Interstellar Mage

by Glynn Stewart

  So, when Maria headed to the hospital to meet Jenna Campbell, she brought Corporal Sylvana Spiros and Trooper Vishal Akkerman with her. The two wore newly issued uniforms with semi-covert armored vests and Red Falcon shoulder flashes to go with their station-authorized SmartDart stunguns and only-arguably-legal concealed handguns.

  Maria wore a similar uniform with the same flashes, though hers didn’t have the body armor and she’d unzipped the suit low enough to show a carefully calculated amount of distracting cleavage. Where Spiros and Akkerman had security and rank insignia pinned to the lapels of their shipsuits, Maria simply wore her gold Mage medallion.

  Once Red Falcon had more Mages, she would add the silver dot of a senior Ship’s Mage to her own lapels, but for now she would revel in living without insignia for the first time in her life.

  Well, the first time while doing a real job, anyway.

  Dr. Singh was waiting for her in the front of the hospital when she and her guards arrived, the physician completely unbothered by her obvious escort.

  “Miss Campbell is resting comfortably and should be fine to move aboard ship tomorrow, presuming you have hired a physician by then,” he told Maria crisply. “You should be fine to meet with her for about thirty minutes, but I do ask you to pay attention to her energy levels. If she is flagging or otherwise appears ill, please cut things short.

  “She was quite severely injured and there may be medium-term consequences we’ve missed so far.”

  “Everyone tells me you’ve done a fantastic job, Doctor,” Maria replied. “The Captain is interviewing doctors today; we should have a ship’s physician aboard by tomorrow. There’s a lot of work to be done, though, and I don’t want us to rush through it without Officer Campbell’s opinion.”

  Maria had pages and pages of reports to go over with Campbell if the woman had the energy, though that was hardly the point of this meeting. The point was to make it clear that she respected Campbell’s position and authority.

  The balance between the Ship’s Mage, a civilian ship’s first officer and the one who took command if something happened to the Captain, and the executive officer who ran the ship on a day-to-day basis, was always a careful one.

  “She’s in room seventeen. I’ll walk you down.”

  Maria stepped into the hospital room on her own, leaving the doctor and her escort outside and closing the door behind her as she met Campbell’s questioning gaze.

  “New uniforms?” the XO asked. “I like the flashes.”

  “I’d hope so,” Maria said with a smile. “David said you designed them.”

  She pulled a chair up next to Campbell’s bed.

  “I’m Maria,” she introduced herself. “I believe the Captain told you he’d hired me?”

  “The ex-Navy Ship’s Mage,” the other woman agreed. “I’d welcome you aboard Red Falcon, except I haven’t been aboard her yet.”

  “Tomorrow, Dr. Singh tells me,” Maria promised. “We’re trying to keep you in the loop, but it’s being a hectic mess.”

  “Given how fast the boss wants to turn this ship around, I’m not surprised. Do we have a cargo yet?”

  “Not yet. The Captain is still working on getting a crew together. We’re still short a tactical officer and a surgeon for senior officers.”

  Campbell shook her head.

  “Can’t believe I’m going to be on a ship with a tactical officer,” the merchant officer replied. “It’s a weird thought.”

  “Red Falcon is a weird ship. Half-Navy, half-civilian, all-expensive. Running her is going to suck.”

  “The boss will find a way,” Campbell said. “Did you get the reports I asked for?”

  “I did,” Maria told her. “And then did you one better.” She tapped her wrist-comp against Campbell’s. “You now have a live encrypted link to the ship’s computers. That should help you pull any data you need to get up to date before tomorrow.”

  “Thanks. Not even tempted to keep me half-out?” the XO asked dryly.

  “Hell, no,” Maria denied with a smile. “If we don’t have a good XO, I have to do way too much work. Everything I’ve seen tells me you’re damn good—only a few other reasons why Captain Rice might have kept you around for a year, after all.”

