As he reached the elevator, he felt a familiar vibration run through the ship, followed by a faint but definable sense of ‘down’ – the ship was moving. He spared a moment to be grateful that the engines hadn’t engaged while he was making his one handed landing from his reckless zero-gravity jump.
Moments later, the elevator delivered him to the outside of his bridge and he carefully walked in, trying not to let the pain in his twisted shoulder throw him off too badly.
“Where are we at?” he asked Jenna, settling into his command chair with a concealed wince.
His XO was at her usual station at navigation, her fingers flying across the screen as she brought the Blue Jay away from the immense-yet-vulnerable bulk of Heinlein Station on their maneuvering thrusters.
“To no one’s surprise, I’m sure, Heinlein Station will bump you to the head of the clearance queue if you pay an extra fee,” Jenna told him. “We’re pulling clear on thrusters and should be ready to engage main engines in about five minutes.”
“How’s our Martian friend?”
Jenna gestured towards the main viewscreen, which was zoomed in on the single icon and showing a series of numbers around it.
“They came out roughly the standard one hundred sixty million kilometers out,” she told him. “I don’t think they’ve noticed us yet – they’re burning in at three gravities, but that’s pretty standard for a Navy ship.”
“We’re heading in the opposite direction, I presume?”
“Of course!” she confirmed. “As soon as I’m clear, I’ll push us up to about one and a half gravities.”
David nodded and turned to the channel to the simulacrum, where Damien was patiently waiting.
“What’s your status, Damien? When can we jump?”
“The matrix is clean and functioning,” the Ship’s Mage told him. “I can jump closer in than most with the amplifier as well – at a gee and a half, we’ll probably be clear in six hours.”
David nodded appreciatively. He kept being surprised by the capabilities that Damien squeezed out of the amplifier he’d turned the jump matrix into. A Navy destroyer could jump at three million kilometers from a planet if they needed to, but it wasn’t fun for anyone.
“Keep an eye on things,” he ordered his Mage. “I don’t want to pick a fight with a destroyer, but I’m not sure I want to surrender either.”
“They can’t catch us in time,” Jenna asserted. “We’ll be heading in the opposite direction at half of their acceleration, and we have a lot less distance to cover.”
“I hope you’re right,” Damien said quietly. “Because they have more Mages aboard, and theirs are trained in the use of an amplifier in combat. I couldn’t face them. And that’s assuming they don’t just blow us up with missiles.”
David didn’t respond aloud. He simply nodded his acceptance of the Mage’s comments, and settled in, watching the viewscreen’s data on the million-ton warship carefully.
#
The next several hours passed quietly. With the course plugged into the computer, David sent Jenna to rest while he and Damien continued to watch the Golden Sword and their own location.
It was obvious when the destroyer’s crew finished running the beacons of all the ships through their databases and identified the Blue Jay. The destroyer’s arc shifted, moving away from a direct course to Heinlein Station and instead shaping an intercept for the Blue Jay – and she sped up, her acceleration increasing from three gravities to ten.
A number of warning signs starting flashing on David’s screen a few moments later, as the Protectorate warship painted the Blue Jay with directional radar and lidar – both lightspeed sensors being targeted on the Blue Jay from several light minutes away.
The Jay’s sensors warned about the laser and radar hits for several seconds, and then the warnings were silent. Standard procedure, David knew from his own long-ago days in the Martian Navy, would be to scan the ship flying a flagged identification beacon to both confirm that it was the right ship and identify any unknown dangers.
From eight light minutes away, it took almost twenty minutes for the sensor reflection to reach the Golden Sword of Freedom, the bridge crew to review it and decide that yes, this was the ship in their database, the commander to record a transmission, and for that transmission to wing its way across space back to the Blue Jay.
When he received the transmission, David threw it up on the screen after checking that Damien was in the communication loop. He preferred the Mage to know what was going on – after all, if things came apart, it would fall to Damien and his amplifier to try and save them.
