Mage-Provocateur

by Glynn Stewart

  “And these appear to be infiltration models—Blade is, if nothing else.”

  “Confirming the existence of those alone has value to the Protectorate,” Skavar reminded her.

  “I can set up a program in the ship’s internal scanners to watch them at all hours,” Kellers noted. “We’d be certain they didn’t do anything we didn’t allow—and we’d have a massive quantity of data on the infiltration Augments to provide the Protectorate.”

  “If we betray LMID’s trust that badly, they may realize it,” Jeeves warned quietly. “These aren’t guys who play nice. They just wiped out a conference of gang lords to maintain a temporary advantage. Blue Star scares me…and these are the guys who scare Blue Star.”

  “So are we,” LaMonte said flatly. “Both MISS and us, specifically. We’ve left pieces of Blue Star, Azure Legacy and other Blue Star successor syndicates scattered across half the fucking galaxy.

  “If LMID wants to play? We’ll play. They want to fuck with Azure Legacy? Let’s throw our enemies at each other. We work for Mars, people. Are we really going to be intimidated by Legatus?”

  Maria chuckled.

  “For a moment there, XO, you sounded like a Navy officer,” she told LaMonte. “And you’re right. I see a lot of possible benefits for us and for MISS if we take this deal—and I won’t deny I want to be out of this system yesterday.”

  “A bird in the hand is worth two in the wind,” Kellers said quietly. “This gets us out of Snap—and out of UnArcana space, too. Your call, Ship’s Mage.”

  “But you think we should do it,” Maria concluded for him. She looked around. “Anyone got a counterargument?”

  “Not really,” Jeeves admitted. “Just a general sense of foreboding doom. But…don’t we need some cyber parts for the Skipper?”

  “Eventually,” Maria agreed.

  “Legatus makes the best,” the gunner reminded her. “See if they can throw them in as a bonus. If we’re gonna do this, let’s soak them for all we can!”

  Whatever Maria wanted to say about LMID—and she had a lot to say about a covert organization that seemed to be busy with treason—they were certainly efficient. From her getting back in touch with “Agent Blade” to the cargo being confirmed to the cargo starting to load was under twelve hours.

  The cargo in question was…less innocent than she’d prefer. Apparently, among its other magnificent qualities, Junkrat was the primary transshipment point for arms exports from Legatus. Atlatl, it appeared, was completely re-equipping its ground, sea, air and space forces with new equipment.

  The containers being loaded onto Red Falcon contained two hundred assault shuttles, a thousand orbital cutters, five thousand tanks, three thousand aircraft, ten thousand armored personnel carriers, eight thousand exosuits and over a million carbines, battle lasers and penetrator rifles.

  Plus, approximately three million tons of munitions for all of the above. It was almost a surprise that the rearmament program was actually mentioned in their most recent MISS updates. Atlatl was being quite up-front about replacing the gear their planetary forces were currently equipped with—since the average age of their existing gear was apparently around sixty years old.

  It seemed there was also an order in with Tau Ceti for four destroyers to provide heavy support to that fleet of assault shuttles and cutters.

  MISS suspected there was more going on than just a desire to replacing an aging fleet of armored vehicles and light spacecraft, but if they’d dug anything up that wasn’t public, it wasn’t in Maria’s update.

  Atlatl was far from poor, but the level of upgrading they were doing was staggering. They had to have invested enough money in the purchases from Legatus to have built a homegrown armament industry—though such an industry probably wouldn’t have been able to provide as wide a breadth of equipment.

  “Ship’s Mage?” the voice of Corporal Spiros interrupted her review of the data on the cargo.

  “Yes, Corporal?”

  “Our guests are here.”

  Maria nodded grimly.

  “I’ll be right down.”

  The guards had been smart enough to pull the entire party aboard Red Falcon while waiting for the officers, and the four women and eight men were standing calmly next to their gear when Maria arrived.

  Agent Blade was standing in front of his people and nodded cheerfully to her as she arrived.

