Interstellar Mage

by Glynn Stewart

  24

  “The good news is that Laser Six and Laser Nine are basically intact,” Kellers explained later. “The bad news is that they’re effectively no longer attached to the hull. The hit that disabled them went through the radiation cap and severed several key internal structural supports for those weapons.”

  “What about the cap itself?” David asked.

  His engineer shook his head and gestured to LaMonte. The junior engineer tapped several commands, and the air above the conference room table was suddenly filled with a three-dimensional image of Red Falcon.

  David had already seen the reports on his own systems and heard LaMonte’s summary. It was still a shock to see the ship laid out in full, the damaged areas red spikes into the hull of his ship.

  Shown like this, the hit that had taken out the two lasers was a clear, straight-through hole, entering the hull on the starboard side of the radiation dome and exiting on the port side—spilling a not-insignificant mass of water along the way.

  The radiation dome held far more water than the ship’s crew could ever actually use, since the material made a fantastic barrier to radiation, was required for the crew and many of the ship’s systems and could, in an emergency, be converted into both fuel and air supplies.

  “If I’m looking at this right,” Campbell said in a slow, somewhat ill, voice, “it missed the habitat ring and the bridge tower by meters.”

  “It was twenty-three meters away from the bridge module,” Kellers replied. “At its closest approach, it was three-point-two away from the gravity ring. The other hits aren’t quite as severe-looking, but…”

  The engineer shrugged.

  “The good news is that the cargo is undamaged, though several containers are in rough shape,” he concluded. “The bad news is that the main structural connection between the engine pod and the main portion of the ship is badly damaged. Between that, the engines, and the damage to the radiation cap, I can’t recommend accelerating more than half a gravity or reaching a velocity above point oh one cee.”

  “That’ll make for a long trip into Svarog, but we can do it,” Campbell pointed out. “We’ll be okay, then?”

  There was a long pause.

  “None of this is reparable out of onboard resources,” the engineer said finally. “The structural damage is bad enough, but we’re all ignoring the other elephant in the room.”

  David’s gaze was drawn to the glaring red blotch at the rear of the ship where he should have had a fifth antimatter engine pod.

  “If we’d been under heavier acceleration when that missile hit, we wouldn’t have engines at all,” Kellers noted. “We lost engine four. It’s gone. The others are damaged but functional.

  “We don’t carry spare antimatter engines. Most star systems don’t have them in stock. Unless we visit a Navy base, wherever we go is going to have to rebuild the thing from scratch.”

  “We’ll do what we have to,” David said grimly. “Fortunately, Svarog should have the facilities to do just that, and our insurance will cover it.”

  He shook his head.

  “And the defenses?”

  “We still have every damn laser turret,” the engineer said. “For all the good they did us in the end.”

  “Three hits, James,” David reminded him. “Three. They fired over three hundred missiles at us. I think the turrets did just fine by us.”

  “We got unlucky,” Acconcio concluded. “We had them outclassed from the beginning, but with their velocity, they had no choice but to keep closing once they realized it.”

  “We’re still here, we didn’t lose any people, and everything is reparable,” David said. “Our cargo is intact, and no one can be truly certain how heavily armed we are. We were lucky enough.”

  As the officers were leaving, David caught LaMonte’s eye and gestured with his chin for the junior engineer to stay. She looked somewhat concerned but held back as everyone else filed out of the meeting room, and waited for David to speak.

  Instead, he closed the door to the room and checked the security systems. The room had been built by the military, after all, and it had a quite impressive suite of anti-intrusion measures. Ones he’d never actually turned on before.

  They were old enough that he didn’t entirely trust their assessment that the room was clean and sealed, but it was all he was going to get.

  “Grab a seat, Kelly,” he told the currently green-haired LaMonte. “I need a favor.”

  “You’re the Captain,” she pointed out cautiously. “While you’re supposed to go through my boss, I do work for you.”

  “You work for me as an engineer,” David said. “I need a programmer, a security specialist, someone who knows our computers and communications inside and out.” He grinned, a moment of amusement spiking through his dread.

  “I need, Miss LaMonte, the reason why your schedule always lined up with Damien Montgomery’s even before everyone knew you were sleeping together and made it happen intentionally,” he concluded. “I know James secured his schedules at least half-decently, mostly because he knew he’d easily forget what he’d put in originally if anyone changed them.”

  The young woman flushed, then shook her head.

  “I didn’t think anyone had ever caught that,” she admitted.

  “James did,” David told her. “Of course, around when he did that, you were busy saving our lives with some of the slickest programming work I’ve seen yet. How’s your hacking, Miss LaMonte?”

  “I’m…not certain this is a conversation I should be having without a lawyer, skipper,” she said carefully.

  “Kelly, the only thing I know you’ve ever hacked is a department schedule so you could make sure to lunch with your crush,” he replied. “I don’t think you have anything to worry about.”

  “It’s just a hobby,” she admitted. “Never been great, but I have a few tricks. But…what is this about, sir?”

