Starpilot's Grave: Book Two of Mageworlds

by Doyle, Debra; Macdonald, James D.

  The wire cage door clanked open and the outer doors of the lift slid apart, revealing a long, spacious hallway paneled in rich blond wood. Soft lighting came down through what appeared at first glance to be skylights; a second look made it clear, to Jessan at least, that the apparent windows overhead were actually high-quality camouflaged light panels. A nullgrav pallet jack waited for them on the deep-pile carpet—looking, in its current surroundings, like an abstract sculpture by a particularly whimsical artist.

  Current Republic technology, thought Jessan as LeSoit brought the jack into the lift and slipped it underneath the heavy black box. And a lot of money, too. Our friend D’Caer isn’t exactly living in poverty-stricken exile.

  LeSoit touched the controls on the jack. The box rose upward until it floated a handspan or so above the floor of the lift. With the nullgrav unit taking the weight, the gunman was able to push the box one-handed down the hallway to the pair of double doors at the end. Jessan, still wary, stuck close beside him, while the four Eraasians walked alongside the box, two on the right side and two on the left.

  “You know where we are?” Jessan asked LeSoit. Might as well ask questions while I can. The locals all think I’m from off-planet anyway.

  “I ought to; I work here,” LeSoit replied. “Boss man’s office is up ahead.”

  They went through the double doors into an executive suite. LeSoit guided the box past a bank of lifts and through a door into an elegant pastel room holding only a well-groomed young man, a pedestal-mount chair, and a freestanding comp unit.

  The young man looked up as they arrived. “Any trouble?” he asked in Galcenian—only faintly accented, this time.

  LeSoit shook his head. “None.”

  “Very good,” the young man said. “Please take off the cover. Gentlesir D’Caer wishes me to make a visual inspection of the subject before we proceed any further.”

  “No problem,” said LeSoit. He nodded to Jessan. “Come on and give me a hand here.”

  Working together, Jessan and LeSoit unlatched the hold-fasts on the box’s black plastic shell.

  “Okay now. One, two, three, lift.”

  They raised the shell and moved it aside, revealing a clear crystal stasis box mounted on a base of gleaming white metal. Inside the box lay a young man dressed in Mandeynan finery, one eye obscured by a bright red optical-plastic patch. His thin lips curled upward in a tight sneer.

  D’Caer’s receptionist nodded. “That’s Tarnekep Portree, all right.”

  Portree’s one visible eye was closed, and his ruffled shirtfront was covered with blood—bright red, kept from clotting by the stasis field. His arms were crossed on his chest, with the hands clenched into loose fists, and his left forearm half-obscured the blaster mark on his white spidersilk shirt.

  The receptionist nodded again. “You’ve done well,” he said to Jessan and LeSoit. “Gentlesir D’Caer will be pleased.”

  He touched a button on the side of his comp. “It’s here.”

  The inner door opened, and Ebenra D‘Caer emerged—still as plainly but expensively dressed as he’d been on Ovredis, and still as predatory and hungry about the eyes. Jessan worried for a moment that D’Caer might recognize him as Princess Berran’s scapegrace brother, the Crown Prince Jamil of Sapne, but the man’s attention was all for the bloodstained body lying in the stasis box.

  LeSoit reached for the controls of the pallet jack. “Do you want this moved inside the office?”

  “Don’t bother,” D’Caer said. “I’ll take it.”

  If his solitary incarceration on the Professor’s asteroid base had improved his manners any, it certainly wasn’t showing. Before LeSoit or Jessan could protest, he took the controls and smoothly maneuvered the box into the inner office. The door swung shut behind him and closed with a gentle click.

  The receptionist turned to Jessan. “Now, about your payment. Do you wish cash, or will an Ophelan bank draft be acceptable?”

  Jessan didn’t answer him. “I don’t hear anything from the office,” he said to LeSoit.

  LeSoit shrugged. “Inner door’s soundproofed—you wouldn’t anyway.”

  “Right,” said Jessan. “So let’s do it.”

