Xi Wu and Maria Soprano were easily missed amidst that collection of armor and weaponry, which was part of the point. If the seven security officers weren’t enough to discourage someone from trying to take down Captain David Rice, the two Mages were almost certainly enough to stop them.
All told, it made for quite the crowd that made its way through the corridors of what had once been an O’Neill cylinder—a spinning habitat to provide massive quantities of habitable space—and was now a massive zero-gravity facility.
Parts of the cylinder had been converted into regular decks, but much of it remained as open, wasted space. Several smaller, more economical if less efficient, spinning habitats had been built inside the old cylinder, and it was one of these that their directions took them to.
There was a single point of entry at the center of the rotating ring, and unlike Rice, Integrity Galactic Transport had not refrained from using exosuited troopers for their defense. A small sign next to the zero-gravity entryway declared that the entire ring was extraterritorial, under the authority and protection of the Legatus government.
Hence the Legatan Self-Defense Force Space Assault troopers guarding the door. The difference between LSDFSA troops and Marines was…a matter of labels. Nothing more. The gear was comparable. The training was comparable
The dozen exosuited assault troops guarding the access to the ring would have been more than a match for the non-Mage component of David’s bodyguard even if his people had been in exosuits. With one side in armor and one side not, David hoped his people were feeling meek.
The octagon of heavy remote-controlled turrets mounted around the hatch didn’t help with the balance of force. He stopped himself just outside the line and leveled his gaze on the one unarmored woman waiting there.
She met his gaze with a cheerful smile…and a steady, square-pupiled look. There was a reason, he supposed, that the Augment hadn’t bothered with armor. A Legatan combat cyborg was better protected inside an exosuit, but they weren’t any stronger or faster.
“Captain Rice,” she greeted him brightly. “I am Liza Sierra. I’m afraid I don’t have you on my list.”
He smiled back at Sierra.
“There must be some mistake,” he told her. “I’m delivering a twenty-million-ton cargo; I need to meet with the receiving agent in person.”
Nothing had actually been arranged, he knew, which meant Sierra was entirely correct. That said, it was odd that nothing had been arranged. He would have expected Arendse to have set up a meeting within a few hours of Red Falcon docking.
Of course, the point of this trip was to be seen, not to necessarily get business done.
“I will touch base with Administrator Arendse’s office,” Sierra promised. “I’m afraid I can’t let you into the habitat ring without some kind of authorization.”
“In this environment, I can understand the paranoia,” David allowed. “Should we wait?”
Sierra nodded briskly, her eyes flickering in response to an image only she could see.
“Please do,” she requested.
Clearly, the cyborg was communicating through her implants, a somewhat uncomfortable experience for everyone around her. There was no reason for her to be visibly responding to anything, except that under all the hardware, Augments were still human.
The square pupils weren’t a necessary part of the technology, as David understood it. They’d been included intentionally to make combat cyborgs obvious to others, to provide some reassurance that no one was wandering around with weapons-grade implants without anyone knowing.
So, of course, David was quite sure Legatus had also built cyborgs without the obvious eyes. It’s what he would have done.
“The Administrator isn’t available at the moment, but you can meet with her chief of staff, if that works for you?” Sierra suddenly replied, concluding a conversation no one else could see. “Ms. Tran should be able to sort out whatever paperwork or assistance you need; she speaks with the Administrator’s voice in most matters.”
“That is more than acceptable,” David agreed immediately. There was no harm in being accommodating, after all—and he’d expected to have to go back to the ship and return another time.
Meeting with Ms. Tran would at least skip that step.
16
By the time they finished meeting with the chief of staff for Junkertown, David was beginning to realize that whatever they were saying, Integrity Galactic didn’t own this particular chunk of rotating habitat.
From the number of troopers he could see, in uniform and out, there had to be at least a full space assault regiment stationed there. Possibly more. Over a thousand of Legatus’s elite ground forces.
Plus at least a platoon from the Augment Corps. The Augments weren’t being as obvious as the assault troopers, but they were definitely present. From the drills that both groups were going through, David could at least guess the purpose of their presence here.
In the case of a serious emergency or threat, Legatus would be able to seize control of Junkertown in minutes. The map on his wrist-comp confirmed his other suspicions: the rotating habitat linked to the outer edge of the original cylinder.
There was no official docking port there, but he suspected that there were probably more gunships stored here than anyone outside realized.
“Anyone else feeling paranoid?” Soprano muttered to him as they made their way out.
“Not really,” he told her. “If I was, say, the Snap System Government…oh, yeah. Legatus has infiltrated a crack combat force under their noses. If I were the government here, I’d wonder why.
“As it is,” he shrugged. “Somebody else’s problem, Ship’s Mage.”
Soprano chuckled softly. Even from MISS’s perspective, this was probably somebody else’s problem, though they’d make sure to report it.
The meeting with Tran had been pretty straightforward, sorting out confirmation of receipt and payment release. The only oddity had been their need to insist on doing it in person—Integrity Galactic, it seemed, would have rather done that entirely electronically.
