“Rebels,” Kellers clarified next to David.
“Not against the Protectorate, in general,” the woman told them. “But, generally the Protectorate’s attention doesn’t get drawn to abuses before things start coming apart. I have a blockade runner slated to take supplies to their destination, but he can’t even make it into Amber without getting jumped – your bounty from the Blue Star Syndicate is nothing compared to what the Mega-Corps have on Seule.”
“So you need us to deliver these ‘supplies’ to Seule,” David said. “What kind of supplies are we talking?”
“Twenty standard shipping containers,” she replied. “They run the full gamut of the needs of fighting a war – guns, ammunition, artillery, tanks, aerospace fighters, and a handful of surface-to-space missiles.”
Twenty interstellar shipping containers was two hundred thousand tons of weapons.
“That’s not a small war,” David said with a soft exhalation.
“When you’re talking a planetwide revolution, that’s barely enough to get started,” Keiko told him. “If you’ll deliver that to my rendezvous point, I can get your list for the two hundred and eighty containers on your ship.”
“Just two hundred, unfortunately,” David told her. “Unless you’ve heard of someone looking to buy a slightly used in-system re-fuelling ship?”
“Even in Amber, you can’t sell spaceships without more paperwork than I think you want to deal with,” the merchant told him with a smile. “I can get you skimming gear for the tanker though,” she said after a moment. “If you can use the tanker to skim giants and re-fuel, that will save you money – and make a Fringe run easier.”
“That would help,” Kellers interjected. “I’m pretty sure Kelly and I can rig it up for remote control, too.”
“Done and done,” David finally said. “We’ll transport your revolution-in-a-box for you, Keiko. How quickly can you get the rest?”
“I’ll need three days to track it all down and get it loaded onto your ship,” she told him. “First things first, though, I promised James’s brother dinner with the three of us. I keep my promises.”
David hesitated. He’d been hoping to get started on loading as soon as possible – and the earlier incident didn’t make him any happier about wandering around Heinlein Station more than they needed to.
“It’ll be fun, Captain,” Keiko told him when he didn’t answer, winking at him. “Trust me; I’ll make sure of it.”
Next to him, he heard Kellers sigh again – much louder this time.
#
By the time midnight Olympus Mons Time rolled around, Kelzin and Kelly had managed to drag Damien at least partially out of his moping. The trio, the youngest of the dozen officers aboard the Blue Jay, had found their way to the shuttle bay with a case of beer.
With the ship docked with the zero-gravity hub of Heinlein Station, only the rotating ribs had gravity. They’d discovered that the beer was not, as they’d assumed, in zero-gravity bulbs but in regular cans.
“You can magic up gravity, can’t you?” Kelzin asked Damien.
“If you ask nicely,” the Mage replied, already feeling relaxed from earlier drinks with Kelly.
“Let him float,” Kelly told him, taking his hand and settling into the field of gravity rolling out around Damien.
“Hey,” Kelzin objected. “I’m the one who bought the beer!”
“Fine,” Damien told him, and gestured with his free hand. The pilot dropped the last few inches from where he was free-floating to the deck with an audible thud.
The field of gravity Damien had woven around the three included the edge of the array of crates that now functioned as the Blue Jay’s armory, allowing the three to take seats on the crates before cracking open the beers.
There was a moment of silence as they all tasted the Amber craft beer.
“That’s good,” Kelly finally said aloud. “I guess Amber produces more than guns and pirate ships, huh?”
Neither of the men answered her, both enjoying the complex flavor of the beer.
“How’s being in charge of the shuttles?” Damien finally asked Kelzin after a long moment.
The pilot shrugged, wincing slightly as he pulled at the bandages over his stomach.
“It’s different, that’s for sure,” he admitted. “I’m still friends with the others, but we can’t really hang out as much as we did before – now I’m in charge, so I can’t get drunk and horse around with them like I used to.”
“So that’s why you’re drinking with us,” Kelly told him. “We’re your substitute buddies!”
