“All right, Iovis,” she told him. “I’ll be waiting!”
It was assumed whenever someone arrived on a new station that they had no idea where they were going or how to get there. Like most orbital platforms, Darwin Orbital had a very competent intelligent guide map that linked in with wrist-comps and gave directions to your destination.
David let Skavar load the software and lead the way through Darwin. He wasn’t entirely certain that he needed the entire ensemble that was accompanying him today—Soprano, Skavar, and two of Skavar’s security troops—but they’d had enough troubles, he wasn’t arguing.
Darwin was an unmodified spoke-and-wheel design, likely assembled from prefabricated parts shipped from Legatus or another Core World. Easily upgraded, easily modified, the design served across the galaxy.
This one only had two connectors from the hub to the wheel, limiting the places where travelers went from the zero-gravity hub to the outside ring with its centripetal “gravity”. The one they followed disgorged them into a brightly decorated market area, the smell of hot food and the colors of vivid clothing just part of a cacophonous assault on the senses.
“Does this actually sell anything to anyone?” Soprano half-whispered in his ear. “It hurts my eyes just looking around.”
“I’ve seen the same kind of setup in at least half a dozen systems,” he replied. “So, I’m guessing it works. I know I’ve bought food in this kind of market.”
“This way, Captain,” Skavar told him, gesturing for the others to follow him as he made his way through the open marketplace. “Our appointment is, of course, halfway around the ring, and New Madagascar didn’t splurge for the internal passenger transit system when they bought this place. I hope everyone feels up to a walk.”
At least Darwin Orbital kept their gravity at a relaxing point six gee. A kilometer-long walk in that wouldn’t be too bad, even for people mostly confined to a single starship.
Something in how Skavar and his other ex-Marines moved sent a clear message to the crowd around them, a path opening to easily carry them through the marketplace and out into the station’s corridors.
“Directions are pretty clear,” the security chief said. “Let’s keep our eyes open, though. We’re all trooping along with the Captain for a reason.”
Five minutes into their walk, David began to wonder if perhaps his paranoia was justified.
“Are we sure the address they gave us was through here?” he asked aloud. They’d moved into a section of Darwin Orbital that was clearly unoccupied. All of the doors they passed were still sealed in the manufacturer’s wrap. If only part of the orbital was occupied, surely their purchaser wouldn’t be on the other side of an empty section?
“This is where the directions are taking me,” Skavar replied, but the security chief had unclipped the cover of his holster and had his hand on his gun. “But yeah. We’re a lot further away from the inhabited sections than I would have expected a shortcut to take us. Lisa, can you check the directions on your wrist-comp?”
Lisa Ambrose joined her boss, the two comparing the maps on their screens.
“Both of ours are showing the same thing,” Skavar concluded. “But… I don’t like this, boss. How much of a headache is it going to be if we cancel this meet and reconvene with the client?”
“Not that big of a headache,” David replied, making an instant executive decision. They should have turned back earlier. If the client really was headquartered on the wrong side of a construction zone, they could do business electronically!
“Let’s get out of here,” he ordered. “This doesn’t smell right.”
No one was arguing with him. All three of the security officers had drawn their guns now. Soprano glanced over at them and shucked her gloves, the silver runes inlaid in her palm glittering in the dim light.
For the first time since meeting the Mage, David actually looked at the runes on her hands and breathed a half-concealed sigh of relief. Jump Mages had one rune in the center of each palm, required to interface with a jump matrix.
Soprano had a third rune just beneath her right middle finger, a small whorl of silver that he recognized from the handful of Marine Combat Mages he’d known. That was the projector rune of a fully qualified Protectorate Combat Mage, a step above even Guild enforcers and other civilian Combat Mages.
“You’re in the middle, boss, Soprano,” Skavar ordered. “At this point, I’m in charge until we’re back aboard ship. Anybody arguing?”
David smiled grimly. This was exactly what he had a Chief of Security for.
“No, Chief,” he replied. “Lead the way.”
18
If there had been any question in David’s mind about whether or not things were going very, very wrong, it disappeared the moment they hit the first sealed hatch.
“That was open when we went the other way, right?” he asked.
“Yes,” Skavar confirmed grimly. “I’m not using the mapping software anymore, just my PC’s backtracker. We’re going back the exact same way we came.”
“Can we get it open?”
“Ambrose!” Skavar snapped.
The security trooper holstered her weapon and stepped up to the control panel for the hatch, poking at its keys for a minute before shaking her head.
“Local control is overridden,” she reported. “I can open up the panel and get it open, but that will almost certainly get us written up for vandalism.”
“If they fine us, we’ll deal with it,” David snapped. “The alternative is to have Maria open it, and that will get us in even more trouble.”
Like most UnArcana worlds, New Madagascar recognized the right of visiting Ship’s Mages to use their power in self-defense. Blasting a hole through a sealed security hatch was still going to leave them in a world of headache.
Ambrose didn’t even wait for him to finish speaking before producing an electronics kits from inside her jacket and going to work on the casing for the control panel.
