Interstellar Mage

by Glynn Stewart

David then pinged the simulacrum chamber. Soprano had gone to rest, but the schedule said Xi Wu had the watch. There was silence for several moments, to his surprise, so he pinged the chamber again.

  Finally, the image of the room popped up, along with the cheerful young Asian Mage.

  “Everything’s fine here,” she chirped. “What can I help you with?”

  “Mage Wu, Chief Kellers and I are having a paranoid moment,” he told her. “I want you to lock down the simulacrum chamber. Don’t let anyone in until Soprano or I give you the okay.”

  “Sure, whatever you need,” Wu said cheerfully, and David froze.

  That was not the response he would have expected.

  “Xi…are you all right?” he asked.

  “Everything’s fine here,” she chirped cheerfully again. It wasn’t just an echo. Same words. Same facial expression.

  “Of course it is,” he said slowly. “Like I said, lock down the chamber and wait for myself or Soprano to tell you to open.”

  “Sure, whatever you need.”

  David cut the channel and wordlessly snarled at the screen that had been showing him a computer simulation of one of his better junior Mages—which meant that someone else had control of the simulacrum chamber.

  He slammed a different sequence into his chair controls, trying to link down to the security barracks.

  No response. A chill ran down his spine and he grabbed his wrist-comp, ordering it to disconnect from the ship’s com network and try to reach Skavar directly.

  “We’re being jammed,” he said aloud. “And someone is in our computers.”

  “Sir?” David looked up at LaMonte sitting at the engineering remote panel and remembered that the young woman on his bridge was dating the Mage who was supposed to be in the simulacrum chamber.

  “That was a simulation of Xi,” he told her. “We’re being blinded inside our own ship—can you fix it?”

  The young woman swallowed, yanking on a loose curl of currently black hair.

  “I’ll try. But…what about Xi?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” David admitted. “But if whoever this is thought they could lock me out of communications on my own ship, I have some surprises they need to learn about!”

  With the other shoe at least identified, if not exactly dropped, David pinged Kellers again.

  “What?” his engineer demanded grumpily.

  “We’ve lost the simulacrum chamber,” the Captain snapped. “Tried to talk to Xi Wu and only got a computer simulation. Not a very good one, either.”

  “We’re busy down here; that’s not my problem,” Kellers replied. “We’ve got a critical flux in one of the engines; didn’t the ship’s system advise you?”

  “No,” David said slowly, studying the man. “Did you get the arms locker open?”

  “What?” his engineer replied. “We’re busy down here!”

  David cut the channel before the program pretending to be his engineer—poorly—managed to make him scream.

  “LaMonte?” he asked quietly.

  “Everything we send into the main network is getting redirected,” she said grimly. “I don’t think they physically redirected the wires, but the software switched us over the moment you reached out to the simulacrum chamber.”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s code, but it’s damned sophisticated code. I have admin access, I can get around it…but it’s going to take me time.”

  “Then take the time,” David ordered grimly. He rose from his chair and crossed to an undistinguished panel near the exit from the bridge. Pushing at the bottom of it popped out a palm reader, and he slapped his hand on it.

  The panel popped open, revealing a small-arms locker. It wasn’t huge, only big enough for a half-dozen carbines, but it contained a half-dozen carbines no one else knew was there.

  “Arm yourselves,” he ordered his bridge crew. “Gaspar, do we have external coms?”

  Cohen Gaspar was one of the chiefs working under Campbell, and the Old Earth native was the man currently on the communications console. He was already poking at his displays before David asked.

  “Clever, clever,” he murmured, then looked up. “It’s set up to look like we do, but it’s running into the same datastream trap LaMonte found,” he admitted. “Probably won’t try to fake a response this time, just leave us silent.”

  “I am getting very sick of discovering my ship doesn’t work for me,” David growled. “Fortunately, I’m a paranoid bastard.”

  “Sir?”