  He spun on the balls of his feet and drove the heel of his hand into the nose of the man who stood beside him. The man crumbled. A blaster sounded with a low snarl; LeSoit had fired once, then twice more. Jessan didn’t bother going for his blaster; he pulled the needler he kept up his sleeve and shot the receptionist with that instead.

  When the firing stopped, he and LeSoit were the only two left standing. Jessan slid the needler back into concealment—a one-shot weapon, it wouldn’t be any good again until he could recharge it—and pulled his blaster from its holster.

  Over on the other side of the reception room, LeSoit was looking down at a body lying by his feet. It belonged to the cargo wrangler who had greeted the gunman by name at the spaceport field. The Eraasian had a chemical projectile weapon clutched in his hand. LeSoit stepped on the man’s wrist and pulled the weapon away.

  “Nasty things,” he remarked, dropping it on the desk beside the slumped body of the receptionist. “Noisy, slow, hardly any shots in them, and they leave a really messy wound. I’d rather get burned any day.”

  The gunman began to make a circuit of the room, shooting each of the crumpled men in the head as he came to them. Jessan watched the slow, methodical killing for a moment without saying anything, then turned to the inner door.

  Blaster at the ready, he grasped the lever and pulled. Nothing happened.

  “Damn it all,” he said. “The bastard’s got it locked.”

  VI.

  THE MAGEWORLDS: ERAASI; ERAASI PORT WARHAMMER: HYPERSPACE TRANSIT TO THE INNER NET

  EBENRA D’CAER.

  Dream, and remember: Ebenra D’—

  Beka dropped back into realtime with a shudder, the transition as abrupt as the crossover to stasis had been.

  Loud clicking noises sounded in her ears. Nyls and Ignac’ unlatching the plastic cover, that would be.

  Her eyes were open and staring at the dark; she closed the right eye, allowing the left to stay open underneath the one-way optical plastic of the eye patch. A moment later the cover came off the box completely, but all she could see through the eye patch’s red haze was a stretch of ceiling.

  “No. I’ll take it.”

  The words came in a distorted metallic whisper, picked up by a comm link hidden in the base of the stasis box and relayed by the tiny speaker close to her left ear. Nevertheless, Beka recognized Ebenra D’Caer’s voice.

  Soon now, she thought. We have some unfinished business, you and I.

  Her crossed arms hid more than the rough edges of Jessan’s makeup job: the long, double-edged knife lay naked in her grip, its handle tight in her fist, its blade extending backward underneath her right forearm. When the moment came, she would be ready. Maybe there would even be time to ask D‘Caer a few questions first. That would make Jessan happy, if they could get some word on what D’Caer was doing on this side of the Net, and why the Magelords had bothered to keep him alive and happy after they’d taken him out of his asteroid prison.

  The seal around the top of the casket broke open with a sigh, and a sleeved arm reached into her field of vision to swing the crystal lid aside. She couldn’t see Jessan anywhere, or LeSoit either. But in the next moment D’Caer himself loomed close above her, leaning over the box, his face dyed red by the plastic filter through which she watched him.

  “So here you are,” D’Caer said. “I’ll bugger you dead, you bastard, for what you did on Pleyver and Darvell. But first—”

  He bent closer. She held her breath, so that no rise and fall of her chest would betray her before it was time.

  Where the hell are Nyls and Ignac’? One of them should have dropped the son of a bitch by now. If something went wrong while I was out …

  “Let’s see what you’re hiding under that eye patch,” D’Caer said, and reached to p
ry up the piece of crimson plastic.

  … then it’s up to me.

  The hand came down on her face, darkening her view—Ebenra D’Caer was standing as close now as he ever would. She punched her dagger hand out and upward.

  The blade hit something soft, and a gush of hot liquid spattered across her nose and mouth. She didn’t stop moving. Throwing her arm over the side of the box, she pulled and rolled her way out, scrambling over the high side to land heavily on the floor.

  She glanced down. Her right hand and the knife she held in it were both covered with blood. And her vision was clear—the eye patch was gone, ripped off by D’Caer’s fingers.

  So D’Caer knows that Tarnekep Portree has two good eyes. She laughed under her breath, a ragged, crazy sound. One way or the other, it isn’t going to matter very long.

