Mage-Provocateur

by Glynn Stewart

  “Perfectly. In exchange, my Mage got drafted to the Mage-King’s service and I got this ship,” David concluded. “And, of course, an entire organization of assassins and bounty hunters looking to avenge Azure.

  “So, we ended up working with the Agency. And now I work for the Agency, as does every senior officer on this ship.”

  “Which now includes me.”

  “You can still back out,” David noted.

  Jeeves laughed.

  “You poked an epic knee in the Syndicate’s eye and need someone to watch your back while they sharpen the knife?” he replied. “No, Skipper, I’m in. I’m guessing we’re heading out to poke them in the eye again?”

  “Lure them into a trap, hopefully,” David said. “See if we can catch some Legatan spies while we’re at it. Make the galaxy a safer place in general.”

  “I’m no good at that on my own,” his old friend said seriously. “I tried and ended up getting conned into running guns for the Syndicate. I’ve got your back, Skipper.”

  “Good. Now all you need to do is not piss off the XO and Ship’s Mage.”

  “Have you ever known me to do anything except make friends?” Jeeves replied, pressing a hand to his heart.

  “Yeah. That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  6

  “We are clear of the gravity well and ready to jump,” LaMonte reported from the navigation station on the bridge. “All cargo is locked in place and hanging on solidly. No issues.”

  David nodded wordlessly as he double-checked all of the metrics himself. He trusted LaMonte, but this was her first flight out as XO.

  Red Falcon was purring along. The hab ring was rotating smoothly underneath the shield dome, the engines were happily turning hydrogen and antihydrogen into thrust, and the cargo suspended along the stem between the two sections of the ship had all been well attached.

  Cobalt Interstellar Elements’ people had done their job well and quickly. Falcon had actually left ten hours before he’d hoped, barely giving Jeeves’s delivery of new clothes time to arrive before they’d set off.

  He didn’t need the twenty-five-percent bonus, not when he could turn over standard carriage rate contracts in half the time of most of his competitors, but it didn’t hurt, either. Plus, his standing policy was to pay out a good chunk of that kind of bonus to the crew.

  Starship captains, especially those who owned multiple ships, were far from poor. Starship crews were often less lucky. There were few jobs aboard a jump-ship that paid poorly, per se, but there were always some crew members who were perpetually in money troubles.

  In David’s experience, Jeeves was of that category no matter what the man was making. He was also, despite his amazing ability to find trouble, one of the better team leads Red Falcon’s Captain had ever met, and he was already settling in to lead the armed freighter’s gunnery crews.

  So far, he’d drunk all of his new team under the table on the way out of Tau Ceti and was now making them do targeting exercises with blistering hangovers.

  “Stand down the exercises, Guns,” David ordered. “We don’t want to be lighting up space with a laser when we jump.”

  “Understood,” Jeeves replied crisply. “Captain says you folks get a break.” He paused. “In fact, you’ve all done okay. Assuming no one ambushes us after the jump, Bravo and Charlie shifts can stand down for a rest cycle.

  “Sorry, Alpha shift, you get the short straw today.” He grinned into the mike. “Bravo gets it next time.”

  David couldn’t hear the responding groans, but he was sure they’d been loud, extended, and melodramatic. The gunners knew their new boss’s type, and Jeeves seemed to know their numbers in turn.

  “Mage Wu,” David greeted his now-second-most senior Mage as he activated the screen to the simulacrum chamber. “I show the ship green to jump. How are things looking back there?”

  Kelly LaMonte’s girlfriend smiled thinly, the petite Chinese woman floating in the middle of the starry chamber at the core of the starship. Her hands rested on the liquid silver simulacrum that magically mirrored the entirety of Red Falcon on a smaller scale.

  “Our calculations are complete and I read the space around as safe to jump. With your permission, Captain Rice?”

  He smiled.

  “Carry on, Mage Wu. You are authorized to jump the ship.”

  He’d barely finished speaking when there was an infinitesimal moment of change…and the stars were suddenly slightly different.

