Mage-Provocateur

by Glynn Stewart

  It had taken the three ships four hours to rendezvous and match velocities after the mis-jump—and that was with everyone accelerating at ten gravities. If Red Falcon had been a more conventional freighter, it would have taken a lot longer.

  “I show the same, Officer LaMonte,” the Lieutenant confirmed. “Mage-Captain Michel suggests that she and Mage-Commander Irving set up a videoconference with yourself and Acting Captain Soprano after the next jump.

  “As we understand, we’re going to be jumping into quite the mess on the other end, and Mage-Captain Michel wants to be sure the task group does their part.”

  “Of course,” Kelly agreed. “I’ll confer with Acting Captain Soprano, but I don’t see a problem.”

  “Our thanks, Officer LaMonte.” The Lieutenant bowed slightly. “The Mage-Captain will make herself available for the conference.”

  It was hard for Kelly not to feel out of place in the videoconference several hours later. Soprano might be a civilian now, but she’d once been an officer of the Royal Martian Navy. As the video links opened up to bring the two starship captains online, she couldn’t help thinking there was an entire layer of communication to the body language between the three officers that she wasn’t picking up.

  “As I understand it,” Michel noted after the initial pleasantries were over, “there is already a Navy cruiser at our final destination. They’ll have spent time preparing their cover and positioning, which allows for a degree of stealth impossible under normal circumstances.”

  “More, anyone arriving is going to be expecting them to be there,” Soprano pointed out. “They’ll have disguised themselves as a derelict.”

  “The Legacy expects to find Azure Gauntlet, a wrecked Minotaur-class armored cruiser,” Kelly said. “Instead, they’re going to find a Minotaur-class cruiser, with her emissions stepped down or concealed and surface work done to appear as if she’s been severely damaged.”

  “That won’t hold for very long,” Mage-Commander Deepali Irving pointed out. The Earth-native Indian man looked fascinated with the entire concept, but that didn’t seem to be stopping him from poking holes in it. “There’s only so much heat they can conceal, and a radar sweep will give up the game instantly.”

  “They’re not going to get a detailed-enough radar sweep outside of maybe ten light-seconds,” Kelly replied. “Remember, these are pirates. At best, they’re running export- or militia-grade sensor suites.

  “And if they approach inside five million kilometers of the cruiser, it’s game over.”

  “That depends on how paranoid they are,” Michel pointed out. “Yes, her ten-gigawatt lasers have a five-million-kilometer effective range, but you have to hit the target with a sixteen-second delay for both targeting data and beam propagation.

  “Even the most cursory of evasive maneuvers will reduce the kill chance. The cruiser is a trump card, yes, but don’t overestimate her capabilities.”

  “And the problem with letting the cruiser resolve the situation is that it doesn’t get your Captain back,” Irving noted. “I’ll confess I’m not certain how exactly you are planning on doing that.”

  “I have four Navy-grade Mages aboard,” Soprano told them. “We’ve been practicing concealment spells. While I can’t conceal Red Falcon underway, we can conceal her heat signature relatively easily if she’s on full standby.

  “After that, it’s a matter of letting them close enough. We have a full suite of boarding torpedoes aboard, and I’m quite comfortable in our ability to conceal those.”

  “You are aware that is basically suicide, correct?” Michel said crisply. “It sounds like a Marine’s plan.”

  “We will have assault shuttles standing by for extraction,” Soprano told her. “We have the ability to identify which ship Captain Rice is on, and the ability to board it.

  “Once we have boarded the vessel and retrieved Captain Rice, Security Chief Skavar will make the assessment of whether we can take control of the vessel or withdraw. If we have to withdraw, that will be the main portion of this mission we need you for.”

  “You want us to cover the assault shuttles,” Irving said quietly. “We may be smaller than Red Falcon, Mage Soprano, but our power density is even higher. We are not easily hidden. There is a reason even Navy Mages are inexperienced in cloaking spells—they’re mostly bloody useless.”

