Mage-Provocateur

by Glynn Stewart

  Keiko Alabaster was the Captain’s girlfriend—the fabulously wealthy mistress of an Amber-based shipping syndicate with a bad habit of getting involved in revolutions.

  “Keiko doesn’t know we work for MISS, does she?” Kelly asked.

  “I think she suspects,” David replied, “but she doesn’t know.” He sighed. “The major reason I think she suspects is that she hasn’t asked. She doesn’t want to make me lie to her, and she knows I couldn’t tell her one way or another.

  “I’d rather not use her connections here,” he continued, “but we need to get to Corinthian without drawing too much attention to ourselves.”

  Kelly considered.

  “Corinthian’s one of the richer MidWorlds,” she said aloud. “What about a spec cargo?”

  “We’d need to find someone willing to sell us at least ten million tons of Sandoval’s exports,” David pointed out. “And the money to pay for it. Even just raw Prime sludge goes for twenty, thirty thousand a ton.”

  “Well, didn’t you just say we were going to talk to MISS?” she pointed out.

  The receptionist at Orange Autumn Exporters didn’t seem to know there was anything unusual going on. The adorably nervous young man’s nerves were pretty clearly entirely related to being brand-new at his job.

  Kelly wanted to pat the puppy-in-human-form on the head and tell him he was doing fine, but she was reasonably sure that qualified as unprofessional. Instead, she let him get her a glass of water and waited for their meeting room to open up.

  Eventually, the young man walked them to the neatly professional meeting room, where a woman in a dark pink suit, not much older than the kid escorting them, was waiting.

  “Captain Rice, Officer LaMonte, greetings,” she told them. “That will be all, Jason.”

  The receptionist bowed his way out of the room, closing the door behind him.

  “Please forgive Jason; he’s been on the job for all of, oh, three days,” the dark-haired broker told them. “He’s a trained MISS bodyguard and lethal with any object that weighs more than about two hundred grams, but he isn’t quite sure how to be a receptionist yet.”

  She rose and offered them her hand.

  “Elena Petrovich,” she introduced herself. “Depending on the day, junior partner in Orange Autumn Exporters, or Deputy Station Chief, Sandoval for the MISS.

  “You come to me with the authentication codes and protocols to command my complete attention, Captain Rice, though I’ll confess that I did not expect to discover that you were an MISS agent when your ship arrived. Red Falcon is in my files, yes, but not as one of ours.”

  “That’s generally to everyone’s advantage,” Rice pointed out. “The fewer people who know your covert ops ship is such, the more useful that ship is going to be.”

  “This is very true,” Petrovich allowed. “How may I be of assistance, Captain Rice?”

  “We need to be in Corinthian,” he said bluntly. “And we need to be in Corinthian for reasons that make sense to others, at least at first blush. If I were to simply pick up and head there, too many questions would be asked about just why I did so.

  “So, I need a cargo.”

  “And no one in Sandoval is shipping to Corinthian. Yes, I see,” Petrovich said. She considered for a moment, tapping on her wrist-comp and turning the long wall of the conference table into an active wallscreen.

  “Honestly, your ship’s capacity is simply too large for most exports from this system,” she admitted. “If it isn’t heading to the Core Worlds, most of Sandoval’s needs are met by smaller ships in the three-to-six-megaton range. Not twenty.

  “I’m not sure I can twist Orange Autumn’s operations into anything remotely near enough of a pretzel to justify a shipment to Corinthian worth hiring your ship for,” she admitted, flipping through screens and reports faster than Kelly could follow.

  “We came to the same conclusions before we got here,” Kelly told her, with a quick glance at Rice to make sure she could lay out what they’d concluded. “So, we found ourselves with one logical option that we think can work.

  “Captain Rice’s resources are known to be impressive at this point, as are his connections,” she noted. “We now own a second ship, Peregrine, which is not something most independent shippers can claim.

