Mercenary Mage - A Dark Space Fantasy (Star Mage Saga Book 4)

by J. J. Green

  Bryce answered. “You’re awake? Did you get enough sleep?”

  “Yes. Is Darius there?”

  “Nope. I thought he was with you.”

  “He isn’t. He went off somewhere while I was in the shower. He could be anywhere!” Carina’s heart was racing.

  “Calm down.”

  “Calm down? He’s six years old.”

  “He can’t have gone far,” said Bryce. “I’ll ask the other kids to look for him.”

  “All right, but tell them to stay in pairs. I don’t want to lose another one.”

  Carina ran into the corridor. Where could her little brother be? What if he’d gone down into the hold? They didn’t know what was down there yet. Foreboding settling over her, she darted back into the room to collect her weapon before setting off to find her young brother.

  He was a smart kid who had experienced more than enough danger for a lifetime. It was out of character for him to wander off alone without telling anyone where he was going. Carina couldn’t think what might have prompted him to leave the suite.

  She opened the first door she came to and scanned the lavish quarters. She spied a couple of backpacks that told her the twins had taken the place for themselves. How typical it was that, despite the extensive accommodation available and their constant bickering, they’d elected to share a cabin.

  But the room was empty.

  “Darius!” Carina shouted as she closed the door. “Darius, where are you?”

  Opening the next door revealed a dining room, set up like a small banquet hall, nothing like any shipboard refectory Carina had ever seen. She took in the long, wooden table and padded, throne-like chairs. It seemed that the Zenobia threw up another puzzle for her at every turn.

  And Darius was not here either.

  Carina left the dining room and ran on. The corridor ended at an elevator. Should she turn around and search the other rooms on that level? Carina guessed that if Darius was nearby he would have heard her calling. She shouted his name again and then, when he didn’t reply, called the elevator and waited for it to arrive.

  When the doors opened, Darius was standing inside.

  “Stars!” Carina exclaimed. “There you are! Where have you been? You frightened me nearly to death.”

  In answer, Darius burst into tears.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” said Carina, hugging him. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  Between sobs, Darius said, “When I woke up I was all alone, so I tried to find you. But I couldn’t so I took the elevator, but I couldn’t remember which way to go or where the bridge was, or…”

  “I was in the shower, that’s all. I didn’t leave you alone. I wouldn’t ever do that. Look, let’s forget about this and go to see the others, okay?”

  Carina told the elevator to take them to the bridge. If Darius had simply done the same he wouldn’t have gotten lost, but maybe he’d been panicking too much or his home on Ithiya hadn’t contained any elevators.

  They walked onto the bridge to find only Bryce there.

  “Hey, Darius,” he said. Then to Carina, “Where did you find him?” His eyes took in her new costume. “And what are you wearing? You look like a bandit.”

  “He was in the elevator,” she replied. “I found some clean clothes in the closet in our room. You should take a look. Maybe it’s time for a style update. Where are the others?”

  “I don’t think they’ve gotten much farther than searching this level. Hold on a minute.” Bryce was sitting in the captain’s chair. He opened the interface on the armrest and leaned over to speak into it. “Comm to all crew. This is your captain speaking. All hands to the bridge immediately.”

  As he spoke, Carina faintly heard his voice echoing in the corridor outside.

  He closed the interface and grinned. “I’ve always wanted to do that. Here, take this.” He tossed her a comm button. “I’d prefer our conversations to be more private.”

  Carina fastened the button to her tunic with an uncomfortable familiarity. She hadn’t worn a comm button since she’d been forced to join the Sherrerr military. How long ago had that been? Only a few months, but so much had happened since then it felt much longer.

  Parthenia, Ferne, Oriana, and Nahla burst into the bridge.

  “Woohoo!” Ferne said. “Here he is. Where did you get to, Darius?”

  “I was looking for Carina.”

  “Ha!” said Ferne. “And she was looking for you.”

