“Somehow,” he murmured to himself, “I don’t think much of my chances of getting hot
sulg
out of this box.”
“I make them a thousand twenty-four to one against,” said a familiar voice behind him.
He half-turned, and saw Beka sliding into the other side of the booth.
Looks tike I wasn’t the only one awake after all
, he thought. “Are you telling me that every combination produces a different drink?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t tried the whole thousand-odd to make sure. But so far, they’ve all been different—and some of them are damned weird, let me tell you. But I do know the combo that nets cha’a. Want some?”
“Sure,” he said. “And thanks.”
He cradled the resultant mug of steaming cha’a between his hands. During local night, a distinct chill tended to settle over the mostly empty base. “It’s late,” he said. “And you’ll be piloting tomorrow. What are you still doing up?”
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “So I decided to take a walk and do some thinking.” She sipped at her own mug of cha’a, and half-smiled at him through the steam. “What’s your excuse?”
“I was just over in the game room having a go at Deathworld,” he said. “The Professor’s got a better version here than any commercial one I’ve ever played, but I still get nailed in the same place every time. I know the solution’s got something to do with the pair of opera tickets, but I can’t figure out how to get past the door with the combination lock.”
“Violence isn’t an answer?”
“When I try violence, I get caught even quicker. But I have an idea for the next time I play … .”
He lapsed into silence. Beka sipped her cha’a for a while, then slid back the chair and stood. “Are you planning to open Deathworld back up?”
“Not right now.”
“Like to walk around a bit?”
He looked up from his cha’a. “Why not?” he said, after a moment. He put his mug down onto the table and stood up. “Lead on, Captain.”
Ari gave the pillow a disgusted punch and sat up in bed. “The hell with it.”
A red light blinked in the darkness, marking where the valet robot stood at rest by the door. “Yes, sir?”
“Is anybody else still awake?”
More lights blinked, and Ari caught the faint sound of electronic beepings as the robot and its series-mates conferred. “Yes, sir.”
“Good,” said Ari, swinging his legs over the side of the bed onto the carpet. “There wouldn’t be a night-robe of some sort around, would there?”
“One moment, sir,” the robot said, and trundled over into the closet. It came out again with a pair of soft shoes and a dark robe in the same thick-piled fabric as the enormous bath towels. “Will this do?”
“Admirably, and thank you.” Ari stood up, belted the robe around him, and slid his feet into the shoes. “Can you tell me where I can find whoever’s up?”
“I’m not sure, sir,” the robot said. “Lieutenant-Commander Jessan left his chambers some time ago for the game room. But according to the gaming log, the commander played only one round of Deathworld and then closed the room down.”
“So he’s still up,” said Ari. “Maybe I’ll run-into him. What about the others?”
More blinking and beeping. “They appear to be wakeful as well, sir. Captain Rosselin-Metadi, for example, has been sighted in several locations by the maintenance units.”
“And the Professor?”
“I can’t say, sir,” the valet said. “He left instructions that he was not to be disturbed under any circumstances short of a threat to the physical security of the base.”
Ari shrugged. The Entiboran wouldn’t have made a very good late-night companion anyhow. “And what do your series-mates tell you about Mistress Hyfid?”
“I’m afraid, sir, that she is no longer in her room, and therefore she must have left it—though her valet did not see her leave.”
“Tell him not to overload his circuits worrying about it,” Ari said. “She’s an Adept. That means if she didn’t want anyone to notice her, they wouldn’t. Someday let me tell you about my younger brother who walks through force fields.”
After a pause, the robot said, “I thank you for the advice, sir. In addition, Mistress Hyfid, wherever she may in fact be, has taken her staff with her.”
“She’s an Adept,” said Ari. “She probably sleeps with the damned thing.”
He started for the doors. “If you could show me the way as far as that game room you mentioned, I can probably handle the rest. From what you tell me, I’m bound to find somebody. awake somewhere.”
His wanderings with Beka, Jessan realized, had brought him into a portion of the base that he didn’t recognize. Beka seemed familiar with it, though, and the Khesatan was content to follow her lead. She strode along the dim . passages without speaking, her hands shoved into the pockets of her quilted jacket, its collar turned up against the chill. Finally, she gave him a sideways glance he couldn’t interpret.
“What are you doing here, anyway?” she asked. “I know why the Professor is with me, and I know what brings Ari into it—and Mistress Hyfid is an Adept, which means she has her own reasons for everything. But this isn’t even your quarrel, and you’ve turned down the chance to get out of it twice already.”
“Well,” he said, “for one thing, they burned down my clinic.”
She looked away from him, toward the floor. “That was my fault,” she said. “And I’m sorry—not that ‘sorry’ is going to do you much good.”
