Alaura regarded the other woman with a degree of calm she didn’t feel.
“I am sorry,” she said calmly. “Did you just tell me you intentionally disregarded a Priority Alpha-One Communique from a Hand of the Mage-King?”
“Everyone who comes to this system thinks their needs are Alpha-One, Lady Stealey,” Castello replied. “It is my job to decide whose needs actually are.”
“Who is your second-in-command?” Alaura asked.
“What?” Castello replied, startled.
“Who is your second-in-command?” Alaura repeated. “Since you are so busy, I will do you the courtesy of not imposing further on your time.”
“Mage-Commodore James Medici of the Fifteenth Destroyers,” the Admiral said slowly.
“Very well. Pack your things,” Alaura ordered. “Mage-Admiral Medici will be assuming command of the Seventh Cruisers, as well as the Fifteenth Destroyers, to accompany me on my mission.”
“You don’t have that authority!” Castello bellowed, surging to her feet.
“I am His Majesty’s Hand, Admiral,” Stealey said flatly. “Be grateful I do not relieve you of your commission. You will transfer your flag to one of the ships remaining – I will be taking your cruisers and Medici’s destroyers.
“If I were you,” she continued, “I would pray that your delay does not result in the failure of my mission. His Majesty will be… displeased if that’s the case.”
Alaura turned on her heel and strode from the Admiral’s office, leaving the woman whose career she’d just shattered staring after her in shock.
#
James Medici was waiting for Alaura once she returned to the Tides of Justice, the destroyer she used as her personal transport. The newly-promoted Mage-Admiral was a tiny man with skin as black as night and the slanted eyes of a Martian native.
“Lady Hand,” he greeted her calmly.
“You’ll need to get new insignia, Admiral Medici,” Stealey told him calmly. He still wore the single star of a Navy Commodore, not the two stars of an Admiral.
“I believed reviewing your brief and meeting with you were a higher priority,” he told her dryly. “I did not wish to raise your ire as Lillian has done.”
“That would be difficult,” the Hand replied. “My office,” she ordered curtly, allowing Mage-Lieutenant Harmon, her personal aide and ‘Navy Liaison’ to lead the way. Medici was silent until they reached her office and Harmon had left them in private.
“Admiral Castello is a capable officer with a lot on her plate,” he said quietly. “Your arrival was unexpected, and this region has more than a few priority concerns.”
“That is my presumption, Admiral Medici,” Alaura told him. “That is why the Admiral is still employed. That said, I need her ships – and I don’t trust her to command them in action. Don’t disappoint me.”
He nodded sharply, standing calmly at attention as she took a seat behind her desk. She gestured Medici to a chair, but he shrugged and remained standing.
“You have reviewed the brief,” Alaura reminded him. “Your opinion?”
“The cruiser represents a significant threat to the security of the Fringe,” Medici agreed. “She is insufficient to present a major threat to the MidWorlds or the Core, of course, but her presence in the hands of the Blue Star Syndicate is a concern.
“That said, the force level you are requesting seems excessive,” he continued. “A squadron of cruisers, a squadron of destroyers and three Marine battalion transports? I’ve seen planetwide rebellions suppressed with one cruiser, let alone eight with as many destroyers.”
“You have professional blinders, Admiral,” Alaura told him calmly. Unlike with Castello, at least he’d read the briefing and seemed prepared to listen. “You’re focusing on the rogue warship and not the other factors in play.”
“Ma’am?”
“The destruction of the Syndicate’s cruiser is a priority,” she told him, “but it is one of two Alpha-One priorities at play here. The second is the capture of the Blue Jay and Ship’s Mage Damien Montgomery – and Montgomery must be captured alive. That requires numbers, to make sure he doesn’t run.
“I also wish to minimize casualties when bringing the Syndicate cruiser down,” Alaura continued, “for which overwhelming force seems wise. Could you guarantee the destruction of the ship with no casualties with a lesser force?”
