Yesterday's Spacemage

by Timothy Ellis

  "No Thorn. You can't. We have the evidence we need now. He has to be publically exposed."

  I said nothing. There really wasn’t anything to say.

  "You can't kill him," she finished.

  I reluctantly nodded, but I was making no promises. I'd seen a friend violated by someone who should have been completely safe. There would be consequences. I was damn sure going to make sure of it.

  "Don't tell Jen we saw that," she whispered.

  I sighed. Damned right I wouldn’t tell her. I felt like just seeing it meant I’d also violated her, and if it wasn’t for the fury raging through me, I’d have felt sick.

  "What the hell are you two doing?" asked Jen, over the coms, breaking the mood of the moment.

  "Thorn's trying to locate him."

  "Don’t bother. We know where he'll be when we arrive."

  "How?"

  "We just received an invitation."

  Fifty Two

  The ballroom was in an area of the station I hadn't visited last time. The invitation had said black tie, so all the men were in tuxedos, and the women in long dresses. Bow ties and feathers. Nearly eighty percent men, showing just how male dominant this group were.

  Captain and first mate had been invited, but it was Tasha and myself who attended. Tasha gave off command vibes, so passed as a first officer. I was way too young to be captain, but as we mingled and the tactless made jokes or outright asked, Tasha politely dropped a name, with the assumption I was captain because of who my father was. Those who understood, quickly assumed Tasha was the real captain, and she played up to this role, almost ruthlessly. Given the company we were keeping, ruthless equaled competence. But also given the vast majority of the captains were men, the acceptance of Tasha was surprising. To me anyway.

  I kept a sneer on my face, and we mingled. I gained a measure of respect for Tasha, given she was projecting pirate, while dressed in an outfit few marines would be seen dead in. Creating it had been a challenge, but as far as I could see, no-one could tell it hadn't been hand tailored. Likewise with the monkey suit I was wearing, which I couldn’t wait to get out of.

  We made a show of drinking, but in reality, I was removing swallow amounts from both our glasses as we pretended to drink.

  The evening wore on. A band played music, but no-one danced. None of this made any sense to me.

  He was nowhere to be seen, although we knew he must be close by. We mingled, bandied words with those who assumed we were competitors, and inferior, and gauged threat levels.

  Most of the men were armed. All of the women were. None showed. Given what the women were wearing, this was no mean feat.

  At last, he made an entrance, greeting people by name, shaking hands, and making his way slowly towards a podium. We kept well away from him. He looked older in person, and I pondered how some people did get made to look younger by the camera. Of course, some time had passed since the rape vid was made as well.

  With him was a man I recognized from the slave auction, being none other than the auctioneer himself. They were flanked by several guards I also recognized from the auction.

  At the podium, he greeted everyone, welcomed us to this, the first pirate gathering in the new age, and proceeded to invite us to an auction the following day, of slaves and ships of the highest quality ever seen in one place. This, he said, would open proceedings which he hoped would lead to a pirate alliance, which would allow this area of space to be quickly brought under their control.

  Someone asked what the military would be doing while this was going on. The grin which answered, reassured everyone the military had plenty to concern itself with elsewhere, and wouldn’t be a problem.

  I saw skeptical looks on faces, but these quickly vanished. The obviously rehearsed speech went on, and the crowd became more and more enthusiastic.

  I felt my sneer faltering. The words flowed around me, and I stood there desperately trying to keep my fury in check.

  Here stood a rapist, projecting command and authority, and inciting treason and rebellion.

  Finally, the words stopped, and the applause began. I looked around the room, and I saw the worst people imaginable, whipped into a frenzy by a rapist.

  The thought popped in, and I suppressed it.

  At the podium, he had his hands raised, grin in place, suggesting the crowd quiet down for more, while provoking the exact opposite.

  The smug look faltered for a moment, and he looked down.

  The area of his groin was turning red.

  He screamed.

  Fifty Three

  "Oops," I muttered, getting a sharp look of horror from Tasha.

  The man collapsed, and a medical team quickly rushed to his side.

  "No-one move!" yelled a voice, and I looked around to find security people streaming in, and encircling the room.

  No-one moved. We watched as the ring formed, and guns were pointed more or less at, or close to, everyone.

  "You will lay your guns on the ground, now."

  There was a general movement as guns were produced, and either dropped, or laid down. The man who'd ordered this, threaded his way towards me, gun raised. He stopped, his gun pointed at my head.

  "I'm not armed," I said, cutting off the obvious question. "Neither is my first mate."

  His head jerked, and two more approached us. Under the threat of his gun, we were both frisked. They found nothing. The gun lowered, and he moved on to someone else. By the podium, he who would never rape again, was placed on a gurney, and hurriedly wheeled out.

  "What did you do?" whispered Tasha.

  "Not here," I whispered back.

  Frisking over, the guns were all checked. They didn’t appear to find what they expected, which I assumed was a gun recently fired.

  The auctioneer took the podium.