The image in the transmission turned out to be a tall, slim, black woman with a shaved head and the dark blue uniform of a senior officer in the Royal Navy of the Mage-King of Mars. Behind and around the woman was visible the room-encompassing viewscreens and silver runes of the destroyer’s simulacrum Chamber – since the main weapon of a Protectorate warship was its amplifier, the simulacrum Chamber at the heart of the ship doubled as the vessel’s bridge.
Unlike the simulacrum Chamber aboard the Blue Jay or any other civilian ship, however, the Golden Sword’s had magically controlled gravity. Despite the ten gravities of acceleration the other ship was pushing, the Captain showed no sign of being under force except a normal gravity.
“Captain David Rice of the Blue Jay,” the woman said calmly. “I am Mage-Captain Amelia Okoro of His Majesty’s destroyer Golden Sword of Freedom.” She paused, seeming to consider her words carefully.
“I know you are running,” she finally continued. “I am ordering you to heave to, and prepare for a rendezvous.
“I promise you, upon the honor of His Majesty’s Navy, no harm will come to you or your crew if you surrender, but you must surrender. I will range upon you before you reach jump distance. Do not force me to act hastily.”
David ran the geometry through his computer, and then glanced up at Damien on the screen to his own simulacrum Chamber.
“When can you jump, Damien?” he asked.
“I could jump now,” the young Mage told him. “I’d be useless for at least twenty-four hours afterwards, though. If we wait three hours to when I originally estimated, I’ll be fine. Can they intercept us short of that?”
“No,” David told him. “She could intercept us well short of the nine light minute mark though, even if she maneuvered to board and we did our best to escape. We’ll jump on schedule, Damien.”
He glanced back at the main viewscreen, then shrugged and activated his own recorder. He leant forwards slightly and focused his gaze on the camera.
“Mage-Captain Okoro,” he said calmly, “I am afraid that I have no intention of surrendering this ship to His Majesty’s forces. I will not allow a member of my crew to have his magic stripped from him to calm the fears of the foolish.”
Another twenty minutes passed while his short message reached the Golden Sword, and Okoro’s response came back. He played it when it arrived.
The black-skinned Captain had acquired an odd quirk to her mouth, as if she was trying not to smile.
“Your loyalty to your crew does you credit, Captain,” she told him. “To my knowledge, Mr. Montgomery is in no danger of that anymore – but I am required to deliver him, yourself, and your crew to the Lady Hand Stealey.”
David smiled, and activated the recorder again.
“If you wish to deliver us to the Hand, you will hardly be able to fire into my ship, Mage-Captain,” he told her dryly. “I have no intention of surrendering or being intercepted. You may as well let us go.”
Time passed. Every exchange burned more time until the Blue Jay could escape, but the destroyer continued to blaze towards them on a pillar of antimatter flame.
This time, when the transmission arrived, Okoro was clearly smiling.
“You may be correct, Captain, in that I cannot fire into your ship,” she said. “It is even possible, given the data I have from Corinthian, that you can escape. Understand this, Ca
ptain Rice. I may not be able track your jumps. I may not be able to chase you from star to star. The Hand can – and the Hand will.
“These are her orders from Mars. She will not fail. If you run, you will be run to ground. If you hide, you will be found. If you surrender now, you will be safe. You have my word, and the honor of his Majesty’s Navy on that.”
A chill of fear ran down David’s spine, and he met Damien’s eyes through the intercom video.
“No one can track a jump,” the Mage reminded him. “Hand or no Hand, she does not know where we’re going – and she cannot follow us.”
David suspected that the younger man was speaking as much to reassure himself as his Captain, but it made him feel better. He turned the recorder on and faced it one last time.
“I am sorry, Mage-Captain,” he said quietly. “But the fact remains that I can no longer trust the Protectorate. I will guard my crew from you with all that is in my power. By the time you receive this message, I will be less than an hour from leaving this system. You cannot catch us. You cannot pursue us.”
