By Honor Betray'd: Mageworlds #3

by Doyle, Debra; Macdonald, James D.

“Get me tentative marks. Hell, get me guesses.”

  “Aye, aye, s—”

  He never finished. The walls of the Combat Information Center buckled inward, as the compression from an explosive hit heated the air instantly to over a thousand degrees. A moment later the fires ignited by the superheated blast went out like snuffed candles—the oxygen that should have fed them dispersed into vacuum through a massive hole in the metal skin of the ship. One by one, the 97’s bulkheads exploded outward as the weakened areas lost structural integrity.

  Far aft, in the engineering spaces, the surviving crew members could hear the crunching sounds as the damage progressed toward them. As they had done a hundred times before during loss-of-pressure drills, some donned p-suits while others waited their turn and still others began the orderly shutdown of the cruiser’s power plant.

  Moments later, as the hull damage reached them, the engines released their energy in a catastrophic second blast. Cruiser #97 continued on, maintaining course and speed, dark and lifeless among the glittering stars.

  Warhammer’s hyperspace transit continued as the ship fell into the usual routine of watches and maintenance checks. The days consisted of the thousand tiny details, mixed with boredom, that filled a spacer’s time. On the twelfth day, Beka passed through the common room, where Jessan and LeSoit were playing double tammani and trying to teach syn-Tavaite the rules, while Owen and Klea looked on. It wasn’t the easy camaraderie of a close-knit crew, but at least it was an improvement.

  “Expect dropout in a few minutes,” Beka said. “I’m going to be dodging asteroids when it happens. So don’t bother me.”

  She went on forward into the cockpit, the airtight doors snicking shut behind her, and toggled on the intraship comm.

  “Strap down, people—I’ll be doing some heavy braking on dropout. That means you, too, Owen.”

  She clicked off the comm and sat watching the navicomp chronometer reel down the numbers to dropout.

  When the 0:00 flashed red, the automatic dropout sequence started. Beka switched on the realspace engines. As soon as the stars reappeared, she threw the ’Hammer into a skew-flip—putting the engines on the starship’s leading edge—and pushed the throttles up to maximum. Inertia pressed her back in her seat as the vessel lost velocity.

  As soon as speed got reasonable, she flipped again to bring the cockpit forward, and started searching for the recognition signals and beacons hidden in the asteroid field to bring her to the base. At last there it was, on visual. Beka felt both exultation and dread as it came into view. The base was safety and comfort. But what was waiting for her there, and what would she do if she was wrong?

  Wrong’s easy. We aren’t any worse off than we were before.

  The big question is, what do I do if I’m right? Everybody thinks I’ve got this figured out down to the last move—even Owen believes that I know what I’m doing, and he damned well ought to know better, considering how Mother grounded us both for a month after that time with the slug … .

  The crater appeared that marked the entrance to the asteroid’s hidden landing bay. She brought the ’Hammer into it slowly, working the nullgravs as much as the realspace engines. The walls turned from rough stone to smooth, then to polished metal, before opening out into the huge, cavernous bay filled with its assortment of spacecraft. Beka brought Warhammer down onto her landing legs and cut all exterior power.

  She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes.

  Home.

  After a few moments she stood up and went back to the common room. Klea and Doctor syn-Tavaite—neither one of them accustomed to high-g braking maneuvers—still looked a bit greenish, but nobody seemed to have suffered any actual harm.

  “Warm clothing, everyone,” she said. “It’s chilly outside.”

  Back in her own cabin she pulled a quilted jacket out of the locker—and recognized, with a start, the garment she’d worn the first time she’d come here, when she’d thought at first that the Professor intended to replicate her.

  Odd that I thought of something like that. He must have had syn-Tavaite’s brand-new replicant Domina tucked away somewhere in a stasis box the whole time we were talking.

  What had he said, exactly, when she’d accused him of planning her own replication?

  “A Mageworld biochemist with a full laboratory setup could … but I can’t.”

