[Mageworlds 5] - The Long Hunt

by Debra Doyle

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.

  Chapter 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.

  "Do you think I'm going crazy?" she said at last.

  Faral pulled a sip of cha'a before answering. "No more than the rest of us. Why?"

  "I didn't used to believe in ghosts. Now I'm not so sure."

  "The Adepts tell all kinds of strange stories," he said. "And the Mages tell even stranger ones. What's got you worried?"

  "It's Guislen," she said. "I know your cousin trusts him and all that… but I've been wondering about him ever since before we left Sapne. And I think that he's a ghost."

  She help up her hand to forestall a reply. "Listen. First, he shows up while we're inhaling that incense at the passport office, and he never does explain where he came from. Next, he just happens to know where this ship is—a ship that's almost a century out of date—and he also just happens to be an expert on flying it."

  "Nothing so mysterious about that," Faral said. "There's a lot of antique ships still around and working. By the time we reach Khesat you'll be the same kind of expert that he is. And you sure aren't a ghost."

  She gave a nervous laugh. "I don't think I am, anyhow. And I'm fairly sure about you and your cousin. But Guislen… the ship's lockplate recognized his hand."

  "I saw that," Faral admitted. "But if he's an Adept, or even Adept-trained, the lockplate would open for him regardless. My mother can do the same thing, and I know that she isn't a ghost."

  Miza reddened. She'd forgotten that Faral's mother was the Mistress Hyfid who'd abandoned her Adept's training to become First of all the Mage-Circles, and that his uncle was the Master of the Guild. For all his comforting matter-of-factness, he was probably accustomed to seeing marvels and apparitions every time he turned around.

  Still, she felt compelled to keep on with her argument. "There were two crew members," she said. "Guislen and that thing in the clearing make two ghosts. And there's other stuff. I've counted the rations here in the galley. I know how many packets there were when we started, and how many packets there are now. I can account for the ones that you've eaten, and the ones I've eaten, and the ones that Jens has eaten. And that's it. Guislen hasn't eaten anything at all since we've been aboard."

  "Are you sure?"

  "I spent the past six months learning how to take inventory," she said. "And I know how to count. I'm sure."

  "That is odd, then." Faral frowned at the lid of his zero-g cup. "Thing is, I saw Guislen twice before we ever got to Sapne. Once on board Bright-Wind-Rising, and once on Ophel."

  "Did you touch him?"

  He glanced up at her sharply. "Did I what?"

  "Touch him." She tapped the back of Faral's hand by way of demonstration. His flesh was warm against hers in the chilly recirculated air. "I'll bet that you didn't."

  "Well… no."

  "You can't. I've tried. He's always someplace else by the time you get there—so smooth, you wouldn't notice he'd done it if you weren't already waiting for it to happen. I've never seen him asleep. I've never had to wait for him to get out of the 'fresher. And I've never seen him do anything mechanical, either. He always asks one of us to turn any knobs that need turning or push any buttons that need pushing. He's never touched any of them himself that I could see."

  From Faral's expression, she gathered that he was going over his own experiences with Guislen and comparing them with hers. At last he said, "You may be right."

  "I know I'm right," she said firmly.

  "Suppose that he really is a ghost," Faral said. "The big question then is, why is he bothering to do all this?"

  "Wrong," she said. "The big question is, how much does your cousin know?"

  The number-one cargo bay aboard Dust Devil was chilly and full of echoes. Amaro had lifted from Ophel with only a partial load—intending, Blossom supposed, to make up the difference at the far end with exotic goods picked up cheap on Sapne. The captain had an eye for bits of primitive artwork that would appeal to the dilettanti on places like Khesat and Ovredis, and he'd made a profit from such things before.

  But not any longer, Blossom thought. Not if we're right about what happened on Sapne.

  She looked at the other two people in the cargo bay: her partner Bindweed and the Dusty's navigator and pilot-apprentice Trav Esmet. Trav seemed uneasy. The cargo bay was a good place to have a conversation without being overheard, but there was no telling who might have snoop-buttons planted anywhere—and a late-night summons to a clandestine meeting with the ship's owners was enough to make any spacer nervous.

