Mage-Provocateur

by Glynn Stewart

  The freighters weren’t carrying anything more than the usual defensive armament of the class, but with dozens of active gunships locked to their hulls, they had a lot of defensive lasers.

  And as soon as the last set of gunships locked on, the four freighters vanished in the Cherenkov-blue flash of jump flares. LMID had clearly achieved whatever they had decided to do—most likely, utterly hammer the Legacy’s fleet in a way that could only undermine the morale of the fragile edifice the lawyers had put together.

  The Legacy had destroyed nine gunships. They’d lost, in exchange, a destroyer, four system-defense ships, and fifteen jump-corvettes. Over half of their fleet obliterated by a force they should have been able to crush.

  It wouldn’t be good for their morale. What would probably be worse in the long run, in Kelly’s opinion, would be when they dissected the fight afterward…and concluded that there were half a dozen ways they could have won.

  “Legatans are clear,” she announced. “Jeeves, what are our positions?”

  “Kelzin is twenty minutes out and they’re starting to take potshots at the decoys,” the gunner replied. “We can throw some missiles into the mix to help cover them.”

  “How much attention is that going to draw to us?” Kelly asked.

  Jeeves shrugged.

  “They know we’re here now, but with our drives down, they have no idea what we are,” he said. “If we open fire, I’ll want to bring the engines up and keep us in motion. Just to make sure they don’t throw long-range laser fire our way. We’re outside range, but…not by much.”

  “Can we try and not be obvious who we are?” Kelly said. “I doubt we’re going to get a clean sweep, and if they associate antimatter missiles and real assault shuttles with Red Falcon, it could cause a lot of questions we don’t want asked.”

  Jeeves pursed his lips.

  “I can make it less obvious,” he agreed. “I can’t make it impossible for them to tell, though. We just have to hope they’re more distracted by the fact that Maze of Glorious Victory is going to stop pretending to be dead in about thirty minutes.”

  And the missiles would, conveniently, make sure that Kelly’s lovers and friends were more likely to make it through alive.

  “Carry on, Guns,” she ordered. “Bringing up the drives for evasive maneuvers now. Let’s see if we can make these bastards blink.”

  The missiles blazed past the assault shuttles at roughly a thousand times their acceleration, leaving trails of fire and radiation as they spiraled around the decoy craft to try and protect them.

  Red Falcon maneuvered as she opened fire, Jeeves emptying her launcher magazines to cover the assault shuttles. Even with refilled magazines, they only had a hundred missiles—but that was a hundred targets that the Legacy ships had to regard as far more important targets.

  It wasn’t enough to save all of the shuttles, and Kelly watched with a mix of amusement and horror as the decoys came apart. Each of those shuttles would normally have carried between thirty and sixty men and women.

  And even if they were empty right now, they also represented millions of dollars of hardware apiece. Hardware that Falcon’s crew was expending like cheap tacos to cover their actual approach.

  “Are we keeping Kelzin updated?” she asked.

  “Punching a tightbeam through to several of the decoy shuttles; they’re relaying,” Jeeves confirmed. “All three ships of Shadow Flight are unharmed. They are decelerating to contact now.”

  Kelly looked over her data. That was odd.

  “Our target is venting atmosphere,” she told Jeeves. “She was leaking a bit before from the hits she took, but…she just dumped the entire contents of her shuttle bay.”

  Jeeves chuckled.

  “Want to bet that’s where our friends are?” he asked.

  “No bet,” she replied. Hopefully, everyone had survived that. “Make sure Mike knows—if everyone is in one place, that makes extraction a lot easier.”

  “I’ll send it on,” Jeeves confirmed. “That narrows down everything a bit. Time to contact ninety seconds and dropping.”

  “How long until they realize Maze of Glorious Victory isn’t a hulk?” Kelly asked.

  “That depends on how much attention they pay,” he replied. “She’ll be in laser range in twenty-five minutes.

  “It’s all down to how fast they can get aboard the shuttles now.”

