“Will do, boss,” Kelly confirmed, shifting Damien’s weight so she could move with him.
“When you’re done, come see me on the bridge,” David instructed as she headed for the door. “If Damien’s damn stupid stunt isn’t enough, we’ll need some way to cover ourselves still. I have some thoughts on that box of missiles we picked up.”
#
By the time the Azure Gauntlet was finally ready to go, Mikhail Azure’s patience had grown very short. Even he couldn’t argue that the six missile tubes and fifteen laser turrets Wong’s crew had got back online weren’t worth the wait, however, so he had remained silent.
Fortunately for Wong, the old bounty hunter’s abilities as a Tracker were sufficient that they had not needed any more data for him to track the Blue Jay, and two jumps after their repairs were complete, they had arrived on the fleeing freighter’s trail.
After twelve hours of repairs and a full day of jumping, however, he was starting to doubt Wong’s abilities. By any reasonable standard, there was no way the Jay was still ahead of them – to have jumped as often, as fast, as it would have taken for them to have come this far should have killed Montgomery.
“We are ready for the jump, my lord,” Wong reported, seemingly unaware of his master’s doubts. He stepped up to stand directly beside Azure and continued, too quietly for any but the crime lord to hear. “I have Jourdaine standing by to jump us again if necessary,” he murmured. “I do not believe that Rice and Montgomery could have gone further than this in the time available.”
“So you are prepared to run?” Azure asked sharply, glancing at his ship’s commander.
“For all of my distaste for the man, Able was very good at what he did,” Wong admitted. “He died. We know what the Blue Jay’s crew did to him, but they have proven themselves very tricky – and no prey is as dangerous as one that knows it’s cornered.
“I am prepared for the unexpected, my lord,” he concluded. “But if my calculations are correct, we will emerge within missile range of your prey, and this long hunt should soon be over.”
Azure nodded slowly, glancing around the bridge of the stolen cruiser. Despite the unexpected strength of their prey, the cruiser had proven valuable beyond his wildest dreams. He wondered, now, why he’d held it in reserve for so long. With Montgomery to build amplifiers for the rest of his fleet, the Gauntlet would make a suitable flagship for the conquest that would ensue.
He saw the future of the Blue Star Syndicate stretch out before him, and it was glorious.
“You may jump when ready, Mister Wong,” he said aloud.
Reality shivered around him, and the Azure Gauntlet was elsewhere. It took precious seconds for her scanners to awaken to their new reality, but when they did they showed the Blue Jay dead center in the Gauntlet’s screens.
#
Damien was on the bridge when the jump flare blasted onto the Blue Jay’s sensors. David’s idea for making sure he didn’t jump early again was apparently to keep a continuous eye on the Mage.
Given the blazing headache the last jump he’d made had left him with, after twelve straight hours of nothing but sleep, the youth wasn’t planning on disobeying the orders he’d been given to avoid jumping until twelve more had passed.
Besides, it had been a while since he’d actually been on the freighter’s bridge. Normally he was linked in by intercom.
Once the massive cruiser appeared on their scanners, though, he started to regret the situation.
“We have this under control, Damien,” David told him, the Captain’s eyes on the scanners. “Of course, I’m not going to object if you were to get down the simulacrum chamber at this point,” he finished dryly.
“Inbound message,” Jenna announced. “I think they want to talk to us.”
“Play it,” David ordered, and Damien turned, standing next to the exit from the bridge, to watch the recording.
A tall man in a plain black suit appeared on the screen, surrounded by the bustle of the cruiser’s bridge. His eyes were a sharp, piercing blue framed by neatly trimmed shoulder-length hair. He wore the gold medallion of a Mage, but without any of the symbols that marked training or degrees.
“I am Mikhail Azure,” the man said simply. “I command the Azure Gauntlet and the Blue Star Syndicate, and I have now brought you to bay.
“This message is for the Mage Damien Montgomery,” he continued. “We both know that you have an extraordinary gift, Damien, and that you are pursued by the Protectorate for its use.
