by Stefon Mears
“Or that you have seen the wisdom to evade unneeded trouble,” added Fionn, twisting the words so that they only made sense to Donal, a special form of communication all familiars shared with their masters.
“Flanking might not be a bad option,” said Li Hua in English. “If you can come around the side fast enough and quiet enough.”
“No,” said Donal. “Better for us both to come out and meet them head on. Two magicians. No waiting.”
Li Hua smiled.
“You do know how to show a girl a good time.”
◊
Kristoff Tunold came last to the mess hall on the Horizon Cusp, almost late to a meeting he had called. His officers chatted among themselves as they waited for him at the center table, just one of over a dozen round tables surrounded by simple wooden chairs.
Tunold had hoped to redecorate the mess hall of his new command: new tables, padded chairs, and actual art alongside the giant Starchaser Spacelines logo and mandatory still displays of duty rosters, maps, and ship regulations. Maybe get rid of that fish smell that always seemed to linger.
But the Horizon Cusp was not his ship. Not yet. Any more than these were really his officers.
Tunold stood behind his chair for a moment, looking over the assemblage, his jaw proudly forward and his posture almost the protractor-straight of Mr. Kelly, the yeoman. Not that anyone could match Kelly’s posture or his precise gestures.
One by one the officers looked up from their conversations and personal notes: Goldberg, the security chief with his unkempt hair and his uniform worn just off enough to remind everyone that he had never been a Navy man; Jang, the chief engineer whose talent and enthusiasm more than made up for her almost childlike size; Dr. Ramirez, ship’s physician, with his owl-like eyes always staring as though he sees some problem you have, but he’s waiting for you to mention it first; Machado, ship’s mage, whose arrogance would have merited censure or dismissal, if the man weren’t every bit as good as he said; and Fredrickson, the potion-stained ship’s alchemist who tapped her fingers to irregular beats when thinking, but who could, in a tight spot, stretch reagents and ingredients far enough to impress even Machado.
A terrific first crew. But not his crew yet.
“Sorry I’m late,” said Tunold, taking his seat.
“You still had three minutes thirty-six seconds,” said Fredrickson, “if we consider you present as of the moment you reached your chair. Three minutes forty, if we count your entering the room.”
“I’ve called you all here because there’s been a change of plans.” Tunold noticed Machado and Jang exchange a look that, for once, appeared to lack animosity. Goldberg, for his part, leaned forward in his chair. Tunold continued, “We will be making the Venus run instead of the Lark’s Song. Captain Jacobs will command, and I will serve as his executive officer. When you return to your stations, you will find the details waiting in your phantasmal displays. Questions?”
“How do I get Tai Shi off my back?” said Goldberg. “I don’t need her breathing down my neck the whole way to Venus.”
“The captain has assured me that once we’re at space, the crew will not be subject to outside supervision.”
“So I have to put up with her in the meantime?”
“No way around it, Chief. Do your best. Other questions?”
“I would like it noted for the record,” said Dr. Ramirez in his slow, thoughtful voice, “that I object in advance to the captain undertaking any investigative actions or participating in any fights, skirmishes, or ‘dust ups.’”
“Noted.”
“Not that it will do any good,” grumbled the doctor. “He’ll do exactly as he damn well pleases and we all know it.”
“Not this time, Doc.” Tunold almost smiled at the speed with which his comment drew all eyes back to him. “The condition I placed on serving as his ex oh was that he plays the old school captain and leaves the affairs of the crew and passengers to me. Which reminds me...”
Tunold swung his chin to take in the assembly in what he hoped was a commanding fashion.
“Any problems on this voyage, anything you think might need to go to the captain, it comes to me first. Understood?”
“No,” said Machado, who had the gall to look relaxed and casual at defying a direct order from his executive officer.
“What did you say, Mister?”
“That’s Magister, which is my point.” The hefty magician leaned forward, casually resting his round elbows on the table. “The ship’s mage reports directly to the captain. I’ve never served in the armed forces, but I’m pretty sure you can’t order me to violate the chain of command.”
