Mage-Provocateur

by Glynn Stewart

  The chime buzzed again. Shaking her head, Kelly turned away from the door, sinking deeper into her funk.

  That was when Mike Kelzin and Xi Wu discovered that she’d been too sunk into her imminent depression to remember to lock her door when she’d come in. The door slid open without hesitation, and her lovers entered in perfect step with each other.

  “I see the wall remains utterly fascinating,” Mike told her, sitting down next to her. He was close enough to invite physical contact and far enough not to force it…and she was moving into his arms before she even thought about it.

  “Not really,” she murmured into his shoulder. A moment later, a second set of arms wrapped around her and she found herself pinned between the two of them.

  “The wall isn’t what you’re looking at,” Xi said, kissing Kelly’s hair as she spoke. “Memories and what-ifs are what you’re looking at.”

  “Something like that,” Kelly agreed.

  “I’d like to note that, once again, you, Ms. XO, are the reason we’re all still breathing,” Mike told her. He squeezed her.

  “And that I still have nightmares about Chrysanthemum,” he murmured in her ear. “You?”

  “Oh god, Chrysanthemum,” she half-gasped. “All I did was lead the cleanup on the ship. That was bad enough.”

  “Chrysanthemum was the first place I killed someone,” her boyfriend told her. “Not the last, not with the way this crew attracts trouble, but the first.”

  “That’s where we got the fuel tanker,” Kelly said. “That was the first thing I killed anyone with.”

  Blue Jay had fled the Chrysanthemum System after the local government had tried to kill Damien Montgomery and betray them all to the Blue Star Syndicate. Kelzin had flown the shuttle that had pulled the officers off the planet, covering their boarding himself with a battle carbine.

  Kelly, in turn, had turned the fuel tanker they’d accidentally stolen into a weapon that had taken down the bounty hunter ship that had chased them from Chrysanthemum. That explosion was one of the memories she was reliving.

  “You’ve both been to counseling,” Xi pointed out, the Mage wrapping her arms around her lovers. “You know you were protecting others, doing what you had to do.”

  “Yeah,” Kelly admitted. “I don’t regret protecting us…just leaving quite a trail of death behind us.”

  “We didn’t start this fight with the Legacy,” Xi reminded her. “And if we’re taking it to them now, well, they’re turning into a bigger threat to others than we can stand by and watch.

  “We agreed to a job with MISS. We may be making ourselves a target, but by doing so, we make others safer.”

  “That’s the theory, anyway,” Mike agreed. “And the Golden Bears…those fuckers do not deserve your sympathy. High and mighty they might pretend to be, but they were outright murderers for hire.”

  Kelly nodded, leaning into his shoulder. Off-shift and with the door closed, she didn’t need to be Red Falcon’s executive officer. Here, she could just be a young woman, leaning on the ones she loved for support.

  Sometimes, that was all you had. Often, it was enough.

  The battle against the Golden Bears had been the first time Red Falcon had gone into combat where Maria and her Mages had literally done nothing. Usually, they were at least playing missile defense, but LaMonte had rendered that unnecessary.

  It wasn’t as though Maria could really feel useless aboard the twenty-million-ton spaceship that only her magic allowed to travel through the stars, but it was an interesting comparison to when she’d served aboard Navy warships with true amplifiers.

  For all that even an amplified Mage had a relatively limited range, a lot of the Royal Martian Navy’s tactics were built around bringing enemies into that range. Missiles and lasers might have longer range, but there was no ship-killer so reliable as a Mage’s ability to warp reality to their whim.

  But neither Falcon nor her enemies possessed amplifiers, which left them restricted to relatively mundane methods of trying to kill each other.

  By any reasonable logic, however, Rice shouldn’t have been in command through the battle. From the way Gupta had hovered over the Captain after the incident, he’d probably run closer to doing himself real harm than Rice suspected.

  But…Maria would never have thought of bribing the mercenaries to tell them where to find their true enemy. If she’d been in command, she’d have pressed the attack after LaMonte had evened the odds, using the fusion-drive missiles and even the lasers to make sure that the Golden Bears didn’t live to tell anyone about Falcon’s capabilities.