David Rice sat in his command chair for a long time after that, watching the Protectorate destroyer draw ever closer, until, finally, Damien wrapped him and his ship in a sphere of magic and whisked them away to safety.
#
“We found them.”
The words were quiet, but Alaura Stealey, Hand of the Mage-King of Mars, hadn’t missed the door to her private office opening. She heard Mage-Lieutenant Harmon, the executive officer of the destroyer Tides of Justice, perfectly clearly.
With a small sigh of satisfaction, she closed down the screen she was reviewing, filled with the latest in a series of reports from agents across the Protectorate. While the Mage-King’s instructions with regards to Montgomery had been clear, she couldn’t ignore the rest of her duties. There were too many trouble spots, here and there across the sphere of human space, which would eventually require the touch of a Hand.
“Who found them, and where?” she asked. There was no question as to who had been found.
“The destroyer Golden Sword of Freedom was making one of our irregular ‘you’re not building pirate ships, promise?’ stopovers in Amber. They detected the Blue Jay making a run for it. Mage-Captain Okoro challenged them, but Rice refused to surrender. The Mage at the transceiver provided a transcript of the conversation.”
Alaura nodded, quickly taking the sheet of hardcopy from the Navy officer and skimming through it. She grimaced at Rice’s words about trusting the Protectorate, and sighed aloud.
“I guess it was too much to hope that dropping all of the charges would get them to talk to us,” she said quietly. If only she could talk to them herself! The limitations of the use of transceiver arrays made that impossible unless she could actually convince the Blue Jay to stay somewhere until she arrived – and Rice had his opinion on that clear to Okoro.
“After Corinthian made it clear they intended to strip Montgomery’s magic, I’m not surprised,” she continued. “But, why Amber?”
Amber was a problem child for the Protectorate. While Alaura found herself somewhat in sympathy with the basic philosophy behind the planet, the fact that the world’s lax law enforcement tended to be abused by scum to do things like arm pirate ships gave her a headache.
“They were probably looking for a cargo, Ma’am,” Harmon told her. “From Amber, they’ll likely sweep out to the Fringe – carry cargos between worlds that see maybe three ships a year, and possibly three Protectorate ship a decade. They could make a lot of money, and avoid any attention from us.”
“Which will make tracking them almost impossible,” Alaura said aloud. She cursed, glancing around the tiny office. Her office gave her command of any resource the Protectorate had to offer, and she had runic tools most didn’t even think were possible, but even she couldn’t track a starship once it had jumped. There were rumors that some people had managed it, but if they had, the Navy had never worked out how.
“Someone on Amber has to know where they’re going, though, don’t they Ma’am?” Harmon asked.
“It’s not a certainty,” the Hand told him. “If they’re smart, they wouldn’t have trusted anyone on Heinlein Station as far as they could throw them.” She shrugged. “With that said, it’s our only lead.
“Send a message back through the Runic Transceiver Array,” she ordered. “Our agents on Amber are to try and track down who Captain Rice dealt with. Once you’ve transmitted that, get us underway. Time is of the essence if we are to find young Montgomery.”
“Understood Ma’am,” Harmon replied crisply. “I’ll inform the Captain, we should be able to break orbit within the hour.”
#
Mikhail Azure, leader of the Blue Star Syndicate, crime lord and master of the underworlds of a dozen systems, floated in zero-gravity in a perfect meditation pose. His eyes closed, he felt the world around him through the tiny twitches of energy and matter carried to him by his magic.
Through his magic he felt the pulsing energy of the Azure Gauntlet, his personal warship. Stolen from the Martian Navy years ago, she represented the ultimate iron fist of his organization. It had been some time since he had been aboard her, and the sense of sheer power the stolen cruiser represented was… calming.
The door to his private zero-gravity meditation room opening should have been a surprise – only one person on the ship would dare interrupt his meditation and only if it was important – and yet, he had known it was coming.