  "Gentlemen and ladies, you may return to your accommodations and ships. The auction will commence on schedule tomorrow."

  He stepped down, and retreated from the room. People began to leave, without their guns. We waited until the rush eased, and left ourselves, walking in no hurry back to the ship.

  For the first time, I was now worried about my magic. Everything up until now, as far as I knew, had been done with very deliberate intent. Now I’d done something without direction, based on a mere thought, which was dismissed as soon as it popped in. And yet, the magic happened.

  It wasn’t that I'd just castrated a man with a mere thought, it was a sense of horror at what I could potentially do with a stray unguarded thought now.

  Tasha took my arm as we walked, not looking at me, but the horror on her face perhaps matching my own.

  I knew I could kill with a thought. I'd accepted that. But killing on an unguarded whim, was now not only possible, but unless checked, very likely. Who knew how much chaos and damage I could do if I really got angry, and lost my temper? Had gun man actually hurt me with his gun, or search guy touched me in the wrong place, I could have killed everyone there before I even knew I’d done it.

  My mind raced as we walked back. The more I thought about it, the more concerned I became.

  They were waiting for us at the airlock. I walked in without saying anything. I'd remote sent the entire event to the main screen on the main bridge, and they knew what had happened.

  When I reached the main lounge room, I sank into a chair. Tasha sat next to me, and the rest followed.

  "What did you do Thorn?"

  Jen's tone was curious.

  "I got angry for a moment."

  "And?"

  "And in that moment, the thought popped in for a split second."

  "What thought?"

  "That rapists should be castrated. Only my definition is a little wider than the normal one."

  There was silence for a full minute.

  "You didn’t?"

  "Yes I did. He won't be raping anyone, ever again."

  "Why not?" asked Lea, who didn’t seem to be keeping up.

  "You know what's between a
man's legs?" Jen asked her.

  "Sure."

  "He doesn’t have anything anymore," I said quickly. "Just three open wounds."

  There was silence again.

  It was broken by Jen and Jess high fiving.

  Fifty Four

  "No," I said. "Count me out."

  It was several hours later, and they'd been discussing what to do the following day. I'd stayed out of the discussion. Several times I’d left it to get drinks.

  Part of me wanted to get drunk. Another part of me was terrified of the consequences if I did. Even just one beer might be the loss of enough self-control to have tragic consequences.

  I drank water. And I made damned sure it stayed water.

  The only thing I agreed on, was the best time to take action, was as the auction started. For the rest, I was somewhat shocked at what they planned to do.

  I shouldn’t have been. They were all military. The troops went in with guns, and guns tended to be fired. In this case, pirates were the bad guys, and there were scores to settle. But early on I’d pulled my pad out, and looked up the station's statistics.

  Sure, the station was run by pirates. But it was owned by a mining company, and they actually had a bounty out for anyone who could take control back for them. Not something I could look up myself, but I'd whispered to Tasha to find out who owned the place, and she'd transferred the results to my pad.

  Of the population living here, more than eighty percent were civilians, who had nothing at all to do with piracy. They suffered under an oppressive security force, but as I'd seen last time I was here, it was just the same as any other station to live on.

  If we went in all guns blazing, the civilian casualties were going to be high. The plan as outlined so far wasn’t quite that bad, but it may as well have been, in my mind.

  The kicker was the plan for the auction space. Go in. Shoot everyone.

  No.

  "I agree with Thorn," said Tasha.

  "You don’t get a vote," said Sasha. "We're here to shut this place down. It's what we came onto this ship for. You agreed when we first discussed it."

  "I'm not going to fire indiscriminately into a crowd."

  "We don’t need to," I added.

  They looked at me. I looked at Jen. She wasn’t happy.

  "This is my call," she said.

  "This is your revenge, you mean. Jen, he's gone, shipped off to a medical facility. I know you want him dead, but he got what he deserved, and living with it is going to be a bigger punishment for him than dying would be."

  She glared at me.

  "I know you want the people who stripped you naked in public, and sold you like meat, to pay, and by pay you mean killed. But if you do this, you become as bad as they are."

  She still looked unhappy, but the glare was gone.

  "Besides, there's another way."

  "What?"

  I told them.

  Fifty Five

  It was a long night. For everyone.

  The easy part for me was copying the data storage for each ship docked at the station. Jess linked them all up to our ever growing intelligence computer, and everyone but me had their pad synced so they could check what was there.

  The first thing we had to establish was if any of the ships were not pirates. The definition of pirate had been widened to include any ship carrying slaves, without any other evidence of actual piracy being necessary. And for those which were, we needed any evidence they had stored away.

  While the data search was going on, I viewed every ship looking for obvious slaves. When I found them, I put what I could see up on the screen on my bridge, and Tasha took images, from which we hoped to identify individual people. Especially against missing person's records from the stations we'd visited so far. The searches were then added to the data collection tasks.

  In the small hours of the morning, I shifted to identifying all the security personnel on the station. Those who were asleep in their beds were easiest to deal with. Sealed doors, and severed coms lines, would keep them isolated until everything was over.

