Alaura sighed.
“Miss Jenna Alabaster,” she said calmly. “I am aware that your aunt entered this office at seven forty five Olympus Mons Time this morning. Despite this office having three separate concealed exits, she has not left since. Please tell her I am here.”
“It’s all right Jenna,” a voice interjected. “Though I would think a Hand would have better things to do than try to intimidate my staff.”
Alaura turned an assessing gaze on Keiko Alabaster, who returned the favor frankly. Where the merchant was tall and slim, Alaura was short and stocky. Where Alabaster was as pale as her name, the Hand was swarthy, her skin worn by years under the sun of space. Where Keiko was young and red-haired, Stealey was aged and graying.
Stealey sighed, nodding acceptance of the rebuke.
“I did not mean to intimidate anyone,” she said calmly. “I am in a hurry, however, and both lives and the security of the Protectorate are at stake.”
“I do not know what assistance I may be to a Hand of the Mage-King, but please, step into my office,” Keiko instructed.
Alaura followed the younger woman into her office. It was a surprisingly cramped space for the mistress of a billion-dollar trade empire. A massive desk filled much of the space, with a single holographic screen that Keiko closed with a wave of her hand as she sat behind the desk, gesturing the Hand to the single seat in front of the desk.
She had to move a stack of papers from the seat. If the dream of a paperless office had died anywhere, it was in Keiko Alabaster’s office. Every surface, from the desk to the bookshelves to the guest chair, was covered in paper. Alaura recognized many of the cover pages as belonging to finance and political think-tanks across the Protectorate. In that, at least, the office was what she expected of Keiko Alabaster.
“How may I assist the Protectorate, Lady Hand?” Keiko finally asked, her helpful words at odds with a body language that accentuated her height and position behind the desk.
“I need to know where you sent the Blue Jay,” Alaura said bluntly.
“I don’t believe I own or contract with a ship by that name,” the merchant princess replied. Her eyes were level and her voice didn’t waver – this woman was good, the Hand reflected.
Unfortunately for her, Alaura had done her research before she’d ever stepped into the office.
“No, you don’t,” she agreed calmly. “You did, however, act as agent for Captain Rice to acquire a cargo of two million tons of aerospace craft and maintenance supplies, ground and aerial terraformers, and advanced farming equipment. Given that the Jay is capable of hauling three million tons of cargo, I can’t help but feel that you and the good Captain came to an agreement on what to do with that other million tons of cargo. A load of weapons, for example.”
“Such a contract would not be illegal on Amber,” Keiko pointed out. “I would have no reason to conceal such a transaction.”
“Please, Miss Alabaster,” Stealey said quietly. “I have spent the last ten years resolving rebellions in the Fringe. I know where the guns for the more moral ones are coming from. If you were less picky, you and I would have had a discussion a long time ago.”
That, finally, pierced the other woman’s armor of perfect calm. She obviously hadn’t realized the Protectorate knew about her little sideline.
“That is neither here nor there,” Keiko said slowly. “I did not engage the Blue Jay to haul a million tons of weapons, if that is what you’re asking.”
“I honestly don’t care if you engaged them to fight a fucking war for you,” Stealey snapped. “I care if you know where they went, and I know that you damned well know.”
Keiko’s hand smacked her desk with a resounding clap.
“This is Amber, my Lady Hand,” she said coldly. “Your authority here is not unlimited, and I will not be bullied. This interview is over.”
“Do not push me, Keiko Alabaster,” Alaura warned, her voice equally cold. “Amberites tend to believe their lack of laws limits the power of a Hand here – but this is a matter of Protectorate Law. In that, I am the highest authority outside of Sol. Did Rice even tell you why the Protectorate might be looking for them?”
“They broke his Mage out of one of your prisons that he’d been jailed in on trumped up charges,” Keiko said. “He was surprised there was no warrant for his arrest.”
It was an improvement, Alaura reflected, that the merchant was no longer denying she’d met Captain Rice.
