“So I can spend my time in a one-man office treating stranded spacers for social diseases,” said Jessan. “It’ll be a picnic, I can tell you.”
“Life around here isn’t exactly going to be a tea party either,” said Llannat. “Four cases of Rogan’s Disease just came in from a logging camp upriver.”
“Four?” said Ari. “Plus the three we’ve got and the one we brought in … that’s more than just a fluke. It’s an outbreak.”
Llannat nodded. “One of the old cases died while you were collecting the latest one. And without any tholovine, we’re going to lose some more.”
“Didn’t anybody put in a request for some?”
“I did,” said Jessan. “As soon as the first case showed up. But you know how it works:
if
Supply can hurry things up, you might see some tholovine before next flood season. And by then it’ll be too late.”
“Too bad we don’t have some right now,” Ari said. “We could handle the problem while it’s still small.”
“And if I had hyperspace engines,” said Llannat, “I’d be a starship. Where are we supposed to get the stuff—on the black market?”
There was a silence. Ari and Jessan looked at one another.
“Munngralla,” said Ari.
“Right,” Jessan said. “If anybody can get it, he can.”
“Wait a minute,” Llannat cut in. “Who’s Munngralla?”
“He’s a Selvaur who runs a curio shop down in Namport,” said Ari. “At least, that’s what he does officially. Unofficially … rumor says he’s the local Quincunx rep.”
“I see,” said Llannat. If the Adept had any qualms about dealing with the most notorious organization of smugglers and black marketeers in the civilized galaxy, she didn’t show it. “But is he likely to have tholovine on hand?”
“You name it,” Ari said, “and Munngralla will sell it. But not for decimal-credit prices.”
“Never mind the price,” Jessan said. “We can always find cash someplace. The question is, how do we get in touch with him? If he thinks we’re working for Security, he won’t take the job no matter how much we offer.”
Another long silence. Then Llannat looked over at Ari. “You did say he was a Selvaur … .”
Ari sighed. “This sounds like something the CO doesn’t want to know about.”
Jessan nodded. “He’d just worry.”
The things I do for the Service
, Ari thought, as the duckboards laid across the intersection buckled under his feet and then pulled free of the mud in a series of sucking noises.
After yesterday’s rains, the town of Namport lay steaming under the late-afternoon sun. A smell of decaying vegetation and other unwholesome substances rose from the muddy streets. Like most of the roads in this lowland agricultural district, the thoroughfares of Namport were unpaved. The shaggy tusker-oxen used as draft animals by the small farmers didn’t care for hard surfaces, and nullgrav-assisted vehicles didn’t need them; so when wet weather came to Namport, foot traffic was left with mud on its boots.
Ari stepped off the duckboards onto the raised wooden sidewalk. He’d worn civilian clothing for this expedition—a dark shirt over uniform trousers and boots—and a glance at his reflection in a shopwindow showed a looming, piratical figure. A heavy Ogre Mark VI blaster completed the effect.
The Mark VI had been Jos Metadi’s, back in the days when the General still carried a sidearm openly instead of hiding one up his sleeve. When Ari left Galcen to join the Space Force, the blaster had gone with him—“for luck,” his father had said, although Ari had never needed to wear it until today.
Halfway down the block, Ari spotted the sign he was looking for: FIVE POINTS IMPORTS, G. MUNNGRALLA, PROP.
G. Munngralla, Prop., hadn’t wasted valuable credits on a holosign; the words were spelled out in fading gold paint on the shop awning over the sidewalk. When Ari reached the door of the shop, he saw that the same legend had been painted on the glass of door and window, along with a stylized depiction of a five-planet star system.
Ari knew as well as anybody else that Nammerin was the fourth planet out in a ten-planet system. He smiled at the sight of the design. So far, so good.
He pushed the door open—no fancy sliding doors with body-heat sensors for Munngralla, just ordinary cheap metal hinges, in need of a good oiling—and stepped inside. The air in the shop was cool and dry: Selvaur-cool, which made it two-shirts-and-a-jacket weather for a human. After the muggy heat of downtown Namport, Ari found it hard to keep his teeth from chattering.
