Mage-Provocateur

by Glynn Stewart

  Nahuatl Orbital was the only place where you could dock more than one starship, but the seven stations provided the system with an impressive port capacity, all told.

  The executive officer tapped a few commands, lighting the freighter’s engines up.

  “Twelve hours, twenty-six minutes to Nahuatl Orbital,” she announced aloud. “The cargo is for the system government, and for some strange reason, they hang out on the planet with the beaches.”

  Jeeves chuckled.

  “I can’t blame them. Any idea what our chances of shore leave are?”

  “Ask the Captain,” Kelly replied with a grin. David was all but strapped to his bed in the infirmary to stop him injuring himself with his new leg, but he was conscious enough to be the one making calls like that.

  And once they’d off-loaded their various deadly cargos, it would be up to him where Red Falcon went next.

  “Unknown vessel, this is Teotihuacan Security Control,” a calm female voice said on the transmission. “Please identify yourself and your purpose for approaching Nahuatl. You aren’t on our list, and frankly, antimatter engines make everybody nervous.”

  “They’re being a bit more than nervous, ma’am,” Jeeves reported. “All six of those rustbuckets they call a militia are maneuvering to rendezvous at an intercept point along our course, and we just got pinged by long-range sensors from something much more modern in Tepoztopilli orbit.”

  “How are we defining ‘much more modern’?” Kelly asked. “That covers a lot of bases.”

  “I’m defining it as ‘has enough stealth and ECM that I can’t make it out from this far away’,” the gunner said bluntly. “I’m guessing remote radar platform feeding a set of orbital missile batteries, but it could be a destroyer.”

  Kelly shook her head.

  “There is definitely more going on here than they’ve told anyone,” she murmured. “Well, let’s chat and see if we can calm them down.”

  She activated the microphone of the captain’s chair and turned on her camera.

  “Teotihuacan Security Control, this is Second Officer Kelly LaMonte of the independent charter freighter Red Falcon,” she greeted them chirpily. She didn’t have to fake bright cheeriness very often, but she was perfectly capable of doing so when she wasn’t actually feeling cheerful.

  “We’re operating under contract to Integrity Galactic Transport to deliver your shipment from Diamond Arms Brokerage on Legatus.” She smiled. “We would very much prefer not to get shot at, but as you can see from the engines, this is a former Navy Armed Auxiliary Fast Heavy Freighter. If you feel you have to shoot missiles at us, we can take it.”

  Most of a minute ticked away slowly…and then the female voice responded with a chuckle as her video feed kicked in. The voice’s owner was an older woman with short-cropped silvering hair and a loose-fitting dark-purple uniform.

  “I think we can refrain from that, Officer LaMonte,” she replied. “This is Commodore Aleksandrina Al-Mufti. If you’ve got my assault shuttles and cutters aboard, you may be my new favorite merchant ship, regardless of our local heart attack at your arrival.”

  “From the bills of lading I received from Integrity and Diamond, we have the full order,” Kelly told her. “From the shuttles to the exosuits.”

  “A lot of people are going to be very happy to see you, then, Officer LaMonte. You’re clear to Nahuatl Orbital. Would you object if my corvettes escort you in?”

  There was about a forty-second lag between each of their communications, but the Commodore kept her smile focused on the camera as she waited for Kelly’s response.

  “I’m always fond of having cops between me and potential bad guys,” Kelly told her. “Your ships are more than welcome to bring us in, though I’ll note that Falcon is quite capable of taking care of herself.” She paused.

  “Is there a reason for the paranoia, ma’am?” she asked. “This all seems…a bit much.”

  “I wish it was,” Al-Mufti replied. “I can’t say much, Officer LaMonte, but let’s just say I have reasons to want to be very sure your cargo arrives unharmed!

  “I look forward to speaking with you and your Captain when you arrive. Safe flight, Officer LaMonte.”

  The channel cut out and Kelly shook her head, her cheerfulness subduing.