“Reyes, with me,” Skavar ordered. “Covering positions. Someone wanted to trap us in here, and I doubt it was just to watch us squirm at the door!”
The two security men stepped back and knelt down, watching the open hall behind them with their handguns out. David stayed by Ambrose but checked the safety and ammunition on his own weapon.
If this was someone’s idea of a prank, it was going to get very ugly very fast.
Glancing around, he coughed, an acrid taste settling into the back of his throat. He barely had time to notice it, however, before Skavar swore, hitting a sequence of commands on his com.
“Something is being pumped into the air,” he warned. “I didn’t bring fucking gas masks.”
“You brought a Mage, Chief,” Soprano reminded him delicately, a soft white glow rippling out from her hands to surround them. She shivered slightly, then shook her head. “Any Ship’s Mage can do an air purification spell. They won’t have counted on this to work.”
“Well, maybe they should have gone for a hardware solution on the door, too,” Ambrose pointed out. The security trooper stood up, packing away her electronics kit as the hatch slid open. “We’re clear.”
“For now,” David murmured. “Lead the way, Chief. Maria? Keep that screen up.”
If Madagascar wanted to raise hell over them using magic to keep the air around them breathable, they could kiss his ass.
Skavar gestured for Reyes to move up with him and stepped through the door, sweeping the path with his gun.
“Keep your eyes and ears peeled,” the ex-Marine told them all. “Everything so far has been chuckle-fuck incompetent, but whoever arranged this hot-wired the station’s guidance software to lead us astray. That is not easy.”
Normally, the presence of atmosphere-containment security hatches was part of the background. They were designed not to impede traffic on the corridors they covered while still being common enough and secure enough to protect the rest of the station from breaches or toxic leaks.
David hadn’t even registered the presence of the hatches on their way out from the dock. Now, however, he was realizing that Darwin Orbital was built to the “best practices” standard of a hatch every twenty-five meters on a major accessway.
He was realizing that because they were all closed with their local controls overridden. None of the three they’d passed through had impeded Ambrose for more than a few minutes, but each door held them up for a few minutes.
“We’re being jammed now,” Skavar told him quietly as Ambrose worked on the fourth hatch. “I’m not sure if someone is actually planning on attacking us or if they just intend to drive me crazy from paranoia. This is…bullshit.”
“The air is growing more and more toxic,” Soprano pointed out. “Someone has to have completely rerouted the environmental controls for this section. There’s no oxygen refresh going on, and I think we’re getting the entire CO2 dump from half the station.”
“Subtle,” David said. “We get lost, trapped, and asphyxiated. Nothing to show there was anything except a systems glitch in an uninhabited area of the station. Sad and preventable, but accidental.”
“With Maria here, that plan’s a bust,” the security chief said. “For which you have my thanks and undying adoration, Mage Soprano.”
She laughed, but there was an edge to her tone.
“I can’t do this forever,” she said softly. “If they’d just cut off the air circulation, I could keep us for days, but they’re pumping in a lot of extra CO2. I can only keep that clean for so long.”
“Even at this rate, we should be out of here in twenty minutes,” David replied. “Are we good for that long?”
She nodded.
“I’m just not sure I can do anything else and keep us safe,” she admitted. “I can take out a door anytime you want, but unless we’re sure it’s the last door…”
“Understood,” David accepted grimly. “Ambrose?”
“It’s not like these doors are designed to be locked,” she pointed out. “Here we—”
Gunfire echoed down the corridor as the hatch sprang open, and Ambrose spun backward as multiple rounds slammed into her.
“DOWN!” Skavar bellowed, the ex-Marine managing to turn around without ever rising from his kneeling firing position. The fusillade of gunfire continued and there was no cover. Nothing.
Reyes and Skavar returned fire and David joined them, but if the security troopers could see anyone, he certainly couldn’t. In the time since they’d come the other way, someone had moved several station security barricades into the hallway, providing the bulletproof cover Red Falcon’s crew lacked.
Then the bullets flying at them hit something, air solidifying into a solid, visible presence between them and their attackers. Gunfire ricocheted from the magical shield, and David glanced back at Soprano.
“I can stop bullets and make air, but I can’t do both for long,” she warned. “Any chance of calling for help?”
“Still jammed,” Skavar replied. Their bullets were also hitting the barrier—magical or not, the barrier was solid enough to stop fire going both ways. “I can’t even get a good visual, but those are good guns. Military-grade close-assault weapons.”
“How’s Ambrose?” David asked grimly, trying to think of a way out of this mess.
His security chief shook his head.
“She’s gone,” he said flatly. “Three of those rounds took her in the head.”
David swallowed hard and glanced at the door they’d just opened. Ambrose might have been able to close it again to give them cover, but she was dead. Soprano could have destroyed it, but that wouldn’t have helped them…except that the hatch was designed to be even tougher than most of the structure of the station.
“Maria,” he said to his Ship’s Mage, “if you could punch out that door, you should be able to go through the walls, shouldn’t you?”
She grimaced.
“Stop bullets. Make air. Destroy a wall. We’re getting down to ‘pick one’,” she snapped.