“There are no warrants because I canceled them all,” she told the other woman. “The local Guildmaster didn’t understand what was going on, and handled it completely wrong. I’ve spent the last few months trying to fix that.”
“If the charges were trumped up, then just let them go,” Keiko snapped, and Alaura noted the flush in the Amberite’s cheeks. There was more going on here than just the usual stubbornness of Amber merchants or protecting a contract. This was… personal for Alabaster.
“I can’t, Miss Alabaster,” the Hand said finally, after a long silence. “The Blue Jay has been modified – her jump matrix has been turned into an amplifier.”
“That isn’t possible.”
“It is,” Alaura told her. “And those with the knowledge to judge such things tell me that the Jay could be used as a template to do that to any jumpship.
“In the hands of a pirate, that ship would allow them to produce an entire fleet of covert raiders, utterly indistinguishable from regular merchant ships until they unleashed magic on their unsuspecting prey. Can you imagine how bad our piracy problem would grow then?”
Alabaster’s face had grown even paler than before, and Alaura knew the merchant was imagining it just fine.
“The Blue Star Syndicate already wanted Rice dead,” she continued. “Now they know what the Blue Jay can do. They will hunt the Jay to the ends of the Protectorate – you can’t save them. I can’t protect them – not if I can’t find them.”
“They won’t be harmed?” Keiko demanded, suddenly and incongruously a young woman concerned for her friends. “Any of the crew?”
“I swear to you, upon the honor of Mars, none of the Blue Jay’s crew will be harmed,” Alaura told her. The Hands voice was firm as she made a commitment that bound not merely herself, but her King, and, in a sense, the entire Protectorate.
From Keiko Alabaster’s face, the other woman knew what it meant for a Hand to swear upon the honor of Mars.
“Excelsior, Lady Hand,” she finally admitted. “I sent them to the Graveyard at Excelsior.”
#
The Blue Jay jumped into Excelsior in the middle of the night Olympus Mons Time. Kelly had joined Damien in the simulacrum Chamber and was looking around wide-eyed as they emerged into the new system. The screens all around them began to fill with images as the Jay’s many cameras began to record the universe around them again.
“Well, we’re here,” Damien said quietly to the screen showing David on the bridge. The Captain nodded, checking something on his own screen.
“We’re about eight hours from the Trojan cluster we’re supposed to meet this Captain Seule at,” he told the Mage. “Keep an eye on things, this system has a lot of rocks floating about.”
The entire system looked odd, Damien realized. There were only four planets, for one thing – one tiny ball of fire-kissed rock tucked in right next to the star, one ball of ice light-hours out, and two mid-sized gas giants. Where orbital dynamics said there should be two more planets between the fire-seared inner planet and the innermost gas giant was two massive asteroid belts.
Both belts were clumped up, with most of the rocks concentrated in a single massive cluster for each. A navigation beacon announced the presence of a number of mining platforms on the outer of the two clusters.
“This place is weird,” Kelly said next to Damien. “Those asteroid belts make no sense.”
“That’s about what the first explorers who surveyed the system said,” David told the two youths. “A lot about the system didn�
��t add up, so they pulled some of the historical astronomical data for this region of space. Some oddities showed up in the late twentieth century data – which just gave them more questions!”
“Doesn’t look like this system has a lot of answers,” Damien said quietly, eyeing the local radar data also being fed to his screens. With the amount of debris in this system, it would be up to him and the Jay’s laser turrets to keep the ship safe.
“It doesn’t,” the Captain admitted. “But the Corporation that had purchased the mining rights wanted to make sure that if something had happened to create the strange asteroid belts, it wouldn’t repeat. They funded an expedition to go into deep space and capture the old light from Excelsior.
“They went almost two light centuries outside explored space,” he continued. “Dodging systems to avoid tempting fate, they went hunting what they figured was the death of a world.”
“Jumping from deep space to deep space, looking backwards the whole time?” Kelly said softly. “Sounds romantic.”
