Interstellar Mage (Starship's Mage: Red Falcon Book 1)

by Glynn Stewart

  “Benedict Rhee, you are under arrest for unlawful detainment,” a voice boomed from the two-meter-tall suit’s shoulders. “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can be used against in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney—”

  “Do you know who I am?!” Rhee demanded, lunging to his feet.

  The webber coughed once, a ball of sticky strands blasting past David’s head and hammering the mogul into the wall.

  “Yes, Mr. Rhee, as a matter of fact, my men do know who you are,” Harold Hayashi said dryly as he stepped up beside the armored cop. “And we’ve been waiting for an opportunity to have this conversation with you for a very long time.”

  14

  Once again in Atsuko Hayashi’s office, this time with both Soprano and Skavar hovering over his shoulder like worried hens, David gladly accepted the glass of scotch the CEO of Dancing Fox pressed upon him.

  “CSS checked,” she told him. “Someone had inserted a worm into the transfer pod controls. As soon as you got into a pod headed back to the dock, it would have run the power level to three times safe.”

  The youngest member of the Hayashi triad shook her head.

  “Even if you’d survived the gee forces, the pods aren’t designed for them. You’d have been flung into space, and those pods have a limited local oxygen reserve. If you weren’t crushed, you’d have asphyxiated.”

  “Even paranoids have real enemies, it seems,” Skavar noted. “I’m guessing there wasn’t a deactivation code for if the boss took Rhee’s deal?”

  “Of course not,” Harry Hayashi replied. “One way or another, Rhee wanted you dead. Nguyen accidentally threw you into the middle of our growing political crisis with every damn hook he possibly could have.”

  “Are you really expecting me to buy that it was an accident?” David said dryly. “He didn’t strike me as the type to be that uninformed.”

  “It…may not have been,” Atsuko told him. “But he didn’t have any instructions from us to do anything of the sort.”

  “What happens now?” David asked.

  “Rhee faces a court. The Importers’ Syndicate probably comes apart—as, to be honest, it should have a few years ago. That kind of organization is supposed to be temporary, but it helps make some people very rich, so…”

  She shrugged. “Even realizing it was a problem, it was hard for me to advocate for its dissolution. It’s going to cost me quite a bit of money. While I’d hate for you to feel obligated, Captain Rice, I’d be very pleased if you took my deal now.”

  “You can guess how much better it is than the only other deal I’ve been offered for the whole cargo,” he replied dryly. “Send the paperwork to Red Falcon; we’ll make it happen.”

  “What about Green Seneschal?” Soprano asked. The ex-Navy officer’s voice was hard. “That kind of crap is—”

  “Outside Cinnamon’s jurisdiction, I’m afraid,” Harry Hayashi interrupted. “If the evidence we pull out of Rhee and O’Toole’s computers adds up how I expect it to, I’ll present a bill to Parliament to have them declared corporate persona non grata here.” He shook his head. “That will leave Atsuko and Factor Nguyen scrambling to find new carriers, but I think we’ll be better off that way!”

  “Too many of the Protectorate’s problems are caused by interstellar corporations muscling around system governments,” Soprano growled. “Please make sure that the MIS is informed of this.”

  The Martian Investigation Service handled investigations that passed between system boundaries but didn’t justify a Hand’s involvement. As Harry Hayashi said, Cinnamon didn’t have jurisdiction over Green Seneschal’s activity outside their system—the MIS did.

  “What about O’Toole?” David asked.

  “He is also under arrest,” Harry Hayashi replied. “Protective custody right now, but we have warrants to rip his personal and work computers to pieces. I expect we’ll find some interesting tidbits in there.”

  “I feel like I was intentionally sent in here as a stalking horse,” Red Falcon’s Captain complained. “I hope you get what you need out of it.”

  “I think so,” the MP replied. “The scale of just what Rhee had set into motion surprised us, but we were pretty sure he and Green Seneschal had their hands dirty. Your recording is enabling us to get warrants across the planet.”

