“Which, of course, we can’t possibly use to target the missiles or battle lasers,” Soprano replied dryly.
Kelly chuckled and gestured to Jeeves.
“Guns? I think that one is yours.”
“Junkertown itself is basically unarmed,” the Third Officer pointed out. “I don’t think any of us actually want to be pointing guns at it, pissed as we all are. With the defensive radar going, I could certainly drop missiles into it and vaporize large chunks of the station, but nothing is overtly prepped for that.
“These six ships, on the other hand, are docked with the Old Ring and have power signatures that suggest they could be armed,” he continued. “And while I’m using the turret radar…yeah, I doubt any of them missed us rotating the ship to align the battle lasers on them.”
Kelly smiled.
“For some reason, they haven’t so much as twitched.”
“Good,” Soprano replied. “Any news on David?”
Kelly’s smile faded as she shook her head.
“Gupta’s been in with him for over half an hour,” she said in a small voice. “That means he’s still with us, but…”
“Gupta is a fantastic doctor,” Soprano told her gently. “If anyone can save David, it’s him.”
“We walked into this, hard.”
“We did,” the Ship’s Mage agreed grimly. “That was the plan, but we misestimated our enemy. They’d been paying attention to how many guns we’d been swanning around with and went for a solution that negated all of that.
“If the sniper had been more experienced with distance shots in a pseudogravity environment, David would be gone already. These fuckers are good and we need to not let ourselves forget that.”
Kelly looked at the screen showing Junkertown.
“Do you think we dragged them out into the open enough?”
“We won’t know anytime soon,” Soprano admitted. “Could be weeks.”
“What do we do now?”
“What we did before we were MISS, I guess,” the Mage said. “We find a cargo, we keep moving.
“We make sure the Captain doesn’t die.”
20
“He’ll live.”
Dr. Jaidev Gupta looked exhausted as he stripped off his gloves and looked frankly at the three officers standing in his waiting room.
“That’s about as good as the news gets,” he continued. “Right now, Captain Rice is in a medically-induced coma and hooked up to a ventilator, replacing the function of his left lung. He’s lost about a meter of his intestines, though that injury is otherwise repaired and the long-term consequences pale in comparison to the rest.
“His left leg is gone about halfway down the thigh, and his right shoulder is shattered.”
Gupta shook his head.
“I’ve pieced together the fragments of his shoulder and have them in a recon matrix. That will heal. The leg and the lung…” He sighed.
“The lung will need to be replaced. Cybernetic or vat-grown, it doesn’t really matter. The leg will need a cybernetic.
“Obviously, I don’t keep cybernetic lungs and legs on hand,” the doctor concluded. “I have the skillset and gear for implantation, but we would need to acquire the parts. I can grow the Captain a new lung, though it will take time, and he can survive with only one once the initial injury has healed.
“Junkertown would have the cybernetics we need,” Gupta told them. “So would the Legatans if we decided to dock there instead. In the absence of those replacements…”
He shrugged.
“I’ll be able to bring him out of the coma in about thirty-six hours, at which point he’ll be off the ventilator but completely unable to use his right arm for about another week. It will take me two months to grow him a cloned lung, or a single overnight surgery to install a cybernetic replacement.
“Same surgery time for the leg, though we have to buy the part. Until we have the replacement limb, however, he’ll be wheelchair- or zero-gee-bound.”
Maria sighed.
“I don’t want to make the decision on cybernetic or regrown for him,” she said. “If he’ll be conscious in a few days, we’ll want to hold off until then.”
Gupta nodded.
“That would be my preference as well, obviously,” he told them. “Even in the case of the leg, where cybernetic is the only replacement option, I would prefer to go over the potential options with the Captain before acquiring the part. Even if the selection here is limited, I would prefer to wait to install a limb that met his requirements than install hardware that didn’t.”
Hardware.
Maria sighed. She hated that word when it came to replacement human parts. Most cybernetics were good enough that no one could tell the difference—and she’d met Legatan Augments who were something like ninety percent machinery by body mass and could pass for unmodified if you didn’t know what to look for.
“Keep us informed, Doctor,” she told him, then looked around at the other officers.
“For now, I’m acting captain unless one of you or Kellers has an issue?” she said.
Jeeves looked terrified at the thought of arguing, and LaMonte just laughed.
“I don’t feel qualified to be XO, let alone Captain,” the younger woman told her. “I’m behind you.”
“Good. Because thirty-six hours is too long for us to just sit here, orbiting Junkertown and looking threatening. We need to find a cargo to get us out of this godforsaken system.”
“Well, let’s see if that broker at the Shippers’ Guild is willing to talk to us still,” LaMonte suggested. “I doubt she knew it was a trap, after all.”
“And if she did?” Jeeves asked.
“Then I doubt she’ll take Mage Soprano’s calls!”
“Ma’am…ma’ams…officers.” Skavar found them right outside the clinic, stumbling over his words. The security chief looked…afraid?
“You need to hear this,” he told them.
“What is it?” Maria asked.
“The news.”
Skavar hit a button on his wrist-comp and the audio starting playing again, an unfamiliar jingle ringing in Red Falcon’s plain corridors.
