Mage-Provocateur (Starship's Mage: Red Falcon Book 2)

by Glynn Stewart

  Campbell winced.

  “With David aboard their ship now.”

  “And therein lies the flaw in our Captain’s brilliant plan,” Maria agreed. “The only option I see is to remove him from their ship before the Navy vaporizes them.”

  “That’s…doable,” Skavar said grimly. “In theory. But…boarding torpedoes may have the range to get at them without giving away Falcon’s position, but they are not stealthy on their own.”

  “Damien once hid an entire ship from Azure Gauntlet itself,” LaMonte suggested. “Could we hide the boarding torpedoes?”

  Maria hesitated. She’d, in theory, been trained in hiding something in space. But she’d never actually done it. She could read up on the spells again, though, and make it happen.

  “We can do it,” she confirmed. “Or at least I can. I hesitate to say any of our other Mages can.

  “In any case, though, it’ll work better with a distraction.”

  “Especially because there’s a wrinkle I don’t think we’ve all processed yet,” Skavar noted. “She said they were going to meet with a fleet. That, to me, suggests they’re going to have a lot more than just a lightly armed jump-yacht for us to deal with.”

  “We can get the Navy involved,” LaMonte said, then paused. “Except that has the same damn problem as us showing up. The Navy shows up, they’ll blame us and kill the Skipper.”

  “…But the idea works,” Maria said slowly, then looked over at Campbell.

  “I don’t want to drag Peregrine into this,” she told the other woman. “This isn’t going to be the kind of mess where an extra half-dozen missiles is going to make a difference. But…”

  “You want me to play courier,” Campbell guessed. “We can do that.”

  “You say that,” Maria replied with a smile, “but you haven’t heard who I want you to play courier to.

  “We have a dead drop in the Erewhon System with the Legatans,” she told Campbell. “I’m presuming they have access to the RTA, hence the drop being there. I want you to give them everything we have—where the ship supposedly is, that the Legacy is going after it, and that the Legacy has David as a hostage.”

  “The Legatans,” Campbell repeated. “LMID, I’m presuming? What do you expect them to do?”

  “I have no fucking idea,” Maria admitted. “But there are systems closer to this whole mess than we are right now, and if they happen to have spaceborne assets in position to intervene, I’m not going to object to a whole new player in the mess David is courting.”

  “What about the Navy?” Jeeves asked.

  “I’m going to use the authorization we’ve got to steal a couple of destroyers from here, just in case,” Maria told them. “But I also want you to report everything to the Navy commander in Erewhon. I’ll give you the authentication codes for a confidential RTA connection.”

  “I think the nearest real fleet presence is Commodore Cor at Ardennes, but if she can spare a cruiser or three on top of our ‘bait,’ that’ll be an ugly wake-up for our Legacy friends.”

  “And what about ALH here?” Skavar asked. “We can’t let them continue on as they are.”

  “And we won’t,” Maria agreed. “But that’s no longer our problem. I’m guessing that when Peregrine and Red Falcon ship out, they may get suspicious…but they’ll also probably relax a bit with us gone.

  “And then Hand Lomond has a follow-up team coming in. Top-level MISS operatives, the kind that Armstrong, Lee and Howard won’t see coming.

  “The kind with a warrant signed and sealed by a Hand of the Mage-King of Mars. Vandella-Howard thinks we don’t have the evidence to nail them to a wall? Those operatives will find it. They’ll be in their systems before they know there’s a problem.”

  “And everybody who’s followed David to the ass end of nowhere is going to end up running into the maw of a fully armed and operational battlecruiser,” Jeeves said with satisfaction.

  “The only real kink is whether or not we can get the Skipper out before everything goes to hell,” Skavar concluded. “If we can sneak some boarding torpedoes up to them under a magical cloak…I think we can do it.”

  “That sounds like a plan,” Maria confirmed. “Let’s get to it, people.”