Medici shrugged, still standing at a slightly relaxed form of attention as he faced her, his hands clasped behind his back.
“There are no guarantees in combat, ma’am,” he reminded her. “Even outnumbered seventeen to one and out-massed nine to one, the Syndicate ship may still inflict damage.”
“The ships are available,” Alaura concluded, “so we will use them. They will also come in handy in exploiting the opportunity we have been handed – the opportunity I want those Marine transports for.”
“I’ll admit to being unclear on that, ma’am,” the Admiral said. “My understanding is that we are pursuing the Blue Jay, as we know her destination and that the Blue Star ship is also chasing her. Why are we bringing enough Marines to fight a mid-sized war?”
“I take it you didn’t note where we know Blue Jay is going, Admiral,” the Hand replied. “My information is that the Jay is headed to Darkport to take on supplies and make repairs. I have the co-ordinates.
“If we can bring our various prey to bay there, so much the better. But I see no reason to pass up the opportunity to wipe out the center of the Protectorate’s slave trade when it is handed to me on a silver platter!”
The little Admiral considered for a long moment, and then nodded.
“Darkport,” he said quietly. “That’s a pockmark on the universe I’ll be glad to burn out.”
#
“I guess that answers that question,” Mikhail Azure said drily, watching the footage on the main viewscreen of the Blue Star Syndicate cruiser Azure Gauntlet. His cruiser.
The screen was showing the now six days old light from when the deadliest bounty hunter he’d ever known had finally caught up with the Blue Jay and its ever-frustrating Captain. For several moments, the crime lord had begun to believe that his pursuit of the hunter and the freighter had been unnecessary.
Then the Jay’s ‘discarded’ fuel tanker had lit up its engines and rammed the bounty hunter ship, removing the most useful contractor Azure had known in recent years from the galaxy in an explosion that put stars to shame.
He crossed over to where Wong, the Captain of the Gauntlet, was reviewing the information from the sensors.
“Well, Mister Wong?” he said calmly. “Can you track them now?”
“Now that I can identify the source of the interference, yes,” the other man replied. Wong was one of the few in the Protectorate who had mastered the complex art of tracking a jumpship through its jump. “That explosion threw out a massive amount of energy,” he continued. “There was no way we could track the Blue Jay through its aftermath.”
Azure nodded grimly. If he’d had even the slightest doubts in Wong’s ability, the Tracker’s insistence that he was unable to pick jump signatures out of the hash of radiation in this quiet corner of deep space would have resulted in the Gauntlet having a new Captain. As it was, the four day exercise of jumping ever-further out, trying to get ahead of the light and radiation from the ‘battle’ had strained his patience to the limit.
“Able did not survive?” he asked.
“Only one jump signature, and there was no ship left when we were there,” Wong answered with a shrug. “Your Hunter is dead.”
Wong did not sound displeased that the second-best Tracker in the Protectorate was dead.
“Then find me the Blue Jay,” Azure told him. “We better not need to repeat this,” he added, gesturing at the old light scans on the screen.
“We won’t,” Wong confirmed. “We will gain on them quickly now. Five days at most – they have only Montgomery to jump them, after all.”
Azure himself had
never learned to jump a starship, but Wong had three Mages serving on his ship. They would jump three times as fast as the Blue Jay. Unless Wong was somehow unable to track the Jay again, they would soon bring their prey to heel.
The Blue Jay and its Mage would make Azure even more powerful than he was now – and the capture of the freighter’s Captain would finally allow him to avenge his son’s death.
He settled back into his chair as Wong began to co-ordinate the jump. He would wait. Impatient as he was, for this prize, Mikhail Azure could wait.
#
The system looked empty. Dead. The ugly bloated red giant of a star recently out of its transition from a smaller sun illuminated the shattered wreck of the system it had eaten. A single gas giant, half again the size of Sol’s Jupiter, orbited well outside the sparse remnants of what had likely been a dense asteroid belt once. Inside the asteroid belt, two rocky balls of worlds orbited, both seared clean of any atmosphere when their star had begun to burn helium.