  She hadn’t stopped moving after she landed, first dropping the dagger and drawing her blaster from its holster, then rolling out from behind the cover of the stasis box on its pallet jack. Now she came to her feet in the smooth movement the Professor had taught her, finishing in a combat crouch with both hands supporting her blaster.

  A single raking glance showed her that she was in a large office far above the streets of Eraasi Port. The walls were mostly window, with only the evening sky visible outside. The floor beneath her feet was covered in a lush black carpet, and in its center stood Ebenra D’Caer, both hands clutched to his throat, his breath coming in whistling gasps.

  She realized that her half-blind stroke with the dagger had nicked D’Caer’s windpipe. A wound like that would make it hard for him to answer questions.

  It doesn’t matter. He hasn’t got anything to say that I’d cry hot tears over missing.

  “Hello, Ebenra,” she said, and relaxed her position to stand with the blaster held loosely in one hand. “Remember me? When I was Tarnekep Portree running cargo through the Net, you tried to have me killed,”

  D’Caer’s eyes were wide and dark, but he hadn’t given up fighting. She saw how he was edging toward the massive desk that filled most of the room behind him. If he could get to the comm panel, he might even manage to summon help in time to keep himself alive.

  Can’t have that, she thought, and shot him in the knee.

  D’Caer collapsed sideways against the desk. His right hand left his neck to grasp his leg where the blaster beam had seared a pathway through muscle and bone alike. A thin spurt of blood leapt in an arc from his neck.

  Nicked an artery, too. Fast, but not fast enough.

  “When I was the Princess of Sapne, you tried to rape me.”

  She took a step closer and shot him in the arm. His hand fell from its grip on his leg. More blood followed it away.

  Another two steps and she was standing over him, looking down as he bled on the deep carpet. He stared back at her, his eyes pain-dark but alive and hating. Incredibly, he was still trying to rise, scrabbling with his left hand for a fingerhold amid the welter of buttons and controls built into the top of the enormous desk.

  “And when I was just plain Beka Rosselin-Metadi,” she said, “you killed my mother.”

  She lifted her blaster, set its muzzle carefully against Ebenra D’Caer’s forehead, and pressed the firing stud. Then she held the blaster steady while the skin and flesh of his face burned down to the skull beneath.

  She was still standing there when Jessan and LeSoit finally broke through the door behind her.

  “It’s finished,” she said without turning around. “Get whatever you want out of his private files, and let’s go home.”

  Warhammer lifted from Eraasi without the formality of receiving departure clearance. The clearance had been requested in the proper form and denied without explanation; Eraasi Inspace Control squawked angrily when the denial was ignored, but no other retribution manifested itself on the way to orbit.

  Beka leaned back in the pilot’s seat. She was still wearing the clean shirt and trousers in which she had walked out of D’Caer’s offices and onto the streets of Eraasi Port; the fresh clothing had come into the building with her, hidden inside the metal base of the stasis box.

  “This whole thing,” she said to Jessan, “has been so easy it’s almost indecent.”

  “Speak for yourself,” said Jessan with feeling. “You weren’t stuck on the other side of that damned door, trying to break through a deadbolt lock and a solid metal core panel with only a pair of blasters.”

  She chuckled. “You needn’t have worried. I would have opened the door for you if you’d knocked.” Her hands moved over the ’Hammer’s controls, rotating the ship into position for a straight run to the jump point. “Still no trouble from the surface. I wonder if Eraasi Security will have a warrant out for me by the time we hit the Inner Net?”

  “Hard to tell,” said Jessan. “Depends on whether they’re mad at us because of the mess we left in D‘Caer’s office, or mad at us because we forgot to pay somebody the right bribes. It doesn’t matter, really. We can send your father a ‘mission accomplished’ signal as soon as we drop out of hyper.”

  “You’ve got a point there,” Beka said. She clicked open the comm link to the common room. “Hey, Ignac’—it looks like we’re going to get away clean on this one after all. Where do you want us to drop you off?”

