“I have a man who can carve the rune for you,” Erena offered breathlessly. “He is careful, his hands steady. Think of it – immense power, and it is yours!”
“How many of those you’ve carved it upon have died?” Damien asked flatly, and the shopkeeper jerked back in surprise. “This rune was tied to the life and power of the man who wielded it – upon any other Mage; it would be a death sentence.”
“How do you… how did you?” Erena was thrown completely off, and then was silent for a long moment as both of them stared at the tanned skin before them. “Well, that explains that, doesn’t it?” the shopkeeper said finally. “Thought it was just bad luck.”
“This thing is bad luck,” Damien told Erena. “Just think what a Hand would do if they learned you had this.” He considered. “I’ll take it off your hands – before anyone comes back looking for revenge.”
The shopkeeper drew up to an impressive height. “I give nothing for free!”
Damien sighed, and quoted a figure. It was less than the shield bracelet had been labeled for, and Erena winced – only to wilt as he looked back at the human skin with its inlaid silver.
“Done. Take it and be gone.”
The box scanners re-keyed, Damien paid Erena and left. Under his arm was the last remnant of a man who had died for the Protectorate and part of him was grimly determined to see it returned home.
The rest of him wondered if he could do what Erena couldn’t – and somehow make use of the rune.
#
“Lord Azure.”
“Yes, Mister Wong,” Mikhail Azure replied. Floating in the middle of his private zero-gravity sanctum, he opened his eyes to look calmly at the Captain of his warship.
“I have completed my assessment,” Wong told him, standing just inside the door of the room, holding onto the edge of the door as he return his master’s gaze. “I have identified our destination.”
“Our destination is the Blue Jay,” Azure told him, his eyes sharp as he tried to read the other man’s inscrutable pose.
“Perhaps I should say the Jay’s destination,” Wong said, unfazed. “They made a point eight light year jump to an uninhabited star system.”
“Then prepare the ship for jump,” the crime lord instructed. “You do not need me for that, Mister Wong.”
The old Tracker remained standing in the door, silent, for a long moment before speaking again.
“You know, My Lord,” he said quietly, “that there are things from my old life that I am not permitted to speak to you of. Oaths I have sworn that are not superseded by my vows to you.”
Azure considered. He vaguely recalled that Wong, previously one of the most dangerous bounty hunters in the galaxy, had warned him of such things when he had entered Azure’s service. The man had delivered two decades of loyal and valuable work since, and the crime lord had mostly forgotten.
“You would not be reminding me of this without a point,” he said softly.
“I am privy, through the Hunters, to information that would be of immense value to your operations,” Wong said calmly. “Certain codes, certain ciphers, certain markers are known to me, and I have kept my eyes and ears open. My oaths to my brothers have kept me silent until now, but with the opportunity now before us I would betray my oaths to you if I kept silent.”
A flicker of power brought Azure’s feet to the ground and he crossed to the wall. He tapped a command, and an image of the stars outside the cruiser suddenly covered the wall. Azure looked out to the abyss around them, and drew patience from infinity. His back still to Wong, he spoke softly.
“What opportunity, Wong?”
“Rice has fled to Darkport,” the ex-bounty hunter said in a single rush of breath.
Azure looked out at the stars, and a cold smile spread across his face. Darkport – the center of Casa Nostra’s power. From that hidden colony, the old Mafia Families stretched their power across the Protectorate, and challenge the Syndicate at every turn. To them, the Blue Star Syndicate – his Syndicate, the most powerful crime organization in the galaxy – was a mere newcomer to the scene.
“An opportunity indeed,” he agreed. “What do you know of their defenses?”
“They were built to withstand a full squadron of Martian destroyers,” Wong told him. “The Azure Gauntlet is almost half again that squadron’s mass, and double its firepower. An assault on the station itself would be more difficult.”
