The Long Hunt: Mageworlds #5

by Doyle, Debra

  But first Miza needed Guislen forward, to instruct her in working the unfamiliar gear.

  A nagging thought came to Faral that this was wrong, this was all too convenient. The easy way leads to the ambush, he kept thinking, recalling cliffdragons waiting above the worn game trails in the Gahlbelly Mountains of Maraghai. I hope we aren’t doing something really stupid.

  Jens lay back against the cushions of his bunk and tried to relax. He and Faral had cleaned out the berthing compartment as best they could with scant time and no proper equipment, but the odor of corruption—and the memory of the two dead crew members—still lingered. He envied Faral his proper acceleration couch down in the bright lights and relatively clean air of the engine room, even though the decision to take the unused bunk for a strapdown position had been his own.

  All this was my idea; so if anybody has to sleep with the ghosts and skeletons, it’s me.

  Nevertheless, he reflected, he could have used some human company. Faral’s, preferably; Jens’s cousin had been his agemate and fellow-conspirator for a long time. Faral had been hurt, though, when he’d learned of the plan to abandon him and Chaka at the Sombrelír spaceport—he’d concealed his reaction well, but not well enough.

  Jens grimaced, thinking that Faral was going to be hurt yet again when he found out what the other things were that his cousin hadn’t yet bothered to mention.

  I hope I haven’t managed to mess up everything completely before I even start.

  The intraship comm system clicked on, and Miza’s voice came over the link to interrupt his thoughts.

  “Copilot’s in the cockpit. Let’s go down the checklist, and see what happens when I press the Launch button.”

  Pleasure craft, limited, Jens said to himself. Class B and up. Guislen … whoever you really are … make certain that she knows everything she needs to know.

  “Shut down exterior vents. Shut down nonessential internals. That’s the blue switch. Seal for launch. Hatch reports positive lock.”

  ‘Miza ran down the checklist as Guislen read it to her. When they reached “crew strapped down for lift-off,” Faral answered up from engineering, though he added, “You have to understand that I don’t have the slightest idea what to do back here.”

  “Not a problem,” Guislen said. “The old Gyfferan Eleveners were pretty much automatic in this phase. The Light’s designed to run with a crew of two, both of them in the cockpit—pilot and navigator for the launch and the run-to-jump.”

  “And here we both are,” said Miza. She was beginning to feel somewhat giddy with tension and uncertainty, and had to suppress the urge to laugh at the absurd mental picture of herself-as-starpilot. “Next step?”

  “Exterior hazard lights on. The yellow toggle, above you. You’ll have to stretch to get it.”

  She reached, flipped the toggle, subsided again onto the cushions. “Okay. Got it.”

  “Internal test, check fuel system, check engines.”

  “The board is green.”

  “Test airtight integrity. Overpressure on.”

  “Testing.” She felt her ears pop, but the indicators on the board stayed green. “Test sat.”

  “When you come to launch,” Guislen said, “you’ll have to do a lot by feel. If there’s excessive vibration, then you change attitude, or increase the power or decrease it until the vibration eases.

  “Mostly, what we have to do here and now is get into space. We don’t have to worry about reaching an assigned orbit, so half of your problems have gone away already. Keep her pointed more or less straight up and you’ll get where you’re going. The throttles are on the arms of your chair. You can do it any time.”

  Miza flexed her fingers and looked over at Guislen uncertainly. “Aren’t we supposed to call Field Operations and Inspace, and tell them that we’re launching?”

  Guislen smiled faintly. “Under the circumstances, I don’t believe that’s necessary.”

  The pleasantry didn’t reassure Miza as much as it could have. She clicked on the interior communications. “If you’re ready back there, I’m ready up here. Departure as soon as I click off, if I haven’t heard different from you by then.”