  Not a lie. The Professor had never lied if he could possibly avoid it; she’d never figured out whether his reasons were aesthetic or moral. And that time he’d told her the literal truth.

  “Stupid,” she muttered. “If I were looking for. the one place in the civilized galaxy most likely to have that kind of lab setup, where’s the first place that I should have looked?”

  She hurried back through the common room—“Wait here,” she said to the others as she passed by—and went outside into the echoing bay. A walkaround told her that Warhammer had made the trip in fine form, though the bay itself was chillier than she’d remembered. She shivered inside her jacket and went back up the ramp.

  “All right, everyone, come on,” Beka said when she reentered the ship. “You don’t need to pack—anything you could possibly need is inside.”

  Beka led the way through the entrance door into the sickbay and through there into the Entibor room. A touch on the switch brought up the holographic illusions. The plain, undecorated chamber became a room from the Summer Palace of House Rosselin, as it had looked before the Mageworlders’ attacks had turned the whole planet into broken, poisoned rock. Beyond the high, arched windows, the sun was just setting over the trees and the mountains beyond.

  “I remember this place,” syn-Tavaite said. “We dined here.”

  One of the black-enameled household robots floated up on silent nullgravs. A crimson light flashed inside its ovoid sensor pod.

  “Welcome back, my lady,” it said to Beka. “Lieutenant Commander Jessan, Gentlesir LeSoit, Doctor syn-Tavaite. Will you be wishing the same quarters as before?”

  “Yes,” said Beka. “All of us. The two new guests are Owen Rosselin-Metadi, Master of the Adepts’ Guild, a native of Galcen, and his apprentice Klea Santreny of Nammerin. See that their accommodations are suitable as well. Aboard Warhammer, in number-one crew berthing, there is another person, whose name is not important. Make certain that he has adequate food and water, and that the cabin door stays locked with him behind it.”

  “Yes, my lady,” the robot said.

  “One more thing,” Beka said. “Is there a stasis box containing a replicant on board this station?”

  “Not to my knowledge, my lady,” the robot replied. “Shall I query my series mates?”

  “Yes,” Beka said. “Please do.”

  The red light inside the robot’s sensor pod flickered for a moment before it spoke again. “I’m sorry, my lady. None of us have any information concerning stasis boxes or replicants, in any combination.”

  “Thank you,” Beka said. “You may go.”

  She turned back to the others. “Now that the formalities are out of the way, let’s figure out what we’re going to do next. First is finding the replicant. I’m certain that it exists, and that it’s here.”

  “You do realize,” Jessan said, “that searching the whole base is not going to be like playing a game of find-the-slipper. This place is huge.”

  “If she’s here, she’s in a stasis box, and something like that can’t just have been shoved out of the way at random,” Beka said. “There’s got to be a record somewhere. The Prof would have wanted it to be found.”

  “The Prof didn’t need a record if he already knew where the replicant was,” said Jessan.

  “He left the base to me, and he knew he wasn’t coming back. So there has to be a record—maybe in the main comp system. I wasn’t looking for anything like that the last time I was here, so I wouldn’t necessarily have spotted it. You can all look different places; the robots will help if you ask.”

  “How about Tarveet?” LeSo
it cut in. “I don’t like leaving him alone on the ship.”

  “You heard,” said Beka. “The robots will take care of him.”

  LeSoit looked dubious. “Like they did with D’Caer?”

  “That’s something else I have to look into,” Beka said. “When I was here that time when we found he’d vanished, the Prof had just died and I was fresh out of a healing pod on Gyffer. We didn’t spend a lot of time on meticulous records checks.”

  “We’ll see,” Jessan said. “Meantime, I’m going to check out the sickbay for anything that looks like a stasis box.”

  He turned to syn-Tavaite with a flourish and a courtly bow. “Doctor, will you accompany me?”

  The others had all gone, and Klea Santreny was alone with Owen in the strange, illusion-filled room. The sun had gone down beyond the distant mountains, and the first stars glimmered in the night sky.

