Mage-Provocateur

by Glynn Stewart

  Like her husband had been. Not that David was going to say that aloud.

  The female was deadlier than the male, indeed.

  “Why are you telling me this?” he finally asked.

  “Two reasons,” she replied, holding up a pair of fingers. “Firstly, there really isn’t anything you can do at this point to change what’s coming. The Blue Star Syndicate will be reborn, and I will control it.

  “Secondly, you’ve proven yourself spectacularly capable and to have connections in the oddest of places,” she told him. “I’d be willing to offer you a position at the top of the organization. Consigliere, I believe the Cosa Nostra call it. Advisor and right-hand man.”

  “Tempting,” David lied. “I don’t suppose you’d be willing to give up the slave trade and illegal genetic augmentation?”

  Vandella-Howard laughed ruefully.

  “I didn’t expect you to accept,” she admitted. “We’ll go our separate ways, Captain Rice. And believe me, my people will be warned never to try and hire you. The new syndicate will keep its distance from you.

  “I’ve seen too many die who failed to learn that lesson.”

  Dinner continued calmly for several more minutes, until one of the ship’s crew knocked at the door. One of the bodyguards went over and had a quiet conversation that David pretended not to be trying to overhear as he tested the several varieties of soy sauce Vandella-Howard’s chef had arrived.

  The bodyguard then came back, leaning down next to the lawyer-turned-crime-boss to whisper in her ear.

  David’s hearing wasn’t good enough to hear what the guard was saying…but he didn’t miss the reaction of the woman across from him. Every gram of tension that had disappeared for this dinner suddenly returned tenfold as the man spoke.

  He never saw her draw the guard’s gun from his holster. The first David was aware of it was when he found himself staring down the spectacularly large barrel of the hand cannon.

  He doubted Vandella-Howard had the wrists to absorb the recoil of even a single shot from the ugly weapon, but she was holding it in a perfect two-handed grip, and there wasn’t even a tremor as it trained directly on his head.

  “What?” he demanded.

  “You betrayed us,” she said flatly. “I don’t know what game you’re playing, Rice, but this is not going to end the way you think.”

  He very slowly raised his hands. Whatever his crew had got up to, his best chance of getting out right now was to play innocent.

  “Would you care to tell me how I apparently betrayed you?” he asked. “I mean, if I’d somehow predicted your exact route and timing to get here well enough to allow for someone to show up three hours after you did, I’d be seeing how large a chunk of the Royal Navy I could send.

  “Assuming I’d somehow predicted that we’d end up out here, anyway,” he continued. “I wasn’t exactly planning on getting dragged out to the ass end of nowhere, no matter how gorgeous the Legacy’s boss turned out to be.”

  “Four ten-megaton-plus jump flares, Captain Rice,” Vandella-Howard said flatly. “Ten million kilometers from us, emerging from jump on a direct course for Gauntlet.”

  That was cruiser-mass. There was no way his crew had managed to find four cruisers and get them there this quickly. He seriously had no idea what was going on now.

  “I’ll note,” he said quietly, “that my ship is over twenty million tons fully loaded. And while Peregrine is in the mass range you quote, she’s only one ship.”

  “It’s about right for two-thirds of a Martian cruiser squadron, though, isn’t it?” she snapped. “Just like you were saying.”

  He sighed.

  “What’s their acceleration?” he asked.

  “What?” she snapped.

  “Their acceleration,” he barked back. “This isn’t anything I arranged, but if they’re coming at us at ten or more gravities, it is the Navy. If they’re coming slower…”

  The gun didn’t move, but Vandella-Howard cocked her head at her bodyguard, nodding the mountain toward the crewman at the door.

  The crewman looked terrified as the bodyguard approached, but followed him to the table at a silent gesture.

  “What was the question, ma’am?” he asked cautiously, taking in the entire scene of David, Vandella-Howard, and the gun.

  “Acceleration,” she demanded. “The bogies. What’s their acceleration?”

  The man swallowed and checked his wrist-comp.