  The shuttle Maria had boarded vibrated underneath her again as she pressed the firing key once more. Whoever had retrofitted this particular spacecraft for the Azure Legacy had been thinking in terms of planetside raiding: the pair of chain guns mounted in the chin were useless as space-to-space weapons but would have made for a nasty strafing run on the surface.

  Trapped inside an airless open space aboard a spaceship, they made an ugly mess of the latest attempt to rush the bay. Explosive shells walked their way across the entrance. The vacuum robbed the explosions of much of their force, but they still ripped apart vac-suited pirates with ease.

  The handful of exosuited attackers went down to Marines with penetrator rifles. The security hatch over the shuttle bay had been history for at least ten minutes. By now, most of the wall around it was wreckage too, and a massive portion of the ship had been opened to space.

  So far, the gravity runes in the bay decking had gone undamaged. The boarding party still had gravity, even if they no longer had atmosphere and the bay doors were wide open.

  Maria, unfortunately, had discovered that there were remote locks built into the shuttles. She’d managed to bring the weapons in the craft online, but the engines remained in cold shutdown. The two Marines who’d squeezed aboard with her and Rice were working on that with the Captain as she provided cover for the men and women outside.

  “There you go,” Rice’s voice suddenly sounded over the intercom. He sounded exhausted. “Software locks overridden. Hardware locks removed.”

  He paused.

  “Any other shuttle will take at least ten minutes as well,” he noted. “We’re not stealing Legacy’s ships to get out of here.”

  “That’s fine; our ride is on its way,” Skavar interrupted. “You can fly?”

  “I can fly anything, just not well,” Maria replied.

  “You two get the hell out of here, then,” the Marine ordered. “You can hide the shuttle from the sensors and visuals, right?”

  “I can, but what about the rest of you?” she asked.

  “Our ride is due any minute now,” he repeated. “But we came for Rice and you’ve got him and can get him home. Go.”

  “And you’re wounded yourself,” Maria reminded him.

  “They’re going to have to haul my carcass onto the shuttles; we’ll worry about that then,” he replied. “We’ll hold. Go.”

  Red Falcon’s security chief was clearly not going to listen. She sighed, sent another spray of explosive shells into the entrance to discourage the pirates, and then brought up the shuttle’s engines. Even with everyone in the bay in exosuits, getting out safely was going to require careful maneuvering.

  She angled the jets to lift the ship off the deck carefully, then brought up the main engines—pointing the nozzles at the entrances from the rest of the ship as she activated them. The heat would expand the holes they’d already made, and somehow, Maria Soprano didn’t care much if she tore massive holes in the guts of Vandella-Howard’s ship.

  She summoned magic around the shuttlecraft as they blasted out into space, concealing it from scanners even as she threw it into a painful series of loops. Behind her, the destroyer’s anti-missile turrets flared to life, laser beams stabbing through where she would have been.

  “Rice just passed out,” one of the Marines reported from the back. “We’re checking in on him. You do what you got to do, Mage Soprano, but I’m not sure he can take another sequence like that.”

  “We’re clear,” she replied, also transmitting to Skavar. “Heading for Red Falcon nice and slow.”

  “And Kelz
in is here,” the Marine replied. “You can’t see him, but his people are hovering just outside the bay. We’re moving out by fire teams.”

  Maria was sufficiently skilled and powerful that she could open a tiny gap in the stealth shield, allowing her to watch as the Marines leapt from the pirate destroyer, tiny fireflies flickering in the night as they flashed across—and then disappeared into the stealth fields.

  “Make sure you move yourself, you big lug,” she told Skavar.

  “Two people are hauling me,” he replied. “We’re moving.”

  A slightly larger firefly flashed out into space…but the Legacy seemed to have finally worked out what was going on. The closest RFLAMs came to life, flickering invisibly deadly beams across the target zone.

  “Everyone else is aboard; it’s just you and your escorts,” Kelzin’s voice said in a worried tone. “Sending Shadow Two and Three back. We’re holding for you, Chief.”