  “Right. But now we’re finally all together,” Carina said, “I want to tell you what we’re doing today. First, we have to make plenty of elixir, using the—”

  “Already on it,” said Bryce. “I’ve deactivated the smoke alarm in the captain’s study so the kids can make a fire in there. They were about to start when you comm’d me about Darius.”

  “Oh,” Carina said, feeling somehow deflated. “In that case, after you’ve made some elixir, you can—”

  “Please don’t give us any more chores,” said Oriana. “Making elixir is enough for today. We want to have fun. We haven’t had any fun since the Matching.”

  “Yes,” Ferne said. “We want to explore.”

  Carina hesitated. They were kids, after all. Even Parthenia was only fifteen.

  “Okay,” she relented.

  Ferne and Oriana whooped. Even quiet, reserved Nahla looked pleased.

  “But only after you’ve made ten liters of elixir,” Carina added. She turned to Bryce. “I noticed we seem to have some real wood aboard. That’ll come in handy if we need extra ingredients.”

  She recalled a chore she’d set for herself that day: to find out what was inside the packages in the hold.

  “Can I leave you to supervise the kids for a while?” she asked. “I want to check the cargo.”

  “Sure,” Bryce replied. “But go and eat something first. You’ll be amazed at what you find in the stores.”

  Chapter Five

  Carina took an elevator down to level zero, the hold. The elevator panel also displayed levels minus one and minus two, which housed the engine rooms. She’d taken a brief survey of them during her watch, and she hoped she would have no need to pay a return visit. While she could fly a starship in a pinch she had no idea how to fix a starship’s engine—or any other type of engine for that matter.

  She would have to rely on the Zenobia’s owner keeping her engines well maintained. But if the state of the less visible parts of the ship was anything to go by, that was probably the case. The more Carina saw of the vessel, the more she had the impression that someone wanted it to appear more decrepit to a cursory view than it actually was.

  The hold looked unchanged from when she had Transported into it. She walked to the center and turned a slow circle, surveying the freight the ship was carrying.

  Her comm chirruped.

  “Hey,” Carina answered.

  “I just wanted to check you’re okay,” Bryce said.

  “I’ve only been gone five minutes.”

  “Yeah, but like you said, we don’t know if someone else is aboard the ship.”

  “I said that before I’d searched it,” said Carina. “Now I’m pretty sure we’re the only ones aboard.”

  “Well, I think it would be a good idea to maintain contact while we’re apart. Just in case something bad happens.”

  Carina smiled. “You know, if you keep this up, the kids will talk about us. I already saw Ferne pretending he was going to vomit when he saw us hug the other day.”

  “Let them talk. I don’t care.”

  “Wait, where are you?” Carina asked.

  “On the bridge.”

  “So where are the kids?”

  “They’re here too.”

  “Are they listening to this conversation?”

  “Yup.”

  Peals of laughter and excited giggling came from Carina’s comm button. She smiled again. It was good to hear her siblings being kids again, free from the fear of capture for once, even if the luxury was only temporar
y.

  “They’ve gone off to make elixir now,” said Bryce. “We can talk freely.”

  “I’m not sure if I believe you. Besides, I can’t talk. I need to check out this stuff.”

  “All right, but leave your button on.”

  Carina selected a tall, thin package to open first. She couldn’t guess what it was from the shape. The netting covering it and adjacent packages ran from the floor to the ceiling, where it hung over hooks. Carina debated climbing up to unfasten it but she didn’t want to risk falling. A Heal Cast might quickly fix her broken bones but she would rather not break them in the first place. Perhaps she should Cast Rise on each section of net where it was attached to a hook.

  She wondered how the netting had been fixed up there. It didn’t seem possible without gymnastics that she was confident were beyond the capabilities of the average cargo handlers.