  She couldn’t keep herself from arching a questioning eyebrow at Campbell. The woman wasn’t particularly attractive, but that would hardly be a barrier to a romantic matchup between Captain and XO who basically lived in each other’s pockets. They wouldn’t be the first pair to run a ship like that, either.

  Campbell laughed aloud, then stopped and coughed painfully.

  “You’re asking if I’m sleeping with Rice?” she asked. “No. Never. Not each other’s type, and neither of us would be inclined to screw up the ship like that. Plus, he’s got a girl on Amber, and much as I like her, she’s fucking terrifying.”

  Maria smiled apologetically.

  “I had to know what I was getting into,” she said. “You and I and the Captain have to work together no matter what, and I haven’t had a chance to see you two interact yet. That’s a minefield I needed to know if it was there.”

  “Fair enough. No, our job is going to be keeping the boss out of trouble. He’s got a soft streak a light-second wide, and it leads us into a lot of causes we’re better off avoiding.”

  That fit with why Alois had drafted Maria to be Rice’s Ship’s Mage, as well as the way everyone aboard seemed hyper-protective of the captain. It wasn’t like Maria wasn’t familiar enough with her own soft streak, though.

  “Well, with two stubborn old biddies like us to keep him on the straight and narrow, we should be fine,” she told Campbell.

  “That we should,” the XO agreed with a grin. “Now, those reports, Ship’s Mage Soprano?”

  8

  By noon, David had interviewed three doctors, four potential First Pilots, and one candidate for tactical officer who had left him wanting to wash his hands. A lot.

  It was hard for him to say just what had set him off about the little man, but he’d managed to set David’s teeth on edge the moment he’d walked into the office, and fifteen minutes of conversation with him had allowed the Captain to realize two things about the man:

  First, he was exactly as competent, knowledgeable and skilled with shipboard weapons as his resume indicated—and secondly, he had acquired none of that knowledge aboard the Royal Navy ships said resume said he’d served on.

  David was grimly certain he’d just interviewed a pirate, but he had nothing solid to give law enforcement to prove it. He sighed and shook his head, consigning the resume to the virtual garbage bin and studying the three doctors.

  Any of them would do, if he was being honest, which made choosing between the three difficult. Normally, he’d run them all by Campbell and get his XO’s opinion—he would have, in fact, had her in the interviews.

  As it was…

  His wrist-comp chimed.

  “Rice,” he answered crisply, glad for the distraction.

  “Boss, it’s Wiltshire,” the administrator greeted him. “I just got a request for an appointment with you on an ‘as soon as possible’ basis. I have your schedule in front of me and you’re blocked off for review and lunch, but if you want, I can get him in maybe fifteen.”

  “That depends on who it is,” David admitted.

  “Trade Factor Harvey Nguyen of Cinnamon,” Wiltshire reeled off instantly. “He’s the senior representative of their off-planet office here. Cinnamon is—”

  “A primarily agricultural MidWorld thirty-six light-years from here,” David concluded. The various worlds of the Protectorate didn’t, technically, have embassies or consulates on other planets. They had “trade offices” and “investment factors” that served much the same purposes for worlds that shared a national identity but remained days or weeks apart by ship.

  The senior trade factor for Cinnamon there was basically the planet’s ambassador to Tau Ceti, in itself the third-largest system economy in the Protecto
rate. Sol was wealthier. Legatus was wealthier—the decision of the first of the “UnArcana Worlds” to ban Mages on the planet meant the system had built an entirely independent industrial empire to fulfill many of its needs.

  Cinnamon probably didn’t have a trade office on Legatus, so after their Councilor and trade factors in Sol, that made Harvey Nguyen one of the most important off-planet officials the system had. If he wanted to meet with a freighter captain, that made David smell profit.

  Which certainly ranked above trying to pick between doctors in his books!

  “Let Mr. Nguyen know I am available at his convenience,” he finally told Wiltshire. “Let me know when he gets here.”