  “The only other option is for you to wait one jump out,” Soprano replied. “We have no way of contacting you in that case short of jumping Falcon herself, which I doubt the pirates will miss.”

  “Unlikely,” Michel agreed. “I would love to consider all pirates incompetent, but if the Legacy didn’t have access to some competent people, this whole mess would have been over long ago.

  “But the same assumption of competence is in play if we try and hide in the system with you,” she pointed out. “One ship, with her reactors stepped down and concealed by magic, may pass unnoticed with the prize of the cruiser on their screens—but every additional vessel we add increases the odds of this entire plan coming apart.

  “And this plan, Mage Soprano, is fragile enough already.”

  “Without covering fire, I’m not certain we can get assault shuttles in to extract our Marines,” Soprano admitted. “And given that I intend to go in with the Marines, and that the whole purpose is to bring Captain Rice out, failing to extract the Marines isn’t an option.”

  “Fragile,” Michel repeated, then smiled. “But daring and necessary. We may be looking at the problem the wrong way.”

  “Oh?” Soprano said noncommittally.

  “Once the boarders are trying to withdraw, the pirates will be looking for someone coming to extract them,” the Mage-Captain said. “If we were to, say, use cloaking spells to cover the two or three shuttles you need to extract your people, they’ll know something’s up and they will spam space with heavy radar.

  “Cloaks are only so effective,” she noted. “If they have multiple ships and they know somebody is out there, they will find the shuttles. And they will destroy them.”

  “So, what do we do?” Kelly asked as levelly as she could. Her boyfriend was almost certainly going to be flying one of those assault shuttles—and if they were concealing them with magic, her girlfriend was almost certainly going to be aboard as well.

  “We let them see what they want to see,” Michael replied. “Red Falcon only carries a handful of assault shuttles, as I understand. Unrelenting Pursuit of Justice and Sword of Untrammeled Liberty both carry full sets.

  “And the RMN’s assault shuttles are fully rigged for remote control,” she concluded. “They’re expensive…but so are Marine Forward Combat Information units. I don’t think anyone will object if we expend a dozen or so of them to cover the extraction.”

  “And since they saw and blew up the assault shuttles they thought were the rescue effort…” Kelly nodded. “They won’t be looking for the cloaked ones.”

  “As for keeping us in a position where we can intervene…” The Mage-Captain sighed. “I’m not sure we can. There’s nowhere for us to hide.”

  Kelly looked at the data they had on the location everyone was converging on, with the estimation of the location of the Navy cruiser playing bait, then smiled.

  “That’s not entirely true.”

  39

  David’s quarters aboard Bleeding Sapphire were no less comfortable than his quarters aboard Luck. He suspected the Azure Legacy’s lawyer leaders had insisted that a portion of the destroyer be refitted to the standard of comfort and luxury they were accustomed to.

  Of course, he had no more access to the ship’s systems there than he’d had aboard Luck. Less, in many ways, since the destroyer was properly set up to contain prisoners. He did, to his surprise, have access to a feed of space outside the starship.

  It didn’t give him sensors or anything as silly as that, just a link to the ship’s basic opticals and some computer zoom functions, but it was enough for him to assess the fleet that the Azure Legacy ha
d assembled.

  He presumed that the lawyers had other weapons in their arsenal. A star fleet was not a subtle tool and an odd choice for a criminal syndicate to have mustered. Piracy and slave raids were possible, he was sure, but he couldn’t see a lot of use for the Legacy’s fleet.

  Not unless they were planning on robbing entire Fringe Worlds…or there were more hidden secret pirate stations out there than David knew about.

  Either of those would justify the fleet, and he knew that the kind of massive-scale pillage that this fleet could unleash on a Fringe World would help earn the Legacy the respect they actually needed to bring the syndicates into line.

  At best, he was seeing only one aspect of their plan gathered around him. Money and blackmail and negotiated agreements were more likely tools for the task the Legacy had been set—and those were all tools Vandella-Howard and her partners were intimately familiar with.

