Read A Working of Stars Online
Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald
A Working of Stars (34 page)
“Communications.”
“Yes, Fleet-Captain?”
“Time to give Lord Natelth his wedding present. Transmit the first signal to receiving units at Serpent Station.”
“Transmitting.”
Nothing that happened next would be visible from orbit. But Winceyt knew what would be going on down below as the receiving units picked up the signal:
Rigging-Chief Olyesi’s constructs would respond to it first, lifting ponderously from the baked earth in a roar of heavy engines. As soon as the constructs had cleared the field, the incendiary charges on the ground would start going off one by one, and the sheds and buildings and storage hangars of Serpent Station would be consumed in white and all-devouring flame.
Let the sus-Peledaen have it. We’re done.
The Pilot-Principal spoke again, her voice thin but firm. “Stand by for jump.”
“Communications. Transmit the second signal.”
What happened next, Winceyt in part experienced and in part could only imagine. Rigging-Chief Olyesi’s constructs, pushing their way toward low orbit, would receive the signal and respond by blowing themselves up—becoming dazzling white fire-blossoms, filling the sky over Serpent Station with a pale and dreadful light and sending hot debris raining down into the coastal sea.
At the same time, the faint queasy sensation of a jump rippled along Winceyt’s nerves. Outside
Garden-of-Fair-Blossoms
’s bridge windows, the bright dot that was Eraasi winked out, and the velvet black of space changed inside a heartbeat to the all-enfolding greyness of the Void.
Garden-of-Fair-Blossoms
’s bridge windows, the bright dot that was Eraasi winked out, and the velvet black of space changed inside a heartbeat to the all-enfolding greyness of the Void.
NINGLIN: NINGLIN SPACEPORT
C
OLD-HEART-OF-MORNING:
NINGLIN ORBIT
C
OLD-HEART-OF-MORNING:
NINGLIN ORBIT
T
he engines of Kiefen Diasul’s chartered courier fell silent, and the spacecraft settled onto its landing legs. The pilot waved a hand at the portion of the local landscape that was visible outside the bridge windows.
he engines of Kiefen Diasul’s chartered courier fell silent, and the spacecraft settled onto its landing legs. The pilot waved a hand at the portion of the local landscape that was visible outside the bridge windows.
“Welcome to Ninglin, the back end of the heartworlds. A wonderful place to be from.”
“You sound as if you know the place,” Kief said.
“Damn straight I know it. I left here as hired crew on a sus-Radal merch as soon as my legs were long enough to hike to the port. And this is the first time I’ve ever been back.”
That explained the accent, Kief reflected. He had to admit that the charter pilot was right. Ninglin was a long way from Eraasi.
The planet was the most recently found of the heartworlds; the Ninglinese had barely qualified as a spacegoing people when their Mages made contact with Eraasi’s across the Void. Garrod syn-Aigal had been the Void-walker who first touched Ninglin’s soil, some years before he left the Hanilat Institute and founded Demaizen; the working had been the last one of any major consequence done by the Institute Circle.
The last one until now,
Kief reminded himself.
The Institute Circle was part of our working for Isayana; now they can call themselves true Mages again.
Kief reminded himself.
The Institute Circle was part of our working for Isayana; now they can call themselves true Mages again.
Ninglin’s backward status meant that the world had only one spaceport, and that one a low and muddy thing—except on the landing field, of course, where the jets of arriving and departing spacecraft had already fused the soil into a glassy hardness.
“I have business here of an unpredictable nature,” Kief said to the pilot. “I may need you to stay in port for quite some time.”
“It’s your money.” The pilot leaned back in the control chair and put his booted feet up on the console. “I’ll be sacking out on board ship, but there’s flophouses in town if you’re tired of sleeping in back like cargo.”
“Thanks,” Kief said. “I think I’ll see what the port has to offer.”