“Do we have the men?” Azure asked, considered the stars. The Blue Jay was a more valuable prize than Darkport, but if he could take both, it would be well worth the risk.
“We would need time to prepare,” Wong replied. “Most of my crew have combat training, but we would need to refresh them and fabricate arms and armor for them.”
“How long?”
“Twelve hours,” the Tracker explained. “I did not wish to jump to Darkport without knowing if you planned to seize it or simply pursue the Blue Jay.”
“Oh, my dear Mister Wong,” Mikhail Azure told him as he turned to face Wong, a cold smile on his face. “With your well-timed warning, I believe we can do both.”
#
Rice called a staff meeting as soon as he and Damien had returned to the Blue Jay. His meeting with the ship parts dealer on Darkport had been even more productive than he’d hoped, and he’d returned to the ship with a briefcase full of details. He’d noticed the young Mage had acquired a similar case of his own, but Damien had been unusually non-committal when asked about it.
The youth had disappeared when they’d arrived back at the ship, but was still one of the first to arrive in the conference room on Rib A. Kellers, Jenna and Mike Kelzin drifted in shortly after the Mage. David waited for everyone to finish seating themselves, and then opened the briefcase to pull out the datachips he’d been provided.
“We have a lot of work to get done in a short time,” he told them, “so I’ll give you the quick rundown.”
“I’ve acquired several weapon systems we’re going to get mounted on the Blue Jay,” he continued. The cost of said systems was still boggling him, but that wasn’t his crew’s issue. Thanks to the LMID’s payment for the Chrysanthemum shipment, he could afford it, but it was going to gut his reserves.
“First, we’re getting two military-grade battle lasers.” David pulled an icon over from one of the datachips, flipping a blue highlighted wireframe of the weapons onto the image of the ship on the big screen behind the table. “These are two gigawatt pulse lasers, used by the Navy’s last generation of destroyers.” He looked at Kellers. “James, I’m assuming we can run them through the radiation cap without too many issues. The specs are on the chips,” he gestured towards the pile of datachips he’d dumped out of the briefcase, “so let me know ASAP if that isn’t the case.”
“Those beams are energy hogs like you won’t believe, boss,” the dark-skinned chief engineer warned. “I don’t know if we can feed them from our current plant.”
“I know we can’t,” David agreed. “The next piece we’re getting after those two is a new five gigawatt fusion plant, the exact same model as our current reactor. The dealer says – and I count on you tell me if he’s wrong – that we can basically bolt the reactor section on as a module at the front of the ship, replacing a bunch of our cargo space. Since we don’t have the tanker anymore…”
“We have over a quarter of our cargo pylons free,” Kellers agreed. “We’ll need to re-arrange the containers we have left.”
“My boys will take care of it,” Kelzin, the ship’s First Pilot, interjected. “I don’t know about anyone else, but I don’t trust this place with cargo.”
“I’m unhappy enough trusting them to cut through the rad cap to install lasers,” Jenna agreed dryly. “You sure about this, boss?”
“Any work here comes with the implicit warning that if they screw us too badly, we can always reveal Darkport to the authorities,” David reminded them all. “It’s true both ways, and everybody knows it. We’ll keep an eye on them,
and we don’t let them anywhere near Damien’s simulacrum chamber, but I think we can trust them to do the work cleanly.”
“I’m still moving the cargo myself,” the Pilot told him, and David laughed.
“Fine,” he agreed. “We’ll have a new pod arriving this evening too – we’re getting a container of Tempest XI smart missiles. Four hundred of them.”
“And just what are we doing with fusion-drive kinetic impacters, boss?” Jenna asked.
“We’re receiving four ten-bird external racks in the morning,” David explained with a grin. “Mount them on the Ribs; we can fire anything from a single missile to all forty of them. No bounty hunter’s modified yacht is going to take forty missiles, even kinetic impacters, and keep coming.”
“What about targeting?” Jenna asked. “We don’t have military-grade sensors, or a missile telemetry suite.”