“…those just joining us, this is Junkertown Stationwide News, coming to you every hour of every day until this shithole falls apart.
“To repeat and bring everyone up to speed, we appear to have a follow-up to yesterday’s gunfight in the Old Ring.
“Now, folks, this is Junkertown and we are not strangers to the odd murder or gang violence, but yesterday was something else entirely…and today is something completely new.
“What passes for authorities in the Old Ring tried to keep our reporters out, but they’ve hauled too many bodies out of the Vesuvius Hotel to hide it now, and they’ve let our Jorge Daniels onto the scene.”
A new voice came on.
“This is Jorge Daniels, for JSN, from inside the Vesuvius Hotel in the Old Ring,” the new speaker introduced himself, swallowing after speaking to try and gain some level of calm. “It is…a slaughterhouse in here. The Tigers aren’t talking as to what they know or what the cameras saw, but I’m standing in the lobby and I can see…eight, nine bodies they haven’t got to yet.
“Cut up, shot down, dead. Like discarded toys…” There was the distinctive sound of someone about to throw up, and the sound cut back to the first speaker.
“As Daniels said, we don’t have a lot of information beyond that the Vesuvius Hotel appears to have been the scene of a massacre unparalleled in Junkertown history. What JSN has confirmed is that Parchment Tiger Blue Dragon Antonio Lawrence was in the hotel and has been removed…in pieces.
“No one is quite sure who was present in the building or why one of the Tigers’ top leadership was there, but from the images Daniels has sent back, there was some kind of meeting or conference going on…and someone decided to end—”
Skavar turned off the channel.
“They started talking about it fifteen minutes ago,” he told Red Falc
on’s senior officers. “I’d say the Vesuvius was hosting the conference we were looking for.”
“Was being the operative word,” Maria replied, shaking her head. “I doubt anyone is going to weep for a bunch of gang lords, but…damn. That’s a lot of dead people with a lot of money and power behind them.
“I certainly wouldn’t have picked that fight.”
“Whoever did this either didn’t expect to be traced or is backed by enough firepower that they have no fear of Blue Star’s successors,” Jeeves said quietly. “The only group that comes to mind for that is…well…MISS.
“Us.”
The word hung in the room like a stone for several moments, but then Maria shook her head.
“That’s not MISS’s style,” she said. “Use them as stalking horses? Sure, that was the plan—but we had agents in place to try and follow everyone home, use the conference as a center point to bring down all of the successor syndicates.
“If we were going to crush the conference, we’d do it with Marines and stunners and mass public arrests,” she continued. “No, I don’t think this was Mars—if only because I know what MISS’s plan for this mess was.”
“What about the other syndicates?” LaMonte asked. “I know we dealt the Mafia a blow helping take down Darkport, but last I heard, Julian Falcone had been broken out of prison. And they’re not the only ones out there.”
“No, they’re not,” Maria agreed. “The Blue Star Syndicate absorbed a dozen lesser crime organizations to get to its size and made a lot of enemies along the way. There are a lot of people out there who wouldn’t want it rebuilt—and many of them are ruthless enough to massacre an entire hotel to make sure it didn’t happen.”
Most of them would probably have gone in for bombs, in her experience, but that didn’t mean there weren’t groups that would have sent in thugs with knives as a matter of style.
“We don’t have enough data, and frankly, it’s not our problem now,” she told the rest of them. “We keep our ears to the ground and we find a cargo and we get out of this system before someone decides to start trying to chop us up.”
She shook her head as the others shivered.
“We’re a target as long as we’re here,” she concluded. “If we don’t find a cargo in the next twenty-four hours, we get the hell out of Snap regardless.
“Unless we’re loading cargo, the Captain does not wake up in this star system!”
Back in her office, Maria took several moments to simply rest her face in her hands and breathe. She couldn’t think of anything she could have done differently—beyond not letting the Captain trawl himself out as bait—but she couldn’t help feel responsible.
Maintaining the shield for the entire trip would have been impossible; at her best, she could only hold a defensive screen for about thirty minutes—and that time dropped dramatically if she was moving it.
Maybe if she’d got it up faster…but that was borrowing trouble. She could easily what-if her way into paralysis, and she had an entire starship to take care of.
Pouring herself a coffee, she focused and brought up the file Rice had put together on the broker they were talking to. She had contacts throughout Junkrat and even on Flytrap itself. If anyone could find them cargo, it would be her.
When she punched in the number, however, it connected instantly…and not to the broker she’d been calling.
Her screen now showed her what looked like a mid-tier hotel room, the camera looking down from a wallscreen across a row of empty bottles at a cross-legged man in a kimono with his eyes closed.
“I’m sorry, I think this is—”
“You entered the correct number, Mage Soprano,” the stranger told her. Something in his build and stance warned her that this wasn’t a man to take lightly. His scalp was shaved clean, with specks of dark stubble across it, and the kimono was tight across shoulder muscles that might have been distracting for Maria in other circumstances.
“You have the advantage of me,” she told him. “Not least in hacking my communications.”
A small smile flitted across the man’s face.