Actually, he’d found the quiet of the empty cargo bay a good thing. He’d spent most of the Void-transit in its echoing space, part of the time occupied in meditation, and part in teaching his new body the moves and forms of combat with a Mage’s staff. Intent counted for much when dealing with the
eiran,
but it was skill that gave a working its highest intensity and drew out of it the greatest power.
eiran,
but it was skill that gave a working its highest intensity and drew out of it the greatest power.
“You might want to take this with you, then.” The pilot fished around in the storage drawer under the main console and extracted a small but menacing-looking handgun, which he held out to Kief butt-first. “Ninglin Spaceport isn’t Hanilat, and if you run into trouble you can’t count on Fire and Security to pull you out.”
“Thank you,” Kief said, although he privately considered the handgun unnecessary. Ninglin Spaceport was unlikely to harbor anything that could take out an Eraasi-trained Mage.
“Yeah, well … portside nightlife can get rough. If you have to come back to the ship in a hurry one night, you won’t be the first person it’s ever happened to.”
Kief thanked the pilot again, pocketed the handgun, and headed into town. The pilot hadn’t mentioned any ships from Eraasi in port; perhaps he had beaten Vai to Ninglin in spite of her head start. That was good; it meant that he could wait and keep watch, and take her unawares.
Nobody looking at him would realize that he was a Mage. He’d taken pains not to look like one, wearing ordinary street clothes and a long loose coat that did well enough to hide the staff at his belt. It might have been wiser to forgo the staff altogether, but he found himself no more willing to leave it behind than Iulan Vai had been.
The main street outside the Ninglin landing field was wide and muddy, a grey silty mud that splashed up onto the wheels and sides of the boxy little locally made groundcars. Somewhere else on Ninglin, Kief assumed, there must be paved roads for the groundcars to run on properly—maybe there was even a pavement here, somewhere under all the mud.
A block past the port gate, his aesthetic senses reeled under the assault of a large, gaudy, internally lighted sign, so big it covered one whole wall of the building it advertised:
HANILAT LOUNGE—HOSTS AND HOSTESSES TO SERVE YOU ANYTIME —BAR AND CAFE—GAMES OF CHANCE—ROOMS BY THE HOUR, THE NIGHT, OR THE WEEK.
Kief looked at the sign in stunned appreciation and began to smile. He hadn’t had much time to know Iulan Vai before the Demaizen Circle split in two and she followed Arekhon sus-Khalgath across the interstellar gap, but he remembered her peculiar sense of humor. She would find the façade of the Hanilat Lounge intensely amusing—he was certain of it.
Today, or tomorrow, or another day, that horrible sign would draw her in without any need for him to work the
eiran
at all.
eiran
at all.
Then I will ask her where to find Arekhon, and she will tell me.
By the time
Fire-on-the-Hilltops
reached Ninglin, the former sus-Dariv contract carrier had acquired a new name, a new port of origin, and a new ID transmitter. Zeri was impressed by the high level of technical knowledge her cousin Herin and Iulan Vai brought to the process of making the forgeries. She was convinced by now that Vai had been somebody’s confidential operative before she became a Mage—which explained a good deal about Herin’s former life as well. She’d always wondered what it was he did for the family; the dilettante act had never struck her as all that convincing.
Fire-on-the-Hilltops
reached Ninglin, the former sus-Dariv contract carrier had acquired a new name, a new port of origin, and a new ID transmitter. Zeri was impressed by the high level of technical knowledge her cousin Herin and Iulan Vai brought to the process of making the forgeries. She was convinced by now that Vai had been somebody’s confidential operative before she became a Mage—which explained a good deal about Herin’s former life as well. She’d always wondered what it was he did for the family; the dilettante act had never struck her as all that convincing.
Me, though … I really was a dilettante. At least I could tell when somebody else wasn’t.