  “Mage Soprano,” he greeted her, sweeping his hand back over his people. “This is my team. If you let us know where you want us to set up camp, we’ll get out of your hair for the rest of the trip to Atlatl.”

  He smiled. For a murdering psychopathic cyborg, he had far too nice a smile.

  “I imagine everyone will be happier if my people stay out of the way of your crew,” he continued. “None of us know an ion engine from a power conduit, so we wouldn’t be much help.”

  “That’s fair,” Maria agreed with a nod. “I’ll have someone show you to the quarters we’ve set aside. Do you have any particular needs we should be aware of?”

  Blade shrugged.

  “The Augments need a far higher quotient of minerals and metals in their food than you’ll have in your kitchen, but we brought supplements for that,” he told her. “Feed us what you’d feed anybody else and we’ll be fine.

  “As for needs…” He picked up one of the two duffle bags at his feet and handed it to her. Despite the casual ease with which he lifted it, it was surprisingly heavy, and she opened it to find two shrink-wrapped plain white boxes. One was the full length of the bag, easily a meter long, where the other was maybe twenty centimeters by thirty.

  “Military Augment-grade replacements,” he noted. “One leg—adjustable to be either right or left if your surgeon is capable of the installation at all. One lung—hooks into the airway, provides full control of oxygen intake and a secondary oxygen reservoir.”

  Blade tapped his own chest.

  “I’ve got two of the lungs, and they’re the best upgrade we have,” he told her. “I hope this all helps your Captain get back on his feet. My superiors are quite enthused with your Captain Rice.”

  “It should,” Maria agreed, closing the bag. “We can only hope. He was quite badly injured.”

  “Believe me, Mage Soprano, the people who ordered that are much worse off,” Blade told her with that same warm grin.

  What had been attractive when he was being helpful was disturbing when he was bragging about mass murder.

  22

  David woke slowly. Very slowly. It was like a fog was slowly lifting from his mind as he came back to wakefulness and then began to blink.

  He blinked several times before his vision could focus, and then he remembered how he’d ended up unconscious and reached toward his chest. One of his arms refused to respond and he half-panicked, looking over to see his right shoulder coated in a heavy, immobilizing cast.

  His chest was wrapped in bandages and several tubes still protruded from his immobilized right arm.

  “Take it easy, Skipper,” Dr. Gupta’s reassuring baritone told him. “You had a rough few minutes and you’re still coming back together. I kept you in an induced coma while the worst of the damage that could heal did.”

  “Could heal, huh?” David echoed, then coughed. His throat was dry and clogged—and the doctor was handing him a glass of water.

  “Drink,” Gupta ordered.

  David obeyed, the doctor watching in silence.

  “How bad?” he asked after finishing the water, his throat feeling less like a desert.

  “You’re short a lung and a leg,” the doctor said flatly. “Your shoulder will be immobilized for at least another two weeks—and be thankful for modern medicine at that! We’re not that many years away from when the degree of shattering your scapula underwent would have meant you needing an artificial replacement from the shoulder down.”

  Wincing, David patted at the blankets covering where he thought his legs had been. He might be conscious, but he was still tanke
d to the gills on painkillers, so he hadn’t noticed he was missing one.

  As the blankets settled over his limbs, that became obvious, though, and he sighed.

  “How long was I out?” he asked.

  “Just over three days,” the doctor told him. “We’re four jumps out from Snap now.”

  “Heading where?” David demanded. It was entirely within Soprano’s authority to take on a cargo and move the ship if he was out, but he did need to know where they were going.

  “Atlatl, carrying cargo for the military there,” Gupta explained. “I don’t know a lot of the details; you’ll want to pin down Soprano or the rest of the senior officers for that.”

  David nodded, sighing as he studied his battered body.

  “So, one lung, huh?” he asked. “I don’t feel short of breath.”

  “You won’t, unless you try and carry out strenuous exercise,” the doctor told him. “You’ll feel it pretty damned quickly then. Of course, exercise will be hard when you’re missing a leg. I’ve got a wheelchair ready for you until you tell me you’re ready for surgery.”

