Mage-Provocateur

by Glynn Stewart

  The Shippers’ Guild—a fancy name for a cargo broker—was located on a large open promenade that linked through levels five, six, seven and eight of the Old Ring’s ten decks. It was large enough that the curvature of the ring could be seen and tall enough that the “higher” levels had noticeably weaker gravity than the “lower” ones.

  This promenade was apparently one of Old Ring’s main commercial areas, with dozens of offices, restaurants and stores. It didn’t have the stalls and chaos of a regular bazaar; this was more of an ground-style mall—more official and organized.

  Unlike the rest of the Old Ring, the promenade was still busy with people. The populace might have realized there were more gangsters and thugs around than usual, but work still needed to get done.

  The presence of the crowds meant that David began to relax. Nowhere on Junkertown was safe, not with the game he was playing, but his enemies seemed unlikely to start a firefight in what was basically a crowded mall—that they owned.

  He was almost right.

  They passed through the crowds without incident, the shoppers and office workers scrambling out of the way of the David’s escorts with a calm assurance that suggested armed groups were far from uncommon there.

  The promenade had broad ramps connecting the levels, home to carefully constructed fast food kiosks. The smell of cooking food swarmed anyone traveling between levels, a clever trick to sell burgers and pre-boxed fried rice dishes.

  Soprano was leading the way still, crossing onto level seven and heading toward the subdued but still visible offices of the guild, when everything went to hell.

  The sniper was good—but not good enough to fully account for the rotation of the promenade on their first shot. The tungsten armor-penetrating dart had been aimed at David but flashed by high and to the right.

  The screams from behind him suggested that they’d hit someone, but they hadn’t been aiming at innocent fast food workers.

  “Shields!” Soprano barked at her subordinate, but the Mages weren’t quick enough.

  Skavar’s Marines were. One of the armored escorts had David on the ground before the Captain could even begin to run for cover himself…and the sniper didn’t miss twice.

  David felt his bodyguard spasm as the heavy dart slammed home…and then again as the sniper kept firing.

  The clamshell body armor his people wore was solid, capable of standing off most small arms. It wasn’t up to withstanding the penetrator rounds designed to punch through exosuits. The third shot punched clean through David’s protector and into his leg.

  The fourth punched into his gut. The fifth into his lung.

  If there were more bullets, he was unconscious before he registered them.

  18

  “Fuck!”

  Maria didn’t even try to swallow the curse, instead focusing on getting the defensive shield up. Several more bullets slammed into it once she was covering the Falcon’s crew, but she was already too late.

  “Skavar,” she snapped. “Medical.”

  “Already on it,” the Marine replied, pulling a medkit from inside his powered harness as he knelt next to the two dying men. “Spiros, you handle Akkerman. Let’s try not to lose anybody.

  “Reyes, Tsao, find that shooter.”

  Reyes was the trooper wearing the other powered harness, the tall man tracking around the promenade with the heavy penetrator rifle.

  “The shooting stopped,” he said grimly. “Why don’t I think that’s a good sign?”

  “Because it’s not,” Maria replied, still focusing on holding the shield. The crowds around them were scattering, fast. On a station with as much gang involvement as Junkertown in general and the Old Ring in particular, the local populace knew when to take cover.

  “Top level, jumpers,” one of the guards snapped, bringing his own carbine up. “Ma’am, ROE?”

  “If they’re armed, put them down,” Maria ordered grimly as the reason for the question sank in: with Rice down, she was in command.

  Carbines barked around her as she refocused her shield to allow the gunfire. Half a dozen attackers in light body armor were coming down from the top level, taking advantage of the mixed gravity to parkour their way down the promenade in a way no other environment would allow.

  If their approach, armor and weapons hadn’t been enough of a clue, they started shooting in almost the same instant that Falcon’s crew did. They didn’t have the benefit of two Mages providing defensive shields, however, and the gunfight rapidly proved uneven.

  The attackers took cover behind the promenade walls, carefully firing around corners as they began to approach more conservatively. They had Maria’s people pinned, though, and it wasn’t like they could move Rice or Akkerman.

