“Everything that we would have equipped this ship with for Navy service is aboard, except we’ve only provided a one-quarter load for the missile magazines and haven’t included exosuit armor or assault shuttles.”
“I can live with that,” David replied. “His Majesty is generous. And so are you.”
There were a hundred or more ways that Commodore Burns could have fulfilled the letter of his orders without going this far out of his way.
“His Majesty’s intentions were quite clear,” Burns told him. “I am not one to honor the letter and not the spirit of my orders, Captain. I imagine the Protectorate would be pleased to have you consider yourself to owe us a favor or six for this, but my understanding is that the Mage-King feels he owes you a significant debt—and a replacement ship.”
“This is a bit more than a replacement,” David said, looking around as Burns led them to the bridge.
“Honestly, Captain, I’m worried we’re handing you a white elephant,” the Commodore told him. “She’s a big ship with immense operating costs. The kind of cargoes she can carry are usually hauled by big ships belonging to big lines. An independent big ship…”
“I have my connections,” David admitted. “I think we’ll be fine.”
“I trust you on that,” the other man replied. “But if you find yourself between work, the Navy will happily hire you for our needs. His Majesty thinks he owes you, and that means His Majesty’s Navy owes you.
“You get me, Captain?”
“I get you.”
“Good. Here’s your new bridge.”
It was hard to come to a full stop in zero gravity, but Red Falcon had enough straps and handholds scattered around that there was one easily to hand. David latched on and slowed himself to a halt, allowing himself to survey his new domain.
Red Falcon’s bridge was significantly larger than any merchant bridge he’d ever served on before, though most of his career prior to owning his own ship had been on vessels much the same size as his Blue Jay. For all of its size, however, there was very little space left to waste.
The space had been designed to function under either acceleration or magical gravity, with all of the stations mounted on one “floor” aligned with the ship’s engines. Some thought had been put into using the bridge in zero gravity, however, and long railings were bolted into each of the walls to allow crew to move hand over hand between sections—or just stop themselves where they needed to be.
Most freighter bridges only had stations for the Captain, sensors and navigation, with maybe a repeater for engineering. Falcon had all of those, with a full station for an engineering liaison officer, plus consoles for backups.
The main addition was a tactical section that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the bridge of a destroyer. Three consoles were linked together around a secondary display a good fraction of the main screen’s size. The section was farther from the Captain than it would have been aboard a warship, but the hope was that Red Falcon would make far less use of her weapons than a warship would.
The main difference between here and an actual warship’s bridge was that it wasn’t also the simulacrum chamber that linked to the ship’s rune matrix. A civilian ship carried a jump matrix, capable of allowing a Mage to teleport a full light-year.
A warship carried an amplifier matrix, which applied a similar scaling effect to any spell the Mage cast. Since the amplifier was the ship’s single most powerful weapon, the simulacrum chamber was also the bridge, allowing the Mage who commanded a Navy warship to control its most powerful weapon herself.
David took a minute to survey it all and then launched himself for the Captain’s chair. A perfectly positioned handhold allowed him to slide easily into the seat, and automatic straps slid out to gently hold him in.
Systems lit up around him, giving him the status of every part of the ship. The seat was Navy-style with multiple repeater screens, he noted, rather than the single display he’d grown used to.
“Fuel at one hundred percent,” he said aloud. “Both hydrogen and antimatter tanks full and stable. Munitions at exactly one hundred.” He shook his head. “All bays report their shuttles loads as promised, all self-checks are green.”
He carefully turned to look at Burns as the Commodore drifted in next to him.
“Everything looks aboveboard to me,” he concluded. “Thank you, Commodore.”
“Final transfers were made over to you as of this morning,” the Navy officer said. “If you run into any problems before you leave, feel free to let me know. We’ll probably have to charge you at this point, but we’ll give you a good rate.”
From the Commodore’s broad grin, he knew that David knew just how much money had been sunk into this ship.
“I’m also instructed to let you know there’s a personal message waiting for you in the Captain’s office,” he concluded. “With that, however, my part in this is done. I have a few people standing by to give your senior officers tours of their sections as they want, but I need to get back to my regular job!”
“I appreciate everything you’ve done, Commodore,” David said, shaking the man’s hand carefully. “I don’t see a need to keep you further.”
Burns somehow managed to click his heels and bow slightly in midair before drifting back out of the bridge, allowing David to look over his officers in private.
“All right, people,” he said. “This girl is ours now, which means we want to go over her from stem to stern. Don’t hesitate to use the Commodore’s people, even if we end up going into what they’ll need to charge us for. I have no problem giving the Navy anything they ask for right now, for some reason,” he concluded dryly.
“I’ll want to check out the simulacrum chamber and do a first-cut sweep of the matrix,” Soprano said calmly. “I trust the Navy’s check-up, but I want my own eyes on the most sensitive parts.”
“And that’s about how I feel about power plants and engines,” Kellers agreed.
“Don’t forget you still need to fill out the rest of your departments,” David warned. “We don’t have long before I want to space out, and we don’t have Jenna to lean on right now.
“Go play, but keep an eye on your schedules,” he ordered.