  “Who died?” she wondered aloud.

  “I don’t know,” Jeeves replied. “But I think you’re right. Somebody died…or perhaps more accurately, was killed.”

  24

  The first few hours of physiotherapy hadn’t achieved much more than highlighting to David just how far he had to go. As Red Falcon made her way in toward Nahuatl, he and Dr. Gupta bundled him into a wheelchair, with the governors on his new leg turned up to maximum.

  Without the governors limiting what the limb could do, he was at risk of accidentally destroying the wheelchair with an unexpected “muscle” spasm. With them limited, the leg wasn’t much more than an expensive paperweight of metal, polymer and electronics, but it would improve.

  With his right arm still immobilized, one of the crew had to wheel him into the transfer bay where the Legatan detachment was waiting. From what the crew told him, they’d kept to themselves the whole trip, which was about all anyone had wanted from them.

  “Captain Rice,” the tallest of them, presumably Agent Blade, greeted him with a smile. “A pleasure to meet you at last. Your crew has been most accommodating and helpful, but it is always a privilege to meet a man of your reputation.”

  David chuckled.

  “There’s only about half of me left,” he noted. “How much of my reputation is attached to that?”

  Blade echoed the chuckle, shaking his head.

  “It will not be long until you feel you are all you again,” he told David. “The initial dysphoria passes quite quickly. Your leg will feel like yours long before it’s actually properly working.”

  “You would know, I suppose,” David allowed. Right now, it didn’t feel much like a limb, more like a weight attached to his hip. That had to pass. Blade, for example, probably didn’t have an actual organic limb left, but he didn’t seem bothered.

  “I must thank you and your crew for your assistance,” the LMID agent continued after a moment. “We have ways to enter the Protectorate, but most of them are known to the Legacy, as several of our former Blue Star partners have betrayed us.

  “You have allowed us to enter Atlatl without our shared enemy knowing we’re coming.” Blade’s smile narrowed, turning more predatory.

  “They will regret making an enemy of us both,” he concluded. A harsh vibration ran through the decking as Red Falcon connected with the dock, and Blade winced. “I see your pilot is still learning,” he said drily. “That’s…much more noticeable to me than you, perhaps.”

  “She was an engineer; she’s learning,” David replied. “She’s doing fine.”

  Blade chuckled again.

  “That she is. It’s just the learning is very noticeable. Nonetheless, I think that is our cue.” He gestured to his people to start collecting their bags.

  “I wish you the best with your new parts, Captain Rice. We have our own way home from here once our mission is complete,” he told David. “Thank you once again for your assistance.”

  “I hope your mission won’t spill back on us,” David told him. “You’ll pardon me if I don’t wish you luck.”

  “Legacy may make the connection,” Blade admitted. “They’ll have the data and they’re not stupid; they just have incompatible objectives to you and me.

  “There will be no…formal repercussions, let us say,” he promised. “The authorities will not trace us to you; I can promise you that.”

  “I’ll hold you to that,” David told him. He didn’t really have a way to hold LMID to that, but the promise stood anyway.

  And in the worst case, well, it wasn’t like David didn’t have a get-out-of-jail-free card for local authorities. It was just that using it would leave his enemies and allies asking q
uestions he didn’t want them thinking about too hard.

  David’s caretaker slowly wheeled him onto the bridge, where Kelly LaMonte and Maria Soprano were both standing by his chair, watching the screen.

  “Ladies, how are we doing?” he asked, stopping to cough in the middle as he suddenly found himself short of breath. His new lung was working, but it occasionally got confused and cut out, leaving his organic lung to try and carry the weight on its own unexpectedly.

  “Aren’t you barred from the bridge?” Soprano asked.

  “Barred from commanding from the bridge,” David corrected. “But since we’re not in flight, I figure it’s okay. Our good doctor will tell me later if I’m wrong,” he finished with a smile.

