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

by Glynn Stewart

  “Somehow, I get the feeling that it’s no accident that someone’s idea of ‘sexy assassins’ ended up running the show,” he observed.

  Turquoise smiled. There was no humor in it.

  “Khaleesi, myself, some others,” she said simply. “We were Conner Maroon’s bodyguards and private assassins. Once he was dead, it took surprisingly few fatalities to bring the rest of the sector in line.”

  David managed to conceal a shiver. Maroon had, apparently, underestimated his bodyguards—and David could guess why the oversexualized assassins he was sharing a room with had turned on their employer.

  “And the Azure Legacy regards you as trouble, I take it?” David asked.

  “More, I’m not one of the ones they’ve decided are the ‘most likely heirs’,” she replied. “Not least because I have no interest in anything beyond my six star systems. So, I am an impediment to their ‘duty’ to reunify the Syndicate.”

  The humorless smile returned.

  “They would see rather me broken and brought to heel than destroyed, but I refuse to kneel again.”

  “So, as Legatus presumed, we share an enemy,” David agreed. He wasn’t sure this bitter, enraged, probably-ex-slave assassin-turned-crime-lord was a better option than Mikhail Azure had been, but she was the ally he had to hand.

  “Indeed,” she said. “I understand you clashed with a squadron of Legacy warships on your way here. How many survived?”

  “None,” he told her shortly. “They underestimated my ship.

  “That’s an error they won’t repeat,” Turquoise warned. “They will now overestimate you, to be certain you are destroyed. Do not underestimate the resources that can be mobilized in this age by the application of vast quantities of money.”

  “Your old boss had a Navy cruiser,” David said. “I don’t underestimate anything he set in motion.”

  She shook her head.

  “You took down Azure Gauntlet,” she said aloud. “I’m impressed. And I must thank you, Captain Rice. You made all this”—she gestured around—“possible. If Azure had lived, I would have remained an assassin.

  “Now I am a queen, and I have no intentions of becoming a slave again. Together, we can break the Legacy.”

  “They already see me as a threat and are trying to take me out,” he pointed out. “If we can arrange for them to ‘accidentally’ learn my next destination, then you can ambush them with whatever ships you have.”

  “Clever, if somewhat obvious,” Turquoise told him. “No, let them overestimate you. Let them overestimate us. If we are to be allies, let them see that we are allies—so they do not see the sucker punch we are preparing with our other hand.

  “I have a cargo that needs to go to a covert staging area,” she continued. “It’s part of the Legatan business you’re already tied up in. They will expect it to be escorted—so you will be met at the first jump point by my own ships.

  “They will expect that, and once they see the force, they will bring everything they have in the sector to intercept you. And then I will intercept them.”

  “Surely, they know how many ships you have,” David said. This didn’t sound safe, though he could see ways to make it work in his favor once he involved the Navy.

  “I have many ships scattered across my systems, but I have toys they do not believe fell into my hands,” Turquoise told him. “I will keep my secrets, Captain, but don’t you worry.

  “I will guarantee you that whatever the Legacy brings, my ships will be victorious and your ship will be safely delivered to my station.

  “We will crush our shared enemy and your ship will be on its way, free of pursuit and heading far away from my systems.” Her eyes flashed dangerously.

  “Are we understood? Do we have a deal?”

  He glanced at Soprano. From the look in her eyes, she’d caught some of Turquoise’s very specific phrasing as well, but she nodded slowly. He knew from past experience that he could only run so long.

  Sooner or later, it was time to turn and fight.

  35

  Maria watched from a viewing gallery as the massive assembly that made up one of Red Falcon’s main antimatter rocket pods swam delicately through space, guided by a trio of small tugs and more men and women in rocket-equipped EVA exosuits than Maria could count.

  If Foundry Yard Alpha’s crews were half as competent as she figured they were, at least two of those EVA suits contained Mages, using their magic to help guide the ten-thousand-ton engine into place.

