Mage-Provocateur

by Glynn Stewart

“Three floors, straight down,” she told the Marines. “We’ll come out just up the corridor from the water tanks. Not sure where our friends will have settled in.”

  “LaMonte, Skavar, Kelzin,” Rice’s voice cut in. “We’re going to broadcast a surrender demand and try to get prisoners that way, and these guys are almost certainly going to try and cut their losses at some point—these aren’t suicide bombers.

  “Most likely, they’re going to try to run. We want them alive if we can, but don’t take any risks.”

  “Yes, sir,” Kelly chirped, following Skavar and his Marines down the ladder. Without gravity, they were walking along the wall of its tube rather than using the rungs themselves.

  A moment later, the broadband transmission from Red Falcon overwhelmed everyone’s radio.

  “Unidentified stowaways, this is Captain David Rice of the merchant ship Red Falcon. You have illegally boarded my cargo and fired on my crew.

  “If you continue to resist, my people will use whatever force is necessary to bring you down and secure our cargo. If you surrender, I will see you peacefully delivered to Protectorate authorities.

  “This offer is limited. If you keep shooting, it will expire damn quickly.

  “Rice out.”

  Kelly and Skavar’s team paused by the exit onto the lowest level for several seconds.

  “Hey, Spiros, did anyone stop shooting?” Skavar asked, his voice falsely light.

  “No,” the Corporal said flatly. “In fact, I think they found a second penetrator rifle. Chau’s got a flesh wound, nothing serious after the suit sealed it up, but they’re getting closer. I’d love that flanking maneuver anytime now.”

  “Coming right up,” he replied, nodding to Kelly.

  The engineer plugged in the code and overrode the door, leaving space for the exosuited troopers to charge through before her and take any unexpected fire.

  There was none.

  “Okay, what now?” Skavar said to her.

  “That way”—she pointed—“is the water tanks, where I suspect we’ll find an emergency hab-bubble with attached heat sinks suspended in a water level that shouldn’t be there at all.

  “Their ship is probably further in that direction.”

  “That way”—she gestured in the opposite direction—“is where the buggers are shooting up your people at the elevator shaft.”

  The Marine considered the situation for all of about three seconds.

  “Sergeant Weaver, take your Charlie fire team and stick with the XO,” he snapped. “Check out the water tanks.

  “Everyone else is with me. We have a counter-ambush to arrange.”

  Kelly wasn’t even sure which of the blank-faced armored form was Sergeant Cho Weaver, but the Marines clearly knew. Moments after Skavar had given his orders, half of the Marines were leaving with the Security Chief and half were gathered around her.

  “Where to, ma’am?” Weaver asked.

  “Down that hall,” Kelly ordered, repeating her gesture.

  “All right. Stay behind us,” the Sergeant instructed. “I’m not explaining to the Captain how you got hurt.”

  “I have no desire to get hurt,” Kelly agreed, letting the four hulking suits of battle armor cut ahead of her. “Mike, do you have their ship yet?”

  “We’re running the data back to Falcon’s computers,” the pilot replied. “Give me a moment… Yes.

  “Yes, we have their ship,” he confirmed. “Gods, that thing is tiny. Are we sure it can jump?”

  “They wouldn’t have brought it with them if it couldn’t,” she replied grimly. “Captain Rice? Skipper? I think this is your call.”

  “Can you disable their escape ship without harming the cargo?” Rice asked.

  Kelzin sucked in a breath.

  “I can’t,” he admitted after a moment. “But, as it happens, Sergeant Davis happened to sneak onto my shuttle on the way out, and she happens to be fully qualified on this bird’s weapons. Sergeant?”

  Silent seconds.

  “Seventy-thirty,” the woman finally said. “No guarantees unless they actually launch. Precision is all fine and dandy, but a thirty-millimeter slug at three thousand kilometers a second doesn’t leave any room for error.”

  “Hold fire,” Rice ordered with a sigh. “If they do launch, summon them to surrender once.

  “Then blow them to hell.”