  37

  David’s trip with Vandella-Howard was going surprisingly pleasantly so far. One rushed taxi ride, crammed into the back seat with the unnamed mountain of genetically modified muscle that had escorted her to the meeting, and then hustled aboard a well-appointed fast jump-yacht.

  The room they’d put him in was gorgeous, easily the same size as his Captain’s cabin aboard Red Falcon, and kitted out with insanely comfortable furnishings. The door had sealed behind him, and his one attempt to knock on it had attracted the attention of what he was reasonably sure was a different muscle mountain.

  It was hard to be certain. He was starting to suspect that the Blue Star Syndicate had been running a larger genetic modification program than anyone had guessed.

  Mountain or not, the guard had been quite polite and had shown him how to work the small auto-chef attached to one wall. It wasn’t designed to provide all of a person’s meals, but it would do to keep a man alive with hors d’oeuvres and tiny sandwiches.

  A quick check showed that his wrist-comp was blocked out of most of the yacht’s computer network, but he was at least linked into the entertainment library. He was definitely a prisoner, but at least they were being polite about their hostage-holding.

  He was nonetheless surprised in the middle of the evening when there was a knock on the door, shortly followed by the entry of his guardian mountain carrying a suit bag.

  “The ship’s tailor says this should fit you, based on his scans when you came aboard,” the man rumbled. “Ms. Vandella-Howard invites you to join her for dinner on the observation deck.”

  David grinned.

  “How much trouble am I in if I refuse?”

  The mountain shrugged.

  “I would guess you could get away with it once,” he said. “The next time, she’d probably ‘ask’ me to bring you up forcefully.”

  They were polite and honest mountains of muscle. Odd fit for the bodyguards of a criminal, though perhaps not a lawyer.

  “The observation deck sounds fascinating,” David allowed as he checked the contents of the bag. He wasn’t surprised to find it contained a gorgeously cut dark gray suit. The color was exactly his own preference, though the cut was more stylish than he usually preferred.

  “I will dress and join Ms. Vandella-Howard,” he promised. “I presume you will be escorting me.”

  “Of course,” the mountain rumbled. “It’s a big ship. You might get lost.”

  It was not a big ship.

  It took David longer to get dressed in the suit—which, as promised, fit him perfectly—than it took him and his escort to cross the length of the yacht and travel up three decks. Following along behind the mountain, he noted the intriguing nature of the suit’s cut.

  The clothes fit perfectly. They were amazingly comfortable. But he also found his movements restricted, contained. He might be comfortable so long as he moved at a normal pace, but the moment he tried to run or fight, the suit would turn into a trap.

  And he doubted the fabric would tear as easily as his usual suits. It was a gorgeous piece of prisoner wear, but it remained very definitively prisoner wear.

  Sarah Vandella-Howard had also changed. Gone was the conservatively cut black suit. In its place she wore a long, skintight dress in midnight black decorated with stars.

  The stars, he realized after a moment, were gemstones. Each glittering little dot was a ruby, sapphire, diamond or emerald. Her “casual” dress was probably worth a million or more…and done in such a way that it managed to be tasteful and not gaudy.

  The dress was slit all the way up to her hip, showing flashes of athletically trim tanned skin. He suspected the purpose was more to free up her legs for movement rather than distraction, and the cut of the shoulders of
the dress and tightness of the bodice matched that idea.

  He doubted the distraction factor of the outfit was an accidental bonus, but the unnamed tailor had designed the dress to allow her to run and fight without impediment. It also showed off her curves and muscles in a way that David suspected had left more than one man making one of several possible fatal mistakes.

  He bowed delicately as he entered the observation deck, and saw her turn to face him at the far end of the room. This was a woman who was perfectly prepared to use any weapon at her disposal, and his own experience with crime lords and ladies had confirmed an old adage for him:

  The female of the species was deadlier than the male.

  “Ms. Vandella-Howard,” he greeted her. “You look lovely.”

  “I find this dress goes nicely with the void,” she replied. “I don’t have many opportunities to leave Corinthian; it’s all arm’s length and couriered recordings. Please, have a seat.”