  Miza hoped that she sounded more confident than she felt. She knew that the real difficulty wasn’t at this end—some astoundingly primitive systems could reach orbit. All it took was pumping out enough energy. Landing at the far end would be the tricky part. She had no confidence at all in her ability to maneuver antique computers through a fins-down pillar-of-fire landing. But if she thought about it too long she’d never get anything done.

  “Gentlesir Huool had better give me an A for this course,” she muttered to herself, and rammed the throttle levers full forward.

  The acceleration answered a lot faster than she’d expected. This wasn’t a slow and stately launch like the shuttle that had taken her to the liner for Ophel, or a smooth lift followed by a quick boost like the nullgrav-assisted short-hoppers she had learned on. It was more like getting kicked in the small of the back by a street fighter.

  Outside the viewport, the Light’s drapery of jungle vines flashed into sudden fire. A weird howling came from all of the ship’s metal parts shaking and singing at once. The vibration made Miza’s jaws ache, and she reached for the throttles to ease back on the thrust.

  “No,” Guislen said. “This isn’t excessive vibration.”

  She drew her hand back. “I’d hate to see what is.”

  The pressure squashed her. Her cheeks felt funny, and she thought she was going to sink right through the cushions of the pilot’s couch and down into the deckplates.

  The stars outside were bright, then brighter, and Guislen said, “Now cut them.”

  She cut power to the engines, and the pressure eased. “Are we where we need to be?”

  “Off the surface—yes, and safe. We can let the orbit stabilize for a while, and discuss what comes next. Tell the crew to foregather in the common room.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Next to the galley.”

  “Where’s that?”

  Guislen looked amused. “I’ll show you.”

  Miza unstrapped—and promptly floated away from her chair. “Damn. I forgot to switch on artificial gravity.”

  “This class of ships never had it,” Guislen said. “The shipbuilders put the resources into increasing the Eleveners’ range and reliability instead. So we’ll be floating for a while. In the meantime, let’s head aft.”

  “Meet me in the galley,” Miza said over the internal links. Then she clicked off, and gave a huge yawn.

  “Lead the way,” she said. “And if the galley has a cha’a maker, and you know how to use it, I’ll bless your name.”

  “For that,” Guislen promised, “I’ll do my best.”

  The jungle felt oddly safe, in spite of the dark. He knew that his goal lay somewhere up ahead, and that when he found it he would need all his wits about him. The foe was clever, but he knew he was the more cunning. Hadn’t enough people said that?

  He wondered where the memory had come from. Every day another memory came into his head. Soon, he was sure of it, he would remember his name.

  Plants brushed against his face, and vines whipped and tore around his legs. Under this planet’s pale and single moon, the shadows under the broad leaves lay black as ink, concealing who knew what dangers.

  Ahead, that was his goal. Someone he had to meet, someone he had to kill. Plans. They came maddeningly close to the surface sometimes, taunting him, teasing at his memory.

  Parts of the past were clearer too: the long run to the Cracanthan spaceport, the contact with the ship’s engineer, the taking of his body. And now, like a beacon ahead, the goal. It was near.

  All at once, a glow burst above the tops of the trees, ahead in the same direction toward which he was half-running, half-walking. A streak of fire rose into the night.

  He recognized the fire as a ship lifting. Why was a ship lifting from the jungle?

 
; It left a cloud of smoke against the stars.

  With a feeling of loss, of sadness, he watched it go. He had failed; his goal had departed.

  But there was another goal. Somewhere else where he needed to be. Another ship. He would follow the one that had departed, and find the ones that he had to kill.

  Ones.

  For the first time he knew that there was more than one person he needed to find. Another memory tickled at the bottom of his conscious mind.

  He turned sharply to his right, and once more set out loping through the dark.

  From her hidden location in the woods, under the curve of a hydraulic landing cradle from which all the fluid had long since leaked through cracked seals, Chaka the Selvaur watched the outer door of the spacecraft spin closed. She waited, still in concealment, until bright lights blossomed around the trailing edges of the fins, pulsing in a danger array. A horn howled from the little ship.

