Warhammer
’s cover ID as the armed merchantman
Pride of Mandeyn
(Suivi registry, Tarnekep Portree commanding).
Soon a muffled clunk and a faint tremor in the deckplates told her that the shuttle had docked. She toggled open the
’Hammer
’s dorsal airlock and let the inspection party come in: two Space Force enlisted personnel, one short, redheaded and female, the other dark-skinned, gangly, and male, under the command of a wide-eyed young ensign who had clearly never seen anything like Tarnekep Portree before in his life.
Beka suppressed an urge to laugh.
So this product of a sheltered upbringing gets to sit across the table from me while we go over the paperwork with a magnifying glass. If I’m lucky, he’ll be twitching so hard he forgets half his questions.
The wide-eyed young ensign, however, wasn’t one to let his personal opinions get in the way of efficient customs procedure. He consulted the clipboard he carried in one hand, then asked for—and got—the sheaf of printout flimsies that contained the
’Hammer
’s pre-inspection paperwork; the official forms that confirmed the vessel’s registry as
Pride of Mandeyn,
and Tarnekep Portree’s legal ownership of same; and the imitation-leather folders that held all the relevant licenses, ID flatpix, and passports (Mandeynan and Khesatan, one each) for the captain and copilot of the
Pride.
He passed the IDs through the clipboard scanner, which beeped quietly as it communicated with the link aboard the shuttle. The shuttle would relay the IDs to the Net Station’s main data banks and pass any relevant information back to the inspecting officer.
“Tarnekep Portree,” the ensign said after the beeping had stopped. “The data net has you down as Wanted For Questioning back on Mandeyn.”
Beka didn’t blink. “This isn’t Mandeyn,” she pointed out. “And a WFQ isn’t a warrant.”
“Granted,” said the ensign. “Nevertheless, the Space Force is legally obligated to pass any word on your whereabouts back to the Petty Council of Embrig Spaceport.”
“Fine. Tell the council I said hello. I love them too.”
The ensign pressed his lips together as if suppressing a hasty reply, and glanced back at his clipboard. When he looked up again at Jessan, his expression had changed from dubious suspicion to active distaste.
“Nyls Jessan,” he said. “Formerly of the Space Force Medical Service. Lieutenant commander, no less. Cashiered.”
Jessan bowed. “The same.”
The ensign’s lip curled. He turned his back on Jessan completely and spoke to Beka. “Captain Portree, I’ll be going over the
Pride
’s paperwork with you. Please direct your … associate … to assist my people in a physical inspection of the vessel.”
“Sure.” Beka waved a hand at Jessan. “You heard the nice man, Doc. Show our friends around.”
“My pleasure, Captain.”
Jessan headed off into the depths of the ship with the two enlisted personnel trailing after him, and Beka sat down at the common-room table with the ensign. The young officer ran through the paperwork line by line, consulting frequently with his clipboard.
“Energy guns dorsal and ventral, shields bow and stem—you carry a lot of firepower for a merch, Captain.”
Beka raised an eyebrow. “We’re an armed freighter, like the registry says. When you work in the outplanets, you can’t always depend on the Space Force to show up in time.”
The ensign looked offended. “This isn’t a war zone, Captain Portree. I’m afraid we’ll have to seal your guns for the duration of your stay in the Mageworlds.”
Beka had been expecting to hear something of the sort; the
’Hammer
’s guns were latest-generation technology, newly upgraded at the shipyards on Gyffer. Nevertheless, she scowled. “What am I supposed to do if somebody over there across the border starts taking potshots at me? Yell for help and hope the fleet comes running?”
“You’re not in the outplanets any longer, Captain. The Mageworlds aren’t in any shape to give you trouble.” He glanced at his clipboard again. “You don’t have a cargo listed.”
“I’m going in empty and looking to pick up a cargo once I get there,” Beka said. “Like it says on the form, I’m interested in rare earths and botanicals for the medical-research trade.”
“Any Republic currency you’ve got has to stay on this side of the border,” said the ensign. “Sorry if it complicates your business dealings, but that’s the law.”
You’re not the least bit sorry, you little bastard,
thought Beka.
Well, I’ll fix you. Just watch me do it.
She emptied the money from her trouser pockets onto the table: five or six decimal-credit pieces, a rumpled ten-credit chit, and a silver Mandeynan mark with a pinpoint blaster hole through the middle.
“Here you go,” she said. “Maybe Doc has a couple of ten-chits on him, but otherwise that’s the lot.”
“How do you plan to pay for your cargo, Captain?”
“I don’t,” she said. “I’m a pilot. Other people pay me.” The ensign looked like he’d bitten down on something sour. He went on with the paperwork, going back and forth between the
Pride’s
forms and the data appearing on his clipboard.
Hunting for something else he can call me on,
thought Beka.
Aha—now he thinks he’s got it.
“About your crew, Captain. You have only yourself and the copilot listed, but you have berthing space for at least six.”
Beka shrugged. “The
Pride
’s a
Libra-
class freighter; she was built to run with a full crew. She’s been upgraded a lot since the old days, but nobody ever bothered to take out the extra berthing. We use it for slopover storage mostly, when we’ve got a lot of cargo on board.”