“Hence the Tempests,” David told her. “They’re fire and forget weapons – we feed them a target at launch and they fly the rest of the way on their own. We’ll need to upgrade and integrate some software,” he admitted, and then gestured at the pile of chips again. “Software for both the lasers and the Tempests is in the pile.”
“LaMonte is our best programmer,” Kellers told him. “I’ll loose her on it – sorry Damien!”
“I can live with my girlfriend programming the guns that will help keep us alive,” the young Mage replied dryly. “That’s a lot of things for everybody else. What do you need me to do?”
“Keep an eye on everything,” David told him. “With your link into the ship, you’re the most likely one to catch if the installers do something we don’t want. Plus, if any of the hunters decides to ignore the bounty ban – or the Falcones themselves decide we’re worth coming after us – you’re still our first line of defense.”
“I’m looking forward to us having guns,” Damien replied. “A defense other than me sounds great.”
David shook his head at the Mage.
“We’ll have our missiles aboard within the hour, and our installers are arriving at nine Olympus Standard tomorrow morning,” he told his officers. “That’s fourteen hours from now – and we need to be ready. Let’s get to it!”
#
Damien was awoken late that night when Kelly finally slipped into the quarters they’d quietly started sharing. It wasn’t a large enough ship that anyone didn’t know they were in a relationship, and his quarters as the Ship’s Mage and Second Officer were noticeably larger than those assigned to the most junior of three Assistant Engineers.
The petite engineer tried not to wake him, but with all of the concerns the senior officers had over Darkport, the young Mage was wound tightly and sleeping lightly. When he heard a noise, he flicked the lights on with a gesture and a touch of power, to catch his girlfriend halfway through undressing in the dark.
“What the?!” she exclaimed, but then turned a green-eyed glare on her boyfriend. “Some warning before you do that would be nice,” she told him. “I was hoping to let you sleep.”
Damien smiled at her as he sat up.
“I don’t think I’ll sleep decently until we’re out of this place,” he told her. “There’s too much that can go wrong, and the people here scare me.”
“Me too,” she admitted, settling onto the bed next to him. “I got all of the software for the missiles and lasers installed. It’s not some hacked together job to run stolen hardware – the programs they gave me were the Navy programs for these guns.”
“I didn’t think the Tempests were Navy missiles?” Damien asked. To his knowledge, the Royal Navy of the Mage-King of Mars had used antimatter missiles for as long as they’d existed.
“Yeah, but the Tempests are approved by the Martians for police, security and armed transport use,” she replied. “And the Navy authorizes all of their installs. The software is written by the same people as the big antimatter birds.”
“The code we got has some gaping holes in it where the remote shutdown orders were, too,” Kelly finished grimly. “The arsenal the Captain has us installing would take down a destroyer if we got close enough.”
“So could the amplifier,” Damien reminded her grimly. “At least these weapons are obvious, not completely invisible.”
“It’s easier for me to grasp the missiles as a threat,” Kelly admitted. “That these people will happily arm us this heavily – it scares me. I knew the pirates have to come from somewhere, but if it’s this easy to get an armed ship, I’m surprised there aren’t more!”
“There were, thirty, forty years ago,” Damien told her. “Then there were half a dozen ports like Darkport. The Protectorate hunted them out and destroyed them.”
Kelly shivered against him.
“And we’re on this side of that fight,” she said quietly. “The side of the slavers and pirates.”
“No, we’re not,” Damien told her sharply. “We’re hiding from the Protectorate, yes. But it’s not the Martians we’re getting guns to protect ourselves from – it’s the ‘slavers and pirates.’ Sooner or later, we’ll be back in the light. I promise you,” he said softly, “I will find a way for us all to go home.”
He held her for a long moment, both of them drawing comfort from the others’ touch.
“It’s not all on you, you know,” she told him quietly. “It’ll take all of us to dig our way out of this hole – and we all put ourselves here knowing what we were getting into.”