  “It wouldn’t appear out of reason for us to pick up a speculative cargo that would fit Peregrine’s capacity here and transport it to Corinthian for sale. Assuming we could find a ten-megaton or larger cargo of Sandoval’s unique organics to purchase.”

  “That…could work,” Petrovich agreed. The wallscreen suddenly changed to a completely different set of reports as she continued to tap away at her wrist-comp.

  “Of course, you wouldn’t be able to find a single cargo like that,” she noted. “You’d need to track down multiple batches from the independent producers, few of which will be over five hundred thousand tons…”

  “We’d need a local broker,” Kelly said with a smile.

  “You would,” Petrovich agreed. “And, I’m assuming, some level of financing? I don’t know if your personal resources will actually stretch to this, Captain Rice, but I have discretionary funds available that should allow for us to pull this together.”

  “I was hoping you’d say that,” Rice told her. “I could afford ten megatons of sludge at the current list price, barely, but buying it in smaller batches is always more expensive.”

  “Let’s see what we can make happen, shall we?”

  With all of the problems they’d been having with security on space stations across the Protectorate, Kelly and Rice moved through Sandoval Prime Orbital in a blur. Their trip to and from the MISS office masquerading as a brokerage was via the fastest in-station transport available, with an entire squad of Skavar’s people riding shotgun.

  They took a different route back to the ship than they took away from the ship, and so far, at least, the new precautions seemed to be working.

  This time, they weren’t trying to provoke an attack. Kelly’s Captain was still having trouble moving with his new leg, even if he’d foregone both the wheelchair and the cane by now.

  The young executive officer heaved an open sigh of relief when they reached the docking tube for the ship to find Soprano waiting for them. The Ship’s Mage looked like someone had hit her between the eyes with a length of pipe, but she was still managing to keep a wary eye out as the Captain came aboard.

  “My office, both of you,” Rice ordered as they passed Soprano. “Kelly, can you ping Jeeves and Kellers as well?” He glanced over at their escort. “If one of you scary gentlemen and ladies wants to spare the XO the hassle of telling Skavar to get to my office, I’d appreciate it.”

  Corporal Spiros grinned.

  “On it, Skipper.”

  “Come on,” he told Kelly. “It’s time to start lining all of the pieces up.”

  Once again, Kelly and the rest of the officers gathered in David’s office. The Captain stumped over to his desk and dropped into his chair with an audible—and concerning—sigh of relief.

  In Kelly’s unqualified but informed opinion, he was pushing himself too hard. But how did an XO with experience measured in weeks tell that to her Captain whose experience was measured in decades?

  “My attempt to contact MISS command got short-circuited,” Soprano told them. “By Hand Lomond.”

  “Another bleeding Hand?” Rice growled. “Who do we work for again?”

  “The Mage-King,” Soprano replied gently. “My report is being passed on, but Lomond is going to deal with the Atlatl situation personally.

  “I now have his explicit authorization to commandeer any Protectorate resources necessary for our mission, on an authenticated recording,” she continued. “Terrifying as that feels, it should let us pull together whatever we need.”

  “I think the resources we need are already in place,” the Captain said. “But that may come in handy regardless. The Navy has set up a general trap for anyone hunting down remna
nts of the Blue Star Syndicate that I intend to try and lure the Legacy into.

  “Thanks to a brainstorm of Kelly’s, we now have a reason to head to Corinthian. We’re going to receive a number of separate deliveries over the next forty-eight hours that add up to about a twelve-million-ton cargo of Sandoval sludge and various refined ferro-organics.

  “Technically, we’re paying for it all ourselves. In practice, MISS is underwriting most of the bill. It’s a spec cargo, but Corinthian is one of, oh, four MidWorlds that might actually be able to justify a regular run from Sandoval,” he concluded. “So, it’s a decent excuse.”

  “I also reached out to Campbell,” Soprano told the others. “Peregrine will be meeting us in Corinthian. Neither of our ships are true combatants, but Peregrine has enough firepower to make having her around reassuring.”