  “Type in James Campbell is the biggest idiot that Mars did ever see,” he told Gaspar. “When it asks you why, type in because I’m his sister.”

  The sheer incongruity of the inputs got a chuckle from the chief even with the tension on the bridge.

  “It’s giving me a whole new menu for short-range coms?” he replied.

  “That’s because there’s an auxiliary com array that’s hard-linked to that panel,” David said. “Now, I want you to pulse the entire ship with a code I’m transferring to you. It’s a high-alert code—both Kellers and Skavar will recognize it.”

  And assuming he hadn’t been speaking to a simulation when he’d ordered both men to prepare their teams for battle, that was going to turn the tide in short order.

  39

  No matter how tired she was. No matter how drained. No matter if she’d just seen her most recent lover shot to death in front of her. There was no way that Maria Isabella Soprano was going to lie down and die.

  Slowly, she pushed herself back up onto her knees, letting her anger fuel the spell letting her breathe. She didn’t have much left, but she was moving on pure determination as she levered herself back up the wall, forcing her limbs to cooperate.

  The secured panel covering the manual override mocked her. Now that she was looking at it, she could see that someone—no prizes for guessing who at this point—had used either magic or some very specialized tools to solder the panel shut from the inside.

  Physical force wasn’t going to open the panel to let her at the lever. Fortunately, however tired she might have been, she wasn’t limited to physical force.

  She activated her shipsuit’s helmet. Its automatic protocols would have triggered in the absence of pressure, but given that the room itself had its own emergency oxygen supply, the designers hadn’t added a safety protocol for low oxygen.

  The suit wrapped around her and its microcapsules began to release their oxygen supply for her. She let the filtering spell drop—the shipsuit only had fifteen minutes of air, enough to get to a locker with real space suits, but it was enough for what she needed to do.

  Taking a deep breath of the fresh-air supply, she channeled energy into her projector rune, conjuring a thin blade of pure force. Four quick slashes later, the soldered-shut panel went spinning off into her room—and she found herself staring at the empty gap that should have held an emergency release lever.

  Someone had been very thorough. Not thorough enough, in the end, but if she’d been asleep, the air would have killed her. If she’d been mostly gone by the time she’d managed to open up the panel, the lack of lever might have been enough to trap her.

  But she was a Mage—and had served in the Royal Martian Navy as one. Her hand slid in to where the lever would have been, and air solidified in her grip, linking the mechanism buried in the wall to her hand.

  She yanked hard, once, and the mechanism engaged. The lock holding the door retracted and half a dozen powerful electromagnets switched off. The top half of the door didn’t move—but the bottom half dropped into its slot in the floor with a resounding crash.

  Maria dove under the half-closed door before she could let herself hesitate, rolling and coming up with her hands out, ready to unleash magic against whoever was in the hallway.

  Which was empty. She exhaled and tapped the command to retract the shipsuit. She breathed the ship’s air for several moments, assessing her options.

  The internal com network was
compromised. Her coms were jammed. She was exhausted, but Acconcio was dead and Costa was on the loose somewhere in the ship—and she doubted that the Mage had set loose this level of catastrophe in the ship’s systems without some of follow-through planned.

  Her wrist-comp buzzed for a moment and she glanced down at it. She was still jammed, but a single code had made it through by simple virtue of being a more powerful signal. Far more powerful than would normally be directed inside the ship.

  It was just a string of letters and numbers, but she recognized one of Falcon’s alert codes when she saw it. Rice was ordering everyone to find weapons and fall back to key areas, digging in to hold the key sections of the ship.

  Those were the bridge, the simulacrum chamber, and Engineering. She was grimly certain the bridge was cut off and the simulacrum chamber had already fallen. That meant she needed to retake it, and she couldn’t do that alone while half-exhausted.

  She needed the Marines.

  Maria was halfway to the security barracks at the other side of the gravity ring when she first heard gunfire. It wasn’t the single shots of pistol fire, either, but the repeated crashes of automatic weapons. Heavy automatic weapons.