“Well, I don’t normally volunteer to be the third wheel,” Kelzin told her with a grin, gesturing at where she had wrapped her leg around Damien’s on the crate.
Kelly made a tossing gesture, and accidentally threw beer at the pilot. The liquid passed out of the tiny area of gravity Damien was maintaining and continued its arc over to splatter against the wall – about a quarter-meter to the right of where James Kellers had just entered the bay.
“Sorry boss!” Kelly immediately apologized, but Kellers just carefully waved, as if to dismiss the sticky mess.
“I’ll forgive you if you’ve got more of that beer,” the Chief Engineer told them.
Damien wasn’t always certain that Kelzin was the sharpest tool in the shed – he had, after all, got himself shot – but the pilot was definitely capable of translating that hint. By the time Kellers joined him, he had a fourth beer open and ready for the dark-skinned senior officer.
“Where’s Captain Rice?” Damien asked as Kellers joined them, pulling up a crate of his own as the Mage expanded the gravity field to cover the other man.
“Our contact is an old high school friend of mine,” James told them as he took a swig of the beer. “They hit it off even better than I expected – David’s spending the night on the station.”
“Wait, the Captain is doing what?” Kelzin exclaimed. “That old dog – I didn’t expect that!”
“If he hears you call him ‘old’ or a ‘dog,’ you might find yourself looking for a new ship to sign on to,” Kellers warned the pilot. “David’s been divorced for over two years, and so far as I know Keiko is the first woman to do more than catch his eye in all that time. Even if I thought she was dangerous, I don’t think I’d have warned him off.”
“So she’s harmless?” Kelly asked, her voice sharp.
Kellers laughed aloud, and then took a careful sip of his beer.
“Keiko has had her fingers in at least four violent revolutions I’m aware of,” he told them calmly. “She outright owns four ships like the Blue Jay, and runs a financing syndicate that has helped folks like David buy at least fifteen more. She is wealthy, powerful, politically involved, and anything but harmless.”
“She also seems quite taken with David, and has to be careful about who she spends her time with,” Kellers concluded. “Amber isn’t a world where anyone else watches out for you. She’s been burned a few times by lovers out to rob her or use her.”
He shrugged, with a sad smile on his face as he drank more of his beer.
“They both have that in common,” he admitted. “They’ll be good for each other.”
#
There was only so much time Damien could spend reading over and practicing the many offensive and defensive spells contained in the Enforcer textbooks. One of the limitations that he faced versus the type of Mage who would be accepted as an Enforcer was a limit in how much magic he was able to wield over time, as well as how much he could command at once. Some, though not many, of the spells in the books were completely beyond him. Those that weren’t still wore him out quickly, leaving him drained and exhausted.
He preferred runes. His ability to see and trace the flows of power through the silver etchings Humanity’s Mages used to guide and control larger spells was unmatched by any Mage he’d ever worked with. One of his classmates had once complained that he felt like he was reading a circuit diagram, where Damien cou
ld tell exactly what the current was doing without even reading the script.
That was the gift that had allowed him to turn the Blue Jay into a full, unlimited, amplifier – something normally restricted to the destroyers and cruisers of the Royal Navy of Mars.
His ability to see the flows instead of having to actually read the runes made going over the rune matrices that tied together the freighter’s amplifier a task of a day or so, rather than the weeks that a Mage without his unique talent would have taken.
He studied the Enforcer handbooks and reviewed the ship’s rune matrix, looking for the tiny efficiencies he could find that no other Mage even saw, while the rest of the crew loaded the cargo aboard or worked on the tanker, installing hardware that Kelly’s explanations of went right over his head.
At the end of the third day, he drifted onto the bridge to join Jenna. The ship’s First Officer was sprawled in the Captain’s chair, data flowing across the screens on the chair while the main viewscreen showed a three-dimensional representation of the system.
“Still holding down the fort?” he asked her.