  “They’ve adjusted course to come for us,” he said very, very quietly. “Acceleration is…two point eight gravities.”

  “That’s not Navy,” Vandella-Howard said, mostly to herself. “Thank you, Mikael. Get back to the bridge and inform Captain Jandaček that I will be joining him shortly.”

  She lowered the gun.

  “That’s a freighter acceleration,” she told David. “Who the hell would have forty million tons of freighters out in the back ass of nowhere?”

  “Someone else who tracked down rumors and fragments and worked out where Azure died,” David finally admitted. Stealey had warned him that they were using the location as bait. They’d apparently managed to get someone else here and walking into the same trap.

  The timing had nearly got him killed. Even if the other ships were completely unarmed and “innocent” salvagers, this was going to be an ugly headache.

  “They’re burning for us,” Vandella-Howard said. “That means they’re looking for a fight.”

  She smiled coldly.

  “Captain Jandaček and the rest of my people will have to oblige them. Karls!”

  Her barked word brought one of the massive bodyguards forward.

  “Take Captain Rice back to his quarters and lock him in,” she snapped. “Sorry, David, but while this may not be your problem, it sure looks questionable when you assured me no one else knew where Gauntlet was.”

  He sighed and rose to follow Karls.

  “Of course, the rest of my bridge crew knew,” he pointed out. “Montgomery knew, if no one else, though he never struck me as the type to sell out. Most of my crew came with me to Falcon, though, or never saw the data.

  “Doesn’t mean someone didn’t pull it from the system and sell it later.”

  “You keep telling yourself that,” she replied. “Just hope that you didn’t like whoever it was, David, because if they’re on those ships, they’re going to die.”

  41

  “That…is a lot more ships than we were expecting.”

  Jeeves’s comment echoed in Maria’s ear as she studied the boarding torpedo in front of her, trying to work out where she was going to squeeze herself in.

  “Okay,” she replied. “What are we looking at?”

  “I make it twenty-nine, possibly thirty ships,” the gunnery officer said softly. “Three are real warships, megaton-range ships with antimatter engines. The rest are smaller, two hundred to five hundred k-tons. Mix of fusion and antimatter thrusters.

  “It’s a fleet, Soprano. What do we do?”

  She looked over her shoulder at Skavar and gestured for the Marine to start loading his people into the three torpedoes they’d prepped for the mission.

  “How close are we?” she asked.

  “We’re about eight million klicks away from them,” Jeeves replied. “We’re off the direct-line course between them and the false Gauntlet. Closest approach looks like…fifteen light-seconds. Four and a half million kilometers.”

  The boarding torpedoes had several hours of endurance but didn’t have much better acceleration that an assault shuttle. They were designed to be fired at close range, using the ship’s launchers to give them a boost the shuttle wouldn’t have, not used for stealth ambushes.

  “You’re the expert, Jeeves,” she told him. “Can we catch them with the boarding torpedoes?”

  She heard him swallow. He was silent for several seconds, running numbers.

  “Yes,” he finally concluded. “Launch in the next ten minutes. You’ll have a two-hour flight ti
me, and you’ll intercept them as they reached their closest approach to us.” He paused. “Your relative vee at intercept is going to be well over a thousand KPS. That’s pushing the limits of what the crush compensator can handle.”

  “I’ve used them before,” Maria told him. “The scribes who put them together underrate the damn things for safety. The crush compensator should be able to eat almost twice that before the passengers are in danger.”

  Jeeves swallowed again.

  “You’re the one riding fire, ma’am,” he conceded. “Once you’re in space, there’s only so much we can do to keep you in the loop. We’ll send updates via directional laser for as long as we can, but we won’t be able to see you, either.”

  “I know,” she said. “Ping the Captain’s beacon, Jeeves. Let’s know what ship we’re shooting ourselves at.”

  “Shouldn’t we wait?” Jeeves asked. “That’s probably the thing they’re most likely to detect.”

  “We need to know what we’re aiming for. We’ll take the risk.”

