Interstellar Mage

by Glynn Stewart

  “Paula Hayashi,” she answered. “Atsuko Hayashi should have been your contact—she’s my wife. Your ship is fast enough that you arrived well ahead of any news of your arrival, and no one was expecting a shipment of this magnitude.”

  “That explains the problem with the docking authority,” David said dryly.

  “Oh, for crying out loud,” Hayashi snapped. She sighed. “I apologize, Captain; we don’t see very many ships that haven’t been here before, and most that are new fly under the Green Seneschal Line, which has pre-existing arrangements with the dock authority.”

  A hard look settled over her face.

  “And you’re not the first non-Green Seneschal captain to complain,” she noted. “I think I’m going to have to talk to Harry and have him look into just what their arrangements entail.”

  That sounded promising, though David didn’t know who “Harry” was. Hayashi saw his confusion, however, and chuckled.

  “Apologies, Harold Hayashi is the Member of Parliament for Cinnamon Station,” she explained. “Also, Atsuko’s and my husband.”

  That sounded complicated—and also like the triad basically ran Cinnamon Station between them. O’Toole was going to have problems in the near future, a likelihood David couldn’t feel sorry for.

  “So, if your wife is in this meeting, should I be waiting to sort out what’s going on with my cargo?” he asked.

  “Sadly, yes,” Hayashi admitted. “Harry gets elected, Atsuko runs the import syndicate, I’m ‘just’ the secretary.”

  And, unless David missed his mark, the woman who actually ran the trio’s affairs. Anyone who underestimated Paula Hayashi was going to find themselves in a lot of trouble.

  “Am I likely to have any issues?” he asked carefully.

  “Ha! No,” the older woman replied. “Cinnamon needs your cargo, Captain Rice. You let my partners work out how we’re paying you for it, but don’t worry.” The brilliant smile widened.

  “We are most definitely paying you for it.”

  12

  The directions from Maria’s contact led her to a bar in a seedy portion of Cinnamon Station’s lower-tier residential sectors. There were areas, most of them aboard space stations in general, that managed to be poor but not problematic.

  This wasn’t one of those areas. The corridor lights had been covered in transparent ceramic armor at some point, a knowing sacrifice of light quality in trade for the lights not needing to be replaced. No one living on a space station would let things get bad enough for there to be actual garbage in the corners, but the walls were dirtier than she was used to, suggesting that whoever ran Cinnamon Station’s cleaning robots had programmed them not to come there.

  A course of action that, like the armor on the lights, was taken only in response to repeated damage or theft.

  The bar itself didn’t look much different from Xu’s back in Tau Ceti, though the Xu cousins would probably have objected to the comparison. It was brighter-lit and cleaner than the surrounding area, but the patrons were all genteelly ignoring each other as the bartender glowered at them.

  The bartender was one of the few obvious cyborgs Maria had ever seen. Cybernetic replacements were reasonably common in the Protectorate, but they were built to resemble the real thing as much as possible. Even combat cyborgs like the Legatan Augments, an extreme rarity in an era of powered exosuit armor and Combat Mages, were hard to tell apart from everyone around them.

  The bartender, however, had clearly either lost his arms at some point or had them voluntarily replaced with cybernetics that made no pretense at just being an attempt to restore function. Maria could pick out the distinct lines in the man’s shirt of the reinforcing plating wrapped around his chest to support the powerful motors visible in the augments.

  He’d have no trouble evicting even the most problematic of customers, and as a bonus, his mechanical limbs were probably even more precise at pouring and mixing than his organic ones.

  The bartender spotted her entering, met her gaze, and jerked his chin toward a specific booth. She was clearly expected.

  Maria wasn’t used to crossing a room without drawing attention, and today was no exception. She was, for once, wearing something that actually covered her cleavage—she wasn’t going to try to weaponize her body against an MISS agent, after all—but that didn’t seem to reduce the number of eyes on her as she walked over to the booth.