  David Rice might be in command by virtue of owning Red Falcon and Peregrine and having access to an amount of money that was still mind-boggling to someone with just their personal finances, but he was also still more a merchant than a spy.

  Which meant sometimes he had solutions that wouldn’t occur to the naval officer turned spy who teleported his ship between the stars.

  Maria smiled as she studied the map. Two more jumps to Sandoval. Six days from Sandoval to Corinthian. They’d probably be delayed finding a cargo that justified them going to Corinthian from Sandoval, though she had faith in her Captain now.

  That was an odd thought. She’d always trusted Rice and believed in his skills…but when had that turned into the near-unquestioning belief that, at least as it came to cargo and contracts, the Captain would simply get it done, no matter what?

  Certainly, he was better at it than she was! She’d found a cargo only because LMID had wanted to use them to strike at the Legacy.

  Maria Soprano was relatively comfortable that she could command a warship…but Red Falcon was no warship, and she still had a lot to learn.

  At least she appeared to have one of the best teachers available.

  29

  Sandoval Prime was a strange and fascinating world to Maria. Even from orbit, the colors were utterly wrong, and the differences only became more obvious as Nicolas maneuvered the shuttle down toward the surface.

  Her wrist-comp had the data to explain everything. The local chlorophyll-equivalent used iron in converting oxygen to energy, resulting in a deep rusty orange color instead of the green she was used to on other worlds. The seawater contained concentrations of copper that were instantly-toxic to Terran life, turning the oceans a stunning shade of pale green like no other world she’d ever seen.

  But despite the oddities of its life and water, Prime had nearly the same gravity and atmospheric mix as Earth. It was the kind of world where the differences were enough to put a spring in your step and not enough to throw off your equilibrium.

  And that same odd life naturally produced some of the most complicated ferro-organic molecules in the universe. The equivalent of Earth’s oil deposits here was a viscous red sludge that was easily refined into high-strength alloys and plastics.

  The settlements were a clear sign of the eternal conflict between Prime’s reason for being and what humans needed to survive. The ash-black cleared zones around the farms of familiar green weren’t there to protect the farms from Prime’s life—they were there to protect Prime’s priceless ecosystem from the food humanity needed to survive.

  Easily half of Sandoval’s food production was in orbit, but some things were simply most efficiently grown in real soil with proper gravity. So, Prime’s cities were surrounded by fields of green crops, which were surrounded in turn by cleared zones where nothing from either ecosystem lived.

  “Coming up on the RTA now,” Nicolas reported. The pilot was listening to his headset. “We are clear to land, though they sound somewhat grumpy at our lack of appointment.”

  Maria grinned as she looked out the window, easily picking out Sandoval’s Runic Transceiver Array from the orange forest surrounding it. The RTA was a massive structure of black concrete, the runes that covered it invisible from here except in the glittering sheen they gave the black sphere.

  “They’ll get over it,” she told Nicolas. “What kind of spies would
we be if we told people we were coming?”

  Exiting the shuttle, Maria found herself met by two of the perfectly standard-robed Mages of the Transceiver Guild. They seemed to be stamped from a mold somewhere, combining a librarian’s faint sense of disapproval at loud conversation with powerful magic of their own and a commitment to confidentiality matched by few in the galaxy.

  “This is a Protectorate-secured facility,” the taller Mage told her grumpily. She couldn’t really see his face under the hood of his robe, but she could tell he was looking down his nose at her. “Access to the transceiver array is by appointment and arrangement only; that is no different here than on any other…”

  He finally noticed the plain white card Maria was holding out to him. It was blank. The card itself was the message—well, that and the data chip concealed within it that held a Transceiver Guild encryption Maria was quite certain Red Falcon’s computers couldn’t break.

  The Mage sighed and took the card, pressing it to his wrist-comp and reading the text that flashed up on his screen.