“Today does not need to end in fire. Your Captain knows the value of my word, and I give it to you on this:
“If you surrender, and swear to serve me willingly, I give my word of honor that I will spare the Blue Jay and its crew – even your Captain Rice, for all his sins against me and mine.”
Mikhail’s piercing gaze seemed to hold Damien’s across the room and the vast gap of deep space between them.
“I am generous to my employees, Damien, and if you serve me I will make you rich and powerful beyond your wildest dreams. You cannot lose here – and do not think you can escape me if you refuse. You are out of time. I can be magnanimous, but I will not be defied.”
The recording ended.
Damien stepped back into the bridge, glancing around at David and Jenna.
“He’s right that we can’t run,” Jenna said quietly, looking at him.
“You got his son killed,” Damien said to David. “Would he really keep his word?”
“He’s not as trustworthy as Falcone,” the Captain replied slowly. “But in this? To buy your loyalty? He would.
“Your gift would be worth that to him.”
Of course, Damien knew, what Azure would want from him was warships. Dozens of ships like the Blue Jay – regular freighters with amplifiers, whose victims would never seem them coming. He could save the Blue Jay, but only at the cost of thousands of lives.
“May I?” he asked Jenna, touching the communication controls. She nodded slowly, activating the recorder and focusing the camera on Damien.
“Lord Azure, I have considered your offer,” he told the camera, “and I have decided that I have no interest in being a low-life murdering scum working for criminals and slavers. You can go to hell, and take your ‘offer’ with you.”
Cutting the recording, Damien turned back to Captain Rice – his Captain.
“Please tell me you have a plan, boss.”
“After all we’ve been through?” David asked him with a slow grin. “Of course I have a plan.”
#
Azure had not actually expected Montgomery to blithely change sides, though he had suspected that Rice might convince the youth to make a career change to save the rest of the ship. There was rejection and there was insulting, however.
“I see that Montgomery has already established his opinion of us,” he said icily, loud enough that everyone on the bridge of the Azure Gauntlet. “I suggest we show him what us ‘low-life murdering scum’ think of lily-handed Mages too naïve to know a good offer when they see one!”
The answering growl told him he’d hit the right tone. Few of his people had chosen the path they now walked, and to be judged by a man who’d been handed the world on a silver platter the way many of the Protectorate’s Mages were stung.
“Take us in to seven light seconds, Mister Wong, and prepare your precision kinetics,” Azure ordered, leaning back in his chair.
They’d emerged from their jump twenty light seconds away from the fleeing freighter. The Blue Jay was well within the range of the Gauntlet’s heavy missiles, but those weapons lacked the precision to disable the ship’s matrix. A single one of those gigaton warheads would vaporize the freighter.
The Navy’s answer to that, decades ago, had been the precision kinetic missile: a light, antimatter-driven missile with no warhead except its own mass. Carefully aimed, the missile could eliminate turrets, break rotating ribs, and similar disabling damage. To carry a low enough velocity to avoid doing c
ritical damage though, the weapon’s range was limited – and detailed targeting instructions were required from the parent vessel.
The Snapdragon V missiles carried by the Gauntlet had a maximum range of just over ten light seconds. At that range, though, Azure’s experience was that even Navy vessels tended to inflict far more damage than intended. The closer they got to the Blue Jay before firing, the better – and rare indeed was the Mage whose amplified reach was more than six light seconds.
“We will be clear to fire in less than three hours,” Wong reported quietly. Behind him, the Mages at the Simulacrum switched out, the dark-haired youth whose golden amulet actually bore the stars of a Jump Mage replacing one of his illegally trained fellows. “I’ve had Jourdaine move up,” Wong continued, nodding to the exchange behind him. “He’s rested for eight hours, so he can jump us after the Jay if they run.”
“Keep your eyes peeled, Mister Wong,” Azure ordered softly, his eyes on the scanners. “Rice is a tricky bastard, and I will tolerate no more surprises from him.”
