“Ah.” Jessan settled back. “Yes. Are you willing to swear to Beka Rosselin-Metadi, Domina of Lost Entibor, of Entibor-in-Exile, and of the Colonies Beyond?”
Osa’s mustache twitched. “She’s been putting on airs since I saw her last. But I’m here because she was the best damn shiphandler I’ve ever seen, and that’s a fact. And when someone crews for me, they’re family, even if they do jump ship and leave an old man to do his own steering.”
“Since you put it that way,” Jessan said, “I’ll accept your oath to the Domina as a given. Are you ready to accept an assignment on her behalf?”
“Wouldn’t have come looking for you if I wasn’t.”
“Excellent. In that case, Gentlesir Osa, I need you to take word to every Space Force unit in Suivi nearspace that their commanding officer has sworn to the Domina. Tell them that they’re not to make contact with Suivi Point for any reason. They should go to Condition II, Wartime Cruising, and await further orders. Now—are you armed?”
“Me? Or my ship?”
“Your ship.”
“Claw Hard’s got a couple of guns on her,” Osa admitted. “You can’t work the outplanets naked. Pirates, you know.”
“Pirates. Right.” Jessan was silent a moment, thinking.
“Since you’re throwing in with us, Captain, I’d like to ask for the loan of a couple of your crew members. This is Suivi, after all, and one or two obvious bodyguards might discourage some of the rougher elements.”
“Not a problem. I’ll send down a couple of my people on the next shuttle. Got an address they should report to?”
“Here,” said Jessan. He glanced at the booth’s menu pad. “The, ah, Merry Dumpling Pastry Shop, on Central across from the Suivi Mercantile Building. I’ll find them.”
“I’ll tell ’em to wait,” Osa said. He stood up. “And you can tell Beka that I want to hoist a few with her in memory of good times past. I might even forgive her for jumping ship if she’ll come pilot for me again. Never saw a hand like hers on the controls—she was better than me and that’s a fact.”
“I’ll let her know,” Jessan said.
After Frizzt Osa had left, Jessan ordered a cup of cha’a and sat for a while, thinking. The good captain wasn’t a very prepossessing sort, but he was still the first volunteer brought in by Beka’s hi-comms message, not counting the local Space Force contingent who would have picked up the signal live. If someone like that could be moved to respond, then others would certainly come to Suivi as well.
And just as certainly, Jessan reflected, there would be a Mageworlds sympathizer among them, or an agent, or someone else who intended to do Beka harm.
Beka Rosselin-Metadi lay on her bunk in Suivi Main Detention’s max-pri cell block. She was beginning to suspect that Contract Security put drugs of some sort in the food packets—she’d started losing her sense of time not long after Tarveet’s first visit.
The councillor had come back at least twice since then, maybe three times. She was losing track of that, too; she couldn’t tell whether some of the visits were real, or just highly detailed dream sequences. This time, however, she’d slept so deeply she hadn’t dreamed; when she woke up, her prison coverall was disarrayed and smelled of sweat, and she felt bruises coming where she hadn’t had any before.
Beka didn’t like the implications of that.
You pay enough on Suivi, and you can get anything. They’ve been questioning me under chemicals. What do I know to betray? How weak we are?
The true name of Tarnekep Portree. The numbers, locations, and balances of all the bank accounts. How the ‘Hammer got her speed. The coordinates of the asteroid base.
When I get out of here, I am going to kill Tarveet. Slowly.
She shook her head. The motion made her feel sick to her stomach; more evidence that the ConSecs were slipping something into the food—or maybe it was the water, or the air.
Face it, girl. You’re not going to get out of this one. You gave the Domina business your best shot, and it didn’t work. Somebody else will have to save the civilized galaxy, because you’re going to be dead. Or the next best thing to dead, anyway.
I wonder how long it takes to go insane down here?
It struck her that she was likely to find out eventually, if she wasn’t finding out already. She moved restlessly on the narrow bunk. Her body complained at the change in position.