  The open emergency access hatch for the water reserve tank was almost a relief to Kelly. She’d have been thoroughly upset with herself if she’d led the Marines here and there hadn’t been anything hidden in the water tank.

  “Stand back,” Weaver told her. “Okafor, sweep ahead.”

  The indicated Marine moved up to the hatch, checking through it with the tip of his weapon first.

  “Tank looks about a quarter-full,” he reported. “Some kind of transparent tube attached to the other side of the hatch, running down into the water. Think I see an airlock at the other end.” He paused. “Cheap plastic airlock.”

  “Like I said, hab bubble,” Kelly agreed. “Submersed in water with added heat sinks, it wouldn’t show up at all on our thermal scanners. Clever bastards.”

  “Pretty fragile, though,” Weaver concluded. “Depending on where we shoot it, they could drown, asphyxiate, freeze…or all three. Not much resistance they could put up.”

  “No. I suggest we ask for surrenders?”

  She couldn’t see Weaver’s nod, but the exosuit gestured for Okafor to continue. The Marine turned off his mag-boots and launched himself down the tube to slam into the airlock. A speaker attachment connected to the airlock and Okafor barked orders through it.

  They waited.

  “No response, Sergeant,” the Marine told them after a minute. “From this range, I think I’ve got a clean thermal reading…it’s showing the bubble as empty.”

  “If they’re moving out, that makes sense,” Weaver noted. “Damn.”

  The Sergeant’s faceless helmet turned to Kelly for a moment.

  “Punch through,” she ordered briskly. “If the bubble’s clear, we need to know, and if they’re playing games…fuck ’em.”

  Exosuits had originally been built as protective hard shells for hazardous-environment workers. Their weight had required additional muscle augmentation, which had only been added to when the design had been coopted as powered combat armor.

  The hab bubble’s flimsy airlock didn’t survive Okafor’s first attempt to open it up, the trooper’s two-meter-tall ceramic war suit ripping through the exterior shell like paper.

  “Yeah,” he said flatly a moment later. “Empty. Not super-comfortable, even, but at least we have some intel out of this.

  “There are eight bedrolls, that gives us a likely minimum if not a max.”

  “That’s more than we knew a moment ago,” Weaver agreed. “Pull back out, I think we need to head to the ship.”

  “Agreed,” Kelly said, running through the map on her comp. “Based off Kelzin’s locator, the best way is that way.” She pointed.

  “All right, folks, our would-be ambushers have surrendered,” Skavar cut in. “We’ve got two more dead and two prisoners. No Mage. I don’t suppose you got them?”

  “There’s nobody here,” Kelly told him. “They abandoned the bubble. There was only beds for eight, though.”

  “And if they were staying in the bubble and keeping exertions minimal, they weren’t hot-bunking,” Skavar agreed. “So, we’re missing two, including the Mage.”

  “They’ve got to be headed for the ship,” Kelly replied. “Cut and run is their best option at this point.”

  “Can you get there first?”

  She looked at Weaver and then at her map.

  “Depends on when they started moving,” she admitted. “But we can get there quickly.”

  “Good enough. Keep following the XO, Weaver.”

  The boarder’s Mage had to have started running for the escape ship as soon as she’d realized there were exosuits in the security t
eam. Kelly and her team were barely halfway to where she guessed it was docked when Kelzin cut into the channel again.

  “Uh-oh. I’ve got fusion plant ignition on the ship.” She could almost hear him shake his head. “No other heat signatures, it’s got to be freezing in there, but she’s booting up fast.”

  “How fast?” Rice demanded.

  Kelly ran the numbers in her head. From a cold start, their regular shuttles could be live in ten minutes, but the assault shuttles…

  “Ninety seconds, tops,” she told them. “She’s supposed to be a fast-escape ship; she’ll use the same rapid-boost tech as the assault shuttles. She’ll have power and engines in under ninety seconds. Life support and guns will be later, but she’ll move and she can jump as soon as the Mage is at the simulacrum.”

  “A ship that small…she’s already at the simulacrum,” Rice said grimly. “Maria—can she jump still attached to the cargo?”