“What else could you have done?” he asked. “Besides, rendering aid to distressed spacers is in the Medical Service charter. Read the fine print if you don’t believe me.”
“I believe you,” she said. “I’m still sorry. You were proud of that place, weren’t you?”
“I never thought about it much,” he said. “But I suppose I was.”
She gave a soft laugh. “Nyls Jessan holding down a paying job. What would they say on Khesat if they knew?”
“The Professor’s been telling tales, I see.”
“Come on,” she said. “I grew up with galactic politics. Maybe there’s more than one family with a name like yours—but there’s only one family that counts.”
“Damn,” he said. “My secret’s discovered. How did I manage to give the game away?”
She smiled at him. “Tell me every Space Force medic has the royal bloodlines for the civilized galaxy on the tip of his tongue, and I’ll call you a liar to your face. And Crown Prince Jamil was too good to be anything but real. Which of your relatives was he, anyway?”
“Now that,” he said, “would be telling.”
“So why aren’t you doing something like that yourself right now—losing a few hundred credits at cards between teatime and dinner, instead of getting ready to go get slaughtered?”
He shrugged. “Because I got so good at cards that nobody would play with me, and the rest bores me out of my mind. Why didn’t you stay on Galcen and play Domina of Lost Entibor for the rest of your life?”
The humor went out of her face as he watched. “Because I spent seventeen years watching my mother die by inches every time she had to put on her damned tiara and be a prop for idiots to play sick little nostalgic games around. And I wasn’t going to let them do that to me. So I left.”
“On the first freighter out of Galcen?”
“Something like that,” she said.
She had stopped walking, and stood with one hand reaching out toward the lockplate of a door indistinguishable from any of the others along that stretch of corridor. “I had my pilot’s license—I got it the day I came of age, and the examiner knew better than to ask how I’d already managed to practice without being legally old enough—and I was good. Once people stopped asking questions about my name and let me show what I could do, I never had any trouble finding a job.”
Beka still hadn’t palmed the lockplate. She seemed uncertain about something, which wasn’t like her at all. Jessan raised an eyebrow. “What’s on the other side—more holoprojections? Or pit traps and deadfalls?”
She shook her head. “I’ll show you, if you’re curious.”
“Always,” he said. “My fatal flaw—next to talking to much, of course.”
She gave him a quick glance, and palmed the lock. The door slid open.
They entered a dim, unfurnished room. A few large cushions lay scattered about, and the floor itself felt springy under Jessan’s feet. In the far corner he spotted a pile of blankets, neatly folded.
“Your room?” he guessed.
She nodded.
“It’s not much like the others.”
“I don’t like fake scenery,” she said. “But watch.”
She pressed a wall plate near her hand, and all the lights went out, leaving the room in total, cavernous blackness. He heard a low humming noise—and then the ceiling split from side to side, like massive jaws opening to let in the stars.
The gap opened wider and wider as the walls rolled down, until the floor floated on the starry void like a tiny square of light. Jessan heard a distant keening like a high wind, and a cold breeze stirred his hair.
ventilation systems,
he told himself, but he shivered anyway.
“This used to be the observation deck, I think,” said Beka. “But I sleep here when the ’
Hammer
’s docked.”
“I can see why,” Jessan said. “It’s beautiful.”
“It’s all I ever wanted,” she said. “My own ship, and the freedom of the stars, with nothing to hold me back … damn it, Nyls, why does everything always have to cost so much?”
Something in her voice drew his eyes away from the glory blazing above them both. He saw the silvery tracks of tears on her pale cheeks, and shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “It just does.”
He reached out a hand to touch her shoulder, and found that she was trembling. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I wish I could help.”
She put her hand up to grasp his wrist. “Then don’t go. Please.”
He bent his head and kissed her, and stood back a little, waiting.
She looked at him for a moment, her lean, angular features as unreadable as ever. Then he felt the warmth of her hands on either side of his face as she drew his lips back again to hers.
I
N THE Entiboran room, Llannat stepped away from the table and leaned her staff against her chair. “Just a moment. Formal blacks weren’t really designed to practice in.”
She took off the jacket and hung it over the back of her chair, so that she stood dressed like her opponent in shirt and trousers alone. Then she retrieved her staff and came to guard, holding the weapon two-handed at the horizontal before her.
Green fire flickered to life in the air about her, but she was careful not to draw more power into herself than befitted a match between friends. Working with all the energy at one’s disposal had a lethal beauty that could dazzle onlookers—she’d seen Master Ransome and Ari’s brother, Owen, spar that way once or twice, for the edification of students at the Retreat—but a match like that demanded control far beyond her own.
A few feet away from her, the Professor also picked up his staff. The silver and ebony rod was much shorter than hers, and plainly meant for one-handed use. He held it loosely, almost casually, but the power of his aura flowed about him in streamers of deep violet against in the moonlight.
