Eventually, there were just the two of them on the bridge, waiting out the double-length pause between jumps.
“How long, do you think?” David asked the other man in the silence after they’d been alone, both watching their screens, for at least ten minutes.
He didn’t say what he was asking about. He knew the other man understood, or he wouldn’t have been there.
“Guessing two Mages,” Acconcio grunted. “Call it four hours between jumps, but they were waiting for us. I figure two and a half, maybe three hours.”
“We’ll pick them up?”
“No question. These are Navy-grade scanners; there’s no way we’ll miss a jump flare.” The gunner shrugged. “If they’re smart, they’ll jump in a light-hour or so off from the normal waypoint. That way, we’ll be gone before their light reaches us, but they’ll be able to confirm we were here.
“It’s not like they can exactly track our jumps, after all.”
“I’ve been chased by people who could,” David said quietly. “It wasn’t a fun experience.”
“That’s not possible,” the ex-Navy man replied. “Yeah, if you know where someone’s coming from and where they’re going, you can ambush them, but you can’t chase people.”
“I don’t know how,” David noted. “But I was chased when I didn’t have a course on record anywhere, and people I trust tell me that’s how I was followed.” He shrugged. “Fortunately, everyone I know can do it is dead.”
Unmentioned was that both of the ships he’d known to track him through jumps were dead at the hands of his crew. If Acconcio hadn’t realized there was more to LaMonte, for example, than a pretty face, well…he’d have some surprises coming.
“Damn,” the man said. “So far as I know, the Navy still thinks that’s impossible.”
“Well, like I said, I don’t know how to do it,” David told him with a grin. “The bastards with my flight plan are bad enough.”
“We’ll deal with them, boss,” Acconcio said grimly. “Between me, Skavar, and Soprano, no one coming after this ship has a damn clue what kind of meat-grinder they’re running into.”
David shook his head.
“Between the three of you, I keep half-expecting to discover this is actually still a Navy ship that everyone lets me think is mine out of courtesy.”
His three ex-military officers were all recent muster-outs, and they’d all dropped all too neatly into his lap. They’d mostly come to him through Burns—and Burns had Alaura Stealey’s trust, which was enough for David Rice. It was still enough to weird him out.
Acconcio laughed.
“If this was a Navy ship, they wouldn’t have let Soprano anywhere near it,” he pointed out. “And I’m here because of her.” The ex-warrant officer paused, then chuckled again. “I’ll give you Skavar. He might still be a Marine, for all I know. He certainly produced a full platoon of ex-Martian Marines at the drop of a dime, from what I heard.”
David shared the laugh.
“If that’s the case, I guess I can be thankful the Protectorate is watching my back?” he asked. “There’s a point when you wonder, though, just how much debt you’ve racked up and when you’re going to be asked to pay it back.”
His tactical officer’s gaze went serious and dark.
“I know,” he admitted. “And sometimes you have to choose just what you’re prepared to sacrifice to pay your debts.”
Something in Acconcio’s tone told David that wasn’t something to ask about, not yet, and he let the silence descend again.
“There,” the other man suddenly snapped, gesturing at his console. “Not sneaky enough, my friends.”
“What have you got?”
“Jump flare at five light-minutes; lit him up like a Christmas tree,” Falcon’s tactical officer replied. “Pretty sure it’s our ghost; the reflection reads like a stealthed hull.”
“So, he knew where we were going.”
“Oh, yeah,” Acconcio confirmed. “Should have jumped even further out. Now I know what we’re dealing with.”
“And that is?”
“Caribbean-class patrol corvette,” the dark-skinned man reported. “Hundred thousand tons, fusion engines, fusion missiles, couple of light lasers. Built as an in-system cutter, they only have a jump matrix for delivery to the destination.
“Couple of systems build them, probably eighty, ninety of them scattered around the MidWorlds and the Fringe.” He shook his head. “Our friend here had his hull upgraded with heat-scattering tiles, but the jump flare lit him up cleanly.”
“All he needed to know to ambush us and a stealthy ship,” David murmured. “Why am I not feeling loved today?”
“We’re forty minutes from the scheduled jump to Cinnamon,” his officer pointed out. “He can’t intercept us; he’s just watching. Stalking.”
“Assessing our jump patterns for when he has our next flight path,” Red Falcon’s Captain said grimly. “I hope your people are living up to your expectations, Mr. Acconcio, because I think we’re going to have work for them soon.”
11
Maria concealed a sigh of relief from her junior Mages as they emerged into the Cinnamon system. She hadn’t been making the jump, so she’d been watching the sensor data and had seen the ship reappear at the last jump point.
Cinnamon was a MidWorld and a relatively unindustrialized one, so her system defense force was minimal—but the dozen corvettes showing up on Red Falcon’s long-range scanners would have made short work of a single ship if it decided to chase the freighter.
“That’s our part done,” she told the Mages. “Well done, people. Thirty-six light-years in three days sets a fine precedent for the Captain to use when bidding for cargo—if we can deliver the most cargo the fastest, then we’ll be the first choice of shipper for a lot of people.