Damien was reminded that his girlfriend, as an engineer, had a strange definition of romantic.
“What they found wasn’t,” David said grimly. “It turns out that about six hundred years ago, a small black hole – a couple of earth masses, nothing more – ripped through the Excelsior system and tore the two middle world to shreds.
“They also discovered what no one had guessed before that – that Excelsior had been inhabited before that. A technic civilization, the only one we know of, had died when that black hole hit. They’d been a couple of centuries ahead of us – early twenty-second century in our nineteenth century – but without magic, they were unable to escape the death of their worlds.”
That got Damien’s attention. Humanity had discovered a total of five non-human intelligences. So far as the xeno-anthropologists could determine, all had lacked critical biological or mineral resources to achieve anything resembling civilization – all of them were still at the hunter-gatherer level. Now that David mentioned it, though, he vaguely remembered something about a dead technological alien race.
“A couple of space stations survived. Once we knew to look for them, we found them. One of the biggest had survived for almost a hundred years after the black hole before they finally died out from the inability to replace critical tech,” David finished. “No one has any idea what pathogens may be aboard, so even the archeologists are only allowed to study it with robots, and only for limited amounts of time. It’s under a quarantine order.”
Damien glanced at their course, towards the trailing Trojan cluster of the outer gas giant. He noticed, now, that there was a second navigation beacon there. One warning everyone away.
“That’s where we’re going,” he said quietly.
“Yeah,” David confirmed. “To the Graveyard of the only other technic civilization we’ve known.” He shrugged. “I’m prepared to bet any ghosts will like me though.”
“Why’s that?” Kelly asked, sneaking her hand into Damien’s. He squeezed, hopefully reassuringly, as he needed the reassurance himself.
“When they identified what had happened, the ship I was serving on in the Navy was part of a task group testing a theoretical way to break up a singularity threatening one of our systems. We took it as a sign of a good test subject.”
He smiled sadly.
“We know almost nothing about Excelsior’s inhabitants even now – but in a strange way, we avenged them.”
#
David was alone on the bridge for most of the approach to the trailing Trojan cluster of the third of Excelsior’s remaining planets. The cluster of asteroids followed the massive gas giant in the lull of gravity in the orbit, what was often called the Lagrange points after the eighteenth century mathematician who’d first theorized them.
After the first hour or so proved non-eventful, with the handful of rocks that had come their way readily handled by the Blue Jay’s defensive turrets, he’d even sent Damien to bed – though, from the way Kelly had dragged him from the simulacrum Chamber, he wasn’t sure the young Mage had got much sleep.
As they crept closer to the cluster of asteroids, thankfully, the ship slowly came awake around him and Jenna joined him on the bridge. For all of his brave words to Damien, David found the thought of entering the Graveyard discomfiting.
Part of the reason that the Protectorate had managed to swing putting the Graveyard off-limits was that the final desperate struggle to survive of Excelsior’s inhabitants had stripped the Trojan cluster of any useable resources – most specifically, potable water. Most of the rocks that followed Excelsior Three in its orbit were just plain rock now, where a cluster like this should have had ice asteroids and a few captured comets.
“There it is,” Jenna said quietly as they finished slowing to a crawl and began drifting into the cluster. In the center of the Lagrange point was the immense structure of the space station that had been the last, doomed, hope of an entire species.
It was possible, sort of, to identify the original mining platform at its center. Welded onto that pitted and ancient heart, though, were the remnants of transport ships, cargo containers, and even entire hollowed-out asteroids. It was dead and silent now, a monument in black iron and meteor pitted rock.
“There is a lot of debris out there,” Jenna said quietly. “It’s full of iron and heavy metals – pretty much every sensor we have is picking up nothing but static.”
“No one else can find us either,” David reminded her. “That’s why we’re here.”
“So, any idea where the Luciole is?”
“Keiko gave us a specific set of co-ordinates,” he said, typing them into the computer. A flashing sphere appeared on the main screen. “We’re to decelerate to zero relative to the Graveyard Station there, and wait for Seule to contact us.”