  “Hey,” Acconcio’s voice said quietly behind her. “May I join you?”

  She sighed.

  She’d been avoiding him for three days, since she’d spotted him in a restaurant he had no reason to be in. But they were about to go back to space, and she couldn’t go into the void with the man without letting him know where they stood.

  “Sure,” she replied, her voice dull. She stepped over to one side, continuing to watch the shipyard at work as Acconcio stepped up to join her at the window.

  “It’s always amazing to watch this kind of shit, isn’t it?” he asked. “Those engines are huge and we have five of them.” She felt him shake his head. “It’s an incredible amount of power.”

  “And nothing without the magic to carry them between the stars,” she reminded him. “The eternal irony of modern man: our technological prowess is only meaningful when linked to an arcane gift we barely understand and hate the source of.”

  It wasn’t something she thought about much, but Maria Soprano was a Mage by Blood. One of her ancestors had been MGS-276, one of the late-stage experimental subjects of Project Olympus, freed by the first Mage-King of Mars.

  Her ancestry couldn’t be traced any further back than that. All she could be certain of was that the nameless and unmarked graves on Olympus Mons included dozens of her forebears.

  “I feel like I stepped in something,” the ex-warrant said quietly. “I’m not even sure what I did, but…”

  “It’s pretty obvious, I would think,” Maria told him. “Were you or weren’t you in Green Parson’s Bar the other night?”

  Silence.

  “Yes,” he admitted. “I was.”

  “You followed me.”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you think you stepped in?” she snarled. “You fucking followed me, and you’re wondering why I’m pissed?”

  “I wanted to be sure you were safe,” he protested.

  She spun, power flaring around her hands and encasing her in a glowing shield of force.

  “If I’d needed your help, Acconcio, I would have told you,” she told him. “If you’d wanted to help, you would have offered.

  “Instead, you stalked me to see what I was doing.” Power collapsed, leaving her cold and alone as she stared at the man a meter away from her. “We’re done. There are lines you don’t get to cross, Acconcio, and that’s pretty high on the damned list.”

  “You lied to me about where you were going,” he pointed out.

  “And?” she asked. “Where I was, who I was meeting, it was ship’s business—and it wasn’t yours. But you couldn’t accept that, and that’s a glaring red sign I won’t accept.”

  “So, that’s it, then?” he asked. “One strike, I’m out?”

  “Fuck, yes,” she agreed. “Never met a man yet who didn’t fuck it up eventually if given a second chance. We’re done.” She shook her head. “I’m not going to get you kicked off the ship or anything stupid like that, Acconcio. We worked together before; we can still do so. Right?”

  He was silent again but sighed.

  “Yeah, sure,” he agreed.

  Through the window, the mass of the engine slid home and dozens of welding torches lit up like tiny fireflies circling Red Falcon’s bulk.

  “WELL, JAMES?” David asked.

  “They do good work,” the engineer replied calmly, studying the screens in the control station in engineering. “Physical connection of the engine is complete. We’re setting up the feeder lines
and control runs right now.”

  He shrugged expressively.

  “Give me twenty-four hours and we’ll be ready for engine tests,” he promised. “Barring unexpected issues, we’ll be out into space in thirty-six hours and looking for cargo, boss.”

  “We got cargo sorted out already,” David told him. He glanced around, making sure they were alone. Kellers’s people were backing up the yard staff, with LaMonte and the other junior engineering officers managing to somehow be everywhere.

  “Any luck tracking down those transmissions?” he asked softly.

  “Not much,” the engineer admitted. “I’ve got a program running and crunching cycles in the background, but it’s a slow, bloody-minded process to get anything useful.”

  “If it’ll help, I can tell you who two of them were from,” David said with a sigh. “One is from Soprano and another is from Skavar. Those are…now known and ‘benign’, as LaMonte put it.”

  Kellers choked, then shook his head.

