Mage-Provocateur

by Glynn Stewart

  She was on her feet again now, the gun finally in her hands and trained on him as he glared at her.

  “Sorry, David, I don’t believe that,” she admitted. “Plus, well, you’ve given me what I wanted. I was going to let you go, but now…now I don’t think I can trust you.

  “And that, my dear Captain, only leaves me one real option, doesn’t it?”

  She wasn’t paying attention to the sensors anymore. Her focus was on David—who was watching the sensors and knew that the Legacy fleet wasn’t going to stop nearly all of the missiles.

  Gravity runes were wonderful things, but they were designed to create a gravity field and counteract acceleration along specific planes.

  They couldn’t do much about the impact of a dozen kinetic missiles hitting at five percent of the speed of light. The ship lurched. Vandella-Howard stumbled, the heavy gun falling from her hands as she cursed.

  David dove forward, dodging under a swinging arm from one of the mountainous bodyguard and scooping up the pistol. Tucking it into his chest, he rolled away from the lawyer, managing to keep the gun in his cuffed hands as he came up to a kneeling position.

  It didn’t matter how big the bodyguards were. How strong they were. The human body could only take so much hydrostatic shock, and the gun was firing big bullets.

  Both of the guards in the room went down in a spray of blood, and David pointed the gun at Vandella-Howard and the crewman.

  “Seal that door,” he ordered the crewman.

  “Okay, okay!” The man raised his hands, crossing over to the door and hitting the command to close it. The moment David started to relax, however, he went for his own gun.

  Everyone on this damn ship was armed. Relaxed or not, though, David had a gun in his hands and the crewman didn’t. The hand cannon boomed again, and David and Vandella-Howard were the only living people left in the room.

  She had backed into the table, her eyes wide and her breath coming short and sharp. Her cheeks were flushed as she met his gaze, and David realized she was in no sense afraid.

  “You are one sick woman,” he pointed out, training the gun on her. “I’m guessing, though, that you’ll make a decent hostage to get me off this boat before the Legatans wreck it.”

  “I can arrange that, I suppose,” she allowed. “I can get you to a shuttle, off the ship without being challenged.… I don’t know where you’re going to go, though.”

  Behind her, new red icons flashed into existence on the scanners as something pulsed the entire fleet with active radar at point-blank range, and he smiled as three new symbols appeared on the screen—moments before a new sequence of impacts shook the ship.

  “I do know,” he admitted. “Because you’re right. I did betray you—and that, Ms. Vandella-Howard, was my ride arriving.”

  44

  Ramming a boarding torpedo into a target starship at thousands of kilometers a second was…not inherently a survivable process. Maria could probably protect the people aboard her own torpedo, at the price of not being able to do much else in the boarding action.

  Since the Royal Martian Marine Corps liked their Combat Mages to actually be able to engage in combat, they’d come up with a solution: the crush compensator.

  The crush compensator was an expensive one-shot runic artifact that happily absorbed hundreds of thousands of newtons of force, reducing an impact that could easily have qualified as a kinetic weapon and liquefied the boarding torpedoes passengers to merely uncomfortable.

  Skavar and his Marines were trained for the process. They snapped the sensors to life as Maria dropped the stealth spell, sweeping the pirate flotilla at point-blank range with active radar and pinging Captain Rice’s beacon.

  There was only so much adjusting they could do to their course at this point—enough to make sure they hit a specific ship but not necessarily enough to hit an exact location.

  “We seem to be missing some pirates,” Skavar noted.

  That was all anyone had time to say before the torpedo hammered home and Maria lost consciousness again.

  She blinked back awake a moment or so later, spitting a sick taste out of her mouth and looking up at the armored Marine next to her. The torpedo had half-emptied while she was blacked out, and she shook herself ruefully.

  “You’re fine,” Skavar told her. “Our pirate friends aren’t. They’ve lost a destroyer, a couple of SDSes and half the damn light ships.”

  “What the hell happened?” Maria asked.