  “Spiros, Conners, go,” Skavar barked. “Even a cripple can pilot the damn thrusters; I don’t need an esc—”

  There was no screaming. No drama. Just an invisible beam that suddenly became visible as half a gigawatt of coherent light washed over three armored figures.

  Then both the beam and the figures vanished.

  “Skavar, come in,” Kelzin barked. “Ivan!”

  Maria didn’t even try. She knew exactly how likely it was that the Chief had survived that.

  “He’s gone, Michael,” she said quietly. “Pull back to Falcon. Our part in this is done.”

  Kelly LaMonte only barely had enough resolution at this range to guess what had happened. At least some of the Marines hadn’t made it—and she’d lost track of all of the shuttles they’d sent over. They were wrapped inside the stealth spells now.

  Most of the decoys were destroyed as well, but she found one still intact to serve as a relay, opening a channel.

  “Guys, you need to get out of there now,” she told them. “Maze of Glorious Victory is in range. This is all about to be over, but you need to not get caught in the crossfire!”

  Seconds ticked away, the pirate flotilla continuing to close with the “derelict” cruiser. With over fifteen light-seconds still separating the Legacy from Maze—and more separating either force from Red Falcon, many of the pirates never even realized they’d been trapped.

  Maze’s heavy battle lasers spoke without warning. Every destroyer and system-defense ship vanished in a single cataclysmic instant, each of the five remaining heavier ships now the target of ten ten-gigawatt lasers.

  The jump-corvettes panicked. Even from millions of kilometers away, Kelly could see that in their suddenly panicked maneuvers, their desperate attempts to clear enough space to cast their jump spells.

  But there were already missiles on the way, and the two destroyers Red Falcon had brought with her emerged from hiding behind the cruiser, their engines fully warmed up and active in a way Maze of Glorious Victory could never have concealed on herself.

  The cruiser’s mass had hidden the destroyers, however, and they now lunged forward at fifteen gravities. Even with the gravity runes, that would be punishing for the crews aboard them—but it was three times the best acceleration the pirate raiders could muster.

  Lasers flashed in the night, the raiders finding the nerve to fire on the Martian Navy in a desperate attempt to survive.

  A hopeless attempt.

  Watching from the sidelines, Kelly picked out three ships managing to escape. That was it. Three ships with Mages who were ready to jump and paranoid enough to already be in the simulacrum chamber.

  That was it.

  Azure Legacy was done.

  46

  Tau Ceti e wasn’t exactly a pleasant world. Neither of Tau Ceti’s habitable planets was known for tropics or beaches, after all.

  That said, most settled planets had enough variety in their climates to have at least one place where people could install a beach resort. Tau Ceti e’s Bree Isles were tucked into a microclimate zone on the planet’s equator, shielded from the worst of the planet’s weather by a range of “islands” that were actually sharp-peaked mountains, rising from the bottom of the ocean to tower a full kilometer above sea level.

  Those islands were all but useless, but they turned the Bree Isles into a semitropical paradise containing the best resorts in the system. Several of those resorts belonged entirely to the Martian military. Some of the islands belonged entirely to the Martian military, and MISS had taken over an isolated corner of one of those to set up a rest, recreation and rehab facility for their often overstressed agents.

  Kelly LaMonte was not currently overstressed. She was currently wearing a bikini, sitting in inch-deep warm water as gentle waves washed over her, eyeing her lovers farther up the beach.

  Xi Wu was taking advantage of the privacy to sunbathe topless on the beach, not that her Asian-descended skin needed to tan. Mike Kelzin was slightly more dressed in a pair of long shorts, but he was completely passed out on a hammock near Xi.

  He might have been asleep, but Mike still wore the stunned smile of a young man who wasn’t quite sure what he’d done to deserve his luck. It was an improvement, at least, over the survivor’s guilt he’d been dealing with over most of the trip back to Tau Ceti.

  Mike had been in charge of the shuttle extraction. He felt…he was responsible for the operation that had failed to extract Skavar, Spiros, and Conners.

  But command and responsibility did not constitute control. The therapists there seemed to have finally drilled that into his head.