  Leaving Jeeves to his work, she turned back to the Marines. Exosuited troopers were packing themselves into the torpedoes like sardines in a can.

  “You folks going to be comfortable?” she asked Skavar.

  He chuckled.

  “Exosuits aren’t too bad. You’re the one getting packed in with us in a vac-suit.”

  Maria made a touché gesture. That part was going to well and truly suck.

  “We’ll have a target in a few minutes,” she told him. “We’ll launch as soon as we do.”

  Skavar shook his head.

  “I heard,” he confirmed. “You sure you can hide us all the way in?”

  “Keep the torpedoes within fifteen hundred meters of each other,” she ordered. “Inside that bubble, yeah. Realize, though, that it’s going to take a lot of my reserves just to get us there.”

  “I know,” Skavar said. “Thirty exosuited Marines and one exhausted Mage against an entire starship. They won’t know what hit them.”

  Maria laughed softly. Even thirty ordinary Marines could probably take a pirate corvette with surprise and exosuits—and Skavar’s people were Marine Forward Combat Intelligence. They were infiltrators and spies, covert ops troops who’d gone through the same training as Marine Force Recon.

  There were probably better troops in the galaxy, but she knew these ones. She’d walk into hell with them.

  “Ma’am, we’ve got him,” Jeeves announced. “Destroyer in the center of the formation. No sign that anybody detected the pulse.”

  “All right,” Maria said, looking into the torpedo and the almost-exactly-Maria-sized space left in it. “Here goes…everything.”

  Red Falcon had four boarding-torpedo launchers mounted in the engine pod at the base of the “mushroom” of her superstructure. The big freighter, currently being concealed in space by Xi Wu and the other two junior Mages, had been rotating slowly since the pirate fleet had been detected.

  The moment of launch was hell. Maria had a momentary sensation of crushing weight before she blacked out. She woke up quickly enough, feeling utterly wrung out but still well enough to cast the spell that would shield them all from the Legacy’s scanners.

  “You okay?” Skavar asked.

  “I’m not used to being sat on by giants,” she said sourly. “It’s been a long time since I was in anything without gravity runes. You forget what ten-plus gravities actually feels like.”

  The Marine chuckled.

  “This has gravity runes,” he pointed out. “Xi Wu charged them yesterday. That’s why we only felt twenty gees.”

  She grunted.

  “If it makes you feel better, half the damn Marines passed out too, and they’re in exosuits,” Skavar told her. “Are we cloaked?”

  “We’re cloaked,” she confirmed. “Get comfortable, Chief. It’s not going to be a short flight.”

  She could feel his grin.

  “If it was going to be easy, they wouldn’t have sent us, Maria,” he said gently. “Are you going to be okay?”

  “Yeah, this is a bit easier than I was afraid of,” she admitted, continuing to spin light around the three metal capsules to shield them from prying eyes. “Anything new on the scanners?”

  “Nah. We’ve got the destroyer the Captain is on dialed in.” He paused. “I probably can’t take a destroyer with thirty Marines, ma’am, even FCI Marines. Not if they’ve got any kind of real security force.”

  “I know. We’re back to the extraction plan.”

  “Even with the decoys, that plan sucks.”

  “Do you have a better one?” Maria asked sweetly.

  “Nope. Just warning you that the odds that we all die on this stunt are easily sixty-forty,” he replied.

  “I see, Chief Skavar. You’re an optimist.”

  42

  It was strange, to put it mildly, to watch an entire fleet blast its way through space and know you were completely invisible to their sensors.

  Kelly had full faith both in Soprano’s ability to hide the torpedoes and in Xi Wu’s ability to hide Red Falcon herself. She trusted the Ship’s Mage—and she trusted her girlfriend without question.

  “You want to know just how deep the shit is, XO?” Jeeves asked.

  “Spill it, Guns,” she ordered.

  “Okay. These”—three icons on the display adjusted, flashing into the standard icon for Protectorate destroyers—“are Tau Ceti-built export destroyers. Not sure of the class, but there’s a dozen identifying characteristics you can’t hide without doing a lot of work.