  She did what any good Navy officer would have done: she changed course toward the sound of the guns. That took her around a corner and down a level from where she’d been headed, but the exchange of fire grew louder as she approached.

  Part of her, both the sensible part and the tired part, suggested caution. The rest of her realized that hesitation was only likely to get people killed. She mustered the tired shreds of her energy and barreled around the corner.

  She wasn’t entirely sure what she’d expected to find, but Kelzin and three of the other pilots holding an impromptu barricade assembled from someone’s bed didn’t surprise her. The two dead men sprawled behind the barricade sadly fit her expectations as well.

  But she’d had no idea what they were facing, and the attack force was something out of her worst nightmares. Three exosuited attackers led the way, pushing slowly forward in spite of the hail of fire the pilots’ carbines were spitting out.

  A six-man squad of lighter-armored troopers had fallen in behind them, hanging back and letting their heavily protected compatriots lead the way.

  How an entire assault team had made it aboard Red Falcon without anyone knowing was beyond her, but what to do about it was not.

  She intentionally crumpled, sliding under the fire from the leading attackers as she crashed into the barricade past Mike Kelzin—using her momentum to flip herself back up as she met three fully armored soldiers at point-blank range.

  If they’d been Marines, she would have died. Marines would have made sure to have ID files on the Ship’s Mages and would have emptied everything they had as soon as they saw her.

  These were not Marines. Mercenaries, probably. Mercenaries who’d never faced a Combat Mage before.

  They twisted their weapons toward her but not fast enough to prevent her reaching them. Short-ranged blades of white-hot plasma erupted from each of her hands, burning ugly holes through the two closest soldiers despite their heavy armor.

  Years-old combat training reflexes took over, dropping her to the ground as a hail of flechettes, designed to take down unarmed crew without wrecking starship hulls, flashed over her head. Still on the ground, she gestured at the last exosuited soldier and conjured fire again.

  As the attacker crumpled, the sound of gunfire redoubled as Kelzin and his fellows charged over the barricade. The non-exosuited soldiers didn’t stand a chance, though another of the pilots fell before Kelzin knelt next to Maria.

  “Mage Soprano, are you okay?” he demanded.

  “I am fucking shattered,” she admitted. “But since someone seems to have boarded us, I’m going to call that okay.”

  “Where the hell did these guys come from?” one of the other pilots asked. “For that matter, Mike, why did you have a crate of Legatus Arms carbines in your locker?”

  “Souvenirs of my last tour with Captain Rice,” the pilot snapped. “Soprano? Any idea what happened to Xi?”

  “She should be on duty in the chamber,” Maria said grimly. “But Costa has betrayed us, and he seemed to think we weren’t jumping anywhere. I’m afraid of the worst…and we need to retake the simulacrum.”

  “Fuck,” Kelzin growled. “I’m not trained for this, ma’am. What do we do?”

  “We find Skavar,” Maria replied. “I’m not entirely sure where these assholes came from, but I can guess.”

  The security troopers found them first. A pair of exosuited troopers, anonymous behind the faceless plates of their armor but with Red Falcon’s ship patch emblazoned brightly on the front of the suits, were sweeping down a corridor, searching for threats.

  “Hold position,” one of them ordered. “Identify yourselves!”

  “Reyes, you bloody well know who I am,” Maria snapped, recognizing the voice and stepping forward. “We need to talk to Skavar. We have boarders aboard.”

  “Damn,” the security man replied. “We were sweeping for the possibility, but we have no confirmed encounters yet.”

  “We ran into a damned assault team heading for the shuttle bays,” Kelzin told him. “Thanks to Mage Soprano, they’re no longer a threat, but where there’s one…”

  “There’s more,” Reyes agreed. “Hold on a moment.”

  The external speaker on his suit went silent, the trooper presumably linking back to Skavar.

  “Chief says to bring you back to the barracks; another fire team is going to take over our sweep,” he told them after a moment.