  “I suspect it has something to do with the gunships falling back onto freighters and trying to get out of here,” the Marine replied. “It looks like the Legatans got our message in time and decided to get involved. They have hammered Legacy’s fleet—hell, this ship’s been hit at least a half-dozen times.”

  “My heart bleeds for them,” she said. “Is the Captain okay?”

  “Beacon is still responding to interrogation pulses; it doesn’t have a biomonitor, but he’s still moving, so…”

  “Ha! Fair enough. Where is he?” Maria demanded.

  “This way,” Skavar replied. “We haven’t run into anybody so far, but we are avoiding battle-station positions. Damage control teams are our biggest threat until someone works out what happened and starts sending security after us.”

  “Let’s see if we can delay that as long as we can. What’s the ETA on our pickup?”

  “Assuming they followed the plan and launched the shuttles as soon as we went visible, fifty minutes. About twenty-five minutes before this whole assemblage reaches the Navy’s range.”

  “Cutting it closer than I’d like,” Maria admitted. “Let’s go find the Captain.”

  “I don’t suppose we have any access to the ship’s systems?” Maria asked as they caught up with the first Marine teams. One of the exosuited troopers was pulling cables out of a linkup to the computers, after all.

  “No,” Corporal Spiros replied. “I tried the MISS codes LaMonte gave me. No dice. They’ve loaded a custom operating system. I’ve loaded some standard worms in that are going to screw up their internal sensors, but that’s all I can do. They can’t see us…but we can’t even pull a damn map without more time.”

  Time they didn’t have.

  “All right,” Skavar cut in. “The Captain is moving. He’s that way,” the Marine pointed, “but heading towards the base of the pyramid. If this ship is designed anything like a Navy destroyer, I’d say he’s heading for the shuttle bay.”

  “On his own?” Maria asked. “If we came all this way and the Captain freed himself…”

  “He’d still be screwed,” the Marine replied. “A rogue shuttle launch in the middle of the flotilla? The Legatans may have kicked their asses, but they’ve still got over a dozen ships out here. Stealing a shuttle is just going to get him vaporized.”

  “If we know where he’s going, can we head him off?” she asked.

  Skavar was studying something on the inside of his helmet.

  “No,” he admitted. “But we can get to the shuttle bay just after him—and while I don’t know what the Skipper has for resources, we have thirty exosuited Marines and a Navy Mage.

  “I think we’ll make a bit of a difference.”

  David was surprised to reach the shuttle bay again without even running into interference. Vandella-Howard wasn’t exactly being cooperative, but she also wasn’t running away, screaming for help.

  With her now wearing the handcuffs her bodyguards had slapped on him, he pushed her against a wall and studied the hangar again. It hadn’t changed much from before. More of the small spacecraft had been closed up since, but the deck crews continued to swarm over the space.

  His previous visit had resulted in one change, though. A squad of security troopers, clad in matching body armor if not matching uniforms, stood watch over each of the two main entrances. Looking around, he also picked out the sniper team hanging out on top of the main flight control room.

  He had one heavy pistol and a hostage. Somewhere on the ship
, hopefully, was a rescue team. There was a decent chance he could get onto a shuttle on his own using Vandella-Howard as a bargaining chip, but he didn’t know what that was going to do to his people’s plan.

  Of course, while he was considering that, the crime boss promptly made all of his plans irrelevant. She kicked him in his still-original leg, dropping him to the ground as she ran out into the hangar bay.

  “Rice is back there!” she shouted. “A million in cash to the man who kills him!”

  For a single moment of cold rage, David seriously considered shooting an unarmed woman in the back. It would end most of this mess, end Mikhail Azure’s legacy. It would even, by just about any standard, be justified.

  But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Instead, he fired in the general direction of the closest armed security squad, sending the armored men and women ducking for cover with a pair of bullets before dodging back into the corridor.

  With the magazines he’d taken from Vandella-Howard’s bodyguard, he had a total of about twenty bullets. Even if he was a good-enough shot for one bullet, one target, there were more than twenty security troopers in the hangar.