  Chaka stared. *Those mud-eggs are going to try to launch!*

  A flickering glow appeared through the shrubbery under the craft. A blast of orange fire exploded outward, throwing sticks and branches into stark black silhouette. In the next instant the branches turned to dust and vanished before the thermal energy of the launch. The vessel’s loading ramp upended, thrown clear of the jets by the blast.

  Then the vines that covered the ship caught fire, surrounding it in a pall of smoke and red-orange flame. Only a moment had passed since the first light had flickered beneath the ship, but everything seemed to be moving slowly to Chaka’s eyes. A roar like thunder filled her ears as the engines fired, their throttles opened wide. A moment longer and the ship lifted, with a tongue of fire burning beneath her, and more fire drifting down in sheets as the vegetable growth of nearly a hundred years sloughed away from her polished metal skin.

  *Bastards!* Chaka howled at the sky. *What do you two mean, going off and leaving me again?*

  The forest floor was adrift with acrid smoke. Tiny embers glowed amid the ash. The clearing was empty.

  Chaka turned and headed back for the Dusty. Perhaps Bindweed and Blossom would know what the three humans had done, and why.

  As she went, she became aware of someone else moving away from the trail—not one of the natives of this world. They were silent, they knew the trails. And even the locals hadn’t come near the overgrown landing field since the sun had fallen from the sky.

  A faint smell of sweat and commercial laundry soap told her that the stranger was a thin-skin, and civilized. Then she recognized him—Captain Amaro of the Dusty, a long way from his ship.

  Lost and wandering? If so, she’d found him, and a Selvaur who couldn’t find her way home wasn’t fit to live under the Big Trees. She approached the captain and called out his name.

  *Ho! Captain Amaro! Going back to the ship?*

  To her surprise he answered her in Trade-talk. She hadn’t realized that he knew it.

  *Yes,* he replied. *Come on; we’ve been away too long.*

  The exterior of Dust Devil was ablaze with lights. If anybody out there was trying to find the ship in the dark, they’d have plenty of help. The Dusty’s two owners stood at the top of the vessel’s extended ramp, inside the security force field.

  “We haven’t heard yet from Chaka, either,” Blossom said. She’d taken a blaster in a holster rig from the Dusty’s small-arms locker, and now she drummed her fingers restlessly on the weapon’s grip. “I wonder what sort of trouble the boys have managed to get into.”

  “Maybe the folks at the passport office insisted on throwing them a party,” said Bindweed. “You know, loud music, strong drink, vertical and horizontal dancing—”

  She broke off as the sky to the south lit up without warning in a sheet of orange flame.

  “Lords of Life!” Blossom exclaimed. “What in the name of everything holy was that?”

  “You know as well as I do,” said Bindweed tersely. “Small cargo craft launching without nullgravs.”

  “Do you think it was that Mage captain kidnapping Amaro?”

  “Wrong direction for them.”

  Blossom tapped the grip of her blaster again. Her fingernails clicked against the hard plastic. “If this was the old days I’d launch right now, meet our mystery ship in high orbit, and ask what them what the hell they thought they were doing. And if the answers didn’t come fast enough to suit me, I’d shoot out their engines and take their cargo by way of a lesson in manners.”

  “It’s a tempting thought,” conceded Bindweed. “But these aren’t the old days. Besides, we’re shorthanded without the skipper. And the purser and the supercargo still aren’t up to standard on the guns.”

  “I suppose you’re right.”

  Blossom and her partner went back to waiting in silence. They didn’t have to wait much longer, however. Before another hour had passed, Captain Amaro and Chaka emerged from the forest and came into the circle of the Dusty’s exterior lights. Bindweed cut the force field to let them in.

  “Stand by to launch,” Captain Amaro said without preamble as he strode up to the foot of the ramp.

  Chaka was right behind him. Bindweed held out a hand to slow the young Selvaur down.

  “What about the boys?” she asked.