  The bartender let the stares continue for several seconds and then cleared his throat loudly and dropped a metallic arm on the table.

  “Oi!” he bellowed. “Lady’s here for drinks, same as you lot. Keep your damned eyes in your damned heads.”

  The degree of simultaneity with which the patrons’ gazes snapped back to their drinks was enough to keep Maria chuckling as she slid into the booth. The man occupying it shared her amusement and smiled at her.

  He was burlier than she’d expected and didn’t look at all out of place in a bar that catered to physical laborers. His head was shaved, with a tribal tattoo covering half of his face, but he smiled warmly as he offered her his hand.

  “Bruno is much more of a sweetheart than he wants people to think,” he murmured as he shook Maria’s hand. “Nikora Samuels. You know who I work for.”

  “The augments probably help,” she replied.

  “Lost his arms in an accident, insurance fucked him,” Samuels said bluntly. “Only way out was mob enforcer, but that got him arms like that.” The man grinned. “’Course, Bruno is much smarter than he looks, though I don’t think he planned on marrying a cop to get out of the mob.”

  Maria shook her head. That would be one way to escape obligations to the mob, yeah.

  “Hence, this place,” Samuels concluded. “Bruno doesn’t turn his old friends into his wife’s bosses and keeps a few booths with privacy fields he doesn’t ask questions about, and they considered his debt paid.”

  “And MISS uses the booths too?” she asked.

  “We do,” he confirmed. “In exchange for our deal with Bruno, which is that if his old friends ever change their minds, we protect him.”

  “Works well for him,” the Mage concluded, glancing back at the big bartender. Much smarter than he looked. “Married, huh?”

  “Happily, three little girls,” the MISS agent replied. “And because Bruno is Bruno, if anyone touches his family, every legal and illegal organization on this station is going to rip them to pieces.”

  Samuels smiled.

  “I can only wish for that kind of protection.”

  “I’ve got Falcon,” Maria said with a grin. “With Rice’s history, I think I’m fine.”

  “That man?” the burly stranger shook his head. “I read his file this morning, the parts of it I can access, anyway. I’d trust him to have my back. And we’re going to have his.”

  “That’s reassuring,” she admitted. “Giving reports on my crew makes my spine itch.”

  “That never goes away,” Samuels said. “You just get used to it. Look, I’ve got your reports on your stalker in my queue to head back to higher up and disseminate. My data doesn’t mention anybody out there with a grudge against Rice with access to even pocket warships, but that just leaves me thinking we’ve missed a Blue Star Syndicate leftover somewhere.”

  “That’s my fear as well.”

  “So, we’ll keep our eyes open,” the spy promised. “We’ve got enough links back into the Navy that if a problem comes up, we can bring the fire down pretty quickly.”

  “That might be rough on us in the meantime,” Maria warned.

  “That’s why the Hand gave him that ship.” Samuels shook his head. “Look, much as you needed the update and assurance that, yes, we are watching your backs, that wasn’t why I asked you to meet me.”

  “I figured,” she replied. “Nice office you have.”

  “MISS has a gorgeous office building in downtown Nutmeg City,” he told her. “Lovely thing. I’ve visited, oh, once. I’m a less obvious asset, working specific file
s. My file, Mage Soprano, is the Legatans.”

  “What about them?” Maria asked.

  Legatus was the first and foremost of the UnArcana worlds, a heavily industrialized system that forbade the practice of magic. Since magic was the only way for ships to visit them, they allowed Jump Mages…so long as they only jumped. No other magic allowed.

  There were about a dozen more UnArcana worlds, but Legatus was the leader and the one that seemed determined to throw wrenches into Protectorate affairs.

  “There’s a lot about them,” Samuels said with a laugh. “Today, though, I’m tracking what appears to be a black-materials conduit for them. Supplies are moving around, appearing and disappearing at random as they send shipments without official notice. We haven’t managed to track anything through the chain of trades; at least some of it’s moving legitimately, but—”

  “But they’re hiding something.”