He shouldered his way past a rack of pugil sticks and a pallet-load of boxes labeled “genuine Entiboran fused-rock paperweights—certificate of authenticity included,” and came up against a Changwe temple gong bearing a hand-lettered sign in Maraghite script: PLEASE RING FOR SERVICE. There was no mallet in sight.
Carrying it a bit far, aren’t you?
Ari asked the absent Munngralla.
How many humans can read Maraghite in the first place? I’m lucky Ferrda took the time to be thorough with his responsibilities. And as for your missing mallet …
He pulled his right arm back a little and struck the heavy cast metal ball with the side of one large and solid fist. The bell gave voice.
A single deep note tolled through the shop like a moan. A small grey lizard, frightened by the sound, ran out from behind a shelf of jars and into a crack in the wall. In the display cases, frangible items vibrated against one another on the glass shelves, setting up a high, brittle tinkling.
Ari struck the gong again.
*All right, all right. Let an old wrinkleskin get his midday sleep, why don’t you?*
G. Munngralla—two meters and then some of not even slightly wrinkled Selvaur—pushed his way through the beaded curtain separating the back of the shop from the storefront.
Ari grinned at him, making sure to bare his canine teeth. *You’re no wrinkleskin—and since when do the Masters of the Forest sleep in midday like animals?*
*Who are you calling “animal,” thin-skin?* growled the shopkeeper. Selvaurs didn’t like that name any better than other sentients did, and they took insults worse than some—Ferrdacorr would have knocked Ari across the room for showing such bad manners, and Munngralla might try yet.
But Ari stood tall enough in his spaceboots to meet Munngralla’s bad-tempered glare straight on, and at a guess had a handspan more breadth in the shoulders. He hooked his thumbs into his belt, braced his feet, and held the predatory grin.
“I rang,” he said. “I have some business to discuss.”
*It’s all for sale,* said Munngralla.
Ari’s lip curled. “I don’t need a pugil stick today, thank you. And as for the Entiboran paperweights—there’s enough of them floating around the galaxy to build a whole new planet. Someday, though, you’re going to get a real Entiboran in here, and he’s going to wreck the place for you.”
*Ask me if I’m worried,* said Munngralla. *Do I look worried?*
“Do I look like a Security Officer?” countered Ari. Then, switching languages again: *Do I
sound
like a Security officer?*
The Selvaur narrowed his eyes at him. *Talk is cheap, thin-skin. Can a Forest Lord or a Brother vouch for you?*
*Ferrdacorr son of Rrillikkik,* said Ari. *He hunts the South Continent High Ridges these days, but he went after other prey during the great war against the Mageworlds. *
*Ahh,* said the Selvaur. *That Ferrdacorr. If he answers for you, we shouldn’t have any trouble doing business. *
“I’m glad to hear it,” said Ari, in Galcenian again. “The Forest Speech isn’t for thin-skinned throats.”
*That’s true,* agreed Munngralla. *Now, which will you have—a service, or merchandise?*
“Tholovine,” said Ari. “In quantity, in a hurry.”
*If you’re after chemical weapons, I carry some already made up,* said the Selvaur. *No need to risk synthesizing your own.*
Ari bared his teeth—in real anger, this time. “If I ever need to hurt someone that badly, I’ll beat him to death with my bare hands,” he said. “It’s just as quick and whole lot cleaner.”
*Suit yourself,* said Munngralla. *How do you want your tholovine—powder, elixir, or pressurized spray?*
“Pure brick. Hospital grade.”
*Who’s paying?*
“Me,” said Ari. “Come on, even an unblooded youngling knows better than to ask that. I’m good for the money.”
Munngralla looked at him a moment. *Will Ferrdacorr pay if you default?*
Ari nodded, and dropped again into the Forest Speech. *I’m family. He’ll pay.*
Munngralla extended a scaly hand—another human gesture. *Then we have a deal. I can have the first delivery for you by midnight tonight.*
“What’s the price?”
*Eight hundred credits the brick.*
Ari pulled his own hand back. “No deal. The stuff’s not illegal; just hard to get. Five hundred, or I go someplace else to do business.”