  “Kelly?” he asked.

  “Nav software running,” his new XO replied. She waited. “Navigation confirms successful jump. We are bang on target at Jump One along the Tau Ceti–Desdemona route.”

  “Mage Barrow is up next,” Xi Wu reported. “In two hours.”

  With four Mages aboard, David had no need to push them past the standard one-jump-every-eight-hours routine. Red Falcon could still outrun most of her competitors—and since every Mage on his ship could do a six-hour jump when needed, she could also outrun her enemies.

  David Rice might, officially, be a spy in the employ of the Protectorate of the Mage-King of Mars…but he was, at heart, a merchant-ship captain. The last thing he was expecting when he entered his office and sat down at his computer was for a message to start playing without him doing anything.

  Hand Alaura Stealey’s image looked up at him from the monitor growing out of his desk, a wry smirk on the old woman’s face.

  “If you’re seeing this, then you’ve completed your first jump away from Tau Ceti and were probably about to sit down for a relaxing cup of coffee or some such,” she told him brightly.

  David looked down at the empty mug sitting on the edge of his desk. He hadn’t made it that far before the preprogrammed image had interrupted him.

  “There’s a lot of different strings to our bow here, Captain Rice, and some of them are even more cloak-and-dagger than the rest,” she continued after a moment. “I apologize for the secrecy, but there are layers that I cannot risk being leaked at all.

  “What we have begun doing is leaking the location where Mikhail Azure died,” she told him. “Depending on the rumor, either there’s nothing there, or either Blue Jay or Azure Gauntlet were left there to drift, in various states of disrepair.”

  He sighed.

  Either of those would be tempting prizes to a lot of criminals. It had been an open secret, in the end, that Damien Montgomery had somehow turned Blue Jay’s jump matrix—the set of runes any starship had that allowed a Mage to teleport it between the stars—into a true amplifier matrix.

  An amplifier matrix could amplify any spell, not just the jump spell, which made it a powerful weapon. They were restricted to the Royal Martian Navy…but Blue Jay would have been a template for any decently trained Rune Scribe to duplicate what Montgomery had done.

  The Navy had destroyed his ship to prevent that.

  Damien Montgomery himself had destroyed Azure Gauntlet, Mikhail Azure’s stolen cruiser flagship, by using Blue Jay’s amplifier matrix to detonate the warship’s antimatter stockpiles.

  There was nothing left of either vessel, but even rumors of their presence would be tempting bait.

  “We expect the rumors themselves to lure some more foolish players into our web,” Stealey noted. “And that is the reason I gave the agents involved. High in my thinking, however, is that the rumors give you a weapon, Captain Rice.

  “There is only one person the Syndicate or Legatus would trust to know the location of Azure’s death with full accuracy,” she said. “You.”

  Her wry smirk turned evil.

  “It turns out that the Navy has four Minotaur-class cruisers, the same class as Gauntlet. A little bit of paint and some engine tuning, and presto! We now have four ships that can pretend to be Azure Gauntlet.

  “They will be rotated through that location for the next year or until I feel we’ve dragged as many flies into our trap as we’re going to get.”

  The smile faded.

  “It giv
es you leverage, Captain, but it also gives you an out,” she told him. “Something you can trade for your life—the location of a crippled but repairable ship.

  “And if they come looking for it with you as their prisoner, I promise you, David Rice, the Navy will rescue you. We owe you far more than that.”

  The message ended, and David stared at the blank screen for a few moments. The cloak-and-dagger mess was already getting on his nerves, but he could see why that needed to stay secret.

  The rumors were one thing, but the fact that the rumors were a trap needed to stay quiet to let the trap work. The chance to lure his enemies into the Navy’s web was tempting, too.

  He could see uses for Stealey’s trap.

  And with all that the Blue Star Syndicate had done, he didn’t even feel guilty for it.

  A full day and twelve more jumps later, the ship was beginning to settle into routine again. David could always tell the point where the crew began to settle down for a voyage. There’d be breaks and cargo off-loading and on-loading, but it would be a while before Red Falcon settled into one place for any extended period again.