  He shook his head.

  “Some of what he said is also making us look quite closely at judges who weren’t as helpful as we expected them to be in the past,” he noted. “I have some pointed questions to be asking.”

  “What’s a general Member of Parliament doing in the middle of all of this crap?” David asked. “It seems a little out of place.”

  “Before Atsuko convinced me to go into politics, I was the Deputy Head of Cinnamon Station Security,” the male Hayashi replied. “So, when my party became government, I was tapped for the Justice portfolio.”

  “So, when Atsuko said you were a Member of Parliament…”

  “She didn’t lie,” he said. “She just didn’t mention that I’m also Cinnamon’s Minister of Justice.

  “Which makes cleaning up the mess Rhee made—and you have so kindly dragged into the open—my problem.”

  ON THEIR WAY out of the Hayashis’ office, Atsuko Hayashi waved David back to her desk.

  “What do you need?” he asked.

  “Nothing you haven’t already managed,” she replied with a throaty chuckle. “But a contact drifted across my radar looking for you, and I figured that after your most recent encounter with our local businessmen, you’d want some reassurance that they were on the up-and-up.”

  “What kind of contact?” he said carefully.

  “One of our bulk exporters has had some problems with finding shipping lately,” she told him. “Reading between the lines, Green Seneschal was playing games with them, trying to force them to agree to an exclusive deal.

  “Now, however, they have managed to build up an unusually large stockpile of goods they want to ship out, and one of their people reached out to mine to quietly get a figure on your ship’s cargo capacity.”

  “We can carry almost anything,” David replied. “Rhee called us a ‘megafreighter’, which is a bit of exaggeration but not much of one.”

  The handful of ships that actually met that description were never owner-operated. They were big, thirty megatons or more, vessels that made the short-distance, high-volume routes between the Core Systems. They carried enough Mages to make them quick once they made it far enough out to jump, but their sheer scale meant they didn’t accelerate quickly.

  “So, I had my people send back to Silk Star,” Hayashi told him. “Silk Star Trade Exports—primarily spices and dried food. I won’t swear they’re innocent as pure-driven snow, but they’re not going to screw you and they aren’t tied up in Rhee’s bullshit!”

  “That’s good to know. I’ll keep an ear out for their call,” David promised.

  “I certainly can’t get you a cargo heading outwards,” she warned him. “I owe you, but I’m an importer, Captain, not an exporter. And I did just dissolve the syndicate that allowed me to deal in twenty million-ton cargos,” she concluded with a grin.

  GIVEN THE HAYASHIS’ demonstrated influence and reach, David wasn’t entirely surprised to find a recorded message waiting for him when he returned to Red Falcon. He left it for a moment while he let Skavar and Soprano take seats in his office.

  “So, why exactly did you meet with the guy who wanted to kill you?” his Mage asked sweetly. “If we were so sure this was going to go sideways, why did you meet with him at all?”

  “I didn’t expect it to go this sideways,” David admitted. “I expected him to try and gouge us for the antimatter costs—antimatter, I’ll note, that we’re not getting.” He shook his head.

  “I was recording it and transmitting it because I was feeling paranoid. I was expecting Skavar to come save the day, not CSS Special Weapons Teams.”

  He leveled his gaze on his Chief of
Security.

  “Just how did that happen?” he asked.

  “It’s generally considered rude to fire boarding torpedoes into a friendly station,” Skavar said calmly. “Short of something that drastic, I wasn’t going to get my people to you in less than fifteen minutes—but I could call CSS, and they brag about a five-minute response time.”

  David thought back to his conversation.

  “You called them the moment he started jamming me?” he asked.

  “Hell, yes,” the ex-Marine confirmed. “If nothing else, military-grade jammers like that are illegal in civilian ownership in the Cinnamon System. Once the dude fired up one of those, I knew we had trouble.”

  “And they managed to get frigging Harry Hayashi there in five minutes?”