*Seven hundred.*
“Six.”
*Six-fifty—take it or see where going someplace else gets you on this planet.* “Six-fifty,” agreed Ari, and this time he didn’t pull away from Mungralla’s grip. “We have a deal.”
*Be here at midnight,* the Selvaur reminded him. *And bring cash.*
“I’ll be here,” said Ari; and then—because Ferrdacorr had taught him courteous behavior—added in Selvauran, *Good hunting. *
Munngralla gave him a growled *Good hunting* in reply, but Ari was already halfway to the door. It swung open as he came near, and Ari had to retreat into the rack of pugil sticks to miss knocking over the Selvaur’s next customer. The man glared up at him in passing.
“Sorry,” said Ari, with a shrug. “I couldn’t see the door through all those boxes of rock.”
The man glared harder, and Ari braced himself for an unpleasant scene. But the stranger never made whatever retort he’d been planning to deliver. Instead, the pupils of his eyes dilated, his mouth snapped shut, and he ducked past Ari without a word.
Fear?
wondered Ari. But he didn’t think so—that hadn’t been the look of someone who’d managed to lose his temper first and notice the other man’s size afterward.
Not fear, then. Recognition?
He’d never seen the stranger before in his life; but he was not, he knew, a difficult figure to describe, and he’d been in and about Namport often enough on Med Station business.
Probably one of Munngralla’s other customers,
Ari decided.
I wonder what he was after, if spotting somebody from the Space Force was enough to set him on edge like that?
On second thought, I probably don’t want to know.
T
ALK IN
Warhammer
’s cockpit had lapsed as the task of keeping the freighter on course took up more and more of Beka’s attention. Now, with the flight-time clock marking off the few seconds remaining in hyperspace, she looked over at the copilot’s seat. Judging from his closed eyes and even breathing, her passenger had fallen asleep.
“Wake up, Professor,” she said. “We’re about to drop out of hyper and start dodging asteroids.”
He didn’t answer, but Beka had other things on her mind than waiting to see if he’d heard. She took a deep breath to calm herself.
We need to lose momentum real fast—there’s going to be a lot of rocks out there. This had better work.
At one second before dropout, she switched in the realspace engines on maximum thrust. Then, as the ship came out of hyperspace, she threw the
‘Hammer
into a 180-degree skew-flip, and felt herself pressed hard into the pilot’s seat as the freighter backed down at twelve gravities.
The cockpit darkened around her. In the center of her field of vision, the readout on the relative motion sensor showed high velocity astern. The negative numbers unwound toward zero as
Warhammer
’s main engines fought momentum. Beka was close to blacking out—she couldn’t see the lights and dials around the edge of the control panel—and she needed all her strength to reach for the master power switch.
-2, -1, 0 … Cut Power!
The release from deceleration threw her forward against the safety belts. Recovering, she slapped the Shield switch to divert energy to the ship’s passive defenses. “Override, off,” she said aloud, talking herself through the checklist while her head cleared. “Sensors, on. Life support, on. Gravity, on. Let’s have a look and see where we are.”
She switched to the Damage Control readout for an assessment of just how bad the trip had been, and decided that Dadda’s little girl could pat herself on the back. Damage was light, and the cargo hadn’t shifted at all.
“Any one you can walk away from, eh, Professor?” Her passenger looked a bit groggy—as well he should after a high-G brake—but his imperturbability was still intact. “I’ve seen worse,” he said.
He worked his hand past the safety webbing into an inner coat pocket, and brought out a second slip of paper.
“Broadcast this recognition signal on this frequency,” he said, handing the paper to Beka, “then listen for the directional beacon you’ll find answering it on this channel. The sooner we get to work, the better.”
Beka made the trip through the asteroid field as quickly as she dared, homing in on the source of the beacon—a big, cave-pocked asteroid. “Dock in the third cave from the elevated pole there,” said her passenger. “Just beside the sunset line.”
She took the
‘Hammer
into the cave at a gentle cruising speed, and watched the rock walls become first smooth stone and then polished metal. Soon the cave was looking more like the docking bay of a small space station.