“That keeps the ship busy and us paid,” she concluded with a grin. “Go rest, all of you. We’re still half a day or so from orbit, and I’ll want you all rested when we start the calculations for the next trip. Go!”
Her new subordinates, the oldest of them ten years her junior, drifted out of the simulacrum chamber. Maria was left alone floating amidst the stars, and she studied the Cinnamon system.
The quiet of the system’s reputation showed in more ways than one. They’d just left Tau Ceti, a system where human habitation was guarded by massive anti-meteor defenses. Here, nature had provided a shield against the same—the third planet was the habitable world, named Cinnamon like the system, but the fourth was a massive super-Jovian gas giant named Peppercorn.
Peppercorn had smashed anything in the system that had been farther out than Cinnamon and sucked all of the debris into its own orbit. The gas giant had massive rings of gas and rock—but the star system didn’t have an asteroid belt of any kind.
Just two rocky worlds, too hot and small to support life—Ghost and Jalapeno, according to Maria’s files—and a third world, slightly larger and less dense than Earth, smack dab in the habitable zone.
Cinnamon had a gravity slightly higher than humanity’s homeworld, a day slightly longer than Earth or terraformed Mars, and only a single ocean.
Most of the planet was a single landmass, wrapped around a single contiguous body of deep water that covered just over forty-five percent of Cinnamon’s surface. The planet had a low axial tilt, calm seasons, and a climate supportive of Earth-native crops over a vast area.
Its local life hadn’t progressed much past plants—but some of those plants were the reason for the system’s theme naming. The original survey had found four plants that were edible to humans and made for spectacular exotic spices.
The colonists had found half a dozen food crops among the native plant life and another twenty spices. Cinnamon exported the spices that gave the world its name and vast quantities of food.
What industry the planet had was mostly in orbit, keeping the atmosphere of the world below clean for both the people and the vast farms that occupied it. Eventually, the ex
ports would allow Cinnamon to bootstrap itself up to a higher standard than many worlds, but for now, it was relatively unindustrialized by MidWorld standards.
“Soprano,” Rice’s voice cut into her thoughts as an intercom screen opened. “Did you check the scan reports for the last jump point?”
“We were still being followed,” she confirmed. “That’s going to be a headache. Any chance it was the locals?”
“Acconcio says they’re using a completely different class of corvette,” the Captain told her. One of the two men on the bridge had clearly had the same thought. “Tau Ceti–built.”
“What do we do?” she asked.
“For now?” His image shrugged. “We’re about ten hours from making orbit at zero relative velocity. We’ll deliver the cargo, get paid, and see what we can find to carry on from here.
“And when we leave, we keep our eyes open.”
“This ship is heavily armed enough to take out any pirate,” Maria noted.
“And they know that, even if they’ve hopefully underestimated our defenses,” her Captain agreed. “So, I worry about just what they’ll bring to the party when they decide to play. Are your people up for any kind of assistance in a fight?”
“There’s some training in the Jump Mage curriculum,” she admitted, “but I wouldn’t rely on it. None of our juniors are that fresh out of school.” She considered the planets on the screens around her for several seconds. “I’ll refresh their training,” she promised. “We won’t add a lot more to Falcon’s defenses than the RFLAM turrets do, but every little bit helps.”
“It does. Thank you.”
“Part of the job, sir. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll go look up some training books,” Maria told Rice. “It’s been a while since I had to do missile defense without an amplifier myself!”
Cinnamon Station was a smaller station than many Maria had seen in her years in the Navy, but like most MidWorlds orbitals, it was the central pride of their space presence. A central fat cylinder, two hundred meters across and two hundred meters high, remained motionless to allow for starship docking. Linked to that was a ring, just over fifteen hundred meters across, that spun fast enough to provide a full gravity of centripetal acceleration at its rim.
The hundred-meter-tall exterior of the ring had probably been more than enough space when it was installed, but Cinnamon had expanded beyond the original capacity of the station. At some point, six carefully balanced towers had been added to the outer rim. Each was about two hundred meters wide and extended three hundred meters “up” and “down” from the ring.
Presumably, they’d added extra thrusters or something to the towers to help keep the whole assemblage spinning safely. Maria was simply glad that no one was making Red Falcon dock at the rotating towers—not that anything larger than a shuttle could.
Red Falcon’s sheer size meant they were getting an entire side of the central hub to themselves, docking nose to nose with a space station that wasn’t, all things considered, significantly bigger than the AAFHF herself.
As a Navy Mage-Commander, Maria had been fully trained to carry out docking operations for ships of even greater size, but she was still glad that it was Campbell and Rice who were docking Falcon today. She didn’t even need to be in the simulacrum chamber—she just found it helped her think.
Her wrist-comp pinged as they closed with the station, and she sighed. She’d sent a report in to MISS with the rest of the mail delivery, relayed to the main office in Nutmeg City.
Part of her had hoped that her reports were simply going to disappear into the bureaucracy of a galaxy-wide security agency. In this case, she was reasonably certain that the Protectorate knowing that they were being hunted wasn’t going to hurt anyone aboard Falcon, but it still felt wrong to betray her shipmates’ confidences.
The response was a simple text message that had somehow managed to arrive on her comp without a return contact address.