  “Work these guys haven’t done.” Jeeves shrugged. “They might have done enough that we won’t be able to tell which ships they are and trace them back, but we’d need to be much closer for that. If we even had the databases for it.”

  “Record everything you can,” Kelly ordered. “MISS does have those databanks.”

  “True enough,” he agreed. Six more icons flashed on the display, changing into smaller, square icons. “These are system-defense ships. Might have been built by any of six systems—my money is on Alpha Centauri, though.”

  “Why Centauri?” she asked.

  “They’re the only ones who actually build SDSes for export,” he told her. “The others who build them use them for local defense. Alpha Centauri’s are designed to be carried by big-enough freighters, though this set clearly had jump matrices added.

  “They’re half a million tons apiece. If they’re Centauri-built, the builder doesn’t have access to antimatter missiles, so they build their ships with no missiles at all. Heavy laser armament, though. Six-, seven-gigawatt beams.”

  Kelly nodded. So, Red Falcon had heavier beams than anything she was facing. They’d restocked their own antimatter missiles from the destroyers’ magazines on the way—Falcon was actually in range to use those missiles on the Legacy fleet.

  They wouldn’t do much beyond exposing the freighter’s presence, though. Salvos of ten missiles could threaten one or two of the SDSes. That was it.

  “And what’s the rest?”

  “The other twenty ships are what we were expecting to see,” Jeeves told her. “Jump-modified corvettes and jump-yachts with weapons added. Your general collection of pirate and bounty hunter junk. One fifty to two fifty apiece.”

  “Can the Navy handle them?” she asked.

  He laughed.

  “Yeah,” he told her. “They can handle the entire collection. But…”

  “But?”

  “We were expecting half a dozen pirates. Not thirty. Our bait can take them…but she’s going to get hurt a lot more than anyone expects. Which means…”

  “They can’t be careful once everyone’s in range,” Kelly said grimly.

  “Exactly. Maria and Ivan need to get the Captain off that ship before the Navy opens fire.”

  “They know that,” the XO said firmly. “As well as we do—they’re both better trained at this than I am.”

  The ex-NCO laughed.

 
“Better trained than either of us. They’ll get it done, XO. They’ll bring him home.”

  There was a translucent green oval on the screen, marking the likely location of the boarding torpedoes. It had broadened enough that they could no longer rely on tightbeam transmissions to hit the torpedoes and nothing else.

  Soprano and the Marines were now blind. They would bring up the torpedoes’ own sensors for the final approach, but until then, the price of invisibility was complete blindness. The boarding torpedoes weren’t big enough for passive scanners.

  “Wait, that’s strange,” Jeeves murmured. The Third Officer was focused on something on his console.

  Kelly resisted her curiosity for all of about a second, then mirrored his display to the repeaters on the Captain’s chair.

  There was a new icon on the screen. A pulsing orange shape that the computers hadn’t resolved into anything useful. Jeeves was already running several different programs to try and identify it, and as she watched, it slowly resolved into four icons.

  Then he looked up at her.

  “XO, we have a new player,” he told her. “Four new jump flares. Engines are coming online; I’m reading them as fusion drives, pushing ten-megaton ships at just under three gravities.”

  “That’s strange,” she echoed. “Not military?”

  “They’re cruiser-sized, but cruisers have antimatter engines,” Jeeves concluded. “They’re freighters of some kind, at a guess. I’ll know more as they get closer, but they’re fifteen million klicks from us. Ten million from the Legacy.”

  About the same distance from the false Gauntlet as from the Legacy, Kelly noted absently.

  “What are they doing?” she asked.

  “If I knew who they were, I might be able to answer that,” Jeeves replied. “But…I have no idea.”

  Kelly studied the display with its now four sets of icons.

  “MISS was using this location as bait for a few groups,” she noted. “But the odds of any of them showing up this conveniently aren’t high.… It’s got to be Legatus.”