  Suddenly the answer came to her. She scanned the room again. It had to be here somewhere, unless the handlers took it away when they left. Carina peered into a corner obscured by boxes. There it was: a cargo mech. The machine looked like it had seen better days. Its paint was chipped and its grips worn. Something else to give the impression the Zenobia was less upmarket than she was.

  As Carina climbed into the machine, scenes of the Mech Battle event on Ostillon came back to her. What a night that had been, and what a finale, when the Sherrerrs had rained down hell on the Dirksen planet.

  She started up the mech and grasped the manipulators, giving the grips a few turns to get the feel of them.

  “What’s that?” said Bryce.

  Carina jumped a little. She’d forgotten he was listening in.

  “Just a cargo mech,” she replied.

  “Ah, okay. Don’t get into any fights in it.”

  “Har har.”

  Carina walked the mech out to the center of the bay and over to the netting that held the tall, thin parcel. She extended the grips all the way up to the ceiling and used the fine tips to lift the netting off the hooks. The thick, knotted ropes fell down, and, released from pressure, the tall package slipped to one side. Carina grasped it and laid it on the floor before turning off the mech and jumping down.

  The wrapping was white and fibrous. Carina rolled the package over, looking for a label or anything that might tell her what was inside, but she found nothing. She took out her knife and cut a long slit. The wrapping was several layers deep and one of the layers was different from the others—a dense material flecked with metallic elements. Something to deflect or confuse scanning waves?

  Carina paused. Did the package contain contraband? And if so, what kind? The first thing that sprang to mind was explosives, or perhaps the package contained a weapon. It would be a very unusual weapon. Despite digging down through five or six layers of wrapping the object inside still felt soft to the touch. Explosives could be soft but she’d never seen them packaged in such an odd way.

  She proceeded with more care. To avoid further poking and prodding, she cut across each end of the slit and then peeled back one side. A final layer of the white material lay between her and the package’s contents. She pushed in the knife tip and gently drew it along the edges of the space she’d created.

  “You’re awfully quiet,” said Bryce.

  Carina nearly leapt out of her skin. “Stars, do you have to keep doing that?”

  “Sorry. Just checking in.”

  “Look, I’m going to turn off my button. I’ll let you know if I find anything interesting.” She closed the comm.

  Carina put down her knife and lifted the corner of the layer she’d cut. Underneath it lay a dark blue substance decorated with orange swirls. She ran her fingertips along the surface. It felt exactly like…a rug.

  She cut away at the wrapping, exposing more of the interior. The swirling pattern continued to spread out over the dark blue background.

  A freaking rug! And she’d been worried it might be explosives.

  The rug was probably a cultural artifact prohibited from export or perhaps it contained a substance banned from use in manufacturing. She knew that applied to some dyes made from poisonous plants.

  Or maybe the rug wasn’t the contraband. Was it hiding something more illegal?

  She cut off the remainder of the wrapping and rolled the rug out on the floor of the hold. Nothing was hidden inside it, though that didn’t mean it wasn’t hiding anything. She’d heard of smugglers soaking materials with banned pharmaceuticals in order to sneak them through customs. She bent down and sniffed the rug but she couldn’t detect anything unusual in its scent. It smelled old which probably meant her initial guess that it was a cultural artifact was correct.

  Carina sat back on her heels and looked around at the other parcels stored in the hold, wondering what interesting items they might contain.

  She rose to her feet. It was time to find out.

  ***

  A couple of hours later, Carina was surrounded by opened packages. She’d discovered animal parts, both dried and bottled; jewelry; paintings; ornate furniture; technology she didn’t recognize; and a host of other eclectic items. More importantly, stashed inside some she’d also found pills and powders she guessed were illegal drugs. This was not the baggage of a rich family traveling between the stars. The Zenobia belonged to a smuggler.

  Carina had no strong feelings one way or the other about smuggling. In the past she’d even contemplated joining the trade to get herself out of a tight spot. Trading in stolen and illicit items probably wasn’t the most moral activity, but people like the Dirksens and Sherrerrs did far worse things. Smugglers were only trying to make a living, not subjugate entire populations to their will.