Situation more critical than expected. Local details an additional complication. Meet me.
No name. Just a time and an address.
Maria sighed. She’d hoped that this job wasn’t going to include cloak-and-dagger bullshit. Give her a ship, give her an enemy, she knew what she was doing. Sneaking around sending reports and receiving secret orders?
She’d ask how an honest soldier had come to this, but she knew the answer to that one.
“And there we go,” Campbell announced with a confident satisfaction in her voice. “Primary connection made; Cinnamon Station is extending umbilicals. We are locked on.”
“Thank you, XO,” David told her. “How’s my message inbox looking?” he continued with a grin.
“You’ve Cinnamon Station on the line, wanting to chat with you about docking fees and contracts, but that’s it for now,” she replied. “I can’t speak to your actual inbox, but if Nguyen was remotely on the level, there will be people looking for you pretty quick.”
“Nguyen’s on the level,” he confirmed. “I’ll go sort out our docking fees. If anyone from the system government or Nguyen’s import syndicate calls, feel free to interrupt. You know how much I love station control.”
“Will do,” Campbell promised.
With the magical gravity now laid out, it was barely a twenty-second walk to his office, where David settled down behind the desk and linked his wrist-comp into the office systems, ordering them to bring up the channel to the station administrator.
“Captain Rice,” the heavyset man on the screen greeted him. “I am George O’Toole, dock administrator for Cinnamon Station. It’s not often we see a ship of your scale dock here. I’ll admit I wasn’t sure we could link up to your fuel tanks!”
“It’s the same fittings, Mr. O’Toole,” David replied. “We just have to pump longer. We’ll also need to acquire antimatter, which I’m assuming is not in your regular umbilical setup.”
The administrator stared at him for a moment.
“I suppose I should have been paying more attention when you burned in,” he finally admitted. “Antimatter?”
“Red Falcon is an ex-Navy ship; we still run on antimatter main engines,” David confirmed. “I’ll have to check my systems to be certain, but I think we’ll need to restock a couple of hundred kilos.”
Several hundred kilograms of antimatter, even with magical transmutation for production, was going to set him back more than the thousands of tons of hydrogen he was going to have to take on to refuel his power plants.
“I’m not certain that we even have that much antimatter on hand,” O’Toole said delicately. “I will have to check around.”
David carefully did not note that Protectorate rules required Cinnamon to maintain a conversion facility and a stockpile of at least five tons of antimatter to refuel any Navy ships that passed through the area. That fuel would be sold to a Navy vessel that arrived and could be sold to anyone. O’Toole might simply not know that, though.
And if they’d screwed that up, well, Red Falcon could easily visit three or four more systems before she actually ran out of antimatter, and could function at reduced efficiency entirely on hydrogen.
That wouldn’t make him happy, but he could do it.
“Let me know,” he told the other man. “Do you have a fee sheet for regular fuel and services?”
“Sending it over,” O’Toole promised. “I apologize, Captain, but your ship is unknown in this system, so we will require payment for all services in advance. No credit.”
No wonder Cinnamon was having problems attracting shippers. That was a problem for a speculative shipper.
“I’m under contract to the Cinnamon government,” he pointed out. “They are obligated to cover my docking fees and refueling.”
O’Toole coughed.
“They are welcome to reimburse you, of course, but we require immediate payment by electronic transfer,” he told David. “If you cannot pay, we will have to seize your ship and cargo to cover the costs.”
“You will do no suc
h thing,” David snapped. “My contract, Mr. O’Toole, is quite clear: the Cinnamon system government is covering my docking fees. You can contact them for your payment. I can even forward you the contact information I have if you somehow can’t get ahold of your own government.”
“I—”
David held up a hand.
“And before you bluster further,” he told O’Toole quietly, “I reminded you that Red Falcon was a Navy armed auxiliary. You can’t take her from me—and if you insist, I will invoke the break clauses in my contract and leave.
“In which case, Mr. O’Toole, you would have to explain to your government why they’re suddenly out a billion-dollar cargo under the penalty clauses.”
He smiled as O’Toole blanched away from the camera.
“Do we have an understanding, administrator?”
David gave himself several minutes after the conversation ended to regain his composure. He’d grown used to dealing with the bureaucracy of the Martian Navy, which had received specific orders from a Hand to cooperate.
He’d forgotten how obstructive normal bureaucrats could be.
A large cup of coffee and a small shot of whisky later, he had calmed enough to actually start reaching out to people. The majority of his cargo belonged to an importer syndicate, one that included the Cinnamon government as a major partner, and they hadn’t contacted him yet.
Nguyen had given him contact information for the lead partner in the syndicate and David plugged it in. Given that he owned half the cargo himself, he wanted the wheels moving.
His wallscreen lit up with the image of an attractive woman with graying hair cut short around her shoulders. Like Nguyen in Tau Ceti, she wore a simple black suit and a black bowler hat. She unleashed a bright smile on him when she saw him.
“You must be Captain Rice,” she greeted him. “I apologize for the delay in reaching out to you; my wife is currently in an emergency meeting of the partners.”
“And you are, ma’am?” he asked delicately.
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