  “Reading between the lines, they fired off a raid they’d already been planning on Rhee’s office,” Skavar told him. “They had warrants and everything. He was already in deep shit; trying to threaten you just put the nail in his coffin.”

  “And good riddance,” Soprano added. “Scum like that create half of the Navy’s work.”

  “And the other half is pirates,” David replied. “Hopefully, Cinnamon will make something stick. If they don’t, well, we’ll be a long ways away.”

  “Do we have a cargo yet?” she asked.

  “Atsuko told me we’d hear from someone,” he told them. “I have a message I expect to be from her contact, so as soon as you’re done lecturing me over my lack of concern for my own safety…”

  Soprano shook her head.

  “I’ve read the unclassified part of your file, Captain Rice,” she said. “I’m starting to think it wasn’t your Ship’s Mage who was a magnet for trouble.”

  THE RECORDED MESSAGE turned out to be another of Cinnamon’s stereotypical tiny Asians, a dark-skinned woman in a tight-fitted dark red dress.

  “Captain Rice, I am Hyeon Choi of Silk Star Trade Exports,” she greeted him with a bright smile. “We have a large cargo that needs to leave the Cinnamon System as quickly as possible. We have several contracts for delivery that are already due for late fees as we could not find shipping.

  “Everything is going to one destination and I am advised by my contacts aboard Cinnamon Station that your ship should be able to carry our cargo.

  “I would like to meet with you in person to pass on the details and negotiate a contract,” she concluded. “Please reach out to me at the contact information attached to this message.”

  Choi bowed over her desk.

  “I look forward to your response.”

  15

  Choi’s office felt very familiar to David when he and Soprano arrived—it was the exact same style of short-term rental office space he’d been using in Tau Ceti. There was no reception area, just a single open set of cubicles with half a dozen young men and women busily working away and one closed-door office off to one side.

  Hyeon Choi met them at the front door, in another tight-fitted dress, this one blue, that managed to both be professional and quite frankly outline an athletically feminine figure.

  “Captain Rice, Ship’s Mage Soprano, welcome, welcome,” Choi said as she led them through to her office. “I heard about your problems with Mr. Rhee, quite a shock! He’s always been a difficult man to do business with, but that...”

  She trailed off, shaking her head as she closed the office door and gestured them to seats.

  “Drinks? We don’t have much on hand, just water and tea,” she admitted. “This isn’t a permanent office for us, as you may have guessed.”

  “I had,” David confirmed. “What brings Silk Star up to Cinnamon Station on a temporary basis?”

  “Normally, we hold our cargo on the surface and ship it up as needed,” Choi told him. “That means we don’t have any office space or storage space up here on the Station.

  “Of late, however, we’ve needed to put more of our goods in long-term storage and, well, vacuum is one of the best preservatives known to man. Approximately seventy-five percent of our inventory is in an orbital storage pod that’s also being rented on a short-term basis.”

  She shook her head.

  “Honestly, our inability to ship our cargo out has been causing some problems with our cash flow,” she admitted. “Your presence here is a godsend, Captain Rice.”

  “What kind of cargo are we talking about?” he asked.

  “Food and spices, all prepaid by our customers out-system,” she told him. “We’re prepared to pay standard carriage rates on eighteen point five million ton of cargo for shipment to the New Madagascar System.”

  “Ah,” David exhaled softly. Of course there was a catch. New Madagascar was a Fringe World, with a primarily resource-driven economy—and was an UnArcana world.

  “I’m sure you’re aware, Miss Choi, that shipping to the UnArcana worlds is rarely done at ‘standard carriage rates’,” he pointed out gently. “There is a distinct risk and…unpleasantness for our Mages in such a trip.”

  He studied Soprano out of the corner of his eye. She looked uncomfortable but not unwilling.

  “I was afraid of that,” Choi said with a sigh of her own. “We have cargo headed to several systems, but New Madagascar is the only one with a large-enough load to justify hiring your ship. Your Red Falcon fits our needs perfectly, but I understand the concern.