“Shall we begin?” he asked.
Llannat nodded, and waited for the Professor to come to the guard position in his turn. The shift to guard never came. Instead, the former Magelord moved without warning, striking for the left side of her head with his ebony staff.
Llannat blocked high and to the left.
The Professor must have anticipated the classic reply. He dropped the tip of his ebony rod to pass below her block, and his attack came back in toward her right cheek.
She shifted her block to the right. The Professor, still holding the rod in that loose-looking one-hand grip, let it return to vertical. His next attack threatened her unprotected abdomen. In response, she pushed her staff straight forward and down against his, but the Professor neither stepped backward nor extended his attack. Instead, he spun his weapon outward with a quick twist of his wrist.
The violet aura around him flared high, and Llannat felt her weapon snatched from her hands. The flickering green light of her own summoning vanished as her staff clattered against the opposite wall.
The Professor crossed over to the fallen staff, picked it up, and handed it back to Llannat. “Shall we try again?”
She drew a deep breath, and took position. “I’m ready.”
Once more, the Professor stood with the ebony rod held loosely at his side. The other hand rested lightly on his hip. “Begin,” he said.
For a long time, neither of them moved. Power flickered around them in a glowing nimbus of green and violet. At last the Professor attacked, the end of his short staff flashing toward Llannat’s left side in a whistling blur.
She blocked. The staves touched; then, somehow, the Professor’s ebony rod was coming in toward her other flank. She blocked again, the two weapons kissed in a flare of green and violet light—and the Professor’s staff flashed over to strike at the left side of her face.
Llannat blocked left.
This time, though, there was no moment of contact with the other weapon. Instead, she felt the ebony staff tap lightly first against her left leg, and then against her right. Too late, she dropped her guard downward to counter the blows—and felt the light contact a third time on the side of her neck.
“You win,” she said, lowering her staff. “I’m dead.”
The Professor stepped back, and bowed to her in salute. “Mistress, attack me. I shall do no more than defend myself.”
“Right,” said Llannat, and swung her staff down toward the Professor’s head.
He blocked it with ease. She followed with a quick series of blows from either end of her staff. They filled the air with the whistling of their passage, but the Professor met them all without shifting his stance. Only his right hand and his extended arm moved at all, catching and deflecting each stroke as it came.
At length, Llannat took a step back and regarded the Professor. He appeared calm and unruffled. Her own forehead and neck ran with sweat, even in the chill of the base’s night, and her breath came in shallow gasps.
“Mistress,” inquired the soft voice, with its incongruous Entiboran accent, “where is your guard?”
Llannat took in her stance. She was out of line, and badly extended. She shook her head, and came back into position.
“Choose a line and guard it,” said the Professor. “I can’t attack you through a closed line.” He emphasized his point with a series of slashing attacks to Llannat’s right side—all of them falling, without any movement of her own, onto the staff she carried. “But try to guard all, and you guard none. Now—what line do you guard?”
“My right flank.”
“Wrong!”
The Professor swung harder than before, and this time the strength of his blow pushed Llannat’s staff away before it, so that she felt the sting of his blow against her ribs. “What line do you guard?”
Llannat shifted her grip, so that she held her staff tightly in front of her. “My head.”
“Again wrong!” The Professor’s weapon circled low, and the end tapped her leg just above the knee. “Your head is not in danger. What line do you guard?”
Llannat felt a hot rush of blood to her face—anger? humiliation?—and struck out with one end of her staff at the Professor’s neck. “
You
tell
me.
”
The Professor caught the blow and allowed her staff to slide down his as he stepped forward. Now, with the staves caught between them, the young Adept and the grey-haired Magelord stood heart to heart in the long, moonlit hall.
“Guard against anger, Mistress,” he said, low-voiced. “It’s a waste of energy, and it insults the power you bear.”
This time she knew that the heat under her skin was embarrassment, because she’d managed to forget the first thing anybody had ever told her about the Adept’s art.
“Don’t ever lose your temper when you’re working with power,” she remembered Master Ransome saying to a group of new apprentices that had included a confused young ensign from the Medical Service. “Somebody always gets hurt.”
Now the Professor nodded over their crossed staves. “I see you remember.”
Without warning, he stepped back, and resumed his one-handed guard position.
I’ve seen that guard before
, thought Llannat. Not at the Retreat, she was sure—she’d have remembered something like that, if it had ever shown up during those long hours of drill in the practice yard.
Not at the Retreat, no, but twice since, once in a clearing on Nammerin and a second time here on this asteroid, when she had been deep in her visionary trance. Whoever she had been that time, she herself had used that same short weapon, the same stance and grip.
This one’s power is weak
, she could remember her adversary /self thinking.
