The Price of the Stars: Book One of Mageworlds by Debra Doyle, James D. MacDonald Read Free Book Online Page A

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.

III. ASTEROID BASE ARTAT NEARSPACE NAMMERIN: NAMPORT
     
    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