  “Xi?” she asked.

  “Ma’am?”

  “Take over the shield,” she ordered the younger Mage. “I need to deal with these assholes.”

  Xi Wu could, she was sure, take out the remaining attackers. But the young Mage had yet to have to use that level of combat magic in the real world. If someone had to have nightmares over this, well, Maria already had that type of nightmare.

  She felt Wu take over the shield, covering them from the attackers’ gunfire, and released her part of it as she took a moment to carefully study their advancing enemies.

  They were still coming, which didn’t seem right. It wasn’t like Maria and Wu were being subtle about their presence—and four men with guns, however brave or skilled, weren’t enough to take down one Mage, let alone two.

  Which meant there was another string to their bow.

  She threw up a new shield, wrapping the entire group in a sphere of impenetrable force that stopped their own bullets, just in time. Even as the shield flickered into existence, glittering white fire hammered into it from at least three locations.

  “Mages,” she hissed. “They brought Mages.”

  “It’s nice to be respected, I suppose,” Skavar said flatly. “Look, I’ve stopped the bleeding and covered the lovely sucking chest wound, but the Captain needs real medical attention—fast.”

  “Akkerman is gone,” Spiros said, her voice cold and distant. “Too many wounds, too much blood. There’s nothing we could have done.”

  More Mage-fire and gunfire hammered into Maria’s shield, and she hesitated. Everyone was looking to her for an answer and she didn’t have one…and then she met Xi Wu’s terrified eyes and realized she did.

  “Xi, your wrist-comp has the program for jump calculations, right?” she asked.

  “Yeah…”

  “We’ve got Falcon’s scans of the Old Ring for angular vector. Plug it all in, calculate the jump. Get the Captain and Akkerman back to the ship with you. These fuckers are here for the Skipper; if he’s gone…”

  “They’re not going to want to fight a full-on Mage duel in a space station,” Skavar concluded. “How fast can you run that calc?”

  Wu didn’t answer him, already focused down on her computer.

  “Not that fast,” Maria admitted. “This could still be a really bad day.”

  The Marine Intelligence officer grimaced, then picked up the penetrator rifle he’d dropped to check on Rice.

  “Let’s share that bad day with our new friends, shall we?”

  A fully trained Combat Mage knew half a dozen tricks for hiding their location while they were bombarding a target. It was rapidly becoming clear to Maria that their attackers, while quite well trained and powerful, were not Combat Mages.

  Most of her focus was kept on protecting everyone, weaving and reinforcing the shield of force that was deflecting bullets and Mage-fire. More shooters had begun to materialize out of the woodwork as well, including somebody with a penetrator rifle who was quite probably the original sniper.

  “Ivan, do you have that sniper dialed in?” she asked.

  “Mostly. I can drop him, but it’s a long-range shot with a high-power weapon,” Skavar replied. “Collateral mess is inevitable.”

  “I’l
l weep for the Parchment Tigers later,” she said. “Right now, I don’t care if you breach the damn hull. Take that fucker down.”

  “Oh, I was hoping you’d say that,” Skavar purred. The powered harness helped him lift the heavy rifle as he tracked his target. “To quote my drill sergeant from long ago: ‘Hey, y’all, watch this!’”

  An RMMC heavy penetrator rifle was usually a single-shot weapon. It fired a discarding sabot that contained a single tungsten flechette dart designed to punch through any body armor, up to and including exosuit armor.

  The Royal Martian Marine Corps being the paranoids they were, the gun was heavily overengineered and entirely capable of fully automatic fire. Even an exosuit or a power harness couldn’t absorb the recoil of a 22mm cannon firing half a dozen rounds a second.

  Ivan Skavar ended up on the ground on his ass—but he kept the gun on target for three entire seconds, covering the sniper’s location in a hail of armor-penetrating death.

  “I really hope that got the bastard,” he said after a moment, sounding short of breath. “Because that hurt a lot more than I expected it to.”