“Get us out of here and the first two are redundant,” David told her. “Make me a hole, Mage Soprano!”
She snarled something unintelligible and gestured. The projector rune on her right palm flared, and the defensive shield the Mage had generated crashed away from them, smashing down the hallway to hammer into the barricades and throw their enemies off-balance.
Before anyone, including David, could do anything else, Soprano hammered fire into the deck beneath them. Plating flashed to vapor and heat scaled his skin—and then the acceleration of the spinning station flung the chunk of metal she’d cut free outward toward the next deck, taking them with it.
David hit the deck hard, his breath going out of him as he ended flat on his face. He could already tell he’d scraped and cut himself in half a dozen places in the landing, but it was a vast improvement over being shot at.
“Come on,” Skavar snapped gruffly, yanking the Captain to his feet. Soprano was leaning on Reyes, looking shattered.
“How are you doing, Soprano?” David asked.
“Better now the air is working properly around us,” she replied. “I’d rather not have to stop bullets for a few minutes if we can manage it—and I don’t know how long it will take these bastards to get control of the air and hatches here!”
“We need to move, sir,” Skavar told them. “They can come down that hole the same as we did—and if they have half a brain, they’ll be leading with grenades.”
“Marketplace is that way.” David pointed. “You’re right. Let’s go.”
“What about Ambrose?” Reyes asked, glancing back up at the hole behind them.
“We’ll come back for her,” David promised. “With station security.”
Their attackers apparently hadn’t allowed for them to go through the floor. The air systems were functioning properly there and the security hatches were open.
That wasn’t as reassuring as it could have been, given that they were still in an unoccupied section of the station. Given normal procedures for this kind of orbital, roughly the eighth of the station they were in would be basically abandoned and running on minimum power. The only reason there were light and air at all was because it was cheaper to let everything cycle through on minimum while they were uninhabited than to purge the crap that would build up if they let the air sit.
More expensive stations were designed to either only be assembled as needed or to leave entire sectors of the station in vacuum until occupied. New Madagascar had bought the cheapest, and, as usual, that meant it would cost more in the long run.
They made it through two of the security hatches before the third one slammed shut in their faces.
“I’m not as good at this as Ambrose was,” Skavar admitted as he yanked the cover off the control panel. “Anyone see anything to use as cover?”
“Well, since I’m not cleaning the damn air, give me a second,” Soprano replied. Magic flared around her and flashed out in neat, perfectly controlled lines of fire.
Ten seconds later, there were some ugly-looking holes in the walls—and a chest-high barricade stretched across the hallway.
“Thanks, Maria,” David told her. At this point, if Darwin Orbital’s masters weren’t going to accept self-defense as an excuse for anything the Mage did, they could continue the discussion with Red Falcon’s battle lasers.
This was supposed to be a civilized station. An easy stop. Not a run-and-gun battle against assassins!
“Here they come,” Reyes announced, the security man having clipped a single-sided earmuff-like device over one ear. “Doesn’t sound like they brought any cover, but…who fucking knows.”
Skavar joined David and Reyes at the barricade.
“I think we’re out of retreats,” he told them. “There’s still at least three more doors before we’re back in inhabited sections of the station. Why didn’t we figure there was something wrong before we ended up over a quarter-kilometer into fucking nowhere?”
“B
ecause none of us are used to the station guides lying to us,” David replied, leaning against Soprano’s barricade and studying the empty corridor in front of them.
He shook his head.
“Out of options, folks,” he said quietly. “I hate death ground. Let them come to us and hope we have more bullets than they have assholes.”
The first people around the curve of the station corridor wore dark gray form-concealing cloaks, presumably over armor of some kind, and carried ballistic shields. Those large black mobile barriers weren’t capable of stopping military-grade weapons…but were more than enough against the handguns David and his people were carrying.
When the attackers saw the barricade Soprano had carved out of the station walls, the shields went from “held in front” to “grounded” and their carriers tucked in behind them before opening fire.
From there, David could actually see the guns being fired at him. The Martian Armaments Caseless Close Assault Weapon, Nine Millimeter, was basically the big brother of the MAC-6 pistol he was carrying, a close-range bullet-fountain designed for exactly this kind of ugly fight.
If he’d had a MACCAW-9 himself, those ballistic shields wouldn’t have counted for much. Fortunately for him, Soprano’s barricade was several centimeters thick and the high-velocity rounds ricocheted off harmlessly.
So far.
“Any brilliant ideas?” he asked quietly.
“Yeah,” Soprano replied. “Don’t piss me off.”
With a cold smile, the Mage rose up and pointed the projector rune on her right hand directly at the closing attackers. A precisely measured line of flame flickered out, punching straight through one of the ballistic shields and into the face of the attacker behind it.
A second lance followed, clearing the hallway of attackers while Soprano dropped back behind the barricade.
She was breathing heavily but shook away David’s concerned look.
“Yes, I’m overdoing it,” she said flatly. “But so long as someone is willing to keep everyone off my back while I sleep for a week, I can do that. For a while, anyway.”
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