  In the meantime, he turned back to the screen on his console with the three resumes, smiled to himself, and then sent all three over to Maria Soprano, asking her opinion.

  If he had his Mage first officer around, after all, he may as well make use of her!

  Factor Nguyen was a pudgy little man in a perfectly tailored black suit and bowler cap, the height of current fashion on Cinnamon, according to David’s quick research in the fifteen minutes it took the man to show up.

  That research had also warned him that his initial impression had, if anything, underestimated Nguyen’s influence. The man was not only the representative of the Cinnamon system government but also the primary agent for Cinnamon’s largest syndicate of importers.

  He wasn’t particularly wealthy in his own right, but a message from the fussy little man in David’s office could send millions—if not billions—of dollars into motion.

  “Please, Mr. Nguyen, sit down,” David greeted the man respectfully. “Can I get you something to drink? A snack?”

  “No, thank you,” the Factor replied. “I have quite strict dietary requirements for my health; it is difficult for others to meet my needs.” He forced a wan smile. “It is easier simply not to try, Captain Rice.”

  “I see,” David said, leaning back in his chair and studying the Cinnamon man across the table. “Then how can I be of assistance to the government of Cinnamon today, Factor?”

  “I find myself in a somewhat awkward situation, Captain,” Nguyen admitted. “An…embarrassment of riches, I suppose.

  “While the government I represent and the syndicate I work with are capable of mobilizing a great deal of capital, that kind of capital must be carefully distributed across the interstellar banking network. Cinnamon lacks a Rune Transceiver Array, so all of our banking must be done with inevitable time delays which require careful management.”

  David nodded his understanding, waiting for Nguyen to get to the point. Every ship that traveled between systems did with a heavily encrypted postal “lock box” of data, mostly news and financial information. The RTA’s were fantastic for allowing interstellar communication, but since they only projected the voice of the Mage using it, they were useless for data transfer.

  Since those lock boxes were the primary means of transferring money around, it meant that each portion of someone’s money effectively had a physical location. Cinnamon might have, say, ten billion in available cash and credit—but if they’d only assigned fifty million to Tau Ceti right now, that was all Nguyen had to work with.

  “My homeworld, like all MidWorlds, is self-sufficient, but our industry lags behind most developed planets,” the trade factor continued. “Most of our heavy industrial equipment and power systems are manufactured off-world, and making certain that our supply of such is sufficient to our needs is a major portion of my job.”

  “I see.” David was still waiting for the point.

  “An opportunity has crossed my path to acquire the inventory of a near-bankrupt manufacturer of such systems on Tau Ceti f,” Nguyen explained. “Said inventory would fill your ship, twenty million tons of robotic manufacturing systems, power plants, several container surface ships, the like.”

  And David finally saw the point.

  “And you don’t have enough money,” he said quietly.

  “I negotiated the price, believing that I would be able to readily access credit here in Tau Ceti,” Nguyen admitted. “I have had difficulties doing so quickly enough. I have no concerns about my ability to do so in the long term, but there are other players and this deal has a limited time.

  “Basically, Captain, if I do not deliver the funds within the next seventy-two hours, the company I am dealing with will have to declare bankruptcy and their inventory will be tied up in those legal proceedings,” the little man told him. “If, however, I make that payment, I will have a twenty-million-ton cargo to send home, and a company I have done solid business with for twenty years will be able to make their bond payment, avoid bankruptcy, and acquire new inventory to continue operating.”

  It was a cute sob story, David had to admit. It might even be true, though the “warm fuzzies” of saving a company and the attendant livelihood of its employees had to be secondary in the cold calculus of a starship captain.

  “You need a partner,” he said calmly.

  “I need a partner,” Nguyen agreed.

  “What’s your offer?” David asked. With the money he’d clawed back from not having to replace Red Falcon’s weapons and his other resources, he’d been considering buying a largely speculative cargo in any case—though he’d be far happier carrying someone else’s cargo and holding that money against future problems and operating costs.