  David finally took a seat himself and took over the controls for the holoprojector in the middle of the room. The battered image of Red Falcon disappeared, replaced by a local astrographic chart.

  “We are here,” he told her unnecessarily, pointing at the green icon in the center of the chart. Their course back to New Madagascar was lit up in straight white lines, each exactly one light-year long in reality and four centimeters long in the display.

  “We aren’t on the jump line from New Madagascar to Legatus,” he continued. “That would have put us here.” A ghostly gray icon appeared on a direct continuation of the first white line on the hologram. “If we’d gone directly to Svarog, we’d have been here.” A second ghostly icon.

  “The pirates knew who we were. They knew where we were supposed to be going and where we were going…and they knew how we were planning on getting there,” David concluded.

  “You’re here, Kelly, because I know you didn’t know that last,” he continued. “Even if you did, I trust you as much as I trust Jenna or James, and their computer knowledge is quite specialized.”

  “Someone sold us out.” The young woman’s voice was calm and level. She might be adorable, but in one memorable instance, Kelly LaMonte had been directly responsible for the destruction of a bounty hunter warship more powerful than any of the corvettes they’d fought today.

  “Someone sold us out,” he confirmed. “Someone that I am sadly quite certain is aboard this ship.”

  “We have a lot of new crew,” she said.

  “We do. A witch hunt would be disastrous for morale and the proper function of the ship,” David agreed. “But. Someone sold us out. Either one of the handful of people who knew our planned course or someone who stole that information from the Mages’ computers.

  “I need you to find out who, Kelly,” he told her. “The only other people on the ship with the right skillset are in the security detail…and they’re all new.”

  “And Marines,” she reminded him. “They’re probably okay.”

  “Ex-Marines,” he said. “And while the
y all served their terms, we don’t know why they didn’t re-up.”

  The young woman smiled enigmatically and nodded.

  “I’ll trust Marines over most spacers,” she admitted. “That said, there isn’t anyone on this ship I wouldn’t trust.”

  “Twenty-four hours ago, I would have sworn this crew was solid gold,” David said sadly. “Now, I know at least one of them set me up. Do you think you can find out who?”

  “I don’t know,” LaMonte warned him. “I’m a talented amateur at best, and odds are whoever sold us out did it sneakily. It might take some time.”

  “It’ll take what it takes,” he told her. “I’ll make sure James knows what’s going on. If you need any help, he can back you up.”

  “And if I find out who?”

  “Tell me,” David ordered. “No one else. Not until I know and can make plans.”

  Best-case scenario, it was one of his new crewmembers. Worst-case scenario, it was one of the Mages or senior officers.

  Absolute worst-case scenario…it was Soprano.

  “Go rest,” Maria told her Mages, her three younger subordinates clustered around her, hoping she had some answers after the meeting with the senior crew.

  “But…” Costa objected.

  “We’re going to take some time to let everyone breathe and for engineering to see if they can patch up the worst of the holes in the engines,” she told them. “We won’t need to jump until they’re done, but we’ll want to be ready when they are.

  “So, go rest,” she ordered.

  With various degrees of obedience, Costa, Wu and Anders all drifted out of the workshop slash office of the Mages’ main working area. Maria waited calmly until the last of her subordinates had left and the door had closed behind them.

  “FUCK.”

  Her shouted curse word echoed through the confined space, and she crossed to a small section of the compartment where they’d set up a target dummy in front of an armored chunk of wall. Mage combat practice was dangerous, and she took a moment to charge the runes that created a shield around the practice area.

  Then she channeled her frustration, conjuring flickering orbs of lighting and fire that smashed into and over the dummy. Fists and feet followed, a flurry of Navy hand-to-hand training and combat magic that the dummy was supposed to be able to survive.

  It lasted about forty seconds before a particularly vicious strike of fire shattered its protective and grounding runes. The matrix that sustained it interrupted, the dummy came apart under her assault almost instantly.

  “Fuck,” she repeated, her voice strained with exhaustion now.

  They should have stopped the damned missiles. She should have stopped those last missiles—but the RFLAMs had been completely effective until that salvo. She’d had a moment of overconfidence…and Red Falcon had been nearly crippled by her mistake.

  Worse, she’d been the one to craft their course. Their far-too-straightforward-once-anyone-knew-exactly-what-their-plan-was course.

  No short jumps. No diversions other than the obvious one. One jump toward Legatus, and then divert to Svarog. It should have been enough, but if someone had sold the Legacy their true destination, easy enough to predict.

  No one had died, but that wasn’t because of Maria. That had been pure luck.

  She’d failed her crew. Failed her promise to Alois. Almost lost them all.

  It was starting to become a pattern, and it wasn’t one Maria liked.

  At least Rice wasn’t likely to fire her the moment they reached Svarog. He seemed a decent-enough Captain, he’d probably let her screw up twice before he kicked her to the curb.

  Maria sighed and moved back over to the workshop office’s computers. They were probably safe now, with their hunters destroyed, but working a few short jumps into the rest of their trip would help keep them that way.