  “I didn’t know you could get holographic projections this good,” she said. “Even that place we went to on Innish-Kyl wasn’t this pretty.”

  “That’s because Aneverian’s country house was real,” Owen said. “Reality has lumps in it; fantasy doesn’t. And this is all fantasy.”

  “There must have been a real place a lot like this, though,” Klea said, “because I can feel the memories here if I try hard enough. I think … I think somebody very lonely made this room to remember something by.”

  “Memories like that can be dangerous,” said Owen. “Don’t get to liking this place too much. I’m not comfortable with the thought that Magelords can come and go here as they please.”

  “The air is cold here,” Klea said. “And dry. Not like home.”

  “The sooner we find that stasis box, the sooner we can leave. And I’ll be glad to go.”

  Klea looked at him curiously. “You think there really is a stasis box with a replicant in it?”

  “My sister does. And if I were a gambler, I wouldn’t put money on her hunch being wrong.”

  “You said there wasn’t any such thing as luck.”

  “There isn’t. But some people don’t have to be Adepts to see which way the universe is flowing. They have the knack of throwing themselves into the stream at the moment when it’s heading the way they want to go.”

  “Owen,” Klea said, “what happens after we find the box? Does your sister—”

  “Expect me to do sorcery, or work a miracle, or jump into the Void blindfolded carrying a life preserver?” Owen shrugged. “Something like that. But what she’s contemplating—it goes against everything my own Master taught me.”

  “So what are we going to do?”

  “Watch to see which way the stream is running,” he said. “And in the meantime, search.”

  Llannat Hyfid was in the Daughter’s meditation room when the Mages broke through.

  She had been in a high state of nerves ever since Ari had given her another hasty kiss and hurried down to the engine room to help attempt repairs. He hadn’t come back. After a while all feeling of ship’s motion had ceased, only to be replaced by an uneasy vibration, then by a high-pitched sound more felt through the deckplates than heard.

  She had run, then, to the black-walled chamber where the door opened only to her, and had knelt there gripping her staff in her hand, trying to find and trace the currents of the universe. Somewhere, somehow, there had to be a trickle of power that she could follow, some loose thread in the weaving that she could catch hold of to pull them all out of the Magelords’ grip—but there was nothing that she could see or do, and the universe held itself aloof.

  “Patience,” she muttered, and was silent. The ship had not been destroyed. Did they want prisoners? A moment of hand-to-hand fighting seemed the best she could hope for, and not even that if the Mages pumped some kind of gas into Night’s-Beautiful-Daughter and waited to let it do its work.

  Llannat wished she could be with Ari one last time. The brief while that they’d been married … she pushed the memories behind her.

  Uneasy motion returned to the ship, followed by a short period of weightlessness. Then gravity returned. Llannat became aware that a stranger was approaching the meditation room.

  The door slid open. A dark figure stood in the opening, dressed in the robes and mask of a Mage—similar in color to an Adept’s garb, but different in cut and style. But the staff this person carried was very similar indeed to the staff that Llannat clenched in her own sweating hand.

  The newcomer spoke. “Ekkat aredenei, etaze.”

  He bowed, then knelt before her, laying his staff on the deck, and spoke again in slow, heavily accented Galcenian:

  “Welcome home, Mistress.”

  Jessan stood in the gleaming, well-appointed sickbay of the asteroid base, with Doctor syn-Tavaite beside him. He remembered the first time that Ari and Llannat Hyfid had seen the sickbay, when they were fresh from the Med Station on Nammerin—Llannat had pointed out, with awed appreciation, that the equipment was state-of-the-art, nothing older than two Standard years.

  And now, he thought, we all know why.

  “Look around,” he said to syn-Tavaite. “Do you remember this room?”

  “No,” the Eraasian said. She seemed confused. “I remember the room we were in before. But the door that opens into here—didn’t, when the Masked One brought me to this place.”

