Mage-Provocateur

by Glynn Stewart

  “I can come back later,” Kelly offered, feeling somewhat awkward.

  Xi’s response was to drag her into a fierce kiss.

  “We barely saw you in the Desdemona System,” the Mage replied. “Not bloody happening. You, miss XO, are getting naked and on the bed, and then Mike and I are going to rub down every last muscle you didn’t know was aching.”

  “You had a far worse few days,” Kelly objected, but she found herself propelled toward the bed, where Mike also wrapped her in an embrace and kissed her.

  “Yes, but I had time off after that,” Xi told her. “You spent the whole time we were there running around organizing cargo and working. Time for you to rest.”

  Kelly’s heart definitely wasn’t in the argument, either, as her lovers began to carefully undress her.

  “Besides,” Xi concluded with a wicked grin, “if you think I’m not getting any relaxation out of this, you haven’t guessed the full agenda.”

  David Rice watched the numbers trickle down toward the jump.

  “So, Captain, would you happen to know where my most senior Mage is?” Soprano asked sweetly over the intercom.

  “Why would it matter?” he asked. “I checked the schedule; she’s not up for jumping for six more hours.”

  Soprano chuckled.

  “That’s fair, I suppose, though I expected her to answer her wrist-comp when I buzzed her.”

  “Well, given that I just made sure that Kelly, Xi and Michael were all off duty at the same time, I bloody well hope she wasn’t answering your call,” David pointed out dryly. “I may not be entirely enthused with my XO having her lovers aboard, but at least they’re out of her chain of command.”

  “And allows you to arrange stress relief?” Soprano asked.

  David chuckled.

  “Oh, I’m trusting them to arrange that all on their own,” he said. “None of the three of them are over twenty-six. I think they’ll manage.”

  His Ship’s Mage laughed.

  “And this isn’t a military ship, Captain Rice, for all of our oddities,” she pointed out. “Chain of command isn’t really a thing.”

  “Old habits die hard,” he murmured. If anything, they should die harder for Soprano. He’d been out of the Navy for decades. She’d barely been out for a year and a half.

  “They do. But on a civilian ship, there’s no need for that one.” Soprano shrugged. “Plus, they’re sensible kids.”

  “They are,” he agreed. “I make us far enough out to jump, Ship’s Mage. You?”

  “Everything looks clear on my end,” she agreed. “Shall we be on our way to Snap?”

  For a moment, David hesitated. Going to Snap was going to paint a giant target on his back…but it was also going to help put down the last of Mikhail Azure’s leftovers.

  “Yeah,” he finally agreed. “You may jump when ready, Ship’s Mage.”

  14

  Junkrat’s orbitals were both more impressive and far more ramshackle than David had been expecting from Stealey’s description. The planet itself was a windswept dustball with a sad excuse for an atmosphere, barely bigger than Earth’s moon.

  Its only real value was as a gravitational anchor to the collection of stations forming a loose ring around Junkrat’s equator. There was everything from structures assembled from welded-together collections of standard transport containers to a Legatan-designed ring station.

  The latter had a squadron of six Crucifix-class gunships hovering protectively above it. The ships were currently sitting in combat mode, their weapons modules spread out in the extended X that gave the ships their name.

  The ships had a pursuit mode that would have enabled them to police most of Junkrat local space relatively easily…but from their identifier codes, the gunships were actually Legatus Self-Defense Force ships.

  They had no legal authority to police anybody in the Snap System and were announcing their lack of intention to do so as clearly as they could.

  The Snap System government certainly wasn’t doing any policing. A beacon positioned above Junkrat’s pole was continuously transmitting that trading was permitted in Junkrat orbit, but any attempt by unauthorized vessels to approach Flytrap would be met with lethal force.

  According to David’s sensors, they’d reinforced that message with a set of about sixty buoys in orbit between the two planets that marked the “do not cross” line. A dozen container ships were locked into the long transfer orbit between Junkrat and Flytrap, cheaply carrying cargo that didn’t need to arrive quickly.