  And while she might have screwed up once, she was not going to let another crew suffer for her mistakes.

  25

  Everyone was awake and on edge when Red Falcon finally jumped into Svarog, two days later than planned and in far worse shape than hoped. The big freighter drifted slowly through the outer system for several minutes as David waited patiently for Kellers to talk to him.

  “We should be good,” the engineer finally told him. “Half a gravity; don’t take us over one percent of lightspeed, like I said. I can’t get us any better than that until we can fix the structural damage.”

  “And the engines?” David asked.

  “The ones we have left are as solid as I can make them, but I’d still rather have a proper shipyard go over them.”

  “Well, you’re in luck,” Falcon’s Captain replied, studying the screens showing Svarog. “Unless I’m misreading this, there are two decent-sized yards in orbit of Dazbog. They should be able to fix us up.”

  “I’m looking forward to it. Any chance of us not getting shot at here?”

  David grimaced.

  “Given our current luck, I’m not taking bets,” he admitted.

  “Wonderful. I’ll let my people know to be careful.”

  “Thanks, James.”

  The engineer shook his head and cut the channel.

  David continued to look over the system. Humanity’s expansion had generally been undertaken with an eye to preserving the environmental stability of the worlds they moved onto. Repairing Earth and protecting its teeming billions from the legacy of a thousand years of industrialization remained a work in progress—and the Protectorate hadn’t wanted to go through that again.

  Dazbog, Svarog’s habitable planet, was an example of why that thought had been required. Colonized by one of Sol’s industrial cartels as a source of raw materials, they had demonstrated just what modern technology could do to a virgin world if unchecked.

  The planet’s ecosystem had been minimal, mostly bacteria and simple plant life. Enough to support a breathable atmosphere and a small animal kingdom, but nothing that the strip miners had felt guilty over when they’d moved in.

  Some of the strip mines were visible from orbit. What was visible even from there, a full week’s flight out at Falcon’s reduced pace, was the change in the atmosphere. Still, technically, breathable, the spectrographic analysis Falcon’s scanners pulled together told a hazardous story, one of trace toxins and dangerous gasses.

  Dozens of asteroids had been pulled into orbit as well, and the planet’s surface apparently bore the scars of the “mistakes” from that process—the final straw that had broken the camel’s back and triggered a violent revolution from the masses of indentured workers.

  The Protectorate had returned self-rule to the system in only the last five years, and while the Mage-King’s hand had been gentler than the cartel’s, the massive industrialization project had continued. Svarog’s asteroid belts were being dismantled and moved to the refineries more carefully now, but the process of feeding those raw materials into the refineries and factories that swarmed above the planet continued.

  What had changed was that the Mage-King had banned any new mining or factories on the surface. The new elected government had reaffirmed that commitment: they were already going to have to functionally terraform the once-habitable world to be safe for most humans again, but they were trying not to make it worse.

  Svarog would never be a rich MidWorld system. The vast industrial base they commanded was enough to allow them to have many things other MidWorld’s couldn’t…but so much of the wealth and resources that industry would otherwise have given them was being plowed back into rebuilding their planet so they’d have someplace to live that didn’t require space station–level atmosphere systems.

  “Any word from Svarog Control yet?” he asked Campbell.

  “Nothing so far,” she replied. “I’ve got a few local destroyers and a three-ship Navy picket on the scanners, but no one is saying hi yet.”

  “Let me know once they do,” he told her. “I don’t think we’re going to need help getting in, but I know insurance is
going to blow a lid over this.” He shook his head. “We’ll want to get started on that sooner rather than later!”

  Maria waited until Iovis had gone to sleep before slipping out of his quarters and returning to her own. She was spending the night as often as not these days, but she also had work to do—and not the job she held aboard Red Falcon.

  Locked away in her quarters, she ran through the events of the previous several trips as quickly and methodically as she could. Svarog had a Runic Transceiver Array, installed during the period of direct rule to allow the Mage-King to keep up with affairs in the system he’d been forced to take over.

  Today, it would allow the local MISS office to relay her report back to authorities on Mars—so long as it was kept very short and sweet. A Runic Transceiver Array could transmit the voice of a Mage standing in the middle of it to another RTA in another star system…but that was it. No artificially created sounds. No datastreams. Just one voice at a time.

  So, while she was attaching chunks of sensor data and as much information as she could to the file, the front section of the report was an executive summary that could only be a few minutes long.

  “Captain Rice has definitely attracted the attention of the elements MISS expected him to find,” she began. “Red Falcon was chased and intercepted by what appear to be forces of an organization called Azure Legacy. We were engaged by six corvettes, but the weapon systems left intact aboard Falcon were sufficient to carry the day.

  “We have also interacted with Legatan agents, who hired us to transport raw material to Svarog while keeping its actual destination secret. Those agents also provided Captain Rice with a contact among organized crime here in Svarog.

  “We will be in-system for some time for repairs. I do not know if Captain Rice intends to make contact with the individual the Conroys provided us or not, but I may need to know what resources are available to us to make certain that Red Falcon survives being bait.”