  For a few precious moments, the gunfire stopped. Part of it, Maria was sure, was sheer shock at the raw firepower Skavar had unleashed—but a lot of it was also waiting to see whether the hail of high-velocity penetrators had managed to breach the station hull.

  As the silence faded, Wu made a soft cheer.

  “I’ve got it.” She hesitated. “I don’t know how many I can take with me.”

  “Take the Captain and Akkerman,” Maria said instantly. “The rest of us can get out of this on our own. Go!”

  The younger Mage crouched over the wounded and dead men, laying a hand on each as she studied the numbers on her wrist-comp screen. She exhaled, closed her eyes…and was gone.

  “I really hope she got the numbers right,” Maria muttered to herself.

  “Can’t you tell?” Skavar asked.

  “No,” the Mage admitted. “I can’t track a jump. There apparently are people who can, but I’m not one of them!”

  A renewed hail of gunfire battered her shield.

  “I don’t think they’ve noticed he’s gone yet,” the Marine said grimly. “What do we do?”

  “We move. Without the wounded, we can do that,” she replied. “Come on. I think our appointment with the Shippers’ Guild is going to have to wait.”

  One of the enemy Mages had made the mistake of both getting too close and getting between Maria Soprano and the way out for the people under her protection. She’d been playing softball because, frankly, she didn’t want to have to kill anyone she didn’t need to.

  Her priority was getting her people out.

  Her shield bubble moved with her and her team, back toward the corridor they’d originally come in through, but there were a Mage and half a dozen gunmen blocking the way. Probably intentionally positioned to make sure that Rice’s people couldn’t retreat.

  The Mage had enough time to meet Maria’s eyes before he learned that while the Navy didn’t train Combat Mages, the officers of an amplifier-armed starship learned a lot of ways to make people die.

  They were throwing fireballs. Maria threw ball lightning. A bolt of plasma arced from her hand to land at the Mage’s feet and then exploded into a fragmenting cluster of electricity and superheated air.

  None of the syndicate thugs even had time to scream before they died, and Maria’s shield flung their bodies aside as she led her people to safety.

  Once in the corridor, the gunfire died down and she looked around.

  “Is everyone okay?” she asked.

  “A few scrapes, but you kept us all pretty well covered,” Skavar told her. “Do we expect trouble between here and the ship?”

  “Probably,” she admitted. “We’ll see how brave they want to be after that mess, though. Plus, well.” She gestured at the recessed and semi-concealed cameras. “They know David’s gone now. We should be safe.”

  Skavar shook his head.

  “Fuckers. I hope the Captain is okay.”

  “Dr. Gupta is good at his job,” Maria said as reassuringly as she could. “He’ll be fine.”

  The Chief of Security had had an even better look at the Captain’s wounds than she had. His expression…wasn’t promising.

  19

  Kelly LaMonte wouldn’t call her obsessive watching of the radio channels and Red Falcon’s sensors paranoid.

  Paranoia would require there not to be a real and active threat. Since she had every reason to expect both enemies and attacks, watching for them was hardly paranoia.

  Potentially, the fact that all of Red Falcon’s RFLAM turrets were currently fully online and operating in a semi-autonomous defense mode was paranoia. If so, she could live with that. She didn’t trust the Blue Star Syndicate’s survivors not to decide to try and destroy the docked freighter.

  Especially not as Skavar’s people began to report in about the attack.

  “Gupta, it’s LaMonte,” she snapped into the ship’s intercom. “We have incoming wounded. The Captain’s been hit—I’m not sure how bad, from what I’m getting, but it does not sound good.”

  “Damn,” the ship’s doctor replied. “How quickly? They’re at nearly the opposite end of the station!”

  “Wu’s bringing him in,” Kelly told him as she listened to the com chatter. “Teleport. Not sure where she’s going to come in, but I’m guessing one of the flight bays.”

  They were big open spaces, and while Kelly wasn’t a Mage, if she was teleporting fifteen kilometers with a dying companion, she’d go for the biggest open space she had.