The ship that had surveyed the system, almost a hundred years ago now, had written the entire place off as useless, even going so far as to name the system Nani Mo Nashi. According to the survey database the Blue Jay had provided Damien, the name meant roughly ‘there’s nothing here.’
“I’ve seen colleges after exams are over with more life than this place,” the young Ship’s Mage announced over the intercom to the bridge. “There’s really supposed to be something here?”
“You’re seeing what they want you to see,” Captain David Rice replied. The ship’s stocky Captain tapped a command on the panel on his chair, zooming in the main viewscreen – and the screen in Damien’s simulacrum chamber at the center of the ship that was currently mirroring it –on the gas giant.
“Most of the system is dead, but Nashi Three has a massive moon, four times the size of Earth,” Rice explained. “This gives it gas giant sized Lagrange points here, here, and here.”
Three spheres were defined on the screen in transparent blinking white light. ‘Nashi Three’ was the gas giant, which had never earned a name other than that of its system. Who would name worlds in a system they never expected humanity to visit?
“From the co-ordinates Seule gave us, Darkport is at this one,” Jenna told the two men, zooming in the view on the Lagrange point directly ahead of the immense moon. Zoomed in that far, even the Blue Jay’s powerful telescopes could only reveal so much, but they showed that the low gravity zone had accumulated a small collection of good-sized asteroids, including one easily eighty kilometers across.
“I have thermals in that cluster that aren’t natural,” Damien told the two bridge officers softly. He floated at the heart of the ship, one of his hands on the magical Simulacrum that allowed him to cast magic through the ship itself. The walls of the simulacrum chamber were coated in screens showing the stars and space around the Jay, and Damien had begun to master the techniques of adding the more esoteric sensors the starship commanded to that view.
“Looks like at least a dozen ships,” he concluded. “If they’re careful, they can jump in and out a lot closer than we did – and if they have any kind of sensor network, anyone leaving can use the giant as a shield to hide their jump flare.”
“It’s a clever set up,” David agreed. “Jenna, set us a course for the cluster. We’ll see how well this ‘bounty hunter truce’ holds up once we show up.”
Captain Seule, the man who’d sent them here, had assured them that no bounty hunter would try and take them on Darkport. Apparently, the Family that ran the station disapproved of trouble.
Of course, given the… enthusiasm the Blue Jay’s pursuers had shown so far, Damien wasn’t entirely sure that the threat of such disapproval would be enough.
#
It took the Blue Jay twenty-one hours to attract the attention of Darkport’s equivalent of Traffic Control. David figured that emerging three light minutes away, easily halfway to the bloated sun at the center of Nani Mo Nashi, had kept them from being noticed. As soon as they made turnover on a Darkport-bound course, however, the station noticed them.
The audio-only transmission, when it arrived, was short and to the point:
“I don’t know who the fuck you think you are, but if you don’t explain yourself damn-sweet, you’re going to be eating missiles up the exhaust port, capiche?”
“They’re not kidding, boss,” Jenna told him. The ship’s husky first officer focused in on a new pair of infrared signatures that had materialized in the Lagrange point they were heading to. The telescope showed them as regular looking shuttles, only slightly larger than the four heavy fusion missiles strapped to them. “Missile boats. No idea how good the missiles are, but it doesn’t take much for eight birds to ruin our day.”
“I was planning on playing nice anyway,” David reminded her. He turned to the small camera installed on his captain’s chair and hit record.
“This is David Rice of the Blue Jay,” he told the station. “Captain Nathan Seule sent me. We’re looking for somewhere to rest and refit, away from prying Protectorate eyes.”
Three minutes later, the audio transmission was replaced by a video transmission, and David knew he’d said the right things. A young, swarthy-looking man with dark hair dressed in an extremely old fashioned suit faced the camera in an extremely ordinary looking traffic control center.
“Darkport is not a resort, Captain,” he told David. “That said, if you have trade goods or physical transfer chips, you can do business here.”