  A fleet of smaller ships, a mix of solar sails and fusion drives, also made the trip…but no jump-ships passed closer than Junkrat.

  According to the MISS files, the Royal Martian Navy visited the planet two or three times a year for various reasons. The reports showed that Flytrap greeted its military visitors politely but unenthusiastically.

  MISS files also noted that, despite the warning that crossing the line would be met with lethal force, Flytrap had never actually destroyed anyone. Their massive fusion missiles had a twenty-minute flight time from the orbital platforms—more than enough for anyone testing the locals’ resolve to change their mind.

  Apparently, the missiles had been designed to return home on orders, too, so the Snap Security Force could have their warning shot and get the weapons back.

  It was an efficient design. Unlike, well, just about anything in Junkrat orbit.

  “Please tell me we’re heading to the Legatan station,” Jeeves said plaintively. “Most of the rest of this place looks like we’ll get tetanus just docking with them.”

  “Sadly, no,” David told him. “I’m told Junkertown is relatively safe, through sheer size if nothing else, and it’s the only place with the transshipment facilities we need. I’ll contact Integrity’s local office and make sure there’s someone there to meet us.”

  “Junkertown,” Jeeves repeated. “I don’t know what sources you have, boss, but if they called Junkertown safe, what was their comparison point? Darkport?”

  “Darkport is being converted into a RMMC zero-gee training facility,” David pointed out. “It’s pretty safe these days.”

  It had once been the center of the sex slave trade in the Protectorate. Then, of course, David Rice had visited.

  He didn’t feel particularly bad about that one.

  “Junkertown isn’t too bad,” he continued. “It’s not a place I want to go unarmed or unescorted, but the fact that everyone expects that actually keeps it relatively calm.” He grinned.

  “Most of the rest of the stations around here? I wouldn’t trust the air, let alone the locals.”

  “Right. Why are we here, again?” the tactical officer asked.

  “To drag our coats in front of the Azure Legacy and see if we can tempt them into a mistake.”

  “Right,” Jeeves echoed. “Can I reconsider the whole prison thing?”

  “Captain Rice, I am Administrator Nkechinyere Arendse,” the dark-skinned woman in his screen greeted him. “I run Integrity Galactic’s broker office here in Snap.”

  “Good to speak to you, Administrator Arendse,” David told her. “I understand you were expecting our cargo?”

  “Yeeees,” Ardendse said slowly. “I believe there are…two components to it?”

  “That is my understanding as well,” he agreed. “I have seventeen point five million tons of raw rock from Puck’s core for smelting, and an additional ten containers of ‘no-questions-asked.’”

  She smiled.

  “Goood.” She drew her vowels out again. “I don’t, as it happens, have a ship on hand to take the cargo on at the moment.”

  David winced.

  “The fees for keeping my ship sitting anywhere are not low, Administrator,” he warned her. “To have us sit in an UnArcana system, let alone in a place with a reputation like Junkrat’s…”

  “Thaaat… won’t be a problem,” Arendse replied. “We have storage facilities here sufficient for those needs.”

  Dav
id nodded, managing not to visibly show surprise. Eighteen million tons of cargo storage seemed like a lot to have on hand, though he supposed if Integrity regularly ran ships that could carry that much, it made sense.

  “We’re on course for Junkertown,” he told her. “Will that work for you, or should we be detouring somewhere else for drop-off?

  “I’m presuming Junkertown is the best place for me to find a new cargo.”

  “Junkertown is fiiiine,” Arendse told him. “We can arrange off-loading there.” She paused. “I suggest you keep your security on duty and awake. Junkertown is safe so long as you appear ready for trouble.”

  “That was my understanding and my plan,” he agreed. “If you have a referral for someone looking to carry cargo somewhere Integrity Galactic doesn’t go…”

  She smiled politely.