Now that David could see that Integrity Galactic’s facility was concealing a Legatan strike force, he could understand why.
“Think we’ve made enough of a spectacle of ourselves, boss?” Skavar asked. “My shoulder blades are starting to itch.”
“If I thought our blue friends were here, I’d say yes, but I doubt the Legatans would permit them to operate in their space.”
David considered for a few seconds.
“This seems like a good place for us to pick up some gear for your people that won’t be available most places,” he pointed out. “Let’s go see if we can find the arms bazaar.”
The Security Chief chuckled.
“I know where that is,” he admitted. “I was poking the station network to see if I could find some heavy anti-armor gear.”
“Well, then, Chief,” David replied, kicking off from the rotating habitat’s exit hatch. “Let’s go find you some anti-tank guns, shall we?”
Junkertown was a sufficiently disorganized mess of a space station that the net informed David that there were at least ten major markets he could call bazaars. Three—including, thankfully, the arms market—were in the old O’Neill cylinder.
It was the first time David had been in a bazaar of any significant size that didn’t even have rotational gravity. It was an “open air” market, hanging in the middle of an area of open space in the cylinder, anchored on a set of storage containers but sprawling out in three dimensions with no sense of order beyond the ropes tying the stalls together.
Rows of weapons dangled in security cuffs at each station, and the smell of hot food drifted out from the solitary saloon—also, so far as David could tell, the only place in the bazaar with magical gravity.
That was odd enough on its own, given that Snap was an UnArcana System. Junkertown really didn’t pay attention to its home system’s laws.
“Over there,” Skava
r told him. “The big green exclamation mark is apparently Weinhauser’s. They don’t have the biggest selection, but their rep says they’ve got gear nobody else has.
“For the kind of esoteric systems we’re looking for, they’re our best hope.”
“It’s your shopping trip, Chief,” David told him. “Lead the way.”
Weinhauser’s exclamation mark was made out of extremely old-fashioned neon tubes, glowing with a bright green unmatched by anything else in the mess. The three-meter-tall icon was attached to a suspended platform thirty meters on a side with a series of plain wooden trellis tables.
Given the lack of gravity, the throwback effect was entirely intentional—and like many other stalls in this market, the merchandise was chained to the tables with manacles normally used for high-security prisoners.
A figure came up to meet them, wrapped in a green suit almost as hideously neon as the exclamation mark.
“I am Weinhauser!” they announced brightly. “Purveyor of arms both extraordinary and mundane for the most discerning of customers. What can I set you up with?”
The androgynous glowing green figure looked over David’s escort.
“You’ve quite the setup already, I see,” they continued. “What do you need? Battle lasers? Explosives? Nukes?”
They paused.
“I don’t actually have nukes,” they noted. “Even in Junkertown, folk disapprove of keeping radioactives on a shop shelf.”
“You have battle lasers?” Skavar asked. “I didn’t think those were in practical use yet.”
“Legatus Arms is up to mod five on their man-portable battle laser,” Weinhauser told him. “Mod one and two were…less than useful, but mod three was a reasonably practical weapon, and mod four is a nasty little piece of gear. LSDF is using it as a squad support weapon, though they’re holding off for mod five for mass rollout.”
“And you have…” Skavar said.
“Six mod fours,” Weinhauser said cheerfully. “They’re great sniper rifles, though the mod five works nicely on armor. I don’t have any mod fives,” they concluded.
“No recoil? Good for EVA work, right?”
“Exactly,” the arms salesperson agreed. “Want them?”
“We’ll take them,” Skavar replied. “But that wasn’t what I was after. Looking for trooper- and exosuit-portable anti-armor gear—thinking multipurpose anti-tank and -aircraft systems.”
Weinhauser nodded and gestured for them to follow. The salesperson was clearly very used to zero gravity, grabbing the ropes and guidelines around their free-floating stall with practiced ease as they led David’s party deeper in.
“Real modern armor isn’t something you see often,” they noted. “Most folks settle for exosuits or, well, gear that wouldn’t look out of place on twenty-second-century Earth. Only the LSDF and the Martians use real tanks.”
“Let’s just say my boss likes to make enemies,” Skavar replied with a pointed glance at David. “I’ve learned not to underestimate their resources.”
Weinhauser nodded, bracing themselves carefully to open a storage locker and slide out a coffin-sized box.
“We don’t have exosuit designed gear for this,” they admitted. “Exosuit teams tend to carry hyper-interceptors for that kind of gear, and people are even less enthused with antimatter on the shelf than they are with radioactives.
“This gear uses the same kind of powered supporting harness you’re wearing,” they continued, nodding toward Skavar’s harness as they popped open the coffin. “I’ve never heard an official name for the things, nobody admits to mass-producing them and I’ve seen at least five different varieties, but everyone just calls them blasters.”
Most of the coffin contained the support harness, an identical version to what Skavar himself was wearing. Nestled in the middle were three items that looked like nothing so much as beehives with chainsaw grips.
“Compressed-plasma gun,” Weinhauser told them. “It’s a fire-and-forget weapon—you fire it once, and then you forget you ever had it. Firing it vaporizes the interior of the gun.