  But the revelation posed a serious problem. The Zenobia’s owner was not a local businessman, who would report the ship’s theft to the authorities and just claim on the insurance. This ship and her contents probably represented a significant portion of her owner’s wealth, and there might not be insurance to claim. The smuggler would be furious at the loss of the vessel and its precious cargo. He or she would stop at nothing to get it back and punish the thieves who had taken it. What was more, the ship was probably fitted with a powerful tracking beacon for the exact eventuality that had befallen it.

  Carina comm’d Bryce.

  “You’re talking to me again?” he asked.

  “I think we may be in trouble.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Are the kids there?” she asked, suddenly remembering their earlier conversation.

  “No. They’re all gone. They made the elixir and then they went off to explore. What kind of trouble?”

  “The big kind. I found—”

  The chatter of excited voices came over the comm. The children had returned to the bridge and they were talking over each other, trying to be the first to tell Bryce something. Carina couldn’t make any sense out of their babble.

  “Quiet down,” she heard Bryce say, followed by, “Parthenia, tell me what this is about.”

  Carina heard her sister say in a soft, serious tone: “We think someone else is aboard the ship.”

  Chapter Six

  “Someone did move it!” Ferne exclaimed. “They did!”

  Carina was skeptical. The children’s claim that they’d spotted signs of a stowaway was turning out to be less than reliable. Bryce had remained on the bridge so she wasn’t sure how much he knew regarding the evidence for their assertion.

  “I put it in the corner,” said Ferne, “but now it’s next to my bed.”

  Carina looked at the object of contention. The backpack’s appearance was no different from the last time she’d seen it. Why would an intruder bother to move an old, weather-stained bag from one side of a room to another? It made no sense.

  “It’s true,” Oriana added, her arms folded to convey her earnestness. “He definitely put it in the corner. I saw him. And when we came back after making the elixir it had moved.”

  Ferne and Oriana had picked a suite with twin beds for
themselves. The room was similarly opulent to Carina and Bryce’s, though a little smaller.

  Carina surveyed the room. She was surprised her brother and sister could tell the place was any different from how they’d left it that morning. They’d discovered the hidden wardrobe and seemed to have transferred most of its contents to the floor and bed. The door to their en suite. stood open, and the mess inside was just as bad.

  “All right,” said Carina. “Let’s say we accept that your backpack mysteriously ended up in a different place from where you put it. Did you check inside? Is anything missing?”

  “I had a quick look,” Ferne replied. “But everything seemed to be there.”

  Carina restrained herself from rolling her eyes. If a stowaway were aboard ship it was a serious matter. She had to investigate the possibility thoroughly before she dismissed it.

  “If you want me to explain why they moved it, I can’t,” Ferne said, his cheeks coloring. “But I’m one hundred percent positive it was moved, and Oriana agrees with me.”

  “That isn’t the only thing, Carina,” said Parthenia.

  Carina turned toward her sister. At fifteen years old, she was a more convincing witness than the others.

  “Did something move in your room too?” Carina asked.

  “No, but…” Parthenia glanced at Nahla, who hung her head. Then the teen looked back at her older sister.

  “Can I show you?”

  “Sure,” Carina said. “Lead the way.”

  Parthenia went ahead and the group passed several doors in the corridor. Eighteen or twenty passengers could live aboard the Zenobia comfortably. Parthenia stopped at a door like all the others.

  “Ferne and Oriana have to stay out,” Nahla said in an uncharacteristically forceful tone.

  Little Nahla, only a couple of years older than Darius and the only non-mage of the siblings, was usually also the quietest and most self-effacing.

  Oriana raised her eyebrows at her twin, who shrugged. “Okay. We won’t come in.”

  “What about me?” Darius asked.

  “You wait outside too,” said Nahla.