“I didn’t hack your communications, Mage Soprano,” he noted. “I hacked the Shippers’ Guild’s communications. Red Falcon’s systems defeated my people. I am…impressed.”
“All right, so you’re showing off,” she said sharply. “Who are you?”
“You don’t need to know my actual name,” he replied. “It’s better for everyone if you don’t. You can call me Blade.”
“‘Blade’,” Maria echoed sardonically. “Is that supposed to be intimidating?”
“No,” Blade said shortly. “I find I rarely need to attempt to be intimidating. You can call me Agent Blade, if you prefer. I work for the Legatus Military Intelligence Directorate, and I owe you a small thank-you.”
Maria managed to hide a shiver. Sussing out more of LMID’s operations was part of Red Falcon’s mandate, but she hadn’t been expecting to have an LMID agent simply…open communications with them.
“A thank-you?” she asked carefully.
“We’d been using the Parchment Tigers as a window into the operations of the Blue Star Syndicate’s leftovers for a while, but we missed the Azure Legacy using them as hosts for their little reunion conference.
“Legatus finds the fragmented syndicates far too useful to allow Blue Star to reform. Measures had to be taken, and we wouldn’t have known if your presence hadn’t brought the Legacy into the open.
“So, again, thank you.”
That had not been an expected result of poking Legacy with a stick. Maria made the connection between the name he’d given her and the description of the bodies in the Vesuvius as “cut up.”
“You could have sent flowers,” she said drily.
“I could,” he agreed. “Or money. Money always seems to go over well with private contractors. As it happens, however, I think we can both be of use to each other still.”
Maria hesitated, then sighed.
“I’m listening, Agent Blade.”
“Azure Legacy wants to destroy you,” Blade said calmly. “For various reasons, LMID wants Azure Legacy destroyed. We share an enemy, and you possess a resource I do not: a jump-ship.”
“You need transportation,” she said slowly.
“I and ten others, mostly Augments, need to reach the Atlatl System,” he confirmed. “We are quite capable of keeping to ourselves, Mage Soprano, and I assure you we will cause no trouble.
“My team are not counter-Mage enforcers like the Augments in Legatus,” he continued. “Indeed, the non-Augment member of my team is a Mage, though not a Jump Mage.”
“And other than striking at a common enemy, what do we get out of this?” Maria asked.
He smiled, opening his eyes for the first time. There was no question in Maria’s mind that this man was an Augment, but he didn’t have the square eyes typical of them. He was clearly one of the infiltration models MISS was quite certain existed but had no proof of.
No proof of until now, anyway.
Blade’s eyes were actually quite pretty, she noted absently, a sparkling warm green that contrasted sharply with his flat expression—and the fact she was quite certain he’d personally cut up half a hotel in the last twenty-four hours.
“As I said, money always seems to go over well,” he noted. “There is a cargo destined for Atlatl that is waiting for an Integrity Galactic freighter that is scheduled to arrive in a few days.
“I will arrange for that cargo to be carried on Red Falcon. You will be paid above-market rates for rapid delivery and to carry twelve extra persons alongside the cargo.
“Is this sufficient, Mage Soprano? More can be arranged, but this would be the cleanest method of compensation.”
“I will need to consult with my Captain,” Maria replied.
“Please, Mage Soprano, I don’t know how long David Rice will be out of affairs, but I know you are acting Captain,” Blade pointed out. “The call is yours. There is only
so much time to work with.”
“I will need to consult with my other officers, then,” she told him. “I will not make the decision on the spur of the moment, Agent Blade.”
He smiled.
“Fair, Mage Soprano. The number you have will continue to reach me for some time longer. We will speak again.”
He didn’t move or touch a control, but the screen cut to black, and Maria exhaled a long sigh.
This was not making life simpler.
21
“So, that’s LMID’s offer,” Maria summarized to her small audience. In a normal ship, the Chief of Security didn’t really have a role in this kind of decision. They were often an unofficial “Fifth Officer”, but since they weren’t Mate-certified or Mages, they didn’t usually get a vote.
Since Red Falcon wasn’t really a civilian freighter anymore, however, the man in charge of the Marines who pretended to be her security detail at least got to sit in the meetings.
Part of that, Maria reflected, was that with the Captain out of commission, they were running sorely short on experienced senior officers. Kellers was a solid, competent engineer, but he didn’t want to be in charge.
Jeeves was an oddity, unused to his current role though doing well as a department head and experienced in general. LaMonte was still inexperienced, learning her job—though proving to be damn good at it.
But the five of them felt…lacking in something that David Rice had. Confidence forged by years of experience, knowledge…something like that, Maria reflected.
“We need a cargo,” LaMonte finally concluded. “There aren’t many to be had in this system that are worth us hauling. And they’re right that we share an enemy.”
“There’s a certain value in delivering a hit squad from one of our enemies to the other,” Skavar pointed out. “Amusement value, if nothing else. ‘Hey, guys, let’s you and him fight.’”
“I’d prefer more value than amusement if we’re going to be hauling Augments on this ship,” Maria said dryly. “They may not be specifically Mage-killers, but killing Mages is what Augments were built for.
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