A Darker Magic (Starship's Mage Book 10)

by Glynn Stewart

  25

  Captain Victoriano Bolivar was not quite what Roslyn had expected from his voice. He was surprisingly young, maybe thirty, and wore a perfectly tailored uniform that showed off the results of a lifetime of working out. Dark-skinned, dark-eyed and dark-haired, Bolivar was eye-catching even without the muscles and the gorgeous black uniform.

  Roslyn had more important things to be doing when they met at the Guardia headquarters than eat the eye candy, but she still had to appreciate the man’s effort.

  “Lieutenant Commander Chambers,” he greeted her in the plainly decorated lobby of the building, bowing over her hand as they shook. “I appreciate your efforts in the quarantine zone and the assistance of your Captain Daalman.

  “It’s been a hellish few days.”

  “I didn’t expect any of this when we arrived for a glorified show-the-flag tour,” Roslyn admitted. She gestured to her companions. “This is my escort, Marine Staff Sergeant Borislava Mooren, and my aide, Ensign Rodrigo Borst.”

  “Borst” was actually Killough, but the MISS agent had insisted on pretending to be a junior Navy officer. His uniform had been quickly fabricated to fit him, and he’d fiddled around with some kind of disguise kit to give his cheeks a youthful chubbiness and smooth complexion that left Roslyn thinking he was maybe twenty.

  “Sergeant, Ensign.” Bolivar nodded to both of them. “This way, please, all of you.”

  Roslyn fell into step beside the attractive Guardia officer.

  “The Planetary Army has set up a full blockade around the Nueva Portugal region,” Bolivar told them. “We have had additional incidents over the last twenty-four hours, but those have thankfully been isolated.

  “Our analysts think we’re still seeing concentrations of the toxin from the explosion drifting around the city and occasionally reaching critical mass.” He shook his head. “That results in an individual or several becoming incoherent and violent. The pattern is consistent with the quarantine zone problem though, gracias a Dios, much more contained.”

  “Do you have any more data on what we’re looking at?” Roslyn asked.

  “I was hoping you did, Commander,” he said. “I’m uncertain why you asked to see Ms. Jackson. She is not exactly a…pleasant person.”

  “We found evidence in that damn underground warehouse that potentially links her to the source of the toxin,” Roslyn told him. “I can’t tell you much more than that, I’m afraid. We’re operating within some strict classification instructions from Mars still.”

  “You’ll forgive me if I find that almost as terrifying as the zombie plague,” Bolivar said quietly, using a word that Roslyn hadn’t let her brain use yet.

  “The people are victims—and still alive. I’m not sure zombie is the right word,” Roslyn pointed out.

  “Look up the origin of the term,” he suggested. “For now…” He sighed. “We’ve brought Ms. Jackson here for interrogation. We will want to record the interview.”

  “Denied,” Roslyn said quietly. “My conversation with Ms. Jackson will be recorded, but I will not be certain if I can release those recordings to the Guardia until afterward.

  “You have my word, Captain Bolivar, that anything of relevance to the Guardia will be provided to you,” she told him. “But there are reasons for the secrecy. You will have to trust me.”

  She could argue need to know for the local police, except…the existence of a secret, Mage-run Republic lab was a political firestorm waiting to happen. Project Prometheus itself had come close to triggering atrocities on the part of the RMN, held back only by professionalism and Damien Montgomery.

  From the flip side, Sorprendidas had been an UnArcana World and was still unreconciled to those rules being stripped away. While so far, everyone was assuming a technological source for the toxin, that was hardly guaranteed.

  A lot of high-end Protectorate biotech work involved magic, after all. The presence of a fully qualified Mage-Surgeon like Ulla Lafrenz suggested all kinds of unpleasant possibilities to Roslyn. While it would still take a solid understanding of DNA and RNA to build an artificial virus with magic, that virus could be made to do things with magic that would be impossible with regular genecoding.

  Roslyn could not tell the locals what she was looking for. The risk of chaos was too great, even if she trusted Bolivar.

  So, she needed Bolivar to trust her.