“Doc, you want to back me up about the captain’s health?”
Before Ramirez could speak, Machado cut in again. “If he’s healthy enough to command, he’s healthy enough to hear what I have to say from my own lips.” He raised a thick black eyebrow. “You want to incite a mutiny, Ex Oh, do it on your own time.”
“Mutiny?” Tunold leapt to his feet, chair thrown back to slam into the next table. “How dare you—”
“How dare you?” said Machado, still as calm as though Tunold weren’t about to twist him into an entirely new shape and put him on display in the Museum of Modern Art.
“Doing your job as ex oh is one thing. Trying to steal duties and decisions from the captain is another.”
Goldberg and Fredrickson nodded their absolute agreement, and Ramirez and Jang reluctantly joined them a moment later.
Tunold started to sit, realized his chair was missing, and snatched one from the table behind him. “All right,” he said slowly. “Bring me everything you can without violating regs. Better?”
“Much,” said Machado.
“You would have been hell on a Navy ship,” said Tunold. “Can you at least try to give me an unofficial heads-up when it comes to trouble? This trip isn’t going to be a stop in Toronto.”
Machado nodded as though the issue had never been in question. Damn his arrogant hide, thought Tunold. “Any further questions?”
Jang started to speak, but Tunold cut her off. “No experiments this trip. No tricks, no tests. By the book, as much as anything about this voyage can be by the book.”
“Not that,” she said, with a distant look the like of which Tunold had never seen cross her face before. “I just need to know. What’s the deal with 4M? Do they own us now?”
“No,” said Tunold. “It’s more complicated than that. They bought out Zoltan’s share, so they own half exactly. Makes some of the decisions difficult, but it won’t have any impact once we hit space. At space the captain is in charge, unquestioned.”
“Think it’ll be that easy?” asked Goldberg in a tone that suggested he knew the answer.
Tunold suspected he knew the answer too. And he didn’t like it.
◊
Donal knew better than to try to be the first one to leave the Jade Monkey. The street was quiet, though Donal could just hear the ticking of runner claws from the traffic down on Market Street.
The sword carrier waited no more than two meters in front of the door of the Jade Monkey: short black hair slicked down, tanned, Eastern European features patient, stylish dark blue suit still crisp, dueling rapier casual at his side, and bouquet of a dozen roses cradled in his left arm.
“If those are for me,” said Li Hua, “I should warn you that I have a boyfriend.”
“So I see,” said the sword carrier, his voice a touch too high to be smooth. “But I assure you that my interest is purely professional.”
“Is that why you have backup?” asked Donal, letting his focus cover his surroundings to ensure that no enchantments were waiting for them to let their guard down.
“Not backup,” he said. “An Unbiased Witness.”
Donal heard the capital letters in the man’s voice, but didn’t know what they meant. But Li Hua must have, because she said, “4M doesn’t have any current disputes up before the Fair Arbiters Guild.”
&
nbsp; “No, but people inconvenient to 4M have had a habit of disappearing lately. You guys are good, but even you won’t cross the Fair Arbiters Guild, not here in San Francisco.”
“We don’t make people disappear either.”
Li Hua’s voice sounded tired, but Donal wondered if her eyes had narrowed a shade too much. Fionn might have agreed, for the cú sidhe focused on Li Hua instead of on the sword carrier, where Donal had expected.
“If you’ve got something to say, say it,” said Li Hua. “But if you imply anything more about my company, I’ll give you an excuse to break in that unused sword of yours.” She smiled, full of danger. “In front of an Unbiased Witness.”
Her words made Donal glance at the man’s sword, and realize that it looked new, its scabbard so pristine it might have hung in a store window that morning. The sword carrier smiled like a boy caught playing out of bounds.
“The sword’s for show, as I’m sure you can tell. All the executives at my firm carry them. Challenge me and I’ll demand a champion.”