  He took the indicated seat, realizing that the bodyguards had stayed outside. He was alone in the room with the lawyer, looking up at a transparent dome that showed the stars outside.

  From the depth of shadow and interplay of light, an experienced spacer like David could judge they were no longer in a star system. They’d clearly made at least one jump since he’d come aboard.

  “This is a fast ship,” he noted. “I wouldn’t have expected us to have left Corinthian yet.”

  “She’s no navy ship like yours, but Luck can keep up quite a pace when she needs to,” Vandella-Howard agreed. “We’re on our way to the rendezvous.”

  “Of course.” She had said something about a fleet. That was a nerve-wracking thought on its own—just how many ships and mercenaries did the Legacy command? What kind of monster had Mikhail Azure birthed to try to keep his empire together?

  There were already silver serving dishes on the table. She gestured for him to open his as she removed the cover over her own dinner, allowing steam to waft up from the steak and lobster on the plate.

  His own dish was much the same, expensive food spectacularly prepared. It was unlikely she was trying to poison him at this point, so David dug in.

  To his surprise, the lawyer ate in silence, allowing him to enjoy the food and the view out the roof. He carefully did not enjoy the “view” that Vandella-Howard’s dress presented. That, in his opinion, was as deadly a trap as the one he was leading her into.

  “You have a good cook,” he said carefully.

  “The staff aboard Luck is the best I can find,” she replied. “As I said, I do not travel often, but I see no reason not to travel in comfort. My partners occasionally use the ship as well, but I inherited her from my late husband.”

  David nodded silently. That opening was also, he judged, a trap. From his dinner companion’s smile, she was enjoying teasing him.

  “There is no reason not to be polite at this point, Captain Rice,” she told him. “Events may yet require that I will have to have you killed, but for now, let us presume we are all playing fair with each other. It’s far more pleasant.”

  She winked at him and David chuckled.

  “If you’re half as informed as I suspect you are, you know better than to think I would do anything to offend Keiko Alabaster’s sensibilities,” he pointed out. “Her reach is long and her claws are sharp.”

  And if he didn’t think Keiko would object to his seducing his way out of a death sentence, Vandella-Howard didn’t need to know that.

  She giggled, a bright and cheerfully infectious sound.

  “That is true,” she allowed. “Though I suspect you’d find my reach is equally long and my claws equally sharp.”

  She glanced at her wrist-comp.

  “And perhaps now is the time to demonstrate that better than any other,” she purred. “Look up, Captain Rice, as Luck jumps.”

  He looked up, studying the stars. He was watching as they shifted, the world changing as the yacht leapt an entire light-year in the blink of an eye.

  There were new stars. More of them than you usually saw in deep space…bigger, too.

  Bigger because they weren’t stars. They were starships. A lot of starships. He was counting them up when Luck rotated, allowing them to see the yacht’s immediate destination.

  At this distance, they were tiny triangles, but Vandella-Howard tapped her wrist-comp and part of the dome above them zoomed in, optics and computers magnifying to allow David to see the three Tau Ceti–style export destroyers that formed the core of the Legacy fleet.

  There were at least two dozen other ships around them. His experienced eye marked most of them as jump-corvettes, the mix of refitted freighters and secret-shipyard-built light warships used by freighters and bounty hunters.

  A handful, though were of a similar ilk to the Golden Bears’ monitors. Not as large, barely half the size of the million-ton destroyers at the core of the fleet, but he could pick out at least six half-megaton ships, probably built as sublight defense ships.

  But someone had installed jump matrices in those SDSes and provided the Legacy with a second tier of warships to rival any system government.

  He stared up at the Legacy’s naval might in shock.

  “Like I said, Captain Rice, money can acquire the ships they build for export,” Vandella-Howard said softly. “But it cannot acquire an amplifier. Deliver that to me and I will finish the task laid before my firm.

  “But betray me…betray me, and as you said…my reach is long and my claws are very sharp.”