  And that was before counting the fact that everybody in the hangar except the lawyer-turned-crime-boss was armed.

  He’d underestimated Vandella-Howard.

  Damn it.

  “Scanners are showing gunfire ahead,” Skavar reported. “A lot of gunfire. I’d say the boss just poked the hornet’s nest.”

  “Then let’s go save him,” Maria replied. It had been a long time since she’d tried to use an exosuit to carry herself forward, but Skavar clearly picked up her intent and deployed the stirrups built into the back of his legs for just that purpose.

  As soon as the Mage was secure on the chief’s back, he took off at full speed after his people. If the shooting had started, now was not the time for subtlety anymore.

  The Red Falcon boarding team smashed into the hangar bay like the fist of god. Whatever the pirates had been expecting, a fully armed and armored Royal Martian Marine platoon was not on their list. Only a handful of the pirates had heavy-enough gear to threaten the exosuits, and all of them were focused on the opposite end of the hangar.

  For a moment, everything went the boarders’ way. They cut through the armored and unarmored opposition alike—but then the enemy woke up. A heavy penetrator smashed into Skavar’s armor, sending the security chief crashing to the floor with Maria.

  Magic flared around her, pulling her out before he could crush her, and then shielding the entire force from the sniper who’d shot Skavar. A team of men was setting up a bipod-mounted penetrator cannon near her—and a blast of fire ended their involvement in the battle.

  The sniper had spotted her, though, and was falling back on the training of every soldier in the modern galaxy: Threat Priority Mage!

  The single-shot sniper rifle they were using couldn’t punch through her shield in one shot, but the heavy penetrator rounds it was firing could do a number if they put enough on target and if she was distracted enough.

  “Skavar?” she snapped. “I can shield us, but I can’t track for counter-fire!”

  “Right,” the wounded Marine gasped. “I can’t stand, servos shot. Spiros!”

  The Marine Corporal was there before Maria could even ask what he needed the woman to do—and she didn’t need an explanation as the next penetrator hammered Maria’s shield.

  “Right,” she said briskly, her own rifle twisting around in her armored gauntlets. The sniper got one more shot—and then Spiros emptied half of a thirty-round clip into the suspended control bay they were using as a perch.

  Maria was reasonably sure Spiros got the sniper. She definitely destroyed the flight control center and sent pieces of it scattering across the hangar bay.

  “Remind me not to piss you off,” she muttered, half-hiding behind the exosuited Marine as she scanned the bridge. “The Captain is at the other entrance,” she barked. “Cover me?”

  “Well, I’m not moving yet,” Skavar replied, levering himself into a sitting position with Spiros’s aid. “Cover is all I can provide.

  “Go!”

  Maria charged across the space, the two Marines opening fire on everything that moved near her. Magic flared around her, deflecting the gunfire the only unarmored person in the attack naturally attracted.

  None of the shooters kept up their fire for long. Any of them that didn’t drop when they realized they were shooting at a Mage were put down by the Marines.

  She was a distraction as the exosuited troops advanced behind her, clearing the hangar bay as they came, but she was also the best hope of protecting the Captain that they had.

  She reached the other side of the hangar as a group of armored troops made a rush at the corner. The loud report of a heavy handgun echoed several times, but at least four of the Legacy troops made it around the corner.

  Unfortunately for them, she was right behind them, fire flashing from her hands as they charged at Rice. They’d run him out of ammunition, but she took them down before they managed to shoot him themselves.

  For a few seconds, she stood over the bodies, looking at where her Captain was leaning against a wall, looking absolutely exhausted.

  “Hey, boss,” she finally said. “Want a ride?”

  “Oh god, yes,” he replied. “Do we have one?”

  “Not yet,” Maria admitted. “We came in by torpedo. Kelzin is on his way with a set of shuttles being stealthed by the rest of our Mages and a pile of decoys we borrowed from the Navy. It’ll make their lives a lot easier if we hold the shuttle bay, though.”