  “You guys have coms?” Maria asked. “We’re being jammed.”

  “Personal coms are out, but the exosuits are designed for a combat environment,” Reyes replied, gesturing for her and the pilots to follow him. “We have micropulse communicators operating on rotating frequencies, designed to cut through almost any jamming.”

  That was not civilian-issue gear—but it was gear that Maria knew Marines had. She hadn’t thought through just what Skavar’s people having actual RMMC equipment would mean.

  “I don’t think anyone was expecting that,” she said quietly, going back to leaning on Kelzin.

  “That, Mage Soprano, was the point.”

  By the time Maria reached the security barracks, it was very clear that Red Falcon’s security detachment was giving up pretending they weren’t actually Marines at this point. Orderly fire teams moved down the hallways in perfect rotations, every corner swept, every door checked.

  Armored guards had the entrance locked down, checking the suit ID chips for Reyes and his companion before they let anyone through.

  Inside, the main lounge area had been converted into a mobile command post. Portable screens and high-powered communicators had materialized out of nowhere to fill the space, giving Skavar a view of his people overlaid on a map of the ship.

  The security chief wore an exosuit, but his helmet was off, laid on the table next to him as he studied the ship. He looked up as she came in.

  “Mage Soprano, you’re all right,” he greeted her with relief. “Damn. I’m feeling half-blind and worried that everyone is gone.”

  “Captain Rice is still with us,” she replied. “You got the alert, same as I did.”

  “Captain Rice was still with us ten minutes ago,” Skavar said grimly. “I have no communications with anyone except my own fire teams. Internal sensors appear to be up, but they’re lying to me, which makes them useless.”

  He gestured at the screens. Green dots marked a growing area in the gravity ring and the magical gravity section of the ship where the Marines had swept. Toward the bridge, however, at the top of the magical-gravity area, the green dots had stopped moving and a set of fuzzy red markers had been added.

  “I can’t trust anything beyond the cameras of my people,” he told her. “We hadn’t run into hostiles when Reyes met up with you, but that didn’t last. We now have a running firefight in the b
ridge tower. Exosuits and Augments, plus at least one Mage.”

  “A Mage?” Maria demanded. “And Augments?”

  “Not Legatan, I don’t think, but bad enough,” he said grimly. “I have no idea where the hell these people came from.”

  “Costa and Acconcio snuck them aboard,” she told him.

  “Fuck.”

  “Acconcio had second thoughts,” Maria continued. “So, Costa killed him. He’s…not a fully trained Combat Mage, but he’s a lot stronger than he was pretending. He tried to trap me in my quarters and gas me.”

  She closed her eyes and sighed.

  “We need to check on Anders,” she told him. “And anyone else who was sleeping, but I’m most worried about Anders.”

  Skavar nodded and tapped something on the screens.

  “Antonov,” he said crisply. “Check out Mage Anders’s quarters; they tried to contain and gas Mage Soprano, so he may be in danger. You’re closest.”

  He turned back to Maria. “That’ll take a few minutes. What about the simulacrum chamber?”

  Maria spared a glance for Kelzin, who was still providing a shoulder to keep her upright, and sighed.

  “Wu was holding it down, but…Costa seemed to think we weren’t going anywhere. I don’t know what happened to her,” she said softly, “but I’m afraid she may be dead.”

  The young man she was leaning on winced.

  “I need to check out the chamber,” she continued. “And I need an escort; we’ll want to punch out whatever force they have holding it. You’ll also want to send a team to sweep to Engineering—Kellers will have armed his people, but they won’t have the gear to stop exosuits!”

  “You can barely stand!” Skavar objected. “We’re sweeping backwards along the ship; we’ll get there, but you can’t do anything.”

  “Ivan, they were in the cargo containers,” she told him gently. “They’re already at the chamber and probably at Engineering. There isn’t time to be methodical. You need a Mage-led assault, and there’s only one Mage available with the skillset.”

  “You still can’t stand,” he replied.