  Assuming, of course, that nobody shot his ship up this time. He wasn’t willing to take that bet.

  He did take advantage of the seeming quiet to cook for his senior officers. It was a ritual David saw no need to give up, especially now that they were the inner circle of a covert operations team as well as the officers of his ship!

  There were a few extras in the room for supper, of course. He had his four senior officers, but he also had Ivan Skavar, the Chief of Security, and Fulbert Nicolas, his First Pilot.

  If it had been a less formal affair, there might have been others—both of Kelly LaMonte’s partners, for example, were relatively senior members of the ship’s crew—but there was a limit to how much David could cook in his little kitchen and to how many people he could fit in his Captain’s dining room.

  Red Falcon had more space than Blue Jay had had, but its military designers had included an officers’ mess for if the Captain wanted to dine with all of his officers—and the thought of the Captain cooking up a massive dish of butter chicken lasagne with his own hands wouldn’t have occurred to them.

  Many modern cuisines were a result of cultural blending on new worlds. This one, however, he understood dated back to North America—the original cultural blender.

  “How are everyone’s departments shaping up?” he asked as he scooped out the steaming pasta.

  “Security is Security,” Skavar said with a shrug. “We’re Marines pretending to be civilians; what do you expect?”

  David chuckled.

  “Trouble, that’s what I expect. How much of it have we got?”

  “Not much,” the Marine told him. “The fact that everyone on the ship now knows what’s going on helps avoid our old problem of my people running their mouths off to get laid.”

  LaMonte coughed pointedly as she took a seat next to Skavar, who had the courtesy to flush—said running of the mouth had occurred when one of Skavar’s squad leaders had tried to get her and Wu into bed at the same time.

  It hadn’t ended well for the Marine in question by any measure.

  “I’m still feeling my way around the ship outside of Engineering and my shiny new admin group,” LaMonte said, answering the question herself and letting Skavar off the hook for his people’s earlier mistakes.

  “Bran Wiltshire and I go way back, and the man knows the admin inside and out,” she continued. “I have no worries there, just finding my feet so to speak.”

  “Engineering’s fine,” Kellers grunted. “You promoted my best helper past me, but we’ll make do.”

  “You didn’t want the job,” David reminded his engineer, who promptly filled his mouth to avoid answering.

  “We’ve got a lot of shuttlecraft,” Nicolas noted, the gaunt blond man filling his plate with far more vegetables and pasta than anyone would have expected, looking at him. “But my people know their jobs and we didn’t lose many when we ‘officially’ went covert ops.

  “Speaking of which, though”—he glanced at Skavar as he took a seat—“am I supposed to admit I know about the squadron of assault shuttles you tucked in Kelzin’s Bravo Bay?”

  “I stuck five hundred tons of munitions in your storage lockers, First Pilot,” Skavar replied. “I bloody well hope you know about the spacecraft they’re for!”

  Jeeves chuckled, shaking his head as he took his own plate.

  “Quite the affair we’ve got going on here,” he noted aloud. “Assault shuttles, Marines…and it’s not like the Navy actually took any of Falcon’s guns out. Who do you have to kill to get this kind of setup, Skipper?”

  “Mikhail Azure,” at least four people chorused back instantly.

  Jeeves laughed in response.

  “Fair enough,” he conceded. “All of the beams, turrets, and launchers check out green. My crews are solid—better than I was expecting, to be honest. I wouldn’t want to fight a cruiser in this ship, but we could probably tangle with a rogue destroyer or two.

  “Presuming we stayed out of amplifier range, anyway,” he concluded, with a glance at Soprano.

  “That’s our job,” she said grimly. “Wu’s taking things a bit rough, but she’s one of the best I’ve ever seen as civilians go. Barrow and Nguyen are ex-Navy, but I think Wu may actually edge them out for sheer power.

  “Once I’ve got them all trained up to what I want, we’ll take you wherever you want to go and get you out of any trouble you happen to find.”