Making the forgeries had proved simple, compared with the job of convincing the Fire’s ship-mind to agree to the disguise. The ship-mind was old and cranky, and not fond of change; it required many iterations of the new data before the
Fire
would agree to answer, for public purposes, to the new name
Once-Over-Lightly.
Fire
would agree to answer, for public purposes, to the new name
Once-Over-Lightly.
“If anybody digs down into the deep files, we’re gone,” Herin said. The
Fire’
s new paperwork had already convinced inspace control, port control, and the local customs office, as well as the desk clerk at their lodgings, but he still looked dissatisfied.
Fire’
s new paperwork had already convinced inspace control, port control, and the local customs office, as well as the desk clerk at their lodgings, but he still looked dissatisfied.
They’d locked up the ship after landing, and taken a quartet of rooms at the Far Call Guest Home, a faded but respectable rooming house at the edge of the port district. The windows in the Far Call’s bedrooms were uncurtained, and the bright lights of the strip cast flashing patterns on the walls: an uncomfortable reminder that ships came and went daily even on Ninglin, and that any one of them might bring pursuit.
On the other hand, while the mattresses on the guest home’s narrow beds were thin and lumpy-looking, at least the rooms had beds instead of acceleration couches. Zeri felt guilty about having been granted the relative luxury of bunking in the captain’s cabin during the transit from Eraasi, and was glad the others would have a chance at some comfort.
“Don’t worry about the deep files,” Len advised Herin. “Anybody who gets close enough to read those will have already spotted the old serial numbers on the outer hull. And we can’t fix those without spending time in a repair yard.”
“You cheer me unspeakably,” Herin told him.
“Stop it, both of you,” said Zeri. “I want to know what we’re going to do on Ninglin now that we’re here. We’ve been running nonstop ever since I climbed out of that window in Hanilat, and I’m tired.”
Iulan Vai answered her. “What we’re going to do on Ninglin is lie low, get some rest, and wait for the hue and cry to die down. The last thing we need is one of Lord Natelth’s operatives following us out of here to the rendezvous point.”
“No,” said Zeri. “We definitely don’t want that.”
The upcoming rendezvous was another thing that was causing her to fret, and she already knew that spending time on Ninglin in forced inactivity was going to make the fretting worse. At least as long as they were on the run, nobody had expected her to make decisions on behalf of what remained of the independent sus-Dariv.
And a pitiful lot we are, too
, she thought darkly.
A handful of ships and a fine-arts dabbler who’s only alive now because she couldn’t be bothered to pay attention to business in the first place.
, she thought darkly.
A handful of ships and a fine-arts dabbler who’s only alive now because she couldn’t be bothered to pay attention to business in the first place.
On the other hand, while she might not have much by Eraasian standards, Ninglin was currently doing a good job of reminding her that Eraasian standards weren’t the only ones around. On a world like this one, three cargo ships, two shuttles, and a fast courier would look like a star-lord’s fortune. Given time, they might even be able to bring the sus-Dariv remnant back to … well, maybe not wealth, as they’d known it before, but something like comfortable prosperity.
The trick, of course, was going to be finding somewhere out of reach of the sus-Peledaen.
And where in the galaxy is
that
going to be
, she wondered,
when we can’t even trust someplace as backward as Ninglin to be safe?
that
going to be
, she wondered,
when we can’t even trust someplace as backward as Ninglin to be safe?
Cold-Heart-of Morning
had been in orbit over Ninglin for almost a week by the time the merchant ship
Once-Over-Lightly
landed at the port below. Egelt and Hussav were passing time at playing flipsticks in the
Cold-Heart’s
wardroom when word of the
Lightly’s
arrival came in.
had been in orbit over Ninglin for almost a week by the time the merchant ship
Once-Over-Lightly
landed at the port below. Egelt and Hussav were passing time at playing flipsticks in the
Cold-Heart’s
wardroom when word of the
Lightly’s
arrival came in.
“Think this one’s our boy?” Hussav asked.