Wong simply nodded and returned to his station, just behind the Simulacrum at the heart of the bridge.
Azure settled into his chair, watching the screens gathered around him and the bridge crew beyond them. They weren’t the finely oiled machine of the handful of Protectorate warship’s he’d seen the bridge of, but they were more than good enough for his purposes.
Sixty minutes passed while the Azure Gauntlet’s massive engines blazed, propelling her towards her prey at fifteen gravities. Without the gravity runes carved into the floor of every level of the ship, the crew would have been crushed to death long ago at these speeds.
“Sir, the Blue Jay just dropped a cargo container,” Hu reported from the sensor station. “I’m not detecting anything unusual about it, but its drifting free in space. Seems an odd time to be ejecting their garbage.”
“The last time the Blue Jay appeared to be disposing of their garbage, a starship hunting them died,” Wong observed dryly. “Monroe! Target that container with a heavy missile and blow it to hell.”
The brightly haired gunner didn’t respond aloud, but moments later a single missile blasted out from the Gauntlet’s forward tubes. It blasted forward at thirteen thousand gravities, closing in on the innocent-looking cargo container.
Four minutes later, with the Syndicate missile still forty seconds out, the cargo container gracefully came apart. With the Azure Gauntlet’s sensors focused on it, Azure was easily able to spot the pre-placed charges that blew out all six exterior panels.
Several seconds passed in silence as Azure found himself holding his breath to see what happened next. Then, with their missile still ten seconds out, the neat racking holding the contents together came apart as well.
The Blue Jay disappeared from their screens, hidden behind hundreds of threat icons.
“What the fuck?!” Azure exclaimed involuntarily.
“The container was full of missiles,” Hu answered after a long pause. “It looks like they suffered some attrition to the charges and initial launch, but we have three hundred and seventy eight fusion drive missiles inbound.”
Azure looked at the blinking red icons on his screens. The missiles were blazing back at the Gauntlet at five thousand gravities, nothing compared to their own missiles, but there were so many of them.
“Talk to me, Wong,” he ordered.
“Tempests of some variety,” his servant explained calmly. “They’re self-targeting and very smart. Compared to our own missiles, they’re slow, long-burning, and carry pitiful warheads.”
“And?”
“And we can stop maybe three-quarters of that salvo,” Wong admitted. “Our armor would probably take thirty or forty hits before it gave way. The remaining fifty or so nukes would gut us and end the Blue Star Syndicate in a blaze of nuclear fire.”
Azure glared at the missiles as they shot towards him.
“Surprises,” he said bitterly. “Do what you must, Mister Wong.”
His captain nodded sharply, and turned back to the Gauntlet’s bridge crew.
“Jourdaine!” Wong snapped. “Get us the hell out of here!”
#
“Damn.”
The mild curse word from David was among the worst Damien had ever heard the Captain swear, but it utterly failed to cover the disappointment at watching the pursuing cruiser disappear into a jump flash as the massive salvo of missiles bore down on it.
“Kelly, activate the self-destructs,” the Captain ordered after a long pause. “No point in leaving a traffic hazard around for the next poor bastard.”
A moment later, the screens surrounding Damien in the simulacrum chamber darkened automatically, as over three hundred one-hundred-megaton fusion warheads detonated simultaneously.
“Damien, get us out of here,” David ordered after the fireballs faded. “While they probably can’t jump right back, I’d rather not stick around and find out!”
The only reasons Damien hadn’t already jumped them away was David’s strict orders not to jump without waiting twelve hours from the last time. Once the Captain revoked that order, he settled his hands on the Simulacrum.
Energy flowed through him as he aligned the runes inlaid into his palms with the gaps and the models, and he relaxed into the warming sensation.
“Jumping,” he reported, and channeled the spell.
One indistinguishable moment later, and the freighter was somewhere else – and Damien’s migraine was back. At least he wasn’t bleeding like he’d been after pushing the first six jumps.