  “That’s what we’re all here for,” David concluded. “Our job is to get in trouble and live through it. I’m glad we all understand that!”

  7

  One positive point in favor of moving massive industrial equipment, Kelly supposed, was that it didn’t require much in terms of watching. It didn’t even require the usual systems checks that they’d have to do on the standard ten-thousand-ton shipping containers.

  There were enough of those in the cargo, but the core pieces for Cobalt Interstellar Elements’ new refinery came in massive, half-kilometer-tall, single-piece components. Once strapped into place, the massive chunks of silent machinery didn’t really require supervision.

  They were also, however, massive chunks of fascinating technology, and Kelly LaMonte was an engineer. Primarily a software and electronics engineer, to be sure, but she didn’t know any engineer who could spend four days a few minutes’ walk away from the galaxy’s most advanced version of anything without taking a peek.

  Which left her poking her way along the computing core of what would shortly be the primary smelter for the Cobalt Desdemona Orbital Refinery. The section was sealed but didn’t have atmosphere or gravity of its own, which left her in a vac-suit with magnetic boots and a flashlight.

  There wasn’t much they could do if something had broken in the pre-built segment, but the contract also required them to make sure everything was transporting safely, so Kelly figured she’d take the chance to take a look.

  The gun was probably overkill, but she’d spent too long aboard Red Falcon to consider anything paranoid. She shone the flashlight around the control center, taking an extra few seconds to appreciate the sheer scale and complexity of the hardware,

  The real key to what would make the station tick was the software, but even if she was feeling like violating their contract that badly, the segments didn’t have power. There was a Desdemona-built fusion plant waiting for them at their destination.

  Turning to run the light over another wall, she caught what she thought was movement. That was impossible—she knew there was no one else outside Red Falcon’s hull. She was the one who had to sign off on EVAs. There shouldn’t be anything moving on the half-kilometer-long chunk of space station she was inspecting.

  Saying hello would be pointless in vacuum, but she flashed her light twice, waiting for a response. Nothing. But there was a hatch in the middle of the wall where she’d thought she’d seen something. />
  For a moment, she considered dismissing it as a trick of the light.

  Then she drew the gun and turned up the lock on her mag-boots to absorb recoil if needed. If someone was aboard the orbital refinery pieces, Red Falcon had a problem.

  Kelly took a moment to localize where the stranger must have been coming from—and going to—and realized they had a problem.

  She tapped her communicator with her chin, cycling through the channels for the one she wanted as she slowly approached the door.

  “Skavar, it’s LaMonte,” she greeted the Security Chief. “We have an issue.”

  There was a pregnant pause.

  “Okay, XO, last I checked you were doing EVA sweeps of our cargo. I don’t like the idea of an issue out there.”

  “Pretty sure I spotted movement, a potential stowaway,” she told him. “Except I’m standing right beside probably the single most expensive and fragile piece of equipment in this whole assemblage.

  “My quick and dirty mental math puts our client in serious trouble if they have any more delays in bringing the platform online,” Kelly continued. “Reading the papers the Skipper gave me says the penalties are to the tune of about ten percent of CIE’s annual profit…per day.”

  “You think we’ve got a saboteur.”

  “I’m afraid we have a saboteur,” she agreed. “Can you get some of your people into suits and ready to follow me out? We have real exosuit combat gear, right?”

  “Enough,” Skavar said grimly. “You need to hold in place until I get backup to you, XO,” he continued. “Are you even armed?”

  “MARP-15,” she told him. The Martian Armaments Rocket-Propelled Fifteen-Millimeter pistol was a low-recoil hand cannon designed for exactly this environment. Its rounds shouldn’t penetrate the refinery’s walls but would do an ugly number on any vac-suit they hit.

  “Okay, better than nothing,” the Marine agreed. “Still, wait for the backup.”

  “Skavar…we’ve swept the cargo for thermals every twelve hours since we loaded it aboard,” she told him. “If there is someone out there, they’re hiding and hiding well. Which means if I don’t follow them and see where they go…”