  “It’s good to see you around and about,” LaMonte told him. “The locals want to meet with the three of us once they start off-loading. They seem…”

  “Twitchy,” Soprano finished. “Or paranoid, however you want to phrase it. They almost started shooting at us when we showed up.”

  “And it was the antimatter engines that freaked them out,” David’s XO added. “Something odd is going on here.”

  “We’ll keep our ears to the ground, see if we can fill in MISS on what’s going on,” he told them. “We probably don’t want to get involved, not unless it turns out to be the Legacy. There’s an entire local MISS branch to take care of Atlatl’s problems.”

  “About that…” LaMonte shook her head. “We pinged the com address we had with the call-and-response code. Nothing. Not a wrong response. No response.”

  “That’s not good,” David agreed. “Do our files include any secondary contact methods for this system?”

  “Just the standard call-and-response and a communication address,” she replied. “We don’t know the physical location of the office or anything. I was hoping to get an update on the situation, see if MISS knows what the issue here is.”

  “If the office is out of communication, the Protectorate needs to know that,” David said quietly. “Where’s the nearest RTA?”

  Runic Transceiver Arrays were massive constructions of magic and runes that allowed a Mage to project their voice across the light-years to another RTA. They took years and vast quantities of money to build, but they were the only method of interstellar communication faster than a ship.

  “Sandoval,” Soprano told him. “Sixteen light-years.”

  “Start charting a course,” David ordered. “We’ll come up with an excuse to fly without a cargo if we need to. We can’t trust this to a courier, not if an entire MISS office has gone silent.”

  “I think you’re all underestimating just how twitchy these folks are,” Jeeves interrupted, the tactical officer joining them around the captain’s chair and tapping a command on the repeater screens.

  The screen on the chair arm now mirrored the gunnery officer’s own console, showing a circle of glowing orange icons in orbit above Tepoztopilli.

  “We got pinged from Tepoztopilli orbit on our way in,” he reminded them. “I couldn’t pick up what was pinging us, and I thought it was because they were playing games; there’s not a lot you can do to hide in space, but there’s a few things.

  “The problem was that I was looking for one emitter,” he concluded. “Tepoztopilli orbit is currently home to twelve, plus forty-two receivers.

  “A distributed Very Large Array, providing them with functionally perfect resolution on anything on this side of Teotihuacan. It’s homebuilt but very capable.”

  “Data like that is only useful if you’ve got something to use it with,” David said quietly.

  “The corvettes could use it for extra-long-range missile fire,” Jeeves told them, “but its main intended user is these guys.”

  Larger orange icons flickered into existence in Tepoztopilli orbit. And Nahuatl orbit. And Macahuitl orbit. Sixty icons distributed unevenly between the three moons. Another dozen icons in their own orbits of Teotihuacan between the moons. A handful more above the barren moons being mined.

  “Like the sensors, the missile platforms are homebuilt,” Jeeves told them. “I got a good look at one of the ones in Nahuatl orbit. Same theory as Snap’s platforms—massive fusion-drive missiles, probably only three, four thousand gravities of acceleration but lots of endurance.”

  “None of that is in our files on Atlatl,” LaMonte noted. “How recently can they have built that?”

  “That depends on how much they bought, how much they built, and how much of their spaceborne industry they took over to build it,” Jeeves replied. “They could have built all this in as little as six months if they prioritized it highly enough.”

  “All right…so, who is threatening a prosperous, successful MidWorld enough that they went to this kind of extent to defend themselves…and never told the Protectorate?” David asked.

  “You know,” Soprano said, almost conversationally, “I actually hope the answer is the Legacy, because the last thing I want to find out is that there’s someone else with this scale of resources.”

  Two women in dark-purple uniforms under black armored vests were waiting when David and his officers exited Red Falcon. As he’d expected, the docking area was zero-gee, but LaMonte and the two security officers helped him out of his wheelchair and folded it up.

  The chair was designed for that, after all, and the two officers took the whole thing with cheerful grace.