“I keep expecting ghosts to come jumping out of the shadows,” Jenna complained. “Why the hell are we meeting here?”
“Because nobody comes here except archeologists, and the latest expedition isn’t due in for eleven months,” David replied. “It’s a perfect place to hand over enough guns to conquer a world.”
Jenna shivered visibly. “Yeah, because that thought makes me more comfortable.”
The Captain shrugged as the Blue Jay entered the agreed co-ordinates, and the maneuvering thrusters brought the massive freighter to a halt relative to the ancient alien station. There wasn’t much he could say to Jenna beyond that he trusted Keiko, and he wasn’t even certain that was wise.
“Do you see anything?” he finally asked.
“Nothing,” his XO replied. “Damien?”
The Mage on the video link shrugged. “I can’t see anything the ship can’t,” he said dryly. “So right now, I’m feeling a bit blind.”
The Blue Jay’s bridge was silent, the two officers and the linked-in Mage all straining their own senses and the ship’s, trying to see something - anything.
“There! What’s that?” Damien asked.
David followed the icon that the Mage threw up on the screen. It was blinking on one of the larger asteroids, a ten kilometer long hunk of iron and rock that a long-ago mining ship had cut a massive gorge into to extract whatever the aliens had needed to sustain a few more years of life.
Inside that massive gorge, a light was flickering. After a few moments, the light rose out of the gorge and revealed itself to be the fusion maneuvering thrusters of a starship. The ship was smaller than the Blue Jay, only three hundred meters and narrow for most of its length with a sizeable ‘mushroom head’ radiation cap shield at the front and hefty engines at the back.
“That’s a Navy High Priority Courier,” David recognized it aloud. The Navy had built them fifty or so years ago to carry small cargos at extremely high speed speeds – the ships had been fitted with antimatter engines and carried a warship’s complement of Mages.
“Those were all decommissioned, weren’t they?” Jenna asked, and David nodded.
“Mars decided that
mounting antimatter engines on full-size freighters was more valuable in an emergency, and that they could use normal freighters the rest of the time,” he confirmed. “The last one was supposed to be scrapped five years ago, but it looks like our Captain Seule saved one from the breakers.”
Antimatter was expensive, and most civilian ships didn’t use it. Somehow, though, David was sure that the Luciole still used antimatter in her main engines – she was, after all, a blockade runner. Corporations would hire and use private warships, but they rarely mounted military grade engines on them.
Once the spindly blockade runner was clear of the gorge and directed towards the Blue Jay, the computer informed them of an incoming transmission. With a swipe across the command pad on his chair, David threw the image up on his main screen.
“You’re our drop-off, I presume?” the dark-haired man in the dark red shirt on the screen asked him. “I can’t see someone randomly stopping in exactly the right spot, not in this place,” he gestured at the space around them.”
“If you are Captain Nathan Seule, then yes, I’m your delivery,” Rice confirmed. “Captain David Rice, of the Blue Jay.”
“I am indeed Captain Seule of the Luciole, Captain Rice. I see that Miss Alabaster delivered as always. How are you set up for cargo transfer?”
“I have four heavy lift shuttles,” David told him. “I think we should be able to transfer the cargo quickly, depending on your own resources.”
“Good to hear, Captain,” Seule told him. “We only have two shuttles ourselves, so it would take a while if we’re left to just my resources. Shall we be about it? I aim to not be around if the miners in-system start asking questions, if you catch my drift.”
“I’ll have my pilots start loading containers,” David said. “Have your pilots contact my First Pilot Kelzin as they approach, he’ll guide them in.”
#
The entire process of deep space cargo transfer, without the many and varied tools and resources of a space dock, was a new one for Damien. The Luciole matched vectors with the Blue Jay at about twenty kilometers distance, just far enough that both ships would be safe to light off their main drives, and then dispatched their two shuttles over.
Starship's Mage: Omnibus: (Starship's Mage Book 1) Page 28