He thought of the locked case tucked away in his closet, with the skin of a Hand of the King. If he could find a way to get that back to the man’s family, maybe that would buy them some leniency. It wasn’t as if they’d hurt anyone from the Navy, all they’d done was run away.
“All right,” he conceded, “we’ll find a way.”
Kelly’s response was interrupted by the beeping of a priority alert on Damien’s com. He hit an audio-only channel button.
“Damien,” he answered sharply.
“It’s Jenna,” the ship’s XO replied. “We have a big problem – a god-damned cruiser just jumped into the system.”
“And it’s not from the Royal Navy.”
#
The rats ran for their holes, and Mikhail Azure smiled.
The Azure Gauntlet advanced on Darkport, making no attempt to conceal their intentions. Around him, Wong’s efficient bridge crew went about their duties. The ship’s First Officer, the senior Mage aboard other than Azure, stood by the glowing silver simulacrum at the heart of both bridge and ship.
“We have identified multiple small craft launching from the asteroid,” one of the junior pirates, a bronze-skinned woman with slanted eyes named Hu, reported. “They appear to be carrying multiple missiles each.”
“When will we range on them?” Wong asked. Azure remained silent, allowing the bounty hunter to command his ship – he knew the limits of his own expertise.
“About thirty minutes,” the ship’s gunner, a man named Monroe with dark skin and a spectacular pink Mohawk, reported. “The missiles appear to be Phoenix Sixes –twenty years older and slower than ours. They won’t range on us for ten minutes after that.”
“Do you wish to speak to the Falcones, my lord?” Wong asked Azure after considering for a moment. “There are several hunter ships at Darkport and the station itself is well armed. Once we have engaged their pilots, I doubt they will talk again until the dust settles.”
Azure settled himself carefully in his chair – the one added for an Admiral to observe the workings of his flagship in the Navy – and nodded slowly.
“Yes, let us see what Julian Falcone has to say today,” he agreed softly.
Another junior pirate quickly approached Azure at Wong’s gesture, the young woman rapidly setting up the communication recorder on the crime lord’s controls.
Looking directly into the camera, Mikhail Azure smiled.
“This message is for Julian Falcone, or whichever of his brothers is currently in charge on Darkport,” he said cheerily. “You have tw
enty minutes to completely surrender the station and all ships docked on it, or I will start blowing things to hell.”
The tech gave a worried looking nod to Azure, confirming the message was on its way, and the crime lord leaned back in his chair to wait.
They’d jumped in almost dangerously close to the asteroid port, but it still took time for the radio waves to wing their way across space. It likely took longer to even find Julian under whatever rock he’d found to hide behind and deliver the message, but the response was well within his twenty minute warning.
“This is Julian Falcone, of la Casa Nostra,” the swarthy, heavily-built man in the responding video. “I don’t know what you’re playing at, Mikhail, but I suggest you drop it and leave. La Casa Nostra has been dealing with fools and pretenders for eight hundred years – this station is not defenseless. Even if you took it from us, you would never be able to keep it!”
Mikhail grinned, watching the timer tick down until the Azure Gauntlet would range on the first of the Falcone’s defenders. He nodded to the young tech to start the recorder again.
“You have eight hundred years of history at being thugs,” he agreed mockingly. “That’s cute. I have a battlecruiser, Julian – and I’m coming for you.”
#
“Have you located the Blue Jay yet?” Azure asked Wong, turning his attention away from his entertainment to the task of the day.
“There is no jump signature that would match her,” the Tracker replied. “I believe she, along with most of the freighters in system, is docked inside the asteroid. Once we have demonstrated our superiority over the Falcone forces, they will attempt to flee.”
“You can track her if she does?”
“Of course,” Wong answered disdainfully. “With sensor footage of the inevitable explosions, there will be no issues.
Starship's Mage: Episode 5 Page 3