Azure would never claim to any man or woman that he could see the future. Neither magic nor science, for all their many gifts to mankind, had ever managed to peel back the veil of time. He often found, however, that he had flashes of insight into the future. He had known he would be interrupted this time, and it would be good news.
“Mister Wong,” he said softly, without opening his eyes. “What news?”
“The bounty hunter has found Rice’s ship,” the man who commanded the Azure Gauntlet for Mikhail told him calmly as he walked into the room. The scuff of the soft slippers Wong wore aboard the ship was loud in Azure’s ears, revealing the other man was using magic to keep his feet on the floor of the chamber.
“But has not captured him,” the crime lord said softly.
“They are at Amber, and he lacks the courage to challenge even that world’s lax defenses,” Wong replied.
“Do not be fooled by their single aged destroyer, Mister Wong,” Azure replied. “The Amber Defense Co-operative is a stronger force than they pretend– no lesser threat than your Gauntlet would suffice to overwhelm Amber.” He slowly rotated to face his servant, magic rotating his body without visible motion.
“Is Able prepared to pursue them?” he asked. He found Wong’s refusal to use the name of anyone who was not a senior member of the Syndicate or a worthy enemy a… tolerable foible, most of the time. Nonetheless, there were enough bounty hunters in the universe that names helped.
“Once he had access to the transceiver array, they had already fled the system before a Navy destroyer,” Wong told him.
“Able is a Tracker,” Azure said flatly. “He’s almost as good as you are.”
He felt Wong’s self-effacing half-bow, and snorted to himself. To his knowledge, fifteen men and women in all of human space had managed to master the trick of tracking a jump. For all that the jump itself was magic; the key to tracking it seemed to be technology – and an entirely intuitive art of reading the sensor readings of the jump.
Wong was the best at it, and it had made him utterly terrifying as Azure’s main enforcer for years. No enemy would evade him by running away in a jumpship. He claimed to be able to track where a ship had gone for days after it had left.
Able wasn’t that good. But he could track a jump and he’d been in the system when the Jay had left.
“They are shaping a course for the Excelsior system,” Wong said simply. “Able intends to ambush them in the asteroids there.”
Azure opened his eyes and l
owered himself to the ground. He stretched, towering over the small form of the cruiser’s commander with the lanky height of those born and raised in low gravity, artificial environments.
“He will fail,” the leader of the Blue Star Syndicate said calmly.
“I agree,” Wong said simply.
“Able has underestimated Rice and Montgomery before – at Chrysanthemum,” Azure continued, ignoring his ship’s captain. “He will do so again, and I do not believe he will survive repeating the mistake.
“Make your course for Excelsior, Mister Wong. If I am wrong, then we will need to make Mr. Able an offer he cannot refuse.
“If I am right, we will have to clean up his mess.”
#
Stealey stalked through Heinlein station like a thunderstorm. The locals who didn’t get out of her way at the ominous cloud hovering over her head tended to clear out when they saw the golden hand icon of her station hanging around her neck.
The people who lived on Amber had little respect for authority, but what little they had tended to be for the Mage-King and his Hands. Stealey and her fellows had shed sweat, tears, and blood to prove themselves the champions of justice and compassion throughout the Protectorate – despite being the only men and women who could act as judge, jury and executioner.
Protectorate agents on Heinlein Station had identified the merchant Rice had dealt with before she arrived. Stealey knew Keiko Alabaster by reputation, and the woman should have known better.
Entering the office hidden away on the bottom floor of the gallery of Heinlein’s Quadrant Gamma, Stealey fixed an agate gaze on the young, mocha-skinned, woman sitting behind the reception desk.
“I need to speak with Miss Alabaster,” she said calmly. “Please inform her that Alaura Stealey is here to see her – she knows who I am.”
“Miss Alabaster is not in today.” The girl was both smart enough to at least not deny whose offices these were, and loyal enough to shield her boss.
Starship's Mage: Omnibus: (Starship's Mage Book 1) Page 27