“Looks like Seule’s name does open the door,” David muttered to Jenna, but the traffic controller was still speaking.
“You may continue to approach the station, but be advised we will acquire weapons lock at seven million kilometers – just to discourage any ideas, you understand,” he said calmly.
“The rules of Darkport are simple. This station is run by the Falcone Family. You fuck with Falcone affairs, we kill you. You risk the atmo integrity of the station, we kill you. You break the bounty ban, we kill you.
“Your safety and the safety of your goods are your problem,” he concluded. “The Family are neither cops nor courts. Cause too much trouble, though, and we kill you.
“Your docking fees are payable upon arrival in goods or physical transfer chips, as assessed by the Family Capo on hand when you arrive.
“If you’ve any issues, you can fuck on off right out of our system. Capiche?”
David waited for a moment to be sure the Mafia made man was done talking before turning on his recorder again.
“I get it,” he said flatly. “We’ll be docking in,” he checked the system, “twenty hours and thirty-one minutes. We’ll negotiate trade good value when we arrive.”
He ended the recording and turned to his XO.
“They sound wonderfully welcoming, don’t they?” he asked dryly.
“They just want our money,” she replied. “Speaking of which…?”
“We have physical transfer chips,” David confirmed. The small black chips contained a specific amount recorded into it by a bank, and were registered ‘to the bearer.’ The Protectorate Council made noises every few years about banning the last form of cash currency, but an anonymous form of interstellar payment was too useful to too many people for that to happen.
“I didn’t want to let the Family know that right off the bat though,” he continued. “I suspect that hunter ship came from here, and those missile boats make me nervous. I don’t want to give them ideas about taking the ship.”
“So you’re assuming they haven’t heard of us, then?” Jenna asked, and David winced.
He hadn’t exactly forgotten that the bounty hunters seemed to know that Damien had transformed the Blue Jay’s jump matrix into a fully functional unrestricted amplifier for magic, but it hadn’t occurred to him as a factor.
“If they’ve heard about us, they’ll want the ship anyway, won’t they?” he admitted aloud. “There’s not much we can do about that, except hope that the bounty ban
works in our favor.”
“Keep guards on the doors and guards on anyone who goes on-station?” she suggested.
“Given the rules and the threat level, I think I need to take Damien,” David said grimly. “His magic is the deadliest short-range weapon we have, and he won’t rip a hole in the hull.”
Jenna looked at the asteroid on the screens and grimaced. “Is this place as bad as I think it’s going to be, boss?” she asked quietly. “Do you really want Damien to see that?”
“Even here, they won’t pick a fight with a Mage,” the Captain told her. “It’ll be an unfortunate wake-up for him, but I don’t think we have a choice.”
#
Damien watched their missile boat escorts carefully as the Blue Jay began their final approach to Darkport. The two heavily armed shuttles had met them well away from the asteroid and accompanied them in, as if they expected the unarmed freighter to cause trouble.
With Damien standing at the simulacrum at the center of the ship, his gloves off and the silver runes inlaid into his palms ready to complete the freighter’s amplifier matrix, the ship was hardly unarmed. He hoped that Darkport’s masters didn’t know that.
“Those look familiar,” Jenna said over the bridge link, and Damien looked up at that screen to see what she was pointing at.
Floating gently in space was a pair of familiar looking jump-yachts. A quick query of Blue Jay’s computers proved them to be the exact same model as had pursued them at Chrysanthemum and Excelsior.
Despite a momentary panic, Damien was quickly able to confirm they were, at least, different ships. With the scanners focused in on the two vessels, he was able to tell they had different armaments from the first hunter ship – but were both definitely armed.
“Hunter ships,” David confirmed. “There’s another docked with the asteroid,” the Captain pointed out. “We’re putting our lives in the Falcone family’s hands here – if any of those guys want to break the bounty ban, this could get messy fast.”
Starship's Mage: Omnibus: (Starship's Mage Book 1) Page 31