  “I will pay half of your normal contracted shipping rate in advance, and my government will pay half upon arrival in Cinnamon,” the factor began. “And I will offer you a thirty-percent stake in the cargo for one hundred fifty million Martian dollars.”

  Red Falcon’s Captain winced. He’d dealt in that kind of money before—Red Falcon, for example, was valued at around thirty-two billion dollars—but that was a lot of money, even for a starship captain.

  He simply didn’t have it right now. He could get it—it wouldn’t be the first time he’d put a mortgage against a starship, and it would be easy to get a one-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar loan with a thirty-billion-dollar ship for collateral, but…

  “Fifty percent,” he said calmly. “For me to find a hundred and fifty million dollars in three days? I need a fifty-percent stake in the cargo.”

  “The cargo costs far more than three hundred million, Captain!” Nguyen objected.

  “And will be completely lost if someone doesn’t come up with the missing money, won’t it?” David asked.

  “You rob me, Captain!”

  “Please. You’re paying, what, four, five hundred for the cargo, all in?” David said. “Fifty percent is a premium for my contribution, yes, but if you’re getting a deal, you’re expecting a twofold return on sale in Cinnamon at least. And without my money and my ship, you don’t have a deal at all, do you?”

  From the way the trade factor coughed, David was close to the mark.

  “Forty-five percent,” Nguyen said firmly. “Anything more and both my government and my financiers will have my head!”

  “Good enough,” Red Falcon’s Captain replied genially, offering his hand. “Get a contract to my man up front as soon as you can and I’ll have you the money in forty-eight hours.”

  “We have a deal, Captain.”

  9

  Somehow, despite everything going on, the following week passed in surprising calm. David kept waiting for the next batch of assassins to emerge from the station crowds, or for the deal with Nguyen’s contact to fall through, or…

  None of his worries had materialized and things had run smoothly until the moment finally came for them to detach from Armstrong Station and dare the meteor swarms Tau Ceti was famous for.

  Tau Ceti had been one of the first systems scouted when humanity had first reached out for the stars under the Mage-King of Mars. The second actually colonized as part of what many still regarded as the biggest bribe ever paid in human history.

  When the Eugenics Wars of the twenty-second and twenty-third centuries ended, the first Mage-King had
found himself unwillingly in control of the entire human race. Since he and his fellow Mages were a product of the Eugenicists’ bloody Project Olympus, he had no more love for his creators than the rest of humanity—but refused to allow his people to be slaves again.

  He’d offered the Compact: in exchange for a number of privileges and guarantees, Mages would put their considerable powers to the service of mankind instead of its mastery. The first service they’d offered had been the jump-ships, carrying humanity’s diaspora outward.

  Now, two hundred years later, Tau Ceti’s two habitable worlds were the anchor for one of the richest systems in the Protectorate. Both planets had been pounded by once-a-century meteor storms before humanity’s arrival, keeping their biospheres primitive and unchallenging to human settlers.

  A massive space station orbited ahead of Tau Ceti f, visible on David’s screens and scanners as a distant, slightly brighter star. The chilly but heavily populated f itself occupied almost half of his view as Red Falcon slowly came fully and entirely alive around him.

  “All systems are online,” LaMonte reported from the engineering repeater station. The young woman had many talents, but she was also one of the best programmers David had ever met. She could do most of her engineering job from anywhere on the ship, so having her as the liaison made sense.

  Not that Kellers or LaMonte had asked his opinion.

  “Fusion One, Two, Three, Four and Five are fully operational and clearing one hundred percent on draw stress tests,” she continued. “Stepping down to regular power needs. Engine nozzles have been swept for FOD and are ready to ignite.

  “Engineering reports ready for flight, sir.”

  “Anybody else got problems?” David asked. Two of Soprano’s new junior Mages had run through the core of the ship during the last week, reactivating all of the gravity runes. His shiny new ship could actually use her engines’ full capacity without crushing the crew, which was a strange thought for a freighter captain.