  “Exactly. And I want you to see if you can find out what.”

  Maria hesitated before replying but then shook her head at Samuels.

  “My understanding was that my job was much more defensive than that,” she pointed out. “I was tasked with working on Rice’s ship and watching his back, not being an investigator for MISS.”

  “You took an Agency salary, Mage Soprano,” he argued. “That means you’re on call for whatever tasks we need.” He sighed. “To be fair, though, yes, that was your job. This would be an additional task, which means I’m not going to order you to take it on. But…the Legatans are up to something, and if they’re not stopped, it could threaten the entire Protectorate.”

  “Surely, it’s not that bad,” Maria replied. “What are they going to do, declare war on us?”

  “I don’t know,” Samuels admitted. “But there’s always been an independence movement in the UnArcana worlds. I can’t see a war, but…they could cause a lot of damage.

  “And we don’t know what their plans are or what they’re moving, Soprano. It could well be that bad.”

  She shook her head again, but the meaning was different now.

  “I’d say I swore an oath, but that was pretty thoroughly voided for me,” she said quietly. “But…fuck it. I was an officer of the Mage-King of Mars and there are things you cannot take away from me.”

  “You’re an agent of the Mage-King of Mars, now,” Samuels pointed out. “Same needs, different oaths.”

  “What do you need me to do?” she asked.

  “My information is that there’s a company here on Cinnamon that’s basically being used to launder funds for this project,” he told her. “Money is funneled in from various sources and used to acquire products for export. Those are shipped elsewhere, where they’re sold and the money used to acquire the next part of the chain.

  “Most of the ships that have come through Cinnamon of late have been Green Seneschal—another point of concern, but nothing I need you to look at!—so they haven’t been able to ship as much of their acquisitions as they’d like. They’ve got a stockpile big enough to justify hiring Red Falcon, and MISS thinks they’ve flagged Rice as a useful ally.”

  “So, we’re going to get an offer for work?” she replied. “And you want us to take it?”

  “Silk Star Trade Exports,” Samuels told her. “I’m not sure where they’re going to ship to, but I need Rice to take that job. You’re his first officer, his Ship’s Mage. Think you can make it happen?”

  “Yeah,” Maria admitted. “But if it comes to a choice between the safety of Red Falcon’s crew and this job—”

  “Protect your crew, Ship’s Mage,” the agent said with a laugh. “That’s the first thing we wanted you on that ship for—and nothing has changed.

  “We may need to use David Rice as bait, but that doesn’t mean we don’t owe him and want him alive.”

  “Good. We’d have a problem if it didn’t,” Maria warned.

  In the end, David ended up meeting Atsuko Hayashi in her office. To his surprise, having spoken with Hayashi’s wife, Atsuko was significantly younger than he, a dark-haired woman in her early thirties of clear Old Earth Japanese extraction.

  “Captain, come on in, have a seat,” Hayashi instructed after David knocked on the door of her office.

  The other occupant of the room was a slightly older man with the melting-pot ethnic features of the either Martian-born or Martian-descended. He wore the same simple suit as Paula Hayashi or Factor Nguyen, with a simple golden pin at his collar suggesting some level of importance.

  “I’m sure Paula mentioned us both,” the woman continued, gesturing to her companion. “I am Atsuko Hayashi, head of Dancing Fox Importers. Harry here is the Member of Parliament for Cinnamon Station. You spoke with our wife.”

  “I did,” he confirmed. “From what she said, I created more of a headache than I expected on my arrival.”

  Mrs. Hayashi laughed.

  “Not your fault, Captain. Harvey Nguyen found an embarrassment of riches and felt he needed to get it home,” she told him. “He probably should have given you more of a warning about how things would blow up when you got here, but it also might not have occurred to him.”

  “Harvey hasn’t been home in over a decade,” Harry Hayashi interjected. “Things change in that kind of time. We’ve had new players move in, new needs arise, but…” He shrugged. “Harvey sent us what we needed and then some. He made the right call; Atsuko and I just had to smack some heads together to make sense of it.”