  “Of course,” she agreed, without meaning it at all. He wasn’t really surprised. “I look forward to speaking with you further once you’ve docked, Captain. Fly safely.”

  “What in the gods’ names is that?” LaMonte’s voiced echoed in the bridge as Junkertown orbited past the horizon and Red Falcon finally got a solid look at her destination.

  “Junkertown,” David said redundantly, studying the ramshackle structure himself. “Which means, I suppose, what happens when a hundred different groups decided to build a space station in the same place for different reasons, and about the only thing they share is a center of gravity.”

  From the layout of the ugly assemblage of pods and work stations that made up Junkertown, it had probably started with the immense zero-gravity transshipment facilities that were still the single largest piece of the station.

  Now, however, the ten tower-like docks and their connecting gantries and cranes rose like dead trees from a swamp. Someone had attached a fat O’Neill cylinder habitat to the transshipment center.

  It had probably been at least two or three decades since the cylinder had rotated, and other habitat modules had been welded to it like tumors over those years. That nearly cancerous-looking growth formed as much of a core as Junkertown had. No less than seven different arms of the station spread out from there, each looking completely different from the others.

  If David was counting correctly, there were easily twenty rotating habitat sections of various sizes, including what looked like it had once been a sister to the Legatan ring station at the near-opposite side of the planet.

  Six—possibly more, but he could definitely pick out six—small asteroids had been towed in and attached to various sections of the station, both surface and interior consumed to provide more living and work space for a sprawling assemblage of humanity unlike anything even David had ever seen.

  “Files say four hundred and fifty thousand permanent population, about twice that in transients and temporary workers,” Jeeves read out. “Three-quarters of the spaceborne human population in this star system is in that mess.”

  “With no law enforcement and no central authority,” LaMonte replied. “How? The whole thing should fall apart.”

  “There’s also no central life support or power,” David told her. “Each segment is run independently. Occasionally, they’ll sell power or air to each other, but when I say Junkertown is a bunch of different space stations that happen to be in the same place, it’s not a bad description.”

  “And somewhere in there, the Legacy is holding a conference to reunify the Blue Star,” his XO noted, studying it. “Would the galaxy really miss this place if we vaporized it?”

  “Over a million people, Kelly,” he reminded her. “Even if they were all guilty of something worth death—and they’re not—you wouldn’t want that on your conscience.

  “We go with the plan.”

  “Is that the one where you go and make a target of yourself?” she said sweetly.

  He sighed.

  “Yes. Exactly that one.”

  15

  Connecting Red Falcon with the cargo docks helped put the whole mass of Junkertown into perspective. The megafreighter was well over a kilometer long, and while the docking towers weren’t long enough to cover her entire length, they covered most of it.

  And if the towers were a kilometer tall, then Junkertown itself was roughly seven kilometers high, roughly the same wide, and twice that long.

  Of course, most of that was empty space, given the sprawling and random nature of the spiderweb that made up the space station, but it was enough to make the clearly organic growth of the orbital impressive.

  Once the ship was docked, a dozen tugs began a rapid approach to the freighter…rapid enough to make David uncomfortable.

  “Jeeves, target those tugs with the RFLAMs,” he ordered. “Be obvious about it.”

  A moment later, the indicators on his repeater screens showed the turrets pinging the incoming ships with active radar.

  “Approaching vessels, this is Red Falcon,” LaMonte said sharply into her mike. “Please state your intentions. We have made no arrangements for cargo pickup.”

  The ships continued on their course for a few more seconds, and then scattered like cockroaches when the light turned on. David sighed.

  “Let me ping Administrator Arendse,” he noted aloud, “and see if we can find our actual pickup. It seems we’re going to need to watch for scavengers.”

  “We’re being hailed by someone on the docking tower,” LaMonte told him. “Do you want me to take it?”

  “No, I’ll talk to them,” David replied. “I suspect this will be entertaining enough.”

  A command flipped the channel to his repeater screens, revealing a perfectly groomed bearded man with unusually black eyes.