  “That it will,” he confirmed. “Skavar?”

  “Back in the bay,” she told him. “Shall we?”

  Rice nodded, levering himself carefully off the wall. Now Maria could see that she hadn’t been as in time as she thought—he’d been shot several times. His rebuilt shoulder was going to need new work, though it looked like the other rounds had hit his cyber-leg.

  “The leg is armored,” he murmured. “The shoulder isn’t. I…wouldn’t turn down painkillers, Ship’s Mage.”

  “I don’t have anything,” she replied, stepping over to support him. “But I bet the Marines have nice drugs.”

  A trio of exosuited troopers joined them around the corner as she was speaking.

  “Skavar is setting up a command post where he fell,” the senior trooper told them. “Good to see you, Skipper. We’ll take over this doorway.”

  Maria half-carried David back to where Skavar was still sitting. From the way he was refraining from moving, she suspected the Marine had taken some serious damage.

  “Are you all right, Ivan?” she demanded.

  “No,” he admitted. “Suit has hit me up with nerve-blockers; I’m lucid but my left leg may as well be gone below the hip.” There was a tired, fatalistic note to his voice. “If I’m reading my medical displays right, that’s about where I’m going to end up, too.”

  “We can get matching ‘I flew on Red Falcon and all I got was a shitty cyber-leg’ t-shirts,” Rice told him. “Anybody got some painki—oh.”

  The audible sigh of relief was from Spiros slamming a trauma patch over the hole in his shoulder.

  “Okay, that’ll do,” he continued, his voice somewhat dreamy as the painkillers took effect. “What’s the plan, Chief?”

  “Kelzin is on his way with the assault shuttles, like I said,” Maria told the Captain. Skavar wasn’t in any better condition than Rice was. “They’ve got a mix of decoys to attract hostile fire and get them all the way in.

  “Then, well, we load everybody up and run, using the Mages to hide us.”

  “At close range, that won’t work as well,” Rice pointed out.

  “It’ll work better than stealing a shuttle and just flying outside to see what they do,” Maria replied.

  Rice chuckled.

  “Fair, I was running out of options.” He looked around. “Did anybody see the blonde lunatic running this asy
lum? I had her prisoner, but she broke free and was somewhere in here…”

  “We traded fire with a lot of people,” Corporal Spiros noted. “Nobody who looked like they were anything other than security or flight crew.” She shook her head. “We’re digging in; we’ll see what they do.

  “Our ride is still twenty minutes out.”

  “Let’s get some of these shuttles turned around,” David suggested. “Their guns will make a nice mess of the approach corridors if the pirates want to push it.”

  Spiros laughed.

  “We left our pilot-trained people with Kelzin and Nicolas,” she told him. “None of us could even manage that—and we are not letting you at the controls of anything with a hole in you!”

  “I can fly the shuttles,” Maria replied. “I figure you have someone who can run the guns if I turn a couple of them around?”

  Skavar barked a laugh, following by a whimper of pain.

  “Now, that adds up,” he concluded. “Spiros, work with the Mage. Let’s get some defenses set up.”

  Before they could move, however, the announcement system crackled to life.

  “You may think you’ve won, David Rice,” a female voice snapped—one Rice definitely recognized. “But you’re still on my ship. We’re evacuating the air from the hangar bay now. I hope you enjoy vacuum.”

  Skavar swore.

  “Spiros, get the Mage and the Skipper aboard one of those damn shuttles and seal it up now,” he ordered. “The rest of us have exosuits, but they’re both squishy.”

  Maria didn’t even have a chance to argue before gauntleted hands had her and the Captain off the ground as Spiros’s fire team ran for the closest shuttle.

  She was guessing the woman on the PA was Vandella-Howard. She hadn’t met the woman—but she was already acquiring a list of reasons to hate her!

  45

  Kelly watched as the last gunship dropped inside the rotating ribs of the freighters that had delivered them, almost dismissively ignoring the hail of missile fire still incoming from the pirate fleet.