  Fortunately…so far, so good.

  Even clad in a prisoner’s shapeless jumpsuit—a sight that brought back memories for Roslyn, few of them pleasant—Josephine Jackson was stunningly attractive. The jumpsuit did little to disguise the woman’s generous curves, drawing side glances from the male half of her prison-guard escort.

  “Leave us,” Roslyn instructed the guards. “Only my team will be in the room. Disable all recorders.”

  “Sir?” the security officer looked at Bolivar.

  The Guardia Captain looked unhappy as he turned his gaze on Roslyn. He still sighed and nodded.

  “This is the Protectorate’s interview, not ours,” he conceded. “Good luck, Mage-Commander.”

  Roslyn concealed a mental snort at the promotion. The “Lieutenant” part of her rank was often dropped as a courtesy, but that usually came with dropping the Mage part. Bolivar was trying to intimidate Jackson.

  As the last of the Guardia trooped out, leaving Roslyn and her escort alone with the prisoner, Roslyn figured Bolivar’s efforts hadn’t achieved much.

  “Double-check the recorders are off,” she instructed Killough. “And check her bindings,” she told Mooren. “Let’s not have any surprises.”

  The prisoner eyed them with curiosity as they worked. She was cuffed to the chair and her hands were cuffed together, though that gave her enough slack to run a hand over her short-cropped hair.

  “They can’t even let me grow out my hair,” she complained. “I don’t suppose you can do anything about that, Mage-Commander?”

  “Probably not,” Roslyn said genially. “If they’re shaving your head, you were doing something unwise with it. I kept my own hair in your place.”

  That got her looks from both Mooren and Killough, but she figured the extra bit of connection couldn’t hurt.

  “A Mage-Commander who’s been in jail? Mierda,” Jackson replied.

  “Juvie. Long string of trouble as a kid,” Roslyn told her. “Not, you know, human trafficking. They let me out. I’m not sure they’re planning on letting you out.”

  The woman rolled her eyes.

  “Thirty-six years,” she told them. “Twenty until the first parole hearing, so I have limited interest in playing nice for at least another decade. Not sure what the point of all this is.”

  “The point of all this is that I believe you were supplying human test subjects to a secret lab working on Project Prometheus,” Roslyn said flatly. “Which would be enough, Ms. Jackson, to get you a second trial…for war crimes.”

  The prisoner lost some of her composure, staring directly at Roslyn.

  “Mierda,” she repeated. “I did not… They were not… FUCK.”

  The curse word echoed off the interrogation chamber walls until it faded to silence.

  “Well, Ms. Jackson?” Roslyn asked. “You seem to know what I’m talking about, though it also seems like somewhat of a surprise.”

  Jackson raised a hand.

  “You want to know what I know,” she said. “I don’t have to tell you shit. You know what omertà is.”

  “I know it doesn’t apply to third parties like this,” Roslyn pointed out. “Even the first Mafia helped fight the Nazis.”

  The room was silent for several seconds.

  “I want immunity for anything we talk about and ten years off my sentence,” Jackson said flatly. “Or I don’t say a fucking word.”

  Roslyn hadn’t even sat down yet, and she smiled mirthlessly.

  “I don’t think you have anything worth that,” she noted. “Shame to have wasted both of our time.”

  She turned ba
ck to the door.

  “Look,” Jackson said behind her. “You do not do what I did by asking questions or being squeamish. I’ve been convicted for enough that I won’t pretend otherwise. While I didn’t think about it then, I can guess which of my clients is most likely to be your problem.

  “I can tell you names, rendezvous points, bank accounts. Stuff I won’t break for anything else,” she told Roslyn. “If they’re what you say they are, omertà doesn’t apply. If they aren’t and I betray them, I’m a dead woman.

  “Either way, I’m still in jail for longer than you’ve been alive, kid.”

  Roslyn grimaced. Clearing that off her face and fixing her eyes and lips in a neutral expression, she turned back to Jackson.