  “Damn,” said Jessan. “Another brilliant idea shot to hell. Any other differences you’ve noticed so far?”

  “We didn’t come through here to find that other room,” she said. “And the entrance was different … not a door in bare rock … I saw a great house on a mountainside, and everything green and growing.”

  “How odd,” Jessan said. “But considering the person who used to own this place, not really surprising.”

  “You knew the Masked One?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Jessan. “Someday, Doctor, I’ll tell you about the night he and the captain showed up in my workroom. In the meantime, let’s try going at our problem the other way around. That door in the other room—the one that opens into this sickbay now—where did it lead to before?”

  “A big room,” syn-Tavaite replied at once. “With more high windows, and other doors leading from it, and a stone floor, and a fire on the hearth.”

  “Doesn’t sound like a sickbay to me,” Jessan said. “Maybe it was another holoprojection.” A quick scan of the immaculate walls, however, failed to reveal any unexplained switches or toggles. “Damn.”

  He fell silent for a while, thinking. Finally he looked up. “That bay outside has disguised itself as a landing field at least once before. Let’s head back to Warhammer. I need to get a comm link.”

  “A … link? You’re going to leave me alone someplace?”

  “Yes. But we’ll be able to talk.” He gave her what he hoped was a reassuring smile. “Don’t worry, you’ll be safe.”

  “Safe among the Adepts,” syn-Tavaite muttered. She added something else in a language Jessan didn’t understand.

  Probably just as well, he thought. It didn’t sound particularly flattering.

  However, she followed him without protest out into the main docking area, where he ducked briefly into Warhammer and came out with one of the pocket comm links. He handed her the link.

  “Here,” he said. “I’ll be in touch with you over this. If you want to say something to me, push that button there and talk. As soon as you see something that looks like the place you came to before, give me the word.”

  She gave him an uncertain nod. “Yes. If I see mountains and sky here inside a cave in the rock, I will surely tell you.”

  “Good. Now stay right here.”

  Jessan went back inside, and made his way through the base’s maze of passageways to a room filled with holoprojectors and comp consoles—and memories. The last time he’d been in here, Beka had been trying to get the truth about Perada’s assassination out of Ebenra D’Caer. The Professor had used an elaborate illusion-making setup to turn the base’s landing bay into a spaceport on O
vredis.

  He frowned as he remembered further. The Prof had drawn that particular sequence extempore, playing over the keys on the projector console to create a rolling panorama. What if he’d done the same thing for Doctor syn-Tavaite?

  No. He came in with her. He couldn’t have been up in the booth making the scenery.

  He looked up at the overhead. “I need a robot in here.”

  A few seconds later, one of the robots floated into the projection room. “What can I do for you, Commander?”

  “Can you work the controls in here?”

  “Of course, Commander,” the robot said. “The base comps are provided with any number of pleasing sequences, all of which I am able to access.”

  “Do any of those sequences show the landing field at Entibor?”

  “Which field, Commander? There are several.”

  “The one at the Summer Palace,” Jessan said.

  “An excellent choice,” said the robot. “That sequence is one of the most extensive in the entire library. The real-time links to the continuing display in the informal dining room are particularly—”

  “Thank you,” said Jessan. “Run it, please.”

  The robot floated over to the holoprojector console. Jessan keyed on his comm link.

  “Stand by, Doctor,” he said. “Take a look at this.”

  VIII. ASTEROID BASE

  GYFFERAN FARSPACE: SWORD-OF-THE-DAWN

  BEKA STOOD in the control center of the asteroid base, the circular chamber that housed the base’s hyperspace communications links, its internal security monitors, and the access terminals for main base memory. She hadn’t been in here since taking the ’Hammer to Suivi Point; nor—absent the necessary specific instructions about this most secure of the base’s areas—had any of the robots entered the room to clean. The Professor’s last, handwritten note still lay crumpled on the console where she had dropped it.

  The door behind her slid open to let in Ignaceu LeSoit. Beka nodded a greeting.