  “Cybernetics,” he said quietly. Protectorate medical science wasn’t up to regrowing limbs, though it could regrow most organs. “What about the lung?”

  “I have the gear to clone you a new one,” Gupta told him. “Or, well, the ridiculously insane cyber-leg we have as an available option came with a matching lung.”

  “What cyber-leg are we talking about?” David asked.

  “Thanks to our Ship’s Mage, there’s a military Augment-grade cyber-limb—with hip reinforcements, thankfully—sitting in a sterile box on the other side of sick bay. There’s a military Augment-grade cyber-lung to go with it.”

  David considered the full meaning of that.

  “Augment-grade?” he asked.

  “Legatan,” Gupta explained. “They make the best cybernetics in the Protectorate, and they keep the military-grade stuff to themselves…and the Augment-grade stuff under even closer watch.

  “LMID apparently likes you, Captain. This stuff is outside my training and experience, though thankfully, the installation is basically the same.”

  “LMID gave us Augment-grade cybernetics for me?” David asked. “When did we even start talking to LMID?!”

  “After an LMID Augment infiltrator team fucking massacred every member of Azure Legacy’s little conference,” Soprano told him. He looked up to see his Ship’s Mage closing the door behind her.

  “We cut a deal: they got us a cargo and the best possible cybernetics for you, we carried that infiltrator team to Atlatl,” she continued. “They’re keeping to themselves and haven’t turned into a problem yet.

  “How is he doing, doc?” she asked, addressing the question to Gupta.

  “I woke him up, didn’t I?” the doctor said grumpily. “Look, I need time to examine him, and then he needs to decide if he wants to go down for implantation now or later.

  “I know he’s the Captain and he needs to be briefed, but…”

  “But that’s enough for now?” Soprano asked.

  Gupta sighed.

  “Not really,” he admitted. “That’s up to you guys. Look, I’ll run the scanners while you jabber.

  “Here.”

  He passed a tablet over to David. “That’s the specs on the two parts the Legatans gave us. There isn’t anything better out there, though there are other options if you’d prefer. I can get you a catalog later.

  “For now, you read, she talks, I poke. Got it?”

  The loss of breath from the missing lung became more apparent to David over the course of the conversation. It was hard for him, though some of that was almost certainly the painkillers, but Soprano’s summary of the events of the last few days was breathtaking.

  “I see we owe Ms. Wu a raise,” he noted after she told him about the Mage teleporting him out. “That was clever and effective. Why didn’t you bring everyone out that way?”

  “Wu could bring two with her. I could bring three. Maybe four,” Soprano told him. “Evacuating the wounded, sure, but I wasn’t leaving half of the security detail behind. Not while we were still under fire and, well…” She shrugged. “I was relatively sure I could get everyone out. It was only really a question of how many people I had to kill.”

  Her last sentence was so matter-of-fact, it sent a shiver down David’s spine. Just what had he dragged his officers—his friends—into when he’d signed up with MISS?

  “And this Agent Blade?” he asked.

  “He seems to be aboveboard, if fucking terrifying,” she said. “But…he’s an infiltration cyborg, an assassin.” She shook her head. “I’m afraid of what we might be delivering him to do, even if it is being done to Azure Legacy.”

  “‘Pay evil unto evil’ and all that,” David agreed, his working hand gently tracing the outline of the cast over his shoulder. “My sympathy for Mikhail Azure’s leftovers is limited, but the concept of cyborg assassins makes me uncomfortable.”

  “And becoming a cyborg yourself?” Soprano asked, gesturing at the tablet in his hand.

  He sighed.

  “How long until we arrive in Atlatl?”

  “About fifty-two hours,” his Ship’s Mage told him. “If you give Gupta the go-ahead, you should be walking and breathing by the time we get there.”

  “That’s optimistic,” the doctor interrupted. “The cyber-lung is autonomous. The leg is not so much, and even the lung has functions you will need to learn.

  “Implantation will be done by the time we arrive in Atlatl, but it will be…days, at least, before you can walk normally.