  “Back on Mandeyn,” came the prompt reply over the link. “Or Suivi Point, if Mandeyn’s too far out of your way. I think I’ve worn out my welcome on this side of the Net.”

  “Suivi it is,” Beka said. She turned back to the control panel. “Navicomp data is in,” she murmured, more for the benefit of the log recordings than to Jessan. “Coordinates are locked. Ready. Commence run-to-jump at this time.”

  She fed power to the panel, pushed the throttles forward, and guided Warhammer along its trajectory. When the hyperspace engines had kicked in and the stars had blazed and died outside the viewscreen, she watched the readouts for a few minutes to make sure that everything was functioning properly, then switched on the autopilot.

  “Autopilot engaged,” she said, to Jessan this time, and unfastened her safety webbing. “Let’s go see how Ignac’ is doing.”

  Back in the ’Hamner’s common room, LeSoit had already unstrapped and gone to work, with the comp screen down from its bulkhead niche and a mug of cha’a on the table at his elbow. He looked up at Beka and Jessan came in.

  “You were right about grabbing the boss’s personal files,” he said. “There’s stuff here that I didn’t even guess about.”

  Beka got a mug of cha‘a from the galley nook and came back over to the table. “Any word on why the Magelords wanted D’Caer back in the first place?”

  “He was coordinating imports,” LeSoit said. “And not just the odd bit of luxury goods, either. Take a look at this.”

  He highlighted several lines on the screen. Beka leaned closer, looked, and whistled.

  “Essential parts for hyperspace engines,” she said. “And resonating chambers for starship-size energy weapons.” She glanced over at Jessan. “The Mageworlds are rearming.”

  Jessan moved closer and bent to read the screen over LeSoit’s shoulder. “How long this has been going on?”

  “No idea,” said LeSoit with a shrug.

  Jessan raised an eyebrow. “And here I thought you worked for the man.”

  “I was his bodyguard, not his accountant.”

  Beka sighed. Good thing I only have to put up with this as far as Mandeyn. At least they’re not on the verge of killing each other anymore.

  “Where’s all the stuff coming from, anyway?” she asked, then peered again at the screen and answered her own question. “Ophel and Suivi Point via Darvell—no surprises there.”

  “Well, here’s one for you,” said LeSoit. He brought up a different page. “Another source of spare parts and matériel is the Republic itself. And somebody in the Space Force is coordinating and supplying.”

  “Space Force,” said Jessan. “Hell. How high up?”

  “High,” LeSoit
said. “Very high. We’re talking sector commander or above.”

  “Name?”

  LeSoit shook his head. “Sorry. Not in this file.”

  “Hell,” Jessan said again.

  “It’s not our worry,” Beka said. “We’ll pass the bad news along to Dadda and let him deal with it.” She gave Jessan a challenging glance. “Or don’t you think that he can?”

  “I have every confidence in the General,” he assured her. “But treason in the Space Force … I never expected that.”

  “Idealist,” said Beka.

  “Everybody’s character has its little flaws. So what are we going to do about our cargo?”

  “That load of medicinal herbs from Raamet?” Beka asked. “I’ll probably sell them myself for whatever I can get, and send the shipper a bank draft. It’s not delivery to Ninglin, but it’s the best that I can do.”

  “And more than most would bother with,” Jessan conceded. “How long before we drop out of hyper?”

  “No time soon,” Beka said. “Scheduled arrival at the Inner Net is in three hundred forty-four hours. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m going to go stand under the shower sonics until they shake the smell of D’Caer’s office off me, and then I’m going to catch up on my sleep. Riding in stasis is interesting, but I wouldn’t exactly call it restful.”

  “Have a good time,” Jessan said. “Don’t use up all the vibrations. And don’t worry about us. We’ll amuse ourselves out here somehow.” The Khesatan looked at LeSoit speculatively. “You wouldn’t happen to play cards, would you?”

  “Odd that you should ask.” LeSoit reached into the inner pocket of his jacket and pulled out an unopened deck imprinted with a stylized flower and the legend “Painted Lily Lounge—Embrig—Mandeyn.”

  “Those are a long way from home,” said Jessan, sliding into a chair across the table. “But then, who am I to talk?”