“But it will put two point five kilograms of one-hundred-thousand-Kelvin hydrogen plasma on target with a two-centimeter divergence in beam for each hundred meters traveled,” the salesman explained.
“I’ve got two sets like this,” the salesperson concluded. “They don’t move fast, but they’re hard to replace, so they aren’t cheap.”
David smiled and held up a hand to his Chief of Security.
“So, how much is ‘aren’t cheap’?” he asked.
To David’s surprise, they made it back to the ship with Skavar’s prizes without being attacked. He summoned a staff meeting at that point, pulling LaMonte, Jeeves, Kellers, Soprano and Skavar into his office for a planning session.
“I’m pretty sure the bastards know we’re here now,” he told his officers. “But they didn’t act while we were out, which leaves me wondering just what buttons to push.”
“You’ve probably pushed the big ones already,” Jeeves said quietly. “Right now, they’re trying to decide if going after you is worth endangering their conference.”
“Any thoughts on where the conference would be?” David asked.
“It’s a big station,” LaMonte pointed out. “I’d guess they’re on Junkertown somewhere, I’d even guess in place with rotational pseudograv, but that still gives us a lot of potential targets.”
“If we could narrow it down, we could see if we could dig up a potential cargo client in the area,” Soprano suggested.
“That’s exactly what I was thinking,” David agreed. “I don’t really want to just start randomly wandering through the rotating sections looking for trouble, though. Some basis for picking one would be good.”
“Which ones are likely to have clients?” LaMonte asked. “I’d guess that the ones with docks, shipping offices, and conference centers are the most likely places to call that kind of meeting.”
David nodded. As usual, his new XO had a point.
“How many places on this collection of junk actually have anything we’d call a conference center?” he asked.
“Five,” Jeeves said instantly, gathering everyone’s attention. He shrugged embarrassedly. “Guys, I got busted for arms running the second time I did it. There are only two places a rookie can find enough guns to make arms smuggling worth it.
“I don’t know Junkertown well, but I’ve gone over the publicly available data a few times. The Old Ring”—he tapped the Legatan-style ring station rotating around one of the station’s arms—“is probably the safest, cleanest, most up-to-date section of the station.
“Which, for those who aren’t paying attention, means it’s also the most corrupt and where most of the illegal transshipping is organized through,” he concluded. “The group that owns it call themselves the Parchment Tigers, but they’ve spaced, shot and stabbed enough people that nobody thinks they’re a paper tiger anymore.”
David shook his head with a chuckle.
“You bought guns from them?” he asked.
“Yup,” Jeeves agreed. “They aren’t so much a Blue Star fragment as they were a Blue Star subsidiary, ran their own op but kicked up to Mikhail Azure at the end of the year.”
“So, they’ve got a stake but are detached enough that people will accept them as neutral enough to host,” David noted. “That sounds like a good place to start. I’ll do some poking around the network to see if I can find someone looking for a cargo carrier.”
“If you walk into the Old Ring, you are painting a giant target on your back, boss,” Jeeves said quietly. “It’s orderly because the Tigers keep it that way. If they decide you need to die—and they’re clearly in bed with the Legacy—they have all of the power to make sure you die there.”
“That’s the risk we have to take,” David replied. “We need to either make them be obvious or find them ourselves.”
“What do we do if we find them before they attack?” Skavar asked.
&
nbsp; Red Falcon’s Captain chuckled again.
“Well, in that case, you do keep reminding me that we have boarding torpedoes.”
17
The Old Ring felt almost sterile compared to the rest of Junkertown. Nowhere on the space station was actually dirty, exactly, as even the most casual of those who lived in space relied on the machinery around them to keep them alive.
But Junkertown was a level below most space stations David had visited. There was litter in corners and visible grime on some of the walls. It probably wasn’t to the point where it was causing problems for life support…but there were spots where it was definitely closer than he was comfortable.
The Old Ring, however, was perfectly clean. The type of clean that spoke to hard labor by either humans or robots. The walls and ceilings had been painted a dull white to reduce glare, and the noise of machinery that was present throughout the station calmed to the normal soft hum here.
His escort, the same group he’d taken to meet Integrity, stayed close to him as they moved through the main corridors. The Old Ring was surprisingly empty of people, and what residents they passed quickly removed themselves from the way of the group of armed spacers.
“Shippers’ Guild is on level seven,” Soprano told him. “Stairs are that way.”
David nodded his thanks. Any of them could look up the map, though they were trying to pass specific places as they made their way. That required them to at least look a little lost.
He gestured for his Ship’s Mage to lead the way, keeping his own eyes peeled down each of the side corridors as they traveled.
It was too quiet.
“This is the largest section of Junkertown with gravity,” he said softly. “Where is everyone?”
“Staying inside,” Skavar replied. “And not because of us. We’re too new. Something else has everyone gun-shy.”
“A crime syndicate holding a reunion conference would do that, wouldn’t it?” David agreed. “We’re already watching our backs…but watch them harder, I think.
Mage-Provocateur (Starship's Mage: Red Falcon Book 2) Page 11