  “Is there anyone on this ship who actually works for you?” he asked.

  “Both of them assure me they work for me as well, at least,” the Captain said. “Surprisingly…I trust them.”

  “Those two are good people,” Kellers agreed after a moment. “So…Protectorate agents?”

  “Marines and MISS,” David confirmed. “Keep that to yourself. Maybe to LaMonte, if you think she can keep it out of her bunk.”

  The engineer laughed.

  “Boss, it took me three weeks to realize she was dating Xi Wu—I almost missed it until after they started being obvious about it—and another two to realize why Kelzin was okay with it,” he replied. “That one can keep her mouth shut when she chooses to—and she’s a better programmer than I am, though don’t tell her I said that.

  “If we want to track down our remaining moles, we need her.”

  “Then fill her in on that,” David told him. He shook his head.

  “We’re working with crooks again,” he warned his engineer. “Dragging our coat to see if we can lure Legacy out for the local Blue Star leftovers to take a shot at. This, of course, means that we are going to get shot at.”

  Kellers coughed again.

  “Yeah, probably by both those groups,” he pointed out. “I just got this ship fixed, boss.”

  “And hopefully, Acconcio will stop them putting more holes in her this time,” David replied. “But yeah, I’m not excepting Silent Ocean to stay on our side, even if we are carrying cargo for them.”

  The engineer nodded.

  “Speaking of on our side, boss,” he said, even more quietly than before, “look at this.”

  He brought up an image on his screen, gesturing for David to follow. It was a familiar set of data from David’s Navy days, the datastream for an RFLAM defensive turret. His gaze automatically picked up the timestamp.

  It was one of their rear turrets, during the battle with the Legacy corvettes. He studied the data as it went by, a visual representation appearing on the other screen.

  “Wait, that missile hit us,” he said as a targeting package crossed the feed.

  “Yeah, that’s the one that took out our engine pod,” Kellers confirmed. “Bridge passed down targeting instructions for three turrets to take it on. It wasn’t missed. It didn’t sneak through our perimeter. Three turrets took a total of fourteen shots at it.”

  That was…unlikely. The chance of the antimissile lasers hitting varied based on a million factors, but fourteen beams should have killed a missile.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “What happened is that someone fucked the code on our rear defensive systems,” the engineer said flatly. “Any missile that looked like it was going to hit the engines acquired a new code tag I’ve never seen before, which activating a sequence that misaligned any laser firing at it by point zero three degrees.”

  That wasn’t a big misalignment. Not one that they’d even notice in a review of the action. But it was enough of one that the missiles wouldn’t be hit except by pure dumb luck.

  “Please tell me this code has been removed.”

  “It’s out,” Kellers confirmed. “I have a copy of it; I’m going over it for signatures and such in my spare time, but not having any luck. But…while it wouldn’t take a lot of command authority to insert that code, it was in the unlinked firmware.”

  “What do you mean?” David asked.

  “The targeting computer on the RFLAM turrets has an ‘input-only’ data connection,” his engineer replied. “You can’t modify the software on the turret via its datalinks. To change that software, you need physical access to the turret.

  “Someone rigged our aft defenses to specifically allow a disabling strike through…and that someone is aboard this damn ship.”

  David studied the datastream again for several long seconds. He’d known he had a mole, but a saboteur?

  That was a new level of problem.

  36

  Red Falcon leapt toward the outer reaches of the Svarog system like a prime thoroughbred finally unleashed. Five antimatter engines lit up with their characteristic bright white flare, pushing the ship away from Dazbog at a full ten gravities.

  The magical gravity negated that acceleration inside the runes’ effect, allowing David to sit comfortably on his bridge and survey the reports and stats for his ship.

  All five engines were purring along perfectly, new-built and repaired alike. They weren’t burning at full power, as Falcon was only carrying a three-quarters load this time. Turquoise’s load was only eleven million tons, and he’d put out a call for partial containers for his official destination of Amber.