  “No,” the Ship’s Mage replied instantly. “The spell would try and jump everything attached to the ship. It won’t work without the runes being specifically designed to encompass a cargo space.

  “She’ll need to get…fifty, maybe a hundred meters clear.”

  That wasn’t a lot of time. Kelly wasn’t the only one thinking that.

  “Transmitting a warning now,” Kelzin said grimly. “The moment they bounce clear, we’re going to shoot them down.”

  “Do it,” Rice ordered grimly.

  Kelly slowed, carefully locking her mag-boots to the ground. Whatever happened now, there was no point in her team rushing through the station segment.

  “Looks like a sixty-second boot time,” the pilot continued. “That’s better than our assault shuttles… No response to our warning.

  “She’s moving. Take the shot, Davis!”

  There was no sound audible from inside the station. Nothing to mark the moment when an assault shuttle fired railgun rounds at one percent of the speed of light. Just…silence.

  “Clean hits,” Kelzin reported after a moment. “She’s breaking up.”

  “Move in and sweep for survivors,” Rice ordered. “Skavar, sweep the station segment for any other stowaways and police up debris and corpses.

  “XO?”

  “Yes, sir?” Kelly replied carefully.

  “Well done. Now get the hell back aboard Red Falcon.”

  9

  “I’m sorry, what happened en route?” the woman on the screen demanded.

  “It appears, Ms. Lauren, that one of Cobalt’s competitors hired mercenaries to attempt to render the smelter components nonfunctional in transit,” David told her calmly.

  From the way Avril Lauren, Cobalt Interstellar Element’s System Executive Officer for Desdemona, whitened at his description, he might well have underestimated the impact on Cobalt if the station implementation was delayed.

  Lauren was pale-skinned to begin with, the sallow tones of someone who spent most of their life under artificial light aboard space stations and starships, and her black hair had glittering streaks of silver in it. There was no give in her ice-blue eyes, however, and fear promptly turned to determination.

  “I presume you do not know who?”

  “We do not,” David admitted. “We did, however, take two prisoners. We don’t have jurisdiction to interrogate them, but Desdemona Security…”

  “Most definitely does,” Lauren finished for him in a satisfied tone. “Please forward DesSec and my own staff everything you have on the incident, Captain. Was there any damage to the cargo?”

  “So far as my Chief Engineer and XO can tell, all components are intact. Obviously, we can’t confirm or guarantee functionality, but we haven’t located any damage.”

  “Thank deity,” she breathed. “I will be frank, Captain Rice: this shipment has been a nightmare from the beginning, and I’m already dreading our activation delays. My copy of the contract says you were owed a bonus for rapid delivery, which you have made despite the interferences.”

  She smiled.

  “We’ll have to wait for the final dockyard approval that everything is on hand, but I’m happy to confirm that the delivery bonus has been secured. When can we expect you in Puck orbit?”

  Puck had been the Desdemona System’s fourth planet, a shattered world that some unimaginable disaster had split in six pieces that still shared roughly the same orbit. The exposed planetary core was why Cobalt was there at all.

  The wreck was actually in the Goldilocks zone, and Puck might have been inhabitable before it had split apart. The fifth planet, Beatrice, was a cold planet in the middle of an ice age, but its equatorial regions were surprisingly warm and welcoming to the folks who’d settled there.

  “About seven hours,” he told her. “I’ll contact DesSec and make sure they have a contingent ready to collect our prisoners upon arrival.”

  “I appreciate it, Captain. You’ve done Cobalt some massive favors that weren’t in your contract, and I promise you, you will be compensated for them,” she assured him.

  “I’m not going to argue,” David replied with a smile. “But believe me, Ms. Lauren, nobody likes armed stowaways shooting at their crew.”

  She was about to disconnect but paused at that.

  “Were any of your crew injured?” she asked. “Can we provide assistance?”

  “A few injuries, nothing severe,” he replied, surprised and heartened at her concern. “Our ship’s doctor has everything under control.”

  “Good, good. If your doctor requires any assistance or resources, do not hesitate to ask,” she told him. “Cobalt is in your debt, and not all liabilities can be settled with cash.”