  They didn’t return David to the quarters they’d put him in. Instead, the mobile mountains that guarded Vandella-Howard led both of them directly to a shuttle bay. This, it seemed, was as far as Luck came.

  The lawyer watched him with obvious amusement as he studied the destroyer they were approaching through the shuttle’s windows.

  “She’s Tau Ceti-built,” Vandella-Howard told him. “Sold to a system government—forgive me if I don’t tell you which one—that found themselves in serious financial distress. If they’d actually come clean about how bad the finances had become, the government would have fallen.

  “So, they sold the destroyers under the table.” She shrugged. “They got the money they needed to hold their infrastructure together and save the next election. I got the destroyers I needed to complete my task.

  “Everybody wins.”

  “I’m sure their constituents might disagree,” David said dryly.

  Vandella-Howard laughed.

  “Since when have politicians cared about what the common mob thinks, beyond what it takes to get elected?” she asked cynically. “Most of our clients are politicians of one stripe or another, Captain Rice. Believe me, however low your opinion of them is, the truth is worse.”

  It occurred to David, at least, that the nature of what Armstrong, Lee and Howard did would inevitably filter things so their partners only saw the worst of the worst.

  He wasn’t going to argue with her, though. Four of her bodyguards had joined them aboard the shuttle, and they’d traded in their expensive tailored suits for equally expensive body armor with low-profile power assists.

  Or, at least, he hoped the armor had low-profile power assists. Otherwise, the genetically augmented giants watching Sarah Vandella-Howard’s back expected to be able to use the full-size penetrator rifles they carried without assistance.

  He wouldn’t disbelieve that. It just said terrifying things about just what Blue Star had been up to while no one was looking.

  “Bleeding Sapphire is the flagship for now,” the lawyer told him as their shuttle dropped towards the destroyer’s shuttle bay. “If you have lied, it will be your grave.”

  There was no malice or threat in her tone. She was simply stating a fact.

  “If you have told the truth, however, Azure Gauntlet will replace her as the flagship. Even damaged, Gauntlet is a symbol of power that will force the syndicates into line.”

  David kept his peace. He was the one who wanted her to belie
ve he could deliver the cruiser…but at the same time, he could have told her a cruiser wouldn’t be enough to bring the Protectorate’s crime syndicates in line.

  Mikhail Azure had kept his Gauntlet as a trophy, not a tool.

  After all, if all it took to bring syndicates in line was a cruiser, well…the Royal Martian Navy had over sixty of them and they’d never managed to stop the Syndicates.

  38

  Kelly LaMonte watched their escorts move back into place after the latest jump. The two destroyers weren’t much in the grand scheme of things, but compared to the regular run of jump-corvettes and such that they expected the pirates to field, one probably would have been enough.

  Or none, given that they were supposed to be luring the Legacy into range of the guns of a Martian cruiser.

  A polite young officer appeared on her screen. Technically, Soprano was in command of Red Falcon, but the Ship’s Mage was down in the simulacrum chamber. That left Kelly in the captain’s chair on the bridge, commanding the freighter’s weapons and handling her communications.

  Fortunately, despite the age difference, Jeeves had yet to so much as blink at following her orders.

  The Martian officer on the screen had skin as dark as his black uniform matched to shockingly white hair. The hair was probably the result of either dye or genetic tampering, given that the man was younger than Kelly herself.

  “Mage-Captain Michel sends her compliments, Officer LaMonte, and the task group is in position to follow you into the next jump,” he told her. “After the last one, she’s asked that our Mages directly confer with Ship’s Mage Soprano to make sure we avoid miscommunication.”

  That was a polite way of saying “Mage-Captain Irune Michel is furious at her Jump Mages for making her look bad in front of the civilians and dishonorably discharged ex-Navy Mage, so she’s going to make them take orders from Soprano so they don’t fuck it up again.”

  Or at least that’s how Kelly read it. Red Falcon’s Mages had come out of the last jump exactly on target, after all.