  With a smile, Kelly rose out of the water and crossed to her partners, giving each of them a soft kiss as she joined them.

  “He’s not going to wake up soon,” Xi purred. “This is nice. Reward for a job well done, huh?”

  Kelly chuckled as she sat on the edge of her girlfriend’s sunbed. “Mike hasn’t worked out what he did to deserve us.”

  “I know,” the Mage agreed. “That’s a good bit of why he’s so adorable.”

  Before Kelly could respond further, there was a chime from the pile of clothes she’d left further up the beach. She sighed.

  “We’re on vacation,” Xi told her. “You could totally tell whoever it was that we were having sex. For that matter…” Kelly’s lover waggled her eyebrows suggestively, and Red Falcon’s XO laughed.

  “The true reward for a job well done is another job, my heart,” she told Xi. “I’ll go see what it is. We’ve had a couple of weeks to help put ourselves back together. We can only hide here on Tau Ceti and pretend to be a normal freighter crew for so long.”

  “Fair. Tell Soprano I said hi,” Xi conceded.

  Kelly wasn’t at all surprised to see that her lover was correct—the call was from Soprano.

  “LaMonte here.”

  “Kelly, can you get back to the main hotel?” Soprano asked immediately. “We have a guest asking to meet the three of us.”

  There was no question as which three that was.

  “I can get back in five minutes, but I’m guessing clothes might be an idea?” Kelly replied.

  David Rice and his crew weren’t the only guests at the Silent Horizons Resort…but since the Silent Horizons Resort was actually a Martian Interstellar Security Service RRR facility, the other guests were also maximum-security-clearance covert operatives.

  Or, well, the medical professionals tasked with making sure none of those covert operatives were going insane. They’d finally managed to get him over the last vestiges of his dysphoria over the cyber-leg, for example.

  And helped Mike Kelzin and others past survivor’s guilt. Losing Ivan Skavar had been a shock to the system.

  The lack of uncleared personnel, however, made it convenient enough for him to commandeer a meeting room for himself, Soprano and LaMonte when the word of their visitor came down.

  Black-suited Protectorate Secret Service agents swept the room after the three of them took their seats, the women calmly professional and polite as they made sure t
hat the Captain of one of the Protectorate covert ops ships hadn’t decided to assassinate a Hand.

  Then Hand Alaura Stealey came into the room. Like every other time David had seen the middle-aged Hand, she looked tired, but she dropped herself into the chair at the head of the table with a smile.

  “David, Kelly, Maria,” she greeted them. “It’s good to see you all.”

  “We made it. Others didn’t,” David replied softly. “What’s the word, ma’am?”

  “Lomond’s team rolled up Armstrong, Lee and Howard without much difficulty once you’d drawn away their attention and much of their firepower. We took the files intact, which means that regular MIS cops are sweeping up Legacy cells across the Protectorate.”

  The similarity between the acronyms for the Martian Investigation Service, the Protectorate-wide police service, and the Martian Interstellar Security Service, the Protectorate’s internal security and covert ops organization, was not unintentional.

  “They’re done?” LaMonte asked.

  “They’re done,” Stealey confirmed. “And their records should allow us to sweep up a bunch of the fragments of the Blue Star Syndicate. Mikhail Azure’s empire is finished.”

  David felt a fierce sense of satisfaction at that.

  “So, what now?” he asked.

  “If the Legacy is gone, then Legatus becomes our priority,” Stealey told them. “Infiltration Augment kill teams? Secret carriers?” She shook her head.

  “The reward for a job well done, Captain Rice, is another job,” she told him. “LMID appears to be willing to use you as a resource and regards themselves as being in your debt, to some extent at least.

  “We need you to use that,” she said grimly. “Use everything—from your links to this Agent Blade and to Major Niska to your connections with Keiko Alabaster.

  “We don’t know what they’re planning. We clearly underestimated their resources. You three already provoked one enemy of the Protectorate into a fatal misstep.

  “Let’s see what we can do with Legatus, Agents.”