  “So, I’m getting paid for this delivery, right?” David asked.

  “Delivery fee was deposited to your credit as soon as I was out of the meeting,” the youngest Hayashi told him. “That much I could do from my own accounts, though I’m quite certain about getting reimbursed for everyone else’s portion.”

  David had seen less predatory grins on sharks.

  “Now, as I understand, part of your deal with Factor Nguyen was that you own forty-five percent of the cargo, correct?” Harry Hayashi asked.

  “Exactly,” David replied. “I helped fund the purchase of the cargo on the expectation I’d be able to sell it on this end.”

  “That, sadly, is part of what my partners are flipping their damn lids over,” the attractive CEO noted. “They’re used to being able to triple or quadruple their investment in anything we buy in Tau Ceti; the thought of having to share that profit is hurting their pretty little heads.”

  “Which, my love, I need to point out is a real concern to the government,” Harry told his younger wife. “This syndicate you put together is starting to look more and more like an oligarchic monopoly. Even the government being a major partner isn’t going to protect them from charges of profiteering much longer.”

  She held up a finger.

  “I know that and you know that, but convince them of that,” she replied. “But that isn’t Captain Rice’s problem. I have a compromise to suggest, Captain. One that I think is of value to all parties.”

  “I’m listening,” David said carefully.

  “Given the price that Nguyen acquired this cargo at and the premium he gave you to get his funding, I must be honest: if you take the time to sell it yourself to the right parties, you could easily quadruple your money,” Atsuko told him. “Finding said parties would require a local partner, but the right local partner—such as, say, Dancing Fox Importers”—she grinned at him—“could probably get that up to five times.

  “But it would take weeks. Months, even. While billions could certainly help offset your operating costs for that time, men don’t take to the stars because they like sitting around.”

  That was true—but it was also a lot of money that the Hayashis were suggesting he could make by staying.

  “What my dear Atsuko hesitates to point out is that your staying might not be safe,” Harry said quietly. “There are reasons I and the government worry about the import syndicate. Between them and certain other corporate parties, Cinnamon politics are more dangerous than they’ve been in some time—and you’d be sticking y
ourself right in the middle.”

  “What’s your compromise, then?” David asked. Poking a hornet’s nest wasn’t his idea of a good time. He’d done enough of that with Damien Montgomery as his Ship’s Mage.

  “I am prepared to buy your portion of the cargo, today, no questions asked, for a one hundred and fifty percent premium over your investment,” she told him. “That will be an entirely separate deal from the syndicate, between just yourself and Dancing Fox.

  “We’ll offload the cargo with everything else and you’ll be a few hundred million or so richer with no major entanglements to a MidWorld you’d be just as happy to never see again,” she continued. “My share is being backed by the Cinnamon government”—she nodded to her husband—“so you don’t need to worry about the payment.”

  “And if I want to take a day or two to shop around for a better deal?” he asked.

  “Feel free,” Atsuko replied, smiling at him. “The government’s main concern is that the cargo doesn’t leave Cinnamon. While I’m certain you could get better prices for portions of the cargo, you’re not going to find a single deal in a few days.”

  “I’ll let you know,” he promised. The odds were that it was a good deal, but he didn’t want to leap on it straight away. His crew would get portions and he had an obligation to them, if no one else these days, to make sure he made the best deal possible.

  “I wouldn’t expect a decision straight away,” Atsuko Hayashi said brightly, though her husband looked disappointed. “You have my contact information. Let me know when you want to deal, Captain Rice.

  “The syndicate’s cargo, we’ll start off-loading tomorrow. Assuming you either take my deal or arrange for storage of your portion, we should have your ship emptied in three days.”

  She offered her hand across the table.

  “Regardless of whether you take my offer, Captain, it’s been a pleasure doing business with you. It’s not often I get to watch these idiots have to squirm around, admitting they don’t want to share profit.”