  “Weeks before you can fully use the extended functions of the implants. You will still be wheelchair-bound when we arrive in Atlatl, whatever we do.”

  “But that rehab and learning can’t start until the limb is attached,” David said.

  “Exactly,” Gupta agreed. “Whenever we do implantation, you’ll be down for twenty-fours for each implant. Unconscious, general sedation. Nerves are not attached easily. The lung will be perfectly functional for normal uses as soon as implantation is complete, and some of the toxin filters and similar defenses will operate automatically.

  “The oxygen reservoirs and some of the other options will require training to use. The leg will definitely require training, but…the sooner everything is in you, the sooner we can train you to use it.”

  David nodded.

  “How’s the ship, Maria?”

  “Kelly has it surprisingly in hand,” his Ship’s Mage reported. “I play Captain so that she doesn’t feel too overwhelmed, and she takes care of everything. She’s turning into a damned fine XO, Skipper.”

  “Well, if you have everything in hand, it sounds like I can take a nice long nap,” David replied. “Any concerns if I tell the good doctor to get started?”

  Soprano snorted.

  “About twelve and a half million of them, but nothing critical,” she told him. “I won’t say I’m not eager to give you the ship back, but I’d rather have a whole Captain in a few days than a stressed, exhausted, broken one right now.”

  “Thanks, I appreciate the vote of confidence,” he replied, then looked over at Gupta. “Would you even let me get back to work if I said to hold off on the implants?”

  “Not a chance in bloody hell,” the doctor replied. “Regardless of whether we proceed with implantation, you need to spend the next week resting. Briefed and consulted, yes. In command from the bridge? No.”

  David chuckled.

  “Then I see no reason to delay,” he noted. “Let me get a meal into me, and then I think you may as well knock me out and start hooking up nerves.”

  23

  “Jump complete,” Xi Wu reported in a drained voice. “Welcome to the Atlatl System.”

  “Thanks, Xi,” Kelly told her girlfriend, her attention torn between her exhausted-sounding lover and the sensor data on the star system.

  Duty won out.

  “Go rest,” she ordered the Mage. �
�Next stop is Nahuatl, but we’re still twelve hours out.”

  Wu nodded and the video link to the simulacrum chamber closed, leaving Kelly looking over the sensor data flowing in from Red Falcon’s various passive arrays.

  Atlatl was an odd system in that the inhabitable worlds didn’t orbit inside the normal liquid water zone for their F-type star’s strength. Instead, a midsized gas giant named Teotihuacan orbited just outside the regular habitable zone, the additional heat from the gas giant’s presence rendering three of its moons habitable.

  Nahuatl, Macahuitl, and Tepoztopilli were each significantly larger than Earth’s moon, dense enough with heavy metals that all three had gravities ranging from seventy to eighty percent of Earth standard.

  The three moons would have seen massive mining efforts for those heavy metals—except that Teotihuacan had four other moons that had been too small or too fast to retain atmosphere or life. With three distinct ecosystems to protect and learn from, and four barren rocks to work from, Atlatl’s populace had chosen to place all of the mining and most of the heavy industry either on the barren moons or in orbit between the seven worldlets that orbited Teotihuacan.

  Nahuatl was the largest moon and the farthest out. Its thick atmosphere and wide oceans actually made it the warmest of the three moons, a temperate tropical paradise that had inevitably ended up as the seat of the system government.

  “Well, at least flying through this mess is easier than traveling around Puck,” Kelly observed aloud. “Jeeves, what have we got for company?”

  “Half a dozen local militia corvettes, Mars-built but old,” the Third Officer reported. “Looks like forty to fifty in-system ships making their rounds around Teotihuacan. Bunch of jump-ships docked at the orbitals—looks like five or six total.

  “It’s hard to say. Lots of small orbitals.”

  Kelly nodded. Each of Teotihuacan’s seven major moons had its own orbital station. Nahuatl’s was the biggest and the main stopping point for jump-ships, but any of the seven could handle ships up to Red Falcon’s size.