I wish I could talk to Nyls. Tell him to kill Tarveet for me someday. Tarveet …
Maybe I should have taken the bastard’s offer while I had the chance. Nyls wouldn’t have liked it very much, but he could have lived with it for a day or two. Long enough for me to get out of here, and for Tarveet to have a brief encounter with a very sharp knife.
Beka sighed. It was a good thought, and one that warmed her blood a little here in the chilly detention block, but she knew that she couldn’t have gotten away with it. Tarveet already knew her far too well, all the way back to that dinner party, the year that she was just-turned-six and her brother Owen was barely seven, and her mother was sponsoring High Station Pleyver for separate representation on the Grand Council … .
Tarveet had been younger then, too, his limp brown hair not yet gone to grey, and the flesh on his long lantern jaws not quite so loose and sagging. He’d always had clammy hands, though, and the habit of pursuing his lips and wetting them before he said anything. The six-year-old Domina-in-Waiting—well-scrubbed and best-gowned for her introduction to the important visitors—had loathed him almost on sight.
“He patted me on the face,” she said to Owen, after the grownups had gone off to talk and she’d made her escape to the rooftop terrace. Owen had found her in their private hiding place among the box-planters at the sunny end a few minutes later. The tall fronds of salad fern and ruffled whipgrass arched over both of them like a green tunnel, shading them and speckling their skin with shifting dots of light. “It felt like a bunch of fat worms touching me.”
“He’s a bad man.” Owen spoke with absolute conviction.
Beka just nodded. She’d known for as long as she could remember that her brother was never wrong about such things. “People say he was a hero in the war, though. Mamma likes him.”
“No, she doesn’t.”
“She smiled at him,” Beka said. The feeling of betrayal was still strong. “And he said that I’d be a fine Domina someday, and to—and to let him know when I was old enough to look for a consort—and she laughed and told him that she would!”
“Maybe,” said Owen. “It doesn’t mean she likes him. She smiles and makes promises to lots of people she doesn’t like.”
“That’s lying.”
“Only if she doesn’t keep the promises. And the smiling’s just good manners.”
Beka made a face. “Then I don’t like having good manners.” She paused, remembering something else. “What’s it mean, anyway, a ‘consort’? I was afraid they’d all laugh at me if I asked.”
“A consort’s a Domina’s husband, like Dadda.”
“No,” she said at once. “Tarveet isn’t. Not even a little bit. And I won’t take him, no matter what Mamma says when I’m grown up.”
“You won’t have to,” Owen said. “Mamma knows that.”
“Then why did she say it?”
“Politics,” he said, in the tone of voice that told Beka he was quoting what somebody else had said—or maybe, had thought without saying. Owen could do that, too. “She wants to keep him sweet until High Station’s petition goes through Council.”
“Mamma can sweeten him by herself, then. I don’t want to.” She pulled up her knees and hugged them tightly. “I’m supposed to sit next to him at dinner, too. I hope he gets sick.”
“He won’t.”
“I know.” She scowled. “I wish I could make him get sick.”
“That’s not very nice.”
“I don’t care. I don’t like him.”
Owen didn’t say anything. She sat and brooded on the unfairness of the wo
rld, until a shift in the wind made the ferns and whipgrass bend down and brush against her skin. Distracted, she turned her attention from her list of grievances to the ecosystem-in-miniature of the box-planters. Maybe if she got dirty enough she wouldn’t have to sit at the big table after all … .
“Hey,” she said a minute later. “Owen, look.”
Her brother looked where she was pointing. “That’s a big one, all right.”
Oblivious to their interest, the garden slug continued eating its way along the frond of salad fern. The slug was, as Owen had said, a big one, almost a finger in length, and a bright, almost yellow, green, exactly the color of a fresh sugar-pepper. Beka felt an idea growing inside her head—a truly marvelous piece of naughtiness, something that would pay back Tarveet for patting her face with those damp, wormy fingers, and pay back Mamma, too, for laughing and making Tarveet promises she didn’t mean to keep.
“You know what, Owen? I bet I can so make Councillor Tarveet sick. I bet if he eats a slug for dinner he’ll be sick all over the table.”