  Maneuvering through the debris fields around Puck was not an exercise for the faint of heart. It couldn’t be left entirely to the computers—the administration tracked the vast majority of the objects floating around the wrecked planet, but there were always items that wouldn’t be picked up until the last moment.

  An even tougher exercise, in David Rice’s opinion, was watching your brand-new XO, who you knew was a mediocre pilot at best, maneuver through those debris fields. LaMonte was utterly focused on her controls and the proximity radar, guiding the massive freighter in toward the main transshipment platform.

  David could take control back, but only if he wanted to undermine his XO’s self-confidence. LaMonte had taken seeing people shot to death in front of her better than he’d been afraid she would, but she was still shaken.

  With all of her attention on flying the ship, however, that seemed forgotten for the moment.

  An incoming call pinged and he redirected it from LaMonte’s console with practiced ease. The whole point was that she didn’t need distractions.

  “This is Red Falcon, Captain Rice commanding,” he answered briskly.

  “Red Falcon, this is the Desdemona Security ship Ravine. We are approaching from your forty-five by sixty-two and matching velocities. Any problems with your prisoners?”

  “My crew have a few sets of surplus RMMC exosuits,” David told the man on the other end. “The prisoners seem thoroughly cowed.”

  Ravine’s com officer chuckled as David checked their location.

  There she was, exactly where they’d said. A hundred-meter-long flattened beetle shape, Ravine was a pretty standard system security corvette. Red Falcon could eat the ship’s entire offensive armament without noticing and obliterate her in a single return salvo.

  Though David probably shouldn’t be considering how to engage the local police spaceship.

  “That’s about where I’d be in their place,” the officer agreed. “There’s a Lieutenant Soun waiting for you at dock six on Midsummer Station with a security team. We’ll take them into custody and we’ll find out what’s going on.”

  “I think Cobalt will appreciate that,” David replied, tapping a message over to LaMonte to give her their exact destination. “Are we clear all the way in?”

  “You’re clear to dock six,” Ravine confirmed. “We’ll fly escort a
ll the way in. Our bosses are twitchy over corporate mercenaries here.

  “Plus, well, armed megafreighters,” he noted.

  “I understand, Ravine. We’ll play nice.”

  Once LaMonte had docked the ship, David joined Maria and Skavar in the main docking tube, leaving the ship in her capable hands. Despite his nerves, his XO had cut through Puck’s danger zone with calm professionalism…and if her free hand had left potentially permanent indentations in her chair arm, it would be unfitting for him to notice.

  The two mercenaries looked far less intimidating in the standard ill-fitting orange jumpsuits most ships kept on hand for unexpected brig inmates. Both were tall men with shaved heads, but much of their bulk had clearly been the coolant-laden stealth suits they’d worn.

  With an exosuited escort apiece, they were being perfectly cooperative, too. Maria’s arrival earned more askance looks as they noted the gold medallion at her throat that marked her as a trained Mage.

  “Any problems with our guests?” David asked Skavar as he reached his security chief.

  “None,” the taller man said cheerfully. “It’s amazing how cooperative people become when you’re the ones with exosuits and stunguns…and they aren’t.”

  David was sure he’d heard one of the mercs choke at that, but he smiled silently himself.

  “We should be meeting a Lieutenant Soun to take them off our hands,” he told his Chief. “So, you guys can go back to being glorified mall cops.”

  “I look forward to it,” Skavar agreed, shifting to clear access to his holster as the indicator lights flicked to green to show atmosphere on the other side of the tube. “I’m told being a mall cop is nice.”

  The door slid open before he finished speaking, revealing a relatively open entryway for passengers to board the station. A clearly marked zone down the middle of the corridor had gravity runes, but most of the dock was zero gee.

  Half a dozen cops in burgundy body armor were in the zero-gee section, locked to the metal floor with mag-boots and holding stunguns at the ready.

  A seventh officer stood in the gravity zone in the same body armor. The man had removed his helmet and holstered his weapon, but his eyes were suspicious as he studied David and his companions.