  What they had to talk about wasn't going to make Trav any happier, either. But there wasn't any point in delay.

  "We've been in hyper for a week now," she said. "And we've been watching Amaro the whole time. What do both of you think?"

  "I'm concerned," Trav said. "We're talking about the captain. Isn't that mutiny?"

  Bindweed gave him a pitying glance. "My dear boy, we own this ship. The captain serves at our pleasure. Whether we are pleased or not… you've known him on a day-to-day basis far longer than we have. Has he been in any way odd?"

  "He hasn't been off the bridge since we left," Trav said. "Look, I'm very uncomfortable with this. Leave me out of the rest of it, all right?"

  He turned and walked quickly from the cargo bay without saying anything more.

  Blossom watched him go, then looked back at her partner. "That leaves us to make a determination."

  Bindweed shrugged. "You knew that it would. Why you even bothered—"

  "It never hurts to observe proper form," Blossom said. "Even in a crisis, which is what we've got. It's not just that Amaro knew our true names, it's that he sent us off to the guns as if this were the 'Hammer from fifty years back. So if he isn't Amaro any longer—who is he?"

  "Who was on Warhammer in those days?" Bindweed asked. "Jos, Errec, and Ferrda. You and me. 'Rada. A few others, on and off. Of the ones who flew, Jos and Errec."

  "And Jos is still alive, or was the last time I heard."

  "So," said Bindweed. "Errec."

  Blossom nodded. She'd known in her heart what the answer had to be, but knowing the answer didn't make reaching a decision any easier. "He always was the one who could go right inside someone's mind. And being dead isn't likely to matter as much to him as it would to some people."

  Bindweed started pacing, always a sign that she was think-ing hard. "Let's go over the options. Suppose I walk up to Captain Amaro in the common room after breakfast and say, 'I believe that you're Errec Ransome.' Either the good captain says 'Yes' or he says 'No'—"

  "Or else he says, '
Gentlelady, you must be joking,' and never answers you outright at all. Which is what Amaro would say if you asked him, and exactly what Errec would say if he didn't want to give you a straight answer. Do you really have any doubt about who's walking around inside that body?"

  Bindweed didn't need to shake her head. Her expression was answer enough. "Do we stop him, then?"

  "Stop him from what?" Blossom tapped the grip of her blaster—a nervous habit she thought she'd shed during the years on Ophel. Hah. Bring back the old ways, and all the old twitches come back right along with them. "We haven't got the faintest idea what he's planning to do."

  "Then all we can do ourselves," said Bindweed finally, "is watch. And be ready to help out our shipmate if we can."

  The Light continued its hyperspace transit to Khesat. Frustrated that her late-night conversation with Faral Hyfid-Metadi hadn't arrived at any useful conclusion, Miza kept on watching Jens and Guislen both. Neither one of them, however, did anything outside the already-established shipboard routine. Eventually Miza relaxed her scrutiny and went back to reading the ship's logbooks.

  The old Gryfferan Elevener had plenty of them for her to choose from, kept mostly on pad-readable datachips and stored in the same drawer as the coursebooks. She'd found a working datapad in there as well, and she used it—as other crew members would have before her—to read and annotate the logs.

  She took the entries in the order she found them, the most recent first—"Today Winzie died. May his spirit find peace"—and working backward. Some of them were in Ilarnan or other languages she couldn't read, but all the ones she could read had a sameness to them: cargoes, prices, ports of call, encounters with other ships. The condition of the engines. Costs for maintenance. Captain Veybesht of Inner Light had been particularly careful with that.

  I wonder if our Gentlesir Guislen went by the name of Veybesht when he was alive, Miza thought. Or was he Winzie?

  She kept on reading. The line of entries stretched backward in time. The last captain of Inner Light had taken over when the previous skipper had earned enough for a stake as a dirtside merchant—"And the only time I'll see the stars is when I go to bed late, but at least in my own bed." Crew members came and crew members went. Cargoes stayed more or less the same for run after run.