  “I see,” he finally said, looking back at her. The faint air of disapproval was still there, but at least he wasn’t looking down his nose at her.

  “I am Zhao Fernandez,” he introduced himself. “We have regularly scheduled communications going on right now. How confidential does your communication need to be?”

  “The highest,” Maria told him. “I need to contact Mars, Mage Fernandez.”

  “Ah.” He nodded slowly. “If you give us about fifteen minutes, Lady Mage, we can clear the facility without drawing too much attention. I can clear it faster, but…”

  “But that would draw attention,” Maria agreed. “Fifteen minutes is fine, Mage Fernandez. My report is based on events from days ago; another half-hour won’t make a difference.”

  He smiled for the first time.

  “I agree with your logic, Lady Mage, but you’d be astonished how many couriers don’t seem to understand that.”

  It took the Transceiver Mages just over twenty-five minutes to clear the various side chambers and recording facilities that allowed a single RTA to provide the sole source of instantaneous communication for an entire planet.

  Finally, Fernandez escorted Maria into the central transmission chamber and bowed.

  “We’re running standard confidentiality procedures, ma’am,” he told her. “We are still recording incoming communications in the other receiving chambers, but there are no recorders active in here, and we will purge any side chatter that makes it into the other recorders.”

  He shrugged.

  “We can’t do more without cutting Sandoval off from the universe, and, apologies ma’am, but your authority doesn’t stretch that far.”

  Maria chuckled.

  “It has stretched more than far enough for my purposes, Mage Fernandez. Thank you.”

  He bowed and withdrew, leaving her alone in the central chamber. She crossed the spherical room to the very center and focused her energies.

  For most people, they would pay a Transceiver like Fernandez to send their message. He would enter this chamber, channel its energies, and speak the message he was given. Only a Mage’s voice could be sent across the galaxy, which inherently limited the use of the RTA beyond even the sheer scale and cost of one’s construction.

  Any Mage, however, could fulfill the same role. Not all of them knew how, but it was part of both Jump Mage and Naval Mage training.

  When she spoke, her words flashed across space to the RTA at Olympus Mons on Mars.

  “This is a Bravo One Priority communication,” she announced into thin air. “Authentication Kappa Kappa Bravo Six Three Lima Romeo Eight Niner One Charlie. I repeat, this is a Bravo One Priority communication.

  “I need to make contact with MISS Command immediately. Please connect.”

  The room was silent for a few seconds, and then a voice responded out of the air.

  “This is Mars RTA Control; we are receiving you,” it told her. “We are clearing a confidential chamber and preparing a radio relay to MISS Command, please stand by.”

  “Belay that,” a new voice cut over. It was an unfamiliar, a husky baritone that spoke with calm authority. “I’ll take that confidential chamber, though.”

  “Understood. Please stand by; we are connecting you to Hand Lomond.”

  Hand Lomond? Hand Hans Lomond was the longest serving of the Mage-King’s Hands, his roving troubleshooters. He was the one who tended to be sent along with the Mage-King’s fleets…

  He was the man they called the Sword of Mars.

  “Mage Soprano,” Lomond’s baritone emerged from the air a few moments later. “Hand Stealey has briefed me on your operation, but she is not currently on Mars. Since I’m here, it seems wiser to pull myself into this than to wait for MISS to find someone senior enough to talk to you.”

  “My Lord Lomond, I did not expect to be speaking to a Hand,” Maria admitted.

  Lomond chuckled.

  “You’ve met Stealey, haven’t you?” he replied. “We’re just ordinary men and women. Well…no less ordinary than any other Mage, at least. His Majesty has asked more of us; that is all.

  “What is your situation? You wouldn’t be reaching out at Bravo One if it wasn’t important.”

  Maria breathed heavily and then launched into her spiel, explaining the events of their voyage so far, focusing on the conflict with the Golden Bears and the problems in Atlatl.

  Lomond waited silently, poking with the occasional question as she continued.