“Yup,” Jenna confirmed cheerfully. “You think I’d get in the way of the boss’s only tryst in three years to dodge standing a watch or two? Not a chance in hell.”
Damien leant against the console that was normally Jenna’s station with David in command. The Jay’s bridge was on Rib One, and with the loading basically complete the ship had spun up for gravity again.
“So how many guns are we carrying?” he asked after a moment, eyeing the cameras showing the over two hundred ten thousand ton containers latched to the Blue Jay’s cargo pylons.
“I didn’t think we’d told you about those yet,” Jenna replied, turning to eye him. “How did you know?”
“Kellers mentioned that his contact had her hands in a bunch of revolutions, and we’re heading to the Fringe,” Damien shrugged. “Putting two and two together with Amber’s reputation for manufacturing weapons, it made sense. Not to mention that the Excelsior system wasn’t on my original plan for the Fringe run.”
Jenna shook her head.
“You have too much time on your hands, Ship’s Mage,” she told him dryly. “Yes, we’re carrying weapons – but I don’t think the Captain wants to spread that about until we’re out-system, clear?”
“I figured that too,” the young Mage told her dryly, and she shook her head again.
“Shouldn’t you and your pretty engineer be imitating the Captain?” she asked.
“Kelly’s busy leading half of our techs all over the tanker,” Damien admitted. “Something to do with an ‘artificial stupid intelligence’?”
“Artificial Sequential Intelligence,” Jenna corrected. “Though I’ve heard engineers call them artificial stupids before.” Damien directed his best confused look at the ship’s exec, who laughed. “It’s the closest thing to artificial intelligence that isn’t the size of the Blue Jay,” she told him. “But, at the end of the day, it’s a massive list of if-then commands, so it requires a hunk of computer to run through them quickly and needs to be custom-written for whatever you want it to do. I think Kellers said your girlfriend was the only person on the ship qualified to code for it.”
“And now I understand why my eyes glaze over when she talks shop,” Damien told Jenna.
“Don’t worry, you can do that to any of us aboard the ship at will,” Jenna reminded him. “I know nothing about ‘Thaumaturgical differential quotients’ or whatever it was you were trying to even out in Rib Four yesterday.”
The young Mage opened his mouth to try and explain, and then turned to study the main viewscreen when he realized that even the simplified explanation was a mouthful of jargon.
“That’s a lot more detail than we usually have,” he realized aloud, his now-practiced eye reading the symbols and text showing the region of space around Amber and Heinlein Station – easily out to several light minutes.
“Yeah, it turns out the Amber Defense Co-operative sub-contracted building and running the planetary sensor arrays,” Jenna told him. “Since they then had information everyone wanted, and this is Amber, that company provides subscription access to what would be military grade arrays anywhere else in the Protectorate.”
Damien nodded his understanding – and bemusement at the way Amber ran its defenses. He paused as a new icon appeared on the screen.
“Jump flare,” he said quietly, eyeing the icon and wondering how much data the link into the planetary arrays would give them.
“Oh shit, shit, shit,” Jenna starting cursing behind him as the icon stabilized, and the sensor arrays calmly populated the transponder signal of the Royal Navy of Mars destroyer Golden Sword of Freedom.
The Protectorate was here.
#
David was finding it surprisingly hard to say goodbye to Keiko. They’d had barely three days together, and neither had pretended that it was anything but a friendly fling between two people of a shared age and attitude towards the world, but as they watched the last of the loading gear retract from the Blue Jay from an observation lounge, he found himself mentally making excuses to put off the moment.
The observation lounge was a quiet, elegant place. The sort of spot where wealthy merchants and starship captains made deals and watched their ships through the walls of steel made transparent through magic. Runes swirled across the floor, creating a gravity field that held everyone and everything down, and discreet human staff delivered drinks to the widely scattered quiet tables.
“I guess that’s it then,” he finally said, watching the Blue Jay’s ribs spin up. If Jenna had spun up the ribs for gravity, then the last of the cargo was loaded. “Your special cargo came aboard with the rest. I’m impressed you found it all,” he admitted.