“Set her down over there.” Her passenger indicated the area next to another small freighter, one that to an unpracticed eye might have been
Warhammer
’s twin.
Beka looked the freighter. “Now I understand what you have in mind.”
“That’s right. Ex-Free Trader
Amsroto
, old
Libra
class. By the time we get done, nobody’ll ever be able to prove that she wasn’t the
’Hammer.”
“That’s going to be a lot of hardware down the drain,” said Beka, as
Warhammer
settled onto the floor of the bay. “And you still haven’t told me how I’m going to pay you for it.”
Her passenger began unbuckling his safety webbing. “Would you believe me, my lady, if I told you I was doing all this out of a sense of obligation to a member of your House?”
“No,” she said flatly. “That stuff died out years ago.”
She thought she heard him sigh. “So it did, Captain. So it did. Do you have the papers listing your hull number and engine numbers?”
Beka undid her own restraining belts and stretched. “In my cabin,” she said. “I’ll bring them out.”
“Right,” said her passenger. “Then you start shifting your cargo to
Amsroto
while I stamp the numbers on her. How soon must we lift out of here, to tow
Amsroto
to Artat on time?”
She checked the cockpit chronometer and punched some figures into the navicomp. “We’ve got six hours forty-nine minutes thirty-five seconds Standard until the jump to hyperspace,” she said. “Make it six hours even to do the job.”
“Let’s move, then.”
By the time she’d fetched
Warhamner
’s papers from the cabin locker and returned to the cockpit, she could see her passenger already waiting by the open entryway of
Amsroto
.
“Works fast, doesn’t he?” she said aloud, and tucked the bundle of papers inside the quilted jacket she’d picked up to take the place of her still-sodden cloak.
The sound of her footsteps on the
’Hammer
’s ramp echoed in the nearly empty bay, and her breath rose in a curl of mist. The Professor—if he was in fact the proprietor of this little hidey-hole—didn’t believe in wasting energy on extra heat.
Out of long habit, she turned to her right at the foot of the ramp. “Let’s have a look at you,” she told the ship. Sensors and damage control comp caught a lot of things a pilot would miss, but … “computers go down, and numbers lie,” her father had said many times. “Always check for yourself.”
In the course of her walk around
Warhammer
, she saw that the hidden bay held a surprising variety of different spaceships. A single-seat fighter, framework tilted at an angle suggesting that its last landing hadn’t been a gentle one, occupied deck space between a meteor-scarred cargo drone and a pleasure yacht decked out like a party cake in blue and silver trimming; and off in a corner beyond a dozen or so other antique craft, a battered-looking Magebuilt scoutship hunched on the deckplates of the bay like a scavenger bird on a rock.
Beka stood very still for a moment, then nodded to herself, slowly, and continued her walk around the
‘Hammer.
By the time she’d finished and walked over to
Amsroto
, the Professor was busy smoothing the serial numbers off one of the hull plates with a hydro-burnisher.
“Have you got
Warhammer
’s papers?” he asked, bending to drop the burnisher into an open tool kit.
“Yes,” she said. She reached into the right-side pocket of her jacket for the miniature blaster that always lived there, and put the business end of the little weapon against the back of his neck.
He froze. Then, with infinite caution, he lifted both hands and placed them flat against Amsroto’s hull.
Beka started breathing again. “Now,” she said. “It’s time you told me what your name really is, and how you wound up with a Mageworld scoutcraft parked in your docking bay.”
“Defiant?”
asked her passenger, sounding imperturbable as ever. “I own her. As for names … names change, and the galaxy has forgotten mine. But I was Armsmaster to House Rosselin, when Entibor was still a living world.”
“I’ll be damned,” said Beka. “Everybody thinks you’re dead.”
“An excusable mistake,” said the Professor. “I … retired abruptly at the end of the war, and didn’t keep up my old acquaintances. My lady, can we abandon this rather awkward conversation for one a bit more civilized?”
“I keep telling you, it’s ‘Captain,’” said Beka, slipping the hand-blaster back into her jacket pocket.
The Professor lowered his arms and faced toward her. “You believe in playing for high stakes, Captain,” he said, turning his right. hand palm-up to disclose a tiny single-charger needler.