Egelt studied the message on the table display. “Hard to say. The configuration’s pretty close, but he’s got a sus-Oadlan contract ID and the ship’s log says he’s come straight here from Ayarat.”
“Damn. I’m starting to think we outsmarted ourselves by coming here, and the pretty sus-Dariv and our mystery man are somewhere else laughing themselves silly at our expense.”
“They’re coming to Ninglin,” Egelt said. “Care to place a bet on it?”
“We already have.”
“Our jobs, yeah.” Egelt frowned at the message again. “Something still doesn’t look right about this guy. We’ll see what our contacts have to say about him after they get done working over his ship.”
“You think that’s going to be worth the trouble?” Hussav was disposed to be gloomy—the last round of flipsticks had not gone well for him, and he was usually better at the game than Egelt. “Those chase-and-go-homes are some of the wonkiest pieces of technology I’ve seen in a long, long time. Expensive sons-of-bitches, too.”
“But if they work,” Egelt said, “and our guy runs again, this time we can follow him without having to make a blind jump and take a wild guess at the dropout.”
All the same, he reflected, it would have made life a lot easier all around if they could have used the chase-and-go-home technology on ships leaving Eraasi—but Hanilat’s port security was too tight, and its groundside crews were too honest. Ninglin, on the other hand, with its low traffic and its lax standards, was an ideal place for deploying the
Cold-Heart’s
limited store of the devices.
Cold-Heart’s
limited store of the devices.
The door of the wardroom slid open and admitted the captain of
Cold-Heart-of Morning,
with a message pad in his hand. The captain approached the wardroom table with a purposeful stride, causing Egelt and Hussav to look at each other with barely suppressed apprehension. Anything that had a full guardship captain doing message delivery—a job usually given to fleet-apprentices, in order to further their general ship-knowledge—could only be bad.
Cold-Heart-of Morning,
with a message pad in his hand. The captain approached the wardroom table with a purposeful stride, causing Egelt and Hussav to look at each other with barely suppressed apprehension. Anything that had a full guardship captain doing message delivery—a job usually given to fleet-apprentices, in order to further their general ship-knowledge—could only be bad.
“Message for you, Syr Egelt.” The captain of the guardship handed over the message pad to Egelt as he spoke.
The display screen on the message pad showed the Eyes Only sigil.
Egelt entered his personal passcode, and the sigil dissolved and reformed as blocks of text. The message itself wasn’t the most shocking that Egelt had ever read, but it came close.
“Thank you, Captain,” he said. “Have you decrypted this?”
“No, of course not.”
“You will have had similar instructions?”
“I wouldn’t know, Syr Egelt, not having seen that.”
“Blast it, did you receive any eyes-only messages? And where did this one come from?”
“A message drone just now dropped in-system from Eraasi,” the captain said. “This was part of its payload.”
Egelt blanked the screen of the message pad and slipped it into his shirt pocket. “Make the
Cold-Heart
ready to leave orbit on my word. We need to shape a course back to Aulwikh.”
Cold-Heart
ready to leave orbit on my word. We need to shape a course back to Aulwikh.”
“Those are your orders? May I see them?”
“I’m sorry, Captain,” Egelt said, making no move to retrieve the message pad. “These are eyes-only. But I will have more for you before we jump. Meanwhile, my partner and I require the services of one of your landing shuttles—we have business to transact in port before we leave.”
Other books
Tallchief: The Hunter by Cait London
Love Inspired November 2014 #2 by Lorraine Beatty, Allie Pleiter
Wynne's War by Aaron Gwyn
The White Mare: The Dalraida Trilogy, Book One by Jules Watson
Anatomy of a Misfit by Andrea Portes
Silver Justice by Blake, Russell
Tempted by Dr. Daisy by Catherine Anderson
Crash Into Me by Tracy Wolff
Bear No Loss by Anya Nowlan
Healing Hearts (The Challenge Series) by Crowe, Liz