She doesn’t really believe.
But the frightened and unbelieving young Adept sent by Master Ransome to guard Ari Rosselin-Metadi had stayed at her post just the same—and Ari’s blaster bolt had cut down the Mage as he raised his arm for the killing blow.
Now, standing in the moonlight of an Entibor that never was, she smiled with sudden understanding.
There’s no such thing as luck or chance … and there’s power in everyone, even a seven-foot Galcenian who claims to be about as sensitive as a brick, or a Space Force medic from a border planet where there hasn’t been an Adept born for as far back as the Forest Lords can remember … .
The insight flooded through her like a rush of light, and for a brief, dizzying second she could feel the universe itself, surrounding her and within her at the same time.
“I think you begin to understand,” the Professor said. “Now shall we spar in earnest?”
Once more, Llannat took a guard position, this time with her staff held vertical by her right side, and waited. Still buoyed up by her moment of realization, she sensed the Professor’s blow coming at her a second or more before his staff began to move. Her own staff turned with his as he tried to come under her guard.
Their auras flared high around them, surges of green and violet mingling in patterns of fire against the dark. Rather than step back, she lunged with the end of her staff, forcing the Professor to give ground. When he tried to beat her weapon aside, she dropped the tip so that he contacted only air.
“You see,” he said. “You’ve learned one important lesson. Now let me teach you another.”
The Professor whirled to the right, ducking under her blow and stabbing upward. She gave ground rather than take a hit to the arm, and felt her sense of oneness with the universe slipping away under the pressure of the immediate.
The Professor seemed to feel it slipping, too. He redoubled his attack. Once more, the unfamiliar rhythms of his fighting style began to dance around her Adept-trained blocks.
Llannat stepped back, and opened herself to power. The sensation of including and being included in the bright oneness that was the universe flowed out of its cramped little corner of memory and filled her as it had before.
It doesn’t go away after all,
she thought.
It’s always there if you look for it.
She turned her awareness outward again, and was surprised to see that she was attacking, moving in hard with fast, arcing swings that started back behind the shoulder. The Professor was slipping each blow, his staff redirecting the force of each smashing stroke outward and away from him, but he was giving ground just the same.
Llannat pressed her attack, forcing the Professor backward step by step until his shoulders touched the far wall. She closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them again, the Professor stood pressed against the wainscoting, pinned by the light but unwavering pressure of the center of her staff against the flesh of his throat.
The Entiboran Magelord smiled. “Now, Mistress, I yield.”
If everybody’s awake,
thought Ari, sliding into the booth in the after-hours galley,
you sure couldn’t prove it by me
.
So far the breakfast nook, the main dining area, and the game room had all turned up empty. If there hadn’t been two half-empty mugs of cha’a still warm on the table in front of him, Ari might have begun to suspect that the valet robot and its cohorts had been mistaken.
He stabbed a few buttons at random on the drink machine. A mug slid into position under the spout to receive a stream of blue liquid. Hot
sulg
, he guessed, from the look of it, and an experimental sip proved him right. He tried to remember what buttons he’d pushed—Jessan might be interested, since his friend was always claiming he hadn’t been able to find good
sulg
since he’d left Khesat.
Ari gave up experimentation after his first try at a repeat garnered him a bowl of something black and sludgy that smelled like it ought to be repairing potholes in a landing pad. Instead, he sat watching steam rise off the azure surface of the
sulg
. His self-inflicted insomnia still hadn’t left him, and he toyed with the idea of going back to the game room and having a go at one of the simulations himself.
It’s not real, but it passes the time.
Another of the Professor’s robots came up to the table and began clearing away the two half-empty mugs.
“Wait a minute—can you tell me how long those have been here?” asked Ari.
“I really can’t say, sir,” said the robot. “I was last by about a Standard hour ago.”
“And they weren’t here then?”
“That’s correct, sir.”
Ari looked again at the two mugs. Both of them held straight black cha’a.
One of them’s likely to be Jessan’s,
he thought.
This is the first place anybody would hit after the game room, and he drinks his cha’a black. The Professor’s incommunicado somewhere, and Llannat drinks her cha’a with sugar and milk when she can get them … which leaves Bee.
“You can go on with your cleanup,” he told the robot. “And take the
sulg
and that black stuff with you.”
“Yes, sir,” said the robot, and trundled off.
Air watched it disappear into the darkness beyond the bright lights of the little galley. So his sister and Jessan were off nightwalking somewhere … he tried to decide just how he felt about that, and realized he wasn’t certain.
Their problem, not mine,
he told himself, standing up again.
Seems like Llannat’s the only one not accounted for. I’ll take one more look around; if she doesn’t turn up she’s probably gone back to bed, and I can spend the rest of the night in the game room practicing up to get killed.