  The admittance buzzer to his quarters chimed. He didn’t even bother to respond—correctly so, as Vandella-Howard simply walked through a moment later. She didn’t even give him enough time to get dressed.

  She’d changed into another suit, though this one was worn over a low-cut top and managed to draw even more attention to her figure than the skin-tight dress had. While David doubted Vandella-Howard had ever killed anyone herself, he suspected that more than one man had died while being distracted by the woman’s physique.

  “Ms. Vandella-Howard,” he greeted her politely, keeping his eye on the “window” showing the outside of the ship. “How may I assist you?”

  “We’ll be coming up on the moment of truth in a few hours,” she told him. “Feeling nervous?”

  David shrugged.

  “If the ship isn’t there, there is nothing I can do about it,” he pointed out. “I know where it was, but if someone has moved it since, then I am aware of the remaining value of my bargaining chip.”

  “A fatalist, I see,” she replied. “You amuse me, Captain Rice. I might almost be sad if we have to kill you, though I’ll admit mostly I’ll be disappointed in the lack of a cruiser.”

  He shivered. Vandella-Howard’s ability to deliver a threat of death in the same tones she’d discuss a mortgage or a contract was…terrifying.

  “What do you want?” he asked flatly.

  “Checking in on the potentially condemned man,” she replied. “Want anything? A last meal? Cigarette?” She ran her hands distractingly down her body. “You’re either about to die or do me a huge favor; either way, I’m not averse to a pity fuck.”

  David rolled his eyes.

  “And how many people have ended up dead taking that seriously?” he asked.

  She laughed and kissed him gently on the lips.

  “Enough that I am always impressed to be turned down,” Vandella-Howard noted. “Six hours until we jump to Gauntlet’s supposed location, David Rice. Spend them wisely.”

  David Rice had a great deal of faith in the promises of the Royal Martian Navy. He had even more faith in the promises of the Hands of the Mage-King of Mars.

  The moments after they arrived at the godforsaken piece of nowhere where Mikhail Azure died, however, were still a strain. The optics he had access to couldn’t pick out a cruiser from the background light, not at any practical deep-space distance.

  With the coordinates he’d given Vandella-Howard, they could have arrived at exactly the spot Azure Gauntlet had died. The wreckage would have drifted from there. Even seemingly empty space had its gravity and its orbits.

  Calculating from the location Gauntlet had died to where its wreck would be was child’s play for any navigational computer. He suspected that the slight haze of slightly denser-than-normal deep-space molecules was the actual remnants of the battle cruiser, regardless of what he’d told the Legacy.

  The cruiser should be out there. He couldn’t see it, but he knew that the sensors mounted on the flotilla would be able to pick out the “derelict” at upward of a light-minute.

  Nonetheless, as seconds turned to minutes, he began to pace uncomfortably in his quarters. He wouldn’t put it past Vandella-Howard to lie to him about which jump would bring them to their destination, just to see what he did, but…

  “Captain Rice,” the lawyer’s voice suddenly cut through the intercom. “Congratulations. It appears you get to live.”

  “Ms. Vandella-Howard?”

  “Please, David, call me Sarah,” she told him, her voice warmer than it had been at any point so far. “We have finished scanning the area and confirmed the presence of a derelict, quite badly damaged cruiser.

  “We jumped in quite a way out and it will take us time to get close enough to make an assessment of how damaged she is, but we now have the proof we needed that you played fair with us.

  “I have some preparations to do up here, but I suggest you find that nice suit we made up for you aboard Luck,” she continued. “You will be joining me for supper, David, as we celebrate our agreement—and the now-inevitable success of the Azure Legacy!”

  To David’s surprise, his wrist-comp beeped at him a few moments after Vandella-Howard ended the call. The device had been authenticated onto a new network—still not even basic crew-level access, but now the access for passengers instead of prisoners.