  *They’re already away,* Chaka answered. *I’ll tell you about it later. I think you won your bet.*

  Amaro looked from one of the ship’s owners to the other. “Nannla—Tilly—what are you doing lounging around? Stand by your guns. We’re lifting.”

  He continued toward the bridge at a fast walk, not looking back. Behind him, Bindweed stood still, with the color draining from her face. She turned to Blossom.

  “Did you hear that?” she asked her partner.

  “I did. But for now, I think that the captain wants us to stand by our guns.”

  Trav Esmet was already at work on the bridge when Amaro arrived. The captain strapped himself into the command seat without a word, and began running through the prelaunch routine. Trav glanced over at him curiously.

  “Where’re we heading, Captain?”

  “Khesat,” Amaro returned, not looking up from his checklist.

  “I have the navicomp data ready for that transit,” Trav said. “Will you be wanting me to take her up?”

  “No,” Amaro said sharply. “On my ship, I fly.”

  “Aye, aye, Captain,” Trav said.

  Disappointed, he turned back to the navigator’s station. Maybe he’d been out of line, he told himself; maybe his request to handle the launch was putting himself forward and he’d earned the rebuke.

  But that wasn’t like the Captain, he thought. They’d been working together for a while now, and Trav knew that such curtness, for Amaro, was definitely out of character.

  “Stand by to launch,” Amaro said, breaking into his reflections. “We have places to be.”

  Almost on the word, he pushed the Dusty’s forward nullgravs to max, tilted the ship to its launching attitude, and fired the jets.

  Afterward, Trav had to admit that he’d been impressed by what he’d witnessed. It was the first time he’d ever seen a run-to-jump commence from the planet’s surface rather than orbit: a military takeoff that hadn’t been used by civilian spacecraft since the days of the Second Magewar.

  XV. HYPERSPACE

  NIGHT AND day were much the same aboard the tiny Gyfferan Elevener. Dark and light cycles, dim and bright, ran from automatic timers. The fathomless grey of hyperspace swirled outside the tiny viewscreen. Miza sat in her command chair and watched it sometimes, until it threatened to drive her mad with its endless, illusory motion. Then she would go back to her study of the Light’s logbooks, which had been kept in a bizarre patchwork of languages, and of the various technical manuals, which were mainly written in Galcenian with marginal notes in Gyfferan and in the Ilarnan script. When even those failed to distract her, she pushed her work aside and thought.

  At the moment it was ship’s-midnight. Miza was alone in the Light’s cockpit—her berth since the
start of the hyperspace transit—when she decided that she didn’t like the way her thoughts had been tending over the last few days.

  I need to talk to somebody else before I start talking to myself, she thought. Failing that, I need a cup of cha’a.

  The spacers who had crewed Inner Light in her working days had kept the ship’s hotpot in the same good order as everything else aboard. The cha’a itself tasted dreadful. The stored water had gone flat and metallic, and the leaves had lost most of their essential oils and complex flavors. Still, the drink was hot and it was there.

  She unstrapped from the couch and headed for the Light’s galley, push-pulling herself awkwardly along in the zero-g environment. I don’t care how much power they saved, she thought as she swung herself into the shadowed galley nook. Failing to rig artificial gravity was a bad idea.

  As she’d half-hoped, Faral Hyfid-Metadi was also in the galley, nursing his own cup of cha’a.

  “Couldn’t sleep either?” he asked.

  Miza nodded. “I got tired of watching hyperspace outside the window. So I decided to come down here instead.”

  She drew a fresh cup with its zero-g cover from the maker, then concentrated on getting the cup working and on orienting herself so that she was rightside-up with respect to her companion. She’d heard that even these days, real spacers prided themselves on being comfortable regardless of whether their personal “up” and “down” matched anybody else’s, but she wasn’t a spacer and didn’t see any point in pretending.

  Faral was another one who didn’t care much for the absence of gravity—unlike his cousin, who appeared to find it enjoyable. Considering the things people said about Khesatans, Miza wasn’t surprised.