  “So, what is our actual plan in Corinthian?” Skavar asked. “No offense, Skipper, but I think we need to be very done with the ‘wander around and see who shoots at us’ plan.”

  Rice chuckled and smacked his leg. The polymer was wrapped in faked skin relatively well—and was designed so that it would over time function as a matrix for his skin to grow over—but right now, hitting the limb created a very mechanical sound.

  “I, my leg, and my lung agree with you completely,” he replied. “I have some names to poke at in Corinthian for contacts, if they’re still in business and willing to talk to me. I’d like to approach these lawyers through an intermediary, but if none of the people we know in the Spindle are willing to talk to us, well…showing up in their front office will probably make an impression.”

  “Not necessarily the impression we want, since we’d rather take their files intact,” Kelly pointed out. “They won’t have anything incriminating hooked up to the system net. We need to get Marine or MISS techs physically in that office before they can start wrecking shit.”

  “Hence why I want to talk to them,” Rice confirmed. “They’ve chased us across half the damn Protectorate at this point. Let’s see if they’re at least willing to talk peace.”

  31

  It was perfectly fine, David reflected, for an Augment who was only about thirty percent human by mass to say that the leg would feel like his before it worked properly. Blade’s legs probably hadn’t even been the first thing the cyborg’s employers had replaced.

  For David, the dysmorphia wasn’t fading at all. He barely registered the odd weight in his chest where his new lung sat; that one had been easy enough to get used to.

  His leg, though…

  He could walk again, after a fashion. Zero gravity was fine. Red Falcon’s magical artificial gravity was a different story, but he could clunk around like a man with a robot leg that didn’t quite want to obey him.

  It wasn’t really a metaphor.

  He thumped back into his office alone after the jump away from Sandoval and collapsed into his chair. He didn’t even have the emotional satisfaction of breathing hard anymore. Anaerobic exercise was apparently a thing of the past once you had a lung that was perfectly willing to top up your oxygen supply from its own reserves.

  The manual said it could take up to six months for the dysmorphia to fade. He wasn’t looking forward to spending half a year with a hunk of metal on his hip that mostly followed his instructions without quite feeling like it belonged to him.

  Red Falcon was back in deep space again, where she belonged. Sandoval Prime was behind them and they were once more out of communication with everybody. Six days and over seventy light-years from now, they would reach Corinthian, and David Rice would challenge the lawyers who were trying to kill him.

  There was something…extra evil about that concept. They weren’t sending killers and mercenaries after him out of malice or even truly personal benefit. It was simply that was what the will said they had to do…so that was what they were going to do.

  Hundreds—possibly thousands—of people were dead because of that. An entire regional syndicate, a successor organization to the Blue Star, had been ground to pieces by the Navy after their attack on David had exposed them.

  Both David and MISS would rather he could focus on Legatus. The UnArcana Worlds were moving in the shadows, and the whole mess with Azure Legacy was a distraction from what MISS suspected were the opening moves of a civil war.

  All because a group of lawyers apparently respected their client’s will more than they respected laws or even human lives.

  When this was over, David was going to make them pay for that.

  And for his leg. There were a lot of things he was angry about at this point, but his leg was pretty high up the list.

  “Mage Soprano, can I have a moment?”

  Maria looked up to see Kelly LaMonte standing in the door of her office, and gestured the young XO in. Unlike her junior Mages, Maria at least had her own separate office. The juniors shared their space with the soldering workbenches and three-dimensional holograms used for jump plotting.

  The office wasn’t big

  “Sure. Want something to drink? Coffee? Water?”

  “Coffee, please,” LaMonte replied.

  Maria slid a cup across the table.

  “What’s up, XO?”

  “The Captain,” the younger woman said quietly. “He’s…not in a great headspace right now, and we’re about to go toe-to-toe with the folks causing us all kinds of grief. I’m worried about him.”

  Maria sighed.

  “I don’t know him as well,” she pointed out. “You’ve served with him longer; you saw him through the whole mess on Blue Jay. This is a smaller-level clusterfuck than that, from what I can tell.”