  He linked the device into the wallscreen and pulled up the sensor feed. He focused the view on the big cruiser. That was what everyone would expect—and while they could tell where he’d focused the screen, they couldn’t tell where he was actually looking.

  There was no sign of any other ships. Any jump flare had dissipated, which meant if there was anyone here, they’d arrived at least two hours before, but it wasn’t like ships were easily hidden.

  He was…reasonably sure the Minotaurclass cruiser the Navy had left here could handle Legacy’s little fleet. Especially if they got too close before realizing there was a problem.

  The problem, however, was that if it came down to the cruiser, he was going to get vaporized along with everyone else.

  A quick check confirmed that he was still locked in. They were trusting him more now they had proof he was playing fair, but Vandella-Howard was still regarding him as a risk.

  Which was fair. He was doing everything in his power to bring the Legacy down.

  Time. All he had was time—the pirates had emerged a full light-minute from the cruiser. It was going to take them a full day to close the distance. He had options and tools his enemies didn’t know about, but if he tried to break himself free right now…

  Well, he had nowhere to go and the Legacy had all of the time in the world to try and bring him back in.

  He trusted the Navy and he trusted MISS…but most of all, he trusted his people.

  It was time to wait and see what they were planning.

  40

  David was reasonably sure that Bleeding Sapphire had come with an observation deck. Most starships did. He was also reasonably sure that the observation deck hadn’t been rigged out as an atrium and luxury dining room before the destroyer had come into Sarah Vandella-Howard’s hands.

  The woman clearly had her preferences for where she liked to eat: surrounded by greenery and looking out over the stars. She certainly had the money and power to make sure any ship she served on had the ability to meet that preference, even if it was an odd one.

  He was escorted to join her by what he was reasonably sure was the same mountain who’d been his guard before, but it was hard to tell. There were at least four different men and they were by no means clones or twins, but they all had the same haircut, build and coloring.

  Plus, it was hard to look past “two hundred and twenty centimeters tall, hundred and fifty kilograms, no fat” to try to pick out distinguishing features. The bodyguards had a presence beyond any attempt to identify or individualize them.

  Dinner this time was cold fish. Sushi, in fact, though David wasn’t sure he’d have trusted a starship to have fish that was high-enough quality and fresh enough for sushi.

  He a
lso wouldn’t want to be the cook who gave Vandella-Howard even a minor stomachache. The food was almost certainly safe.

  She was still dressed in her suit from earlier, but there was a loose relaxedness to how she sat that he hadn’t seen before. He hadn’t realized how much tension there had been in the woman every time they’d spoken until he saw her without it.

  “David, please, sit down,” she told him. “I brought my cook over from Luck after we boarded. He does fantastic sushi; try it!”

  David carefully took a piece of raw fish and rice without saying anything. It was as good as he expected.

  “Thank you…Sarah,” he replied. She had instructed him to use her name, after all. It was roughly on par with shaking paws with a trained tiger. It was probably safe, but the claws were still there.

  “We’re going to be here for a while,” she warned him. “I suspect that Gauntlet won’t be movable in her current state, so we’ll need to move more resources out to make sure we can either tow her or repair her in place.

  “The courier I send back to my partners will have the stop order for the bounty on you,” she promised. “Your ship will have been unmolested in Corinthian, and so long as they are there until the stop order starts propagating, they hopefully won’t get anywhere before it does.

  “You’ve done us a service,” she concluded. “We pay our debts, David.”

  “And Mikhail Azure is still dead,” David observed.

  “That he is,” Vandella-Howard agreed, taking a sip of wine. “And my partners may even still think we’re giving the rebuilt syndicate over to one of his sub-bosses, but if they were leadership-quality, well, we wouldn’t be doing all the work for them.”

  David managed not to wince. He’d suspected that was where she was going with this.

  “And your partners?”

  She made a throwaway gesture.

  “Now that we have assembled this fleet, have access to Gauntlet, and have our fingers already moving through the rest of the galaxy, my partners have become expendable,” she said. “They will fall into line or…be removed from my way.”