  “Don’t worry, Captain; we’re delighted to see you,” the senior woman told him. “We’ve been waiting on your cargo for six months.”

  “It’s quite the cargo,” he noted as they “swam” through the zero-gravity dock. “And we saw a bunch of missile platforms on the way in. Are those new?”

  “Very,” she agreed. “I’m not cleared to say much, Captain; Commodore Al-Mufti will fill you in on what she’s prepared to tell you.”

  “All right, then lead the way,” David told them with a smile. “It’s not like I’m going much of anywhere without help!”

  Nahuatl Orbital was the largest single space station in Teotihuacan local space, but that didn’t mean much. It had a grand total of four docks and was basically a large X in space with a spinning hab section around the central point.

  The section was smaller—and therefore spun faster—than most David had seen, and the transition from the docking structure to the pseudogravity hab ring was nauseating. Even the locals looked uncomfortable as the elevator pod accelerated up to speed.

  For its small size, however, there was a warm feeling to the Orbital that a lot of space stations didn’t have. All of the walls were painted, and many had murals of agricultural or pastoral scenes from the moonlets around them—and others had decoration that had very clearly been designed and applied by relatively young children.

  That decoration made up in color and enthusiasm what it lacked in style or comprehensibility, bringing a smile to even David’s currently disgruntled face.

  Unfolding the wheelchair and getting him back into it took longer than he’d like, but eventually they reached the security doors into Teotihuacan Security Control. Even there, the warm nature of the decorations continued. The scene painted across the heavy hatch was a cutesy bright one of sunlit meadows and white rabbits.

  If only half the rabbits were really identifiable and the sun had a face, well, that helped reduce the threat level of the two exosuited guards standing outside the armored hatch.

  One of their uniformed escorts handed the guards a plastic card, and there was a silent exchange before the door slowly opened.

  “The Commodore is waiting for you, Captain Rice.”

  Commodore Aleksandrina Al-Mufti’s office was just off from a planetary command center space that would have done a much larger military force proud. A massive holographic tank displayed every object in the Teotihuacan planetary system, with green icons marking the corvettes as well as the missile launchers Jeeves had pointed out.

  There were also two larger green icons attached to a structure that David’s people hadn
’t picked up orbiting Teotihuacan well inside the orbit of the moonlets humanity had taken for their own. David Rice was perfectly capable of reading the standard tactical iconography used by the Martian Navy and the system militias, which meant he identified the two destroyers instantly.

  It was a non-standard code, one even most Navy veterans wouldn’t be able to read—but David had been a CIC technician.

  The codes attached to their icons told him neither warship was active. That could be for any of a dozen reasons, but he suspected they were still undergoing fitting-out while their crews trained.

  Even if there’d been more data in the tank, he wouldn’t have been able to pick it out before he was wheeled into Al-Mufti’s office. Unlike the rest of the station, Security Control’s space was austere and plain, and Al-Mufti’s room was no exception.

  The walls were currently a plain industrial white but had the telltale glimmer of wallscreens. The Commodore worked from a single desk with a standard console display. As they entered, she was standing next to the one wallscreen not pretending to be a plain wall, studying a visual of what David guessed to be the VLA assembled around Tepoztopilli.

  “Commodore Al-Mufti,” he greeted her. “You asked to speak with myself, my Ship’s Mage and my XO?”

  “I did,” she agreed. She tapped a command on her wrist-comp and the door slid shut behind them, locking out the rest of the Commodore’s people with a neat finality. “This room is as secure as Teotihuacan Security can make it,” she noted.

  The wallscreen blanked behind her and David’s wrist-comp bleeped a calm no signal warning.

  “Including having the ability to be turned into a Faraday cage,” she continued with a small smile. “Your ship attempted to ping the MISS office here in Atlatl. I’m hoping my interpretation of that was correct and that one of you three, at least, is an MISS operative.”

  David sighed. He was authorized to brief local authorities on Red Falcon’s true nature, but it had been made clear that everyone preferred he didn’t.