  “Yeah, but…” LaMonte shook her head. “The thing is, while he took losing people hard, I don’t think the Captain has ever actually been seriously injured himself before. He wants to be the kind of person where his people matter more than he does…but he lost a goddamn leg, Maria.

  “Nobody bounces back from that as quickly as he’s trying to.”

  Maria sighed.

  “I know,” she admitted. “And I suspect he thinks he’s failing us by not being at his best.”

  “We’re supposed to be at his back, holding him up,” LaMonte said. “How do we do that when I’m not one hundred percent sure he’s thinking clearly?”

  “By using our judgment, XO,” Maria told her. “Preferably better than I have historically.”

  LaMonte winced at that. She knew at least the high level of why Maria had barely avoided being dishonorably discharged from the Royal Martian Navy.

  “We’ll meet Campbell in Corinthian, too,” Maria continued. “She knows Rice better than anyone alive—far better than even Alabaster, I suspect. Alabaster’s just sleeping with the man. Campbell was his XO for over a decade.”

  “And what do we do if we think he’s about to go off the deep end?” LaMonte asked quietly.

  “We find bungee cords, XO, and we pull him back up,” Maria replied. “That’s the damn job, isn’t it?”

  Maria didn’t bother to knock as she walked into Ivan Skavar’s spectacularly chaotic office. She knew the Marine intelligence officer far too well to believe the room was as disorganized as it looked, but paper and datapads were strewn over every surface like a hurricane had swept through.

  “Welcome, welcome, have a seat,” Skavar said dryly as she shifted a pile of papers off a chair with a gesture and a flick of magic.

  There were clear chairs, but the one with paper on it looked far more comfortable, and she dropped into it with an exaggerated sigh.

  “Four metal folding chairs, one stuffed armchair, and which one do you fill with papers?” she asked rhetorically. The papers spun in the air distractedly.

  “I presume you want these somewhere specific?” she continued.

  Skavar snorted.

  “That chair?” he replied. “Otherwise, drop them on the end of my desk here.” He pointed. “That’s the ‘to be sorted’ pile.”

  “As opposed to the rest of the room?”r />
  “Those piles each have a purpose,” he objected, then grinned. “Of course, the chair was an expansion of the ‘to be sorted’ pile.”

  Maria shook her head at the Marine, adding the papers and datapad from the chair to the designated pile. She straightened it up with her magic as she did so; the datapad would probably have fallen off if she didn’t.

  “So, our Captain is about to shove his head into the dragon’s mouth,” she noted. “He’s smarter about it than some I’ve met, but I’m wondering if you have any particular ideas for making sure we get him back from that.”

  Skavar sighed.

  “I don’t think I can justify rules of engagement that call for exosuits on the Spindle,” he pointed out, referring to Corinthian’s primary space station. “Not least, given the Captain’s history there, I suspect the local authorities would take a poor view of us traipsing around in heavy battle armor.”

  “There comes a point where we stop caring what the locals think,” Maria replied. “We have the authority to do whatever we need to.”

  “Yes, but if we fire boarding torpedoes loaded with exosuits into the damn station, no one is ever going to believe Red Falcon is an innocent merchant ship ever again,” Skavar told her. “An assault shuttle? Sure, people might believe we bought that with the ship.

  “Boarding torpedoes? Exosuits? Attack flights of armed shuttles? We could very easily blow any chance of us ever having a cover again!”

  “If it’s a choice between that or losing the Captain, what do we do?” Maria asked.

  Skavar winced like she’d hit him.

  “I could argue that we should accept losing the Captain,” he said levelly. “I won’t, but I could. If it comes down to it, I and my people will go all-out and we will fuck up the Legacy with everything we’ve got.

  “Is that what you want to hear, Mage Soprano? I’ll have a boarding torp loaded with exosuits ready to go, but…” He shook his head again. “There’s a limit to what we can do in an inhabited system under eyes of a few million people.