“We’ve bought ourselves at least some time,” David told Damien and the others over the intercom. “Everyone get some rest – especially you, Damien. In six hours, I need you to jump us again.
“Then, once we’ve got a bit more space between us and these assholes, I’m calling a staff meeting,” the Captain continued. “I’m starting to run out of clever ideas, so I’m planning on stealing all of yours.”
#
Alaura paced her office on the Tides of Justice impatiently. She’d configured the one bare wall to show her the view of the asteroid below, and it was a depressing sight.
Darkport had been hammered hard, and it turned out that their main hangars weren’t even working anymore. Brigadier Raphael’s transports had ended up having to blast their way into the station to deliver desperately needed oxygen resupply.
For all that the second thing the Brigadier’s men had done was arrest the entire ruling council of the station – all Falcone Dons, wanted for dozens of crimes across the Protectorate – they’d been greeted as rescuers and heroes. Julian Falcone, who had met the Marines when they boarded and pre-emptively surrendered himself, had not understated the situation.
Raphael’s men judged that they’d had less than twenty minutes to spare when they’d blasted new tunnels into the blocked off third of the station and set up field oxygen supplies. There had been fourteen hundred people in that part of the station, and every one of them owed their lives to the Protectorate.
The Protectorate was now in unquestioned control of the notorious station that had spawned a lot of black spots on recent history. The last twenty hours were easily described as ‘a good day’s work,’ but Alaura still had a problem.
They had no idea where either the Blue Jay or Mikhail Azure’s Azure Gauntlet had gone. Darkport didn’t require flight plans on good days, let alone while under attack by overwhelming force.
Now that Raphael’s men were in control of the station, he had a cyber-warfare team quietly tearing through the computers. Alaura’s hope was that they would find some clue that would permit to chase one of the two ships.
A pinging chime from her wrist personal computer interrupted her reverie, and she threw the call up on the wall-screen, superimposing it over the image of Darkport.
“Brigadier,” she greeted Raphael. “Do you have good news?”
“Not sure yet, ma’am,” the soldier, still wearing his combat exosuit despite h
aving declared the station secure four hours ago, told her. “I have someone who is insisting on speaking to the ‘leader of your tin cans out there’, and since she managed to sneak into my command post past half a platoon of very capable security types, I figured she might well be worth your time.”
Raphael gestured, and the camera rotated to show a woman dressed in a dark blue jumpsuit. For a moment, Alaura thought she was a small woman, and then realized that the soldiers flanking her were still in exosuits. The intruder was easily six feet tall, with short-cropped black hair and dark eyes that were currently unreadable.
“I am Alaura Stealey, Hand of the Mage-King of Mars,” Alaura introduced herself calmly. “You’ve managed to impress my Brigadier. Who are you, and why do you wish to speak with me?”
“A Hand, huh?” the woman repeated in a soft voice. “That works. I am Julia Amiri. You haven’t heard of me.”
Alaura checked her files surreptitiously.
“You’re right,” she admitted.
“I’m a bounty hunter,” Amiri continued. “I worked with my brother, ran a ship – the Last Angel. We tried to stay on the right side of everybody, including the Protectorate.”
Alaura gestured for her to continue. She wasn’t sure where Amiri was going, but she could at least guess at part of it.
“My brother, idiot that he was, took the Last Angel out against Azure,” Amiri said flatly. “Mikhail Azure killed him – him and twenty-six other men and women who were the next thing to family to me.
“I want blood, Lady Stealey, and I think you can give it to me,” she finished bluntly.
“I’m not sure what you think I can do, Miss Amiri,” Alaura said carefully. “I intend to pursue Azure, yes, but I don’t see any reason to bring you with me.”
“You won’t find him without me,” the hunter replied. “I can give you Azure. I can even give you the ship he jumped out of here after, since I doubt you care nothing for the Blue Jay and its wonder Mage,” she continued with a cold smile.
Starship's Mage: Omnibus: (Starship's Mage Book 1) Page 36