“He won’t eat it, though.”
“There’s going to be sugar-peppers in the salad. There’s always sugar-peppers in the salad.”
“Nobody’s going to mistake a slug for a sugar-pepper.”
“They will if you help me,” Beka said. She looked at her brother. “Please?”
Owen never had been able to refuse her anything. Dinner that night had been a memorable experience for everybody present—even now, in Main Detention’s max-pri cell block, Beka smiled at the memory.
I don’t care what happened afterward. It was all worth it.
Jessan made his way back to the Merry Dumpling Pastry Shop nearly twelve frustrating hours later, having carefully stayed in the public areas of the Suivan business district during the interval. Dahl&Dahl hadn’t contacted him so far, which after the earlier conference didn’t really surprise him. He was getting the feeling that Beka wasn’t going to come out of Main Detention legally.
His latest round of visits along Embassy Row, made after talking with Frizzt Osa, hadn’t done anything to change his mind. The Galcenian Interests Section was shut down tight, the doors locked and the windows darkened. The Khesatan Interests Section was still open, but with a drastically reduced staff; the sympathetic woman left minding the office hadn’t been able to promise anything more than sending a message to Khesat as soon as the spotty hi-comms allowed it. And there was no Entiboran Interests Section, unless Jessan wanted to count the storefront office he’d shared with Beka until her arrest.
Jessan’s final stop had been the Gyfferan Interests Section. Beka was half-Gyfferan, after all—not to mention being the daughter of a planetary hero. Maybe that would be enough to get her diplomatic immunity, or at least enough official backing to make her a risky target for intrigue. But the Gyfferan Interests Section, though full of obvious activity, had been locked and guarded. A sign on the front door read: ALL CITIZENS OF GYFFER ARE ADVISED TO LEAVE SUIVI POINT AT ONCE.
Disheartened, Jessan returned to the pastry shop. Down back, in the booth he had shared before with Frizzt Osa, a pair of spacers in faded, much-washed coveralls sat nursing half-empty cups of cha’a. The one facing his way was a young woman with brown curls and worried eyes. Her companion, a man by the set of his shoulders, had tawny hair grown shaggy enough to skim his collar in the back.
Jessan purchased a steamed vegetable bun and a cup of cha’a at the front counter. Carrying his purchases, he slid carefully into the booth across the shop’s narrow central aisle from the pair. From this close he could see that the man and the woman both wore Claw Hard shoulder patches.
They also carried the long, polished wooden staves that proclaimed them as Adepts to anybody with an eye to notice them, and which left Jessan in no doubt as to why Osa had picked this particular pair of crew members to lend him for the duration. Right now the staves were propped inconspicuously against the wall of the shop, and the two spacers seemed interested in nothing but their cha’a; but Jessan had seen what even a quiet and respectable Space Force medic like Llannat Hyfid could do with such a weapon if she felt the need.
He ate his steamed bun without undue haste and wiped his fingers on the disposable napkin before looking into the dregs of his cha’a and murmuring, “Osa sent you?”
The man turned toward Jessan. “Are you the gentlesir who’s been sleeping with my sister?”
The accent was pure Galcenian, and uncannily familiar, as was the expression in the man’s hazel eyes.
Jessan sighed. “Since I don’t have the honor of your name, I really can’t say.”
“Osa says that you’re the General of the Armies of Entibor,” the man said. “If that means what it used to, then you’re sleeping with my sister. I’m Owen Rosselin-Metadi.” He nodded toward the woman across from him. “And that’s Klea Santreny. Osa asked for volunteers, and we’re them.”
“Ah,” said Jessan, unsurprised. “I thought the eyes looked familiar. I suppose I shouldn’t ask how you happened to show up on Suivi Point now that the galaxy’s fallen apart?”
“Not here,” Owen said. “No.”
The young woman—a girl, really; she couldn’t be much over twenty in spite of the lines around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth—was looking at Beka’s brother with an expression that Jessan couldn’t quite place.