The tools and systems available for Red Falcon’s Captain were going to take David days to just find the full extent of, let alone get used to. He toyed with the repeater screens in his chair for a few minutes after his staff scattered to the corners of the ship, and then decided to go see just what the message waiting for him was.
Even in zero gravity, getting to the captain’s office was relatively straightforward. This section of the ship would have gravity only if he had Soprano recharge the gravity runes—they were already there, after all, the silver whirls and lines of the Martian Runic script etched into the deck beneath him—or if the ship was under acceleration.
The captain’s office, however, was even more set up to function under gravity than the bridge was. Burns’s people had clearly put some thought into making it work without magical gravity—installing the same auto-restraining type of chair he’d seen on the bridge, for example—but it was still a standard-enough office to have problems in zero gee.
The chair was enough for now, however. If Soprano got her hands on enough junior Mages, David probably was going to get the runes restored—having a chunk of the ship that would be the same gravity no matter what acceleration they were under was handy.
He strapped himself into the chair and linked his com into the desk console, bringing up the screen and checking into Red Falcon’s systems.
The computers asked a bunch of validating questions as he convinced it to accept his wrist-comp as the Captain’s comp, with attendant authority, and then linked in into the full computer network layered through Red Falcon’s hull.
He couldn’t fly the ship from his office, but it had a better interface into the ship’s automatic reporting than Blue Jay had had. From here, he could see how much fuel he had left, wha
t the overall cargo mass was, how many missiles they had in the magazines…everything he could see from the bridge.
It was an impressive setup.
There was also, as he’d been promised, a blinking icon of a waiting message that instantly added itself to his inbox. There was no sender tagged onto it this time, but he was pretty certain he knew who it was from.
He was unsurprised when the screen dissolved into the image of Alaura Stealey, Hand of the Mage-King of Mars. She was a graying middle-aged woman, still athletically built but going soft around the edges in a way that David was all too familiar with himself.
“Captain Rice,” the recording greeted him. “This message should be waiting for you when Burns leaves you aboard your new ship, and if you’re the man I know you to be, you’re wondering if the good yardmaster went further than we wanted him to.
“He didn’t,” she said flatly. “You have no concept of what a prize you delivered to us with Damien Montgomery—not merely in his skills and gifts, but in the honor and integrity I was not certain would have survived months on the run.
“I credit you with the survival of his soul, Captain Rice,” Stealey told David. “And where I give credit, so does His Majesty. If our instructions have been followed—and I know Rasputin Burns of old—you now possess one of the last fully functional Armed Auxiliary Fast Heavy Freighters still in existence.”
The image shook her head.
“So, now I will tell you a secret: the records will show that your ship was partially disarmed before she was handed over to you. According to all official records, Red Falcon kept only half of her defensive armament and two lasers. Nothing more.”
David nodded slowly. That bit of misinformation would come in handy, though anyone who interacted with his crew for long wouldn’t be fooled.
“Now, I’ll be honest and admit that this all wasn’t entirely done as a favor,” the Hand noted. “You and Damien killed Mikhail Azure, but the Blue Star Syndicate is dying more slowly—and messily. We’re aware of at least four functioning fragments of the organization, each large enough to be a major crime syndicate in their own right.
“I believe at least one is going to come after you, David Rice,” Stealey warned. “So, I have turned you into a trap. With all that we owe you, I feel a bit guilty about that, but…”
She shrugged.
“I have a job to do and I will use every weapon I have to hand for that job,” she reminded him. “But remember as well, Captain Rice, that you have established an account of some depth with the Protectorate. We will use you as both bait and trap for our enemies, but we have no intention of leaving you hanging.
“If Azure’s remnants come hunting for you, remember that His Majesty’s Protectorate extends over you. Call and we will answer,” she promised, then smiled wryly. “If for no other reason, Captain Rice, than because experience suggests that I need to keep an eye on you!”
7
David was back in the office on Armstrong Station, going through page after page of resumes for junior officers, when one of Skavar’s security officers pinged him. They had yet to hire anyone resembling a secretary, which meant Skavar’s slowly growing force of predominantly ex-Marines was doing all of the greeting and screening.
If that scared anyone off, well, they probably wouldn’t be interested in serving on a ship the Protectorate seemed determined to make a stalking horse to bait their enemies.
“What is it, Corporal Ambrose?” he asked.
“I’ve got a group of people here who say you know them,” the security woman told him. “Names don’t mean much to me, but they say they’re from Blue Jay.”
David sat up. He’d held onto Campbell and Kellers, but that was all he’d been able to justify keeping on salary while sitting in port. He’d sent the rest of his junior officers on with glowing letters of recommendation and his best wishes.
They’d all been hired, so if any of them were showing up now…
“Send them in,” he told Angler. “But keep an eye on the panic button. I wouldn’t put it past someone to pretend to be my old crew.”
The corporal nodded with a more serious expression than David’s comment deserved.
“Wilco, Skipper.”
After the incident in the concourse, David no longer went unarmed. He slid the drawer in his cheap rented desk open, leaving the caseless automatic inside it easily within reach.
The petitely attractive purple-haired young woman who came through the door first, however, put his worries to rest and he smiled broadly.