“Don’t insult me or my boyfriend and we can get on with our night in peace.”
“First, these are for you.” He held out the roses, but when Li Hua made no move to take them, he shrugged and set them on the sidewalk. “There’s a card, but under the circumstances, I’d better just tell you the message.”
The sword carrier raised his eyebrows, and at Li Hua’s nod he continued.
“Please accept these flowers as a gesture of respect to your talents and abilities. We ask that you leave 4M, either for another company or to go into private practice. Failing that, we ask that you cancel your passage on a certain upcoming trip to Venus. In either case, you will be compensated for making the right choice.”
“Vague and useless,” said Li Hua. “Not even an amount or a signatory.”
“The signatory is ‘The Consortium,’ As for the amount...” The sword carrier smiled with the winning confidence of a salesman. “That’s the other reason I brought an Unbiased Witness.”
If the man expected a reaction from Li Hua, he didn’t get it. Donal flicked his eyes up and down Octavia Boulevard: a young couple enjoying riding double on a horse, and an old man leaving an apartment building, huddled into his coat against the cool spring evening.
The sword carrier gestured to the roses on the ground. “If you don’t want those, I could—”
“Leave them,” said Li Hua.
“Right,” said the sword carrier, hands up and backing away across the street before he continued on his way.
“They look like nice roses,” said Donal. Li Hua kicked them into the street. She turned to say something — something flirty by the tilt of her head — but a dark-skinned young man, clean-cut enough to be working his way through college, got out of a parked runner and approached them.
The man held up his right hand, fingers splayed so they could see the seal of the ring he bore on his middle finger. Donal reached for his tuning fork, but Li Hua stroked her earring. The ring flared green in response.
“You have been identified to me as Tai Shi Li Hua,” said the Unbiased Witness, “and I have substantiated your identity to my professional satisfaction. I bear a message for you, the veracity of which has been confirmed and verified by the Fair Arbiters Guild. Do you wish to receive this message in private, or here in front of your acknowledged companion Donal Cuthbert?”
Donal wondered if his identity had also been substantiated, and what that process involved. Under the circumstances, though, he declined to ask.
“Here is fine,” said Li Hua, “if the message is brief.”
“The message is as follows: ‘Tai Shi Li Hua, we of the Consortium have placed in escrow with the Fair Arbiters Guild the sum of fifty million dollars. You may claim half of that sum if you appear at their downtown San Francisco office in person at any time during the upcoming Starchaser Spacelines flight to Venus. You may claim the entire amount if, at that time, you present evidence or testify to the satisfaction of the Fair Arbiters Guild that you have terminated your employment with 4M and the 4M family of companies. If you choose the latter option, the names and companies of the members of the Consortium will be made available to you, and if you contact any of them you will be offered a director level position with salary and benefits commensurate with those offered by 4M.’ This ends the message.”
“That was brief?” said Donal. Li Hua nodded and the Unbiased Witness said, “Very.”
“Message received and understood,” and Li Hua. The Unbiased Witness nodded acknowledgment, then his posture relaxed and he jerked a thumb at the Jade Monkey and smiled broadly. “This place any good? I’m starved.”
Donal’s jaw dropped, and he managed a rapid nod as his eyes found Fionn and saw confirmation in the gaze of his familiar. When the Unbiased Witness entered the restaurant, Donal turned to Li Hua and said, “Geas magic? Seriously?”
“That’s how they guarantee their results.” She took his arm. “Come on.”
Donal hesitated, tried to relax into a stroll with Li Hua while their familiars circled, watching for threats, but he could not quite manage it.
“So he has no idea what he said, but he was compelled to say it to you.”
“His ring wouldn’t even respond to a check right now. He’s off the clock.”
“Rough job requirements.” Silence fell between them as they approached Li Hua’s runner, a sleek, feline design with four furry legs but only two seats. “Speaking of jobs...”