  I made note of those scheduled to head for bed as soon as the shift changed in the morning, and left magic intent on their doors, to seal them in as soon as they closed doors behind them, and sever their coms at the same time.

  This probably wouldn’t work, as those relieving them wouldn’t show up. But it was worth the effort, even if it just trapped a few. The less we had to deal with the better.

  I identified every place on the station where security were located, or regularly patrolled, and prepared to isolate them as well.

  The next step was the really long boring part. I had to cover every ship again, and the whole station, rendering every single weapon useless.

  By the morning, we were all on stimulants of one sort or another, but we had what we needed.

  Every ship docked here with people on board but ours, had a slave on board, and we'd identified at least one slave on each ship as being someone reported missing. Several on different ships were linked to the same missing ship. Several of the ships were missing ships, with new ID's overlaid cleverly. Another five were actually missing ships, with their actual ID's intact. The assumption was, they were providing the slaves for the auction, and the ships were to be auctioned after them.

  The pity was, nothing we collected would stand up in a court. But it wouldn’t matter, because it was all still there to be discovered by more appropriate authorities. And then it would.

  As the station shifted into day time mode, and security people began to be noticed as not turning up for work, while others who'd just ended their shifts dropped off the coms, the marines geared up.

  I rechecked the locations they would start from, making sure they were empty. We had three main targets, and four teams to target them.

  "Thorn," said Jen, over the coms, "we're ready for you."

  I didn’t bother responding. I simply moved myself to where she was waiting with the others near the airlock. The marines were back in uniform.

  Sasha was leading the first team. I walked over to her, and held my arm out. She slipped a hand over mine. A ring formed with the rest of the squad, as they also put a hand on top of a hand. Most of the hands were inside metal.

  "Ready?" I asked.

  Sasha nodded. I rechecked the store room, found it still empty, and moved us there. I dropped my hand, and shifted myself back. The second group, led by the Sergeant, did the same thing, as did the third, led by Tasha.

  When I materialized next to Jen once more, it was just us, Jess, and Lea left. They were dressed in security uniforms, and had the only security side arms still working. Jen looked at me, and opened her mouth.

  "No," I said, cutting her off. "If you take assault rifles, you'll only be tempted to use them. I won't sanction casualties if they can be avoided. Revenge doesn’t require bloodshed. There are far worse fates than being dead, and I for one intend to deliver them. Are you with me?"

  What I didn’t say was, if she used her side arm for anything other than self-defense, I'd take it away from her.

  It could be said Jen wasn’t very happy with me. But enough of the others had endorsed my plan to make her see her way wasn’t the best way of handling things. Her way we ended up in jail cells ourselves. My way we had options which didn’t include incarceration.

  I was finally getting a handle on Jen. She was a very good ship captain. But her emotions were too raw to let her be anything more.

  And for the first time since my first desperate jump, I was using the strategic and tactical skills which had me winning the wargames during my testing period. It felt so long ago now, part of another life. But the skills I’d learned then, were here with me now.

  For a moment I wondered if my ego was getting the better of me. Perhaps, perhaps not. Time would tell. But for now, it was my plan, and I didn’t intend to lose.

  "Fine then," said Jen. "Let's get going."

  Fifty Six

  The auction started on
time.

  I could see a small amount of concern on the face of the auctioneer's face as he emerged, but it was quickly gone, replaced by arrogance and showmanship. He took his place at the podium, and beamed around the room.

  I wasn’t really paying attention, as the action wasn’t happening here. Yet.

  Sasha and her troops made a clean sweep of the main security offices, taking everyone into custody, and locking them in their own cells. Most of them had pulled guns, and been horrified when they failed to fire. Satisfied no-one was going anywhere, by the expedient of having them all strip to their underwear, thus removing pockets, and anything in them, Sasha moved out to find and neutralize the remaining security officers patrolling the station.

  At the same time, the Sergeant's team swept into the slave pens. Security there also discovered their guns didn’t work, and several of them decided to fight. You couldn’t even call it a fight really, as armour simply pounded them into the deck. The rest surrendered, were also stripped to their underwear, and left locked in the smallest of the slave cages.

  While the big mouth at the podium was rabbiting on, the controls for the slave collars were identified, and the collars removed.

  One slave went up to the Sergeant, and identified himself as the senior ship captain there. Within minutes, all of them were on their way to his ship, the marines acting as an escort. I double checked there was no-one on board, and had the airlock open, and waiting for them. But I also made sure the engines would not turn on, so the ship couldn’t leave. They, and their testimony, would be needed later.

  I nodded to Jen, who was positioned not far away from the podium, facing outward as if monitoring the crowd, but in actual fact, making sure her face couldn’t be seen from the podium. She nodded back, and the four of us made eye contact with each other, the others being spread around the area.

  The auctioneer announced lot one, and made a big flourish, expecting the first slave to be brought to the block. Nothing happened. He announced the first slave again, and nothing continued to happen. His grin faded a little.