  “I see,” he finally concluded. “Fortunately, I happen to have a trio of cruisers and, oh, a Hand spoiling for a fight. I think I shall need to visit Atlatl and make certain the situation is contained.

  “We will keep your Captain’s promise to the Bears for now,” he noted. Maria might not have told MISS everything, including what they’d promised, but she wasn’t going to lie to a Hand. Not even by omission.

  “If they behave, they can keep their license. If we discover they are continuing to be knives for hire, they will learn the limits of the Protectorate’s patience,” Lomond said calmly. In some ways, his calm was scarier than another man’s rage.

  “What about Corinthian?” she asked.

  “That depends on what Rice is planning,” Lomond admitted. “I don’t want to joggle the man’s elbow, and we frankly don’t have much in the area we can quickly commit. RTAs get sparse on the ground in that region.

  “I can arrange for a cleanup team to arrive about a week after you do,” he continued. “If you can pull them off balance, the team I’m thinking of will make sure to get all of their files…but Rice is correct.

  “If we show up with destroyers and Marines and storm their office, they’ll have a destruct built into their files. We’ll gain nothing. We need to finish the Legacy off, forever.

  “You and Rice know what you’re doing,” he concluded. “Whatever resources you need to commandeer, you have the authority to.”

  “We do?” Maria asked, surprised.

  Lomond coughed.

  “All right, then, get a recorder going and I’ll give you that authority,” he told her with a chuckle. “You know where the jugular of one of our most pernicious enemies is located. They wouldn’t call me the Sword of Mars if I wasn’t the type to tell you to go for it!”

  30

  Kelly was rubbing her head to try and ease away her headache when the Captain wandered into her office. He didn’t look in much better shape than she did.

  “How’s the off-loading going?” he asked, his voice tired.

  “I’m wishing we’d paid more attention to that ‘multiple delivery location’ clause in the contract,” she told him. “I was expecting, I don’t know, two, maybe three locales?”

  “So was I,” Rice grunted. “I know Nicolas’s people have been run ragged. How bad?”

  “A quarter of the cargo went to the orbital for later distribution,” she told him. “The rest…forty different orbital food platfo
rms and fifteen different surface locations. We’re being reimbursed for fuel and time, but…”

  She shook her head.

  Fifty-six different delivery locations, varying from five containers of soil to over four hundred heading to the orbital. Sandoval Prime Orbital had transshipment facilities to handle most of their four hundred-plus themselves, thankfully, but the other deliveries had all fallen on Red Falcon’s shuttle pilots.

  The heaviest shuttles Falcon had could carry two ten-thousand-ton containers. The big freighter had a lot of shuttles…but she also carried eighteen hundred containers.

  It had been a busy few days, and Kelly suspected it might take Kelzin a day or two to have enough energy to even look at his lovers again. The surface flights were especially rough on the pilots—and so inevitably ended up on the most experienced and senior flight crews.

  “Total up the fuel and time spent and bounce it to my comp,” Rice told her. “We may as well get fully paid for this cargo.”

  The grouchiness in his tone warned her of the problem.

  “We don’t have a cargo to Corinthian?” she asked.

  “We don’t have a cargo. Period,” the Captain told her. “Sandoval imports a lot of crap, including millions of tons of soil, but most of their exports are locked down by a group of Core World interstellars, and they use the big shipping firms.

  “There’s nothing shipping out of Sandoval worth loading up the Falcon with,” he concluded. “You and I have an appointment with a shipping broker this afternoon, but that…”

  The Captain shrugged.

  “That’s actually just cover for a meeting with the local MISS branch, seeing if they can help out. We need an excuse to go to Corinthian, and right now it looks like we’ll be leaving Sandoval with a quarter-load at best.”

  “And we can’t justify taking a quarter-load more than half a dozen light-years,” Kelly agreed. “Not six days to Corinthian.”

  “Exactly.” Her boss sighed, leaning against her desk. “I’ve run the data we have, and I think we can swing a quarter-load into Amber. From there, I’m pretty sure I can arrange a cargo to Corinthian, even if I have to beg a favor from Keiko.”