“Later,” said Li Hua, turning to face Donal and placing two fingers on his lips. Excitement burned in her eyes, her smile. “We both got amped up for a fight, but there was no fight. Do you really want to waste our adrenaline?”
Donal had not built up adrenaline, so much as nervousness. But he saw no reason to point that out.
Donal kissed Li Hua hard, his arms tight around her, and as she matched his passion he wondered how far back her runner’s seats reclined.
Not much later, in a secluded spot, he learned that they reclined all the way...
Chapter Five
By oh-seven-hundred the next morning, Jacobs stepped into the office that was once more his, aboard the Horizon Cusp. The bookshelves behind the huge desk sat bare, waiting for his many volumes to return to their accustomed spots from their crates down in the hold. The walls looked empty without his art, especially his gallery of the scores of ships he had served on, from old seagoing Naval vessels through the advent of magically borne aircraft, to the first space runabouts, all the way through helioships, the current leading edge of space travel.
Three things remained as they had been the last time Jacobs stood in this doorway: the air smelled slightly of the sea (from the cleaning staff’s cleansers, a special concoction for Jacobs); his old, comfortable couch still sat under the huge porthole (that right now showed only a view of the San Francisco Spaceport where the ship sat at dock); and on that couch sprawled his slightly grizzled white tomcat, Benny Sugg.
As he so often did, Benny pulled Jacobs out of his reverie with a meow of complaint, as though the cat were horribly mistreated and had not seen so much as a kind hand in years, and he demanded to know where Jacobs had been anyway, and how dare he be gone for so long?
Jacobs chuckled. "I'm afraid you'll have to join me at the desk, Benny. I have too much to do right now to nap with you." Jacobs strode over to his desk and called up his phantasmal display before he so much as sat or tossed down the small bundle under his arm, a collection of reports and forms, along with the memopad he used for exactly one purpose: to transfer charts. He set it about that process now, while Benny Sugg, affronted, rolled over and went back to sleep with a huffing churr that suggested that he expected better treatment when he awoke.
Kelly had offered to handle the chart transfer, knowing as the rest of the crew did the discomfort Jacobs still took with the myriad replacements for the tools of his youth. But Jacobs declined. So far as he was concerned, space travel was the single greatest accomplishment
of magic, and if Jacobs would use it then he felt he owed it to magic, somehow, to give it the respect of doing his work for himself.
Jacobs would no sooner allow Kelly to transfer his charts than he would allow Mr. Burke, the helmsman, to plot his courses for him. Tunold might have a point about Jacobs letting his ex oh handle more of the on-ship demands for this flight — as a Naval ex oh would — but so long as Jacobs sat in the big chair he would not relegate his responsibilities.
The transfer now complete, Jacobs called up a three dimensional image of Venus and the space around it within a decan, a clearer, more detailed view than he had gotten in his Starchaser Spacelines office.
Jacobs frowned at the sight. The planet should never have been colonized, but humans were ever impatient for expansion. A zuglodon hunting ground passed within half a decan of the planet. And if Jacobs read the correspondences right, that region of space lay closest to Earth this time of year.
Of course. What fun is a tricky flight without a zuglodon or two trying to batter down our wards and feast on our elements?
A red zone between Venus and Mercury had been expanded since the last charts Jacobs had seen, a warning update from the Navy. The details were classified, damn them, which meant they had their own exploration going that direction and designated a no-fly zone. That meant patrols and trouble, trouble the likes of which even Jacobs dared not skirt.
The whole zone might as well have been labeled 'Here There Be Dragons.'
No. Some idiot would take that seriously.
Could they be charting a course to Mercury already? No. Too much money going into Ganymede right now. That meant that the red zone represented a hazard, something the military didn't want to admit to. At least not yet. Fine then. Their problem, and they could keep it. Still...
Jacobs stretched the red zone in his display. A military no-fly zone meant military patrols. Military patrols meant support in case of trouble, or at least rescue in case of emergency.