  “I can guarantee immunity for anything we discuss,” she conceded. She didn’t necessarily want to—the woman across the table had kidnapped dozens of people and fed them into a bioweapon lab for human testing, after all—but she’d trade that for finding the damn lab.

  “I have no control over your existing sentence from the Sorprendidan authorities,” she told Jackson. “The Royal Navy doesn’t have that authority.”

  Roslyn could manage it with the Warrant she carried, but if she could get through this mess without using that, she would.

  “If your evidence is useful, I will ask that the locals reconsider the time before parole hearings, if nothing else, and consider your cooperation,” Roslyn promised. “I cannot do more.”

  The interrogation room was silent for a good minute, then Jackson bowed her head.

  “Fine,” she conceded. “Sit down, ‘Mage-Commander.’ And start whatever recordings you need. I’ll tell you as much as I can.”

  Roslyn took the seat. Just sharing a room with Jackson made her feel dirty. She was going to need to shower after all of this.

  “We’re already recording,” she told Jackson. “Tell us everything.”

  The human trafficker nodded, inhaling as she marshaled her thoughts.

  “The most likely person for what you’re looking for is a contact who went in our files as Six-Eight-Three-One,” Jackson noted. “I met her twice, both times she introduced herself simply as R. Tall woman, blonde. Mixed ethnicity, skin tone much like yours.”

  “Mars-born,” Roslyn concluded. That fit the profile for Ulla Roxana Lafrenz, at least.

  “She was paying well below market rate for cargo,” the trafficker continued, her tone brushing calmly over what cargo meant in this case. “But she didn’t care about condition, and having a local purchaser buying in bulk was handy initially.

  “It got harder as she wanted larger numbers and a greater variety. Normally, we focus on quality cargo—young and attractive. She wanted samples of every age and health we could find.”

  Jackson shrugged.

  “Turns out that a lot of middle-aged sick people will jump at chances for jobs and new starts even more readily than kids will.”

  It took every scrap of self-control Roslyn had not to pin the other woman to the wall with magic—or her fists. The callous disregard for the lives Jackson had ruined—dozens, even hundreds of people sold into slavery or delivered to Lafrenz’s experiment—beggared belief.

  “How many.”

  The two words Roslyn ground out didn’t sound like a question to her, but Jackson got the point.

  “Hard to say; I wasn’t involved at that level of—”

  “How many,” Roslyn growled.

  “Several hundred. No more than five.”

  “Dear god,” the Mage-Commander whispered, staring at the utter monster sitting calmly across from her. “You kidnapped five hundred people for them without asking what they wanted them for?”

  “Over three years,” Jackson countered. “It wasn’t like R walked up to me and asked for a statistically viable random population of five hundred cargo in the first meeting! She was our largest on-planet client, but…”

  The trafficker cut herself off before admitting that “R” hadn’t even been the majority of her business, but Roslyn picked it up. Against even a small planetary population, several hundred missing people a year was nothing, but the scale of the woman’s operation was horrifying.

  “You said you could give me names, account numbers, locations,” Roslyn said flatly. “Start.”

  “I don’t know R’s name,” Jackson conceded. “But I did learn the names of several of the subordinates I dealt with. There were four regular contacts, named Iole Man, Kane Unkle, Miluse Shriver and Iracema Jain. Not all of those might be real names, but they should give you a starting point from records, yes?”

  “Keep talking,” Roslyn said shortly. The more the woman said of value, the more she was going to be able to justify this to herself at night.

  “They picked up a new boss shortly before I got arrested, just after the war ended,” Jackson continued. “I met him once, damn pretty man but no soul in his eyes.”

  That was rich, coming from Jackson.

  “I wasn’t supposed to know his name—he was introduced to me as ‘C,’ but we overheard a few phone calls and got the pieces. They called him Connor ad Aaron.”

  Even with Roslyn already exercising ironclad self-control not to violently injure the woman in front of her, that made her jump. She’d hoped Connor ad Aaron was dead. He’d been somewhere in the fortifications at Hyacinth when Mage-Admiral Jane Alexander had destroyed them, after all.