  The four hundred ten-thousand-ton containers he’d acquired in response to that call would be all that he had aboard when he actually reached that system, but that was fine. He’d be rid of the cargo of high-energy components and power sources he was carrying for the criminals and have a cargo to justify visiting his girlfriend’s home planet.

  And if he was very lucky, he’d gut the organization determined to kill him off along the way.

  “Time to jump?” he asked Campbell and Soprano.

  “Two hours,” Campbell confirmed. “Soprano?”

  “I make the same,” the Ship’s Mage replied. “Initial jump is six light-months to the designated rendezvous point.”

  David nodded and turned to look at Acconcio. Falcon’s third officer had been out of sorts for several days now, but that wasn’t unusual for a man who’d just been dumped. David wasn’t going to ask questions, but he was relying on the man not to be a completely useless weight.

  “Iovis,” he said to the man. “I don’t trust Silent Ocean as far as I can throw this ship. We’re supposed to be meeting a trio of Amber-built armed jump-ships.”

  Amber had been founded by North American libertarians. The system had exactly enough laws and government to fulfill the Protectorate’s requirements for law enforcement and healthcare, and not one sentence or person more.

  That meant that a lot of the illegal armed ships in the Protectorate came from there, as did a lot of gray-area bounty hunter ships and the like.

  “Those ships aren’t built to any standard specification,” he warned the gunner. “We don’t know how capable they are, but it’s likely we have them outgunned. That said, watch them. Like a hawk. If they twitch a muscle without a reason, be ready to blow them to hell.”

  “They probably won’t risk it if they’re in laser range,” Acconcio replied, confidence in his skills and ship dragging him out of his funk. “We put two or three five-gigawatt lasers into each of them, the game is over. They know that. We know that. They’ll behave.”

  “That’s what I’m relying on,” David agreed, “but once things start getting hot, I want you to keep watching them. We’re vulnerable with potentially hostile armed ships that close to us.”

  He shook his head.

  “Make sure you’ve got a solid cycle of rest with your deputies,” he ordered. “We’re going
to be on high alert until we make the final rendezvous. This whole situation makes my skin crawl.”

  “Someone will be on duty, watching the scanners and the guns the whole way,” Acconcio promised. “No one is going to sneak up on us, and we’ll blow away anyone that tries.”

  David nodded and glanced over at Campbell. He didn’t say anything. She knew what he was asking and gave him a clear nod.

  So far, everything was proceeding according to plan.

  “JUMP IN FIVE. Four. Three. Two. One. JUMP.”

  Power flared around Shachar Costa as Maria watched, the young Tau Ceti native’s pale skin glowing in the light from the simulacrum as the he cast the spell that tore them through half a light-year.

  The young man was still her weakest Mage, but he’d demonstrated an unusual affinity for the short jumps despite that. Or perhaps because of it; she wasn’t sure. It wasn’t like a short jump required that much less energy, but apparently it was enough that Costa could focus more and manage the spell in ways that were difficult for most Mages.

  Even the short jump left him looking like he’d been run over by a garbage truck with spiked tires, trembling and wavering even he floated in zero gee.

  “Go rest,” she told him gently as she checked their position. “We’re bang on. Well done.”

  “Thanks, ma’am.”

  The youth left, leaving Maria alone in the simulacrum chamber as she ran over the sensor data Falcon’s systems were feeding her. The big ship sat in deep space, in the section of the void that astrophysicists argued over whether it should be considered part of a star system or not.

  She was alone.

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, boss,” she said over the link to the bridge, “but weren’t we supposed to be meeting an escort here?”

  “We were,” Rice confirmed. “We’re two hours from jumping, according to the schedule we gave Turquoise, right?”

  “Yep. Want me to step it up?” she asked.

  “No. We’ll give our erstwhile allies those two hours,” he told her. “Then we’ll do them the courtesy of leaving a beacon and continue on our way.”