“LaMonte,” he greeted her. “And Kelzin!”
The young man who followed her through had grown his hair out since David had last seen him and apparently bulked up, gaining at least twenty pounds of muscle since Mike Kelzin had been the replacement First Pilot aboard Blue Jay.
Kelly LaMonte had been one of Kellers’s junior engineers aboard the same ship. She’d also been Damien Montgomery’s lover and the first of David’s officers to disappear into the ether after they’d returned to civilized space after Blue Jay’s destruction.
The second man was less familiar to David, a sandy-haired older man who’d worked as Campbell’s assistant and proved his worth mostly by never coming to the Captain’s attention. He gave a slightly less casual salute than the two younger officers.
“Bran Wiltshire, sir,” he introduced himself, apparently concerned that David would have forgotten him.
“I didn’t forget you, Bran,” David told the man with a smile. “What brings the three of you to my office, and in a group, too?”
Kelzin and Wiltshire both instinctively deferred to LaMonte, he noted. The young woman with the long purple hair glanced back at both men and visibly swallowed a sigh.
“We were all on the same ship,” she began. “Dreams of Excessive Profit. Gods, the name should have been a clue but, well…” She shrugged. “When I signed on, I wanted a million light-years between me and anyone who’d remind me of Damien.
“This pair,” she gestured at Wiltshire and Kelzin, “took my presence as a recommendation.”
“I take it that didn’t work out well,” David said mildly.
“Could have been worse,” LaMonte replied, an ugly expression flashing across her face. “Almost was worse, but Captain Melbourne very distinctly had his limits. Cut corners to save costs? Totally okay. Sexually harass the new junior engineer? You’re finding dirt under your feet before you realize what hit you.”
“I’m sorry to hear about that,” David said. LaMonte was young and pretty, and on his ship, he’d made damn sure Kellers was keeping a careful eye out to nip that kind of issue in the bud. It shouldn’t have been allowed to get far enough to require beaching someone.
“Could have been worse,” she echoed. “But Dreams is an unpleasant ride. If a corner can be cut, it gets cut. If a customer can be squeezed for a few extra bucks, the customer gets squeezed. She’s a ten-million-ton freighter I half-expect to fall out of the damn sky.”
There were few harsher condemnations from engineers, in David’s experience.
“So, you’re looking to switch berths?” he asked. That could give him a headache but would be worth it for Kelzin and LaMonte—and he had no qualms taking on the fight for Wiltshire on pure stubborn loyalty grounds.
“We already told Melbourne where he could stick his death trap,” the older man said crisply. “He took it better than the kids were expecting—I don’t think it’s the first time an engineer has talked their friends off his boat.”
LaMonte wasn’t even fazed at being called “the kids.” Clearly, she’d grown at least somewhat used to Wiltshire.
“So, we’re jobless but heard you were looking and figured we’d check in,” she concluded. “Talked four more crew—two engineering techs, a shuttle pilot and a junior ship’s mage—into jumping ship with us. If you want them, I can talk them into signing on.”
“You’d recommend them?” David asked. No one in the room was pretending he wasn’t hiring o
n his old crew.
“In a heartbeat,” LaMonte confirmed. “Xi Wu is no Damien, but she’s no slouch as a Mage, either. I wouldn’t want to fly with her as the only Mage, but…”
“Red Falcon is going to have four,” he told her. “Assuming Soprano can find them, anyway. Have your friends get in touch. You three are hired, if you had any doubts,” he concluded with a grin.
“Wiltshire, Campbell’s in hospital. You’d be the security team’s hero if you’d take over running the front desk,” he continued. “LaMonte, Kellers is back on the ship making sure everything is in order. Once you’ve pinged your friends, move your crap aboard and help him out.”
Finally, he turned his gaze on Kelzin.
“I don’t have a First Pilot yet,” he told the younger man, “but…”
“I wasn’t First on Dreams and, hell, Skipper, I saw the specifications for Falcon’s boat bays,” Kelzin replied cheerfully. “I won’t be offended if you bring in someone above me.”
That was another giant check mark in David’s mental book for the pilot, and made up at least part of the decision.
“You’ll be Bravo flight leader,” he decided instantly. “That makes Shuttle Bay Bravo your territory, under the First’s orders once I’ve hired them. Work for you?”
“If you’ll trust me with it,” Kelzin said carefully after a quick glance at LaMonte.
David concealed a smile. It didn’t look like the pilot had replaced Montgomery in the young engineer’s affections yet, but he certainly seemed to be applying for the position as hard as he could!
“Screw it up and I’ll bump you down to cargo hauler,” he half-jokingly warned. “Until then, yeah, you’ve proven you can handle a boat bay to me. All of you, get moving. I’ve got a list of interviews to schedule as long as my arm!”
“Pass that my way,” Wiltshire told him. “I’ll take care of it. I always did for Jenna.”
If any member of Red Falcon’s new and rapidly growing crew didn’t need an escort, Maria was quite certain it was her. Chief Skavar, however, had been at least a little spooked by his dramatic “job interview” and was insisting that the senior officers be escorted by at least one guard everywhere they went.
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