Beka closed her eyes and let out her breath in a long, shuddering sigh. “My father always said,” she remarked, “that there was no feeling in the galaxy quite like noticing you were still alive after all. Now I know what he meant.”
The Professor slipped the needler into his coat. “Was all that really necessary, Captain Rosselin-Metadi?”
She took the ’
Hammer
’s papers out from inside her jacket. “Yes,” she said. “I couldn’t think of any other way to learn if I could trust you, except to see whether you killed me or not.”
The Professor took the papers from her outstretched hand—she wasn’t shaking, which surprised her a little—and said, “A bit drastic for most people, but effective. As long as you’ve decided to trust me, Captain, may I trouble you for one thing more?”
“I suppose,” said Beka. “What do you need?”
He made a deprecating gesture with one hand. “Just a small amount of your blood.”
“What the hell for?”
“Additional verisimilitude,” said the Professor. “It’s the little touches that mark the work of an artist. At the same time that I—call it ‘acquired’—
Defiant
, I came into possession of her medical kit as well. Since she was Magebuilt, the kit included an emergency supply of undifferentiated general-purpose tissue.”
“You want to replicate me?” Beka backed off a step, shaking her head. “Oh, no, you don’t!”
The Professor made an exasperated noise. “A Mageworld biochemist with a full laboratory setup might have been able to coax a replicant out of that glop, but I can’t. It’s nothing but first-aid stuff—doesn’t know whether it wants to be a liver or a leg, but slap it onto an open wound instead of tape or syn-thaflesh, and you’ll heal overnight without a scar.”
“Handy,” said Beka. “But the blood—”
“It’s one way to initialize the match,” said the Professor. “
Amsroto
still needs a pilot, after all—or at least, the convincing remains of one.”
Beka nodded, and began to smile. “Professor, I like the way you think.”
A little over sixteen hours later the
’Hammer
—with the newly renamed and reloaded
Amsroto
attached to her belly by landing claw—approached the dropout point for the Artat system. Beka had kept
Warhammer
’s hyperspace velocity down to normal or a little below for this leg of the trip, and the control panel showed mostly green, with only occasional blinks of amber and red in protest at the ship’s doubled mass.
The lights blurred as Beka fought down a massive yawn. She counted back—yes, it had been close to forty-eight hours since the last time she’d gotten any sleep, back when the
’Hammer
had been running on autopilot for Mandeyn.
Good thing there isn’t much more of this. I’m nearly seeing double already.
“Are you sure this is going to work?” she asked the Professor, more to keep her mind from wandering than for any other reason.
“Of course it’ll work,” said her passenger. “No one puts a contract out on a corpse. And every holochannel in the galaxy will carry the news when the rich, famous, and beautiful Beka Rosselin-Metadi spatters herself and her father’s historic spacecraft all over some backworld.”
When Dadda finds out I’m still alive
, Beka thought,
he’s going to kill me for doing this to him
. Aloud, she said, “I’m not rich. Or famous. Or beautiful, either.”
“You will be by the time the news announcers get through with you,” the Professor promised. “As soon as the obsequies are officially over we can go back to Mandeyn and pick up the trail. Whoever wanted you dead, Captain, is almost certainly connected to the one who ordered your mother’s assassination.”
She gave him an inquiring look. “What makes you think you can find either of them?”
“I’ve been a number of other things in my time besides Armsmaster to your House,” the Professor said. “As a professional myself in that line of work—I can find them.”
For a moment there was no sound besides the
’Hammer
’s own ambient noise. “So,” Beka said, when the pause had stretched out long enough, “how do we go about finding our assassin? It’s a big galaxy out there.”
“The easy part,” said the Professor, “is going to be finding the person who actually engineered the job. Only about six people in the business could handle an assassination that subtle—and I didn’t, which leaves five to check on.”
“What’s in all this for you? Last I heard, hired killers didn’t take charity cases.”
She heard her passenger sigh. “Archaic as it sounds, my lady, I swore an oath of loyalty to your House. And no matter what your occupation, you’re still the Domina of Entibor.”