  “Red Falcon, I am dock control for Junkertown Tower Six,” he introduced himself politely. “You are expected, but there are fees and costs associated with docking with the Tower.” He coughed delicately.

  “Integrity arranged your dock but has made it clear they are not covering any of your costs. We will need to make sure those are sorted before Tower Six can hook up umbilicals.”

  Docking costs normally were covered, but David had to admit that he was working for Wu, Lee and Wong, not Integrity. The Administrator had to sign off on receipt of the cargo before funds would be released to him, but she wasn’t paying him.

  Fortunately, he was being paid enough to cover this; he would just have preferred if Wu had mentioned that little complication in advance.

  “And the cost for standard docking and air supply is?”

  The groomed man quoted him a number.

  David almost laughed aloud.

  “And that includes antimatter resupply, I suppose?” he asked. The number was extortionate, far beyond anything that was reasonable, even for the ass end of nowhere.

  “That is a standard docking fee including air,” the other man said calmly. “Given the size of your vessel, we could easily see increasing it, given the amount of life support you clearly use. Any fuel, antimatter or otherwise, would be an additional charge.

  “I have no negotiating discretion on the rate, Captain Rice. If you do not want to pay it, you are welcome to disconnect from our Tower and try and negotiate a better rate.”

  “And let me guess, you take no responsibility for our security while docked?” David said dryly.

  “Of course not. We are a dock provider, nothing more.”

  “You sound like more like a protection racket,” the Captain muttered. “And what rate does Integrity pay when their ships dock?”

  “Integrity Galactic is a customer of long standing with preexisting contracts,” the man, who still hadn’t actually given a name, replied. “They are a special case.”

  David smiled thinly.

  “All right, I suggest you take a good, long look at my ship,” he told the dockmaster. “This was an Armed Auxiliary Fast Heavy Freighter. While we’re docked, your tower is inside our defensive perimeter. No natural debris, no meteors, no missiles, nothing will threaten you while we are here.

  “We will ha
ppily guarantee your security…in exchange for paying the docking fees that Integrity Galactic pays for their own ships of our size.”

  Unspoken was that those same defensive systems could gut Tower Six. David wouldn’t even need the main weapons; at this range, the anti-missile laser turrets would gouge twenty- or thirty-meter wide holes through the dock’s framework at full power.

  “I see, Captain Rice,” the bearded man told him carefully. “I…think we can come to an arrangement.”

  He quoted a new rate. It was high enough that David suspected it wasn’t actually what Integrity paid…but it was low enough to be merely highway robbery rather than grand theft.

  “That’s acceptable,” he replied. “Transferring funds now. A pleasure doing business with Tower Six.” He paused. “Will you be able to supply antimatter?”

  The bearded man smiled, a shark-like expression that triggered a mental sigh in the back of David’s head.

  “That, Captain Rice, would be why Administrator Arendse sent you to us,” he replied. “We are the only dock in Junkertown with access to antimatter supplies.

  “Which means, of course, that supply is hardly cheap.”

  There was hiding from your enemies…and then there was what David Rice was doing on Junkertown. He’d drawn the line at having Skavar roll out exosuited security troopers, but the Security Chief had accompanied him himself—along with half a dozen men in the heaviest unpowered body armor they had.

  Skavar and one of the other men actually went a step beyond that. They weren’t in full exosuits, but they were both wearing powered harnesses over their armor that allowed them to carry the heavy penetrator rifles used by exosuits to kill each other.

  Those guns were highly illegal in most space stations and planets…but Junkertown didn’t have a central authority to enforce any law. Even sensible ones like “don’t carry weapons that can punch through the station hull.”

  Xi Wu and Maria Soprano were easily missed amidst that collection of armor and weaponry, which was part of the point. If the seven security officers weren’t enough to discourage someone from trying to take down Captain David Rice, the two Mages were almost certainly enough to stop them.