  The rogue Mage had been a member of the Republic Intelligence Directorate and the mastermind behind kidnapping Alexander—and Roslyn.

  “Names don’t help much,” Roslyn pointed out after a moment. “Anyone can say their name is anything. Locations. Details. If you don’t know where the damn lab is, Ms. Jackson, I’m not sure we’ve done much other than make me ill.”

  The criminal chuckled.

  “Such a squeamish stomach for a naval officer,” she replied. “Are you bothered by little old me?”

  “I am bothered, Ms. Jackson, by the effort it requires not to kill you where you sit,” Roslyn said calmly. “I have faced battlefleets unarmed and Republic combat cyborgs in my underwear. Please stop wasting my time.”

  The interrogation room chilled again as Roslyn held the other woman’s eyes until Jackson finally looked away. Roslyn wasn’t sure the criminal knew how deathly serious she was being, but her point appeared to be made.

  “There were supposed to be individual new drop-offs each time,” Jackson said quietly. “After the first eighteen months, they stopped being quite so careful, though. There were six repeated locations. They didn’t always use those six, but they kept showing up, so I think they had to be convenient to the lab.”

  “Ensign, get us a map,” Roslyn told Killough. A moment later, a holographic map of Nueva Portugal appeared between the two women. “Show me, Ms. Jackson. We’ll take the account numbers afterward—those might come in handy as well—but I need those locations.”

  26

  “Did she help?” Bolivar asked as Roslyn and her escorts left the interrogation.

  “She tried, at least,” Roslyn conceded. “And I managed not to throw her into a wall, which I consider a small personal triumph.” She sighed. “I promised I’d tell you she was cooperative and helpful and that should be considered in future assessments of her sentence.”

  “I’ll pass it along,” he agreed. “Will we need her again or should I have her sent back to her cell?”

  “We’re done with her,” Roslyn said after a moment’s thought. Either the locations and account numbers would help, or they wouldn’t. There was no way that they were getting anything else useful from Jackson—the presence of ad Aaron confirmed they were looking for the right people.

  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost, Mage-Commander,” Bolivar noted. “Is there…anything we should be looking at?”

  “Yeah.” She gestured to Killough. “Ensign, give Captain Bolivar the account numbers that Ms. Jackson provided us. The Guardia is going to be better able to trace the money than we are—and followin
g the transactions might help them roll up more of her former organization, as well.”

  Killough quickly loaded a datachip and passed it over to Bolivar.

  “What happens now, Commander?” Bolivar asked.

  “I take the data Ms. Jackson provided and compare it against everything we’ve already pulled together on these people,” Roslyn told him. “Then, if we’re only moderately lucky, I go kick down another set of secret doors that actually has a bioweapon lab behind them.”

  Bolivar grimaced.

  “The last set of doors is giving me a headache,” he admitted. “The lawyers aren’t going to succeed in arguing against probable cause on your part, but they’re already set up to try and have filed an injunction to have the prisoners released on the grounds of violation of their habeas corpus rights.”

  “No offense, Captain, but the local mob isn’t my problem,” Roslyn said. “By no means do I mind that we accidentally ripped apart a major smuggling operation with links to human trafficking, but my focus is on the source of this damn weapon.”

  “I hear you,” he conceded. “I will need statements from you and your Marines on the warehouse eventually, though.”

  “I’ll have Captain Daalman forward appropriately redacted versions of our reports,” she said. “I’m afraid I can’t offer better right now. That said, I don’t expect Huntress to leave Sorprendidas soon unless something goes very wrong.

  “We’ll be available when you actually end up in court…assuming my main mission is resolved.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be Song of the Huntress’s tactical officer?” Bolivar asked.

  “Any officer of Her Majesty’s Navy must be prepared to handle ancillary duties as required,” Roslyn replied virtuously. “I cannot really say more than that.”

  “Fair.” He sighed. “My superiors have asked me to pass on the request to tell us before you launch an aerial assault in the city next time.” He chuckled. “I recognize the value of surprise and the complexity of the situation, but it does help us provide backup if needed.”