“I am the best at what I do,” Keiko told him cheerfully, her gaze meeting his. “This has been nice, David, but I’m not one for teary goodbyes. I hope you weren’t expecting one.”
“Hardly,” he said with a snort of laughter. “It would clash with your ‘hardened revolutionary’ vibe.”
She put a finger to her lips. “Shush,” she replied, laughing herself. “That’s not part of my reputation here. On Amber, I’m known as wealthy, ruthless, and perfectly willing to bury people in lawsuits if they get in my way.”
“Guess that’s how business is done here,” David admitted, eyeing his ship. “I was surprised by how good the safety gear was, to be honest. I was expecting…”
“You were expecting slaves driven with whips?” Keiko asked dryly. “Which do you think is going to motivate a business to do better at safety: a government standard that, once they meet, they’re no longer liable – or the knowledge that a death will see them sued out of business? Our companies have the best safety gear around – they know they won’t survive a death liability case.”
David figured much of that to be exaggeration – the gear wasn’t as bad as he’d feared, but he’d definitely seen better and safer work crews, too. That was also, he understood, at least partially the choice of the crews – and that was how Amber worked. He kept his peace, though. Keiko was a native of Amber, and a fervent believer in its unique system.
“I should get to my ship,” he said finally. “We need to leave by morning if we’re going to make the rendezvous at Excelsior.”
Keiko’s eyes were suddenly softer, and she laid her hand on top of his.
“Seule won’t disappear if you’re late,” she told him. “You can spend the night on the station if you want.”
“I thought you weren’t one for long goodbyes?” he asked.
“I’m not planning goodbyes,” she told him with a wicked wink. “I’ll twist some arms; make sure you’re clear all the way out in the morning. What’s the point of influence if I can’t spend some of it to get laid?”
David laughed, and was about to agree when his wrist computer buzzed. The tone was an urgent message, not something that Jenna would use unless it was an emergency. He flipped the message up on
the screen, and the laughter died.
Protectorate destroyer in system. Return to ship ASAP – it’s time to go boss.
“I have to go,” he said quietly, meeting Keiko’s eyes. “There’s a Protectorate ship in system. I don’t think even the ADC will ignore a direct request from a warship to hold us – not once the destroyer realizes we’re here.”
Wordlessly, Keiko dragged him into a surprisingly fierce embrace.
“I understand,” she told him, then kissed him thoroughly. “If you’re ever back in Amber, look me up,” she ordered. “I won’t make promises, but we can always see what happens.”
“I will try,” David said, cautiously, and she laughed.
“Go, my dear Captain,” she told him after one final kiss. “Tell Seule I say ‘hi’ – and remember, the Luciole in the Excelsior Three trailing Trojan cluster.”
“The Graveyard,” he said softly. “I remember.”
David paused on the edge of the lounge for one long moment, looking back at the tall, thin, Amberite – his opposite in many ways – and gave her one last wave.
Then the Captain of the Blue Jay left, heading for his ship.
#
David found himself envying Damien’s ability to generate his own gravity with magic as he made his way down the zero-gravity keel of the Blue Jay. The personnel tube, which had retracted behind him as he came aboard, connected at the rear of the ship. The Blue Jay’s bridge was on Rib One, at the front of the ship.
It was noticeably faster to make the long dive along the keel and around the simulacrum chamber from the shuttle bay to the forward elevators than it was to run along the Ribs themselves with their centrifugal gravity. What it wasn’t, David considered as he plummeted towards the front of his ship, was safer.
Practice allowed him to catch one of the handholds by the elevators with his stronger hand, and swing himself to a halt. The effort almost wrenched his arm out of its socket. He oriented himself towards the elevators gingerly, wincing at the now-vicious pain in his shoulder.
Starship's Mage: Omnibus: (Starship's Mage Book 1) Page 26