  “What is the normal premium for such a shipment?”

  “Anywhere from seventy to a hundred percent,” David replied. “Given the number of Mages aboard Red Falcon and the speed we can deliver at, I’d expect something at the high end of that range.”

  “Ah,” Choi said softly. “As I said, we are in some degree of financial distress from the holdup on our shipments. I could see us being able to pay a forty percent premium, but any more would require me to touch base with my partners and financers back on the surface.”

  “Of course,” David allowed, letting her set her negotiating position. “Forty percent definitely wouldn’t be enough for us to travel to an UnArcana Fringe World,” he warned, “so I suggest you do that and get back to us.”

  The last time he’d gone to an UnArcana Fringe World, a lot of people had died. Plus, before he agreed to that kind of job, he’d want to make sure Soprano was entirely on board.

  “I can do that,” Choi promised. “I am certain we can come to an agreement, Captain Rice, but I can’t commit to higher than a forty percent premium on my own.”

  “I understand,” he told her. “I am certainly interested in the job, Miss Choi, but I must discuss with my senior officers and wait for your next offer.”

  “I appreciate your patience, Captain Rice.”

  “It’ll be two more days before we’re fully off-loaded,” he told her with a grin. “I can be patient.”

  MARIA SKIMMED through the files MISS had provided her on Silk Star Trade Exports and found herself wondering if Green Seneschal had had a clue who they were trying to pressure. The links to Legatan money and Legatan operations were subtle, but they were definitely there. Some she’d have caught on her own; some were pointed out in the analyst commentary in the files.

  Silk Star was owned by Cinnamon natives, with its financing secured through private lenders also on Cinnamon. Those lenders’ books were closed and their ownership was secret—but MISS had tracked them back to Legatus.

  Other things were more visible, if less incriminatory. When a major deal had been negotiated with Legatus for the purchase of spices and food from Cinnamon, Silk Star had led the way—and they’d been a central part of a deal to acquire Legatan farm and industrial machinery a few years before.

  It could easily just be a long-term relationship between an export company and one of their customers. Or it could be what MISS thought it was—that Silk Star was being funded by Legatan covert operations as a way to launder money without it obviously coming from Legatus.

  Finding out which was why MISS wanted Red Falcon to take the job.

  The admittance chime on her door sounded, and the
Ship’s Mage smiled. She’d been waiting for the Captain to drop by.

  “Come in,” she instructed, watching the door slide open to reveal David Rice. “I have coffee on.”

  “Am I that predictable to you?” Rice asked, crossing to the pot and pouring himself a cup.

  “You’d be a worse Captain than I expect if you didn’t check in with the Mages before taking on a shipment to an UnArcana world,” she pointed out. “Have they come back with an offer yet?”

  “Not yet,” he admitted, then shrugged. “Choi will talk to her bankers and partners and come back around a fifty percent premium. I’ll counter at eighty. We’ll go back and forth a few times, settle around sixty to sixty-five.

  “New Madagascar isn’t one of the UnArcana worlds where I expect to find frothing fanatics looking for Mages to step out of bounds; it should be relatively safe. That said…” The Captain met her gaze. “It’s not my call if we go to an UnArcana world. I’m not the one at risk.”

  “You’re the Captain,” Maria replied, taken aback by his willingness to toss a major deal on her say-so.

  “And part of my job is protecting my crew,” Rice said. “If you and your Mages aren’t comfortable going to an UnArcana world, I’ll kill the deal. I haven’t had great experiences going into that sector of space myself, so…”

  Under normal circumstances, she’d be tempted to hold him to that. She’d visited UnArcana worlds as a Navy officer, and even then, with the weight of the Mage-King’s authority behind her, that had been an unpleasant experience.

  But MISS wanted them to take this job—and she could see why. She couldn’t tell Rice that, though.

  “How many cargos big enough to justify Falcon are we actually going to see ship out of Cinnamon?” she asked.