  “Nicolas,” she pinged the ship’s first pilot. “Wu is going to teleport in with the Captain. He’s been shot; I’m guessing she’s going for the big open spaces, which would be your bays.

  “Have your people watching—we need to get the wounded to Gupta ASAP.”

  “I hear you,” Nicolas replied grimly. “I’ll pass the word.”

  Kelly continued to run down her list.

  “Lieutenant Armand,” she said, reaching out to Skavar’s second in command. “Do you have a response team ready to go?”

  “Aye,” the Marine replied instantly. “One in exosuits, one in regular body armor.”

  Exosuits were rare enough aboard civilian ships that sending them out would draw far too much attention to Red Falcon, and with the Captain hopefully extracted…

  “Load the exosuit team onto a boarding torpedo and prep it for if everything goes to absolute hell,” she ordered. “Take the rest in to meet our people. Bring them home, Armand.”

  “Will do,” the other woman replied. “I’ll get everyone moving while I get out of this armor. Nobody else is taking my people into that shithole.”

  “That’s your call, Armand,” Kelly told her.

  “This is Kelzin,” her boyfriend’s voice interrupted. “We have Wu and the Captain on the deck in Bay Bravo. I’ve got a stretcher team moving in; we’ll have him in the medbay in sixty seconds."

  Kelzin paused.

  “We’ve got Akkerman as well, but…he’s not as urgent.”

  Kelly winced. That was what she’d expected from listening to the coms.

  “Understood,” she said grimly. “Mike…can you prep the assault shuttles for a strike flight? I think this mess is resolved for now, but I want everything ready if we have to go full-court.”

  “On it.”

  Kelly leaned back in the Captain’s command chair, hoping she’d covered everything—and hoping she wasn’t going to have to order her crew to blow their cover to extract the remaining people aboard Junkertown.

  If she had to, she’d blow holes in the station big enough to fly Red Falcon herself into. Hopefully…hopefully…things were enough under control to avoid that.

  “David is in surgery with Dr. Gupta now,” Kelly told Soprano over the radio. “Gods only know how that’s going to go, but he’s in the best hands he can be.

  “Where are you at?”


  “Moving halfway back to the cylinder,” the Mage replied grimly. “So far, people seem to be just getting the hell out of our way. No new incidents.”

  “Armand is on her way to you with another squad,” Kelly told the older woman. “I’ve got backup standing by if anything else goes to hell, and I’ve brought the RFLAM turrets to full defensive mode.”

  She shook her head.

  “Short of shooting holes in the station, we’ve gone as far as we can.”

  “I don’t think that’ll be required,” Soprano said with a chuckle. “I think our friends have realized David is back aboard; they certainly seem to be leaving us alone. We’ll be back aboard in fifteen minutes.”

  “Okay. Your orders?” Kelly asked quietly.

  “Fuck.”

  Soprano was silent for several seconds.

  “Do we have anyone off-ship other than us and the rescue squad?” she finally asked.

  “No,” Kelly confirmed. “We had a few people outside, but I’ve pulled everyone back except a small guard outside the personnel connection. I’ve locked down every other way aboard the ship.”

  “Good call. Keep that one open till we get aboard, please, but then button up the ship,” Soprano ordered. “We’ll still want to find a cargo if we can, but I think we want to cut free of Junkertown for now.

  “Start the clearance process.”

  “And if they don’t want to expedite for us?” Kelly asked. She could guess the answer, but she wanted the confirmation.

  “Then cut the umbilicals. They can sue the damn Tigers for it.”

  Tower Six’s controllers clearly understood exactly where Kelly and her ship were. All of the umbilicals and connections were retracted by the time Soprano and the security troops made it back aboard, and Kelly had no problems breaking the big ship free of Junkertown and moving her away from the station.

  “So, XO, how obvious are we being about the fact we’ve dialed in the Old Ring for weapons fire?” Soprano asked as she walked onto the bridge.

  “I would never dream of threatening innocents like that,” Kelly replied virtuously. “I just have the defensive-turret radar going at full force.”