“You never told me your name was Rosselin-Metadi,” she said to Owen. Her accent was another one Jessan recognized, strong Nammerinish backwater-talk this time. “You never told me your last name at all.”
Owen glanced back in her direction and his fair skin reddened slightly. “I’m sorry. I forgot.”
“Forgot.” She drew a deep breath, and Jessan got the impression that only strength of will kept her voice from rising to a shriek. “You belong to one of the most famous families in the civilized galaxy, and you … just … forgot?”
“I’m sorry,” Owen said again. “I really don’t think about it very much. I’d have told you if you asked.”
She closed her eyes and let out a sigh. Jessan smiled in spite of himself.
“Now I see why Ari used to say that his younger brother only connected to reality at a few widely divergent points.”
“Ari wouldn’t know reality if—” Owen shut his mouth on whatever else he’d been going to say. After a few moments of silence he went on. “I’m many things, Gentlesir Jessan, but I’m not a mind reader in any sense that you’d find immediately useful. Is there somewhere safe we can go while you fill me in on what’s happening? I’ve been—out of touch—for a while.”
“Right,” said Jessan. “Walking around is best. Finish your cha’a, and I’ll give you two the galactic diplomat’s decimal-credit tour of downtown Suivi Point. We have a lot to discuss.”
II. GYFFER: TELABRYK LOCAL DEFENSE BASE; SPACE FORCE HQ BUILDING
SUIVI POINT: ADMNISTRATIVE DISTRICT
RSF KARIPAVO: MAGEWORLDS SPACE
THE GYFFERAN Local Defense Force was one of the handful of planetary fleets that hadn’t merged into the Space Force at the end of the First Magewar. That independence had caused a great deal of comment at the time. Gyffer’s unswerving loyalty to the Resistance—and the fact that even after a long and devastating conflict the planet remained self-sufficient enough to opt for neutrality if pushed too hard—eventually silenced the opposition. Gyffer kept its own fleet, and policed its own system space, with only a minimal Space Force presence.
Since the fall of Galcen, even that much of the Republic’s protection was gone. Gyfferan scoutships patrolled the distant reaches of local space, out beyond the sensor range of the farthest unmanned watch stations, relaying their messages back to Telabryk via the local links once hi-comms had returned.
So far, the reports had all been the same: No activity in this sector. Continuing patrol.
“What everyone’s hoping they’ll run into,” Ari said to Llannat, “is at least some of the Space Force.”
Llannat shook her head
. “Don’t count on it.”
The two of them were in the officers’ club at the Gyfferan LDF’s Telabryk base. They’d been extended privileges along with the rest of the people off Naversey and the Daughter, and the club’s dining room at least provided hot meals made from actual ingredients, instead of reconstituted and reheated space rations.
Under normal circumstances, the Telabryk club would probably have been a cheerful, gossipy place, with cold buffet and salad tables every day at lunch, half-price bar from local twilight until full dark, and live entertainment every LastDay night. These days, the circumstances were anything but normal. Tense, harried-looking men and women in LDF uniforms ate their meals too fast, talked too much or not at all, and didn’t look at the flatscreen monitor set into the wall beside the dining-room door.
Until recently, Ari suspected, the screen would have displayed the Telabryk base’s Plan of the Day, or the club’s list of upcoming social events. Since the fall of Galcen, though, and the Citizen-Assembly’s decision to resist both the Mages and Admiral Vallant, the dining-room screen and others like it had changed their displays. Now the screen showed a continuously updated roster of the LDF’s long-range scoutships, by mission status: in the launch queue, on patrol, and safely home to Gyfferan nearspace. According to the local newscasts, a roving scoutship would detect the approaching enemy—whether Vallant’s mutinous forces out of Infabede or the Mageworlds warfleet fresh from the conquest of Galcen—and warn Gyffer of the impending attack.
None of the people in the Telabryk officer’s club expected real life to be anything like the newscasts predicted. Sooner or later, one of the scouts would fail to make its scheduled report. That failure might be all the warning the LDF would ever get.
By Honor Betray'd: Mageworlds #3 Page 13
